Intro to Psychology-- Prolouge + Types of psychology

Prescientific Psychology

• Buddha: sensations and perceptions work together to form our ideas
• Hebrew scholars: bowels= emotions- connected with your mind
• Plato and Socrates thought soul and body were separate- body is shell to house the mind
• Aristotle disagreed-- worked with animals, saw connection: knowledge comes from experience
• Descartes: tried to figure out how the mind and body connected
• Bacon: scientific-- mind imposes order where there is none
• Locke: empiricism= mind is a tabula rasa
• beginnings of psychology-- first scientific approach using observation + experimentation

Early Psychological Science

• Structuralism: using introspection to explore the structure of the human mind
• do an activity, report the sensations/feelings it gives you (too vague, couldn't pinpoint any specific patterns because of individual differences in test subjects)
• Functionalism: (william james) how mental/behavioral processes function in the real world
• why do we smell, why do we feel emotions
• darwin-inspired: must be some survival reason for these behavioral functions
• Humanistic Psychology: searching for greater success and satisfaction in life, growth and development of personality + influence of surrounding environment
• Behaviorism: (Watson and Skinner) behavior is most important part of psychology
• mind+emotion=not practical, Pavlov's dogs drool at the ringing food bell
• Freud: childhood experiences determine your behaviors-- deep seated violence+sexual desire
• Cognitive Revolution: brain imaging technology, drugs to alleviate psychological disease
• highlights importance of internal thought processes, highly scientific

Contemporary Psychology

• Nature vs. Nurture debate: are we predisposed to act a certain way?
• nurture works on what nature endows
• Darwin: certain behaviors lead to natural selection+evolution
• Levels of analysis
• biopsychosocial approach: considers genetics, emotions and societal pressure
• current fields of psychology: 
• neuroscience= how body enables sensory experiences (body brain connection)
• evolutionary= natural selection promotes certain behaviors
• behavior genetics= effects of genes vs. environment (nature v. nurture debate) 
• psycho-dynamic= unconscious drives and conflicts, especially from childhood experience
• behavioral= how rewards and punishment influence behavior
• behaviorism= learning
• cognitive= how we encode, store and retrieve information
• social-cultural= variations in behavior across cultures

Research: psychology is now regarded as a pure science

• biological= links between brain and mind
• developmental= womb to tomb changes over lifetime
• cognitive= how we percieve, think, solve problems
• personality= investigate persistant traits
• social= how we view and affect eachother

Applied Research

• clinical psychologist: treat mental disorders
• counseling psychologist: help people work out hard problems (marriage and family therapist)
• educational: school psychologists
• industrial/organizational: workplace morale boost