Psychology

Learning objectives

1- Studying psychology is important to master communication skills

2- To understand how and why normal people behave so that be able to
identify the abnormal
3- To understand the relation between biological and psychological aspects of
higher mental processes like consciousness, thinking, perception, learning,
memory, emotion and motivation
 introduction

Psychology:
is the scientific study of behavior and mental processes.
The roots of psychology can be traced to the 4th and 5th centuries B.C. One of the earliest debates about human
psychology focused on the question of whether human capabilities are inborn or acquired through experience (the
nature–nurture debate)
This nature–nurture debate centers on the question of whether human capabilities are inborn or acquired through
experience. The nature view holds that human beings enter the world with an inborn store of knowledge and
understanding of reality.
The nurture view holds that knowledge is acquired through experiences and interactions with the world. Although
some of the early Greek philosophers had this opinion, it is most strongly associated with the seventeenth-century
English philosopher John Locke. According to Locke, at birth the human mind is a tabula rasa, a blank slate on which
experience ‘writes’ knowledge and understanding as the individual matures.
Although some psychologists still argue that human thought and behavior result
primarily from biology or primarily from experience, most psychologists take a more
integrated approach. They acknowledge that biological processes (such as heredity or
processes in the brain) affect thoughts, feelings, and behavior, but say that
experience leaves its mark, too. So the current question is not whether nature or
nurture shapes human psychology but rather how nature and nurture combine to do
so.
Scientific psychology was born in the late nineteenth century with the idea that mind
and behavior could be the subject of scientific analysis.
 CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGICAL
PERSPECTIVES

The biological perspective

The human brain contains well over 10 billion nerve cells and an almost infinite number of
interconnections between them. It may be the most complex structure in the universe. In
principle, all psychological events can be related to the activity of the brain and nervous
system. The biological approach to the study of human beings and other species attempts to
relate overt behavior to electrical and chemical events taking place inside the body. Research
from the biological perspective seeks to specify the neurobiological processes that underlie
behavior and mental processes. The biological approach to depression, for example, tries to
understand this disorder in terms of abnormal changes in levels of neurotransmitters, which
are chemicals produced in the brain that make communication between nerve cells possible.
The behavioral perspective
As described in our brief review of the history of psychology, the behavioral
perspective focuses on observable stimuli and responses and regards nearly all
behavior as a result of conditioning and reinforcement. For example, a behavioral
analysis of your social life might focus on which people you interact with (the social
stimuli), the kinds of responses you make to them (rewarding, punishing, or neutral),
the kinds of responses they in turn make to you (rewarding, punishing, or neutral),
and how the responses sustain or disrupt the interaction.
The cognitive perspective
The contemporary cognitive perspective is in part a return to the cognitive
roots of psychology and in part a reaction to the narrowness of behaviorism,
which tended to neglect complex human activities like reasoning, planning,
decision making, and communication. Like the nineteenth-century version,
the contemporary cognitive perspective is concerned with mental processes
such as perceiving, remembering, reasoning, deciding, and problem solving.
The psychoanalytic perspective
Sigmund Freud developed the psychoanalytic conception of human behavior in
Europe at about the same time that behaviorism was evolving in the United States.
The basic assumption of the psychoanalytic perspective is that behavior stems from
unconscious processes, meaning beliefs, fears, and desires that a person is unaware
of but that nonetheless influence behavior. Freud believed that many of the impulses
that are forbidden or punished by parents and society childhood are derived from
innate instincts. Because each of us is born with these impulses, they exert a
pervasive influence that must be dealt with in some manner.
• Forbidding them merely forces them out of awareness into the unconscious.
They do not disappear, however. They may manifest themselves as
emotional problems and symptoms of mental illness or as socially approved
behavior such as artistic and literary activity. For example, if you feel a lot of
anger toward your father but you cannot afford to alienate him, your anger
may become unconscious, perhaps expressed in a dream about him being
hurt in an atrocious accident.
The subjectivist perspective
This perspective contends that human behavior is a function of the perceived world, not the
objective world. Although allied with cognitive psychology, subjectivism has been most
pervasive within social and personality psychology. To understand human social behavior, this
view holds, we must grasp the person’s own ‘definition of the situation’, which is expected to
vary by culture, personal history, and current motivational state. This perspective, then, is the
most open to cultural and individual differences and to the effects of motivation and emotion.
PSYCHOLOGICAL
DEVELOPMENT
Some developmental psychologists believe that development occurs in a sequence of periods in
which
(1) behaviors at a given stage are organized around a dominant theme or a coherent set of
characteristics.
(2) behaviors at one stage are qualitatively different from behaviors at earlier or later stages, and
(3) all children go through the same stages in the same order.
Critical or sensitive periods are times during development when specific experiences must occur for
psychological development to proceed normally. Like the first few months of life for attachment
and the first 6 years for language development.
 CAPACITIES OF THE NEWBORN

Early theorists believed that all sensory preferences and abilities had to be learned, but research
over the past several decades has established that infants are born with their sensory systems
intact and prepared to learn about the world.
Newborns have poor vision and cannot see as well as an adult until about age 2.
Newborns pay attention to sounds, and they seem to be born with perceptual mechanisms that are
already tuned to the properties of human speech that will help them learn language.
Infants can discriminate between different tastes and odors shortly after birth. They seem to show
a preference for the taste and odor of breast milk.
Infants can learn from the moment they are born and show good memories by three months of
age.
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDHOOD

Piaget’s theory describes stages in cognitive development. They proceed from

the sensorimotor stage (in which an important discovery is object
permanence), through the preoperational stage (when symbols begin to be
used) and the concrete operational stage (when conservation concepts
develop), to the formal operational stage (when hypotheses are tested
systematically in problem solving).
Much of the newest research in children’s cognitive development focuses on
children’s theory of mind, or understanding that other people have beliefs and
expectations that can be different from their own and different from reality.
Piaget believed that children’s understanding of moral rules and judgments
develops along with their cognitive abilities. Kohlberg extended Piaget’s work
to include adolescence and adulthood. He proposed three levels of moral
judgment: preconventional, conventional, and post conventional.
 PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL
DEVELOPMENT

Some early social behaviors, such as smiling, reflect innate responses that
appear at about the same time in all infants, including blind infants. The
emergence of many later social behaviors – including wariness of strangers
and distress over separation from primary caregivers – appears to depend on
the child’s developing cognitive skills.
An infant’s tendency to seek closeness to particular people and to feel more secure in their
presence is called attachment. Attachment can be assessed in a procedure called the strange
situation, a series of episodes in which a child is observed as the primary caregiver leaves and
returns to the room. Securely attached infants seek to interact with a caretaker who returns
from an absence.
Children’s self-concepts grow throughout development, from a generally positive sense of the
self to a more complex, domain-specific sense of one’s enduring traits and capabilities.
Gender identity is the degree to which one regards oneself as male or female. It is distinct
from sex typing, the acquisition of characteristics and behaviors that society considers
appropriate for one’s sex.
Consciousness
A person’s perceptions, thoughts, and feelings at any given moment
constitute that person’s consciousness. An altered state of consciousness is
said to exist when mental functioning seems changed or out of the ordinary to
the person experiencing the state. Some altered states of consciousness, such
as sleep and dreams, are experienced by everyone; others result from special
circumstances such as meditation, hypnosis, or the use of drugs.
The functions of consciousness are
(a) monitoring ourselves and our environment so that we are aware of what is happening
within our bodies and in our surroundings and
(b) controlling our actions so that they are coordinated with events in the outside world.
Not all events that influence consciousness are at the center of our awareness at a given
moment. Memories of personal events and accumulated knowledge, which are accessible but
not currently part of one’s consciousness, are called preconscious memories. Events that
affect behavior, even though we are not aware of perceiving them, influence us
subconsciously.
According to psychoanalytic theory, some emotionally painful memories and
impulses are not available to consciousness because they have been repressed
– that is, diverted to the unconscious.
Unconscious thoughts and impulses influence our behavior even though they
reach consciousness only in indirect ways – through dreams, irrational
behavior, and slips of the tongue.
The notion of automaticity refers to the habituation of responses that initially
required conscious attention, such as driving a car.
Sleep, an altered state of consciousness, is of interest because of the rhythms
evident in sleep schedules and in the depth of sleep. These rhythms are
studied with the aid of the electroencephalogram (EEG). Patterns of brain
waves show four stages (depths) of sleep, plus a fifth stage characterized by
rapid eye movements (REMs). These stages alternate throughout the night.
Dreams occur more often during REM sleep than during the other four stages
(NREM sleep)