The document provides an overview of the key topics covered in a psychology lecture, including: - Early psychologists like Wundt who studied consciousness using introspection. - William James who believed thinking and other mental processes help humans survive. - Memory studies by Ebbinghaus and Calkins showing forgetting occurs rapidly at first. - Cognitive psychology focusing on thinking, perceiving, and other intellectual processes. - Behaviorism studying how learning from experience shapes behavior. - Freud believing unconscious motives like sex and aggression influence behavior. - Neuroscience examining the brain structures underlying psychological processes. - The sociocultural perspective considering how gender, culture and experiences shape people.

1. Psychology
Lecture 2

2. Warm up exercise
 "Lying to your friends”
 Students will go around the room and tell two true and one
untrue thing about themselves. Students will then try to guess
which were true and which were untrue.
 This exercise is to explore the concept of stereotyping and
impression formation among other concepts.

3. Psychologists
 Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), Edward Titchener (1867 –
1927)
 Studied about basic element of human consciousness
 This is known as “Structuralism”
 They used the method called “Introspection” to look inwardly at
one’s own conscious experience

4. William James (1842-1910)
 Tried to understand the “Survival value”
 He believe that thinking, feeling, learning, remembering, and
other mental processes exist only because they help us survive
as a species
 Because human can think logically so we are better able to find
food, avoid danger, and care for our children all of which help
the human species survive.
 This is known as “Functionalism”

5. Herman Ebbinghaus (1850-1909),
Mary Whiton Calkins (1863-1930)
 Studies of memory
 They found that forgetting is very rapid at first but proceeds
slowly thereafter.
 Almost half of his original learning was lost within 20 minutes
and almost all of the forgetting that was going to occur had
occurred within about 9 hours

6. Cognitive psychology
 Cognition is a broad term that refers to all intellectual
processes, perceiving, believing, thinking, remembering,
knowing, deciding, and so on
 In many ways cognitive psychology is the heart of modern
psychology

7. Behaviorism and Social learning theory
 Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936)
 Did not interest in the adaptive functions of consciousness .
 This approach is known as behaviorism because they believed
that it was not possible to study conscious experience
scientifically.
 Instead, the behaviorists studied the adaptive value of learning
from experience

8. Social learning theory
 Social learning theory states that the most important aspects
of our behaviour are learned from other persons in society
 We learn to be who we are from our family, friends, and
culture. The social learning viewpoint, which integrates
aspects of behaviorism and the cognitive perspective,
continues to be an important theoretical perspective today.

9. Nature of the unconscious mind
 While most of the psychologists were focusing on the
structure of the brain, or on conscious mental processes or
overt behaviour.
 Others were moving in yet another direction.
 They believed that the most important aspect of human
psychology was the mental processes of which we are
“unaware”.

10. Sigmund Freud
 Freud believed that the roots of the psychological problems
he tried to treat were innate motives, particularly sexual and
aggressive ones that reside in an unconscious part of the
mind.

11. Humanistic psychology and the
unconscious mind
 Humanistic psychologists believe that the unconscious mind
often defeats our efforts to make good, conscious decisions.
 To the humanists, our view of what we are like “Our self-
concept” is the key element of conscious decision making.

12. Humanistic
 If you think you are intelligent, you may sign up for a difficult
college course
 However, society also makes it difficult to have an accurate
self-concept because we are constantly bombarded with
information from society that says only attractive good
looking people are worth loving.
 So what if you are a little dull, slightly clumsy and not so
attractive?

13. Neuroscience perspective
 Focuses on the nervous system in explaining behaviour and
mental process.
 The structures of the brain that play roles in emotion,
reasoning, speaking, and other psychological processes.

14. Contemporary perspectives and
specialty areas in psychology
 Sociocultural Perspective
 People are all the same in Fundamentally important ways and
yet different in other equally important ways.
 We are all the same in the sense that the principles of
psychology apply equally to all of us, your brain has the same
working parts whether you are a woman of Chinese descent
who was raised in Holland or a Man of Swedish descent raised
in Ohio.
 Even so, people also are different from one another. Their
gender, culture, age, sexual orientation, and unique experiences
all contribute to these differences

15. Sociocultural perspective
 How well educated are the members of your family?
 What is your political philosophy?
 If all these things about you were different, would you be a
different person in important ways?
 I am not asking you if you would be a better or a worse person,
but I am asking only if you would be psychologically different
from who you are presently.
 All of these important questions are addressed by the sociocultural
perspective in psychology.
 During the past 20 years psychologists overlook the important
message that the human race comes in a rainbow of sociocultural
varieties.
 So “Human Diversity” explore differences related to gender,
ethnicity, age, physical disability and other factors.

16. Cultural Relativity
 Sociocultural not only encourages us to consider cultural and
social factors when attempting to understand our neighbors but
also require that we not misuse that information.
 Sociocultural perspective promotes culture in relative terms rather
than judmental terms, although virtually every culture in the world
views other cultures as inferior.
 That is sociocultural perspective promotes the view that different
cultures, ethnic groups, genders, and sexual orientations are simply
different from, rather inferior to, others.
 Also, it reminds us that not all members of a given culture, ethic
group, or gender are “alike”. Some are tall some are short, some are
good at mathematics and some are not.

17. Common Sense Quiz
 Focusing on a person’s voice is a better way to detect whether someone is telling a
lie than focusing on the person’s face.
 We tend to see the people in our own groups as more diverse and different from
each other than we see people in other groups.
 People in a sad mood are less likely to help others than are people in a neutral mood
 Simply having other people around tends to make individuals perform better on easy
tasks.
 Physically attractive individuals are usually seen as less intelligent than physically
unattractive individuals.
 Women are more likely to reveal intimate facts and feelings to someone else than are
men.
 People are more likely to be aggressive when it’s hot outside than when it’s cool.
 Male-to-female relationship violence is much more common than female-to-male
relationship violence.
 Very wealthy people (e.g., lottery winners) are happier than most other people.