PSYC 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Insanity Defense, Comparative Psychology, Educational Psychology

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Jordan Poppenk

Document Summary

Psychology is the scientific study of behaviour, thought and experience. It is not the study of the brain, although brain matters. Psychology is both a natural science and a social science (concerning relationship and interactions between people, how we structure our attitudes toward people). Psychology is involved with many disciplines such as: medicine, education, business, humanities, law (in order to make reasonable decisions is someone is guilty, discussing mental illnesses. ), engineering (humans like to use the devices that engineers make, how humans interact with machines). Outline some of the questions psychologists ask: why do people have free will? , are people inherently good or evil? . Explain structuralism and functionalism in relation to empiricism. Relationship to biology/natural selection: natural selection says that characteristics vary among members of a species, passed from parents to offspring, characters that cause greater reproduction or survival get more common whereas characteristics that hinder survival, do not.