PSY 1101 Lecture 1: PROLOGUE

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 1101
• Professor: Najwa Haddad

Document Summary

Psychology is a science that seeks to answer questions about us all how and why we think, feel and act as we do. Psychology as a science is 136 years old. This is very young compared to the other sciences. The questions and topics of psychology are as old as humanity itself. Wrote extensively about dreams, sleep, memory, perception and personality. The debate over nature vs nurture is ancient. It is the longstanding controversy over the relative contributions that genes and experience make to the development of psychological traits and behaviors. Today"s science sees traits and behaviors arising from the interaction of nature and nurture: plato. The greek philosopher plato assumed that we inherit character and intelligence and that certain ideas are inborn (nature: aristotle. Countered that there is nothing in the mind that does not come first from the external world through the sense (nurture) Argued that the mind is a blank sheet on which experience writes: descartes.