PSYC121 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Ageism, Behaviorism, Existence Precedes Essence
Week 1
Psych121 - Foundations of Psychology A
Leaders - Mekael, Ashley and Bethany (the PASS team)
Mark Allen (subject coordinator)
Amy Sowerby (head tutor)
Psychology in general
-Defined as the scientific investigation of mental processes, behaviour and the interaction
between them
-Biology and culture provide possibilities and constraints within which people think, feel and act
-Psychologists apply the scientific method to understand human behaviour
Major sub-disciplines of psychology
-Biological - genetics and any form of biological processes that relate back to mental
processes
-Developmental - understanding the mental processes of human development
-Social - interpersonal relationships
-Group processes - an extension of social psychology but specifically how groups of
individuals are together; eg racism, sexism, age discrimination ect.
-Clinical - interested in the treatment of clinical disorders
-Cognitive - the understanding of mental abilities and what makes individuals better at
particular things eg memory skills, exercise improving memory
-Personality - what makes/influences a personality
-Organisational - motivation
-Educational - motivation to do well
-Health - drug abuse, smoking, alcoholism
-Counselling (applied) - similar to clinical but more understanding the role/behaviour of
the psychologist and developing a better relationship between the doctor and the
patient, how the psychologist can affect the patients treatment and why that is
-Sport - interested in performance in sport settings
-Forensic - behaviour in the courtroom, ect
-Positive -
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Week 1
Psych121 - History & Philosophy of Psychology
Lecture 1
-Psychology —> a long past and a short history…
•Discovering what it means to be human —> the philosophy of psychology
•Looking at the breadth of thought that has come to be the history of psychology
•The number of synapses in the human brain is larger than the number of galaxies in the
observable universe
•Psychology has a long past —> this means that it has always been around and people
have been trying to understand it
•A short history —> this means that it is now a ‘scientific discipline’ and it is now a field of
research
•Psychology is more about researching human behaviour
The Two Histories of Psychology (both in smorgasbord version)
-The Short History
•Focuses on experimental psychology
•Holds the models and methods of experimental psychology to be definitive
•Equates experimentation with science —> this started in the late 1800’s
•After this start, the short history of psychology developed through major moments such as
Wundt’s structuralism, William James’s functionalism, influence from the mental testing
movement all the way through to the behaviourism of the middle quarters of the last century
and then onto the triumph of cognitivism —> cognitivism is the approach that dominates
psychology today —> we are probably making the same mistakes with cognitivism as we
were with behaviourism
-The Long History
•Allows the idea that ‘psychology’ is any attempt to understand the mind, the person and
why we act as we do —> this idea goes much further back than the late 1800’s
•Folk psychology —> when people started asking questions about human behaviour (such
as why did someone do this? why do they not like me? ect)
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