Psychological Movements Flashcards
Which areas of the brain are responsible for controlling the body?
Somatosensory and motor cortices
What 3 components do positive psychologists believe happiness is made up of?
Positive emotion and pleasure,
Engagement with life,
Living a meaningful life with good relationships and a history of accomplishment
Idea
Unorganized principles or thoughts about behaviour
Theory
Organized set of principles, which state how behaviour operates
○ Lays out all the evidence in a particular field of study e.g. all the evidence collected so far about how people form relationships
○ Introduces a way of understanding or simplifying this
○ Preemptively tells critics all the other possibilities that have been considered
○ From a theory, can derive hypotheses and predictions
What does peer review test for?
Tests research to see whether it’s innovative, important, and well-conducted.
Tell me about Skinner
Extreme empiricist, key figure in behaviourism, thought humans could be adapted to any lifestyle, though an “efficient” way of organizing society would be to decide people’s roles at birth and train them into those specific roles.
Behaviourism
Developed as a response to critiques of functionalism that unobservable mental events could not be studied scientifically– instead focused on observing the ways that people actually behaved in different situations, to find measurable and specific findings that could be reproduced.
Extreme empiricism. Example: behaviourist theory of language acquisition says that parent rewards a baby for babbling by smiling at them and interacting with them, which makes baby babble more and eventually speak.
Dominant view from late 1930s-late 1950s/early 1960s until Chomsky’s critiques founded cognitive psychology.
What were some negative effects of behaviourist ways of thinking?
Belief we could be moulded through experience led CIA to do project bluebird and MK ultra.
Recruited Ewen Cameron to research how to make people unlearn things and replace with American ideology using whatever tools necessary.
METHOD 1: playing specific phrases over and over.
METHOD 2: hypnotics and psychedelics like thorazine, nembutal, seconal, LSD
METHOD 3: use sensory deprivation to cause dissociation
Results: People become slightly more susceptible to new ideas, temporarily failed to remember a lot of who they were, often confused researchers with mother/father or god, >50% unable to return to normal life.
What were Hebb’s studies at McGill?
Hebb’s McGill students got $20/day (late 50s) in sensory deprivation. Meant to last 60 days, all 63 students quit after 2 days. Most after 1hr.
□ Cameron criticizes Hebb for letting the students out–says they consented to the study.
□ Hebb calls Cameron “an eminent monster”.
Instinctual drift
Example: Pigs like rooting for things. In studies, they were trained to pick up a coin and put it in a slot to get food. But then after a while they go back to rooting at the coin/pushing it around, and will even starve and stop putting it in the slot. Most behaviourist studies are/were terminated once the animal starts doing the behaviour.
How did Skinner say language is acquired and how did Chomsky say he was wrong?
○ Skinner -> reinforcement for babbling, then speaking.
○ Chomsky -> humans are born with a predisposition towards language
§ Acquired too quickly for behaviourism to be true.
§ Used too creatively, e.g. colourless green ideas sleep furiously
§ Other examples: People without language and who haven’t been reinforced to use it develop it if given the chance, e.g. Deaf twins who haven’t been taught to communicate.
§ Chomsky’s universal grammar has fallen out of favour.
What is cognitive psychology?
–Developed in response to behaviourism’s extreme nativism.
–Chomsky believed that humans have an in-built propensity for learning language–that language is too widespread, and too creative, to develop entirely as a result of reinforcement learning.
–It also developed due to the invention of AI, which made the idea that there are internal processes that lead to behaviour popular.
–Cognitive psychologists focus on studying mental processes such as memory, perception, reasoning, attention, problem solving, creativity, and language use.
Nativism
The belief that certain knowledge–usually “knowing how” to perform certain skills and abilities, or a predisposition towards doing so, are a priori–we have them innately and do not have to learn them from experience.
Empiricism
The belief that everything we know, we have learned a posteriori–through experience.
Empiricists focus on studying how situations lead to us learning the things that we learn–if we understand what causes us to learn the things we do and what situations caused us to be the way that we are, then we will understand everything there is to know about why we are the way that we are.
