Quiz 2 (Psychology) Flashcards
(49 cards)
What is the psyche?
- the breath of “life”
- one’s inner private mind
What does the psyche represent?
1) “human” nature
2) the “soul” (for dualists)
3) the HUMAN mind and its associated conscious states
4) the inner private workings of the mind
What is psychology?
- the study of mind and behaviour
- the relationship between the internal states of mind and external states of behaviour
Psychology vs Cognitive Science
Psychology:
-focus on behaviour, the “psyche”, and personality
Cognitive science:
- focus on the mind in general
- mind as information processor (psyche not necessary)
What is voluntarism?
mental elements could be assembled into higher cognitive components through the power of will
What are the mental elements of voluntarism?
- thoughts
- feelings
- pictures
Immediate experience
- internal perception and apperception
- our direct awareness of something
- what we think of things without any previous memory/knowledge of them
Mediate experience
- related to self-observation and reliance on memory systems
- come from a mental reflection about an object
Apperception
the mental process by which a person makes sense of an idea by assimilating it to the body of ideas he or she already possesses
Wundt’s idea of introspection
-a kind of internal perception that could be objectively measured
How Wundt performed introspection tests
1) put themselves to a ready state of attention prior to their introspecting
2) The students would repeat their observations several times
3) Wundt would then modify specific aspects of the stimulus, such as size and duration of the experience
Wundt’s Tri-Dimensional Theory of Feeling
1) pleasure-displeasure
2) tension-relaxation
3) excitement-depression
Wundt’s Principle of Creative Synthesis
- the mind perceptually organizes constituent parts in order to create a whole containing new properties
- empiricists viewed this process as passive rather than active (a criticism)
What is will?
- there are many different definitions
- A desire, purpose, or determination, especially of one in authority
Wundt’s definition of will
-a voluntary effort of the mind
Who was the founder of structuralism?
Edward B. Titchener
What is structuralism?
-similar to voluntarism except it replaces introspection with the scientific method
-Mental elements are combined passively
according to mechanistic laws
-a theory that emphasizes studying the structure or basic elements of the mind and how they combine
stimulus error
confusing our true experience of an object with a description of the object based on language and past experience
What are structuralist subjects treated as?
-reagents (in chemistry, a substance added to a mixture in order to produce a particular chemical reaction)
How many elements in Titchener’s Periodic Table?
-32,820 visual elements
-11,600 auditory elements
= 44,420 sensation elements
Titchener’s Periodic Table 5 attribute groups
- Quality (What makes a particular sensation unique from other sensations)
- Intensity (the strength of a sensation)
- Extensity (the extent to which a sensation fills or occupies space)
- Duration (how long, short, or persistent a sensation is)
- Clearness (how distinguishable from other sensations)
What is functionalism (psychology)?
- more concerned with what something does than what something is made of
- the acquisition, fixation, retention, organization, and evaluation of experiences and their subsequent utilization in the guidance of conduct
Angell’s 3 major themes of Functionalism
- mental operations (How does the mind operate and what does the mind operate on?)
- Fundamental utilities of consciousness ( Why are we conscious? What is the utility/value of being conscious?)
- Psychophysical [embodiment] relations (How the physical body relates to the physiological mind, relationship between organism and environment)
Functionalist complaint about introspection
- every time one used introspection to describe a discrete object, one had to artificially “freeze” their thought processes
- In fact, describing experiences in general is ultimately, a reflective practice and ironically, part of mediate experience
- Therefore, these mental elements were actually synthetized or created for the experimenter rather than existing naturally
