Introduction to Psychological Science

Integrating Behavioral, Neuroscience and Evolutionary Perspectives

William J. Ray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367697785
• eBook ISBN: 9781000397680
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Introduction to Psychological Science provides students with an accessible, comprehensive, and engaging overview of the field of scientific psychology. It expertly incorporates a variety of perspectives ranging from neuroscience to cultural perspectives at an introductory level.

Ray brings together cutting-edge research from traditional psychological literature to modern, evolving perspectives, and creates a unified approach by focusing on three core themes:

• Behavior and Experience: an analysis of behavior and experiences observed across a variety of everyday life situations.
• Neuroscience: an examination of psychological experiences through neuroscience lens ranging from genetic/epigenetic to cortical networks as related to psychology.
• Evolutionary/Human Origins: an exploration of broader scientific questions by examining psychological processes from the perspective of human and cultural history.

Through these themes, the book delves into topics like social processes, psychopathology, stress and health, motivation and emotion, developmental sequences, and cognitive functions such as memory, learning, problem solving, and language. Throughout it helps students to understand the nature of psychological science by addressing common myths and misconceptions in psychology, showing how psychological science can be applied to everyday life and how new research can be created. Additionally, this student-friendly book is packed with pedagogical features, including "concept checks" to test reader knowledge, "extensions" features which show how to apply knowledge, and a comprehensive glossary.

Reflecting the latest APA Guidelines concerning the essential elements of an introductory psychology course, this text is core reading for all undergraduate introductory psychology students.

1
Psychology

Historical Roots and Modern Approaches

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• 1.1 Define psychology and how the processes of behavior and experience influence how we interact with one another.
• 1.2 Review the historical concepts that have influenced psychology.
• 1.3 Summarize the major approaches to psychology in the 20th century.
• 1.4 Describe the three themes used in this book.
• 1.5 Describe the different levels of analysis used by psychologists.

On what began as a normal day, Tom was driving home from soccer practice. An oncoming car crossed over into his lane and hit him. The car went out of control and Tom was thrown out of the car. Tom lost his left arm in the accident. However, afterward, he could still feel his arm as if it were there. He even had the sense of moving each finger and being able to grab an object (Ramachandran & Blakeslee, 1998). Strange as it might seem, Tom is not alone in experiencing the sensation of having a limb that is not there. This phenomenon has been reported since antiquity and following the US Civil War, it came to be known as phantom limb. Phantom limb is experienced today in those who have fought in a war or have had industrial or other accidents that resulted in loss of limbs. Not only do individuals with a lost limb experience its presence, more than 70% of them also experience pain in the limb, which can last for years after its loss.

Can you remember where you were on your 15th birthday? How about what you had for lunch two weeks after that? Although most of us can remember what we wore for a special occasion, what we wore or had for lunch three weeks later is next to impossible. However, there is a small number of people who can remember every day of their life after about age 10. This ability is referred to as Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (LePort et al., 2012).

If you are walking to class and almost get hit by a car, what do you say? If you are like most people, you say the driver is “stupid” or even a more colorful remark. However, if you are driving and almost hit someone, what do you say then? Typically, most people say something like the sun was in my eyes or he ran in front of me or another situational explanation. As you will see in the chapter on social processing, we tend to attribute trait characteristics such as being stupid to others, while using situational explanations such as having the sun in our eyes for ourselves.

As you read about these three experiences described (phantom limb, superior memory, and attribution), a number of questions may come to mind. You might wonder how it happens that some can experience a hand that is not there. This takes us to a larger question of how we come to have the experience of having our own body and knowing where it is in space. In later chapters you will learn about how our brain receives information from our body and creates our experiences of moving through space or picking up an object such as your coffee cup.

You may also wonder if you experience the world the same as others, especially if you see words in colors or can remember every day of your life in detail. One thing you will learn in the memory chapter is that being able to recall every event that happened to you every day in your life will not make it easier to learn academic material for a test. There are, however, things you can do to help you learn new information.

The last example of almost being hit by a car helps us to understand that how we see the world and the importance of the situation influence attributions. As you will see, our social perceptions and social relationships are a critical aspect of our human history. We have always lived with others in groups and this shapes how we treat social relationships. In fact, many of us use much of our day engaging in social relationships in person or through social media. This also brings up the question of how you feel about yourself if you see yourself different from how others see you. These are some of the questions we will be asking in this book.

Psychology Is About Behavior and Experience

This book is a journey to explore who we are as humans, how we think, feel, and do, as well as how we interact with others and ourselves. We will look at ourselves through the lens of psychology. Psychology is the study of behavior and experience. Behavior is what we do. Experiences are related to our internal thoughts and feelings. Some of our experiences are similar to those of others. Other experiences are rare but still can be understood through the scientific methods available to psychologists. Let’s begin with a description of behavior and experience.

Behavior is simply the way we act. Behavior includes our actions and those of others in a variety of situations. We see behavior all around us and make inferences about its meaning. Watching others from a distance, we can quickly determine if they are friends, lovers, or even angry at each other without even hearing a word of what they are saying. Quite amazing, isn’t it?

How do we do that? We just watch their behavior, which includes facial expressions, gestures, and touching. Humans have had thousands of years of learning to infer the behavior of others. Otherwise, we would not have survived. The fact that we are always making inferences about ourselves and others and the manner that we are able to do this is one important aspect of psychology. Ask yourself, for example, how do the people in the picture below feel about each other?

Another aspect of psychology that will be important in this book is that of experience. Unlike actions that we can observe, experiences are internal and take many forms. We have internal feelings as we interact with others. We dream at night. We remember an event we have experienced or a person we have known. We feel moved by music or stories. We may feel excited when we go to a new country. We enjoy gossip. We let our mind wander as we wait for someone or even spontaneously daydream in the middle of an event. We feel hungry or tired. We see and hear a world full of colors and sounds. We also talk to ourselves, which at times is helpful as we plan for what we need to do. Other times what we say to ourselves is not very helpful, as we become negative about ourselves, which separates us from others and our world. The manner in which scientists have sought to study internal processes is another important aspect of psychology.

Behavior and experience always take place within a context. Sometimes the context is the present, including the people we are with and the particular tasks we are doing. Sometimes, we remember something that happened to us in the past and this has a profound influence on what we experience in the present. We might remember when a friend left and we feel sad. We can even imagine what might happen in the future and this leads us to see the world differently. That is, we have emotional reactions at this moment based on what might happen in the future. We know, for example, that those individuals with depression can imagine that a future meeting will not work out well. This leads them to withdrawing and not trying.

Figure 1-1 Couple sitting on park bench—how do they feel about each other?

Although you have no problem knowing how the couple in the picture feel about each other, this is only the beginning in psychology. You could be wrong. Psychological considerations are always tested through science. You will learn some of the exact techniques of science in later chapters. For now, it is important to realize that psychology is a science that covers all aspects of human behavior and experience.

Sometimes our research in psychology emphasizes how we interact with other people. In the real world salespeople often shake our hands or touch us lightly on the shoulder as they tell us how wonderful we will look in that new car. Other salespeople may turn us off if they don’t listen to what we say. Psychological scientists can test which factors determine whether we like or dislike another person. Another example is what factors determine whether we obey another person or not. Most of us imagine that we are in charge of our own actions and able to predict our own behavior. However, as you will see later in this book, experiments suggest this is not always the case. Sometimes each of us reacts differently to a new situation than we image we would.

Not only can we consider how people are influenced in the present by their thoughts, feelings, and actions, but we can also consider how our ancestors may have lived life and interacted with others in the past. What would your life have been like if you had lived 100, 1,000, or even 10,000 years ago? This takes us to a larger context that includes the vast scale of human history. If you think about it for a minute, you may realize there has never been a time in our human history that humans have lived alone. We have always lived in groups, whether it is our present-day communities and cities or our previous existence in hunter-gatherer groups.

Given this type of historical cultural perspective you might guess that humans would have developed a variety of ways of interacting with others and even ourselves. You would be correct. It is not surprising that humans today love to be with others, to gossip, to talk on the phone, to send text messages, and to update their social media pages. Scientific psychology is interested in learning more about how our past ways of interacting with others and ourselves play a role in our current life.

Behavior and experience also take place in different types of situations. For example, we often feel different when we work than when we play. With others, we are generally aware of our interactions. At some times these interactions are easy and fun and at other times difficult and tiring. This has led psychologists to ask: what are the characteristics involved when everything seems to be going your way? You can’t miss the tennis shot or basketball hoops or play an instrument perfectly. Psychologists are also interested in when we don’t reach our potential. Sometimes we are just tired. Other times this results from some type of psychological problem such as anxiety or depression. Much of what you will read in this book discusses how we normally behave and experience the world.

How to Understand Ourselves and Others

As a science, psychology is just over 130 years old, although humans have been thinking about other humans and suggesting reasons for their actions for thousands of years. Psychology is one of the most popular courses in universities in the United States. However, many individuals come into the course expecting something other than a science course (Toomey, Richardson, & Hammock, 2017). It is to be hoped that those individuals will have a new perspective after reading about psychology. This book is about how scientists have come to view human behavior and experience. As humans we create reasons for why a person does a particular behavior. Sometimes we are correct and sometimes not. Thus, we need ways to check out our ideas. Psychologists check their ideas by designing experiments and using other scientific methods.

Those engaged in the science of psychology seek to develop theories that give us insight into human behavior. Having a theory is not enough; we also need to determine if our theories are accurate or not. To do this, psychologists developed specific research methods. These methods help us to understand what factors influence our behavior and experience. Scientific methods also help us to know if our theories are wrong.

In psychology, we ask critical questions as to what makes us human and how are we like other species. Aspects of our genes and physiology are shared by a variety of species. Thus, how are we unique as a species? Are there processes that humans do that other species cannot? One answer to this question is that we produce and understand language in a manner that other species do not. Another answer is that we create institutions such as schools and universities to formally teach others. Part of being human is to actively seek and pass on knowledge.

As humans we also create culture in which we build cities and develop technology. More than 35,000 years ago, humans began to draw pictures of animals on the walls of caves (Aubert et al., 2019). As humans we seek to represent and share the experiences that we encounter. This has a long history, but modern technology has changed and sped up how we communicate with one another. In less than 40 years, computers, cell phones, and how they connect with each other has greatly changed our society and our world. However, we continue to use technology within the context of a culture. For example, some cultures see it as OK to use a cell phone in a restaurant or theater or train or bus, whereas others do not. How our culture influences us as well as which characteristics are common across cultures is another topic important to psychology.

Figures 1-2a and 1-2b C...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Psychology: Historical Roots and Modern Approaches
• 2 Scientific Psychology and Its Research Methods
• 3 The Neuroscience of Behavior and Experience
• 4 Developmental Processes
• 5 Sensation and Perception
• 6 Consciousness
• 7 Memory
• 8 Learning, Ethology, and Language Processes
• 9 Cognition, Problem-Solving, and Intelligence
• 10 Motivation and Emotion
• 11 Stress and Health
• 12 Social Psychology
• 13 Personality
• 14 Psychological Disorders
• 15 Treatment
• References
• Glossary
• Index