Chapters 1-4 Psychological science Michael Gazzaniga PDF

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notes from chapters 1-3 and a little bit of 4 of the textbook, has the subtitles of each and the chapters...

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PAGE 3 - 24: The Science of Psychology - Intuitively we predict actions/behavior - 1.1: Psychological Science Is the Study of Mind, Brain, and Behavior - The study, through research, of mind, brain, and behavior - Mind: mental activity, the senses, biological processes - Behavior: subtle and not, complex and not, in the past, it was an actual action, but now there are more things about mental states because we have the technology - 1.2: Psychological Science Teaches Critical Thinking - Avoiding misunderstandings, evaluating testing, spot poor experiments, evaluating false claims - EX: media loves stories, often provocative, need to decipher what is the real story, and get a correct understanding of phenomenons - Amiable skepticism - Critically thinking - Being open but not naive - Supporting evidence-backed things - critical thinking involves using logic and reasoning to see whether the information is correct and unbiased - Useful in every aspect - 1.3: Psychological Science Helps Us Understand Biased or Inaccurate Thinking - Noncritical thinking leads us to erroneous conclusions - Biases motivated by our intelligence can lead us down wrong paths - We can see patterns that dont exist, we make them up - stereotypes about people shape expectation, and we see their behavior usually in ways that agree with the stereotype - Twenty times more astrologers than astronomers - Major Biases: - Ignoring evidence (confirmation bias) - People place greater importance on evidence backing themselves - down play other evidence - Selective sampling, memory - Seeing Relationships - Relating two events that happened - Example: superstition - Accepting after the fact explanations - Hindsight bias - example : exaplinnign why you lost the game, election ect - Warning signs that were ignored, ext - Easy to distort historic evidence - Taking mental shortcuts - Availiabilty heuristic

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People overesitame child kid napping becuase a few reports, and underestimate other activities - Vivid nature of kidnapping posesses someones mind - Leads people to drive rather than fly - 1.4 Why Are People Unaware of Their Weaknesses? - Failing to see your own inadequacies - People are blissfully unaware of weaknesses because they cannot judge those weaknesses at all - “Thus, if people lack the skills to produce correct answers, they are also cursed with an inability to know when their answers, or anyone else’s, are right or wrong” - Being taught specific skills can help you judge yourself and your abilities What Are The Scientific Foundations of Psychology - Sought to understand human nature - 1.5: Many Psychological Questions Have a Long History - Nature vs nurture back to ancient greece (Or culture) - dynamically interact in psychological development in humans - Height + good coaching leads to good basketball players - mind /body problem - Are the mind and body separate and distinct, or simply subjective experience of ongoing brain activity? - scholars believed mind was separate from and in control of the body. - dualism - the idea that the mind and the body are separate yet intertwined - psychologists reject dualism. In their view, the mind arises from brain activity. It does not exist separately. - 1.6: Experimental Psychology Initially Focused on the Structure, Not the Function, of Mental Activity - psychology as “the science of the elementary laws of the mind” - only through the methods of science would the processes of the mind be understood - reaction time was established to see how quickly people can respond to events - 1880s first institute made to test psychology - introspection = a systematic examination of mental experiences that requires people to inspect and report on the content of their thoughts - subjective - structuralism - Idea that conscious experience can be broken into components, quality, intensit, duration and clarity - Experience is subjective which made introspection unreliable - Functionalism - The mind can NOT be broken up into components like structuralism says - Mind is more complicated than that - Stream of consciousness, everchanging thoughts - Evolution, adaptation, and behavior

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Darwin: evolutionary theory - Adaptations on birds and species that changed over time, based on survival and reproduction - Natural selection: the process which changes are adaptive - survival of the fittest will reproduce - Understanding of many aspects of mind and behavioir together 1.7: Different Schools of Thought Reflected Different Perspectives on Mind, Brain, and Behavior - Schools of thought: dominate the field for a while, new schools take over the field - Five other major schools of thought - Psychoanalytic theory ( sigmund friend) - Understand unconscious thoughts cause psychological disorders - Found few patients had medical reasons for paralysis, saw psychological factors instead - Behavior determined by mental processes - Unconscious emphasized - Unconscious conflicts from childhood trauma - Analyzed dreams as symbols of a patients trauma - Free association, let patient talk about whatever for whenever - Revealing unconscoius stream of conflicts - Gestalt movement - Study subjective perceptions as a unified whole - Theory: the whole of personal experience is not simply the sum of its constituent elements - The whole is different from the sum of its parts - Ex: You see a triangle rather than three lines - Sought out ordinary observations - Behaviorism - Wanted to stop focus on conscious and unconscious, focus on environmental effects on observable behavior - Focus on nature vs nurutrue - Influenced by pavlov - Teaching a dog - Study environmental stimuli or triggers in situations - Better understand and can predict reactions/responses - Humanisitc Psychology - How people are free to choose activities that make them happy and fulfilled - Emphasized the basic goodness of people - Emphasizes the quality of relationships and taking joy in accomplishments - School of thought that emphasizes the freedom to choose activities that bring personal fulfillment

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Cognitivism - Psychology was largely focused on studying observable behavior - Learning is not simple, perceptions of situations can inflcence behavior, connections were all made in the mind - The study of the neural mechanisms underlying thought and learning, perception, language and memory - Rise of computers and AI affected cognitivism 1.8: Biology Is Increasingly Emphasized in Explaining Psychological Phenomena - Three major breakthroughs - Progress in understanding brain chemistry, developments in neuroscience and advances in decoding the human genome - Brain chemistry - Hundreds of substances in the brain, not simple as previously thought - Chemical substances iinfluence memory and behavior - Brain imaging - Can now study he working brain as it performs its vital functions - Consistent patterns of brain activity can reveal a lot - Localization of functions are shown - Mapping has been the focus, where functions of the brain occur, if there are more than one spot - Can help decipher how brain circuitry changes in psychological disorders - Human Genome - The basic genetic code, blueprint for the human body - Maps figure out how hereditary transmission of genes affect thoughts, actions, feelings - Could develop treatments to memory problems - Genetic defects could be corrects - Understanding relationship between situations, genees and behaviors 1.9: Evolutionary Thinking Is Increasingly Influential - Human mind shaped by evolution - Evolutionary psychology aims to explain mental triats as products of natural selection - Functions (memory, perception and language) are seen as adaptations throughout evolutionary history - Solving adaptive problems - Useful for considering whether behaviors are adaptive whether they affect survival and reproduction - Special circuits in the brain have evolved to solve adaptive problems such as dealing with people - For example: peopel who lie, cheat or steal lessen their chance of reproduction and survival - Our evolutionary heritage - Today many people struggle to resist junk food, prehistoric times had a scarce amount of junk food

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- Preference towards junk food is adaptive 1.10: Culture Provides Adaptive Solutions - Demanding adaptive challenges involve dealing with others - Many of cultures rules reflect adaptive solutions worked out by previous generations, because they had to deal with mating, living in groups, socializing - Things are passed down from generation like tastes and preferences - Culture evolution is faster than biological evolution - For example: globalization - We havent change physically - Different cultures produce striking different minds - Significant role in understanding complex relationship between culture and behavior - Our interfaces have changed and advanced - Our globalization has separated and combined cultures - Around the world there are different perspectives because of culture 1.11: Psychological Science Now Crosses Levels of Analysis - Studying a phenomenon at one level of analysis has been the favored approach - But explaining behavior is better with several levels of analysis - Four levels: - Biological level - How body contributes to mind and behavior - Brain systems, neurochemistry, genetics - Individual level - How differences in personality and in the mental processes affect how people percieve the world - Individual differences, percention and cognition, behavior - Social level - How group contexts affect the ways in which people inteact and influence each other - Interpersonal behavior, social cognition - Cultural level - Explores how peoples thoughts feelings, and actions are similar or different across cultures - Thoughts, actions, behaviors—in different societies and cultural groups - cultural differences reveal evidence for universal phenomena - Consider how psychologists studied music - They examine how musical preferences vary among individuals , across cultures, how it affects mental and emotional states, thought processes - How brain perceives sound as music rather than noise - Music recruits brain regions involved in processes of mood and memory

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listening to sad background music leads young children to interpret a story negatively, whereas listening to happy background music leads them to interpret the story much more positively - Social analysis levels might compare types of music people prefer when they are in groups vs when alone - Rap music was associated with deviant behavior - Often psychologist collaborate with other fields to make their work interdisciplinary - By doing so they realize that the whole is different from the sum of its parts 1.12: Subfields in Psychology Focus on Different Levels of Analysis - Setting often depends on whether the psychologists primary focus of research

Page 29-28 Research Methodology 2.1: Science Has Four Primary Goals - description, prediction, control, and explanation - to describe what a phenomenon is, predict when it will occur, control what causes it to occur, and explain why it occurs. - The role of Theory - Explanation based on observations - Is simple and it can be tested - Creates a hypothesis - two competing theories exist, the simpler of the two theories is generally preferred = Occam’s razor - 2.2: The Scientific Method Tests Hypotheses - 7 steps : - Frame research question - Theory leads to wide variety of interesting questions - Conduct a Literature Review - review of the scientific literature related to the theory, many resources available to assist with literature reviews, - results of your searches will reveal if and how other scientists have been testing the same idea or similar ones. - Form a Hypothesis - From the literature review, you design tests—that is, specific research studies—aimed at examining the theory’s predictions. - Design a Study - Designing a study refers to deciding which research method you want to use - Surveys, naturalistic observation, videos, performing an actual experiment, - Conduct the Study

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choose your research method, you have to conduct the study: Recruit participants and measure their responses - take care in defining the appropriate size and type of sample of participants. These issues are addressed more completely later in this chapter, under the discussions of operational definitions and sampling. - Analyze the Data - Want to describe the data, get averages, how common is it - Want know what conclusions you can draw from your data - Report the Results - Unreported results have no value 2.3: The Scientific Method Is Cyclical - Must restart the scientific process, because no one study can be definitive for a phenomena - Replication - Involves repeating a study - Replication has become an increasingly important topic in science. - Replication can and has disproved fidnings, and confuses none psychologists - The Importance of Context The change in attitudes toward marriage equality makes it difficult to replicate studies on the topic conducted years ago - contextual factors may explain some failures to replicate - THEORY REFINEMENT, cancels some weaker theories through replication 2.4: Evaluating Scientific Findings Requires Critical Thinking - Critical thinking is a skill/ ability, you have to practice it to get good - First step to critical thinking is questioning information - But how can facts be “alternative”? Facts are facts—pure information, not statements based on personal beliefs. - Another aspect of questioning when thinking critically is to ask for the definition of each part of the claim. - In science, well-supported evidence typically means research reports based on empirical data that are published in peer-reviewed journals - However, peer review does not mean that flawed studies are never published. Thus, critical thinkers must always stay vigilant—always be on the lookout for unreasonable claims and conclusions that may not be valid interpretations of the data.

43-51 - 2.7: Correlational Studies Describe and Predict How Variables Are Related - examine how variables are naturally related in the real world, without any attempt by the researcher to alter them or assign causation between them - cannot be used to determine the causal relationship between the variables. - DIRECTION OF CORRELATION

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first step in examining the correlation between two variables is to create a scatterplot. - positive correlation: both variables either increase or decrease together—they “move” in the same direction - negative correlation, the variables move in opposite directions. An increase in one variable predicts a decrease in the other variable. - Variables are not related we say there is a zero correlation. - THINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT CORRELATIONS - Can NOT conclude that smoking causes cancer, but can show relation between the two variables - DIRECTIONALITY PROBLEM - One problem with correlational studies is in knowing the direction of the relationship between variables. - Sleep (A) and stress (B) are correlated. ■ Does less sleep lead to more stress? (A → B) or ■ Does more stress lead to less sleep? (B → A) - THIRD VARIABLE PROBLEM - A problem that occurs when the researcher cannot directly manipulate variables; - the researcher cannot be confident that another, unmeasured variable is not the actual cause of differences in the variables of interest. - Texting while driving (A) is correlated with driving dangerously (B). ■ Risk-taking (C) leads some people to text while driving. (C → A) and ■ Risk-taking (C) leads some people to drive dangerously. (C → B) - Ethical reasons for correlation: - There are many important real-world experiences that we want to know about but would never expose people to as part of an experiment. - Unethical to induce trauma - Making Predictions - used to determine that two variables are associated with each other. - By establishing such connections, researchers are able to make predictions. - example, correlational research has identified a strong relationship between depression and suicide. For this reason, clinical psychologists often assess symptoms of depression to determine suicide risk. 2.8: The Experimental Method Controls and Explains - In an experiment, the researcher manipulates one variable to measure the effect on a second variable. - Types of Variables

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independent variable is the variable that gets manipulated. Researchers manipulate the variable by giving different levels of the variable to different participants. - Two types: “treatment” level and a “comparison” level - In the study of cell phone use and driving ability, the people who actively used the cell phone received the “treatment.” A group of study participants who receive the treatment is the experimental group. - dependent variable variable that gets measured, which is why it is sometimes called the dependent measure. - operational definition A definition that qualifies (describes) and quantifies (measures) a variable so the variable can be understood objectively. - control group The participants in an experiment who receive no intervention or who receive an intervention that is unrelated to the independent variable being investigated. - Establishing Causality - A confound anything that affects a dependent variable and that may unintentionally vary between the study’s different experimental conditions. 2.9: Participants Need to Be Carefully Selected and Randomly Assigned to Conditions - Convenience Sample - taken from an available subgroup (e.g., students at a particular school) in the population (i.e., all students). Most of the time, circumstances force researchers to use a convenience sample. - Sampling is the process by which you select people from the population to be in the sample. - Random Assignment - participants are assigned at random to the control group or the experimental group. Random assignment is used when the experimenter wants to test a causal hypothesis. - Larger Samples the results are more accurate if the researchers use a large sample (such as the big picture here) rather than a small sample (such as the detail)? - selection bias - unintended differences between the participants in different groups; it could be caused by nonrandom assignment to groups. - culturally sensitive research - Studies take into account the role that culture plays in determining thoughts, feelings, and actions.

60-64 - 2.15: The Correlation Coefficient Summarizes the Relationships Between Variables - descriptive statistic provides a numerical value (between −1.0 and +1.0) that indicates the strength and direction of the relationship between the two variables. - If two variables show no apparent relationship, the value of the correlation will be a number close to zero

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2.16: Inferential Statistics Permit Generalizations - inferential statistics A set of procedures that enable researchers to decide whether differences between two or more groups are probably just chance variations or whether they reflect true differences in the populations being compared. - Meta-analysis is a type of study that, as its name implies, is an analysis of multiple analyses.

CHAPTER 3: Biology and Behavior - Nerve cells are very important - How Does the Nervous System Operate? - Two basic units: - Central and peripheral nervous system - CNS : is the brain and spinal cord - PNS: is everything else - Anatomically different, but interdependent - PNS sends sensory information to CNS, and CNS makes judgements - 3.1 : Neurons Are the Basic Units of the Nervous System

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Neurons do not communicate randomly or arbitrarily, however. They communicate selectively with other neurons to form circuits, or neural networks - They get to know each other to form systems and fire not arbitrarily - PNS has somatic and autonomic nervous systems - somatic : voluntary behaviors (reaching out to see how something feels) - autonomic : less voluntary behaviors (controls the heart rate and body functions) - Functions of Nuerons - Neurons meant to communicate, if you feel s...