Origins of Psychology and Research Methods Worksheet

Origins of Psychology and Research Methods Worksheet
PSY/103 Version 7 / 1

University of Phoenix Material

Origins of Psychology and Research Methods Worksheet

Part I: Origins of Psychology

Within psychology, there are several perspectives used to describe, predict, and explain human behavior. The seven major perspectives in modern psychology are psychoanalytic, behaviorist, humanist, cognitive, neuroscientific/biopsychological, evolutionary, and sociocultural. Describe the perspectives, using two to three sentences each. Select one major figure associated with one of the perspectives and describe his or her work in two to three sentences. Type your response in the space below.

Psychoanalytic perspective is rooted in theories Frued created about the id, ego, and supergo. This perspective is about understaning how subconscious and conscious interact with one another. The behaviorist perspective is interesting as it tries to understand human actions by how the environment influences it. Behaviorism involves an undertstanding of learning by association and operant condititions. The humanist perspective seeks to understand people wholistically, or in totality. The humanist approach involved sel-actualization and a belief that people can attain happiness. The cognitive perspective is that people’s feeling and emotions are rooted in experience and memory. Cognitive psychology aims to understand people’s actions by understanding memory, attention, problem-solving, and language. The neuroscientific/biopsychological perspective ains to explain how physcology is rooted in phsyiology of the brain. Some biopsychologists will study one hormorone type to see how it influences peoples’ emotions, thoughts, and actions. The evolutionary perspective is rooted in the concept that the brain is geared towards problem solving to survive. As such this perspective suggests behaviors maybe adaptive for surviving and naturally selected. The sociocultural perspective is grounded in understanding how circumstances influence a society’s behaviors. The environment and ideas of nuture (rather than nature) are a key part of the sociocultural perspective.

Charles Darwin is a major fiure associatied with evolutionary psychology. His observation about how animals interact and survive have led to the theory of natural selection. This theory is often used in understanding how the brain has evolved and for what reasons. His work also alludes to weaker individuals not surviving and/or eliciting a stress response, which comes up often in evolutionary phsycology research.

Part II: Research Methods

Describe research methods used in psychology by completing the following table. Then, select two of the research methods, and compare and contrast them. Your response must be at least 75 words.

Method / Purpose / Strengths / Weaknesses / Example
Experimental / To determine the cause of an effect or action / It is not correlative, such that it provides evidence for the cause and effect. / Hard to produce / Experimental manipulation of 2 different groups, with 1 control group for comparison
Descriptive / To learn more about a subject area / Aquire lots of qualitifative data and insight into study topic. / Hard to quantify and sometimes hard to apply to broader scenarios / Taking notes on how one cultural group lives
Correlational / To find out if there is a relationship between different things / It helps determine of there is an association between multiple factors. / Correlation does not imply causation. / Measuring if height is related to happiness by collection data on the two and trying to find if they are correlated using statistics.
Biological / To determine how the human body influences the variable under study / It links physiology to physcology. / It can be expensive to conduct and requires highly skilled scientists. / Invesitgating the inheritance of ‘anger’ using genetic studies of parents to children.

Part III: The Brain

Studying the functions and elements of the brain is essential to understanding human behavior. Watch the CyberPsych animation, “The Brain,” to research the brain in more depth. To access the animation, do the following:

Open WileyPlus by clicking on the link on the student website.
Select Chapter Two.
Click Animation:The Brain.

After watching the animation, use it and your textbook to answer the following questions:

Why do psychologists study twins? Why do psychologists study children who have been adopted? What can be learned from these types of studies?

Physcologists study twins and children that are adopted for the same reasons.They want to figure out the proportion of their mentality that stems fromgenetics and the portion that stems from the environment. These studies can help better understand the concepts of nurture versus nature and for twin, it can prodive information related to the development and maintenance of psychological disorders.

What are the functions of neurotransmitters and hormones? How do they influence the brain and behavior?

Neurotransmitters strongly influence brain function by signaling and controlling different hormones and enzymes. Neurotransmitters aim to keep brain chemistry in balance. They can influence the brain and behaviors by being the cause of many disorders which range from mile depression to addictive diseases.

What is neuroplasticity?

Neuroplasticity is the idea that the nervous system, particularly the brain, is adaptable to changes that it gets subjected to. Thus the brain is reactive and can respond to many different stimuli.