Psychology Essay Questions – Flashcards

Neuroscience perspective focuses on how the body and brain enable emotions, memories, and sensory experiences. Much of behavior is influenced by our genetic background and by biological processes that occur inside of different systems in our bodies. One question a psychologist may ask is how is blood chemistry linked with moods and motives? Psychologists are testing body chemistry because imbalanced body chemistry in either direction can create stress or anxiety (or any emotion) that can lead to abnormal behavior. Another part of the Neuroscience perspective allows psychologists to take measurements or images of the brain that allows them to see inside of the brain without cutting into it. With this advancement in technology this field of psychology is making great advancements in studying the human mind and behavior.

Psychodynamic perspective focuses on how behavior springs from unconscious drives and conflicts. Sigmund Freud developed a collection of theories that have formed the basis of the psychodynamic approach to psychology. Psychodynamic perspective states that our behavior and feelings are powerfully affected by unconscious motives. Psychologists are studying if our behavior and feeling as adults are rooted in our childhood experiences. Psychologists are continuing to learn more of the human mind and behavior through the psychodynamic perspective as they continue to study and make observations through clinic and counseling.

Behavioral perspective focuses on how we learn observable responses. B.F. Skinner was a leading behaviorist who rejected the idea of studying inner thoughts and feelings. He studied how consequences shape behavior. The Behavioral perspective takes on an objective stance, rather than on internal causes of behavior. This study of psychology can easily be tested in a lab. It is highly individualistic in its approach and how an organism reacts to certain stimuli in the environment.

Cognitive perspective focuses on how we encode, process, store, and retrieve information. It is a form of psychology that examines internal mental processes, such as creativity, perception, thinking, problem solving, memory, and language. Cognitive psychologists are interested in how a person understands, diagnoses, and solves a problem, concerning themselves with the mental processes that mediate between stimulus and response. In recent years cognitive psychology has become associated with computer information processing and artificial intelligence, studying parallels in the ways that both brain and computer receive, process, store and retrieve information.

Evolutionary perspective focuses on how the natural selection of traits passed down from one generation to the next has promoted the survival of genes. In short, evolutionary psychology is focused on how evolution has shaped the mind and behavior. Why do humans learn some fears so much more easily than others? How has our evolutionary past influenced our modern-day mating preferences? These are a few questions that evolutionary psychologists are attempting to answer.

Dual processing is our perception, thinking, memory, and attitudes all operate on two levels: a conscious, aware track, and an unconscious, automatic, unaware track. A study done with a woman who became perceptually blind due to an accident was still able to grasp objects with accurately. This woman was still able to grasp objects because of the dual processing of vision. A visual perception track enables us to think about the world - to recognize things and to plan future actions. A visual action track guides our moment-to-moment actions. Psychologists have also done tests with working memory that further supports the idea that our mind has two-tracks.

Sensation is the process by which our sensory receptors and nervous system receive information and transmit it to the brain. Perception is the process by which our brain organizes and interprets that information. Normally perception and sensation blend into one process. Sensation is a bottom-up process by which the physical sensory system receives and represents stimuli. Perception is the top-down mental process of organizing and interpreting sensory input. The textbook gives an example of a woman who is unable to recognize people's faces. Her sensation works perfectly fine. But her perception is almost normal, though she can recognize other features of people he brain is unable to organize and interpret the information given to her to be able to recognize faces.

We learn from the behavioral perspective by simply observing and doing. B.F. Skinner felt that some behavior could be explained by the person's motive. Therefore behavior occurs for a reason, and the three main behavior-shaping techniques are positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement and punishment. We also learn from the cognitive perspective. In classical conditioning, animals may learn when to expect a unconditioned stimulus and may be aware of the link between stimuli and responses. In operant conditioning, cognitive mapping and latent learning research illustrate learning that occurs without immediate consequences. This demonstrates the importance without immediate consequences. This demonstrates the importance of cognitive process learning.Other research shows that excessive rewards (driving extrinsic motivation) can destroy intrinsic motivation for an activity.

(a) neuroscience - Activate retrieval cues. Mentally re-create the situation in which your original learning occurred. Imagine returning to the same location and being in the same mood. Jog your memory by allowing one thought to cue the next. (b) behaviorism - Minimize interference. Study before sleeping. Do not schedule back-to-back study times for topics that are likely to interfere with each other, such as Spanish and French. (c) cognitive psychology - Make the material meaningful. You can build a network of retrieval cues by taking text and class notes in your own words. You can increase retrieval cues by forming as many associations as possible. Apply the concepts to your own life. Form Images. Understand and organize information. Relate the material to what you already know or have experienced. Restate concepts in your own words. Mindlessly repeating someone else's words won't supply many retrieval cues.

1.)Sigmund Freud's theory of dreams suggested that dreams were a representation of unconscious desires, thoughts and motivations. 2.) Is a form of psychotherapy- the dreamer is able to make connections between different thoughts and emotions in a safe environment. 3.) Sleep allows us to consolidate and process all of the information that we have collected during the previous day. 4.) Dreams are the result of our brains trying to interpret external stimuli during sleep. 5.) Dreams serve to 'clean up' clutter from the mind, much like clean-up operations in a computer, refreshing the mind to prepare for the next day

We construct our memories, using both stored and new information as well as our imaginations. For this reason we should remain skeptical about the veracity of our memories. One example of misinformation (exposure to misleading information) given by the text was an experiment done with showing people a picture of them in a hot air balloon as a small child, when realistically they had never gone. At weekly clinical sessions the majority of the people began forming retelling "memories" of the past experience in the hot air balloon that they actually never had.