Essential Elements of Psychology

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There are many foundations upon which human psychology rests. Each component is essential in determining and shaping the overall psychology. Here are a few examples of what I mean:

• Sensation

What is sense? Sensory neurons respond to certain inputs. Sensory receptors perceive sensation. The back of the eye cells changes chemically when light enters. According to biopsychology, these cells send action potentials to the central nervous system. Transduction converts sensory energy to an action potential.

We have five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. The five senses are simplistic. The vestibular sense, proprioception, kinesthesia, nociception, and thermoception offer information about balance, movement, pain, and temperature.

Absolute thresholds express a sensory system's sensitivity to relevant stimuli. The absolute threshold is the stimulus energy required for 50% detection.

How dim or soft can a light or sound be and yet be perceived half the time? Sensory receptors are amazingly sensitive. On a clear night, the most sensitive retinal cells may detect a candle flame 30 miles away (Okawa & Sampath, 2007). The inner ear's hair cells may hear a clock ticking 20 feet distant in quiet settings (Galanter, 1962).

Subliminal communications are also feasible. An absolute threshold is reached when a stimulus excites sensory receptors and sends nerve impulses to the brain. Subliminal means below that threshold: We receive it unconsciously. Subliminal messages in advertising, rock music, and self-help audio programs have long been debated. Laboratory studies reveal that people can process and respond to information without awareness. Hidden messages do not affect behavior outside the lab.

Absolute thresholds are measured under extremely controlled settings in sensitivity-optimal conditions. We sometimes focus on how much stimulus difference is needed to identify a difference. Difference thresholds vary with stimulus intensity, unlike absolute thresholds. Consider a dark movie theater. If a theatergoer received a text message that lit up her phone screen, many people would notice. In a brightly illuminated basketball arena, few would notice. The cell phone's brightness remains constant, but its capacity to be noticed as a change in illumination differs greatly

• Perception

Our sensory receptors absorb environmental information, but how we perceive it determines how we interact with the world. Perception organizes, interprets, and consciously experiences sensory information. Perception is bottom-up and top-down. Sensory input creates perceptions. Our knowledge, experiences, and thoughts affect how we interpret those sensations. Top-down processing.

The sensation is physical and the perception is psychological. For example, when you go into a kitchen and smell cinnamon rolls baking, your scent receptors register cinnamon, but your perception may be "Mmm, this smells like the bread Grandma used to bake when the family gathered for holidays."

Sensations build perceptions, although not all sensations do. We rarely notice constant stimulation. Sensory adaption. Imagine entering class with an antique analog clock. The clock ticks when you enter the room, but once you start talking to students or listening to your professor, you don't notice it anymore. The clock keeps ticking, disrupting auditory receptors. Sensory adaptation reveals that feeling and perception are different.

Attention influences sensation and perception. Attention determines perception and sensation. Imagine a gathering with music, discussion, and laughter. A fascinating talk with a friend drowns out the surrounding noise. You wouldn't know what music just ended if someone interrupted you.

Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris (1999) did a fascinating study on how attention affects our experience of the world. Participants watched a video of black-and-white people passing basketballs. Participants counted the white team's passes. A black gorilla costume guy walks between the teams in the video. The gorilla should be noticed, right? Despite the gorilla's nine-second visibility, nearly half of the viewers didn't spot him. Participants ignored other visual information because they concentrated on the white team's ball passes. Inattentional blindness occurs when something observable goes unnoticed.

Our ideas, attitudes, prejudices, expectations, and life experiences shape our perceptions. As you will see later in this chapter, binocular vision throughout crucial development is necessary for depth perception (Fawcett, Wang, & Birch, 2005). Shared cultural experiences can shape perception. Marshall Segall, Donald Campbell, and Melville Herskovits (1963) found in a multinational study that Westerners were more likely to experience certain visual illusions than non-Westerners, and vice versa. Westerners experienced the Müller-Lyer illusion more often: The lines appear different yet are the same length.

These perception variations matched culturally specific environmental characteristics. Westerners perceive a carpentered world of straight-lined buildings. The Zulu of South Africa, who live in villages of round houses built in circles, are less likely to fall for this illusion. Culture affects more than vision. Indeed, cross-cultural differences in odor identification, pleasantness, and intensity have been found.

• States of Consciousness

Consciousness is self-awareness (Koch, 2004). Human consciousness is essential. We all know what it is to be conscious, and we believe that others do too.

Psychologists have long studied consciousness and used it in numerous hypotheses. Sigmund Freud's personality theories distinguished between unconscious and conscious behavior, and modern psychologists distinguish between automatic (unconscious) and controlled (conscious) behavior and implicit and explicit memory.

Philosophers and religions believe the mind and body are separate. René Descartes (1596-1650), believed in dualism, the belief that the mind, a nonmaterial entity, is separate from (though connected to) the body. Psychologists believe consciousness and the mind are in the brain, unlike dualists. Psychologists believe that consciousness is caused by the brain's many neuronal connections and that our consciousness changes based on what our brain is doing.

The psychological question of free will depends on consciousness research. We comprehend and believe that some of our behaviors are caused by unconscious factors, but we believe we have control over them and are aware of most of them. It's frightening to learn that we or someone else committed a sophisticated activity, like driving a car and injuring others, without being aware of it. However, psychologists are increasingly convinced that most human behavior is caused by unconscious processes over which we have little control.

Consciousness helps us control our behavior and think logically about situations. Consciousness helps us plan and track our goals. Consciousness is essential to our morality—we believe we have the free will to do good and avoid evil.

However, consciousness can become aversive if we realize we are not meeting our goals or expectations or think others view us adversely. We may utilize alcohol or other psychoactive drugs to escape consciousness (Baumeister, 1998).

Consciousness fluctuates with brain activity. Too much coffee or beer affects brain function and consciousness. Brain activity changes during anesthesia and concussions can cause us to lose consciousness.

• Learning

Winter birds nest and migrate. Infants breastfeed. Wet dogs shake. Salmon spawns upstream, and spiders weave elaborate webs. How are these behaviors related? All unlearned. Instincts and reflexes are innate. Motor or neural reflexes respond to environmental stimuli. They are simpler than instincts, involve specific body parts and systems (e.g., the knee-jerk reaction and pupil contraction in intense light), and include more primitive central nervous system areas like the spinal cord and medulla. In contrast, instincts are innate behaviors activated by more events, such as aging and seasonal changes. They involve higher brain areas, organism-wide mobility (sexual activity and migration), and sophisticated behavior.

Reflexes and instincts enable organisms to adapt without learning. Every healthy newborn has a sucking reflex at birth. Babies know how to suck on a bottle or human nipple. No one teaches a baby to suck or a sea turtle hatchling to swim toward the ocean.

Learning, like reflexes and instincts, helps organisms adapt. Learning is a generally permanent change in behavior or understanding that emerges from experience. Learning requires experience, unlike natural tendencies. Looking back at our surfing scenario, Julian will need more practice with his surfboard to ride waves like his father.

Learning to surf, like learning psychology, requires complicated conscious and unconscious processes. Learning's simplest components—our minds' instinctive linkages between events—have been explored. Our brains naturally link related occurrences. A creature learns by associating environmental cues or occurrences. Associative learning is central to all three basic learning processes discussed in this chapter: classical conditioning involves unconscious processes, operant conditioning involves conscious processes, and observational learning adds social and cognitive layers to both conscious and unconscious associative processes. As you begin to understand learning from a psychological perspective, a brief summary of these learning processes is helpful.

Classical conditioning—also known as Pavlovian conditioning—teaches organisms to associate repeated stimuli. This happens daily. During a storm, lightning may flash and thunder may boom. Loud noises like thunder make you leap reflexively. Lightning reliably forecasts thunder, so you may jump when you see lightning. Psychologists examine this association mechanism through behavior.

Again, organisms associate events—action and its outcome (reinforcement or punishment)—in operant conditioning. Punishments discourage behavior, whereas rewards encourage it. Imagine teaching your dog Hodor to sit. You treat Hodor for sitting. Hodor learns to associate sitting with treats. Sitting earns him a dog treat. If the dog receives a slight shock when crossing an invisible electric fence, it learns to avoid that activity.

Responses have consequences in operant conditioning. This dog knows which behaviors receive treats.

Observational learning enhances classical and operant conditioning. Unlike classical and operant conditioning, which only teaches through direct experience, observational learning involves watching and copying others. Humans and animals learn through observation. Consider Ben and his son Julian from the introduction to see how observational learning extends effectiveness. How might observation help Julian surf instead of trial & error? He can emulate his father's successes and avoid his failures. What have you learned through watching someone else?

Behaviorism does not cover all learning research. Memory and cognition have their own learning traditions, thus other chapters will help you understand the issue. These traditions eventually merge.

• Motivation and Emotion

Motivation is a force that energizes, activates, and directs behavior, but definitions vary. Franken defined motivation as the “arousal, direction, and persistence of a person’s behavior” in 2006.

Most motivation theorists assume that any taught behavior requires energy to execute. Thus, all behavior requires incentive. Thus, motivation affects behavior.

Psychology defines emotion as a conscious, subjective experience defined by mental states, bodily reactions, and psychological or physiologic expressions (e.g., facial expressions). "Emotion" was adapted from "eauvoir" (to stir up) in 1579.

Emotions differ from "feelings" since feelings are subjective and personal. Emotions are shorter-lived than moods. "Affect" is the experience of emotion and its expression (such as facial expressions or hand gestures).

Many psychologists think motivation and emotion are linked for three reasons. First, emotion and motivation stimulate behavior. Emotions often accompany intentions. "Movere"—the Latin root word for emotion and motivation—suggests the cause. Third, basic emotions often motivate. Happiness inspires better performance.

Emotion and motivation share a focus on energy rather than direction. Another is that while intellect seems "cold," emotion and motivation often involve pressure and heat. Both psychological conceptions depend on the individual-environment interaction. According to Thayer, Newman, and McClain, emotion is linked to motivation in such a manner that people do things they believe will bring them enjoyment, satisfaction, and other pleasant emotions. Thus, emotions can reward or punish motivated behavior.

• Personality

We notice how varied people are when we observe them. Some are quiet, others talkative. Some are energetic, others lazy. Some worry a lot, while others rarely do. When we use words like "talkative," "quiet," "active," or "anxious" to describe others, we are describing their personalities. Personality psychologists study these differences.

Gordon Allport and other "personologists" believed that personality qualities are the best method to understand individual differences. Personality traits show fundamental differences (Matthews, Deary, & Whiteman, 2003). According to trait psychologists, there are a limited number of these dimensions (such as Extraversion, Conscientiousness, or Agreeableness), and each person falls somewhere on each dimension, meaning they might be low, medium, or high on any characteristic.

Personality traits are continuous rather than separate. This means that when personality psychologists talk about Introverts and extroverts, they are not talking about two unique sorts of people who are entirely and truly different. They mean persons who score low or high along a continuous distribution. When personality psychologists test traits like extraversion, most people score in the center, with smaller numbers reflecting more extreme levels.

Consistency, stability, and individuality define personality qualities. Personality traits require some consistency in behavior. If they chat at home, they talk at work. Trait-related behaviors are also stable among trait carriers. They will be talkative at 40 if they are at 30. Trait-related behaviors vary. Speech and walking are not personality traits—almost everyone does them. However, talkativeness and activity level are personality qualities.

Finding the qualities that distinguish people was a trait approach difficulty. For decades, scientists created hundreds of new features, making them hard to track and understand. One psychologist may study "friendliness" while another study "sociability," a related topic. Scientists sought methodical approaches to minimize the number of variables and identify the underlying qualities that explain most of the differences between people.

Allport and Odbert (1936) searched the vocabulary for all personality descriptors. The lexical hypothesis suggests that we should characterize others using all essential personality traits. Thus, the words people use to describe each other can help us understand how people differ. Where should we look for people's descriptors? Odbert and Allport checked the dictionary first. They employed statistical methods to discover which personality characteristics "went together" after starting with almost 18,000 terms. If everyone who stated they were "friendly" also said they were "sociable," personality psychologists might only need one measure to capture individual variances in these attributes. Statistical methods were employed to investigate if a few dimensions underlying all of our thousands of words for humans.