01 Introduction to Psychology 2024ز.pptx

Introduction to Psychology
Professor Ahmed Saad
Professor of Psychiatry
Head of Psychiatry Department
Ain Shams University

Introduction
• Luckily, most students find psychology fascinating.
• We do, too, and we do our best to convey this
fascination to you ,
• Psychology interests people because it asks questions
that touch virtually every aspect of our lives:
• How does the way your parents raised you affect the
way you will raise your own children?

Introduction
• What is the best treatment for drug dependency?
• Can a man care for an infant as capably as a
woman can?
• Can you remember a traumatic experience in
more detail under hypnosis?
• How should a nuclear power plant be designed to
minimize human error?

Introduction
• What effects does prolonged stress have on
the immune system?
• Is psychotherapy more effective than drugs in
treating depression?
• Psychologists are conducting research to find
answers to these and many other questions.

Introduction
• Psychology also affects our lives through its
influence on laws and public policy.
• Psychological theories and research have
influenced laws dealing with discrimination,
capital punishment, courtroom practices,
pornography, sexual behavior, and personal
responsibility for actions.

Introduction
• For example, so-called lie-detector tests are not
admissible evidence in U.S. courts because
psychological research has shown them to be
unacceptably inaccurate.
• Because psychology affects so many aspects of our
lives, even people who do not intend to specialize in
it need to know something about this dynamic field.

What is psychology?
• Psychology can be defined as the scientific
study of behavior and mental processes.
• An astonishing variety of topics fit this
definition (All of these topics are discussed in
more detail at various points ).

The historical origins of psychology
1. The most famous of them, Socrates, Plato,
and Aristotle, posed fundamental questions
about mental life:
2. What is consciousness?
3. Are people inherently rational or irrational?

1. Is there really such a thing as free choice?
2. These questions, and many similar ones, are
as important today as they were thousands of
years ago.
3. They deal with the nature of the mind and
mental processes, which are the key elements
of the cognitive perspective in psychology.

• Other psychological questions deal with the nature
of the body and human behavior, and they have an
equally long history.
• Hippocrates, often called the ‘father of medicine’,
lived around the same time as Socrates.
• He was deeply interested in physiology, the study of
the functions of the living organism and its parts.

• He made many important observations about
how the brain controls various organs of the
body.
• These observations set the stage for what
became the biological perspective in
psychology.

Nature-nurture debate
• One of the earliest debates about human psychology
is still raging today.
• This nature-nurture debate centers on the question
of whether human capabilities are inborn or acquired
through experience.
• The nature view holds that human beings enter the
world with an inborn store of knowledge and
understanding of reality.

• The nurture view holds that knowledge is
acquired through experiences and interactions
with the world.
• Although some of the early Greek philosophers
had this opinion, it is most strongly associated
with the seventeenth-century English
philosopher John Locke.

• According to Locke, at birth the human mind is
a tabularasa, a blank state on which
experience “writes” knowledge and
understanding as the individual matures.
• This perspective gave birth to associations
psychology.

• The classic nature-nurture debate has become
much more nuanced in recent decades.
• Although some psychologists still argue that
human thought and behavior result primarily
from biology or primarily from experience,
most psychologists take a more integrated
approach.

• They acknowledge that biological processes
(such as heredity or processes in the brain)
affect thoughts, feelings, and behavior, but say
that experience leaves its mark, too.
• So the current question is not whether nature
or nurture shapes human psychology but rather
how nature and nurture combine to do so.

The beginnings of scientific psychology
• Wilhelm Wundt established the first
psychological laboratory at the University of
Leipzig in Germany in 1879.
• The impetus for the establishment of Wundt’s
lab was the belief that mind and behavior, like
planets or chemicals or human organs, could
be the subject of scientific analysis.

• The reliance on introspection, particularly for
very rapid mental events, proved unworkable.
• Even after extensive training, different people
produced very different introspections about
simple sensory experiences, and few
conclusions could be drawn from these
differences.

• As a result, introspection is not a central part
of the current cognitive perspective.
• And, as we will see, some psychologists’
reactions to introspection played a role in the
development of other modern perspectives.

Perspectives of psychology
• Any topic in psychology can be approached
from a variety of perspective.
• Each perspective offers a somewhat different
explanation of why individuals act the why
they do.

Perspectives in Psychology
• The analysis of psychological phenomena can be
approached from several perspectives.
• Each offers a somewhat different account of why
individuals act as they do, and each can make a
contribution to our conception of the total person.
• The Greek letter psi (Ψ) is sometimes used as an
abbreviation for psychology.

1. Biological perspective
• The biological approach relates behavior to
electrical and chemical events taking place
within the brain and nervous system.

1. Biological perspective
• The biological approach to learning has
emphasized that condition involves
occurrence of changes in the connections
between neurons mediated by alterations in
the amount of certain chemicals.

2. Behavioral perspective
• With the behavioral approach, a psychologist
studies individuals by looking at their behavior
rather than at their brain and nervous system.
• The first founder of this approach was the
American Psychologist John Watson in 1900.

2. Behavioral perspective
• According to behaviorism, Stimulus-response
psychology studies the stimuli in the
environment, the responses that are elicited
by these stimuli and the rewards or
punishments that follow these responses.

3. Cognitive perspective
• It is concerned with mental processes such as
perceiving, remembering, reasoning, deciding
and problem solving.
• Cognitive psychology resembles a modem
computer or what is known as information
processing system.

3. Cognitive perspective
• Incoming information is processed in various
ways i.e., it is selected, compared and
combined with other information already in
memory, transformed, rearranged and so on.
• The response output depends on these
internal processes at that moment.

4. Psychoanalytical perspective
• The basic assumption of Freud’s theory is that
much of our behavior stems from processes
that are unconscious.
• By unconscious processes Freud meant
beliefs, fear and desires a person is unaware
of but nevertheless influence behavior.

4. Psychoanalytical perspective
• Forbidden impulses (sex and aggression are
focused out of awareness into the
unconscious where they remain to affect
dreams, slips of speech, manifest themselves
as emotional problems and symptoms of
mental illness.

5. Phenomenological perspective
• It focuses almost entirely on subjective
experience.
• We are not acted on by forces beyond our
control, but instead we are, capable of
controlling our own destiny.

5. Phenomenological perspective
• We are the builders of our own lives because each
of us is a free agent, to make choices and set goals
and therefore accountable for our life choices.
• Some phenomenological theories include also
humanistic views which mean that all of us have a
basic need to develop our potential to the fullest
towards self actualization.

In summary
• The biological perspective uses concepts and
principles that are drawn from physiology and
biology to explain psychological concepts and
principles in biological terms such as change in
neurotransmitters and neural connection.
• In behaviorsim, behavior is controlled by
external stimuli.

In summary
• In cognitive psychology behavior is determined
by the processing of information in perception
and memory.
• In psychoanalytic theories behavior is
controlled by unconscious impulses.
• Phenomenological perspective emphasizes the
importance of free will for self-actualization.

Five perspectives within psychology
1. Biological
perspective
An orientation toward understanding the
neurobiological processes that underlie
behavior and mental processes.
2. Behavioral
perspective
An orientation toward understanding
observable behavior in terms of conditioning
and reinforcement.

3. Cognitive
perspective
An orientation toward understanding mental
processes such as perceiving, remembering,
reasoning, deciding, and problem solving and
their relationship to behavior.
4. Psychoanalytic
perspective
An orientation toward understanding behavior
in terms of unconscious motives stemming
from sexual and aggressive impulses.

5. Subjectivist
perspective
An orientation toward understanding behavior
and mental processes in terms of the
subjective realities people actively construct.

Major subfields of psychology
• So far, we have gained a general understanding
of the nature of psychology by looking at its
topics and perspectives.
• We can further our understanding by looking
at what different kinds of psychologists do and
at emerging fields of emphasis in twenty-first-
century psychology.

• About half the people who have advanced degrees
in psychology work in colleges and universities.
• In addition to teaching, they may devote much of
their time to research or counseling.
• Other psychologists work in schools, hospitals or
clinics, research institutes, government agencies, or
business and industry.

• Still others are in private practice and offer
their services to the public for a fee.
• We now turn to a brief description of some of
the subfields of psychology.

Fields of psychology
1. Biological psychology
• Physiological psychologists seek to discover
the relationship between biological processes
and behavior.

Biological psychology
• Biological psychologists (also referred to as
physiological psychologists) look for the
relationship between biological processes and
behavior.

2. Experimental psychology
• Psychologists who use experimental methods
to study how people react to sensory stimuli,
perceive the world, learn and remember,
reason and how they are motivated to action.

3. Developmental psychology
• Psychologists who are concerned with human
development and the factors that shape
behavior from birth to old age.

Developmental psychology
• Developmental psychologists are concerned
with human development and the factors that
shape behavior from birth to old age.
• They might study a specific ability, such as
how language develops in children, or a
particular period of life, such as infancy.

4. Social psychology
• Psychologists who are interested in the ways of
interactions with other people, which influence
attitude and behavior, public opinion surveys,
market research, investigating topics such as
persuasion, conformity, inter-group conflict and
the formation of attitudes.

5. Personality psychology
• Psychologists who study each individual’s
unique qualities and differences between
other individuals.

Social and personality psychology
• These two subfields overlap.
• Social psychologists are interested in how
people perceive and interpret their social
world and how their beliefs, emotions, and
behaviors are influenced by the real or
imagined presence of others.

• They are also concerned with the behavior of
groups and with social relationships between
and among people.
• Personality psychologists study the thoughts,
emotions, and behaviors that define an
individual’s personal style of interacting with
the world.

• Accordingly, they are interested in differences
between individuals, and they also attempt to
synthesize all the psychological processes into
an integrated account of the total person.

6. Clinical psychology
• Psychologists who apply of psychological
principles to the diagnosis and treatment of
emotional and behavioral problems, mental
illness, juvenile delinquency, criminal behavior,
drug addiction, mental retardation, marital and
family conflict and other adjustment problems.

6. Clinical psychology
• Clinical psychologists may work in psychiatric
hospitals, institutions of the mentally
retarded, prisons, university medical schools
or in private practice.

7. Counseling psychology
• Like clinical psychologists work with high
school or university students providing help
with problems of social adjustment and
vocational and educational goals.

Clinical and counseling psychology
• Clinical psychologists are the largest group of
psychologists.
• They apply psychological principles to the
diagnosis and treatment of emotional and
behavioral problems, including mental illness,
drug addiction, and marital and family conflict.

Clinical and counseling psychology
• Counseling psychologists perform many of the
same functions as clinical psychologists,
although they often deal with less serious
problems.
• They frequently work with high school or
university students.

8. School and educational psychology
• School psychologists work with individual
children to evaluate learning and emotional
problems, intelligence, achievement and
personality.
• Educational psychologists do research on
teaching methods and learning.

School and educational psychology
• Because serious emotional problems often make
their first appearance in the early grades, many
elementary schools employ psychologists whose
training combines courses in child development,
education, and clinical psychology.
• These school psychologists work with children to
evaluate learning and emotional problems.

School and educational psychology
• In contrast, educational psychologists are
specialists in learning and teaching.
• They may work in schools, but more often
they work in a university’s school of
education, where they do research on
teaching methods and help train teachers.

9. Industrial and engineering psychology
• Industrial psychologists concerned with selecting
people for jobs, training programs, motivation of
employees, consumer behavior and advertising.
• Engineering psychologist seeks to improve the
relationship between people and machines; they
help design machines to minimize human error.

Organizational and engineering psychology
• Organizational psychologists (sometimes called
industrial psychologists) typically work for a
company.
• They are concerned with selecting people who
are most suitable for particular jobs or
designing structures that facilitate
collaboration and teamwork.

Organizational and engineering psychology
• Engineering psychologists (sometimes called
human factors engineers) try to improve the
relationship between people and machines.
• For instance, they improve human-machine
interaction by designing machines with the most
efficient placement of gauges and controls, which
leads to better performance, safety, and comfort.

10. Forensic psychology
• Psychologists who work within the legal and
judicial systems.
• They may consult with police departments
and prisons, to increase the understanding of
human problems.

10. Forensic psychology
• They participate in decision about whether an
accused person is mentally competent to
stand trial, or prepare psychological reports to
help judges decide on the most appropriate
course of action for a convicted criminal.

Cognitive psychology
• Cognitive psychologists are concerned with
people’s internal mental processes, such as
problem-solving, memory, and language and
thought.

Psychology In Relation To Medicine
Psychology has a direct relation to medicine in five
areas:
1- Behavioral manifestation of medical illness:
a) Some physical diseases and general medical conditions are
presented with changes in behavior.
b) In many diseases of aging there are changes in behavior.
c) In diseases of the brain, changes in behavior arise from
damage to localized brain regions.
d) Intake of some medical drugs may be presented with
psychiatric symptoms (corticosteroids induced
hypertension).

Psychology has a direct relation to medicine in five
areas:
2- Human behavior has a role in the etiology of medical
problems:
• Many physical illnesses arise from what people do to
themselves.
• Human behavior such as smoking and reckless driving can
result in serious and often fatal medical problems. (e.g.,
cancer lung, car accidents)
• There are also ranges of disorders, which are referred to as
"stress - induced" illnesses (Psychosomatic disorder) e.g.
bronchial asthma, peptic ulcer etc.

Psychology has a direct relation to medicine in
five areas:
3- Understanding doctor - patient relations:
• The relation between the doctor and the patient lies at the
heart of all medicine.
• The quality of communication between doctor and patient
can determine not only what problems are discussed, but
also the degree to which patients adhere to treatment.
• The patient responds emotionally both to illness and
treatment.

five areas:
4- Patient's response and coping to illness and
treatment:
• Serious medical illnesses require psychological and social
adjustment.
• The psychological aspects play an important role in
determining adaptation to treatment and subsequent speed
of recovery.

five areas:
5- Psychological approaches in treatment of physical
illness:
• Behavioral medicine is concerned with the application of
psychological approaches for treatment of physical
disorders.
• Such methods as talk, relaxation, emotional expression and
direct behavior medication are used to treat hypertension,
headache and pain.

five areas:
5- Psychological approaches in treatment of physical
illness:
• It is also important to note that the incidence of some
problems, such as respiratory and cardiovascular diseases
could be affected by changing behavior such as stopping
smoking, exercise and healthy diet.

Coping with physical Illness
The physical illness can be perceived as a stressful
event
1. Problem-focused or direct coping behaviors involve
attempts to deal directly with the situation in order
to make it more manageable or tolerable.
2. Emotion focused or palliative coping is more
concerned with managing the emotions generated
by the illness.

01 Introduction to Psychology 2024ز.pptx

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