02 24 2013 GENERAL THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES Psychology The science of understanding human individuals affect behavior cognition ABC s o Affect feelings emotions o Cognition thinking information processing 5 basic goals of psychology Describe explain predict control improve Theories Sociobiological o Much of what exists was is adaptive to help the individual survive or make their genes survive reproduce Sociocultural Learning outcome o Group norms guide thought behavior o Behaviorism behavior is determined by experience with o People do things for basic reasons with no planning ahead if they have a positive outcome they will do it again not do it again if they have a negative consequence Social cognitive o Thought behavior are guided by beliefs attitudes expectations goals memories o Thought always comes first How sociobiology can be applied to explain differences in sexual behavior between males females Males of most species typically pursue the female because o Men can afford to be less selective because they can have more children o Women have to be more selective because of the physical investment in pregnancy nurturing an infant o Males pick younger women because they have more years of childbearing left War men go to war because women are watching want to be many to show that they have good genes so the women want to let them mate Males are a vast breeding experiment run by females Prostitution female chimps use sexual come ons to get more than her share of food dominant males cannot afford to alienate the most precious resource Watson s study on fear Little Albert Showed a baby a rat the baby has no response because he has no experience with it Accompanied the rat with a loud sound the baby automatically cries because of the scary loud sound The baby learns to be afraid of the rat and other furry things because he associates it with the loud sound o Fear is learned from experience Bandura s study on aggression Had children watch someone else beat up a doll The children began to beat up the doll when they were put in a room with it used other forms of aggression on it too Aggression can be learned from observation RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 1 Naturalistic observation Researcher unobtrusively collects information without participant s awareness Advantage researcher does not influence behavior can provide interesting descriptive data Disadvantage not everything can be observed naturally time consuming expensive behavior must be interpreted others may interpret it differently researcher does not know the participants well people do not have the opportunity to decide if they want to be observed 2 Structured observation Researchers set up a situation observe behavior Advantage researcher can keep most variables under control researcher can collect other information from participants Disadvantage participant is aware that they are being observed so there could be an influence researcher may still need to interpret behavior 3 Self report Participants are asked to provide information or responses to questions on a survey structure assessment Advantage inexpensive can collect a lot of data easy to create score computers allow data collection from around the world Disadvantage differences between what people think what they think the researcher wants them to think participants may misinterpret the questions answers participants may be unwilling or unable to answer 4 Controlled experiment Researchers create a controlled environment they can carefully manipulate one variable to test its effect on another Advantage researcher can be relatively sure that any difference observed was caused by studied behavior Disadvantage not everything can be manipulated because of morality issues 5 Longitudinal Researchers periodically collect data from same participants over a long period of time Advantage researchers can track changes over time Disadvantage takes a long time o Attrition not all participants who begin will complete drop out die be hard to find o Selective attrition something particular can cause participants to drop out so the sample at the end may be different in an important way from how it started 6 Cross sectional Researchers can gather participants of different ages look for differences between the groups Advantage researchers can study effect of time or experience in less time than longitudinal studies no attrition Disadvantage o Cohort effects a generation may have different experience than another one national events movies parenting norms 7 Case study Research can conduct a detailed analysis of a particular person Advantage researchers can study unusual rare difficult to find participants in depth analysis can reveal interesting areas for Disadvantage what happens with one case may not generalize 8 Archival Researcher examines data that has already been collected for other Advantage researchers can analyze very large data sets without time expenses of data collection Disadvantage data may be missing incomplete have errors difficult group etc future study limited results purposes to access Correlation vs causation Correlation DOES NOT equal causation Causation 1 thing caused another to occur o Use an experiment to find o Manipulate the independent variable measure the dependent variable Correlation 2 things occur together may be related but 1 is not the cause of the other even if it seems to make sense o Measure measure each variable o Limited because there is no definite cause of what happened other variables may come into play If you are told that when people eat more breakfast calories they tend to have higher GPAs it is possible that there are other causes involved Types of correlations Positive as one increases the other one increases o Positive slope on a line o Ex people who sleep more tend to have higher GPAs Negative as one decreases the other one increases o Negative slope on a line o Ex less educated people tend to be happier Curvilinear relationships variables are related o Curved lines o Ex anxiety before a test vs amount of studying little studying high anxiety right amount of studying low anxiety too much studying high anxiety again would be a U shape on a graph Spurious unrelated false correlation o Ex as more people drown more ice cream is bought coincidence because more ice cream is bought during summer when people are at the beach people drown at the beach o Spurious correlations are often coincidences Sampling Probability sampling included in the sample
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