Lecture Video 1.2: Intro to Psychology As A Science - Analysis of Pre-Test - Section 1: Methodology

Hello again, Anderson Smith here.

And today we're going to talk about the results of the pretest that you took

about psychology.

Again, isn't it interesting that you feel comfortable taking a test

about the content of a course before you take the course.

But you can do that in psychology, because as I said earlier,

it really does represent things you've been studying for a very long time.

How behavior works, and how I can understand it, and how I can predict it.

Now, the reason we took the test is we want to differentiate between the myths

about behavior, which we often infer from experiences in life, and

the facts about behavior.

And only we can learn from the scientific study by using research methods

that allow us to determine facts versus myths.

Now, let's look at the questions on the test and by the way,

if you haven't taken the pre-test, stop right now, go take it, and come back.

But if you have, let's deal with each of the questions.

The first question said,

the right side of the brain is creative while the left side is analytic.

This asymmetry between these very complex kinds of cognitions.

The answer to the question is false.

We will find out that there are lots of symmetries of the brain.

For example, waving my right hand is caused by the left hemisphere and

waving my left hand is caused by my right hemisphere.

Very complex kinds of things like creativity, and

analytical thinking, are represented across the entire brain.

So this is a very big factor in pop psychology.

It really has very little validity,

as we'll find out when we talk about the methods that they use to study the brain.

The second question, psychologists study behavior and the mind, but not biology.

Well, the title of this course is Biological Foundations.

And clearly, if we're going to understand behavior in the mind,

we have to understand the brain and other biological systems that influence that.

Answer, false.

Question number three, to see an object more clearly at night,

look directly at it, focusing the object on the most sensitive part of the eye,

the fovea, in the retina.

The answer, false.

While it's true if you look directly at something, you focus it on the fovea,

the fovea contain mostly cones which are most sensitive parts of the eye that

require high levels of illumination.

This is why we see very bright colors in the daytime but not so much at night.

Requiring less illumination are the rods and

the rods are located just outside of the fovea for the most part.

So, if I want to see the boogeyman at the foot of my bed at night then

I don't want to look directly at it.

I want to look just a little bit to the left,

a little bit to the right of where the object is and I will see it better.

Try it out tonight.

Not that you'd expect to have a boogieman, but try the way you need to look at

when you want to have maximum sensitivity at low levels of illumination.

The fourth question, a person who is blind in one eye cannot see depth and

therefore cannot fly an airplane or drive a car.

Well it's true that we have many binocular cues for

depth perception, things like where our muscles are when our eyes look at

something close versus looking at something far apart.

But if you only have one eye, you still have many cues of depth perception,

as we'll see.

And you can drive a car perfectly well or fly an airplane perfectly well without

having the dual vision caused by both eyes, false.

The fifth question, some people don't dream.

You might believe you don't dream, but I promise I can show you that you do.

In sleep laboratories, we can wake people up when they're experiencing REM sleep,

and we'll find out what that actually means in this course.

But in REM sleep your body is sort of immobile but your brain looks like its

very active and that's because you're dreaming for the most part.

And if I wake you up from that REM sleep you will be able to report the dream.

Even though if I will let you go back to sleep, you wake up the next morning and

tell me, see I told you I don't dream and

I have to show you a videotape just to convince you, that in fact you do dream.

Everybody dreams.

Dreams have important function as we'll find out, false.

The sixth question is in operant conditioning,

punishment is called negative reinforcement.

There's a tremendous amount of confusion between punishment and

negative reinforcement.

But in conditioning they're very different to each other.

Punishment is used when you want to reduce the probability of

a behavior occurring and

reinforcement is when you want to increase the probability of a behavior occurring.

So negative reinforcement is used to increase a behavior

by taking away a negative stimulus, false.

Question number seven, all memory declines with adult aging, this happens to be my

research area, I've been studying aging in memory for a very long time.

And what we've learn is that while episodic memory,

the ability to remember from our past declines dramatically with aging.

Semantic memory, our world knowledge about things,

continues to increase up into the 70s.

So not all memory declines with age.

Just some memories decline with age, false.

Question number eight, in order to be creative,

you must have high levels of intelligence.

Well, intelligence is important in creativity for

some things like designing rockets if you're a rocket scientist, but

really if you just look at what creativity is which is novel solutions that

have some significance, then creativity is not correlated with intelligence.

You can be creative and have low intelligence.

You can be creative and have high intelligence, false.

Question number nine, genius is related to mental illness.

You've probably watched A Beautiful Mind too many times.

The answer is that Psycho pathologies really

are not correlated with intelligence.

You have high intelligence people that have mental illness and

you have low intelligence that have mental illness.

In many cases, mental illness is a disease and smart people and

not so smart people both get diseases, false.

Question number ten, the more motivated and aroused you are,

the better your performance will be.

Commonly believed to be true.

Arousal is important for performance, but it shows an inverted U-shaped function.

Arousal will increase your performance up to some point and

if you have too much arousal, it can decrease your performance.

You've probably experienced that.

If you have arousal because you're taking a final exam and

you really haven't studied that much for it.

You have really high levels of arousal,

it will probably actually reduce your performance on the test.

So, it's important, this inverted u-shape function.

The answer, false.

11, much of human behavior is instinctive.

While infants have a lot of reflexes, which are biologically produced behaviors,

we can't think of almost any behavior that's instinctive in adults.

Most every behavior is learned, or maybe has, we have genetic predisposition to

have a particular behavior, but whether we have the particular behavior or not is

often influenced by the environment, not just by our genes, answer false.

We only use about 10% of our brain at any one time.

How many times have I heard that in the press about

dealing with the brain in psychology?

In fact, our brains are active all the time.

In fact, a neuron, when it's not producing a message going down the neuron,

is already activated.

It's polarized at -70 millivolts.

So we use our brains.

It wouldn't make sense or

be adaptive if we only used 10% of our brain at any one time, false.

13, shock treatment is now used for people with severe anxiety.

Well shock treatment is still used, but

it's used as a last resort for very serious psychopathologies and

certainly not used for anxieties and phobias, false.

14, to better control behavior, reinforcement should be applied

consistently, every time the behavior occurs.

In fact one of the biggest things about reinforcement and

behaviour is that the partial reinforcement effect.

Behavior is better controlled if you reinforce only

a partial number of the correct behaviors, not every time it occurs, false.

Question 15, a person with schizophrenia has a split personality.

Split personality is actually called associative syndrome and

not schizophrenia.

In schizophrenia you don't have a split personality,

it's just that you have split from reality that everybody else experiences.

This is false.

16, opposite types of people attract each other.

Well actually the matching services that are advertised on television know this

is false, because in fact, people that are alike are attracted to each other.

You tend to look more at common things you share,

rather than things that you do not share.

17, psychologists are trained to be therapists.

Well I'm a psychologist and I've never had one minute of training to be

a therapist and in fact, the last person you want to be your therapist is me.

So false, psychology is a very broad discipline and

you're trained to do many different things.

And with some psychologists, clinical psychologists, it includes therapy.

18, old people become senile if they live long enough.

This implies that senility, or

as we would say, dementia, occurs simply as an age effect.

When dementia is a disease, and you either get the disease or

you don't get the disease.

It's true that age is related to the probability of developing dementia.

The older you are the more the likelihood you would develop dementia.

But it's a disease.

And not everybody does it.

Even people above 85, only about 20% of the people have serious dementia, false.

19, people who threaten suicide are rarely the ones who commit suicide.

In fact, if you have a friend, or colleague that's threatening suicide,

take it seriously.

Because that is a reaching out of someone who is in pain and

the probability of committing suicide is actually greater If

people know that you've threatened suicide in the past, false.

20, most cases of color blindness can be cured by diet.

Well, currants might help you see, but

color blindness is not related to diet, false.

21, only humans use tools.

The answer is false and we'll see that some psychologists studying animal

populations have found that they're very good at using tools to do what they want.

For example,

chimpanzees can use sticks to dig at termite mounds to get the termites to eat.

So tools are used by the species.

The use of psycho-analysis is on the increase in this country.

Know with manged care and with insurance paying limits on how much therapy you can

get, psychoanalysis is the kind of therapy that takes a very long time, even years.

And you can't be reimbursed for that.

So long lasting therapies, like psychoanalysis, that's based on

Freud's theory, is actually on the decrease in this country, false.

23, hypnosis is a useful technique for retrieving forgotten events.

The belief is that if you have repressed an event because of the severity of it,

you repress it and

you actually forget about it and only hypnosis can help you retrieve it.

In fact, the evidence doesn't show that.

You can not use hypnosis to retrieve things.

Other than things that you learned under hypnosis itself.

So it can't be used for looking at regressed memories, false.

24, there is safety in numbers.

The more people that witness an emergency,

the probability that someone will intervene increases.

In fact, psychology has shown the opposite to this.

The more people that you have witnessing an emergency,

you had diffusion of responsibility, and the least likely you

will get someone to intervene, it's called bystander apathy, or the bystander effect.

25, exercising the brain with intelligent games and

tasks will improve brain efficiency and intelligence.

Well got in trouble for saying this.

And they actually lost a court case,

because there is no evidence that exercising the brain with intellectual

games will do more than improve your ability to do intellectual games.

It won't transfer to other kinds of intelligence.

And intelligence is a very complex construct, false.

So what we've discovered is that taking a test,

based on your experiences, doesn't often give you the facts.

If you haven't seen this pre-test before, I doubt that you got them all right.

In fact, giving this in other classes of introductory psychology,

I find that a majority of the answers are true on this test, rather than false.

So in this course we'll begin to understand how methodology,

methological foundations, can help us understand the true facts about behavior.

And we're going to talk about bio-psychology.

Thank you.

Lecture Video 1.2: Intro to Psychology As A Science - Analysis of Pre-Test

Introduction to Psychology as a Science 1 – Methodological and Biological Foundations

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