What assumptions do behaviourists make? Behaviourists regard all behaviour as a response to a stimulus. They assume that what we do is determined by the environment we are in, which provides stimuli to which we respond, and the environments we have been in in the past, which caused us to learn to respond to stimuli in particular ways. Behaviourists are unique amongst psychologists in believing that it is unnecessary to speculate about internal mental processes when explaining behaviour: it is enough to know which stimuli elicit which responses. Behaviourists also believe that people are born with only a handful of innate reflexes (stimulus-response units that do not need to be learned) and that all of a person’s complex behaviours are the result of learning through interaction with the environment. They also assume that the processes of learning are common to all species and so humans learn in the same way as other animals. How do behaviourists explain human behaviour? Behaviourists explain behaviour in terms of (1) the stimuli that elicit it and (2) the events that caused the person to learn to respond to the stimulus that way. Behaviourists use two processes to explain how people learn: classical conditioning and operant conditioning. In classical conditioning, people learn to associate two stimuli when they occur together, such that the response originally elicited by one stimulus is transferred to another. The person learns to produce an existing response to a new stimulus. For example, Watson & Rayner (1920) conditioned a young boy (‘Little Albert’) to respond with anxiety to the stimulus of a white rat. They achieved this by pairing the rat with a loud noise that already made Albert anxious. The anxiety response was transferred to the rat because it was presented together with the noise. The response also generalized to other stimuli that resembled the rat, including a rabbit and a fur coat. Over time, conditioned responses like this gradually diminish in a process called extinction. In operant conditioning, people learn to perform new behaviours through the consequences of the things they do. If a behaviour they produce is followed by a reinforcement then the likelihood of that behaviour being repeated increases in future (the behaviour is strengthened). A consequence can be reinforcing in two ways: either the person gets something good (positive reinforcement) or they avoid something bad (negative reinforcement). Conversely, if a behaviour is followed by a punishment then the likelihood of that behaviour being repeated in future decreases (the behaviour is weakened). Whereas classical conditioning only allows the person to produce existing responses to new stimuli, operant conditioning allows them to learn new responses.
18. Describe specifics and achievements of gestalt-psychology. Gestalt psychology is based on the observation that we often experience things that are not a part of our simple sensations. The original observation was Wertheimer’s, when he noted that we perceive motion where there is nothing more than a rapid sequence of individual sensory events. This is what he saw in the toy stroboscope he bought at the Frankfurt train station, and what he saw in his laboratory when he experimented with lights flashing in rapid succession (like the Christmas lights that appear to course around the tree, or the fancy neon signs in Las Vegas that seem to move). The effect is called apparent motion, and it is actually the basic principle of motion pictures.
Furthermore, say the Gestalt psychologists, we are built to experience the structured whole as well as the individual sensations. In perception, there are many organizing principles called gestalt laws. The most general version is called the law of pragnanz. Pragnanz is German for pregnant, but in the sense of pregnant with meaning, rather than pregnant with child. For example, a set of dots outlining the shape of a star is likely to be perceived as a star, not as a set of dots. We tend to complete the figure, make it the way it “should” be, finish it. Like we somehow manage to see this as a "B"...
The law of closure says that, if something is missing in an otherwise complete figure, we will tend to add it. A triangle, for example, with a small part of its edge missing, will still be seen as a triangle. We will “close” the gap.
The law of similarity says that we will tend to group similar items together, to see them as forming a gestalt, within a larger form. Here is a simple typographic example:
OXXXXXXXXXX
XOXXXXXXXXX
XXOXXXXXXXX
XXXOXXXXXXX
XXXXOXXXXXX
XXXXXOXXXXX
XXXXXXOXXXX
XXXXXXXOXXX
XXXXXXXXOXX
XXXXXXXXXOX
XXXXXXXXXXO
It is just natural for us to see the o’s as a line within a field of x’s.
Another law is the law of proximity. Things that are close together as seen as belonging together. For example...
**************
**************
**************
You are much more likely to see three lines of close-together *’s than 14 vertical collections of 3 *’s each.
Next, there’s the law of symmetry. Take a look at this example:
[ ][ ][ ]
Despite the pressure of proximity to group the brackets nearest each other together, symmetry overwhelms our perception and makes us see them as pairs of symmetrical brackets.
Another law is the law of continuity. When we can see a line, for example, as continuing through another line, rather than stopping and starting, we will do so, as in this example, which we see as composed of two lines, not as a combination of two angles...:
Figure-ground is another Gestalt psychology principle. It was first introduced by the Danish phenomenologist Edgar Rubin (1886-1951). The classic example is this one... But the gestalt principles are by no means restricted to perception -- that’s just where they were first noticed. Take, for example, memory. A similar example involved a five year old girl, presented with a geometry problem way over her head: How do you figure the area of a parallelogram? She considered, then excitedly asked for a pair of scissors. She cut off a triangle from one end, and moved it around to the other side, turning the parallelogram into a simple rectangle. Wertheimer called this productive thinking.
The idea behind both of these examples, and much of the gestalt explanation of things, is that the world of our experiencing is meaningfully organized, to one degree or another. When we learn or solve problems, we are essentially recognizing meaning that is there, in the experience, for the “dis-covering.”
Most of what we’ve just looked at has been absorbed into “mainstream” psychology -- to such a degree that many people forget to give credit to the people who discovered these principles! There is one more part of their theory that has had less acceptance: Isomorphism.
Isomorphism suggests that there is some clear similarity in the gestalt patterning of stimuli and of the activity in the brain while we are perceiving the stimuli.
19. Define peculiarities of Z. Freud psychoanalysis approach. Sigmund Freud explored the human mind more thoroughly than any other who became before him. His contributions to psychology are vast. Freud was one of the most influential people of the twentieth century and his enduring legacy has influenced not only psychology, but art, literature and even the way people bring up their children.
Freud’s lexicon has become embedded within the vocabulary of western society. Words he introduced through his theories are now used by everyday people, such as anal (personality), libido, denial, repression, cathartic, Freudian slip, and neurotic.
Freud was the founding father of psychoanalysis, a method for treating a mental illness and also a theory which explains human behavior.
Freud (1900, 1905) developed a topographical model of the mind, whereby he described the features of mind’s structure and function.
In this model the conscious mind (everything we are aware of) is seen as the tip of the iceberg, with the unconscious mind a repository of a ‘cauldron’ of primitive wishes and impulse kept at bay and mediated by the preconscious area.
However, Freud found that some events and desires were often too frightening or painful for his patients to acknowledge. Freud believed such information was locked away in a region he called the unconscious mind. This happens through the process of repression.
Sigmund Freud emphasized the importance of the unconscious mind, and a primary assumption of Freudian theory is that the unconscious mind governs behavior to a greater degree than people suspect.
Indeed, the goal of psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious conscious.The Psyche
Freud (1923) later developed a more structural model of the mind comprising the entities id, ego and superego (what Freud called “the psychic apparatus”).
These are not physical areas within the brain, but rather hypothetical conceptualizations of important mental functions.
Freud assumed the id operated at an unconscious level according to the pleasure principle. The id is contains two kinds of biological instincts (or dives) which Freud called Eros and Thanatos.
Eros, or life instinct, helps the individual to survive; it directs life-sustaining activities such as respiration, eating and sex (Freud, 1925). The energy created by the life instincts is known as libido.
In contrast, Thanatos or death instinct, is viewed as a set of destructive forces present in all human beings (Freud, 1920). When this energy is directed outward onto others, it is expressed as aggression and violence.
Freud believed that Eros or stronger than Thanatos, thus enabling people to survive rather than self-destruct.
The ego develops from the id during infancy. The egos goal is to satisfy the demands of the id in a safe a socially acceptable way.
In contrast to the id the ego follows the reality principle as it operates in both the conscious and unconscious mind.
This particular theory shows how adult personality is determined by their childhood experiences.
20. Reveal peculiar features of neo-behavioral psychology. A professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, Tolman focused his experimental work largely on white rats learning their way through mazes. He differed from his behaviorist predecessors by taking a more holistic approach to behavior than they had. Rather than talking in terms of atomistic, isolated stimuli and responses, Tolman emphasized their integration with the environment by referring to them as "stimulating agencies" and "behavior acts." In his 1932 Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men, Tolman argued that purpose and cognition were essential to behavior and should be interpreted not as mentalistic entities but as outwardly observable features of behavior describable in objective language. He also defined the notion of the intervening variable, a link between stimulus and response that helps to determine behavior. As many as ten intervening variables could exist between a stimulating agency and a rat's decision to move in a certain direction at a choice-point in a maze. Of the three neobehaviorists, Hull was the most ambitious about constructing a formal theory of behavior. He believed he had found the fundamental law of learning or habit-formation—the law of stimulus generalization—and that this law not only underlay all behavior in animals and humans, but was a principle basic enough to unify all the social sciences. These laws of behavior explained how all learning took place without resorting to immaterial notions like soul or free will. Hull, who had originally intended to become an engineer, even designed a variety of machines that worked on the principles of conditioning reflexes, in order to demonstrate that learning was a wholly mechanistic process. He expressed his laws of behavior in mathematical terms, filling his 1943 Principles of Behavior: An Introduction to Behavior Theory with complex equations.
Neobehaviorism came in for strong criticism in the late 1950s and 1960s. Philosophers of science questioned the claim that any science could be theory-neutral and based solely in observation; observations were themselves seen to be theory-laden. Psychologists questioned the idea that learning was a singular entity that could form the basis for all of psychology. In particular, cognitive psychology, drawing on insights from computer science, redefined mental processes such as problem solving, learning, and memory in terms of information processing, a development that gave a new autonomy and a new respectability to the study of internal mental states. Influenced by this cognitivist turn, the psycholinguist Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) published a scathing review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior, arguing that language had to be understood in terms of universal and innate mental structures, not as behavior shaped by the environment. Behaviorism is currently regarded by psychologists as one approach among many; both cognitivism and neuroscience are arguably as influential in understanding mind and behavior.
21. Represent content of cognitive approach in modern psychology. Cognitive psychology is the scienitific study of the mind as an information processor Cognitive psychologists try to build up cognitive models of the information processing that goes on inside people’s minds, including perception, attention, language, memory thinking and consciousness. The cognitive perspective applies a nomothetic approach to discover human cognitive processes, but have also adopted idiographic techniques through using case studies (e.g. KF, HM). Cognitive psychology is also a reductionist approach. This means that all behaviour, no matter how complex can be reduced to simple cognitive processes, like memory or perception. Typically cognitive psychologists use the laboratory experiment to study behavior. This is because the cognitive approach is a scientific one. For example, participants will take part in memory tests in strictly controlled conditions. However, the widely used lab experiment can be criticized for lacking ecological validity (a major criticism of cognitive psychology).
Cognitive psychology became of great importance in the mid 1950s. Several factors were important in this:
· Dissatisfaction with the behaviorist approach in its simple emphasis on external behavior rather than internal processes.
· The development of better experimental methods.
· Comparison between human and computer processing of information.
The emphasis of psychology shifted away from the study of conditioned behaviourand psychoanalytical notions about the study of the mind, towards the understanding of human information processing, using strict and rigorous laboratory investigation.
The cognitive approach began to revolutionize psychology in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, to become the dominant approach (i.e. perspective) in psychology by the late 1970s. Interest in mental processes had been gradually restored through the work of Piaget and Tolman.
But it was the arrival of the computer that gave cognitive psychology the terminology and metaphor it needed to investigate the human mind. The start of the use of computers allowed psychologists to try to understand the complexities of human cognition by comparing it with something simpler and better understood i.e. an artificial system such as a computer.
The information processing approach is based on a number of assumptions, including:
1. Information made available from the environment is processed by a series of processing systems (e.g. attention, perception, short-term memory);
2. These processing systems transform, or alter the information in systematic ways;
3. The aim of research is to specify the processes and structures that underlie cognitive performance;
4. Information processing in humans resembles that in computers.
22. Consider K. Jung's psychoanalytical approach. Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist whose research was deep-rooted in psychoanalysis. He was greatly influenced by Sigmund Freud and even conducted research alongside him. Eventually, though, Jung disagreed with many of Freud's theories. Jung is best known for his research in personality, dream analysis and the human psyche. His theories are so revered that they were made into their own school of psychotherapy: Jungian psychology, which is also called analytical psychology. Let's look deeper into the main theories of Jungian psychology.
In his theory of personality, Carl Jung distinguishes two different attitude types: Introverts, which are those people who receive stimulation from within, and extroverts, which are those who receive their stimulation from the environment. Jung also separates introverts and extroverts into four subtypes according to the functions that control the way they perceive the world. Both introverts and extroverts can be any of these subtypes, so there are eight possible personality types. These four functions are:
1. Thinking
Applying reasoning to the situations and environments you encounter.
2. Feeling
Applying subjective, personal assessment to the situations and environments you encounter. Unlike David, Donna relies on her feelings to tell her how to make a decision. If something feels good, she goes for it; if it doesn't, she avoids it.
3. Sensation
Applying aesthetic value to the situations and environments you encounter.
4. Intuition
Using your unconscious or the mystical to understand your experiences.
The major concepts of analytical psychology as developed by Jung include: Synchronicity - an a-causal principle as a basis for the apparently random simultaneous occurrence of phenomena.[54]
Archetype - a universal predisposition to form images, a structural aspect of the psyche, personal and collective, the 'imprinter'
Archetypal images - symbols with numinosity; symbols that mediate opposites in the psyche, often found cross-culturally in religious art, mythology, fairy tales; the 'imprint'
Complex - psychic traits associated with an archetype, often in a state of repression
Extraversion and introversion - personality traits contributing to Personality type.[55]
Shadow - the repressed side of the personality, often experienced as negative
Collective unconscious - the shadow of the group, as the obverse of the herd
Anima - the feminine aspect of a man's psyche, personal and collective, both a complex and an archetypal image
Animus - the masculine aspect of a woman's psyche, personal and collective, complex and archetypal image
Self - the central archetypal image governing the individuation process, symbolized by mandalas, the union of male and female, totality, unity
Individuation - a process of wholeness "which negates neither the conscious or unconscious position but does justice to them both"
24. Clarify a content of humanistic approach in modern psychology. Humanistic, humanism and humanist are terms in psychology relating to an approach which studies the whole person, and the uniqueness of each individual. Essentially, these terms refer the same approach in psychology.
Humanism is a psychological perspective that emphasizes the study of the whole person. Humanistic psychologists look at human behavior not only through the eyes of the observer, but through the eyes of the person doing the behaving. Sometimes the humanistic approach is called phenomenological. This means that personality is studied from the point of view of the individual’s subjective experience. For Rogers the focus of psychology is not behaviour (Skinner), the unconscious (Freud), thinking (Wundt) or the human brain but how individuals perceive and interpret events. Rogers is therefore important because he redirected psychology towards the study of the self.
The humanistic approach in psychology developed as a rebellion against what some psychologists saw as the limitations of the behaviorist and psychodynamic psychology. The humanistic approach is thus often called the “third force” in psychology after psychoanalysis and behaviorism. Humanism rejected the assumptions of the behaviorist perspective which is characterized as deterministic, focused on reinforcement of stimulus-response behavior and heavily dependent on animal research.
Humanistic psychology also rejected the psychodynamic approach because it is also deterministic, with unconscious irrational and instinctive forces determining human thought and behavior. Both behaviorism and psychoanalysis are regarded as dehumanizing by humanistic psychologists.Humanistic psychology begins with the existential assumptions that phenomenology is central and that people have free will. Personal agency is the humanistic term for the exercise of free will. Personal agency refers to the choices we make in life, the paths we go down and their consequences.
A further assumption is then added - people are basically good, and have an innate need to make themselves and the world better. The humanistic approach emphasizes the personal worth of the individual, the centrality of human values, and the creative, active nature of human beings. The approach is optimistic and focuses on noble human capacity to overcome hardship, pain and despair. Both Rogers and Maslow regarded personal growth and fulfillment in life as a basic human motive. This means that each person, in different ways, seeks to grow psychologically and continuously enhance themselves. This has been captured by the term self-actualization, which is about psychological growth, fulfillment and satisfaction in life. However, Rogers and Maslow both describe different ways of how self-actualization can be achieved.
Central to the humanistic theories of Rogers (1959) and Maslow (1943) are the subjective, conscious experiences of the individual. Humanistic psychologists argue that objective reality is less important than a person's subjective perception and understanding of the world. Because of this, Rogers and Maslow placed little value on scientific psychology, especially the use of the psychology laboratory to investigate both human and animal behavior.
Humanism rejects scientific methodology like experiments and typically uses qualitative research methods. For example, diary accounts, open-ended questionnaires, unstructured interviews and unstructured observations. Qualitative research is useful for studies at the individual level, and to find out, in depth, the ways in which people think or feel (e.g. case studies). The way to really understand other people is to sit down and talk with them, share their experiences and be open to their feelings.
23. Signify A.Adler's concept of inferiority complex. An inferiority complex is a lack of self-worth, a doubt and uncertainty, and feelings of not measuring up to standards. It is often subconscious, and is thought to drive afflicted individuals to overcompensate, resulting either in spectacular achievement or extreme asocial behavior. In modern literature, the preferred terminology is "lack of covert self-esteem".[1] For many, it is developed through a combination of genetic personality characteristics and personal experiences.
Classical Adlerian psychology makes a distinction between primary and secondary inferiority feelings.
· A primary inferiority feeling is said to be rooted in the young child's original experience of weakness, helplessness and dependency. It can then be intensified by comparisons to siblings, romantic partners, and adults.
· A secondary inferiority feeling relates to an adult's experience of being unable to reach a subconscious, fictional final goal of subjective security and success to compensate for the inferiority feelings. The perceived distance from that goal would lead to a negative/depressed feeling that could then prompt the recall of the original inferiority feeling; this composite of inferiority feelings could be experienced as overwhelming. The goal invented to relieve the original, primary feeling of inferiority which actually causes the secondary feeling of inferiority is the "catch-22" of this dilemma. This vicious cycle is common in neurotic lifestyles.
Feeling inferior is often viewed as being inferior to another person, but this is not always the case in the Adlerian view. One often feels incompetent to perform a task, such as a test in school.
An inferiority complex occurs when the feelings of inferiority are intensified in the individual through discouragement or failure. Those who are at risk for developing a complex include people who: show signs of low self-esteem or self-worth, have low socioeconomic status, or have a history of depression symptoms. Children reared in households where they were constantly criticized or did not live up to parents' expectations may also develop an inferiority complex. Many times there are warning signs to someone who may be more prone to developing an inferiority complex. For example, someone who is prone to attention and approval-seeking behaviors may be more susceptible. Also, children raised in families where everything is done for them, who have developed what Adler called a "pampered lifestyle". These individuals have developed a form of learned helplessness and are unable to overcome the problems of life without assistance.
When an inferiority complex is in full effect, it may impact the performance of the individual as well as impact the individual's self-esteem. Unconscious psychological and emotional processes can disrupt students’ cognitive learning, and negatively “charged” feeling-toned memory associations can derail the learning process. Hutt found that math can become associated with a psychological inferiority complex, low motivation and self-efficacy, poor self-directed learning strategies, and feeling unsafe or anxious.[5]
Widely researched, but often not talked about specifically in this area is the concept of self-esteem and that people can feel good about their abilities and have self-esteem in areas where they feel competent and might not hold such personal esteem in other areas of their life. In essence, self-esteem can also be context-driven. Thus, the theory that someone has an overarching inferiority complex is a bit outdated (see Self-complexity theory).
In the mental health treatment population, this characteristic is shown in patients with many disorders such as certain types of schizophrenia, mood disorders, and personality disorders.
25. Discuss a principle of determinism in psychology. Determinism is not just causality. Determinism goes far beyond 1 causality, and certainly much farther than psychological science requires. Many scientific psychologists embrace determinism without realizing what it means. That, at least, is the distinct impression left with me after the dramatic debate about free will at the keynote session of the big annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in Tampa earlier this month. Plenty was said to support determinism - but it seemed quite irrelevant. The gist seemed to be, in psychology we study causes, so we have to believe in determinism. This is wrong to the point of silly.
Determinism is a belief in the inevitability of causation. Everything that happens is the only possible thing that could happen. The chains and networks of causes are so powerful and inexorable that every outcome is inevitable. We are already locked in to everything else that is going to happen in the entire future of the universe. If you knew all the causal principles and had enough information about the present, you could predict the future with 100% accuracy. The universe resembles a giant machine, grinding alone exactly as it must inevitably continue to do, following rigid rules. That is determinism. To a determinist, there are no counterfactuals. Nothing that didn't happen could possibly have happened. Everything that did happen was the only possible thing that could have happened at that point in time and space, given the causes.
That is why determinism and free will strike most people as incompatible beliefs (even though in recent decades a growing group of philosophers have embraced some form of ‘compatibilism' that preserves a watered-down notion of free will while also embracing determinism). The essence of free will is that the person really could do more than one possible response to a given situation. To a determinist, that is wrong. Causes, including unconscious causes, are operating to bring the person inevitably to what he or she will eventually do. The appearance of multiple options is an illusion, to a determinist. To a determinist, all choice is illusory. The literal meaning of choice is that there are multiple options, and the person selects one of them. Thus, choice requires multiple possible outcomes, which is a no-no to determism. To the determinist, the march of causality will make one outcome inevitable, and so it is wrong to believe that anything else was possible. The chooser does not yet know which option he or she is going to choose, hence the subjective experience of choice. Thus, the subjective choosing is simply a matter of one's own ignorance - ignorance that those other outcomes are not really possibilities at all.
For psychological science, however, a belief in choice seems more plausible and useful than determinism. Choice is fundamental in human life. Every day people face choices, defined by multiple possibilities. To claim that all that is illusion and mistake is to force psychological phenomena into an unrealistic strait jacket. Also, psychological causality as revealed in our labs is arguably never deterministic. Our studies show a change in the odds of one response over another. But changes in the odds entail that more than one response was possible. Our entire statistical enterprise is built on the idea of multiple possibilities.
26. Define a principle of development in psychology. Developmental psychology is a scientific approach which aims to explain how children and adults change over time. A significant proportion of theories within this discipline focus upon development during childhood, as this is the period during an individual's lifespan when the most change occurs.
Developmental psychologists study a wide range of theoretical areas, such as biological, social, emotion, and cognitive processes. Empirical research in this area tends to be dominated by psychologists from Western cultures such as North American and Europe, although during the 1980s Japanese researchers began making a valid contribution to the field. The three goals of developmental psychology are to describe, explain, and to optimize development.
Developmental Psychology study of behavioral changes and continuity from infancy to old age. Much emphasis in psychology has been given to the child and to the deviant personality. Developmental psychology is particularly significant, then, in that it provides for formal study of children and adults at every stage of development through the life span.
Developmental psychology reflects the view that human development and behavior throughout the life span is a function of the interaction between biologically determined factors, such as height or temperament, and environmental influences, such as family, schooling, religion, and culture. Studies of these interactions focus on their consequences for people at different age levels. For example, developmental psychologists are interested in how children who were physically abused by their parents behave when they themselves become parents. Studies, although inconclusive, suggest that abused children often become abusive parents.
Normative development is typically viewed as a continual and cumulative process. However, it should be noted that people can change if important aspects of one's life change. This capacity for change is called plasticity. For example, Rutter (1981) discovered than somber babies living in understaffed orphanages often become cheerful and affectionate when placed in socially stimulating adoptive homes. When trying to explain development, it is important to consider the relative contribution of both nature and nurture. Nature refers to the process of biological maturation inheritance and maturation. Nurture refers to the impact of the environment, which involves the process of learning through experiences. The basic principles of growth and development are physical development, social development and cognitive development. Growth and development in children is nearly always a sequential process. However, negative experiences, such as child abuse or witnessing a traumatic event, can delay the growth and development process.
Physical development includes changes to the size and function of the body, the development of motor skills and a change in appearance. Childhood and early adolescence are the major periods of physical development. However, many changes occur well into adulthood. For example, physical development occurs during pregnancy.
Human development is the process of growth and change that every person goes through in life. People grow and develop at different rates, but mostly follow a general trajectory: people learn to crawl before they walk and to walk before they do cartwheels. Though some people may walk (or do cartwheels) earlier than others, in the end, people generally follow the same script of development.
27. Reveal a principle of integrity of human consciousness and activity. Integrity is the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness. It is generally a personal choice to hold oneself to consistent moral and ethical standards. In ethics, integrity is regarded by many people as the honesty and truthfulness or accuracy of one's actions. Integrity can stand in opposition to hypocrisy, in that judging with the standards of integrity involves regarding internal consistency as a virtue, and suggests that parties holding within themselves apparently conflicting values should account for the discrepancy or alter their beliefs. The word integrity evolved from the Latin adjective integer, meaning whole or complete. [3] In this context, integrity is the inner sense of "wholeness" deriving from qualities such as honesty and consistency of character. As such, one may judge that others "have integrity" to the extent that they act according to the values, beliefs and principles they claim to hold.
Significant attention is given to the subject of integrity in law and the conception of law in 20th century philosophy of law and jurisprudence centering in part on the research of Ronald Dworkin as studied in his book Law's Empire. Dworkin's position on integrity in law reinforces the conception of justice viewed as fairness. A value system's abstraction depth and range of applicable interaction may also function as significant factors in identifying integrity due to their congruence or lack of congruence with observation. A value system may evolve in a while, while retaining integrity if those who espouse the values account for and resolve inconsistencies.
Human beings possess the most wonderful of all gifts—reason with its keen insight into the remote past and the future, its penetration into the sphere of the unknown, its world of dreams and fantasy, creative solutions to practical and theoretical problems and the realisation of the most daring plans. As the highest level of human mental activity, consciousness is one of the basic concepts of philosophy, psychology and sociology. The unique nature of this activity lies in the fact that the reflection of reality, and its constructive-creative transformation in the form of sensuous and mental images, concepts and ideas, anticipate practical action by individuals and social groups and give them a goal, an orientation.
Human consciousness is a form of mental activity, the highest form. By mental activity we mean all mental processes, conscious and unconscious, all mental states and qualities of the individual. These are mainly processes of cognition, internal states of the organism, and such attributes of personality as character, temperament, and so on. Mental activity is an attribute of the whole animal world. Consciousness, on the other hand, as the highest form of mental activity, is inherent only in human beings, and even then not at all times or at all levels. It does not exist in the newborn child, in certain categories of the mentally ill, in people who are asleep or in a coma. And even in the developed, healthy and waking individual not all mental activity forms a part of his consciousness; a great portion of it proceeds outside the bounds of consciousness and belongs to the unconscious phenomena of the mind. The content of the activity of consciousness is recorded in artifacts (including language and other sign systems), thus acquiring the form of ideal existence, existence as knowledge, as historical memory. Consciousness also includes an axiological, that is to say, evaluative aspect, which expresses the selectivity of consciousness, its orientation on values evolved by society and accepted by the individual—philosophical, scientific, political, moral, aesthetic, religious, etc. It includes the individual's relation both to these values and to himself, thus becoming a form of self-consciousness, which is also social in origin.
28. Discuss an issue of the psyches’ origin in the process of evolution. Evolutionary psychology (EP) is a theoretical approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological structure from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations – that is, the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection in human evolution. Adaptationist thinking about physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and immune system, is common in evolutionary biology. Some evolutionary psychologists apply the same thinking to psychology, arguing that the modularity of mind is similar to that of the body and with different modular adaptations serving different functions. Evolutionary psychologists argue that much of human behavior is the output of psychological adaptations that evolved to solve recurrent problems in human ancestral environments.
Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach to psychology that attempts to explain useful mental and psychological traits—such as memory, perception, or language—as adaptations, i.e., as the functional products of natural selection. The purpose of this approach is to bring the functional way of thinking about biological mechanisms such as the immune system into the field of psychology, and to approach psychological mechanisms in a similar way. In short, evolutionary psychology is focused on how evolution has shaped the mind and behavior. Though applicable to any organism with a nervous system, most research in evolutionary psychology focuses on humans. Evolutionary Psychology proposes that the human brain comprises many functional mechanisms, called psychological adaptations or evolved cognitive mechanisms designed by the process of natural selection.
Examples include language acquisition modules, incest avoidance mechanisms, cheater detection mechanisms, intelligence and sex-specific mating preferences, foraging mechanisms, alliance-tracking mechanisms, agent detection mechanisms, and so on. Evolutionary psychology has roots in cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology. It also draws on behavioral ecology, artificial intelligence, genetics, ethology, anthropology, archaeology, biology, and zoology.
Evolutionary psychology is closely linked to sociobiology, but there are key differences between them including the emphasis on domain-specific rather than domain-general mechanisms, the relevance of measures of current fitness, the importance of mismatch theory, and psychology rather than behaviour.
Many evolutionary psychologists, however, argue that the mind consists of both domain-specific and domain-general mechanisms, especially evolutionary developmental psychologists. Most sociobiological research is now conducted in the field of behavioral ecology. Evolutionary psychology is not a distinct branch of psychology, but rather a theoretical lens that is currently informing all branches of psychology. It is based on a series of logically consistent and well-confirmed premises: (1) that evolutionary processes have sculpted not merely the body, but also the brain, the psychological mechanisms it houses, and the behavior it produces; (2) many of those mechanisms are best conceptualized as psychological adaptations designed to solve problems that historically contributed to survival and reproduction, broadly conceived; (3) psychological adaptations, along with byproducts of those adaptations, are activated in modern environments that differ in some important ways from ancestral environments.
29. Explain various approaches to the question "what is psyches" (, bio-psychism, anthropo-psychism, neuro-psychism). P sycho is a 1960 American psychological horror film directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock, and written by Joseph Stefano, starring Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, John Gavin, Vera Miles and Martin Balsam, and was based on the 1959 novel of the same name by Robert Bloch. The film centers on the encounter between a secretary, Marion Crane (Leigh), who ends up at a secluded motel after stealing money from her employer, and the motel's disturbed owner-manager, Norman Bates (Perkins), and its aftermath.
When originally made, the film was seen as a departure from Hitchcock's previous film North by Northwest, having been filmed on a low budget, with a television crew and in black and white. Psycho initially received mixed reviews, but outstanding box office returns prompted reconsideration which led to overwhelming critical acclaim and four Academy Awardnominations, including Best Supporting Actress for Leigh and Best Director for Hitchcock. Psycho is now considered one of Hitchcock's best films and praised as a work of cinematic art by international film critics and film scholars. Ranked among the greatest films of all time, it set a new level of acceptability for violence, deviant behavior and sexuality in American films,[6] and is widely considered to be the earliest example of the slasher film genre. Psycho is based on Robert Bloch's 1959 novel of the same name, which was loosely inspired by the case of convicted Wisconsin murderer and grave robber Ed Gein. Both Gein, who lived just 40 miles from Bloch, and the story's protagonist, Norman Bates, were solitary murderers in isolated rural locations. Each had deceased, domineering mothers, had sealed off a room in their home as a shrine to her, and dressed in women's clothes. However, unlike Bates, Gein is not strictly considered a serial killer, having been charged with murder only twice.
panpsychism is the view that consciousness, mind or soul (psyche) is a universal and primordial feature of all things. Panpsychists see themselves as minds in a world of mind.
Panpsychism is one of the oldest philosophical theories, and has been ascribed to philosophers like Thales, Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz and William James. Panpsychism can also be seen in ancient philosophies such as Stoicism, Taoism, Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism.
Panpsychism is the doctrine that mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe. In this entry, we focus on panpsychism as it has been discussed and developed in Western philosophy. Unsurprisingly, each of the key terms, “mind”, “fundamental” and “throughout the universe” is subject to a variety of interpretations by panpsychists, leading to a range of possible philosophical positions.
The synthesis of psychodynamic and neuroscientific data may be advanced by the study of similarly configured specific patterns of defense along continua from the normal and neurotic mental mechanisms of defenses, through what might be termed neuropsychiatric defenses influenced by the neurological state, to the more clearly neurological cortical reactions. These similar patterns and continua are the particularly human way brain adds its flavor of organism to mind, and the way in which all the psychodynamic mechanisms are specifically imbedded in brain. A purely psychological psychodynamics lacking this medical perspective fails to model human mental processes and reflects problems with artificial intelligence models that do not model brain.
30. Distinguish stages of the psyches development throughout evolution of species (elementary-sensory, perceptive, intellectual, consciousness), Developmental psychology is the scientific study of how and why human beings change over the course of their life. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence, adult development, aging, and the entire lifespan. This field examines change across a broad range of topics including: motor skills, cognitive development, executive functions, moral understanding, language acquisition, social change, personality, emotional development, self-concept and identity formation.
Developmental psychology examines the influences of nature and nurture on the process of human development, and processes of change in context and across time. Many researchers are interested in the interaction between personal characteristics, the individual's behavior and environmental factors, including social context and the built environment. Developmental psychology involves a range of fields, such as, educational psychology, child psychopathology, forensic developmental psychology, child development, cognitive psychology, ecological psychology, and cultural psychology.
The notion of consciousness in the English scientific literature denotes a global ability to consciously perform elementary and intellectual tasks, to reason, plan, judge and retrieve information as well as the awareness of these functions belonging to the self, that is, being self-aware. consciousness can also be defined as continuous awareness of the external and internal environment, of the past and the present. The meaning of consciousness is different in various languages, but it invariably includes, the conscious person is capable to learn, retrieve and use information. Disturbance or loss of consciousness in the Hungarian medical language indicates decreased alertness or arousability rather than the impairment of the complex mental ability. Awareness denotes the spiritual process of perception and analysis of stimuli from the inner and external world. Alertness is a prerequisite of awareness. Clinical observations suggest that the lesions of specific structures of the brain may lead to specific malfunction of consciousness, therefore, consciousness must be the product of neural activity. "Higher functions" of human mental ability have been ascribed to the prefrontal and parietal association cortices. Impaired consciousness in the neurological practice is classified based on tests for conscious behavior and by analyzing the following responses: 1. elementary reactions to sensory stimuli--these are impaired in hypnoid unconsciousness, 2. intellectual reactions to cognitive stimuli--these indicate the impairment of cognitive contents in non-hypnoid unconsciousness.
An intellectual is a person who engages in critical study, thought, and reflection about the reality of society, and proposes solutions for the normative problems of that society, and, by such discourse in the public sphere, he or she gains authority within the public opinion.[1][2] Coming from the world of culture, either as a creator or as a mediator, the intellectual participates in politics, either to defend a concrete proposition or to denounce an injustice, usually by producing or by extending an ideology, and by defending a system of values.
If someone calls you perceptive, they mean you are good at understanding things or figuring things out. Perceptive people are insightful, intelligent, and able to see what others cannot. Perceive means "to see"; so, perceptive is a word to describe someone who is good at seeing. Perceptive is derived from the Latin word percipere which means "to obtain or gather." A perceptive person is good at gathering information and using her senses to take in the world. If you are upset but trying to hide it, a perceptive person is the one who will notice.
31. Describe basic functions of human consciousness (purposive, combination of knowledge, stating relations, self-establishing). Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives." The purposive approach (sometimes referred to as purposivism, purposive construction, purposive interpretation, or the "modern principle in construction")is an approach to statutory and constitutional interpretation under which common law courts interpret an enactment (i.e., a statute, part of a statute, or a clause of a constitution) in light of the purpose for which it was enacted.
The historical source of purposive interpretation is the mischief rule established in Heydon's Case. Purposive interpretation was introduced as a form of replacement for the mischief rule, the plain meaning rule and the golden rule to determine cases. Purposive interpretation is exercised when the courts utilize extraneous materials from the pre-enactment phase of legislation, including early drafts, hansards, committee reports, and white papers. The purposive interpretation involves a rejection of the exclusionary rule.
Critics of purposivism argue it fails to recognize the separation of powers between the legislator and the judiciary.The legislator is responsible for the creating the law, while the judiciary is responsible for interpreting law. As purposive interpretation goes beyond the words within the statute, considerable power is bestowed upon the judges as they look to extraneous materials for aid in interpreting the law. The psychology of self is the study of either the cognitive, conative or affective representation of one's identity or the subject of experience. The earliest formulation of the self in modern psychology derived from the distinction between the self as I, the subjective knower, and the self as Me, the object that is known.
Current views of the self in psychology position the self as playing an integral part in human motivation, cognition, affect, and social identity.It may be the case that we can now usefully attempt to ground experience of self in a neural process with cognitive consequences, which will give us insight into the elements of which the complex multiply situated selves of modern identity are composed.
The self has many facets that help make up integral parts of it, such as self-awareness, self-esteem, self-knowledge, and self-perception. All parts of the self enable people to alter, change, add, and modify aspects of themselves in order to gain social acceptance in society. "Probably the best account of the origins of selfhood is that the self comes into being at the interface between the inner biological processes of the human body and the sociocultural network to which the person belongs.
32. Reveal differences between animals' behavior and human conscious activity. Animal behaviour, the concept, broadly considered, referring to everything animals do, including movement and other activities and underlying mental processes. Human fascination with animal behaviour probably extends back millions of years, perhaps even to times before the ancestors of the species became human in the modern sense. Initially, animals were probably observed for practical reasons because early human survival depended on knowledge of animal behaviour. Whether hunting wild game, keeping domesticated animals, or escaping an attacking predator, success required intimate knowledge of an animal’s habits. Even today, information about animal behaviour is of considerable importance. For example, in Britain, studies on the social organization and the ranging patterns of badgers (Meles meles) have helped reduce the spread of tuberculosis among cattle, and studies of sociality in foxes (Vulpes vulpes) assist in the development of models that predict how quickly rabies would spread should it ever cross the English Channel. Likewise in Sweden, where collisions involving moose (Alces alces) are among the most common traffic accidents in rural areas, research on moose behaviour has yielded ways of keeping them off roads and verges. In addition, investigations of the foraging of insect pollinators, such as honeybees, have led to impressive increases in agricultural crop yields throughout the world.
Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. hanks to recent developments in technology, consciousness has become a significant topic of research in psychology, neuropsychology and neuroscience within the past few decades. The primary focus is on understanding what it means biologically and psychologically for information to be present in consciousness—that is, on determining the neural and psychological correlates of consciousness. The majority of experimental studies assess consciousness by asking human subjects for a verbal report of their experiences (e.g., "tell me if you notice anything when I do this"). Issues of interest include phenomena such as subliminal perception, blindsight, denial of impairment, and altered states of consciousness produced by alcohol and other drugs, or spiritual or meditative techniques.
Consciousness has always been a tricky topic to broach scientifically. After all, science deals specifically with effects that can be observed and described mathematically, and consciousness has heretofore successfully evaded all such efforts. In most serious scientific circles, merely mentioning consciousness might result in the rescinding of your credentials and immediate exile to the land of quacks and occultists.
But clearly, consciousness — or sentience or soul or whatever else you call the joie de vivre that makes humans human — is a topic that isn’t going away. It’s probably awfully pretentious of us to think that consciousness is the unique reserve of humans — but hey, evolution handed us these giant, self-aware brains, and so we’re going to try our damnedest to work out whether consciousness is a real thing — whether our brains really are tied into some kind of quantum realm — or if we’re all just subject to an incredibly complex Matrix -like simulation put on by our hyper-imaginative and much-too-powerful human brain.
33. Distinguish cognitive phenomena in the functional system of the psyches. Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes such as "attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and thinking." Much of the work derived from cognitive psychology has been integrated into various other modern disciplines of psychological study, including educational psychology, social psychology, personality psychology, abnormal psychology, developmental psychology, and economics.
Cognitive Phenomena can be classified as "complex" phenomena because they typically involve the spontaneous emergence of "concepts" or "ideas" which are formulated out of "thoughts" or "feelings" that are holistic in nature. Unlike colorful distortions of raw perception from our sensory cortices or the emergence of primal impulses from our emotional brain, Cognitive Phenomena are typically defined in terms of "expanded states" of consciousness, the production of "novel memes," and the shifting or shattering of the "paradigms" through which we view reality. Cognitive Phenomena are tied closely to both concepts of self as well as the basic logic and language functions of the brain (which would be located in the prefrontal cortex), but they also rely on areas of our brain responsible for more intuitive, loosely-associative interpretations of data. Because of this, Cognitive Phenomena may seem cryptic, paradoxical, and grand in scope; the states are often described in spiritual terms of mystical awareness and metaphysical awakening; and reports from users all over the world often use the same language metaphors to describe various states of "expanded consciousness." And since Cognitive Phenomena emerge into both the "mind" and into the culture arena as fully-formed as experiential "concepts" or "ideas," they are arguably the most powerful, transformative, and easy-to-translate artifacts of the psychedelic experience.
Several aspects of human cognition are particularly suggestive of the kinds of neural mechanisms described in this text. We briefly describe some of the most important of these aspects here to further motivate and highlight the connections between cognition and neurobiology. However, as you will discover, these aspects of cognition are perhaps not the most obvious to the average person. Our introspections into the nature of our own cognition tend to emphasize the ``conscious'' aspects (because this is by definition what we are aware of), which appear to be serial (one thought at a time) and focused on a subset of things occurring inside and outside the brain. This fact undoubtedly contributed to the popularity of the standard serial computer model for understanding human cognition, which we will use as a point of comparison for the discussion that follows. Attempts to understand cognition by only focusing on what's ``above water'' may be difficult, because all the underwater stuff is necessary to keep the tip above water in the first place -- otherwise, the whole thing will just sink! To push this metaphor to its limits, the following are a few illuminating shafts of light down into this important underwater realm, and some ideas about how they keep the ``tip'' afloat. The aspects of cognition we will discuss are:
· Parallelism
· Gradedness
· Interactivity
· Competition
· Learning
34. Denote regulative phenomena in the functional system of the psyches. Phenomenology is the study of subjective experience. It is an approach to psychological subject matter that has its roots in the philosophical work of Edmund Husserl. Early phenomenologists such as Husserl, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty conducted philosophical investigations of consciousness in the early 20th century.
The experiencing subject can be considered to be the person or self, for purposes of convenience. In phenomenological philosophy (and in particular in the work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty), "experience" is a considerably more complex concept than it is usually taken to be in everyday use. Instead, experience (or being, or existence itself) is an "in-relation-to" phenomenon, and it is defined by qualities of directedness, embodiment, and worldliness, which are evoked by the term "Being-in-the-World".
The quality or nature of a given experience is often referred to by the term qualia, whose archetypical exemplar is "redness". For example, we might ask, "Is my experience of redness the same as yours?" While it is difficult to answer such a question in any concrete way, the concept of intersubjectivity is often used as a mechanism for understanding how it is that humans are able to empathise with one another's experiences, and indeed to engage in meaningful communication about them. The phenomenological formulation of Being-in-the-World, where person and world are mutually constitutive, is central here.
Cognition is a broad term that deals with organisms' ability to gather, process, store and respond to knowledge. Perceiving, thinking, speaking, understanding, feeling emotions, memorizing, recalling memories and judging are all cognitive phenomena. Attention, reasoning, learning and problem solving are also phenomena studied within the field of cognitive psychology. Sensation and perception are fundamental concepts in psychology. Sensation underlies organisms' ability to experience external reality, while perception allows organisms to interpret external stimuli. Perception is a cognitive phenomenon.
Certain senses are tactile, meaning that contact with stimuli is necessary in order to sense the stimuli. Smell, taste and touch are the three tactile senses. Smell and taste are chemical senses, meaning that they intercept chemical stimuli from the environment and send the information to the brain for perceptual processing, such as identification, judgment and psychological response. Touch is a sense that is based on the nervous system making contact with stimuli. Vision is that ability to sense light, and hearing is the ability so sense vibrations and pressure changes.
A model for light-induced charge separation in a donor-acceptor system of the reaction center of photosynthetic bacteria is described.
