Chapter 1 Outline
December 27th, 2015
I. Psychology Is A Way of Thinking
a. As you go farther in to the field of Psychology you can anticipate to learn more about things like cognition, research about the brain, social behavior, child development and clinical disorders.
b. Psychologists are empiricists, meaning one's conclusions are based on systematic observations. They will conduct studies on humans or animals in either a specific environment or in their natural environment.
c. Research is a very important part of the understanding of psychology.
II. Research Producers, Research Consumers
a. Producers do things such as studying brain anatomy, observing the behavior of pigeons or monkeys, administering personality questionnaires or observing a child in a school setting.
b. A Consumer would be most likely to pursue a career as a family therapist, teacher, guidance counselor or police officer.
c. Although there are two different roles, they are still very much alike. Psychologists in both roles require the curiosity about behavior, emotion and cognition.
III. Why the Producer Role is Important
a. In future classes of psychology it is important to know how to be a producer of research.
1. In order to graduate work in psychology, you will have to write a paper following the APA guidelines.
2. In order to succeed you'll need to be able to randomly assign groups, measure attitudes accurately and interpret results from a graph. b. As an undergraduate you may work in a research lab.
1. You may get the opportunity to get involved in the professors laboratories.
2. You could be asked to do things such as code behaviors, assign participants to different groups, graph an outcome or write a report.
IV. Why the Consumer Role is Important
a. As a consumer you'll need to strengthen your ability to read about research with curiosity and to be able to understand it, learn from it, then ask appropriate questions about it.
b. Even as a sales representative, family therapist, or even teacher you'll need to know how to interpret published research with a critical eye.
c. Licensure for these type of careers requires knowing the research behind evidence-based treatments.
V. The Benefits of Being a Good Consumer
a. FC is an unsupported technique due to the fact that some psychologists suspect that alleged successes of FC could be related to the facilitators.
b. Even if you don't go into the field of psychology you can still benefit from reading psychological research.
VI. How Scientists Approach Their Work
a.