Psychological Universonality is designed to take you on a journey through contemporary psychology. It will lead you from the inner spaces of the brain and mind to the outer dimensions of human behavior. We will investigate the processes that provide meaningful structure to your experiences, such as how you perceive the world, communicate, learn, think, and remember. We will try to understand the more dramatic expressions of human nature, such as how and why people dream, fall in love, act aggressively, and become mentally ill. Finally we will demonstrate how pyschological knowledge can be used to understand and change cultural forces at work in our lives.

What is human nature?Psychology answers this question by looking at the processes that occur within individuals as well as forces that arise within the physical and social environement.

Psychology: the scientific study of behavior of individuals and their mental processes. scientific, behavior, individual, mental.

Psychological conclusions must be based on evidence collected according to principles of the scientific method. The scientific method consists of a set of orderly steps used to analyze and solve problems. This method uses objectively collected information as the factual basis for drawing conclusions.

Behavior is the means by which organisms adjust to their environment. Behavior is action. The subject matter of psychology largely consists of the observable behavior of humans and other species of animals. Smiling, crying, running, hitting, talking, and touching are some obvious examples of behavior you can observe. Psychologists examine what the individual does and how the individual goes about doing it within a given behavioral setting and in the broader social or cultural context.

Many researchers in psychology also recognize that they cannot understand human actions without also understanding mental processes, the workings of the human mind. A lot of human activity takes place as private, internal events, - thinking, planning, reasoning, creating, and dreaming. Many psychologists believe that mental processes represent the most important aspect of psychological inquiry therefore we will be taking very close looks at mental processes here as well.

The goals of the psychologist conducting basic research are to desribe, explain, predict, and control behavior.

1. Describe
2. Explain
3. Predict
4. Control

Psychologists usually refer to such observations as their data or datum. Behavioral data are reports of observations about the bahavior of organisms and the conditions under which the behavior occurs. In order to investigate an individual's behavior, researchers may use different levels of analysis - from the broadest, most global level down to the most minute, specific level.

Supppose you were looking at a painting.

At the global level you might describe it perhaps by title, or general content of the painting, or maybe the artist. At a more specific level, you might recount features of the painting: what is happening in the painting, this part, that part etc. And finally at a very specific level, you might describe the technique the artist used to create the scene. The description at each level would answer different questions about the painting.

Different levels of psychological description also address different questions. At the broadest level of psychological analysis, researchers investigate the behavior of the whole person within complex social and cultural contexts. At this level researchers might study cross-cultural differences in violence, the origins of prejudice, and the consequences of mental illness. At the next level, psychologists focus on narrower, finer units of behavior, such as speed of reaction to a stop light, eye movements during reading, and grammatical errors made by children acquiring language. Researchers can even study smaller units of behavior. They might work to discover the biological bases of behavior by identifying the places in the brain where different types of memories are stored, the biochemical changes that occur during learning, and the sensory paths responsible for vision or hearing. Each level of analysis yields information essential to the final composite portrait of human nature that psychologists hope ultimately to develop.

Most important, no matter what the pychologist is observing, they strive to describe behavior objectively. Collecting facts as they exist, and not as the researcher expects or hopes them to be.  Because every observer brings to each observation their own subjective point of view - biases, prejudices, and expectations - it is essential to prevent these personal factors from creeping in and distorting the data.

While descriptions must stick to perceivable information, explanations deliberately go beyond what can can be observed. In many areas of psychology, the central goal is to fid regular patterns in behavioral and mental processes. Psychologists want to discover how behavior works. Why do you laugh at situations that differ from your expectations of what is coming next? What conditions could lead someone to commit suicide or commit a crime?

Explanations in psychology usually recognize that most behavior is influenced by a combination of factors. Some factors operate within the individual, such as genetic makeup, motivation, intelligence level, or self-esteem. These inner determinants tell something special about the organism. Other factors, however, operate externally. For example, a child trying to please a teacher, or driver getting angry in a traffic jam. These types of behaviors are largely influenced by events outside the person. When psychologists seek to explain behavior, they almost always try consider both types of explanations and sometimes use either one or the other, or both in a combined explanation.

Often a psychologist's goal is to explain a wide variety of behavior in terms of one underlying cause. Consider a situation in which your teacher says that to earn a good grade, each student must participate regularly in class discussions. Your roommate, who is always well prepared for class, never raises his hand to answer questions or volunteer information. The teacher chides him for being unmotivated and assumes he is not bright. The same roommate also goes to parties but never asks anyone to dance, doesn't openly defend his  point of view when it is challenged by someone less informed, and rarely engages in small talk at the dinner table. What is your diagnosis? What underlying cause might account for this range of behavior? How about shyness? Like many other people who suffer from intense feelings of shyness, our roommate is unable to behave in desired ways (Zimbardo & Radl, 1999). We can use the concept of shyness to explain the full pattern of your roommate's behavior.

To forge such causal explanations, researchers must often engage in a creative process of examining a diverse collection of data. Master detective Sherlock Holmes drew shrewd conclusions from scraps of evidence. In a similar fashion, every researcher must use an informed imagination, which creatively synthesizes what is known and what is not yet known. A well-trained psychologist can explain observations by using their insight into the human experience along with the facts previous researchers have uncovered about the phenomenon in question. Much psychological research attempts to determine which of several explanations most accurately accounts for a given behavioral pattern.

Predictions in psychology are statements about the likelihood that a certain behavior will occur or that a given relationship will be found. Often an accurate explanation of the causes underlying some form of behavior will allow a researcher to make accurate predictions about future behavior. Thus, if we believe your roommate to be shy, we could confidently predict that he would be uncomfortable when asked to have a conversation with a stranger. When different explanations are put forward to account for some behavior or relationship, they are usually judged by how well they can make accurate and comprehensive predictions. If your roommate were to blossom in contact with a stranger, we would be forced to rethink our diagnosis.

Just as observations must be made objectively, scientific predictions must be worded precisely enough to enable them to be tested and then rejected if the evidence does not support them. A scientific prediction is based on understanding of the ways events related to one another, and it suggests what mechanisms link those events to certain predictors. A causal prediction specifies the conditions under which behaviors will change. For example, the presence of a stranger reliably causes human and monkey babies, beyond a certain age, to respond with signs of anxiety. Changes in the observed behavior, however, may depend on variations in the exact situation - such as the extent of strangeness. Would fewer signs of anxiety appear in a human or a monkey baby if the stranger were also a baby rather than an adult? Would more signs of anxiety occur if the stranger was of a different species? To improve a causal prediction, a researcher would create systematic variations in environmental conditions and observe their influence on the baby's response.

For many psychologists, control is the central, most powerful goal. Control means making behavior happen or not happen - starting it, maintaining it, stopping it, and influencing its form, strength, or rate of occurrence. A causal explanation of behavior is convincing if it can create conditions under which the behavior can be controlled.

The ability to control behavior is important because it gives psychologists ways of helping people improve the quality of their lives. For example describing how people can harness psychological forces to eliminate unhealthy behaviors like smoking and initiate healthy behaviors like regulars exercise or describing what parenting practices can help parents maintain solid bonds with their children. Or in understanding what forces make stranger reluctant to offer assistance in emergency situations and how those forces can be overcome. These are just a few examples of the broad range of circumstances in which psychologists use their knowledge to control and improve people's lives. In this respect, psychologists are a rather optimistic group, many believe that virtually any undesired behavior pattern can be modified by the proper intervention. Here we share that optimism.

"Psychology has a long past, but only a short history" wrote one of the first experimental psychologists, Hermann Ebbinghaus (1908-1973)

Almost as soon as psychology emerged in the first experimental laboratory founded by Wilhelm Wundt in 1879, a debate arose as to the proper subject matter and methods for the new discipline. This debate isolated some of the issues that still loom larger in psychology. We will describe here, specifically, the tension between structuralism and functionalism.

Psychology's potential to make a unique contribution to knowledge became apparent when psychology became a laboratory science organized around experiments. In Wundt's laboratory, experimental participants made simple responses (saying yes or no, pressing a button) to stimuli they perceived under conditions varied by laboratory instruments. Because the data were collected through systematic, objective procedures, independent observers could replicate the results of these experiments. Emphasis on the scientific method, concern for precise measurement, and statistical analysis of data characterized Wundt's psychological tradition.

When Titchener brought Wundt's psychology to the United States, he advocated that such scientific methods be used to study consciousness. His method for examining the elements of conscious mental life was introspection, the systematic examination by individuals of their own thoughts and feelings about specific sensory experiences. Titchener emphasized the "what" of mental contents rather than the "why" or "how" of thinking. His approach came to be known as structuralism, the study of the structure of mind and behavior.

Structuralism was based on the presumption that all human mental experience could be understood as the combination of basic components. The goal of this approach was to reveal the underlying structure of the human mind by analyzing the component elements of sensation and other experience that form an individual's mental life. Many psychologists attacked structuralism on three fronts: 1. It was reductionalistic because it reduced all complex human experience to simple sensations; 2. it was elemental, because it sought to combine parts, or elements, into a whole rather than study complex, or whole, behaviors directly; and 3. it was mentalistic, because it studied only verbal reports of human conscious awareness, ignoring the study of individuals who could not describe their introspections, including animals, children, and the mentally disturbed.

One important alternative to structuralism, pioneered by the German psychologist Max Wertheimer, focused on the way in which the mind understands many experiences as gestalts - organized wholes - rather than as the sums of simple parts: Your experience of a painting, for example, is more than the sum of the individual daubs of paint.

The second major opposition to structuralism, came under the banner of functionalism.

William James agreed with Titchener that consciousness was central to the study of psychology; but for James the study of consciousness was not reduced to elements, contents, and structures. Instead, consciousness was an ongoing stream, a property of mind in continual interaction with the environment. Human consciousness facilitated one's adjustment of the environment; thus, the acts and functions of mental processes were of significance, not the contents of the mind.

Functionalism gave primary importance to learned habits that enable organisms to adapt to their environment and to function effectively. For functionalists, the key question to be answered by research was "What is the function or purpose of any behavioral act?" The founder of the school of functionalism  was the American philosopher John Dewey. His concern for the practical uses of mental processes led to important advances in education. Dewey's theorizing provided the impetus for progressive education in his own laboratory school and more generally in the United States: "Rote learning was abandoned in favor of learning by doing, in expectation that intellectual curiosity would be encouraged and understanding would be enhanced" (Kendler, 1987, p 124).

Although James believed in careful observation, he put little value on the rigorous laboratory methods of Wundt. In James's psychology, there was a place for emotions, self, will, values, and even religious and mystical experience. His "warm-blooded" psychology recognized a uniqueness in each individual that could not be reduced to formulas or numbers from test results. For James, explanation rather than experimental control was the goal of psychology (Arkin, 1990).

If person A's behavior is far away from Person B's. Person B will reject person A. If continual contact is possible  and person A behaves as person A does, then person B will become familar with person A's personality and behavior and generalize and accept the behavior more as time passes. However, there needs to be an underlying motivating factor causing the desire to continue increasing Anna.

Relative Competitors

The more potential motivators there are the more difficult it is to be a motivator. The more isolated a motivator is, the easier it is to not only be a motivator, but a primary motivator or the strongest motivator. You put any man with any woman alone for a long enough period of time, they will become primary motivators. "If you were the last woman on earth I wouldnt.." Not true. Any  man would without a doubt. Social and biological reason tells us it would be so.

Predetermined fatigue seems to be in direct correlation with preannounced overtime that is not in your personal schedule regularly.

For example, it was announced on Monday that next Saturday, your boss wants you to work overtime on Saturday, and on Sunday. Agreeableness on Monday came without question,, however by Friday evening fatigue began to set in even before physical fatigue was logically calculatable.