Introduction    (CR1, CR15, CR16)

Introduction Objectives:

1.      Define psychology and trace its historical development.

2.      Describe psychology’s concerns regarding stability and change, rationality and irrationality, nature and nurture.

3.      Briefly describe the different perspectives from which psychologists examine behavior and mental processes and explain their complementarity.

4.      Identify some of the basic and applied research subfields of psychology

5.      Describe the mental health professions of clinical psychology and psychiatry

6.      Discuss several principles for effective learning and explain the PRTR study method.

Introduction Assignments: This section is assigned to be completed over the summer.

Chapter 1        Thinking Critically with Psychological Science         (CR2, CR15, CR16)

 Chapter 1 Objectives:

1. Describe the hindsight bias and explain how it often leads us to perceive psychological research as merely common sense.

2. Discuss how overconfidence contaminates our everyday judgments.

3. Explain how the scientific attitude encourages critical thinking.

4. Describe the relationship between psychological theories and scientific research.

5. Compare and contrast case studies, surveys, and naturalistic observation and explain the importance of proper sampling.

6. Describe both positive and negative correlations, and explain how correlational research can aid the process of prediction.

7. Explain why correlational research fails to provide evidence of cause-effect relationships.

8. Discuss how people form illusory correlations and perceive order in random sequences.

9. Identify the basic elements of an experiment and discuss how experimental control contributes to causal explanation.

10. Explain how bar graphs can be designed to make a small difference appear to be large. 

11. Describe the three measures of central tendency and the two measures of variation

12. Discuss three important principles in making generalizations from samples, and describe how psychologists make inferences about differences between groups.

13. Explain the value of artificially simplified laboratory conditions in learning about principles of behavior, and discuss the generalizability of psychological research in terms of culture and gender.

14. Explain why psychologists study animals, and discuss the ethics of experimentation with both animals and humans.

15. Describe how personal values can influence psychologists’ research and its application, and discuss the possibility for misuse of research findings.