3: Nonexperimental Research Methods
Psychological researchers are not confined to experimentation in doing their work. We look at some of the other methods available, beginning with correlational observation, in which researchers attempt to determine whether there is a relationship between two behaviors....
10: Schizophrenic Disorders
Occurring in only 1 percent of the population, schizophrenia is a psychotic disorder in which there is a break with reality that nearly always involves both positive symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations, or disorganized speech and behaviors; and negative symptoms such as emotional flattening, lessened speech, or deficient will....
13: Physical Therapies-ECT, Surgery, Genes
Several physical interventions besides drugs have been used to treat mental illnesses. This lecture looks at some of them, beginning with chemical and electrical means of introducing convulsions and continuing on to discuss surgical and genetic approaches to treatment.
14: Talking Therapies-Psychoanalysis
Psychotherapies are talking therapies based on the assumption that behavioral problems are caused by inappropriate thoughts and feelings. This lecture focuses on the therapy Freud developed, based on his own landmark psychoanalytic theory, to help patients find out what the contents of the unconscious are so that the unconscious can be restructured....
16: Behavior Therapies-Classical Conditioning
Behavior therapies are based upon the assumption that the client has learned an inappropriate way of responding. The goal of behavior therapies based on classical conditioning is to substitute a new appropriate response for the old inappropriate response and strengthen the new stimulus-response connection to eliminate the old response....
21: Psychoactive Drugs-Processes, Stimulants
Legal or not, most people use psychoactive drugs to change the way they feel or act. We begin our examination with a discussion of how such drugs work and a look at some of the more common stimulants, including caffeine, nicotine, methamphetamines, and ecstasy....
27: Complex Learning
This lecture examines several forms of complex learning, along with the argument that it cannot simply be built from the building blocks of classical and operant conditioning. Our discussion will include the differing views put forth by B. F. Skinner and linguist Noam Chomsky....
32: Evolutionary Psychology-Basic Concepts
Because behaviorists and their blank-slate concept of learning held sway for many years, it is only recently that the theory of evolution has had an impact on psychology. But since the subfield of evolutionary psychology was founded in the 1990s, its impact has become major....
35: Engineering Psychology
Engineering psychology is concerned with specifying the characteristics and limitations of the human operator in a human-and-machine environment. This lecture looks at the branch of psychology that is part of the interdisciplinary area of human factors, or ergonomics....
Psychology is the most sophisticated of the sciences because we do have to deal with human variability in what we do.
ALMA MATER
INSTITUTION
About David W. Martin
Dr. David W. Martin is Professor of Psychology at North Carolina State University. He earned his B.A. in Psychology from Hanover College in Indiana, where he also finished the necessary coursework for a major in physics. He earned an M.A. in Experimental Psychology and a Ph.D. in Engineering Psychology from The Ohio State University. Professor Martin is the recipient of the Roush Award for Teaching Excellence and was named to the Academy of Outstanding Teachers at NC State. He is a member of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, the Psychonomic Society, and the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. Dr. Martin is author of Doing Psychology Experiments, an experimental methods text now in its 6th edition and adopted at more than 100 colleges. He has also engaged in professional consulting and has more than 75 publications and papers.
