1. MODERN PSYCHOLOGY
Early psychology was predominantly researched-based; today, applied psychology (dealing w/life problems) is more prominent → clinical psychology is an applied discipline dealing with diagnosing and treating psychological disorders

2. MODERN PSYCHOLOGY
→ clinical psychology grew profoundly after WWII due to the need for treating veterans and government support for training programs

3. SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT: COGNITIVE AND BIOLOGICAL/NEUROSCIENCE PERSPECTIVES
Consciousness began to regain itself in the 1950s: Piaget, Chomsky, and Simon were forerunners of cognition-based research → the cognitive perspective, perhaps the dominant one today, involves the study of internal mental events and their effect on behavior

5. SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT: COGNITIVE AND BIOLOGICAL/NEUROSCIENCE PERSPECTIVES
→ sometimes considered part of the cognitive perspective, the biological/neuroscience perspective focuses on how behavior is influenced by brain structures and biochemical processes

6. SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT: THE EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE
Evolutionary psychologists believe that behaviors are adaptations that have been naturally selected to promote an organisms survival → critics of this perspective point out that its ideas can’t be proved and, in fact, can be made up for any type of behavior

8. SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT: POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
Pioneered by Martin Seligman, the positive psychology movement focuses on positive emotions, character traits and institutions → positive psychology turns away from studying pathology and suffering and towards that which help people and communities thrive

10. SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT: THE SOCIAL-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE
Psychology had traditionally been a European/North American-centric research and applied science assuming its findings were universal → the social-cultural perspective explores how behavior varies across cultural contexts

11. SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT: THE BIOPSYCHOSOCIAL APPROACH
Taken together, the various schools of thought form an integrated biopsychosocial approach which considers the influences of biology, psychology, and social-cultural factors

12. SEVEN TEXTBOOK THEMES
1. Psychology is Empirical → conclusions are not based on speculation or guesswork, but on direct observation with a healthy dose of skepticism

13. SEVEN TEXTBOOK THEMES
2. Psychology is Theoretically Diverse → multiple perspectives are necessary to explain and understand behavior

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3. Psychology Evolves in a Sociohistorical Context → the development of psychology reflects the place and time in which it occurs

15. SEVEN TEXTBOOK THEMES
4. Behavior is Determined by Multiple Causes → the multifactorial causation of behavior means we can rarely blame behavior on a single cause; it is too complex

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5. Behavior is Shaped by Cultural Heritage → culture can be one of many causes of behavior; though we can generalize about diverse cultures, diversity also exists within cultures

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6. Heredity and Environment Jointly Influence Behavior → to what degree do heredity and genetics influence our behavior?

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7. People’s Experience of the World is Highly Subjective → we perceive the world around us in a personalized manner, often seeing what we want to see and what we expect to see