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Here is a term paper on ‘Experimental Psychology’. Find paragraphs, long and short term papers on ‘Experimental Psychology’ especially written for school and college students.
Term Paper on Experimental Psychology
Term Paper Contents:
- Term Paper on the Introduction to Experimental Psychology
- Term Paper on Attention
- Term Paper on Sensations
- Term Paper on Perception
- Term Paper on Suggestibility
- Term Paper on Feelings and Emotions
- Term Paper on Reaction Time
- Term Paper on Fatigue
- Term Paper on Learning
- Term Paper on Remembering
- Term Paper on Imagination
- Term Paper on Social Processes
1. Term Paper on the Introduction to Experimental Psychology:
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It may be recalled that when Experimental Psychology was in its infancy, the main objective was to understand and explain human behaviour. Practically no experimental psychologist of the early nineteenth century, and perhaps very few of the later nineteenth century, were seriously concerned about the application of their findings. But Experimental Psychology today presents a very different picture.
While enquiries into basic behavioural processes are steadily continuing, at the same time efforts have been made to apply the findings of such enquiries to widely ranging real-life situations. There has been a steady movement from the laboratory to real-life situations. The results of experimental psychologists are finding ever increasing application in factories, offices, hospitals, schools, etc.
There is probably no aspect of life where Experimental Psychology cannot make its contributions. In fact, it is one of the more prestigious among the family of sciences, and its scope and area of application is much wider than those of most other sciences.
2. Term Paper on Attention:
The term ‘attention’ refers to the process by which we become aware of the stimuli in the environment. Attention is usually defined as a selective process. This term is likely to be misleading as in many instances stimuli command our attention without any voluntary selection. For a long time, attention was defined as a purely conscious process.
Today, it is well-known that we attend to stimuli without any conscious effort or even awareness on our part. However, the bulk of experimental work refers to conscious attention. Traditionally, attention was considered to be a preliminary step to sensation and perception. But in actual life it is difficult to separate attention, sensation and perception. Together, they constitute a single psychological process.
The process of attention is influenced by a number of factors, some of which relate to external stimuli-objective factors and others to individual-subjective factors. Examples of the first type are size, movement, contrast, familiarity, etc. and of the latter, interest, need fatigue, etc. The process of attention has several psychological factors like the limits of attention, variation of attention, etc. Several experiments have been carried out on these different aspects.
3. Term Paper on Sensations:
The human being, receives stimuli through his eyes(light), ears(sound), nose(smell), tongue(taste), skin(cold or heat, touch and pain), etc. Every stimulus from the external world takes one of the forms mentioned above. Corresponding to these different forms, there are different impressions, and each of these impressions is located in a specific organ of the body called a sense organ or a receptor. Every type of stimulus thus acts through a specific sense organ, and produces a particular sensation.
The sensations were the earliest items of human behaviour to be studied by psychologists like Wundt, Titchner, Helmholtz, Herring and others. Since some of these early psychologists were also physiologists and physicists, a number of experiments were also done on the physiological functions of the eye, ear, etc. For a long time it was thought that man had five sense organs and five corresponding sensations. Today, however, it is known that there are at least eight sense organs and eight corresponding sensations.
Of these, vision and audition are the most studied. Each sense organ is connected to a specific part of the brain and that is why a sense impression results.
4. Term Paper on Perception:
When a stimulus from the environment operates, we experience a sensation. However, the stimuli are not sensed exactly in the way prescribed by the sensory stimulus. Every stimulus produces an experience which has a meaning in the context of its own background and the psychological background of the perceiver. The same stimuli are perceived in different ways by different observers.
The organism therefore organises and interprets the stimuli in accordance with the external environment and its own internal environment. This process involving a considerable amount of psychological and physiological organisation is called the perceptual process. This process of perceptual organisation takes very little time, and accompanies all cognitive experiences. Every sensory stimulation passes through the perceptual process before the organism experience it. Illusion are the typical examples of this.
The perceptual process has a number of important characteristics.
Some of these are:
1. It is selective- since we cannot process all the information in our sensory channels at any particular moment of time, we partially block out some inputs while attending to the rest.
2. It involves grouping of stimuli- the various elements of the stimulus condition are grouped in patterns and then experienced.
3. It is influenced by the individual’s experiences.
4. It is influenced by the present mental set of the individual.
Our perceptions often are distorted because of these factors. Typically, there are two types of perceptual errors. These are illusions and hallucinations. In illusions, a stimulus actually present is perceived wrongly. This is due to wrong grouping of stimuli, past experience and mental set. In hallucinations, on the other hand, an individual experiences stimuli which do not exist. This is due to some deep-seated psychological abnormalities like fear and anxiety.
5. Term Paper on Suggestibility:
Often, we accept the statement of others, or arrive at judgements about objects or other people without any logical ground and also independent of our actual experiences. This phenomenon occurs both in social and non-social situations. We often believe a rumour to be a fact. Similarly, in judging heights, weights, etc. also we make mistakes.
The phenomenon of acceptance of a judgement or arriving at a judgement in the absence of logical grounds or independent of actual experience is called ‘suggestion’. Every individual is suggestible to some degree or the other. Individuals show wide variations in suggestibility. The extent to which a person is suggestible depends on a number of factors. Some of these are his age, intelligence, past experience, mental set, etc. The commercial advertiser makes extensive use of suggestibility and suggestion.
6. Term Paper on Feelings and Emotions:
Feelings and emotions together constitute what are called affective processes. Affective processes are perhaps, the ones least understood. In fact, very often it is difficult even to differentiate feelings from emotions. Affective processes usually follow cognitive processes or associative processes. These are activists which are both mental and physical.
In fact, historically speaking, one of the most important controversies in psychology has centered on the role of bodily activities in emotions. The James-Lange theory propounded independently by William James, the American psychologist, and Carl Lange, the Danish physiologist, placed undue emphasis on bodily changes.
According to this theory, any emotion is nothing but the awareness in the organism of the concomitant bodily changes. This theory, however, tended to underestimate the role of the cerebral cortex and consciousness in emotions. Subsequent experimental studies by Cannon and Masserman on animals and by Blitz on human beings posed serious objections to this theory.
Another important question centering on the role of bodily activities in emotions has been the possibility of judging emotions from facial expressions. The study of bodily changes in emotions has also derived impetus from the attempts of psychologists to develop the polygraph or the lie detector.
An important question has been in relation to the number of emotions in the human being. Early psychologists considered all emotional behaviour to be innate and believed that there were a number of innate emotional reactions. However, Watson as a result of his experiments and observations stated that love, rage and fear were the only three basic emotional patterns present in the infant.
Other patterns, according to him, developed as a result of the process of conditioning. Subsequent psychologists like Sherman, Bridges and others have however stated that in the very young infant no specific pattern of emotional behaviour could be discovered and only generalised reactions of excitement could be seen.
7. Term Paper on Reaction Time:
If two of us see a red light at a traffic junction, one of us may stop earlier than the other. Similarly, in all situations some people react more quickly than others. Individuals, thus, differ in their reaction time. The problem of reaction time was one of the earliest to be studied in Experimental Psychology. Helmholtz, Galton and Donders were the first to do experiments on reaction time.
The original experiments were simple and attempted to measure the time taken by a person to notice a single stimulus and produce an appropriate response. Later experiments, starting with the work of Donders, tried to study reaction time in more complicated situations. In some situations, there may be several stimuli, but a person may have to respond to only one of them, i.e., he has to discriminate one stimulus from the others and respond only to it. This is called discrimination reaction time.
Naturally this type of reaction is more complex than the simple reaction and hence takes a longer time. Yet another type of situation is one where a subject has not only to respond whenever anyone of a number of stimuli occurs, but has also to make completely different responses depending on the particular stimulus. This involves not only a discrimination of the stimulus but also a choice of response. This is called ‘choice reaction’. Naturally, this takes the longest time.
8. Term Paper on Fatigue:
The word ‘fatigue’ is a familiar word. All of us use it whenever our ability to do work which we have been doing decreases. When work output falls we say” we are fatigued”. In all such instances the layman thinks that fatigue is due to a physiological loss of energy; but today we know that fatigue does not depend only on lack of energy but also on other factors like loss of interest, loss of motivation, etc.
Experimental study of fatigue in a laboratory was made possible by Mosso, the Italian physiologist, who devised an apparatus called ‘ergograph’, which literally means ‘work record’. After Mosso designed his apparatus, several types of ergographs have been devised. The most common one is the ‘finger ergograph’. Experiments on fatigue reveal that it is influenced by several factors like rest interval, the nature of work, motivation, etc.
9. Term Paper on Learning:
Learning is perhaps the most important area of research in modern Experimental Psychology. Most books on Experimental Psychology devote a large section to this area. In fact, some of the psychologists try to explain the entire human personality in terms of their learning theories. Historically, scientific interest in understanding the learning process may be said to have begun with the work of the Associationistic Philosophers.
However, actual laboratory work started with the works of Thorndike, Pavlov, Bechterev, Watson and others. It is interesting to note that in the early stages most of the experimental work on learning was done on animals, and that continues even today. The findings of these experiments have been in working out designs and hypotheses for experimentation with human beings.
Each of the psychologists working in this field, has his/her own particular way or theory of explaining the learning process. According to Thorndike, all learning takes place by the trial and error method. In connection with this, he formulated three laws-the law of exercise, the law of recency and the law of effect.
According to Pavlov and several other behavioristic psychologists, all learning takes place by what they call conditioning. Based on his dog-bell experiment, Pavlov explains all learning as resulting from the formulation of stimulus-response associations between various stimuli and responses. More complicated learning according to him results from generalisation and discrimination.
Later psychologists like C.L. Hull and B.F. Skinner though accepting the basic principle of conditioning, emphasise certain other factors like drive, reward, etc., in explaining the learning process. Their approach is known as instrumental conditioning as opposed to Pavlov’s classical conditioning.
A third group of psychologists mainly belonging to the Gestalt School disagree with the above approaches and stress the importance of what they call ‘insight’. Some psychologists like E.C. Tolman, take an intermediary position and accommodate both conditioning and insightful learning. The bulk of the psychologists today, however, agree that learning of different types of skills cannot be explained by any single theory. They recognise more than one type of learning, like sign learning, response learning, etc.
Experiments in the field of learning have used a wide variety of material, some involving motor and muscular behaviour and others involving language. Among the well-known pieces of apparatus that have been devised for these experiments are the different types of mazes, the Skinner problem box, the Lashely jumping stand and the Yerkes multiple choice apparatus.
Experiments on learning deal with different aspects of the learning process, like the different types of learning, the role of motivation, the role of individual differences, the role of reward and punishment, the role of learning conditions, etc.
10. Term Paper on Remembering:
We are able to carry out most of our everyday activities only because we are able to remember things, places, people, events, etc. Imagine our lives without this ability to remember. There would be utter confusion and probably no action would be possible. Learning of any sort would be impossible if we did not remember what we perceived, experienced and learned earlier.
However, Ebbinghaus came out with his epoch making experiments, the results of which showed that our ability to remember is influenced by a number of factors and not just the ability factor. Some of these factors relate to the material, some to individual factors, some to the situation under which learning takes place and some relate to the situation under which we are trying to remember.
Subsequent to the experiments of Ebbinghaus, the Gestalt theory and the outstanding experiments of Bartlett served to remove the notion that remembering is simply a process of retention of experiences and perceptions in the original form. These experiments showed that the process of remembering is not a passive or a simple phenomenon but a dynamic and complex one wherein several changes take place between the stage of learning and the stage of recalling.
Experimental works of Zeigarnik, and Freud’s work ‘Psychopathology of Everyday Life’, showed the importance of emotional factors in the functioning of memory.
Today psychologists recognise the process of remembering as one which involves three stages, encoding, storage and retrieval. Research on remembering has been attempting to show that the mental operations occurring at each of these stages are different, and if any of these operations goes wrong, the result is failure to remember. The process of storage of material appears to depend on whether the information that is learnt is to be stored for a short time, i.e., for seconds or for a longer interval perhaps days or years.
It is this discovery that has led to the distinction between short-term memory and long – term memory. Thus effective remembering depends on the nature of encoding, the type of storing, the transfer of information from short term to long-term, memory, the ways in which these processes take place etc. The experiments which follow help us understand some of the factors which operate during the process of remembering.
11. Term Paper on Imagination:
Imagination has been generally considered along with learning and memory as constituting what are known as higher mental processes. The term higher mental processes implies that these activities entirely depend on the functioning of the higher nerve centres. Two other terms ‘symbolic processes’ and ‘associative processes’ are also employed to designate these functions.
Imagination means the ability to arouse perception in the absence of stimuli. It can range from an undirected and disconnected chain of perceptions to a very directed, coherent and organised chain of perceptions. When imagination is directed to some specific stimulus or problem situation, it is called thinking or reasoning. The process of imagination takes place with the help of images.
This point however was the subject of a burning controversy. Some psychologists like Kulpe, Watt and others argued that thought or imagination could take place in the absence of images, while others like Titchener opposed this view. Watson stressed the importance of muscular movements in thinking.
Whenever there is a stable association established between a set of stimuli and set of thoughts or imaginative processes, a concept is said to be formed. Human life depends on the formation of stable concepts. Concept formation depends on two processes, discrimination and generalisation. While forming a concept, the individual learns to respond in a general way to a certain group of stimuli and at the same time learns to respond differently to this class of stimuli as distinguished from other classes of stimuli.
12. Term Paper on Social Processes:
Man is usually defined as a social animal, though one cannot completely accept this definition in view of the evidence of social life among lower animals. It is true that human social life is more complicated and more enduring. In fact, most human behaviour takes place in response to stimulations from other human beings. It is governed or influenced by the individual’s feelings and attitudes towards the other and serves to produce some responses in the other too.
Though the human infant at birth is not much different from the animal baby, gradually and progressively the infant is socialised to incorporate within himself the customs, values and ways of living of his group. He develops social skills and also different social responses to different members and different groups.
His actions come to be influenced more and more by the actions of others, and also begin to influence others. These problems are studied in social psychology. Social psychologists have developed various theories to explain social behaviour and have also conducted ingenious experiments. Some of the experiments have led to conclusions capable of application in real life situations.