- I want to give a proposal to company "The Big Leaf".

- This proposal is about telling them that how I can help them to expand there business in The West coast of Canada.

What I want you to write- the solutions and diagnostic tools (Porter’s five forces) specifically for The BIG Leaf.

1. Diagnostic tool I want to use is "Competitive Forces Model ( Porter’s 5 Forces)". In this I want you to discuss about the competitor companies and there week points which Big Leaf can focus to promote its business- this can be searched from the mentioned website (https://clutch.co/profile/big-leaf#summary).

2. Solution -

The Big Leaf can develop Downloadable resources on their website including Tips, Directions, Position Papers, and other helpful resources. A part of these resources could be monetized as low-hanging fruits. Another solution to address the Marketing gap is for The Big Leaf to explore Paid-for Niche Market proposals (Commoditization off tailor-made using competencies of its members), like usage of customized templates for earning income and popularity.

Introducing Psychology –Chapter 1

Dr. Ghada Shahrour

What is Psychology?

The word “psychology” comes from the Greek words

.“psyche,” meaning life, and “logos,” meaning explanation

Broadly speaking, psychology as a science is defined as the scientific study of mind and behavior

Defining Psychology

Therefore, psychology as a science deals systemically with human behavior, motives, feelings, emotions, thoughts, and actions of human beings

Like other sciences, psychology aims at understanding, explaining, predicting, and thus modifying human behavior. Psychologists reach these aims objectively using the scientific method. The scientific method is the process of observing, asking questions, and seeking answers through tests and experiments.

Psychology

Psychologists use the scientific method to conduct their research. The scientific method is a standardized way of making observations, gathering data, forming and testing hypothesis and interpreting results.

Example:

All tall men are intelligent

All green-eyed people are happy

The evolution of Psychology

The earliest psychologists that we know about are the Greek philosophers Plato (428-347 BC) and Aristotle

(384-322 BC).

These philosophers asked many of the same questions that today’s psychologists ask; for instance, they questioned the distinction between nature and nurture and the existence of free will.

Early Psychologists

Plato argued on the nature side, believing that certain kinds of knowledge are innate or inborn, whereas Aristotle was more on the nurture side, believing that each child is born as an “empty slate” and that knowledge is primarily acquired through learning and experience

Early Psychologists

French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) also considered the issue of free will, arguing in its favor and believing that the mind controls the body through the pineal gland in the brain (an idea that made some sense at the time but was later proved incorrect).

A scientist as well as a philosopher, Descartes dissected animals and was among the first to understand that the nerves controlled the muscles. He also addressed the relationship between mind (the mental aspects of life) and body (the physical aspects of life).

Descartes believed in the principle of dualism: that the mind is fundamentally different from the mechanical body.

Early Psychologist

The fundamental problem that these philosophers faced was that they had few methods for testing their claims. Most philosophers didn’t conduct any research on these questions, in part because they didn’t yet know how to do it, and in part because they weren’t sure it was even possible to objectively study human experience.

Structuralism

German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt(1832-1920) began the field known as structuralism, a school of psychology whose goal was to identify the basic elements or structures of

psychological experience

Structuralists used the method of introspection

to attempt to create a map of the elements of consciousness

Introspection involves asking research participants to describe exactly what they experience as they work on mental tasks, such as viewing colors, reading a page in a book, or performing a math problem.

Structuralism

An important aspect of the structuralist approach was that it was rigorous and scientific. The research marked the beginning of psychology as a science, because it demonstrated that mental events could be quantified.

Example: the experiment of recognizing the sound and naming it

- But the structuralists also discovered the limitations of introspection. Even highly trained research participants were often unable to report on their subjective experiences..

Functionalism

Pioneered by the American psychologist William James (1842-1910).

William James and the other members of the school of functionalism aimed to understand why animals and humans have developed the particular psychological aspects that they currently possess. For James, one’s thinking was relevant only to one’s behavior.

Functionalism

Functionalists were influenced by Charles Darwin’s (1809-1882) theory of natural selection, which proposed that the physical characteristics of animals and humans evolved because they were useful, or functional. The functionalists believed that Darwin’s theory applied to psychological characteristics too. Just as some animals have developed strong muscles to allow them to run fast, the human brain, so functionalists thought, must have adapted to serve a particular function in human experience.

Functionalism

The work of the functionalists has developed into the field of evolutionary psychology, a branch of psychology that applies the Darwinian theory of natural selection to human and animal behavior.

Evolutionary psychology accepts the functionalists’ basic assumption, namely that many human psychological systems, including memory, emotion, and personality, serve key adaptive functions.

Psychodynamic Psychology

- Pioneered by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and his followers

- It is an approach to understanding human behavior that focuses on the role of unconscious thoughts, feelings, and memories.

Freud developed his theories about behavior through extensive analysis of the patients that he treated in his private clinical practice. Freud believed that many of the problems that his patients experienced, including anxiety, depression, and sexual dysfunction, were the result of the effects of painful childhood experiences that they could no longer remember.

Freud developed the psychoanalysis therapy which depends on

Dream analysis and talk therapy to get to the unconscious experience

And thus resolve patient’s psychological problems.

Psychodynamic Psychology

Psychodynamic therapy emerged from the psychoanalysis therapy. It share with psychoanalysis common themes including:

1- the importance of unconscious in human behavior

2- the idea that early childhood experiences are critical, and the concept of therapy as a way of improving human lives

Behaviorism

- Pioneered by Ivan Pavlov and Skinner

-Behaviorism is a school of psychology that is based on the premise that it is not possible to objectively study the mind, and therefore that psychologists should limit their attention to the study of behavior itself.

- behaviorists believe that it is possible to develop laws of learning that can explain all behaviors.

Behavior has two components:

A stimulus response

The Cognitive Approach

Cognitive psychology is a field of psychology that studies mental processes, including perception, thinking, memory, and judgment.

Cognitive psychologists maintain that when we take into consideration how stimuli are evaluated and interpreted, we understand behavior more deeply.

Cognitive psychology remains enormously influential today, and it has guided research in such varied fields as language, problem solving, memory, intelligence, education, human development, social psychology, and psychotherapy.

Social-Cultural Psychology

The field of social-cultural psychology is the study of how the social situations and the cultures in which people find themselves influence thinking and behavior.

Social-cultural psychologists are particularly concerned with how people perceive themselves and others, and how people influence each other’s behavior

Social-Cultural Psychology

Concepts related to social-cultural psychology include:

- conformity: the frequently of changing our beliefs and behaviors to be similar to those of the people we care about.

- Social norms: the ways of thinking, feeling, or behaving that are shared by group members and perceived by them as appropriate. Norms include customs, traditions, standards, and rules, as well as the general values of the group.

- culture: the common set of social norms, including religious and family values and other moral beliefs, shared by the people who live in a geographical region

Research Methods in Psychology

Dr. Ghada Shahrour

Introduction

psychologists believe that research is the best tool for understanding human beings and their relationships with others. Rather than accepting the claim of a philosopher that people do (or do not) have free will, a psychologist would collect data to empirically test whether or not people are able to actively control their own behavior

This statement and others made by psychologists are empirical, which means they are based on systematic collection and analysis of data

The Scientific Method

All scientists (whether they are physicists, chemists, biologists, sociologists, or psychologists) are engaged in the basic processes of collecting data and drawing conclusions about those data. The methods used by scientists have developed over many years and provide a common framework for developing, organizing, and sharing information.

The scientific method is the set of assumptions, rules, and procedures scientists use to conduct research

Characteristics of the Scientific Method

1- Empirical: refers to the systematic collection and analysis of data.

2- Procedures used need to be objective: free from the personal bias or emotions of the scientist.

3- replication: to repeat, add to, or modify previous research findings.

Products of the Scientific Method

1- Laws: Principles that are so general as to apply to all situations in a given domain of inquiry .

Example: Law of effect: is the belief that a pleasing after-effect strengthens the action that produced it.

Theory: is an integrated set of principles that explains and predicts many, but not all, observed relationships within a given domain of inquiry.

Example: Piaget stage theory of cognitive development

Products of the Scientific Method

3- Research Hypothesis:

Theories are usually framed too broadly to be tested in a single experiment. Therefore, scientists use a more precise statement of the presumed relationship between specific parts of a theory — a research hypothesis.

A research hypothesis is a specific and falsifiable prediction about the relationship between or among two or more variables, where a variable is any attribute that can assume different values among different people or across different times or places.

The research hypothesis states the existence of a relationship between the variables of interest and the specific direction of that relationship.

Products of the Scientific Method

Example: “using marijuana will reduce learning”

The ideas that form the basis of a research hypothesis are known as conceptual variables.

Conceptual variables are abstract ideas that form the basis of research hypotheses

A conceptual variable can be simple (e.g., age, gender, education level) or complex (e.g., self-esteem, anxiety, cognitive development)

Products of the Scientific Method

Operational definition: refers to a precise statement of how a conceptual variable is turned into a measured variable.

e.g., The conceptual variable “participating in psychotherapy” could be represented as the measured variable “number of psychotherapy hours the patient has accrued.

Types of Research Design

A research design is the specific method a researcher uses to collect, analyze, and interpret data.

Psychologists use three major types of research designs in their research, and each provides an essential avenue for scientific investigation:

Descriptive research

Correlational research

Experimental research

Descriptive Research

Designed to provide a snapshot of the current state of affairs.

There are 3 types of descriptive research:

Case study

Survey

Naturalistic observation

Case study

Is an in-depth descriptive record of one or more individual’s experiences and behavior.

Example: Phineas Gage, a man whose thoughts and emotions were extensively studied by cognitive psychologists after a railroad spike was blasted through his skull in an accident

Sometimes case studies involve ordinary individuals. More frequently, case studies are conducted on individuals who have unusual or abnormal experiences or characteristics or who find themselves in particularly difficult or stressful situations.

Surveys

a survey is a measure administered through either an interview or a written questionnaire to get a picture of the beliefs or behaviors of a sample of people of interest.

The people chosen to participate in the research (known as the sample) are selected to be representative of all the people that the researcher wishes to know about(the population).

Naturalistic Observation

naturalistic observation: is research based on the observation of everyday events.

For instance, a developmental psychologist who watches children on a playground and describes what they say to each other while they play is conducting descriptive research.

Correlational Research

Correlational research involves the measurement of two or more relevant variables and an assessment of the relationship between or among those variables.

e.g., height and weight

When there are two variables in the research design, one of them is called the predictor variable and the other the outcome variable

Example: viewing violent TV show and aggressive play.

Correlational Research

The linear relationship between two variables are measured by Pearson correlation coefficient, which is symbolized by the letter r.

The value of the correlation coefficient ranges from r = –1.00 to r = +1.00.

Positive values of r (such as r = .54 or r = .67) indicate that the relationship is positive linear, whereas negative values of r (such as r = –.30 or r = –.72) indicate negative linear relationships

The strength of the linear relationship is indexed by the distance of the correlation coefficient from zero (its absolute value). For instance, r = –.54 is a stronger relationship than r = .30, and r = .72 is a stronger relationship than r = –.57.

Correlational Research

The disadvantage of correlational research is that it can not draw a causal relationship between the variables and another variable may explain their relationship, this variable is called a common-causal variable.

It is a variable that is not part of the research hypothesis but that causes both the predictor and the outcome variable and thus produces the observed correlation between them.

Example:

Viewing violent TV Aggressive play

Parent’s harsh discipline

Experimental Research

The goal of experimental research design is to provide more definitive conclusions about the causal relationship among the variables in the research hypothesis than is available from correlational designs.

The variables of interest are called the independent variable (or variables) and the dependent variable.

he independent variable in an experiment is the causing variable that is created (manipulated) by the experimenter

The dependent variable in an experiment is a measured variable that is expected to be influenced by the experimental manipulation.

Experimental Research

Example: the effect of meditation on stress

Despite the advantage of determining causation, experiments do have limitations. One is that they are often conducted in laboratory situations rather than in the everyday lives of people. Therefore, we do not know whether results that we find in a laboratory setting will necessarily hold up in everyday life. Second, and more important, is that some of the most interesting and key social variables cannot be experimentally manipulated

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