Fields of psychology Work with people who have mental or personal problems (such as marital problems, social difficulties, depression, eating disorders, etc.). Administer psychological tests to diagnose and administer therapy to help patients understand themselves and others better. Work in his/her own clinic, in private clinics with other psychologists, mental hospitals, industry, drug rehab centers, homeless shelters, or school systems

1. Fields of psychology
And application

2. Clinical/Counseling Psychologists
• Work with people who have mental or personal problems
(such as marital problems, social difficulties, depression,
eating disorders, etc.).
• Administer psychological tests to diagnose and
administer therapy to help patients understand
themselves and others better.
• Work in his/her own clinic, in private clinics with other
psychologists, mental hospitals, industry, drug rehab
centers, homeless shelters, or school systems

3. Applied psychologists
• applied psychology, the theory generated through pure
psychology finds its practical shape.
• Its applications of psychological rules, principles, theories
and techniques with reference to the real practical life
situations.
Branches of applied psychology
• apply the psychological principles, theories and
psychological principles, theories and techniques to
human behavior in educational situations.
• The subject matter of this branch covers psychological
way and means of improving all aspects of the teaching /
learning process.

4. School/Educational Psychologists
• Work with students, teachers, or administration.
• Design and improve curriculum, administer psychological
tests to students, design curriculum for students with
learning disabilities, help students socially with learning
disabilities or emotional impairments, or work as a
consultant to the administration.
• Work primarily in K-12 education; some work in regional
centers or the medical clinics of institutes of higher
education.

5. Environmental Psychologists
• Work with industrial designers or personnel, or
government personnel, usually as part of a group.
• Study the effect of the environment on people where they
work (ex: disasters, overcrowding, toxic materials, etc.)
and also design desirable working conditions.
• Work in private industry or government agencies.

6. Developmental/ Child Psychologists
• Work with parents or other caretakers of children and
directly with children themselves who have mental
disabilities or problems.
• Research and publish findings on child development;
• administer IQ and other psychological tests; work directly
with parents in child-rearing.
• Work in clinics, private practices, or universities.

7. Industrial Psychologists/
Organizational psychologists
• Work with management personnel in industry; employees
who have personal problems.
• Work with management to improve working conditions,
• to obtain greater efficiency from the work force,
• to increase sales, and to keep the company’s image
positive with the public;
• work with employees on any issues they might have, from
difficult work conditions to problems at home.
• Work in public and private industry, usually larger
companies.

8. Engineering Psychologists
• Work in private or public industry.
• Design product or store layouts for efficiency;
• everything from studying how to design the instruments
on an automobile to the best physical design for a
shopping mall.
• Work in architectural and design firms or in public or
private industry.

9. Experimental Psychologists
• Usually work by themselves or with a group doing
research on various topics.
• Research to understand better how the human operates
physically or psychologically; their goal is to add to the
literature.
• Work at universities, clinics designed for administration
of physical and psychological testing, laboratories.

10. Social Psychologists
• Social psychologists study how people influence one
another.
Personality Psychologists
• Personality psychologists study the differences among
individuals.

11. Where do new psychologists work?

12. Sensation and Perception

13. Sensation
• The process of detecting a stimulus (something that attracts
the attention of a sensory organ)
• the stimulation of sensory receptors and the transmission of
sensory information to the central nervous system
Five Traditional Senses:
• Vision
• Hearing
• Touch
• Taste
• Smell

14. Sensation Sensory Receptors: located
in the sensory organs
• cells that convert physical energy in the environment or
the body to electrical energy that can be transmitted as
nerve impulses to the brain
• Eyes
• Ears
• Nose
• Tongue
• Hands

15. Thresholds
• minimum amount of any given sensation that has to be
present for us to notice it
• E.g: Ticking of a watch from 20 ft away
Absolute Threshold:
• minimum amount of a stimulus that is necessary for us to
notice it 50% of the time
• 1 drop of perfume in a small house
Just Noticeable Difference: (Difference Threshold)
• Smallest amount of difference in amount of stimulation that a
specific sense can detect (difference in shades of two colors)
E.g: Smallest difference in the shades of red your eye can see

16. Cont..
Sense Absolute threshold
smell A drop of perfume diffused throughout a six-room
apartment
Taste One teaspoon of sugar in two gallons of water
Touch An insect’s wing falling on your cheek from a height of
about half an inch
Hearing The tick of a watch at 20 feet in a quiet room
sight A candle flame 30 miles away on a clear, dark night

17. Sensory Adaptation
• process by which we become less aware of weak stimuli
• if a stimulus is unchanging, we become desensitized to it
• We adapt to lying on a beach by becoming less aware of
weak stimuli like the sounds of the ocean
• We adapt to living near a highway by becoming less aware
of the sounds of traffic

18. Sensory Overload
• Can use selective attention to reduce sensory overload
• Selective Attention focusing of attention on selected
aspects of the environment and the blocking out of others

19. Our Visible Spectrum
• Light
• “Our Visible Spectrum”
• Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet
• Hue determines color
• Depends on length of the distance from one peak to the next on
the wave
• Brightness Lightness and luminance;
• the visual experience related to the amount of light emitted from or
reflected by an object
• Saturation
• Vividness or purity of color; the visual experience related to the
complexity of light waves.

20. The Eye
• Cornea
Protects eye and bends light toward lens
• Lens
Focuses on objects by changing shape.
• Iris
Controls amount of light that gets into eye.
• Pupil
Widens or dilates to let in more light.

21. The Eye
• Retina
Neural tissue lining the back of the eyeball’s interior, which contains the
receptors for vision.
• Rods
Visual receptors that respond to dim light.
• Cones
Visual receptors involved in color vision. Most humans have 3 types of cones.

22. The Ear
• Loudness
The dimension of auditory experience related to the
intensity of a pressure wave.
• Pitch
The dimension of auditory experience related to the
frequency of a pressure wave.
• Timbre
The distinguishing quality of sound; the dimension of
auditory experience related to the complexity of the pressure
wave.

23. The Ear
• Auditory Localization:
Sounds from different directions are not identical as they
arrive at left and right ears
• Loudness
• Timing
• Phase
The brain calculates a sound’s location by using these
differences.

24. The Ear
• Three theories on how we perceive sound:
• Frequency Theory
Neural impulses are stimulated more with higher frequencies of air
waves
• More plausible for small frequencies, rather than high frequencies
because we can hear freqs higher than the maximum rate of neural
firing (1,000 neurons a second)
• Place Theory
Different frequencies of air waves activate different places along the
basilar membrane
• Volley Theory
Neurons fire out of sequence to add up to a certain Hz

25. Smell
• Olfaction Lock-and-key
• Detects molecules in the air
• Olfactory receptors (i.e., the locks) are built so that only
molecules (the keys) with particular shapes will fit in
particular receptors
• Receptors send neural signals to the brain, passing the
thalamus (memory) and the limbic system (emotions)
along the way
• This is why odors often trigger emotional memories

26. taste
Process
• Sense of taste combines with the sense of smell to produce perception of
flavor of food
• Research suggests that neural impulses for both senses converge to some
degree in brain area associated with the perception of flavor
• When the sense of smell is blocked, we have a harder time detecting most
flavors

27. Skin Senses Touch
• Skin is the body’s largest sensory organ
• Millions of skin receptors mix and match to produce
specific perception
• Four basic types of sensations
• Pressure
• Warmth
• cold
• pain

28. Skin Senses Temperature
• Two separate sensory systems – one for signaling warmth
and the other for signaling cold
• Also have distinct spots on the skin that register only
warmth or cold
• If you activate both at the same time, the person
perceives ‘hot’!

29. Skin Senses Pain
Pain serves a function
• it warns us of impending danger Endorphins
• Neurotransmitters in the brain that have a pain-killing
effect
Gate-control theory
• Pain impulses can be inhibited by closing of neural gates
in the spinal cord

30. Body Senses
Kinesthetic sense
• Provides info about position of joints, muscles, limbs
• Gives us control over body movements
Vestibular sense
• Provides info about body’s orientation relative to gravity
and head’s position in space
• Helps us maintain balance
• Relies on semicircular canals in the inner ear

31. Perception:
• process by which the brain organizes & interprets sensory
information
• uses sensory information to form a meaningful pattern
• final, organized, meaningful experience of sensory information
An example:
• Have you ever started the car and had to quickly turn down the
volume on the radio from where it was set last time you were in the
car?
• The level of energy (I.e., loudness) of the radio hasn’t changed
• (the volume know remains in the same place as when you last had it
on),
• but your perception of the loudness has changed drastically!

32. Influences on Perception
• Our needs affect our perception because we are more
likely to perceive something we need
• Our beliefs can affect what we perceive
• Emotions, such as fear, can influence perceptions of
sensory information
• All are influenced by our culture.
• Expectations based on our previous experiences influence
how we perceive the world.

33. Perceptual Set
• What you see in the centre figures depends on the order in which you look at
the figures:
• If you scan from the left, see an old woman
• If you scan from the right, see a woman’s figure

34. Context Effects
• The same physical stimulus can be interpreted differently
• We use other cues in the situation to resolve ambiguities
• Is this the letter B or the number 13?

35. Rules of Perceptual Organization
• Gestalt Principles of Vision:
• notes the various ways people make sense of sensory
information through:
• Figure-Ground
• The recognition of objects against a background
• What we perceive as the object & perceive as the
background influence our perception

36. Cont..

37. Rules of Perceptual Organization
Proximity
• Grouping together visual & auditory stimulus which are near
to one another
• Marks near one another tend to be grouped together
• What do you see?- 3 rows of dashes or 36 dashes
Similarity
• Tendency to group elements together that look alike
• Marks that look alike tend to be grouped together
• What do you see?- 3 columns of red or a 4 x 6 pattern

38. Rules of Perceptual Organization
Closure
• We tend to fill in gaps in what your senses tell you
Continuity
• Marks that tend to fall along a smooth curve or a straight
line tend to be grouped together
• People prefer to see smooth continuous
patterns not disrupting ones

39. Depth and Distance
Binocular Cues:
• Visual cues to depth or distance that require the use of both eyes.

40. Cont..
Convergence:
• Turning inward of the eyes, which
they focus on a nearby object.
Retinal Disparity:
• The slight difference in lateral
two objects as seen by the left eye
eye.

41. Depth and Distance
Monocular Cues
• visual cues to depth or distance that can be used by
one eye alone.
• Cues create the illusion of three dimensions or depth
on two-dimensional or flat surfaces
• Cause certain objects to appear more distant than
others

42. Visual Constancies
• The accurate perception of objects as stable or unchanged despite changes in
the sensory patterns they produce.
• Size constancy
• Color constancy
• Brightness constancy
• Shape constancy

43. Size Constancy
• the tendency to perceive an
object as being of one size no
matter how far away the object
is

44. Color Constancy
• the tendency to perceive an object
as keeping their color
• even though different light may
change the appearance of their color

45. Brightness Constancy
• the tendency to perceive an object as being equally bright
• even when the intensity of the light around it changes

46. Shape Constancy
• the knowledge that an item has only one shape
• no matter what angle you view it from
• even though these images cast shadows of different shapes, we still see the
quarter as round

47. Illusion or perceptual illusion
• The misperception of the true characteristics of an object or an
image.
• Illusory Contours: How Many Triangles Do You See?
• The Gestalt principles of perceptual organization contribute to
the illusion of triangular contours in this image.
• you instantly reverse figure and ground so that the black circular
regions become the ground,
• while the white region is visually favored as the figure.
• . The images produce a second intriguing illusion:
• The pure white illusory triangle seems brighter than the
surrounding white paper

49. The Müller-Lyer Illusion
• Compare the two photographs.
• Which corner line is longer?
• Now compare the two line drawings.
• Which center line is longer?
• In reality, the center lines in the photographs and the line drawings
are all exactly the same length
• which you can prove to yourself with a ruler

50. moon illusion
• A visual illusion involving the misperception
that the moon is larger when it is on the
horizon than when it is directly overhead.
The Moon Illusion Dispelled
• The moon illusion is subjectively very
compelling.
• When viewed on the horizon, the moon
appears to be much larger than when it is
viewed higher in the sky.
• But as this time-lapse sequence of the moon
rising over the Seattle skyline shows, the size
of the moon remains the same as it ascends
in the sky.

51. Extra Sensory Perception
• Extrasensory perception (ESP) is perception that occurs
independently of the main physical senses
• (sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell or, indeed, perceptual
processes such as proprioception)
• In some ways the term is vague but it is generally used to imply
a source of information that is unknown to modern science

52. Types
• Telepathy
• Clairvoyance
• Precognition and Retrocognition
• Experimental evidence
a) Restricted-choice experiments
b) Free-response experiments

53. Telepathy
• the source of information is another person’s mind
• The principle requirement of telepathic transmission is that the information transfer
cannot be explained by any known physical process
• Often the demonstration involves information transfer over large distances
• Unlike physical information transfer, telepathy is not subject to the weakening of the
signal the further you move away from the source
Clairvoyance
• we can propose clairaudience where the source of information is auditory rather than
visual
• Clairaudience is an alleged psychic ability to hear things that are beyond the range of
the ordinary power of hearing
• such as voices or messages from the dead
Precognition and retrocognition
• clairvoyance or clairaudience concerns things in the future or the past the these are
referred to as precognition and retrocognition respectively
• Dreams have sometimes been related to precognition
• Retrocognitions can be about recent events
• (e.g. the perpetrator of a recent murder) or distant events (e.g. historic events)
Retrocognition is different from past life regression

54. Experimental evidence
• experiments fall into two broad categories
• Restricted-choice experiments
• The receiver must make a decision about what is being transmitted from a
small set of known possibilities
Free-response experiments
• Here the sender will choose an item from a large but finite set of possible
stimuli
• The receiver is not told anything about the nature of the chosen stimulus
The remote viewing you participated in was a free-response set up.