CBSE Class 11 Psychology Supplementary Reading Material

UNIT 1

1.1 Consciousness

To be conscious means to be aware of something. We are aware of not only the objects present in the outside environment but also of the processes taking place in ourselves. Thus we are aware of the diverse sensations, perceptions, memories and feelings that take place in ourselves. You will agree that we spend most of our lives in the state of waking consciousness, a state of clear, organized alertness. In waking consciousness, we perceive time, place, and events as real, meaningful and familiar. However the states of consciousness related to conditions such as fatigue, delirium, hypnosis, drugs and ecstasy may differ markedly from the state of "normal" awareness. They are called "altered states of consciousness". Everyone experiences at least some kinds of altered states of consciousness such as sleep, dreaming and daydreaming. In everyday life, changes in consciousness may also accompany long distance running, listening to music, making love or other circumstances.

During an altered state of consciousness changes can occur in the quality and pattern of mental activity. Typically, there are shifts in perceptions, emotions, memory, time- sense, thinking, feelings of self control and suggestibility.

1.2 Linkages across Psychological processes: Psychologists study a wide range of issues related to mental and behavioral functioning. The knowledge generated provides not only basic understanding but also helps people to understand personal and social problems. This kind of effort is known as application.

Human beings are biological as well as socio-cultural beings, who are growing and developing. Psychologists study how the biological system works and socio-cultural bases shape human behaviors. Contemporary psychologists study these processes from a lifespan perspective. The basic psychological processes are parts of a dynamic regulated system. Thus, in order to attend to and perceive theinformation received from environment organisms engage in attention and perception. These are important topics for study.

The effect of the flow of information needs to be retained in the memory system for future use. It will be of use only if you are able to recall it whenever the need arises. All these processes are interconnected and together help the organism to adapt to environment and grow. At times you must have been astonished by the complex feats that are performed by the pilots of aircrafts, mathematicians, scientists, authors, and engineers. It's really intriguing how people attain such levels of accomplishment. The tremendous range of adaptability and potential to acquire various skills, languages, and concepts is the outcome of learning. This has made the study of learning essential.

Knowing the environment requires several mental processes, which together are called cognition. Psychologists study how information is used in thinking, reasoning, decision-making, communicating, and solving problems. Psychologists also study the causes of behaviors. The why of behavior is as important as the how of behavior. Such questions are covered under the theme of motivation. The feelings and emotions provide colour to our lives. While interacting with others you must have experienced love, hate, surprise, shame, guilt, and so on.

We cooperate and compete with others. We also feel frustrated and anxious. The nature causes and consequences of these affective states are important concerns for psychologists. We also notice that people differ from each other in terms of apparent physical characteristics, such as intelligence, personality, temperament, interests, values etc. Understanding these differences is important in their own right and helps in different ways for the purposes of guidance, counseling, and selection for jobs etc.

These areas have received considerable attention from the researchers and many theories and assessment tools have been developed. Similarly, psychologists have also shown interest in abnormal behaviors and applications of psychology in the different spheres of human affairs, like schools, business organizations and hospitals. Thus psychology addresses a diverse range of issues and has numerous specialities.

WHAT IS STATISTICS?

Researchers deal with a large amount of data and have to draw dependable conclusions on the basis of data collected for the purpose. Statistics help the researchers in making sense of the enormous amount of data. Let us first understand the term statistics. Technically “statistics” is that branch of mathematics which deals with numerical data. Researchers are interested in variables. Variables refer to some aspect of a person, an object or environment that can be measured and whose value can change from one observation to the other. Statistics deals with description, summarising and representation of data. The inferential statistics helps to draw conclusions from data. The process of measurement involves use of rules to assign a number to a specific observation of a variable. Psychologists use four levels of scales: Nominal, Ordinal, Interval, and Ratio. Nominal scale is at the lowest level and ratio the highest. In general higher we go up the scale type, more information is contained in the scale.

GRAPHICAL REPRESENTATION OF DATA

After collecting data, the next step is to organize the data to get a quick overview of the same. Graphical representation helps us in achieving this objective. It is a part of the descriptive statistics through which we organize and summarise the data. The outcome is visually presented that makes it easy to see pertinent features of the data. Such presentations are called graphs.

There are different kinds of graphs. However, here we shall consider only the Bar Diagram, the Frequency Polygon, and the Histogram. These graphs have much in common, especially the frequency polygon and histogram, though, they look different.

Basic Procedures

Graphed frequency distributions generally have two axes: horizontal and vertical. The horizontal axis is called X-axis or abscissa and the vertical axis the Y-axis or ordinate. It is customary to represent the independent variable on the X-axis and dependent variable on the Y-axis. The intersection of the two axes represents the origin or the zero point on the axis. However, if the initial score (or midpoint of the class interval) of a data to be represented on the graph is away from zero (e.g. midpoint 142 in table 1), we break the horizontal line (axis) to indicate that the portion of the scale is missing.

To make the graph look symmetrical and balanced, it is customary to keep the height of the distribution about three-quarters of the width (height 75 pc of the width). Some trial and error may be necessary to create graph suitable in size and convenient in scale. The graph should be given clear and suitable caption with figure number and labels on both the axes. The caption of a graph is written below the graph with a suitable figure number.

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