AP Psychology Notes - History of Psychology

AP Psychology Chapter 1 1. History of Psychology - Introspection ▪ Important in establishing the science of psychology o Wilhelm Wundt ▪ Set up first psychological laboratory ▪ Trained subjects on introspection ▪ Structuralism: idea that mind operates by combining subjective emotions with objective sensations o William James ▪ Published the first psychology textbook: principles of psychology ▪ Functionalism: examined how biological structures function in our lives o Students of William James ▪ Mary Whiton Calkins • President of APA ▪ G. Stanley Hall • Pioneered the study of child development • First president of APA o Margaret Floy Washburn ▪ First woman to earn PhD in psychology - Gestalt psychology ▪ Examined a person’s total experience because the way we experience world is more than just accumulation of perceptual experiences ▪ Little influence in current psychology o Max Wertheimer ▪ Argued against dividing human thought and behaviour into discrete structures - Psychoanalysis o Sigmund Freud ▪ Discovered the unconscious mind: part of mind we do not have conscious control over • Built over years through repression: anxiety and tension our conscious minds cannot deal with • To understand human behaviour, must examine unconscious mind through dream analysis, word association and other psychoanalytic therapy techniques • Criticized for being unscientific and unverifiable • Many terms moved to being used in day-to-day speech e.g. defence mechanism - Behaviourism ▪ Dominant school of thought from 1920-60 o John Watson ▪ ▪ Studied pioneering experiments of Ivan Pavlov (conditioning of dogs) Behaviourism: only look at behaviour and causes o behaviour: stimuli and responses, not concern with describing elements of consciousness o Skinner ▪ Expanded idea of behaviourism to include idea of reinforcement: environmental stimuli that either encourage/discourage actions - Multiple perspectives o Eclectics: drawing from multiple perspectives 2. Psychological Perspectives - Humanist perspective o Tried to describe mysterious aspects of consciousness, stressed individual choice and free will ▪ We choose behaviours: guided by physiological, emotional or spiritual needs o Psychologists ▪ Abraham Maslow ▪ Carl rogers o Contrasts with determinist behaviourists: theorized that all behaviours are caused by past conditioning - Psychoanalytic perspective o Unconscious mind controls most of our actions ▪ Look for impulses or memories pushed into the unconscious through repression ▪ Must examine our unconscious mind through dream analysis, word association and other psychoanalytic therapy techniques - Biopsychology (Neuroscience) perspective o Human cognition and reactions might be caused by effects of our genes, hormones, and neurotransmitters in the brain (or combination) - Evolutionary (Darwinian) perspective o Examine human thoughts and actions in terms of natural selection o Some psychological traits may be advantageous for survival and would be passed down from parents to the next generation → traits explained by survival advantage and increasing reproductive chances - Behavioural perspective o Look strictly at observable behaviours and reactions organisms get in response to behaviours o Explain behaviour in terms of reward and punishment (environmental conditions) - Cognitive perspective o Examine human behaviour in terms of how we interpret processes and remember environmental events - Sociocultural perspective o How our behaviours vary from people living in other cultures → explain by cultural rules and social interactions o Emphasize influence culture has on ways we think and act Chapter 2 – Research Methods - Statistics o Descriptive Statistics: describes a set of data: summarizes data using charts etc. o Inferential statistics: determines whether or not findings can be applied to the larger population from which sample was selected ▪ P value - Ethical guidelines o Must have clear scientific purpose o Must answer specific important scientific question o Animals chosen must be best-suited to answer question at hand o Must care for and house animals in humane way o Must acquire animal subjects legally o Must design procedures that employ least amount of suffering - Human research o No coercion ▪ participation should be voluntary o Informed consent ▪ Participants must know they’re involved in research and give consent ▪ If deceived in any way, deception must not be so extreme as to invalidate informed consent o Anonymity or confidentiality ▪ Privacy must be protected o Risk: participants cannot be placed at significant mental or physical risk o Debriefing: after study participants told purpose of study and ways to contact researchers about results Chapter 3 – Biological Bases of Behaviour 1. Important neurotransmitters - Dopamine o Motor movement and alertness o Lack of dopamine associated with Parkinson’s disease o Overabundance associated with schizophrenia - Acetylcholine o Motor movement o Lack of acetylcholine associated with Alzheimer’s disease - Endorphins o Pain control o Involved in addiction - Serotonin o Mood control o Lack of serotonin associated with clinical depression - - GABA o Important inhibitory neurotransmitter o Seizures, sleep problems Glutamate o Excitatory neurotransmitter, involved in memory o Migraines, seizures Norepinephrine o Alertness, arousal ▪ depression - Neurons o Afferent neurons ▪ Take information from sense to the brain o Interneurons ▪ Once information reaches brain/spinal cord, interneurons take messages and send them elsewhere in brain or to efferent neurons o Efferent neurons (motor neurons) ▪ Take information from brain to rest of the body 2. Nervous system - Somatic nervous system o Controls voluntary muscle movements o Motor cortex of brain sends impulses to somatic nervous system controlling muscle o Autonomic nervous system: controls automatic functions of body: heart, lungs, etc. o Control responses to stress ▪ Sympathetic: fight or flight, mobilizes body to respond to stress ▪ Parasympathetic: slows down body after stress response o Neurons either fire completely or does not fire → all or none principle 3. Ways of studying the brain - Accidents - o When parts of the brain are damaged in an accident, scientists can discover clues about brain function - Lesions o Lesioning is removal or destruction of part of the brain ▪ Never done purely for experimental purposes → sometimes done as treatment for certain conditions • Frontal lobotomy → lesioned part of frontal lobe: made patients calm and relieved some serious symptoms but drug treatments now replace frontal lobotomies ▪ When lesions are performed, doctors closely monitor the patient’s subsequent behaviour for changes o Researchers can examine behaviour changes and try to infer the function of the brain region (removed) - Electroencephalogram o Detects brain waves: researchers can examine what type of waves the brain produces during different stages off consciousness and use this to generalise about brain function ▪ Widley used in sleep research to identify different stages off sleep and dreaming - Computerized axial tomography (CAT) o CAT uses several X-ray cameras that rotate around the brain and combine all pictures into a detailed 3-D picture of the brain’s structure o CAT scans only show the structure of the brain, not the functions or activity of different brain structure - Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) o MRI uses magnetic fields to measure the density and location of brain material ▪ Doesn’t use radiation (X-rays) o MRI gives doctors information about structure of brain, not function - Positron emission tomography o Allows researchers to see what areas of the brain are most active during certain tasks o Measures how much of a certain chemical parts of the brain are using ▪ Different types of scans used for different chemicals such as neurotransmitters, oxygen flow, drugs - Functional MRI o fMRI can show detail of brain structure with information about blood flow in the brain → shows brain activity during cognitive tasks 4. Brain Structure and Function - Hindbrain o Medulla ▪ Control of blood pressure, heart rate and breathing ▪ Located above spinal cord o Pons ▪ - - - Involved in control of facial expressions and connects hindbrain with mid and forebrain ▪ Located just above medulla o Cerebellum ▪ Coordinates some habitual muscle movements • E.g. tracking a target with our eyes or playing saxophone ▪ Located on the bottom rear of brain Midbrain o Coordinates simple movements with sensory information (integrates some sensory information) ▪ Muscle coordination ▪ Reticular formation – netlike collection of cells throughout the midbrain that controls general body arousal and ability to focus our attention → does not function, then we fall into deep coma o Located just above the spinal cord, between hind and forebrain Forebrain ▪ Control what we think of as thought and reason o Thalamus ▪ Responsible for receiving the sensory signals coming up the spinal cord and sending them to the appropriat4e areas on the rest of the forebrain ▪ Located on the top of brain stem o Hypothalamus ▪ Controls several metabolic functions • Body temperature, sexual arousal, hunger, thirst and endocrine system & biological rhythms ▪ Next to thalamus o Amygdala ▪ Vital to our experiences of emotion o Hippocampus ▪ Vital to our memory systems • Individuals with damage to this area are unable to retain new information ▪ Memory is passed through this area and sent to other locations in cerebral cortex for permanent storage Cerebral cortex o Thin 1mm layer off densely packed neurons o Surface is wrinkled (fissures) to increase the available surface area of the brain (to fit inside skull) o Areas of cerebral cortex ▪ Frontal lobe • Located at top front part of the brain • - - Anterior is called PFC, plays critical role in directing thought processes & acts as central executive • Broca’s Area (left hemisphere): responsible for controlling muscles involved in producing speech • Thin vertical strip at back is called motor cortex → sends signals to our muscles, controlling voluntary movements o Top of body controlled by neurons at bottom of cortex progressing down as you go up cortex ▪ Temporal lobe • Processes sound sense by our ears o Sound was processed by ears, turn to neural impulses, and interpreted by auditory cortices o Auditory cortex not lateralized like visual cortex, sound received by ear is processed in both hemispheres • Wernicke’s area (left hemisphere): responsible for understanding language (written and verbal) ▪ Parietal lobe • Located behind frontal lobe but on top of brain • Contains sensory cortex (somatosensory cortex), located behind motor cortex in frontal lobe o Receives incoming touch sensations from rest of body o Organized similarly to motor cortex: top receives sensations from bottom of body, progressing down cortex to the bottom (signals from face and head) ▪ Occipital lobe • Very back of our brain • Impulses from retina are sent to visual cortex to be interpreted o Impulses from right half of retina processed by visual cortex in right occipital lobe and vice versa Hemispheres o Contralateral control: right hemisphere gets sensory messages & controls motor functions off left half of body & vice versa o Brain lateralization: specialisation of function in each hemisphere ▪ E.g. left hemisphere more active during logic and sequential tasks/ right hemisphere more act during spatial and creative tasks o Most research done by examining split-brain patients used to treat severe epilepsy ▪ Pioneered by neuropsychologist Roger Sperry & Michael Gazzaniga Hormones o Hormones ▪ Chemical messengers that regulate metabolism and influence body growth, mood, and sexual characteristics. o Pitulary gland ▪ Master galnd, controled by hypothalamus, influence other glands ▪ Secrete growth hormone o Testosterone ▪ The male sex hormone o Estrogen ▪ The female sex hormone o Adrenal glands ▪ Epinephrine and norepinephrine (or called adrenaline and noradrenaline) - Brain plasticity o New connections forming in the brain to take over for damaged sections (ability of brain to rewire itself to recover functions lost through some type of brain damage) o Since dendrites grow throughout our lives, if one part of the brain is damaged, dendrites may be able to make new connections in another part of the brain that would be able to take over the functions usually performed by the damaged part of the brain - Twins o MZ twins share the same genetic material so researchers have studied them to examine the influence off genes on human traits ▪ Thomas Bouchard found more than 100 identical twins who were given up for adoption and raised in different families • Made conclusions on relative influences of genetics and environment on specific traits (.69 vs .88 correlation on IQ) ▪ Physical similarity shared by twins may cause others to treat them in similar ways, creating same effective psychological environment - Chromosomal abnormalities o Turner’s Syndrome ▪ Born with only single X chromosome, on 23 rd pair of chromosomes o Klinefelter’s Syndrome ▪ Extra X chromosome: XXY ▪ Causes minimal sexual development and personality traits like extreme introversion o Down Syndrome ▪ Born with extra chromosome on 21st pair of chromosomes ▪ Physical characteristics: rounded face, shorter fingers & toes, slanted eyes set far apart, intellectual disability Chapter 4 – States of Consciousness - Dualism vs. Monism o Dualists believe humans and universe consist of 2 materials: matter and thought ▪ Matter is everything that has substance ▪ Thought is a nonmaterial aspect that arises from, but is in some way independent of, a brain • Thought gives human free will o Monists believe everything is the same substance, and thought and matter are aspects of it ▪ Thought is a byproduct of brain processes and stop existing when body dies o Psychologists define consciousness as our level of awareness about ourselves and our environment: there exists different levels and different states off consciousness 1. Levels of Consciousness - Conscious level o Information about yourself and your environment you’re currently aware of - Nonconscious level o Body processes controlled by your mind that you are not usually aware of (e.g. digestion, respiration) - Preconscious level o Information about yourself or your environment that you are not currently thinking about but you could be ▪ Remember favourite toy from childhood, you could bring preconscious memory to conscious level - Subconscious level o Information that we’re not consciously aware of but we know must exist due to behaviour o Some information is accessible to this level of consciousness but not to our conscious level: ▪ Mere exposure effect: when we prefer stimuli we have seen before over novel stimuli, even if we do not consciously remember seeing the old stimuli ▪ Priming: participants respond more quickly/accurately to questions they have seen before even if they do not remember seeing them - Unconscious level o Psychoanalytic psychologists believe some events/feelings are unacceptable to our conscious mind so are repressed into the unconscious mind ▪ Many say this is difficult to prove - Research has demonstrated more subtle and complex effects of different levels of consciousness o Blind sight: people who report being blind can nonetheless accurately describe the path of a moving object or accurately grasp objects they say they cannot see ▪ A level of their consciousness is not getting visual information, another level can ‘see’ 2. Sleep o State of consciousness as we are less aware of ourselves and our environment than we are when we are in our normal awake state - Sleep cycle o Circadian rhythm –metabolic and thought processes follow a certain pattern ▪ Part of circadian rhythm is sleep cycle – typical pattern of sleep o Sleep onset ▪ Period when we are falling asleep ▪ Between wakefulness and sleep ▪ Brain produces alpha waves when we are drowsy but awake - ▪ Might experience mild hallucinations o Sleep stage 1 ▪ Theta waves produced → high frequency low amplitude waves o Sleep stage 2 ▪ Theta waves produced → high frequency low amplitude ▪ EEG starts to show sleep spindles • Short bursts of rapid brain waves o Sleep stage 3 (SWS: slow-wave sleep) ▪ Transitional sleep stage ▪ Delta wages o Sleep stage 4 ▪ Delta waves – slowest waves ▪ Growth hormone secreted o REM (rapid eye movement) sleep – paradoxical sleep ▪ Brain waves appear as active and intense as they do when we are awake ▪ Dreams can occur in any stage, but far more likely during REM ▪ REM deprivation interferes with memory ▪ Babies spend more time in REM → as we age, need for sleep & REM time declines ▪ More stress during day, longer period REM will be Sleep disorders o Insomnia ▪ Persistent problem getting to sleep or staying asleep at night • Usually treated with suggestions for changes in behaviour o Reduction in caffeine or other stimulants o Exercise at appropriate times o Maintaining consistent sleep pattern • Use sleep pills with caution and can prevent truly restful sleep, disturbing sleep patterns during night o Narcolepsy ▪ People who suffer from periods of intense sleepiness and may fall asleep at unpredictable and inappropriate times • May suddenly fall into REM sleep regardless of what they’re doing at that time • Can be treated with medication and by changing sleep patterns o Sleep apnea ▪ Apnea causes person to stop breathing for short periods of time during the night • Body causes person to wake up slightly and gasp for air and sleep continues • Robs person of deep sleep and causes tiredness and possible interference with memory and attention • Individuals do not remember waking up during night • Can be treated with respiration machine that provides air for person as they sleep o Night terrors ▪ Occur more commonly in children and during first few hours of night in NREM4 • Most people stop having night terrors and somnambulism as they get older ▪ Related in some way to somnambulism (sleep walking) 3. Dreams - Dreams: series of storylike images we experience as we sleep - Sigmund Freud o Considered dreams as important tool in therapy → emphasized dream interpretation as method to uncover repressed information in unconscious mind ▪ Dream analysis emphasizes 2 levels of dream content • Manifest content: literal content of dreams • Latent content (more important): unconscious meaning of the manifest content o During sleep, our ego protected us from material in unconscious mind by presenting these repressed desires in form of symbols o Difficult to validate or invalidate Freud’s theory → unscientific - Activation-synthesis theory o Dreams as a biological phenomenon → dreams are nothing more than the brain’s interpretation of what’s happening physiologically during REM sleep ▪ Dreams may be a story made up by literary part of mind caused by intense brain activity during REM sleep - Information-processing theory o Points out that stress during day will increase number and intensity of dreams during the night o Proponents of information processing theorize that perhaps brain is dealing with daily stress and information during REM dreams 4. Drugs - Types of drugs o Stimulants ▪ Arouses the autonomic nervous system ▪ Speed up body processes: autonomic nervous system functions (heart rate, respiration rate) + euphoria → make users feel extremely self-confident and invincible ▪ Produce tolerance, withdrawal effects • Side effects: disturbed sleep, reduced appetite, increased anxiety, heart problems ▪ Examples: • Cocaine • Caffeine • Amphetamines • nicotine o Depressants ▪ Slow down the autonomic nervous system • Euphoria accompanies depressing effects + slows down body systems stimulants speed up ▪ Create tolerance and withdrawal symptoms ▪ Examples: • Alcohol • Barbiturates • Tranquilizers o Hallucinogens ▪ Cause sensory distortions • Change in perceptions of reality, sensory hallucinations, loss of identity, vivid fantasies ▪ Persistence: reverse tolerance as second dose may be less than first but cause same or greater effects ▪ Examples: • Marijuana • LSD • Peyote • Mushrooms • Psilocybin o Opiates ▪ Relieve pain, elevate mood • Cause drowsiness and euphoria associated with elevated endorphins ▪ Create tolerance and withdrawal symptoms ▪ Examples: • Codeine • Morphine • Heroin • Methadone Chapter 5 – Sensation and Perception 1. Sensation - Sensation o The process by which our sensory receptors and nervous system receive and represent stimulus energies from our environment ▪ Senses detect information, transmit them to the brain - Perception o The process of organizing and interpreting sensory information, enabling us to recognize meaningful objects and events 3. Transduction o Conversion of one form of energy into another ▪ In sensation, transforming of stimulus energies into neural impulses our brain can interpret - 3 basic steps to all sensory perception o Receive sensory stimulation (afferent neurons) o Transform that stimulation into neural impulses o Deliver the neural information to our brain - Psychophysics o Study of relationship between the physical characteristics of stimuli such as their intensity and our psychological experiences of them 5. Sensory adaption - Sensory adaptation o Decreasing responsiveness to stimuli due to constant stimulation - Sensory habituation o Perception of sensations is partially due to how focused we are on then 6. Influences on Perception - Perceptual set o Mental predisposition to perceive one thing and not another o Mental tendencies and assumptions that greatly affects what we perceived (top-down ) ▪ Influences what we taste, hear, and see ▪ Schemas prime us to organize and interpret ambiguous schemas in certain ways - Perception’s not only influenced top-down (our expectations and by the context), but are also influenced by our emotions and motivation o Perceptual bias energizes our going for it; motives also direct our perception of ambiguous images ▪ Sad vs. happy music can predispose people to hear “die” rather than “dye” ▪ Desired object, such as a water bottle, when thirsty, seem closer - Extrasensory perception (ESP): the controversial claim that perception can occur apart from sensory input, and includes: o Telepathy: mind-to-mind communication o Clairvoyance: perceiving remote events such as a house fire in another state o Precognition: perceiving future events, such as an unexpected death in the next month - Parapsychology: the study of paranormal phenomena, including ESP and psychokinesis 7. Vision - Characteristic of light to determine sensory experience o Wavelength: the distance from the peak of one light/sound wave to the peak of the next ▪ Hue: the dimension of colour that is determined by the wavelength of light (e.g. blue, green) o Intensity: the amount of energy in a light or sound wave, which we perceive as brightness/loudness as determined by the wave’s amplitude - - - The eye o Pupil: adjustable opening the centre of the eye through which light enters o Iris: ring of muscle tissue that forms the coloured portion of the eye around the pupil and controls the size of pupil opening o Lens: transparent structure behind the pupil that changes shape to help focus image on the retina Retina: Light sensitive inner surface of the eye, containing the receptor rods and cones, plus layers of neurons that begin the process of visual information ▪ Accommodation: the process by which the lens change shape to focus near or far objects on the retina ▪ The retina doesn’t see the whole image, rather its millions of receptor cells convert particles of light into neural impulses and forward those to the brain ▪ Outer layer of retina is buried in receptor cells • Rods: retinal receptors that detect black, white, and grey, necessary for peripheral and twilight vision (dim conditions) • Cones: retinal receptor cells that are concentrated near the c enter of the retina and that function in daylight or in well-lit conditions (cones give colour) o Cluster around the fovea, the central focal point of the retina o Each one transmits to a single bipolar cell that helps relay the cones’ individual message to the visual cortex, which devotes a large area to input from the fovea (preserves cone’s precise information & ability to detect fine detail) 1. Chemical changes spark neural signals, activating nearby bipolar cells 2. Bipolar cells, in turn, activate the neighbouring ganglion cells 3. Ganglion cells’ axons twine together to form the optic nerve • The point at which the optic nerve leaves the eye is known as the blind spot as it has no receptor cells • Carries information to the brain → thalamus ready to distribute information Visual information processing o Visual information percolates through progressively more abstract levels on its path through thalamus to visual cortex ▪ Most sensitive part is retina → same sensitivity that enables it to fire can lead it to misfire • So responsive even pressure can trigger them - Steps of visual processing 1. Retina processing (transduction) o Receptor rods & cones → bipolar cells → ganglion cells → optic nerve → LGN (thalamus) 2. Feature detection o Brain’s detector cells respond to specific features: edges, lines and angles (bottom-up processing) 3. Parallel processing o Brain cell teams process combined information about motion, form, depth, colour 4. Recognition o Brain interprets the constructed images based on information from stored images (top-down processing) - Feature detection o Feature detectors: nerve cells in the brain that respond to specific features of stimulus such as shape, angle or movement (discovered by David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel) o Cells pass other cortical areas, where teams off supercell clusters respond to more complex patterns ▪ A temporal lobe area by right ear enables you to perceive faces → fusiform face area ▪ Face perception is separate from object perception - Parallel processing o The processing of many aspects of a problem simultaneously ▪ The brain’s natural mode off information processing for many functions, including vision o Contrasts with the serial (step-by-step) processing of most computers and of conscious problem solving 8. Colour vision - (Young-Helmholtz) Trichromatic theory o The theory that the retina contains three different colour receptor, (each either most sensitive to red, green, or blue), which when stimulated in combination, can produce the perception off any colour ▪ Weakness – does not explain afterimages and colour blindness • Afterimages: when you look at green for a long time, you see red, green’s opponent colour • Colour blindness: individuals with dichromatic colour blindness cannot either see red/green shades or blue/yellow shades - Opponent process theory: sensory receptors areas that are arranged in the retina come in pairs: red-green, yellow-blue, black-white, if one sensor is stimulated, its pair is inhibited from firing 9. Hearing - Auditory sense also uses energy in form of waves → sound waves are vibrations in the air rather than electromagnetic waves o Sound waves are created by vibrations that travel through air and are collected by our ears ▪ Amplitude: height of waves, determines loudness of sounds (decibels) ▪ Frequency: length of the waves, determines pitch (megahertz) • High pitched sounds have high frequencies, waves are densely packed together • Low-pitched sounds have low frequencies, waves spaced apart - Sound waves collected in the outer ear (pinna) Middle ear: the chamber between the eardrum and cochlea containing three tiny bones (malleus, incus, stapes) that concentrate the vibrations of the eardrum on the cochlea’s oval window Inner ear: the innermost ear containing the cochlea, semicircular canals and vestibular sacs Cochlea: a coiled, bony, fluid-filled tube in the inner ear where sound waves travel through to trigger nerve impulses o Motion of liquid causes ripples in the basilar membrane, bending the hair cell lining in its surface o Hair cell movement trigger impulses in the adjacent nerve cells (organ of Corti) and axons of those converge to form the auditory nerve, sends neural messages via the thalamus to the auditory cortex in the brain’s temporal lobe Pitch theories o Place theory ▪ Theory that links the pitch we hear with the place where the cochlea’s membrane is stimulated • We sense pitch because hair cells move in different places in cochlea, some bend in response to high pitches, some to low o Frequency theory ▪ Theory that the rate of nerve impulses travelling up the auditory nerve matches the frequency of a tone, thus enabling us to sense its pitch - - - Deafness o Sensorineural hearing loss ▪ Hearing loss caused by damage to the cochlea’s receptor cells or to the auditory nerves (nerve deafness) o Conduction hearing loss ▪ Hearing loss caused by damage to the mechanical system that conducts sound waves to the cochlea ‘ o Cochlear implant: device converting sounds into electrical signals and stimulating the auditory nerve through electrodes threaded into the cochlea 10. Touch - We have many different types of nerve endings in every patch of skin, and exact relationship between these different types of nerve endings and the sense of touch is not completely understood o We do know that our brain interprets the amount of indentation (or temperature change) as the intensity of the touch, from a light touch to a hard blow o Fingers have a high nerve concentration whereas the back of our elbow has low nerve concentration o If touch or temperature receptors are stimulated sharply, a different kind of nerve ending called pain receptors will also fire - Gate-control theory o The theory that the spinal cord contains neurological “gate” that blocks pain signals or allows them to pass on to the brain o The ‘gate’ is opened by the activity of pain signals travelling up small nerve fibres and is closed by activity in larger fibres or by information coming from the brain o Some pain messages have a higher priority than others → the gate swings open for high priority message and shuts for low priority messages which we do not feel ▪ Endorphins, pain-killing chemicals in the body, also swing the gate shut 11. Taste (Gustation) - Taste buds are located on papillae, bumps on the tongue → located all over the tongue and some parts of the inside of the cheeks and the roof of the mouth Human sense made of five types of taste: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami o The more densely packed the taste buds, the more chemicals are absorbed and the more intensely the food is tasted - Survival function of basic tastes o Sweet: energy source o Sour: potentially toxic acid o Salty: sodium essential to physiological process o Bitter: potential poisons o Umami: proteins to grow and repair tissue 12. Smell (Olfaction) - Depends on chemicals emitted by substances - Olfactory bulb contain olfactory receptor cells and send olfactory information the brain o Odorants bind to odorant receptors → olfactory receptor cells are activated and send electric signals → signals relayed via convergent axons → transmitted to higher regions of the brain o Impulses do not go through thalamus first, they go directly to the amygdala and then to hippocampus → why smell is a powerful trigger for memories 13. Body Position Senses - Kinaesthetic sense o The system for sensing the position and movement of individual body parts o Receptors in muscles and joints send information to our brains about our limbs o This information, combined with visual feedback, lets us keep track of our body - Vestibular sense o The sense of body movement and positions, including the sense of balance ▪ Semicircular canals in inner ear give body feedback about body orientation → when position of head changes, fluid moves in canals, causing sensors to move (movement of these hair cells activate neurons and their impulses go to the brain) • Too much movement of the fluid in canals can cause dizziness and nausea - Sensory interaction o The principle that one sense may influence another, as when the smell of food influences taste - Embodied cognition o the influence of bodily sensations, gestures and other states on cognitive preferences and judgements 14. Thresholds - Absolute threshold o The minimum stimulation needed to detect a particular stimulus (light, sound) 50% of time - Signal detection theory - o Theory predicting how and when we detect the presence of a faint stimulus (signal) amid background stimulation (noise) ▪ Theorists seek to understand why people respond differently to the same stimuli - Subliminal o Stimuli below one’s absolute threshold for conscious awareness ▪ Affected by stimuli so weak that you don’t consciously notice them ▪ Unnoticed image or word can reach visual cortex and briefly prime response to later question - Priming o The activation, often unconsciously, of certain associations, thus predisposing one’s perception, memory or response ▪ Flashing words then replaced by a masking stimulus that interrupts the brain’s processing before conscious perception - Difference threshold o The minimum difference between two stimuli required for detection 50% off the time ▪ We experience difference threshold as a just noticeable difference ▪ Increases with size of stimulus (e.g. adding 2 kg to a 5kg is very noticeable) - Weber’s Law o Principle that, to be perceived as different, two stimuli must differ by a constant minimum percentage, rather than a constant amount ▪ Two lights must differ in intensity by 8% , two objects differ in weight by 2% 15. Selective attention - The focusing of conscious awareness on particular stimulus o When attending to two not so important tasks, selective attention may shift back and forth between, but when a situation requires attention, you can give one task the full attention ▪ Five senses take 11,000,000 bits of information per second, but you only consciously process 40 ▪ People blink less when they’re focused and more when their minds are wandering o Multitasking comes at a cost: fMRI scans offer biological account of how multitasking distracts from brain resources allocated to driving o Some stimuli are so power that we experience popout – we don’t choose to attend to these stimuli, they draw our eye and demand our attention - Inattentional blindness: failing t see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere (byproduct of focusing attention on some part of our environment) - Change blindness: failing to notice changes in the environment - Cocktail Party Effect o Ability to attend to only one voice among many but also being able to detect your own name in an unattended voice 16. Perception Signal detection theory: investigates the effects of the distractions and interference we experience while perceiving the world (tries to predict what we will experience among competing stimuli) o Takes into account how motivated we are to detect certain stimuli and what we expect to perceive - Receiver operating characteristics: using factors like response criteria, signal detection theory tries to explain and predict the different perceptual mistakes we make o A false positive is when we think we perceive a stimulus that is not there o A false negative is not perceiving a stimulus that is present ▪ You may not notice the directions at the top of a test that instruct you to write your name o In some situations, one type of error is more serious than the other - Bottom-up processing (feature analysis) o Analysis that begins with the sensory receptors and works up to the brain’s integration of sensory information (using only the features on the object itself to build a complete perception), a highly automatic process ▪ Enables sensory systems to detect lines, angles, colours that form the flowers and leaves - Top-down processing o Information processing guided by higher-level mental processes, as we construct perceptions drawing on our experience and expectations ▪ Allows us to interpret what our senses detect o Occurs when we use background knowledge to fill in gaps in what we perceive o Experiences create schemata, mental representations of how we expect the world to be, and influence how we perceive the world o Schemata create a perceptual set, a predisposition to perceiving something in a certain way ▪ In 1970s, some parent groups were very concerned about backmasking (supposed hidden messages musicians recorded backward in their music) → due to schemata, perceive noise to be threats 17. Principles of Visual Perception - Figure-ground o The organization of the visual field into objects (figures) that stand out from their surroundings (ground) - Grouping o The perceptual tendency to organize stimuli into coherent groups 18. Gestalt rules - Idea that we normally perceive images as groups, not as isolated elements, and several factors influence how we will group objects o Proximity: objects that are close together are more likely to be perceived as belonging to the same group - o Similarity: objects that are similar in appearance are more likely to be perceived as belonging in the same group o Continuity: objects that are arranged in a continuous line or curve are more likely to be perceived as belonging in the same group (a trail on a geometric figure etc.) o Closure: similar to top-down processing: objects that make up a recognizable image are more likely to be perceived as belonging to the same group even if the images contain gaps that the minds need to fill up 19. Constancy o Our ability to maintain a constant perception of an object despite changes in angle, light etc. - Size constancy: objects closer to our eyes will produce bigger images on our retinas, but we take distance into account in our estimations of size → we keep a constant size in mind for an object - Shape constancy: objects viewed from different angles will produce different shapes on our retinas, but we know that the shape off an object remains constant - Brightness (colour) constancy: perceiving familiar objects as having consistent colour even if changing illumination alters the wavelengths reflected by the object - Perceived motion’ o Ability to gauge motion → brains are able to detect how fast images move across our retinas and take into account our own movement ▪ Stroboscopic effect: images in a series off still pictures presented at a certain speed will appear to be moving ▪ Phi phenomenon: an illusion of movement created when two or more adjacent lights blink on and off in quick succession ▪ Autokinetic effect: if a spot of flight is projected steadily onto the same place on a wall of an otherwise dark room and people are just asked to stare at it, they will report seeing it move - Depth cues o Without depth perception, we would perceive the word as a two-dimensional flat surface, unable to differentiate between what’s near and what’s far ▪ Visual cliff effect: infant placed onto one side of glass-topped table that creates an impression of a cliff will not crawl across the visual cliff, implying the child has depth perception o Researchers divide cues we use to perceive depth into 2 categories: ▪ Monocular cues: cues that do not depend on having 2 eyes • Allows us to judge depth using information transmitted by only one eye • E.g. relative size, interposition, relative height, relative motion, linear perspective, light and shadow o Relative size cue: two objects of same size has one appearing bigger, it will be closer to us o Interposition cue: objects that block the view to other objects must be closer to us o Texture gradient: we can see details in texture close to us but not far away o Shadowing: shading shows where the light source is and implies depth and position of objects ▪ Binocular cues: • Let us judge depth using information transmitted from both eyes o Retinal disparity (binocular disparity) → each of our eyes see objects from a slightly different angel, because the brain gets both images, it knows that if the object is far away, the images will be similar compared to if the objects were close to the eye o Convergence: as an object gets closer to our face, our eyes must move toward each other to keep focused on the object; brain receives feedback from muscle controlling eye movement and knows that the more eyes converge, the closer the object 21. Effects of Culture on Perception - Research indicates that some of the perceptual rules are actually learned instead of being innate - Some optical illusions are not perceived in the same way by people from different cultures Chapter 6 – Learning - Classical conditioning o Learning has taken place once the animal responds to the CS without the US (called acquisition – animal has acquired a new behaviour) o Factor affecting acquisition ▪ Up to a point, repeated pairings of CS and US yield stronger CRs ▪ Order and timing of CS and US pairings has an impact • Most effective method is to present CS first and then introduce the US while the CS is still evident ▪ Methods of conditioning • Delayed conditioning o CS first and then US while CS is still present • Trace conditioning o Presentation of CS and then US after a short break between CS and US • Simultaneous conditioning o CS and US are presented at the same time • Backward conditioning o US presented first and is followed by the CS (particularly ineffective) o Extinction: when CS no longer elicits CR → repeatedly presenting CS without US, breaking association between the two o Spontaneous recover: after a continuous response has been extinguished and no further training of animal has taken place, response briefly reappears upon presentation of CS o Generalisation ▪ Respond to similar CS (e.g. bell-like sounds when conditioned with bell) - - o Discrimination ▪ Ability to tell the difference between various stimuli, responding only to specific CS (repeatedly pair original CS with presentation of US → intermix trials with presentation of other stimuli with no US) o Aversive conditioning: conditioned to have negative response to stimulus – e.g. to stop biting nails o Second-order (higher-order) conditioning ▪ Once CS elicits CR, it’s possible to use the CS as a US in order to condition a response to a new stimulus Learned taste aversions o Most commonly occur with strong and unusual tastes ▪ CS must be salient for us to learn to avoid it • Easily noticeable and therefore creates a more powerful conditioned response ▪ Loud noise with shock and unusual tasting water with nausea seems to be adaptive Operant conditioning ▪ Learning through consequences of behaviour o Reinforcement: anything that makes a behaviour more likely to occur o Punishment: anything that makes a behaviour less likely o Positive reinforcement ▪ Addition of something pleasant o Negative reinforcement ▪ Removal of something unpleasant o Escape learning ▪ Allows one to terminate an aversive stimulus o Avoidance learning ▪ Enables one to avoid unpleasant stimulus altogether o Shaping ▪ Reinforces steps used to reach the desired behaviour o Chaining ▪ Teaching animals to perform a number of responses successively to get a reward o Discriminative stimulus ▪ Only display learned behaviour in a particular setting o Primary reinforces ▪ Things that are in itself rewarding e.g. food, water and rest o Secondary reinforcers ▪ Things we have learned to value such as praise and chance to play video game o Token economy ▪ Every time a person performs a desired behaviour, they are given a token where they can trade tokens for any one of a variety of reinforcers o Premack principle: reinforcing properties of something depend on the situations ▪ Whichever of 2 activities is preferred can be used to reinforce the activity that is not preferred o Reinforcement schedules differ in two ways ▪ What determines when reinforcement is delivered (ratio vs interval schedule) o Pattern of reinforcement ▪ Either constant or changing (fixed/variable schedules) • Fixed: reinforcement delivered after a set number of responses • Variable: reinforcement delivered after a variable number of responses o Instinctive drift: tendency for animals to forgo rewards to pursue their typical patterns of behaviour - Contiguity model o The more times two things are paired, the greater the learning that will take place ▪ Contiguity (togetherness): determines strength of the response - Contingency model: rests upon view of classical conditioning: presence of one event reliably predicts the presence of the other o Expectations influence their learning - Observational learning (modelling) o Learning by observation and imitation - Latent learning (Edward Tolman) o Learning that becomes obvious only once a reinform cent is given for demonstrating it (rats may have learned a maze but complete it slowly, only when there is reason to run the maze quickly [reward] do they actually improve performance) ▪ They have cognitive map/mental representation of maze and only evidenced this knowledge once it would earn them reward - Abstract learning o Understanding concepts such as tree or same rather than learning to simply press a bar to secure a reward ▪ Shown particular shape and rewarded in one series of trials when they picked up same shape out of two choices/pecked at different shapes - Insight learning (Wolfgang Kohler) o Occurs when one suddenly realizes how to solve a problem ▪ Often happens in a sudden way due to insight rather than the gradual strengthening of S-R connection Chapter 7 – Cognition 1. Models of Memory - Three-box (information-processing) Model o Sensory → short term → long term o Sensory memory ▪ Split-second holding tank for incoming sensory information ▪ Holds information for a very short period of time (> 1 sec) ▪ Iconic memory: split second perfect photograph of a scene ▪ Echoic memory: perfect brief 3-4 sec memory for sounds ▪ Most memory is not encoded, only some are encoded in STM • Selective attention determines which sensory messages are encoded into STM o Short-term memory (STM) ▪ Also called working memory – these are memories we are currently working with and are aware of in our consciousness ▪ Temporary if we do nothing with them • Usually fade in 10-30 secs ▪ Gregory Miller: 7+_2 limit of storage of STM • Can be expanded through chunking (grouping items into no more than 7 groups) ▪ Rehearsing information can also allow it to be stored in STM o Long-term memory (LTM) ▪ Once information reaches LTM, we are likely to remember it for the rest of our lives ▪ Memories can decay or fade from LTM, so it’s not truly permanent ▪ LTM can be stored in 3 different formats • Episodic memory o Memories about specific events, stored in a sequential series of events • Semantic memory o General knowledge of the world, stored as facts, meanings or categories rather than sequentially • Procedural memory o Memory of skills and how to perform them – sequential but might be too complicated to describe in words - Memories can be explicit or implicit o Explicit memories (declarative memories) ▪ Conscious memories of facts or events we consciously try to remember o Implicit memories ▪ Unintentional memories that we might not even realize we have - Eidetic (photographic) memory - Levels of processing model o Theory explains why we remember what we do by examining how deeply the memory was processed or thought about ▪ Memories are neither long or short term ▪ They are deeply (elaboratively) processed or shallowly (maintenance) processed o We remember things we spend more cognitive time and energy processing o Explains why we remember questions better than statements and stories better than recitations 2. Retrieval - Two different kinds of retrieval o Recognition ▪ Process of matching a current event or fact with one already in memory o Recall ▪ Retrieving a memory with an external cue - Factors that influence retrieval o Primacy effect (Hermann Ebbinghaus) ▪ Our ability to recall items presented at the beginning of a list o Recency effect ▪ Our ability to recall the items at the end of a list • Items in the middle are most often forgotten o Serial position effect (serial position curve) ▪ Seen when recall of a list is affected by the order of items in a list o Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon ▪ Semantic network theory: brain might form new memories by connecting their meaning and context with meanings already in memory → our brain might form new memories by connecting their meaning and context with meanings already in memory • Our brain creates a web of interconnected memories, each one in context tied to hundreds or thousands of other memories o Flashbulb memories: ability to give detailed descriptions of a particular event tinged with emotion ▪ Importance of the event caused us to encode the context surrounding the event o Mood-congruent memory ▪ The greater likelihood of recalling an item when our mood matched the mood we were in when the event happened o State-dependent memory ▪ The phenomenon of recalling events encoded while in particular states of consciousness • If you remember appointment when you’re drowsy, you may not remember the appointment until you feel drowsy again 2. Constructive memory - Recovered memory phenomenon: when individuals claim to suddenly remember events they have repressed for years - Memory researchers like Elizabeth Loftus have shown that memory of these may be constructed or false recollections of events o Constructed memory can report false details of a real event or might be a recollection of an event that never occurred o They feel like accurate memories to the person recalling them – the only way to differentiate between a false and real memory is through other types of evidence such as physical evidence or other validated reports of the event 3. Forgetting - One cause of forgetting is decay: forgetting because we do not use a memory or connections to a memory for a long period of time o Even memories that decay do not seem to disappear completely ▪ Relearning effect: if you have to memorize something again after you’ve forgotten about it, it will take you less time than it did to study if the first time - Interference: sometimes information in memory competes with what you are trying to recall o Retroactive interference ▪ Learning new information interferes with the recall of older information o Proactive interference ▪ Older information learned previously interferes with the recall of information learned more recently 4. Memory storage in the brain - Hippocampus is important for encoding new memories o Damage to hippocampus can result in anterograde amnesia – cannot encode new memories but can recall past events ▪ Indicates that memory for these skills (procedural memory) is stored elsewhere in the brain (animal studies indicate procedural memories are stored in the cerebellum) - Long-term potentiation (neurological level) o Neurons can strengthen connections between each other – repeated firings can strengthen connection and the receiving neuron becomes more sensitive to the messages from the sending neuron 5. Language - Language cam be described with phonemes and morphemes o Phonemes ▪ Smallest unit of sound used in a language o Morphemes ▪ Smallest unit of meaningful sound - Syntax: words spoken or written in a particular order - Language acquisition stages o Babbling stage ▪ About 4 months ▪ Appears to be innate – even babies born completely deaf go through this stage ▪ Capable of producing any phoneme from any language in the world o Holophrastic stage ▪ Usually about first birthday ▪ Retain ability to produce phonemes from primary language(s) and lose ability to make some other phonemes o Telegraphic speech ▪ Occurs at 18 months ▪ Two-word stage ▪ Toddlers will combine words they can say into simple commands ▪ Meaning is usually clear but syntax is absent ▪ Children begin to learn syntax and grammar rules o Children gradually increase their abilities to combine words in proper syntax if these uses are modelled for them ▪ Misapplication of grammar rules is called overgeneralization or overregularization - Language acquisition o Behaviourists theorized that language is learned like other learned behaviours – operant conditioning and shaping ▪ When children use language correctly, they get rewarded by parents o Cognitive psychologists: point out amazing number of words and language rules learned by children without explicit instructions by parents o Noam Chomsky theorized that humans are born with a language acquisition device – the ability to learn a language rapidly as children (nativist theory of language acquisition) ▪ Pointed to retarded development of language in cases of children deprived of exposure to language during childhood → theorized a critical period (window of opportunity during which we must learn a skill, or our development will permanently suffer) for learning language exists - Linguistic relativity hypothesis: the language we use might control and in some ways limit our thinking (Benjamin Whorf) 6. Thinking and Creativity - Concepts: cognitive rules we apply to stimuli from our environment that allows us to categorize and think about the objects, people and ideas we encounter - Prototypes: what we think is the most typical example of a particular concept - Images: mental pictures we create in our minds of the outside world 7. Problem Solving - Algorithms o Trying all possible solutions – rule that guarantees the right solution by using a formula or other foolproof method - Heuristics o Rule of thumb – a rule that is generally, but not always, true that we can use to make a judgement in a situation o Often limits the possible alternatives we think of ▪ Availability heuristic • Judging a situation based on examples of similar situations that come to mind initially ▪ Representativeness heuristic • Judging a situation based on how similar the aspects are to prototypes the person holds in his/her mind o Overconfidence (tendency to overestimate how accurate our judgements are) ▪ Belief bias + belief perseverance: concern our tendency not to change our beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence • Belief bias: when we make illogical conclusions in order to confirm our preexisting beliefs • Belief perseverance: tendency to maintain a belief even after the evidence we use to form the belief is contradicted - Impediments to problem solving o Rigidity (mental set): tendency to fall into established thought patterns ▪ People will use solutions or past experiences to try to solve new problems o Confirmation bias: tendency to look for evidence that confirms our beliefs and ignore evidence that contradicts what we think is true o Framing: the way a problem is presented ▪ Presentation can drastically change the way we view a problem or issue 8. Creativity - Criteria for creativity o Originality and appropriateness ▪ We look at whether it’s original or novel and somehow fits the situation ▪ Thinking of new ways to use what we are familiar with/new ways to express emotions or ideas we share - Convergent thinking o Thinking points toward one solution - Divergent thinking o Thinking that searches for multiple possible answers to a question ▪ More closely associated with creativity Chapter 8 – Testing and Individual Differences 1. Reliability and Validity - Split-half reliability o Randomly dividing test into 2 different sections then correlating people’s performances on the two halves - Equivalent-form reliability o Correlation between performance on the different forms of the test - Test-retest o Correlation between a person’s score on one administration of the test with the same person’s score on a second administration of the test - Face validity o Superficial measure of accuracy - Content validity o How well a measure reflects the entire range of material it’s supposed to be testing - Criterion-related validity: extent to which a measure agrees with a gold standard o Concurrent validity: how much of a characteristic a person has now o Predictive validity: measure of future performance - Construct validity: the extent to which the measure 'behaves' in a way consistent with theoretical hypotheses and represents how well scores on the instrument are indicative of the theoretical construct 2. Types of Tests - Aptitude tests o Measure ability or potential - Achievement tests o Measure what one has learned or accomplished - Speed tests: consists of larger number of questions asked in short number of time o How quickly a person can solve problems o Amount of time allotted should be insufficient to complete problems - Power test o Consists of items of increasing difficulty levels ▪ Sufficient time to work through as goal is to determine the ceiling difficulty level - Group tests o Administered to large number of people at a time o Interaction between examiner and person taking test is minimal o Instructions are provided to group and people are given certain amount of time to complete sections of the test o less expensive and more objective - Individual tests o Involve greater interaction between examiner and examinee 3. Theories of Intelligence - Intelligence: ability to gather and use information in a productive way - Fluid intelligence: our ability to solve abstract problems and pick up new information and skills - Crystallized intelligence: using knowledge accumulated over time (holds steady/increase with age) - Charles Spearman o Intelligence could be expressed by a single factor (factor analysis to measure correlation between different items) - Howard Gardner o Idea of multiple intelligences ▪ Linguistics, logical-mathematical and spatial ▪ Added: musical, bodily-kinaesthetic, intra-personal, interpersonal, naturalists intelligence • Interpersonal: person’s ability to get along and be sensitive with others • Intrapersonal intelligence: able to persevere without becoming discouraged/ differentiate between situations where they will be successful and those that may just frustrate them - Daniel Goleman o Emotional intelligence: interpersonal + intrapersonal intelligence - Robert Sternberg (non-traditional definition) o Sternberg’s triarchic theory: 3 types of intelligence ▪ Componential (analytic) intelligence • Skills traditionally thought of as reflecting intelligence ▪ Experiential (creative) intelligence • Ability to use their knowledge and experiences in new and innovative ways ▪ Contextual (practical) intelligence • Street-smart: able to apply what they know to real-world situations • Does intelligence depend on context? If it does, devising a test becomes particularly difficult 4. Intelligence Tests - Alfred Binet o Concept of mental age: presupposes that intelligence increases as one gets older o Created standardised test and administered test to standardization sample and constructed a test to differentiate between children functioning at different levels - Louis Terman o IQ (intelligence quotient): dividing the person’s mental age by chronological age and multiplying by 100 - David Wechsler o Does not involve finding quotient o 3 different tests exist ▪ WAIS (Weschler adult intelligence scale) • Testing adults ▪ WISC (Weschler intelligence scale for children) • Children between 6-16 ▪ WPPSI (Weschler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence) • Administered to children >4 - Nature vs nurture o Heritability: measure of how much a trait’s variation is explained by genetic factors ▪ 0-1 (0 indicates environment is totally responsible; 1 means all variation can be accounted for genetically) o Flynn effect: performance on intelligence tests has been steadily increasing throughout the century o MZ twins score much more similarly on intelligence tests than do DZ twins o Racial differences are explained by differences in environment Chapter 9 – Developmental Psychology 1. Research Methods - Cross-sectional study - Longitudinal study - Focuses on the idea that while there are many common patterns to human development, each person’s development is also in some ways unique o Shared and distinctive elements o Stability and change (major life continuities and transitions) 2. Parental Influence on Development - Teratogens o Chemicals or agents that can cause harm if ingested by the mother, passing through the placental barrier and can affect the foetus in profound ways ▪ E.g. alcohol • Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS): children born with this have small, malformed skulls, and intellectual disability • Fetal alcohol effect: children that do not show all symptoms of FAS but may have specific developmental problems in later life, such as learning disabilities or behavioral problems 3. Motor/sensory development - Reflexes ▪ Automatic responses to certain specific stimuli – all babies exhibit a specific set of reflexes o Rooting reflex ▪ When touched on cheek, baby will turn his/her head to the side where s/he felt the touch and seek to put object into her mouth o Sucking reflex ▪ Wen object is placed into baby’s mouth, the infant will suck on it o Grasping reflex ▪ If object is placed into the baby’s palm or foot pad, baby will try to grasp the objects with his/her fingers or toes o Moro reflex ▪ When startled, baby will fling his/her limbs out and retract then quickly, making him/her as small as possible o Babinski reflex ▪ When a baby’s foot is stroked, s/he will spread the toes - Newborn’s senses o Babies can hear even before birth o Babies have the same basic preference in taste and smell as we do ▪ Love the taste of sugar and respond to a higher concentration of sugar in foods ▪ Preferences in tastes and smells will change as we develop o Babies’ vision is different than ours ▪ When we’re born, hearing is the dominant sense due to babies’ poor vision (born almost legally blind) • They can see 8-12 inches in front of them but everything beyond that is blur ▪ Babies like to look at faces and face-like objects (symmetrical objects and shapes organised in an imitation of a face) more than any object • This preference and their ability to focus about 12 inches in front of them makes babies well equipped to see their mother as soon as they’re born - Motor development o Motor control develops as neurons in our brain connect with one another and become myelinated ▪ Research shows that most babies can roll over when they’re about 5-12 months old, stand at about 8-9 months, and walk themselves after about 15 months 4. Parenting - Attachment theory o Harry Harlow o Mary Ainsworth ▪ Researched the idea of attachment by placing human infants into novel situations ▪ Observed infants’ reactions when placed into a strange situation: parents left them alone for a short period of time and then returned ▪ She divided the reactions into 3 broad categories • Secure attachments (66%) o Confidently explore the novel environment while parents are present, are distressed when they leave and come to the parents when they return • Avoidant attachments (21%) o May resist being held by parents and will explore the novel environment; they do not go to parents for comfort when they return after an absence • Anxious/ambivalent attachment (12%) o May show extreme stress when the parents leave but resist being comforted by them when they return 5. Parenting Styles - Diana Baumrind researched parent-child interactions and described 3 overall categories of parenting styles o Authoritarian parents ▪ Set strict standards for their children’s behaviour and apply punishments for violations of these rules ▪ Obedient attitudes are valued more than discussions about the rationale behind the standards ▪ Punishment for undesired behaviour is used more often than reinforcement for desired behaviour o Permissive parents ▪ Do not set clear guidelines for their children ▪ Rules do exist in the family o Authoritative parents 6. Stages of Development - Continuity vs. Discontinuity o Lev Vygotsky — ‘zone of proximal development’ ▪ Range of tasks the child can perform independently and those tasks the child needs assistant with • Teachers and parents can help them accomplish tasks at upper end of their zone of proximal development, encouraging further cognitive development o Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson base their stages on psychoanalytic theories - - Sigmund Freud o Oral stage ▪ Babies tend to put everything they can grab into their mouths if they can get away with it ▪ Fixation at this stage may lead to overeating, smoking, and in general have a childlike dependence on things and people o Anal stage ▪ Develops toilet training ▪ If conflict around this arises, person may fixate in this stage and be overly controlling (retentive) or out of control (expulsive) o Phallic stage ▪ Babies realize their gender and this causes conflict in the family ▪ Boys go through Oedipus complex, girls go through Electra complex ▪ Conflict in this stage could cause later problems in relationships o Latency stage ▪ A period of calm, and low psychosexual anxiety o Genital stage ▪ Focus of sexual pleasure is the genital ▪ Fixation in this stage is normal Erik Erikson (neo-Freudian; believed that personality was profoundly influenced by our experiences with others — psychosocial stage theory) o Trust vs Mistrust ▪ Babies’ first social experiences of the world centres on need fulfilment ▪ They learn whether or not they can trust the world to provide for its needs ▪ Sense of mis/trust will carry throughout the rest of our lives o Autonomy vs shame + doubt ▪ Toddlers begin to exert their will over their own bodies for the first time ▪ Autonomy: control over our own body — potty training an early action to learn control ▪ If we develop a healthy will, we can control our own body and emotional reactions during rest of the social challenges we face o Initiative vs guilt ▪ Children want to understand the world — feel a natural curiosity about surroundings & take initiatives in problem solving and ask many questions ▪ If this initiative is encouraged, we will feel comfortable about expressing our curiosity thought he rest of the stages • If those around us scold for our curiosity, we might learn to feel guilty about asking questions and avoid doing so ▪ Industry vs inferiority • Beginning of formal education • Preschool inferiority and kindergarten were mostly about play and entertainment o For the first time, children are asked to produce work that is evaluated o We expect to perform as well as our peers at games and schoolwork’ o If we realize that we are behind and cannot do as well as our peers, having an inferiority complex, we may feel anxious about our performance in that area throughout the rest of the stages ▪ Identity vs role confusion • Adolescence: main social task is to discover what social identity we’re most comfortable with • Person might naturally try to different roles before he or she found the one that best fit his or her internal sense of self • Adolescents try to fit into groups in order to feel confident in their identities o Adolescent should figure out a stable sense of self before moving on to the next stage or risk having an identity crisis in life ▪ Intimacy vs isolation • Young adults must figure out how to balance their ties and efforts between work and relationships with other people • Patterns established in this stage will influence the effort spent on self and others in the future ▪ Generativity vs stagnation • • - By the time we reach this age, we’re starting to look critically at our life path We want to make sure that we are creating the type of life that we want for ourselves and our family • We might want to seize control of our lives at this point to ensure that things ago as we plan • If they’re not, we may try to change our identities or control those around us to change our lives ▪ Integrity vs despair • Toward the end of life, we look back at our accomplishments and decide if we are satisfied with them or not • If we can see that our lives are meaningful, we can step outside the stress and pressures of society and offer wisdom and insight • If we feel serious regret over how we lived our lives, we may fall into despair over lost opportunities Jean Piaget o Hypothesized that children roughly the same age gave similar answers to questions on intelligence tests as they were all thinking in similar ways and these ways differed from the way adults think o Piaget described how children viewed the world through schemata (cognitive rules we use to interpret the world) ▪ Schemas • Concepts or framework that organizes and interprets information ▪ Assimilation • Interpreting our new experiences in terms of our existing schemas ▪ Accommodation • Adapting our current understandings (schemas) to incorporate new information o Piaget thinks humans go through this process of schema creation, assimilation and accommodation as we develop cognitively o His cognitive development theory describes how our thinking progresses through 4 stages: ▪ Sensory motor stage • 0-2 years • Babies start exploring world strictly thought their senses • Soon the first cognitive schemata develop • Major challenges to this stage are to develop object permanence o Babies do not realize that objects continue to exist even when they’re out of sensory range ▪ Preoperational stage • 2-8 years • Children start to use symbols to represent real-world objects - o We start speaking our first words and gradually learn to represent the world more complete through language • Still limited in the ways we think about relationships between objects and characteristics of objects • Children are egocentric — they cannot look at the world from anyone’s perspective but their own ▪ Concrete operational stage • 8-12 years • Think more logically about complex relationships between different characteristics of objects • Demonstrated concepts of conservation (realization that properties of objects remain the same even when their shapes change) o Different aspects of objects are conserved even when their arrangement changes ▪ Volume: volume of material is conserved even if the material’s container or shape changes ▪ Area: area is conserved even if objects within that area are rearranged ▪ Number: the number of objects stay the same even when the objects are rearranged ▪ Fully operational stage • 12-adulthood • Adult reasoning — abstract reasoning (we can manipulate objects and contrast ideas in our mind without physically seeing them or having real-world correlates • Hypothesis testing: person can form a hypothesis • Metacognition (ability to think about the way we think) gained o We can trace our thought processes and evaluate the effectiveness of how we solved a problem o Criticisms of Piaget ▪ Many still value Piaget’s insights about the order in which our cognitive skills develop ▪ Most agree he underestimated children: many go through the stages faster and enter them earlier than Piaget predicted • Error may be due to the way he tested children o Some think his tests relied to heavily on language use o Others wonder if development does not occur more continuously than Piaget described Information-processing model: a more continuous alternative to Piaget’s stage theory o Points out that our abilities to memorize, interpret and perceive gradually develop as we age rather than developing in distinct stages o Research shows that attention spans gradually increase as we get older — could explain some apparent cognitive differences ▪ Children’s inability to understand conservation of number may have more to do with their ability to focus for long periods of time than any developing reasoning ability - Lawrence Kohlberg — moral development o Wanted to describe how our ability to reason about ethical situations change over the course of our lies o He categorized moral development into 3 levels ▪ Preconventional • Focus on making decision most likely to avoid punishment • Limited to how the choice affects themselves (focused on consequences to themselves) ▪ Conventional • Children re able to move past personal gain or loss and look at the moral choice through other’s eyes • Learn conventional standards of what is right and wrong from their parents, peers, media and so on o They may try to follow these standards so that people will see them as good ▪ Postconventional • Examines the rights and values involved in the choice • Self-defined ethical principles: personal conviction to uphold justice • Societal rules are examined rather than blindly accepted o Criticisms of Kohlberg ▪ Developmental psychologists challenge Kohlberg’s conclusions ▪ Carol Gilligan points out that Kohlberg developed the model based on responses of boys, girls don’t give same responses — males and females come to moral conclusions in different ways - Social-cognitive theory o Gender-schema theory: we internalize messages about gender into cognitive rules about how each gender should behave ▪ Boys often encouraged in rough physical play - Personal fable o When a teenager thinks his or her thoughts are unique to him or her – nobody else could understand how she feels - Temperament o Characteristics of a newborn child – easy, difficult, slow-to-warm-up (not necessarily inherited from parents) Chapter 10 – Motivation and Emotion 1. Theories of Motivation o Motivation are feelings or ideas that cause us to act toward a goal - Drive reduction theory o Theory that our behaviour is motivated by biological needs ▪ ▪ - - - - Need is one of our requirements for survival such as food water or shelter Drive is our impulse to act in a way that satisfies this need • Primary drive: biological needs – e.g. thirst • Secondary drive: learned drives – e.g. money gets us food and water to satisfy primary drive o Drive reduction theory cannot explain all motivations ▪ Sometimes we are motivated to perform behaviours that do not seem connected with any drive – e.g. doing extreme sports that are risky Arousal theory o Some motivations that seem to violate biological theories of motivation can be explained by arousal theory, which states that we seek an optimum level of excitement arousal o Each of us has a different need for excitement or arousal and we are motivated by activities that will help us achieve this level ▪ People with high optimum levels of arousal might be drawn to high-excitement behaviours, while the rest of us are satisfied with less exciting and less risky activities o Yerkes-Dodson Law: performance increases with level of stress, but only up to a point, when level of arousal becomes too high, performance decreases Opponent-process theory of motivation o People are usually at a normal/baseline state, when we perform an act, it may be initially pleasurable but eventually we feel an opponent process, meaning a motivation to return to our baseline, neutral states o Often used to explain addictive behaviours ▪ With physically addictive substances, we also experience withdrawal and the discomfort of the withdrawal state moves us away from the neutral baseline • A smoker may feel uncomfortable without nicotine in his system so this state creatures a desire to smoke more cigarettes to return to a state of feeling normal Incentive theory o Incentives are stimuli that we are drawn to due to learning – we learn to associate some stimuli with rewards and others with punishment and we are motivated to seek the rewards Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs o Not all needs are created equal – described a hierarchy of needs we will be motivated to satisfy first o Hunger Motivation ▪ Biological basis • Lateral hypothalamus: stimulation causes animal to eat • Ventromedial hypothalamus: stimulus causes animal to stop eating o If hypothalamus functions normally, these two areas oppose each other and send signal impulses to eat and stop eating at appropriate times • Set-point theory o Hypothalamus wants to maintain a certain optimum body weight: when we drop below that weight, the hypothalamus tells us we should eat and lowers our metabolic wate o Hypothalamus tells us to stop eating when that set point is reached and raises our metabolic rate to burn any excess food ▪ Psychological factors • Externals are more motivated to eat by external food cues such as attractiveness or availability of food • Internals are less attracted to the presence and presentation of food and respond more often to internal hunger cues • Garcia effect: a conditioned taste aversions that develop when food is associated with a negative reaction, such as nausea or vomiting • Culture and background affect our food preferences o Food we’re raised with are the food we’re most likely to find appetizing, though new preferences are acquired ▪ Eating disorders • Bulimia o Eating large amounts of food in a short period of time (binging) and then getting rid of the food (purging) by vomiting, excessive exercise or the use of laxatives o Bulimics are obsessed with food and their weight • Anorexia nervosa o Starve themselves below 85% of their normal body weight and refuse to eat due to their obsession with weight • Family history of eating disorders, indicating a potential genetic component o Sexual motivation ▪ Sexual response cycle • William Masters and Virginia Johnson: documented sexual response cycle in men and women • Our sexual response progresses through four stages o Initial excitement ▪ Genital areas become engorged with blood • Penis becomes erect • Clitoris swells ▪ Respiration and heart rate increase o Plateau phase ▪ Respiration and heart rate continue at an elevated level ▪ Genitals secrete fluids in preparation for coitus o Orgasm ▪ Rhythmic genital contractions that may help conception ▪ Respiration and heart rate increase further ▪ Males ejaculate, often accompanied by a pleasurable euphoria o Resolution phase ▪ Respiration and heart rate return to normal resting state ▪ Male systems experience refractory period – a time period that must elapse before another orgasm (female systems do not have similar refractory period and can repeat cycle immediately) ▪ Psychological factors in sexual motivation • Unlike many animals, our sexual desires are not motivated strictly by hormones • Sexual desire can be present even when the capability to have sex is lost ▪ Sexual orientation • Studies show that gay and lesbian sexual orientation is not related to traumatic childhood experiences, parenting styles, the quality of relationships with parents, masculinity or femininity, the sexual orientation of parents • Researchers have identified specific brain structures might differ in size in brains of gay people compared with the same structures in heterosexual people o Social motivation ▪ Achievement motivation • Theory that examines our desire to master complex tasks and knowledge and to reach personal goals o Some people have high achievement motivations and consistently feel motivated to challenge themselves more than others ▪ Extrinsic/intrinsic motivation • Extrinsic motivators: rewards that we get for accomplishments from outside ourselves o Grades, salary etc. • Intrinsic motivators: rewards we get internally o Enjoyment, satisfaction 2. Management Theory - Studies of management styles show 2 basic attitudes that affect how managers to their jobs o Theory X ▪ Managers believe employees will work only if rewarded with benefits or threatened with punishment o Theory Y ▪ Managers believe employers are internally motivated to do good work and policies should encourage this internal motive 3. Theories about Emotion - James-Lange o We feel emotion because of biological changes caused by stress - Cannon-Bard o Biological changes and the cognitive awareness of the emotional state occur simultaneously o Similar physiological changes correspond with drastically different emotional states - Schachter’s Two-Factor Theory o Both our physical responses and our cognitive labels (mental interpretations) combine to cause any particular emotional response ▪ People who are already physiologically aroused experience more intense emotions than unaroused people when both groups are exposed to the same stimuli ▪ There’s an interaction between biology and cognition - Nonverbal expressions of emotions o Showing people pictures of people experiencing emotions to people from different cultures and asking them to label the emotions ▪ Most people from cultures around the world are able to label these facial expressions very accurately ▪ Test that shows the way we express emotions nonverbally is universal 4. Stress o Stress can refer to either certain life events (stressors) or how we react to these changes in the environment (stress reactions) - Measuring stress o Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe ▪ Designed one of the first instruments to measure stress: social readjustment rating scale (SRRS) ▪ SRSS measured stress using life-change units (LCUs) • An event usually considered to be positive, like getting married, counts for as many or more LCUs as a negative event like being fired ▪ Person takes test to report changes in life, and changes in life are assigned different LCUs • Any major life change increases the score on the SRRS • Person who scored very high on SRRS is more likely to have stress-related diseases than a person with a low score o Hans Selye’s general adaptation syndrome (GAS) • Describes the general response of humans and other animals to have a stressful event – our response patterns to many different physical and emotional stresses is very consistent • Explains some of the documented problems associated with extended periods of stress o Contribute to physical diseases like ulcers, heart conditions and emotional difficulties – body can remain ready for a challenge only so long before resources are depleted and we are vulnerable to disease through exhaustion ▪ Selye’s GAS describes the following stages • Alarm reaction o Heart rate increases, blood is diverted away from other body functions to muscles needed to react o Organism readies itself to meet challenge through activation of sympathetic nervous system • Resistance o Body remains physiologically ready (high heart rate etc.), hormones released to maintain this state of readiness o If resistance lasts too long, body can deplete its resources • Exhaustion o Parasympathetic nervous system returns our physiological state to normal o We can be more vulnerable to disease in this stage, especially if our resources were depleted by extended resistance stage o Perceived control ▪ Various studies show that a perceived lack of control over events exacerbate the harmful events of stress Chapter 11 – Personality 1. Personality o Unique attitudes, behaviours and emotions that characterize a person - Some ideas of personality do not fit neatly into one school of thought o Type A personality ▪ People tend to feel a sense of time pressure and are easily angered ▪ They are competitive and ambitious, work hard and play hard o Type B personality ▪ Relaxing and easy-going o These do not fall on opposite ends of a continuum 2. Psychoanalytic Theory - Sigmund Freud believed that one’s personality were essentially set in early childhood o Conscience: our sense of right and wrong that is typically associated with the superego o Conscious: what we are aware of in our mind - He proposed a psychosexual stage theory (discontinuous development) of personality o Oral stage ▪ 0-1 years ▪ Children enjoy sucking and biting because it gives them a form of sexual pleasure o Anal stage ▪ 1-3 years ▪ Sexual gratification through act of elimination o Phallic stage ▪ 3-5 years ▪ Sexual gratification moves to genitalia ▪ Oedipus crisis: boys sexually desire their mothers and view their fathers as rivals for their mother’s love • Castration anxiety: fear that if they misbehave, they will get castrated • To protect them from this threatening realization, Freud believed that boys used defence mechanism of identification – when people emulate and attach themselves to an individual they believe threatens them (prevents boys from fearing fathers and encourages them to break away from their attachment to their mothers) ▪ Electra crisis: girls desire their fathers and see their mothers as competition for his love • Penis envy: desire for a penis o Latency stage (period) ▪ 6-puberty ▪ Children push all their sexual feelings out of conscious awareness (repression) ▪ Children turn their attention to other issues – start school, learn how to interact with others o Genital stage ▪ Adult – people remain in this stage for the rest of their lives ▪ Seek sexual pleasure through sexual relationships with others o Freud suggested that children could get fixated in any one of these stages ▪ - - Fixations could result from being either undergratified or overgratified • E.g. child who was not fed regularly might develop an oral fixation – they will overeat • Someone with anal expulsive personality (die o anal fixation from traumatic toilet training) tends to be messy and disorganized o Term anal retentive is used to describe people who are meticulously neat, hyperorganized and a bit compulsive • Fixation in the phallic stage could result in people who appear sexually assured and aggressive or people who are consumed with their perceived sexual inadequacies o Fixations result from psychic energy (libido), getting stuck in one of the psychosexual stages Freud believed that much of people’s behaviour is controlled by a region of the mind he called the unconscious o We do not have access to the thoughts in our unconscious, and we spend tremendous amount of psychic energy to keep threatening thoughts in the unconscious ▪ Contrasted unconscious with preconscious and conscious • Conscious contains everything we are thinking about at an one moment • Preconscious contains everything we could potentially summon to conscious awareness with ease Freud posited that the personality consists of 3 parts: o Id ▪ Follows the pleasure principle – wants immediate gratification ▪ Exists entirely in the unconscious mind ▪ Exists from birth o Ego ▪ Follows the reality principle – job is to negotiate between the desires of the id and the limitations of the environment (mediator between the id and superego) • Part of its job is to protect the conscious mind from the threatening thoughts buried in the unconscious • Uses defence mechanisms to help protect the conscious mind o Repression ▪ Blocking thoughts out from conscious awareness o Denial ▪ Not accepting the ego-threatening truth o Displacement ▪ Redirecting one’s feelings toward another person or object o Projection ▪ Expressing the opposite of how one truly feels o Regression - - - ▪ Returning to an earlier, comforting form of behaviour o Rationalization ▪ Coming up with a beneficial result of an undesirable occurrence o Intellectualisation ▪ Undertaking an academic, unemotional study of a ▪ Ego is partly in the conscious mind and partly in the unconscious mind ▪ Emerges around 2/3 o Superego ▪ Acts as a conscience ▪ Operates on both the conscious and unconscious level ▪ Develops around age 5 Freud believed two types of instincts exists o Eros (life instincts) ▪ Eros is most often evidence as a desire for sex o Thanatos (death instincts) ▪ Thanatos is seen in aggression o Libido is the energy that directs the life instincts Criticisms of Freud o Little empirical evidence to support it ▪ Unconscious and complexes are difficult to prove – positive and negative reactions to the theory are all seen as support o Has little predictive power ▪ Doesn’t predict ahead of time what problems an individual will develop o Feminists find his theory objectionable ▪ Karen Horney and Nancy Chodorow believed Freud’s assumption that men were superior to women rather than from any empirical observation • Horney posits that men may suffer from womb envy – jealousy of women’s reproductive capabilities • Take issues with Freud’s assertion that men have stronger superegos than women Psychodynamic theory o Neo-Freudian theory ▪ Carl Jung & Alfred Adler • Jung proposed that the unconscious consists of 2 different parts o Personal unconscious ▪ Contains the painful/threatening memories and thoughts the person does not wish to confront (termed these complexes) o Collective unconscious ▪ Passed down through the species and explains certain similarities we see between cultures ▪ Contains archetypes (universal concepts we all share as art of the human species) • Shadow represents the evil side of personality and the persona is the person’s creation of a public image • Adler is called ego psychologist because he downplayed the importance of the unconscious and focused on the conscious role of the ego o Believed that people are motivated by the fear of failure (termed inferiority) o Desire to achieve, he termed superiority o Known for his work on the importance of birth order in shaping personality 3. Trait Theories - We can describe people’s personalities by specifying their main characteristics or traits o E.g. honesty, laziness - Some trait theorists believe that the same basic set of traits can be used to describe all people’s personalities - Nomothetic approach: Hans Eysenck believed that by classifying all people along an introversion-extroversion scale and unstable-scale - Raymond Cattel developed the 16 PF (personality factor) test to measure what he believed were the 16 basic traits present in all people - Paul costa & Robert McCrae: proposed that personality can be described using the Big Fiver personality traits o Extroversion ▪ How outgoing or shy someone is o Agreeableness ▪ How easy to get along with someone o Conscientiousness ▪ High on conscientiousness tend to be hardworking, responsible and organized o Openness to experience ▪ Related to one’s creativity, curiosity and willingness to try new things o Emotional stability (neuroticism) ▪ How consistent one’s mood is - Factor analysis: statistical technique used to reduce the vast number of different terms used to describe people to a few basic traits o Allows researchers to use correlations between traits in order to see which traits cluster together as factors ▪ E.g. conscientiousness= punctuality, diligence, neatness - Idiographic theorists: assert that using the same set of terms to classify all people is impossible o Each person needs to be seen in terms of what few traits best characterize his/her unique self ▪ Honesty might be important in describing one person but not someone else - Gordon Allport o Believed that although there were common traits useful in describing all people, a full understanding of one’s personality is impossible without looking at his/her personal traits o Differentiated between 3 different types of personal traits ▪ Cardinal dispositions • A trait that plays a pivotal role in virtually everything a person does ▪ Central dispositions • Have a larger influence on personality and are more often apparent and describe more significant aspects of personality ▪ Secondary dispositions • Less influence on personality - Main criticisms of trait theories is that they underestimate the importance of the situation – nobody is always conscientious or unfailingly friendly so evaluating someone’s personality should also consider context 4. Biological Theories - View genes, chemicals and body types as central determinants of who a person is - Growing body of evidence supports the idea that human personality is shaped, in part, by genetics o Little evidence exists for heritability of specific personality traits - Much evidence suggests that genes play a role in temperaments (emotional style and characteristic way of dealing with the world) o Infants differ immediately at birth – some are extremely active while others are calmer o Thought to influence child’s personality - Hippocrates: believed that personality was determined by the relative levels of four humors (fluids) o Four humors were blood, yellow bile, black bile, phlegm ▪ Cheerful person was said to have excess blood - William Sheldon’s somatotype theory o Identified 3 body types: ▪ Endomorphs (fat) • Friendly and outgoing ▪ Mesomorphs (muscular) • Confident and assertive ▪ Ectomorphs (thin) • Shy and secretive o Findings have not been replicated and methodology questioned – his research only shows correlation and even if found to be reliable and valid, doesn’t show that biology shapes personality 5. Behaviourist Theories - Theorists argue that behaviour is personality and that the way most people think about personality is meaningless o Reinforcement contingencies to which one is exposed creates one’s personality o Criticized for failing to realize the importance of cognition 6. Social-cognitive Theories - Albert bandura: personality is created by an interaction between the person (traits), the environment, and the person’s behaviour o Based on the idea of triadic reciprocity (reciprocal determinism): the three factors influence both of the other two in a constant looplike fashion - Self-efficacy: high self-efficacy are optimistic about their own ability to get things done; low efficacy feel a sense of powerlessness o Theorized that people’s sense of self-efficacy has a powerful effect on their action - George Kelly proposed the Personal-Construct Theory of Personality o Argued that people, in their attempt to understand their world, develop their own individual systems of personal constructs (consists of pairs of opposites such as fair-unfair, smart-dumb and exciting-dull) o People’s behaviour is determined by how they interpret their world o Based on the fundamental postulates: people’s behaviour is influenced by their cognitions and that knowing how people have behaved in the past can predict how they act in the future - Julian Rotter’s locus of control o Internal locus of control ▪ Feel that they are responsible for what happens to them • Believe that hard work will lead to success ▪ External locus of control • Generally believes that luck and other forces outside of their control determine their destinies 7. Humanistic Theories o Many models of personality are deterministic - Determinism o The belief that what happens is dictated by what has happened in the past ▪ Psychoanalysts: personality is determined by what happened to an individual in his early childhood ▪ Behaviourists: personality is determined by the environment in which one has been raised o Neither theory supports the existence of free will (an individual’s ability to choose his or her own destiny) - Humanistic psychology (third force): rose in opposition to the determinism so central to both psychoanalytic and behaviourist models o See people as innately good and able to determine their own destinies through the exercise of free will o Stress importance of people’s subjective experiences and feelings o Focus on a person’s self-concept and self-esteem ▪ Self-concept: person’s global feeling about him/herself • Develops through a person’s involvement with others • Someone with positive self-concept has high self-esteem - Abraham Maslow & Carl Rogers o Both believed that people are motivated to reach their full potential (self-actualise) ▪ Maslow developed the hierarchy of needs • Self-actualisation sits at the top of the hierarchy ▪ Roger’s created self-theory • He believed that though people are innately good, they require certain things from their interactions with others (most importantly unconditional positive regard) o Blanket acceptance – parents make children feel as if they are loved no matter what o People must feel accepted to make strides toward self-actualisation - Humanistic theories are criticized for putting forth an overly optimistic theory of human nature o If humans are innately good and striving to do their best, it’s difficult to explain the number and range of truly terrible acts that people commit 8. Assessment Techniques - Reliability o Consistency – reliable measures yield consistent, similar results even if results are not accurate - Validity o Accuracy: measures what it purports to measure - Projective tests o Often used by psychoanalysts o Involve asking people to interpret ambiguous stimuli ▪ Rorschach inkblot test involves showing people a series of inkblots and asking them to describe what they see ▪ Thematic apperception test (TAT) consists of a number of cards, each which contains a picture of a person/people in an ambiguous situation • People are asked to describe what happens ▪ Both are ambiguous so psychoanalysts reason that people’s interpretations reflect their unconscious thought - Self-report inventories o Questionnaires that ask people to provide information about themselves o Often referred to as objective personality tests since people’s scores are determined simply by their answers and are thus unlikely to be affected by evaluator bias o Interview – a subjective assessment (subjectivity decreases reliability but some believe the measure yields richer and more valid data) - Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2) o One of the most wide used self-report instruments o Potential problem with this is people may not be completely honest o Some tests have lie scales built in to try to detect when people are not being honest - Barnum effect: people have tendency to see themselves in vague, stock descriptions of personality Chapter 12 – Psychological Disorders - Defining psychological disorders o It’s maladaptive (harmful) or disturbing to the individual o It’s disturbing to others o It’s unusual – not shared by many members of the population o It’s irrational – does not make sense to the average person - DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) provides a way for psychologist to diagnose their patients o Contains the symptoms of everything currently considered to be a psychological disorder o Does not include much discussion of the causes or treatment of various disorders - Different psychological perspectives disagree about treatment and cause of disorders o Psychoanalytic: caused by traumatic events that occurred during the psychosexual stages o Behaviourists: person’s history of reinforcement o Cognitive: maladaptive ways of thinking o Humanistic: failure to strive toward one’s potential or being out of touch with one’s feelings – roots in a person’s feelings, self-esteem and self-concept o Sociocultural: dysfunctional society – social ills (racism, poverty, sexism) lies at heart of psychological disorders o Biomedical: biological factors like hormonal/neurotransmitter imbalance or differences in brain structure & genetic predispositions o Most clinical psychologists are eclectic 1. Types of disorders - Anxiety disorders ▪ Share common symptom of anxiety o Specific phobia ▪ Classified as anxiety disorder as contact with feared object/situation results in anxiety ▪ Intense unwarranted fear of a situation • Claustrophobia: fear of enclosed spaces • Agoraphobia: fear of open, public spaces o Generalized anxiety disorder ▪ Experiences constant, low-level anxiety → constantly feeling nervous o Panic disorder ▪ Suffers from acute episodes of intense anxiety without any apparent provocation o Theories about causes: ▪ Psychoanalytic: unresolved, unconscious conflicts → among the desires of id, ego and superego, an outward manifestation of the internal conflict ▪ - - - Behaviourists: all behaviours are learned so anxiety disorders are learned through conditioning/cognitive learning ▪ Cognitive theorists: dysfunctional ways of thinking → unhealthy, irrational way of thinking (GAD patient may have unrealistically high standard for his/her own behaviour ) Somatic Symptom and Related Disorders o Somatoform disorders ▪ When person manifests a psychological problem through a physiological symptom • Physical problem without any identifiable cause o Conversion disorder ▪ Patients report existence of severe physical problem such as paralysis or blindness and they will be unable to move/see though there are no biological reasons for problems o Theories of causes: ▪ Psychodynamic: merely outward manifestations of unresolved unconscious conflicts ▪ Behaviourists: somatic symptoms are reinforced for their behaviour • Blindness experienced to avoid unpleasant tasks like working Dissociative disorders ▪ Involve disruptions in conscious processes o Dissociative amnesia ▪ When a person cannot remember things and no physiological basis for the disruption in memory can be identified • Biologically induced amnesia is called organic amnesia o Dissociative identity disorder (DID) ▪ When person has several personalities rather than one integrated personality → often personalities will be opposite of each other o Causes: ▪ Psychoanalysts believe that dissociative disorders result when an extremely traumatic event has been so thoroughly repressed that a split in consciousness results ▪ Behaviourists posits that people who have experienced trauma simply find not thinking about it rewarding → producing amnesia • Growing belief that people do not engage in repression, these facts have led to many questions whether DID is a legitimate psychological disorder Depressive disorders ▪ Someone with mood/affective disorder experiences extreme or inappropriate emotions o Major Depressive disorder (unipolar disorder) is most common mood disorder ▪ Length of depressive episode > 2 weeks ▪ Other common symptoms: loss of appetite, fatigue, change in sleeping patterns, anhedonia, feelings of worthlessness - - o Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD): depression in only certain times of the year (winter, when there is less sunlight) ▪ Often treated with light therapy o Theories about causes of depressive disorders ▪ Aaron Beck: depression results from unreasonably negative ideas people have about themselves, their world, their futures (cognitive triad) ▪ Attributions people make about their experiences → explanation of cause • Internal (personally responsible)/external (other factors caused failure) • Global (generalize failure in one to all)/specific (failure in one is just in one • Stable (will always fail)/unstable (outcome could change on another occasion) o People who make internal, global, and stable attributions are more likely to be depressed ▪ Martin Seligman: learned helplessness • Dogs that received electric shocks: where dogs had no way to stop shocks learned that they could not control fate so they just endured the shock and gave up → learned to act helpless • When one’s prior experiences have caused that person to view him/herself as unable to control aspects’ of the future that are controllable → passivity and depression ▪ Biological explanation: low levels of serotonin & norepinephrine linked to MDD, more acetylcholine receptors in brain and skin linked to bipolar • Both unipolar and bipolar disorder often respond to somatic therapies → disorders are at least partially caused by biological factors • Depressive disorders run in families → genetic component to etiology Bipolar and related disorders → formerly known as manic depression • Bipolar involves both depressed and manic episodes o Depressed episodes involve all symptoms discussed above o Manic episodes usually involve feelings of high energy though experiences vary in different ways ▪ A small number of people appear to experience mania without depression Schizophrenic disorders o Most severe and debilitating psychological disorders → striking people as they enter young adulthood o Disordered, disoriented thinking → delusions, hallucinations, disorganized language, unusual affect/motor behaviour ▪ Delusions are perceptions in the absence of any stimulation ▪ Inappropriate affect: might laugh in response to hearing someone’s died ▪ Flat affect: consistently have essentially no emotional response at all o Often evidence odd use of languages - ▪ Neologism: make up their own words ▪ Clang associations: string together a series of nonsense words that rhyme o Catatonia: motor problem where person remains motionless in strange postures for hours at a time, move jerkily and quickly for no apparent reason ▪ Display waxy flexibility (allow their body to be moved into any alternative shape and will then hold that new pose) o Often divided to two types of symptoms ▪ Positive symptoms • Excesses in behaviour, thought or mood (neologisms and hallucinations) ▪ Negative symptoms • Deficits in behaviour (flat affect and catatonia) o Causes of schizophrenia ▪ Biological: excess dopamine • Antipsychotic drugs to treat schizophrenia result in lower dopamine levels and decrease in disordered thought and behaviour o Extensive use of these drugs may cause tardive dyskinesia (muscle tremors and stiffness) • When Parkinson’s patients are given excess L-Dopa, they have schizophrenic like distortions in thought • Genetic predisposition seems to exist o People who re related to schizophrenic suffer from the disorder at an increased rate ▪ Diathesis-stress model • Environmental stressors can provide circumstances under which a biological predisposition for illness can express itself ▪ Cognitive: existence of double binds • Double bind is when person is given contradictory messages → conflicting messages may cause people to develop distorted ways of thinking due to impossibility of rationally resolving experiences Personality disorders ▪ Well-established maladaptive ways of behaving that negatively affect people’s ability to function o Antisocial personality disorder: little regard for other’s feelings and view the world as a hostile place where people need to look out for themselves o Dependent personality disorder: rely too much on attention and help of others o Paranoid personality disorder: feel persecuted, but will not experience distortion of thought/delusions schizophrenics do o Narcissistic personality disorder: seeing oneself as centre of the universe o Histrionic personality disorder: overly dramatic behaviour (histrionics) o Obsessive compulsive personality disorder: overly concerned with certain thoughts and perform certain behaviours, but will not be debilitated to same extent as OCD - Somatic symptom disorders: physical complaints without organic causes → conversion disorder - Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) o Obsessions: persistent unwanted thoughts → results in anxiety ▪ E.g. cleanliness o Compulsions: need to engage in particular actions → anxiety reduced when person performs compulsive behaviour ▪ E.g. constantly worried that environment is dirty → wash hands and shower repeatedly - Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): usually involves flashbacks or nightmares following a person’s involvement in an extremely troubling event e.g. wars → memories of events cause anxiety - Paraphilias (psychosexual disorders): sexual attraction to an object, a person, or activity not usually seen as sexual o e.g. paedophilia, zoophilia (animals), fetishism (objects), voyeur (watching others), masochist (pain inflicted), sadist (inflicting pain on someone else) - Eating disorders o Anorexia nervosa ▪ Being significantly low weight for one’s age and size, an intense fear of fat and food, and a distorted body image o Bulimia ▪ Bing-purge cycle where sufferers eat large quantities of food and then attempt to purge the food from their bodies by throwing up or using laxatives o Bing-eating disorder ▪ Eating very large quantities of food in a short time while experiencing feelings of loss of control - Substance-related addictive disorders: diagnosis made when the use of such substances or behaviours like gambling regularly negatively affects a person’s life - Developmental disorders o Autism spectrum disorder: seeks out less social and emotional contact and are hypersensitive to sensory stimulation ▪ Often exhibit intense interest in objects not viewed as interesting by most people and engage in simple, repetitive behaviours ) o Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): difficult paying attention or sitting still - Neurocognitive disorders o Alzheimer’s disease: form of dementia, a deterioration of cognitive abilities, often seen most dramatically in memory 2. The Rosenhan Study: influence of labels - - Rosenhan & researchers sought admission to a number of mental hospitals → all claimed they had been hearing voices (sole symptom) and all were admitted to institutions as suffering from schizophrenia Raised important issues o Should people who were once diagnosed with psychological problems carry that diagnosis for the rest of their lives? o To what extent are disorders the product of a particular environment, and to what extent do they inhere in the individual o What is the level of institutional care available if the imposters could go undetected for a period of days, in some cases, weeks? - Major changes in DSM-5 Chapter 13 – Treatments of Psychological Disorders 1. History - Early societies o Researchers theorize that the making of holes, trephining, was an early form of treatment that was supposed to let the harmful spirits escape o Hippocrates and Galen posited that psychological illnesses were influenced by biological facto o Europeans during Middle Ages returned to the belief that demons and spirits were the cause → persecutions rather than treatments usually resulted - Enlightenment led to more sympathetic views - - - - o Led to call to treat victims of mental illness more humanely at the turn of 19 th century 1950s: development of drugs → many people released from mental institutions o Deinstitutionalisation was far less successful than initially hoped, once released, many former patients were unable to care for themselves o Their psychological needs were supposed to be met by local clinics on an outpatient basis (many schizophrenics ended up homeless) Recently, a growing effort has been placed on preventative efforts: if psychological problems can be treated proactively or before they become severe, the suffering of the client as well as cost of providing care can be reduced o Primary prevention: attempts to reduce the incidence of societal problems, such as joblessness or homelessness that can give rise to mental health issues o Secondary prevention: working with people at-risk for developing specific problems o Tertiary prevention: aimed to keep people’s mental health issues from becoming more severe, for instance working with earthquake survivors who are already suffering from anxiety disorder Psychotherapy (all perspectives but biological) o All except behavioural treatments, consist of talking to psychologist ▪ Behavioural therapies focus on changing contingencies of reinforcement to which a person has been exposed to ▪ While most psychologists refer to people who come to them for help as patients, humanistic therapists prefer the term clients Psychoanalytic therapy o Developed by Sigmund Freud o View the cause of disorder as unconscious conflicts, as a result, their focus is on identifying the underlying causes of the problem → other methods of therapy may succeed in ridding symptoms but will not address the true problem o Symptom substitution: when after a person is successfully treated for one psychological disorder, the person begins to experience a new psychological problem ▪ Psychoanalytic therapists argue that a person’s symptoms are the outward manifestations of deeper problems that can be cured only through analysis, often this approach is lengthy o To delve into the unconscious minds of his patients, Freud developed a number of techniques including hypnosis, free association and dream analysis ▪ Hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness where people are less likely to repress troubling thoughts ▪ Psychoanalysts ask patients to free associate – to say whatever comes to mind without thinking • Based on idea that we all constantly censor what we say, thereby allowing us to hide some of our thoughts, if we force ourselves to say whatever pops into our minds, we’re more likely to reveal clues about what is really bothering us by eluding the ego’s defences ▪ - Dream analysis: ask patients to describe their dreams → ego’s defences are relaxed during sleep, they hope that dreams will help the therapist see what’s at the root of the patient’s problem • What the patient reports is called the manifest content of the dream – of interest to the analyst is the latent/hidden content, only revealed as a result of the therapists interpretive work o All these techniques rely heavily on interpretations of the therapists and are criticized for their inherent subjectivity ▪ When people disagree, psychoanalysts tend to see objections as a sign of resistance o Transference: in the course of therapy, when patients begin to have strong feelings toward their therapists – seen as further technique to reveal source of problem o Psychoanalytic treatments and humanistic therapies are sometimes referred as insight therapies: highlights the importance of patients gaining an understanding problem Humanistic therapies o Focus on helping people to understand and accept themselves, and strive to self-actualize ▪ If people are supported and helped to recognized their goals, they will move toward self-fulfilment o Self-actualisation: to reach one’s highest potential → viewed as a powerful motivational goal o Humanistic psychologists operate from the belief that people are innately good and that possess free will (capable of controlling their own destinies, opposite of determinism – belief that people have no influence over what happens to them and their choices are predetermined by forces outside their control) o Carl Rogers ▪ Created client-centred therapy (person-cantered therapy) that hinges on the therapist providing the client with what Rogers termed unconditional positive regard • The blanket acceptance and support of a person regardless of what the person says or does ▪ Rogers believed unconditional positive regard is essential for healthy development and people who have not experienced this may view themselves in the negative ways others made them feel • Therapies are non-directive, therapists will not tell clients what to do but rather, would seek to help clients choose a course of action for themselves ▪ Often therapists say little and encourage clients to talk about how they feel and sometimes mirror back those feelings (active listening) o Gestalt therapy (Fritz Perls): ▪ Emphasize the importance of the whole, and encourage clients to get in touch with their whole selves • Encourage their clients to explore feelings of which they may not be aware and emphasize the importance of body positions and seemingly minute actions • - - Want clients to integrate all their actions, feelings, thoughts to a harmonious whole – then one can best appreciate the totality of an experience as it occurs o Existential therapies ▪ Humanistic therapies that focus on helping clients achieve a subjectively meaningful perception of their lives ▪ See client’s difficulties being caused by clients having lost or failed to develop sense of their lives’ purpose → formulate a vision of their lives as worthwhile Behavioural therapies o Counterconditioning (Mary Cover Jones): an unpleasant conditioned response is replaced by a pleasant one (flooding + systematic desensitization) o Systematic desensitization (Joseph Wolpe) ▪ Teaching client to relax (breathing + meditation) and then work together to construct an anxiety hierarchy (rank ordered list of what client fears, starting with least frightening, moving up hierarchy until no anxiety is felt even at the top of hierarchy) • In in vivo desensitization, the client confronts the actual feared objects or situations • In covert desensitisation the client imagines the fear-induced stimuli ▪ The more relaxation is paired with feared stimuli, the stronger the relaxation response o Flooding ▪ Method of treating anxiety disorders that use classical conditioning ▪ Unlike systematic desensitisation, flooding involves having clients address the most frightening scenario first • This process produces tremendous anxiety, but if clients face their fears and not back down, they will soon realize that their fears are irrational ▪ If nothing bad happens as a result, fear will soon be extinguished o Modeling ▪ Learning through observation and imitation a model who interacts calmly with a particular stimuli and acting patient to reenact the what s/he witnessed o Aversive conditioning: ▪ Involves pairing a habit a person wishes to break such as smoking with an unpleasant stimulus such as electric shock or nausea o Operant conditioning ▪ Involves using B.F. Skinner’s principles such as reinforcement and punishment to modify a person’s behaviour • Token economy: desired behaviours are identified and rewarded with tokens that can be exchanged for various objects or privileges Cognitive therapies ▪ Locate the cause of psychological problems in the way people think, their methods of therapy concentrate on changing these unhealthy thought patterns ▪ - Try to change patient’s attribution style to a healthier one so they would view cause of problems as being situational than ▪ Often quite combative as therapists challenge the irrational thinking patterns of clients o Aaron Beck created cognitive therapy, a process most often employed in treatment of depression – involves trying to get patients to engage in pursuits that will bring them success ▪ This will alleviate depression while also identifying and challenges the irrational ideas that caused their unhappiness ▪ Explains depression using the cognitive triad, people’s beliefs about themselves, their worlds, their futures • People suffering from depression often have irrationally negative beliefs about all 3 areas, and try to make beliefs more positive o Cognitive Behavioural Therapies ▪ Therapies that combine ideas of cognitive and behavioural therapists • Rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT), developed by Albert Ellis, looked to expose dysfunctional thoughts of their clients → show the client that his or her beliefs are unlikely ad not a big deal • Focuses not just on how and what clients think but also on what they do – often give homework assignments which they are asked to engage in the behaviours they fear (for anxiety disorders) o Group therapy ▪ Involve groups in addition to one-on-one client therapist interactions • Family therapies – client’s problems do not occur in a vacuum so therapists find meeting with the whole family helpful in revealing patterns of interaction between family members and altering behaviour of whole family ▪ Sometimes involve meeting with a number of people experiencing similar difficulties • Self-help groups such as Alcoholic Anonymous (AA) are a form of group therapy that doesn’t involve a therapist at all Somatic therapy (biomedical) o Psychologists see cause of disorder in organic causes like imbalance of neurotransmitters or hormones, structural abnormalities in the brain, genetic predispositions etc. ▪ These psychologists advocate the use of somatic therapies: therapies that produce bodily changes o Psychopharmacology/chemotherapy: drugs to treat many kinds of psychological problems ranging from mood disorders to schizophrenia ▪ More severe a disorder, more likely drugs will be used • Schizophrenia uses antipsychotic drugs like Thorazine, Haldol, but side effect is tardive dyskinesia (chronic muscle tremors) • Mood disorders often respond well to chemotherapy → increasing serotonin o Tricyclic antidepressant monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibitors o Serotonin selective reuptake inhibitor (Prozac) • Lithium used to treat manic phase of bipolar disorder • Anxiety disorder often treated with drugs o Act by depressing the activity of the CNS, making people feel more relaxed ▪ Barbiturates such as Miltown ▪ Benzodiazepines such as Xanax, Valium o Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT): ▪ Electric current is passed through both hemispheres of the brain, significant side effects (memory loss) for bilateral ECT though it’s more effective ▪ Prior to administering ECT, patients are given muscle relaxant to reduce the effects of the seizure, briefly lose consciousness ▪ Less common treatment than chemotherapy → used for severe cases of depression after other methods have failed o Psychosurgery ▪ Psychosurgery involves the purposeful destruction of parts of the brain to alter a person’s behaviour – most intrusive and rarest form ▪ Even today, when surgical procedures gave grown much more precise, debate remains over the risks of psychosurgery and such procedures are done as a last resort - Eclectic therapies o Many therapists don’t exclusively use one type of therapy ▪ Research indicates that CBT can be particularly effective for some anxiety and mood disorders, combining systematic desensitization with talk therapies that help clients understand his or her unrealistic cognitions about the source of anxiety Chapter 14 – Social Psychology 1. Attitude Formation and Change - Social cognition: field applies concepts in field of cognition, memories and biases, to help explain how people think about themselves and others - Attitude: a set of beliefs and feelings that predispose us to respond in a particular way to objects, people and events - Mere exposure effect: the more one is exposed to something, the more one will come to like it - Persuasive messages can be processed through the central or peripheral routes o Central route: occurs when interested people focus on the arguments and respond with favourable thoughts, involves deeply processing the content of the message o Peripheral route: occurs when people are influenced by incidental cues such as a speaker’s attractiveness, involves other aspects of the message including the characteristics of the person imparting the message o Certain characteristics have been found to influence the effectiveness of a message ▪ Communicator: attractive people, experts, famous people are more likely to persuade ▪ Audience: less educated are more likely to be persuaded ▪ Presentation: one-sided message is best to a relatively uninformed audience/ more sophisticated audience is best when opposing arguments are acknowledged and refuted • Arousal of fear may be effective - Relationship between attitude and behaviour o Richard LaPiere: attitudes do not perfectly predict behaviours, what people say they would do and what they actually do often differ ▪ Sometimes if you can change people’s behaviour, you can change their attitudes o Cognitive dissonance theory (Leon Festinger & James Carlsmith) is based on idea that people are motivated to have consistent attitudes and behaviours ▪ Theory that we act to reduce the discomfort we feel when two of our thoughts are inconsistent → we act to reduce discomfort by changing our attitudes ▪ When they do not, they experience unpleasant mental tensions or dissonance • Festinger conducted experiments: paid $1 to lie about boring task were more likely to have positive attitudes than those paid $20 – they experienced a lot of cognitive dissonance as they lied not for money ($20 lied for money so little dissonance) 2. Compliance Strategies - Compliance strategies: strategies people use to get others to comply with their wishes - Foot-in-the-door phenomenon: tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request - Door-in-the-face phenomenon: when people refuse a large request, they will look favourably upon a follow-up request that seems, in comparison, much more reasonable - Norms of reciprocity: tendency to think that when someone does something nice for you, you ought to do something nice in return 3. Attribution Theory - Tries to explain how people determine the cause of what they observe o We can attribute behaviour to a person’s stable, enduring traits (dispositional/personal attribution) o We can attribute it to the situation (situational attribution) o Stable attribution: infer that a person’s always been like that o Unstable attribution: there was a situational cause to the event, e.g. test was easy so he did well ▪ Situation-stable, situation-unstable etc. - Harold Kelley: theory that explains kind of attributions people make based on 3 kinds of information: o Consistency: how similarly individuals act in same situation over time ▪ Important in determining stable/unstable attribution o Distinctiveness: how similar this situation is to other situations in which we have watched o Consensus: considers how others in the same situation have responded ▪ Important in determining situation/person attribution - Self-fulfilling prophecy: expectations we have about others can influence the way those others behave o Robert Rosenthal & Lenore Jacobson: Pygmalion in the classroom ▪ Administered a test to elementary school children that would supposedly identify those on verge of academic growth (randomly selected children but teacher’s belief did change student’s behaviour) - Attributional biases o Fundamental attribution error: tendency for observers, when analysing other’s behaviour, to underestimate the impact of situations and to overestimate the impact of personal dispositions ▪ People do not have same tendencies in explaining their own behaviours → more likely to say their own behaviour depends upon situation ▪ Far less likely to occur in collectivist cultures than individualistic cultures (more attuned to ways different situations influence own behaviour) o False-consensus effect: tendency for people to overestimate the number of people who agree with them o Self-serving bias: tendency to take more credit for good outcomes than bad ones o Just-world bias: belief in a just world where misfortunes befall people who deserve them (tendency to blame victims) 5. Stereotypes, Prejudice, Discrimination - Stereotypes: expectations that influence the way we interact with members of groups o Positive or negative and applied to virtually any group → vicious cycle of stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination - Prejudice: an undeserved, usually negative attitude towards a group of people o Stereotyping can lead to prejudice when negative stereotypes are applied uncritically to all members of a group o Ethnocentrism: belief that one’s culture is superior to others (specific kind of prejudice) o Stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination all reinforce one another - Outgroup-homogeneity: people tend to see members of their ingroup as more diverse than members of other groups (outgroups) - Ingroup bias: preference for members of one’s own ingroup – stem from people’s belief that they themselves are good people o Social learning theory: stress stereotypes and prejudice are often learned through modelling - Combatting prejudice o Contact theory: increasing contact between hostile groups will reduce animosity, but only if groups are made to work towards a goal that benefits all and necessitates the participation of all (superordinate goals) 6. Aggression and Antisocial Behaviour - Psychologists distinguish between 2 types of aggression o Instrumental aggression: when aggression is intended to secure a particular end o Hostile aggression: aggression that has no clear purpose - Frustration-aggression hypothesis: feelings of frustration makes aggression more likely - Common theory: social learning theory – exposure to aggressive models make people aggressive as illustrated by Bandura and Ross 7. Prosocial Behaviour o Factors that make people more likely to help one another - Bystander intervention - Bystander effect: lager the number of people who witness an emergency situation, the less likely anyone is to intervene - Diffusion of responsibility: the larger the group of people who witness a problem, the less responsibility any one individual feels to help o People tend to assume that someone else will take action so they do not need to do so - Pluralistic ignorance: people tend to decide what constitutes appropriate behaviour in a situation by looking to others 8. Attraction - Factors that increase the chance that people will like one another o Similarity: we are drawn to people who are similar to us ▪ Those who share our attitudes, backgrounds and interests o Proximity: nearness (suggested by mere-exposure effect), the greater the exposure one has to another person, the more one comes to like that person o Reciprocal liking: the more someone likes you, the more you will like them o Attractiveness: people are also attracted to those who are physically attractive - Self-disclosure: one self-discloses when one shares a piece of personal information with another o Close relationships are often built through a process of self-disclosure o Term often employed as part of liking and loving studies 9. Influence of Others on Individual Behaviour - Research on how individual’s behaviour can be affected by another’s actions or merely by another’s presence o Social facilitation: the presence of others improves task performance o Social impairment: when task being observed was difficult, being watched by others actually hurt performance - Normative social influence: influence resulting from a person’s desire to gain approval or avoid disapproval - Informational social influences: influences resulting from one’s willingness to accept other’s opinions about reality - Conformity: the tendency for people to adjust their behaviour or thinking to coincide with a group standard to go along with the views or actions of other o Asch Conformity experiment: confederates made people make series of perceptual judgements, and when participants were told to give verbal answers, they were likely to (1/3) follow confederates to give incorrect answer when confederates all gave wrong answer, though they were clearly wrong o We’re most likely to conform in these situations: ▪ We feel incompetent or insecure ▪ Group has at least 3 people ▪ Everyone else agrees ▪ Admire group’s status and attractiveness ▪ Have not already committed to another response ▪ We know we’re being observed ▪ Culture encourages respect for social standards - Obedience: people’s willingness to do what another asks them to do o Obedience is highest when: ▪ Person giving orders is nearby ▪ Person giving orders is perceived as a legitimate authority figure ▪ Research was supported by prestigious institution ▪ Victim was depersonalized or at a distance ▪ There were no role models for defiance 10. Group Dynamics - Group norms: rules about how group members should act - Social loafing: phenomenon where individuals do not put in as much effort when acting as part of a group as they do when acting alone (may be less motivated) - Group polarization: tendency of a group to make more extreme decisions than the group members would individually (individuals may be exposed to new, persuasive arguments in group + responsibility of extreme decision is diffused across group members) - Groupthink (Irving Janis): tendency for some groups to make bad decisions as group members suppresses their reservations about ideas supported by a group, so a false unanimity is encouraged o Flaws in groups decisions may be overlooked - Deindividuation: loss of self-restraint when group members feel anonymous and aroused → rioting and looting o Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment where people deindividuated due to the roles and the situation in general