Psych 243 Exam 1

Martin Seligman

APA President in the late 1990s

• aimed to bridge the divide between academic researchers and clinical practitioners

• Focused on studying human strengths, optimal functioning, and flourishing rather than mental illness and pathology

  • came to this idea after having an epiphany with his daughter

    • Nikki (Seligman’s daughter) said if she could stop whining, he could stop being grouchy - made Seligman realize parenting psychology should nurture strengths rather than correct flaws

Positive Psychology

Adopts a more optimistic perspective on human potential, motives, and capacities

• supports efforts to eliminate social problems such as drug abuse, criminal behavior, and mental illness by studying the protective factors as well as the risk factors

hedonia

“Hollywood happiness”

• chasing immediate sensory pleasure and avoiding pain

  • ex: eating your favorite meal, binge-watching a show, going to a concert

Eudaimonia

Deeper well-being rooted in living virtuously, cultivating meaning, and realizing one’s true potential

Seligman’s PERMA model

• five pillars of well being

i. Hedonic

• Pleasure

ii. Eudaimonic

• Engagement

• Relationships

• Meaning

• Achieving

Three levels of Positive Psychology

1. Subject Level

2. Individual Level

3. Institutional Level

Subject Level/states

Internal states like happiness, optimism, life satisfaction

• positive emotions

• Happiness

• Satisfaction with life

• optimism and hope

• sources of energy and confidence

Individual Level/ traits

Enduring traits such as character strengths, creativity, and flow

Institutional Level

Systems that support flourishing

• functional families

• healthy workplaces

• supportive schools

• reduce high risk behavior by punishing or supporting alternatives

FLOW

State of optimal performance and intense focus

• occurs when a person is so completely immersed in an activity that self-consciousness fades, distractions disappear, and time seems to distort

  • identified by psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi

VIA classification of Character Strengths

• 24 character strengths that fall under six broad virtue categories

  • wisdom

  • courage

  • humanity

  • justice

  • temperance

  • transcendence

• Universally valued traits that encompass our capacities for helping ourselves and others and produce positive effects when we express them

Pre WWII psychology

A balanced field addressing mental illness, talent/genius cultivation, and everyday well-being

Post WWII psychology

Shifted heavily toward treating trauma and developing psychotropic drugs

• sidelined the study of strengths and giftedness

Freud

viewed humans as driven by dark, socially disruptive impulses (id) that require societal restraint

• believed humans live in social groups to control innate aggression

Maslow

• Rejected Freud’s ideas and emphasized human potential via his hierarchy of needs

  • believed we live in social groups to sustain our need for belongingness

• believed only a few people could reach self-actualization

Maslow’s pyramid of needs

i. Physical needs

ii. Security/safety needs

iii. social needs

iv. Esteem needs/ego

v. Self-actualization

The social brain and face hypothesis

• Current explanation of why humans live in social groups

  • The brain did not evolve to be unusually large to solve physical survival problems, but instead to manage complex social relationships

• we process social demands/communication

• complex facial expression for social expression

• evidence that we are fundamentally a social species

Why did evolution not make humans permanently happy?/ evolutionary perspectives on obstacles to happiness

• natural selection prioritizes survival and reproduction

  • negative emotions exist because they solve specific survival problems

hedonic treadmill

when a positive event happens, the joy quickly fades and we return to our baseline emotional state

• if this did not occur and humans found permanent satisfaction, humans would lose the motivation or need to find new goals for survival

loss aversion

• “Bad is stronger than good”

  • The psychological pain of a loss is significantly more intense than the pleasure of an equivalent gain

mismatch theory

our brains evolved for ancestral environments (nomadic bands of roughly 150-200 people immersed in nature), creating friction with modern life

built environments

lack of regular exposure to nature reduced baseline vitality and calm

social fragmentation

we have numerous superficial acquaintances but fewer tight-knit kinship networks

massive social comparisons

constant exposure to curated peer achievements and media distorts self-worth and mate assessment

fear as an evolutionary survival sign

triggers freeze-or-flee responses to immediate threats

anger as an evolutionary survival sign

to deal with things strategically / reduce stress

disgust as an evolutionary survival sign

prevents pathogen exposure and poisoning

sadness as an evolutionary survival sign

signals distress to solicit support from the group

jealousy as an evolutionary survival sign

protects pair-bonds against abandonment

competition

evolutionary drives favored mechanisms to outperform rivals

• explains schadenfreud

Schadenfreud

experiencing pleasure at a competitors set back

Signal Detection

a framework used to measure how people or systems make accurate decisions under conditions of uncertainty, separating true information from background noise

error

an incorrect judgment (false alarm or a miss)

bias

A systematic skew in perception that intentionally leans toward one outcome under conditions of uncertainty.

Error management theory

When asymmetric costs exist between two errors (false positive vs false negative), evolution selects for the bias that commits the cheaper mistake

• ex: mistaking a stick for a snake (false positive) costs minor energy; mistaking a snake for a stick (false negative) costs your life

  • thus humans have more negativity bias

negativity bias

humans have a tendency to give more weight and attention to negative events rather than neutral or positive events

Fundamental Attribution error

tendency to over-attribute someone’s actions to internal character traits rather than situational circumstances

• stronger in individualistic western cultures that are more focused on individual agency

conditions of uncertainty

tendency to make judgments that allow for error because of reliance on mental shortcuts such as heuristics or stereotypes that more often yield correct decisions than not

Chronesthesia

• mental time travel

allows you to re-experience personal past events and imagine future scenarios

• conceptualized spatially

  • ex: english reads left to right and think of the past as to the left and future to the right but arabic is opposite

retrospection

the deliberate act of looking back on, reviewing or contemplating past events and experiences

prospection

mental process of imagining, generating, and evaluating possible future scenarios

Default Mode Network

interconnected set of brain regions that are active when resting, daydreaming, or mind wandering, and dialed down during focused/task oriented efforts

• implicated in the episodic memory

episodic memory

responsible for default mode network, mental time travel (cronesthesia), day dreaming, and wandering through our minds when lost in thought

Mouse-tracking experiment

• demonstrates how our physical movements reveal subconscious mental conflict when out internal concept of time clashes with what we see on a screen

  • when the word displayed on the screen matches the way the researchers place “future” and “past” there is no “pull away'“ and the hand smoothly picks the correct choice

postural sway

subtly forward leaning occurs when contemplating the future, and backward leaning when recalling the past

present-focused

• helps slow time perception down in a good way by bringing your attention to here and now

• mindfulness mediation

• seeking novelty and savoring

mindfulness mediation

focusing on all sensations in the moment - breathing, sounds around you, the feeling of air on your skin

past-focused

re-engaging in past memories

• gratitude journaling helps create positive past orientation

• focus on the positives when recalling the past

  • focusing on negatives leads to perseverations and fuels depression

future-focused

trying out hypothetical scenarios induces emotions

• being planful, setting realistic goals and meeting them fuels positivity

• adopting a hopeful mindset and imagining desired future outcomes yields positivity

• playing out worst case scenarios can be stressful and anxiety inducing

Slow motion Effect

hyperattentiveness leads to encoding many details in memory

• heightened arousal slows perception of time

  • often associated with trauma

  • occurs during flow as well (people report losing sense of space and time entirely

Thought pace

faster thought processing is linked with higher elevated mood and optimism

• can also correlate with impulsivity and less helping behavior towards others

Procrastination

occurs when very present-oriented and not at all future-oriented

cognitive dissonance

mental discomfort caused when your actions, thoughts, or behaviors do not match your beliefs or values

• $1 vs $20 example

• real world examples:

  • cult initiation

  • hazing

  • benjamin franklin effect

affective forecasting

the process of predicting how future events will make us feel emotionally

• valence

• specific emotions

• intensity

• duration

affective forecasting errors

• habituation and adaptation to pleasurable and painful situations

• modification to the hedonic treadmill - even though pain takes longer to get rid of you will eventually return to the set point

Impact bias

people overestimate the intensity and duration of future emotional reactions

• dating game

Types of Forecasting Errors

• misconstrual

• framing effects

• recall and affective theories

• correction for unique influences

• expectation effects

• focalism

misconstrual

imagining an event incorrectly before it happens

• ex: imagining a wedding only as pure bliss and ignoring logistical stress

focalism

focusing exclusively on the target event while ignoring unrelated daily events that will buffer or alter mood

• ex: assuming a sports win will make the entire week great , ignoring work stress

framing effects

letting superficial ways an event is presented alter out emotional prediction

• evaluating dorm satisfaction based purely on room size rather than social community

recall and affective theories

relying on reconstructed, incomplete memories to project future feelings

• forgetting the specific phyiscal pain of childbirth when planning a future family

projection bias

projecting our current internal state onto future judgements

• grocery shopping while starving and predicting we will eat massive portions

expectation effects

preconceptions altering actual experiences

• overhyping a movie so much that even a good film feels disappointing

Subjective well being

A type of hedonic well-being composed of three factors: high levels of positive affect, low levels of negative affect, high levels of life satisfaction

Authentic happiness

a perspective bridging the gap between the hedonic and eudaimonic approaches, in which well-being is achieved

anecdotal evidence

evidence collected in an informal manner; involving stories or personal testimony

confirmation bias

tendency of people to seek out, notice, and remember evidence that supports what they believe rather than trying to find counterevidence to test their beliefs

empirical research

research based on a set of methods that enable investigators to draw conclusions based on systematically collected evidence

true experiment

A research design that allows for investigators to determine a causal relationship among variables by manipulating one or more of those variables

mediator

A variable that explains the relationship between two other variables. Mediators provide insight into how one variable influences another variable through a third variable

validity

the extent to which a method of measure actually measures what it claims to