PSYCH 10 Final practice

What is a mental disorder?

A persistent dysfunction in behavior, thought, or emotions that causes significant impairment

What causes disorders?

Bio-psycho-social model

Diathesis-Stress model

Bio-psycho-social model:

 Biological (genes), Social (environment, culture), and Psychological (learning, memory, and perceptions)

Diathesis-Stress model:

suggests that people with an underlying predisposition for a disorder are more likely than others to develop a mental disorder when faced with some sort of major stressor

How do we classify disorders?

DSM (Diagnostic and Statical Manual)

RDoC (Research Domain Criteria Project)

DSM (Diagnostic and Statical Manual):

handbook used by healthcare professionals in the United States and much of the world as the authoritative guide to the diagnosis of mental disorders. 

RDoC (Research Domain Criteria Project):

focus on studying the underlying cause of disorders 

Benefits to DSM-5

• Helps practitioners communicate with each other 

• Allows for greater standardization of diagnosis 

• Can guide practitioners in selecting the “most effective” treatment option

• Provides a common language to describe disorders by providing sets of symptoms 

Drawbacks of the DSM-5

• Labeling can lead to stigma 

• “Being sane in insane places”- Normal behavior is interpreted as psychiatric 

• “Below” cut-off can be problematic 

• Systematic diagnosis of mental illness can be difficult

Specific Phobia

• Blood- injury- injection phobias are biologically driven and run in families 

• Most common anxiety disorder: 12%

• Irrational fear of a particular object or situation that interferes with a person's ability to function

Social anxiety disorder

• Fear of social situations which leads to worry and diminished day-to-day functioning 

  • Public speaking 

• Second most common anxiety disorder

Panic Disorder

• Panic disorders results from recurrent, sudden, and unexpected panic attacks 

• 5% of the population

Agoraphobia

Fear/Avoidance of public places in which a person feels like they are unsafe or unable to escape in the event of developing panic

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)

• Excessive worry about everyday things that is out of proportion to the specific cause of the worry 

• At least 6 months 

• 6% of the population 

• Associated with 3 or more of the following symptoms, only one required in children 

  • Restless 

  • Easily fatigued 

  • Difficulty concentrating 

  • Irritability 

  • Muscle tension 

  • Sleep disturbance

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

• Thoughts (obsessions) and ritualistic behaviors (compulsions)

• Takes up a significant amount of time 

• Designs to fend off those thoughts that interfere with an individual’s functioning

PTSD

Chronic physiological arousal, recurrent unwanted thoughts or images of the trauma, and avoidance of things that call the traumatic event to mind

Major Depressive Disorder

Severely depressed mood or inability to experience pleasure that lasts 2 or more weeks and is accompanied by feelings of worthlessness, weight change, sleep and appetite disturbance

Bipolar Disorder

Characterized by cycles of abnormal, persistent high mood (manic) and low mood (depression)

Schizophrenia

• Delusions 

• Hallucinations- perceptual experiences that occur even when there is no stimulus in the outside world 

• Disorganized Speech

Psychological Treatments :

Reduces inner conflict by giving patients insights into their unconscious thoughts and feelings

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT):

Teach people new, more constructive ways of thinking and acting

Psychopharmacology:

the study of the effect of drugs on the mind and behavior

What are the four stages of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development?

Sensorimotor (birth-2 Years), Preoperational ( 2-7 years), Concrete Operational (7-11 yrs), and Formal Operational (11+)

Sensorimotor (birth-2 Years) key components:

• Learn through the world through their senses and motor behaviors (grasping and sucking), recognizes that their self is responsible for action, progress from simple reflex actions to symbolic processing

• object permanence (9 months)

• A-not B error (pass until 12 months):

• Violation of expectations

Object permanence:

realize that things continue to exist when they are no longer visible

A-not B error:

baby searches for the toy, looks under “A” mat and finds the toy. This activity is repeated several times (always with the researcher hiding the toy under mat “A”). Then, in the critical trial, the experimenter moves the toy under mat “B.” Babies of 10 months or younger typically make an error, meaning that they look under mat “A” even though they saw the researcher move the toy under mat “B.”

Violation of expectations:

Infants will look longer at events that violate their expectations

Preoperational ( 2-7 years) key components:

1. Learn to use language to represent objects mentally and symbolically BUT lack logical reasoning and relating to the experiences of others 

2. Law of conservation (pass around until 6-7 years)

law of conservation:

1. even if something changes shape/volume/amount it still stays the same 

   1. Theory of Mind 

      1. Develop theory of mind (understand that people have thoughts feelings, and beliefs that are different from their own)

      2. Sally-anne test

Concrete Operational (7-11 yrs) key components

Can think logically about real concrete objects and events, but have difficulty thinking abstractly and reasoning hypothetically 

Formal Operational (11+) key components

Can think logically about abstract and hypothetical ideas

Issues with concept of development:

development is much more continuous rather than  occurring at set stages, underestimates children’s abilities, not everyone thinks or solves  problems in the same way, undervalues socio-cultural environment, vague, etc.

Delayed gratification

• The act of resisting an impulse to take an immediately available reward in the hope of obtaining a more-valued reward in the future.

• Example: Marshmallow

• ⅔ of the 4-year-olds failed

• Correlations between delayed gratification at 4 years of age and : self control, attention, planning ability and SAT scores 11-14 years later.

• 4 year olds that waited the longest were better educated and had higher levels of self esteem in their late 20s

Social psychology:

concerned with the way individual’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by others

Social cognition:

the processes by which people come to understand one another and  figure each other out

How skilled are we in evaluating others?

Judgements can be made quickly and with some degree of accuracy

How do the concepts of stereotypes, stereotype threat and illusory correlations all relate?

Stereotypes are widely held beliefs that people have certain characteristics because of their membership to a particular group. Stereotypes can be inaccurate, overused and lead to biases

Stereotype threat:

fear of confirming a negative stereotype about their social group

Illusory correlation:

when people estimate they have encountered more confirmation of  an association between social traits than they have actually seen

How can we reduce bias?

“fast friends”

Conformity:

the tendency to do what others do simply because others are doing it

Obedience:

the tendency to do what an authority figure tells you to do

Normative influence

people conform to a group to fit in, to feel good and be accepted by a group 

Informational influence:

 people conform because they believe the group is competent and  has the correct information, particularly when the task or situation is ambiguous.

What factors make a person more or less likely to fall into group pressure?

• The size of the majority: The greater the # of ppl in the majority, the more likely an  individual will conform  

• The presence of another ally: if there is at least one ally, conformity drops

• The public or private nature of the response: When responses are made publicly,  conformity is more likely to occur than in private

Milgram Experiment

• This experiment shows obedience which is the change of an individual’s behavior to  comply with a demand by an authority figure – people obey because they are concerned  about a consequence if they do not comply  

• 65% continued until the end!  

• Variations on Milgram  

  o Closeness of confederate  

  o Closeness of experimenter 

  o Respectability of environment  

  o Number of other “teachers”

What were some ethical issues with the Stanford Prison Experiment?

• Unethical, those involved in the experiment did not know the study would pan out this  way and may not have fully consented  

• Power of social roles and how those roles play out in specific situations

• Was supposed to last for 2 weeks but only lasted 6 days 

• Deindividuation: Being in a group can lead you to do things you wouldn’t normally do on  your own 

• Demand characteristics: refers to an experimental artifact where participants form an  interpretation of the experiment’s purpose and unconsciously change their behavior to fit  that interpretation

Bystander Effect:

 situation in which a witness or bystander does not volunteer to help a  victim or person in distress 

Why do people commit to the bystander effect?

• Assuming that others could also provide assistance relieves bystanders of some measure  of personal responsibility and reduces the likelihood that bystanders will intervene  (diffusion of responsibility)

• If one person helps then other people are also likely to help 

• Bystander effect may be driven more by uncertainty  

In groups we …

• Are more likely to conform  

• Less likely to respond to an emergency (bystander effect)  

  • Deindividualization  

  • Normative influence & informational influence  

  • Diffusion of responsibility  

  • Uncertainty

Social loafing:

 tendency for people to expend less effort when in a group than when alone

Social facilitation:

when one’s performance is affected by the presence of others

Altruistic behavior:

motivated behavior that is intended to help others without  expectation of reward or acknowledgement

What are the four decision-making biases?

Availability Bias/Heuristic, framing effect, anchoring, and confirmation bias

Availability Bias/Heuristic

judging the probability of events based on examples that readily come to mind (For example: Winning the lottery)

Framing Effect:

changing how an issue is presented or framed can change people’s decisions.  (For example: Advertising)

Two types of framing effect

lost aversion and sunk cost fallacy

Loss Aversion:

people want to avoid losses more than they want to achieve gains

Sunk-cost fallacy:

when individuals continue a behavior as a result of previously  invested resources (ie, gambling more money in hopes to get your money back)

Anchoring:

 tendency to rely too heavily or “anchor” on one trait or piece of info when  making decisions

Confirmation Bias:

We tend to only look for information that is confirming rather than  disconfirming evidence 

What is language?

a system for communication with others using signals that are combined  according to rules of grammar; conveys meaning.

What are the three components of language?

Morphemes, syntax, and phonemes

Morphemes:

smallest unit of meaning in a language (can be words, suffixes, prefixes,  parts of compound words)

Phonemes:

the smallest unit of sound

Syntax:

rules of word combination (just because words obey the rules of syntax, they  may not have meaning though ex: colorless green ideas sleep furiously)

Behaviorist Perspective

• We learn language though  reinforcement  

• Nurture  

• Ex: a child being praised for  calling a ball a ball  

• Problems: parents respond  more to context than to the  grammatical structure of  speech

Nativist Perspective

• Language learning capacities  are “built in” the brain, we  are born with it  

• Noam Chomsky

• Support: language  

• development is consistent  around the world / kids are  able to apply rules to new  words / critical period of  learning a language easier at a  certain point in time

• Critical Period Example:  Genie Story – at age 13 learned some words but never developed full grammatical structures

Interactionalist Perspective

• Innate capacity for language  interacts with experience 

• social and biological factors  have to interact in order for  kids to learn language  

• Ex: speaking in motherese or  baby talk, social communication with children  to develop their language skills

Categorical Speech Perception

when phonemes are classified they are often perceived to fall into distinct categories even  though they follow along a continuum

Perceptual Narrowing for Phonemes

• 6- to 8-month-old English learners can differentiate the Salish & Hindi contrasts  • By 10 - 12 months they lose this ability 

o Infants that are faster to tune into the speech sounds of their native language  have larger vocabularies at age 2.  

What is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?

Strong version: thoughts and behavior are determined by language  

Weak version: thoughts and behavior are influenced by language  

Russian Blue experiment

In Russian they label light and dark blue in everyday language. If you show them a spectrum of blues, they are faster to label the blues instead of English speakers. Language affects our attention

In order to determine if someone has just used “bark” or “park”, you have to discriminate the initial sound, or:

the phoneme

The prefix “un” is an example of a…

morpheme

What is Developmental Psychology?

Study of how and why human beings change over the course of their life 

Continuous Development:

 development as a gradual process with gradual change

Discontinuous Development

development as something that takes place in stages and that occurs at specific ages.

Perceptual experience begins in ___

In the last trimester (the last three months of pregnancy)

The child’s auditory system comes online so the child is actually able to hear while in ___

the utero

Newborns prefer to listen to

• Their mother’s voice over another woman’s voice 

• Their mother’s native language over another language

experience begins in the

womb

Most infant testing methodologies are based on 3 assumptions:

• Infants will attend/orient to stimuli they prefer or find interesting 

• 2. Infants prefer to hear/see stimuli that they have heard/seen before  (familiarization) 

• If they have been repeatedly exposed to a stimulus (to the point of boredom) then  they should prefer novel stimuli (habituation)

Infants will look longer at ___ stimuli than ___ stimuli

interesting, uninteresting

What are the four stages of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development?

1. Sensorimotor (birth-2 yrs)

2. Preoperational (2-7 yrs)

3. Concrete operational (7-11yrs)

4. Formal Operational (11+)

Assimilation:

 the process of placing new info into an existing schema

Accommodation:

the process of creating a new schema or drastically altering an existing schema to include new info that otherwise would not fit into existing schema.

Long-Term Memory (LTM):

Memory that persists over time without conscious activation

Explicit Memory

• Consciously and intentionally try to remember and recall 

• Knowing what something is and how you came to know this thing 

• Expressed verbally 

• Declarative memory

Episodic

• Information about events we have personally experienced (specific time and place)

• High school graduation

Semantic

• General knowledge and facts 

• The first president of the US

Implicit Memory

• Unconscious or automatic 

• Knowing how to do something like a task of some sort 

• Expressed behaviorally 

•  Non-Declarative Memory

Procedural

• Skill based memories 

• How to do things 

  • Riding a bike

Priming

• Exposure to the world influences your future behavior 

• Reading a list of words and having a fill-in-the-blank

Conditioning

Classical Conditioning/ Operant Conditioning

Serial Position Effect

When there is a greater delay of remembrance, the primacy effect remains strong but the recency  effect decreases 

primacy effect

an individual's tendency to better remember the first piece of information they encounter than the information they receive later on.

recency effect

a cognitive bias in which those items, ideas, or arguments that came last are remembered more clearly than those that came first.

Encoding specificity principle:

The more similar the retrieval situation is to the encoding situation, the better the retrieval

Recall

 access information without any cues