Intro to Psych Final - New Material

Thinking about mental illness throughout history - early on

Ancient Egyptians (6000-5000 BCE)

• Largely equated mental, physical illness

• But thought all illness was due to evil spirits

Classical Greeks (e.g., Hippocrates, 400 BCE)

• Suggested treatments for “human conditions”, not just severe psychosis

• But treatments included bloodletting, getting married

Thinking about mental illness throughout history - more modern

1500s

• Mentally ill = witch

• Best Case: chained up in an institution

• Worst Case: killed

1700s

• Some advocacy for humane treatment

1800s

• Mental hospitals

• Some were pretty nice

Thinking about mental illness throughout history - late 1800s

Big, Expected Problems

• Nice asylums are expensive

• Asylums were being overwhelmed

• Late-stage syphilis patients

• Asked to also take care of elderly dementia patients

• Psychiatrists spent all their time managing asylums, not treating mental illness

• As overcrowding reaches critical levels, mortality rates reach 5x general population

Thinking about mental illness throughout history - late 1800s-1950s

Serious thinking about treatments, not just confinement

• Freud is thinking hard about counseling

• Psychiatrists are trying out medical treatments

Unfortunately, many treatments are wacky, ineffective, or even harmful

Freud’s approach is based mostly on his intuition, not scientific evidence

Medical approaches are even worse

• Inducing malarial fever

• Inducing diabetic coma

Thinking about mental illness throughout history - modern times

Talk therapies grow up:

• Still influenced by Freud’s interesting but non-scientific approach

• But now based in serious experimental research

Freud - Importance of early childhood events “Subconscious” processes in the brain -

• Talk-therapy as a treatment / cure

Medical approaches grow up:

• Drugs targeting specific neurotransmitters

  • Depression (serotonin)

  • Anxiety (GABA)

  • Anti-psychotics (dopamine)

Talk Therapy - Psychoanalysis

Derived from Freud’s theory of personality

Aims to relieve subconscious “conflicts”

Methods:

• Free-association

• Dream interpretation

• Analysis of “Freudian Slips”

Drawbacks:

• Takes a long time (and money)

• Probably not effective for serious disorders

• Probably not more effective than any other therapy

Psychodynamic Therapy

Neo-Freudian”

Aims: To understand maladaptive behaviors by looking for themes across relationships in a person’s life

Therapist discovers negative behavior “themes”

Helps the patient to change

Behavior Therapies - counter-conditioning

Derived from classical conditioning

Ex: phobias

Counter-conditioning:

• Pairing the trigger stimulus with a new response that is incompatible with fear (go to your happy place)

Over time, phobia weakens

Behavior Therapies - exposure therapies

Exposure Therapies:

• Expose a person to the stimulus that causes anxiety, until they are no longer anxious

Behavior Therapies - systematic desensitization

Systematic Desensitization

• Figure out what causes the anxiety and gently expose them to it.

Behavior Therapies - alcoholism

Aversive Conditioning:

Substituting a negative response for a positive response to a harmful stimulus:

Pairing alcohol with nausea can make alcoholics averse to drinking

Does it work?

• 33% after 3 years

Knowing actual cause of nausea may decrease effectiveness

Operant Conditioning

Recall:

• OC can be used to “shape” behaviors

• Step-by-step reinforcement of specific actions

• Cat could escape from “puzzle” box

Locus of Control

• How do you account for what happens in your life?

• Why do good things happen to me?

• Why do bad things happen to me?

Internal - in control of ones own actions

External - everything happens from luck or fate

Helplessness Experiment

In both animals and people, helplessness leads to depression

Experiment:

• Group A: No shocks

• Group B: Gets shocked, jumps away, repeat

• Group C: Same shocks as Group B, but no control

Group C dogs “think”: I have no control over my life

Thoughts about Locus of Control

Similarly, people who think they are in control are happier:

Nursing home patients were given more control

93% reported positive changes to quality of life, compared to control group:

• More alert

• More active

• Happier

Cognitive Therapies

Aim: Adjust a person’s maladaptive thinking style

Most people have “self-serving bias”:

• Attribute Success to personal, internal factors

• Attribute Failures to external factors

Depressed people may not exhibit SSB

Cognitive Therapy:

• Teach depressed people to “reinterpret” events

Group/Family Therapy

Often problems are directly related to social interactions

• Especially family interactions

Aim: Help family resolve conflicts more effectively

Rationale:

• Solutions to family problems should involve whole family

• Also, some therapy may benefit from support / knowledge of other people with similar problems (e.g., AA)

Does Therapy Work?

Therapy effectiveness is not easy to measure:

• Patients often enter therapy when at their worst, and so they’re likely to get better (“regression to the mean”)

• Clients develop a relationship with the therapist, want to believe the therapist is effective (cognitive dissonance?)

• Not surprisingly, clinicians feel they are very effective (but may not feel the same way about other therapists)

Unusual Therapies

“Scared Straight”: Programs that take young people to jails to see what their future might be

• Kids say it made a huge difference

• Studies show: Kids are actually MORE likely to later wind up in jail

“Boot Camp” style programs:

• No indication that they are effective

• Untrained “counselors” have been implicated in abuse scandals

Alternative Therapies

Mostly untested, unknown effectiveness

When tested, most turn out to be ineffective or harmful

Does therapy work? - standard therapies

Legitimate, modern therapies have a relatively good record:

Average therapy patient does better than 80% of similar untreated control

Which therapies work?

Behavioral therapies:

• Good for disorders with clear stimulus-response characteristics:

• Phobias, Compulsions, Sexual Disorders

Cognitive Therapies:

• Good for disorder that involved negatively-biased thinking

• Depression, Anxiety

Many therapists combine BOTH approaches (“Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy”)

Psychopharmacology

Hugely influential, and helpful to many:

But…

• Less effective than many believe

• Controversial (may be vastly over-prescribed)

Antipsychotic drugs

Dopamine-blocking drugs reduce schizophrenia symptoms

Long term use can lead to Parkinson’s disease like symptoms (Parkinson’s disease is related to dopamine deficiency)

Side effects / difficulty determining proper dosage can make schizophrenics feel lousy, not take their medication

Antidepressant drugs

Mostly SSRIs:

S=Selective

S=Serotonin

R=Reuptake

I =Inhibitor

Works for many (41%), but so does placebo (31%)

Criticism of antidepressant drugs

Criticism:

• Depression is not only biology

• Biological effects interact with “social” factors

• Interact?

  • Are caused by

  • Are increased / decreased by

• Biology can be dominated by social factors

  • Often people are depressed for a reason

  • Prozac will not get you a better job / friends / life

  • “Talk” therapy is still, on average, most effective

Anti-anxiety drugs

Depress nervous system

Relieve fear-like symptoms of anxiety

Criticism:

• Treat symptoms, but not underlying cause of anxiety

• Considered by most addiction specialists to be “highly addictive”

Radical Therapies

Electroconvulsive therapy:

• Electricity applied to Brain

• Used for severe depression

• Likely works by stimulating neuron growth in brain areas related to emotion regulation

• Can cause memory loss

• May be only effective treatment for some patients

Potential New Therapies

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation

• Painless magnetic field applied to surface of brain

• Used for severe depression

• Effectiveness not established

• No known side-effects

Ketamine, psilocybin, Ecstasy, LSD, other psychedelics?

Therapist

Training, license, supervision, and experience of the therapist have little effect on patient outcomes

So, is all this training useless? No!

• Hard to evaluate outcomes

• Hard to equate “training”, “experience” across therapists

• ALSO: Different therapists see very different patients

How are therapists trained?

Counselors: no training necessary.

Clinical, psychiatric social worker:

• 2 year MSW program + post graduate supervision

Clinical psychologist:

• Ph.D. or Psy. D., research, assessment, therapy training, supervision, internship, postdoctoral training, state license

Psychiatrist:

• MD + specialty, knowledge of pharmaceutical agents

• Only therapist who can prescribe medications

The computer metaphor

Encoding: Information goes in

Storage (Short term, Long term)

Retrieval: Information is accessed later on

How is your memory NOT like a computer?

• Memories can get details wrong; can forget.

• Computers store exact copies.

Type 1 - sensory memory

Visual info

Iconic memory: Very short term photographic memory

• How short? < 0.5 s

Sperling’s experiments:

Used arrays of letters

(1) Array pops up on screen

(1) Array disappears after a very short time

(1) Tone (high, medium, low) indicates recall line

• If retention interval = 0 sec

  • Recall (from one line) = 3 letters = 100%

  • So, all 9 letters were still in memory

• If retention interval = 1/2 sec

  • Recall (from one line) = 1 letter = 33%

  • So, only 3 letters (out of 9) were still in memory

Type 2 - working(short term) memory

Receives attended information from Sensory Memory

Holds, processes visual and auditory information

Coordinates with Long Term Memory

Experiment:

• Subjects were asked to remember 3 consonants (e.g. GHJ)

• Rehearsal was limited by a backwards counting task

• After 3 sec., performance was at 50% correct

Type 3 - long term memory

Very high capacity

Memories are stored permanently

But memories interfere with each other

• Forgotten information is not gone

• It’s just inaccessible

Encoding

Getting info into your brain

Some encoding is automatic.

• Spatial locations – where did you park your car?

• Events – what did you do yesterday?

• You don’t have to try to remember those things.

Other encoding requires effort

• What we typically think of as “memory”

• Learning the state capitals

Encoding and Sleep

Sleep is important for encoding information in LTM

Information presented:

• just before sleep is remembered poorly

• 1 hour before sleep is remembered well

• while sleeping is not remembered

Serial Position Effect

Remember first and last stuff really well and middle stuff not so well.

Have strategy in beginning and then so many words that begin to forget.

Levels of Processing

Semantic - actually understanding meaning; what you do with it.

• Stays in memory longer and will be more robust.

Acoustic - is a bit less understanding

Visual - understanding meaning to the lowest capacity.

Chunking

Using existing memories to store more information per chunk

Test right away - 100%

Forgetting happens quickly and slowly later on.

When relearning, get better quickly but levels off as time goes down.

Encoding - best practice

Don’t make it easy

• More difficult encoding leads to better learning

Performance: How you’re doing right now

Learning: How you’ll do in the future

An “expanding retrieval schedule” can help keep encoding difficulty high (which is a good thing)

• Study until you can recall 100%

  • Wait 10 minutes

• Study until you can recall 100%

  • Wait 30 minutes

• Study until you can recall 100%

  • Wait 2 hours… and so on.

Ebbinghaus forgetting curve

During breaks, forgetting happens

How do you measure forgetting?

• Had people encode nonsense syllables: VUT, GER, ROP…

• Wait some time

• Measured “savings on relearning”:

Savings = Original Learning Reps - Relearning Reps/Original Learning Reps

Savings on relearning

Forgetting is fast at first, then slow

You keep forgetting more, the longer you wait, but most of the forgetting happens early on

But each time you relearn, overall forgetting slows down

Context

Items presented together are associated in memory

Everything associated with an item is its “context”

Recall of context will cue recall of other information

Emphasizing different details can trigger memory of other different details

Forgetting - retrieval failure

Proactive Interference (acts forward in time):

• Past learning interferes with new learning

• Ex: Trying to learn new student names

  • Interference from previously learned students’ names impairs ability to learn new names

Retroactive Interference (acts backwards in time):

• New learning interferes with already learned information

• Ex: An actor learns lines for a new play

  • Interference from newly learned lines impairs ability to remember previously learned lines

Interference and sleep

You don’t forget as much while you’re sleeping

One theory: When you’re awake, there’s more interference

2 main types of long term memories

Explicit

• Processed in hippocampus

• Facts- general knowledge

• Personality experienced events

Implicit

• Processed by cerebellum

• Skills - motor and cognitive

• Classical and operant conditioning effects

Amnesia

Amnesiacs lose the ability to form new explicit memories

Can still form new implicit memories

The hippocampus

Neural center involved in forming explicit memories

Monkeys with surgically removed hippocampus lose memories formed in the last month

Won’t be able to form new memories

The cerebellum

Neural structure related to formation of implicit memories

People with damaged cerebellum may be unable to develop basic classical conditioned responses:

Forgetting - repressed memories

Memories for traumatic events

• Cannot be recalled for long periods of time

• Sometimes resurface in therapy

Little evidence they exist; Some evidence they don’t

Most memory researchers don’t believe in them

Retrieval from Long Term Memory

Memories of events are not only your encoded experience

Memories of events are a reconstruction, based on:

• Some encoded facts about your experience

• A lot of knowledge about how things probably were

What makes eyewitness testimony unreliable?

1) Leading questions

• Police may supply information or presume facts:

  • “Did you see the gun?” (bad; assumes a gun) vs.:

  • “What did you see?” (good; no bias induced)

• These subtle changes can alter memory

2) Focus of attention

• Details that might be important later might seem unimportant at the time

3) Context/Arousal

• Memory is most effective at moderate arousal levels

• Arousal is part of “context”. If you’re calm at the time of the interview, context will be very different, recall is impaired

4) Overconfidence

• Witnesses are often repeatedly questioned during trial prep

• Recalling events many times gives the false impression that a memory is more reliable than it really is:

Best practice - cognitive interview

1) Mentally reinstate the context

2) Report all details, including “unimportant” details

3) Recount events from other perspectives

4) No leading questions

Cognitive Interview uses many concepts from class:

• Reinstate context for accuracy

• Vary the context for more information

• Avoid contaminating the memory

Implanted Memories - Elizabeth Loftus

The “Lost in a Mall” Story

• Had subjects read stories, most of which were true (from their own lives), one of which was plausible, but made up:

• Subjects were later quizzed on events from the stories and asked to answer if these events were from their own lives

• After repeated questioning about the stories (over days), subjects began to believe false events were real:

Source error - brought up in 1st interview not realizing that memorized from 1st interview instead of real life

Children as eyewitnesses

Social Aspect

• Child’s desire to please the interviewer

Cognitive Aspect

• Source errors - child often cannot distinguish whether they remember something, or were told something

• Implanted memory - leading questions actually change child’s memory

Both also affect adults, but not as much

Children’s Suggestibility

Children repeatedly asked leading questions:

• Can be convinced false events occurred

• Refuse to believe something was made up, even after being told by the questioner how they were deceived

• Experts on child behavior are unable to detect implanted vs. real memories from child’s report

By age 10, children are no more suggestible than adults

Take home point:

• Because children can be victims of crime, it’s important that they be allowed to testify…

• But, we must be careful because young children are more susceptible to memory manipulation

What is intelligence?

Brain Size / Body Mass predicts intelligence

So, for animals with the same body mass, Bigger Brain = Smarter Brain?

In some brain areas, more brain mass correlates with intelligence

Is intelligence just having a good brain?

No

Concept of “intelligence” varies across cultures

What our society values determines (to some extent):

• What we choose to do

• What we excel at

• How our brains develop

General vs Specific Intelligence

General intelligence involves an overall enhancement in problem solving and reasoning skills.

But people can develop high performance in specific areas, such as (but not limited to): word fluency, memory, inductive reasoning, etc.

Savant Syndrome

• Highly specific, enhanced ability

• “Islands of Intelligence”

• Sometimes associated with autism

Multiple Intelligences

Common types of savants:

- Music

- Drawing / painting

- Calendar calculating

- Languages

- Accurate perception of passing time

Emotional Intelligence

The ability to use / understand / manage

- Your own emotions

- Other people’s emotions

Brain damage can selectively impair Emotional Intelligence

The IQ Test

Q tests attempt to measure the “general” part of intelligence

What an IQ test SHOULDN’T do:

- Depend on culture, race, etc.

- Change with age

- Change with level of education

Binet’s mental age

Mental development trajectory is similar across children

Some progress more rapidly than others

Average score by age = mental age

Stanford-Binet IQ = Baby’s Mental Age / Real Age x 100

Modern IQ Tests for adults

IQ is measured relative to people of the same age

• Population mean is set to 100

• Standard deviation is set to 10

Correlations with IQ:

• School grades

• Yrs. of education:

• Parent’s SES:

• Job Performance

• Husband + Wife:

• Identical Twins

• Good Social Skills

How to develop a good psych test

1) Standardization: Scores are “curved” so that mean, standard deviation are the same for every version of the test

• Otherwise, scores may reflect difficulty of test, not intelligence

2) Reliability: If a test measures a stable characteristic of a person, it should give consistent, stable results.

• A single person should get roughly the same score if:

  • They take 2 versions of the same test

  • The test is administered by different people

  • The test is given at two different times

3) Validity: Does your test actually measure intelligence?

• Content Validity: Test covers relevant material

• Predictive Validity: Test predicts future achievement

The Flynn Effect

Better…

- Test-taking skills?

- Nutrition?

- Environmental factors (mental stimulation)?

- Public education availability?

New results suggest the Flynn Effect may have stopped

What affects your IQ?

1) Age?

• Not a lot. Relatively stable across 70 years

2) Genes? Yes.

3) Environment? Yes.

• Over time genetic effects dominate environment:

Big controversy with IQ tests:

• Do different races have different average IQs?

• Answer? Yes

Why does race affect IQ scores?

Maybe:

- Biased test questions (probably small effect)

- Differences in education quality, SES, etc.

- Other environmental influences

No:

- Genetic differences

Measured IQ vs IQ

- “Measured IQ” = Score on an IQ test

- “IQ” = Actual measure of a person’s Intelligence

What affects your measured IQ?

At birth (equal):

• White, black infants equal on infant intelligence measures

8th grade - end of high school:

• Black students scores go down

• White students scores go up

College (back to roughly equal):

• Black students increase 4X white students

• Gap narrows considerably

Great differences in quality of schooling

• Public schools are funded through property taxes

On average, boys and girls are about the same

• But at extreme scores, there are more boys

It is commonly believed that Girls + Boys differ by ability

Girls are appear to be better at:

- Spelling

- Verbal ability

- Remembering locations

- Touch, taste, odor sensation

- Math computation (adding up #s, etc.)

Boys appear to be better at this - math problem solving

Degrees of Intellectual Disability

Mild - may learn academic skills up to 6th grade level. Adults may, with assistance, achieve self-supporting social and vocational skills.

Moderate - may progress to second-grade level academically. Adults may contribute to their own support by laboring in sheltered workshops.

Severe - may learn to talk and to perform simple work tasks under close supervision but are generally unable to profit from vocational training.

Profound - require constant aid and supervision.

Intelligence extremes - high end

People with relatively high IQs:

• Do not tend to be socially maladjusted

• No more likely to have emotional problems

Geniuses

• Sometimes defined as IQ > 140

• People with very high IQs may feel isolated because set of “peers” is very small

• If you have an IQ of 135 only 1 out of every 100 randomly selected people will be as smart or smarter than you

• More likely to have social, emotional problems