PSY2012 Final Exam

Developmental psychology

 study of how behavior changes over the lifespan

• Nature: our genetics

• Nurture: environment

Gene-environment interaction

• The impact of genes on behavior depends on the environment in which the behavior develops

  • Bidirectional relationship of genes and environment

  • Example: Individuals with gene causing low production of monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) are more likely to become violent criminals

    • This genetic risk factor depends on exposure to environmental factors

    • Low MAO gene + maltreatment → violence

    • Low MAO gene without maltreatment → no effect

Nature via nurture:

genetic predispositions drive us to select and create particular environments that influence our behavior

• Leads to mistaken appearance of nature being the causal factor, but in reality, genetics are involved in the environment we select

• Ex. fearful children seek environments rid of their anxieties → makes it appear as though safe environments creates fearfulness, even though this is controlled by their genetic predispositions

Gene expression:

some genes “turn on” only in response to specific environmental triggers

• Epigenetics: whether genes are active is regulated by day-by-day and moment-by-moment environmental conditions

• Ex. children with genes that predispose them to anxiety may never become anxious unless a highly stressful life event occurs (ex. family death)

Misconception about early experiences

• External stimuli have a significant impact on brain development and behavior

• Mistake of overestimating the unique impact of experiences during infancy on long-term development

  • Children are highly resilient

    • Can withstand stress and trauma in surprisingly good shape

  • Later experiences play a large role in development, not just early experiences

    • Positive experiences can often counteract the negative effects of early deprivation in children from diverse cultures

    • Brain changes throughout childhood and adulthood

Systematic differences between generations…

• Systematic differences between generations can impact behavior

  • Ex. the spending habits of millennials vs. those raised during the Great Depression differ due to systematic differences in the environments they were raised in

Cross-sectional design

research design that examines people of different ages at a single point in time

Cohort effects

the risk of cross-sectional design is that it doesn’t control for cohort effects: effect observed in a sample of participants that results from individuals in the sample growing up during a certain time period

Longitudinal design

• research design that examines development in the same group of people on multiple occasions over time

  • The only way to control for cohort effects

  • Can be costly, time consuming, or nearly impossible to conduct

  • Attrition: participants drop out of study before it is completed

    • Problem in longitudinal design because participants who drop out may differ in important ways from the participants that stay in

  • Commonly observational designs instead of experimental → cannot infer cause and effect relationship

Post-hoc fallacy:

false assumption that because one event occurs before another event, it must have caused that event

• Ex. 100% of serial killers drank milk as children → doesn’t mean milk CAUSES murder

Bidirectional influences

Children’s experiences influence their development, and their development also influences what they experience

Prenatal period: (definition and 5 stages)

human body acquires basic form and structure

1. Zygote: fertilized egg

2. Blastocyst (conception to 1.5 weeks, germinal stage)

• Zygote divides to form blastocyst: ball of identical cells without specialized function

3. Embryo (2-8 weeks, embryonic stage)

• Cells differentiate

• Development of limbs, facial features, major organs (heart, lungs, brain)

• Spontaneous miscarriages occur when embryo doesn’t form properly

4. Fetus (9 weeks to birth, fetal stage)

• Major organs are established, heart begins to beat

• Physical maturation until birth (“bulking up”)

Brain Development: 18 Days and Beyond

• Brain begins to develop 18 days after fertilization

• Continues to develop well into adulthood and adolescence (until other organs which only grow in size after birth)

• Proliferation: prenatal stage from 18 days to 6 months when neurons develop at astronomical rate

  • Up to 250,000 brain cells per minute

• Migration: beginning in the 4th month, neurons migrate and move to their final positions in specific structures of the brain, such as the hippocampus and cerebellum

Obstacles to normal fetal development (4)

1. Premature birth (less than 36 weeks gestation)

2. Low birth weight (less than 5.5 lbs)

3. Exposure to hazardous environmental influences

4. Genetic disorders/errors in cell division

Premature birth

• Full term = 40 weeks

• Premature birth = born at less than 36 weeks gestation

• Viability point: point in pregnancy at which infants can typically survive on their own (25 weeks but varies)

• Preemies (premature birth babies) have underdeveloped lungs and brains, often cannot breath/maintain healthy body temperature → delays in cognitive and physical development

• With each week of pregnancy, odds of fetal survival increase and odds of development disorders decrease

  • Some preemies can “catch up” and do not suffer long-term consequences, especially if born after 32 weeks gestation and have healthy birth weight for their gestational age

Low birth weight

• Less than 5.5 pounds at full term

• Average is 7.5 pounds

• Linked to high risk of death, infection, developmental delays, psychological disorders such as depression and anxiety (may be confounding variables)

Teratogens

• environmental factors that can affect prenatal development negatively

  • Drugs, alcohol, chicken pox, X-rays

    • Fetal alcohol syndrome → learning disabilities, delays in physical growth, facial malformations, behavioral disorders

    • Smoking → low birth weight

  • Chronic stress, anxiety, and depression in gestational parent → alters fetus’s chemical and physiological environment

Infant reflexes

• Infants born with automatic motor reflexes that are triggered by survival needs

  • Sucking reflex: automatic response to oral stimulation

  • Rooting reflex: infants look for feeding source in response to stimulation of their face

Acquisition of purposeful motor behaviors

• Motor behaviors: bodily motions that occur as a result of self-initiated force that moves the bones and muscles

  • Major motor milestones

1. Sitting without support: 6 months

2. Crawling: 9 months

3. Standing: 11 months

4. Cruising: 12 months

5. Walking without assistance: 13 months

6. Running: 18-24 months

Factors that influence motor development

• Physical maturation/body weight → strength and coordination

  • Heavier babies take longer to develop enough strength to hold themselves up

• Cultural and parenting practices

  • Swaddling in Peru, China, Tajikistan → prevents free movement of limbs, slows down motor development

  • Stretching, massaging, and strength building exercises in Africa and West Indies → speeds up infants motor development

  • Cloth and disposable diapers in industrialized societies → slow down walking

Growth/physical development throughout childhood

• Head to body ratio decreases

• Hormonal changes

Hormonal changes

• Growth hormone (pituitary gland) → growth spurts

• Reproductive system releases sex hormones estrogen and androgen → growth and physical changes

  • Puberty: maturation of reproductive systems

    • Primary sex characteristics: reproductive organs and genitals

    • Secondary sex characteristics: sex-differentiating characteristics that don’t directly relate to reproduction

      • development of breast tissue, deeper voices in men, and pubic hair

    • Menarche: onset of menstruation, begins once girls have achieved full physical maturity (?)

    • Spermarche: first ejaculation, 13 years old

      • Boys take much longer to fully mature

      • Can ejaculate before they are physically mature

    • Genetic component of puberty onset

    • Noticeable difference in strength and endurance

Physical changes in adulthood

• Physical peak in early 20s

  • As we age…

    • Change in muscle mass/body fat ratio

    • Decline in senses

    • Decline in fertility (females) in 30s and 40s

• Menopause: end of menstruation, women can no longer reproduce

  • Triggered by reduction in estrogen → “hot flashes”

• Men can reproduce well into old age, but there is a decline in sperm production and testosterone levels

• Changes in agility and physical coordination with age

  • Simple motor tasks → no decline in ability

  • Learning new motor skills → decline in ability

  • Strength training minimizes the decline in motor capability

Cognitive development

study of how children acquire the ability to learn, think, reason, communicate, and remember

Core differences in different theories on cognitive development

1. Stage-like development vs. continuous development

• Mental growth spurts (sudden spurts in knowledge followed by periods of stability)

• Continuous (gradual and incremental) changes in understanding

2. Domain-general vs. domain-specific

• Domain-general: changes in cognitive skills that affect all areas of cognition together

• Domain-specific: children’s cognitive skills in different domains develop at different times

3. Main source of learning

• Physical experience: moving around in the world

• Social interaction: how parents and peers engage with them

• Biological maturation: innate programming of certain mental capacities

Jean Piaget’s theories showed that…

• Showed that children are not miniature adults → their understanding of the world differs fundamentally 

• Children are NOT passive learners, they are active learners who seek information and observe the consequences of their actions

Piaget’s 4 stages of development

1. Sensorimotor stage (birth to 2 years)

• Main source of knowledge and thinking is through physical interaction with the world

• Observing consequences of their actions

• Object permanence and separation anxiety

• No thought beyond immediate physical experiences

2. Preoperational stage (2 to 6 years)

• Able to think beyond the here and now, but egocentric and unable to perform mental transformations

• Symbols such as language and drawings

• Egocentric: the world revolves around their personal experiences

3. Concrete operational stage (7 to 12 years)

• Able to perform mental transformations but only on concrete physical objects

  • Ex. can sort coins by size → need a physical experience as an anchor for mental operations

• Can’t perform mental operations in abstract or hypothetical situations

4. Formal operational stage (12+ years)

• Can perform most sophisticated type of thinking: hypothetical reasoning beyond the here and now

• Can understand logical concepts and abstract questions

Equilibration:

Piaget proposed that cognitive change occurs in children to achieve equilibration: the balance between their experience of the world and their understanding of it

• Children match their thinking about the world around their observations

• Assimilation: absorbing new experience into our current understanding/schema, there is no change in cognition or worldview

• Accommodation: Beliefs/schemas are altered to become more compatible with new experiences

  • Stage changes are a result of accommodation → forces children to accept a new way of thinking about the world

Pros and cons of Piaget’s theory

• Evidence that development is more continuous than stagelike

• Development is less domain-general than Piaget proposed

• Depended on children’s ability to report their experiences, which doesn’t match their ACTUAL level of understanding 

• Culturally biased

3 important contributions of Piaget

1. Viewing children as entirely different from adults

2. Characterizing learning as an active rather than passive process

3. Exploring general cognitive processes that apply to many domains → more straightforward underlying factors in development

Vygotsky’s Theory: Social and Cultural Influences on Learning

• Social and cultural factors influence learning

• Scaffolding: parents provide initial assistance in children’s learning but gradually remove structure as children become more competent

  • “Taking training wheels off of the bicycle”

• Zone of proximal development: phase when children are receptive to learning a new skill but aren’t yet successful at it

  • At this stage, children benefit from instruction

• There are NO domain-general stages → different children acquire skills and master tasks at different rates

Cognitive Landmarks of Early Development

1. Physical reasoning

• Piaget’s object permanence: understanding that objects continue to exist when they’re out of view (developed around 5 months of age)

2. Conceptual categorizations

• Learning to categorize objects by kind

• Things that look different can take a conceptual relationship

3. Formulation of self-concept

• Developing a sense of self distinct from others

• Theory of mind: children’s ability to understand that others’ perspectives can differ from theirs

  • Ability to reason about what other people know or believe

Language acquisition

• Begins in the womb

• 5th month of pregnancy: fetuses can make out the gestational parent’s voice, recognize parts of their nature language and specific songs/stories

  • Shown through operant conditioning (high-amplitude sucking procedure) → showed that babies were more responsive to mother’s native language than foreign language

• 1st year of life

  • Phonemes: native language sounds

  • Babbling: intentional vocalization that lacks specific meaning

  • Learning words

    • Comprehension precedes production: children can recognize and interpret words well before they can produce words

    • Children begin to speak at around 1 year old

    • 1 year to 1.5 years: vocabulary between 20 and 100 words

    • Mistakes in children’s speaking

      • Over-extension: applying words in a broader sense

      • Under-extension: applying words in a narrower sense

    • One-word stage: children begin speaking with individual words to convey entire thoughts

    • By age 2, they progress to 2-word phrases → more and more words over time

    • Critical period for language learning: narrow window of time in development when organism must learn skill in order to be successful at it

      • Fluency in language is influenced by age of exposure 

      • Homesign: system of signs invented by children who are deaf with hearing parents → children develop language without parental input

Variability in language development

• Different children reach language milestones at different points → doesn’t necessarily correlate with language proficiency later on

• Parents talking to their kids more greatly improves vocabulary

  • Poorer parents tend to talk to their children less → language deficits

• Is language developed through imitation?

• This is partially true because babies learn the language they hear

• However, this doesn’t explain everything because language is generative

  • Generativity: language isn’t a set of predefined sentences, we produce new thoughts and ideas through unique combinations of words

Nativist account

• States that children come into the world with some basic knowledge of how language works

• Children are born with expectations of syntactic rules

• Language acquisition device: Noam Chomsky hypothesized that humans possess a language “organ” preprogrammed in the brain that houses syntactic rules

• Weakness of nativist account: claims are difficult to falsify

Challenges to these theoretical accounts

• Children are better than adults at acquiring language

• Specific areas of the brain are more active during language processing than in other contexts

Cognitive changes in adolescence

• Frontal lobe is not done maturing until late adolescence or early adulthood

  • Largely responsible for planning, decision making, and impulse control

  • Explains impulsive behaviors in teenagers

  • Teens have potential to engage in harmful behaviors (sex, vandalism, drunk driving) → make worse decisions because brain is not done developing

• Peer influence

  • Limbic structures of the brain involved in social rewards become more active → teens more susceptible to peer influence and risk-taking

Cognitive function in adulthood

• Many aspects of cognitive function decline with age

  • Ability to recall information decreases after age 30

  • Processing speed also declines, likely due to decrease in brain matter in certain areas

  • Aging brains become less efficient at removing waste proteins → cognitive decline

• Some aspects of cognitive function improve with age

  • Free recall declines, but cued recall and recognition remain intact

  • Aging adults show relatively little decline when asked to remember material pertinent to their everyday lives

    • In contrast, their ability to remember random lists of words declines

  • Older adults perform better on vocabulary and knowledge tests that younger adults because crystallized intelligence stays the same or increases with age

Infants prefer looking at _____ over __________

• Infants prefer looking at faces over other objects

• At 4 days of age, infants prefer looking at their gestational parent’s face over others

Stranger anxiety

•  develops around 8-9 months, infants will scream around strangers

  • Before this develops, infants are friendly with strangers

  • Stranger anxiety increases until 12-15 months, then declines steadily

Temperament

 individual differences in children’s social and emotional styles that appears early in development and is largely genetic

• Temperament is stable across infancy

• Influences how parents and caregivers interact w/ infants

• Cultural differences in newborns

3 major temperamental styles

1. Easy infants (40%): adaptable and relaxed

2. Difficult infants (10%): fussy and easily frustrated

3. Slow to warm up infants (15%): disturbed by new stimuli at first but gradually adjust

4. 35% of infants do not fall into any of these categories

   1. Behavioral inhibition (10%): another temperamental style identified by Jerome Kaga, infants become frightened due to new/unexpected stimuli → hearts pound, bodies tense, and amygdalae become active

      1. High behavioral inhibition increases risk for shyness and anxiety disorders later in life

      2. Very low behavioral inhibition increases risk for impulsive behaviors later in life

Attachment

strong emotional connection we share with those to whom we feel closest

• Evolutionary purpose: ensures that infants and children don’t stray too far from caretakers

Imprinting

• animals such as geese imprint on the first large moving object they see after hatching and become very fixated on it and are unlikely to follow or bond with anything else

  • Critical period: imprinting only occurs during a specific time period (36 hours)

  • Humans and more advanced mammals do not imprint, but still form attachment

Sensitive period

developmental windows in more complex creatures such as cats, dogs, and humans

Contact comfort

positive emotions afforded by touch

“The Strange Situation” lab procedure:

• measures how comfortable infant is alone in a room, how the infant responses when a stranger enters the room, how infant responds when mother leaves infant alone with stranger, infants behavior when mother returns

• Revealed 4 attachment styles: (percentages apply to U.S. infants)

• These attachment styles predict children’s later behavior 

  • Secure attachment style → tend to be more well-adjusted, helpful, and empathetic compared to infants with other attachment styles

  • Anxious attachment style → more likely to be disliked and mistreated by peers later in childhood

• Infants can have different attachment styles with different family members

  • Display strong preference for primary caregiver until 18 months old

4 attachment styles

1. Secure attachment (60%): infant explores room but makes sure caregiver is watching, returns to caregiver when stranger enters, becomes upset when caregiver leaves, and then is happy when caregiver returns

   1. Caregiver is secure base: rock-solid source of support

2. Insecure-avoidant attachment (15-20%): infant explores without acknowledging caregiver, doesn’t care about entry of stranger, doesn’t care when caregiver leaves or re-enters

3. Insecure-anxious attachment (15-20%): infant doesn’t explore toys without caregiver’s assistance, is distressed when stranger enters, panics when caregiver leaves, and shows mixed reaction when caregiver returns (reaches for caregiver but refuses to be picked up)

   1. Also called anxious-ambivalent attachment

4. Disorganized attachment (5-10%): inconsistent and confused set of responses

Parenting styles

1. Permissive: Lenient with children, little to no discipline, lots of affection

2. Authoritarian: strict with children, little freedom, use punishment, little outward affection

3. Authoritative: supportive and affectionate but set/enforce clear and firm rules

4. Uninvolved: ignore their children, pay little attention to their positive or negative behaviors

Impacts of parenting style

• Authoritative parenting style leads to children having the best social and emotional adjustment and lowest levels of behavior problems 

• Uninvolved parenting style leads to worst outcomes

• Authoritarian/Permissive parenting styles are in-between

• These findings may only apply to middle-class White American families

Average expectable environment

•  environment that provides children with basic needs for affection and discipline

  • As long as parents provide this, children will turn out fine

Self control

ability to inhibit our impulses

Identity

sense of who we are, life goals, and priorities

Erik Erikson’s 8 stages of Human development

• Believed that personality/identity growth is continuous

• Each of the stages has a distinct psychosocial crisis: dilemma concerning an individual’s relations to other people 

• Identity crisis: confusing that most adolescents experience regarding their sense of self

  • Difficulty resolving earlier crises heightens risk for later identity confusion and difficulty with intimacy/meaningful relationships

• and difficulty with intimacy/meaningful relationships

1. Infancy (trust vs. mistrust): developing general security, optimism, and trust in others

2. Toddlerhood (autonomy vs. shame/doubt): developing a sense of independence and confident self-reliance, taking setbacks in stride, or they doubt their abilities

3. Early childhood (initiative vs. guilt): developing initiative in exploring and manipulating the environment, or they feel guilty about efforts to be independent

4. Middle childhood (industry vs. inferiority): enjoyment and mastery of applying themselves to tasks, in and out of school, of they feel inferior

5. Adolescence (identity vs. role confusion): establishment of a stable and satisfying sense of role and direction, or they become confused about who they are

6. Young adulthood (intimacy vs. isolation): young adults struggle to form close relationships and to gain the capacity for intimate love, or they feel socially isolated

7. Adulthood (generativity vs. stagnation): satisfaction of familial needs and contributing to the world through work/helping others, or they feel a lack of purpose

8. Aging (ego integrity vs. despair): adjusting to the process of aging with satisfaction (or failure)

Emerging adulthood

period of life between the ages of 18 and 25 when many aspects of emotional development, identity, and personality become solidified

• Role experimentation: occurs during emerging adulthood, trying on different identities

Moral development

knowing right from wrong

• Moral development begins in childhood

  • Based on fear

    • Right → reward

    • Wrong → punishment (we learn not to do bad things to avoid punishment)

• Moral dilemmas: situations in which there are no clear right or wrong answers

• Piaget believed that children’s moral development is constrained by their cognitive development

  • Can understand intentions better as they progress through the stages of development

Kohlberg’s Moral Dilemmas and 3 stages of morality development

• Scored participants based on reasoning processes

• Concluded that morality develops in 3 major stages:

1. Preconventional morality: focus on punishment/reward

2. Conventional morality: focus on societal values

3. Postconventional morality: focus on internal moral principles

Emotions

mental states or feeling associated with out evaluation of our experiences

Discrete emotions theory

• humans have a small number of distinct emotions that are rooted in biology and combine in complex ways

1. Emotions have biological roots

2. Each emotion has an evolutionary function

• The cortex (thinking) evolved after the limbic system (emotion), therefore our emotional reaction comes before our thoughts

• Emotions are innate and essentially universal

Support for the evolutionary basis of emotions:

1. Emotional expressions don’t require direct reinforcement

• Infants smile when alone

• Blind infants have facial expressions

2. Behavioral immune system: set of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral mechanisms that alert us to threat of disease and motivate us to take steps to avoid infection

• Certain emotions are evolutionarily adaptive

  • Ex. disgust: we wrinkle our nose, close eyes slightly, etc. to prevent disgusting stimuli with harmful bacteria from entering our bodies

• Emotions prepare us for biologically important actions → physiological changes

  • Ex. clenching teeth and fists when angry → ready to fight

  • Ex. opening eyes wide when scared → looking for predators

3. Similarities between humans and nonhuman animals

• Most mammals have similarities in communication → may have the same evolutionary origins

4. Cultural universality of emotional expressions

• Similarities between expressions across cultures

• Ekman and Friesan study: isolated New Guinea tribe could recognize emotions on Americans

• Primary emotions: small number (7?) of emotions that are supposedly cross-cultural (happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, disgust, fear, contempt)

  • Can be combined to form secondary emotions

Cultural differences in emotional expression

• People from different cultures don’t always agree on emotional expressions

  • But on average, there is still some universality of emotions

• Cultures differ in display rules: social guidelines or norms for how and when to express emotions

  • Friesen’s study on Japanese and American students’ reactions to gory film showed that Japanese participants changed their reaction to become more positive/neutral in the presence of authority figure, while Americans did not change their reactions

Cognitive theories of emotion

emotions are a product of our thinking

• Disagrees with discrete emotion theory that claims that emotions are largely innate motor programs triggered by certain stimuli

• Thinking → emotions

• The way we interpret a situation influences what we feel in response

• No discrete emotions because boundaries across emotions are blurry

  • Emotions are as diverse as our thoughts

4 cognitive theories of emotion

1. James-Lange theory: emotions result from our interpretations of our bodily reactions to stimuli

• Observations of our physiological state determine emotion

  • Ex. our body reacts to stimulus of a bear with sweating, feet running, heart pounding → fear

2. Somatic marker theory (Damasio): unconsciously and instantaneously use our autonomic responses to determine course of action

• Physiological markers (ex. palms sweating) help us make decisions

3. Cannon-Bard theory: our bodily reactions and emotional responses occur simultaneously in response to stimulus

• Ex. when we see bear hiking in forest, we feel fear and start running at the same time

• Proposes that the thalamus triggers emotion and bodily reactions

• Later researchers determined that thalamus AND hypothalamus and amygdala contribute to emotions

4. Two-factor theory: emotions are produced by 2 psychological events

1. In response to stimuli, we experience undifferentiated physiological arousal (alertness)

   1. Undifferentiated means that this arousal is the same across all emotions

2. Seek to explain source of autonomic arousal by labeling it with an emotion

   1. Emotions are the explanations we attach to state of arousal

• Two-factor theory is supported by the Schachter and Singer experiment

  • Emotion requires physiological arousal AND attribution of that arousal to emotion-inducing event (in this case, it was the emotion of the confederate/undercover research assistant)

• However, emotions don’t always require arousal

Unconscious influences on emotion:

variables outside our awareness that can affect our feelings

Mere exposure effect

•  phenomenon in which repeated exposure to a stimulus enhances favorability

  • Evidence

    • Exposure to meaningless syllables/stimuli causes greater liking toward those stimuli

    • Subliminal exposure: exposure below the threshold of awareness causes greater liking

Facial feedback hypothesis

facial blood vessels send feedback to the brain that alters our experience of emotions

Much of our emotional expression is ________

nonverbal communication

Nonverbal leakage:

unconscious spillover of emotions into nonverbal behavior

• Acts as a powerful cue when trying to conceal behavior

Types of gestures

1. Illustrators: highlight or accentuate speech

• Ex. moving our hands while talking

2. Manipulators: one part of the body strokes/presses/bites/touches another body part

• Occurs when we are stressed (ex. nail biting)

3. Emblems: convey conventional meanings recognized by members of a culture

• Ex. thumbs up in America means good

Proxemics

study of personal space

Edward Hall’s 4 levels of personal space

1. Public distance (12 feet or more): typically used for public speaking, such as lecturing

2. Social distance (4-12 ft): typically use for conversations among strangers and casual acquaintances

3. Personal distance (1.5-4 ft): typically used for conversations among close friends or romantic partners

4. Intimate distance (0-1.5 ft): typically used or kissing, hugging, whispering “sweet nothings,” and affectionate touching

• These rules may differ by culture

• When these implicit rules are violated, we feel uncomfortable

Lying and Lie Detection

• Common misconception that nonverbal cues give away dishonesty (ex. shifty eyes, nervous body language)

  • This is not true!

• Over-reliance on nonverbal cues leads to poor lie detection accuracy

• Best way to figure out if someone is lying is to listen to what they’re saying rather than how they say it

  • Interviews that ask unexpected questions and look for lack of plausibility, inconsistency, sparse and uncheckable details

• We are only 55% accurate at detecting lies on average (including police officers, customs officials, psychiatrists, and polygraph administrators)

Purpose of happiness

• Happiness may serve evolutionary adaptive functions

• “Broaden and build theory” by Frederickson’s: happiness predisposes us to think more openly, allowing us to see a big picture we may have overlooked

  • We find novel solutions to problems, see more of the world, seek out more opportunities → better social lives

• People with positive attitudes live longer

What Makes Us Happy: Myths and Reality

• Life events don’t determine happiness

  • Positive life events were not correlated with higher overall happiness

• Does money cause happiness?

  • Below annual salary of $75,000, there is a modest association between wealth and happiness

  • Above $75,000 a year, additional money doesn’t make us much happier

  • Killingsworth study found that number to be a bit higher 

    • Larger incomes give people more control over their lives, greater opportunities for spending money to increase enjoyment and reduce suffering, and greater financial security

    • There is some amount at which happiness probably levels out

• Old age?

  • Yes, happiness tends to increase with age

  • Positivity effect: tendency for individuals to remember more positive than negative information with age

  • Diminished activity of amygdala (which processes negative emotions) → older people are less affected by unpleasant information

• Geographic location? 

  • No, living in a beautiful geographic location does not increase happiness

Factors correlated w/ happiness/unhappiness

• Factors correlated with happiness: strong social relationships, satisfying marriages, fewer health problems, less smoking, less physical pain and stress, more exercise

• Factors correlated with unhappiness: lack of income, social support, and health

• College increases happiness

  • Higher income, more meaningful work, better health outcomes, more stable marriages

• Religion increases happiness

  • Feel connected to a larger community and higher power

• Gratitude

  • Writing down/expressing gratitude increases happiness

• Experiences

  • Life experiences tend to make us happier than material possessions

• Flow state

  • Being in flow state makes us happy (completely immersed in what we’re doing)

Forecasting happiness, affective forecasting, durability bias, hedonic treadmill

• We are very bad at affective forecasting: predicting our own and others’ happiness

  • Durability bias: we overestimate the long-term impacts of events on our moods, expecting that good and bad moods will last longer than they actually do

    • Ex. winning the lottery doesn’t actually increase long-term happiness as much as we think

    • Ex. paraplegic’s return to baseline happiness after a few months

  • This return to baseline is due to the hedonic treadmill: the tendency for our moods to adapt to external circumstances

    • Our levels of happiness adjust quickly to our ongoing life situations

    • Hedonic treadmill hypothesis proposes that we begin life with happiness “set point” 

      • Set point is mostly stable, but can shift over time

        • Downward shift: divorce, widowed, laid off of work

        • Upward shift: engaging intentionally in rewarding activities consistent with our goals and values

Myths and Realities About Self Esteem

• Self-esteem: evaluation of our worth

• Self-esteem is positively correlated with happiness, taking initiative, and bouncing back from failure

  • NOT correlated with academic success, good social skills, better relationships, or abstaining from alcohol/drug abuse

• Single-variable explanation: self esteem is the single cause for happiness, without self esteem, people are aggressive/depressed

  • NOT TRUE! There is no evidence that self-esteem is the root of all unhappiness

Self esteem is related to…. which may lead to ….

• High self esteem is related to positive illusions: tendencies to perceive ourselves more favorably than others do 

  • Can lead to healthy self confidence → allows them to take healthy risks in interpersonal situations, such as asking someone out or applying for a job

  • Excessive positive biases may lead to narcissism: extreme self-centeredness 

    • Types of narcissism

1. Grandiose narcissism: flamboyant, charming, domineering, brag about their accomplishments

2. Vulnerable narcissism: introverted, preoccupied with themselves, oversensitive to perceived minor slights, always playing the victim

Positive psychology

 emerging discipline in the 21st century that emphasizes human strengths such as coping, life satisfaction, love, kindness, and happiness 

• Intervention such as expressing gratitude about others regularly and writing about positive experiences tends to enhance moods, combat depression, and improve well-being

Defensive pessimism

anticipating failures → over preparing for negative outcomes

• Encourages people to work harder + improves performance

• Can decrease life satisfaction and irritate others

Motivation:

psychological drives (wants and needs) that propel us in specific directions

Theories of motivation

1. Drive reduction theory

   • Yerkes Dodson curve

2. Incentive theories

Drive reduction theory

1. Drive reduction theory: certain drives, like hunger, thirst, and sexual frustration, motivate us to act in ways that minimize aversive states

• Drives are unpleasant → satisfying drives minimizes negative feelings and creates pleasure

• Strength of drives serves evolutionary function (survival and reproduction)

  • Ex. thirst drive is stronger than hunger because it is more essential to life

• Goals of drives: maintaining homeostasis

• Strength of drives and task performance are affected by physiological arousal

• Yerkes-Dodson Law: inverted U-shaped relation between physiological arousal and mood and performance

• There is an optimal “peak” of arousal for best performance

• Below optimal point: low motivation, don’t perform well

• Above optimal point: we are too anxious/stimulated, don’t perform well

• Yerkes-Dodson Law popular among sport psychologists → correct arousal is important for peak performance

• Underarousal can heighten our curiosity (ex. sensory deprivation)

Conflicting drives

• Approach: predisposition towards certain stimuli (ex. food)

• Avoidance: disposition away from certain stimuli (ex. scary things)

• Avoidance gradient is steeper than approach gradient → avoidance gets higher and higher compared to approach as goals become closer

Incentive theories

• Explains why we engage in behaviors even after our drives are satisfied

• Intrinsic motivation: motivated by internal goals, such as liking the activity

• Extrinsic motivation: motivated by external goals (rewards)

  • Contrast effect: certain rewards may undermine intrinsic motivation → makes us feel like we are controlled/forced to engage in the behavior → intrinsic motivation decreases once reward is removed

Types of needs

• Primary needs: biological necessities like hunger and thirst

  • Secondary needs: psychological desires

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

• We must satisfy our primary needs before we can progress to more complex secondary needs

  • Bottom of the triangle: needs produced by drives

  • Top of the triangle: needs produced by incentives

• Maslow’s Hierarchy is not based on biological reality → omits important evolutionary needs like sexual and parenting drives

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Hunger: definition, ghrelin, CCK, glucostatic theory

• complex interplay between brain and digestive organs

  • Full stomach activates neurons in hypothalamus → fullness

  • Hormones produced by stomach

    • Ghrelin: hormone that makes us hungry by communicating with the hypothalamus

    • CCK (Cholecystokinin) counteracts effects of ghrelin, decreases hunger

  • Glucostatic theory: when blood glucose drops, hunger creates a drive to restore the proper level of glucose → homeostasis

____% of American adults are obese

41.9

Biological contributors to obesity

• Leptin: hormone that increases due to more stored energy in fat cells → signals hypothalamus to reduce appetite and increase energy expenditure

  • Leptin resistance contributes to obesity → appetite doesn’t decrease despite increased fat/energy stores

• Sensitivity to serotonin: sight/taste/smell of food can release neurotransmitters that activate pleasure in the brain

  • Some people find these stimuli especially rewarding → contributes to obesity

• Biological set point: value that established a range of body fat and muscle mass we tend to maintain

  • Obese people may have a higher set point: born with more fat cells, lower metabolic rate, leptin resistance → makes it hard to lose weight

• Melanocortin-4 receptor gene: in 6% of obesity cases, mutation in melanocortin-4 gene makes it impossible for people to feel full

Psychological contributors to obesity

• Negative emotions: overeating can also provide comfort to distract from negative emotions

• Portion distortion: American portions are much larger than portions in other countries

  • Portions at restaurants have drastically increased over time

• Internal-external theory: people with obesity are motivated to eat more by external cues like portion size, taste, smell, and appearance of food rather than internal cues like a growling stomach

Bariatric surgery

 surgeries that assist with weight loss

• Gastric bypass surgery: decreases size of stomach (food bypasses the rest of the stomach) → activates hormones that suppress hunger because stomach becomes full on much less food

Bulimia nervosa

• Bulimia nervosa: characterized by pattern of bingeing and purging

  • Bingeing: eating large amounts of highly caloric foods in brief periods of time

    • Binge eating disorder: bingeing with no purging

  • Purging: vomiting or other means of drastic weight loss, like frantic exercising or taking laxatives

    • Purging disorder: people purge on recurrent basis but do not binge

  • Binge-purge pattern

  • Eating disorders influenced by genetics and sociocultural expectations about body image

Anorexia nervosa:

• eating disorder characterized by excessive weight loss achieved by caloric restriction and irrational perception that one is overweight

  • Sometimes fueled by sociocultural influences

  • “Fear of fatness,” distorted body perception

  • May lose upwards of 25%-50% of body weight

  • Very high mortality rate (5-10%) → one of the most threatening psychological conditions

Libido

• Libido = sexual desire, wish/craving for sexual activity and sexual pleasure

  • Rooted in genes, biology, and sociocultural factors

____ have higher sex drive than ____ on average

Biological and cultural influences on sex drive

Variability in sex drive

• Males have higher sex drive than women on average

• Biological and cultural influences on sex drive

  • Testosterone increases sexual interest

  • High levels of serotonin decrease sexual interest

  • DRD4 gene: protein related to dopamine transmission is correlated with sexual desire and promiscuity

  • Cultural norms

• Sex drive and sexual orientation are a continuum

  • Women have greater variability in sex drive

  • Women w/ high sex drive more likely to be bisexual

Genetic contribution to sexuality

Homosexuality in men associated with thicker corpus callosum

3 environmental contributions to sexuality

• Fetal exposure to testosterone

  • Girls exposed to excess testosterone in womb → more likely to be lesbian

  • Boys exposed to too little testosterone → more likely to be gay

• Maternal immune response/fraternal birth order

  • Having older brothers increases odds of male homosexuality by 33% for each older brother because male fetuses trigger mother’s immune system to develop anti-male antibodies that affect sexual differentiation of fetus

  • Have older sisters and being an only child also increase odds of homosexuality → due to different types of maternal immune responses

• Cultural acknowledgement and acceptance

  • Leads to higher rates of homosexuality and openness

4 Social influences on interpersonal attraction

1. Proximity

2. Similarity

3. Reciprocity

4. Physical attraction