PSYC midterm case studies

Rosenthal and Jacobson: Pygmalion effect

• Context: Teachers at a California elementary school were told that randomly selected students were “intellectual bloomers”; at the end of the study, selected children showed statistically significant gains in IQ, normal children didn’t change

• Hypothesis: Teacher expectations can influence student achievement, particularly for younger children

• Critiques: not every grade showed effect, test not normed for that population

Schwartz and Ward: maximizing vs. satisficing

• Context:

  • maximizing is correlated with regret and happiness

  • maximizers are more likely to be affected by upward social comparison;

  • maximizers are more sensitive to regret, less satisfied by outcomes in bargaining games

• Finding: maximizers feel worse off as the options they face increase

• Notes:

  • Maximizers maximize in more domains than satisficers, but not every domain

  • Maximizing ≠ perfectionism

Hans Selye: stress

• Context: rats being injected with hormone extracts had enlarged adrenal glands, shrunken lymph nodes, and bleeding ulcers; rats injected with a neutral solution exhibited similar effects

• Finding: the stress of being handled and injected, rather than what was being injected, created psychological changes in the rats

Holmes and Rahe: social readjustment rating scale

• Context: list of 43 stressful life events that can contribute to illness eg. death of spouse, marriage, divorce, detention in jail, major injury or illness

• Finding: change causes stress

Gross and Levenson: effects of inhibiting negative and positive emotion

• Context: female participants told to watch sad, neutral or amusing films either suppressing their expressions or not

• Finding: suppressing emotion can lead to increased arousal compared to expressing emotion, which puts strain on the cardiovascular system

Langer and Rodin: perceived control

• Context: nursing home residents were given a plant and told it was their responsibility to take care of it

  • compared to the control floor, they had higher happiness and activity level

  • At 18 months, the mortality rate was reduced from the baseline 30% to 15%

• Finding: a sense of control staves off depression, improves health

Shelley Taylor: positive illusions

• Context: AIDS patients with a realistic acceptance of death died 9 months sooner than AIDS patients who held positive illusions about their ability to overcome the disease

• Finding: Healthy people possess positive illusions, which then become self-fulfilling to a degree

Schachter and Singer: epinephrine

• Context: subjects were injected with epinephrine or placebo, and told it was a drug to test their vision

  • Of those injected with epinephrine, some were informed of the side effects, while some remained unaware.

  • Subjects then sat in a room with a confederate modeling euphoric or angry behavior.

• Finding:

  • Surprisingly, subjects with the placebo drug showed some arousal.

  • Those informed about the epinephrine attributed their arousal to the shot, resulting in no emotion.

  • Those ignorant about the epinephrine expressed the most euphoria or anger

Lyubomirsky and Ross: social comparison

• Context: after finding out they performed better than someone, self-rated happy and unhappy individuals were both happy; after finding out they performed worse, happy people were unaffected, while unhappy people were devastated

• Finding: self-rated unhappy individuals are more sensitive to social comparison information than happy ones

Lyubomirsky and Ross: resolution of cognitive dissonance

• Context: People were told to rank 10 desserts and given their second choice, then told to re-rank the desserts.

  • Unhappy people elevated their dessert and derogated the desserts they rejected or were denied

  • Happy people did not derogate any

• Finding: Happy individuals maintain their initial preferences and are less affected by the cognitive dissonance.

Brickman: hedonic treadmill

• Context: lottery winners, a control group, and accident victims were asked to rate their happiness in the past, present and future on a scale of (0-5); every group reported the same level of happiness for the future

• Finding: people are used to adjusting to their baseline happiness level

Rosenhan: on being sane in insane places

• Context: Rosenhan and 7 other pseudopatients faked insanity and were sent to a psychiatric hospital

  • Had very few visitors

  • Experienced feelings of objectification and dehumanization

  • No staff could figure them out, while other patients did

• Finding: Hospitals impose a special environment where mental health professionals easily misunderstand the meanings of behavior; attitude influences judgment

• Critique:

  • One pseudopatient said he had a positive experience, but he didn’t make it into the writeup

  • Psychiatric hospitals aren’t supposed to tell who’s insane or not, that is legal jurisdiction; they are meant to treat people

Nolen-Hoeksema: rumination vs distraction

• Context: Depressed and nondepressed participants were told to ruminate or distract themselves for 8 minutes, then told to solve interpersonal problems

  • Depressed ruminators are poor problem solvers

  • Depressed distractors performed as good as nondepressed

• Finding: initially distract yourself before solving problems 

Hohmann: spinal cord

• Finding: among male individuals with paralysis, the higher the spinal cord injury, the less intense they felt emotion