ubc psyc 102 odic

Four tactics for measuring behaviour in children

1. Universal Behaviours: rely on behaviours that everyone has access to (e.g. sucking reflex).

2. Looking Preferences: rely on the early maturity of the visual system.

3. Searching and Foraging: once children learn to crawl or walk, rely on their natural tendency towards wanting to explore their environments.

4. Embedding Into Games: create psychological tasks that resemble games and toys to have children be more likely to engage with them.

nativism/innate

children are born with specific abilities or will naturallygain them with maturity (e.g., puberty, perceiving colours).

Empiricism/learned

children must learn certain skills with experience andpractice and would never gain them without such exposure (e.g., reading).

Stage-Theories

children develop through a series of universal "stages"; different abilities come from different stages.

Continuous-Theories

development is fluid and continuous and any ability can emerge at any time depending on the child's own experiences and/or genetics.

Cross-Sectional Design

a methodological design where we recruit participants of different ages/cohorts and measure their performance then simultaneously to compare it.

Pro: quick and (relatively) easy to do.

Con: Cohort Effects: a unique type of third-variable problem in cross-sectional research; differences between the younger and older participants could be attributed to changes in socialization, life events, nutrition, or experience rather than to age itself.

Longitudinal Design

a methodological design where we recruit one group of participants and then sequentially re-test them as they get older, comparing their performance to their past selves.

Pro: removes cohort effects, as the same group of people are tracked over time.

Con: extremely time intensive (we have to wait for people to get older), very expensive, very high "attrition rates" (people dropping out of the study before it is officially done).Developmental psychologists want most studies to be longitudinal, but in reality most are cross-sectional.

Newborns Imitate Facial Expressions

within days of birth, newborn babies can imitate the facial expression they see.

Newborn Language Preferences

within hours of birth, babies who hear the language of their parents begin sucking a pacifier harder.

Looking Preference

a baby can choose to look at one of two things, and a preference for one display over another is measured.

Face Preference Study

when newborns are shown two paddles, one that that has three dots arranged so that they resemble a face, they look longer to the paddle that is "face-like", suggesting an innate preference for faces.

Habituation

a measure of a child's ability to detect differences between several stimuli (e.g., human versus primate faces).

An infant is shown the same stimulus over and over and over again, while we measure for how long they look at it. The infant will eventually be bored ("habituated") and stop looking at that stimulus. At this point, we show the infant a new stimulus that is either very different or only a little bit different from the old one. If the infant can tell the difference, they will recognize it as something new and look again with high interest (they "dishabituate"). If they cannot, they continue being bored and not looking at the new stimulus.

Number Study

6-month-old infants are shown a display of 6 dots over and ove ragain until they are bored. They will then dishabituate when shown 12 dots (but not6 dots) suggesting they have a basic sense of number.

Toddlers remember up to three objects

objects are are hidden inside a box, and the toddler is allowed to search the box; by measuring how long they search for we can understand how many objects they think are hidden inside the box.

Children's memory gets more precise with age

if you hide objects in a sandbox, the place children search first gets more and more precise with age (i.e., they make smaller and smaller mistakes).

The age we can create toys and games that are actually psychology measurements in disguise

3 years old

Prenatal Development

development that occurs in the ~40 weeks from conception to birth (i.e., while the baby in in the womb). While we will talk about "stages", prenatal development is continuous and fluid.

Teratogens

chemical agents that impair or alter prenatal development (e.g. tobacco; alcohol, usually by changing the expression of various genes).

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS)

a disorder caused by exposure to ethanol alcohol during the prenatal period. Common symptoms include: low body weight, distinctive facial features, and brain damage. The exact effects of alcohol are different during different developmental stages and depending on the amount exposed to. The worst outcomes emerge if alcohol is introduced in the embryotic stage when organs are differentiating.

Downs Syndrome (DS)

a neurodevelopmental disorder caused by a third copy of chromosome 21, and is one of the most common types of chromosome abnormalities (affecting around 1 in 750 births).Symptoms include physical changes and delays, and moderate intellectual disability. The average adult with DS has an IQ of 50, roughly equivalent to a 10 year-old. DS is an example of a domain-general disorder: almost every facet of development, from language, attention, memory, etc., are all affected.

Williams Syndrome (WS)

a rare neurodevelopmental disorder caused by deletion of about 26 genes on chromosome 7. Rare (occurs in about 1 in15,000 births). Symptoms include changes in facial appearance (nasal bridge, wide mouth), coupled with profound problems in IQ and visuospatial abilities (e.g., navigation, spatial rotation) But, most other abilities - especially language and social abilities - are typically developing, and even sometimes above-average. WS is, unlike DS, a domain-specific disorder: while spatial abilities are profoundly affected, language and social skills are completely spared.

Perceptual Development

the development of children's ability to see, hear, touch, taste, etc. The most important research focus is going to be on how they perceive objects, faces, and early language signals.

Motor Development

the development of children's bodies and their motor control, especially crawling and walking. motor development helps perceptual development, which in turn helps motor development.

Perceptual Narrowing

the gradual fine-tuning of perceptual abilities through experience and exposure to the world.

When young, babies can notice things in the environment that even some adults cannot. With experience, they learn what can be ignored, and become adult-like in paying attention only to relevant things. This process occurs for speech, memory, face perception, and more.

Own-Species Effect

young babies (<6 months) are equally capable of distinguishing human and non-human faces apart, while older infants (>9 months) can only differentiate human faces.

Own-Race Effect

young babies (<6 months) are equally capable of distinguishing faces of humans of all ethnicities, while older infants (>9 months) lose sensitivity for ethnicities they do not encounter in daily life.

Babies prefer listening to speech over other sounds:

Prefer real human speech compared to sounds that are equally complicated.

Prefer the language they heard in the womb.

Prefer their mother's voice to the voice of other women.

Infant-Directed Speech (IDS)

the slower, highly inflected and wide-pitch pattern of speech typical when people speak to infants ("baby talk").Babies might prefer IDS because it is easier to parse the sounds and word boundaries.

Sensitive Periods

the specific period of development during which exposure to particular experiences has the biggest effect on subsequent development.

Imprinting

a behaviour of some birds in which they will follow the first moving stimulus they see 13-16 hours after hatching.

Reflexes

very specific and unlearned motor actions triggered involuntarily by specific stimuli; usually for self-preservation. Rooting reflex: touching a cheek gets the baby to turn their heads towards the touch.

Sucking reflex: automatic sucking when mouth is touched.

Stepping reflex: alternating leg movements when foot touches ground.

Cephalocaudal rule

growth and motor control emerge from head to feet. Babies first learn to control their head, then torso, then tops of arms and legs.

Proximodistal rule

growth and motor control emerge from the center to the periphery. Babies last learn to control their hands and feet.

Posture-Specific Learning

rather than transferring knowledge their motor abilities from one stage to another, babies need to re-learn what is safe and what is dangerous every time they learn a new form of locomotion.

Kitty Carousel Experiment

two kittens were raised experiencing nothing but the same striped enclosure. During training, one kitten could walk around, while the other was passively carried.• The "active kitten" later showed visual normal responses like blinking to an approaching object and visually tracking something moving.• The "passive kitten" could not do these things.• This suggests that voluntary motion is necessary for development of perceptual abilities.

Abstract thinking

to represent, mentally manipulate, and communicate about things that are not in our perception (e.g., mathematics, science, the concept of justice, etc.)

Sensorimotor Stage

the first stage, marked by the absence of abstract thought. All infants [0 - 12 month-olds] and most toddlers [12 - 36 month-olds] are in this stage. For the child in this stage, the only things in their minds are what they can perceive right here, right now, including their own bodies. Knowledge is conceptualized and gained through immediate perceptual and motor experiences only. Out of sight is out of mind.

Object Permanence

the knowledge that is something can't be seen it continues to exist.

Schema

an organized, stable bit of abstract knowledge about how the world works (e.g., that objects fall down when they are unsupported them).

Assimilation

integrating new information into an existing schema (e.g., realizing that your pet Fido is a member of the schema "dogs").

Accommodation

hanging or making new schemas once new information is discovered (e.g., realizing that cats are not dogs).

Pre-Operational Stage

the second stage during which children understand the permanence and abstraction of objects and events, but still struggle to think about minds of others, or to logically manipulate objects in their mind. Some toddlers and all preschoolers [3 - 6 year-olds] are pre-operational. Children in this stage lack a theory of mind. Children remain "fixated" by their perception, easily believing things they see even if they are logically false.

Conservation

logically reasoning that quantities don't change from simple transformations.

Volume Conservation Task: children are shown two glasses with the same amount of water. The water from one cup is then poured into a wider cup; children say that the two glasses don't have the same anymore.

Number Conservation Task: two rows of five coins are aligned and children say that the two rows have the same number; one of the rows is stretched, and the kids now say that the longer row has more.

Concrete Operational Stage

the third Piagetian stage during which children become capable of doing basic logical thinking (e.g., "reversibility" of perception) but still cannot imagine the world to be different than it is. All school-aged children [6 - 12 year-olds are concrete operational.

Counterfactual Rule Task

a child is told a counter-intuitive rule and asked to predict - if the rule is true - what will happen. Concrete operational children focus on the reality of the situation, not on what would logically happen if the rule was true.

Formal Operational Stage

the final Piagetian Stage during which children become fully capable of logical and abstract thinking and are no longer dominated by their own perceptions or intuitions about the world. This finally gives them the ability to conceptualize of hypothesis testing, deductive reasoning, and planning of what to do and how to achieve it. All adolescent [post-puberty until 19] and adults are formal operational.

Modern research shows that children do not go through ordered stages

Domain-Specificity: children develop some very abstract abilities early (e.g. language skills) but other ones very slowly (e.g., spatial navigation) despite a comparable level of abstraction required.

Cross-Cultural effects: children's development varies widely across cultures; in cultures where children are taught to hunt from an early age, their spatial navigation develops substantially faster than in cultures where they do not.

EARLY ABSTRACTION

Physics of objects: if a baby is shown an object that is impossibly balanced, they will be surprised and stare at the object longer.

Morality: babies as young as six months understand the concept of "nice" vs. "bad" guy and gravitate towards nice ones.

Number: newborns have been shown to be able to represent and think about numbers approximately, as well as roughly add, subtract, and even multiply.

Language

a system of thinking and communicating that combines arbitrary symbols (e.g., words or gestures) in a rule-based way to generate meaning:

Language is for communicating (external) but also for thinking (internal).

The symbols that language uses are arbitrary (i.e., there is nothing particularly dog-like about the word "dog").

The symbols can be verbal, written, gestural, etc. Sign language is as much a language as spoken language is.

Phonemes

the basic building blocks (e.g., sounds) out of which words are constructed.

Syntax

the grammatical rules that we follow to construct meaning out of words.

Morphology

some languages, like English, mark for tense or number by adding "morphemes" at the ends of words (e.g., table/tables, clean/cleaned/cleaning). Other languages mark for these properties by introducing entirely new words(e.g., in Malay, you pluralize by repeating the word).

Semantics

the meanings that we derive from words and complete sentences.

Languages can all express the same meanings at the sentence-level. But languages vary at which meanings they carry as words:

Spatial terms: languages like Korean differentiate between spatial terms that refer to things fitting tightly together.

Color words: while some languages have hundreds of words for different colours, some languages only have 2 or 4 (roughly mapping to cool vs. warm colour).

Pragmatics

the "extra-linguistic" inferences we make from the manner in which we say sentences, or from information that we choose to include or exclude.

Language Acquisition

the developmental process through which a child learns their first language, and masters all four levels from phonemes to pragmatics.

Production/Comprehension Asymmetry

children begin understanding/comprehending the language they are learning earlier than they start producing their own sentences. Language acquisition is usually about when children begin understanding, not when they begin speaking.

Statistical Learning

a learning mechanism that identifies which things tend to co-occur/follow each other very often, and which do not. Things that co-occur together frequently are assumed to be meaningful.

Babies are powerful statistical learners: they listen to fluid speech and detect which phonemes are occurring together again and again, and infer that common co-occurrences are word boundaries.

Overgeneralization

a common developmental phenomena whereby children temporarily apply a syntactic rule to words that they shouldn't:

When learning past tense, many children will say "I eated him" or "I goed to the store"; when learning plurals, children will say words that they have never heard from adults or those around them (e.g., "mouses" instead of "mice").This shows that children are learning syntactic rules and not just imitating what they have heard around them

Fast Mapping

young children map a word to a meaning after only a single exposure.

Mutual Exclusivity

children assume that every object has only a single word, and therefore assume that a word they have never heard before goes with something they don't know what to call.

Cons of bilingualism

Delayed production: most bilingual children begin uttering their first words 2 - 4 months later than monolinguals.

Slower acquisition of syntax: most bilingual children go through a period where their syntactic understanding of L1 and L2 is lower than monolinguals, leading to frequent situations where their utterances are blends of the two languages.

Reduced mutual exclusivity: bilinguals can't use mutual exclusivity as reliably because every object in the world does have multiple labels, slowing down their semantic word acquisition, as well.

pros of bilingualism

Dual Language Mastery: once they are about 4 - 6 years-old, bilinguals have fully caught up to monolinguals in syntax and semantics, and are now fully proficient in both languages.

Inhibitory control: inhibitory control, delay of gratification, and other cognitive control functions are slightly better in bilinguals compared to monolinguals.

Benefits for aging: bilingual brains show significantly reduced effects of aging, including in preserving long-term memory and inhibitory control for longer periods of time; these benefits extend to both linguistic and non-linguistic tasks.

Attachment

the earliest emotional and social bond that forms between newborn infants and their primary caregivers; this includes expectations of physical and emotional care.

Attachment is a strong predictor of social development more generally, even after childhood.

Children develop separate attachment relationships with different caregivers in their life.

Wire Mother Experiments

aby monkeys were raised choose between one of two "mothers": The "wire mother" gave food but no warmth or comfort(physical care)The "cloth mother" gave warmth and comfort but no food (emotional care)Baby monkeys strongly prefer the cloth mother and only went to the wire mother to feed. Monkeys raised in isolation from other monkeys and with only the wire monkey showed disturbed social behaviours.

Romanian Orphanages

very overfilled--> children got no contact from workers--> formed no attachments; no stimuli in environment--> nothing engaging to do--> kids grew up having smaller brain and social-emotional issues (high anxiety rates)

Strange Situations

a behavioural test that examines how each child is attached to a specific caregiver. A child and their caregiver come into the lab and the child spends some time playing with an experimenter with the caregiver present. The caregiver then leaves the room for a few minutes, and the child's reaction is observed. The caregiver then returns and the child's reaction is again examined.

Children fall into one of four categories

Secure Attachment: children notice the caregiver leaving and may show some distress; when the caregiver comes back they notice this and are calmed down by the presence, exhibiting positive emotions.

Avoidant Attachment: children appear minimally upset when the caregiver leaves and when the parent returns they do not acknowledge them (i.e., they are simply avoiding the caregiver in every situation); but they are stressed.

Ambivalent/Resistant/Anxious Attachment: children are clingy and very upset when the caregiver leaves but are still inconsolable or even angry when the caregiver returns.

Disorganized Attachment: children or their caregivers show no clear patterns, or show fear or anger towards each other.

Temperament

characteristic patterns of emotional reactivity, including tendencies towards irritability, fearfulness, loud noises, new people, etc. Strong genetic component. Children that are more temperamental are less secure.

Parenting style

characteristic patterns of parenting, including degree of attention to child, amount of help, etc. Secure infants tend to have parents that are empathic and reactive. Abuse, trauma, and parental conflict are more likely to lead to disorganized attachment.

False Belief/Sally-Anne Task

children are told a story about Sally who hides a toy in a basket and leaves the room; Anne comes in and moves the toy from the basket to a box. When Sally returns, where will she look for the toy? Children younger than ~4.5 years "fail" this task, and believe Sally will look where Anne moved it. Children older than ~5 "pass" and reason, like adults, that Sally will look to where she last placed it.

Moral Reasoning

the thinking and justification process by which we decide whether something was a moral or immoral behaviour. Most classic work in development focuses on how children learn this process.

Moral reasoning is rarely about actions or outcomes, but about intentions and motivations behind them. For example: If somebody helps to become famous, we don't think it's very moral. If you steal something to save a starving child, we may think it is moral

Kohlberg Morality Stages

Preconventional Stage (Consequences): reasoning is focused on material consequences, such as avoiding punishment or maximizing pleasure.

Conventional Stage (Rules): reasoning is focused on conformity to societal values and norms and other people's opinions.

Postconventional Stage (Principles): reasoning is focused on abstract principles, derived independently from society, other people, or specific time and place. Focus is on mutual benefit, balance between individual and group liberty, and democracy.

The Heinz Dilemma

A woman is dying and needs an expensive medication. Husband cannot afford the medication, should he steal it or should she die?

Problems with Kohlberg's Theory

Only relevant for Western male participants: theory is based entirely on Western male viewpoints of morality and with only Western male participants; the fit of the stages to different cultures is poor.

Inconsistency: the very same person can reason about different dilemmas using different principles, invalidating the idea of stages.

Reasoning is NOT necessarily morality: people can consistently act in ways thatare moral (or immoral) without being able to justify it verbally; what do we makeof their sense of morality?

Modern work on morality development

Focused on actions rather than justifications: we find that children are highly pro-social from early life, and will spontaneously help members of their in-group.

Moral emotions: focus is on children's experience of shame, guilt, and empathy, which all emerge very early in development.

Morality in Infancy: by using measures of overt behaviour and looking, we can examine what infants believe to be good vs. bad behaviour.

Helper/Hinderer Infant Experiment

infants see one agent who helps and one who hinders a third party; they then get to choose which one they want to play with or look at.

By 6 months, infants show a strong preference for the helper puppet .The task generalizes to other domains of helping, like opening boxes or finding hidden objects.

Mental Health Stigma

a culturally-specific negative belief and attitude towards those who are seen as suffering from a mental health problem.

Mental Disorder

a condition characterized by:

a) Cognitive/emotional distress.

b) Significant impairment in daily function.

c) Underlying psychobiological dysfunction and not only environmental factors.

d) That is not primarily the result of social deviance or societal conflict.

e) Is usually long-term (i.e., weeks to months to years).

Medical Model of Disorders

all psychological disorders are due to physical/biological causes, have clear and identifiable symptoms, and can be cured like any other disease.

Rosenhan's Pseudopatient Study

Researchers admitted themselves to a mental institution and falsely reported symptoms of schizophrenia. After they are diagnosed, they acted normally and reported feeling fine.

Despite this, they were forced to stay in the hospital for between 7 and 52 days. Upon release, they were diagnosed with "paranoid schizophrenia in remission".

Therefore: diagnosing and labelling somebody with a disorder changes how we perceive them and their symptoms in the future, often to their harm.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 5th Edition Text Revision (DSM-5-TR)

a classification system for diagnosing recognized 150+ disorders, indicating how they can be distinguished from other, similar problems and describing their typical presentation.

Unique features of the DSM

1. Developed by researchers: the DSM-5-TR is made by psychiatrists and psychologists who research the disorders they diagnose.

2. "Atheoretical": the DSM-5 is a tool for categorizing, not for telling you why somebody is experiencing a disorder.

3. Impairment in everyday functioning: most disorders can only be diagnosed if symptoms are causing significant problems in everyday functioning.

4. Medical, environmental, and deviancy exclusions: clinicians are instructed to make sure that the problem is truly psychobiological in origin, and not caused by medical problems or societal conflicts or purely environmental effects.

5. Criteria and Decision Rules: each disorder has a set of clearly defined features with some degree of flexibility.

DSM-5-TR: Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

Patient must meet all criteria:

A. Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across contexts, not accounted for by general developmental delays, and manifest by all three of the following:

1) Deficits in social-emotional reciprocity.

2) Deficits in non-verbal communication.

3) Deficits in developing and maintaining relationships.

B. Restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour manifested by at least two of the following:

1) Stereotyped or repetitive speech or motor movements.

2) Excessive adherence to routines.

3) Highly fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus.

4) Hyper- or hypo-reactivity to sensory input.

C. Symptoms must be present in early childhood.

D. Symptoms together limit and impair everyday functioning.

DSM-5-TR: MILD NEUROCOGNITIVE DISORDER

The patient must meet criteria for A, B, C, and D.

A. Evidence of modest cognitive decline from a previous level of performance in one or more cognitive domains (complex attention, executive function, learning and memory, language, perceptual-motor, or social cognition) based on: Concern of the individual, a knowledgeable informant, or the clinician that there has been a mild decline in cognitive function; and a modest impairment in cognitive performance, preferably documented by (age-normed) standardized neuropsychological testing or, in its absence, another quantified clinical assessment.

B. The cognitive deficits do not interfere with capacity for independence in everyday activities (i.e., complex instrumental activities of daily living such as paying bills or managing medications are preserved, but greater effort, compensatory strategies, or accommodation may be required).

C. The cognitive deficits do not occur exclusively in the context of a delirium.

D. The cognitive deficits are not better explained by another mental disorder (e.g., major depressive disorder, schizophrenia)

DSM-5-TR: CRITICISMS

Ties With Insurance: when the DSM changes, people might suddenly lose their diagnosis and therefore no longer have access to treatment.

Comorbidity: co-occurrence/correlation of two or more diagnoses within the same person. If we properly categorize disorders, comorbidity should be zero (e.g., having a cold is not correlated with having insomnia). However, the DSM-5-TR disorders show widespread comorbidity.

Categorical disorders: the DSM treats most disorders as categorical (you have it or you do not), when in reality there are clearly variations in severity

The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP):

a research-informed manual that adopts a multi-dimensional approach that focuses on problems in specific psychological functions across different levels that might lead to overlapping conditions.

Anxiety

a state of apprehension and tension in which a person anticipates upcoming danger, catastrophe, or misfortune.

Anxiety is differentiated from fear and stress by it's anticipatory nature and by having a diffuse target. Anxiety can vary in severity from mild but persistent, to severe.

Panic attack

a severe state of anxiety coupled with difficulty breathing, fast heart beating, choking sensations, sweating, and dizziness; often associated with feelings of losing control and dying.

Anxiety Disorders

group of disorders in which excessive, irrational, and impairing anxiety is the primary manifesting symptom.

Category Prevalence: The most commonly diagnosed clinical disorder, with~20% lifetime prevalence. Anxiety disorders have strong genetic component and prevalence is correlated with high levels of neuroticism.

Category includes: specific phobia, social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, separation anxiety disorder, selective mutism, and more.

Phobic Disorders

marked, persistent, and excessive fear and avoidance of specific objects, activities, and/or situations (e.g., animals, situations, feelings, etc.).

DSM-5-TR sub-classifies them into "animal", "natural environment", "blood-injection-injury", "situational", and "other" types.

DSM-5-TR is careful to examine environmental and medical factors as exclusions (e.g., fear of loud noises during wartime would not count as phobia).

Fear Conditioning

the theory that phobias are caused by associating a particular stimulus with a negative event through everyday life experience.

Little Albert Experiment

a 6-month-old infant not previously afraid of white rats was conditioned by pairing a loud noise every time he touched the rat; his fear generalized to other white, furry things.

Preparedness Theory

the theory that we are biologically programmed to be afraid of certain things with little experience, or from general stress.

The Garcia Effect

when a rat mildly poisoned once after drinking sugar water they will - upon recovering - never again drink sugar water again (even if they were actually poisoned by something else).

Social Anxiety Disorder

he most commonly diagnosed anxiety disorder, in which the primary set of symptoms is excessive anxiety around being judged by others, often to the point that the person avoids all social situations.

Individuals with social anxiety are not antisocial: they often crave social contact, but are so worried about humiliation and judgement that their fear prevents them from being social. Onset is most often in childhood, with moderate heritability and correlations with temperament and neuroticism.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder

an anxiety disorder characterized by chronic and excessive worry accompanied by three or more of the following: fatigue, concentration problems, irritability, muscle tension, and sleep disturbance for more than 6 months.

GAD seems related to the brain's ability to inhibit information: patients suffering from GAD show significantly higher levels of general brain activity.

Is moderately heritable, with environmental effects like stress and trauma being the other main predictors.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

a clinical disorder marked by:

Repetitive, intrusive and irrational thoughts and worries (obsessions).

Ritualistic behaviors (compulsions) done in an attempt to fight those thoughts.

The obsessions and compulsions impair everyday function, including ability to maintain a job.

Category Prevalence: About 2-5% lifetime prevalence.

Along with PTSD, it was classified as an anxiety disorder until DSM-5, but is now considered an independent category.

most common automatic obsessions/compulsions

-Concerns with dirt, germs, or toxins

-Dangerous events, like fires, death, illness

-Symmetry, order, exactness

-Excessive hand washing, bathing, tooth brushing, grooming

-Repeating rituals (in/out of a door, up/down a chair

-Checking doors, locks, appliances

Depression

a negative state marked by unhappiness, sadness, pessimism, hopelessness, and lethargy, coupled with changes in eating and sleeping habits, difficulty concentrating, and social withdrawal.

Some psychologists have argued that depression is adaptive: it makes us re-assess our goals, ask for help, and preventing us from spending energy on wasteful actions.

Depressive realism

individuals experiencing depression are somewhat more likely to predict performance on a task due to reduced overconfidence.