PSYCH100 EXAM2

Fetal Development

A single sperm cell (male) penetrates the outer coating of the egg (female) and fuses to form one fertilized cell.

Germinal Stage

- First 2 weeks
- Zygote (initial splits, then differentiate into different body structures

Embryonic Stage

- 2-8th week
- Embryo (zygote’s outer part attaches to the uterine wall, starting to form the placenta)

Fetal Stage

- 8th week to birth
- Fetus

Placenta Functions

- Transfers nutrients, oxygen, antibodies, and hormones from the mother’s to the fetus.
- Also, it forms a barrier (placental barrier) that filters out some harmful substances - teratogen;
- The barrier also prohibits the blood transfusion between the mother and the fetus.

Teratogen

Potential harmful influences

- German measles (rubella)
(Eyes, ears, heart problem) Deafness
- X-rays and other toxic chemicals
(cognitive abnormality) attention problem, lower IQ
- STD
Intellectual disability , blindness, other physical disorder
- Cigarette smoking
Miscarriage, premature birth, underweight baby
- Regular consumption of alcohol
Birth defects and intellectual disability (FAS – fetal alcohol syndrome)
- Drugs
Impaired Cognitive and language ability

Infancy

Newborn to toddler (0~3)

Childhood

Toddler (3) to teenager

Rooting reflex

turns head towards gentle touch

Sucking reflex

instinctively sucks on anything that touches the roof of their mouth

Moro reflex

also known as the startle reaction or embrace reflex

Physical development

First, infants begin to roll over. Next, they sit unsupported, crawl, and finally walk. Experience has little effect on this sequence.

Brain development

- Brain cells: present before birth
- Neural network development
- 3 to 6: frontal lobe (rational planning)
- 6 to puberty: association areas

Sensorimotor stage

- 0-2 years
- Infants learn about the world through their senses and actions.
- Tasting and touching everything

Object permanence

- 8 months
- The knowledge that an object does not disappear into thin air when it’s hidden – that’s why peek-a-boo is so fun for little babies.

Stranger anxiety

- 7-8 months
- Infants start to distinguish between family members and strangers. They start to show anxiety around strangers.

Preoperational stage

- 2 to 6~7 years
- Memory and language develop in leaps and bounces at this stage. They rely primarily on intuition rather than logical reasoning.

Egocentrism

Cannot take the perspective of another person yet

Conservation

The knowledge that properties such as mass, volume, and number remain the same despite changes in the form or shape.

Concrete operational

- 7 to 11
- Kids start to understand logic and reason
- Identity
- Acquire the ability of conservation, comparison and categorization.
- Mathematical transformation

Formational Operational

- 12~
- Reasoning ability expands from concrete thinking to abstract thinking. We can now use symbols and imagined realities to systematically reason.

Imprinting

Discovered by Konrad Lorenz, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1973 for his breakthrough. Lorenz showed that young geese will form a lasting social bond with the first moving being they encounter after birth—even if it is Konrad Lorenz.

Secure Attachment

They explore their environment happily in the presence of their mothers. When their mother leaves, they show distress. When the mother returns, they are happy for the reunion

Insecure Attachment

- Clingy and anxious (anxious-ambivalent), or are cold and distant (anxious-avoidant).

Adolescence

- Is defined as a life between childhood and adulthood.
- The transition from parental influence to peer influence

Mental Disorder

Persistently harmful thoughts, feelings, and actions. It describes deviant, distressful, and dysfunctional behaviors.

DSM

- Defines a diagnostic process and 16 clinical syndromes. Without presuming to explain their causes, it describes various disorders and lists their prevalence.

Anxiety Disorder

Feelings of excessive apprehension and anxiety.

Generalized Anxiety

- Chronic and exaggerated worry and tension
- Symptoms:
- Persistent and uncontrollable tenseness and apprehension.
- Autonomic arousal.
- Inability to identify or avoid the cause of certain feelings.

Panic Disorder

- Sudden surge of intense fear and anxiety
- Symptoms:
- Minutes-long episodes of intense dread which may include feelings of terror, chest pains, choking, or other frightening sensations.
- Occasionally a panic attack can be mistaken as a heart attack.

Phobia

Persistent and irrational fear of an object or situation that disrupts behavior.

OCD

Persistence of unwanted thoughts (obsessions) and/or urge to engage in senseless rituals (compulsions) that cause distress

PTSD

- Mental disorder characterized by flashbacks to previously encountered highly stressful experiences, such as military combat, abuse, assault
- Symptoms:
- At least 1 re-experiencing symptom (flashback, bad dreams, frightening thoughts)
At least 1 avoidance symptom (avoiding places, people, thoughts)
- At least 2 arousal and reactivity symptom (easily startled, tense, insomnia, angry outbursts)
- At least 2 cognition and mood symptom (amnesia, depression, guilt/shame, loss of interest)

- Symptoms typically develop early – within 3 months of the traumatic incident, but could begin years afterward.
- Some people recover within 6 months, many have symptoms that last much longer, or even become chronic

Mood disorder

Psychological disorders characterized by emotional extremes

Depression

- A mood disorder in which a person experiences, in the absence of drugs or a medical condition, two or more weeks of significantly depressed moods, feelings of worthlessness, and diminished interest or pleasure in most activities
- Major Depression Symptoms:
- Dysphoric mood: sad, hopeless, loss of pleasure in almost all usual activities;
- Appetite: Significant weight loss/gain
- Sleep: Insomnia or hypersomnia
- Motor activity: Markedly slowed down or agitated
- Guilt: Feelings of worthlessness; self-reproach
- Concentration: Diminished ability to think or concentrate; forgetfulness
- Suicide: Recurrent thoughts of death; suicidal ideas or attempts

Mania

Extreme elation, euphoria, grandiose thoughts or feelings

Bipolar

The person alternates between depression and manic episodes (formerly known as manic depression).

Schizophrenia

A group of severe disorders characterized by disorganized and delusional thinking, disturbed perceptions

Schizophrenia Positive Symptoms

- Positive symptoms: the presence of inappropriate cognitions or behaviors
- Hallucinations: Experiences (sights, sounds, smells, tastes, or touches) of people or things that are not really there
- Disorganized Thinking: A positive symptom of schizophrenia in which thoughts and speech are not properly structured, and speech is thus unintelligible
- Delusional Belief: Personal convictions that contradict known facts about the world but that a person clings to even when faced with conflicting evidence
- Wrong reactions/Flat Affect: An absence of normal emotional expression; a negative symptom of schizophrenia
- A schizophrenic person may laugh at the news of someone dying or show no emotion at all (flat affect).

Schizophrenia Negative Symptoms

- Negative symptoms: the absence of appropriate behaviors
- expressionless faces
- rigid bodies
- Cognitive impairments: reduced ability to perform everyday thinking tasks.
- Patients with schizophrenia may continually rub an arm, rock a chair, or remain motionless for hours (catatonia).

DID

A disorder in which a person exhibits two or more distinct and alternating personalities (formerly called multiple personality disorder)

Personality Disorder

Chronic styles of thinking, behavior, and emotion that severely lower the quality of people’s personal relationships. These personal styles create conflicts with others and in the long run, harm the person with the disorder.

Cluster A

- Odd and eccentric
- Personality disorders are often associated with schizophrenia. The difference is mainly in the degree of severity and duration. This cluster people tend to have greater grasp on reality than schizophrenia patients.
- Paranoid personality
- Schizoid personality
- Schizotypal personality

Cluster B

Dramatic and erratic

Antisocial personality

A pervasive pattern of disregard for a violation of the rights of others, lack of empathy, bloated self image, manipulative and impulsive behavior. They tend to be cynical of the feelings and sufferings of other people. They may display a superficial charm and can be verbally facile

Borderline Personality

A pervasive pattern of abrupt mood swings, instability in relationships, self-image, identity, behavior and affect, often leading to self-harm and impulsivity.

Histrionic Personality

Pervasive pattern of attention seeking behavior and excessive emotions.
- Uncomfortable or feel unappreciated when they are not the center of attention;
- Appearance and behavior of them are often inappropriately sexually provocative or seductive;
- Style of speech is excessively impressionistic and lacking in detail;

Narcissistic Personality

Pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy.
- Grandiose sense of self-importance;
- They believe they are superior, special, or unique and expect others to recognize them as such;
- Require excessive admiration;
- Lack of empathy and have difficulty recognizing the desires and feelings of others;
- Often envision others to be envious of them.

Cluster C

Anxious and fearful

Avoidant personality

feelings of social inhibition and inadequacy, extreme sensitivity to negative evaluation

Dependent personality

pervasive psychological need to be cared for by others

Obsessive-Compulsive

rigid conformity to rules, perfectionism, and control to the point of satisfaction and exclusion of leisurely activities and friendship (different from obsessive-compulsive disorder).

Psychoanalysis

The first formal psychotherapy to emerge was psychoanalysis developed by Sigmund Freud

Psychoanalysis Goal

Freud believed psychological problems originate from repressed impulses and conflicts in childhood, the aim of psychoanalysis is to bring repressed feelings into conscious awareness where the patient can deal with them.

Psychoanalytic Method

Freud developed the method of free association to unravel the unconscious mind and its conflicts.
- The patient lies on a couch and speaks whatever comes to his mind. During free association, the patient edits his thoughts to resist his feelings and to express his emotions. Such resistance becomes important in the analysis of conflict-driven anxiety. Eventually the patient opens up and reveals his innermost private thoughts to the therapist, developing positive or negative feelings (transference) towards him.

Humanistic Therapy

Aims to boost self-fulfillment by helping people grow in self-awareness and self-acceptance.

Behavioral Therapy

Therapy that applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors. To treat phobias or addictive behaviors therapists do not delve deeply below the surface looking for inner causes.

Exposure Therapy

Exposes patients to things they fear and avoid. Through repeated exposures anxiety lessens because they habituate to the things feared.

Aversive Therapy

A type of counterconditioning that associates an unpleasant state with an unwanted behavior. With this technique, temporary conditioned aversion to alcohol has been reported.

Cognitive Therapy

Aaron Beck (1979) suggests that depressed patients believe that they can never be happy (thinking) and thus associate minor failings (e.g. failing a test [event]) in life as major causes for their depression.

Group Therapy

Normally consists of 6-9 people and a 90-minute session which can help more people and cost less. Clients benefit from knowing others have similar problems.

Drug Therapy

- Drugs directly alter chemical activity in the brain.
- Placebo effect may occur through drug therapy.

Encoding

Getting information to the brain

Automatic processing

Some information (route to your school)

Effortful processing

New or unusual information

Memory Effects

Mechanisms that influence how (and how well) memory works

Rehearsal

Effortful learning usually requires rehearsal or conscious repetition.

Serial Postion Effect

Primacy effect
- Encoding the first items better
Recency effect
- Encoding the last items better

Saliency Effect

Encoding the items that stand out (visually or semantically)

Chunking Effect

Organizing information into meaningful units

Spacing

We retain information better when our rehearsal is distributed over time.

Sensory Memory

Snapshot memory, very large capacity, very short duration. ​​The duration of sensory memory varies for the different senses.

Working Memory

Limited capacity, highly efficient. Working memory, a new name for short-term memory, has limited capacity (7±2) and short duration (20 seconds).

Long-Term Memory

Unlimited capacity, with memory decay. Unlimited capacity store. Estimates on capacity range from 1000 billion to 1,000,000 billion bits of information (Landauer, 1986).

Episodic Memory

Memory about events (in time)

Semantic Memory

Memory about fact, concepts, etc..

Autobiographical Memory

Similar to episodic memory, but only pertains to self

Procedural Memory

Memory for skills – how to use something, how to do something.

Emotional Memory

Memory related to a particular emotion

Retrieval

Refers to getting information out of the memory storage

Recognition

the person has to identify an item amongst others e.g., a multiple-choice test requires recognition

Recollection

the person must retrieve information using effort, e.g., a fill-in-the blank test requires recall

Relearning

the individual shows how much time (or effort) is saved when learning material a second time.

Retrieval cues

Memories are held in storage by a web of associations. These associations are like anchors that help retrieve memory.

Priming

To retrieve a specific memory from the web of associations, you must first activate one of the strands that leads to it.

Forgetting

An inability to retrieve information due to poor encoding, storage, or retrieval

Interference

learning something new (especially similar) will cause competition to the old material/Learning some new information may disrupt retrieval of other information.

Retroactive Interference

Sleep prevents retroactive interference (nothing occurs afterwards). Therefore, it leads to better recall.

Proactive Interference

Studying first thing in the morning is also an effective strategy. It minimizes proactive interference – because nothing occurs before.

Memory Reconstruction

​​While tapping our memories, we filter or fill in missing pieces of information to make our recall more coherent.