PSYC 321: Exam #2

Nature vs. Nurture

• Nature

  • Genetics

  • Hormones

  • Neurotransmitters

  • Structure/activity in the brain

• Nurture

  • Prenatal nutrition, exposure to drugs

  • Friends, neighborhood

  • Parenting

Culture and Biology

• Human thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are the result of the interplay and combination of a person’s inherited tendencies and their life experiences.

Twin Studies

• Compare identical to fraternal twins

  • ~50% of variance = genetic

  • ~50% of variance = environmental

Genetics x Environment Interactions

• DNA = genotype

• Gene expression = phenotype

• Environment affects how genotype codes for phenotype

Epigenetics

• Environment changes you genotype

• Low licking and grooming of baby mice results in low GR expression manifesting in high corticosterone levels, high anxiety, and low licking or grooming of their young.

Evolution

• Genes produce traits

  • Behaviors, thoughts, and feelings

• Certain traits spread because they are adaptive

  • Natural selection: promote survival

  • Sexual selection: promote reproduction

• Traits spread that are well-adapted to their environmental context.

  • Ex. Thick white fur is well-adapted to the artic and not the tropics, so it will spread in the arctic and not in the tropics.

Social Brain Hypothesis

• Psychological Adaptation that allowed humans to conquer the world.

• Humans’ best skill = socially-complex groups of non-kin

• Requires complex mind/brain

  • remembering relationships, tracking reputations, coordinating alliances, navigating hierarchies.

  • High neocortex ratio.

• Humans can represent many relationships (roughly 150).

The Self in Social Psychology

• The self is fundamentally social

  • The need to belong

  • Brain’s default setting is social

    • The brain at rest is very similar to what the brain looks like when it thinks about others.

Schemas

• Organized bundles of concepts related to your self

• social roles, traits, preferences

  • Ex. students, blonde, daughter, kind

The Self

• “Who I Am”

• Accumulation of all your schemas

The Working Self

• Many selves

• “Current” self

• Strongly affected by situation

  • Ex. Sole female in student in a class of male students

    • Working self-concept will highlight her gender

Self-Other Overlap

• Selves have interpersonal boundaries

  • How you know you are “you"

• Boundaries are permeable

• Close others bleed into our self-concepts

• Breakup

  • More overlap, more detrimental impact

Cultural Differences of Self-Concept

• Independent self

  • Self/Other boundaries are firm

  • Western cultures

• Interdependent self

  • Self/other boundaries are permeable

  • Eastern cultures

Self-Discrepancy Theory

• Ideal Self: The self that you (or significant others) would ideally like to be.

• Ought Self: the self that you feel you ought to - or should be. This self could be based on your own feelings of obligation, responsibility or duty, or the views of significant others in your life about your responsibilities, duties, and obligations.

• Actual Self-Ideal Self Discrepancy:

  • Believed self attributes do not match the ideal state that they hope to attain, or that a relevant significant others hopes they will attain.

• Ideal Self-Ought Self Discrepancy:

  • Ideal self attributes of the individual do not match what the individual or significant other feels they ought to be.

• Ought Self-Actual Self Discrepancy:

  • Believed self attributes do not match what they or a significant other feels they is their duty or obligation to be,

Self-Awareness Theory

• When aware of yourself, discrepancies are highlighted.

  • Change self or behavior

  • Reduce or escape self-awareness

    • TV, alcohol, drugs, video games

Self-Esteem

• Evaluation (pos vs. neg) of your self

• Sociometer theory

  • Evolutionary roots (rejection can be dangerous!)

  • Self-esteem helps us gauge our social standing

Self-Enhancement Theory

• Exaggerate positive traits, minimize negative traits

• Better-than-average effect

Self-Regulation

• Changing yourself to meet your goals

• Relies Upon:

  • Goals

  • Monitoring

    • Track how you match your goals

  • Capacity to change

    • Ability to align yourself with your goals

    • Self-control

Self-Control

• Effortful inhibition of an impulse

• Goals > immediate desires

• How does it work?

  • TOTE Model

  • Strength Model

  • New Models:

    • Fatigue

    • “Have-To” vs “Want-To”

TOTE Model

• Test, Operate, Test, Exit

• Test → incongruity → Operate → Test → congruity → Exit

Strength Model of Self-Control

• Not true

• Self-control is like a muscle

• A limited resource

  • Gets depleted with use

  • Resisting the temptation to eat cookies reduced on perfromance task.

• Problems for Strength Model

  • “Depletion” effects eliminated by:

    • Money, beliefs, mood, food

New Approach

• Its not depletion, its fatigue

  • Could exert more control but you don’t

• Shifts

  • Away from “Have-To”

  • Towards “Want-To”

Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation

• Intrinsic Motivation

  • Comes from within the self

  • Ex. sense of achievement, curiosity, interest, pride

• Extrinsic Motivation

  • Comes from outside the self

  • Ex. Money, grades, praise, career, exams

  • Rewards kids for good grades.

Overjustification Effect

• Ascribe motive to external forces instead of internal motivation.

Emotion-Regulation

• Attempts to meet emotion goals

  • Reduce negative emotions

  • Increase positive emotions

  • Prevent emotions from affecting behavior

• Difficult

• You are not supposed to be good at emotion-regulation

  • Emotions are judges

    • Pos emotions: keep doing that

    • Neg emotions: stop that

  • Need them to be independent of your wishes.

Emotion Suppression vs. Reappraisal

• Suppression:

  • Inhibit your feelings

  • leads to rebound

• Reappraisal:

  • Change the way you interpret your feelings

    • From threatening to exciting!

    • Effective and lasting emotion change

Mindful Acceptance

• Embrace and investigate emotions without judgement

• Ride them as they wax and wane

How to Improve Self-Regulation

• Structure your life so that you don’t have to use self control.

  • Willpower fails more than it succeeds

• Intrinsic motivation

• Emotions

  • Reappraisal (not suppression)

  • Acceptance

• Tie goals to your identity

• Increase the value

Emotion

• Conscious feelings that arise in reaction to events

Mood

• conscious feelings not clearly linked to events.

Affect

• less conscious feelings

• Good or bad

• Usually arising in reaction to events.

• Affect is the building material of emotions and moods

• It arises from the body

6 “Basic” Emotions

• Anger, Happiness, Surprise, Disgust, Sadness, Fear

• Not correct

• Vary wildly by culture and context

• Not distinguishable.

Social Emotions

• Moral Disgust

• Envy/Jealousy

• Shame/Embarrassment/Guilt

• Empathy

• Schadenfreude

• Gluckschmerz

Moral Disgust

• Nonverbal expression

• Withdrawal

• 
  

Envy vs. Jealousy

• Negative feelings

• Envy: you don’t have it, someone else does

• Jealousy: you have it, someone else wants it.

Shame vs. Guilt vs. Embarrassment

• Response to moral violations

• Guilt: I feel bad about what I did

• Shame: I feel bad about who I am

• Embarrassment: breaking a social (but not moral) rule.

Empathy

• Sharing someone else’s emotional experience

  • Emotional contagion

Schadenfreude

• the pleasure derived from someone else’s pain

Gluckshmerz

• the opposite of “schadenfreude”; the sorrow and discomfort felt at the good fortune of others

Why Have Emotions?

• Tell us what’s important

• they promote effective responses

The Quest for Happiness

• Hedonic Treadmill

  • We pursue happiness

  • Rapidly habituate

  • Illusion of lasting happiness

• Does not apply to negative emotions.

Bad is Stronger than Good

• Negativity bias

• Misfortune weighs more heavily than good fortune

• Forget positive event, ruminate on negative events.

We are Bad at Predicting Our Future Emotions

• Impact bias

  • We think future events will affect our feelings more than they already do.

Mesoudi (Cultural Evolution: Integrating Psychology)

• RQ: how cultural evolution provides an integrated framework linking psychology, evolutionary biology, and anthropology to explain human ecological dominance.

• Methods:

• Concl:

  • The Cultural Niche: human adaptability and success are driven primarily by learned cultural traits—technology, norms, and institutions—rather than genetic adaptations to specific environments. Humans inhabit a cultural niche supported by cultural intelligence.

  • High Fidelity Social Learning: unlike other primates, humans uniquely possess socio-cognitive mechanisms (aka imitation, teaching, prosociality) that allow social learning with high enough fidelity to prevent the degradation of information across generations.

  • Cumulative Cultrual Evolution: because information is faithfully transmitted, beneficial modifications accumulate over time, creating complex technologies and systems beyond what any single individual could invent alone.

  • Micro-Evolutionary Learning Biases: cultural transmission is guided by non-random biases.

    • Content Biases: preferentially acquiring traits based on intrinsic appeal.

    • Model Based Biases: preferentially copying individuals with specific traits.

    • Frequency-Dependent Biases: copying traits based on their commonality

    • Guided variation: individuals transform acquired traits in non-random directions through indivudal leanring or cognitive tendencies before passing them along.

  • Macro-Evolutionary Outcomes: applying populaiton-level mathematial models to these micro-level biases helps explain broad phenomena, including the dynamics of cumulative technology, cultural phylogenetic trees, cross-cultural regulairites, and large-scale human cooperation via cultural group selection.

Berkman et al. (Finding the “Self” in Self-regulation: the Identity Value Model)

• RQ: What is the Identity Value Model

• Concl:

  • IVM: a mechanistic framework that links self-regulation to identity through decision making valuation process.

    • Goal Alignment via Value: the IVM proposes that self-regulation operates through a dynamic value integration process, Decisions are driven by comparing the cumulative subjective value of different response options.

    • Identity as a Source of Value: Behaviors that align with a person’s identity carry higher positive subjective value than identity-irrelevant behaviors.

    • Tipping the Scale: In self-control conflicts, incorporating idenitity into the choice architecture increases the subjective value of the goal-consistent option, making it more likely to be selected.

  • Subjective Value: a continuous, integrated “common currency” calculation of expected reward or disutility associated with an action, evaluated in the pre-decision period.

  • Main Predictions:

    • Identity Increases Subjective Value; Goal-directed actions that are connected to an active aspect of identity receive an added boost in the subjective value.

    • Neural Overlap: Neural system underlying idenitity processing and value computation share key substrates, particularly within the mesolimbic dopamine circuits and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

    • Intervention Potential: interventions that make goal-relevant identities salient can systematically improve self-regulation across time and varied contexts.

Stronhminger et al. (The True Self: A Psychological Concept Distinct from the Self)

• RQ: how do people conceptually distinguish between the self generally and the true self specifically.

• Concl:

  • Morality is central: changes to a person’s moral capacities cause people to judge that the individual’s core identity has changed significantly more than changes in memory, perception, or physical abilities.

  • Default Positivity Bias: people tend to view bad behaviors or negative traits as belonging to the “surface self” or external influences, whereas moral improvements and positive traits are seen as revealing a person’s “true self.”

  • Actor-Observer Invariance: while traditional psychological research shows people are often more critical of others than themselves, judgements of the “true self” consistently attribute deep-seated goodness to both oneself and other people.

  • Real-World Implications: believing in a positive “true self” influences well-being, life satisfaction, decision-making, blame/praise attributions in moral cognition, and attitudes toward psychological or medical interventions.

Lindquist (Emotions Emerge from More Basic Psychological Ingredients)

• RQ: Outline a modern psychological constructionist framework for understanding human emotion.

• Concl:

  • Challenge to the “Basic Emotion”/ Nautral Kinds View: traditional models claim that there is discrete emotional categories with biological hardwiring, neural circuts, physiological responses, and behavioral signatures. Over the last century biology, behavior, and neuroscience have failed to show this.

  • Modern Constructionist Model:

    • Emotions are situated in conceptualizations- mental events constructed in real time when a perceiver categorizes bodily sensations and external sensory input using context and conceptual knowledge.

    • Culinary Metaphor: just as baked goods emerge from ingredients, distinct emotions emerge from the combination of domain-general psychological ingredients- primarily core affect and conceptualization.

    • Neuroscience: Brain regions activate durin emotional experiences do not belong to “emotion modules” rather they form intrinsic functional networks involved in visceromotor control, hedonic representation, conceptual processing, and executive control.

  • Constructionism accounts for both wide variability in how people experience emotions across situations/cultures and conscious perception that emotions feel discrete and distinct.