Scientific Foundations Of Psychology Week 11

Effect Size

Allows reseacrehrs to asses practical significance of our findings beyond mere statistical significance

• Answers the question of “how big is the impact?”

• non-significant result means the effect size is meanignless

Confidence Intervals

Statistical range that provides an estimated range of values within which a population parameter is likely to lie, based on sample data

• Convery degree of uncertainty surrounding paramete of plausible values

• Determines 95% chance that the true mean lies between somewhere close in the data estimates

• bigger sample = narrower

Interpreting Confidence Interval

• Misunderstanding to think confidence interval means there is a 95% the true mean lies within the interval

• If we repeated the experiment many times, there is a 95% chance that the resulting intervals contain the true mean

Statistical Error

Discrepancy between a sample-nbased estimate and the true population value it aims to represent

Type 1 Error

Mistakenly rejecting a true null hypothesis

• Extremely important to control for

• α or significance level denounces chance of having this error

Type 2 Error

Failing to reject a null hypothesis that is false

Statistical Power

The probability of correctly rejecting a false null hypothesis

• probability of detecting true effect in study

Powerful Hypothesised Is Characterized By

small value of β, whilst keeping α fixed at some desried level

- three levels of α: .05, .01 and .001. designed to ensure α is small but there is no corresponding guarantee regarding β

T-Test For Independant Means

Evaluates whether the difference between the means of two samples is greater than what would occur by chance, if in the population there was no real different

• Simply the difference between the ean of one group and the mean of anotger

Humanism And Rogerian Theory

Theoretical approach that emphasises the uniqueness of the individual and takes optimistic view of human experience

• Focused on aspects of humanity not shared with other animals

• Innate potential to actualise, maintain and enhance the self

Rogerian Therapy/Perspective: Empathy

Understand client perspective and show accurate senese of emapth through openess and genuine concern

Rogerian Theory/Perspective: Congruence

Counsellor attmeptors to find ways of helping client close gap between percieved self and ideal self

Rogerian Theory/Perspective: Unconditional Positive Regard

humans grow up in an atmosphere where they are gien love and support on the condition that they behave they way they are expected to

Humanistic Psychology - Carl Rogers

People are free to choose activities that make them happy/bring them joy

• emphasizes the basic goodness of people

• Everyone experiences things differently

• Humans are innatelu good

Basic Assumptions Of Rogerian Theory

• Assume people are innately good

• Behaviour is purposeful and goal-directed

• Disturbed behaviour results from faulty learning. Effectve learning takes place when unconditional regard is recieved

• Responsibility for the clitnets behaviour rests in the client

Maslow Hierarchy Of Needs

• Physiological (Bottom): Breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, exertion

• Safety (Second to bottom): Security of body, of employment, of resources, of morality, of the family, of health, of property

• Love/Belonging (Middle): friendship, family, sexual intimacy

• Esteem (Second to top): Self-esteem, confidence, achievement, respect of others, respect by others

• Self-Actualization (Top): Morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts

Jonah Complex

Fear of growth because growth may lead to new situations we eont know how to handle

• Stops self-actualization

Gordon Allport: Precursor To Humanism

• Key catalyst for development of humanistic perspective

• String advocate for psychology emphasizing individual experience

happiness Has Three Components

• positive emotion and pleasure

• engagement in life

• meaningful life

Broad-And-Build Theory

A positive mindset broadens out thought-action repertoire

• negative emotions narrow oneself and prompts narrowed range of behaviours

Being Positive Has Healthy Benefits

Higher levels of hope and curiosity were associated with reduced risk and hypertension and diabetes

• Positive emotions related to better health

Support Is Associated With Good Health

• people with hig wellbeing tend to have string social networks and are more socially intergarted than those lower in wellbeing

• people with more friends live longer than those with less friends

• men with less friends has 2.3x more chance to die then men with more friends

• women with less friends has 2.8x more chance to die then women with more friends

Buffering Hypothesis

Process that when others provide emotional support, the recipient is better able to cope with stressful events

Humanist Proposal

People seek to fufill their potential for personal growth through greater self-understanding → self-actualization

Person-Centered Approach

Emphazised peoples sibjective understanding of their lives

• deal with clients problems and concerns as the client understand them

Conditional Love

The parents love their children as long as the children do what the parents want them to do. Parents who disapprove of their children’s behavior may withhold their love. As a result, children quickly abandon their true feelings, dreams, and desires. They accept only those parts of themselves that elicit parental love and support.

Positive Psychology

Aiks to understand what makes people happy

• happiness interventions significantly enhance subjective wellbeing and reduce depressive symptoms

Key Positive Psychology Interventions

• keeping active and socialising

• Writing about positive experiences

• Performing acts of kindness

Cohen’s d

Scale free measure of the deperation between two groups means

• provides measure. ofdifference between two groups means in terms of common standard deviation

• cohen d = 0.5 means that there is half a SD between scores of two groups measured

Cohen d Score Meaning

• 0.2 is small

• 0.5 is medium

• 0.8 is large

Pointers for Understanding Margin Of error

Indication of how well a study is capturing the actual population mean

• greater sample size = smaller MoE

• smaller MoE = greater precision

• Big MoE = lots of variability and less reliability

To be 99% Confident

Will need to be wider than 95% confidence intervals

Confidence Interval Containing Zero

Includes null hypothesis, therefore research hypothesis should not be accepted

• Very wide confidence intervals indicate excessive variability in the data and therefore meaning the study probably doesn’t have much value

• If confidence overlap by more than a third, its a higher chance of the result being insignificant

Aristotle Perspective

Saw the heart as the pirmary seat of emotions and sensations, hosuign the ‘central sense organ’ that processes information from peripheral sense organs

• Heart sends messages to limbs to make action

• Cardiocentric

Hippocrates Perspective

Men ought to know that the brain and fromt he brain only arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and tears

• Cerebrocentrist

Humanistic Psychologists

Value the sbjective inner world of consciousness, arguing free will may limit psychology's ability to predict behaviour

Mechanistic Psychologists

Endow humans with machine-like qualities, emphasising determinist and arguing for an objective scientific psychology that can predict lawful human behaviour

• only behaviour is observable in others, therefore conscious experience has no place in scientific psychology

William JAmes Automatic Sweetheart Question

• Ask reader to imagine a soulless automatic sweetheart who's actions are identical to that of a real soulful human

• Then, he asked if individuals could consider the automatic sweetheart to be the equal of a spiritually animated human sweetheart

Turing Test

• Involves human judge in one room and human and machine in another

• human engages in written conversaton with human and machine, both appearing to be human

• If the human cannot reliably tell which is the machine and which is the human, the machine has passed the Turing test

Hedonic Impact

Things that we think will make us happy usually don’t make us as happy as we think they will

• winning lottery doesn’t solve all problems, being unable to walk ins’t the end of the world

Relative Happiness Example

• winning lots of money can be an extreme, distinctive life event and provides a positive comparison point, thus asusming that the thrill of winning will shift out happiness level up (Adaptation)

• Eventually the thrill of winning will veentually wear off (habitual), with winning eing the baseline against which other experiences are judged

Neuroeconomics

Encompasses economics, psychology and neuroscience

• shed slight on how and why people make the decisions they make

• Value-based choice: assign values to potential stimuli available, then compare the values to make our decision