Psychology #3 Exam

Gender & Sexuality

Sex: The biologically influenced characteristics by which people define males and females (Genesis 1:27); before Gen. 3 (sin)

• There are 2 separate sexes

• 1 in 5,000 births have indistinguishable (ambiguably) genitalia

Gender: The socially influenced characterized by which people define men and women

• Our gender is the product of the interplay among our biological dispositions, our developmental experiences, and our current situations

Sexual orientation is our enduring sexual attraction toward

• Members of one’s own sex (homosexual orientation)

• The other sex (heterosexual orientation)

• Or both sexes (bisexual orientation)

In all cultures, heterosexuality has statistically prevailed but homosexuality has existed

• Survey results by survey methods and population; less open response in less tolerant places

  • Exclusively homosexual: 3-4% in men and 2% in women

  • Actively bisexual” Reported by fewer than 1% for ex, 12 out of 7076 people in a Dutch survey

  • Indirect measures (such as online gay porn search) tend to back these numbers up

  • 6% of men and 17% of women in the U.S. report some same-sex sexual  contact during their lives

• Women’s sexual orientation tends to be less strongly felt and potentially more fluid; sexual activity level also varies more

What causes it?

• Secular- there is no consensus; most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation

• Regardless of what causes sexual orientation, a good starting point is that everyone has choice over their sexual behavior (Theme 4: we are responsible, limited agents)

Environmental Origins of Sexual Orientation

• There is a lack of evidence for environmental causes of homosexuality

• Homosexuality is not linked with

  • Problems in parent-child relationships

  • Fear or hatred of the other sex

  • Childhood sexual victimization

Biological Origins of Sexual Orientations

• Same-sex attraction in other species

  • Same-sex behavior has been observed in several hundred species (swans, penguins, grizzlies, gorillas, monkeys, flamingos, and owls)

• Gay-straight brain differences

  • Gay-straight brain diff where one hypothalamic cell cluster is smaller in women and gay men than in straight men

• Genetic influences

  • Shared sexual orientation is higer among identical twins than among fraternal twins

  • Sexual attraction in fruit flies can be genetically manipulated

• Prenatal influences

  • Altered prenatal hormone exposure may lend to homosexuality in humans and other animals

  • Male homosexuality often appears to be transmitted from the mother’s side of the family

  • Men with several older biological brothers are more likely to be gay, possibly due to a materal immune-system reaction

Social Psychology

Social psychologists:

• Use scientific methods to study how people think about, influence, and relate to one another

• Study the social influences that explain why the same person will act differently in different situations

Social Psychology is the field of study opposite to Personality Psychology

• Personality psychology focuses on how internal individual factors influence behavior

• Social psychology focuses on the power of the situation

Most people want to believe that individual factors are what cause our behavior, but the situation ends up being a better predictor of behavior

3 Core Concepts:

• Fundamental attribution error

• Cognitive dissonance

• Central motives

3 Core Studies:

• Asch

• Milgram

• Zimbardo

Fundamental Attribution Error

• Committed by underestimating the influence of the situation and overestimating the effects of stable, enduring traits for other people’s errors

  • Is a stable and bi-directional error

• Through social identities people associate themselves with certain groups and contrast ourselves with others

  • Ingroup: “us” - people with whom we share a common identity

  • Outgroup: “them” - those perceived as different or apart from our group

  • Ingroup Bias: favoring of our own group

Cognitive Dissonance Theory - a boring psych study

• We act to reduce the discomfort (dissonance) we feel when two of cognitions and/or behaviors are inconsistent

Solomon Asch’s Experiments: Conformity & Social Norms

• Conformity: Adjusting our behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard

• Solomon Asch’s (1955) experiments on conformity showed that people fear being “oddballs” and will often conform with other group members, even though they do not agree with the group’s decision

  • A psychological study where participants were placed in a group and asked to identify the length of a line but were deliberately misled by other group members (confederates) who gave obviously wrong answers, testing how much individuals would conform to the group opinion even when it was clearly incorrect

Central Motivations

• Normative Social Influence: Influence resulting from a person’s desire to gain approval or avoid disapproval

  • Conforming to avoid rejection or to gain social approval

• Informational Social Influence: Influence resulting from one’s willingness to accept others’ opinions as new information

  • Conforming because we want to be accurate

Asch and others have found that people are most likely to adjust their behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard when:

1. They are made to feel incompetent or insecure

2. Their group has at least 3 people

3. Everyone else agrees

4. They admire the groups’ status and attractiveness

5. They have not already committed to another response

6. They know they are being observed

7. Their culture encourages respect for social standards

Stanley Milgram’s experiments (1963, 1974) were intended to see how people would respond to outright commands

• Research participants became “teachers” to supposedly random “learners” and believed they were subjecting them to escalating levels of electric shock

Role Playing Affects Attitudes

• A role is a set of expectations (norms) about a social position, defining how those in the position ought to behave

• At first, your behavior in a new role may feel phony, as though you are acting, but eventually, these new ways of acting become a part of you

• Philip Zimbabrdo’s 1972 Standford Prison simulation study:

  • Controversial, but showed the power of the situation and of role playing

Lessons from the Obedience Studies

• Strong social influences can make people conform to falsehoods or capitulate to cruelty

• Ordinary people are corrupted by evil situations

Memory

Memory is any indication that learning has persisted over time; it is our ability to store and retrieve information

2 Major Purposes of Memory

1. Memory is different than we intuitively think

2. You are probably studying wrong

Memories are construction 

Step #1: Encoding, Dual Track Encoding

1. Some information is a automatically processed

2. However, new or usual information requires attention and effort

Automatic Processing: We process an enormous amount of information effortlessly, such as the following:

1. Space: We automatically encode the place of a picture on a page

2. Time: We unintentionally note the general time that events take place

3. Frequency: You effortlessly keep track of things that happen to you

Effortful Encoding

• A lot of information that hits our brains will be lost forever

  • Which is why you have to take notes on this slide

Encoding Issues

1. Next-inline Effect: When you are so anxious about being next that you cannot remember what the person just before you in line says, but you can recall what other people around you say

2. Serial Position Effect: When your recall is better for the first and last items on a list, but poor for middle items

3. Spacing Effect: We retain information better when we rehearse over time

Memory Hacks based on Encoding/Storage

• Spacing effect: Encoding is more effective when it is spread over time

  • Distributed practice produces better long-term retention that is achieved through massed study

  • Massed practice in contrast, produces speedy short-term learning and feelings of confidence, but those who learn quickly also forget quickly

• Testing Effect: You have to clear out your working memory before you can be sure that information has reached your long-term storage! Repeated self–testing does more than assess learning, it improves it

Step #2: Storage: Maintaining memories over time

• Sensory Memory

  • Storage that holds sensory information for a few seconds or less

    • Iconic Memory: Fast-decaying store of visual information

    • Echoic Memory: Fast-decaying store of auditory information

• Short-Term Memory (STM)/Working Memory

  • Storage that holds non-sensory information for more than a few seconds but less than a minute; can hold about 7 items (+/-2)

  • Primarily involves the prefrontal cortex

    • A 1959 experiment showed how quickly short-term memory fades without rehearsal. On a test for memory of three-letter strings, research highly accurate when tested a few seconds after exposure to each string, but if the test was delayed another 15 seconds, people barely recalled the strings at all 

• Long-Term Memory (LTM)

  • Storage that holds information for hours, days, weeks, or years; no known capacity

  • Primarily incolces the hippocampus

  • In contrast to both sensory and STM, LTM has no known capacity limits

  • People can recall items from LTM memory even if they haven’t thought of them for years

    • Researchers have found that even 50 years after graduation, people can accurately recognize about 90% of their high school classmates from yearbook photographs

Retrieval Cues: Memories do not sit in a single place in your brain; They are held in storage by a web of associations. These associations are like anchors that help retrieve memory

Step #3: Priming: To retrieve a specific memory from the web of associations, you must first activate one of the strands that leads to it

• Context Effects: Scuba divers recall more words underwater if they learned the list underwater, while they recall more words on land if they learned that list on land

• Moody & Memories: We usually recall experiences that are consistent with our current mood

  • Emotions, or moods, serve a retrieval cues

Main Improving Memory Strategies

• Study repeatedly in shorter bursts to boost long-term recall

• Spend more time rehearsing or actively thinking about the material (as opposed to passively reading it)

• Turn off the music and get the screens out of reach!

• Plan your retrieval cues

  • Make material personally meaningful

  • Use mnemonic devices and planned retrieval cues

    • Method of Loci (memory palace): a memorization technique that uses familiar spaces to recall information

    • Make up a story

    • Chunks- acronyms or hierarchies (Hierarchy: Complex information broken down into broad concepts and further subdivided into categories and subcategories)

Every brain is different, some trial and error to figure out what works best for you is normal

Emotion

Emotion is a response of the whole organism, involving:

1. Bodily arousal (heart pounding)

2. Expressive behavior (tears, smiling)

3. Conscious experience (both thoughts and feelings)

Emotions are adaptive responses that support survival

Corollary Izard (1977) isolated 10 basic emotions that include physiology and expressive behavior

• Joy

• Interest-excitement

• Surprise

• Sadness

• Anger

• Disgust

• Contempt

• Fear

• Shame

• Guilt

Naturally occurring infant emotions:

• Joy

• Anger

• Interest

• Disgust

• Surprise

• Sadness

• Fear

Gender & Emotion:

• Men and women do not appear to differ in the amount of emotion they feel

• Women

  • Tend to read emotional cues more easily and to be more empathetic

  • Express more emotion with their faces

• People tend to attribute female emotionality to disposition and male emotionality to circumstance

Theories of Emotion

• James-Lange Theory:

  • Arousal comes before emotion

  • Experience of emotion is caused by our physiological response

    • EX: Bear -> Specific physiological state -> Experience of fear

• Cannon-Bard Theory:

  • Arousal and emotion happen at the same time

  • Emotion-arousing stimulus simultaneously triggers (1) physiological response and (2) the subjective experience of emotion

  • Human body responses run parallel to the cognitive responses rather than causing them

    • EX: Bear -> Specific physiological state AND Experience of fear

• Two-factor Theory:

  • Schachter-Singer’s theory that to experience emotion, one must (1) be physically aroused and (2) cognitively label the arousal

  • Emotions have two ingredients: Physical arousal and Cognitive appraisal

    • EX: Bear -> General physiological arousal -> Experience of fear

Fast & Slow Pathways of Fear: According to Joseph LeDoux, information about a stimulus takes two routes simultaneously: 

• Fast pathway which goes from the thalamus directly to the amygdala

• Slow pathway which goes from the thalamus to the cortexT and then to the amygdala

Emotional Regulation: Use of cognitive and behavioral strategies to understand and influence one’s emotional experience