Untitled Flashcards Set

Social Psychology

Forming Impressions

• First impressions are often based on:

  • Physical appearance

    • We see people who we view as physically attractive as being more confident

  • Non-verbal expressiveness

• Prejudice refers to unjustifiable attitudes toward a group

  • Includes beliefs, emotions, and predispositions toward actions

  • Prejudice is a negative attitude, whereas discrimination is a negative behavior

• Stereotypes are generalized beliefs about a group of people

  • Stereotypes create biases in our perceptions

  • We overestimate how often we see stereotypes

• Illusory correlation: perceived but non existent correlation

  • When we believe there is a correlation between two things, we usually recall instances that confirm these beliefs more often than instances that do not

  • Fueled by stereotypes

In Group vs. Out group

• We tend to divide the world into us vs. them

• This can create sense of community, but also fuels racism and large scale prejudice

• Through our social identities, we associate ourselves with some groups and contrast ourselves from others

• This group identification typically promotes an in-group bias, or a favoring of one’s own group

• Our desire to have our own group rise to the top predisposes us to prejudices against other groups

• Chimpanzees will wipe down areas that chimps from other groups have sat on before them

Attribution

• Attribution theory: people typically attribute others behaviors to either internal dispositions (aspects of personality) or external situations (there is something else going on that is leading a person to act the way they are)

• Fundamental Attribution Error: overestimating the influence of internal attributions and underestimating the influence of situations

  • Stronger in the western world

  • We are a lot kinder to ourselves and those that are close to us than strangers

Physical Attractiveness

• Affects our first impression of an individual the most

• Attractive people are:

  • perceived as being healthier, happier, more sensitive, more successful, and as having better social skills

  • Not seen as more compassionate or honest

  • More likely to enjoy occupational success

• Beauty is in the eye of the culture, our standards of beauty reflect time and place

• Attractiveness also depends on our feelings about the person, perceived personality traits

• You need to find someone physically attractive to find a connection, but physical imperfections become less noticeable the more time you spend with someone

Similarity or Reciprocity

• Similarity:

  • We are more attracted to people that are similar to us

  • Friends and couples tend to share common attitudes, beliefs, and interests

• Reciprocity

  • We like people who show us they like us

  • We tend to see others as liking us more if we like them

  • We tend to others as disliking us more if we dislike them

Attitudes

• Attitudes are feelings, often influenced by our beliefs, that predispose our reactions to objects, people, and events

• 3 Components:

  • Cognitive component

  • Affective component

  • Behavioral component

• Attitudes predict our behaviors

  • The strength of this prediction depends on how strong our beliefs are and how we are expected to behave in certain situations

  • We are good at masking our attitudes if we don't think they are socially desirable

• Behaviors predict our attitudes

  • We tend to believe things we have supported through behaviors

• When our attitudes and actions do not coincide, we experience cognitive dissonance: disconnect between actions and behaviors

• We can convince ourselves to believe in things if we have taken action on them

• The less coerced and more responsible we feel in engaging in a troubled action, the more dissonance and discomfort we feel, motivating us to change our attitudes to justify our actions

  • While it can be difficult to directly control feelings, we can influence our feelings/attitudes by altering our behaviors

Conformity and Obedience

• Elevator Experiment: a bunch of people get into elevator facing the wrong way, and influence the experiment’s subject to switch direction they face

• Ash Paradigm: we tend to conform to others behaviors despite how we usually would behave

Group Pressure and Conformity

• We adjust our behavior or thinking toward some group standard

• Solomon Ash: psychologist who influenced our understanding of conformity

  • Ash called male college students to answer simple questions

  • Majority of the group answer a question wrong confidently

  • There is a strong likelihood that perfectly intelligent individuals will give the wrong answer because that is what other people were doing

  • Given a partner who answers the same, people are more likely to answer what they think

  • Ash told subjects they must write answer down on paper instead of speaking it aloud, people answered more truthfully

• Conformity is strongest when you hold other group members in high esteem

• Conformity is stronger in cultures that require respect for social standards/uniformity more than individualistic cultures

Obedience

• Stanley Milgram: How do people respond to outright commands to do something?

  • Curious about how nazis were convinced to murder strangers

  • Invited group of white middle class men to Yale, instructed to draw a piece of paper from a hat, determined if they were a teacher or learner in a study

  • Learners were hooked up to a machine, punished for each wrong answer with an electric shock by the teachers

  • With each error, voltage on machine increases

  • 63% of teachers complied fully down to the last shock, even though learners were collapsed in pain

  • Teacher still continued to administer shocks because they were told to do so

  • Learners were planted by milgram, faking it, but teachers believed it was real

• Phil Zimbardo: Stanford Prison Experiment

  • Random assignment of men to the roles of prison guards and prisoners

  • What happens to good people in an evil place: does an institution control your behavior or does what is inside of you control your behavior?

  • Mock prison cells and solitary confinement “hole”

  • Prison guards started to degrade the prisoners

  • Prisoners started to rebel against guards, guards turned on prisoners, anger increased on both sides

  • Prisoner 8612 asks to leave experiment, zimbardo asks to make a deal with prisoner 8612 to be a snitch instead, 8612 tells other prisoners they cannot leave, all genuinely believe they cannot leave and starts to act crazy in hopes of getting out

  • Guards start to believe prisoner 8612 will come back to free the rest of the prisoners

  • Guards punish other prisoners for ones prisoners mistake, prisoners lose solidarity and become more obedient

  • Prisoner 819 tries to leave the experiment, other prisoners chant “prisoner 819 did a bad thing”. 819 almost changes his mind about leaving, does not want to become a “bad prisoner”

  • New prisoner 416 joins experiment, starts hunger strike within prison, upsets guards

  • Guards test solidarity of prisoners, prisoners have no solidarity

  • Power corrupts; proves how difficult it is for victims of abuse to stand up for themselves

  • John Wayne: most degrading guard

  • None of the more moral guards ever intervened with Wayne

  • Evil place won over good people

  • Zimbardo himself assumes the rule of prisoner Warden, becomes victim of his own experiment

Emotion

• Emotion leads to motivation, motivation leads to emotion

• Ex: you are anxious about exam, motivating you to study harder. But studying hard for an exam can also make you more anxious

• Emotion 3 Aspects:

  • Physiological component: 

    • Autonomic nervous system mobilizes our bodies to take action when there is some kind of crisis, calms it when the crisis has past

      • Sympathetic nervous system: directs adrenal glands to release stress hormones and sugar, prepares us for a flight or flight response, increases heart rate, adrenaline, etc.

      • Parasympathetic nervous system: calms body by inhibiting release of additional hormones, helps us get back to homeostasis

    • Polygraph test: when people lie, they produce physiological emotional responses (higher blood pressure, stopping of breath, sweating), polygraphs measure anxiety

      • Issues: pathological liars do not feel anxiety when lying, some people naturally just get anxious when answering questions even if they are innocent

  • Cognitive component

    • Cognition can define emotion

    • Spillover effect: Arousal response to one event influences our response to another event

    •  Schachter and Singer Study: men were injected with epinephrine, put in a waiting room with another individual who was acting either super happy or super irritated, half were told certain side effects would occur, the other half were not told anything

      • The true participants not told about physical effects would start to act similarly to the other individual, reported the same physical symptoms and emotions of the other person in the room

      • Those told the side effects report the same physical symptoms but not emotion

    • Some emotional responses do not require conscious thinking

      • Many of our emotional reactions are automatic and effortless

      • Changing these emotional responses is difficult

      • When emotions stem from conscious thought, you can change your thought and change your feeling

  • Behavioral component

    • Emotions are expressed through body language and facial expressions

    • The Facial Feedback Hypothesis: posits that facial muscles send signals to the brain that help it recognize the emotion being experienced

    • Blind athletes react in the same way facially as sighted athletes, notion that our facial expressions of emotion are innate

    • If you smile, it will physiologically make you happier

    • Cross culturally there are:

      • Similarities in the ability to differentiate facial expressions of emotions

      • Differences in the categorization of emotions

      • Cultural differences in how westerners vs easterners respond to emotion: westerners are more individualistic and analytic, whereas easterners are more holistic 

Personality

• Personality refers to an individual's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting

  • Explains the stability of a person’s behavior over time and across situations (how consistent it is)

  • Explains the behavioral differences among people in similar situations (how distinctive it is)

• A personality trait is a characteristic pattern of behavior, or a disposition to behave in a particular way in a variety of situations

Personality Tests

• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) which was originally devised to identify emotional disorders

  • Can be affected by social desirability 

  • Lie detector scale built in to assess faking 

    • This is done through universal questions, items that everyone experiences, “I get angry sometimes”

• The Big Five

  • McCrae and Costa maintain that most personality traits are derived from 5 higher order traits;

    • Extraversion

      • How you get your energy

    • Neuroticism

      • How emotionally stable you are

    • Openness

      • How open or closed your thinking is, having unusual interests, curiosity, change vs. familiarity

    • Agreeableness

      • How considerate, friendly, and helpful you are

    • Conscientiousness

      • How Reliable, good at planning ahead, organized you are

  • These traits seem to be universally applicable as well as relatively stable throughout adulthood

The Psychoanalytic Approach

• Sigmund Freud

  • grew up in a middle class Jewish home in Vienna, Austria during the Victorian era where sexual repression was the norm

  • Life impacted by WWI and the growing anti semitism at that time

  • These experiences greatly influenced his work

  • Psychodynamic Analysis: lengthy conversations with his clients during which time he probed deeply into their lives

  • Psychoanalytic approach: attempts to explain personality, motivation, and mental disorders by focusing on unconscious determinants of behavior

  • At first, Freud thought hypnosis might unlock door to the unconscious, but he ultimately turned to free association

    • the practice of allowing the patient to discuss thoughts, dreams, memories, or words, regardless of coherency. The patient is allowed to talk without pause in a stream of words. 

    • Key to process is being in a completely relaxed state while talking

• Levels of Awareness

  • Conscious: whatever one is aware of at a particular point in time

  • Preconscious: Material just beneath the surface of awareness that can be easily retrieved

  • Unconscious: thoughts, memories, desires that are well below the surface of awareness but insert great influence on behavior

• Personality Structure

  • Conflict between biological urges and our internalized social controls over those urges

  • Personality is the result of our efforts to resolve these basic concepts

  • How we express our biologically driven impulses without bringing feelings of guilt or punishment

  • ID

    • Primitive, instinctive component of personality that strives to satisfy basic drives

    • Operates according to the pleasure principle

    • Thinking that is fantastical, illogical

  • Ego

    • Our partially conscious perceptions, thoughts, judgements, and memories

    • Operates according to the reality principle

    • Seeks to gratify the ID’s impulses in realistic ways that will bring about long term pleasure

  • Superego:

    • Voice of our moral compass that focuses on how we ought to behave

    • Produces feelings of pride and guilt

• Defense Mechanisms

  • Defense mechanisms are tactics that reduce or redirect anxiety by distorting reality

  • 9 types:

    • Repression: banishes anxiety-arousing wishes from consciousness

    • Regression: allows us to retreat to an earlier stage of development

    • Reaction formation: the ego unconsciously makes unacceptable impulses look like their opposites 

      • ex: feeling inferior so acting like you are superior

    • Projection: we disguise threatening impulses by attributing them to others

      • Ex: i think my boyfriends not into me, but the truth is i'm not into him

    • Rationalization: we generate self-justifying explanations to hide ourselves from the real reasons for our actions

    • Displacement: diverts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable object or person 

    • Denial: protects individual from real events that are too painful to accept by rejecting an event in its entirety or rejecting seriousness of something

    • Identification: bolstering self esteem by forming an alliance with a person or a group

      • Ex: Fan clubs

    • Sublimation: channels unconscious impulses into socially acceptable behavior 

      • Ex: taking up boxing to let out aggression

• Stages of Psychosexual Development

  • Oral Stage

    • 0-18 months

    • pleasure/focus is on the mouth

    • Those who are not satisfied at this stage will develop oral fixations in the future

  • Anal Stage

    • 18-38 months

    • Coping with demands for control 

    • Pleasure focuses on bladder and anal secretions

    • Harsh toilet training can lead to issues later on

      • Anal retentive: rule biting, control freak, obsessive

      • Anal explosive: messy, careless, disorganized

  • Phallic Stage

    • 3-6 years

    • Resolving the Oedipal Complex: When children have erotic leanings towards their opposite sex parent and resent their same sex parent

    • If one does not get the pleasure from this stage, sex responses that are either over or under sexualized in the future

  • Latency

    • 6-puberty

    • Expanding social contacts

    • Focus on forming friend groups, relationships

  • Genital

    • Puberty and on

    • Establishing intimate relationships, romantic and platonic

    • Contributing to society through one’s work

    • Failure in earlier stages makes this one harder to achieve

• Early childhood experiences can influence one’s personality with consequences that last through adulthood

Neo-Freudians

• Accepted basic underlying premises of Freud’s theories

• Veered away from Freud in two ways:

  • Placed more emphasis on role of the conscious mind

  • Doubted that sexuality and aggression are all consuming motivations

• Karen Horney

  • Childhood anxiety is triggered by the child’s sense of helplessness and dependence

• Alfred Adler

  • Much of our behavior is driven by efforts to conquer childhood feelings of inferiority, feelings that trigger desires for superiority and power

• Horney and Adler believed that social tensions more than sexual tensions influence later life

• Carl Jung

  • In addition to the personal unconscious, we have a collective unconscious

  • Explains deeply rooted spiritual concerns and ancestral memories

Assessing the Unconscious 

• Objective assessments tap into the conscious

• Projective tests provide ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger the projection of one’s inner dynamic

  • TAT: shown ambiguous images, asked to talk about them or tell a story

  • Rorschach Inkblot test: asks people to describe what they see in a series of inkblots 

Behavioral Perspectives

• Believe that psychology should only study observable behavior, and explain personality in terms of learning

• BF Skinner: personality is learnt through conditioning

  • Personality is a collective of response tendencies

  • Personality is acquired through learning over the course of the lifespan

• Bandura

  • Role models have a large impact on our personality development

  • self-efficacy: our beliefs about our abilities to perform behaviors that should lead to expected outcomes

  • Greater self-efficacy associated with greater success, less procrastination

Humanistic Perspectives

• Humanistic psychologists focus on the way healthy people strive for self-determination and self-realization

• Abraham Maslow proposed that we are motivated by a hierarchy of needs

  • Studied healthy, creative people

  • Recent criticism by evolutionary psychologists

• Carl Rogers believed that unless they are thwarted by their environment, people are primed for growth and fulfillment

  • A central feature of personality is self-concept: all the thoughts and feelings an individual has in response to the question “Who Am I?”

  • If self concept is positive, you will act and perceive the world in a positive way

  • If self concept is negative, you will feel dissatisfied, unhappy, view life darkly

  • Three aspects key to our development:

    • Genuine

    • Accepting: unconditional positive regard, an attitude of total acceptance towards another person: you are valued for who you are even though you have flaws

    • Empathic

Biological Perspective

• Hans Eysenck posited that personality can be characterized along three dimensions:

  • Extroversion–Introversion

    • Eysench proposed that introverts have higher levels of physiological arousal, which makes them more easily conditioned to have inhibitions

    • Dopamine is higher in extroverts 

    • Extroverts seek additional arousal from world around them, while introverts have a high level of natural brain arousal

  • Emotional Stability–Instability

  • Psychoticism

  • Modern research in behavioral genetics has supported his ideas that personality is molded by heredity

  • Studied identical twins raised apart, high level of similarity in personality

    • Substantially more similar than fraternal who were raised together

Social-Cognitive Perspective

• Is your life beyond your control?

• Is what happens to you your own doing?

• Social-cognitive psychologists emphasize our sense of personal control

  • External locus of control: the perception that outside forces determine your fate

  • Internal locus of control: the belief that you control your own destiny

Culture and Personality

• Research shows that individuals from a variety of cultures exhibit same basic traits, but differ in terms of which traits are exhibited most often

• Independent Cultures

  • Western cultures

  • View the self as a unique individual

• Interdependent Cultures

  • East-asian cultures

  • Encouraged to fit in, be more modest, part of a larger group

  • Self accomplishment is group accomplishment

Psychological Disorders

• No known society where people do not have Depression and Schizophrenia

• Psychological Disorders: ongoing patterns of thoughts feelings and actions that are:

  • Deviant: unlike others in your culture, deviance is contextual, deviance alone is not sufficient to determine mental illness

  • Distressful

  • Dysfunctional: disable and impair an individual's life

Understanding Disorders

• Medical model

  • Focus is on genetically influenced abnormalities in brain structure and biochemistry

  • Psychological disorders have physical causes that can be diagnosed and treated

• Biopsychosocial Approach

  • Grounded in belief that all behavior arises from the interaction from nature and nurture

  • If an individual has some form of mental illness, this approach attributes it to some factor in genetics or environment

  • Recognizes that the mind and body are inseparable

Classifying Disorders

• Classifying aims to:

  • Describe a disorder

  • Predict the disorder’s future course

  • Identify appropriate treatment

  • Stimulate research to identify causes

• The classification system is outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)

• Classification results in labels

  • David rosenhan and several others went to hospitals complaining they were hearing voices saying “empty, hollow, and thud”, took tests at hospital and answered all other questions honestly 

    • All 8 were misdiagnosed with a form of mental illness

    • Most of them were kept inpatient for almost 19 days

    • During this period, they exhibited no additional symptoms, yet clinicians were able to come up with a diagnosis and assign causes of the disorder

    • Actions of patients were misinterpreted as symptoms 

  • Labels can help individuals discern treatment

Anxiety Disorders

• Generalized Anxiety Disorder: Unexplainably and continually tense and uneasy

  • Excessive worrying

  • Symptoms seem commonplace, but their persistence is not

  • Jittery, agitated, sleep deprived, hard time concentrating

  • Difficult to identify the cause, no known cause

  • Much more common in women

  • Rare after the age 50

• Panic Disorder: sudden episodes of intense dread

  • Anxiety escalates into a panic attack: minutes long episode of intense fear that something horrible is about to take place

  • Strikes suddenly, wreaks havoc, and disappears, leaving its mark

  • Prevalence is high

  • Smokers are twice as likely to have it

• Phobias: irrationally and intensely afraid of a specific object or situation

  • Causes person to avoid particular object, activity, individual, situation

  • Most people can just live with their phobias, but some are incapacitated by their phobia

  • Not all phobias have specific triggers, but many do

  • Social phobias: shyness but taken to a extreme

  • Common forms include Claustrophobia, acrophobia, hydrophobia, agoraphobia

• Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: troubled by repetitive thoughts or actions

  • When obsessive thoughts constantly interfere with everyday living 

  • “Obsessive” refers to thoughts, “Compulsive” refers to behaviors

  • 2-3% of the population develop OCD

  • More common among teens and young adults

• Post-traumatic Stress Disorder: 

  • 7% of the population have suffered from PTSD

  • Difficulty falling or staying asleep, concentrating

  • Lasts for at least a month, often lasts far longer than that

  • Common among war veterans, survivors of accidents, disasters, violent and sexual assaults

  • Intrusion: repeated memories, nightmares, flashbacks

  • Avoidance: trying to avoid anything that might stimulate memory of event

  • Alterations in Cognition and Mood: unable to remember important aspects of traumatic event, display distorted beliefs about themselves or others, self-blame, shame, anger, guilt, showing little interest in things previously enjoyed, detachment from others, unable to experience happiness or satisfaction

  • Alterations in Arousal and Activity: irritable, angry outbursts, self-destructive, get startled either, difficulty concentrating or sleeping

  • The greater one’s emotional distress during the traumatic event, the higher the risk for PTSD symptoms

  • Some PTSD symptoms might be genetically predisposed

Etiology of Anxiety Disorders

• Learning Perspective

  • Anxiety can be learned

  • Conditioning

    • Little albert learned anxiety through classical conditioning

    • Through conditioning, one event can lead to numerous or exaggerated fears

    • Stimulus generalization: an attack by a dog might leave an individual to fear all dogs

    • Reinforcement: maintains phobia/compulsion

      • Ex: OCD washing hands to relieve anxiety reinforces notion to repeatedly wash hands

  • Observational Learning

    • Parent with a fear of all dogs will lead to child with a learned fear of dogs

• Biological Perspective

  • Natural selection: we are biologically prepared to fear threats based on our ancestors

  • Phobias focus on snakes, spiders, animals, heights, storms, dark, most of which are not actually dangerous but were dangerous to our ancestors

  • Genetics: genes can regulate neurotransmitters, certain neurotransmitters affect serotonin, a lot of anxiety disorders stem from not producing right amount of serotonin

Dissociative Disorders

• Conscious awareness becomes separated from previous memories, thoughts, feelings

• Individual experiences sudden loss in memory or change in identity often in response to an overwhelmingly stressful event

• Dissociative Amnesia: sudden loss of memory for important personal information

• Dissociative Fugue: loss of memory for one’s entire life along with sense of personal identity, often individual will end of traveling to or find themselves in a random place

• Dissociative Identity Disorder:

  • Exhibiting two or more distinct and alternating personalities

  • Argument over if its real or not: way more prevalent in western countries/North America

  • Studied differences in eye movements, brain patterns

  • Some argue that it is a form of PTSD

Mood Disorders

• Depression is the most common reason people seek mental health services

• 13% of adults in the US suffer from depressive disorders

• Depression impacts twice as many women as men

• 25% of experiences with depression are struggling with a significant loss

• Two Main Forms:

  • Major Depressive Disorder: general lack of interest in engaging with the word, lethargy

    • Disorder occurs when at least five signs of depression last for two or more weeks

    • Depressed mood most of the day

    • Diminished interest in pleasure

    • Significant weight loss or gain

    • Changes in one’s appetite

    • Insomnia or sleeping too much

    • Fatigue

    • Feelings of worthlessness

    • Diminished ability to think or concentrate

    • Suicidal ideations, recurrent thoughts of death

  • Bipolar Disorder: alternating between depression and mania (heightened state)

    • Manic Phase:

      • Overly-talkative

      • Overactive

      • Elated

      • Little need for sleep

      • Few sexual inhibitions

      • Irritated by advice

      • Much less common than major depressive disorder but more dysfunctional, more loss of workdays

      • Affects men and women equally

• Biological perspective

  • Genetic Influences

    • Risk increases if you have parent or sibling with disorder

    • Identical twins have 70% chance of having the same mood disorder

  • Depressed Brain

    • Studies have found less brain activity during depressive states, increased during periods of mania

    • Left frontal lobe of the brain which is active during positive emotions is likely to be inactive during depressed states

    • At least 2 neurotransmitters that play a role:

      • Norepinephrine: scarce during depression, overabundant during mania

      • Serotonin: scarce during depression

• Sociocognitive Perspective

  • Self-defeating beliefs

    • Might stem from learned helplessness (far more common among women than men)

    • Women are more likely to overthink than men

  • Negative explanatory style

    • Tendency to explain bad events in terms that are stable (this is going to last forever, going to affect everything I do)

    • Internal (it is all my fault)

    • Self-focused, self-blaming, over-generalized

  • Depression is more common in Westerners because of the focus on individualism

  • Stressful Experiences -> Negative explanatory style -> Depressed mood -> Cognitive behavioral changes

Schizophrenia

• Disorganized thinking

  • Minute, irrelevant stimuli, intonations in a voice distract attention from a bigger event

  • delusions, thinking you are being persecuted

• disturbed perception

  • Hallucinations: stimulus perception that is not real

  • Most often auditory, hearing voices that insult or give orders to do bad things

• Inappropriate emotions and actions

  • Engaging in behaviors that demonstrate a split from reality

  • Ex: Laughing at loss of a loved one, Random anger, inappropriate motor actions (rocking back and forth, rubbing arms, catatonia)

• Disruptions in relationships, careers, living in private inner world preoccupied with illogical ideas and unreal images

• Strikes as young people mature into adults, can appear gradually or suddenly

• Schizophrenia is a cluster of different disorders

• Subtypes of Schizophrenia include:

  • Paranoid: preoccupation with delusions/hallucinations, themes of prosecution or grandiosity

  • Disorganized: jumping from one topic to another, random actions, inappropriate emotions

  • Catatonic: immobility or extensive purposeless movements, extreme negativism, parrot-like repetitive or no speaking at all

  • Undifferentiated: variety of symptoms that are very hard to pinpoint

  • Residual: experience of withdrawal after symptoms of schizophrenia have subsided

• Schizophrenia can be marked by positive symptoms or negative symptoms

  • Positive: presence of inappropriate behaviors

Negative: absence of appropriate behaviors

• Negative: absence of appropriate behaviors, including lack of motivation, social withdrawal, and diminished emotional expression.