unit 4 ap psych

Neo- Freudians

• Neo freudians agree with freud that: personality structure of id ego and superego, importance of unconscious, importance of childhood, anxiety and defense mechanisms 

  • Place more emphasis on the conscious mind in interpreting and coping and less of an emphasis on sex and aggression 

Humanistic perspective 

• Abraham maslow & hierarchy of needs 

  • Actualization is a need not a capacity 

  • Deficiency and growth orientation 

• Personality develops through an actualizing tendency that unfolds with each persons unique perception of the world

Cognitive Perspective

• Albert ellis - believed our personality is formed by the way we respond to situations and event, called his ABCs: Activating Event, Belief about that event, consequence of the event 

• Aaron beck - thought patterns lead to a feeling of learned helplessness

  • Focus on internal or external locus of control

Social Cognitive Theory

• Suggests behavior patterns are created by the interaction of our thoughts and what we learn through observation and conditioning, emphasizes how personality interacts with environment

• Assumed our traits interact with social context to produce our behavior which is predicted by behavior in past similar situations

• Albert bandura (bobo doll) - reciprocal determinism, behavior personal factors and environment contribute to self efficiency and self esteem

  • Self concept - how we view ourselves in relation to others

  • Self efficiency - our sense of competence and effectiveness

  • Self esteem - our feelings of high or low self worth

Sociocultural Perspective 

• Individualist - people concerned about own well beings 

• Collectivist - people concerned about well being of group 

• Trait perspective - focused on what traits are and patterns of predictable behavior 

  • Gordon allport - describe behavior in terms of fundamental traits which are made up of a person's characteristic behaviors and conscious motives 

    • Cardinal traits - dominate whole life

    • Central traits 

• Isabel briggs meyers and katherine briggs wrote meyers briggs personality inventory 

• Major trait personality inventories - objective tests, forces answer choices based on normed and standardized data to analyze results, more reliable than projective tests

Attribution Theory & Person Perception 

• Attribution - the process of explaining the causes of one’s behavior

  • Internal - personal/dispositional

  • External - situational 

• Explanatory style - predictable patterns of how people explain good/bad events 

• Three steps of attribution

  • Antecedent - prejudge people or events on what we know or think about them

  • Attribution - give reasons for an individual’s behavior based on the antecedent, comes from personal experience and/or schemas

  • Consequence - the real reason for the behavior

Biases in Attribution

• Fundamental attribution error - tendency to attribute behavior of others to internal factors

• Actor/observer bias - tendency to attribute others’ behavior to internal causes while attributing our own behavior to external causes

• Self serving bias - tendency to take personal credit for positive outcomes, but blame external causes for failures

• Confirmation bias - we only remember information that confirms our bias, and forget information that does not

• Mere exposure effect - all else being equal, attitudes toward object/person become more positive the more frequently exposed to it

• Self fulfilling prophecy - behaving in ways that elicit behaviors from others that confirms their beliefs/perceptions about themself or others

• Social comparison - evaluating oneself based on comparison to other members of society or social circles  

• Social loafing - exerting less effort when performing a group task than when performing same task alone

• Group polarization - interaction and discussion of individuals in a group with similar beliefs/attitudes tends to make them more extreme 

• False consensus effect - tendency to overestimate how much others agree with oneself 

• Conformity - changing one's behavior of beliefs to match those of others generally as a result of real or imagined through unspoken group pressure 

  • Asch’s conformity study 

Factors Influencing Conformity

• Ambiguity - when something is less certain, rely on others opinions

• Group size unanimity - more powerful when 3+ people, if one person disagrees, conformity decreases

• Social status 

• Prior commitment 

• Culture that promotes importance of social standards 

Motivation and Emotions

• Motivation - process that initiates, guides, or maintains behavior

• Evolutionary theories 

  • Based on instincts - common behaviors common across a species and unlearned

• Biological theories

  • Drive reduction theory - physiological needs create a tense state called a drive that motivates the organism to find a way to satisfy the drive

    • Homeostasis focused 

  • Optimal arousal theory - we are motivated to maintain a certain level of arousal, each person has a different level of sensation seeking that satisfies them

  • Yerkes dodson law - performance improves with optimal arousal up to a certain point then performance decreases

• Cognitive and behavioral theories 

  • Incentive theories - pulled toward what motivates us through incentives

  • Intrinsic motivation - driven by an interest or enjoyment in a task or internal positive feelings

  • Extrinsic motivation - driven by a desire for external factors 

• Humanistic theories

  • Maslow hierarchy of needs - physiological needs, safety and security, love and belonging, self esteem, self actualization 

• Hunger and motivation

  • Lateral hypothalamus motivates us to feel hungry

  • Ventromedial hypothalamus motivates us to feel full 

  • Hunger is influenced by insulin, leptin, orexin, ghrelin, obestin 

Theories of Emotion

• Have various components

  • Physiological arousal 

  • Expressive behaviors

  • Consciously experienced thoughts and feelings  

• Emotion - a temporary experience with positive, negative, or mixed qualities, experienced with varying intensity as happening to self 

• James lange theory - stimulus arousal physiological response and emotion comes from our awareness of this response 

  • Physiological arousal and experience of emotion happen at the same time

  • Brain’s cortex and sympathetic nervous system are simultaneously activated 

• Schachter two factor theory - current theory, emotion comes from cognitive interpretation of our physiological arousal 

  • Expecting arousal - little emotion, told would do nothing, similar emotions to others around them 

Stress

• Occurs anytime we adapt and adjust to our environment

• Distress - stress that stems from acute anxiety or pressure

• Eustress - positive stress which results from striving toward a challenge 

• Hassles - minor, day to day stressors

• Uplifts - an activity or situation that makes a person feel good, protects a person from stress

• Approach approach conflicts - choose between 2 attractive options 

• Avoidance avoidance conflicts - choose between two disagreeable options 

• Approach avoidance - you find yourself in a situation that has both enjoyable and disagreeable consequences

• Double approach avoidance - choose between multiple alternatives, each has pleasurable and disagreeable aspects 

• General adaptation syndrome - hans style 3 stages

  • 1. Alarm - prepares body to react

  • 2. Resistance - does what it takes to get through the time or event

  • 3. Exhaustion - stress is gone and body can relax, depletes immune system 

• Tend and befriend - response to stress by reaching out to seek and give support, caused by different hormones and neurotransmitters released under stress in women so they tend to do this approach more

• Factors that enhance stress - unpredictability, pressure

• SRRS scale - measures stress 

• Coping - stressful attitudes have to do with the type of person you are

  • Type a 

  • Type b - easygoing 

  • Optimistic personality type - events are temporary, it's not your fault, will not have broader effects

  • Pessimistic - events as a direct implication about you, events having catastrophic events 

• Problem focused coping - deals directly with the root of the stress and tries to fix it for the future

• Emotion focused coping - helps to control your own emotions or negative feelings about the stressor 

• Maladaptive coping techniques - can come from any positive coping technique 

• Psychodynamic theory - freudian theory that tells what shaped our personalities 

  • Ego - executive mediator conscious mind 

  • Superego - internalized ideals preconscious mind

  • Id - unconscious psychic energy unconscious mind