Unit 1: Scientific Foundations of Psychology

Roots of Psychology

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Principal Approaches to Psychology

Behavioral Approach

• The behavioral approach focuses on measuring and recording observable behavior in relation to the environment.

• Behaviorists think behavior results from learning.

• Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov trained dogs to salivate in response to the sound of a tone, demonstrating stimulus–response learning.

Psychoanalytic/Psychodynamic Approach

• Sigmund Freud

• Psychodynamic psychoanalysis includes Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Karen Horney, Heinz Kohut, and others.

Humanistic Approach

• In contrast to behaviorists and psychoanalysts, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and other psychologists believed that humans have unique behavior.

• Humanists value feelings and believe people are naturally positive and growth-seeking. Humanists interview people to solve their own problems.

Evolutionary Approach

• An offshoot of the biological approach, evolutionary psychologists, returning to Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection, explain behavior patterns as adaptations naturally selected because they increase reproductive success.

Cognitive Approach

• Cognitive psychologists emphasize receiving, storing, and processing information, thinking and reasoning, and language to understand human behavior.

• Jean Piaget's cognitive development research influenced preschool and primary education.

Sociocultural Approach

• The sociocultural approach examines cultural differences to understand, predict, and control behavior.

Biopsychosocial Model

• The biopsychosocial model integrates biological processes, psychological factors, and social forces to provide a more complete picture of behavior and mental processes.

• The model is a unifying theme in modern psychology drawing from and interacting with the seven approaches to explain behavior.

Domains of Psychology.

• Developmental psychologists study psychological development throughout the life span.

  • They study intellectual, social, emotional, and moral development.

  • Some specialize in adolescence or geriatrics.

  • Developmental psychologists work in schools, daycare centers, social service agencies, and senior and geriatric facilities.

  Neuropsychologists explore the relationships between brain/nervous systems and behavior.

  • Biological psychologists, biopsychologists, behavioral geneticists, physiological psychologists, and behavioral neuroscientists are neuropsychologists.

Experimental Method

Eliminating Confounding Variables

• Reliability is consistency or repeatability.

• Validity is the extent to which an instrument measures or predicts what it is supposed to

Inferential Statistics

• Inferential statistics are used to interpret data and draw conclusions.

• They tell psychologists whether or not they can generalize from the chosen sample to the whole population, if the sample actually represents the population.

• Statistical significance (p) is a measure of the likelihood that the  difference between groups results from a real difference between the two groups rather than from chance alone.

• Meta-analysis provides a way of statistically combining the results of individual research studies to reach an overall conclusion.

Ethical Guidelines

• The American Psychological Association (APA) lists ethical principles and code of conduct for the scientific, educational, or professional roles for all psychologists.

• They include psychology practice, research, teaching, and trainee supervision.

• They also include all aspects of their performance in public service, policy development, social intervention, and development and conduction of assessments, to name but a few.

• The code applies to all communications, including phone, social media, and in-person.

• Discuss intellectual property frankly: The “publish-or-perish” mindset can lead to trouble when it comes to determining credit for authorship.

  • The best way to avoid disagreements, according to the APA, is to discuss these issues openly at the start of a working relationship, even though many people often feel uncomfortable about such topics.

• Be conscious of multiple roles: This includes avoiding relationships that could negatively affect professional performance or exploit or harm others.

  • Participation in a study should be voluntary, and not coerced or influenced as part of a grade, raise, or promotion.

• Follow informed consent rules such as IRBs, which ensure that individuals are voluntarily participating in the research with full knowledge of relevant risks and benefits.

  • The purpose, expected duration, and procedures of the research.

  • Their rights to decline to participate and withdraw from the research once it has begun, as well as consequences, if any, of doing so.

  • Factors that might influence their willingness to participate, such as possible risks, discomfort, or adverse effects.

  • Any possible research benefits.

  • Limits of confidentiality and when that confidentiality must be broken.

  • Incentives for participation, if any.

Unit 2: Biological Bases of Behavior

Techniques to Learn About Structure and Function

• Studies by Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga of patients with these “split brains” have revealed that the left and right hemispheres do not perform exactly the same functions (brain lateralization) that the hemispheres specialize in.

• Computerized axial tomography (CAT or CT) creates a computerized image using X-rays passed through various angles of the brain showing two-dimensional “slices” that can be arranged to show the extent of a lesion.

• In magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a magnetic field and pulses of radio waves cause the emission of faint radio frequency signals that depend upon the density of the tissue.

Measuring Brain Function

• An EEG (electroencephalogram) is an amplified tracing of brain activity produced when electrodes positioned over the scalp transmit signals about the brain’s electrical activity (“brain waves”) to an electroencephalograph machine.

• The amplified tracings are called evoked potentials when the recorded change in voltage results from a response to a specific stimulus presented to the subject.

• Positron emission tomography (PET) produces color computer graphics that depend on the amount of metabolic activity in the imaged brain region.

• Functional MRI (fMRI) shows the brain at work at higher resolution than the PET scanner.

  • Changes in oxygen in the blood of an active brain area alters its magnetic qualities, which is recorded by the fMRI scanner.

• A magnetic source image (MSI), which is produced by magnetoencephalography (MEG scan), is similar to an EEG, but the MEG scans are able to detect the slight magnetic field caused by the electric potentials in the brain.

Organization of Your Nervous System

• Peripheral nervous system : includes two major subdivisions: your somatic nervous system and your autonomic nervous system.

• Your peripheral nervous system lies outside the midline portion of your nervous system carrying sensory information to and motor information away from your central nervous system via spinal and cranial nerves.

• Somatic nervous system: has motor neurons that stimulate skeletal (voluntary) muscle.

• Autonomic nervous system: has motor neurons that stimulate smooth (involuntary) and heart muscle.

  • Your autonomic nervous system is subdivided into the antagonistic sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system.

Localization and Lateralization of the Brain’s Function

• Medulla oblongata—regulates heart rhythm, blood flow, breathing rate, digestion, vomiting.

• Pons—includes portion of reticular activating system or reticular formation critical for arousal and wakefulness; sends information to and from medulla, cerebellum, and cerebral cortex.

• Basal ganglia—regulates initiation of movements, balance, eye movements, and posture, and functions in processing of implicit memories.

Structure and Function of the Neuron

• Glial cells guide the growth of developing neurons, help provide nutrition for and get rid of wastes of neurons, and form an insulating sheath around neurons that speeds conduction.

• The axon is usually covered by an insulating myelin sheath (formed by glial cells).

• Dopamine stimulates the hypothalamus to synthesize hormones and affects alertness and movement.

• Glutamate is a major excitatory neurotransmitter involved in information processing throughout the cortex and especially memory formation in the hippocampus.

• Serotonin is associated with sexual activity, concentration and attention, moods, and emotions.

• Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) inhibits firing of neurons.

• Norepinephrine, also known as noradrenaline, is associated with attentiveness, sleeping, dreaming, and learning.

• Agonists may mimic a neurotransmitter and bind to its receptor site to produce the effect of the neurotransmitter.

• Antagonists block a receptor site, inhibiting the effect of the neurotransmitter or agonist.

Neuron Functions

• Spaces between segments of myelin are called nodes of Ranvier.

• When the axon is myelinated, conduction speed is increased since depolarizations jump from node to node.

  • This is called saltatory conduction.

• Excitatory, the neurotransmitters cause the neuron on the other side of the synapse to generate an action potential (to fire); other synapses are inhibitory, reducing or preventing neural impulses.

Reflex Action

• Interneurons, located entirely within your brain and spinal cord, intervene between sensory and motor neurons.

The Endocrine System

• Parathyroids: endocrine glands in neck that produce parathyroid hormone, which helps maintain calcium ion level in blood necessary for normal functioning of neurons.

• Adrenal Glands: endocrine glands atop kidneys: immune system, blood pressure, other responses to stress

Genetics and Behavior

• Behavioral geneticists study the role played by our genes and our environment in mental ability, emotional stability, temperament, personality, interests, and so forth; they look at the causes of our individual differences.

Transmission of Hereditary Characteristics

• Turner syndrome have only one X sex chromosome (XO).

• Klinefelter’s syndrome arise from an XXY zygote.

• Males with Klinefelter’s tend to be passive. The presence of three copies of chromosome 21 results in the expression of Down syndrome.

• Tay-Sachs syndrome produces progressive loss of nervous function and death in a baby.

• Albinism arises from a failure to synthesize or store pigment and also involves abnormal nerve pathways to the brain, resulting in quivering eyes and the inability to perceive depth or three-dimensionality with both eyes.

• Phenylketonuria (PKU) results in severe, irreversible brain damage unless the baby is fed a special diet low in phenylalanine within 30 days of birth; the infant lacks an enzyme to process this amino acid, which can build up and poison cells of the nervous system.

• Huntington’s disease is an example of a dominant gene defect that involves degeneration of the nervous system.

• A form of familial Alzheimer’s disease has been attributed to a gene on chromosome 21, but not all cases of Alzheimer’s disease are associated with that gene.

Sleep and Dreams

• Electroencephalograms (EEGs) can be recorded with electrodes on the surface of the skull.

• Hypnagogic state; you feel relaxed, fail to respond to outside stimuli, and begin the first stage of sleep, Non-REM-1.

• EEGs of NREM-1 sleep show theta waves, which are higher in amplitude and lower in frequency than alpha waves.

• As you pass into NREM-2, your EEG shows high-frequency bursts of brain activity (called sleep spindles) and K complexes.

• NREM-3 sleep EEG shows very high amplitude and very low-frequency delta waves.

• REM sleep (Rapid Eye Movement sleep) about 90 minutes after falling asleep.

• Pitch is determined by frequency while amplitude determines sound volume

Interpretation of Dreams

• Freud tried to analyze dreams to uncover the unconscious desires (many of them sexual) and fears disguised in dreams.

  • He considered the remembered story line of a dream its manifest content, and the underlying meaning its latent content.

• Psychiatrists Robert McCarley and J. Alan Hobson proposed another theory of dreams called the activation-synthesis theory.

• Pons generates bursts of action potentials to the forebrain, which is activation.

Sleep Disorders

• Insomnia is the inability to fall asleep and/or stay asleep.

• Narcolepsy is a condition in which an awake person suddenly and uncontrollably falls asleep, often directly into REM sleep.

• Sleep apnea is a sleep disorder characterized by temporary cessations of breathing that awaken the sufferer repeatedly during the night.

• Night terrors are most frequently childhood sleep disruptions from the deepest part of NREM-3 (formerly referred to as stage 4) sleep characterized by a bloodcurdling scream and intense fear.

• Sleepwalking, also called somnambulism, is also most frequently a childhood sleep disruption that occurs during deep NREM-3 sleep characterized by trips out of bed or carrying on complex activities.

Drugs

• Psychoactive drugs are chemicals that can pass through the blood-brain barrier into the brain to alter perception, thinking, behavior, and mood, producing a wide range of effects from mild relaxation or increased alertness to vivid hallucinations.

• Psychological dependence develops when the person has an intense desire to achieve the drugged state in spite of adverse effects.

• Tolerance: decreasing responsivity to a drug

• Physiological dependence or addiction develops when changes in brain chemistry from taking the drug necessitate taking the drug again to prevent withdrawal symptoms.

• Withdrawal symptoms include intense craving for the drug and effects opposite to those the drug usually induces.

• Depressants are psychoactive drugs that reduce the activity of the central nervous system and induce relaxation.

  • Depressants include sedatives, such as barbiturates, tranquilizers, and alcohol.

• Narcotics are analgesics (pain reducers) that work by depressing the central nervous system.

  • They can also depress the respiratory system.

• Stimulants are psychoactive drugs that activate motivational centers and reduce activity in inhibitory centers of the central nervous system by increasing activity of serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine neurotransmitter systems.

• Hallucinogens, also called psychedelics, are a diverse group of psychoactive drugs that alter moods, distort perceptions, and evoke sensory images in the absence of sensory input.

alcohol, barbituates, opiates: Name some depressants

8. Stimulants: temporarily excite neural activity and arouse body functions

9. Hallucinogens: distort perceptions and evoke sensory images

10. Barbituates: drugs that depress the activity of the central nervous system, reducing anxiety but impairing memory and judgment

11. Opiates: opium and its derivatives, such as morphine and heroin they depress neural activity, temporarily lessening pain and anxiety

12. Amphetamines: drugs that stimulate neural activity, causing speeded-up body functions and associated energy and mood changes

13. Ecstasy MDMA: a synthetic stimulant and mild hallucinogen. Procedures euphoria and social intimacy, but with short-term health risks and longer-term harm to serotonin-producing neurons and to mood and cognitive
14. LSD: a powerful hallucinogenic drug; also known as acid

15. Alcohol: Depressant-- initial high followed by relaxation and disinhibition -- depression, memory loss, organ damage, impaired reactions

16. Heroin: Depressant-- Rush of euphoria, relief from pain-- depressed physiology, agonizing withdrawl

17. Caffeine: Stimulant-- increased alertness and wakefulness-- anxiety, restlessness, and insomnia in high doses; uncomfortable withdrawl

18. Methamphetamine: Stimulant--Euphoria, alertness, energy-- irritability, insomnia, hypertension, seizures

19. Cocaine: Stimulant--rush of euphoria, confidence, energy-- cardiovascular stress, suspiciousness, depressive crash

20. Nicotine: Stimulant-- Arousal and relaxation, sense of well-being-- heart disease, cancer

21. Ecstasy MDMA: Stimulant; mild hallucinogen-- Emotional elevation; disinhibition-- dyhydration and overheating, depressed mood and cognitive functioning

22. Marijuana: Mild hallucinogen--Enhanced sensation, relief of paint, distortion of time, relaxation 1 / 2 DRUGS!!! Ap Psychology Study online at https://quizlet.com/_36qm9

23. THC: the major active ingredient in marijuana; triggers a variety of effects, including mild hallucinations 2 / 2

Unit 3: Sensation and Perception

Thresholds

• Difference threshold—the minimum difference between any two stimuli that a person can detect 50 percent of the time—has been reached.

• According to Weber’s law, which was quantified by Gustav Fechner, difference thresholds increase in proportion to the size of the stimulus.

Visual Pathway

• Millions of rods and cones are the photoreceptors that convert light energy to electrochemical neural impulses.

• Your eyeball is protected by an outer membrane composed of the sclera, tough, white, connective tissue that contains the opaque white of the eye, and the cornea, the transparent tissue in the front of your eye.

• Rays of light entering your eye are bent first by the curved transparent cornea, pass through the liquid aqueous humor and the hole through your muscular iris called the pupil, are further bent by the lens, and pass through your transparent vitreous humor before focusing on the rods and cones in the back of your eye.

• Bipolar cells: Rods and cones both synapse with a second layer of neurons in front of them in your retina.

• Bipolar cells transmit impulses to another layer of neurons in front of them in your retina, the ganglion cells.

• Blind spot: Where the optic nerve exits the retina, there aren’t any rods or cones, so the part of an image that falls on your retina in that area is missing.

• Feature detectors:  The thalamus then routes information to the primary visual cortex of your brain, where specific neurons

• Parallel processing: Simultaneous processing of stimulus elements

Color Vision

In the 1800s, Thomas Young and Hermann von Helmholtz accounted for color vision with the trichromatic theory that three different types of photoreceptors are each most sensitive to a different range of wavelengths.

• People with three different types of cones are called trichromats; with two different types, dichromats; and with only one, monochromats.

• People who are color-blind lack a chemical usually produced by one or more types of cones.

• According to Ewald Hering’s opponent-process theory, certain neurons can be either excited or inhibited, depending on the wavelength of light, and complementary wavelengths have opposite effects.

Ear

• The pinna, auditory canal, and tympanum make up your outer ear.

• The eardrum vibrates with sound waves from the outer ear.

• The middle ear's ossicles—the hammer, anvil, and stirrup—vibrate.

• The vibrating stirrup hits the inner ear's cochlea oval window.

• A basilar membrane with hair cells bends vibrations and converts them to neural impulses.

• Auditory neurons form the auditory nerve by synapsing with hair cells.

• The auditory nerve sends sound to the temporal lobe auditory cortex via the medulla, pons, and thalamus.

• The medulla and pons cross most auditory nerve fibers, so your auditory cortex receives input from both ears, but contralateral input dominates.

• The process by which you determine the location of a sound is called sound localization.

• According to Georg von Békésy’s place theory, the position on the basilar membrane at which waves reach their peak depends on the frequency of a tone.

• According to frequency theory, the rate of the neural impulses traveling up the auditory nerve matches the frequency of a tone, enabling you to sense its pitch.

• Conduction deafness is a loss of hearing that results when the eardrum is punctured or any of the ossicles lose their ability to vibrate.

• Nerve (sensorineural) deafness results from damage to the cochlea, hair cells, or auditory neurons.

• Somatosensation as a general term for four classes of tactile sensations: touch/pressure, warmth, cold, and pain.

• Itching results from repeated gentle stimulation of pain receptors, a tickle results from repeated stimulation of touch receptors, and the sensation of wetness results from simultaneous stimulation of adjacent cold and pressure receptors.

• Touch is necessary for normal development and promotes a sense of well-being.

Chemical Senses

• Gustation (taste) and olfaction (smell) are called chemical senses because the stimuli are molecules.

Gestalt Organizing Principles of Form Perception

• Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Kohler studied how the mind organizes sensations into perceptions of meaningful patterns or forms, called a gestalt in German.

Depth Perception

• Linear perspective provides a cue to distance when parallel lines, such as edges of sidewalks, seem to converge in the distance.

• Relative brightness can be seen when the closer of two identical objects reflects more light to your eyes.

• Optical illusions, such as the Müller-Lyer illusion and the Ponzo illusion, in which two identical horizontal bars seems to differ in length, may occur because distance cues lead one line to be judged as farther away than the other.

Perceptual Constancy - Mental Set - Schema

Unit 4: Learning

Classical Conditioning

• Aversive conditioning:  Conditioning involving an unpleasant or harmful unconditioned stimulus or reinforcer, such as this conditioning of Baby Albert.

• Spontaneous recovery:  Although not fully understood by behaviorists, sometimes the extinguished response will show up again later without the re-pairing of the UCS and CS.

• Generalization: occurs when stimuli similar to the CS also elicit the CR without any training.

• Discrimination occurs when only the CS produces the CR.

Thorndike’s Instrumental Conditioning

• Instrumental learning: is a type of learning that involves the acquisition and use of skills or strategies to achieve a specific goal. It can involve trial-and-error processes, imitation, reinforcement, modeling, memorization and more.

• Law of Effect: states that behaviors followed by satisfying or positive consequences are strengthened (more likely to occur), while behaviors followed by annoying or negative consequences are weakened (less likely to occur).

B. F. Skinner’s Training Procedures

• Premack principle: a more probable behavior can be used as a reinforcer for a less probable one.

• Punishment training: a learner’s response is followed by an aversive consequence.

• Omission training: In this training procedure, a response by the learner is followed by taking away something of value from the learner.

Operant Aversive Conditioning

• Aversive conditioning: is a type of learning in which an organism learns to associate an unpleasant stimulus with a particular behavior.

  • This type of conditioning works by creating an association between the behavior and some sort of punishment or discomfort, so that the organism will be less likely to do it again.

• Avoidance behavior: takes away the aversive stimulus before it begins.

Reinforcers

• Primary reinforcer: is something that is biologically important and, thus, rewarding.

• Secondary reinforcer: is something neutral that, when associated with a primary reinforcer, becomes rewarding.

• Generalized reinforcer: is a secondary reinforcer that can be associated with a number of different primary reinforcers.

• Token economy: has been used extensively in institutions such as mental hospitals and jails.

Teaching a New Behavior

• Shaping: positively reinforcing closer and closer approximations of the desired behavior, is an effective way of teaching a new behavior.

• Chaining: is used to establish a specific sequence of behaviors by initially positively reinforcing each behavior in a desired sequence and then later rewarding only the completed sequence.

Schedules of Reinforcement

• fixed ratio schedule—know how much behavior for reinforcement

• fixed interval schedule—know when behavior is reinforced

• variable ratio schedule—how much behavior for reinforcement changes

• variable interval schedule—when behavior for reinforcement changes

Cognitive Processes in Learning

• Behaviorists included John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner.

• Only observable behaviors, antecedents, and consequences were studied.

The Contingency Model

• Pavlov’s view of classical conditioning is called the contiguity model.

  • He believed that the close time between the CS and the US was most important for making the connection between the two stimuli and that the CS eventually substituted for the US.

• Cognitivist Robert Rescorla: suggesting a contingency model of classical conditioning that the CS tells the organism that the US will follow.

Unit 5: Cognition

Models of Memory

Information Processing Model

• Information processing model: compares our mind to a computer.

• Encoded when our sensory receptors send impulses that are registered by neurons in our brain, similar to getting electronic information into our computer’s CPU (central processing unit) by keyboarding.

• Donald Broadbent: modeled human memory and thought processes using a flowchart that showed competing information filtered out early, as it is received by the senses and analyzed in the stages of memory.

• Attention: is the mechanism by which we restrict information.

  • Trying to attend to one task over another requires selective or focused attention.

  • We have great difficulty when we try to attend to two complex tasks at once requiring divided attention, such as listening to different conversations or driving and texting.

• According to Anne Treisman’s feature integration theory, you must focus attention on complex incoming auditory or visual information in order to synthesize it into a meaningful pattern.

Levels-of-Processing Model

• According to Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart’s levels-of-processing theory: how long and how well we remember information depends on how deeply we process the information when it is encoded.

• Shallow processing: we use structural encoding of superficial sensory information that emphasizes the physical characteristics, such as lines and curves, of the stimulus as it first comes in.

• Semantic encoding: associated with deep processing, emphasizes the meaning of verbal input.

Three-Stage Model

• Atkinson–Shiffrin three-stage model of memory: describes three different memory systems characterized by time frames: sensory memory, short-term memory (STM), and long-term memory.

• Sensory memory: visual or iconic memory that completely represents a visual stimulus lasts for less than a second, just long enough to ensure that we don’t see gaps between frames in a motion picture.

• Auditory or echoic memory lasts for about 4 seconds, just long enough for us to hear a flow of information.

• Parallel processing: a natural mode of information processing that involves several information streams simultaneously.

Short-Term Memory

• Alan Baddeley’s: working memory model involves much more than chunking, rehearsal, and passive storage of information.

• Working memory model: is an active three-part memory system that temporarily holds information and consists of a phonological loop, visuospatial working memory, and the central executive.

Long-Term Memory

• Semantic memory of facts and general knowledge, and episodic memory of personally experienced events.

Organization of Memories

• Dr. Steve Kosslyn: showed that we seem to scan a visual image of a picture (mental map) in our mind when asked questions

Biology of Long-Term Memory

• Long-term potentiation (or LTP):  involves an increase in the efficiency with which signals are sent across the synapses within neural networks of long-term memories.

• The role of the thalamus in memory seems to involve the encoding of sensory memory into short-term memory.

• The hippocampus, frontal and temporal lobes of the cerebral cortex, and other regions of the limbic system are involved in explicit long-term memory.

• Anterograde amnesia: the inability to put new information into explicit memory; no new semantic memories are formed.

• Retrograde amnesia: involves memory loss for a segment of the past, usually around the time of an accident, such as a blow to the head.

• The cerebellum is involved in implicit memory of skills, and studies involving patients with Parkinson’s disease have indicated involvement of basal ganglia in implicit memory too.

Retrieving Memories

• Retrieval: is the process of getting information out of memory storage.

• Multiple-choice questions require recognition, identification of learned items when they are presented.

• Fill-in and essay questions require recall, retrieval of previously learned information.

• Often the information we try to remember has missing pieces, which results in reconstruction, retrieval of memories that can be distorted by adding, dropping, or changing details to fit a schema.

• Hermann Ebbinghaus: experimentally investigated the properties of human memory using lists of meaningless syllables.

  • He drew a learning curve.

  • He drew a forgetting curve that declined rapidly before slowing.

• Savings method: the amount of repetitions required to relearn the list compared to the amount of repetitions it took to learn the list originally.

• Overlearning effect:  Ebbinghaus also found that if he continued to practice a list after memorizing it well, the information was more resistant to forgetting.

• Serial position effect: When we try to retrieve a long list of words, we usually recall the last words and the first words best, forgetting the words in the middle.

• Primacy effect: refers to better recall of the first items, thought to result from greater rehearsal

• Recency effect: refers to better recall of the last items.

• Retrieval cues: can be other words or phrases in a specific hierarchy or semantic network, context, and mood or emotions.

• Priming: is activating specific associations in memory either consciously or unconsciously.

• Distributed practice: spreading out the memorization of information or the learning of skills over several sessions, facilitates remembering.

• Massed practice: cramming the memorization of information or the learning of skills into one session.

• Mnemonic devices: or memory tricks when encoding information, these devices will help us retrieve concepts.

• Method of loci: uses association of words on a list with visualization of places on a familiar path.

• Peg word mnemonic: requires us to first memorize a scheme.

• Context-dependent memory:  Our recall is often better when we try to recall information in the same physical setting in which we encoded it, possibly because along with the information, the environment is part of the memory trace

• Mood congruence: aids retrieval.

• State-dependent: things we learn in one internal state are more easily recalled when in the same state again.

• Forgetting:  may result from failure to encode information, decay of stored memories, or an inability to access information from LTM.

• Relearning: is a measure of retention of memory that assesses the time saved compared to learning the first time when learning information again.

Cues and Interference

• Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon:  Sometimes we know that we know something but can’t pull it out of memory.

• Interference:  Learning some items may prevent retrieving others, especially when the items are similar.

• Proactive interference: occurs when something we learned earlier disrupts recall of something we experience later.

• Retroactive interference: is the disruptive effect of new learning on the recall of old information.

• Sigmund Freud: believed that repression (unconscious forgetting) of painful memories occurs as a defense mechanism to protect our self-concepts and minimize anxiety.

• Misinformation effect: occurs when we incorporate misleading information into our memory of an event.

• Misattribution error:  Forgetting what really happened, or distortion of information at retrieval, can result when we confuse the source of information—putting words in someone else’s mouth—or remember something we see in the movies or on the Internet as actually having happened.

• Language: is a flexible system of spoken, written, or signed symbols that enables us to communicate our thoughts and feelings.

Building Blocks: Phonemes and Morphemes

• Language is made up of basic sound units called phonemes.

• Morphemes: are the smallest meaningful units of speech, such as simple words, prefixes, and suffixes.

Combination Rules

• Each language has a system of rules that determines how sounds and words can be combined and used to communicate meaning, called grammar.

• The set of rules that regulate the order in which words can be combined into grammatically sensible sentences in a language is called syntax.

• The set of rules that enables us to derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences is semantics.

Language Acquisition Stages

• Babbling is the production of phonemes, not limited to the phonemes to which the baby is exposed.

• Holophrase: one word—to convey meaning.

• Telegraphic speech:  they begin to put together two-word sentences.

• Overgeneralization: or overregularization in which children apply grammatical rules without making appropriate exceptions.

Theories of Language Acquisition

• Noam Chomsky says that our brains are prewired for a universal grammar of nouns, verbs, subjects, objects, negations, and questions.

• He compares our language acquisition capacity to a “language acquisition device,” in which grammar switches are turned on as children are exposed to their language.

Thinking

• Linguist Benjamin Whorf proposed a radical hypothesis that our language guides and determines our thinking.

  • He thought that different languages cause people to view the world quite differently.

• Linguistic relativity hypothesis: has largely been discredited by empirical research.

• Metacognition: thinking about how you think

Problem Solving

• Algorithm: is a problem-solving strategy that involves a slow, step-by-step procedure that guarantees a solution to many types of problems.

• Insight: is a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem.

• Trial-and-error approach: This approach involves trying possible solutions and discarding those that do not work.

• Inductive reasoning: involves reasoning from the specific to the general, forming concepts about all members of a category based on some members, which is often correct but may be wrong if the members we have chosen do not fairly represent all of the members.

• Deductive reasoning: involves reasoning from the general to the specific.

Obstacles to Problem Solving

• Fixation: is an inability to look at a problem from a fresh perspective, using a prior strategy that may not lead to success.

• Functional fixedness: a failure to use an object in an unusual way.

• Amos Tversky and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman studied how and why people make illogical choices.

• Availability heuristic: estimating the probability of certain events in terms of how readily they come to mind.

• Representative heuristic: a mental shortcut by which a new situation is judged by how well it matches a stereotypical model or a particular prototype.

• Framing: refers to the way a problem is posed.

• Anchoring effect: is this tendency to be influenced by a suggested reference point, pulling our response toward that point.

Biases

• Confirmation bias: is a tendency to search for and use information that supports our preconceptions and ignore information that refutes our ideas.

• Belief perseverance: is a tendency to hold onto a belief after the basis for the belief is discredited.

• Belief bias: the tendency for our preexisting beliefs to distort logical reasoning, making illogical conclusions seem valid or logical conclusions seem invalid.

• Hindsight bias: is a tendency to falsely report, after the event, that we correctly predicted the outcome of the event.

• Overconfidence bias: is a tendency to underestimate the extent to which our judgments are erroneous.

Creativity

• Creativity: is the ability to think about a problem or idea in new and unusual ways, to come up with unconventional solutions.

• Convergent thinkers: use problem-solving strategies directed toward one correct solution to a problem

• Divergent thinkers: produce many answers to the same question, characteristic of creativity.

• Brainstorm: generating lots of ideas without evaluating them.

Standardization and Norms

• Psychometricians: are involved in test development in order to measure some construct or behavior that distinguishes people.

• Constructs: are ideas that help summarize a group of related phenomena or objects; they are hypothetical abstractions related to behavior and defined by groups of objects or events.

• Standardization: is a two-part test development procedure that first establishes test norms from the test results of the large representative sample that initially took the test and then ensures that the test is both administered and scored uniformly for all test takers.

• Norms: are scores established from the test results of the representative sample, which are then used as a standard for assessing the performances of subsequent test takers; more simply, norms are standards used to compare scores of test takers.

Reliability and Validity

• If a test is reliable, we should obtain the same score no matter where, when, or how many times we take it (if other variables remain the same).

  • Several methods are used to determine if a test is reliable.

• Test-retest method: the same exam is administered to the same group on two different occasions, and the scores compared.

• Split-half method: the score on one half of the test questions is correlated with the score on the other half of the questions to see if they are consistent.

• Alternate form method or equivalent form method: two different versions of a test on the same material are given to the same test takers, and the scores are correlated.

• Interrater reliability: the extent to which two or more scorers evaluate the responses in the same way.

• Validity: is the extent to which an instrument accurately measures or predicts what it is supposed to measure or predict.

Performance, Observational, and Self-Report Tests

• Performance test: the test taker knows what he or she should do in response to questions or tasks on the test, and it is assumed that the test taker will do the best he or she can to succeed.

  • Performance tests include the SATs, AP tests, Wechsler intelligence tests, Stanford–Binet intelligence tests, and most classroom tests, including finals, as well as computer tests and road tests for a driver’s license.

• Observational tests: differ from performance tests in that the person being tested does not have a single, well-defined task to perform but rather is assessed on typical behavior or performance in a specific context.

• Speed tests: generally include a large number of relatively easy items administered with strict time limits under which most test takers find it impossible to answer all questions.

Ability, Interest, and Personality Tests

• General mental ability is particularly important in scholastic performance and in performing cognitively demanding tasks.

• Interests influence a person’s reactions to and satisfaction with his or her situation.

• Personality involves consistency in behavior over a wide range of situations.

• Aptitude tests are designed to predict a person’s future performance or to assess the person’s capacity to learn, and achievement tests are designed to assess what a person has already learned.

Ethics and Standards in Testing

• Tests: are developed and used ethically to avoid abuse.

• Numerous professional organizations, including the American Psychological Association, have published technical and professional standards for the construction, evaluation, interpretation, and application of psychological tests to promote the client's welfare and best interests, protect assessment results from misuse, respect the client's right to know the results, and protect test takers' dignity.

• Personnel testing: requires informed consent and confidentiality from psychologists.

• Professionals should use tests as intended.

Intelligence and Intelligence Testing

• Reification: occurs when a construct is treated as though it were a concrete, tangible object.

• Intelligence test developer David Wechsler said, “Intelligence, operationally defined, is the aggregate or global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment.”

Francis Galton’s Measurement of Psychophysical Performance

• Francis Galton: who measured psychomotor tasks to gauge intelligence, reasoning that people with excellent physical abilities are better adapted for survival and thus highly intelligent.

• James McKeen Cattell: brought Galton’s studies to the United States, measuring strength, reaction time, sensitivity to pain, and weight discrimination, using the term mental test.

• French psychologist Alfred Binet was hired by the French government to identify children who would not benefit from a traditional school setting and those who would benefit from special education.

  • He collaborated with Theodore Simon to create the Binet–Simon scale, which he meant to be used only for class placement.

Alfred Binet’s Measurement of Judgment

• Binet believed that as we age, our knowledge of the world becomes more sophisticated, so most 6-year-olds answer questions differently than 8-year-olds.

• Children were given a mental age or level based on their test responses.

• When a 6-year-old and an 8-year-old have mental ages 2 years below their chronological ages, it can be misleading.

• The younger child would lag behind peers more.

• German psychologist William Stern suggested determining a child's intelligence by comparing mental age (MA) to chronological age (CA).

Mental Age and the Intelligence Quotient

• Lewis Terman: developed the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scale reporting results as an IQ, intelligence quotient, which is the child’s mental age divided by his or her chronological age, multiplied by 100; or MA/CA × 100.

The Wechsler Intelligence Scales

• David Wechsler: developed another set of age-based intelligence tests: the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI) for preschool children, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) for ages 6 to 16, and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS ) for older adolescents and adults.

Kinds of Intelligence

• A contemporary of Alfred Binet, Charles Spearman, tested a large number of people on a number of different types of mental tasks.

• Factor analysis: a statistical procedure that identifies closely related clusters of factors among groups of items by determining which variables have a high degree of correlation.

• Louis Thurstone disagreed with Spearman’s concept of g.

• John Horn and Raymond Cattell determined that Spearman’s g should be divided into two factors of intelligences: fluid intelligence, those cognitive abilities requiring speed or rapid learning that tend to diminish with adult aging, and crystallized intelligence, learned knowledge and skills such as vocabulary that tend to increase with age.

Multiple Intelligences

• Howard Gardner: is one of the many critics of the g or single factor intelligence theory.

  • He has proposed a theory of multiple intelligences.

  • Three of his intelligences are measured on traditional intelligence tests: logical-mathematical, verbal-linguistic, and spatial.

  • Five of his intelligences are not usually tested on standardized tests: musical, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalistic, intrapersonal, and interpersonal.

  • Gardner has also introduced the possibility of a ninth intelligence—existential—which would be seen in those who ask questions about our existence, life, death, and how we got here.

• Peter Salovey and John Mayer labeled the ability to perceive, express, understand, and regulate emotions as emotional intelligence.

• Triarchic theory of intelligence: analytic, creative, and practical.

• Analytical thinking: is what is tested by traditional IQ test and what we are asked to do in school—compare, contrast, analyze, and figure out cause and effect relationships.

Environmental Influences on Intelligence

• According to the reaction range model, genetic makeup determines the upper limit for an individual’s IQ, which can be attained in an ideal environment, and the lower limit, which would result in an impoverished environment

• Stereotype threat: anxiety that influences members of a group concerned that their performance on a test will confirm a negative stereotype, has been evidenced in studies by Steele, Joshua Aronson, and many others.

Unit 6: Developmental Psychology

Nature vs. Nurture

Prenatal Development

• Prenatal development begins with fertilization, or conception, and ends with birth.

• The zygote is a fertilized ovum with the genetic instructions for a new individual normally contained in 46 chromosomes.

• Different genes function in cells of the three different layers; the forming individual is now considered an embryo.

• Fetus: the developing human organism from about 9 weeks after conception to birth.

Behavior of the Neonate

• Rooting: is the neonate’s response of turning his or her head when touched on the cheek and then trying to put the stimulus into his or her mouth.

• Sucking is the automatic response of drawing in anything at the mouth.

• Swallowing is a contraction of throat muscles that enables food to pass into the esophagus without the neonate choking.

• Grasping reflex: when the infant closes his or her fingers tightly around an object put in his or her hand.

• Moro or startle reflex: in which a loud noise or sudden drop causes the neonate to automatically arch his or her back, fling his/her limbs out, and quickly retract them.

Theories of Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

• Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget developed a stage theory of cognitive development based on decades of careful observation and testing of children.

• Piaget believed that all knowledge begins with building blocks called schemas, mental representations that organize and categorize information processed by our brain.

• Through the process of assimilation, we fit new information into our existing schemas.

• Through the process of accommodation we modify our schemas to fit new information.

Sensorimotor (First) Stage - Birth to 2 years old

• During which the baby explores the world using his or her senses and motor interactions with objects in the environment.

• The concept of object permanence—that objects continue to exist even when out of sight—to Piaget seemed to develop suddenly between 8 and 10 months.

Preoperational (Second) Stage - 2-7 years old.

• The child is mainly egocentric, seeing the world from his or her own point of view.

• Egocentrism: is consistent with a belief called animism, that all things are living just like him or her and the belief, called artificialism, that all objects are made by people.

Concrete Operational (Third) Stage - 7-12 years old

• Conservation concepts: in which changes in the form of an object do not alter physical properties of mass, volume, and number.

Formal Operational (Fourth) Stage

• In this stage, youngsters are able to think abstractly and hypothetically.

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory of Cognitive Development

• Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky emphasized the role of the environment (nurture) and gradual growth (continuity) in intellectual functioning.

• Vygotsky thought that development proceeds mainly from the outside in by the process of internalization, absorbing information from a specified social environmental context.

• Zone of proximal development (ZPD): the range between the level at which a child can solve a problem working alone with difficulty and the level at which a child can solve a problem with the assistance of adults or more-skilled children.

Cognitive Changes in Adults

• Fluid intelligence: those abilities requiring speed or rapid learning—generally diminishes with aging

• Crystallized intelligence: learned knowledge and skills such as vocabulary—generally improves with age (at least through the 60s).

Theories of Moral Development

• Lawrence Kohlberg: like Piaget, thought that moral thinking develops sequentially in stages as cognitive abilities develop.

• Preconventional level of morality: in which they do the right thing to avoid punishment (stage 1) or to further their self-interests (stage 2).

• Conventional level of morality: in which they follow rules to live up to the expectations of others, “good boy/nice girl” (stage 3), or to maintain “law and order” and do their duty (stage 4).

• Postconventional level of morality: in which they evidence a social contract orientation that promotes the society’s welfare (stage 5) or evidence an ethical principle orientation that promotes justice and avoids self-condemnation (stage 6).

• Carol Gilligan: found that women rarely reach the highest stages of morality, because they think more about the caring thing to do or following an ethic of care, rather than what the rules allow or following an ethic of justice.

Theories of Social and Emotional Development

• Harry Harlow’s: experimental research with monkeys disproved that belief when he found that baby monkeys separated from their mothers preferred to spend time with and sought comfort from a soft cloth-covered substitute (surrogate) rather than a bare wire substitute with a feeding bottle.

• Mary Ainsworth: studied attachment using a “strange situation” where a mother and baby play in an unfamiliar room, the baby interacts with the mother and an unfamiliar woman, the mother leaves the baby with the other woman briefly, the baby is left alone briefly, and then the mother returns to the room.

• Self-awareness: consciousness of oneself as a person, and social referencing, observing the behavior of others in social situations to obtain information or guidance, both develop between ages 1 and 2.

Parenting Styles

• Diana Baumrind: studied how parenting styles affect the emotional growth of children.

Erikson’s Stage Theory of Psychosocial Development

• Erik Erikson: made this chart below

Middle Age and Death

• Daniel Levinson: described a midlife transition period at about age 40, seen by some as a last chance to achieve their goals.

• Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s studies of death and dying have focused attention on the end of life, encouraging further studies of death and dying and the growth of the hospice movement that treats terminal patients and their families to alleviate physical and emotional pain.

Gender Roles and Sex Differences

• Psychoanalytic Perspective: According to Freud’s psychoanalytic perspective, young girls learn to act feminine from their mothers, and young boys learn to act masculine from their fathers when they identify with their same-sex parent as a result of resolving either the Electra or Oedipal complex at about age 5.

• Behavioral Perspective: According to (the behavioral perspective) social learning theory, children respond to rewards and punishments for their behavior, and they observe and imitate significant role models, such as their parents, to acquire their gender identity.

• Cognitive Perspective: According to the cognitive perspective,  children actively engage in making meaning out of information they learn about gender.

  • Sandra Bem’s gender schema theory says that children form a schema of gender that filters their perceptions of the world according to what is appropriate for males and what is appropriate for females.

• Androgyny: the presence of desirable masculine and feminine characteristics in the same individual.

Sex Differences in Cognition

• Meta-analysis: of research on gender comparisons indicates that, for cognitive skills, the differences within either gender are larger than the differences between the two genders.

• Stereotype threat: anxiety that influences members of a group concerned that their performance will confirm a negative stereotype.

Unit 7: Motivation, Emotion, and Personality

Theories of Motivation

Instinct/Evolutionary Theory

• Instincts: are complex, inherited behavior patterns characteristic of a species.

• To be considered a true instinct, the behavior must be stereotypical, performed automatically in the same way by all members of a species in response to a specific stimulus.

• Drive reduction theory: behavior is motivated by the need to reduce drives such as hunger, thirst, or sex.

Incentive Theory

• Secondary motives: motives we learn to desire, are learned through society’s pull.

Arousal Theory

Yerkes–Dodson rule: states that we usually perform most activities best when moderately aroused, and efficiency of performance is usually lower when arousal is either low or high.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Physiological Motives

• Hunger and Hormones: The hypothalamus reduces hunger by stimulating the small intestine to release cholecystokinin when food enters.

  • Sugars from the small intestine raise blood sugar. When blood sugar rises, the pancreas releases insulin.

Hunger and the Hypothalamus

• Lateral hypothalamus (LH): was originally called the “on” button for hunger.

• Ventromedial hypothalamus (VMH): was called the satiety center, or “off” button, for hunger.

Social Motivation

Achievement

• Achievement motive: is a desire to meet some internalized standard of excellence.

• McClelland used responses to the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) to measure achievement motivation.

• Affiliation motive: is the need to be with others.

James-Lange Theory

• American psychologist William James, a founder of the school of functionalism, and Danish physiologist Karl Lange proposed that our awareness of our physiological arousal leads to our conscious experience of emotion.

• According to this theory, external stimuli activate our autonomic nervous systems, producing specific patterns of physiological changes for different emotions that evoke specific emotional experiences.

Cannon-Bard Theory

• Walter Cannon and Philip Bard disagreed with the James-Lange theory.

• According to the Cannon-Bard theory, conscious experience of emotion accompanies physiological responses.

• Cannon and Bard theorized that the thalamus (the processor of all sensory information but smell in the brain) simultaneously sends information to both the limbic system (emotional center) and the frontal lobes (cognitive center) about an event.

  • When we see the vicious growling dog, our bodily arousal and our recognition of the fear we feel occur at the same time.

Opponent-Process Theory

• According to opponent-process theory, when we experience an emotion, an opposing emotion will counter the first emotion, lessening the experience of that emotion.

Cognitive-Appraisal Theory

• Different people on an amusement park ride experience different emotions.

• According to Richard Lazarus's cognitive-appraisal theory, our emotional experience depends on our interpretation of the situation we are in.

Stress and Coping

Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome

• Hans Selye, we react similarly to both physical and psychological stressors. Stressors are stimuli such as heat, cold, pain, mild shock,restraint, etc., that we perceive as endangering our well-being.

• Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS): three-stage theory of alarm, resistance, and exhaustion describes our body's reaction to stress.

Psychodynamic/Psychoanalytic Theories

Sigmund Freud

• Reaction formation: is acting in a manner exactly opposite to our true feelings.

• Sublimation: is the redirection of unacceptable sexual or aggressive impulses into more socially acceptable behaviors.

Freud’s Stages of Psychosexual Development

Carl Jung's Analytic Theory of Personality

• Personal unconscious: is similar to Freud's preconscious and unconscious, a storehouse of all our own past memories, hidden instincts, and urges unique to us.

• Collective unconscious: is the powerful and influential system of the psyche that contains universal memories and ideas that all people have inherited from our ancestors over the course of evolution.

• Archetypes: or common themes found in all cultures, religions, and literature, both ancient and modern.

• Individuation: is the psychological process by which a person becomes an individual, a unified whole, including conscious and unconscious processes.

Albert Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory

• Reciprocal determinism: which states that the characteristics of the person, the person's behavior, and the environment all affect one another in two-way causal relationships.

• Self-efficacy: is our belief that we can perform behaviors that are necessary to accomplish tasks, and that we are competent.

• Collective efficacy: is our perception that with collaborative effort, our group will obtain its desired outcome.

Gordon Allport's Trait Theory

• Cardinal trait: is a defining characteristic, in a small number of us, that dominates and shapes all of our behavior.

• Central trait: is a general characteristic, between 5 and 10 of which shape much of our behavior.

Unit 8: Clinical Psychology

Definitions of Disorder

• The definition of disordered behavior is composed of four components.

  • First, disordered behavior is unusual—it deviates statistically from typical behavior.

  • Second, disordered behavior is maladaptive: that is, it interferes with a person’s ability to function in a particular situation.

  • Third, disordered behavior is labeled as abnormal by the society in which it occurs.

  • Finally, disordered behavior is characterized by perceptual or cognitive dysfunction.

Theories of Psychopathology

• Freud and the psychoanalytic school hypothesized that the interactions among conscious and especially unconscious parts of the mind were responsible for a great deal of disordered behavior.

• Humanistic school: of psychology suggests that disordered behavior is, in part, a result of people being too sensitive to the criticisms and judgments of others.

• Cognitive perspective: views disordered behavior as the result of faulty or illogical thoughts.

• Behavioral approach: to disordered behavior is based on the notion that all behavior, including disordered behavior, is learned.

• Sociocultural approach: holds that society and culture help define what is acceptable behavior.

Schizophrenia Spectrum and other Psychotic Disorders

Disorganized thinking and disorganized speech are typical.

Anxiety Disorders

• Panic disorder: is an anxiety disorder characterized by recurring panic attacks, as well as the constant worry of another panic attack occurring.

• Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD): is an anxiety disorder characterized by an almost constant state of autonomic nervous system arousal and feelings of dread and worry.

• Agoraphobia: for example, is the fear of being in open spaces, public places, or other places from which escape is perceived to be difficult.

Trauma-and Stressor-Related Disorders

• Other disorders include reactive attachment disorder: which can occur in seriously neglected children who are unable to form attachments to their adult caregivers, and adjustment disorders, or maladaptive responses to particular stressors.

Disassociative Disorders

• Thus, one might experience derealization, the sense that “this is not really happening,” or depersonalization, the sense that “this is not happening to me.”

• Significant gaps in memory may be related to dissociative amnesia, an inability to recall life events that goes far beyond normal forgetting.

  • dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder), in which one may not only “lose time,” but also manifest a separate personality during that lost time.

Somatic Symptom and Related Disorders

• Somatic symptom disorder: involves, as one might expect, bodily symptoms combined with disordered thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors connected to these symptoms.

• Related worries appear in illness anxiety disorder, in which one worries excessively about the possibility of falling ill.

• Conversion disorder: (formerly known as hysteria) involves bodily symptoms like changed motor function or changed sensory function that are incompatible with neurological explanations.

• Factitious disorder: in which an individual knowingly falsified symptoms in order to get medical care, or sympathy or aid from others.

Personality Disorders

• Cluster A: includes paranoid, schizoid, and schizotypal personality disorders.

  • Schizoid personality disorder is marked by disturbances in feeling (detachment from social relationships, flat affect, does not enjoy close relationships with people), whereas schizotypal personality disorder is marked by disturbances in thought (odd beliefs that do not quite qualify as delusions, such as superstitions, belief in a “sixth sense,” etc.; odd speech; eccentric behavior or appearance).

• Cluster B: includes antisocial, borderline, histrionic, and narcissistic personality disorders.

  • Terms like psychopath or sociopath have been used to describe people with antisocial personality disorder, which is characterized by a persistent pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others.

  • Borderline personality disorder: involves a very stormy relationship with the world, with others, and with one’s own feelings.

  • Histrionic personality disorder: involves a pattern of excessive emotionality and attention-seeking, beyond what might be considered normal (even in a “culture of selfies”).

  • Narcissistic personality disorder: involves an overinflated sense of self-importance, fantasies of success, beliefs that one is special, a sense of entitlement, a lack of empathy for others, and a display of arrogant behaviors or attitudes.

• Cluster C: includes avoidant, dependent, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorders.

  • Avoidant personality disorder: involves an enduring pattern of social inhibition, feelings of inadequacy, and hypersensitivity to real or perceived criticism, which lead to avoidance behavior in relation to social, personal, and intimate relationships.

  • Dependent personality disorder: is marked by an excessive need to be cared for, leading to clingy and submissive behavior and fears of separation.

  • Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD): is marked by a rigid concern with order, perfectionism, control, and work, at the expense of flexibility, spontaneity, openness, and play.

Humanistic Therapy

• Client-centered therapy: was invented by Carl Rogers and involves the assumption that clients can be understood only in terms of their own realities.

• The next key for successful client-centered therapy, according to Rogers, is unconditional positive regard.

  • Unconditional positive regard: is a term used in psychology to refer to an attitude of acceptance and warmth towards another person, regardless of their behavior or beliefs.

  • The therapist provides this unconditional positive regard to help the client reach a state of unconditional self-worth.

• The final key to successful therapy is accurate empathic understanding.

  • Accurate empathic understanding: is the ability to accurately understand and identify what someone else is feeling.

• Rogers used this term to describe the therapist’s ability to view the world from the eyes of the client.

• Fritz Perls: developed this approach to blend an awareness of unconscious tensions with the belief that one must become aware of and deal with those tensions by taking personal responsibility.

Behavioral Therapy

• Behavioral therapy: stands in dramatic contrast to the insight therapies.

• Counterconditioning: is a technique in which a response to a given stimulus is replaced by a different response.

  • One way of trying to extinguish a behavior is called flooding.

  • Flooding involves exposing a client to the stimulus that causes the undesirable response.

• Implosion: is a similar technique, in which the client imagines the disruptive stimuli rather than actually confronting them.

  Modeling: is a therapeutic approach based on Bandura’s social learning theory.

  • This technique is based on the principle of vicarious learning.

Cognitive Therapy

• Cognitive approaches to the treatment of disordered behavior rely on changing cognitions, or the ways people think about situations, in order to change behavior.

• One such approach is rational-emotive behavior therapy (REBT) (sometimes called simply RET, for rational-emotive therapy), formulated by Albert Ellis.

• Another cognitive approach is cognitive therapy, formulated by Aaron Beck, in which the focus is on maladaptive schemas.

• Maladaptive schemas: include arbitrary inference, in which a person draws conclusions without evidence, and dichotomous thinking, which involves all-or-none conceptions of situations.

Biological Therapies

• Biological therapies are medical approaches to behavioral problems.

• Biological therapies are typically used in conjunction with one of the previously mentioned forms of treatment.

• Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT): is a form of treatment in which fairly high voltages of electricity are passed across a patient’s head.

  • This treatment causes temporary amnesia and can result in seizures.

• Another form of biological treatment is psychosurgery.

  • Perhaps the most well-known form of psychosurgery is the prefrontal lobotomy, in which parts of the frontal lobes are cut off from the rest of the brain.

• Psychopharmacology: is the treatment of psychological and behavioral maladaptations with drugs.

  • There are four broad classes of psychotropic, or psychologically active drugs: antipsychotics, antidepressants, anxiolytics, and lithium salts.

• Antipsychotics: like Clozapine, Thorazine, and Haldol reduce the symptoms of schizophrenia by blocking the neural receptors for dopamine.

• Antidepressants: can be grouped into three types: monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibitors, tricyclics, and selective reuptake inhibitors.

• MAO inhibitors: like Eutron, work by increasing the amount of serotonin and norepinephrine in the synaptic cleft.

• Tricyclics: like Norpramin, Amitriptyline, and Imipramine increase the amount of serotonin and norepinephrine.

• The third class of antidepressants, selective reuptake inhibitors (often called the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, for the neurotransmitter most affected by them) also work by increasing the amount of neurotransmitter at the synaptic cleft, in this case by blocking the reuptake mechanism of the cell that released the neurotransmitters.

• Anxiolytics depress the central nervous system and reduce anxiety while increasing feelings of well-being and reducing insomnia.

• Benzodiazepines: which also include Valium (Diazepam) and Librium (Chlordiazepoxide), cause muscle relaxation and a feeling of tranquility.

• Lithium carbonate:a salt, is effective in the treatment of bipolar disorder.

Modes Of Therapy

• Group therapy: in which clients meet together with a therapist as an interactive group, has some advantages over individual therapy.

• Twelve-step programs: are one form of group therapy, although they are usually not moderated by professional psychotherapists.

• Another form of therapy in which there is more than a single client is couples or family therapy.

  • This type of treatment arose out of the simple observation that some dysfunctional behavior affects the afflicted person’s loved ones.

Unit 9: Social Psychology

The Relationship Between Attitudes and Behavior

• Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith: conducted the classic experiment about cognitive dissonance in the late 1950s.

  • Their participants performed a boring task and were then asked to lie and tell the next subject (actually a confederate1 of the experimenter) that they had enjoyed the task.

Compliance Strategies

• Often people use certain strategies to get others to comply with their wishes.

• Such compliance strategies have also been the focus of much psychological research.

• Another common strategy involves using norms of reciprocity.

• People tend to think that when someone does something nice for them, they ought to do something nice in return.

• Norms of reciprocity: are at work when you feel compelled to send money to the charity that sent you free return address labels or when you cast your vote in the student election for the candidate that handed out those delicious chocolate chip cookies.

Attribution Theory

• Attribution theory: is another area of study within the field of social cognition.

  • Attribution theory tries to explain how people determine the cause of what they observe.

• Harold Kelley: put forth a theory that explains the kind of attributions people make based on three kinds of information: consistency, distinctiveness, and consensus.

• Consistency: refers to how similarly the individual acts in the same situation over time.

• Distinctiveness: refers to how similar this situation is to other situations in which we have watched Charley.

• Consensus: asks us to consider how others in the same situation have responded.

• A classic study involving self-fulfilling prophecies was Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson’s (1968) “Pygmalion in the Classroom” experiment.

Attributional Biases

• When looking at the behavior of others, people tend to overestimate the importance of dispositional factors and underestimate the role of situational factors.

  • This tendency is known as the fundamental attribution error.

• The fundamental attribution was named fundamental because it was believed to be so widespread.

• In an individualistic culture, like the American culture, the importance and uniqueness of the individual is stressed.

• In more collectivist cultures, like Japanese culture, a person’s link to various groups such as family or company is stressed.

• False-consensus effect: The tendency for people to overestimate the number of people who agree with them.

• Self-serving bias: is the tendency to take more credit for good outcomes than for bad ones.

• Researchers have found that people evidence a bias toward thinking that bad things happen to bad people.

  • This belief in a just world, known simply as the just-world bias, in which misfortunes befall people who deserve them, can be seen in the tendency to blame victims.

Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination

• Stereotypes: may be either negative or positive and can be applied to virtually any group of people (e.g., racial, ethnic, geographic).

• Prejudice: is an undeserved, usually negative, attitude toward a group of people.

• Stereotyping: can lead to prejudice when negative stereotypes (those rude New Yorkers) are applied uncritically to all members of a group (she is from New York, therefore she must be rude) and a negative attitude results.

• Ethnocentrism: the belief that one’s culture (e.g., ethnic, racial) is superior to others, is a specific kind of prejudice.

• People tend to see members of their own group, the in-group, as more diverse than members of other groups, out-groups.

  • This phenomenon is often referred to as out-group homogeneity.

• In-group bias: is thought to stem from people’s belief that they themselves are good people.

Origin of Stereotypes and Prejudice

• Many different theories attempt to explain how people become prejudiced.

• Some psychologists have suggested that people naturally and inevitably magnify differences between their own group and others as a function of the cognitive process of categorization.

• By taking into account the in-group bias discussed above, this idea suggests that people cannot avoid forming stereotypes.

Combating Prejudice

• One theory about how to reduce prejudice is known as the contact theory.

• The contact theory: states that contact between hostile groups will reduce animosity, but only if the groups are made to work toward a goal that benefits all and necessitates the participation of all.

  • Such a goal is called a superordinate goal.

• Muzafer Sherif’s (1966): camp study (also known as the Robbers Cave study) illustrates both how easily out-group bias can be created and how superordinate goals can be used to unite formerly antagonistic groups.

  • He conducted a series of studies at a summer camp.

Aggression and Antisocial Behavior

• Instrumental aggression: is when the aggressive act is intended to secure a particular end.

• Hostile aggression: has no such clear purpose.

• Sociobiologists: suggest that the expression of aggression is adaptive under certain circumstances.

• One of the most influential theories, however, is known as the frustration-aggression hypothesis.

Prosocial Behavior

• Helping behavior is termed prosocial behavior.

• Much of the research in this area has focused on bystander intervention, the conditions under which people nearby are more and less likely to help someone in trouble.

• Counterintuitively, the larger the number of people who witness an emergency situation, the less likely any one is to intervene.

  • This finding is known as the bystander effect.

• One explanation for this phenomenon is called diffusion of responsibility.

  • The larger the group of people who witness a problem, the less responsible any one individual feels to help.

• People tend to assume that someone else will take action so they need not do so.

• Another factor contributing to the bystander effect is known as pluralistic ignorance.

• People seem to decide what constitutes appropriate behavior in a situation by looking to others.

Attraction

• Social psychologists also study what factors increase the chance that people will like one another.

• A significant body of research indicates that we like others who are similar to us, with whom we come into frequent contact, and who return our positive feelings.

• A term often employed as part of liking and loving studies is self-disclosure.

• One self-discloses when one shares a piece of personal information with another.

• Close relationships with friends and lovers are often built through a process of self-disclosure.

The Influence of Others on an Individual’s Behavior

• A major area of research in social psychology is how an individual’s behavior can be affected by another’s actions or even merely by another person’s presence.

• A number of studies have illustrated that people perform tasks better in front of an audience than they do when they are alone.

  • They yell louder, run faster, and reel in a fishing rod more quickly.

  • This phenomenon, that the presence of others improves task performance, is known as social facilitation.

• When the task being observed was a difficult one rather than a simple, well-practiced skill, being watched by others actually hurt performance, a finding known as social impairment.

• Conformity: has been an area of much research as well.

  • Conformity is the tendency of people to go along with the views or actions of others.

• Solomon Asch (1951): conducted one of the most interesting conformity experiments.

Group Dynamics

• All groups have norms, rules about how group members should act.

• Within groups is often a set of specific roles.

• Sometimes people take advantage of being part of a group by social loafing.

  • Social loafing: is the phenomenon when individuals do not put in as much effort when acting as part of a group as they do when acting alone.

• Group polarization: is the tendency of a group to make more extreme decisions than the group members would make individually.

  • Studies about group polarization usually have participants give their opinions individually, then group them to discuss their decisions, and then have the group make a decision.

• Groupthink: a term coined by Irving Janis, describes the tendency for some groups to make bad decisions.

  • Groupthink occurs when group members suppress their reservations about the ideas supported by the group.

• This loss of self-restraint occurs when group members feel anonymous and aroused, and this phenomenon is known as deindividuation.

• One famous experiment that showed not only how such conditions can cause people to deindividuation but also the effect of roles and the situation in general, is Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiment.