Untitled Flashcards Set

 Chapter 9: Human Development

9.1 Special Considerations in Human Development

Developmental psychology: study of how behavior changes over the lifespan

• Nature: our genetics

• Nurture: environment

Clarifying the nature-nurture debate

• Gene-environment interaction: The impact of genes on behavior depends on the environment in which the behavior develops

  • Bidirectional relationship of genes and environment

  • Example: Individuals with gene causing low production of monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) are more likely to become violent criminals

    • This genetic risk factor depends on exposure to environmental factors

    • Low MAO gene + maltreatment → violence

    • Low MAO gene without maltreatment → no effect

• Nature via nurture: genetic predispositions drive us to select and create particular environments that influence our behavior

  • Leads to mistaken appearance of nature being the causal factor, but in reality, genetics are involved in the environment we select

  • Ex. fearful children seek environments rid of their anxieties → makes it appear as though safe environments creates fearfulness, even though this is controlled by their genetic predispositions

• Gene expression: some genes “turn on” only in response to specific environmental triggers

  • Epigenetics: whether genes are active is regulated by day-by-day and moment-by-moment environmental conditions

  • Ex. children with genes that predispose them to anxiety may never become anxious unless a highly stressful life event occurs (ex. family death)

The Mystique of Early Experience

• External stimuli have a significant impact on brain development and behavior

• Mistake of overestimating the unique impact of experiences during infancy on long-term development

  • Children are highly resilient

    • Can withstand stress and trauma in surprisingly good shape

  • Later experiences play a large role in development, not just early experiences

    • Positive experiences can often counteract the negative effects of early deprivation in children from diverse cultures

    • Brain changes throughout childhood and adulthood

Attending to Cohort Effects

• Systematic differences between generations can impact behavior

  • Ex. the spending habits of millennials vs. those raised during the Great Depression differ due to systematic differences in the environments they were raised in 

  • Cross-sectional design: research design that examines people of different ages at a single point in time

    • Cohort effects: the risk of cross-sectional design is that it doesn’t control for cohort effects: effect observed in a sample of participants that results from individuals in the sample growing up during a certain time period

  • Longitudinal design: research design that examines development in the same group of people on multiple occasions over time

    • The only way to control for cohort effects

    • Can be costly, time consuming, or nearly impossible to conduct

    • Attrition: participants drop out of study before it is completed

      • Problem in longitudinal design because participants who drop out may differ in important ways from the participants that stay in

    • Commonly observational designs instead of experimental → cannot infer cause and effect relationship

Post-hoc fallacy: false assumption that because one event occurs before another event, it must have caused that event

• Ex. 100% of serial killers drank milk as children → doesn’t mean milk CAUSES murder

Bidirectional influences

• Children’s experiences influence their development, and their development also influences what they experience

9.2 The Developing Body: Physical and Motor Development

Conception and Prenatal Development: From Zygote to Baby

• Prenatal period: human body acquires basic form and structure

1. Zygote: fertilized egg

2. Blastocyst (conception to 1.5 weeks, germinal stage)

• Zygote divides to form blastocyst: ball of identical cells without specialized function

3. Embryo (2-8 weeks, embryonic stage)

• Cells differentiate

• Development of limbs, facial features, major organs (heart, lungs, brain)

• Spontaneous miscarriages occur when embryo doesn’t form properly

4. Fetus (9 weeks to birth, fetal stage)

• Major organs are established, heart begins to beat

• Physical maturation until birth (“bulking up”)

Brain Development: 18 Days and Beyond

• Brain begins to develop 18 days after fertilization

• Continues to develop well into adulthood and adolescence (until other organs which only grow in size after birth)

• Proliferation: prenatal stage from 18 days to 6 months when neurons develop at astronomical rate

  • Up to 250,000 brain cells per minute

• Migration: beginning in the 4th month, neurons migrate and move to their final positions in specific structures of the brain, such as the hippocampus and cerebellum

Obstacles to Normal Fetal Development

1. Premature birth

• Full term = 40 weeks

• Premature birth = born at less than 36 weeks gestation

• Viability point: point in pregnancy at which infants can typically survive on their own (25 weeks but varies)

• Preemies (premature birth babies) have underdeveloped lungs and brains, often cannot breath/maintain healthy body temperature → delays in cognitive and physical development

• With each week of pregnancy, odds of fetal survival increase and odds of development disorders decrease

  • Some preemies can “catch up” and do not suffer long-term consequences, especially if born after 32 weeks gestation and have healthy birth weight for their gestational age

2. Low birth weight

• Less than 5.5 pounds at full term

• Average is 7.5 pounds

• Linked to high risk of death, infection, developmental delays, psychological disorders such as depression and anxiety (may be confounding variables)

3. Exposure to hazardous environment influences

• Teratogens: environmental factors that can affect prenatal development negatively

  • Drugs, alcohol, chicken pox, X-rays

    • Fetal alcohol syndrome → learning disabilities, delays in physical growth, facial malformations, behavioral disorders

    • Smoking → low birth weight

  • Chronic stress, anxiety, and depression in gestational parent → alters fetus’s chemical and physiological environment

4. Genetic disorders/errors in cell division

Infant Motor Development: How Babies Get Going

• Infant reflexes (survival instinct)

  • Infants born with automatic motor reflexes that are triggered by survival needs

    • Sucking reflex: automatic response to oral stimulation

    • Rooting reflex: infants look for feeding source in response to stimulation of their face

  • Acquisition of purposeful motor behaviors

    • Motor behaviors: bodily motions that occur as a result of self-initiated force that moves the bones and muscles

      • Major motor milestones

1. Sitting without support: 6 months

2. Crawling: 9 months

3. Standing: 11 months

4. Cruising: 12 months

5. Walking without assistance: 13 months

6. Running: 18-24 months

• Factors that influence motor development

  • Physical maturation/body weight → strength and coordination

    • Heavier babies take longer to develop enough strength to hold themselves up

  • Cultural and parenting practices

    • Swaddling in Peru, China, Tajikistan → prevents free movement of limbs, slows down motor development

    • Stretching, massaging, and strength building exercises in Africa and West Indies → speeds up infants motor development

    • Cloth and disposable diapers in industrialized societies → slow down walking

Growth and Physical Development Throughout Childhood

• Head to body ratio decreases as we age

• Hormonal changes

  • Growth hormone (pituitary gland) → growth spurts

  • Reproductive system releases sex hormones estrogen and androgen → growth and physical changes

    • Puberty: maturation of reproductive systems

      • Primary sex characteristics: reproductive organs and genitals

      • Secondary sex characteristics: sex-differentiating characteristics that don’t directly relate to reproduction

        • development of breast tissue, deeper voices in men, and pubic hair

      • Menarche: onset of menstruation, begins once girls have achieved full physical maturity (?)

      • Spermarche: first ejaculation, 13 years old

        • Boys take much longer to fully mature

        • Can ejaculate before they are physically mature

      • Genetic component of puberty onset

    • Noticeable difference in strength and endurance

Physical changes in adulthood

• Physical peak in early 20s

  • As we age…

    • Change in muscle mass/body fat ratio

    • Decline in senses

    • Decline in fertility (females) in 30s and 40s

• Menopause: end of menstruation, women can no longer reproduce

  • Triggered by reduction in estrogen → “hot flashes”

• Men can reproduce well into old age, but there is a decline in sperm production and testosterone levels

• Changes in agility and physical coordination with age

  • Simple motor tasks → no decline in ability

  • Learning new motor skills → decline in ability

  • Strength training minimizes the decline in motor capability

9.3 The Developing Mind: Cognitive Development

Cognitive development: study of how children acquire the ability to learn, think, reason, communicate, and remember

Core differences in different theories on cognitive development

1. Stage-like development vs. continuous development

• Mental growth spurts (sudden spurts in knowledge followed by periods of stability)

• Continuous (gradual and incremental) changes in understanding

2. Domain-general vs. domain-specific

• Domain-general: changes in cognitive skills that affect all areas of cognition together

• Domain-specific: children’s cognitive skills in different domains develop at different times

3. Main source of learning

• Physical experience: moving around in the world

• Social interaction: how parents and peers engage with them

• Biological maturation: innate programming of certain mental capacities

Jean Piaget’s theories

• Showed that children are not miniature adults → their understanding of the world differs fundamentally 

• Children are NOT passive learners, they are active learners who seek information and observe the consequences of their actions

Piaget’s 4 Stages of Development

1. Sensorimotor stage (birth to 2 years)

• Main source of knowledge and thinking is through physical interaction with the world

• Observing consequences of their actions

• Object permanence and separation anxiety

• No thought beyond immediate physical experiences

2. Preoperational stage (2 to 6 years)

• Able to think beyond the here and now, but egocentric and unable to perform mental transformations

• Symbols such as language and drawings

• Egocentric: the world revolves around their personal experiences

3. Concrete operational stage (7 to 12 years)

• Able to perform mental transformations but only on concrete physical objects

  • Ex. can sort coins by size → need a physical experience as an anchor for mental operations

• Can’t perform mental operations in abstract or hypothetical situations

4. Formal operational stage (12+ years)

• Can perform most sophisticated type of thinking: hypothetical reasoning beyond the here and now

• Can understand logical concepts and abstract questions

Equilibration: Piaget proposed that cognitive change occurs in children to achieve equilibration: the balance between their experience of the world and their understanding of it

• Children match their thinking about the world around their observations

• Assimilation: absorbing new experience into our current understanding/schema, there is no change in cognition or worldview

• Accommodation: Beliefs/schemas are altered to become more compatible with new experiences

  • Stage changes are a result of accommodation → forces children to accept a new way of thinking about the world

Pros and cons of Piaget’s theory

• Evidence that development is more continuous than stagelike

• Development is less domain-general than Piaget proposed

• Depended on children’s ability to report their experiences, which doesn’t match their ACTUAL level of understanding 

• Culturally biased

3 important contributions of Piaget

1. Viewing children as entirely different from adults

2. Characterizing learning as an active rather than passive process

3. Exploring general cognitive processes that apply to many domains → more straightforward underlying factors in development

Vygotsky’s Theory: Social and Cultural Influences on Learning

• Social and cultural factors influence learning

• Scaffolding: parents provide initial assistance in children’s learning but gradually remove structure as children become more competent

  • “Taking training wheels off of the bicycle”

• Zone of proximal development: phase when children are receptive to learning a new skill but aren’t yet successful at it

  • At this stage, children benefit from instruction

• There are NO domain-general stages → different children acquire skills and master tasks at different rates

Cognitive Landmarks of Early Development

1. Physical reasoning

• Piaget’s object permanence: understanding that objects continue to exist when they’re out of view (developed around 5 months of age)

2. Conceptual categorizations

• Learning to categorize objects by kind

• Things that look different can take a conceptual relationship

3. Formulation of self-concept

• Developing a sense of self distinct from others

• Theory of mind: children’s ability to understand that others’ perspectives can differ from theirs

  • Ability to reason about what other people know or believe

Language acquisition

• Begins in the womb

• 5th month of pregnancy: fetuses can make out the gestational parent’s voice, recognize parts of their nature language and specific songs/stories

  • Shown through operant conditioning (high-amplitude sucking procedure) → showed that babies were more responsive to mother’s native language than foreign language

• 1st year of life

  • Phonemes: native language sounds

  • Babbling: intentional vocalization that lacks specific meaning

  • Learning words

    • Comprehension precedes production: children can recognize and interpret words well before they can produce words

    • Children begin to speak at around 1 year old

    • 1 year to 1.5 years: vocabulary between 20 and 100 words

    • Mistakes in children’s speaking

      • Over-extension: applying words in a broader sense

      • Under-extension: applying words in a narrower sense

    • One-word stage: children begin speaking with individual words to convey entire thoughts

    • By age 2, they progress to 2-word phrases → more and more words over time

    • Critical period for language learning: narrow window of time in development when organism must learn skill in order to be successful at it

      • Fluency in language is influenced by age of exposure 

      • Homesign: system of signs invented by children who are deaf with hearing parents → children develop language without parental input

Variability in language development

• Different children reach language milestones at different points → doesn’t necessarily correlate with language proficiency later on

• Parents talking to their kids more greatly improves vocabulary

  • Poorer parents tend to talk to their children less → language defecits

Theoretical accounts of language acquisition

• Is language developed through imitation?

  • This is partially true because babies learn the language they hear

  • However, this doesn’t explain everything because language is generative

    • Generativity: language isn’t a set of predefined sentences, we produce new thoughts and ideas through unique combinations of words

• Nativist account

  • States that children come into the world with some basic knowledge of how language works

  • Children are born with expectations of syntactic rules

  • Language acquisition device: Noam Chomsky hypothesized that humans possess a language “organ” preprogrammed in the brain that houses syntactic rules

  • Weakness of nativist account: claims are difficult to falsify

• Challenges to these theoretical accounts

  • Children are better than adults at acquiring language

  • Specific areas of the brain are more active during language processing than in other contexts 

Numbers and mathematics

• First counting systems developed only a few thousand years ago → counting/mathematical skills do not inevitably develop

• Mathematical concepts that children learn:

1. Numbers are about amount

2. Numbers refer to specific quantities

3. Numbers ordered from small to large

4. Size is not relevant to quantity (large object and small object are both 1 item)

• These concepts are very difficult to learn, develop in different rates across countries

Cognitive changes in adolescence

• Frontal lobe is not done maturing until late adolescence or early adulthood

  • Largely responsible for planning, decision making, and impulse control

  • Explains impulsive behaviors in teenagers

  • Teens have potential to engage in harmful behaviors (sex, vandalism, drunk driving) → make worse decisions because brain is not done developing

• Peer influence

  • Limbic structures of the brain involved in social rewards become more active → teens more susceptible to peer influence and risk-taking

Cognitive function in adulthood

• Many aspects of cognitive function decline with age

  • Ability to recall information decreases after age 30

  • Processing speed also declines, likely due to decrease in brain matter in certain areas

  • Aging brains become less efficient at removing waste proteins → cognitive decline

• Some aspects of cognitive function improve with age

  • Free recall declines, but cued recall and recognition remain intact

  • Aging adults show relatively little decline when asked to remember material pertinent to their everyday lives

    • In contrast, their ability to remember random lists of words declines

  • Older adults perform better on vocabulary and knowledge tests that younger adults because crystallized intelligence stays the same or increases with age

9.4 The Developing Personality: Social and Moral Development

Social Development in Infancy and Childhood

• Infants prefer looking at faces over other objects

• At 4 days of age, infants prefer looking at their gestational parent’s face over others

• Stranger anxiety: develops around 8-9 months, infants will scream around strangers

  • Before this develops, infants are friendly with strangers

  • Stranger anxiety increases until 12-15 months, then declines steadily

• Temperament: individual differences in children’s social and emotional styles that appears early in development and is largely genetic

  • 3 major temperamental styles

1. Easy infants (40%): adaptable and relaxed

2. Difficult infants (10%): fussy and easily frustrated

3. Slow to warm up infants (15%): disturbed by new stimuli at first but gradually adjust

4. 35% of infants do not fall into any of these categories

   1. Behavioral inhibition (10%): another temperamental style identified by Jerome Kaga, infants become frightened due to new/unexpected stimuli → hearts pound, bodies tense, and amygdalae become active

      1. High behavioral inhibition increases risk for shyness and anxiety disorders later in life

      2. Very low behavioral inhibition increases risk for impulsive behaviors later in life

• Temperament is stable across infancy

• Influences how parents and caregivers interact w/ infants

• Cultural differences in newborns

Attachment: strong emotional connection we share with those to whom we feel closest

• Evolutionary purpose: ensures that infants and children don’t stray too far from caretakers

• Imprinting: animals such as geese imprint on the first large moving object they see after hatching and become very fixated on it and are unlikely to follow or bond with anything else

  • Critical period: imprinting only occurs during a specific time period (36 hours)

  • Humans and more advanced mammals do not imprint, but still form attachment

  • Sensitive period: developmental windows in more complex creatures such as cats, dogs, and humans

• Contact comfort: positive emotions afforded by touch

Different Attachment Styles

• “The Strange Situation” lab procedure: measures how comfortable infant is alone in a room, how the infant responses when a stranger enters the room, how infant responds when mother leaves infant alone with stranger, infants behavior when mother returns

• Revealed 4 attachment styles: (percentages apply to U.S. infants)

1. Secure attachment (60%): infant explores room but makes sure caregiver is watching, returns to caregiver when stranger enters, becomes upset when caregiver leaves, and then is happy when caregiver returns

   1. Caregiver is secure base: rock-solid source of support

2. Insecure-avoidant attachment (15-20%): infant explores without acknowledging caregiver, doesn’t care about entry of stranger, doesn’t care when caregiver leaves or re-enters

3. Insecure-anxious attachment (15-20%): infant doesn’t explore toys without caregiver’s assistance, is distressed when stranger enters, panics when caregiver leaves, and shows mixed reaction when caregiver returns (reaches for caregiver but refuses to be picked up)

   1. Also called anxious-ambivalent attachment

4. Disorganized attachment (5-10%): inconsistent and confused set of responses

• These attachment styles predict children’s later behavior 

  • Secure attachment style → tend to be more well-adjusted, helpful, and empathetic compared to infants with other attachment styles

  • Anxious attachment style → more likely to be disliked and mistreated by peers later in childhood

• Infants can have different attachment styles with different family members

  • Display strong preference for primary caregiver until 18 months old

Influence of Parenting on Development

• Parenting styles (Baumrind #1-3 Maccoby and Martin #4)

1. Permissive: Lenient with children, little to no discipline, lots of affection

2. Authoritarian: strict with children, little freedom, use punishment, little outward affection

3. Authoritative: supportive and affectionate but set/enforce clear and firm rules

4. Uninvolved: ignore their children, pay little attention to their positive or negative behaviors

• Authoritative parenting style leads to children having the best social and emotional adjustment and lowest levels of behavior problems 

• Uninvolved parenting style leads to worst outcomes

• Authoritarian/Permissive parenting styles are in-between

• These findings may only apply to middle-class White American families

• Average expectable environment: environment that provides children with basic needs for affection and discipline

  • As long as parents provide this, children will turn out fine

Self control: ability to inhibit our impulses

Identity: our sense of who we are + life goals and priorities

Erik Erikson’s 8 Stages of Human Development

• Believed that personality/identity growth is continuous

• Each of the stages has a distinct psychosocial crisis: dilemma concerning an individual’s relations to other people 

• Identity crisis: confusing that most adolescents experience regarding their sense of self

  • Difficulty resolving earlier crises heightens risk for later identity confusion and difficulty with intimacy/meaningful relationships

1. Infancy (trust vs. mistrust): developing general security, optimism, and trust in others

2. Toddlerhood (autonomy vs. shame/doubt): developing a sense of independence and confident self-reliance, taking setbacks in stride, or they doubt their abilities

3. Early childhood (initiative vs. guilt): developing initiative in exploring and manipulating the environment, or they feel guilty about efforts to be independent

4. Middle childhood (industry vs. inferiority): enjoyment and mastery of applying themselves to tasks, in and out of school, of they feel inferior

5. Adolescence (identity vs. role confusion): establishment of a stable and satisfying sense of role and direction, or they become confused about who they are

6. Young adulthood (intimacy vs. isolation): young adults struggle to form close relationships and to gain the capacity for intimate love, or they feel socially isolated

7. Adulthood (generativity vs. stagnation): satisfaction of familial needs and contributing to the world through work/helping others, or they feel a lack of purpose

8. Aging (ego integrity vs. despair): adjusting to the process of aging with satisfaction (or failure)

Emerging adulthood: period of life between the ages of 18 and 25 when many aspects of emotional development, identity, and personality become solidified

• Role experimentation: occurs during emerging adulthood, trying on different identities

Moral development: knowing right from wrong

• Moral development begins in childhood

  • Based on fear

    • Right → reward

    • Wrong → punishment (we learn not to do bad things to avoid punishment)

• Moral dilemmas: situations in which there are no clear right or wrong answers

• Piaget believed that children’s moral development is constrained by their cognitive development

  • Can understand intentions better as they progress through the stages of development

Kohlberg’s Moral Dilemmas

• Scored participants based on reasoning processes

• Concluded that morality develops in 3 major stages:

1. Preconventional morality: focus on punishment/reward

2. Conventional morality: focus on societal values

3. Postconventional morality: focus on internal moral principles

Chapter 10

10.1 Theories of Emotion: What Causes Our Feelings?

Emotions: mental states or feeling associated with out evaluation of our experiences

Theories of emotions

• Discrete emotions theory: humans have a small number of distinct emotions that are rooted in biology and combine in complex ways

1. Emotions have biological roots

2. Each emotion has an evolutionary function

• The cortex (thinking) evolved after the limbic system (emotion), therefore our emotional reaction comes before our thoughts

• Emotions are innate and essentially universal

Support for the evolutionary basis of emotions:

1. Emotional expressions don’t require direct reinforcement

• Infants smile when alone

• Blind infants have facial expressions

2. Behavioral immune system: set of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral mechanisms that alert us to threat of disease and motivate us to take steps to avoid infection

• Certain emotions are evolutionarily adaptive

  • Ex. disgust: we wrinkle our nose, close eyes slightly, etc. to prevent disgusting stimuli with harmful bacteria from entering our bodies

• Emotions prepare us for biologically important actions → physiological changes

  • Ex. clenching teeth and fists when angry → ready to fight

  • Ex. opening eyes wide when scared → looking for predators

3. Similarities between humans and nonhuman animals

• Most mammals have similarities in communication → may have the same evolutionary origins

4. Cultural universality of emotional expressions

• Similarities between expressions across cultures

• Ekman and Friesan study: isolated New Guinea tribe could recognize emotions on Americans

• Primary emotions: small number (7?) of emotions that are supposedly cross-cultural (happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, disgust, fear, contempt)

  • Can be combined to form secondary emotions

Cultural differences in emotional expression

• People from different cultures don’t always agree on emotional expressions

  • But on average, there is still some universality of emotions

• Cultures differ in display rules: social guidelines or norms for how and when to express emotions

  • Friesen’s study on Japanese and American students’ reactions to gory film showed that Japanese participants changed their reaction to become more positive/neutral in the presence of authority figure, while Americans did not change their reactions

Cognitive theories of emotion: emotions are a product of our thinking

• Disagrees with discrete emotion theory that claims that emotions are largely innate motor programs triggered by certain stimuli

• Thinking → emotions

• The way we interpret a situation influences what we feel in response

• No discrete emotions because boundaries across emotions are blurry

  • Emotions are as diverse as our thoughts

3 Cognitive theories of emotion

1. James-Lange theory: emotions result from our interpretations of our bodily reactions to stimuli

• Observations of our physiological state determine emotion

  • Ex. our body reacts to stimulus of a bear with sweating, feet running, heart pounding → fear

2. Somatic marker theory (Damasio): unconsciously and instantaneously use our autonomic responses to determine course of action

• Physiological markers (ex. palms sweating) help us make decisions

3. Cannon-Bard theory: our bodily reactions and emotional responses occur simultaneously in response to stimulus

• Ex. when we see bear hiking in forest, we feel fear and start running at the same time

• Proposes that the thalamus triggers emotion and bodily reactions

• Later researchers determined that thalamus AND hypothalamus and amygdala contribute to emotions

4. Two-factor theory: emotions are produced by 2 psychological events

1. In response to stimuli, we experience undifferentiated physiological arousal (alertness)

   1. Undifferentiated means that this arousal is the same across all emotions

2. Seek to explain source of autonomic arousal by labeling it with an emotion

   1. Emotions are the explanations we attach to state of arousal

• Two-factor theory is supported by the Schachter and Singer experiment

  • Emotion requires physiological arousal AND attribution of that arousal to emotion-inducing event (in this case, it was the emotion of the confederate/undercover research assistant)

• However, emotions don’t always require arousal

Cons of cognitive emotional theories

• Discrete emotions → underestimates cultural differences, diversity of emotions, and how thinking influences emotions

• Two-factor theory → partially true, but not all emotions require arousal

Unconscious influences on emotion: variables outside our awareness that can affect our feelings

• Mere exposure effect: phenomenon in which repeated exposure to a stimulus enhances favorability

  • Evidence

    • Exposure to meaningless syllables/stimuli causes greater liking toward those stimuli

    • Subliminal exposure: exposure below the threshold of awareness causes greater liking

• Facial feedback hypothesis: facial blood vessels send feedback to the brain that alters our experience of emotions

10.2 Nonverbal Expressions of Emotion

Much of our emotional expression is nonverbal

Nonverbal leakage: unconscious spillover of emotions into nonverbal behavior

• Acts as a powerful cue when trying to conceal behavior

Body language and gestures

• Posture and body language can convey our mood

• Types of gestures

1. Illustrators: highlight or accentuate speech

• Ex. moving our hands while talking

2. Manipulators: one part of the body strokes/presses/bites/touches another body part

• Occurs when we are stressed (ex. nail biting)

3. Emblems: convey conventional meanings recognized by members of a culture

• Ex. thumbs up in America means good

Personal space

• Proxemics: study of personal space

• Anthropologist Edward Hall observed that person distance is correlated with emotional distance

  • According to Hall, there are 4 levels of personal space

1. Public distance (12 feet or more): typically used for public speaking, such as lecturing

2. Social distance (4-12 ft): typically use for conversations among strangers and casual acquaintances

3. Personal distance (1.5-4 ft): typically used for conversations among close friends or romantic partners

4. Intimate distance (0-1.5 ft): typically used or kissing, hugging, whispering “sweet nothings,” and affectionate touching

• These rules may differ by culture

• When these implicit rules are violated, we feel uncomfortable

Lying and Lie Detection

• Common misconception that nonverbal cues give away dishonesty (ex. shifty eyes, nervous body language)

  • This is not true!

• Over-reliance on nonverbal cues leads to poor lie detection accuracy

• Best way to figure out if someone is lying is to listen to what they’re saying rather than how they say it

  • Interviews that ask unexpected questions and look for lack of plausibility, inconsistency, sparse and uncheckable details

• We are only 55% accurate at detecting lies on average (including police officers, customs officials, psychiatrists, and polygraph administrators)

Polygraph tests ask 3 kinds of yes or no questions

1. Relevant questions

2. Irrelevant questions

3. Control questions (probable lies)

Results: does better than chance at detecting lies, but has VERY high rate of false-positives → this test is biased against the innocent

• Confuses physiological arousal with evidence of guilt

10.3 Happiness and Self-Esteem

Purpose of happiness

• Happiness may serve evolutionary adaptive functions

• “Broaden and build theory” by Frederickson’s: happiness predisposes us to think more openly, allowing us to see a big picture we may have overlooked

  • We find novel solutions to problems, see more of the world, seek out more opportunities → better social lives

• People with positive attitudes live longer

What Makes Us Happy: Myths and Reality

• Life events don’t determine happiness

  • Positive life events were not correlated with higher overall happiness

• Does money cause happiness?

  • Below annual salary of $75,000, there is a modest association between wealth and happiness

  • Above $75,000 a year, additional money doesn’t make us much happier

  • Killingsworth study found that number to be a bit higher 

    • Larger incomes give people more control over their lives, greater opportunities for spending money to increase enjoyment and reduce suffering, and greater financial security

    • There is some amount at which happiness probably levels out

• Old age?

  • Yes, happiness tends to increase with age

  • Positivity effect: tendency for individuals to remember more positive than negative information with age

  • Diminished activity of amygdala (which processes negative emotions) → older people are less affected by unpleasant information

• Geographic location? 

  • No, living in a beautiful geographic location does not increase happiness

• Factors correlated with happiness: strong social relationships, satisfying marriages, fewer health problems, less smoking, less physical pain and stress, more exercise

• Factors correlated with unhappiness: lack of income, social support, and health

• College increases happiness

  • Higher income, more meaningful work, better health outcomes, more stable marriages

• Religion increases happiness

  • Feel connected to a larger community and higher power

• Gratitude

  • Writing down/expressing gratitude increases happiness

• Experiences

  • Life experiences tend to make us happier than material possessions

• Flow state

  • Being in flow state makes us happy (completely immersed in what we’re doing)

Forecasting Happiness

• We are very bad at affective forecasting: predicting our own and others’ happiness

  • Durability bias: we overestimate the long-term impacts of events on our moods, expecting that good and bad moods will last longer than they actually do

    • Ex. winning the lottery doesn’t actually increase long-term happiness as much as we think

    • Ex. paraplegic’s return to baseline happiness after a few months

  • This return to baseline is due to the hedonic treadmill: the tendency for our moods to adapt to external circumstances

    • Our levels of happiness adjust quickly to our ongoing life situations

    • Hedonic treadmill hypothesis proposes that we begin life with happiness “set point” 

      • Set point is mostly stable, but can shift over time

        • Downward shift: divorce, widowed, laid off of work

        • Upward shift: engaging intentionally in rewarding activities consistent with our goals and values

Myths and Realities About Self Esteem

• Self-esteem: evaluation of our worth

• Self-esteem is positively correlated with happiness, taking initiative, and bouncing back from failure

  • NOT correlated with academic success, good social skills, better relationships, or abstaining from alcohol/drug abuse

• Single-variable explanation: self esteem is the single cause for happiness, without self esteem, people are aggressive/depressed

  • NOT TRUE! There is no evidence that self-esteem is the root of all unhappiness

• High self esteem is related to positive illusions: tendencies to perceive ourselves more favorably than others do 

  • Can lead to healthy self confidence → allows them to take healthy risks in interpersonal situations, such as asking someone out or applying for a job

  • Excessive positive biases may lead to narcissism: extreme self-centeredness 

    • Types of narcissism

1. Grandiose narcissism: flamboyant, charming, domineering, brag about their accomplishments

2. Vulnerable narcissism: introverted, preoccupied with themselves, oversensitive to perceived minor slights, always playing the victim

Positive psychology: emerging discipline in the 21st century that emphasizes human strengths such as coping, life satisfaction, love, kindness, and happiness 

• Intervention such as expressing gratitude about others regularly and writing about positive experiences tends to enhance moods, combat depression, and improve well-being

Defensive pessimism: anticipating failures → over preparing for negative outcomes

• Encourages people to work harder + improves performance

• Can decrease life satisfaction and irritate others

10.4 Motivation: Our Wants and Needs

Motivation: psychological drives (wants and needs) that propel us in specific directions

Theories of motivation

1. Drive reduction theory: certain drives, like hunger, thirst, and sexual frustration, motivate us to act in ways that minimize aversive states

• Drives are unpleasant → satisfying drives minimizes negative feelings and creates pleasure

• Strength of drives serves evolutionary function (survival and reproduction)

  • Ex. thirst drive is stronger than hunger because it is more essential to life

• Goals of drives: maintaining homeostasis

• Strength of drives and task performance are affected by physiological arousal

• Yerkes-Dodson Law: inverted U-shaped relation between physiological arousal and mood and performance

• There is an optimal “peak” of arousal for best performance

• Below optimal point: low motivation, don’t perform well

• Above optimal point: we are too anxious/stimulated, don’t perform well

• Yerkes-Dodson Law popular among sport psychologists → correct arousal is important for peak performance

• Underarousal can heighten our curiosity (ex. sensory deprivation)

• Conflicting drives

  • Approach: predisposition towards certain stimuli (ex. food)

  • Avoidance: disposition away from certain stimuli (ex. scary things)

  • Avoidance gradient is steeper than approach gradient → avoidance gets higher and higher compared to approach as goals become closer

2. Incentive theories: propose that we are motivated by positive goals

• Explains why we engage in behaviors even after our drives are satisfied

• Intrinsic motivation: motivated by internal goals, such as liking the activity

• Extrinsic motivation: motivated by external goals (rewards)

• Contrast effect: certain rewards may undermine intrinsic motivation → makes us feel like we are controlled/forced to engage in the behavior → intrinsic motivation decreases once reward is removed

Types of needs

• Primary needs: biological necessities like hunger and thirst

• Secondary needs: psychological desires

Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

• We must satisfy our primary needs before we can progress to more complex secondary needs

  • Bottom of the triangle: needs produced by drives

  • Top of the triangle: needs produced by incentives

• Maslow’s Hierarchy is not based on biological reality → omits important evolutionary needs like sexual and parenting drives

Hunger and Eating

• Hunger: complex interplay between brain and digestive organs

  • Full stomach activates neurons in hypothalamus → fullness

  • Hormones produced by stomach

    • Ghrelin: hormone that makes us hungry by communicating with the hypothalamus

    • CCK (Cholecystokinin) counteracts effects of ghrelin, decreases hunger

  • Glucostatic theory: when blood glucose drops, hunger creates a drive to restore the proper level of glucose → homeostasis

Weight Gain and Obesity: Biological and Psychological Influences

• 41.9% of American adults are obese

• Biological contributors to obesity

  • Leptin: hormone that increases due to more stored energy in fat cells → signals hypothalamus to reduce appetite and increase energy expenditure

    • Leptin resistance contributes to obesity → appetite doesn’t decrease despite increased fat/energy stores

  • Sensitivity to serotonin: sight/taste/smell of food can release neurotransmitters that activate pleasure in the brain

    • Some people find these stimuli especially rewarding → contributes to obesity

  • Biological set point: value that established a range of body fat and muscle mass we tend to maintain

    • Obese people may have a higher set point: born with more fat cells, lower metabolic rate, leptin resistance → makes it hard to lose weight

  • Melanocortin-4 receptor gene: in 6% of obesity cases, mutation in melanocortin-4 gene makes it impossible for people to feel full

• Psychological contributors to obesity

  • Negative emotions: overeating can also provide comfort to distract from negative emotions

  • Portion distortion: American portions are much larger than portions in other countries

    • Portions at restaurants have drastically increased over time

  • Internal-external theory: people with obesity are motivated to eat more by external cues like portion size, taste, smell, and appearance of food rather than internal cues like a growling stomach

Bariatric surgery: surgeries that assist with weight loss

• Gastric bypass surgery: decreases size of stomach (food bypasses the rest of the stomach) → activates hormones that suppress hunger because stomach becomes full on much less food

Eating Disorders: Bulimia and Anorexia

• Bulimia nervosa: characterized by pattern of bingeing and purging

  • Bingeing: eating large amounts of highly caloric foods in brief periods of time

    • Binge eating disorder: bingeing with no purging

  • Purging: vomiting or other means of drastic weight loss, like frantic exercising or taking laxatives

    • Purging disorder: people purge on recurrent basis but do not binge

  • Binge-purge pattern

  • Eating disorders influenced by genetics and sociocultural expectations about body image

• Anorexia nervosa: eating disorder characterized by excessive weight loss achieved by caloric restriction and irrational perception that one is overweight

  • Sometimes fueled by sociocultural influences

  • “Fear of fatness,” distorted body perception

  • May lose upwards of 25%-50% of body weight

  • Very high mortality rate (5-10%) → one of the most threatening psychological conditions

Sexual Motivation

• Libido = sexual desire, wish/craving for sexual activity and sexual pleasure

  • Rooted in genes, biology, and sociocultural factors

• Males have higher sex drive than women on average

• Biological and cultural influences on sex drive

  • Testosterone increases sexual interest

  • High levels of serotonin decrease sexual interest

  • DRD4 gene: protein related to dopamine transmission is correlated with sexual desire and promiscuity

  • Cultural norms

• Sex drive and sexual orientation are a continuum

  • Women have greater variability in sex drive

  • Women w/ high sex drive more likely to be bisexual

Sexual Orientation

• Genetic contribution to sexuality

  • Homosexuality in men associated with thicker corpus callosum

• Environmental contribution to sexuality

  • Fetal exposure to testosterone

    • Girls exposed to excess testosterone in womb → more likely to be lesbian

    • Boys exposed to too little testosterone → more likely to be gay

  • Maternal immune response/fraternal birth order

    • Having older brothers increases odds of male homosexuality by 33% for each older brother because male fetuses trigger mother’s immune system to develop anti-male antibodies that affect sexual differentiation of fetus

    • Have older sisters and being an only child also increase odds of homosexuality → due to different types of maternal immune responses

  • Cultural acknowledgement and acceptance

    • Leads to higher rates of homosexuality and openness

10.5 Attraction, Love, and Hate

Social influences on interpersonal attraction

1. Proximity: nearness increases attraction

• Nearness an be physical or virtual, people we interact with every day

• Exposure effect increases attraction

• Frequency and duration of conversations are strong markers of attraction

2. Similarity: like attracts like

• Extent to which we have things in common with others is a predictor of attraction

• When interests and attitudes overlap, it paves the foundation for mutual understanding

• Sharing common goals enhances attraction

• People who agree with us validates our views

3. Reciprocity: give and take

• Reciprocity strengthens relationships, makes people feel like they can be vulnerable in return

4. Physical attraction

• Physically attractive people perceived as more competent, intelligent, trustworthy, and productive

• Facial symmetry is universally attractive

• Men generally attracted to women with hip-waist ratio of 0.7

• There are some cultural differences in attractiveness (some cultures find thinner or heavier bodies more ideal)

• Evolutionary models

  • Men attracted to women with cues of potential health and fertility such as youth and physical attractiveness

  • Women attracted to men who can provide for offspring (well off monetarily, physically strong, experienced in life)

• Social role theory: biological variables + social roles play a role in attraction

  • Women tend to have lower social status → prioritize finding a partner who is financial stable

  • Over time, social roles are diminishing and females and males have become more similar in mate preferences

• Average faces tend to be more attractive → absence of any abnormalities

Types of love (Hatfield and Rapson)

1. Passionate love: powerful, overwhelming, longing for one’s partner

   • “Romeo and Juliet”

   • Long-term passionate love is possible

2. Companionate love: sense of deep friendship and fondness for one’s partner

   • Romantic relationships tend to progress over time from passionate to companionate, but most healthy relationships still have some passion

   • Older couples have stronger companionate love

Robert Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love

• 3 major elements of love:

1. Intimacy: I feel really close to this person

2. Passion: I’m crazy about this person

3. Commitment: I really want to stay with this person

• Consummate love is the combination of all 3 of these

Sternberg’s Theory of Hate

1. Negation of intimacy: “I would never want to get close to these people”

2. Passion: “I absolutely and positively despise these people”

3. Commitment: “I am determined to stop or harm these people”

• Burning hate is the combination of all 3

  • Can contribute to groupthink, confirmation bias, and other logical fallacies

  • Propaganda fuels hate

  • Hate can be unlearned by teaching people to overcome confirmation bias and having compassion for others

Chapter 11

For Friday's class (and Quiz 3 and the final exam), we will not cover 11.4: Promoting Good Health and Less Stress. Feel free to check out this section of the book for a discussion on healthy lifestyle habits and the science behind complementary/alternative medicine, but it will not be tested.

11.1 What is Stress?

Stress: tension, discomfort, or physical symptoms that arise in response to a stressor

3 approaches to studying stress

1. Stress as stimulus

• Identifying different types of stressful events (job loss, combat, natural disasters) and identifies the people more susceptible to stress afterwards

2. Stress as a response

• Assessing people’s psychological and physical reactions to stressful circumstances

• Measures multiple outcome variables:

  • Stress related feelings: depression, hopelessness, hostility

  • Physiological changes: increases in heart rate, release of stress hormones (corticosteroids)

• Post-traumatic growth: highly stressful life events can lead us to perceive beneficial changes or personal transformations in the face of adversity

  • People reinterpret their lives more positively and find meaning in adversity as a coping strategy

  • Stressful circumstances that impact a whole community can increase social awareness, solidify interpersonal bonds

3. Stress as a transaction (between people and their environments)

• Examines interaction between potentially stressful life events and how people interpret and cope with them

• Primary appraisal: deciding whether an event is harmful

• Secondary appraisal: deciding how well we can cope with an event

  • Problem-focused coping: tackling life’s problems by taking action

  • Emotion-focused coping: placing a positive spin on it

  • Meaning-focused coping: finding meaning in highly aversive and uncontrollable circumstances

    • Finding meaning and purpose in everyday life, embracing human interconnectedness

Measuring stress

1. SRRS (Social Readjustment Rating Scale) by Holmes: measures number of stressful life events and reported physical/psychological diagnoses

   • Positive association between # of stressful life events and diagnoses

   • Doesn’t include interpretation of events, coping behaviors and resources, and chronic stressors in marginalized communities

2. Hassles Scale

   • Hassles: minor annoyance or nuisance that strains our ability to cope

   • Both major life events AND hassles are associated with poor general health

   • Daily hassles can add up and negatively impact health → better predictors of physical health, depression, and anxiety than are major life events

3. Interview-based methods of measuring stress

   • More in-depth picture of life stress than self-report measures

     1. Distinguishes ongoing/chronic stressors from one-shot stressors

     2. Considers the interaction between events that produces physical and psychological problems

   • Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA)

     1. Uses smartphone prompts to gauge what people are thinking, feeling, and doing at random/predetermined time intervals

     2. Efficient, cost-effective, eliminates human recording errors, and immediacy of responses minimizes inaccurate responses when people have to recall previous events

11.2 Adapting to and Coping with Stress

Hans Selye General Adaptation Syndrome

• Recognized connection between stress responses and physical illness

• Hypothesized that we respond to stress by moving into “high gear” → too much stress leads to breakdown

• General adaptation syndrome: all prolonged stressors take us through 3 stages of adaptation

1. Alarm

• Excitation of autonomic nervous system → hormone release, physical symptoms of anxiety

  • Stress hormones: adrenaline, noradrenaline, cortisol

  • Emotional brain/limbic system = site of anxiety (amygdala, hypothalamus, hippocampus)

    • Hypothalamus receives signals of fear → sympathetic nervous system activates adrenal gland → secretes epinephrine and noradrenaline → spike in blood pressure, pupils dilate, heart rate increases (FIGHT OR FLIGHT RESPONSE)

2. Resistance

• Adapting to stressor and finding ways to cope with it

• Engages the “thinking brain” (cerebral cortex) → using reasoning/rationalization and coping mechanisms to decrease our stress response

3. Exhaustion

• Prolonged, uncontrollable stressor leads to exhaustion

• Levels of activation bottom out → damage to organ systems, depression/anxiety, immune system breakdown

Selye’s Eustress and Distress

• Short-term stress (eustress)

  • Situations that are challenging, but not overwhelming

  • Lasts minutes to hours, can trigger a healthy immune response and enhance mental and physical performance

• Long-term stress (distress)

  • PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)

    • Vivid flashbacks (memories, feelings, and images)

    • Feelings of detachment/estrangement from others

    • Increased arousal (difficulty sleeping, easily startled)

Managing stress: What works

• Social support: relationships with people, groups, and the larger community that can provide us with emotional comfort and personal and financial resources

  • Strong inverse relationship between number of social connections and probability of dying

  • Breakup of close relationships through separation, divorce, widowing, and social isolation is strong risk factor for health problems and mortality

• Gaining control of the situation

1. Behavioral control: doing something about it

   1. Parallels problem-focused coping, which is more effective at relieving stress than avoidance-focused coping

2. Cognitive control: ability to think differently about negative emotions that arise in response to stress

   1. Parallels emotion-focused coping

3. Decisional control: ability to choose among alternative courses of action

4. Informational control: acquiring information about a stressful event

   1. Proactive coping: anticipating stressful situations and taking steps to prevent or minimize the difficulties before they arise

5. Emotional control: controlling emotions in a flexible way to meet the demands of a situation

   1. “There’s a time and place for everything”

Acceptance-based coping: accepting circumstances and feelings and thoughts we can’t change and finding positive ways of thinking about our problems

Ways of Managing Stress: What Doesn’t Work

• Rumination: focusing on how badly we feel and endlessly “spinning our mental wheels,” analyzing the causes and consequences of our problems

  • Negative repetitive thoughts linked to PTSD, anxiety, and other psychological conditions

• Catharsis: disclosing painful feelings

  • When it involves problem solving and constructive efforts to minimize harm, catharsis can be beneficial

  • When catharsis reinforces a sense of helplessness → can be harmful

  • Physical catharsis (yelling, throwing, punching) can increase anger and anxiety in the long run

• Crisis debriefing: people discuss their reactions to traumatic events in a group setting (ex. firefighters, emergency responders)

  • May make matters worse and increase risk of PTSD because it gets in the way of people’s natural coping strategies

  • Talking about our problems when we are upset may not be helpful → better to talk about problems in a constructive light

Individual differences in coping

• Hardiness: set of attitudes marked by sense of control over events, commitment to life and work, courage and motivation to confront stressful life events

  • Buffer against stress-induced illness

• Optimism: having a positive outlook, expecting that good things will happen

  • Increased likelihood of active coping, finding solutions to problems, and tend to be less anxious and depressed, more productive, focused, persistent, and better at handling frustration

  • Lower mortality rate, better immune response

• Spirituality: search for the sacred, which may or may not extend to belief in God

  • Higher perceived well-being, improved health, more adaptive reactions to loss

  • May be due to increased self-control, social support, sense of meaning and purpose, control over life

• Gender

  • Tend and befriend: reaction that mobilizes people to nurture (tend) or seek social support (befriend) under stress

    • More common among women, helps them deal with stress and has evolutionary benefit

11.3 How Stress Impacts our Health

Nocebo effect: beliefs can create reality

Immune system: body’s defense system against invading bacteria, viruses, and other potentially illness-producing organisms and substances

• AIDS: acquired immune deficiency syndrome: life-threatening treatable condition when HIV attacks and damages the immune system

Psychoneuroimmunology: study of relationship between immune system and central nervous system

• Chronic stress related to increased risk of colds

  • Immune system function impacted by sleep and stress

• Chronic stress disrupts immune system

  • Alzheimer’s caretakers have 24% longer wound healing time

Biopsychosocial view of stress-related illnesses

• Common myth: mental states are the root cause of physical ailments

  • Psychosomatic illnesses: due to deep-seated emotional conflicts

• In reality, medical conditions result from biological, psychological, AND social factors

  • Stress can play an indirect role in contributing to illnesses

• Psychophysiological illnesses: category of illness in which emotions and stress can aggravate/maintain the illness

  • Includes asthma, ulcers, headaches, coronary heart disease

  • Biopsychosocial perspective: conditions are neither all physical nor all psychological → depend on complex interplay of genes, lifestyle, immunity, social support, everyday stressors, and self-perceptions

Coronary Heart Disease (CHD): complete/partial blockage of arteries, #1 cause of death and disability in the U.S.

• Atherosclerosis: cholesterol collects in walls of arteries → narrows arteries

• High levels of stress hormones contribute to CHD

  • Irregular heart rhythm

  • Atherosclerosis

  • Increase in body-wide inflammation

  • Stress correlated behavioral risk factors (poor diet, inadequate exercise)

Chapter 12

12.1 What is Social Psychology?

Social Psychology: study of how people influence others’ behavior, beliefs, and attitudes (for better or for worse)

• We tend to believe that others are vulnerable to social influence, but we are not

• Human gravitate to small groups and form “in-group members” and “out-group members”

Gravitating to each other

• Dunbar’s magic number 150 = approximate size of most human social groups

  • Social media may be changing this

Why we form groups

1. Need-to-belong theory (Leary): Humans have a biologically based need for interpersonal connections

• Schachter pilot study on social isolation with sample size of 5 showed that people hate isolation

  • One participant failed in 20 minutes, longest participant made it to 8 days

• Prison inmates experience severe stress and more psychological symptoms, especially mood and anxiety problems, more likely to die after being released and more prone to suicidal behavior

• Mere threat of social isolation causes stress/dysregulated function

  • Jean Twenge study gave college students a questionnaire and randomly told them them that based on their results, they were more likely to end up alone in life → led to unhealthy eating behaviors, procrastination, IQ test impairment

2. Loneliness: not just about being alone, also about feeling socially or emotionally isolated from others and experiencing distress about this isolation

• Long term loneliness is damaging to our health

  • Cognitive decline

  • 26% elevated risk of premature mortality

  • Increased depression

Why People Affect Us

1. Social influence is powerful and often unconscious

• Social influence can impact behaviors, attitudes, or beliefs without us knowing

2. Social influences are adaptive and naturally selected/culturally important

• These processes have served us well over the course of evolution

• Conformity, obedience, and many other forms of social influence become maladaptive only when they’re blind or unquestioning

• Cultural norms

  • Prosocial behavior: behaviors that clearly benefit others

  • Antisocial behaviors: harm others

3. Social comparison theory: we evaluate our abilities and beliefs by comparing them with those of others

• Upward social comparison: comparing ourselves to someone superior

• Downward social comparison: comparing ourselves to someone inferior

• Both upward and downward social comparison can boost self-concepts

  • Upward social comparison → if they can do it, so can I!

  • Downward social comparison → we feel better than others

  • If someone is better than us, we may make an excuse that the other person is “an exception to the rule,” or “they’re just a genius” to buffer our self concepts

4. We look to others in ambiguous situations when we are unsure of what to do

• Social behavior is contagious

  • Mass hysteria: contagious outbreak of irrational behavior that spreads much like a flu epidemic

    • Fueled by anxiety, can have disastrous consequences

    • Can lead to collective delusions: many people simultaneously become convinced of bizarre things with no evidence (conspiracy theories, misinformation)

  • Urban legends: false stories repeated so many times that people believe them to be true

    • Surprising yet plausible, tug on our negative emotions, provoke interest or concern

Social facilitation: enhancement of performance brought about by the presence of others

• Occurs only on tasks we find easy

Social disruption: worsening of performance in the presence of others

• Occurs on tasks we find difficult

• More likely to “choke” on difficult task when distracted by being watched → limits our working memory we can use on performing the task

Attributions: assigning causes to behavior

• Dispositional influences: enduring characteristics such as personality traits, attitudes, and intelligence

• Situational influences: what's going on around the person/externally

Fundamental attribution error: tendency to attribute too much of people’s behavior to disposition influences (rather than the situation they are in)

• Aka underestimating impact of situational influences on other’s behavior

• However, when it comes to OURSELVES, we believe that situational influences are stronger than dispositional 

• Less likely to commit fundamental attribution error if we’ve been in the same situation ourselves (empathy)

• Certain collectivist cultures are less likely to commit FAE (Japan, China) because they view behaviors in context

12.2 Social Influence: Conformity and Obedience

Conformity: tendency of people to alter their behavior because of group pressure

• Causes of conformity:

  • Belongingness and being accepted

  • Avoiding rejection

  • Aligning with group norms

Asch Line Studies on Conformity (1950s)

• 1 participant, the rest are confederates pretending to be participants

• Participants are asked which of the “comparison lines” is the same length as the “standard line”

• 3 influences on conformity

1. Uniformity of agreement: if all confederates gave the wrong answer, participant was more likely to conform

2. Difference in the wrong answer: if someone else in the group disagreed with the majority, the participant was less likely to conform

3. Size: size of majority only made a difference up to 5-6 confederates. People were no more likely to conform in a group of 10 than a group of 5

• Participants actually knew the correct answer, so norms affect people’s expressed behavior, not their perceptions of reality

Deindividuation: tendency of people to engage in atypical behavior when stripped of their usual identities as unique individuals

• Due to feeling on anonymity + lack of personal responsibility

• Online disinhibition effect: people post nasty online comments when anonymous (internet “trolling”)

• Crowds can become more or less aggressive depending on prevailing social norms

  • Mob storming the capital → more aggressive than they would act individually

  • People on public transport/crowds → people limit social interactions to minimize conflict

Stanford Prison Experiment (Philip Zimbardo)

• Zimbardo wondered whether dehumanizing prison conditions stemmed from people’s personalities or roles they were in

  • To explore this question, participants were randomly assigned to role of prisoner or guard

  • Abuse started after day 1

Groupthink: emphasis on group consensus at the expense of critical thinking and objective decision making

• Lack of independence in group member’s judgements

• Ex. 1986 Challenger shuttle explosion

• Antidotes to groupthink

  • Supporting viewpoint diversity: valuing a range of different perspectives

  • Encouraging dissent

  • Inoculation: convincing people to change their minds about something by introducing reasons why the perspective might be correct and then debunking these reasons

  • Including a devil’s advocate in groups

• Symptoms of groupthink:

  • Illusion of group’s invulnerability, unanimity, unquestioned belief in the group’s moral correctness, conformity pressure, stereotyping of the out-group

• Can lead to cults: groups of individuals who exhibit intense and unquestioning devotion to a single individual or cause

Group polarization: tendency of group discussion to strengthen the dominant positions held by individual group members

• Polarization happens at the individual level

Obedience: adherence to instructions from those of higher authority

• Influence is vertical (we are influenced by leaders who are above us) rather than horizontal (influenced by peers)

• In conformity, social influence is implicit

• In obedience, social influence is EXPLICIT (authority figure tells us what to do, and we obey)

• Migram experiment on obedience 

  • Evaluated effects of punishment on learning

  • Participants deliver shock of increasing voltage to learners (confederates) if they answer a question incorrectly

    • Milgram wanted to see how high they would put the shock

    • 66% of participants obeyed until the highest voltage level

12.3 Helping and Harming Other: Prosocial Behavior and Aggression

Prosocial behavior: behavior that helps others

Bystander effect: why do bystanders tend to not intervene or help in situations?

1. Pluralistic ignorance: error of assuming that no one in the group perceives things as we do

   1. If nobody else is responding, the situation must not be an emergency

2. Diffusion of responsibility: the more people present for an emergency, the less each person feels responsible to help

   1. “Plenty of other people could have helped, so it's not my fault for not intervening”

Studies on bystander nonintervention

• Latane and Nida performed analysis of 50 studies with 6,000 participants → found that people were more likely to help when alone than in groups 90% of the time

• Things that make people MORE likely to intervene/help:

1. If victim is in immediate danger, bystanders are more likely to intervene

2. If there are cameras or recording devices present, bystanders are more likely to intervene

3. Enlightenment effect: learning about psychological research can change real-world behavior for the better → more likely to intervene

Social loafing: people tend to slack off when working in groups

• Variant of bystander nonintervention

• Occurs due to diffusion of responsibility: people working in groups feel less responsible for the outcome of the project than they do when working alone, so they invest less effort

• Social loafing is more likely in individualist cultures (U.S.) than collectivist cultures (China)

Prosocial behavior and altruism

• Altruism: helping others for unselfish reasons

  • Fueled by empathy

  • Situational influences on helping others:

    • More motivated to help when we are held accountable for actions

    • More motivated to help when we can’t escape the situation 

    • Characteristics of the victim (more likely to help a person with a cane than a drunk person)

    • Being in a good mood makes us more likely to help

    • Exposure to role models who help others

Aggression: behavior intended to harm others (verbally, physically, or both)

• Contributors to aggression:

  • Interpersonal provocation

  • Frustration

  • Media influences: violent media may increase odds of violence due to observational learning

  • Aggressive cues being present, such as guns or knives → serves as discriminative stimuli which make us more likely to respond violently to provocation

  • Physiological arousal (alertness)

  • Alcohol and other drugs

  • Outside temperature: warmer temperatures increase irritability and aggression

Cultural differences in aggression

1. Personality traits: people with high levels of negative emotions, impulsivity, and lack of closeness to others are especially prone to violence

2. Sex differences: men are more aggressive than women on average

3. Cultural differences: physical aggression and violent crime are less prevalent in east Asian countries than in western countries

   1. U.S. has a “culture of honor” → more likely to use violence to defend what they believe in (why southern states are more violent)

12.4 Attitudes and Persuasion: Changing Minds

Attitudes and behavior

• Belief: conclusion regarding factual evidence

• Attitude: belief that includes an emotional component

Misconception: attitudes are good predictors of behavior

• In reality, attitudes are only moderate predictors of behavior (correlation coefficient r = 0.38)

• Sometimes, attitudes CAN predict behavior well:

  • If attitudes are highly accessible (come to mind easily)

  • If attitudes are firmly held and stable over time

  • In people who are low in self-monitoring: extent to which people’s behavior reflects their true attitudes/feelings

    • Aka people who don’t conceal their attitudes

Key influences on our attitudes: 

• Recognition heuristic: we are more likely to believe something we have heard many times

• Attitudes and personality → influence religious beliefs and political affiliations

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

• Cognitive dissonance: unpleasant state of tension between 2 or more conflicting thoughts (Thought A and Thought B)

  • We can reduce this anxiety in 3 major ways:

    • Change cognition A

    • Change cognition B

    • Introduce new cognition, C, that reconciles the inconsistency between A and B

Persuasion

• Two pathways to persuading others (“dual-access model” of persuasion)

1. Central route

• Careful and thoughtful consideration of arguments merits

• Focuses of informational content of the argument

• Produces strongly held, enduring attitudes

2. Peripheral route

• Relies on “snap judgements” that we make very quickly based on heuristics

• Focuses on surface elements of the argument

• Persuasion is weaker and unstable, but can still affect short-term choices

Persuasion techniques

1. Foot in the door: small request → big request

2. Door in the face: large request → small request

• Both foot-in-door and door-in-face are equally effective at achieving agreement

3. Low-balling: agree to price → add-ons until cost is much higher than original agreement

4. Telling someone “but you are free to choose”: giving people the sense that they are free to choose doubles the odds of compliance

12.5 Prejudice and Discrimination

Stereotypes

• Broad application of belief about characteristics of group

  • Can be positive, neutral, or negative

• Ultimate attribution error

  • Attributing negative behavior of an entire group to disposition

  • Attributing positive behaviors of an entire group to luck or rare exceptions

    • Disregard for situational influences in both cases

Prejudice

• Negative conclusion about a group not based on experience

• Tendency towards prejudice is influenced by:

1. In-group bias: favoritism towards individuals inside our group

2. Out-group homogeneity: tendency to view all individuals outside our group as highly similar

• Makes it easy to dismiss members of other groups

• Implicit vs. explicit prejudice

  • Implicit Association Test (IAT) flashes images of people to uncover implicit biases

• Prejudices may arise due to:

1. Scapegoat hypothesis

2. Belief in a “just” world

3. Conformity to social norms

• Prejudice often, but not always, accompanies discrimination: negative behavior towards members of out-groups

Combating prejudice

• Superordinate goals: working together towards a higher purpose

• Raising awareness through educational or workplace trainings

Chapter 13

13.1 Personality: What is it and How Can We Study It?

Overview of personality

• Personality: typical ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving

  • Consists of traits: relatively enduring predispositions that influence behavior

• 2 ways to study personality

1. Nomothetic: identify general laws that govern behavior of all individuals

   1. Allows for generalization

2. Idiographic: identify unique characteristics and life experiences of individual (e.g. case studies)

Causes of personality

• Identical twins have much higher correlation in personality than fraternal twins → personality is genetic

• Identical twins raised together and apart have similar correlation in personality → environment does not have much influence?

• Correlation in personality between biological parents and child is much higher than adoptive parents and child → personality is genetic

Behavior-Genetic Studies: A Note of Caution

• Personality being heritable does NOT indicate the existence of a “genetic code” for personality traits

  • Genes code for proteins, not behaviors

  • Environment shapes when/whether genes are expressed

13.2 Psychoanalytic Theory and Humanistic Models of Psychology

Theories of personality

Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory of Personality

• 3 core assumptions

1. Psychic determinism: all psychological events have a cause (usually stemming from childhood)

• Freud believes that powerful inner forces drive us

2. There is a hidden and symbolic meaning to all actions: no action is meaningless

3. Unconscious motivation: we are largely unaware of why we do what we do

• 3 parts of personality

1. Id: primitive impulses

• Operates on pleasure principle

• Unconscious

2. Ego: decision maker

• Operates on reality principle

3. Superego: sense of morality

• The “judgemental parent”

• Conflict between these different parts of personality causes distress, which increases risk of psychological disorder

Major Freudian DEFENSE mechanisms

• Repression: motivated forgetting

• Projection: attribution of own negative qualities to others

• Sublimation: transforming unacceptable impulse into a valued goal

• Rationalization: reasonable explanation for unreasonable behavior or failure

• Displacement: redirecting unacceptable impulse onto acceptable target

• Reaction-formation: transforming anxiety-producing experience into its opposite

• Regression: psychological return to younger/safer life stage

• Identification: adopting psychological characteristics of threat

• Intellectualization: focusing on abstract and impersonal thoughts

Freud’s Model of psychosexual/personality development

• Controversial, largely dismissed as pseudoscientific

• Premise: 

  • Sexuality begins in infancy

  • Inability to resolve each stage results in fixation (getting “stuck”) → can occur from deprivation of sexual gratification or excessive gratification\

1.Oral stage (birth to 12-18 mos.) ~ Nursing

• Fixation: intense dependence; excessive eating/drinking; smoking

2.Anal stage (18 mos. – 3 years) ~ Potty training

• Fixation: excessive neatness; stingy; stubborn

3.Phallic stage (3 – 6 years) ~ Oedipus/Electra complex

• Fixation: life-long feelings of inferiority; heightened risk of later problems

4.Latency stage (6-12 years) ~ Sexual impulses disappear into unconscious

5.Genital stage (12 years +) ~ Creation/maintenance of love attachments

Neo-Freudianism

• Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Karen Horney

• Similarities to Freud: emphasis on unconscious influences + importance of early experience in shaping personality

• Differences from Freud: social drives rather than sexual drives, more optimistic than Freud about personality change over life course

13.3 Humanistic Models of Personality:

Humanistic Models of Personality

• Carl Rogers (1947): Personalities consist of…

1. Organism: innate blueprint that makes organisms inherently good

2. Self: beliefs about who we are (self-concept)

3. Conditions of worth: expectation imposed on us for inappropriate and appropriate behavior

• Personality differences stem from conditions of worth imposed by others

13.4 Behavioral and Social Learning Theories of Personality

Behavioral Models of Personality

• Personality stems from habits acquired through conditioning

  • Personality consists of behavior

  • Overt (observable) and covert (unobservable)

• Personality = genetics + environmental contingencies (reinforcements and punishments)

• Behavioral determinism → free will is an illusion, we unconsciously process external influences which determine our behavior

Social Learning Models of Personality

• Emphasize thinking as cause of personality

• Reciprocal determinism: mutual influence of personality, cognition, behavior, and environment

• Acquire habits from parents and caregivers via observational learning

• “Locus of control” shapes personality

  • Belief in control over reinforcers and punishers

  • Internal vs. external locus of control

13.5 Trait Models of Personality: Consistencies

What causes personality? 5 different theories:

1. Psychoanalytic theory

2. Neo-Freudian theory

3. Humanistic theory

4. Behavioral theory

5. Social learning theory

The Big 5 Model of Personality

• Trait models seek to find the STRUCTURE of personality, not its cause

  • These traits are assessed on a SPECTRUM

• O: openness to experience

• C: conscientiousness

• E: extroversion

• A: agreeableness

• N: neuroticism

Trait Models: Basic Tendencies vs. Characteristic Adaptations

1. Basic tendencies: underlying personality traits

2. Characteristic adaptations: behavioral manifestation of underlying traits

• Traits can be expressed in dramatically different ways, can be constructive or destructive

  • Sensation-seeking: tendency to seek out new and exciting stimuli

    • Firefighters and prisoners have nearly identical scores of sensation seeking

Can personality traits change?

• Change can happen prior to age 30, can sometimes be substantial

  • Beyond age 30, some reliable change observed across the lifespan

    • Decline in extraversion 

    • Decline in neuroticism

    • Increase in agreeableness

    • Increase in conscientiousness

• Stability in personality is largely the norm

13.6 Personality Assessment: Measuring and Mismeasuring Psyche

Structured personality tests: questions that respondents answer in one of a few fixed ways

• True/false or Likert scale (1-7), etc

1. MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory)

• MMPI-2: 567 true or false questions

• 10 basic scales: detection of major mental health conditions

• 3 validity scales: tests for response sets and malingering

• Developed via empirical observation → low face validity

• Largely supported by extensive research

2. CPI (California Psychological Inventory)

• The “common person’s MMPI”

• Assessment of personality traits in the typical range

  • Common for industry, college counseling centers, etc.

3. NEO-PI-R

• Tests the BIG 5 traits (OCEAN) 

• Rational/theoretical method

4. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

• Based largely on work of Carl Jung/neo-Freudian thinking

• Rational/theoretical method

What are projective tests

• Influenced by psychoanalytic views of personality

  • Projective hypothesis: people project their personality onto ambiguous stimuli, interpreters work in reverse by examining people’s answers for clues about their personality

• Projective tests are highly controversial (disputed reliability and validity)

Types of projective tests

1. Rorschach Inkblot Test

• Asks participants “What does inkblot resemble?”

• Answers are scored for characteristics associated w/ personality traits

  • For example, focusing on tiny details of the inkblot could indicate OCD

  • Not reliable or valid

2. Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

• Asks participants to construct a story about ambiguous images

• Interpreted on “impressionistic” basis

3. Draw-A-Person (DAP)

• Examine features of free-drawing (ex. eyes)

• Confounded with drawing ability

4. Graphology

• Interpretation of handwriting

• Influenced by representativeness heuristic

Pitfalls in personality assessment

• P.T. Barnum effect: acceptance of broad description as specific to oneself

• Personal validity does NOT equal test validity

  • Astrological horoscopes

  • Palmistry

  • Crystal ball/tea leaf/tarot card readings

Criminal profiling: is it legit?

• Criminal profiling conclusions are often based on Barnum-effect-esque statements

• “Trained professionals” may be no more accurate in generating profiles than college students

• More of an urban legend

Chapter 14

14.1 Conceptualizing Disordered Behavior

Recipe of a psychological disorder

• No clear-cut definition

• Host of criteria, not exhaustive

• Family resemblance view: family members share a loose set of features but aren’t always identical

  • Statistical rarity

  • Subjective distress

  • Impairment

  • Societal disapproval

  • Biological dysfunction

  • Need for treatment

  • Irrationality

  • Loss of control over one’s behavior

Historical conceptions of psychological disorders

• Explanations of abnormal behavior and treatments are influenced in cultural conceptions

1. Middle ages: demonic model

• Evil spirits infesting the body, treated via exorcisms

2. Renaissance “enlightenment”: medical model

• Placed the mentally ill into asylums

• Treatment: bloodletting, frightening the illness out of patients

3. Moral treatment (late 1700s-1800s)

• Emphasis on dignity, kindness, and respect

• Marked improvement in asylum conditions

4. Modern day

• Early 1950s → introduction of chlorpromazine (Thorazine), an antipsychotic drug

• 1960s/1970s → deinstitutionalization

  • Positive and negative consequences

Psychiatric diagnosis today

1. DSM-V (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, APA, 2013)

• Includes diagnostic criteria and rules for how many criteria must be met for diagnosis

• Information on “organic” causes for symptoms → What other factors might cause these symptoms?

  • Ex. stressful life event, lack of exercise, lack of sleep, poor diet, etc

• Prevalence of disorders (what % of population that has disorder)

• Biopsychosocial considerations

• Interview guide to determine cultural identity

2. ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases, Worth Health Organization, 2010)

14.2 Anxiety-Related Disorders

Overview of anxiety-related disorders

• Anxiety is not always bad, it is an adaptive mechanism

  • Anxiety is only a problem when it gets out of hand

• Anxiety disorders are among the most common of all psychological disorders

Roots of Anxiety Disorders

1. Learning models: idea that fears are learned through…

   1. Classical and/or operant conditioning

   2. Observational learning

   3. Misinformation or information learned from others

2. Tendency to catastrophize and high anxiety sensitivity

3. Genetic influence

   1. High in neuroticism

   2. Frontal lobe abnormalities and overactivity

Types of anxiety disorders

1. Generalized anxiety disorder

• Characterized by spending 60% of the day worrying

• Tendency to “sweat the small stuff”

• Often accompanies other anxiety disorders

2. Panic disorder

• Repeated, unexpected experiences of panic attacks and behavioral change in attempt to avoid attacks

• Attacks: sweating, dizziness, racing heart, shortness of breath, light-headedness

3. Phobias: disproportionate, intense fear of an object or situation

• MOST COMMON anxiety disorder

PTSD and OCD

• Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

  • Marked by flashbacks (intrusive memories)

  • Attempts to avoid anything related to the event

  • Difficulty sleeping and startling easily

• Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)

  • Obsession → repetitive thought about unacceptable topic

  • Compulsion → repetitive behavior or mental act

    • Relieves anxiety or stress associated with obsession

14.3 Mood Disorders and Suicide 

Mood disorders and suicide

• Major depressive disorder

  • The “common cold” of psychological disorders

  • Symptoms: depressed mood, diminished interest in pleasurable activities

    • May be accompanied by weight loss, sleep difficulty

  • Recurrent: people with major depressive disorder usually have around 5-6 episodes over the life course

  • Roots of major depressive disorder = complex interplay of many factors

    • Life events

    • Social media use (direction of association is unknown)

    • Interpersonal problems

    • Lack of reinforcement

    • Negative schemas

    • Attributions for success vs. failure 

      • Tend to blame failures on themselves (dispositional) while attributing luck to luck or other situational factors 

    • Low norepinephrine, dopamine

    • Dysfunctional reward and stress-response systems

Bipolar disorder

• Characterized by manic episodes

  • Only takes 1 episode to qualify for diagnosis

  • Symptoms of manic episode: elevated mood, decreased sleep, inflated self-esteem, irresponsible, impulsive behavior

    • Causes problems with social and occupational functioning

    • May be triggered by stressful OR positive life event

• Bipolar disorder is highly heritable (up to 85% heritability)

Suicide

• There is the highest risk increase for suicide with major depression and bipolar disorder

  • Also increased risk for people with panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, and substance abuse disorder

• Predicting suicide is difficult but very critical

  • Single best predictor: a previous suicide attempt

14.4 Personality and Dissociative Disorders: The Disrupted and Divided Self

Overview of personality disorders:

• DSM-V diagnosis requires:

1. Onset by adolescence 

2. Traits are inflexible, stable, and displayed in various situations

3. Results in distress or impairment

Borderline personality disorder

• “Stable instability” → long term pattern of emotional instability regarding mood, sense of self, interests, life goals, and relationships

• Highly sensitive to feelings of abandonment

  • Causes them to be reactive in scenarios where they fear abandonment

  • Leaving at the first sign of abandonment, jumping from one relationship to another

• Impulsive and self-destructive behaviors

• Manipulativeness: may threaten of attempt suicide to control others

• Can harm ability to form long term relationships and jobs, but not always

Psychopathic personality (psychopath/sociopath)

• NOT formally classified as a disorder in the DSM-V

• Guiltless, dishonest, manipulative, callous, self-centered

• Display of callous-unemotional traits in childhood

• Can also be superficially charming, engaging, and personable → allows them to sometimes occupy positions of power

• Overlaps with antisocial personality disorder from DSM-V

  • Antisocial personality disorder: violent/criminal activity

Dissociative Disorders: disruptions in integration of consciousness, memory, identity, or perspective

1. Depersonalization/derealization disorder

• Depersonalization: dream or movie-like state, feeling of seeing self from 3rd person perspective

• Derealization: external world seems strange or unreal

• Must be multiple episodes of this to be diagnosed

• May be influenced by sleep deprivation (quality of sleep and disruptions to sleep)

2. Dissociative amnesia

• Inability to recall important personal information, usually following a stressful experience

  • Loss of job, loved one, etc.

  • Not the result of “ordinary forgetting” and cannot be explained by other factors such as brain injury

• Sometimes includes dissociative fugue (physical relocation) → “woke up one day in a new location with no memories of their past”

3. Dissociative identity disorder

• Presence of 2+ distinct personality states (alters)

• These alters are different from the “host” personality

  • Can be different name, age, gender, race, species, and number of alters can differ

• Explanations:

  • Response to trauma (physical of sexual abuse at a younger age) so that only one of the personalities is a victim to abuse

  • Product of social/cultural factors such as hypnosis or guided imagery

14.5 Schizophrenia

Roots of schizophrenia

• Diathesis-stress model

  • Diathesis (vulnerability) + stress (triggers)

  • Possible diathesis: 

    • Family history/genetics

    • Schizotypal personality disorder: motor limitations, unusual beliefs and fears, issues with social relationships → often a predecessor of schizophrenia

    • Factors that impact development: 

      • Maternal illness during 2nd trimester

      • Lack of gestational nutrition

      • Viral infection in-utero

      • Complications during birth

Symptoms of schizophrenia

• Disturbances in attention, thinking, language, emotion, and interpersonal relationships

• Delusions and hallucinations

  • Delusion: strongly held belief with no basis in reality, commonly involving persecution

  • Hallucination: sensory perceptions in the absence of external stimulus (primarily auditory in nature)

    • Can be command hallucinations or violent hallucinations, but this is rare

    • Most of the time, voices are narrating and neutral

• Disorganized speech (“word salad”): can produce words, but the syntax of words is incorrect

  • Deficits in thinking + fundamental impairment in ability to shift and maintain attention

• Catatonia: bizarre or rigid body positions (“waxy flexibility”) → if you move the person, they are moldable

  • Accompanied by echolalia: parrot-like verbal repetition

• Disorganized behavior: lack of self-care and personal hygiene

14.6 Childhood Disorders

Autism Spectrum Disorders (DSM-V category including both Autism and Asperger’s)

• Symptoms of severity are on a continuum

• Difficulties with communication, social bonding, and imagination

• Repetitive or restrictive behaviors (motor movements, words)

• Very resistant to changes in environment or daily schedule

  • Can have behavioral outbursts in response to change

• 657% increase in rates of autism across the U.S. from 1993-2003

  • People questioned why autism rates were increasing so much 

    • Vaccines are NOT the cause of autism

  • Exact causes for this are unknown

  • Most likely, this uptick was due to changes in diagnostic criteria

ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder)

• Infancy: incessant crying, fussiness, emotional outbursts, constant need for movement

• Middle childhood: disruptive classroom behavior, academic struggles

• Adolescence: impulsiveness, restlessness, inattention, delinquency

• Debate in over-vs-under-diagnosis

  • Boys are 2-4x more likely to receive a diagnosis than girls

Early-Onset Bipolar Disorder

• Sometimes challenging to distinguish manic episodes from ADHD in children

  • May share ADHD diagnosis → makes us question whether they have severe ADHD or early onset bipolar?

• Symptoms: rapid mood change, reckless behavior, irritability, aggression

Chapter 15

15.1 Psychotherapy

What is psychotherapy?

• Hard to define, many variations of psychotherapy (over 600 approaches)

• Psychotherapy: psychological intervention intended to help people resolve emotional, behavioral, and/or interpersonal difficulties

  • Variety of individual reasons for seeking therapy: behavioral, emotional, social difficulties

  • Goal: improve quality of life

Who practices psychotherapy?

• “Therapist” is not a legally-protected term, does not mean a lot

  • Licensed therapists: undergo formal, structured training protocol, take a standardized exam to become licensed

    • Includes clinical psychological, psychiatrists, mental health counselors, and clinical social workers

  • Unlicensed therapists: religious/vocational/rehabilitation counselors, art/music therapists, and paraprofessionals → do not have to take standardized exam, but still usually undergo some sort of training

• Professional training may not make a big difference in effectiveness

What makes psychotherapy effective?

• Therapist having certain characteristics makes them more effective:

  • Warm, direct, caring, empathetic, flexible

  • Avoid contradicting clients (don’t disagree or shut them down) → creates safe space to voice concerns

  • Match treatments to client needs

15.2 Insight Therapies

Insight Therapies (Freudian)

• Psychoanalytic/psychodynamic therapies: based on 3 core facets

1. Abnormal behavior stems from childhood trauma

2. During therapy sessions, therapists analysis focuses on:

• Avoided thoughts/feelings

• Wishes/fantasies

• Recurring themes and life patterns

• Significant past events

• Therapeutic relationship

3. Achieving insight into previously unconscious material will resolve symptoms

• Key ingredients in psychoanalysis

  • Free association: self-expression without censorship, clients encouraged to say whatever is on their mind

  • Interpretation: analyst-formed explanations for client’s dreams, emotion, and behavior

  • Dream analysis: relating client’s dreams to waking life

  • Resistance: client’s attempts to avoid confronting feared aspects of self

  • Transference: projecting feelings from past onto therapist

  • Working through: problem processing

Neo-Freudian Therapy

• Greater concern for conscious aspects of functioning

  • Consideration of past experiences and future goals

• Goal of therapy is individuation: integrating opposite aspects of personality

• Emphasis on cultural and interpersonal influences

  • Interpersonal therapy: form of neo-Freudian therapy which aims to strengthen social skills and clients ability to cope with interpersonal projects

• In neo-Freudian therapy, working through problems is more important than insight into problems (working through > insight)

Humanistic Therapies

• Help clients overcome sense of alienation + develop sensory and emotional awareness

• Emphasizes love, responsibility for our path in life, authenticity, and staying present in the moment

• Relates to theories of Maslow, Rogers, tunes into the humanistic idea that people are inherently good

• Carl Rogers: person-centered therapy

1. Therapist authenticity: don’t say things you don’t really mean

2. Unconditional positive regard towards client: nonjudgemental towards client

3. Empathic understanding for client: repeat back/paraphrase what the client is saying to show active listening

• Existential therapy: pioneered by holocaust survivor Victor Frankl

  • Psychological disorder stems from failure to find meaning in life

  • Logotherapy (feelings towards existence)

  • Stresses responsibility for our actions and rising to meet life’s challenges

• Gestalt therapy

  • Integration of different/opposing aspects of personality into unified self

  • Accepting responsibility for our feelings and maintaining contact in the present

  • Two-chair technique → talking to other aspect of personality in a different chair

15.3 Group Therapies

Group therapies

• Treat more than one person at a time

  • Groups may range from 3 to 20 people

• Pros of group therapy: efficient, time-saving, cost-effective, and equal effectiveness to individual therapy

• Alcoholics Anonymous

  • Considered a self-help group → usually no mental health professional is present during meetings

  • “12 step” program predicated on alcoholism as a physical disease

    • Key factor in effectiveness may be social network participation

  • Focuses on relapse prevention: aims to help people avoid “abstinence violation effect”

    • 1 slip up → binge

Family therapy

• Focuses on interaction between family members (the “unit”)

1. Strategic family therapy: strategically removes barriers to effective communication through directives

• Directives: list of tasks they need to complete on their own time

  • May involve “reverse psychology:” for example, for a family with fighting parents, the directive may be to argue more

2. Structural family therapy: therapist is actively immersed in daily activities

• Comparable effectiveness to individual therapies

15.4 Behavioral and Cognitive-Behavioral Approaches

Behavioral approaches

1. Systematic desensitization: slow, stepwise process that progresses through an anxiety hierarchy

• Based on “reciprocal inhibition”: can’t be related and anxious as the same time

• Can be done as a mental exercise or in vivo (live)

• Common treatment for phobias

2. Flooding therapy: clients are exposed to most-feared stimulus for long periods of time

• Based on idea that avoidance perpetuates fears

• Paired with response (ritual) prevention

• Can be done virtually, with images, or in vivo (live)

• Commonly used to address anxiety disorders

3. Modeling therapy: therapist models positive behaviors for the client → client learns observationally

• Assertion training: socially appropriate expression of thoughts/feelings

• Behavioral rehearsal: client/therapist role-play as practice for real world interactions

4. Operant and Classical Conditioning Procedures

• Operant conditioning: behavior is modified by consequences

  • Token economy

    • Positive behaviors rewarded with exchangeable tokens, stickers, etc.

    • Negative behaviors ignored or punished

• Classical conditioning: undesirable behaviors are paired with unpleasant stimulus

  • Aversion therapy → mixed support for effectiveness

Cognitive-Behavioral Approaches

1. Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy: maladaptive thoughts and behaviors can be identified, measured, and modified

• ABC = client

  • A: Activating Event

  • B: Belief system

  • C: consequences

• DEF = therapist

  • D: Dispute irrational beliefs

  • E: Effective (adaptive) beliefs

  • F: Feelings that are desirable

2. Beck’s Cognitive Therapy

• Cognitive distortions and behavioral manifestations

• Slightly more emphasis on behavioral procedures than rational emotive behavioral therapy (REBT)

Third-Wave Therapies

• Centered around acceptance

1. Acceptance and commitment therapy: our thoughts are NOT facts

2. Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT): addresses contradiction between changing behavior and accepting it

• Frequently used in cases of borderline personality disorder to accept emotions while making life changes to cope

15.5 Is Psychotherapy Effective?

Is Psychotherapy effective?

• The “Dodo bird” verdict: “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes” → all therapies appear equivalent in outcome

• Conclusion is NOT unanimous… effectiveness may depend on:

  • What is being treated

  • Existing problems can become worse after treatment (for example, if people are being “scared straight”)

• Common characteristics shared by different forms of therapy → essential for fostering client motivation

  • Listening with empathy

  • Instilling hope

  • Establishing emotional bond

  • Providing clear treatment rationale

  • Using techniques that create new ways of thinking/feeling/behaving

    • May help explain improvement across diverse treatment types

15.6 Biomedical Treatments

Psychopharmacotherapy: prescribing medication

• Anxiety disorders → anxiolytics or antianxiety drugs

• Depression → antidepressants

• Bipolar disorders → mood stabilizers

• Psychotic conditions → Neuroleptics/antipsychotics or major tranquilizers

• Attention difficulties → psychostimulants

Dosage and side effects are important considerations 

• Not everyone reacts the same

• Caution against over-prescribing or prescribing for young children

Electrical Stimulation:

1.  Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT)

• Muscle relaxant and anesthetic + electrical pulses → seizures

• Serious depression, bipolar, schizophrenia, or catatonia

• “Bad rap” from depiction in the media

  • 91% of ECT clients report feeling grateful for receiving treatment

  • 80-90% improvement rate in cases of severe depression

2. Transcranial stimulation

• Stimulation of the vagus nerve: stimulates serotonin release and increases blood flow to brain

• Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS): magnetic impulses delivered at skull surface

• Deep brain stimulation: electrodes implanted deep into patient’s brain

Psychosurgery

• Historically common, but now seen as a last resort due to controversial effects

  • Frontal lobotomy: blunted affect causes “zombie-like” personality