Untitled Flashcards Set

Ch 11 Health and Wellness pg 1196 

• Stress is caused by our reactions and perceptions of external events

• Western medical model defines health as absence of disease, meaning people’s mental states have little effect on their physical state

11.1 Social Context, Biology, and Behavior Combine to Affect Health pg 1198

• Both mental states (outlook on life) and behaviors affect prevention of illness

• Well Being: positive state of life and health satisfaction AND absence of disease

• Biopsychosocial Model: health and illness are a result of biological conditions (genes), behavioral factors, and social contexts

• Norms and conditions by our communities and cultures can influence our health as well as individuals (family, friends, partners) b/c we learn from them, care about what they think and desire to live to their expectations

  • ex) increased car crashes in netherlands lead to people protesting for the gov. to redesign streets for bikes (behavior/action) -> more people bike -> more physical activity -> better health + longer life spans

• Societal factors: how public environments are structured, how much money a country can dedicate to health care

• Cultures and lifestyles: ex: adopting more Westernized behaviors (less physical activity, junk food) -> increase in obesity related diseases (diabetes)

• "Tightness-Looseness" of cultures: greater or less value on adhering to social norms (ex: how closely people in that culture follow public health guidelines during Covid)

• Causes of Mortality: 

  • In the past and in developing countries: infections and diseases were the leading causes of death

  • Now: heart disease, cancer, strokes, lung disease, accidents due to lifestyle, habits, poor nutrition, overeating, smoking, alcohol, and lack of exercise in developed nations

11.2 Inequities in Societies Contribute to Health Disparities Among Social Groups pg 1207

• Health Disparities: differences in health outcomes (illness/death rates) among different groups of people 

  • Based on age, gender, socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, disability, homelessness

• Racial and ethnic groups experience health disparities b/c of genetic susceptibility to certain diseases, lack of / access to healthcare, cultural diet and exercise habits, and racial bias in the medical system

  • Often receive lower quality care, less time, fewer procedures offered

  • Mistrust in medical system due to past/ongoing racism/abuse -> less likely to follow screening guidelines to recovery EVEN when equal access

• Opioid and alcohol abuse lowered life expectancy for white rural Americans the most

• There is health disparities between people who immigrate to US vs their US born children

  • Immigrant Paradox: Immigrants tend to have better health outcomes than later generations (U.S born children and grandchildren of immigrants)

    • Often due to poor diet, substance use, loss of cultural/social networks, discrimination and stigma -> stress

    • As well as adopting US culture's dietary habits, substance use, lack of physical activity

• Socioeconomic status health gradient: Health disparities b/w people with greater/fewer resources (socioeconomic status wise: education, wealth, income)

  • People with fewer resources (low income) -> worse health outcomes (sick, restricted health care, isolation) -> more likely to contract disease due to being frontline workers

  • Living in more polluted, violent environments with less healthy food and safe outdoor space access as well as chaotic/unpredictable 

  • Lower levels of socioeconomic status are also correlated with interpersonal conflict, major life disruptions, poor sleep

11.3 Healthy Eating Is an Important Health Behavior pg 1213

• Leading causes of death used to be infectious diseases (tuberculosis, smallpox, malaria) but due to antibiotics and health practices -> chronic illness (heart disease, cancer, diabetes) 

• Which is slow develop, and influenced mostly by HEALTH BEHAVIORS 

• Health behaviors: actions people take to promote wellbeing and prevent onset / slow progression of disease 

• Healthy diet: natural less processed (not artificially/processed), not to overeat/take too many calories than needed, and a diet heavy in fruits, vegetables and light on animal proteins

• People who eat food high in fat and sugar tend to store more body fat -> increase risk for metabolic syndrome: a bunch of risk factors including high blood sugar, insulin resistance, high cholesterol blood levels, cardiovascular disease

• Humans eat much more when exposed to a large variety of options 

• People eat more when the portion size is larger

• Overweight people have more activity in the reward regions of the brain when seeing tasty looking foods

• Overeating stems from large variety of high calorie foods, large restaurant portion size, individual responses to food cues

11.4 Smoking is a Leading Cause of Death pg 1218

• Suddenly permanently giving up smoking due to a critical event changing how a smoker thinks about the addiction

  • Ex: a father who would actually leave his kids in the rain to get cigarettes -> shocking revelation of himself and quit smoking on the spot

• Addiction to nicotine 

11.5 Physical Activity is a Particularly Beneficial Health Behavior pg 1224

• Aerobic exercise (temp. increase of breathing and heart rate) promotes new neuron growth -> larger brain (white (myelinated) and gray matter) + hippocampus growth -> memory and cognition benefits

• Also lowers blood pressure, strengths heart and lungs

• As little as 10 minutes of exercise can enhance mood and vigor 

• At least 30 minutes of exercise = the most positive mental state

• Any brief infrequent exercise at any age has some psychological and physiological benefit

11.6 Why are People Afraid of Flying but Not Driving (or Smoking)? Pg 1227

• People don’t seem to be worried about the things that are actually most likely to kill them (ex: car crashes)

• People are actually more afraid of less likely things to happen (airplane crash, flesh eating bacteria, murder in foreign country) b/c they are judged to happen more often than they actually do

• Availability Heuristic: tendency to believe information that comes most easily to mind (people will judge an event as more likely to occur if it is easy to imagine/recall)

  • b/c news/media widely and dramatically reports plane crashes and have memorable vivid pictures or detailed accounts

11.7 What is Stress, Stress in Response to Life Events Pg 1231

• Stress is a result of the ways we think about events in our lives

• Stress: a type of response that includes an unpleasant state

  • Eustress: stress of positive events 

  • Distress: stress of negative events

  • Any event can be stressful because they require you to make adjustments

  • Higher scores indicate how much a person must adjust as a result of the change

• Stressor: something in the external situation that is perceived as threatening or demanding

  • Major Stressors: changes/disruptions that strain central areas of people’s lives

  • Chronic Stress: set of ongoing problems that are linked to long term illness, poverty, caregiving

  • Daily Hassles: small irritations and annoyances

• Coping Response: attempt to avoid, escape or minimize the stressor 

• The gap between the demands of the situation and our resources to cope with them

• Chronic Stress and Discrimination related stress are often unpredictable and uncontrollable

11.8 Stress has Physiological Components pg 1239

• A stressor activates the fast acting sympathetic nervous system and a slower response from a system of biological events called the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis

1. Brain has a perception of a stressful event 

2. Hypothalamus activates sympathetic nervous system

3. Which activates the adrenal glands (release norepinephrine and epinephrine)

4. Increase heart rate, redistribution of blood supply to muscle and brain, deeper respiration, dilation of pupils, inhibiting gastric secretions, increase glucose release

5. Directs all energy to threat at hand

• Fight or Flight Response: physiological preparation of animals to deal with an attack, ability to deal effectively with stressors to survive and reproduce

• At the same time in the HPA:

1. Hypothalamus sends a msg to the pituitary gland which sends a hormone to the adrenal glands

2. The adrenal glands secrete cortisol which increases the amount of glucose to prepare the body to respond quickly to the stressor

3. When cortisol reaches the hypothalamus it triggers a negative feedback loop to turn off the HPA

4. Cortisol also helps the hippocampus and amygdala encode memories 

• Prolonged stress can cause brain receptors for cortisol to become less sensitive to cortisol's effects if too exposed to it too often and may require more to shut off the HPA 

• Stress can still affect the body even if stressor is removed 

• Chronic stress can disrupt working memory, long term memory impairments, damage neurons, inability to retrieve info from LTM

• General Adaptation Syndrome: when stressed, there is the same pattern of physiological changes: enlarged adrenal glands, diminished immune system, stomach ulcers which are NONSPECIFIC stress responses since any stressor in any species elicits this response

• The effects of one stress response cycle and how it damages bodily organs

1. Alarm: emergency reaction, flight or fight, release of cortisol and epinephrine to boost physical abilities, immune system kicks back in

2. Resistance: body prepares for longer defense against the stressor, immunity increases as body maximizes defenses

3. Exhaustion: physiological and immune systems start failing, body organs are weak 

• Allostatic Load: how wear and tear on the body from stress can add up, biological systems (stress, digestive, immune, cardiovascular, hormonal, etc.) change after repeated or chronic stress causing systems to become stuck in certain states or less responsive

  • The cumulative effect of multiple stressors to the point the response system becomes inflexible!

• Unpredictable stress in pregnant rats also cause abnormalities in fear learning and heightened physiological responses to stress in their offspring

• Stress can affect behaviors over generations

• Females respond to stress by protecting and caring for others and forming alliances to reduce risks to individuals and themselves (tend and befriend response)

11.9 Stress Disrupts the Immune System Pg 1247

• Stress can turn off the immune system to save energy for other functions to help us survive a short term threat

• But too much stress can cause stomach ulcers since the immune system cannot destroy the bacteria and decrease the production of white blood cells, and heals more slowly

• Immune system is made up of 3 types of specialized white blood cells: lymphocytes

  • B cells: produce antibodies (protein molecules that attach themselves to foreign agents and mark them for destruction), sometimes remembers certain cells making identification in the future easier

  • T cells: attacks the intruders directly and increase the strength of the immune response

  • Natural Killers: kill viruses and attack tumors

• Being stressed leads to worse cold symptoms and higher viral counts but smoking, poor diet, not exercising have small effects on colds

• More desirable events produced more antibodies while undesirable events had weaker antibody production

11.10 Stress Increases the Risk of Heart Disease pg 1215

• Genetics, health behaviors and personality traits related to how people respond to stress all determine heart disease risk

• Type A behavior pattern: the set of personality traits the predicted heart disease, competitive, achievement oriented, aggressive, hostile, impatient and time pressed

• The certain component of Type A related to heart disease is hostility (angry, cynical, combative)

• Causes of heart problems due to stress:

  • Unhealthy coping mechanisms

  • Personality traits like depression and hostility -> negative social networks

  • ^^ these things can produce direct physiological effects on the heart

• Arteries that supply the heart with blood (oxygen, nutrients) become narrow due to fatty deposit buildup and become stiff = pressure against the heart making it work harder to pump and then eventually heart disease

• Stress also decreases blood flow by making blood vessels harder to dilate 

• Solution: blocking cortisol production

11.11 Coping Reduces the Negative Health Effects of Stress pg 1258

• Primary Appraisal: to decide whether stimuli are stressful or irrelevant 

• Secondary Appraisal: used when a stimuli is deemed stressful, used to evaluate ways to respond and choose coping behaviors

• Anticipatory Coping: coping occuring before the onset of a future stressor 

• Coping strategies:

  • Emotion Focused Coping: trying to prevent an emotional response to the stressor, distract or numb the pain (avoidance, minimizing problems/feelings, overeating, drinking)

    • DOES NOT solve the problem

  • Problem Focused Coping: taking direct steps to solve the problem, generate alternative solutions, weigh pros/cons

    • Happens when people perceive stressors as controllable or only experience moderate levels of stress

    • Can backfire with uncontrollable stressors causing frustration/lack of control

• Positive Reappraisal: cognitive process where a person focuses on good things about the situation

• Downward Comparison: comparing oneself to those who are worse off

• Creation of Positive Events: giving positive meaning to ordinary events

• Stress Resistant/Hardiness: capable of adapting to life changes by viewing events constructively, consists of three components: commitment, challenge, control

  • Have increased positive thoughts about themselves when stressed

  • In resilient individuals, activity in anxiety related brain regions increased only when threatening pictures appeared while individuals low in resilience had heightened brain activity no matter the picture

  • Broaden and Build Theory: positive emotions expand people's view of what is possible, helping new ideas develop and relationships

11.12 Being Positive Has Health Benefits pg 1264

• Happiness's three components: 1) positive emotion/pleasure, 2) engagement in life, 3) meaningful life

  • Argued that a successful life includes good relationships and accomplishments

• Higher levels of hope are associated with reduced risk of high blood pressure, diabetes and respiratory tract infections while high levels of curiosity were associated with reduced risk of hypertension and diabetes

• People with positive affect tend to have an enhanced immune system and greater longevity

• Positive emotions and good health are related, but directionality and causation have not been fully determined

11.13 Social Support Is Associated with Good Health pg 1269

• People with fewer friends or small social networks are more likely to catch colds and die earlier especially women

• Sick people who aren’t well connected with others are more likely to die earlier too

• Social support lessens demands on others decreasing their likelihood of stress such as providing material help, doing chores but mostly effective when people care about them

• Buffering Hypothesis: when provided emotional support from others, the recipient can better cope with stress ^

• Religious people tend to have greater feelings of well being and cope better possibly through the social and physical support of their faith communities and promotion of gratitude, many also support healthy behaviors (avoid drugs, alcohol)

  • also tend to derive meaning and purpose in their lives

11.14 Can Psychology Improve Your Health? Pg 1273:

• Eat natural foods (complex carbs: whole grains, fruits, veggies WHILE other animal products are at a minimum, avoid processed or artificial and fast sugary foods)

• Eat only when you are hungry

• Drink alcohol in moderation or not at all (small quantities may have cardiovascular benefits but excessive consumption = serious health problems)

• Keep active (4 hours+ for at least half an hour)

• Do not use tobacco 

• Practice safe sex

• Learn to relax or meditate

• Build a strong support network

• Try happiness exercises

• Shotgun Interventions: fast acting happiness/stress relieving activities (giving a card, keeping a journal, etc.) for a small investment and little risk

Part 1 – Stress is a Response to Life Events (13 minutes)

• Stress: physiological (body) and psychological (mind) to a threatening or challenging situation, requiring an adjustment, typically unpleasant 

• Stressors: major life stressors (big events that strain central areas of ppl’s lives… requires a BIG change in your life) and daily hassles (little stressors, irritation, annoyance that can add up to more stress than the major stressors sometimes)

  • Catastrophic events: can cause post traumatic stress disorder, very negative major life stressors

• Holmes and Rahe's Social Readjustment Rating Scale: stress measurement that ranks life events from most to least stressful using point values (add up all the points for each stressful event you had for the year)

Part 2 – How Stress Affects Your Body (5 minutes)

• Short term stress can be beneficial but long term or too often stress can cause damage to your brain and organs

• Adrenal Glands release cortisol (endothelium or lining of blood vessels to not function and can cause cholesterol build up in your arteries) , epinephrine, and norepinephrine causing your heart to beat faster and higher blood pressure = tension

• Autonomic NS is activated and sends messages to your intestinal NS (brain-gut) causing disruptions to natural contractions in the gut, irritable bowel syndrome and increase sensitivity to acid (heartburn) and change the composition and function of gut bacteria (digestive)

• Cortisol tells you to replenish energy stores -> stress eating -> deep fat that releases cytokines (hormones + immune system chemicals) that increase risk of heart disease and insulin resistance

• Stress hormones help immune cells to fight invaders and heal injury but chronic -> dampens immune cell function -> susceptible to infections + slow healing time

• Shortens telomeres (tips of chromosomes, allows copying of DNA, shortens at each cell division), if its too short, a cell cannot divide and dies

Part 3 – Stress has Physiological Components (14 minutes)

• A stressor activates the fast acting sympathetic nervous system and a slow response from the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis (a system of biological events)

• Begins in the brain: a perception of a stressful event

• Hypothalamus activates SNS which activates adrenal glands (releases epinephrine and norepinephrine) 

• Increase heart rate, blood pressure, respiration (body ready for action!) 

• HPA (slow) at the same time ^, hypothalamus sends a msg to pituitary gland -> sends a hormone in the bloodstream to adrenal glands (diff region tho then ^) -> secrete cortisol (increases glucose: gives energy to body to act) 

• Stress has long lasting effects b/c hormones affect organs even when the stressor is removed! 

  • Disrupts working memory, LTM, retrieving memory (cognition problems)

• Early childhood stress is a risk factor for psychological disorders for the future 

• Stress in pregnant moms can pass to their offspring and damage child development

  • Rats exposed to unpredictable stress that led to physiological changes in their brain, when mated days later, their offspring had a heightened fear response

• General Adaptation Syndrome: consistent pattern of responses to stress consisting of 3 stages

  • Every person with a major stressor is going through these 3 stages

  • 1) Alarm Stage: fight or flight response, initial, high alert, body and mind very active

  • 2) Resistance Stage: body prepares for longer resistance for LT, stress feels a lil better (coping with the stressor)

  • 3) Exhaustion Stage: eventually exhaustion from LT resistance, reserves depleted and body start failing (immune system, illness, organs are becoming damaged) THE BODY CANNOT GO FOREVER!

Part 4 – Sex Differences in Response to Stress (7 minutes)

• Physiological reaction to stress (SNS and HPA) is around the same

• Reactions to stress BEHAVIORALLY are different between genders!

• In general on average NOT individuals specifically

• Tend and Befriend: Women tend to react to stress by protecting and caring for others and form alliances (social groups) 

  • Oxytocin (hormone associated with bonding/trust) is higher in women not men when stressed

• Men prefer to withdraw themselves from others 

Part 5 – Three short youtube videos about stress (8 minutes)

• Metabolic Uncoupling: psychological stress is bad for cardiovascular health but exercise stress is good 

  • When you exercise, your heart rate and metabolic rate go up, you breathe harder, your muscles change TO MAINTAIN HOMEOSTASIS (balance) 

  • Psychological Stress causes your heart rate to rise but your metabolic rate stays the same causing your heart to work harder than everything else (imbalance) leading to wearing out the heart

• Cognitive Reappraisal: changing how we interpret our situation, shift on thinking can lessen stress’s negative effects on your body

Part 6 – Coping with Stress (14 minutes)

• Types of Coping: CHANGE and ACCEPT

  • Problem Focused Coping: direct coping that reduces/modifies/eliminates the stressor (source of stress) itself (change the source), BEST when it’s possible to solve the problem

  • Emotion Focused Coping: Change the way you feel or respond emotionally to the stressor, b/c you can’t change the stressor anymore (manage emotions), BEST when you cannot solve the problem or things u cannot change

  • Proactive Coping: take action in advance of a stressful situation to prevent it from occurring or lessening the stress when it does 

• High Hardiness: stress resistant, capable of adapting to life changes due to different views on events, committed to daily activities, view threats as challenges/growth opportunities, see themselves as IN CONTROL of their lives (our behaviors determine our success NOT fate/etc), positive thoughts about self 

Part 7 – Can Psychology Improve Your Health?  What are Health Psychologists?  (11 minutes)

• Subjective Well Being = happiness

• Try improving your HEALTH by improving your happiness

• Writing a letter of gratitude interdisciplinary 

• Journal about positive aspects of your life 

• Act like a happy person (how would a happy person act or think in this situation) fake it till you make it *positive thoughts about yourself

• Health Psychologists: promoting and understanding social and psychological factors that contribute to poor or good health (behaviors, eating, smoking, mind-body connection (stress effect on immune system), coping strategies) 

  • Individual/Private Practice: teach individuals effective ways to handle stress or deal with chronic health condition

  • Academic/Clinical/Hospital: work with doctors or dietitians, to encourage patients to follow diet recommendations or take certain medications  

  • Public Health Agency: study health related issues (obesity rates, outbreaks of contagious diseases)

  • College and Universities: conduct research (emotion on health, immune system on health, stress hormones) and develop intervention to promote healthy behavior

  • Most have a masters/graduate/phd BUT 

  • Just Bachelors: Health educator, Research Assistant

Ch 13 pg 1426 - 13.16

• Personality: a person's characteristic thoughts, emotional responses, behaviors

• Personality Trait: a pattern of thought, emotion, behavior that is relatively consistent over time and across situations

13.1 Genetic Factors Influence the Expression of Personality pg 1430

• Personality traits or characteristics are only expressed if the gene for it is turned on or off which can depend on a person’s experience 

• Identical twins were much more similar than fraternal twins showing the influence of genes and that traits run in families

• Two adopted siblings even in the same household are no more alike in personality than two randomly picked strangers

  • Same with adopted children and their adoptive parents

• Parenting has less of an impact on personality than genetics

• Genetic similarity however does not mean similarity in personality 

• Why? b/c personality is also shaped by the friendships you make outside the home

• Parenting decisions (not style) have a stronger effect on personality (where they live, how many children, change in socioeconomic status, moving)

• Different biological factors not shared by identical genes/siblings could be exposure to stress hormones during pregnancy = diff in personality even in siblings

• Dispositions: behavioral, mental, emotional response tendencies to stimuli b/c there is no single gene to account for personality, there are multiple acting making you more or less likely to react in a specific way to certain stimuli

• A great number of genes, rather than any individual genes, influence the likelihood or level of personality traits. Parenting style has very little direct influence on personality.

13.2 Temperaments Are Evident in Infancy pg 1435

• Temperaments: general tendencies to feel/act in certain ways, broader than personality traits (which can be altered by life experiences) while temperaments are innate biological structures of personality and are relatively stable

  • Activity Level: overall amount of energy and action

  • Emotionality: intensity of emotional reactions

  • Sociability: the general tendency to affiliate with others

• When newborns react to new situations they can become startled, distressed, crying = inhibited (a characteristic that is biologically determined) which can predict whether children will be socially anxious or shy in their teens, depressed, unemployed, attempt suicide, etc.

• Inhibited people (social anxiety) show greater activation of the amygdala while viewing new faces (threat response)

• However when parents create supportive, calm environments where children can deal with new things and stress at their own pace (not sheltering), inhibited children can learn to deal with negative feelings leading to less shyness as a teen

13.3 Intro:

• Trait Approaches: characterize people in dimensions of behavior (extraversion, openness) and the biological factors that underlie them

• Humanistic: describe people based on their personal history and the narratives they create to understand themselves

• Cognitive: distinguish people based on how they think about their abilities and to what degree of control they feel they have over their lives

13.3 Trait Approaches Describe Behavioral Tendencies pg 1442

• Trait Approach: how individuals differ in personality dispositions 

• Personality traits are viewed on a continuum. Many people are in the middle and few are in the extremes for a personality trait

• Factor Analysis: grouping items according to their similarities to identify the basic dimensions of personality

• Five Factor Theory: identifies five basic personality traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism)

  • There is a continuum for each factor and each factor describes a broad trait made up of several related specific traits 

• Each of the factors captures a variety of different behaviors while their facets (the more specific traits) have specific behaviors

• Facets are more predictive of behavior in a given situation than the Big 5

• conscientiousness predicts grades in college but not scores on standardized tests, whereas openness to experience predicts scores on standardized tests but not grades

• Factor analysis is used to group traits according to their similarity, allowing researchers to organize traits into the Big Five and their specific facets.

13.4 Traits have a biological basis pg 1448:

• Extraversion is associated with brain areas related to reward system

• Neuroticism is associated with brain areas related to threat and negative affect

• the Big Five factors can be reliably distinguished based on patterns of brain activity

• Biological Trait Theory: Eysenck proposed personality traits have 3 major dimensions: introversion/extraversion, emotional stability/neurotic, and high/low constraint (psychoticism): aggression, poor impulse control, self centered, lack of empathy

  • Believed intro/extraversion was due to difference in arousal

  • Everyone operates at some specific level of arousal

  • Eysenck proposed that introverts are often above their level of arousal while extraverts are typically below their optimal arousal which is why introverts prefer to be with few stimuli and extraverts seek out more stimuli

• Jeffery Gray: personality is rooted in two motivational functions: approach rewards, avoid pain 

  • Behavioral Approach System (BAS): brain structures that lead organisms to approach stimuli in pursuit of rewards "go" system

    • Related to extraversion, extraverts are more sensitive to rewards than punishment 

  • Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS): "slow down" system, sensitive to punishment, inhibits or slows behavior when there are signs of danger, threats, pain, BE CAUTIOUS/VIGILANT/CAREFUL

    • Related to anxiety

    • Related to people that are neurotic (anxious in social situations when they can anticipate possible negative consequences)

  • Fight Flight Freeze System: "stop or escape" system, promotes behaviors to protect an organism from harm, FEAR related, ESCAPE!

13.5 Humanistic Approaches Emphasize Integrated Personal Experience pg 1454

• Humanistic: emphasize personal experience, belief systems, uniqueness of each human, inherent goodness, seek to fulfill their potential for personal growth through greater self understanding (self actualization) 

• Carl Rogers: create a supportive, accepting environment, importance of how parents show affection to their children, how parental treatment affects personality development

  • most parents provide condition love (aka parents might withhold their love if the child does something they disapprove of)

  • Children will lose their sense of self (things like actually truly desire, true feelings, dreams) and only accept parts of them that elicit parental approval and positive regard

  • Unconditional Positive Regard: parents should accept and prize their children no matter how they behavior (express disapproval and love at the same time) to develop healthy self esteem and become a fully functioning person

• Dan McAdams: narratives: stories that we tell ourselves about where we came from and where we are going = is understanding of our own identity (redemption, contamination, meaning-making)

13.6 Personality Reflects Learning and Cognition pg 1458:

• Behavioral Psychology: B.F. Skinner, idea that personality is NOT a result of internal processes but LEARNED responses to reinforcement

• Julian Rotter: behavior is a function of a person's expectancy that a reward will result from a behavior (reinforcement) and the values a person ascribes to particular rewards

  • Difference in how much people believe their efforts will lead to positive outcomes

  • Locus of control: how much control people believe they have over what happens in their lives

  • Internal: believe they can bring about their own rewards vs External: rewards and fates result from forces beyond their control

• George Kelly: personal constructs: personal theories on how the world works, people are scientists constantly testing theories by observing events, developing through experiences

• Albert Bandura: reciprocal determinism: three factors influence how a person acts: environment, PERSON factors: characteristics, self confidence, expectations

  • Personality is expressed through behavior which is influenced by person factors and environment

• Need for cognition reflects how much a person enjoys and tends to engage in complex thought

  • High in need for cognition: tend to systematically evaluate and compare info before voting, making a major decision or forming an opinion (difficult to pursue without good evidence)

13.7 Personality in the Workplace pg 1462:

• industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology investigate how people’s personalities relate to their performance and satisfaction in different roles within organizations

• measures personality traits to optimize the fit b/w a employee's traits and a job requirement, observe how they work in a team and make suggestions to improve productivity or minimize interpersonal conflicts

13.8 People Sometimes Are Inconsistent pg 1465:

• Mischel: behaviors are determined more by situations than by personality traits (situationism) 

• Self monitoring: being sensitive to cues of situational appropriateness, alter their behavior to match the situation = low levels of consistency

• Cognitive Affective Processing System: people react in predictable ways to specific conditions (if A, then B, if reward, excited to pursue, if uncertain, worried)

• People will exhibit stable behavior if they find themselves in similar situations over time, personality is stable over time because people choose the situations they place themselves in

• Strong Situations mask differences in personality due to the rules of a strong social environment/expectation (ex: funeral) while Weak Situations reveal differences in personality (ex: home)

  • Interactionism: behavior is determined by situations and underlying dispositions

13.9 Development and Life Events Alter Personality Traits pg 1470

• Personality traits are relatively stable over the adult life span

• People tend to be more conscientious as they age, increased self control and emotional stability (less neurotic), less extraverted, less open to new experiences, become more agreeable

• Life events also produce changes in personality (marriage, becoming a parent, being employed) = altered lifestyle = behaviors, thoughts, emotions can change

• College students who travel abroad have faster positive personality changes (agreeableness and openness goes up) and become less neurotic compared to those who do not travel

• People do not change much relative to others, but average levels of personality traits change in the population.

13.10 Culture Influences Personality pg 1478

• People from Eastern cultures tend to think in terms of relations with other people, whereas those from Western cultures tend to think in terms of independence.

• supports the argument that the Big Five are universal for humans

• Self reports are not always accurate due to biases of individuals comparing themselves with their national reputations (which are more accurate)

  • Ex: Canadians are known to be very agreeable but Canadians self report that they are as agreeable as anyone else B/C the people around them are very agreeable as well so it’s hard to see yourself as very agreeable/above average if everyone around u is also agreeable/above average

13.11 Researchers Use Multiple Methods to Assess Personality pg 1481:

• Idiographic: person centered, focused on individual lives, how various characteristics are integrated into unique persons, the way they tell the story of their life, uniqueness of each individual, NARRATIVE

• Nomothetic Approaches: focus on characteristics common among all people but vary from person to person, compare all people and their relative standing, TRAIT

• Projective Measures: maps out response patterns by having people describe or tell stories about ambiguous stimulus items (too imprecise for diagnostic purposes BY ITSELF)

  • ex: Rorschach inkblot test: person looks at inkblot and describes what it appears to be to "reveal" unconscious conflicts, problems and get a fuller sense of a person

  • Thematic Apperception test (TAT): person is shown an ambiguous picture and asked to a tell story about it, scored based on the motivational schemes to reflect the person's motives, useful in measuring motivation traits (achievement, power, affiliation) 

• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (a self report questionnaire): used to assess psychopathology (assess a person's personality generally) and to compare a person's scores to the average to assess whether this person is likely to have a psychological disorder

• Q Sort: asked to sort cards into nine piles according to how accurate the statements describe them, BUT to ensure the validity (no lying to distort the truth to make favorable impressions), fewer cards are allowed at the extreme ends) TO SEE which are central and not secondary traits

• Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR): device that unobtrusively tracks a person's real world moment to moment interactions, revealed self reports on the Big 5 do predict real world behavior 

13.12 Observers Show Accuracy About Other People’s Traits pg 1489:

• David Funder: a person's close acquaintances are accurate in trait judgments in some circumstances probably because we tend to explain our bad behaviors in terms of situation factors rather than personal ones, ESPECIALLY OBSERVABLE traits!!!

• Evaluative traits: Vazire, argues people have blind spots about the aspects of their personalities because they want to feel good about themselves, especially for highly valued traits in society

• People are more accurate in rating themselves for hard to observe traits (internal)

13.13 Our Self-Concepts Consist of Self-Knowledge

• Self Schema: integrated set of memories, beliefs, generalizations about the self that helps us efficiently perceive, organize, interpret and use information related to ourselves, helps us filter information that are self relevant 

• When you process information about yourself deeply, spotting self relevant information can be processed automatically such as behavior or aspects of our personalities 

• Self schema helps you remember information that is relevant to yourself easily accessible, when people think about adjectives in a self referential way they are more likely to recall them

• Self concept: the larger idea encompassing all the info and beliefs we hold about we we are, what made us that way and what motivates us

• Activity in the prefrontal cortex when thinking about the self, damage to frontal lobes alters how people see themselves

• Working Self Concept: people can only hold a certain amount of info about themselves in the mind at one time, limited amount of personal knowledge can be active in the mind at once

• people are especially likely to mention characteristics that distinguish them from other people.

  • Ex if a black man is with a group of women, he might be more aware of his manliness than his race

13.14 Perceived Social RegardInfluences Self-Esteem

• Self Esteem: a person's emotional response to contemplating personal characteristics 

• Reflected Appraisal: the process of learning about oneself through the eyes of others, people's self esteem can be derived from their beliefs about how others perceive them, people internalize the values/beliefs expressed by importance others in their lives to adopt those attitudes as their own

• When someone is rejected, ignored, demeaned, or devalued by someone they respect, they experience low self esteem

• Mark Leary: self esteem is a mechanism for monitoring the likelihood of social exclusion

• Baumeister: self esteem is weakly related to life outcomes but high self esteem is related to being happier

  • Due to the need to protect their self worth even if not socially acceptable

• Narcissism: self centered people view themselves in grandiose terms, feel superior and entitled, manipulative

• Dark Triad: narcissism, psychopathy (general lack of caring for the welfare of others), machiavellianism (manipulative for their own gain, lack concern when harming others)

  • related to career success (more money, leadership, political election winning)

• Light Triad: humanism (valuing the worth and dignity of every person), faith in humanity (believing in the inherent goodness of humans), Kantianism (never use other people, don't manipulate others)

13.15 People Use Mental Strategies to Maintain A Positive Sense of Self:

• People show favoritism to anything associated with themselves and overvalue things they own, referenced to them

• Most people rate themselves as above average (better than average effect)

• Positive Illusions: overly favorable, unrealistic beliefs about themselves (better than average effect, strong internal locus of control for positive outcomes, unrealistically optimistic about their future)

  • evolutionarily adaptive? helps protect people from harmful effects of stress or threat, reduced illness, and greater likelihood of recovery

• Social Comparison: compare our actions, abilities, beliefs with others to see where we stand, understanding people's actions and emotions

• Downward Comparison: comparing yourself to someone worse than you feels good but provides little information VS Upward Comparison: contrasting yourself to someone better than you feels bad but provides information on how to improve

• Self Serving Bias: people with high self esteem tend to take credit for their success but blame failure on external factors

13.16 Are There Cultural Differences in the Self-Serving Bias?

• Heine: self serving bias is more common in Western cultures than Eastern

• Collectivist cultures: interdependent on others, harmony and cohesion in relationships/social groups VS individualist cultures: independent, focus on individual achievements and freedoms

• Americans show a bias for listing successes while Japanese students listed successes and failures equally (Americans explained failures using external factors while Japanese students used external factors to explain successes)

• What is universal is the desire to feel good about one’s own behavior with respect to local norms

  • people in Eastern cultures feel better about themselves when they demonstrate that they are modest and self-effacing, whereas Westerners feel better when they can show they are successful

  • Self Serving Biases in people from Eastern cultures might be hidden by typical explicit attitude assessments because of cultural norms (they don't report self enhancing views because they value modesty)Where Does Personality Come From?:

    • Half of your personality comes from your genes and the other half from your environment

    • Shared environment (parents, same house, same parenting style, religion, school) vs non shared environment (different friends, different extracurriculars, different experiences, different teachers) with siblings

    • Adopted sibling and their adoptive siblings or adoptive parents have a small correlation when it comes to their personality traits but this doesn’t mean that your environment barely influences your personality but just YOUR NON SHARED environment has more impact

    • Individual differences in babies (are not called personality b/c it hasn’t been developed over a long time)

    • Temperaments: general tendencies to act in certain ways

      • Three Basic Characteristics 

        • Activity Level (Energy, Behavior)

        • Emotionality: intensity of emotional reactions

        • Sociability: tendency to affiliate with others

    • Your temperament can have long term implications 

      • Can predict personality structure and behavior

      • Ex) socially inhibited babies -> are more likely to commit suicide, be unemployed, etc.

      • Ex) babies become startled and upset when shown new objects -> likely to be shy as teens

    • Personality is adaptive (we keep traits that are evolutionary adaptive so that you can survive and reproduce)

      • If unattractive trait: no one wants to reproduce with you / you don't live long enough = trait does not pass on

      • If attractive trait: mate options -> offspring has your trait

    • Big 5 Traits (OCEAN)

      • Agreeableness (high): nice, cooperative, considerate, cares about others

      • Extraversion (high): outgoing, high energy

      • Neuroticism (low): being emotionally stable, calm collected, balanced, less likely to be stressed

      • Openness (high): likely to try new things, creative, smart

      • Conscientiousness (high): responsible, hardworking, good at planning ahead, very in control of their actions

    • Groups with diverse skills > limited skills which is why everyone is different from each other rather than just high in everything and low on neuroticism (best traits) 

    Psychological Defenses:

    • Theories of Personality:

      • Psychodynamic (Freudian) Approach: Defense Mechanisms (protects us from anxiety)

        • How we cope when we are faced with harmful things that are a threat to our ego (sense of our self as a good person) and how we can trick ourselves into protecting ourselves from feeling anxiety, etc. 

        • Unconscious desires, impulses, wants that are forbidden / not acceptable by society (we don’t want them to be in the conscious mind b/c it will cause us anxiety) 

          • To hide us from our unconscious, the mind tricks us using defense mechanisms 

            • Displacement: repressed forbidden urges but we cope with them by replacing them with more socially acceptable ones

              • Ex: your in love with your friend’s fiancee but since you cannot do that, you decide to convince yourself that your in love with someone else that is similar to your friend’s fiancee 

              • Ex: your boss gets mad at you and yells at you, you cannot express that anger to your boss, so you take it out on your sibling 

            • Projection: your unconscious thoughts are not recognized as your own so you push it on someone else or attribute them to someone else

              • Ex: we don’t realize we are in love with our friend’s fiancee but don’t want to believe it so we convince ourselves that our friend’s fiancee LIKES us instead 

            • Reaction Formation: convincing yourself that you feel the opposite of what you actually feel

              • Ex: you are in love with your friend’s fiancee but don’t want to admit it so you convince yourself you actually HATE them 

    Psychosexual Development:

    • Libido: drive for pleasure, sex, happiness focused on different parts of the body through stages

    1. Oral stage: pleasure through the mouth

       1. Fixation: put pens/pencil in mouth, chew on things, smoke, overeat, talk a lot, sarcastic

    2. Anal stage: pleasure from the anus 

       1. Fixation: 

          1. Anal Retentive: want to have control over everything, perfectionism 

          2. Anal Expulsive: major slob, don’t have control / order over your life 

    3. Phallic stage: learns the difference b/w girls and boys, genital stimulation, … little girls are in love with their fathers and want to kill their mother (but guilt so end up connecting with their mother and hanging out with them for the rest of their lives) and same vice versa for boys

       1. Girls: elector complex

       2. Boys: oedipus complex

    4. Latency stage: libido goes dormant (nothing happens)

    5. Genital stage: adult sexual relationship, puberty

    • If you cannot successfully pass a stage, you will be fixated in that stage so you must get the proper amount of stimulation to that area (not too much, not too little)

    The Learning & Cognition and Humanistic Approach:

    • Rotter = does actions = outcomes? (rotter and freud are learning and cognition) 

      • Internal Locus of control: it's up to me, my actions + hard work will get me to my goal

      • External Locus of control: we aren’t responsible for our outcomes, it's up to luck/fate/god

    • Kelly = personal constructs (how you view the world and your expectations affect how we choose to interact with them) ex: someone distrusting of others may interact with others/the world differently than someone who is very trusting of others

    • Humanistic Approach: focuses on strengths, what’s good about people and community, optimistic view of humanity, what is going right

      • What happens when things go right, study positive institutions, emotions

        • Positive Traits/Character Strengths: personal characteristics that contribute to a person’s happiness without diminishing someone else’s (creativity, braveness, fairness, kindness, gratitude) 

    The Trait Approach:

    • Focuses on how people are different from each other and measure and compare 

    • Big 5 Theory: the 5 different categories that make up every personality

      • Openness: creative, curious, intellectual, open to new experiences

      • Conscientiousness: organized, systematic, punctual, dependable

      • Extraversion: outgoing, sociable, talkative

      • Agreeableness: warm, trusting, kind, sensitive, tolerant

      • Neuroticism: anxious, irritable, temperamental, moody

    Traits have a Biological Basis:

    • Personality traits have 3 major components: extraversion-introversion, neuroticism (emotional stability), psychoticism (impulse control, aggression, lack of self control and empathy)

    • Biological differences in physiological arousal lead to behavioral differences 

    • Everyone operates best a some specific arousal level for each individual 

      • Extroverts have low arousal generally, so they seek out outer arousal to feel more comfortable, not as sensitive to external stimuli 

      • Introverts are above regular arousal so they get overstimulated easily, leading them to reduce external stimuli

    • Everyone wants to reach their optimal level of arousal 

    • Behavioral Activation (BAS) vs Behavior Inhibition Systems (BIS)

      • BAS: system of brain structures that lead people to approach stimuli to pursue awards (green light GO!), take action to get a goal!

      • BIS: stop system, red light, sensitive to punishment, tells you to stop!

      • People who have a stronger BAS system than their BIS are more likely to take risks and be impulsive

      • People who have a stronger BIS system, are less impulsive and less willing to take risk

    Type A Personality:

    • Making to do lists calm you down

    • Waiting is hard

    • Everything is urgent

    • Sensitive to clutter

    • Frequently interrupts people

    • You never say no

    • Unread emails give you anxiety

    • Competitive

    • Schedule everything

    • Multitasker 

    • Value friendship

    • Works 7 days a week even if you only get paid for 5

    • Gets shit done

    Personality Types:

    • Type A: competitive, time urgent, hostile, aggressive, excessive drive, impatient

      • More likely to develop stress related coronary heart disease (heart attacks)

      • Work harder, in a large variety of jobs, higher work positions, more successful at school

    • Type B: relaxed, takes time, expresses feelings healthily

    How Consistent Are People:

    • Certain kids cheated on the school test while different kids tended to cheat on the athletics test

    • One’s behavior in one situation doesn’t tell us about their behavior in another situation

    • Personality Paradox: people behave much less consistently than their personality trait would predict

    • Mischel: argued that the lack of consistency in behavior in individuals must mean personality doesn’t exist

    • People don’t always behave in consistent to their personality

    • Strong situations shape behavior b/c they have consequences and strict rules

    • Weak situations (not clear on how someone should behave, no clear rules) = personality comes through = variation in behavior 

    • Personality is stable but situations also shape our behavior

    • Behavior can depend on who we are

    • Personality reflects a person’s underlying disposition and the activation of a person’s goals in a particular situation and the activation of someone’s emotional response 

    Development and Life Events Alter Personality Traits:

    • Personality is stable but also changeable 

    • People’s personality changes as we get older

      • In general: people develop increased self control and emotional stability

      • Less Neurotic, Less Extraverted, Less Open to new experiences, but more agreeable and conscientious

      • Usually due to new duties/obligations (ex: long term relationships, children, career)

      • Goal: succeed in those specific life tasks by changing your personality a little bit

    Personality & Culture:

    • Extroverts in America are a lot happier but in Germany/Japan extroverts are the same happiness as introverts

      • WHY? In America, you have to FIND your own social networks

      • In Japan, everyone’s social network is the same since they were children

    • Different desirability of personality traits based on location/culture 

      • America: want their children to be extroverts and self expressive (play dates with strangers, etc.)

      • Japan/Germany: want them to polite, quiet, agreeable, calm

    Culture Influences Personality:

    • Do different cultural norms translate into reliable cultural differences in personality 

    • Different cultures have different cultural expectations for what behavior is acceptable/encouraged

    • Individualistic cultures (individual achievement) vs Collectivist (family/group cohesiveness)

    • Self reports often don’t match up with stereotypes

      • Ex: agreeableness is important in EA but self reports: EA vote themselves as low in A

    • National reports are more accurate while self reports aren’t (biased comparisons of themselves with their national reputation) 

      • Ex: maybe canadians self report as not agreeable b/c they are constantly around other agreeable people so you can’t notice much of a difference

    • When people take self report/questionnaires they are probably comparing themselves to other people they know/spend time with which can alter results 

    • Women are more empathetic and agreeable, and more neurotic

    • Men are more assertive 

    • Sex differences are largest in Europe/USA even when they have more equal opportunities/treatment but smallest in Asia/Africa

      • Probably b/c individualistic cultures compare themselves to groups that are different from them and describe themselves in ways that differentiate from men leading to self reported gender/culture differences

      • b/c individualistic cultures value a person being unique / different 

    • Self reports often do not match cultural stereotypes

    How is Personality Assessed?:

    • Idiographic Approach: thinks about personality as very person centered, individual lives, how various characteristics are integrated into unique persons, open ended, recognition of uniqueness

      • Ex: asking someone to describe themselves

    • Nomothetic Approach: characteristics that are common to all people but vary from person to person, compares people by measuring traits, generalization, numerical data, categorical

      • Ex: Big 5, self report 

    • Ask other people to describe a person’s personality = Acquaintance report 

    • Informants (friends, family) are pretty accurate at judging their person’s personality and traits

    • Sometimes other people know you better than you know yourself depending on whether the traits are observable and whether the person is motivated to view themselves positively on these traits 

    • Strangers can actually judge people’s personality by looks (ex: extroverts tend to be more stylish)

    • People like people who have similar personalities to them

    
    

    The Self: How Do We Know Our Own Personalities?:

    • Self Schema: self knowledge, a set of beliefs of who we are, who we want to be, our values and past behaviors (facts)

    • Self Esteem: how we feel about ourselves, a mechanism for monitoring how likely we are to be socially excluded and when you have to change your behavior to be accepted

      • Depends on how you compare to your same sex parent and your peer group

      • Also depends on what type of love you had as a child 

    • Social Regard: how much we feel that other people like us, approve of our behavior, affects self esteem 

    • People don’t like to be excluded and have low self esteem so we look on how to change our behavior 

    • People with high self esteem are likely to be happier but it is not related to life outcomes 

    People Use Mental Strategies to Maintain Positive Sense of Self:

    • Self esteem is not always related to life outcomes

    • People use mental strategies or tricks to maintain a positive self esteem (ex: ignore things that we find out are bad about ourselves) 

    • Better Than Average Effect: Americans tend to think they are above average

    • Self Serving Bias: people with high self esteem tend to take credit for their successes and blame failure on external factors

      • Thought to protect our self esteem and protect us from harmful emotions we can’t control

    Are There Cultural Differences in the Self-Serving Bias?:

    • Self serving biases are more common in the Western culture

      • People from Western cultures tend to list more of their successes than failures

    
    
    
    
    
    

    *children not biologically related…. On test?!

    Albert Bandura something … on test?

    
    
    Ch 12 Social Psychology pg 1289

    • Neocortex: the outer layer of the cerebral cortex

    • Social Brain Hypothesis: the size of a species' standard social group is related to the volume of their neocortex

    
    

    12.1 People Favor Their Own Groups pg 1294

    • Ingroups: groups to which particular people belong to

    • Outgroups: groups where they don’t belong to 

    • When two conditions are met, people form groups:

      • Reciprocity: people treat others how others treat them

      • Transitivity: people generally share their friends' opinions of other people 

    • Outgroup Homogeneity Effect: people notice more variation among members of their own ingroup and less variation among people in outgroups “they all look alike”

    • Social Identity Theory: people who identify and value their certain groups also experience pride through their group membership

    • Ingroup Favoritism: people give preferential treatment to ingroup members than outgroup members (by learning, mimicking and internalizing the ways other group members behave towards ingroup and outgroup members)

    • Minimal Group Paradigm: even when two groups were randomly assigned members, participants gave more money to their ingroup members and tried to prevent outgroup members from receiving any money

    • Medial Prefrontal Cortex: middle region of prefrontal cortex; important for thinking about other people, associated with ingroup bias and less active when people consider outgroup members (why? perhaps people see ingroup members as more human than outgroup members) 

    
    

    12.2 Groups Influence Individual Behavior pg 1301

    • Risky Shift Effect: groups often make riskier decisions than individuals do

    • Group Polarization: when groups make decisions, they usually choose the course of action that was initially favored by the majority of the group

    • Group Think: for the sake of politeness and preserving the group's cohesiveness, the group may end up making a bad decision

    • Social Facilitation: the presence of others generally enhances performance

      • Zajonc's Model of Social Facilitation: the presence of others leads to arousal which enhances the dominant response (the required response) if easy/well learned = good performance, if difficult / not well learned = poor performance

    • Social Loafing: people do not work as hard when they are in a group rather than working alone b/c they don't feel personally responsible for the outcome

    • Deindividuation: people lose their individuality when they become part of a group leading them to do things they normally wouldn't (usually accompanied by high levels of arousal, anonymous, responsibility is diffused/reduced expectations of being held accountable)

    12.3 People Conform with Others pg 1308

    • Conformity: people alter their behaviors and opinions to match those of others/to what is expected

      • Normative Influence: people go along with the crowd to fit in and to avoid looking foolish

      • Informational Influence: when people are uncertain about what is correct, appropriate or expected so people look to others for cues on how to respond

    • Social norms: expected standards of conduct, which behavior is appropriate for a given situation and how people should response to those who violate norms

    • Autokinetic Effect: a stationary point of light appears to move when viewed in total darkness when multiple people had to call out their estimates, participants quickly revised their estimates until they agreed and believed the information (informational)

    • Solomon Asch: line experiment, when in a group of people who chose the lines that didn't match with the original one, the participant would follow and choose the wrong line even when they knew the actual answer (normative)

    • People usually don't conform if the group size is 1-2 people but it eventually levels off and lack of consensus 

    • Medial prefrontal cortex: involved with understanding group members AND predicting people's conforming behavior

    
    

    12.4 Can Social Norms Marketing Reduce Binge Drinking? pg 1314

    • Social norms marketing works for excessive drinkers because it shows them that they drink way above the average, leading to them to decrease their drinking but it can backfire for nondrinkers/light drinkers. Students who usually only drink one might interpret the posters as suggesting the norm is more and adjust their behavior accordingly

    
    

    12.5 People Obey Authority Figures pg 1317

    • Stanley Milgram's Obedience Experiment: what factors influence people to follow orders given by an authority

      • Each participant was instructed to "shock" a participant who was a "learner", each time the learner makes a mistake, the participant was told to give them a shock and with each error they must increase the voltage, the learner acts as if they are being shocked -> dead but the authority figure always tells you to continue shocking them 

      • ordinary people can be coerced into obedience by insistent authorities

      • If the participant could see or touch the learner, obedience to the authority figure decreased or when the experimenter had to give orders over the telephone (not physically present and visible)

      • Factors that maximize obedience: when shock level increases slowly, victim starts protesting later in the study, orders justify continuing, study is conducted at a high status school

      • Participants in the Milgrim experiment convince themselves that what they are doing is HELPFUL to inflict pain on an innocent victim

    12.6 Many Factors Can Influence Aggression pg 1326

    • Aggression: intention to harm another physically or using words/symbols that threaten, intimidate or emotionally harm

      • Can be learned through observation learning, exposure to violent media, when activated defense mechanisms when socially rejected or due to heat being in pain or negative emotional states (b/c it disrupts the functioning of brain regions involved in controlling behavior)

    • High levels of testosterone and maturational changes (physical growth, change in social expectations) promote aggression may be due to reducing activity of brain circuits that control impulses

      • may be related to social dominance a result of having greater power/status rather than a direct causal role in aggression

    • Disrupting serotonin systems can lead to people being impulsive, hostile, disruptive, increase the amygdala's response to threat and interfere with the prefrontal cortex's control over aggressive impulses

    • MAOA gene controls the amount of MAO (monoamine oxidase) an enzyme that regulates the activity of neurotransmitters (serotonin, norepinephrine), involved in impulsive behaviors and aggressive violence

    • Society and Culture influence people's tendencies to commit violent acts: such as how likely criminals will be caught, brought to justice and amount of poverty and inequality

    • Culture of Honor: boys and men learn that it is important to protect their reputations through physical aggression (ex: Southern males felt more cortisol and testosterone increases than Northern males)

    
    

    12.7 Cooperation Can Reduce Outgroup Bias pg 1331

    • Sherif: boys were divided into two groups and competed against each other in a camp athletic tournament for prizes, the Eagles burned the Rattler's flag and Rattlers trashed the Eagles' cabin. Cooperating in tasks together to meet common goals can reduce hostility and aggression between groups.

      • Shared SuperOrdinate goals (require people to cooperate) reduce hostility between groups since they work together to achieve a common goal

    
    

    12.8 Many Factors Can Influence Helping Behavior pg 1337

    • Prosocial Behaviors: doing favors, offering assistance, paying compliments, pleasant and cooperative

      • Motivated by empathy (people share other’s emotions) or due to selfish motives (maintaining public image, relieve their own negative mood)

    • Altruism: providing help when it's needed without immediate reward for doing so

      • Inclusive Fitness: people are altruistic towards those with they share genes with so that some of your genes survive (kin selection)

      • Reciprocity: one organism helps another because the other may return the favor in the future

    • Bystander Intervention: Kitty Genovese was walking home when someone attacked and killed her, none of the 38 witnesses tried to help or called the police

      • Bystander Intervention Effect: failure to offer help by those who observe someone in need due to expecting other people available to help

        • Latane and Darley: smoke starts filling the room, when participants are alone they mostly went for help quickly, with naive participants some of them went for help initially but with confederates (those working with the experimenter) just shrugged and continued filling out the questionnaires, participants did the same and did not seek assistance

      • Diffusion of Responsibility: bystanders expect other bystanders to help, so the greater number of people who witness someone in need of help, the less likely someone will step forward

      • People fear making social blunders, worried they will look foolish seeking out help when it isn't needed

      • Less likely to help if they are anonymous 

      • If the harm outweighs the risk of helping, you might not help

    12.9 People Form Attitudes Through Experience and Socialization pg 1345

    • Attitudes: feelings, opinions and beliefs about anything

    • People generally develop negative attitudes about new things rather than positive attitudes

    • The more people are exposed to something, the more likely they are to like it

    • Mere Exposure Effect: greater exposure to an item -> greater familiarity causes people to have more positive attitudes about the item

    • Classical Conditioning: pairing a celebrity with aa product tends to develop more positive attitudes about the product

    • Operant Conditioning: if rewarded each time you do a behavior, you will develop a more positive attitude towards that behavior

    • Attitude Accessibility: the ease or difficulty that a person has in retrieving an attitude from memory

      • Fazio: attitudes easily brought to mind are more stable, predictive of behavior and resistant to change

      • Explicit Attitudes: attitudes you know about and can report to other people

      • Implicit Attitudes: influences feelings and behaviors at an unconscious level, are accessed from memory quickly with little effort or control

        • Implicit Association Test: measures how quickly a person associates objects with positive/negative words (ex: people who are faster to pair female with good (vs bad) are thought to have less implicit bias against women)

        • IAT is best used as a measure of bias in a group of people rather than an individual measure of bias for a given person

    12.10 Discrepancies Lead to Dissonance pg 1353

    • Leon Festinger's Cognitive Dissonance: people have a need for psychological consistency so when their attitudes conflict, they experience an unpleasant state which leads to the motivation to reduce the feeling of dissonance: by changing attitudes/behaviors or rationalizing the discrepancies

    • Insufficient Justification: People paid $1 to lie that they liked a task even though they didn't report enjoying the task more the next time b/c the $1 wasn't enough to justify lying. So to reduce this dissonance between "I lied for no reason" and "I'm an honest person" caused them to change their attitudes about the task "I didn't really lie because I actually found the taks interesting." While those paid $20 felt justified so they did not experience conflict between their action "I got paid money to say that" and their attitude "I am an honest person"

      • A way to get people to change their attitudes is to change their behaviors first using few incentives

    • Justifying Effort: Aronson, Mills: some women read a list of obscene words or sexually explicit passages in front of the male experimenter and another group read a list of milder words. Women who read the embarrassing words reported finding the boring seminar much more interesting, engaging and important.

      • Dissonance is caused by putting themselves through pain/discomfort to join a group and to resolve it they tell themselves that the group and their commitment to it is important because they had put so much effort / already sacrificed a lot to join the group.

    • PostDecisional Dissonance: dissonance arises when a person holds positive attitudes about different options but chooses one of the options anyways, motivates them to focus on the chosen option's positive aspects and the other options' negative aspects, occurs automatic w/ little cognitive processing or awareness

    
    

    12.11 Attitudes and Behaviors Can Be Changed Through Persuasion pg 1360

    • Persuasion: active conscious effort to change an attitude or behavior usually with a message

    • Source: who delivers the message (most persuasive when attractive and credible, or similar to the receiver), Content: what the message says (repeating the message over and over, appeal to emotions, one sided arguments work best for gullible or already on the speaker's side, for a skeptical crowd, speakers should acknowledge both sides to be more persuasive), Receiver: who processes the message

    • Elaboration Likelihood Model: persuasive communication leads to attitude change (when motivated and able to process the info: persuasion takes the central route = strong attitudes that last over time and people actively defend) or (when people are not motivated or unable to process, persuasion takes the peripheral route: impulsive action, weaker and more likely to change over time)

    • Compliance: other people do the requested thing when asked to change their behavior 

      • People are especially compliant when they are in a good mood or if a reason is given to avoid conflict

      • Foot in the Door Technique: if people agree to a small request, they become more likely to comply with a large undesirable request

      • Door in the Face: if you refuse a large request, you are more likely to comply with a smaller request

      • Low Balling: when you agree to buy a product for a certain price, you are likely to comply with a request to pay more for the product

    12.12 People Make Judgments About Others pg 1367

    • People evaluate other people's facial appearance to identify if they are trustworthy or not (amygdala is important for judging trustworthiness)

    • Judges giving instructions to juries reveal that a judge's nonverbal actions (facial expressions, gestures, mannerisms) can predict whether a jury will find the defendant guilty or not because judges unconsciously indicate their beliefs through the nonverbal actions

    • Attributions: explanations for events or actions (other people's behavior)

      • Personal Attributions: place the cause of a behavior on internal factors (abilities, moods, efforts: i did well on the exam because I worked hard/am smart)

      • Situational Attributions: place the cause of a behavior on outside events (luck, accident, other people)

    • People tend to overemphasize the importance of personality traits and underestimate the importance of situations when it comes to explaining other people's behavior (ex: in the Milgram study the participant is an evil person thats why hes shocking other people not because he's being forced to)

      • ^ correspondence bias: focusing on beliefs that correspond with the behavior but neglecting other factors

      • ^ also known as fundamental attribution error b/c it is a mistaken association b/w a behavior and a fundamental feature about the person

    • Actor/Observer Discrepancy: people tend to focus on situations when interpreting their own behavior and focus on dispositions when interpreting other people's behavior (ex: take credit for their own achievements but blame factors on situational/external)

      • Ex: people attribute their own lateness to traffic but other people’s lateness to laziness 

    • People in Eastern cultures tend to take the perspective of other people and understand their behavior is a result of BOTH personal and situational factors but like Westerners they still favor personal information over situation information when making attributions about others but just a little less 

      • Different cultures tend to differ in how much they emphasis the situation 

    12.13 Stereotypes Can Lead to Prejudice and Discrimination pg 1375

    • Stereotypes: beliefs/cognitive schemas where group membership is used to organize information about people, short mental shortcuts/heuristics so that you can easily process information about someone (sometimes inaccurately)

      • Used to efficiently form impressions of others 

    • Illusory Correlations: seeing relationships that do not exist due to stereotypes being maintained over time, don't pay attention to disconfirming evidence so much so memories become biased to match stereotypes

    • Subtyping: when they encounter someone who does not fit the stereotype they don't alter it but put them in a special category

    • Prejudice: negative feelings, opinions, and beliefs associated with a stereotype

    • Discrimination: differential treatment of people based on group membership

    • People tend to favor their own groups over others and stigmatize those who pose threats to their groups

    • Shooter Bias Effect: (Colgate), people are shown pictures of people holding either guns or non gun objects and told to press the button shoot as quickly as possible if they are holding a gun or don't shoot when they aren't holding a gun ... the result is participants mostly press shoot even when the person does not have a gun because they are black and vice versa with white people (don't shoot when they are white and have a gun)

    • Modern Racism: subtle forms of prejudice that coexist with the outward rejection of racist beliefs

      • Indirectly endorsing actions/policies that have the same effect as discrimination without labeling them as such

    12.14 Prejudice and Its Effects Can Be Reduced pg 1383

    • Stereotype Threat: concern or fear that people will believe their performance on a task would confirm negative stereotypes about their group

    • Reduces effects of prejudice by helping the target think about the situation differently

      • Reframing: taking a negative stereotype and transforming it from a weakness to a strength

      • Self Labeling: taking ownership of a slur and embracing it 

    • People can consciously alter their automatic stereotyping by presenting positive examples of the stereotyped group 

    • But overall difficult since you need the frontal lobes (controls thoughts/behavior) to override emotional responses by amygdala activity (detects potential threats)

      • So it's really up to the individual if they are motivated to reduce their prejudice and focus on self control and thinking about other people's points of views

    • Perspective Taking: actively contemplating the psychological experiences of other people (reduces racial bias, stereotyping)

    • Perspective Giving: people share their experiences of being targets of discrimination (positive changes in attitude towards another group)

      • Helps a lot for groups with less political power to be heard and for groups with more power to listen

    12.15 Situational and Personal Factors Influence Interpersonal Attraction and Friendships pg 1390

    • Proximity: how often people come into contact with each other because they are physically nearby

    • Familiarity: people like familiar things more than unfamiliar ones (mere exposure: people like things that they are exposed to repeatedly)

      • Neophobia: fear of anything novel

      • Sometimes can lead to contempt (if the person already dislikes them in the first place which can be caused by how different they are from you)

    • Matching Principle: most successful romantic couples also tend to be the most physically similar

    • People like those who have personal characteristics that are valuable to the group based on two dimensions: warmth and competence (reliable)

    • People find symmetrical faces more attractive since it is thought to be more healthy/disease resistant

    • People tend to view averaged faces as attractive probably due to mere exposure effect, seeing them as more familiar, or because it removes asymmetries or distinguishing facial features that could be unattractive/unhealthy seeming

    • What is Beautiful is Good Stereotype: attractive people are less likely perceived as criminals, lighter sentences, happier, more intelligent, more sociable, more capable, gifted, successful and less social deviant, paid more, have more career opportunities

    12.16 Emotions Play an Important Role in Romantic Relationships pg 1399

    • Passionate Love: state of intense longing and sexual desire (active midbrain dopamine systems)

    • Companionate Love: what passionate love evolves into, a strong commitment to care for and support a partner

    • People typically experience less passion for their partners over time, if people do not develop companionate forms of satisfaction: friendship, social support, intimacy then it leads to dissatisfaction and dissolution of the relationship

    • One's attachment style in adulthood is related to early childhood experiences (parenting)

      • Warm supportive responsive parents -> secure attachments in relationships: easy to get close to others, do not fear abandonment

      • Cold distant -> avoidant attachments -> hard to trust or depend on others, wary of those who become close to them 

      • Parents who are inconsistent (sometimes warm sometimes not) -> ambivalent attachment -> clingy, worry that people do not love them or want to leave them

        • Based on people's recollections of how their parents treated them (memories can be distorted), relationships can also change people's attachment styles, with patient understanding trustworthy partners people are likely to become secure but if a "bad" partner become insecure

    • Gottman: four interpersonal styles that lead to dissolution of couples: overly critical, holding the partner in contempt, being defensive, and mentally withdrawing 

    • Capitalization: deliver criticism lightly and with compassion when things go wrong but revel in each other's successes when things go right

    • Attributional Style: how one partner explains the other's behavior (happy couples: overlook bad behavior and respond constructively: accommodation vs unhappy couples: distress-maintaining attributions: view each other in most negative ways possible)

      • Try to attribute good things to each other and bad things to situations

    12.17 Findings from Psychological Science Can Benefit Your Relationship Pg 1405

    • If a couple has about 5 positive interactions for every negative one, chances are good that the relationship will be stable

    • Try to understand your partner’s perspective.

    • Be affectionate.

    • Show you care.

    • Spend quality time together.

    • Maintain trust.

    • Learn how to handle conflict.

    
    Your behavior, thoughts, and emotions are all affected by other people to some extent 

  • We prefer people we are in groups with over those we aren’t in groups with 

  • Ingroups: groups to which we belong

  • Outgroups: groups to which we don’t belong to

  • Reciprocity: if I do something nice for you, you are more likely to do something nice for me, we tend to treat people the way they treat us

  • Transitivity: people generally share the same opinions are their ingroup/friends

    • Ex: if I like Person A and dislike Person B my friend is most likely to share the same opinion

  • Outgroup Homogeneity Effect: we tend to view outgroup members as less varied “they are all the same” while people in our ingroup are considered as individuals and unique from one another

  • Stereotyping and prejudice: if we have a bad experience with one person in that outgroup, we assume that all people in that outgroup are the same as that person (a bad person) etc.

  • Social Identity Theory: ingroup consist of individuals who perceive themselves as members of the same category, people value their ingroups and experience pride through their membership with that group 

  • Women show more in group bias qualms

    • Caused Gender inequality 

  • When people are around us, our physiological arousal rises 

    • The amount of physiological arousal we need to do well depends on the task we are performing (if easy = we do best when physiological arousal is rised = better performance when watched by others) 

    • Social Facilitation: we do better when others are watching us do easy tasks or well practiced 

    • Social Inhibition: we do worse when others are watching us do difficult or not as well practiced tasks because it requires a lot of cognitive ability

  • Social Loafing: when in a group, the group produces less effort overall than they would if they each individually worked together 

    • Due to diffusion of responsibility and anonymity because how will anyone know if i don’t work my best / put all my effort in / maybe someone else will put in more effort for me

  • Deindividuation: when an individual in a group loses awareness of themselves as a separate individual = mob mentality, forgetting their own individual moral rules or conduct and default to what the groups’ moral rules or conduct is 

    • Happens when high level of arousal in a group, they are anonymous and responsibility for their actions are diffused 

    • Ex: Red Soxs Fans Victory 

    • Ex: Stanford Prison Experiment: even when assigned a role, a person can forget their identity and morals, get caught up in the role and “become” their role

      • Students playing the guards become extremely sadistic and cruel towards other students who played as prisoners 

  • Groups usually make better decisions than an individual BUT

    • Group Polarization: going into a conversation with a weak initial opinion but when you find out the group also all feels the same way, it makes your attitude stronger and more extreme

      • I kinda like mary more, everyone else also kinda likes mary more, we all talk about how great mary is, at the end of the meeting we all like mary much more at the extreme to the point why did we even consider susan

    • Risky Shift: a type of group polarization 

      • I think we should take a little risk, everyone else thinks we should take a little risk, we all convinced each other to take risks, = group makes a huge risk

    • Group Think: a cohesive (close) group comes together to make a decision, to keep group harmony or to not be excluded, individuals don’t voice their own opinions if they clash with the groups’ opinion

      • Group does not fully process the information and reassure each other they are doing the right thing

      • Usually common in a tight knit group that is under an external threat

  • Conformity: when people change their behavior because of social pressure

    • Sherif: Autokinetic Effect Study: judge how much a light point moved in a dark room 

      • The participant just went along with whatever the confederate thought the light moved 

        • Ex: if confederate said light moved around a lot, they also said the light moved around a lot 

      • Informational Influence ^ example since people didn’t really know how much the light moved since its an illusion so they just go along with what other people said

    • Normative Influence: even though a person knows the correct answer, they go with whatever other people chose to fit in / not be the odd one out

      • Ex: Asch’s Line Study, the confederates gave the wrong answer but the participant who went last saw everyone giving the wrong answer so they also gave the wrong answer despite knowing the real answer is something else

  • Causes of conformity:

    • Informational Influence: shows peoples’ desire to be correct, when a situation is unclear, people conform to others because we believe that they know what to do

    • Normative Influence: shows peoples’ desire to be liked or to not be judged or foolish/weird, conform to others ideas because they don’t want to be the odd one out

  • Eastern cultures tend to be collectivist while Western cultures tend to be individualistic

  • Collectivists tend to conform more to people in their social group BUT are less likely to conform to strangers compared to individualists 

    • Individualists care across the board so we equally conform to ingroup and outgroups

    • Collectivists only care how they are perceived by their ingroup so will only conform to their ingroup since they only feel social pressure then

  • Obedience: change in behavior in response to an instruction or command from another person (especially authority) (ex: Nazi Germany concentration camps WW2)

  • Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Study: Milgram told participants to give electric shocks to another person, Milgram told the participants (teachers) that everytime the other person (confederate/learner) got a word pair wrong, they should give them an electric shock (that increase in severity over time)... when the learner (confederate) starts screaming so the teacher (participant) looks to Milgram (authority figure/experimenter) on what to do but Milgram says that you must continue with the experiment so most of the participants (teachers) do even when the learner (confederate) goes silent 

  • Biological factors that are linked to aggression

    • People who have a certain ver of the MAOA gene and experience violent child maltreatment are more likely to be violent criminals

      • Interaction b/w nurture and nature showing u need both that gene and to experience maltreatment to become more aggressive

    • Women do have testosterone but less than men 

    • Men on average tend to be more aggressive than women (especially physically) 

    • When people are aggressive, testosterone levels rise (testosterone is a cause and result of aggressive behavior)

  • Social cultural factors that are linked to aggression

    • When is violence okay or not and what type is okay

  • Bystander Intervention: when you are a bystander but then see someone in need of help and you help them 

  • Bystander Apathy: when you are a bystander but then see someone in need of help and you don’t help them / don’t take action

    • Bystander Effect: the larger the group a person is in, the smaller the chance that you will take action (if there are other bystanders, you probably won't help either b/c you are sure someone else will help *diffusion of responsibility)

    • Ex: Kitty Genovese: many people witnessed her murder but no one helped 

  • Why does the bystander effect happen?

    • Diffusion of responsibility: thinking someone else will help, it’s not an individual personal responsibility

    • Fear of making social blunders (Pluralistic Ignorance) caused by ambiguity, you aren’t sure what's going on, is this an emergency or not? Does this situation need intervention or not? When people aren’t sure what to do / if to help or not, they look to others to see what to do / if to help or not 

    • Less likely to help people when they are anonymous and can remain so 

      • When people are identified as an individual they are more likely to help

    • People consider how much risk/harm they are likely to receive if they help out

  • Robbers Cave Experiment: boys were divided into 2 groups and pitted against each other causing hostility, so they established cooperative goals that required the boys to work together to fix the problem

  • Goals with cooperation reduce hostility 

  • Attitude: evaluation or state of mind about an event/object/idea, how you feel or think or behave

    • Formed by hearing, learning, reading, experiencing new things and gain information

  • Mere Exposure Effect: the more we are exposed to something, the more you like it (b/c more familiar) 

  • Attitudes can be conditioned (celebrity paired with a product, tend to develop positive attitudes about that product) 

  • Rewards and punishments also develop positive/negative attitudes

  • Socialization (people around us, culture, media) shape how we think we should feel about things

  • Our behaviors are not always consistent with other attitudes 

    • Our behaviors ARE consistent with our attitudes is our attitude is STRONG and personally relevant 

    • The more specific the attitude the more predictive your behavior is (specific>general)

    • Attitude Accessibility: ease or difficulty to which your attitude about something comes to mind 

      • Attitude is more accessible -> attitude is more in line with your behavior (predictable)

  • Cognitive Dissonance: discrepancies between your attitude and behavior (they don’t match up causing discomfort, thus motivating us to reduce it!)

    • Solution: change your behavior to align with your attitude

      • Yeah… texting and driving is bad. Let’s stop texting while driving!

    • Solution: giving yourself an excuse to reduce your dissonance 

      • Well, I only texted once! And it was for an emergency!

    • Solution: change your attitude to match your behavior

      • Eh.. texting and driving isn’t that bad so I can do it anyways

    • Festinger CarlSmith - Rationalization: everyone was forced to do a really boring task, then experimenter asks participants to lie and tell the next participant that the task was really fun, group A is given $20 to lie, group B is only given $1, group A did not have cognitive dissonance b/c it was a big enough excuse to justify lying therefore their opinion on the task still remained as boring, but Group B had cognitive dissonance b/c $1 wasn’t a big enough excuse to justify lying so they tried to change their attitude to align with their behavior (convinced themselves i didn’t really lie… the task was actually fun-)

  • Bem’s Self Perception Theory: we aren’t quite sure what our attitude is so we step back and observe our own behavior and look at what we’ve done in the past to figure out our attitude 

  • Foot in the Door technique: ask someone to do a small favor -> people usually agree -> thinks of themselves as someone who helps others / cares about that cause -> more likely to agree when ask to do something again but a bigger favor

  • Elaboration Likelihood Model: directly trying to persuade people to a particular attitude

    • Central Route to Persuasion: when you are really paying attention to someone trying to convince you with facts and evidence, logic, pros/cons, analyzing it

    • Peripheral Route to Persuasion: devotes far less cognitive resources, focused more on how the message is being delivered (funny, good speaker/talker, celebrity, i'm an “expert”), peripheral cues

  • Social Cognition: process of interpreting and thinking about the social world (how do people think of others) 

  • Nonverbal Behavior: facial expressions, gestures, movements

    • Liars actually know they are supposed to look directly into the other person’s eye when lying to appear honest

    • Liars actually speak in a higher pitch, more hesitantly and blink less often, or staring hard

  • Attributional Dimensions: we come up with reasons as to why someone is behaving a certain way

    • Dispositional Internal Attribution: give an explanation of a person’s behavior based on their personality or character

    • Situational External Attribution: give an explanation of a person’s behavior based on their situation 

    • Can be a permanent or temporary attribution or controllable or uncontrollable

    • Fundamental Attribution Error: tend to overemphasize the impact of internal attribution to someone’s behavior and underestimate/emphasize the situational attributions when judging others

    • Actor/Observer Discrepancy: tendency to place responsibility on situational factors when it comes to explaining our own behavior 

      • But when looking at other people’s behavior we explain it due to their internal/dispositional factors (personality, characteristics)

      • People in eastern cultures use a lot more information before making an attribution, tend to believe that BOTH situational and dispositional factors are causes of a person’s behavior

        • Easterners still make the fundamental attribution error just at a lesser degree than westerners

  • Attitudes have 3 components: affect (emotion), cognition (thinking), and behavior (doing) component 

    • Prejudice and Ingroup favoritism: affect, how we feel about people in another group

      • Solution: Perspective Taking: actively contemplating the psychological experiences of other people (try to put yourself in someone else’s shoes)

      • Perspective Giving: sharing one’s own experiences of being the target of discrimination

    • Stereotypes: cognition, thoughts and beliefs we have about other people’s groups

      • Based on automatic categorization: schemas, thoughts and beliefs about people based on group membership (leading to prejudice and discrimination)

      • Can be self fulfilling (we expect this person to act that way so we create a situation where they are likely to act that way)

        • ex: Rosenthal & Jacobsen Teacher Expectation Study: teachers paid more attention to those with a golden star (even tho it was random) causing the starred students to score higher iq than the beginning iq assignment

    • Discrimination: behavior, how we treat other people in other groups

  • Proximity/Near Exposure -> Familiarity: the more times we come into contact with a person we are more likely to like them

  • People are more likely to stay in long term relationships when they are more similar to each other

  • Symmetrical faces = more attractive 

    • “Average” faces are more attractive 

  • “What is beautiful is good” effect: we assume attractive people are good at everything

  • Romantic/Passionate Love: wildly emotional state at beginning of the relationship

    • Arousal Theory of Love: 

      • Physiological Arousal

      • Set of beliefs and attitude that leads to interpretation of your arousal and identifying the cause (source) as passion for this person

  • Companionate Love: passionate love transforms into companionate love (decreased interest in sex, friendship, emotional support, mutual respect) if not develops into companionate love -> end of relationship

  • Gottman: 4 interpersonal styles that end relationships: being overcritical (attacking someone’s character), holding partner in contempt (degrading, lack of respective), defensive (won’t take responsibility, deflects it), mentally withdrawn (silence treatment, refusal)

  • More happier longer relationships show concern and care about their other person, emotionally cal, see each other’s point of view

  • Accommodation: differ in the way they explain their partner's behavior (attributions) partner enhancing attribute good events to partner’s character and bad events to situational factors > distress maintaining behavior attribute good events to situational factors and bad events to partner’s character

  • Viewing your partner in a positive light

  • Golden ratio: 5 positive events for every bad one = likely to be long lasting relationship 

    • Show interest in your partner

    • Show you care (praise)

    • Be affectionate

    • Spending quality time 

    • Maintain loyalty 

    • Learn how to handle conflict 

    • Recognize and Celebrate what is good

Applied Psychology: the term originated from the field of ergonomics 

US workers work the most hours than anyone else in the world (average almost 2,000 hours)

Happier people are more productive workers and more likely to get a better job

American workers reported lack of control to be the second greatest stressor by 25% of the participants, not a single Indian worker mentioned control, Indian most stressor: lack of structure (by 25% again)

Europeans take 3 times as much vacation time as Americans

Industrial Organizational Psychology’s Three Components: scientific management, ergonomics, human relations to management 

• Scientific Management: done by engineers, emphasizes the worker as a well oiled machine and determines efficient methods for performing a work related task, Frederick Winslow Taylor

  • Jobs need to be analyzed to identify the optimal way to perform them

  • Employees are hired according to the characteristics needed to be successful in the task (characteristics are defined by examining those already successful at the job)

  • Employees must be trained

  • Employees must be rewarded for productivity to encourage higher performance

• Frank and Lillian Gilbreth: time and motion studies: examined the precise movements required to complete a task and removing the unnecessary ones, Frederick Winslow Taylor

• Henry Ford: the assembly line: workers stayed in one place and an individual only assembled one part of the machine as it moved along the conveyor belt (NOT from start to finish)

  • Hired frederick winslow taylor

• First in military (selecting recruits and training them) during WW1

• Ergonomics (human factors): field combining engineering and psychology, to enhance safety and efficiency of humans working with machines/tools BORN IN WW2

• Hawthorne Studies: Mayo, how various work conditions influence productivity, group with consistent lighting and one with a variety of light intensities, both did better over time except when lighting was so dim

  • Dim lighting -> worse performance

  • Workplace is a social system of people who work and relate together

• Hawthorne Effect: tendency for individuals to perform better because they were singled out/made important

• Mayo's human relations approach: disputed the thought that what was good for the business was good for the employee, emphasizes psychological characteristics of workers and managers (morale, attitudes, values, humane treatment)

• I: maximize efficiency, safety and cost effectiveness VS O: human relations, feelings of fulfillment

• Industrial Psychology: job analysis + evaluation, employee selection, training, performance appraisal (assessment), focused on increasing efficiency and productivity through appropriate use of employees (human resources)

  • Job Analysis: generates a description of what a job involves (what knowledge/skills are necessary)

    • Follows systematic procedure, job is broken down into small units, analysis leads to an employee manual that accurately characterizes the job

  • KSAOS or KSAS: included in person oriented job analysis, stands for knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics 

  • Dictionary of Occupational titles: job descriptions for 20,000+ occupations based on expert ratings and interviews

  • Occupational Outlook Handbook: occupations that are in demand or expected to grow fastest

  • 2014 expected to grow fastest: home health aides, network system, data communication system analysts, medical assistants and physician assistants

  • Essential Functions: fundamental, necessary tasks and duties of a job as defined by the employer

  • Nonessential Functions: aspects of the job that may not be necessary but are desirable

  • Americans with Disabilities Act: illegal to refuse employment or promotion to someone with a disability that prevents them from performing only nonessential functions

  • Job Evaluation: determining the monetary value of a particular occupation (pay rate), depends on experts on where the occupation stands for compensable factors (education required, consequences of error on the job, level of responsibility and skill required)

• Those with connections usually perform the best but those who apply through the Internet are better quality candidates than those who apply in response to a newspaper advertisement USUALLY

• Psychological tests to assess personality traits and motivation, Intelligence Tests related to later performance (considered reliable, fair and valid)

• Integrity Test: assesses whether the candidate is likely to be dishonest on the job

• Biographical Inventory: asks the candidates about life experiences that seem verifiable (respondent is less likely to lie if the questions are asking about a "permanent record")

  • might be biased because not all questions tap into particular KSAOs for the job

• Civil Rights Act of 1964: illegal to deny someone employment on the basis of gender or ethnicity

• Interviewer Illusion: interviewers' mistaken tendency to believe in their own ability to discern the truth from an interview

• Structured Interview: asks specific questions that methodically seek to get truly useful info from the interview (valid and reliable)

• Orientation: introduces newly hired employees to the organization's goals, rules, regulations and getting to know how things get done

• Training: teaching the new employee the essential requirements to do the job well

  • Overlearning: giving trainees practice after they have achieved a level of acceptable skill at some task so that the skill becomes automatic

• Mentoring: an experienced employee serves as an advisor and source of support for the newer employee

• Performance Appraisal: evaluating a person's success at their job (feedback to improve, promotion/raises, terminations/firings)

• Performance Ratings: subjective judgments (prone to biases, errors)

  • Halo Effect: rater gives the person the same rating on overall items even though there is actual variability (uses general impression to guide ratings)

  • Distributional Error: refers to ratings that fail to use the entire rating scale (leniency: rater goes easy on everyone, severity: rater goes hard on everyone, central tendency: rater sees everyone as average)

• 360 Feedback: collect feedback on a employee's performance from a variety of sources/individuals (themselves, a peer, a supervisor, a subordinate, customer/client)

• Fairness: defined the dimensions to be used in the performance appraisal, raters are trained, employees can appeal the ratings, tracked and document performance, counseling to poorly performing employees

• Types of behaviors found in performance evaluations:

  • Thinking outside the box

  • Organizational Citizenship behavior: actions that the employee does to promote organizational effectiveness but are not part of the person's formal responsibilities (ex: coming in early, staying late, helping a colleague)

    • positively associated with fellow employee's satisfaction and loyalty when the supervisor's abusiveness was low

    • when supervisor is abusive, OCB was negatively related to job satisfaction for coworkers (can't tell which side this person is on)

• Organizational Psychology: how relationships at work influence job satisfaction/commitment, efficiency, productivity

• The "Japanese" Management Style (by W. Edwards Deming: Father of the Quality Revolution): importance on innovation and plans for the future rather than just economic results, take risks and make decisions based on quality, foster strong relationships with suppliers, employees, customers

• Theory X Managers: assume work is unpleasant and employees want to avoid it so they need direction and must be kept in line, exert control and punishment

• Theory Y Managers: effortful behavior is natural to human beings, people work hard, motivate employees by suggesting them to create solutions to problems

• Waigawa System: example of Theory Y using Honda (Japanese car): when corp faces difficult problem, anyone from any level of the organization can have input no matter their rank

• Strengths Based Management: Donald Clifton (Founder of Strengths-Based Psychology): maximize an employee's existing strengths rather than building such attributes from ground up

• Job Satisfaction: extent to which a person is content in his or her job (Canada > England) (done with ratings/self reports)* canada highest job satisfaction

  • Does not depend on the amount of money but rather on the person’s perception that the pay was fair

  • evidence that job satisfaction is relatively stable over time

  • “chronic kickers”: those who complained no matter what the researchers did

  • Job satisfaction is related to lower job turnover and absenteeism and an increase in organizational citizenship

• Three types of commitment to understand an employee’s dedication:

  • Affective: a person’s emotional attachment to the workplace, commits to the organization because THEY WANT TO

  • Continuance: the employee’s perception that leaving the organization would be too costly, both economically and socially they HAVE to 

  • Normative: the sense of obligation an employee feels toward the organization because of the investment the organization has made in the person’s personal and professional development OUGHT to feels like they owe it to the organization

• Individuals who view their occupation as their calling show higher levels of life satisfaction and job satisfaction, more likely to do citizenship behaviors, devote more time to work and miss work less

  • Calling = portable resource across jobs

• Job Crafting: physical and cognitive changes individuals can make within the constraints of a task to make the work "their own"

• Leader: a person who influences, motivates and enables others to succeed

  • Transactional Leader: just the person in charge, responsible for running but not changing things, focused on rewards or punishment, structure, "that's how we do it around here" and only does management by exception (aka only stepping in when there's a problem)

  • Transformational Leader: changing rules, brings charisma, passion and vision to the position (idealized influence: does what they think is the right thing to do, inspires people to do their best, want to intellectually stimulate their employees, provide individualized consideration to their employees/shows concern for each person's well being)

• Organizational Identity: employees' feelings of oneness with the organization and its goals

• Organizational culture: organization's shared values, beliefs, norms and customs

  • Power culture: power is centralized to only a few people, control is enforced from the center to outward, few rules, little bureaucracy, quick decision making

  • Role culture: clearly defined structure and authority, hierarchical, authority (top to down)

  • Task Culture: teams and status of members depend on expertise

  • Person Culture: everyone believes they are above the organization itself, difficulty surviving, NOT a shared mission

• Compassion: empathizing with the suffering of another and doing something to alleviate that suffering

• Virtuousness: moral goodness, doing the right thing

• Downsizing: dramatically cutting the workforce 

  • shows a lack of compassion but also is economically ill advised

• Workplace Incivility: rude or disrespectful behaviors that reveal a lack of regard for others (rumors, inflammatory emails, sabotage)

• Women file approximately 85 percent of the complaints of sexual harassment in the workplace

• Quid pro quo sexual harassment: unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature in which submission is made either explicitly or implicitly a condition of the victim’s employment, expected to tolerate the behavior or submit to sexual demands in order to be hired or to keep the job 

  • rejection results in denied promotion or negative performance evaluation

• Hostile work environment sexual harassment: unwelcome sexual behavior with the purpose or effect of interfering with an individual’s work performance or creating an intimidating or offensive work environment (sexually graphic humor, suggestive remarks, making fun of someone’s body, or touching individuals inappropriately) 

• Workplace violence can happen due to individuals not feeling that they are treated fairly leading to verbal or physical aggression

• Role conflict: when a person tries to meet the demands of more than one important life role, such as worker and mother

• High job demands (heavy workload, time pressure), Inadequate Opportunities to participate in decision making, high level of supervisor control, lack of clarity about criteria for competent performance

• Significant drop in life satisfaction following unemployment and increase following reemployment but not at the same level as previously to being unemployed

• Burnout: extremely distressed psychological state where a person experiences emotional exhaustion and little motivation for work

• Leisure refers to the pleasant times before or after work when individuals are free to pursue activities and interests of their own choosing

• Men who took annual vacations were 21% less likely to die over the 9 years and 32% less likely to die of coronary heart disease

• Flow: the optimal experience of a match between our skills and the challenge of a task

• Happy people are more likely to graduate and get a job and secure BETTER jobs, (more autonomy, meaning) more successful (higher better performance ratings)

• Happier people are better at their job because

  • Less likely to show absenteeism: not showing up

  • Less likely to show turn over: leaving a job

  • Less likely to have burn out

  • Less likely to demonstrate retaliatory behaviors

• Happier workers are more likely to be a productive one especially when worker’s overall sense of well being is at issue

• A typical leader has high extroversion, high in conscientiousness and low neuroticism

• Leadership likely emerges from an individual's disposition to get noticed, assert themselves and to demonstrate responsibility
  Pussin: treated his psychopathology patients with kindness and care NOT violence which = positive therapeutic results

• Philippe Pinel: removed patients from chains and physical punishment, moral treatment: therapy with close contact and careful observation

• Dorothea Dix: spread moral treatment in America 

• Hippocrates: classified psychopathologies into mania, melancholia, phrenitis (mental confusion), believed disorders resulted from a certain amount of humors or bodily fluids a person possessed (ex: too much black bile = melancholia (sadness/depression)

• Psychological disorders are one of the greatest portions of disability in developed countries

• 1 in 4 (25%) Americans over age 18 have a diagnosable psychological disorder in a given year and 1 in 5 receive treatment over any 2 year period

• Kraepelin: not all patients with psychological disorders have the same one, categories: groups of symptoms that occur together

• DSM groups disorders by symptom similarity and allows providers to be paid (DSM diagnosis is required by most insurance companies) 

  • Introduction and instructions to using manual

  • Diagnostic criteria for each disorder grouped by similar categories

  • Guide for future psychopathology research and conditions that aren’t yet disorders

  • Problem: categorical approach: either someone has a psychological disorder or doesn’t and a distinct cut off, comorbidity: many psychological disorders occur together (depression and anxiety, depression and substance abuse)

    • psychologists classify mental disorders into categories b/c patient symptoms and behaviors rarely fit into precise diagnostic categories

• Dimensional Approach: considers psychological disorders along a continuum on which people vary in degree rather than in kind

• Research Domain Criteria method: defines basic domains of functioning (attention, social communication, anxiety) and considers them across multiple levels of analysis (genes to brain system to behavior) 

  • Domains: negative valence, positive valence, cognitive systems, social processes, arousal and regulatory systems

• Caspi: p factor involved in all types of psychological disorders, higher p factor scores are associated with more life impairment and worsens over time, reflects low-high psychopathology severity and likely to remain stable over time

• Hypothyroidism: an endocrine disorder that must be ruled out before a psychological disorder like depression or anxiety is treated because symptoms are similar

• Diathesis Stress Model: an individual has an underlying vulnerability or predisposition to the specific disorder (either environmental or biological called the diathesis) but not enough along to trigger the disorder, the additional stressful circumstances can finally tip the scale enough to be classified as a disorder (the stress)

• Genetic factors: affects production, level of neurotransmitters and their receptor sites, size/shape of brain structures and their level of connectivity (PET and fMRI scans)

• Family Systems Theory: problems that arise within an individual are manifestations of problems within the family

• Eccentric behavior by the wealthy is tolerated in many cultures

• Those in lower socioeconomic status tend to be diagnosed with schizophrenia the most

• Cognitive Behavioral Approach: abnormal behavior is learned and therefore can be unlearned

• Two Types of Psychopathology: 

  • Internalizing Disorders: focused on negative emotions (fear vs distress) (depression, anxiety, panic), common in women ex. Anorexia nervosa 

  • Externalizing Disorders: impulsive, out of control behavior (alcohol, antisocial personality disorder), common in men ex. Alcoholism

  • Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are equally likely in both sexes

• A disorder with a strong biological component will tend to be more similar across cultures

• A disorder heavily influenced by learning, context, or both is more likely to differ across cultures

• cultural syndromes: disorders that include a cluster of symptoms that are found in specific cultural groups or regions

• people diagnosed with anxiety or depressive disorders die about eight years earlier than those without the disorders

• Anxiety disorders: excessive fear and anxiety in the absence of true danger, continuously arouses the autonomic system 

  • More than 1 in 4 Americans will have some type of anxiety disorder during their lifetime

  • Can result in shrinking / atrophy of the hippocampus (learning and memory)

  • include generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, specific phobias, and agoraphobia

  • Specific phobia: fear of something that is disproportionate to the threat, exaggerated

    •  1 in 8 people 

  • Social anxiety disorder: Fear of being negatively evaluated by others in a social setting

    • 1 in 8 people and 7%, often begins to develop around age 13

    • Likely to also have depression and substance abuse problems

  • Generalized anxiety disorder: Nearly constant anxiety not associated with a specific thing

    •  6 percent of the U.S (Women > men)

  • Panic disorder: Sudden attacks of overwhelming terror

    • are cued by external stimuli or internal thought processes

    • Or can come from nowhere

  • Agoraphobia: Fear of being in a situation from which one cannot escape

    • Can cause panic attacks 

• Biased thinking: anxious individuals perceive ambiguous or neutral situations as threatening and focus excessively on the "threats"

• Learning: develop a fear by observing other people fearfully respond to it

• inhibited children are more likely to develop anxiety disorders later in life especially social anxiety disorder

Depressive Disorders: common feature of all depressive disorders is the presence of sad, empty, or irritable mood along with bodily symptoms and cognitive problems that interfere with daily life

• Major Depressive Disorder: loss of interest in pleasurable activities every day for at least 2 weeks, appetite/weight changes, sleep disturbances, loss of energy, difficulty concentrating, guilt, thoughts of death

  • Extremely depressed moods for short periods of time

  • 7–8 percent of Americans at any one time

  • Lifetime Prevalence: 13%

  • May involve monoamines (mood, arousal and motivating behavior neurotransmitters)

    • ex) increase in norepinephrine alleviates depression

    • Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIS): increase serotonin (ex: Prozac) to treat depression 

• dysthymia / persistent depressive disorder: less intense version of major depressive disorder, “low” or “down” feelings, 2–3%, more days than not or most of the day for 2 years

  • Milder moderate depression but for longer periods

  • Considered a personality disorder not a mood disorder 

• about twice as many women as men experience depressive disorders

• more likely overwork, unrealistic societal expectations, and lack of structural and financial support contribute to the high rate of depression in women

• men experience greater stigma surrounding depression because of social expectations that men remain unemotional

• concordance rates (share the same disorder) for identical twins are 2-3 times higher than fraternal twins concordance rates

  • Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are high in biological components

• Aaron Beck: the causes of depression are negative thoughts and beliefs about oneself, the world and the future (cognitive triad)

  • Depressed people do not have positive self illusions and actually blame bad events on themselves and positive events on fate/luck

• Seligman: Learned Helplessness: believe they are unable to have any effect on the events in their lives, expect bad things to happen to them and believe they are powerless to avoid them

Bipolar Disorders (Depression and Mania):

• Mania: elevated mood, feeling "on the top of the world", increased energy and physical activity or agitation and restlessness

• True Maniac Episodes: last at least a week, abnormal and persistent elevated mood, increased activity, less of a need for sleep, grandiose ideas, extreme distracted, excessive involvement in activities that feel good but can be harmful in the long run, thought disturbances, hallucinations

• Bipolar I disorder: characterized more by manic episodes than by depression (which isn't necessary for DSM-5 diagnosis)

• Bipolar II disorder: less extreme mood elevations (hypomania), heightened creativity and productivity episodes, does NOT cause significant impairment or hospitalization like bipolar I

  • Requires at least one depressive episode 

• any type is estimated at around 4 percent

• bipolar disorders are equally prevalent in women and men

• usually emerge during late adolescence or early adulthood (BI 1 faster than BI 2)

• Risk factor: Family History 

• concordance rate for bipolar disorders in identical twins is more than 70 percent, versus only 20 percent for fraternal

• Joiner: people desire death when 2 fundamental needs are frustrated to the point of extinction: the need to belong/connect with others and the need for competence (feeling like we aren't capable)

  • People who do act on suicidal ideation usually have acquired the capacity or willingness to harm themselves

• Suicide might have a genetic risk factor that runs in families and majority of people who commit suicide did have psychological disorders

Schizophrenia: 

• psychosis: a break from reality in which the person has difficulty distinguishing real perceptions from imaginary ones

• Schizophrenia: alterations in thoughts, perceptions or consciousness, split or disconnection from reality (NOT dissociative identity disorder: multiple personality disorder)

  • Must have for 6 months+

  • must show 2+ symptoms: delusions (+), hallucinations (+), disorganized speech (+), lack of emotion (-), slowed speech and movement (-)

    • Symptoms are grouped by positive (present in schizophrenia and not in typical behavior) and negative (characteristics missing in schizophrenia that are usually apart of daily functioning)

    • Delusions (+): false beliefs based on incorrect inferences about reality

      • Persecutory: belief that others are trying to harm or spy on them

      • Referential: belief that objects/events/other people have particular significance to them

      • Grandiose: belief that they have great power, knowledge or talent

      • Identity: belief that they are someone else

      • Guilt: belief that they have committed a terrible sin

      • Control: belief that their behavior or thoughts are being controlled by some outside force

        • German patients had delusions that involved guilt and sin (religion), the Japanese patients had delusions of harassment (persecutory)

    • Hallucinations (+): vivid “real like” false sensory perceptions that are experienced without an external source

      • speculation that auditory hallucinations might be caused by a difficulty in distinguishing normal inner speech from external sounds

      • may be structural abnormalities in the auditory cortex

    • Disorganized Speech (+): incoherent, cannot follow a normal conservation or a grammatical structure, responses with irrelevant information, frequent change of topics

      • Word Salad: speech is entirely incomprehensible 

    • Disorganized Behavior (+): acting strange, unpredictable agitation or childish silliness

      • Catatonic Behavior: decrease in responsiveness to the environment, remain immobilized, mindlessly repeat words (echolalia)

    • Positive symptoms can usually be reduced by antipsychotic medications

    • Negative Symptoms: behavioral deficits, reductions in feelings or behaviors associated with isolation and withdrawal, avoiding eye contact, seem apathetic, long pauses, slowed speech, monotone voice, reduction in motor movement, no interest in initiating behavior or social interaction

      • Negative symptoms are more common in men

• similar rates for both genders, prognosis is better in developing cultures and rate is lower in developing nations, perhaps developing countries are more tolerant of unusual symptoms or have greater sympathy

• If one twin develops schizophrenia, the likelihood of the other twin developing it is almost 50 percent if the twins are identical but only 7–14 percent if the twins are fraternal. If one parent has schizophrenia, the risk of a child developing the disease is 13 percent. However, if both parents have schizophrenia, the risk jumps to 40–50 percent 

  • Rare mutations in DNA / genes related to brain development and neurological function (3-4 times more)

  • the ventricles are enlarged in people with schizophrenia, and the brain tissue is reduced (the more reduction in brain tissue and less activity in the medial temporal and frontal lobes = association with more negative outcomes) 

    • Reduced or altered brain connectivity

    • Drugs that block dopamine activity decrease symptoms

  • Symptoms/Risk Factors: a family history of schizophrenia, greater social impairment, higher levels of suspicion/paranoia, a history of substance abuse, and greater frequency of unusual thoughts

    • Usually becomes obvious at 20-30 yrs old….

  • Growing up in a dysfunctional family may increase the risk of developing schizophrenia for those who are genetically at risk (diathesis model: genetic vulnerability -> dysfunctional family = schizophrenia)

  • a wide variety of evidence that heavy cannabis use during adolescence produces a greater risk of developing psychosis

  • being born or raised in an urban area approximately doubles the risk of developing schizophrenia later in life

  • SchizoVirus theory: reports of finding antibodies in the blood of schizophrenia patients that aren't in normal people and evidence that maternal inflammation plays a role in schizophrenia

• Obsession with an idea or thought and the compulsion to repeat the act in a certain way over and over again to reduce anxiety temporarily 

  • OCD 1-2% Women > Men early adulthood

• pure obsession: the obsessive thoughts are not accompanied by an associated behavior

  • a mental ritual or second thought is used to reduce the anxiety/distress

• Reward cycle that maintains ocd is based on behavior, for pure obsession it is based on thoughts

• OCD fear what they might do or might have done 

• Classical conditioning (associating something with anxiety) leading to a compulsion and relief (operant conditioning) that reinforces this behavior and obsession contributing to a person's developing OCD

  • Runs in the family and the OCD related genes appear to control the neurotransmitter glutamate (excitatory, increases neural firing)

  • a streptococcal infection apparently can cause a severe form of OCD in some young children (appears to be overnight, autoimmune response that damages reward learning brain areas)

• Anorexia Nervosa: excessive fear of becoming fat and severely restrict how much they eat (begins in early adolescence)

  • Equally likely in both genders

  • Can cause a loss of bone density and about 15-20% die from anorexia nervosa (starving to death)

• Bulimia Nervosa: alternate between dieting, binge eating and purging (self induced vomiting) or compensatory behaviors (laxative abuse, compulsive exercise), develops during late adolescence

  • 1-2% of college and high school women

  • Women > men

  • Tend to be done secretly 

  • Associated with dental and cardiac disorders

• Binge Eating Disorder: binge eating at least once a week but do not purge

• Many effective treatments for eating disorders symptom-free five years after diagnosis

• Addiction: drug use that persists despite its negative consequences (not a DSM-5 disorder)

• Tolerance: a person needs to consume more of a particular substance to achieve the same subjective effect

• Withdrawal: failing to ingest the substance leads to physiological and psychological state characterized by anxiety, tension and cravings (nausea, chills, body aches, tremors)

• Involves dopamine activity in the limbic (nucleus accumbens) which controls WANTING 

• brain regions that are important for addiction include the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, thalamus, and hippocampus

• Insula: craving for addiction, patients with insula damage report quitting smoking easily 

• The loss of euphoria that comes from addiction occurs because the brain reward system becomes less sensitive, both to drug-related and non-drug related rewards

• Adolescents high in sensation seeking (a personality trait that involves attraction to novelty and risk-taking) are more likely to associate with deviant peer groups and to use alcohol, tobacco, and drugs

  • Only about 5-10% of drug takers become addicted

• Inherited Risk Factors: risk taking, impulsive, reduced concern for personal harm, nervous system low in arousal, predisposition to finding chemicals pleasurable

• Lee Robins: examined soldiers from the Vietnam War with drug addiction who were returning to the US

  • More than 90% admitted to using and about half thought they were addicted / unable to stop 

  • approximately 1 soldier in 5 returning from Vietnam was addicted to one or more substances

  • Only a handful of “addicted” Vietnam War veterans remained addicted when they returned to the US 

  • Approximately 95 percent of the soldiers who used heroin no longer used drugs within months of their return—an astonishing quit rate considering that the success rate of the best treatments is typically only 20–30 percent

  • Addiction is created and maintained within a specific environment, they quit when they came back to the US because they did not have the same motivations or opportunities to take the drugs (cues that triggered drug craving where removed)

Trauma: prolonged psychological and physiological response to a distressing event, often violates the person’s beliefs about the world

• Trauma is defined by the subjective response to an event and not the event itself

• Distressing events during childhood such as abuse and neglect and exposed repeatedly to stressors are particularly likely to lead to trauma

• protective factors can buffer children from the harmful effects of early life stress, including warm, nurturing parenting and positive memories of other childhood experiences

• Adjustment disorder: difficulty adjusting to the stressor for about 6 months

• Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): negative reactions long after the danger has passed, frequent and recurring unwanted thoughts related to the trauma (nightmares, intrusive memories, flashbacks)

  • 7% (women > men)

  • certain genetic markers related to serotonin functioning were much more likely to show PTSD symptoms

  • Inability to forget, attentional bias and hypervigilant to stimuli associated with their traumatic events

    • Exposure to stimuli associated with past trauma leads to activation of the amygdala

    • Overconsolidated event = burned into memory

    • No extinction in fear learning

Dissociative Disorders: disruptions of identity, memory or conscious awareness, a self protective purpose by splitting the traumatic event off from the rest of the person's life and identity

^ likely to be caused by stress, in concordance with PTSD 

• Dissociative Amnesia: a person forgets an event had happened or loses awareness of a substantial block of time (ex: losing memories of personal facts, identity, place of residence)

  • ex) Joudrie shot her husband who was physically abusive but did not remember doing so

  • Dissociative Fugue: rarest most extreme form of dissociative amnesia, loss of identity and travel to another location and assumption of a new identity, fugue state often ends suddenly and unsure how they ended up in unfamiliar surroundings

  • Jeff Ingram: developed retrograde amnesia (a type of dissociative amnesia) and had no memory of his previous life

  • Dissociative Identity Disorder: also known as multiple personality disorder, occurrence of two or more distinct identities in the same individual, memory gaps where they cannot recall everyday events

    • individual people can manifest dozens of different personas, each with different memories, preferences, and personalities

    • Were most likely severely abused children

Borderline Personality Disorder: linked to trauma in childhood, 1-2%, twice as common in women than men

• instability in sense of self, interpersonal relationships, goals, emotions and behavior (lack a strong sense of self), cannot tolerate being alone and fear abandonment, constantly search for signals of rejection and act impulsively 

• usually linked to diminished capacity in frontal lobes

• 70–80 percent of those with borderline personality disorder have experienced physical or sexual abuse or witnessed extreme violence

Personality Disorders are divided into 3 clusters:

• Cluster A: odd, eccentric behavior, are suspicious, difficult for them to form relationships (paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal personality disorders)

  • paranoid: tense, guarded, suspicious, holds grudges

  • schizoid: socially isolated, restricts emotional expression

  • schizotypal: Peculiarities of thought, appearance, and behavior that are disconcerting to others; emotionally detached and isolated

• Cluster B: dramatic, emotional, erratic behavior

  • histrionic: seductive, need for immediate gratification and constant reassurance, rapidly changing moods, shallow emotions

  • narcissistic: self absorbed, expects special treatment, envious of attention to others

  • borderline: cannot stand being alone, intense, unstable moods and relationships, anger, drug and alcohol abuse

  • antisocial: manipulative, exploitative, dishonest, disloyal, does not feel guilty, breaks social rules, often from childhood history, trouble with the law

Cluster C: Anxious or fearful behavior

• Avoidant: easily hurt and embarrassed, few close friends, sticks to routines to avoid new and stressful experiences

• Dependent: wants others to make decisions for them, constant need for advice and reassurance, fears being abandoned

• Obsessive Compulsive: perfectionist, overconscientious, indecisive, preoccupied with details, stiff, unable to express affection

Personality disorder - trait specified: a person can be diagnosed if they are impaired in some area of function and display pathological levels of one or more traits even if they do not meet the criteria for any other specific personality disorder

More about antisocial personality disorder: discovered by Robert Hare

• Psychopath or sociopath: someone who is willing to hurt and take advantage of others without concern or remorse

• also tend to be hedonistic (seeking immediate gratification of their wants and needs), have a grandiose sense of self worth, shallow affect and are manipulative

• people who are psychopathic PLAN and almost always kill intentionally to attain money, sex or drugs

• ex: Dennis Rader and Gary Gilmore

• 1-4% have antisocial personality disorder

• Common in men than women

• most apparent in late adolescence and early adulthood and generally improves around age 40

• cannot be diagnosed before age 18 and must have displayed antisocial conduct before age 15

• usually quite bright and highly verbal people that can talk their way out of bad situations

• punishment appears to have very little effect on them and will usually repeat the problematic behaviors

• Lykken reported that psychopaths do not become anxious when they are subjected to aversive stimuli (psychopaths don’t show anxiety or fear)

• have slower alpha-wave activity and have lower arousal activity

• have atypical patterns of brain activity and connectivity among brain regions when they attempt to empathize with others

• Proposal of smaller amygdala 

• malnutrition at age 3 has been found to predict antisocial behavior at age 17

Childhood Disorders: ADHD (usually improves over time but never the same as a non-diagnosed person) and Autism (does not improve over time, usually lifelong unless treatment starts early!)

• Autism Spectrum Disorder: Persistent impairment in social interaction characterized by unresponsiveness; impaired language, social, and cognitive development; and restricted and repetitive behavior; begins during early childhood, founded by Leo Kanner

  • characterized by impaired communication, restricted interests, and deficits in social interaction

  • children with deficits in social interaction but less severe impairments in other domains were considered to have Asperger’s syndrome

    • Underdeveloped theory of mind (understand other people’s mental states and predict their behavior)

    • boys are about 5 times more likely to be diagnosed than girls 1-2%

    • seemingly unaware of other people

    • do not smile at caregivers, do not respond to vocalizations, reject physical contact and eye contact by 6 months of age even if they do in 2 months

    • Communication deficits are apparent by 14 months

    • exhibit odd speech patterns (ex: echolalia: repetition of words or phrases that someone else spoke *also in schizophrenia)

    • Or interpret phrases literally

    • will focus on the unimportant details in the scene rather than on the social interaction

    • changes in daily routine or in the placement of furniture or of toys can be very upsetting for children with autism

    • concordance rates to be as high as 70–90 percent for identical twins

    • have an abnormal number of copies of DNA segments that affect the way neural networks form during childhood

  • suggest that schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder may be related

    • Prenatal or early childhood impairments/disruptions: brains of autistic children are unusually large and then growth slows around age 5, rapid growth at 6-12 months

    • abnormal antibodies (due to infection and certain immune cells in the womb), exposure to pathogens

• Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder ADHD: hyperactive, inattentive and impulsive behavior that causes social or academic impairment, begins before age 12

  • symptoms: hyperactivity, restlessness, inattentiveness, impulsiveness, difficulty keeping clean or remembering rules, trouble keeping and making friends due to social mistakes or missing cues

  • must have at least 6 or more symptoms of inattention and at least 6 or more symptoms of hyperactivity/impulsiveness for 6 months and interfere with functioning or development

    • Present before age 12

    • 8% boys > girls

    • children with ADHD are now more likely to be obese

    • stereotype of ADHD is thin overactive white male

    • etiology points that ADHD is most likely heterogeneous (behavioral profiles vary so the causes likely vary as well)

    • Concordance is about twice as high in identical twins as in dizygotic twins

    • Zametkin: ADHD children have reduced metabolism in brain regions involved in self regulation of motor functions and attentional systems and reduced volume in attention, cognitive, motor control, emotional regulation and motivation brain regions

      • Especially basal ganglia (motor control and impulse control -> hyperactivity)

    • delayed maturation hypothesis: ADHD is caused by a delay in the maturation of those brain regions

  • During adolescence, for example, ADHD is characterized less by hyperactivity and more by impairment in academic performance and peer relationships

  • Adults with ADHD symptoms (4%) struggle academically and vocationally -> adults diagnosed with ADHD as children usually are lower than expected socioeconomic level, change jobs frequently, have substance abuse problems, and are likely to be divorced

  • Mostly diagnosed and identified when children enter a structured social setting that requires conformity (day care/school)

• Third Variable Problem: ex: Andrew Wakefield: receiving vaccinations -> developing autism (fraudulent!!)

  • the rate of autism spectrum disorder among unvaccinated children was 1 percent, identical to the rate among vaccinated children

• Psychopathology: sickness or disorder of the mind

• Etiology: factors that contribute to the development of the disorder

• Evidence Based Assessment: approach to clinical evaluation where research guides the evaluation, methods and diagnosis (identification of disease)

• Prognosis: course and probable outcome 

• 50% of people suffer from psychological disorder

• Earliest views of psychological disorders: due to possession by demons/spirits 

  • Solutions at the time: Exorcism, bloodletting, forced consumption of potions

• Renaissance: asylums (chained, filthy living conditions) 

• 1793: Phillippe Pinel: removed chains, removed physical abuse, moral treatment: close contact and observation of asylum patients 

  • Dorothea Dix: spread moral treatment to America

• Criteria of disorder/psychopathology:

• Maladaptive: gets in the way of your function and normal way of life (disruption to one part of the person’s life: work, social relations, self care)

• Deviates from acceptable norms of behavior for that particular culture 

• Is it self destructive or hurting others 

• Discomforts or concerns other people / harms their social relationships 

• Duration and severity of the symptoms 

• 46% will experience at least one disorder, 28% will experience two

• Co-occurring disorders (having 2) is actually more common than someone getting one without having ever had one 

• Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM): sets out specific criteria for each disorder (duration, frequency, intensity of symptoms) 

  • Categorical approach: either you have a disorder or don’t 

    • Cons: is a cut off, doesn’t capture severity 

• Dimensional approach: people experience symptoms on a continuum 

• Assessment: set of procedures used to get information about an individual in order to make a diagnosis (self report, psychological testing (clinician asking you questions), observations, interviews, neuropsychological testing (questions have right or wrong answers to see if your brain is working correctly)) 

  • Structured Interview: specific questions asked in a specific order, gold standard

  • Self Report: fill out a questionnaire (usually before ^)

  • Projective Test: asked to explain or respond to an ambiguous stimuli (made to uncover unconscious wishes/conflicts) ex: Thematic Apperception Test, Rorschach Inkblot Test

    • Not necessarily evidence based

  • Neuropsychological Testing: performs a task or action (copying picture, drawing from memory, sorting cards) usually involving planning or coordination or remembering to see if there are problems with a certain brain region (MRI or PetScan)* expensive which is why neuropsychological test first ^

    • Ex: switching sorting categorical rules (sort by shape -> sort by color) problems with frontal lobe

• Some methods (Projective Test) are not helpful for diagnosis or treatment assessment but good for icebreakers 

• Many people choose assessment styles based on personal beliefs and not scientific studies (evidence based: structured interview)

• Depression and substance abuse is co-occurring

• Diagnostic labels were useful to determine which treatment should be used for certain mental disorders, uniform framework for describing the difficulties a patient could be having, allows them to bill insurance companies (treatment is not free), relief for patient, allows efficiency for communicating about disorders between multiple doctors 

  • Cons: marked with stigma  

• Biological Factors: genetics, neurotransmitters, brain structures, malnutrition, alcohol, infection 

• Environmental / Cultural / Social: relationships, culture, neighborhoods, growing up in different environments 

• Cognitive Behavioral Factors: abnormal behaviors, thoughts and beliefs are LEARNED, change the way people think, behave and feel 

• Diathesis Stress Model: when mental disorders are developed it is due to a combination of biological, environmental and cognitive factors

  • Diathesis: the risk factors that put someone at a predisposition for this disorder

  • Stressor: the trigger of the potential of the disorder to the actual disorder

  • You need both to develop the disorder!!

• Rates of some disorders vary by gender/sex

  • Women are more likely to have depression, PTSD, anxiety

    • Symptom of PTSD: Attentional Bias: hypervigilant to stimuli associated to traumatic event (increased physiological responsiveness to stimuli, activation of amygdala, -> overconsolidation: something is “burned into memory”

  • Men are more likely to have ADHD, Autism, Antisocial Personality Disorder, Alcohol Dependence

• Internalizing Disorders: negative emotions, stress, fear, trouble regulating emotions (women)

• Externalizing Disorders: acting out or aggression, directed at others (men)

• Asian/Collectivistic cultures: physical symptoms prevalent 

• Individualistic/American cultures: emotional symptoms prevalent

• Cultural Syndromes: disorders only found in a certain culture or region

Anxiety Disorders: makes people anxious, apprehensive and tense

• Main Symptom: feeling of intense excessive fear and anxiety in the absence of true danger

• Lifetime Prevalence: 29% of people suffer from an anxiety disorder at least once in their life

• Phobias, Panic Disorders, Agoraphobia, Generalized Anxiety Disorder

• Phobias: intense irrational fear coupled with great efforts to avoid feared object or situation

  • Fear is exaggerated and out of proportion to the actual danger

  • Interferes with important part of life

  • Specific Phobias: directed at a particular object (lifetime prevalence: 13%)

    • Women are twice more likely than men to develop specific phobias

• Panic Disorder: re-occuring unexpected (or triggered) panic attacks (sudden overwhelming episodes / a few minutes of chest pain, lack of breath, choking, etc.) (lifetime prevalence: 3%  (5% in women, 2% in men)

• Agoraphobia: fear of being in situations where help or escape is not available (usually accompanied by ^ panic disorder) ex: crowded shopping mall, public transportation

  • Maybe unable to leave their homes 

• Social Anxiety Disorder: intensely afraid of being negatively evaluated (lifetime prevalence: 13% but RIGHT NOW: 7%) Women = Men 

• Generalized Anxiety Disorder: not related to anything in particular, continuous, pervasive, difficult to control, anxiety all the time about anything, 6+ months (lifetime prevalence: 6%) women > men 

  • Dr. Q Case Study: learn to live with your anxiety instead of getting rid of it entirely, anything is progress :) 

Some anxiety or fear related disorders are caused by:

• Learned 

• Caused by Trauma 

• Vicarious Conditioning: learned fear by watching other people be afraid 

• Biological: different number of genes contribute and inhibited temperament in childhood can predict future social anxiety disorder

• Maltreatment in childhood (abuse)

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD): unwanted frequent thoughts and images (obsessions) and desire to engage in maladaptive behaviors over and over again (compulsions) (ex of OCD related disorders: body dysmorphic disorder (obsession with deficiencies in physical appearance), chronic hair / skin picking, hoarding).

• Usually dirt/germs, fear of harming others, checking things, balance/order

• Compulsions are attempts to reduce anxiety

• Lifetime Prevalence: 1-2% (Women > Men)

• Begins in early adulthood

  • Mr. M case study 

• Causes of OCD: Biological: etiology (genetic), dysfunction in brain region: caudate, Environmental: streptococcal infection in young children

Trauma or Stress Related Disorder (PTSD 1 MONTH+): disorder that results from complications by having to experience a traumatic event (period of numbness = dissociation first and acute stress disorder: recurring nightmares and flashbacks) Lifetime Prevalence: 7% (Women > Men)

• Common causes in women: rape, physical assault

• Common causes in men: military combat 

• Symptoms in Four Clusters:

  • Re-Experiencing Intrusion: nightmares, flashbacks

  • Arousal: hypervigilance, irritability, sleep disturbances (constantly in flight or fight)

  • Negative Cognitions/Mood: guilt, estrangement, self blaming, not remembering what happened

  • Avoidance: memories, reminders, going out of your way to avoid distressing memories or reminders of the event

• PTSD risk factors: severity of the trauma, genetics (serotonin genetic markers)

• Protective Factors: social support 

• Inhibited temperament -> 6 weeks 

Major Depressive Disorder: experience major depressive episode (depressed mood or lose of interest in pleasurable activities) every day for at least 2 weeks 

• 6-7% of americans in a given 12 month period

• Lifetime prevalence: 7-12% of men, 20-25% of women aka 16% of Americans

  • More common in women > men

Persistent Depressive Disorder: aka Dysthymia, a moderate to mild severity, same symptoms as major depressive disorder but less intense, BUT goes for a longer time!! Depressed for most days lasting 2 years+

• Periods of depressed moods usually last 5-10 years for people with persistent depressive disorder

• Lifetime prevalence: 2-3% 

Increasing serotonin can lessen depressive symptoms b/c it can promote the release of other chemicals that can create more neurons! (neurogenesis) 

Hippocampus is much smaller than a normal person’s (emotion and memory focused) *stress decreases neurons 

More vulnerable to depression if SHORT mutation in the serotonin transporter gene 

Bipolar disorder and depression run in families :(

Concordance rate is 2-3 times higher in identical twins than fraternal twins (if one has the disease, how likely is it for the other to have it too)

Medications that increase neurotransmitters / monoamines: norepinephrine and serotonin lessen depressive symptoms

• ex) Prozac (a Serotonin reuptake inhibitor SSRIs) increase serotonin to lessen depressive symptoms 

People with clinical depression have less brain activity in the left prefrontal cortex

Life stressors or negative life events increase risk for depression (usually precede the diagnosis)

• Depression is more common / likely in lower socioeconomic status

• Strong social connections / networks (friends, family) lessen the likelihood of depression (protective factor!)

Cognitive Components: Aaron Beck: cognitive triad (negative views of themselves/oneselves, negative thoughts about their situation/the world and the future) NEGATIVE THOUGHTS OF SELF, FUTURE, SITUATIONS

• Tend to attribute negative events to their personal defects even if it’s not their responsibility or fault and positive occurrences are because of luck (opposite of self serving bias)

• Make errors in logic: overgeneralize simple events and magnify the seriousness of these events / blow out of proportion

  • Thinking in extremes 

• Learned Helplessness: after continuous failures of trying, you think that there is no point in trying again

Bipolar Disorder: two extremes: elation and depression 3-4% lifetime prevalence *usually life long, treatment only prolongs the periods of normalcy

Equally prevalent in both genders

• Recurrences are common, periods of normalcy -> manic/depression episodes -> repeat

People who have bipolar disorder… their brains’ pruning ability (brain connections) are disrupted

• Type 1: extreme highs (manic episodes: feelings of irritation or invincible) and lows (depressive episodes*not required for diagnosis for bipolar 1), significant impairment can be hospitalized

  • Risky behavior, abnormal thoughts, behavior, delusions, paranoia, etc.

  • Mania: elevated mood to feel on top of the world, lasts a week, grandiose ideas, not needing sleep, increased activity, racing thoughts, risky behavior, cannot see consequences, loss of reality (sometimes even psychotic) (can be smashing furniture, bursting into song)

    • Linked to dopamine

    • Runs in families strong genetic component 

    • Mood stabilizing medicine: Lithium, antipsychotic drugs, electroconvulsive therapy *careful controlled seizure in brain

• Type 2: lesser briefer periods of elation with long periods of depression, hypomanic episodes: heightened productivity and creativity, no significant impairment or hospitalization, but REQUIRES at least 1 depressive episode

Suicide:

Suicide Ideation: thinking of committing suicide 

Thomas Joiner: people desire death when 2 fundamental needs are not met (need to belong/be connected with others) and (need for competence *feel like we are able, talented at something, feel useful)

• Highest risk is when people want to commit suicide and able to hurt themselves (practiced at self harm)

Dissociative Disorders: disruption in memory, awareness, identity

Dissociation: split from the external world, extreme versions of daydreams and lost in thoughts *does not include delusions or hallucinations

Dissociative Fugue: flight, involves loss of identity (don’t know who you are) and travel to another location, suddenly out of fugue 

Dissociative Identity Disorder: two or more distinct personalities living in the same individual with memory gaps 

• Skeptical because ulterior motives *usually after committing a crime

• Use of hypnosis and drugs to force patient to “remember” traumatic events

• Difficult to tell if someone is faking it or has fallen prey to suggestions by therapist

Schizophrenia: 1-2% of pop. diagnosed in early adulthood and late adolescence, equally prevalent in both genders but men get diagnosed more earlier due to showing symptoms earlier

• Positive Symptoms: not evident in healthy people 

  • Delusions: incorrect false beliefs even if evidence points against it 

    • Ex: I am president of the US 

  • Hallucinations: vivid realistic sensing things that aren’t there (seeing or hearing)

  • Disorganized Speech: incoherent speech and switches topics (doesn’t make sense, hard to understand) 

  • Unusual Behaviors and poor hygiene 

    • Positive symptoms can be reduced heavily by psychoactive drugs but NOT negative symptoms

• Negative Symptoms: behavior that is missing in schizophrenia patients that healthy people have

  • Avoid eye contact, seem apathetic (not interested in engaging with you)

  • Doesn’t express emotion (flat affect)

  • Slowed Speech and don’t say much (long pauses), fail to answer

  • Anhedonia: loss of interest in pleasurable activities

  • Slowed movement and reduced amount of movement

Schizophrenia is heavily genetic / runs in family

Mothers in the 2nd trimester during influenza epidemic (flu virus) when child’s brain is developing -> higher chance of schizophrenia 

Ventricles are enlarged (brain tissue is reduced) 

Abnormally high level of dopamine activity 

Dysfunctional families increase risk for schizophrenia in patients having pre existing vulnerability (diathesis) 

Stress of urban areas increase risk for schizophrenia too 

Low socioeconomic status also increase risk for schizophrenia (x9)

Personality Disorders: describes the whole person (way of being) is maladaptive not just a component, usually a problem that distresses OTHERS, they may think they are totally fine 

• Ecostonic: does not bother the person who has it but bothers others (TYPE A and B)

Cluster A: odd eccentric behavior

• paranoid personality disorder: suspiciousness and mistrust of other people, conspiracy theories, people are out to get them

• Schizoid personality disorder: detachment from other people / disinterest of other people, no need for belonging / affiliation, preference to be by self

• Schizotypal personality disorder: discomfort with close relationships, cognitive or perceptual distortions, odd behavior (light schizophrenia) 

Cluster B: dramatic emotional erratic behavior

• Borderline personality disorder: poor self control, lots of emotional instability (high neuroticism), impulsive, instability in relationships, emotions and self concept, not a strong identity, desperately need a relationship tho -> manipulative / controlling / clingy (anxious ambivalent attachment) *may threaten suicide/self harm if person leaves, sleep abnormalities (similar to depression)

  • Cause environmental: trauma or abuse or extreme violence (70-80%)

• Antisocial personality disorder: lack of empathy or guilt, lack of regard for other people’s welfare or rights, steal or hurt people, commit crimes, can seem charming / high IQ / understanding of other people -> manipulative (1-4%)

  • Psychopath = extreme version of antisocial personality disorder / behavior

  • Only people with lifetime history of antisocial behavior (cannot be diagnosed if under 18), repeated broken the law, using aliases, lying, reckless, disregard for their or other’s safety

    • 50% of inmates 

• Histrionic Personality Disorder: attention seeking, does anything to get attention or sympathy from other people, super intense emotions

• Narcissistic Personality Disorder: a little bit attention seeking, lack empathy, NEED the admiration of other people, think they are better than others and other rules don’t apply to them because they are SPECIAL, only want to be associated with good looking / rich people 

Cluster C: anxious fearful behavior

• NOT ecostonic: does bother the people who have them

• Avoidant Personality Disorder: social inhibition and insecurity, has an interest in other people but too afraid or insecure to pursue them (extreme anxiety disorder)

• Dependent Personality Disorder: excess need to be taken care of by other, wants someone to take care of them or make decisions for them

• Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder: orderliness, perfection, control, WANT to be in control, ex: workaholics 

Autism Spectrum Disorder: developmental problems (language and motor problems and social problems)

• Asperger’s Disease: milder more functionable version of autism 

• Little interest in other people or understanding of people, lack of empathy (lack of theory of mind: only can consider their point of view)

• Deficit in communication/language 

• Restricted Activity or Interests: changes in routine are upsetting, extreme tantrums, depends on predictability, repetitive movement patterns that soothe them

• Genetic Component: gene mutations, exposure to abnormal antibodies when a fetus (when brain is still developing)

Vaccines don’t cause autism 

1998 Dr. Wakefield Published a Study With 12 Children 

• Myth that getting MMR vaccine (measles, mumps, rubella) causes autism in the Lancet 

• FALSE ^ but widespread on the media 

ADHD: impulsive, inattentive, restless, trouble with sustained attention: paying attention to something for a long period of time especially if not interesting, lifetime prevalence: 8%, 11% for boys, 4% for girls men>women

• Causes: Genetics and in the brain, deficient in prefrontal brain circuits (basal ganglia: regulates impulsive control and motor control)

• Typically does not go away in adulthood 

• Often academic failure and job failure and trouble maintaining or making social relationships

  • Struggle academically and vocationally (career/job)

  • Psychotherapy: interactions between the practitioner and client, understand their symptoms, the problem and possible solutions

    • changing patterns of thought, emotion, or behavior

    • Limitation: apathy or indifference -> not interested in being treated

    Biological Therapy: mental disorders result from abnormalities in neural and bodily processes (malfunction in brain region or imbalance of a neurotransmitter)

    • Ex: drugs, electrical stimulation, surgical intervention 

    • Limitation: long term success often requires the patient to continue treatment (possibly indefinitely)

    Eclectic Approach: using various techniques 

    Freud: disorders are caused by prior early traumatic experiences

    • Free Association: client says whatever comes to mind and therapist looks for signs of unconscious conflicts (especially those they don't want to talk about directly)

    • Dream Analysis: therapist interprets the hidden meaning of the client's dreams

    • Psychodynamic Therapy: help clients examine their needs, defenses and motivates to understand why they are distressed

      • explore distressing thoughts, recurring themes, traumatic experiences, relationships and childhood attachments, dreams/fantasies

      • useful for depression, eating disorders and substance abuse

      • Consider maladaptive behavior the result of an underlying problem

    Josef Breuer: psychoanalysis: client lies on couch and uncovers unconscious feelings 

    • Goal: increase clients' awareness of their own unconscious psychological processes and how they affect their daily functioning

    • Expensive, time consuming, minimal empirical evidence, ineffective

    Behavioral / Cognitive Therapies: the behavior, emotion and thought is the problem (not interested in WHY the person has developed this disorder but how to OVERCOME it)

    Behavior Therapy: behavior is learned and can be unlearned through classical and operant conditioning

    • modeling: therapist acts out an appropriate behavior and encourages client to imitate it

    • exposure: patient is exposed repeatedly to anxiety producing stimulus (confronting feared stimuli in the absence of negative consequence, reassociate it with new non threatening ones)

      • MOST effective any anxiety/fear disorder, OCD, and prolonged exposure for PTSD

    Cognitive Therapy: distorted thoughts produce maladaptive behaviors/emotions, modify the thought patterns 

    • Aaron Beck: cognitive restructuring: recognize maladaptive thought patterns and replace them with REALISTIC ways of viewing the world

    • Albert Ellis: rational emotive therapy: teacher method, explains the patient's errors in thinking and demonstrating adaptive ways to think/behave instead

    • Interpersonal Therapy: focuses on circumstances, relationships the client attempts to avoid, integration of cognitive and psychodynamic insight therapy, helps clients explore interpersonal experiences and express their emotions

    • John Teasdale: Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy: people that recover from depression are still vulnerable to faulty negative thinking, help clients become more aware of their negative thoughts/feelings and help them disengage from ruminative thinking through meditation

      • Effective for major depression

    • Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: correct client's faulty cognitions and train them to engage in new behaviors, most widely used version of psychotherapy and effective for anxiety and depressive disorders (especially since they are comorbid *occur together)

    A good therapist - client relationship can foster the expectation of receiving help 

    • Humanistic Approach: emphasizes personal experience and an individual's belief systems, treat the person as a whole

    • Carl Rogers: client centered therapy: encourages people to fulfill their individual potentials for personal growth / greater self understanding

      • creation of a safe comforting setting to access true feelings and accept clients through unconditional positive regard

      • reflective listening: therapist repeats clients' concerns to help them clarify their feelings

    • William Miller: Motivational Interviewing: very short period, identify discrepancies between current state and where they would like to be in their lives, spark motivation for change

      • helpful for drug and alcohol abuse, improving eating and exercise habits

    • Systems Approach: individual is part of a larger context, especially within the family, usually long term prognosis that consider every family member the client

      • Expressed emotion: pattern of negative actions by client's family members (critical comments, hostility, emotionally over involved)

      • Ex: helps with schizophrenia relapse rates

    • Group therapy: popular after WW2, inexpensive, improve social skills and learn from each other's experiences

      • Ideal number of patients per group = 8

      • Behavioral / Cognitive Behavioral groups are usually highly structured with specific goals and techniques (effective for bulimia and OCD)

      • Less structured groups: increasing insight and providing social support 

    Drugs are used assuming the psychological disorder is a result from deficits or excesses in specific neurotransmitter or dysfunction in the neurotransmitter receptors

    Psychotropic Medication Categories:

    • Antianxiety Drugs: aka Anxiolytics, short term treatment of anxiety 

      • Benzodiazepines (Xanax, Ativan): increase activity of GABA (inhibitory neurotransmitter, inhibits brain activity), reduces anxiety and promotes relaxation, induces drowsiness and highly addictive

      • Sleeping Pills (Ambien, Lunesta): effects through GABA receptors, bind to receptors that induce sleep rather than relaxation, tranquilizers, Beta blockers, sedative relaxation drugs

    • Antidepressants: used primarily for depression but can help with anxiety

      • Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors were first antidepressants (is an enzyme that breaks down serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine)

      • Tricyclic Antidepressants: inhibit the reuptake of serotonin and norepinephrine, more is available in synapse

      • Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors: ex: Prozac, inhibit the reuptake of serotonin, serotonin remains in the synapse so effects on postsynaptic receptors are prolonged to alleviate depression

    • Antipsychotics: also effective treatment for bipolar, neuroleptics, used to treat schizophrenia’s positive symptoms and psychosis, reduces delusions and hallucinations, dopamine antagonists that bind to dopamine receptors blocking it's effects

      • Not always effective and can have permanent effects

      • ex: tardive dyskinesia: involuntary twitching of muscles in the neck/face

      • Not useful for treating negative symptoms of schizophrenia 

      • Women, Non Hispanic White Americans are twice as likely to use psychotropic medication or receive mental health treatment

    • Mood Stabilizers

      • Lithium: effective treatment for bipolar disorder *temperature affects Lithium

    • Anticonvulsants: stabilizes moods in bipolar disorder and prevents seizures

    Alternative Biological Treatments: brain surgery, brain stimulation, usually last resorts

    Trepanning: let out evil spirits (holes in skulls that healed over time), treatment for epilepsy, headaches, mental disturbances

    Psychosurgery: areas of the brain are selectively damaged

    Antonio Egas Moniz: prefrontal lobotomy: severing nerve fiber pathways in prefrontal cortex, treat schizophrenia, major depression and anxiety

    • became listless, flat affect = easier to manage, impaired abstract thought, planning, motivation and social interaction

    Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT): placing electrodes on a person's head and administering electrical current strong enough to produce a seizure, used to treat schizophrenia and depression

    Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: powerful electrical current runs through a wire coil, producing a magnetic field, when switched on/off, induces an electrical current in the brain region below the coil interrupting neural function in the region, treatment for SEVERE depression

    • Single Pulse TMS: disruption of brain activity occurs only during brief period of stimulation (interfere with that person's ability momentarily)

    • Repeated TMS: multiple pulses of TMS over an extended time, disruption lasts beyond period of direct stimulation

    Deep Brain Stimulation: surgically implanting electrodes deep within the brain, mild electricity stimulates the brain at an optimal frequency and intensity, used to treat Parkinson's (dopamine, movement), OCD, major depression

    • Especially good for parkinson’s 

    Treatment validity: to conduct empirical research comparing the treatment with a control condition 

    Randomization: ensures groups are comparable and controls for potential confounds

    Placebo Effect: any improvement in mental health attribute to the inert drug or minimal contact

    • reduces symptoms of psychopathology because participant believes it will, treatment's effects must be stronger than placebo effects

    • successful action of placebos is related to changes in brain activity that may be similar to that produced by other treatments

    Jonathan Shedler: evidence based treatments can be statistically significant w/o providing practical improvement in symptoms (not sufficient relief that people are able to function effectively in their daily lives but treatment group still improves more than non treatment group)

    People debriefed after natural disasters are actually more likely to develop PTSD than those not debriefed, teens in scared straight programs show increase in conduct programs, children in DARE programs are more likely to drink alcohol and smoke and hypnosis produces false memories

    Clinical Psychologists: 5-7 years of graduate school, research on psychological disorders and treatment includes 1 year clinical internship, PhD, employed at academic settings, private practice, hospitals, mental health centers, substance abuse programs

    • PsyD: 4-6 years of graduate school, clinical skills to treat psychological disorders, 1 year internship, work at: private practice, medical settings, mental health centers, substance abuse programs

    • almost all therapists have arrangements with physicians who can prescribe medications

    Psychiatrists: 4 years of med school, 3-5 additional years of specialization in residency programs, MD

    • Can legally prescribe medication

    Counseling Psychologists: 4-6 years of graduate school (academic, life-stress, relationship, work NOT psychological disorders), PhD, EdD

    Psychiatric Social Workers: 2-3 graduate training on direct clients and mental health care, MSW

    Psychiatric Nurse: 2 years associate degree (ASN, RN), 4 years bachelor degree (BSN) or 2-3 years graduate training (MSN) 

    Paraprofessionals: work under supervision to assist those with mental health problems in daily living, limited advanced training, no advanced degree

    only around one mental health provider for every 504 Americans

    ModeratedDrinking.com effective for not heavy drinkers, iCBT internet based cognitive behavioral therapy effective for treating depression (therapist guided for severe)

    Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) works best for adult anxiety disorders and persists long after treatment: using exposure to threatening stimuli in a safe environment producing extinction

    • Anxiolytics work in short term for generalized anxiety disorder but do little to alleviate the source and are addictive

    • Antidepressant drugs (blocks reuptake of serotonin and norepinephrine) are effective for treating generalized anxiety disorder but effects may be limited to the period in which the drug was taken

    Exposure therapy: systematic desensitization to treat phobias: 

    • make a fear hierarchy: list of situations in which fear is aroused in ascending order

    • exposure: client is imagining or enacting scenarios that become progressively more upsetting

      • Due to learning new nonthreatening associations

    • Successful CBT treatment alters the brain's way of processing the fear stimulus (decreased activation in regions of the brain related to processing and responding to threats)

    Panic Disorder: imipramine (antidepressant) prevents panic attacks but does not reduce the anticipatory anxiety occurring when people fear they might have an attack

    • Cognitive restructuring: client identifies their fears, estimates how many panic attacks they experienced, assign percentages to each fear and compare the numbers with the actual number of times the fears have been realized (recognize irrationality of their fears)

    • Panic attacks continue because of a conditioned response to the trigger = exposure done repeatedly to induce habituation -> extinction

    • David Barlow: those who received CBT were less likely to relapse than those who took medication

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    Traditional antianxiety drugs are completely ineffective for OCD

    SSRIs were effective in reducing the obsessive components in depression AND OCD (clomipramine: serotonin reuptake inhibitor)

    CBT (exposure and response prevention: person is exposed to stimuli that triggers compulsive behavior but prevented from engaging in the behavior) is effective for OCD

    CBT > clomipramine / medication >> placebo 

    DBS Deep Brain Stimulation (usually done on the caudate) leads to a clinically significant reduction of symptoms and increased daily functioning in about two thirds of those with OCD who receive treatment

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    Addiction treatment must help the patient 1) stop using drugs 2) stay drug free 3) be productive in family life, work, society

    Medication assisted treatment is gold standard for opioid use disorder (methadone: agonist has same effects as opiates on the brain w/o producing the high to reduce drug cravings and help people with addictions stay in treatment longer)

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    Iproniazid: drug that stimulates appetites, increased energy and gain overall sense of well being to treat depression BUT it is a MAO inhibitor and when ingesting substances containing tyramine = lethal elevations in blood pressure

    • Only for those who do not respond to other antidepressants

    Tricyclic antidepressants: imipramine effective in relieving clinical depression, have a lot of side effects

    Prozac: SSRI that did not affect the histamine system or neurotransmitters other than serotonin

    Bupropion: not an effective treatment for panic disorder or OCD

    SSRIs and Bupropion are FIRST line medications since have few side effects: usually for persistent depressive disorder

    Tricyclics are POSSIBLY beneficial for serious severe hospitalized depressive disorders

    CBT is just as effective as antidepressants in treating depressive disorders

    • Aaron Beck: cognitive triad of negative thoughts about oneself, situation and future (past, present and future NOT just future) 

    • thinking about situations in a negative way can become automatic, identify and monitor these patterns and recognize other ways to view the same situation

    • drug treatment may be the most effective option for those who are suicidal, in acute distress, or unable to commit to regular sessions with a therapist

    • While CBT would be better for people with cardiac or liver problems

    • psychotherapy and drugs involved the same brain regions, activity in those regions was quite different during the two treatments

      • Most effective TOGETHER than separate

    • Phototherapy: exposure to a high intensity light source  for part of each day (helps SAD: seasonal affective disorder) *works faster for SAD than CBT 

      • SAD is related to latitude (places that don’t see much sun during winter *northern areas are more common

    • Aerobic exercise also reduces depression by releasing endorphins

    • Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) works faster than antidepressants (better for severe depression or suicide cases) and for pregnant women *seizure does not harm fetus

      • However high relapse rate and memory loss usually limited to the day of ECT treatment

      • perform unilateral ECT over only the hemisphere not dominant for language to reduce memory disruption

    • Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS): over left frontal regions reduce depression, does not involve anesthesia or have major side effects, effective for those with major depressive disorder and cannot be helped by other methods

    • Mayberg: Deep Brain stimulation in the prefrontal cortex helped 4/6 patients

      • ⅔ shows long lasting benefits from DBS 

      • DBS allows people to lead more productive lives (work or engage in meaningful activities outside the house)

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    Since Prozac was introduced, the use of antidepressants has quadrupled in the United States, and it is estimated that more than 1 in 10 Americans over age 6 takes antidepressant medication

    Irving Kirsch: used Freedom of Information Act to obtain all placebo controlled studies of widely used antidepressants (most studies had negative or null results)

    • placebos were 80 percent as effective as antidepressants, and the change in self-reported depressive symptoms showed that improvement on drugs compared with placebos was modest at best

    • relative effectiveness of treatment with antidepressants increased with the severity of depression

      • For those who were severely depressed, antidepressant treatment was more effective than a placebo, but those with mild depression showed no benefit

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    Bipolar Disorder: effective: lithium (mood stabilizer) and other atypical antipsychotics *controls mania better than the depressive episodes

    Manic phase: alterations in thought linked to psychotic states in schizophrenia

    Negative moods: associated with depressive episodes linked to depression

    John Cade: urine of manic patients were toxic (uric acid might cause mania so lithium would diminish these symptoms)

    • Lithium appears to balance excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitter levels

      • Has side effects that diminish after a few weeks

    • Anticonvulsant medications used to reduce seizures and can stabilize mood for INTENSE bipolar episodes

    • Atypical Antipsychotics: stabilize moods and reduce mania episodes, ex: quetiapine (Seroquel)

    • SSRIs are preferable to other antidepressants because they are less likely to trigger episodes of mania

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    Reserpine (dogbane toxic herb) -> chlorpromazine (tranquilizer) or haloperidol* has less side effects than chlorpromazine but still motor side effects calms agitated people, sedative for people with schizophrenia and reduces positive symptoms

    Traditional antipsychotics ^

    Tardive Dyskinesia: involuntary movements of the lips, tongue, face, legs, etc. often permanent 

    Atypical Antipsychotics: clozapine can treat negative and positive symptoms, no symptoms of Parkinsons or tardive dyskinesia (yes fewer side effects but these are more serious: seizures, heart arrhythmias, weight gain, reduction in white blood cells)

    • Extremely expensive + drug test use

    • Only used for severe cases

    • Risperdal and Zyprexa are front line treatments for schizophrenia 

    Social Skills training: helps schizophrenia patients recognize social cues, regulate affect, predict the effects of their behaviors, self care, grooming/bathing, managing medications and financial planning BUT not specific cognitive skills like modifying thinking patterns or coping with hallucinations

    • Helps reduce relapse

    only about 1 in 7 individuals achieved recovery (reduction in symptoms and good social function)

    long-term use changes dopamine receptors so that antipsychotic medication becomes less effective

    People who experience their first symptoms later in life have a more favorable prognosis than people who start to show symptoms during childhood or adolescence

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    Borderline personality disorder: impulsivity, emotional and identity disturbances

    • Marsha Linehan: most successful treatment: dialectical behavior therapy: combination of behavioral and cognitive treatments, Eastern mindfulness approach 

    1. Learn to change extreme behaviors with problem solving, coping and mindfulness meditation: CONTROL ATTENTION and focusing on the present

    2. Explore past traumas underlying the emotional problems

    3. Increase self esteem and independence / stop depending on others for validation

    • more likely to remain in treatment and less likely to be suicidal than are those in other types of therapy

    • SSRIs are often used to treat depressive symptoms in combination ^

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    Antisocial personality disorder patients have diminished cortical arousal (stimulants used to normalize arousal levels: anti anxiety drugs and lithium are beneficial with lowering hostility and treating aggressive impulsive behavior for SHORT TERM)

    • Behavioral and cognitive therapy > traditional psychotherapeutic

      • Behavioral: therapist needs to control constant reinforcement, person cannot leave treatment and GROUP therapy, effective in residential treatment center or correctional facility

      • Cognitive: clients can meet their goals more easily by following the rules of society rather than by trying to get around them (problem: they know what they do is wrong they just don't care and like the thrill of getting away with something)

    • Criminals with antisocial personality disorder but without psychopathy typically improve after age 40

    • Conduct disorder: childhood condition that is a precursor for antisocial personality disorder: persistent inappropriate behavior, bullying, cruelty to animals, theft, lying, violating rules/social norms

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    at least 12—20 percent of children and adolescents experience psychological disorders

    Boys were more likely to receive medications than girls

    ADHD: inattention, impulsivity, hyperactivity, increased risk for other psychiatric disorders, lower socioeconomic level and drop outs

    • Common treatment: central nervous system stimulant: methylphenidate (Ritalin -> Concerta) affects Dopamine or Adderall

      • selectively stimulates frontal lobe activity to support cognitive/behavioral control -> increase attention and concentration

    • nearly 8 percent of college students had taken a non prescribed stimulant in the past 30 days and that 60 percent reported knowing students who misused stimulants

    • clear support for the effectiveness of behavioral therapy for ADHD

    • the children receiving medication and those receiving a combination of medication and behavioral therapy had greater improvement in their ADHD symptoms than did those in the behavioral treatment group

      • Children who received medication and behavioral therapy showed a slight advantage in areas such as social skills, academics, and parent-child relations over those who received only medication

      • Medications may be important in the short term, but psychological treatments may produce superior outcomes that last

        • After 3 years, advantage of medication therapy was no longer significant and children who received behavioral therapy improved

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    Autism Spectrum Disorder: impaired communication, restricted interests, deficits in social interaction, self stimulation and extreme behaviors

    • often oblivious to rewards, social praises or prizes = finding an effective reinforcer is hard (sometimes only food works..)

    • overselectivity of attention: tendency to focus on specific details while ignoring others -> cannot generalized learned behavior to other stimuli/situations

    Ivar Lovaas: applied behavioral analysis (ABA): based on operant conditionings: behaviors that are reinforced increase in frequency and behaviors not reinforced diminish

    • should be started early in life, requires a minimum of 40 hours of treatment per week

    • After more than two years of ABA treatment, the children had gained about 20 IQ points on average and most of them were able to enter a normal kindergarten program

    Teaching children to engage in joint attention during ABA treatment: teacher imitates child's action and maintains eye contact = improved language skills

    Instruction in symbolic play (imagining or pretending that one object represents another) = greater parent-child play, greater creativity

    SSRIs are not helpful for treating the symptoms of autism spectrum disorder and actually may increase agitation

    Antipsychotics (Risperdal) reduce repetitive behaviors associated with self stimulation

    a deficit in oxytocin may be related to some of the behavioral manifestations of autism

    • nasal spray containing oxytocin -> make more eye contact, feel increased trust in others, better infer emotions from people's facial expressions + reducing repetitive behaviors and self injury

    • A higher IQ may mean a better ability to generalize learning and therefore a better overall prognosis

    Applied behavioral analysis is the most successful treatment, especially when combined with symbolic play or joint attention, but it is limited by the necessary time and energy commitment from families.

    
    Psychological Treatments:

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    • Behavioral: focused on observable behaviors NOT your internal feelings or unconscious

    • Classical Conditioning: associating situations or things with certain emotions (break or make)

      • Systematic Desensitization (Exposure Therapy): treats phobias

        • Taught a relaxation technique 

        • Pair relaxation response with fear evoking stimuli 

        • Constructs a fear/anxiety hierarchy (which stimuli is most fear evoking to least)

        • Exposure: imagine first scene of the hierarchy while attempting relaxing 

          • Once mastered they move level up (counterconditioning)

          • In vivo desensitization = do it in real life 

      • Modeling Techniques (Learn by imitating): therapist shows they aren’t afraid when faced with the specific phobia stimuli 

    • Operant conditioning: change behavior through reinforcement (reward)

      • Contingency management/Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA): this good behavior leads to a reward, misbehavior leads to punishment APPLIED on a consistent schedule (40 hours a week for 2 years)

        • Effective for Autism (gained 20 IQ points, developed language skills)

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    • Cognitive Behavioral: irrational or negative thoughts that maybe aren’t true -> negative mood ->  cause behavioral problems (change the way we think -> feel -> behave)

      • Idea to replace our negative thinking with positive ones!

      • Highly structured sessions with homework (practice new skills and new ways of thinking)

      • Cognitive Restructuring: change thoughts or habits about how we think about the world

        • Ex: i failed test -> im stupid (NAH: i'm smart but i can do better) -> depression (no depression)

        • Developed by Beck and Ellis: effective for bipolar, anxiety: panic, phobia, obesity, chronic pain

        • Asked to recognize and record negative thoughts, identify and challenge them and CHANGE them / replace them with a more true or rational thoughts

          • Ex: Automatic Thought Record: cue, thought/feeling response, behavioral response, consequence

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    Humanistic Approaches: search for personal growth and meaning, help you become the best person you can be, who you are, people try to be someone they are not / not being their authentic self

    • Carl Rogers Client Centered Therapy: help a person accept who they are, understanding who you are, not opposing limits on yourself 

      • Genuineness: sharing authentic reactions with the patient, truly making a connection with the patient

      • Unconditional positive regard: nonjudgmental and accepting, positive feelings towards patient no matter what they say or do 

      • Empathetic Understanding: see things from their perspective, try to feel what they feel 

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    The Context of Therapy Matters: 

    • Family Systems Approach: individual is part of a larger social context (family) any change in individual behavior will affect the whole system 

    • Cultural Beliefs: eastern countries are usually resistant to talking about mental problems (stigma)

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    Biomedical Treatments: 

    • Pharmacological Treatments (medication): psychotropic drugs = medications that control or moderate manifestations of the psychological disorders

      • Antipsychotics / Neuroleptics: treat schizophrenia, blocks dopamine (reduce amount of dopamine in the brain), taken everyday

        • 67% of schizophrenia patients spent most of their lives in mental hospitals BEFORE antipsychotic drugs were invented

      • Antidepressants: Tricyclics and SSRIs: taken everyday

      • Antianxiety: tranquilizers, beta blockers, benzodiazepines: only taken on a needed basis 

        • Ex: Xanax, Valium 

    • Nonpharmacological Treatments: 

      • Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT): only used for severe depression (when traditional medical approaches fail)

        • Put to sleep and given muscle relaxant 

        • Electric current is passed through the brain between two electrodes for half a second to 4 seconds

        • 6-10 treatments over 2 years

        • Produces a seizure for 25-120 seconds

          • Can show confusion or loss of short term *usually day of memory (can be reduced if you limit shock area to one side of the brain), high relapse rates

        • Percentage of people improving from a result of ETC: 70-90% *people who do not respond to other methods 

      • Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS): powerful electrical current creates a magnetic field which is rapidly turned on and off producing an electrical current in the brain region directly underneath the wire coil disrupting neural function

        • Less invasive 

      • Deep Brain Stimulation: most dramatic new technique for treating severe disorders, surgically implanting electrodes deep into the brain, mild electrical stimulation and activates specific brain regions to alleviate symptoms, AREA 25 for severe depression

        • Not approved by FDA yet 

        • 2/3 of patients got better

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    Treatment Providers: 

    • Clinical psychologist (pHd or PsyD in clinical psych)

    • Counseling Psychologist (pHd or PsyD in counseling)

    • Psychiatrists (medical degree MD): can prescribe medication

    • Licensed professional clinical counselor (MA in counseling)

    • Marriage and Family Therapist (MA in MFT)

    • Psychiatric Nurses (BS or MS in nursing)

    • Licensed Clinical Social Worker (MSW)

    Treatment Recipients: 

    • People who have a diagnosable disorder

    • Subsyndromal Disorder: doesn’t meet the criteria for diagnosis but still has symptoms that cause problems

    • Relationship, everyday issues, confusion about major life decisions

    40% of people with psychological disorders in the US got treated in the last year

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    Anxiety Disorder Treatments: ANXIETY

    • Exposure therapy is MOST effective for specific phobia and panic disorder

      • Virtual reality

    • CBT is also effective for specific phobia, is AS effective or MORE effective than medication for panic disorders (with no side effects or addictive properties)

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    AntiDepressant Treatment: DEPRESSION

    • Tricyclics: very effective depression medication, gets rid of depressive symptoms by increasing serotonin and norepinephrine and reducing acetylcholine HOWEVER lots of side effects

      • drowsiness, weight gain, sweating, constipation, heart palpitations, dry mouth

    • SSRIs: ex: Prozac, fewer but some side effects 

      • insomnia, headaches, weight loss, sexual dysfunction

    Cognitive Behavioral Treatment: 

    • CBT (Beck and Ellis) is just as effective as medication for depression

    • CBT + medication = most effective than one alone

    Alternative Treatment:

    • For people that are treatment resistant: 

      • Aerobic exercise: reduce symptoms and prevent recurrence 

      • ECT for treatment resistant severe depression *electrical current induced seizure

      • TMS for reducing depression *magnetic coil to stimulate certain brain area

      • DBS still experimental but reduces depression

        • 10% couldn’t work or be productive outside home -> 67% now can! Meaningful activities :)

    Gender Related Stressors:

    • Female: work, family, reproduction, menopause

    • Male: reluctance to admit to depression, seek therapy “conspiracy of silence”

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    Personality Disorder Treatments:

    • Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT): for borderline personality disorder

    • Antisocial Personality Disorder: therapy is NOT effective

      • Extremely difficult to treat, prognosis is POOR

      • Some improvement after age 40 *for those w/o psychopathic symptoms 

        • NOT for underlying nature but obeying more society rules now

      • Best to spend time and effort on prevention (for children so they don’t develop the disorder)

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    Childhood Adolescence Disorder Treatment: for ADHD 

    • Operant Conditioning and ABA Applied Behavioral Analysis for Autism

    • Central nervous system stimulants (Ritalin, Adderall) for ADHD (symptoms of ADHD: inattention, hyperactivity, impulsiveness)

      • Happier, more socially adapt, more academically successful, interact better with their parents

        • Sleep problems, reduce appetite, body twitches, suppression of growth (side effects)

    • Operant conditioning and ABA is also good for ADHD too! (reward good behavior, punish or ignore bad behavior)

    • Medication + behavioral therapy = is best long term outcome for ADHD 

      • Order of treatment matters: Behavioral Therapy BEFORE medication

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    Dr. Bruss Guest Lecture: Clinical PsyD

    • 5 more years for doctorate degree

      • PHD in clinical psychology*older model scientist-practitioner Boulder, smaller groups of students ex: 7 or PsyD practitioner-scientist Vail, larger number 50, much more expensive, professional schools

      • 3.8 UCI GPA average, worldwide 3.5

      • Must be in a lab or research publication

      • Volunteer Clinical Work

      • Research based psychologists -> WW2 shellshock (PTSD) -> help in clinical settings
        

1. Diathesis Stress Model of Mental Disorders: we can have a predisposition to a mental disorder without ever developing it (you need the diathesis and the stress)

2. Dimensional Nature of Psychopathology: Sarah is at the extreme end of the anxiety spectrum

3. Recent Rapid increase in the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder because: More therapists believe the disorder is real and elicit reports from their patients that support the diagnosis

   1. Therapist unintentional make their patients have the symptoms of the dissociative identity disorder (unconsciously suggesting patients) 

4. By age ___, children can judge faces for their level of trustworthiness as well as adults can -> age 7 years

5. The section on personality disorders has been altered in the most recent version of the DSM to reflect: the notion that personality disorders represent extreme personality traits

6. Low on the trait of SELF MONITORING (pay attention to the situation and figures out what other people or the situation want you to do, and go along with the behavior that is expected of you) is associated with relatively high consistency in your behavior across situations

7. Miko (Japan) is likely to list FEWER things she is proud of and MORE things she is ashamed of COMPARED to most Americans because self serving bias is more common in Western cultures than Eastern cultures

8. Phobias are best treated using behavior therapies (exposure, systematic desensitization, modeling)

9. Specific phobias develop: as a result of classical/Pavlovian conditioning

10. Two most similar anxiety disorder: social anxiety disorder and specific phobia

    1. Specific thing that you are afraid of social anxiety disorder is being negatively evaluated by others and social situations

11. People in impoverished inner city areas and poor are X9 times more likely to develop schizophrenia than people in high socioeconomic environments

12. NOT an obsession commonly associated with obsessive compulsive disorder: fear of performing poorly in school

    1. common fears are acting aggressively, fear of contamination/germs, and fear of accidents

13. A diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder may be invalid, which is NOT a piece of evidence supporting this claim: many therapists have claimed responsibility for causing dissociative identity disorder

14. Job analysis is generating a description of what a job involves, knowledge/skill necessary to carry out the job functions, WHICH of these is NOT informed by job analysis: the determination of market wages and pay rates for occupations

15. New job as receptionist, does not expect it to be very stressful but still nervous about learning how to perform well in the job, Melinda will have SHORT TERM stress and may result in BETTER immune functioning

1. What would the concordance rate for schizophrenia in identical twins be if schizophrenia did NOT have a genetic basis? VERY LOW

2. Jayda and LeMario had a disagreement and began to attack each other's character. Jayda told LeMario that he is "assertive." LeMario told Jayda that she is "neurotic." If Jayda is a "typical" female and LeMario is a "typical" male, which one has made an accurate personality assessment?: BOTH 

   1. On general on average, women are more neurotic than men and men are more assertive than women

3. Jaime is talking to spirits that no one else can see. She sometimes channels the spirits so they can talk with living people. Jaime: MAY BE doing something NORMAL depending on her culture

4. According to your textbook, which of the following is FALSE with respect to autism spectrum disorder?: children have abnormal amounts of antibodies in their blood

   1. Its when the mother when pregnant has the abnormal amounts of antibodies not the children

5. Treatments for ADHD (ideally) aim to increase positive behaviors (e.g., positive peer interactions) while also reducing negative behaviors (e.g., interrupting others). When the medication Ritalin is given to children who have ADHD, if: slightly increases positive behaviors while dramatically reducing negative ones

6. When you punish yourself for your various shortcomings and assorted moral failings, the agency responsible for the guilt feelings that result is what Freud called the _____. = SuperEgo (your conscious, your angel that tells you to do the right thing and if you don't that's bad)

7. When Van goes to college, he resolves to be a good student even though being on the college football team will absorb a lot of his time and is important to him. When he thinks about what has happened at the end of his day, he usually winds up thinking about football. He has to make an effort to shift his thoughts to what happened in his classes. You could predict that Van will find it much easier to fulfill his football obligations than his academic obligations, because of: Attitude Accessibility

8. Lily has stopped washing her hair, going to the grocery store, going to work, and talking to people. Several of her friends and family members are concerned about these changes. Based on this information alone, which criterion for a psychological disorder does Lily FAIL to meet?: Personal Distress

9. The effectiveness of the foot-in-the-door technique of persuasion suggests that: Our beliefs can change as a result of our own actions

10. One exciting new treatment has shown stunning results in people suffering from severe depression. Four out of six patients in one study felt relief from their depressive symptoms almost immediately after the treatment was implemented. This treatment is: Deep Brain Stimulation

11. Charles tries to watch a debate on television, but he is distracted by constantly having to chase his toddler around the room. Given that Charles was distracted while watching the debate, which aspects of the debate are LEAST likely to affect his attitude toward the debate topic?: The logic of the arguments offered

    1. Uses central route of persuasion (requires effort and attention)

12. Given the prevalence rates, you know that adolescent girls are MORE likely to suffer from bulimia nervosa as compared to anorexia (BULIMIA > ANOREXIA)

13. The dimensional approach to diagnosing psychopathology is most evidence in the DSM-5 revised criteria for which disorder?: Autism Spectrum

14. The role of hereditary factors in autism spectrum disorders: has been recently confirmed by twin studies 

    1. Autism spectrum disorders are highly influenced by genetics 

15. Phillipe Pinel, a French physician, is often credited with: Major Reforms in Mental Hospital Practices

1. Psychologists would label a tendency to act in a certain way over time and various situations as a: Disposition

2. In addition to treating depression, cognitive (or cognitive behavioral) therapy has been successfully applied to disorders/conditions in which the role of maladaptive beliefs may be less prominent, including: bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, obesity 

   1. Despite CBT being made for depression

3. Lamont, a 10-year-old, has been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Which of the following outcomes would you expect to see as Lamont gets older?: Likely to maintain the disorder into young adulthood

4. A program that provided _____ to children resulted in a reduced likelihood of _____ disorder in the kids when they were tested 20 years later: Better Nutrition, Antisocial personality Disorder

   1. Risk factor for antisocial personality disorder is actually bad nutrition

5. Which of these is a behavior therapy technique?: Contingency Management aka ABA Applied Behavioral Analysis 

   1. Uses Operant Conditioning (reward good behavior, punish bad behavior)

   2. Client centered therapy = humanistic, psychoanalysis = freudian psychoanalytic, rational-emotive therapy = cognitive

6. One variant of the Asch line-length experiment required that the participant write down her guesses in private. What was this change in procedure intended to explore?: The role of embarrassment in conformity

7. When teachers were informed that some children in their classes had been identified as "bloomers," the students were later found to have significantly improved their test scores over the following year. In fact, the students were randomly selected and had no greater intellectual abilities than their classmates. This study illustrates the phenomenon of: Self Fulfilling Prophecy (Effect of Expectation)

8. Three students are paid different amounts of money to give a speech in support of more difficult final exams, a position that is contrary to each of their attitudes. Sarah is paid $1, Lynn is paid $5, and Kelly $20. According to dissonance theory, which student is most likely to support difficult exams after giving the speech?: Sarah Person that is paid only 1 dollar has insufficient justification for giving a speech on exams being more difficult, those paid more were able to resolve their dissonance because they got paid a lot of money (justification), so sarah must reduce her dissonance by convincing that she does actually believe exams should be more difficult 

9. Alex is a brand-new researcher fresh out of graduate school. He has decided that he is going to devote his career to positive psychology. We can assume that his research would focus on all of the following topics EXCEPT: the flow of positive energy within the body

10. When is informational influence most likely to result in conformity?: when one is confused about what the correct answer might be 

    1. Do what other people are doing because you think other people know more / better than you

11. ADHD is thought to be caused by: Biological Factors

12. Which of the following clearly illustrates or involves pluralistic ignorance (a type of misunderstanding that occurs when members of a group don't realize that the other members share their perception - often, their uncertainty about how to react in a situation - which results in each member wrongly interpreting the others' inaction as reflecting their better understanding of the situation)?: Passerby decides a man lying on the sidewalk is not in trouble because nobody else in the vicinity is stopping to assist him

    1. Pluralistic ignorance: look to others to see what to do But others are also looking to us ?! everyone is going off of each others inaction

    2. Diffusion of Responsibility: deciding not to help because others will do so

    3. Not knowing how to help 

13. Amnesia, fugue, or multiple identities may be symptoms of: Dissociative Disorders

14. Counterconditioning to a phobic stimulus a new response that is incompatible with the fear attached to that stimulus in order to displace it is called: Systematic desensitization 

    1. Aka exposure therapy

15. A woman has recently begun chemotherapy to treat her breast cancer, a diagnosis that produced significant stress for her. According to Selye, the woman is in the _____ stage of his model: RESISTANCE 

    1. Alarm and Mobilization: first learning she had breast cancer 

    2. Resistance: coping 

    3. Exhaustion: the treatment has been going for so long, body is tired/breaking down