Unit 1 – Scientific Foundations of Psychology

Approaches & People

• Wilhelm Wundt is known as father of psychology b/c he founded first lab
• Edward Titchener – structuralism (studying the mind by trying to look at what it is made of by using introspection)
• William James – Functionalism (study the mind’s functions)
• Psychodynamic approach developed by Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory
  • Think of the unconscious mind and motives/things we are repressing
  • Strength: can’t really be proven wrong
  • Limitation: theory isn’t scientific
• Behaviorism: reflexes and behaviors
  • Ivan Pavlov – classical conditioning through dog salivating experiment
    • Strength: reflexes/triggers can be measured + observed
    • Weakness: creativity + thoughts are not simple reflexes that can be trained
  • BF Skinner – operant conditioning
    • Strength: behaviors can be measured
    • Weakness: people are more complex than rewards/punishments
• Cognitive approach focuses on thoughts
  • Strength: allows for differences between people & complexity of thought
  • Limitation: thoughts are difficult & almost impossible to observe + study
• Biological approach focuses on brain reactions to things
  • Strengths: scientific theory means it can be measured
  • Limitation: too simplistic
• Humanistic – positive view on how people are unique/special & achieve the best
  • Strength: encourages differences b/w people for growth
  • Weakness: not based on science
• Sociocultural – impact from environment which shapes our behavior
  • Strength: somewhat measurable
  • Weakness: difficult to apply to individual & culture is hard to measure

Research Methods

• Correlational methods: Surveys, naturalistic observation, case study
• Longitudinal: same people over long time
• Cross sectional: many people at same time in moment
• Experiments are the only way to find a casual relationship
  • Independent and dependent variables
  • Placebo effect: change due to belief in the independent variable
  • Placebo: something that is as close to the independent variable as possible, but does not have any real effect
    • Reduces placebo effect
  • Experimental & control group (placebo group)
  • Random sample/selection: each person in population has equal chance of being chosen
  • Representative sample: group “looks like” larger population
  • Random assignment: participants have equal chance of being put in experimental or control group
• Confounding variables: factors which interfere or influence a study not intended or expected by researchers
• participants/subjects bias (Hawthorne effect): consciously/unconsciously behaving in a way to ensure research outcome fit his/her expectations or what they perceive the researcher wants to find
  • Single-blind procedure avoids this: subjects are not aware if they are in the control group
• experimenter/researcher bias: consciously/unconsciously conducts research to ensure the outcome fit with researcher's expectations
  • Double-blind procedure combats this: neither researcher not subjects know who is in control/experimental group

Statistical Analysis

• Quantitative vs. qualitative data
• Frequqnecy distribution tables
• Central tendency: mean, median, mode
• Higher the standard deviation, the less similar the scores
• Standard deviation allows researchers to indicate the average distance from the mean for a set of scores
• 
• Positive correlation (direct relation) vs negative correlation (inverse)
• Look for a p-value as close to 0 as possible
  • Shows their data supports hypothesis & outside factors haven’t influence results
• Statistical significance: the likelihood data collection is a result of the manipulation of the independent variable and not left to chance

Ethical Guidelines

• IRB is the ethical committee that sets the rules & reviews experiments
• Researchers must conduct studies which are beneficial to others & don’t cause harm
• Have a positive atmosphere for the subjects built on accountability and ethical consideration
• Transparent practices
• Must prevent unjust practices by remaining aware of their biases, level of competence, and area and limits of expertise
• Subjects have informed consent & rights to privacy

Unit 2 – Biological Bases of Behavior

Heredity + Environment

• Charles Darwin survival of the fittest – Theory of Evolution
• Nature is heredity while nurture is the environment
• Reciprocal determinism: the environment affects the person, then the person reacts & thus influences the environment
• Epigenetics: environmental pressures can change the activity of genes
  • Can change metabolic processes and behaviors
  • Changes can be passed to the next generation
  • Genes “turn on or off”
  • Slowly changes
  • Important for the benefit of the species
• Polygenic: many genes; if a behavior or trait was caused by genes, it is likely caused by many genes
• Plasticity: the brain changes and arranges itself on the cellular level in response to what is going on in the environment
  • Brain structure changes
  • Quickly changes
  • Flexible brains are important for the individual in learning and therapy

Endocrine System

• Main purpose is to allow for communication
• Glands use hormoens to talk to other glands & other parts of the body
• Adrenal galdns: send adrenaline through bloodstream all over the body in terms of emergency
• Hypothalamus: controls fear, hunger, anger, sexual desire
  • Controls the pituitary gland
• Pituitary gland: helps to regulate and communicates with all other glands (“master gland”)
• Pineal gland: involved in producing melatonin (*circadian rhythm melatonin*)
• Thyroid gland: regulates body's metabolism
• Pancreas: produces insulin, helps get energy from food
• Ovary: produce strogen and progesterone
• Testes: produces testosterone
• Hormones talk to glands
• In nervous system, neurotransmitters talk to neurons
• Endocrine and nervous systems communicate with each other
  • Neurotransmitters can fit into the receptor sites of glands
  • Hormones can fit into the receptor sites of neurons
• Brain acts as a feedback loops b/c the glands communicate to body & body communicates back to brain

Nervous System & Neuron

• Central nervous system: brain and spinal cord
  • Organizes movement, creates thoughts, forms emotions, produces behavior
• Peripheral nervous systems: carries out orders from CNS
  • Somatic nervous system: controlvs voluntary movement of skeletal muscles
  • Autonomic nervous system: involuntary system
    • Sympathetic: arouses
    • Parasympathetic: calms down

Neural Firing

• Glial cells: protect and provide nutrient for neurons
• Dendrites: receive chemical information from adjacent neurons
• Soma: cell body which contains the nucleus and other structures which help maintain health of neuron
• Axon: carries information away from cell body
• Myelin sheath: fatty insulating convering of axon
• Nodes of ranvier: gaps in the myelin sheath which helps promote action potential
• Axon terminal/terminal buttons: house neurotransmitters
• Synapse: space b/w axon terminals and adjunct dendrite
• Sensory/afferent neurons: receive info from sensory receptors throughout the body & send it to brain
• Motor/efferent neurons: sends information from brain to body
• Mirror neuron: activated when we watch others complete an activity
• Resting potential: a state where there are more positive ions on the outside than on the inside
• Permeability: a process where positive and negative come together
• Action potential: neuron fires an impulse b/c positive sweep down the axon (firing threshold)
• A neuron either fires or it does – all or nothing
• Refractory period: cell cannot fire again but must wait to achieve its intensity
• Re-uptake: any excess neurotransmitters left in the synapse is recollected
• Excitatory neurotransmitters (stimulate the firing which sends messages) vs inhibitory neurotransmitters (slows the firing which slows/stops the message)

Influences of Drugs on Neural Firing

• Agonist: mimic/copycat for a neurotransmitter & produces more of or an enhanced effect for whatever that neurotransmitter does b fitting into the receptor site the same way
  • Opiates are antagonists of endorphines
• Antagonist: blocks the neurotransmitter from being released by the terminal or from binding to the receptor site
  • Produces less of or no effect for whatever that neurotransmitter does by stopping the neurotransmitters
  • Alcohol acts as an antagonist for glutamate (blocks release of glutamate)
• Drugs can act as a reuptake inhibitor: blocks neurotransmitter from being absorbed back into the presynaptic axon terminal
  • Produces more of the neurotransmitter at the synapse the next time the neuron fires

The Brain

• Hindrbain: pons, medulla, cerebellum, reticular formation
  • Medulla: autonomic function necessary for survival such as respiration, BP, reflexes
  • Pons: autonomic function necessary for survival such as regulating sleep cycle, communicating b/w cerebellum and forebrain, bladder control
  • Cerebellum “little brain”: balance, posture, coordination, integral to implicit memory formation
  • Reticular formation: attention, arousal, consciousness, regulating sleep cycles
• Midbrain: thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdala, hippocampus (all located within limbic system)
  • Thalamus: sensory + motor relay station
    • Routes incoming sensory signals to forebrain to be interpreted
  • Hypothalamus: maintain a state of balance (homeostasis) through the use of hormones
    • Temperature, hunger
    • Pituitary gland (master gland) works w/ hypothalamus
      • Fight or flight, sex drive, social bonding, reward pathway
  • Amygdala: emotional reactions (fear, agression)
  • Hippocampus: memory formation, learning, emotional regulation
• Forebrain/cerebral cortex divided into left and right hemisphere divided into 4 lobes
  • Frontal lobes: prefrontal, motor cortex, association areas, Broca’s area (speaking)
    • Movement, judgement, planning
  • Parietal lobes: somatosensory cortex, association areas
    • Touch & space
  • Occipital lobes: primary visual cortex, association areas
  • Temporal lobes: auditory cortex, association areas, Wernicke’s area (understand/interpret sound)

Tools for Examining Brain Structure and Function

• • HM had severe epilepsy, so the neurosurgeon removed the hippocampus which seemed to be the source of his seizures
    • Lost ability to form new memories while still holoding on to old ones
    • Neuroscientists found out that the function of the hippocampus was to store long-term memories
  • Phineas Gage: a rod went through his brain
    • Damage to prefrontal cortex which impaired jdgement, emotional regulation, planning & his personality had changed
  • Someone w/ a split brain has their corpus callosum cut in order to reduce epilepsies
  • 
  • Left visual field of both eyes gets processed in the right visual cortex
    • Can draw what they see with their left hand; right=visual
  • Right visual field of both eyes get processed in the left visual cortex
    • Can say what they see b/c left =language
  • Left brain is for language + logic & right is for spatial + facial recognition
  • EEG detects electrical activity from neurons firing by placing electrodes on the head
  • PET: inject w/ radioactive glucose & detect hot spots of cellular activity
  • MRI: a pulse is sent to distort magnetic field and atoms in the body and as they return to normal, MRI machine is able to produce a detailed image of the slices of the brain
  • fMRI: measures oxygen from blood flow

The Adaptable Brain

Sleep and Dreaming

• Cycles through sleep stages every 90-120 minutes
• NREM gets shorter throughout night
• REM gets longer throughout night
• Transition down to deeper stages & then transition up to more internal active stages
• Awake → NREM 1 → NREM 2 → NREM 3 → REM
• NREM 1
  • 5-10 minutes, light sleep, alpha waves
• NREM 2
  • 10-20 minutes, harder to awaken, theta waves
  • Stable transitional stage
• NREM 3
  • Deepest sleep, hardest to awaken, delta waves
  • Body sleep
  • Growth hormone
  • Gets shorter as night passes
• REM (rapid eye movement)
  • Beta waves
  • Internally very active, externally paralyzed, dreams/nightmares, memory synthesis

Why do we spend so much time sleeping? (Theories)

• Restoration theory: our bodies wear out during the day & use up resources → sleep helps restore the resources & re-energize body
  • Restore + repair muscles and brain tissue
  • Supports growth
• Adaptive theory: based on evoolutionary approach b/c sleep protects us
  • Animals evolved to preserve energy and protect us during the time of day when there is little value for movement & removes us from considerable danger
  • Helped animals adapt to environment to survive
• Cognitive and information processing theories: sleep helps us restore and rebuild our memories of the day’s experiences
  • Memory consolidation occurs during REM
  • Sleep deprived individuals struggle cognitively
  • People from all ages remember prior day’s events better on a well-rested brain
• Psychological theory: dreams are the road to the unconscious mind, filled w/ content that we cannot face in conscious, waking life (Freud)
  • Contains manifest content & latent content
• Biological & Information Processing Theories: dreams provide a way to sort out the day’s events & serve to consolidate our memories for storage
  • Activation-Synthesis Model
    • REM helps preserve and develop neural connections
    • REM triggers neural activiity in the cortex as memories are synthesized
    • Activation → synthesis
• Insomnia: inability to fall and stay asleep
  • Causes: stress, irregular sleep schedule, pain/illness, diet/medications
  • Treatments: stress management, medications/melationin, treatment of illness, changing habits
• Sleep apnea: cessation of breathing while sleep, snoring, gaping, never feel rested/restored even after full night of sleep
  • Risk factors: weight, smoking, gender, age, thick neck, narrow airway, nasal obstruction
• Narcolepsy: falling into uncontroollable “sleep attacks” throughout the day; drowsiness, muscle paralysis, REM sleep

Unit 3 – Sensation and Perception

Principles of Sensation

• Gestalt psychology: the whole is greater than the sum
  • Figure and ground: objects (figures) stand out from surroundings (ground)
  • Grouping:
    • Proximity: have six lines together vs 3 separate groups of 2
    • Similarity: objects that appear similar are grouped together
    • Continuity: naturally follow the pattern that maintains continuous group
    • Connectedness: objects that move in the same direction tend to be seen as one object
    • Closure: fill gaps in our mind (think of triangle and circles example)
• Depth perception: ability to perceive distance of objects in one’s visual field in 3D
• Binocular cues require two eyes – convergence & retinal disparity
  • Convergence: two eyes move inward for near objects & two eyes straighten for further objects
  • Retinal disparity: images from each eye differ
    • The closer the object, the larger the disparity
    • Further the object, the smaller the disparity
    • Ex: Viewing the same thing while covering either eye makes the object “move”
• Monocular cues require one eye – relative size, interposition, light and shadow, relative height, texture gradient, linear perspective
  • Relative size: if an object appears to be smaller relative to size of the similar object, then the one that appears larger is closer
  • Interpostiion: images appeared to be blocked appear to be farther away
  • Light and shadow: things that are shaded/hazy seem to be farther away
  • Relative height: higher up in the visual field tend to be seen as farther away
  • Texture gradient: things that are clear are closer & clumped is farther
  • Linear perspective: if lines seem to converge in the distance, it is farther
• Sensory transduction: stimulus → sense receptors (sensory neurons) → transduced into a sensation
• Absolute threshold: smallest amount of energy that will produce a sensation about 50% of the time
  • Wings of a bee on your cheek
  • Light of a candle on a clear dark night from 30 miles away
  • Ticking of a watch from 20 feet away in a quiet environment
• Thresholds are low, but not too low so we can foucs
• Children have lower aboslute thresholds than adults
• Sensory adaptation: diminished sensory awareness due to constant stimulation above the threshold
• Difference threshold/Just-noticeable threshold: the smallest amount of change in a stimulus that will produce a change in sensation
  • Weber’s Law: physical proportion of change necessary before we “sense” the change
• Signal detection theory: at what point we are able to detect a sensory signal and change our behavior

Principles of Perception

• Bottom-up: first we sense the stimulus & then we perceive and process the experience
• Top-down: we perceive and process the experience first
  • Expectations, experience, culture, motivation, emotion
• Perceptual set: our tendency to perceive some parts of sensory data and ignore other
  • Influences same as top-down processing
  • Example: for emotion, angry people perceive hostility
• Schemas: mental frameworks for ognaizing our understanding of the world around us
  • Based on experiences & guide perceptual sets

Visual Anatomy

• 
• Light waves → cornea → iris → pupil → lens → retina → fovea (which contains cones/rods) → bipolar cell → ganglion cell→ optic nerve → primary visual cortex
• Lightwaves consist of wavelength and amplitude
  • Wavelength determines hue (color)
  • Amplitude determines intensity (how rich/vibrant the color is)
• Trichromatic theory (Young and Helmholtz): photoreceptors (cones) work in teams of three which are red, green, and blue
  • Combination of cones firing makeup all colors in the visual spectrum
  • Strength of the signal determines how the brain interprets the color
• Opponent-process theorY: as visual information is transferred from the cones to the ganglion cells, some neurons are excited (turned on) while other are inhibited (turned off)
  • Explains phenomenon of afterimages
  • Red-green, blue-yellow, white-black
• Color blindness is the result of a lack of functioning photoreceptors for color
  • Cannot distinguish excitatory from inhibitor signals OR may have unresponsive cones

Visual Perception

• Physical illusions: distortions of scales; manipulation of monocular cues for depth perception
• Physiological illusions: visual system gets overstimulated
  • Excitement or fatigue of cones
  • Fatigue or stimulation of feature detectors in visual cortex
• Cognitive illusions: mismatch between what you perceive and what you sense
  • Top down processing, perceptual set, context cues, manipulation of a Gestalt principle

Auditory Sensation and Perception

• Frequency affects pitch & amplitude affects loudness
• The outer ear gather, concentrates, and amplifies sound waves
• Middle ear acts as a medium of sound transfer
• Pinna → external auditory canal → 3 bones (hammer, anvil, stirrup) → cohclea → cilia→ audiotry nerve → auditory cortex in temporal lobe
• Sensorineural hearing loss impacts loudness, clarity, and range of sounds heard
  • Usually damage to cochlear hair cells and auditory nerve
  • Both ears
  • Causes: aging, trauma, disease (more common)
• Conduction hearing loss: sound waves cannot progress normall through outer and/or middle ear
  • Outer ear, ear drum, and bones in middle ear
  • One ear or both
  • Causes: blockage, trauma to eardrum

Chemical Senses & Body Senses

• Taste and smell are chemical senses
• 5 main taste sensations: sweet, salty, btiter, sour, umami
• Body senses: touch (pressure, temperature), pain, vestibular sense (bodily balance and movement), kinesthetic sense (position and movmenet of skeletal joints)
• Sensory interaction with the body senses helps us feel a variety of things
• It is important to feel pain to prevent further injury
• Kinesthetic and vestibular sense helps us with direction and orientation in space

Unit 4 – Learning

Introduction to Learning

• Learning: changes in behavior resulting from experience which is relatively permanent
• Key Researchers – Albert Bandura (observational learning), Ivan Pavlov (classical conditioning), Edward Tolman (latent learning), John Watson (behaviorism), John Garcia (taste aversion), BF Skinner and Edward Thorndike (operant conditioning)
• Insight learning, emotional learning, superstitious behaivor, learned helplessness

Classical Conditioning

• Unconditioned stimulus at first elicits an unconditioned responose
• Conditioned stimulus is associated with an unconditioned stimulus
• Conditioned response is elicited by the conditioned stimulus after pairing
• Extinction occurs if the CS is no longer paired with the US
• Sponatneous recovery occurs when an extinguished response return
• Stimulus discrimination occurs when responses differ with different stimuli
• Gernatlization occurs when response are the same with different stimuli
• Higher order learning/conditioning occurs when we associate a conditioned stimulus with another conditioned stimulus

Operant Conditioning

• Law of Effect (Edward Thorndike): responses that produce a satisfying outcome strengthens stimulus-response relationship
• 
• Intrinsic motivation: desire to perform a behavior for its own sake
• Extrinsic motivation: desire to perform a behavior for future rewards or to avoid threat of punsihment
• Overjustification: when extrinsic rewards replace intrinsic motivation
• Schedule of Reinforcement:
  • 

Social and Cognitive Factors in Learning

• Emotion focused coping: attempts to avoid stressor by attending to emotional needs (does not solve issue)
• Problem focused coping: associated with greater stress reduction, feeling more in control
• Self-control: ability to delay gratification and control impulses
• External locus of control: outside factors affect our lives
  • Ex: luck, fate
• Internal locus of control: we direct our own fate; correlated with achievement and health
• Biofeedback: usess cognitive factors to influence physiological factors of stress
  • Feedback about subtle bodily responses (e.g., tension in forehead, BP)
  • Reduce intensity of tension headaches

Unit 5 – Cognitive Psychology

Introduction to Memory

• Memory is learning that persists over time
  • Information and/or experiences that are encoded, stored, and retrieved
• Atkinson & Shiffrin’s Information-Processing model/3 stage model
  • Sensory, short term, long term memory
  • Stimuli → sensory memory → attention → working/short term memory (~ 7 bits stated by Miller) → encoding → long-term memory
• Baddeley revised STM → working memory – where we process information actively
  • STM is like a shelf used temporarily; working memory is like the rokspace at your desk
• Iconic memory is visual sensory memory (<1 s)
• Echoic memory is for sounds (longer than iconic memory; about 3-4 seconds)

Encoding

• Shallow processing: little elaboration with a focus on superficial and/or perceptual elements
  • Ex: encoding a word by the type of font
• Deep processing: focus on the meaning with deeper elaboration
  • Ex: encoding a word by meaning and connecting it to previous learning
• Visual encoding: encode by visual elements
  • Ex: italicized word in colored font
• Acoustic encoding: encode by sound
  • Ex: rhymes with…
• Semantic encoding: encode by meaning
  • Ex: putting a word in a category
• Massed practice: try to encode all at once
• Distributed practice: encode over multiple time periods; the longer, the better
• Spacing effect: distributed practice leads to long-term retention better than mass practice
• Testing effect: retrieving infor for assessments > restudying or rereading
• Serial position effect: the middle items are the least remembered
  • Recency effect: the last items in a list are remembere best immediately after presentation
  • Primacy effect: the first items in a list are remembered best in the long term
• Chunking: clustering items into units
• Mnemonics: memory devices, often using association or memory
• Hierarchies: creating categories with subdivisions

Storing

• Serial processing: only one process occurs at any given time, one after the other
• Parallel processing: multiple tracks of brain processes occurring at the same time
• Effortful processing: explicit (declarative) memories
  • such as experiences and facts
• Automatic processing: implicit (non-declarative) memories encoded unconsciously
  • Includes procedural memory and classical conditioning
  • Ex: time, space, frequency
• Dual track memory system:
  • 

Retrieving

• Retrieval: getting information out of long term memory
• Recognition: identify previous learning; stable
  • Ex: MCQ
• Recall: retrieving or “pulling out” previous learning; declines with age
  • Ex: fill in the blank questions
• Relearning: improved retrieval with repeated learning
• Overlearning: practice after learning a skill to make it more resilient to forgetting
• Retrieval cues: serve as connection point to access a memroy, such as smell, sounds, or visual elements
  • Priming: activation of memory associations, sometimes unconsciously
    • Previous exposures may influence future thoughts/behaviors
  • Context-dependent memory: revisiting the location of an experience serves as a cue
  • State dependent memory: what we experience in one state could be remembered better the next time we are in that state
    • Ex: Mood-congruent memory

Forgetting and Memory Distortion

• Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve: memorized nonsense syllables & figure out there is a steep drop-off of recall initially, then levels out
• Retrieval failure: stored information that is not accessible
  • Can affect retrospective memory (looking back at previous info)
• Prospective memory: memory to do something in the future; may be assisted with retrieval cues
• Proactive interference: prior information disrupts learning new information
• Retroactive interference: new learning affecting recalling old
• Retrograde amnesia: inability to remember past information or experiences
  • Procedures remain intact
• Anterograde amnesia: inability to form new memories
  • Ex: H.M., who had hippocampus removed in seizure surgery
• Source amnesia: attributing an experience to the wrong source
• Ways to improve memory: make it meaningful, distributed practice, activate retrieval cues, testing effect, chunking, mnemonics, sleep

Biological Bases of Memory

• Long-term potentiation: increased efficiency in the synapse when repeatedly stimulated
  • Neuron needs less activation
  • More connections between neurons
  • Lasts from hours to weeks
• Explicit memory associated with hippocampus and frontal lobe
  • Hippocampus - hub through which complex neural memory networks are made
• Implicit memory associated with cerebellum and basal ganglia
  • Cerebellum - associated with classical conditioning
  • Basal ganglia - associated with procedural memory
• Emotinoal memory associated with limbic system (including hippocampus and amygdala)
• Flashbulb memory: not immune to alteration
  • Usually a very personal experience

Introduction to Thinking and Problem Solving

• Concept: a cluster of cognitive raw material
• Prototype: “a great, abstract example: not a perfect one, but a great one
• Artificial concept: a perfect example, geometry, rare in real life
• Informal reasoning (fast thinking) vs formal reasoning (slow thinking)
  • Informal reasoning used in heuristics, top-down processing, schema, mental set, mental model
  • Formal reasoning used in algorithm, bottom-up processing, syllogism, diagnosis, AI
• Heuristics: often based on experience, usually work, fast and efficient
• Top-down processing: already have the gist of a situation or concept before having all of the details
• Schema: a set of ideas or set of concepts that can be used to view a problem
• Mental set: way of thinking that has worked before
• Mental model: a way of thinking about how thing interact
• Algorithm: step-by-step process
• Bottom-up processing: gathering as many bits of data as possible before making a conclusion
• Syllogism: using logic
• Diagnosis: eliminating all of the wrong answers will leave you with the right answer

Biases and Errors in Thinking

• Heuristics: thinking shortcuts that can lead us into the wrong answer
• Cognitive bias: the result of using an imperfect thinking strategy
• Representativeness heuristic: thinking that a new thing that has a few characteristics of a schema, will then fit nicely into that schema
• Availability heuristic: when strategy easily comes to mind
  • Many student when they are are stuck, use study techniques that easily pop into their mind and tye don’t think of other study strategies
• Anchoring bias: a powerful or emotional thought weighs down the rest of the mind
• Confirmation bias: personal opinions biasing our view of new information
• Hindsight bias: “I knew it all along”
• Fixedness: not being able to see the problem from a different point of view
• Framing effect: how you ask/say something can influence response
• Illusory correlation: seeing a correlation when there isn’t one
• Functional fixedness: not being able to see that an object can be used in different ways
• Belief perseverance: when when presented with concrete convincing evidence to the contrary, a person will hold onto their wrong beliefs

Introduction to Intelligence

• Intelligence is the ability to think creatively & ability to apply knowledge to new situations
• Psychometrics: measuring the mind
• Speed of processing is easily measured and it does seem to be positively correlated with intelligence
• Fluid intelligence is related to speed of processing
• Flynn Effect: over time (decades), the average IQ of a given society rises
• Crystallized intelligence is related to heuristics; as we age we are slower
• Savant syndrome: a genius-like ability in a very narrow area
• Stereotype threat: members of a group who thought to be “less than” in certain areas will perform worse in that area than members of a different group
• Psychometrics: intelligence can be quantified
• Alfred Binet came up with the first test to classify mental abilities
  • Mental age/chronological x 100 = IQ

Psychometric Principles and Intelligence Training

• Standardization starts with giving many sample pretests to many people before the test is actually administered as an official test
  • From those pretests, you see the number of answer people get right
  • A pattern starts to develop
• A good test must correlate with another version of the test to be reliable
• Different types of validity
  • Content validity: testing from all aspects
  • Construct validity: measuring the intelligence through the test
  • Criterion validity: does the score of the test apply to the person’s intelligence IRL too?
  • Predictive validity: how well a test predicts future performance

Components of Language and Language Acquisition

• Secondary language acquisition is a lot harder because you are learning enw grammar rules, conventions, and patterns
• Primary language acquisition is an unconscious process
• Noah Chomsky: language is an innate faculty b/c we are born with a set of rules about language in our minds (universal grammar)
• Linguistic determinism: the language you were raised in and think in determines the thoughts you are going to have
• Stages of language acquistion: eye contact, babbling, holophrase (one word, but a complete thought), telegraphic speech, fast mapping (using context and what you hear other say to learn the meaning of new words), overgeneralization, critical period, sensitive period

Unit 6 – Developmental Psychology

The Lifespan & Physical Development in a Child

• Zygote (fertilized egg): undergoes rapid cell division, sex determined by father, least vulnerable to environmental influences
• Down syndrome: not usually inherited; likely caused by gene copying error
  • Physical gorwht delays and intellectual disabilities
• Phenylketonuria (PKU): inability to produce enzymes to digest proteins
  • Inherited disorder – autosomal recessive
  • Neurological impairment
• Whatever the mother breathes, eats, or drinks may impact the course of development
• Teratogens are environmental influences that can reach the embryo or fetus during prenatal development and cause harm
  • Alcohol/Fetal Alcohol Syndrome: susceptibility to abuse alcohol later in life & neurological/phsyical impairments
  • Tobacco: cleft palate, low birth weight
• Embryo is provided nourishment and oxygen by the placenta
  • Organs begin to form, heart begins to beat, central nervous system begins to develop
• Fetus (~9 weeks - birth): sex organs differentiable, toes and fingers grow, hearing develops, lungs develop, brain undergoes rapid growth, bones and muscles develop

Social Development in Childhood

• Erikson’s Psychosocial Development Conflicts:
  • Trust vs. Mistrust (infancy - 18 months): infants must trust caregivers and if they don’t, they may grow up to view the world as a dangerous place
  • Autonomy vs. Shame/Doubt (early childhood): taking care of your own needs to feel a sense of accomplishment
  • Initiative vs. Guilt (preschool): directing play and other social interactions; explore environment and take control to do things on their own
  • Industry vs. Inferiority (school): being productive upon receiving an evaluation of one’s work & inferiority means that an individual becomes discouraged
• Mary Ainsworth Attachment Styles: secure, resistant, avoidant
  • Strange Situation Test: tested how babies respond to the temporary absence of their mothers

• Parenting styles:

• Outcomes of different parenting styles:
  • Authoritative: happy, confident, capable, socially competent
  • Authoritarian: passively dependent, angry, low self-esteem, obedient
  • Permissive: lack self-discipline, self-involved, demanding
  • Uninvolved: anxious, emotionally withdrawn, untrusting

Cognitive Development in Childhood

• Schemas: mental representations of what we know
• Schema assimilation: using these representations to interpret a stimulus
  • Ex: schema is that if an animal has 4 legs, it is a dog
  • Schema assimilation is seeing a cat and calling it a dog b/c it has 4 legs
• Schema accommodation: altering these represntaitons to incorporate new information
  • Child learns that dogs bark & cats meow
• We are constantly judging and interpreting our enviornment using existing schemas (assimilation)
• Child calls a dog “dog” and the parent praises a child & child sees a cat → schema assimilation → child calls cat “dog” represents stimulus generalization
• When discrepancies between what we already know and what we discover appear, we must accommodate our schemas
  • Child calls cat “dog” represents stimulus generalization (no reinforcement is available; child is corrected) → schema accommodation → child calls cat “cat” & calls dog “dog” represented stimulus discrimination
• Piaget stages of cognitive development:

• Criticism of Piaget is that it underestimated age

Adolescent Development

• James Marcia Identity Crises (not unfirom across all development aspects: work, religion, politics)

• Adolescent Egocentrism
  • Imaginary audience: an adolescent’s tendency to believe that others are watching and evaluating them
    • Self-conscious behavior
  • Personal fable: an adolescent’s belief that they are special and unique; none of life’s difficulties or problems will affect them, regardless of their behavior
    • Risk-taking behavior
• Adolscent Risk Taking Behavior:
  • Biological: pre-frontal cortex unable to mediate actions of limbic system
  • Psychological: personal fable
  • Social: influences of peers

Adulthood and Aging

• Brain – regional loss of volume (frontal lobe, cerebellum), teolmeres shorten, decreased plasticity → risk of dementia (decrease in ability to think and remember)
• Memory – procedural and semantic stable; decline in working memory, impacts fluid intelligence, declines → declining fluid intelligence
• Other changes – vision (presbyopia), declining sex hormone levels, loss of muscle mass
• To combat this: exercise, healthy diet, new experiences

Moral Development

1. Level 1: Preconventional Morality – right and wrong determined by rewards and punishments
   1. Stage 1: punishment/obedience – whatever leads to punishment is wrong
   2. Stage 2: the right way to behave is the way that is rewarded
2. Level 2: Conventional Morality – views of others matter; avoidance of blame; seeking approval
   1. Stage 3: good intentions – behaving in ways that conform to the good behaviors that others expect of us
   2. Stage 4: obedience to authority – importance of “doing one’s duty”
3. Level 3: Post-conventioanl Moraltiy – abstract notions of justice; rights of others can override obedience to laws/rules
   1. Stage 5: differentbetween moral and legal right – recognition that rules should sometimes be broken
   2. Stage 6: individual principles of conscience – takes account of likely views of everyone affected by a moral decision

• Critism of Carol Gilligan b/c she found the results were not generalizable to women
  • She accounted for interpersonal relationships over rationality

Gender and Sexual Orientation

• Gender roles: expected behaviors for males and females; based on culture
• Gender stereotypes: a schema children develop about the behavior of people based on their gender
• Gender schema theory: children actively form mental categories for masculintiy and femininity, recognize their own gender role, and select activites that mathc that role

Unit 7 – Motivation, Emotion, and Personality

Theories of Motivation

• Motivation: a need or desire that energizes and directs behavior toward a goal
• Primary needs: innate/unlearned (hunger, thirst)
• Secondary needs: psychologoical (social approval, belongingness)
• Drive reduction theory: we are motivated to engage in behaviors that reduce drives in order to return our body to homeostasis
  • Lack of homeostasis →need →drive→motivation to reduce drive→homeostasis initial need is reduced
• Incentive theory: we are pulled by incentives to behave in a certain manner
  • Overjustification effect is related to do this (as incentive increases, we lose intrinsic motivation)
• Arousal theory: people are motivated to take actions to either increase or decrease their arousal levels in order to achieve and maintain a personal optimum level of arousal
  • Yerkes-Dodson Law: you need more arousal for easier tasks (b/c motivation to perform is not there) & less arousal for harder tasks (b/c anxiety will hurt performance)

Specific Topics in Motivation

• Hunger is a physiological drive and according to drive reduction, we want to reduce that drive
• According to Maslow’s Hierarcy, we have a motivation to fulfill the basic physiological need of hunger
• According to incentive theory, we are pulled by the promise of rewards of eating
• Hunger and eating behaviors
  • Social-cultural: presence of others, serving portions
  • Psychological: anticipated pleasure/rewards of eating, mood
  • Biological: blood glucose, hormones
    • Raised glucose → diminished hunger → don’t eat → lowered glucose → increase hunger → eat → cycle repeats
    • Leptin makes you less hungry while ghrelin is secreted and increases hunger
• Approach-approach conflict: conflict arises when choosing between 2 desirable, but mutually exclusive, options
  • Win-win situation
  • Ex: Picking b/w two items you love at a restaurant
• Avoidance-avoidance conflict: choosing between 2 undesriable, but mutually exclusive, toptions
  • Picking the “less of the 2 evils” (no-win situation)
  • Ex: Cleaning the house or cleaning the car
• Approach-avoidance conflict: when a single/one event or goal has both desirable and undesirable consequences
  • Ex: you are offered a new job with more money but longer commutes
• Double approach-avoidance: when you have to choose between 2 options that have both desirable and undesirable consequences that are mutually exclusive
  • Ex: you were accepted into a few schools – one option is staying in state where a lot of your friends are going but you don’t like the program & the other option is that you like the program but it is expensive

Theories of Emotion

• James-Lange: emotions occur as a result of physiological reactions to events
  • stimulus → physiological arousal → emotionl experience
  • Noise → heart pounds → fear
  • Weakness: relies on the premise that every emotion is accompanied by a unique pattern of physiological arousal
• Schacter-Singer: you cognitively label the physiological arousal before the emotional experience
  • A cognitive appraisl of the arousal precedes the emotional experience
  • stimulus → physiological arousal → cognitive appraisal → emotionl experience
  • Weakness: some emotions seem automatic (there is no appraisal) & sometimes we don’t experience an arousal or an emotion until we appraise the situation
• Cannon-Bard: we simultaneously have physiological arousal and emotional experience after a stimulus
  • Weakness: doesn’t factor in new situations where we may be unclear as to what we feel
• Lazarus: stimulus → cognitive appraisal → simultaneous physiological arousal and emotional experience
• Zajonc-LeDous: some emotions are automatic, like fear, anger, surprise
  • Stimulus → emotional experience
  • 

Stress and Coping

• Stress: a condition in which the human system responds to changes in its normal balanced state
• Stressor: anything that is perceived as challenging, threatening, or demanding
• Adaptation: change in response to a stressor
• Eustress: stress interpreted as beneficial
• Distress: stress interpreted as detrimental
• Alarm reaction: stressor upsets homeostasis
• Resistance: body fights back by adjusting to the stressor
• Exhaustion: body no longer able to resist the stressor
• 
• Exposure to stressors decrease the effectiveness of lymphocytes in the bloodstream (defend body from viruses)

Introduction to Personality

• Personality: the characteristic pattern of a person’s thinking, feeling, and acting
• Nature vs nurture on personality
  • Nature: our genetics determine our behavior; personality is fixed at birth
  • Nurture: our environment and upbringing combine with our experiences and determine our behavior; personality is “nurtured”
• 
• Heritability does not indicate what proportion of a trait is determined by natur or nurture
• Heritability does not reflect the extent to which traits are passed down from parents to children
• Heritability does indicate the variability in the trait in a population that is due to genetic difference among people
• Heritability: to what degree do differences in genes account for difference in our personality traits
  • Big 5 personality traits: agreeablesness, extraversion, openness, neuroticism (tendency towards anxiety), conscientiousness (responsible)

Psychoanalytic Theories of Personality

• According to Freuid, people are born with psychic energy (libido) that must be redirected during social development
• Aggressive and sexual impulses fight to come out and must be restrained
• Id: primal, pleasure-seeking portion that is almost all uncsoncious
  • It wants what it wants & it wants it now
  • Operates on immediate gratification
  • If you’re hungry, you want the food now
• Superego: conscience – uses socialization and guilt to restrain the Id mostly unconsciously
• Ego: conscious portion
  • Listens to both Id and Supergego & operate in reality
  • Functions on delayed gratification
• Personality structures develop over time as we progress through 5 distinct stages
  • In each stage, a conflict needs to be resolved
  • If it resolves normally, development proceeds
  • If conflict is not resolved well, fixation may occur and last well into adulthood

• Carl Jung: added idea of the collective unconscious, filled with archetypes
  • Collective unconscious – an unconscious that we all share as human beings
• Alfred Adler: concept of inferiority complex, arguing that we constantly strive for feelings of superiority
• Karen Horney: environmental and social situations might be causal factors instead of biological and instinctual drives
  • Probosed that relationships greatly shape your personality
• Psychodynamic theory strayed from Freud’s sexual emphasis and began to encorporate more conscious aspects
• Freuid explained numerous ways in which Ego defends against demands of Id and Superego
  • These are unconscious in nature and we cannot easily stop ourselves from doing them
  • Protect us from anxiety
  • i.e. compensation, denial, displacement, identification with aggressor, intellectualization, projection, rationalization, reaction formation, regression, repression, sublimation
• GOOD FRQ PRACTICE AT END OF VIDEO

Behaviorism and Social Cognitive Theories of Personality

• Only behavior is observable and therefore able to be studied
• Behaviorism proposes that personality is a function of the environment
• Personality is predictable, based on the history of reinforcements and punishments
• Inconsistencies in personality or behavior are due to the situation, not internal factors
• Social cognitive theories propose that personality is due to a combination of environmental conditions, behavior, and cognitive factors
  • Julian Rotter and Albert Bandura
  • Bobo doll study – imitation is not always flattery
• Rotter’s Expectancy Theory: we learn what to expect in different situations
  • Our behavior is governed by those expectations and how much we care about the outcome
  • Your belief in your own ability to affect the outcome is referred to as “locus of control”
    • Recall internal vs external locus of control
• Bandura said personality is learned in social situations – the 3 main components are observational learning, self-efficacy, and reciprocal determinism
  • Observational learning is hwen you see something modeled and then do it
  • Self-efficacy is your own level of belief in your ability to be successful at a specific task
  • Reciprocal determinism is the interaction of your mental state, your behavior, and the environment

Humanistic Theories of Perosnality

• Focus on the positive
• People want to improve and grow as individuals
• We want to reach our potential – self-actualization
• Our self-concept dictates how we see ourselves currently and where we want to see ourselves later
• Carl Rogers: we crave approval from others (positive regard)
  • When we receive positive regard and it agress with our own self-evaulations, we are in congruence → this becomes part of our self-concept
  • If our self-evaluations and others’ views of us are not the same, we experience incongruence → anxiety or depression can be a result
  • Seeking approval → comparing to our sense of self → development of personality
• Abraham Maslow: everyone wants to improve, but we have other needs that take precedence
  • Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: Physiological, safety, belongingness/love, esteem, self-actualization
• GOOD FRQ

Trait Theories of Personality

• 3 basic assumptions of trait theories:
  • 1) personality traits are relatively stable in individuals and therefore predictable
  • 2) traits are relatively stable across situations
  • 3) everyone is different in how much of one trait and how much of another they have, leading to infinite variations in overall personality, while being comprised of the same basic traits
• Gordon Allport: analyzed the dictionary to identify words that describe human behavior
  • He determined that personality could be describe in 7 or fewer terms, most of the time
  • Personality ocnsists of cardinal traits (rarely), central traits, secondary traits
• Raymond Cattell: used factory analysis (clustering of traits that are typically found together) to identify 16 personality factors or dimensions
  • The factors were bipolar (i.e. shy vs bold)
  • The degree to which a person score on side or the other of each factor forms their unique personality profile
• Hans Eysenck: used factor analysis but ended up with only two dimensions:
  • Emotionality vs. stability & extraversion vs. introversion
  • Proposed that biological causes were behind the different levels of each factor for different people
• Paul Costa and Robert McCrae the Big Five Model
  • Based on their own factor analysis and many other studied of personality traits and factors
  • Identified that 5 dimensions appear across the board
  • OCEAN: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism

Measuring Personality

• Personality assessment is mostly about traits and characteristics
• 4 main sources of information to describe someone’s personality
  • 1) life outcomes: education level, income, marital status
  • 2) situational tests: laborator measurements of fractions to different types of events
  • 3) observer rating: judgment made by those familiar with the individual
  • 4) self-reports: responses to personality tests
• Objective personality tests
  • Mostly MCQ type of tests – more reliable and valid
• Projective personality tests: primarily in use bypsychologists with a psychodynamic background
  • Unconscious guides reponses, yielding insight into personality functioning in subtle and indirect ways
  • Can provide information about how people are likely to think, feel, and act that is difficult to obtain from objective tests
  • Rorschach Inkblot Test
  • Lack validation and reliability compared to objective measurements

Unit 8 – Clinical Psychology

Introduction to Psychological Disorders

• Clinical diagnosis is based on DSM-5
  • Lists symptoms, descriptions, and other criteria for making a correct diagnosis of a psychological disorder
  • Provides a base to assist w/ reliable and consistent diagnostic judgements
• DSM was created to standardize mental health diagnsosis and classification
• An abnormality classifies as a disorder if it involves a clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior
  • “Dysfunctional”
• Major depressive disorder is diagnosed by identifying at least 5 specific symptoms
  • Some of the symptoms are distressing (i.e. suicide)
  • Others are irrational, like being hopeless
  • Other symptoms may be maldaptive, like not engaging in social activities

Psychological Perspectives and Etiology of Disorders

• Each of the psychological perspectives has its own position on the etiology (cause) of psychological disorders
• Behavioal = mental illness is due to environmental and consequences of behaviors
• Psychoanalytic = unresolved, unconscious conflicts create anxiety and emotional disrutpion
• Cognitive = troubling thoughts create outcomes that can be dysfunctional
• Biological = medical model focuses on physical aspects of illness like genetics, anatomy, biochemistry
• Medical model still persists due to continuing research that keeps finding strong biological evidence
  • Identify chemical imablances and genetic aspects of the disorder
• Biospychosocial model: takes more comprehensive approach
  • Consider factors similar to medical model as well as individual’s negative thoughts, recent environmental events, cultural differences
• Labelinig makes things easier to understand & shows how things are related and helps w/ research into understanding disorders better
• Downsides of labeling:
  • Attaching stigma
  • Creating preconceptions
  • Making people feel more hopeless and powerless
  • Rosenhan experiment****

Neurodevelopment and Schizophrenic Disorders

• Neurodevelopmental disorders: disorders that typically emerge during the time when we are developing (childhood and adolescence)
  • Typically involve dysfunctions in personal, social, academic, or occupational areas
  • Intellectual disability, communication disorders, autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficity hyperactivity disorder, speicifc learning disorder, motor disorder
• Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): affects communication and behaviors
  • Symptoms usually appear by the age of two
  • Symptoms:
    • Difficulty w/ communication and interaction w/ others
    • Restricted, often overly focused interests
    • Repetitive behaviors, like repeating words or phrases
    • Affects ability to socialize
• ADHD: persistent patterns of attention difficulties, hyperactive behavior, impulsivity
  • Loses focus, disorganized, frequently off task & not due to lack of ability/comprehension
  • Hyperactivity manifests in frequent fidgety behaviors and moving around
  • Impulsive behavior indicates immediate need for gratification and inclination to speak/act w/o thinking first
• Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorder: People w/ schizophrenia seem like they have lost touch w/ reality
  • Can cause distress for individual and loved ones
  • Delusional/Brief Psychotic/Schizophreniform/Schizophrenia/Schizoaffective Disorder
• Schizophrenia: display 2+ symptoms for at least one month
  • Delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, catatonia (disorganized/abnormal motor behavior), negative symptoms (reduced emotional expression, initiative)

Bipolar and Depressive Disorders

• Bipolar disorder is an intermediate step between disorders like schizophrenia and deprssion
• Major depressive disorder diagnosis requires at least 5 symptoms
  • Depressed mood – almost all the time
  • Withdrawal from activities due to lack of interest or pleasure
  • Weight loss or gain or appetite increase or decrease
  • Insomnia or hypresomnia
  • Psychomoto agitation or retardation
  • Fatigue
  • Feelings of worthlessness or guilt
  • Problems w/ concentration or indecisiveness
  • Frequent thoughts of death or suicide
• Bipolar disorder involves moving from deprsesive episodes to manic episodes
  • Depressive episodes can have the same symptoms as major deprsesive disorder
  • Manic episdoes involve excess energy, heightened emotions, and even delusional behaviors
  • Most episodes are weeks long or even longer
• Anxiety disorders exist when normal anxiety doesn’t go wawy as it should and begins to cause dysfunction in someone’s life
  • Specific phobia: out of proportion fear of a certain object or situation
    • Lasting and severe enough to cause significant distress or impairment
    • Person avoids object/situation or endures it with considerable fear and anxiety
  • Social anxiety disorder: fear of anxiety about social situations where the person may be observed or scritunized by others
    • Individual fears embarrassing themselves or showing anxiety and being negatively jduged
    • Avoidance or endurance with fear is common
  • Panic disorder: sudden/repeating pannic attacs
  • Agoraphobia: fear of anxiety about being in situations where escap emight be difficult or help might not be available → often results in avoidance
    • Two or more of these situations: public transportation, open spaces, enclosed spaces, standing in lines or crowds, being away from home alone
  • Generalized Anxiety Disorder: excessive worry or anxiety, often about multiple things at once
    • Occurring the majory of the time for at least 6 months
    • Uncontrollable andndysfunctional
• Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD): presensce of obsesions, compulsions, or both
  • Obsessions: thoughts or urges that are persistent and troubling, causing distress or anxiety
    • Thougths are intrusive and veyr difficult to ignore
    • Ex: fear of contamination, fear that doors aren’t locked
  • Compulsions: actions that are taken, often repetitvively, to reduce or control the obsessive thoughts
    • They may involve rules to be followed strictly
    • Intended to reduce anxiety or prevent something bad from happening
    • Behaviors are not usually well connected to what they are trying to prevent or neturalize and may be excessive

Trauma - and Stressor-Related Disorders

• Acute stress disorder lasts up to a month but PTSD can be over a month (mostly over a span of years)
• Symptoms of PTSD: reliving traumatic event, avoidance behaviors, cognitive and mood changes, arousal issues
• PTSD mostly treated by psychotherapy and medication
• Common factor of dissociative disorders is trauma from earlier in life & dissociation is a form of coping with trauma
• Dissociatve Identity Disorder
  • People typically experience changes in personality, but all of those variations comprise their overall personality
  • Have an incomplete overall personality b/c normal variations have become disconnected from one another
  • Experiences 2 distinct personality traits & gaps in memories
• Dissociative amnesia: memory loss of personal information, events, period of time
  • Often, people don’t realize that they have any memory loss until somehow directly confronted with it
  • Discount lack of memories as something normal or insignificant
• Somatic Symptom and Related Disorders:
  • Somatic symptom disorder: intense focus on physical symptoms that causes distress and dysfuction
  • Conversion disorder: if individual’s response is simialr to nervous system condition
    • Mental factors convert into physical symptoms (i.e. paralysis, loss of sensation, seizures or uncontrollable motor movements)
  • Illness anxiety disorder: if response is mostly cognitive, like concern or worry about getting a serious illness
    • Preoccupation with become seriousl ill, which may lead the individual to seek out medical care, perform self-examinations, or just constantly live in fear and anxiety
    • Person may or may not have actual physical symptoms
    • FEAR of symptoms

Feeding/Eating, Substances/Addictive, and Personaltiy Disorders

• Personality Disorders: an enduring pattern of inner experiences and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture, is pervasive and inflexible, has an onset in adolescence or early adulthood, is stable over time, and leads to distress or impairment
• Antisocial Personality Disorders: disregard for and violation of the rights of others, as well as lack of remorse
• Histrionic Perosnality disorder: pattern of ecessive emotionality and attention seeking
• Dependent personality disorder: pattern of submissive and clinging behavior
• Causes for personality disorder: genetics (family history, underlynig vulnerability) & environment (childhood trauma and verbal abuse)
• Psychotherapy, medication, family therapy used to treat personality disorders
• Anorexia Nervosa: persistent energy intake restrictions because of intense ear of gaining weight or becoming fat
• Builimia nervosa: recurrent episodes of binge eating and then pursing
• Bing-eating Disorder: recurrent episodes of binge eating

Introduction to Treatment of Psychological Disorders

• Psychotherapy; treatment of psychological disorders and emotional issues by psychological rather than physiological means
  • Talk therapy
  • Counseling
• Psychologist: doctoral degree in psychology with specialization in clinical and counseling
  • Practice psychotherapy, testing and evaluation
• Psychiatrist: medical doctor who speciializes in prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of psychological disorders
  • Medical school, biological approach, psychotherapy, testing and evaluation
• 

Psychological Perspectives and Treatment of Disorders

• Psychotherapy: the goal of the therapist is to bring inner conflict and repressed membories into conscious awareness
  • Free association
  • Therapist looks for signs of resistance
  • Transference may occur
    • Positive: transfer good feelings and relief onto therapist
    • Negative: transfer negative feelings and anxiety from repressed memories on therapist
• Psychodynamic; emphasis on exploring ways we avoid painful or threatening feelings, fantasies, or thoughts
• Client-centered therapy based on the humanistic theory of personality
  • Person seeking treatment is an equal to the therapist
  • Client decides what is discussed and the direction of therapy
  • Goals of therapist are to facilitat personal growth, self-awareness, self acceptance, and self-esteem
  • Techniques: unconditional positive regard, active listening, genuineness, empathy
  • Goal: perosn is able to resolve incongruence between ideal self and real self
• Pros and cons of client-centered therapy:
  • PROS
    • Provides insight and a caring environment
    • Helps clients to feel empowered
    • Great in the early stages of therapy to build trust and caring between therapist and client
  • CONS
    • Difficult for therapists to be non-directive
    • Difficult not to interpret or analyze or offer advice
    • Not effective for diagnosed illnesses
• Behavior therapy: the therapist works to help learn new, adaptive ways of behaving
  • Behavior modification: helps the person learn new, adaptive ways of behaving, creating new emotional associations
  • Exposure therapies: learn new conditioned response to the same UCS (called counterconditioning – Mary Cover Jones)
  • Systematic Desensitization (Joseph Wolpe): condition relaxation response with fearful stimulus
    • Establish anxiety stimulus hierarchy
    • Practice progressive relaxation (CR)
    • Work through hierarchy from lesat to greatest fear. Pain relaxation (CR) with each step (UCS)
    • Create a new CR to the UCS
    • Alternatively use VR technology
  • Flooding: exposing people to fear-invoking object or situation intensely and rapidly
  • Aversive conditioning: pair an undesirable behavior with an aversive stimulus to create a negative association
  • Token economy: reinforcement is used to modify behavior
    • Earn “tokens” for correct behavior & token can be exchanged for desired items
  • Social learning: observe correct behaviors and imitate them (modeling)
    • More likey to model behaviors if they see other person reinforced for their behavior
• Behavioral therapy very beneficial for treating: anxiety disorders, substance use disorders, autism, ADHD, depression, eating disorders
  • More beneficial when combined with cognitive therapy
• Cogntive therapy; therapist works to help people identify irrational, self-destructive, harmful thoughts and teach new, more adaptive ways of thinking
  • Assume that abnormal behaviors and thoughts are the result of fault or irrational thinking
  • REBT (Albert Ellis): the way people feel isinfluenced by how they think, not their unconscious or conditioned associations
    • • ABC - Activating event, Beliefs, Consequence
• Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: combines the resversal of self-defeating thinking with efforst to modify behaviors and learned association of behavioral therapy
  • Practice new ways of interprating events and create a new, more positive self-schema (Aaron Beck)

Treatment of Disorders from the Biological Perspective

• Assume that abnormal behaivors and thoughts are the result of organic or physical issues
• 
• Electroconclusive therapy (ECT):
  • Patient is sedated with general anesthesia
  • Controlled electrical currents are passed through the brain
  • Brief, controlled seizure
  • Used to treat severe depression where other forms of treatment do not work, sometimes used with bipolar disorder
• Transcranimal Magnetic Stimulation (TMS):
  • Created to treat depression in a more targeted way than ECT
  • Large, electromagnetic coil is placed on the head
  • Short pulses directed to parts of the brain determined to be focus of emotional lows
  • Depressed neurons become activated
• Beneficial for treating anxiety, depression, panic attacks, addiction, personality disorders, eating disorders
  • Decreases chance of relapse

Evaluating Strengths and Weakenesses of Treatments of Disorders

• Hans Eysenck noted that psychotherapy was not effective in treating individuals classified as “neurotic” (emotionally unstable)
• Those who do not seek treatment often improve
  • Spontaneous remission of their symptoms wiht no therapy
• Those who undergo therapy are more likely to improve, especially more quickly
  • Improve with less risk of relapse
• Psychodynamic therapy: depression, anxiety
• Behavioral therapy: phobias, OCD, marital problems, sexual dysfuctions
• Cognitive-Behavioral therapy: anxiety, PTSD, depression
• Therapy is most effective when the problem is straight-forward
• Practices should be evidence-based
  • Clinical decision-making should integrate the following:
    • Most updated research, clinical expertise, patient needs and preferences
  • Practices should be rigorously evaluated by clinicians
• Therapy offers hope, new perspectives & empathetic, trusting, caring relationships

Unit 9 – Social Psychology

Attribution Theory and Person Perception

• We treat others differently because of how we perceive them
• Attribution Theory: explains how we explain or attribute our own behaviors and the behaviors of others
• Situational attribution: we blame or credit the situation with causing the behaivor
  • Similar to idea of external locus of control
  • Ex: sun was in my eyes, test was unfair, it was my lucky day
• Dispositional attribution: we blame or credit a relatively permanent trait of the person
  • Ex: I’m a hard worker, she is just lazy
  • Similar to idea of internal locus of control
• Outgroup homogeneity: they’re all like that
  • Allows for all types of bias, prejudice, and discrimination
• Unconsciously use represntativeness heuristic to judge members of a group
• 
• Actor-observer bias: a person judges themselves (the observer) differently than they do the others (actors)
• Just world hypothesis: the false idea that the world is fair
  • If something works out well for us, we think we earned it
  • We are so convinced that we are good and deserving, we seek information and then process information that supports that idea (confirmation bias)
• Self-fulfilling prophecy: if you attribute your heavior to situational factors, you might not try, then you will not succeed, and then you will blame the situation for being unfair
• False Consensus Effect: the belief that lots of people they the way we do, which allows us to keep using heuristic and tricks to continue in ways that benefit us
• Self-serving bias: when a person automatically and unconsciously gives themselves the benefit of the doubt or “spins” things a certain way to make themselves look good

Attitude Formation and Attitude Change

• Cognitive dissonance: attitude and behaviros are in conflict with each other
• Elaboration likelihood model: a thoery that is based on how much a person thinks about the relevant information in a persuasive argument

Conformity, Compliance, and Obedience

• Asch line experiment looked at conformity
  • There are two types of conformtiy:
    • 1) Informational Social Influence: conform to what others are doing because they might have better information
    • 2) Normative Social Influence: conform to what others are doing to fit in because they might have higher status in situation
• Milgram Obedience experiment looked at obedience
  • Problmes with Experiment:
    • Ethics: though no one was shocked, that doesn’t mean people were not harmed
    • Confounding variables:
      • Consistency: in some of the trials, the authority figures gave different instructions
      • Demand Characteristics: some of the participants knew something was “fake”
• Stanford Prison Experiment looked at compliance
  • Sampling bias b/c only men
  • There wasn’t an experimental group that got the independent variable
  • There wasn’t a control group that got a placebo
  • Didn’t use a double-blind technique

Group Influences on Behavior and Mental Processes

• Diffusion of Responsibility: category of social psychology concepts that occurs when people feel less of responsibility to take the right action when other people are present
  • We are less likely to be ourselves or think of ourselves as an individual
  • Bystander Effect: a type of diffusion of responsibility in which people are less likely to offer help to a victim when other people are present
  • Social Loafing: a type of diffusion of responsibility
    • The idea that someone else will take care of it
    • Ex: group projects
  • Social Trap: a type of diffusion of responsibility
    • When extreme short term competition ruins long term utility
    • Exact opposite of compromise
• In-group = us & out-group = them
• Deindividuation: temporary loss of self-awareness
• Social Facilitation: when a group of people are around, an individual performs better
  • Group causes this behavior
• Reciprocity Norm: when Person A does something positive (or negative), Person B will do something positive (or negative) back
• Social Norms: an understanding of how people should act
  • Develop and change over time and different cultures
• Social Inhibition: when we curb our behaviors, comments, and even personality for fear of not matching the social climate
• Group Polarization: group members’ decisions and opinions become more extreme than originally
  • Like a loyalty competition
• Social Traps: when extreme short term competition reduces long term utility
• 
• 
  • What comes first: thinking of your competitors as part of us, then seeking non-zero solution or seeking a non-zero solution and then seeing them as an us

Bias, Prejudice, and Discrimination

• Bias: predisposition of being for or against someone that is typically considered unfair
  • Research biases: Hawthorn Effect, placebo effect, sampling errors
  • Cognitive biases: confirmation bias, anchoring bias, hindsight bias
  • Social bias: in-group/out-group bias

• Almost all our social problems are because we aredifing us vs them & not relating us with them
• Ethnocentrism: when people judge other cultures according to the preconceptions based on their own culture
• Out-group homogeneity is an example of using heuristics, schema, and other cognitive cevices to simplify thinking
• Prejudice: unjustifiable negative attitude or stereotype of a group member or whole group without having sufficient information to support such ideas
  • You might have formed prejudice attitude from bottom up thinking
  • Apply it using top down thinking
• Stereotypes: generalized beliefs based on the characteristics of a few members of group
  • Representativeness heuristic
  • You could have positive stereotypes about a group
  • Usually, those positive stereotypes are reserved for your in-group
• Discrimination: negative behavior based on prejudices
• sterotypes/prejudices are thought processes, discrimination is what you do with those thoughts
• Mere exposure effect: tendency to develop positive feeling for things after being frequently presented with them
  • Ex: big corporations who pay large amounts of money to place their logo in a stadium think the more you see it, the more you’ll like it
  • Might work to increase familiarity and positive feeling towards members of outgroups or aspects of and outgroup’s culture
    • However, being repeatedly exposed to something you hate might make a situation worse

Altruism and Aggression

• Aggression: hositle behavior toward another person or their interests
• Passive Aggrsssion: aggression because the aggressor is still trying to harm by indirect means (witholding affection, not being “present”)
• Evolutionary approach: animals (and people) who were more aggressive had a better chance of passing on their genes
• Biochemical approach: aggression is related to a feedback loop between certain brain structures via electrical and chemical reactions
  • Amygdala, hypothalamus, high testosterone levels, low serotonin, traumatic brain injuries
• Psychodynamic apporach: feeling of aggression and how we express it are often the result of unconscious processes
• Social approach: interaction w/ others
• Positive reaction: emotion based coping, then moving to solution based coping
  • Internal locus of control – planning
• Negative reactions: emotion based coping, and being stuck in the grievance
  • External locus of control – scapegoating
• Scapegoating: blaming an innocent person for the faults of others
  • Projection of blame by scapegoating is a form of anger and fear
    • Projection = unconscious defense mechanism (psychodynamic)
• Hositle aggression: causing physical or emotional harm is the goal
  • More emotional, crime of passion
• Instrumental aggression: aggression is a tool used to acquire what the aggressor desires
  • More cognitive, premeditated crime
• Robber’s Cave (field) experiment
  • Sampling errors, no random sample (cannot be generalizable)
• Altruism

Interpersonal Attraction

• Factors that lead to attraction:
  • Halo Effect: when we think attractive people are nicer, smarter, kinder than average looking people
  • Similarity: attracted to people who are similar to us in values, interests, backgrounds
  • Proximity: you need to be near someone to like them
  • Physical attractiveness
• Something that is beautiful/attractive is dependent upon:
  • Cognitive appraisal
  • cultural determinations
  • Perceptual processes: perceptual set, top down processing, embodied cognition
  • Biological conditions
• Attraction: physical attractiveness, proximing, mere exposure
• Friendship: physical attractivieness, proximity, similarity