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12/03

Attitudes and Actions

Social Psychology and Personality

• Social psychology: The study of how we think about, influence, and relate to one another

The Fundamental Attribution Error

• Attribution theory: The theory that we explain someone's behavior by crediting either the situation or the person's disposition

• Fundamental Attribution Error: The tendency for observers, when analyzing others' behavior, to underestimate the impact of a situation and overestimate the impact of personal disposition

• Actor-observer bias: Tendency for those acting in a situation to attribute their behavior to external causes, but for observers to attribute others' behavior to internal causes

  • This contributes to the fundamental attribution error

  • Ex: A student blames their academic struggle on external factors but the teacher blames it on internal problems 

Prejudice and Discrimination

• Prejudice: An unjustifiable and unusually negative attitude toward a group and it's members

  • Prejudices is a mix of:

    • Beliefs (stereotypes)

    • Negative feelings

    • Predispositions to discriminate

Components of Prejudice

• Stereotype: Sometimes accurate but often overgeneralized belief about a group of people

Prejudice

• Ethnocentrism: Assumption that one ethnic group is superior to another

• Discrimination: Unjustifiable negative behavior toward a group and its members 

Social Roots of Prejudice

• Just-World Phenomenon: The tendency for people to believe the world is just and that people therefore get what they deserve 

• Social Identity: The “we” aspect of our self-concept; the part of our answer to “Who am I?” that comes from our group memberships

• Ingroup: “Us”- people with whom we share a common identity

• Outgroup: “Them”- those perceived as different or apart from our ingroup

• Ingroup Bias: The tendency to favor our own group

Emotional Roots of Prejudice

• Scapegoat theory: The theory that prejudice offers an outlet for anger by providing someone to blame

Cognitive Roots of Prejudice

• Other-race effect: The tendency to recall faces of one's own race more accurately than faces of other races

Attitudes and Actions

• Attitude: Feelings, often influenced by our beliefs, that predispose us to respond in a particular way to objects, people, and events

  • Ex: If we believe someone is threatening us, we may feel fear and act defensively

Actions Affect Attitudes

• Foot-in-the-door Phenomenon: The tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request

• Role: A set of expectations about a social position, defining how those in the position ought to behave

• Cognitive Dissonance Theory

  • We reduce the discomfort (dissonance) we feel when two of our thoughts (cognition) are inconsistent

    • Ex: We become aware that our actions clash. We can reduce the resulting dissonance by changing our attitudes

Persuasion

• Persuasion: Changing people's attitudes, potentially influencing their actions

• Peripheral Route Persuasion: When people are influenced by incidental cues, such as a speakers attractiveness

  • AKA snap judgments

• Central Route Persuasion: When interested people focus on the arguments and respond with favorable thoughts

12/04

Conformity and Obedience 

Conformity

• Norms: Unwritten rules for accepted and expected behavior

  • Norms prescribe “proper” behavior

  • Ex: Walking on the right side of the sidewalk/hallway, please/thank you, not talking with food in mouth

Social Contagion

• Social contagion has been called the chameleon effect

  • Unconscious mimicry of the postures, mannerisms, facial expressions, and other behaviors of ones interaction partners

  • Ex: Some can be biological (yawning, laughing) others are learned for social status

Conformity and Social Norms

• Conformity: Adjusting our behavior or thinking to fit in with a group, “jumping on the bandwagon”

  • Ex: Liking a musician or band, fashion trends 

Results of Social Norm Experiment

• Solomon Asch studied conformity of individuals and groups

• Participants would many times conform to the wrong answer

  • 25% never 75% at least once; 37% every time

• When one actor gave the right answer conformity greatly declined

  • 5% went with the majority every time

• When interviewed after, participants admitted they knew the answer but didn't want to be different

• Normative Social Influence: Basic human desire to be liked or gain approval

• Informational Social Influence: Assumption we make that a majority of people can’t be wrong

  • “They must be right, there's fours of them and one of me”

Conformity

• Conformity increases when more people are present but there is little change once the group size goes beyond four or five people

• Conformity increases when tasks are more difficult. In the face of uncertainty, people turn to others for information about how to respond

• Conformity increases when other members of the group are of higher social status, People conform more when they view the others in the group as more powerful, influential, or knowledgeable than themselves 

• Conformity decreases when people are able to respond privately 

Obedience

• Obedience: Tendency to follow pressure that comes from authority figures

• Stanley Milgram: Studied people's obedience through electric shocks 

  • Instructed volunteers to administer a shock to a supposed “learner” every time they give the wrong answer

  • With each error, the participant moved to the next higher voltage 

Results of the Milgram Experiment

• Many participants said they didn't want to continue

  • Milgram never threatened them but also said they must continue

• Almost 2/3rds administered the strongest shock (450 volts) even though they thought it would kill the other person

Obedience

• In Milgram's experiment, the participants displayed genuine stress

  • His use of deception triggered a debate over research ethics 

• Milgram discovered obedience was highest when:

  • The person giving the orders was close at hand and was perceived to be a legitimate authority figure

  • The authority figure was supported by a powerful or prestigious institution

  • The victim was depersonalized or at a distance

  • There were no role models for defiance 

12/05

Group Behavior

Group Behavior

• Social Facilitation: Improved performance on simple or well-learned tasks in presence of others

  • Ex: Expert pool players who made 71% of their shots when alone made 80% when four people watched them

• Social Loafing: Tendency for people in a group to exert less effort when pooling their efforts toward attaining a common goal that when individually accountable

  • Group assignments

• Deindividuation: The loss of self-awareness and self-restraint occurring in group situations that foster arousal and anonymity- “get caught up in the moment”

  • Sporting events: Fans may act in ways that are more extreme than they normally would

  • The Internet: People may behave in ways they would not normally behave due to physical or full anonymity 

• Group Polarization: The enhancement of a group's prevailing inclinations through discussion within the group

  • Echo chamber

  • Being in your own bubble

• Groupthink: A mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives

  • Group conformity

Cultural Influences

• Culture: The enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, values, and traditions shared by a group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next

Variation Across Cultures

• Tight Culture: A place with clearly defined and reliably imposed social norms. Norms are strictly enforced by the people

• Loose Culture: A place with flexible and informal social norms. Norms are not consistently enforced by the people

12/05

Aggression

Aggression

• Aggression: Any physical or verbal behavior intended to harm someone physically or emotionally

The Biology of Aggression

• Genes influence aggression

  • Studies have shown that identical twins are more likely to show similar aggressiveness compared to other pairs of siblings

• The hormone testosterone influences the neural systems that control aggression, as a result males are typically more aggressive than females

• As male’s testosterone levels diminish with age, aggressive teenagers mature into quieter and more gentle elderly men

Biochemical Influences on Aggression

• Alcohol unleashes aggressive responses to frustration

  • Aggression-pron adults are more likely to drink, and more likely to become violent when intoxicated

  • Alcohol leads people to interpret ambiguous acts as more personal/intentional

    • Bumped into on purpose

Psychological and Social-Cultural Factors

• Frustration-aggression principle

  • The principle that frustration creates anger, which can generate aggression

  • Road rage is caused by frustration on the roads that leads to anger that leads to aggression

  • Being hangry is the result of frustration from not being able to eat

• Learning can alter natural reactions to aversive events

  • According to the social learning theory, parents modeling aggression cna make children more aggressive later in life

    • aggressive/abusive parents do not always create aggressive/abusive children but it does increase the likelihood

Media Model for Violence

• Media violence teaches us social scripts

  • Culturally provided mental files for how to act in certain situations

• Studied confirm that we sometimes imitate what i've viewed

  • Albert Bandura's “Bobo Doll Experiment”

12/06

Attraction

Attraction

• Factors of attraction

  • Proximity

  • Similarity

  • Reciprocity 

Proximity

• Proximity, or geographical nearness, is friendships most powerful predictor

  • Most friendships/romantic  relationships  originate from people you directly interact with

  • Distance strains relationships

• Mere exposure effect: Phenomenon where people are more likely to prefer things they are repeatedly exposed to

  • The more time we spend with people the more we like them

Physical Attractiveness

• Physical attractiveness predicts how both men and women date as well as people's self confidence and sense of self

• Women are more likely than men to say another's looks don't affect them

  • However studies show that a man's looks do affect women's behavior

Similarity

• Couples are far more likely to share common attitudes, beliefs, and interests

  • Opposites attract is not truly accurate

  • Being complementary is important, but complete opposite do not typically have enduring relationships 

Love

• Passionate love: A state of intense positive absorption in another at the beginning of a romantic relationship

• Companionate love: Deep affectionate attachment for those who are deeply entwined in our lives

• Equity: A condition in which people receive from a relationship in proportion to what they give to it

• Self-disclosure: The act of revealing intimate aspects of ourselves to others

12/06

Altruism, Conflict, and Peacemaking

Altruism

• Altruism: Regard for the welfare of others for no personal gain or to the detriment of oneself

Bystander Intervention

• Bystander effect: The tendency for any given bystander to be less likely to give aid if other bystanders are present 

• Darley and Latane assembled their findings

• We will help only if the situation enables us

  • To notice the incident

  • To interpret it as an emergency

  • Assume responsibility for helping 

• Diffusion of Responsibility: When a group of people share a responsibility for helping in a situation

  • Results in any individual person in a situation being less likely to help

Why do we Help?

• Social exchange theory: Social behavior is an exchange process, the aim of which is to maximize benefits and minimize costs

  • Ex: When considering donating blood, you may weigh the cost of doing so (time and discomfort) against the benefits (reduced guilt and social approval)

Helping

• Reciprocity norm: An expectation that people will help, not hurt, those who have helped them

  • Paying it forward

  • You scratch my back I scratch yours

• Social-responsibility norm: An expectation that people will help those needing their help

Conflict and Peacemaking

• Conflict: A perceived incompatibility of actions, goals, or ideas

• Social trap: A situation where individual/group act in their own self-interests that are detrimental to their long-term interests

  • Cheating on a romantic partner

  • Overfishing of oceans 

• Mirror-image perceptions: When conflicting groups have shared, opposite, perceptions of each other. “Were the good guys, they're the bad guys”

  • Ex: My political party has good motives and helps people, the other political party is inherently bad

• Self-fulfilling prophecy: A belief that leads to its own fulfillment

  • Candace believes that she is not good at math and does not put forth much effort, as a result, she gets a D in math

12/09

Sigmund Freud and Psychodynamics

Classic Perspectives and Personality

• Personality: An individual’s pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting

Personality

• Psychodynamic theories: Theories that view personality with focus on the unconscious and the importance of childhood experiences

• Psychodynamic theories are descended from Freud's psychoanalysis

  • His theory of personality that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts

  • Treat psychological disorders by seeking to expose and interpret unconscious actions

Exploring the Unconscious

• Unconscious

  • According to Freud, a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories

  • In contemporary psychology, information processing of which we are unaware

• Free association

  • In psychoanalysis, a method of exploring the unconscious in which the person relaxes and says whatever comes to mind

  • Mother→witch

  • Mother→perfect angel

• Our conscious mind is what we are aware of

  • Beneath is the larger unconscious mind, with its thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories

    • The preconscious area stores thoughts outside our awareness, but retrievable into conscious awareness

Personality Structure

• Id

  • A reservoir of unconscious energy that strives to satisfy basic sexual and pleasure motives

  • The id operates on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification

• Superego

  • The part of personality that represents internalized societal rules, moral values, standards by which we judge things

  • “The Conscience”

• Ego

  • Largely conscious “executive” part of personality that mediates among the demands of the id, superego, and reality

  • The ego operates on the reality principle, satisfying the id’s desires in ways that will realistically bring pleasure rather than pain

Personality Development

• Some psychoanalysts in Freud’s era believed that girls experience a parallel Electra Complex

• Oedipus complex

  • According to Freud, a boys desires toward his mother and feelings of hatred for the rival father

Defense Mechanisms

• Defense mechanisms

  • The ego’s protective methods for reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality

• Repression

  • Basic defense mechanism that banishes form consciousness anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories

• Regression

  • Retreating to an earlier stage of development, where some psychic energy remains fixed

  • Ex: An adult is super stressed at work and copes by overindulging on sweets. A man is upset with his partner and reverts to name calling to vent his frustrations. A stressed college student calls his mom and cries about wanting to come home and be with her

• Reaction Formation

  • Switching unacceptable impulses into their opposites

  • Ex: A boy in middle school makes fun of a girl in his class because he secretly has a crush on her. A woman who doesn't like her mother in law plays nice and smiles while visiting for the holidays. A mean girl tells a classmate she loves her skirt even though she thinking it's the ugliest effing skirt shes ever seen 

• Projection

  • Distinguishing one's own threatening impulses by attributing them to others

  • Ex: A woman attracted to her male coworker gets mad at her husband for mentioning a female coworker. A parent disappointed in their own athletic career is overly invested in their child's sports teams. A person insecure about their attractiveness constantly judges others on their looks 

• Rationalization

  • Offering logical explanations in place of the real, more threatening reasons for one's actions

  • Ex: Sorry I didn’t return your call, I was really bust. What they did was way worse

• Displacement

  • Shifting sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person. “Taking it out on someone else”

  • Ex: An employee gets chewed out by their boss. At lunch, the worker goes ballistic on the waitstaff when there is a mistake with their order

• Sublimation

  • Healthy transfering of unacceptable impulses into socially valued motives

  • Ex: A person with rage issues vents frustrations at a boxing class. An annoyed employee goes for a walk to get some fresh air while taking their next call. A man upset with the homeless population in his community regularly volunteers at a homeless shelter on weekends

• Denial

  • Unhealthy refusal to believe or even perceive painful realities

  • Ex: An alcoholic downplays the significance of their addiction. A woman refuses to acknowledge how sick she is and refuses going to the doctor

The Modern Unconscious Mind

• Terror-Management Theory

  • Anxiety comes from our known mortality, people manage anxiety about death by believing they lived a useful life

Assessing Unconscious Processes

• Projective test

  • A personality test, such as the Rorschach, that provides ambiguous image designed to trigger projection of one's inner dynamics 

• Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

  • A projective test in which people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes 

• Rorschach ink test

  • Most widely used projective test

  • Set of 10 inkblots, designed by Hermann Rorschach

  • Identify people's inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots

12/10

Humanistic Theories

Humanistic Theories

• Humanistic theories

  • Theories that view personality with a focus on the potential for healthy personal growth

Maslow's Self-Actualizing Person

• Hierarchy of needs

  • Maslow’s pyramid of human needs, beginning at the base with physiological needs that must be satisfied before higher-level safety needs and then psychological needs become active

• Self-actualization

  • One of the ultimate psychological needs that arises after basic physical and psychological needs are met and self-esteem is achieved

  • The motivation to fulfill one's potential

• Self-transcendence 

  • The striving for identity, meaning, and purpose beyond the self

Carol Rogers’ Person-Centered Perspective

• Rogers believed that a growth-promoting social climate provides

  • Acceptance

    • Unconditional positive regard: a caring, accepting, non-judgmental attitude, which Rogers believed would help people develop self-awareness and self--acceptance

  • Genuineness

  • Empathy 

• Self-concept

  • All our thoughts and feelings about ourselves, in answer to the question, “Who am I?”

• Ideal self

  • Idealized version of yourself learned from experiences, societal expectations, roles models, etc

Assessing the Self

• Incongruence

  • When there's a separation of the actual and ideal selves

    • When how someone sees themselves is separate from how they would like to be

    • Ex: The incongruence in cultural values and norms between Americanized adolescents and their more traditional immigrant parents can lead to family conflict and adolescent behavior problems

What Causes Incongruence?

• Conditions of worth

  • Conditions we believe we have to meet to gain acceptance, love, or positive regard from others

    • Ex: A child believes that if he does well in school. He is a better person and worth more

12/10

Trait Theories

Trait Theories

• Trait

  • A characteristic pattern of behavior or disposition to feel and act in certain ways, as assessed by self-report inventories and peer reports

• The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is used for counseling, leadership, training, and work-team development

  • Offers choices such as “Do you usually value sentiment more than logic, or value logic more than sentiment?”

Exploring Traits

• British psychologists Hans Eysenck and Sybil eysenck reduced normal individual variations to two dimensions

  • Extraversion-introversion

  • Emotional stability-instability

Assessing Traits

• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory

  • The most widely researched and clinically used of all personality tests

  • Originally developed to identify emotional disorders, this test is now used for many other screening purposes

• The MMPI test is empirically derived

  • Created from a pool of items those that discriminate groups 

The “Big Five” Factors

• Robert McCrae and Paul Costa created a model known as the Big Five to assess personality traits

  • This test looks at five dimensions:

    • Conscientiousness

    • Agreeableness

    • Neuroticism

    • Openness

    • Extraversion 

• Conscientiousness

  • High score: organized, careful, and disciplined 

  • Low score: disorganized, careless, and impulsive

• Agreeableness

  • High score: soft-hearted, trusting, and helpful

  • Low score: ruthless, suspicious, and uncooperative

• Neuroticism (emotional stability v. instability)

  • High score: anxious, insecure, and self-pitying 

  • Low Score: calm, secure, and self-satisfied

• Openness

  • High score: imaginative, prefers variety, and independent

  • Low score: practical, prefers routine, and conforming

• Extraversion

  • High score: sociable, fun-loving, and affectionate

  • Low score: retiring and reserved 

12/12

Social and Cognitive Theories

Social-Cognitive Theories

• Behavioral approach

  • Focuses on the effects of learning on our personality development

  • Ex: A child with a very controlling parent may learn to follow orders rather than think independently

• Social-cognitive perspective

  • Views behavior as influenced by the interaction between people's traits (including their thinking) and their social context

Reciprocal Influences

• Reciprocal determinism

  • The interacting influences of behavior, internal cognition, and environment

Research Methods to Investigate Personality

• Case Study

  • In-depth study f one individual

  • Benefits: Less expensive than others

  • Weaknesses: May not generalize to the larger population

• Survey

  • Systematic questioning of a random sampling 

  • Benefits: Results tend to be more reliable

  • Weaknesses: May be expensive

• Projective tests

  • Ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of inner dynamics

  • Benefits: Designed to get beneath the conscious surface of a person's self-understanding

  • Weaknesses: Results have weak validity and reliability

• Observation

  • Studying how individuals react to different situations

  • Benefits: Allows researchers to study the effects of environmental factors

  • Weaknesses: Results may not apply to the larger population

• Personality inventories

  • Objectively scored group of questions designed to identify personality dispositions

  • Benefits: Generally reliable and empirically validated

  • Weaknesses: Explore a limited number of traits

12/12

Exploring the Self

Exploring the Self

• Self

  • In contemporary psychology, assumed to be the center of personality, the organizer of our thoughts, feelings, and actions

• Spotlight effect

  • Overestimating others noticing and evaluating our appearance, performance, and blunders (as if we presume a spotlight shines on us)

  • We can improve this by self-esteem and self-efficacy

The Benefits of Self-Esteem

• Self-esteem

  • One feelings of high or low self-worth

• Self-efficacy

  • One's sense of competence and effectiveness

The Cost of Self-Esteem

• Excessive optimism can blind us to real risks by creating “an unrealistic optimism about future life event”

• Ironically, people often are most overconfident when most incompetent

  • The Dunning-Kruger effect

• Self-serving bias

  • A readiness to perceive oneself favorably

• Narcissism

  • Excessive self-love and self-absorption

  • Narcissistic people tend to be unforgiving, take a game-playing approach to romantic relationship

• Defensive self-esteem

  • Fragile

  • Focuses on sustaining itself, which makes failure and criticism feel threatening

• Secure self-esteem

  • Less fragile

  • Feeling accepted for who we are, and not for our looks, wealth, or acclaim

Culture and the Self

• Individualism

  • Giving priority one's own goals and defining one's identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications 

• Collectivism

  • Giving priority of one's group often ones extending family or work group) and defining one's identity accordingly

12/13

Motivational Concepts

Motivational Concepts

• Motivation

  • A need or desire that energizes and directs behavior

• Instinct theory now replaced by evolutionary perspective) focuses on genetically predisposed behavior

• Drive-reduction theory focuses on how we respond to our inner pushes and pulls

• Arousal theory focuses on finding the right level of stimulation

• Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs focuses on the priority of some needs over other

Instinct Theory

• Instinct

  • A behavior that is rigidly patterned throughout a species and is unlearned

  • Ex:

    • Imprinting in birds

    • Infants rooting reflex

Drive and Incentives

• Physiological need

  • A basic bodily requirement 

  • Ex: food or water

• Drive-reduction theory

  • The idea that a physiological need creates an aroused state (a drive) that motivates an organism to satisfy the need

• Drive reduction is one way our bodies strive for homeostasis

  • A tendency to maintain a balance or constant internal state

    • The regulation of any aspect of body chemistry, such as blood glucose, around a particular

    • Ex:

      • If our body temperature cools, our blood vessels constrict to conserve warmth, and we feel driven to put on more clothes or seek a warmer environment 

• Not only are we pushed by our need to reduce drives, we are also pulled by incentives

  • A positive or negative environmental stimulus that motivates behavior

• When there is both a need and an incentive, we strongly driven

  • Ex:

    • A hungry person who smells pizza may feel a stronger hunger drive

• Overjustification effect

  • When an expected external incentive such as money or prizes decreases a person's intrinsic motivation to perform a task

Arousal Theory

• Human motivation aims not to eliminate arousal but to seek optimum levels of arousal

  • Having all our biological needs satisfied, we feel driven to experience stimulation

• Yerkes-Dodson Law

  • The principle that performance increases with arousal only up to a point, beyond which performance decreases

  • Ex:

    • When taking a test it pays to be moderately aroused, alert but not trembling with nervousness

A Hierarchy of Needs

• Abraham Maslow described our priorities as a hierarchy of needs

  • Maslow's pyramid of human needs, beginning at the base with physiological needs that must first be satisfied before higher-level safety needs and then psychological needs become active

• Physiological needs

  • Need to satisfy hunger and thirst

• Safety needs

  • Need to feel that the world is organized and predictable

  • Need to feel safe

• Belongingness and love needs

  • Need to love and be loved, to belong and be accepted

    • To avoid loneliness and separation

• Esteem needs

  • Need for achievement, competence, and independence

  • Need for recognition and respect from others

• Self-actualization needs

  • Need to love up to our fullest and unique potential

• Self-transcendence needs

  • Need to find meaning and identity beyond one’s self

• Maslow's hierarchy of needs is not universally fixed

  • Ex:

    • People have starved themselves to make a political statement

• Self-esteem matters most in individualist nations, whose citizens tend to focus more on personal achievements than family and community

12/16

Affiliation and Achievement

The Need to Belong

• Affiliation need: The need to build relationships and to feel part of a group

• Evolutionary perspective: Cooperation with others enhanced our survival

  • Those who feel a need to belong survived and reproduced most successfully

• Feelings of love activate the hormone oxytocin in the brain

  • Increases feeling of well being

• Even pictures of our loved ones can activate the same response

• Self-determination theory: The theory that we feel motivated to satisfy our needs for:

  • Competence: Need to feel capable in one’s abilities

  • Autonomy: Need to feel in control of our lives

  • Relatedness: Need to feel connected to others

• Intrinsic motivation: The desire to perform a behavior for enjoyment or fulfillment and not rewards

• Extrinsic motivation: Desire to perform a behavior ro receive rewards

  • Intrinsic=internal forces

  • Extrinsic=external forces

The Pain of Being Out

• Ostracism: Deliberate or social exclusion of individuals or groups

  • Ostracism can be used to publish and control behavior

  • Being shunned threatens one’s need to belong

12/16

Hunger Motivation

The Physiology of Hunger

• Glucose: Sugar that circulates in the blood and provides the major source of energy for body tissues

  • When glucose level is low, we feel hunger

Body Chemistry and the Brain

• Ghrelin: A hunger-arousing hormone secreted by an empty stomach

• Leptin: A hunger-suppressing hormone

• Set point: The point at which your “weight thermostat” may be set.

  • When your body falls below this weight, increased hunger and lowered metabolic rate may combine to restore lost weight

• Basal metabolic rate: The body's resting rate of energy output for maintaining basic body functions

The Psychology of Hunger

• Carbohydrates boost the neurotransmitter serotonin, which has calming effects

• Our preferences for sweet and salty tastes are genetic and universal

• Other taste preferences are conditioned

  • Preferring family recipes over other versions of a meal

Situational Influences on Eating

• Arousing appetite: overstimulation drives eating

• Friends and food: socializing drives eating

• Serving size is significant: you'll eat what's in front of you

• Selections stimulate: large variety drives eating 

12/17

Theories and Physiology of Emotion

Emotions

• Emotion: A response of the whole organism, involving

  • Physiological arousal

  • Expressive behaviors

  • Conscious experience

Historical Emotion Theories

• James-Lange theory

  • Discredited theory that emotion is our awareness of our physiological responses to an emotion-arousing stimulus

    • Stimulus→arousal→emotion

    • Ex: I see a bear, my heart elevates and I start sweating, I am afraid

  • Discredited because:

    • People with sensory disorders still have emotions

    • Many emotions have same sensory responses (fear, anger)

Schachter-Singer Two Factor Theory

• Two-factor theory

  • The Schachyer-Singer theory that emotion is a combination of 

    • Physical symptoms

    • Environmental factors

  • Ex: your boss calls you into their office because they need to speak with you/ Your heart starts racing and you get “nervous”. Once seated across the desk from your boss they smile and are very welcoming. They tell you they want to give you a raise.

Does Cognition Precede Emotion?

• Emotions involving complex feelings such as hatred and love travel the “high road” or “slow road” to the thalamus

  • From there, it is analyzed and labeled before the response command is sent out through the amygdala

LeDoux’s Theory

• Simple emotions such as our likes, dislikes, and fears, take a “low road” or “fast road”

  • A fear provoking stimulus immediately travels from the eye/ear to the amygdala

    • This “short road” creates lighting fast emotional responses before our interpretation of the stimuli

      • Why we freak out before realizing there's nothing to be scared of

The Physiology of Emotions

• Polygraph or “lie detector machine”: A device used to detect lies by measuring perspiration, heart rate, and breathing changes

• No longer credible or admissible as evidence in courts because they are not reliable

  • Fast “lies” register due to similar looking spikes in sweat/heart rate/breathing

• Our brain can detect subtle expressions and help read nonverbal cues but it is difficult to identify lying accurately

The Effects of Facial Expressions

• Facial feedback effect

  • Tendency of facial expressions to trigger corresponding feelings such as fear, anger, or happiness

    • “Smile through it”

• Behavior feedback effect

  • Tendency of behavior to influence our own and others thoughts, feeling, and actions

    • Engaging in “mopey” behavior will make you feel sad