Gen Psych - Exam 2
Health Psychology: the branch of psychology that studies how biological, behavioral, and social factors influence health, illness, medical treatment, and health-related behaviors
Psychosomatic = psychological symptom
Used to mean issues were in your head
Mental health is directly related to physical health
Those with mental health issues (like anxiety) are more likely to develop health-threatening diseases (cancer, diabetes) due to lots of stress all the time
Stress: a negative emotional state occurring in response to events that are perceived as taxing or exceeding a person’s resources or ability to cope
Stress Appraisal: how you see or appraise the stress or present situation
Appraisal model: experience of stress is determined in part by our subjective evaluation of phenomenon as well as our resources for coping
Stressor: events we see as threatening or challenging
Traumatic Events: events or situations that are negative, severe, and far beyond our normal expectations for everyday life or life events
Stressful for everyone
Traumatic does not mean difficult or annoying
Traumatic can be life-threatening
If you overreact to small things you will not have the mental strength for big events
According to health psychologist Shelley Taylor, the “tend and befriend” response is a phenomenon when those around you quickly come to your aid, whether stranger or friend, during traumatic events
Stressful events increase our ability and willingness to do things we normally would not do
Walter Cannon: confirmed that the response to stress is a mind/body experience and results in a chain of internal physical reactions
Observed that stressors trigger an outpouring of stress hormones and is part of the sympathetic nervous system’s response
Result is a change in physical symptoms and a release of energy from the body’s reserves
Cannon calls the response to these changes fight or flight where levels of stress involve both the sympathetic nervous system and the endocrine system
Stress hormones are released when the sympathetic nervous system activates the endocrine system
General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS): the body’s adaptive response to stress
Comes in 3 stages (ARE)
Alarm: sympathetic nervous system is activated, ready to fight challenge (heart rate zooms), initial reaction
Resistance: blood pressure, temp and breathing remain high, hormones flow, if stress continues it can deplete body’s reserves during phase 3
Exhaustion: the body’s energy reserves become depleted, leading to illness and possibly death
Stress competes with energy needed to fight disease and infection, stress hormones suppress the disease fighting lymphocytes and impair immune system functioning
Chronic stress triggers the secretion of corticosteroids, which influence immune system functioning
Psychoneuroimmunology: the interdisciplinary field that studies the interconnections among psychological processes, nervous and endocrine system functions, and the immune system
Studies show that daily moods affect people’s immune system
Anger is an emotion that is closely linked to stress related illnesses especially heart attacks
Hostility levels are positively correlated to heart disease
Research shows a link between the number of daily hassles one experiences and psychological distress and physical ailments
It is believed that individual stressors may be unimportant, but the effects of daily stressors can be cumulative
Problem-focused coping: attempting to alleviate the stress directly, by changing the stressor or the way we interact with that stressor
Emotion-focused strategy: managing the emotional impact of the situation
Social support: resources provided by other people in times of needs, including emotional, tangible, and informational support
Good support system = less stress = longer survive
Resilience: the ability to cope with stress and adversity, to adapt to negative and unforeseen circumstances, and to rebound after negative experiences
Personality
Personality: an individual’s unique and relatively consistent patterns of thinking, feeling, and behavior
No one theory can describe how personality develops
Psychoanalytic Theory:
Freud
First theory of personality
Includes ideas about an unconscious region of the mind, psychosexual stages, and defense mechanisms for holding anxiety at bay
Issues unresolved pushed into unconscious, will affect you lifelong
Resistance → resistant to answer means you are answering
Unconscious: according to Freud, it is a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories
Freud believed humans repressed urges due to religion, laws, afterlife
Freud believed humans were sexual (reproduction) and aggressive (survival), but people are instinctually bad
Ultimately believed there are 3 levels of awareness
Conscious - yea
Preconscious - still part of conscious, but you can figure it out on your own
Unconscious - need psychoanalyst
Psychoanalysis: techniques used in treating psychological disorders by seeking to expose and interpret unconscious tensions
Freud believed our unconscious holds troublesome feelings and ideas which influence us many times in disguised forms so nothing was accidental
No dream, statement, thought is accidental
Assessing the Unconscious
Free Association: in psychoanalysis, method of assessing the unconscious by asking patients to spontaneously report mental images, thoughts, and feelings as they come to mind
Dreams: the “royal road to the unconscious”
Freud referred to the remembered content of dreams as their manifest content which he believed to be a censored expression of the dreamer’s unconscious wishes. Freud referred to the disguised, symbolic meaning of dreams as the latent content.
Freud proposed 3 interacting systems that make up the personality: id, ego, superego
Id: unconscious, pleasure-seeking, wants immediate gratification (want what you want)
Ego: executive part of personality, seeks to gratify Id’s impulses in realistic ways, reality principle (balances both)
Superego: voice of conscience, focuses on how one ought to behave, wants perfection, leads to pride and guilt
Freud believed boys seek genital stimulation and develop both unconscious sexual desires for their mother and jealousy/hated for their father who they consider a rival
Called the Oedipus complex
Psychosexual stages: the childhood stages of development during which the id’s pleasure seeking energies focus on distinct erogenous zones
Oral: 0-18m, focus is on oral stimulation (mouth)
Anal: 18-36m, focus is on potty training and control
Phallic: 3-6 yrs, focus is on genitals
Latency: 6-puberty, sexual urges are repressed and child prefers same sex friends
Genital: puberty on, sexual urges that remain for rest of one’s life
Ego Defense Mechanisms: tactics to reduce, avoid, or redirect anxiety by distorting reality
Ultimately, Freud believed they are unhealthy and require a great deal of psychological energy
Psychologically healthy people temporarily use ego defense mechanisms to deal with stressful events and buys time while seeking a realistic solution
When used on a short-term basis, it does not require a great deal of psychological energy
Adler (inferiority complex) believed that much of our behavior is driven by efforts to conquer childhood feelings of inferiority and can be done in an unhealthy/healthy way
Entire life to compensate for those feelings
Napoleon complex
Personality forms around insecurity
Reaction to inferiority matters, no complex if you don’t care
The healthy person uses inferiority as a motive for productivity and overcoming obstacles. The unhealthy way is to strive for overcoming inferiorities at others expense or one’s own.
Karen Horney emphasized the importance of human relationships in personality development
Rather than overcoming an inferiority issue, Horney focused on the need to overcome feelings of low self-worth
Both Horney and Adler agreed that faulty parenting contributing significantly to faulty personality development
Americans are driven by competition, adapt to level your own (adaptation-level phenomenon), relative deprivation (feel bad because of what others have/can do)
Arguing is a battle of wills, a competition, therefore we don’t just say sorry
Carl Jung: less emphasis on social factors, agreed with Freud about the unconscious, but believed it contains more than repressed thoughts and feelings
Collective unconscious: images derived from our species’ universal experiences (inherited experiences), reflects human evolutionary history and is common to all people
Born with memories of other people? Not just our own ancestors
Ultimately Jung believed 3 levels of consciousness exist: conscious, unconscious, and collective unconscious
Humanistic Perspective - Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers (2 pioneers)
In direct contrast to Freud’s pessimistic view of people, the humanistic psychologists saw people as being innately good and naturally strive to fulfill his or her unique potential
Humans inherently aggressive and sexual per Freud
Humanists say world creates bad people, people just want a good life and want to fulfill their potential
Jung believed all humans had a shadow, a piece of themselves, that is the dark side of humanity so we are all capable of bad things (in right circumstances the shadow can take over, ex: Holocaust or Stanford Prison Experiment)
Humanistic perspective focuses on the way “healthy” people operate and strive for self determination and self realization
Goal of Life per Humanism: self actualization (actualize who you are meant to be)
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: self actualization, the desire of fulfilling our potential
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs* know the order
Self Actualization (smallest)
Esteem
Belonging and Love
Safety
Physiological (biggest)
Self-transcendence added later to the TOP
Carl Rogers: known for the Person-centered perspective, contended that the most basic human motive is the actualizing tendency: the innate drive to maintain and enhance the human organism
Unconditional positive regard: regards to the sense of being unconditionally loved and valued, even if you don’t conform to the standards and expectations of others (Rogers believed this in parenting)
Children need unconditional love
Conditional positive regard: the sense that you will be valued and loved only if you behave in a way that is acceptable to others, conditional love or acceptance
Social Cognitive Perspective
Albert Bandura: proposed the social-cognitive perspective of personality development, emphasized the interaction between the person (personal traits), their situation, and the resulting behavior
Social-cognitive theory of personality emphasizes:
observational learning - baby monkeys bred in captivity try to play with snakes on monitors, if put with their mother, mom goes ballistic at snakes and then babies learn from her
conscious cognitive processes - aware cognition, how you consciously process information
social experiences - environment, upbringing, religion
self-efficacy beliefs - the degree to which you are subjectively convinced of your own capabilities and effectiveness in meeting the demands of a particular situation (begins in childhood and continues all through life)
reciprocal determinism - reciprocating favors/actions, the interaction of behavioral, cognitive, and environmental factors
Bandura believed our self-system guides how we perceive, evaluate, and control our behavior in different situations
Believed the most critical element influencing the self-system are our beliefs of self-efficacy
Self-Efficacy: the degree to which you are subjectively convinced of your own capabilities and effectiveness in meeting the demands of a particular situation (begins in childhood and continues all through life)
If demeaned as a child, self-efficacy is negative throughout life
Bandura believed human behavior and personality are caused by reciprocal determinism: the interaction of behavioral, cognitive, and environmental factors
Traits: relatively stable, enduring predisposition to behave in a certain way
People’s characteristic behaviors and conscious motives (motivations)
Cross-cultural research on traits have found that people in varied cultures describe personality in terms of these same basic traits that are identified by the five factor model
Two types of personality tests: projective tests and self reports
Projective tests: personality test that involves a person’s interpreting an ambiguous image used to assess unconscious motives, conflicts, psychological defenses, and personality traits (say what you see in a picture)
The main strength of projective tests is that they provide qualitative information about an individual that can be helpful in psychotherapy (information that cannot be counted, measured, or easily expressed using numbers)
TAT (thematic apperception test): people view ambiguous pictures and then make up stories about them
Rorschach Inkblot Test:most widely used and famous: set of 10 inkblots seeks to identify inner feelings by analyzing their view of the blots