principals of psych 1

What is psychology?

“The scientific study of behavior and mental process”

Behavior: observable actions (things people do)

Mind: unobservable things (inside the head stuff) (conscious and unconscious)

Psychology helps us understand:

• Student issues

• Health issues

• Legal issues

• Social issues: stereotyping group processes

Origins of psychology

Wilhelm Wundt

First psychology lab made in 1879

What experiment was he known for?

Why was that experiment important?

Structuralism vs. Functionalism

• Structuralism: the study of “basic elements” of the mind

  • Researchers: Willhelm Wundt, Edward Titchener

  • Introspection: self-examination of one’s own experiences

    • “What is going through your head as you smell this rose?”

• Functionalism: study of how mental and behavioral processes help the organism adapt, survive, function

  • Researchers: William James, Mary Calkins

Behaviorism (1920 - 1970)

• Behaviorists focused only on observable behavior

  • Did not care about the mind

  • John Watson, Rosalie Rayner, B.F. Skinner

• Focus on behavioral responses in different situations

• Focus on rigorous experimental methods

Freudian Psychology (1920 - 1970)

• Sigmund Freud

  • Emphasized effect of the “unconscious” on our thoughts, feelings, and behavior

  • Legacy in popular culture

    • “Freudian slip”

    • “Oral fixation”

    • “Anal personality”

    • “Daddy issues”

• Complicated legacy

Humanism (1960)

• Humanists focused on how environmental influences nurture or limit potential for human growth

  • Reaction to “pessimism” of Freud

  • Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow

Contemporary Psychology

• The Cognitive Revolution (~1970s) brought the “mind” back into psychology

  • Cognition: attention, language, memory, perception, problem-solving, creativity, reasoning (inside the head stuff!)

  • Combined focus on cognition with experimental rigor of behaviorism

  • Analogy: Brain as a computer

    • Information is saved as input, manipulated, stored, retrieved, etc.

• Cognitive Neuroscience

Contemporary Psychology

• Nature vs. Nurture

  • Are our human traits present at birth (nature), or do they develop through experience (nurture)?

  • It's a little of both

  • Gender differences, personalities, intelligence, mental disorders…

Three Levels of Analysis in Psychology

1. Biological: inside our bodies and brains

2. Psychological: inside our minds; our thoughts

3. Social-cultural: outside environment; culture, et

• Biopsychosocial Approach: integrates all three levels of analysis when

attempting to understand human psychology

• Each provides different perspective

• One single study cannot combine all perspectives

Three Levels of Analysis in Psychology

• Biological

• Psychological

• Social-cultural

Psychology’s Subfields

• Basic Research: building knowledge base

  • Developmental psychology

  • Cognitive psychology

  • Personality psychology

  • Social psychology

  • Biological psychology

Applied Research: tackling practical problems

• Clinical psychology

  • Counseling psychology

  • Psychiatry

  • Basic researchers can also conduct applied research!

    • User experience (UX) research

    • Public policy application

The Scientific Attitude

• Curiosity: desire to know why things are the way they are

• Skepticism: willingness to challenge claims

• Humility: awareness of our own vulnerability to biases, being wrong

• Critical thinking: carefully evaluating knowledge by:

  • Examining our assumptions

  • Appraising the source of information

  • Thinking about our own biases

  • Assessing evidence and conclusions

• Beware of pseudoscience (literally “false science”)

  • Phrenology, water-dowsing

Read Ch. 1, pp. 14-33

(“Research Strategies: How Psychologists Ask and Answer Questions”)

SEPTEMBER 2 2022

The need for psychological science

We cannot rely only on intuition and common sense

1. Hindsight bias:

• After we know an outcome of an event, we think it's obvious

• “I knew all along” “of course that was going to happen”

• Common sense describes what happened, not why it happened

• Doesn't let us make good predictions about the future

We can not rely only on intuition and common sense

1. Hindsight bias

2. Overconfidence

• We think we know more than we do, about yourself, the world, other people

• Science helps us remove our own confidence

3.  Tendency to see order among chaos

• Brain is made to see patterns where there are none

• These things lead us to overestimate our intuition/ understanding

The scientific method

“A process for evaluating ideas with observation and analysis”

1. The cycle of discovery

• Facts

  • Things you're trying to explain (behaviors)

  • Understanding and explaining thoughts and beliefs from behaviors

• Theory

  • Explains the behaviors or events(facts)

  • A good theory:

    • Organizes past observations

    • Helps predict the future observations (make hypothesis)

• Hypothesis

  • A specific testable prediction (implied by theory)

• Conduct study

  • Test hypothesis (do experiments)

2. Types of research designs

Descriptive studies

• Goal: to describe behavior/ thoughts/ feelings

1. Case study: one in which the researcher focuses on one individual or one group in depth

• Very useful for rare or not well understood phenomenon

• Example: phineas gage

2. Naturalistic observation: observing and recording behavior in “naturally occurring” situations

• Observing bullying in schoolyards

• Humans laugh 30x more in social situations that alone

3. Survey: obtaining “self reported” attitudes or behavior

• Populations vs. sample

  • Population: all SU students

  • Sample: small group of SU students that is intended to represent the population

Disadvantage of descriptive studies:

• Can describe what, but not why

• Psychologists want to predict and explain behavior, not just describe it

• Why? (pg 20)

Correlational studies

Goal: measuring the systematic relationship between two continuous variables

• Can you predict one variable from the other? Do they correlate?

• Does X predict Y?

(A note about continuous variables)

• Variables that can be measured on a spectrum

  • Age, # of hours slept, how long it takes to walk to class, reaction time

  • Few vs. many, weak vs. strong, a lot vs. little

• Discrete/ categorical variables are different

  • Values represent different categories

  • What is your major? What is your eye color?

Operationalization

How will you measure a variable

(very important concept)

• Hunger:

  • What is hunger? Not eating for 1 or 24 hours?

  • Ex: how hungry are you on scare 1-3

• Aggression:

  • What counts as aggression? A mean look? A push?

  • Ex: “how many times did you feel frustrated, angry, upset today?”

What are other ways to operationalize these variables?

SEPTEMBER 5 2022

Types of research designs: correlational

Question: does knowing how hungry someone is let one predict how aggressive they will be? (predict aggression from hunger?)

Aggression “how many times did you feel frustrated, angry, or upset today?”

Hunger: “how hungry were you today on a scale of 1-3?”

Both are continuous variables

Goal is to measure the systematic relationship between two continuous variable

Positive correlation: when X goes down Y goes down, move in same direction

Negative correlation: when one goes up the other goes down, move in opposite directions

No correlation: X and Y are not related at all

• Correlation coefficient: statistic that expresses how strong the relationship is between two continuous variables. Ranges between -1.00 and +1.00

• Direction

  • Positive: as one variable increases, so does the other

  • Negative : as one variable increases, the other decreases

• Strength

  • Strong: close to -1 or +1

  • Weak: close to 0

Correlation is not = to Causation

• General limitation of correlational method: tells us if there is a relationship and how strong it is (helpful) but it doesn't say if one variable caused the other

  • Doesn't mean there can't be a casual relationship

  • Spelling bee probably doesn't cause spider aggression

• When you have 2 variables, there are 3 possible causal relationships

Bidirectionality, going in both directions

Third variable problem, a third variable is causing both of the variables to correlate

Why care about causality?

• We don't only want to describe and predict thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, we want to explain and apply

  • Causality: “hunger causes aggression..”

  • Application: “if no one is hungry, we can achieve world peace”

Experiments allow us to make causal conclusions

SEPTEMBER 7 2022

Types of research design: experiments

• The experimental method: researcher manipulates one or more variables and measures resulting change in another variable

• Variable types

  • Independent variable: variable researcher manipulates to see if doing so causes changes to the dependent variable

    • The type/ what is different between each measure

  • Dependent variable: variable researches measure to see if it was changed by independent variable

• Researcher randomly assigns participants to different conditions of the IV and ensures conditions are identical except for the IV

• We can test if the IV causes changes to the DV

Independent variable (IVs)

Variable measured to see if it causes changes

• Variables being studied to see if it causes changes in behavior

  • Usually categorical, not continuous

  • Must have at least 2 levels (or “conditions”)

  • Independent variables are also known as “factors”

Example: does coffee drinking improve test taking?

• What is IV? and DV?

• I give you all the exact same exam next friday, before exam split in half and randomly assign

  • Condition 1: no one drinks coffee

  • Condition 2: everyone drink 5 cups

• Dependent variable: exam score

• Independent variable: coffee consumption

• How many levels: 2

• The levels: 1. No coffee 2. 5 cups

Important aspects of experiments

• Researcher manipulates some variables and controls others

  • Independent variable is manipulated

  • Other things are “controlled” - must be the same between both conditions

    • Day of the week, king of coffee, etc

• Be careful of confounding variable: a variable (that isn't the IV) that systematically changes with independent variable - NOT GOOD

• Random assignment- helps oath confounding variables (pg. 23-24)

Experiments to evaluate treatment

• Why use placebo?

  • May still influence people that things are the same

  • Placebo effect

• Double blind procedure: neither participant nor researcher knows which condition a participant is in

  • Why is this important?

Example: is “hangriness” real?

• Independent variable: hunger

1. Hungry: told not to eat for 6 hours before study

2. Not hungry: told to eat right before study

• Dependent variable: aggression

  • Hot sauce task: how much hot sauce does participant give to a partner to eat (when they know the partner does not like hot sauce?)

  • More hot sauce = more aggression

• Hypothesis: participants in the hungry condition will give their partner more hot sauce than the participants in the “not hungry condition

Can experiments predict “real” behavior?

• Some are not designed to recreate specific, everyday life behaviors

• Psychological science focuses on general theoretical principles, which should apply to a wide range of behaviors

The purpose of study

• Descriptive- to describe

• To look at relationships or if x predicts y; no language of causality = Correlational

• To either manipulate a variable (IV) or to examine the “cause” or the “effect” that variables have on each other = Experimental

Confounding variables

• Confounding variable: a variable (that isn’t the IV) that systematically changes with independent variable

• Start by writing down the IV, how many levels the IV has, and what the DV is.

• Can help with identifying potential confounds: What else is different between the groups apart from the IV?

Example: Does watching violent movies make people less likely to help people in need? I go to 

a movie theater and wait until people are leaving a violent movie – and pretend to fall injured; 

Then I count how many people offer to help me. Then I do the same thing for a non-violent 

movie – I pretend to fall injured and count how many people offer to help me

• IV? How operationalized; how many levels? 

• DV? How was it operationalized?

• Potential confounds = baseline helpfulness?

• Random assignments can help.

Research ethics

Psychologists sometimes do research on animals

• Can be done humanely

• Animal research has led to many advances in science and technology

Most research is on human subjects

Ethical codes from American Psychological Association (APA) and University 

Ethics Committees (Institutional Review Board; IRB):

1. Informed consent

2. Protect from harm

3. Keep personal information confidential

4. Fully debrief people (i.e., explain the experiment)

• Especially important if there is deception involved in study

SEPTEMBER 9 2022

Everything psychological is also simultaneously biological 

Neural communication

The body's information system is made up of billions of interconnected cells called neurons, the building block of the nervous system.

Anatomy of a neuron

Dendrites- receive messages from other cells, get information - passed through the… 

Axon- which then sends the information away to another neuron - when the end of axon gets to…

Terminal branches- forms junctions with other cells, information exits from here

Cell body (soma): energy center of cell; contains nucleus

Myelin sheath: fatty layer that increase conductivity of an ion

Action potential/ the neural impulse

• This is the “information” that travels throughout the brain and body = thoughts, feelings, behavior

Neural impulses

• Action potential: brief electrical charge that “travels” down axon

  • At rest, the electrical charge inside is more negative than outside

  • Depolarization: changing of that difference

  • Takes time! Not instant

Neural impulses: action potential

• Each neuron receives excitatory and inhibitory signals from other neurons

• When excitatory signals exceed a certain threshold - action potential fires

• Action potentials are all or none

  • Excitatory Signals can cause neuron to fire faster; more neurons to fire, but cant make stronger

  • Intensity of an action potential remains the same throughout the length of axon

  • Neuron can not “half fire”

• Refractory period

Pg 37-40 youtube video on canvas

Where neurons communicate

• Synapse: space between the axons of one neuron and the dendrites

of another neuron

• Site of chemical communication between neurons

• Synaptic cleft: gap at synapse

How neurons communicate

• Neurotransmitters: chemicals that transmit information across the synapse to another neurons dendrites

  • Can be excitatory or inhibitory

  • “Passing the message” to the next neuron

• Reuptake: when neurotransmitters in the synapse are reabsorbed by presynaptic (sending) neuron

How neurotransmitters influence us

• Acetylcholine (ACh): present at every synapse between motor neurons and skeletal muscles

  • Tells post synaptic neurons muscles to contract

• Dopamine: influences movement, learning, attention, and emotion

  • Oversupply linked to schizophrenia

  • Undersupply…

• Serotonin: affects mood, hunger, sleep, and arousal

  • Undersupply…

The nervous system

… all the neurons that allow us to take in information, make decisions, send signals to our body to move

Two main division

• Central nervous system (CNS)

  • Made up of the brain and the spinal cord

• The peripheral nervous system (PNS)

  • Sensory and motor neurons connecting CNS to rest of body

  • Nerves: bundled axons that connect CNS with muscles, glands, etc.

Types of neurons in nervous system

• Motor neurons: carry signals from spinal cord and brain to muscles and glands to produce movement

• Sensory neurons: receive information from senses and relay to brain

  • Nerve endings are specialized (for light, vibration)

  • In your eyes

  • On your tongue

• Interneurons: move information within brain, spinal cord

  • Connects sensory neurons and motor neurons

Peripheral nervous system

Somatic Autonomic

(self regulated action) (involuntary (internal organs)

Sympathetic parasympathetic

“Fight or flight” “rest and digest”

Central nervous system (CNS)

• Brain: contains neural networks of 86 billion neurons

• Spinal cord:

  • Two way information highway connecting PNS and brain

  • Ascending fibers send sensory information to brain (touch, pain)

  • Descending fibers send motor information down to body (move your hand)

• Reflexes: simple, automatic responses to stimuli

  • Controlled by neural pathways

  • Action may happen before information gets to brain

The Endocrine system

• The body's “slower” chemical communication system

  • Effects may be longer lasting than nervous system

• Hormones: chemicals produced by endocrine glands

  • Adrenal glands, pituitary glands

  • Some are chemically identical to neurotransmitters

  • Adrenaline

• Endocrine and nervous system are tightly linked

SEPTEMBER 12 2022

Tools to study the brain

• How to know what the brain is doing

• What part of the brain is responsible for what psychological functions

• One way: examine lesion patients

• Electroencephalogram (EEG)

  • Measure electrical activity on surface

• Positron emission tomography (PET) scan

  • Track a radioactive substance in blood throughout the brain

• Magnetic resonance imagining (MRI) scan

  • Use magnet and radio waves to examine tissue structure

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

  • Measured blood flow in brain using magnets

  • Shows brain structure

  • Can help identify brain function

    • (Where is the blood flowing when people complete this task/ are thinking about this?)

• Pro: great spatial accuracy (localization)

• Con: low temporal resolution

Older brain structures

• Aka, “subcortical” -> “below the cortex”

• Less complex part of brain

  • Evolutionary “older” than the cortex

Consists of:

• Brainstem

  • Responsible for automatic survival functions

    • Controlling heartbeat, breathing

    • Oldest part of brain

    • Extension of the spinal cord

• Thalamus and reticular formation

  • Gets input from the senses then redirects information up to brain and then down into the spinal cord

    • Sits on top of brainstem

    • Reduced activity during sleep

• Cerebellum

  • Aids in judgement of time, sound/tecture discrimination, and emotional control

  • Coordinates voluntary movement and output and balance

  • “Little brain”

• Limbic system

  • Associated with emotions such as fear, aggression and drives for food and sex

1. Amygdala

• Emotions (fear and anger)

2. Hypothalamus

• Directs “maintenance” activities (eating, drinking, body temperature)

• Helps with endocrine system; pituitary gland

• Involved in learning and rewards

3. Hippocampus

• Memory

Cerebral cortex

The body's ultimate control and information processing center

• Thin surface layer covering cerebrum

• Not just automatic survival functions (like subcortical structures)

• The capacity to think, learn; gives rise to what makes us distinctly human

Structure of the cortex

• Two hemispheres: left and right

• Each hemisphere is divided into four lobes:

  • Frontal

    • Complex decision making; planning; personality

    • Initiating voluntary movement

  • Parietal lobe

    • Body senses (touch, pain, temperature)

  • Occipital lobe

    • Visual processing

  • Temporal lobe

    • Language, hearing, some vision

  • Each lobe carries out multiple functions; many functions require interactions between multiple lobes

Functions of the cortex

1. Motor functions

• Motor cortex: controls voluntary motor functions (frontal lobe)

2. Sensory functions

• Somatosensory cortex: receives information from body about touch senses and movement of body (parietal lobe)

• Additional sensory areas

  • Visual cortex (occipital lobe)

  • Auditory cortex (temporal lobe)

3. Association areas

• “Uncommitted” to a specific function; hard to find

• Involved in interpretation, interaction

• Found in all lobes

•  Example: prefrontal cortex

  • Frontal lobe

  • Judgment, personality, planning

Motor and somatosensory concepts

• Topographic organization

  • Example: adjacent parts of skin send information to adjacent parts of the brain

  • Also applies to tones/ hearing

• Cortical magnification

  • More cortex is dedicated to a body part (motor or sensory) depending on how fine a movement or sensitive sense is necessary

    • Face vs. elbow

SEPTEMBER 14 2022

Information flow in the brain

Mental experiences arise from coordinated brain activity between several areas

• Information constantly moves throughout brain

• Crosses functional and geographical boundaries

• Example: planning intentional movement involves memories, vision, hearing.. Everything

Brain plasticity

• Plasticity: the brain's ability to change due to experience

  • Especially in childhood

  • After damage, brain can reorganize and build new pathways

  • Ability diminishes later in life

  • Example: cortical remapping

    • Somatosensory areas that are no longer receiving information are “taken over” by adjacent areas on somatosensory cortex

    • Example: after amputation of limb, digit

    • Example: deaf or blind people

Our divided brain

• Lateralization: left and right hemispheres serve different functions

  • Evidence from lesion studies

  • Left hemisphere: reading, writing, speaking

  • Right hemisphere: perceptual tasks, less dramatic effects from damage

• Contralateral connections:

  • Hemispheres of brain control opposite sides of the body

  • Left hemisphere controls right side of body, and vise- versa

  • Visual information from right visual field processed by left side of visual cortex

Sharing information

• Corpus callosum: bundle of fibers that connects hemispheres of the brain

  • Information is shared across in the brain

  • Information that is sent to one side of the brain is sent to the other side

Splitting the brain

• “Split brain”: when corpus callosum is served

  • Hemispheres are now separated from each other

    • No information sharing

  • Sometimes used to treat epileptic seizures

  • Not dissociative identity/ split personality disorder

• Sperry and gazzaniga (pg 62-63)

Genterics, evolutionary psychology, and behavior

• Why are twin studies valuable?

• What is epigenetics?

  • What is an example from the book?

What is consciousness?

• Consciousness: our awareness of ourselves and our environment

  • “Awareness” 

    • Humans can have a narrative experience of their awareness

• Altered states of consciousness

  • Spontaneous: daydreaming

  • Physiological: drug induced hallucinations

  • Psychological: meditation

SEPTEMBER 16 2022

Selective attention

Attention: when awareness is focused on a specific aspect of your consciousness experience 

• Focusing attention on something automatically decreases attention to irrelevant things

• Important things may also automatically grab our attention

• “Cocktail party effect”

Hearing one’s own name above the page the noise demonstrates different “tracks” of consciousness

Selective attention and accidents

• Study: Participants were left alone for 28 minutes with a computer and a TV

  • “How many times do you think you switched attention during that time?”

  • Average guess: 15 times

  • Actual: ~120 times

• There is a cost to task switching

  • Slower at tasks

  • Less accurate

• Don’t text and drive.

  • More than 25% of accidents ~ texting/talking

  • 4x to 25x more likely to get in accident while texting

Inattentional blindness

• Inattentional blindness: Failure to see visible objects when our attention is

directed elsewhere

• e.g., failing to see the gorilla; failing to notice the curtain color change

• Why does this happen?

Focusing attention on something automatically decreases attention to other things

Change blindness

• Change blindness: Failure to notice changes in the environment

  • e.g., not noticing that that person you were giving directions to turned into a different person’

Dual-Processing: The Two-Track Mind

We all have two minds:

• Conscious track (the “high” track):

  • Our minds take deliberate action, we are aware of these processes

  • Experience of concentration, focus, choice…

• Unconscious track (the “low” track”):

  • Our minds perform automatic actions; we are unaware of these

Evidence for Dual-Processing

• Blindsight

  • Woman named “DF” with brain damage

  • Unable to recognize things she was looking at, but could pick them up…

• Separation between visual perception (recognition) track and visual action track (coordinating movement, holding, etc.)

• DF’s brain revealed normal functioning in visual action-related areas!

Evidence for Dual-Processing

The Stroop Task

• Conscious processing: goal to name the font color

• Unconscious processing: reading the word

  • Adults know reading so well that is unconscious

• Conscious and unconscious processes may conflict with one another!

  • Trying to diet (conscious goal to eat healthier)

Sleep and Dreams

• Sleep: periodic, natural loss of consciousness

  • Another state of consciousness

  • Not the same as unconsciousness from coma, anesthesia, hibernation

• We are still processing information during sleep!

  • Just as when awake, most information is processed unconsciously

Daily Rhythms and Sleep

• Circadian rhythm: regular body rhythms that occur on a 24-hour cycle

  • e.g., temperature, mental sharpness, wakefulness, etc.

  • Matched to lightness and darkness in the environment

• There are individual differences in daily rhythms

  • “Larks” vs. “Owls”: energy peaks in the morning vs. evening

  • Old vs. young

  • Women become more morning-oriented after children

Sleep Stages and Cycles

• Sleep stages: Distinct patterns of brain waves and muscle activity that are associated with different types of consciousness and sleep

  • There are 4 stages of sleep

• Sleep cycles: The patterns of cycling through sleep stages

  • Every 90 minutes, you cycle through the stages

Not yet asleep

• Alpha waves are the relatively slow brain waves of a relaxed, awake state

(e.g., when you are eyes are closed, but still awake)

As you fall asleep…

• Yawning: brief boost in alertness as brain metabolism slows

• Breathing slows

• Brain waves become slower and irregular

• May have hallucinations, such as sensation of falling or floating

• Brain waves change from alpha waves to NREM-1

  • NREM-1 = non-REM sleep Stage 1

Non-REM sleep stages 

Deeper sleep, but not yet dreaming

NREM- 1 (1 second)

NREM- 2 (20 minutes)

NREM- 3 (30 minutes) (deep sleep)

Sleep stages across 8 hours

Awake → NREM-1 → NREM-2 → NREM-3 → NREM-2 → REM → …

Rapid Eye Movement (REM) Sleep

• REM Sleep

  • Periods of fast, jerky eye movements; every 30 seconds

  • Heart rate rises and breathing becomes rapid

  • Dreams occur during this phase of sleep

Why do we Sleep?

• Protection

  • Evolutionary ancestors

  • Non-human species: sleep patterns fit ecological niche

• Restore and repair

  • Restore immune system; repair brain tissue

  • Species with high metabolism do more damage to body; need more sleep

• Consolidates memories

  • Studies: adults and children trained to perform tasks do better after a night’s sleep

• Creative thinking

  • Studies: sleeping promotes problem-solving, making connections between ideas

• Growth

  • Growth hormone released during sleep; necessary for muscle development

Sleep Deprivation (pp. 94-98)

• How does sleep loss / deprivation affect…

  • Brain

  • Immune system

  • Fat cells

  • Joints

  • Heart

  • Stomach

  • Muscles

SEPTEMBER 19 2022

Dreams

• Dreams: sequence of images, emotions, and thoughts passing through a sleeping person's mind

  • During REM sleep

  • Generally difficult to remember

• What we dream about

  • Negative events or emotions (especially failure)

  • “Story” usually involves traces of previous days experiences

  • Incorporates real world sounds and stimuli

  • May also include images from recent, traumatic, or frequent experiences

  • Do not often include sexuality

Why do we dream?

• To satisfy our own wishes (wish fulfillment, freud)

  • Dreams express unacceptable feelings

  • Manifest vs. latent content

  • Consideration: no scientific support

• To store memories (information-processing)

  • Dreams help us organize events and consolidate memories

  • Studies: people remember less if they slept after learning but were woken up during REM sleep (while dreaming)

    • Studies: rats running mazes

  • Consideration: why dream about past events and those we have not experienced?

• To develop and preserve neural pathways (psychological function)

  • Consideration: does not explain why we experience meaningful dreams

• To make sense of neural “static” (activation- synthesis)

  • REM triggers neural impulses that evoke random visual memories; brain “weaves” into stories

  • Consideration: the way someone's brain “weaves” the story tells us something about them

Conclusion

• All researchers agree we need REM sleep

Do not study drugs and consciousness (Pg 104-117) not on exam 1

Big issues in developmental psychology

1. Nature vs nurture

   1. Genes play an important role, but we are shaped by experience

   2. People within groups differ much more than people between groups

2. Continuity and stages

   1. Gradual change over time (continuity): focus on experience and learning

   2. “Stage theories” of development: focus on genetically- predisposed steps or stages

3. Stability and change

   1. Life characterized by both

   2. Temperament is stable across lifespan

   3. Social attitudes (morality, gender roles, political attitudes) less stable over time

Prenatal development and the newborn

Pg 122-125

What is the course of rental development and how do teratogens affect that development?

Infancy and childhood

• Infancy: newborn until toddler (18-24 months)

• Childhood: toddler to teenager

• Many skills are developing during infant

  • Can mimic facial expressions within first hour of life

  • Poor sight, but canhabitutate to visual stimuli

  • Can recognize (and prefer) mothers face after 12 hours of life

• Reflexes: specific patterns of motor responses triggered by specific patterns of sensory stimulation

  • Innate (don't have to teach them)

  • “rooting reflex” in humans

How do we know what infants know?

• Habituation: once baby gets familiar with object/ event, they look at it less

  • They stop looking when they're “bored”

  • Babies look longer at interesting, novel, or unexpected objects

• Therefore…

  • Longer looking time= novel, different, unexpected, important

  • Shorter looks= expected, boring

Infancy & childhood - Cognitive Development

• How do children develop the cognitive skills that  adults take for granted and how do those skills change as we age?

• Cognition: how we think, know, communicate (language), remember (memory)

Piaget Stage Theory of Development

• Jean Piaget: father of cognitive development

• Cognitive development constructed as child interacts with their environment

  • Children constantly try to make sense of the world

  • Cognitive development shaped by the errors we make

• As motor control develops children develop internal representations of the world and how their actions affect objects -> develop schemas

SEPTEMBER 21 2022

Piaget stages of cognitive development

• Sensorimotor stage (birth - 2 years)

  • Thought = behavior

  • What they're thinking is what they're doing, not planning ahead

  • Children first exploring world through action and perception

  • Developing schemas

  • By end of this stage, kids can act with intention- can make a plan

    • Important accomplishment in this stage: object permanence (6-18 month)

    • Object permanence

      • We know objects still exist if they are out of sight

      • According to Piaget, emerges 6-8 months

• Preoperational stage (2 years - 7 years)

  • Children are able to represent objects symbolically

    • Using hairbrush to represent microphone

    • Playing “make believe”

  • Starting to develop language

  • But don't yet understand operations

    • Doing a reversible action on something

    • Can not think beyond immediate characteristics of an object (how it could change)

  • Because of this, children in this stage fail conservation tasks

  • Egocentrism: unable to perceive things from another persons point of view

  • Do not have Theory of Mind: the ability to understand the beliefs of other people, when those beliefs are same as your own, and when they are different

    • ToM starts to develop around preschool aged children

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• False context task

  • What's in the box? “Band aids”

  • What will your mom think is in the box? “ribbons”

  • What did you think was in the box before I opened it? “Ribbons”

Theory of mind

• Children can not pass  false belief tasks until age 4-6 if normally developing

  • Children with autism have difficulty with false belief tasks

  • Other developmental delays do not affect theory of mind (down syndrome)

• Concrete - operational stage (7 years - 12 years)

  • Concrete reasoning is improved

  • Can think about reversible consequences of actions

    • Can pass conservation tasks, but must be done concretely

  • Can think logically and systematically but not abstractly

    • Very experience-specific; can only apply what they have experiences/ seen

    • Can't imagine a broken egg being put back together

• Formal - operational stage (12 years - )

  • Understand operations, understand abstract reasoning

  • Can do hypothesis testing

  • Can apply formal rules across situations

  • Can think theoretically and apply principles to actions that can not be performed

Alternate to Piaget

• Lev Vygotsky and the social child (pg 134)

SEPTEMBER 23 2022

Infancy and childhood - social development

• Attachment: emotional attachment to another person

  • In developmental psychology, emotional bond between infants and their caregiver

  • Forming hea;thy attachment early in life -> good social development later in life

• What will produce good attachment? Is food/ nourishment enough?

Harlow's monkeys

• Food is not enough for normal social development

• Bodily contact is the most important

  • Monkeys would go to wire mother for food but rest of time with cloth mother

  • Monkeys raise with only wire mothers showed odd social behaviors

  • Studies are no longer ethical

Attachment styles

• Secure attachment (60% of children)

  • Explore environment happily when mother is present

  • Show distress when mother leaves

  • Mothers are responsive and attentive

• Insecure attachment

  • Cling to mother (do not explore) when she is present

  • Mothers who only attend to children only when they wanted to but ignored it otherwise

• How to study? Strange situation test

  • Infant and mother are brought to an unfamiliar room

  • Mother and stranger (researcher move out:

    • Baby alone -> just mother -> just stranger

Attachment is important

• Influence of parents attachment with their own parents

• Attachment affects other relationships

• Securely attached children ->

  • More confident, sociable; better problem solvers; emotionally healthier

• Any attachment is better than none

  • Infants raised in social isolation -> withdrawn, frightened, speech development issues (romanian orphanages)

  • If parental support or caregiving is deprived for a long time or child is abused or neglected, risk for physical, psychological, social problems

    • Decreased brain serotonin levels

Parenting styles

• Authoritarian: parents impose rules and expect obedience

  • “Because I said so”

• Permissive: parents submit to child's demands

• Authoritative: parents are demanding but responsive to children

  • Explain reasoning for discipline

  • Obedience not because they are afraid, but because they understand why rules exist

• Children of authoritative parents often have higher social competence, and more self-reliant

  • But correlation x= causation: remember bidirectionality and third variable problem
    
    

Adolescence

Development is a lifelong process (our personality is not set at birth)

• Adolescence: period of transition between childhood to adulthood

  • From puberty to independence

  • Changes in brain

The adolescent brain

• Frontal cortex development

  • Neurons in frontal lobe grow myelin

  • Lags behind limbic system development

  • Hormonal surges and limbic system may explain teenage impulsiveness

    • Reward system is present, but reasoning capabilities are not fully formed until 25

Moral action: delay of gratification

• An important part of acting morally is self-discipline and self regulation to restrain your (potentially immoral) impulses

• Delayed gratification tested using the marshmallow test

  • Waiting -> better academic, vocational, and social outcomes as they got older

  • Biodirectionality and nature vs. nurture

Moral development

• Kohlberg's stage theory of moral development

  • Presented moral dilemmas to children, adolescents

  • How does their reasoning change over time?

  • Used moral dilemmas

• The Heinz dilemma

• Preconventional morality (birth - 9 year)

  • Self interested; decisions based on getting in trouble or getting reward

  • “Heinz shouldnt steal because he'll get in trouble”

• Conventional morality (early adolescence)

  • Social morality; decisions based on maintaining social order or approval from others

  • “Heinz should steal because the pharmacist was being greedy”

• Postconventional morality (adolescence and beyond

  • Morality depends on basic rights and universal ethical principles

  • “Heinz should steal it because human life is worth more than drugs”

Moral reasoning vs. moral intuition

• Kholberg cared about moral reasoning: how people think through and give reasons for moral decisions

• More recent focus on moral intuition (Hadit)

  • Moral decisions are based on “quick gut feelings”

  • Reasoning only comes after the decision has been “made”