Psych 111

1/21 Lecture 1- Intro

7 themes of Psychology:

1. Empirical- based on real-world observations

2. Theoretically Diverse- multiple theories for a single behavior

3. Socio Historical evolution- influenced by society more than any other science

4. Multiple causality- multiple causes for a single behavior

5. Cultural Heritage Matters

6. Nature vs. Nurture- not one of the other, but a combination

7. Subjectivity- no two people are exactly the same

Basic Definitions:

• Psychology- the study of the human mind and behavior

• Clinical psychology- assessment and treatment of psychological disorders

• Experimental psychology- scientific investigation of basic psychology processes

Important Terms and People:

• G. Stanley Hall- first American to receive a PhD in psychology

  • Opened first American psychology lab at John Hopkins

  • Helped in founding American Psychological Association (APA)

• Margaret Floy Washburn- first woman granted a PhD in psychology

• Frances Cecil Sumner- first African-American granted a PhD in psychology

  • influence/legacy left through students

• Clinical psychology- treatment for mental disorders using therapy

• Counseling psychology- use of therapy but not to treat mental disorders

• Community psychology- promote positive health using social aspects

• Psychiatry- medical doctor who uses medication to treat mental disorders

Early Theories of Psychology:

• Nativism- people are born with knowledge (Plato)

• Philosophical empiricism- all knowledge is gained through learning (Aristotle)

• Demons cause the symptoms of psychological disorders

  • Led to exorcisms and trephination

    • Trephination- drilling holes in the skull to allow demons to escape

• Different organs held different parts of psychology

• John Locke- introduced the idea that human are born “Tabula Rasa”, or as a blanket slate

  • Experiments and observations build thoughts

• Witchcraft caused symptoms of mental disorders

  • Solution was isolation for the person affected

• Philosophical dualism- views the mind and body as fundamentally different things

• Phrenology- study of the skull as indication of psychology

Modern Trajectory:

• Weber & Fechner- real vs. perceived world

• Gestalt- the way we look at and perceived

• Structuralism- what makes up our consciousness

  • Wilhelm Wundt- father of structuralism and psychology

    • Opened first ever psychology lab in 1879

• Functionalism- what is the function of our consciousness

  • William James

• Freud/psychoanalysis- studied the unconscious

• Behaviorism- it doesn’t matter what happens in the mind, it matters what behaviors you’re exhibiting

• Humanism- all humans have the capacity for good

  • Carl Young

• Cognitive- how internal processes affect thoughts and behaviors

  • Kurt Lewin- in order to understand someone’s behavior, you must understand their subjective experience

• Social: influences of others, both actual and imagined, on our thoughts and behaviors

• Biopsychological:

  • Biological- long-lasting physical components

  • Psychological- mental components

  • Social- temporary, situational components

Modern Subfields:

• Evolutionary psychology- adaptive problem the mind solved during our ancestors time and how it affects us today

  • Comparative psychology- understanding human psychology by comparing them to other animals

• Cultural psychology- how does someone’s culture affect their psychology?

• Educational psychology- looking for ways to better education

• Industrial/organizational psychology

• Forensic psychology- intersection between psychology and the law

  • Criminal psychology- focuses on the criminal mind

  • Experimental psychology- betterment of justice system

• Differential psychology- how individual differences affect people’s behavior

• Environmental psychology- using psychology to increase environmentally friendly behaviors

1/23 Lecture 2- Methods

Important Terms:

• Basic vs. applied

  • Basic- psychology that gives us more info than we had previously

    • No direct connection to a problem in the real world

    • Ex: looking at how long it takes for a nerve impulse to go from your foot to your brain

  • Applied- taking information from psychology and applying it to the real world

    • Seeking to solve/better some sort of problem

    • Ex: using psychology to better people’s study habits

• Reciprocal determinism- we influence others and others influence us

  • Humans are inherently very social creatures- no man is an island

    • We are being changed by others but we are also changing those people

• Skepticism- belief we can’t believe everything we see

  • We need to investigate to actually understand what we are seeing

  • Too far- conspiracy theorist

• Naive realism- belief the world is exactly as we see it

  • Ex: flat earthers → can’t see the world

  • Too far- don’t go too deep into things

• Skepticism vs. naive realism are on opposite spectrums

  • Want to be somewhere in the middle

• Peer review- important to research process, informed others look at our methods and results and they will determine if they are worthy for dispersal 

  • People who have the knowledge to your research will determine if your research findings can be shared

• Parsimony- coming up with simplest explanation to explain the most phenomenon

  • Ex: Hoofbeats → horses not zebras (could be from zebras but the most simple explanation is horse hooves)

• Methods of observation vs. explanation- both important

  • Observation- seeking to examine what people are actually doing

  • Explanation- seeking why people do what they do

Scientific method:

• Observe- what does this phenomenon look like?

• Question/Theory- seeking to explain the observation you just made

• Formulate a hypothesis- a tested statement meant to examine your theory

• Design a study- to test your statement 

• Collect data- bring participants in

• Analyze data- look at data

• Draw conclusions- does this prove or disprove your hypothesis?

• Report + revise- peer review

• Replicate- having a study happen once could be due to chance → need to see similar results across multiple testings

Roadblocks to scientific thinking:

• Hindsight bias- once you know the end result, you assume that you believed that result all along

  • Ex: you did your study (red room makes people less angry) and saying that that's what you thought all along

  • People like to be right

• Overconfidence- tend to be a lot more confident than we should be 

• Perceiving patterns- make patterns where patterns aren’t actually there

  • chance and randomness make humans uncomfortable 

  • Ex: superstitions

• Post-truth- objectivity seems to matter less now than subjectivity

  • what we used to take as evidence as truthful is now (idk)

• Repetition- means reliability 

  • Just because it happens more times does not mean it is the right decision

  • Ex: eating chicken nuggets everyday because your team keeps winning

• Availability of powerful examples- can lead us to mistaken beliefs 

  • Ex: winning the lottery → entering the lottery even though there is a very slim chance

Elements of research:

• Hypotheses- going to look different depending on how you approach your theory

  • All of them should be testable

• Independent variable- (cause of the change) the variable that the researcher is expecting to cause change

  • Under control of the researcher → researcher manipulates the variable

    • Ex: levels of fertilizer

  • Levels- how many different conditions of that variable are you going to test?

    • Ex: 4 levels of fertilizer

  • Control- meant to be baseline, nothing is there how do things behave?

    • Ex: zero drops of fertilizer

• Dependent variable- effect of the change

  • Ex: growth rate of the plant

• Operational definition- how you concretely measure an abstract concept

  • Happiness- levels of neurotransmitters (serotonin + dopamine)

  • Productivity- hours per day spent on classwork

  • Memory- memory tests

    • Repeat a story someone told you

Types of research:

• Experiment- what allows to determine causality

  • These changes in variable A caused the changes in variable B

  • Randomly assign the participants to different levels of the independent variable

    • Using chance to distribute the participants across the different levels

  • In control and be able to manipulate the independent variable

    • Ex: gender

• Quasi-experiment- where you have a variable that cannot be manipulated or randomly assigned

  • Can’t determine causality, it can determine relationships

    • Ex: age

• Cross-sectional vs. longitudinal- (just apply to age)

  • Cross-sectional- take two respective groups of different ages that go through the same experiment at the same time 

    • Ex: a group of 17 yr olds and 7 yr olds go through the same experiment at the same time

    • Issues- time (7 yr olds in 2016 vs. 7 yr olds in 2020)

  • Longitudinal- follow a group of 7 yr olds until they are 17 yrs old

• Field studies- rather than do the experiment in a lab, go out of the lab in a more naturalistic environment to do the experiment/quasi-experiment

  • Method of explanation

• Naturalistic observation- go out and observe people in their natural environment

  • Method of observation

  • Ex: Jane Goodall

• Case study- looking at a singular person/family that is experiencing something unusual in order to understand the phenomenon

  • Could not replicate in the lab

    • Ex: Phinea Gate + Jeannie

• Survey- ask participants a bunch of questions and get their answers 

  • Running your analysis based on their responses to those questions

• Between-subjects- each participant is only exposed to 1 level of the independent variable

  • Go through the study quicker → need more participants (1 data point from each participant)

    • Ex: red room group behavior vs. blue room group behavior

• Within-subjects- each participant participates in every level of the independent variable (comparing people to themselves)

  • Longer → fewer participants

    • Ex:

Lecture 3 1/28

Important Research Considerations:

• Reliability- same participant will get the same score across multiple testings

• Validity- make sure that you are testing what you think you are testing

  • Ex: happiness; counting the amount of times you drink coffee will not test how happy you are because there is no correlation between drinking coffee and happiness → not reliable, as a result not valid either

  • In order for a study to have validity, you MUST have reliability

  • Internal validity- how much control the researcher has over the study 

    • Higher internal validity will get a stronger connection between variables

  • External validity- how similar your study is to the real world

    • Working in opposition; higher internal validity → less external validity (and vice versa)

• Testing- measure to define a concept → test it to make sure it is reliable and valid

  • Standardization- creating a procedure that is going to ensure that basically everyone is getting in the same way → making sure there is consistency in how you are giving the measure to people across time + testing

  • Norming- determining in your data where your cutoff is 

    • Ex: what score do you have to get to determine you fall in a happy or sad category

Participants: people in your study

• Sample vs. population:

• Sample- actual people who participate in the study

  • Ideally, want your sample to be representative of your population

• Population- who you want your research to be applicable to (who does this apply to?)

  • Ex: study on 7 + 17 yr olds, do not test 12 yr olds (not part of the population)

  • WEIRD:

    • Western- western population, Educated, Industrialized, Rich- rich cultures + populations, and Democratic- democratic politics

  • Self-selection- choose studies that interest you → creates bias

    • People who chose your study are different from the participants that did not choose your study

  • Bias- we need to consider how these different biases affect our studies + participants

Statistical considerations:

• Descriptive stats- describe what our data looks like

  • Mean- average of your data (4)

  • Median- organize your data set numerically, look at the halfway point (3)

  • Mode- most commonly occurring data point (2,3)

    • 1,2,2,3,3,4,6,7,8

• Inferential stats- what allow us to say if there is significance between two variables

  • T-test- comparing two groups 

  • F-stat- testing more than two groups

  • P-value- set a p-value of 0.05 (5% that the result you got were purely by chance)

• Correlation strength- look at correlation from 1 to -1; further from 0 is going to be stronger

• Correlation direction- positive correlation (two variables move together); negative correlation (two variables opposite direction)

  • Ex: positive- the more you workout the more you sweat

  • Ex: negative- the more you workout the less you weigh

• Distributions- positive skew, symmetrical distribution (normal distribution or bell curve), negative skew

  • Symmetrical distribution- mean, median, and mode are very similar (if not exactly the same)

  • Positive skew- majority of the data set are on the lower end of the scale

    • Mode- smallest

    • Median- middle

    • Mean- highest

  • Negative skew- majority of the data set are on the higher end of the scale

    • Mode- highest

    • Median- middle

    • Mean- lowest

• Measures of variance- how different or dissimilar is your information from your other data

• Effect size- how strong is the effect that you see between your two variables

  • Large effect size -means it is very likely you would see this effect in a large number of different circumstances

Ethics:

• Informed consent- what you give to your participants prior to participating that tells them about the study they are about to study in

  • Critical → informing the participants about any sort of risk they could be vulnerable to

• Respect for persons- you cannot coerce your participants into participating

  • Ex: you can’t force someone into a room until they participate

  • Ex: can’t make someone feel bad into participating 

• Beneficence- maximizing the benefits and minimizing the costs of your research

• Confidentiality- your information is not connected to anything conducted

  • Does not disclose information about participants

• Fairness- participants need to be treated fairly

  • One group gets benefits → have to offer this benefit for the other group as well

    • Ex: control group → if the research is deemed “effective”, researchers must offer this effective treatment to the control group

• Debriefing- end of the study, where you are reminded about what you did and why you did it → also how to get in contact with a researcher if you have any questions

• Deception- sometimes you have to deceive your participants to test what you need; you must come clean about the deception was and why it was necessary 

• Tuskegee (Jones, 1993)- not ethical; researchers went into the poorest area in Alabama and injected about 400 Black men with syphilis and studied/followed them

  • These men were never informed about the experiment or the data being collected about them or given treatment (even after the fact that there was treatment)

  • 128 men died, 40 passed it onto their wives, and 19 children were born with it

• Animal research- controversial → animals cannot consent; rules + regulations are at a much larger rate and more extreme

Problems with research:

• Misconduct- someone purposefully does something wrong (in terms of ethics)

  • Plagiarism- taking someone else's ideas as your own (includes research ideas)

  • Falsification- change data in order to fit your desired result

  • Fabrication- completely make up data so it fits with your hypothesis

• Observer bias- where your thoughts and opinions the way you perceive your research → usually not intentional

  • Ex: Clever Hans → taught to do math but could not actually do math, just picking up on the behavior of other people

  • Demand characteristics- behaviors in the observer that communicate a desired result to the participant

  • Interpretation- how we see things; your observer bias effects interpretation → expectations, beliefs, and hopes may interfere with interpretation

  • Blindness- where the researcher who is interacting with the participant does not know what level of the independent variable the participant has been exposed to

• Hawthorne effect- people behave differently when they know they are being watched

• Social desirability bias- look at things that are considered socially undesirable → people aren’t going to respond honestly when they are asked certain questions in fear of being ostracized or punished

  • Bogus pipeline- you tell the participants that can determine if they are being truthful

• Confound/third variable problem- seems like there is a significant relationship between variable A and variable B

  • Confound- something outside of your study is driving the relationship between your variables

    • Li (1975)- survey that went out to Taiwanese households asking a bunch of questions; correlation between birth control use and # of electronics they had in their house (wealth was driving the relationship)

Psychology best practices:

• Experiment- only thing that can determine causality

  • Manipulated variable- variable that can be manipulated 

  • Random assignment- randomly assign participants 

• Double blind- administrator should not know the level of the independent variable

Developmental psychology:

Important terms:

• Universal vs. ecological:

  • Universal- all humans across  the world develop at a similar pace and in similar way

  • Ecological- acknowledge the impact that culture and environment have on development

• Teratogens- potentially dangerous components that a fetus can be exposed to that affects the fetus’ development

  • Ex: alcohol → fetal alcohol syndrome

• Critical vs. sensitive periods

  • Critical- has to be learned at a certain period or else it will never be learned

  • Sensitive- it is easier for an organism to learn that ability during that period

    • Ex: learning a language when you are younger vs. when you are older

• Post Hoc thinking- because A came before B, A caused B to happen

  • Ex: because crawling comes before talking, crawling causes talking

• Stage theories- the idea that development happens in stages and you must complete one stage before you complete the next stage of development

• Habituation- when a baby becomes used to a stimulus, they habitutate or stop responding to it. If you use a new stimulus the baby will start responding again.

  • Essentially, a baby gets bored after a while and needs something new

• Infantile Amnesia- memory loss that occurs from 0-4 due to rapid neural growth

  • huge amount of neuron growth messes with memory

• Social clock- culturally defined timeline to achieve different milestones

  • Milestones of success/achievements → first house, graduate college, getting married (different depending on culture + country)

Prenatal Sense Development:

• Sound- fetuses heart rate slows when it hears its mothers voice

  • Can remember sounds that they hear in utero → habituation

• Smell & taste- amniotic fluid → if the mother is eating heavy flavored food (licorice), the fetus recognizes the smell and taste after birth

• Vision- nonexistent (in utero), weakest sense

Sense Development:

• Vision- babies see in black and white for the first few months outside utero

  • Visual cliff- where you put the baby on a table, contrasting pattern and then glass on the other side → ability to perceive depth ( around 1 yrs old stop by the glass)

  • Scale error- sees a smaller version of something they are used to (toy car), treat the smaller version as if it is the larger version

    • May try to get into the toy car

• Brain growth- brain development + growing in complexity more so than size; reorganizing itself → frontal lobe is the last to develop (decision making)

Parenting Style:

• Authoritarianism- very specific, lots of rules, break those rules → severe punishment

  • Seen as coercive → once the children leave the household they go through a very big rebellious phase

• Permissive- unrestrained → ask very little, not a ton of rules, break those rules → not a ton of punishment

  • Parents want to be more like friends rather than parents

• Negligent- permissive taken to the extreme, don’t want to be involved or interact with the child at all

• Authoritative- take the good parts of all the styles and leave the bad parts, structure + supportive

  • Confronting → talk to the child if they did something wrong

  • Listen to the child → why they did it and a punishment befitting for that

Attachment Styles:

• Attachment- the close emotional bond between an infant and their caregiver

  • Strongly correlated with separation anxiety

• Strange situation (Ainsworth et al., 1978)- you bring the child into the lab, parent interacts with the child, the parent leaves, see how the child responds, parent returns, and see how the child responds

• Secure- when the caregiver leaves, the child may be or may not be distressed → does not matter when the caregiver leaves; when the caregiver comes back → acknowledges that the caregiver came back (if crying, stops crying when caregiver comes back, if not crying, acknowledges caregivers presence)

  • 60%

• Avoidant- child does not care that the caregiver left; when the caregiver returns they continue to avoid the caregiver

  • 20%

• Ambivalent/anxious- the baby is distressed; the baby continues to be distressed when the caregiver returns → different from secure because the baby continues to be upset

  • 15%

• Disorganized- don’t show a clear pattern of response; various responses from when the caregiver leaves + comes back

  • 5%

• Can have different attachment styles to different caregivers

Temperament:

• Thomas & Chess (1977; 1989)- looked at 3 month old babies, then followed up with them 10 years later → saw a correlation between the category they were placed under and their personality in their development (consistent)

• Easy- adapt really well to new experiences, show positive moods → regular eating and sleeping habits

• Slow to warm up- low activity level, withdraw from new situations but eventually adapt to the new situations 

• Difficult- very emotional and irritable, crying a lot

• Average- any baby that didn’t fit into the other three categories

Moral Development:

• Piaget’s Moral Development- instead of being a stage theory it’s a shift theory

  • Realism to relativism- realism (rules are rules and should always be follow) → relativism (sometimes you have to break the rules and sometimes that is not a bad thing)

    • Ex: parent may have a rule not to run in the house; realism (any running in the house is bad b/c it’s breaking the rules) → relativism (if the house is on fire I should run in the house) → taking into account the environment

  • Prescription to principle- prescription (taking the rule at the letter of the law, looking explicitly at what is stated in the rule) → principle (understand the intent of the rule)

    • Ex: running in the house → prescription (run when they go to grandma’s house) → principle (not run at grandma’s house because they know they should not run indoors)

  • Outcomes to intentions- outcomes (what’s right and wrong based on the consequences of the action) → intentions (look at the why behind the action)

    • Ex: child purposefully breaks a pencil because they were mad at their parents or if they broke an ipad on accident → intention purposefully breaking the pencil is worse than accidentally breaking the ipad because of the intention 

Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral: 

• 3 stage theory- 

• Preconventional (1st stage)- what’s right and wrong based on what is rewarded and punished

• Conventional (2nd stage)- take the rules that authority figures give you and internalize it → base what is right and wrong using your parents + teachers (authority figures)

• Post-Conventional (3rd stage) - you determine your own personal code of ethics based on your personal values (reaching adulthood)

Cognitive Development:

• Assimilate vs. Accommodate: 

  • Assimilate- interpret your experiences based on the current experiences of the world (take new experiences and force them into the mindset you already have)

    • Ex: you have a dog but you go to a house with a cat → treat the cat like a dog

  • Accommodate- change your mindset when you encounter new experiences

    • Ex: you have a dog but a few years later meet a rabbit → change their thought process and treat the rabbit like a rabbit (new experience)

• Sensorimotor- birth- 2 yrs; babies are building their mindset based on their motor and sensory exploration of the world 

  • Object permanence- where a child starts to understand just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it blipped out of existence (develops around 8 months)

• Preoperational- (2-7 yrs old) child starts to think symbolically

  • Pretend play- able to pretend to be different things/have different things 

  • Egocentrism- world revolves around the child → your perspective doesn’t matter, only mine

• Concrete operational- mentally manipulate things directly in front of them 

  • Conservation- child understands just because it hasn’t changed shape, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t changed mass

• Formal operational- begin to understand hypotheticals, and start to process abstract information better

  • Ex: algebra 

Critiques of Piaget:

• Underestimation- underestimating children, complex thought and less internally focused than previously thought

• Stage mixing- stages were distinct → once you complete a stage you never go back; research has shown that there is mixing between these stages

• Universality- differences in cultures in how and when they present 

Vygotsky:

• Social interactions- key element for cognitive development was social interactions, especially with older individuals 

  • Scaffolding- expert helps someone learn a task or trait, helps a lot at the beginning but starts to lay off → allows the new person to learn more effectively

• Language- critical for cognitive development

  • Private speech- language that we speak to ourselves

    • Preschoolers will externalize this private speech (talk aloud) → with age they start to internalize

Theory of Mind:

• Understanding of others- understand that other people have their own mental experiences and processes

• Egotism- because I am the center of the world, everyone should follow me

• Deficits- children with autism + deaf children of hearing parents difficulty communicating

• Advanced- older siblings, daycare, regular playdates, children in socioeconomic status

Motor Development:

• Developmental norms- median age where these traits tend to develop

• Reflexes:

  • Rooting- stroke a child's cheek, they move their mouth toward the stroking

  • Palmar- put something into a baby’s palm, they’ll grasp it

  • Sucking- put something in a baby’s mouth it will reflexively suck on it

  • Babinski- stroke a babies foot they will fan out their toes

  • Moro- falling reflex, make a baby feel like they are about to fall, they will reach out their arms and legs

• Control:

  • Cephalocaudal- control starts at the top and goes down

  • Proximodistal- control starts at the torso and moves outward

Social Development:

• Senses- face information, language → building them up to be a social creature 

• Social referencing- look back at a person (especially caregiver) in order to process a situation

• Mischel et al. (1972-2015)- marshmallow study → 3-5 yr olds and offered them a treat, “you can have this treat but if you wait 15 minutes you can have 2” and then would see → studied the amount of trust in the researcher