AP Psychology Ultimate Guide

Unit 1: Scientific Foundations of Psychology

Roots of Psychology

• Roots of psychology can be traced to philosophy and physiology/biology over 2,000 years ago in ancient Greece.
• As a result of examining organisms, physician/philosopher/physiologist Hippocrates thought the mind or soul resided in the brain but was not composed of physical substance (mind-body dualism).
• Philosopher Plato (circa 350 BC), who also believed in dualism, used self-examination of inner ideas and experiences to conclude that who we are and what we know are innate (inborn).
• Plato’s student, Aristotle, believed that the mind/soul results from our anatomy and physiological processes (monism), that reality is best studied by observation, and that who we are and what we know are acquired from experience.
• Descartes defended mind-body dualism (Cogito ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am”) and that what we know is innate.
• Empirical philosopher Locke believed that mind and body interact symmetrically (monism), knowledge comes from observation, and what we know comes from experience since we are born without knowledge, “a blank slate” (tabula rasa).
• Nature-nurture controversy: which our behavior is inborn or learned through experience.

Leading Psychologists

Structuralism

• In 1879, Wilhelm Wundt founded scientific psychology by founding a laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, to study immediate conscious sensation.
• He taught his associates and observers to introspectively analyze their sensory experiences (inward-looking).
• Replicating results under different conditions was his requirement.
• Wundt used trained introspection to study the mind's structure and identify consciousness's basic elements—sensations, feelings, and images.
• G. Stanley Hall founded the American Psychological Association, founded a psychology lab using introspection at Johns Hopkins University, and became its first president.
• Edward Titchener brought introspection to his Cornell University lab, analyzed consciousness into its basic elements, and investigated how they are related.
• Structuralism included Wundt, Hall, and Titchener.
• Titchener's first graduate student and first psychology PhD was Margaret Floy Washburn.

Functionalism

• American psychologist William James thought structuralists were asking the wrong questions.
• James studied behavioral functions.
• He believed humans actively processed sensations and actions.
• James, James Cattell, and John Dewey were Functionalist psychologists who studied mental testing, child development, and education.
• Functionalists used various methods to apply psychological findings to practical situations and study how mental operations adapt to the environment (stream of consciousness).
• Behaviorism and applied psychology followed functionalism.
• First female American Psychological Association president Mary Whiton Calkins studied psychology under James at Harvard.
  • Her self-psychology reconciled structural and functional psychology.

Principal Approaches to Psychology

Behavioral Approach

• The behavioral approach focuses on measuring and recording observable behavior in relation to the environment.
• Behaviorists think behavior results from learning.
• Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov trained dogs to salivate in response to the sound of a tone, demonstrating stimulus–response learning.
• Pavlov’s experiments at the beginning of the 20th century paved the way for behaviorism, which dominated psychology in America from the 1920s to the 1960s.
• Behaviorists examine the ABCs of behavior.
• They analyze Antecedent environmental conditions that precede a behavior, look at the Behavior (the action to understand, predict, and/or control), and examine the Consequences that follow the behavior (its effect on the environment).

Psychoanalytic/Psychodynamic Approach

• Sigmund Freud opposed behaviorists in Austria.
• He talked with mental patients for long periods to reveal unconscious conflicts, motives, and defenses to improve self-knowledge.
• Psychoanalytic theory explained mental disorders, personality, and motivation through unconscious internal conflicts.
• Freud believed that early life experiences shape personality and that the unconscious is the source of desires, thoughts, and memories.
• Psychodynamic psychoanalysis includes Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Karen Horney, Heinz Kohut, and others.

Humanistic Approach

• In contrast to behaviorists and psychoanalysts, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and other psychologists believed that humans have unique behavior.
• Free will and personal growth shape behavior and thought.
• Humanists value feelings and believe people are naturally positive and growth-seeking. Humanists interview people to solve their own problems.

Evolutionary Approach

• An offshoot of the biological approach, evolutionary psychologists, returning to Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection, explain behavior patterns as adaptations naturally selected because they increase reproductive success.

Cognitive Approach

• Psychologists could study cognition—thinking and memory—again thanks to technology.
• Cognitive psychologists emphasize receiving, storing, and processing information, thinking and reasoning, and language to understand human behavior.
• Jean Piaget's cognitive development research influenced preschool and primary education.

Sociocultural Approach

• Travel and the economy globalized in the second half of the 20th century, increasing cross-cultural interactions.
• Psychologists found that different cultures interpret gestures, body language, and speech differently.
• Psychologists studied social and environmental factors affecting cultural differences in behavior.
• The sociocultural approach examines cultural differences to understand, predict, and control behavior.

Biopsychosocial Model

• Psychologists who use techniques and adopt ideas from a variety of approaches are considered eclectic.

• The biopsychosocial model integrates biological processes, psychological factors, and social forces to provide a more complete picture of behavior and mental processes.

• The model is a unifying theme in modern psychology drawing from and interacting with the seven approaches to explain behavior.

  

Domains of Psychology

• Research and applied psychologists deal with a huge number of topics.
• Topics can be grouped into broad categories known as domains.
• Psychologists specializing in different domains identify themselves with many labels.
• Clinical psychologists evaluate and treat mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders.
  • Clinical psychologists treat people with temporary psychological crises like grief, addiction, or social issues and those with chronic psychiatric disorders.
  • Clinical psychologists can specialize in children, the elderly, or specific disorders or work with a wide range of populations. Hospitals, community health centers, and private practice employ them.
• Counseling psychologists help people adapt to change or make changes in their lifestyle.
  • Counseling psychologists are similar to clinical psychologists, but they focus more on lifestyle changes than psychological disorders.
  • Schools, universities, community mental health centers, and private practice employ these psychologists.
• Developmental psychologists study psychological development throughout the life span.
  • They study intellectual, social, emotional, and moral development.
  • Some specialize in adolescence or geriatrics.
  • Developmental psychologists work in schools, daycare centers, social service agencies, and senior and geriatric facilities.
• Educational psychologists focus on how effective teaching and learning take place.
  • They study human learning and create materials and strategies to improve it.
  • Universities, labs, and publishers employ educational psychologists.
• Forensic psychologists apply psychological principles to legal issues.
  • They are concerned with the numerous facets of the law, such as determining a defendant’s competence to stand trial, or whether a victim has suffered psychological or neurological trauma.
• Health/positive psychologists concentrate on biological, psychological, and social factors involved in health and illness.
  • They focus on psychology's role in health promotion and illness prevention and treatment.
  • This may include creating and promoting programs to help people quit smoking, diet, manage stress, and exercise.
  • Hospitals, rehabilitation centers, public health agencies, and private practice employ them.
• Industrial/organizational psychologists aim to improve productivity and the quality of work life by applying psychological principles and methods to the workplace.
  • They manage organizational efficiency through human resources.
  • Organizational psychology emphasizes employee well-being and development, while industrial psychology emphasizes performance appraisals, job design, and selection and training.
  • Business, factories, and research facilities employ I/O psychologists.
• Neuropsychologists explore the relationships between brain/nervous systems and behavior.
  • Biological psychologists, biopsychologists, behavioral geneticists, physiological psychologists, and behavioral neuroscientists are neuropsychologists.
  • They study biochemical mechanisms, brain structure and function, and emotional chemical and physical changes.
  • They can diagnose and treat brain and nervous system dysfunction-related behavior.
  • Hospitals have most doctoral and postdoctoral positions.
• Psychometricians, sometimes called psychometric psychologists or measurement psychologists, focus on methods for acquiring and analyzing psychological data.
  • Psychometrists can create and modify intelligence, personality, and aptitude tests.
  • They may help psychology and other researchers design and interpret experiments.
  • They work in universities, testing centers, research firms, and government agencies.
• Social psychologists focus on how a person’s mental life and behavior are shaped by interactions with other people.
  • They study how others influence our thoughts, feelings, and actions.
  • Hospitals, federal agencies, and businesses are hiring social psychologists for applied research.

Experimental Method

The Controlled Experiment

• The laboratory tests hypotheses, predictions of how two or more factors are likely to be related.
• Variables are factors with multiple values.
• In a scientific experiment, the researcher controls a variable and observes the response.
• The researcher manipulates the independent variable (IV).
• The dependent variable (DV) is the factor that may change as a result of manipulating the independent variable.
• The researcher can draw the conclusion that the change in the independent variable caused the change in the dependent variable if the dependent variable changes when only the independent variable is changed.
• The independent variable causes the dependent variable.
• Only a controlled experiment can prove cause-and-effect.
• The population includes all the individuals in the group to which the study applies
• Sample:  a subgroup of the population.
• Random selection can be achieved by putting all the names in a hat and picking out a specified number of names, by alphabetizing the roster of enrollees and choosing every fifth name, or by using a table of random numbers to choose participants.
• Experimental group: receives the treatment
• Control group: does not receive the treatment.
• Between-subjects design:  The participants in the experimental and control groups are different individuals.
• Random assignment of participants to the experimental and control groups minimizes the existence of preexisting differences between the two groups.
• Confounding variables:  Differences between the experimental group and the control group other than those resulting from the independent variable.
• Subjects: attend the same two sessions upon which the quiz is based.
• Operational definition describes the specific procedure used to determine the presence of a variable.

Eliminating Confounding Variables

• Experimenter bias (also called the experimenter expectancy effect) is a phenomenon that occurs when a researcher’s expectations or preferences about the outcome of a study influence the results obtained.

• Demand characteristics:  The clues participants discover about the purpose of the study, including rumors they hear about the study suggesting how they should respond.

• Single-blind procedure, a research design in which the participants don’t know which treatment group—experimental or control—they are in.

• Double-blind procedure, a research design in which neither the experimenter nor the participants know who is in the experimental group and who is in the control group.

• Placebo:  The imitation pill, injection, patch, or other treatment

• Placebo effect is now used to describe any cases when experimental participants change their behavior in the absence of any kind of experimental manipulation.

• Within-subjects design: A research design that uses each participant as his or her own control.

• Counterbalancing, a procedure that assigns half the subjects to one of the treatments first and the other half of the subjects to the other treatment first.

• Quasi-Experimental Research: Quasi-experimental research designs are similar to controlled experiments, but participants are not randomly assigned.

• Correlational Research:  Correlational methods look at the relationship between two variables without establishing cause-and-effect relationships.

  • The goal is to determine to what extent one variable predicts the other.

• Naturalistic Observation: Naturalistic observation is carried out in the field where naturally occurring behavior can be observed.

  • Naturalistic observation studies gather descriptive information about typical behavior of people or animals without manipulating any variables.

• Survey Method:  researchers use questionnaires or interviews to ask a large number of people questions about their behaviors, thoughts, and attitudes.

• Retrospective or ex post facto studies look at an effect and seek the cause.

• Test Method:  Tests are procedures used to measure attributes of individuals at a particular time and place.

  • Like surveys, tests can be used to gather huge amounts of information relatively quickly and cheaply.
  • Results of tests can be used for correlational analysis or for generating ideas for other research.

• Reliability is consistency or repeatability.

• Validity is the extent to which an instrument measures or predicts what it is supposed to.

• Case Study:  is an in-depth examination of a specific group or single person that typically includes interviews, observations, and test scores.

• Elementary Statistics: Statistics is a field that involves the analysis of numerical data about representative samples of populations.

  • A large amount of data can be collected in research studies.

• Descriptive Statistics:  Numbers that summarize a set of research data obtained from a sample.

• Frequency distribution, an orderly arrangement of scores indicating the frequency of each score or group of scores.

• Histogram—a bar graph from the frequency distribution

• Frequency polygon—a line graph that replaces the bars with single points and connects the points with a line.

  

Measures of Central Tendency

• Measures of central tendency describe the average or most typical scores for a set of research data or distribution.
• The mode is the most frequently occurring score in a set of research data. If two scores appear most frequently, the distribution is bimodal; if three or more scores appear most frequently, the distribution is multimodal.
• The median is the middle score when the set of data is ordered by size.
• The mean is the arithmetic average of the set of scores.
• The normal distribution or normal curve is a symmetric, bell-shaped curve that represents data about how many human characteristics are dispersed in the population.
• Distributions where most of the scores are squeezed into one end are skewed.

Measures of Variability

• Variability describes the spread or dispersion of scores for a set of research data or distribution.
• The range is the largest score minus the smallest score.
• Variance and standard deviation (SD) indicate the degree to which scores differ from each other and vary around the mean value for the set.

Correlation

• Scores can be reported in different ways.
• One example is the standard score or z score.
• Standard scores enable psychologists to compare scores that are initially on different scales.
• Percentile score, indicates the percentage of scores at or below a particular score.
• A statistical measure of the degree of relatedness or association between two sets of data, X and Y, is called the correlation coefficient.
• The strength and direction of correlations can be illustrated graphically in scattergrams or scatterplots in which paired X and Y scores for each subject are plotted as single points on a graph.

Inferential Statistics

• Inferential statistics are used to interpret data and draw conclusions.
• They tell psychologists whether or not they can generalize from the chosen sample to the whole population, if the sample actually represents the population.
• Statistical significance (p) is a measure of the likelihood that the  difference between groups results from a real difference between the two groups rather than from chance alone.
• Meta-analysis provides a way of statistically combining the results of individual research studies to reach an overall conclusion.

Ethical Guidelines

• The American Psychological Association (APA) lists ethical principles and code of conduct for the scientific, educational, or professional roles for all psychologists.
• They include psychology practice, research, teaching, and trainee supervision.
• They also include all aspects of their performance in public service, policy development, social intervention, and development and conduction of assessments, to name but a few.
• The code applies to all communications, including phone, social media, and in-person.
• Discuss intellectual property frankly: The “publish-or-perish” mindset can lead to trouble when it comes to determining credit for authorship.
  • The best way to avoid disagreements, according to the APA, is to discuss these issues openly at the start of a working relationship, even though many people often feel uncomfortable about such topics.
• Be conscious of multiple roles: This includes avoiding relationships that could negatively affect professional performance or exploit or harm others.
  • Participation in a study should be voluntary, and not coerced or influenced as part of a grade, raise, or promotion.
• Follow informed consent rules such as IRBs, which ensure that individuals are voluntarily participating in the research with full knowledge of relevant risks and benefits.
  • The purpose, expected duration, and procedures of the research.
  • Their rights to decline to participate and withdraw from the research once it has begun, as well as consequences, if any, of doing so.
  • Factors that might influence their willingness to participate, such as possible risks, discomfort, or adverse effects.
  • Any possible research benefits.
  • Limits of confidentiality and when that confidentiality must be broken.
  • Incentives for participation, if any.

Unit 2: Biological Bases of Behavior

Techniques to Learn About Structure and Function

• Paul Broca (1861) performed an autopsy on the brain of a patient, nicknamed Tan, who had lost the capacity to speak, although his mouth and his vocal cords weren’t damaged and he could still understand language.
• Tan’s brain showed deterioration of part of the frontal lobe of the left cerebral hemisphere, as did the brains of several similar cases.
• This connected destruction of the part of the left frontal lobe known as Broca’s area to loss of the ability to speak, known as expressive aphasia.
• Carl Wernicke similarly found another brain area involved in understanding language in the left temporal lobe.
• Destruction of Wernicke’s area results in loss of the ability to comprehend written and spoken language, known as receptive aphasia.
• Lesions, precise destruction of brain tissue, enabled more systematic study of the loss of function resulting from surgical removal (also called ablation), cutting of neural connections, or destruction by chemical applications.
• Studies by Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga of patients with these “split brains” have revealed that the left and right hemispheres do not perform exactly the same functions (brain lateralization) that the hemispheres specialize in.
• Computerized axial tomography (CAT or CT) creates a computerized image using X-rays passed through various angles of the brain showing two-dimensional “slices” that can be arranged to show the extent of a lesion.
• In magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a magnetic field and pulses of radio waves cause the emission of faint radio frequency signals that depend upon the density of the tissue.

Measuring Brain Function

• An EEG (electroencephalogram) is an amplified tracing of brain activity produced when electrodes positioned over the scalp transmit signals about the brain’s electrical activity (“brain waves”) to an electroencephalograph machine.
• The amplified tracings are called evoked potentials when the recorded change in voltage results from a response to a specific stimulus presented to the subject.
• Positron emission tomography (PET) produces color computer graphics that depend on the amount of metabolic activity in the imaged brain region.
• Functional MRI (fMRI) shows the brain at work at higher resolution than the PET scanner.
  • Changes in oxygen in the blood of an active brain area alters its magnetic qualities, which is recorded by the fMRI scanner.
• A magnetic source image (MSI), which is produced by magnetoencephalography (MEG scan), is similar to an EEG, but the MEG scans are able to detect the slight magnetic field caused by the electric potentials in the brain.

Organization of Your Nervous System

• Central nervous system: consists of your brain and your spinal cord.
• Peripheral nervous system : includes two major subdivisions: your somatic nervous system and your autonomic nervous system.
• Your peripheral nervous system lies outside the midline portion of your nervous system carrying sensory information to and motor information away from your central nervous system via spinal and cranial nerves.
• Somatic nervous system: has motor neurons that stimulate skeletal (voluntary) muscle.
• Autonomic nervous system: has motor neurons that stimulate smooth (involuntary) and heart muscle.
  • Your autonomic nervous system is subdivided into the antagonistic sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system.
• Sympathetic stimulation results in responses that help your body deal with stressful events including dilation of your pupils, release of glucose from your liver, dilation of bronchi, inhibition of digestive functions, acceleration of heart rate, secretion of adrenaline from your adrenal glands, acceleration of breathing rate, and inhibition of secretion of your tear glands.
• Parasympathetic stimulation calms your body following sympathetic stimulation by restoring digestive processes (salivation, peristalsis, enzyme secretion), returning pupils to normal pupil size, stimulating tear glands, and restoring normal bladder contractions.
• Spinal cord, protected by membranes called meninges and your spinal column of bony vertebrae, starts at the base of your back and extends upward to the base of your skull where it joins your brain.

The Brain

• According to one evolutionary model (triune brain), the human brain has three major divisions, overlapping layers with the most recent neural systems nearest the front and top.
• The reptilian brain, which maintains homeostasis and instinctive behaviors, roughly corresponds to the brainstem, which includes the medulla, pons, and cerebellum.
• The old mammalian brain roughly corresponds to the limbic system that includes the septum, hippocampus, amygdala, cingulate cortex, hypothalamus, and the thalamus, which are all important in controlling emotional behavior, some aspects of memory, and vision.
• The new mammalian brain or neocortex, synonymous with the cerebral cortex, accounts for about 80 percent of brain volume and is associated with the higher functions of judgment, decision making, abstract thought, foresight, hindsight and insight, language, and computing, as well as sensation and perception.
• The surface of your cortex has peaks called gyri and valleys called sulci, which form convolutions that increase the surface area of your cortex.
• Deeper valleys are called fissures.
• The last evolutionary development of the brain is the localization of functions on different sides of your brain.

Localization and Lateralization of the Brain’s Function

• Association areas are regions of the cerebral cortex that do not have specific sensory or  motor functions but are involved in higher mental functions, such as thinking, planning, remembering, and communicating.

  

• Medulla oblongata—regulates heart rhythm, blood flow, breathing rate, digestion, vomiting.

• Pons—includes portion of reticular activating system or reticular formation critical for arousal and wakefulness; sends information to and from medulla, cerebellum, and cerebral cortex.

• Cerebellum—controls posture, equilibrium, and movement.

• Basal ganglia—regulates initiation of movements, balance, eye movements, and posture, and functions in processing of implicit memories.

• Thalamus—relays visual, auditory, taste, and somatosensory information to/from appropriate areas of cerebral cortex.

• Hypothalamus—controls feeding behavior, drinking behavior, body temperature, sexual behavior, threshold for rage behavior, activation of the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, and secretion of hormones of the pituitary.

• Hippocampus—enables formation of new long-term memories.

• Cerebral cortex—center for higher-order processes such as thinking, planning, judgment; receives and processes sensory information and directs movement.

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• Plasticity: Although specific regions of the brain are associated with specific functions, if one region is damaged, the brain can reorganize to take over its function.

Structure and Function of the Neuron

• Glial cells guide the growth of developing neurons, help provide nutrition for and get rid of wastes of neurons, and form an insulating sheath around neurons that speeds conduction.
• The neuron is the basic unit of structure and function of your nervous system.
• The cell body (a.k.a. cyton or soma) contains cytoplasm and the nucleus, which directs synthesis of such substances as neurotransmitters.
• The dendrites are branching tubular processes capable of receiving information.
• The axon emerges from the cyton as a single conducting fiber (longer than a dendrite) that branches and ends in tips called terminal buttons, axon terminals, or synaptic knobs.
• The axon is usually covered by an insulating myelin sheath (formed by glial cells).
• Neurogenesis, the growth of new neurons, takes place throughout life.
• Neurotransmitters are chemicals stored in structures of the terminal buttons called synaptic vesicles.
• Dopamine stimulates the hypothalamus to synthesize hormones and affects alertness and movement.
• Glutamate is a major excitatory neurotransmitter involved in information processing throughout the cortex and especially memory formation in the hippocampus.
• Serotonin is associated with sexual activity, concentration and attention, moods, and emotions.
• Opioid peptides such as endorphins are often considered the brain’s own painkillers. Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) inhibits firing of neurons.
• Norepinephrine, also known as noradrenaline, is associated with attentiveness, sleeping, dreaming, and learning.
• Agonists may mimic a neurotransmitter and bind to its receptor site to produce the effect of the neurotransmitter.
• Antagonists block a receptor site, inhibiting the effect of the neurotransmitter or agonist.

Neuron Functions

• The neuron at rest is more negative inside the cell membrane relative to outside of the membrane.
• The neuron’s resting potential results from the selective permeability of its membrane and the presence of electrically charged particles called ions near the inside and outside surfaces of the membrane in different concentrations.
• When sufficiently stimulated (to threshold), a net flow of sodium ions into the cell causes a rapid change in potential across the membrane, known as the action potential.
• If stimulation is not strong enough, your neuron doesn’t fire. The strength of the action potential is constant whenever it occurs.
  • This is the all-or-none principle.
• The wave of depolarization and repolarization is passed along the axon to the terminal buttons, which release neurotransmitters.
• Spaces between segments of myelin are called nodes of Ranvier.
• When the axon is myelinated, conduction speed is increased since depolarizations jump from node to node.
  • This is called saltatory conduction.
• Excitatory, the neurotransmitters cause the neuron on the other side of the synapse to generate an action potential (to fire); other synapses are inhibitory, reducing or preventing neural impulses.

Reflex Action

• Reflex involves impulse conduction over a few (perhaps three) neurons. The path is called a reflex arc.
• Sensory or afferent neurons transmit impulses from your sensory receptors to the spinal cord or brain.
• Interneurons, located entirely within your brain and spinal cord, intervene between sensory and motor neurons.
• Motor or efferent neurons transmit impulses from your sensory or interneurons to muscle cells that contract or gland cells that secrete.
• Muscle and gland cells are called effectors.

The Endocrine System

• Your endocrine system consists of glands that secrete chemical messengers called hormones into your blood.
• The hormones travel to target organs where they bind to specific receptors.
• Endocrine glands include the pineal gland, hypothalamus, and pituitary gland in your brain; the thyroid and parathyroids in your neck; the adrenal glands atop your kidneys; pancreas near your stomach; and either testes or ovaries.
• Pineal Gland: endocrine gland in brain that produces melatonin that helps regulate circadian rhythms and is associated with seasonal affective disorder.
• Hypothalamus: portion of brain part that acts as endocrine gland and produces hormones that stimulate (releasing factors) or inhibit secretion of hormones by the pituitary.
• Pituitary Gland: endocrine gland in brain that produces stimulating hormones, which promote secretion by other glands including TSH (thyroid-stimulating hormone); ACTH (adrenocorticotropic hormone), which stimulates the adrenal glands; FSH (follicle stimulating hormone), which stimulates egg or sperm production; ADH (antidiuretic hormone) to help retain water in your body; and HGH (human growth hormone).
• Thyroid Gland: endocrine gland in neck that produces thyroxine, which stimulates and maintains metabolic activities.
• Parathyroids: endocrine glands in neck that produce parathyroid hormone, which helps maintain calcium ion level in blood necessary for normal functioning of neurons.
• Adrenal Glands: endocrine glands atop kidneys
• Pancreas: gland near stomach that secretes the hormones insulin and glucagon, which regulate blood sugar that fuels all behavioral processes.
• Ovaries and Testes: gonads in females and males, respectively, that produce hormones necessary for reproduction and development of secondary sex characteristics.

Genetics and Evolutionary Psychology

• The nature-nurture controversy deals with the extent to which heredity and the environment each influence behavior.
• Evolutionary psychologists study how natural selection favored behaviors that contributed to survival and the spread of our ancestors’ genes and may currently contribute to our survival into the next generations.
• Evolutionary psychologists look at universal behaviors shared by all people.

Genetics and Behavior

• Behavioral geneticists study the role played by our genes and our environment in mental ability, emotional stability, temperament, personality, interests, and so forth; they look at the causes of our individual differences.
• Identical twins are two individuals who share all of the same genes/heredity because they develop from the same fertilized egg or zygote; they are monozygotic twins.
• Fraternal twins are siblings that share about half of the same genes because they develop from two different fertilized eggs or zygotes; they are dizygotic twins.
• Heritability is the proportion of variation among individuals in a population that is due to genetic causes.

Transmission of Hereditary Characteristics

• Each DNA segment of a chromosome that determines a trait is a gene.
• Chromosomes carry information stored in genes to new cells during reproduction.
• Normal human body cells have 46 chromosomes, except for eggs and sperms that have 23 chromosomes.
• Turner syndrome have only one X sex chromosome (XO).
• Klinefelter’s syndrome arise from an XXY zygote.
• Males with Klinefelter’s tend to be passive. The presence of three copies of chromosome 21 results in the expression of Down syndrome.
• The genetic makeup for a trait of an individual is called its genotype.
• The expression of the genes is called its phenotype.
• If the genes are different, the expressed gene is called the dominant gene; the hidden gene is the recessive gene.
• Tay-Sachs syndrome produces progressive loss of nervous function and death in a baby.
• Albinism arises from a failure to synthesize or store pigment and also involves abnormal nerve pathways to the brain, resulting in quivering eyes and the inability to perceive depth or three-dimensionality with both eyes.
• Phenylketonuria (PKU) results in severe, irreversible brain damage unless the baby is fed a special diet low in phenylalanine within 30 days of birth; the infant lacks an enzyme to process this amino acid, which can build up and poison cells of the nervous system.
• Huntington’s disease is an example of a dominant gene defect that involves degeneration of the nervous system.
• A form of familial Alzheimer’s disease has been attributed to a gene on chromosome 21, but not all cases of Alzheimer’s disease are associated with that gene.

Levels of Consciousness

• Preconscious is the level of consciousness that is outside of awareness but contains feelings and memories that you can easily bring into conscious awareness.
• Nonconscious is the level of consciousness devoted to processes completely inaccessible to conscious awareness, such as blood flow, filtering of blood by kidneys, secretion of hormones, and lower-level processing of sensations, such as detecting edges, estimating size and distance of objects, recognizing patterns, and so forth.
• Unconscious, sometimes called the subconscious, is the level of consciousness that includes often unacceptable feelings, wishes, and thoughts not directly available to conscious awareness.
• Dual processing refers to processing information on conscious and unconscious levels at the same time.
• Unconsciousness is characterized by loss of responsiveness to the environment, resulting from disease, trauma, or anesthesia.

Sleep and Dreams

• Hypothalamus: systematically regulates changes in your body temperature, blood pressure, pulse, blood sugar levels, hormonal levels, and activity levels over the course of about a day.

• Circadian rhythm is a natural, internal process that regulates the sleep-wake cycle and repeats roughly every 24 hours.

  • It's also known as your body’s clock — it influences when you fall asleep and wake up.
  • Your circadian rhythm mainly responds to light and darkness in your environment.

• Sleep is a complex combination of states of consciousness, each with its own level of consciousness, awareness, responsiveness, and physiological arousal.

• Electroencephalograms (EEGs) can be recorded with electrodes on the surface of the skull.

• Hypnagogic state; you feel relaxed, fail to respond to outside stimuli, and begin the first stage of sleep, Non-REM-1.

• EEGs of NREM-1 sleep show theta waves, which are higher in amplitude and lower in frequency than alpha waves.

• As you pass into NREM-2, your EEG shows high-frequency bursts of brain activity (called sleep spindles) and K complexes.

• NREM-3 sleep EEG shows very high amplitude and very low-frequency delta waves.

• REM sleep (Rapid Eye Movement sleep) about 90 minutes after falling asleep.

• Nightmares are frightening dreams that occur during REM sleep.

• Lucid dreaming, the ability to be aware of and direct one’s dreams, has been used to help people make recurrent nightmares less frightening.

  

  

Interpretation of Dreams

• Freud tried to analyze dreams to uncover the unconscious desires (many of them sexual) and fears disguised in dreams.
  • He considered the remembered story line of a dream its manifest content, and the underlying meaning its latent content.
• Psychiatrists Robert McCarley and J. Alan Hobson proposed another theory of dreams called the activation-synthesis theory.
• Pons generates bursts of action potentials to the forebrain, which is activation.

Sleep Disorders

• Insomnia is the inability to fall asleep and/or stay asleep.
• Narcolepsy is a condition in which an awake person suddenly and uncontrollably falls asleep, often directly into REM sleep.
• Sleep apnea is a sleep disorder characterized by temporary cessations of breathing that awaken the sufferer repeatedly during the night.
• Night terrors are most frequently childhood sleep disruptions from the deepest part of NREM-3 (formerly referred to as stage 4) sleep characterized by a bloodcurdling scream and intense fear.
• Sleepwalking, also called somnambulism, is also most frequently a childhood sleep disruption that occurs during deep NREM-3 sleep characterized by trips out of bed or carrying on complex activities.

Hypnosis

• Hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness characterized by deep relaxation and heightened suggestibility.
• Under hypnosis, subjects can change aspects of reality and let those changes influence their behavior.
• Hypnotized individuals may feel as if their bodies are floating or sinking; see, feel, hear, smell, or taste things that are not there; lose sense of touch or pain; be made to feel like they are passing back in time; act as if they are out of their own control; and respond to suggestions by others.
• According to the dissociation theory, hypnotized individuals experience two or more streams of consciousness cut off from each other.

Meditation

• Meditation is a set of techniques used to focus concentration away from thoughts and feelings in order to create calmness, tranquility, and inner peace.
• Meditation is popular in Asia, where Zen Buddhists meditate.
• EEGs of meditators show alpha waves characteristic of relaxed wakefulness.

Drugs

• Psychoactive drugs are chemicals that can pass through the blood-brain barrier into the brain to alter perception, thinking, behavior, and mood, producing a wide range of effects from mild relaxation or increased alertness to vivid hallucinations.
• Psychological dependence develops when the person has an intense desire to achieve the drugged state in spite of adverse effects.
• Tolerance: decreasing responsivity to a drug
• Physiological dependence or addiction develops when changes in brain chemistry from taking the drug necessitate taking the drug again to prevent withdrawal symptoms.
• Withdrawal symptoms include intense craving for the drug and effects opposite to those the drug usually induces.
• Depressants are psychoactive drugs that reduce the activity of the central nervous system and induce relaxation.
  • Depressants include sedatives, such as barbiturates, tranquilizers, and alcohol.
• Narcotics are analgesics (pain reducers) that work by depressing the central nervous system.
  • They can also depress the respiratory system.
• Stimulants are psychoactive drugs that activate motivational centers and reduce activity in inhibitory centers of the central nervous system by increasing activity of serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine neurotransmitter systems.
• Hallucinogens, also called psychedelics, are a diverse group of psychoactive drugs that alter moods, distort perceptions, and evoke sensory images in the absence of sensory input.

Unit 3: Sensation and Perception

Thresholds

• Absolute threshold, the weakest level of a stimulus that can be correctly detected at least half the time.
• According to signal detection theory, there is no actual absolute threshold because the threshold changes with a variety of factors, including fatigue, attention, expectations, motivation, and emotional distress.
• Subliminal stimulation is the receipt of messages that are below one’s absolute threshold for conscious awareness.
  • Subliminal messages can have a momentary, subtle effect on thinking.
• Difference threshold—the minimum difference between any two stimuli that a person can detect 50 percent of the time—has been reached.
• According to Weber’s law, which was quantified by Gustav Fechner, difference thresholds increase in proportion to the size of the stimulus.
• Sensory adaptation permits you to focus your attention on informative changes in your environment without being distracted by irrelevant data such as odors or background noises.

Transmission of Sensory Information

• Transduction refers to the transformation of stimulus energy to the electrochemical energy of neural impulses.
• Perception is the process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting sensations, enabling you to recognize meaningful objects and events.

Vision

• Since most people rely on sight, psychologists study visual perception.
• The retina's cones and rods, the brain's pathways, and the visual cortex in the occipital lobes are where visual sensation and perception begin.
• Your retinal image is upside-down and incomplete. Your brain instantly corrects the upside-down image.

Visual Pathway

• Millions of rods and cones are the photoreceptors that convert light energy to electrochemical neural impulses.

• Your eyeball is protected by an outer membrane composed of the sclera, tough, white, connective tissue that contains the opaque white of the eye, and the cornea, the transparent tissue in the front of your eye.

• Rays of light entering your eye are bent first by the curved transparent cornea, pass through the liquid aqueous humor and the hole through your muscular iris called the pupil, are further bent by the lens, and pass through your transparent vitreous humor before focusing on the rods and cones in the back of your eye.

  

• Nearsighted if too much curvature of the cornea and/or lens focuses an image in front of the Farsighted if too little curvature of the cornea and/or lens focuses the image behind the retina so distant objects are seen more clearly than nearby ones.

• Astigmatism is caused by an irregularity in the shape of the cornea and/or the lens.

• Dark adaptation:  When it suddenly becomes dark, your gradual increase in sensitivity to the low level of light

• Bipolar cells: Rods and cones both synapse with a second layer of neurons in front of them in your retina.

• Bipolar cells transmit impulses to another layer of neurons in front of them in your retina, the ganglion cells.

• Blind spot: Where the optic nerve exits the retina, there aren’t any rods or cones, so the part of an image that falls on your retina in that area is missing.

• Feature detectors:  The thalamus then routes information to the primary visual cortex of your brain, where specific neurons

• Parallel processing: Simultaneous processing of stimulus elements

Color Vision

• The colors of objects you see depend on the wavelengths of light reflected from those objects to your eyes.
• Light is the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.
• The colors vary in wavelength from the longest (red) to the shortest (violet).
• A wavelength is the distance from the top of one wave to the top of the next wave.
• In the 1800s, Thomas Young and Hermann von Helmholtz accounted for color vision with the trichromatic theory that three different types of photoreceptors are each most sensitive to a different range of wavelengths.
• People with three different types of cones are called trichromats; with two different types, dichromats; and with only one, monochromats.
• People who are color-blind lack a chemical usually produced by one or more types of cones.
• According to Ewald Hering’s opponent-process theory, certain neurons can be either excited or inhibited, depending on the wavelength of light, and complementary wavelengths have opposite effects.

Hearing (Audition)

• Hearing is the primary sensory modality for human language.
• Amplitude is measured in logarithmic units of pressure called decibels (dB).
• Pitch: determine the highness or lowness of the sound
• You can tell the difference between the notes of the same pitch and loudness played on a flute and on a violin because of a difference in the purity of the wave form or mixture of the sound waves, a difference in timbre.

Ear

• The pinna, auditory canal, and tympanum make up your outer ear.
• The eardrum vibrates with sound waves from the outer ear.
• The middle ear's ossicles—the hammer, anvil, and stirrup—vibrate.
• The vibrating stirrup hits the inner ear's cochlea oval window.
• A basilar membrane with hair cells bends vibrations and converts them to neural impulses.
• Auditory neurons form the auditory nerve by synapsing with hair cells.
• The auditory nerve sends sound to the temporal lobe auditory cortex via the medulla, pons, and thalamus.
• The medulla and pons cross most auditory nerve fibers, so your auditory cortex receives input from both ears, but contralateral input dominates.
• The process by which you determine the location of a sound is called sound localization.
• According to Georg von Békésy’s place theory, the position on the basilar membrane at which waves reach their peak depends on the frequency of a tone.
• According to frequency theory, the rate of the neural impulses traveling up the auditory nerve matches the frequency of a tone, enabling you to sense its pitch.
• Conduction deafness is a loss of hearing that results when the eardrum is punctured or any of the ossicles lose their ability to vibrate.
• Nerve (sensorineural) deafness results from damage to the cochlea, hair cells, or auditory neurons.
• Somatosensation as a general term for four classes of tactile sensations: touch/pressure, warmth, cold, and pain.
• Itching results from repeated gentle stimulation of pain receptors, a tickle results from repeated stimulation of touch receptors, and the sensation of wetness results from simultaneous stimulation of adjacent cold and pressure receptors.
• Touch is necessary for normal development and promotes a sense of well-being.
• Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall’s gate-control theory attempts to explain the experience of pain.
  • You experience pain only if the pain messages can pass through a gate in the spinal cord on their route to the brain.

Body Senses

• Kinesthesis is the system that enables you to sense the position and movement of individual parts of your body.
• Sensory receptors for kinesthesis are nerve endings in your muscles, tendons, and joints.
• Your vestibular sense is your sense of equilibrium or body orientation.

Chemical Senses

• Gustation (taste) and olfaction (smell) are called chemical senses because the stimuli are molecules.
• Your chemical senses are important systems for warning and attraction.
• You won’t eat rotten eggs or drink sour milk, and you can smell smoke before a sensitive household smoke detector.
• Taste receptor cells are most concentrated not only on your tongue in taste buds embedded in tissue called fungiform papillae, but are also on the roof of your mouth and the opening of your throat.
• Tasters have an average number of taste buds, nontasters have fewer taste buds, and supertasters have the most.
• Supertasters are more sensitive than others to bitter, spicy foods and alcohol, which they find unpleasant.

Attention

• Selective attention: You focus your awareness on only a limited aspect of all you are capable of experiencing.
• Bottom-up processing: your sensory receptors detect external stimulation and send these raw data to the brain for analysis.
• Top-down processing takes what you already know about particular stimulation, what you remember about the context in which it usually appears, and how you label and classify it, to give meaning to your perceptions.
• Visual capture:  Where you perceive a conflict among senses, vision usually dominates.

Gestalt Organizing Principles of Form Perception

• Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Kohler studied how the mind organizes sensations into perceptions of meaningful patterns or forms, called a gestalt in German.

• Phi phenomenon, which is the illusion of movement created by presenting visual stimuli in rapid succession.

• Figure–ground relationship: The figure is the dominant object, and the ground is the natural and formless setting for the figure.

• Proximity, the nearness of objects to each other, is an organizing principle.

• Principle of closure states that we tend to fill in gaps in patterns.

  • The closure principle is not limited to vision.

• Principle of similarity states that like stimuli tend to be perceived as parts of the same pattern.

• Principle of continuity or continuation states that we tend to group stimuli into forms that follow continuous lines or patterns.

  

• Optical or visual illusions are discrepancies between the appearance of a visual stimulus and its physical reality.

• Visual illusions, such as reversible figures, illustrate the mind’s tendency to separate figure and ground in the absence of sufficient cues for deciding which is which.

Depth Perception

• Depth perception is the ability to judge the distance of objects.
• Monocular cues are clues about distance based on the image of one eye, whereas binocular cues are clues about distance requiring two eyes.
• Retinal disparity, which is the slightly different view the two eyes have of the same object because the eyes are a few centimeters apart.
• Motion parallax involves images of objects at different distances moving across the retina at different rates.
• Interposition or overlap can be seen when a closer object cuts off the view of part or all of a more distant one.
• Relative size of familiar objects provides a cue to their distance when the closer of two same-size objects casts a larger image on your retina than the farther one.
• Relative clarity can be seen when closer objects appear sharper than more distant, hazy objects.
• Texture gradient provides a cue to distance when closer objects have a coarser, more distinct texture than faraway objects that appear more densely packed or smooth.
• Relative height or elevation can be seen when the objects closest to the horizon appear to be the farthest from you.
• Linear perspective provides a cue to distance when parallel lines, such as edges of sidewalks, seem to converge in the distance.
• Relative brightness can be seen when the closer of two identical objects reflects more light to your eyes.
• Optical illusions, such as the Müller-Lyer illusion and the Ponzo illusion, in which two identical horizontal bars seems to differ in length, may occur because distance cues lead one line to be judged as farther away than the other.

Perceptual Constancy

• As a car approaches, you know that it’s not growing in size, even though the image it casts on your retina gets larger, because you impose stability on the constantly changing sensations you experience.
• Three perceptual constancies are size constancy,  by which an object appears to stay the same size despite changes in the size of the image it casts on the retina as it moves farther away or closer; shape constancy, by which an object appears to maintain its normal shape regardless of the angle from which it is viewed; and brightness constancy, by which an object maintains a particular level of brightness regardless of the amount of light reflected from it.

Perceptual Adaptation and Perceptual Set

• If you repeated your actions, you probably reached the item quickly.
• Blind people who become sighted can immediately distinguish colors and figure from ground, but it takes time to recognize shapes.
• Cultural assumptions and beliefs affect visual perception.
• You must be familiar with the object and have seen it in the distance to use relative size.

Culture and Experience

• Your perceptual set or mental predisposition can influence what you perceive when you look at ambiguous stimuli.
• Your perceptual set is determined by the schemas you form as a result of your experiences.
• Schemas are concepts or frameworks that organize and interpret information.

Unit 4: Learning

Classical Conditioning

• In classical conditioning: the subject learns to give a response it already knows to a new stimulus.
  • The subject associates a new stimulus with a stimulus that automatically and involuntarily brings about the response.
• Stimulus is a change in the environment that elicits (brings about) a response.
• Response: is a reaction to a stimulus.
• Neutral stimulus (NS): initially does not elicit a response.
• Unconditioned stimulus (UCS or US): reflexively, or automatically, brings about the unconditioned response (UCR or UR).
• Conditioned stimulus (CS): is a NS at first, but when paired with the UCS, it elicits the conditioned response (CR).
• Aversive conditioning:  Conditioning involving an unpleasant or harmful unconditioned stimulus or reinforcer, such as this conditioning of Baby Albert.
• Spontaneous recovery:  Although not fully understood by behaviorists, sometimes the extinguished response will show up again later without the re-pairing of the UCS and CS.
• Generalization: occurs when stimuli similar to the CS also elicit the CR without any training.
• Discrimination occurs when only the CS produces the CR.
• Higher-Order Conditioning: Higher-order conditioning, also called second-order or secondary conditioning, occurs when a well-learned CS is paired with an NS to produce a CR to the NS.
  • In this conditioning, the old CS acts as a UCS.
• Operant Conditioning: In operant conditioning, an active subject voluntarily emits behaviors and can learn new behaviors.
  • The connection is made between the behavior and its consequence, whether pleasant or not.

Thorndike’s Instrumental Conditioning

• Instrumental learning: is a type of learning that involves the acquisition and use of skills or strategies to achieve a specific goal. It can involve trial-and-error processes, imitation, reinforcement, modeling, memorization and more.
• Law of Effect: states that behaviors followed by satisfying or positive consequences are strengthened (more likely to occur), while behaviors followed by annoying or negative consequences are weakened (less likely to occur).

B. F. Skinner’s Training Procedures

• Positive reinforcement: or reward training, emission of a behavior or response is followed by a reinforcer that increases the probability that the response will occur again.
• Premack principle: a more probable behavior can be used as a reinforcer for a less probable one.
• Negative reinforcement: takes away an aversive or unpleasant consequence after a behavior has been given.
• Punishment training: a learner’s response is followed by an aversive consequence.
• Omission training: In this training procedure, a response by the learner is followed by taking away something of value from the learner.

Operant Aversive Conditioning

• Aversive conditioning: is a type of learning in which an organism learns to associate an unpleasant stimulus with a particular behavior.
  • This type of conditioning works by creating an association between the behavior and some sort of punishment or discomfort, so that the organism will be less likely to do it again.
• Avoidance behavior: takes away the aversive stimulus before it begins.

Reinforcers

• Primary reinforcer: is something that is biologically important and, thus, rewarding.
• Secondary reinforcer: is something neutral that, when associated with a primary reinforcer, becomes rewarding.
• Generalized reinforcer: is a secondary reinforcer that can be associated with a number of different primary reinforcers.
• Token economy: has been used extensively in institutions such as mental hospitals and jails.

Teaching a New Behavior

• Shaping: positively reinforcing closer and closer approximations of the desired behavior, is an effective way of teaching a new behavior.
• Chaining: is used to establish a specific sequence of behaviors by initially positively reinforcing each behavior in a desired sequence and then later rewarding only the completed sequence.

Schedules of Reinforcement

• Continuous reinforcement: is the schedule that provides reinforcement every time the behavior is exhibited by the organism.
• Partial reinforcement: schedules based on the number of desired responses are ratio schedules.
• Interval schedules: Schedules based on time.
• Fixed ratio: schedules reinforce the desired behavior after a specific number of responses have been made.
• Fixed interval: schedules reinforce the first desired response made after a specific length of time.
• Variable ratio: schedule, the number of responses needed before reinforcement occurs changes at random around an average.
• Variable interval: schedule, the amount of time that elapses before reinforcement of the behavior changes.
• fixed ratio schedule—know how much behavior for reinforcement
• fixed interval schedule—know when behavior is reinforced
• variable ratio schedule—how much behavior for reinforcement changes
• variable interval schedule—when behavior for reinforcement changes

Cognitive Processes in Learning

• Behaviorists included John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner.
• Only observable behaviors, antecedents, and consequences were studied.
• Since they couldn't measure thought processes, they ignored them.
• They believed nurture shaped behavior (the environment).

The Contingency Model

• Pavlov’s view of classical conditioning is called the contiguity model.
  • He believed that the close time between the CS and the US was most important for making the connection between the two stimuli and that the CS eventually substituted for the US.
• Cognitivist Robert Rescorla: suggesting a contingency model of classical conditioning that the CS tells the organism that the US will follow.
• Latent Learning:  is defined as learning in the absence of rewards.
• Insight is the sudden appearance of an answer or solution to a problem.
• Social Learning: which occurs by watching the behavior of a model.

Biological Factors in Learning

• Mirror neurons in the premotor cortex and other temporal and parietal lobes support observational learning.
• Both doing and watching an action activates neurons.
• These neurons convert the sight of someone else's action into the motor program you would use to do the same and feel similar emotions, the basis for empathy.

Preparedness Evolves

• Conditioned taste aversion: an intense dislike and avoidance of a food because of its association with an unpleasant or painful stimulus through backward conditioning.
• Preparedness: means that through evolution, animals are biologically predisposed to easily learn behaviors related to their survival as a species, and that behaviors contrary to an animal’s natural tendencies are learned slowly or not at all.
• Instinctive drift: a conditioned response that drifts back toward the natural (instinctive) behavior of the organism.

Unit 5: Cognition

Models of Memory

Information Processing Model

• Information processing model: compares our mind to a computer.
• Encoded when our sensory receptors send impulses that are registered by neurons in our brain, similar to getting electronic information into our computer’s CPU (central processing unit) by keyboarding.
• Store and retain the information in our brain for some period, ranging from a moment to a lifetime, similar to saving information in our computer’s hard drive.
• Retrieved upon demand when it is needed, similar to opening up a document or application from the hard drive.
• Donald Broadbent: modeled human memory and thought processes using a flowchart that showed competing information filtered out early, as it is received by the senses and analyzed in the stages of memory.
• Attention: is the mechanism by which we restrict information.
  • Trying to attend to one task over another requires selective or focused attention.
  • We have great difficulty when we try to attend to two complex tasks at once requiring divided attention, such as listening to different conversations or driving and texting.
• According to Anne Treisman’s feature integration theory, you must focus attention on complex incoming auditory or visual information in order to synthesize it into a meaningful pattern.

Levels-of-Processing Model

• According to Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart’s levels-of-processing theory: how long and how well we remember information depends on how deeply we process the information when it is encoded.
• Shallow processing: we use structural encoding of superficial sensory information that emphasizes the physical characteristics, such as lines and curves, of the stimulus as it first comes in.
• Semantic encoding: associated with deep processing, emphasizes the meaning of verbal input.
• Deep processing: occurs when we attach meaning to information and create associations between the new memory and existing memories (elaboration).

Three-Stage Model

• Atkinson–Shiffrin three-stage model of memory: describes three different memory systems characterized by time frames: sensory memory, short-term memory (STM), and long-term memory.
• Sensory memory: visual or iconic memory that completely represents a visual stimulus lasts for less than a second, just long enough to ensure that we don’t see gaps between frames in a motion picture.
• Auditory or echoic memory lasts for about 4 seconds, just long enough for us to hear a flow of information.
• Selective attention: focusing of awareness on a specific stimulus in sensory memory, determines which very small fraction of information perceived in sensory memory is encoded into short-term memory.
• Automatic processing: is unconscious encoding of information about space, time, and frequency that occurs without interfering with our thinking about other things.
• Parallel processing: a natural mode of information processing that involves several information streams simultaneously.
• Effortful processing: is encoding that requires our focused attention and conscious effort.

Short-Term Memory

• Short-term memory (STM): can hold a limited amount of information for about 30 seconds unless it is processed further.
• Chunk: can be a word rather than individual letters or a date rather than individual numbers.
• Alan Baddeley’s: working memory model involves much more than chunking, rehearsal, and passive storage of information.
• Working memory model: is an active three-part memory system that temporarily holds information and consists of a phonological loop, visuospatial working memory, and the central executive.

Long-Term Memory

• Long-term memory (LTM): is the relatively permanent and practically unlimited capacity memory system into which information from short-term memory may pass.
• Explicit memory: also called declarative memory, is our LTM of facts and experiences we consciously know and can verbalize.
• Semantic memory of facts and general knowledge, and episodic memory of personally experienced events.
• Implicit memory: also called non-declarative memory, is our LTM for skills and procedures to do things affected by previous experience without that experience being consciously recalled.
• Procedural memories: are tasks that we perform automatically without thinking, such as tying our shoelaces or swimming.
• Prospective memory: is our memory to perform a planned action or remembering to perform that planned action.

Organization of Memories

• Hierarchies: are systems in which concepts are arranged from more general to more specific classes.
• Concepts: can be simple or complex.
• Prototypes: which are the most typical examples of the concept.
• Semantic networks: are more irregular and distorted systems than strict hierarchies, with multiple links from one concept to others.
• Dr. Steve Kosslyn: showed that we seem to scan a visual image of a picture (mental map) in our mind when asked questions.
• Schemas: are preexisting mental frameworks that start as basic operations and then get more and more complex as we gain additional information.
• Script: is a schema for an event.
• Connectionism: theory states that memory is stored throughout the brain in connections between neurons, many of which work together to process a single memory.
• Artificial intelligence (AI): have designed the neural network or parallel processing model that emphasizes the simultaneous processing of information, which occurs automatically and without our awareness.
• Neural network: computer models are based on neuronlike systems, which are biological rather than artificially contrived computer codes; they can learn, adapt to new situations, and deal with imprecise and incomplete information.

Biology of Long-Term Memory

• Long-term potentiation (or LTP):  involves an increase in the efficiency with which signals are sent across the synapses within neural networks of long-term memories.
• Flashbulb memory: a vivid memory of an emotionally arousing event, is associated with an increase of adrenal hormones triggering release of energy for neural processes and activation of the amygdala and the hippocampus involved in emotional memories.
• The role of the thalamus in memory seems to involve the encoding of sensory memory into short-term memory.
• The hippocampus, frontal and temporal lobes of the cerebral cortex, and other regions of the limbic system are involved in explicit long-term memory.
• Anterograde amnesia: the inability to put new information into explicit memory; no new semantic memories are formed.
• Retrograde amnesia: involves memory loss for a segment of the past, usually around the time of an accident, such as a blow to the head.
• The cerebellum is involved in implicit memory of skills, and studies involving patients with Parkinson’s disease have indicated involvement of basal ganglia in implicit memory too.

Retrieving Memories

• Retrieval: is the process of getting information out of memory storage.
• Multiple-choice questions require recognition, identification of learned items when they are presented.
• Fill-in and essay questions require recall, retrieval of previously learned information.
• Often the information we try to remember has missing pieces, which results in reconstruction, retrieval of memories that can be distorted by adding, dropping, or changing details to fit a schema.
• Hermann Ebbinghaus: experimentally investigated the properties of human memory using lists of meaningless syllables.
  • He drew a learning curve.
  • He drew a forgetting curve that declined rapidly before slowing.
• Savings method: the amount of repetitions required to relearn the list compared to the amount of repetitions it took to learn the list originally.
• Overlearning effect:  Ebbinghaus also found that if he continued to practice a list after memorizing it well, the information was more resistant to forgetting.
• Serial position effect: When we try to retrieve a long list of words, we usually recall the last words and the first words best, forgetting the words in the middle.
• Primacy effect: refers to better recall of the first items, thought to result from greater rehearsal
• Recency effect: refers to better recall of the last items.
• Retrieval cues: can be other words or phrases in a specific hierarchy or semantic network, context, and mood or emotions.
• Priming: is activating specific associations in memory either consciously or unconsciously.
• Distributed practice: spreading out the memorization of information or the learning of skills over several sessions, facilitates remembering.
• Massed practice: cramming the memorization of information or the learning of skills into one session.
• Mnemonic devices: or memory tricks when encoding information, these devices will help us retrieve concepts.
• Method of loci: uses association of words on a list with visualization of places on a familiar path.
• Peg word mnemonic: requires us to first memorize a scheme.
• Context-dependent memory:  Our recall is often better when we try to recall information in the same physical setting in which we encoded it, possibly because along with the information, the environment is part of the memory trace
• Mood congruence: aids retrieval.
• State-dependent: things we learn in one internal state are more easily recalled when in the same state again.
• Forgetting:  may result from failure to encode information, decay of stored memories, or an inability to access information from LTM.
• Relearning: is a measure of retention of memory that assesses the time saved compared to learning the first time when learning information again.

Cues and Interference

• Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon:  Sometimes we know that we know something but can’t pull it out of memory.
• Interference:  Learning some items may prevent retrieving others, especially when the items are similar.
• Proactive interference: occurs when something we learned earlier disrupts recall of something we experience later.
• Retroactive interference: is the disruptive effect of new learning on the recall of old information.
• Sigmund Freud: believed that repression (unconscious forgetting) of painful memories occurs as a defense mechanism to protect our self-concepts and minimize anxiety.
• Misinformation effect: occurs when we incorporate misleading information into our memory of an event.
• Misattribution error:  Forgetting what really happened, or distortion of information at retrieval, can result when we confuse the source of information—putting words in someone else’s mouth—or remember something we see in the movies or on the Internet as actually having happened.
• Language: is a flexible system of spoken, written, or signed symbols that enables us to communicate our thoughts and feelings.

Building Blocks: Phonemes and Morphemes

• Language is made up of basic sound units called phonemes.
• Morphemes: are the smallest meaningful units of speech, such as simple words, prefixes, and suffixes.

Combination Rules

• Each language has a system of rules that determines how sounds and words can be combined and used to communicate meaning, called grammar.
• The set of rules that regulate the order in which words can be combined into grammatically sensible sentences in a language is called syntax.
• The set of rules that enables us to derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences is semantics.

Language Acquisition Stages

• Babbling is the production of phonemes, not limited to the phonemes to which the baby is exposed.
• Holophrase: one word—to convey meaning.
• Telegraphic speech:  they begin to put together two-word sentences.
• Overgeneralization: or overregularization in which children apply grammatical rules without making appropriate exceptions.

Theories of Language Acquisition

• Noam Chomsky says that our brains are prewired for a universal grammar of nouns, verbs, subjects, objects, negations, and questions.
• He compares our language acquisition capacity to a “language acquisition device,” in which grammar switches are turned on as children are exposed to their language.

Thinking

• Linguist Benjamin Whorf proposed a radical hypothesis that our language guides and determines our thinking.
  • He thought that different languages cause people to view the world quite differently.
• Linguistic relativity hypothesis: has largely been discredited by empirical research.
• Metacognition: thinking about how you think

Problem Solving

• Algorithm: is a problem-solving strategy that involves a slow, step-by-step procedure that guarantees a solution to many types of problems.
• Insight: is a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem.
• Trial-and-error approach: This approach involves trying possible solutions and discarding those that do not work.
• Inductive reasoning: involves reasoning from the specific to the general, forming concepts about all members of a category based on some members, which is often correct but may be wrong if the members we have chosen do not fairly represent all of the members.
• Deductive reasoning: involves reasoning from the general to the specific.

Obstacles to Problem Solving

• Fixation: is an inability to look at a problem from a fresh perspective, using a prior strategy that may not lead to success.
• Functional fixedness: a failure to use an object in an unusual way.
• Amos Tversky and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman studied how and why people make illogical choices.
• Availability heuristic: estimating the probability of certain events in terms of how readily they come to mind.
• Representative heuristic: a mental shortcut by which a new situation is judged by how well it matches a stereotypical model or a particular prototype.
• Framing: refers to the way a problem is posed.
• Anchoring effect: is this tendency to be influenced by a suggested reference point, pulling our response toward that point.

Biases

• Confirmation bias: is a tendency to search for and use information that supports our preconceptions and ignore information that refutes our ideas.
• Belief perseverance: is a tendency to hold onto a belief after the basis for the belief is discredited.
• Belief bias: the tendency for our preexisting beliefs to distort logical reasoning, making illogical conclusions seem valid or logical conclusions seem invalid.
• Hindsight bias: is a tendency to falsely report, after the event, that we correctly predicted the outcome of the event.
• Overconfidence bias: is a tendency to underestimate the extent to which our judgments are erroneous.

Creativity

• Creativity: is the ability to think about a problem or idea in new and unusual ways, to come up with unconventional solutions.
• Convergent thinkers: use problem-solving strategies directed toward one correct solution to a problem
• Divergent thinkers: produce many answers to the same question, characteristic of creativity.
• Brainstorm: generating lots of ideas without evaluating them.

Standardization and Norms

• Psychometricians: are involved in test development in order to measure some construct or behavior that distinguishes people.
• Constructs: are ideas that help summarize a group of related phenomena or objects; they are hypothetical abstractions related to behavior and defined by groups of objects or events.
• Standardization: is a two-part test development procedure that first establishes test norms from the test results of the large representative sample that initially took the test and then ensures that the test is both administered and scored uniformly for all test takers.
• Norms: are scores established from the test results of the representative sample, which are then used as a standard for assessing the performances of subsequent test takers; more simply, norms are standards used to compare scores of test takers.

Reliability and Validity

• If a test is reliable, we should obtain the same score no matter where, when, or how many times we take it (if other variables remain the same).
  • Several methods are used to determine if a test is reliable.
• Test-retest method: the same exam is administered to the same group on two different occasions, and the scores compared.
• Split-half method: the score on one half of the test questions is correlated with the score on the other half of the questions to see if they are consistent.
• Alternate form method or equivalent form method: two different versions of a test on the same material are given to the same test takers, and the scores are correlated.
• Interrater reliability: the extent to which two or more scorers evaluate the responses in the same way.
• Validity: is the extent to which an instrument accurately measures or predicts what it is supposed to measure or predict.

Performance, Observational, and Self-Report Tests

• Performance test: the test taker knows what he or she should do in response to questions or tasks on the test, and it is assumed that the test taker will do the best he or she can to succeed.
  • Performance tests include the SATs, AP tests, Wechsler intelligence tests, Stanford–Binet intelligence tests, and most classroom tests, including finals, as well as computer tests and road tests for a driver’s license.
• Observational tests: differ from performance tests in that the person being tested does not have a single, well-defined task to perform but rather is assessed on typical behavior or performance in a specific context.
• Speed tests: generally include a large number of relatively easy items administered with strict time limits under which most test takers find it impossible to answer all questions.

Ability, Interest, and Personality Tests

• General mental ability is particularly important in scholastic performance and in performing cognitively demanding tasks.
• Interests influence a person’s reactions to and satisfaction with his or her situation.
• Personality involves consistency in behavior over a wide range of situations.
• Aptitude tests are designed to predict a person’s future performance or to assess the person’s capacity to learn, and achievement tests are designed to assess what a person has already learned.

Ethics and Standards in Testing

• Tests: are developed and used ethically to avoid abuse.
• Numerous professional organizations, including the American Psychological Association, have published technical and professional standards for the construction, evaluation, interpretation, and application of psychological tests to promote the client's welfare and best interests, protect assessment results from misuse, respect the client's right to know the results, and protect test takers' dignity.
• Personnel testing: requires informed consent and confidentiality from psychologists.
• Professionals should use tests as intended.

Intelligence and Intelligence Testing

• Reification: occurs when a construct is treated as though it were a concrete, tangible object.
• Intelligence test developer David Wechsler said, “Intelligence, operationally defined, is the aggregate or global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment.”

Francis Galton’s Measurement of Psychophysical Performance

• Francis Galton: who measured psychomotor tasks to gauge intelligence, reasoning that people with excellent physical abilities are better adapted for survival and thus highly intelligent.
• James McKeen Cattell: brought Galton’s studies to the United States, measuring strength, reaction time, sensitivity to pain, and weight discrimination, using the term mental test.
• French psychologist Alfred Binet was hired by the French government to identify children who would not benefit from a traditional school setting and those who would benefit from special education.
  • He collaborated with Theodore Simon to create the Binet–Simon scale, which he meant to be used only for class placement.

Alfred Binet’s Measurement of Judgment

• Binet believed that as we age, our knowledge of the world becomes more sophisticated, so most 6-year-olds answer questions differently than 8-year-olds.
• Children were given a mental age or level based on their test responses.
• When a 6-year-old and an 8-year-old have mental ages 2 years below their chronological ages, it can be misleading.
• The younger child would lag behind peers more.
• German psychologist William Stern suggested determining a child's intelligence by comparing mental age (MA) to chronological age (CA).

Mental Age and the Intelligence Quotient

• Lewis Terman: developed the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scale reporting results as an IQ, intelligence quotient, which is the child’s mental age divided by his or her chronological age, multiplied by 100; or MA/CA × 100.

The Wechsler Intelligence Scales

• David Wechsler: developed another set of age-based intelligence tests: the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI) for preschool children, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) for ages 6 to 16, and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS ) for older adolescents and adults.

• Intellectual disability:  Test takers who fall two deviations below the mean have a score of 70

  

Intellectual Disability

• Over the past two decades, the term mental retardation has been replaced by intellectual disability (intellectual developmental disorder).
• To be considered intellectually disabled, an individual must earn a score at or below 70 on an IQ test and also show difficulty adapting in everyday life.
• Adaptive behavior: is expressed in conceptual skills, social skills, and practical skills.
• Severity: is determined by adaptive functioning rather than IQ score.

Kinds of Intelligence

• A contemporary of Alfred Binet, Charles Spearman, tested a large number of people on a number of different types of mental tasks.
• Factor analysis: a statistical procedure that identifies closely related clusters of factors among groups of items by determining which variables have a high degree of correlation.
• Louis Thurstone disagreed with Spearman’s concept of g.
• John Horn and Raymond Cattell determined that Spearman’s g should be divided into two factors of intelligences: fluid intelligence, those cognitive abilities requiring speed or rapid learning that tend to diminish with adult aging, and crystallized intelligence, learned knowledge and skills such as vocabulary that tend to increase with age.

Multiple Intelligences

• Howard Gardner: is one of the many critics of the g or single factor intelligence theory.
  • He has proposed a theory of multiple intelligences.
  • Three of his intelligences are measured on traditional intelligence tests: logical-mathematical, verbal-linguistic, and spatial.
  • Five of his intelligences are not usually tested on standardized tests: musical, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalistic, intrapersonal, and interpersonal.
  • Gardner has also introduced the possibility of a ninth intelligence—existential—which would be seen in those who ask questions about our existence, life, death, and how we got here.
• Savants: individuals otherwise considered mentally retarded, have a specific exceptional skill, typically in calculating, music, or art.
• Peter Salovey and John Mayer labeled the ability to perceive, express, understand, and regulate emotions as emotional intelligence.
• Triarchic theory of intelligence: analytic, creative, and practical.
• Analytical thinking: is what is tested by traditional IQ test and what we are asked to do in school—compare, contrast, analyze, and figure out cause and effect relationships.
• Creative intelligence: is evidenced by adaptive reactions to novel situations, showing insight, and being able to see more than one way to solve a problem.
• Practical intelligence: is what some people consider “street smarts.”

Creativity

• Creativity: the ability to generate ideas and solutions that are original, novel, and useful, is not usually measured by intelligence tests.
• According to the threshold theory, a certain level of intelligence is necessary, but not sufficient for creative work.

Heredity/Environment and Intelligence

• Down syndrome: is primarily hereditary, whereas intellectual disability resulting from prenatal exposure to alcohol
• Fetal alcohol syndrome: is primarily environmental.
• Phenylketonuria (PKU): results from the interaction of nature and nurture

Environmental Influences on Intelligence

• Flynn effect: cannot be attributed to a change in the human gene pool because that would take hundreds of years.
  • Theorists attribute the Flynn effect to a number of environmental factors, including better nutrition, better health care, advances in technology, smaller families, better parenting, and increased access to educational opportunities.
• Heritability: is the proportion of variation among individuals in a population that results from genetic causes.
• According to the reaction range model, genetic makeup determines the upper limit for an individual’s IQ, which can be attained in an ideal environment, and the lower limit, which would result in an impoverished environment.

Human Diversity

• Racial differences in IQ scores show African Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanic Americans typically scoring 10 to 15 points below the mean for white children.
• When comparing groups of people on any construct, such as intelligence, it is important to keep in mind the concept of within-group differences and between-group differences.
• The range of scores within a particular group, such as Hispanic Americans, is much greater than the difference between the mean scores of two different groups, such as Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans.

Stereotype Threat

• Stereotypes: are overgeneralized beliefs about the characteristics of members of a particular group, schema that are used to quickly judge others.
• Stereotype threat: anxiety that influences members of a group concerned that their performance on a test will confirm a negative stereotype, has been evidenced in studies by Steele, Joshua Aronson, and many others.

Unit 6: Developmental Psychology

Nature vs. Nurture

• Nature versus nurture controversy: dealing with the extent to which heredity and the environment each influences behavior.
• Maturation: biological growth processes that bring about orderly changes in behavior, thought, or physical growth, relatively unaffected by experience.
• Continuity versus discontinuity: deals with the question of whether development is gradual, cumulative change from conception to death (continuity), or a sequence of distinct stages (discontinuity).
  • quantitative changes in number or amount, such as changes in height and weight.
  • qualitative changes in kind, structure, or organization.
• Stability versus change: deals with the issue of whether or not personality traits present during infancy endure throughout the lifespan.
• Longitudinal Studies:  follows the same group of people over a period from months to many years in order to evaluate changes in those individuals.
• Cross-sectional study: researchers assess developmental changes with respect to a particular factor by evaluating different age groups of people at the same time. Cross-sectional studies can be invalid if a cohort, group of people in one age group, is significantly different in their experiences from other age groups, resulting in the cohort effect, differences in the experiences of each age group as a result of growing up in different historical times.
• Cohort-sequential studies: cross-sectional groups are assessed at least two times over a span of months or years, rather than just once.
• Biographical or retrospective studies: are case studies that investigate development in one person at a time.

Physical Development

• Physical development: focuses on maturation and critical periods.
• Critical period: is a time interval during which specific stimuli have a major effect on development that the stimuli do not produce at other times.

Prenatal Development

• Prenatal development begins with fertilization, or conception, and ends with birth.
• The zygote is a fertilized ovum with the genetic instructions for a new individual normally contained in 46 chromosomes.
• Different genes function in cells of the three different layers; the forming individual is now considered an embryo.
• Fetus: the developing human organism from about 9 weeks after conception to birth.

Birth Defects

• Teratogens:  Chemicals such as alcohol, drugs, tobacco ingredients, mercury, lead, cadmium, and other poisons or infectious agents, such as viruses, that cause birth defects
• Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS): is a cluster of abnormalities that occurs in babies of mothers who drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy.

Behavior of the Neonate

• Neonates: or newborn babies, are equipped with basic reflexes that increase their chances of survival.
• Rooting: is the neonate’s response of turning his or her head when touched on the cheek and then trying to put the stimulus into his or her mouth.
• Sucking is the automatic response of drawing in anything at the mouth.
• Swallowing is a contraction of throat muscles that enables food to pass into the esophagus without the neonate choking.
• Grasping reflex: when the infant closes his or her fingers tightly around an object put in his or her hand.
• Moro or startle reflex: in which a loud noise or sudden drop causes the neonate to automatically arch his or her back, fling his/her limbs out, and quickly retract them.
• Habituation: is decreasing responsiveness with repeated presentation of the same stimulus.

The First 2 Years

• The first two years of an infant's physical development are amazing.
• From the prenatal period, when about 20 billion brain cells are produced, to the first two years, when dendrites proliferate in neural networks, especially in the cerebellum, then in the occipital and temporal lobes as cognitive abilities grow, brain development proceeds rapidly.
• The head becomes less out of proportion as the torso and limbs grow faster.
• The nervous system matures while the musculoskeletal system develops from head to tail and from the center outward, allowing the baby to lift its head, roll over, sit, creep, stand, and walk, usually in that order.
• New behaviors develop from maturity, motor and perceptual skills, motivation, and environmental support.
• In the frontal cortex, dendrites proliferate rapidly during childhood.

Adolescence

• Puberty: is sexual maturation, marked by the onset of the ability to reproduce.
• Primary sex characteristics: reproductive organs (ovaries and testes) start producing mature sex cells, and external genitals (vulva and penis) grow.
• Secondary sex characteristics: nonreproductive features associated with sexual maturity—such as widening of hips and breast development in females; growth of facial hair, muscular growth, development of the “Adam’s apple,” and deepening of the voice in males; and growth of pubic hair and underarm hair in both.
• Adolescence involves selective pruning of unused dendrites, emotional limbic system development, and frontal lobe maturation.
  • The judgment and decision-making prefrontal/frontal cortex matures into early adulthood.
  • The prefrontal cortex has not had enough time to develop, so this disconnect between physical and mental maturation can cause risky behavior.

Aging

• By our mid-20s, our physical capabilities peak, followed by first almost imperceptible, then accelerating, decline.
• According to evolutionary psychologists, peaking at a time when both males and females can provide for their children maximizes chances of survival for our species.
• Decreased vigor, changes in fat distribution, loss of hair pigmentation, and wrinkling of the skin are changes associated with advances in age.
• In females at about age 50, menopause—cessation of the ability to reproduce—is accompanied by a decrease in production of female sex hormones.
• Men experience less frequent erections and a more gradual decline in reproductive function as they age.

Theories of Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

• Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget developed a stage theory of cognitive development based on decades of careful observation and testing of children.
• Piaget believed that all knowledge begins with building blocks called schemas, mental representations that organize and categorize information processed by our brain.
• Through the process of assimilation, we fit new information into our existing schemas.
• Through the process of accommodation we modify our schemas to fit new information.

Sensorimotor (First) Stage

• Birth to 2 years old
• During which the baby explores the world using his or her senses and motor interactions with objects in the environment.
• The concept of object permanence—that objects continue to exist even when out of sight—to Piaget seemed to develop suddenly between 8 and 10 months.
• Stranger anxiety: fear of unfamiliar people, indicating that they can differentiate among people they know and people they don’t know.

Preoperational (Second) Stage

• 2-7 years old.
• The child is mainly egocentric, seeing the world from his or her own point of view.
• Egocentrism: is consistent with a belief called animism, that all things are living just like him or her and the belief, called artificialism, that all objects are made by people.

Concrete Operational (Third) Stage

• 7-12 years old
• Conservation concepts: in which changes in the form of an object do not alter physical properties of mass, volume, and number.

Formal Operational (Fourth) Stage

• In this stage, youngsters are able to think abstractly and hypothetically.
• They can manipulate more information in their heads and make inferences they were unable to make during the previous stage.

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory of Cognitive Development

• Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky emphasized the role of the environment (nurture) and gradual growth (continuity) in intellectual functioning.
• Vygotsky thought that development proceeds mainly from the outside in by the process of internalization, absorbing information from a specified social environmental context.
• Zone of proximal development (ZPD): the range between the level at which a child can solve a problem working alone with difficulty and the level at which a child can solve a problem with the assistance of adults or more-skilled children.

Cognitive Changes in Adults

• Fluid intelligence: those abilities requiring speed or rapid learning—generally diminishes with aging
• Crystallized intelligence: learned knowledge and skills such as vocabulary—generally improves with age (at least through the 60s).

Theories of Moral Development

• Lawrence Kohlberg: like Piaget, thought that moral thinking develops sequentially in stages as cognitive abilities develop.
• Preconventional level of morality: in which they do the right thing to avoid punishment (stage 1) or to further their self-interests (stage 2).
• Conventional level of morality: in which they follow rules to live up to the expectations of others, “good boy/nice girl” (stage 3), or to maintain “law and order” and do their duty (stage 4).
• Postconventional level of morality: in which they evidence a social contract orientation that promotes the society’s welfare (stage 5) or evidence an ethical principle orientation that promotes justice and avoids self-condemnation (stage 6).
• Carol Gilligan: found that women rarely reach the highest stages of morality, because they think more about the caring thing to do or following an ethic of care, rather than what the rules allow or following an ethic of justice.

Theories of Social and Emotional Development

• Theories of social development look at the influence of others on the development of a person.
  • Others include members of the family and other caregivers, peers, and even culture, which consists of the behaviors, ideas, attitudes, and traditions transmitted from one generation to the next within a group of people who share the same language and environment.
• Bonding: is the creation of a close emotional relationship between the mother (or parents) and baby shortly after birth.
• Attachment: As the mother (or other caregiver) bonds with the infant, through frequent interactions, the infant gradually forms a close emotional relationship with his or her mother (or other caregivers)
• Harry Harlow’s: experimental research with monkeys disproved that belief when he found that baby monkeys separated from their mothers preferred to spend time with and sought comfort from a soft cloth-covered substitute (surrogate) rather than a bare wire substitute with a feeding bottle.
• Mary Ainsworth: studied attachment using a “strange situation” where a mother and baby play in an unfamiliar room, the baby interacts with the mother and an unfamiliar woman, the mother leaves the baby with the other woman briefly, the baby is left alone briefly, and then the mother returns to the room.
• Temperament: or natural disposition to show a particular mood  at a particular intensity for a specific period, affects his or her behavior.
• Self-awareness: consciousness of oneself as a person, and social referencing, observing the behavior of others in social situations to obtain information or guidance, both develop between ages 1 and 2.

Parenting Styles

• Diana Baumrind: studied how parenting styles affect the emotional growth of children.
• Authoritarian: parents set up strict rules, expect children to follow them, and punish wrongdoing.
• Authoritative: parents set limits but explain the reasons for rules with their children and make exceptions when appropriate.
• Permissive: parents tend not to set firm guidelines, if they set any at all.
• Uninvolved: parents make few demands, show low responsiveness, and communicate little with their children.

Erikson’s Stage Theory of Psychosocial Development

• Erik Erikson: was an influential theorist partly because he examined development across the life span in a social context, rather than just during childhood, recognizing that we continue to grow beyond our teenage years, and our growth is influenced by others.

• His stage theory of psychosocial development identifies eight stages during which we face an important issue or crisis.

  

Middle Age and Death

• Daniel Levinson: described a midlife transition period at about age 40, seen by some as a last chance to achieve their goals.
  • People who experience anxiety, instability, and change about themselves, their work, and their relationships during this time have a challenging experience sometimes termed the mid-life crisis.
• Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s studies of death and dying have focused attention on the end of life, encouraging further studies of death and dying and the growth of the hospice movement that treats terminal patients and their families to alleviate physical and emotional pain.

Gender Roles and Sex Differences

• Gender: is the sociocultural dimension of being biologically male or female.
• Gender roles: are sets of expectations that prescribe how males and females should act, think, and feel.
• Gender identity: is our sense of being male or female, usually linked to our anatomy and physiology.
• Biopsychosocial model: ascribes gender, gender roles, and gender identity to the interaction of heredity (biology) and environment (including psychological and social-cultural factors).
• Biological Perspective: The biological perspective attributes differences between the sexes to heredity.
• Evolutionary Perspective: According to the evolutionary perspective, our behavioral tendencies prepare us to survive and reproduce.
• Psychoanalytic Perspective: According to Freud’s psychoanalytic perspective, young girls learn to act feminine from their mothers, and young boys learn to act masculine from their fathers when they identify with their same-sex parent as a result of resolving either the Electra or Oedipal complex at about age 5.
• Behavioral Perspective: According to (the behavioral perspective) social learning theory, children respond to rewards and punishments for their behavior, and they observe and imitate significant role models, such as their parents, to acquire their gender identity.
• Cognitive Perspective: According to the cognitive perspective,  children actively engage in making meaning out of information they learn about gender.
  • Sandra Bem’s gender schema theory says that children form a schema of gender that filters their perceptions of the world according to what is appropriate for males and what is appropriate for females.
• Gender role stereotypes: which are broad categories that reflect our impressions and beliefs about males and females, have typically classified instrumental traits, such as self-reliance and leadership ability, as masculine and expressive traits, such as warmth and understanding, as feminine.
• Androgyny: the presence of desirable masculine and feminine characteristics in the same individual.

Sex Differences in Cognition

• Meta-analysis: of research on gender comparisons indicates that, for cognitive skills, the differences within either gender are larger than the differences between the two genders.
• Stereotype threat: anxiety that influences members of a group concerned that their performance will confirm a negative stereotype.

Unit 7: Motivation, Emotion, and Personality

Theories of Motivation

Instinct/Evolutionary Theory

• Instincts: are complex, inherited behavior patterns characteristic of a species.
• To be considered a true instinct, the behavior must be stereotypical, performed automatically in the same way by all members of a species in response to a specific stimulus.
• Ethologist: (animal behaviorist) Konrad Lorenz, who worked with baby ducks and geese, investigated an example considered an instinct.
• Imprinting:  Ducks and geese form a social attachment to the first moving object they see or hear at a critical period soon after birth by following that object, which is usually their mother.
• Sociobiology: which tries to relate social behaviors to evolutionary biology.

Drive Reduction Theory

• Drive reduction theory: behavior is motivated by the need to reduce drives such as hunger, thirst, or sex.
• The need is a motivated state caused by a physiological deficit, such as a lack of food or water.
• This need activates a drive, a state of psychological tension induced by a need, which motivates us to eat or drink, for example.
• Homeostasis: is the body’s tendency to maintain an internal steady state of metabolism, to stay in balance.
• Metabolism: is the sum total of all chemical processes that occur in our bodies and are necessary to keep us alive.

Incentive Theory

• Incentive: is a positive or negative environmental stimulus that motivates behavior, pulling us toward a goal.
• Secondary motives: motives we learn to desire, are learned through society’s pull.

Arousal Theory

• Arousal: is the level of alertness, wakefulness, and activation caused by activity in the central nervous system.
  • The optimal level of arousal varies with the person and the activity.
• Yerkes–Dodson rule: states that we usually perform most activities best when moderately aroused, and efficiency of performance is usually lower when arousal is either low or high.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

• According to Maslow, few people reach the highest levels of self-actualization, which is achievement of all of our potentials, and transcendence, which is spiritual fulfillment.

• Although this theory is attractive, we do not always place our highest priority on meeting lower-level needs.

  

Physiological Motives

• Hunger: Early research indicated that stomach contractions caused hunger.
  • Yet even people and other animals who have had their stomachs removed still experience hunger.
• Hunger and Hormones: The hypothalamus reduces hunger by stimulating the small intestine to release cholecystokinin when food enters.
  • Sugars from the small intestine raise blood sugar. When blood sugar rises, the pancreas releases insulin.

Hunger and the Hypothalamus

• Lateral hypothalamus (LH): was originally called the “on” button for hunger.
• Ventromedial hypothalamus (VMH): was called the satiety center, or “off” button, for hunger.

Obesity

• Obesity and diabetes/hypertension risks are growing concerns in our population.
• Obese people respond to short-term external cues like smell, food attractiveness, and mealtime, while normal-weight people respond to long-term internal cues like stomach contractions and glucose–insulin levels.
• Many people also eat when stressed.

Eating Disorders

• Underweight people who weigh less than 85 percent of their normal body weight, but are still terrified of being fat, suffer from anorexia nervosa.
• Bulimia nervosa is a more common eating disorder characterized by eating binges involving the intake of thousands of calories, followed by purging either by vomiting or using laxatives.

Sex

• Sexual orientation: refers to the direction of an individual’s sexual interest.
• Homosexuality: is a tendency to direct sexual desire toward another person of the same sex, and bisexuality is a tendency to direct sexual desire toward people of both sexes.
• Heterosexuality: is a tendency to direct sexual desire toward people of the opposite sex.

Social Motivation

Achievement

• Achievement motive: is a desire to meet some internalized standard of excellence.
• McClelland used responses to the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) to measure achievement motivation.
• Affiliation motive: is the need to be with others.
• Intrinsic motivation: is a desire to perform an activity for its own sake rather than an external reward.
• Extrinsic motivation: is a desire to perform an activity to obtain a reward from outside the individual, such as money and other material goods we have learned to enjoy, such as applause or attention.
• Conflict: involves being torn in different directions by opposing motives that block you from attaining a goal, leaving you feeling frustrated and stressed.
• The least stressful are approach-approach conflicts, which are situations involving two positive options, only one of which you can have.
• Avoidance-avoidance conflicts: are situations involving two negative options, one of which you must choose.
• Approach-avoidance conflicts: are situations involving whether or not to choose an option that has both a positive and negative consequence or consequences.
• Multiple approach-avoidance conflict: which involves several alternative courses. of action that have both positive and negative aspects.
• Emotion: is a conscious feeling of pleasantness or unpleasantness accompanied by biological activation and expressive behavior; emotion has cognitive, physiological, and behavioral components.

James-Lange Theory

• American psychologist William James, a founder of the school of functionalism, and Danish physiologist Karl Lange proposed that our awareness of our physiological arousal leads to our conscious experience of emotion.
• According to this theory, external stimuli activate our autonomic nervous systems, producing specific patterns of physiological changes for different emotions that evoke specific emotional experiences.

Cannon-Bard Theory

• Walter Cannon and Philip Bard disagreed with the James-Lange theory.
• According to the Cannon-Bard theory, conscious experience of emotion accompanies physiological responses.
• Cannon and Bard theorized that the thalamus (the processor of all sensory information but smell in the brain) simultaneously sends information to both the limbic system (emotional center) and the frontal lobes (cognitive center) about an event.
  • When we see the vicious growling dog, our bodily arousal and our recognition of the fear we feel occur at the same time.

Opponent-Process Theory

• According to opponent-process theory, when we experience an emotion, an opposing emotion will counter the first emotion, lessening the experience of that emotion.
• When we experience the first emotion on repeated occasions, the opposing emotion becomes stronger and the first emotion becomes weaker, leading to an even weaker experience of the first emotion.

Cognitive-Appraisal Theory

• Different people on an amusement park ride experience different emotions.
• According to Richard Lazarus's cognitive-appraisal theory, our emotional experience depends on our interpretation of the situation we are in.

Stress and Coping

Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome

• Stress: is the process by which we appraise and respond to environmental threats.
• Hans Selye, we react similarly to both physical and psychological stressors. Stressors are stimuli such as heat, cold, pain, mild shock,restraint, etc., that we perceive as endangering our well-being.
• Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS): three-stage theory of alarm, resistance, and exhaustion describes our body's reaction to stress.

Psychodynamic/Psychoanalytic Theories

Sigmund Freud

• Although Sigmund Freud was a Viennese physician who practiced as a neurologist in the late 1800s and early 1900s, he was unable to account for personality in terms of anatomy.
  • He and other psychoanalysts believed that people have an inborn nature that shapes personality.
• The conscious includes everything of which we are aware at a particular moment.
• Just below the level of conscious awareness, the preconscious contains thoughts, memories, feelings, and images that we can easily recall.
• Generally inaccessible to our conscious, the largest part of the mind, the unconscious, teems with wishes, impulses, memories, and feelings.
• id: which consists of everything psychological that is inherited, and psychic energy that powers all three systems.
• ego: mediates between our instinctual needs and the conditions of the surrounding environment in order to maintain our life and see that our species lives on.
• superego: which is composed of the conscience and the ego-ideal.
• Defense mechanisms: operate unconsciously and deny, falsify, or distort reality.
• Repression: is the pushing away of threatening thoughts, feelings, and memories into the unconscious mind: unconscious forgetting.
• Regression: is the retreat to an earlier level of development characterized by more immature, pleasurable behavior.
• Rationalization: is offering socially acceptable reasons for our inappropriate behavior: making unconscious excuses.
• Projection: is attributing our own undesirable thoughts, feelings, or actions to others.
• Displacement is shifting unacceptable thoughts, feelings, or actions from a more threatening person or object to another, less threatening person or object.
• Reaction formation: is acting in a manner exactly opposite to our true feelings.
• Sublimation: is the redirection of unacceptable sexual or aggressive impulses into more socially acceptable behaviors.

Freud’s Stages of Psychosexual Development

Carl Jung's Analytic Theory of Personality

• Personal unconscious: is similar to Freud's preconscious and unconscious, a storehouse of all our own past memories, hidden instincts, and urges unique to us.
• Collective unconscious: is the powerful and influential system of the psyche that contains universal memories and ideas that all people have inherited from our ancestors over the course of evolution.
• Archetypes: or common themes found in all cultures, religions, and literature, both ancient and modern.
• Individuation: is the psychological process by which a person becomes an individual, a unified whole, including conscious and unconscious processes.

Albert Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory

• Reciprocal determinism: which states that the characteristics of the person, the person's behavior, and the environment all affect one another in two-way causal relationships.
• Self-efficacy: is our belief that we can perform behaviors that are necessary to accomplish tasks, and that we are competent.
• Collective efficacy: is our perception that with collaborative effort, our group will obtain its desired outcome.

Gordon Allport's Trait Theory

• Cardinal trait: is a defining characteristic, in a small number of us, that dominates and shapes all of our behavior.
• Central trait: is a general characteristic, between 5 and 10 of which shape much of our behavior.

Self-Concept and Self-Esteem

• Self-concept: is our overall view of our abilities, behavior, and personality or what we know about ourselves.
• Self-esteem: is one part of our self-concept, or how we evaluate ourselves.
  • Our self-esteem is affected by our emotions and comes to mean how worthy we think we are.

Unit 8: Clinical Psychology

Definitions of Disorder

• The definition of disordered behavior is composed of four components.
  • First, disordered behavior is unusual—it deviates statistically from typical behavior.
  • Second, disordered behavior is maladaptive: that is, it interferes with a person’s ability to function in a particular situation.
  • Third, disordered behavior is labeled as abnormal by the society in which it occurs.
  • Finally, disordered behavior is characterized by perceptual or cognitive dysfunction.

Theories of Psychopathology

• Sigmund Freud engaged in careful observation and analysis of people with varying degrees of behavioral abnormalities.
• Freud and the psychoanalytic school hypothesized that the interactions among conscious and especially unconscious parts of the mind were responsible for a great deal of disordered behavior.
• Humanistic school: of psychology suggests that disordered behavior is, in part, a result of people being too sensitive to the criticisms and judgments of others.
• Cognitive perspective: views disordered behavior as the result of faulty or illogical thoughts.
• Behavioral approach: to disordered behavior is based on the notion that all behavior, including disordered behavior, is learned.
• Biological view: of disordered behavior, which is a popular one in the United States at the present time, views disordered behavior as a manifestation of abnormal brain function, due to either structural or chemical abnormalities in the brain.
• Sociocultural approach: holds that society and culture help define what is acceptable behavior.

Diagnosis of Psychopathology

• The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) is the American Psychiatric Association’s handbook for the identification and classification of behavioral disorders.
  • The DSM-5 calls for the separate notation of important social factors and physical disabilities, in addition to the diagnosis of mental disorders.

Neurodevelopmental Disorder

• The term neurodevelopmental refers to the developing brain.
• Related disorders manifest early in development, and may be due to genetic issues, trauma in the womb, or brain damage acquired at birth or in the first years of life.
• Intellectual disability: (formerly known as mental retardation) is characterized by delayed development in general mental abilities (reasoning, problem-solving, judgment, academic learning, etc.).
• Autism spectrum disorder: is a neurodevelopmental disorder that often manifests early on in childhood development.
• Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): is described as patterned inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity.
• Other neurodevelopmental disorders include communication disorders such as language disorder, speech sound disorder, and fluency disorder (stuttering); motor disorders such as developmental coordination disorder, stereotypic movement disorder, and tics; and specific learning disorders.

Schizophrenia Spectrum and other Psychotic Disorders

• Although the term schizophrenia literally means “split brain,” these disorders have nothing to do with what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder.
• Delusions: are beliefs that are not based in reality, such as believing that one can fly, that one is the president of a country, or that one is being pursued by the CIA (assuming that these things are not true).
• Hallucinations: are perceptions that are not based in reality, such as seeing things or hearing voices that are not there, or feeling spiders on one’s skin (assuming they are not really there).
• Disorganized thinking and disorganized speech are typical.
• It is important to distinguish between positive symptoms and negative symptoms.
  • A positive symptom: of schizophrenic disorders refers to something that a person has that typical people do not.
  • A negative symptom: refers to something that typical people do have, but that one does not have.

Bipolar and Related Disorders

• Bipolar disorders: as the name suggests, involves movement between two poles: depressive states on the one hand, and manic states on the other hand.
• Because manic states often have psychotic features, the DSM-5 now regards bipolar disorders as a bridge between the psychoses and the major depressive disorders.

Depressive Disorders

• Unlike the everyday-language use of the term (“I’m so depressed about that test”), depressive disorders involve the presence of a sad, empty, or irritable mood, combined with changes in thinking and bodily functioning that significantly impair one’s ability to function.

Anxiety Disorders

• Fear: is an emotional response to something present; anxiety is a related emotional response, but to a future threat or a possibility of danger.
• Physical effects of anxiety may include but are not limited to muscle tension, hyperalertness for danger signs, and avoidance behaviors.
• Panic disorder: is an anxiety disorder characterized by recurring panic attacks, as well as the constant worry of another panic attack occurring.
• Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD): is an anxiety disorder characterized by an almost constant state of autonomic nervous system arousal and feelings of dread and worry.
• Phobias: or persistent, irrational fears of common events or objects, are also anxiety disorders.
• Agoraphobia: for example, is the fear of being in open spaces, public places, or other places from which escape is perceived to be difficult.

Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders

• As the name suggests, these disorders involve obsessions and/or compulsions.
  • Obsessions: are intrusive (unwanted) thoughts, urges, or images that plague the individual.
  • Compulsions: are repetitive behaviors (or mental acts) that one feels compelled to perform, often in relation to an obsession.
• OCD is characterized by involuntary, persistent thoughts or obsessions, as well as compulsions, or repetitive behaviors that are time consuming and maladaptive, that an individual believes will prevent a particular (usually unrelated) outcome.

Trauma-and Stressor-Related Disorders

• By definition, these disorders follow a particularly disturbing event or set of events (the trauma or the stressor), like war or violence.
• The best-known such disorder is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which can involve intrusive thoughts or dreams related to the trauma, irritability, avoidance of situations that might recall the traumatic event, sleep disturbances, diminished interest in formerly pleasurable activities, and social withdrawal.
• Other disorders include reactive attachment disorder: which can occur in seriously neglected children who are unable to form attachments to their adult caregivers, and adjustment disorders, or maladaptive responses to particular stressors.

Disassociative Disorders

• In many cases, these disorders appear following a trauma, and may be seen as the mind’s attempt to protect itself by splitting itself into parts.
  • Thus, one might experience derealization, the sense that “this is not really happening,” or depersonalization, the sense that “this is not happening to me.”
• Significant gaps in memory may be related to dissociative amnesia, an inability to recall life events that goes far beyond normal forgetting.
  • Perhaps the most extreme of these disorders is dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder), in which one may not only “lose time,” but also manifest a separate personality during that lost time.

Somatic Symptom and Related Disorders

• Soma means “body.”
• Somatic symptom disorder: involves, as one might expect, bodily symptoms combined with disordered thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors connected to these symptoms.
• Related worries appear in illness anxiety disorder, in which one worries excessively about the possibility of falling ill.
• Conversion disorder: (formerly known as hysteria) involves bodily symptoms like changed motor function or changed sensory function that are incompatible with neurological explanations.
• Factitious disorder: in which an individual knowingly falsified symptoms in order to get medical care, or sympathy or aid from others.

Feeding and Eating Disorders

• Anorexia nervosa: (commonly called anorexia) involves not only restriction of food intake, but also intense fear of gaining weight and disturbances in self-perception, such as thinking one looks fat, when one does not.
• Bulimia nervosa: (commonly called bulimia) involves recurrent episodes of binge-eating: eating large amounts of food in short amounts of time, followed by inappropriate behaviors to prevent weight gain, such as self-induced vomiting (purging), using laxatives, or intense exercising.
• Binge-eating disorder:: might be thought of as bulimia without purging.
• Pica refers to regular consumption of non-nutritive substances (plastic, paper, dirt, string, chalk, etc.).

Personality Disorders

• A personality disorder refers to a stable (and inflexible) way of experiencing and acting in the world, one that is at variance with the person’s culture, that starts in adolescence or adulthood, and leads to either personal distress or impairment of social functioning.
• Cluster A: includes paranoid, schizoid, and schizotypal personality disorders.
  • Schizoid personality disorder is marked by disturbances in feeling (detachment from social relationships, flat affect, does not enjoy close relationships with people), whereas schizotypal personality disorder is marked by disturbances in thought (odd beliefs that do not quite qualify as delusions, such as superstitions, belief in a “sixth sense,” etc.; odd speech; eccentric behavior or appearance).
• Cluster B: includes antisocial, borderline, histrionic, and narcissistic personality disorders.
  • Terms like psychopath or sociopath have been used to describe people with antisocial personality disorder, which is characterized by a persistent pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others.
  • Borderline personality disorder: involves a very stormy relationship with the world, with others, and with one’s own feelings.
  • Histrionic personality disorder: involves a pattern of excessive emotionality and attention-seeking, beyond what might be considered normal (even in a “culture of selfies”).
  • Narcissistic personality disorder: involves an overinflated sense of self-importance, fantasies of success, beliefs that one is special, a sense of entitlement, a lack of empathy for others, and a display of arrogant behaviors or attitudes.
• Cluster C: includes avoidant, dependent, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorders.
  • Avoidant personality disorder: involves an enduring pattern of social inhibition, feelings of inadequacy, and hypersensitivity to real or perceived criticism, which lead to avoidance behavior in relation to social, personal, and intimate relationships.
  • Dependent personality disorder: is marked by an excessive need to be cared for, leading to clingy and submissive behavior and fears of separation.
  • Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD): is marked by a rigid concern with order, perfectionism, control, and work, at the expense of flexibility, spontaneity, openness, and play.

Psychoanalysis

• Psychoanalysis: or psychoanalytic therapy, as it is sometimes called, was first developed by Freud and focuses on probing past defense mechanisms of repression and rationalization to understand the unconscious cause of a problem.
• Countertransference: may occur if the therapist transfers his or her own feelings onto the patient.

Humanistic Therapy

• The humanistic school of psychology takes a related, yet different approach to the treatment of disordered behavior.
• Client-centered therapy: was invented by Carl Rogers and involves the assumption that clients can be understood only in terms of their own realities.
  • The client-centered therapist approaches this differently from the Freudian.
• The therapist is honest, open, and emotional with the client (an active listener).
  • Rogers called this client-relationship genuineness.
• The next key for successful client-centered therapy, according to Rogers, is unconditional positive regard.
  • Unconditional positive regard: is a term used in psychology to refer to an attitude of acceptance and warmth towards another person, regardless of their behavior or beliefs.
  • The therapist provides this unconditional positive regard to help the client reach a state of unconditional self-worth.
• The final key to successful therapy is accurate empathic understanding.
  • Accurate empathic understanding: is the ability to accurately understand and identify what someone else is feeling.
• Rogers used this term to describe the therapist’s ability to view the world from the eyes of the client.
• This empathy is critical to successful communication between the therapist and client.
• A different type of approach toward treatment is Gestalt therapy, which combines both physical and mental therapies.
• Fritz Perls: developed this approach to blend an awareness of unconscious tensions with the belief that one must become aware of and deal with those tensions by taking personal responsibility.

Behavioral Therapy

• Behavioral therapy: stands in dramatic contrast to the insight therapies.
• Counterconditioning: is a technique in which a response to a given stimulus is replaced by a different response.
• Counterconditioning can be accomplished in a few ways.
  • One is to use aversion therapy, in which an aversive stimulus is repeatedly paired with the behavior that the client wishes to stop.
  • Another method used for counterconditioning is systematic desensitization.
  • This technique involves replacing one response, such as anxiety, with another response, such as relaxation.
• Other forms of behavioral therapy involve extinction procedures, which are designed to weaken maladaptive responses.
  • One way of trying to extinguish a behavior is called flooding.
  • Flooding involves exposing a client to the stimulus that causes the undesirable response.
• Implosion: is a similar technique, in which the client imagines the disruptive stimuli rather than actually confronting them.
• Operant conditioning: is a behavior-control technique that we discussed in the chapter on learning.
  • A related approach is behavioral contracting, in which the therapist and the client draw up a contract by which they both agree to abide.
• Modeling: is a therapeutic approach based on Bandura’s social learning theory.
  • This technique is based on the principle of vicarious learning.

Cognitive Therapy

• Cognitive approaches to the treatment of disordered behavior rely on changing cognitions, or the ways people think about situations, in order to change behavior.
• One such approach is rational-emotive behavior therapy (REBT) (sometimes called simply RET, for rational-emotive therapy), formulated by Albert Ellis.
• Another cognitive approach is cognitive therapy, formulated by Aaron Beck, in which the focus is on maladaptive schemas.
• Maladaptive schemas: include arbitrary inference, in which a person draws conclusions without evidence, and dichotomous thinking, which involves all-or-none conceptions of situations.

Biological Therapies

• Biological therapies are medical approaches to behavioral problems.
• Biological therapies are typically used in conjunction with one of the previously mentioned forms of treatment.
• Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT): is a form of treatment in which fairly high voltages of electricity are passed across a patient’s head.
  • This treatment causes temporary amnesia and can result in seizures.
• Another form of biological treatment is psychosurgery.
  • Perhaps the most well-known form of psychosurgery is the prefrontal lobotomy, in which parts of the frontal lobes are cut off from the rest of the brain.
• Psychopharmacology: is the treatment of psychological and behavioral maladaptations with drugs.
  • There are four broad classes of psychotropic, or psychologically active drugs: antipsychotics, antidepressants, anxiolytics, and lithium salts.
• Antipsychotics: like Clozapine, Thorazine, and Haldol reduce the symptoms of schizophrenia by blocking the neural receptors for dopamine.
• Antidepressants: can be grouped into three types: monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibitors, tricyclics, and selective reuptake inhibitors.
• MAO inhibitors: like Eutron, work by increasing the amount of serotonin and norepinephrine in the synaptic cleft.
• Tricyclics: like Norpramin, Amitriptyline, and Imipramine increase the amount of serotonin and norepinephrine.
• The third class of antidepressants, selective reuptake inhibitors (often called the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, for the neurotransmitter most affected by them) also work by increasing the amount of neurotransmitter at the synaptic cleft, in this case by blocking the reuptake mechanism of the cell that released the neurotransmitters.
• Anxiolytics depress the central nervous system and reduce anxiety while increasing feelings of well-being and reducing insomnia.
• Benzodiazepines: which also include Valium (Diazepam) and Librium (Chlordiazepoxide), cause muscle relaxation and a feeling of tranquility.
• Lithium carbonate:a salt, is effective in the treatment of bipolar disorder.

Modes Of Therapy

• Group therapy: in which clients meet together with a therapist as an interactive group, has some advantages over individual therapy.
• Twelve-step programs: are one form of group therapy, although they are usually not moderated by professional psychotherapists.
• Another form of therapy in which there is more than a single client is couples or family therapy.
  • This type of treatment arose out of the simple observation that some dysfunctional behavior affects the afflicted person’s loved ones.

Unit 9: Social Psychology

Attitude Formation and Change

• An attitude is a set of beliefs and feelings.
  • Attitudes are evaluative, meaning that our feelings toward such things are necessarily positive or negative.
• The mere exposure effect states that the more one is exposed to something, the more one will come to like it.
• Persuasive messages can be processed through the central route or the peripheral route.
• Central route: to persuasion involves deeply processing the content of the message; what about this potato chip is so much better than all the others?
• Peripheral route: on the other hand, involves other aspects of the message including the characteristics of the person imparting the message (the communicator).

The Relationship Between Attitudes and Behavior

• Cognitive dissonance theory: is based on the idea that people are motivated to have consistent attitudes and behaviors.
  • When they do not, they experience unpleasant mental tension or dissonance.
• Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith: conducted the classic experiment about cognitive dissonance in the late 1950s.
  • Their participants performed a boring task and were then asked to lie and tell the next subject (actually a confederate1 of the experimenter) that they had enjoyed the task.

Compliance Strategies

• Often people use certain strategies to get others to comply with their wishes.
• Such compliance strategies have also been the focus of much psychological research.
• The door-in-the-face strategy argues that after people refuse a large request, they will look more favorably upon a follow-up request that seems, in comparison, much more reasonable.
• Another common strategy involves using norms of reciprocity.
• People tend to think that when someone does something nice for them, they ought to do something nice in return.
• Norms of reciprocity: are at work when you feel compelled to send money to the charity that sent you free return address labels or when you cast your vote in the student election for the candidate that handed out those delicious chocolate chip cookies.

Attribution Theory

• Attribution theory: is another area of study within the field of social cognition.
  • Attribution theory tries to explain how people determine the cause of what they observe.
• Harold Kelley: put forth a theory that explains the kind of attributions people make based on three kinds of information: consistency, distinctiveness, and consensus.
• Consistency: refers to how similarly the individual acts in the same situation over time.
• Distinctiveness: refers to how similar this situation is to other situations in which we have watched Charley.
• Consensus: asks us to consider how others in the same situation have responded.
• A classic study involving self-fulfilling prophecies was Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson’s (1968) “Pygmalion in the Classroom” experiment.

Attributional Biases

• When looking at the behavior of others, people tend to overestimate the importance of dispositional factors and underestimate the role of situational factors.
  • This tendency is known as the fundamental attribution error.
• The fundamental attribution was named fundamental because it was believed to be so widespread.
• In an individualistic culture, like the American culture, the importance and uniqueness of the individual is stressed.
• In more collectivist cultures, like Japanese culture, a person’s link to various groups such as family or company is stressed.
• False-consensus effect: The tendency for people to overestimate the number of people who agree with them.
• Self-serving bias: is the tendency to take more credit for good outcomes than for bad ones.
• Researchers have found that people evidence a bias toward thinking that bad things happen to bad people.
  • This belief in a just world, known simply as the just-world bias, in which misfortunes befall people who deserve them, can be seen in the tendency to blame victims.

Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination

• Stereotypes: may be either negative or positive and can be applied to virtually any group of people (e.g., racial, ethnic, geographic).
• Prejudice: is an undeserved, usually negative, attitude toward a group of people.
• Stereotyping: can lead to prejudice when negative stereotypes (those rude New Yorkers) are applied uncritically to all members of a group (she is from New York, therefore she must be rude) and a negative attitude results.
• Ethnocentrism: the belief that one’s culture (e.g., ethnic, racial) is superior to others, is a specific kind of prejudice.
• People tend to see members of their own group, the in-group, as more diverse than members of other groups, out-groups.
  • This phenomenon is often referred to as out-group homogeneity.
• In-group bias: is thought to stem from people’s belief that they themselves are good people.

Origin of Stereotypes and Prejudice

• Many different theories attempt to explain how people become prejudiced.
• Some psychologists have suggested that people naturally and inevitably magnify differences between their own group and others as a function of the cognitive process of categorization.
• By taking into account the in-group bias discussed above, this idea suggests that people cannot avoid forming stereotypes.

Combating Prejudice

• One theory about how to reduce prejudice is known as the contact theory.
• The contact theory: states that contact between hostile groups will reduce animosity, but only if the groups are made to work toward a goal that benefits all and necessitates the participation of all.
  • Such a goal is called a superordinate goal.
• Muzafer Sherif’s (1966): camp study (also known as the Robbers Cave study) illustrates both how easily out-group bias can be created and how superordinate goals can be used to unite formerly antagonistic groups.
  • He conducted a series of studies at a summer camp.

Aggression and Antisocial Behavior

• Instrumental aggression: is when the aggressive act is intended to secure a particular end.
• Hostile aggression: has no such clear purpose.
• Sociobiologists: suggest that the expression of aggression is adaptive under certain circumstances.
• One of the most influential theories, however, is known as the frustration-aggression hypothesis.

Prosocial Behavior

• Helping behavior is termed prosocial behavior.
• Much of the research in this area has focused on bystander intervention, the conditions under which people nearby are more and less likely to help someone in trouble.
• Counterintuitively, the larger the number of people who witness an emergency situation, the less likely any one is to intervene.
  • This finding is known as the bystander effect.
• One explanation for this phenomenon is called diffusion of responsibility.
  • The larger the group of people who witness a problem, the less responsible any one individual feels to help.
• People tend to assume that someone else will take action so they need not do so.
• Another factor contributing to the bystander effect is known as pluralistic ignorance.
• People seem to decide what constitutes appropriate behavior in a situation by looking to others.

Attraction

• Social psychologists also study what factors increase the chance that people will like one another.
• A significant body of research indicates that we like others who are similar to us, with whom we come into frequent contact, and who return our positive feelings.
• A term often employed as part of liking and loving studies is self-disclosure.
• One self-discloses when one shares a piece of personal information with another.
• Close relationships with friends and lovers are often built through a process of self-disclosure.

The Influence of Others on an Individual’s Behavior

• A major area of research in social psychology is how an individual’s behavior can be affected by another’s actions or even merely by another person’s presence.
• A number of studies have illustrated that people perform tasks better in front of an audience than they do when they are alone.
  • They yell louder, run faster, and reel in a fishing rod more quickly.
  • This phenomenon, that the presence of others improves task performance, is known as social facilitation.
• When the task being observed was a difficult one rather than a simple, well-practiced skill, being watched by others actually hurt performance, a finding known as social impairment.
• Conformity: has been an area of much research as well.
  • Conformity is the tendency of people to go along with the views or actions of others.
• Solomon Asch (1951): conducted one of the most interesting conformity experiments.

Group Dynamics

• All groups have norms, rules about how group members should act.
• Within groups is often a set of specific roles.
• Sometimes people take advantage of being part of a group by social loafing.
  • Social loafing: is the phenomenon when individuals do not put in as much effort when acting as part of a group as they do when acting alone.
• Group polarization: is the tendency of a group to make more extreme decisions than the group members would make individually.
  • Studies about group polarization usually have participants give their opinions individually, then group them to discuss their decisions, and then have the group make a decision.
• Groupthink: a term coined by Irving Janis, describes the tendency for some groups to make bad decisions.
  • Groupthink occurs when group members suppress their reservations about the ideas supported by the group.
• This loss of self-restraint occurs when group members feel anonymous and aroused, and this phenomenon is known as deindividuation.
• One famous experiment that showed not only how such conditions can cause people to deindividuation but also the effect of roles and the situation in general, is Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiment.