PSY110 EXAM #4 Study Notes

CH 12: Social Psychology

  • Social psychology definition: Study of interactions between two or more people, even implied interactions (e.g., reading an author's book).
  • The field gained prominence prior to World War II due to concerns about Hitler's tactics.
  • Einstein & Aristotle: “The more you learn the more you realize how little you know.”
  • Corollary: “The less you know the easier it is to think you know everything.”
  • Textbooks usually have 14-15 chapters, corresponding to the weeks in a semester.

Attitudes

  • Definition: A belief or opinion about anything; behaviors are shaped by beliefs or attitudes.
  • ABC Model (Albert Ellis, 1955): Well-formed attitudes have three components:
    • Affective component:
      • A (Affective, Activating Event/Antecedent): Trigger that initiates the sequence (physical event, memory, thought). Example: “I am scared of spiders.”
    • Behavioral component:
      • B (Behavioral): Thoughts, interpretations, and beliefs about the activating event (rational or irrational). Example: “I will avoid spiders and scream if I see one.”
    • Cognitive component:
      • C (Cognitive, Consequences, Beliefs): Emotional, behavioral, and physical reactions resulting from beliefs about the event. Example: “I believe spiders are dangerous.”

Persuasion

  • Definition: Attempting to change someone else’s attitude or belief, related to knowledge.
  • Yale University researchers (2020) analyzed persuasion techniques, motivated by Hitler's success:
    • Aimed to understand how Hitler mobilized a large population to commit atrocities.
    • Examined his messaging, speeches, and propaganda to understand how they resonated with the German public.
    • Sought to understand the psychological processes involved in persuasion (comprehension, acceptance, belief).
Source/Speaker
  • Credibility: How likely one is to believe what someone says.
  • Attractiveness: Affects outcome.
    • Example: More attractive men often win; less attractive women often win.
  • Similarity: Alikeness.
    • Example: Donald Trump trying to appear as an ordinary person despite his privileged background.
Messages
  • One-Sided Message:
    • Presents only arguments supporting a particular viewpoint.
    • Works best when the audience is initially in favor of the message.
    • Example: Presenting funds to people who donate to a company already.
  • Two-Sided Message:
    • Presents supporting arguments and counter-arguments, and may refute opposing arguments.
    • Works better when the audience is initially opposed to the message.
    • Example: Presenting funds to people who do not donate to a company.
  • One-sided messages are more effective when the audience is unlikely to generate counterarguments; two-sided messages work better when the audience is likely to encounter opposing viewpoints.
Target/Audience
  • Gender: Studies from the 1950s-60s suggested women were more persuadable. Later work showed it reflected topic familiarity.
    • Example: Originally women seemed like they would change their opinion more easily than men, but it was found women were less knowledgable on the subject.
    • When men and women had equal background knowledge, their resistance to persuasion was the same.
  • Knowledge: Education and background on a topic matter.
    • People with more education scrutinize persuasive appeals more carefully.
    • Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM):
      • High-knowledge audiences process via the central route: They focus on argument quality.
      • Low-knowledge audiences rely on peripheral cues: The speaker, visuals, etc.
  • Forewarning: Telling people in advance that someone will try to persuade them.
    • Triggers psychological resistance; listeners defend current attitudes and pay attention to counterarguments.
    • Example: Subliminal Nike advertisements vs. being explicitly warned about marketing.
  • Inoculation: Introducing a weakened form of an opposing argument and then refuting it, thereby “building up” resistance.
    • Example: A president running for a second term preemptively addressing and refuting criticisms about the economy.
    • Pre-emptive Attack and Refutation, Result: When opponents emphasize the economy later, listeners already have a ready-made counterargument and are less likely to shift their vote.

The Cognitive Dissonance Theory

  • Study by Leon Festinger and CarlSmith in 1957.

  • Definition: "Behavior can change one’s attitudes or beliefs."

  • Describes the psychological discomfort individuals experience when their beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors are contradictory.

  • Dissonance motivates individuals to reduce the discomfort by changing their beliefs, justifying their actions, or finding ways to reconcile the conflict.

  • Three-stage experiment demonstrated how small external incentives lead to internal attitude shifts:

    1. Boring Task: Participants turned wooden spools repeatedly for several minutes.
    2. Paid to Lie: Participants were paid either $1 or $20 to tell the next participant the task was fun.
    3. Attitude Measure: Participants rated how enjoyable the task was on a 1-10 scale.
      • Results:
        • \$1 group: mean ≈ 8.5 (“It was pretty fun!”)
        • \$20 group: mean ≈ 2.0 (“Still boring”)
      • Explanation: \$20 provided enough external justification, so those people didn’t have to change their internal belief (“This was boring”) to justify lying. But \$1 wasn’t enough so they resolved the dissonance by convincing themselves the task was enjoyable.

  • Cognitive dissonance theory developed from this experiment.

  • Festinger described dissonance as an aversive drive—a psychological tension we’re motivated to reduce.

  • The greater the conflict (very important beliefs vs. contradictory actions), the stronger the drive.

  • Drive Theory: Cognitive dissonance creates an aversive motivational state—a “drive”—like hunger or thirst—that pushes us to take action to reduce it.

  • Attitude/Discrepant/Behavior → Cognitive dissonance → Change/Attitude, Change/Behavior, Seek/Justification

  • We have a need to be consistent.

    • Example: People who are pro-life also tend to believe in the death penalty, justifying it by differentiating between innocent potential and individuals who have committed crimes.

  • 3 ways to reduce cognitive dissonance:

    1. Change one of the cognitions.
    2. Add a third cognition that makes the original two cognitions seem less inconsistent with each other.
    3. Trivialize the cognitions that are inconsistent.

The Causal Attribution Theory

  • Definition: A judgement about the cause of someone’s behavior.

  • The process of trying to determine the causes of people's behavior; attributions are made to personal or situational causes.

  • It is easier to make personal attributions when a behavior is unusual or unexpected and when people are perceived to have chosen to engage in it.

    • Example: Attributing someone's compliment about your shirt to the shirt itself.

  • Internal Attributions: Internal to the actor.

    • Attributing an event or behavior to personal factors within the individual, such as their personality, skills, or efforts.
    • Internal attributions can lead to feelings of pride and accomplishment, as well as increased motivation to continue pursuing similar activities.
    • Examples: Attributing a high grade on an exam to hard work and intelligence, Attributing a successful business venture to one's own leadership skills and strategic vision, Attributing a sports victory to the team's superior talent and teamwork

  • External Attributions: External to the actor.

    • Attributing an event or behavior to situational factors outside of the individual, such as luck, the environment, or other people's actions.
    • Examples: Attributing a high grade on an exam to luck or an easy test, Attributing a business failure to a poor economic climate or unfair competition, Attributing a sports loss to bad luck or the referee's biased calls

  • The Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE): Overuse of the internal attributions.

    • The tendency to overemphasize internal (dispositional) explanations for others’ behavior and under-emphasize external (situational) factors.
    • Origin of racism/prejudice
    • Example: You see a coworker snap at their boss and think “They must have an awful temper,” not “They’re under extreme stress today.”

  • The Actor-Observer Effect: We switch between two perspectives.

    • Observer: Watching someone else’s actions → prone to FAE (internal attributions).
    • Actor: Reflecting on our own actions → we see the external context more clearly and make situational attributions.

  • Self Serving Bias: When we succeed, we credit ourselves (internal); when we fail or do something wrong, we blame outside factors (external).

  • For other’s problem behavior: we make the FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR (we over-use internal attributions).

  • For our own problem behavior: we employ a SELF-SERVING BIAS (we over-use external attributions).

    • Example: When someone cuts us off while driving we say something’s wrong with that person but when we cut someone off we justify why we did it because we are 30 mins late to school

Prejudice

  • Definition: (A feeling, usually negative) A belief or attitude.
  • Judgement about a person based solely on their involvement in a group results in thinking you know something about them.
  • While attitudes have three components, ABC prejudice has the Affective Component
  • Discrimination: A behavior based on prejudice.
  • Involves negative, hostile, and injurious treatment of members of rejected groups.
  • Stereotypes: Cognitions that they are all alike on one or more than one issue.
    • (EX. All Asians are good at math, all Jews are rich…)
  • Racism: Belief that observable differences among races are due to genetics.
    • The belief that different races possess distinct characteristics, abilities, or qualities, especially so as to distinguish them as inferior or superior to one another.
  • Sexism: Belief that observable differences between sexes are due to genetics.
    • Example: Almost all violent crimes are committed by men since testosterone or women that are aggressive normally have higher levels of testosterone

Social Categorization

  • Definition: The overwhelmingly strong tendency among humans to divide the world into two groups that we treat very differently.
  • Example: Us vs Them or In group vs out group
  • Once you’ve drawn that line, you instinctively treat the two groups very differently
Us Vs Them

  • In-Group (Us): The people you identify with—your team, your religion, your nationality.

    • You see them as “good,” trustworthy, and deserving of solidarity.

  • Out-Group (Them): Anyone who isn’t “one of us.”

    • They become the convenient target for suspicion or hostility, often painted as “bad” or “wrong.”
    • Example: Saying “Our church is the one true faith” instantly casts every other denomination as misguided or inferior.

  • Illusory Correlations: A pattern in the data that doesn’t really exist.

    • We think we see a pattern in the data, but it isn’t really there.

      • Distinctive Pairings: We notice rare events more—like a crime by a minority group—so we overestimate how often it happens.
      • Confirmation Bias: Once we think there’s a link, we only remember cases that “fit” and forget the rest.
      • Example: Astrology; We say that characteristics are similar for those of the same astrological sign but in fact there are no correlations.

  • Self Serving Bias (again): Using the data that makes us right and makes them wrong

  • The Ultimate Attribution Error: When people apply the logic of the Actor-Observer effect to groups rather than to individuals.

    • When a member of a group does something bad, we blame the group (Internal attributions) but when a member of our own group does the same thing, we quickly blame the person and say they’re a bad person (External attributions)

  • White Supremacy: A racist ideology based upon the belief that white people are superior in many ways to people of other races and therefore white people should be dominant over other races.

  • LECTURE EXAMPLE: Book titled “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond.

    • Diamond proposes that the differing trajectories of human societies are largely explained by geographical factors, rather than inherent human differences.
    • Thinking about the European perception that they were vastly more genetically or evolutionarily advanced than the “primitive” peoples they encountered as they explored the planet,(an idea still popular among white supremacists).
    • Jared Diamond, with much supporting evidence, explains that there were many third variables responsible for the noted disparity in technology and capabilities.
    • The regions of the planet that had access to the best resources (metal deposits, large animals and good, wild plants that could be crossbred into useful beasts of burden and food sources) developed first, not the people who were somehow smarter or better or most moral.
    • Germs also played an important role.

Social Influence

  • Definition: When one person tries to influence one or more/other people.
  • It underlies everything from parenting and teaching to advertising and peer pressure.
  • 3 subtypes: Conformity, Compliance, Obedience
Conformity
  • Going along with unwritten norms to be liked or accepted by a group or because you assume the group knows better than you.
  • Asch’s Line-Comparison Paradigm 1951
    • Setup: A participant judges which of three lines matches a standard line.
    • The experiments involve participants judging the length of lines, with confederates (actors) intentionally providing incorrect answers.
    • The study demonstrates that individuals will often conform to the group's incorrect judgment, even when it contradicts their own perception, highlighting the power of social influence.
    • Result: Roughly 76% of real participants conformed at least once, even though the answer was obvious. Only one real subject, so inefficient
  • Power of an ally is if there’s at least one person who thinks the way you do then you will feel empowered to express what you think is correct.
  • Having an “ally” reduces the pressure to conform—you feel emboldened to stick with your own judgment
Compliance

  • Changing your behavior in response to a direct request, even if you don’t privately agree.

  • It is a two-step process: The first step is used for compliance and the second step is always the actual goal.

    • Foot-In-The-Door:
      • Step 1: You agree to a small request (EX. sign a petition).
      • Step 2: You’re more likely to agree to a larger request (EX. donate money) because you see yourself as “helpful.”
    • Door-In-The-Face:
      • Step 1: You refuse a large, outrageous request (EX. chaperone a week-long trip).
      • Step 2: You’re then more likely to comply with a smaller request (EX. drive kids to the zoo for a few hours).
Obedience
  • Going along with direct orders.
  • Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment explored how far ordinary people would go in obeying authority figures, even when the orders conflicted with their moral beliefs.
    * The study, conducted at Yale University, showed that a significant percentage of participants were willing to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to a learner (a confederate) at the command of an experimenter.
    * Tell ppl it’s a learning experiment.
    * Man at a shock machine that is a teacher and then learner answering questions.
    * Said learner would be shocked by the teacher when the answer is wrong.
    * Got so many wrong, shocks would have killed him.
    * Results of study: 65% went all the way to the end: take away; most of us will follow legitimate authority to the point of hurting someone.
  • Is Destructive Authoritarianism limited to certain nations like Germany? Absolutely NOT.
  • Destructive Authoritarianism Is Not Country-Specific.
  • “Authoritarianism”—where power is centralized in a leader or elite who demands unquestioning obedience—can arise in any society under the right conditions.
  • While Nazi Germany is the most infamous 20th-century example, the same dynamics—fear, propaganda, scapegoating, suppression of dissent—have shown up in dictatorships, military juntas, and one-party states around the globe

Groupthink

  • Groupthink (Irving Janis, 1971):

    • Definition: A phenomenon that occurs when a group of individuals reaches a consensus without critical reasoning or evaluation of the consequences or alternatives.

    • Groupthink is based on a common desire not to upset the balance of a group of people.

    • When cohesive groups value unanimity over critical analysis, they can make worse decisions than any lone individual would.

    • Janis identified a cascade of processes that undermine sound judgment:

      • Antecedent Conditions: High group cohesiveness, isolation from outside information, directive leadership, high stress from external threat, lack of methodical search/appraisal.
      • AVOID Directive Leadership. if the leader says “i think we should attack at dawn.. What do you guys think?” Well because the leader said this, it's likely that there won't be any useful input after as most ppl are thought to agree with the leader.

  • Symptoms of Groupthink:

    • Illusion of invulnerability.
    • Certainty of groups morality.
    • Collective rationalization.
    • Stereotype view of opponents.
    • Intense pressure to conform, self censorship/conforming with a norm.
    • Illusion of unanimity.
    • Presences of mind guards is to "filter" and control the amount of information that is available to the group in the name of attempting to focus, as well as to limit, the number of possible solutions that are likely to arise within the group

  • Groupthink is reduced by:

    • Every member was required to list potential problems, encourage careful questioning of each alternative, break into subgroups, “second chance” meeting,
    • use Nominal Group Technique (NGT): every reason we should follow this idea, every reason we shouldn't follow this idea, and play devil's advocate: one person whose job is to raise objections.

  • Recent Examples of Groupthink:

    • Coke’s 1985 decision to replace its highly successful drink with “New Coke” only to quickly back down and reintroduce “Coke Classic”.
    • The decision to launch the Challenger shuttle with school teacher Christa McAuliffe aboard on 1/28/1986 when it was too cold to launch (18 degrees the night before)
    • The Bush, Chaney and Rumsfeld decision to launch the Iraq War on 03/20/2003, which lasted over 11 years and resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries and was no plan for the after the shock/awe campaigne.

  • Also Brainwashing and Cults have been well studied.

    • Detach people from competing influences like parents, newspapers, the opposition, etc

The Bystander Effect

  • “The more people who are present in an emergency; the less likely it is that anyone will help."

  • Example: A woman was murdered on her doorstep in Queens, NY. There were 38 people that had watched it happen but no one did anything because everyone thought someone else was going to do something/call 911.

  • There are two possible causes of this:

    • Fear of Social Blunder: Worried about doing something wrong in front of other people
    • Diffusion of Responsibility: If there is one person when something happens, they have 100% of responsibility and are likely to do something. If there are two people when something happens, they each have 50% of responsibility. The more people there are, the less responsibility each person has, meaning it’s less likely for anyone to do anything.

Aggression

  • Instinct: (Frued’s Thanatos and Eros)
  • From the motivation lecture, instinct theories of aggression gave way to drive theories. What MOTIVATES people to be aggressive?
  • Drive (Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis, initial theory proposed by John Dollard and Neal Miller in 1939) later reformulations, particularly by Leonard Berkowitz, acknowledged that frustration is not always the sole cause of aggression.
  • These later revisions emphasize the role of negative affect, aggression cues, and individual differences in the likelihood of an aggressive response.
  • Social Learning: Current theory that claims aggressive behavior is learned classically, operantly, or observationally. This is more optimistic because it does not have to be learned. A nonviolent world is possible.
  • Lecture Example: The book titled “Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” is a 2011 book by Steven Pinker, in which the author argues that violence in the world has declined both in the long run and in the short run and suggests explanations as to why this has occurred.
  • Those reasons are: the rise and reason of empathy, the spread of commerce, the empowerment of women, and moral progress

CH. 13 EMOTIONS, STRESS, AND HEALTH

Interpersonal Attraction

  • 4 Important Factors:

    • Similarity: common things
    • Proximity: close range
    • Reciprocity: give back what we get
    • Physical Attractiveness

  • 2 Types of Romantic Love:

    • Passionate love starts high and drops off fairly quickly
    • Companionate love starts very low and builds off the relationship

Emotions

  • Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions (8 primary emotions: Fear, Joy, Anger, Anticipation, Acceptance, Surprise, Sadness, Disgust) (8 secondary/mixed emotions arise where two primaries meet on the wheel (EX. joy + trust = love, fear + surprise = horror)

  • How do we know other people's emotions?

    • Duchenne Smile: A genuine smile engages both the mouth (zygomatic muscles) and the eyes (orbicularis oculi → “crow’s feet”).
    • Posed (fake) smiles only lift the mouth corners; true happiness shows in the eyes. Babies don’t do this

  • Paul Elkman:

    • The TV show “Lie to Me” dramatizes Paul Ekman’s work on spotting these.
    • He claimed there were 6 facial expressions that were from genetics.
    • In 1972, Ekman published a list of those universal facial emotions, consisting of six emotions: anger, disgust, happiness, sadness, fear, and surprise

  • Innate Vs Learned Parts of Emotion: Are Emotions Taught?

    • Darwin said facial expressions are not learned, they are genetic.
    • Paul Ekman agreed with Darwin, but he added that some parts of emotions are taught.
    • How quickly we reveal our emotions on our face is learned though.
    • Also recognition of emotions is taught like being able to insinuate what others are feeling.
    • (if baby monkey is held in isolation it will show fear but will not be able to recognize fear on someone else)

  • Theories of emotional experiences: How do we know our own emotions?

    • James-Lange Theory:

      • Perceive → Bodily Response → Emotion.
      • James lange theory thinks that a stimulus is seen (like seeing a bear) and then a physical response occurs (running) and then while running and feeling your heart beat fast the individual is able to identify that they are experiencing fear.

    • Cannon-Bard Theory:

      • Thinks that a stimulus is seen (like a bear) and then simultaneously the thalamus sends information to the cerebral cortex and the peripheral nervous system which provokes a physiological and emotional response at the same time.

    • Schacter & Singer Theory:

      • Perceived that stimulus triggers a bodily response and then a cognitive label is applied to explain the experienced emotion.
      • This relates to the Suproxin Study where all patients were injected with “suproxin” which is adrenaline and the dependent variable was participants’ current mood on a 10 point scale.
      • The 2 independent variables were the knowledge of the effects of suproxin (told effects/not told effects) and the emotional state of the confederate (happy/angry).
      • The attitude of the confederate had a bigger effect on the bottom group because they didn’t know the effects of the suproxin so as to understand why they were feeling the way they were based on their surroundings (hence why happy confederates yielded happier ppl).

    • Example of Theories Applied: In James-Lange, (one thing leads to another) you see the bull, one part of your brain sees the bull(perceived stimulus) u feel something and then a different part of the brain reacts to the perceived stimulus like fight or flight response and then because of how u react, u experience the emotion (like fear).

    • Then in Cannon-Bard, you see the bull and simultaneously one part of the brain experiences emotion and another part acts of the bodily response.

    • Then, in Schachter & Singer, your perceived stimulus triggers a bodily response and you think about what is causing it and apply a cognitive label that leads to the experienced emotion.

    • Like you look at the bull and u feel some way so u try to label why you feel that and then experience an emotion (gives more room for cognitive work to be applied→ conscious control)

Stress/Sources of Stress

  • Definition: Psychological wear and tear on the body due to the demands placed on it.
  • Conflict, frustration and environmental factors (humidity, heat, noise, crowding) are all sources of stress especially when unexpected, unpredicted, and uncontrollable.
  • Glass and Stinger Study With Noise and Addition: When you give ppl difficult tasks like an exam you should do it in a quiet room for ideal conditions.
  • Experiment with some people doing additional tasks… in the quiet room no one got anything wrong. In the noisy environment it was found that people made more mistakes.
  • Second time they told them there was a button under their chair to turn off the noise if they absolutely needed to but then no one did and there weren't any mistakes in calculations because of the “illusion of control”
  • Holmes and Rahe’s Life Event Checklist: Also known as the Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS), is a tool used to assess stress levels based on life events experienced over a specified period, typically the past year.
  • It assigns "life change units" (LCUs) to various life events, with higher scores indicating greater potential stress and increased risk of illness.
  • It consists of 43 life events, each assigned a point value representing the perceived amount of stress associated with that event.
  • By summing the points for events experienced in the past year, one can get a rough estimate of their overall stress level and potential impact on health. (child death vs parent death with child death holding a higher place than parents in terms of amount of stress) (then there was a health problem checklist.)
  • The major life checklist vs health checklist correlation.. They didn't find a lot in common.
  • They realized they were forgetting the daily stress… Some people are better at coping than others.
  • Richard Lazarus' Idea of Cognitive Appraisal: Explains that our emotional responses are not solely determined by a stimulus, but also by how we interpret and assess that stimulus, which is a mental process called appraisal.
  • This theory emphasizes the role of individual thoughts and beliefs in shaping emotional experiences. Glass half full/empty.
  • If you think of it as a problem it will be more stressful, if you think of it as an opportunity it won't be as stressful.
  • Example: If you're late for a presentation and someone is slow in line, primary appraisal might involve thinking, "This situation is relevant to me because it could impact my presentation, potentially causing me stress”

Physiological Reaction to Stress

  • Han Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS): Proposed in 1930s, 3 Stages are?

    • Alarm (when the person/animal recognizes that there is a stressful event, Resistance (moving closer to try to lower the stress/anything to combat the stress)
    • Exhaustion (when something goes wrong/breaks down like getting sick

  • Coping With Stress: Social Factors

    • Supportive relationships
    • Sense of belonging (to a group)

  • Coping With Stress: Cognitive Factors

    • Problem vs Emotion Focus: There are ppl who have a problem that then look for solutions to the problem, other people focus on the emotion of the problem and don't look for any solutions. (problem focus people on average do better when coping with stress, emotion focus are more likely to act like everything bad happens to them) (avg men are problem focus and avg women are emotion focus)
    • Sense of Commitment (to an idea): Committed to solving covid, committed to curing cancer (easier to cope when u have a commitment to something greater than yourself)
    • The I/E scale Julien Rotter, 1966: (internal/external scale): internal is that you look inside yourself to reason why things are the way they are, external is when you look around you to justify why things are the way they are. Internal control when getting a bad grade is to say that “i should've studied more” . External control when getting a bad grade is to say that “the test was unfair/too hard” . It was discovered that internal people cope with stress better on average, thus do better in general.
    • Having Actual Control: Rodin and langer Nursing Home Study by 2 female researchers. They thought that people in the nursing home were at a time in their lives where they were losing all control. Older people that could have once been CEOs of big businesses lose all sense of control when placed in group housing. (no decor, no meals, etc).
    • They said maybe the lack of control is harming people's psychological wellbeing and killing them sooner.

  • So they split the nursing home in half; one side being normal “fixed”; and the other side was given choice over everything. Then waited for several months, and then measured the death rate. They found in the ordinary group 30% had died, and in the other group in the more control group it was cut in half to 15%. Significant drop in mortality when left with more control.

  • Learned Helplessness, 1970: Book by Martin Seligman. Learned helplessness is the inappropriate generalization of non control from one situation to another.

    • In one situation the learner learns they are helpless (don’t have control) but then in another situation, they just assume they don’t have control (when they actually do), so they overgeneralize it and it’s a source of stress.
Coping With Stress: Personality Factors

  • I/E Personality Scale: People are either internal or external.

  • Type A or B personality: Type a= coronary prone; high sense of time urgency and more likely to have a heart attack. Hostility is the real issue; angry. Hostility damaging the heart. Type b= lack of type a.

  • Optimism vs pessimism: Optimistic: glass half full. Cope with stress better; always trying to see the bright side of things. Less likely to get sick, to get depressed, to earn more money. Often shaped by parents. Learned optimism in 1990 (Martin Seligman)

  • Psychological Hardiness: Idea that combines 3 things that make a person particularly resistant to stress. Combination of commitment, internal, and problem focus characteristics to be psychologically hardy. Those three things are listed below:

    • Commitment vs Alienation: (EX. A student high in commitment will see a tough exam as an opportunity to master the material (“I really want to understand this”), whereas
    • Journal writing: “journal therapy” someone leaning toward alienation might say, “I’ll never get this anyway,” and stop studying.)
    • Internal Locus of Control: Believing that your own actions make a difference in the outcomes you experience. You see yourself as the author of your life story, not just a passive character. (EX. After missing a deadline, a person with an internal locus will ask, “What can I change in my schedule or habits to avoid this next time?” rather than blaming “bad luck” or “mean professors.”)
    • Problem Focused style: When faced with stress, you tackle the root of the problem head-on—analyzing the situation, generating solutions, and taking concrete steps—rather than just venting emotions or avoiding the issue. (EX. If your group project is off-track, you might reassign tasks, set mini-deadlines, or schedule extra check-ins (problem-focused) instead of just complaining about teammates (emotion-focused) or ignoring the project until the last minute (avoidant)
Coping With Stress: Behavioral Factors
  • Aerobic exercise: exercise in a way that gets u out of breath for at least 20 minutes a day 3x a week or more and cope with stress better
  • Lose weight
  • Quit smoking: nicotine can create stress
  • Reduce salt and caffeine
  • Learn to relax
  • Meditation, yoga, self hypnosis
  • Biofeedback: fitbits/apple watches learn to lower heart rate by breathing

Health Psychology

  • Definition: Explores how psychological factors, behaviors, and social influences impact health, illness, and well-being.

  • The understanding of how stress can affect the immune system, leading to the development of Psychoneuroimmunology, played a crucial role in the emergence and growth of this field

  • Psychoneuroimmunology:

    • In 1975, Robert Ader and Nicholas Cohen, at the University of Rochester, advanced PNI with their demonstration of classical conditioning of immune function, and they subsequently coined the term.
    • It is a study/branch of psychology that explains how psychological, neural, and immune systems interact and influence each other.
    • It emerged as researchers began to understand the bidirectional communication between the brain and the immune system.
    • Since 1979, this idea helped launch a huge new field of research and practice called Health Psychology or Behavioral Medicine.

  • Psychobiology: Psychology + Biology.

    • “Psychology” comes first—you start with a mental or behavioral question, then look for its biological basis (EX. How neurotransmitter imbalances link to anxiety).

  • Biopsychology: Biology + Psychology.

    • Treat biology as primary—you explore how nervous-system structures and functions give rise to behavior and experience. (EX. Lesion studies in animals, electrophysiology, very fine‐grained brain mapping.)

  • Behavioral Medicine: The things you can do to be healthier (eating, exercising)

CH. 14 ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY

  • Behavioral Neuroscience: Study behaviors through brain studies. Directly tying neural circuits to specific actions or cognitive processes.
    • Example: fMRI or EEG while humans perform memory, emotion, or decision-making tasks)
  • Physiological Psychology: Looking at the mapping of the brain. Mapping precise physiological mechanisms (ion channels, synaptic events) onto behaviors.
    • Example: Single-cell recordings in animals
  • Neuropsychology: Studies how brain injury, disease, or atypical development affects cognition and behavior.
    • Example: Neuropsychological test batteries like Wisconsin Card Sorting, Rey–Oster