Psychology Unit 2 Semester 1 Exam Notes

Exam Checklist: Psychology Unit 2 Semester 1

Key Science Skills + Research Methods (Chapter 1)

  • Hypothesis and Variables:
    • Formulating a hypothesis, which is a testable prediction.
    • Identifying independent variable (IV) and dependent variable (DV).
  • Investigation Methodology:
    • Controlled experiment designs:
      • Within-subjects design: Each participant experiences all conditions.
      • Between-subjects design: Different participants are assigned to different conditions.
      • Mixed design: Combines within-subjects and between-subjects elements.
  • Data Collection:
    • Self-reports: Participants provide data about themselves (e.g., surveys, interviews).
  • Types of Data:
    • Quantitative vs. qualitative:
      • Quantitative: Numerical data.
      • Qualitative: Descriptive data.
    • Primary vs. secondary:
      • Primary: Data collected directly by the researcher.
      • Secondary: Data that already exists (e.g., in previous studies).
    • Subjective vs. objective:
      • Subjective: Based on personal opinions or feelings.
      • Objective: Based on facts and measurable data.
  • Ethical Guidelines:
    • Informed consent: Participants must be fully informed about the study and agree to participate.
    • Withdrawal rights: Participants can leave the study at any time.
    • Deception: Only permissible if justified and followed by debriefing.
    • Debriefing: Explaining the true purpose of the study after participation.
    • Confidentiality: Protecting participants' personal information.
    • Voluntary participation: Participants should not be coerced into participating.
  • Ethical Concepts:
    • Beneficence: Maximizing benefits and minimizing risks to participants.
    • Integrity: Conducting research honestly and with accuracy.
    • Justice: Ensuring fair and equitable treatment of participants.
    • Respect: Valuing the rights, dignity, and welfare of participants.
    • Non-maleficence: Avoiding causing harm to participants.
  • Extraneous and Confounding Variables:
    • Extraneous variables: Variables other than the IV that could affect the DV.
    • Confounding variables: Variables that systematically vary with the IV, making it difficult to determine the true effect.
    • Order effect: The order of presenting treatments affects the DV.
    • Experimenter effect: The experimenter unintentionally influences the results.
    • Individual participant differences: Natural variations among participants.
    • Placebo effect: Participants' expectations affect the DV.
    • Non-standardized procedures and instructions: Inconsistent procedures across conditions. These should be controlled to ensure the validity of the experiment.

Social Cognition (Chapter 6)

  • Attribution: Explaining behavior.
    • Personal attributions: Explaining behavior based on internal factors (e.g., personality).
    • Situational attributions: Explaining behavior based on external factors ( .g., environment).
    • Halo effect: A general impression of a person influences how we perceive other aspects of their character.
  • Biases:
    • Self-serving bias: Tendency to attribute our successes to internal factors and failures to external factors.
    • Fundamental attribution error: Tendency to overestimate the role of personal factors and underestimate the role of situational factors in others' behavior.
    • Actor-observer bias: Tendency to attribute our own behavior to situational factors and others' behavior to personal factors.
  • Attitudes:
    • Definition: An evaluation a person makes about an object, person, group, event or issue.
    • Tri-component model of attitudes (ABC):
      • Affective: Feelings or emotions.
      • Behavioral: Actions or behavior.
      • Cognitive: Thoughts and beliefs.
  • Heuristics: Mental shortcuts used for decision-making.
    • Availability heuristic: Making decisions based on how easily information comes to mind.
    • Representative heuristic: Making decisions based on how similar something is to a prototype.
    • Affect heuristic: Making decisions based on current emotions.
  • Cognitive Bias: Systematic patterns of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment.
    • Cognitive dissonance: Mental discomfort experienced when holding conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes.
  • Factors Influencing Attitude Formation:
    • Classical conditioning: Involuntary learning through association.
      • NS (Neutral Stimulus), UCS (Unconditioned Stimulus), UCR (Unconditioned Response), CS (Conditioned Stimulus), CR (Conditioned Response).
    • Operant conditioning: Voluntary learning through consequences.
      • Positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment, negative punishment.
  • Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination:
    • Stereotypes: Generalized beliefs about a group of people.
    • Ingroup and outgroup: "Us" (ingroup) vs. "them" (outgroup).
    • Prejudice: Negative attitude toward a group.
    • Discrimination: Treating someone unfairly based on group membership.
    • Relationship between prejudice and discrimination: Prejudice is an attitude, while discrimination is a behavior. Discrimination can result from prejudice.

Factors That Influence Individual and Group Behaviour (Chapter 7)

  • Status and Power:
    • Influence of status and power within groups: Status and power affect how individuals interact and behave.
    • Relationship between status and power.
    • Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment:
      • What he did: Simulated a prison environment to study the effects of status and power; assigned participants as 'prisoners' or 'guards'.
      • Ethics: Highly unethical due to psychological harm to participants.
      • Conclusion/results: Demonstrated the powerful influence of situational factors on behavior.
    • Power types:
      • Legitimate power: Derived from a formal position or role.
      • Reward power: Derived from the ability to provide rewards.
      • Expert power: Derived from knowledge or expertise.
  • Obedience:
    • Milgram’s study of obedience:
      • What he did: Investigated the extent to which individuals would obey authority figures, even when it meant harming another person; participants were instructed to administer electric shocks to a "learner" for incorrect answers.
      • Ethics: Highly unethical due to psychological distress caused to participants.
      • Conclusion/results: Showed that people are surprisingly likely to obey authority figures, even if it conflicts with their conscience.
    • Factors that affect obedience:
      • Social proximity: The closeness of the authority figure and the victim.
      • Legitimacy of authority figure: The perceived authority of the person giving orders.
      • Group pressure: The presence of others who are also obeying or disobeying.
  • Conformity: Adjusting one’s behavior or thinking to align with a group standard.
    • Define conformity: Adjusting one's behavior or thinking to match those of a group.
    • Factors that affect conformity: Group size, unanimity, informational influence, normative influence, culture, social loafing, deindividuation.
    • Collectivist vs. individualistic cultures and conformity: Collectivist cultures tend to show higher levels of conformity.
  • Influence of media on behaviour:
    • Positive and negative influences of media on behavior: Media can promote prosocial behavior or aggression.

Perception and Distortions of Perception (Chapters 8 & 9)

  • Sensation & Perception
    • Sensation vs. perception:
      • Sensation: The process by which our sensory receptors and nervous system receive and represent stimulus energies from our environment.
      • Perception: The process of organizing and interpreting sensory information, enabling us to recognize meaningful objects and events.
    • Role of attention:
      • Divided attention: Concentrating on more than one activity at the same time.
      • Sustained attention: The ability to maintain focus on one activity for a prolonged period.
      • Selective attention: Focusing on one stimulus while ignoring others.
    • Top-down vs. bottom-up processing:
      • Top-down processing: Information processing guided by higher-level mental processes, as when we construct perceptions drawing on our experience and expectations.
      • Bottom-up processing: Analysis that begins with the sensory receptors and works up to the brain’s integration of sensory information.
  • Vision
    • Sensation (reception, transduction, and transmission) and perception (interpretation).
    • Reception: Light enters the eye and is detected by photoreceptors (rods and cones) in the retina.
    • Transduction: Photoreceptors convert light energy into electrical signals.
    • Transmission: Electrical signals are sent to the brain via the optic nerve.
  • Biological visual factors:
    • Structure of the eye (role of the retina, rods, cones):
      • Retina: Contains photoreceptors (rods and cones) that detect light.
      • Rods: Enable vision in low light conditions (black and white vision).
      • Cones: Enable color vision and function best in bright light.
    • Monocular cues (pictorial depth cues):
      • Linear perspective: Parallel lines appear to converge in the distance.
      • Interposition: If one object blocks another, it is perceived as closer.
      • Height in the visual field: Objects higher in the visual field are perceived as farther away.
      • Relative size: Smaller objects are perceived as farther away.
      • Texture gradient: Details become less distinct as distance increases.
    • Binocular cues:
      • Convergence: The extent to which the eyes converge inward when looking at an object.
      • Retinal disparity: The difference between the visual images that each eye perceives.
      • Accommodation: The lens changes shape to focus on near or far objects.
  • Psychological visual factors:
    • Perceptual set (past experiences, context, motivation, and memory): A predisposition to perceive things in a certain way.
      • Past experiences: Prior experiences influence how we interpret visual information.
      • Context: The surrounding environment affects perception.
      • Motivation: Our goals and desires influence what we perceive.
      • Memory: Memories shape our perception of current events.
    • Gestalt principles (similarity, closure, figure-ground, proximity):
      • Similarity: Grouping similar objects together.
      • Closure: Filling in gaps to create a complete image.
      • Figure-ground: Distinguishing between the object (figure) and the background.
      • Proximity: Grouping objects that are close together.
  • Social visual factors:
    • Culture: Cultural background influences visual perception.
  • Taste perception
    • The 5 basic tastes: Sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami.
    • Structure of the tongue (papillae, taste buds, taste receptors):
      • Papillae: Bumps on the tongue that contain taste buds.
      • Taste buds: Structures that contain taste receptors.
      • Taste receptors: Cells that detect different tastes.
    • Biopsychosocial influences on taste perception (age, genetics, memory, food packaging, and culture):
      • Age: Taste sensitivity decreases with age.
      • Genetics: Genetic factors influence taste preferences.
      • Memory: Past experiences shape our taste perceptions.
      • Food packaging: Visual cues influence how we perceive taste.
      • Culture: Cultural norms affect taste preferences.
  • Distortions of perception:
    • Optical illusions:
      • Ames room illusion: A distorted room that makes people appear different sizes.
      • Muller-Lyer illusion: Lines with different arrowheads appear to be different lengths.
    • Spatial Neglect:
      • Brain area damaged: Usually the parietal lobe.
      • Symptoms of this condition: Inability to attend to stimuli on one side of the body.
    • Miraculin:
      • Describe what it is: A taste-modifying glycoprotein found in the miracle berry.
      • How it influences taste perception: Causes sour foods to taste sweet.
    • Judgement of flavours: perceptual set, texture, colour intensity
      • An individual's flavor perception is heavily influenced by their perceptual set, which is composed of expectations based on prior experiences.
        • The texture of food substantially affects flavor perception; for example, creamy textures are often associated with richness and sweetness.
        • The color intensity of food can alter perceived sweetness and flavor concentration, with vibrant colors often leading to expectations of stronger, more intense flavors.

Exam Tips

  • Reading Time:
    • Carefully read the instructions. Plan your time carefully.
    • Try to keep calm if you come across a question that you are uncertain of. Often when you start writing, information comes back to you.
  • Writing Time:
    • USE PEN (blue or black only).
    • Read the questions carefully. Be especially aware of negatives. For instance, questions that include phrases such as “which of these is NOT…”.
    • Answer ALL multiple-choice questions. USE PENCIL!
    • If you do not know the answer to a question, GUESS. Your guessing should be done by eliminating answers that you think are certainly wrong. Guess only between those you cannot eliminate. This increases your chances of giving the correct answer.
    • Read all of the alternatives, even if you think the first one is correct. You may have made an error, or there could be a better answer further on.
    • Attempt ALL of the short answer questions.
    • Try to leave enough time to look over your answers to ensure you haven’t made any obvious mistakes.
    • Check ALL your answers, but do not change any of them unless you are absolutely sure that you have made an incorrect response.