Intro to Psych midterm notes

Ch 5: Motivation and Emotion

Theories of Motivation

Motive: a tendency to seek rewards and avoid negative outcomes.

Instinct theory (William James): motives are genetically determined, unlearned behaviors that help survival.

Examples: a baby rooting, a bird building a nest. It fell out of favor because the list of "instincts" kept growing.

• ⭐Drive-reduction theory: a need (food, water) creates a drive (hunger, thirst), which pushes you to a drive-reducing behavior (eating, drinking).

  • ⭐ Primary drives: innate, for survival (hunger, thirst).

  • Secondary drives: learned (money, social approval).

  • ⭐ Homeostasis: the body's tendency to keep a steady internal state.

  • Incentive: an outside stimulus that pulls behavior (a reward).

• Arousal theory: we're motivated to keep an optimal level of arousal.

  • Yerkes-Dodson law: performance rises with arousal only up to a point, then drops, making an inverted U. Moderate arousal is best.

  • Sensation seekers crave high arousal. Curiosity is an example of a non-physiological motive.

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• ⭐ Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (bottom to top):

basic survivial needs, such as food and water

1. Physiological (food, water)

2. Safety

3. Belongingness and love

4. Esteem

5. Self-actualization: reaching your full potential

6. Self-transcendence: finding meaning beyond yourself

• Lower needs get priority, but the order isn't universal (it varies by culture and income).

• Self-determination theory: people need to feel competent, autonomous, and related.

  • Autonomous motivation: doing something because you want to (hobbies).

  • Controlled motivation: doing somehting becasue you feel pressured/ compelled (studying to avoid disappointing parents).

• ⭐ Intrinsic vs. extrinsic:

  • Intrinsic: personal satisfaction, an internal goal.

  • Extrinsic: outside rewards like grades, money, awards.

• Need to belong: social exclusion (ostracism) causereal pain and activates the anterior cingulate cortex. Isolation hurts health. Micro-friendships (bantering with a barista) boost happiness.

Hunger and Eating

• Hunger is a primary drive run by a negative feedback loop. If you lose weight, hunger rises, you eat more, and you regain the weight. This protects against starvation but makes dieting hard.

High glycemic foods

• spike blood sugar and don't keep you full for long.

Hypothalamus:

• lateral hypothalamus (LH):the "on switch" for hunger

• ventromedial hypothalamus (VMH:creates the feeling of fullness.

- Sleep deprivation can affect the hypothalamus and lead to overeating.

⭐Obesity: BMI of30 or more.

• Overweight is a BMI of 25–29.9.

• obesity linked to type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and some cancers.

• Why weight loss is hard:the body defends against "starvation." Circadian rhythms matter, evening people tend to skip breakfast and eat later, and a low resting metabolic rate also plays a part

• Weight-based prejudice: people who are overweight are often ridiculed and discriminated against.

Eating Disorders ⭐

• ⭐Anorexia nervosa: self-starvation, intense fear of gaining weight, distorted body image.

• ⭐ Bulimia nervosa: binge, then compensate (purging, fasting, excessive exercise).

• ⭐Binge eating disorder (BED) recurrent binges without regular compensatory behaviors. It's often tied to disgust, depression, or guilt.

Sexual Motivation

• Libido: physical desire for sex, influenced by the hypothalamus and hormones.

• Testosterone is the major hormone for libido in humans (testes in males, adrenal glands in females). Humans have no estrus, and estrogen isn't closely tied to human female libido.

• Masters and Johnson (the first to directly observe and measure sexual responses) -n — sexual response cycle in four phases: excitement, plateau, orgasm, resolution.

• Sexual orientation: attraction to the same and/or other sex. It can change over time, and women report more change than men.

Emotion

• componets of Emotion:has physiological, behavioral, expressive (facial), cognitive, and affective parts. ⭐

• universal types: fear, anger, joy, disgust, and sadness are considered universal.

• Cannon's 3 criticisms of James-Lange:

- body responses can look similar across emotions, can be slower than feelings, and artifical arousal doesnt always creste emotion

1. Physiological arousal looks too similar across emotions.

2. Body responses are sometimes slower than feelings.

3. Artificial arousal doesn't create emotion.

• Modern research shows some emotions do have different body patterns, which partly supports James-Lange.

Ch 6: Learning

• ⭐ Learning: a relatively permanent change in behavior from experience

• Habituation: you stop responding to a repeated, harmless stimulus.

• Dishabituation:you respond strongly again.

Classical Conditioning (Pavlov) ⭐

Learning to link two stimuli and anticipate events.

• ⭐ How to tell them apart: unconditioned means unlearned and automatic. Conditioned means learned.

• Acquisition: the learning phase, when NS and US are paired.

• Extinction: the CR fades when the CS keeps appearing without the US.

• Spontaneous recoverythe extinguished CR suddenly returns after a pause.

• Generalization:similar stimuli trigger the conditioned response

• ⭐stimulus Discrimination: learning to tell the CS apart from similar, irrelevant stimuli.

• Best conditioning: the CS comes just before the US (short delay, contiguity), and the CS reliably predicts the US (contingency).

• Little Albert (Watson and Rayner): a loud noise was paired with a white rat, and the fear generalized to rabbits, dogs, and furry coats.

• Mary Cover Jones used conditioning to reduce a child's fear.

• Higher-order conditioning: a CS gets paired with a new stimulus.

Operant Conditioning ⭐

Learning from the consequences of voluntary behavior.

• ⭐ Thorndike's Law of Effect: behaviors followed by good outcomes get stronger, and those followed by bad outcomes get weaker.

• ⭐ B.F. Skinner: coined "operant conditioning" and used the Skinner box.

• ⭐ Key trick: positive means adding, negative means removing. Reinforcement means the behavior goes up, and punishment means it goes down. Negative reinforcement is not punishment.

• ⭐ Punishment: a consequence that decreases a behavior.

• ⭐ Shaping: rewarding successive approximations until the desired behavior appears.

• Extinction (operant):the behavior fades when reinforcement stops.

• extinction burstis a temporary increase before it fades.

• Primary reinforcer: rewarding on its own (food).

• Secondary reinforcer: gains value through association (money, tokens).

• Token economy uses tokens that can be cashed in.

Schedules of reinforcement:

• Continuous reinforcement rewards every response, and it's vulnerable to extinction.

• Punishment problems: it doesn't teach the right behavior, can teach aggression, and causes negative emotions.

• —Alternatives: time-outs, loss of privileges, DRI (reward an incompatible good behavior), and empathy training.

Cognitive and Observational Learning

• ⭐ Cognitive map (Tolman): a mental layout of your environment.

• → Latent learning: learning that isn't shown until later.

• Insight learning (Köhler): the sudden "aha!"

• Bandura's Bobo doll: children imitated aggressive adults. Kids who saw the behavior rewarded or ignored copied it more, and kids who saw it punished were hesitant. Learning can happen without reinforcement.

• Four steps of modeling: Attention, Retention, Reproduction, Motivation.

Ch 7: Memory

Basics

• Three functions:

• ⭐ Encoding putting information into memory

• Storage (keeping it),

• ⭐ Retrieval getting information out of memory

• ⭐ Explicit (declarative) memory is conscious and verbal.

• ⭐ Implicit (nondeclarative) memory is unconscious: skills, habits, priming, and conditioning.

• Measures of retention:

• recall (hardest, like an essay),

• recognition: identifying information you have leaened;(easier, like multiple choice),

• relearnin: learning information again(relearning faster the second time).

Three-Stage Model

1. ⭐ Sensory memory: big capacity, very short duration.

   • ⭐ Iconic = visual sensory memory (a fraction of a second).

   • ⭐ Echoic = brief auditory or sound sensory memory

2. Short-term memory (STM): holds about 7 ± 2 items (about 4 chunks) for roughly 30 seconds.

   • ⭐ Chunking: grouping small bits into larger ones (phone numbers).

   • Maintenance rehearsal: repeating info to hold it in STM.

   • Elaborative rehearsal: linking info to what you already know, which moves it to LTM.

3. ⭐ Long-term memory (LTM): no known limit.

• Working memory: the systeme that temporarily hold and works wiht information has the central executive: controls attention in working memory(controls attention),

• phonological loop:(verbal/sound)

• visuospatial sketchpad (visual/spatial)

• episodic buffer (bridges STM and LTM).

• Levels of processing: deeper, more meaningful processing means better memory (shallow = physical traits, deep = meaning).

• ⭐ Serial-position curve: you remember the first items (primacy, LTM) and the last items (recency, STM) best, and the middle worst. Recency is most affected by aging.

• ⭐ Mnemonics: memory aids (ROYGBIV).

Types of Long-Term Memory

• Declarative (explicit):

  • Semantic: general facts, not personal.

  • Episodic: your personal experiences.

• ⭐ Procedural (implicit): how-to skills, like riding a bike.

• ⭐ Schema: a mental framework that organizes knowledge.

Amnesia ⭐

• ⭐ Anterograde: can't form new memories (the future is affected).

• ⭐ Retrograde: can't recall old memories (the past is affected).

• CTE: caused by repeated head trauma, linked to tau protein.

Forgetting

• Encoding failure: the info never got stored (stress, distraction, shallow processing, multitasking).

• Decay: forgetting over time whne information isnt used "use it or lose it."Interference:

• retroactive = new info blocks old.

        → Proactive = old info blocks new.

• Cue-dependent forgetting: missing retrieval cues. Encoding specificity: retrieval is best when the context matches encoding.

• Motivated forgetting / repression: threatening memories are blocked.

Accuracy and Biology

• ⭐ Flashbulb memories: vivid memories of emotional events (amygdala and stress hormones), though not always fully accurate.

• Memory is reconstructive, not a video camera. The misinformation effect is when later info distorts the original memory. This matters for eyewitness memory.

• Brain structures: Hippocampus = declarative memory. Amygdala = emotional memory. Cerebellum = procedural memory. Left frontal lobe = verbal memory. There's no single "memory center."

• Memory consolidation: stabilizing memories for long-term storage.

• Study tips: avoid multitasking, don't cram, use elaborative rehearsal, overlearning, self-testing, mnemonics, sleep, nutrition, and exercise.

Ch 8: Cognition, Language, and Intelligence

Thinking

• ⭐ Cognition: all mental activities of thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating. Metacognition:thinking about your own thinking.

• ⭐ Concepts: categories of objects, events, or ideas with common properties. They're organized as superordinate (fruit), basic (oranges), and subordinate (navel oranges).

• Mental representations are stored in LTM, and we tend to think visually.

Problem Solving

• 6 steps: identify, represent, plan, execute, evaluate the plan, evaluate the solution.

• ⭐ Algorithm vs. heuristic:

  • Algorithm: a step-by-step method that guarantees a solution.

  • Heuristic: a faster rule-of-thumb shortcut that may be wrong.

• Obstacles: fixation / mental set (sticking with an old strategy) and functional fixedness (seeing objects only in their usual role).

• Divergent thinking (many ideas, creativity). Well-structured problems have a clear path, and ill-structuredones don't.

Reasoning and Judgment

• ⭐ Deductive reasoning: general to specific (all birds have feathers, robins are birds, so robins have feathers).

• Inductive reasoning: specific to general (dark clouds, so I predict rain).

• Heuristics:

  • Availability: judging by how easily examples come to mind.

  • Representativeness: judging by how well something fits a category (can fuel prejudice).

  • Affective: judging by an immediate emotional reaction.

• Loss aversion and risk aversion affect decision-making.

Language

• ⭐ Phoneme: the smallest unit of sound. Morpheme: the smallest unit of meaning.

• ⭐ Grammar: the system of rules for a language. Semantics = meaning of words and sentences. Syntax = rules for arranging words into sentences. (The slide has these two definitions swapped, so use the ones here.)

• Language development: ~4 months babbling, ~10 months babbling like the home language, ~12 months one word, ~24 months two-word speech.

  • ⭐ Cooing = early vowel sounds, then babbling adds consonants.

  • Telegraphic speech: short, ungrammatical sentences.

• Chomsky: we're born with a language acquisition device. Usage-based theory: exposure and interaction matter most.

• ⭐ Whorf's hypothesis: linguistic determinism (language determines thought) is the extreme version and is generally rejected. Linguistic relativity is the weaker version: language influences thought.

• Aphasia: language impairment. Broca's area (frontal lobe) controls speaking. Wernicke's area (temporal lobe) controls understanding.

Intelligence

• Intelligence: the ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt.

• ⭐ General intelligence (g): Spearman's idea of one core intelligence behind all abilities.

• Thurstone: 7 primary mental abilities.

• Cattell-Horn-Carroll: Fluid (Gf) is abstract reasoning and declines with age. Crystallized (Gc) is accumulated knowledge and grows with age.

• ⭐ Gardner's multiple intelligences (9): linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalist, existential. For career examples, interpersonal fits a counselor or nurse, bodily-kinesthetic fits an athlete or surgeon, and spatial fits an architect.

• ⭐ Sternberg's 3 intelligences: analytical (book smarts), creative (innovation), practical (street smarts).

• Emotional intelligence: perceiving, understanding, managing, and using emotions.

• Savant syndrome: exceptional skill in one area despite limits elsewhere.

Measuring Intelligence

• Galton: an early pioneer who measured reaction time and physical traits.

• ⭐ Binet and Simon: the first reputable test, built on mental age.

• Terman: the Stanford-Binet. ⭐ IQ = (Mental Age ÷ Chronological Age) × 100.

• ⭐ Wechsler: uses subscales (not one number) and is based on scores relative to the average. WPPSI = preschool, WISC = children, WAIS = adults.

• Normal distribution: the average IQ is 100, with about 68% between 85 and 115.

• Reliability = consistent results. Validity = measures what it's supposed to.

• ⭐ Criticisms: cultural bias, and socioeconomic and environmental effects.

• Nature and nurture: intelligence comes from both (interactionism). Twin studies compare identical and fraternal twins. Genotype = inherited code, phenotype = the trait you actually develop.

Quick Cram Checklist

• Positive vs. negative reinforcement vs. punishment (add or remove, behavior up or down)

• Conditioned vs. unconditioned (US, UR, CS, CR)

• James-Lange vs. Cannon-Bard vs. Schachter-Singer

• Anterograde vs. retrograde amnesia

• Primacy vs. recency

• Algorithm vs. heuristic

• Phoneme vs. morpheme

• Anorexia vs. bulimia vs. BED

Note: the slide for Binet's focus topic is garbled. This guide uses what the full slides say: Binet used mental age, and Wechsler used subscales scored against the average.