Psychology
Chapter 13
Social psychology
Humans are naturally interested in assessing the personality characteristics and attitudes of other humans they encounter.
This drive has clear adaptive functions. Other people can help us or hurt us in our life endeavors. Understanding others helps us predict their behavior and decide how to interact with them.
The accuracy of judgments of others sometimes suffers from certain consistent mistakes, or biases.
These biases occur most often when we are not using our full mental recourses, or have only limited information with which to reason, or have unconscious motives for reaching particular conclusions.
Making attributions from observed behavior
Actions are directly observable, and thoughts are not. Judgments about the personalities of people we encounter are based largely on what we observe of their actions.
Any judgment about another person is, in essence, a claim about causation. It is an implicit claim that the person is caused in part by some more or less permanent characteristic of the person.
Any claim about causation is an attribution. A claim about the cause of someone’s behavior.
The logic of attributing behavior to the person or the situation.
To build a useful picture of a person on the basis of his or her actions, you must decide which actions imply something unique about the person and which actions would be expected of anyone under similar situations.
When behavior is clearly appropriate to the environmental situation, people commonly attribute the behavior to the situation.
Three questions in making an attribution
Given the answer to questions 1 and 2, question 3 will allow us to assess the generality of the personality attribute we can reasonably infer.
Often people lack the information, the time or the motivation to make a logical attribution. In that case they may take shortcuts in their reasoning, which may result in certain consistent errors or biases.
The person bias in attributions
People tend to give too much weight to personality and not enough to the environmental situation when they make attributions about others’ actions.
This is the person bias in attribution.
Some of the most dramatic examples of the person bias occur in situations in which a person is socially pressured or required to behave in a certain way.
A person’s social role can have undue effects on the attributions that others make about that person. We might develop different impressions of the same person if we saw him or her in out-of-role situations.
The fundamental attribution error: the pervasiveness and strength of the bias and to suggest that it underlies many other social-psychological phenomena.
But it might not be as fundamental as thought:
A cross-cultural difference in attributions
Because of philosophies, social orientation and religions:
People in western cultures may learn to attribute behavior more to the person than to the situation.
In eastern cultures, people might make relatively fewer person attributions and more situation attitudes.
Effects of facial features on person perceptions
The attractiveness bias
Attractive people are commonly judged more intelligent, competent, sociable and morel than less attractive people.
Judgments of personality can also affect judgments of physical appearance.
East Asians are less susceptible to the attractiveness bias than are westerners. So the attractiveness bias is at least partly a result of an influence of Western culture.
Correlations between perceived intelligence and perceived attractiveness are high. 0.57
The correlations between perceived attractiveness and IQ are lower 0.21
The ‘good genes’ theory.
The baby-face bias
Some people, regardless of their age, have facial features that resemble those of a baby.
Baby-face adults are perceived as more naïve, honest, helpless, kind and warm than mature-faced adults of the same age and sex. Even though they could tell that the baby-faced persons were not really younger.
Judges find it hard to think of baby-faced persons as deliberately causing harm but do not find it difficult to think of them as incompetent or forgetful.
People vote for the mature-faced person, who looks more competent over the baby-faced person who looks more naive.
Long ago, human beings intuitively respond to infants’ facial features with feelings of compassion and care, a characteristic that helps promote the survival of our offspring.
We generalize this response not just to babies and animals but also to adult humans whose faces resemble those of babies.
Possible evolutionary consequences of the baby-face bias
Human adult, overall, are much more baby-faced than the adults of our closest primate relatives.
The function of the baby-face bias is that it promotes caretaking of infants and young children by adults. Immature facial features may provide adults with cues regarding a child’s health and overall maturity level that in turn may influence the amount of time and resources they devote to a child.
Bias toward baby-faces is not reliably found until adolescence.
Biases toward cues of immaturity may be related to the onset of puberty and possible parenthood.
Biases toward infantile features are specific to times during development when women are more likely to find themselves in a caregiving role, possibly mediated by hormones.
Forming impressions on the Internet
The Internet has added new dimensions to human communication.
There are positive correlations between Internet use and overall sociability and emotional well-being.
The role of the Internet in meeting new people.
Get-acquainted meetings over the Internet are more intimate, more revealing of what each person considers to be his or her ‘true self’, than are such meetings conducted face-to-face.
The relative anonymity of the Internet, along with the lack of visual and auditory contact, reduces social anxiety and frees people to reveal more about themselves than they would if they met face-to-face. Also, the biasing effect of attractiveness, or the lack thereof, are absent. Communication is not shut down by early negative judgments or anxieties based on physical features.
Not only can people show their ‘true’ selves on the Internet, they can also ‘try out’ new identities. This happens especially during adolescence.
In this context, identity can be defined as ‘the aspect of the self that is accessible and salient in a particular context and that interacts with the environment’.
Self-awareness is often described as one of the hallmarks of our species.
At about 18 months of age, children begin to recognize themselves in a mirror.
Not all species are capable of this.
For chimpanzees, at least, the capacity of self-recognition seems to depend on social interaction.
Many psychologist and sociologists have argued that the self-concept is fundamentally a social product. To become aware of yourself, you must first become aware of others of your species. And then become aware, perhaps from the way others treat you, that you are one of them.
In humans, self-awareness includes awareness of the physical self and also of one’s own personality and character, reflected psychologically in the reactions of other people.
Seeing ourselves through the eyes of others
Looking-glass self: people who react to us.
We all naturally infer what other people what others think of us from their reactions, and we use those inferences to build our own self-concepts.
Effects of others’ appraisals on self-understanding and behavior
The beliefs and expectations that others have of a person can to some degree create reality by influencing that person’s self-concept and behavior.
These effects are called self-fulfilling prophecies or Pygmalion effects.
There are real gains, not just perceived gains.
Changes in subject’s self-concepts can result from differences in the way that others treat them. It can also occur by simply telling others that they are consisted with the attribute that they are told to have.
In cases where an attribution runs directly counter to a person’s strong beliefs about himself, the attributions can backfire.
Self-esteem as an index of others’ approval and acceptance
Self-esteem is one’s feeling of approval acceptance and liking of oneself.
Sociometer theory: self-esteem acts like a meter to inform us, at any given time, of the degree to which we are likely to be accepted or rejected by others.
What you experience as your self-esteem at this very moment largely reflects your best guess about the degree to which other people, whom you care about, respect and accept you.
From an evolutionary perspective, other people’s views matter a great deal. Our survival depends on others acceptance of us and willingness to cooperate with us.
Actively constructing our self-perceptions
Although other people’s views of us play a large role in our perceptions of ourselves, we do not just passively accept those views.
We actively try to influence others’ views of us, and in that way we also influence our own self-perceptions.
We compare ourselves to others as a way of defining and evaluating ourselves, and we often bias those comparisons by giving more weight to some pieces of evidence than to others.
Social comparison, effects of the reference group
In perception everything is relative to some frame of reference. In self-perception the frame of reference is other people.
You see yourself compared with other people.
Social comparison: the process of comparing ourselves with others in order to identify our unique characteristics and evaluate our abilities
A direct consequence of social comparison is that the self-concept varies dependent on the reference group. The group against whom the comparison is made.
Effects of the reference group on self-descriptions
People identify themselves largely in terms of the ways in which they perceive themselves to be different from those around them.
Effect of the reference group on self-evaluations
The evaluative aspect of social comparison can be charged with emotion.
The big-fish-in-the-little-pond effect. The difference reflects the difference in the reference groups.
A person’s self-esteem is equal to his achievements divided by his pretensions (the persons self-chosen goals and reference groups).
Enhancing our views of ourselves
At least in North America and Western Europe, people tend to rate themselves unduly high on practically every dimension that they value.
It is useful to have relatively accurate views of ourselves, but it feels good to think well of ourselves, so most of us skew our self-evaluations in positive directions.
We maintain our unduly high self-evaluations by treating evidence about ourselves differently from the way we treat evidence about others.
Four means by which we do that:
Self-control
When we perceive that someone is trying to control our behavior we sometimes act in opposition, termed a reactance effect, in order to exert some self-control.
Self-control is related to executive functions.
Ego depletion
If self-control can be viewed as a special case of executive functions, then it is a mentally effortful activity that is potentially available to conscious awareness, and its execution consumes a person’s limited mental resources.
Ego depletion: exerting self-control on one task would deplete some of one’s limited mental resources, resulting in poorer self-control on subsequent tasks.
People find it to exert the mental effort necessary for self-control when they are stressed, tired, frustrated or sad.
‘Loss of mental energy’ means that ego depletion is caused by the actual depletion of a form of glucose in the brain.
Self- control is costly in terms of mental effort that cost is paid by reduced self-control on subsequent tasks.
Free will
The most obvious expression of self-control is in the perception of free will.
We follow the definition of free will as ‘a particular form of action control that encompasses self-regulation, rational choice, planned behavior and initiative’.
Free will, in the form of self-control, evolved as a result of pressure from living in increasingly complex social groups.
The increase of self-control was accompanied by an increase of self-awareness and thus the perception of free will.
There are degrees to which our behavior is truly intentional.
It matters what people believe about free will when it comes to some social important behaviors.
A deterministic (anti-free-will) view of the human mind results in reduced moral behaviors. Believe in free will may be one mechanism that promotes prosocial behavior and may have been selected over the course of human evolution to promote more harmonious life in a human group.
Others are not just involved in the construction of the self-concept, they are also part of its contents.
We think of ourselves in terms of our individual characteristics, and also in terms of the groups to which we belong and with which we identify.
Personal identity and social identity.
Shifting between personal and social identities.
Our self-concepts are relatively consistent from situation to situation, but nor rigid.
Our evolution as a species has entailed a continuous balance between the need to assert ourselves as individuals and the need to cooperate with others. We have the capacity to hold both personal and social identities and to switch between them to meet or needs for survival.
Different cultures tend to vary in the relative weights they give to personal and social identity.
Consequences of personal and social identity
Our feelings about ourselves depend not just on our personal achievements, but also on the achievements of the groups with which we identify, even when we ourselves play little or no role in those achievements.
In some situations, high achievement by other members of our groups can temporarily raise or lower our self-esteem, depending on whether our social identity or our personal identity is more active.
Group-enhancing bias
Our bias to think highly of ourselves applies to our social identity as well as to our personal identity.
In some conditions our group-enhancing biases are at least as strong as our self-enhancing biases.
It occurs even when there is no realistic basis for assuming that one groups differs from another.
Group-enhancing biases increase when people are primed to think of their social identities and decline when people are primed to think of their personal identities.
Stereotypes and their automatic effects on perception and behavior
We can switch between personal and social identities in our perception of others as well as ourselves.
This is particularly true when we view members of out-groups.
The schema (or organized set of knowledge or beliefs) that we carry in our heads about any group of people is referred to as a stereotype.
We gain our stereotypes largely from the ways our culture as a whole depicts and describes each social category.
A stereotype may accurately portray typical characteristics of a group, or exaggerate those characteristics, or be a complete fabrication based on culture-wide misconceptions.
Stereotypes are useful to the degree that they provide us with some initial, valid information about a person, but they are also sources of prejudice and social injustice.
Distinction between implicit and explicit stereotypes
Three levels of stereotypes:
Implicit stereotypes and unconscious discrimination
Implicit stereotypes can lead people who are not consciously prejudiced to behave in prejudicial ways, despite their intentions.
Implicit stereotypes can be deadly
Defeating explicit and implicit negative stereotypes
Explicit and implicit stereotypes are psychologically quite different from each other.
People often hold implicit stereotypes that do not coincide with their explicit beliefs about the stereotyped group.
Explicit stereotypes are products of conscious thought processes, modifiable by deliberate learning and logic.
Implicit stereotypes are products of more primitive emotional processes, modifiable by such means as classical conditioning.
The association of positive feelings with individual members of the stereotyped group helps reduce automatic negative responses toward the group as a whole.
An attitude: any belief or opinion that has an evaluative component (like good or bad, attractive or repulsive, moral or immoral).
Our attitudes tie us both cognitively and emotionally to our entire social world.
Our most central attitudes, values, help us judge the appropriateness of whole categories and actions.
Relationships of attitudes to behavior: distinction between explicit and implicit attitudes
The attitude-behavior relationship depends very much upon the way in which the attitude is accessed.
Explicit attitudes: conscious, verbally stated evaluations.
Implicit attitudes: attitudes that are manifested in automatic mental associations.
Implicit attitudes automatically influence behavior
Implicit attitudes automatically influence our behavior. The less we think about what we are doing, the more influence our implicit attitudes have.
Our explicit attitudes require thought. The more we think about what we are doing, the more influence our explicit attitudes have.
People’s implicit attitudes are reflected directly in portions of the brain’s limbic system that are involved in emotions and drives.
Explicit attitudes are reflected in portions of the prefrontal cortex that are concerned with conscious control.
In cased where an explicit attitude counters an implicit attitude, the subcortical areas respond immediately to the relevant stimuli, in accordance with the implicit attitude, but then downwards connections from the prefrontal cortex may dampen that response.
Early findings of lack of correlations between explicit attitudes and behavior
There is a lack of correlations between measures of explicit attitudes and measures of behavior.
Explicit attitudes must be retrieved by memory to affect behavior
People are must likely to behave in accordance with an explicit attitude if they are reminded of that attitude just before the behavioral test.
If you are trying to behave in accordance with some newly formed explicit attitude, then you may need to exert considerable mental effort, at least for a while, to keep reminding yourself of your attitude. Until your implicit attitude begins to change.
The origins of attitudes and methods of persuasion
To a considerable degree, our attitudes are products of learning.
Through direct experience or from information that others convey to us, we learn to like some objects, events and concepts and to dislike others.
This can be automatic or highly controlled.
Attitudes through classical conditioning: no thought
Classical conditioning can be thought of as an automatic attitude generator.
It leads us to feel positive about objects and events that have been linked in our experience to pleasant, life-promoting occurrences. And the other way around.
Such conditioning generally affects people’s implicit attitudes more than their explicit attitudes. It is possible to generate either a positive or negative implicit attitude through conditioning while, at the very same time, generating an opposite attitude through the presentation of evaluative statements.
Classical conditioning, when its effects aren’t countered with opposite statements, can effect explicit attitudes in the same direction as the implicit effects.
Attitudes through heuristics: superficial thought
The more sophisticated, but still relatively automatic process of using certain decision rules, or heuristics, is to evaluate information and develop attitudes.
Heuristics provide shortcuts to a full, logical elaboration of the information in a message. They can affect our explicit and our implicit attitudes.
We learn to use such rules because they often allow us to make useful judgments with minimal expenditures of time and mental energy. The rules become mental habit, without awareness that we are using them.
Attitudes through logical analysis of the message: systematic thought
Sometimes we think logically in ways that produce rational effects on our explicit attitudes. We most likely do this for issues that really matter to us.
Elaboration likelihood model
A major determinant of whether a message will be processed systematically or superficially is the personal relevance of the message.
We tend to be cognitive misers. We reserve our elaborate reasoning powers of messages that seem most relevant to us, and we rely on mental shortcuts to evaluate messages that seem less relevant.
Attitudes as rationalizations to attain cognitive consistency
The cognitive dissonance theory
We have a mechanism built into the workings of our mind that creates an uncomfortable feeling of dissonance, or lack of harmony, when we sense some inconsistency among the various explicit attitudes, beliefs, and items of knowledge that constitute our mental store.
The discomfort of cognitive dissonance motivates to seek ways to resolve contradictions or inconsistencies among our conscious cognitions.
Such a mechanism could well have evolved to serve adaptive functions related to logic.
The dissonance-reasoning drive does not always function adaptively. It can lead us to reduce dissonance in illogical and maladaptive ways.
Avoiding dissonant information
People generally choose things that they believe will support their existing views.
One way avoid dissonance is to avoid situations in which we might discover facts or ideas that run counter to our current views.
Firming up an attitude to be consistent with an action
After we have irrevocably made one choice or another, any lingering doubts would be discordant with our knowledge of what we have done. According to the cognitive dissonance theory, we are motivated to set those doubts aside.
People tend to set their doubts aside after making an irrevocable decision. Even in the absence of new information, people suddenly become more confident of their choice after acting on it that they were before.
Changing an attitude to justify an action: the insufficient-justification effect
Sometime people behave in ways that run counter to their attitudes and then are faced with the dissonant cognitions. They can’t undo what they did, but they can relieve dissonance by modifying, or even reversing, their attitudes.
This change in attitude is called the insufficient-justification effect.
It occurs only if the person has no easy way to justify the behavior, given his or her previous attitude.
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Foundations for the study of psychology - a summary of chapter 1 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)
Psychology
Chapter 1
Foundations of the study of psychology
Psychology is the science of behaviour of the mind.
Behaviour is the observable action of a person or animal
Mind refers to an individual’s subjective experiences.
Dualism
René Descartes (1596-1650)
Important about him: the body is like a complicated machine, a machinal control of movements. Quite complex behaviours can occur trough purely machinal means.
Nonhuman animals have no souls.
Thought (Descartes defined as conscious deliberation and judgment) is ascribed to the soul.
Body and soul communicate through the pineal body.
Increased understanding of reflexes
The basic arrangement of the nervous system.
Some suggest that all human behaviour occurs through reflexes. → reflexology by I. M Sechenov (1863-1935) This inspired Pavlov.
The concept of localization of function in the brain
The idea that specific parts of the brain serve specific functions in the production of mental experience and behaviour.
Johannes Müller (1838-1965)
Different qualities of sensory experience come about because the nerves from different sense organs excite different parts of the brain. (We experience vison if this part of the brain is active).
Pierre Flourens (1824-1965)
Experiences on animals. Brain damage on different parts of the brain causes different deficits on animals abilities to move.
Paul Broca (1861-1965)
Publics effidence that people who suffer brain damage on specific parts of the brain lose the ability to speak, but do not lose other mental abilities
Methods of psychology - a summary of chapter 2 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 2
Methods of psychology
In psychology, the data are usually measures or descriptions of some form of behaviour produces by humans or other animals.
A fact (or observation) is an objective statement, usually based on direct observation, that reasonable observers agree is true. In psychology, facts are usually particular behaviours, or reliable patterns of behaviours, for persons or animals.
A theory is an idea, or conceptual model, that is designed to explain existing facts and make predictions about new facts that might be discovered.
Any prediction about new facts that is made from a theory is called a hypothesis.
Facts lead to theories, which leads to hypothesis, which are tested by experiments, which leads to new fact. It is a cycle of science.
Each of this dimensions can vary form the others, resulting in any possible combination.
Research design
Researches design a study to test a hypothesis, choosing the design that best fits the conditions the researcher wants to control.
Also in three basic types.
Genetics and evolutionary foundations of behaviour - a summary of chapter 3 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 3
Genetics and evolutionary foundations of behaviour
Adaption refers to modifications as a result of changed life circumstances.
Evolution is a long-term adaptive process.
How genes affect behavior
Genes are associated with behavior (they never produce or control behavior directly).
All the effects that genes have on behavior occur through their role in building and modifying the physical structures of the body. Those structures, interacting with the environment, produce behavior.
All genes that contribute to the body’s development are “for” behavior. Since all parts of the body are involved in behavior.
Genes provide the codes for proteins
Genes affect the body’s development (only) through their influence on the production of protein molecules.
Structural proteins; forms the structure of every cell of the body.
Enzymes; controls the rate of every chemical reaction in every cell.
Genes are components of extremely long molecules of a substance called DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid).
These molecules exist in the egg and sperm cells that join to from a new individual. And they replicate themselves during each cell division in the course of the body’s growth and development.
A replica of your whole DNA molecules exists in the nucleus of each of your body’s cells, where it serves to code for and regulate the production of protein molecules.
Each protein molecule consists of a long chain of smaller molecules. Those are amino acids.
A single protein molecule may contain from several hundred to many thousand amino acids in its chain.
There are a total of 20 distinct amino acids in every from of life on earth (and they can be arranged in countless sequences to from different protein molecules).
Some DNA serve as templates (as molds or patterns) for producing RNA. RNA severs as a template for producing protein molecules.
A gene is segment of a DNA molecule that contains the code that dictates the particular sequence of amino acids for a single type of protein.
A human being has between 20.000 and 25.000 genes.
Most of the DNA in human cells does not code for proteins.
Genes work only through interaction with the environment
The effects of genes are
.....read more Basic processes of learning - a summary of chapter 4 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 4
Basic processes of learning
To survive, animals must adapt to their environments.
Evolution by natural selection, is the slow long-term adaptive process that equips each species for life within a certain range of environmental conditions.
Environments changes and individuals must adapt to these changes over their lifetimes. Animals must learn.
Learning: any process through which experience at one time can alter an individual’s behavior at a future time.
Experience refers to any effects of the environment that are mediated by the individual’s sensory systems.
Behavior at a future time refers to any subsequent behavior that is not part of the individual’s immediate response to the sensory stimulation during the learning experience.
Classical conditioning
Classical conditioning is a learning processes that creates new reflexes.
A reflex is a simple, relatively automatic stimulus-response sequence mediated by the nervous system.
A stimulus results in a response.
To be considered a reflex, the response to a stimulus must be mediated by the nervous system. Because reflexes are mediated by the nervous system, they can be modified by experience.
Habituation: a decline in the magnitude of a reflexive response when the stimulus is repeated several times in succession. Not all reflexes undergo habituation.
Habituation is one of the simplest forms of learning. It does not produce a new stimulus-response sequence, but only weakens an already existing one.
Classical conditioning is a form of reflex learning that does produce a new stimulus-response sequence.
(First described by Ivan Pavlov)
Fundamentals of classical conditioning
The procedure and generality of classical conditioning
The stimulus (the bell sound by Pavlov) is a conditioned stimulus.
The response to the (condtionised stimulus, the bell) stimulus is a conditioned response.
The original stimulus (natural, before doing anything) is an unconditioned stimulus with an unconditioned response.
The procedure is called classical conditioning or Pavlovian conditioning
Pavlov concluded that, any environmental event that the animal could detect could become a conditioned stimulus of salivation. Of course classical conditioning is not limited to salivary responses.
Extinction of conditioned responses and recovery from extinction
Pavlov found that, without food, the bell elicited less and less salvation on each trial, and eventually none at all. This phenomenon is called extinction.
Extinction does not return the animal to the unconditioned state.
The mere passage of time following extinction can partially renew the conditioned response. This is called spontaneous recovery.
A single pairing of the conditioned stimulus with the unconditioned stimulus can fully renew the
The neural control of behavior - a summary of chapter 5 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 5
The neural control of behavior
Behavior is a product of the body’s machinery, especially the nervous system.
Neurons, the building blocks of the brain
The brain contains roughly 80 to 100 billion nerve cells, or neurons, and roughly 100 trillion synapses between neurons.
These are all more-or-less active, and their collective activity monitors our internal and external environments, creates all of our mental experiences, and controls all of our behavior.
The magic of this nervous system, lies in the organization of their multitudes.
Each neuron is itself a complex decision-making machine.
Each neuron receives information from multiple sources, integrates that information, and sends its response out to many other neurons or, in some cases, muscle cells or glands.
Three basic varieties of neurons, and structures common to them
The brain and spinal cord make up the central nervous system.
Extensions from the central nervous system, called nerves, make up the peripheral nervous system.
A neuron is a single cell of the nervous system
A nerve is a bundle of many neurons (or a bundle consisting of the axons of many neurons) within the peripheral nervous system.
Nerves connect the central nervous system to the body’s sensory organs, muscles and glands.
The central nervous system and peripheral nervous system are parts of an integrated whole.
Neurons come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes and serve countless specific functions.
They can be grouped into three categories according to their functions and their locations in the overall layout of the nervous system.
All neurons contain the same basic parts.
Mechanisms of motivation and emotion - a summary of chapter 6 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Introduction to psychology
Chapter 6
Mechanisms of motivation and emotion
Motivation: the entire constellation of factors, some inside the organism and some outside, that cause an individual to behave in a particular way at a particular time.
Motivational state, or drive.
An internal condition that orients an individual toward a specific category of goals that can change over time in a reversible way. (The drive an increase and decrease).
Different drives direct a person toward different goals.
Those are hypothetical constructs! We infer the existence from the animal’s behavior.
Motivated behavior is directed toward incentives, the sought-after objects or ends that exist in the external environment.
Incentives are also called reinforces.
Drives and incentives complement one another in the control of behavior. If one is weak, the other must be strong to motivate the goal-directed action.
They also influence each other’s strength. A strong drive can enhance the attractiveness of a particular object.
A strong incentive can strengthen a drive.
Varieties of drives
In general, drives motivate us toward goals that promote our survival and reproduction. Some drives promote survival by helping us maintain the internal bodily conditions that are essential for life.
Drives that help preserve homeostasis.
Homeostasis: the constancy of internal conditions that the body must actively maintain.
Maintaining homeostasis involves the organism’s outward behavior as well as its internal processes.
The basic physiological underpinning for some drives is a loss of homeostasis, which acts on the nervous system to induce behavior designed to correct the imbalance.
Limitations of homeostasis: regulatory and nonregulatory drives
Homeostasis is not enough for understanding many drives.
Two general classes of drives:
A functional classification of mammalian drives
Five categories of mammalian drives:
The psychology of vision - a summary of chapter 8 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 8 (in part)
The psychology of vision
The purpose of human vision is to identify meaningful objects and actions.
Your visual system has sorted all the points and graduations that are present in the reflected light into useful renditions of the objects. It has provided you’re with all the information you need to reach out and touch, or pick up, whichever object you want to use next.
Vision researchers generally conceive of object perception as a type of unconscious problem solving, in which sensory information provides clues that are analyzed using information that is already stored in the person’s head.
The detection and integration of stimulus features
Any object that we see can be thought of as consisting of a set of elementary stimulus features, including the various straight and curved lines that form the object’s contours, the brightness and color of the light that the object reflects and the object’s movement or lack of movements with respect to the background.
Feature detection in the visual cortex
Ganglion cells of the optic nerve run to the thalamus and form synapses with other neurons that carry their output to the primary visual area of the cerebral cortex.
Within the primary visual area, millions of neurons are involved in analyzing the sensory input.
Different neurons respond to different patterns.
Edge detectors: neurons that respond best to stimuli that contains a straight contour separating a black patch from a white patch.
Bar detectors: respond best to a narrow white bar against a black background, or a narrow black bar against a
white background.
Any edge detector or bar detector responds best to a particular orientation of the edge or bar.
Neurons in the primary visual cortex are sensitive not just to the orientation of visual stimuli, but also to other visual features, including color and rate of movement. (One neuron might respond best to a yellow bar on a blue background, tilted 15 degrees clockwise and moving slowly from left to right).
Taken as a whole, the neurons of the primary visual cortex and nearby areas seem to keep track of all the bits and pieces of visual information that would be available in a scene.
Because of their sensitivity to the elementary features of a scene, these neurons are referred to as feature detectors.
Treisman’s two-stage feature-integration theory of perception
The feature-integration theory.
Any perceived stimulus (even a simple one such as an X) consist of a number of distinct primitive sensory features, like color and the slant of its individual lines.
To perceive the stimulus as
Memory and attention - a summary of chapter 9 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 9
Memory and attention
Information-processing theories are built on a set of assumptions concerning how humans acquire, store and retrieve information.
Key assumptions:
The model we use to portray the mind as containing three types of memory stores.
Each store is characterized by its function, its capacity and its duration.
In addition to the stores, the model specifies a set of control processes.
Those govern the processing of information within stores and the movement of information from one store to another.
Sensory memory: the brief prolongation of sensory experience
This trace is called sensory memory.
A separate sensory-memory store is believed to exist for each sensory system (like vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste), but only those for vision and hearing have been studied extensively.
Each sensory store is presumed to hold, very briefly, all the sensory input that enters that sensory system, whether or not the person is paying attention to that input.
The function of the store, presumably, is to hold on to sensory information, in its original sensory form, long enough for it to be analyzed by unconscious mental processes and for a decision to be made about whether or not to bring that information into the short-term store.
Most of the information in our sensory store does not enter into our consciousness.
We become conscious only of those items that are transformed, by the selective process of attention, into working memory.
The short-term store: conscious perception and thought
Information in the sensory store that is attended to moves into the short-term store.
Each item fades quickly and is lost within seconds when it is no longer actively attended to or thought about.
This is conceived of as the major workplace of the mind (working memory).
Working memory has been used to refer to the process of storing and transforming information being held in the short-term store. It is the seat of conscious thought.
Information can enter the short-term store form both the sensory-memory store
.....read more Reasoning and intelligence - a summary of chapter 10 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 10
Reasoning and intelligence
Reasoning: The process by which we use our memories in adaptive ways
Intelligence: our general capacity to reason
We reason by using our memories of previous experiences to make sense of present experiences or to plan the future.
To do so, we must perceive the similarities among various events we have experienced.
Fast and slow thinking
Cognitive processes could be placed on a continuum from automatic to effortful.
It is useful to think of any cognitive process as falling somewhere along this continuum.
When solving problems, people have two general ways of processing. (Dual-processing theories).
In many cases, when presented with a problem, you cannot shut of the ‘fast’ system, even if it may interfere with your arriving at the correct solution to a problem via the ‘slow’ system. (Like the stroop interference effect).
The ‘fast’ implicit system effortlessly produces impressions, feelings and intuitions that the ‘slow’ explicit system considers.
The effortful ‘slow’ system has potential control over the ‘fast’ system. (But when making routine decisions, the ‘fast’ system is in control. Like reading and making sense of language). The fast system even makes simple decisions, some of which are in contradiction to the correct solution that can only be derived by using the slow system.
Fast processing is not unique to humans. But no other species comes close to the effortful, explicit cognition displayed in Homo sapiens.
Analogies as foundation for reasoning
Two kinds of reasoning that depend quite explicitly on identifying similarities are:
The development of body, thought and language - a summary of chapter 11 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 11
The development of body, thought and language
Prenatal development
Zygotic, embryonic and fetal phases
The prenatal period is conventionally divided into three phases:
By the end of the 12th week after conception, all the organs are formed, though not functioning well, and are in same proportion to each other as in a full-term newborn, just smaller.
The external genitalia begin to differentiate between males and females between the 9th weeks but are not fully formed until about the 12th week.
In the 8th week, the embryo begins to move and activity increases by 12 weeks.
Fetuses ‘behave’ and are able to perceive some stimuli.
By 6 months fetuses respond to their mothers’ heartbeat and sounds from outside the womb, including language.
The effects of experience during the prenatal period
Although embryos and fetuses are sheltered from the outside world they are nonetheless subject to the effects of experience.
Teratogens: environmental agents that cause harm during prenatal development.
Most teratogens are in the form of substances that get into the embryo’s or fetus’s system from the mother through the umbilical cord.
A teratogen’s potential effect on prenatal development depends on how early or late in pregnancy the exposure occurs. If
Social development - a summary of chapter 12 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 12
Social development
The natural human environment is a social environment.
Social development: the changing nature of our relationships with others over the course of life.
Human infants are completely dependent on caregivers for survival. But they are not passively dependent.
They enter the world biologically prepared to learn who their caregivers are and to elicit from them the help they need. By the time they are born, babies already prefer the voices of their own mother over other voices (and the smell of their own mother). Newborns signal distress through fussing and crying.
By the time they are three months old, they express clearly and effectively their emotions through their facial expressions. And they respond differentially to such expressions in others.
Though such actions, infants help build emotional bonds between themselves and those on whom they most directly depend, and then they use those caregivers as a base from which to explore the world.
Attachment: such emotional bonds.
Attachment to caregivers
Harlow’s monkeys raised with surrogate mothers
Providing adequate nutrition and other physical necessities is not enough. Infants also need close contact with comforting caregivers.
The form and functions of human infants’ attachment
Bowlby observed attachment behaviors in young humans, from 8 months to 3 years of age.
Children show distress when their mothers left them. Especially in an unfamiliar environment. They showed pleasure when reunited with their mothers, showed distress when approached by a stranger unless reassured or comforted by their mothers and where likely to explore an unfamiliar environment when in the presence of their mothers than when alone.
Bowlby contended that attachment is a universal human phenomenon with a biological foundation that derives from natural selection. Infants are potentially in danger when out of sight of caregivers, especially in a novel environment.
Attachment is strengthen at about the age 6 to 8 months, when infants begin to move around on their own.
The strange-situation measure of attachment quality
Mary Ainsworth developed the strange-situation test.
Infants in this test are:
Social psychology - a summary of chapter 13 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 13
Social psychology
Humans are naturally interested in assessing the personality characteristics and attitudes of other humans they encounter.
This drive has clear adaptive functions. Other people can help us or hurt us in our life endeavors. Understanding others helps us predict their behavior and decide how to interact with them.
The accuracy of judgments of others sometimes suffers from certain consistent mistakes, or biases.
These biases occur most often when we are not using our full mental recourses, or have only limited information with which to reason, or have unconscious motives for reaching particular conclusions.
Making attributions from observed behavior
Actions are directly observable, and thoughts are not. Judgments about the personalities of people we encounter are based largely on what we observe of their actions.
Any judgment about another person is, in essence, a claim about causation. It is an implicit claim that the person is caused in part by some more or less permanent characteristic of the person.
Any claim about causation is an attribution. A claim about the cause of someone’s behavior.
The logic of attributing behavior to the person or the situation.
To build a useful picture of a person on the basis of his or her actions, you must decide which actions imply something unique about the person and which actions would be expected of anyone under similar situations.
When behavior is clearly appropriate to the environmental situation, people commonly attribute the behavior to the situation.
Three questions in making an attribution
Social influences on behavior - a summary of chapter 14 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 14
Social influences on behavior
Human behavior is influenced powerful by the social environment in which it occurs.
We behave as we do not just because of who we are, but also because of the social situations in which we find ourselves.
Social pressure: the entire set of psychological forces that are exerted on us by others whether real or imagined.
We are most strongly influenced by those people who are physically or psychologically closed to us.
Social pressure arises from the ways we interpret and respond emotionally to the social situations around us.
It promotes our social acceptability and helps create order and predictability in social interactions.
Facilitating and interfering effects of an audience
Social facilitation: the enhancing effect of an audience on task performance.
Social interference: a decline in performance when observers are present.
Facilitation of ‘easy’ tasks, interference with ‘hard’ ones
The presence of others facilitates performance of dominant actions and interferes with performance of nondominant actions.
Dominant actions: actions that are so simple, speciestypical, or well learned that they can be produced automatically, with little consciously thought
Nondominant actins: actions that require considerable conscious thought or attention
The presence of an audience increases a person’s level of drive or arousal.
The arousal increases the person’s effort, which facilitates dominant tasks where the amount of effort determines the degree of success.
The arousal interferes with controlled, calm, conscious thought and attention and thereby worsens performance of nondominant actions.
Evaluation anxiety as a basis for social interference
The primary cause of social interference is evaluation anxiety.
Social interference increases when the observer are high in status or expertise and are present explicitly to evaluate. It also increases when subjects are made to feel unconfident and more anxious about their ability.
It decreases when subjects feel confident about their ability.
Choking under pressure: the working-memory explanation
‘Choking’ is especially likely to occur with tasks that make strong demands on working memory.
The worry takes space out of the memory span.
Choking on academic tests
Distracting and disturbing thoughts flood their minds and interfere with performance on tests.
With sufficient pressure, choking can even occur in students who normally do not suffer from tests anxiety. It occurs specifically with tests items that make the highest demands on working memory.
Stereotype threat as a special cause of choking
Stereotype threat: threat that test-takers experience when they
.....read more Personality - a summary of chapter 15 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 15
Personality
Personality refers to a person’s general style of interacting with the world, especially with other people.
The development during childhood of chronic patterns of behavior that differ from one individual to another.
The most central concept in personality psychology is the trait. This is a relatively stable predisposition to behave in a certain way.
This is considered to be part of the person, not the environment.
States (other than traits) of motivation and emotion are, defined as inner entities than can be inferred from observed behavior. Traits are enduring, but states are temporary.
A trait might be defined as an enduring attribute that describes one’s likelihood of entering temporarily into a particular state.
Traits are dimensions along which people differ by degree.
Trait theories: efficient systems for describing personalities
The goal of any trait theory of personality is to specify a manageable set of distinct personality dimensions that can be used to summarize the fundamental psychological differences among individuals.
Factor analyses as a tool for identifying an efficient set of traits
Factor analyses: a method of analyzing patterns of correlations in order to extract mathematically defined factors, which underlie and help make sense of those patterns.
Steps:
Factor analyses tells us that two dimensions of personality are relatively independent of each other.
Cattell’s pioneering use of factor analysis to develop trait theory
Cattell:
An infinite number of different personalities can be formed from a finite number of traits.
He identified 16 basic trait dimensions and made a questionnaire called the 16 PF questionnaire to measure them.
The five-factor model of personality
The five-factor model (or big five theory)
A person’s personality is most efficiently described in terms of his or her
Mental Disorders - a summary of chapter 16 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 16
Mental Disorders
Before clinicians can diagnose a psychological disorder, the must evaluate the behavior in terms of four themes, the four D’s.
The diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM)
Specifies criteria for deciding what is officially a ‘disorder’ and what is not.
It is a work in process.
What is a mental disorder?
Mental disorder has no really satisfying definition.
Categorizing and diagnosing metal disorders
Diagnosis: the process of assigning a label to a person’s mental disorder.
To be of value, any system of diagnosis must be reliable and valid.
The quest for reliability
The reliability of a diagnostic system: the extent to which different diagnosticians, all trained in the use of the system, reach the same conclusion when they independently diagnose the same individual.
To test alternative ways of diagnosing each disorder, they conducted field studies in which people who might have a particular disorder were diagnosed independently by a number of clinicians or researchers using each of several alternative diagnostic systems.
The systems that produced the greatest reliability were retained.
All the criteria are based on observable characteristics or self-descriptions by the person being diagnosed.
The Question of validity
The validity of a diagnostic system is an index of the extent to which the categories it identifies are clinically meaningful.
This is based on extensive research. To conduct the research needed to determine whether or not a diagnosis is valid, one must fists form a tentative, reliable diagnostic system.
The results of such studies may lead to new means of defining and diagnosing the disorder or to new subcategories of the disorder, leading to increased diagnostic validity.
Systems for classifying mental disorders:
The DSM
The Word Health Organization (WHO) has developed the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10)
Possible dangers in Labeling
Diagnosing and labeling may be essential for the scientific study of metal disorders, but labels
.....read more Treatment - a summary of chapter 17 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 17
Treatment
What to do with individuals with severe mental disorders? A brief history
A major chance in the treatment of people with severe mental disorders occurred in the 1950s, inspired by several factors;
A positive development: assertive community treatment
Since the 1970s, an increasing number of communities have developed outreach programs, often referred to as assertive community treatment (ACT) programs, and aimed at helping individuals with severe mental illness wherever they are in the community.
Each person with mental illness in need is assigned to a multidisciplinary treatment team. Someone on the team is available at any time of the day to respond to crises.
Each patient is visited at least twice a week by a team member, who checks on his or her health, sees if any services are needed, and offers counseling when that seems appropriate.
The team meets frequently with family members who are involved with the patient, to support them in their care for the patient.
Structure of the mental health system
Mental health professionals
Mental health professionals are those who have received special training and certification to work with people who have psychological problems or mental disorders.
The primary categories;
Relieve the disorder by directly altering bodily processes.
Drugs
Drugs for mental disorders are far from unmixed blessings.
They nearly always produce undesirable side effects.
Antipsychotic drugs
Used to treat schizophrenia and other disorders in which psychotic symptoms predominate.
Such drug reduce and in some cases abolish the hallucinations, delusions, and bizarre actions that characterize the active phase of schizophrenia and they reduce the need for hospitalization.
All antipsychotic drugs in use today decrease the activity of the neurotransmitter dopamine at certain synapses in the brain, which is believed to be responsible for the reduction in psychotic symptoms.
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