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 score on each of five relatively independent global trait dimensions:
Nearly all of the thousands of adjectives commonly used to describe personalities correlate at least to some degree with one or another of these five traits.
The model also posits that each global trait dimension encompasses six subordinate trait dimensions referred to as facets of that trait. These faces correlate with one another, but the correlation is far from perfect.
Measurement of the big five traits and their facets
The most used questionnaire to measure the big five traits is the NEO personality inventory.
In its full form, the person being tested rates 240 statements on a 5 point scale ranging from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’. Each statement is designed to access on facet or one of the five major traits.
The relationship of personality measures to people’s actual behavior
A personality test is valid to the degree that scores on each of its trait measures correlate with aspects of the person’s real-world behavior that are relevant to that trait.
Personality differences do not reveal themselves equally well in all settings.
It may be most clearly revealed when people are in novel, stressful situations and in life transitions, where cues as to what actions are appropriate are absent or weak.
Continuity and change in personality over time
The general stability of personality
There is a higher stability of personality throughout adulthood.
Personality becomes increasingly stable with increasing age up to about age 50, and it remains at a relatively constant level of stability after age 50.
Patterns of change in personality with age
Over adult years,
Neuroticism and openness to experience tend to decline
Conscientiousness and agreeableness tend to increase
Individual’s personality can change, at least to some degree, in any direction, at any age, in response to a major life change. .
People who have a particular personality characteristic often make life choices that alter their personality even further in the pre-existing direction.
Genetic foundations of personality traits
The heritability of traits
The traits identified by trait theories are rather strongly heritable.
It is .5 for most traits, including all of the big five.
Relative lack of shared effects of the family environment
Being raised in the same family has an almost negligible effect on measures of personality.
Single genes and the physiology of traits
Genes affect personality primarily by influencing physiological characteristic of the nervous system.
Like their influence on neurotransmission in the brain. There is a significant correlation between specific personality characteristics and specific genes that alter neurotransmission.
Variation in personality derives from the combined effects of many genes interacting with influences of the environment.
Advantages of being different from one another
Natural selection hedges its bets, producing organisms with a range of cognitive and behavioral disposition that may be adaptive for the range of environments it may encounter.
We find personality differences in the animal kingdom.
Many dimensions of personality identified in nonhuman animals have equivalents in the five-factor model.
Personality appears to be a basic, biological aspect of animal life.
Diversifying one’s investment in offspring
Diversified investment greatly reduces the potential for dramatic loss while maintaining the potential for substantial gains over the long run.
Over the course of evolution, mechanisms that ensure diversity of personality in offspring would be favored by natural selection.
Studies of the bold-cautious dimension in fish
Bold individuals eat more and grow more rapidly than do cautious individuals.
Boldness may be especially valuable when the narrow niche occupied by cautious individuals is nearly filled, so the risks entailed in exploring new objects, areas, and life strategies are offset by the potential for finding new, needed resources.
Individual fish can become either bolder or more cautious, depending on the number of other bold or cautious fish in their environment.
The big five traits as alternative problem-solving strategies
From an evolutionary perspective, personality traits in humans can be thought of as alternative general strategies for solving problems related to survival and reproduction.
Individual differences on trait dimensions are partly heritable and partly the product of environmental experience.
Differential susceptibility to environmental influence
Personal traits are viewed as relatively stable characteristics of a person.
There is one trait that is associated not with stability but whit change: differential susceptibility to environmental influence.
Children with fearful, anxious and difficult dispositions are more sensitive to the effects of parenting than other children.
Such environmentally sensitive children will readily change their behavior and personalities to novel environments, both positive and negative. So they fare especially poorly in less-than-optimal environments, but do well
in supportive environments.
Other children are stable and less influenced by their environment.
There is a gene associated with susceptibility to parental influence.
There is a highly sensitive personality (HPS) trait, in which people are more aware of subtleties in their surroundings, process experiences more deeply and are more easily overwhelmed in highly stimulating environments.
Such people are more affected by both positive and negative experiences.
Adapting to the family environment
The first social environment to which most new human beings must adapt is that of the family into which they are born.
Children come into the world with nervous systems predisposed for behaving in certain ways, but those ways of behaving are first exercised and built upon within the family.
BUT
The family environment plays little or no role in shaping personality.
Siblings have different family experiences.
Sibling contrast: carving out a unique niche within the family
Pre-existing small differences between siblings may become exaggerated in part because siblings tend to define themselves as different from one another and tend to accentuate those differences through their own behavioral choices.
Parents likewise tend to focus more on differences than on similarities then they describe two or more of their children.
This within-family emphasis on the differences between siblings is sibling contrast.
Possibly related to sibling contrast is split-parent identification. The tendency for each two siblings to identify with a different one of their two parents.
Sibling contrast and split-parent identification are devices by which parents and children consciously or unconsciously strive to reduce sibling rivalry, which can be highly disruptive to family functioning.
Evolutionary such differentiation may promote the survival of the two siblings and other member of their family by diversifying the parental investment.
Both phenomena are much stronger for adjacent pairs of siblings than for pairs who are separated in birth order. And stronger in same-sex pairs of siblings. And for age.
Adapting to one’s gender
Some gender differences in personality
Women score higher than men in agreeableness.
Women are, on average, more concerned than men with developing and maintaining positive social relationships.
Women report higher levels of anxiety and feelings of vulnerability than do men. They also score slightly, but significantly, higher on conscientiousness.
Gender does not only influence the kind of personality one develops, but also affects the relationship of personality to life satisfaction.
Evolutionary foundations of gender differences
Personality measures are merely descriptions, not explanations of psychological differences among people.
The universality of certain gender differences and the long history of evolution in which males and females were subject to different reproductive challenges generation after generation.
Male and female mammals in general tend to respond differently to stressful situations.
Sex differences in hormones contribute to these differences in personality.
Cultural foundations of gender differences
(Sociologically)
The immediate causes of gender differences in personality are social forces that encourage girls and boys to behave differently.
Some gender differences in personality have changed, over historical time, in keeping with social roles and expectations.
Gender differences in personality are greater in developed, prosperous, egalitarian countries.
In wealthier, more egalitarian countries, where people are freer to choose their own routes in life, men and women choose ways of life that are consistent with and reinforce their inborn personality traits.
Elements of the psychodynamic perspective
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Developed a method of treatment in which patients would talk freely about themselves and he would analyze what they said in order to uncover buried memories and hidden emotions and motives.
The goal was to make the patient conscious of his or her unconscious memories, motives and emotions so that the patient’s conscious mind could work out ways of dealing with them.
Psychoanalysis: both the method of treatment and the theory of personality.
Psychodynamic theories: personality theories that emphasize the interplay of mental forces. Two guiding premises of psychodynamic theories are:
The sex drive is a primary instinct, expressed in all stages of life.
The main source of pleasure satisfaction, or tension reduction, is centered in specific bodily zones, called erogenous zones. These zones change through the course of development, with erogenous centers shifting from the oral to the anal area over the course of early childhood, and then eventually to the genital area.
How parents deal with their children’s sexual (or pleasure-seeking) impulses has significant consequences for their later development.
But… there is little evidence for it.
The concept of unconscious motivation
The main causes of behavior lie deeply buried in the unconscious mind.
The reasons people give to explain their behavior often are not the true causes.
The technique is to sift the patient’s behavior for clues to the unconscious.
The elements of thought and behavior which are least logical, would provide the best clues to the unconscious.
Sex and aggression as motivating forces in Freud’s theory
(Unlike most modern psychologists) Freud considered drives to be analogous to physical forms of energy that build up over time and must somehow be released.
To live in peace in society, people must often inhibit direct expressions of the sexual and aggressive drives, so these are the drives that most likely build up and exert themselves in direct ways.
Freud concluded from his observations that much of human behavior consist of disguised manifestations of sex and aggression and that personality differences lie in the different ways that people disguise and channel these drives.
Social drives as motives in other psychodynamic theories
Freud viewed people as basically asocial, forced to live in societies more by necessity than by desire, and whose social interactions derive primarily from sex, aggression and displaced forms of these drives.
Most psychodynamic theories since Freud’s time have viewed people as inherently social beings whose motives for interacting with others extend well beyond sex and aggression.
Alfred Adler
Developed a psychodynamic theory that centers on people’s drive to feel competent.
Everyone beings life with a feeling of inferiority, which stems from the helpless and dependent nature of early childhood. The manner in which people learn to cope with or to overcome this feelings provides the basis for their lifelong personalities.
Erik Erikson
A psychosocial theory of development.
The role of society in shaping personality. Other people, and society in general, place demands on people as they develop, and who children handle these demands affect their personalities.
Important developmental milestones extended beyond childhood into adulthood and old age.
Eight stages of psychological development. People face conflicts, or crises, at each of these stages in their relationships with other people. How they deal with the crises at one stage influences how they will deal with crises at the next and following stages.
In all psychodynamic theories, the first few years of life are especially crucial in forming of the personality.
The idea that the mind defends itself against anxiety
Mental processes of self-deception, defense mechanisms, operate to reduce one’s consciousness of wishes, memories, and other thoughts than would threaten one’s self-esteem or in other ways provoke a strong sense of insecurity or anxiety.
Examples:
Defensive styles as dimensions of personality
Repressive coping as a personality style
People often repress memories of traumatic or highly disturbing events so fully that they can be recalled only through psychotherapy, which uncovers them.
But almost no evidence for this.
Many people regularly repress the emotional feelings that accompany disturbing events in their lives. They are able to recall and describe the events, but they claim that such memories do not make them anxious or otherwise disturb them. These people are repressors.
Repressors report much less psychological distress in disturbing situations than do nonrepressors, but, by physiological indices, they manifest more distress than do nonrepressors.
Repressors avoid experiences of anxiety by diverting their conscious attention away from anxiety-arousing stimuli and by dwelling on pleasant rather than unpleasant thoughts.
Repressors my develop more health problems and experience more chronic pain than do nonrepressors. They experience stress physically rather than as conscious emotion.
Distinction between mature and immature defensive styles
Some defenses are more conductive to a person’s long-term well-being than are others.
As humans grow older, people rely less on defenses that deny or distort reality and more on defenses that allow them to accept reality.
The use of mature defenses correlates positively with measures of life satisfaction and success.
The humanistic perspective: the self and life’s meanings
Humanistic theories emphasize people’s conscious understanding of themselves and their capacity to choose their own paths to fulfillment. They center on an aspect of human nature that seems to distinguish us clearly from other animals, our tendency to create belief systems, develop meaningful stories about ourselves and the world, and to govern our lives in accordance with those stories.
Phenomenology: the study of conscious perceptions and understandings.
Phenomenological reality: each person’s conscious understanding of his or her world.
Being one’s self: making one’s own decisions
A central aspect of one’s phenomenological reality is the self-concept.
Rogers
People are often diverted from becoming themselves by the demands and judgments placed on them by other people.
To be oneself, is to live life according to one’s own wishes rather than someone else’s.
An important dimension of individual difference has to do with the degree to which a person feels in charge of his or her own life.
In different cultures, people tend to have different values and to choose different activities, but in each culture those who see those choices as their own claim to be most satisfied with their lives.
Self-actualization and Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs
Self-actualization is the process of becoming one’s full self, realizing one’s dreams and capabilities. The specific route to self-actualization will vary from person to person and form time to time within a person’s lifetime, but for each individual the route must be self-chosen.
Full actualization requires a fertile environment, but the direction of actualization and the ways of using the environment must come from within the organism.
To grow best, individuals must be permitted to make those choices and must trust themselves to do so.
Abraham Maslow:
To self-actualize one must satisfy five sets of needs that can be arranged in a hierarchy.
A person can focus on higher needs only if lower ones are sufficiently satisfied so that they do not claim the person’s full attention and energy.
Social-cognitive theories emphasize the roles of general beliefs about the nature of the world, which are acquired through one’s experiences in the social environment as the prime shapers of personality.
These beliefs may be conscious, but they may also be so ingrained and automatic that they exert their influence without the person’s conscious awareness.
They can be thought of as automatic habits of thought, which can influence many aspects of a person’s behavior.
Unconscious refers to automatic mental processes.
Beliefs viewed as personality traits
Beliefs about the locus of control over desired effects
People behave differently at various tasks or games in the laboratory depending on whether they believed that success depended on skill or luck.
People’s behavior depends not just on the objective relationship between their responses and rewards, but also on their subjective beliefs about that relationship.
In many life situations it is not clear to what degree we have control over rewards. In such situations, people tend to behave according to a generalized disposition acquired from past experience, to believe that rewards either are or are not usually controllable by people’s own efforts.
This is the locus of control.
Successful action in any realm tends to lead to a stronger sense of control, which may promote further successful action and vice versa.
Beliefs about one’s own ability to perform on specific tasks
Self-efficacy: people’s beliefs about their own abilities to perform specific tasks.
Self-efficacy may be quite specific to a very narrow range of tasks or quite general over a broad range of tasks.
Improved self-efficacy for a task predicts improvement in actual performance of the task. It is no simply a correlate of good performance, nut is also a cause of it.
Beliefs about the possibility of personal improvement
The degree of malleability of one’s own personal qualities.
This position makes a big difference in life.
People who view themselves as malleable are more likely to strive for self-improvement in all realms of life.
The power of positive thinking
People with an optimistic style of thought are happier and tend to cope more efficiently with life’s stressors than do people who have a pessimistic style.
Optimistic thinking leads people to devote attention and energy to solving their problems or recovering from their disabilities, which in turn leads to positive results.
The optimistic child
The most optimistic on any people on the planet are young children.
Such optimism can be adaptive in young children. Children’s tendencies to overestimate their abilities and characteristics enhance their self-efficacy and give them the confidence to try things they would not otherwise try.
Adaptive and maladaptive optimism and pessimism
There is a danger of unrealistic, self-delusional forms of optimism.
Optimism of this sort, defensive optimism, may reduce anxiety by diverting thoughts away from fearful possibilities, but it may also lead to serious harm.
The idea of situation-specific personality traits
Cross-cultural differences in personality
Collectivism, individual as a personality dimension
Cultures vary in the degree to which they have a collectivist versus an individualist orientation.
Personalities of people in collectivist and individualist cultures differ from each other in predictable ways.
There is a relationship between personality style and life satisfaction depending on the cultural context.
Cultural differences in conceptions of personality
People in different cultures tend to differ not only on their average scores on various personality measures, but also in their views about the significance of personality and the relative importance of particular traits.
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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