An analogy refers to a similarity in behaviour, function, or relationship between entities or situations that are in other respects different from each other. The prefrontal cortex is involved in analogical reasoning. Analogical reasoning uses multiple areas in the prefrontal cortex, unlike simple semantic retrieval.
Inductive reasoning or induction is the attempt to infer some new principle or proposition from observations or facts that serve as clues. It is also called hypothesis construction. It is reasoning that is founded on perceived analogies or other similarities. Inductive reasoning is prone to several biases:
Deductive reasoning is the attempt to derive logically the consequences that must be true if certain premises are accepted as true. There is a bias in deductive reasoning. This occurs when people tend to use their knowledge rather than formal knowledge in answering deductive reasoning questions.
Insight problems are problems that are specifically designed to be unsolvable until one looks at them in a different way. These problems are generally very difficult, because their solution depends on abandoning a well-established habit of perception or thought, referred to as a mental set, and then viewing the problem in a different way. There is a mental set known as functional fixedness, in which there is a failure to see an object as having a function other than its usual one. There is a design stance in which people assume that some tools are designed for an intended function. This leads to more user-efficiency. People solve insight problems best if they take some time off from the problem, do something else and come back to it. This is known as the incubation period.
The broaden-and-build theory states that negative emotions tend to narrow one’s focus of perception and thought. The understanding of what is expected of a participant in a test is culturally dependent. People from non-western cultures are also more likely to sort things by function instead of taxonomy. In cultures such as China and Japan, the reasoning is more holistic and less individually centred.
In the early ages of intelligence testing, the testing of intelligence was focussed on schoolwork, rather than other intelligence-related concepts, such as abstract thinking or logical reasoning. The first intelligence test commonly used in North America was the Stanford-Binet Scale. This intelligence test, tested verbal comprehension, perceptual processing, working memory and processing speed. This test gives you an IQ score as a result and the average IQ of the population is 100.
The strength of the correlation between performance on the job and IQ depends on the type of job. There is a positive correlation, but the correlation gets stronger with more demanding jobs.
The positive manifold holds that scores always correlate positively with one another if the sample Is large enough when giving different mental tests to people who are part of the same broad cultural group. General intelligence (g) is the underlying ability that contributes to a person’s performance on all mental tests. General intelligence is usually measured by getting the average of several mental tests, which is done in most IQ tests nowadays.
Cattell argued that general intelligence consists of two parts that correlate positively with each other:
There is a positive correlation between general intelligence and mental speed, the inspect time that is required to detect certain patterns. The working-memory span also positively correlates with general intelligence. People with higher general intelligence perform better on executive function tasks. It is possible that general intelligence has been selected during human evolution because it helps us deal with novel problems.
Heritability is the degree to which variation in a particular trait, within a particular population of individuals, stems from genetic differences as opposed to the environmental differences. This is often quantified by the heritability coefficient. It does not say anything about how much of any trait is due to genetic factors, only what percentage of the difference in a trait within a specific population can be attributed to inheritance. Heritability is relative, varying with the environmental conditions in which people within the population live.
Heritability=r identical twins-r nonidenticaltwins*2
When the heritability is 1.0, it means that the environment for everyone in the population is the same and the differences in the population are fully caused by differences in genes. If the heritability is 0.0, it means that the genes are exactly the same for everyone and all the differences are caused by differences in the environment.
The influences of families on intelligence exists, but this effect disappears in early adulthood because by then the individuals choose their own environment.
If there are two wheat fields, each planted from the same package of genetically diverse wheat seeds, but with different soils, then there will be big differences between the wheat fields, but the differences within a wheat field are determined by genes and not the differences between the wheat fields.
There is a difference in IQ scores in the United States between blacks and whites, because of the social designation of black and white. Besides that, there is a stereotype threat. Stereotypes of a race influence the results on an IQ test.
Involuntary or castelike minorities on average score lower on IQ scores, because they are treated differently by society, than voluntary minorities. The Flynn-effect is the effect that the average IQ rises 9 to 15 points every 30 years. This effect could occur because of the improvements in modern life. More people receive education, more people have intellectual demanding jobs and modern technology is also increasingly intellectually demanding.
Psychology by P. Gray and D. F., Bjorkland (eight edition) – Summary chapter 2 Science is the attempt to answer questions through the systematic collection and analysis of objective, observable data.
Clever Hans was a horse, which had received an education and seemed to be able to answer a lot of questions, including arithmetic questions. This was, in fact, not true. The horse was able to recognize visual signals to which he responded. The story of Clever Hans shows that the result of an experiment (e.g: asking a horse what 9+10 is) can be influenced by the observers (they give unintended visual signals). This is phenomenon is known as the observer-expectancy effect.
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. A hypothesis is a prediction about new facts based on the theory.
Scepticism leads to more mundane explanations instead of a highly unlikely one because scepticism leads us to test, rather than accept a bizarre theory. A theory has to be parsimonious. The simpler, more sober theories are preferred over complex theories. A theory also has to be falsifiable. Experiments should be conducted in a controlled environment because the observer (and other things) can (unintentionally) influence the outcome of the experiment. It is important that the researcher controls the conditions, to make sure that no unaccounted conditions influence the outcome of the research and to exclude alternative explanations. Besides that, researchers should beware of the observer-expectancy effects.
There are several types of research determined by:
Experimental research is used to determine a cause-effect relationship between two variables. An experiment is a procedure in which a researcher systematically manipulates one or more independent variables and looks for changes in one or more dependent variable while keeping all other variables constant. There are two types of variables in a cause-effect relationship. An independent variable is a variable that is determined and controlled by the researcher. A dependent variable is a variable that (hopefully) is affected by the independent variable. There are two basic types of experiments. A within-subject experiment, in which the participant is exposed to each of the conditions of the independent variables and is repeatedly tested. It is a within-subject experiment if there multiple conditions of the independent variable are applied to the same subject. A between-subjects experiment, in which the participant is only tested in one condition of the independent variable and there are multiple participant groups, a group for each of the conditions of the independent variable.
A correlational study is used when you cannot conduct experimental research, such as when researching personal variables that can´t be manipulated, such as divorce. A correlational study is a study in which the researcher does not manipulate any variable, but observes or measures two or more already existing variables to find a
.....read more Psychology by P. Gray and D. F., Bjorkland (eight edition) – Summary chapter 3Adaptation refers to modification as a result of changed life circumstances.
Genes never produce behaviour directly, so genes are technically not for a behavioural trait, but associated with that behavioural trait. All the effects that genes have on behaviour occur through their role in building and modifying the physical structures of the body.
Genes affect the body’s development through, and only through, their influence on the production of protein molecules. A class of proteins called structural proteins forms the structure of every cell in the body. Another, much larger class called 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). A replica of your whole unique set of DNA molecules exists in the nucleus of your body’s cell, where it serves to code for and regulate the production of protein molecules. Each protein molecule consists of a long chain of smaller molecules called amino acids. There are two types of genes. Coding genes: genes that code for unique protein molecules and regulatory genes which help suppress or activate coding genes and thereby influences the body’s development.
The environment is everything except for the genes and this influences the genes. Behaviour is influenced by the genes through the interaction with the environment. The environment is everything except for the genes. The internal environment influences the genes by certain gene activations for example. The external environment influences the genes by eating, for example, a different kind of foods. The genes then go on to activate or suppress development in certain physiological areas and this affects the behaviour.
Experience can activate a certain gene which then goes on to affect behaviour. The experience activates genes, which produce proteins, which alter the function of some of the neural circuits in the brain and thereby changes how an individual behaves.
Genotype refers to the set of genes an individual possesses and phenotype refers to the observable properties of the body and behavioural traits. If two individuals with the same genotype are exposed to different environmental conditions, they will have different phenotypes.
The genetic material (strands of DNA) exists in each cell in structures called chromosomes. When cells divide, other than sperm or egg cells, they do so by a process called mitosis. In this process, the chromosome copies itself before the cell divides so there’s an identical copy of the cell. When cells divide to produce sperm or egg cells, they do so by a process called meiosis, which results in cells that are not genetically alike. During meiosis, each chromosome replicates itself once, but then the cell divides twice.
When a sperm and an egg cell unite, the result is a zygote, which contains the full complement of 23 paired chromosomes. The zygote then grows, through mitosis. By producing diverse offspring, parents are reducing the chance that all of their offspring will die as a
.....read more Psychology by P. Gray and D. F., Bjorkland (eight edition) – Summary chapter 4The brain contains a lot of nerve cells or neurons. The points of communication between neurons are called synapses. The brain and the spinal cord make up the central nervous system. Extensions from the central nervous system, called nerves, make up the peripheral nervous system. The difference between a neuron and a nerve is that a nerve is a bundle of neurons within the peripheral nervous system.
There are three types of neurons:
Neurons consist of the following things:
Neurons exert their influence on other neurons and muscle cells by firing off all-or-none impulses called action potentials. In motor neurons and interneurons, action potentials are triggered at the junction between the cell body and the axon. In sensory neurons, they are triggered at the dendritic end of the axon. Each action potential produced by a given neuron is the same strength as any other action potential produced neuron and the action potential retains its full strength down the axon.
A cell membrane encloses each neuron. It is porous skin that permits certain chemicals to flow into and out of the cell while blocking others. Among the various chemicals dissolved in the intracellular and extracellular fluids are some that have electrical charges. These include soluble protein molecules (A-), which have negative charges and exist only in the intracellular fluid, and sodium ions (Na+) and chloride ions (Cl-) which are more concentrated in extracellular than intercellular fluid.
The charge (-70mv relative to the outside) across the membrane is called the resting potential. The action
.....read more Psychology by P. Gray and D. F., Bjorkland (eight edition) – Summary chapter 5Slower changing components of the mind are referred to as behavioural states (e.g: variations in motivation, emotion).
Motivation refers to the entire constellation of factors, inside and outside of the organism, that causes an individual to behave in a particular way at a particular time. Motivational state or drive refers to an internal condition that orients an individual toward a specific category of goals that can change over time in a reversible way (the drive can increase and decrease).
Motivated behaviour is directed towards incentives or reinforcers. The motivational state for searching for food is hunger, but the incentive is the food itself. Drives and incentives complement each other and influence each other’s strength.
Homeostasis is the constancy of internal conditions that the body must actively maintain. The loss of homeostasis is the psychological foundation of drives because this loss acts on the nervous system to induce behaviour designed to correct the imbalance.
There are two general classes of drives: regulatory drives and nonregulatory drives. There are five categories of mammalian drives:
Things such as art, music and literature can be seen as an extension of the educative drive, but it can also be seen as something that taps into our already existing drives.
The central-state theory of drives states that different drives correspond to neural activity in different sets of neurons in the brain. A set of neurons in which activity constitutes a drive is called a central drive system. For a set of neurons to be a central drive system, it must receive and integrate the various signals that can raise or lower the drive state. Besides that, it must act on all the neural processes that would be involved in carrying out the motivated behaviour; it must direct perceptual mechanisms toward stimuli related to the goal and motor mechanisms toward producing the appropriate movements. The hypothalamus is believed to be the hub of many central drive systems because it fits the exact description and has a strong connection with the pituitary gland.
The term ‘reward’ has three interrelated meanings.
Psychology by P. Gray and D. F., Bjorkland (eight edition) – Summary chapter 7Photoreceptors are specialized light-detecting cells. One possible evolutionary road of the eyes is the following: photoreceptors became concentrated in groups, they began to form light detecting organs and this light-detecting organ developed until it became the eye as we know it today.
The front of the eyeball is covered by the cornea, a transparent tissue. Here the light is focussed. Behind the cornea is the iris. Inside the iris is the pupil. Behind the iris is the lens, which adds to the focusing process began by the cornea. The lens is adjustable and the cornea is not. Light forms an image of the object on the retina. The image is on the retina is upside down, but the retina’s function is to trigger patterns of activity in neurons running to the brain.
The process by which a stimulus from the environment generates electrical changes in neurons is called transduction. Transduction is the function of photoreceptor cells. There are two types of photoreceptor cells on the retina:
At the place on the retina where the axons of neurons converge to form the optic nerve, there is a blind spot. We normally don’t notice this. There are two separate, but interacting visual systems within the human eye:
The three-primaries law states that three different wavelengths of light can be used to match any colour that the eye can see if they are mixed in the appropriate proportions. The primaries can be any colour, as long as one is from the longwave end of the spectrum, one from the shortwave and one from the middle. The law of complementarity states that pairs of wavelengths can be found that, when added together, produce the visual sensation of white.
There are two theories of colour vision:
Most of what new-born sees is out of focus. Convergence (both eyes looking at the same object) and coordination (both
.....read more Psychology by P. Gray and D. F., Bjorkland (eight edition) – Summary chapter 8Animals need to learn to survive. Learning is any process through which experience at one time can alter an individual’s behaviour at another tie. Experience is any effects of the environment that are mediated by the individual’s sensory system. Future behaviour is any behaviour that is not part of the individual’s immediate response to the sensory stimulation during the learning experience.
Classical conditioning is a learning process that creates new reflexes. A reflex is a simple, relatively automatic, stimulus/response sequence mediated by the nervous system. Habituation is a decline in the magnitude of a reflexive response when the stimulus is repeated several times in succession. Not all reflexes undergo habituation.
With classical conditioning, several things should be taken into account:
A conditioned response can be extinguished when the same conditioned stimulus is represented each time, without showing the unconditioned stimulus (e.g: ringing a bell without presenting food repeatedly). This is called extinction. 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 conditioned response. The response is somehow inhibited. It can be disinhibited by the passage of time or the recurrence of the unconditioned stimulus.
Individuals don’t only react to the conditioned stimulus, but also stimuli that resemble the unconditioned stimulus. This is called generalization. The less a stimuli resembles the original conditioned stimulus, the weaker the conditioned response is. Generalization between two stimuli can be abolished if the response to one is reinforced while the response to the other is extinguished. This is called discrimination training. (e.g: dogs were given food when a bell of 1000 hertz is heard, but not given food when a bell of 700 hertz is heard). For humans, interpretation is important for classical conditioning. When they are shown several words and a conditioned response is learned, they also show a similar response to words that have the same meaning as the original words but not to words that look similar to the original words.
The school of thought known as behaviourism argued that science should avoid terms that refer to mental entities because such entities cannot be directly observed. They believed that psychology should focus on the relationship between observable events (stimuli) in the environment and observable behavioural reactions to those events (responses). Behaviourism argued that all of behaviour is in essence reflex-like in nature.
There are several theories of what is actually learned in classical conditioning:
Psychology by P. Gray and D. F., Bjorkland (eight edition) – Summary chapter 9In a model on how the memory works there are three types of memory stores:
The model specifies a set of control processes, which govern the processing of information within stores and the movement of information from one store to another. The control processes are:
Individual mental operations can be placed on a continuum with respect to how much of one’s limited capacity each requires for its execution.
All the sensory information is briefly analysed at an unconscious level and this is called preattentive processing. The preattentive processing helps determine whether something is significant and should be paid attention to. People are able to select what they pay attention to. This is shown in a couple of ways:
Psychology by P. Gray and D. F., Bjorkland (eight edition) – Summary chapter 10An analogy refers to a similarity in behaviour, function, or relationship between entities or situations that are in other respects different from each other. The prefrontal cortex is involved in analogical reasoning. Analogical reasoning uses multiple areas in the prefrontal cortex, unlike simple semantic retrieval.
Inductive reasoning or induction is the attempt to infer some new principle or proposition from observations or facts that serve as clues. It is also called hypothesis construction. It is reasoning that is founded on perceived analogies or other similarities. Inductive reasoning is prone to several biases:
Deductive reasoning is the attempt to derive logically the consequences that must be true if certain premises are accepted as true. There is a bias in deductive reasoning. This occurs when people tend to use their knowledge rather than formal knowledge in answering deductive reasoning questions.
Insight problems are problems that are specifically designed to be unsolvable until one looks at them in a different way. These problems are generally very difficult, because their solution depends on abandoning a well-established habit of perception or thought, referred to as a mental set, and then viewing the problem in a different way. There is a mental set known as functional fixedness, in which there is a failure to see an object as having a function other than its usual one. There is a design stance in which people assume that some tools are designed for an intended function. This leads to more user-efficiency. People solve insight problems best if they take some time off from the problem, do something else and come back to it. This is known as the incubation period.
The broaden-and-build theory states that negative emotions tend to narrow one’s focus of perception and thought. The understanding of what is expected of a participant in a test is culturally dependent. People from non-western cultures are also more likely to sort things by function instead of taxonomy. In cultures such as China and Japan, the reasoning is more holistic and less individually centred.
In the early ages of intelligence testing, the testing of intelligence was focussed on schoolwork, rather than
.....read more Psychology by P. Gray and D. F., Bjorkland (eight edition) – Summary chapter 11The prenatal period is divided into three phases:
Teratogens are environmental agents that cause harm during prenatal development. The embryo is most susceptible to teratogens. Nutrition and maternal stress are involved in prenatal development. A child physically develops a lot during the early stages of life, especially during infancy and puberty. The head grows a lot first and then the body follows. This is called cephalocaudal development. The average age of menarche has decreased over the last couple of centuries, mainly because of better nutrition.
Infants show signs of habituation and dishabituation. An infant will look at novel stimuli longer than at familiar ones. If an infant is looking at a familiar object and is presented with a novel object, the viewing time is immediately increased. This is called dishabituation. Infants show an increased interest in objects that they can control.
Infants will first put everything in their mouth as a mean of exploring. From the age of 5 to 6 months, infants will start examining objects. They will use their hands and their eyes to look at objects. Here, the rule of habituation also applies. Infants learn about objects’ properties through examination.
The infants also respond to social cues. This can be seen in the phenomenon known as gaze-following and later in life, they will also see other people as intentional agents, individuals who cause things to happen. This is seen in infants of around 9 months of age when they engage in shared attention with another person. They pay attention to the thing the individual points at. Infants will also engage in social referencing. They will look at their caregiver’s emotional expression for clues about the possible danger of their actions.
If infants are shown events that don’t seem fitting with their ideas on the physical world, then they will look at it longer than events that do, showing that even infants have knowledge of core physical principles, such as that unsupported things should fall down.
Piaget argues that infants don’t have a sense of object permanence, which is shown by his simple-hiding experiment, but it may have something to do with having to act on the object, as the infants do show a sense of object-permanence if they only have to look at certain objects, instead of acting on them.
There are three general theories of children’s mental development, starting with Piaget.
Piaget: Mental development derives from the children’s own actions on the physical environment. Children develop schemes, mental blueprints for actions. A scheme is something that a child can do with an object or a category of objects. The growth of schemes involves
.....read more Psychology by P. Gray and D. F., Bjorkland (eight edition) – Summary chapter 12
As infants, we depend physically and emotionally on adult caregivers. As children, we learn to get along with others and to abide by the rules and norms of society. As adolescents, we begin to explore romantic relationships and consider how we will take our place in the adult world. As adults, we assume responsibility for the care and support of others and contribute, through work, to the broader society.
The bond between infant and parent is promoted by innate tendencies: the infant to cry and the parent to help. Infants prefer their caregivers and react to their caregivers and in that way, the infants take an active role in building emotional bonds between themselves and those on whom they most directly depend. Attachment refers to emotional bonds.
The experiments of Harlow with monkeys provided a lot of evidence for the contact comfort theory, in which the bond between mother and infant is promoted by the warmth and comfort of the mother. Bowlby’s evolutionary explanation of the fact that infants between 8 months and 3 years old are distressed when their caregivers are out of sight is that infants who were in their mother's sight were an evolutionary advantage in the past. Evidence for this comes from the fact that similar behaviours occur in all human cultures and in other species of mammals.
There are four types of attachment and this can be assessed by the strange situation test, in which the mother suddenly leaves the room leaving the child either by itself or with a stranger.
Sensitive care is the behaviour in which the infant’s signals of distress are responded to promptly and the infants receive regular contact comfort and interact with the infant in an emotionally synchronous manner. Sensitive care correlates with secure attachment and the children that are securely attached were more likeable people later in life, as well as better at problem-solving and emotionally healthier. Children that have a certain homozygous gene are less affected by environmental experiences.
There are three successive stages in a child from age 1 – 12: autonomy, initiative and industry. Prosocial behaviour is voluntary behaviour intended to benefit other people. There are three aspects of young children’s prosocial behaviour:
Psychology by P. Gray and D. F., Bjorkland (eight edition) – Summary chapter 13
Humans are ‘natural psychologists’. This has an evolutionary explanation: people can help us or hurt us and we want to find out their intention. Attribution is a claim about the cause of someone’s behaviour. It is possible to attribute the cause of someone’s behaviour to two things:
There are three questions one can ask himself to determine whether the attribute has to be about the situation of about the person:
People give to much weight to personality and not enough to the environmental situations when they make attributions about other’s actions. This is also called person bias. Or the fundamental attribution error. People also have the tendency to attribute success to themselves and attribute failure to the situation. Person bias occurs mainly in western countries.
There are several biases that arise from the perception of facial features:
People that meet each other on the internet before meeting each other face-to-face like each other more than people that just meet each other face-to-face, because meeting over the internet reduces social anxiety. It also allows people to be their ‘true-self’ and frees people from biases that arise from physical attractiveness.
Self-concepts refer to the way that a person defines him- or herself. According to Cooley, we create our self-image based on what others think of us. He introduced the term looking glass self. The beliefs and expectation that others have of a person, whether true or false, can to some degree create reality by influencing that person’s self-concept and behaviour. These effects are called self-fulfilling prophecies or Pygmalion effects. Someone’s expectation can affect someone’s behaviour and self-image.
Self-esteem is one’s feeling of approval, acceptance and liking of oneself. The sociometer theory states that we derive our self-esteem from others’ attitudes towards us and that self-esteem reflects your best guess about the degree to which other people respect and accept you. From an evolutionary perspective, other people’s views of us matter a great deal, because our survival depends on it.
The process of comparing ourselves with others in order to identify our unique characteristics and evaluate our abilities is called social comparison (e.g: we ourselves as tall if we
.....read more Psychology by P. Gray and D. F., Bjorkland (eight edition) – Summary chapter 14
Personality is the relatively consistent patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour that characterize each person as a unique individual. A trait is a relatively stable predisposition to behave in a certain way. There are traits that are always present, but there are also traits that need a certain situation before they manifest. Traits are dimensions, which are measurable, continuous characteristics, along which people differ by degree.
Trait theories of personality endeavour to specify a manageable set of distinct personality dimensions that can be used to summarize the fundamental psychological differences among individuals. Factor analysis is used in defining the most useful dimensions. There are three steps in factor analysis:
Factor analysis tells us that the dimensions are relatively independent of each other. The Big Five Theory of Personality states that someone’s personality is best described using five, relatively independent personality dimensions. These dimensions spell out OCEAN.
There was a proposal for a higher-order personality trait independent of IQ that is predictive of success in a wide range of domains and is called grit. Grit is defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Especially the tendency to persist at difficult tasks seems to be important for predicting success. The validity of the Big Five Theory of Personality is measured by checking the correlation between the test and the actual behaviour.
People with socially aversive personalities score high on the dark triad, which consists of three things:
Personality is relatively constant throughout adulthood and stays constant after 50 years of age. The older someone is, the less likely it is that their personality is going to change. The heritability of personality traits is about 0.50. The household in which an individual grew up does not correlate with personality at all. A single gene may influence neuroticism, as well as the neurotransmitter serotine. A single gene may influence novelty seeking, as well as the neurotransmitter dopamine.
It could be that personality is a side-effect of evolution. It could also be that personality has an evolutionary advantage. If there are more different types of individuals in one species, the likeliness of survival is bigger. There are differences in behavioural styles across species. The Big Five can
.....read more Psychology by P. Gray and D. F., Bjorkland (eight edition) – Summary chapter 15A potential psychological disorder must be evaluated in four aspects:
A person must have clinically significant scores on all these aspects for something to be a psychological disorder. There are three demands to be made to a condition before being labelled a psychological disorder:
The reliability of a diagnostic system refers to the extent to which different diagnosticians, al trained in the use of the system, reach the same conclusion when they independently diagnose the same individuals. The validity of a diagnostic system is an index of the extent to which the categories it identifies are useful and meaningful in clinicians. A label implying a psychological disorder has the potential to interfere with the person’s ability to cope with his or her environment through several means:
The medical student’s disease is characterised by a strong tendency to relate personally to and to find in oneself, the symptoms of any disease or disorder described in a textbook. There are several cultural related psychological disorders, such as anorexia nervosa. This used to be a psychological disorder that was only known in western cultures, but because of the globalisation, it happens in other cultures too. Culture does not only affect the types of behaviours and syndromes that people manifest but also affects clinician’s decisions about what to label as disorders, for example, homosexuality used to be labelled as a disorder. There are constantly new disorders being added, one of those is ADHD, which has three varieties:
One of the most important causes of psychological disorders is brain deficit and the brain itself. Down Syndrome is a disorder that is present at birth and is caused by an error in meiosis, which results in an extra chromosome. Alzheimer’s disease is found primarily in older adults. The disorder is characterised psychologically by a progressive deterioration in all person’s cognitive abilities, followed by deterioration in the brain’s control of bodily functions. The disorder is caused by the presence of amyloid plaques, deposits of a particular protein, called beta-amyloid. There is a difference between chronic disorders and episodic disorders, disorders of which the effects are reversible.
Environmental assaults to the
.....read more Psychology by P. Gray and D. F., Bjorkland (eight edition) – Summary chapter 16The caring for people with psychological disorders used to be non-existent. Nowadays, there is more care. Since the 1970s, assertive community treatment has existed, aimed at helping a person with severe psychological problems and preventing hospitalization.
Electroconvulsive therapy is used primarily in cases of severe depression that does not respond to psychotherapy or antidepressant drugs. The treatment consists of people receiving anaesthesia and passing an electric current through a patient’s skull triggering a seizure in the brain that lasts approximately one minute. The shocks and the seizures promote the producing of neurotransmitters and the sensitivity of postsynaptic receptors. It also stimulates the growth of new neurons. The most frequent side effect of the treatment is memory loss, although this mostly clears up within a few months after the treatment.
Psychosurgery is a last-resort treatment, which involves surgically cutting or producing lesions in portions of the brain to relieve a psychological disorder. The consequence of prefrontal lobotomy was that people did not have access to their executive functions anymore and needed constant care. In deep brain stimulation, a thin wire electrode is planted permanently in the brain, usually in the cingulum or in a portion of the basal ganglia for patients with OCD, and this electrode can be activated in order to electrically stimulate, rather than destroy the neurons lying near it.
Psychotherapy aims to treat psychological disorders through talk, reflection, learning and practice. Psychotherapy is any theory-based, systematic procedure, conducted by a trained therapist, for helping people to overcome or cope with mental problems through psychological rather than physiological means. Each major approach in psychotherapy draws on a set of psychological principles and ideas that apply to adaptive as well as maladaptive behaviour:
Psychoanalysis refers to the forms of therapy that are closely tied to Freud’s ideas. Psychodynamic therapy is used to include psychoanalysis and therapies that are more loosely based on Freud’s ideas. Psychodynamic therapy focusses on the fact that mental problems arise from unresolved mental conflicts, which themselves arise from the holding of contradictory motives and beliefs. Symptoms are surface manifestations of the disorder. The disorder itself is buried in the person’s unconscious mind and must be unearthed before it can be treated. The elements of thought that are the least logical give clues to the unconscious motive and psychodynamic therapists use three techniques to find these elements of thought:
Psychology by P. Gray and D. F., Bjorkland (eight edition) – Summary chapter 10An analogy refers to a similarity in behaviour, function, or relationship between entities or situations that are in other respects different from each other. The prefrontal cortex is involved in analogical reasoning. Analogical reasoning uses multiple areas in the prefrontal cortex, unlike simple semantic retrieval.
Inductive reasoning or induction is the attempt to infer some new principle or proposition from observations or facts that serve as clues. It is also called hypothesis construction. It is reasoning that is founded on perceived analogies or other similarities. Inductive reasoning is prone to several biases:
Deductive reasoning is the attempt to derive logically the consequences that must be true if certain premises are accepted as true. There is a bias in deductive reasoning. This occurs when people tend to use their knowledge rather than formal knowledge in answering deductive reasoning questions.
Insight problems are problems that are specifically designed to be unsolvable until one looks at them in a different way. These problems are generally very difficult, because their solution depends on abandoning a well-established habit of perception or thought, referred to as a mental set, and then viewing the problem in a different way. There is a mental set known as functional fixedness, in which there is a failure to see an object as having a function other than its usual one. There is a design stance in which people assume that some tools are designed for an intended function. This leads to more user-efficiency. People solve insight problems best if they take some time off from the problem, do something else and come back to it. This is known as the incubation period.
The broaden-and-build theory states that negative emotions tend to narrow one’s focus of perception and thought. The understanding of what is expected of a participant in a test is culturally dependent. People from non-western cultures are also more likely to sort things by function instead of taxonomy. In cultures such as China and Japan, the reasoning is more holistic and less individually centred.
In the early ages of intelligence testing, the testing of intelligence was focussed on schoolwork, rather than
.....read more Psychology by P. Gray and D. F., Bjorkland (eight edition) – Summary chapter 11The prenatal period is divided into three phases:
Teratogens are environmental agents that cause harm during prenatal development. The embryo is most susceptible to teratogens. Nutrition and maternal stress are involved in prenatal development. A child physically develops a lot during the early stages of life, especially during infancy and puberty. The head grows a lot first and then the body follows. This is called cephalocaudal development. The average age of menarche has decreased over the last couple of centuries, mainly because of better nutrition.
Infants show signs of habituation and dishabituation. An infant will look at novel stimuli longer than at familiar ones. If an infant is looking at a familiar object and is presented with a novel object, the viewing time is immediately increased. This is called dishabituation. Infants show an increased interest in objects that they can control.
Infants will first put everything in their mouth as a mean of exploring. From the age of 5 to 6 months, infants will start examining objects. They will use their hands and their eyes to look at objects. Here, the rule of habituation also applies. Infants learn about objects’ properties through examination.
The infants also respond to social cues. This can be seen in the phenomenon known as gaze-following and later in life, they will also see other people as intentional agents, individuals who cause things to happen. This is seen in infants of around 9 months of age when they engage in shared attention with another person. They pay attention to the thing the individual points at. Infants will also engage in social referencing. They will look at their caregiver’s emotional expression for clues about the possible danger of their actions.
If infants are shown events that don’t seem fitting with their ideas on the physical world, then they will look at it longer than events that do, showing that even infants have knowledge of core physical principles, such as that unsupported things should fall down.
Piaget argues that infants don’t have a sense of object permanence, which is shown by his simple-hiding experiment, but it may have something to do with having to act on the object, as the infants do show a sense of object-permanence if they only have to look at certain objects, instead of acting on them.
There are three general theories of children’s mental development, starting with Piaget.
Piaget: Mental development derives from the children’s own actions on the physical environment. Children develop schemes, mental blueprints for actions. A scheme is something that a child can do with an object or a category of objects. The growth of schemes involves
.....read more Psychology by P. Gray and D. F., Bjorkland (eight edition) – Summary chapter 12
As infants, we depend physically and emotionally on adult caregivers. As children, we learn to get along with others and to abide by the rules and norms of society. As adolescents, we begin to explore romantic relationships and consider how we will take our place in the adult world. As adults, we assume responsibility for the care and support of others and contribute, through work, to the broader society.
The bond between infant and parent is promoted by innate tendencies: the infant to cry and the parent to help. Infants prefer their caregivers and react to their caregivers and in that way, the infants take an active role in building emotional bonds between themselves and those on whom they most directly depend. Attachment refers to emotional bonds.
The experiments of Harlow with monkeys provided a lot of evidence for the contact comfort theory, in which the bond between mother and infant is promoted by the warmth and comfort of the mother. Bowlby’s evolutionary explanation of the fact that infants between 8 months and 3 years old are distressed when their caregivers are out of sight is that infants who were in their mother's sight were an evolutionary advantage in the past. Evidence for this comes from the fact that similar behaviours occur in all human cultures and in other species of mammals.
There are four types of attachment and this can be assessed by the strange situation test, in which the mother suddenly leaves the room leaving the child either by itself or with a stranger.
Sensitive care is the behaviour in which the infant’s signals of distress are responded to promptly and the infants receive regular contact comfort and interact with the infant in an emotionally synchronous manner. Sensitive care correlates with secure attachment and the children that are securely attached were more likeable people later in life, as well as better at problem-solving and emotionally healthier. Children that have a certain homozygous gene are less affected by environmental experiences.
There are three successive stages in a child from age 1 – 12: autonomy, initiative and industry. Prosocial behaviour is voluntary behaviour intended to benefit other people. There are three aspects of young children’s prosocial behaviour:
Psychology by P. Gray and D. F., Bjorkland (eight edition) – Summary chapter 13
Humans are ‘natural psychologists’. This has an evolutionary explanation: people can help us or hurt us and we want to find out their intention. Attribution is a claim about the cause of someone’s behaviour. It is possible to attribute the cause of someone’s behaviour to two things:
There are three questions one can ask himself to determine whether the attribute has to be about the situation of about the person:
People give to much weight to personality and not enough to the environmental situations when they make attributions about other’s actions. This is also called person bias. Or the fundamental attribution error. People also have the tendency to attribute success to themselves and attribute failure to the situation. Person bias occurs mainly in western countries.
There are several biases that arise from the perception of facial features:
People that meet each other on the internet before meeting each other face-to-face like each other more than people that just meet each other face-to-face, because meeting over the internet reduces social anxiety. It also allows people to be their ‘true-self’ and frees people from biases that arise from physical attractiveness.
Self-concepts refer to the way that a person defines him- or herself. According to Cooley, we create our self-image based on what others think of us. He introduced the term looking glass self. The beliefs and expectation that others have of a person, whether true or false, can to some degree create reality by influencing that person’s self-concept and behaviour. These effects are called self-fulfilling prophecies or Pygmalion effects. Someone’s expectation can affect someone’s behaviour and self-image.
Self-esteem is one’s feeling of approval, acceptance and liking of oneself. The sociometer theory states that we derive our self-esteem from others’ attitudes towards us and that self-esteem reflects your best guess about the degree to which other people respect and accept you. From an evolutionary perspective, other people’s views of us matter a great deal, because our survival depends on it.
The process of comparing ourselves with others in order to identify our unique characteristics and evaluate our abilities is called social comparison (e.g: we ourselves as tall if we
.....read more Psychology by P. Gray and D. F., Bjorkland (eight edition) – Summary chapter 14
Personality is the relatively consistent patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour that characterize each person as a unique individual. A trait is a relatively stable predisposition to behave in a certain way. There are traits that are always present, but there are also traits that need a certain situation before they manifest. Traits are dimensions, which are measurable, continuous characteristics, along which people differ by degree.
Trait theories of personality endeavour to specify a manageable set of distinct personality dimensions that can be used to summarize the fundamental psychological differences among individuals. Factor analysis is used in defining the most useful dimensions. There are three steps in factor analysis:
Factor analysis tells us that the dimensions are relatively independent of each other. The Big Five Theory of Personality states that someone’s personality is best described using five, relatively independent personality dimensions. These dimensions spell out OCEAN.
There was a proposal for a higher-order personality trait independent of IQ that is predictive of success in a wide range of domains and is called grit. Grit is defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Especially the tendency to persist at difficult tasks seems to be important for predicting success. The validity of the Big Five Theory of Personality is measured by checking the correlation between the test and the actual behaviour.
People with socially aversive personalities score high on the dark triad, which consists of three things:
Personality is relatively constant throughout adulthood and stays constant after 50 years of age. The older someone is, the less likely it is that their personality is going to change. The heritability of personality traits is about 0.50. The household in which an individual grew up does not correlate with personality at all. A single gene may influence neuroticism, as well as the neurotransmitter serotine. A single gene may influence novelty seeking, as well as the neurotransmitter dopamine.
It could be that personality is a side-effect of evolution. It could also be that personality has an evolutionary advantage. If there are more different types of individuals in one species, the likeliness of survival is bigger. There are differences in behavioural styles across species. The Big Five can
.....read more Psychology by P. Gray and D. F., Bjorkland (eight edition) – Summary chapter 15A potential psychological disorder must be evaluated in four aspects:
A person must have clinically significant scores on all these aspects for something to be a psychological disorder. There are three demands to be made to a condition before being labelled a psychological disorder:
The reliability of a diagnostic system refers to the extent to which different diagnosticians, al trained in the use of the system, reach the same conclusion when they independently diagnose the same individuals. The validity of a diagnostic system is an index of the extent to which the categories it identifies are useful and meaningful in clinicians. A label implying a psychological disorder has the potential to interfere with the person’s ability to cope with his or her environment through several means:
The medical student’s disease is characterised by a strong tendency to relate personally to and to find in oneself, the symptoms of any disease or disorder described in a textbook. There are several cultural related psychological disorders, such as anorexia nervosa. This used to be a psychological disorder that was only known in western cultures, but because of the globalisation, it happens in other cultures too. Culture does not only affect the types of behaviours and syndromes that people manifest but also affects clinician’s decisions about what to label as disorders, for example, homosexuality used to be labelled as a disorder. There are constantly new disorders being added, one of those is ADHD, which has three varieties:
One of the most important causes of psychological disorders is brain deficit and the brain itself. Down Syndrome is a disorder that is present at birth and is caused by an error in meiosis, which results in an extra chromosome. Alzheimer’s disease is found primarily in older adults. The disorder is characterised psychologically by a progressive deterioration in all person’s cognitive abilities, followed by deterioration in the brain’s control of bodily functions. The disorder is caused by the presence of amyloid plaques, deposits of a particular protein, called beta-amyloid. There is a difference between chronic disorders and episodic disorders, disorders of which the effects are reversible.
Environmental assaults to the
.....read more Psychology by P. Gray and D. F., Bjorkland (eight edition) – Summary chapter 16The caring for people with psychological disorders used to be non-existent. Nowadays, there is more care. Since the 1970s, assertive community treatment has existed, aimed at helping a person with severe psychological problems and preventing hospitalization.
Electroconvulsive therapy is used primarily in cases of severe depression that does not respond to psychotherapy or antidepressant drugs. The treatment consists of people receiving anaesthesia and passing an electric current through a patient’s skull triggering a seizure in the brain that lasts approximately one minute. The shocks and the seizures promote the producing of neurotransmitters and the sensitivity of postsynaptic receptors. It also stimulates the growth of new neurons. The most frequent side effect of the treatment is memory loss, although this mostly clears up within a few months after the treatment.
Psychosurgery is a last-resort treatment, which involves surgically cutting or producing lesions in portions of the brain to relieve a psychological disorder. The consequence of prefrontal lobotomy was that people did not have access to their executive functions anymore and needed constant care. In deep brain stimulation, a thin wire electrode is planted permanently in the brain, usually in the cingulum or in a portion of the basal ganglia for patients with OCD, and this electrode can be activated in order to electrically stimulate, rather than destroy the neurons lying near it.
Psychotherapy aims to treat psychological disorders through talk, reflection, learning and practice. Psychotherapy is any theory-based, systematic procedure, conducted by a trained therapist, for helping people to overcome or cope with mental problems through psychological rather than physiological means. Each major approach in psychotherapy draws on a set of psychological principles and ideas that apply to adaptive as well as maladaptive behaviour:
Psychoanalysis refers to the forms of therapy that are closely tied to Freud’s ideas. Psychodynamic therapy is used to include psychoanalysis and therapies that are more loosely based on Freud’s ideas. Psychodynamic therapy focusses on the fact that mental problems arise from unresolved mental conflicts, which themselves arise from the holding of contradictory motives and beliefs. Symptoms are surface manifestations of the disorder. The disorder itself is buried in the person’s unconscious mind and must be unearthed before it can be treated. The elements of thought that are the least logical give clues to the unconscious motive and psychodynamic therapists use three techniques to find these elements of thought:
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