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:
Sensitive care correlates with secure attachment and positive later adjustment
Sensitive care: infants become securely attached to mothers who provide regular contact comfort, respond promptly and helpfully to the infants’ signals of distress, and interact with the infant in an emotionally synchronous manner.
There are positive correlations between the ratings of the mother’s sensitive care and security of the infant’s attachment to the mother.
Children judged to be securely attached in infancy, found, on average, to be more confident, better at solving problems, emotionally healthier and more sociable later in childhood than those who had been found to be insecurely attached.
Some children are more susceptible to parental effect than are others.
The relationship between parental care and infant’s attachment depends, at least partly, on the genetic make of the child.
The gene at issue (5-HTTLLPR gene) comes in two forms (or alleles) a short s form and a long l form.
The l allele results in grater uptake of serotonin into brain neurons.
Children who are homozygous for the l allele are less affected by negative environmental experiences than are other children.
Attachment security increased significantly and rather sharply with increased maternal sensitivity so the ss/sl group, but was not significantly affected by maternal sensitivity for the ll group. The ll infant’s showed highly secure attachment regardless of the level of maternal sensitivity.
High-quality day care also correlates with positive adjustment
Infants can also develop secure attachments with fathers, grandparents, older siblings and day-care providers.
High-quality day care correlates with positive development just as high-quality home care does.
The higher the quality of day care during infancy and toddlerhood, the better is the social and academic adjustment of children in early school years.
Day care generally does not interfere with the abilities of infants and toddlers to maintain secure attachments with their mothers and fathers.
Parental attachments are better predictors of positive adjustments than are attachments with day-care providers, regardless of the amount of time spent in day care.
Cross-cultural differences in infant care
Caregiving in Hunter-gatherer societies
! Kung infants spend most of their time during their first year in direct contact with their mothers’ bodies. The infants nurse at will. The infant is never left alone, when the mother does not held the infant, the infant is passed around among others. The! Kung never leave an infant to cry alone, and usually they detect the distress and begin to comfort the infant before the crying even begins.
Studies of other hunter-gatherer cultures have shown a similarly high degree of indulgence toward infants.
But the people who provide can vary.
Among the Efe, infants are in physical contact with their mothers for only about half the day. During the rest of the day, Efe infants nurse at will, not just from their mothers but also form other lactating women in the group. But at 8 to 12 months Efe infants begin to show increased preference for their own mothers.
In general, parental involvements appears to be greater in hunter-gatherer cultures than in agricultural or industrial cultures.
Issues of indulgence, dependence and interdependence
There is a direct correlation between the degree of indulgence and the number of adults who live communally with the infant. Indulgence is greatest for infants who live in large extended families or close-knit village groups, and least for those who live just with one or both parents.
As children grow from infancy into toddlerhood and beyond, they become increasingly mobile and capable of a wide variety of actions in their physical and social worlds.
Erikson divided the years from age 1 to 12 into three successive stages.
These characteristics are all closely related to one another. They have to do with the child’s ability to control his or her own actions.
Children’s actions frequently bring them into conflict with caregivers and others around them.
Caregiver’s responses to children’s actions influence children's social behavior.
The development of prosocial behaviors
The early emergence of empathy and empathic comforting
Newborn babies reflexively cry and show other signs of distress in response to another baby’s crying. This tendency to feel discomfort in response to another’s expressed discomfort is a foundation for the development of empathy.
Over time, the response becomes less reflective and more accompanied by thought.
Until 15 months of age, the child’s distress when others are distressed is best referred to as egocentric empathy.
The distressed child seeks comfort for him- or herself rather than for the other distressed person.
At about 15 months, children begin to respond to another’s discomfort by attempting to comfort that person. By age 2 then begin to succeed at such comforting.
The young child’s natural tendency to give and help
Around 12 months of age, infants routinely begin to give objects to their caregivers and to delight in games of give and take, in which the child and caregiver pass and object back and forth to each other.
They do this without any special encouragement.
In addition to give, young children enjoy helping with adult tasks.
The fact that helping actions seem to stem from the child’s own wishes is evidence that our species has evolved prosocial drives, which motivate us, with no feeling of sacrifice, to involve ourselves in positive ways with other people.
In their relationships with caregivers, young children are most often on the receiving end of acts of giving, helping and comforting. They therefore have ample opportunity not only to witness such behaviors, but also to feel their pleasurable and comforting consequences.
Children who have received the most sensitive care, and who are most securely attached to their caregivers, also demonstrate the most comforting and giving to others.
Sharing
Closely related to giving is sharing.
Young children are notoriously poor sharers. It is more common with older children, with the amount that children share of any commodity increasing with age.
However, just as young children will offer to help and give things to others on some occasions, they also will share in many context. Young children seem especially likely to share in situations in which they need to collaborate to achieve a goal.
As they get older, children are increasingly likely to see fairness in terms of equitable distributions. This is also related to theory of mind.
Social learning
Much of what children learn is accomplished by a social context.
Over imitation
Children of about 2 years of age and younger frequently engage in emulation.
Things begin to change around age 3. Beginning about this time most children faithfully repeat the actions of a model, even if many of those actions are irrelevant and if there is a more efficient way to solve the problem.
This is over imitation.
Not only children in Western cultures do this.
Although older children and adults should know better, even they engage in over imitation.
Copying irrelevant actions increased with age.
But children are not necessary blind mimics. Children are less apt to mimic when actions where accidental than when cued as intentional.
Yet over imitation seems to be the rule. But why?
Learning from other children
Children can learn from other children.
Preschool children do not often deliberately teach a skill to another child. More common is that one child is performing some task while classmates happen to see the outcome.
Young children have a number of social-learning abilities at their disposal. A skill learned by one child will be transmitted to other children, sometimes with fidelity and sometimes with modifications.
Two dimensions in parenting styles.
Correlations between disciplinary styles and children’s behavior
Four styles of parenting.
Children of authoriative parents exhibit the most positive qualities. They are friendlier, happier, more cooperative and less likely to disrupt other’s activities.
Children of authoritarian parents often perform poorly in school, have low self-esteem, and are more apt to be rejected by their school peers.
Children of permissive parents tend to be impulsive and aggressive, often acting out of control.
Children of uninvolved parents typically fare the worst. In adolescence they often show a broad range of problem behaviors.
The cause-effect problem in relating parenting style to children’s behavior
Children with different temperaments do elicit different disciplinary styles from their parents.
Children have a strong orientation to members of their own generation.
It is the peer group that will provide the child’s most direct future collaborators in life-sustaining work and reproduction.
Children beyond age 4 or 5 years spend more of the daytime hours with other children than with adults. Mostly they are playing. Their play takes universal forms. In every culture studied, children tend to segregate themselves by sex when they play. Through playing with others of their own sex, children develop the gender-specific skills and attitudes of their culture.
Developmental functions of play
Play is a vehicle for acquiring skills
Children all over the world play chase games. These promote:
Physical stamina, agility and the development of strategies to avoid getting caught.
Children all over the world also play nurturing and fighting. Everywhere the former is more prevalent among girls and the latter is more prevalent among boys.
Other universal forms of human play are specific to our species.
In cultures where children can directly observe the sustenance activities of adults, children focus much of their play on those activities.
Children’s play reflects and may help transmit a culture’s values and skills.
Children’s play can help create an advance culture as well as reflect it.
Play as a vehicle for learning about rules and acquiring self-control
Play may enable children to acquire more advanced understanding of rules and social roles and greater self-control.
Unsupervised play with peers is crucial to moral development.
Adults use their superior power to settle children’s disputes, but when adults are not present, children argue out their disagreements and acquire a new understanding of rules based on reason rather than authority.
Children learn trough play how to control their own impulses and to abide by socially agreed-upon rules and roles, an ability that is crucial in social life. There are rules in play.
Play has this paradoxical quality. Children freely enter into it, but in doing so they give up some of their freedom. Play in humans evolved at least partly as a means of practicing self-discipline of the sort that is needed to follow social conventions and rules.
There is a positive correlation between the amount of social fantasy play that children engage in and subsequent ratings of their social competence and self-control.
The special value of age-mixed play
Age-mixed play is often qualitatively different from play among age mates.
Gender differences in social development
Gender differences in interactions with caregivers
Even in early infancy, boys and girls, on average, behave somewhat differently from each other.
Parents and other caregivers behave differently toward girls and boys, beginning at birth.
They, on average, are gentler with girls than with boys and are more likely to talk to girls and to jostle with boys.
Adults offer help and comfort more often to girls than to boys and more often expect boys to solve problems on their own. This treatment may lead girls to become more affectionate and sociable and boys to become more self-reliant than they otherwise would.
Adult’s assumptions about the different interests and abilities of girls and boys may play a role in the types of careers that the two sexes eventually choose.
Gender identity and its effects on children’s behavior
Children actively mold themselves to behave according to their culture’s gender conceptions.
By age 4 or 5, most children have learned quite clearly their culture’s stereotypes of male and female roles. They also recognize that they themselves are one gender or the other and always will be. This understanding is gender identify.
Once they have this understanding, children of all cultures seem to become concerned about projecting themselves as clearly male or female.
From a biological perspective, gender is not an arbitrary concept but is linked to sex, which is linked to reproduction.
Children’s self-imposed gender segregation
In all cultures studied, boys and girls play primarily with others of their own sex. Such segregation is more common in activities structured by children themselves than in activities structured by adults.
The peak of gender segregation occurs on age 8 to 11 years. In their separate playgroups, boys practice to be the masculine activities of their culture, and girls practice what they perceive to be the feminine activities of their culture.
Gender differences in styles of playgroup
Girls and boys tend to play differently as well as separately, and the differences are in some ways consistent from culture to culture.
Some social scientists consider boy’s and girls’ peer groups to be so distinct that they constitute separate subcultures. Each with its own values, directing its members along different developmental lines.
In their free time, children often play in age-mixed groups. Boys and girls play together more often in age-mixed groups than in age-segregated groups.
Whether or not they play together, boys and girls are interested in each other. That interest begins to peak as children enter adolescence.
Adolescence is the transition period from childhood to adulthood.
It begins with the first signs of puberty, and it ends when the person is viewed by him- or herself and, and by others, as a full member of the adult community.
Adolescence is a stage of identity crisis. The goal of which is to give up one’s childhood identity and establish a new identity appropriate for entry into adulthood.
It is a period in which young people either consciously or unconsciously act in ways to move themselves from childhood toward adulthood.
Shifting from parents to peers for intimacy and guidance
Breaking away from parental control
Adolescence is often characterized as a time of rebellion against parents, but is rarely involves out-and-out rejection.
The typical rebellion, if one occurs at all, is aimed specifically at some of the immediate controls that parents hold over the child’s behavior.
At the same time that adolescents are asking to be treated more like adults, parents may fear new dangers that can accompany this period of life, and try to tighten controls instead of loosening them.
For both sons and daughters, increased conflict with parents is linked more closely to the physical changes of puberty than to chronological age.
Establishing closer relationships with peers
As adolescents gain more independence from their parents, they look increasingly to their peers of emotional support.
Conforming to peers
As children approach and enter their teenage years, they become increasingly concerned about looking and behaving like their peers.
People tend to choose friends who have interest and behaviors similar to their own. Over time, friends become more similar to one another in frequency of risky or unhealthful behaviors than they were originally.
Increased rates of recklessness and delinquency
On a statistical basis, all over the world, people are much more likely to engage in disruptive or dangerous actions during adolescence than at other times in life. Especially in males.
Why? Adolescence:
Explanations that focus on adolescents’ segregation from adults
Relatively unique to modern, Western cultures.
Adolescent recklessness is largely an aberration of modern times, not a product of natural selection.
Our cultures segregation of adolescents from adult society contributes to adolescents’ risky and sometimes delinquent behavior.
Perhaps adolescents seek adult-like status while, at the same time, identifying with the behaviors and values of their adolescent subculture.
The neurological basis of risk-taking in adolescence
Risk-taking behavior is governed by underlying changes in adolescents’ brains.
Adolescent risk taking behaviors reflects a competition between two developing brain systems.
Although adolescents are able to make logical decisions as well as young adults under ‘neutral’ conditions, the socioemotional brain network becomes dominant under conditions of emotional or social arousal or when the presence of peers.
An evolutionary explanation of the ‘young-male’ syndrome
Risky and delinquent activities are much more readily pursued by young males than by young females.
Among mammals in general, the number of potential offspring a male can produce is more variable than the number of a female can produce and is more closely tied to status.
In our species’ history, males who took risks to achieve higher status among their peers may well have produced more offspring, on average. So genes promoting that tendency may have been passed along.
Females also exhibit a peak in violence during adolescence and youth, although it is a much smaller peak than men’s.
An expanded moral vision and moral sense of self
Adolescence is a period of rapid growth in the sophistication of moral reasoning and a time in which many people develop moral self-images that guide their actions.
Advancement on Kohlberg’s scale of moral reasoning
Moral reasoning develops through a series of stages.
Each successive stage takes into account a broader portion of the social world.
Sexual explanations
Adolescence is first and foremost the time of sexual blooming.
The developmental of sexuality and sexual behavior in adolescence
Sexual attraction
Sexual behavior follows a typical pattern for adolescents in developed countries.
Evolutionary explanation of sex differences in sexual eagerness
Young men are more eager than young women to have sexual intercourse without a long-term commitment.
The standard explanation is parental investment.
How teenage sexuality may depend on conditions of rearing
Great variation on the dimension of sexual restraint versus promiscuity exist within each sex, both across cultures and within any given culture.
Promiscuity prevails among both men and women in cultures where men devote little care for young, and sexual restraint prevails in cultures where men devote much care.
Natural selection may have predisposed humans to be sensitive to cues in childhood that predict whether one or the other sexual strategy will be more successful.
Establishing intimate, caring relationships and finding fulfillment in work are the main tasks of early and middle adulthood.
Love
Romantic love viewed as adult attachment
Romantic love is similar in form to the attachment that infants develop with their parents.
The emotional bond is not simply a by-product of shared pleasures.
Adults form with romantic partners can be classified as: secure and anxious or avoidant. People form mental models of close relationships based on their early experiences with their primary caregivers and then carry those models into their adult relationships.
Ingredients of marital success
Happily married couples argue as often as unhappily married couples, but they argue more constructively.
In happily married couples, both partners are sensitive to the unstated feelings and needs of the other.
Employment
Work occupies an enormous portion of adult life. At best, work is for adults what play is for children.
The value of occupational self-direction
In surveys of workers, people most often say they enjoy their work if it is:
This constellation of job characteristics is occupational self-direction. These jobs are less stressful. They also promote certain positive personality changes.
The job affect the psychology not just of the workers but also of the workers’ children.
Balancing out-of-home and at-home work
Women, more often than men, hold two jobs. One outside the home and the other inside.
Wives enjoy their out-of-home work more than their at-home work, while the opposite is true for husbands.
The differences derived from the men’s and women’s differing perceptions of their choices and obligations.
Growing old
Older adults, on average, report greater current enjoyment of life than do middle-age people. And middle-age people report greater enjoyment than do young adults.
A shift toward focus on the present and the positive
The socioemotional selectivity theory.
As people grow older, they become gradually more concerned with enjoying the present and less concerned with activities that function primarily to prepare for the future.
The older one is, the less sense it makes to sacrifice present comforts and pleasures for possible future gain.
As people grow older, they devote less attention and energy to casual acquaintances and strangers and more to people with whom they already have close emotional ties. They do show less anger than do younger adults.
Selective attention to and memory for the positive
Older people attend more to emotional positive stimuli than to emotionally negative stimuli and show better memory for the former than the latter.
Selective memory is one means by which older people regulate their emotions in a positive direction. This is a positivity bias. And extends beyond memory.
Approaching death
The one certainty of life is death.
Fear of death typically peaks in the person’s fifties, which is when people often begin to see some of their peers dying. Older people have less fear of death. They are likely to accept it as inevitable.
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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