Speed Run PSY 202

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Intro to Psychology(PSY202)

for the sake of getting high GPA in the shortest amount of time

Credit by Mohan Ji

Prerequisites

  • none

Helper

MODULE 1A Brain areas

left lobe

MODULE 1B Learning method

Distributed practice:

An experiment to test the most efficient training schedule

Training Schedule A:
2 sessions per day, 2 hours of practice in each session
(4 hours total per day)

Training Schedule B:
1 session per day, 2 hours of practice in the session
(2 hours total per day)

Training Schedule C:
2 sessions per day, 1 hour of practice in each session
(2 hours total per day)

Training Schedule D:
1 session per day, 1 hour of practice in the session
(1 hour total per day)

result

Levels of Processing:

Making deeper connections to material as you study makes the material easier to recall

Active Versus Passive Learning

Long period: Active learning >>> passive learning
Short period active learning< passive learning

Effect of Interleaving Material:

Newbie learning badminton:

Group #1 did fully massed block practice.  They did 36 short serves.  Then they did 36 long serves.  Then they did 36 drive serves  

Group #2 did interleaved practice.  They did 36 triplets of short, long, and drive serves (e.g., Short-Long-Drive-Short-Long-Drive-…until they did 36 of each type of serve)

Group #3 did random practice.  They did 36 total serves of each type, but could randomly choose which they did on any given serve - with the condition that they couldn’t do more than two in a row of any given serve

interleaved practice> massed practice

Sleep:

Sleep Serves to Consolidate AND ORGANIZE Information

Distraction:

Having media on in the background while you’re trying to learn causes you to learn less: 

In a similar study, researchers again had participants read a long article about a medical condition and then take a quiz on the reading.  The participants were split into four groups  

Group #1 - The television was off while they were reading the article AND when they took the quiz
Group #2 - The television was on while they were reading the article, but off when they took the quiz
Group #3 - The television was off while they were reading the article, but on when the took the quiz
Group #4 - The television was on both while they were reading the article and when they took the quiz 

result

Group #1 (no-TV) did well (12.65 out of 15)
Group #2 did by far the worse (10.65 out of 15)
Group #3 did well (12.66 out of 15)
Group #4 did by far the worse (9.78 out of 15)

MODULE 2A Classical Conditioning

Classical conditioning:

  • unconditioned stimulas
  • conditioned stimulas
  • unconditioned response
  • conditioned response

Operant conditioning:

e.g.

Positive Reinforcement:
Give a treat whenever a dog sits when you say the word “sit.”  The probability of the dog sitting in response to the word “sit” increases through time.  So you’ve given something (positive) that increases the probability of an action (reinforcement)

Negative Reinforcement:
A child has 10 chores to do each weekend.  But if they do their homework on time each night.  One chore is removed from the list.  The probability of the child doing their homework increases through time.  So you’ve taken something away (negative) that increases the probability of an action (reinforcement)

Positive punishment:
A mouse gets an electric shock whenever it touches a certain red square in its cage.  The probability of the mouse touching the red square decreases through time.  So you’ve given something (positive) that decreases the probability of an action (punishment)

Negative punishment:
A child normally gets 1 hour of video game time each night.  However, each time they fight with their siblings, 15 minutes of video game time is removed.  The probability of the child fighting with their siblings decreases through time.  So you’ve taken something away (negative) that reduces the probability of an action (punishment)  

Brain area

Lateral Hypothalamus:

involved in a host of functions related to feeding/hunger, pain, regulation of body temperature and blood pressure, and some digestive functions

  • Stimulation of the lateral hypothalamus acts like positive reinforcement

Amygdala:

important for the processing of fear

MODULE 2B  Vision and audition

Retina - rods and cones:

There are two types of cells in the human eye that are what we call photoreceptors.
The job of the photoreceptors is transduction, which is the term we use for the process of converting energy out in the world into electric signals that can be passed to the brain

Audition:

To sum up:

  1. Sound pressure waves are funneled into the ear
  2. These waves cause the eardrum to vibrate
  3. This causes the three small bones - the malleus, incus, and stapes (hammer, anvil, and stirrup) to vibrate and further amplify the signal
  4. As the stapes vibrates, it pushes back and forth on the cochlea (which is filled with fluid).  This converts the sound pressure waves into waves in the fluid 
  5. The movement of the fluid causes hair cells in the cochlea to bend.  It is these cells that actually transduce the signal.  When they bend, an electrical potential is changed, and this is then transmitted back to the brain by the auditory (or cochlear) nerve

Perception:

Perception = Bottom-up Information + Top-Down Information

  • Bottom-up Information: raw information that comes in from the outside world and is transduced by the sensory systems

  • Top-Down Information: the knowledge that you use to help you interpret the bottom-up information in order to make it meaningful and understandable

Brain area

notes primary visual cortex and primary auditory cortex
Lifespan

MODULE 3A What is attention?

Why Do We Need Attention?

3 Models of Attention:

  • A filter can be regarded as the selector of relevant information based on basic features, such as color, pitch, or direction of stimuli

  1. Early Selection Model:
    attention acted BEFORE recognition

  2. Late Selection Model:
    all information is attended to, whether intentionally or unintentionally

  3. Treisman’s attenuation model:
    attention doesn’t act as a perfect filter. Instead, it selects some information to pass through for further processing and then attenuates (rather than completely blocks or filters) the other information

Inattentional Blindness:

e.g.

when you were attending to just red shapes, you failed to recognize words associated with other colors. Your photoreceptors were still detecting those colors. The information was just cut off before it reached recognition and awareness

brain Areas

Damage to Posterior Parietal Cortex:

Hemineglect Syndrome:

Damage to the posterior parietal cortex in the right hemisphere results in a condition that we call left hemineglect 

  • the patients are not “blind” to the left side of space
  • Instead, the way to think of it is that all of their attention has gotten pulled completely to the right side of space, so there’s very little (or sometimes no) attention left over for processing the left side of space

Balint Syndrome:

Bilateral Damage to the Posterior Parietal Cortex 

  •  results in what’s called simultanagnosia - the inability to perceive the visual field as a whole and instead really only be able to perceive one thing at a time(salient thing)

MODULE 3B Memory

Types of memory:

  • Sensory Memory(within a second)

    • including echoic and iconic memory

  • Short-term Memory

    • including how we can keep things in short-term memory for longer by using maintenance rehearsal

  • Long-term Memory

    • including explicit memory (semantic & episodic)
    • including implicit memory (procedural, priming, conditioning)

Process of Memory Formation: encoding, storage, and retrieval

5 “Sins” of Memory

Suggestibility:

The tendency to incorporate misleading information from external sources into personal recollections

Car accident experiment:

Participants were first shown a video of a car accident. 
Then, after a short break, they were asked to describe how fast the first car was going when it [verb]ed the other car.  Participants were randomly assigned to five different groups that got different verbs to describe the accident

Group #1: “Smashed” into the other car
Group #2:“Collided” with the other car
Group #3:“Bumped” into the other car
Group #4:“Hit” the other car
Group #5:“Contacted” the other car

Later, the participants were asked to recall the video of the car crash that they watched and estimate how fast the cars were traveling. The effects of the verb that was used to describe the accident on the participants’ memory of the speed of the first car was striking:

result

Group #1 Smashed: 40.5 miles per hour
Group #2 Collided: 39.3 miles per hour
Group #3 Bumped: 38.1 miles per hour
Group #4 Hit: 34.2 miles per hour
Group #5 Contacted: 31.8 miles per hour

A simple shift in the verb given caused a difference of 10 miles per hour in the recalled speed of the collision (33%) between Group 5 and Group 1.  More interestingly perhaps, is that when participants were asked to describe the full accident scene, individuals in Group 1 tended to describe a much more violent scene than they had actually observed.  For instance, many of them reported remembering broken glass strewn about on the road (there was none)  

Bias:

  • Egocentric Bias :

    remember the past in a self-enhancing manner

  • Consistency Bias :

    the tendency, when reconstructing the past, to make it better match the present

  • Stereotypical Bias:

    a stereotype is a widely held but oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing

Misattribution:

Misattribution is when the content is remembered correctly, but the source or circumstance is remembered incorrectly

Overconfidence:

Overconfidence is thus exactly as it sounds - it is the tendency for people to be too certain about their ability to accurately remember events and to make judgments

Forgetting

  • The Serial Position Effect:

    Imagine I give an individual the following list of non-sense syllables to read and then repeat back from memory:

    DUP - GOW - BAV - HIN - SUT - VIG - COZ - PEM - RAB

    words that are most likely to be FORGOTTEN are those in the middle of the list

Brain Areas

Patient H.M. and the Hippocampus

hippocampus - critical for the initial encoding and storage of explicit memories. It is not the site of memory storage itself

Patient H.M.’s hippocampus was removed

he lost the ability to form explicit memories, unable to learn any new explicit facts,  couldn’t remember things he had done that day

Nonetheless, he was able to form new implicit memories(including procedural memories. Procedural memory includes learning new skills that are difficult to verbalize.)

MODULE 4A What is Language?

What is Language?

#1: Language involves precise semantic content

#2: Language has a clear grammatical structure

#3: Grammatical structure allows for what we call “productivity”

#4: Children learn language without explicit instruction

Units of Language and how they are combined:

Language Development:

#1: Children learn language at an astonishing rate

#2: Children make surprisingly few errors when learning to speak

#3: Children’s Passive Mastery Develops Faster Than Their Active Mastery

Children can typically understand spoken language better than they can produce it

Why Do Humans Have Language While Other Animals Don’t?

Hypothesis #4: Language as a Special Brain Module

The final hypothesis is that humans have evolved specialized brain structures that allow us to learn and utilize language

I just removed the first 3 hypothesis cause they are too wrong to remember

Learning to read:

  • Phonics

  • Whole Language

Both classroom and laboratory research has consistently shown that phonics-based approaches are far superior in creating skilled readers than whole language approaches

Brain Areas

  • Broca’s Area

  • Wernicke’s Area

left lobe

MODULE 4B fallacies

Availability Bias:

items that are more available in memory tend to be judged as more common 

Representativeness Heuristic:

Another way that our estimates of the probability of outcomes can go awry is that we tend base our judgments on the extent to which outcomes match what we expect will happen (i.e., whether the outcomes are “representative” of our expectations), while ignoring other potentially more relevant information

Conjunction Fallacy:

e.g.

Which is more likely:
Option A) Linda is a bank teller
Option B) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement

People rate that Option B is more likely because the description in Option B (e.g., active in the feminist movement) seems more representative of the description of Linda (e.g., concerned with social justice). 
But again - the probability that Linda is a bank teller AND active in the feminist movement CAN’T be more likely than the probability that Linda is a bank teller alone

Gambler’s Fallacy:

If something happens more frequently than what is expected during some period, then it will happen less frequently in the future, and vise versa

Hot Hand Fallacy:

A situation where a person who has experienced success with a random event believes that they have a greater chance of further success in additional attempts

Ignoring the Base Rate:

e.g.

Problem:
Sarah loves to listen to New Age music and faithfully reads her horoscope each day. In her spare time, she enjoys aromatherapy and attending a local spirituality group. Based on the description above, is Sarah more likely to be a public school teacher or a holistic healer?

When participants are given this problem they overwhelmingly choose ‘holistic healer’. This is consistent with the representativeness bias. The description of Sarah fits in with our existing ideas of how a holistic healer might behave. In reality though, it is far more likely that Sarah is actually a school teacher based purely on probability - more specifically the base-rate probability associated with the two professions - holistic healer and public school teacher.
Public school teachers are far more common than holistic healers

Information Bias:

Information bias describes the tendency to seek information, even if that information isn’t useful in determining what to do (which often arises from ignoring the base-rate)

Framing Effects:

Framing effects reflect the tendency for people react to a particular choice in different ways depending on whether it is presented as a loss or as a gain, as positive or negative 

e.g.

  • Burgers sell better when presented as containing 80% lean beef, than when presented as 20% fat

  • Candy is often presented as a “fat free food”.  It’s however never presented as a 100% sugar food

Loss Aversion:

Loss aversion describes the fact that the “bad” of losing $100 tends to be worse than the “good” of winning $100

Problem:  You have to select one of the following two options (with your own money). 
Option 1:
50% chance of winning $1000
50% chance of losing $500
Option 2:
50% chance of winning $100
50% chance of winning $50

Almost everyone selects Option 2 The thought of possibly losing $500 looms very large.  However, when you work through the rational choice - the expected value of Option 1 (+$250) is far higher than Option 2 (+$75)

Risk Aversion:

Problem: You must choose between the following two options:

Option 1:
50% chance of losing $1000
50% change of losing $0
Option 2:
100% chance of losing $400

People overwhelmingly tend to pick Option 1.  They’d prefer some possibility of no loss whatsoever over a certain loss.  So you can think of it as we hate losses and we hate risk, but we hate losses more than we hate risk

Sunk Cost Fallacy:

e.g.

You buy expensive tickets to a concert (let’s say $100). On the day of the event, you come down with a horrible case of food poisoning. You’re vomiting, you have aches and chills, and generally you feel miserable.  Despite this though, you decide to go to the concert because otherwise “you would have wasted your money” (let’s say that for some reason you can’t sell the ticket - you have to use yourself or it doesn’t get used)

Endowment Effect:

The tendency to ascribe more value to things because they’re yours - because you own them

Confirmation Bias:

This tendency is a real problem in today’s world, where we get to choose our own sources of information.  As such, we’re likely to search for confirmatory evidence - evidence that indicates that our beliefs are right.  And we’re unlikely to search for disconfirmatory evidence - evidence that indicates that our beliefs are wrong

Anchoring:

The human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered (this first piece of information is called the “anchor”) when making decisions.  It’s strongly related to the availability heuristic or bias

Temporal Discounting:

The fact that we don’t value things in the future as much as things in the present is known as temporal discounting

Belief Perseverance:

Beliefs are remarkably resilient in the face of empirical challenges that seem logically devastating.  In other words, even when individuals are presented with incontrovertible evidence indicating that their beliefs are false, those beliefs nonetheless tend to persist

Bias Blindspot:

Not only do we tend to be biased (e.g., confirmation bias), but we tend to not be aware of it

Over-confidence:

Too confidence

Brain Areas

Failure to properly evaluate risk

Arises due to: Damage to the pre-frontal cortex

Behavioral Outcomes: Don’t notice when decisions are risky, make risky decisions, don’t show normal biophysiological responses to risky decisions

MODULE 5A Intelligence testing

Howard Gardner’s Eight Specific Intelligences

Intelligence Description
Linguistic The ability to speak and write well
Logical-mathematical The ability to use logic and mathematical skills to solve problems
Spatial The ability to think and reason about objects in three dimensions
Musical The ability to perform and enjoy music
Kinesthetic (body) The ability to move the body in sports, dance, or other physical activities
Interpersonal The ability to understand and interact effectively with others
Intrapersonal The ability to have insight into the self
Naturalistic The ability to recognize, identify, and understand animals, plants, and other living things
Brain Areas

Prefrontal cortex:

Given that intelligence and decision-making are deeply related, it’s probably not surprising that a common brain area is important for both.  In particular, damage to the pre-frontal cortex often is associated with reductions in fluid intelligence (or “g” or the “one” intelligence).  It’s not though, necessarily associated with changes in other “types” of intelligence - such as crystallized intelligence 

Nature Versus Nurture

Is Intelligence Heritable?

How Does Intelligence Change With Age?

Are There Sex Differences in Intelligence?

By and large no

However, for verbal memory, female tends to score higher, and for spatial abilities, male tends to score higher

Gene affects IQ the most

MODULE 5B Attitudes

Attitude:

  • Affective Component (Emotions): 
    The way a person feels toward an object, person or situation
  • Behavioral (Actions): 
    The actions a person takes in regard to an object, person, or situation
  • Cognitive (Thoughts): 
    The way a person thinks about the person, object, or situation

Social Exposure:

Peer affects a lot

Classical Conditioning:

Advertising pairing things

The Mere Exposure Effect:

People tend to develop a preference for things or people that are more familiar to them than others

Cognitive dissonance:

Aroused by inconsistent beliefs and behaviors. Believing cigarettes are bad for your health, but smoking cigarettes anyway, can cause cognitive dissonance

Justification of Effort:

The behaviors after Cognitive dissonance

e.g.

That were associated with the highest level of effort were evaluated as being more valuable than those that did not. Furthermore, students indicated that they learned more in courses that required more effort, regardless of the grades that they received in those courses

Attribution:

We call an inference about the cause of a person’s behavior an attribution

  • Situational
  • dispositional

Fundamental attribution error:

  • overestimate the influence of personal traits(honesty, moodiness, laziness)
  • underestimate the influence of the situation

Actor-observer effect:

we tend to make situational attributions for our own behavior

Consensus behavior:

You’re the actor: You are yelling at an airline ticket agent. You think in a situational way

Consistency Information:

Is this Consistent Behavior?

Distinctiveness:

Here you consider how the person’s behavior varies from one situation to the next. If an individual is friendly in almost every situation, but is always angry in just one place, you make a situational attribution. If the behavior doesn’t vary by situation (e.g., they’re angry in every situation), you make a dispositional attribution

The Self-Serving Bias:

Just-World belief.” This belief describes the idea that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. And you make situational attribution towards yourself

Primacy Effect:

First Impressions Matter

Possible Reason #1: We’re Cognitive Misers

Because we desire to conserve our energy, we are more likely to pay more attention to the information that comes first and less likely to attend to information that comes later

Possible Reason #2: Anchoring

Another reason for the primacy effect is that the early traits lead us to form an initial expectancy about the person, and once that expectancy is formed, we tend to process information in ways that keep that expectancy intact

Possible Reason #3: Availability

If we learn that a person is “intelligent” and “industrious,” those traits become cognitively accessible – they’re more “available” to memory, which leads us to develop an expectancy about the person

Stereotype Threat:

is process is called stereotype threat.  We briefly mentioned in a previous module the fact that, when individuals who belong to a certain group are presented with stereotypical information about their group, they have a tendency to behave more similarly to the stereotype than they otherwise would have 

Sexism:

Sexism is prejudice and discrimination toward individuals based on their sex

Ageism:

People often form judgments and hold expectations about people based on their age

Homophobia:

Another form of prejudice is homophobia: prejudice and discrimination of individuals based solely on their sexual orientation

Realistic-Conflict Theory:

  • How easily we form in-groups and out-groups
    and 
  • How, once in-groups and out-groups is established it’s often the case that prejudice toward or discriminatory behavior toward the out-groups will follow

Measuring Prejudice and Stereotyping:

Bogus Pipeline:

participants who believe the truthfulness of their responses are being monitored are far more likely to be truthful

Implicit Attitudes Test

e.g.

Imagine if every time you ate ice cream, you got a brain freeze. When it comes time to categorize ice cream as good or bad, you may still categorize it as “good,” but you will likely be a little slower in doing so compared to someone who has nothing but positive thoughts about ice cream

Reducing Prejudice and Stereotyping:

Equal Status Contact

Prejudice and the amygdala:

Some findings from these studies include: the amygdala is activated upon seeing such images, amygdala activation is correlated with prejudicial attitudes of the viewer, and amygdala activity in white people is higher when viewing black faces with darker skin tones

Cultural Differences in Attributions:

With regard to attributions, individuals from more collectivistic cultures(China, Japan, Korea) are less likely than those from individualistic cultures to explain behaviors in terms of personality/disposition

MODULE 6A Social Facilitation

Social Facilitation

People watch-> weak weaker, strong stronger

Social Loafing:

The exertion of less effort by a person working together with a group

Conformity:

Everyday observation confirms that we often adopt the actions and attitudes of the people around us. Trends in clothing, music, foods, and entertainment are obvious

  • Asch effect(observed from an experiment)

    • The presence of another dissenter: If there is at least one dissenter, conformity rates drop to near zero.

    • The public or private nature of the responses: When responses are made publicly (in front of others), conformity is more likely; however, when responses are made privately (e.g., writing down the response), conformity is less likely.

Bystander Apathy:

The Murder of Kitty Genovese

Factors that decrease bystander intervention:

  • The presence of other people (diffusion of responsibility)
  • Being in a big city or very small town
  • Vague or ambiguous situations
  • When personal costs outweigh the benefits of helping

Groupthink:

The modification of the opinions of members of a group to align with what they believe is the group consensus, often in an attempt to maintain harmony in the group

Group Polarization:

The strengthening of an original group attitude after the discussion of views within a group. That is, if a group initially favors a viewpoint, after discussion the group consensus is likely a stronger endorsement of the viewpoint

e.g. prejudice

Persuasion:

Yale Attitude Change Approach

Elaboration Likelihood Model:

  • central route or systematic persuasion:

    logic driven and uses data and facts to convince people of an argument’s worthiness
    e.g., a car company seeking to persuade you to purchase their model will emphasize the car’s safety features and fuel economy

  • The peripheral route or heuristic persuasion:

    an indirect route that uses peripheral cues to associate positivity with the message
    e.g., having a popular athlete advertise athletic shoes is a common method used to encourage young adults to purchase the shoes

Social Influence:

The ability for one person to control another person’s behavior

Obedience:

  • The Famous Milgram Experiment:

    Electronic shocks

  • The Stanford Prison Experiment:

    result

    “At this point it became clear that we had to end the study. We had created an overwhelmingly powerful situation—a situation in which prisoners were withdrawing and behaving in pathological ways, and in which some of the guards were behaving sadistically.”
    The Stanford prison experiment demonstrated the power of social roles, norms, and scripts in affecting human behavior

Deindividuation:

Refers to the loss of self-evaluation, disinhibition, and decreased personal responsibility leading to anti-normative behavior

MODULE 6B Classic Approaches to Personality

Classic Approaches to Personality:

  • The Four Humors

  • Phrenology

  • Freud:

    • Defense Mechanisms:

      Defense mechanisms are unconscious protective behaviors that work to reduce anxiety.

    Freud believed that personality develops during early childhood: Childhood experiences shape our personalities as well as our behavior as adults

    • Stages of Psychosexual Personality Development:

      Stage Age (years) Erogenous Zone Major Conflict Adult Fixation Example
      Oral 0–1 Mouth Weaning off breast or bottle Smoking, overeating
      Phallic 3–6 Genitals Oedipus/Electra complex Vanity, overambition
      Latency 6–12 None None None
      Genital 12+ Genitals None None

Objective Tests:

Objective personality tests can be further subdivided into two basic types - self-report and informant ratings 

With informant ratings, psychologists ask someone who knows a person well to describe his or her personality characteristics

Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)

NEO PI-R:

based upon the “Big 5” personality dimensions 

Myers-Briggs Test(binary categories):

 incredibly prevalent on social media

  • Introversion/extraversion
  • Sensing/intuitive
  • Thinking/feeling
  • Judging/perceiving

Projective Tests:

This kind of test relies on one of the defense mechanisms proposed by Freud—projection—as a way to assess unconscious processes. During this type of testing, a series of ambiguous cards is shown to the person being tested, who then is encouraged to project his feelings, impulses, and desires onto the cards—by telling a story, interpreting an image, or completing a sentence

  • Rorschach Inkblot Test

The Trait Approach to Personality:

The Five-Factor Model of Personality(OCEAN)

With its five factors referred to as the Big Five personality traits

The Person-Situation Debate and Alternatives to the Trait Perspective:

Because of the findings that Mischel emphasized, many psychologists focused on an alternative to the trait perspective. Instead of studying broad, context-free descriptions, like the trait terms we’ve described so far, Mischel thought that psychologists should focus on people’s distinctive reactions to specific situations

Brain Areas

Pre-frontal Cortex:

Phineas Gage and Personality:

Phineas Gage personality shift (more impulsive, rude, less conscientious) 
Arose due to: Damage to the pre-frontal cortex 
Behavioral Outcomes: Massive personality shift 

 Nature Versus Nurture

Role of Genes in Personality:

Twin studies, huge similarity between identical twins

Cultural Role in Personality:

Personality in Individualist and Collectivist Cultures

Environmental influences on and interactions with personality 

Stability of Personality Traits Through the Lifespan:

Older, stabler

MODULE 7A What Are Emotions and How Do Emotions Manifest Themselves?

Emotions:

  • expressive behaviors

  • physiological reactions
    Sympathetic system

  • internally experienced mental states   

    Mixed feelings

Measuring Emotion

  • Physiological Responses: facial electromyography (EMG)

  • Subjective Experience: One of the more common questionnaires is the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) (figure below). (Self report)

Axes Of Emotion(two dimensions)

  • Valence:
    refers to how how positive or negative the experience is.  For instance, emotions such as “happy” or “excited” would be positive in valence.  Meanwhile, emotions such as “depressed” or “angry” would be negative in valence

  • Arousal:
    refers to how active or passive the experience is.  For instance, emotions such as “astonished” and “afraid” would both be high arousal.  Meanwhile, emotions such as “content” and “tired” would be low in arousal’

Theories of Emotion:

James-Lange Theory:

asserts that emotions arise from physiological arousal

e.g.

a venomous snake in your backyard, your sympathetic nervous system would initiate significant physiological arousal, which would make your heart race and increase your respiration rate

Emotion is the consequence – not the cause – of our physiological reactions

Cannon-Bard theory

The external event (the grizzly bear, the snarling dog) activate the brain and then the brain independently causes the activation of the sympathetic nervous system/arousal AND the subjective sense of fear

the arousal is INDEPENDENT of the subjective sense of fear.  They’re independent

Schacter-Singer Theory (Two-Factor Theory)

emotion = arousal + cognition

Asserts that the experience of emotion is determined by the intensity of the arousal we are experiencing, but that the cognitive appraisal of the situation determines what the emotion will be

e.g.

Suspension bridge effect

Note arousal is like button-up information while cognition(context) is like top-down information

Emotional Regulation:

  • Reappraisal: 
    altering our emotional reactions to events by thinking about the events in more neutral terms
  • Thought Suppression: 
    attempting to suppress negative thoughts/not feel negative emotions
  • Rumination: 
    thinking about, elaborating, and focusing on undesired thoughts or feelings.  This tends to prolong negative emotions  
  • Distraction: 
    doing or thinking something other than the troubling activity or thought

Emotional Intelligence(EQ)

Motivation

  • drive theory

  • Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs(國中學的需求金字塔)

  • Self-determination theory (SDT):

    • The need for competence: 
      People seek out opportunities gain mastery of challenging tasks and to learn different skills
    • The need for social connectedness: 
      People need to experience a sense of belonging and attachment to other people
    • The need for autonomy: 
      People need to feel in control of their own behaviors and goals
Brain Areas

Amygdala:

typically associated with fear

Routes to the Amygdala - Fast and Slow

Routes 1: referred to as the “fast route,” the “direct route,” the “speedy route” or the “low-road(information more vague)

e.g. retina –> thalamus –> amygdala

Route 2: This route is referred to as the “slow route,” the “indirect route,” the “slow route”, the “high-road,” or the “thinking road.”(information more accurate)

e.g. retina –> thalamus –> primary visual cortex –> pre-frontal cortex –> amygdala.    

In the indirect route, the information has gone through primary visual cortex, been identified, and then went to pre-frontal cortex where it was evaluated.  By the time the information reaches the amygdala via this pathway, it’s usually clear that there’s no need for fear

Frontal Cortex

A large portion of Elliott’s pre-frontal cortex was removed

result

Elliott lost the ability to exhibit emotion

MODULE 7B Binary Schemes in Sexuality and Gender

Intersex:

The Number and Type of Sex Chromosomes

Klinefelter syndrome:

referred to as 47,XXY. Affected males are often infertile or have reduced fertility and may have underdeveloped sexual organs

Turner Syndrome:

shorthand as 45,X. Individuals with Turner syndrome are typically considered to biologically female

Triple X syndrome:  called 47,XXX.

XX Male Syndrome: In  XX Male Syndrome (sometimes de la Chapelle syndrome), individuals are genetically XX, but one of the X chromosomes (from the father) contains the SR-Y gene (due to unequal crossing over

Sex hormones

Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome:

Complete androgen insensitivity syndrome is when the external genitalia are that of a prototypical female. Mild androgen insensitivity syndrome is when the external genitalia are that of a prototypical male. And partial androgen insensitivity syndrome is when the external genitalia are partially, but not fully, masculinized

Gender:

Androgyny(ambigender, polygender):

the combination of masculine and feminine characteristics

Cisgender:

This term refers to individuals whose gender identity, gender expression, or behavior conforms to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth

Transgender:

This term refers to individuals whose gender identity, gender expression, or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth.  Around 1.5-2 million individuals would describe themselves as transgender

Transgender Man (sometimes Trans Man, Female-to-Male, F to M, F2M, or FTM):

An individual whose sex assignment at birth was female but whose gender identity is male

Genderqueer:

Refers to individuals who identify as neither man nor woman, or as a combination of man and woman

Sexual Orientation:

Heterosexual:

attracted to members of the opposite sex

Homosexual:

attracted to members of the same sex

Conversion Therapy

Claims of successful gay conversion therapy have received wide criticism from the research community due to significant concerns with research design, recruitment of experimental participants, and interpretation of data. In fact, these practices have been condemned by the APA and other medical bodies in the United States as unethical in that they are based upon the erroneous assumption that homosexuality per se is a mental disorder   

Brain Areas

Difference in Homosexual Versus Heterosexual Individuals

Hypothalamus (Suprachiasmatic nucleus)
Inter-hemisphere connectivity
Inter-hemisphere symmetry

notes gene takes a large proportion of assigning a person’s sexual orientation

MODULE 8A What is Stress and What Causes Stress?

What is Stress?

  • Significant life events
  • Daily Hassles
  • Chronic Negative Situations

Physiological Response to Stress:

Hhypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis

Selye and the General Adaptation Syndrome:

  • alarm reaction:
    describes the body’s immediate reaction upon facing a threatening situation or emergency
  • stage of resistance:
    During this stage, the initial shock of alarm reaction has worn off and the body has adapted to the stressor. Nevertheless, the body also remains on alert and is prepared to respond as it did during the alarm reaction, although with less intensity
  • stage of exhaustion:
    the person is no longer able to adapt to the stressor: the body’s ability to resist becomes depleted as physical wear takes its toll on the body’s tissues and organs

Brain Areas

PTSD may be connected with smaller hippocampus

Nature Versus Nurture

Module 8B(very brief note) Disorders

Anxiety Disorders

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)

a relatively continuous state of excessive, uncontrollable, and pointless worry and apprehension

Phobic Disorders

Panic Disorder

e.g.

Imagine that you are at the mall one day with your friends and—suddenly and inexplicably—you begin sweating and trembling, your heart starts pounding, you have trouble breathing, and you start to feel dizzy and nauseous

Its symptoms include accelerated heart rate, sweating, trembling, choking sensations, hot flashes or chills, dizziness or lightheadedness, fears of losing control or going crazy, and fears of dying

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

Diagnosed when an individual continuously experiences distressing or frightening thoughts, and engages in obsessions (repetitive thoughts) and compulsions (repetitive behaviours) in an attempt to calm these thoughts

Mood Disorders

Depressed mood most of the day, nearly every day” (feeling sad, empty, hopeless, or appearing tearful to others), and loss of interest and pleasure in usual activities

Bipolar Disorder

To be diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a person must have experienced a manic episode at least once in his life; although major depressive episodes are common in bipolar disorder, they are not required for a diagnosis. According to the DSM-5, a manic episode is characterized as a “distinct period of abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood and abnormally and persistently increased activity or energy lasting at least one week,” that lasts most of the time each day

Psychotic Disorders

Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a serious psychological disorder marked by delusions, hallucinations, loss of contact with reality, inappropriate affect, disorganized speech, social withdrawal, and deterioration of adaptive behaviour

  • Hallucinations:
     imaginary sensations that occur in the absence of a real stimulus or which are gross distortions of a real stimulus.
  • Delusions:
    false belief

Dissociative Disorders

Dissociative Amnesia

An individual with dissociative amnesia is unable to recall important personal information, usually following an extremely stressful or traumatic experience such as combat, natural disasters, or being the victim of violenc

Personality Disorders

Borderline Personality Disorder

Characterized by a prolonged disturbance of personality accompanied by mood swings, unstable personal relationships, identity problems, threats of self-destructive behaviour, fears of abandonment, and impulsivity

Childhood Disorders

Autism Spectrum Disorder

A developmental disorder that affects communication and behavior

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

A brain disorder marked by an ongoing pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity that interferes with functioning or development

Treatment in Childhood Depression

  • Prozac
  • CBT
  • Prozac + CBT
  • Placebo (no treatment)

 

61% of those in the Prozac group showed significant improvements, 43% of those in the CBT group improved, 35% in the placebo group improved, and the best overall effect was in the combined Prozac + CBT group, where 71% improved 
The major problem though is that the children assigned to groups where they took Prozac were twice as likely to have suicidal thoughts/intentions/behaviors as those taking a placebo.  And of the 7 individuals in the study who attempted suicide, 6 were in a Prozac group   

supplement:

notes quizlet is very good