Psychology Explained

The Trait Perspective

Trait: a characteristic pattern of behavior or a disposition to feel and act, as assessed by self-report inventories and peer reports

Allport & Odbert, identified 18,000 words representing traits

Personality types, assessed by measures like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, consist of a number of traits

For example, a feeling type personality is sympathetic, appreciative, and tactful.

Factor analysis is a statistical approach used to describe and relate personality traits.

Cattell used this approach to develop a 16 Personality Factor (16PF) inventory.

Cattell found that large groups of traits could be reduced down to 16 core personality traits based on statistical correlations.

Hans and Sybil Eysenck suggested that personality could be reduced down to two polar dimensions, extraversion-introversion and emotional stability-instability.

The Big Five

Today’s trait researchers believe that Eysencks’ personality dimensions are too narrow and Cattell’s 16PF too large. So, a middle range (five factors) of traits does a better job of assessment.

These traits are quite stable in adulthood. However, they change over development.

They are fifty percent or so heritable for each trait.

These traits are common across cultures.

They can predict other personal attributes. Conscientious people are morning type and extroverted are evening type.

Evaluating the Trait Perspective

Walter Mischel points out that traits may be enduring, but the resulting behavior in various situations is different. Therefore, traits are not good predictors of behavior.

People can fake desirable responses on self-report measures of personality

Trait theorists argue that behaviors from a situation may be different, but the average behavior remains the same. Therefore, traits matter.

Traits are socially significant and influence our health, thinking, and performance

The Social-Cognitive Perspective

Social-Cognitive Perspective: views behavior as influenced by the interaction between persons (and their thinking) and their social context.

Bandura believes that personality is the result of an interaction that takes place between a person and their social context.

Social-cognitive theorists believe we learn many behaviors through conditioning, observing, or modeling (social part)

They also stress that what we “think” about our situations affect behavior (mental part)

Reciprocal Influences

Reciprocal Determinism: the interacting influences between personality and environmental factors

The three factors, behavior, cognition, and environment, are interlocking determinants of each other.

Different people choose different environments.

Our personalities shape how we react to events.

Our personalities shape situations.

Behavior emerges from interplay of external and internal influences.

Personal Control

Personal Control: our sense of controlling our environment rather than feeling helpless

Self control is the ability to control impulses and delay gratification (predicts good adjustment, social success, good grades)

External locus of control refers to the perception that chance or outside forces beyond our personal control determine our fate.

Internal locus of control refers to the perception that we can control our own fate.

Learned Helplessness: the hopelessness and passive resignation an animal or human learns when unable to avoid repeated aversive events

An optimistic or pessimistic attribution style is your way of explaining positive or negative events.

Critics say that social-cognitive psychologists pay a lot of attention to the situation and pay less attention to the individual, his unconscious mind, his emotions, and his genetics.

Positive psychology, such as humanistic psychology, attempts to foster human fulfillment. Positive psychology, in addition, seeks positive subjective well-being, positive character, and positive social groups.

Exploring the Self

Research focuses on the different selves we possess. Some we dream and others we dread.

Research studies how we overestimate our concern that others evaluate our appearance, performance, and blunders (spotlight effect).

Research studies the self-reference effect in recall.

Self-Esteem

Self-Esteem: one’s feelings of high or low self-worth

Maslow and Rogers argued that a successful life results from a healthy self-image (self-esteem).

When self-esteem is deflated, we view others and ourselves critically.

Low self-esteem reflects reality, our failure in meeting challenges or surmounting difficulties.

People maintain their self-esteem even with a low status by valuing things they achieve and comparing themselves to people in similar positions.

We accept responsibility for good deeds and successes more than for bad deeds and failures. Defensive self-esteem is fragile and egotistic whereas secure self-esteem is less fragile and less dependent on external evaluation.

Personality Structure

Freud saw personality as the product of a conflict between our biological impulses.

The players in this conflict are three interacting systems: the id, the ego, and the superego.

Id

Examples: infants crying for a need; those addicted for tobacco or alcohol

Ego

The ego contains our partly conscious perceptions, thoughts, judgments, and memories

Superego

The part of personality that, according to Freud, represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgment (the conscience) and for future aspirations

Develops at age 5

Strives for perfection

Personality Development

Freud believed that personality formed during the first few years of life divided into 5 psychosexual stages

Psychosexual Stages: the childhood stages of development (oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital) during which, according to Freud, the id’s pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct erogenous zones

Oral (0-18 months): pleasure centers on the mouth- sucking, biting, chewing

Anal (18-36 months): pleasure focuses on bowel and bladder elimination, coping with demands for control

Phallic (3-6 years): pleasure zone is in the genitals; coping with incestuous sexual feelings

Latency (6 to puberty): Dormant sexual feelings

Genital (puberty on): maturation of sexual interests

Oedipus Complex: according to Freud, a boy’s sexual desires toward his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father

Identification: the process by which children incorporate their parents’ values into their developing superegos

Fixation: lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, in which conflicts were unresolved

Defense Mechanisms

Defense Mechanisms: the ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality

Reaction Formation: causes the ego to unconsciously switch unacceptable impulses into their opposites. People may express feelings of purity when they may be suffering anxiety from unconscious feelings about sex.

Projection leads people to disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others.

Displacement shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person, redirecting anger toward a safer outlet.

Neo-Freudian and Psychodynamic Theorists

Collective Unconscious: Carl Jung’s concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species’ past.

This is why many cultures share certain myths and images such as the mother being a symbol of nurturance.

Alfred Adler believed in social childhood tensions. A child struggles with an inferiority complex during growth and strives for superiority and power.

Horney also believed in the social aspects of childhood growth and development. She countered Freud’s assumption that women have weak superegos and suffer from “penis envy.

Assessing Unconscious Processes

Critics argue that projective tests lack both reliability (consistency of results) and validity (predicting what it is supposed to).

When evaluating the same patient, even trained raters come up with different interpretations (reliability).

Projective tests may misdiagnose a normal individual as pathological (validity).

Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective

Personality develops throughout life and is not fixed in childhood.

Freud underemphasized peer influence on the individual, which may be as powerful as parental influence.

Gender identity may develop before 5-6 years of age.

There may be other reasons for dreams besides wish fulfillment.

Verbal slips can be explained on the basis of cognitive processing of verbal choices.

Suppressed sexuality leads to psychological disorders. Sexual inhibition has decreased, but psychological disorders have not.

Embodied Emotion

Emotions and the Autonomic Nervous System

The autonomic nervous system controls arousal.

It’s sympathetic division mobilizes us for action by directing adrenals to release stress hormones, which in turn increase heart rate, blood pressure, and blood sugar levels, and by triggering other defensive physical reactions.

The parasympathetic division calms us after a crisis has passed, through arousal diminishes gradually.

Arousal and Performance

Very high or very low arousal can be disruptive.

We perform best when arousal is moderate, though this varies with the difficulty of the task.

For easy or well-learned tasks, best performance is linked to high arousal.

For difficult tasks, performance peaks at lower levels.

Physiological Similarities/Differences Among Specific Emotions

Physiological responses to the emotions of fear, anger, and sexual arousal are very similar.

Emotional experiences (and sometimes our facial expressions) differ during these three states.

Physical responses, like finger temperature and movement of facial muscles, change during fear, rage, and joy

The amygdala shows differences in activation during the emotions of anger and rage. The activity of the left hemisphere (happy) is different from the right (depressed) for emotions.

Cognition and Emotion

The spillover effect occurs when our arousal from one event influences our response to other events.

Arousal fuels emotion, cognition channels it

Emotional responses are immediate when sensory input goes directly to the amygdala via the thalamus, bypassing the cortex, triggering a rapid reaction that is often outside our conscious awareness.

Responses to complex emotions (such as guilt, happiness, and love) require interpretation and are routed along the slower route to the cortex for analysis.

2nd pic

Lie Detection

Polygraph: a machine, commonly used in attempts to detect lies, that measures several of the physiological responses accompanying emotion (such as perspiration and cardiovascular and breathing changes).

Embodied Emotion

People’s expressive behavior reveals their emotion.

Emotions are expressed on the face, by the body, and tone of voice.

Nonverbal Communication

Most of us are good at deciphering emotions through non-verbal communication.

We can usually detect anger in another language.

We read anger and fear in the eyes and happiness in the mouth.

In a crowd of faces, a single angry face will “pop out” faster than a single happy face.

Gender, Emotion, and Nonverbal Behavior

Women are much better at discerning nonverbal emotions than men.

When shown sad, happy, and scary film clips, women expressed more emotions than men.

Women surpass men in conveying happiness, but men communicate anger better.

But as with everything, this could also be caused by nurture. But this is just what tends to happen; there’s a pattern

Detecting and Computing Emotion

Facial muscles reveal signs of emotion.

Most people find it difficult to detect deceiving emotions

Culture and Emotional Expression

The meaning of gestures varies with culture, but many facial expressions, such as those of happiness and fear, are found all over the world, indicating that these expressions are culturally universal aspects of emotion.

Cultures differ in the amount of emotional expression they consider acceptable.

Some emotional expressions help us to take in more sensory information or to avoid taking in toxic substances.

3rd pic

The Effects of Facial Expressions

The facial feedback hypothesis proposes that expressions amplify our emotions by activating muscles associated with specific states, and the muscles signal the body to respond as though we were experiencing those states.

The behavior feedback hypothesis assumes that if we move our body as we would when experiencing some emotion, we are likely to feel that emotion to some degree.

Experienced Emotion

Corroll Izard’s research found the 10 basic emotions of joy, interest-excitement, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust, contempt, fear, shame, and guilt.

Most of them are present in infancy, except for contempt, shame and guilt.

Some psychologists believe that pride and love may also be basic emotions.

Emotions can be placed along two basic dimensions: arousal (high versus low) and valence (pleasant, or positive, versus unpleasant, or negative).

Fear

Fear can torment us, rob us of sleep, and preoccupy our thinking.

Fear can be adaptive. It makes us run away from danger, it brings us closer as groups, and it protects us from injury and harm.

We learn specific dears through conditioning (associating emotions with specific situations) and through observational learning (watching others display fear in response to certain events or surroundings).

We are biologically prepared to learn some fears (snakes, spiders, heights) but not others (fast driving, bombs, electricity).

The amygdala plays a key role in fear learning, associating fear with specific situations.

The amygdala receives information from cortical areas that process emotion, and it sends information to other areas that produce the bodily symptoms of fear.

People differ in the extent to which they are fearful or fearless, and part of that difference is genetic.

Anger

Causes of anger:

People generally become angry with friends and loved ones who commit wrongdoings, especially if they are willful, unjustified, and avoidable.

Foul odors, high temperatures, traffic jams, and aches and pains also anger people.

Catharsis: emotional release.

Research does not support the catharsis hypothesis (the idea that releasing negative energy will calm aggressive tendencies).

Venting rage may calm us temporarily, but in the long run it does not reduce anger and may actually amplify it.

Anger is better handled by waiting until the level physical arousal diminishes, calming oneself, and expressing in grievances in ways that promote reconciliation rather than retaliation.

When reconciliation fails, forgiveness can reduce one’s anger and its physical symptoms.

Anger breeds prejudice.

Happiness

People who are happy perceive the world as being safer.

They are able to make decisions easily, are more cooperative, rate job applicants more favorably, and live healthier, energized, and more satisfied lives.

Feel-good, do-good phenomenon: people’s tendency to be helpful when already in a good mood.

Research in positive psychology is currently exploring the causes and consequences of subjective well-being (self-perceived happiness or satisfaction with life), supplementing psychology’s traditional focus on negative emotions.

The Short Life of Emotional Ups and Downs

Negative emotion is highest just after we wake up and before we go to sleep.

Positive emotion rises gradually, peaking about seven hours after we rise, then falls gradually.

The moods triggered by the day’s good or bad events seldom last beyond that day.

Over the long run, our emotional ups and downs tend to balance.

Wealth and Well-Being

At a basic level, money helps us avoid pain by enabling better nutrition, health care, education, and science, and these, in turn, increase happiness.

Increases in wealth can also increase happiness in the short term. But in the longer term, research does not show an increase in happiness accompanying affluence at either the individual or national level.

Two Psychological Phenomena: Adaption and Comparison

Adaption-level phenomenon: our tendency to assess stimuli (including material possessions) by contrasting them with a neutral level that changes with our experience.

Relative deprivation: the perception that one is worse off than others with whom one compares oneself.

Happiness is relative to both our past experience and our comparisons with others.

Predictors of Happiness

Happiness is in part genetically influenced, and in part under our own control.

Predictors of happiness:

Correlation

When one trait or behavior accompanies another, we say the two correlate

Scatterplot

Correlation does not cause causation, it can only suggest a relationship

Illusory Correlation: the perception of a relationship actually exists

Experimentation

Experimental Condition: the condition of an experiment that exposes participants to the independent variable

Control Condition: serves as a comparison for evaluating the effects (you only observe)

Independent Variable: the factor that is being manipulated and studied

Dependent Variable: a factor that may change in response to an independent variable

In psychology, it is usually a behavior or a mental process

Confounding Variable: an extraneous variable (factor) whose presence affects the variables being studied so that the results you get don’t reflect the actual relationship between the variables under investigation

Evaluating Therapies

Double-Blind Procedure: in evaluating drug therapies, patients and experimenter’s assistants should remain unaware of which patients had the placebo treatment

Assigning participants to experimental and control conditions by random assignment minimizes pre-existing different between two groups

Statistics

Statistics help us see and interpret data

Visualize data in a histogram (bar graph)

Summarize data using a measure of central tendency = one score that represents a whole set of scores

Mode: most frequently occurring score

Mean: average score

Median: score in the middle

Measures of Variation: tells us how similar or diverse the scores are

Low variation -> more reliable

High variation -> less reliable

Range: gap between highest and lowest score

Crude estimate of variation

Standard Variation: better measure of how much scores vary around the mean