Source from Richie Gabres

Yale’s Intro to Psychology (Part 2)

Week 4: Self and Others

Where do complex things come from?

• Creationism vs. Natural Selection
• Problem with Creationism:
• Pushes back the questions; Evidence for evolution; Occasional poor design
• Natural Selection:
• Random variation
• Which give rise to differences in survival and reproduction and gets passed from generation to generation
• Gives rise to “that perfection of structure that justly excites our imagination”

Misconceptions about evolution and psychology

• Natural selection causes animals, including humans, to want to “spread their genes”:
• Wrong. Ultimate vs. Proximate Causation
• Natural selection entails that everything is adaptive.
• Wrong. There are adaptations but also by-products and accidents.

Life is impossible without emotions.

Types of Smiles

• Happiness smile/Duchenne smile
• Greeting smile
• Coy smile (desire to affiliate)

Kin Selection

• A gene will spread in a population if either:
• It increases the changes that the bearer of that gene will survive
• It increases the chance that other individuals who also possess that gene will survive.

Attachment

• Child’s attachment to parents
• The cupboard theory (Skinner): Conditioning, rewards, food
• Innate attachment (Bowlby):
• Positive force: drawn to mother for comfort
• Negative force: fear of strangers
• Innate need to attach to a main attachment figure

Reciprocal Altruism (Trivers): “If you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours.”

Prisoner’s Dilemma

• Best strategy, Tit-for-Tat (1st time cooperate, then copy what others did in previous trial.)
• We feel gratitude and liking for people who cooperate with us. This motivates us to be nice to them in the future.

The Ultimatum Game

• The Irrational approach: Unfair distributions are unacceptable. B would reject them out of spite. A has to offer more.

The Usefulness of irrationality

• A rational person is easily exploited. Response to provocations and assault will always be appropriate.
• A person with a temper has an advantage. “Mess with me and I’ll kill you.
• If this is convincing, the person won’t be messed with.

Cultures of Honor (e.g. Scottish Highlanders, Masai warriors, Bedouin tribesman)

• Can’t rely on the law
• Resources are easily taken.
• Reputation for excessive violent retaliation is essential to keep your resources.
• What difference does it make?
• Gun laws
• Corporal punichsment and capital punishment
• Attitude towards the military
• More forgiving towards crimes of honor
• Higher rate of violence but in certain circumstances

Social Priming: Subtle cues can exert large, unconscious influences on human behavior.

Self

• Spotlight effect: People tend to believe that they are being noticed than what they really are.
• Lake Wobegon effect: People’s tendency to overrate themselves.
• Self-Serving Bias: Positives are a result of ourselves. Negatives are a result of external factors.
• Cognitive Dissonance Theory: The tendency to reduce unpleasant feelings.
• Avoid inconsistent information, e.g. Confirmation bias
• Insufficient justification effect: people are more likely to engage in a behavior that contradicts their beliefs when offered a small than large award.

Attribution Theory

• Attribution: a claim about the cause of someone’s behavior; Seeking a reason for the occurrence of events/behaviors.
• Heider: “We intuitively attribute others’ actions to personality characteristics.”
• Person Bias
• Fundamental attribution error: underestimate environmental, situational factors while overestimating dispositions and personality.

Liking

• Why do we like other people?
• Familiarity
• Similarity
• Attractiveness
• The Matthew Effect: Rich get richer, poor and poorer.
• Self-fulfilling Prophecy/The Pygmalion Effect: Our expectation of others creates reality or influences behavior of ourselves and others.
• Three levels of stereotypes:
• Public
• Private
• Implicit

Week 5: Variations

How are we different?

• Gender Identity, Sexual Preference, Happiness, “Success” vs “Failure”, Mental illness, Personality, Intelligence

Personality

• Person’s general style of dealing with other ppl and the world.
• Assessing Measures of Personality:
• Reliability: Consistency of results on same person
• Validity: How well it is measuring what it is supposed to measure.

The Big Five Personality Factors (OCEAN)

• Neuroticism vs. Stability
• Extroversion vs. Introversion
• Openness to experience vs. Non openness
• Agreeableness vs. Antagonism
• Conscientiousness vs. Undirectedness
• Conclusion:
• Stable over many years (more after 30)
• Agreement across multiple observers
• Predicts real world behavior

Defining and Measuring Intelligence

• Charles Spearman: Two factors, general intelligence (g), specific ability (s)
• g accounts for similarity in results; s accounts for differences in results.
• Standardized scoring of IQ tests
• Raw scores converted to standardized scores
• Normal distribution with mean of 100, standard deviation of 15
• How valid are IQ tests? Meaningful but also self-fulfilling prophecy

Why are we different?

• Genes & Environment
• Nature & Nurture

Behavioral Genetics

• Heredity: Proportion of variance due to genetic differences
• Shared Environment: Proportion of variance due to the environment shared by family members.
• Non Shared Environment: Proportion of variance due to all other factors.
• Heredity, shared and non shared environment together contributes to behavioral differences.
• Tools of Behavioral Genetics:
• Monozygotic twins, 100% overlap in genes
• Dizygotic twins, 50% overlap in genes
• Adopted siblings, 0% overlap in genes

Parenting

• Flynn Effect: Environmental factors have a huge impact on behaviors.
• Child Effect：The child is making the parents good, not vice-versa.

Mental Disorders

• DSM — 5: Manual for assessment and diagnosis of mental disorders.

Schizophrenia

• ~1% of the world population, not Multiple Personality Disorder
• Positive symptoms:
• Hallucinations — sensory
• Delusions — irrational belief
• Disorganized speech
• Disorganized behaviors
• Negative symptoms:
• Absence of normal cognition
• Subtypes of Schizophrenia:
• Paranoid: delusions of persecution, grandeur
• Catatonic: unresponsive to surroundings
• Disorganized: delusions and hallucinations with little meaning
• Undifferentiated: hard to classify types
• Likelihood increases from general population to twins but not 100%.
• Possible environmental triggers:
• Early: difficult birth, prenatal viral infection
• Later: stress producing circumstances, difficult family environment

Mood Disorders

• Major Depressive Disorder:
• “A severely depressed mood that lasts 2 or more weeks and is accompanied by feelings of worthlessness and lack of pleasure, lethargy, and sleep and appetite disturbances.”
• At least 2 weeks, average episode is 12 weeks
• Affects women more than men
• Highly heritable, some role of norepinephrine and serotonin
• Patterns of negatively biased thoughts
• Bipolar Depression:
• Mania + Depression
• Highly heritable
• Interesting association with creativity (Van Gogh)

Anxiety Disorders

• A diffuse, vague feeling of fear and apprehension
• Primary disturbance is distressing, persistent anxiety or maladaptive behaviors that reduce anxiety.
• Generalized Anxiety Disorder:
• Intense, irrational fears of objects, event, situations; More or less constant worry about many issues that seriously interferes with functioning.
• ~5% of people have it at some time in their lives.
• Physical symptoms: headaches, stomachaches, muscle tension, irritability.
• Related genetically to major depression and childhood trauma.

Phobias

• Preparedness theory: you are psychologically “ready” to be afraid of something (often associated with ancestral environment)

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

• Obsessions are irrational, disturbing thoughts; Compulsions are repetitive actions to alleviate obsessions.
• e.g. washing hands, check for home keys

Dissociative Disorders

• Disassociation: Person suddenly becomes unaware of some aspect of their identity or history; Some degree of dissociation is normal.
• Dissociative Amnesia / Psychogenic Amnesia:
• Only shows memory loss
• Often selective loss surrounding traumatic events; Person still knows identity and most of their past; Can also be global loss of identity without replacement with a new one.
• Dissociative Fugue / Psychogenic Fugue:
• Global amnesia with identity replacement (leave home, develop a new identity, no recollection of former life); “fugue state”
• Dissociative Identity Disorder / Multiple Personality Disorder:
• Two or more distinct personalities manifested by the same person at different times.
• Causes: Pattern typically starts prior to age 10; Mostly are women; Most report recall of torture, sexual abuse as children and show symptoms of PTSD.
• Less than 25% psychiatrists believe DID is a valid disorder.

Personality Disorders

• Extreme /Inflexible Personality Types:
• Paranoid, narcissistic, dependent, histrionic, borderline
• Antisocial personality disorder:
• Typically male; Selfish, callous, impulsive, promiscuous; Some people could have it but also reach great power.

Therapy

• Psychodynamic Therapy (Freud): Focus on underlying causes and not symptoms:
• Many session per week, could lasts for years
• Use free association, dream analysis
• Behavior therapy (Skinner):
• Identify and correct distorted thinking.
• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
• Medical interventions:
• Antipsychotics, anti-anxiety, antidepressants
• Electroconvulsive therapy
• Transcranial magnetic stimulations
• Does therapy work?
• Generally people in treatment do better than those not; Some types of therapy work better for specific problems; Some therapists are better than others.

Week 6: Happiness

Happiness

• Happiness is a goal-state animals have evolved to pursue; a signal that needs to be satisfied.
• Happiness is highly heritable.
• Happiness has a genetically-determined range
• Happiness doesnt change as much as you think.
• Happiness is relative; Happiness is influenced by absolute and relative factors.
• Our judgments about the pleasure and pain of past events are skewed. Endings matter.

Why dont life events matter as much as we think they will?

• Failure to appreciate day-to-day irrelevance of certain events
• The logic of the set-point: we adapt to good and bad things.