Psychology Chapter 2: Key Terms

Chapter 2: Key Terms

• Population: The entire group of interest to researchers.
• Sample: The portion of the population that is used in a study.
• Sampling bias: When a sample does not represent the entire population.
• Random Sampling: Ensures every individual in a population has an equal chance of being included in a sample.
• Independent Variable: The variable you manipulate.
• Dependent Variable: Variable you measure.
• Experimental Group: The group of participants that receives the manipulation of the independent variable.
• Control Group: The group of participants that doesn't receive the manipulation.
• Random Assignment: Each participant has an equal chance of going in to either the control or experimental group.
• Double-blind procedure: Neither the participant nor the researcher knows who is in which group.
• Theory: A set of interrelated ideas used to explain observations.
• Correlations: Indicates a relationship between two variables, but does not mean causation.
• Inferential Statistics: Indicates if the difference between groups is meaningful.
• Correlation Coefficient: A calculated statistic symbolized by "r." It is a numerical representation of the relationship between variables.
• Descriptive Statistics: Used to organize raw data into meaningful descriptions.
• Measure of central tendency: A numerical value representing the center of distribution, such as mean, median, and mode.
• Measures of variability: Numerical value representing how different the scores within a group are from each other, such as range, standard deviation, and variance.

Research Ethics and Methods

• Research Ethics Board: An oversight group that evaluates research to protect the rights of participants.
• Informed Consent: Participants have the right to be informed of all aspects of a study prior to participating, although it is not always possible due to deception, animal subjects, or vulnerable populations.
• Debriefing: After participation, participants are fully informed of the purpose of the study.
• Confidentiality: Information about a participant must be kept in the strictest confidence.
• Canadian Council on Animal Care: Oversees all research involving animal subjects.
• Animals are only used if research promises significant benefit to humans or animals.
• Age of Viability: By 6 months, a fetus may be able to survive outside the womb.

Scientific Inquiry

• Events are governed by some lawful order that can be observed, measured, and tested.
• The scientific method helps keep the scientific process accurate.

Steps in Psychological Research

• Make observations and review literature.
• Develop a testable hypothesis.
• Choose participants, select the research method, and collect data.
• Analyze the data and accept or reject the hypothesis.
• Seek scientific review, publish, and replicate the study.
• Build a theory.

Methods to Collect Data

• Case studies
• Naturalistic observation
• Surveys and questionnaires

Types of Research Methods

• Experimental Research: Demonstrates cause and effect, allowing causal conclusions.
  • Good control with cause and effect identified.
  • Ethical concerns and artificial conditions.
• Correlational Research: Asks how variables are related to each other.
  • Measures two or more variables.
  • Does not allow manipulation of variables or cause-effect conclusions.
  • Useful for studying topics that can't be studied using experimental methods due to ethical or practical reasons.
  • Can study behavior under more natural conditions.

Making Sense of Research Results

• Comparing two groups in experimental research involves a t-test to find a t-value.
• Comparing more than two groups in experimental research involves an F-test to find an F-value.
• A p-value of less than 0.05 (p < 0.05) is statistically significant.
• A p-value of more than 0.05 (p > 0.05) is non-significant.

Chapter 4: Key Terms

• Development: Continuities and changes that occur within an individual between conception and death.

Developmental Research Designs

• Longitudinal Design: The same individuals are studied repeatedly over time.
  • Can access developmental change.
  • Expensive, time-consuming, and subject to practice and cohort effects.
• Cross-Sectional Design: Individuals of different age groups are studied at the same time.
  • Less time-consuming and expensive, can uncover age differences.
  • Cannot distinguish age effects from cohorts or assess developmental change.
• Sequential Design: Individuals from different age groups are repeatedly tested over time.
  • Less time-consuming and expensive compared to longitudinal designs, can assess developmental change.
  • More time-consuming and expensive than cross-sectional designs, can't generalize results to other cohorts.
• Teratogens: Any drug or disease that can have detrimental effects on a developing fetus.
• Cephalocaudal Principle: Development proceeds from head to foot (head is largest and then the body).
• Proximodistal Principle: Development proceeds from innermost to outermost (arms before fingers, torso before arms).
• Cognition: Mental activities that help us function (e.g., memory, language, problem-solving).
• Schemas: Organized pattern of thought that represents the understanding of a concept.
• Stranger Anxiety (6-18 months): Distress over contact with unfamiliar people.
• Separation Anxiety (1-3 years): Distress over being away from primary caregiver.

Prenatal Development

• Beings with conception: sperm and egg unite to bring genetic material together and form an organism called a zygote.
• Germinal Stage (10-14 days): From conception to implantation.
  • Cell division occurs at an exponential rate.
  • Cells begin to differentiate into specialized structures and locations.
• Embryonic Stage (Weeks 2 to 8): Most vital organs are formed, and is a period of vulnerability.
  • Cell differentiation continues as cells develop into organs and bones.
• Fetal Stage (Weeks 9 to 38): From the end of the embryonic stage to birth.

Potential Problems During Development

• Genetic problems and environmental problems can occur.

Infancy and Childhood

• Newborns' visual system is least developed, and they prefer patterned stimuli and their mothers' faces.
• Newborns can do simple observational learning and imitate adult facial expressions.

Reflexes in Newborns

• Rooting Reflex: When touched around the cheek, a baby will orient towards the touch.
• Moro Reflex: When startled by a lack of support to the head, a baby will flail their arms.
• Grasping Reflex: When a baby's palm is touched, they will squeeze with a strong grip.

Brain Development

• The brain grows inside out.
• At birth, the brainstem and midbrain are most developed.
• Primary sensory and motor cortex are the first areas to mature.
• Last areas to mature are associative areas of the cortex.
• The sequence of skill acquisition is consistent, but the age can vary.

Cognitive Development (Piaget)

• Studied errors in cognition to see how children differ from adults.
• Identified stages of cognitive development.
• Schemas are built through nature and nurture.
• Development proceeds in stages.

Schema Modification

• Assimilation: New experiences incorporated into existing schemas.
• Accommodation: New experiences cause change in existing schemas.

Stages of Development (Piaget)

• Sensorimotor Stage (Birth - 2 years): Understand the world through senses and physical interactions.
  • Begin to acquire language.
  • Develop object permanence at 6-8 months (understanding objects exist even when they can't be seen).
• Preoperational Stage (2 - 7 years): World is represented symbolically through words and mental images and is why symbolic thinking enables pretend play.
• Concrete Operational Stage (7 - 11 years): Ability to perform basic mental operations with tangible problems and situations, ability to interact in conversation, and difficulties with abstract problems.
• Formal Operational Stage (11+ years): Ability to think logically about concrete and abstract problems and able to form and test hypotheses.

Cognitive Development (Vygotsky)

• Social interaction is important for development.
• Children learn thinking skills by internalizing language from others and developing inner speech.
• Development is viewed as building on a scaffold of mentoring, language, and cognitive support from parents, siblings, teachers, etc.
• The ideal level of instruction is the zone of proximal development, where a child can do something with guidance but not alone.

Attachment Styles

• Secure Attachment (60%): Infants explore when the caregiver is present and are upset when the caregiver leaves, greeting them warmly upon return and seeking comfort.
• Anxious Type (10%): Infants cling to the caregiver, are less likely to explore, are upset when the caregiver leaves, and remain upset upon return.
• Avoidant Type (15%): Infants show little distress when the caregiver leaves and seem to ignore them, being sociable with or ignoring strangers.
• Disorganized Type (15%): Infants seem to both approach and avoid the caregiver and may act dazed or freeze.

Chapter 5: Key Terms

• Sensation: The stimulus-detection process where organs translate stimuli into nerve impulses.
• Perception: Organizing and giving meaning to sensory input.
• Sensory Adaptation: Diminishing sensitivity to an unchanging stimulus, freeing senses to be more sensitive to changes in the environment.
• Top-Down Processing: Using models, ideas, and expectations to interpret sensory information.
• Bottom-Up Processing: Taking sensory information and then assembling and integrating it.
• Perceptual Set: What we see based on what we expect to see.
• Divided Attention: Multitasking and paying attention to more than one stimulus at a time.
• Selective Attention: Focusing on one stimulus while ignoring other stimuli.
• Inattentional Blindness: When the effects of attention are so strong that we fail to see stimuli directly in front of us.
• Gestalt Principles: Pattern, shape, form. The wholes we perceive are more than the sum of their parts.
• Optic Disc: An area of the retina without rods or cones because it is where the optic nerve leaves the eye.
• Trichromatic Theory (Young-Helmholtz): Three types of color receptors in the retina, with individual cones most sensitive to blue, green, or red wavelengths of light. The visual system combines activity from these cells to perceive all colors. It cannot explain afterimages.
• Opponent-Process Theory: Three cone types, each responding to two different wavelengths.
• Explains afterimages because neural processes become fatigued, resulting in a rebound effect with the receptor responding with its opponent, opposite reaction.
• Primary Visual Cortex (Occipital Lobe): Specific regions of the retina are processed in specific areas of the cortex.
• Feature Detectors: Cells in the primary visual cortex are particular about what will make them fire.
  • They begin the visual process by firing to specific shapes, colors, depths, and movements of a stimulus.
  • There are two main pathways: the ventral stream and dorsal stream.
• Parallel Processing: Different areas of the brain process different aspects of a stimulus.
• Sound Waves: Described by frequency (pitch) and amplitude (loudness).
• Conduction Hearing Loss: When the middle ear isn't conducting sound well to the cochlea.
• Sensorineural Hearing Loss: When the receptor cells aren't sending messages through the auditory nerves.
• Pheromones: Chemical signals found in natural body scents.

Gestalt Principles

• Proximity: Elements that are close together belong together.
• Similarity: Similar items belong together.
• Continuity: Elements linked to form a continuous line.
• Closure: Open edges are perceived as boundaries.

The Active Process of Perception

• Perceptual Constancies: Our ability to see objects as appearing a constant color, size, and shape, despite continual changes in our perspective (top-down process).
• Color Constancy: Seeing consistent color in changing illumination conditions.
• Brightness Constancy: Seeing consistent brightness in changing shadow conditions.
• Shape Constancy: Seeing a constant shape in an object despite receiving different sensory images of the shape.
• Size Constancy: Seeing objects as having a constant size, despite changes in the sensory input with variations in distance.

The Visual System: Light

• The stimulus our visual system processes is light, or waves of electromagnetic radiation.
• Our eyes respond to some of these waves.
• We perceive the wavelength/frequency of the light waves as color.
• We perceive the amplitude/height of the light waves as brightness.
• Light travels through the cornea and the pupil and gets focused and inverted by the lens.
• The light then lands on the retina, where the light waves are transduced into a neural signal.

The Visual System: The Retina

• Layer 1: Photoreceptors: Transduce light waves into a neural impulse.
  • Rods function best in low illumination and are found mostly in the retina's periphery.
  • Cones function best in high illumination, are for color and detail, and are concentrated in the fovea (center retina).
• Layer 2: Bipolar Cells: Rods and cones have synaptic connections with bipolar cells.
  • Cones have a one-to-one connection, while many rods connect to a single bipolar cell.
• Layer 3: Ganglion Cells: Bipolar cells synapse with ganglion cells.
  • Axons of ganglion cells form the optic nerve.

Preventing and Treating Hearing Loss

• Loud sounds can damage hair cells.
• Structures of the middle and inner ear can also be damaged by disease.
• Conduction hearing loss can be helped with hearing aids that amplify sounds.
• Sensorineural hearing loss can be helped with a cochlear implant that translates sound waves into signals the brain can process.

The Auditory System: Loudness

• Loudness is interpreted by the brain through:
  • The firing rate of hair cells where higher amplitude sound waves cause greater release of neurotransmitter and firing rate.
  • The number of hair cells firing, where higher amplitude sound waves move more hair cells than softer sounds.
  • The type of hair cell firing, where certain neurons fire only to specific amplitudes.

The Auditory System: Pitch

• Frequency theory: Nerve impulses match the frequency of the wave; does not work for frequencies above 1000 Hz.
• Place theory: Specific frequencies peak at certain places on the cochlea, depending on pitch. The brain reads pitch by reading the location where the signals are coming from.

The Auditory System: Sound Localization

• Binaural hearing (two ears) helps us localize sound in two ways:
  • Timing of sounds: Sounds arrive at the closest ear first.
  • Intensity of sounds: Sound arriving at the closest ear will be more intense.

The Auditory System: Neural Pathways

• Impulses go from the thalamus to the primary auditory cortex (temporal lobe).
• Specific regions of the cochlea are represented in specific areas of the cortex.
• Signals then go to the secondary auditory cortex, which interprets complex sound (speech and music).

The Chemical Senses

• Rely on chemical molecules, not a form of energy.
• Taste uses chemical receptors, taste buds, each with several receptor cells, responding to sweet, sour, salty, and bitter qualities.

Chapter 8: Key Terms

• Memory: The processes that allow us to record and retrieve experiences and information.
• Recall: Retrieving previously stored information.
• Recognition: Identifying which stimulus, out of a bunch of choices, matches stored information.
• Relearning: Comparing rates of learning information on successive occasions to the first occasion.
• Iconic Memory: Visual memory lasting less than a second.
• Echoic Memory: Auditory memory lasting roughly 5 seconds.
• Chunking: Used to increase capacity by combining individual items into larger units of meaning.
• Retrieval Cue: Any stimulus that leads to activation of information stored in long-term memory.

Forgetting

• Rapid loss of memory at first, then a more gradual decline.
• Brain damage, encoding failure, storage decay, retrieval failure, and interference can cause forgetting.
• Proactive Interference: Past material interferes with the recall of newer material.
• Retroactive Interference: New information interferes with the ability to recall older information.
• Misinformation Effect: Distortion of memory by misleading post-event information.
• Human Lesion Studies: Study memory loss due to brain damage.
• Nonhuman Animal Lesion Studies: Deliberate damage to brain regions.
• Brain Imaging Studies: Examine the brains of healthy participants as they perform memory tasks.
• Hippocampus: Converts short-term memories into long-term memories and is responsible for memory consolidation (binding process).
• Cerebral Cortex: Encodes information from sensory memory and stores explicit memories.
• Prefrontal Cortex: Involved in the functions of working memory, with deep processing increasing brain activity in the left prefrontal cortex.
• Thalamus: Damage to this area results in extensive anterograde and retrograde amnesia.
• Amygdala: Responsible for the emotional aspects of memory.
• Cerebellum: Stores conditioned responses.
• Basal Ganglia: Responsible for procedural memory.
• Primary Effect: Superior recall of early items on a list.
• Recency Effect: Superior recall of last items on a list.
• Encoding: Getting information in.
• Automatic Processing: Unintentional and requiring minimal attention.
• Effortful Processing: Intentional and conscious.
• Depth of Processing: Increases recall, with structural processing (shallow), phonemic processing (deeper), and semantic processing (deepest) being the methods.
• Maintenance Rehearsal: Repetition of information that is not optimal.
• Elaborative Rehearsal: Focuses on the information's meaning.
  • Can involve chunking, understanding, relating to already learned concepts, and using imagery.
• Self-Reference Effect: Relating material to ourselves helps memory.
• Dual Coding Theory: Memory is enhanced in the use of multiple memory codes.
  • This type of processing leads to deeper processing and more retrieval cues.
• Mnemonic Devices: Memory aids intended to improve memory for specific information.
  • Ex. Acronyms and first-letter techniques.
• Storage: Long-term memory is organized like a web of associations.
• Priming: Activation of one concept leads to the activation of other, related concepts.

The Process of Forming and Using Memory

• Encoding - Getting information in by translating it into a neural code that the brain can process.
• Storage - Retaining the information over time.
• Retrieval - Getting information back out of storage when we want to use it.

The Atkinson-Shiffrin Model

• Assumes memory is a multi-stage process where information flows through separate and interacting memory stores where memory stores do not correspond to specific brain structures, but rather to different processes of memory (encoding, storage, retrieval).
• Sensory Memory: Briefly holds sensory information and is the initial information processor where selection occurs for what details to pay attention to.
• Short-Term Memory: Temporarily holds a limited amount of information and has Memory represented in various forms, not necessarily corresponding to the form of the original stimulus.
• Working Memory: A mental workspace where information is stored and actively processed.

Short-Term and Working Memory

• Limited capacity system, being able to remember around 7 items.
• Information is lost unless we do active rehearsal.
  • Maintenance rehearsal is simple repetition.
  • Elaborative rehearsal focuses on the meaning of the information.
• Long-Term Memory:Library of durable stored memory that has unlimited storage capacity and it can ensure for a lifetime

Improving Retrieval

• Multiple retrieval cues: Involves deeper processing.
• Self-generated retrieval cues: Have personal meaning.
• A match between conditions of encoding and retrieval: Likely because the cue is linked to memory.

Brain Damage and Forgetting

Amnesia

• Retrograde Amnesia: The inability to retrieve memories of the past.
• Anterograde Amnesia: The inability to form new long-term, explicit memories.

Forgetting

• Decay of Memory Trace: Long-term physical traces in the nervous system fade away over time and with disuse.
• Retrieval Failure: Sometimes memory is intact, but the associations and links to the memory are decayed.
  • Building multiple associations and links at the time of encoding can help prevent retrieval failure.
• Interference: Information is forgotten because other items in long-term memory impair the ability to retrieve it.

The Biology of Memory

• Emotions trigger an increase in stress hormones.
• These hormones trigger the amygdala, which is next to the memory-forming hippocampus.
• The amygdala increases memory-forming activity and engages the frontal lobes and basal ganglia to tag the memory as important.
• As a result, the memories are stored with more sensory and emotional details.

Chapter 9: Key Terms

• Language: A system of symbols and rules for combining symbols for the purpose of communication.
  • It has a hierarchical organization that allows translation between thought and sound.
• Language Production: The structured and conventional expression of thoughts through words.
• Speech: The expression of language through sounds.
• Language Comprehension: The process of understanding spoken, written, or signed language.
• Sentence: A coherent sequence of words that expresses meaning.
• Word: The smallest free form in a language.
• Morpheme: The smallest unit of a word that can carry meaning.
• Phoneme: The smallest unit of sound that can distinguish words in a language.
• Syntax: A system of rules for arranging words to convey a specific meaning.
• Pragmatics: The practical aspects of language use, such as pace, gesturing, tone, and body language.
• Prelinguistic Period: The period prior to the production of the first word.
  • Infants show early sensitivity to speech, and initial vocalizations are similar across languages.

Theories of Language Development

• Behaviorist Theory: Adults shape a child's speech through reinforcement (Skinner), where the children learn by imitating adults (Bandura) and use child-directed speech.
• Nativist Theory: Certain universal features common to all languages are innate. Humans are biologically programmed to acquire language (Chomsky's Language Acquisition Device)
• Interactionist View: Both nature and nurture are important for language acquisition.
• Broca's Area: Critical for speech production.
• Wernicke's Area: Critical for language comprehension.
• Problem Solving: The process in which one begins with a goal and seeks steps that will lead to that goal.
• A well-defined problem is when the goal and operators are clearly specified.
• An ill-defined problem is when the goal and operations are not clearly specified.
• Algorithms: Systematic trial and error.
• Heuristics: Shortcuts that do not provide a guaranteed solution but effectively narrow the range of possible solutions.
• Forming Subgoals: Break the problem into a bunch of intermediate steps and then solve each step.
• Hill-Climbing Strategy: Always move in the direction of the goal, though many problems require you to move away from the goal.
• Working Backwards: When the solution has a well-specified endpoint, it may be easier to start at the end point and work backwards.
• Decision Making: Evaluating alternatives and making choices among them.
• Availability Heuristic: Basing the estimated probability of an event on the ease with which relevant instances come to mind.
• Representativeness Heuristic: Basing the estimated probability of an event on how similar it is to the typical case of that event.
• Ignore Base Rates: Ignoring information about the broad likelihood of a particular category or type of event.
• Conjunction Fallacy: Occurs when people estimate the odds of two uncertain events happening together as greater than the odds of either event happening alone.
• Confirmation Bias: The tendency to be more responsive to evidence that confirms one's beliefs and less responsive to evidence that challenges one's beliefs.
• Framing Effect: Decisions are based on how the issues are presented or how choices are structured.

Language and Problem Solving

• Telegraphic Speech (by age 2): Simple two-word sentences that contain only the crucial content.
• Pragmatics (age 3): Basic understanding of practical information regarding language.
• Grammar (age 4): Basic rules of grammar are understood without formal education.

Problems Inducing Structure

• Require you to discover the relationship among numbers, words, symbols, or ideas.

Problems of Arrangement

• Requires you to arrange the parts of a problem to satisfy some criterion.
  • Anagrams rearrange the letters to make an English word
• Problems of Transformation: Requires you to carry out a series of transformations in order to reach a specific goa.
• Searching for Analogies: Can make an analogy with another problem previously solved.
• Use mental imagery and get rid of irrelevant information.

Barriers to Problem Solving

• Functional Fixedness: The tendency to perceive an item only in terms of its most common use.
• Mental Set: When people get locked into a particular line of thinking when trying to solve a problem.
• Unnecessary Constraints: When people impose their own constraints on the problem when those constraints don't exist.

Chapter 10: Key Terms

• Intelligence: The ability to learn and to meet the demands of the environment effectively.
• Metacognition: The ability to understand and control one's mental activities.
• Mental Age: The age at which an individual is performing intellectually.
• Crystallized Intelligence: The ability to apply previously learned knowledge to current problems.
• Fluid Intelligence: The ability to deal with novel problem-solving situations without any previous knowledge.
• Electrophysiological Studies: Show a modest relation between IQ score and speed of processing.
• PET Scans: Show lower levels of glucose in people of high intelligence.
• Neural Plasticity: Forming new connections may underlie differences in intelligence.

Intelligence Testing

• Standardization: Controlling for extraneous factors that could differ across testing situations.
• Norms: Provides a basis for interpreting your score.

Historical Figures in Intelligence Research

• Sir Francis Galton: Argued mental ability is inherited and tested sensory processing, motor skills, and reaction time.
• Alfred Binet: Developed the first standardized intelligence test.
• Lewis Terman: The Stanford-Binet intelligence scale was used along with Binet's MA to develop the intelligence quotient.
• Spearman: Used factor analysis to determine the structure of intelligence and measured general intelligence (g factor) and specific abilities (s factors).
• David Wechsler: Recognized two problems with current tests: the distinction between mental and chronological age becomes less informative with increasing age, and avoid language arrears to cloud IQ scores.
  • He created a series of subtests (verbal and performance): Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence.
• Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences: Nine relatively independent intelligences, including linguistic, math, and visual-spatial are tested on traditional intelligence tests.
• Naturalistic, musical, body-kinesthetic, and existentialist intelligence are not tested on traditional intelligence tests.

Sternberg's Triarchic Theory of Intelligence

• Intelligence is a function of the interaction between innate potential, environment, and motivation.

Influencers on Intelligence

• Environment: Adoption studies, cumulative deprivation hypothesis, and the Flynn effect influence intelligence.
• Emotional Intelligence:
  • Capacity to read others emotions
  • Capacity to Respond to others appropriately
  • The ability to motivate oneself
  • Capacity to regulate and control one's own emotional responses
  • Self Awareness of one's own emotions

Chapter 11: Key Terms

• Motivation: A process that influences the direction, persistence, and vigor of goal-directed behavior.
• Instinct Theory: Argues that instincts are more motivating, but has little support and often uses simplistic explanations.
  • Heredity may partly account for motivational differences among people.
• Adaptive Significance: People are motivated to engage in behaviors that promote survival advantages.
• Homeostasis: Internal physiological equilibrium that the body strives to maintain. Requires sensory mechanism, response system, and control center.
• Drive Reduction Theory: We act to reduce physical needs and restore balance in the body.
• Arousal Theory: We are motivated to pursue an optimum level of stimulation, where some behaviors increase arousal and others decrease it.
• Yerkes-Dodson Law: Performance on a task is best when the arousal level is optimal for that task.
• Incentives: Stimuli that pull an organism toward a goal.
• Incentive Theory: Behavior is determined by the strength of the expectation that the behavior will lead to a goal and the incentive value placed on that goal.
• Primary Incentives: Rewards or punishments that are innate.
• Secondary Incentives: Stimuli that are viewed as rewarding as a result of learning about their association with other events.
• Extrinsic Motivation: Performing an activity to obtain an external reward or to avoid punishment.
• Intrinsic Motivation: Performing an activity for its own sake.
• Set Point Theory: Biologically determined standard around which fat mass is regulated.
  • Homeostatic mechanisms alter energy utilization and hunger to return us close to our original weight.
• Lateral Hypothalamus: May be involved in stimulating eating, but is not a "hunger on" center.
• Ventromedial Hypothalamus (VMH): May influence stopping eating, but is not a "hunger off" center.
• Paraventricular Nucleus (PVS): Involves various neurotransmitters.
• Obesity: Body mass index (BMI) is a measure of body fat based on height and weight.
• Prefrontal Cortex: Ability to regulate emotion.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

• We are motivated to fill needs from the bottom of the pyramid before we fill the top.
  • Physiological needs at the bottom being the first to fulfill, then safety needs, love and belonging needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization at the top.

Signals to Start and End a Meal

• Signals to Start a Meal:
  • A decline in blood glucose levels where the liver converts stored nutrients into glucose and blood glucose levels increase and the production of the drop-rise pattern in glucose where changes in the supply of glucose provide signals that help the brain regulate hunger.
• Signals to End a Meal:
  • Stomach and intestinal distention and the release of Cholecystokinin (CCK) and other peptides released by the small intestine into the bloodstream, travel to the brain.
• Signals that Regulate Appetite and Weight:
  • Hormones secreted by fat cells signal to the brain to decrease appetite and increase energy expenditure.
• Psychological Aspects of Hunger: Eating is positively reinforced by good taste and negatively reinforced by hunger reduction, the expectations that eating will be pleasurable and will reduce hunger stimulate eating, beliefs, memories, and attitudes about food can also affect eating, and the pleasure for thinnest with cultural standards of beauty have changed that involved objectification theory that are altered by what women think they need to be and men overestimate how bulky they need to be.
• Environmental Factors: Variety, smell and sight of food, presence of others, familiarity of food, and stress affects eating.
• Genetic Influences on Obesity:
  • Influence basal metabolism and the tendency to store energy as fat or lean tissue.
• Environmental Influences on Obesity:
  • Inexpensive, tasty foods high in fat and/or carbs, supersizing due to cultural value of getting best value, and decreased daily activity due to technological advances.

Sexual Motivation

• Motivations include the desire to reproduce, express love and intimacy, obtain and give sensual pleasure.

Stages of Sex

• Excitement: Vasocongestion, the blood flow increases to the genitals.
• Plateau: Increases in vasocongestion, heart rate, respiration, and muscle tension.
• Orgasm: Rhythmic contractions.
• Resolution: Genital organs return to normal.
  • Males enter the refractory period, while females may orgasm more.

Emotion

• Hypothalamus controls the pituitary gland, which regulates secretions of gonadotropins that affect the secretion of androgens and estrogens.
• Excitement phase: Includes the hypothalamus, amygdala, prefrontal cortex, striatum, and ventral tegmental area.
• Orgasm phase: Includes the cerebellum and ventral tegmental area.

The Psychology of Sex

• Fantasy: Connection between mental processes and psychological functioning.
• Desire: Sexual stimulus is perceived positively while negative influences include Z stress, fatigue, anger, and performance anxiety.

Features Common to All Emotions

• Cognitive Component: Subjective conscious experience involved in every aspect of emotion.
• Interpretations and meanings attached to sensory stimuli: Different appraisals can result in different behaviors that Influence expressions and actions and result in different reactions to the same event.
• Physiological Component: Bodily arousal interactions between cortical and subcortical structures.
• Hypothalamus, amygdala, and hippocampus can produce aggression.
• Stimulation can produce aggression, while destruction can produce an absence of aggression.
  • The Thalamus sends sensory input along two independent neural pathways, one directly to the amygdala for emotional and behavioral responses and one to the cerebral cortex for conscious interpretation of stimulus.
• Amygdala: Can process input before interpretation by the cortex, where emotion is accompanied by sympathetic autonomic nervous system activation, followed by parasympathetic ANS activation.
• Behavioral Component: Characteristic overt expressions that are expressive behaviors or observable emotional displays.
• Infer emotions of others where emotional expression contributed to species survival where the similarity in basic emotional expressions across species which modern evolutionary theorists believe.
• All express expression of certain emotions are similar across a variety of cultures. Children blind from birth express basic emotions as sighted children do.
• Facial expressions are judged best in the context of the situation, where general agreement across cultures show that women are generally more accurate in expression.

Emotion Theories

• James-Lange Theory: Somatic theory of emotion that states the body informs the mind. Physiological reactions determine emotions.
• Cannon-Bard Theory: Cognition is involved in that stimuli - The thalamus and the cortex determine our emotion.

The Role of Autonomic Feedback

Feedback from the body's reactions to eliciting stimuli is critical to emotional experience People with spinal cord injuries support the idea that feedback from the body is not necessary for emotional experience.

Facial Feedback Hypothesis

Muscular feedback from to the brain plays a key role in emotional experience the Vascular theory of emotional feedback that is stimulated by Tensing facial muscles alters temperature of blood flow, for example, where cooling increases positive affect and warming increases negative affect.

• Schachter Theory: Look to external cues to decide what to feel as physiological arousal is how strongly we feel and labeling is what we feel.

Chapter 13: Key Terms

• Social Psychology: The study of how the individual is affected by others.
  • We must study the interaction between the person and the situation to fully understand social reality.
• Mimicry: Taking on ourselves the behaviors, emotional displays, and facial expressions of others.
• Chameleon Effect: Nonconscious mimicry of others that involves automatically copying behavior without realizing it (e.g., yawning).
• Social Norms: The guidelines for how to behave in social contexts, that are usually unwritten.
• Social Facilitation: Improvement in performance because others are present and operates for both physical and mental tasks.
• Social Loafing: The tendency to expend less individual effort when working in a group than when working alone and is caused by the belief that individual performance is not being monitored, the goal or task has little value or meaning to the person, and that thetask is simple and the participant thinks their effort is redundant.
• Group Polarization: People of similar views form a group, and discussion within the group makes their views more extreme.
• Groupthink: In pursuit of social harmony (and avoidance of open disagreement), the group makes decisions without an open exchange of ideas, leading to less thinking ironically.
• Conformity: Adjusting our behavior or thinking to fit in with a group standard.

Likelihood of Conformity Factors

Participants are more likely to conform when:

• Others conform first.
• Responses are made publicly.
• There are not firmly committed to one set of beliefs or style of behavior.
• The group is medium-sized and unanimous.
• Participants feel positive toward the group.
• The group tries to make the participant feel incompetent, insecure, and closely watched.
• The task is ambiguous or unclear.
• The culture encourages respect for norms.

Types of Social Influences for Comformity

• Normative Social Influence: Examples of conformity are going along with others in pursuit of social approval or belonging (and to avoid disapproval/rejection), such as the Asch conformity studies and clothing choices.
• Informational Social Influence: Examples of conformity are going along with others because their ideas and behavior make sense, such