Psychology Chapter on Personality and Disorders

Stress Management Agenda

• What is Stress?
• Effects of Stress on Health
• Stress Management

Social Psychology Chapter 13

• Introduction to Social Psychology
• First Impressions and Attributions
• Attitudes and Persuasion
• Prejudice and Stereotypes
• Groups

Why are Humans So Social?

• Humans need other humans
• Earliest human ancestors lived in small social groups
• Social interaction is a basic human need (e.g., attachment)
• Social isolation is detrimental
• Poor sleep
• Negative mood
• Earlier mortality

Social Psychology Definition

• The scientific study of how people influence other people's behavior, thoughts, and feelings

First Impressions

• Formed rapidly (sometimes within seconds)
• Long-lasting
• Even in the face of contradictory information

Attribution

• A judgment about the cause of a person's behavior
• Why did that just happen?

Attribution: Why did that just happen?

• Dispositional (Internal) Attribution: Personal qualities → Behavior
• Situational (External) Attribution: Environment → Behavior

Correspondence Bias

• Disposition → Behavior → Situational factors → Behavior

Defensive Attributions

• Actor-observer bias: Tendency to make situational attributions about our own behavior and dispositional attributions about others' behavior
• Self-serving bias: Viewing our successes differently than our failures (success = dispositional attribution, failure = situational attribution)
• Just-world belief: Good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people

Cultural Influences on Attribution

• Collectivistic Cultures: More emphasis on situational factors, more likely to show group-serving bias
• Individualistic Cultures: More emphasis on dispositional factors, more likely to use self-serving bias and the just-world belief

Attitudes

• Favorable or unfavorable evaluations that predispose behavior
• Affect (emotion)
• Behavior
• Cognition

How are Attitudes Formed?

• Observation
• Other people
• Personal experience
• Genetics (twin studies)

Cognitive Dissonance

• The uncomfortable state when behaviors don't match attitudes
• Powerful tool for changing attitudes

Cognitive Dissonance: Reducing Dissonance

• Change one of the two cognitions/behaviors
• Introduce a new cognition
• Reduce importance domain

Cognitive Dissonance Example

• Get paid for $1 or $20 to tell another person that the task was fun

Persuasion: The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM)

• A model predicting response to persuasion through two routes
• Central route
• Peripheral route

The ELM and Persuasion

• Central route: When a person considers persuasive arguments carefully and thoughtfully
• Peripheral route: When a person responds to peripheral cues without considering the quality of the argument

What Influences Persuasion?

• Motivation
• Education
• Time
• Emotions
• Characteristics of the person
• How the message is communicated
• Age of audience

Persuasion and Social Media

• How do people of different generations view the credibility of persuasive messages from professional vs. user-generated sources?

Key Terminology (Prejudice and Stereotypes)

• Stereotype: Simplified sets of traits associated with group membership (cognition)
• Prejudice: A pre-judgment or attitude (usually negative) towards a person based on group membership
• Discrimination: Unfair behavior based on stereotyping and prejudice

Prejudice and Stereotypes (Example)

• Stereotype: "All blondes are dumb"
• Prejudice: “I don't like this person because she is blonde.”
• Discrimination: “I would never accept a blonde into my law school.”

Sources of Prejudice and Stereotyping

• Humans categorize information
• Humans misjudge correlations between groups and their stereotypical behaviors
• Direct experience
• Learned from others
• Emotional responses (amygdala)

Outcomes of Prejudice

• Stereotype threat: Fear of confirming a negative group stereotype; anxiety of confirming stereotype prevents you from doing your best work (Steele & Aronson, 1995)

Measuring Prejudice

• Implicit Association Test (IAT): Uses reaction time to assess people's unconscious attitudes. (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/)

Reducing Prejudice

• Increased contact
• Increased cooperation
• Expand definition of in-group

Why Do We Go Along with the Group?

• Social norms: Rules for behavior in social settings (e.g., stand at the back of the Starbucks line, stand forward facing in an elevator).
• Conformity: Matching your behavior and appearance to the perceived social norms of a group (Asch's conformity study)

The Stanford Prison Study

• Images from the Stanford experiment

Why Do We Conform?

• Useful in ambiguous situations
• Reduce risk of rejection

Compliance

• Agreement with a request from someone with no perceived authority
• Reciprocation: Feeling obligated to give something back to people who have given something to us
• Powerful tool for social influence

How Can We Get People to Comply?

• Door-in-the-face: Large, unreasonable demand followed by a smaller one
• Foot-in-the-door: Small request followed by a larger one
• Low balling: Making further requests from someone who has already committed

Obedience

• Compliance with the request of an authority figure
• Stanley Milgram's Obedience Study

Milgram's Obedience Study

• Participant: "teacher"
• Confederate: "learner"
• Experimenter: "authority figure"
• "Shocks" for wrong answers

Effect of Proximity (teacher-learner/experimenter)

• Ordinary people, simply doing jobs, can carry out actions they find morally questionable

Social Facilitation

• The presence of other people affects individual performance
• Yerkes-Dodson Law: Effect of arousal on performance depends on the complexity of the task; simple tasks = improve, complex tasks = initial improvement then impairment.

Social Loafing

• Reduced motivation and effort shown by individuals working in a group compared to working alone.

Deindividuation

• Immersion in a group, making the individual relatively anonymous

Group Polarization

• Intensifying of an original attitude following discussion
• Why does this happen?
  • Conformity
  • Tendency to associate with people who share similar views
  • New reasons for holding attitude

Groupthink

• Group members suppress dissenting opinions in the interests of group cohesion; confirming with decisions to avoid feeling ostracized

Individual Differences - Intelligence

• What is intelligence?
• Types of intelligence
• Measuring intelligence
• Extremes of intelligence
• Nature and Nurture (biological and genetic influences vs. environmental influences)
• Genes might establish a certain range, but environment may refine specific score
• Environmental influences include Socioeconomic status (SES), poverty, nutrition, quantity/quality of education, medical care, breastfeeding, stress,

Distribution of Intelligence

• 95% of population falls between 70 and 130 IQ
• Remaining 5%: IQ <70 (intellectual disability) or >130 (gifted)

Intellectual Disability (ID)

• Diagnosed in individuals with IQ scores < 70 and poor adaptive behaviors/life skills.

Types of Intellectual Disability (ID)

• Mild (IQ: 55-70)
• Moderate (IQ: 40-55)
• Severe (IQ: 25-40)
• Profound (IQ: below 25)

Giftedness

• Having an IQ score of 130+
• Genius: giftedness + creativity and achievement

Psychological Disorders

• How prevalent are psychological disorders?
• Estimated 1 in 7 people in Hong Kong will experience a disorder
• Higher prevalence in young adults (Lifetime prevalence more than 70%)
• Comorbidity: Co-occurrence of two or more disorders in one person
• Have you ever felt depressed? Been anxious? Dissatisfied with your appearance? Had trouble concentrating?
• Medical students' syndrome
• Resources (Counseling and Wellness Center, School Wellness Manager Vanessa at [email protected] or 2358-6955)

Respect (Person First Language)

• A person with a disorder (not "a schizophrenic person")
• A child who has a disorder (not "an autistic child")

Normal vs. Abnormal

• The continuum
• Healthy behaviors and reactions
• Ailing and Illness behaviors

Statistical Normality

• Ab = "away from"
• Norma = "the rule"

Cultural Normality

• Normality is culture dependent

What is Abnormal Behavior?

• Unusual
• Distressing
• Harmful to self or others

What are Psychological Disorders?

• Disturbances in behavior, thoughts, or emotions.
• Significant personal distress or impairment
• Internal dysfunction (biological, psychological, or both)

Diagnosing Psychological Disorders

• Observable behavior and self-reported experience
• Use manuals (DSM-5 and ICD-10) to create consistency
• Problems in diagnostic approach: Differentiating normal/abnormal, individual differences in manifestation.

Why do Psychological Disorders Develop?

• Biological Factors (genetics, biochemistry, structural brain abnormalities)
• Environmental Factors (poor socialisation, stressful life circumstances, cultural/social inequalities)
• Gene x Environment Interaction

The Diathesis-Stress Model

• Genetic predisposition + environmental stress → psychological disorder

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

• Characterized by deficits in social relatedness and communication skills
• Often accompanied by repetitive, ritualistic behavior
• Symptoms include: Lack of social-emotional reciprocity, unawareness of others' perspectives, trouble developing and maintaining relationships, insistence on routine, repetitive behaviors/rituals, unusual increased/decreased sensitivity to stimuli, restricted interests
• Prevalence: 1 out of every 68 children. Boys are diagnosed more often than girls.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

• Characterized by inattention, hyperactivity, or both
• Symptoms include: Inability to focus, high level of motor activity, impulsivity

Causes of ADHD

• Biological Factors (genetics, structural/functional differences in the brain)
• Environmental Factors (lead contamination, low birth weight, prenatal exposure to tobacco, alcohol, other drugs)

Symptoms of Schizophrenia

• Psychotic disorder (positive and negative symptoms)
• Key Positive Symptoms: Delusions, Hallucinations, Disorganized speech/behavior.
• Negative Symptoms: Emotional/social withdrawal, apathy, and avolition.

Causes of Schizophrenia

• Biological (50% concordance rate in identical twins, neural degeneration, reduced frontal lobe activity, dopamine hypothesis)
• Environmental (extreme stress, low SES, prenatal exposure to viruses, marijuana use)

Individual Differences - Personality

• What is personality?
• Historical approaches (psychodynamic, behaviorist, humanistic)
• Trait Theories (Big Five Theory)
• Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism
• Social-Cognitive Theories (locus of control, reciprocal determinism, if-then relationships)