Exam 2 Objectives.pdf

Chapter 3 1. Define learning and describe how learning theory relates to our lives. - Learning is defined as a relatively permanent change in behavior as a result of experience or practice. - Children learn to be assertive, conscientious, self-suffi...

Chapter 3 1. Define learning and describe how learning theory relates to our lives. - Learning is defined as a relatively permanent change in behavior as a result of experience or practice. - Children learn to be assertive, conscientious, self-sufficient, aggressive, fearful, and so forth by observing others behaving in these ways. - Examples: You hate green peas because you were forced to eat them as a kid. Do you eat them now? If you drink something that tastes good, will you drink it again? If you try something and fail at it, what are the chances that you will attempt it again? - Before you can begin the process of learning, you have to pay attention. - Three kinds of stimuli attract our attention: novel stimuli, significant stimuli, and conflicting stimuli. - Learning theory is the basis of all interactions – we are applying it constantly and it is constantly being applied to us, most of the time without our knowledge. - Learning theorists believe that our behavior, including our personality, is shaped through classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and observational learning. - Understanding learning theory will help you acquire new relationships, understand and improve the relationships you have, understand yourself and others, and discover ways in which you can influence other people’s behavior. 2. Define" locus of control" and identify your personal locus of control. - Locus of control is an individual’s belief system regarding the causes of his or her experiences and the factors to which that person attributes success or failure. - This concept is divided into two categories (internal and external). - If someone has an internal locus of control, that person attributes success to his or her own efforts and abilities. - A person with an external locus of control, who attributes his or her success to luck or fate, will be less likely to make the effort needed to learn. 3. Identify strategies that can help individuals gain control over their personal life. - Consider changing aspects of your environment, try new activities rather than the usual safe and secure ways of doing things, begin to assume more responsibility for tasks at home, work, and school, notice new things to you stay  anchored in the present, engaged, and mindful, and work to get things done and try not to procrastinate, but manage your emotions. 4. Define self-efficacy and describe its importance in emotional well-being. - Self-efficacy is our belief about our ability to perform behaviors that should lead to expected outcomes. - Believing that you can direct your behaviors is fundamental to self-management. - Individuals having high self-efficacy for particular behaviors or skills are likely to work longer and try more strategies to develop these skills than those with low self-efficacy. - When self-efficacy is high, we feel confident that we can execute the responses necessary to earn reinforcers. - When self-efficacy is low, we worry that the necessary responses may be beyond our abilities. - Perceptions of self-efficacy are subjective and specific to different kinds of tasks. - Perception of self-efficacy can influence which challenges we tackle and how well we will perform them. - Good outcomes increase self-efficacy; they fuel an appetite for future risk. 5. Describe social learning theory and identify how it relates to your personal life. - An important aspect of social learning theory that may have an important impact on our lives is observational learning – the fact that much of personality is learned in social situations through interactions with and observations of other people, including family members. - Observational learning occurs when an individual’s behavior is influenced by observing others, who are called models. - Observational learning requires that you pay attention to someone who is significant to you, a parent, or a friend. You observe their behavior and understand its consequences, and then store this information in your memory. it is not always conscious, sometimes we emulate observed behavior to fit in without thinking about it. We can be led to act out without understanding where the impulse to act originated. - According to Social Learning Theory, modeling (imitation) has a great impact on personality development. Children learn to be assertive, conscientious,  self-sufficient, aggressive, fearful, and so forth by observing others behaving in these ways. 6. Identify the principles and application of operant conditioning. - Based on the premise that we are controlled by the consequences of our behavior. - Relies on the law of effect, which states that behaviors followed by positive consequences are more likely to be repeated, and behaviors followed by negative consequences are less likely to be repeated. - Most psychologists will say that most of our behavior is learned through operant conditioning. - We make a response and the consequences of that response determines whether or not we make that response again. - For example, if you cry and then get what you want, are you going to cry the next time you want something? The cry was reinforced, and the reinforcement will increase the probability of you crying the next time you want something. 7. Describe the consequences of our behavior in relation to the principles of positive and negative reinforcement and punishment. - In behavioral terminology, pleasant or unpleasant stimuli that strengthen a behavior are called reinforcers, and their effect is called reinforcement. - Primary reinforcers are the simplest type of reinforcer. It is a pleasant or unpleasant one to which we respond automatically without thinking (food, drink, heat, cold, pain, physical comfort or discomfort). - The vast majority of our reinforcers are conditioned or secondary reinforcers – stimuli to which we have attached positive or negative value through association with previously learned conditioned reinforcers. - Negative consequences need not be physical punishment, but giving options that have consequences. - Reinforcers act to strengthen behavior through two different types of consequences – positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. Consequences can also weaken or eliminate a behavior through the use of punishment. - A positive reinforcement is anything that increases a behavior by virtue of its presentation. Positively reinforce the good responses – not the bad ones. If you  help a stranger who responds by giving you five dollars, what is the chance of you helping other strangers? - A negative reinforcement is anything that increases a behavior by virtue of its termination or avoidance. For example, your manager yells at you for not producing enough work, so now you work harder to produce more in order to avoid being yelled at. You were given five dollars (positive reinforcement) for helping the stranger, and that five dollars will increase the probability of you helping other strangers in the future. - Punishment is anything that decreases a behavior by virtue of its presentation. You drink too much scotch one evening and get very sick. To your amazement, you do not ever want to drink scotch again. Getting sick is the punishment for over-drinking. - Psychologists suggest that we do not need to use negative consequences as a means of disciplining our children, because positive reinforcement is the most effective and best means of controlling someone’s behavior. 8. Summarize the influence of classical conditioning on your personal behavior and the behavior of others. - Classical conditioning has created many of our emotions, including fears, phobias, likes, dislikes, attractions, and bonding experiences. - Classical conditioning helps explain the formation of fears, attitudes, prejudices, and feelings that may seem quite irrational. For example, you don’t understand why you have an uneasy feeling around your red-haired boss. You notice you have the same feeling around other red-haired individuals. One day, while reminiscing about elementary school, you remembered that your second-grade, red-haired teacher slapped your hands with a ruler every time you made a mistake. This painful, embarrassing experience that you repressed is still having an effect upon your present life, especially your interactions with red-haired individuals. You were conditioned to dislike red-haired individuals. Prior to second grade, you liked people with red hair, but since this one experience, red-haired individuals have become the conditioned stimulus for your fear (uneasy feeling), the conditioned response. 9. Describe a "self-change" program that will enable change and improvement in your life.  - Identify the behavior to be changed, observe the behavior to be changed, set your goal, design your program, and monitor and evaluate your program. - Start with your operant level (baseline) and continue to accurately record the frequency of your targeted behavior so you can evaluate your progress. If your behavior shows improvement, keep going. If there is no improvement or you begin to regress, you need to reevaluate your reinforcers, since they do not seem to be motivating you to improve. You may need to strengthen your reinforcement or the delay between the time you emit the behavior and the time you receive the reinforcement may be too lengthy. You may also not be reaching your goal because you are trying to do too much too quickly by setting unrealistic goals. - When set into action, self-modification also known as behavioral modification programs often need some fine-tuning. - Often a new and improved pattern of behavior becomes self-maintaining. - When you feel good about yourself and know that you are successful, keeping up your change becomes self-reinforcing. Chapter 4 1. Define emotions and summarize how they influence our everyday life. - An emotion is a feeling and its distinctive thoughts, psychological and biological states, and range of propensities to act. - Emotions are feelings that are experienced. - Emotion is a feeling state that involves certain components: physiological changes, subjective cognitive states, and expressive behaviors. - Our emotions begin to have negative effects when they are viewed as being excessive in intensity and duration. - When mild, emotions can be facilitative – they increase our functioning. When emotions are intense, or sustained, they are debilitative – they disrupt our overall functioning. - Some emotions cause us more difficulty than others. Some of these are fear, anxiety, anger, guilt, grief, and love. 2. Describe strategies that help to control our emotions. - We can learn how to change emotional patterns that are self-defeating or harmful to our growth toward self-actualization. We can also learn how to develop ways to become more emotionally expressive.  - Think for a moment and try to recall how your moods affect your emotions. - Be mindful of your emotions, utilize deep breathing, identify the emotion that you’re feeling, acknowledge your emotional triggers, and take care of yourself. - Self-care and activities that bring you joy can help you manage your emotions and maintain your well-being. 3. Identify the four characteristics of emotions. - Characteristics of emotions: physiological or internal changes, behavioral expressions, cognitive interpretations, and motivational tendencies. 4. Identify the different types of emotions. - Primary, mixed, mild, or intense. - Primary emotions are joy, acceptance, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation. Robert Plutchik suggests that these primary feelings can combine to form other mixed emotions. - Mixed emotions are love, submission, awe, disappointment, remorse, contempt, aggressiveness, and optimism. - Intense emotions are strong emotions such as fear, depression, anger, and hate. These emotions can disrupt our functioning and ability to relate to other people. - Gary Emery indicates that there are only four basic emotions: mad, sad, glad, and scared. 5. Describe strategies that can help an individual live with emotions that can be problematic such as fear, anxiety, anger, guilt, grief, and love. - Facing your fears and anxieties: admit your fears, take risks, acknowledge the positive, recognize your worst fears, stay in the present, and have patience. - To diffuse anger: Pause and slowly count to ten, take a cooling-off period, don’t address anger when you’re rushed, and don’t try to address your anger when you’re tired or before sleep. - The goal with anger is to own the moment so this emotion doesn’t own you. Then you can mindfully respond rather than simply react. You’ll have the lucidity to be solution-oriented, and therefore empower how you relate to others. - Dealing with grief: The grief process consists of freeing ourselves emotionally from the loss, readjusting to life after this loss, and resuming ordinary activities and forming new relationships. 6. Summarize how emotions develop.  - From early infancy, human beings display tendencies toward responding emotionally. - Jungian philosophy’s classical theory: heredity does predispose us toward fairly specific emotional tendencies. - For several months, babies will continue to show their excitement by crying when they feel like doing so. After a few weeks, they have learned to distinguish and respond to two basic emotions – distress and delight. Bodily discomfort (a wet diaper or hunger) brings forth the earliest unpleasant reaction, known as distress. Delight, the earliest pleasant reaction, appears several weeks after distress, in the form of smiling, gurgling, and other babyish sounds of joy. - Soon, we become more aware of the world within us and the world outside us. - We learn emotional responses such as love, anger, frustration, fear, and jealousy from others and our own experiences. - We learn which emotions bring us punishment and which ones bring us reward. - We learn various ways of dealing with our emotions through family, school, and social experiences. - We receive messages on how to express and deal with some of our emotions, such as “don’t make a scene by crying.” - Cultural stereotypes can have an effect on our emotional development. 7. Define emotional intelligence and describe the abilities needed for higher emotional intelligence. - Emotional intelligence consists of the ability to monitor, access, express, and regulate one’s own emotions; the capacity to identify, interpret, and understand others’ emotions; and the ability to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions. - Emotional intelligence includes four essential abilities. - First, people need to be able to accurately perceive emotions in themselves and others and have the ability to express their own emotions. Second, people need to be aware of how their emotions shape their thinking, decisions, and coping behavior. Third, people need to be able to understand and analyze their emotions, which may have important social implications. Fourth, people need to be able to regulate their emotions so they can minimize negative emotions and make effective use of positive emotions.  - Daniel Goleman, an emotional intelligence writer, writes, “If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.” - Developing your own emotional intelligence enables you to know yourself reasonably well, control your own emotions, show empathy with the feelings of others, and use social skills in an effective as well as simply a pleasant way. 8. Describe the consequences of denying emotions. - Repression: the self automatically excludes threatening or painful thoughts and feelings from awareness. Repressed emotions, such as fear, anger, or strong passions, may still affect one physically. Symptoms such as headaches, insomnia, or other painful manifestations can occur. - Repression and suppression are defense mechanisms. - Suppression: people are usually conscious of their emotions, but deliberately control rather than express them. - While suppression of emotions is a healthier way of handling feelings than repression, habitual suppression may lead to many of the undesirable effects of repression. - Chronic suppression of feelings interferes with rational problem-solving. Holding back unexpressed feelings affects our ability to think clearly. This can interfere with studying, work, and socializing. Consistently suppressing can lead to people exploding and doing or saying things out of character. - Chronic suppression can be just as unhealthy as repression. 9. Summarize the five steps involved in dealing with your emotions. - Listen to your body. Remember physiological changes are a part of your emotions. Those internal changes speak to you very clearly; do not ignore them. - Identify your feelings. Name all of the feelings you are having. Do not deny or suppress your feelings. Identify your primary feeling, then your secondary feeling. - Personalize your feelings. Describe the impact the feelings are having on you. Describe what action you feel like taking. - Own your feelings. Your feelings are yours. The acceptance of the truth involved is critical.  - Decide what you will do with your feelings. Consider timing and appropriateness of place, how much emotion to express, significance of relationship, words and mannerisms, and recognize the difference between feeling and acting. 10. Describe the emotional display rules of different cultures. - Display rules are a social group or culture’s informal norms that distinguish how one should express themselves. They can be described as culturally prescribed rules that people learn early on in their lives by interaction and socializations with other people. - Different cultures have different display rules – norms about when, where, and how much we should show emotions. These differences, if not understood, can lead to communication problems. - For example, Americans say “I love you” more than members of other cultures. 11. Identify the benefits of expressing your feelings. - Several long-term, positive benefits can be derived from learning to express emotions. - You will develop positive feelings about yourself, your relationships will grow stronger, and pressure is relieved. Many emotional responses feel good to us. - Feelings of love, tenderness, and warmth toward other people give us a sense of well-being. - Emotional responses involved in happy or joyful experiences in life are enhancing to us, as are emotional responses found in humor or laughter that tend to help us feel good about being alive. - The real benefit of having good feelings can only be found if one chooses to truly experience emotions and share them with others. - Sometimes, when expressing feelings, we even go through a healing process. 12. Summarize the main components of the healing process - known as forgiveness. - Exploring the anger you have, deciding to forgive, working on forgiveness, and discovery and release, whereby one learns a great deal about oneself, the other person, and relationships. - Forgiveness is something you do for yourself, for your own happiness, health, and well-being. - Forgiveness is feeling free of negative energy. If you remain angry, the hostility will reverberate through all your relationships.