PSYA02 Full Book Notes

Chapter 9: Intelligence Testing

● Measuring Intelligence
○ Focus Questions:
■ How have intelligence tests been misused in modern society?
■ Why do we have the types of intelligence tests that we have?
○ Leilani Muir: forced to be sterilized due to low IQ score
○ Different Approaches to Intelligence Testing
■ What IS intelligence? Is it getting good grades?
■ Intelligence and Perception: Galton’s Anthropometric Approach
● Galton believed that because people learn about the world
through their senses, those with superior sensory abilities would
surely be more intelligent
● He created a set of tests around this idea
○ Anthropometrics: methods of measuring physical and
mental variation in humans
● Cattell took Galton’s tests and administered them to university
students
○ He found that the different sensory test scores were not
correlated with each other
■ Some people have better hearing than eyesight
○ He found that scores on the sensory tests were not
correlated with their university abilities
○ Because of this, the approach was scrapped.
■ Intelligence and Thinking: the Stanford Binet Test
● Binet argued that intelligence should be indicated by more
complex thinking processes, such as memory, attention, and
comprehension
● Intelligence: the ability to think, understand, reason, and adapt to
or overcome obstacles
● Binet and Simon developed a test to determine the abilities of
children who might benefit from special education
● Binet believed that a child’s test score measured her mental age
○ Mental age: the average intellectual ability score for
children of a specific age
● Terman described the Stanford-Binet test (a test adapted for the
US) as a test intended to measure innate levels of intelligence
○ Binet’s intent was not this, and this is a pretty substantial
difference
● Terman and Stern ended up developing IQ, which took mental age
and divided it by chronological age, on a 100 point average scale.
 ●Take the difference between:
○ Mental age of 7, 3 years behind others
○ IQ of 70, 30 points below average
● Also, this approach makes no sense when considering adults
● Deviation IQ: taken average test scores of people of the same
age, with the average being set at 100
■ Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale
● Offers a Full Scale IQ, General Ability Index (GAI) and Cognitive
Proficiency Index (CPI)
■ Raven’s Progressive Matrices
● Developed to correct a cultural bias in intelligence tests
● Relies on visual pattern identification
○ The Chequered Past of Intelligence Testing
■ IQ and the Eugenics Movement
● Eugenics was all the rage and assumed that White Westerners
were genetically superior, justifying their imposition of their values
on other cultures
● Social Darwinism grew into eugenics
○ Galton coined this term and believed intelligence to be an
innate property
○ He believed that eminence in families was a result of good
genetics, explaining why wealth and other achievements
concentrated in a few families
● These ideas, as well as the results of Native American, Mexican,
and Black people’s tests, justified stratifying them into a lower
social class… and eventually sterilizing them
■ The Race and IQ Controversy
● Different ethnic groups have differences in average IQ scores
○ Asians and Jews were at the top, with Latinos and Blacks
at the bottom
● Example: “The Bell Curve” which presented the research and
argued that affirmative action programs were unnecessary, and
that a meritocratic society was most healthy (with the high merit
individuals at the top and the low merit individuals at the bottom)
● There’s a large amount of controversy due to this
■ Problems with the Racial Superiority Interpretation
● Despite the work to de-bias standardized tests, the differences in
racial and ethnic groups remained
● A few explanations:
○ Some groups are more exposed to standardized tests than
others
○ Some groups have a higher motivation to do well
 ○ Some groups have more in common with test
administrators
● Stereotype threat: occurs when negative stereotypes about a
group cause group members to underperform on ability tests
○ Increases negative arousal which undermines test
performance
○ Causes people to become more self focused
○ Increases the tendency to actively try to inhibit negative
thoughts, altering cognitive resources
● There are problems with both the validity of the scores and the
interpretation of the findings
● Working the Model
○ What do we know about the kinds of beliefs that may affect
test scores?
■ Children’s perceptions of their mental abilities have
a very strong influence on their academic
performance
■ Entity theory: the belief that intelligence is a fixed
characteristic and hard to change
■ Incremental theory: the belief that intelligence can
be shaped by experiences, practice, and effort
○ How can science test whether beliefs affect performance?
■ Dweck tested students, each in groups (entity
theory vs. incremental theory) and gave them a 476
question exam
■ They got immediate feedback as to whether each
question was correct
■ Those who held entity beliefs were more likely to
give up, while those who held incremental beliefs
were less likely to do so
■ They also tested teaching incremental theory to
kids. This group’s grades increased.
○ Can we critically evaluate this research?
■ What if, in some situations, it’s true that the task is
impossible no matter how hard they try?
○ Why is this relevant?
■ School grades have become increasingly important
■ People can see better outcomes often by changing
the way they think about their own intelligence
● Understanding Intelligence
○ Focus Questions:
■ Is intelligence one ability, or many?
 ■ How have psychologists attempted to explain intelligence as a collection
of different abilities?
○ Most people believe that intelligences involves the ability to think, understand,
reason, learn, and find solutions to problems: but how to do they relate?
○ Intelligence as a Single, General Ability
■ We used factor analysis to compare different aspects of intelligence and
look at how well they correlate with each other
■ Spearman’s General Intelligence
● General intelligence factor: a constant (g) representing a person’s
abilities
● Is it real? What does it predict?
○ It reasonably predicts GPA, with a correlation (rho) of
about .5
○ It also predicts how many years a person will stay in
school, as well as their income.
○ It predicts other seemingly unrelated phenomena, such as
life expectancy, quickness of snap judgments during
discrimination tasks, and self-control
● General intelligence factor correlates with job performance better
than any other predictor (.53)
● It also predicts how efficiently we conduct impulses along nerve
fibers and across synapses
○ Brains of the highly intelligent don’t have to work as hard.
There’s less brain activation for the same task.
■ Does g tell us the whole story?
● It reflects something real but correlation isn’t everything.
● It may reflect motivation, or other factors
● It also cannot capture the kind of genius that a savant like Rain
Man has
● It cannot capture the wide range of human abilities, either.
○ Many people would, at the same time, admit that Kanye is
both smarter than them and not so.
○ Intelligence as Multiple, Specific Abilities
■ The Problem with g
● One problem with g that Spearman noticed is that not all items on
the test correlated with each other all that well
● He hypothesized a second, skill-based intelligence: s
● We cannot deny that you need to hone a skill, like a sword, in
order for it to be sharp. However, g is problematic for some.
● Thurstone came up with 7 clusters of primary mental abilities, and
that there was no singular meaningful g
● Turns out, both Spearman and Thurstone were right
■ The Hierarchical Model of Intelligence
 ● Some types of intelligence seem to be nested together
● We have a ‘general’ intelligence which affects everything, and
sub-intelligences that affect specific abilities
● Many theories arose from this idea
● Working the Model
○ What do we know about fluid and crystallized intelligence?
■ Fluid intelligence (Gf): a type of intelligence used in
learning new information and solving new problems
not based on previously attained knowledge
● Solving geometric puzzles, such as Raven’s
progressive matrices
■ Crystallized intelligence (Gc): a type of intelligence
that draws upon past learning and experience
● Vocabulary, general knowledge, even the
ability to do a job
■ They’re largely separate
■ Greater Gf may lead to greater Gc… but this isn’t
proven.
○ How can science help distinguish between fluid and
crystallized intelligence?
■ One study of people 20-89 were given a bunch of
tasks
■ Researchers found that task performance that
require Gf peaks in early to middle adulthood and
declines thereafter.. as well as that Gf peaks in
adolescence then declines.
■ Functioning of brain regions associated with Gf
declines sooner than the functioning of those
supporting Gc (prefrontal cortex)
○ Can we critically evaluate crystallized and fluid
intelligence?
■ Is fluid intelligence real? We’re unsure: it may just
be a result of correlation between other shit
■ Fluid and crystallized intelligence are not entirely
separable
● You will need both to learn, for example, a
card game
○ Why is this relevant?
■ Helps reduce stereotypes and expectations about
intelligence in older people
■ Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory of Intelligence
● Triarchic theory of intelligence: a theory that divides intelligence
into three distinct types: analytical, practical, and creative
 ● Analytical intelligence: book smarts - how to reason logically
through a problem and find solutions
● Practical intelligence: street smarts - how to find solutions to real
world problems encountered in daily life
● Creative intelligence: the ability to create new ideas and generate
novel solutions to problems
■ Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences
● Inspired by savants, who had amazing abilities in limited domains
and limited abilities in others (as well as low g)
● Verbal/linguistic intelligence
● Logical/mathematical intelligence
● Visuospatial intelligence
● Bodily/kinesthetic intelligence
● Musical/rhythmical intelligence
● Interpersonal intelligence
● Self/intrapersonal intelligence
● Naturalist intelligence
● Existential intelligence
● Overall, this is hard to test because measurement scales do not
accurately capture this information
○ The Battle of the Sexes
■ There’s no difference in average intelligence between the sexes
■ Males have a greater variability in IQ scores
■ Males tend to have a larger percentage of the upper echelon of math test
takers
● Seems to be a result of an unintentional selection bias
■ Do Males and Females have Unique Cognitive Skills?
● Females seem to be better at verbal abilities, memory tasks, and
the ability to read emotions
● Males seem to be better at visuospatial tasks
● The underrepresentation of females in STEM may be a result of
this, but is more likely a result of stereotype threat
● Biological, Environmental and Behavioral Influences on Intelligence
○ Focus Questions:
■ Which biological and environmental factors have been found to be
important contributors to intelligence?
■ Is it possible for people to enhance their own intelligence?
○ Biological Influences on Intelligence
■ The Genetics of Intelligence: Twin and Adoption Studies
● Genetic similarity does contribute to intelligence test scores
● Identical twin scores correlate at about .85, much higher than
fraternal twins
○ .80 when raised in different homes
 ● This is the same as testing twice
■ The Heritability of Intelligence
● Seems to be between 40% and 80%
● A heritability estimate describes how much of the differences
between people in the sample can be accounted for by differences
in their genes
○ This means it depends on the amount of people being
studied
○ If people in a sample inhabit highly similar environments,
the heritability will be higher
● Comparing within a sample of wealthy individuals, most of the
differences can be found to be genetic.
○ Not so comparing wealthy vs. poor, or even within a
sample of poor individuals.
● This causes problems, as genes do not operate in isolation from
the environment
○ Epigenetics: changes in genetic expression
● Genes that influence intelligence may do so indirectly
■ Behavioral Genomics
● Behavioral genomics: a technique that examines how specific
genes interact with the environment to influence behaviors
● Intelligence can, on some level, be predicted based on a collection
of genes that pool together.
● These genes have a small effect by themselves… except in cases
of genes that could signal mental retardation.
● Gene knockout studies: involve removing a specific gene and
comparing the characteristics of animals with and without that
gene
○ They can do the opposite as well
● Example: Doogie mice
○ Created by manipulating the gene NR2B, which encodes
the NMDA receptor.
■ This receptor plays a crucial role in learning and
memory
○ Mice with altered NR2B learned significantly faster and had
better memories than other mice
● How do these effects occur?
● Working the Model
○ What do we know about brain size and intelligence?
■ Bigger brains were thought to be linked to higher
intelligence, and used as justification for white
supremacy
 ○ How can science explain the relationship between brain
size and intelligence?
■ 36% of the variation in verbal intelligence scores
was accounted for by the size of the brain
■ Did not account significantly for any of the other
component of intelligence
■ However, the convolutions of the brain account for
25% of the variability in the scores on the WAIS
○ Can we critically evaluate this issue?
■ We’re not 100% sure what is being tested
■ Third-variable problem
○ Why is this relevant?
■ Gives us insight into the effects of anorexia nervosa
or alcohol abuse
○ Environmental Influences on Intelligence
■ Rats in enriched environments has a 5% larger brain and their cortices
contained 25% more synapses
■ Birth Order
● Oldest children had, on average, 3 higher IQ points than the 2nd
child and 4 higher IQ points than the 3rd
● Likely due to the fact that the oldest children share their wisdom,
reinforcing and processing the information differently
■ Socioeconomic Status
● Children in wealthy homes have higher IQs than those living in
poorer homes
● High SES homes:
○ have higher vocabularies
○ talk to the children more
○ read to them more
■ Nutrition
● Diets like the typical Western diets cause kids to have lower IQ
scores on average
● Higher IQ scores result in eating foods low in saturated fats, high
in omega-3 fats, whole grains, fruits and veggies
■ Stress
● Interferes with working memory and self-control due to the release
of cortisol
■ Education
● Attending school has a large impact on IQ scores
■ The Flynn Effect: Is Everyone Getting Smarter?
● Flynn Effect: the steady population level increases in IQ scores
over time
 ● Likely due to the requirement of certain intellectual skills in modern
society
○ Behavioral Influences on Intelligence
■ Brain Training Programs
● The N-back task actually improved IQ scores as well as skill at the
task
■ Nootropic Drugs
● Ritalin (methylphenidate)
○ Inhibits the reuptake of norepinephrine and dopamine
● Modafinil
○ Boosts short-term memory and planning abilities by
affecting the reuptake of dopamine
● Could cause dependency issues as well as promoting the belief
that these drugs need to be taken in order to stay competitive
■ Meditation
● Going on a ten-day mindfulness retreat has been shown to
improve working memory
● Mindfulness meditation increases the thickness and denisty of the
white-matter pathways connecting the anterior cingulate gyrus to
other brain regions

Chapter 10: Lifespan Development

● Physical Development from Conception through Infancy

○ Focus Question
■ How does brain development occur, before and after birth?
■ What are newborns able to sense?
○ Methods for Measuring Developmental Trends
■ Developmental psychology: the study of human physical, cognitive,
social, and behavioral characteristics across the lifespan
■ Cross-sectional Design: used to measure and compare samples of
people of different ages at a given point in time
● Pros
○ Cheaper, easier, can be done quicker
● Cons
○ Cohort effects: differences between people that result from
being born in different time periods
■ Longitudinal design: follows the development of the same set of
individuals through time
■ Patterns of Development: Stages and Continuity
● Development is seen as a progression of abrupt transitions
(stages) interspersed with slower, more gradual change
■ The Importance of Sensitive Periods
 ● Sensitive period: a window of time during which exposure to a
specific type of environmental stimulation is needed for normal
development of a specific ability
○ Zygotes to Infants: From One Cell to Billions
■ Fertilization and Gestation
● Zygote: the initial cell formed when the nuclei of the egg and
sperm fuse
● This is the beginning of the germinal stage
○ Germinal stage: the first phase of prenatal development,
from conception to 2 weeks
● The zygote splits into many cells
● The resulting blastocyst splits into two halves: the fetus and the
placenta
● Embryonic stage: spans weeks two through eight, when the
embryo begins developing major physical structures such as the
heart and nervous system, plus the limbs
● Fetal stage: weeks eight through birth, the skeletal, organ, and
nervous systems become more developed and specialized
■ Fetal Brain Development
● In the embryonic stage:
○ 4 weeks: forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain form
● In the fetal stage
○ 11 weeks: cerebral hemisphere, cerebellum, and brainstem
○ Late stages: myelin coats the nerve cells
■ Myelin insulates nerve cells, enabling them to
conduct messages more rapidly and efficiently
● At birth:
○ 100 billion neurons are in a brain 25% of the size of the
adult brain
○ This is basically the same amount as in an adult brain
○ Over time, the connections between neurons form
○ This gives us insight into how we adapt to highly diverse
environments
○ Humans are pretty useless and helpless at birth
■ Nutrition, Teratogens, and Fetal Development
● To provide adequate nutrients to the baby, pregnant women need
to increase their calories by 20% and add omega-3’s, folic acid,
zinc, calcium and magnesium
○ For this reason, supplementation is key
● Fetal malnutrition causes:
○ Underweight babies
○ Higher likelihood of suffering from diseases
○ Higher likelihood of cognitive defects
 ■ ADDs and trouble handling emotions
■ Mental health issues
● Teratogens: substances that impair the process of development
○ Thalidomide is a perfect example
○ Increased rates of phocomelia (flippered limbs)
● Fetal alcohol syndrome: involves abnormalities in mental
functioning, growth, and facial development
● Smoking: 30% higher chance of premature birth, 3 times as likely
to die from SIDS
● Working the Model
○ What do we know about premature birth?
■ Under 36 weeks
■ Have problems regulating body temperature and
breathing
■ 95% of survival for infants born at 30 weeks, 50%
for 25 weeks
○ How can science be used to help preterm infants?
■ NIDCAP: behaviorally based intervention where
preterm infants are observed and given intensive
care
■ Minimal lights, sound levels, and stress
■ Helps throughout life
○ Can we critically evaluate this research?
■ Low sample size
○ Why is this relevant?
■ 9% of infants are born preterm
○ Sensory and Motor Development in Infancy
■ Compared to other species, human babies are helpless
● Many other species come out able to get food
■ Adults rely heavily on top-down processes, but infants don’t have many of
them
■ However, human babies do have sensory abilities
● They have a preference for their mother’s voice
■ Auditory patterning of babies’ brains is so significant that they have
already started to internalize the sounds of their own native tongue
● Babies cry with an accent (lmao)
■ The visual system is not so well developed at birth
● Babies have about 1/40th of the visual acuity of adults and can
only see about 30cm/1ft away
● They can’t see in color at birth, and only discriminate colors at
around 2 months
● Depth perception doesn’t appear until 4 months
● It takes 8 months for infants to perceive shapes and objects
 ● They are highly responsive to visual cues that they can see,
however
● By a few days of age, babies will mimic facial expressions of
others
■ Taste and smell are well developed at birth
● They turn their heads toward breastmilk
■ Motor Development in the First Year
● Motor development takes several years
● However they do have some reflexes right out of the womb
○ Rooting reflex: when an infant is stimulated at the corner of
their mouth, they will turn toward it and start sucking
■ Aids in feeding
○ Moro reflex: when infants lose support of their head, they
reach their arms out and inward in a hugging motion
■ Used to hold onto the mother when support is lost
○ Grasping reflex: by stimulating the infant’s palm, they will
grasp tightly
● Visual cliff: babies will not crawl over a deep end
● In the first 12 to 18 months, infants start to be able to crawl, stand,
and walk
○ The actual age varies
○ Cultures that expect their children to walk earlier will
typically produce children that do
● The brain changes too
○ Myelination: formation of a fatty myelin sheath around the
axons, persists through to adulthood
○ Synaptogenesis: forming of new synaptic connections
○ Synaptic pruning: the loss of weak nerve cell connections
● Infancy and Childhood: Cognitive and Emotional Development
○ Focus Questions
■ Which types of activities do infants and young children need for their
psychological development?
■ Given that social interactions are so important, which specific abilities are
nurtured by them?
○ Cognitive Changes: Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory
■ Piaget observed children and tested them
■ His research laid the groundwork for the modern science of cognitive
development
● Cognitive development: the study of changes in memory, thought,
and reasoning processes that occur throughout the lifespan
■ According to Piaget, knowledge accumulates and is modified by two
processes: assimilation and accommodation
 ● Assimilation: a conservative process whereby people fit new
information into the belief systems they already possess
● Accommodation: a creative process whereby people modify their
belief structures based on experience
■ Piaget also postulated that learning about the world occurs in stages
■ The Sensorimotor Stage: Living in the Material World
● This stage is from 0-2 years during which infants’ thinking about
and exploration of the world are based on immediate sensory and
motor experiences
● Babies, for example, do not have a concept of object permanence
○ The ability to understand that objects exist even when they
cannot be directly perceived
■ The Preoperational Stage: Quantity and Numbers
● Ages 2 to 27
● Devoted to language development, using symbols, pretend play
and mastering the concept of conservation
○ Conservation: the knowledge that the quantity or amount of
an object is not the same as the physical arrangement and
appearance of that object
○ “Which row has more quarters”
○ Children seem to understand conservation better when
they are able to eat the results, but this may be due to
interpretation of ‘more’
■ The Concrete Operational Stage: Using Logical Thought
● Age 7-11 years
● When children develop skills in logical thinking and manipulating
numbers
● They understand that if A > B and B > C, then A > C
■ The Formal Operational Stage: Abstract and Hypothetical Thought
● 11/12 to adulthood
● Involves development of advanced cognitive processes such as
abstract reasoning and hypothetical thinking
○ Scientific thinking
■ Working the Model
● What do we know about cognitive abilities in infants?
○ Core knowledge hypothesis: infants have inborn abilities
for understanding key aspects of their environment
○ Habituation: decrease in responding with repeated
exposure to an event
○ Dishabituation: increase in responsiveness with the
presentation of a new stimulus
● How can science help explain infant cognitive abilities
 ○ Infants were most attentive when what they saw and heard
matched in number
● Can we critically evaluate alternative explanations?
○ Is “looking time” a measure of what we’re looking for?
○ It’s very hard to understand what infants think and feel
● Why is this relevant?
○ It seems that cognitive development in babies is more
sophisticated than psychologists have assumed
■ Complementary Approaches to Piaget
● Vygotsky proposed that development is ideal when children
attempt skills and activities that are just beyond what they can do
alone, but they have guidance from adults who are attentive to
their process
○ Zone of proximal development
● Scaffolding: a highly attentive approach to teaching in which the
teacher matches guidance to the learner’s needs
○ Social Development: Attachment, Personality and Reading Others
■ Types of Attachment
● Attachment: the enduring emotional bond formed between
individuals
● How we get social comfort
● Harlow found that monkeys would cling onto cloth objects and
would panic when those cloth objects were removed
● He also did an experiment which found that monkeys would cling
to this object, despite the fact that it didn’t give them food
● Parenting wisdom of the time was against attachment and toward
behaviourism
● Ainsworth developed a procedure that used the strange situation
to measure infant attachment by observing how infants behave
when exposed to different experiences that involve anxiety and
comfort
● Found patterns of behavior that reflected three attachment styles
○ Secure attachment: the caregiver is a secure base that the
child checks for occasionally
○ Insecure attachment
■ Anxious/resistant: infant depends heavily on the
caregiver
■ Avoidant: infant acts as if the caregiver isn’t even
there and is unconcerned about the stranger
○ Disorganized: caregivers are sources of fear and comfort
■ Self Awareness
● The ability to recognize one’s individuality
 ● Goes hand-in-hand with being able to recognize others as
separate beings
● Young children are described as egocentric
○ They only consider their own perspective
● Theory of mind: the ability to recognize the thoughts, beliefs, and
expectations of others, and to understand that these can be
different from one’s own
○ The false-belief task illustrates this ability
■ Prosocial Behavior
● Children show a natural predisposition toward prosocial behavior
very early in their development
● They’re also able to make complex moral discriminations, such as
preferring others who are kind to someone who is prosocial and
others who are unkind to someone who is antisocial
● Social and communicative support from adults is important
scaffolding for children’s understanding of both their own and
others’ intentional states
● Children start to demonstrate instrumental helping at 1 year old
○ Instrumental helping: providing practical assistance such
as helping to retrieve an object that is out of reach
● They start to demonstrate empathetic helping at 2 years old
○ Empathetic helping: providing help to make someone feel
better
● Humans possess two psychobiological systems
○ Attachment behavioral system: focused on meeting our
own needs for security
○ Caregiving behavioral system: focusing on meeting the
needs of others
■ Parenting
● Society currently tends to use a behaviorist approach to parenting
● Children are not merely stimulus-response machines that only
respond to conditioning
○ Children will only continue engaging in rewarding behavior
if it continues to produce rewards
○ Their self-esteem ends up being more dependent upon
external sources of validation
● We use this approach on our children, but wouldn’t think twice
doing it with our romantic relationships
● The research found that all forms of explicit reward undermined
participants’ interest in the activity for which they received the
reward
○ Resulted in introjection: the internalization of the
conditional regard of significant others
 ● Moral development is associated with more frequent use of
inductive discipline
○ Explaining the consequences of a child’s actions on other
people, activating empathy for others’ feelings
● Adolescence
○ Focus Questions
■ Does Internet use impair or enhance social relationships during
adolescence
■ Which other psychological characteristics are major points of change
during adolescence
○ Physical Changes in Adolescence
■ The hypothalamus begins stimulating the release of hormones such as
testosterone and estrogen, which contribute to the development of
primary and secondary sex traits in boys and girls
● Primary sex traits: changes in the body that are part of
reproduction
○ E.g. ejaculation, menstruation, ovulation
● Secondary sex traits: changes in the body that are not part of
reproduction
○ Breast tissue, pubic hair, increased muscle mass
● Menarche: onset of menstruation, occurs around age 12
● Spermarche: first ejaculation of sperm
■ Puberty happens much earlier now than 100 years ago
● Likely due to diet changes resulting in increased body fat, which
seems to be an indicator for the body saying that it’s time to
initiate puberty
■ Adolescents that develop earlier than their peers can face extra
challenges
● Early bloomers run a greater risk of drug and alcohol abuse and
unwanted pregnancies
○ Emotional Challenges in Adolescence
■ In many non-Western cultures, the transition from childhood to adulthood
happened remarkably smoothly
■ Today’s teens tend to keep their debauchery to a minimum and then
move on from it in later years
■ The emotional challenges are many, though
■ Adolescents are prone to high volatility in emotions, including heightened
anxiety and depression
■ Adolescents who rely upon a limited number of adaptive strategies and
only rely on them are at greater risk for anxiety and depression
■ The ability to delay gratification is key, and is correlated with later success
in life
● It seems that this ability remains roughly static
 ● Interestingly enough, it’s also a skill that can be learned
○ The kids in the marshmallow test were asked to rely on
different strategies to maintain self control: some more
effective than others
○ The ability to effectively choose reframing strategies relies
on a cognitive control network involving the frontal and
parietal lobes
○ Cognitive Development: Moral Reasoning vs. Emotions
■ Kohlberg’s Moral Development: Learning Right from Wrong
● Would you kill one person to save five?
● The shift to postconventional morality is a key development
because society needs individuals who rebel against injustice
● Three stages of moral reasoning were developed using the male
in mind
○ Preconventional morality: characterized by self-interest in
seeking reward or avoiding punishment
○ Conventional morality: regards social conventions and rule
as guides for appropriate moral behavior
○ Postconventional morality: considers rules and laws as
relative
● However, it seems that females are more likely to base morality on
a standard of caring for others… or do they?
● It turns out that moral reasoning doesn’t predict actual behavior
very well
● Social intuitionist perspective: moral judgments are guided
primarily by gut feelings
○ Psychopaths do not ‘feel’ right and wrong like most do
○ Social Development: Identity and Relationships
■ Who am I? Identity formation during Adolescence
● Identity: a clear sense of what kind of person you are
● Adolescents tend to experience identity crises
■ Peer groups
● Often times, kids hang out in cliques
● However, crowds are a bit bigger and tend to have labels
○ Jocks, stoners, geeks
● Social exclusion is often devastating. With the Internet, there are
virtual social networks that facilitate being part of a group
● School shootings are almost exclusively the cause of social
exclusion
■ Romantic Relationships
● Half of Canadian teens report having sexual intercourse, 80% of
American teens report having non-intercourse sexual acts
 ● 60% of teens reported having experienced psychological
aggression against them by their romantic partner
● Adulthood and Aging
○ Moving from Adolescence to Adulthood
■ Legally, an adult is anyone who is 18 years or older
■ However, new adults often learn more about:
● Relationships
● New possibilities
● Personal strengths
○ Physical Changes in Adulthood
■ Happens rather slowly, but does happen
● Weight gain
● Thinning and greying of hair
● Gradual decline in sensory abilities
■ Women around 50 start to experience menopause
● Menopause: the termination of the menstrual cycle and
reproductive ability
● Can produce hot flashes, reduced sex drive, and mood swings
■ Men don’t really go through this, it’s just harder for us to get it up
■ White and grey matter in the cerebral cortex reduces, as well as the
hippocampus
■ The prefrontal cortex and its connections to subcortical regions are also
affected
■ Dementia: disruption of mental functioning, memory loss, disorientation,
poor judgment and decision making
■ Alzheimer’s: a degenerative and terminal condition resulting in severe
damage of the entire brain
● This is due to proteins that clump together in the spaces between
neurons
○ Psychosocial Development across the Lifespan
■ Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development
● Divided the lifespan into 8 stages
○ Infancy: trust vs. mistrust
○ Toddlerhood: autonomy vs. shame and doubt
○ Preschool: initiative vs. guilt
○ Childhood: industry vs. inferiority
○ Adolescence: identity vs. role confusion
○ Young Adulthood: intimacy vs. isolation
○ Adulthood: generativity vs. stagnation
○ Aging: ego integrity vs. despair
● There is little research support for some aspects of his theory
○ Social Development: Intimacy and Generativity
■ Love and Marriage (ba-dum)
 ● 67% of Canadian families involve a married couple (from 70.5% in
2001)
● Common-law and lone-parent families are about 16%
● Being in a non-abusive relationship provided these benefits:
○ Greater health
○ Longer life
○ Increased happiness
● “Swinging single” is generally a myth
● However, about 40% of Canadian marriages end in divorce
● The “Four Horseman” of Divorce
○ Criticism
○ Contempt
○ Defensiveness
○ Stonewalling
■ Parenting
● Within the first two years of having children, marital satisfaction
tends to decline
● However, ‘empty nesters’ are just as satisfied as newlyweds
■ Career
● Generativity: being engaged in meaningful and productive work,
as well as making contributions to future generations
● Wage earnings, job interest, and relationship with managers all
play a role in how people feel about their jobs
■ Emotional Changes
● Generally, the emotional turmoil of youth subsides and is replaced
with stability and positivity
● People generally become more positive as they age (‘cranky old
men’ are not the norm)
● Socioemotional selectivity theory: describes how older people
have learned to pay more attention to positive experiences and set
goals that emphasize positive motions and meaningful connection

Chapter 11: Motivation and Emotion

● Hunger and Eating

○ The study of motivation concerns the physiological and psychological processes
underlying the initiation of behaviors that direct organisms toward specific goals
■ These initiating factors, or motives, include the thoughts, feelings,
sensations, and bodily processes that lead to goal-directed behavior
● E.g. when receptors sense a high concentration of compounds
that are typically diluted by water, they trigger and send signals to
the brain indicating thirst
■ The result is the sudden awareness that you are thirsty
 ● This is called a drive
● Drive: a biological trigger that tells us we may be deprived of
something and causes us to seek out what is needed
● When drives are satisfied, reward centers in our brain are
activated
■ Motivation is essential to an individual’s survival because it contributes to
homeostasis
● However, we’re not always motivated to engage in behaviors that
promote homeostasis (for example, stress eating)
● Motivation is not only influenced by current needs, but also by the
anticipation of future needs
○ This is called allostasis
■ This ability to predict the future isn’t perfect though.
○ Physiological Aspects of Hunger
■ Not simply a homeostatic mechanism
■ On and off switches involved in hunger are found in the lateral
hypothalamus and ventromedial hypothalamus, respectively.
● Detects changes in the level of glucose, a sugar and primary
energy source
● Insulin, from the pancreas, helps cells store circulating glucose
■ The brain influences the body and the body influences the brain
■ A full stomach is one cue for satiation
● Satiation: the point in a meal when we are no longer motivated to
eat
● Caused by cholecystokinin (CCK), released when the intestines
expand
■ Sometimes, formally pleasurable food can become aversive
● The orbitofrontal cortex judges the reward value of foods
● Multiple brain areas are involved when we are motivated to eat
○ Psychological Aspects of Hunger
■ We’ve evolved, for the most part, in a world where food was sometimes
scarce. We now live in a world where food is abundant nearly all of the
time.
■ We’ve developed bodies that prefer high-energy (calorically dense) foods
to others, like poutine and hamburgers.
● Receptors on the tongue seem to be sensitive to fat content of
food
● These receptors stimulate the release of endorphins and
dopamine
● In some situations, high-energy food can be a more powerful
reinforcer than high-quality drugs
■ Janice had greater cravings for fatty and sugary foods while stressed out
possibly because of ghrelin
 ● Stress modulates ghrelin, a hormone secreted in the stomach
● This hormone causes hunger pangs and increased appetite
● This result is likely because of evolutionary situations, where a
person who believed a threat was looming would prepare by
eating so they would be physically ready
○ It makes sense, honestly.
■ Attention and Eating
● The quantity of food we eat is not entirely controlled by the brain
or by evolutionary mechanisms
● The bottomless soup bowl study indicates that humans are bad at
figuring out when to stop eating
○ The bottomless group ate 70% more!
○ Unit bias: the idea that a unit of sale or portioning is an
appropriate amount to consume
■ We stuff ourselves at parties not only because we
can, but because we should.
■ Eating and the Social Context
● Social facilitation: Eating more (especially at Grandma’s house!)
● Impression Management: Eating less (we don’t wanna look like
pigs on a date, do we?)
● Modelling: Eating whatever others eat, or how they eat (Prof. Paré
told a story about how he met up with businesspeople who were
eating edamame with the skin on… so when in Rome!)
■ Overall, eating is a behavior motivated by biological, social, and individual
psychological factors.
○ Disorders of Eating
■ Obesity
● Obesity: a disorder of positive energy balance in which energy
intake exceeds energy expenditure
● 20% Canadians are obese (according to BMI), and 60% are
overweight
● Why, though?
○ Large amounts of foods available
○ Craving fatty, energy-rich foods, which are readily available
and cheap as fuck
■ This explains why obesity affects the poor more
than the rich
● Individual differences often contribute to obesity
○ Obese individuals have greater brain activity in response to
food than people of normal weight
■ Anorexia and Bulimia
● Anorexia nervosa: an eating disorder that involves (1) self
starvation, (2) intense fear of weight gain and dissatisfaction with
 one’s body, and (3) denial of the serious consequences of
severely low weight
● Bulimia nervosa: characterized by binging and purging (e.g.
puking)
○ Linked to impulsiveness
○ More likely to enter treatment programs than anorexics
■ Why do people get eating disorders, anyway?
● Patients with eating disorders report greater levels of premorbid
(before the disorder) stress than do similar people without eating
disorders
● Interacts with depression, guilt, anxiety, and perfectionism; low
self-esteem; suppressed anger
● Peer influence (pro-ana movements)
● It seems that people use eating disorders to cope with
difficult-to-control lives
■ Working the Model
● What do we know about the effect of media depictions of beauty
on body image?
○ It’s affected by the time period (take Marilyn Monroe, who
despite a thin waist, had a large bust and large hips)
○ Now, we want a super thin waist, big T+A, and that’s
basically impossible
● How can science explain the effect of the media on people’s body
image?
○ Increased exposure to media is related to greater
internalization of the slender ideal and a greater
dissatisfaction with one’s own body
● Can we critically evaluate this research?
○ They used brain imaging data
■ Anorexics showed increased activity in the
amygdala (fear and emotional arousal)
● Why is this relevant?
○ Understanding the relationship between the media and
disorders of body image allows professionals to help
image-conscious individuals
● Sex
○ Sex starts with the libido
■ Libido: the motivation for sexual activity and pleasure
○ Human Sexual Behavior: Psychological Influences
■ Sex frequently occurs without an end goal of reproduction
● You don’t say?
● This is observed in many other great ape species… and dolphins.
■ Psychological Measures of Sexual Motivation
 ● Kinsey
○ Interviewed thousands of people and published the results
in the Kinsey Reports
○ Quite flawed by modern standards, and very controversial
○ Reported, for example, that 37% of males had at least one
homosexual experience resulting in orgasm (compared to
13% for females)
○ He believed that homo and heterosexuality existed on a
continuum
○ Used questionnaires, still in use today
■ Why People Bang (Fig 11.6)
● For physical reasons
● To help attain a goal
● For emotional reasons
● Because of insecurity
○ Human Sexual Behavior: Physiological Influences
■ Physiological Measures of Sex
● Sexual arousal can affect what we pay attention to and how we
respond to it
● Masters and Johnsons
○ Described the human sexual response cycle
■ Describes the phases of physiological change
during sexual activity, which has four main stages
● Excitement
● Plateau
● Orgasm
● Shame Resolution
■ Men usually experience a single orgasm followed
by a refractory period: a time during which erection
and orgasm are not physically possible
■ Women can experience multiple climaxes and
resolutions
■ Stimulation of erogenous zones (breasts, nipples,
genitals) releases oxytocin
● Oxytocin: secreted by the hypothalamus,
plays a role in orgasm and post-orgasm, as
well as in the feeling of trust
■ After climax, dopamine levels decrease and
serotonin levels increase
● This means that the brain’s activity changes
once the motivation has been satisfied
■ Sexual Orientation: Biology and Environment
 ● Sexual orientation: the consistent preference for sexual relations
with members of the opposite sex, same sex, or either sex
● People can have sexual orientation without ever having sex
● Theories (that don’t hold water) for homosexuality
○ Seduction by an older playmate or sibling (Ellis and Ames,
1986)
○ A domineering mother and a weak father (Freud, 1905)
● LeVay: found that the area of the hypothalamus was smaller in
gay men (INAH3)
○ Some people took this to believe that homosexuality must
be genetic
○ However, development of the brain is not all due to genetic
factors!
○ These results have been difficult to replicate, and it was
found that these men had died of HIV
● Twin studies have found that homosexuality has a heritability of
between .3 and .6 for both men and women
○ This result has been replicated for gay men, but not for gay
women!
● It’s generally believed that both genetic AND environmental
factors come into play, but nothing is certain.
○ Human Sexual Behavior: Cultural Influences
■ Gender roles: the accepted attitudes and behaviors of males and females
in a given society
■ Sexual scripts have changed over time
● Sexual scripts: the set of rules and assumptions about the sexual
behaviors of males and females
○ Less general than gender roles, primarily to do with sex
● Men tended to see women as conquests and focus on their
physical attractiveness
● Females would be focused on a stable relationship with a man
with status, power, and resources
● This is likely due to the fact:
○ that children (the primary result of sex) require resources
and females generally did not produce goods for
themselves or own land,
○ that females have a limited amount of eggs and males
have an essentially unlimited amount of sperm,
○ and that men who could impregnate as many women as
possible had a higher chance of passing down their
genetic code
● Men have higher levels of testosterone
 ● Testosterone: a hormone involved in the development of sex
characteristics and the motivation of sexual behavior
● Sexual scripts are changing, and so is technology
● Women’s rights movement
● Contraception
● However, some cultures have more or less conservative sexual
views
○ Sex guilt: the feeling of guilt when thinking about or
engaging in sexual behavior
● Sexual scripts also exist in homosexuality
■ Sex and Technology
● Raise your hand if you’ve ever had sex with someone with whom
your first contact was online
○ *raises hand*
● It usually starts off with cybersex, too.
○ Cybersex: the use of the Internet to send sexually explicit
photos, videos, or messages
○ Be careful, though. If you’re under 18, you can be charged
with distribution of child pornography, even here in
Canada, and even if the pictures are of yourself!
■ Possession in Canada is okay, as long as the
pictures are consensual
■ Working the Model: Does Sex Sell
● Yes it does, MOVING ON
● However, females are less receptive to it, as are conservative
minded people.
○ Take a break from studying: do this quiz!
■ From a 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree), answer the following
questions:

1. I do not need to be committed to a person to have sex with him or her.

2. Casual sex is acceptable.
3. I would like to have sex with many partners.
4. One-night stands are sometimes enjoyable.
5. It is okay to have ongoing sexual relationships with more than one person
at a time.
6. Sex as a simple exchange of favors is okay if both people agree to it.
7. The best sex is with no strings attached.
8. Life would have fewer problems if people could have sex more freely.
9. It is possible to enjoy sex with a person and not like that person very
much.
10. It is okay for sex to be just a good physical release.
 ■ Add up your total and divide it by 10. 1 is ‘most liberal’ and 5 is ‘most
conservative’.
■ Men, on average, scored 3.63.
■ Women, on average, scored 4.47.
■ The author of these notes, a hetero man in a long-term committed
relationship, scored 2.9.
■ What’s your score?
● Social and Achievement Motivation
○ Belongingness and Love Needs
■ We all need food, shelter, water, etc. to survive. But there’s more that we
deeply need, without which we will feel unsatisfied.
■ Hierarchy of Needs
● Maslow: created one of the most well-known hierarchies of needs
that you will ever see in like half of your classes
○ Physiological Needs: food, water, shelter from the
elements
○ Safety Needs: freedom from danger and feeling of security
○ Social, Belongingness, and Love Needs: acceptance,
friends, and significant love
○ Esteem Needs: to achieve, competence, gain approval
■ Cognitive needs: to know, understand, and explore
■ Aesthetic needs: symmetry, order, beauty
○ Self-actualization Needs: to find self-fulfillment and realize
one’s own potential
● The hierarchy element is disputed, because we’ve all put
higher-order needs before lower-order ones
○ I get good grades (esteem), but I don’t put much work in
social relationships (social). I flip flop back and forth, with
some days being focused on hanging out and chill, other
days being focused on my grades and work.
■ Belonging is a NEED, not a WANT
● Affiliation motivation (need to belong): the motivation to maintain
relationships that involve pleasant feelings such as warmth,
affection, appreciation, and mutual concern for each other’s well
being
● We can’t live without it. We need it on a permanent basis.
○ The lonely executive making tons of money and doing
fulfilling work is likely less happy than the rural farmer who
is close with his family and community
● Loneliness is a risk factor for illnesses such as heart disease and
cancer
 ● Belonging is NOT the same as social interaction. Belonging to a
community is much more fulfilling than having social interactions
with strangers on a regular basis.
■ Love
● We form bonds of love with family and friends
● However, romantic relationships are often treated differently.
○ Passionate love: associated with a physical and emotional
longing for the other person
■ Think of it as ‘puppy love’
○ Companionate love: tenderness and the affection we feel
when our lives are intertwined with another
■ This is more what you might see with a married
couple that bickers a lot.
● The brain responses to images of loved ones were stronger in
dopamine-rich areas of the brain
○ They contain receptors for oxytocin
■ Love and Marriage Commitment
● Factors influencing commitment
○ Initial strength of the attraction
○ Barriers to leaving (religion, children, mutual friends)
○ The availability of alternatives
■ If you think you have options, you may want to
exercise them.
● Brain’s response to a breakup
○ Several days after the breakup, the brain responds to
images of that person like a drug addict craving a drug
○ However, as the days go by, the craving disappears.
○ So, in short, if you get dumped:
■ Don’t look at pictures of the person
■ Don’t talk about the person
■ And don’t look at anything that reminds you of the
person
○ Achievement Motivation
■ Achievement motivation: the drive to perform at high levels and to
accomplish significant goals
● This is a very strong force in human behavior
● For example, I know that getting an A in intro psych as a 4th year
won’t really help me much, and I know that in my field GPA barely
matters. But I want the grades to feel like I’ve accomplished
something! A 4.0 semester average is an accomplishment,
dammit!
■ Types of Goals
 ● Approach goal: an enjoyable and pleasant incentive that a person
is drawn toward, such as praise, financial reward, or a feeling of
satisfaction
○ If I get a 4.0, I get respect from family and friends.
● Avoidance goal: an attempt to avoid an unpleasant outcome such
as shame, embarrassment, losing money, or feeling emotional
pain
○ Some of you guys are trying to get 4.0’s to prevent your
parents from hitting you with a cane, or disowning you, or
marrying you off to that ugly dude from the rich family.
■ Describing achievement motivation SOUNDS simple, in this way… but it’s
really not. Let’s read about some theories to explain it.
■ Self-Determination Theory
● Pros and cons of a goal don’t really tell the whole story.
● Some basic needs concerning goals:
○ Relatedness: feeling connected with others.
○ Autonomy: the need to feel in control of your own life
○ Competence: the ability to perform a task at a skill level
that is satisfying to the individual
■ Influenced by how competent we THINK we are or
self-efficacy
● All these themes are part of self-determination theory
○ Self-determination theory: a theory that states that an
individual’s ability to achieve their goals and attain
psychological well-being is influenced by the degree to
which he or she is in control of the behaviors necessary to
achieve those goals
○ By achieving this control, we get motivation and more
happiness
■ Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation
● Extrinsic motivation (performance motive): motivation geared
toward gaining rewards or public recognition, or avoiding
embarrassment
● Amotivational: feeling of having little or no motivation to perform a
behavior
○ Often caused by a large amount of extrinsic motivation
● Intrinsic motivation (mastery motive): the process of being
internally motivated to perform behaviors and overcoming
challenges
○ I get A’s not because I’m gonna get a good job after
university (I’m not), or because my parents need me to get
good grades (they don’t), or because I’m trying to go to
post-university schooling (I’m not). I enjoy the grind, even
 when I hate it, and I enjoy being able to overcome things
that many others cannot. No one will congratulate me, but I
don’t need their congratulations.
■ The above statement is 100% bullshit I need
validation all the time please tell me I’m smart and
good looking
● Experiment on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
○ Children praised for being smart tended to feel less
pleasure during learning and instead tended to worry about
how well they were doing
■ Performed poorly
○ Children praised for their effort performed better
■ A Continuum of Motivation
● These things are not mutually exclusive from each other. They
seem to exist on a continuum.
● If you give someone a reward for an intrinsically motivated
behavior, the intrinsic motivation decreases.
○ This is the Overjustification effect, and likely due to the
change in autonomy associated with the achievement
● Emotion
○ Emotion: a behavior with the following three components:
■ Subjective thought or experience,
■ Accompanying patterns of neural activity and physical arousal
■ An observable behavioral expression
○ Physiology of Emotion
■ Emotional behaviors are quite complex and involve a number of different
components or stages
■ Each stage uses a distinct set of brain regions
■ Your emotional system allows for later stages to provide feedback to
earlier stages
■ The Initial Response
● The brain shows emotion-dependent responses within 150 ms of
seeing or hearing a potential threat
○ This is to tag or highlight that stimulus so it receives extra
processing by brain structures at later stages of perception
○ That’s why it happens so early.
● The amygdala is the brain area critical in this process
○ Located in the medial portion of the temporal lobes in each
hemisphere of the brain
○ Fires when we are exposed to emotionally arousing stimuli
○ Especially sensitive to images and sounds
○ It fires to specific parts of the brain depending on what the
stimulus is
 ■ The Autonomic Response: Fight or Flight
● The autonomic nervous system specializes in this rapid
preparation for a crucial event
● Split into two systems
○ The sympathetic nervous system, which is directly
responsible for the fight or flight response
○ The parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible
for calming you down after the event is over
■ The Emotional Response: Movement
● Research has found that emotional stimuli (particularly threatening
emotional stimuli) trigger an increase in activity in brain areas
related to planning movement and in regions of the spinal cord
■ Emotional Regulation
● This is the last stage and is also the most complex
● The frontal lobes receive info from the amygdala and from sensory
areas
● Then, they must determine whether the instinctual emotional
response is the best one
● This is important for making sure that the ANS isn’t depleting
resources
○ Experiencing Emotions
■ How are the physiological response and the psychological (feeling)
response related?
■ James-Lange theory of emotion
● Suggested that our physiological reaction to stimuli precede the
emotional experience
● It suggests that your feeling of fear is determined by how your
body responds
● Example
○ Stimulus is perceived
○ Heart starts to race
○ Brain receives feedback about the racing heart
○ You feel fear
● This is contradictory to common sense!
■ Cannon-Bard theory of emotion
● Suggested that the brain interprets a situation and generates
subjective emotional feelings, then these representations in the
brain trigger responses in the body
● Suggests that these emotional processes occur quickly and
simultaneously
● However, there’s more empirical support for James-Lange than for
Cannon-Bard, oddly enough.
■ Facial feedback hypothesis
 ● Suggests that our emotional expressions can influence our
subjective emotional states
● It has quite a bit of empirical support, and some common sayings
derive from this
○ Smile, you’ll feel better!
■ Physical touch also has a bit to do with our emotional responses
■ Working the Model
● What do we know about the two-factor theory of emotions
○ Two-factor theory: holds that patterns of physical arousal
and the cognitive labels we attach to them form the basis
of our emotional experiences
● The rest is unnecessary this time. Lmao
○ Expressing Emotions
■ We’re bad at detecting liars. Turns out, so are polygraph tests.
■ This is because we’re able to hide a lot of the responses that often
accompany lies.
■ Emotional Faces and Bodies
● Our primary method of communicating our emotional feelings is
through our facial expression
● Some expressions:
○ Crinkling of muscles near the eye (orbicularis oculi)
○ Movement of the mouth (zygomatic major)
● But why?
○ Researchers here at the University of Toronto found that
the disgust face (crinkling the nose, frowning, scrunching
the eyes) reduces airflow to the nose
● Darwin was the first to recognize that facial expressions of
emotions were universal, throughout all cultures
○ Ekman followed this up by going to Papua New Guinea
and meeting an uncontacted tribe. Turns out, they were
able to recognize the emotions that European faces made
● Faces aren’t the only thing that show emotions, there’s also body
language.
○ Body language can show off just as much as facial
expressions can!
■ Culture, Emotion, and Display Rules
● Cultural groups have unique emotional dialects, or variations
across cultures in how common emotions are expressed
● They also have different display rules
○ Display rules: the unwritten expectations we have
regarding when it is appropriate to show a certain emotion
 ■ In Japan, for example, it’s inappropriate to show
embarrassment, so if they are embarrassed, they’ll
smile
● People must also attempt to figure out why a person is expressing
that emotion
○ Western countries focus on the persons expressing the
emotion, Eastern countries tend to focus on those around
the person expressing that emotion
Chapter 12: Personality

● Contemporary Approaches to Personality

○ Personality: a characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving that is
unique to each individual, and remains consistent over time and situations
○ We often adopt an idiographic approach when we think about personality
■ Idiographic approach: focused on individual people
■ Example: My boy Eddie has a laid-back personality and is generally pretty
trustworthy, but he’s too easy to clown on and sometimes takes it
personally.
■ Another example: I’m a bit of a dick.
○ Psychologists tend to take a nomothetic approach when discussing personality
■ Nomothetic approach: focusing on large groups of people, or the average,
and attempt to generalize to those large groups
○ The Trait Perspective
■ Who are you?
● Take a break from studying! Write down 10 things to describe what
kind of person you are.
● Example: I am:
○ Generally laid back
○ Someone who is generally nice to everyone
○ A bit self-centered and self-involved, but I’ll do my best to
avoid seeming that way
○ Easy to talk to
○ Prefers serious friendships over acquaintances, prefers
long-term romance over one-night stands
○ Loyal, won’t stab you in the back
○ Methodical and analytical
○ Not too emotional, will rarely express anger, sadness, or
happiness
○ Patient
○ A sexy beast (editor’s note: see #3; he’s not good at hiding
it)
■ Allport tallied about 18,000 different traits to explain how humans are!
● That’s too damn many, Let’s do some factor analysis!
 ● Factor analysis: grouping items that are correlated well to each
other and coming up with a smaller number of factors
■ Currently, there are a lot of different personality quizzes and tests, like on
Buzzfeed.
■ However, the Barnum effect (the effect where people end up applying
extremely general statements to themselves) is apparently on many of
these tests!
● This explains horoscopes and psychics, which are complete
bullshit, by the way.
■ The Five Factor Model
● Cattell came up with 16 key personality traits.
● Then, McCrae and Costa created the Five Factor Model
○ Five Factor Model: a trait-based theory of personality
based on the finding that personality can be described
using five major dimensions
● These are the Big Five, the OCEAN Five, that you will hear about
a ton in later classes.
○ Openness: curiosity, open-mindedness, creativity
■ High O: very curious and open minded
■ Low O: rigid, conventional, prefer to follow the rules
○ Conscientiousness: efficiency, organization, self-discipline
■ High C: reliable, meets deadlines, meticulous, has
high attention to detail
■ Low C: messy, unreliable, tends to be late
○ Extraversion: social, open to people
■ High E: highly social, prefer parties to staying in
■ Low E: reserved, quiet, prefer to stay in than party
○ Agreeableness: friendliness and warmth
■ High A: good-natured, trusting, supportive
■ Low A: rude, uncooperative, hostile, competitive
○ Neuroticism: insecurity and emotionality
■ High N: insecure, anxious, emotional
■ Low N: tranquil, emotionally stable, zen
■ Beyond the Big Five: The Personality of Evil?
● Humans are able to commit some horrible atrocities, and we’re not
talking just about Hitler or Stalin. We’re interested in the type of
person who would follow Hitler or Stalin not out of fear, but out of
belief.
● Adorno: suggested that there was a personality type called the
authoritarian personality
○ Authoritarians are supposedly rigid, dogmatic, and
believed strongly in the concept of Us vs. Them
 ● HEXACO model: six factors, adding the HH (Honesty-Humility)
factor
○ High HH: sincere, honest, faithful, modest
○ Low HH: deceitful, greedy, pompous
● Dark Triad: Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism
○ Machiavellianism: the tendency to use people
○ Psychopathy: general tendency toward shallow emotional
responses, preferring stimulation over empathy
○ Narcissism: a preoccupation with self-image and an
excessive focus on self-importance
○ But not all people are this kind of evil: this is a special kind
of evil typically found in people who climb to the top by
stepping on others.
● Right-Wing Authoritarianism: a set of characteristics, such as:
○ Obeying orders and deferring to the established authorities
in a society
○ Supporting aggression against those who dissent or differ
from the established social order
○ Believing strongly in maintaining the existing social order
○ Right-Wing authoritarians have a strong sense of Us vs.
Them and tend to be very prejudiced
■ Interestingly enough, researchers have found that
this correlates to a lower IQ. Funny, that?
■ Personality Traits Over the Lifespan
● The reality is: a lot of aspects of ourselves change over time
○ For instance: I was very shy as a kid. Now, I have no issue
going out of my way to talk to people. I even enjoy doing
so. However, I still do feel a bit awkward when people try
and talk to me, so some of it is still there.
● In child development studies, researchers have found that infants
possess different temperaments from birth.
○ Some kids are more happy-go-lucky, others are often
grumpy and cranky
○ This isn’t necessarily anyone’s fault!
● It was found that temperament at age 3 was strongly predictive of
behavioral tendencies, personality, and life outcomes many years
later
○ Well-adjusted: capable of self-control, confident, not overly
upset by new people or situations
○ Under-controlled: impulsive, restless, excitable, distractible
○ Inhibited: socially uncomfortable, fearful, easily upset by
strangers
 ● The under-controlled children were more likely to engage in
externalizing behaviors (fighting, bullying, lying, disobeying) and
internalizing behaviors (worrying, being fussy, crying easily)
● The inhibited children were more likely to engage in internalizing
factors
● Personality tends to reinforce itself over time
○ Conscientious people will often attribute part of their
success to their meticulousness, and this will reinforce
itself
○ This also makes sense in the context of neurons, which, as
they fire more often, develop stronger synapses
● “In most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like
plaster, and will never soften again” (William James, 1890)
○ Personality stability increases over time, too.
● However, emotional responses decrease over time, as well,
indicating a decrease in neuroticism
● What causes personality changes?
○ Environment, likely.
■ Personality Traits and States
● State: temporary physical or psychological engagement that
influences behavior
○ Behaviorist and Social-Cognitive Perspectives
■ Behaviorists believe primarily that everything about individual differences
between people can be explained through environmental factors
■ Skinner, for example, believed that personality was just a description of
the response tendencies that occur in different situations
■ A behaviorist might find a label like ‘extraversion’ unnecessary
■ Bandura
● Believed in reciprocal determinism: behavior, internal, and external
factors interact to determine one another and that our
personalities are based on interactions among these three aspects
● Cultural and Biological Approaches to Personality
○ Culture and Personality
■ WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic
● 96% of psychology studies have been conducted on people from
WEIRD cultures
■ Universals and Differences Across Cultures: The Big Five
● Turns out… people in different cultures DO share basic personality
structures!
■ Personality Structures in Different Cultures
● When looking at Chinese personality traits using Chinese words
and ideas, they found 26 new personality traits in total and
developed a new structure different than the Big Five
 ○ Neuroticism (dependability)
○ Extraversion (social potency)
○ Agreeableness (individualism)
○ Interpersonal relatedness (no cognate!)
■ People with high IR emphasize social harmony,
tradition, and an emphasis on one’s social
relationships
■ Comparing Personality Traits Between Nations
● Extraversion
○ Highest: Serbia and Croatia
○ Lowest: Bangladesh and France
● Openness
○ Highest: Chile and Belgium
○ Lowest: Hong Kong and Japan
● Agreeableness
○ Highest: Jordan, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)
○ Lowest: Japan, Lithuania
● Conscientiousness
○ Highest: Ethiopia, DRC
○ Lowest: Japan, South Korea
● Neuroticism
○ Highest: Japan, Argentina
○ Lowest: DRC, Slovenia
● These findings are very interesting, especially since Japan values
high agreeableness, high conscientiousness, and low neuroticism!
○ It’s likely that Japanese people were likely to rate
themselves lower due to their own self-critiquing style!
■ Challenges in Cross-Cultural Research
● Translation
● Response styles
● Essentializing cultural differences
○ Thinking that there are essential core differences between
cultures
○ How Genes Affect Personality
■ Twin Studies
● Identical twins raised in different households were quite similar in
many ways, more similar than fraternal twins in the same situation.
● Siblings who are adopted and raised in the same household are
no more similar in personality than two people picked randomly off
the street
■ Chromosome 17
● There’s an allele on this chromosome that affects personality:
specifically, a preference for positive images over negative ones
 ● A short allele and a long one= no preference.
● 2 short alleles = prefer negative images
● 2 long alleles = prefer positive images
○ The Role of Evolution in Personality
■ Animal Behavior: The Evolutionary Roots of Personality
● Dogs have personalities, too. So do pigs, cats, and horses.
○ Although, this might be due to our need to
anthropomorphize the animals in our lives.
● Particularly, one species of bird (Parus major) has two very distinct
personality types: fast-exploring and slow-exploring.
● Chimps share 3 of the 5 personality traits with us: extraversion,
conscientiousness, and agreeableness!
■ Why so many different personalities?
● There seems to be an evolutionary basis.
● Extroverts: tend to be risk-takers, but they also tend to rise in
social hierarchy.
● High-C’s: tend to be reliable partners and providers, but can also
lack spontaneity.
● There’s other examples.
■ Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus
● Men and women tend to differ on their Big Five ratings
○ Women are higher on all but openness
● But there’s more individual variability than there is between
genders.
● Highly industrialized countries tend to note larger differences
between men and women, likely because the increased wealth of
a country makes it easier to stratify gender roles.
● At the end of the day, though, men and women are from Earth.
○ The Brain and Personality
■ Humorism: explained illnesses of the body and brain as resulting from
imbalances in key fluids in the body: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow
bile
■ Phrenology: the theory that personality characteristics could be assessed
by measuring the outer skull
■ Extraversion and Arousal
● Arousal theory of extraversion (Eysenck)
○ Argues that extraversion is determined by people’s
threshold for arousal
○ Extraverts have a higher threshold for arousal, according
to the theory
○ The ascending reticular activating system plays a central
role in controlling this arousal response
 ■ Introverts have a higher level of reactivity, rather
than higher level of arousal, in the ARAS
● Approach model of inhibition
○ Behavioral activation system: arouses the person to action
in the pursuit of desired goals (the ‘go’ system, like Charlie
Sheen)
■ Extraversion is related to this
○ Behavioral inhibition system: a danger system, motivating
the person to action in order to avoid punishments or
negative outcomes
■ Neuroticism is related to this
■ Contemporary Research: Images of Personality in the Brain
● Extraverts have a larger medial orbitofrontal cortex (reward center)
and have less activation in the amygdala (the emotional/fear
center)
● Neuroticism is associated with a smaller dorsomedial prefrontal
cortex (emotional control center) and hippocampus (helps control
excessive negative thinking), and a larger mid-cingulate gyrus
(perceives pain)
● Agreeableness: high A’s have smaller left superior temporal sulcus
(activated when one interprets another’s actions or intentions),
and a larger posterior cingulate cortex (involved in empathy)
● Conscientiousness: high C’s have larger middle frontal gyrus
(involved working memory processes and carrying out plans)
● Openness: high O’s have more activation in the dorsolateral
prefrontal cortex (involved in creativity and intelligence)
● These differences are likely not causal, but are just associated
with these traits.
● Psychodynamic and Humanistic Approaches to Personality
○ Interesting Aside: Maslow’s Observations of the Self-Actualized
■ Attuned to reality as it is, rather than engaging in wishful thinking or
filtering their experiences through their wants and needs
■ Strive to be authentic, rather than bowing to social pressures or fearing
the judgment of others
■ Spontaneous, creative, with free and natural responses to their
circumstances
■ Ground their awareness firmly in the present moment, not dwelling on the
past or dreaming of a brighter future
■ Possess a profound capacity for gratitude, appreciation, and wonder,
taking great delight in the world around them
■ Experience a strong-universal sense of connection and empathy for all of
humanity
 ■ Frequently seem to have ‘peak experiences’: moments of awe, ecstasy,
wonder, and feeling one with the universe.
○ Freud: we make fun of him now, and kind of see him as a quack.
■ However, he was quite influential, particularly on his ideas of personality.
■ Some words he coined are in common use today, such as ‘repressing
harmful memories’ or ‘regressing to childhood’ or ‘projecting one’s beliefs
and actions on another’.
■ Freud was able to locate eel testicles (such a Freudian thing to do)
■ Freud was a doctor: a neurologist and a physician.
○ The Psychodynamic Perspective
■ Essentially, we have very little control with our thoughts and actions.
■ Everything we think, feel, and do comes from some unconscious place.
■ Unconscious Processes and Psychodynamics
● Conscious mind: current awareness, containing everything you
are aware of right now
● Unconscious mind: a vast, inaccessible part of the consciousness,
operating in the background without our awareness or will
○ Freud believed that inadvertent behaviors or slips of the
tongue were due to the subconscious
○ “I, Ross, take thee, Rachel…”
● Think of it like an iceberg floating in the water. The conscious mind
is just the tip of the iceberg.
■ The Structure of Personality
● Id: represents a collection of basic biological drives, including
those directed toward sex and aggression
○ Fueled by the libido, which controls the biological drives of
sex, hunger, and aggression
○ Operates according to the pleasure principle: motivating
people to seek out experiences that bring pleasure
○ Freud believed the workings of the id were related to things
that society found unacceptable.
● Superego: comprised of our values and moral standards
○ The angel on the shoulder, being the upstanding citizen
that God and the Queen want you to be.
● Ego: exists in between and makes the decisions, frequently under
tension, and reconciles the opposing urges of the id and superego
● The idea behind personality is that personality is dependent on
how strong the id, ego and superego are relative to each other
● Anxiety is felt because of that tension between the id and
superego, and the ego defends against it
■ Defense Mechanisms
● Defense mechanism: an unconscious strategy the ego uses to
reduce or avoid anxiety
 ● Examples:
○ Repression: holding it inside and ‘forgetting’ about it
○ Denial: refusing to acknowledge unpleasant information
(especially about oneself)
○ Rationalization: hiding true motives by providing what
seems like a reasonable explanation for unacceptable
feelings or behaviors
○ Displacement: transforming an unacceptable impulse into
a less unacceptable or neutral behavior
○ Identification: unconsciously assuming the characteristics
of a more powerful person in order to reduce negative
feelings about oneself
○ Projection: attributing negative qualities about oneself to
other groups of people
○ Reaction formation: altering an impulse that one find
personally unacceptable into the opposite (homophobia
when you’re gay, etc.)
○ Sublimation: transforming unacceptable impulses into
socially acceptable or even pro-social alternatives
■ Personality Development: The Psychosexual Stages
● This is where the bullshit really begins. Hope you’re ready.
● Basically, Freud believed that people progress sexually through 5
stages between birth and adulthood.
● He believed that one should progress properly, otherwise they will
develop fixations
○ Fixation: becoming preoccupied with obtaining the
pleasure associated with a particular stage
● The stages:
○ Oral stage: birth to 18 months
■ Putting things in your mouth: sucking, biting, and
nomming in general on things
■ To prevent fixations, one must be weaned off of the
comfort object (the nipple, the pacifier, or the
thumb)
■ Not progressing through this stage properly causes
people to develop oral habits such as chewing
gum, smoking, or biting nails.
■ Freud theorized that this kind of person will tend to
overindulge.
○ Anal stage: 2 to 3 years
■ This deals with the toddler learning control of their
bowel and bladder movements. They need to learn
how to competently do so to prevent fixations
 ■ If parents did not control their child:
● They become anal expulsive: slovenly,
disorganized, and irresponsible
■ If parents were too harsh on their child:
● They become anal retentive: rigid,
compulsive, and obsessive
○ Phallic stage: 3 to 6 years
■ Children start to learn the genital differences
between boys and girls
■ Freud used highly sexual language to describe this
stage, despite the fact that children don’t even have
words to describe these things!
■ Boys tend to go through an Oedipus complex:
being attracted to their mother, fearing their father,
and seeing him as competition
■ Girls tend to go through an Electra complex: being
attracted to their father, fearing their mother and
seeing her as competition
● Freud did not like this term, as he believed it
was different
● He believed in penis envy: that girls
WANTED a penis because their fathers had
one, and that this continues through
adulthood
● This idea was that women will try to
dominate men using sex and
passive-aggression
■ Fixations include:
● Being preoccupied with sex, seduction, and
competitiveness
● Being a less moral being
○ Latency stage (5 to 13)
■ Nothing happens till puberty, really.
■ Boys identify with their fathers, girls identify with
their mothers
■ Boys play with boys, girls play with girls, and they
remain uninterested in each other in general.
○ Genital stage (Puberty to adulthood)
■ Remaining fixated on any previous stage, by the
time they get to this stage they will have a host of
psychological problems.
■ This is the stage where boys and girls develop
attractions for each other.
 ■ Exploring the Unconscious with Projective Tests
● Projective tests: personality tests in which ambiguous images are
presented to an individual to elicit responses that reflect
unconscious desires or conflicts
○ Rorschach inkblot test: taking an inkblot with no real
imagery and asking the patient what they see
○ Thematic Apperception Test: taking a picture and asking
the patient to tell the story behind it
○ Alternatives to the Psychodynamic Approach
■ Analytical psychology: focuses on the role of unconscious archetypes in
personality development
● Developed by Carl Jung
● Two main types of the unconscious
○ Personal unconscious: a vast repository of experiences
and patterns that were absorbed during the entire
experiential unfolding of life
○ Collective unconscious: a separate realm that holds the
collective memories and mythologies of humankind,
stretching deep into our ancestral past
■ Archetypes: images and symbols that reflect common truths across
cultures, such as universal life experiences or types of people
■ Adler: argued for the importance of social dynamics and conscious
thoughts
● Inferiority complex: the struggle with feelings of inferiority, which
stem from experiences of helplessness and powerlessness during
childhood
■ Horney: ironically, disagreed with Freud’s emphasis on sex and sexuality
(especially as it pertained to children)
● Womb envy: the opposite of penis envy, implying that men feel
separated from the development of life
○ Humanistic Perspectives
■ Rogers: championed a person-centred perspective, founded on the
principle that people are basically good and with the right environment will
develop normally
■ Positive psychology: the idea that psychology is not just the study of
pathology, weakness, and damage, but also the study of virtue

Chapter 13: Social Psychology

● The Power of the Situation: Social Influences on Behavior

○ The Person and the Situation
■ Most of us grow up with a clear distinction between right and wrong, good
vs. evil.
■ Normal people don’t torture or murder people, we say. However, Phil
Zimbardo had a different view.
● Abu Ghraib was a prison in Iraq where US soldiers were found to
have mistreated inmates… and took photos
● Abu Ghraib: lack of supervision, non-military personnel, stress and
exhaustion experienced by soldiers, language and cultural
barriers, and of course the fact that they were in charge of
prisoners
● It’s too simplistic to blame the individuals: you have to look at the
situational forces
■ We assume that people have free will, but why do they act in ways that
are quite horrifying?
■ Lewin: said that B = f(P,E) (Behavior is a function of the Person and the
Environment)
● This challenges both behaviorism and Freudian theories
● It focuses primarily on the present moment
■ Mimicry
● Mimicry: taking on for ourselves the behaviors, emotional displays,
and facial expressions of others
● We often follow the herd unconsciously, likely as a result of how
we tend to learn
● The vast bulk of our conscious behavior is determined through
implicit processes that we are not aware of
● The cerebellum is involved with the motor system and procedural
learning
● It relies on patterns formed through active, embodied learning that
forms procedural knowledge networks
● Because of this, we can see that what the body does is important
to learning behaviors
● The chameleon effect: how people mimic others non-consciously,
automatically copying others’ behaviors even without realizing it
○ Acts a sort of ‘social glue’ to help people feel reassured
and validated by each other
● People often use mimicry on purpose to get people to like them:
and it works
● In general, people find it difficult to resist the influence of others
○ What if the crowd is going in a morally wrong direction?
● We often conform to social norms that are evident in a situation
○ Social norms: typically unwritten guidelines for how to
behave in social contexts
○ They influence everything and govern our behavior even
when we don’t realize it
■ Group Dynamics: Social Loafing and Social Facilitation
 ● Groups can produce poorer outcomes due to social loafing
○ Social loafing: when an individual puts less efforts into
working on a task with others
● People loaf for many reasons, such as:
○ Low efficacy beliefs
○ Believing that one’s contributions are not important to the
group
○ Not caring about the group’s outcome
○ Feeling like others are not trying very hard
● Social facilitation can produce better outcomes
○ Social facilitation: when one’s performance is affected by
the presence of others
○ Example: Triplett found that cyclists ride faster when racing
against each other than when trying to beat the clock
● The presence of others is likely to interfere with our performance
when our skills are poor or the task is difficult
● Explanation for social facilitation
○ The presence of others is arousing, which tends to
strengthen our dominant responses (the way we are
typically going to do a task)
■ The simpler the task, the more this applies
■ Groupthink
● The pressures that build within groups also limit creativity, shutting
down the ability for different perspectives to be heard or
considered
● This causes group brainstorming to be less effective
● Brainstorming can work if group members trust each other and
accept others’ ideas
● People often hold back their ideas due to this pressure
● Groupthink: the stifling of diversity that occurs when individuals
are not able to express their true perspectives, instead having to
focus on agreeing with others and maintaining harmony in the
group
● Three main problems with avoiding disagreements:
○ Group members may minimize or ignore potential
problems and risks in the ideas they’re considering
○ They may apply social pressure to influence people who
are not fully in support
○ The group often becomes overconfident and fails to think
critically about its conclusions
● Works similarly to an abusive household
 ● When groupthink occurs, there is a directive leader who
suppresses dissenters and encourages the group to consider
fewer alternatives
● Groupthink is also likely to occur in groups of similar people
○ The Asch Experiments: Conformity
■ Asch gave people an easy task (choose the line that is the exact same as
the other line)
■ Then, he had people do this in a room with confederates who gave out
the wrong answers on purpose
■ When done individually, people typically got the answers right 100% of
the time
■ When done in a group with the confederates, 75% of people gave the
wrong answer on at least one of the trials and 33% of the participants
conformed altogether.
■ Conformity can happen through normative influence or informational
influence
● Normative influence: a social pressure to adopt a group’s
perspective in order to be accepted
● Informational influence: occurs when people internalize the values
and beliefs of the group, coming to believe the same things
■ Informational influence leads more directly to the person privately
accepting the group norm
■ When there are 3 or more other people, conformity rates instantly reach
their maximum level
■ Group norms are created every day in various situations, such as
gossiping groups, homeowner’s associations, and lunch tables
■ A single dissenting voice can shatter the power of the group, reducing
conformity to 25% of its original level
○ The Bystander Effect: Situational Influences on Helping Behavior
■ Kitty Genovese: attacked and murdered outside of an apartment complex
with 38 people watching from their windows
■ The bystander effect: describes the finding that the presence of other
people actually reduces the likelihood of helping behavior.
■ Some reasons for this:
● Someone else has probably done something.
● What if nothing is actually wrong?
■ Diffusion of responsibility: occurs when the responsibility for taking action
is spread across more than one person, thus making no single individual
feel personally responsible
■ Pluralistic ignorance: occurs when there is a disjunction between the
private beliefs of individuals and the public behavior they display to others
■ Smoke-filled room study:
 ● When alone, people examined the smoke filled room and looked
for the experimenter, tried to leave
● When in a group of people, nobody takes any action
■ Pluralistic ignorance is part of the reasons why uprisings and revolutions
typically don’t occur, and when they do, they occur quickly and seemingly
out of nowhere
■ Social roles: specific sets of expectation for how someone in a specific
position should behave
● If you are in an emergency situation, call someone out specifically
and ask them for help. They will be likely to behave consistently
with the role.
○ Social Roles: The Stanford Prison Study
■ A mock prison turned psychologically damaging, prisoners and guards
adapted extremely quickly to their roles
■ There were at least 50 outside observers and nobody questioned the
ethics until one person spoke up
■ A role, even a randomly assigned role, can make well adjusted people do
things that they would never dream possible for themselves
■ However, not all people were affected equally: some became rogue cops
and were the most damaging to the prisoners. Others were good cops
who were nice to the prisoners
○ Obedience to Authority: The Milgram Experiment
■ Participants were told that the study was about the effects of punishment
on learning memory
■ They were told to use electric shock on a confederate (which they thought
was another participant, but was just an actor who was pretending to be
shocked
■ The shocks would be stronger every time, eventually until the confederate
stopped responding at all.
■ If the participant asked to leave, they would be told ‘The experiment
requires that you continue’.
■ Most (65%) people bowed to authority pressure, even after the
confederate was telling them to stop
■ Two powerful variations
● When the two confederate “teachers” refused to continue the
experiment, 90% of students would also refuse
● When the subject “teacher” was not the one giving the shocks,
92.5% of people would continue to the end
■ Milgram designed these studies to provide insight into what happened
during the Holocaust
■ Turns out, it’s not a question of good vs. evil, but rather a question of the
power of social situations
● Social Cognition
○ The field of social-cognitive psychology is a fusion of social psychology’s
emphasis on social situations, with cognitive psychology’s emphasis on
cognitions (perceptions, thoughts, and beliefs)
■ Essentially, cognitions about social situations
■ Two major types of processes
● Explicit processes: conscious thought; deliberative, effortful, slow,
and under our intentional control
● Implicit processes: unconscious thought; intuitive, automatic,
effortless, fast, and outside our intentional control
○ A larger set of patterns
○ Lower-level (construal) processes
● These two sets of processes work together to:
○ Regulate our bodies
○ Update our perceptions
○ Infuse emotional meaning to experiences
○ Affect how we think, make decisions, self reflect
● Explicit processes influence implicit processes when our beliefs
influence how we process information
● Implicit processes can influence explicit processes as well
○ Example: when our stereotypes influence decisions
○ Black man stereotype: must be dangerous, suspicious. If
I’m a police officer, why is he running from me unless he
has something to hide? He must be reaching for a gun.
○ When these are faulty, it’s hard to protect ourselves from
their influence
● Dual-process models: models of behavior that account for both
implicit and explicit processes
○ Person Perception
■ Person perception: the processes by which individuals categorize and
form judgments about other people
● Guided by past experiences and interpersonal knowledge from the
culture
● We rely on our schemas (organized clusters of knowledge, beliefs,
and expectations) to guide our beliefs
■ Thin Slices of Behavior
● Implicit processes can be instantaneous
○ Within the first minute, we’ve already evaluated someone
● Thin slices of behavior: very small samples of a person’s behavior
that we make judgments based on
● We also judge people by their face, often within half a second
○ Oddly enough, we’re often correct.
■ Self-fulfilling Prophecies and Other Consequences of First Impressions
● A jury will treat a defendant often based on these very simple cues
 ● Self-fulfilling prophecies: when a first impression (or expectation)
affects one’s behavior, then that affects others’ behaviors which
leads them to confirm the initial expectation
○ Your beliefs affect your actions, which affect others’
actions, which reinforce those initial beliefs
○ Example: teachers told a group of students that they were
exceptional: their IQs jumped dramatically. Telling them
this influenced the way teachers taught, which influenced
the students’ learning, which influenced the teacher’s
impression, which influenced the students’ impressions of
themselves.
○ The Self in the Social World
■ We have a schema about ourselves that we use to judge others
● We tend to think the way we are is the way people should be
● We have a tendency to split people into Us vs. Them, and we see
Us more positively than we see Them
● In the quest to feel good about ourselves, we sow the seeds that
grow into distrust, prejudice, and discrimination. This causes
suffering to others.
■ Projecting the Self onto Others: False Consensus and Naive Realism
● We tend to project our self-concepts onto the social world
● False consensus effect: the tendency to project the self-concept
onto the social world
● Naive realism: we also tend to assume the way we see things is
the way things are
○ Works both ways, too: if you have no trust in your own
judgments of reality, your life will be filled with doubts and
stress
■ Self-Serving Biases and Attributions
● Naive realism represents a tendency to want to have high self
esteem
● We prefer self-esteem boosts to many other forms of pleasure
● Self-serving biases: biased ways of processing self-relevant
information to enhance our positive self evaluation
○ We take credit for our successes but attribute failures to
others or bad luck
○ We also tend to assume that we are better than average
■ A 3.11 GPA must be above average! :D
● This bleeds into our evaluations of other things: for example, we
prefer the letters in our initials to other letters
● These processes also influence the types of attributions that we
make for our own and others’ behaviors
 ● Internal attribution: whereby one explains the behavior of another
in terms of some innate quality of that other person
○ Someone cut me off on the freeway. Fuck em, they’re an
asshole! They probably beat their kids and cheat on their
tax returns!
● External attribution: whereby one explains the behavior of another
as a result of the situation
○ Someone cut me off on the freeway. Well, they’re probably
late for something important!
● Fundamental attribution error (FAE): the tendency to
overemphasize internal attributions over external ones
● When we explain our own behaviors, we tend to use attributions
that paint us in the best light
○ Yea, I might be a convicted felon and sex offender, but first
of all (1) I was poor, I sold drugs to pay the bills and (2)
how the fuck was I supposed to know she was 14? What,
should I ask for ID every time I pick up a girl from the bar?
She was at a bar for fuck’s sake!
○ That one’s a bit extreme. Fine. How about: I failed that
exam because I got a question I wasn’t expecting! It wasn’t
anywhere on the practice questions! It threw me off and
made me answer poorly for all the rest of the test.
● FAE is more apparent in individualistic cultures
○ Take that, Randians!
■ Ingroups and Outgroups
● Ingroups: groups we feel positively toward and identify with
○ Family, ethnicity, sports team, nationality, friend group
● Outgroups: groups we don’t identify with
○ Basically, one’s ingroup is another’s outgroup
● We tend to categorize ingroups as “Us” and outgroups as “Them
○ See where this gets dangerous? We’re willing to attribute
more dispositional factors to outgroups, and we’ll attribute
whatever factors make us feel good for ingroups.
○ This is known as ingroup bias, and it’s dangerous. It’s one
of the roots of prejudiced beliefs such as racism, classism,
nationalism, and general bigotry.
● Not only that, we do this very quickly!
○ Minimal group paradigm: how easily people form social
categories using criteria that may or may not mean
anything
○ You can literally assign people to groups and they will
attribute ingroup biases for no reason (Sorrentino, Hodson)
 ■ The worst part is… we need all these biases to quickly and effortlessly
make snap judgments about the world we live in. Without them, the world
would be a confusing, stressful, and uncertain place.
■ We need to find a balance.
○ Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination
■ These three concepts are related, but quite different.
● Stereotype: a cognitive structure made up of a set of beliefs about
the characteristics that are held by members of a specific social
group. They act as schemas.
● Prejudice: an affective (emotional) process which includes
negative attitudes toward and critical judgments of other groups
● Discrimination: behavior that disfavors or disadvantages members
of a certain social group in some way
■ Myths in Mind
● Positive aspects of stereotypes carry a hidden danger
● Sexism example: many cultures consider women to be the ‘fairer
sex’ and as a result, hold them to different social and moral
standards than men
■ Prejudice in a Politically Correct World?
● The norms have changed. There are things we are allowed and
not allowed to say about other people or groups.
● People often attribute this to a rush toward political correctness:
where the reasons why we can’t say what we think are because it
is not socially acceptable these days.
● Those people tend to assume that we live in an age of equality for
all, and that people who play the ‘race card’ or things like that are
just trying to use it to gain some sort of advantage, or to win an
argument.
● This is simply not true. Prejudice and discrimination is still alive
and well, even though we are well aware that it is wrong.
● Oddly enough, our belief in an equal and just society perpetuates
this idea that “being PC” is silly and we should be able to say what
we think (which we CAN, by the way, no one is actually preventing
these assholes from saying what they want to say!)
○ How is saying that “a black person is 5 times more likely to
die in a police confrontation than a white person” any more
politically correct than “white people do better in school
than black people, on average”? Both of these are true, but
only one is considered ‘politically correct’ despite both of
them having a similar implication!
● Our stereotypes and prejudices are strong: within less than a
second, we make snap judgments about people based on their
skin color (not ‘ethnicity’, but skin color!)
 ■ Working the Model
● What do we know about measuring prejudice?
● How can science study implicit prejudice?
○ Implicit Associations Test: measures how fast people can
respond to images or words flashed on a computer screen
○ It turns out (surprise surprise) our racial schema associate
more negativity with black people than with white people!
○ This is due to how long it takes to associate a positive
word with a black face.
● Can we critically evaluate this?
○ It may not be measuring prejudice, but instead exposure to
negative stereotypes. Just because we think them doesn’t
mean we feel them.
■ Stereotypes are cognitive, whereas prejudice is
affective or emotional.
● Why is this relevant?
○ Because we have prejudices that have little basis in reality,
no matter what Stormfront copypastas on Reddit tell you!
○ Improving Intergroup Relations
■ How do we overcome these implicit processes that work to create
negative impressions of people we don’t even know?
● It seems that implicit networks can be reprogrammed
■ Contact hypothesis: predicts that social contact between members of
different groups is extremely important to overcoming prejudice
● If you grew up in the northern USA, you may hear things like
“southerners are more racist”. They’re likely not, because they’re
more exposed to black people who are closer in social status to
them!
● Attitudes, Behaviors, and Effective Communication
○ Changing People’s Behavior
■ Four common approaches to change the public’s behavior:
● Technological
● Legal
● Economic
● Raising awareness
■ All of these are methods of persuasion
■ Persuasion: Changing Attitudes through Communication
● Elaboration Likelihood Model: predicts that when audiences are
sufficiently motivated to pay attention to a message, they have the
opportunity for careful processing, and they have the cognitive
resources (ability) to understand, they will be persuaded by the
facts of the argument
 ○ If one of the factors are missing, they will be persuaded by
some other way
● Information can appeal to people through two general routes:
central route and peripheral route
● Central route to persuasion: occurs when people pay close
attention to the content of a message, evaluate the evidence
presented, and examine the logic of the arguments
● Peripheral route to persuasion: less about substance, more about
style
○ Using the Central Route Effectively
■ Make it Personal
● Making it self-relevant influences motivation
● “Imagine for a moment that your friend has some juicy, scandalous
gossip to tell you.”
● The power of making things personal is due to the effect of
psychological distance.
● Construal-level theory: how information affects us differently
depending on our psychological distance from the information
○ Personal: close. Impersonal: distant.
○ Depends on:
■ Spatial distance (how close something is
physically)
■ Social distance (how close a person or offering is to
one’s own identity)
■ Probabilistic distance (how likely something seems)
■ Temporal distance (how close something is in time)
■ Abstraction or construal level (how easily we can
imagine it in our head, how specific it is)
● It’s hard to make climate change personal. Why?
○ We can’t feel the immediate effects. It’s abstract: 2 degrees
Celsius warmer doesn’t feel much warmer!
○ The harsher, more concrete effects seem far away in time.
○ The harsher effects that are happening now are pretty far
away (like the polar bears in the North Pole)
■ Working the Model: The Identifiable Victim Effect
● What do we know about communicating about tragedy?
○ Identifiable victim effect: people are more motivated by a
single suffering person
■ We care more about a single 7 year old girl from
Africa than the 200,000 7 year olds that are
starving in the same area
○ The dual process model:
■ Experiential system
 ■ Analytic system
● Can we critically evaluate this evidence?
○ The study itself can’t tell us whether the story of any given
individual will be more motivating than statistical
information
● Why is this relevant?
○ Information can be framed in a personal way
○ Abstract information can be described in terms of personal
experiences
○ The timeframe can be shortened
○ Specific actions that will make a difference can be
emphasized
○ Information can be more personally engaging if it is told to
a person by their friends
■ Value Appeals
● Using appeals that are in line with someone’s core values is a
more effective strategy
■ Preaching or Flip Flopping? One-sided vs. Two-sided Messages
● A two-sided message can be more powerful (unless, of course,
you convince someone of the other side)
● Attitude inoculation: a strategy for strengthening attitudes and
making them more resistant to change by first exposing them to a
weak counter-argument and then refuting that argument
■ Emotions in the Central Route
● Negative emotions such as confusion are very damaging
● Processing fluency: the ease with which information is processed
○ Fonts, colors, sizes… all of these affect fluency
○ Also, confusing words and jargon can affect fluency as well
○ Using the Peripheral Route Effectively
■ Authority
● Use figures of people we trust
● In fact, it’s no longer allowed to use advertising with doctors in
them because of how powerful the appeal is
■ Liking
● Use physically attractive, trustworthy-seeming people
■ Social Validation or Social Proof
● Also called ‘consensus’
● Use the behavior of others to guide persuasion
■ Reciprocity
● You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours
● “Free sample!”
● Door-in-the-face technique: ask for something big expecting a
“no”, then follow up with a request for something small
 ● Cialdini’s 1975 study
○ 17% of people asked were willing to chaperone inmates for
a day trip to the zoo
○ However, 50% of people who were asked first whether
they would volunteer two hours a week (and said no), were
willing to chaperone inmates for a day trip to the zoo!
■ Consistency
● Foot-in-the-door technique: make a simple request followed by a
more substantial request
● Ask someone to watch your stuff for you, and it’s less likely to be
stolen
● This is because people REALLY don’t want to seem hypocritical.
○ The Attitude-Behavior Feedback Loop
■ Cognitive dissonance theory: when we hold inconsistent beliefs, this
creates a kind of aversive inner tension (dissonance) that we are
motivated to reduce in whatever way we can
■ Example: doomsday cult
● A doomsday cult predicted the world would end. It didn’t.
● They then turned around and believed that they saved the world
from ending by being faithful to the cult!
■ Another example: hazing
● It turns out that victims of hazing continue to support it, but not
because they want to share their misery
● It’s because they feel like the experience of hazing made being
part of the group that much more special!
■ Cognitive dissonance is based on our need for self consistency
● This does not work the same in all cultures, though.
● Collectivistic cultures experience less dissonance in their choices
because their idea of the ‘self’ is more interpersonal in nature
■ Foot-in-the-door technique is most effective when you are trying to get
people to engage in similar behaviors

Chapter 14: Health, Stress, and Coping

● Behavior and Health

○ The choices people make often influence their health
■ Smoking, eating, even choice of career
■ Most premature deaths are due to lifestyle factors
○ Smoking
■ Causes life-shortening health problems such as:
● Cancer (lung, mouth, throat)
● Heart disease
● Pulmonary diseases such as emphysema
 ■ Represent 21% of deaths in 2009
■ The average smoker has a 7 to 14 year shorter life span
■ Quitting by the age of 30 greatly reduces the likelihood that a person will
die of smoking-related causes
■ Despite this, around 20% of Canadian adults smoke. But, why?
■ Working the Model
● What do we know about media influences on smoking
○ Societal factors such as: family members smoking,
personality, culture, and socioeconomic status
○ But does exposure to smoking in entertainment lead teens
to begin smoking?
● How can science help us analyze these effects?
○ The more exposure the adolescents in the study had to
movies that featured smoking, the more likely they were to
have tried smoking
○ Didn’t explain this correlation, though
● Can we critically evaluate this evidence?
○ Correlations indicate that there’s an effect but it’s not
necessarily causal
● Why is this relevant?
○ Smoking kills, and kills over time.
■ Efforts to Prevent Smoking
● Policymakers and healthcare workers know that more needs to be
done to decrease smoking
● Examples: banning smoking in public places, steep taxes added to
tobacco, warning labels
● Image based warnings have a great effect (40% of Canadian
quitters cited the images as having an influence)
○ Obesity
■ The Freshman 15: more like the Freshman 6
● The average weight gain in the first year of university is 6 pounds
● But why?
○ Increased food intake
○ Decreased physical activity
○ Increased alcohol consumption
○ Stress
■ Defining Healthy Weights and Obesity
● Height is a major factor
○ A 200 pound person at 6’4” is at a healthy weight, but a
200 pound person at 5’2” is not
● Body mass index (BMI): divide weight (kg) by [height (m)]^2
○ I sit at a middling 23.7 BMI. Not skinny, not large, but pretty
firmly normal.
 ○ 25-29.9 is overweight
○ 30+ is obese, representing 24% (about one quarter) of
Canadian adults
■ 34.4% of Americans are obese. We like food.
● Obesity rates skyrocketed in the mid-90s, and people are
becoming obese earlier in life
● However, not all people are built equally. Two people of the same
height and gender can live the same lifestyle and eat the same
amount of food, but one is heavier. Why is that?
■ Genetics and Body Weight
● Set point: a hypothesized mechanism that serves to maintain body
weight around a physiologically programmed level
○ Somewhere around 10% to 20% of one’s current weight
● That is, if a person goes from 150 to 165 lbs, their set point would
shift upward. This could explain why some people find it difficult to
lose weight, because their set point range is larger.
● However, it’s more likely that a person who succeeds at losing
weight and keeping it off is simply maintaining a more active
lifestyle
■ The Sedentary Lifestyle (that is, my lifestyle)
● People who watch a lot of television are more likely to be obese
● Working in front of the computer, however, does not produce this
same result!
● It’s likely that this is because people snack while they watch,
whereas computer time is generally more engaging.
● For kids, video games and TV are the culprit.
■ Social Factors
● What children eat is largely based on what their parents are
feeding them (duh, right?)
● These eating patterns develop in childhood and tend to continue
as adults
● There’s also the problem of food advertising
○ Children who view food advertising during a cartoon
consume 45% more snack food than those who do not
○ That could be a 10 lb weight gain every year! That adds up
quick for a kid.
■ Psychology and Weight Loss
● How can someone use the power of psychology to lose weight?
● First, think critically about weight loss products. You cannot simply
lose weight by taking a pill. There is no magic pill. Even fat
burners only work if you’re at a caloric deficit (eating less than you
burn.
 ● Second, take a positive outlook about yourself. Simply writing
down things that you feel are positive about yourself can have an
impact.
● Third, reduce your life stress in whatever way possible.
○ A previous chapter talks about meditation and mindfulness,
where you focus on your breathing and remain silent for a
period of time.
● It’s not all bunnies and rainbows, though. If you’re obese, you
have some factors working against you.
○ Obese individuals pay more attention to food cues, finding
them more rewarding than non-obese people.
○ The drive to eat increases as more time passes since the
last meal.
■ I’m hungry right now!
○ The restraint involved in dieting may actually reinforce the
value of food in the long run.
■ Ever just finish losing weight and you immediately
want to reward yourself with something tasty?
There’s a reason for that.
● There’s a mini quiz in the book. You should do it. I ain’t gonna
write about it here. (page 593)
○ Psychosocial Influences on Health
■ Our environments, as well as the people we interact with, influence our
physical and mental health.
● In university, it’s pretty common to get sick around midterm and
finals season: stressed kids cramped together in a small study
space doesn’t make for a good combo.
■ Poverty and Discrimination
● Health and wealth increase together.
○ Better access to health care
○ Greater sense of control over their environments
○ Have the resources to maintain a lifestyle of their choosing
● Those who experience poverty and discrimination have higher
incidences of depression, anxiety, and other mental health
problems
● Physical health problems are magnified by stress, as well.
○ Heart disease is more common in poorer households.
● Being a target of discrimination is linked to increased blood
pressure, heart rate, and secretions of stress hormones
■ Family and Social Environment
● Chronic social isolation is as great a mortality risk as smoking,
obesity, and high blood pressure
 ● Married people tend to live longer and have better mental and
physical health
○ Men enjoy greater health benefits from marriage
○ This only really has been found in heterosexual
relationships, however
● Marriage can be a source of stress, too, as well as a source of
stress for their kids.
■ Social Contagion
● Social contagion: the often subtle, unintentional spreading of a
behavior as a result of social interactions
● This affects body weight, smoking, and other health-related
behaviors
● Stress and Illness
○ Stress
■ Stress: a psychological and physiological reaction that occurs when
perceived demands exceed existing resources to meet those demands
● Refers to events (stressors) and experiences in response to
stressors (stress responses)
● Stressors can take many forms, such as acute events (during a
test, getting assaulted) or chronic events (illness, marital
problems)
● The effects on performance can be both positive and negative
■ What Causes Stress?
● People differ in response to stress
● They differ in their appraisal of stress
○ Appraisal: the cognitive act of assessing and evaluating
the potential threat and demands of an event
● Primary appraisal: perceiving the threat then asking whether or not
it is a threat
● Secondary appraisal: after determining that the threat exists, one
must determine how to cope
○ If the person can cope, they will do what they need to.
○ If the person cannot cope, then the reactions will continue
● Causes differ from person to person; however, there are patterns
○ Example: workplace stressors, such as high work
demands, long hours, safety concerns, and interpersonal
factors
● Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS): rates stressful events
by magnitude
○ Highest: death of a spouse (100 pts) and divorce (73 pts)
○ Lowest: a traffic ticket (11 pts) , a holiday (12 pts or 13 pts,
depending on your definition of ‘holiday’)
 ○ The points on the scale add up, and at around 300 points
or so, the person is at risk of illness and heart problems
● Life stress experiences will not be the same across age groups or
cultural groups
● Stress can be a good thing in order to motivate performance
○ When the task is easy, stress can help
○ When the task is hard, stress can hurt
○ This is because stress uses up cognitive resources
normally reserved for the task at hand (working memory)
○ Physiology of Stress
■ The physical responses are quite general despite the fact that stressors
come from widely varying sources
● This is the fight or flight response: a set of physiological changes
that occur in response to psychological or physical threats
■ There is a larger adaption pattern during responses to stress
● General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS): a theory of stress
responses involving stages of alarm, resistance, and exhaustion
○ Alarm: recognition of the threat and the physiological
fight-or-flight response
○ Resistance: using the physical and mental resources to
respond appropriately
○ Exhaustion: when the experience depletes the resources
and the stress response declines
■ The Stress Pathways
● Reactions such as sweaty palms, increased heart rate, and
butterflies in the stomach are the result of activity in the autonomic
nervous system (ANS) pathway
○ The nervous consists of the central nervous system and
the peripheral nervous system.
○ Peripheral NS contains the ANS.
○ The hypothalamus stimulates the ANS (specifically the
sympathetic NS, part of the ANS) and releases
epinephrine (adrenaline) and norepinephrine.
○ These chemicals trigger the fight-or-flight response
● The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis: a neural and
endocrine circuit that provides communication between the
nervous system (hypothalamus) and the endocrine system
(pituitary and adrenal glands)
○ After perceiving a stressful situation, the hypothalamus
releases the corticotropin-releasing factor
○ This stimulates the pituitary gland to release
adrenocorticotropic hormone
○ This hormone stimulates the release of cortisol
 ■ Cortisol: a hormone secreted by the adrenal cortex
that prepares the body to respond to stressful
situations (also called the ‘stress hormone’)
○ The release of cortisol can stimulate increased access to
energy stores or lead to decreased inflammation
● Humans mount both autonomic and HPA axis responses to stress
○ Highly adaptive
○ Promote behaviors that help survival (added vigilance,
faster running)
● Chronic stress responses impact long term health
● Stress response differences are often linked to early childhood
experiences (both autonomic and HPA)
○ Glucocorticoid release is affected by social stressors such
as being excluded from a conversation
○ These responses are larger in individuals with depression
or a history of childhood maltreatment
○ There are fewer glucocorticoid receptors in those who had
childhood stressors
■ Oxytocin: To Tend and Befriend
● Men are more likely to respond to stress with a fight-or-flight
response
● Women are more likely to have a tend-and-befriend response
○ Likely promoted by the release of oxytocin: a
stress-sensitive hormone that is typically associated with
maternal bonding and social relationships
○ Stress, Immunity, and Illness
■ Psychoneuroimmunology: the study of the relationship between immune
system and nervous system functioning
● Example: getting sick during exams is common; med students did
blood samples before exams and during exams, found a
decreased immune response during exams
● This correlates with a higher chance of getting a minor illness
■ Acute stressors activate the immune system; chronic stressors suppress
the immune system
■ Working the Model
● What do we know about hormones, relationships, and health?
○ Oxytocin and vasopressin are involved in social behavior
and bonding
○ Oxytocin inhibits activity in the amygdala (the part of the
brain associated with fear and threats)
○ Oxytocin can prevent the release of adrenocorticotropic
hormone and cortisol (stress hormones)
 ○ High vasopressin levels report petter relationship quality
with their spouses
○ These hormones also interact with the immune system to
reduce inflammation
● How can science explain connections between hormones,
relationships, and health?
○ Generally tested with how well people recover from a
minor wound (in this case, a suction blister)
○ Individuals with high oxytocin and vasopressin levels
healed more quickly
● Can we critically evaluate this evidence?
○ Oxytocin and vasopressin research is still in its infancy,
especially with regards to immune system function
● Why is this relevant?
○ The physiological and physical healing benefits of close,
positive social relationships extend to romantic
relationships, friendships, and family
■ Stress, Food and Heart Disease
● High stress levels appear to put people at greater risk for
developing coronary heart disease
○ Coronary heart disease: a condition in which plaques form
in the blood vessels that supply the heart with blood and
oxygen, resulting in restricted blood flow
○ Work and home stress causes males to be 30% more
likely to die from heart disease
● Stress causes an increase of molecules that cause inflammation,
triggering heart disease
● People (especially women) are drawn toward sweet and fatty
foods when stressed
○ This result is likely due to the stress suppressing the
reward system in the brain
○ Eating fatty foods will bring it closer to normal levels
■ AIDS
● People who experience stress are less responsive to HIV
treatments
■ Cancer
● Stress levels affect the progression of cancer
● Epinephrine supports cancer cell growth and cortisol magnifies the
effect
■ Ulcers are NOT caused by stress! They’re caused by a bacterium:
Helicobacter pylori.
○ Stress, Personality and Illness
■ How people cope with stress can depend on their personality
 ● Children who are easily dressed tend to be more prone to illness
in adulthood
● Children who are able to better focus their attention on tasks tend
to be healthier in adulthood
● Infants with secure attachment to their mothers show reduce
activity in their sympathetic NS when mothers are absent
■ Personality types according to stress response
● Type A personality: people who tend to be impatient and worry
about time, easily angered, competitive, and highly motivated.
○ Aka the worst people to work with yet the best people to
have on your team
○ More likely to have heart attacks
○ More likely to engage in harmful lifestyle factors such as
depriving themselves of sleep and drinking larger
quantities of alcohol
● Type B personality: people who are more laid back and
characterized by a patient, easygoing, and relaxed disposition
● People who are prone to hostility and anger are at greater risk for
developing coronary heart disease
● The way we mentally react to stressors can influence how our
body responds
● Coping and Well-Being
○ Coping
■ Coping: refers to the processes used to manage demands, stress, and
conflict
■ Some of us take a problem-solving approach
● Define the problem, work toward a solution
● Example: school stress (problem), get a tutor (solution)
■ However, this doesn’t work in all cases (example: death of a loved one)
● One way might be to find ways to reduce the negative effects the
emotions are having
■ Not all coping techniques actually help
● Eating a pint of Haagen-Dazs while watching Friends reruns is not
a healthy coping strategy
■ Positive Coping Strategies
● Positive psychology: uses scientific methods to study what makes
people thrive, human strengths, and human potential
● One good coping mechanism is to focus on positive emotions
○ Watch a funny movie
○ Focusing on positive emotions can also increase creativity
○ Positive emotions can help slow the heart rate, bringing it
back to normal
■ Optimism and Pessimism
 ● Optimism: the tendency to have a favorable, constructive view on
situations and to expect positive outcomes
● Pessimists: tend to have a negative perception of life and expect
negative outcomes
○ Pessimistic explanatory style: the tendency to interpret and
explain negative events as internally based and as a
constant, stable quality
■ Basically, negative events are due that person’s
fault and there’s nothing he/she can do
● Optimists have better health outcomes than pessimists
○ Higher white blood cell count for optimists
○ Pessimists have a 19% increase in mortality risk
○ Longer life expectancy, even when accounting for lifestyle
factors
■ Personality and Coping
● Neuroticism
○ High N’s have negative affectivity: the tendency to respond
to problems with a pattern of anxiety, hostility, anger, guilt
or nervousness
● Extraversion
○ High E’s are more likely to seek help from others and more
likely to reframe the stress in a positive or constructive way
● Agreeableness
○ High A’s avoid added interpersonal stress by being less
tended to argue
● Conscientiousness
○ High C’s tend to distance themselves from their emotions,
lessening the negative effects that these emotions may
have on other responsibilities during periods of stress
● Openness
○ High O’s are more likely to respond with empathy and less
likely to use emotional distancing as a way of coping with
interpersonal issues
■ Resilience
● Individuals differ in their ability to bounce back from events such
as disaster, disease, or major loss
● Resilience: the ability to effectively recover from illness or
adversity
● Factors such as financial and social resources, opportunities for
rest and relaxation, and other positive life circumstances help
resilience
● Personality and emotional characteristics are also important
contributors to resilience
 ● Example: Victor Frankl, who despite having his wife and parents
killed in concentration camps, was able to find meaning in his life
● Post-traumatic growth: the capacity to grow and experience
long-term positive effects in response to negative events
○ Not an alternative reaction to post-traumatic stress
■ Meditation, Relaxation, and Biofeedback
● Biofeedback: a therapeutic technique involving the use of
physiological recording instruments to provide feedback that
increases awareness of bodily responses
● Meditation methods
○ Concentrative/focused attention meditation: focusing on a
specific thought or sensation
○ Mindfulness/open monitoring meditation: attending to all
thoughts, sensations and feelings without attempting to
judge or control them
● Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR): a structured
relaxation program based on elements of mindfulness meditation
○ Goal: to cope and relax by increasing the link between
one’s body and one’s mind
○ Example: paying attention to one’s body parts, the
sensations, over the course of 15-20 minutes
○ Leads to increased brain activity in the insula
● Integrated mind-body training (IMBT): a more complicated method
of meditation which involves posture correction and heightening
awareness of one’s body
○ Leads to increased activity in the anterior cingulate gyrus
○ Also leads to the ability to lower heart rates, breathing
rates, and stress responses
■ Exercise
● Short bursts of exercise can help
○ Students who sprinted before a vocabulary test were able
to learn 20% more items on a vocabulary list
● Intense exercise increases levels of dopamine, epinephrine, and
brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF)
○ BDNF: a protein in the nervous system that promotes
survival, growth, and formation of synapses
● Cardio improves cognitive processing speed
○ Perceived Control
■ The most stressful of circumstances are the ones that people have little or
no control over
■ Learned helplessness: an acquired suppression of avoidance or escape
behavior in response to unpleasant, uncontrollable condition
● Often associated with those who experienced abuse
 ■ Perception of how controllable a stressor is will influence whether the
stress response will be inhibited, and whether the person will experience
an event as being stressful
● The stress response is inhibited by the frontal lobe when the
stressor is controllable
■ Learned helplessness is due to learning that actions cannot remove the
stressor in one situation, and generalizing it to another
■ Compensatory control: psychological strategies people use to preserve a
sense of nonrandom order when personal control is compromised

Chapter 15: Psychological Disorders

● Defining and Classifying Psychological Disorders

○ In the past, psychological disorders were seen as the mark of the devil, or
demons possessing someone
■ This caused methods like torture and exorcism to be commonly used,
believing that the pain was being caused to the demons and not the
individual
■ In some cases, these possessed people were killed.
○ Later on, these illnesses started to be seen as akin to physical illnesses like
leprosy.
■ Many people were cooped up in asylums to be separated from the
general public.
● Asylums: residential facilities for the mentally ill
● They would be ‘shocked’ out of the diseased state with treatments
like bloodletting and tossing them into a pit of snakes
○ Some treatment, eh?
■ Changes occurred later, thanks to Philippe Pinel (physician from France)
and Dorothea Dix (schoolteacher from US)
● These two developed moral treatment
○ Moral treatment: a new approach to treating mental illness
which had patients being treated with kindness and
decency
● Despite this being wonderful for the ill, it did not represent an
effective treatment or cure.
■ The invention of Chlorpromazine in 1955 gave schizophrenics the ability
to function independently
● Chlorpromazine: a drug that treated schizophrenia as early as
1955
● This allowed many asylums to be shut down due to an 80% drop
in psychiatric inpatients
 ■ However, this was not the end. Many schizophrenics stopped their
treatment and started showing symptoms again. They became homeless
after the asylums were shut down
■ This treatment addressed the symptoms, and not the root cause.
● Medical model: sees psychological conditions through the same
lens as Western medicine tends to see physical conditions: as
sets of symptoms, causes and outcomes.
○ Treatments in the medical model focused on changing
physiological processes to alleviate symptoms
■ This model is missing an appreciation for the whole system of factors that
affect the person’s well being.
■ Now, the biopsychosocial model holds more sway:
● Biopsychosocial model: includes physiological processes within a
more holistic view of the person as a set of multiple interacting
systems
○ Biological (physical)
■ Depression: involves serotonin
○ Psychological (mental)
■ Depression: involves negative beliefs of the self
and hopelessness
○ Sociocultural
■ Depression: involves social isolation
■ How do we define who has a mental disorder?
○ Defining Abnormal Behavior
■ Normal depends on the context: the time, culture, and occasion.
● Beliefs and values are culturally bound, and so is behavior and
experience
● This causes a challenge for the clinical psychologist, who is also
bound by his/her context
● One possible solution:
○ First, understand the appropriate cultural framework to
figure out if most people in the culture would have similar
experience
○ However, this can be problematic because most people, as
we know, tend to engage in experiences that may not be
healthy
■ We eat shitty food, we drink and do drugs (some of
us to excess), we hate our bodies because the
media tells us to… we’re a mess!
○ Not only that, but few people engage in healthy behaviors
such as meditation or a meat-free low-sugar diet
● So, abnormal isn’t simply the only factor.
 ● The important factor is whether the thoughts, feelings, or
behaviors are maladaptive
○ Maladaptive: Causes distress to oneself or others, impairs
day-to-day functioning, or increases the risk of injury or
harm to oneself or others
○ Granted, some of these criteria don’t really indicate mental
illness either. Low self-esteem could do harm, but it’s not
necessarily a mental disorder.
■ Psychology’s Puzzle: How to Diagnose Psychological Disorders
● Mental illness was once categorized as ‘idiocy/insanity’.
● The US military developed a diagnostic system for mental illness.
● This eventually became the DSM
○ Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM): a standardized manual to aid in the diagnosis of
disorders
● By the 1990s, the DSM had over 350 disorders listed in it.
○ This could be due to (1) the inherent diversity of mental
disorders or (2) pharmaceutical companies wanting to sell
more drugs.
■ You be the judge.
● The DSM-5 (the newest edition) describes three important pieces
of information for each disorder:
○ A set of symptoms and the number of symptoms that must
be met to classify as that disorder
○ The etiology (origins or causes) of the symptoms
○ A prognosis or prediction of how these symptoms will
persists or change over time
● The older versions of the DSM used five axes:
○ Clinical disorders
○ Personality disorders and mental retardation
○ General medical conditions
○ Psychosocial and environmental problems
○ Global assessment of functioning
● The DSM-5 instead uses more separate categories
○ Mental retardation became ‘intellectual disability’ or
‘developmental disorder’
○ Obsessive-compulsive disorders and related ones because
their own category
○ This caused a lot of controversy because of how much the
pharmaceutical companies had to do with it
● It also does not resolve past criticisms
○ Diagnosis of specific disorders is not highly reliable
○ Definitions are not always based on empirical evidence
 ○ Disorders often share many common symptoms
○ Sends the implicit message that disorders can be defined
objectively
○ Might lead to overdiagnosis
■ Case in point: ADHD, which seems to be 10x more
common in the US than in Europe despite the
contextual factors not being all that different
■ ADHD is treated with stimulants, which could
potentially be problematic for children as they get
older
● Adderall is amphetamine salts! I wouldn’t
give speed to my kid just so he can get
better grades!
● One solution: develop more objective biological indicators that are
involved in the symptoms and deficits of the individual
● A big criticism: the line between ‘disorder’ and ‘odd behavior
exhibited by a normal person’ is very very fine
○ Checking symptom boxes depends heavily on the doctor
■ Working the Model: Labelling and Mental Disorders
● What do we know about how labels affect people?
○ Seeing oneself as mentally ill has been shown to be
associated with low self-esteem or feelings of helplessness
○ This can cause a self-fulfilling prophecy where they are
isolated and stigmatized
● How can science explain how labels may affect perceptions of
another person’s behavior?
○ Normal behaviors seem abnormal when coupled with the
label of mental disorders
● Can we critically evaluate this information?
○ Labels help doctors identify symptoms and can also help
individuals understand their own situation
● Why is this relevant
○ We need to reduce the stigma associated with mental
illness
○ Applications of Psychological Diagnoses
■ Being able to reliably diagnose particular disorders is a central and
ongoing challenge to the mental health fields, having an impact on
situations such as:
● Individuals knowing how to effectively navigate the mental health
system
● The use of the insanity defense in a court of law
■ The Mental Disorder Defense (Not guilty by reason of Insanity)
 ● Mental order defense: does not deny that the person committed
the offense, but claims that the defendant was in such an extreme,
abnormal state of mind when committing the crime that he or she
could not discern that the actions were legally or morally wrong
● It’s difficult to actually determine ‘insanity’
○ In 2001, a lady drowned all five of her kids in the bathtub
■ Intuitively, we think that she must be insane
because it’s extremely abnormal and seems to be
motiveless
■ She got life without parole initially, but then got her
sentence overturned by reason of insanity due to
her history of mental health issues
○ Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed men, had sex with their
corpses, and ate them, was found perfectly sane due to his
admission of guilt and the fact that the crimes occurred
over a span of 13 years
■ However, intuitively we understand that he must be
insane to actually want to do something like that.
■ He was an alcoholic, drug addict, and exhibited
behaviors associated with borderline personality
disorder
○ M’Naghten rule: where someone is found incapable of
understanding the moral implications of their actions so
they must not be incarcerated.
■ Symptoms, Treatments, and Culture
● PTSD, for example, exhibits different symptoms in people of
different cultures
○ Americans (individualists) tend to experience more
flashbacks, whereas Afghans and Sri Lankans
(collectivists) tend to experience worries about the welfare
of their families and communities
○ The physiological symptoms are common to all cultures.
● MDMA, which is known as a rave drug in the West, has been
shown to be an effective treatment for cases of PTSD that resist
other treatments
○ Because of its status as a rave drug, there are hurdles in
the wide acceptance of MDMA as a treatment for mental
disorders
● Personality and Dissociative Disorders
○ The Case of Aileen Wuornos
■ Born in an abusive home, sexually abused by her grandfather, and
prostituted herself out for money and cigarettes
■ Eventually killed 7 men and sentenced to death
 ■ She claimed that these men all tried to rape her so she killed them in self
defense
■ She was claimed fit to stand trial despite being diagnosed with borderline
personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder
○ Defining and Classifying Personality Disorders
■ Personality disorders: particularly unusual patterns of behavior that are
maladaptive, distressing to oneself or others, and resistant to change
● Some feel no empathy to others
● Others have intense needs and feel severely rejected if their
expectations are not met
● 10 distinct personality disorders and 3 clusters
○ Cluster A: odd or eccentric behavior
■ Paranoid Personality Disorder
■ Schizoid Personality Disorder
■ Schizotypal Personality Disorder
○ Cluster B: dramatic, emotional, and erratic behavior
■ Antisocial Personality Disorder
■ Borderline Personality Disorder
■ Histrionic Personality Disorder
■ Narcissistic Personality disorder
○ Cluster C: anxious, fearful, and inhibited behavior
■ Avoidant Personality Disorder
■ Dependent Personality Disorder
■ Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder
○ Disorder Not Otherwise Specified
■ Fits no clusters but is consistent with a disorder
● We will study Cluster B disorders here
■ Borderline Personality Disorder
● Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD): characterized by intense
extremes between positive and negative emotions, an unstable
sense of self, impulsivity, and difficult social relationships
● Experience a wide range of emotions
● Fall in and out of love quickly
● Manipulative in relationships
○ Manipulative to the point where many therapists will limit
themselves to only one or a very small number of clients
with BPD
● Believed that it arises out of the person’s attempts to deal with
deeply rooted insecurity and severe emotional disturbances that
are ultimately rooted in traumatic or emotionally difficult
experiences
○ Abusive or neglectful parenting
 ● Commonly associated with destructive, impulsive, and risky
behavior
■ Narcissistic Personality Disorder
● Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD): characterized by an
inflated sense of self-importance and an excessive need for
attention and admiration, as well as intense self-doubt and fear of
abandonment
● Little empathy for others
● Manipulative so their own needs are met first in relationships
● Strong sense of entitlement
● Willing to cheat to get ahead
■ Histrionic Personality Disorder
● Histrionic Personality Disorder (HPD): characterized by excessive
attention seeking and dramatic behavior
● Typically high functioning
● Use flirtatiousness, sexuality, and flattery to get attention
● Engages in indulgent and risky behaviors
● Sensitive to criticism and manipulative in relationships
● Highly flamboyant and dramatic
■ Antisocial Personality Disorder: Working the Model
● Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD): profound lack of empathy
or emotional connection with others, a disregard for others’ rights
or preferences, and a tendency to inserting their own desires,
often violently, onto others regardless of the consequences for
others
○ Highly resistant to treatment and rarely motivated to
change
● What do we know about antisocial personality disorder?
○ Abusive and find themselves in trouble with the law
○ Often described as ‘psychopathic’
○ However, APD patients are less likely to be serial killers
and more likely to be successful businesspeople
● How can science explain antisocial personality disorder?
○ Many people kill in the ‘heat of the moment’, but APD
patients are very unlikely to do this.
○ APD patients are underreactive to stress and unlikely to
feel guilt
○ Their amygdala does not function properly, causing a lack
of empathy and lack of restraint from fear
● Can we critically evaluate this information?
○ Don’t assume all APD patients are serial killers or at-risk
individuals
 ○ Many of them are very successful, very high-functioning,
and can be desired and respected (even by you!)
○ These characteristics may contribute, at least partially, to
their success.
● Why is this relevant?
○ APD is resistant to therapies because APD patients tend to
not want to change.
■ Not all APD patients have low self-esteems, after
all.
○ It also doesn’t mesh well with our moral psyches that
people with characteristics associated with APD (and with
very dangerous people) are often glorified. Possible results
of these characteristics (charisma, determination,
perseverance) are also rewarded in our culture.
■ Ted Bundy could have just as easily been a
successful salesman as he was a murder-rapist!
○ Maybe we need to look long and hard about what we value
as a culture and take steps to change.
■ The Biopsychosocial Approach to Personality Disorders
● Psychological Factors
○ Do people with personality disorders think differently from
normal people?
○ NPD and HPD patients often have deep-rooted negative
opinions of themselves
■ This may cause them to seek attention
○ Adults with APD and children with conduct disorders (often
a precursor to APD) have difficulty learning tasks that
require decision making and following complex rules
■ They score lower than ADHD patients!
● Sociocultural Factors
○ Troubled homes and communities may contribute to the
development of APD
○ Personality disorders can arise due to emotional damage
from childhood experience, such as abuse or neglect
● Biological Factors
○ Not everyone who experiences abuse develops a
personality disorder
○ Specific genes may contribute to emotional instability
through serotonin systems in the brain
○ Other genes may contribute to unique activity in the limbic
system and frontal lobes
■ Comorbidity and Personality Disorders
● Comorbidity: the presence of two disorders simultaneously
 ● The presence of two disorders can interact with treatment
○ Substance abuse may be comorbid with personality
disorder, which can affect how treatment is applied
● APD and BPD are generally reliable to diagnose, however.
○ Dissociative Identity Disorder
■ Dissociative experiences: characterized by a sense of separation
(dissociation) between a person and the surroundings
● “Out-of-body” experience
■ These tend to be normal.
■ Some people have such extreme dissociative experiences that they may
be diagnosed with a dissociative disorder
● Dissociative disorder: a category of mental disorders
characterized by a split between conscious awareness from
feeling, cognition, memory and identity
■ Conditions:
● Dissociative fugue: a period of profound autobiographical memory
loss
● Depersonalization disorder: a strong sense of the surreal, the
feeling that one is not connected to one’s body, the feeling of
disconnection from one’s regular identity and awareness
● Dissociative amnesia: a severe loss of memory, usually for a
specific stressful event, when no biological cause for amnesia is
present
■ Dissociative identity disorder: where a person experiences a split in
identity such that they feel different aspects of themselves as though they
were separated from each other
● Can be severe to the point where people construct multiple
personalities separate from one another
● Also called multiple personality disorder
■ The idea that a single individual can house two different people (Jekyll
and Hyde) is frightening and interesting
■ Thought to be brought on by extreme stress such as childhood abuse
■ DID is rare, affecting only 1% of psychiatric patients
● There’s a controversy about whether this is a real disorder
● It’s very difficult to test for
○ One approach: check for memory dissociations between
alter identities
○ PET scanning (found that frontal lobe activity differed
between alter identities)
● Huge increase in the number of cases from 1970 to 1998 (79 to
40,000)
○ This could mean that some psychologists are very willing
to diagnose it
 ● DID did not exist in Japan until described to Japanese
psychologists in the American context
● Anxiety, Depressive, and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders
○ There are documented cases of OCD-like symptoms occurring after a bout of
strep throat
■ Turns out, the immune system’s reaction damages cell in the caudate
(related to impulse control)
■ OCD is theorized to be related to dealing with a lost sense of impulse
control
○ Anxiety Disorders
■ Anxiety disorders: a category of disorders involving fear or nervousness
that is excessive, irrational, and maladaptive
● Fear and nervousness is perfectly normal
● However, sometimes the experience of anxiety can become highly
maladaptive
● Anxiety occurs as part of the fight-or-flight response, preparing our
bodies for quick action
● However, our modern society has rendered our fight-or-flight
responses less functional. We very rarely have to respond quickly
to threats such as a large animal or a warring tribe.
● Our fight-or-flight response often triggers as a response to things
such as test results, job interviews, presentations… things that
aren’t actually harmful to us but can represent a big risk in our
minds.
■ Varieties of Anxiety Disorders
● Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)
○ Generalized Anxiety Disorder: involves frequently elevated
levels of anxiety, generally from the normal challenges and
stresses of everyday life
○ Characterised by difficulty sleeping, breathing, difficulty
concentrating
○ People often have difficulty understanding their experience
and cannot identify specific reasons for which they are
anxious
○ As one source is dealt with, the anxiety shifts to another
source
○ A convergence of stresses commonly precede the onset of
the disorder
● Panic Disorder
○ Panic disorder: an anxiety disorder marked by occasional
episodes of sudden, very intense fear
 ○ Panic attacks are a key feature of this disorder, which arise
when a fear causes physical arousal and the increased
physical symptoms feed the frightening thoughts
■ “I’m going to die” -> “I feel scared” -> Heart starts
being fast -> Cold sweats -> Nausea -> “I’m going
to die right now and there’s nothing I can do” ->
Hyperventilating occurs -> Vision blurs -> Muscles
tense -> Repeat until a few minutes later, when the
person calms down likely due to running out of
energy
○ Many people develop fear of the attacks rising up again,
causing them to be afraid of unsafe open spaces
○ Agoraphobia: intense fear of having a panic attack in
public, causing the person to not leave the home
● Working the Model: Specific Phobias
○ Phobia: a severe, irrational fear of a very specific object or
situation
○ What do we know about specific phobias?
■ Often developed through unpleasant or frightening
experiences, such as being chased by a dog as a
little kid
■ Can arise out of the patterns of anxiety as
children’s fears of give to thoughts, emotions,
arousal, and reactions such as avoidance
■ They develop out of the normal experience of fear
○ How can science explain why some people are more likely
than others to develop specific phobias?
■ Some risk factors for phobias are shyness and
temperamental inhibition, which are partly
genetically determined
○ Can we critically evaluate this information
■ This doesn’t add to our knowledge about how a
phobia develops or how it can be treated
○ Why is this relevant?
■ It helps understand new fields of possible treatment
options
● Social Phobias
○ Social anxiety disorder: a very strong fear of being judged
by others or being embarrassed or humiliated in public
○ Example:
■ A student shows up to class right as it begins in
order to prevent risking an awkward conversation
 with someone who doesn’t know or sitting
conspicuously alone
■ The student won’t go into the cafeteria because his
roommate is not around
■ He won’t say hi to a professor in fear of not being
recognized
■ The Vicious Cycle of Anxiety Disorders
● Anxiety disorders tend to be self-perpetuating
● Social anxiety disorder patients may avoid social situations,
stunting their ability to function correctly in social situations
● In other cases, emotions associated with anxiety can lead to
physiological responses, which in turn lead to more anxious
emotions.
● Interrupting the cycle is central to the treatment of anxiety
disorders
● Exposure: where the person is repeatedly and in stages exposed
to the object of his fear so that he can work past the emotional
reactions
■ Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
● Used to be categorized as an anxiety disorder until 2013
● OCD: characterized by unwanted, inappropriate, and persistent
thoughts (obsessions) and tend to engage in repetitive almost
ritualistic behaviors (compulsions)
● Example: someone who is so anxious about germs and
cleanliness that they wash their hands until they bleed
● Usually, OCD develops over time.
● Obsessions and compulsions are pretty normal and easy to think
about, however they increasingly become maladaptive and
interfere with life
● Psychologists tend to believe that the compulsions of OCD are the
result of ways that OCD patients take control of their anxiety
○ Switching the light exactly 7 times to make sure it is
actually off
● Symptoms in OCD Patients
○ Obsessions
■ 58% fear being contaminated
■ 56% experience constant doubt
■ 48% need to arrange things in a symmetrical
pattern
■ 45% have aggressive thoughts
○ Compulsions
■ 69% checking
■ 60% cleaning
 ■ 56% Repeating actions
■ Anxiety disorders tend to be amenable to treatment, unlike personality
disorders. Many patients find these disorders distressing and will actively
seek treatment.
○ Mood Disorders
■ Major depression: a disorder marked by prolonged periods of sadness,
feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness, social withdrawal, and
cognitive and physical sluggishness
● Can cause lack of sleep and lethargy
■ Bipolar disorder: characterized by extreme highs and lows in mood,
motivation, and energy
● Involves manic episodes, followed by depressive episodes
● Mania takes several forms, such as talking excessively fast, racing
thoughts, impulsive and spontaneous decisions, or high-risk
behaviors
● Most of the time, these episodes last several weeks or months,
switching back and forth throughout the year
■ Cognitive and Neurological Aspects of Depression
● People with depression can become confused and have difficulty
concentrating and making decisions
● They develop a pessimistic explanatory cycle
○ Pessimistic explanatory cycle: a set of habitual ways of
explaining events to oneself which tend to be dysfunctional
● These attributions tend go in stages
○ Internalizing: attributing something to oneself
○ Stabilizing: attributing something to how things always will
be
○ Globalizing: attributing these beliefs to everything
● Twin studies suggest an underlying genetic risk for developing
major depression
● Two primary regions of the brain affect depression
○ The limbic system, which is active in emotional responses
and processing
■ The limbic system overacts and responds strongly
to emotions
○ The dorsal of the frontal cortex, which plays a role in
controlling thoughts
■ Signals from the limbic system lead to a decrease
in frontal lobe activity, lowering control of these
thoughts
● Some neurotransmitters are involved in depression
○ Serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine
● Individuals with depression are at a higher risk of:
 ○ Minor illness
○ Cardiovascular disease
○ General mortality
● People who inherit “short” copies of 5-HTT (responsible for
serotonin activity) are predisposed to depressive episodes in
response to stress and are more prone to suicide attempts
■ Sociocultural Influences on Mood Disorders
● Environmental Factors
○ Poor neighborhoods are associated with higher stress
levels, higher vulnerability to stressors, and weaker social
ties
● Suicide
○ Suicide is the second leading cause of death for Canadian
youth, behind traffic accidents
■ Four times more likely among males than females
■ 2-3 times more likely among Native Americans and
Europeans
■ 60% higher among aged 65 and older
○ Warning signs of suicide
■ Talks about committing suicide
■ Trouble eating or sleeping
■ Drastic changes in behavior
■ Withdraws from friends or social activities
■ Loses interest in school, work or hobbies
■ Prepares for death
■ Gives away prized possessions
■ Previous attempts
■ Takes unnecessary risks
■ Has recently experienced serious losses
■ Preoccupied with death and dying
■ Loses interest in personal appearance
■ Increases alcohol or drug use
○ Suicide hotlines work best with an active listener
● Schizophrenia
○ John Nash
■ The inspiration for the movie “A Beautiful Mind”
■ Developed mathematical work on game theory and has a very famous
concept, called Nash equilibrium, named after him
■ Developed schizophrenia in 1959 and his ability to function in daily life
fluctuated greatly
■ His marriage ended and he spent a decade in an institution
■ He learned how to manage his symptoms, and was an active speaker
until his death in 2015
○ Symptoms and Types of Schizophrenia
■ Schizophrenia: a brain disease that causes the person to experience
significant breaks from reality, a lack of integration of thoughts and
emotions, and problems with attention and memory
■ Schizophrenia has nothing to do with multiple personalities and is not a
degrading illness
● Schizophrenia fluctuates wildly, sometimes sending the patient
into a wild psychosis where they are not in touch with reality
■ Three phases of schizophrenia
● Prodromal: easily confused, difficulty organizing their thoughts,
may lose interest and begin to withdraw from friend and family,
may lose normal motivations, withdraw from like, and spend
increasing amounts of time alone
○ Some people may see the person as becoming lazy
● Active: experience delusional thoughts, hallucinations, or
disorganized patterns of thoughts, emotions, and behavior
● Residual: where predominant symptoms disappear or lessen
considerably and may present itself as withdrawal, lack of
concentration, and lack of motivation
■ Some people cycle through these phases often, others may cycle through
them once in their life
■ Characteristics symptoms: hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized
behavior
● Hallucinations: alterations in perception, such that a person hears,
sees, smells, feels, or tastes something that does not actually
exist except in that person’s own mind
● Delusions: beliefs not based on reality (such as believing you are
Jesus Christ)
● Disorganized behavior: describes the considerable difficulty
people with schizophrenia may have completing the tasks of
everyday life
■ Types of Schizophrenia
● Paranoid schizophrenia
○ Delusional beliefs that one is being watched, followed, or
persecuted
● Disorganized schizophrenia
○ Thoughts, speech, behavior and emotion that are poorly
integrated and incoherent
○ May show inappropriate, unpredictable mannerisms
● Catatonic schizophrenia
○ Episodes in which a person remains mute and immobile for
extended periods
● Undifferentiated schizophrenia
 ○ Combination of symptoms from more than one type of
schizophrenia
● Residual schizophrenia
○ Reflects individuals who show some symptoms of
schizophrenia but are either in transition to a full-blown
episode or in remission
■ Positive vs. Negative symptoms
● Positive symptoms: the presence of maladaptive behaviors
○ Confused or paranoid thinking
● Negative symptoms: the absence of adaptive behaviors
○ Lack of interacting with others
○ Flat emotional reactions
■ Neurological Issues
● The prefrontal cortex, which is related to many cognitive abilities,
shows significant neurological decline in individuals with
schizophrenia
● Working memory deficits may explain this
■ Social issues
● Social interaction is often very difficult for many people with
schizophrenia
● Can be poorly socially adjusted
● May seem ‘odd’, especially if exhibiting strange behaviors
● There seems to be a relation between social interaction and
progression of the disease: a lack of social interaction facilitates
the progression of schizophrenia
■ Schizophrenia is Not a Sign of Violence of Genius
● Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) was a Harvard Ph.D graduate
and suffered from schizophrenia, but this is not the norm
● Most schizophrenics suffer from cognitive impairments that cause
them to score lower on IQ tests
● Their propensity for violence is not meaningfully different from the
rest of the population
● However, the mentally ill are 10 times more likely to be victims of
crime than the non-mentally ill
○ Explaining Schizophrenia
■ Genetics
● Genes do contribute to schizophrenia but the individual genes that
contribute to it have not been identified yet
■ Schizophrenia and the Nervous System
● People with schizophrenia have ventricle spaces that are 20-30%
larger than people without it
● Seems to be due to a loss of brain matter during the progression
of the disease
 ● People who have a long history with the disorder show lower
levels of activity in their frontal lobes during both resting states and
active states
● Smaller amygdala and hippocampal regions
● Schizophrenics have overreactive dopamine receptors and excess
dopamine can produce positive symptoms such as hallucinations
or delusions
● They also have underreactive glutamate receptors
■ Environmental and Cultural Influences on Schizophrenia
● Environmental and Prenatal Factors
○ People with schizophrenia are more likely to have been
born in the winter months due to exposure to influenza
○ Traumatic factors such as war or violence during
pregnancy could cause a higher risk
○ Marijuana can also potentially cause psychotic symptoms
○ Head injuries before age 10 can put people at greater risk
if they’re genetically at risk
○ Poorer urban environments put someone at higher risk as
well
● Social Factors
○ Emotional expressiveness (EE): families with high EE tend
to be overly critical and controlling, whereas families with
low EE tend to be more supportive, accepting, and
non-judging
○ Schizophrenics from high-EE families are three to four
times more likely to experience a relapse of their
symptoms within a nine-month period
■ Could be due to reverse causality due to the stress
of caring for someone with schizophrenia
● Cultural Factors
○ Mexican-Americans focus more on how schizophrenia
affects the body, whereas Anglo-Americans focus more on
how it affects the mind
○ Indonesians show no auditory hallucinations, attributed to
the low use of speech in the culture
○ The Swahili of Tanzania believe that schizophrenia is
spirits entering the body
○ Schizophrenic long-term outcomes are actually better in
developing (third-world) countries, surprisingly
■ Working the Model: The Neurodevelopmental Hypothesis
● What do we know about the neurodevelopmental hypothesis?
 ○ Neurodevelopmental hypothesis: the adult manifestation of
schizophrenia is an outgrowth of disrupted neurological
development early in life
■ Sounds kind of Freudian… doesn’t it?
● How can science test the hypothesis?
○ Adults who developed schizophrenia showed unusual
motor patterns as kids, such as jerky, repeated, and
unnecessary arm movements
○ These did not persist in adulthood, but they did eventually
develop schizophrenic symptoms
○ Teens sometimes report hearing, for example, their mother
calling their name even if she isn’t home
● Can we critically evaluate this information?
○ The precursors to schizophrenia as described are not
unique to schizophrenia
● Why is this relevant?
○ By identifying developmental patterns and catching them
early, it may be possible to alter the progression of the
disorder

Chapter 16: Therapies

● Treating Psychological Disorders

○ Previously: we described some psychological disorders affecting people
■ More than 20% of us would benefit from treating our issues
■ Attitudes toward therapy have changed over the years (Brene Brown’s
TED Talk)
■ 10% of the Canadian population seeks treatment for mental health issues
● Women seek therapy more than men
● 35-55 adults seek therapy more than 55+ and under 35
● Asians and Natives are less likely to seek mental health treatment
■ There is still a level of stigma as well as several barriers to effective
mental health treatment
○ Barriers to Psychological Treatment
■ 30% of people with depression or an anxiety disorder studied had went to
therapy
● 66% of people do not seek help from the mental health system at
all
● Half of those who get treatment, delay to do so
■ Some barriers include:
● No easily definable line between ‘ill’ and ‘healthy’
○ Am I depressed, or just sad?
○ Am I suffering from an anxiety disorder, or just stressed?
 ○ People actively minimize their symptoms
● People try not to see themselves as mentally ill because it’s a sign
of weakness or failure to them
● Some may not trust psychologists or psychiatrists
■ These barriers exist despite the fact that 99% of people asked said they
would seek mental health treatment if they deemed it helpful!
■ Stigma about Mental Illness
● Typically, someone will not tell very many people about their
mental illness
● In some professions, mental illness carries a stigma
● There can also be social costs
○ ½ of Canadians say they would not socialize with a friend
who had a serious mental illness
○ ¼ of Canadians say they’re afraid of the mentally ill
■ Gender Roles
● Men will actively avoid treatment to seem strong and independent
■ Logistical Barriers: Expense and Availability
● Psychotherapy is expensive: $100+ an hour
● Sometimes, treatment means time away from work
● This isn’t good, as many people will end up in the ER avoiding
regular treatment
● This affects people in poverty disproportionately
● Drug treatments can be expensive, however generic drugs are
cheaper
■ Involuntary Treatment
● Many people, due to legal or medical requirements, are put into
the mental health system against their will
● Proponents say it improves mental health, reduces costs on
society, and increases effectiveness of treatment
● Opponents say it’s unethical because it restricts the freedom of
people to treat themselves, and could lead to dangerous side
effects
● Involuntary treatment decisions are also backed up by bias, with
ethnic minorities more likely to be required to have treatment
○ Mental Health Providers and Settings
■ Mental Health Providers
● Clinical psychologists: have a Ph.D and can formally diagnose and
treat mental health issues
○ Cannot prescribe medications
● Counselling psychologists: work with people through more
common problems and could have a Masters or Ph.D.
○ Cannot prescribe medications
 ● Psychiatrists: medical doctors (M.D.) who specialize in mental
health and who are allowed to diagnose and treat mental
disorders through prescribing medications
■ Inpatient Treatment and Deinstitutionalization
● In the past, people with mental illness were institutionalized in
asylums
● Bedlam: comes from a mispronunciation of the St. Mary of
Bethlehem hospital in London and refers to the chaos and
madness of the asylum; soon came to mean chaos in general
● Philippe Pinel in 1792 was the first to release asylum patients in
France
● Dorothea Dix, a schoolteacher from the US, campaigned to
improve the conditions of asylums
● This made the conditions better, however it didn’t effectively treat
the asylees
● In the 1960s, people with mental disorders who were being treated
with things such as chlorpromazine were released from asylums to
live more normal lives within society
○ Deinstitutionalization: where mental health patients were
released back into their communities, generally after
having their symptoms alleviated through medication
● In the coming decades, treatment became more streamlined, with
a suicide attempt patient being evaluated, treated, and discharged
in as little as 3 or 4 days
● Residential treatment centers: housing facilities in which residents
receive psychological therapy and life skills training, with the
explicit goal of helping residents become reintegrated into society
as well as they can
○ Low-level facilities are for reintroducing people into society
○ Mid and high-level: more for those who are charged with
crimes
■ Outpatient Treatment and Prevention
● Grew in popularity during the 20th century
● Community psychology: an area of psychology that focuses on
identifying how individuals’ mental health is influenced by the
neighborhood, economics and community resources, social
groups, and other community-based variables
○ To prevent depression, community psychologists might
conduct research into the neighborhood and environmental
factors that contribute to stress, anxiety, and depression
○ They would work with community groups to resolve these
problems
○ Evaluating Treatments
 ■ In the 90s, the APA set up task forces to evaluate different therapy
practices and made them online in 2005
● The philosophy: use properly designed research studies to
examine the effectiveness of different therapeutic approaches,
and these approaches should evolve depending on what research
says does and does not work
■ Empirically Supported Treatments
● Empirically supported treatments: treatments that have been
tested and evaluated
● Tested through an experiment
○ Randomly assigned groups: treatment vs. control
■ Are control groups ethical? They deny treatment to
those who need it.
○ Double-blind (neither the researcher nor the patient knows
which group they’re in)
● Criticisms
○ Ignores many of the nuances and complexities that exist in
the process of therapy
○ Ignores individual differences
● Therapeutic alliance: the relationship that emerges from therapy
■ Working the Model: Can Self-help Treatments Be Effective?
● What do we know about the availability of self-help treatments?
○ There’s lots of em. Some are written by experts, some by
celebrity gurus.
○ Bibliotherapy: the use of self-help books and other reading
materials as a form of therapy
● How can science test the effectiveness of self-help treatments
○ One study found no difference in depression levels
between a self-help book and just standard care
○ This may be due to differences in books, however.
○ One book, Feeling Good, seemed to work, though.
● Can we critically evaluate this evidence?
○ Consider the source of the books: some ‘gurus’ are more
interested in selling books than treating people
● Why is this relevant?
○ Self-help options are very low cost compared to therapy
and drugs
● Psychological Therapies
○ Hippocratic Oath: an agreement that states that doctors will cause no harm to
their patients
■ Some treatments do more harm than good, e.g. Scared Straight
○ Insight Therapies
■ Insight therapies: a general term referring to therapy that involves
dialogue between client and therapist for the purposes of gaining
awareness and understanding of psychological problems and conflicts
● Psychodynamic therapies: forms of insight therapy that emphasize
the need to discover and resolve unconscious conflicts
■ Psychoanalysis: Exploring the Unconscious
● Freud: hypothesized that much of our consciousness occurs in the
unconscious
○ Urges like sexuality, hunger, and aggression are socially
reprehensible, therefore they are buried in the unconscious
● By bringing people’s unconscious into the conscious, it is
supposed to allow clients to gain insight into their problems and
the past experiences from which they stem
● Methods of psychoanalysis
○ Free association: encouraged to write or talk without
censoring their thoughts in any way
○ Dream analysis: a method for understanding the
unconscious by examining the details of what happens
during a dream (the manifest content) to gain insight into
the true meaning of the dream, the emotional, unconscious
material that is communicated symbolically (the latent
content)
■ What does the dream mean?
○ Resistance: occurs as the treatment brings up unconscious
material that the client wishes to avoid, and the client
engages in strategies for keeping the information out of
conscious awareness
■ Using humor to talk about something painful, etc.
○ Transference: a process whereby clients direct the
emotional experiences that they are reliving toward the
therapist, rather than the original person involved
● Neuroses: the unconscious conflicts and their effects
■ Modern Psychodynamic Therapies
● More concerned with the client’s conscious mind rather than the
unconscious
● Object relations therapy: focuses on how early childhood
experiences and emotional attachments influence later
psychological functioning
○ Focus on objects: the client’s mental representations of
themselves and others
○ The therapist tries to understand where these patterns
come from
 ● Interpersonal psychotherapy: where the therapist is the participant
observer, who interacts with and observes the client over time to
understand any unrealistic expectations the client may have
toward their relationships and daily life
○ Coined by Harry Stack Sullivan
○ Found to effectively treat depression, substance abuse,
and eating disorders
■ Humanistic-Existential Psychotherapy
● Humanistic therapies emphasize individual strengths and potential
for growth and promotes the belief that human nature is
essentially positive
○ Opposed to the negative perspective advanced by
psychoanalytic approaches
● Humanistic and existential therapies share many similarities
○ To help people express their authentic selves
○ To overcome alienation
○ To become more loving
○ To take responsibility for their experiences so they learn to
dwell fully in the present
● Phenomenological approach: the therapist addresses the clients’
feelings and thoughts as they unfold in the present moment, rather
than looking for unconscious motives or dwelling in the past
● Client-centered therapy (person-centred therapy): focuses on
individuals’ abilities to solve their own problems and reach their full
potential with the encouragement of the therapist
○ Developed by Carl rogers
○ Believed that all individuals could develop and reach their
full potential
○ Believed that people experience problems when others
impose conditions of worth or expectation
■ Example: a father never satisfied with his child’s
report card
○ Believed that these conditions of worth result in behavior
that is mainly about gaining affection and approval, living
for others instead of themselves
■ Evaluating Insight Therapies
● Just because a therapy doesn’t work for most, doesn’t mean it
won’t work for some
● Psychodynamic therapies meet most of the criteria to be
empirically accepted but few studies have been conducted with
proper design
○ Effectiveness depends on the condition treated, e.g. works
well with addiction, BPD, and panic disorder
 ● Insight therapies can help people gain understanding and
awareness of the nature of their psychological problems
● However, young children and schizophrenia patients are not well
suited for these therapies
● The strength of the alliance is related to how successful insight
therapies end up being
● Person-centred therapy seems to be more useful than nothing, but
the research is inconsistent
○ Behavioral, Cognitive and Group Therapies
■ Behavioral therapies: address problem behaviors and the environmental
factors that trigger them as directly as possible
● The belief that patterns of behavior are the result of conditioning is
at the core of these therapies
■ Systematic Desensitization
● Systematic desensitization: where gradual exposure to a feared
stimulus or situation is coupled with relaxation training
● The client builds an anxiety hierarchy, starting from the least scary
to most scary, then goes through each step, practicing relaxation
● Example: public speaking fear
○ The person will first imagine walking up to the front of the
room where he is going to give the speech
■ In the meantime, he’s doing relaxation practice
○ Then he progresses to more concrete manifestations of the
situation
● Flooding: the client goes straight to the most challenging part;
exposing himself to the scenario that causes the most anxiety and
panic
● Modelling: the client observes another person engage with the
feared object or situation
○ An ophidiophobe (person who is afraid of snakes) may
observe someone handle a snake
● Virtual reality exposure (VRE), where someone uses a VR
headset to simulate a situation, can help people overcome fears
■ Aversive Conditioning
● Aversive conditioning: a behavioral technique that involves
replacing a positive response to a stimulus with a negative
response, typically a punishment
● Example: Antabuse, which is a pill that causes nausea when
someone drinks alcohol
● Requires willpower
■ Cognitive-Behavioral Therapies
● Ellis and Beck found that people with depression tend to interpret
and think about their lives in a negative light
 ● Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT): a form of therapy that
consists of procedures such as cognitive restructuring, stress
inoculation training, and exposing people to experiences they may
have a tendency to avoid
○ Similar to systematic desensitization
● Helps clients become more aware of the thought, emotion, and
behavioral patterns that arise in their current lives
● They learn to identify habitual dysfunctional tendencies and work
on building more functional cognitive and behavioral habits
● Someone with social anxiety, for example, may be made to make
small talk with strangers
● Cognitive restructuring: learning to challenge negative thought
patterns, question self-defeating beliefs, and to view situations in a
different light
● The dysfunctional set of thinking patterns that reinforces
depression is the tendency to make internal, stable, and global
attributions for negative events (negative explanatory style)
○ Internal attributions: attributed to the self
○ Stable attributions: beliefs that these issues will not change
○ Global attributions: beliefs that apply to everything in one’s
life
● CBT helps depression patients note their thinking patterns as they
occur
■ Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy
● Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT): Combines
mindfulness meditation practices with cognitive-behavioral
approaches
● Essentially, watching your mind and developing a COAL attitudes
○ COAL: curious, opening, accepting, and loving
○ This develops the brain areas called the “social circuitry”
■ Medial prefrontal cortex
○ This develops an interpersonal attunement: between
oneself and others
● Mindfulness is, in itself, intrapersonal attunement: within oneself
● Decentering: occurs when one is able to ‘step back’ from one’s
normal consciousness and observe oneself more objectively as an
observer
● Seems to be beneficial for social anxiety and GAD, bipolar
disorder, depression, hypochondriasis (believing one is sick all the
time), and suicidal thoughts
■ Group and Family Therapies
● Group therapy sessions: where members share their personal
stories and experiences
 ○ Can produce strong bonding experience
● Family therapy: group therapy that includes the family
● Family therapists generally take a systems approach
○ Systems approach: an orientation that encourages
therapists to see an individual’s symptoms as being
influenced by many different interacting systems
○ Example: a family where one member is abusive might
result in behaviors such as not letting others come to visit,
or monitoring their own behavior to not make them angry
■ Evaluating CBTs
● Effective in treating anxiety disorders, OCD, specific phobias
● Helpful in increasing behavioral skills such as social skills and
decreasing problematic behaviors
● CBT is the most effective treatment currently available for anxiety
disorders (more so than medications!)
■ See Table.4 in the textbook
● Biomedical Therapies
○ Prozac
■ Prozac came onto the market in 1987, one of many selective serotonin
reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)
■ It, and other drugs, caused a wide array of side effects such as sexual
dysfunction and suicidal thoughts
○ Drug Treatments
■ Psychopharmacotherapy: the use of drugs to attempt to manage or
reduce clients’ symptoms
● Psychotropic drugs: medications designed to alter psychological
functioning
● All psychotropic drugs are designed to cross the blood-brain
barrier
○ Blood-brain barrier: a network of tightly packed cells that
only allow specific types of substances to move from the
bloodstream to the brain in order to protect delicate brain
cells against harmful infections
● These drugs affect neurotransmitters such as serotonin,
dopamine, and norepinephrine, affecting how sensitive neurons
are to them
■ Antidepressants and Mood Stabilizers
● Antidepressant drugs: medications designed to elevate mood and
reduce other symptoms of depression
● Types of antidepressants
○ Monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs): deactivate
monoamine oxidase, an enzyme that breaks down
serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine at the synaptic
 clefts (spaces between the axon and dendrite) of nerve
cells
■ This allows more dopamine, serotonin, and
norepinephrine to remain at the synapse
■ Having more of these neurotransmitters allows
them to have more of an effect
■ Side Effects
● dangerous interactions with smoked meats,
aged cheeses, alcohol, and medications
● Diarrhea
● Weight gain
● Sexual dysfunction
○ Tricyclic: blocks the reuptake of serotonin and
norepinephrine
■ Earliest antidepressants available
○ Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs): block the
reuptake of serotonin only (Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil)
■ Increasing serotonin function seems to be how it
works, however it could be that
● the serotonin amounts decrease brain stem
activation, reducing negative emotions, or
● Decreasing amygdala activity reduces
negative emotions
■ Have been shown to lead to neurogenesis (birth of
new neurons) in the hippocampus, alleviating
depression
○ Mood stabilizers: drugs used to prevent or reduce the
severity of mood swings experienced by people with
bipolar disorder
■ Lithium: one of the first mood stabilizers from the
1950s to 1980s which was the standard drug
treatment for depression and bipolar disorder
● Antidepressants are not happy pills and do not cause a high
■ Working the Model: Is St. John's Wort Effective?
● What do we know about St. John’s Wort?
○ An herbal supplement, used as a mood enhancer
● What have scientific studies found about St. John’s Wort and
depression?
○ It’s more effective than a placebo and just as effective as
prescription drugs
○ Fewer side effects than most drugs
○ Could potentially work for severe depression, only tested
on mild to moderate depression
 ● Can we critically evaluate this evidence?
○ It works for some, but not for others. This may be due to
variance in quality among brands
● Why is this relevant?
○ Knowledge about treatment options can help people make
fully informed choices
■ Antianxiety Drugs
● Antianxiety drugs: affect the activity of gamma-aminobutyric acid
(GABA), an inhibitory neurotransmitter that reduces neural activity
● Short-lived and happen within a few minutes
● Examples
○ Xanax, Valium, Ativan
● Side effects
○ Drowsiness, tiredness, impaired attention
○ Memory impairments, depression, decreased sex drive
● Have high potential for abuse
■ Antipsychotic Drugs
● Antipsychotic drugs: generally used to treat symptoms of
psychosis, such as delusions, hallucinations and disorganized
thought
● Commonly used for schizophrenia patients
● Tardive dyskinesia: a movement disorder involving involuntary
movements and facial tics
○ Associated with antipsychotic medications that block
dopamine receptors
○ Other side effects: seizures, anxiety, nausea, and
impotence (ouch)
● Atypical antipsychotics: second-generation antipsychotics that are
claimed to be less likely to produce side effects
○ This isn’t always true though.
○ Clozapine: can compromise the body’s white blood cells,
leading potentially to death
● Zyprexa: a drug that came out for schizophrenia patients
○ Was hailed as a wonder drug and prescribed to many
people
○ Linked to the onset of diabetes, hyperglycemia, and
pancreatitis
○ Zyprexa was prescribed off-label to dementia patients,
Alzheimer’s, agitation, aggression, hostility, depression,
and sleep disorders in elderly patients
○ Eventually prescribed to all adult patients because Eli Lilly
marketed it as such
○ Eli Lilly had to pay out $1.2 billion to settle lawsuits
 ■ Evaluating Drug Therapies
● Drugs are not more effective in many cases
● They don’t always treat the root causes
● Effects are rarely evident until weeks after taking them
■ Exercise: the true wonder drug
● It’s more effective than placebos at relieving depressive symptoms
and can be just as effective as medication
○ Technical and Surgical Methods
■ Frontal lobotomy: surgically removing regions of the cortex to ‘cure’
psychological problems
● Risky and quite horrifying: removing these regions in chimpanzees
made them less aggressive
● Led to leucotomy: the surgical destruction of brain tissues in the
prefrontal cortex
● Transorbital lobotomy (ice pick lobotomy): lobotomy through the
eye socket
○ Freeman developed this and drove around in a
lobotomobile (what the fuck?!)
○ It worked for a lot of people, though.
■ Focal Lesions
● Small areas of brain tissue are surgically destroyed
○ For depression, OCD, and anxiety disorders, a focal lesion
is given to a cluster of cells in the anterior cingulate cortex
○ The anterior cingulate cortex is overactive in people with
these problems
■ Electroconvulsive Therapy
● Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT): passing an electrical current
through the brain in order to induce a temporary seizure
● Quite unsafe, but does not typically result in future impairments
● We’re not quite sure why it works though.
■ Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
● Transcranial magnetic stimulation: a therapeutic technique in
which a focal area of the brain is exposed to a powerful magnetic
field
● Can reduce depressive symptoms
■ Deep Brain Stimulation
● Deep brain stimulation (DBS): a technique that involves electrically
stimulating specific regions of the brain
● Produces instantaneous results and can help people with severe
depression
● Can cause internal bleeding and infection from insertion of the
wires
■ When are Technological and Surgical Methods Used
 ● Typically reserved for severe cases of depression, OCD,
schizophrenia, or anxiety disorders

Congrats, you sat through it all. Now ace the exam.