September 13, 2017

Reading considered today:

Course Outline

Moghaddam, Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4

From the previous class

What makes an idea “great”?

The discipline of Psychology, metapsychology

Phenomena, methods, purposes

Causal science and normative science

Reductionism and interpretation

Definitions of Psychology

Reflection on elements of the definitions

Affect (emotion), Behaviour (action), Cognition (thinking)

Science

A method rather than a set of facts

Public and replicable

Describe and explain

Causes or normative patterns (regularities)

Determinants or contextual agency

Physiology or meaning systems (cuiture)

Moghaddam's degrees of freedom

Causal and normative science

Causal - experiments, laws, natural sciences

Hard vs. soft

Fechner, Weber example (M p9) – low df

Normative (interpretive)

How things seem (ought) to be

Regularities in thought and action related to culture

Example of boys and girls in school – high df

Zaolian 早恋 -- Puppy love

Models rather than laws

“Carriers” of meaning systems and cultures

Newsweek and Guardian links regarding meaning
systems and the Confederate flag

Discovery and (social) construction

All scientific work involves Data and Theory

Working in and working out

CHAPTER 2

Examples of Psychology Laboratory Experiments

Skinner box experiments

Skinner box images

Reward schedules (reinforcement)

Studies of serial learning, associative learning

Hamlet's experiment

Teaching methods and study skills experiments

Concepts to be applied to the examples

Variables: Independent, Dependent

Cause, Effect

Operationalizing variables of interest

Tajfel's social categorization (M p19)

Minimal group paradigm

Controlling variables of no interest

Removing contextual factors, particularly social factors

Teaching methods example

Hamlet example

Random assignment to groups

Reliability - consistency

Validity – accuracy

How realistic is the laboratory experiment?

Internal & external validity

University student culture

Norms for participants in experiments

Milgram’s obedience experiment

“The main advantage of the laboratory is still seen to be the control of variables, so that the link between cause and effect, independent variable and dependent variable, can be objectively studied.” (M p20)

Other important topics in Chapter 2

Introspection

Imageless thought?

Structuralism, Behaviourism, Cognitive Psychology

Individualism and the laboratory

Causation, the “causal universalism” assumption (M p22)

Personal responsibility

Free will, contextual agency, degrees of freedom

Reductionism

CHAPTER 3

The Placebo Effect

Inactive substances can be effective when one believes in them.

“Subjective beliefs can determine the course of physical illness”.

Mind over matter?

No, but beliefs do make a difference for behaviour and emotion.

Meaning systems explanations – a model of the effect

1. We interpret the situation and assign meanings

Birthday noodles example

“Carriers” of meaning may be involved

Courtesy seats in public transportation

2. These interpretations and meaning influence us

3. Our changed behaviour (thinking, emotion) affects us physically

Shamans and other non-biologically oriented healers

Another possibility: Natural course of illness

Some terminology: Inactive, Active (negative, positive)

Some non-medical examples

Self-fulfilling prophecies

Artistic (ron, lynn) or mathematical ability (kate)

Expectancy effects - Robert Rosenthal

Operation S.M.A.R.T.

Self-presentation and placebo (p 32)

William James example (with Grover)

When fearful, act confidently

Authority and placebo

The power of the stethoscope in ads

The Milgram study

The design of medical/drug experiments

Controlling for the placebo effect

Ethics of studying and prescribing placebos

Humanistic Psychology and the placebo effect

Rogers, Maslow, the anti-psychiatry movement (Laing, Szasz)

Jerome Frank's Psychotherapy as Rhetoric

Therapy is an attempt to persuade clients to change their meaning systems. In order to feel better, change your view of the world.

“In order to survive, humans must make sense of their experiences; that is, they must attribute meanings to them. The determinants of our thinking, feeling, and behaviour are the meanings we attribute to our own feelings and to personal events.”
“Successful psychotherapy relieves distress and disability by transforming the meanings patients ascribe to events from negative to positive.”
Jerome Frank

For more information on placebo effects:

Mechanism of the placebo effect
Self-fulfilling prophecy and expectancy effects
nocebos
The Healing Power of Placebos - a consumer-oriented article from the U.S. Federal Drug Administration
A recent review of York philosopher David Jopling's Talking Cures and Placebo Effects.
Journalist Erik Vance’s writing on placebo and suggestibility
Vox article on placebo effect

CHAPTER 4

Mind: Conscious, nonconscious and unconscious psychological processing

Processes that take place outside of conscious awareness

Automaticity

Automatic body processes

Stroop task (reading colours)

Implicit meanings and associations

Priming

Anagram task

Perceptual priming (M p58)

Fiery or charming?

False consciousness (class or gender relations)

Learning and memory processes

Savings scores

Reconstructive memory (M p56)

Courtroom examples

Sensation and perception

jnd (M p44)

Gestalt closure (M p45)

The Freudian Unconscious

Theories of Human Nature

Conflict

Thomas Hobbes

Jean Jacques Rousseau

Karl Marx

Conflict among id, ego, superego

Anxiety and its effects

Repression and other defense mechanisms

Sublimation

Dreams and slips of the tongue

Royal road to the unconscious

REMs and other biological aspects

Is it true?

Falsifiability

Freudian view of human nature

Deterministic, irrational (emotional rather than rational),

instinctual, bestial, in conflict with society

Is it useful?

Film, literary, art criticism

Jackson Pollock, for example

Antonio Damasio’s studies of consciousness and emotion

Damasio’s TED Talk


From Damasio’s book Looking for Spinoza: Joy, sorrow, and the feeling brain