Ch. 3 – Nature vs. Nurture
•Evolutionary Psychology-The study of behavior, emotions, and thinking that allowed our ancestors to survive, reproduce and send their genes into the future.
•Examples: Fear of spiders, snakes, heights, and bitter foods.
•Behavior Geneticists: Study the differences between heredity and environment.
•Evolutionary Psychology-The study of behavior, emotions, and thinking that allowed our ancestors to survive, reproduce and send their genes into the future.
•Examples: Fear of spiders, snakes, heights, and bitter foods.
•Behavior Geneticists: Study the differences between heredity and environment.
•Chromosomes: 23 pairs (23 from sperm & 23 from egg); 46 in total.
•Identical Twins: Develop from the same egg and splits in two; Same gender only
•Fraternal Twins: Develop from separate eggs and can be same or different genders
•Adoption Studies: Have provided clues to hereditary and environmental influences. Adopted children tend to share values and attitudes with adoptive parents, but personalities with biological parents.
•Temperament: Emotional excitability
•Heritability: The extent to which variation among individuals can be attributed to differing genes.
•Subfield of biology that studies the molecular structure and function of genes.
•Mutations: Random error in gene replication
•Parents influence long-term decisions
•Peers influence short-term decisions
•Culture: Behaviors, ideas, attitudes, values & traditions shared by a group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next
•Norms: Rules for accepted behavior.
•Personal Space: Buffer zone maintained around our bodies
•Individualism: Emphasis on the independent self
•Collectivism: Emphasis on the interdependent self
•X Chromosome: The sex chromosome found in both men and women. XX is female
•Y Chromosome: Found only in males (XY).
•Color blindness is on the X chromosome
•Testosterone: The main male hormone produced by the testes.
•Estrogen: The main female hormone.
•Gender Role: Expectation about the way men and women behave
•Gender Identity: Our sense of being male or female
•Gender Typed: Exhibiting the expected traits of boys or girls
•Social Learning Theory: Learning gender behaviors by observing and imitating and by being rewarded or punished.
•Gender Schema Theory: SLT & Cognition: Children form concepts and a schema about their gender.
Ch. 4- Development
•Developmental Psychologists: Study the physical, cognitive, & social changes throughout the life cycle.
•Conception: The union of the sperm & egg
•Zygote: First 2 weeks after conception (always female)
•Embryo: Development from 2 weeks to 2 months
•Fetus: 3rd month through birth.
•Teratogens: Chemicals and viruses that can affect the unborn child during prenatal development
•Fetal Alcohol Syndrome: Small head & brain, and leading cause of mental retardation
•Newborn: Rooting Reflex-touching the infant’s cheek will cause the infant to turn and open its mouth in search of the nipple
•Habituation: A decrease in responding with repeated stimulation (infant looks away sooner)
•Maturation: Biological growth uninfluenced by learning
•Cognition: All mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering and communicating
Piaget-Cognitive Development
•Theory based on schemas-mental framework
1) Sensorimotor (B-2): Experiencing the world through our five senses
•-object permanence: awareness that things exist even when not perceived
•-stranger (separation) anxiety: baby experiences fear when separated from primary caregiver
2) Preoperational (2-6): Stage in which language develops:
•-symbolic representation: child gains vocabulary
•-egocentrism: child cannot understand that others feel differently then he or she does
•-assimilation: fitting new information into an already existing schema
•-accommodation: changing a schema to fit new information
•-theory of mind: the ability to infer what others are thinking (premack & Woodruff-re: chimpanzees)
3) Concrete Operational (7-12): The ability to understand the world in which they live, children cannot go beyond their own concrete experiences
-centration (conservation): the ability to understand size and shape within 3 dimensions
-reversibility: the ability to understand positive and negative
4) Formal Operational (13- ): The ability to think abstractly and hypothesize
Autism: A disorder marked by impaired communication and repetitive behaviors (affects four boys to every girl).
Social Development
•Attachment: Bond between an infant and their caregiver
•Critical Period: An important period from 6 months to 3 years in which proper development takes place
•Imprinting: Lorenz’ study in which ducklings attached to the first moving creature they observed
•Basic Trust: First stage of Erikson theory which states that infants can find safety and reliability in their world
•Day Care: Does not affect attachment if programs are decent
•Reactive Attachment Disorder: Children who are abused or neglected can develop serious disorders later in life.
•Self Concept: An understanding and assessment of who one is
•Parenting Styles (Baumrind)
•-Authoritarian: Parents impose rules and expect obedience
•Permissive: Parents submit to children’s desires
•Authoritative: Parents are demanding and responsive. They set rules but are fair and firm
Physical Development
•The years spent changing from childhood to adulthood (has lengthened over the past 100 years).
•Puberty: The time spent sexually maturing
•Primary Sex Characteristics: Reproductive Organs and external genitalia
•Secondary Sex Characteristics: The non-reproductive organs
•Menarche: A girl’s first period
•Menopause: A woman’s last period
Freudian Development
•Libido: Sexual energy where the focus of the body is located
•Oral Stage (b-2): Focus is on the mouth range
•Anal Stage (2-4): Focus is on the anal range
•Phallic Stage (4-6): Focus is on the genital area
•Latent Stage (6-12): Focus is repressed
•Genital Stage (13 - ): Focus is on the genitals
•Oral fixation results in passive dependence
•Anal Expulsive & Retentive
•Phallic: Oedipus & Electra Complex
Ch. 5 - Sensation
•Sensation-Detecting physical energy and encoding it
•Perception-Organizing and interpreting our senses
•Psychophysics-how physical energy relates to our psychological experience
•Absolute Thresholds-the minimum stimulation necessary to detect or notice
•Signal Detection Theory: Predicts when we will detect weak signals and measures our ratio of “hits” to “false alarms.”
•Subliminal Stimuli: Stimuli under the absolute threshold level
•Priming: The activation of an association
•Difference Threshold (Just Noticeable Difference): Minimum difference a person can detect between any two stimuli half the time
•Weber’s Law: To be perceived as different, two stimuli must differ by a constant minimum percentage rather than a constant amount.
•Sensory Adaptation: diminished sensitivity as a consequence of constant stimulation
Vision
•Transduction: the process by which our sensory systems encode stimulus energy as neural messages
•2 Physical Characteristics of Light: Wavelength and hue:
•Wavelength: the distance from one wave peak to the next
•Hue: the colors we experience
The Eye
•Cornea: Protects the eye
•Pupil: Small opening in which light enters
•Iris: Regulates amount of light allowed
•Lens: Focuses rays to clear vision
•Retina: Located at the back of the eye, contains rods and cones.
•Rods: Controls light and dark vision
•Cones: Control color vision
•Acuity: Sharpness of vision
•Farsightedness: Inability to see close
•Nearsightedness: Inability to see far
•Optic Nerve: Carries information to the brain which is received by the thalamus
•Blind Spot: Where the optic nerve contains to receptor cells
•Fovea: The retina’s area of central focus in which the cones cluster
Visual Information Processing
•Feature Detector: nerve cells in the brain that respond to specific features such as shape, angle or movement
•Parallel processing: the brain divides a visual scene into subdimensions such as color, form, depth and movement
•Trichromatic Theory of Color: Retina has three color receptors (red, green, blue). Other colors are combinations of these colors
•Opponent Process Theory: Opposing retinal processes enable color vision
Hearing
•Hearing-(Audition) controlled by the auditory nerve of the brain.
•Decibels-Vibrations of sound
•Pitch-Tone of sound
•Cochlea-Snail shaped tube in the inner ear responsible for nerve deafness and sensorineural hearing loss
•Conduction deafness-partial deafness due to outer ear damage
Other Senses
•Touch: 4 touch senses: heat, cold, pressure, pain; (warm + cold = hot).
•Kinesthesis: Sense of position and movement
•Vestibular Sense: Also monitors position and movement
•Pain-Gate Control Theory: Theory of pain stating that a gate in the brain opens to feel pain and closes to shut off pain
•Sensory Interaction: Principle that one sense influences another
•Basic Tastes: Sweet, Salty, Sour, Bitter (most dangerous taste)
•Smell & Taste (Olfactory Nerve)
Ch. 6 - Perception
•Selective Attention: Focusing our awareness on a limited perspective of our experience
•Inattentional Blindness: Failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere
•Change Blindness: Failing to see a change in stimuli when our attention is directed elsewhere
•Illusion: Misrepresentation of reality
•Visual Capture: Vision dominates our senses
•Figure-Ground Relationships: Figure vs. Background (Some figure-ground is reversible)
•Gestalt: Whole form together
•Grouping: Putting items together
•Proximity: The closeness of items
•Similarity: The likeness of items
•Continuity: The smoothness of items
•Connectedness: The linking of items
•Closure: The filling in gaps of items
•Depth Perception: The ability to see objects in three dimensions and judge distance
•Visual Cliff: A lab device for testing depth perception created by Eleanor Gibson, showing that both animals and newborn humans can detect depth instinctively
Binocular Cues
•Judging Distance using both eyes
•Retinal Disparity: The eyes perceive the distance of objects differently
•Convergence: A muscle cue in which turning the eye inward when viewing closer objects
Monocular Cues
•Monocular Cues: Cues that are relevant to one eye at a time rather than both eyes together
•Relative Size: Objects farther away appear smaller than objects closer to us
•Interposition: If one object partially blocks another, we perceive it as closer
•Relative clarity: Hazy objects are perceived as farther away than sharp objects
Perceptual Constancy
•Phi Phenomenon: When adjacent lights flash off and on, we perceive them as one moving light.
•Perceptual Constancy: The ability to perceive changing stimuli as unchanging.
Final Perception Concepts
•Sensory Deprivation: A loss of our senses can cause hallucinations
•Perceptual Set: A mental predisposition to perceive one thing and not another
•Human Factors Psychologists: Design appliances and machines that fit our perceptions
•Parapsychology: The field of psychology which studies ESP