Research doing a case study

Exploring Psychology by David G. Myers

Chapter 7: Learning

· Learning: the process of acquiring through experience new and relatively enduring information or behaviors

· Learning by association: learning that certain events occur together and linking those events

· Stimulus: any event or situation that evokes a response

· Cognitive learning the acquisition of mental information, whether by observing events, by watching others, or through language

· Classical conditioning: a type of learning in which one learns to link two or more stimuli and anticipate events

· Ivan Pavlov and classical conditioning

· John Watson believed that human emotions and behaviors, though biologically influences, are mainly a bundle of conditioned responses

· Reinforcement: operant conditioning, any event that strengthens the behavior it follows

· Shaping: an operant conditioning procedure in which reinforcers guide behavior toward closer and closer approximations of the desired behavior

· Punishment has negative impacts on the subject being punished

· Punishment sends mixed messages

· Punishment reinforces aggressive behavior

· Punishment can teach fear

· Latent learning: learning that occurs but is not apparent until there is an incentive to demonstrate it

· Intrinsic motivation: a desire to perform a behavior effectively for its own sake

· Extrinsic motivation: a desire to perform a behavior to receive promised rewards or avoid threatened punishment

· Observational learning: learning by observing others

· Modeling: the process of observing and imitating a specific behavior

Chapter 8: Memory

· Memory is learning that has persisted over time; it is information that has been acquired, stored, and can be retrieved.

· Measures of retention:

· Recall: retrieving information that is not currently in your conscious awareness but that was learned at an earlier time (a fill-in-the-blank question tests your recall)

· Recognition: identifying items previously learned (a multiple choice question tests your recognition)

· Relearning- learning something more quickly when you learn it a second or later time. When you study for a final exam or engage a language used in early childhood, you will relearn the material more easily than you did initially

· Get information into our brain, a process called encoding

· Retain that information, a process called storage

· Later get the information back out, a process called retrieval

· Short-term memory: activated memory that holds a few items briefly

· Long-term memory: the relatively permanent and limitless storehouse of the memory system. Includes knowledge, skills, and experiences.

· Working memory: a newer understanding of short-term memory that focuses on conscious, active processing of incoming auditory and visual-spatial information, and of information retrieved from long-term memory

· Hippocampus: a neural center located in the limbic system; helps process explicit memories for storage

· The best retrieval cues come from associations we form at the time we encode a memory- smells, tastes, and sights that can evoke our memory of the associated person or event.

· Forgetting is often not memories faded, it is memories unretrieved

· Sexual abuse happens and there is no characteristic “survivor syndrome”

· Injustice happens

· Forgetting happens

· Recovered memories are commonplace

· Memories of things happening before age 3 are unreliable

· Memories “recovered” under hypnosis or the influence of drugs are especially unreliable

· Memories, whether real or false, can be emotionally upsetting

Chapter 9: Thinking, Language, and Intelligence

· Psychologists who study cognition focus on the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating information

· Cognition: the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering and communicating

· Concept: a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, and people

· Prototype: a mental image or best example of a category. Matching new items to a prototype provides a quick and easy method for sorting items into categories

· Algorithm: a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem

· Heuristic: a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier- but also more error-prone – use of heuristics

· Heuristic: a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error prone than algorithms

· Insight: a sudden realization of a problem’s solution; contrasts with strategy-based solutions

· Confirmation bias: a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence

· Intuition: our fast, automatic, unreasoned feelings and thoughts

· Overconfidence: the tendency to overestimate the accuracy of our knowledge and judgments

· Belief perspective, clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited (It is often the source of many conflicts)

· Creativity: the ability to produce novel and valuable ideas

· Convergent thinking: narrows the available problem solutions to determine the single best solution

· Divergent thinking: expands the number of possible problem solutions

· Creativity has five components:

· Expertise: well developed base of knowledge

· Imaginative thinking skills: recognize patterns and make connections

· Venturous personality: seeks new experiences, tolerates ambiguity and risk

· Intrinsic motivation: driven by interest and satisfaction

· Creative environment: sparks, supports, and refines creative ideas

· Language: our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning

· Grammar: in a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with an understand others. In a given language, semantics is the set of rules for deriving meaning from sounds, and syntax is the set of rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences

· We learn language in stages

· Language influences the way we think

· Intelligence: mental quality consisting of the ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new situations

· Savant syndrome: a condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has an exceptional specific skill, such as in computation or drawing

· Emotional intelligence: the ability to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions:

· Perceiving emotions: recognizing them in faces, music, and stories

· Understanding emotions: predicting them and how they may change and blend

· Managing emotions: knowing how to express them in varied situations

· Using emotions to enable adaptive or creative thinking

Chapter 10: Motivation and Emotion

· Psychologists today define motivation as a need or desire that energizes and directs behavior. Our motivations arise from the interplay between natures. Motivated behavior includes:

· Instinct theory: focuses on genetically predisposed behaviors

· Drive-reduction: focuses on how we respond to our inner pushes

· Arousal theory: focuses on finding the right level of stimulation

· Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs focuses on the priority of some needs over others

· Instinct: a complex behavior that is rigidly patterned throughout a species and unlearned

· Homeostasis: a tendency to maintain balanced or constant internal state; the regulation of any aspect of body chemistry, such as blood glucose, around a particular level

· The need to belong: we have a need to affiliate with others, even to become strongly attached to certain others in enduring, close relationships.

· There are multiple benefits of belonging including: exercising our ability to cooperate, think, feel and act

· Social networking: we connect with one another via internet

· There is a constant debate: are social networking sites making us more or less socially isolated?

· Does electronic communication stimulate healthy self-disclosure?

· Do social networking profiles and posts reflect people’s actual personality?

· Does social networking promote narcissism?

· Achievement motivation: a desire for significant accomplishment, for mastery of skills or ideas, for control, and for rapidly attaining a high standard

· James-Lange theory: the theory that our experience of emotion is our awareness of our physiological responses to emotion-arousing stimuli

· Cannon-Bard theory: the theory that an emotion-arousing stimulus simultaneously triggers 1. Physiological responses and 2. The subjective experience of emotion

· Two-factor theory: the Schachter-Singer theory that to experience emotion one must 1. Be physically aroused and 2. Cognitively label the arousal.

· Our basic emotions are: joy, anger, interest, disgust, surprise, sadness, fear

· Gender and emotion: Studies show that women surpass men in detecting emotions

· Culture and emotion: the meaning of gestures and expressions differ across some cultures

· Facial feedback effect: the tendency of facial muscle states to trigger corresponding feelings, such as fear, anger, or happiness