PSYC104/PSYU1104/PSYX1104 - Lecture Notes

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PSYC104 Lecture Notess
Introduction to Psychology I (Macquarie University)
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PSYC104 LECTURE NOTES

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WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGY?
- The study of how people think, feel and behave

- Both a science and a profession
HISTORY AND THEORY OF PSYCHOLOGY

- Psychology is a science of human behaviour
- Science: using scientific methods to get information about something
- Comes from Greek word psyche – soul or mind
- Some key issues:
o What is it to be human
o The existence of and relationship between the mind and the body
o Knowledge and how to obtain it
o Emotion and its role in human existence
Pythagoras:
- Numbers will explain the universe

- Quantify our experience
- First to connect physical events to psychological events
- Listening to musical tones and what emotions it brings out in people, through observation
- Perfection is only to be found in the mathematical world; only embrace the world by reason
- Cant fully experience the world through only senses, have to use reason
- Mind-body distinction, first with a clear cut mind-body dualism in Western thought
- Sense/Flesh experiences are inferior to cognitive reason
- Plato was a member of the Pythagoreans
Plato:
- Combines Socratic method with Pythagorean mysticism

- Socratic – questioning a claim
- Objects in material world are inferior representations to objects in the world of pure forms
(ideas)
- True knowledge is attained by grasping the true forms themselves rather then focusing on
the sensory experiences of the world
- Mathematics is a higher form of knowing but not the ultimate
- Knowledge is brought into the body with the soul
Aristotle:
- Founded the Lyceum (regarded as the first university)

- He was the first to examine such topics as: memory, sensation, sleep, dreams, geriatrics,
learning
- Know by studying nature – senses bring in information from the world, putting it together,
evaluating that, and making conclusions from that (inductive methods)

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- A rationalist empiricist: the mind must analyse information from the senses to produce
knowledge
- Explained psychological evens in terms of biology
- Possibly the first physiological psychologists
Ancient Greek thinkers:
- A significant period in Western thought around 600BCE

- Don’t just accept information, instead question it and make own conclusion
- Questioned the establishment
- Established of rigor in analytical thinking
- Knowledge is in a continual process of development and change
The Dark Ages:
- 400s – 1300s CE in the west

- Greek learning largely lost to the West
- Burning and destroying of records by church as it was questioning God, therefore
information lost
- Backwards regression of thought and science and thinking
- Put a stop to the open inquiring concerning the nature of human beings
- Human reason was down played
- However: Preservation of Greek learning was carried out by Islamic scholarship
- Towards the end of the dark ages, the rediscovery of Aristotles work lead to a re-awakening
of discussion and inquiry
- Many of the classic western institutions date from around this period (Cambridge, Oxford)
- The germ of Humanism was sown, Humans as the measure of all things
Renaissance Humanism:
- 1400s – 1600s CE
- Social and intellectual focus turned onto human beings and activities
- Four themes were prominent:
1. Individualism
2. Personal religion
3. Interest in past, Greek and Roman writers
4. Anti-Aristotelianism, one powerful person telling people how to think
- Much progress made when humans could measure the world
- Dogma was no longer unchallenged
- The rise of a multitude of princely kingdoms, rejection of centralised control
- Corruption in the church was apparent, and affronted many -but dissent wasn’t stomped out
like previously
- The rise of Skepticism – critical evaluation
- Greater exploration of the world

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Newtonian Science
- Newtonian science provides the fundamentals for modern science

- Principals of Newtonian science
o God created but does not micromanage
o The material world is governed by natural laws (cause and effect relationships,
means we can predict things that will happen)
o He rejected Aristotles final cause concept (predictable knowing end point, know how
something will end)
o Accepted Occam’s Razor (Simplest explanations usually are the best)
o Knowledge is imperfect because of the limitations of human beings (we never really
know anything definitively because of bias, imperfections and errors, therefore
never be able to perfectly understand, always more to understand)
o Classification is not explaining (labelling something is not the same as explaining the
behaviour)
Francis Bacon
- Stressed the observation of events (not just thinking about it, but interacting with the world)
- Desired no theories (only observations)
o Counter to psychological science
- Empirical observation was the ultimate authority in matters scientific
- Scientific endeavours should benefit society. Practical knowledge was the rationale for
expending public funds on science
Descartes
- Aimed to establish knowledge with same certain basis as truths of maths (same precisions
and certainty as maths, he wanted to have for human mind)
- Rationalism: I think, therefore I am
- Four rules
o Avoid all prejudgment, all is up for discussion
o Divide problems into as many parts as might be required to obtain a solution
(reductionism)
o Analyse the parts in an orderly fashion (start with simplest, work toward most
difficult)
o Be thorough – scientific rigour
- Believed some ideas were innate
- Humans and animals possessed similar methods of responding to the environment
o Implications for animal models of human physiology
- Interactive dualism of the mind-body
- Paved the wat for scientific study of consciousness
o Validity in self-report (how to know how they feel, ask how they feel)

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Locke
- Empiricist: all knowledge comes from experience

o Opposed ‘innate ideas’
- Ideas were simple mental ideas, they are produced by either sensation or reflection
- Human are motivated by seeking pleasure and avoiding pain
o Counter to (existing) moral theories of right and wrong, original sin, etc (not doing
things for the moral good of others and god etc)
- Understanding motivation by looking at the conditions under which behaviours exist
- The mind was a blank slate, tabula rasa (born as a blank slate, no innate ideas)
o Fundamental for behaviourism
- All actions exists due to experiences
Hume
- Science of humanity must be based upon experience and observation

- Believed that the first step was careful observation and then generalise from those
observations
- Examined causality – proposed four conditions to define:
o Contiguous in space and time (happen in same place and time)
o Once cause = one effect
o Constant union of cause and effect (effect has to always follow cause)
o Same cause for same effect
- Fundamental ideas for modern psychology that Hume considered:
o The mind consists of the perceptions we are having at any given moments
o The emotions are the consistent motivators of human actions
o Humans learn the same as animals through reward and punishment
- Believed psychology underpinned topics such as philosophy, religion and science
Kant
- Synthesised rationalism and empiricism

- Defined causality beyond mere co-occurrence
- How do we know things?
o Observation (empirical nature of getting things from the world)
o How we think about it (evaluate, critiquing etc, actively engage in the mind – active
mind) make sense of the observations – what do they mean
- Inherent subjectively of the minds processes – he was critical of the limitations of
psychology:
o An objective study of the mind is not possible since it is not a physical thing
o Even introspection was not proper scientific method since th mind was studying
itself
o how could the data be safe from corruption?
o Fundamental for how we (today) measure psychological processes
Darwin
- Voyage of the Beagle

o Theories of evolution
o Saw variation and tried to explain the cause of this evolution

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o Couldn’t find explanation until reading “essay on the principal of population”

o Saying that the environment can shape the evolution of animals, this provided
Darwin the opportunity to explain his observation
- Survival of the fittest – survival of the best viewed from the perspective of the species as a
whole, not focusing on individual
- Individuals carry the traits that ‘fit’ the environment – survival of the best fitted to the
environment that they are in
- Necessity of the theory to explain observation
- Genetics has provided a mechanism for explaining the process of passing on traits (but this
was not known in Darwins time)
- Emphasis on the environment-species fit
- He asserted that both humans and great apes descended from a common primate ancestor
- Animals can experience and show emotions
Modern Psychological Theories

Structuralism
- Predominately in Europe
- Wundt and Tichener
- What is the structure of the mind? (how do elements of mind come together to be able to
think and reason)
- Similar to rationalist
- Think about own thoughts – introspection
Functionalism
- What is the practical use of the mind (how does it help us adapt better to our environment)
- Combination of evolution and pragmatism (interaction with environment)
- William James
- Combing rationalist and empirical
- Commonalities between people and individual differences (variation between people)
Evolutionary Psychology
- We are as we are now due to experiences of humans over time, through evolution
- Psychological processes and traits as evolutionary adaptions
- Fundamental to many aspects of psychology
Psychodynamic perspective
- Freud
- Unconscious impulses and desires
- Based on 3 assumptions
o Actions are determined by thoughts, feelings, wishes
o Much of mental activity occurs outside of conscious awareness
o Mental processes might conflict one another
- Behaviour, health symptoms etc, could be the product of unconscious motives

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Behaviourism
- Rejected the concept of mind

- Instead Tabula Rasa (blank slate)
- All about external environment not on unconscious desires
- Can make any behaviour come about with right environment
- Argued psychology should focus solely on observable actions (and conditions from which
actions result)
- Control the conditions and one can control the behaviour
o Watson claimed that, given a baby, he could shape its personality to suit any
profession
- Conditioning (stimulus and response)
Humanism:
- Emphasis on the actualisation of the self

o Reaching ones potential is the goals of humanistic approaches in therapy and other
activities
o Best version of yourself
- The approach assumes the uniqueness of the individual (focus on uniqueness not
commonality)
- empathy and attempts to focus on the individual
o “person-centred”
Cognitive perspective:
- How different people interpret, react and understand the same event
- How peoples perceive, process, retrieve and utilise information
- Experimental methods used to infer unobservable mental processes
WRAP UP:
- Ancient and modern figured laid the groundwork for the discipline of psychology
- Scientific thinking and practises are fundamental to psych
o Critical evaluation is key
o Claims must be testable and tested
o Empiricism is fundamental to furthering psych knowledge
- Different psychological perspectives developed, dominated, over time

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MOTIVATION
What is motivation?
- Motivation driver of directed behaviours; particularly our wants and needs

- Motivation involved both biological and social drives
- Biological motives – needs we require for survival and biological needs (thirst, hunger, sleep,
oxygen)
- Social motives – needs we acquire through learning and experiences (achievement, power,
curiosity)
- Drives propel engagement in some behaviours (approach motivation)
- Drives repel engagement in other behaviours (avoidance motivations)
- Apparent obsession with boosting motivations (e.g. personal trainers, motivational speakers)
- However, while motivational speakers invigorate biological drivers (e.g. adrenaline), long
time benefits are lacking
Motivation: Early perspectives
- Psychodynamic Perspective (Freud)  theorised behaviours motivated by unconscious and

conscious desires, which are not in unison
- Three theoretical constructs of psyche
o Id: unconscious, instinctual, irrational drives, Eros and Thanatos
o Superego: morally responsible drives, operates at preconscious awareness (drive for
perfection)
o Ego: conscious, rational mind, ensures id and superego drives manifest appropriately
(role is to refine the two parts of psyche so that behaviours that we manifest or
display are appropriate)
- How can we measure unconscious desires?
- Thematic Apperception Tests (TATs) claim to measure unconscious desires
- Longitudinal study 1950-1962 (McAdams & Valliant, 1962)
- Method:
o TAT responses assessed four social motives: achievement, power, affiliation, and
intimacy motivation.
o Self-report survey of motives (e.g., “Is achievement important to you”)
o Psychosocial adjustment: income, job promotion and enjoyment, marriage
satisfaction, drug use, days off sick etc.
- Results: achievement (assessed by TAT) more predictive of long-term entrepreneurial
success than self-report.

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Drive Reduction Theories
- Formulated in 1940s
- Thirst, hunger and sexual frustration drive us to reduce the averseness of these states
(driven to remove unpleasant states)
- Pleasurable experience to remove these unpleasant states
- Some drives are hierarchical (thirst > hunger > sex)
- Motivated to maintain psychological homeostasis (or equilibrium)
Yerkes-Dodson law
- Arousal affects strength of drives (Yerkes-Dodson, 1908)

- Inverted U-shaped curve represents relationship between arousal level and performance
quality (Zajonc, 1965)
E.g. running race:
- higher arousal will cause higher stress and anxiety towards it and will effect quality of their
race (e.g. don’t hear the gun go off as thinking too much)
- lower arousal will cause less effort and drive, therefore won’t try hard and will effect quality
of race

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- under-arousal causes stimulus hunger – a drive for stimulation

- stimulus-hunger may be satisfied in numerous ways
- under-arousal can increase curiosity
- Sensory deprivation experiments – induced under arousal (Zuckerman & Hopkins, 1966)
o deprived 22 people of all sensory experiences, caused visual halogenations
Clashing Drives
- Approach-approach conflict (e.g. dinner vs movie)

- Avoidance-avoidance conflict (e.g. failing an exam vs studying exam)
- Approach-avoidance conflict (e.g. approaching attractive person vs fear of rejection)
- As goal gets closer, the approach and avoidance grows stronger

- Avoidance tendency increases at a faster rate than approach tendency
Incentive Theories
- Drive Reduction theories (DRT) inadequate; we repeatedly engage in behaviours despite

satisfaction of drives (eating after full because food is really good)
- Incentive theories build on DRT – drive by positive goals
- Incentive theories further differentiate between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
- Intrinsic motivation can be devalued by extrinsic reinforcements
Relative importance of needs
- Some physical and psychological needs more important than others

- Physiological (or primary) needs, more important than psychological
(or secondary) needs (Murray, 1938)
- Need for achievement predicts academic performance (Spangler,
1992)-rchi
- Maslow (1954; 1971) formalized thinking in Hierarchy of needs theory

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Sexual Motivation
- Libido  human sexual desire, drive for sexual activity and pleasure
- Physiological drivers of libido include testosterone and…
- …a protein (DRD4) related to neurotransmitter dopamine
- Link between genes and self-reported sexual desire: 19% DRD4 variation linked with
increased sexual desire
- Evidence suggests men have stronger libido than women because men:
o Desire sex more frequently and experience more arousal
o Have more variety and number of sexual fantasies
o Masturbate more frequently
o Want more sexual partners
o Want to have sex earlier than women when in relationships
o But, variability exists within and between sexes
Sexual Response Cycle
- Pioneering research by Masters and Johnson in mid-1950s into human sexual response
- Human sexual response cycle has four phases:
1. Desire phase
2. Excitement/plateau phase
3. Orgasm phase
4. Resolution phase
- degree of satisfaction will be best predicted by the degree of feelings of love and connection
for ones sexual partner
Sex and Ageing
- Sex is more frequent early in relationships, twice per week

- While sex frequency decreases with age, satisfaction does not
- Healthy people in 70s and 80s, in happy relationships remain sexually active
- 75% of married men and 56% of married women over 60 years are sexually active
- 63% of married men and 30% of married women over 80 years are sexually active
Goal-setting: what really works?
- Research findings indicate setting goals to

motivate. Set, SMART goals:
1.Specific (not general)
2. Measurable
3. Action-oriented (not outcome)
4. Realistic
5. Time-based
- Self-efficacy and feedback important

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WEEK 2 – TEXTBOOK READINGS NOTES:

1.3 scientific thinking: distinguishing fact from fiction
Identify key features of scientific scepticism
1.3a Scientific Scepticism:
- Approach of evaluating all claims with an open mind, but insisting on persuasive evidence
before accepting them
- Derives from Greek word Skeptikos – “to consider carefully”
- Adopt two attitudes:
 A willingness to keep an open mind to all claims
 A willingness to accept these claims only after researchers have subjected
them to careful scientific tests
- Scientific sceptics are willing to change their minds when confronted with evidence that
challenges their preconceptions, and if evidence is persuasive
- Unwilling to accept claims based on authority alone
Identify and explain the test’s six principles of scientific thinking
1.3b A basic framework for scientific thinking:
Six key scientific thinking principles are:
- Extraordinary claims
 Is the evidence strong enough as the claim?
 The more a claim contradicts what we already know, the more
persuasive the evidence for this claim must be before we should
accept it
- Testing predictions
 Can the claim be tested?
 Scientists try to test the novel predictions of their (and rival)
theories in order to find out if the theory really describes the world
- Occam’s razor
 Does a simpler explanation fit the data just as well?
 If two hypotheses explain a phenomenon equally well, we should
generally select the simpler one
- Replicability

Can the results be duplicated in other studies?
A finding must be capable of being duplicated by independent

researches following the same ‘recipe’
 E.g. if researcher finds that people who meditate are 50% smarter,
but no other researches can duplicate this, be sceptical
- Ruling out rival hypotheses
 Have important alternative explanations for the findings been
excluded?

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 Findings consistent with several hypotheses require additional

research to eliminate these hypotheses
- Correlation versus causation

 Can we be sure that a causes b?
 The fact that two things are associated with each other does not
mean that one causes the other
- Replicability has assumed particular importance over the past decide in light of the
realisation that certain psychological findings are challenging for independent investigators
to reproduce
Identify the major theoretical frameworks of psychology
Theoretical perspectives:
- Structuralism
 Uses introspection to identify basic elements or structures of experience
- Functionalism
 To understand the functions or adaptive purposes of our thoughts, feelings
and behaviours
- Behaviourism
 To uncover the general principles of learning that explains all behaviours,
focuses largely on observable behaviour
- Cognitivism
 To examine the role of mental processes on behaviour
- Psychoanalysis
 To uncover the role of unconscious psychological processes and early life
experiences in behaviour
Describe different types of psychologists and identify what each of them does
Types of psychologists:
- Clinical psychologists
 Perform assessment, diagnosis and treatment for mental disorders
 Research on people with mental disorders
- Counselling psychologists
 Work with people experiencing temporary or self-contained life problems,
e.g. marital conflict
- School psychologist
 Develop intervention programs for children in school settings
 Remedy students behavioural, emotional and learning difficulties
- Industrial/organisational psychologists
 Work in companies and business and are involved in maximising employee
performance, help select productive employees, and examine the effects of
different working conditions on peoples behaviours
- Forensic psychologists
 Often work in prisons or court settles
 Diagnose inmates and assist with their rehabilitation and treatment
- Developmental psychologists

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 Study how and why people change over time

- Experimental psychology
 Use research methods to study the memory, language, thinking and social
behaviours of humans
- Biological psychologists
 Examine the physiological bases of behaviour in humans and animals
Describe two great debates that have shaped the field of psychology
Great debates of psychology:
1. Nature vs Nurture
- Poses the question of are our attribute mostly our genes (nature) or to our rearing
environments (nurture)?
2. The Free Will-Determinism Debate
- Poses the question of to what extent are our behavioural choices able to be freely selected
rather than mechanically determined by relevant causal factors? (outside of our control)
Describe how psychological research affects our daily lives
How psychology effects our lives:
- Psychological research has shown how psychology can be applied to such diverse fields such
as advertising, public safety, the criminal justice system, and education
11.4 Motivation: our wants and needs

Explain basic principles and theories of motivation
11.4a Motivation: a beginners guide:
2 theories of motivation are:
1. Drive Reduction Theory

- States that drives (such as hunger and thirst) pull us to act a certain ways
- The Yerkes-Dodson law posits an inverted u-shape relation between arousal and mood /
performance
- When our drives clash = approach and avoidance
- Approach and avoidance often drives conflict
2. Incentive Theories
- Theories proposing that we are often motivated by positive goals
- E.g. the pleasure of creating a great painting, or the glory of finishing a race first
- Both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
Describe the determinants of hunger, weight gain and obesity
11.4b Hunger, eating and eating disorders:
Chemical messengers and eating:
- the more stored energy in fat cells, the more they produce a hormone called leptin
- leptin signals the hypothalamus and brainstem to reduce appetite and increase the amount
of energy used
- lack of leptin may increase chances of obesity, and obese individuals often seem resistant to
the effects of leptin

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- food can be hard to resist for obese people due to rewarding taste qualities, the taste, smell
or sight can trigger a release of neurotransmitters, including serotonin which actives the
brains pleasure circuit
The set point:
- each of us have a genetically programmed set point – a value that establishes a range of
body fat and muscle mass we tend to maintain
- when we eat too little or drop below set point, regulatory mechanisms kick in to increase
our appetite or decrease our metabolism
The role of genes in obesity:
- genes exert a substantial influence on our weight

- about 6% of cases of severe obesity, a mutation in a major gene is responsible, this mutation
makes people never seem to feel full  their brains don’t tell them to stop eating
Sensitive to cues and expectations:
- external cues: time of day, watching others eat etc

- supersizing of portions, when people are served large portions of food they are inclined to
eat everything on their plate therefore eating more food then they should
- internal – external theory: theory holding that obese people are motivated to eat more by
external cues than internal ones
Identify the symptoms of bulimia, binge-eating disorders and anorexia
11.4c Eating Disorders
Bulimia Nervosa:
- associated with a pattern of bingeing and purging in an effort to lose or maintain weight
Binge-eating disorders:
- when people binge on a recurrent basis – at least once a week for 3 months – but do not
purge afterwards
- more common the bulimia or anorexia
Anorexia:
- associated with excessive weight loss and the irrational perception that one is overweight
Describe the human sexual response cycle and factors that influence sexual activity
11.4d Sexual Motivation:
Four stages of sexual response cycle:
- excitement (experience sexual pleasure and notice physiological changes associated with it)
- plateau (sexual tension builds)
- orgasm (involuntary rhythmic contractions in the muscles of genitals)
- resolution (people report feeling relaxation and sense of well-being
Factors that influence sexual activity:
- frequency decreases with age, but sexual satisfaction does not

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- sex – males typically have higher sex drives
Identify potential influences on sexual orientation
11.4e Genetic and Environmental Influences on Sexual Orientation
Influences:
- sex hormones – these influence whether the brain sets the child on a path towards more
feminine or masculine characteristics
- having older brothers
o increase homosexuality by 33% for each older brother
o male foetuses trigger the release of anti-male antibodies in the mothers immune
system, this affects the sexual differentiation of the foetuses brain, with the effect
intensifying each male baby the mother has prior

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12/3 – week 3 Appetite

Why do scientists study eating?
- Eating has a big impact on your health (and pocket)

 By 2025 – 1 in 3 Australian adults will be obese
- Eating is a big business in Australia
 Processed food manufacture has a turnover of around 74 billion $/y
Body – Energy levels
The body has two modes of energy storage:
- Short term store using glucose (less important for intake)

- Long term store using fat (more important intake)
Changes in body fat affect appetite:
- Fat cells secrete a hormone called leptin

- More fat = more leptin, suppressing appetite
- Less fat = less leptin, allowing food intake to increase
Body – Sensation
Food flavour drives intake:
- Taste, smell and touch form flavour

- We are hard-wired to like sweet, salty and fatty things
- These flavours gets associated with the foods appearance and smell
- Then when we see/smell nice food we want to eat it
Sensory specific satiety slows intake in a meal:
- the more we eat a specific food, the more our liking for it declines
- It acts to signal the end of a meal (before stomach and gut signals your brain you are full)
- It also drives dietary variety
Body – Digestive Organs
Multiple systems are involved in digesting food and all send signals to the brain about their status
Signals:
- Stomach is distended or empty

- Gut and stomach taste receptors
- Stomach is emptying its nutrients rich content (chyme) into the small intestine
- Gut bacterial signals of fat content
How are these signals communicated to the brain?
- Nerves

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- Hormones
- Nutrients
Brain – Neurochemicals
- Many neurochemicals modulate eating

- Two important examples are serotonin (SE) and dopamine (DA)
- Increase levels of both suppress appetite
 Most commercial appetite suppressants are SE or DA agonists
 Many common psychiatric drugs affect these neurotransmitters, and so
many also affect body weight
- Neurochemicals are modulated by events in the body
 Leptin (from fat cells) stimulates release of CRH in the brain (corticotrophin
releasing hormone) suppressing appetite
 Grehlin (from stomach) stimulates release of NY (neuropeptide Y) in the
brain increasing appetite
Brain – Locations
Which are important, what do they do, and how do we know?
- Hypothalamus (lesions, imaging)

 Ventromedial nucleus (stop eating)
 Lateral hypothalamus (start eating)
- CRH and NY exert their effects here
- Cortical (lesions, imaging)
 Frontal (impulsivity)
 Insula (interoception)
- Limbric system
 Hippocampus (memory)
 Eating and Henry Molaison
 Important role of conscious intake of food
Environment – Food
- A potent means of getting you to eat is to show you food

 If you like it, this will trigger a desire to eat and a cephalic phase response
(salivation, insulin release etc)
- All of this is pretty sensible from and evolutionary perspective, because in the past if you
came across ‘good’ food it would be very sensible to eat it
- However we cant now escpae from palatable food
 Everyone has snack machines, coffee shops, supermarkets etc
 Few social prohibitions on eating
 Food advertising is ubiquitous
Environment – Time and Place
- People can be quite habit bound

 They often tend to eat at the same time (& place) each day
 Time of day (& place) then become associated with eating
 These can then become cues to trigger hunger and eating

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 You can see this clearly when you travel across multiple time zones
and you get hungry at inappropriate times
- When people are placed in deep caves, with no cues to the passage of time, eating
behaviour changes significantly
 The size of the last meal then dictate how long it will be before the next
meal -not the time on the clock
Environment – People and Leisure
- One of the most potent effects on how much we eat is the number of people we eat with
 These effects occur for all meal types
 They occur with family, friends and even strangers
- Another important appetite stimulant is TV
 TV is the principal leisure activity of most Westerners
 Eating with TV can stimulate eating in several ways
 Adverts, learning & distraction – to name a few
Environment – portion and plate
- People tend to eat what is in front of them

 If you have a large plate you will eat more then if you have a small one
 If you are given a larger serving you will eat more
 Average portions size have increased in recent times
- Mean portion sizes in the US are on average 25% larger then in France
 recipe book portions, and even guide books focus more on portion size in
the US than in France
All these forces – who is in charge?
Who is in charge –body, brain or ‘self’?
- When and how much we eat seems to be mainly driven by environmental factors that we
are not usually aware of – mindless eating – environment/brain
- Biological factors are probably only important at the extremes (starvation/gross over-
indulgence) –body/brain
- Conscious control of food intake probably only plays a small role – self-brain
- A crucial conclusion–the brain ultimately controls how much we eat, so when control of
eating breaks down, this is a brain-related problem
Obesity
Breakdown:
- Obesity is the main eating-related health problem

 Obesity causes chronic illness – type 2 diabetes, circulatory disease, joint
damage, cancer
 All of these diseases are costly from a personal, social and economic
perspective
- So what is obesity?
 It is determined by a person body mass index – BMI
 This is your weight in Kg / height
 BMI provides an estimate of how much fat you have

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 Normal BMI is 18-25, 25-30 overweight, 30+ obese

- People in the west have been getting fatter over the last 50 years, with obesity rates tripling
or quadrupling in many countries
Obesity – Why?
- People in the west have gotten much fatter over the last 50 years
- The basic reason why is simple
 Energy intake exceeds energy expenditure
 Excess energy is then turned into fat and stored in white fat cells
- The key thing is that our environment has changed
 We move less and we eat more
 While our genes have not changed they are still very important in
determining who gets fat – which sounds confusing doesn’t it?
 Identical twins studies show that 70% of their variability in weight can be
accounted for by shared genes
- So why do genes matter?

 In an environment where food is scarce and you have to work very hard to
get it, no one gets fat and genes that predispose to weight gain cannot
influence body weight
 However, in an obesogenic environment, genes that predispose to weight
gain can be very influential, making some people much fatter than others
Dieting
- Dieting is still the principal form of treatment for obesity

- Dieting is also very popular amongst the population at large
 Over 70% of adults claimed to have dieted
 Most people diet because they believe that weight loss will make them
more attractive
 People have very unrealistic expectations about dieting
- All diets work by limiting energy intake
- Most attempts at dieting end in failure –why?
 It relies on conscious regulation of food intake, which needs masses of self-
control

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 Most attempts at dieting are too short (4 weeks vs. 20+ weeks)
 Most lost weight is regained even in controlled clinical trials (see graphs
below)
- For healthy people I would not recommend dieting, instead I would focus on making some
simple changes to prevent further weight gain and get fit!
 Exercise all you can, eat loads of fruit and veg, avoid soft drinks, limit
processed/fast food
Eating Disorders
- Binge eating disorder

 Repeated binges, no compensation – in 9-18% of obese people
- Anorexia nervosa (AN)
 Dietary restriction (and/or purging), intense fear of weight gain, disturbance
of body image – in 0.5-2% of women
 No single cause – multi-factorial  Significant genetic components (obsessive
compulsive traits – perfectionism, rigidity), common appearance at
menarche coincides with a major redistribution of body fat creating a
‘window of vulnerability’
 Stress, adverse life events, cultural emphasis on thinness also play a role ―
Difficult to treat and most lethal of all psychiatric disorders (510% lifetime
mortality)
- Bulimia nervosa (BN)
 Binge eating with compensation, adverse self-evaluation – in 13% of women
 Multi-factorial, b ut far easier to treat than AN
Starvation
- Around a billion people don’t get enough to eat

 Malnourishment exerts its worst effects on children, stunting their growth,
permanently lowering IQ and limiting future earing power
 In all people malnourishment impairs immunity and this is what takes so
many lives when there is famine
- Starvation has a big impact on behaviour
 This was studied intensively by the US Minnesota Starvation Study
 The effects are best described by Samuel Legg one of the volunteers:
“…The psychological aspects of starvation are unbelievable. We went there because we were
concerned about people abroad and wanted to do what we could to help those less fortunate than
ourselves, and I think we lost that feeling after about two months. At the end of 5 months of
starvation our attitude was “ to heck with the people abroad; I am hungry ” . That was all that was
important. The only important thing left was whether I was ever going to get food. I was only
interested in myself…”

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LEARNING: AN INTRODUCTION
Function of Learning:
- It helps us to adapt to changing conditions in the world

- Adaption is the process of changing behaviour to fit changed environment conditions
What might need to be learned? (animals)
- The nature of food

- The distribution of food sources
- Identifying parents/offspring or potential mate
- Migratory routes
- Efficient exploration of resources by being able to predict the location of food at a particular
time of day
What are the costs of learning?
- There is delayed reproductive effort and/or success

- increased juvenile vulnerability
- increased parental investment in young
- greater complexity of the nervous system: learning requires complex CNS  requires high
energy costs to maintain and serve nerve tissue. Brains use 20% metabolic energy but is
only 2% of the body’s weight, learning abilities cost energy
- developmental fallibility: trial and error vs instinct (danger of learning wrong info, instincts
guard that)
- some behaviours might be too important to be left to learning
Four types of learning that we will discuss
1. Noticing and Ignoring

- Need to notice important events but learn to ignore events that occur repeatedly without
consequence
2. Learning What Events Signal
- Need to learn when something is about to happen so that we can prepare for it
3. Learning About the Consequences of Our Behaviour
- Need to learn the results of our behaviours to avoid making mistakes and repeat behaviours
that produce positive outcomes; learn when & how to act.
4. Learning from Others
- Need to learn from the results of the behaviours of others as well
Learning is about adapting to our environment and learning from our experiences in that
environment
- Noticing and Ignoring

 sensitisation and habituation
- Learning What Events Signal
 classical conditioning
- Learning About the Consequences of our Behaviour

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 operant conditioning
- Learning from Others
 observational Learning
Define Learning:
- A relatively permanent change in behavioural potentiality that occurs as a result of

reinforced practice. (Kimble, 1961. p. 2)
- i.e. Learning is any enduring change in the way an organism responds, based on its
experiences.
- The ability to assess the consequences of one's actions is fundamental to survival: an animal
must learn an effective hunting strategy if it is to eat, and to elude predators if it is to live to
see another day.
 Change/Adaptation
 Adaptation by learning is flexible.
 Necessary for survival
 Humans adapt to life’s demands by learning and not by instinct.
 Enduring - but can be altered with future learning
 The key to learning is association.
- Learning cannot be observed directly. It is inferred from behaviour that is observed.
- Conditioning is a process of learning associations between environmental stimuli and
behavioural responses
What is not learning?
- Instincts: behaviours that occur as a result of the organisms genotype

- Reflexes: behaviours that occur as a result of an automatic reaction to some environmental
change or condition
- Changes in behaviour due to fatigue, drugs, illness and maturation etc
Learning can either be associative or non-associative
- Associated learning: result of learning to associate one stimulus with another

- Non-associative learning: learning that results from the impact of one particular stimulus
(e.g. Habituation)
Habituation
- People and animals notice novelty from birth

- When something new happens we pay attention to it and show an orienting response (move
towards the event)
- After repeated exposure to the event we habituate
- Habituation: decline in the tendency to respond to the event that has become familiar
through repeated presentation (e.g. car alarm, aeroplane flying over house)
Non-associative learning: Sensitisation
- Sensitisation occurs when our response to an event increases rather than decreases with
repeated exposure
- Often we become sensitised to repeated loud noises and our reaction becomes more
intense and prolonged

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- E.g, baby crying

- Both habituation and sensitisation are natural responses to repeat events, when will one
occur versus the other?
Habituation or Sensitisation:
- Whether repetition of a stimulus  habituation or sensitisation, depends on several factors

one of which is the intensity of the stimulus:
 Mild  habituation
 Intense, potentially threatening stimuli sensitisation
- For example, after a series of car engine problems, a driver may become very alert when
there is a change in engine sounds, sounds that might formerly have been ignored.
How does learning occur?
- We learn by association
 Our minds naturally connect events that occur in sequence
- Associative learning
 Learning that two events occur together: we learn to associate two
environmental events with each other so that we can predict/expect the
second event to occur after we have perceived the first event (classical
learning)
 We learn to associate a response that we make with its consequences
(operant conditioning)
Classical Conditioning:
- The learning of a new association between two previously unrelated stimuli

- We learn that a stimulus predicts the occurrence of a certain events and we respond
accordingly
- In classical conditioning, all responses are reflexes or autonomic responses ie responses that
we cannot voluntarily emit
Classical Conditioning - Key Terms
- Neutral Stimulus (NS): the stimulus that, before conditioning, doesn’t naturally bring about
the response of interest.
 E.g. in Pavlov’s experiments, the NS was a sound such as from a metronome,
bell, tuning fork, or a tactile stimulus

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- Unconditioned Stimulus (US): A stimulus (an event) that elicits /triggers an unconditioned
(involuntary) response – without previous conditioning
- Unconditioned Response (UR): An unlearned response to an unconditioned stimulus
occurring without prior conditioning.
 Examples: salivation to food, jumping when hearing a loud noise, moving
away from something painful
 In Pavlov’s experiments, salivation to the food was the UR
- Conditioned Stimulus (CS): previously NS that, through repeated pairings with an US, now
causes a CR.
 E.g. in Pavlov’s experiments, the CS was a sound such as from a bell, tuning
fork, a tactile stimulus
- Conditioned Response (CR): learned reaction to a CS occurring because of previous
repeated pairings with an UCS.
 in Pavlov’s experiments, the CR was salivation.
Classical Conditioning Basic Principles
- Acquisition
 Formation of a learned response to a stimulus through presentation of an
unconditioned stimulus
- Extinction
 Elimination of a learned response by removal of the unconditioned stimulus
- Spontaneous Recovery
 Re-emergence of an extinguished conditioned response after a rest period
Why does conditioned responding develop?
- The CS doesn’t just substitute for the US

- CR is not always the same as the UR
 Example: rats freezing instead of jumping when a shock is about to occur
 Cognitive view of classical conditioning the CS predicts the US (learn
association) and so we react by preparing for that event
TEXTBOOK NOTES FOR WEEK 3

CLASSICAL CONDITIONING
Describe Pavlov’s model of classical conditioning and discriminate conditioned stimuli and responses from unconditioned
stimuli and responses
6.1a: Pavlov’s Discovery of Classical Conditioning + Basics of Classical Conditioning
- Placed dogs in a harness and inserted a cannula into their

salivary glands to study their digestive responses to meat
powder
- Noticed dogs started to salivate not only at the meat
powder itself, but at a previously neutral stimuli that had
become associated with it, such as the research
participants who brought it in

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- Classical Conditioning: form of learning in which animals come to respond to a previously

neutral stimulus that has been paired with another stimulus that elicits an automatic
response
- Unconditioned Stimulus (UCS)  stimulus that elicits and automatic response
- Unconditioned Response (UCR)  automatic response to a non-neutral stimulus that
doesn’t need to be learnt (food)
- Conditioned Response (CR)  response previously associated with a non-neutral stimulus
that is elicited by a neutral stimulus through conditioning
- Conditioned Stimulus (CS)  initially neutral stimulus (the bell)
Explain the major principles and terminology associated with classical conditioning
6.1b: Principals of Classical Conditioning
Classical conditioning occurs in 3 phases:
- Acquisition
- Learning phase during which conditioned response is established
- Extinction
- Gradual reduction and eventual elimination of the conditioned response after the
conditioned stimulus is presented repeatedly without the unconditioned stimulus (dogs
stopping responding to the bell if food didn’t come with it)
- Spontaneous Recovery
- Sudden re-emergence of an extinct conditioned response after a delay in exposure to the
conditioned stimulus
Explain how complex behaviours can result from classical conditioning and how they can emerge in our daily lives
6.1c: Applications in Daily Life
- advertising  repeatedly pairing sights and sounds of products with sexualised women, marketers
try and condition connections between their brands and positive emotions
TEXTBOOK NOTES - WEEK 4

6.2: Operant Conditioning
- Def: learning controlled by the consequences of the organism’s behaviours

- Example: using fish to train a dolphin to jump through hoops
- the organism ‘gets something’ out of the response
6.2a Distinguish operant conditioning from classical conditioning
- in classical conditioning, the organisms response is elicited – that is ‘pulled out’ of the
organism by the UCS, and later, the CS. Remember that in classical conditioning the UCR is a
reflexive and automatic response that does not require training. In operant conditioning,
the organisms response is emitted – that is, generated by the organism in a seemingly
voluntary fashion
- in classical conditioning, the animals reward is independent of what it does. Pavlov gave
his dogs the meat powder regardless of whether, or how much, they salivated. In operant
conditioning, the animals reward is contingent – or dependent – on what it does. If the
animal does not emit the response in an operant conditioning paradigm, it comes out empty
handed

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- in classical conditioning, the organisms responses depend primarily on the autonomic

nervous system. In operant conditioning the organism’s responses depend primarily on the
skeletal muscles. That is, in contrast to classical, in which learning involves changing heart
right, breathing, perspiration and other bodily systems, in operant learning involves
changed in voluntary motor behaviour
6.2b Describe Thorndike’s law of effect
- Def: principle asserting that if a stimulus followed by a behaviour results in a reward, the
stimulus is more likely to elicit the behaviour in the future
- If a response, in the presence of a stimulus, is followed by a satisfying state of affairs, the
bond between stimulus and response will be strengthened
6.2c Describe reinforcement and its effects on behaviour and distinguish negative reinforcements
from punishment as influences on behaviour
- Def: outcome or consequence of a behaviour that strengthens the probability of the

behaviour
- Positive reinforcements  when administered something pleasant  increases target
behaviour
- Negative reinforcements  when administered something unpleasant, or pleasant thing is
taken away  increase target behaviour
Difference between negative reinforcements and punishments:
- Punishment is any outcome that weakens the probability of a response, reinforcements

increases target behaviour
- Example: if a child is kicking the wall, the mother yells at him to stop and yet he doesn’t =
reinforcing that behaviour and therefore strengthening the probability of the response (him
continuing to kick)
- If the child stops after a second scolding, then this is a punishment as it’s weakening the
probability of a response
6.2d Identify the four schedules of reinforcement and the response pattern associated with each
- The consistency of administering reinforcements

o Can be FIXED – provide reinforcements on a regular basis
o Can be VARIABLE – provide reinforcements on a irregular basis
o Variable schedules tend to be provide more consistent rates of responding
o If we never know when our next treat is coming, it is in our best interests to
keep emitting the response to ensure we have emitted it enough times to get
our treat
- The basis of administering reinforcements
o Operate on RATIO SCHEDULES – reinforces the animal based on the number of
responses it has emitted
o Operate on INTERVAL SCHEDULES – reinforces the animal based on the amount of
time elapsed since last reinforcement
o Ratio schedules tend to provide higher rates of responding
o If a dog gets a treat every 5 rolls he does, he is going to roll more often then a dog
who gets a treat every 5 minutes as that dog can roll 3 or 10000 times and still get
the treat

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6.2e Describe some applications of operant conditioning
- Animal training
- Overcoming procrastination
19/3 – WEEK 4

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26/3 – WEEK 5
LEARNING – CONTINUED
Learning that occurs from consequences of our actions
Thorndike
Law of Effect
Thorndike’s rule is that the probability of an action being repeated is strengthened when it is
followed by a pleasant or satisfying consequence.
Skinner
emphasized that:
1. reinforcement (which increases the likelihood of a response) and
2. punishment (decreases the probability) are always defined after the fact.
Operant Conditioning
- Through operant conditioning, an individual makes an association between a particular

behaviour and a consequence (Skinner, 1938).
- It is learning through reinforcement (reward) and punishment
- Behaviour(responses) is voluntary
- Behaviour is modified according to its consequences

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Thorndike - Studied cats placed in puzzle boxes
Law of Effect:
- Behaviour that results in reward will be more likely in

the future.
- Behaviour that results in punishment will be less
likely in the future.
- Behaviour is controlled by its consequences.
Operant Conditioning: Learning New Behaviours
- B.F. Skinner’s “Radical behaviourism”:

- The factor controlling an organism’s behaviour was the consequence of that behaviour. –
There was no need to hypothesise internal processes.
- The only appropriate object of study is overt, observable behaviour
- The laws governing “learning” via operant conditioning were the same for all organisms
Reinforcement Contingencies
- Contingencies reflect conditions that must be met in order for reinforcement to be

dispensed.
- The reinforcement must be meaningful to the organism
- The reinforcement must follow the behaviour.
The Consequence of Responding in Operant Conditioning
- The term consequence is used when there is a contingent relationship between a behaviour
and an event -a consequence is an event that is CAUSED by a behaviour. ) Consequences
include events that may involve:
- the presentation of a stimulus
- the removal of a stimulus that is already present

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There are Two Types of Contingent Relationships Between a Response and a Consequence
- Positive contingency - when a response causes the presentation of a stimulus.

- Negative contingency - when a response causes the removal of a stimulus that is already
present.
Different Types of Stimulus Events
- Pleasant (desired; appetitive)

- Unpleasant (undesired, aversive)
- Neutral
Two Types of Effects of Behaviour-Consequence Relationships on Behaviour:
- Reinforcement -any contingent relationship between a consequence and response that

causes the response to increase in frequency.
- Punishment - any contingent relationship between a consequence and response that causes
the response to decrease in frequency.
Reinforcement:
- Positive Reinforcement
o The presentation of a pleasant stimulus
after a behaviour makes the behaviour
more likely to occur in the future.
- Negative Reinforcement
o The removal of an aversive stimulus
after a behaviour makes the behaviour
more likely to occur in the future.

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Contrasting Positive and Negative Reinforcement
Baby's View
- Wakes up hungry  Cries Receives bottle  (response) (positive reinforcement for baby)
Mother's View
- Hears crying (aversive stimulus)  Gives bottle (response)  Crying stops (negative
reinforcement for mother)
Punishment
- Positive Punishment
o The presentation
of an aversive
stimulus after a
behaviour
reduces the
likelihood of the
behaviour
occurring in the
future.
- Negative Punishment
o the removal of pleasant stimulus after a behaviour reduces the likelihood of the
behaviour occurring in the future. Speed  Lose licence
Discriminative stimuli
• In classical conditioning –they elicit autonomic responses (i.e. involuntary reflexes)
• In operant conditioning –they inform us as to when we can emit a voluntary response
The Discriminative Stimulus: Knowing When to Respond
- Discriminative stimulus: when present a response will be followed by reward or punishment

- Can be a particular situation or thing in the environment
- May produce the behaviour in response to a similar stimulus (stimulus generalisation),
unless it doesn’t produce same reward (stimulus discrimination)
-

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Acquiring Complex Behaviours: Shaping
- Complex behaviours, such as bar pressing, unlikely to occur spontaneously, so they are hard
to reinforce.
- Solution: Shaping – A procedure in which reinforcement is delivered for successive
approximations of the desired response
- Training a dog to fetch the paper
- Teaching a child to tie shoelaces
Variables That Affect Operant Conditioning these apply to both Reinforcers and Punishers
- Reinforcer Magnitude
o The larger the reward  the faster the acquisition of learning.
o The quality of the reinforcer is also important.
o N.B. the reward has to be of a certain value in order for the instrumental response
to be performed (after acquisition).
Magnitude of Reinforcer
- Crespi
o the larger the reward the faster rats run down an alley.
- Likelihood and intensity of a response depends on size of reward.
o Must be sufficient for response to occur
o Intensity of response varies with size of reward.
- Reward size also affects human learning.

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o Children age 4 & 5 learn faster when given small prizes instead of buttons (tokens).
o Adults show higher achievement when paid more money
o Rats prefer 1 cube in pieces to one cube as it appears to be greater
Frequency of reinforcement
Reinforcement Contingencies: Timing and Schedules of Reinforcement
- Continuous reinforcement: reinforcing the desired response each time it occurs

- Problems:
o Habituation to the reinforcer: the reinforcement loses its reinforcing qualities
o Satiation: the organism becomes sated with the reinforcer.
- Intermittent Reinforcement: periodic administration of the reinforcement.
- Partial (Intermittent) Reinforcement
o Maintains behaviours with fewer reinforcement trials following initial learning
o reinforcing a response only part of the time
o results in slower acquisition
o greater resistance to extinction
Schedules of Reinforcement
- Ratio schedules
o Reinforcement depends on the number of responses made
- Fixed Ratio (FR)
o reinforces a response only after a specified number of responses
o faster you respond the more rewards you get
o different ratios
o very high rate of responding
o like piecework pay
- Variable Ratio (VR)

o reinforces a response after an unpredictable number of responses
o average ratios
o an example would be playing poker machines
o very hard to extinguish because of unpredictability
- Interval schedules

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o Based on the amount of time between reinforcements. The first response following
the minimum time is reinforced.
- Fixed Interval (FI)
o reinforces a response only after a specified time has elapsed
o response occurs more frequently as the anticipated time for reward draws near
 An example would be receiving a pay cheque every two weeks
- Variable Interval (VI)
o reinforces a response at unpredictable time intervals
o produces slow steady responding
 An example would be checking your emails at random times to see if you
have a new message
 Waiting for an appropriate wave to catch
 Buying petrol on a cheap(er) day
Not all behaviour is about getting food
- Primary:
o Reinforcers such as food, water and sex that have an innate basis because of their
biological value to the organism.

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- Secondary:
o Stimuli, such as money or grades, that acquire their reinforcing power by a learned
association with a primary reinforcer.
o Also called Conditioned Reinforcers.
- The basic procedure for establishing a secondary reinforcer is the process of classical
conditioning.
- Skinner used the flash of a strobe light as a conditioned reinforcer to train Agnes flash light
 cube of beef; jump up wall  flash light
Doing what I don’t like doing in order to do what I like doing:
- The Premack Principle: (Grandma’s Rule)

o Using a desired or high frequency behaviour to reinforce a less desirable or lower
frequency behaviour;
- A more-preferred activity can be used to reinforce a less preferred activity.
o If you eat all your veggies  you’ll get to eat cake
Issues of punishment
1. Punishment does not usually result in long term behavioural change - effects are temporary
2. Punishment does not promote better, alternative behaviour
- Example: If Punish a child for fighting with sibling: it does not teach the child to
cooperate with their sibling
- Better: Reinforce an alternative response
3. Punishment typically leads to escape behaviour
4. Learner may learn to fear the administrator rather than the association between their
behaviour and the punishment
5. Punishment may not undo existing rewards for a behaviour–unless it is delivered every time
6. Punitive aggression may lead to modelling of aggression
Issues of Punishment
Learned Helplessness
- When there is no (perceived) relationship between the individual’s behaviour and

punishment
- If the punishment is very aversive  PTSD

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Applications of Operant Conditioning
Behavioural Therapy
- wide variety of everyday behaviour problems, including obesity, smoking,

alcoholism, social anxiety, depression, delinquency, and aggression.
o Token Economies
o Remedial Education
o Therapy for Autism
o Training dogs
o Biofeedback
Psychology in Everyday Life: Operant Conditioning
In biofeedback training:
1. internal bodily processes (like blood pressure or muscle tension) are electrically recorded
2. information is amplified and reported back to the patient through headphones, signal lights,
and other means
3. this information helps the person learn to control bodily processes not normally under
voluntary control
- Can we learn to control involuntary body responses?
- Most useful for promoting relaxation, which can help relieve a number of conditions
that are related to stress.

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Observational Learning aka Social Learning -Bandura
- Aka vicarious learning, imitation, modelling

- Observational learning or vicarious conditioning (sometimes referred to as
behavioural contagion)
- Learning by watching others “models” or “demonstrators”
- it is how we acquire new information by being exposed to one another in a common
environment
Observational Learning: Overview
- Learning that occurs as a result of observing the experiences of others

- Consider: What would life be like if you could only learn through your own trial and
error?
o adaptive to learn from others
o Basis of how our culture gets passed from one generation to the next
- Who learns by observation:
o many species, including chimpanzees, rhesus monkeys, some birds and –
bees!
- When do we start to imitate?
o From 12 days of age onwards
- What behaviours are learnt?
o Specific actions and learning general styles of behaviour
- When do we learn by observing?
o We copy when asocial learning is costly (dangerous/uncertain situations).
Can’t afford to learn from your own mistakes as in operant conditioning e.g.
might get lost if don’t take the same precautions as experienced
bushwalkers.
o We copy a successful individual i.e. copy if someone is doing it better, or
when our established behaviour is unproductive e.g. buy/sell shares when
your wealthy friend does.
Besides true imitation, social learning results from one or more of a number of other social
phenomena.
- Social facilitation
o One’s behaviour prompts similar behaviour of another
- Local or Stimulus enhancement
o Behaviour of one person/animal directs attention of others to an object
- True imitation
o Imitation of a novel behaviour pattern in order to achieve a specific goal of
particular interest that is either very unusual or quite improbable to have
occurred by other means (i.e. spontaneously)
Social facilitation (simplest)
- an increase in the frequency or intensity of a behaviour (that is already in the

animal’s repertoire) caused by the presence of others (of the same species)
performing the same behaviour at that time.
- E.g. yawning

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Local or stimulus enhancement
- local or stimulus enhancement refers to a process in which one individual directs

another individual's attention to a particular object or some activity or someplace in
the environment -after observing another individual engage in that activity, but the
observer does not necessarily attend to the actions of the “model”.
- E.g. stare at sky –others will look up to see what you’re looking at
Imitation – the most complex form of social learning-only primates?
- Imitation-(least simple).
- True Imitation — When an animal imitates a behaviour that it has never done
before.
- True imitation can be defined as duplicating a novel behaviour (or sequence of
behaviours) in order to achieve a specific goal, without showing any understanding
of the behaviour.
Observational Learning Processes
In order to learn by observation four processes are involved:

1. Attention
2. Retention
3. Reproduction
4. Motivation (from reinforcement)
Social Learning Theory
- Children can learn by observation – Vicarious reinforcement

- Child can learn without immediate performance of the behaviour (may not produce
the behaviour until they are an adult)
- Achieved through formation of a SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATION
- Have to see someone do it (a MODEL)
Key Features of the MODEL
- APPROPRIATENESS –aggressive male models more likely to be imitated than

aggressive female ones, due to cultural factors in Western world
- SIMILARITY –children are more likely to imitate someone they perceive as similar to
themselves
o same sex, same age, same ethnic group, etc.

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Procedure
- Each child tested individually
Stage One:
- taken to room set out for play with attractive toys

- adult model taken to opposite corner where Bobo, mallet and other objects were.
o NON-AGGRESSIVE CONDITION
o Model assembled tinker toy in quiet subdued manner and ignored Bobo
o AGGRESSIVE CONDITION
o Model started to assemble tinker toy but after one minute turned to Bobo
and was aggressive to it in a stylised and distinctive way
Stage two:
- child subjected to ‘mild aggression arousal’

- Taken to a room with enticing toys, but soon as they started to play with them
- told that they couldn’t as they were reserved for special children
- child then taken to a third room
Stage three:
- In this room were a variety of aggressive and non-aggressive toys

- child kept in this room for 20 minutes and observed via a one way mirror
- Observations made every 5 seconds. Giving 240 response units per child
What did Bandura et al. (1961) find?
- exposure to aggressive models will lead to imitation of the aggression observed

- exposure to non-aggressive models generally has an inhibiting effect on aggressive
behaviour
- same-sex imitation is greater than opposite-sex imitation for some behaviours (Boys
especially)
- boys imitate aggression more than girls and are generally more aggressive except for
verbal aggression
Conclusion
- Aggression is a learned behaviour, not an inbuilt instinct

- Learning can take place in absence of any reinforcement, only via observation and
modelling
- Modelling is a powerful and fast way of learning
Bandura’s further research
- Bandura, Ross & Ross (1963): children watched films with either an aggressive or
non-aggressive model
- Filmed model produced even more aggression than live model
- Model rewarded or punished for aggression
- Children imitated the rewarded aggressive model the most
- Bandura’s research as the ‘first generation’ of scientific research on the effects of
media violence on children

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Week 6: Personality
Personality
- Personality psychology studies those things about a person that remain somewhat
stable across different situations (e.g. tendency to be anxious or to be extraverted)
- Social psychology examines effects whereby the effect of a situation on a person
remains stable across different types of people (e.g. the tendency to stereotype
those from outgroups or to conform to group standards
- DEF: Personality refers to the enduring patterns of thought, feelings, motivation
and behavioural that are expressed in different circumstances
- Pervin notes the influence of both genes and environment, including memories and
past experiences
General theories of personality are about:
- The structure of personality

o How personality processes are organised
o What are the basic elements
o Is personality stable across time?
- Individual differences
o The way people vary in their personality characteristics
o BUT – dynamic? Reciprocal interaction?
Personality research
- Issues to be aware of:

o What is good evidence
o Empirical does not = experimental many valid approaches
- We see others through our own glasses, our own biases, beliefs and understandings
- Three traditions:
o Clinical approach
o Correlational approach (dominate)
o Experimental approach
Clinical approach:
- Focus: involves the systematic, in depth research of individuals

- Methods: observation (and self-report e.g. questionnaires)
- Significant research:
o Charcot
1. Hysteria brought on or alleviated with hypnosis
o Morton Prince
1. The dissociation of personality
2. Different selves exist within us all, why aren’t we all multiple personalities?
o Murray
1. Clever ways to test personalities
2. Flawed self-reports
- Strengths of this approach on the study of personality:
o Observes a great variety of phenomena and often in detail
o Considers the functioning of whole person

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o Does not assume that everyone has the same degree of insight into their
own functioning as self-report questionnaire measures do, so seeks to find
answers deeper than those that are self-reported
Correlational Approach
- Focus: establishes associations between sets of measures on which people have

been found to differ
o Not studying the person as a whole, but relationships between elements
- Methods: measurement based on self-report
o E.g. trait approach to personality
- Significant researches:
o Sir Francis Galton
1. Explored differences due to heredity, especially intellectual abilities
- Q: Are there basic groups of characteristics on which people differ
- Techniques: self-report questionnaires, factor analysis
- Assumes: trait is fundamental unit of personality
- Aims: sought periodic table of elements of personality
- Strengths:
o Self-report is easy to use on large groups, cost effective
o Compares an individual on the average via numerical scores: clinical utility
- Weaknesses:
o Correlation does not equal causation
o Factor analysis has subjective elements
o Self-reports are subject to biases and errors – self-deception, social
desirability
Experimental Approach
- Focus: involves the systematic manipulation of variables to establish causal

relationships
- Methods: experimental manipulation, direct experimental control
- Significant Researches:
- Wundt
o How do changes in stimuli influence changes in immediate experiences
- Pavlov:
o Experimental neurosis
o Gradually increase stimulus similarity
o Dogs cant discriminate even when return to highly distinguishable stimuli
- Strengths:
o Close to scientific ideal
o No need to worry about whether subject knows truth about self or telling
truth
- Weakness:
o Important parts of personality hard to test
o Not in the context of whole person
o Participants bring own expectations into lab
o Experiment is a social situation

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Temperament
- It is valuable to first examine temperament – one aspect of personality that:
o does have a significant genetic component.
o has strong claims for consistency across the life span.
- Because temperament variables are quite influenced by genes, they are notoriously
difficult aspects of personality to change
- Temperament variables include:
o How one does something
o Inhibition to the unfamiliar
o Reactivity
o Impulsivity
o One’s vigour or energy level
o The strength of one’s actions
o Temporal features of a response
o The rhythm of responding.
Inhibition to the unfamiliar
- A cluster of attributes found in some children

- Includes shyness, anxiety when faced with novel stimuli
- About 10% of children
- These children cry, are upset, display other characteristic facial expressions when
confronted with unfamiliar stimuli
- Researchers assume a biological substrate
- Kagan showed that those who show this pattern from about 4 months are:
o More fearful when confronted with novel stimuli at ages 9, 14 and 21
months;
o More fearful about a range of common situations at age 7 1/2
o Children who did change tended to have mothers who were not over
protective and who placed reasonable demands on them
- Moffit et al 1996 found that children inhibited at age 3 were more likely to be
depressed at age 21.
Impulsivity
- Zuckerman talked about:

o stimulus hungry people
o issues of impulsivity and sensation-seeking
- Impulsivity: takes risks, lively, non-planning
- Sensation seeking – seeks novel & intense experiences, uninhibited, easily bored
- Evolutionary advantage? Approaching dangerous environments?
- Zuckerman (1994):
o Places sensation seeking in the limbic system rather than the cortex (deeper
in the brain, more primal)
o Dopamine seen as driving sensation-seeking (linked with pleasure seeking)
o Serotonin seen as inhibiting sensation-seeking (linked with inhibition)

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- Those described as impulsive at age 3 more likely to be diagnosed with an antisocial

personality at age 21 (Moffit et al)
- Impulsivity linked with aggression, psychopathy, anti-social behaviour, addictions
Heritability
- As already noted, a basic personality disposition heavily influenced by genes can be
thought of as being a temperament factor
- However, there is also a strong belief among many personality researchers that a
wide range of personality traits are heritable as well
- Some evidence for some traits being heritable (e.g., wellbeing, aggression,
traditionalism)
- Tellegen found similar levels in identical twins reared apart as in identical twins
reared together
- Later studies found much weaker effects
Heritability and traits
- Swedish study of adoptees

- Identical twins reared together had much closer scores for various traits than
identical twins reared apart (less evidence of heritability)
- Agreeableness and conscientiousness had minimum heritability, strong influence by
environment
- Openness to experience largely heritable
- Extraversion and neuroticism substantially influenced by both genes and
environmental influences
Trait Approaches to Personality

- Assume that:
o All people have enduring characteristics or traits
o Personality can best be described as a set of these characteristics
o Self-report measures can measure the level to which a person has a certain
trait
- Examples of traits
o Extraversion
o Conscientiousness
o Willingness to trust others
o Emotional stability
According to trait models, such characteristics:
o occur in every individual at levels that can be mapped on a continuum from

low to high,
o are normally distributed across the general population, and
o do not change much over the adult lifespan
Heritability of traits
o Trait models often emphasise the heritability (genetic component) of traits

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o HOWEVER: Traits can be both genetically determined and acquired through

experience (learned)
o The influence of genetics and experience differ according to the nature of
the trait:
1. anxiety levels - quite heritable
2. trustingness – greater learne component
The Nomothetic Approach

- Assumes that levels of particular traits occur on a continuum from low to high in all
people, and are normally distributed in the general population.
- The level of a particular trait in an individual is compared to the levels of that trait
found in the wider population.
- Deductions about that person’s personality are then made from that comparison
A Hypothetical example: Extraversion scores
- Extraversion is scored on a continuum from extremely introverted - extremely

extraverted.
- In the nomothetic approach, it is not the person’s raw score on the continuum that
matters, but where that score lies in relation to other people’s scores on the
continuum
You get a measure for everyone else (the mean) then compare an individual to the mean to get a
sense of their personality e.g. compared to everyone else how extraverted is this individual?
Idiographic vs Nomothetic
- Whereas the nomothetic approach compares individual scores to wider norms, the
idiographic approach emphasises the uniqueness of the individual
- In this approach, different methods (e.g., detailed case studies and observations)
may be preferred to assess an individual’s unique characteristics.
Trait Approaches
- Introduced by Gordon Allport (1937; see also Allport & Odbert, 1936).
- Allport used Webster’s Dictionary to find 18,000 words that could be used to
distinguish one person from another

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- Cattell (1957) used factor analysis to reduce this list to 16 traits
- Eysenck (1953) distinguished traits and types

- Types or ‘super-traits’ represented a higher order organisation of personality
o e.g., extraversion = liveliness + sociability + activity + sensation seeking
- After a great many studies, Eysenck concluded there were three ‘super-traits’:
1. Extraversion – introversion
- Extraverts sociable, active, willing to take risks
- Introverts socially inhibited, serious and cautious
2. Neuroticism
- Anxious, guilty, tense, moody, low self-esteem, versus
- Calm, guiltless, relaxed, emotionally stable, high self-esteem
3. Psychoticism
- Aggressive, egocentric, impulsive, antisocial versus
- Empathic and able to control impulses
- Eysenck believed that individual differences in such traits as extraversion could be

traced back to individual differences in levels of cortical arousal in the Ascending
Reticular Activating System (ARAS)
- Extraverts have lower base levels and seek stimulation/arousal through risk-taking,
novelty and interaction with other people.
- An Introverts’ ARAS allows more stimulation so they avoid arousal by sticking to
solitary activities and familiar surroundings
The Five Factor Model
- Costa and McCrae (e.g., McCrae & Costa, 1990) among others, have put forward the
currently dominant theory of personality types and traits;
- Again based on factor analysis of person descriptors
- In this approach there are five overarching, supra-ordinate traits (The Big Five) which
represent an amalgam of several lesser traits or facets.

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- The Big Five can be remembered using the mnemonic OCEAN:

o Openness to experience
o Conscientiousness
o Extraversion
o Agreeableness
o Neuroticism
Openness to experience consists of the following facets:
- Fantasy (active fantasy life

- Aesthetics (artistic interests)
- Feelings (emotionally open)
- Actions (flexible in behavioural responses)
- Ideas (intellectual)
- Values (unconventional)
Conscientiousness consists of the following facets:
- Competence
- Order
- Dutifulness
- Achievement striving
- Self-discipline
- Deliberation
Extraversion consists of the following facets:
- Warmth
- Gregariousness (outgoing nature)
- Assertiveness
- Activity
- Excitement seeking
- Positive emotion
Agreeableness consists of the following facets:
- Trust
- Straightforwardness
- Altruism
- Compliance
- Modesty
- Tenderness
Neuroticism consists of the following facets:
- Anxiety
- Angry hostility
- Depression
- Self-consciousness

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- Impulsivity
- Vulnerability
Stability over time
- An important assumption in the trait approach is that traits are an enduring and stable part
of personality that do not change much over the adult lifespan.
- Indeed Costa and McCrae (1994) suggested that human personalities were “set in plaster”
by the age of 30
- Important for viability of expensive tests BUT
- Tests are poor predictors of behaviour – employees, soldiers, reality show contestants
Why don’t personality tests predict behaviour better?
- The tests may need further refinement or poorly measure the trait of interest
- Adult personalities may not be as ‘set in plaster’ as some think
- The ‘situation’ may have a stronger influence
- Factors like how we are feeling, what we are thinking and other internal factors may
override the influence of traits
Self-report measures
- One of the problems with using self-report measures is that they rely on the person having
good self-awareness and being truthful
- For example, have a look at this item from the Galanter General Well-Being Scale
Strengths & Weaknesses
Strengths of self-report tests
- Are cheap and quick.

- Clinical utility and helpful tools in some areas
Weaknesses of self-report tests
- Open to biases (faking, patterns) + fatigue

- Responses may differ from one time to the next (low reliability)
- Not open to those without language skills
- Responses can be influenced by many things (mood, environment, interpretation)
Personality tests in the world
- Although personality tests aren’t perfect, it is important to understand that they are a very
important and effective tool in many areas:
o testing job applicants
o clinical assessment
o suitability for certain tasks (e.g., soldier)
o entertainment (e.g., Biggest Loser, Reno Rumble, Search for a Pussycat Doll etc.)
o research, and many others
- So, personality tests have their limitations but also have an important role to play.
- A good psychologist understands both the strengths and the weaknesses of self-report tests,
and uses this knowledge to assess people appropriately and effectively.

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Freud: The development of personality

Freud
- Clinician at turn of century

- Hysteria (paralysis, numbness, fainting spells)
- No biological basis; patient outwardly trying to stop it
- Must be an unseen force driving the effect – the unconscious
- Maybe parts of the mind are in conflict?
Freud’s Topographic Model
- Conscious mental processes

 Rational, goal directed thoughts
 At the centre of awareness
- Pre-conscious mental processes
 Not conscious but could become conscious at any point
- Unconscious mental processes
 Irrational
 Organised on associative lines (i.e., what is linked with what)
 Inaccessible to consciousness because they are repressed (i.e., kept from
consciousness to avoid emotional distress)
Freud assumed that:
- Symptoms (like hysterical paralysis) have meaning

- Symptoms may be psychosomatic
- Unconscious conflicts are the causes of some illnesses
- Repressed mental processes, although unconscious, are still active and may affect the
person in the form of a bodily symptom
- Emphasised ambivalence – conflicting feelings or motives
- EVERYTHING MEANS SOMETHING
Freud and Drives - Where do unconscious conflicts come from?
- Society won't let us directly express many of our urges, BUT

- These urges (instinctual drives) give us the energy to work, to love, play, create art
- We are still driven by these urges regardless of social standards
The Drives:
- Respiration (breathing)
- Hunger
- Pain-avoidance
- Thirst
- Sex (libido)
- Later drive – aggressive drive, thanatos, death wish, 1st world war
Freud’s Psychosexual Stages The Psychosexual Stages
- A theory about the development of key aspects of personality

- A universal theory; theorised to apply to everyone

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- Reflect the child’s “evolving quest for pleasure and the social limitations put on this
quest” (Burton et al).
- At each stage the libido is focused on a different part of the body or erogenous zone
Apart from the obvious focus on certain parts of the body (e.g., mouth or anus), this theory looks at:
- Wider developmental issues that occur during the stage

- Fixations
o Conflicts or concerns related to a given stage that persist past the
developmental period in which they arise
o Arise from excessive or inadequate pleasure at the given stage
o e.g., smoking linked to fixation in oral stage
- Regression
o Returning to an earlier psychosexual stage, particularly during times of
stress.
o For example, a child whose parents suddenly divorce may return to soiling
their bed (anal stage) or sucking their thumb (oral stage)

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Week 6 Textbook Notes: Personality

15.1 Personality: what is it and how can we study it?
- Def: peoples typical ways of thinking, feeling and behaving

- Personality consisting of relatively enduring predispositions that influence our behaviour
across many situations
- These predispositions also called traits - such as introversion, aggressiveness and
conscientiousness – account for part of consistencies in our behaviour across both time and
situations
- Two major ways of studying personality:

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o Nomothetic approach
 focuses on identifying general laws that govern the behaviour of individuals
 most modern personality research is nomothetic because it aims derive
principles that explain the thinking, emotions and behaviours of all people
 generalisation across individuals
o Idiographic approach
 Focuses on identifying unique configuration of characteristics and life history
experiences within an individual
- Influences on personality:
o Genetic factors
o Shared environment factors
 Experiences that make individuals within the same family more alike
o Non-shared environmental factors
 Experiences that make individuals within the same family less alike
15.1a – Describe how twin and adoption studies shed light on genetic and environmental influences
on personality
- Correlation between identical twins who live separately are less than 0.1 on personality
traits
- This shows the non-shared environmental factors play a large role on the construction of an
individuals personality
- But the correlation does still show that genetics play a role in personality
15.2: Psychoanalytic Theory: the controversial legacy of Sigmund Freud and his followers
15.2a – describe the core assumptions of psychoanalytic theory
1. Psychic determinism
- Freudians believe in psychic determinism: the assumption that all psychological events have
a cause
- We are not free to choose our actions, because we are at the mercy of powerful inner forces
that lie outside our awareness
- Dreams, neurotic symptoms and ‘Freudian slips’ of the tongue are all reflections of deep
psychological conflict bubbling to the surface
- Many key influences on adult personality stem from early childhood experiences, especially
parenting
4. Symbolic meaning
- No actions, no matter how trivial it may seem, is meaningless
- All actions are attributed to preceding mental causes, even if we cannot figure out
what they are
- If while teaching a class, your male professor manages to crack a long piece of chalk
in two, some might be inclined to ignore this behaviour
- Freudians in contrast would be likely to argue that this piece of chalk is symbolic for
something else, almost certainly something sexual in nature
5. Unconscious Motivation

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- We rarely understand why we do what we do, although we quite readily cook up

explanations for our actions after the fact
- Some authors have compared Freudians view of mind to an iceberg with the
unconscious – the part of personality of which we are entirely unaware – being the
vast and largely uncharted area of the psyche submerged entirely underwater
- The conscious component is merely the tip of the iceberg
- For Freud, the unconscious is of immensely greater importance than the conscious
in the causes of our personality
The id, ego and superego: the structure of personality
- Freud hypothesised that the human psyche consists of three agencies or components
- The interplay among these three gives rise to our personalities, and differences in the
strength of these agencies account largely for individual differences in personality
The id: basic instinct
- Reservoir of our most primitive impulses, including sex and aggression

- A cauldron of pasions and desires that provide the impetus for much of our behaviour
- Entirely unconscious
- Contains a variety of drives, particularly the sexual drive or libido and the aggressive drive
- Id operates by means of pleasure principle, striving for immediate gratification
Ego: the boss
- Psyches executive and principal decision maker

- Primary tasks are interacting with the real world and finding ways to resolve the competing
demands of the other two psychic agencies
- Much of operations are unconscious
- Not to be confused with the ego or inflated sense of self-worth
- Governed by the reality principle
- Strives to delay gratification until it can find an appropriate outlet
- E.g. you find psych lecture boring and hard, id = yell during it out of frustration = satisfying
your aggressive impulses. Ego = waiting til after class to find a more appropriate outlet for
aggression e.g. venting to class mate
Superego: moral standards
- Our sense of morality

- ‘above ego’ = judgmental parent looking down upon the ego
- This psychic agency contrains the sense of right and wrong we have internalised from our
interactions with society, particularly our parents
- This moral sense may be harsher and more primitive than the moral principles of which we
are consciously aware
- The superego is partly unconscious and it is largely formed in early childhood
15.2b – describe key criticisms of psychoanalytic theory and the central features of neo-Freudian
theories
Criticism:
- Untestablility
o Hypothesis are difficult or impossible to test

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- Failed predictions
o Some claims made by Freud have been rejected
o E.g. children exposed to overly harsh toilet training would grow up rigid and
perfectionists, yet most investigators found no relationship
- Questionable concept of the unconscious
- Reliance on unrepresentative samples
- Flawed assumption of shared environmental influence
Neo-Freudians:
- Shared with Freud an emphasis on unconscious influences and the importance of early
experience
- Places less emphasis on sexuality as a driving force
15.3: Behavioural and social learning theories of personality
15.3a – identify the core assumptions of behavioural and social learning theories of personality
Behavioural views:
- View personality as under the control of two major influences

o Genetic factors
o Contingencies in the environment – reinforcers and punishers
- These combined explain our personality differences
Behavioural views of determinism
- Believe all actions are products of pre-existing casual influences

- Free will is an illusion
- We are convinced that we are free to select our behaviours only because we are usually
oblivious to the situational factors that trigger them
Behavioural views of unconscious processing
- we often do not understand the reasons for our behaviour

- for skinner  we are unconscious of many things because we are often unaware of
situational influences on our behaviour
Social Learning Theories of Personality: the causal role
Social learning views of determinism
15.3b – describe key criticisms of behavioural and social learning approaches
Week 7 - Personality: An Introduction

(Continued)
Freud’s Structural Model
- Freud’s Structural Model: Id, Ego, Superego

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Id:
- Concerned with the pleasurable

- ‘Pleasure principle’
- wants more and it wants it now; immediate gratification
- Doesn’t understand “no”
- Cannot wait – impulsive
- Runs according to primary process thinking – wishful, illogical, associative thought
Superego
- Concerned with the ideal

- Internalised moral principles of our parents by introjection/identification
- Responsible for self-imposed standards of behaviour
- Seeks perfection and can make us deeply unhappy/guilty and anxious
Ego
- Concerned with the actual

- Works on the ‘Reality principle’ – balances the drives of the id, the constraints of the
superego, and what is realistically possible in the world
- Does the repressing of ‘unacceptable’ urges
- Realistically satisfies the drives in conjunction with environment
- The conscious-self
- Involves:
o perception
o memory
o motor co-ordination
o cognition
o problem solving
o management of emotions
o finding compromises
- Can delay gratification and weigh alternatives (secondary process thinking: rational, logical,
goal-directed).
- Responsible for defence mechanisms like sublimation
EXAMPLE:
Ambitious young lawyer supervises a more talented rival
- Wants to hurt rival (id)

- Urge to provide (incorrect) poor evaluation
- Conscience uncomfortable with such a blatant lack of integrity (superego)
- SO: Justifies the poor evaluation on moral grounds – e.g., such evaluations discourage
laziness (i.e., compromise by ego)
Freud’s Defence Mechanisms

Defence mechanisms
- Unconscious mental processes used by the ego to protect the person from experiencing
unpleasant emotional states (especially anxiety) or to avoid danger

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- Ego does this by falsifying inner perceptions

- Not just an interesting theory – there is good (and growing) empirical evidence for most
defence mechanisms
- Defences can often be adaptive; help us to function better
- A positive bias (seeing oneself through unrealistically positive eyes) is linked with happiness
and good health
- Realism is linked with depression and poor health
Repression
- Repressing (keeping our of our consciousness) thoughts or memories that are too painful,
disturbing or threatening to acknowledge
Denial
- Refuse to acknowledge painful or threatening external realities, or painful emotions
Projection
- A person attributes his/her own unacknowledged feelings or impulses to others

- Good evidence for this defence. Research shows that the process of keeping a thought
suppressed seems to keep it chronically activated at an implicit (nonconscious) level; this
keeps the mind ‘looking out’ for it (and thus more likely to see it in others).
Reaction formation
- Turns unacceptable feelings or impulses into their opposites.

o Conservative, family values politicians who have affairs;
o George Rekers, board member of the National Association for Research and Therapy
of Homosexuality (NARTH), an organisation dedicated to ‘changing the sexuality of
gay people’.  was caught out for hiring a male prostitute
Sublimation
- Converting aggressive or sexual impulses into socially acceptable activities such as sport, art,
music, etc.
Rationalisation
- Explains away actions in a seemingly logical way to avoid uncomfortable feelings, especially
guilt and shame
Displacement
- Directing emotions (like anger) away from the real target to a substitute
- Usually when the person feels powerless to display that emotion to the real target
- E.g. angry at boss, cant show that anger to him out of fear of job loss, therefore get angry at
children when get home
Regression

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- As already noted, returning to behaviours from an earlier stage of psychosexual

development, usually when stressed
- E.g. sucking thumb when stressed
Passive aggression
- Indirect expression of anger toward others

- Often ambiguous enough that others cannot clearly categorise it as aggression
- E.g., Squeezing the toothpaste from the middle of the tube knowing this is one of your
partner’s pet hates
Isolation (also called Isolation of Affect)
- Severing of the conscious psychological ties between an unacceptable act or impulse and its
memory source.
- The act is not ‘forgotten’ exactly, but is separated from the emotions linked to it.
- In classic psychoanalysis is linked with obsessional neuroses
Undoing
- Usually in children
- Try to ‘undo’ the unpleasant outcome of some act by mentally replaying it (or ritualistically
re-enacting it) with a different, more acceptable outcome
Identification with the aggressor (Stockholm Syndrome)
- Empathising, sympathising with a person who is treating one brutally
Reversal
- The turning about of an instinct

- For example, moving from sadism to masochism
- Anna Freud believed this defence may underlie reaction formation
Freud and beyond: Object Relations Theories

Object relations theories
- One of the areas of theory/research that grew from psycho-analysis

- Like psychoanalysis, has grown from a clinical tradition of research
- Unlike classical psychoanalysis, focuses on relationship seeking rather than instinctual
gratification
- Disturbances to early relationships also disturb the development of one’s self-definition and
creates vulnerability to blows to self-esteem
- Concerned with how past experiences of important others in one’s life are represented as:
o Aspects of understandings about one’s self
o Aspects of understandings about others
o Aspects of understandings about the self in relation to others
- Concerned about how these understandings affect relationships in the present
- Although there are many differences among object relations theorists, they all agree on the
importance of early relationships in the development of mental representations of the self
and of the self in relation to others.
- These mental representations may be called

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o Inner working models

o Schemas (self-, other-, relational-schemas)
o Mental models
o Knowledge structures + many more
- Similar concept regardless of the label
Self-systems
- Some suggest that these representations of self, others, and self in relation to others are
organised into a self-system
- People are motivated to maintain a sense of cohesion, coherence, and integration among
elements of the system (the ‘systems view’)
- Seen as important in terms of developing a stable and healthy sense of self
Inner working models
- Inner working models are central to the attachment theory of John Bowlby
- Also central to models of attachment styles in adult romantic relationships
o Secure (secure, trusting, seeks intimacy)
o Ambivalent (insecure, needy; dependent)
o Avoidant (distrustful, avoiding, independent)
o Fearful (afraid of being hurt, abandoned, exposed)
Psychoanalytic Testing
- Word-association test
- Life History Methods
o Projective tests
o Hypnosis
o Dream interpretation
 What is the narrative?
 What is the symbolism?
 What are the underlying wishes?
- Freud: Everything is laden with meaning
Analysis of transference
- Transference is when a person relates to another person as if that person is a different

person from their past
- For example, if a therapist reminds a patient of their father, or triggers thoughts feelings or
memories of the father in the patient, then that patient may treat the therapist as if they
were the father (e.g., be afraid that the therapist will punish or abandon them, and respond
accordingly).
Psychodynamic approach
Strengths
- Strong empirical support for some constructs – mental models, defences, importance of
childhood experiences
- Clinical utility and success

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Weaknesses
- Does not deal with adult learning

- Very male-centred
- Hard to test some facets
Social Cognitive approaches

Basic idea
- That learned behaviours and learned emotional reactions become a stable part of
personality
- These are linked with triggers in the environment or specific events
- Learned through:
o Operant conditioning
o Associative learning
o Modelling/Social learning
Focuses on
- Beliefs
- Expectations
- Memories and knowledge
- Knowledge structures such as schemas and scripts about the self, others, the self in relation
to others, and about the world
- Information processing
- Assumes an underlying neural network
Neural networks

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- Social Cognitive approaches assume that we have a neural network of memories, emotions,
thoughts and plans for action that are linked together in the brain.
- For example, the more aggression and violence we experience, the greater the number of
nodes that recognise concepts related to aggression and violence and the greater the
strength of the connections between those nodes
- If the same sequence of events plays out often enough, either in real life, or vicariously
through:
o seeing it in real life
o seeing it in the media
o playing it on a video game etc.
- Then it may become like a script that plays out the same way whenever it is triggered
THEORIES:
Albert Bandura - The key researcher
- Imitation in the absence of reinforcement or Pavlovian conditioning

- Blending of social and cognitive psychology
- Focuses on how individuals perceive, recall, think about and interpret information about
themselves and others
Self-efficacy
- Behaviour outcome expectancy – the expectation that a certain behaviour will lead to a
certain outcome
- Self-efficacy expectancy – the expectancy that one has the capability to carry out the
behaviour to reach a desired outcome
- Predicts success on task performance
- Predicts attempts to obtain an outcome
Cantor & Kihlstrom (1987)
- Self-understanding is largely determined by:

o How we conceive ourselves
o How we conceive others
o How we encode social information
o How we interpret social information
o How we remember social information

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 Accurate and well organised schemas lead to a more functional person
What is a schema?
- A mental outline or framework of some aspect of experience, which is based on prior

experience or memory (For example, what to expect in a restaurant or a supermarket)
- In essence, schemas provide the mental glasses through which we see the world and
evaluate what is happening in it.
- May include:
o Knowledge (e.g., attributes)
o Beliefs
o Emotions
o Memories
o Links to other concepts, thoughts, feelings, emotions
o Ways to respond; action tendencies
- In terms of neural networks, a schema might be thought of as a group of nodes with
associative links that are so strong that the activation of any node/concept within it will
begin to activate the entire schema network
- If enough nodes are activated, the entire schema will ‘reach threshold’, become fully
activated, and then influence the person’s thoughts, feelings and behaviour
- If some nodes are activated, but the schema does not reach threshold, it is said to be
primed.
- A primed schema can clearly influence behaviour, but that influence will be automatic and at
an implicit level
- Schemas help categorise and interpret experiences in a meaningful and efficient way
- Their influence is generally out of conscious awareness and is usually automatic
- May be adaptive – assist with quickly categorising and dealing with our experiences
- May be maladaptive –
o bias the way life events are perceived;
o prompt inappropriate responses
Development of schemas
- Jeffrey Young has based his therapy for personality disorders on such maladaptive schemas,
which he calls ‘early maladaptive schemas’ (EMSs)
- Young assumes that certain childhood experiences bias the way we see ourselves and
others, and that these biases continue to be elaborated across the life span, forming part of
our stable ‘self’
- E.g. Toxic childhood – lot of schemas that aren’t very adaptive
Abandonment schemas
- Involves the belief that one’s closest relationships are unstable or unreliable and thus cannot
provide enduring nurturance.
- Also involves the expectation that significant others are likely to leave, either through death
or finding another more worthy.
- Considered as one of the most powerful/damaging schemas
Developmental origin:
- Parent or primary caregiver left the house permanently when child was young

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- Parents withdrew or left child alone for extended periods

- Parents unpredictable
- Parents moody
- Alcoholic parents
- Parents seemed to prefer a different sibling
Defectiveness/Shame schemas
- Belief that one is defective, bad, inferior, or unwanted, and would be unlovable to significant
others if exposed.
- Hypersensitive to criticism, blame, rejection, comparisons to others,
- Often feels a strong sense of shame
Developmental origin:
A consistent pattern of:
o Extremely critical, demeaning, punitive, blaming parenting

o Sexual, physical, emotional abuse
o Neglectful, unloving parents
o Repeated unfavourable comparisons to others; made to feel a disappointment
Entitlement schemas
- Belief that one is superior to others, entitled to special rights, not bound by normal rules of
social reciprocity, and should be able to do or have whatever one wants, regardless of cost
to others.
Developmental origin: Spoiled entitlement
- Insufficient discipline by parents; weak limits

- Spoiled by one or both parents
- Child not asked to take responsibility,
- Parents don’t follow thru with consequences
Developmental origin: Dependent overindulgence
- Child over-indulged
- Child becomes dependent on parents
- Parents assume responsibilities
- Child comes to expect this level of care
- Parents poor at self-control
Schema Therapy
- Young and colleagues have developed a therapy for personality disorders (e.g., borderline
personality disorder; narcissistic personality disorder) based on changing entrenched
schemas
- Schemas are challenged and new patterns of thinking established over a significant period of
therapy (often 2-3+ years)

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Scripts
- Huesmann (1988; 1998) put forward Script Theory

- A script is a schema about how a particular event plays out over time
- Throughout development people are exposed to and internalise various scripts for
behaviour
- Particularly influenced by scripts played out in the family, at school, and in the mass media
- Person meets situation
- Attend to and evaluate cues from environment
- Heuristic search; retrieve scripts for behaviour
- Evaluate accessed scripts
o How appropriate?
o Likely outcomes?
o Self efficacy?
o Costs and consequences?
- Act on script
- Evaluate response to your response; feedback
Social-Cognitive Theories
- A personality theorist who has a good grounding in both psychodynamic and social-cognitive
theories has a good base from which to begin to understand personality
- Both approaches could learn a lot from each other
Strengths
- Acknowledge the role of thoughts, memories, neural networks in personality

- Readily testable through experimentation
- Applied value (therapies, change framework)
Weaknesses
- Too much focus on rational and conscious processes (this is changing)

- Assumption that people can report what they think feel and want
Humanistic approaches
- Arose in 1950s and 1960s
- Focus on aspects of personality that are distinctly human
o What is the human experience? “Phenomenology”
o What gives life meaning?
o What is ‘self’ and how does it develop?
o Hard scientific methods not necessarily valuable for studying the complexity of the
person
Carl Rogers “Person Centred Approach”
- The most influential theory from this group

- Influenced by Rousseau (people are basically good but are held back from their full potential
by social experiences)
- Need to understand each individual’s ‘phenomenal’ experience – the way they conceive
reality, experience themselves, and experience the world

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- Strong influence on therapy

- The therapist’s greatest tool is not a test, but the ability to empathise, to understand the
other person’s experience
- Unconditional positive regard essential
- True self: Core self-untainted by the world
- False self: mask; ultimately mistaken to be the true self
- Ideal self: what the person believes they should be like
- Self-concept: organised pattern of thoughts and perceptions about oneself
- If the person’s self-concept becomes too distant from the person’s ideal self, the person
changes their behaviour or their self-view to avoid the painful reality of this disparity.
- Self-actualisation is the primary motivation in humans – to reach one’s human potential.
o Meet all of one’s needs
o Be open to experience
o Express one’s true self (rather than a false self)
Jean-Paul Sartre  Existentialism
- Essentially would disagree that we have a personality (people are ever-changing and must
create themselves)
- What we create dies with us
- Must therefore live in the moment and create a meaning for our existence
o Commit to values, ideals, people, courses of action BUT
o Also realise that these have no lasting value or intrinsic meaning
Strengths
- Therapeutic value and unique emphasis on life-meaning and reaching potential

- Positive about human nature
- Interested in the unique person
Weaknesses
- Not a comprehensive theory of personality

- Many humanistic ideas are not testable/falsifiable, thus have less empirical evidence (Rogers
an exception)
RECAP OF PERSONALITY:
- Clinical, correlational and experimental traditions in personality research
- Trait approaches: (from correlation) (experimental has the least influence on personality)
o Emphasise genetic origins
o Personality comprises various stable traits, every person can be placed on a
continuum
o Nomothetic approach (compare scores on such a continuum to population norms)
o Popular view currently – Five personality factors (OCEAN)
Temperament
- Very stable part of the way someone approaches the world

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- e.g., Inhibition to unfamiliar; impulsivity, reactivity, vigour, rhythm etc.

- Origins more likely to be rooted in biology and genes than other aspects of personality
Heritability
- Some personality traits may be influenced by genes (e.g., openness to experience) but
others more by environment (e.g., trust)
Psychodynamic theories
- Everything a person does has meaning

- Powerful role of unconscious
- Development of personality through childhood experiences
Social cognitive approaches
- Importance of learning and experience

- Development of stable approaches to self and world through schemas
- Emphasise human experience and the motive to seek self-actualisation

- Strengths and weaknesses of each approach
- We will now look at several personality styles, and the contribution of the different
approaches to understanding what they encompass and how they develop.
WEEK 8 - Social Motivation

Social Learning accounts
- The role of learning and modelling – people become violent behaviours from what they
learn/see
- Bobo doll experiment (kids who saw aggressive behaviour by adults to dolls were also
aggressive to them, kids who saw kind behaviour were kind to the dolls)
- Greitemeyer and Mugge (2014) – meta-analysis of 98 studies on 37,000 people – found
significant, positive relationship between violent videogames and aggressive behaviour
Social learning - problems
- Doesn’t explain the origins of human violence

- Why have humans behaved aggressively throughout history and across cultures?
- Why are humans attracted to violence, even though they fear it?
- Is human aggression learned or instinctive, or both?
“Instinctive” accounts
Aggression as instinct:
- Darwin – aggression functions to assert power and dominance

- Threat and appeasement displays
Freud and Lorenz
- Freud – the ‘death’ instinct

- Lorenz – “On Aggression” (1963) – proposed a “fighting instinct”

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o aggression is a healthy, adaptive instinct but needs appropriate channeling

o Catharsis – purifying discharge, gets rid of aggressive ‘energies’
Instinct theories: problems
- No evidence for aggressive energy reservoirs inside people

- Catharsis doesn’t work – violence breeds violence
Current thinking
- Aggression and violence involve a complex interaction between nature (innate propensities
– what we come into the world with) and nurture (what we learn from our families and
culture – our socialization)
- But.. why are we born with the capacity for violent behaviour? What’s it for?
Evolutionary account
- Functions of aggression - what is achieved by behaving aggressively?

- How has aggression worked to enhance the reproductive success of the human species over
thousands of years of evolution?  Note – no morality involved here – culture teaches us
what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ but there are no ‘oughts’ or ‘shoulds’ in nature
Functions of aggression
- Aggression helps us to…

o co-opt the resources of others
o defend ourselves from attack and protect our own resources
o Inciting fear in rivals  Aggression can function to build your reputation as a
dangerous person – “If you mess with me, you’ll be sorry!”
Problems
- Short-term versus long-term consequences

- Aggression breeds aggression – leading to revenge and retribution cycles
- Hard to break out of – who ‘gives in’ first?
- Cultures of honour – ‘losing’ is shameful; feuds and vendettas may last for centuries
Men, women, and violence
- Are men more violent than women?

- Yes - cross-cultural and historical evidence
- “Young male syndrome” (Wilson & Daly, 1985) – propensity for risk-taking behaviour – fast
driving, dangerous sports, heavy drinking, violent behaviour
Social factors
- Rewarding male violence – if the culture rewards male violence, there will be more of it
The role of testosterone
- Testosterone increases aggressive behaviour in animals.. and young males have the most
testosterone and are the most violent

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- Testosterone decreases with age; older men are less violent
But the issue is complex..
- Most men with high testosterone don’t commit violent crimes

- Many violent criminals don’t have high testosterone levels
- Causal direction issues - winning increases testosterone levels (Dabbs, 2000; Mazur & Lamb,
1980)
Female aggression
- Violent female offenders have higher testosterone than non-violent offenders

- Higher testosterone in females is associated with more aggressive fantasies and behaviours
So..
- Testosterone seems to energize people and elicits pleasurable feelings of power and control,
especially in competitive contexts
Evolution, sex, and aggression
- Note differences between male and female reproductive interests

- Females – need healthy, successful mate willing to invest resources in her and child
- May opt for two or more mates to secure ‘good genes’ (sexual mate) and
commitment/resources (social mate – husband!)
Men’s sexual strategies (1)
- Can opt for quantity over quality

- Can pursue cheap (commitment) free sex because spreading his genes is relatively easy
Men’s sexual strategies (2)
- BUT – most men end up trading quantity (many sexual partners) for quality (commitment to
one or few) – a strategy that enhances reproductive success
To attract a quality mate, men must
- display and exaggerate status and resources (see what a big house, watch, car, bank
account, I have!)
But men must also..
- compete with and beat rivals
So men may be aggressive because..
- They fight other males to protect resources (which wins them mates)
- They engage in competitive and risky behaviours to display ‘good genes’ and status (which
wins them mates)
- They may be violent toward women in order to control women’s sexual behaviour – which in
turn ensures ‘paternity certainty’
Male sexual jealousy
- The leading cause of wife-beating and homicide.. may even be excused as a ‘crime of
passion’

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Female sexual strategies
- Females are also competing for mates

- they need a healthy, resourceful and committed mate to ensure reproductive success
- How to win the healthiest, wealthiest mate in a market with many rivals?
Female attractiveness
- Derives from signs of youth and fertility
To attract a mate women must..
- Exaggerate youth and beauty (including lying about age)
But women also must..
- Signal commitment and trustworthiness
So women competing for mates..
- Engage in verbal aggression against one another

- In particular, they derogate (put down) their rivals’ appearance and sexual
history/behaviour (ie, signs of potential betrayal)
- And sometimes, they will engage in physical combat (note the role of cultural norms)
Conclusions
- We all have the capacity to behave aggressively and aggression can serve a variety of
functions for men and women
- But aggressive behavior is always a choice
- The decision to behave aggressively is influenced by many factors, including context (e.g., in-
group/outgroup, culture, learning, personality factors, alcohol, etc.)
Altruism and kindness
- Why are humans kind to one another?

- Although humans do sometimes hurt one another, they are also extremely cooperative and
helpful
Theories of altruism
- Is human kindness innate? Or are we born completely selfish and having to learn to co-
operate?
- The role of learning – children are encouraged and taught to share and care for others
- Greitemeyer and Mugge (2014) – playing prosocial video games increases prosocial
behaviour (goodness in, goodness out).
Evolutionary account
- But caring for others also has an evolutionary basis

- Humans are motivated to co-operate (and would not have survived otherwise)
So who do people help?
- Inclusive fitness theory:

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o People differ in genetic relatedness to one another (siblings, cousins, etc)

o Humans are more likely to help their kin (genetic relatives) than they are to help
non-kin
Experimental evidence
- Experimental participants – asked to imagine a house is burning down, and they can only
save one person in the house – who do they save?
- Given choices involving babies, old people, family members etc.
- The likelihood of saving an individual decreases as genetic relatedness decreases (e.g., see
Burnstein, Crandall & Kitayama, 1994)
Other evidence
- Studies showing the effects of differential investment

- For example, grandparents are more likely to help grandchildren (related to them by 25%)
than cousins are to help cousins (related by 12.5%)
- Kinship terminology is used to encourage bonding/helping in non-kin groups
(brother/sisterhoods etc.)
Why do we help non-kin  Theoretical explanation:
- Reciprocal altruism (or, what goes around, comes around; you scratch my back and I’ll
scratch yours, etc.)
- Vital component of successful group living
Reciprocal altruism – why?
- Individuals who engage in reciprocal altruism are more likely to survive than individuals who
act selfishly
- In lean times, can rely on each other for support
- For humans, motives and emotions associated with ‘sharing’ (i.e., feelings of debt,
obligation, gratitude, guilt etc.), are passed onto succeeding generations
Cheater mechanism
- Humans readily detect ‘cheating’

- Betrayal and ‘unfairness’ are registered at an emotional level
- Cheated individuals experience hurt, anger, impulses for retaliation
- E.g. Lance Armstrong
Costs of cheating
- Cheating incurs reputation costs for the cheater (Do not help this person!)
Friendship
- A powerful context for reciprocal altruism

- More of a communal (kin-like) relationship than an exchange relationship

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- What are the rules of friendship?
Breaking friendship rules
- Betrayal of trust in friendship

- The risks of being vulnerable to others
- “Enemy-ship”
- The problem of fair-weather friends – how do we know our friends are ‘true’ friends?
Encouraging co-operation (Axelrod, 1984) (1)
- Enlarge shadow of the future

- Encourage people to think beyond the present moment, to realize they may need a
continuing relationship with an ‘enemy’
Encouraging co-operation (2)
- Teach reciprocity – give and take

- Insist on no more than equity – don’t be greedy
Encouraging co-operation (3)
- Respond quickly to provocation

- “Tit for tat” is important – but be the first to co-operate
- Cultivate a personal reputation as a reciprocator (I can be trusted to pay my debts –
benefiting me is not risky for you)
Is this view too ‘cold’?
- Do humans constantly weigh up rewards and costs, and calculate genetic relatedness, when
deciding to be kind (or not) to others?
Emotions do the work for us
- Empathy
Hot and cold empathy
- Hot (emotional) empathy – also called ‘empathic distress’

- You feel distressed and may help to make yourself feel better
Cognitive empathy
- Being aware of, and understanding suffering, but not necessarily experiencing the same
distress
- May be more effective than hot empathy (fairer, better outcomes)
- Compassion – a primary motivator of kindness?
The role of culture
- Teaches us who to care about, how, and by how much

- How generous “should” we be to family? Neighbours? Friends? Refugees? Strangers?
- Evolutionary theory suggests we’re strongly influenced by kinship cues

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Extending kin boundaries
- Dehumanizing others makes them ‘non-kin’ – easier to hurt or kill
Week 9 - Psychopathology
Psychopathology
- Patterns of thought, feeling, or behaviour that disrupt a person’s functioning or wellbeing

- Although some abnormal behaviour is universal, what is abnormal can depend on a person’s
culture
o Unlucky Number 13 vs 4
o Social anxiety vs taijin kyofusho (I will embarrass someone else)
o Hearing voices of the dead
- No single behaviour is sufficient in determining abnormality
- Various indicators of abnormality include:
o Subjective distress
o Maladaptiveness
o Statistical deviancy
o Violation of standards of society
o Social discomfort
o Irrationality and unpredictability
o Dangerousness
- Decisions about abnormal behaviour involve judgments and are based on cultural values and
expectations and change over time
Mental Health and Mental Disorders
- Mental Health:
o State of emotional and social wellbeing
- Mental Health Problems:
o Emotional and behavioural abnormalities which impair functioning
- Mental Disorder:
o Clinically recognisable symptoms that cause distress and impair functioning,
generally requiring treatment

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- Australian stats
- Almost half population will experience a disorder
- Mood – depressive / bipolar
At risk populations:
- Children and adolescents

- Older people
- Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders
- Those living in rural and remote areas
- Homeless individuals
- Incarcerated individuals
- Culturally and linguistically diverse individuals
Historical Account
Demonology, Gods, Magic
- Possession by evil spirits, perhaps punishment from God

- Treatment = Exorcism
Hippocrates
- Mental disorders due to brain pathology and imbalance of blood, phlegm, bile, black bile
- Treatment = Balance the four humours
Early Chinese medicine
- Yin and yang

- Treatment = Restore balance
Middle Ages in Europe
- Supernatural causes of mental illness

- Treatment = Prayer, holy water, sanctified ointments, touching relics, mild forms of exorcism
Renaissance Period
- Scientific questioning re-emerged, very slowly replacing demonology and superstition •

Treatment = Asylums, 16th and onward
Philippe Pinel (France 1790’s)
- Removed chains from inmates to test hypothesis that patients with mental illness should be
treated with kindness
William Tuke (England 1790’s)
- Established the York Retreat, a place where mentally ill patients lived, worked, and rested in
a kindly, religious atmosphere (Quackers)
- Treatment = Restore balance

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As word spread about the success of Pinel and Tuke’s work, laws were established to improve the
care of people with mental illness
Contemporary Views
Biological Perspective
- Genetic vulnerabilities
o Usually not one gene, almost always polygenic
o Genotype-environment interactions
o Diathesis-stress model
- Brain dysfunction and neural plasticity
o Genetics neural activity behaviour
- Neurotransmitter imbalance
o Norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin, glutamate, GABA
- Hormonal imbalance
o Malfunctioning of the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) has been implicated in a
handful of mental disorders
New Psychodynamic Perspectives
- Object Relations
o Emphasises that interactions with real and imagined other people could give rise to
inner conflicts
- Interpersonal perspective
o Emphasises cultural and social forces rather than inner instincts as determinants of
behaviour
- Attachment theory
o Emphasises the importance of early with attachment relationships as laying the
foundation for later functioning throughout life
o Quality parental care is needed to develop secure attachments
o If care givers unreliable, didn’t soothe when under distress – likely to grow up with
insecure interpersonal relationships, anxious and avoidant attachment styles
developed

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o If care givers soothed and protected us from harm, likely to grow up with secure
interpersonal attachments and well-functioning interpersonal relationships as adults
- These newer perspectives have tried to improve the scientific limitations of traditional
psychodynamic theory
- Attachment theory has taught us a lot about normal and abnormal child development, while
interpersonal therapy effectively treats depression
Behavioural Perspective
- Arose in part as a reaction against the unscientific methods of psychoanalysis

- Only observable behaviour and the stimuli and reinforcing properties of it can serve as the
basis for understanding behaviour
- Central to this approach is learning
o Modification of behaviour as a consequence of experience
o Classical (Pavlovian) Conditioning
o Instrumental (Operant) Conditioning
-spider
-Isn’t scary when born
-Unconditioned stimulus –
spider bite, response – pain
-Therefore now spider is
scary
Cognitive-Behavioural Perspective
- Arose in part as a reaction against radical behaviourism

- Important to understand how thoughts and information processing can become distorted
and lead to maladaptive emotions and behaviour
- Self-efficacy
o The belief that one can achieve desired goals
- Cognitive distortions
o An exaggerated or irrational thought pattern involved in the onset and perpetuation
of psychopathological states
- Attentional bias
o The tendency for people's perception to be affected by their recurring thoughts at
the time
Social Perspective
- Exposure to multiple uncontrollable and unpredictable frightening life events is likely to

leave a person vulnerable to psychopathology

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o Early life deprivation or trauma

o Problems with caregivers
o Marital discord and divorce
o Low SES and unemployment
o Maladaptive peer relationships
o Prejudice and Discrimination
- This approach has highlighted the importance of environment and has contributed to the
development of programs designed to improve the social conditions that lead to
maladaptive behaviour
Important points:
The diathesis-stress model posits that mental disorders develop

from a genetic or biological predisposition for that illness combined
with stressful conditions that play a precipitating or facilitating role.
(example of a biological perspective, gene-environment
interaction)
Dopamine plays a role in addiction, whereas serotonin plays a role

in anxiety and depression.
Psychodynamic perspective theorists distinguish three broad

classes of psychopathology (neuroticism, personality, psychosis) that form a continuum of
functioning, from the least to the most disturbed.
Classical conditioning has long been applied as an etiological model for anxiety disorders
The behavioural perspective has taught us that maladaptive behaviour is the result of learning
Classification and Diagnosis
DSM-5 Definition of a Mental Disorder (APA, 2013)
“A mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s

cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological,

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or developmental processes underlying functioning. Mental disorders are usually associated with
significant distress or disability in social, occupational, or other important activities. An expectable or
culturally approved response to a common stressor or loss, such as the death of a loved one, is not a
mental disorder. Socially deviant behavior (e.g., political, religious, or sexual) and conflicts that are
primarily between the individual and society are not mental disorders unless the deviance or conflict
results from a dysfunction in the individual, as described above.”
DSM-5 Guiding Principles
- Must be practical for use in clinical practice

- Only create changes that are supported by empirical evidence
- Try to maintain continuity with DSM-IV
- Harmonise with ICD-11
- Aim to include cultural variations where possible
- Reduce excessive use of “not otherwise specified”
Classification system helps clinicians identify a client’s problems, formulate a plan for interventions,
and helps researchers search for new knowledge.
Diagnosis is the act of placing an individual into a category of a classification system
The DSM-5 main goal is to have clinical utility
DSM-5 disorders are causes of behaviour – FALSE

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Week 10 - Psychopathology
Continued
Depressive Disorders
Major Depressive Disorder
- Over 2-week period, 5+ symptoms (below), including (1) or (2)

1. Depressed mood most of day (irritable in kids)
2. Markedly diminished interest or pleasure in almost everything
3. Weight loss or gain or appetite loss or gain
4. Insomnia or hypersomnia
5. Agitation or retardation
6. Fatigue or loss of energy
7. Worthlessness or excessive guilt
8. Poor concentration or indecisiveness
9. Recurrent thoughts of death
- Plus, must experience marked distress or decrease in functioning for at least 2 weeks and no
manic or hypomanic episode ever
- When diagnosing an individual with MDD, clinicians need to add “specifiers”

- MDD has a variety of specifiers that let other professionals know about the type of
depression and its severity
- Severity
o Mild, Moderate, Severe, With psychotic features, In partial remission, In full
remission
- Type
o anxious distress, mixed features, melancholic features, atypical features, mood-
congruent psychotic features, mood-incongruent psychotic features, peripartum
onset, seasonal pattern (referred to as seasonal affective disorder
Persistent Depressive Disorder (Dysthymia)
A. Depressed mood (irritable for kids), most of the day, more days than not – at least 2 years (1 year
for kids; irritability)
B. Two or more of:
1. Poor appetite or overeating

2. Insomnia or hypersomnia

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3. Fatigue or loss of energy

4. Low self-esteem
5. Poor concentration or indecisiveness
6. Feelings of hopelessness
C. < 2 months without symptoms
D. May have MDD at same time
E. No manic or hypomanic episode ever
- difference between this and major depressive disorder is length of symptoms
- 18% of 21 year old’s experience major depressive disorder

- at 15 the rates drastically increase
- females rates are higher
Suicide
- Most people who die from suicide meet the criteria for a depressive disorder in the weeks
before death
- Worldwide, suicide is the 15th leading cause of death
- In Australia, suicide is the 13th leading cause of death
- High-income countries have higher rates of suicide than low and middle income countries
- Suicide is the leading cause of death among women aged 15-19 years
- Suicide is the second leading cause of death among 15-29 year olds
- Men are much more likely to die by suicide, almost 3x greater risk
Risk factors for suicide in Australian youth – Patton & Burns (1997)
o Being male
o Living in rural and remote areas
o Being Aboriginal
o Having a mood disorder
o History of suicidal behaviour
o Substance abuse
o Stressful life events
o Non-intact family
o Family history of suicide
o Access to firearms
o School disengagement
o Unemployment
Two models of how people become depressed:

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Empirically Supported Treatments
- Behavioural Activation
- Cognitive Therapy
- Interpersonal Psychotherapy
Bipolar and Related Disorders

Bipolar and Related Disorders
• Bipolar I—meet criteria for a manic episode

 Major Depressive Episode is not a requirement for Bipolar I (although very
common – 75%)
• Bipolar II—meet criteria for a hypomanic episode and for a major depressive
episode
 Major Depressive Episode is a requirement for Bipolar II
• Bipolar I and Bipolar II are distinguished from each other in terms of duration and
severity
 A hypomanic episode cannot "turn into" a manic episode until it reaches 7
days in duration AND is accompanied by an increase in severity
(Hypo)manic Episode
A. Abnormally & persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood for at least 1 week (most of day)
[Note – hypomanic episode – 4 or more days]
B. At least 3 of the following to a significant degree:
1) Inflated self-esteem or grandiosity

2) Decreased need for sleep
3) Pressure to keep talking
4) Flight of ideas or racing thoughts
5) Distractibility
6) Increase in goal-directed activity
7) Excessive involvement in activities that have potentially negative consequences.
(substance abuse, reckless driving)
C. Marked impairment in social or occupational or requires hospitalisation for safety [Not so for
hypomania]
Genetics of Bipolar Disorder--Shih et al. (2004)
• Family studies
 1st degree relatives – 3-15%; Controls – 0-1%
 Low risk for probands of unipolar depression
• Twin studies
 Concordance: MZ – 20-75%; DZ – 0-8%
 Heritability estimated around 80%
Neurotransmitters and Bipolar Disorder

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• Norepinephrine
 Higher during mania than when depressed
• Serotonin
 Reduced levels when depressed
• Medications are recommended as the first treatment for bipolar disorder

 Mood stabilisers
 Antipsychotics
• Psychological adjuncts
 Family focused therapy (helpful for depression)
 Systematic care
 Psychoeducation
- Bipolar I and Bipolar II are distinguished from each other in terms of duration and severity
- Medication are the first line treatment for bipolar disorder
Anxiety Disorders
Specific Phobia
- Marked fear or anxiety about a specific object or situation

- Exposure to the phobic stimulus almost always provokes immediate fear or anxiety
- The phobic object or situation is avoided or else is endured with intense fear or anxiety.
- The fear or anxiety is out of proportion to the actual danger posed by the object or situation
- The fear, anxiety, avoidance is persistent, typically lasts 6 mos or more
- The fear, anxiety, avoidance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social,
occupational, or other important areas of life
- Not better accounted for by another mental disorders (e.g., fears of flying, enclosed spaces,
elevators may resemble agoraphobia; panic disorder)
Types of phobias:
 ANIMAL – spiders, snakes, other insects, dogs, birds, sharks, etc

• NATURAL ENVIRONMENT – storms, heights, water
• BLOOD, INJECTION, INJURY – seeing blood or an injury, receiving an injection or invasive
medical procedure (fainting response - approx. 70%)
• SITUATIONAL – tunnels, bridges, elevators, flying, driving, enclosed spaces, driving
• OTHER – choking, vomiting, contracting an illness, loud noises, costumed characters
• The average person with SP fears 3 objects or situations—this leads to multiple SP dxs

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• Lifetime Prevalence: 12.5% -- most common anxiety disorder
Social Anxiety Disorder
- Marked fear/anxiety about social situation/s involving possible scrutiny by others. In

children, anxiety must occur with peers, not just adults.
- Fears will act in way that will be negatively evaluated, including showing anxiety
symptoms.`
- Social situations almost always provoke fear/anxiety. In children, fear/anxiety may be
expressed by crying/tantrums/freezing/clinging/shrinking/failing to speak.
- Social situations are avoided/endured with intense fear/anxiety.
- Fear/anxiety out of proportion to actual threat.
- Fear/anxiety/avoidance persistent, typically 6mths+.
- Fear/anxiety/avoidance causes clinically significant distress/impairment.
- Fear/anxiety/avoidance not attributable to physiological effects of a substance or
another medical condition.
- Fear/anxiety/avoidance not better explained by another mental disorder (e.g. panic dx).
- If another medical condition present, fear/anxiety/avoidance unrelated or excessive.
Preparedness Theory
- Prevalent fears reflect a biological

predisposition to fear objects and
situations that have threatened
humans throughout history
- Mixed empirical findings
Social Anxiety Disorder
- 2nd most prevalent anxiety disorder

o 12.1% lifetime
o 6.8% last year
- When using a higher disability threshold
o 5% lifetime
o 2.8% last year

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- Threat beliefs
o World is a dangerous, uncontrollable place.
o World is unpredictable.
o I’m ill-equipped to cope with it.

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- Behaviour
o Overestimate likelihood of feared events
o Catastrophise costs
o Avoidance of affect
o Avoidance of situations
People worry:
• To stop bad things from happening

• To show one cares
• To prevent punishment
• To enhance perceived control.
• To be prepared for all possibilities
• To keep safe But worry prevents effective problem-solving and maintains anxiety
- Specific Phobia
• Exposure Therapy
- Social Anxiety Disorder
• Cognitive-behavioural therapy
- Panic Disorder
- Generalised Anxiety Disorder
Anxiety Disorders Now in Other Chapters of the DSM

OCD
A. Presence of obsessions, compulsions, or both: Obsessions are:
1) Recurrent and persistent thoughts, urges, or images that are experienced, at some time
during the disturbance, as intrusive and unwanted, and that in most individuals cause
marked anxiety or distress
2) The individual attempts to ignore or suppress such thoughts, urges, or images or to
neutralise them with some other action or thought
Compulsions are defined by:
3) Repetitive behaviours or mental acts that the individual feels driven to perform in response
to an obsession or according to rules that must be applied rigidly
4) The behaviours or mental acts are aimed at preventing or reducing anxiety or distress, or
preventing some dreaded event or situation; however, these behaviours or mental acts are
not connected in a realistic way with what they are designed to neutralize or prevent, or are
clearly excessive
B. The obsessions or compulsions are time-consuming (take at least an hour a day) and cause
clinically significant distress or impairment
C. The O-C symptoms are not attributable to substances or a medical cond
D. Not better explained by another disorder

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NOTE: Young children may not be able to articulate the aims of compulsions
- Exposure and Response Prevention
PTSD Criterion A
- EXPOSURE TO ACTUAL OR THREATENED DEATH, SERIOUS INJURY, OR SEXUAL

VIOLENCE IN 1 (OR MORE) WAYS:
- Directly experiencing the event(s)
o includes, but not limited to: war (combatant or civilian), threatened or
actual sexual violence or physical assault, kidnapping, hostage, torture,
POW, natural or human-made disasters, severe MVAs.
o ‘A life-threatening illness or debilitating medical condition is not necessarily
considered a traumatic event. Medical incidents that qualify as traumatic
events involve sudden, catastrophic events (e.g., waking during surgery),
anaphylactic shock).’
- Witnessing, in person, the event(s) described above as it occurred to others, as
well as witnessing a medical catastrophe in one’s child (e.g., life threatening
haemorrhage)
o Death due to natural causes does not qualify
- Learning that the traumatic event(s) occurred to a close family member or friend.
In cases of actual or threatened death, the event must have been violent or
accidental
o Unexpected events inc. violent personal assault, suicide, serious accidents &
serious injuries
o Excludes death due to natural causes

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- Experiencing repeated or extreme exposure to aversive details of the traumatic

event(s)
o First responders collecting human remains, repeated exposure to child
abuse by police, etc
o Does not apply to exposure through electronic media, television, movies, or
pictures, unless this exposure is work related
PTSD Criterion B
- 1 (OR MORE) INTRUSION SYMPTOMS (AKA POSITIVE DISSOCIATION)

- Recurrent, involuntary, and intrusive distressing memories of the traumatic
event(s)
o Differs from rumination—involuntary and includes sensory, emotional, or
physiological behavioural components
- Recurrent distressing dreams in which the content/affect of the dream are related
to the traumatic event
- Dissociative reactions in which the individual feels or acts as if the traumatic
event(s) were recurring
o Can last a few seconds up to a few days
o Occurs on a continuum from brief visual or other sensory intrusions about
part of the traumatic event without loss of reality orientation, to complete
loss of awareness of present surroundings
o Often referred to as flashbacks
- Intense or prolonged psychological distress at exposure to internal or external
cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event
- Marked physiological reactions to internal/external cues that symbolise or
resemble an aspect of the trauma
Criterion C
- 1 (OR BOTH) PERSISTENT AVOIDANCE SXS

- Avoidance of or efforts to avoid distressing memories, thought, or feelings about
or closely associated with traumatic events
- Avoidance of or efforts to avoid external reminders that arouse distressing
memories, thoughts, or feelings about or closely associated with the traumatic
event
Criterion D
- 2 (OR MORE) NEGATIVE ALTERATIONS IN COGNITIONS AND MOODS

- Inability to remember an important aspect of the traumatic event(s)
o Can be thought of as negative dissociation
- Persistent and exaggerated negative beliefs or expectations about oneself, others,
or the world
o Can manifest as a negative change in perceived identity (e.g., “I can’t trust
anyone ever again”)
- Persistent, distorted cognitions about the cause or consequences of the traumatic
event(s) that lead the individual to blame himself/herself or others
- Persistent negative emotional state
- Markedly diminished interest or participation in significant activities

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- Feelings of detachment or estrangement from others

- Persistent inability to experience positive emotions
Criterion E
- 2 (OR MORE) MARKED ALTERATIONS IN AROUSAL AND REACTIVITY ASSOCIATED

WITH THE TRAUMA
- Irritable behaviour and angry outbursts (with little/no provocation) typically
expressed as verbal or physical aggression toward people or objects
- Reckless or self-destructive behaviour
- Hypervigilance
- Exaggerated startle response
- Problems with concentration
- Sleep disturbance
Why PTSD is not longer under anxiety section:
- Enough data to say its more than just anxiety

- Fear and anxiety are not the only emotions
- Anger and shame experienced after a trauma predict the development of PTSD,
even after controlling for fear
- Patients with PTSD may be no more likely to report fear over other emotions

PSYC104/PSYU1104/PSYX1104 - Lecture Notes

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PSYC104 Lecture Notess

Introduction to Psychology I (Macquarie University)

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PSYC104 LECTURE NOTES

- The study of how people think, feel and behave

HISTORY AND THEORY OF PSYCHOLOGY

- Numbers will explain the universe

- Combines Socratic method with Pythagorean mysticism

- Founded the Lyceum (regarded as the first university)

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Ancient Greek thinkers:

- A significant period in Western thought around 600BCE

The Dark Ages:

- 400s – 1300s CE in the west

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- Newtonian science provides the fundamentals for modern science

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- Empiricist: all knowledge comes from experience

- Science of humanity must be based upon experience and observation

- Synthesised rationalism and empiricism

- Voyage of the Beagle

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o Couldn’t find explanation until reading “essay on the principal of population”

Modern Psychological Theories

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- Rejected the concept of mind

- Emphasis on the actualisation of the self

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- Motivation driver of directed behaviours; particularly our wants and needs

Motivation: Early perspectives

- Psychodynamic Perspective (Freud)  theorised behaviours motivated by unconscious and

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Drive Reduction Theories

- Arousal affects strength of drives (Yerkes-Dodson, 1908)

E.g. running race:

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- under-arousal causes stimulus hunger – a drive for stimulation

- Approach-approach conflict (e.g. dinner vs movie)

- As goal gets closer, the approach and avoidance grows stronger

- Drive Reduction theories (DRT) inadequate; we repeatedly engage in behaviours despite

Relative importance of needs

- Some physical and psychological needs more important than others

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Sexual Response Cycle

Sex and Ageing

- Sex is more frequent early in relationships, twice per week

Goal-setting: what really works?

- Research findings indicate setting goals to

1.Specific (not general)

3. Action-oriented (not outcome)

- Self-efficacy and feedback important

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WEEK 2 – TEXTBOOK READINGS NOTES:

1.3a Scientific Scepticism:

1.3b A basic framework for scientific thinking:

Six key scientific thinking principles are:

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 Findings consistent with several hypotheses require additional

- Correlation versus causation

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 Study how and why people change over time

Great debates of psychology: