Psychology Notes – Exam 3

Emotions
A psychological state with four components:
1. A positive or negative subjective experience
2. The activation of specific mental processes and stored information
3. Bodily arousal (like when you’re angry and your heart rate goes up)
4. Characteristic, overt behavior
Six Basic Emotions: happy, sad, scared, angry, surprised, and disgusted
- Genetically hardwired into people
Separate But Equal Emotions
- Positive and negative emotions can coexist
o Like when you’re moving: happy/excited that you’re moving on, but sad
that you’re leaving your friends behind
- Approach emotions
o Love & happiness
o Left frontal lobe
- Withdrawal emotions
o Fear & disgust
o Right frontal lobe
James-Lange Theory
- Event  physiological arousal  interpret physiological change  emotion
- You feel emotions after your body reacts
Canon-Bard Theory
- Said the previous theory depended too much on bodily signals
- Their argument: the event causes arousal & emotion simultaneously
Cognitive Theory
- Your arousal and the context combine to form emotions
o Ex: seeing a bear at the zoo vs. seeing a bear in the forest
Facial Feedback Hypothesis
- We experience emotions in part as a result of the position of our facial muscles
o Smiling makes you feel happier
o Frowning makes you feel sadder
The Shacter-Singer Experiment
- Emotions seem to be contagious
- Participants are told they are receiving a vitamin supplement
- They actually received epinephrine
o Caused a gradual increase in arousal
- Confederate: a person who works for the study but pretends to be a participant
o If the confederate acted happy, the participant was also happy
o If the confederated acted angry, participant also got angry
- Emotional response depended on the context of the situation
Fear
- Most well-understood emotional experience we have
- Fear keeps you alive
 - Fear-potentiated startle: when you are already afraid for some reason, you are
more likely to be startled by something
- Basic facts about fear:
o Fear can be an emotional reflex
o Fear can be classically conditioned
o Fear interacts with mental processes
Happiness
- While fear narrows the scope of attention, happiness broadens the scope of
attention
- Can money buy happiness?
Expressing Emotions
- Cultural display rules: what’s acceptable?
- Body language
- Nonverbal communication
- Role in conveying sexual interest
Motivation
“the requirements and desires that lead animals (including humans) to behave in a
particular way at a particular time and place”
Theories of Motivation
- Instincts: organisms have inherited tendencies to produce organized and
unalterable responses to particular stimuli (in order to survive)
o Weakness = human behaviors are more complex and flexible than
instincts can explain
o Evolutionary psychology = hard-wired goals
- Drive: in response to internal imbalances, drives push you to reduce the
imbalance
o Homeostasis = our body is supposed to stay balanced
o Weakness = assumes the goal is homeostasis, but sometimes people seek
increased or decreased arousal
- Arousal Theory: we seek intermediate levels of stimulation; when
understimulated, we seek arousal and vice versa
o Yerkes-Dodson Law = we are most productive when we’re at an
intermediate level of arousal
o Weakness = difficult to define levels of stimulation and how they vary
- Incentives: we’re motivated toward particular goals in anticipation of a reward
- Learned Helplessness: condition that occurs after an animal has an averse
experience in which nothing it does affects what happens to it, so it simply
gives up and stops trying to change the situation or escape
o Ex: domestic violence (women feel like they can’t escape it)
Needs & Wants
- Need  a condition that arises from the lack of a requirement
o Leads to drives
- Want  a condition that arises when you have an unmet goal that will fill a
requirement
o Leads to incentives
Types of Rewards
- Deprived reward = occurs when a biological need is met
- Nondeprived reward = satisfies a want
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Need
- Seven levels of need (form a pyramid)
1. Physiological needs (on the bottom and the most important)
a. Food, water, air
2. Safety needs (shelter, protection)
3. Belongingness needs (a sense of connectedness and a sense of being
loved)
4. Esteem needs (being appreciated by other people and having
confidence)
5. Cognitive needs (thinking, remembering, understanding, learning,
and any processes that require these things)
6. Aesthetic needs (we all have a need for beauty and harmony)
7. Self-actualization needs
a. Even if you reach this level, you’re not aware of it because
you keep striving for more
Sigmund Freud
“Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.”
- Born and raised in Vienna
- Neurologist
- Lived during the Victorian Age
o At this time, morals were the most important
- Opium was legal and encouraged at the time
o Was seen as a sign of class
o Freud was a druggie
- Freud’s neurology practice consisted of only female clients that all had the
same problems
o Made the mistake of generalizing the situation to all humans
- “hysteria”  diagnosed the women with this because he thought their “illness”
was related to the uterus
Theory of Personality
- Your personality is composed of 3 parts:
1. Id: completely unconscious and is driven by the pleasure principle

a. “if it feels good, it is good”

2. Superego: extra conscious, driven by the morality principle
a. Driven by what’s appropriate in society
3. Ego: conscious; driven by reality principle

- In cartoons: guy=ego; devil on houlder=id; angel on other shoulder=superego

- “libido”  is part of Id
o A wad of sexual energy that moves and is with you since birth
Psychosexual Stages
1. Oral stage (0-1)
 a. Believed children were displaying sexual release by chewing/sucking
on things
i. Fixation: getting stuck on the phase (at a later age, people
would exhibit this through their addiction to smoking or biting
their nails, anything involving their mouth)
2. Anal Stage (1-3)
a. Potty training for toddlers
b. The activity of defecation had some sort of sexual release to it
c. Anal retentive = get fixated on being clean and organized
d. Anal expulsive = “omg your shit is everywhere”
3. Phallic Stage (3-6)
a. Phallic symbol: in some way resembles genitals
b. Libido has gone to the genital area
c. Kids are very curious at this age
d. Oedipal complex: little boys are sexually attracted to their mom, but
dad gets in the way  identification with the dad
i. Castration anxiety
e. Electra complex: little girls are in love with their dads because they
envy their daddy’s junk (penis envy)  identification with mom
4. Latent Stage (6-puberty)
a. Libido goes to sleep in genital area
b. At this point, the purpose is to go to school because the libido is
hibernating
5. Genital Stage (puberty-forever)
a. Do it now, with this person, or later?
Psychoanalysis: helps you identify unconscious motivation for bad behavior
- Hypnosis: Id can speak unfiltered
- Free association: “I say a word, you say what comes to your mind”
- Freudian slip: when you say something on accident and it sounds dirty ;)
o “it’s what you were actually thinking”
- Defense mechanisms: what your superego does to keep your Id quiet
Personality: Part 2
What is personality?
- “a set of behavioral, emotional, and cognitive tendencies that people display
over time and across situations”
Hans Eysneck
- The Big Five (Five Superfactors)
1. Extraversion (sociability)
2. Neuroticism (emotionality)
3. Agreeableness (altruism)
4. Conscientiousness (dependability)
5. Openness (open-minded)
Measuring Personality
- Inventory
o MMPI (most common)
o Questionnaires
 o Produce a personality profile
o Easy to score & statistically analyze
o Social desirability bias  when people fill out their profile based on
what they think they should say
- Projective Tests
o Assesses personality and psychopathology
o Requires the test-taker to make sense out of ambiguous stimuli
o Concerns about their validity & reliability
o Include Rorschach and Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
o Rorschach Test
 “ink-blot test”
 There is no right or wrong answer
 Perception is very important
Temperament
- Innate tendencies to behave in certain ways
o Always has a genetic tendency
- Correlation between temperament at infancy and adulthood
- Arnold Buss & Robert Plomin
o 4 dimensions of temperament
1. Sociability – preference for being in the company of others
rather than being alone – what would you prefer?
2. Emotionality – a tendency to become emotionally aroused,
especially in negative situations
3. Activity – being busy and staying active
4. Impulsivity – tendency to respond to a situation immediately
without considering the consequences