C2: Individual Differences Flashcards
Freud: aim
To document the case of and treat Little Hans who was suffering from anxiety, a lively interest in his widdler and who had developed a phobia of white horses
Freud: sample
Little Hans was studied from the age of 3-5, Hans father Max Graf and Little Hans mother were also patients of Freud
Freud: research method
Longitudinal case study
Freud: procedure
- Lively interest in his wider and the presence and absence of this in other people lead to threats from his mother
- Gained a sister he resented
- Later gained a fear of horses as this reminded him of his father
- Fear generalised to carts and buses
Freud: conclusions
Supported his theory of: - Psychosexual/infant sexuality
- His suggestion that boys in the phallic stage of psychosexual development experience the Oedipud complex
- Nature of phobias are the product of unconscious anxiety displaced onto harmless external objects
Baron Cohen: aim
To investigate if high functioning adults with autism or asperger syndrome would be impaired on a theory of mind test called the ‘Eyes Task’
Baron Cohen: 3 hypotheses
1) Autism and aspergers syndrome participants will show significant impairment on the theory of mind test compared to ‘normal adults’ and participants with Tourette’s syndrome
2) Females will perform significantly better on he theory of mind test compared to males
3) Participants who are impaired on the eyes task will also be impaired on the strange stories task
Baron Cohen group 1: sample
16 participants with high functioning autism (4) and asperges (12) all had moral intelligence, there were recruited from a variety of clinical sources, as well as adverts in the National Autistic Society magazine
Baron Cohen group 2: sample
50 ‘normal’ adults 25 males, 25 females who had no history of any psychiatric condition and were obtained via random sampling drawn from the general population of Cambridge which was held in the University of Experimental Psychology and Psychiatry
Baron Cohen group 3: sample
10 people wit Tourette’s syndrome age matched with group 1 and 2 recruited from a tertiary referral centre in London which they were attending. People with tourette’s syndrome were used to help control some extraneous variables that could have affected the results
Baron Cohen: controls
- All participants passed the Theory of Mind test based on 6 year old Theory of mind skills
- All participants had normal intelligence and a disorder supposed to originate in the frontal lobe
Baron Cohen: research method
Quasi/natural experiment
Baron Cohen: independent variable
The type of person likely to ave TOM deficits was naturally occurring so could not be manipulated or controlled by the researchers
Baron Cohen: dependent variable
Performance score out of 25 on the Eyes Task measured by each participant
Baron Cohen: experimental design
Matched pairs design
Baron Cohen: Eyes task procedure
- Participants shown black and white photographs or the eye region from 25 different faces taken from magazine photos and the size of the pictures were standardised
- Picture shown for 3 seconds before the researcher asked which word best describes them
- The target word to describe the mental state behind each pair of eyes was generated by four judges, the word pairs were then tested on a panel of eight judges blind to the hypotheses of the study
Baron Cohen: Happe’s strange stories procedure
- Participants also tested on the validity of the eyes task (do they perform similar- concurrent validity)
- Found autism and asperges sample were impaired on both the Happe’s strange stories task and the eye task so concurrent validity was established
Baron Cohen: control task procedure
Gender recognition- participants were shown the same images as in the eyes task but asked what gender the image was
Basic emotion- participants were shown images of whole faces and asked to identify the emotion displayed
- All tests presented in a random order and tested individually in a quiet room at home, clinic or lab
Baron Cohen: mean score out of 25 on the Eyes task for each condition
Autism/AS condition = 16.3
Normal = 20.3
Tourette’s = 20.4
Baron Cohen: mean score on the gender control task for each condition
Autism/AS condition = 24.1
Normal = 23.3
Tourette’s = 23.7
Baron Cohen: mean score our of 25 on the theory of mind test between males and females
Males = 18.8 Females = 21.8
Baron Cohen: hypothesis 3 result
The autism and asperges syndrome were impaired on both the Happe’s strange stories tasks and the eyes task
Baron Cohen: conclusions
- Adults with autism/AS do possess an impaired theory of mind
- Supports the idea that the central deficit within high functioning autism and AS is a failure to fully develop the cognitive process of a theory of mind
- Normal females shown to be better at recognising emotional states in the eyes than normal males on the Theory of Mind test
Gould: aim
To examine the early history of intelligence testing as conducted by Yerkes on army recruits in the USA during WW1
Gould: research method
Piece of empirical research, article review
Gould: sample
1.75 million army recruits from the USA during WW!, they were white americans, negroes and european immigrants
Gould: army alpha test
Test designed for people who were literate, consisting of 8 parts
Gould: army beta test
- Test designed for people who were illiterate or who failed the army alpha test, this has 7 parts and consisted of a picture completion task
- Instructions were written in English in three of seven parts the answers had to be given in writing, yet this was a test for illiterates
Gould: individual spoken examination
If recruits failed the other two tests, they were supposed to be given this however this rarely happened
- Every individual given a grade A-E with a plus or minus sign
Gould: findings
- Average mental age of a white american adult was 13
- European immigrants could be graded by their country of origin with the darker people of Southern Europe and the Slavs of Eastern Europe being less intelligent than the fair people of Western and Northern Europe
- The black man had an average mental age of 10.41, the lighter the skin colour, the higher the score
Gould: conclusions
- IQ tests are culturally specific and biased
- IQ tests do not measure innate intelligence so often unreliable and invalid
- Innappropriate, poorly administered IQ tests can lead to tragic consequences
- Nations can be graded by their intelligence
- America is a nation of morons
Hancock: aim
To use statistical analysis to examine the features of crime narratives provided by psychopaths homicide offenders. Psychopathic speech was predicted to reflect an instrumental/predatory world view, unique socioeconomical needs and a poverty of affect
Hancock: research method
Semi structured interviews and open ended questions
Hancock: sample
comprised of 52 psychopathic and non psychopathic male murdered incarcerated in Canadian correctional facilities who admitted their crime and volunteered for this study
Hancock: procedure
- Potential participants to ask if interested, if they were then as interview was schedule which stated the purpose of the study and verbally explained the procedure
- Participants asked to describe their homicide in as many details as possible
- Interviewers consisted of 2 senior psychology graduate students and one research assistant, all blind to the psychopathy scores lasting 25 mins
- Lastly, narratives transcribed and checked over
Hancock: quantitative results
- The 14 psychopath narratives contained 29,562 words and averaged 2,201.5 per participant
- The 38 control narratives contained 97,814 words and averaged 2,554.3 per participant
So no significant difference
Hancock: instrumental language analysis
- Psychopaths produced more subordinating conjunctions than controls
- Pattern suggests psychopaths were more likely to have viewed the crime as a logical outcome of a plan, consistent with previous findings that their violence is indeed more instrumental and goal driven than that of their offenders
Hancock: hierarchy of needs analysis
- Psychopaths used approximately twice a many words related to basic psychological needs including eating or drinking
- Controls used significantly more language related to social needs including family and religion
- Supports the idea psychopaths lack the capacity for bands and presumably the capacity for religious experience or spiritual experience or enlightenment, so describe the crime in a cool, detached manner and in terms of the basic psychological needs they met at the time
Hancock: emotional expression of language
- Psychopaths use more past tense verbs than controls
- Psychopaths used fewer present verbs than controls
- Psychopaths produced a higher rate of articles than controls, revealing that their language involved more concrete nouns
Hancock: conclusions
- Psychopaths more likely to describe cause and effect relationships when describing their murder
- Psychopaths more likely to view crime as a logical outcome
- Psychopaths gave less emotionally intense descriptions of their crimes and use less emotionally pleasant language than non-psychopaths
