Exam 1 Essay Questions Flashcards
Discuss the differences between the cognitive and mechanistic approaches to understanding behavior and motivation.
Mechanistic: behavior and motivation is blind and triggered automatically by changes in internal or external states
Cognitive: behavior and motivation is controlled by rational, purposive thought
Define the nomothetic and idiographic approaches to motivation and how they are different.
Nomothetic approach involves the development of general or universal laws to determine how something is similar
Idiographic approach proposes that we can understand behavior by looking at how people differ from each other by examining how people are unique.
One approach looks for the similarity and the other looks for the difference.
Name and describe three techniques used to study motivation at the physiological level.
Electrodes: where portions of the brain could be stimulated with electricity
Chemically Stimulating the brain after inserting a minute tube(canula) into a specific brain region, injecting a solution, and noting how motivation changes as a result.
Recording Natural Brain Activity during various motivated states through the use of EEG, PET MRI or fMRI
What role does natural selection play in evolution?
Individuals who inherited genes that give them an advantage in the environment have a better chance of living long enough to reproduce, while those with inherited genes that put them at a disadvantage have a greater likelihood of dying before they have a chance to reproduce.
What is sexual selection and what role does it play in evolution?
Sexual selection occurs when there is a competition for mates, or when one member of a mating pair is chosen by the other member of the pair. The outcome is that the genes of the selected pair are advanced or passed on into another generation, while the genes of the non selected are decreased in future generations.
Discuss the controversy over the usefulness of the “instinct” concept including its critiques by Kuo and Tolman.
Kuo believed that there is no agreement concerning what types of or how many instincts exist, and maintained that a compiled list of instincts are arbitrary and depend upon each writer’s interests.
Tolman believed that the arbitrary designation of behaviors (such as curiosity, playfulness) as instinctive robs the concept of any explanatory value.
Define an “innate releasing mechanism,” and give one example each in humans and in non-human animals.
IRM works like a lock that can be opened by the proper key. The key that allows the behavior to occur is a biologically important stimulus that may be either environmental or the result of the behavior of a species member.
Humans: when a human smiles at another, the other tends to smile
Animal: the red belly of the stickleback fish releases aggressive behavior in other male stickleback fish.
Define imprinting and discuss its characteristics (time course, variability, etc.)
Imprinting: a socialization process in which a young organism forms an attachment to its parents.
Sensitive period that peaks between 13 and 16 hours after hatching for mallard ducklings
The imprinting is permanent and irreversible, once established it does not extinguish.
Describe two possible functions that have been proposed for sleep.
Sleep may protect from activities when we are least efficient
Sleep keeps organisms from responding at unnecessary or dangerous times.
Describe two or more factors that may influence whether people can reduce the stressing effects of life changes (and thereby avoid illness).
Emotional Insulation: the ability to step back from emotional events and keep them in perspective
Hardiness: serve to buffer the effects of stress because they are associated with curiosity and interest in the experience of life.
Social Relationships: can buffer the effects of stress through the encouragement an individual can offer to the person experiencing the stress.
Describe the stages of the General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS), and diseases that may occur when the GAS is not adaptive.
Alarm Reaction: the forces of the body are mobilized so that life can be maintained while local adaptive responses progress.
Stage of Resistance: the processes accelerated during the alarm reaction drop back almost to normal levels.
Stage of Exhaustion: the reaction to the stressor becomes general again.
If the stressor is not eliminated or removed, the bodily defenses are exhausted and death occurs.
