Exam #2 Study Guide Flashcards

Question

Teresa aces her psychology midterm exam and assumes it's because she studied really hard, when she gets a bad grade on the final exam she assumes that the teacher wrote a bad exam and he ruined her chances of getting a good grade. This is an example of what type of error/bias?

Answer 1

Self-Serving Bias: the tendency to take credit for success but deny blame for failure; or internal attributions for success, external attributions for failure

Answer 2

Help - Most cognitive errors and biases are geared helping the person argue their case and convince others. More often than not, heuristics provide the correct answers, or at least answers that are good enough. Harm - Mental shortcuts open the door to errors and biases that can harm well-informed, thoughtful decision making. They cause people to be lazy in their thinking and make it more likely someone will rely on faulty anecdotal information instead of the factors playing into the situation at hand.

Answer 3

There are several factors that can help reduce cognitive errors: teaching people not to ignore relevant statistics, making information easier to process, and avoiding thinking about ones feelings while decision making all help reduce cognitive errors Debiasing: reducing errors and biases by getting people to use deliberate processing rather than automatic processing. - getting people to use deliberate processes instead of automatic processes like relying on memory; instead they should consider multiple options, use explicit decision rules, search for disconfirmatory information, and use meta-cognition

Answer 4

Counterfactual thinking: imagining alternatives to past or present events or circumstances. Upward counterfactuals are imagining better alternatives, and downward counterfactuals are imagining worse alternatives. Generally, upward counterfactuals make people feel worse about themselves and motivate them to improve their lives, and downward counterfactuals make people feel better about themselves.

Answer 5

Meta-cognition is reflecting on one's own thought processes.

Answer 6

Emotion is a deliberate system reaction that is clearly linked to some event, while affect is a automatic system reaction that something is good (positive affect) or bad (negative affect).

Answer 7

Arousal differs from affect and emotion as it refers to the physiological reaction that accompanies most conscious emotion, rather than the automatic conscious reaction (affect) or the emotion itself. Arousal is related to these things because it may accompany both affect and emotion. Mood is different from affect in the way that it is a state of feeling, whereas affect is not, and it's not the same as emotion, which is a feeling state clearly linked to some event while mood is not linked to any event. It is related to both affect and emotion in the way that affect may sometimes produce a mood and it is the opposite of emotion. dumbass question

Answer 8

Affective forecasting: the ability to predict one's emotional reactions to future events. Most people are fairly accurate at predicting which emotions they will feel, but they substantially overestimate how long they will feel that way.

Answer 9

The affect-as-information hypothesis states that people use subjective emotional processes as sources of information in order to make judgements. This can cause people to disregard probabilities and odds, and may harm decision-making especially if the person misattributes the cause of their emotion. risk-as-feelings hypothesis: the idea that people rely on emotional processes to evaluate risk, with the result that their judgements may be biased by emotional factors.

Answer 10

Facial feedback hypothesis: the idea that feedback from the face muscles evokes or magnifies emotions. Botox injections reduce muscular feedback from the face, so the brain doesn't get all the usual input that helps it use emotional information. People with botox have been measured to be worse at recognizing emotion in others.

Answer 11

James-Lang

Answer 12

Cannon-Bard

Answer 13

Schacter-Singer

Answer 14

Excitation Transfer: the idea that arousal from one event can transfer to a later event. There is a disconnect between the brain and the body- physical arousal from one event can transfer to the other which may lead to people to thinking the later event caused the arousal (misattribution).

Answer 15

Affect balance and life satisfaction are both measures of happiness.

Answer 16

Objectively: People who have money, a good job, a happy relationship, friends, and good health are generally happier than people who lack these things- but the difference is pretty weak. The human emotional system is set up do it's very hard for a person to be happy alone in life. Subjectively: Happiness appears to lie more in our outlook and personality than in our circumstances; subjective feelings and approaches to life are strong predictors of happiness.

Answer 17

Happy people are healthy people- positive emotions have direct effects on the body that improve health. Many practices like meditation, expressing gratitude, exercise, and being optimistic all increase happiness. Happiness is strongly linked to good social relations.

Answer 18

Catharsis theory: the proposition that expressing negative emotions produces a healthy release of those emotions and is therefore good for the psyche. Research does not support catharsis theory, venting anger keep arousal high and keeps anger and aggression alive - tends to exacerbate aggression and conflict. Venting anger is also linked to heart disease.

Answer 19

Guilt is an unpleasant moral emotion associated with a specific instance in which one has acted badly or wrongly, while shame is a moral emotion that, like guilt, involves feeling bad but, unlike guilt, spreads to the whole person. Guilt motivates people to be more prosocial while shame is usually destructive.

Answer 20

Guilt is far more constructive than shame,