Freud, memories, and the self Flashcards
social psychology
scientific study of how we think and feel about and behave towards the people around us and how our thoughts/feelings/behaviors are influenced by these people
Freud
founder of psychoanalysis - unpopular because of
- strange theories (penis envy, etc…),
- sexuality conversations ,
- drug use
- being an asshole
- unconscious motivation, unconscious dynamics and defense mechanisms
unconscious motivation
unknown reasons for feelings and actions
unconscious dynamics
ID: primitive desires
Ego: balance between and conflict between the two
Superego: do’s and don’ts
Defense mechanisms
a way for the ego to protect itself; no conscious awareness of strategy, Some examples include:
- denial, rationalization, intellectualization, displacement, and sublimation
denial
rejecting a thought or feeling
rationalization
coming up with a bogus explanation to justify behavior
intellectualization
over-analyzing to avoid feeling
displacement
redirecting feelings to another target
sublimation
redirecting feelings in a a USEFUL way
Why reject Freud?
- proven wrong
- Vague
- circular reasoning
- Barnum statements: generic assumptions of personalities of personalities and believed to apply uniquely to an individual
Social psychology shifts
social psych alternates between periods of stability and paradigm shifts
paradigm
a new way of looking at the world + new theories/explanations
falsifiability
hypothesis can be proven wrong
systematic investigation
e.g. experimental studies
replicability
when repeated, studies will have same results
anecdotal evidence
stories/causal observations
- con: unreliable
- pro: can inspire more systematic investigation
parsimony
explanation uses the fewest assumptions
observational research
naturalistic: existing differences between groups through observation
solutions to experimenter bias
blind studies (double blind, experimenter or participant blind)
operational defintion
how the variable is measured in the study
memory is organized into…
semantic networks
- based on context
context based experiment
scuba divers
- water and water/ land and land remembered best
- watering land remembered least
state-dependent memory
retrieval is superior when individual is in the same physiological or psychological state as they were during encoding memory (drunk rat in maze)
verbatism
remembering specific words; rote memorization
gist
general idea of something
study on false memory
given a list of words
- remembered false words - only ones that were distractor words, not unrelated ones
schemas
collections of general knowledge about events, situations, people, objects, and actions
schemas and word study - what was remembered?
self reference words > semantic > phonemic > structural
“I” as self-knower
conscious subject as experiencer
“Me” self as known
conscious of what is experienced
self concept
what you know and believe about yourself
The Social Me
all your various social roles
- higher self complexity = better
Self esteem
a subjective feeling we have about ourselves
