HPS 111 - Week 2 Flashcards
Why are automatic responses important?
They ensure that we stay alive and healthy.
Define both “reflex” and “instinct” and explain the difference between the two.
Reflex: Simple, instantaneous, and automatic behaviours (patella/knee jerk reaction, baby grabbing anything that touches their palm) - one stimulus/one response. Instinct: Refer to tendencies within organisms to perform more complex behaviours. For example - sea turtles migration or kangaroo joey’s climbing into pouches. Tricky more complex to understand.
What is the Fight, Flight, Freeze response?
The Fight, Flight, Freeze response is a physiological reaction that occurs in the autonomic nervous system in response to a perceived harmful event, attack or threat to survival.
What is comparative psychology and how does it relate to human behaviour?
Is the study of animals in order to find out more about humans. The underlying assumption is that to some degree the laws of behaviour are the same for all species and that therefore knowledge gained by studying rats, dogs, cats and other animals can be generalised to humans.
Explain what the moro, diving, rooting, and the sucking reflexes are and why we might have them?
Moro: startle reflex to prevent falling. Diving: holding breathe underwater - babies. Rooting: baby turns face to something when it’s cheek is brushed and starts to make sucking motions. Suckling: baby sucks on something that touches roof of it’s mouth - instinctively to feed to survive.
What does it mean to have a theory?
A theory isn’t a “hunch”, or a “guess”, and it isn’t a description of how a system works (we call them “laws”, like the “law of gravity”). A theory is an explanation of observations, importantly, one that is consistent with all available observations.
Explain the process of evolution via natural selection.
Natural selection is defined as a process by which species of animals and plants that are best adapted to their environment survive and reproduce, whilst those that are less well adapted die out.
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Instinct - free fof social-cultural behaviour.
Best way to think of Psychology is applied biology.
Both reflexes and instincts have a lot in common. Fundamentally they are automatic behaviours, but they differ in scope and time.
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Reflexes - simple, instantaneous, and automatic behaviours (like knee jerk reaction). One stimulus -> one simple response.
Instincts - refer to tendencies withing organisms to perform more complex behaviours (migration of sea turtles). Quite tricky and complex to understand.
Both reflexes and instincts have in common is that they are NOT learned.
Despite complication sociocultural factors, instincts are still influence us today.
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Familiar reflex - Fight, flight, and freeze response - autonomic nervous system.
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Diving reflex (mammalian reflex) - mammals will respond to cold air or water rushing over their face by slowing their heart rate and controlling their breathing.
Mammals (feed their young with milk) that rae more like us when they’re born will have reflexes more like us when we’re born.
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Theory isn’t a hunch or a guess.
Evolution - how and why we have different species. How they evolve over time due to conditons and how they have changed.
Species evolve not to “be better” but to have characteristic’s that helped their forebears survive and reproduce. This “survive and reproduce” outcome is called “reproductive fitness”. (survival of the fittest).
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Evolution is described as backwards looking process; we adapt based on success in previous generations not success now.
Selection Pressure - a factor that influences the rate of survival or fertility of a population.
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What is a Phenotype?
observable properties of an organism that arise from the interaction between heritable (genetic) factors and the environment. (hair colour, eye colour, height, strips on a cat, length of a fox tail etc).
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What are the “Principles of Evolution”?
- Organisms reproduce and increase in number.
- Organisms inherit features from their parents but also accumulate random variation.
- Features in the environment make some features more or less helpful in surviving and reproduction.
- Organisms that survive and reproduce pass on features via number 2.
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What are the “Requirements of Evolution”?
- Feature must be variable.
- Feature must be heritable (encoded in genetics).
- There must be selection pressure.
Behaviour can be shaped through selection pressure.
All 3 conditions need to be met in order for evolution to affect our physiology or behaviour.
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Variable
If it cannot change, then no process (evolution or otherwise) can lead to change.
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Heritiable
The trait also needs to be something that it can be inherited. If something cannot be inherited, then it can not be transitted. (people’s personal memmories aren’t passed down from one person to the next).
