Individual Differences Area Flashcards
1
Q
Individual Differences Area
A
- Unique, measuring differences, complex behaviour
- Assumes behaviour is due to individual differences and behaviour is understood by studying how we differ from each other
- Behaviours can be categorised and measured e.g. differences in psychology are measured using the Rorschach inkblot test and IQ tests
- Provides an understanding of normal and abnormal behaviour e.g. phobias, disorders, criminal thought patterns
2
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Individual Differences Strengths
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- Holistic: looks at all various aspects of behaviour and improves understanding of mental disorders and suggesting treatments
- Deterministic: differences drive behaviour and doesn’t account other causes
3
Q
Individual Differences Weaknesses
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- Socially sensitive: categorising normal and abnormal behaviour can have potential harmful effects in society use
- Ethnocentric: studies are often focused on individuals from one culture
4
Q
Individual Differences Studies
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Freud – Little Hans
Baron-Cohen – Autism In Adults
Gould – A Nation Of Morons Bias In IQ Testing
Hancock – Language Of Psychopaths
5
Q
Psychodynamic Perspective
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- Unconscious processes, psychosexual stages
- Assumes that unconscious processes cause behaviour but individuals create defence mechanisms to protect themselves from their unconscious mind so we have no direct awareness of this part of the mind
- There is psychodynamic conflict as parts of the mind are in constant dynamic struggle, this is unconscious but helps us to understand behaviour
- Personality is shaped by: relationships, experiences and conflicts experienced over time e.g. the Oedipus conflict during the psychosexual stages of development as fixation at any stage impacts behaviour later in life.
6
Q
Psychodynamic Perspective Strengths
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- Holistic: looks at how various experiences shape behaviour
- Useful in everyday life: better understanding of human behaviour e.g. for therapy
7
Q
Psychodynamic Perspective Weaknesses
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- Not scientific: cannot be objectively observed or falsifiable
- Deterministic: explains the most prominent parts of behaviour being due to childhood as this has the most impact on the unconscious, but there are also other explanations
8
Q
Freud Context
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- Freud theorised that young children go through unconscious psychosexual stages during early development
- Boys will develop an Oedipus complex of desiring their mother and wanting to get rid of their father
9
Q
Freud Aim
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- Follow little Hans’ feelings and behaviour while he went through the phallic stage of development as this could help support Freud’s theory
10
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Freud Method
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- A longitudinal case study
11
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Freud Sample
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- A 5-year old boy called Little Hans
- Whose father exchanged letters to Freud and Freud would interpret Hans’ behaviour and wrote back with suggestions
12
Q
Hans & His Widdler
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- Hans’ father wrote to Freud saying that Hans is “afraid a horse will bite him in the street and his fear seems connected to him being frightened by a large penis”
- This is during the time Hans had an interest in his “widdler”
13
Q
Hans’ Mother & Sister
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- Hans had a fear of his mother dropping him in the bath
- He admitted to his father that he wanted his mother to drown his sister
- The unconscious desire was translated by Freud as being a fear that his mother might let him drown
14
Q
Horses & Anxiety
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- Hans had a fear that a white horse would bite his finger off
- Freud interpreted this as a fear of losing his mother since on another occasion he asked her to put her finger on his widdler but she said it would not be proper and because he liked playing with his widdler but his mother threatened to arrange for it to be cut off
15
Q
Dreams & Fantasies
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- He had a dream about two giraffes
- He took away the crumpled one away and sat on it making the big one cry out
- This was interpreted as him sitting on the crumpled giraffe (his mother) shows him claiming her for himself
16
Q
Fear Of Horses & Fear Of Father
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- Freud suggested that the fear of horses was a fear of his father as the black around the horses mouth and the blinkers in front of their eyes were symbols for his father’s moustache and glasses
17
Q
Hans’ Resolution
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- The fear of horses subsided and he began to identify with his father
- This was suggested from a final fantasy where he says, “the plumber came and took away my behind with a pair of pincers and gave me another then he did the same with my widdler,”
- This was interpreted as Hans being given a bigger backside and widdler like his fathers
18
Q
Freud Conclusion
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- There was evidence to support the Oedipus complex and successful resolution of the conflict came when Hans was able to express his feelings about his mother and father and transfer his identification to his father
19
Q
Freud Evaluation
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- Method: case studies raise issues of generalisability and the close bonding that develops between the people involved and the experimenter affects objectivity
- Data: qualitative due to reports of Han’s dreams and conversations between the father and Freud
- Ethics: it was confidential as Hans’ real name was hidden, informed consent was given by his parents and there was no deception involved
- Validity: the interpretations could be said to have not being the most valid explanations of Hans’ behaviour e.g. other approaches such as the behaviourist approach which explains the fear of horses by classical conditioning from hearing the adult warning the child
- Reliability: sample was too small to establish an affect
- Sample: was small and could’ve been subjective to the individual it was also ethnocentric as it was based in Vienna from a the middle class so other children may behave differently
20
Q
Baron-Cohen Context
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- Research using theory of mind tasks shows that children diagnosed as autistic are not able to reason another person’s thoughts or emotions and as adults they have problems with social relationships
21
Q
Baron-Cohen Aim
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- To investigate and assess the theory of mind competency in adults with high-functioning autism or Asperger’s syndrome using an adult test
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Baron-Cohen Method
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- A quasi (natural) experiment
- Matched participant design on age and intelligence
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Baron-Cohen Procedure
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- The ‘eye task’ showed 25 black and white images of eyes for 3 seconds
- The participants were individually tested and asked, “which word best describes what this person is thinking or feeling?”
- The images were selected from a magazine and four judges generated the target words, which were the correct answer and the foil word was the opposite
- As a control the target word was presented on a variation of both the left and right side
- Strange stories task – they were given stories with lies, jokes, irony and figure of speech and had to explain why the character had said what they said
- There were control tasks:
- Gender identification: all participants were asked to identify the gender of each of the 25 eye photos
- Basic emotion task: all participants were asked to identify the emotion in full-face photos – happy, sad, angry, afraid, surprise, disgust (Ekman categories)
24
Q
Baron-Cohen Results
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- The normal and TS participants had a similar mean score of around 20/25 on the ‘eyes task’
- While the autism/AS mean score was around 16.3/25 as they made more errors
- There were no differences between groups on the control tasks of Gender and Emotion
- Normal females performed significantly better than normal males on the ‘eyes task’
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Baron-Cohen Evaluation
- Method: quasi experiment as participants had already been diagnosed with high-functioning autism/AS or TS and this was also an independent measures matched task
- Data: answers from participants were expressed quantitatively making it easier for analysis and comparisons
- Ethics: informed consent gained, there was no mention of withdrawing or if they were debriefed but no harm or stress was caused
- Validity: participants were matched on age and intelligence levels to minimise extraneous variable and the inclusion of the Strange Stories Task helped to confirm the concurrent validity
- Reliability: Group two of the normal people was made up of 25 males and 25 females which is the number of complete people needed to establish a reliable effect
- Sample: were obtained through a range of sampling methods and attempts to match participants in their different conditions, but was based in the UK so the findings may not be generalizable to other cultures
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Gould Context
- The first intelligence tests were designed by Binet as a means of testing French schoolchildren to see who might require special education
- The intelligence quotient was calculated using (mental age [score on test] / chronological age x 100)
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Gould Aim
- To expose the fundamental problems involved in the attempts to measure intelligence
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Gould Method
- A review of the history of IQ testing
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Gould Sample
- 1.75 million US Army recruits for the First World War
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Gould Procedure
- Yerkes was a psychologist who saw possibilities in the field of IQ testing and how it could be useful to society
- When the First World War came about he saw the opportunity to develop mental testing for all the army recruits so that the most able could be given jobs with greater responsibility
- The types of questions included: analogies, filling in the next number in a sequence and multiple choice
- There were two versions of the test: Army Alpha was a written exam and Army Beta was a set of pictured given to those who couldn’t read but involved writing answers
- Each man was graded by a psychologist from A to E
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Gould Results
- The tests became widely used after the war by schools and businesses and the psychologist Boring studied test results from 160,000 men and made these conclusions:
- White Americans have an average mental age of 13 which is just above being a moron
- European Immigrants were all morons but those from the northern and western Europe were brighter
- Negroes were at the bottom scoring an average age of 10
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Gould Conclusion
- Test scores rose in relation to the number of years an immigrant had lived in the USA, which suggested that learning was involved in their score rather than an innate intelligence
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Gould Evaluation
- Method: Gould can be seen as having carried out a review of Yerkes’ work; it’s legitimate to question the objectivity he used to select his evidence as it could have been chosen to support the argument he wants to put forward
- Data: quantitative data was collected from Yerkes’ tests for the number of correct answers scored by recruits on the tests
- Ethics: the army recruits would not have been told about the examination or it’s purposes, would be unable to withdraw and have to provide their names, age and education
- Validity: Yerkes’ tests weren’t an accurate measure of intelligence but the score represented ‘native intellectual ability’ based on the amount of schooling they had and how long they had been in the USA for
- Reliability: the tests were reliable as they had a standardised design since all people taking them received the same questions and they ensured the level of difficulty of the Army Alpha and Army Beta were similar
- Sample: the sample was limited as it only consisted of men of a certain age
- Ethnocentrism: although the sample came from a range of ethnic backgrounds the questions used were favoured towards those who had lived in America the longest so the test was culturally biased
34
Hancock Context
- Recent research suggested that much can be learned about people who are psychopaths by close examination of their language; words can reveal significant insights about psychological functioning
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Hancock Aim
- Investigating whether the characteristic traits of psychopaths can be found in their speech patterns through the use of statistical text analysis
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Hancock Method
- Context Analysis
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Hancock Sample
- The crime narratives of 14 psychopath murderers
| - 38 non-psychopath murderers were analysed using two text analysing tools
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Hancock Procedure
- Psychopathy was determined using the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised
- The PCL-R measures characteristics of psychopaths such as superficial charm, pathological lying, manipulation of others, impulsivity, juvenile delinquency and criminality
- The Wmatrix linguistic analysis tool was used to examine parts of speech and semantic content (the reasoning given)
- The Dictionary of Affect and Language tool was used to examine the emotional characteristics of the narratives
39
Hancock Results
- Psychopaths included more rational cause-and-effect descriptions with words such as ‘because’ and ‘since’ and focused on material needs e.g. food, drink, money with fewer references to social needs e.g. family, religion
- Psychopaths speech contained higher frequency of speed disfluencies such as ‘uh’ and ‘um’ meaning it was difficult for them to describe an emotional event
- Psychopaths used more past tense showing greater psychological detachment from the incident and used less emotionally intense language
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Hancock Conclusion
- These language differences support the notion that psychopaths operate on a primitive but rational level
41
Hancock Evaluation
- Method: the study can be seen as following a quasi-experiment method with the naturally occurring independent variable being whether the participants were psychopaths or non-psychopaths
- Data: the prisoner’s descriptions of there crimes were analysed in a way that generated quantitative data allowing for differences in language between psychopaths and non-psychopaths to be compared
- Ethics: confidentially was maintained and the prisoner volunteered to participate and was not deceived but may have been unaware they were assessed for psychopathy
- Validity: the findings were valid as prisoners were unaware of the independent variable and the use of a double blind procedure reduced possibility of researcher bias in analysis of the data
- Reliability: there was an inter-rater reliability check in relation to the coding of the PCL-R assessments
- Sample: there were only 14 psychopaths so this limits the generalisability of the findings
- Ethnocentrism: men from other countries may use language in different ways
