Individual Differences Area

Question 1

Individual Differences Area

Answer 1

• 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

Question 2

Individual Differences Strengths

Answer 2

• 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

Question 3

Individual Differences Weaknesses

Answer 3

• 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

Question 4

Individual Differences Studies

Answer 4

Freud – Little Hans

Baron-Cohen – Autism In Adults

Gould – A Nation Of Morons Bias In IQ Testing

Hancock – Language Of Psychopaths

Question 5

Psychodynamic Perspective

Answer 5

• 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.

Question 6

Psychodynamic Perspective Strengths

Answer 6

• Holistic: looks at how various experiences shape behaviour

- Useful in everyday life: better understanding of human behaviour e.g. for therapy

Question 7

Psychodynamic Perspective Weaknesses

Answer 7

• 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

Question 8

Freud Context

Answer 8

• 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

Question 9

Freud Aim

Answer 9

• Follow little Hans’ feelings and behaviour while he went through the phallic stage of development as this could help support Freud’s theory

Question 10

Freud Method

Answer 10

• A longitudinal case study

Question 11

Freud Sample

Answer 11

• 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

Question 12

Hans & His Widdler

Answer 12

• 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”

Question 13

Hans’ Mother & Sister

Answer 13

• 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

Question 14

Horses & Anxiety

Answer 14

• 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

Question 15

Dreams & Fantasies

Answer 15

• 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

Question 16

Fear Of Horses & Fear Of Father

Answer 16

• 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

Question 17

Hans’ Resolution

Answer 17

• 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

Question 18

Freud Conclusion

Answer 18

• 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

Question 19

Freud Evaluation

Answer 19

• 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

Question 20

Baron-Cohen Context

Answer 20

• 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

Question 21

Baron-Cohen Aim

Answer 21

• To investigate and assess the theory of mind competency in adults with high-functioning autism or Asperger’s syndrome using an adult test

Question 22

Baron-Cohen Method

Answer 22

• A quasi (natural) experiment

- Matched participant design on age and intelligence

Question 23

Baron-Cohen Procedure

Answer 23

• 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)

Question 24

Baron-Cohen Results

Answer 24

• 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’

Question 25

Baron-Cohen Evaluation

Answer 25

• 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

Question 26

Gould Context

Answer 26

• 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)

Question 27

Gould Aim

Answer 27

• To expose the fundamental problems involved in the attempts to measure intelligence

Question 28

Gould Method

Answer 28

• A review of the history of IQ testing

Question 29

Gould Sample

Answer 29

• 1.75 million US Army recruits for the First World War

Question 30

Gould Procedure

Answer 30

• 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

Question 31

Gould Results

Answer 31

• 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

Question 32

Gould Conclusion

Answer 32

• 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

Question 33

Gould Evaluation

Answer 33

• 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

Question 34

Hancock Context

Answer 34

• 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

Question 35

Hancock Aim

Answer 35

• Investigating whether the characteristic traits of psychopaths can be found in their speech patterns through the use of statistical text analysis

Question 36

Hancock Method

Answer 36

• Context Analysis

Question 37

Hancock Sample

Answer 37

• The crime narratives of 14 psychopath murderers

- 38 non-psychopath murderers were analysed using two text analysing tools

Question 38

Hancock Procedure

Answer 38

• 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

Question 39

Hancock Results

Answer 39

• 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

Question 40

Hancock Conclusion

Answer 40

• These language differences support the notion that psychopaths operate on a primitive but rational level

Question 41

Hancock Evaluation

Answer 41

• 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