Introduction

Question 1

What are the Basic premises of Freud?

Answer 1

• Most behaviour driven by unconscious forces; motives of which we have limited awareness
• Much of our psychological energy is taken up suppressing unconscious urges. Unconscious is really powerful
• Much of our behaviour is shaped by early-life experiences; difficult, perhaps impossible, to change later on. Early life really matters

Question 2

What kinds of consciousness are there? (Freud)

Answer 2

conscious, pre-conscious and conscious

Question 3

What is Conscious? (Freud)

Answer 3

me being aware of you in the audience, aware of what is going on around you

Question 4

What is Preconscious? (Freud)

Answer 4

easily accessible material; my street, my office

Question 5

What is Unconscious? (Freud)

Answer 5

thoughts, memories, urges, we are unaware of because they are actively kept in the unconscious (repression). Painful thoughts you don’t think about, can’t be accessed

Question 6

What did Freud believe that dreams showed?

Answer 6

Dreams were believed to be a route into the unconscious

Question 7

What is Manifest content?

Answer 7

recalled by the dreamer

Question 8

What is Latent content?

Answer 8

interpreted by the analyst

Question 9

What are believed to be the Sources of motivation?

Answer 9

• Darwin: evolutionary and natural selection
• Libido; sexual drives
• Life-preserving drives: hunger, pain. Acting a certain way in response
• Death instinct
• Human motivation is accounted for via these drives

Question 10

What is the id?

Answer 10

id: raw, uninhibited, instinctual energy. E.g. ‘I want it now!’, Pleasure principle (achieve pleasure/avoid pain); sex/aggressive drives, greatest interest to Freud

Question 11

What is the ego?

Answer 11

-Ego: socialisation during development means the child needs to plan, reason etc to satisfy the needs of the id, reality principle. Helps control the id to not be impulsive.

Question 12

What is the superego?

Answer 12

-Superego: latest in development, the ‘conscience’ of the child, believed to be internalisations of parental attitudes and expectations; morality. E.g. is it right to bribe someone?

Question 13

What happens in the Oral stage: birth to 1 year?

Answer 13

• Primary focus is on feeding; satisfying these needs. This is the basic need to satisfy the hunger
• Baby’s lips, mouth, tongue are all erogenous zones
• Focus is in achieving basic gratification
• Failure to meet needs at this stage can lead to a oral personality. Self-oriented, impatient, demanding, may continue to seek oral gratification (especially when stressed): thumb sucking, nail biting, cigarette smoking

Question 14

What happens in the Anal stage: 18 months to 3 years?

Answer 14

• Lower trunk matures; comes under greater physical control, can go to the toilet by themselves, can control bowel movement
• Sensual pleasure from bowel movements; this becomes the new erogenous zone
• Focus on the notion of power and control, can come into conflict with caregiver as they are able to do something themselves.
• Fixation can lead to anal personality: Early/harsh potty training = anal personality – orderly, stingy, stubborn. Liberal potty training = anal-expulsive personality – untidy, disorganised, does not follow rules.

Question 15

What happens in the Phallic stage: 3-5 years?

Answer 15

• Penis becomes erogenous zone
• Penis envy (girls); castration anxiety (boys)
• Boys become aware of their mothers as sexual objects; father seen as rival (Oedipal complex).

Question 16

What happens in the Latency stage: around 5- 12 years ?

Answer 16

• Resting stage (for psychosexual development); socio-learning.
• Genital stage: around 12 to 18 years – Puberty; more mature sexual attachment occurs.

Question 17

What is Intrapsychic conflict?

Answer 17

• id vs ego vs superego. Conflict between the three e.g. going to a party will mean missing a lecture!
• id: saying to do it
• Ego: maybe I can sneak out and won’t be noticed
• Superego: it is wrong to waste tuition fees
• Consequence = anxiety

Question 18

What is repression?

Answer 18

Pushing undesirable things away, not pathological unless taking to extremes

Question 19

What is projection?

Answer 19

blaming others for our shortcomings, e.g. blaming the lecturer for a bad exam grade

Question 20

What is rationalisation?

Answer 20

post-hoc explanation, e.g. I didn’t want that job anyway

Question 21

Strengths of the Freud model

Answer 21

• Provided provocative theories of human behaviour – led to much research
• Often very good descriptions of human behaviour
• Defence mechanisms – helps make ourselves feel better

Question 22

Problems with the Freud model

Answer 22

• Based on evidence from his patients – however, to protect anonymity very few case studies were published. Middle class stay at home mums, can’t be generalised
• Often revised his ideas – hard to follow the theoretical narrative. Changed his ideas
• Often vague – hard to devise clear empirical tests of his ideas. Ideas cannot be tested
• Is it feasible to explain the lionshare of behaviour via sexual and aggressive drives? – Little on social drives etc.
• Modern evidence does not place overly high importance on early life effects for personality development. – Behaviour genetics (more later on in the course)
• Good evidence of unconscious processes – Less clear if these processes drive behaviour

Question 23

What study did Pavlov conduct?

Answer 23

• Used classical conditioning to train dogs
• Unconditioned response for a dog to salivate at a bowl of food
• Ringing a bell is a neutral stimulus
• Show the dog the food and the bell to pair them to create the conditioned response of the dog salivating at the bell

Question 24

What did Watson do?

Answer 24

• Looked at human behaviour
• Developed and popularized this approach in the US
• Rejected psychoanalysis as unscientific
• Argued for a move towards observable constructs, and a move away from studying the unconscious. Founding figure of the school of behaviourism
• Cannot study anything that cannot be physically observed
• Application to humans: Linking desired outcome (reading) with a pleasurable activity (mother’s warmth)

Question 25

What did BF Skinner look into?

Answer 25

• Argued that classical conditioning is too simple to explain most behaviour
• Developed operant conditioning
• Based upon the notion that humans are motivated to achieve pleasure and avoid pain, i.e. humans ‘operate’ on the environment to achieve their goal state

Question 26

What is the pigeon example?

Answer 26

• Used a Skinner box
• Pecked on a key and food would come out
• Wanted to teach them the difference between red and green lights

Question 27

What did Skinner think about personality?

Answer 27

• In contrast to, say, Freud (and many others) he argued that there are no ‘structures in the head/mind’
• In fact, he de-emphasised the notion of personality: He didn’t believe in personality per se, nor that his ideas were a personality theory.
• Believed that conditioning could account for what we otherwise thought of as personality: i.e. behaviour is simply the set of responses we have acquired to deal with common stimuli

Question 28

What did Skinner think about psychopathology?

Answer 28

• No such thing as a ‘sick personality’, outside world is responsible
• Rather, a failure to respond appropriately to stimuli
• e.g. social anxiety = faulty reinforcement histories in which social skills were not developed, not a result of a specific parenting style in a specific developmental stage (Freud)

Question 29

What are the strengths of the learning theory?

Answer 29

• Committed to systematic hypothesis testing, rigorous and careful tests need to be done
• Clear recognition of the importance of external factors as shapers of behaviour
• Pragmatic approach; has led to much treatment-oriented development i.e. clear steps can be taken to alleviate, say, behaviour problems such as aversion therapy

Question 30

What are the problems with learning theory?

Answer 30

• Lacks a serious discussion of any genetic influence – Skinner did acknowledge these possibilities, but downplayed them.
• Studies superficial behaviour, not useful in humans daily life
• Fails to acknowledge the rich mental lives we possess – These constructs are deemed beyond science and so not examined. – But gravity is unobservable; didn’t stop Einstein making progress – For this, we must await the cognitive revolution…
• Difficult to perform such work with humans – Bandura and Rotter; some success. Mainly focused on animal studies
• Lacks a single unified theory; a collection of techniques and processes

Question 31

What did Maslow believe?

Answer 31

-Humanistic (human potential movement)
-Basic premises:
– Psychoanalytic and learning theories were dominant in the early 20th century
– Maslow and similar others – humanistic psychologists – were inspired by existential philosophy • How do we find meaning for our existence? • So-called “third-force” approach
– Personal growth; free-will; responsibility
– Maslow found the negative views of humanity from psychoanalysis uninspiring
– Wanted to show that humans were capable of great things • Started exploring high achievers
Human

Question 32

What are “Deficiency motives”?

Answer 32

Hunger, thirst, need to be safe, need to be loved

Question 33

What are “Growth motives” (or “being motives”)?

Answer 33

Developing skills; giving love

Question 34

What are the hierachy of needs?

Answer 34

• Self-actualisation – you are living to the highest of your potential
• Esteem – you’ve acquired the skills that lead to honour and recognition
• Love and belonging – achieving deeper, more meaningful relationships
• Safety – feeling safe
• Physiological needs – food, water and sleep
• Dispute how they should be ordered

Question 35

What is self-actualisation?

Answer 35

• Highest level
• Once basic needs are met we can focus on what we want from life – Indeed, one might be rich and professionally successful but unfulfilled and unhappy
• Not all get to this stage
• Maslows’ examples of self-actualisers: – Albert Einstein; William James; Thomas Jefferson – Bill Gates? Mark Zuckerberg?

Question 36

What are peak experiences?

Answer 36

• Totally absorbed by the activity.
• Challenging and requiring full attention, but not so difficult that progress cannot be made.
• The individual feels in control.
• Personally engrossing; does not think about the self.
• All sense of time is lost.

Question 37

What are the problems with Maslows model?

Answer 37

• Reasonable enough model, but rather simplified – No biology mentioned (we will come to this later in the course)
• Limited evidence base – Selected specific individuals who were perceived as self-actualisers; inconsistent measurement
• Concepts hard to define precisely; impossible to formally test
• The basic needs are arbitrarily picked and presumably there are others to be included as well.
• No exact mention of how to self-actualize. – Although does provide some guide; e.g. student-centred learning
• Focused on growth; doesn’t really offer much about mental illness