Lecture 1 Flashcards
First publishers of intelligence
In 1994 - multiple psychologists published in the Wall Street Journal and defined intelligence as quick thinking, reasoning, problem solving and planning.
Intelligence definition
General capability to: Reason, Plan, Solve Problems, Think Abstractly, Comprehend Complex Ideas, Learn Quickly, Learn From Experience
Wall Street Journal Intelligence Theory
Intelligence cannot be taught and reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings.
How is intelligence measured?
Correlation and Factor Analysis
Who created the first intelligence test?
Francis Galton
What statistical concept was created because of intelligence?
Correlation by Francis Galton
Francis Galton’s hypothesis
Intelligence should correlate with observable traits like reflexes, muscle grip, and head size
Francis Galton Books
“Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development” (1883)
“Hereditary Genius” (1869)
“The History of Twins” (1875)
Who coined the term eugenics?
Francis Galton (1883)
Eugenics History
- “well born”
- concerned with “race betterment” and conscious efforts to “improve the race”. State involvement.
- first by encouraging healthy, capable people of above- average intelligence to bear more children (so called ‘positive eugenics’).
- Davenport (1910) founded the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) in New York; goal of eugenics was “to improve the natural, physical, mental, and temperamental qualities of the human family.
- Resulted in policies aimed at removing the related genes from the population via policies that included involuntary sterilization or institutionalization (so called ‘negative eugenics’). These policies specifically targeted the least-powerful people: minority women, immigrants, the physically and mentally ill, and the poor.
What is factor analysis?
A method of dimension reduction that seeks to identify underlying unobservable variables that are reflected in the observed variables.
Factor analysis starting point
Start at a correlation matrix, you are looking to reduce the dimensionality of this matrix (Field, 2000)
Spearman correlation findings
Spearman found that the better a child is at discriminating between different weights, the better they perform on school
Alfred Binet (1857-1911)
- Sought to find an objective way to identify children who needed additional help.
- In collaboration with Theodore Simon, he constructed the Simon- Binet Intelligence Scale.
- Binet recognised limitations of Intelligence Scales.
- Importantly he believed that measures of intelligence were not always generalizable and could only apply to children with similar backgrounds and experiences.
Wechsler Scale
Good scale for measuring intelligence, and it surrounds lots of different tasks to estimate general intelligence
WAIS-IV
Developed and marketed by the Psychological Association. 2200 people, between the ages of 16 and 90, were tested in the USA. They had a good spread of education background and everyone sat all 15 tests.
WAIS-III
There were substantial correlations between scores on all tasks. 105 correlations, all significant, lowest 0.21 and highest 0.74. The average of the 105 correlations was 0.45. Thus, full-scale IQ, our best estimate of the g factor, is a weighted average of all of them.
IQ standardisation
IQ scores have a mean of 100 and SD of 15.
Are the WAIS tests actually measuring intelligence?
The combination of general ability and group factor is not enough to account for how well people perform on individual tests. There seems to be a specific ability that is not in any of the tests
Salthouse (2004)
Looked at whether there was a hierarchal structure of intelligence. Almost half of the variance among this group of participants appeared to be attributable to a general mental ability that is required to perform all of the tests. Narrower types of mental ability relate to certain types of tests, as well as specific abilities help specific tasks.
Scottish Mental Survey
Beginning in the late 1990s two cohorts (1921 and 1936) that took the Scottish Mental Survey tests in 1932 and 1947.
Scottish Mental Survey Results
No perfect stability and people tended to score better in 1998 (aged 77) compared to 1932 (aged 11). People who did well in 1932 tended to do well in 1998. Correlation between 0.6 and 0.7
Batty et al (2009)
Studied 1 million Swedish men and found that every SD increase in IQ associated with 32% decrease in mortality risk 20 years later.
Lower childhood IQ associations:
- Schizophrenia (David et al., 1997, Osler et al., 2007, Gunnell et al., 2002, Zammit et al., 2004, Dickson et al., 2012)
- Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) (Koenen et al., 2007, Kremen et al., 2007, Gale et al., 2008, Gale et al., 2010)
- Depression (Zammit et al., 2004, Gale et al., 2008).
Gale et al., 2008, Gale et al., 2010, Koenen et al., 2007, Osler et al., 2007
1 SD increase in IQ score while young is associated with a 13% to 43% reduction in mental health difficulty risk
Deary et al (2007)
- IQ at age 11 was a powerful predictor of educational attainment at age 16 (accounting for a little over half of the differences in GCSE scores).
- However, a considerable amount of the variation in GCSE scores were not related to CAT scores at age 11.
- Implies IQ is a substantial component of GCSE success but not the whole story.
Goleman (1998)
Emotional intelligence matters as much as IQ. 90% of the difference between star performers and other workers in a professional job is attributed more to emotional intelligence factors
Watkins (2000)
85% of success could be attributed to emotional intelligence.
Higher ability-based emotional intelligence is associated with:
- Better social and work relationships.
- Being more able to accurately detect variations in personal heartbeat (Schneider, Lyons, & Williams, 2005).
- Being more able to recognise and reason about emotional consequences (e.g. affective forecasting; Dunn et al., 2007).
- Lower scores on measures of distress symptoms (David, 2005), even after controlling for variation attributable to variation in Big Five personality dimensions.
Warne and Burningham (2019)
Factoral g was created and observed by the Western world. 52,340 individuals in 97 non-western countries, we found that a single factor emerged unambig-
uously from 71 samples (73.2%) and that 23 of the remaining 26 samples (88.5%) produced a single second-order factor. This is similar to western samples.