Studies 11-20 Flashcards
- Watson & Rayner: Little Emotional Albert (Conditioned emotional responses)
Hypothesis: Emotional responses are learned through conditioning
Method: 1 participant (Little Albert), 9 months old, Albert was presented with neutral stimuli such as a white rat, a monkey… had no natural fear responses. Then, a steel bar was struck behind him to make a loud noise which made him cry (fear response from unconditioned stimulus). Every time a neutral stimulus was presented, the bar was struck and he began to cry. This was repeated a week later. Then Albert was presented with the animals without the noise, and he still exhibited the fear response (the conditioned response). His fear remained after a month and was never reconditioned to not be afraid of the animals.
Discussion:
-Demonstrated that fear can be learned and conditioned
-Contradicted Freud’s theories that behavior stems from unconscious processes
-Ethical violations
-Criticism that conditioned fear responses will remain indefinitely
-Many researchers believe phobias are conditioned like Albert’s, others think they may include genetic component
- Skinner: Knock Wood! (Superstition in the pigeon)
- Radical behaviorism: reinforcement and punishment influences feelings and behaviors
- Hypothesis: Superstition arises when a person/animal believes there is a connection between their superstitious behavior and a reinforcing consequence, when in reality no causal relationship exists
- Method: Skinner box and pigeons, 15-sec between food dispensing, pigeons developed unique superstitious behaviors that they hadn’t exhibited before. When food was dispensed every 1-minute, their superstitious behaviors stopped
- Discussion:
- Hypothesis supported
- Partially reinforced behaviors are hard to extinguish, much like real-life superstitions
- Critiqued by Carl Rogers, behaviorism is too simple to investigate the scope of humans abilities to make goals, values, purposes, perceptions of self/others
- Greater levels of superstition developed under conditions of negative reinforcement than positive reinforcement
- Bandura, Ross, & Ross, See Aggression… Do Aggression (Transmission of aggression through imitation of aggressive models)
- Social learning theory: human interaction is the primary factor in personality development, we learn by observing and imitating the behavior of others
- Hypothesis: Children who observed adults modeling acts of aggression would engage in similar aggressive behaviors, those who observed nonaggressive models would be less aggressive, children would imitate behavior of same-sex model, boys would demonstrate more aggressive behavior than girls to account for societal conditioning
- Method: 72 children between 3-6 years old, played alone in a room and exposed to either aggressive or non-aggressive adult model, then the child was observed playing (and had their anger aroused by being told they couldn’t play with the attractive toys) after the model had left and aggressive or nonaggressive behaviors were recorded.
- Results: Children exposed to violence tended to imitate the exact behaviors they had observed. Specific aggressive behaviors that were modeled in aggression condition were never observed in nonaggressive condition and had significantly fewer instances of aggression overall. Results strongly supported gender differences hypothesized.
- Subsequent research: More aggression live than on film, less when saw punishment for violent behavior
- Violent effects of media on children may continue into adulthood
- Rosethal & Jacobson, What You Expect is What You Get (Teachers’ expectancies: Determinates of pupils’ IQ gains)
Experimenter Expectancy Effect: Observers often have specific expectations that may cause them to telegraph unintentional signals to the participant being studied, causing them to respond in a way that confirms their biases and fulfills their expectations
- Hypothesis: When an elementary school teacher is provided with information that creates expectancies about students, they might unknowingly behave in ways that reinforce these expectancies
- Method: Students in elementary Oak School given a fake IQ test at beginning of year and teachers received randomly assigned lists of which children were “bloomers”, would show unusual intellectual gains, and everybody else. The children were given same test at end of the year, and intellectual growth was compared.
- Results: In the lower grades, the “bloomers” had significantly more intellectual growth than the non-bloomers, this effect decreased with age.
- Discussion:
- Teachers expectations greatly effected treatment (warmth and attention) in classroom, this greatly impacted learning
- Many standardized tests used to measure intelligence contain racial and cultural biases. A combination of this, teachers being given test scores of their students, and evidence of expectations influencing treatment of students which influence outcomes = fucked up shit.
- The difference in effect over age might be explained by: younger children being thought of as more maleable, not already having a reputation
- Can apply to more situations than just the classroom
- Gardner, Just How Intelligent Are You (Frames of mind: Theory of multiple intelligences)
Hypothesis: Brain specialization may mean that different parts of the brain are responsible for different forms of intelligence
Method: Created 8 different criteria that an intelligence must meet to be considered autonomous
Results:
1. Linguistic: use language in skillful, convincing way
2. Musical: Gifted abilities involving sound
3. Logical-mathematical: think about, analyze, and compute relationship among abstract objects
4. Spatial- Creating, visualizing, manipulating mental images
5. Bodily-kinesthetic: awareness of body in space and skill in controlling body
6. Intrapersonal: ability to be aware of and understand who you are, emotions, motivations
7. Interpersonal: ability to be aware of others’ emotions and motivations
Possible: 8. Naturalistic and existential
- Tolman, Maps in Your Mind (Cognitive maps in rats and men)
-Cognitive-behaviorism: using mental maps, stimulus-response connectionist view of behaviorism
-Hypothesis: 1. The true nature of learning can’t be understood without examination of internal mental processes
2. Internal cognitive processes can’t be observed but they can be scientifically inferred from observable behavior.
-Method:
1. Latent learning experiment: Rats in 3 groups: control, no reward, delayed reward. Rats who weren’t receiving a reward didn’t appear to learn much about the maze unlike the ones who had a reward. However, when rats in delayed reward group were given a reason, they learned it much quicker than the rats in the original reward group. Explanation: As rats wandered the maze, they had been learning much more about the maze than they were showing.
2. Spatial orientation experiment: Learned maze and then their path was blocked, they could choose from 12 other paths. Most chose the path closest to location of previous food, not path closest to the one that had previously worked. Shows that rats had acquired a complex mental map of the maze.
Discussion:
-When rats were overly motivated or frustrated, they developed narrower views and were less likely to acquire comprehensive cognitive map.
-Influenced cognitive and environmental psychology
- Loftus, Thanks for the Memories (Leading questions and eyewitness report)
-We tend to believe that the way a person says they remember an event is the way it happened
-Reconstruction of memories occurs during recall, we fill the gaps in our memory with new and existing information
-Hypothesis: If eyewitnesses are asked questions that contain a false presupposition about the eyewitnessed event, new false information may be incorporated into the witnesses memory of the event and appear in the eyewitness testimony.
-Methods:
Included 4 experiments involving between 150 and 40 participants, viewed videos of car crashes and answered questionnaires with differently-worded questions
-Results: Participants remembered or forgot objects based on the wording of the question, they remembered more people than there had been based on wording, they remembered seeing a barn based on it being asked in the question, and they even remembered an object that wasn’t there to have been there based on the question wording.
Discussion:
-The process of witnesses recalling recreated memories that had been reconstructed to include new information
-Eyewitnesses are not reliable in criminal investigations
-Suppressed memory and the unconscious may not exist
- Harlow, Discovering Love (The nature of love)
- Your experiences as an infant with closeness, touching and attachment to your mother may influence your ability to be close to others later in life.
- Research question: Does love develop from an infant’s needs being met, or is it an intrinsic basic need that may be stronger than hunger or thirst?
- Methods:
1. Original experiment: 2 surrogate mothers that could provide food and warmth, only one was made of wood and soft padding and the other made of wire, 8 infant monkeys were randomly assigned to a wire mother providing food or the cloth mother and observed for the first 5 months of their lives.
2. Manipulations: introducing fear, exploring a new situation, open field reunions - Results:
- All monkeys preferred cloth mother even the ones who were being fed by the wire mother
- Went to cloth mothers when scared
- Monkeys with just wire mother did not gain weight or digest food as well due to psychological distress
- Discussion:
- Close contact with infant is important in the development of close attachment with an infant
- Does not matter as much who has the ability to feed an infant, close contact is just as important
- Can we generalize to humans? Humans develop slower than monkeys
- Ethical violations
- Piaget, Out of Sight but Not Out of Mind (The development of object concept)
-Intellectual abilities develop through maturation (not necessarily learning)
-Older children think differently than younger children about problems, developed 4 stages of cognitive development in children
-Hypothesis: Children must leave sensorimotor stage before preoperational stage to be able to develop object permanence
-Methods: Studies his own 3 children
6 Substages of sensorimotor period
Stage 1: reflexes related to feeding
2: Primary circular reactions, passive expectation
3: secondary circular reactions, first signs of object permanence
4: Fully developed object concept
5. Follow visible sequential displacements, not invisible displacements
6. Object permanence becomes fully realized
Discussion:
-Critiqued that he applied this universally (cross-culturally)
-Ages associated with each stage are approximate and lead into one another gradually
-Implications: Used interview method of data collection to let the children lead the direction and explore the concepts, didn’t use rigid standardized testing
- Kohlberg, How Moral Are You? (The development of children’s orientation towards a moral order: Sequence in the development of moral thought)
-Children internalize moral values from parents and culture, and then make them their own when relating these values to their own goals
-Hypothesis: Children develop morality through universal stages and they tend to function at the highest moral stage they have reached
-Method: 72 boys ages 10, 13, and 16 interviewed about 10 hypothetical moral dilemmas
6 Stages:
Premoral level:
1. Child fails to recognize interests of others and behaves morally out of fear of punishment for bad behavior
2. Recognizes others’ interests, behaves morally to get good behavior back
Conventional Role Conformity:
3. Behaves good to maintain trust and loyalty in relationships, “golden rule thinking”
4. Authority maintaining morality, maintain law and order, don’t question authority
Morality of Self-Accepted Moral Principles:
5. Child recognizes what might be moral might not be legal, still should maintain social harmony
6. Morality of individual principles of conscience, right and wrong are matters of individual philosophy according to universal principles
-Discussion:
-Moral reasoning doesn’t always reflect behavior
-Criticism that stages aren’t universal- collectivist v. individualistic cultures
-Might not apply equally across genders (Care orientation for women)
-Drinking alcohol during pregnancy can impact child’s moral development)
- Langer & Rodin, In Control and Glad of It (The effects of choice and enhanced personal responsibility for the aged: A field experiment in an institutional setting)
- Hypothesis: Increasing personal power and choice for a group of nursing home residents will improve their mental alertness, activity level, satisfaction with life, and other measure of behavior and attitude.
- Methods: 91 participants between the ages of 65 and 90 from Connecticut nursing home were randomly assigned to 2 conditions: a responsibility-induced group (could choose how to arrange their furniture, if they wanted a plant, and what day to see a movie) and a comparison group (given a plant, assigned a time to see a movie)
- Results: Choice group reported feeling happier and more active, less time engaging in passive activities, better overall health
- Discussion:
- Ethical dilemma in ending the interventions and health declining as a result
