Study Guide 2 (4-6) Flashcards
Effects of testosterone: castration and male sex offenders
The main sex hormone in males is testosterone. Sexual arousal can be a cause and a result of increased testosterone.
Castration: men’s sex drive falls as testosterone levels decline sharply.
Male sex offenders: Drugs that reduce testosterone levels also reduce sexual urge.
Sexually Transmitted Infection (STI)
Adolescence are at a higher risk for an STI. Phantom partners are all the past partners, this helps to spread STI’s.
Sexual behavior in men vs. women
Women: puberty earlier, become re-aroused sooner after orgasm.
Transgender, gender identity, sex, sexual orientation
Transgender: Those who do not address themselves as their birth sex.
Women’s orientation tends to be more fluid, men’s tends to be more black and white.
Orientation: who they are attracted to.
Intersex
Possessing male and female biological sexual characteristics at birth. May be born with an unusual combination of male and female chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy.
Alcohol and sexual behavior
Among older teens and young adults, hook ups occur more often after alcohol use.
Homosexual - heterosexual difference
Homosexual: attracted to same sex
Heterosexual: attracted to opposite sex
Effects of sex hormones on fetal brain development
Seven weeks after conception, the Y chomosome (male) triggers the growth of reproductive organs and starts producing testosterone.
Females have less testosterone and more estrogen.
During the fourth and fifth prenatal months, sex hormones bathe the fetal brain and tilt its wiring toward female or male patterns.
Do we chose to confide in women or men?
Men have more social power. Women have more ability to handle emotional situations.
Habituation
Repeated exposure to any stimulus causes our response to lessen. The brains stops responding to meaningless information (I can’t feel my watch because I don’t need to).
Social roles
Difference gender roles have changed throughout history. Women have typically not been the thinkers of society until today where it is more balanced.
Stages of sexual arousal (Masters and Johnson
William Masters and Virginia Johnson conducted an experiment and found 4 stages of sexual arousal.
1. Excitement (genital area filled with blood and swell).
2. Plateau (Excitement peaks, blood pressure rises, sperm produced).
3. Orgasm (Muscle contractions, blood pressure rises, peak).
4. Resolution (gradually returns to unaroused state, genital blood vessels release accumulated blood, men enter refractory period, women have shorter refractory periods).
Sexism and income
Women are underrepresented in STEM fields and still experience sexism.
Gender schemas
The way we make sense of the difference in genders and male/female characteristics. Helps us think about our gender identity and who we are.
Perceptual set
You learn expectations through experiences which causes you to perceive the world how you expect it.
Mental tendencies and assumptions that affects, top-down (brain creates meaning), what we hear, taste, feel, and see.
Sound localization
The ability to determine where a sound is coming from based off what ear your hearing it from (Image with man facing away from sound).
Vestibular sense
Works hand in hand with kinesthesia to monitor your head’s (and thus your body’s) position and movement. Uses structures in your ears.
Perceptual adaptation, constancies, and retinal disparity
Perceptual adaptation: ability for your brain to adjust to changes in the eyes (weird glasses).
Constancies: Size constancies (the size of an object doesn’t change according to distance), and shape constancies (a door is a rectangle even though on it’s side it looks more like a trapezoid).
Retinal Disparity: Each eye receives a different image and your brain combines the two. The greater disparity (difference), the closer the object is.
Subliminal priming
A person’s response to a stimulus can be influenced by a previous stimulus, without the person being aware of the connection (kitten and werewolf example).
Olfaction
We sniff molecules out of the air and
a tiny cluster of receptor cells at the top of each nasal cavity. These 20 million olfactory receptors respond selectively.
Smell goes through the nasal conchae to the olfactory bulb, the olfactory epithelium receive air molecules, the olfactory bulb goes to the olfactory tract which sends messages to the brain.
Phantom Limb
Without normal stimuli from a missing limb, the brain can misinterpret other stimuli and cause it to feel like the limb is hurting or moving.
Nociceptors
Sensory receptors that detect harmful temperatures, pressures, and chemicals. Your brain processes these signals and interpret it into pain.
Bottom up and Top down processing (senses)
As your brain absorbs information, bottom-up processing enables sensory systems to detect lines, angles, and colors that form the image. Top-down processing interprets what senses detect.
Bottom-up: sensation
Top-down: perception
Audition
The sense of hearing. It helps us adapt and survive. Allows us to communicate invisibly.
Hering and afterimages
Ewald Hering proposed what is now called the opponent-process theory. We detect green because we don’t detect red, yellow because we don’t detect blue. Sometimes the brain remembers the after image.
Monocular cues
At farther distances that retinal disparity won’t help at, you rely on depth cues (a building behind another building, two parallel lines meeting on horizon.
Context effects
Our perceptions are different in different contexts.
Pain, distraction, endorphins
Gate Theory of Pain: drawing attention away from painful stimulation activates other brain pathways and decreases pain.
Types of blindness
Cortical blindness (born-blind): can sense without seeing, this is called blindsight.
Retinal blindness: damage to the retinal wall.
Types of deafness
Sensorineural hearing loss: damage to the cochlea’s hair receptors.
Auditory nerve damage: people may hear sound but have trouble discerning what someone is saying.
Conduction hearing loss: damage to mechanical system (eardrum and middle ear bone) that conducts sound waves to the cochlea.
Latent learning
Learning that is not apparent until there is a motivation to demonstrate it (rats running a maze again with food at the end).
Perception of size
Perceiving an objects distance gives us cues to its size.
Respondent behavior and Operant behavior
Respondent Behavior: In classical conditioning, we pair two things. When lightning flashes, we brace ourselves for the sound, this automatic response is called respondent behavior.
Operant behavior: We learn to associate an action (or behavior) with its consequence, therefor we learn to repeat actions that produce good results, and avoid bad (saying please and getting a cookie strengthens the please action).
Primary and secondary reinforcers
Primary reinforcers (satisfying things) are unlearned.
Conditioned (secondary) reinforcers are get their power through learned associations with primary reinforcers (a rat associating turning on a light - secondary - to getting food - primary).
Adaptive quizzing
A low stakes way of learning that reinforces the material. Students move though on their own pace and get feedback personalized to them.
Stages of learning
Sensory memory, short-term memory, long-term memory. Unconscious incompetence, Conscious incompetence, Conscious competence, Unconscious Competence.
Law of effect
Behaviors that result in a satisfying state of affairs are likely to be repeated.
Exposure to TV violence
Observational learning.
Imitation: children will imitate what they see on screen, which can cause violence.
Desensitization: people become desensitized to the violence and become less sympathetic and aware of victims of violence.
Observational learning and prosocial behavior
Mirror-neuron research shows we look, imitate, and learn. Prosocial behavior is behavior we get from observing something good.
Associative learning
Linking two events because they occur together (helps form habits).
Modeling
Learn through observation. Sister burns herself on stove, other sister learns not to touch stove. Guy throws darts, boy thinks he could be good at it.
BF Skinner - what controls human behavior
Pigeon tray thing. Learned ability through reinforcement.
Conditioning
Classical: Unconscious learning by pairing two things. Pavlov’s dog salivating to human footsteps
Operative: Pairing ones own action with a consequence. Skinners box experiment.
Reinforcement schedules
Continuous reinforcement: Fastest, but doesn’t stick (reward every time).
Partial (intermittent) reinforcement: slower, but sticks (don’t know when the reward will come - slot machines).
- Fixed ratio: reward after 10 responses (coffee shop), may slow down after the 10th response.
- Variable ratio: high rates of responding (gambling) unsure of when reward is.
- Fixed interval: choppy start pattern, reinforced response after a fixed time period.
- Variable interval: Reinforce first response after unpredictable time. when will I get next reward?
Components of Classical Conditioning - US, UR, CS, CR, and NS
- Unconditioned Stimulus (US): has potential but is not yet learned. (food)
- Unconditioned Response (UR): natural response or behavior. (salivate)
- Conditioned Stimulus (CS): new stimulus you can learn from. (whistle plus food)
- Conditioned Response (CR): learned correlation (hearing whistle and salivating)
- Neutral Stimulus (NS): can have been exposed to stimulus but has not learned from it. (whistle)
Types of reinforcement and punishment
- Reinforcement Schedules: how many times an action is reinforced. Variable ratio makes an extinction resistant behavior (slot machines). Fixed interval is the worst: they learn when they have to be good instead of always being good.
- Punishment: Punishment (adding something bad, a glare or insult), response cost (a behavior now has a cost, coming late for curfew means you don’t get to go out the next day).
