Task 2 Flashcards
Mental abilities
the capacity to solve problems that demand thinking-related skills
o defined by the quality of following mental processes: reasoning understanding, imaging and remembering
Fluid ability
ability to response flexible to a new situation
Crystallized abilities
ability to use well-learned skills or knowledge
o Not always supported empirically
Four branch model (Salovey&Mayer)
Four related abilities:
• Perceiving: detect and discriminate emotions in faces, pictures or voices as well as identify one’s won emotions (original)
• Using: Facilitate various cognitive activities such as thinking and problem solving (good mood facilitates creativity, bad mood structured working)
• Understanding: ability to comprehend emotion language and to appreciate complicated relationships among emotions (original)
• managing emotions: regulating emotions in ourselves and others
Thinking accurately about emotions
Correlates slightly to mental abilities and personality but has some unique aspects
Ability to regulate one’s own emotions (Goleman)
Includes self-control, self-confidence, trustworthiness, empathy, optimism, achievement orientation, conflict management, teamwork and awareness of one’s emotion
Correlates strongly with personality (basically describes the same)
Novel test
Test such as puzzles or riddles for which you cant really prepare (fluid ability)
Familiar test:
Test for which you can prepare (e.g. school tests) (crystallized ability)
EQ and life satisfaction
researcher found that emotional intelligence is only a weak predictor of life satisfaction
Academic Achievement and performance (IQ)
o Factors that influence school grades such as afford, behave good, making nice presentations don’t have much to do with academical achievement
o Academic tests do cover different kinds of Factors of mental ability, e.g. working with numbers and texts, this might be a reason for the correlation between both
o Correlations is higher in lower academic levels such es elementary school compared to university ,
This might be due two less variation in IQ between the children/adults in class university because lo level IQ dropped outJob performance (IQ)
Higher mental abilities lead to faster learning of rules, better decision making and advanced problem solving
Simple cognitive jobs .20 correlation, cognitive demanding jobs .50
Occupational achievement (IQ)
correlation .40 - .30 (moderate)
Might arise through the social status of the family if it is already good they have better education and get better jobs
Longevity and Health (IQ)
o Mental abilities are correlated with longevity even when they came from different social classes
o Related to behaviours that influence health (greater likelihood of identifying illnesses/seeing a doctor more often
Criminality
o Significant links between criminality and mental ability
o People with high IQ tend to choose, if they do, crimes with higher pay off and lower probability of arrest
o People wit lower IQ have higher fearlessness and they overestimate the pay off
Spearman and the g-factor
o Found correlations in school children’s grade between different subjects
o Performance of each task is influenced by a general mental ability (g stands for general intelligence)
o General Intelligence: is involved even in tasks that appear to be very different from each other
G-loadings (g-factor theory)
the loading of the various tasks on the g-factor
The principle of the indifference of the indicator: the content of the task (the indicator) was unimportant in determining whether the task would show a high g-loading or a low g-loading
It is about the kind of mental processing involved in the task
Low g-loading: rather easy tasks, spelling words, calculation of numbers or simple comparisons
High g-loading: the deuction of relations and correlates
Thurstone and several primary factors
o Tasks having similar content, or tasks requiring similar mental processes would be very highly correlated with each other
o Primary factors of mental ability:
Verbal fluency: ability to produce many words related to a given category
Verbal comprehension: ability to understand many words, alone or in the context of a written passage
Numerical Facility: ability to work quickly with numbers
Spatial Visualization: ability to imagine shapes from different perspectives
Memory: ability to remember strings of information or paired associations
Perceptual speed: ability to notice quickly the similarities and differences between objects or symbols
Reasoning: ability to infer patterns, similar to “eduction of relations and correlates”
o “g” alone is not enough to explain the relations between the different mental abilities
G plus group factors
o Participants who scored high in one of Thurstone primary factors were likely to score high in others too, which is evidence for a general intelligence (1930)
o Some of Thurstone’s factors had very high g-loading, but it was established that there are more smaller specific abilities
Brain size and IQ
o Has a correlation of 0,33 with mental ability
o Different brain parts are thought to play the bigger role
Reaction time and IQ
reaction time is correlated with mental ability, longer reaction time → lower mental ability
Inspection time
o inspection time task: Two lines are flashing and are then hided. One is longer than the other and the participant has to say which one
o good indicator of the brains basic speed
o higher inspection time → lower mental ability
o strongly implicated in the g factor because little cognitive challenging so processing speed has to be important for mental ability ´
Brain waves (IQ)
o higher mental abilities are related to: shorter latency (faster response), higher frequency, lower amplitude, and greater over all complexity of the waves
Brain glucose metabloism
o Higher mental ability correlates with less glucose consumption while performing a mental ability task
Genetic influence
o Children: The heritability for children is about .40 about the same as for shared environment
o Adults: the heritability is around .50(in twins .65 but due to shared womb environment it is suggested to be lower), shared environment probably under .20
Womb environment
o Some pat of “genetic influence” in twins might be due to shared womb environment rather than genetics
o Influence on mental ability is about .20 when fraternal twins were considered and only 0.05 when nontwin siblings were tested
Nutrition (IQ)
o Longer duration of breastfeeding was associated with higher levels of mental ability but not because of better nutrition just because smart mothers are more likely to breastfeed and they have smarter children by default
o Vitamine B12 might influence mental abilities in adults
Birth order (IQ)
o First born children have slightly higher IQs as adults than their siblings
Might be due to more and better social interactions for first born
Gardeners Theory of multiple intelligences
o Says the g-factor arises from the fact that most ability test are in a verbal format so people with higher abilities in verbal understanding have advantages
o No measurement and not really empirical proven
o 8 kinds of distinct intelligences:
Linguistic, logical mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal and naturalistic (classify elements in natural world (e.g. different species of animals or plants)
o Considers sensory acuteness (musical intelligence), personal tendencies and motor skills which others don’t do
o Musical, physical and intrapersonal intelligence might only have low g-loading
Sternbergs Triarchic Theory of Intelligence
o Three fundamental aspects of mental ability:
Analytic intelligence: corresponds closely to the kind of ability that is highly valued in school, critical and logical thinking
creative intelligence: represents the ability to create new ideas and to gain original insights into problems
practical intelligence: involves solving problems in everyday life
o Three factors are intercorrelated
So they depend on a g-factor
Flynn effect
• The change in mental abilities over the last decades
o The performance did not increase for all tests (no difference in crystalized abilities but therefore in fluid abilities)
• Using logic became more important and got taught at schools
• People started to think about hypothetical problems too, instead of only concrete real issues (We take the hypothetical seriously)
o Promoted moral discussions because it enables you to view something from another perspective
Explanation of Flynn effect
People have been doing more and more of the kind of novel tasks e.g. puzzle solving tasks so they got better at this tasks. In comparison tests about skills and knowledge related to school education did not increase because it were already familiar decades ago
o proportion of people working in cognitive demanding jobs increased dramatically as well as the jobs itself got more complex
o Family decreases IQ
o Life history speed: (most likely) number of sexual partners and offspring, slower is related to IQ gains might be caused by reduced mortality threat so more energy for cognitive investment
influence of school systems on Flynn effect
o Countries that have a new school system might not only currently experiencing improvement in fluent abilities (due to changes and society) but also crystallized abilities (due to increased literacy and numeracy)
Developmental changes in mental ability
o Generally: rising from childhood continuing into adolescents and then decreases during old age (accounts for arithmetic problem solving)
o Specific: verbal abilities middle aged adults score highest, for spatial ability young people scored highest. (low validity because of cross sectional study)
Stability of mental abilities across life span
o It does appear to be a high consistency across the life course in relative mental ability compared to others, at least after childhood
Francis Galton (1880)
His observations that people differ from each other in many ways marks beginning of field of study of Individual Differences.
Interested in individual differences in physical attributes and complex mental attributes and tested them by measuring sensory thresholds.
Postulated that individuals who can detect subtle changes have better mental ability than those who can only detect more obvious changes.
Alfred Binet (1905)
Along with Theodore Simon, is the founder of Binet-Simon Scale of intelligence, that was introduced to identify weaker school children.
His goal was to develop a procedure for distinguishing normal from intellectually challenged learners.
Series of 30 tasks related to everyday life arranged in increasing difficulty that aimed at assessing Direction (what has to be done and how), Adaptation (how to perform a task and monitor it), Criticism (ability to critique thoughts and actions).
Level at which task was completed gave indication of mental age.
William Stern
He introduced the concept of Intelligence Quotient (IQ).
He refined Binet’s technique to measure intelligence.
IQ has been useful to quantify children’s mental ability, but it did not work well in adults because cognitive development does not increase at same rate Wechsler further refined this.
IQ= metal age/chronological age times 100
J. Paul Guilford
Extended Thurstone’s theory and proposed another multifactor theory, the Structure-of-Intellect model, that claims the existence of 150 independent ability factors that can be organized in three dimensions (operations, contents and products).
Operations – Describes type of mental processing a person carious out (e.g. evaluation, memory and cognition).
Contents – Related to materials being processed (e.g. visual material).
Products – Describes how information is stored or processed (e.g. units).
Because of large number of elementary abilities represented, its practical applications were limited and it was not widely embraced.
