W2: History of Psych + Motivation Flashcards
What is included in the Scientific Thinking Principle?
Extraordinary Claim (the more extraordinary the claim is, the stronger the evidence needs to be), Testing Predictions, Occam’s Razor (simplest explanation), Replicability, Ruling out rival hypothesis (excluding other plausible explanations), Correlation is not necessarily causation
What are the major theoretical frameworks of psychology?
Structuralism: identify basic elements of experiences - E. B. Titchener
Functionalism: understand the adaptive purposes of thoughts, feelings, and behaviours - William James
Behaviourism: focus on observable behaviour - John B. Watson, B.F. Skinner
Cognitivism: examine the role of mental processes on behaviour - Jean Piaget, Ulric Neisser
Psychoanalysis: exploring role of unconscious psychological processes and early life experiences in behaviour - Sigmund Freud
What’s scientific scepticism
Being open-minded when evaluating claims, however, only accepting them when persuasive evidence it presented.
what’s the decline effect?
Describes that the size of certain psychological findings appears to be shrinking over time.
The nature-nurture debate
Asks whether our behaviours are attributable mostly to out genes (nature) or our environment (nurture)
The free will-determinism debate
Asks to what extent our behaviours are freely selected rather than caused by factors outside our control.
Psychology affects in daily life
Applied to diverse fields, such as education (HSC or VEC to better measure student performance by Zimbardo, 2004), advertising, road safety (John Voevodsky, adding a third break light at the back of cars)
Scientist-practitioner gap
conflicting models of practice in clinical psychology due to different work settings (e.g. academics in research and private practitioners)
How can evidence-based practice help bridge the scientist-practitioner gap?
By combining the findings of academics and rigorous single case study methods of private practitioners, it builds the evidence to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions
What is motivation?
Psychological drives that influence our direction
Drive Reduction theory
Clark Hull (1943) and Donald Hebb (1949)
The theory proposes that certain drives (e.g. hunger, thirst, sexual frustration) motivate us to act in ways that minimise aversive states; also propose that we are motivated to maintain a psychological homeostasis
Yerkes-Dodson law
Inverted U-shaped related where arousal level is on x-axis, and performance is on the y-axis.
We tend to do our best, and are most consistent, when experiencing intermediate levels of arousal.
Approach and avoidance drives
Some drives create tendencies to approach, e.g. food, sexual desire
Some drives create tendencies to avoid, e.g. frightening animals, rude people
Drives clashes
Approach - approach conflict: both alternatives are equally attractive
Avoidance - avoidance conflict: both alternatives are not desirable
Approach -avoidance conflict: attracted and repel to engage in the same goal
Incentive theories
People are often motivated by positive goals
Incentive theories differentiate intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, give example
Psychology class:
- Intrinsically motivated –> desire to master the material
- Extrinsically motivated –> desire to get good grades
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
satisfy low level needs (physiological an safety needs) before higher-level needs (belong, self esteem needs and self-actualisation)
Falsifiable in the case of staving artist achieving self actualisation first
Symptoms of bulimia nervosa
- Recurrent binge eating
- Attempting to minimise weight gain after
Symptoms of binge eating
- Recurrent binge eating
- No purging
Symptoms of anorexia nervosa
- Refusal to eat
- Significantly low body weight expected for age and height
Determinants of hunger
Hunger is associated with low levels of glucose (glucose provides energy)
Low levels of glucose incentivises hunger to create the drive to eat to restore an equilibrium state of glucose
Determinants of weight gain and obesity
- Lack of and mutation of the leptin gene
- Mutation of specific gene, melanocortin-4 receptor gene
- Internal external theory: obese people are more motivate to eat by external cues rather than internal cues
Human sexual response cycle
Excitement, Plateau, Orgasm, Resolution
Factors influencing sexual activity
Age, Social norms and culture
