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PSYC211 > WEEK 5 > Flashcards

WEEK 5 Flashcards

1
Q

Does personality change?

A

yes

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2
Q

Teens & 20s are…

A

more aggressive, disruptive, criminal

  • slows down in 30s
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3
Q

Who is the most aggressive age group?

A

Toddlers

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4
Q

A Cohort is…

A

People who are developing or going through similar situations at same time

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5
Q

Childhood personalities….

A

Predict adulthood personalities

e.g.
• Childhood agreeableness and self-control—adult success at work, relationships
• Childhood impulsiveness—adult loud talkers

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6
Q

Personality disorders are….

A
  • Personality disorders are stable

* Once a narcissist, always a narcissist

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7
Q

What is temperment?

A

• Precursor to personality

  • basically baby level personality
  • thought to be linked to genetics
  • as babies can’t be extraverted/introverted
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8
Q

What are things that shape your personality?

A

• Body features
- attractiveness, Born male/female, tall/short –> Shape how others react to you

• Environmental features
- Born in the country/city, rich/poor, small family/large family

• Early experience
- stress

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9
Q

What is the relationship between stress and development?

A

Curvilinear relationship
- a certain threshold of stress must be experienced in childhood for optimal development

  • too much or too little stress exposure in childhood and result in problems in adulthood
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10
Q

Do trigger warnings help?

A

No, they are counter productive

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11
Q

How do you cope with traumatic events and PTSD?

A 
Learn to cope with reminders
• Reframe
• Okay to be sad
• You’re not alone
• Exposure therapy (slow increase exposure to that thing until you're no longer discomforted by it)
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12
Q

Person-Environment transactions

A
  • People seek out environments to fit them
  • Avoid environments that don’t fit them
  • Shape environments that then reinforce their personality
  • Positive children reinforce positive feedback from parents
  • makes it difficult to disentangle genes from environment to explain this.
    (e. g. warm temperament due to genes or positive feedback from parents?)
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13
Q

How much can personality change across different ages?

A
  • Childhood r = .31
  • University years r = .54
  • 50 to 70 years old r = .74
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14
Q

Why does personality tend to have a lower chance of changing as we get older?

A
  • Roles, relationships, goals stable

* Reliant on current system, oppose change

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15
Q

What determines if a person is not the same person anymore? What is the true self?

A

The true self = the moral self

e.g. used to think robbing banks is bad but now doesn’t

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16
Q

What are some RESEARCH methods to test personality development?

A

Cross-Sectional Studies
• Compare people at different ages today
• Cohort effects! (comparing 2 different generations)

Longitudinal Studies
• Compare same people at different ages
• Long studies! (follow people for years)
• Mostly similar developmental profiles for Big 5

17
Q

Do people become more conservative as

they age?

A

No, political change often occurs not by changing

old minds but as aging generations die

18
Q

What percentage of people want to change something about their personality and why don’t they?

A

• 87-97% want to change something about themselves• (Old people want to change as much as anyone else)

Why don’t we change? Maybe conflicted desires?
• Conscientious—but also want to relax
• Outgoing—but really just want more friends

19
Q

How can you change your personality?

A

• Psilocybin (drug- magic mushroom)
- Increases openness to experience over a year later

• Living abroad

  • Learn norms are culturally relative
  • Have to be flexible
  • Increased creativity

• General Interventions

  • Investment in schools, nutrition & health, parenting classes, one-onone learning
  • Lasting student success

• Targeted Interventions

  • Easier to change specific behaviours than major traits like extraversion or neuroticism
    e. g. Fear of snakes vs. general fear

• Psychotherapy

  • Identify traits/behaviours you want to change
  • Develop plan to change them
  • Small changes in behaviour can produce lasting trait changes
20
Q

How do you correlate brain and behaviour/feelings/thoughts

A

Brain Scans

21
Q

How do you correlate body and behaviour/feelings/thoughts

A
  • Heart rate
  • Respiratory rate

• Skin conductance response

  • Increased sweat gland activity
  • Physiological/psychological arousal
22
Q

What is the purpose of biological measures in personality psychology?

A

Looking for Brain and Body individual differences

–> and hoping these indicate differences in
psychological processes
(involves making an inference) –> problem of inferences reduced by prior existing evidence/data

23
Q

What is the Somatic marker hypothesis?

A

When we notice a physiological response (e.g. increase heart rate) it can help us understand what emotion we’re feeling based on the situation we’re in.

  • e.g. watching horror movie–> notice HR increase –> oh I must be fearful right now
24
Q

What is the problem with drawing inferences from

Biological Measures?

A

This biological data can be ambiguous and make it difficult to make inferences as to what data actually means.

e.g. Brain activity -> is it fear or is the activity as a result of fear and trying to calm us down or is the brain activity causing the fear?

25
Q

What are two Aspects of the Brain That Can Be Examined with Technology?

A

Anatomy: functions of parts of the brain

Biochemistry: effects of neurotransmitters and hormones on brain processes

• Both are related to personality and behaviour

26
Q

How do we learn about how brain structure relates to personality?

A
  • Lesions (injury to brain)
  • Brain stimulation (simulate a lesion)
  • Brain scans
27
Q

Who is Phineas Gage?

A

• Railway worker impaled by a rod which went through his Front lobe

  • went from nice guy to mean guy with little self-control
  • indicates this area of his brain was probably responsible for this aspect of his personality
28
Q

What are the issues with information from Lesions?

A 
Legions informative but accidental
• Rarely precise area damaged
• Traumatic (changes in behavior could be do to this)
• Irreversible
• Animal models
29
Q

What is Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) / Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and the advantages / disadvantages?

A

Technology that allows us to create temporary artificial brain legions

Advantage
• Manipulates state of brain
temporarily (temporary lesion)
• No permanent damage

Disadvantage
• Cost ($100,000/unit)
• Training
• Ethics approval nightmare

30
Q

What are the advantages/disadvantages of Brain scans (fMRI, EEG)

A

Advantages
• Allow measurement of brain during “normal” activity
• See either location or timing of brain processes

Disadvantages
• More expensive to way more expensive
• EEG → MRI ($500/hr!)

• Invasive

  • MRI can be terrifying
  • Loud, cramped, completely novel
  • EEG can be uncomfortable
  • Cap application
  • Physical space
31
Q

How does fMRI work and advantages/disadvantages?

A

Records Blood oxygenation in relatively active areas

  • must compared regular brain activity looks like and what it looks like during task to find out which region is doing the cognitive processing (10% of brain myth)
  • Good spatial resolution (where things are happening)
  • Bad temporal resolution (not in real time - delayed as blood flow is slow)

• “Behaviour” within scanner (limited in what behaviour can be study - as you can’t move)

32
Q

How does ECG work and advantages/disadvantages?

A
  • EEG: Electroencephalogram
  • Electric activity of active neurons in brain
  • Good Temporal resolution
  • Bad spatial resolution
  • Behaviour slightly more portable
33
Q

What is network analysis?

A

A recent development that takes a holistic approach (looks at the brain as a whole compared to localized areas for specific functions)

  • Emphasizes interconnectedness of brain
  • Brain functions less localized, more distributed
  • e.g. Emotion “areas” are really networks (patterns across the whole brain code for specific emotions)
34
Q

Neurotransmitters

A
  • Neurons communicate with neurotransmitters
  • Neurotransmitters stimulate or inhibit neural activity
  • About 60 chemicals transmit information in the brain and body
  • 100 billion neurons
35
Q

Dopamine

A
  • Neurotransmitter
  • Involved in responding to reward and approaching attractive objects and people
  • Related to sociability, general activity level, and novelty seeking (extraversion)
  • Parkinson’s disease—low dopamine
  • Many addictive drugs increase synaptic dopamine or prevent its re-uptake - keeping it in the system to rebind to the receptors of the receiving neuron

PSYC211 (12 decks)

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