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34 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Stress |
The tension, discomfort, or physical symptoms that arise when a situation (a stressor) acts as a stimulus to strain our ability to cope effectively traumatic event: stresser that is so severe it produces long term effects |
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Approaches to Stress |
Stressors as Stimuli: identify different types of stressful events, as well as who is most susceptible to different stressors Stress as a Transaction: Stress is subjective, depends on your interpretation of the stressor. primary appraisal: Is it harmful? secondary appraisal: Can you cope? problem-based coping: Coping strategy by which we problem solve and tackle life's challenges head on emotion-focused coping: Coping strategy that features a positive outlook on feelings or situations accompanied by behaviours that reduce painful emotions Stress as a Response: psychological and physical reactions to stressors. Reactions can include feelings, heart rate, release of corticosteroids (stress hormones) |
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Stress Assessments |
Social Readjustment Rating Scale: how many major life events have you experienced recently? High score associated with some physical disorders Hassles Scale: frequency and perceived severity of hassles better predictors of health, depression, anxiety, than major life events. Hassles: minor annoyances or nuisances that strain our ability to cope |
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General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) |
Alarm: excitation of autonomic nervous system, discharge of adrenalin (stress hormone), physical symptoms of anxiety as the body experiences the fight-or-flight response Resistance: adapt to stressor and find a way to cope Exhaustion: run out of resources, unable to cope any longer. Experience health problems, depression, anxiety, etc. |
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Types of Stress Responses |
Fight-or-flight: physical and psychological reaction that mobilizes people and animals to either defend themselves or escape a threatening situation Tend and befriend: reaction that mobilizes people to nurture others or seek social support under stress PTSD: condition that can follow traumatic experiences. Symptoms: flashbacks, efforts to avoid reminders of trauma, detachment, difficulty sleeping, startling easily |
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Psychoneuroimmunology |
Study of the relationships between the immune system and central nervous system Study: stressful events (particularly unemployment, longlasting interpersonal difficulties) predict the number of colds people develop. Positive emotions and social support can guard against stress-related illness Psychophysiological: illnesses such as asthma and ulcers in which emotions and stress contribute to, maintain, or aggravate the physical condition |
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Personality and Stress |
Type A Personality: personality type that describes people who are competitive, driven, hostile (most predictive of heart disease), and ambitious. Type B Personality: calmer and mellower personality type |
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Ways of Coping with Stress
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Social Support: provides us with emotional comfort; financial assistance; and information to make decisions, solve problems, and contend with stressful situations. Gaining Control over situations: Behavioural Control: (problem-focused coping), acting to reduce the impact of a stressful situation or prevent its recurrence Cognitive Control: (includes emotion-focused coping) cognitively restructure or think differently about negative emotions that arise in response to stress-provoking events. Decisional Control: ability to choose between alternative courses of action Informational Control: ability to acquire information about stressful event (proactive coping: anticipating problems and stressful situations, which helps you to effectively cope in the long run) Emotional Control: ability to suppress and express emotions. ex: writing in a diary Catharsis (disclosing painful feelings): helpful when it involves problem solving. Not so much when it's just about "letting it out" |
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Individual differences that can affect our stress response |
Hardiness: set of attitudes marked by a sense of control over events, commitment to life and work, and courage and motivation to confront stressful circumstances Optimism: optimists more productive, focused, persistent, better at handling frustration than pessimists. Lower mortality Spirituality: lower mortality, better immune system, lower blood pressure, better able to recover from illnesses Rumination (focusing on how bad you feel and endlessly analyzing causes and consequences of your problems): can increase depression |
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Behaviours to promote good health and reduce stress, and hurdles |
Stop smoking Stop drinking alcohol Have a healthy body weight (can also improve mental health) Exercise Personal Inertia: It is difficult to try new things Feeling powerless: It is difficult to break old habits Misestimating Risk: judge likelihood of event by how easily examples come to mind (availability heuristic) |
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CAM |
Complementary and Alternative Medicine Alternative medicine: health care practices and products used in place of conventional medicine Complementary medicine: health care practices and products used together with conventional medicine biofeedback: feedback by a device that provides almost an immediate output of a biological function (ex: heart rate, skin temperature) meditation: can be used to treat pain, medical conditions. Can improve blood flow to the brain, immune function acupuncture: can help relieve nausea, treat some pain conditions (but most or completely placebo) homeopathy: remedies that feature a small dose of an illness-inducing substance to activate the body's own natural defences. (representativeness heuristic: judge the similarity between two things by gauging the extent to which they resemble each other: like goes with like. "The treatment for this must resemble its cause") |
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Heuristics and Biases |
Representativeness heuristic: judging the probability of an event by its superficial similarity to a prototype. Like goes with like. (Does not always work, need to consider base rates as well) Availability heuristic: estimating the likelihood of an occurrence based on the ease with which it (or an example of it) comes to our minds Recognition heuristic: tendency to believe something you have heard many times Hindsight bias: tendency to overestimate how well we could have successfully forecasted known outcomes Overconfidence: tendency to overestimate our ability to make correct predictions Response Set: tendency of research participants to distort their responses to questionnaire items Experimenter expectancy effect: phenomenon in which researchers' hypotheses lead them to unintentionally bias the outcome of the study Demand characteristics: cues that participants pick up from a study that allow them to generate guesses regarding the researchers' hypotheses |
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General notes on social psychology |
social psychology: study of how people influence others' behaviour, beliefs, attitudes -150 is the approximate size of most human social groups -humans have a biologically based need for interpersonal connections. Being cut off from social contact hurts. -social comparison theory: theory that we seek to evaluate our abilities and beliefs by comparing them with those of others (upward and downwards social comparison can boost our self concepts) -mass hysteria: irrational behaviour spread by social contagion |
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Fundamental attribution error |
Attribution is the process of assigning causes to behaviour. Fundamental attribution error: tendency to overestimate the impact of dispositional (enduring characteristics, ex: personality, intelligence) influences on other people's behaviour -less likely to commit error when you have been in same situation yourself -Japanese/Chinese less likely to commit: more aware of outside influences |
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Solomon Asch |
Line studies. Participants tended to conform even when they knew the right answer. |
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Conformity |
tendency of people to alter their behaviour as a result of group pressure -Asians more likely to conform |
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Deindividuation |
tendency of people to engage in uncharacteristic behaviour when they are stripped of their usual identities |
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Groupthink |
emphasis on group unanimity at the expense of critical thinking |
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Group polarization |
tendency of group discussion to strengthen the dominant positions held by individual group members |
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Cult |
group of individuals who exhibit intense and unquestioning devotion to a single cause. Inoculation effect: first introduce some reasons why the perspective might be true and then debunking them |
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Milgram |
-morally developed people more willing to defy experimenter -authoritarian people more willing to comply (need to respect, not question, authority) -sadistic people no more likely to comply |
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Bystander Nonintervention: why? |
Pluralistic ignorance: Error of assuming that no one in a group perceives things as we do Diffusion of responsibility: Reduction in feelings of personal responsibility in the presence of others (Can also contribute to phenomena such as social loafing, where individuals are less productive in groups) |
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Prosocial Behaviour |
Altruism: helping others for unselfish reasons Enlightenment effect: learning about psychological research can change real-world behaviour for the better People who are more likely to intervene in emergencies: -less concerned about social approval -less traditional -extroverted -lifesaving skills -men |
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Situational and individual influences on aggression |
-interpersonal provocation -frustration -media influences -aggressive cues (ex: seeing a gun or knife) -arousal (can attribute it as anger) -alcohol (only when we are focused on the target of our aggression, like when someone threatens us) -drugs -temperature Prone to violence/aggression: -high irritability/mistrust -high impulsivity -lack of closeness to others -high in testosterone (but females: relational aggression) -Canadians/Americans and/or from a culture of honour (i.e. not Asian) |
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Attitudes |
Attitude: belief that includes an emotional component (as opposed to a belief which is a conclusion regarding factual evidence) -predicts behaviour best when the attitudes are highly accessible: come to mind easily. self-monitoring: the extent to which people's behaviour reflects their true feelings and attitudes. (low self-monitors' actions mirror their attitudes the closest) Attitudes are influenced by: -How many times have you heard it? (Recognition heuristic: tendency to believe something you have heard many times) -Personality (more or less likely to adopt a certain attitude) |
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Theories of how Attitudes can Change |
Cognitive Dissonance Theory where "cognitive dissonance" is an unpleasant mental experience of tension resulting from two conflicting thoughts or beliefs: we alter our attitudes because we experience this. Self-Perception Theory: We acquire our attitudes by observing our behaviours Impression Management Theory: We don't really change our attitudes in response to cognitive dissonance, but we report that we have to appear consistent with our attitudes |
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Persuasion |
Dual Process Model of Persuasion: Central route: evaluate the informational content of arguments. Attitudes acquired this way are strong and enduring Peripheral route: snap judgments based on superficial factors Foot-in-the-door: ask for something small, go bigger Door-in-the-face: start with big request, go smaller Lowball: sell something for cheap but have add-ons Implicit egotism effect: we're more positively disposed towards people, places, or things that resemble us (includes name-letter effect) |
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Prejudice vs Stereotype vs Discrimination |
Drawing negative conclusions about a person, group of people, or situation, prior to evaluating the evidence vs A belief, positive or negative about the characteristics of members of a group that is applied generally to most members of the group vs Negative behaviour towards members of outgroups |
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Ultimate attribution error |
Assumption that behaviours among individual members of a group are due to their internal dispositions |
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Adaptive conservatism |
Evolutionary principle that creates a predisposition towards distrusting anything unfamiliar or different |
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In-group Bias vs Out-group homogeneity |
Tendency to favour individuals within our group over those from outside our group vs Tendency to view all individuals outside our group as highly similar |
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Reasons why we are prejudiced |
Scapegoat hypothesis: Claim that prejudice arises from a need to oblame other groups for our misfortunes Just-world hypothesis:Claim that our attributions and behaviours are shaped by a deep-seated assumption that the world is fair and everything happens for a reason (Place blame on groups that are already disadvantaged) Conformity and need-to-belong People who tend to be more prejudiced: -authoritarian -people who like to categorize others -extrinsic religosity (view religion as a means to an end) |
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Implicit vs Explicit Prejudice |
Implicit Prejudice: Unfounded negative belief of which we are unaware regarding the characteristics of an out-group Explicit Prejudice: Unfounded negative belief of which we're aware regarding the characteristics of an outgroup |
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Jigsaw Classroom |
Educational approach designed to minimize prejudice by requiring all children to make independent contributions to a shared project |
