Psyc 305 - Midterm 2 - Concordia University

Front 1

What was Watson's perspective on emotions?

Back 1

Watson viewed emotions as sets of behavioral and physiological states which are conditioned to specific stimuli. The stimulus generates the emotion, that is, the stimulus generates a physio-behavioral response in the organism.

Does not consider the organisms appraisal of the state as being a factor of emotions. (Unlike the James-Lange theory)

Front 2

What is counter-conditioning?

Back 2

Counterconditioning is the method of using a stimulus which elicits a response that is different from a given conditioned stimulus to eventually have the organism give the response given to this particular stimulus instead of the response given to the conditioned stimulus.

Basically overriding the response to a conditioned stimulus with a new response with the assistance of a new stimulus.

Front 3

What is 'transfer of learning'?

Back 3

Transfer of learning is Thorndike's way of explaining the way in which learning transfers into areas of learning that were not necessarily directly stimulated. There is a 'carry-over' effect

Front 4

What is evolution

Back 4

Evolution is the process by which adaptive, or surviving, traits are past down from generation to generation and shapes the species over an extended period of time. And how this accounts for biodiversity

Front 5

What are reflex associations?

Back 5

Reflex associations is the association of basic reflexes into increasingly complex behaviors.

Front 6

How to environmental elements come to impact behavioural acquisition- or learning?

Back 6

By providing the organism with reinforcer/punisher-contingent elements

Front 7

What is pragmatism?

Back 7

It is the philosophical perspective that views the value of ideas in terms of their practicality and applicability rather than in terms of ideological, abstract, or semantic appropriateness.

Basically the view that ideas are good if they work and that theoretical mumbo-jumbo is useless or worthless.

Front 8

What is a conditioned response?

Back 8

A conditioned response is a behavioral response which has become associated with a conditioned stimulus.

Front 9

What is the 'reflex arc'?

Back 9

The reflex arc is the link between stimulating input and behavioural output.

The modern definition of the reflex arc is that it is a short neural pathway between sensory neurons and motor neurons at the level of the spine. This old definition of the reflex arc basically extends the idea that all behaviours are akin to this type of automated response.

Front 10

Why did the behaviorists theory of language contribute to the downfall of behaviorism as the paradigm of psychology?

Back 10

Because Chomsky, basically.

(Just kidding. But seriously, Chomsky and other important contributors argued that the complexity of language could not be explained by the sum of observable stimulus-response accumulations of a given individual. It was argued that environmental input was insufficient to explain language learning and that therefore some underlying, unobservable mechanisms must be contributing to the process of language acquisition.)

Front 11

What was the organisms position and role in the perspective of dynamic psychology?

Back 11

The organism occupies a mediating position and role between the stimulus and the response.

Front 12

What is the Law of primary reinforcement? What is Secondary reinforcement?

Back 12

Responses that result in drive reduction are more likely to be repeated.
Secondary reinforcement is reinforcement stimulated by the attenuation of secondary drives

Front 13

What are the two types of behaviour accord to Skinner?

Back 13

Operant and respondent

Front 14

What are some of Galton's contribution to statistics in the behavioral sciences?

Back 14

Proposed that various variables were normally distributed in the population, proposed the idea of 'regression towards the mean' (or as he called it, 'regression towards mediocrity'), and developed correlation as a method of investigation

Front 15

What importance did the functionalists give to consciousness?

Back 15

They viewed consciousness as being adaptive. It served a survival-enhancing purpose.

Front 16

How did James see habits as affecting our free will?

Back 16

James thought that we experienced a loss in free will as conscious decisions (with free will) were converted into unconsciously driven habits (without free will).

The individual became a sort of automaton as they grew older and more and more aspects of their lives became substantiated with habituated processes.

Front 17

According to Julian's social learning theory, what other than reinforcements and environmental factors determine behavior?

Back 17

Internal, cognitive, factors mediate the effects of reinforcements and environmental factors (contingencies)

Front 18

What is operationalization?

Back 18

Operationalization is the process by which things are operationally defined for the convenience of scientific development and measurement.
An operational definition defines an internal, unobservable, or immeasurable phenomenon in terms of its measurable outcomes or in terms of its consequences.

For example, intelligence may be operationally defined in terms of IQ which is measurable through the administration of standardized tests.
However, the test results (IQ score) are not necessarily representative of intelligence, but at least it provides a common-ground for discussion and debate.

Front 19

What are primary and secondary reinforcers and punishers?

Back 19

A primary reinforcer is an unconditioned stimulus which acts as a reinforcing element. A secondary reinforcer is a stimulus which has been conditioned to a primary reinforcer.

Front 20

What are 2 great contributions of William James to psych?

Back 20

Considered evolutionary theory in his theoretical developments.

Advocated eclectic methodology. Was open to more areas of research in psychology and was open to methods of investigation from outside the existing psychology paradigm

Front 21

What were the 3 basic emotions according to Watson?

Back 21

Love, fear, and anger

Front 22

What are four principles that determine behavior (learning-or-frequency of behavior)?

Back 22

Subjective expectations about reinforcement, -Adjust behavior to maximize reinforcement, -assess relative values across situations, -individuals draw unique conclusions

Front 23

Why did Galton study the proportion of 'great relatives' in relation to 'great men'?

Back 23

He sought to demonstrate that 'greatness' or 'genius' had an element of inheritance.

Front 24

What are intervening variables between the stimulus response according to EC Tolman?

Back 24

Tolman believed that responses were not purely attributable to the organisms exposure to a given stimulus, but that certain internal mental states contributed to the given response.

Stimulus-organism-response

Front 25

In Galton's perspective, from where was intelligence derived?

Back 25

Galton saw intelligence as being hereditary to a great degree.
More specifically, he proposed that intelligence was a product of sensory acuity. People with a more receptor and accurate perception of the world yielded more accurate representations of reality and therefore were more intelligent.

Front 26

What is 'fitness' in terms of evolution?

Back 26

Fitness is the organisms capacity to successfully endure the environment and reproduce

Front 27

What is the relevance of evolution in the theoretical framework of functionalism?

Back 27

Functionalist sought to understand mental functions in the way they served the organism's adaptation to the environment.
It sought to understand they 'why?' of mental activity

Front 28

What is extinction in behaviorism?

Back 28

Extinction is the gradual cessation of a conditioned response after the conditioned stimulus has been presented many consecutive times without the conditioned stimulus.

Animals cease to perform ungratified behaviors.

Front 29

EL Thorndike's puzzle box revealed to him 3 characteristics concerning learning.

Back 29

Learning is incremental. It occurs gradually in small steps
Learning is an automatic phenomenon
The way by which learning occurs is universal

Front 30

What is connectionism?

Back 30

Connectionism is a sort adaptation of associationism for behavior. It is concerned with the relationship between situation and response.

Front 31

Which types of behaviors are the most modelled?

Back 31

Those produced by similar models (people we can relate with) and behaviors which result in excitatory responses in the model

Front 32

What are habits according to functionalists such as William James?

Back 32

Habits are acquired responses to specific stimuli which the individual develops through experience.
Habits develop from conscious mental efforts and slowly become automated and unconscious.

Front 33

What is a cognitive map?

Back 33

A cognitive map is an internally existing map of an environment. The existence of these maps could explain how rats were able to rapidly and effectively navigate through certain mazes in ways that they had not been previously conditioned to do perform.

Front 34

What relevance does G. Stanley Hall's recapitulation theory have to psychotherapy?

Back 34

It is relevant because the theory suggests that if primitive impulses are not satisfied during the individual's development, the individual will maintain the particular impulse into later development.

Hall viewed development as paralleling the history of human evolution such that earlier periods in an individual's development were psychologically equivalent to that of a primitive human of a certain ancestral era.

Front 35

What is Thorndike's Law of Effect?

Back 35

Responses with enjoyable results are more likely to be reproduced while those with unenjoyable results are less likely to be repeated.

Front 36

Who was a positivist?

Back 36

Skinners and to a certain degree Hull

Front 37

How does classical conditioning work?

Back 37

An organism is presented with a neutral stimulus and an unconditioned stimulus. The organism responds to the unconditioned stimulus.
The specific neutral stimulus is constant present along with the unconditioned stimulus.
Eventually, the neutral stimulus can elicit a response. Now, the neutral stimulus is considered a conditioned stimulus and the response is considered a conditioned response.

Front 38

What are 3 characteristics of learning proposed by EL Thorndike?

Back 38

Learning is:
incremental
automatic
consistent across animals

Front 39

How is Bandura's social cognitive theory relevant to the behaviorist paradigm?

Back 39

Bandura's application of the social cognitive theory was greatly for the purpose of modifying maladaptive behaviors. He studied the impact of observational learning (vicarious reinforcement) on behavioral outcomes in individuals.

Front 40

What are three major themes which characterized the functionalist movement?

Back 40

A focus on mental processes rather than mental elements.
Study the adaptive relevance of behaviors and mentall processes
A study of the individual which views it as essentially within a context. The context and the individual are inseparable.

Front 41

Why did William James think of consciousness as being 'stream-like' in quality?

Back 41

James thought that consciousness could not be reduced to individual component elements as did structuralists, rather he thought of consciousness as being a continuous stream of thoughts. And that the sum of experienced mental states/thoughts contributed to the current states/thoughts such that things could never be the same.

Basically, consciousness is in constant metamorphosis where past experiences accumulate to produce a constantly developing flow which contributes to a unique experience of the present.

Front 42

What is purposive behaviorism?

Back 42

Purposive behaviorism is a behavioral perspective held by EC Tolman where the organism is studied under a behaviorist paradigm but that accounts for the existence of underlying purposes guiding the given behaviors.

The purpose is operationally defined in behavioral terms and concepts, and studied in a behaviorist research paradigm, but purpose is considered in the theoretical framework.

Front 43

What did Harvey Carr describe as being the function of mental activity?

Back 43

Harvey Carr saw mental activity as being a mediating force between the stimulus and the response

Front 44

What was John Dewey's take on the reflex arc?

Back 44

John Dewey view the bifactorial (stimulus-response) perspective of the reflex arc as inappropriate.
Dewey thought of the reflex arc as being a dynamic process where past experience of certain stimuli affect our future perceptions of it.
The arc cannot be reduced to two simple elements.

Front 45

What does the James-Lange theory of emotion postulate?

Back 45

It postulates that emotions are the product of the appraisal of our physiological states.
Basically, if we, without necessary reason, start to experience the physiological symptoms of happiness, we will, in response to this, experience happiness as a resulting mental phenomenon.

Front 46

What is continuous reinforcement?

Back 46

Continuous reinforcement is a reinforcement pattern where the organism is rewarded after each time the target behavior is expressed

Front 47

Hull's strength was also his weakness. What was his strength?

Back 47

His systematicity, precision, and quantification

Front 48

Clark Hull was known for his use of the hypothetico-deductive method. What are the components of this method?

Back 48

Self-correcting & formal model of science:
• Postulates: General statements derived
from the current knowledge base.

• Theorems: Inferred from postulates and
are used to generate testable predictions.

• Only incorporated into the knowledge base
once they have been experimentally verified.

Front 49

How did functionalism affect the shift in psychology from the study of the mind to the study of behavior?

Back 49

The functionalist movement introduced a few important contributions which later enabled behaviorism.
Validated and introduced the use of animals in the study of psych
Studied the organism as being importantly within a context (behaviorism would take this to an extreme and only view the organisms psychological charactestics in term of observable elements)
Emphasized the role of motivating forces on the organism

Front 50

What is a reinforcement contingency?

Back 50

A reinforcement contingency is an element of the environment.

Front 51

What is an unconditioned stimulus?

Back 51

An unconditioned stimulus, as opposed to a neutral stimulus, is a stimulus which stimulates a response in the absence of conditioning.
For example: sudden loud noises typically scare us. We did not need to learn to fear the loud noise.

Front 52

What is George Romanes' anecdotal method?
What sort of problematic perspectives arose from this method?

Back 52

The anecdotal method was a method of investigating animal behavior by means of anecdotal-type reports.

A problem with this method is that it is so prone to bias and anthropomorphization which led him to inappropriately perceive mental capacities in animals, such as reason in lobsters, that are probably non-existent.

Front 53

By Toleman's methodology, how would we experimentally define hunger, and how would we define it as an observable behaviour?

Back 53

Hunger is an experimental variable which is defined in terms of observable behavior.

The experimental variable, hunger, can be defined in terms of how long it has been since the organism has been fed.
Observable behaviors could be the amount of time the organism spends eating, the vigour with which the organism feeds, or efforts produced by the organism to arrive at the food-stimulus

Front 54

What does bandura postulate concerning perceived schedules of reinforcement?

Back 54

Bandura suggests that perceived schedules of reinforcement are more relevant than actual schedules of reinforcement

Front 55

Why is radical behaviourism defined as a descriptive, or empirical, approach to psychology rather than a theoretical one?

Back 55

Because the primary effort of researchers in the field was to observe and measure behavior, and draw conclusions from the findings that did not generate unmeasurable postulations

Front 56

How did Skinner define learning and behavior?

Back 56

Skinners defined learning and conditioning only in terms of observable behaviour. The rate of specific behaviors (associated with a specific outcome). NOT as a product of intervening internal processes

Front 57

What is partial reinforcement?

Back 57

Partial reinforcement is reinforcement which which follows any type of non-continuous reinforcement pattern.

Front 58

"A teleology is any philosophical account that holds that final causes exist in nature, meaning that — analogous to purpose found in human actions — nature inherently tends toward definite ends."

Is Darwin's theory of evolution teleological?

Back 58

No.

Front 59

What are some key characteristics of behaviorism?

Back 59

Concerned only (or mostly) with observable behavior
Very strict methods of research
Considered consciousness irrelevant, or inappropriate as a research topic
Would focus on the relationship (often statistical) between stimuli and responses
Attempted to be atheoretical

Front 60

What is more effective in behavioral modification, punishment or reinforcement?

Back 60

Reinforcement

High reincarceration rates are representative of this. Throwing people in jail isn't actually associated with much of a decrease in future criminal activity. Rehabilitation and social support programs may yield better results?

Front 61

What could we consider the three historical stages of behaviorism?

Back 61

Watson -> Behaviorism
Skinner -> Neobehaviorism
Bandura -> sociobehaviorism (pouring over into cognitive psychology)

Front 62

What is Galton's word association task? What did it reveal to him and how did it influence subsequent theorists?

Back 62

Word-association tasks require that the individual be presented with a list of words. For each word, the individual must respond as quickly as possible with the first things that pop into mind. These would be considered associations.

This was important because he caused Galton to postulate the existence of an unconscious aspect of the mind. This had great importance on later psychologists, notably CG Jung.

Front 63

What does Hall's recapitulation theory propose?

Back 63

Recapitulation theory proposes that the individual's developmental stages actually simulates the evolutionary development of humanity.

This is such that the newborn child is reminiscent of our ancestral origins and the child is shaped into a modern human as it grows into an adult.

Front 64

How does vicarious reinforcement work?

Back 64

By the projection of unexperienced consequences on ourselves. We, as a result of observation, 'feel' as though the reinforcers of punishment outcome experienced by the model happened to ourselves

Front 65

What was William James' perspective on consciousness' role in decision making?

Back 65

James thought of consciousness as being an active element in the contribution to decisions. What of consciousness' roles, however, was to select which stimuli to be attentive based on their relevance to the individual.

Consciousness serves an adaptive function where it enhances an individual's ability to effectively respond to his or her environment.

Front 66

What is latent learning?

Back 66

Toleman demonstrated that although learning had been solely behaviorally defined, that is, as a sequence of statistically representable response- frequencies and response-type successions, that, in fact, there were gaps in the learning process that could not be accounted for by statistical interpretations of 'observable' behaviors. The animal made 'jumps' in progress without the presence of reinforcers.

Front 67

Is the passage "Organisms can develop new parts and behaviour then pass them on to subsequent generations" representative of Darwin's theory evolution?

Back 67

Not quite. Organisms do not 'develop new parts and behaviors', per se, and then pass them down to future generations. Nearly each organism is completely unique and has their own set of traits and trait variants. Traits which are generally associated with organism that successfully reproduce are passed down.
In other words, 'evolution' is a fairly random process that depends a lot on chance, rather than

Front 68

What is social Darwinism?

Back 68

Social Darwinism is the application of natural selection to individuals, organizations, and society. Individuals which are better adapted to society perform better (are wealthier and have higher social statuses)

Front 69

What is learning according to Hull? How can we define the 'degree' of learning?

Back 69

Learning is the development of habits. How well something has been learned can be defined in terms of habit strength which is basically the sum of all the stimulus-response combinations concerning the particular behavior.

Front 70

What was James' perspective on instincts?

Back 70

He saw instincts as inherent and modifiable.

Front 71

What is a puzzle box?

What is an example of puzzle boxes being used in the study of learning?

Back 71

A puzzle box is basically a cage in which the animal needs to perform a certain sequence of actions in order to escape.

Researchers, such as EL Thorndike, have used puzzle boxes to examine the amount of time a particular animal needs to escape from the box after x amount of trials. The relationship between trials and time required to escape gave them quantifiable evidence concerning the nature of learning.

Front 72

What is tropism?

Back 72

Tropism is the theoretical perspective which states that all animal behavior is composed of automatic responses to stimuli

Front 73

How did Galton's research into the heritability of greatness and his perspective on the findings cause him to produce a potentially negative influence?

Back 73

Through eugenics. Eugenics is basically selective breeding and the sterilization of individuals deemed 'unfit'.
This practice poses great ethical issues

Front 74

The principle that "Animal behavior can not be interpreted as the outcome of a higher mental process if it can be explained by a lower mental process" is known as the law of _____.

Back 74

Parsimony

Front 75

What are the characteristics of functionalism?
a) Opposed Study of Mental ______.
b) Understanding the _____ of the ______.
c) Psychology is treated as a ______ ______.
d) Openness to _____ methodology.
e) Motivation and ______ _____.
f) Focus on _____ differences

Back 75

a) Opposed Study of Mental Elements
b) Understanding the functions of the mind
c) Psychology is treated as a practical science, rather than a purely theoretical/investigative one
d) Openness to eclectic methodology. This means that they are open to methods and approaches from various disciplines and sub-discipline. (such as physiology, evolution, development, etc.)
e) Motivation and proximate causation.
f) Focus on individual differences. Structuralists neglected individual differences.

Front 76

According to Hull, \/\/hat is drive reduction?
What are the two different types of drives?

Back 76

Drive reduction is the cause of reinforcement. Drives are the forces which we seek to satisfy. When an organism is presented with a reinforcer, the drive is said to be reduced. (The organism is satisfied)

There exists primary and secondary drives. Primary drives are forces derived from unconditioned elements, such as hunger. Secondary drives are forces which are derived from conditioned stimuli, such as money or job promotions.

Front 77

What is Skinner's Law of Acquisition?

Back 77

The law of acquisition postulates that behaviors which are rewarded are more likely to be reproduced while those which are punished are less likely to be reproduced

Front 78

Why did Darwin's theory of evolution validate the use of animals in psychological research?

Back 78

Because his theory withdrew the line that separated humans from animals. Now humans could be seen as a variant of other animals (primates)

Front 79

Name the reinforcers and punishers

Back 79

Positive/negative-reinforcers/punishers

Front 80

What is latent learning?

Back 80

Latent learning is learning which occurs without the overt exposure to reinforcers or punishers. Latent learning occurs without immediately observable reasons.

Front 81

What are the three facets of the self as per James' theory?

Back 81

The self is composed of the material self (that which we possess)
The social self (that image of us which persists in the social environment)
The spiritual self (our experience of reality, that utmost intimate uniqueness of our own subjective reality)