Week 1

Research Designs

Articulate the difference between correlational and experimental designs.

● Experimental (dependent variable): isolates and manipulates the independent

variable to observe its effect on the dependent variable, and controls the
environment in order that extraneous variables may be eliminated.
Experiments establish cause and effect.
● Correlation (independent variable): identifies variables and looks for a
relationship between them.

Experimental Research

Random assignment: The experimental chooses what the participants should do

and shouldn’t in a experiment.

❖ In addition to using random assignment, you should avoid introducing

confounds (telling the participant about the experiment and what outcome it
should give) into your experiments. Confounds are things that could
undermine your ability to draw causal Research Designs 4 inferences. For
example, if you wanted to test if a new happy pill will make people happier,
you could randomly assign participants to take the happy pill or not (the
independent variable) and compare these two groups on their self-reported
happiness (the dependent variable).
❖ However, if some participants know they are getting the happy pill, they might
develop expectations that influence their self-reported happiness. This is
sometimes known as a placebo effect.
❖ participant demand (Not being yourself) This occurs when participants try to
behave in a way they think the experimenter wants them to behave. Placebo
effects and participant demand often occur unintentionally.
❖ Even experimenter expectations can influence the outcome of a study. One
way to prevent these confounds from affecting the results of a study is to use
a doubleblind procedure. In a double-blind procedure, neither the participant
nor the experimenter knows which condition the participant is in.

Correlational Designs

❖ (Correlational design means participants are not under controle of

experimentals). When scientists passively observe and measure phenomena
it is called correlational research.Here, we do not intervene and change
behavior, as we do in experiments. In correlational research, we identify
 patterns of relationships, but we usually cannot infer what causes what.
Importantly, with correlational research, you can examine only two variables at
a time, no more and no less.

Qualitative Designs

❖ Qualitative designs, including participant observation, case studies, and

narrative analysis are examples of such methodologies.

Quasi-Experimental Designs

❖ Samiliare to the experimental design but quasi-experimental lacks random

assignment. The outcome is relay on what is already exsiect.

Longitudinal Studies

❖ Longitudinal studies track the same people over time. Some longitudinal
studies last a few weeks, some a few months, some a year or more.
Longitudinal studies provide valuable evidence for testing many theories in
psychology, but they can be quite costly to conduct, especially if they follow
many people for many years.

Surveys

❖ A survey is a way of gathering information, using old-fashioned questionnaires

or the Internet.
❖ Surveys can reach a larger number of participants at a much lower cost.
Although surveys are typically used for correlational research, this is not
always the case. An experiment can be carried out using surveys as well.

Understand how to interpret correlations.

● The direction of a correlation is either positive or negative. In a negative

correlation, the variables move in inverse, or opposite, directions. In other
words, as one variable increases, the other variable decreases. For example,
there is a negative correlation between self-esteem and depression.

Understand how surveys relate to correlational and experimental research.

● Experimental: two different types of people completing a survey and
comparing the results by those two people (independent and dependent
variables)
 ● Correlational: the smile intensity form women's college yearbook photos being
related to how soon they were to get married

Explain what a longitudinal study is.

● A longitudinal study is a study that records the same people over the course
of years, rather than days.

List a strength and weakness of different research designs.

● Strength: to understand the pros and cons of different research methods and
distinctions among them.
● Weakness: correlational research is often incorrectly represented as casual
evidence.

Why Science?

science is the use of systematic observation in order to acquire knowledge.

● The careful observation of the natural world with the aim of better
understanding it. Observations provide the basic data that allow scientists to
track, tally, or otherwise organize information about the natural world.
These empirical methods are wonderful ways to learn about the physical and
biological world.
● Approaches to inquiry that are tied to actual measurement and observation.

Observation leads to hypotheses we can test.

● A logical idea that can be tested.
● Theories: Groups of closely related phenomena or observations.

Science is democratic.
● Scientists are skeptical and have open discussions about their observations
and theories. These debates often occur as scientists publish competing
findings with the idea that the best data will win the argument.

Psychological science is useful for creating interventions that help people live better
lives. A growing body of research is concerned with determining which therapies are
the most and least effective for the treatment of psychological disorders.

Scientific psychologists follow a specific set of guidelines for research known as a

code of ethics.
● Professional guidelines that offer researchers a template for making decisions
that protect research participants from potential harm and that help steer
scientists away from conflicts of interest or other situations that might
compromise the integrity of their research.
There are extensive ethical guidelines for how human participants should be treated
in psychological research. Following are a few highlights: Informed consent,
Confidentiality, Privacy, Benefits, Deception (telling the participent the true nature of
experiment after it’s done).

Describe how scientific research has changed the world. (the 3 researchers)

● Edward Jenner-vaccinations
● Fritz Haber and Norman Borlaug-saved more than a billion human lives by
giving humans the ability to produce their own food (hybrid agricultural crops)

Describe the key characteristics of the scientific approach. (4)

● 1. Systematic observation is the core of science.

● 2. Observation leads to hypotheses we can test.
● 3. Science is democratic. (form their own opinions and debate conclusions)
● 4. Science is cumulative. (build onto earlier research)

Describe several ways that psychological science has improved the world.

● 1. Creating inventions that help people live better lives (effective forms of
treatment for different kinds of psychological disorders.)
● 2. A number of psychological interventions have been found by researchers to
produce greater productivity and satisfaction in the workplace.
● 3. Forensic science has made courtrooms more valid.

Describe a number of the ethical guidelines that psychologists follow.

● 1. Informed consent: when people are involved in research ,they should know
what will happen to them during the study.
● 2. Confidentiality: info about individual participants should not be made public
without consent.
● 3. Privacy: researchers should not make observations of people in private
places (bedrooms).
● 4. Benefits: Researchers should consider the benefits of their proposed
research and weigh these against potential risks to the participants.
● 5. Deception: Researchers are required to let participants know if they were
"deceived" during the study, after the fact.

Week 5

Conditioning and Learning

 Classical or Pavlovian conditioning: Classical conditioning theory states that
behaviors are learned by connecting a neutral stimulus with a positive one,
such as Pavlov's dogs hearing a bell (neutral) and expecting food (positive). The
learned behavior is called a conditioned response.

Although classical conditioning is widely studied today for at least two reasons:
● First, it is a straightforward test of associative learning that can be used to
study other, more complex behaviors.
● Second, because classical conditioning is always occurring in our lives, its
effects on behavior have importance for understanding normal and disordered
behavior in humans.

Unconditioned response (UR): The unlearned response to a stimulus. In other

words, it is any original response that occurs naturally and in the absence of
conditioning (e.g., salivation in response to the presentation of food).

Unconditioned stimulus (US): An unconditioned stimulus is a stimulus that leads to

an automatic response (production of an involuntary reaction without you being
trained to have that response). is a signal that has no importance to the organism
until it is paired with something that does have importance. For example, in Pavlov’s
experiment, the bell is the conditioned stimulus.

Although classical conditioning is a powerful explanation for how we learn many

different things, there is a second form of conditioning that also helps explain how we
learn.

Instrumental or operant conditioning: Operant conditioning occurs when a behavior

is associated with the occurrence of a significant event.
Operant: A behavior that is controlled by its consequences. The simplest example is
the rat’s leverpressing, which is controlled by the presentation of (food) the
reinforcer.

● Now, once the rat recognizes that it receives a piece of food every time it
presses the lever, the behavior of lever-pressing becomes reinforced (Any
consequence of a behavior that strengthens the behavior or increases the
likelihood that it will be performed again). That is, the food pellets serve as
reinforcers because they strengthen the rat’s desire to engage with the
environment in this particular manner.
● Operant conditioning research studies how the effects of a behavior influence
the probability that it will occur again. For example, the effects of the rat’s
lever-pressing behavior (i.e., receiving a food pellet) influences the probability
that it will keep pressing the lever.
 law of effect: when a behavior has a positive (satisfying) effect or consequence
(negetive effect).

Punishers: Effects that have negative consequences or effects that decreases

behaviors are referred to as punishers.

Classical Conditioning Has Many Effects on Behavior

● For example, in addition to salivation, CSs (such as the bell) that signal that
food is near also elicit the secretion of gastric acid, pancreatic enzymes, and
insulin (which gets blood glucose into cells). All of these responses prepare
the body for digestion.

Taste aversion conditioning: The phenomenon in which a taste is paired with

sickness, and this causes the organism to reject—and dislike—that taste in the
future. For example, a person who gets sick after drinking too much tequila may
acquire a profound dislike of the taste and odor of tequila.

Fear conditioning: Refers to the pairing of an initially neutral stimulus(tone) with an

aversive fear eliciting stimulus. If an experimenter sounds a tone just before applying
a mild shock to a rat’s feet, the tone will elicit fear or anxiety after one or two
pairings. Similar fear conditioning plays a role in creating many anxiety disorders in
humans, such as phobias and panic disorders, where people associate cues (such
as closed spaces, or a shopping mall) with panic or other emotional trauma.

Conditioned compensatory responses:

● For example, morphine itself suppresses pain; however, if someone is used to
taking morphine, a cue that signals the “drug is coming soon” can actually
make the person more sensitive to pain. Because the person knows a pain
suppressant will soon be administered, the body becomes more sensitive,
anticipating that “the drug will soon take care of it.” Remarkably, such
 conditioned compensatory responses in turn decrease the impact of the drug
on the body—because the body has become more sensitive to pain.
● This conditioned compensatory response has many implications. For
instance, a drug user Conditioning and Learning 7 will be most “tolerant” to
the drug in the presence of cues that have been associated with it (because
such cues elicit compensatory responses). As a result, overdose is usually not
due to an increase in dosage, but to taking the drug in a new place without the
familiar cues— which would have otherwise allowed the user to tolerate the
drug.

Blocking:

Prediction error: Principally, a prediction error can be defined as the mismatch

between a prior expectation and reality.

Preparedness: The notion of 'preparedness for learning' means that an organism can
learn only those associations that it is genetically prepared to acquire.

Extinction: classical conditioning can be undone, using the reverse method: the
response to the Conditional Stimulia can be eliminated if the CS is presented
repeatedly without the Unconditional Stimulia. For example, if Pavlov kept ringing the
bell but never gave the dog any food afterward, eventually the dog’s CR (drooling)
would no longer happen when it heard the CS (the bell), because the bell would no
longer be a predictor of food.

Spontaneous recovery: Spontaneous recovery refers to the sudden reappearance of

a previously extinct conditioned response after the unconditioned stimulus has been
removed for some time. For example, imagine you strongly associate the smell of
chalkboards with the agony of middle school detention. Now imagine that, after years
of encountering chalkboards, the smell of them no longer recalls the agony of
detention (an example of extinction). However, one day, after entering a new building
for the first time, you suddenly catch a whiff of a chalkboard and WHAM!, the agony
of detention returns. This is called spontaneous recovery.
Stimulus control: When an operant behavior is controlled by a stimulus that precedes
it. Although you know that green means go, only when you have the green arrow do
you turn. In this regard, the operant behavior is now said to be under stimulus
control. And, as is the case with the traffic light, in the real world, stimulus control is
probably the rule.

Discriminative stimulus: The stimulus controlling the operant response. Parents can
also use discriminative stimuli while at home to help reinforce good behaviors with
their children. For instance, if a child exhibits good table manners when asking for
their favorite dessert, such as ice cream, their actions can be rewarded by the
parents immediately providing them with the candy.

Quantitative law of effect: The law of effect stated that those behavioural responses
that were most closely followed by a satisfactory result were most likely to become
established patterns and to occur again in response to the same stimulus.

Reinforcer devaluation effect: The finding that an animal will stop performing an
instrumental response that once led to a reinforcer if the reinforcer is separately
made aversive or undesirable.
 Observational learning: By watching the behavior of the other kids, the child can
figure out the rules of the game and even some strategies for doing well at the game.

Vicarious reinforcement: Learning that occurs by observing the reinforcement or

punishment of another person.

Memory (Encoding, Storage, Retrieval)

Autobiographical memory: Memory for the events of one’s life.

Consolidation: The process occurring after encoding that is believed to stabilize

memory traces.
The Unconscious

Cartesian catastrophe: The idea that mental processes taking place outside
conscious awareness are impossible.

Conscious: Having knowledge of something external or internal to oneself; being

aware of and responding to one’s surroundings.

Distractor task: A task that is designed to make a person think about something
unrelated to an impending decision.

EEG (Electroencephalography): The recording of the brain’s electrical activity over a

period of time by placing electrodes on the scalp.

Eureka experience: also known as the Aha! moment or eureka moment) refers to the
common human experience of suddenly understanding a previously incomprehensible
problem or concept.
Mere-exposure effects: The result of developing a more positive attitude towards a stimulus
after repeated instances of mere exposure to it. Mere Exposure Effect is simply a
psychological phenomenon whereby people feel a preference for people or things
simply because they are familiar. For example, babies smile at the people who
smile at them more.

Unconscious: Not conscious; the part of the mind that affects behavior though it is
inaccessible to the conscious mind.

Understand the logic underlying the assumption that unconscious processes

are important?
The most famous advocate for the importance of unconscious processes was
Sigmund Freud. His theoretical work argued that human behaviour never starts with
a conscious process. Freud and Wilhelm Wundt had another logical argument for the
necessity of unconscious psychological processes - that we may become
consciously aware of many different things, but these experiences do not hover in
the air before they reach us. They are prepared somehow, somewhere (the
conscious mind).

Obtain a basic understanding of some important historical thoughts about

unconscious processes?
The term 'unconscious' wasn't introduced until the 18th century. Scientists
investigate the extent to which human behavior is voluntary or involuntary, and
scientists investigate the relative importance of unconscious versus conscious
psychological processes, or mental activity in general. Descarte's idea of dualism
has a strict distinction between body and mind, and some psychologists have
referred to this idea as the Cartesian catastrophe.

Learn about some of the important psychological experiments on the

unconscious?
Psychologist Watt showed that we are only consciously aware of the results of
mental processes. Participants were repeatedly presented with nouns (ex. oak) and
had to respond with an associated word as quickly as possible. Sometimes
participants were asked to name a superordinate word (ex. tree), or a part (ex.
acorn), or a subordinate (ex. beam). Participants thinking was divided into four
stages: the instructions (ex. superordinate), presentation of the noun (ex. oak), the
search for an appropriate association, and the verbalization of the reply (ex. tree).
Participants had to introspect all four stages to shed light on the role of
consciousness during each stage. The third stage (searching for an association) is
the stage during which the actual thinking takes place and this was considered the
most interesting stage. Unlike the other stages, this stage was introspectively blank:
Participants could not report anything. The thinking itself was unconscious, and
participants were only conscious of the answer that surfaced.
Appreciate the distinction between consciousness and attention?
Our behaviour is largely guided by goals and motives, and these goals determine
what we pay attention to— but not necessarily what we become consciously aware
of. We can be conscious of things that we hardly pay attention to (such as fleeting
daydreams), and we can be paying a lot of attention to something we are temporarily
unaware of (such as a problem we want to solve or a big decision we are facing).
Part of the confusion arises because attention and consciousness are correlated.
When one pays more attention to an incoming stimulus, the probability that one
becomes consciously aware of it increases. However, attention and consciousness
are distinct. And to understand why we can do so many things unconsciously,
attention is the key. We need attention, but for quite a number of things, we do not
need conscious awareness.

Consciousness

Awareness: A conscious experience or the capability of having conscious

experiences, which is distinct from self-awareness, the conscious understanding of
one’s own existence and individuality.

Conscious experience: The first-person perspective of a mental event, such as

feeling some sensory input, a memory, an idea, an emotion, a mood, or a continuous
temporal sequence of happenings.

Contemplative science: A research area concerned with understanding how

contemplative practices such as meditation can affect individuals, including changes
in their behavior, their emotional reactivity, their cognitive abilities, and their brains.
Contemplative science also seeks insights into conscious experience that can be
gained from first-person observations by individuals who have gained extraordinary
expertise in introspection.

First-person perspective: Observations made by individuals about their own

conscious experiences, also known as introspection or a subjective point of view.
Phenomenology refers to the description and investigation of such observations.

Third-person perspective: Observations made by individuals in a way that can be

independently confirmed by other individuals so as to lead to general, objective
understanding. With respect to consciousness, third-person perspectives make use
of behavioral and neural measures related to conscious experiences.

Understand specific approaches to comprehending consciousness?

The term consciousness can denote the ability of a person to generate a series of
conscious experiences one after another. Consciousness can also refer to the state
of an individual, as in a sharp or dull state of consciousness, a drug-induced state
such as euphoria, or a diminished state due to drowsiness, sleep, neurological
abnormality, or coma.

Be familiar with evidence about human vision, memory, body awareness, and
decision making relevant to the study of consciousness?
You may be visually aware of some things, but not others. For example,
motion-induced blindness is a phenomenon where bright discs vanish from ones'
vision in full attention. Also, you are not always aware of all images presented to you.
When a number is quickly flashed and rapidly replaced by a random pattern, you
may have no awareness of the number despite the fact that your brain has allowed
you to determine that the number was greater than 5.

Appreciate some contemporary theories about consciousness?

A contemporary answer about the crucial ingredient of visual awareness is that our
awareness of a visual feature depends on a certain type of reciprocal exchange of
information across multiple brain areas, particularly in the cerebral cortex. A related
view, the Information Integration Theory of Consciousness, is that shared information
itself constitutes consciousness. An organism would have minimal consciousness if
the structure of shared information is simple, whereas it would have rich conscious
experiences if the structure of shared information is complex.

States of Consciousness

Blood Alcohol Content (BAC): a measure of the percentage of alcohol found in a person’s
blood. This measure is typically the standard used to determine the extent to which a person
is intoxicated, as in the case of being too impaired to drive a vehicle.

Circadian Rhythm: The physiological sleep-wake cycle. It is influenced by exposure to

sunlight as well as daily schedule and activity. Biologically, it includes changes in body
temperature, blood pressure and blood sugar.

Cues: a stimulus that has a particular significance to the perceiver (e.g., a sight or a sound
that has special relevance to the person who saw or heard it)

Depressants: a class of drugs that slow down the body’s physiological and mental
processes.

Dissociation: the heightened focus on one stimulus or thought such that many other things
around you are ignored; a disconnect between one’s awareness of their environment and
the
one object the person is focusing on.
Euphoria: an intense feeling of pleasure, excitement or happiness.

Flexible Correction Model: the ability for people to correct or change their beliefs and
evaluations if they believe these judgments have been biased (e.g., if someone realizes they
only thought their day was great because it was sunny, they may revise their evaluation of
the day to account for this “biasing” influence of the weather).

Hallucinogens: substances that, when ingested, alter a person’s perceptions, often by

creating States of Consciousness 18 hallucinations that are not real or distorting their
perceptions of time.

Hypnosis: the state of consciousness whereby a person is highly responsive to the

suggestions of another; this state usually involves a dissociation with one’s environment and
an intense focus on a single stimulus, which is usually accompanied by a sense of
relaxation.

Hypnotherapy: The use of hypnotic techniques such as relaxation and suggestion to help
engineer desirable change such as lower pain or quitting smoking.

Implicit Associations Test (IAT): A computer reaction time test that measures a person’s
automatic associations with concepts. For instance, the IAT could be used to measure how
quickly a person makes positive or negative evaluations of members of various ethnic
groups.

Jet Lag: The state of being fatigued and/or having difficulty adjusting to a new time zone
after
traveling a long distance (across multiple time zones).

Melatonin: A hormone associated with increased drowsiness and sleep.

Mindfulness: a state of heightened focus on the thoughts passing through one’s head, as
well as a more controlled evaluation of those thoughts (e.g., do you reject or support the
thoughts you’re having?)

Priming: the activation of certain thoughts or feelings that make them easier to think of and
act upon.

Stimulants: a class of drugs that speed up the body’s physiological and mental processes.

Trance: a state of consciousness characterized by the experience of “out-of-body

possession,” or an acute dissociation between one’s self and the current, physical
environment surrounding them.

Define consciousness and distinguish between high and low conscious

states?
Higher states of consciousness are more like traveling in a canoe. In this scenario,
you have a paddle and can steer, but it requires more effort.

low awareness, you simply float on a small rubber raft and let the currents push you.
It's not very difficult to just drift along but you also don't have total control.

understanding consciousness
when you think about your daily life it is easy to get lulled into the belief that there is
one "setting" for your conscious thought. That is, you likely believe that you hold the
same opinions, values, and memories across the day and throughout the week.

But "you" are like a dimmer switch on a light that can be turned from full darkness
increasingly on up to full brightness.

This switch is consciousness.

At your brightest setting you are fully alert and aware; at dimmer settings you are day
dreaming; and sleep or being knocked unconscious represent dimmer settings still.

The degree to which you are in high, medium, or low states of conscious awareness
affect how susceptible you are to persuasion, how clear your judgment is, and how
much detail you can recall.

Understanding levels of awareness, then, is at the heart of understanding how we

learn, decide, remember and many other vital psychological processes.
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Physiology, Noradrenergic Synapse - StatPearls - NCBI Bookshelf (nih.gov)