No questions today
No questions today
There is a correlation between smoking and death rates. Smokers die, on average, 7 or so years before non-smokers. There are, of course, a number of third variables that could produce that effect -- for example, smokers may be more prone to live in areas that are unhealthy or otherwise have bad health habits. How then could you "prove" that smoking causes early death?
Imagine that you are engaged in a research project to assess the effects of several variables on student academic success. Being a good psychologist you know that you must have a precise and operational definition of "student success" How would you define this presumably important variable?
Some people complain that most psychological research is done with college students as being unrepresentative of people in general. In what ways are college students unrepresentative of the population? Representative?
There has been much recent controversy about the failures of American (and other country's) intelligence organizations to predict or at least to anticipate the attacks on 9/11. Short of an intercepted message of intent ("Tomorrow we attack the World Trade Center"), how successful can we be in such prediction exercises? What can we do to improve our predictive accuracy?
Aggression, like personality, has historically been a battleground between those who think that behavior (in this case aggressive behavior) is dictated more by the situation and those who see it as a personal disposition or trait. What do the readings suggest?
There is little doubt that various neural structures, hormones, and neurotransmitters play a role in aggressive behavior. How would you characterize that role?
Several psychiatrists and psychologists believe that highly violent people have damaged brains. If this turns out to be the case, what does this say about responsibility for violent behavior?
Why are young males especially prone to behave in an aggressive or violent way?
Prisons seem o be almost totally ineffective in correcting violent tendencies. Most men are just as violent when they leave prison as when they entered. Why?
Although most synaptic transmission is chemical, a few neurons are connected electrically in which case the transmitting axon is fused to the receiving dendrite. There must be advantages to both kinds of transmission for both to exist and some significant disadvantages to electrical since it is comparatively rare. Speculate about the relative advantages and disadvantages of both.
It would seem that a creature which evolved eyes on the back of its head (literally) would have a tremendous evolutionary advantage. Why don't humans have an eye or eyes in the back of their heads? This is not a question about neurons but rather about evolutionary "decisions" about neural engineering.
What are the assumptions underlying interpretation of research involving monozygotic and dizygotic twins?
One of the more elegant approaches to the study of genetic influences is studying monozygotic twins who have been raised in different homes with no contact since birth. It is widely assumed that in such cases any similarities cannot be due to environmental factors since they have different environments. Is this a viable assumption?
Humans have an uncountably large number of physical, behavioral, and psychological features. Which ones seem to you most likely to be influenced by heredity?
Lots of questions today
For the discussion of evolutionary approaches (which will be continued on Thursday), please focus on whether you think this approach is valuable. What kinds of evidence could you use to support or refute the basic model? Also be sure that you understand the model and its various predictions. It is appropriate to ask questions about concepts you do not fully understand.
Most general theories try to explain as much as they can. Evolutionary psychology is no exception. What do you think are the limits of this approach in explaining human behavior? In other words, what sorts of psychological phenomena do you think evolutionary psychology cannot explain?
The articles suggest an evolutionary basis for mate selection and gender differences both in strategies and in responses to infidelity. How compelling do you find these arguments? The theory does not attempt to explain all aspects of mate selection. What does it not explain?
Published reports tend to suggest that high quality day care for infants and children have few negative and at least some positive effects on children. Yet many people still insist that day care is harmful to children. Perhaps we have been looking at the wrong variables. If you wanted to show that day care was harmful what outcomes would you want to examine?
Research suggests that children in many Asian countries tend to out-perform American children in school achievement. What does the reading suggest is the main reason for that. Should we (could we) use similar ideas in this country to improve education.
Obviously there are many differences between males and females on average and probably some differences that are more a matter of perception than of reality. Aside from obvious biological differences what are the major sex differences that psychologists have documented? Which of these seem to you most important?
What is Eagly's role theory explanation for sex differences? According to this model how might we eliminate sex differences?
What arguments do Eagly and Wood use against evolutionary theory accounts of sex differences?
Maccoby offers a developmental account of sex differences. What is the primary "cause" of sex differences according to this model? Are sex differences inevitable according to her logic? If not, what might we do to reduce or eliminate them?
No questions today
What are some examples of classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and social learning from your own experiences?
Which of the three forms of learning seems to you to be the most important in everyday life?
We will briefly discuss the questions from last class on day-care.
Otherwise I will mostly lecture on memory today so no specific questions
If people's memories of sexual abuse are deeply repressed, how can therapists know that they have been abused?
Since the time of Freud, repression has been thought to be a special type of forgetting. Repression involves memories that are not available through normal conscious mechanisms of retrieval. Many cognitive psychologists and the great majority of memory experts believe that there is no evidence for the existence of repression. How might you explain repression like effects using normal memory models?
Most people who accept that people repress early memories of sexual abuse believe that sexual abuse is akin to a traumatic experience that must be repressed to maintain sanity. What kinds of evidence might you use to support or refute this claim?
If people's reports of recovered memories of sexual abuse are not, in fact, accurate memories as many claim, how could they be produced. In other words why would people report such memories?
One essential argument in modern personality theory is whether our person characteristics are consistent from one situation to another. Consider a person (you, a friend, a family member). Which of that person's features seem to be consistent from situation to situation? Which inconsistent?
Does the Funder article convincingly make the point that behaviors are consistent from situation to situation?
Funder and Colvin try to predict behavioral features from ratings by peers and friends. Some behaviors are well predicted, others less so? What differences, if any, do you see between those behaviors that are and are not well predicted?
Cervone and Shoda argue that personal consistency may be quite idiosyncratic in the sense that a trait that is consistent for one person might not be for another. Why?
Sylvia is fairly representative of schizophrenics. Is there any place on earth for her? Would it be better to keep her hospitalized? If not how might we change our treatment so as to provide a more humane life for the thousands of Sylvias now roaming our streets?
Data tend to show that psychotherapy of one kind or another tends to help about 60-70% of people to function better. People with no therapy (control groups) tend to get better about 40-50% of the time. Furthermore, there seem to be no major differences among the various types of therapies in their effectiveness. How might you account for these data?
Pennebaker and Wegner discuss the psychological consequences of discussing and suppressing unwelcome thoughts. What are the implications for psychotherapy?
Stereotypes are generalizations we have about groups of people. Because our cognitive systems are set up to form generalizations about categories of things we encounter, it is not likely that we can avoid having stereotypes, and as Macrae and his colleagues argue stereotypes are actually quite useful (as are all generalizations). That does not mean, of course, that the stereotypes we have need be negative or accurate or the ones that most people in our society seem to have. Furthermore just as our generalizations about all things can sometimes cause us to make costly errors, so can our stereotypes lead to social mischief. What seems to you to be the most problematic aspects of our stereotypes? And what might we do to correct these problems?