• Explain what are some things that people might do
• Catastrophizing - cognitive processes like rumination (dwell on it and think about it  a lot)
• Pessimism - perceptions of helplessness and magnification of pain symptoms
  • The bigger mess they make of it, the more pain

• fMRI - combo of petscan and MRI -- info about activity
  • We find that people who catastrophize have higher levels of activity in the amygdala (lower level brain center involved with emotion -- particularly fear and aggressive emotions)

• Feelings of helplessness correlate with levels of inflammation -- in people with rheumatoid arthritis 

- Distraction: reduce pain perception by 30%-40% - Reappraisal - Making positive statements -- this pain really isn't that bad -

Religious coping

- You stay up late Friday night, Saturday night and your biological clock changes

- We try to go to bed on at a sensible hour on Sunday night but we cant because our SCN is saying that it's time to be awake 

 biological cycles that occur on a daily circle 

• Your body doesn’t stay the same temperature all day
• There's a pattern
• During a normal day when your body temp is at its peak, that’s when you're most productive
• Causes brain to tell whether you're sleepy or awake
• When you pull an all-nighter you get this dip in body temperature but it rises again so you feel more awake then you did a few hours ago; you get a second wind
• Its counterintuitive because there's a large sleep debt 

• we become irritable 
• memory issues, concentration difficulties, lower motivation 

• sleep deprived college students had eyes taped open and were instrucyted to push a button every time they saw a flash
• sometimes they didn't push the button when it flashed
• they experienced micro sleeps -- brief periods of sleep that intrude into wakefulness 

Long Haul Truckers

• They have truckers on brain monitoring equipment (EEG)
• Also collecting data from trucks
• AVERAGE SLEEP was 4.78 hours per day
• 7% of the time, the truck was moving and truckers were asleep
• Emphasizes that we're going to sleep whether we want to or not  and our brain will choose to sleep 

Rapid Eye Movement 

• The higher the number, the deeper the sleep
• Theres always brain activity; its not like hibernation
• Stage 1: probably could wake you up just by saying your name
• Stage 4: We could do a lot of things and don't wake you up
• When we sleep we're cut off from the outside world (sensory things)

Is the REM sleep all that important since Stage 4 is the most important?

• Yes; the brain keeps special track of REM sleep and it's possible to take a nap and go right to REM sleep and not go through all the stages
• Even if you just deprive people of REM, they will still act like they did not get a good night's sleep 

Peak alertness comes a different time and it is age related 

• Owls - experience a peak body temperature at 8 PM
• Larks - peak body temperature at 8 AM
  • American culture values Larks
  • "early bird gets the worm"
• these are physiological differences 

• worked with REM sleep 
• Told students told to solve problems while they dream
• O, T, T, F, F ….
• H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O -- solution to this problem is one word: WATER
• Out of 1,148 attempts, there were 7 solution

• has done a lot of stidies about, can people know they're dreaming while they're dreaming?
• people gave him signals
• People can have some awareness of dreaming and have some control 

What do dreams mean?

(2 views)

• Activation synthesis view
  • dreams have no meaning; it's all randomness; you get random signals from lower brain centers
  • Dreams are the brain's attempt to make sense of activity

• Freud's view 
  • believes dreams are symbolic
  • usually has to do with sex

what literally happens

Freud

Dreaming:

Domhoff's view 

• Also interested in physiology of dreaming 
• What's going on that makes dreaming dreamlike?
• Speculates that content may be meaningful
• Outlined ways to study content in a scientific way
• Found things like: children are more likely than adults to dream about animals

Alcohol:

Ridderinkholf et al (2002)

• How well do we notice our mistakes when we're under the influence of alcohol?
• Social Drinkers  -- ruling out people that have alcohol problems
• Simple video game - practiced it until they were perfect at it 
• Randomly assigned to 3 conditions
  • Placebo --sparkling grape juice
  • Alcohol with BAC .04 moderate
  • BAC .10 -- high alcohol consumption group
• Performed computer game again under these conditions
• Participants in both alcohol groups failed to notice mistakes
• They were looking for activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (area of the brain that is active when we know we've made a mistake) -- "opps response"
• Even when you're perfectly legal its hared to know if you made a mistake

Focus on present

reduced ability to see negative consequences

• no alcohol - ice water
• Placebo - drank tonic water but there was vodka on the glass rim so that people would get a taste of alcohol; 60% thought they consumed at least one drink
• Low alcohol - BAC brought to .025% -- 94% thought they had at least 1 drink
• Moderate alcohol - BAC .065% -- 100% thought they consumed at least 1 drink
• Asked questions like should the man try to have sex with the woman even if it means using force     

Results: 

• In non receptive condition -- alcohol made no difference 
• Moderate and low alcohol conditions now significant difference compared to no alcohol 
• To be fair, we're asking people if they agree with rape 

people are just playing the hypnosis game 

people will appear to see things that aren't there 

sectioning off a part of our consciousness

ex) pain reduction -- suggests that people can section off that part of the brain so that you don't feel pain  

• People randomly assigned to be hypnotized or pretend that they're hypnotized
• They were asked to listen to a pair of tones and tell which one is louder
• They were told that in between the tones that they were going to dip deeper into hypnosis and that they may not even hear the second tone
  • If they're following the tones, they should  say that the first tone should be louder
  • Those pretending to be hypnotized followed the instructions and reported first tone as louder
  • The really hypnotized reported accurately
  • People who are hypnotized and aren't respond differently 

1. pain reduction 
2. memory effects
3. age regression 
4. perception -- delayed playback 

degree to which a person can be hypnotized

fantasy prone personality

type of learning in which an organism comes to associate stimuli.  A neutral stimulus that signals an unconditioned stimulus beings to produce a resopnse that anticipates and prepares for the unconditioned stimulus.  Also called Pavlovian or respondent conditioning 

• Bring Food to Dogs and they salivate -- nobody has to teach the dogs to do this
  • Then they started ringing a bell before the dog had food -- they start salivating to the response of the bell 

automatically produced response

ex) Dog salivating 

learned stimulus 

ex) bell

Fred likes reading, but when he calls people names, the teacher punishes him with a book report

Now Fred hates reading 

conditioned response to books -- negative feeling towards book 

Never punish your children with something you want them to like 

active learning 

a type of learning in which behavior is strengthened if followed by a reinforcer or diminished if followed by a punisher 

providing a desired stimulus following the target behavior

rate of target behavior increases 

increasing behaviors by stopping or reducing negative stimuli, such as a shock.  A negative reinforcer is any stimulus that when removed after a response, strengthens the response 

ex) aspirin relieves headache therefore these provide negative reinforcement and increase the likelihood that you will repeat these behaviors

positive reinforcement 

teaching a behavior by positively reinforcing successive approximations of that behavior

ex) dog training and child rearing 

classical conditioning

• • Boy with autism needed eye surgery and needed glasses for his eyes to heal properly
  • First they used classical conditioning to causes a clicker to be positively reinforcing
  • When boy wears glasses, they use clicker and boy is happy 

• Reinforcement must be contingent upon performance

removing a desired stimulus following the target behavior; makes the target behavior less frequent 

ex) Time out 

• Little boy who is throwing up his food and can't keep anything down and has had surgery to keep it down
• Things tape to his face send electric shock when he starts gagging (positive punishment)

 reinforcing a response only part of the time; results in slower acquisition of a response but much greater resistance to extinction than does continuous reinforcement

ex) NYC traffic lights 

Tolman and Hozrik (1930)

one has to be reinforced to learn 

Rats in a maze ran 10 times without any reinforcement 

the 11th time, there was reinforcement in the end

12th time, rats ran the maze quickly 

observational learning theory

said we can learn from watching others 

observationaly learning theory 

experiment to see if we can change people's short term tolerance for aggression in the lab

• Randomly assigned kids to 2 groups 
• one -- trace and field events // two -- assigned to moderate violence conditions
• kids who watched violent scene took twice as longer to get the experimenters -- represents tolerance for aggression 

observational learning 

ability to imagine the effects of a reinforcer -- makes the target behavior more likely to happen 

ex) man buying wife flowers -- associates flowers with hugs, kisses 

observational learning 

ability to imagine effects of a punisher - makes target behavior less likely

memory in the purest form 

• used nonsense syllables, consonant vowel consonant (HEB)
• Ebbinghouse found that it was hard for him to recall the words, but when he went to go back and study it, he found it easier to pick up again 

difference between the time requres to learn and relearn material 

shows that Ebbinghaus had a memory for it even though he couldn't access it; there was something still there in his brain 

course of forgetting is initially rapid and levels off with time 

model of memory

Atkinson-Shiffrin

Stimulus ----> Sensory memory --- {attention}---> Short term memory (STM) --{encoding}--> Longer term memory (LTM)

vast; most is forgotten 

FLEETING 

15 seconds unless we rehearse it 

7 plus or minus 2

memory

meaningful cohesive units of information 

ex) acronyms

maintenance vs elaborative

• maintenance -- reading over book, reading over notes; repetition 
• elaborative -- more effortful; relating it to otehr things 

tried doing a study where cramming works best 

they had students study a concept learning, learning to identify work by little known artists 

spacing beat cramming!!

a semantic network 

• semantic network -- connections of related ideas 
  • capacity is unlimited 
  • the more ideas you know, the more ideas you have to connect to 
• ex) kids being red to before they go to school have more developed semantic network they can connect new information to 

priming :: observation learning theory approach

• people randomly assigned to play video games 
• one -- violent condition \\ two -- non violent (tetris)
• asked to fill in word M U _ _ E R
• one -- MURDER \\ two -- MUDDER
• those in nonviolent condition were less likely to create aggressive words
• video games activating aggressive side of our semantic network 

you're goign to recall information best when we are in the same mental state (mood) at encoding and retrieval 

ex) if you can't stand the class, you'll do better coming in and taking the test angry 

we tend to store and recall information that is consistent with our current mood 

ex) those suffering from depression will store many memories that are negative -- why people who are depressed are continually depressed 

reliability of memories

• showed popel movie of a car accident and asked questions 
• HOw fast were the cars going when they ______ each other?
  • smashed, collided, bumped, hit, contacted
• one word made a significant estimate about speed 
• shows that it's easy to manipulate memory 

2 weeks later followup:

• Broken glass? -- one word significance still had an effect on the person's memory 2 weeks later 

interested in people's memory for a crime scene 

• had people watch a video of a crime and determine the perpetrator who was not present 
• dependent variable -- confidence in selection 
• Disconfirming feedback had no effect -- didnt matter if it came right away or late, they didn't change their confidence 
• confirming feedback increased people confidence
• timing of feedback had no effect 

nondeclarative memory

unconscious capacity

skills taht you could not explicitly explain 

• repeats a lot of the same story but doesn't matter 
• area destroyed -- hypocampus 
• he could remember past really well -- neighborhood
• can't form explicit long term memory 

when old information interferes with recall of new inforamtion 

• 1. Ex) guy walking down the quad and can't remember new girl friend's name bc old girlfriends name keeps coming to mind