James Lange

Emotion Theory

bodily responses and sensations play an integral and sometimes causative role in subjective experience of emotion.  Emotion is indistinguishable from bodily reaction.

Emotion Theory

Somatic Marker Theory à

optimal level of involvement of emotion in decision making, and too much or too little emotion hurts the quality of judgment.

Emotion Theory

predicted that physiological reactions and emotional experience occur simultaneously, and neither is causative of the other.  When presented with a stimulus for emotion, resulting sensory information travels directly to the thalamus (NOW DISPROVEN).

Schachter & Singer’s

Emotion Theory

Two-Factor Theory à

emotion has two components – undifferentiated physiological arousal of the ANS, and the cognitive interpretation of that arousal.  Cognitive interpretation is what differentiates one emotion from another.  Adrenaline Study and High Bridge Study (Aron and Dutton).

Conducted a number of experiments designed to show that true, empathy-based altruism exists, and is distinct from more selfish forms of altruism.  Number recall task where a confederate appeared to be getting electric shocks every time he made a mistake (easy and difficult escape).  Another experiment tests the common assumption that an experience of feeling empathic towards a member of a stigmatized group would make one’s attitude toward the group more positive.

Nancy Eisenberg

Found that children watching video who had an increased heart rate and facial expressions of discomfort were less likely to give up there recess when compared to those children who had decreased heart rates and facial expressions of sympathy or concern.

 looked at people’s willingness to help stranger in urban and rural areas.  Looked into diffusion of responsibility.  People were more likely to help in rural than urban settings, despite where they were raised.

Darwin 

Tompkins

Tompkins, Izard, and Ekman

encoding hypoth: suggests that human beings have a universal set of basic emotions which are associated with the same set of facial expressions, across cultures.

decoding hypotheses:human beings are able to interpret the same facial expressions in the same way across cultures.

Ekman

Looked at what facial muscles differentiate one expression from another. 

Duchenne Smile= Genuine smile. 

Display Rules – culture specific, deep values regarding the appropriate and inappropriate contexts in which to display particular emotions.

Ritualized Displays – some cultures teach a stylized way of expressing some emotions. 

Ekman and Friesen

Experiments on cross-cultural consistency of facial expressions supported Ekman's decoding and encoding hypotheses and Darwin's theory of universal emotional states. 

Experiments on Display Rules: American college students expressed more emotion in the presence of an authority figure than Japanese students, despite sharing similar emotional arousal.

Catherine Lutz

Psychological anthropologist. 

Began to consider emotion as a social phenomenon, rather than as something entirely innate.  Studies on Ifaulk of Micronesia.  Argued, what we think of as “emotion”, the finished product, is not the simple sum of these “hardwired” elements but rather a socio-culturally mediated adaptation to innate components.

Kitayama 

Socio-cultural environment mediates the experience of emotion, and the development of emotional processes.

   The actual specific emotions we experience are dependent on their cultural context, on the developmental history of multiple cultural contexts that produce our ultimate subjective experience. 

Emotion scripts: cultural messages shape the subjective emotional experiences of individuals.

Markus and Kitayama

Conceptual framework that looks at core cultural ideas that come to structure individuals’ experience of emotion – key ideas, core ideas, local world. 

Individual emotion is shaped by culture, and culture persists and evolves because of its maintenance and transmission through emotion.

Feedback loop, flow chart.

Berkowitz

Aggression

Suggested that an aggressive response is most likely to be provoked in a circumstance in which an aversive experience is paired with an attribution of responsibility; when there is someone to blame for one’s frustration.

Miller and Dollard

Aggression

Classical aggression theory was centered on their frustration aggression hypothesis in the 1930s.  Aggression is inherently a response to the perception that one is being blocked while in pursuit of a goal.

The closer one is to achievement the greater the liklihood of aggression.

Husemann and Eron

Aggression

Followed group of male subjects from age 8 to 30 to look at media influence on aggression.  Found a preference for violent TV was predictive

of adult criminal behavior.

Anderson and Bushman

Aggression

Found that for both men and women, violent video games appear to increase blood pressure, aggressive thought content, and aggressive behavior,

while reducing cooperative behavior and altruism.

Leyens and Picus

Aggression

Justified Aggression

  Some P’s were instructed to identify themselves in the role of aggressive main character.  Identification DID NOT impact level of identification significantly.  High identifiers did administer more shocks AND were in a better mood after doing so than low identifiers.

Nisbett and Cohen

Aggression

Narrow Hallway, "Asshole" Experiment

Southern subjects reacted more aggressively to the insults, elevated testosterone and cortisol, than Northerners.  Culture of honor. 

Cognitive Psychology 

1. All behavior is caused by mental processes and mind is a computer (brain). 

2. Belief that mental processes account for most of how people behave, and that mental processes can be best understood through scientific methods that describe mental processes as information processing models.  Most concerned with neuroscience.

Gestalt Psychologists

Origins of Cognitive Psych

Direct early influence on cognitive psychology.

Both perceptions and instances of learning, are irreducible wholes came to inform cognitive psych.

Alan Turing 

Origins of Cognitive Psych

British mathematician.  Largely responsible for theory behind first real computers.  Turing machines were an abstract model of possible information processing.

Still integral ideal to AI theory.

Simon, Newell, Shaw

Origins of Cognitive Psych

General Problem Solver (GPS): analyze the terms of novel problems and then solve. 

In a crude way, this sort of information processing began to provide a credible explanation of how the mind/brain works.

George Miller

Origins of Cognitive Psych

Wrote The Magical Number 7, +/- 2, working memory could hold 7 pieces of info, size didn't matter. 

Worked with Chomsky at Stanford and at the center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences.  Founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard.

Ulric Neisser

Origins of Cognitive Psych

Coined Cognitive Psychology in 1967.  Student of Miller’s. 

Worked on pattern recognition, attempting to get computers to function as humans.

Looked at the mind as an information processing system.

Sensation and Perception Definitions

Sensation: registration of physical stimulation through sensory organs.

Perception: refers to the process of becoming aware of sensory information through the modulation, integration, and interpretation of sensation.

Johannes Muller

Perception

First to discuss people's experience of seamless perceptions of the world, product of an integration of their senses.

Mid 1800's

Ludwig von Helmholtz 

Classical Perception Theory

Student of Muller’s. 

Demonstrated that particular receptor cells in each of the sensory systems specialized in responding to the particular sorts of stimuli.  Trichromatic theory of color vision.  Physiological illusion.

Perceptual Constancy

Once an object has been perceived as an identifiable entity, it tends to be seen as a stable object having permanent features, despite variations in how it is viewed.

Ability to synthesize past experience and current sensory cues.

Bottom-Up Processing

Direct Perception Theories 

Start with input, and through manipulation yield richer and more useful output.

-Pandemonium Model- feature demons, cognitive demons, decision demons, "loud" reports allow for identifying input. (Selfridge) 

Top-Down Processing

Constructive Perception

Involve some sort of expectation/prior knowledge which drives the initial approach to any possible input.

-Pattern recognition is primarily a top down because stimulus recognition and feature detection are guided by preexisting representations in memory.

Neisser and Selfridge

Created a computer model of the process by which people recognize letters called the Pandemonium Model.  

Perception

Computational Theory of Vision

You see 2D, your brain makes is 2.5D, and then your previous experience allows you to perceive it in 3D.

Behaviorist Model of Learning

Cognitive Theories of Memory

Denied the need for the processing of information in memory by suggesting that each instance of learning/conditioning thinks for itself.  No overarching mental agency manages how pieces of

learning influence behavior.

Encoding, Storage, Retrieval

Encoding: transformation of a sensory input into a memory representations

Storage: the holding of material in stored representational form

Retrieval: Accessing the stored memory

Highly Interdependent

Atkinson and Shiffrin

Modal Memory Model

First to propose that the memory system is not unitary in nature, and proposed sensory, short-, and long-term memory.

Endel Tulving

First important figure to study long term memory.  Thought LTM could be divided into implicit (procedural-motor skills memory) and explicit (semantic - knowledge gleaned from experience) memories. 

Theory of Encoding Specificity: retrieve specific memories from LTM using "retrieval cues". 

Most effective retrieval cues are those that were stored along with the memory of the experience itself at the time of encoding.

"Lost in the Shopping Mall" Study

Illustrated that episodic memory can be inaccurate. 

25% of original study remembered the fake story

BF Skinner on

Psycholinguistics

Language was acquired through operant conditioning.

Piaget

Language was a form of social knowledge and argued against innateness.

Noam Chomsky

Psycholinguistics

generative grammar. 

Language Acquisition Device (LAD) – born with universal grammar which is ready to absorb the details of whatever language it first encounters.  Not only is the mind born with key elements of language built in, but the rest of the mind has only limited access to the LAD’s knowledge.  "Poverty of Stimulus",  thoroughly disproved that language has no innate components.

Surface and Deep Structures of Language

Chomsky theory of LAD

Surface: structure of particular language with specific rules governing phonetics and grammar.

Deep: More abstract, encompasses all the varieties of grammar within human languages.

Jerry Fodor

Modularity of Mind

 Philosopher who first proposed the notion of modularity in 1983.  Mind is not a single all-purpose problem solving program, but a series of specialized modules designed to deal with particular kinds of tasks.  Information Encapsulation and Domain Specificity.

John Toby

Evolutionary Psych and Massive Modularity

Thought that the mind doesn’t have just a few specialized modules for sensory inputs, but a vast number of highly specialized modules.  Suggested that the mind may not have central processes at all. 

Huge amount of human nature is hardwired,

especially social behavior.

Computationalism and Fodor  

Computational Models include those that suggest

the mind is an information processing system, info in mind takes the form of symbol language of thought, and mind uses specific algorithms to manipulate input to yield different output.

Fodor argues that our ability to represent the world experientially only makes sense if we accept the idea of a “language of thought” in the mind.  Thinks this language of thought literally exists in the brain in some form.

-Overthrew the reductionist, Behaviorist Model

Connectionism

Connectionism conceptualizes mental or behavioral phenomena as the emergent processes of interconnected networks of basic units.

More reductionistic than Computationalism.

Spreading Activation: activation in one unit in the network increases the liklihood of activation of other particular units.

Parallel Distributed Processing: mental processing is interactions among neuron-like processing units, through weighted connections.

"Knowledge" exists in the connections between neurons and networks.

Frederick Bartlett

Schema Theory

English psychologist, first stated construct in 1932.

Suggests we all use cateogircally organized templates derived from previous experience to process and organize new information (top-down processing).

Heavily influenced by culture.

Accretation, Tuning, Restructuring

Schema Theory: 3 Ways we handle novel information

Accretation: assimilating new info into existing schema without any change.

Tuning: modify an existing schema to assimilate new info.

Restructuring: Creating an entirely new schema.

Newell and Simon

Forms of Reasoning

Used puzzles like the Tower of Hanoi and chess to explore problem solving approaches as part of their AI research.  Came to the conclusion that problem solving is a search for a “path” from an “initial state” to a “goal state” through a “problem space.” 

First-Best Search and Means-End Analysis Heuristics.

Inductive Reasoning

Involves the drawing of general conclusions from a small set of observed instances.

Categorization

Pattern Recognition

Tends to go wrong when schema are interfering, pushing one to modify schema

instead of create new schema.

Expert Reasoning

Starts at big picture perception of problem and then leaps to details. 

Ability for an expert to move quickly because categories of schema already exist.

Analogical Reasoning

Process of transferring info from a familiar problem to an unfamiliar but similar problem.

Saves cognitive effort, generally what

we think of as our "intuition".

Deductive Reasoning

The ability to distill the pertinent facts and details of a situation from a wider body of evidence and generalizations.

Cognitive Psych suggests we use far more than just deductive reasoning.

Kin Selection

Empathy, Emotion Theory

More altruistic towards family members in a selfish attempt to preserve gene pool.

Reciprocal Altruism

Behave altruistically towards others in the hopes of the others being altruistic

towards you in the future.

Reputational Advantage

Egoic Distress

Witnessing the distress of others is

distress-inducing because of the process

of imagining oneself in their circumstances.

-Motivated to help to alleviate their own vicarious suffering.

ex. babies cry when they hear others baby cry