Basic Attribution Processes

Naive psychologist: people use rational, scientific-like, cause-effect analyses to better understand the world.

Heider's three principles:

1. Our own behaviour is motived rather than random thus we look for the causes and reasons of other people's behaviour and uncover their motives.
2. In order to predict and control the environment, we seek stable and enduring properties of the world around us. (Personality traits and enduring abilities in people, or stable properties of situations)
3. When attributing causal factors, a difference between personal (internal attribution) and environmental (external attribution) factors are made.

Jones and Davis's theory of correspondent inference

Correspondent inference: the causal attribution of behaviour to an underlying disposition or personality trait

Five sources of information are drawn upon in order to make a correspondent inference:

1. Freely chosen behaviour is more indicative of a disposition
2. Non-common effects (effects of behaviour that are relatively exclusive to that behaviour rather than other behaviours. Outcome bias (the belief that the individual intended to produce the outcome of a behaviour)
3. Socially desirable behaviour are likely controlled by norms so socially undesirable behaviour provides a basis for making a correspondent inference
4. Confident correspondent inferences are made when the consequences are personally significant (hedonic relevance)
5. Confident correspondent inferences are made when the behaviour is personally beneficial or harmful (personalism)

Kelley's covariation model

Covariation model: people assign cause of behaviour to the factor that covaries most closely with the behaviour.

People decide whether or not to attribute a behaviour to internal dispositions (e.g. personality) or external environmental factors (e.g. time constraint). The three classes of information required to make this decision are:

1. Consistency information [Always (high consistency) versus sometimes (low consistency)]
2. Distinctiveness information [Always (low distinctiveness) versus specific/situational (high distinctiveness)]
3. Consensus information [Everyone behaves likes this (high consensus) versus the individual only (low consensus)]

Discount: when there is not a consistent relationship between variables a third factor is sort to be the cause.

Causal schemata: beliefs or preconceptions (based on previous experience and knowledge) about the way certain types of cause interact in order to produce an effect.

Affect and Emotion

Research on affect and emotion is interested in how feelings influence and are influenced by social cognition. Where different situations can evoke different emotions and how the same situation can evoke different emotions in different people.

Affect
When there is a demand on an individual they use the resources available to them to deal with the demand. If the resources available equal or exceed the perceived demand, the individual will be motivated and challenged. Avoidance behaviours will however be felt by the individual if the resources are felt to be inadequate to meet the demand. (This can play a major role in producing anxiety in individuals)

Affect-infusion model: the effects of mood on social cognition/social judgements reflect current mood.

There are four ways in which people process information about one another (Forgas):

1. Direct access (directly accessing the schemas or judgments stored in memory
2. Motivated processing (forming a judgement on the basis of specific motivations to achieve a goal
3. Heuristic processing (rely on cognitive short cuts or heuristics)
4. Substantive processing (carefully and deliberately make a judgement from numerous sources

Process of Social Inference Summation

Social inference addresses the inferential process that is used to identify, sample and combine information in order to form impressions and make judgements. There are two processes used for social information:

1. The top-down deductive process that relies on general schemas or stereotypes and;
2. The bottom-up inductive process that relies on specific instances.

Normative models: the ideal processes for making accurate social inferences

Behavioural decision theory: the collective of normative models

Gathering data and sampling the information collected is the first step of making inferences. During this stage people tend to rely too much on schemas, which can cause information to be lost or exaggerated.

Regression: the tendency for the initial inference of an instance to be exaggerated or poorly judged in comparison to subsequent instances.

Base-rate information: factual and statistical data about an entire class of events (base-rate information is often ignored and can play a role in racial and unjust stereotyping, e.g. media coverage of extremist catholic protesters where individuals who view or read the story begin to attribute this behaviour and value to all catholics when it is the behaviour and values of the minority).

Illusory correlation: the belief that two stimuli or events are correlated to a high degree when there may only be a small or no correlation.

• Associative meaning: an illusory correlation where items are seen as belonging together on the basis of prior knowledge
• Paired distinctiveness: an illusory correlation where items are seen as belonging together because they share an unusual feature

Person Memory

Cognitive psychologists mainly use the associative network (when information stored in our memory are categorised by associative links such as traits, beliefs and behaviours) model of memory.

• Not all links are as strong as each other
• They are strengthened by cognitive rehearsal and when there are numerous links to a specific idea
• Each link assists in the activation of the other links through association increasing its retrieval

Note: long-term memory (the majority of information stored that can be accessed and brought to your conscious) and short-term memory (small amounts of information occupied by your attention at the present time).

The majority of person-memory contains information about traits

• These traits are based on inferences made from the behaviour and situations of individuals
• These inferences revolve around making causal attributions to behaviour
• This information is stored into to categories of socially desirable (e.g. friendly) and competence (e.g. intelligent)

When making judgements about others, people tend to rely on incoming information based on schemas to produce impressions. They are much less likely to use the information they have stored to make impressions and are influenced by the goals and purposes of the interaction. This suggest that the more psychologically and emotionally committed to the interaction an individual is, the greater amount and strength of the associative links there will be.

Social Encoding

Social encoding is the process of seeking information from an external social environment and is extremely subjective revolving around the stimulus which captures an individuals attention

There are four stages to social encoding:

1. Pre-attentive analysis (a general scan of an individuals environment)
2. Focal attention (stimuli is consciously noticed, identified and categorised)
3. Comprehension (stimuli is given semantic meaning)
4. Elaborative reasoning (that stimuli is then linked to other knowledge in order for complex inferences to be made)

Key terms related to social encoding include:

• Salient stimuli: a property of a stimulus which captures attention from other stimulus in a particular context
• Vivid stimuli: an intrinsic property of a stimulus itself (e.g. violent crime)
• Priming: the influence of accessible categories or schemas on the way information is processed

Schema use and Development

People tend to use a basic-level of categorisation of neither too inclusive nor too exclusive by accessing subtypes, social stereotypes and role schemas (e.g. doctor). Other influences include:

• Observable features (e.g. physical appearance)
• Contextually distinctive (e.g. a female amongst a group of males)
• Use schemas based on earlier information (primacy effect)
• Accessibile schemas such as those commonly used and;
• Schemas which have a personal importance

These theory-driven schemas are appropriate and accurate enough for a majority of the time, however a data-driven approach is taken on when the costs of being wrong are increased (e.g. responsibility, rewards and punishments). This is when individuals collect more information in order to create a more accurate schema. Individuals are more likely to rely on schemas when:

• Time is scarce
• Highly distracted and;
• Anxious

Subjective importance of schemas and accessibility are major influences of the degree and type of schema used. Other influences include:

• Attributional complexity (individuals vary in the complexity and the number of explanations of other people)
• Uncertainty orientation (individuals vary in the amount of information they want and may prefer to be uninformed)
• Need for cognition (the variance in the amount that individuals think about things)
• Cognitive complexity (the variance in individual complexity of cognitive processes and representations)

The acquisition and development of schemas

• The more encounters experience the more abstract they become
• They become more complex
• As the complexity increases so do the links between schematic elements
• As the schema grows, it becomes well organised and easier to access
• They become more resilient, incorporating a broader variety and understanding its inclusiveness
• They should then become more accurate and assist to better understanding the social world
• Although schemas tend to be slow to change, if a schema has been greatly inaccurate a major subjective experience has the ability to change the schema dramatically

Three process suggested by Rothbart (1981) of schema change are:

1. Bookkeeping (a slow and gradual change brought on by new evidence)
2. Conversion (information in contrast to the schema is slowly acquired that the schema can no longer be sustained, a sudden change to the schema occurs)
3. Subtyping (inconsistent information changes the structure of the schema causing the formation of subcategories, e.g. the change from all apples are red to apples can be both red or green)

Social Schemas and Categories

A schema is a cognitive structure that allows us to understand and perceive a concept or type of stimulus with only a limited amount of information. It uses previous experience and knowledge to 'paint a picture' and is based on concepts and theory; a top-down approach of processing information.

There are many types of schema including person, role, events (generally called scripts), content-free and self-schemas.

• Person schema: individual knowledge about specific people.
• Role schema: the knowledge you have about the way certain people/roles such as doctors act or for example the questions they may ask.
• Scripts/events: the information you have about an event allows you to act accordingly such as to be quiet during a lecture or to be outgoing and social at a party.
• Content-free schema: based around rules or attributing a cause to an individual's behaviour.
• Self-schema: this is the in-depth and complex information individual's have about themselves.

Categorisation is the process of interpreting information to fit into that particular schema

• Family resemblance: the defining property of information which places it into a particular category.
• Prototype: the typical representation and attributes of what is expected for each category
• Fuzzy sets: as information will not be exactly the same as the prototype, categorises are compiled of features and attributes which revolve around the prototype.
• Exemplars: a specific member of a category used when it is new and unfamiliar.
• Associative network: when information stored in our memory are categorised by associative links such as traits, beliefs and behaviours.
• Accentuation principle: when the categorisation accentuates the perception of similarities and differences between groups that they believe (personally, relevant or of value) are correlated with the category. (This plays a major role in the production of discrimination and prejudice involving stereotyping)

Psychological Theories of Crime

There are five psychological theories of crime: biological, behavioural, social learning, social ecological and situational explanations.

Attention has been directed to human cognition (mental content, process and abilities) and affect (moods and emotions), and to the biological foundations of and the environmental influences of behaviour.

Biological

• Individual genetic variations may be linked to criminality; transferring these genetic variations to biological offspring
• This heritability of criminality may exist in a genetic foundation for crime-related behavioural tendencies such as aggression, addiction, selfishness, impulsivity and sexual deviance.
• Biological changes such as those during adolescence provide an increase in physical strength and sexual urges. This may help to understand the increase in the crime rate for males peaking in early adulthood and steadily declining afterwards.
• Children of criminal parents are more likely than children of non-criminals to becomes criminals.
• This intergenerational transmission of crime may be a product of learning.
• The ingestion of alcohol and other drugs, act on the CNS producing poor social judgment and aggression as well as other environmental contributions such as brain injuries/damage and toxins increasing the likelihood of deviant behaviour occurring.
• From an evolutionary perspective the biological make-up serves the fundamental purpose of survival and reproduction.
• r/K theory: r-selected strategy; opportunistic, impulsive, aggressive and dominant. K-selected strategy; cautious, self-controlled and socially co-operative.

Behavioural

• Behavioural focuses on the way that individuals learn, using classical and operant conditioning.
• Classical conditioning is the pairing of a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus which produces a conditioned response. The previously neutral stimulus is then a conditioned stimulus.
• Operant conditioning uses two types of consequences: reinforcement; the behaviour is more likely to occur and punishment; the behaviour is less likely to occur. Both types of consequences can be positive or negative.
• It is possible in classical conditioning for a learned association to occur with a single trial learning although classical conditioning typically corporates multiple pairings.
• A concern for the justice system would be that operant conditioning sees that unless punishment occurs immediately after (typically) the behaviour, the individual will not associate the punishment with the behaviour.

Personality

1. The three types of mental processes comprising Freud's topographic model are conscious, preconscious and unconscious.

2. Ambivalence; conflicting feelings or motives. Conflict; tension between opposing motives.

3. Freud's developmental model and the five psychosexual stages involved are: oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital.

Notes on Emotion

1. The James-Lange theory states that emotions originate in the peripheral nervous system, which then gets interpreted by the central nervous system. The Cannon-Bard theory however says that emotion-inducing stimuli simultaneously elicit both an emotional experience and bodily responses.
2. Emotional disclosure has been found to increase the overall health who frequently discuss (talk about) or write about stressful or unpleasant events.
3. Facial expressions have the ability to influence a person's emotional state.
4. There are six facial expressions that are recognised by people of most cultures. These are:
   (a). Surprise
   (b). Fear
   (c). Anger
   (d). Disgust
   (e). Happiness
   (f). Sadness
5. Display rules are controlled expression of emotions by individuals that are considered appropriate for that culture.
6. There is a difference in how men and women experience and express emotion. Where women are more likely to feel emotions more intensely and to be able to read the emotions of others, males do not show this strength of empathy. Although the exact reasons are unknown, from an evolutionary perspective gender roles may have played a part in this emotional expression.
7. Positive affect (pleasant emotions) drives pleasure-seeking, approach-oriented behaviour, whereas negative affects (unpleasant emotions) leads to avoidance-oriented behaviour.
8. A hierarchical system for classifying emotions are: Positive and negative emotions; basic categories such as love, joy, anger, sadness and fear; subordinate categories such as fondness, pride, jealousy, agony and worry.
9. There are two types of ways that individuals regulate their emotions. Reframe; putting it into perspective and suppression; ignoring and hiding the feeling.
10. According to the Schachter-Singer theory of emotion, physiological arousal and cognitive interpretation interact by making inferences about the way that an individuals body is behaving and the situation that that individual is in.

Notes on Motivation

1. According to Freud, aggression and sex are the two drives that motivate human behaviour.
2. Psychodynamic theorists now emphasise another two motives; the need for relatedness to others and the need for self-esteem. They have also moved away from using the concept of 'drives' to 'wishes and fears'.
3. Implicit motives can be measured using the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), where explicit motives are more reliably measured through self-reports.
4. According to the behavioural perspective a primary drive is an innate or biological drive where a secondary drive is learned.
5. The conditions necessary for maximum job performance according to goal-setting theory are:
   (a). Experience a discrepancy between what she has and wants;
   (b). Define specific goals rather than general ones;
   (c). Receive continuing feedback that allows her to gauge her progress towards the goal;
   (d). Believe she has the ability to attain the goal;
   (e). Set a high enough goal to remain motivated; and
   (f). Have a high degree of commitment to the goal.
6. Three innate needs suggested by self-determination theory are competence, autonomy and relatedness to others. Self-determination theory view's rewards as a possible hinderance on the intrinsic value of that activity. When these innate needs are met without offering an external reward, the intrinsic value increases.
7. Maslow's five categories of needs starting from the lowest needs are physiological, safety, love or belongingness, esteem and self-actualisation.
8. The three levels of needs that form the basis of ERG theory are; existence, relatedness and growth.
9. The theory of inclusive fitness accounts for the motivation to care for close relatives as a need to protect the reproduction of genetically related individuals.
10. Motivation can be shaped by culture as emphasis on things such as material objects and wealth may be praised in some societies but looked down on by others.
11. The two phases of metabolism are absorptive; ingesting food and fasting; not eating.

Perspectives of Motivation

Psychodynamic: Looks at the differences between conscious or explicit and unconscious or implicit motives.

Behavioural: Humans repeat behaviours that lead to reinforcement and avoid behaviours linked to punishment.

Cognitive: Human behaviour is based on values and the belief that it is achievable.

Humanistic: Works of the self-actualisation theory of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Problem solving

1. Preparation: Identify facts

2. Production: Separate truly relevant from those that are irrelevant

3. Evaluation: Define his or her ultimate goal

Common barriers fo effective problem solving

• Confirmation bias; trying to confirm pre-existing positions or beliefs whilst ignoring contradictory evidence
• Availability heuristics; judging the likelihood of an event based on how readily available other instance of the event are in memory
• Representativeness heuristics; estimating the probability of something based on how well the circumstances match a representation example or prototype
• Functional fixedness; the tendency to view objects only for their usual customary use
• Mental sets; persistently returning to old solutions even when they are not working now

Language development

For many years, psychologists have debated the existence of a critical period for language learning. The first three years of life seem to be the optimal time to attain native fluency.

Language development progresses through a series of stages.

Before infants can start to acquire vocabulary or syntax, they have to learn to segment the continuous streams of speech they hear into units. They then have to learn to classify words into syntactic categories.
Babies' first recognisable speech sounds occur as babbling in the first year. Sometime in the second year they begin to speak in one-word utterances. Young children use telegraphic speech, leaving out all but the essential words. By age four, most of the sentences children produce are grammatical.

Memory

The standard model of memory is predicated on the metaphor of the mind as a computer; it distinguishes three memory stores: sensory memory, short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM)


Working memory


Working memory refers to the temporary storage and processing of information that can be used to solve problems, respond to environmental demands or achieve goals

Long-term memory


Declarative memory refers to the memory for facts and events; it can be semantic (general knowledge) or episodic (specific events). Procedural memory refers to 'how to' knowledge of procedures of skills and include habits.

Explicit memory refers to conscious recollection and recall
Implicit memory refers to memory that is expressed in behaviour

Everyday memory refers to memory as it occurs in daily life

Remembering, misremembering and forgetting

• Psychologists often distinguish between the availability of information in memory and its accessibility
• People make memory errors for a variety of reasons
• Psychologists have proposed several explanations for why people forget, including decay, interference and motivated forgetting
• Memories recovered in therapy cannot be assumed to be accurate, but they also cannot be routinely dismissed as false
• Specific kinds of distortion can also occur within the memories of people whose brains have been affected by illness or injury. Anterograde amnesia involves the inability to retain new memories. By contrast, retrograde amnesia involves losing memories from a period before the time that a person's brain was damaged.

Consciousness

The nature of consciousness


Consciousness refers to the subjective awareness of metal events and serves two main functions;

1. Monitoring the self and the environment and
2. Controlling thought and behaviour

Perspectives on consciousness


The psychodynamic perspective. Freud distinguished three types of mental activities conscious processes, of which of the person is currently subjectively aware; preconscious processes, which are not presently conscious but could be readily brought into consciousness; and the unconscious processes, which are dynamically kept from consciousness because they are threatening.

The cognitive perspective. The cognitive unconscious focuses on information-processing mechanisms that operate outside of awareness, such as procedural knowledge and implicit memory.

The behavioural perspective. Consciousness was considered analogous to a continuously moving video camera, surveying potentially significant perceptions, thoughts, emotions, goals and problem-solving strategies. The two functions of consciousness - monitor and control - allow people to initiate and terminate thought and behaviour in order to attain goals.

The evolutionary perspective. Consciousness evolved as a mechanism for directing behaviour in adaptive ways, which was superimposed on more primitive psychological processes such as conditioning. The primary function of consciousness is to foster adaptation.

Sleeping and dreaming


The sleep cycle is governed by circadian rhythms, cyclical biological 'clocks' that evolved around the daily cycles of light and dark

Sleep proceeds through a series of stages that can be assessed by EEG. The major distinction is between rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM (NREM) sleep. Most dreaming occurs in REM sleep, in which the eye dart around and the EEG takes on an active pattern resembling waking consciousness.

Three theories on dreaming:

1. Freud believed that dreams have meaning and distinguished between the manifest content (story line) and the latent content (underlying meaning) of the dream

2. The cognitive perspective suggests that dreams are the outcome of cognitive processes and that their content reflects the concerns and metaphors people express in their waking cognition

3. Some theorists propose that dreams are biological phenomena with no meaning at all

Altered states of consciousness


Altered states of consciousness, in which the usual conscious ways of perceiving, thinking and feeling are modified or disrupted, are often brought about through meditation, hypnosis, ingestion of drugs and religious experiences

Meditation creates a deep state of tranquility by altering the normal flow of conscious thoughts

Hypnosis is characterised by deep relaxation and suggestibility

The most common way people alter their state of consciousness is by ingesting psychoactive substances - such as alcohol and other depressants, stimulants, hallucinogens and marijuana - that operate on the nervous system to alter mental activity

Approaches to Intelligence

The psychometric approach examines which intellectual abilities tend to correlate statistically with one another. This approach uses factor analysis to identify common factors that underlie performance across a variety of tasks

The information processing or cognitive approach aims to describe and measure the specific cognitive processes that underlie intelligent behaviour, including the following: speed of processing, knowledge base, and the ability to learn and apply mental strategies

Current multifactor theories of intelligence include Sternberg's triarchic theory (analytical, practical and creative) and Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences

Intelligence Testing

Intelligence tests are measures designed to assess the level of cognitive capabilities of an individual compared to other people in a population

Alfred Binet developed the first intelligence test to identify children performing in school at a level below that of their age peers

James Wilson-Miller (1982) created the Koori IQ test to show the cultural bias in typical IQ tests held in the education system

Terman brought intelligence testing to North America, adapted the concept of intelligence quotient (IQ) and expanded the meaning of the IQ from a predictor of school success to a broader index of intellectual ability

IQ = (MA/CA) x 100


Raven's Progressive Matrices can be used when looking at non-verbal cognitive skills

James Flynn found that each generation has a higher IQ than the last

Perception

Perception refers to the closely related process by which the brain selects, organises and interprets sensations.

Perceptual organisation integrates sensations into meaningful units, locates them in space, tracks their movement and preserves their meaning as the perceiver observes them from different vantage points.

Gastalt principles:

• Figure-ground perception
• Similarity
• Proximity
• Good continuation
• Simplicity
• Closure

Form perception refers to the organisation of sensations into meaningful shapes and patterns (percepts).

Depth perception is the organisation of perception in three dimensions. Depth perception organises two-dimensional retinal images into a three-dimentional world, primarily through binocular and monocular visual cues.

Motion perception refers to the perception of movement. Two systems appear to be involved in motion perception. The first calculates motion from the changing image projected by the object on the retina; the second makes use of commands from the brain to the muscles in the eye that signal eye movements.

Bottom-up processing; seeing as it is; emphasises the role of sensory data in shaping perception

Top-down processing; shaped by experience; emphasises the influence of prior experience on perception

Divisions of the Nervous System

Level One. Nervous System: Provides the biological basis for psychological experience

Level Two. Peripheral Nervous System: Carries information to and from the central nervous system

Level Three. Somatic Nervous System: Conveys sensory information to the central nervous system and sends motor messages to muscles

Level Three. Autonomic Nervous System: Serves basic life functions, such as the beating of the heart and response to stress

Level Four. Sympathetic Nervous System: Readies the body in response to threat; activates the organism

Level Four. Parasympathetic: Calms the body down; maintains energy

Level Two. Central Nervous System: Directs psychological and basic life processes; responds to stimuli

Level Three. Spinal Cord: Receives sensory input; sends information to the brain; responds with motor output

Level Three. Brain: Directs psychological activity; processes information; maintains life supports

Level Four. (Brain): Forebrain, midbrain, hindbrain