Chapter 1 Psychology is the scienti c study of feelings affect behavior and cognition thoughts and other mental processes Psychology is different from say anthropology because psychology looks at how the mind works whereas anthropology is the study of humans a a culture and society Sociology looks at patterns in our society for things such as class age or race Psychologists develop theories and test them through research Types of psychologists A Social psychologists study how a person s mental life and behavior are shaped by their B Engineering psychologists conduct research on how people work best with machines The C Developmental psychologists study the psychological development humans as they grow D Experimental psychologists work to collect data and manipulate variables within the laboratory as a way of better understanding a wide range of psychological ideas include cognitive processes comparative psychology and learning and conditioning interactions with other people relationship between mankind and machines E Cognitive psychologists study human perception thinking and memory Carol Dweck suggests that all children develop a belief about their own intelligence She created two mindsets for learning The Fixed Mindset represents those who think that their intelligence is pre determined and cannot increase They believe that when presented with new material there is already a limit to how much they can understand and learn Contrary to this those with a Growth Mindset believe intelligence develops throughout your entire life These people believe that they never stop learning or growing Dweck ran an experiment wherein she looked at several hundred students and assessed which students believed their intelligence was unchangeable xed and which believed their intelligence could grow growth Then she looked at their math grades over the next two years Those with a growth mindset ended up increasing their math grades over the two years while those with a xed mindset showed a decrease in performance Dweck then ran another experiment with 100 students who were all struggling in math They were each randomly assigned to a workshop on study skills One workshop gave lessons on how to study well and the other taught about the expanding nature of the brain The students in the workshop that taught students the mind grows and expands started doing better in math than those in the other workshop Learning Styles Researchers have found no experimental evidence that there truly are fundamental differences in the way that people learn There is no scienti c studies showing that people with different preferences perform better on an exam when the information was presented in one way or the other Better to practice over time than to cram the night before John Dunlosky ran an experiment with 4 leading psychologists about the best ways to study Their ndings are below The Worst highlighting underlining rereading summarizing unless you re skilled at it The Best distributive practice and practice testing The Mediocre mental imagery elaborative interrogation asking why self explanation mixing up different types of problems and keyword mnemonic Roediger Karpicke ran an experiment where they had college students study a passage All students were given 7 minutes to study and then were randomly divided into 2 groups One group was given 7 more minutes to study while the other was given a test on what they had just read The nal graded test was given to students either 5 minutes 2 days or 1 week later Students who were given the extra time to study did better on the test that was 5 minutes later however those who took the practice exam did much better on the test either 2 days or 1 week later This means that being tested is the best way to study for an exam A healthy brain learns better Sleep affects muscle control Sleeping helps remember things learned shortly before sleep Exercise provides a short term oxygen boost to the brain and can be bene cial to mental performance Vitamin B12 and folic acid keeps homocysteine to a minimum High levels of homocysteine are thought to have very negative health implications and can possibly lead to heart damage Test Anxiety Causes fear of failure lack of preparation poor test history Symptoms physical symptoms headache nausea diarrhea emotional symptoms feeling angry fearful helpless behavioral cognitive symptoms dif culty concentrating thinking negatively Advice be prepared develop good test taking skills maintain a positive attitude stay focused practice relaxation techniques Weems found that exposure to natural disasters was associated with anxiety and poor academic performance His study focused on test anxiety interventions Task Oriented motivated to learn new things and feel successful when making progress towards a personal goal Ego Oriented feel successful when praised Self Handicapping protecting elf esteem by protecting themselves from failure minimize their ability as an explanation for poor performance Experiment subjects who had previously succeeded on a task were offered either a performance hindering or performance enhancing drug Those who didn t think they d accomplish the task again took the performance hindering drug so they d have an excuse when they failed They took the opportunity to protect themselves All the successes had been rigged Half of the group took a test with 16 solvable and 4 unsolvable problems while half took a test with 16 unsolvable and 4 solvable problems Everyone was told they performed well Most of the subjects who had the 16 unsolvable problems self handicapped because they did not expect to succeed Stereotype Threat performance in any situation may be in uenced by the threat of being negatively stereotyped The fear is that when facing a negative stereotype one s performance will con rm that stereotype This causes anxiety and stops people from doing their best Inattentional Blindness is when we focus our attention on one thing and fail to notice everything else that is going on 4 general theoretical perspectives describe why we do certain things A Biosocial Theory impact of intellectual emotional social and biological in uences in people Biological traits reacting to environmental stimuli Has to do with evolution for survival and reproduction development by examine the rules of social groups and subgroup in which the individual is a member What other think Group norms we do actions according to group norms behavior Completely excludes
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