Psychology Study Notes: Development, Learning, Memory and Disorders

Problem Solving and Decision Making

Search for information: The first approach tends to test untested hypotheses such as the ADCU and many other possibilities.

Representativeness: The heuristic that determines whether one particular instance represents the first certain classes or categories.

Availability: The heuristic by which the probability of an event is determined by how easily it comes to mind.

Comparison: This is the tendency to value benefits or gains in relative terms rather than absolute ones. Framework: It tends to influence the presentation of results as negative or positive, making decisions that tend to risk adverse outcomes.

Adolescence: The period from approximately 12 to 20 years of age.

Physical Changes: Puberty

Puberty: The moment at which the individual reaches sexual maturity.

• Primary sexual characteristics: The characteristics directly involved in reproduction, such as the maturation of the reproductive organs.
• Secondary sexual characteristics: Characteristics that develop during adolescence and are not directly related to reproduction, such as facial hair, changes in skin, and so on.

Intellectual and Cognitive Changes: Formal Operational Stage

The last stage of intellectual development in Piaget's theory, characterized by abstract thinking. It is reached during adolescence or adulthood.

• Personal fable: The feeling shared by many adolescents that they are unique and that others do not understand them.
• Imaginary audience: The assumption that others are constantly watching and concerned with their appearance and behavior.

Personality and Social Changes

Identity formation: Includes identity achievement, moratorium, foreclosure, and identity diffusion.

Peer groups, family influences, and commitments.

Personality: A stable pattern of behavior, thought, and feeling that distinguishes one person from another.

The Big Five Personality Traits

• Extraversion: Talkative and expressive people.
• Agreeableness: Altruistic and giving people.
• Conscientiousness: Organized, reliable, and responsible people.
• Neuroticism: Self-critical, anxious, and people who worry excessively about themselves.
• Openness to experience: People who enjoy new and unfamiliar experiences and are not traditional.

Stages of Psychosexual Development

• Oral stage (0–18 months): Mouth.
• Anal stage (18 months–3 years): Anus.
• Phallic stage (3–6 years): Genitals.
• Latency stage (6 years–puberty): None.
• Genital stage (adolescence–adulthood).

Anxiety Disorders

Anxiety: A general feeling of apprehension characterized by symptoms in thought, behavior, or physiology.

Phobia: An irrational fear of an object or situation that is not in proximity to the current danger.

Agoraphobia: Fear of public places such as crowds and shopping centers. It sometimes occurs in panic disorders.

Social phobia: Fear related to being observed or judged by others.

Specific phobia: The first major category of phobias alongside agoraphobia and social phobia, including phobias related to animals, the natural environment (storms, water), and blood-injection-injury.

Panic disorder: The most severe anxiety disorder, characterized by intense physiological arousal in response to a non-specific stimulus. It also involves apprehension about possible future attacks and worry about the consequences of the attacks, which are often perceived as heart attacks.

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD): High and chronic anxiety that is not linked to a specific stimulus. It includes excessive worry about a number of events or activities.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD): An anxiety disorder characterized by repetitive thoughts, impulses, or images (obsessions) that are irrational and intrusive, and repetitive acts (compulsions) that feel irresistible, such as checking locks or washing hands constantly.

Dissociative identity disorder: The presence of two or more distinct personalities, often associated with a history of sexual and physical abuse.

Depression: A mood disorder characterized by sadness, feelings of worthlessness, changes in sleep, appetite, and behavior, and sometimes thoughts of suicide.

Bipolar disorder: A disorder in which a person experiences episodes of mania alternating with depression.

Schizophrenia: A psychotic disorder characterized by positive symptoms (excesses) such as delusions and hallucinations, and disorganized speech, or negative symptoms (deficits) such as flat or dull affect.

Psychology

Psychology: The science of behavior and mental processes.

Aims of psychology: To describe, predict, and control behavior.

Ethics in psychology: Protection against harm, confidentiality, voluntary participation, avoidance of deception and intimidation, and ethics in research with animals.

Specialties of psychology: Clinical, educational, developmental, industrial, forensic, and social.

Sensation: The activation of sensory receptors by environmental stimuli.

Perception: The process of organizing and interpreting sensory information.

Absolute threshold: The minimum amount of energy required for a participant to detect a stimulus 50% of the time.

Difference threshold (just noticeable difference): The smallest change in a stimulus that a person can detect 50% of the time.

Learning

A permanent change in behavior or potential behavior.

Classical conditioning: Learning that occurs when two stimuli, one neutral and one unconditioned, become associated.

Operant conditioning: Learning in which a participant is more likely to produce a behavior that leads to a change in the environment.

• Positive reinforcement: A stimulus or event presented after a response that increases the likelihood that the response will happen again.
• Negative reinforcement: The removal of a stimulus after a response, which increases the likelihood that the response will happen again.
• Positive punishment: Results in a decrease in a response when a stimulus is presented.
• Negative punishment: A stimulus whose removal produces a decrease in a response.

Motivation

Physiological and psychological factors that explain the activation, direction, and persistence of behavior.

• Instincts: Behaviors that are not learned, are species-specific, and are often complicated. Example: bats locating objects using sound waves, similar to radar.
• Drives: Pressures created by physiological needs, such as the need for food. Example: if you had not eaten lunch, you would be driven to eat.
• Emotion: Physiological changes and feelings of pleasure or displeasure, triggered by external stimuli and internal experiences, that lead to behavioral reactions.
• Pyramid of needs: Self-actualization, esteem, belonging and love, safety, and basic physiological needs.

Theories of Emotion

James-Lange theory: States that physiological changes precede the experience of emotion. Emotional stimulus → physiological changes → emotion.

Cannon-Bard theory: Highlights the role of the thalamus in sending signals simultaneously to the cortex (emotional experience) and the sympathetic nervous system.

Memory

Long-term memory: The stage with very large capacity in which information is stored in a relatively permanent way. It is important to rehearse information to transfer it from short-term memory (STM) to long-term memory (LTM).

Types of memory:

• Procedural: Memory of how to perform actions and skills.
• Semantic: Storage of our general knowledge.
• Episodic: Memory of personal events.
• Implicit: A non-conscious type of memory related to identifying words and objects.

Useful memory techniques: Clustering, acronyms, acrostics, and imaginative mnemonic words.

Proactive interference: Old learned information makes it difficult to remember new information.

Retroactive interference: New information makes it difficult to remember previously learned information.

Problem Solving: Methods and Obstacles

Algorithms: Methods of solving a problem that involve a systematic exploration of all possible solutions until the correct solution is found.

Heuristics: Rules of thumb or general strategies used to solve problems. They do not guarantee a correct answer.

Help and obstacles in problem solving:

• Establishing submethods: Asking people to think aloud helps psychologists understand how they solve problems, and complex problems are divided into submethods.
• Rigidity: The tendency to depend on the methods and approaches learned from past experience when solving new problems.