PSY-1A

• The self


  A holistic being with interconnected thoughts, feelings, sensations and behaviors
• Thinking self


  • System 1: Makes quick decisions based on little information
  • System 2: Makes slow, effortful, considered responses
• As the complexity of a task increases


  People are more likely to engage in System 2 decision making
• Decreasing the legibility of a font


  Makes people more likely to switch to System 2
• As social pressure to respond in a particular way increases

  System 2 may filter responses to create "appropriate" responses
• Cognitive biases


  Systematic errors in thinking
• Peak and rule


  People judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak and its end, disregarding the total sum of pleasantness or unpleasantness
• Representativeness


  Assumption that any object (or person) sharing characteristics with the members of a particular category is also a member of that category
• Anchoring and adjustment


  In making judgments under uncertainty, people start with a certain reference point (anchor), then adjust it insufficiently to reach a final conclusion
• Guarding against cognitive biases

  1. Recognize the signs that you are in a cognitive minefield, slow down, and ask for System 2 for help

  2. Identify practices and tasks and the kind of thinking they demand

  3. Listen to understand rather than listen to answer

  
• Paul Ekman's 7 basic emotions

  • Anger
  • Contempt
  • Disgust
  • Fear
  • Happiness
  • Sadness
  • Surprise
• Paul Ekman


  • Clinical practice: Studied depression
  • Research: Found facial expressions are universal, studied patients who claimed they were not depressed and later committed suicide
• Microexpressions


  Current research: How to respond to others' emotions, working with Dalai Lama
• Components of emotional experience

  • Antecedent condition
  • Cognitive appraisal
  • Physiological
  • Emotional expressions

  
• Antecedent condition


  Events, contexts, or situations that trigger an emotion

  
• Cognitive appraisal


  Thoughts and beliefs can impact how you feel and how you behave

  
• Physiological


  Distinctive patterns of biological activities for each basic emotion, involving the autonomic nervous system, central nervous system, neurotransmitters and hormones

  
• Emotional expressions


  Display rules: Cultural rules that dictate how emotions should be expressed, when and where expression is appropriate

  
• Emotional experience is a process

  
• The three components of the self (thinking, feeling, and behavioral) are interconnected
• System 1 thinking


  • Detect distance, orient to sudden sounds, complete phrases, make disgust faces, detect hostility, answer simple math, read billboards, drive on empty roads, recognize occupational stereotypes
• System 2 thinking


  • Brace for a race, focus attention, search memory, maintain faster walking speed, monitor social appropriateness, count letter occurrences, compare products, fill out forms, check logical arguments
• Socialization


  The interactive process through which people learn basic skills, values, beliefs, and behavior patterns of a society, developing a sense of self
• Self-concept


  The sum total of beliefs we each have about ourselves
• Looking glass self


  Other people serve as a mirror in which we can see ourselves
• Charles Horton Cooley


  • Created the idea of how primary groups are the foremost force in developing a person's character
  • The looking glass self is based on reflected appraisals - our self-views form as a result of our perceptions of other people's opinions of us
• Formation of self-concept


  1. Imagine how others see us

  2. Imagine how others assess us

  3. Develop self-views through these judgments
• People's self-concepts often do not match what others actually think of them
• George Herbert Mead


  • Sense of self stems from the human ability to be self-conscious and take ourselves as objects of experience
  • The self is an emergent product of social experience, as we take the perspectives of others toward ourselves
• Development of self


  1. Language: Allows one to act or take the role of others and receive feedback

  2. Play: Person takes on roles of others and displays expectations

  3. Games: Person makes attitudes part of their nature by learning roles of others
• Characteristics of the self


  • Separate and distinct from other selves
  • Self-contained and independent
  • Consistent and has an enduring personality
  • Unitary
  • Private
• Psychoanalytic perspective


  Sigmund Freud's levels of mental life: Unconscious, preconscious, conscious

  
• Unconscious


  Includes drives and instincts that motivate most human behaviors, can become conscious only in disguised or distorted form
• Preconscious


  Contains images that can become conscious either quite easily or with some difficulty
• Conscious


  Plays a relatively minor role, stems from perception of external stimuli or from the unconscious and preconscious
• Freud's structural model of personality

  • Id, ego, superego
• Unconscious


  Drives and instincts that are beyond awareness but that motivate most human behaviors
• Preconscious


  Contains images that are not in awareness but that can become conscious either quite easily or with some level of difficulty
• Conscious


  Plays a relatively minor role in Freudian theory, stems from either the perception of external stimuli or from the unconscious and preconscious after they have evaded censorship
• Id


  Raw, unorganized, inborn part of personality, primitive desires of hunger, sex, and aggression, works with Pleasure Principle, satisfaction is the ultimate goal, its only resource is to form mental images of what it wants, a process called wish-fulfillment