Final Material

Question 1

What’s stereotyping?

Answer 1

• cognitive component (beliefs)
• belief that certain attributes are characteristic of a group of people
• involves thinking about a person not as an individual, but as a member of a group, and projecting your beliefs about the group onto that person
• form of schema that helps us categorize people
• occurs automatically
• can be positive, negative, or neutral

Question 2

What’s prejudice?

Answer 2

• affective component (attitudes)
• an attitudinal and affective judgment/evaluation of a group and its members
• negative feelings and beliefs associated with a stereotype
• can be positive or negative, but typically refers to to negative, unfavourable judgments
• more affective/emotional
• prejudice = pre-judgment of others

Question 3

What’s discrimination?

Answer 3

• behavioural component (behaviours)
• differential treatment of individuals based on their membership in a particular group
• involves behaviour and some sort of action and it can take many forms (be very mild or severe)
• typically used to refer to negative behaviour directed against a group

Question 4

How could stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination occur simultaneously?

Answer 4

• stereotypes can lead to prejudice, or can be used to justify prejudice, which may in turn lead to negative behaviour (i.e., discrimination)
• people are more inclined to injure those they hold in low regard

Question 5

How could stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination occur independently?

Answer 5

• attitudes (prejudice) do not always predict behaviour (discrimination)
• laws, cultural norms, and egalitarian values may prevent people from acting on their prejudices
• not all instances of discrimination derive from prejudice
• ingroup favoritism can arise even when there isn’t any hostility (prejudice) toward different outgroups

Question 6

How can ingroup favouritism contribute to discrimination?

Answer 6

• many cases of discrimination are driven by desire to help member of ingroup rather than hurt member of outgroup
• however, linking of our own group (ingroup) may lead to hatred of the outgroup

Question 7

What’s the evolutionary perspective on outgroup prejudice?

Answer 7

• we tend to prefer the familiar over the unfamiliar (probably adaptive)
• Safest when staying with the group you know: ingroup is predictable, provide protection, share resources
• Outsiders are a potential threat: carry disease, can kill or hurt, steal precious resources
• we use appearance-based cues of “outsiderness” to identify danger, trigger ingroup favouritism and cohesion

Question 8

Describe the Robber’s Cave experiment

Answer 8

• Study of 11-12 yr boys at summer camp
• White, middle-class, Protestant background (no notable ethnic group differences among them)
• Divided into two groups: separate cabins, given different tasks, etc.
• 3 phases to experiment:
• Ingroup formation
• Intergroup conflict
• Integration/conflict resolution

Question 9

Describe the ingroup formation phase (1st phase) of the Robber’s Cave experiment

Answer 9

• Groups kept separate from each other, not aware of each other’s existence
• Given tasks that required co-operative discussion, planning, & execution
• Activities were designed to foster group unity
• Developed group norms, leadership & group structure, attachment to group (cohesion to group)
• Chose names and made shirts & flags

Question 10

Describe the intergroup conflict phase (2nd phase) of the Robber’s Cave experiment

Answer 10

• The groups were then made aware of each other’s presence and a series of competitions were orchestrated
• The competitive nature of the tournament was designed to encourage each group to see the other as an obstacle to obtaining the reward and hence as an enemy
• Increased group solidarity
• Negative stereotyping of the other group
• Hostile intergroup interactions

Question 11

Describe the integration/conflict resolution phase (3rd and final phase) of the Robber’s Cave experiment

Answer 11

• Sherif and team tried a bunch of interventions to get the 2 groups to reconcile
• Ex: Peace meetings, individual competitions, pleasant activities
• What ended up working was getting them to work on superordinate goals
• The hostility produced by five days of competition was erased by the joint pursuit of common goals

Question 12

What are superordinate goals and how can they be used to reduce conflict?

Answer 12

• Mutually desired goals that could only be achieved through cooperation between the two groups
• By working towards a common goal, intergroup conflict can be reduced as they have to put their joint efforts together and realize that they are not as different as they may seem
• By working towards a common goal together, they may grow a liking for the other group
• It’s the pursuit of bigger, shared, superordinate goals that keeps everyone’s eyes on the prize and away from troublesome subgroup distinctions

Question 13

Describe what’s the jigsaw classroom

Answer 13

• Teacher divides class into small, diverse lesson groups
• Students within a group are tasked with becoming experts in different parts of the lesson
• Must rely on each other to complete the full lesson
• Students from different groups in charge of learning the same part meet
• Experts go back to and teach their original groups
• Reduces competitiveness between classmates
• By focusing on the common goal of learning the material and doing well in the class, classmates depend on each other for success and work together to learn the material which relates to the idea of superordinate goals
• Jigsaw classroom can boost academic performance and facilitate positive racial and ethnic relationships

Question 14

What’s the realistic group theory?

Answer 14

• Competition for resources can lead to negative intergroup attitudes
• Prejudice and discrimination should increase under conditions of economic difficulty, such as recessions and periods of high unemployment
• Negative feelings can be culturally transmitted from generation to generation, so intergroup hostility may persist even when original realistic conflict is no longer relevant
• Ex: heightened hostility towards immigrants during tough economic times
• Groups often compete not just for material resources, but over ideology and cultural supremacy as well

Question 15

Describe the minimal group paradigm?

Answer 15

• An experimental paradigm in which researchers create groups based on arbitrary and seemingly meaningless criteria and then examine how the members of these “minimal groups” are inclined to behave toward one another
• Random assignment of participants to groups
• The categories for groups were arbitrary and members of each group did not know who the others members were
• After learning their group membership, the participants were taken to separate cubicles and asked to assign points, redeemable for money, to pairs of their fellow participants, without knowing the identity of who they were assigning points to

Findings:
- The participants in many of these studies favoured members of one’s own group over members of other group
- They were more focused on maximizing difference in outcome between ingroup and outgroup (relative gain) than on maximizing absolute value of ingroup outcome

Question 16

What does the minimal group paradigm teach us about ingroup favouritism?

Answer 16

The ingroup favoritism that emerges in this context demonstrates how easily we slip into thinking in terms of US versus THEM, to the point where we would rather “beat” the outgroup than maximize our own groups gains

Question 17

What’s the Social Identity Theory?

Answer 17

• People derive their self-esteem and sense of identity not only from their individual status and accomplishments but also from those of the groups to which they belong
• We may therefore be tempted to boost the status and fortunes of these groups and their members
• Ingroup favouritism -> doing everything we can to feel better about the ingroup leads us to feel better about ourselves
• Taking criticism about the group as criticism about the self

Question 18

What’s basking in reflected glory?

Answer 18

• We tend to take pride in the group’s accomplishments even when we had nothing to do with the group’s accomplishment
• People go to great lengths to announce their affiliation with a group when that group is doing well
• Can boost self-esteem by associating with successful groups
• We want to identify with such groups when they do well but to distance ourselves from them when they lose
• “We won!” vs. ”They lost”

Question 19

How could threats to self-esteem promote prejudice & discrimination?

Answer 19

• We may partake in scapegoating
• May denigrate members of outgroups to bolster our self-esteem

Question 20

Summarize research by Fein & Spencer (1997) on how threats to self-esteem promote prejudice & discrimination

Answer 20

• Researchers recruited non-Jewish American participants
• They threatened the self-esteem of half the participants by telling them they had just performed poorly on an intelligence test; while the other half were told they had done well
• Participants then had to rate a candidate
• Participants in self-esteem threatening condition rated woman more negatively if they thought she was Jewish
• The more negatively they evaluated the (purportedly) Jewish American woman, the more their self-esteem increased

Question 21

What are explicit measures of prejudice?

Answer 21

• Explicit prejudice is conscious and deliberate
• People who are explicitly prejudiced know that they are prejudiced
• Can be measured via self-report
• “I don’t like those people”

Question 22

Summarize research by Sinclair & Kunda (1999) on how threats to self-esteem promote prejudice & discrimination

Answer 22

• Study where non-black participants were either praised or criticized by a white or black male doctor
• Participants were particularly fast at recognizing words related to black stereotypes after getting criticized by the black doctor and slow at recognizing those words when praised by the black doctor
• Participants were fast at recognizing medical words when praised by the black doctors and slow when criticized by the black doctor
• Conclusion: when the black doctor criticized the participants, they saw him as a black man but when he praised them, they saw him as a doctor

Question 23

What’s old-fashioned traditional prejudice?

Answer 23

• Conservative outdated views
• Explicit prejudice
• Traditional patriarchal and racist views
• “Black people are generally not as smart as white people”
• “Women are generally not as smart as men”

Question 24

What’s contemporary, modern/aversive prejudice?

Answer 24

• More subtle and less explicit racism/prejudice
• People may not be consciously aware that they are prejudiced
• Rejection of explicitly racist beliefs can co-exist with unacknowledged prejudice and in-group bias
• People will try to behave in line with egalitarian values
• “Discrimination against [Black people/women] is no longer a problem in North America”
• “[Black people/Women] are getting too demanding in their push for equal rights”
• “Over the past few years, the government and news media have shown more respect to [Black people/women] than they deserve

Question 25

Describe the situations in which modern prejudice is most likely to
manifest behaviourally. Summarize supporting research

Answer 25

Bias may manifest when the situation is ambiguous and discrimination may be easily rationalized
Ex study: Study by Gaertner & Dovidio where white participants were put in a position to help another “participant” in need of medical assistance
* Experimental design: Races of confederate: White vs. Black) and opportunity to “diffuse” responsibility: Alone vs. Others Present
- Results: When alone participants were more likely to help the black confederate but when others were present, participants were much less likely to help the black confederate (more likely to help white confederate)

Question 26

What are implicit measures?

Answer 26

They tap into the mind of participants without them being aware of it and measure their implicit bias (bias they are unconscious or unaware of)

Question 27

What’s implicit bias?

Answer 27

• Automatic, difficult-to-control associations between groups and positivity/negativity
• Associations develop somewhat automatically over the course of our lifetime
• Could be due to exposure to cultural stereotypes (family, media, etc.)
• Everyone tends to have it to some degree
• The effects of implicit bias might be small, but small differences can accumulate, building into big differences at societal level

Question 28

What’s the implicit association test and what does it capture?

Answer 28

• Series of words or pictures are presented on a computer screen, and the respondent presses a key with the left hand if the picture or word conforms to one rule and another key with the right hand if it conforms to another rule
• Technique for revealing subtle, nonconscious prejudices, even among those who sincerely believe they are bias-free
• It’s thought to tap into the automatic, difficult-to-control associations between groups and positivity/negativity
• It captures semantic memory
• Concepts are organized in networks in our mind, with some concepts more tightly or more loosely linked -> 2 concepts that are often found side-by-side are more likely to be linked together after being exposed to them over and over

Question 29

What’s an example of a consequence of implicit bias?

Answer 29

Implicit bias against Black individuals associated with disproportionally more use of lethal force by police

Question 30

What did Greenwald and Banaji think would happen with the Implicit Association Test?

Answer 30

• They argued that respondents would be faster to press one key for members of a particular group and words stereotypically associated with that group than they would to press the same key for members of that group and words that contradict the stereotype associated with that group
• They thought it’s easy to respond quickly when members of a group and the attributes associated with them are signaled with the same key rather than different keys

Question 31

What’s priming and give an example of a priming procedure?

Answer 31

• The presentation of information designed to activate a concept (e.g. stereotype) and hence make it accessible
• Can be used to identify prejudices people are unaware they hold
• Ex: an implicit measure of prejudice can thus be derived by comparing a person’s average reaction time to real and made-up words preceded by faces of members of a given category

Question 32

What’s the affect misattribution procedure?

Answer 32

• Priming procedure designed to assess people’s implicit associations to different stimuli, including associations to various ethnic, racial, occupational, and lifestyle groups
• Measures how people evaluate the stimulus presented
• The key question is whether the feelings associated with the target group (for example, Muslims) transfer to the subjects’ evaluations of the subsequent, otherwise neutral image (for example, Chinese pictographs)
• Responses on the AMP have been shown to be related to political attitudes, other measures of racial bias, and significant personal habits like drinking and smoking

Question 33

What’s the outgroup homogeneity effect?

Answer 33

• The tendency for people to assume that within-group similarity is much stronger for outgroups than for ingroups
• The tendency to think of groups we don’t belong to as black or white (homogenous)
• To think of the outgroup as unitary (“they”)
• We assume the outgroup all think, act and look alike, but that we are a remarkably varied lot

Question 34

Where does the outgroup homogeneity effect come from?

Answer 34

• From less contact with outgroups, less knowledge, less opportunity to develop complex mental representations, but much more frequent contact with members of our own group so easier to discern individual traits and habits
• Sometimes all we know about an outgroup is what its stereotypical characteristics are reputed to be
• When we do interact with outgroup members, we tend to process information about them differently (less focus on individuating characteristics and more on how they are representative of their group)
• If we think members of that group are all alike, we’re more inclined to behave toward all of them in the same way, thereby eliciting the same kind of behaviour from all of them

Question 35

What’s the Own-race identification bias?

Answer 35

• Tendency to be better at recognizing and differentiating between faces of own race than other races
• Also see the effect for age groups

Question 36

Where does the Own-race identification bias come from?

Answer 36

• Appears to result from the fact that people interact with members of their own race as individuals, without thinking about race, and so the individual features of the person in question are processed more deeply
• When interacting with someone from another race, part of one’s attention is drawn to the person’s race, taking away from the processing of the person’s individuating characteristics
• We encode individuating features of same-race faces, but race- specifying features of cross-race faces

Question 37

What are schemas?

Answer 37

Cognitive structures for organizing information

Question 38

What are stereotypes?

Answer 38

• Schemas for social groups
• Quick, convenient summaries of what a group of people is like

Question 39

Why do we rely on stereotypes?

Answer 39

• Like all schemas, they help us process information more efficiently and conserve cognitive resources

Question 40

When are we more likely to rely on stereotypes?

Answer 40

When lacking cognitive resources:
* Tired
* Mentally taxed
* Overloaded with information
* Intoxicated
* When tested at low point of circadian rhythm

Question 41

What are examples of studies that highlight why and when we rely on stereotypes?

Answer 41

Study by Macrae et al. (1994)
- On one task, participants formed an impression of a (hypothetical) person described by a number of trait terms (e.g. rebellious, dangerous, aggressive)
- Other task involved monitoring a lecture about Indonesia, while memorizing trait terms and then taking a quiz on the content of the lecture
- Participants who were given a stereotype (e.g., skinhead) associated with their trait terms were better able to remember the trait terms AND information about Indonesia

Study by Bodenhausen (1990)
- Participants invoked stereotypes during low points of circadian rhythm
- “Morning people” when tested at night were more likely to conclude that if a person was caught cheating on an exam they were guilty if they were an athlete
- “Night people” when tested in the morning, were more inclined to conclude that a person charged with dealing drugs was guilty if he was black

Question 42

How can stereotypes lead to inaccurate and biased assessments of individuals?

Answer 42

• Stereotypes are often completely invalid
• People will assume that something they were told, a joke they heard or a misinterpreted statistic is true of a group of people
• They will then construe information about an individual belonging to that group to confirm their suspicions
• The stereotype is then strengthened by “confirmation” from their biased observations
• This can happen from paired distinctiveness and illusory correlations

Question 43

What’s paired distinctiveness?

Answer 43

• The pairing of 2 distinctive events that stand out because they occur together
• Leads to illusory correlations

Question 44

Give an example of how paired distinctiveness leads to stereotypes

Answer 44

• The only Mongolian person you’ve met in your life walks his 5 pet ferrets every evening in your neighbourhood
• “I guess Mongolians really like ferrets” and then you start to associate Mongolians with liking ferrets
• But maybe this particular Mongolian man is just a ferret-loving person

Question 45

What are illusory correlations?

Answer 45

• people sometimes see correlations that do not actually exist
• distinctive events are more likely to be noticed & remembered
• people for instance detect false correlations based on the distinctiveness of minority group members and the distinctiveness of negative behaviours
• they notice 2 distinctive events and correlate them together
• people may come up with stereotypes about people, especially people of minority groups, due to illusory correlations

Question 46

Why do stereotypes persist, even in the face of contradictory evidence?

Answer 46

1) Confirmation bias
2) Subtyping
3) Attribution to intrinsic vs. extrinsic causes 4) Self-fulfilling prophecies

Question 47

What does confirmation bias have to do with stereotypes?

Answer 47

• Look to confirm our pre-existing hypotheses (in this case, hypothesis = stereotype)
• Seeking out confirming, but not disconfirming, information
• Also more likely to recall stereotype-consistent information

Question 48

What does subtyping have to do with stereotypes?

Answer 48

• Creating a subtype of particular groups
• Stereotype: girls are bad at math
• Disconfirming evidence: Olivia is good at math
• Option 2: “Olivia’s not like other girls”
• And so stereotype endures

Question 49

What does attribution to intrinsic vs. extrinsic causes have to do with stereotyping?

Answer 49

• When behaviour confirms the stereotype
• “Its because girls are bad at math” (intrinsic explanation)
• When behaviour disconfirms the stereotype
• “It’s because it was an easy test” (extrinsic explanation)
• And stereotype endures

Question 50

What do self-fulfilling prophecies have to do with stereotyping?

Answer 50

• Our pre-existing expectations can lead us to behave towards a person in a way that elicits the very behaviour we expected in the first place
• We create the social reality we expect

Question 51

What’s subtyping?

Answer 51

Explaining away exceptions to a given stereotype by creating a subcategory of the stereotyped group that can be expected to differ from the group as a whole

Question 52

What’s stereotype threat?

Answer 52

The fear of acting in a manner consistent with stereotypes (i.e., confirming stereotypes about their group)

Question 53

What are some underlying mechanisms of stereotype threat?

Answer 53

• Increased anxiety, physiological arousal, distracting thoughts
• Shift from promotion focus (pursuing success) to prevention focus (avoiding failure)
• May make people more likely to “play it safe”, less likely to persist, is cognitively taxing
• End result: drain on cognitive resources, difficulty concentrating & thinking -> poorer performance

Question 54

Describe the study by Spencer, Steele, & Quinn (1999) on stereotype threat for women vs men intelligence

Answer 54

• Stereotype: “women are bad at math”
• Make stereotype threat more salient: “men tend to do better on this test” -> female participants perform worse compared to male participants
• Remove stereotype threat: “men and women perform equally well on this test” -> female participants perform as well as male participants

Question 55

Describe the study by Steele & Aronson (1995) on stereotype threat on black vs white intelligence

Answer 55

• Stereotype: “Black people are less intelligent”
• Leave stereotype threat in place: “this test measures intellectual ability” -> black participants perform more poorly
• Remove stereotype threat: “this test is not a good measure of intellectual ability” -> no difference in performance

Question 56

Describe the study by Aronson et al. (1999) on stereotype threat on white vs black athletic ability

Answer 56

• Stereotypes: “White men can’t jump” or ”Black people have natural athletic ability, but White people do not”
• Test is a measure of “sports psychology” -> both groups perform equally well
• Test is a measure of “natural athletic ability” -> White participants perform worse
• Test is a measure of “sports intelligence” -> Black participants perform worse

Question 57

Describe the study by Shih et al. (1999) on stereotype threat on asian women

Answer 57

Competing stereotypes: “Women are bad at math” and “Asian people are good at math”
* When gender identity made salient: perform worse
* When Asian identity made salient: perform better

Question 58

What are the consequences of stereotype threat on members of stigmatized groups?

Answer 58

• Poorer performance
• Quitting
• Concealment
• Physical & mental health
• Professional opportunities & work outcomes (hiring, firing, salary, promotion)
• Interactions with police
• Outcomes in criminal justice system
• Intergroup conflict and violence
• People may mask their identity to disarm the stereotypes

Question 59

How can attributional ambiguity, stereotype threat, and concealment attempts exact a physical and psychological toll on members of stigmatized groups

Answer 59

• Stress
• Diminished psychological well-being
• Greater incidence of diseases such as hypertension and diabetes
• Greater engagement in unhealthy behavior such as smoking, poor nutrition, and missing doctor appointments

Question 60

What’s attributional ambiguity?

Answer 60

• Not knowing the underlying causes of what one is experiencing
• Especially true for members of stigmatized groups because they can’t always tell whether their experiences have the same causes as the majority or whether their experiences are instead the result of prejudice

Question 61

Describe the study by Michael Inzlicht and Talia Ben-Zeev (2000) on stereotype threat on men vs women intelligence

Answer 61

• Female undergraduates took a math test in the company of either two other women or two men
• They did not say a word about any gender differences on the test
• Those who took the test with other women got 70 percent of the problems correct on average
• Those who took the test with men got 55 percent correct on average

Question 62

What are concealment attempts with regards to stereotypes?

Answer 62

Members of stigmatized groups feel compelled to hide their true identity

Question 63

What is the physical and psychological toll on members of stigmatized groups that concealment attempts with regards to stereotypes could cause?

Answer 63

Physical: Concealment of sexual orientation is associated with cardiovascular stress and gay men who conceal their sexuality show more rapid progression of HIV symptoms

Psychological: being “out of the closet” is associated with reduced depression, less anger and higher self-esteem

Question 64

What are the conditions under which intergroup contact can help reduce
stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination?

Answer 64

• When most of these conditions are met, intergroup contact effectively reduces prejudice:
• Superordinate goals
• Equal status between groups
• Broader social norms favour contact
• Involve one-on-one interactions

Question 65

Describe how positive contact with outgroup members may reduce intergroup
prejudice

Answer 65

• Reduces anxiety about interacting with outgroup
• Personalization/reduction of outgroup homogeneity
• Increases empathy/perspective taking (extrinsic attributions)
• Generalization of positive feelings towards the person from the outgroup to the outgroup as a whole
• Superordinate identities—our “common humanity”…sharing a common identity

Question 66

What’s the contact hypothesis?

Answer 66

The idea that prejudice would be reduced if members of minority and majority groups were in frequent contact with one another

Question 67

What’s aggression?

Answer 67

Physical or verbal behaviour intended to harm a person who does not want to be harmed

Question 68

What’s hostile aggression?

Answer 68

• Behaviour motivated by feeling of anger/hostility
• Primary goal is to injure/harm another (either physically or psychologically)

Question 69

What’s instrumental aggression?

Answer 69

• Behaviour motivated by considerations other than anger/hostility
• Goal is to injure, but only in as a means to some other end (e.g., accumulating resources or enhancing one’s social status, advancing political or ideological causes)

Question 70

Describe the evolutionary view on aggression

Answer 70

• Aggression is part of our basic programming, results from evolutionary pressures
• Purposeful aggression improves odds of survival and reproduction
• If you don’t compete for mates and the resources you need to survive, won’t get to pass on your genes
• Evidence of this programming can still be seen in our modern-day behaviour

Question 71

Explain how evolutionary theory
accounts for higher rates of violence in men compared to women

Answer 71

• Across cultures & across time, men are dramatically more likely to engage in physical aggression than women
• Men’s greater propensity towards violence derives partly from their historically greater need to compete for mates
• Males compete with other males due to women being choosier with their mates

Question 72

What’s frustration?

Answer 72

Caused by the blocking of goal-directed behaviour

Question 73

What’s the frustration-aggression hypothesis?

Answer 73

Frustration increases the likelihood of aggression

Question 74

What’s displaced aggression?

Answer 74

Aggression directed towards a target other than the source of one’s frustration
Ex: the vending machine eats your money and you snap at your friend

Question 75

Describe the study by Buss (1963) on the frustration-aggression hypothesis

Answer 75

Participants give stronger shocks to a partner whose incompetence prevented them from winning a desirable prize

Question 76

How can the frustration-aggression hypothesis account for the link for poor
economic conditions and/or income inequality and aggression?

Answer 76

• It’s not just complete economic deprivation that can increase aggression but also the gap between what you expect and what you get (relative deprivation)
• Higher levels of income inequality positively associated with violent crime

Question 77

What’s relative deprivation?

Answer 77

Perception that one is less well off than others with whom one compares oneself

Ex: You live in a hut and so do all your neighbours VS. You live in a hut but your neighbours live in a mansion & own a yacht

Question 78

Describe the study by Greitemeyer & Sagioglou (2016) on relative deprivation and aggression

Answer 78

Participants made to feel less well-off compared to others exhibit more aggression

Question 79

In what situations is frustration-driven aggression most likely to be
observed?

Answer 79

• The closer the person is to the goal, the more frustrating it is to have the goal blocked & thus greater the likelihood of aggression
• Ex: when waiting in long line, people nearer to the ticket window are more likely than people at the back of the line to be aggressive towards a person cutting in line
• Aggression more likely to result from arbitrary vs. non-arbitrary frustration
  Ex: Is your progress toward the goal blocked for a good reason or on a whim?

Question 80

Why is physical pain associated with aggression?

Answer 80

• Studies in non-human animals (e.g., rats, monkeys, cats, even turtles) show that physical pain is a powerful elicitor of aggression
• Pain often signals the presence of a serious, proximate threat to survival (acts like an alarm system)
• In some cases, you may be able to flee the threat—but often fighting is your best chance
• Thus, pain triggers a defensive state that may facilitate survival
• However, can also lead to aggression against those who are not the source of the pain

Question 81

What’s psychological pain?

Answer 81

Unpleasant emotional state experienced when we miss out on some valued reward, such as when we
* Get smaller reward than expected
* Don’t get the reward at all
* Barrier placed between individual and
reward

Question 82

What’s social pain theory?

Answer 82

Experiencing aversive emotional reaction to experiences of social loss (e.g., breakups or bereavement), rejection, ostracism (being left out), or relational devaluation (feeling less valued as romantic partner, friend, etc. than you might want)
- Explained by some overlap in the brain mechanisms involved in processing both physical and social pain

Question 83

Identify the brain regions related to processing social pain

Answer 83

• Pain experience can be divided into two, dissociable components
• Sensory-discriminative component: what, where, how intense is it?
• Involves primary somatosensory cortex (strip of parietal lobe containing a “map” of your body)
• Affective component: how unpleasant is it?
• Involves dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula
• The affective component of pain gives it its motivational force:
• Captures attention (alarm system)
• Motivates action

Question 84

Why does aggression often occur in response to social rejection?

Answer 84

• Because of the many evolutionary advantages to being integrated into groups, social rejection came to activate a threat defense system that involves fight-or-flight, cardiovascular arousal
• Like physical pain, experience of social pain may contribute to a defensive stance that promotes aggression
• By-product of tapping into a defensive system designed to deal with threat in general
• Pain may activate aggressive impulses fairly automatically—similar to crying urge

Question 85

Summarize the research on rejection and aggression

Answer 85

• People who report a chronic sense of rejection are more likely to act aggressively in their romantic relationships, even resorting to physical abuse (Dutton, 2002)
• People who were led to imagine a lonely, socially rejected future were more likely than control participants to administer unpleasant noise blasts to strangers who had nothing to do with the participant’s rejection (Twenge, Baumeister, Tice, & Stucke, 2001)

Question 86

What are real-world implications of the effect of social rejection on aggression?

Answer 86

• Intimate partner violence: Abusers’ perceptions or fears of rejection may escalate violence
• Mass shootings: Common theme is experienced or perceived bullying, feelings of ostracization

Question 87

Explain why hot weather is associated with increased aggression

Answer 87

• People are aroused by the heat, but they are often unaware of the extent to which hot weather is the source of their arousal
• When they encounter circumstances that prompt anger, they attribute their arousal to that person, and this misplaced annoyance gives rise to amplified feelings of anger, which can lead to aggression
• Could result from misattributed arousal or from excitation transfer theory
  Ex: getting aggressive with partner because too hot

Question 88

Provide research evidence of hot weather being associated with increased aggression

Answer 88

• Violent (but not nonviolent) crimes more frequent in hottest regions of countries & during hottest time of year (Anderson et al., 1989)
• Baseball pitchers more likely to hit batters with the ball as the weather gets hotter (Reifman et al., 1991)
• Road rage higher on hotter days relative to cooler days (Kenrick & MacFarlane, 1986)

Question 89

What’s the cognitive neoassociation theory?

Answer 89

• Aggressive thoughts, emotions, and behavioural tendencies are linked together in memory in networks
• When one concept or node is activated, this activation spreads to related concepts and increases their activation as well

Question 90

What’s misattributed arousal?

Answer 90

Ascribing arousal resulting from one source to a different source

Question 91

What’s the excitation transfer theory?

Answer 91

Leftover arousal caused by an initial event can intensify emotional reactions to a second event

Question 92

What’s the weapons effect?

Answer 92

The presence of a weapon, mixed with an already angered state could make people more aggressive

Question 93

Describe the study by Berkowitz et al. (1968) on the weapons effect

Answer 93

• First manipulation: Participants are given either small or large number of electric shocks, then given a chance to retaliate against person who shocked them
• Second manipulation:
• Handgun on the table
• Badminton racquet on the table
• Nothing on the table
• Participants gave confederate more shocks if there was a handgun on the table, especially if they had been angered (or shocked) first

Question 94

Describe how exposure to media and video game violence is related to aggression

Answer 94

• Weapons effect (frequent activation of a concept results in it becoming more chronically accessible)
• Learning of aggressive scripts (how to respond aggressively to aggressive situations)
• Exposure to violent video games can:
  1. increase aggressive behavior
  2. reduce prosocial, positive behavior
  3. increase aggressive thoughts
  4. increase aggressive emotions, especially anger
  5. increase blood pressure and heart rate, two physiological responses associated with fighting

Question 95

What are examples of how exposure to media and video game violence is related to aggression

Answer 95

• Watching aggressive films has been found to make juvenile delinquents confined in a minimum-security prison more aggressive
• Watching aggressive films has been found to make male college students apply more intense shocks to a female confederate when made to feel angry
• Watching videos that were violently pornographic, made males more strongly endorse aggression against women

Question 96

What’s the social learning theory?

Answer 96

We learn aggressive behaviours by observing others
Ex: Children mimic an adult’s aggressive behaviour without being instructed to do so (e.g. bobo doll study)

Question 97

How do social and cultural factors influence aggression?

Answer 97

• Our social environment and broader culture shape our schemas of our social world, construals, & gives us scripts for how to behave in certain situations
• Can teach us to amplify or suppress our aggressive tendencies in given contexts

Question 98

What’s vicarious reinforcement?

Answer 98

An increase in a behavior due to the observer witnessing the model being reinforced for that behavior

Question 99

What’s vicarious punishment?

Answer 99

A decrease in a behavior due to the observer witnessing the model being punished for that behavior

Question 100

Describe how differences in aggression between men and women can be
explained from a gender socialization perspective

Answer 100

• Starting early in life, men are socialized to value and exhibit dominant aggressive behaviour while women are socialized to value and exhibit empathy & compassion
• Mothers talk more about emotions with their daughters than with their sons, and such conversations may cultivate greater empathy in women
• The one emotion mothers don’t talk more about with their daughters is anger, which mothers are more likely to mention in labeling the emotions of their sons
• Startled baby more likely to be seen as angry if male, fearful if female

Question 101

What kind of aggression do women exhibit most?

Answer 101

• Relational/emotional aggression: harm is caused through damage to social relationships or social status, rather than through physical injury
• Thought to be influenced by social norms

Question 102

What are cultures of honour?

Answer 102

• Characterized by:
  1) strong concerns about one’s own reputation, as well as the reputation of one’s ingroup
  2) willingness to defend one’s honour after injury or insult
• Prevalent in U.S. South
• Thought to derive from history as herders
• More likely to respond with anger and aggression to insult
• More accepting of violence in the defence of one’s honour

Question 103

Why is aggression more common in cultures of honour?

Answer 103

• It’s thought that is has to do with their history as herders
• Herders are susceptible to losing their entire wealth in an instant if someone steals their animals
• Farmers, in contrast, are susceptible to no such rapid and catastrophic loss, at least not at the hands of another person
• The vulnerability of the herder means he has to develop a tough exterior and make it clear he’s willing to take a stand against the slightest threat, even an insult or a joke at his expense

Question 104

How can personality shape propensity toward aggression?

Answer 104

• Personality can be thought of as the sum of a person’s knowledge structures (schemas, scripts, etc.)
• Certain types of people may be more likely to aggress because of tendency toward hostile, negative attributions, construals, & expectations
• Certain traits may make people more sensitive to certain kinds of threats (e.g. Narcissism and Rejection sensitivity)

Question 105

Explain why people high in rejection sensitivity may be prone to
aggression in certain contexts

Answer 105

• These people create an automatic link between rejection and aggression-related cognitions
• They’re quicker to respond to words like “hit” after being primed with words like “abandon”
• Perceived or anticipated rejection triggers aggressive responses,

Question 106

What’s rejection sensitivity?

Answer 106

• Dispositional tendency to anxiously expect, readily perceive, and strongly react to social rejection
• Social experiences are filtered through prior expectations
• Perceive intentional rejection in ambiguous behaviour of others (negative construals)
• Vicious cycle: perceived or anticipated rejection triggers aggressive responses, which are likely to elicit rejection from close others

Question 107

Describe how genes may interact with the environment to shape propensity toward
aggression

Answer 107

• Aggression is a highly complex behaviour, with no single gene acting as a determinant
• Genetic & situational factors interact to predict aggressive behaviour
• Ex: MAOA gene & childhood environment interact to predict aggressive & criminal behaviour in men
• Differential susceptibility hypothesis: a gene that leads to negative outcome in negative social circumstances may also lead to positive outcome in positive social circumstances

Question 108

What’s dehumanization, how does it contribute to aggression and when is it likely to occur?

Answer 108

• Stripping of other people of human characteristics by attributing nonhuman characteristics to them
• Dehumanization can unleash aggression as it’s easier to harm people when they seem less human, less like ourselves
• Factor that increases likelihood of dehumanization is loyalty to valued social groups (social connection) -> when we feel strongly committed to a group, whether a political party, an ethnic group, or a sports team, we are more likely to dehumanize outgroup members

Question 109

What are the factors that may inhibit reappraisal following provocation?

Answer 109

When insufficient cognitive resources are available:
* Fatigue, cognitive overload, lack of sleep
* Alcohol
* Potentially diet
* Biological factors (e.g., prefrontal cortex damage—Phineas Gage)
* Some strong threats (e.g., physical or social pain) may make it more difficult
to reappraise because they shift us into a highly reactive, defensive state

Question 110

What is an example of an initial automatic appraisal and a deliberate reappraisal after being provoked?

Answer 110

• “He’s such a jerk!” (initial automatic appraisal)
• “He just had a bad day” (more deliberate reappraisal)

Question 111

What’s altruism?

Answer 111

• Motivation to increase another person’s welfare (“other- concern”)
• Prosocial behavior that benefits others without regard to consequences for oneself
• Altruistic acts arise out of feelings of compassion that lead us to behave in ways that benefit others who are suffering, often at a cost to ourselves

Question 112

What’s egoism?

Answer 112

motivation to increase one’s own welfare (“self-concern”)

Question 113

What’s the social exchange theory and how does it relate to helping?

Answer 113

• Social interactions are guided by a (not always conscious) cost-benefit analysis
• Strive to maximize benefits while minimizing costs
• What are the costs of helping vs. the benefits of helping (or costs of not helping)?

Question 114

What are benefits of helping?

Answer 114

• May involve tangible rewards (e.g., material goods, money)
• Could enhance our self-esteem, which is strongly tied to social approval (sociometer theory)
• Social rewards like praise, positive attention, gratitude
• Being positively evaluated by others leads to activation in same parts of the striatum as monetary rewards
• Most eager to help people whose approval we desire -> attractive people more likely to be helped
• More altruistic individuals are more sexually desirable, have more sex partners, and have more sex within relationships

Question 115

What are costs of helping?

Answer 115

• Cost of time, energy, resources, risk of physical injury
• Less likely to help in situations where we have to confront feelings of disgust or aversion
• Fears of embarrassment if we misconstrued the situation or if we do the wrong thing

Question 116

Describe Piliavin & Piliavin’s (1972) subway study about helping

Answer 116

Participants were less likely to help a person who had collapsed in the subway if he had blood trickling out of his mouth

Question 117

What are the costs of not helping?

Answer 117

• Negative state relief hypothesis
• Feeling distress for situation where person needs help

Question 118

What’s the negative state relief hypothesis?

Answer 118

• People help others in order to reduce their own distress
• See person collapse on the metro -> experience distress -> alleviate that distress by helping the person
• Still driven by egoistic motives

Question 119

What’s the role that guilt and
personal distress may play in helping?

Answer 119

• Distress and guilt increase chances of helping someone out of motive for reducing such negative feelings
• People helping out of distress or feeling guilty for not helping are doing it to alleviate their negative feelings and hence their motive for helping is driven by egoistic motives

Question 120

Describe the influence of social norms on helping

Answer 120

• Often help not because we want to, but because we know we ought to
• That sense of ought comes from social norms -> culturally inculcated standards for how we should behave
• Ex: social responsibility norm
• What happens when we don’t live up to those oughts = self-discrepancy theory (feel guilty, tense)

Question 121

What’s the social responsibility norm and when are we more or less likely to abide by it?

Answer 121

• Norm that states that we should help those who need help, even if they cannot reciprocate
• More likely to apply social responsibility norm in situations where the victim’s hardship is not perceived as the consequence of their own actions
• Won’t help in situations where we feel the norms don’t apply
• The attributions we make are an important in determining whether we will or won’t help

Question 122

Describe the study by Piliavin et al. (1969) on the social responsibility norm

Answer 122

• Collapse on the subway study
• When target carried a cane, people helped 90% of the time
• When target appeared to be drunk, people helped less than 20% of the time

Question 123

Describe Batson’s empathy-altruism model

Answer 123

• People are driven to help by empathy—their ability to understand and relate to the experiences of the other person
• Helping will depend on how much one empathizes with the victim
• When empathy is low, one will help when benefits outweigh the costs
• When empathy is high, one will help even at cost to oneself

Question 124

What’s the experimental evidence for
the existence of empathic concern?

Answer 124

• Study by Fultz, Batson, Fortenbach, McCarthy, & Varney (1986)
• Participants were told they’d interact with another participant of the same sex (actually a confederate of the experiment), who would complete several trials of a digit-recall task and receive a shock after each mistake
• Participants who mostly felt egoistic distress and could escape the situation took few shocks on behalf of the confederate. Those participants who felt empathic concern, however, volunteered to take more shocks, even when they could leave the study
• Batson’s research shows that feelings of empathic concern and sympathy increase the likelihood that people will act altruistically, helping those who suffer

Question 125

What’s empathic concern?

Answer 125

• “other-oriented” feelings of sympathy and concern for the other
• the feeling people experience when identifying with someone in need, accompanied by the intention to enhance the other person’s welfare
• this experience of empathic concern is fast and intuitive and produces selfless or other-oriented altruism

Question 126

What are the components that comprise empathy?

Answer 126

• Personal distress
• Empathic concern

Question 127

What’s personal distress?

Answer 127

“self-oriented” feelings of personal anxiety and distress

Question 128

When would we be more likely to empathize with someone?

Answer 128

• When we are closer to them and are more likely to incorporate them into our sense of self
• When that person is in distress/pain

Question 129

What’s kin selection?

Answer 129

• Propensity to help genetic relatives, thus furthering their survival and reproductive success
• By helping relatives survive, people help their own genes pass to future generations
• Likelihood of helping tied to closeness of genetic relationship (those who share more of their genes): more likely to help parents or siblings than uncles/aunts or cousins & identical twins more likely to help each other than fraternal twins

Question 130

What 2 factors can describe the evolutionary perspective on helping & cooperation?

Answer 130

• Kin selection -> across many cultures, people report receiving more help from close kin than from more distant relatives or non-relatives
• Reciprocal altruism -> reduces the likelihood of dangerous conflict, helps overcome problems arising from scarce resources, and offers a basis for people to form alliances and constrain more dominant individuals

Question 131

What’s reciprocal altruism?

Answer 131

Helping other people with the expectation that they’ll help in return at some other time

Question 132

What’s the prisoner’s dilemma game?

Answer 132

• A type of economic game
• Situation involving payoffs to 2 people who must decide whether to cooperate or defect
• Trust & cooperation lead to higher joint payoffs than mistrust and defection
• To maximize your own self-interest, the best, or “rational,” choice is to defect
• If both of you cooperate, you’ll each receive $5. If both of you defect, you’ll each get $2. If one cooperates and the other defects, the defector will receive $8 and the cooperator will not receive anything

Question 133

What’s reputation in cooperation?

Answer 133

• Reputation refers to the collective beliefs, evaluations, and impressions about an individual’s character that develop within a group or social network
• Studies of people at work find that they quickly develop reputations for being good citizens (cooperators) or “bad apples” (defectors) and that these reputations spread through the organization and persist over time
• Ex for prisoners dilemma study:
• Participants are told before the game what the reputation of their partner is
• Participants readily cooperate and give resources to an interaction partner who has a reputation for cooperation
• Participants will defect and won’t give resources to a partner known to be greedy

Question 134

What’s the role of construal processes in cooperation?

Answer 134

• The way we explicitly label situations could influence levels of competition and cooperation
• Ex for prisoners dilemma study:
• Half the participants were told they were going to play the “Wall Street” game, and the other half were told it was the “community” game
• Those playing the community game cooperated on the opening round twice as often as those playing the Wall Street game
• The Wall Street label made the participants adopt a perspective that made maximizing their own profits paramount
• The community label increased the appeal of maximizing the participants’ joint outcomes

Question 135

What’s the tit-for-tat strategy for the prisonner’s dilemma game and how does it encourage cooperation?

Answer 135

• Strategy where the player’s first move is cooperative, and thereafter, the player mimics the opponent’s behaviour, whether cooperative or competitive
• Encourages cooperation through encouraging mutually supportive action toward a shared goal and someone using this strategy can do very well without resorting to competition

Question 136

What’s the bystander effect?

Answer 136

Finding that people are less likely to help in the presence of other bystanders

Question 137

How does noticing the presence of other people inhibit helping during the three stages of the response to an emergency?

Answer 137

1. Noticing the Emergency -> people notice emergencies quicker when alone than when in groups (we tend to notice things less when in a group as we’re focused on looking away from people and not looking around)
2. Interpreting the emergency -> pluralistic ignorance
3. Assuming responsibility -> diffusion of responsibility

Question 138

What are the 3 stages of the response to an emergency?

Answer 138

1. Noticing the Emergency
2. Interpreting the emergency
3. Assuming responsibility

Question 139

What’s pluralistic ignorance?

Answer 139

• failure to realize that others are thinking and feeling the same thing we are
• when we’re in an ambiguous situation, we look to others to make sense or come to a conclusion about the situation
• if we assume no one thinks there’s an emergency like we do, then we’ll be less likely to react as though there is an emergency

Question 140

What’s diffusion of responsibility?

Answer 140

• People are less likely to take responsibility for helping when there are other people around who could help
• Assumption that the others will intervene

Question 141

What’s the Good Samaritan study and what does it tells us about helping?

Answer 141

• Study by Darley & Batson (1973)
• Demonstration of the power of the situation
• Participants were male seminary students, who were asked to give a talk about either the Good Samaritan parable (norm salient condition) or on topic unrelated to helping
• Some participants told they were late (high hurry condition), others simply told to walk over
• They then encounter individual slumped over in the alley
• Participants who don’t feel rushed helped
• Helping: people have competing responsibilities that may interfere with their ability to help

Question 142

Describe how situational factors relate to differences in helping in urban vs. rural settings

Answer 142

• Stimulus overload in urban areas: narrow focus and attention and what circumstances you recognize as having a claim on your thoughts, feelings, and actions. Too many inputs, so you shut down a bit and are less likely to attend to the needs of others and less likely to act altruistically
• More people in urban areas which increases likelihood for diffusion of responsibility
• Diversity hypothesis: more willing to help a member of your ingroup vs outgroup -> rural areas tend to be representative of one group whereas urban areas are much more diverse
• In rural settings, people’s actions are more likely to be observed by people who know them and who can comment on their reputation to others

Question 143

What’s the biomedical model?

Answer 143

• Rooted in the idea that mind and body are distinct, separable entities (mind-body dualism)
• Medicine looks to bodily factors, rather than the mind, for explanations of health and disease
• Appeared about 300 years ago and was the dominant model in the west

Question 144

What’s the biopsychosocial model?

Answer 144

• A model of health that considers the effects of biological, psychological, and social factors on health and illness
• Biopsychosocial model arised in the 21st century
• Narrowing the bridging between mind-body gap

Question 145

Why do zebras not get ulcers (and other stress-related diseases) while we do?

Answer 145

• We have everyday stress
• Zebras get stressed about acute threats to their lives, such as a lion
• What separates us from animals and zebras is our highly developed prefrontal cortex that allows us to think about the future
• Simply thinking about stressful events and imagining stressful situations can trigger stress
• Emotional disturbances, or “stress”, can have a negative impact on our health, causing or exacerbating chronic disease

Question 146

What’s rumination and why is it a problem?

Answer 146

• The tendency to think about an event repeatedly
• To anticipate and dwell on potential and past experiences, prolonging our stress
• Caused by our highly developed prefrontal cortex
• Can lead to stress-induced diseases and a lot of stress-related disease can be attributed to the fact we frequently activate physiological systems designed for acute emergencies, keeping them turned on for months or years at a time worrying about grades, relationships, money, etc.

Question 147

How did Hans Selye’s work contribute to our understanding of stress?

Answer 147

• Rats injected with hormone developed peptic ulcers, greatly enlarged adrenal glands, shrunken immune tissues -> this was actually due to environmental stressors
• He postulated that the body mounts a similar set of responses (general adaptation syndrome; what we now call stress) to a broad array of stressors
• Stress is “the nonspecific response of the body to any demand” (Selye, 1976)
• These responses mobilize the organism for action; but if stressors go on for too long, they can make you sick

Question 148

What neural regions serve as a neural alarm system and project (send their signals) to the hypothalamus?

Answer 148

• Dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC)
• Anterior insula (AI)
• Amygdala

Question 149

What’s the role of the hypothalamus in the stress response?

Answer 149

• Plays a key role in coordinating motivated behaviours required for
  survival, including the fight-or-flight response
• Receives input from a set of regions that serve as a ‘neural alarm system’
• The hypothalamus initiates sympathetic nervous system arousal

Question 150

What’s the sympathetic nervous system pathway and how does it enables organisms to deal with stressors?

Answer 150

• “Sympathizes with our need to fight or flee danger”
• A physiological system that governs the body’s immediate response to a stressful event, enabling the ability to fight or flee
• Stimulates a part of of the adrenal glands, which secrete chemical messengers including epinephrine
• Leads to increased blood pressure, heart rate, sweating

Question 151

What’s the role of the parasympathetic nervous system?

Answer 151

• The “brake pedal”
• Acts antagonistically to the sympathetic nervous system
• Once the emergency has passed, restores the body to a normal state, allowing resources to be devoted to life-sustaining processes such as digestion and growth

Question 152

Describe the order of processing a stressful event through the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis pathway

Answer 152

Stressful event -> Amygdala -> Hypothalamus -> Pituitary gland -> Adrenal Glands (in kidneys) -> Cortisol release

Question 153

Describe the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis pathway

Answer 153

• Hypothalamus initiates a chemical cascade that stimulates pituitary gland (the “master” gland)
• Hormone released by the pituitary stimulate a different part of the adrenal glands, which in turn releases hormones including cortisol

Question 154

What does cortisol do?

Answer 154

• Mobilizes sugar for fuel
• Increases heart rate & blood pressure
• Directs attention toward threat
• Contributes to formation of “flashbulb memories” in hippocampus
• Suppresses the immune system, keeping resources available for metabolically demanding fight-or-flight behavior

Question 155

What are the effects of chronic/prolonged stress on the cardiovascular system?

Answer 155

Chronic activation of the sympathetic system & HPA axis can lead to the buildup of plaque
on arterial walls, which increases risk of a heart attack

Question 156

What are the effects of chronic/prolonged stress on the immune system?

Answer 156

• Prolonged experiences of stress
  compromise the immune system
• When participants were exposed to a cold virus, those reported experiencing chronic stressors were more likely to develop a cold in response to the virus (Cohen et al., 1998)
• Stress can slow down wound healing
• While cortisol normally inhibits inflammation, prolonged stress can result in increased glucocorticoid resistance of immune cells, leading to heightened inflammation
• Immune cells become incapable of “listening” to cortisol
• Prolonged elevation of the inflammatory response implicated in a large number of diseases, including depression, cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease

Question 157

What are the two factors that have been identified as the key ingredients of events that people find stressful?

Answer 157

• Uncontrollability
• Social-evaluative threat (possibility that the self could be negatively judged by others)

Question 158

What’s the primary appraisal for stressful events?

Answer 158

• A person’s perception of the demands or challenges of a given situation
• Is the event positive, negative, or neutral?
• If negative, to what extent is it harmful, threatening for the future,
  or challenging?

Question 159

What’s the secondary appraisal for stressful events?

Answer 159

• A person’s perception of his or her ability to deal with the demands of a given situation
• Are coping abilities and resources sufficient to deal with and overcome the harm, threat, or challenge posed by the event?

Question 160

What’s the Tier Social Stress (TSST)?

Answer 160

• Lab paradigm for inducing physiological and psychological stress
• Consists of interview speech given in front of panel of judges, followed by surprise mental math task
• Judges remain impassive, withhold feedback
• Uncontrollability -> In TSST: lack of social feedback, surprise math task
• Social-evaluative threat -> Tasks with a social evaluative component associated with an effect size 3X as large as effect size for tasks without such a component

Question 161

What’s the stress appraisal theory?

Answer 161

• Appraisals of an event and our role in it shape our emotional experience of the event, and our physiological reactions to it
• This theory postulates that stress is what happens when the demands of the situation exceed our ability to cope
• The subjective experience of stress results from the balancing of primary and secondary appraisals

Question 162

When is perceived stress likely to be high?

Answer 162

• When the primary appraisal of the situation’s demands exceeds
  the secondary appraisal of your ability to meet those demands
• Ex: High harm/threat + low coping = substantial stress

Question 163

What’s the role that cognition plays in response to stressful events?

Answer 163

• Definition: the way we think about a situation
• Plays a major role in triggering, amplifying, and reducing stress responses

Question 164

What are positive illusions for coping with stress?

Answer 164

• Exaggerated perceptions of personal control
• Unrealistic optimism

Question 165

What’s the role that the illusion of control (exaggerated perceptions of personal control) plays in response to stressful events?

Answer 165

• People who feel less control over stressful events are at a greater risk for depression
• Perceptions of control positively associated with more adaptive patterns of physiological responses to stressors
• Ex: more favourable outcomes in cancer patients and longevity in nursing home patients
• Sense of control over stressor can change appraisal from threat to challenge
• Mere sense of having control can attenuate the impact of the stressor
• Can also foster problem-focused coping—active attempts to modify or eliminate the stressor
• In some cases, may be able to remove the source of the stress

Question 166

What’s the role that optimism plays in response to stressful events?

Answer 166

• Dispositional optimism is characterized by generalized positive expectations for the future
• Less cortisol reactivity to stressors
• Less likely to develop cold symptoms after exposure to cold virus
• Show better recovery post surgery and cancer treatment
• Optimism training intervention in patients with heart disease -> improvements in cardiac health
• Like illusion of control, fosters persistence, motivation, & performance
• Improves social functioning

Question 167

What’s physical/objective social isolation?

Answer 167

When someone is physically isolated from people and social situations

Question 168

What’s subjective sense of
social isolation/loneliness?

Answer 168

When someone feels isolated and lonely despite being surrounded by people

Question 169

How do physical/objective social isolation and subjective sense of loneliness relate to health?

Answer 169

• Loneliness is strongly associated with heightened risk of morbidity (sick) and mortality
• Subjective feelings of loneliness are at least as strong, and potentially even stronger, predictor of health outcomes as objective isolation

Question 170

Why may loneliness be related to negative health outcomes?

Answer 170

• Evolutionary perspective: safer in a group, more vulnerable when alone
• Consequently, when alone, enter ”self-preservation mode”:
• Hypervigilance for social threat, anxiety, hostility
• Increased sleep fragmentation
• Heightened HPA axis activity
• Altered immune gene expression & increased inflammation
• Depressive symptomatology
• Increased hypervigilance for social threat can make loneliness self-perpetuating (self-fulfilling prophecies, etc.)

Question 171

What’s social support?

Answer 171

The degree to which people believe they can turn to other people for information, help, advice, or comfort

Question 172

How does social support relate to health?

Answer 172

People who report having a larger and more supportive social network have:
- Lower blood pressure
- Lower levels of stress hormones
- Stronger immune systems
- Decreased likelihood to develop depression and other psychopathologies
- Increased lifespans

Question 173

What’s the role that oxytocin plays in social support/connection and health?

Answer 173

• A complex hormone, with different kinds of effects (including negative ones)
• It floats through the brain and bloodstream and fosters feelings of trust, love, and devotion
• It appears to play an anxiolytic function, reducing feelings of anxiety and inhibiting cortisol
• Oxytocin may appear when we feel socially supported

Question 174

What’s the role that that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex plays in social support/connection and health?

Answer 174

• Viewing pictures of attachment figures engages the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC)
• VMPFC responds to the absence (vs. presence) of threat & ‘safety cues’
• Inhibitory effect on threat-related neural regions (e.g., amygdala)
• Inhibits SNS and promotes PNS activity
• Inhibits cortisol release
• Our brain responds to lack/loss of social connection like it would to an existential threat
• Being the presence of close others contributes to the sense that the world is a safe place

Question 175

How can minority opinion influence majority opinion?

Answer 175

• When the minority opinion was consistent, it had both a direct effect on participants’ responses in the public setting and a latent effect on their subsequent private judgments
• Minority opinions can influence the majority through consistent and clear messages that persuade the majority to systematically examine and reevaluate its opinions
• The majority might wonder why the minority keeps stating its divergent opinion. This can lead the majority to consider the stimulus more carefully, resulting in a level of scrutiny and systematic thought that can produce genuine change in attitudes and beliefs
• Minorities have their effect primarily through informational social influence rather than through normative social influence

Question 176

What’s the norm of reciprocity?

Answer 176

• Cross-cultural norm dictating that people should provide benefits to those who have provided benefits to them (“you scratch my back, I scratch yours”)
• When someone does you a favor, you have an obligation to agree to any reasonable request that person might make in turn
• To fail to respond is to violate a powerful social norm and run the risk of social condemnation
• Emerges early in development (ex: 21-month-old infants more willing to help those who have tried to give them a toy)
• May feel obligated to comply with later request if first given a favour—even if it’s something small that we didn’t ask for -> this is how we can elicit compliance
• ”You should provide benefits to those who have provided benefits to you”

Question 177

Describe the study by Regan (1971) on the norm of reciprocity?

Answer 177

• Participants recruited for study on “aesthetics”
• Participated together with another ”participant” (in actuality, a confederate)
• Randomly assigned to 1 of 3 conditions:
• Favour: “I asked the experimenter if I could go get myself a Coke, and he said it was OK, so I bought one for you, too”
• No favour control condition
• Irrelevant favour (experimenter gives Participants Cokes)
• Confederate later makes a request to purchase raffle tickets
• Those in the favour condition were more likely to purchase more tickets

Question 178

What are real-world examples where we see the norm of reciprocity?

Answer 178

• Solicitations for donations more successful when gift included
• Hare Krishnas handing out small gifts in airports
• Businesses and other organizations often precede their request with a small gift
• Insurance agents give out calendars or return-address labels
• Marketers who want us to complete a survey send it along with a dollar
• Cult members offer a flower before giving their pitch

Question 179

What’s the door-in-the-face technique?

Answer 179

• A compliance approach where the target request is preceded by a more extreme request that is likely to be get rejected
• The technique doesn’t work when the two requests are made by different individuals. In that case, the second, smaller request isn’t seen as a concession, but rather an entirely separate request by a different person, so the person being asked doesn’t feel the same obligation

Question 180

Describe the study by Cialdini et al. (1975) on the door-in-the-face technique

Answer 180

• Asked individual students if they would be willing to chaperone a group of juvenile delinquents on a trip to the zoo (83 percent, refused)
• Second group of students who had first encountered a much larger request. They were first asked whether they would be willing to counsel juvenile delinquents for 2 hours a week for the next two years! Not surprisingly, all of them refused, at which point they were asked about chaperoning the trip to the zoo
• Fifty percent of these students agreed to chaperone—triple the rate of the other group

Question 181

How may reciprocal concessions contribute to the
effectiveness of the door-in-the-face technique?

Answer 181

People may see the second favour as a concession that needs to be honoured since they denied the first one and so they will be most likely to accept the second moderate favour

Question 182

How does the study by Cialdini et al. (1975) show that reciprocal concessions contribute to the
effectiveness of the door-in-the-face technique?

Answer 182

The pressure participants felt to comply to what was perceived as a concession (chaperone one trip to the zoo rather than provide counsel for the next two years) increased their likelihood to comply to the second request

Question 183

What’s the foot-in-the-door technique?

Answer 183

People are more likely to comply with a larger request if they have already complied with a smaller initial request

Question 184

Describe the studies by Freedman & Fraser (1966) on the door-in-the-face technique

Answer 184

• Walked around suburban neighbourhoods, randomly assigning households to 1 of 2 conditions:
• 1) Asked to first comply with small request, then, 3 days later, larger related request
• Participants more than twice as likely to agree to the large request (giving a group of strangers permission to snoop around their house for 2 hours) if they had previously agreed to a smaller request (answering a few questions about the kinds of soaps they used)
  OR
• Participants were more likely to comply with a request to put a big, ugly sign (“Drive Carefully”) on their front lawn if they had previously agreed to put a small sign in their window

Question 185

What are real-world examples where we see the foot-in-the-door technique?

Answer 185

Charities often first ask for very small donations, then later ask for bigger donations

Question 186

What are the effects of mood on compliance?

Answer 186

• Both positive and (some) negative moods can increase rates of compliance
• Our mood colours how we interpret events
• We are more likely to view requests for favors as less intrusive and less threatening when we’re in a good mood
• People want to maintain a positive mood so they agree more easily (mood maintenance)
• It feels good to say yes
• Inducing positive mood only effective at increasing compliance with a request if the request is not incompatible with the positive mood state
• Negative state relief hypothesis: the idea that people engage in certain actions, such as agreeing to a request, to relieve their negative feelings and feel better about themselves
• Strong positive association between guilt and compliance

Question 187

What are norm-based approaches for eliciting compliance and distinguish between descriptive and prescriptive norms?

Answer 187

• Norm-based appeals: Letting people know what others are doing also can be used to increase compliance
• Based on the power of social norms
• Appeal to both the head and heart
• Descriptive norms: the behaviour exhibited by most
  people in a given context
• Prescriptive norms: the way a person is supposed to behave in a given context; also called injunctive norm
• If descriptive norm conflicts with prescriptive norm, technique can backfire

Question 188

What were the general procedures, the percentage of participants who went to the end (roughly), and the take-away message of the studies

Answer 188

• Learner is strapped into chair & electrodes are attached to his wrist
• Set of switches ranging from 15 to 450 volts
• Shock level increased (at 15 volt increments) with every wrong answer
  ● As experiment progresses, the learner screams that he is pain, demands to be let out of the experiment, and eventually stops making any sounds
  ● Experimenter tells participant that he “must go on”; tells them to treat non- responses like wrong answer
• A bit more than 60% of participants gave the maximum amount of voltage (450V)
• Message: ”Normal” people can be made to commit harmful acts in the name of obedience and power of situation

Question 189

What were the factors (identified in subsequent research) that made disobedience more likely?

Answer 189

• Immediacy of the victim: as the learner became more present (increased feedback and proximity), the rate of obedience decreased (tuning in the learner)
• Experimenter gives orders over the telephone; experimenter has lower status; experimenter is contradicted by another experimenter
• Embarrassment of having to walk out with the learner
• Reluctance of hurting others

Question 190

What were the factors (identified in subsequent research) that made obedience more likely?

Answer 190

• Feeling of responsibility for one’s actions is transferred to other people (e.g. to the experimenter who seems to know what he’s doing)
• Step-by-Step Involvement: each increment is only 15 volts, so each one seems like a small step
• Immediacy of the victim: victim less present
• Experimenter gives orders over the telephone; experimenter has lower status; experimenter is contradicted by another experimenter
• Ineffective disobedience: not enough experience with disobeying (not good at it)

Question 191

What’s the reactance theory?

Answer 191

• People experience an unpleasant state of arousal when they believe their free will is threatened, and they often act to reduce this discomfort by reasserting their prerogatives
• Reactance theory predicts that the moment you feel your freedom is being taken away, it becomes more precious and your desire to maintain it increases