psyc 263 Flashcards
(49 cards)
The Adaptive Unconscious:
The part of our brain that leaps towards conclusions
Adaptive unconscious sizes up world, warns of us dangers, sets goals and initiates actions
Factors determining marital stability and what is the most important predictor of marital
stability:
a mix of personal, relational, and external influences. 4 critical negative
predictors: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt
The quality of communication is the strongest predictor of marital stability.
positive and negative emotion independent of what is said…interactions that appear positive can actually be very negative
Fists:
distinctive patterns
Friends vs. Strangers judgment of you (Samuel Gosling’s studies):
Uses the Big 5 inventory to study personality
– Extraversion
– Agreeableness
– Conscientiousness
– Emotional Stability
– Openness to new experiences
Friends describe us accurately. Overall, strangers rate us better than our friends do
Factors influencing whether a doctor will be sued for medical malpractice:
Surgeons who have never been sued…
– Spend about 3 minutes more with each patient
– More likely to make orienting comments (first I’ll do this, then that)
– More likely to engage in active listening
– Importantly, however, no difference in quality of information/care given by those who have been sued relative to those who have not
The influence of conceptual priming on behavior (Bargh’s studies):
people’s behavior can be unconsciously influenced by subtle cues in their environment.
How the activation of stereotypes influence performance:
half of all subjects are asked to identify races (prime stereotypes of African Americans?)
* People asked about their race do half as well as subjects who weren’t
The Implicit Association Test:
We make connections more quickly between pairs of ideas that already related in our minds than we do pairs that are unfamiliar to us
Verbal Overshadowing:
Describing a face impairs your otherwise effortless ability to recognize a face
When forced to describe something you interfere with visual memory and moved your processing from the right to left hemisphere
Insight (what is it) and insight problems:
How the brain reorganizes information or breaks out of unhelpful thought patterns to reach a solution.
Insight problems demonstrate how mental blocks and fixed thinking patterns can make simple solutions hard to see—until insight breaks through
How choice influences consumer decision making:
Number and type of options people have can shape not only what they choose, but how they feel about the decision afterward
Coke vs. New Coke test— preferred old coke
Sensation Transference:
In consumer situations, appearance of label, container, etc. are highly important as people have implicit connections between certain thing
The influence of expertise on cognition:
Becoming highly skilled or knowledgeable in a particular area can change the way people think, remember, and solve problems. Experts don’t just know more facts—they actually process information differently than novices.
Food critics can often identify things about food that the general public never could
Why it is difficult to gage public reaction to new and different things:
People have a tendency to think of things that are different, as ugly
Influence of extreme arousal on cognition:
Bad things start to happen when the heart beats over 145
* Complex motor skills break down, doing something with one hand but not the other becomes difficult
Distinction between linguistics and psycholinguistics:
Linguists study the structure of language
Psycholinguists (psychologists) study language use
Learning-performance distinction: psycholinguists interested in language performance, linguists interested in language competency
The Four Levels of Language and what is represented at each level:
– Phonemic- a single speech sound that can be represented by a single symbol – is the basic unit of spoken language
– Syntactic- the rules that govern the operation of combining morphemes to produce words
– Semantic- When morphemes are combined in such a way as to convey meaning
– Pragmatic- Takes phonemics, syntactics, and semantics, and incorporates the concept
of intention into language
Ex: “Do you think you could have gotten here faster” means two different things when
said to a sprinter at the finish vs. the best man who’s late for your wedding
Transformational Grammar and the three items that comprise linguistic competence:
Recognized in his revised theory that most language is very similar beneath the surface and
that his grammar should place more emphasis on meaning
– Surface structure is the outward appearance of an utterance
– Deep structure is the underlying form (meaning) of an utterance
– Transformation rules can be used to change either surface or deep structure (meaning
can be realized in many different ways, no previous theory captured this idea)
How changes in surface structure vs. underlying meaning influence comprehension and
memory of written text
Consistent with Chomsky’s idea that deep structure is more important than surface structure
This doesn’t mean surface structure is never retained
Comprehension is a conscious process, so that we can be sensitive to the nuances of our environment
Swinney, and Seidenberg et al.’s studies of lexical access:
read a sentence
– “They need a new sink”
pronounce a probe word that follows
– right away, “tap” (related to noun) and “swim” (related to verb) are primed
– a little later, only “tap” is primed
lexical access of multiple word meanings probably occurs rapidly; selection of appropriate meanings follows shortly thereafter
Eye movements and reading comprehension:
Eye movement work confirms other behavioural results
Cirilo and Foss (1980) showed that people spend the most time at the beginning and end of passages, and less time on sentences in the middle
Garden path sentences: what are they?
sentences that start off in a way that leads the reader to interpret them one way, but then suddenly shift in meaning, forcing the reader to go back and re-read to understand them correctly.
“They lead you down the garden path”
Dyslexia and its characteristics:
Extreme difficulty in reading and in learning to read
General language comprehension problem
Familial and lifelong
Still intelligent as normals
The distinction between Broca’s aphasics and Wernicke’s aphasics:
Broca’s aphasia (also called anterior or expressive aphasia): results from a lesion—tissue destruction—in the left frontal cortex in the anterior region of the brain
- Broca’s aphasics have difficulty retrieving, holding (in STM) and working with words whether to produce or to understand speech
Wernicke’s (posterior) aphasia: result from lesions to the temporal or parietal cortex—the posterior region
Also called receptive or fluent aphasia because its victims have problems understanding, yet produce, fluid, meaningless utterance
