Ch.12

The conditions that make attitudes predictive of behavior.
The more specific the attitude toward something, the more predictive it is, such as liking a specific NFL team as opposed to football in general. Attitudes formed through direct experience also tend to predict behavior better. This condition explains why parenting a second child might be influenced, and therefore more predictable, by the first.
The difference between implicit and explicit attitudes.
Explicit attitudes are those you know about and can report to other people, such as stating things you like. Implicit attitudes are those that influence our feelings and behaviors at an unconscious level, such as confidence at something you have practiced.

The concept of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is when there is a contradiction between either two attitudes or an attitude and a behavior. When someone knows something is wrong but still does it, is an example of this concept.

Personal attributions and their implications. Personal attributions, also known as internal or dispositional attributions, are explanations that refer to things within people. It refers to internal characteristics such as traits, abilities, moods, efforts, etc. to explain an event or behavior.
Jigsaw classroom.
With the jigsaw classroom, interaction between not only individuals, but also groups occur. When a group is assigned a collective project upon a general topic, areas of this topic will be assigned to a specific person of a group like a job. The experts of the same job in all groups will then get together and collaborate and then return to their groups to relay the information. Thus the cooperation is twofold and the material is better learned.

What are attitudes and where do they come from? Discuss the following sources of attitudes: Familiarity and the mere exposure effect, Classical conditioning ,Operant Conditioning ,Socialization.

Attitudes are our evaluations of objects, events, or ideas. They are shaped by social context and play an important role in interaction and evaluation. In cases where we are more familiar to an item, they will generally have more positive attitudes toward it, because of the mere exposure effect. Attitudes can be conditioned classically by using positively stimuli to associate a neutral object with a positive attitude. By rewarding certain events or actions can create a positive attitude towards them through operant conditioning. Socialization also affects our attitudes by common practice and the bandwagon effect.

How can attitudes be changes? Consider discrepancies between attitudes and behavior, as well as persuasion. Research gathered in dissonance studies have shown that one way to get people to change their attitudes is to change their behavior. By justifying effort, it is shown that it is harder to absolve oneself from something that initially caused great dissonance therefore inflating importance and influencing attitude. In persuasion, a message is transmitted in order to change attitude. Further studies of persuasion have also found that more memorable and simplistic messages are often the most persuasive.
What are attributions, in general? How do attributions affect our impressions of others and of ourselves? Are our attributions accurate?
Attributions are people's explanations for events or actions. People make attributions to satisfy our basic need for order and predictability. The just world hypothesis is when we make attributions about a victim of a senseless crime. There are two main types of attributions, personal and situational. Personal attributions are explanations that refer to things within people, such as ability, mood, etc. Situational attributions are external factors, such as weather, accidents, other people, etc. Our explanations of other peoples' behavior overemphasizes their personality traits and underestimates the importance of the situation; this is called the fundamental attribution error. Because of the correspondence bias, people expect others' behaviors to correspond with their own beliefs and personalities.

What are stereotypes? How may they be self-fulfilling? How do they affect our behavior? Stereotypes are cognitive schemas that help us organize information about people on the basis of their membership in certain groups. Initially untrue stereotypes can become true through self-fulfilling prophecy, in which people come to behave in ways that confirm their own or others' expectations. Negative stereotypes can lead to prejudice and discrimination, whereas positive stereotypes may lead to pleasantness.
How can stereotypes and the associated prejudices be changed? what evidence do we have for effectiveness of various methods?
When people are prejudice, they have negative judgments about people based on their stereotypes. Shared superordinate goals reduce hostility between groups, because they require cooperation. Muzafer Sherif did a study where he took two groups of all white, 5th-grade boys to a camp. After the two groups had spent time getting to know the members within their respective groups, they then competed against each other in high-stakes athletics. This caused prejudice and mistreatment between the groups.

Ch.9

Discuss the charastics of motivation. How are motives related to needs, arousal, drives, homeostasis, and incentives?

Motivation is the area of psychological science concerned with the factors that energize, or stimulate, behavior. It focuses on what produces behavior. Motives are things that drive you to finish tasks. Motives are related to needs because if you need something you are motivated to do it. Its related to arousal because your mind is telling you that its good and you want it so that motivates you more to get it. Its related to drive because you are motivated to satisfy a need. Homeosasis is related to motivation because your body is always motivated to keep equilibrium. Motivation is related to incentives because your are more motivated if you get something in return.

Discuss intrinsic and extrinsic and how the latter can replace the former.

Intrinsic motivation is motivation to perform an activity because of the value or pleasure associated with that activity, rather than for an apparent external goal or purpose. Extrinsic motivation is motivation to perform an activity because of the external goals toward which that activity is directed.

Discuss at least two major adaptive roles of emotion.

Emotion is feelings that involve subjectives evaluation, psychological processes, and cognitive beleifs. Emotions are adaptive because they prepare and guide behaviors when needed to like running from an deadly animal.

Discuss the major types of emotion that people feel and how there types are realted to each other.

The major types of emotion that people feel are aroused, negative, not aroused, positive and neutral.These major types of emotions are realted because of the circumplex map of emotion shows how they are all related.

Discuss the role in emotion of the amgydala and the pre frontal cortex.

The frontal cortex when damaged the person loses all emotion pretty mauch and the pre frontal cortex controls many different types of emotion.

Negative feedback in motivation.

In the brain, the hypothalamus regulates the body in order to create a state of homeostasis. When a person is cold their brain will send signals to the skeletal muscles to shiver in an attempt to warm the body and the person will be motivated to put on a sweater

Evidence for an optimal level of arousal.

According to the Yerkes-Dodson law, people operate best with some arousal. People are motivated to seek an optimal level of arousal which is demonstrated by a parabola (inverted U). Too little arousal causes us to become bored and too much arousal can lead to anxiety.

How can we set goals that we are able to attain?

Good goals are those that are challenging, because they encourage effort, persistence, and concentration. Being specific when making your goals also helps. Knowing exactly what is desired to achieve may help breaking large goals into smaller steps that help build up toward reaching a goal.

How and why flavor variety motivates eating.

By having a variety of flavors and larger quantities of these varieties cause rats and humans to eat more, which typically leads to obesity. Because of sensory-specific satiety, animals will stop eating quickly when they have just one type of food to eat. The part of the frontal lobe that assesses reward value of food increases activity when new foods are presented.

The hormones that affect sexual motivation.
Females and males have all the sexual hormones. Males have a higher level of androgen and females have more estrogen and progesterone. Testosterone is an androgen that drives sexual behavior. Oxytocin is another important hormone that is released during sexual arousal and orgasm, and is believed to promote feelings of love and attachment between partners.

Ch.8

Discuss representations and how they are used in thought. What kinds are there in general? How do they differ from each other? What evidence indicates their use in thought?

a. For the most part our thoughts are adaptive. We develop rules for making fast decision’s. The general kinds of representations are analogical representation which is a mental representation that has some of the physical characteristics of an object; it is analogous to the object. The second is symbolic representation which is an abstract mental representation that does not correspond to the physical features of an object or data. Evidence that indicates their thought is analogical corresponds to geographical layouts, and family trees. Symbolic indicates abstract and do not have relationships to physical qualities of objects in the world.

Discuss expected utility theory and how its limitations are shown by the evidence that people use heuristics in decision making and are influenced by framing effects.

Expected utility theory is one normative model of how humans should make decisions. In examining how people make everyday decisions, Tcersky and Kahneman identified several heuristics, the mental short cuts or rules of thumb that people typically use to make decisions. Framing is the effect of presentation on how information is perceived. Framing a decision to emphasize the potential losses or potential gains of at least one alternative can significantly influence the decision making

Discuss how goals are involved in problem solving and at least two strategies that people use for reaching their goals

To solve the problem, the person must use knowledge to determine how to move from the current state to the goal state, often by devising strategies to overcome obstacles. How the person thinks about the problem can help or hinder that person’s ability to find solutions. One strategy is organization of subgoals, using subgoals is important for many problems. Imagine a high school senior has decided she would like to become a doctor. To achieve this goal, she needs first to attain the more immediate subgoals of being admitted to a good college. To get into a good college, she needs to earn good grades in high school. The other is sudden insight sometimes as you stand there pondering the problem, a solution will pop into your head. How does this happen? Insight is the metaphorical mental light bulb that goes on in someone’s head when he or she suddenly realizes the solution to a problem.

Distinguish the three major approaches to intelligence and one major finding from each.

General intelligence, in sense, providing a single IQ score reflects the idea that one general factor underlies intelligence. Although most psychological scientists agree that some form of g exists, they also recognize that intelligence comes in various forms. Fluid intelligence, it is often assessed in nonverbal, more culture-fair intelligence tests. Crystallized intelligence, crystallized intelligence is likely aided by a strong fluid intelligence.

Discuss the concept of general intelligence, fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence and how they are studied.

General intelligence is the idea that one general factor underlies all mental abilities. In general, people who are very good at math are also good at writing, problem solving, and other mental challenges. Fluid intelligence is information processing in novel or complex circumstances, such as reasoning, drawing analogies, and thinking quickly, and flexibly. Crystallized intelligence is knowledge acquired through experience and the ability to use that knowledge. It is somewhat analogous to distinguishing between working memory (which is more like fluid intelligence.

Prototype model of the nature concept

Prototype is an approach to object categorization that is based on the premise that within each category, some members are more representative than others. A positive feature of the prototype model is that it allows for flexibility in the representation of concepts.

Use of scripts in thinking about people

According to this theory, we tend to follow general scripts of how to behave in particular settings. At the movies for example we expect to buy a ticket, the cost of which might depend on the moviegoer’s age and the time of day.

The difference between decision making and problem solving

Decision making is attempting to select the best alternative among several options. Problem solving is finding a way around an obstacle to reach a goal.

How well we do in forecasting how we will feel after various events occur

After a negative event, people engage in strategies that help them feel better, such as rationalizing why it happened and minimizing the events importance. These strategies are generally adaptive in that they protect the sufferers’ mental health-making sense of an event helps reduce its negative emotional consequences.

Validity and how it differs from reliability

Reliability is the extent to which a measure is stable and consistent over time in similar conditions. Validity is the extent to which the data collected address the research hypothesis in the way intended.