Introductory Psychology

History, Approaches, Methods (Module 1)

[Prof. David Sitt]

We're going to begin with the overview of the first chapter in the
CLEP exam, History and Approaches and Methods of Psychology.

In this section we will cover four topics: the history of

psychology, approaches including biological, behavioral,
cognitive, humanistic, and psychodynamic approaches, then we
will cover the research methods including experimental, clinical
and correlational systems, and finally we will cover the ethics in
research of psychology.
Introductory Psychology

Video

[Prof. David Sitt]

As we begin a discussion, in any discipline, we want to ask

ourselves, "What is the origin of the discipline itself?" Psychology
can find its roots in Greek terminology, psyche meaning the
mind or soul, or even spirit, and ology means the study of.

So, psychology is the study of the mind.

But in a more advanced fashion, psychology is the scientific

study of human behavior and mental processes, mental
processes meaning thoughts or emotions, or even impulses, and
behaviors include actions that we can visibly see.

And a scientific study means using observable methodology and

quantifiable techniques to study these behaviors and mental
processes.

Psychology has its roots in philosophy and in physiology.

And in fact, we trace back psychology to the first research lab

established for the study of psychology in Leipzig, Germany.

This lab was founded by Wilhelm Wundt.

He was actually studying psychology and physiology at the

same time in his lab in order to scientifically exam how people
sense and perceive the world around them.

Debate arose, at the time of Wundt's work, around what

specifically would be the domain of psychology, and how should
psychology be studied? Wundt, in his work, focused on a
technique called structuralism, and structuralism believed that
consciousness was made up of basic elements that were
combined in different ways to produce perceptions, much like
hydrogen and oxygen would combine to form water if they were
put together in the right way.

Thus, structuralists wanted to discover the form, or basic

elements, of mental experiences, structures, as you would, of
what makes up the human experience.

The primary technique used by Wundt and other structuralists

was introspection.

Introspection is a method of looking inwards to understand what

is involved in reporting your own conscious thoughts and
feelings.

Although Wundt and other structuralists, such as Edward

Titchener, who set up the first lab in the United States,
emphasized accurate measurements and the ability to replicate
what they found in their studies, introspection was,
nevertheless, a very subjective process, meaning we look at
what I think and I feel about a stick of gum or a piece of art.

And because it was so subjective, it is not something that was

easily able to replicate and fell out of favor.

Next up, were the functionalists, led by William James.

They were less interested in what made up mental experiences

and more interested in the processes or the functions of the
human condition.

They believed that consciousness, and ultimately, behavior in

general, helped people and animals to adjust to their
environments.

Understanding the mind meant understanding what the mind

could accomplish.
Introductory Psychology

Approaches: biological, behavioral, cognitive, humanistic,

psychodynamic (Module 1.2)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Over the past decade, many different approaches came about in

order to help us understand and explain human behavior and
the human condition.

We're going to focus on five areas for the purpose of this exam.

The first approach that we focus on is the biological approach.

In this approach, we understand that physiological and

biochemical explanations are at the root of all of our behaviors,
meaning, it is genetics, it the hormones in our body, it is
neurotransmitters and neurochemicals that are the root of
human behavior, and human emotion.

And it is through the combination of these biological functions,

that humans experience their emotions, behaviors, thoughts,
and physiological experiences.

A second approach is that of the behaviorists.

The behaviorist approach focuses on learned responses, to

predictable patterns of external stimuli.

What that means is that we respond to our environment, and

behave in various ways, based on what the environment is
bringing towards us.

There are two classic theorists behind this approach, Ivan

Pavlov, who focused on classical conditioning.

He did a lot of his research with dogs, who would salivate into a
bowl, and after drooling into a bowl, eventually he would remove
the bowl, and show them food, and see if they would drool.
And he learned from this approach that they learn to pair the
bowl of food with the food itself.

And this led Pavlov to develop his classical conditioning

approach, which we'll talk about later on in a future module.

BF Skinner is the other individual from the behaviorist school,

who focused on operant conditioning.

This is where Skinner contributed the ideas of rewards, and

punishments, and how those affect our behaviors.

Another approach is that of the psychodynamic school of

thought, mostly initiated by Sigmund Freud, in the late 1800s
and early 1900s.

Sigmund Freud spoke about the role that unmet needs and
desires, as well as conflicts, that arise up in us from childhood,
and their affect on us as adults, and later development.

He basically said that unconscious elements in our psyche, as

well as ways of attaching to our parents when we were younger,
really play a role throughout our entire lives, and these
interpersonal dynamics, are at the bedrock of Freud's dynamic
theories.

Freud focused on three particular areas.

These elements that he referred to as the id, the ego, and the
superego, basically are what make up the human psyche.

The id operating under the pleasure principle, I want it, and I

want it now.

The superego, which is very much about morals and values, we

can't do that, that could be dangerous for us, so we have to
follow the rules of society.

And the ego, which is the great moderator between the id and
the superego, which operates on the reality principle.

Freud also spoke about the role of defense mechanisms, such as

repression, suppression, reaction formation, and sublimation, as
playing a key role in forming our personalities.

And finally, Freud spoke at length about sexual urges, and

aggressive drive, that motivate and direct our behaviors,
thoughts, and feelings.

The next school of thought that we'll focus on, is the cognitive
approach.

This school rose up in reaction to the behaviorists, who had

focused primarily on the observable expectations, and the
observable reactions in our environment, and the cognitive
school focused on elements that you couldn't necessarily track
or observe externally, but yet were certainly occurring
underneath the surface.

So they spoke about memory, they talk about attention, they

contributed greatly to understanding various thought processes,
all from the cognitive approach.

Finally, the last school of thought, is the humanistic approach.

The humanistic approach also developed in reaction to previous

schools, such the behaviorist and the psychodynamic school.

Both the behaviorist and psychodynamic school, seemed to tell

us that we don't have much of a choice in what happens to us.

Psychodynamics are telling you that by three years old, your

personality is locked in.

Behaviorists are saying, you don't have free will, you're reacting
to your environment, to rewards and punishment.

But the humanistic school, came about to say, we do have free

will, and in fact, we are motivated to grow, we are motivated to
develop into higher order and high functioning beings.

The two people to contribute mostly to this school, are Abraham

Maslow, and Carl Rogers.

Abraham Maslow focused on the hierarchy of needs.

In this approach, he spoke about our drive to rise up the ladder,

from basic physiological needs, such as food, and then moving
up to safety, all the way up to love and belonging, esteem, and
finally at the top of the pyramid, self-actualization, the ability to
become a full-functioning and enlightened individual.

Lastly, we have Carl Rogers, from the humanistic school, who

believed that people are basically good in their nature, unlike
Freud, who said that we are nihilistic and destructive in our
nature.

Rogers said that we are all driven by an unconditional positive

regard, meaning a drive to reach for positivity, in a non-
judgmental way, unconditionally.

These were the contributors to the humanistic approach, and we

have just finished covering five different schools of thought that
have resulted in the past century's advancement in psychology.
Introductory Psychology

Research methods: experimental, clinical, correlational (Method 1.3)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Because psychology is a science information about human

behavior is collected in systematic, objective, and quantifiable
ways that can be replicated over time.

There are several different methods for experimentation and

research, but we're only going to focus on two for the purposes
of the CLEP exam.

We'll focus on experimentation, and correlational studies.

I'm going to begin by defining a few terms for you, and then
giving you one example to help understand the application of
the terms.

Within experimental research methodology we're investigating a

cause and effect relationship between two variables, or even
more than two variables.

Where we are conducting experimental methodology there are

going to be two variables that we measure.

The independent and dependent variables.

The independent variable is the variable that is being

manipulated.

Essentially, it is the cause, and the cause and effect relationship.

The dependent variable is the variable that we are measuring

for change.

It's the effect.

What is the result of the application of an independent variable?

To give you a brief example for these two terms, if I'm going to
investigate the effects of an antidepressant medication on
someone's depression, the variable being manipulated is
whether or not I give them an antidepressant pill, or maybe I
give them a sugar pill or a placebo.

The dependent variable is the mood, the effect.

Does the placebo, or the antidepressant medication change their

depression? It depends on whether or not they receive
treatment A, or treatment B.

Moving forward within the experimental method we have

different groups within the design.

An experimental group is that group which is exposed to the

quote unquote "cause," or the group that is exposed to the
independent variable.

These are the individuals who might receive the antidepressant

medication, and we would see the impact of that medication on
the group.

The second group is the control group.

The control group is that group which is not exposed to the

cause.

They receive no treatment, whatsoever, or, perhaps, a treatment

that should have no effect, so in this example of examining
depression and treatment, the experimental group would receive
the medication, or maybe even therapy, and the control group
would be a group that receives no medication, no therapy,
whatsoever, but we are observing them as a control to see was
it the medication or the therapy that led to a reduction in the
depression, or was it simply other factors in people's
environment? A control group is what helps us achieve that
understanding.

Three other concepts that we need to understand in the

experimental approach are the idea of a random assignment.

If we are conducting an experiment it is important that we don't

know who we are going to apply the treatments to, but rather
that we use a random method of applying whether it be the
antidepressant pill, or the therapy, or the no treatment, and we
do it randomly because if we don't do it randomly we might
succumb to certain types of biases in how we're selecting who
goes into each group.

For a brief example if I want to know about the GPA's of a

college, or a high school if I'm going to just ask the students in
the first row of a classroom what is your GPA I'm likely going to
get high GPA values as opposed to me going around, and
randomly asking people because the front row of the class is
generally the people who want to sit in the front, who want to
work hard, and they are more likely to have high GPA's,
therefore, for me to adequately understand the question I have
to randomly distribute my treatment, or randomly distribute my
questions.

Next, we're talking about blind and double blind studies.

In a research study such as, let's say the depression study if I

know as the researcher who I'm going to give the medication to I
might influence the patient themselves if I say here's a pill.

I can't really tell you what pill it is, although, I know which pill it
is.

They might read from my facial expressions, or my body

language which medication they are getting, and that will affect
the study, so both myself as the experimenter, and the person
receiving the medication are blind.

We refer to this as the Double Blind Study when neither party

knows what they are receiving, and this leads to a more pure
research study.

Finally, as I referred to earlier a placebo is a sugar pill, a pill that

has just sugar inside of it, but people might think has a
medication.

When I administer a placebo it might lead to a person reacting

as if it were the medication.

This is a very powerful effect, and it's referred to as the Placebo

Effect.
When a person receives a benign product, or a benign treatment
tool, and yet they had a response to the treatment we know that
it wasn't actually the medication, but, perhaps, just the sheer
belief that I'm taking a medicine that changes people's state of
mind.

We now turn to a few other research methods.

From the clinical realm we talk about case studies which are
individual, or single cases of studying a behavior, or a condition,
or an emotion, such as the technique used by Sigmund Freud
who we read about earlier in the chapters.

Freud used this method to develop the psychoanalytic theory

that has its advantages in that we get deep into understanding
an individual, and it has its disadvantages because it is very
hard to apply our understandings from a single case into a
broader population.

Next we have the method of naturalistic observation.

In this method we observe the behaviours of our subjects in a

naturalistic environment, so I might sit in a classroom, and
observe the interactions of the students with their teacher.

I might go to a remote jungle, and observe from a distance the

behaviors of the animals in order for me to study, and
understand animal behavior.

Next we have the method of clinical interviews where I might sit

and interview someone one-on-one, and get deep information
about the person's clinical presentation.

It is very important in these approaches for me to understand

that if I sit with one person, and then another clinician sits with
that same individual we may get very different information, so
we have to be aware that clinical interviews as all of the other
approaches have their advantages as well as their
disadvantages.

Let's move forward to the last of the methodologies, the

correlational method.
In this method we are observing how two variables relate to
each other, but we are not manipulating either of these
variables.

Earlier I spoke to you about using a research study for

understanding depression, and I might manipulate our
understanding by giving an anti-depressant medication, or a
sugar pill.

I as the experimentator am manipulating that variable, but in

correlation we're merely observing, and taking an accounting of
what happens without manipulating, so in this case I might
observe the correlation between mood and the amount of exams
that you're studying for.

If you're studying for five exams versus 10 exams does that

affect your mood? It's a correlation or a connection between two
variables.

Again, what's very important to understand is that there is no

cause and effect that we're measuring here, only a relationship.

Within correlations we have a mathematical way of representing

the connection or the relationship between variables.

We're looking for a correlation coefficient which is a

measurement of relationship from a negative 1.0 to neutral to a
positive 1.0.

We can see here that in a positive correlation in this domain

here two variables might be related to each other, and they
move in the same direction, so that as you receive one variable
the other variable also receives the positive impact.

For example, if I press my foot on the gas of a car the car will go
faster.

As I increase the pressure on the pedal the car will go faster.

As one goes up the other variable goes up, and as well if I

decrease the application of one variable there's a decrease in
reaction as well.

The less time I spend studying the lower my grade will be.
Less time studying equals a reduction in my grade.

As one goes down the other one goes down.

A negative correlation is different in that as one variable

increases the other decreases.

I might say in this case the more exercise, or the more time I
spend exercising the lower my weight might be.

As one increases the other variable decreases.

This is a negative correlation.

Finally, we also talk about surveys which are self-reported

measurements that I administer, and answer on my own, and
surveys are very effective because I can reach a large
population of people, but their downside is that they're subject
to my own bias in that I might not report honestly on this survey.

This about covers it for various research methods that we will

cover for the CLEP exam.
Introductory Psychology

Ethics in research (Module 1.4)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Within the world of psychology and research methods, a great

amount of attention has turned to ethics in research methods.

Over the years, due to learning the hard way from experiments
that were not of high ethical standard, a set of standards has
been established, and a few of them are important for you to
understand for the CLEP exam.

First of all, in conducting research, participants must be treated

morally and respectfully.

Any research study that you might participate in has to clearly

state to you ahead of time the purpose of the study, the
duration of the study, and what processes will go into effect for
conducting that study.

And usually, that is done by a person signing a consent form

prior to engaging in a research study.

Finally, any possible harm or negative or adverse effects that

might come about from the study must be disclosed to the
participants ahead of time so that they know what they
potentially are signing up for.

When these ethic rules are adhered to, research studies are run
very effectively and smoothly.

And hopefully, you will understand from these ethics how

research studies in psychology are to be conducted.
Introductory Psychology

Introduction (Module 2.0)

[Prof. David Sitt]

At this point we're going to turn to discuss the field of Behavioral

Neuroscience.

This is the section that will cover how the body and
communication, among its parts, influences our behaviors as
well as how information is moved throughout the body.

Nothing in our lives can happen without a process occurring

between the brain and the external environment.

Specifically we will cover five topic areas.

We will review the endocrine system, followed by the concept of

etiology.

We will then turn our attention to the functional organization of

the nervous system.

We will then talk about genetics and finally neuroanatomy.

Introductory Psychology

Endocrine system (Module 2.1)

[Prof. David Sitt]

The endocrine system is the first of the systems that we will

cover in the neuroscience section of the psychology course.

The endocrine system is made up of glands which are located

throughout the body which secrete hormones into the
bloodstream.

Hormones are chemical messengers which through the

bloodstream regulate bodily functions.

The hormone system operates at a slower pace than the

nervous system which we'll get to in a few moments.

What is controlled by the endocrine system? Well, some

examples are the regulation of metabolism, our growth rate,
how well we digest our food, blood pressure, sexual
development as well as reproduction.

Within the endocrine system there are multiple glands located

throughout the body.

The master gland is known as the pituitary gland.

The pituitary gland is located right here behind the third eye, as
they say.

Between the eyes in the middle of the brain, and this gland
controls multiple other systems and other glands within the
body.

And when activated by the hypothalamus, activates the

remaining glands throughout the body.

The thyroid, for example, the adrenal glands, the testes in a

man, or the ovaries, the pancreas, adrenal glands, thymus, and
thyroid gland in a female.

This entails the endocrine system.

Introductory Psychology

Etiology (Module 2.2)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Within our understanding of neuroscience there is a concept

referred to as etiology.

Etiology is the biological explanation for mental disorders within

psychology.

It's basically the roots or origins of what mental problems we

might be discussing.

A very common etiology that we discuss are the genetic

predispositions and hereditary links at the root of many of the
psychological disorders.

For example what is the etiology or the root cause of

schizophrenia, alcoholism, or bipolar disorder? Within these
particular disorders we know that there's a very strong genetic
etiology or predisposition to developing these particular
conditions.

We also know that another form of etiology is the malfunctioning

which can occur within the brain chemistry.

Such as overabundance of dopamine, or serotonin, or

norepinephrine, or other chemicals in the brain, as well as there
being difficulties with neuroanatomic pathology.

So a person might develop a disorder or condition if a part of

their anatomy is smaller than usual or larger than is typical in a
normal human being.

All of these are examples of etiology or root causes that we refer

to in understanding the psychological disorders in the human
condition.
Introductory Psychology

Functional organization of the nervous system (Module 2.3)

[Prof. David Sitt]

In order for us to function and operate the way that we do, there
is behind the scenes a communication system, a very rapid and
efficient communication system.

This is known as the nervous system.

Communication occurs within the nervous system via neurons.

Neurons are cells that have highly specialized tasks and

methods for both receiving and transmitting information all
across the body.

The neurons have a very specific structure.

There are three parts to the structure that we'll focus on for the
purposes of the CLEP exam.

We have the cell body, which contains the central operating

system, if you were, of the cells, which contains the nucleus,
where all of the energy is produced and the efficiency of the
entire cell is focused in the cell body.

Next we have the dendrites.

Dendrites, up here and all around here, these little branches that
jet out, these take information in from the outside of the cell.

They're feelers that look out for information and bring that
information into the center of the cell, into the cell body.

Then we have the axons.

The axons pass information along to other nerve cells and the
axon typically is one single strand and at the very end of the
axon are axon terminals and this provides a very efficient way to
get information from the cell out to the rest of the body.

Another important feature of the nerve is something called the

myelin sheath.

The myelin sheath cover the axon on some of the neurons not
necessarily all neurons and the purpose, I'm gonna go back
here, the purpose of the myelin sheath right here, this covering
here, it's like the covering that you might find on an electrical
wire.

It's meant to insulate the communication and the transmission

of electrical impulses along the axon so that the information
travels in a rapid fashion and as we said, in an efficient manner.

You'll notice that in between the myelin sheath there are breaks
in the line.

These are referred to as the nodes of Ranvier.

It's almost like a subway car.

They're not fully attached all the way through.

At least on the New York City subway, there are breaks and gaps
in between the protected areas of the axon.

Let's now talk about some of the functions within the nervous
system.

We have three specific types of neuron that we focus on.

The first are the sensory or afferent neurons.

These neurons take information from the body tissues and from
all areas of the body, whether it be touch or sight or sound,
smell, taste, all of the senses gather information and send that
along these neural pathways along the spinal cord up into the
brain.

The motor neurons, or efferent neurons, act in the way that they
sound, they send information out so that we can react in a motor
fashion to the information that we receive.
So information is sent from the spinal cord and the brain,
outwards to the body tissues to the muscles and to our sensory
organs in order to respond to the environment.

So think about it if I would touch a hot tea kettle, my sensory

neurons are gonna send that information up my arm into my
spinal cord, into my brain, and send a message saying, wow,
that's hot.

And I have to react.

So my brain is gonna send a message back through my spinal

cord and through my arm to the motor neurons saying, I think
you should move your hand because that is really hot.

And that's how the motor neurons work.

In between the sensory and the motor neurons are interneurons

or association neurons.

These are the neurons that communicate information between

the motor and sensory neurons and these are the most
abundant within the body.

Neurons work through the use of electrical impulses and

neurotransmitters.

Neurotransmitters are chemical molecules that are contained

within something called the vesicle, almost like a sac at the end
of an axon terminal.

You can see here, this was the soma that we talked about
earlier, the dendrites were up here and this is the axon that
sends information outwards and at the bottom of the axon is this
vesicle area.

Within this vesicle area, or the sac, are contained our

neurotransmitters, these chemical molecules, which
communicate across the synapse and the gap within a axon and
on the other side of this gap is the receiving dendrite of the next
neuron.

So this is how communication occurs, travelling through the

axon, releasing and stimulating the neurotransmitters, which
travels through the gap and stimulates information on the
receiving dendrite, which then fires information out to the next
neuron.

Any neurotransmitter that is left inside of the gap, any of these

chemicals that are left in that space, are broken down and
absorbed back into the neuron and this process is called
reuptake.

It's kind of like a recycling system.

So anything that's leftover, we wanna try to reuse and be

efficient.

So either it is broken up and taken back into the original neuron

or it is destroyed and no longer used.

It's quite an interesting system, quite brilliant if you think about

it.

Now, within the neurotransmitters, within the family of

neurotransmitters, each neurotransmitter has its own function.

Today, we know about several neurotransmitters and I'm sure

that there are many more that we will learn about in the near
future, but some of which we know about are serotonin, which
has an impact on our mood and emotional states, as well as
playing a role in sleep and attention.

We have dopamine, which also plays a role in attention,

movement and pleasure sensations.

As you might be able to decipher, these neurotransmitters,

sometimes interact in similar ways as each other, and
oftentimes, extremely different ways from each other.

In total, the system is a very efficient and fast moving system

and at times, the neurotransmitters can be tricked and the
nervous system can be tricked by the addition of drugs or
medicines into the body, which mimic the communication of
these neurotransmitters.

There are two particular methods of tricking these

neurotransmitters.

The first is an agonistic process, whereby an increase in neural

activity and flow of information would occur.

And then there are certain drugs that are called antagonists,
which decrease neural activity and decrease the flow of
information.

There is a drug called curare, for example, which if you receive

curare and it's an ancient African chemical, it causes paralysis in
the body because this curare actually shuts down the production
of dopamine within the body and acts as an antagonist.

The nervous system is made up of different divisions that have

unique functions.

First we'll talk about the central nervous system, the CNS, which
includes the brain and the spinal cord.

The CNS is suspended in cerebral spinal fluid, so it's almost like

a cushion that makes sure that the brain, if it gets knocked
around, is protected, as well as the spine as well is protected
from the cerebral spinal fluid.

The CNS controls reflexive behavior.

So this is when you go to the doctor or you hit your elbow and it
jerks out or your knee and your knee jerks out, or perhaps
something blows in my eye and I blink, these are reflexes that
are controlled by the central nervous system.

And they involve these sensory, motor and interneuron systems.

This is a bit of a view of the central nervous system.

The brain and the spinal cord.

Next we have the peripheral nervous system.

Peripheral nervous system connects the brain and the spinal

cord to the rest of the body.

The peripheral nervous system is further divided into two parts,

the somatic nervous system, which carries information from the
muscles and the organs and the skin over to the central nervous
system and it carries messages from the central nervous
system, such as the brain, over to my skeletal muscles so that I
know how to react.

Just as a little hint, soma, the root word soma is body.

So the somatic nervous system has to do with the movements

within the body and voluntary reactions as well.

The second division is the autonomic nervous system.

Autonomic almost sounds like automatic, and that's a hint to us

to understand that the autonomic nervous system controls the
involuntary movements in the body.

So this controls certain of our muscles and our glands, it helps

control swallowing and breathing, things that we wouldn't
consciously put effort into controlling and within the autonomic
nervous system, we have yet another division, a sub-division of
two parts, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous
systems.

The sympathetic nervous system is that which prepares us for

action.

It is the part of the brain that when we are facing danger, helps
the body prepare to either fight or run away, the fight or flight
response that you may have heard about.

So the eyes dilate a certain way, the blood constricts a certain

way, my muscles get ready for action, due to this sympathetic
nervous system and the activation from it.

Once I'm done running or fighting, my body needs to calm itself

down.

And that happens through the parasympathetic nervous system.

This is the part of the brain that calms the body down, reduces
breathing, reduces glandular work, dilates the pupils in the
proper way, so on and so forth, in order to bring the body back
into its calm state.
So these are just a few of the features of the nervous system
that we're going to focus on for the CLEP exam.
Introductory Psychology

Genetics (Module 2.4)

[Prof. David Sitt]

While the topic of genetics is quite a vast one and one that is
growing in attention from the research world.

For the purpose of our CLEP exam, there's just a few concepts
and notions that you need to understand.

Genetics plays a large role in how and when learning, growing,

and development occur within the human body.

Human behavior is a product of genetics and our environment,

and in the interaction of these two.

There is a ongoing debate as to what causes more of our

personality or of our behavior.

Is it our nature, meaning the way I am born right out of the

womb, which would be a genetic argument, meaning it's all
genetics that leads me to be shy or outgoing or have a good
sense of humor.

Or perhaps it is really my nurturing, how I am brought up, how I

am raised within my environment.

My caregivers or parents, the school that I went to, the media

that I watch, the social media that I engage in.

Perhaps that is what controls my personality and my style.

In reality we know that it is not one or the other, but it is a

combination of the two depending on what we are, what
behaviors or personality traits we are talking about.

Genes do not determine behavior exclusively but they can have

a significant impact on what we do and why we do it.
Introductory Psychology

Neuroanatomy (Module 2.5)

[Prof. David Sitt]

[Instructor] The brain functions in quite a sophisticated manner.

As we said earlier neurons in the brain work together in a

networked fashion in order to contribute to our various
behaviors, emotions and even cognitions or thoughts.

Different parts of the brain utilize different functions which

influence the thoughts, feelings and behaviors in our lives.

And there are certain brain regions which seem to be fairly

specific to certain behaviors and functionality.

And then there are parts of the brain which interact with one
another in order to produce the outcomes of our behaviors,
thoughts and emotions.

We learned a lot about the brain and its functions through

studying when damage occurs or when malfunctioning occurs
into different regions of the brain.

Let's begin talking about the brain from the base of the brain
working our way up.

The oldest region of the brain is the brain stem.

The brain stem develops first during conception as the first part
of the brain to develop after conception occurs, it is also the
oldest in terms of evolution, and the brain stem is what controls
our basic functions such as swallowing and breathing and
involuntary muscle movements.

The pons and the medulla in particular help within the

functioning of those areas.
The brain stem where the spinal cord enters the skull connects
up into the midbrain region, and within the midbrain region we
can find the thalamus.

The thalamus receives information about the senses, our taste,

touch, sight and hearing are all processed and relayed from the
brain stem into the middle region where the thalamus is located
and sends all that information up to the higher regions of the
brain.

We have the cerebellum which helps us control our balance as

well as other voluntary movements as well as the limbic system
which sits between the older parts of the brain and the more
recently evolved cerebral cortex on top of the brain.

We have, not listed here, but we have the hippocampus which

controls the memory system, or helps coordinate the memory
system, as well as the hypothalamus in this particular region
here in the midbrain.

The hypothalamus helps control our feeding, the fight or flight

response, our sexual activity as well is controlled by the
hypothalamus.

The reticular formation is a unique part of the brain which runs

through the thalamus and the brain stem and helps control sleep
and arousal, meaning our ability to be alert and awake, and it
also helps us to filter these stimuli that comes into the body
from the various senses and to usher that out into other parts of
the brain.

We already mentioned the limbic system, and now we'll turn our
attention to a few of the pieces of the limbic system that we left
out earlier, the amygdala which controls fear and anger.

And we already covered the hippocampus as well as the

hypothalamus.

The upper most part of the brain, the most recent to develop
both in terms of evolution and what develops last after
conception, is the cerebral cortex.

The cerebral cortex is the outer covering of the brain.

And it is divided into two hemispheres which in combination
helps us to control higher order functioning, helps us control
motor functioning, our higher order cognitive processes, aspects
such as time management, task management, time
management, all of the higher aspects of cognitive functioning.

Almost like the conductor in an orchestra who has to coordinate

the most sophisticated parts of an orchestra.

This is what's located in the cerebral cortex.

And we're talking about this region up here.

The cerebral cortex is further, the cerebral cortex is divided into

two hemispheres, two portions which are connected by a line of
fibers that help communicate from left to right.

And we further divide the brain into four regions.

We have the frontal lobe, parietal lobe, temporal lobe and

occipital lobe.

So the frontal lobes in this region here in orange, are what

coordinate movement and higher level functioning.

It is also within the frontal lobe that we find the Broca's area and
the Wernicke's area which control our speech and language and
comprehension and speech production.

If there is damage to these areas of the brain, it can lead to

severe difficulties in speech production or in speech
comprehension.

The parietal lobes located kind of on the top of the brain are
what helps control the senses of touch.

And we have neuropathways all the way down to the feet and
the palms of the hand which send information to the parietal
lobe for sensory information.

The temporal lobe which are located near our temple helps
control hearing among other functions.

And finally the occipital lobe located ironically in the back of the
head are what helps us control vision.

These four lobes coordinate with each other to lead to all of our
behaviors, thoughts, and emotions and as we said earlier, if
there is any damage to any of these regions, it leads to
significant changes in our functioning.

So as we said this is an overview of quite a dense topic, but for

the sake of the CLEP exam, we're just going to focus on these
few areas in neuroanatomy.
Introductory Psychology

Physiological techniques (Module 2.6)

[Prof. David Sitt]

We spent the past few slides discussing various regions of the

brain.

And I mentioned that if you had any damage to the brain it

would lead to various effects on your emotional state and your
behavioral state.

So how do we actually examine such damage? How can we look

into the brain and see its functioning? Fortunately over the past
50 years, science has led to a lot of advances in techniques to
look inwards into the brain.

These techniques include the EEG, electroencephalograph,

which are little kind of electrodes that we put into various parts
of the brain and head, and other parts of the body which yield
kind of these lines that we see on the hospital scans.

We have an MRI, magnetic resonance imaging technique.

These are also very sophisticated machinery.

And now we have something called the FMRI, functional

magnetic resonance imaging, a more advanced method of
looking into the brain.

We have CAT scans as well as PET scans.

Each one of these techniques has a different methodology of

looking at features of the brain, and if necessary they can all be
taken together to give us a full picture as to what is happening
in the brain.

We know that we are only at the beginning of this work and

there's way more to go in terms of being able to see the insides
of how the brain functions.

But for where we are, and what our purpose is for this exam,
knowing these few imaging techniques should suffice.
Introductory Psychology

Introduction (Module 3.0)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Alright welcome back.

We are going to now turn our attention to the chapter on

sensation and perception.

It's a technical chapter and in this chapter we're going to discuss

various topics within this field.

Specifically covering attention, the various senses such as

somesthesis, olfaction, gustation, vestibular senses.

We'll then turn to perceptual development, perceptual

processes, we'll talk about the process of vision and hearing,
and finally we'll talk about sensory mechanisms such as sensory
thresholds and adaptation.

Alright we'll see you in a few.

Introductory Psychology

Attention (Module 3.1)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Alright, let's jump into this topic area which is gonna be a bit
technical, but very exciting information.

What we're talking about here is the notion of how information is

transmitted from the outside world, the various stimuli that exist
in our world, sounds, sites, smells and touch.

How that sensory information gets transferred from the outside

world into my brain, processed and then developed an ability for
me to respond to this type of information.

So, we're talking about sensation and perception.

Sensation being the portion of that process that I just described

of transforming energy from outside stimuli into neural energy,
meaning energy within the brain and perception is the process
of taking that neural energy and creating an image of the
outside world.

So, those are the basic foundation definitions as we move

forward.

Psychophysics itself is the area of psychology that addresses the

topic of sensation and it talks about the levels of intensity that
we can detect various stimuli.

Each of person has a different degree of sensitivity with which

they might notice a stimuli.

So, for example, a person might, one person might be walking

down the street and not hear a car backfire.

Yet, another individual who has a higher degree of sensitivity

may quickly react to that car backfiring and there are different
psychological factors that play a roll in influencing our ability to
sense various stimuli.

So, what are we talking about when we refer to psychological

factors? We're talking about things such as motivation.

An example might be if you're sleeping at home and you have

siblings, you're not married, but you have siblings, and one of
your siblings is crying at night, a younger sibling, you may not
be motivated to get up and respond to that stimuli.

Yet, your parents, who are attending to that infant, are certainly
gonna be more motivated and, therefore, their sensory system
will react and respond to that environmental contributor.

Past experiences are playing a roll and expectations as well in

terms of my ability to notice various stimuli.

The signal detection theory is one of the theories that talks

about how I respond, as I said earlier, to different degrees of
stimuli that come into my environment and that's very much
dependent on how sensitive I am to that particular stimuli.

It's important to know that there is, there are differences

between various stimuli and my ability to either be aware that
stimuli is in my environment or is absent in my environment are
the individual differences between people and even between
myself.

So, I might respond to one particular type of noise or one smell

or one odor, but I may differentiate that through a different
smell or odor, or perhaps I may not notice a particular smell all
together.

All of this is due to the various differences in our sensory

processing system.

In terms of how much information we can hold in our awareness,

it's actually far less if you think about it then what is out there in
the environment.

There are billions of stimuli out there at any given moment, but
we are only holding into awareness a small subset or a narrow
field of that stimuli from our environment.
Of course, how do I decide what to tend to from my
environment? Well, that is due to selective attention process.

I will select information from my environment that is more

meaningful to me.

I will organize information from my environment based on how I

interpret their value and that's why we're talking about selective
attention having even this feature of interpreting my senses
from the environment.

And finally, it's important to understand that perception plays a

key role in all of stimuli evaluation because I'm looking to make
meaning and perceive my environment in order for it to become
important for me and if I'm going to perceive something in my
environment that's meaningful and that way the sense sticks
with me among all the billions of senses that are presented to
me.

What is meaningful is what will stick with me and that is what

will resinate and remain within my neural network.

So, this is just the beginning of, as I said, a technical topic and
so I hope that the beginnings of it are already making sense to
you and we'll pick up at the next subtopic.
Introductory Psychology

Other senses: somesthesis, olfaction, gustation, vestibular system

(Module 3.2)

[Prof. David Sitt]

All right, we're going to go through a few of the senses in the

Sensory and Perception Systems.

We'll start with somesthesis, which is the body's sense of touch,

which is broken down into three different systems.

First, we talk about the skin.

The skin, which is actually the largest organ in the body, keeps
bodily fluids in and keeps germs out.

And our ability to sense with the skin various temperatures,

senses of pain, different areas, being able to sense where within
the body a stimuli is being received, is all part of the skin
sensory system.

You may have had, as a kid, someone try to run their finger up
your hand and then say stop, and you're pretty accurate at
being able to know where they stopped, but if you run a finger
along the back, it's a little bit harder to know where the person
is stopping, because the senses are different in different areas of
the skin.

Next, we talk about the kinesthetic sense.

The kinesthetic sense is knowing how your body is moving,

without visually observing it.

So it's this internal sense of awareness of movement of my body.

I'm not looking at my feet when I'm walking, but yet I know
where they're moving.
I'm not visually looking at my hands right now as they're
moving, but I have a sense kinesthetically where they are.

So holds true for various parts of the body, the mouth, the eyes,
and you know, all of the rest of the body has this kinesthetic
sense.

We also have a vestibular sense, which basically keeps the

body's balance system in check, and it gives me my sense of
balance.

So when I am perhaps spinning around in circles, I might through

off my vestibular sense, when I'm walking on a balancing beam,
I'm challenging my vestibular sense.

Riding a bicycle, playing any sports activity, will all call into
attention, as you were, the vestibular sense.

So these are three of the body's somesthesis sensory systems.

Now, but moving more specifically into parts of the body, the
nose produces the olfactory sense, and this part of the sensory
system is unique in that while all other information travels, let's
say from the eye or the ears, travels first into a relay station in
the brain, and then over to the higher levels, the olfactory
system goes through its own, what's called the olfactory bulb,
and the olfactory bulb then has a direct connection to the
amygdala.

And if you recall, the amygdala is the emotional, one of the

emotional seats in the brain, and one that responds and helps us
process emotions like anger, and fear, and frustration, or
excitement.

So, information that's traveled through the olfactory bulb,

through the amygdala, and then over to the hippocampus, which
relates to memory as well as emotions, and in this way, there's
almost a near direct line, between the smell sense and memory.

This helps explain why many people have a strong memory

response when they smell food, or a perfume or a cologne, and
more so, this sense triggers memory more than other senses do.

Moving forward to the sense of taste, referred to as gustation or

the gustatory sense of the body.

The gustatory sense of the body is an interplay between the

tongue and the nerves, the millions of nerve endings that may,
that stem from the tongue, and as well as relating to the nostrils
and the nose as well.

The gustatory sense isn't just there to help us process smells,

but it is also there to contribute to our nutritional processes and
understanding what to take in, what is, when are we satiated,
when are we full? Perhaps, when food is noxious to us or
poisonous.

When you drink spoiled milk, how is it that we know that it's
spoiled? Think about that strong smell and the strong taste that
you experience when you have a spoiled beverage, and that is
due to the gustatory system.

We have five main types of taste, we have bitter, sweet, salty,

sour, and savory, otherwise known as unami.

So these are the five main types of taste that the taste buds and
the gustatory system communicate to our brain, and help us
understand how to react to the environment, that to the foods
that we're eating through this system.

Moving on, we mentioned the vestibular system.

The vestibular system provides sensory information that

pertains, as we said earlier, to motion and equilibrium, and more
than that, to spatial awareness.

So being able to know that, for example, I have a podium in

front of me with my iPad that I'm using for this presentation.

So I have a sense of where this is without even looking at it

because of my vestibular system.

Now the vestibular system is a very interesting one, because it

is based on information that is processed from the ear.

And within the ear, in these semicircular canals within the ear,
there is a liquid, and this liquid in the ear moves around.
And it is through this movement of this liquid and the interaction
with gravity, and movement both in linear and horizontal
fashion, that my brain processes where my body is at relative to
gravity and relative to other objects within my sensory
environment.

If you think about it, it also helps us when we're playing a sport
to keep, they say keep your eyes on a target even if my head is
moving around, I can still stay focused on the target that's in
front of me which at this point, may be you, or you're keeping
your eyes on me even if I move around or you move around.

The vestibular system helps us keep all of this in check.

It's quite an amazing system, quite intricate, and for the sense,
for the purposes of our CLEP exam, I've gone over the basics of
it, and of course I encourage you to refer back to your print
materials to help you drill down some of the finer details.

All right, we'll see you at the next module.

Introductory Psychology

Perceptual development (Module 3.3)

[Prof. David Sitt]

[Instructor] Okay, we're back here to talk just about two brief
concepts before we go on to the next module.

When we talk about perceptual development over time and the

development of our perceptual capacities, we come back to the
same question that has come up over and over which is the
origins of our capacities.

Is it due to our nature, our upbringing, rather our nature

meaning inborn capacities, biological, genetics, or is it due to
our nurturing, our upbringing? So in this area as well there are
two sides of that discussion.

We have the ecological viewpoint from the nature perspective

which states that some of our abilities are present at birth.

And in fact we have seen innate abilities at birth such as the

ability to see between dark and light shadows.

We do have a certain amount of auditory senses.

Ironically, sight is slow to develop as is smell.

Actually sight is really slow to develop because when we come

out of the womb, we're in darkness for so long and it takes time
for us to develop.

But it does get tuned and fine-tuned over time and these
perceptual processes do shift around as we get older in life.

So even the sense of smell takes a while to really fully come

online.

I have a young child, he's now two and a half, three years old,
and lately his ability to smell has come really full, has really hit a
different level of processing for him.

So this gives us a lot of the argument for the nurture side of

development.

And then we come to the nurture side of development referred

to here in this context as the constructivist or constructivism
approach which says that perception is constructed through
learning experience and through my reliance on various
experiences within life.

So I'm going to refine my vestibular sense by engaging with the

outside world as I get older.

So perhaps I may not be as able to catch a ball and then as I get

older, I develop that sense because of my nurturing, because of
my upbringing and the environment that helps me to refine
those capacities.

So again this is just a brief overview of the nature versus nurture

concept.

We'll move on in a few moments to the next topic.

Introductory Psychology

Perceptual processes (Module 3.4)

[Prof. David Sitt]

All right, let's move forward in this topic and talk about
perceptual processes.

We'll begin by understanding that a lot of what we talk about in

this particular area stems from, or relates to some of the work of
the Gestalt psychologists, who were really among the first to
formulate rules by which the brain pieces together meaningful
experiences out of fragments of sensations.

The German word gestalt means a whole, or a form, and much

of the research of Gestalt psychologists shows that in a variety
of ways, the mind fills in gaps in our sensations.

So, for example, if I were to show you this shape here, What
would you see? Most of you would probably say a triangle.

But in reality, that is not a triangle.

There are three Pac-Men, or three lines that your brain is filling
in the gap over here, and creating a triangle, but in reality, so
that's what your brain is perceiving, but in reality, that was not a
triangle.

So, we're also capable of seeing objects in three dimensions, or,

you know, with our perception, despite the fact that images on
our retina are only coming in in two-dimensional manners as a
sensation.

So I'm sensing something in a two-dimensional way, but yet I

perceive things as three dimensional.

Let's turn our attention now to depth perception.

Depth perception is what allows us to estimate distances

between ourselves and the objects that we see.

We do this with the help of two types of cues.

First is the binocular cue.

With the binocular cue we are using both eyes, and because of
the spacing between our eyes, each retina receives a slightly
different picture of the world.

This retina disparity is one of the cues to distance.

So if I hold my finger close to my nose over here, and if you try it

at home, if you hold your nose here, your finger here, you won't
be able to see the entirety of your finger from each eye.

Each eye is picking up a different portion of the finger.

However, if I move the finger further out, I see the finger as a

whole with both eyes.

And if I get, in this way, the two eyes, instead of one, pick up
every, pick up similar images, and it seems whole to me
because the items are out in a distance.

Now, when we talk about retinal disparity, also, in terms of low

retinal disparity, this is a crude indicator than an object is
relatively far away.

A second binocular cue to distance is convergence.

Convergence, or the extent to which the eyes must turn inwards,

meaning converge towards the nose to view an object.

The greater the convergence, indicates that an object is closer.

So, the closer my eyes are gonna turn and converge towards
each other means that the object is closer to me.

As I push an object away, the convergence opens up, and the

object is further away.

Now let's turn to monocular cues, right? So binocular is two

eyes, bi, mono is a single eye, single cues.
So, monocular cues to depth perception require only one eye,
and in particular, linear perspective, refers to the fact that
parallel lines appear to converge as they are further away.

Thus, when we're looking at railroad tracks, so if I'm looking at

railroad tracks from here, and keep drawing them, in the
distance the railroad tracks appear to converge, they become
more narrow with the greater distance.

Now, so, with, in this sense, the greater the distance, the more
narrow the convergence will be.

Now let's turn to another concept, motion parallax.

Motion parallax refers to, also, by the way, known as relative

motion, refers to the apparent motion of stable objects as we
ourselves are moving.

So if I'm sitting on a train, or I'm in a car and I'm driving, when I

look outside of the window, it appears that the things outside of
the window are also moving, even though it's really me that's
moving and the objects are stationary.

So, objects that also would be closer than a tree would appear to
be moving backwards, and the nearer they are, the faster they
seem to be moving.

Objects that are more distant than the fixation point seem to be
moving with you, but more slowly as they get further away.

When one object is blocked, or partially blocked, and blocks a

second object, we perceive it as closer, right? So just because I
have one object here and it blocks something that is in the
distance, the object that blocks the other, that is blocking
appears closer, okay? This is called interposition, where
positioning, based on the positioning of an object, it affects my
depth perception.

Texture, gradient, is also a concept that influences judgements

of depth.

Objects that are closer tend to appear more distinct, meaning

more refined, and thus having a, even a, you can say a coarse
texture, whereas those items that are further away tend to blend
together in an indistinct, finer texture.

Okay.

Now, the notion of there being perceptual cues is based on the

fact that these cues are hardwired, and mostly hardwired into
our brains.

But to some extent, our experiences, as we said earlier, do

shape our perceptions.

This has been demonstrated in various studies of sensory

restriction.

For example, if kittens are kept from seeing for several months
when they're born, they actually are unable to tell the difference
between objects of different shapes.

So if we deprive them of sensory stimulation, for this several-

month period of time, they like the ability to differentiate
shapes, a circle versus a square for example.

Now, without appropriate stimulation, the cells in the kittens'

cortexes don't develop the inner connections that are necessary
to allow this type of perception.

Now, this doesn't happen when the sensory restriction takes

place during adulthood, it only really happens during birth,
which suggests that there is a critical period during which
exposure to appropriate stimuli is required in order for these
perceptual skills to develop.

Now, another way in which experience shapes perception is

through something we call perceptual sets.

Now, perceptual sets are predispositions to perceive one thing

over another.

In line, for example, with gender stereotyping, people often

perceive a crying baby to be weak and scared if they believe
that it's a girl, but strong and mad if that crying baby is a boy.

So, the perceptual set is affected by what our expectation is

from the stimuli itself.

Similarly, you might perceive the sound of water that's hitting

the spout in your tub to be the sound of a phone ringing if you're
expecting someone to call while you're in the shower, right? So
it really all depends on the environment, the set where my
perceptions are occurring.

The general principle here is that processing information about

the environment occurs in both a bottom-up fashion, meaning
from simple sensory receptors to the more complex neural
networks, as well as there being a top-down, a process of a top-
down fashion, from which expectations, motives, maybe even
contextual cues are on the top level all the way down to our raw
sensory data.

So my expectations begin on the higher-up level, and they

trickle down to the most raw element and the raw aspects of my
sensory data.

So, as I mentioned, this set of modules is dense, they have a lot

of details.

I encourage you to go back to the printed material so that you

make sure, along with these videos, that you are understanding
the topics and you are retaining the differences between the
various definitions that we're describing here.

Okay, we'll see you at the next module.

Introductory Psychology

Receptor processes: vision, audition (Module 3.5)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Okay, we're back with just a few final points for this particular
chapter on perception and sensation.

And here we'll be talking about receptor processes, in terms of

the visual processes and auditory processes.

Briefly, the visual processes allows for the processing of visual

details through the use of the eyes.

We've already spoken in previous submodules of this chapter

about different visual cues and different types of factors that
influence depth perception.

Basically, it's just important to know that we detect and interpret

information from visual light that comes in from our external
environment and this visual light basically hits upon the retina
and then travels on to the optic nerve and into the visual cortex
and this allows us to build a representation of the world around
us.

There are a lot of details about the visual processing and the
optic nerve such as how information is actually flipped upside
down when it goes into the brain, how one side of the eye sees
the opposite visual field and it's bringing all this information
together that creates the visual imagery on the visual cortex in
the back of the brain.

I think that is a bit beyond what you'll probably need to know for
the CLEP exam, but I figured it's best just to give you some
sprinklings of that detail.

Turning to the auditory process, which again, we've talked about

briefly.
Audition is the process of taking in sound through the ear and
how it travels to the brain.

Within the ear, there are a myriad of microsystems involved in

creating sound themselves.

Auditory energy enters into the ear and goes into the various
canals.

There is a almost like a drum that resonates and creates

energetic movement against a membrane in the ear, which
sends information further along into the auditory nerve system,
until eventually it hits the auditory cortex of the brain and that's
where we process all of the auditory information in the brain and
this is how we interpret information as being meaningful or less
meaningful.

Again, just for consideration, how much sound is in your

environment as you're walking the streets or in your own home
or as you're listening to this video? How many competing sounds
are there? Your brain is actually taking that in and there are
resonance and vibrations occurring in your earlobe, within the
ear canal.

But you're filtering it out, you're deciding that it's not meaningful
for you, because that is part of the complexity and the brilliance
of the auditory or audition system.

So, that really covers it for the various topics within sensation
and perception.

I will stress again this is probably one of the two more technical
modules, this along with the module on the brain.

So I encourage you to take some time, review the videos, review

whatever print materials that you have on this area and create
some memory tricks or mnemonic devices to help you retain the
more technical definitions that you'll need to know for the CLEP
exam.

All right, we'll see you at the next module in just a few.
Introductory Psychology

Introduction (Module 4.0)

[Prof. David Sitt]

In this section we will be covering various forms of

consciousness, or states of awareness.

We will review, first, sleeping and dreaming, which are states of

consciousness which are natural and don't require any external
influence.

We will then turn our attention to hypnosis and meditation,

aspects of consciousness which are assisted by perhaps another
individual or by a focused intention by ourselves.

And finally we will focus on psychoactive drug effects and how

those change states of consciousness.
Introductory Psychology

Sleeping and dreaming (Module 4.1)

[Prof. David Sitt]

In this first portion of consciousness we will be discussing sleep

and dreaming.

But before we get to that point let's first explain what

consciousness is at least to our knowledge.

Consciousness is a way of defining our state of awareness and

when we speak about awareness I mean self-awareness, self-
consciousness, awareness of our environment, as well as the
states of consciousness which occur as we'll talk about shortly
when we're sleeping, dreaming, or in some type of altered state.

There are many different forms and states of consciousness but

we will only be covering a few of these for the purpose of the
CLEP exam.

Let's first turn our attention to the state of sleep and dreaming.

In order for our bodies to function we have a built in clock a set

of rhythms and pace that is labeled as a circadian rhythm.

Circadian is a Greek word stemming from circa diem meaning

about a day, which references the fact that if we are left to a
free floating or free form environment where there are no clocks,
there's no sunlight, I will actually run on my own 24, really to 25
hour body clock.

It's this natural rhythm that we have that controls our

wakefulness, that controls our ebs and flows in alertness, even
such things as our body temperature and hormone levels are
controlled by this rhythmic flow in the body.

As I said before it's a 25 hour clock if left to itself to run freely.

The body also has a type of rhythmic clock for sleeping itself, we
know about this from a measurement of EEG waves, electro and
sethlograph machines which we can plug onto our forehead and
different parts of our body while we're sleeping and we can see
different changes in neural activity.

We're going to talk about five stages, unique stages, that differ
based on brain waves while we're sleeping.

So let's imagine we're going to sleep, we're a little tired, we're

starting to dose off, our eyes are closing, and we're starting to
calm down and get ready for a long night of sleep.

This is when we enter the first stage of sleep and during this
stage we experience the advent of alpha waves, during this
stage alpha waves are moving fairly quickly, and we begin to
experience this hypnogogic sensation.

This is when you're falling asleep and suddenly it feels like you
fell off your bed or you're dropping out of an airplane and you hit
the ground and you have a sudden moment of wakefulness, this
is referred to as the hypnogogic jerk or hypnogogic sensation
which is characteristic of stage one of sleep.

From there we enter into the stage two of sleep, our brain waves
switch over from alpha over to the theta waves, a bit slower, and
what is identified in this area of sleep are sleep spindles which
kind of look like slower jerky, more jerky type of electric waves
and we have these K-complexes which are spikes of neural
activity which occur and look like K's if you would during a sleep
cycle.

From there we move on to third and fourth stages of sleep, these

are our deep sleep stages where we have the advent of delta
waves as well as what we refer to as slow wave sleep.

Finally, the fifth stage is referred to as REM or rapid eye

movement sleep.

It is during this period that our eyes are literally rapidly moving
back and forth and back and forth, and it is during this phase
that we have our dreams, this is the dream state.

It's referred to as the paradoxical stage of sleep because our

minds are extremely active, the most active throughout the
whole sleep process where we dream, our bodies are actually
shut down, our bodies can't move.

So we sleep and we can't move our limbs, and the reason is

because if we were able to move our limbs imagine what we
would do during our dream states where we're running or we're
fighting or we're jumping up and down.

If our body wasn't shut down it would be pretty unfortunate for

the person that which they'd be next to.

So these are the five stages of sleep.

Next we should cover the sleep disorders that occur.

Insomnia, the first of the disorders and the most common is

what occurs when we have difficulty falling asleep, so you're up
in your bed and you just can't get your mind to enter into those
deeper states of sleep.

You may also experience insomnia in the early morning when

you wake up too early and you just can't back to sleep at 4:30 or
five in the morning, this is early morning or early onset
insomnia.

Hypersomnia is quite the opposite where you're sleeping too

much, where you fall into sleep and you can't actually break out
of your sleep easily.

Narcolepsy is a separate sleep condition where a person might

be operating in their average daily activity and suddenly sleep
onset comes like a snap of a finger and they suddenly will fall
sleep while they're doing whatever they're doing, and this can
be an extremely dangerous sleep condition and people are told
not to drive or operate heavy machinery if they are narcoleptic.

Finally, we have sleep apnea.

This is a sleep condition whereby people lose oxygen to the

brain because they are having a variation of snoring where the
airways from the nostrils shut down or are closed rather and a
person isn't able to breathe as freely, again a serious condition,
a dangerous condition, and needs to be investigated and treated
properly.

We move on to talking about sleep and dreaming in terms of

what are dreams? Dreams occur, as we mentioned earlier,
during REM sleep, mostly during REM sleep, and we know a lot
about dreams mostly from what people report, it is impossible
for us to see what goes on in a person's mind during dreaming,
but as what we know from self-reporting.

We know that dreams are quite important to us and that the

body when it loses a lot of sleep, let's say I pull an all nighter or
I'm up for a long period, 30, 40 hours, right when I catch my first
rate of sleep my body will give me what's called a REM rebound
which is an excessive extra amount of REM sleep.

I normally have a REM period once every 90 minutes but in this

case I might get an excessive amount of REM to replenish my
body's energy source.

Moving on we are now able to talk about some theories of

dreaming.

The most famous of the dream theorists is Sigmund Freud.

Freud's theory of dreams is that we dream about and we have

images during our sleep, during sleep that on the surface level
seem maybe perhaps interesting and what we, Freud would refer
to as a manifest content of the dream, I dreamt that I went to
the dentist last night perhaps, but Freud said underneath that
was the latent content, the hidden meaning of the dream, what
does it really mean that I went to the dentist and they pulled my
teeth, maybe it means they were pulling a deep secret from me,
something that I was afraid to talk about or let go of.

More to talk about that perhaps, but with our limited time we
must move on to two other interesting theories, the activation
synthesis theory, this theory basically says that at night our
brain is firing with billions of neural activity and because of this
firing of neural activity various images pop up into the mind's
eye as it were and we synthesize these images when we wake
up in the morning and concoct a story that kind of makes sense
in some way, which is why sometimes our dreams don't feel
completely fluid and they seem disjointed because of perhaps
this activation synthesis process that is occurring.
Finally, we have the information processing model.

This model states that our dreams are meant to help us digest
and make sense of the activities of our day, and when we go to
sleep at night the dreams that we have are pulling together
various concerns, anxieties, worries, or hopes and put them out
in this, and process them in a form of almost a movie as it were
for us to be able to digest and process what is going on in our
daily life.

So we covered a lot of information in this particular module of

sleep and dreaming, I hope you can review it and understand it
well and be prepared for this section of the CLEP exam.
Introductory Psychology

Hypnosis and meditation (Module 4.2)

[Prof. David Sitt]

In this section we will be discussing altered states of

consciousness.

Specifically, a state of consciousness which is brought about

through the manipulation, or effort of another person, upon the
individual, to achieve a hypnotic state.

Hypnosis is a narrowed state of focus and awareness, so while I

might normally be over here in my awareness state, when I am
hypnotized, I am much, much, much, more narrowed in my
focus.

And I do this by becoming very relaxed.

And in doing so, I become highly suggestible to what another

person might ask of me, or infer for me what kind of actions
they'll ask me to take.

So what is the explanation for hypnosis? How does it actually

come about? So one explanation of the effects of hypnosis is
that it's simply a heightened state of motivation.

Meaning that if I am one to by hypnotized, I might be very

motivated, to want to be hypnotized.

I might be motivated to see what a person will say to me, and

what action I take when I am less on the hook for what I am
doing, and I'm motivated by that.

That's one explanation.

Another explanation is that people being hypnotized are fulfilling

some type of a social role by behaving in the way they think a
hypnotist wants them to behave.
So it's fulfilling a social relationship need.

And finally, there's an explanation that talks about there being a

type of dissociation, a splitting, if you will, in my states of
consciousness, which ultimately allows a person to be under the
influence of another person and engage in activities that I might
not normally engage in, because I have dissociated from my
normal states of awareness.

A second form of altered states of conciousness is achieved

through meditation.

Meditation's an effortful manner of heightening ones' awareness.

It is a practice of acknowledging the contents of one's mind.

Meaning I might focus my awareness on my breath.

You might try this now for just a moment if you close your eyes,
and notice your breath.

(inhales) Notice what your breath feels like.

Noticing that, even just for three seconds, is a state of

meditation.

And you're acknowledging what you notice in your mind at that

moment, and that is meditation.

It's no big, large, major activity that requires you to climb the
top of a mountain in India.

Rather just taking a focus moment to notice what you see in

your mind.

Doing so, according to research, promotes a state of relaxation.

It gives you a great surge of energy.

It can help you develop states of compassion, and love, and

kindness.

And it is becoming extremely popular, and I highly recommend

meditating a bit, before you prepare for your CLEP exam.

Because it should certainly help you increase your state of focus

and concentration.
Introductory Psychology

Psychoactive drug effects (Module 4.3)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Psychoactive drugs produce a state of altered consciousness

that is different from our normal consciousness.

Psychoactive drugs achieve this by mimicking or inhibiting,

perhaps even stimulating the activity of the neurotransmitters
that are in our brains.

The three most common types of these drugs are depressants,

stimulants, and hallucinogens.

Depressants such as alcohol, barbiturates, or opiates operate on

the central nervous system of the brain and actually depress the
functioning of the central nervous system.

This is why people feel like they are slowing down when they're
drinking alcohol for example or taking a barbiturate drug.

It slows functioning down, it slows reaction time down, it slows

mental processing down.

The second class of drugs are referred to as stimulant drugs.

These drugs increase neural activity and increase body

functioning in the opposite way perhaps that you'd say of the
depressants.

Cocaine is considered a stimulant, amphetamines, even caffeine

and nicotine from cigarettes are all stimulants that increase our
neural activity and increase metabolism and other functions of
the brain and body.

Finally we have the hallucinogens.

These are a class of psychoactive drugs which distort

perceptions and produce sensations that have no physical basis.

So in this way if a person induces LSD or acid, mescaline, or

other classes of hallucinogens, such as mushrooms, they will
experience altered states of perceptions either from what they
see, in the auditory fashion.

Maybe altered things that they're hearing, so they're hearing

things, seeing things, feeling things on their body that aren't
there, all produced by this altered psychoactive drug class of
hallucinogens.

So that about covers it for the class of psychoactive drugs, and

this also wraps up our section on consciousness and altered
states of consciousness.

I hope you understood the material well and we'll be able to go

over it in preparation for the CLEP exam.
Introductory Psychology

Introduction (Module 5.0)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Now we will turn to studying the different processes of learning.

In this section we will cover five different subtopics of learning.

We will begin with the biological bases of learning.

We will discuss classical conditioning, cognitive processes in

learning.

We'll then turn to observational learning, and finally we'll discuss

operant conditioning.
Introductory Psychology

Biological bases (Module 5.1)

[Prof. David Sitt]

When it comes to learning, before we talk about how we can

learn through associations with our environment and other
methods of learning, it's important for us to understand that
there is a pre-programmed biological basis of behaviors that are
not learned but were rather born with.

We refer to these as reflexes.

Whether they be motor reflexes, when you go to the doctor, they

hit your knee, and your knee kicks out.

Or even neural reactions.

If I take a straw and I blow a puff of air, my eye will naturally

blink.

And when I have a little sneeze, my nose tickles, again I'll

sneeze.

Or I have something in my throat, I cough.

These are all motor or neural reflexes that are built in and are
unlearned.

We refer to these as instincts as well, innate behaviors that are

triggered by events in our environment.

So my instinct when I hear a very loud noise, my instinct might

be to duck.

Or if I smell fire, my instinct might be naturally to go into

protective mode, either to run or to resolve the problem at hand.

All of these biologically based aspects of innate learning help us

and organisms in general adapt to their environment, and it
helps them to survive and endure over the long term both within
one's lifetime and as evolutionarily speaking.

So this is the basic foundation of learning theories, and we'll get

to talking about how theorists and researchers add on to what
we know from reflexes and instinct, in order to advance different
learning theories.
Introductory Psychology

Classical conditioning (Module 5.2)

[Prof. David Sitt]

When it came to trying to understand learning, you would think

that perhaps psychologists actively reached and sought out that
information.

Ironically, the first of the learning theories came about by pure

accident.

A physiologist by the name of Ivan Pavlov was working in his

laboratory studying the salivation of dogs, and to understand
the digestive system of dogs.

Nothing at all to do with psychology or learning.

And through his work, he learned that animals, dogs at the time,
he later extrapolated to us, to human beings, have a system of
associative learning, a process in which learning occurs whereby
we associate a stimuli, in his case it was the ringing of a bell, or
the dog associated the ringing of the bell with a consequence,
and ultimately began anticipating that consequence.

So let's talk a little bit about that study with Pavlov and his dogs.

So the way the study worked was that Pavlov would, initially
he'd be bringing his dogs food in a bowl.

And obviously when the dogs would see the food in the bowl,
they would start to drool into this tube.

One day Pavlov walked in, and the bowl was empty.

There was no food in it, and suddenly he turned around, and the
dog was drooling.

And he had a eureka moment, and he said, the dog must have
learned to associate the bowl with the fact that there would be a
reward in the environment, or a reaction in the environment, of
food, and started to drool.

From this, he created his classic condition model.

And the way it works is that he took a neutral stimulus, which

was the bell that we saw in the previous picture, and prior, he
would ring the bell, then he would bring dog food, the dog would
then drool.

Now, any time I give a dog food, he's naturally going to drool.

It's an unconditioned stimulus, the food itself.

Unconditioned meaning it's unlearned.

The stimulus itself is reflexive, as we said earlier.

It's natural, or instinctual, for a dog to drool when it sees food.

And the unconditioned response, as we said, would be this

drooling.

So unconditioned stimulus is the food, unconditioned response,

is drooling.

Pavlov introduces a neutral stimulus, which is the ringing of a

bell, which, if I rang a bell for a dog on any given day, he would
kind of look at me funny.

Why are you ringing a bell? It does nothing for me, it's just a
bell.

But when I pair the ringing of the bell with the food, and then
the dog will drool, and I repeat that process several times, in
what he called the acquisition phase of learning, eventually, I
could remove the food altogether, and just ring that bell, and as
I ring that bell, let's go back.

As I ring that bell, the dog will start to drool.

I now have my conditioned stimulus, which is the ringing of the

bell, and a conditioned response, which is the drooling.
And let's not get confused, here.

The drooling is both the unconditioned stimulus, because it's

natural when it's paired with the food, but once it gets paired
with the neutral stimulus of the bell, the bell becomes
something different.

The bell becomes this conditioned stimulus, and the drooling is

now referred to as conditioned response, because it is in
response to that bell.

So this, in brief, is Ivan Pavlov's model of classical conditioning.

That as I ring a bell, the dog will drool, and learning has actually
occurred.

Pavlov, in his research, found that we could generalize not just

from the bell being, let's say, a high-pitched bell, ding ding ding
ding ding.

He might be able to generalize the drooling of the dog to a

lower-pitched bell, ding ding ding ding, or maybe even a light
blinking, or any other source that he could generalize out from
the original condition.

Now, just as a side note, there was research done by a very

famous psychologist whose name was Watson, who investigated
the development of fear in children with a baby called Little
Albert.

And he created a phobia in this child by pairing a loud noise with

a rabbit.

And initially, the boy was not afraid of the rabbit, it was neutral,
he liked the rabbit.

Then they made a very loud noise, which is a unconditioned

stimulus to create an unconditioned response of fear, and
eventually, when they brought the rabbit to the boy, the rabbit
became a conditioned stimulus, and led to a conditioned
response of fear.

And in this case, Watson generalized from the rabbit to a dog, to

a furry animal, to many other furry things, and that was when
learning was generalized.

At times, after a series of presenting this ringing of a bell, for

example, to the dog after 10 days, eventually the dog will forget
that it was associated with the food, and extinction will occur.

And this is when we lose the conditioned response.

In conducting his research, Pavlov found that he could transfer

the learning from the bell to, and generalize it to other
conditions as well.

So if initially he used a high-pitched bell, ding ding ding ding

ding, he was able to experiment with a low-pitched bell, ding
ding ding ding ding, and find that the learning occurred in this
condition as well, and this was referred to as generalization.

So, in terms of a phobia, I might develop a phobia from being in

a elevator because initially the elevator was neutral for me, and
one day I got stuck inside of the elevator, and that created a lot
of fear in me.

And now I develop this fear of closed spaces.

I might generalize not just from being in an elevator, but maybe

I now have a fear of being in a subway car, or being in an
airplane, generalizes out from the one condition to other
conditions, and this is what Pavlov found in his original studies.

He also found that if he presented the conditioned stimulus,

which again, if you remember in his study, the conditioned
stimulus was ringing of that bell.

If he presented the bell without the food for let's say five days in
a row, eventually the dog would realize, wait a minute, I've been
drooling for this bell the whole time, expecting food to come, but
I figured out that food never came.

And so extinction might occur, whereby the conditioned stimulus

is presented, the bell, without the food, the unconditioned
stimulus, and eventually the conditioned response, the drooling,
will extinguish or become extinct.
So this another feature of the classic conditioning model that
Pavlov presented in his original studies, that was taken forward
by many other researchers, notably John Watson and his
research with Little Albert, that you might need to brush up on
as well.

And we learned a lot from Pavlov, and applied it to our lives in

many ways, and hopefully you can apply it in terms of your
preparation and studies for the CLEP exam.
Introductory Psychology

Cognitive process in learning (Module 5.3)

[Prof. David Sitt]

We're now going to turn our attention towards the intersection

between the cognitive processes and memory even to a certain
extent and learning.

There is a complex set of interactions that occurs both

consciously and unconsciously in order to facilitate the learning
process.

We need to understand that much of learning happens in an

associative fashion, meaning things are associated from one to
another and through those associations we learn.

I might associate being in a certain classroom with my necessity

to sit upright and take notes.

I associate that particular classroom with the need to sit up and

take notes, whereas another classroom that I'm in might not
require note taking and I associate that particular room with
more active engagement of raising my hand and participating
based on my association.

The process of learning through association is one that occurs

again somewhat consciously and to a certain extent also in this
unconscious, unintentional manner.

Within non-associative learning, we have types of learning that

occurs through habituation.

If I am always riding to school on a bus and I habituate that as

soon as I walk towards the turnstile of a New York city subway to
put my hands in my pocket and pull out my Metro card.

If I go to the subway every single day and I have to consciously

think, "Oh, take out my Metro card to pay," but eventually I'm
going to habituate to do that and I automatically put my hands
in my pocket, I swipe it through the gate, and I walk into the
subway in a habituated fashion.

Habituation is a unconscious form of learning.

It's not something that I'm doing consciously or purposefully.

Also we also develop a sensitivity or a sensitization within our

learning.

If someone begins to pinch me or flick my arm and in the

beginning it's a bit irritating but eventually I don't notice it
anymore and it begins to ...

I become sensitized to it.

Or let's say I'm putting on a suit and maybe it's a little tight.

When I first put it on I might feel the tightness of it, but

eventually I'm going to get sensitized to that and I may not
notice that it is tight anymore.

Tying your shoes, first it's tight.

You feel it but eventually over a few minutes as time passes,

you'll become sensitized to the tightness in your shoe and you
have learned that your foot can stay in your shoe comfortably
and you've learned that that pressure from the shoelaces is no
longer being registered consciously.

A few other features that are notable, our attention and our
ability to focus our attention is very much correlated with our
ability to learn.

When I intentionally direct my attention toward something, it is

going to make it more likely that I can learn from that
experience.

There is something to be said for how much my attention span

can hold onto information for the purpose of learning.

Sensory information, for example, within the sensory register

system, actually holds information for only a few seconds.
If I'm sitting in a classroom or listening to a video in preparation
for my CLEP exam, my ears are going to hear the information
and sense that information in my auditory cortex, but it's only
going to last a very short period of time, maybe two or three
seconds even, until it disappears unless I attend to it.

I give it attention.

If I give that information attention, it becomes meaningful and

relevant to me.

In that way I can deepen the learning experience.

This explains why you might forget so much information from

your lectures at school, because maybe you're not taking notes
and maybe you're not making it personally meaningful to you,
and so the information as they say goes in one ear and out the
other because it doesn't actually solidify and become attended
to within the sensory register system.

Once information does travel into the sensory register and it

becomes somewhat meaningful, it has a chance of entering into
my short-term memory system.

My short-term memory system is where I can manipulate

information, where I begin to, let's say, rehearse the information.

If you meet somebody and you ask them for their phone number
and then you try to repeat that number over and over, so 212-
555-2552.

212-555-2552.

I repeat the number over and over and over again, I'm trying to
get the information to stick in my short-term memory so that it
doesn't disappear, and once I feel like it's locked into short-term
memory, I then have a chance at sending it along to the long-
term memory system.

Now, short-term memory as we will discuss in the memory

module, has a limited capacity of seven items plus or minus two.

That's the magic formula.

On the average person it ranges between five to nine items is
the average short-term memory capacity.

There's a reason why our phone numbers have 10 digits but

really three chunks of information, because that's really pushing
the outer limits of the memory system.

Long-term memory has unlimited capacity.

Once I attend to the information and whichever way that I

consciously put effort into remembering it, and sometimes long-
term memory gets created in an unconscious way.

I have an emotional experience, maybe a traumatic experience

that will last with me for the long term, I didn't put effort into
learning about that experience and remembering it but it sticks
with me and it stays with me for years and years and years to
pass.

The long-term memory again has an unlimited capacity.

In order to understand the differences you should definitely refer

to the memory chapter, but for the sake of learning we now
understand the role that attention and memory system plays
within learning, and finally in terms of encoding and retrieval of
information once I enter information into my long-term memory.

Again, sensory memory becomes relevant.

Sensory memory system, it's relevant.

I send it along to the short-term memory system.

I rehearse it.

It practice it over and over and over again.

Once it sticks within the short-term memory and it really

develops a meaningfulness, it enters into the long-term memory
system.

Then I have to retrieve that information from long-term memory

back into my present state and my short-term memory.
That's the retrieval of information.

Information gets encoded into long-term memory and it gets

retrieved back from long-term memory for me to access in my
present state.

In its present state I can then utilize it for other learning

purposes.

That about sums up the cognitive processes that are utilized

within the learning modules.

I hope this was meaningful for you and that the information will
stick in your short-term memory so you can get it into long-term
memory and you can access it for the CLEP exam.

In case you're worried about that, I encourage you to go back

and look at the printed materials as well as look at the test
examples and practice that material so that all of what we're
covering for the CLEP exam can stick with you for you to show
up and do very well on your CLEP exam.

I'll see you at the next sub-module.

Introductory Psychology

Observational learning (Module 5.4)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Observational Learning is another aspect of Learning Theory.

And in this model, we talk about how people learn from viewing
the behaviors of others.

Essentially, how people model their own behaviors by watching

other people.

You might look at children and note that children very often
mimic what they see happening from the adults around them.

What children see, children do.

Monkey see, monkey do, right? You hear that statement often.

So this is something as well, that happens in terms of Learning

Theory.

We note from the work of Albert Bandura much about

Observational Learning Theory.

And it's Albert Bandura's work with a a Bobo Doll, which is a

blowup doll that he put in a room, and he had children watch
adults play with this blowup doll.

And the children who watched adults play with this Bobo Doll in
very aggressive ways, punching the doll, kicking the doll, the
children who watched this behavior, when they were observed
playing with this doll, exhibited similar aggressive behavior with
this Bobo Doll, and in fact went beyond the type of behavior that
the adult had shown.

So they picked up a toy gun in the room, and shot, made it as if

they were shooting the doll, and other very aggressive
behaviors.

And those children who watched the nonviolent behaviors from

the adults similarly mimicked less aggressive behavior with their
Bobo, with the blowup doll.

And this is what Bandura based his seminal learning and

Observational Theories on.

He applied this notion to both pro-social behavior, meaning how

is it that people engage in positive acts to help out others in
society? Very often it is done through watching the models of
others, whether it through media or social media, or observing
people in your life.

Engaging in positive activity, we then are more likely to engage

in such behavior.

And this holds true for anti-social activities as well.

If I'm observing anti-social or negative or aggressive behaviors

for the sake of society, people and children and people are more
inclined to follow suit.

Bandura mentioned there being stages of attending to

information that we watch, retaining it, holding onto it,
reproducing such behavior, and having a motivation to further
engage in such behavior as was observed in their learning
process.

So this about covers the Observational Learning portion of this

chapter, and the work of Albert Bandura.
Introductory Psychology

Operant conditioning (Module 5.5)

[Prof. David Sitt]

We're at the last of our learning models, and this model was
contributed, and ascribed mostly to B.F.

Skinner.

Skinner, who was an American psychologist, who had learned of

the work of classic conditioning and Ivan Pavlov, and was
actually working on techniques to help, in part, the US Army in
creating pigeons who were actually missile guiding pigeons that
he taught through a system of rewards and punishments how to
interact with the military's missile system at the time.

And other very interesting efforts.

So out of his work, Skinner came up with this model called

classical conditioning, where we have a learning which occurs
through an association between some stimulus, and a response
that follows it.

So, a stimulus could be a baby that cries, and the response that
follows it is a parent that picks up the baby.

That is a stimulus followed by a response.

And through that process a baby might learn, if I need

something, I'm gonna cry, so that my parents will pick me up.

And that is a form of, an example of reinforcement.

Skinner also utilized the work of the Law of Effect from Edward
Thorndike, who had basically written one of the very few laws in
psychology.

We have a lot of theories, but very few laws.

Thorndike wrote of something called the Law of Effect, which
very simply stated that the, based on a consequence that's
positive is more likely to lead to repetition of a behavior.

So if there's a behavior that occurs and there's a reward, that

behavior is more likely to occur again in the future.

If there's a behavior that occurs which receives a punishment,

that behavior is simply less likely to occur in the future.

So through this understanding of rewards and punishments,

Skinner began to elaborate on this theory of rewards and
punishments, and began to give more details about the system.

Spoke about reinforcement, saying that any time a behavior is

likely to be repeated, we are dealing with reinforcement.

Again, any time we're looking to repeat a behavior, we're talking

about reinforcement.

Any time we're trying to reduce a behavior, we're talking about

punishment.

But we'll get to that in a moment.

He divided reinforcement into two types, or two flavors.

Positive and negative reinforcement.

Positive reinforcement is what occurs when I add something in

order to increase the likelihood that a behavior will occur.

And actually what I'm adding is something desirable.

So when I add a desirable stimulus in order to increase the

likelihood that a behavior will occur.

What's an example of a positive reinforcement? If I, if you have a

child that does his homework, and you give him a extra
chocolate chip cookie at night, or let him play extra games on
their gaming system, that is something that they desire, and
hopefully it will lead to an increase in their behavior of doing
their homework.
Positive reinforcement.

Negative reinforcement is when I remove something desirable in

order to increase the likelihood, excuse me, when I remove
something undesirable in order to increase the likelihood of a
behavior.

A classic example of this is when you get into your car, and the
seatbelt sound goes off.

(mimics dinging) This is something quite undesired.

I really don't like that sound.

So when I take my seatbelt and I click it in, and that sound goes
away, I have removed that undesirable sound, and the car
manufacturer hopes that I am more likely to put on my seatbelt
in the future to remove that negative stimuli.

Or if I have a headache, and I take an Advil.

The Advil removes that negative stimuli of the headache,

therefore in the future the next time I have a headache, I am
likely to repeat that behavior, take that Advil, and remove that
negative stimuli, and this too is an example of negative
reinforcement.

Punishment is, as I said earlier, any time that I want to reduce

the likelihood of a behavior occurring.

A positive punishment is when I introduce a undesired stimuli in

order to reduce the likelihood of a behavior occurring.

So this might be, if I had a student in the classroom who is using

their cell phone.

A teacher might give that student a five point reduction, they

might give them five point penalty on their exam.

So they're introducing something undesired.

They introduced a punishment of sorts, in order to decrease the

likelihood of my behavior occurring.
Another example would be if I, if I don't want, people who have
dogs, and they don't want them to run into the street, they may
give the dog a loud yelling.

Don't go into the street.

That's undesired, the dog doesn't want to be yelled at.

And hopefully it will decrease the likelihood that they'll run into
the street.

A negative punishment is when I remove a desired stimulus in

order to decrease the likelihood that a behavior will occur.

So, a example of, when I'm removing something that's desired, I

have a student who is not doing their homework, so I remove
their Xbox from them.

Or I remove their cell phone for three days, or a day, in order to

decrease the likelihood that they'll repeat that undesired
behavior.

So these are just some of the examples of negative punishment,

positive punishment, negative reinforcement, and positive
reinforcement.

Finally, we have from Skinner a discussion about how to apply

these reinforcements and punishments.

And Skinner talked about a schedule, or a method, of applying

these reinforcements and punishments according to either a
time frame, or a number of applications.

So he talked about there being a ratio schedule, which means

how many times a response has been made.

So, I might have a fixed ratio schedule of reinforcement.

So this would mean that every ten times that a salesman sells a
watch, I would give them a $100 reward.

So for every ten sales they get a $100 bonus.

It's a fixed ratio, a fixed number of occurrences whereby they'll
get their reward.

A variable ratio means an unknown number of occurrences.

So I might tell a class that I have, you're going to get pop

quizzes.

It might happen after two classes, then it might happen after ten
classes, and then after three classes.

You don't know at which number you're going to receive this pop
quiz.

Another example is from in the gambling world.

If I go to a slot machine, and I pull the lever down, I don't know if

I'm going to get the reward, or hit the jackpot, after one pull, ten
pulls, or 100 pulls.

Or scratching a lottery ticket.

Is it one lottery ticket, five, 10, 15, I can't predict, because it's a
variable ratio schedule.

Finally, we talk about the interval schedule.

This is based on an amount of time in between reinforcements.

So a fixed interval would be a reward that occurs after a set

period of time.

I get paid after, on every Tuesday of the week.

Semantically you might say that's seven days, but when we look
at it as time, it's the passage of seven days that provides me
with my reward.

A variable interval would be an unfixed period of time, where I

can't predict how often I'll get the reward or the punishment.

So an example might be if I am working in a factory, and I am

the foreman of the factory.
I might walk out onto the factory floor, if it's fixed, at nine a.m.,
at 10 a.m., at 11 a.m., and as I walk around at nine a.m.

my workers might start to increase their productivity for just that

period of time, and then it'll dip down in productivity, until 10
o'clock comes.

They'll start working more, and then they'll dip once I leave the
floor.

A more steady level of production will occur with a variable

interval schedule.

They can't predict if I'll come out one day at nine o'clock, one
day at 9:05, one day at 9:13, and then at 10:11, and then at
10:27, and because they can't predict when I will come out to
check on their work, they are more likely to work at a steadier
rate.

And therefore this is a encouraged method to use in terms of

reinforcement, as well as punishment.

So this completes our discussion of the various learning

techniques, from the beginning to the end.

I hope that you will spend time reviewing these concepts, they
are definitely can be complicated and require you to repeat
reading through this material so that you don't get confused
from the various learning theories that are out there.

Good luck getting through it, we'll see you at the next chapter.
Introductory Psychology

Introduction (Module 6.0)

[Prof. David Sitt]

In this section we will study the different areas of cognition.

In this section we will cover intelligence and creativity.

We'll discuss language and its acquisition.

We'll review the aspects and portions of the memory system.

And finally thinking and problem solving.

Introductory Psychology

Intelligence and creativity (Module 6.1)

[Prof. David Sitt]

When we talk about intelligence, we might find ourselves

wondering, is there a single type of intelligence? Are there
different ways of measuring intelligence? What differentiates my
level of intelligence from your level of intelligence, and what
difference does that have in how we live our lives? These are
just some of the questions that have been asked since the early
1900s, when we began to try and understand what is
intelligence.

We trace back the definition of intelligence to a basic

understanding of problem solving, how can we solve problems
and how can we apply these solving of problems to our lives.

Alfred Binet, a French theorist, was one of the first individuals to

begin studying and writing about intelligence.

And he came up with the first actual test of intelligence.

And he did so in the French school system.

Within his system, he was able to yield a mental age, meaning, I

might have my chronological age when I was 12 years old, and
through taking Binet's tests, he would see whether my actual
mental age was that of a 12-year-old, or perhaps it was of a 14
or 15-year-old.

So this was Binet's method of intelligence testing.

Further along, we began to understand intelligence as a

quotient, or intelligence quotient, what today we call the IQ.

The IQ uses this idea of there being a mental age and divides
that mental age by my chronological or actual age.
And then I multiply that number by a hundred.

So, if I am a 12-year-old and I have the intelligence of a 14-year-

old, I divide 12 by 14, multiply that by a hundred, and I would
have received my IQ score.

In reality, today, that system has been further advanced, and we

use a standardized score for understanding intelligence.

It is roughly out of a large scale, maybe up to 165, and the

average intelligence score is a hundred, the mean score, the
average, is a hundred when it comes to intelligence.

And, in doing so, we're able to make comparisons between test

takers and the average population in terms of intelligence.

Over time, multiple theories came up to identify and explain

intelligence.

The first and dominant theory was that of the g-factor theory of
intelligence.

This was put forward originally by Charles Spearman, and

Spearman said that there is a way to boil down all of our
intelligence into this single g-factor, this generalized factor, or
generalized number, ultimately, that represents all of my
intelligence, and in a way that I can compare my intelligence, or
my g-factor intelligence, to yours or anybody else's.

Over time, other theories started to come up that diverge from

this single number or g-factor, and they came up with multiple
forms of intelligence.

One such theory was proposed by Robert Sternberg.

Robert Sternberg put together a triarchic theory of intelligence

that covered three different areas, or three different types of
intelligence.

The first was analytic intelligence.

This is what we might call our academic type of intelligence.

Can I analyze information, mathematics, in order to produce a

high score on a test? Am I able to analyze different prose in
Shakespeare and reflect that information back? This is analytic
intelligence.

His second type of intelligence was called practical intelligence.

This is my ability to problem=solve, to operate and work within

the real world in a practical manner.

You might call this the ability to apply information that I pick up
in school, but in a practical sense that helps me live my life on a
day-to-day level, not necessarily in a academic manner.

Finally, Sternberg talked about a creative intelligence.

This is an ability to develop new information, to solve problems

outside of the box, to generate hypothesis based on information
that isn't necessarily in front of me, or not what I've learned
beforehand.

It's that creative nature.

So this is one example of a multiple form of intelligence.

Another type of multiple intelligence theory was put forward by

Raymond Cattell.

Raymond Cattell divided intelligence into two formats.

He spoke of fluid intelligence, which is basically how fast I can

learn new information, and how fast I can respond to my
environment.

If you think about it, if I have a puzzle open in front of me, I have
to think on my feet and be very fluid in my ability to apply my
knowledge and information to solve such a problem.

This is what Cattell referred to as fluid.

In opposition to that is my crystallized intelligence.

This is information that I learn over time.

It's crystallized, it's solidified.

My ability to use skills that I learned perhaps in an academic
environment, and my ability to solve problems using this
crystallized information, it might be vocabulary words, it might
be mathematical formulas, perhaps it's information from my
psychology course, this is all information that is set and
crystallized, that sticks with me really hopefully for the long
term.

A important question that will inevitably come up when we talk

about intelligence is, what is the root of intelligence, where does
it come from? Is it my nature or my genetics or my biological
contributions at birth that set my intelligence level? Or is it my
nurturing, my upbringing, my environment that contributes to
my intelligence level? Well we know from tests done with
identical twins that, on the one hand, there is certainly a
hereditary feature to my intelligence, so that if I take two
identical twins and I put them in the same home, I generally
might find a close relationship between their intelligence level.

However, what happens if I take one of those identical twins and

I place him in another home, and they are raised in a separate
environment? Well, in that case, the research finds that there
are variations in the intelligence that unfolds, which leads in to
believe that there is an influence from my upbringing, from my
nurturing.

And so, we know and we conclude that it is a combination of

nature and nurture that leads to intelligence.

We also should point out that there are certain learning

disabilities that relate to intelligence.

dysgraphia, having to do with difficulties in writing, or dyslexia,

having to do with learning difficulties in terms of my ability to
read and to digest information.

And there are other varying learning disabilities, but for the sake
of our CLEP exam, we can limit our knowledge to just these two
areas.

Finally, when it comes to intelligence, creativity also plays an

interactive role with intelligence.
What is creativity? Well that is our ability to generate new ideas,
to create new discoveries, and to solve problems that perhaps
weren't able to be solved before, and suddenly we have
epiphanies, or sudden realizations, eureka moments, where the
light bulb goes off and I'm able to creatively solve problems in
my environment.

I might use this divergent thinking pattern, or I might use other

facets of my intelligence in order for me to solve new problems
creatively.

This about wraps up our opening discussion about intelligence

and creativity.

I hope that it is beginning to sink in.

Introductory Psychology

Language (Module 6.2)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Language is also a tool that we use to solve problems, the same

way we do intelligence and modes of creativity.

Now, we use language in order to get ideas from one person to

another.

It's been our method of communicating since we sat around fires

in caves.

And we do so not only to communicate from one to another, we

do it to communicate into large groups as well.

And language is occurring not just verbally but in nonverbal

formats as well.

However, the spoken language is unique to the human race, as

we know.

And there are certain features of language that we're going to

discuss and cover today.

To make problem solving and communicating possible through

language, we use a system of rules, whether they follow spoken,
written, or sign language, and these rules are composed of
grammatical rules as well as rules related to our lexicon or how
we develop the actual words that we use, the breakdown of
words into the elementary parts, such as phonemes and
morphemes, which are syllables, essentially, and vocalizations
that we combine using different rules of syntax and different
rules of grammar in order to form our human language.

We also know that semantics are a crucial part to constructing

language.
What are the contexts by which language is formed also is very
relevant to us.

The skills that we use for these rules develop with age, of
course, and, although age-related changes in speaking are
usually, we can find them by observing children speak and we
see how that evolves over time, by the time we reach adulthood,
we can really see the formation of our syntax and grammatical
rules well in place.

Let's just speak for a moment about some of the early stages,
though, from childhood.

Usually, we describe the progression in terms of the number of

words that a child can put together, that they can string
together, in order to form a thought.

At about four to six months of age, babies begin to babble.

It seems like that they are not making much sense, but, in their
minds, they are actually beginning to communicate and practice
the sounds that they hear in their surrounding, and in the
language that's spoken in their homes.

This stage lasts roughly until the child's first birthday, where
they're still babbling and putting pieces of syllables together.

And, during this time, their ability to recognize sounds that are
not used in their language increases.

And, actually, the occurrence of these sounds decreases over

time.

At about a year of age, a child enters the one-word stage, which

lasts about 18 months.

They're saying mom, dada, ball, up, down, single words.

And sometimes they string them into two-word sentences.

Cup here, in which case they're really communicating, bring that

cup over here.

So it expresses a lot more than just those two words.

This is called telegraphic speech, and it's also typical of, as we
said, the two-word stage, during which children primarily use a
noun combined with a verb.

Maybe they say, mommy hug, or doggie bite.

And, a few months later, they may throw in an adjective, such as

good doggie.

So they're expanding their language as they get older.

Although attempts have been made to begin to explain

language development in terms of operant conditioning, from
the works of B.F.

Skinner, we actually look to the work of Noam Chomsky, who

really contributed a lot of our knowledge in language
development from his seminal works.

He claimed that children have a language acquisition device, a

type of universal, built-in system that helps them interpret and
use language in various ways relative to their unique
environment, though this mechanism is, this acquisition device
is one that we find, again, across cultures, in all different
countries, all children around the world have, according to
Chomsky, this system.

We also find there to be a universal, a universality to the stages

with which children run through the development of language
over time.

That about covers it for our focus on language, and in a moment

we will turn our attention to memory.
Introductory Psychology

Memory (Module 6.3)

[Prof. David Sitt]

We would really not be able to function easily and certainly not

be able to solve the problems that come up for us have we not
had this amazing memory system.

The memory system is traditionally broken down into three

parts.

The sensory memory, the short-term, otherwise knows as

working memory system, and finally, the long-term memory
system.

Each has its own unique features, in terms of duration, capacity,

and subjectivity to forgetfulness.

Sensory memory is as it sounds, the memory system that is

triggered by the various senses that we have.

So, this is the part of the memory which responds to sights,

sounds, smell, touch, and all of that information that enters into
our brain and actually lasts only brief moments, seconds and
nanoseconds.

If we do not attend to information in the sensory memory

system, it is fleeting, it disappears, it disintegrates.

So, if I walk in a place like Times Square in New York City, I'm
going to be bombarded with millions of sensory data points,
colors, sounds, sights, smells, but I yet might only remember
that the Spiderman person who came up to me and asked me to
take a picture, and everything else disappeared out of my
sensory memory system.

From the point on, I trigger the short-term or working memory

system.
So, once I meet Spiderman at Times Square, he might enter into
my short-term memory if something meaningful happens in that
interaction.

And we know in terms of the short-term memory system that it

too is limited.

It's limited in how much information can be stored.

We have found through various research studies that the

magical number of information or data points is seven.

Seven bits of information is about how much I can hold on to for

that several seconds of time.

By the way, that number seven is plus or minus two so the

average person is seven, maybe if you have a great memory,
you can hold to nine bits of information, less so is five.

There's a reason why our phone numbers are made up of this

many digits.

So, three, six, and 10.

That's the outer limit of memory but when we use certain

memory techniques such as chunking, I group these into just
three portions.

So, a phone number can be brought to really three chunks.

Once I grab something in the short-term memory system,

hopefully, it resonates with me, there's meaning to it, and it gets
sent down to the long-term memory system.

Extra effort is required to hold on to the information there,

perhaps I give it semantic meaning.

Perhaps, I have a personal reference to something in my life that

allows me to hold on to that information and once it gets locked
into long-term memory, well, the capacity is pretty much
unlimited.

It's kind of like what exists today in the cloud where we can put
all these information up into the cloud and it seems like
terabytes upon terabytes can be held up into the cloud as
opposed to my shorter-term memory on my hard drive.

What is fascinating about memory is that it can be manipulated.

We can enhance that memory system through various memory

tricks referred to as mnemonic strategies or mnemonic devices,
and these can help to expand the knowledge base with the use
of things like chunking as I said before, rehearsing, coming up
with a, for example, you know the colors in the rainbow are
ROYGBIV.

These are the color spectrum, red, orange, yellow, green,

something, something, and something, right? And this is the
colors of the memory system, in the color spectrum and other
mnemonic devices help us lodge information into that long-term
system.

As you can tell, some of them have left me but we keep trying to
use more and more memory tricks to help us especially when it
comes to studying for a test.

That about covers it for the memory portion of this chapter and
again, I hope you use some of these information to help you
memorize information for the CLEP exam.
Introductory Psychology

Thinking and problem solving (Module 6.4)

[Prof. David Sitt]

A variety of thought processes either facilitate or get in the way

of problem solving.

For example, we often use shortcuts referred to as heuristics,

otherwise known as mental rules of thumb, kind of these mental
guidebooks or playbooks, as a way to solve our problems.

And this is especially true for those that involve estimates of the
likelihood that something might happen.

And we try to do, you know, come to this estimation of

likelihoods with as little effort as possible.

For example, if you wanted to decide how likely it is that a class

that you wanna sign up for would be interesting, you might
compare the characteristics of the class, whether it be the
teacher or the materials that are gonna be used, maybe the
time of day that the course is taught or what platform it's taught
with, if it's an online course.

And you're going to compare that to what you normally or

generally like.

And if there is a good crossover or representation of that

information, you're more likely to engage in that particular
course.

The closer the fit, the more likely it is that you would expect the
course to be interesting.

This problem solving method is called representativeness

heurtistics.

Essentially what we're asking of ourselves is how similar or

representative one event is of a larger group of events that I
have become accustomed to experiencing.

Another shortcut or another heuristic is the availability heuristic.

This involves judging the likelihood that an event will happen in

terms of how readily I can bring myself or bring an instance of
that into my own mind.

So, events that are more sharp in my mind, they're more vivid,
they've happened more recently, perhaps, these may be judged
as being more likely to happen to me again as opposed to things
that are more distant in my past.

I don't remember them that well.

So if I've been dating somebody and they had a sense of humor

that I really liked and they made me laugh a lot, I might be more
inclined for the next person I might date to look for that type of
a humor as opposed to maybe a partner I had many, many years
ago that wasn't as funny.

So I'm not gonna look out for that level of humor, 'cause it's
older, I want something that's more available and more recent in
my memory.

So thus based on availability, I might come to the conclusion

that judicial trials are maybe relatively common and plea
bargains are relatively rare.

And actually the reverse is really true.

It happens to be that plea bargains are way more common, but

news reports of trials are just much more common for us in the
media.

So we just would believe that trials are what more commonly

happens as opposed to plea bargaining.

Neither of the heuristics that we've just mentioned are

necessarily steer me towards a correct judgment, although they
become more commonly used by us and hopefully get us to
more of our correct answers in life.
Okay, so, much of what is studied with respect to thinking and
problem solving, or actually also subject to problems in
judgment and problems in problem solving.

So we have here a few types of biases.

The confirmation bias is a process whereby which I'm looking for

information to confirm what I already believe.

So if I have a belief that a certain sports team is my preferred

sports team, I'm gonna look for data that confirms that that
sports team is the best sports team around.

Even if they're not ahead in the stats, I'm still gonna confirm
based on what my predisposing beliefs might be.

Another common bias that happens with problem solving is a

hindsight bias, whereby I face a particular problem, let's say it's
me thinking about how to study for an exam.

And then after I get the results of my exam back, I have this
hindsight bias where I look back in time and I say, well now that
the exam grade came in, I can look back in hindsight and
critique how I approached the problem, but really it's only
because I'm looking in hindsight, as they say a Monday morning
quarterback, or a rear view mirror perspective.

Finally, there's two other biases, I'll mention one.

Availability bias is my tendency to base my solutions for

problems on what information is available to me at that time.

So it doesn't really give me the full breadth of knowledge that I

might use to solve a problem, but merely what is at my disposal
at the time and this can cause problems in my ability to solve
problems in my environment.

Finally, another concept is the idea of functional fixedness,

which is a method by which I become very limited in seeing the
utility of things in my environment.

So if I have a remote control that I have to replace the battery

of, I have one in my hand here, and if I have to loosen that
screw, but I don't have a screwdriver, I might be very fixed and
think that there is no way other than using a screwdriver to open
up this remote control.

But what about the penny or the quarter that I have in my

pocket that I can pull out, and use as a screwdriver, as it were,
in order to open up this particular remote control? We get stuck
in functional fixedness thinking there's only one way that
something can function without realizing that things have
multiple functions beyond what they originally were intended
for.

So I hope this portion of the study program taught you some

relevant information and reminded you of relevant information
that you can apply not only for the purpose of this exam, but
also for living your life more clearly and fully.
Introductory Psychology

Introduction (Module 7.0)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Hello there, we're back, and now we're going to turn our
attention towards the discussion of motivation and emotion.

In this section we will cover different theories of motivation and

emotion.

Specifically we'll be talking about the biological bases of hunger,

thirst, sex, and pain, and we'll also talk about social motivation,
along with the other theories in this particular section.
Introductory Psychology

Theories of emotion (Module 7.1)

[Prof. David Sitt]

In this section, we begin talking about emotions.

Emotions are quite common and known to us.

When we talk about emotions, I wanna just point out that we're
not speaking about mood.

Mood is a prolonged, less explicit, effective state.

It's kind of like, what's your mood been over the past month
following the election.

My mood has been a certain, kind of stable point.

It's not usually determined by a single event, but it's an

overarching state.

In opposition to this is an emotion.

An emotion is a physiological state that involves three distinct

components.

There is the subjective experience, meaning what I'm

experiencing myself, subjectively.

Then there's my physiological arousal.

How does going on a roller coaster affect me physiologically.

And then there are the behavioral or expressive features of such

an emotion.

So this is how we define emotions overall.

Now, there are several theories that have come about to try to
explain how emotions come about and how we even register a
response to our emotions.

We're going to focus on just three of these theories, maybe we'll

throw in a fourth as well and we'll start off with the James-Lange
theory.

Let me also point out that I'm gonna be flipping over, back and
forth to an image.

So try to follow with me when I bring that image up.

The James-Lange theory says that, Let's say I'm out and I'm
walking in a field and suddenly, a snake pops up in front of me.

In this, James-Lange theory, I would first sense the arousal,

meaning my body or my mind would notice that there's a snake
and have a physiological arousal state, which would lead me to
be heart pounding.

(heart beat) I start to sweat.

Right, so he's gonna start to sweat, Oh man, he's sweating; he's

sweating.

And at that point, fear is registered.

That is the emotion I have.

Ah! I'm afraid.

Fear.

Alright, snake.

So, this is the James-Lange theory.

Now...

as opposed to the James-Lange theory, we have the Cannon-

Bard theory.

Now the Cannon-Bard theory states that relevant stimuli are

actually what generate the arousal themselves, and at that
point, information is sent to the central nervous system and the
cortex.

So, that right away, once I see this snake, the information is sent
over to my central nervous system and at the same time, at the
same moment, my heart begins to pound, I may sweat, I might
have other physiological effects, and the fear is registered within
that same moment.

As opposed to, again, a two step process above.

One, two for James-Lange.

Cannon-Bard is a single, kind of, cannon experience.

That's a good way to remember it.

It's a cannon.

It just happens all at once.

Finally, we can talk about the Two-Factor theory.

The Two-Factor theory, which was proposed by Schachter, states

that the quality of our emotional experiences, depends on how
we label, or how I appraise the particular arousal that I'm
experiencing.

So, what he would say, Schachter and Singer, is that I see the
snake.

I begin to have heart pounding.

And at that point, my mind has to assess why is my heart

pounding? What is causing my heart to pound? Well, if I appraise
that there's a snake in front of me and that's dangerous, I'm now
going to have a conclusion of fear.

And that's when my emotion is gonna register.

I'm going to be afraid because I've assessed the heart pounding,

from the snake, to be dangerous and that is fear.
If I would have had a heart pounding, and then I notice that
there was an attractive person nearby I might say, oh it's not the
snake, it's actually that person that I'm attracted to and I
attribute the heart pounding to that person, and therefore, I
won't have fear, but maybe I have excitement or some other
emotion.

Okay, there is one other theory by Lazarus, which is the

cognitive-mediational theory which says that after I see the
snake, I appraise the situation and then, from there, I have the
fear or the heart pounding and sweating.

So it's kind of a two-step process as opposed to what we saw in

this area.

So that's about it for this particular section.

Covering three, or really four theories of emotional processing

and I hope you got it.

And do your best to even picture this grid when you're trying to
study.
Introductory Psychology

Theories of motivation (Module 7.2)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Alright, we are now moving on to the theories of motivation.

So, if you think about it, we're now preparing for a CLEP exam,
studying for this exam, maybe other exams, and you might
wonder what's driving you, what motivates you to prepare for
this exam? What motivates us to prepare or be driven towards
anything in our lives? Relationships, happiness, love, food,
anything that we're actually driven towards has a motivation
behind it.

So, here in psychology, we try to understand what makes us

behave in these ways, what actually drives us.

So motivation, we can summarize this as studying motivation,

which is a description of the wants or the needs that direct
behavior towards a particular goal.

So, it's a broad definition, and we're gonna go into some

specifics that describe some of what drives us or motivate us.

The first theory that we come upon is the Drive theory.

The Drive theory states that, basically we have an assumption

that we're all operating under homeostasis, a certain state of
balance, as you would.

And when our system becomes imbalanced in any particular

way, that is what's going to create the physiological need to
regain balance.

So any time I deviate from that state of homeostasis, I'm gonna

be driven to resolve that by achieving whatever it is that I'm
lacking in that particular area.
So, for example, let's just say I am without food, I'm very hungry.

This will cause a drop in my blood sugar level.

Blood sugar drops, and in that way, it leads me to become more

hungry, and that'll drive me to find food, or if I'm thirsty, to get
some beverage into me, and that'll resolve that imbalance in
that homeostasis.

This is true for sleep also.

If I'm tired, I'm gonna seek out sleep.

If I am cold, I'm gonna seek out something to make me warm.

If I'm too hot, again, I might seek to resolve the balance by

removing certain articles of clothing, so that I can achieve that
state.

And the drive that we have is habitual, in many ways.

We're likely to engage in whatever behavior that has worked

before.

So I don't always have to think about going for food when I'm
hungry.

I'm almost preconditioned because it's what's worked in the past

and I'm into the habit of doing so.

Let's move on to a second theory of motivation.

This is the Yerkes-Dodson law.

The Yerkes-Dodson law talks about how we can achieve an

optimal level of arousal, based on what kind of performance and
quality I need to achieve.

So, before we even get to this level, let's just first understand
that, if I'm going to be studying for an exam, there is a sweet
spot that I have to be optimally focused in that work, and if I'm
very lethargic or very tired, that's not gonna be good for me.

And if I'm overly excited and have too much energy in me, that's
also not gonna be beneficial to my studying.

We have to try to find that optimal level of arousal.

Now, Yerkes-Dodson went a step further and explained that

there is a variable of complexity.

How complex a task is relates to how much, what kind of level of

arousal is optimal for my performance.

So if I have a very complex task, let's say extremely difficult

calculus, or if I'm building something that takes a lot of work,
Yerkes and Dodson found that I actually need a lower level of
arousal.

I have to be patient and not overly excited.

And in that way, I will have an optimal level for difficult tasks, as
we can see here in blue.

Now, for easy tasks, I need to actually have a higher level of

arousal, so that I don't get bored.

So if I'm doing something simple like painting a wall, it's not too
complicated to paint a wall, but I need to then have a higher
level of arousal, and me being more aware and awake of what's
happening.

So that is the Yerkes-Dodson law.

Finally we move on to Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

We've already referenced Maslow's hierarchy in a previous

chapter, but we revisit it again here in terms of motivation and
drive.

Maslow, as you may recall, states that we have a certain amount

of needs that rise up from basic, physiological needs, and they
climb on up until we get to the more complicated types of
needs.

And that this is an ongoing life process where first I have to get
food, water, and shelter.
And you can think of a child, an infant.

That's all they care about is just being warm and fed.

And as a child gets older, they need to have some security,

some safety.

As they get older, they may even need to be employed.

Later on you may have social needs that have to be met.

You have to have friends, you wanna have close family, you may
start to date and become intimate and eventually get married.

From there on we move on to esteem, what's my self worth,

what's my value? Do I feel a sense of accomplishment and
confidence in my life? And finally we have the pinnacle of the
process of the triangle being self-actualized, and reaching this
state of inner fulfillment.

So these are the stages of Maslow's hierarchy, and that about

covers several of the theories that we're going to focus on for
the purpose of your CLEP exam.

Good luck remembering these, and we'll see you at the next
module.
Introductory Psychology

Biological bases of Hunger, Thirst, Sex, Pain (Module 7.3)

[Prof. David Sitt]

We're now going to turn our attention to the biological bases of

motivation and specifically focus on hunger, thirst, sex, and
pain.

So let's being by talking about hunger.

I'm sure as you've been preparing and listening to these

presentations studying for the CLEP exam, you get hungry.

It's natural, right? So, you might ask, how does this happen?
Where does hunger come from? So it's a complicated process.

For the sake of this exam, we're gonna explain a few ideas.

So, first of all, it's important for us to remember that hunger is a

biological instinct for survival.

If we're not eating, we're simply not going to live and survive.

It's meant to help us have duration and longevity in our days

and in our lives.

Now, on the physiological level, here are a couple of the

processes that occur.

If I go a couple of hours without eating, my stomach becomes

empty.

I've processed all the food and there's no more food left in my
system.

And that will trigger hunger pains.

And along with that, certain chemicals will start to be produced

that will initiate the hunger and send signals into my brain that
it's time to eat.

Specifically, glucose is a form of blood sugar that is produced

from the break down of food.

And basically, what glucose is, is energy.

It's the energy that the body uses to meet its needs.

When food is ...

...

we'll come to this in a moment.

Let me also point out that insulin is another of the important

chemicals and insulin -- We talked about glucose.

Insulin helps reduce glucose in the body and reduce glucose

levels, thereby, impacting hunger.

Let's turn our attention to some parts of the brain that play a
role in hunger.

And we'll begin by talking about the hypothalamus.

The hypothalamus is the part of the brain that seems to be the

most important for monitoring hunger related signals.

and specifically, the ventral medial hypothalamus, which is the

lower-middle portion of this area called they hypothalamus.

This ventral medial hypothalamus appears to be responsible for

stopping hunger.

Stimulating this particular part of the brain will reduce hunger, it

will depress my hunger.

And damage to this part of the brain results in eating even when
one is full.

Even if my body physically has enough food in it, if there's

damage to this VH part of ventral hypothalamus, I'm going to
keep eating even if I shouldn't.

On the other hand, the lateral hypothalamus, or the LH, which is

the sides of the hypothalamus are responsible for increasing
hunger.

Stimulating this lateral hypothalamus will basically cause me to

eat.

Even among animals that are well fed, we know from research.

And damage to this part of the brain will prevent, even animals
who are starving, from wanting to go out and eat food.

Now, in addition to these factors, each of us appears to have a

set-point.

A set-point is basically when the weight of my own body works

to maintain this point that is stable for myself.

When my weight drops below this set-point, then I'm going to

have increases in hunger.

Which obviously will make me take in more food and take in

more calories.

Activity level will also decrease if I reach this set-point.

Also, if you think about it, what happens when you get tired, you
get lethargic, you start to yawn and slow down.

At that point in time, my body is reaching its set-point and I'm

not gonna take in as much food.

Again, reaching a set-point.

If I am too lethargic and too sedentary then, that will also lead
me to potentially increase in weight.

We know this is a big problem in our country.

At least in the United States.

Obesity arises in part due to some of these dynamics.

Let's now turn our attention to some of the aspects of eating
that aren't in healthy states.

And this is when we talk about eating disorders.

Eating disorders are basically a results of most theories say,

social and cultural pressures.

To reach an ideal body, an ideal body image.

And there are differences in eating disorders around the world,

based on the way media portrays the body.

So we know that's an important factor.

And there are also biological and genetic features that

contribute to eating disorders.

Specifically, we're talking about two eating disorders, anorexia

nervosa, and bulimia.

They appear to stand out in part in adolescent girls, and also it

can be found in boys as well.

This is an increase goal to reduce body weight.

In bulimia, there is a push to eat excessively.

Not necessarily to lose weight, but rather there is a need to

binge and purge and get rid of the food in bulimia.

And we also have a new disorder called, newly named, binge

eating disorder.

And binge eating is when people eat excessively and they don't
have that set-point working very well for them.

So these are a few of the eating disorders.

I encourage you to read more up on them as they can be quite

impactful on our lives.

Moving along.
We're talking about now, thirst.

Thirst is basically produced by depletion of fluid within the cells

and around the cells of the body.

The peripheral and central nervous systems are implicated in

thirst.

The subfornical organ and the lateral hypothalamic nucleus are

features of the brain that play a role in triggering the body to
reach out for liquids when it is thirsty.

Angiotensin is produced by the kidneys in order to also facilitate

communication to the brain, letting us know when we are thirsty
and we need to satiate ourselves.

Moving along to sexual behavior.

Sexual behavior has been studied only in recent years.

Maybe the last 60-70 years.

We'll talk about where that came from in a moment.

The origins of sexual motivation of the body stem from the

limbic system.

Specifically, the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens are the

parts of the brain that respond to sexual urges and sexual needs
and relegate the sexual drives.

The hormones that are produced in the body by the endocrine

system are estrogen, and this is primarily in women and then
testosterone, which is produced both in men and in women, as
the actual primary, sexual motivator physiologically, is from
testosterone.

It's important to remember that testosterone can be found in

both men and women, even though you only hear of
testosterone in men.

It actually is found in both men and women and plays a role in

sexual motivation.
Let's turn our attention now to two individuals, who's work was
seminal in achieving our knowledge base in sexuality.

Dr.

Alfred Kinsey, very well known for establishing the Kinsey scale.

The Kinsey scale was used to understand sexual habits in the

1940s, 1950s, 1960s and beyond.

And it was used to categorize individual's sexual orientation

among other aspects of sexuality.

So it is through the Kinsey scale and one of the versions of the

scale rates people at a one through a five in terms of their
sexual orientation.

No person is necessarily has to be an extreme in terms of

heterosexuality or homosexuality.

They can fall somewhere in the middle in terms of orientation.

Kinsey very influential in establishing our knowledge base.

Finally we have the research of Masters and Johnson.

Masters and Johnson studied the sexual response cycle by

actually conducting for the first time research on sexual
behavior in humans.

Very controversial research at the time.

And they determined that the human sexual response has

several phases to it.

And the cycle as it were.

The first phase is the excitement phase.

Next, the phase travels to a plateau, into orgasm, and finally, it

resolves through a resolution.

Scale looks like this and suddenly after orgasm, it drops down to
resolution and it's different for both men and women.

Let's move on.

There we go, we're back.

We'll move on to the biology of pain.

For the purpose of our exam, we're not gonna go into great
detail here.

It's just valuable to know that the way pain works is that I first
come into contact with whatever stimulus is causing the pain.

It can be a thorn from a bush, a hot tea kettle, or a cut or any

wound that I might receive.

And the nerve ending sense the stimulus and it sends that
information over to my spinal cord and the central nervous
system in order for me to know that I have pain.

And then there is a pain center within the brain that further
processes this stimuli and makes a determination of what to do.

To react, to pull away, that perhaps I'm able to deal with the
pain.

And these are the basic aspects of pain production and sensing
of pain.

I have physical pain that have physical characteristics in

intensity.

I might have an acute or sharp pain or I might have a chronic

pain, and that's long lasting.

It can be something that lasts days, months, or even years.

So these are variations in terms of physical pains.

And finally, we talk about pain.

Social pain, which is the pain of a social disconnection.

Maybe I lose a loved one.

Or I have a boyfriend or girlfriend or someone that I'm a partner

and I lose them and that causes social disconnection and social
pain.

And finally, there is, of course, psychological pain, which can be

experienced through depression, through anxiety, through other
mental disorders.

Each of these types of pains has a different processing system

way beyond the scope of what we're talking about here for the
CLEP exam.

This was a large chunk that we just covered.

Make sure to go back over it and take some time to study the
details of this particular section.
Introductory Psychology

Social motivation (Module 7.4)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Alright, we're back.

We're gonna wind down the section on motivation and emotion

and talk about social motivation.

In particular here, we're gonna talk about the human need to

interact with others.

The motivation that exists both intrinsically and extrinsically to

connect and be accepted by others.

So what do we mean by extrinsic motivation? If you think about

it, sometimes I'm motivated to achieve an end based on an
external or technically, extrinsic motivation.

Where I might receive something from somebody else.

Maybe I'm motivated by getting a good grade in a class.

That I can say is extrinsic.

Maybe I'm gonna get paid for the work that I do.

Perhaps I'm gonna get a pat on the back, or some type of

recognition that someone else outside of me will give.

So these are some examples of extrinsic motivations.

As opposed to intrinsic motivation.

An intrinsic motivator is something that drives me from inside.

Maybe it's a biological motive.

Maybe I'm driven to, as we said before, I'm driven to eat
because of a biological motivation internally.

Maybe I'm searching for a sense of personal satisfaction.

I want to feel good about my work.

I want to have a sense of accomplishment.

I want to feel like I tried my hardest and that makes me feel

internally fantastic and it's not about the reward that someone
will give me externally.

So that's the juxtaposition or the difference between intrinsic

and extrinsic motivations.

Finally, we'll talk again about Albert Bandura, who we reference

in a previous chapter.

Who did the research for the Bobo dolls.

In terms of modeling behavior.

In this context, Albert Bandura's well known for proposing a

theory of self efficacy that motivates behavior.

Meaning, I'm gonna be driven by myself, by being efficacious, by

being effective at what I do in life.

And that is ultimately what motivates me even if there is an

external motivator.

Even if there is something outside of me giving me money or a

grade or a prize or something else.

Bandura felt that we really ultimately have a strong drive for self
efficacy and that's what leads people to succeed.

And on that note, I hope that as we're now midway through, if

you are going from beginning to end on this CLEP exam, that
you're motivated to continue and you're motivated to keep
studying hard so that you can pass your CLEP exam for both
intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.
Introductory Psychology

Introduction (Module 8.0)

[Prof. David Sitt]

We are now going to turn our attention to the area of

developmental psychology.

In this particular area we'll focus on the different areas of

development across the stages of life.

We'll learn about different theories of development and cover

also research methods, including the longitudinal and cross-
sectional methods, theories of development, dimensions of
development, including physical, cognitive, social, and moral
development.

We'll talk about gender identity and sex roles in brief, and finally
we'll talk about heredity and environmental issues related to
development.
Introductory Psychology

Research methods: longitudinal, cross-sectional (Module 8.1)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Alright, we're going to begin this topic of development by

focusing on what tools are used to actually investigate
developmental psychology, and there are three in particular
methods that we'll focus on today.

The first method is the cross-sectional method of investigation.

In this method, we compare people of different ages at the same

time.

So essentially, let's say I want to understand the, the morality

levels of people living in the technology generation that we're in
now.

So I might investigate people in their teens, and compare them

to people in their 20s and 30s, versus people in their 40s and
50s, 60s and 70s, and beyond.

And then this way I'm comparing people of different ages groups
but today, at this particular point in time.

So it's taking different sections of the population and cross-

comparing them.

In this way we're able to understand the similarities which,

which might arise, and also the differences due to whatever time
period I'm investigating.

It is important to understand that there can be a confounding

variable here, or a confounding finding due to the fact that
everyone is being effected by their current context, and so that
might make it difficult for me to really determine differences
between people if I can't really tease out is it the age that's
different, that's leading to the different result, or maybe it's the
fact that everyone reacts differently to that particular context.

So there is pluses and minuses to using the cross-sectional

approach to investigation.

Moving on to the second method, referred to as the longitudinal

method, and this is a way of tracking people over time.

So if I have someone who's born at zero years old, I might then

track them when they're at two years old, at four, at 10, at 20,
so on and so forth, and track then over time.

I might do this for an individual or maybe even for a group,

otherwise known as a cohort.

There are a lot of advantages to a longitudinal approach.

It allows me to see how someone will develop over time, and

this way if I'm investigating one person or one group, they stay
the same, that's a variable that we can control for because it's
the same people even though they are getting older and
developing over time, and this way I can see what the impact of
time is, or let's say I am gonna investigate technology.

So I might study a person who's born today, and every couple of

years give them a set of self-report measurements, or maybe
run them through a series of experiments and see how they are
evolving along with the evolution of technology, and that's
gonna be very powerful in giving me information in this
longitudinal method.

There is a drawback, however, and that is over time people may

drop out of an investigation due to life circumstances.

So if I start out with 10 people in this study of technology and its

impact on us, over time I might lose touch with some of the
participants, they may decide they don't want to get involved in
the study anymore, and that would affect my data over the long-
run.

Although it is still believed to be a very powerful method.

Finally the last method is what's called a cross-sectional

approach, and that is a combination of the two previous
methods we discussed.

So this is when we take people of different ages, like cross-

sectional, and we follow them over long periods of time, like
longitudinal, and this helps to reduce confounding variables.

So I might take a group right now who is zero to five years old,
and then a group who is six till 10, and then a group that's 11 till
20, and so on and so forth.

And then I'm gonna compare them in the year of 2016, and then
I want to compare them at 2020, and so on.

And I'm gonna see how they track over time.

That's the most powerful method that we use in psychology.

Helps us to understand development over time.

It is a very expensive method, and therefore it's not as

commonly used, but it is by far the gold standard in trying to
understand development over time.
Introductory Psychology

Theories of development (Module 8.2)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Let's now turn our attention to a few of the dominant theories of

development.

There are, of course, many theories in psychology that relate to

development, but for the purposes of our exam, for the CLEP
Exam, we're just gonna highlight a few of the key figures.

We begin with the research of Jean Piaget.

Piaget was a French theorist and a French psychologist,

developmental psychologist whose contributions still refer to
today as being quite accurate in their assessments.

So let's go through some of Piaget's theories.

His Cognitive Development theory focused on the changes that

occur in a child from birth up until their teens in terms of how
they view the world cognitively, how they think about the world
and how they relate to the world.

So in Piaget's theory at birth a child enters into this sensory

motor stage.

And it's during this stage that a child is getting all of their
information about the world from their senses.

So you might have a child in your home or have a younger

sibling and you watch them crawl around and they grab
everything they can and put it into their mouth.

They are tasting things, they're smelling things, they are trying
to rub and touch things.

That's because they're trying to get information through their

senses.

And this occurs roughly through the second year of life.

One thing that is notable on Piaget's theory is this idea of object

permanence.

So at the early stages of the sensory motor process, a child does

not have object permanence, which means that if I take a
blanket and I cover a doll the child in the early stages will not
know that that doll is still there.

They don't believe that the object is permanent, they imagine

it's disappeared because they don't have that cognitive capacity
to know that if something is out of sight it is still in existence.

As the child progresses, maybe it's closer to one year old, they
have this ability, they develop the ability for object permanence,
knowing that even if I put it behind my back, if I put my
cellphone behind my back, that it is still there and I know how to
go after it.

I have a son who's about a year and he's unfortunately very

interested in the cellphone.

So we're constantly hiding it from him but he knows where it is

wherever I move it 'cause he has developed object permanence.

Now at two years old, a child enters into the pre-operational

stage otherwise kind of known as a pre-logical stage.

And it is during this state that a child is very egocentric.

This term egocentric means that the child is very much focused
on themselves.

It's all about me, nothing else really matters but me, is the inner
experience of a child.

And that's a crucial part of this stage of development.

They also, a child in this stage, is starting to use symbolic

thought and very much depends on symbolic thought.
So they're using imagery and words to begin to relate to the
world as opposed to a one-year-old they're not using words.

They're not able to draw a picture or understand what a picture

or a number represents.

That comes about through the pre-operational stage that we're

discussing now.

One other very important feature of this state is the inability to

understand conservation.

So imagine if you would that I have a slice of cheese.

And I take the slice of cheese and in front of a child I cut it in

half.

I now show the child that I have two halves of cheese and I show
it next to the larger piece of cheese.

And now I had asked them which has more cheese, the pile on
the left or the pile on the right? And the child responds generally
that well, this pile here has more cheese it is because they do
not have this idea of conservation.

In reality it is the same amount of cheese but they don't have

that cognitive capacity, the same as if I put in a cup of water a
tall glass of water.

So we'll go over here and we'll have a tall glass of water and it's
filled up till this point with water.

And then I take that same water and I poured into a long
cylinder, and the water then fills up to this point.

And I ask the child which has more water, they will oftentimes
say the tall glass because it looks taller even though it has the
same amount of water and that is due to an inability to
understand conservation.

They will develop this ability as they reach around six or seven
years old.

And we turn to our next two stages.

Their concrete operation stage is when logical rules begin to
take hold in a child.

So they understand the idea that if you do this then that will
happen, that there are logical rules to the world around us.

They start to understand mathematics.

They start to understand the ability to use logic to solve various

problems both academically and in their personal lives.

Finally, Piaget spoke about a formal operation stage.

And this stage is entered at age 12 years old or thereabouts

when a child is able to think in hypothetical terms, to think with
a scientific mindset about abstract principles.

So it is here that a child's gonna understand something like don't

throw a stone at a glass walls or if you tell them birds of a
feather flock together.

What does that mean? It means that people who are alike
generally spend time together, and this is an abstract concept
that only a child in this formal operation stage is able to grasp.

And Piaget said this is the indication that they've reached the
final stage of development as far as cognitive skills.

And from there on out, we're pretty solidified according to

Piaget.

Let's turn to another very influential theorist that we've

discussed in previous modules, and his name is Sigmund Freud.

In the late 1800s, Sigmund Freud developed the psychoanalytic

theories of psychology.

The first major theories to come about to explain the human

psyche were put forward by Sigmund Freud.

And although today they are not necessarily as revered or as

referred to as some other theorists, they remain very influential
in the broad field of psychology.
So we'll first start off with Freud's psychosexual theory.

Freud believed that all of us have an energy source in us.

And that energy source known as Eros also can play a role in our
sexual development when it takes the form of libido.

Libido is the sexual energy, Eros is the life energy or general life
force.

So in Freud's psychosexual theory, he said that the libido, the

sexual energy starts out at birth in the mouth, in the oral area.

And it is during this phase where all pleasure is received from

the oral cavity of the body.

So this is when babies are breastfeeding, they are sucking their

thumbs, they're grabbing everything they can and they just take
it inside of their mouth, glasses, pens, cellphones, dirt, really
doesn't matter because they get pleasure according to Freud
from this particular area of the body.

And this is when we have the pleasure principle where

everything operates over what I need and I need it now.

At one years old, Freud said that the libido moves through a
different area to the anal area.

And this is when a child seeks pleasure from controlling their

bodily functions by holding in and letting go of their wastes.

This creates, according to Freud, a sense of pleasure.

And it is through toilet training and other interactive social

experiences that a child starts to develop and learns the
principles of that are necessary to help them guide through their
life.

Next the libido moves to the phallic area, and this is when sexual
desires start to turn towards people, according to Freud, the
opposite sex, for he didn't address really in his time so much
about same-sex or homosexuality or other than heterosexuality.
And he said that this is where energy focuses in the general area
and a child has to overcome a very important challenge called
the Oedipus complex as well as the Electra complex, where
basically they develop a sense of desire for the parent of the
opposite sex.

So a young boy he says, starts to develop a desire for his mother

then looks towards his father and says wait a minute you're a
competing energy to me.

You're a competing being.

I wanna try to get you out of the picture, dad.

But then the child learns that I really can't beat my father in a
battle 'cause he's much larger than I am therefore I affiliate with
my father.

And I'm like my father.

And therefore they resolve this edible complex and are able to
pass through this phallic stage.

There's a lot more details to this but we're not gonna go into it
for the sake of the CLEP Exam.

The last two stages that Freud talks about are the latency and
genital phases.

During the latency phase, Freud said that this libido, this sexual
energy actually enters into a dormancy phase.

It's quieted down.

There's not much sexual activity or energy being exerted in

these six to 12-year-old period according to Freud.

It is during this stage that the super ego develops as well as the
conscious thinking patterns.

Finally, the libido reemerges during the genital phase.

This is when a child enters puberty and the sexual energy

focuses on more appropriately with the opposite sex.
And this is the final stage according to Freud's psychosexual
stages.

The last theorist that we'll talk about in this section is Erik
Erikson.

Erik Erikson was also originally from the psychoanalytic school of

thought and he wrote his theories in the '40s and and '50s and
even beyond that.

And Erikson focused not just on the first, let's say 12 years of life
which is when Freud focused.

Erikson believe that we have to talk about the human being from
zero to death.

And he came up with the eight stages of development.

According to Erikson, in each stage we have a mission, we have

a goal where we have to resolve a certain battle.

In the first stage, for example, we battle with the sense of trust
versus mistrust.

A child, when they're born, has to figure out can I trust my

environment, can I trust that the adults around me will take care
of me properly.

If they do, well then I have a sense of trust in my life.

If, however, the adults don't take care of me well then I may not
be able to trust my environment and maybe my environment is
not reliable and I have a sense of mistrust that will stay with me
through the next stages.

He talked about a stage called autonomy versus shame and

doubt.

At one years old a child starts to become autonomous.

They start to crawl around and they start to figure out can I get
around my environment by myself in an autonomous way.
If so, excellent, you have achieved that state.

If not, the child might have a sense of shame, a sense of doubt

that they aren't able to be independent in their environment.

Next stage is the sense of initiative versus guilt.

At three to five years old, as a child able to kind of state a sense

of purpose at school.

Can they set a goal in school that they're going to learn the
alphabet? And through learning the alphabet they're able to
achieve a sense of initiative, or will they actually have a sense of
guilt.

I'm not like the other children.

I'm not able to figure out these problems and therefore I might
have a sense of guilt that I will carry with me through the next
stages.

Industry versus inferiority is the next stage.

We'll jump over to identity versus role confusion 'cause this is

the most important stage according to Erikson.

This is when a child has to, or at this point, excuse me I meant

the star over here, identity versus role confusion.

This is when a child has to develop their sense of self, their

sense of identity.

If they are able to establish a sense of "who am I," "who do other

people think I am" then their identity is strong and established
otherwise they may enter into their next stages of life being
very confused about who they are, having a sense of role
confusion.

Intimacy versus isolation has to do with relationships and

intimacy with others.

Generativity versus stagnation is the next stage.

That's accomplished from 36 to 55 years old roughly.

Do I have a sense of, can I generate a success in my life? Do I
have care? Do I have empathy, concern, and caring for others?
And finally the last stage is integrity versus despair.

At the end of life, does a person have a sense that I have a

sense of integrity in my life.

I have accomplished.

Who am I? What have I achieved? Or perhaps they have a sense

of despair and they may be very sad at the end of their life
because they have not accomplished what they had set out to
do.

This brings us to the conclusion of this chapter.

I'll scale back just to one of the slide.

This is the end of this section of the theories of development.

There's a lot of information, take your time to study these, go on

to the details of the theorists because they can be confusing and
feel free to review this particular piece a few times over.

Okay, good luck.

Introductory Psychology

Dimensions of development: physical, cognitive, social, moral

(Module 8.3)

[Prof. David Sitt]

All right, we're now going to turn our attention to a few of the
different dimensions of development.

Certain things we'll be repeating, certain things are gonna be

fresh.

So let's begin with talking about physical development.

Even before we talk about birth, after conception, physical

development is quite outrageous.

It's quite outstanding.

After conception, we are the size even less than a grain of rice.

And from there, we develop over a nine to 10-month period to

be the size of a melon.

There is rapid cellular growth, there's rapid neural growth in the

brain, billions upon billions of neural pathways are formed, bone
structures come into place, everything really starts to come and
to form and it's quite a fantastic process that happens in utero.

Once a child is born, they begin to grow on a pretty steady basis,

five to seven pounds a year and two to three inches per year.

The brain is at 55% of its development and growth by age two.

And by age six, we're already at 90% of our physical and

physiological growth within the brain structures.

And also, in terms of motor development, there's a very rapid

development that occurs from an infant being able to develop
motor tone so that they can hold, eventually they can hold their
neck up, be able to roll over from side to side, then a child is
tested to see if they can eventually push themselves up and
then sit up, start to walk around, start to crawl, and then
eventually obviously, walking and running.

All of these occur within the first two years of life.

Physically speaking, adolescents achieve some very significant

changes in their bodies, indicating the maturity and the
beginning of sexual gland development, reaching...

Also, rapid increases in height occur.

At this stage also, puberty is what is occurring, and we see the

signs of puberty through a female's menarche stage, which is
the advent of her cycle, of her menstrual cycle; and a male
experiences his first ejaculation, which is referred to as
spermarche.

So these are the physical signs of development in adolescence.

In adulthood, physical maturation is complete.

We see that as people get older and they mature, their physical
state starts to decline.

They're not as strong as they were when they were younger.

As they get into their older years, there are significant physical
changes, maybe to eyesight, to hearing, and these by the way,
eyesight and hearing, are declining even earlier in life, really in
middle adulthood.

But as we enter late adulthood, our bones may become more

brittle.

You hear people breaking their hips and their knees and certain
parts of the body more easily.

Actually, some people even begin to shrink and lose height as

they age.

Okay, moving forward to some of the cognitive development

milestones.

At infancy through childhood, there are significant cognitive

abilities that are developing and four processes.

We already mentioned in the last section about Jean Piaget's

work about cognitive development.

A child is able to have more advanced capacity for mathematics,

for language, for logic.

As we said, language is developing quite naturally actually out of

birth.

Some of that is an inborn skill set.

If you are a child that grows up in a bilingual home or a

multilingual home, you're not putting effort into learning the
language.

It just is being developed and absorbed by a certain part of your

brain, which is a very different part of the brain that has to learn
a language as an adult.

Much harder to learn a language as an adult.

Because as a child, there's an inborn capacity for this.

Moving on to other aspects of cognitive development.

An adolescent is able to tackle more complex logical questions.

They're able to think, as we said, abstractly.

There is an efficiency with which a child or an adolescent is able

to think through their thoughts and problem solve, both in
school and out of school.

An abstract thought becomes significant in adolescence.

So I can expect an adolescent to be able to speak with

analogies, saying something like, birds of a feather flock
together, so that we know that two people who are alike maybe
get together.
Or they may understand the saying such as people in glass
houses shouldn't throw stones, okay? And another important
feature of this adolescence is the ability for empathy.

Empathy is the capacity for understanding other people's

emotions, being able to feel a pain or sadness or a care for
another person even if you haven't gone through that feeling
yourself or that experience yourself.

You can know that people who are suffering, what it might feel
like, even if you you haven't developed that experience yourself.

So this is empathy, which is not present in earlier years but does

come in adolescent years.

And adulthood, obviously we are living complex lives, ever-

changing lives.

Circumstances are changing.

The ability to manage a lot more complex aspects of life, being

to manage a family and a work life and a social life, all of these
are complex aspects of living that come with age.

With age also comes an increase in crystallized intelligence.

As you get older, you remember more information, crystallized

information, such as dates, historical influencers over time,
knowing the states of a country, the capital cities, formulas,
mathematics, the stock market ticker.

So all of this information is crystallized and grows with age.

Unfortunately though, as we get older, there is a decline in

cognitive capacity.

We may lose the ability for fluid intelligence.

The ability to remember how to operate certain types of

electronics or devices that we once knew how to use.

The ability for other fluid types of information can decline over
time.
But generally, the crystallized information does stay relatively
stable, unless you are suffering from dementia or Alzheimer's or
another cognitive deficit in older years.

We now move on to social aspects of development.

We turn to the work of John Bowlby who talked about this notion
of there being an attachment between a caregiver and their
parent, and that there are different types or levels of attachment
that a child experiences with their caregiver.

And based on the type of attachment, a child will have different

personality styles or traits.

So Bowlby talked about there being an avoidant, a resistant,

disorganized and secure attachment styles.

So just to speak about some of them, this secure attachment

with a child is one where a child knows that the parent, they can
depend on their parent, they are tightly bonded with their
parent.

If the parent leaves the room and a six month old is there, the
six month old will cry quite a lot because of that secure
attachment.

Sometimes people think that if a child cries too much when a

parent leaves, that's a bad sign.

But in reality, the research shows that that's a strong sign of

there being a solid bond and sense of attachment with the
parent.

An avoidant, on the opposite side, attachment is a child who the

parent is not really engaging with the child, they are avoiding
that attachment, they are avoiding that bond.

And that can lead to significant difficulties for that child as they
get older.

A disorganized attachment is one where it's not really

dependable.
Maybe there's inconsistencies with the type of attachment that
the child experiences with the parent, and that has its own set of
implications.

Moving forward, let's talk about some parenting styles that a

parent might bring to their upbringing of their children.

There are four different types of styles that we'll talk about.

The authoritarian style is a parent who is quite strict with their

child, where it's my way or the highway.

The rules are very rigid.

An authoritarian parent does not want to be challenged.

And if they are challenged, they come down very strong and
very strict and with quite a lot of punishment for their children.

A variation of this is the authoritative parent.

The authoritative parent also has strict rules.

They also have a desire for the child to follow the regiments that
are set up by the parents.

However, they are more flexible and more forgiving when the
child doesn't follow exactly what the parent wants.

They may be more patient with exploring with the child why
they're not following the rules that are set up in the home.

They may be more open to hearing what the child has to say
about their preference.

And so it's a bit of more of a collaborative process.

Research has shown that it is the authoritative approach, which

yields the strongest bond and, more broadly speaking, the
healthiest and most well-adjusted child.

The permissive parent is the one who basically just is laissez-

faire, as they say, very open, very easy going.
They're not really putting up much of a struggle nor are they
setting a tremendous amount of rules.

So a child may ask, can I go out? Sure.

Can I sleep by my friend? Okay.

Very much whatever the child would like.

There are some benefits and some drawbacks to this approach.

Finally, the uninvolved parent is as it sounds.

The parent that is really not getting involved at all.

So anytime a child comes up to them and says, hey mom, dad,

can I do this or that, and the parent says whatever, I don't know,
do what you want, I don't really care.

That's the uninvolved parent and obviously results in a child

having quite a loose amount of boundaries and rules and has a
lot of implications.

Moving on.

In adolescence, we've already talked about the value of forming

an identity through Eric Erickson's work.

This is when children begin to pull away from their parents.

They are starting to go out with their friends without their

parents having to take them around.

Eventually they start driving and gaining that sense of

independence.

Peer relationships are crucial during this age.

It is no longer the parents that are setting the tone but rather a
child's peer group that is setting the tone of ways of behaving
and setting up what's expected by society.

I'll also add here that social media has acquired an important
role in setting up the social expectations of adolescents, and this
is becoming more and more of a factor with cyber bullying and
becoming very influential these days.

So it's not just face-to-face peer time but it's also digital peers
and the digital media in general that are setting the tones.

We're moving on now to adulthood.

Through adulthood, obviously life becomes more complex.

There's a greater need to have and to find meaning in one's life.

What is my purpose? As Erickson, again, spoke about in his

theory, having a sense of generativity.

How do I generate an influence in this world? What legacy will I

leave behind? Very often, people define themselves by their
career.

When you meet somebody, after they ask you your name, they
wanna know what do you do for a living, and that's how people
begin to categorize you and get a sense of who you are because
there is quite a fusing between who you are and what you do.

Although, of course, we encourage people to have hobbies

beyond just what they do for work, because that also create
depth of character and who you are.

Family relationships are also crucial and they play a central role
in who we are.

Our children, our spouses, our immediate circle of family.

So as you go out and get further and further out of the central
point, you have less of an influence on the person.

But each role, each layer, does have its impact on the individual.

Finally, let's turn our attention to the development of morals and

values.

And this has been done by the work of Kohlberg.

Kohlberg discusses stages, four stages of moral development.

He says that as an infant, we really only know right and wrong
by what feels good and feels bad.

It's not really something that we have an ability to learn, but it's
really, I feel like grabbing this from my brother, I feel like taking
this water and spilling it on the table.

That's just what I feel like doing.

It's not because I think it's the right or wrong thing, I just act the
way I feel, and there's no real filter that an infant has.

However, as they enter into the second stage, the toddler

phase, the sense of right and wrong are being developed
through what they're told by others.

So if you think about it, a child two, three, four, five years old
starting to enter into preschool and kindergarten, and they're
being told by their teachers, they're told by their parents don't
do that, don't hit your friend, don't take their toy, make sure to
share.

All of these messages start to come out and begin to develop a

child's sense of morality.

What is right, what is wrong? Well, it must be what other people

tell me.

As they get older and they enter into later years, they begin to
internalize the family's values and the family's consequences of
behavior.

So I know what's right in my home and my family.

And then as they get to the school age, seven years old, first
grade, second grade, third grade and those early years of
school, I begin to get a sense of what I should or shouldn't do,
again, based on what other people are telling me.

But it's more than just what they tell me, there is an inner sense
of what is the right thing to do.

There is a sense of I think I know, I think I know what's right and

wrong.

I know that I shouldn't be taking my friend's belongings.

I know that I shouldn't be hitting other people or pushing other

people or stealing from other people.

There is a greater sense of what should and shouldn't happen.

And finally, Kohlberg spoke about the development of abstract

right and wrong, this sense that the larger society begins to
teach us abstractly, knowing from a moral code, is it right for me
to steal a loaf of bread if I am starving? Is that right or wrong?
Well, there may be a debate about that.

His famous story of a pharmacist who develops a drug that can

save people's lives but he wants to charge $10 million for that
drug.

So what would happen if a man's wife is dying and that drug is

the only thing that can save her life and he doesn't have the
money? Is stealing it wrong if he's not being given the
opportunity to buy it? Well, that's not a black and white answer,
and that's where this sense of abstract right and wrong begins
to come into play, and it is through the preteen and teen years
that we begin to develop that capacity.

So that about wraps up the various aspects of development in

this section.

There was a lot that we covered, so I encourage you to go back

and go through it slowly, both with your written materials, as
well as through this video material.

And make sure that you grasp the differences in what we've
talked about in this and in the previous sections of development.

You're doing great so far, can't wait to see you at the next
module.
Introductory Psychology

Gender identity and sex roles (Module 8.4)

[Prof. David Sitt]

[Instructor] Welcome back.

We're now going to turn to a brief discussion about gender

identity and sex roles.

Gender identity is a, broadly speaking, a sense of being male or

female that a person has developed over their lifetime.

The idea that a person might not actually feel the way that their
biological body was born can oftentimes lead to a sense of
dismay or perhaps even what's labeled gender dysphoria.

Gender dysphoria is a sense of discomfort in identifying with

one's biological sex, and according to the DSM, Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Health, this has to persist for six
months for us to deem it to be of concern and requiring
attention.

Now once we establish that there is a role that is played by one's

identity and identification with one's biological sex, we know
that this can also lead to an influence of stereotyping.

So one's sexual beliefs and what they view as the role of a man
or the role of a woman can actually influence the development
of stereotypes in adolescents, adults, so on and so forth.

So for example, we might based on these stereotypes believe

that men are generally more aggressive, and that women are
more delicate.

We may assume that men prefer sports whereas women may

prefer to be in a domesticated environment.

And that might not be the case for every man or for every
woman.

And so these are based on stereotypes which develop over time

stemming from sexual beliefs.

Finally, we understand that expected behaviors for each gender

is very much influenced by society's norms.

So not only in what we expect of or what we assume about other

people in terms of stereotypes but also in terms of what kind of
behaviors are normed.

And we see this even with children so that you oftentimes see
children, young girls are being given dolls and boys are given
trucks.

And why is that the case? Why are boys given blue as their color
when they're born and girls are given pink? Is pink an inherently
female color or is this something society has established as the
norm based on expectations for what a gender should prefer?
Finally, we understand that there is a socialization that occurs
for the role that each sex should play.

So the same way I was alluding to before in terms of the colors

that are associated with a boy or a girl, a male who's born is
going to be expected to act in certain masculine ways or are
going to be taught to behave in masculine ways.

Maybe a parent may engage him in sports from an early age as

opposed to a woman or a girl who is born may be socialized to
be more feminine in their activities, to be engaged more in
dress-up play with their dolls or to engage in, buy them a
kitchen set so they can cook.

Again, purely based on society's socializations of what a sex role

should be.

And of course a lot of research shows that it's not necessarily

the case that a boy or a girl must adhere to that or the need to
be more open minded in terms of these socialization roles.

But as far as we're concerned for this exam, these brief

definitions are basically as much as you need to know in order to
be prepared for the CLEP exam.
Alright, we'll see you at the next module.
Introductory Psychology

Heredity-environment issues (Module 8.5)

[Prof. David Sitt]

For the last portion of this chapter on development, we're going

to talk about heredity and environmental matters.

So, the question has come up already in our preparation in

earlier modules, about nature versus nurture.

The debate of what influences my behavior and my

development? Is it my up, my nature of my biology, my genetics,
or is it my parents or other caregivers in my, or school, in terms
of how they nurture me? So, we do know, again, that genes play
a very significant role in development and hereditary factors
influence who we are.

There's no debate about the fact that there is an influence.

How much influence is what the debate becomes.

We know that there are certain traits or characteristics that are

part of not just the genetics from my parents but even things
that have evolved throughout humanity.

So, we know that there are certain traits that are meant to help
us survive and be, you know, the fight-or-flight traits, the ability
to defend and react to danger and we also know that there are
things such as being shy that can be related to genetics and we
know that personality traits and styles can also be genetic.

Depression can be genetic, anxiety can have genetic

underpinnings.

However, we also know that nature, or excuse me, that

nurturing and one's environment plays a significant role.

So, everything we are and everything we know is based on our

experience.

Who are we if not for the experiences and the memories that
we've had.

We know that if I take, as we said earlier, if we take identical

twins who have 100% genetic overlap, and they're raised in two
separate homes, meaning, two separate environments, we see
that their personalities are different.

They have different strengths and different weaknesses,

different likes and dislikes.

If they were 100% as our genetics are 100% the like, then, the
environment would have no impact on them but that's not the
case.

The environment has a significant impact on them and we know

that that yields a conclusion that environment has quite a role
on development.

Now, the behaviorists have gone so far as to say that all or, I
guess, most of behaviors result from learning and conditioning,
that it is my interaction with the environment that results in the
choices and behaviors that I engage in.

So, if it's the fact that I'm studying for CLEP exam so that I can
get college credit and that's a reward that I'm seeking, or it's a
set of behaviors that I engage in to get the applause from my
friends.

So the environment plays a significant role in establishing our

behaviors according to behaviorists.

Finally, we know from the exploration of this nature-nurture

debate that very often, the conclusion becomes it is a
combination of both nature and nurture that yields the net result
of who we are and how we've developed and how we behave.

So, the interaction of nature and nurture rather than one single
factor is more commonly referred to as the root causes of who
we are and explaining why we do what we do.

I hope this has been helpful for you and get ready for the next
module and we'll see you in a few.
Introductory Psychology

Introduction (Module 9.0)

[Prof. David Sitt]

All right, welcome back.

We are making our way through, we're on the ninth chapter, or

the ninth module of the CLEP prep exam.

We are gonna turn this chapter to talk about personality.

We've alluded to personality all throughout the previous

chapters, in different ways, and then this particular chapter
we're gonna focus in on, and in some areas we'll be repeating
what we've already talked about, but focusing on the theories
and approaches to understanding personality.

We'll talk about research methods and the aspects that impact
the personality.

Specifically, these will be the areas that we cover, assessment,

growth, as I said, theories and approaches, self-concept, self-
esteem, and then research methods, all right? So be patient,
we're gonna get through it all together, and hopefully you're on
your way to passing this CLEP exam.
Introductory Psychology

Assessment techniques (Module 9.1)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Alright, let's jump right in over here.

This is a very brief sub-module where we talk about the different

methods that are used to assess and test personality.

So, there are a couple of different categories of evaluations for

personality.

We'll start off with the self-report inventories.

These are ways of administering a series of questions to people,

and giving them an opportunity to answer for themselves based
on what they're reading.

Now, it's not as straightforward as simply, tell us your

personality, or being able to read a set of questions that seems
very obvious about what they're asking.

The methods are actually quite sophisticated.

The most sophisticated of all personality inventories is known as

the MMPI.

The MMPI, now in its second edition, has versions up to 587

questions.

Now, that's a lot of questions to have to answer about yourself

to reflect your personality, and that's because it's a very
sophisticated measure that is not only asking you about your
personality traits: are you outgoing, are you shy, are you
gregarious, are you easy-going, are you difficult, but it is also
checking on how reliable and valid the answers are that you're
giving.
And it's built with these reliability and validity scales to check
how valid are your answers.

And there's also a scale referred to as the lie-scale to make sure

that you're not lying in your answers and perhaps you're trying
to fake being good, meaning you're trying to fake being
something more than you are, or maybe even some people are
faking bad.

For some reason, they have an investment in giving answers

that make them seem less put together.

So that's MMPI, an example of the self-report inventory.

We're now gonna turn to projective tests.

These are a series of tests that are meant to use the Freudian
mechanism of projection, which is a way of projecting outwards
from my inner being, how might I get people to project from
their inner being outward so that I can see what their personality
really is inside.

These are less obvious measures.

The MMPI is one that I could read and it says, are you happy, or
do you like to go and play risky games? So it's asking me
questions that I could kind of begin to figure out, but projective
tests are not obvious.

So I might get a Rorschach Inkblot Test, which is a series of

inkblots.

There are about 10 inkblot cards, and each one looks really like
an inkblot.

Maybe it looks something like this.

Alright? I'm just drawing one here.

And then they'll ask you, what does this look like to you? Now in
reality, it's just an inkblot.

But people will begin to say, oh, this looks like a pond.
It looks like a bat.

It looks like whatever comes out of their mind, and that helps
the evaluator to assess aspects of a person's personality based
on what they're projecting forward.

Another version of a projective test is called the Thematic

apperception test.

This test gives respondents a picture.

A still photo, as it were.

It's really more of an etching, and they're asked to report back

what is happening in the story.

With a beginning, middle, and an end, and also to tell the

emotions of the characters in the story.

And by doing so, it is believed that the participants are

projecting again from their own inner feelings onto the image
and onto the story what they are thinking, feeling, and
ultimately, a reflection of their personality.

So, these are, again, a different form of tests.

They are not as supported in terms of validity, scientific

validation, but they have quite extensive use still to this day,
and for your purposes, you know, this is a good place to begin
for understanding projective tests for the CLEP exam.
Introductory Psychology

Growth and adjustment (Module 9.2)

[Prof. David Sitt]

We have now the opportunity to talk about growth and

adjustment.

Very briefly, when we're talking about personality we understand

that we develop our personality over time.

Even if there are certain features of personality that may be

ingrained or inborn, there is still a lot that develops over time.

And personality growth is viewed as something that we're

proactively seeking.

It's something that we're consciously driven towards.

And in this way, we're self developing.

We're developing ourselves in the way that we react to our

environment and take certain risks or seek out certain
opportunities in order to proactively develop and grow my
personality.

As we're going along, we're certainly going to come up with

opportunities to adjust our personality.

And this is where we get to the second aspect of personality

development.

And this is where we react to the environment where we're

coping with the challenges that come up in life, whether it be a
physical challenge or an emotional challenge.

Perhaps it is reacting to one of the most common personality

creators is loss.
Loss of finances, loss of hope, loss of a loved one, loss of a view
that I would get into a particular college.

All of these present us with the challenge to cope with life.

And this is the second aspect of a personality adjustment.

And finally, we know that our personalities have to adapt and

adjust to certain cultural components that we become more
aware of as we are getting older.

And perhaps even if we move across cultures or to different

parts of the world, we're going to have to make adjustments to
our personality.

If I grew up in the west, especially like myself I grew up in New

York City so I'm a very outgoing kind of individual with a bit of a
loud personality.

And if I move or visit in China, which I've traveled to, I have to

really pull back my personality and adjust my personality
because of cultural relativism that in China or in other Asian
cultures, it is not as common to be so gregarious and outgoing.

So, these relative adjustments are part of making

accommodations for our personality over time.
Introductory Psychology

Personality theories and approaches (Module 9.3)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Okay, we are now at the core, the meat and potatoes if you
would of personality theories and we are now going to turn our
attention to the work of Sigmund Freud.

We've already spoke about our good friend Sigmund Freud a few
times in the past and we're now going to focus on a few other of
his theories.

So Sigmund Freud in his, in his work focused a lot on the

unconscious drives that define our personalities and the drives
or motives in our personality according to Freud were actually
rooted in quite aggressive drives.

This drive towards either annihilation or destruction, even death

as well as a drive towards sexuality and sexual urges and Freud
said that most of these sexual and aggressive urges are not
accepted by society.

They are not ones that we can openly and overtly talk about and
so we really push them down and out of consciousness but
meanwhile they are being worked on underneath the surface.

And Freud talked about there being three different aspects of our
personality that are oftentimes in battle with each other in terms
of the expression of our personality.

Freud began with explaining the fact that an infant is born with
an Id, it's inborn and we are born with this Id and the Id has a, a
gratification that is all about the here and now.

He talked about this instant gratification.

I want it and I want it now.

So this is why you might find a newborn or an infant basically
crying when they want to cry, according to Freud.

They want to grab something off of your face, your glasses and
put it in their mouth, that's what they're gonna do.

Take your cell phone, throw it in the toilet, they don't care.

They only want what they want and they want it now and in this
way they were driven by the pleasure principle.

Whatever they can do to get pleasure, that's what they would

seek.

This aspect of the personality as I said is inborn and it really

plays, it's around from birth and it's really there alone until the
ego comes about.

The ego is the reality principle, operates on the reality principle

which basically is what responds to the fact that you can't
always get what you want.

So there's a famous song by the Rolling Stones, it says "You

can't always get what you want.

"But if you try, sometimes you just "might find you get what you
need." And that's basically what the ego does.

The ego figures out that I can't get what I want all the time from
instant gratification because my adults keep, now they're onto
me.

They know that when I cry, I'm not just gonna get what I want.

But I still want things so the ego comes about using the reality
principle and figures out a way to get the Id what it needs.

So if the mother says "You cannot have a lollipop, sorry." That

child might run around to their little sister and say "Pop? "Pop?"
And the little sister might say "Oh that's so cute.

"You want a lollipop, sure I'll get you a lollipop." And she'll give
her little sibling a lollipop, meanwhile that's not what the mother
wanted but this infant now, this toddler has figured out how to
get what they want in reality and the ego now has its way of
helping out with the personality.

Next we have the development of the superego.

The superego operates on the morality principle and this is

where a person develops their morals from.

We mentioned earlier the Oedipus or an Electra Complex and it

is through the resolution of the Electra and Oedipus Complex
that a child actually learns their morals because once they have
learned that they can't beat their father in order to, or destroy
their father in order to have their mother and to be married or
the lover of their mother, they realize that they can't beat their
father because they're actually quite like their father and so as
they say, if you can't beat them, join them.

So the child really affiliates and associates with the parent of the
same sex according to Freud and from that they learn to
associate with their morals and principles of that same adult and
that's where the morality principle develops and where the
moral compass develops, in the superego.

Freud mentioned that these are analogous to an iceberg so that

on the top level is the conscious mind, what I'm aware of and I
have some aspects of the ego on top and some aspects of the
superego on top but the Id is buried deep beneath the surface
where our unconscious mind rests and this is where the darker,
more aggressive aspects of our personally lie and this pleasure
principle lies unless the ego and the superego help it come
about out of the surface.

Freud also talked about the notion of anxiety and he said that we
have conflicts over how we behave, meaning I want to do, part
of me wants to do one thing, so my Id wants to go out and party
and not study for my exam and my superego says no, no, no, we
have to study for the CLEP Exam.

It's very important that we prepare because we're going to

college and have all these rules we have to follow and so there
becomes a battle and anxiety rises up.

And so when there's anxiety between the Id and the superego,

the ego rises up to the rescue and here ego comes to save the
day by developing ego defense mechanisms, all right? These
ego defense mechanisms such as repression or sublimation or
denial, that's a very famous one, or projection as we've said
before.

These are mechanisms that the ego uses to protect against all of
that anxiety that comes up when there's a battle between the Id
and the superego or when there's other types of anxieties that
come up.

So if I hear bad news, I might say "No, no, no, no.

"I don't believe it, it can't be, it can't be true." I'm denying that
truth, that's a defense mechanism.

Sometimes you even hear people who call on the radio and they
win a prize.

They call up Z-100, "You're the 100th caller.

"You just won tickets to our big concert." And the first thing you
hear the person say is "No, I don't believe it." And the DJ says
"No it's true, you really won." "No, get outta here, it can't be."
They're literally denying because it's too anxiety-provoking that
they're a winner and so they use these defense mechanisms and
there's many other examples of defense mechanisms but we'll
only stick with just these few.

Okay, psychosexual stages.

We already spoke about these in an earlier Module at 8.2.

So I'm gonna ask you to go back there to learn more details but
again it is the anal, oral, phallic, latent and genital stages and
we also talked about the Electra and Oedipal Complex there as
well.

One thing that I did not mention here, when I told you about the
boy who wants to be with his mother or sleep with his mother
and kill his father, what actually happens as part of that process
of getting over the love for the mother is when he looks at his
father and he says "Uh-oh, you're a big man.

"I think you may have it out for me "and you may want to cut off
my penis." And that causes castration anxiety, right? So that's a
very famous Freudian term and the female version of this story
is when the woman, the little girl develops something that we
call penis envy where they envy the fact that the father has
male genitalia and that creates a sense of anxiety and so she
then turns to her mom and says "Wait a minute, mom.

"Dad has male genitalia but we don't, right? "We're missing that
and so we are like each other." And that's how she associates
with the mom and she develops her superego and her morals
and principles from that process.

Okay so let's move on from Freud, as exciting and interesting as

it may be and turn to another approach and that is the approach
of Carl Rogers from the Humanistic school of thought.

Carl Rogers as well as Abraham Maslow spoke about a person-

centered theory.

So in this theory it's very much about giving us the benefit of the
doubt.

Rather than presuming that we are nihilistic or driven by

aggressive urges or sexual urges, Carl Rogers and those in his
camp believe that we're not striving to reduce this type of sexual
urge and energy and anxiety but rather we're striving towards
congruence.

We're striving to match a ideal self, right? My view that I might

be in the future, over here this ideal self, what I'd like to be, how
can I match that up with my true self? So my true self is my
talents, my desires, my thoughts and feelings and all of that is
wrapped up with my self concept.

How do I view myself? You know, what do I think that I'm like?
Not just what actual talents do I have but what do I think I am
and what would I like to become? And so what he talked about,
Rogers was taking my real self and my ideal self and hopefully
having this crossover point here where this is where I'm trying to
merge my real with my ideal and this is what I currently am at
the current, my true self is right here in this middle, okay? And
the goal is to try to merge those two and overlap them enough
so that my ideal is actually what I'm living now, I'm actually
living my ideal self.
Okay, moving along.

Rogers also spoke about the idea of my having a condition of

worth meaning my parents or my caregivers impose upon me a
sense of shoulds.

You should be this way, you must act in that particular way.

It's very important that you have this ideal or this moral or this
value, that's what we believe in in our family and so this, and
only if you follow these conditions are you worthy and if you're
not following these rules, you're not worthy, you're not good.

You're not desirable or likeable to us and therefore even to

yourself you should not be proud of yourself if you're not
meeting these conditions of worth.

And Rogers said that this type of an upbringing is less than ideal,
less than healthy and he proposed that we strive towards a
sense of unconditional positive regard where I am loved and
liked no matter what I do.

So that I might tell a child, rather than telling my child, "You got
a 68 on your test.

"That's terrible, I'm so disappointed in you.

"I don't even know what I even bother studying with you for,
"you're just terrible." That's conditional, and if they come home
with a 95, "Oh I love you, you're so brilliant.

"You're the best child I ever had.

"You're my son, you're not my wife's.

"You're my son, you're the smart one, that's me." Right, that's
conditional.

What Rogers said was that we should strive towards

unconditional positive regard.

So if a child comes home with a bad exam or a poor grade, you

might say "I'm unhappy with this poor grade.
"I'm disappointed that you didn't study and I love you
"tremendously and because I love you so much, "I need you to
know that I have to take away "your X-Box because it's not fair
that you're not "preparing with the right energy because we are
"putting so much time and effort into helping "you and we love
you so much." That is a sense of unconditional positive regard.

It teaches empathy.

Rogers spoke about a sense of genuineness and the value of

being genuine with other people and the value of accepting
other people even if they don't meet all of your expectations.

So you can already see the difference between a Rogers and

Freud's approach.

Rogers was a much more kind of open and accepting approach

to explaining personality.

Okay, a few more points to make.

Another approach is referred to as the social-cognitive approach

and this approach talks about how people think about
themselves, in other words how they cognate and how they
think about themselves and then how they relate to society
around them.

So it's a social-cognitive approach, it's a merging of my self-

perceptions and my cognitions and how I relate to everyone else
around me and how your perceptions are integrated into my self
concept as well.

In this theory, we talk about reciprocal determinism which is the

notion that people and how people think, how people behave
and how they interact with their surroundings and with their
environment is what determines how consistent I might be in my
personality, how consistent I will be in my behaviors.

It's all about this reciprocal determinism.

It's almost like you would imagine a circle and each area
influences the next and it goes 'round and around and around.
How I think and how I behave and how my environment
interacts how I think and how I behave in my environment, it
goes around and around and 'round.

One other concept from this area is cognitive dissonance, the

idea that sometimes I might think something and actually
behave in a way other than the way I think.

So, if it's in an election and you vote for someone even though
you're not so confident in that individual, you might experience
something called cognitive dissonance.

There's a discomfort internally because you're doing something

even though you believe in something else and therefore people
strive to reach a balance by either adjusting the way they think
or adjusting the way they behave in order to reach congruence.

Okay, we're at the final theory here and that's the trait theory,
otherwise known as the individual- difference approach and in
this approach we are measuring the way people differ based on
their traits.

Okay, a trait can be something like being shy or outgoing, being

very open to experience or being very closed and protected.

We learn a lot about the trait theory from questionnaires that we

give people.

The most well known of these trait theories is the Big Five or the
Five Factor Model.

It's also called the Five Factor Model and the Big Five is basically
a way of trying to understand how do we whittle down
personality traits to define us in a limited set of variables? So if
you look in the English Dictionary, there are hundreds, if not
thousands of words to describe our personalities and so
researchers over time began to take all of those words or
descriptors and use a scientific or a statistical method known as
factor analysis.

It's a statistical methodology of reducing down into core factors

and in doing so, they resulted first in 10 personality traits.

Then another theorist came up with seven and then eventually

the most popular and commonly- used trait theory brings us to
five factors and they are remembered by the pneumonic OCEAN
and they stand for Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion,
Agreeableness and Neuroticism.

So just to give you an example, openness is how open I am to

new experiences.

Conscientiousness is how mindful I am and conscientious of

myself and my environment.

Extraversion is how outgoing I might be in terms of my

communication.

Agreeableness is how well I get along with other people.

How well do I communicate with other people? And neuroticism

is a bit about anxiety, how neurotic am I? And all this exists on a
scale, so you can either be high or low in something.

So you can be low or high in a given trait and that is how we

define these five traits and again, this is the final of the Five
Factor Models.

Here's a little image here to show you the different aspects of

the Five Trait theory and how they interact to create one's
personality.

Once again, this was a dense subtopic so please take your time
and review it and make sure that you practice these concepts.

Use some pneumonic devices like OCEAN to remember the

various aspects of the Module and we'll see you at the next stop.
Introductory Psychology

Self-concept, self-esteem (Module 9.4)

[Prof. David Sitt]

All right, we're back.

We're gonna touch upon a concept very quickly, very briefly, and
it's one we've already touched on before, the idea of a self-
concept and self-image.

Again, these are somewhat related to the work of Carl Rogers,

who spoke about the fact that we have an image, self-image,
how do I view myself.

I have consciousness of myself.

And then one's personality, it's quite important to understand

that my personality will be related to my self-image, my self-
concept.

And the fact that there is also a sense of unchanging

characteristics within me.

So, does a trait change over time? Does my self-concept adjust

over time? Or do I basically stay the same? Do I adjust based on
my environment? Maybe in one scenario or with one group of
friends I'm loud, and I'm outgoing, and I'm comfortable, but then
when I'm in class I'm quiet, and I'm demure, and I don't raise my
hand.

So I'm different based on where I am, but generally speaking, I

can say my characteristics are fairly stable.

My self-concept is also influenced by my social, physical, and

psychological surroundings.

And so all of these factors contribute to the self-concept.

Self-esteem is the extent to which I accept or approve of myself.

So I have my concept of myself, this is who I know myself to be,

but then there's the question of do I like myself? Do I feel like I
have a sense of worthiness, and a sense of self-esteem, and do I
value myself? And you, I'm sure, can all relate to this at home.

You know how you feel about yourself, and you know how you
wanna project yourself to other people, and how much do other
people's reactions to you matter.

Do you compare yourself to other people? Who do you identify

with in your family? Maybe you identify with an older sibling or
one parent over another? Think about it, when you go to the
school lunchroom, which group of people do you sit down with?
Who do you like to have lunch with? Are they people who are all
like you? Or are they very different than you? Do they all share
something in common, like being athletes, or artists, or into
technology? What is it that identifies your value, your self-worth,
your self-concept, and ultimately how does that create your
sense of self and your self-esteem? So these are two very brief
concepts that are fused in with the talk on personality.

And I'm sure those were very easy to relate to personally.

We have just one more concept to get to right after this break.
Introductory Psychology

Research methods: idiographic, nomothetic (Module 9.5)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Alright, we're back and we're at the last stop of talking about
personality.

In this section, we're going to be talking about some methods

that are used to understand personality.

Not to necessarily evaluate them, like we talked about before

with the MMPI and TAT and Rorschach, but rather in the way that
we understand people's personalities.

So, the first approach that is used is the idiographic approach,

and the idiographic approach focuses on what makes us unique.

What is special about me, what is the qualitative difference of

subjective nature to me and my personality? So, the methods
that are used are often times qualitative.

For example, a case study method, is an in-depth interview, like

I might read in any type of a newspaper or magazine, about a
person's personality.

We also use informal interviews and unstructured observations.

So, these are all qualitative methods that are looking for the
quality of a person, not quantifying how much they are of this or
how little they are of that.

It's more of an essence of a person and it's based on the

humanistic approach to understanding personality from the
school of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow.

So, this again is the idiographic approach to understanding

personality and this is in comparison to the nomothetic
approach, which focuses on what we actually share with others.
What are the personality traits that I have that are in common
with other people in my surrounding or in my age group or in an
area that I live? This method is a more quantifiable one,
meaning it is one that we want to get a sense of relative
differences.

So, that might be something that I assess with numbers and

numerical values and I might use the correlation method.

So, how is your personality correlated with being outgoing or

being shy? I might utilize the experimental methods to
understand the personality traits that a person might have and
other similar quantitative methods.

These methods are often times those used by the biological

perspective, people from the behaviorists school and even the
cognitive school of methods utilizes these approaches.

So, that about wraps it up for the personality chapter.

We've covered a wide variety of topics.

We've mentioned a lot of specific names of theorists, so please

make sure to go back and make sure you know who said what
and use those mnemonic devices to remember some of the
specific aspects of these personality theories.

Alright, that's about it and we'll see you at the next topic.
Introductory Psychology

Introduction (Module 10.0)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Okay, we are now ready to turn to the discussion of

psychological disorders and treatment, as well as aspects of
stress and health.

This is an area that gets a lot of attention in general.

Many people think psychology is most exclusively about this

clinical area.

We're going to cover various aspects of the disorders, the

theories behind these disorders, as well as how to treat some of
these psychopathologies.

Specifically we'll also go over the DSM.

We'll talk about anxiety disorders, affective disorders,

somatoform disorders, dissociative disorders, psychoses,
personality disorders, the theories behind psychopathology, and
finally we'll talk about health, stress, and coping.

It's a lot to cover so get yourself into a focused zone and we'll
see ya at the first module.
Introductory Psychology

Background and DSM-V (Module 10.1)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Okay, let's establish some background information about this

particular topic.

We're talking about psychopathology, which is a fancy word for

abnormal psychology.

Psychopathology can be broken down into pathos, which is the

study, excuse me, -ology, which is the study of pathos, which is
illness of, and psyche, which are mental.

So it's the study of mental illnesses.

And this is the branch of psychology which deals with mental

illnesses.

It includes the study of symptoms, the etiology or causes of

disorders as well as the treatments of the various disorders.

When we say the words psychological disorders we are referring

to conditions that are characterized by abnormal thoughts,
abnormal feelings, as well as abnormal behaviors.

And we have a missing word here, but I would also say and
physiology.

So now in addition to understanding the definition it's important

to know that there is a guidebook as it were, or a, almost like an
encyclopedia of all of these psychological disorders and
conditions, referred to as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of Mental Disorders, abbreviated as the DSM-V which is in the
fifth edition.

It is published by the American Psychiatric Association or the

APA, and it basically goes over what are the symptoms of each
condition, brings up some statistics, tells you how many
symptoms within each category you have to have.

So maybe it's six out of nine in order to have a disorder, and

what's focused as well is the fact that there needs to be
functional impairments across multiple domains.

So it's not just that you're affected in at school, but it may be at

home or among friends in your social environments, and this is
an important feature of a diagnosis within the DSM.

After this we'll turn to the various disorders and we'll go over
them one by one.

See you soon.

Introductory Psychology

Affective disorders (Module 10.2)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Alright, we're going to begin with the first of the modules on

affective disorders.

The word affect itself is the synonym for mood.

So, earlier you saw the word affective.

So, affect...

is a synonym for mood or emotion.

It's probably more appropriately emotion rather than mood.

And so, this particular area talks about the mood disorders
beginning with depression.

So, depression is a emotional state that most of us out there

have a sense of.

It is when we experience great sadness, loss of pleasure.

In the more extreme cases, there is a sense of hopelessness and

worthlessness.

Now, to be diagnosed or to experience depression, it is not to

have what would be an ordinary level of sadness.

This is when there is functional impairment due to the degree of

sadness, so a person may not be attending school and classes.

They may have trouble with work or they may not be socializing
due to the symptoms of their depression.

There are several different types of depression.

There is something referred to as major depressive disorder.

And major depressive disorder impacts people for a minimum of

two weeks, where a person might experience the symptoms of
depression that we alluded to earlier with many more that we
didn't allude to, for most of the day, nearly everyday for a two
week period of time.

There is also something referred to as a seasonal pattern or

seasonal affective disorder, which is what happens when people
get depressed when there are changes of the season.

Most often, we experience in this when daylight savings occurs

and there's less daylight.

Or when people live in an environments where there is less

daylight, they may experience seasonal patterned depression.

Postpartum depression are the types of depression that

generally women will experience.

It happens after the birth of a child for a given period of time

and it lasts up until a few months, after which the diagnosis
might shift into something else.

And then, more recently there was a new diagnosis in the DSM-5
of persistent depressive disorder, which is a depression that
lasts for much longer than a two week period of time.

There's something-- a synonym for that or a different version of

this is called dysthymia, which is a low-level consistent type of
depression.

We know that depression shows some abnormal activity within

the brain.

In particular, we know that the neural transmitter serotonin is

implicated, where we believe there are lower levels of serotonin
in the brains of those who are experiencing depression.

It's not so easy to differentiate whether the depression causes

the low serotonin or if low serotonin causes the depression.
But we do know that there are lower levels of depression, of
serotonin.

And we also are aware that the regions of the brain such as the
prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, or the amygdala, are
implicated in brain functioning of people with depression.

We know that, unfortunately, experiencing depression can

increase people's risk for suicide.

Both in terms of suicide, suicidal thoughts, and suicidality and

fantasy, as well as the potential for taking steps towards suicide.

Very concerning aspects of depression and one that we know

leads to a lot of attention being given to depression, this is with
elevated numbers occurring on college campuses, and the
highest actual rates of suicide and suicidality existing within the
geriatric population, the older population.

White men, 75 and older are actually the highest group at risk
for suicide.

Now, in terms of talking about the etiology or some of the...

theories or roots of depression, we know there is a strong belief

of the diathesis-stress relationship, which states that we have
predisposition towards a depression, perhaps due to a genetic
underpinning or biological features that out of, really out of birth
might make me more susceptible to depression.

And that the stressors of my life come into play and increase the
probability that the underlying depression will unfold.

The cognitive theories are quite well-known and well researched

today.

Research put forward by Aaron Beck and his belief in the

negative triad, which is a...

the presence of negative beliefs in self, the world, and the

future.

So, Aaron Beck believed that people with depression had a

higher degree of negative thoughts about themselves, about the
world in general.

"So, I'm a terrible person.

"I'm no good, I'm never gonna succeed.

"The world is against me.

"There's no way for me ever to succeed in this world.

"And the future is hopeless, there's no way "that I can make

something of myself in the future." That's Beck's cognitive triad.

There is a theory about hopelessness that...

people who develop a sense of hopelessness are much more

prone to depression.

People who are prone to helplessness are much more prone to

depression.

And a theory called learned helplessness by Martin Seligman

states that people actually learn through experiences with their
environment that they don't have a chance at being happy,
because they've been disappointed so many times in the past
that they just become accustomed to being depressed as it were
and learn to be helpless.

And the notion of rumination is another part of the cognitive

theory that people ruminate and have repeating thoughts of
negative tense that remain in their minds almost as it were to a
degree like a obsession in the mind with these thoughts being
repeated.

Another form of mood disorder is called-- is referred to as bipolar

disorder.

Bipolar disorder is a much more severe, it can be a much more

severe condition, one that has a, either a oscillation or a
vacillation between states of depression as we described before,
and mania.

Mania is rather than being depressed, which is low energy, low

mood, low activity level, lack of interest in things, lack of
socialization, mania is the opposite.

A high degree of socialization, overly energetic, the ability to be

up and awake for many days in a row, to be hypersexual, to be
spending way more money than one should be spending at a
given period of time.

And at times, a person in a manic state can even become

psychotic and have delusions or hallucinations.

And by the way, these manic episodes lasts seven days and can
require hospitalization.

And there is a lower level of this called hypomania, which lasts

three days.

A three day, which is kind of a shorter version of hypomania.

So, to have both depression and mania at the same time leads
to a diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

You only need to have one of these manic episodes to be

considered bipolar, along with depression.

There are much more technical aspects of this, but for the sake
of the CLEP, this should be enough.

Finally, if you have the facts about bipolar disorder, they have a
very high comorbidity rate.

Comorbidity means that, along with having one particular

condition, you are also are diagnosed with a second condition,
so they are comorbid, they coalesce, they come together.

And so, bipolar disorder has a high degree of coalescence or

comorbidity with anxiety disorders, substance abuse disorders,
and some personality disorders such as borderline personality
disorder, which we'll talk about in a few moments in a different
module.

We know that bipolar disorder...

Actually...
There are some, there's some slight indication of men being,
having more bipolar disorder than women, but not by much, it's
really pretty close.

Depression is much higher in women than in men.

And suicide rates are quite high within the bipolar population
where there's a 36% attempt rate and a 15-19% completion
rate.

So, a very significant disorder.

In terms of etiology, bipolar disorder has a much stronger

genetic link to it versus just straight depression.

And the treatments of bipolar disorder is a very different

treatment requiring primarily the use of lithium.

And there are other versions of treatments for bipolar disorder,

but different than what we treat for depression.

Okay, so that about covers it for the affective disorders.

And we'll pick up in a few minutes with the anxiety disorders.

Introductory Psychology

Anxiety disorders (Module 10.3)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Alright, let's now turn our attention to anxiety disorders.

Anxiety itself is a sensation, an experience an emotional state

that we all can relate to.

All of us experience anxiety at a certain point in time.

However, when anxiety is experienced to an extreme degree,

where we are overestimating our ability to cope and
underestimating our resources by which we have to cope, we
can enter into more of a disordered state with our anxiety.

When anxiety peaks, it can lead to an unusual feeling of dread, a

sense of fearfulness, perhaps even leading to a state of terror.

The anxiety can come in intense waves and it can also be

experienced as a free floating state.

Speaking of a free floating type of anxiety, we begin with

generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD.

Generalized anxiety disorder is described as free floating

anxiety, where a person has an excessive amount of
uncontrollable anxiety that persists throughout their day,
throughout their activities.

So a person may wake up in the morning and say I'm not sure
what I should wear today, I feel really anxious.

Should I put on a blue shirt or should I put on a white shirt? I

don't know which I'm gonna wear today.

And then they go brush their teeth.

Should I brush my teeth with this toothpaste first, or should I
floss first? Every day is a series of anxieties.

What should I have for breakfast? Am I gonna be late to work?

Or just constant worries and the source of the anxiety just shifts
all the time.

So that's generalized anxiety disorder.

Panic disorder, another type of an anxiety disorder, is when a

person experiences recurrent and unexpected panic attacks.

Now, what's a panic attack? A panic attack is a sudden rush of

anxiety that peaks in about a 15 to 20 minute window, maybe
even sooner than that, and it's an attack of extreme
physiological sensations, so heart beating fast, breathing
becoming constricted, eyes dilating, extreme sweating, perhaps
getting very dizzy, perhaps getting very nauseous.

During a panic attack a person might feel as if in their mind,

they're having a heart attack, and actually think that they may
die.

So they're very intense experiences.

When a person has recurrent panic attacks, in a way where they

can't even predict when they're gonna have a panic attack, that
is when they may be diagnosed with a panic disorder.

We know norepinephrine is implicated to some degree in these

panic disorders and we know in terms of treatments, cognitive
behavior therapy is among the more popular treatments.

Moving forward to obsessive-compulsive disorder, otherwise

known as OCD.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder, a very interesting type of

disorder, but a highly impactful one for people who suffer from
it.

An obsession, the first portion of the disorder, is a repetitive

thought that comes up for a person, either as an image or a
thought, that comes up over and over again and it creates an
extreme sense of anxiety.
So, for example, a person might have an obsession with germs
and over and over again, they may think, I just touched that
doorknob, the doorknob must have germs on it, I must be
getting these germs, I'm gonna get sick, I'm going to die
because I touched the doorknob.

And now I just shook that person's hand and they had germs on
their hands and that's surely gonna be filled with danger and
surely I'm gonna die and I can't stop thinking about how I just
touched their hand and it's an ongoing obsessional repetitive
thought pattern.

The compulsions are repetitive behaviors, also they can be

mental actions that a person does in their mind, intended to
reduce the anxiety that's caused by the obsession.

So if a person has an obsession with germs, they may then have

a compulsion to engage in washing their hands over and over
again, or Purell-ing their hands on a constant non-stop basis, but
to a degree that is also very ritualized, not just repeating a
behavior, but I must wash my hands three times in this
particular order, in this particular motion, and if I don't do it in
this order and this motion, I have to start all over again.

This is a time consuming, very troubling disorder.

And we know that there is a relationship to a degree to a

hoarding disorder.

Hoarding is when a person cannot let go of things.

They collect either old things or new things or whatever it might

be, newspapers, articles, articles of clothing, and cannot let it go
because there is an obsession that if I let go of this object, it will
be highly problematic, so the obsessional behavior is to hold it
close at all times.

So this is obsessive-compulsive disorder and hoarding.

Let's move on to phobias.

Phobias are intense and, this is very important, irrational fears of

specific objects or events.
An example of a phobia is someone who has an extreme fear of
heights.

Now, its not just, I don't like heights.

It's, if I get placed on a high floor of a building, I may have a

panic attack.

It's that degree of intensity.

I will be gripping onto the walls while I'm up in that high

building.

Or I have a phobia of an animal and that animal, when a dog is

around me, I get panic attack or I have an extreme fear and I
must run away, I cannot endure that experience without having
extreme anxiety.

And it's important that we know that there's a great

differentiation from just normal I don't like something to a
irrational fear that leads to changes in behavior.

Next we move onto agoraphobia.

Agoraphobia is the avoidance of places where it would be

difficult for me to escape from should I get a panic attack.

So the notion here is that I might be in a marketplace and have

a panic attack, which is a very embarrassing experience for
some people, and if they don't have a sense that they can
escape that environment, they basically decide not to go out to
such environments and that leads to what we call agoraphobia.

It could also be a person who has an extreme fear of going to a

cornfield, where there may not be anyone available to help me if
I have panic attack.

That too can be an example of agoraphobia.

Finally we can talk about social anxiety disorder, which is an

extreme experience of fear and anxiety during social
interactions with other people, whether it be public speaking
and getting extreme anxiety about speaking up in public.
It can also be having anxiety about eating in front of other
people and the anxiety that is caused by that type of an
interaction.

So that about covers it for the anxiety disorders that we think

are important for you to know for the CLEP exam.

We'll see you at the next module in just a few moments.

Introductory Psychology

Somatoform disorders (Module 10.4)

[Prof. David Sitt]

All right, let's turn our attention to somatoform disorders.

Somatoform, again in case you've heard this word throughout

our course here, is based on the word soma.

Soma is Greek for body.

So somatoform disorders are those disorders where there are

physical symptoms expressed by an individual with actually no
medical explanation for that condition.

So this can be a person who complains of pains in their bodies

and goes to the doctor often and yet there's actually no
physical, neurological issue.

Or a person says that they lose feeling in parts of their body,

their hands or they can't see, and there's no neurological basis
for the blindness or for the paralysis in the hand.

It could go so far as women who say that they're pregnant and

actually when they go to the doctor, even though their body,
even in response to the mind becomes bloated, as if it looks like
a woman may be pregnant, and they'll go to the doctor, and
there is no pregnancy.

So very powerful types of conditions.

Hypochondriasis is kind of a subtype here where there's a

preoccupation with bodily symptoms.

Fear of having disease and illness.

So afraid that I have a brain tumor.

Afraid that I have various number of medical conditions and
despite going to doctors who tell them "You are all right.

"There's nothing wrong with you." a person persists in having

this.

So hypochondriasis is almost a a combination of somatoform

along with anxiety disorder.

A conversion disorder is more specifically when a person has

neurological symptoms without medical cause.

So I alluded to this earlier before with paralysis of the hand or

blindness.

These are types of conversion disorders where there is no

medical cause for these neurological symptoms.

Those are quite rare in general.

Treatments for these disorders are not very strong.

We don't have great treatment protocols for these particular

conditions.

And again very often we pick up on them because people show

up to medical doctors and are tested for their complaints, and
there's no foundation for them.

All right, that's it for this area.

Introductory Psychology

Dissociative disorder (Module 10.5)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Let's turn our attention to the next area in this module,

dissociative disorders.

Dissociative disorders, broadly speaking, have to do with

fragmentations of both personality and the memory system.

So there are disturbances, or again, break downs or

fragmentations of personality, a sense of who one is, as well as
memories about oneself.

One particular type of dissociation is dissociative amnesia.

This is when a person becomes unable to recall aspects of their

personality, aspects of their, of themselves.

Dissociative amnesia, has, there are biological forms of

dissociative amnesia, there are reactionary types, when a
person gets hit on the head and has a brain injury and they
experience amnesia.

But there are also psychological amnesias that are not triggered
by any external factor or medical illness or disease.

But yet there still is a break from a person's memory system and
personality within a distinct period of time.

In addition to amnesia, a person may experience a fugue.

A dissociative fugue is when an individual has not only a state of

amnesia, where they forget who they are, or aspects of their
memory, but they then run away, or they escape from their
place of origin.

And in doing so in this, what they call a fugue state, when a

person runs away, they may actually take on an entirely
different identity.

So a man, there's a story of a client that I had worked with, who

walked in on his spouse having an affair, and the event was so
traumatic to him that he just turned around, walked out the
door, and they didn't find him for weeks.

Turns out he moved to Florida, and was found by a friend

working at a restaurant.

And the friend said, "Hi, what's? "You know, I haven't seen you in
a while, Jake, "where've you been?" And the man said, "Jake, I'm
not Jake.

"My name is Andy." "What do you mean, Jake, you're from New
York." "No, I'm not from New York.

"I grew up in Indianapolis, "and this is my girlfriend over there."

"Girlfriend, you were married in New York, "you don't
remember?" So this person had a fugue, they broke from their
memory.

They had no recollection of those traumatic events, and they

created a whole new identity.

Now, an even more intense version of dissociation is known as

dissociative identity disorder.

This used to be called multiple personality disorder.

And you'll understand why in a moment.

DX is shorthand for disorder.

Multiple personality disorder is when a person develops two or

more distinctly different identities.

And when I say or more, there are cases of people that have 60
or 70 personalities.

Not necessarily, it's somewhat of a controversial diagnosis in

and of itself, but what we do know about people who have
dissociative identity, or this multiple personality is that they
commonly have reports of childhood trauma, abuse, or sexual
abuse in their upbringing, which in theory leads to a
fragmentation of their personalities, and they create secondary
personalities in order to defend or protect against the events
that are happening.

And as they get older, these personalities become protectors for

that individual even through their adult lives.

Finally, we'll talk about depersonalization, or derealization

disorders.

Depersonalization disorders are when an individual detaches

from aspects of themselves.

One way to explain that is that a person may be aware that in

one moment I'm here, standing in a room or in a classroom, or
at home, and suddenly my mind feels like I'm not in my body,
like I'm looking out on top of myself down onto myself.

And I'm depersonalizing from where I am in this very moment.

This derealization or detachment from the world feels like a fog,

it feels like a dream.

It comes and goes at will for people who suffer from this
condition.

It certainly can be dangerous if they are in the middle of driving

or operating heavy machinery and suddenly they experience
one of these depersonalization experiences.

It could actually be quite dangerous.

Alright, so before we go on, it's not on the slide here, and it's a
little bit out of context, but I just wanna make mention of it.

One other disorder that I think would be important for you to

know about is PTSD, or post traumatic stress disorder.

Post traumatic stress disorder is when a person experiences a

traumatic event in their life or stressor.

It can be being in war, which is where we learned the most

about PTSD was from veterans who experience extreme events
during war time, or a person who was abused at any point in
their life, physically or sexually, being in an accident.

Basically being anywhere where your life is in danger, and

threatened.

And in response to that, you develop an extreme stress response

whereby you have a lasting series of symptoms including
recollections of that event, either in the form of flashbacks,
nightmares, when a person tries to avoid the aspects of that
event that remind them of the trauma.

So if a person was in a car accident, maybe they don't drive in a

car anymore because of not wanting to expose themselves to it.

And symptoms also include being very much on edge and being
hypervigilant.

Hypervigilant means, hypervigilant, is being very much aware of

what goes on around you.

So veterans who have PTSD will say they're always looking

around them, and checking the doors, and checking the
entranceways.

And when there's loud noises, they may have a startled

response.

These individuals have difficulty sleeping.

It can lead to depression, it can lead to substance abuse as well.

And so these are just some of the features of post traumatic

stress disorder.

Again, out of context, not part of depersonalization or

dissociation, but I hadn't put them on a slide, but I realize now
it's important for you to know it.

So hope you got that all in, and we'll see you at the next
module.
Introductory Psychology

Psychoses (Modules 10.6)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Welcome back.

In this module, we're going to be talking about psychosis.

Psychosis refers to symptoms that are breaks from reality.

Breaks from reality.

In a previous module we talked about breaks in personality and

breaks in memory.

For example, with dissociative identity disorder but in this area

when we talk about things such as schizophrenia, we're talking
about breaks from reality.

There's what you and I know to be real and there are symptoms
that are not necessarily able to be proven as real.

Let's talk about this in the context of schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia which is diagnosed in about 1% of the population

across the globe has a set of breaks in reality within a symptom
set that we call positive symptoms.

Now we use the word positive symptoms not to imply that they
are good but rather they are in addition to your normal activity
level.

Positive implies the plus sign or in addition.

Two types of positive symptoms that we have here are

hallucinations.

Hallucinations are very convincing sensory experiences in the

absence of an external stimuli.

When we say sensory, we mean visual.

Seeing something that isn't quite there whether it be very

specific like a person or an animal or a shadow or a shape or
kind of more diffused images.

Auditory hallucinations, hearing things that aren't there.

This is the most common of hallucinations is hearing sounds or

voices or thuds.

Smelling things, tasting things, sensing things on your skin that

are not there.

These are all forms of hallucinations, breaks from reality.

Delusion is a false belief despite contrary evidence.

This is when a person believes that perhaps they are being

chased by the CIA.

That's an example of delusion of persecution, delusion of

persecution is one example.

Delusion of grandiosity or grandiose delusions believing that I

am someone great.

I'm the Queen of Sheba or I am Napoleon or I am the leader of

an alien nation.

All these are examples of kind of grandiosity.

Delusions can be also somatic delusions, believing that my body

has certain problems to it or certain powers.

And there's many other forms of delusions but that I think is

enough to give you examples.

The negative symptoms.

Again, not meaning bad even though they're not favorable for a
person to have but negative really means it implies an absence
or lacking from one's normal personality.

The first example of a negative symptom is flat emotions or flat

affect.

It's when a person doesn't show any volatility in their speech.

So, they may be very monotone in the way that they speak even
if it's my birthday today and I'm very happy.

That is flat affect.

A person may show non-responsiveness, not responding to

people in their environment, just very mellow and distant.

They may show avolition which is a reduction in drive or

motivation.

Anytime you see the word or the letter A before something it

means a lack of, so lack of volition.

Alogia is a reduction of speech so this is basically when you see

someone that has schizophrenia not speaking, I mean very
quiet, it's likely due to this symptom of alogia.

They may have anhedonia.

Anhedonia is an inability to experience pleasure from things like

eating, having sex, enjoying movies or other activities that
others might find pleasurable.

And they may also be socially withdrawn or I might also say

asocial.

Moving on to some other categories of symptoms for

schizophrenia, we have motor symptoms.

Motor symptoms are those that affect the motor movements of

the body.

People with schizophrenia might experience catatonia.

Catatonia is a type of movement that has either odd posturing.

People with schizophrenia might be drooped over and stay
drooped over for a while.

They may have waxy flexibility which is when their hands may
be in a position and you can move it this way, and it'll stay there
for quite a long time until you move it down.

Different kind of motor symptoms.

Cognitive symptoms.

Cognitive symptoms include things such as having disorganized

thinking.

Not being able to think clearly, getting their thoughts together

easily and this comes out in terms of how they speak as well.

They may exhibit something called word salad where you can't
quite put together what they're saying because it's very choppy.

So they may talk to you and say yes, today I saw a light in my
room and the room was cold.

Turkeys love to go and see horse fly near tie, stripe, pen why
don't we go light friend.

If you didn't understand that that's because that was word salad
and difficulty to follow a line of thought and reasoning.

And this is a very complicated symptom for those suffering with

schizophrenia because it makes it hard for them to relate to
others.

There are many other symptoms of schizophrenia that we will

not go into here and it should be enough to give you an
overview and prep for the exam.

Just briefly there are other psychotic disorders, there are other
psychoses that are covered in the DSM.

I'm not sure that the CLEP would necessarily go into this much
detail but they are schizoaffective disorder which is having some
symptoms of schizophrenia but also having an affective piece to
it, an emotional piece to it.
Schizophreniform is basically having schizophrenia but the
symptoms last less than six months.

Because for schizophrenia you have to have six months worth.

Brief psychotic disorder is even less than that, it's less than one
month of the same type of symptoms.

Delusional disorders maybe just focused on delusions rather

than the full picture that we spoke about before.

And a person can have substance-induced psychosis.

If a person takes some type of psychedelic drug or even a

prescribed drug and it leads to psychosis, we refer to this as a
substance-induced psychosis.

That about covers it for the psychotic disorders.

Again, do your best to go over the details, look over your print
materials so you have an understanding of the different
technical terms.

And we'll pick up over in the next module.

Introductory Psychology

Personality disorders (Module 10.7)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Let's move on to the next disorder category.

This categories are labeled, or referred to as personality

disorders.

Personality disorders are quite different than the other disorders

that we've talked about so far.

These are disorders that are differences in one's personality, a

personality style rather than kind of an externalized symptom
per se, but rather the way that a personality is presented might
be one that is has inflexibilities to it, there are pervasive
patterns that cause discomfort for the individual, and actually,
more than causing discomfort for an individual, personality
disorders lead to problems for other people in the lives of those
diagnosed with the personality disorders.

They can oftentimes have difficulty maintaining relationships

with other people, and, they lead to personality styles that are
significantly different than the expectations of a culture that one
lives in.

The way that personality disorders could be divided in the DSM-

IV, in the earlier versions of the DSM, they divided them by
these three clusters, or three categories.

The DSM-V has slightly different types of categorization, but it's

not necessary for the level that we're at for the CLEP exam, so
we're gonna stick to the cluster system.

So, the first cluster, cluster A, are those disorders, personality

disorders that are described as odd, or eccentric.

Behaviors that are odd or eccentric are the definitions of these

subtypes.

So, for example, we have a paranoid personality disorder.

This is not someone who has psychosis, that we spoke about

earlier, but someone who has a personality style where they are
constantly paranoid about people around them, can I trust
people, can I trust my spouse, are they being faithful, constantly
questioning their spouse about their faithfulness, being paranoid
that people at work may be talking about them behind their
back, being paranoid that they may lose money and that the
bank may take their money.

And so it's this odd style.

A schizoid personality is a person who is very odd in the way

they interact and communicate to other people, they're socially
withdrawn and difficult to relate to, and have very odd kinda
mannerisms about them.

Moving on to the cluster B area, we're talking about people who

are very impulsive, dramatic, or erratic in their personality
styles.

Two types that we'll focus on here.

The borderline personality disorder are people who experience a

viewing of the world that's black or white, meaning it's either
one way or the other, and they're always on this kind of
borderline of believing one set of viewpoints or the other.

So, one minute this person may express tremendous love for
you and say how amazing you are and how much they adore
you, and you're the greatest thing since sliced bread, and then,
the next day, they walk over to you and say how despicable of a
person you are and they can't even believe that they're friends
with you, and they have this kind of oscillating black and white
approach.

They can be very dramatic in expressing pain and sadness.

Borderline people, people with borderline personalities can be

highly suicidal, or at least dramatically expressing suicidality,
oftentimes it can be to seek attention rather than a genuine
desire for suicidality.

Again, part of the dramatic and erratic presentation.

Antisocial personalities, or antisocial personality disorder, are

people who are, not antisocial meaning we don't like to socialize,
that's asocial, antisocial are people who are against society,
they don't follow the rules of society, they don't adhere to the
morals and values of society.

So these are individuals who are, on the more extreme level

they are your serial killers, people who don't believe that there's
anything wrong with killing others, and on a lower level, they
may be people who are disregarding the rules, the tax code, and
disregarding the rules of being in a relationship, and aren't being
faithful in their relationship.

As children, they may be very abusive to animals and show this

antisocial, these personality traits when they're younger.

Just a, and histrionic and narcissistic are people who are very
dramatic and expressive in their emotionality, narcissists believe
that they are the greatest things in the world and have everyone
is, they desire everyone to know that they are great and, just all
of their interactions are tainted by that self-perception.

Finally, we turn to the cluster C portion of personality disorders.

These are people that have a nervous, or fearful, or avoidant

style about them.

We have people with avoidant personality, who just avoid

interacting with others, they don't wanna, to rock the boat as it
were.

People who have a dependent personality disorder are very

dependent on others, they are difficult to be with in a
relationship because they are very uncomfortable if they are left
alone for periods of time, they're very reliant on their partners
for, pretty much all emotional stability in their life.

And finally, the obsessive compulsive personality disorder, or

OCPD, are people who, don't have the formal OCD that we spoke
about earlier, but OCPD is where they are, perhaps, very
oriented towards being neat, I'm very obsessed with my room
being organized in a certain way.

I don't have a ritual that requires me to repeat something every

day to have my room being neat, but my room must be very
orderly, and the red books need to be in the red book section,
and the blue books, and then any book that's white goes over
there, and my drawers are perfectly aligned, and my cookies
that I bake have to have five chocolate chips and not six.

So this is a personality style rather than really driven by these

compulsions and obsessions that we spoke about in a previous
sub-module.

So that about covers it for the personality disorders for the CLEP
exam.

We'll see you at the next module.

Introductory Psychology

Theories of psychopathology (Module 10.8)

[Prof. David Sitt]

[Lecturer] Now that we've spent some time talking about the
various disorders let's turn our attention to some of the theories
behind the psychopathology.

We'll start off with what was really an old, original view point
which is the supernatural perspective.

Historically people believed that there were spiritual forces that

were behind people's conditions.

Maybe it was black magic or being possessed by the devil or by

spirits.

And this viewpoint led people to take a pretty drastic measures

to treat people with disorders.

So they may perform exorcisms and bring a priest into the room
along with various elements to exorcise the devil.

Or when there was believed to be witches they would take these

individuals and perform the witch test, which would be when
they would dunk them in a body of water tied to some type of a
heavy block of brick to their leg.

It was actually called, I'm sorry, the float test, if they would float
up to the surface then that would be a sign that they were a
witch.

At which case they would kill the person.

And if they didn't float up to the top of the water well, that's
good.

Now we know they're not a witch but unfortunately the person

likely would have died as well.

So you can understand how these were very inhumane practices

and not efficient at all in really treating people for their
conditions.

Over time, as time passed, the biological perspective became

one that got a lot more attention and support.

We're talking about genetics, chemical imbalances in

neurotransmitters like dopamine, or serotonin, or norepinephrine
that we've alluded to.

There could be problems in brain structures whether it be for

example, people with ADHD are said to have a smaller frontal
lobe.

So these are some of the biological perspectives that are taken,

and they lead to treatments that are biologically-based.

But we'll get to that in a moment.

Another theory that we've alluded to or addressed very

specifically in previous sub-modules is the diathesis stress
model.

The diathesis stress model again, states that I have a

predisposition maybe it's a genetic predisposition.

And when a stressor in my environment peaks then that

predisposition is triggered and that ability or capacity for such a
disorder kind of unfolds, in crude terms.

This integrates biological and psychosocial factors in order to

explain the outflow of disorders.

There, of course, are other perspectives including the

behaviorist perspective which talks about the relationship
between learning and how I learn things in my environment,
such as what Pavlov taught us.

The cognitive perspective which we alluded to earlier as well

with Aaron Beck's work which talks about my cognitions or my
perceptions playing a role in the advent or the root of certain
disorders.

And there's also the evolutionary theories which say that a lot of
our disorders may stem from evolution pre-programming, so
phobias maybe there because it helped me to survive, to have a
fear of a saber-toothed tiger.

And now that translated to having a fear of dogs or I used to be

afraid of heights 'cause that was dangerous for me to be in high
places as a Neanderthal.

But today in an elevator even though it may be safe I still have

this underpinning of a fear.

And so the evolutionary theory would refer to that.

So that covers a number of different theories behind

psychopathology.

We have just about one more, sub-module to go so we'll get to

that in just a moment.
Introductory Psychology

Health, stress and coping (Module 10.9)

[Prof. David Sitt]

All right, we are going to now close off this module on abnormal
psychology and psychopathology, by talking about stress, health
and coping, some ways that we can actually deal with stress.

In the next module, we'll talk about treatments in general for the
disorders.

So what is stress? Stress is something that we all experience, it's

common in life, it's part of our biological process to experience
stress.

And it's very much tied into our perceptions and our responses.

So stress is triggered by how I perceive in a particular

environment.

If I am in an environment, and I appraise that environment as

being threatening, I'm going to experience stress.

In fact, the primary appraisal of the stress appraisal process, has

me looking at my environment, and appraising what is out there,
and how dangerous is it to me.

And that's very much a biological, has a biological and

evolutionary underpinning.

When we were running around in far less developed areas,

where we were combating for our lives against other mammals
on the planet, we had to appraise, is that saber tooth tiger
gonna cause me harm? Is that snake gonna cause me harm?
And I have to appraise the danger and as well as the
environment around me for other features of danger.

Then I enter into the secondary appraisal phase, which is where I

begin to understand about myself what do I have within me?
And maybe even what do I have access to outside of me to deal
with that stressor? So it's a two-part process.

Primary is actually stressing me out in my environment.

Secondary to that is what do I have to cope with that? If I

overestimate the environment, and I underestimate my ability to
cope, I'm going to be living in a much more stressful mindset
more of the time.

If I can manage to reduce my stress reactions to my

environment, and actually inflate, or really pump up my belief in
my personal ability to cope, well, then I'm gonna be far less
stressed and much more able to cope with what comes my way,
for example, in taking a CLEP exam.

Now not all stress is bad stress.

We know that there is types of stresses that are helpful to us.

We call this Eustress.

So when it comes to preparing for a date, you get stressed,

sometimes there are butterflies in your stomach, you're a bit
nervous, but those nerves help you prepare for that date, or
maybe it's for a sporting activity.

There may be a bit of nerves and stress.

But you use that stress to your advantage to help you cope with
that, and actually to excel in those scenarios.

That's an example of good stress.

Now when I am overly stressed, or I'm in distress, I might have

passed, this is kind of an optimal level of stress.

It's building up, it's building up, it's building up over time.

So this is time and this is stress over here.

And, over time, I might begin to lose that energy and begin to
burn out, because I'm over, I get passed my optimal level of
stress.

When we do go over this optimal level of stress, we begin to

have an increase in sensitivity to pain.

My immune system begins to be affected.

And so as my stress level increases, the susceptibility within my

immune system increases.

As my stress level increases, and as it goes up, as I indicated

here, my psychological disorders will increase.

As my stress level increases, risk factors for cardiovascular

illnesses increase as well.

So I might experience heart attacks more likely, strokes and

other diseases and disorders, as my immune system begins to
weaken, due to the fact that stress level increases.

If you think about it, in your experiences, when you're taking

your finals, isn't that oftentimes when people are experiencing
colds, and they're blowing their noses, and they're feeling sick
and they're tired.

The minute after finals are over, they crash hard, that's because
with all the stress that you've been under, during your
preparation for your exams, your immune system gets weaker
and weaker, and weaker, and eventually, you crash.

And that's basically how it goes.

There are various coping styles that come into play when
dealing with stress.

We have the problem-focused style of coping, where I try to

alleviate the source of the stress itself.

So if I am trying to study for an exam, and my brother's playing

loud music, so I go to my brother's room, I knock on the door,
and I say, "Hey, can you turn your music down?" "I'm trying to
study." Or I might put ear plugs on, or go to a different room in
the house.
So I do things to try to alleviate the source of stress.

Emotion-focused responses is when I reappraise the stressor.

And I try to construe it differently.

So maybe I say, you know, it's not so bad that my brother's

music is playing, I kind of like the music that he's playing.

Maybe it'll help me focus.

So that's a way of using my own internal emotions to re-assess

the situation and cope with it.

In terms of coping, social support is one of the most significant

features that a person can bring into their lives to cope with
stress.

We know that social support is indicative of longevity and long

life span.

So research shows that people who are living over the age of 80
and 90 show to have still a social support network.

We know that people coping with financial difficulties, or

relationship problems, at any point in life, if they turn to social
support, that will significantly help them manage their stress
levels.

And then, finally, there are multitudes of stress reduction

techniques that you can call upon to help you deal with stress.

Exercise is a very well-established method for coping with stress.

15 minutes to 30 minutes of cardiovascular activity a day is

quite helpful for reducing stress levels.

Even if you can get to do 20 push-ups, and 10 sit-ups, or any

type of heart-exerting physical activity can significantly help
reduce your stress.

We know that meditation is an extremely powerful tool for

reducing stress levels.
And meditation shouldn't feel like something that has a high
level of perfection.

Even if you were to sit for 10 seconds, and close your eyes and
say to yourself, "What does my breath feel like right now?"
(inhales and exhales) And you open your eyes, you have
meditated.

There's no right or wrong way to go about it.

You can download many apps that can help you with meditation
these days.

So highly encouraged, I highly encourage you to explore

meditation as a form of stress reduction.

There are other techniques like biofeedback, which can be

helpful in stress reduction, being aware of your nutrition can also
play a roll in your body's ability to cope with stress, and to
maintain a healthy immune system.

So all this being said, it's important for you to be aware of stress,
especially when you're preparing for the CLEP exam.

Be mindful of your stress levels, be mindful of burning out.

Be mindful of exercising and meditating, and bringing on other

techniques to help you cope with your stress during these
particular types of challenging experiences in your life.

That about covers it for this module on abnormal psychology or

psychological disorders and we'll be picking up with the next
module on, I believe, on the treatment of psychological
disorders.
Introductory Psychology

Introduction (Module 11.0)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Now that we've gone over the psychological disorders in the

previous module, we're going to turn our attention to the
treatments of psychological disorders in this module.

We'll be covering different treatment approaches and modalities

including insight therapies, as well as biological and drug
therapies.

We'll turn our attention to behavior and cognitive therapies, and

finally we'll talk about community and preventative approaches.

And that should cover it for this particular module.

I'll see ya at the first stop.

Introductory Psychology

Insight therapies: psychodynamic and humanistic approaches

(Module 11.1)

[Prof. David Sitt]

How are you? Ready to get started? Well that's good, 'cause we
have ourselves a very interesting set of approaches when it
comes to treating psychological disorders.

We are going to open up with the psychodynamic and

humanistic approaches for treatments of disorders.

And begin with the psychodynamic approach which stems from

the work of Sigmund Freud, who we've heard about in a couple
of different iterations across the prep course.

So Sigmund Freud, in the late 1800s, began to receive a lot of

patients seeking his counsel.

He was trained, not as a psychologist or a psychiatrist, as there

were none formally in that time, but he began to see patients
and apply theories of what he felt were emotionally centered
theories, and began to theorize that the problems that people
were coming to him with, whether it be depression or anxiety, or
some people even coming in saying they had neuroses or not
being able to feel their arm or suddenly being blind, and he
found that the root of their problems were these underlying
aggressive and sexual urges, which we spoke about in the
personality module.

And he began to use techniques like free association which is

when a person basically begins to freely express the first thing
that comes to mind.

So they may just unfold with, you know, I had a hard day today
and Freud might say, "What are you feeling today?" And they
would say, "I was at work and I saw my boss." And then he
would ask, "What did you think next?" "I thought my boss was
not in a good mood." "What did you think next?" And it would go
on and on and on until he would get to a point to where
something from that unconscious mind would be revealed,
something that had been repressed might come up to the
surface.

And in this way, Freud believed that insight and awareness

would be developed.

Doing so, according to Freud, was his approach at resolving past

conflicts that had developed in early childhood.

And he also would depend on a technique known as dream

analysis, whereby he would be asking patients did you have any
dreams the prior night or in the past and when the dream would
be expressed to Freud, he would interpret the dream and say
that there are two levels of the dream, there was a manifest
content and a latent content.

And the surface-level content was only one level of the dream,
but underneath that was the deeper level, a deeper content of
the dream.

And so that was some of Freud's techniques including as well the

notion that through insight and through this long psychoanalytic
process, catharsis could be reached.

Catharsis is an emotional cleansing, it's a freeing up of all that

bottled-up psychic energy that was located in the depths of the
psyche that would liberate a person and make them feel
emancipated and free of their psychological symptoms that they
would come to Freud with.

He noted that oftentimes in therapy people would bring

resistance to the work, they would resist in wanting to let go of
whatever it is that they were holding on to in the depths of their
unconscious.

And Freud would interpret, let's say a patient coming late to a

session or not showing up to a session, or saying to him, "I have
nothing to talk about today." And Freud would say that is
resistance.

And this is a technique that even still till today psychodynamic-

oriented therapies are utilizing to help bring about catharsis and
breakthrough resistance in therapies.

In addition, psychodynamic therapies are interpreting and

understanding the defense mechanisms that come up, and we
have already spoken about these as well in previous modules.

Things such as repression or denial or reaction formation or

projection and other tools that the ego uses to protect itself.

Psychodynamic therapy would interpret those and try to

understand what is their meaning in the context of the work that
we're doing here.

Next we turn to the humanistic-style of therapy in the

humanistic approach to alleviating symptoms in
psychopathology.

The humanistic school is most known for the work of Carl Rogers
and Abraham Maslow.

Maslow, we've talked about in terms of his hierarchy of needs.

Carl Rogers is most known for contributing a style and approach

of therapy known as client-centered therapy.

And in Rogers' client-centered therapy, the therapist would

engage in what he called active listening, which is a method of
listening to a client speak and actively engaging in the dialogue
with them, reflecting back what you heard from a person.

So if they may say to you, "I'm feeling very anxious today,

"'cause I've been preparing for my exam, "and I really don't
think that I'm going to pass, "'cause I don't think I'm studying
enough." The therapist might say, "So I'm hearing you say "that
you're quite anxious.

"You're anxious about an exam that you're studying for,

"because it seems like you feel "like you haven't prepared
enough." So all the therapist did was paraphrase back in an
active listening manner so that the client says, "Yes, that is what
I said, that is how I'm feeling.

"I'm feeling anxious because of this and that, "and I know that
you're now paying attention." And this, by the way is in
opposition to the analytic approach which would have in the
traditional setup a therapist sitting behind the patient, the
patient on a couch, the therapist doing much more listening and
only a guiding people through conversation, but not as much of
an active listening stance.

Slight differences and in a dynamic world there are a myriad of

different subsets.

So we don't want to narrow it down, but for the sake of this

exam, we are kind of generalizing here.

And getting back to the client-centered therapy approach, the

client works with the therapist in a collaborative way to make
interpretations.

So it's not simply and exclusively the therapist that makes the
interpretations of the situation, but the client as well.

In this modality, self-awareness and self-acceptance are the goal

and they result in personal growth for the client and very much
so the notion of unconditional positive regard, which also is a
constant we've spoken about several times already, whereby it's
a nonjudgmental environment that the therapist is creating.

And this nonjudgmental environment is one where there's an

unconditional, positive sense that is given from the therapist.

We unconditionally support you and believe in you and that way

a client is able to feel that there's no judgment standing in the
way of them achieving their self-awareness and self-acceptance.

Okay, so that brings us to the end of the humanistic and

psychodynamic approaches.

We'll touch on a few more approaches in the modules to come.

Introductory Psychology

Biological and drug therapies (Module 11.2)

[Prof. David Sitt]

In this sub-module we will focus on the biological and drug

therapies.

Drugs or medications or surgery are often used to alter brain

functioning.

This approach is based on the medical theories of psychology

and of mental illness.

The primary methods of treatment within this modality are

psychotropic medications.

These are drugs such as antidepressants, anti-anxiety

medications and antipsychotic medications.

Specifically, antidepressant medications are those which

oftentimes are based on the control of serotonin.

One particular class of drugs are called SSRIs, as we see here,

and the SSRIs stands for serotonin-specific reuptake inhibitors,
SSRI, serotonin-specific reuptake inhibitors.

And these basically prevent the reuptake of serotonin, which in a

normal person, serotonin remains in the synaptic cleft, the gap
as it were, between one neuron and the next, so maybe this is
the vesicle of a neuron and these are all of the
neurotransmitters and this is the neurotransmitter that it's
receiving and when serotonin comes into the gap over here, in
people who have depression, the theory is that there's a
shortage of serotonin so an SSRI comes in and basically blocks
in this area over here a vacuum that normally would reuptake or
vacuum back in the extra serotonin and by blocking that, it
basically leads to more serotonin staying and remaining in that
gap for the next neuron to take in.
It's a beautiful drawing.

I'm sure it's very technically accurate, but hopefully you get the
point.

Anti-anxiety medications are those that reduce the arousal of

the central nervous system, which is implicated in anxiety
disorders.

Oftentimes, SSRIs are also used to treat anxiety, but there are
also other forms of anxiety medications, like benzodiazepines, or
shorthand referred to as benzos, and each type of medication
has its own upside and downside.

Antipsychotic medications are those that focus primarily on

dopamine but not exclusively.

The medications have a tremendous amount of side effects, very

powerful drugs.

And there are atypical and typical types of antipsychotic

medications, atypical and typical forms of antipsychotic
medications, but beyond that you wouldn't really be responsible
for knowing.

In addition, within this domain of treatment, we find other

techniques, such as electroconvulsive therapy, ECT, which is
these days most exclusively used for people suffering from very
severe depression, very severe depression and that depression
which doesn't respond to the other medications that we've
already spoken about.

So it's almost like a last resort type of treatment, where

electrodes are placed on a person's head, in various points,
protective measures are placed to control a person, and mild
shocks to severe shocks are sent through the brain in order to,
actually we don't even quite understand why ECT works, but it
disrupts neural firings within the brain and it can lead to an
improvement in depressive symptomatology.

It has side effects of disrupting memory as well, but it is

hopefully done in close supervision and checking for these side
effects.
Other types of biological treatments are deep brain stimulation.

This is a relatively newer form of treatment where electrodes are

placed, these small little electrodes are surgically placed
through the skull into parts of the brain, either temporarily or
permanently, and low pulses of stimulation are sent in and have
an impact on the brain's functioning.

And finally psychosurgery is also a technique that's performed

whereby, and this is not done much anymore, but lobotomies,
whereby full portions of the brain are removed.

Oftentimes they're parts of the brain that connected the upper

regions to the lower regions and by removing them, it was
thought that symptom relief would occur.

In reality, these surgeries led to reducing overall patient

functioning.

They're not widely used if at all today, but still historically worth
noting.

So that covers the biological and drug therapies section.

We have a few more sub-topics to go through so we'll pick up on

the next sub-topic.
Introductory Psychology

Behavioral therapies (Module 11.3)

[Prof. David Sitt]

All right, welcome back.

Let's turn now to a brief discussion of behavior therapies.

Behavior therapies are the modality of therapies that focus on

modifying or changing undesirable behaviors.

These therapies come out from the work of B.F.

Skinner, we've spoken about Skinner before and of the work of

Ivan Pavlov, and even the work of John Watson and many other
theorists who have come about over time.

The basic idea is to create a counterconditioning, meaning a

counter learning to what already may have been established to
yield a disordered way of behaving, feeling or acting.

One example of counterconditioning is the use of exposure

therapy.

People who experience tremendous fears or phobias or even

obsessive compulsive disorder are generally avoiding a,
something that causes tremendous anxiety for them.

They may be avoiding a dog because they have a tremendous

fear of dogs and so, exposure therapy will essentially expose
them to a dog.

But it's done in a gradual manner in a systematic way that is

intended to help desensitize the individual.

For example, in a systematic way for a person with a fear of

dogs, I might first talk to them about a dog in session and gauge
their anxiety level out of a hundred.
So, how are you feeling now as we talk about dogs? You're at a
hundred.

Okay, let's keep talking and then hopefully the anxiety will come
down which it should because what they are afraid of happening
with a dog won't happen because there's no dogs in the room.

And then we'll watch a movie about a dog and the anxiety might
spike again until eventually the anxiety reduces and the person
realizes, wow, I'm overestimating the danger here and I'm
underestimating my ability to cope with that, and so, anxiety
goes down.

And systematically, you get closer and closer until we're ready
to be around a dog.

Maybe I'm standing 10 feet away and five feet away and then I
pet the dog and then I hold the dog and eventually as you
understand, we systematically get closer and closer to that
which causes the anxiety.

Or an obsessive compulsive situation, that which is causing my

obsessions.

Germs or any other type of obsession.

Flooding, we have here, is a version of counterconditioning

where we basically run right to the finish line.

Rather than gradually getting a person to be near a dog we walk

them into a room of dogs maybe in a kennel and flood them with
the exposure.

Not done lightly, it's only usually done in ways where there's a
controlled, enough environment and there's a sense that a
person can manage and handle the flooding.

But it is a different type of counterconditioning and aversive

conditioning is a way of helping people who are having aversion.

Let's say a person has a problem with drinking alcohol and we

want to countercondition them to their addiction to alcohol.
I might pair the alcohol with something that causes them to be
nauseous and in making that pairing happen I am creating a
sense that every time they get near the alcohol they'll get
nauseous.

Whereas alcohol itself was, let's say a neutral stimulus and,

where it's the alcohol is neutral and whatever causes the nausea
makes them throw up.

Let's say it's product X makes them nauseous or throw up and

when I pair these two together, I give them alcohol then I give
them the item that makes them nauseous.

I repeat that over and over and over again.

Eventually I just show them the alcohol and the nausea will be
triggered.

At that point in time, the alcohol becomes the conditioned

stimulus, the CS, which leads to the conditioned response, the
response being nausea.

So that's aversive conditioning.

Okay, finally we have a token economy which is another

treatment modality out of the behavior school which is where we
utilize a reward system or tokens in order to reward desirable
behavior in individuals.

And maybe remove those tokens as a punishment to reduce

undesired behaviors.

Easy example is a child who we give a gold star to or stickers to

for doing their homework or for doing their chores.

In a hospital setting, in inpatient settings this is done when

inpatients are given certain freedoms.

They're able to walk outside of the hospital for a given amount

of time.

They're able to go outside for a smoke break.

This is a token that they're given in order to reward desirable

behavior and they lose those privileges when they act out of
accordance with what is preferred by either that hospital setting
or a parent or whoever is setting up the token economy.

In this day and age, we have a lot of gamification that occurs on

apps and in games and very much they're based on these token
economies.

So, you may be able to relate to those examples as well.

Well, that about covers it for the behavioral modalities, we're

gonna turn to a few other actually, two others in the next two
modules.

Okay, we'll pick up there.

Introductory Psychology

Cognitive therapies (Module 11.4)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Let's now turn to cognitive therapies as another modality that is

used in the treatment of psychological disorders.

If you take a moment to reflect on this...

How you think of any given situation ultimately is really what

determines how we feel, according to the cognitive theorists.

So, it's not a situation itself that causes you to feel good or bad,
but it's how you interpret that situation that yields you feeling
good or bad.

So, I've used the example before in this series about a

rollercoaster.

So I might go to a rollercoaster, and I might look at that

rollercoaster and be really excited and want to go on it, because
I've interpreted the rollercoaster as being fun, whereas my
friend might say no, that's not for me.

I'm gonna avoid that at all costs.

It's not the rollercoaster itself that is causing me to be fearful,

but it's my interpretation of that rollercoaster that is making me
feel the way I feel and act the way that I do.

And based on this theory, changing a person's or adjusting a

person's dysfunctional thoughts, and by dysfunctional we mean
those types of thoughts that don't allow us to function at our
optimal level, is what will yield a reduction in my distress, or my
anxiety, or my depression.

Or my anger.
So, it's about adjusting and adapting my dysfunctional thinking
that helps me shift and ultimately, how I behave and how I feel.

The theory goes that we experience cognitive distortions.

Distortions of situations based on these misinterpretations.

So some examples of a cognitive distortion might be all-or-

nothing thinking.

When a person engages in all-or-nothing thinking, they may say

to themselves, there's no way I'm gonna pass my exam.

It's impossible.

I shouldn't even study at all, because there's no way I'm gonna

pass.

And so, that's an all-or-nothing thinking.

It's all, either I am gonna pass or I'm not gonna pass.

There's no in-between.

There's no, I can get a 70, or I can get an 80.

Either I have to get 100, or 90 or above, or nothing.

Another example of a...

type of distortion is thought reading.

When I look at a person and I say, oh, I know that that person, I
know that they're not interested in me.

I know that they don't like me as a friend.

They probably think that I'm not fun to be around.

Did they ever tell you that? Have you heard that directly? Do
you have direct evidence of it? Because if not, you're engaging
in thought reading, which is not necessarily realistic.

It may be a cognitive distortion.

And so the approach applies a method of finding more realistic
ways of examining our own thoughts.

So we would ask ourself, what is the evidence that I have in

support of this thought that I keep thinking about? I'm never
going to get into the college of my choice.

What evidence do you have that you'll never get into college of
your choice.

Do you know anybody that didn't have the high GPA that the
college expected, but yet still got in? If so, that's evidence that
people can get in, even if they aren't set up perfectly to get into
that college yet.

What evidence do you have, maybe, that you'll be okay even if

you don't get into that college.

How do you know that you will still be able to survive? That it's
not an all-or-nothing scenario, where your life is doomed and the
world is not worth engaging in anymore.

So, that's some of the methods that the cognitive approach

utilizes.

Very heavily supported in the research, and for anyone who may
be dealing with anxiety or depressive disorders in particular, the
cognitive model, or now it's called the CBT, more commonly the
Cognitive Behavioral Model, which combines what we spoke
about in the previous sub-module, with these notions that we
spoke about here, into a therapy call Cognitive Behavior
Therapy.

Very commonly used for those conditions.

Alright, that about covers it.

We'll have one more sub-topic, and that'll wrap up this module.

See you then.

Introductory Psychology

Community and preventative approaches (Module 11.5)

[Prof. David Sitt]

For the last sub-module of this topic of psychological treatments,

we're going to talk about community and preventative
approaches.

In this area, we understand that behavior is really a adaptation

of resources and circumstances.

We know that utilizing the resources of a community can be

quite impactful to help alleviate or at least support those
symptoms and those people suffering from psychological
symptoms.

In order to understand the person we really need to look them in

the context of their community and the context of their family,
and the context of their larger society.

And so in doing so, we can create types of treatments within a

community setting.

So, a person might go to a community group, they may go to a

support group that addresses the particular problem area that a
person is facing.

We are also taking a look at the relationship between a person

and their environment.

We're talking about the politics in their environment, the culture,

the other influences in terms of cultural diversities and
sensitivities that might exist, and understanding that we can't
just treat the symptoms, we need to treat the whole person.

To treat the whole person means the person within the context
of their community and of their society.
The emphasis in these particular areas is on strengths and
competencies, so the ability for them to depend on their
intelligence strengths, maybe their creative strengths, maybe
their interpersonal strengths.

It could be their strengths are in terms of their empathy, and so

these are not your types of approaches that, let's say, a
biological model is looking at or a dynamic model is looking at,
but are very much part of the whole person when we speak
about strengths, and so the community and approaches, and the
preventative approaches really emphasize these types of
strengths-based techniques to help treat not just the symptoms
but the person in their entirety.

Research has shown that for particular conditions these

community types of treatments are very effective.

Certain things like Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics

Anonymous, or Other Addictions Anonymous, are types of
community-oriented treatments.

Support groups for parents of children going through disorders is

another example, spousal support groups is another example.

All of these are kinda community-oriented treatments, and

they're aimed also at preventative measures, not just
reactionary measures but how to prevent the person in the
context of their community from falling to their symptoms once
again.

That about covers it for our psychology treatments for

psychological disorders.

Again, this was a chapter that had a fair amount of information

presented to you, so make sure to look over the material from
the videos, look over the supplemental materials that we'll point
out for you, and make sure you're practicing the questions that
come with this chapter so that you can have a sense of
confidence in your knowledge of this particular area.

All right, we'll see you over at the next module.

Introductory Psychology

Attribution processes (Module 12.1)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Let's begin our discussion of social psychology by focusing on

attribution of processes.

If you stop for a moment and consider how you view yourself in
terms of your successes and failures, and then how you view
other people in your lives, and how you judge the roots of their
successes and failures, you might find yourself realizing that you
come upon some of these dispositional attribution styles, and
that perhaps you are susceptible to certain errors.

So let's first focus on the two different types of attributions, or

manners in which we ascribe blame, if you would, or causality.

The first method is the dispositional attribution.

This is when we attribute the causes of either good or bad things

that we do to internal reasonings, or to traits that I have.

So for example, if I perform really well on my CLEP exam, I might

say that it's because I'm really intelligent, I'm really smart, that's
a trait that I have, it's an inborn aspect of who I am, and that's
why I succeeded.

Or maybe if I'm playing a sports game, and I have a really

fantastic game, I might say, I did great, I crushed it because I'm
awesome, I'm great, I'm such a good ballplayer.

In opposition to this, or in comparison to this, we have the

situational attribution style.

The situational attribution style is when I attribute things to

external factors, things that have to do with the outside
environment, and perhaps to state reasonings, rather than being
a trait, which is a long-term inborn personality style, a state
event is something that happens temporarily in that particular
moment, in that state of affairs.

So let's keep in mind the dispositional and situation attribution

styles, and turn our attention to the fact that, at times, we run
into the fundamental attribution error.

Now, this error occurs when we assume that other people's

behaviors are due to dispositional reasoning, and we minimize
the role of situational factors.

So, for example, I might say that a friend of mine who did not do
well on the CLEP exam, I'm gonna say, well they didn't do well
because they're not intelligent, because they're not smart,
they're lazy.

I'm gonna say they didn't do well because they're lazy, but I
minimize the fact that the week that they took the exam, they
had the flu.

The flu is an external situational factor, but I usually make this

error when I think about other people's behavior, and I minimize
the external factors, I minimize the external factors and I
accentuate the internal reasonings behind their behaviors.

And this is, if you think about it in your own lives, you'll find that
you do this to your parents, and to your siblings, you're quick to
blame them on their traits, and say it's because of them being
this or that, and you're not taking into account the external
factors.

Now, one other error or bias that occurs is known as the actor-
observer bias.

The actor-observer bias is stating that when I am the actor,

when I'm the individual in question, I really focus on the external
factors that go wrong, and I minimize the internal factors.

So, a classic example is if I'm taking a walk on the sidewalk, I'm

walking, I'm walking, all of a sudden, I trip.

I look back at the sidewalk and say, whoa, the sidewalk was
broken, did everyone around me see that? The sidewalk was
broken, that's why I tripped, not because I'm clumsy.
And then, I'm walking, I'm walking, and I see someone else trip.

I'm quick to say, wow, look at that person, he's just a clumsy
guy that he tripped like that on the street.

Must be that they're clumsy.

We don't say, "I wonder if the sidewalk was broken.

"I wonder if there was an external factor "that got in their way."
So this is the actor-observer bias, when I'm the actor, I'm quick
to blame external factors, but when I'm the observer, I'm quick
to blame the internal or dispositional factors.

Let's move on the final feature of this part of the social

psychology chapter, and that's the cognitive dissonance theory.

We've already spoken about cognitive dissonance in a previous

chapter.

This is essentially what happens when I say one thing, and

believe something different.

Or, I do something even though I believe quite the opposite of

how I should've acted.

An example might be, if I believe that it is proper to open the

door for other people that are in my vicinity, if I'm walking into a
building, I'm gonna let them walk in first.

And I find myself walk into a building, and suddenly, I don't

really care who's around me, I walk in to the building.

I might experience a bit of dissonance in that moment, oh, I

didn't do what I normally believe In doing.

Certainly, more extreme examples exist when it comes to

thinking about politics, or thinking about religion.

When people believe in something politically, and yet they aren't

consistent in that belief in how they vote in their local elections.

So this creates dissonance and a discomfort, and a way to deal

with that is either change the way you behave, or change the
way you think.

So you have one of the two options in order to deal with

cognitive dissonance.

Very powerful concept, I encourage people when they run into

cognitive dissonance, to try to take the position of other people,
put yourself in other peoples' shoes, take the opposite position
of how you believe, and actually get into a roleplay debate, and
that can help you really appreciate other peoples' perspectives,
and help you cope better with these cognitive dissonance
issues.

Alright, so that wraps up this particular portion of social

psychology, we have a whole lot more to get to, so get a quick
drink of water, and take a stretch, little quick meditation, and
we'll see you at the next subtopic.
Introductory Psychology

Attitudes and attitude change (Module 12.2)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Let's take the conversation a bit further, from where we were in

the last subtopic when we talked about attributions and
attributional styles.

A lot of what we were alluding to in that topic, had to do with

attitudes, perspectives, viewpoints.

So, attitudes play an important role in the research of social

psychology.

Essentially, my attitude is an evaluation that I have made,

evaluation that I've made or a feeling that I have towards
people, ideas, objects, environments, whatever it might be.

These are perceptions that I develop based on my history, based

on my early experiences, and based on the interaction that I
have with other people and the environment with which we
exist.

So, in thinking about attitudes, obviously, we come across the

reality of us having positive and negative attitudes, favorable
and unfavorable attitudes.

And the way that we deal with this and act upon this comes
across in both emotional ways or affect.

We deal with these things, these attitudes, behaviorally and

cognitively as well, the way we think.

All of these are our means by which we express our attitudes.

It's important to try to keep in mind that an attitude can be

expressed, not only explicitly and verbally, but also non-verbally.
Without us even realizing it, our facial expressions, our body
language, all of this expresses the attitudes that we hold.

And when we run up against conflicts of attitudes, either

because of having stereotypes, or having prejudices, or
discrimination, these are all negative reactions to internal
attitudes that we have.

And so it's important, again, for us to be mindful of how an

attitude is formed and how it can be expressed.

Now, how do we change an attitude? In the previous subtopic,

we did already talk about cognitive dissonance.

And it's been a topic that's come up at least maybe three times
already in the CLEP prep course, which should let you know how
important of a theory cognitive dissonance is and how valuable
it is to learn how to change your attitudes through
understanding cognitive dissonance.

And I mentioned the last subtopic, of taking other people's

perspective is a way of challenging your own dissonance.

Another important process that we should understand when it

comes to attitude and attitude change is persuasion and the art
of persuasion.

There are countless research studies and countless books, and

countless insights and seminars that are given to leaders and
salesmen on the art of persuasion.

Persuasion is the process of changing our attitude or even

changing other people's attitudes towards something or
someone via a type of communication.

So, we'll give just a few examples of persuasive techniques, and

we'll start off with the foot-in-the-door technique.

The foot-in-the-door technique is a method of persuasion

whereby we begin to try to persuade someone by inviting them
into an easy yes, an easy situation for them to be persuaded to
hear you out or participate in what you're doing.

So here, in New York City, it has become quite commonplace to

walk down any given avenue and come across volunteers for
non-profit organizations, who are looking to sign you up for their
program or learn something about you.

And this is their method.

So, you're walking towards them and they'll say, "Excuse me, do
you like children?" Or even better yet, they will say, "Excuse me,
were you ever a child?" And naturally, the answer is going to be,
"Uh, yes, yes, I've been a child." "Oh great, now we'd like to ask
you something else.

"Would you take a few minutes to volunteer "to answer a few

questions that we have about children "and poverty in third-
world countries?" "Well, I've already said yes to one question, "I
guess I feel comfortable saying yes to that.

"Sure, why not?" So, this is the foot-in-the-door technique,

getting people to say yes to something small, get your foot in
the door, and then open the door up with a larger request.

This has applications to so many areas of our lives.

Now, it can be used when trying to sell a product in a store.

It can be used when trying to ask someone out on a date.

It can be used to try to convince people to change their attitude

about a particular belief that they have.

A second technique, is the door-in-the-face technique, the

opposite in a sense.

In this effort, we actually begin the process of persuasion by

throwing a very indigestible concept toward somebody and then,
scaling back.

So, a classic example might be when someone walks into an

appliance store to go buy a new oven.

They walk in the door, and the salesman says, "Hello, how can I
help you today?" And the person says, "I'm looking to buy a new
oven, "but I don't want something too expensive." So, the
salesman, who's very smart says, "Ah, okay.
"Well, we have this top-of-the-line oven "that costs only $5,000."
"Whoa! What? "$5,000, that's way too rich, "way too
professional of an oven, way more than I need.

"I feel like you just threw the door in my face.

"I'm disoriented." And quickly, the salesman says, "Oh, that's

not what you're interested in? "No problem, let me show you this
other model "that is only $1,000." Now, in that case, the person
walking in may have intended to buy a $500 oven.

But because they slammed the door in their face and showed
them a $5,000 item and then backed it up to a $1,000 item, the
person, the shopper, is actually more inclined to consider the
$1,000 item because they already considered no way for the
5,000 and maybe I want a little bit more of an upgrade than the
cheaper item.

So, this is a classic technique used in sales, again, called the

door-in-the-face technique.

So, I might tell someone on a first date, "Would you marry me?"
And they may say, "You're nuts.

"What are you asking me to, that's, "I just met you five minutes
ago.

"How could say will I marry you?" "Okay, I'm getting ahead of
myself.

"How 'bout a second date?" "All right, that's a little less than
getting married.

"I could handle that." So, these are techniques that are used
very often in advertising.

And attitude change is very common in advertising, so keep an

eye out for these techniques as the buyer and consumer.

And if you are considering going into sales, and once you pass
the CLEP exam, and you go to college, and you get all your
credits in, then you graduate and you become super successful,
you may be, you'll come back to some of these approaches and
techniques and apply them to your life.

Okay, we'll see you over at the next submodule.

Introductory Psychology

Interpersonal perception (Module 12.3)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Okay, welcome back.

We have just one slide to get through here.

Just a little bit of information for this subtopic of interpersonal

perception.

When we talk about perception, we are talking about awareness.

Awareness of ourselves, of our mental thought processes, or

mental acts that occur within us.

And these processes are really important for us to be mindful of

because we can fall to certain errors and mistakes as we spoke
about in topic, I think it was, 10.1.

So certain biases that we come upon due to these attitude or

mental mindsets are the actor-observer bias, which again had to
do with my belief that when I make a mistake it's due to an
external factor.

I tripped on the sidewalk because it was broken, not because I'm

a clumsy person.

But when I see someone else drop their coffee on their table at
the coffee shop, I say, "Oh, they were so clumsy." and I don't
even consider thinking that maybe the table was broken.

Maybe it was a wobbly table.

Or maybe even someone else knocked it over.

I don't do that because of the actor-observer bias.

And that, again has to do with my own mental processes.

The halo effect is quite an interesting effect that occurs.

Especially when we're in a job site and I might be conducting a

review on an employee.

And that employee is someone that I met early on in their work

with my company.

And when I first met them, we got to chatting and I learned that
they really like snowboarding.

And I happen to really like snowboarding.

I've been snowboarding for 20 years.

And so that creates a halo over their head in my mind and in my

perception, in my thoughts, that this person must be great.

Because they like something that I like.

And so we have a lot in common and then what happens is I

ignore other features of their work and other problems that may
be coming up because I've been biased by this halo that I put
over their heads.

And this is not just in a work setting.

This occurs in social interactions.

It occurs in school settings.

It's quite common for us to fall prey to.

There is an opposite of that called the horn effect which is when

we see something bad happen and we think someone is a bit
devilish because they did one thing that was not to our liking,
and then we are biased to the other behaviors that they present.

Another type of bias is the false-consensus which is when I

basically look for consensus or agreement from others.

Even consensus within myself to make a big decision when I am

already invested in the outcome.

I already know what I want to see happen.

And so I generally will go over, let's say in a classroom, I will go

over to the people that I already know agree with me to ask
them, "What is your consensus? "Do you guys vote that we
should end class "ten minutes early today "and then start
tomorrow ten minutes early?" 'Cause that's what I wanna do, so
let me ask who I know will agree with me.

That's a way of forming false consensus.

And again, it's due to this type of a bias in our thinking patterns.

And finally we could fall prey to psychological projection.

Pshycological projection is when I have a feature inside of myself

and I project it outwards.

Almost like flashing and shining a light and projecting it out onto
other people.

And so I then look towards other people and I see in them what I
felt or feel or believe about myself.

So this happens classically in the dating world.

So a person might feel like they are very funny internally, and
then when they're out with someone else, they project onto that
other person.

They feel, "Oh, they're so funny.

"They were laughing so much.

"It must mean that they are funny." but maybe they were just
laughing at your jokes but they themselves aren't as funny of a
person but you're projecting your own psychological state onto
them and not really observing their personal particular state.

So we've just gone over a couple of different aspects of

cognitive processes that both can help us and work against us.
So we should try to be mindful of these and of course in terms of
the CLEP exam, do your best to review these particular
definitions and get some examples written down, so that you
can know how they're applied, not just what their definition is.

All right, we'll see you soon.

Introductory Psychology

Video

[Prof. David Sitt]

We're gonna turn now to the discussion of aggression, antisocial

behavior as well as talk a bit about the opposite end of the
spectrum in terms of altruism and pro-social behavior.

Much of the research on social relationships has to do with

aggression, and aggression itself involves behaviors that are
intended to hurt others.

According to an old theory called The Frustration-aggression

Hypothesis, it's believed that aggression is always the product of
frustration, and frustration, basically always leads to aggression.

If you think about this, the analysis, or the conclusion that this
theory came to, cannot really always but true, because
sometimes, I get frustrated just because, or rather when I get
frustrated, I get upset, maybe I get sad.

I don't necessarily get aggressive every time I'm frustrated.

Nonetheless, this research opened up the door into investigating

a lot about aggression, and taught us a lot about things such as
hostile aggression, which is a form of aggression which is,
intends to cause pain onto others, as opposed to instrumental
aggression, which is intended to achieve a goal.

So not all aggression is the same.

Not all aggression has the same intention behind it.

And the differences between these two types of aggression do

differentiate in terms of the outcome, and also have
differentiations in terms of the effect on the aggressor and the
agressee.
We also know that testosterone plays a very important role
when it comes to aggression.

So testosterone is a hormone that it's, located both in men and

in women, but it's normally much higher in men than in women.

What we also know about testosterone, is that it appears to

lower the threshold for aggression, meaning if I have higher
levels of testosterone, the bar of what it will take to tip me off
into an aggressive state is lower, right.

It's a lower threshold so that more testosterone equals more

aggression.

People and animals, we're not just talking about people, but
even animals who have these high levels of testosterone are
more easily provoked, and therefore are more likely to engage in
aggressive behaviors.

The presence of aggression, and aggressive cues such as the

presence of guns, knives, or even the presence of black clothing,
can lead people to higher levels of aggression, specifically
among those people who have already been provoked, or who
have a predisposition towards being provoked.

This phenomenon is called The Weapon Effect or The Weapons

Effect.

Aggression also can but learned.

It's not just something that we see being, a reaction to one's

environment, but it is something that can be taught by others,
as we know from The Social Learning Theory, and the work of
Albert Bandura, which we've talked about in previous chapters.

Children who observed the aggressive behavior of adults in a

two-way mirror, in a room with a lot of toys, would then go into
that toy room themselves, meaning the children would go into
the toy room that the adults were in being very aggressive, and
the children would act very aggressively.

What children see, children will do.

They learn from the models that they see.

Now we know this is proven, or rather supported in research,
and also of course anecdotally we see this as well.

There's research about video games and violent video games

and whether those have an effect on increasing the potential for
violence or aggression, so there is a lot of research in this
particular domain.

We know about research into antisocial behavior that individuals

who are engaged in antisocial behavior have the potential for
low levels of remorse.

They don't care for other people's feelings, they are very easily
angered and hostile, and their affect, or their emotion, is
expressed through these types of aggressive acts.

We already spoke about the antisocial personality disorder in the

chapter on psychological disorders when we spoke about
personality disorders.

And these are the traits that we often see in those with
antisocial personality disorder.

And while there is a predisposition towards these behaviors, we

also know that, from social learning theory, these elements of
acting, behaving, can be learned.

Now, what about the opposite end of the spectrum? What about
acting kindly and nicely to people? Is that something that can be
learned? Is that something that we have innately? So, there has
been quite a influx in research over the past 20 years in the
positive psychology realm about altruism and about helping
behaviors.

We know about altruism, which is this basic, lack of unselfishly

helping others without expecting something in return.

We know that this type of altruistic behavior is possible, and we

know that unfortunately, people may not always step up into
their role of being altruistic, specifically when many other people
are around you.

So when there's a dangerous situation that arises, and there's

25 other people, or hundreds of other people, you might shrink
back and say, "Someone else will do it." And you may fall into
what's called the Bystander Effect.

We know about this phenomenon of the Bystander Effect from

an unfortunate murder that happened here in New York, in New
York City, to a woman named Kitty Genovese in 1964.

In 1964, this woman was assaulted at, in her apartment

complex, and she had yelled out for help repeatedly on three
different occasions as her attacker approached her and then ran
away and then approached her again.

And despite the fact that over 38 people heard the screams as
reported by the police later on, none of them allegedly made a
phone call to the police.

And unfortunately, the woman was killed, and no one acted in

an altruistic manner to try to help this woman, due to this
Bystander Effect.

We know that altruism is something that can be inspired by

having smaller groups of people around, we know that once the
first person steps up to help, more people do step up to help,
and according to the Social Exchange Theory, our goal in life is
to maximize our rewards and to minimize the costs of our, of our
actions.

So if helping someone will benefit that other person, and not

actually get me in trouble, then I am more likely to step up and
try to engage in that activity.

So that about covers it for this particular chapter on, or rather

this subtopic from social psychology, and we'll wait and see
what we have next in store.
Introductory Psychology

Video

[Prof. David Sitt]

Welcome back, we are in the home stretch of the social

psychology module, and we are here to talk about conformity,
obedience, and through understanding some of the most classic
research in all of psychology.

So, conformity, a concept of, of great interest to us, what does it

take to make people go along with the crowd? Why do people
conform to the behaviors and actions of other people, A, if they
don't believe in those actions, and B, if they don't even
understand what actions are being taken? Why conform, and
what role does it play in society? So these were questions that
Solomon Asch had been very curious about in his research in
many, you know, I think it was in the 1950s.

So, Solomon Asch's research basically lined up a group of,

supposedly, research participants, when in reality, out of the six
people that were sitting in the research room, only one of them
was an actual person being experimented on, a participant, and
the five others were what we call confederates.

They were in on the secret, they were in on the experiment, and

what they were told to do was to look at these set of lines right
here, and they were told to look at the first line all the way on
the other side and compare that line to the practice lines in the
second box, and indicate which line matches the original
stimulus line.

And the first round would occur, and everyone would give the
correct answer, so in this case, if the answer is C, everyone
would say, C, C, C, C.

After two or three rounds where everyone agreed, and the actual
participant was feeling good, okay, we're all on the same page,
Asch instructed the confederates to change their answer to an
obviously wrong answer, and so, they would be asked, "Which of
the lines "matches the stimulus line," and people would start to
answer, B, B, and one by one, they would all answer B, until they
get to the actual research participant, and he would look around,
or she would look around, and what would happen, that was the
question Asch had asked, and what he found was that a very
large percentage of people, somewhere around 37% of people,
would actually give the incorrect answer, and conform to what
the confederates were saying, and they would say B.

Now, they would look awkward in the video, they would look
uncomfortable, they would have that cognitive dissonance
experience, I'm saying something out loud, even though I know
internally it's not true, but I am gonna conform to what the
group and the majority are saying.

Very important research study, and it led to some other

concepts that Asch wrote about, specifically, the normative
social influence, which is a concept whereby we conform to the
group norm in order to fit in, in order that we should feel good,
and so that we're not judged negatively by those around us.

So, in this way, when friends say, "Come on, let's go smoke a
cigarette "when we're only 14 years old," and the person doesn't
really want to participate in that behavior, but they don't want to
be left out, they don't want to be judged as not being like their
friends, and so, they engage in that activity, which is clearly not
to their benefit or health, but they give into that pressure, they
conform.

And in other occasions, there's informational social influence,

and this is when people conform because they believe the group
is actually confident, and actually has the correct information,
and that they themselves may not know any better, and so they
conform to what the group is saying, particularly when the task
that we're talking about is somewhat ambiguous, and Asch had
an entirely different experiment to show this informational social
influence.

And this comes into play sometimes in juries, when a person

might be swayed to go along with the majority because they
may believe they know better, they must've seen something in
the trial that I didn't see, they got some information that I didn't
understand.
So that's informational social influence.

Moving right along to a concept we refer to as compliance,

compliance is when we go along with the request or demand of
a authority figure, or of someone other than ourselves, and what
leads us to comply to the demands or requests of others? Is it
perhaps a desire to fit in? Maybe it's my desire to be liked, and
perhaps it could be to gain information about the group that I'm
in.

So, I'm gonna comply with what you're asking of me, and maybe
in a college setting, when you're in the Greek life, and people
want you to rush for their fraternity, you might end up comply to
demands that they're asking of you, even though you might
normally not engage in such a behavior, because you want to be
liked, and you want to learn more about the group, and you want
to belong.

And in the long run, you're willing to make these short term
sacrifices for the long term gain.

At times, this can actually be very dangerous.

There is a concept known as groupthink.

Groupthink is when we go along with the group, we go along

with others, in order to form consensus, in order to be like
everybody else, even if you know you're wrong, or even if you
have the sense that what the group is doing isn't the right
decision.

Groupthink has been implicated in the 2008 financial crisis and

disaster that we experienced here in America, whereby different
banks and bankers went along with what the groups were doing
in terms of the practices with subprime mortgages and other
such examples.

An older example is the Bay of Pigs incident relating to Cuba,

and in terms of how people made decisions in politics at the
time, it was believed that people went along with the group in
making that political decision, whereas, after the fact, when
people were interviewed, they reported saying, "I didn't really
believe in "my decision, I didn't think it was the right "thing to
do, but the group was doing it." Two other points that I wanna
make here have to do with social loafing and social facilitation.

How do we act when we're in a group? What do we do when I'm

the individual among many people, and they're putting effort
forward into an activity? Well, sometimes I might, let's say, be in
a classroom, and the teacher asks a question.

I know the answer, but I don't wanna raise my hand, because I

think someone else is gonna do it, so I'm gonna be a loafer, a
social loafer, I'm gonna wait for everyone else to raise their hand
and participate.

I'm gonna depend on the group to take care of the problem, and
I'm just gonna sit back, or maybe I am in a tug of war, where I'm
pulling a rope, and if I'm alone playing that tug of war game, I'm
gonna actually put a lot of effort into pull that rope, but if I'm
joined by 10 other people, the amount of energy I put in is
gonna be relatively less than if I was doing it alone, that is
another example of social loafing.

Letting go of my exertion or contribution because I think other

people will tow the line.

Then we have social facilitation, which is when being among a

social group actually facilitates me to step up my game and
perform even better than I would.

So the examples used in a sports setting, a person who is sitting,

taking free throws, and there's no one in the audience, may
actually not perform as well than when the crowd is cheering
them on and giving them the energy to perform as best as they
can.

So that's an example of social facilitation.

Okay.

Let's turn to the last of the topics, obedience.

What brings people to actually obey the demands of others? It

goes beyond just complying and goes beyond just joining others,
how do we explain when people are overly obedient to a
authority figure, when what they're being obedient towards is
something they should likely not be engaging in? This question
was raised by Stanley Milgram in his research following World
War II and Nazi Germany when he was really shocked at how
people living in the areas where the Nazis were engaging in their
atrocities, how did they just sit back and be silent? How were
they so quiet? And in certain cases, even comply with what was
happening, so this led Milgram to want to understand obedience
and, as well as conformity.

So he conducted an experiment that involved using a machine

that, in theory, distributed shocks to a research participant.

In reality, the research participant receiving the shocks was also

a confederate.

They were in on the research study, and in reality, they weren't

being given the shock.

The person who was administering the shock was the one being
experimented on, and the people were average professionals
living in the area around where Milgram conducted his research
study.

And when they would sit down, they would be told by a man in a
white lab coat that they are to administer a shock if the person
on the other side of the wall answered a question incorrectly.

The question was a memory matching game, they were

supposed to remember a pair of words, so if the pair of words is
cat, light, and then you tell them cat, they're supposed to
answer light, if they answer the word incorrectly, they receive a
shock, and the shock is administered from zero volts all the way
up to 450 volts, and on the machine, it says "Extreme danger,
XXX extreme danger, "in theory, this can kill somebody," and
the participants were then, one by one, asked questions, and if
the person got it wrong, they were to administer a shock, and
the man in the white lab coat would tell them, "Please continue,
"you must administer the shock, you must "obey what I'm telling
you," and when the person would say, "I don't understand, that
person is "yelling as I give a shock," the man in the lab coat
would say, "That's okay, "I'm responsible, you continue." Out of
all of the participants, you would be surprised to learn how many
administered the full 450 volts.
When asked by a group of psychiatrists at the time how many
people did they think would go all the way up to 450 volts, they
said, "Nobody, or at most, under 5% of "the people would
administer 450 "extreme volts shock, danger." The study was
conducted, and nearly 63% of participants went all the way up,
as you can see in this graph, to the extreme shock, 450 volts.

Even furthermore, 100% of the participants went up to 135

volts, which is already in the danger zone.

So, from this study, Milgram understood that we are susceptible

to obedience, and there are several factors by which we achieve
this state of obedience.

So, he learned that when people are directly in front of the

researcher in the white lab coat, they will follow the instructions,
but if that person takes off the lab coat, and they look like
they're dressed ordinarily, that might reduce obedience.

Furthermore, if they can see the person receiving the shock, that
would reduce the obedience.

Also, if they were told that it was their responsibility, they would
reduce the shock level.

So there were many different factors that went into play here
that might reduce the obedience level, and the study itself was
seminal and very much one of the most important studies to be
conducted in the research, it also was criticized for ethical
issues, because Milgram actually caused a lot of discomfort and
dissonance in his participants, and didn't quite do enough to
alleviate that dissonance.

So, that about covers our review of social psychology, I

encourage you to go back into the topics, review them, use the
printed material and these study questions to really get through
this material, and be prepared for the CLEP exam.

We will be reviewing one more topic, and that should take us

through the full exam, so get a, again, drink of water, relax,
stretch, and we'll see you in the 13th topic.
Introductory Psychology

Introduction (Module 13.0)

[Prof. David Sitt]

We will now study statistics.

We'll cover the different types of measurements and tests that

are used in statistics, and we'll cover descriptive and inferential
statistics, samples, populations, and norms.

We'll then move on to talk about reliability and validity, which

are very important features of statistics.

We'll discuss measurements of intelligence, and finally we'll

have a brief discussion about the types of tests that may be
used.
Introductory Psychology

Descriptive and Inferential Statistics; Samples, populations, norms

(Module 13.1)

[Prof. David Sitt]

OK, so we are ready to dive into the core of statistics.

Statistics are a collection, an analysis and the interpretation and

even the presentation of numeric data.

We use statistics in order to assess and understand the variables

that we're interested in comparing.

We could use statistics to see what is the rate of depression in

the population? We might use statistics to compare different
groups of people to each other.

We use statistics really for anything that we're going to need to

have a quantifiable understanding of.

So let's go into some of the specific aspects and parts of a

statistical analysis.

Any time we're going to ask a question about a population, and

a population is reallY the group of people that we're trying to
study, we have to understand that it's quite difficult to measure
the information of an entire population.

We're not going to be able to give a test to every single person

or a survey to every single person, so therefore we pick out
samples of a population.

A sample is a representative subset of the larger population.

So perhaps if I'm interested in understanding the fashion trends

that are occurring in the population, I might look towards a
college campus to give me a sample of the broader population.
I might even go further within a college population to assess just
those students who are living in state, versus people who come
from out of state.

So each subset of my broader population gives me a sample for

me to assess.

Ideally when I'm utilizing a sample, I'm going to do so in a

random way so that I'm not going to create a bias by how I
select the people that I want to measure.

So just by brief example, if I wanna know what the intelligence

level, average intelligence level of a college is, so I teach at a
college called Baruch College in New York City.

If I wanted to know the intelligence level of the Baruch College

student, if I went out to take a sample of all of the students in
my class, I teach a class of 400 students at times.

So if I only look at the people in the front row, and I ask

everybody in the front row for their GPA, I'm likely going to get a
high GPA average from those in the front row because it's a bias
sample.

Most student who are achieving, or high achievers, will sit in the
first few rows of a college course, and therefore the GPAs will be
higher.

It's not a representative sample.

For me to do so, I would have to get a random sample of, so, if

this is my classroom, not just the front row, but I'm gonna have
to get a student from here, and there, and there, and all over
the classroom, sitting in the back, in the middle.

And that would be a more representative sample of my

population.

Once I'm getting my sample, I wanna also create norms, which

are my ability to identify the normal behavior of a group in order
to make comparisons to that group.

So if I, let's say, wanna understand intelligence, again, I wanna

get a norm from the broader sampling of the population.
I'm going to wanna see what is the average intelligence level of
people ages 18 to 35? And once I establish my norm, it helps me
make comparisons for the larger group.

Now, within statistics, I'm going to want to be able to describe

my numbers, describe my data.

And we do so using descriptive statistics.

And these statistics descriptors are used mostly for correlational

and experimental designs, which are really the most popular and
broadly used research designs.

And they help me provide a measurement of the behavior from a

sample.

So there are three particular descriptive measurements that we

use, or descriptive statistics that we use.

The first is the mean.

The mean is simply the average of a group.

So if I have five scores, then I take the average of the five scores
and divide it by five.

Or I take the total of the five scores, and I divide it by five.

So if I have 10, 15, 10, 15, and 10 as my five scores, I have 30

and 30, I have 60, divide by five, right, and that is gonna come
up to 12 is my mean score, alright.

Then I have the mode.

The mode is the most commonly occurring score.

Which score among all those that I have repeats the most? And
in this case here, with my numbers, I have 10, OK.

10 is the mode in this particular statistical data set.

Finally, I might wanna know the median score.

The median is the middle score.

As if I line up all of my scores from lowest to highest, so in this

case it would be 10, 10, 10, 15, and 15.

And the median or middle score in this case is a 10, OK.

So that is the middle score which divides the lower and upper
halves of all of my scores.

OK, let's move on to talk about the standard deviation.

The standard deviation is a statistical measure of how much any

particular score in a sample varies or moves away from the
mean.

So if I have an intelligence, again, we're using intelligence a lot

here.

But let's say it's weight.

So I wanna look at the average weight in a college population.

This is gonna be my distribution curve.

Over here is going to be my average score.

This is average right here in the middle, let's say it's 100.

Let's use intelligence to make it easy.

So 100 would be my average, or mean intelligence, and I have

one standard deviation away at 110, and then at 90 is one
standard deviation away.

I know it's a very fine print over there, but one standard
deviation away from 100 is 90, and that is my measure of how
much I vary from around the mean.

The higher a standard deviation, the more variability or the more

spread there is.

The lower the standard deviation, the less spread I have.

So if I only have one standard deviation away from the average
IQ score, it's 10 points of intelligence give or take one direction
or the other.

If I have three standard deviations away from my average 100

intelligence score, that's gonna take me way further out, maybe
even as high as 145 IQ score, and maybe as low as 40 or 55, OK.

So 55 intelligence score, or 145 is quite spread away from the

mean.

And also we have represented by this image here that I drew out
for you, is the normal distribution.

Normal distribution is a bell curve shown above, which shows a

symmetrical alignment of the variables.

Again, here it might be intelligence.

So that in the middle is the average, I have the most amount of

people are going to be represented in this domain, and then on
the edges here, I have fewer people that are going to be in the
extreme 160 IQ score, and there's fewer people that will be in
the lower range of 35 or 40 in IQ.

So this is referred to as a normal distribution rather than let's

say being weighted like this.

That wold be a non-distributed statistical data set.

OK, let's move on to the last point here, and that is to talk about
inferential statistics.

Inferential statistics allows us to make inferences about

populations based on characteristics of your sample.

So to do this, researchers use tests of statistical significance.

To understand what statistical significance is, we should keep in

mind that any relationship, for example, in a correlation study,
or any difference between two means, let's say in an
experiment, could have happened by chance.

Who's to say if depression scores go up when we change the

clock and we have fewer daylight hours? We hear about this a
lot, there seems to be a correlation, but who's to say for sure
that there really is a relationship between number of daylight
hours and depression scores? Maybe it happens by chance.

So there really would never be a way to know unless we came

up with methods of evaluating the differences.

So if a relationship or a difference is significantly significant, it

simply means that it wasn't likely to have happened by chance.

And basically it's saying that the relationship is meaningful if

there is a statistical meaningfulness between the two variables.

In other words, if two variables are not correlated in a population

of people, and then you draw a sample of those people for your
study, the variables might still be correlated in your sample just
by chance.

And if it is just by chance, then your correlation coefficient and

your sample should be somewhere close to .00, or close thereof.

After all, that's a true correlation in your population.

The bigger the coefficient, let's say I have a point, again, we're
going towards positive 1.0, so if I have a .89 correlation
coefficient, that shows that there is quite a statistical
significance to the relationship between my variables.

So the information that we presented here is dense, it's

complicated.

Statistics is probably the hardest part of all of psychology to

understand.

So take your time to review the video again, to review the

written materials on this topic again, and definitely take some
sample questions that we have set up for you to make sure that
you're understanding the material, alright? We'll see you over at
the next sub-module.
Introductory Psychology

Reliability and validity (Module 13.2)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Let's jump further into our discussion of statistics and we'll talk
about too the bedrock features of statistics and those are
reliability and validity.

Any measure of psychological characteristic or any assessment

of variables must show reliability and validity.

Now, these are two different concepts and two different terms.

So we're gonna take them one at a time and we'll start off with
reliability.

Reliability refers to the consistency of people's scores on a test.

This can be assessed in a number of different ways, meaning

how reliable and how dependable will a score be over time can
be tested in different ways.

The first way and by the way, a test does not need to be valid in
order for it to be reliable.

They're again too different measurements.

So let's start with talking about test-retest reliability.

This refers to the consistency of scores across different

administrations of a test.

So if you're taking the test on more than one occasion, the

question is do people get about the same score the second time
that they take the test compared to the first time they take the
test.

When an adequate number of people have taken a test twice,

the researcher developing the test can then compute a
correlation coefficient between the two sets of scores, meaning
the first set of scores and the second set of scores across the
various people who have taken that test.

Now, if the correlation coefficient is larger than about .70,

positive .70, that is a pretty good indication that the scores from
the first test are correlating to the scores on the second test and
therefore we can say that the test has a high degree of high-
retest reliability.

Now, of course the measurement of test-retest reliability

depends on the type of test we're talking about, what we're
measuring and what the scores are being used for.

Moving forward, the reliability of self-report measures is typically

described in terms of internal consistency and internal
consistency is how well does the test correlate with itself
internally.

Not compared to a single person taking a test multiple times,

but within itself does the test at the beginning when it's asking a
set of questions, is it reliable with what we ask at the end of a
test, for example, internally and this is assessed using the split-
half reliability measurement.

So for each test taker, let's say I'm taking a test, a score is
generated for let's say all of the even numbered of test items in
the test and perhaps I simply total up all of the scores of the
even numbered test items as well as for the odd number items
and eventually I will produce a correlation coefficient across the
two sets of scores.

So I have the even numbers here, I have the odd numbers here.

So I'm gonna look at my scores on numbers two, four, six, eight,

and 10 and compare them to obviously one, three, five, seven,
and nine and I total up the scores and I compare to see how well
do they coalesce with each other, how well do they correlate.

Thanks to math and to computers, the split-half reliability of a

test can actually be calculated as the average correlation for
every possible way of splitting the test in half and this
measurement is what we call the Cronbach's alpha hidden right
in there, okay.

So the Cronbach's alpha is the average correlation of every

single way that a test can possibly be split and so it would
actually be hard to do just by hand, but it's a very advanced
measurement.

Now, let's move on to talk about validity.

Validity refers to how well a test measures what it proposes that

it will measure.

So if a test says that it's going to measure the ADHD level in a

person, how much ADHD does a person have if they have it at
all or how much anxiety a person experiences and a test says
we think this test measures anxiety, validity let's me know how
well does the test measure what we are proposing it measures.

So if the reliability of a psychological test is low, it can't possibly

measure what it's supposed to measure in basically some
enduring stable psychological characteristic, thus it can't be
valid if it is not reliable.

Again, a test cannot be valid if it is not first reliable.

So first we have to establish reliability and then we can establish

validity.

However, the same is not always true in the opposite.

Being reliable is not a guarantee that a test is valid.

It could be measuring the same wrong thing over and over

again.

So for example, if a personality test has people rating how much

they gossip, it's possible that individuals would get the same
score every time they took the test, which would indicate that
it's reliable.

Right, every time I take the test, it reliably tells me that I gossip,
however, these scores could merely be reflecting how concerned
I might be about coming across well on the personality test,
meaning I might be faking it on that test and so if I'm faking it,
then it's not really going to be a valid measure and it would have
very low validity.

Okay, so now that we understand the basics about what validity

is and how it compares to reliability, let's talk about several
ways for us to assess validity.

We'll start off with talking about face validity or otherwise known
as content validity.

So face validity or content validity refers simply to whether a

test looks as though it is measuring what it is supposed to
measure.

This is fine for say a driver's test, right, because if I'm gonna test
a person's ability to drive, I want to make sure that it's really
testing my ability to drive, right.

So at face value, if it says it's gonna test my driving abilities, I

really want it to measure my driving abilities so that there aren't
accidents all over the streets.

But the same is not true for most psychological tests, okay.

I don't necessarily want the people taking the psychological test

to be able to figure out what I am actually measuring.

So it gets a little tricky.

Predictive validity, on the other hand, refers to how well scores

on the test predict the actual behavior of the type that the test
is supposed to measure.

Okay so again, this is about testing does the test predict well
what behavior it is that the test is saying it will predict.

So maybe it's an aptitude test.

If a test says that I think from this test I can predict how good of
an accountant you'll be, that's what this test is gonna tell me.

So I need to measure how predictive and how valid it will be for

measuring one's accounting abilities.
Next, let's talk about, that's predictive.

Now let's talk about construct validity.

So construct validity refers to whether the scores on a

questionnaire are related in expected ways, either positively or
negatively, to scores on other questionnaires that are proposing
to measure the same thing.

So if I have measurement A that's going to assess let's say my

athleticism and then I'm gonna have a test B and test C, I want
to be able to compare how well A does in its predictability to
what B says and C says about my athleticism.

So other tests, by the way, or rather I should say tests in general

need to be standardized.

If I compare them to a large number of people with known

characteristics such as a person's age or their race or their sex, I
want to be able to standardize the test in order to make it
possible to determine how well a single person will perform
relative to those in a larger group who have taken that particular
test.

Knowing how many problems that I've gotten right, for example
on an intelligence test, is meaningless without knowing how well
other people my age are doing on that same type of intelligence
test.

So that helps me to standardize the measure and determine

whether it can be effective as a measurement.

All right, so that was a lot of information about reliability and

validity, which are again the bedrocks for statistical analysis.

We have a few more topics to talk about in this area.

So take a break and we'll see you in just a few moments.

Introductory Psychology

Measurement of intelligence (Module 13.3)

[Prof. David Sitt]

[Instructor] Alright, let's turn our attention now towards a few

different types of tests that are used in statistics.

While there are many many tests that are used, we're only going
to cover a few of the basics here.

We'll start off with just understanding that many of these tests
that are used in statistics such as t-tests, ANOVAs and Pearson's
correlations, are used in order to rule out chance.

So if I'm going to measure the interaction between two variables

or make a comparison between two variables or two groups,
once I come to a conclusion as to the relationship between those
two groups or variables or even the difference between the two
groups or variables, I need to ultimately decide and figure out if
the difference or relationship is true, if the difference is due to
the essence of the variables or if perhaps they are due to
chance.

And it is a chance factor that is contributing to the findings.

So the first of these tests that are used is know as a t-test.

A t-test is used to compute for two means or two variables to

see if they come from either the same population or to
understand if the difference between the two groups is due to
chance or due to some variable within the groups that account
for the difference between those two groups.

So let me give you a quick example.

Let's consider that an analyst wants to study the amounts that

people from Pennsylvania and people from California spend and
understand the differences between their spending per month.
Even let's say on clothing.

It wouldn't be practical for us to record the spending of every

single individual or family in both states.

And therefore, we would take a sample of spending habits from

selected groups of individuals from each state.

And the group may be of any small to moderate size.

And for this example, let's say that the sample group is 200
individuals.

So if the average amount of Pennsylvanians comes to $500 on

clothing, and all Californians spend $1000 per month, so it's 500
for Pennsylvanians and $1000 for Californians, then it is highly
unlikely that 200 randomly selected individuals all spent that
exact amount, respective of their state.

Thus, if an analyst or a statistician came to these results then it

is safe to conclude that the difference between the sample
groups is really indicative of a significant difference between the
populations as a whole of each state.

And that's what a t-test might help me conclude.

That it's not that each person spent $500 and $1000 but that
there was a difference between the groups, sizeable enough that
explains the average.

So another type of test that is used is called the ANOVA test

which is short for analysis of variance.

And this type of statistic analysis, we are measuring the

differences among our statistical numbers, among our findings.

How much is a finding, does it vary from, let's say the average in
a particular group? So if the average person spends $500 in
Pennsylvania, how do we measure the people who spend $2000
in Pennsylvania versus that person who spent $100 in
Pennsylvania? There's variability and variance between the
people within the state, and so an ANOVA measurement would
help us analyze and understand the variability and the variance
within this group.

Finally, we talk about the Pearson's correlation coefficient.

We've already talked about the correlation coefficient in previous

chapters.

This is a measurement that is assessed from a range of minus

1.0 to positive 1.0.

And it's a assessment to see how two variables correlate or

connect to each other.

The higher the number up to on the positive means that as one

variable increases the other variable is increasing as well.

So if I have a positive .70, that's a very strong correlation

showing that two variables are coalescing or connected to each
other.

If I have a negative .01, that's a very low correlation.

It's not a very strong correlation.

The closer to zero one gets, the weaker the correlation.

The further away from zero either in the positive or negative

realm, the stronger the correlation and the implication of the
finding.

So that about sums it up for these three types of tests that we

use to figure out and assess chance in statistics.

Okay, we have just one more module to go and that will wrap it
up for statistics.

So we'll see you in a moment.

Introductory Psychology

Types of tests (Module 13.4)

[Prof. David Sitt]

Alright , we're at the tail end of this last module on statistics and
test measurements.

And here we talk about a few of the different types of

intelligence tests that have been developed, and that are
commonly used.

Again, you're only likely going to be required to know the broad,

general facts here, rather than the minute details.

So first we have the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale.

The Stanford-Binet was regarded as the first IQ test to be

developed.

And it is widely used today, I believe it's in its' 5th edition, right
now.

The Stanford-Binet is used for children and adults, and it is

based on normed data, meaning it's been standardized and
administered to many children and adults in order to develop a
set of norms, or what would be the normal score that one should
expect, relative to a persons' age or education.

And based on those norms, we can measure a persons'

particular scores on the test, to the norms of their age, or
education level, and that will result in a measurement of
intelligence.

Another very popular and widely used set of intelligence tests, is

that developed by Wechsler.

The Wechsler Intelligence Tests are organized by age, and there

are three different, there's more than three but, three standard
basic tests.

The first is the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Test.

That's the WAIS, it's for adults.

The WISC is the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for children.

And that is generally for school aged children.

Lets say 1st grade all the way through high school.

And then the WPPSI is used for pre-school and as well as primary
school.

So the WISC and the WPPSI do overlap to a degree, but the

WPPSI is used for pre-school aged children, as well as primary
school.

And like the Stanford-Binet, the Wechsler Intelligence Scales are

standardized.

They are also normed against populations, both in the United

States and other countries as well.

It's normed in different languages, aside from English.

It's also normed in Spanish and several other languages as well.

And through completing these intelligence tests, there are

several domains that are evaluated.

Four domains for the most part, there are four domains.

And each domain may have a different intelligence score, and in

total it gives a single score, assuming that the scores are valid
and reliable within each other.

But again, that's way more detail than you'll need to know.

Just knowing that we have the Wechsler and the Stanford-Binet

should be good enough for now.

And one other point that I want to make for you, is about the
whole notion of intelligence itself.

There's a lot of debate abour intelligence.

Wether or not there's a single type of intelligence or multiple

types of intelligences, and we've talked about this in previous
modules.

But one thing that has been found, is that there is something
called the Flynn effect.

The Flynn effect is a finding that, interestingly, with each

generation that we've been tracking over the past 50-60 years,
it seems like IQ scores are getting higher and higher.

And presumably that the population is becoming smarter and

smarter as time progresses.

So it is worth thinking about.

This is the last of all of our modules for CLEP prep exam.

And here we are, saying that we are getting more intelligent as

time goes on, and it very well might be, because technology
advances and we're more able to spread knowledge, even in this
course itself.

We can never have done this, 15, 10, maybe even five years
ago.

But now we're able to use technology to advance our knowledge

base, and in that way maybe we are getting smarter, over time,
and hopefully you too will find yourself getting smarter and more
intelligent through the preparations of this course, and you'll
wind down all this preparation, get out there, take your CLEP
exam, and go out into college and find your own success, and
own advances in intelligence.

OK, that about wraps it up for this particular module.

It's been great working with you.