Psychology Review
Chapter 1: The Science of Psychology (add lecture 1?)
Psychology: the study of mental activity and behaviour
Chapter 3: Biology and Behaviour
Endocrine system: communication network that influences thoughts, behaviours and
actions. It is slower than the nervous system and uses hormones.
Hormones: chemical substances released into the bloodstream by the endocrine
glands. They travel through the blood stream until they reach their target tissues,
where they bind to receptor sites and influence the tissues. As they travel through
the blood, the time that they take to reach their target is indefinite. Their effects can
last for a long time and affect multiple targets.
Endocrine glands influencing sexual behaviour: gonads
Endocrine and Nervous System are Coordinated
They link neurochemical and psychological processes to behaviours, thoughts
and feelings.
The endocrine system is under the nervous system’s control.
o The brain interprets external and internal stimuli and then sends
signals to the endocrine system.
The endocrine system is mainly controlled by the hypothalamus via signals to
the pituitary gland, located at the base of the hypothalamus.
o Pituitary gland: By releasing hormones into the bloodstream, it controls
all other glands and governs major processes such as development,
ovulation, and lactation. This integration can be finely tuned.
o Neural activation causes the hypothalamus to release one of the many
releasing factors.
o This releasing factor determines what hormone the pituitary gland will
secrete.
o It then travels throughout the body to reach its destination.
Nurture can influence nature
Men and women may perform the same task differently. Females show greater use
of language-related brain regions, whereas males show greater use of spatial-related
brain regions.
Plasticity: over the course of development, throughout a constant stream of
experience, and after injury, the brain constantly changes. The brain is extremely
adaptable.
Decreases with age;
The rewiring and growth within the brain represents the biological basis of
learning.
,Changes are mainly in the strength of existing connections:
One possibility is that when two neurons fire simultaneously, the synaptic
connection between them strengthens.
Conversely, not firing simultaneously tends to weaken the connection
between two neurons.
“Fire together, wire together”
Donald Hebb (1949)
o “Burning in”: a pattern of neural firing becomes more likely to recur, and
its recurrence leads the mind to recall an event
o Integrating of habits: repeating a behaviour makes the person tend to
perform that behaviour automatically.
More rarely, entirely new connections grow between neurons. This new
growth is a major factor in recovery from brain injury.
Neurogenesis: the production of new neurons.
Occurs in the hippocampus
o Involved largely in the storage of new memories. Eventually transferred
to the cortex as the hippocampus is continuously being overwritten.
Social environment can strongly affect brain plasticity
o Animals with a “superiority complex” produce more neurons
o Animals who go through stressful experiences do not
Somatosensory Homunculus:
More cortical tissue is devoted to body parts that receive more sensation or
are used more.
o Wiring in the brain is affected by amount of use.
Phantom limb:
o This phenomenon suggests that the brain has not reorganized in
response to the injury and that the missing limb’s cortical
representation remains intact.
o Phantom hand: hand amputees feel a touch on their face when their
eyes are closed.
On the somatosensory homunculus, the hand is represented
next to the face (closest group).
The rest of the brain has not kept pace with the somatosensory
area enough to figure out these neurons’ new job, so the
neurons formerly activated by a touch on the hand are activated
by a touch on the amputee’s face.
Genetics: describes how characteristics are passed on to offspring through
inheritance.
Gene expression: whether a particular gene is turned on or off.
Can be affected by environmental factors.
Determines the body’s basic physical makeup, but it also determines specific
developments throughout life.
It is involved in all psychological activity.
o Allows us to sense, learn, fall in love…
,Gene predispositions: important in determining the environments people select for
themselves.
Biology and environment influence the development of one’s brain.
Genome: master blueprint that provides detailed instructions for everything
E.g. how to grow a gallbladder, where the nose gets placed on a face…
Whether a cell becomes part of a gallbladder or a nose is determined by
which genes are turned on or off within that cell, and these actions are in turn
determined by cues from both inside and outside the cell.
The genome provides the options, and the environment determines which
option is taken.
Chromosomes: found in each cell.
Made up of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).
o Two intertwined strands of molecules in a double helix shape.
Segments of these are called genes.
Every cell contains 23 pairs of chromosomes.
Each gene specifies an exact instruction to manufacture a distinct
polypeptide.
o One or more of these make up a protein.
Protein: basic chemical that makes up the structure of cells and their direct
activities.
o The environment determines which proteins are produced and when
they are produced.
Chapter 4: Consciousness
Consciousness: one’s subjective experience of the world, resulting from brain
activity.
Refers to moment-by-moment subjective experiences.
E.g. paying attention to your immediate surroundings, reflecting on your
current thoughts…
Psychologists believe that the mind and the brain are inseparable.
The activity of neurons in the brain produces the contents of consciousness
o E.g. sight of a face, smell of a rose…
o For each type of content, there is an associated pattern of brain
activity.
The activation of this particular group of neurons in the brain
somehow gives rise to conscious experience.
Conscious experience is usually unified and coherent.
The mind is a continuous stream and thoughts float on that stream.
Attention involves being able to focus selectively on some things and avoid
focusing on others.
o Although they are not the same thing, attention and consciousness
often go hand-in-hand.
, Automatic processes: are so well learned that we do them with- out much attention
(e.g. walking)
Controlled processing: slower than automatic processing, but it helps people perform
in complex or novel situations.
Shadowing experiment: participant wears headphones that deliver one message to
one ear and another message to another. The person is asked to attend to one of
the two messages and “shadow” it by repeating it aloud. As a result, the person
usually notices the unattended sound (the message given to the other ear) but will
have little knowledge about the content of the unattended sound. You would
probably hear your own name but know nothing about the rest of the message.
Some important information gets through the filter of attention. It has to be personally
relevant information, such as your name or the name of someone close to you, or it
has to be particularly loud or different in some obvious physical way.
Selective attention:
Donald Broadbent developed filter theory to explain the selective nature of
attention.
o He assumed that people have a limited capacity for sensory
information.
o They screen incoming information to let in only the most important
material.
o Attention is like a gateway that opens for important information and
closes for irrelevant ones.
Change blindness: a failure to notice large changes in one’s environment.
Because we cannot attend to everything in the vast array of visual information
available, we are often “blind” to large changes in our environments.
Video with man asking for directions and they change him.
Indicates that we can attend to a limited amount of information.
Thus, our perceptions of the world are often inaccurate, and we have little
awareness of our perceptual failures.
o We do not know how much information we miss on the world around
us.
Subliminal perception: the processing of information by sensory systems without
conscious awareness.
Subliminal perception occurs when stimuli get processed by sensory systems
but, because of their short durations or subtle forms, do not reach
consciousness.
Evidence suggests that subliminal messages have minimal effects on
behaviour.
Freudian slip: occurs when an unconscious thought is suddenly expressed at an
inappropriate time or in an inappropriate social context.
Different types of sensory information are processed by different brain areas.
The particular type of neural activity determines the particular type of
awareness.
