IB Psychology- Cognitive Review

Dalai Lama

Happiness is in our own hands. Happiness can be achieved through systematic training of mind and heart and through reshaping attitudes and outlook. The whole purpose of life is happiness and happiness is determined more by the state of ones mind than by external conditions as long as basic survival needs are met.

Johnson & Kruger 2006

Found that although many believed there is a relationship between happiness and money, it is rather satisfaction with ones salary that brings happiness.

Bartlett's Study

He found that people had problems with remembering stories from another culture and they reconstructed the story according to their culture. Also, he demonstrated the memory that people remember in terms of meaning and what makes sense to them which leads to memory distortions.

Breckler (1994)

He found that peoples current attitudes towards blood donation impacted their memories by how they felt when they donated blood in the past.

Three components of emotions

Physiological changes, the persons own subjective feelings of an emotion, and associated behavior such as smiling or running away

Flashbulb memory

Suggested by Brown and Kulik (1977). It is special kind of emotional memory which refers to vivid and detailed memories of highly emotional events that appear to be recorded in a brain as though with the help of a cameras flash.

Bradley & Hitch (1974)

Suggested the working memory model, based on multi-store model. However, they challenged the view that STM is a single store. Working memory is a model of STM and it includes several components, whereas the multi store model of memory only includes one.

Social Comparison theory

based on the idea that people learn about and assess themselves by comparison with others. According to this theory, people are happy if they have more than those they normally compare themselves to.

Baddley & Hitch 1974

performed an experiment in which they asked participants to read a prose and understand it, while at the same time remembering sequences of numbers. They found that in dual task experiments there was a clear and systematic increase in reasoning time if people had to undertake a memory dependent task at the same time. The prediction of the working memory model is that there will be impairment in concurrent tasks.

Procedural memory

nonconscious memory such as skills or habits. Emotional memory (not yet well understood)

Stereotype

People who have fixed ideas about others.

Three stages of memory processing

1. Encoding- transferring sensory information into a meaning memory 2. Storage- creating biological trace of the encoded information into the memory which is either consolidated or lost. 3. Retrieval- using the distorted information.

Fundamental principles of Cognitive psychology

1. Human beings are information processors and that mental processes guide behavior. 2. Mind can be studied scientifically by developing theories and using a number of scientific research methods. 3. Cognitive processes are influenced by social and cultural factors.

Perception

Cognitive processes that interprets and organizes information from the sensed to produce some meaningful experience of the world.

Schema theory

Cognitive theory about information processing suggests what we already know will influence the outcome of the information processing. It is also defined as "network of knowledge, believes & expectation."

Explicit Memory

Consists of fact based information that can be retrieved. It is divided into two sections 1: Semantic memory(general knowledge) 2: Episodic memory(memory from personal experiences and events.)

Long term memory (LTM)

It is conceptualized as a vast store house of information with indefinite duration and of potentially unlimited capacity. The material is not an exact replica of events or facts but rather stored as outline.

Schemas

Mental representation of knowledge.

(Theory)

People compare themselves to others. The is based on the cognitive theory related to social, psychology suggested by Leon Festinger.

Second social comparison theory

People link happiness to reaching certain goals but they tend to set higher goals once they achieve the first ones. Therefore, they never end up feelings happy.

Lazarus & Folkman (1984)

People use different strategies in stressful situations. One of them is called problem focused coping which aimed to change the problematic situation that causes emotion stress. They call the other emotion focused coping where the purpose is to handle the emotions rather than changing the problematic situation.

Myers and Dieners 1995

They have shown that there is discrepancy between wealth and happiness. They found that although the buying power of the average american had tripled since 1950s, the proportion of Americans who described themselves as very happy remained stable at about one third. This indicated that there is no direct link to wealth and happiness.

Short term memory (STM)

Very small part of information attended will continue into the STM, which has limited capacity to round seven items from 6 to 12 seconds.

Implicit Memory

contains memory that we are not consciously aware of.

Chunking

grouping bits of information into larger units to help them remember.

Holmes 2008

studied the association between visuospatial sketchpad capacity and childrens mathematics attainment in relation to age. Based on the sample of children in age groups 7-8 and 9-10 years, they studied age related differences in the relationship between the visual and spatial memory subcomponents of the visuospatial sketchpad and a range of mathematical skills. They found that in older children, mathematical performance could be significantly predicted by performance on the visual patterns test.

Episodic buffer

the role of the episodic buffer is to act as a temporary and passive display store until the information is needed--much like a television screen. The processing of information takes place in other parts of the system.

Eysenk 1988

there is reasonable evidence that individual differences in intelligence may depend partly on differences in working memory capacity.

Sigmund Freud

was convinced that forgetting was caused by repression. According to Freud, people who experience intense emotional and anxiety provoking events may use defence mechanism, such as repression, to protect their conscious self from knowing things that they cannot cope with. They send the dangerous memories to the unconscious, which means that they will deny it ever happened. However, the memory will continue to haunt them in symbolic form sin their dreams until a therapist is able to retrieve the memory using specific techniques.