September 18, 2017

Reading considered today:Moghaddam Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6

CHAPTER 3The Placebo Effect

Inactive substances can be effective when one believes in them.

Meaning systems explanations – a model of the effect

1. We interpret the situation and assign meanings

2. These interpretations and meaning influence us

3. Our changed behaviour (thinking, emotion) affects us physically

Shamans and other non-biologically oriented healers

Some non-medical examples

Self-fulfilling prophecies

Expectancy effects - Robert Rosenthal

Operation S.M.A.R.T.

Self-presentation and placebo (p 32)

William James example (with Grover)

When fearful, act confidently

Authority and placebo

The power of the stethoscope in ads

The Milgram study

The design of medical/drug experiments

Controlling for the placebo effect

Ethics of studying and prescribing placebos

Humanistic Psychology and the placebo effect

Rogers, Maslow, the anti-psychiatry movement (Laing, Szasz)

Jerome Frank's Psychotherapy as Rhetoric

Therapy is an attempt to persuade clients to change their meaning systems. In order to feel better, change your view of the world.

“In order to survive, humans must make sense of their experiences; that is, they must attribute meanings to them. The determinants of our thinking, feeling, and behaviour are the meanings we attribute to our own feelings and to personal events.”

“Successful psychotherapy relieves distress and disability by transforming the meanings patients ascribe to events from negative to positive.”

Jerome Frank

For more information on placebo effects:

Mechanism of the placebo effect

Self-fulfilling prophecy and expectancy effects

nocebos

The Healing Power of Placebos - a consumer-oriented article from the U.S. Federal Drug Administration

A review of York philosopher David Jopling's Talking Cures and Placebo Effects.

Journalist Erik Vance’s writing on placebo and suggestibility

Vox article on placebo effect

Culture-bound syndromes

CHAPTER 4Mind: Conscious, nonconscious and unconscious psychological processing

Processes that take place outside of conscious awareness

Automaticity

Automatic body processes

Stroop task (reading colours)

Implicit meanings and associations

Priming

Anagram task

Perceptual priming (M p58)

Fiery or charming?

False consciousness (class or gender relations)

Learning and memory processes

Savings scores

Reconstructive memory (M p56)

Courtroom examples

Sensation and perception

jnd (M p44)

Gestalt closure (M p45)

The Freudian Unconscious

Theories of Human Nature

Conflict

Thomas Hobbes

Jean Jacques Rousseau

Karl Marx

Conflict among id, ego, superego

Anxiety and its effects

Repression and other defense mechanisms

Sublimation

Dreams and slips of the tongue

Royal road to the unconscious

REMs and other biological aspects

Is it true?

Falsifiability

Freudian view of human nature

Deterministic, irrational (emotional rather than rational), instinctual, bestial, in conflict with society

Is it useful?

Film, literary, art criticism Jackson Pollock, for example (M p55)

Antonio Damasio’s studies of consciousness and emotion

Damasio’s TED Talk

From Damasio’s book Looking for Spinoza: Joy, sorrow, and the feeling brain

CHAPTER 5

Study of the mind

Origins in philosophy

Influence of biological science

Search for objectivity

Reductionism and the nature/nurture debate

Causal science – normative science

The Bio-Psychological approach

Some philosophical matters

Materialism and monism

Mind and Body (M p64)

Associationism (M p66)

William James

A few things about neurons

Synapses

Neurotransmitters

Pavlov's classical conditioning

Split-brain research

Gazzaniga videos (about 20 mins. total)

Genetics

Are there genes for particular psychological characteristics?

Can psychological characteristics be inherited?

Where is memory, how does it work?

Physical correlates of learning

Engram or memory trace

Materialism and monism

connected parts of brain, neurons, RNA molecules

Long-term potentiation

Moghaddam's footnote (p. 75)

Donald Hebb

Plasticity

Associationism

Pavlov's classical conditioning

Hebbian synapses, cell assemblies and phase sequences

Stimulation and Inhibition

Localization of psychological functioning in specific brain regions

Gall, Flourens, Broca, Lashley, Penfield

Phineas Gage

Ramachandran video

Potential locations of memory and mind

Cell structures

Electrical activity

Magnetic activity

Neurochemistry (LTP)

Eric Kandel prions, Randy Gallistel neurons

Potential to improve memory

Moghaddam's concerns (FM 74)

Duration of LTP

Reductionism (relation to meaning systems)

Psychological phenomena as side-effects

Changing our experience, changing our environment

Where is the agency?

CHAPTER 6Learning and Behaviourism

Basic tenets - natural science (M p80)

Associationism

Innate intuitions vs Tabula rasa

Experience: repetition, contiguity

Evolution

Positivism (M p316) (truth, observable)

No consciousness

Nothing subjective

Environmental orientation, adaptation emphasis

Reductionism (atomistic) and Individualism

Universal laws of learning (nomothetic, M p208)

Law of effect, law of exercise

Learning is a relatively long-term change in behaviour as a result of experience

S - R

S - O - R

Experimental, laboratory methodology

The classical conditioning paradigm

S - R learning

S - S learning

Stimulus substitution

Words as a second signal system

Applications of classical conditioning

Learned fears and other emotions

Kuo’s kittens

Little Albert on YouTube

Operant conditioning paradigm (instrumental learning)

Thorndike's puzzle box

Behaviour changes as a result of its consequences - not insight

Skinner box

Schedules of reinforcement – variable ratio, for example

Responses / Reinforcers

Control, measurement, free will

Antecedent, Behaviour, Consequence

Deborah Skinner

Reinforcers, Reinforcement

Learning processes – extinction, generalization

Applications of operant conditioning

Transitions from behaviourism to cognitive science

Language - Chomsky and Skinner

Konrad Lorenz - Imprinting

Some behaviours more easily learned

Lev Vygotsky – scaffolding

Collaborative construction of meaning

Opening the “black box”

Causal conceptual frameworks for both

Behaviourism as a reaction to introspection problems

Behaviourism and materialism, Pavlov and Vygotsky

The North American zeitgeist

Rags to riches

Individual freedom

Personal responsibility

Reinforcers - The Premack principle

Attention and time-out

Punishment

Behaviour modification

Social learning theory

Albert Bandura (3:56)

Observational learning

Modelling

Topics in the video

S – O – R

Environment - Person - Behaviour

Desensitization and modelling

Self-efficacy (relation to effort and doubt)

Fortuity (Chance favours the adventurous and inquisitive)

Moral disengagement

Heredity and Environment (nature/nurture)