How do we understand the behavior of other people? Rather than focusing on a person’s traits (or their disposition) as we did in personality psychology, we’ll now include a focus on the situation the person is in. We’ll begin with … Read More
You’re undoubtedly familiar with the concept of stress, but like many psychological variables we’ve seen, you may find it difficult to come up with a precise definition. What exactly is stress and how can we go about measuring it Walter … Read More
Another way of categorizing motivations is to consider them as either approach motivations or avoidance motivations. An approach motivation is a drive to experience a positive outcome, while an avoidance motivation is a drive to not experience a negative outcome. The … Read More
Freud proposed a structural organization of personality with three main components; the id, the ego, and the superego. The id was the raw animal drives of the personality. These included drives for food, sex, and aggression, which were driven by … Read More
In designing an intelligence assessment, I may want to know the level of difficulty that someone is capable of solving. In this case, I would probably look at whether a person is able to solve a particularly difficult puzzle or … Read More
Our sleeping pattern follows a circadian rhythm, which is really just a way of saying a daily pattern of wakefulness and sleepiness (circadian derived from Latin: circa – “about” and diem– “day”). Our circadian rhythm is influenced by environmental factors, … Read More
In their first study of the availability heuristic, Tversky and Kahneman asked participants to estimate whether English had more words that started with the letter K or more words that had K as the third letter. What do you think? … Read More
Why do we remember some things and not others? How much can we remember and how long can our memories last? What processes shape our memory of the world? Memories are a fundamental part of who we are, so it’s … Read More
By closely monitoring the occurrence of behaviors and the frequency of rewards, Skinner was able to look for patterns. Receiving a reward each time the lever is pressed would be an example of continuous reinforcement. But Skinner also wanted to … Read More