Adaptation refers to modification as a result of changed life circumstances. Genes never produce behaviour directly, so genes are technically not for a behavioural trait, but associated with that behavioural trait. All the effects that genes have on behaviour occur through their role in building and modifying the physical structures of the body.Genes affect the body’s development through, and only through, their influence on the production of protein molecules. A class of proteins called structural proteins forms the structure of every cell in the body. Another, much larger class called enzymes controls the rate of every chemical reaction in every cell. Genes are components of extremely long molecules of a substance called DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). A replica of your whole unique set of DNA molecules exists in the nucleus of your body’s cell, where it serves to code for and regulate the production of protein molecules. Each protein molecule consists of a long chain of smaller molecules called amino acids. There are two types of genes. Coding genes: genes that code for unique protein molecules and regulatory genes which help suppress or activate coding genes and thereby influences the body’s development. The environment is everything except for the genes and this influences the genes. Behaviour is influenced by the genes through the interaction with the environment. The environment is everything except for the genes. The internal environment influences the genes by certain gene activations for example. The external environment influences the genes by eating, for example, a different kind of foods. The genes then go on to activate or suppress development in certain physiological areas and this affects the behaviour.Experience can activate a certain gene which then goes on to affect behaviour. The experience activates genes, which produce proteins, which alter the function of some of the neural circuits in the brain and thereby changes how...

Slower changing components of the mind are referred to as behavioural states (e.g: variations in motivation, emotion).Motivation refers to the entire constellation of factors, inside and outside of the organism, that causes an individual to behave in a particular way at a particular time. Motivational state or drive refers to an internal condition that orients an individual toward a specific category of goals that can change over time in a reversible way (the drive can increase and decrease).Motivated behaviour is directed towards incentives or reinforcers. The motivational state for searching for food is hunger, but the incentive is the food itself. Drives and incentives complement each other and influence each other’s strength. Homeostasis is the constancy of internal conditions that the body must actively maintain. The loss of homeostasis is the psychological foundation of drives because this loss acts on the nervous system to induce behaviour designed to correct the imbalance. There are two general classes of drives: regulatory drives and nonregulatory drives. There are five categories of mammalian drives:Regulatory drivesThese are drives that promote survival by helping to maintain the body’s homeostasis.Safety drivesThese are drives that motivate an animal to stay safe (e.g: fear, anger).Reproductive drivesThese are drives that motivate an individual to reproduce and keep the offspring safe.Social drivesThese are drives that promote cooperation and friendship.Educative drivesThese are drives that motivate an individual to play and to explore. Things such as art, music and literature can be seen as an extension of the educative drive, but it can also be seen as something that taps into our already existing drives.The central-state theory of drives states that different drives correspond to neural activity in different sets of neurons in the brain. A set of neurons in which activity constitutes a drive is called a central...

Animals need to learn to survive. Learning is any process through which experience at one time can alter an individual’s behaviour at another tie. Experience is any effects of the environment that are mediated by the individual’s sensory system. Future behaviour is any behaviour that is not part of the individual’s immediate response to the sensory stimulation during the learning experience.Classical conditioning is a learning process that creates new reflexes. A reflex is a simple, relatively automatic, stimulus/response sequence mediated by the nervous system. Habituation is a decline in the magnitude of a reflexive response when the stimulus is repeated several times in succession. Not all reflexes undergo habituation.With classical conditioning, several things should be taken into account:Unconditioned stimulusThis is the original stimulus which should trigger the reflexUnconditioned responseThis is the reflexConditioned stimulusThis is the new stimulusConditioned responseThis is the reflexA conditioned response can be extinguished when the same conditioned stimulus is represented each time, without showing the unconditioned stimulus (e.g: ringing a bell without presenting food repeatedly). This is called extinction. The mere passage of time following extinction can partially renew the conditioned response. This is called spontaneous recovery. A single pairing of the conditioned stimulus with the unconditioned stimulus can fully renew the conditioned response. The response is somehow inhibited. It can be disinhibited by the passage of time or the recurrence of the unconditioned stimulus. Individuals don’t only react to the conditioned stimulus, but also stimuli that resemble the unconditioned stimulus. This is called generalization. The less a stimuli resembles the original conditioned stimulus, the weaker the conditioned response is. Generalization between two stimuli can be abolished if the response to one is reinforced...

An analogy refers to a similarity in behaviour, function, or relationship between entities or situations that are in other respects different from each other. The prefrontal cortex is involved in analogical reasoning. Analogical reasoning uses multiple areas in the prefrontal cortex, unlike simple semantic retrieval.Inductive reasoning or induction is the attempt to infer some new principle or proposition from observations or facts that serve as clues. It is also called hypothesis construction. It is reasoning that is founded on perceived analogies or other similarities. Inductive reasoning is prone to several biases:Availability biasPeople tend to rely too strongly on information that is readily available to us and ignore information that is less available (e.g: people tend to believe that a lot of people die from shark attacks because it gets a lot of news coverage, but this is not correct).Confirmation biasPeople tend to look for information that confirms the hypothesis, rather than look for information that disproves the hypothesis.Predictable-world biasPeople tend to believe that there are patterns in the world that do not exist (e.g: in a game of chance people that have seen a certain card a few times tend to go for another card, even though the probability is just as high, because they feel like the first card can’t come up again). Deductive reasoning is the attempt to derive logically the consequences that must be true if certain premises are accepted as true. There is a bias in deductive reasoning. This occurs when people tend to use their knowledge rather than formal knowledge in answering deductive reasoning questions. Insight problems are problems that are specifically designed to be unsolvable until one looks at them in a different way. These problems are generally very difficult, because their solution depends on abandoning a well-established habit of perception or thought, referred to as a mental set, and then viewing...

As infants, we depend physically and emotionally on adult caregivers. As children, we learn to get along with others and to abide by the rules and norms of society. As adolescents, we begin to explore romantic relationships and consider how we will take our place in the adult world. As adults, we assume responsibility for the care and support of others and contribute, through work, to the broader society.The bond between infant and parent is promoted by innate tendencies: the infant to cry and the parent to help. Infants prefer their caregivers and react to their caregivers and in that way, the infants take an active role in building emotional bonds between themselves and those on whom they most directly depend. Attachment refers to emotional bonds. The experiments of Harlow with monkeys provided a lot of evidence for the contact comfort theory, in which the bond between mother and infant is promoted by the warmth and comfort of the mother. Bowlby’s evolutionary explanation of the fact that infants between 8 months and 3 years old are distressed when their caregivers are out of sight is that infants who were in their mother's sight were an evolutionary advantage in the past. Evidence for this comes from the fact that similar behaviours occur in all human cultures and in other species of mammals.There are four types of attachment and this can be assessed by the strange situation test, in which the mother suddenly leaves the room leaving the child either by itself or with a stranger.Secure attachment (60%)These infants actively explore the environment with their mothers present and become distressed when their mother leaves.Insecure-resistant attachment (10%)These infants appear anxious even with their mothers present and don’t explore much. They become very distressed when their mother leaves, but display anger towards the mother upon return.Insecure-avoidant attachment (15%)These infants appear anxious even with their mothers...

Personality is the relatively consistent patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour that characterize each person as a unique individual. A trait is a relatively stable predisposition to behave in a certain way. There are traits that are always present, but there are also traits that need a certain situation before they manifest. Traits are dimensions, which are measurable, continuous characteristics, along which people differ by degree. Trait theories of personality endeavour to specify a manageable set of distinct personality dimensions that can be used to summarize the fundamental psychological differences among individuals. Factor analysis is used in defining the most useful dimensions. There are three steps in factor analysis:Collect data from a lot of peopleFactor extraction Correlate the data with each other. Here you correlate the terms with each other (e.g: friendly and likeable).LabelHere the factors that correlate strongly together get a new label, such as conscientiousness.Factor analysis tells us that the dimensions are relatively independent of each other. The Big Five Theory of Personality states that someone’s personality is best described using five, relatively independent personality dimensions. These dimensions spell out OCEAN. Neuroticism – StabilityExtraversion – IntroversionOpenness to new experience – Non-opennessAgreeableness – AntagonismConscientiousness – UndirectednessThere was a proposal for a higher-order personality trait independent of IQ that is predictive of success in a wide range of domains and is called grit. Grit is defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Especially the tendency to persist at difficult tasks seems to be important for predicting success. The validity of the Big Five Theory of Personality is measured by checking the correlation between the test and the actual behaviour.People with socially aversive personalities score high on the dark triad, which consists...

The caring for people with psychological disorders used to be non-existent. Nowadays, there is more care. Since the 1970s, assertive community treatment has existed, aimed at helping a person with severe psychological problems and preventing hospitalization. Electroconvulsive therapy is used primarily in cases of severe depression that does not respond to psychotherapy or antidepressant drugs. The treatment consists of people receiving anaesthesia and passing an electric current through a patient’s skull triggering a seizure in the brain that lasts approximately one minute. The shocks and the seizures promote the producing of neurotransmitters and the sensitivity of postsynaptic receptors. It also stimulates the growth of new neurons. The most frequent side effect of the treatment is memory loss, although this mostly clears up within a few months after the treatment. Psychosurgery is a last-resort treatment, which involves surgically cutting or producing lesions in portions of the brain to relieve a psychological disorder. The consequence of prefrontal lobotomy was that people did not have access to their executive functions anymore and needed constant care. In deep brain stimulation, a thin wire electrode is planted permanently in the brain, usually in the cingulum or in a portion of the basal ganglia for patients with OCD, and this electrode can be activated in order to electrically stimulate, rather than destroy the neurons lying near it.Psychotherapy aims to treat psychological disorders through talk, reflection, learning and practice. Psychotherapy is any theory-based, systematic procedure, conducted by a trained therapist, for helping people to overcome or cope with mental problems through psychological rather than physiological means. Each major approach in psychotherapy draws on a set of psychological principles and ideas that apply to adaptive as well as maladaptive behaviour:The psychodynamic approach focusses on the idea that...