Psychology is Key

Personalities and Stress

dammitmadison — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 15:41:05 -0600

Type A - competitive, hard-driving, impatient, verbally aggressive, and anger-prone people

Type B - easygoing and relaxed people

Type A are more likely to be affected by illnesses associated with stress:

Coronary Heart Disease - the clogging of the vessels that nourish the heart muscle; the leading cause of death in the United States

Psychophysiological Illness - mind-body illness; any stress-related physical illness, such as hypertension or some headaches

Ways to help with stress:

Aerobic Exercise - sustained exercise that increases heart and lung fitness; may also alleviate depression and anxiety

Biofeedback - a system for electronically recording, amplifying, and feedback information recording a subtle physiological state, such as blood pressure or muscle tension

General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) - Selye’s concept of the body’s adaptive response to...

dammitmadison — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 15:21:05 -0600

General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) - Selye’s concept of the body’s adaptive response to stress in 3 stages:

Alarm Reaction - this is when your body begins to respond to the stress and your nervous system becomes active
Resistance - stress hormones such as adrenaline start to set in so you can do what needs to be done
Exhaustion - your body becomes exhausted from continuous stress and this is when you become more vulnerable to illness

Burnout - physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion brought on by persistent job-related stress

Lymphocytes - two types of white blood cells that are part of the body’s immune system (they protect you from getting cancer)

Fact: People who have more stress in their lives are more likely to get cancer because your lymphocytes won’t work as well to protect you from cancer cells.

Stress - the process by which we perceive and respond to certain events, called stressors, that we...

dammitmadison — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 14:40:05 -0600

Stress - the process by which we perceive and respond to certain events, called stressors, that we appraise as threatening or challenging

Health Psychology - a sub-field of psychology’s contribution to behavioral medicine

dammitmadison — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 14:10:05 -0600

Health Psychology - a sub-field of psychology’s contribution to behavioral medicine

Behavioral Medicine - an indisciplinary field that integrates behavioral and medical knowledge and...

dammitmadison — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 13:40:05 -0600

Behavioral Medicine - an indisciplinary field that integrates behavioral and medical knowledge and applies knowledge to health and disease

Creativity

dammitmadison — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 13:15:05 -0600

the ability to provide novel valuable ideas

5 Components of creativity:

Expertise - a well developed base of knowledge
Imaginative Thinking Skills - the ability to see things in a new ways to recognized patterns and make connections
Venturesome Personality - tolerated ambiguity and risk, preserves in overcoming obstacles, and seek new experiences rather than following the pack
Intrinsic Motivation - focusing not so much on extrinsic motivators (meeting deadlines, impressing people, or making money) but on the intrinsic pleasure and challenge of their own work
Creative Environment - sparks, supports, and refined creative ideas (emotional intelligence)

Are you any of these?

Intelligence Disabilities

dammitmadison — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 12:46:06 -0600

Savant Syndrome - a condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has an exceptional specific skill, such as in computation or drawing

Mental Retardation - a condition of limited mental ability, indicated by an intelligence score below 70 and difficulty in adapting to the demands of life; varies from mild to profound

Down Syndrome - a condition of retardation and associated physical disorders caused by an extra chromosome in one’s genetic makeup

Intelligence Test

dammitmadison — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 12:16:06 -0600

a method for assessing an individual’s mental aptitudes and comparing them with those of others, using numerical scores

Mental Age - a measure of intelligence test performance devised by Binet; the chronological age that most typically corresponds to a given level of performance. Thus, a child who does as well as the average 8-year-old is said to have a mental age of 8

Stanford-Binet - American revision of Binet’s original intelligence test

Intelligence Quotient (IQ) - defined originally as the ratio of mental age (ma) to chronological age (ca) and multiplied by 100

Aptitude Test - designed to predict a person’s future performance; aptitude is the capacity to learn

Achievement Test - a test designed to assess what a person has learned

Intelligence

dammitmadison — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 11:49:06 -0600

mental quality consisting of the ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new situations

General Intelligence - a general intelligence factor that Spearman and others believed underlies specific mental ability and is therefore measured by everyday tasks

Analytical (academic problem solving) Intelligence - assessed by intelligence tests, which present well-defined problems having a single right answer

Creative Intelligence - demonstrated in reacting adaptively to novel situations and generating novel ideas

Practical Intelligence - often required to everyday tasks, which are frequently ill-defined, will multiple solutions

Emotional Intelligence - the ability to perceive, express, understand, and regulate emotions

Which type of intelligence do you think you are?

Near-Death Experience - an altered state of consciousness reported after a close brush with death;...

dammitmadison — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 20:45:00 -0600

Near-Death Experience - an altered state of consciousness reported after a close brush with death; often similar to drug induced hallucinations

Hypnosis - a social interaction in which one person suggests to another that certain perceptions,...

dammitmadison — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 20:19:05 -0600

Hypnosis - a social interaction in which one person suggests to another that certain perceptions, feelings, thoughts, or behaviors will spontaneously occur

Fun Fact: if you don’t want to be hypnotized then no one can ever hypnotize you because you’ve already shut off your mind to the hypnosis. Only people who are interested and love the feeling of losing control can be hypnotized.

Posthypnotic Amnesia - supposed inability to recall what one experienced during hypnosis; induced by the hypnotists’s suggestion

Posthypnotic Suggestion - a suggestion, made during a hypnosis session, to be carried out after the subject is no longer hypnotized; used by some clinicians to help control undesired behaviors and symptoms

REM Rebound - the tendency of REM sleep to increase following REM sleep deprivation (created by...

dammitmadison — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 19:50:06 -0600

REM Rebound - the tendency of REM sleep to increase following REM sleep deprivation (created by repeated awakenings during REM sleep)

Theory:

You can tell when you’ve had REM Rebound because those are the nights when you just have dream after dream and don’t feel rested at all.

Dream - a sequence of images, emotions, and thought passing through a sleeping person’s mind....

dammitmadison — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 19:21:05 -0600

Dream - a sequence of images, emotions, and thought passing through a sleeping person’s mind. Dreams are notable for their hallucinatory imagery, discontinuities, and incongruities, and for the dreamer’s delusional acceptance of the content and later difficulties in remembering it.

Help in remembering what you dreamed: as soon as you wake up, think about your dream, telling yourself the story of what happened and explain it to yourself before getting out of bed. If you start thinking about other things and moving as soon as you wake up then your dream will be forgotten. This is why dream journals work.

Manifest Content - according to Freud, the remembered story-line of a dream

Latent Content - according to Freud, the underlying meaning of a dream

Night Terrors - a sleep disorder characterized by high arousal and an appearance of being terrified;...

dammitmadison — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 18:53:06 -0600

Night Terrors - a sleep disorder characterized by high arousal and an appearance of being terrified; unlike nightmares, night terrors occur during Stage 4 sleep within 2 or 3 hours of sleep and are seldom remembered

So you’re not dreaming when you have night terrors.

Sleep Apnea - a sleep disorder characterized by temporary cessations of breathing during sleep and...

dammitmadison — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 18:23:06 -0600

Sleep Apnea - a sleep disorder characterized by temporary cessations of breathing during sleep and consequent momentary rewakeness (i.e. snoring)

If you have a big problem with snoring then you should see your doctor because that means you’re having a hard time breathing during sleep and you could die.

Narcolepsy - as a sleep disorder characterized by uncontrollable sleep attacks. The sufferer may...

dammitmadison — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 17:55:06 -0600

Narcolepsy - as a sleep disorder characterized by uncontrollable sleep attacks. The sufferer may lapse directly into REM sleep, often in inappropriate times

Insomnia - recurring problems in falling or staying asleep Just so you know, everyone has a hard...

dammitmadison — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 17:25:05 -0600

Insomnia - recurring problems in falling or staying asleep

Just so you know, everyone has a hard time falling asleep on a regular basis so just because you’re awake at like 11, that doesn’t mean you have insomnia. Sorry to break it to you but insomnia is a serious thing where you literally don’t sleep for days. If you just have a hard time falling asleep at 10 or 11 then you’re just like everyone else.

Hallucinations - false sensory experiences, such as seeing something in the absence of an external...

dammitmadison — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 16:58:05 -0600

Hallucinations - false sensory experiences, such as seeing something in the absence of an external visual stimulus

Sleep - periodic, natural, reversible loss of consciousness

dammitmadison — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 16:31:05 -0600

Sleep - periodic, natural, reversible loss of consciousness

Drugs

dammitmadison — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 16:08:05 -0600

Psychoactive Drug - a chemical substance that alters perceptions and mood

Tolerance - the diminishing effect with regular use of the same dose of drug, requiring the user to take larger and larger doses before experiencing the drug’s effect

Withdrawal - the discomfort and distress that follows discontinuing the use of an addictive drug

Physical Dependence - a physiological need for a drug, marked by unpleasant withdrawal symptoms when the drug is discontinued

Psychological Dependence - a psychological need to use a drug, such as to relieve negative emotions

Depressants - drugs (such as alcohol, barbiturates, and opiates) that reduce neural activity and slow body functions

Stimulants - drugs (such as caffeine, nicotine, and the more powerful amphetamines and cocaine) that excite neural activity and speed up body functions

(In my opinion: stimulants would be the most addictive of the other types of drugs)

Hallucinogens - psychedelic (mind manifesting drugs) drugs, such as LSD, that distorts perceptions and evoke sensory images in the absence of sensory input