Questions on Lectures

If you can answer the following questions, you will probably do well on the lecture questions in the exam:

In preparation for Test #3:

What is George Mandler’s definition of emotion?

Describe five different components of emotion.

What is the James-Lange theory of emotion? Give example of how this theory would account for your subjective experience of anger, fear, or passionate love.

What were Walter Cannon’s criticisms of the James-Lange theory?

What is the Schachter-Singer two-component theory of emotion? What component of emotion does this theory add to the James-Lange theory?

Describe the Schachter-Singer experiment. How did these researchers manipulate arousal in their experiment? How did they manipulate the labeling of emotion (as either anger or euphoria)?

What were Darwin’s principles for how emotional expressions developed in animals and in people?

Can people accurately judge facial emotions in others? What’s the research evidence for this? Is there cross-cultural consistency in the display and judgment of facial expressions of emotion? What are six primary emotions that seem to be expressed through distinct facial expressions?

What are “display rules,” and how do they effect the expression of emotions across different cultures?

What is a “Duchenne smile”?

What does the word “taxonomy” mean?

What is the “facial feedback hypothesis”? How is this hypothesis related to the James-Lange theory of emotion?

What does the term “personality” refer to? What is meant by the term, “individual differences”?

Give a brief description of each of the following approaches to personality: trait theories, social learning theories, Freudian (or psychodynamic) theory.

Which theory of personality argues most strongly that behavior is consistent across settings and over time?

Which theory of personality argues that behavior is often inconsistent across settings?

Which theory of personality focuses most on unconscious motives and basic biological drives such as sex and aggression?

Describe Freud’s stage model of psychosexual development.

Describe Freud’s structural model of personality: the id, the ego, and the superego.

What are defense mechanisms? List a number of common defense mechanisms.

What was Freud’s theory of dreams? What is the difference between the “manifest content” and the “latent content” of dreams?

What is a projective test? Describe the TAT and the Rorschach Ink Blot Test.

What is the “person versus situation” debate in personality psychology?

What is the “lexical approach” to personality?

What are the “Big Five” personality traits? Why are they important? How do they provide a taxonomy of personality?

What were the findings of Hartshorne and May’s early research on moral behaviors in children?

When are people’s behaviors most likely to be trait-like (that is, consistent across settings and over time)?

Describe the difference between low self-monitoring and high self-monitoring people? Which kind of person is more “trait-like” in their behavior, and which is more variable across situations?

What is the difference between a “weak situation” and a “strong situation,” and how do these situations affect the consistency between traits and behavior?

What does the principle of “aggregation” refer to? What kinds of behavior show the most consistency – single behaviors or summed behaviors?

Describe research on the effects of people and situations on anxiety? Does anxiety vary most across people, does it vary most across situations, or does it depend most on the interaction between people and situations?

List some evidence that suggests that personality traits are real. Some kinds of evidence to consider are: consensus among different people who rate personality, the longitudinal stability of personality, and behavior genetic research.

What does the term “heritability” refer to? What is the heritability of personality traits? What is the difference between shared (or common family) enivironmental factors and nonshared (or unique or noncommon family) environmental factors? Which of these tends to makes siblings similar in personality, and which tends to make siblings different? According to behavior genetic research, which of these two kinds of environmental factors is more important in molding individuals’ personality traits?

Define social psychology.

Define obedience. Describe Milgram’s famous series of obedience experiments. In the basic Milgram experiment, what percent of subjects obeyed the experimenter completely and delivered increasing severe electric shocks to an innocent victim? How did proximity (closeness to the victim) influence subjects’ obedience in Milgram’s studies? How did the presence of peers, who either rebelled against the experimenter or went along with the experimenter, influence subjects’ obedience in Milgram’s studies?

Define conformity. In Asch’s conformity experiments what percent of subjects conformed at least once during the experiment.