The Rat Pack

Play in class with the normal version

Intelligence, IQ, Theorists and Problems

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Research Methods for Year 11 Psychology

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VCE Psychology 2015 – Unit 2

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Stories, theorists and definitions – getting started in Psychology…

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February 18, 2014

12:47 am

Introductory Greetings

Psychology has many hats. There are many fields of knowledge that it touches on and connects with: for instance, philosophy, biology, neurology, education, health, business, sport and criminology. I hope you find the diversity of the subject stimulating and thought-provoking. — Psychology has many hats. There are several fields of knowledge that it touches on and connects with: for instance, philosophy, biology, neurology, education, health, business, sport and criminology. I hope you find the diversity of the subject stimulating and thought-provoking.

The quiz below will help you get a feel for the variety, the words and the human stories in psychology. Every now and then I hope to nip back to Learningapps.org, where I concocted the quiz, and add a question, another story or an extra comment. In this way the quiz will continue to develop, just like your knowledge and understanding of psychology.

There are a few simple questions in the quiz about research methods, as well as on topics such as memory, visual perception and the pioneers of psychology. You’ll learn just or much (indeed, perhaps more) by getting the questions wrong, because there are many explanations of both right and wrong answers.

I actually like the idea of learning by getting answers wrong. When Piaget talked with children, he focused on the reasoning behind their wrong answers; that’s how he came by many of his deepest insights.

There’s something to be said for getting something wrong and having to think it through. We really should allow ourselves to get things wrong more often. Except in exams, of course.

Kind regards,

Ms Green

PS Sophia and Mikaela designed the visual stimulus below, which illustrates the ideas of the Gestalt psychologists. It can be perceived in various ways, depending on which part of the stimulus you focus on; if you focus on the star, that becomes the figure; if you focus on the storm, the star becomes the ground.

Perhaps your dominant perception could even show whether you’re naturally optimistic or naturally pessimistic – but to ascertain that would of course require systematic empirical research.

In any case, the Gestaltists are famous for having identified the principles by which we organize the visual world. The figure-ground principle was a central idea of theirs. Thank you, Mikaela and Sophia!

**A stimulus illustrating the principle of figure-ground, created by Mikaela and Sophia**

Visual perception – individual, changeable and potentially illusory

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February 19, 2013

2:29 am

Last year’s students – their visual stimuli for the first outcome

I’m a big girl, sure, but in reality I’m not bigger than my husband, who is cowering over in the corner… This Ames Room in the north of England made me look like a giant, while he suddenly transmogrified, at least in the eyes of a perceiver, into a midget.

Visual perception is a paradox.

On the one hand, we have remarkably stable perceptions despite the rapid and bizarre changes in our retinal image.

On the other hand, our perceptions can be flawed. Sometimes the rules that normally allow us to view the world quite accurately lead us to make perceptual errors. For instance, we assume that the Ames Room is square and regular in shape and this leads us to perceive the two people at opposite corners as a giant and a midget. We know the perception is wrong. But the illusion is unavoidable. You can watch Phillip Zimbardo’s video explanation of this illusion at this link.

To find out more about visual perception, try these links and pages on this blog:

The wonderful human eye

A simple test of your blind spot (recommended by Dewansh)

Introduction to visual perception

The Müller-Lyer Illusion

A brief introduction to visual illusions and other perceptual phenomena

We hope you enjoy this topic and occasionally catch yourselves in the act of perceiving.

Kind regards,

Ms Green and Ms Bottrell

Revision Handouts for Unit 2 Exam, 2012

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November 14, 2012

10:12 pm

group with hearts — Thanks for a very good year, Year 11 students. We wish you the very best for your exams and next year.

Dear Year 11 students,

These three documents should help you to prepare for the exam. You could use a kind of traffic light method to determine your priorities for revision. A green dot beside a topic means you feel totally confident about it, a yellow one means you’re not so sure, and a red one, in the memorable phrase used by Ms Simkin, means “freak out”!

Then become your own examiner. As you tackle the more difficult content for the exam, try to dream up all kinds of nasty questions. What are the questions that you, as a vicious and punitive examiner, a kind of exam-writing superego, would ask?

Kind regards,

Ms Green

Simple questions and answers on the content of the course: Revision Quiz for Psychology Unit 2, 2012
Badly designed studies with buzz words and ideas for fixing them: Psych Fixer with Answers
Dot points for revision: Exam Revision Unit 2 2012

Measuring kindness

September 9, 2012

7:31 am

Dear Year 11 students,

As you have no doubt realised after a year or more of study, psychologists like to assign numbers to seemingly immeasurable qualities, just to show that every human behaviour can be studied in some way. It seems that even kindness can be quantified.

Kindness may not seem a very scientific concept, but if you call it prosocial behaviour instead, generate precise definitions of what constitutes it and set up experiments to discover when people show it and when they don’t, you can begin to get a handle on this nebulous idea.

Prosocial behaviour means helping another person or, in a broader sense, acting in a way that benefits society as a whole. It encompasses activities such as helping an old person across a road, donating money to charity, giving aid when someone is injured or even donating a kidney to a person with kidney disease. In other words, prosocial behaviour is a phrase for the act of being kind to the other people who inhabit the world.

Not surprisingly, research psychologists have come up with some entertaining and occasionally alarming ways of studying prosocial behaviour. For instance, in the footage below, which is completely silent but strangely compelling, you can observe whether a person, when left alone, decides to report a fire. You can then watch how a person in a group reacts to exactly the same stimulus: that is, smoke pouring into the room. Whether the person is alone or not affects the reaction, as you will see. The possible reasons for the different response are introduced in the slideshow beneath the footage.

Having observed this relatively old study, you might like to attempt the true/false quiz in the slideshow below, then watch a recent study about rats, one of my favourite animals. As you will see, the rats in this study showed that humans have no monopoly on kindness. Of course, the researchers did not call it that. Their name for it was “empathically motivated helping behaviour”.

Kind regards,

Ms Green

Prosocial Behaviour

Being obedient…

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August 12, 2012

5:23 am

Dear Year 11 Psychology students,

Even though I don’t want you to start swinging from the rafters during my classes, I do want you to appreciate the dangers as well as the advantages of obedience. That’s why I’m publishing this presentation on Milgram’s experiment. I find his study chilling, both because of its results and because he dreamed it up in the first place. But the message of the experiment, however suspect its ethics, is one that should be made clear to every soldier, every teacher, every person in authority, every person whose deference to an authority figure, a dictator or a maniac could lead to human suffering. In short, to every person on earth.

The experiment included a fake generator

Milgram’s study arose partially from the Holocaust and the Nuremberg trials, where the Nazi war criminals frequently said that they had only been following orders in the death camps. They did not say, “I did the wrong thing,” but instead, “I did what I was told”.

I do not believe that everyone in the world is capable of the kinds of actions that the Nazis carried out. There were many other historical factors at work in the development of Hitler’s dictatorship and the implementation of the Nazis’ genocidal policies. But all the same, Milgram examined that suspect, horrifying defence, “I did what I was told”, and discovered that ordinary Americans – and people of other nationalities – were often more prepared than he would have thought to be senselessly cruel to innocent strangers.

A source of hope and consolation, perhaps, is that Milgram found one factor in particular that reduced this numbing willingness to obey the authority figure. Read the presentation below to find out what this factor was.

Of course, you need not obey.

Kind regards,

Ms Green

Social Influence Milgram

Afterword:
At this link is a short video and a transcript of an interview with several Australians who were involved in an experiment similar to Milgram’s in the 1970s at La Trobe University. The long-term effects on the participants are explored in a compassionate way. Their mental suffering, even decades afterwards, highlights the cruelty of the study and the ethical principles it breached.

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2012/s3489852.htm

Year 12 PP Slides

by felicitysj

March 21, 2012

6:54 am

Year 12 PP Slides – are now all up in a pdf format so hopefully everyone can easily access them -Ms Shiel-Jones

Perceptive students…

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March 15, 2012

2:38 am

Student Work

ambiguous stimulus, Bridey, Emma, Gestalt principles, Jamie, Lizzie, Steven, visual perception, Year 11 Psychology

So far the outcomes on visual perception that I have corrected have been eye-catching. Below are some of the year eleven students’ clever visual illusions or ambiguous stimuli. Test your own visual tendencies or leave an admiring comment.

Here is the first stimulus, a painting by Emma, whose work also appears in an earlier post.

Ambiguous stimulus by Emma — Part of Emma's comment on her work: "The ambiguous stimulus I have created can be interpreted in two main ways...Notice that when you focus upon the couple, what used to be part of the figure becomes part of the ground." A remarkably effective and slightly spooky artwork, Emma - brilliant!

took quite a different course in developing his visual stimulus. You can view it below:
Jamie’s Visual Stimulus

Bridey and Steven, meanwhile, applied some Gestalt principles to an icon in the history of psychology. I was impressed by their ingenuity as well as by Steven’s description, which is shown below the picture. The only thing missing from the stimulus is the ubiquitous cigar…

Sigmund Freud — An old man, a famous psychologist or some lines of text? - A visual stimulus created by Bridey and Steven

Steven’s description:

“The Gestalt principles play a huge role when observing this picture, as the brain has a tendency to organise and group many small objects (words or letters) into one larger object (a man’s face). The figure-ground principle is vital in determining what an observer sees in this image.

“If the figure (the focus point) is the image as a whole, the observer will most likely see a face. If the observer looks more closely and makes the figure a small section of the image, they are more likely to see lines of text. Humans also group visually similar objects together. This is why we can differentiate between the lighter areas of the text (for example the beard) and the darker areas (for example the glasses). Here the observer groups the elements of visual similarity (lighter text or darker text) together to form recognisable objects. The proximity of the letters and words is also key in the perception of this image. If the letters and words were further apart the observer would be far less likely to see a face…”

Finally, the photo below shows Lizzie’s version of the hallway illusion. Although a tall girl, Lizzie looks somehow not quite so tall in one part of the picture. The reasons include our use of depth principles such as relative size and linear perspective, as well as other pictorial cues.

In my mind, of course, wherever she stands and whatever she does, Lizzie will always be tall…

In every picture you see, the monocular cues to depth help you to interpret the picture as a 3D scene. Sometimes these cues can lead you astray, especially if someone doctors what you see.

Year 12 Unit 3 SAC 1

by felicitysj

March 2, 2012

3:56 am

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Year 12 Unit 3 SAC 1 – Please revise by completing Activity 5 page 9 and Activity 6 page 10 of the psych book VCE Units 3 & 4. It will be a test on research methods, states of consciousness and sleep. Study up on stages of sleep and the different states of consciousness.

Revision topics for the first test – Year 11 Psychology

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February 26, 2012

5:30 am