Psychology and Life (Virtual Course at Fudan University)

Sigmund Freud:

• The unconscious, inner forces & conflicts are the main causes underlying our behaviors.
• Tension reduction is the purpose of all behaviors.
• Freud’s ideas grew out of his work with mentally disturbed patients, but he believed that the principles he observed applied to both normal and abnormal behavior.
• human nature is not always rational and that actions may be driven by motives that are not in conscious awareness

John B. Waston:

• Environment matters: every behavior is triggered by a stimulus
• Study of the relationship between stimulus and behavior
• Mental states cannot be studied
  • Introspection 反省 is not objective 客观
  • “Talk is cheap”
• Stimulus -> Black Box -> Response

B. F. Skinner

• Operant conditioning (training)
  • Reinforcement (reward, stimulus) increases the incidence of a behavior
  • Punishment decreases the incidence
• Verbal Behavior (1957)
  • Attempt to explain how children learn to use language with operant conditioning

• the third wave, challenging the first two waves: people are neither driven by the powerful, instinctive forces, nor manipulated by their environments.
• Instead, people are active creatures who are innately good and capable of choice.

Carl Rogers (1902-1987)

• men strive to seek positive self development and are capable of making meaningful choices.

Abraham Maslow (1908- 1970)

• Multiple-motivation-system: Hierarchy of needs

Focus on mental processes (attention, thinking, problem solving, decision making etc.)

Noam Chomsky (1928 -)

• Critique of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior:
  • Humans are genetically predisposed to learning language
  • Language requires some kind of mental representation

Jean Piaget (1896- 1980)

• used a series of mental tasks to demonstrate qualitative changes over the course of cognitive development

George Miller: Why can people remember 7 (+ or - 2) items, but not more?

• Experience and behaviors are largely understood as the result of chemical and electrical activities taking place within and between nerve cells.
• Reductionism: even the most complex behavior can be entirely explained by chemical and electrical activities
• “What changes in your brain occurred while you learned to read?”
• Behavioral neuroscience: to understand the brain processes underlying behaviors such as sensation, learning, and emotion.
• Cognitive neuroscience: focus on the brain bases of higher cognitive functions such as memory and language

• Darwin: law of natural selection
• Those organisms that are better suited to their environments tend to produce offspring (and pass on their genes) more successfully than those organisms with poorer adaptations
  • Metal abilities & behavioral tendencies are evolved to solve central adaptive problems (survival pressures): eating, mating, keeping safe

• Social and cultural factors (other than physical environment) shape our behaviors and mental processes, e.g. religious belief
  • Human beings are essentially social beings (instead of physical beings) and need to survive socially
• A cross-cultural perspective can be brought to bear on almost every topic of psychological research:
  Do the languages people speak affect the way they experience the world?
  How does culture affect the way children develop toward adulthood?
  How do cultural attitudes shape the experience of old age?

• Lesion study
• EEG
• Brain Imaging

Event related potentials (ERP)

• Uses electroencephalogram (EEG) recording to detect electrical activity of brain
  • Mechanism: Neurons firing cause slight changes in the electrical potential of the scalp
• A single EEG recording of an experimental trial has a lot of noise, but if you sum over a great number of trials, the noise averages out and you can see systematic patterns
• Advantages:
  • High temporal resolution - you can distinguish different stages of processing
  • Relatively cheap
• Disadvantage:
  • Low spatial resolution - hard to tell where the activation comes from

Brain Imaging:

• Uses Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Functional MRI (fMRI) to detect changes in the flow of blood to cells in the brain
• MRI gives us very high-resolution, three-dimensional images of the body (structural MRI)
  • Mechanism:
    • Brain reacts to neuronal activity by increasing blood flow to the active areas. Higher oxygen saturation in active areas
    • MRI can distinguish oxygen-rich blood from blood that is low in oxygen.
• Advantages
  • Relatively high spatial resolution: Which part of the brain is activated.
  • No radioactivity
  • More and more widely available
• Disadvantages
  • Poor temporal resolution - brain takes ~ 1-2 s to adjust the blood flow
  • Still expensive - around $60/h

• Changes in the performance of the brain based on experiences
• Self healing: collateral sprouting 侧枝出芽; substitution of function and neurogenesis

Fechner (1801 - 1887)

• The study of the relationship between physical stimuli and psychological experience (sensation).

Absolute Threshold

The minimum amount of physical energy needed to produce a sensory experience.

• Operational definition: the stimulus level at which a sensory signal is detected half the time.

Difference Threshold

The smallest physical difference (just noticeable difference, JND) between two stimuli that can still be recognized as a difference.

• OD: the point at which the stimuli are recognized as different half of the time

Weber’s law

JND between stimuli is a constant fraction of the intensity of the standard stimulus

• the bigger or more intense the standard stimulus, the larger the increment needed to get a just noticeable difference.
• 100g vs 110g & 1000g vs 1010g?

Sensory Adaptation

• e.g., sunshine seems less blinding after a while outdoors; foul odor fades out as your smell system adapts.
• The diminishing responsiveness of sensory systems to prolonged stimulus input

Sensory organ: eye

• The journey:
  • light-cornea 角膜
  • anterior chamber 房水
  • pupil (iris 虹膜)
  • retina-receptors (being sensitive to photons with specific wavelength
  • optic nerve-lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus (LGN，丘脑视神经外侧膝状核)
  • primary visual cortex (occipital lobe)-secondary visual cortex

The Retina

• Convert info. about the world from light waves into neural signals.
• Rod cells: 120 millions, Operates best in near darkness
• Cone cells: 6-7 millions. Densely packed in fovea, specialized ine bright, color-filled in Tiled,
• Blind spot/optic disk where the optic nerve leaves the eye and no receptors

Eye Adaptation:

• Human eyes have extraordinary abilities to adjust to different levels of light and ndarkness
  • From daylight to darkness: 20-30 minutes
  • From darkness to daylight: 5 minutes
• Dark Adaptation
  • The gradual improvement of the eyes’ sensitivity after a shift in illumination from light to near darkness
  • Rods are able to respond to less light from the environment than your cones are

Physical properties	Experience of color
wavelength	hue
intensity (wave’s amplitude)	brightness
purity	saturation

• Gestalt laws
  1. Form perception
  2. Figure and ground
  3. Proximity
  4. Similarity
  5. Good continuation
  6. Closure

How to perceive 3-dimentional world out of 2- dimentional patterns ?

Binocular cues: comparisons of the visual information from two eyes

• Retinal disparity: (the displacement between the horizontal positions of corresponding images in the two eyes) increases with the distance in depth between two objects
• Convergence: ( the degree to which the eyes turn inward to fixate on an object), increases as the objects gets closer (within 1 meter)

Monocular cues:

• Interposition: occluded object is farther away than the occluding one.
• Relative size: Objects of the same size at different distances project images of different sizes on the retina.
• Linear perspecive: parallel lines seem to converge at distance.
• Texture gradient: a texture is coarser for near areas and finer for more distant ones.
• Perceptual constancy: you see the world as invariant, constant, and stable despite changes in the stimulation of your sensory receptors.
  • Size constancy: refers to your ability to perceive the true size of an object despite variations in the size of its retinal image.
  • Shape constancy: You perceive an object’s actual shape correctly even when the object is slanted away from you, making the shape of the retinal image substantially different from that of the object itself.
  • Lightness constancy: is your tendency to perceive the whiteness, grayness, or blackness of objects as constant across changing levels of illumination.

Bottom-up process

• Taking sensory data in and sending it to the brain for extraction and analysis
• Data-driven processing: the starting point is the sensory data

Top-down process

• The process where your expectations affect perception
• Conceptually-driven processing: concepts in memory affect the interpretation

The influence of contexts, expectations &experiences

• Perceptual set: A readiness to detect a particular stimulus in a given context (a mental predisposition to perceive one thing and not another )

An accidental discovery by Pavlov.

Pavlov:

• A Russian physiologist, who won the Nobel Prize on medicine for his work on the gastric juices involved in digestion
• “Accidents” of measuring secretions: from meat powder iptself to other stimulus (“predicting” the meat powder)
• A turning point for his career: 532 studies in 30 years

Classical conditioning

a type of learning in which an initially neutral stimulus (NS), when paired with a stimulus that elicits a reflex response, results in a learned response.

• Reflex: response triggered by specific stimuli that are biologically relevant for the organism
• Components:

  Unconditioned Stimulus (UCS)

  the specific stimulus that triggers the reflex.

  Conditioned Stimulus (CS)

  a neural stimulus that is intended to pair with the UCS to trigger the reflex.

  Unconditioned Response (UCR)

  the response triggered by UCS.

  Conditioned Response (CR)

  the (same) response triggered by CR.

• Procedures:
  • Before conditioning: UCS automatically elicits UCR. CS (neural) elicits no or irrelevant response.
  • During conditioning: CS followed by UCS elicits UCR.
  • After conditioning: CS directly elicits CR.

Other types of conditioning

• Delay conditioning (most widely used and most effective): the CS comes prior to and stays on at least until the UCS is presented.
• Trace conditioning: the CS is discontinued or turned off before the UCS is presented.
• Simultaneous conditioning: both the CS and UCS are presented at the same time.
• Backward conditioning: the CS is presented after the UCS

Timing Requirements:

• CS and UCS must occur close together in time.
• CS must also reliably predict and occurrence of the UCS.

Extinction

CR no longer appears when CS is presented due to the fact that CS does not predict UCS

Spontaneous 自发的 recovery

CS elicits a weak CR after extinction

• Rapid relearning of CS-CR (saving)

Stimulus Generalization

Once a CR has been conditioned to a particular CS, similar stimuli may also elicit the response. The more similar the new stimulus is to the original CS, the stronger the response will be.

Stimulus Discrimination

Respond differently to stimuli that are distinct from the CS on some dimension (e.g., differences in hue or in pitch).

Implications and Applications

• Fear conditioning: Watson and Little Albert
  • UCS (loud noise), UCR (startle response)
  • NS (white rat) -> UCS (7 times) -> CS
  • Generalization: white rat -> other furry objects
• Advertisement and positive emotional conditioning
  • UCS (beautiful woman) -> UCR (sexual arousal)
  • NS (product, such as a type of whisky) + UCS -> CS

Operant conditioning: Learning about consequences

• Law of effect (E L. Thorndike, 1874 - 1949) A response that is followed by satisfying consequences becomes more probable and a response that is followed by dissatisfying consequences becomes less probable.
• B. F. Skinner embraced Thorndike’s view that environmental consequences exert a powerful effect on

Operant

the behaviors exhibited by an organism that have observable effects on its environment

Operant conditioning

A type of learning where the frequency of a behavior (operant) is influenced by its consequences (resulting environmental stimuli).

Reinforcement Contingencies 偶发事件 (RC)

• Establish the RC
  • A consistent relationship between a response and the changes in the environment.

Reinforcer

a stimulus that increases the probability of a given behavior

Reinforcement: the delivery of reinforcers

Positive Reinforcement

A process of increasing the likelihood of a behavior by following it with the delivery of a pleasant stimulus.

Negative Reinforcement

A process of increasing the likelihood of a behavior by following it with the removal of an aversive stimulus.

Positive punishment

A process of reducing the likelihood of a behavior by following it with the delivery of an aversive stimulus.

Negative punishment

A process of reducing the likelihood of a behavior by following it with the removal of a pleasant stimulus.

The disadvantage of using punishment:

• Reinforcing the abuser, Lead to other “unwelcomed” response, e.g., avoidance & aggression

How to use punishment effectively:

• “Follow through” the rule, Limited time and intensity, Reinforcing the appropriate behavior at the same time
• Try to use negative punishment instead of positive punishment.
• Do not punish someone because of the person’s personality / characteristics.

Types of Reinforcers

Primary reinforcers

(biologically determined, e.g. food, sex)

Conditioned reinforcers

(NS associated with PR, e.g. money, praise)

Criterion for choosing effective reinforcers: things or activities that one prefers or is derived - one man’s trash is another man’s treasure

Continuous reinforcement

Every time a behavior occurs, it is followed by a reinforcer (reward) without exception. This schedule is useful for initially establishing a behavior.

Partial reinforcement

Not every occurrence of the behavior is reinforced. It can be more “extinction-resistant”.

Fixed-Ratio

Reinforcement is delivered after the organism has emitted a fixed number of responses. For example, a unit-payment system where an employee receives payment for every fixed number of units produced.

Variable-Ratio

reinforcement is given after an unpredictable (variable) number of responses are made by the organism. E.g., gambling; highest rate of R and greatest resistance to extinction

Fixed-interval

Reinforcement is delivered after a fixed period of time has passed since the last reinforcement was given. A scalloped pattern (扇形模式)

Variable-Interval

a response is rewarded after an unpredictable amount of time has passed. A moderate & stable pattern.

Nature vs. Nurture: the limits of behaviorism

• Biological factors may put “limits” on classical conditioning and operant conditioning.
• Instinct drift: learned behavior drifts toward instinctual behavior
  • e.g. pigs poked at coins with snout instead of putting them into a “piggy bank”
  • “Genetically programmed resistance to change”

Observational learning (social learning or modeling)

method of learning that consists of observing and modeling another individual’s behavior, attitudes, or emotional expressions.

• Vicarious reinforcement and punishment
• Expectation matters.

Albert Bandura, Stanford University.

• Can violent behaviors be learned by observation?
• Four-processes theory
  • attention
  • retention
  • motor reproduction
  • motivation

By G. Sperling (1960)

Whole-report procedure

• Materials: 3x4 matrix of letters and numbers.
• Display time: 1/20 second (50ms), very short.
• Task: To report as many as possible
• Result: participants only reported 4 items.

Partial-report procedure

• Materials: the same.
• Display time: the same.
• Task: To report only one row according to the tone signal.
• Result: Most participants could remember correctly for any of three rows.
• Inference: All of the information in the display has gotten into iconic memory. (large capacity).

Fading speed:

The principle of encoding specificity: Memories emerge most efficiently when the context of retrieval matches the context of encoding.

Context-dependent memory (Godden & Baddeley, 1975):

• Scuba divers learned lists of words either on a beach or under water.
• Tested for retention of those words in the two contexts.
• Perforance was nearly 50% better when the context at encoding and recall stage matched.

The origins of intelligence testing:

• Binet’s intelligence test: to classify and seperate developmentally disabled from normal school children

• The Stanford-Binet intelligence scale:

  Intelligence quotient (IQ) = mental age / chronological age * 100.

• The Wechsler intelligence scale: combine verbal with nonverbal subtests, Wechsler adult intelligence scale (WAIS)-IV (2008),

  

  • The family of Wechsler’s IQ tests: Wechsler intelligence scale for children (ages 6 to 16, WISC-IV), Wechsler Preschool and primary scale of intelligence (ages 2.5 to 7.25, WPPSI-IV).

Intellectual disability (satisfy both)

1. below the age of 18, IQ scores 2 standard deviations below the mean on an intelligence test.
2. limitations in adaptive behavior, such as conceptual skills (language use, reading and writing, money concepts), social skills (follow rules/laws, social responsibility, avoid dvcictimization), and practical skills (personal care, health care, occupational skills)

Giftedness

• IQ scores above 2 standard deviations.
• “Three-ring” conception: gifted individuals are found at the intersection of above-average ability, high levels of creativity, and high levels of task commitment.

Gifted individuals are better in addressing their social and emotional issues, and may have lower levels of anxiety.

Crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence:

Crystallized intelligence

involves the knowledge a person has already acquired and the ability to access that knowledge. It is measured by tests of vocabulary, arthmetic, and general information.

Fluid intelligence

is the ability to see complex relationships and solve problems. It is measured by tests of block designs and spatial visualization in which the background information needed to solve a problem is included or readil apparent.

• General intelligence (g): The performance of individuals on each of a variety of intelligence tests was highly correlated - a general intelligence underlying all intelligent performance.
• Specific skills (s): Each individual domain also has associated with it specific skills.
• A person’s performance on a test depends both on the person’s g and s.

• Analytical intelligence: information processing (like academic problem-solving)
• Creative intelligence: the ability to deal with novel problems
• Practical intelligence: involves your ability to adapt to new and different environments, select appropriate environments, and effectively shape your environment to suit your needs.

Implication: People can excel in domains that are not recognized by traditional conceptions of intelligence.

Critics: Overlap among people’s functioning on what Gardner argues are separate types of intelligence

Emotional Intelligence

• The ability to perceive, appraise, and express emotions accurately and appropriately.
• The ability to use emotions to facilitate thinking
• The ability to understand and analyze emotions and to use emotional knowledge effectively.
• The ability to regulate one’s emotions to promote both emotional and intellectual growth

Test: Multifactor emotional intelligence scale, MEIS.

To assess the extent to which intelligence is genetically deterimined.

• need to tease apart the effects of shared genes and shared environment.

Genetic influence

identical twins show higher correlations between their IQs than fraternal twins or other sibling pairs do

Environmental influence

the correlations are also higher when the twins and other sibling pairs were raised together.

Heritability estimate

A heritability estimate of a particular trait, such as intelligence, is based on the proportion of the variability in test scores on that trait that can be traced to genetic factors.

• about 30 to 80% of the variance in IQ scores is due to genetic makeup. For hieght, 93-96%.
• Heritability estimates pertain only to the average in a given population of individuals. We cannot determine the specific generic contribution to any individual’s IQ.

Socioeconomic status (SES) of the family

• Children from more privileged, high-SES backgrounds are likely to have higher IQs than their less privileged, low-SES peers.
• Poor helath, low birth weight, lowered mental ability
• Lack of books, written media, computers, and other materials.
• Poor parents have little time or energy to play with intellectually stimulate their children.

The Head Start Program: (US federal government)

• (poor-family) Children are exposed to special preschool education, they receive decent daily meals, and their parents are given advice on health and other aspects of child rearing.

Intelligent people have longer lives:

• Better environment
• More efficient brains
• More education, fewer potential dangers
• Engage in fewer unhealty behaviors.

• Germinal stage (胚种期): first 2 weeks after formation of the zygote
• Embryonic stage (胚胎期): 3-8 weeks
• Fetal stage (胎儿期): 9 weeks to the birth

Reflex: a response that is naturally triggered by specific stimuli that are biologically relevant for the organism.

Rooting reflex

when something brushes against infants’ cheeks, they turn their heads in that direction.

Sucking reflex

when an object is placed in their mouths, infants begin to suck.

Hearing: Capable of hearing, but auditory acuity not completely mature. By week 3, recognize mom’s voice.

Seeing: Visual acuity not fully developed but can see to some extent.

Touch, smell, and taste: Not onlt present at birth, but are reasonably sophisticated. Can discrimiate different tastes.

Physical growth is accompanied by the maturation of motor ability

Sensitive period (Weak critical period)

an optimal stage for children to have appropriate environmental experiences relevant to normal development, i.e., otherwise, they will experience development with more difficulty, but still doable.

• Development will proceed most smoothly if children have those experiences during the sensitive period.

(Strong) critical period

a maturational stage during which children must obtain appropriate environmental experiences, i.e., otherwise, they may not be able to develop a particular function. The condition is a stronger.

Principles:

• Cephalocaudal: from head to foot.
• Proximodistal: from center to the extremities.
• From gross o fine motor skills (which require more precise coordination of smaller muscles).

Gesell’s Maturational Theory, the Ladder experiment

• Subjects: a pair of identical twins A and B
• At 46 weeks, A started to climb the ladder for 10 minutes every day,

and B did not.

• After 6 weeks, how long would it take A and B to climb 5 steps?
• How about when they turned one-year old?

Method: interviews and experiments with his 3 children

Basic concepts:

Scheme 图式

the mental structures for selecting information and interpreting the world

Assimilation 同化

new environmental information is modified (digested) to fit into what is already known

Accommodation 顺应

existing schemes are restructured or modified to understand and interpret new information

The interweaving of assimilation and accommodation results in new cognitive development & adaptation

Stages	Age	Schemes	Achievement/Limitation
Sensorimotor	0-2	Use body movement to coordinate sensations. Sensorimotor sequences,such as looking at mother when she speaks	From “out of sight, outof mind ” to object permanence (representation of “absent object”)
Preoperational	2-7	Improved ability to represent mentally objects that are not physically present; language/images/gestures	Egocentrism: inability to take the perspective of another person. Centration: Fail to use mental operation
Concrete operations	7-11	Reasoning with respect to concrete physical objects; concepts/categories/perspective taking	Conservation / reversibility
Formal operations	11+	Abstract reasoning and hypothetical thinking; applied to both concrete and abstract (hypothetical & future) situations	“Scientist” thinking / topics like truth, justice and exercise

• Sensorimotor stage: Object permanence refers to children’s understanding that objects exist and behave independently of their actions or awareness.
• Preoperational stage:

  Egocentrism (自我中心)

  The child’s inability to take the perspective of another person.

  Centration (中心化)

  focus their attention on only one aspect of a situation and disregard other relevant aspects.

• Concrete operational stage:

  Conservation

  know that the physical properties of objects do not change when nothing is added or taken away, even though the objects’ appearances change.

Limitations:

• Underestimate an infant’s capacity while overestimate adolescents’; neglect the role of culture and education
• Development is a more continuous course
• Post-formal operations: beyond Piaget’s formal operations, considering practical experience, moral judgment and values.

• Intelligence: fluid intelligence (learn quickly and thoroughly), crystallized intelligence (verbal abilities). Age-related gains in wisdom - expertise in the fundamental practices of life (Staudinger & Glück, 2011)
• Memory: aging does not affect the access to the information stored long ago; instead, aging affects the processes that allow new information to be effectively organized, stored, and retrieved (Buchler & Reder,2007).

Erik Erikson: trained by Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud.

• Proposed that every individual must successfully navigate a series of psychosocial stages, each of which presented a particular conflict or crisis.
• How to solve crisis:
  • The interaction between dispositions and supports from the social environment.
  • The quality of the social interactions matters.

Age	Crisis	Adequate resolution	Critical social experiences
0-1	Trust vs. mistrust	Developing a sense that the world is safe and good	A caring and consistent mother
1-3	Autonomy vs. self-doubt	Realizing that one is an independent person with the ability to make decisions	Patient and supportive (vs. excessive restriction or criticism)
3-6	Initiative vs. guilt	Developing a willingness to try new things and to handle failure	Encourage the sense of freedom and self-confidence
6-11	Competence vs. inferiority	Learning competence in basic skills and to cooperate with others	Encouraging parents and trustful peers & teachers
11-20	Identity vs. role confusion	Developing a coherent, integrated sense of inner self	Supportive social surroundings
20-40	Intimacy vs. isolation	Establishing ties to another in a trusting, loving relationship	Partners whom you can identify with
40-65	Generativity vs. stagnation	Finding meaning in career, family, and community via productive work	Satisfying career and family life
65+	Ego integrity vs. despair	Viewing one’s life as satisfactory and worth living	Supporting younger

Temperament (气质) - biologically based levels of emotional and behavioral response to the environment.

4 kinds of temperaments (Thomas & Chess, 1984)

• easy babies (40%): have a positive disposition; their body functions operate regularly and they are adaptable.
• difficult babies (10%): have negative moods and are slow to adapt to new situations; when confronted with a new situation, they tend to withdraw.
• slow-to-warm-up babies (15%): are inactive, showing relatively calm reactions to their environment; their moods are generally negative, and they withdraw from new situations, adapting slowly.
• The remaining 35 % cannot be consistently categorized

Attachment (依恋) – a close emotional relationship between infants and caregiver, providing the basis of survival and socialization/cognitive development

Secure base

• Infant will seek his/her caregiver when facing threat and danger
• Caregiver provides the sense of safety and structure that allow the infant to explore the world and grow

Assessment of the attachment style: The Strange Situation Test (Ainsworth & colleagues, 1978)

• The child is brought into an unfamiliar room filled with toys. With the mother present, the child is encouraged to explore the room and to play. After several minutes, a stranger comes in, talks to the mother, and approaches the child. Next, the mother exits the room. After this brief separation, the mother returns, there is a reunion with her child, and the stranger leaves.
• Key point for assessment: How child react after the mother leaves & returns
• Securely attached children (65%) show some distress when the parent leaves the room; seek proximity, comfort, and contact upon reunion; and then gradually return to play.
• Insecurely attached–avoidant children (20%) seem aloof and may actively avoid and ignore the parent upon her return.
• Insecurely attached–anxious/ambivalent children (15%) become quite upset and anxious when the parent leaves; at reunion, they cannot be comforted, and they show anger and resistance to the parent but, at the same time, express a desire for contact.
• High correlation of attachment styles has been observed, e.g. Infant & children (Bohlin et.al., 2000)

Parenting Styles:

Demandingness

the extent to which parents expect their children to behave.

Responsiveness

the extent to which parents are sensitive to their children’s needs.

Sigmund freud:

• Psychic energy – the source of motivation for human actions
• Two basic drives: self-preservation (meeting such needs as hunger and thirst) & Eros, the driving force related to sexual urges and preservation of the species.
• Libido: the psychic energy that drives individuals toward sensual pleasures of all types, especially sexual ones.
• Erogenous zones: genitals and other sensitive areas

Five stages:

Key concepts:

• Fixation : an inability to progress normally to the next stage of development, which is due to too much gratification or too much frustration at one of the early stages.
• Psychic determinism: the assumption that all mental and behaviorall reactions are determined by earlier experiences.
• Unconscious: the repository of information that is unavailable to conscious awareness: Freud’s most important contribution to the science of psychology.
• Unconscious thinking or information could be reflected by neurotic symptoms, dreams, and slips of the pen and tongue.
• Freudian slip: verbal or memory mistake that is linked to the unconscious mind.
• Free association:the principal procedure used in psychoanalysis to probe the unconscious and release repressed material.

The structure of personality:

• The id is the storehouse of the fundamental drives. It operates irrationally, and is governed by the pleasure principle, without concern for consequences. The id wants to do what feels good
• The superego, the conscience(良心), is the storehouse of an individual’s values, including moral attitudes learned from society. It is the inner voice of oughts and should nots. Superego insists on doing what is right.
• The ego is the reality-based aspect of the self that arbitrates the conflict between id impulses and superego demands.

Ego defense:

• Ego defense mechanism are mental strategies the ego uses to defend itself in the daily conflict between id impulses that seek expression and the superego’s demand to deny them - Vital to an individual’s psychological coping with powerful inner conflicts.
• Repression – keeps information out of consciousness, basic defense
• Anxiety is an intense emotional response triggered when a repressed conflict is about to emerge into consciousness. Repression is not working!