Transcript Applied cognitive psychology

Applied cognitive
psychology
Social psychology
Therapy
SLA
Morals - religion
Attention!
 Friday:
 8-10:
North 6.87
 10-12: South 4-429
 12-18: North 6.87
New implicit methods
 IAT
– Implicit Association Test
 LIB (Linguistic Intergroup Bias)
 Affective priming
 The visual-probe test
 Go-NoGo tasks
 Extrinsic affective Simon Task
 Emotional Stroop
Social cognition
 La
Piére”s Chinese couple in the USA
– Explicit attitudes cannot predict actual
behaviour
Applied implicit cognition
 Social
cognition:
– The IAT (Greenwald, McGee and
Schwartz, 1998)
– Implicit Association test
– Applied to attitudes, stereotypes, selfesteem
 “the
introspectively unidentified (or
inaccurately identified) trace of past
experience that mediates R” where R refers
to the category of responses that are
assumed to be influenced by that construct
The implicit association test
BUTTON A
Women (names or faces)
BUTTON B
Men (names or faces)
The implicit association test
BUTTON A
Positive traits (wonderful,
glorious)
BUTTON B
Negative traits (horrible)
The implicit association test
BUTTON A
Women (names or faces)
Positive traits (wonderful,
glorious)
BUTTON B
Men (names or faces)
Negative traits (horrible)
Validity
Less fakeable – unless done various
times
 Does not always correlate with
reported measures – which one is
true?

Disadvantages
 Sometimes
arbitrary categories have
to be chosen, no natural contrasts
exist
– Spiders
– Cocaine
 Unipolar
versions – there is simply
one category and a control condition
The implicit association test
BUTTON A
Spider names (black
widow, tarantula)
Positive words
(wonderful, glorious)
BUTTON B
Negative words (horrible)
The implicit association test
BUTTON A
BUTTON B
Spider names (black
widow, tarantula)
Positive words
(wonderful, glorious)
Negative words (horrible)
The implicit association test
BUTTON A
Cat names (Siamese,
Persian)
Positive words
(wonderful, glorious)
BUTTON B
Negative words (horrible)
The implicit association test
BUTTON A
BUTTON B
Cat names (Siamese,
Persian)
Positive words
(wonderful, glorious)
Negative words (horrible)
Basic idea
2000
1800
1600
1400
1200
spider
cat
1000
800
600
400
200
0
negative
positive
Race and prejudice
 The
willing and able problem
– Self report measures are transparent to
most people
– Remember the Chinese couple travelling
through America.
white
black
desirable
undesirable
Jamal
Sue-Ellen
wonderful
disgusting
Explicit measures

Semantic
differential
– 7 point
– Beautiful – ugly
– Pleasant –
unpleasant
– good – bad
– Honest – dishonest
– Nice - awful

Feeling
thermometer

Explicit and implicit measures
– sometimes correlate (Dovidio et al, 1997)
– Sometimes they don’t (Greenwald et al. 1998)

Actual behaviour (interaction with black
experimenter)
– correlates slightly more significantly with
implicit measures (0.39) than explicit ones
(0.33)
 but
in this study the two measures (implicit and
explicit) correlate
Learning attitudes

Olson & Fazio
(2001)
empathic
cruel
Attitudes

IAT task – positive
vs negative
love
death
The BeanFest Game

Faizio, Eiser and
Shook
– Imgaine you’re on a
new planet and have
to live off beans. You
have an energy of 100
initially, which
decreases if you eat
bad beans or do not
eat at all, and
increases if you eat.
Your goal is to survive
on the planet.
– With time on every
trial you lose -1
– You gain +10 with
good beans
– You lose -10 with bad
beans
Learning attitudes
 Luupites
and Niffites
– They were told different stories about
Luupites and Niffites
– There were names to the different
categories
 Positive

and negative nouns
Gregg, A. P., Banaji, M. R., & Seibt, B. (2006). Easier made than undone: the asymmetric malleability of automatic
preferences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 1–20.
LIB
 The
Linguistic intergroup bias
– the tendency to describe stereotypic events in more
abstract terms than counterstereotypic events.
 Distancing
from the self?
Abstract - concrete
 Descriptive
action verbs (hit)
– refer to objective descriptions of
observable behaviors that have a clear
beginning and end
 interpretive
action verbs (hurt)
– describe a general class of behaviors
and have positive or negative
connotations
Abstract - concrete
 state
verbs (hate)
– refer to enduring states without a clear
beginning or ending
 adjectives
(is violent)
– describe highly abstract personal
dispositions
Jim Jones hit the guy.
Jim Jones hurts the guy.
Jim Jones hates the guy.
Jim Jones is violent.
Jim Jones hit the guy.
Jim Jones hurts the guy.
Jim Jones hates the guy.
Jim Jones is violent.
She is violent.
She hit the guy.
Priming
Lexical Decision Task

Press YES or NO for whether the
following is a real word in English:
HOUSE
SLEEP
NOIK
BRUKE
NURSE

Non-words (BRUKE) are ‘fillers’
– Just to check the subject is paying attention
– We only look at real words
FAST response = easy to access (450 msec)
 SLOW response = hard to access (500 msec)

What affects lexical access
time?

1. Word Frequency
 High
frequency words = common words (cat,
mother, house)
 Low frequency words = uncommon words
(accordion, compass)

High frequency are faster to access
than Low
frequency
 even
when they’re balanced on other features
(e.g. length)
– E.g. Pen vs. Pun
– Rubenstein et al. (1970)
The Logogen Model
Morton (1969)
 Accounts
for the frequency effect
 The
lexical entry for each word
comes with a logogen
 The lexical entry only becomes
available once the logogen ‘fires’
 When
does a logogen fire?
– When you read/hear the word
Think of a logogen as being like a
‘strength-o-meter’ at a fairground
When the bell rings, the
logogen has ‘fired’
‘cat’
[kæt]
• what makes the logogen fire?
– seeing/hearing the word
• what happens once the logogen has fired?
– access to lexical entry!
‘cat’
[kæt]
• So how does this
help us to explain the
frequency effect?
– High frequency
words have a lower
threshold for firing
–E.g. cat vs. cot
‘cot’
[kot]
Low
freq
takes
longer
What affects lexical access
time?
 2.
Semantic Priming Effects
– (Meyer & Schvandeveldt, 1971)
 Subject
sees 2 words
 Must say YES or NO whether both are
real words
SLOW
– doctor
grass
… because nurse
FAST
– doctor
nurse
is already
‘warmed up’ by
having just
activated doctor
Spreading Activation Model
cradle
baby
bed
hospital nurse
dentist
doctor
heat
delirium
sun
green
grass
mammal
bird
canary
rain
fever
animal
yellow
ostrich
Spreading Activation Model
cradle
baby
bed
hospital nurse
dentist
doctor
heat
delirium
sun
green
grass
mammal
bird
canary
rain
fever
animal
yellow
ostrich
Semantic Network
cradle
baby
bed
hospital nurse
dentist
doctor
heat
delirium
sun
green
grass
mammal
bird
canary
rain
fever
animal
yellow
ostrich
Fits nicely with Logogen
Model
 Each
of the nodes in the network
has a logogen with it
 When
fires
we read doctor, its logogen
= doctor gets ‘activated’
 The
activation from doctor spreads
to nurse, this lowers the threshold
for nurse
– so make nurse faster to access
‘doctor’
[doktə]
• spreading activation
from doctor lowers the
threshold for nurse to
fire
– So nurse take less
time to fire
‘nurse’
[nə:s]
Spreading
activation
network
doctor nurse
docto
nurse
Homophobia

Homophobic individuals
– are threatened or sickened by their own personal
attraction to gay individuals
– somewhat odd and likely false to suggest that the
phobic individual harbors a secret attraction to the
phobic object (e.g., a snake in the case of snake phobia

Freud, S. (1936). The problem of anxiety. New York: W.W. Norton
& Company.

Adams et al.
– Homophobic men (versus non-homophobic
men) became physiologically aroused (i.e., had
increased penile tumescence) when presented
with short video clips of gay men involved in
sexual activity
– (only half of them!)

Shields & Harriman, 1984
– homophobic men exhibit physiological signs of
fear and anxiety while viewing pictures of gay
men
– similar to that exhibited by spider phobics
when viewing spider stimuli
 Defensie
and non-defensive
homophobia types
– high homophobia in the context of high
levels of self-deception should take a
defensive form
– low levels of self-deception should take
a non-defensive form
– Individual diVerences in self-deception
correlate positively with unrealistic selfportrayals in self-report
phobic participants (i.e., spider, snake,
and bloodinjection phobias) choose to
view phobic objects for a shorter time
than non-phobic individuals
 Participants had to rate the pleasentness
of pictures of heterosexual or homosexual
pairs in romantic contexts – actually the
measure taken was viewing time

3000
2500
2000
1500
1000
500
0
GAY
heterosexual
Questionnaires

Self deception
– Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding
I

always know why I like things;
Homophobia
– Index of Homophobia
I
would feel uncomfortable if I learned that my
neighbor was homosexual
 I would feel comfortable working closely with a male
Homosexual
 It would disturb me to Wnd out that my doctor was
homosexual
adjectives
Vocal categoization task:
gay or neutral
Positive or negative –
press button on a
response box
870
860
850
840
830
820
810
negative
positive
800
790
780
gay
neutral
White power
Subliminal prime
Blank screen or white face
Had to scale liking of black
or wite (old and new faces)
4,7
4,6
4,5
4,4
white exposed
control
4,3
4,2
4,1
4
black face
white face
Affective priming
100 ms ISI
200 ms prime presentation
Target appears
evaluative categorization
lexical decision
pronounciation
Mental health
Therapy?

Normal and
abnormal
– Deviant
– Maladaptive
– Personal distress
Implicit cognition and therapy
 Psychopathologies:
– lack of intentional control
– Irrational
– Affectional in nature
 Freud,
TAT
– More contamination
– fakeable
Cognitive models of anxiety
 Maladaptive
fear schema
– More attentive to threatening cues
– Interpretation of ambiguous situations
– Automaticity of fear schemas
 Explicit:
not going to be fatally attacked by
daddylonglegs
 Implicitly: avoidance
Anxiety disorders

Watson versus
genetics
Phobic disorder
A
persistent and irrational fear of an
object or situation that presents no
realistic danger
Arachnophobia
Arachnophobia and IAT
 There
is no natural implicit opposing
category to spiders
– Snakes?
– Household items?
– Blood-injection?
 Mixed
results
 Go-NoGo task
Go-noGo task
Has to answer quickly – otherwise it is not automatic – 1400
ms window
 Spider
fear
– Participants had to approach a
frightening-looking spider
– They had to report anxiety level
– on the basis of the distance they were
groupes into high-fear group and lowfear group
Depression

Unipolar and bipolar
Mood disorders
 Implicit
and ecplicit views
– Negative schemas activated
– Dual process theory of depression
 Questionnaires
(explicit):
– BDI
– CSQ (Cognitive Style Questionnaire)
– General distress Scale
 IAT
(Implicit)
– Self (own name, personal data taken)
– Positive adjectives
3 week follow-up
Cultural variations



Main disorders everyhere – but with minor differences
Culture bound disorders
􀂉 Koro
– 􀂉 an obsessive fear that one’s penis will withdraw into one’s
abdomen, seen only in Malaya and other regions of southern
Asia.

􀂉 Windigo
– intense craving for human flesh and fear that one will turn into
a cannibal, seen only among Algonquin Indian cultures

􀂉 Anorexia nervosa
– an eating disorder characterized by intentional self-starvation,
until recently seen only in affluent Western cultures
Religion
 Attribution:
percieved cause of action
– Interoceptive sensations of bodily action
– Attention: drawing attention either to
self or others shifs attribution
– Actor/observer effect (Jones and
Nisbett)
– The „mirror experiment” subjective and
objective self-awareness (Duval and
Wicklund) self-aware and environment
aware.
– Stigmas – social and linguistic

Dijksterhuis, A. et al., EVects of subliminal priming of self and God on self-attribution
of authorship for events, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (2007),
doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2007.01.003
Hypercorrection
 Bement
a házba.
 Bent van a házban.
 Mirror:
sticking to the norms more
God’s punishment

Authorship in a word recognition task
– Participants are told they are competing with a
computer
– The computer takes the word off the screen
after 450, 500, 550, 600, 650, 700 ms
– Participants have to make a judgement on 1-6
scale whether it was them or the computer
who took the word off the screen
17 ms prime
250 ms
premask
„me”
„computer”
„God”
„the”
„broccoli”
„xxxxx”
50 ms
postmask
Target word
Judgement
task: was it
you or the
computer?
(1 computer
6 me)
 No
differences in lexical decision time
"It wa
s
me wh
o
did th
is "
4,5
4
3,5
3
2,5
non-primed
primed
2
1,5
1
0,5
0
me
computer
GOD
nonb
GOD
believers
 Cross/culturally
religion:
recurrent features of
– communal participation in costly ritual
– belief in supernatural agents and
counterintuitive concepts
– separation of the sacred and the
profane
– adolescence as the critical life phase for
the transmission of religious beliefs and
values
costliness of religious activities

the four “B’s”
–
–
–
–

religious belief
behavior (rituals)
badges (such as religious attire)
bans (taboos)
Sosis, 2006: honest signals
– costly religious demands are today increasing
in many communities throughout the world!
– kashrut (laws pertaining to edible food) among
Ultra-Orthodox Jews are more stringent now
than at any time

multicultural openness of Western
societies
– in-group cohesion requires that groups
increase their distinctiveness in order to
preserve the relative costliness of the group’s
previous bans and badges
– the universal features of religious terrorists is
a strong rejection of Western multiculturalism!

video testaments - undeniable contracts

How could suicide terrorism be adaptive?
– suicide terrorism is likely to benefit the group groups deploying suicide terrorists tend to
achieve their goals
– recoup their losses through benefits to their
kin
 Palestinian
suicide terrorists receive financial
payments (up to $10,000) for their martyred sons
and daughters
 Israel’s policy of destroying suicide bomber’s homes !
– payoffs motivating suicide bombers are not
material but rather otherworldly
 72
virgins await a shahid
 Female martyrs are promised to be the chief of the
virgins and exceed their beauty
Suicide terrorism
 3%
of all causes 48% deaths
 Religious?
 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
(LTTE), a Marxist-Leninist group
False beliefs
Palestinian suicide bombers have above
average education and are economically
better off than the general population
 no evidence of psychopathology in an
international sample of Muslim terrorists
(not depressed)
 religion is the means by which terrorists
translate a local political struggle into a
cosmic war – divine significance

 Bin
Laden
– local grievance (getting U.S. troops off
“Muslim” soil) into a cosmic clash
between civilizations
Suicide terrorism
 Group
cohesion?
 Conscious of death – anxious to
defeat it (cemeteries – exclusively
humane)?