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Psychotherapy has been shown to help individuals cope with serious physical diseases. Psychotherapy can also aid individuals by alleviating physical symptoms directly or by reducing psychological problems, such as depressions, that are related to physical illness. Research has sown moreover that brief psychotherapy may be a cost-effective way to prevent serious psychological disorders. Psychotherapy aims not only at reducing the presence of psychological illness but also at enhancing psychological wellness and personal growth. Individuals who gain in the wellness are less likely to fall prey to recurrent psychological distress. Interventions such as well-being therapy have been designed to promote wellness itself.

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Using meta-analysis, researchers have found that psychtherapies are successful in treating psychological disorders The Dodo bird hypothesis states that therapy works but that no therapy is conclusively more effective than any other. People considering psychotherapy should find out all they can about the various types of treatments and think about which might best suit their personality and problem. The therapeutic alliance and client factors are tow important variables that influence therapeutic success. The key to successful therapy may lie not in a particular therapist or technique but in the client. Although a individual may be in distress when beginning treatment, his or her internal resources and strengths are brought forth by therapy, as a result of which the individual might expect a healthier, more satisfying life.

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Psychotherapies' traditional focus on the individual may be successful in individualistic Western cultures. However, individualcentered psychotherapies may not work as well in collectivistic cultures. Therapy is often more effective when there is an ethnic match between the therapist and the client, although culturally sensitive therapy can be provided by a therapist with different background than the client's. Psychotherapies emphasize on independence and self-reliance may be problematic for the many women who place a strong emphasis on connectedness n relationships To address that problem, feminist therapies ave emerged.

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Self-help support groups are voluntary organizations of individuals who get together on a regular basis to discuss to[pics of common interest. They are conducted without a professional therapist. The community mental health mouvement was born out of the belief that individuals suffering from psychological disorders should not be locked away from their families and communities. The deinstitutionalization that resulted from the movement caused the homeless population to rie, however. Empowerment is often a goal of community mental health.

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Group therapies emphasize that relationships can hold the key to successful therapy. Family therapy is group therapy with family members. Four widely used family therapy techniques are validation, reframing, structural change, and detriangulation. Couples therapy is group therapy with married or unmarried couples whose major problem is within their relationship.

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As many as 50% of practicing therapists refer to themselves as "integrative" or "eclectic." Integrative therapy uses a combination of techniques from different therapies based on the therapist's judgement of which particular techniques will provide the greatest benefit for the client.

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Cognitive therapies emphasize that the individual's cognitions (thoughts) are the main source of abnormal behavior. Cognitive therapies attempt to change the person's feelings and behaviors by changing cognitions. Three main forms of cognitive therapy are Ellis's rational-emotive behavior therapy (REBT), Beck's cognitive therapy, and cognitive-behavior therapy. Ellis's approach is based on the idea that individuals develop psychological disorders because of their beliefs, especially irrational beliefs. In Beck's cognitive therapy, which has been especially effective in treating depression, the therapist assists the lient in learning about logical errors in thinking and then guides the client in challenging these thinking errors. Cognitive-behavior therapy combines cognitive therapies and behavior therapy techniques. Self-efficacy and self-instructional methods are used in this approach.

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In operant conditioning approaches to behavior therapy, a careful analysis of the person's environment is conducted to determine which factors need modification. Applied behavior analysis is the application of operant conditioning to change human behavior. Its main goal is to replace maladaptive behaviors with adaptive ones.

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Behavior therapies use principles of learning to reduce or eliminate maladaptive behavior. They are based on the behavioral and social cognitive theories of personality. Behavior therapies seek to eliminate these symptoms or behaviors rather than to help individuals to gain insight into their problems. Two main behavior therapy techniques based on classical conditioning are systematic desensitization and aversive conditoning. In systematic desensitization, anxiety is treated by getting the individual to associate deep relaxation with increasingly intense anxiety-producing situation. In aversive conditioning, pairing of the undesirable behavior with aversive stimuli are repeated to decrease the behavior's pleasant associations.

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Psychotherapy is the process that mental health professionals use to help individuals recognize, define, and overcome their disorders and improve their adjustment. In Freudian psychoanalysis, psychological disorders stem from unresolved unconscious conflicts, believed to originate in early family experiences. A therapist's interpretation of free association, dreams, transference, and resistance provides paths for understanding the client's unconscious conflicts. In humanistic therapies, the analyst encourages clients to understand themselves and to grow personally. Client-centered therapy, developed by Rogers, is a type of humanistic therapy that includes active listening, reflective speech, unconditional positive regard, empathy, and genuineness.

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Biological approaches to therapy include drugs, electroconvulsive therapy (ETC), and psychosurgery. Psychotherapeutic drugs that tret psychological disorders fall into three main categories: antianxiety drugs, antidepressant drugs, and antipsychotic drugs.
Benzodiazepines are the most commonly used antianxiety drugs. Antidepressant drugs regulate mood; the three main classes are tricyclics, MAO inhibitors, and SSRI drugs. Lithium is used to treat bipolar disorder. Antipsychotic drugs are administered to treat severe psychological disorders, especially schizophrenia.

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Conscientiousness and personal control relate to health and longevity through their association with healthy lifestyle choices. Self-efficacy is also related to the ability to make positive changes in lifestyle. Optimism is another personality characteristic that is related to better health. The Type A behavior pattern is a set of characteristics that may put an individual at risk for the development of heart disease. Type A behavior includes hostility, time urgency, and competitiveness. Type B behavior, in contrast, refers to a more easygoing style. The crucial aspect of Type A appears to be hostility. Personality traits that are related to health and wellness can also be thought of as states. Thus, even if you are low on these wellness traits, you can still benefit by seeking out states that foster positive attributes.

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Self-report tests assess personality by asking participants about their preferences and behaviors. One problem in self-report research is the tendency for individuals to respond in socially desirable ways. Empirically keyed tests avoid social desirability problems by using items that distinguish between groups even if we do not know why the items do so.

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The most popular test for assessing the big five traits is the NEO-PI-R, which uses self-report items to measure each of the traits. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is the most widely used empirically keyed personality test. Projective tests, designed to assess unconscious aspects of personality, present individuals with an ambiguous stimulus, such as an inkblot or a picture, and ask them to tell a story about it. Projective tests are based on the assumption that individuals will project their personalities onto these stimuli. The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is a projective test that has been used in personality research. Other assessment methods include behavioral observation, reports from peers, and psychophysiological and neuropsychological measure.

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Research has found the dopamine is associated with behavioral approach extraversion) and serotonin with behavioral avoidance (neuroticism). Behavioral genetic studies have shown that the heritability of personality traits is approximately 50%. Studies of biological processes in personality are valuable but can overestimate the causal role of biological factors.

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Eysenck suggest that the brain's reticular activation system (RAS) plays a role in introversion/extraversion. He thought of these traits as the outward manifestations of arousal regulation. Gray developed a reward sensitivity theory of personality, suggesting that extraversion and neuroticism can e understood as two neurological systems that respond to rewards (the behavioral approach system, or BAS) and punishments (the behavioral inhibition system, or BIS) in the environment.

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A particular strength of social cognitive theory is its focus on cognitive processes. However, social cognitive approaches have not given adequate attention to enduring individual differences, to biological facts, and to a personality as a whole/

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Social cognitive theory states that behavior, environment, and person/cognitive factors are important in understanding personality. Two important concepts in social cognitive theory are self-efficacy and personal control. Self-efficacy is the belief that one can master a situation and produce positive outcomes. Personal control refers to individuals' beliefs about whether the outcomes of their actions depend on their own acts (internal) or on events outside of their control (external).

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Mischel's controversial book Personality and Assessment stressed that people do not behave consistently across different situations but rather tailor their behavior to suit particular situations. Personality psychologists countered that personality does predict behavior for some people some of the time. Mischel developed a revised approach to personality characteristics are more likely to predict behavior in weak vs. strong situations.

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Murray described personology as the study of the whole person. Contemporary followers of Murray study personality through narrative accounts and interviews. McAdams introduced the life story approach to identity, which views identity as a constantly changing story with a beginning, middle, and an end. Psychobiography is a form of personological investigation that applies personality theory to one person's life.

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The current dominant perspective in personality psychology is the five-factor model. The big five traits include openness to experience, conscientisations, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Extraversion is related to enhanced well-being, and neuroticism is linked to lowered well-being.

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Trait theories emphasize that personality consists of traits - broad, enduring dispositions that lead to characteristic responses. Allport stated that traits should produce consistent behavior in different situations, and he used the lexical approach to personality traits, which involves using all the words in the natural language that could describe a person as a basis for understanding the traits of personality.

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Freud developed psychoanalysis through his work with patients suffering from hysterical symptoms (physical symptoms with no physical cause). Freud viewed these symptoms as representing conflicts between sexual drive and duty.

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Humanistic perspectives stress a person's capacity for personal growth ad positive human qualities. Maslow developed the concept of a hierarchy of needs, with self-actualization being the highest human need. In Roger's approach, each of us is born with a tendency toward growth, a sense of what is good and bad for us, and a need for unconditional positive regard. The humanistic perspectives promote the positive capacities of human beings, The weakness of the approach are a tendency to be too optimistic and an inclination to downplay personal responsibility.

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Personality is a pattern of enduring, distinctive thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that characterize the way an individual adapts to the world.

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Cognitive Factors of Emotion

The two-factor theory of emotion states that emotion is determined by two factors: physiological arousal and cognitive labeling. Those who developed this theory states that we look to the external world for an explanation towards our arousal. We interpret external signs and label according to an emotion.

Our appraisals guide our emotions, although both thinking and feeling could come first when faced with the question “Which comes first, thinking or feeling?”

Behavioral Factors
The most interest in behavioral perspective of emotion is that it has been focus on a nonverbal behavior of facial expressions.

According to the facial feedback hypothesis, facial expressions can influence emotions alongside reflect them as well. Facial muscles send signals to the brain to recognize the emotion we are feeling.

Sociocultural Factors
Display rules are the sociocultural standard that could help determine when, where, and why emotions should be expressed.

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Emotion

Motivation and emotion are closely linked. Emotion is feeling, or affect, that can involve physiological arousal, a conscious experience, and behavioral expression.

Biological Factors
ANS takes the message to and from the body’s internal organs, monitoring processes. The SNS is involved in the body’s arousal, causing a reaction to a stressor. This then causes an increase in those monitored processes.

Theories of Emotion
According to the James-Lange theory, emotion results from physiological states triggered by the environment. Each emotion has a distinct set of physiological changes, evidently shown in responses like heart rate, breathing, sweating, etc. This theory also proposes that after the initial perception, the emotion experience results from the perception of one’s physiological needs.

According to the Cannon-Bard theory, it proposes that emotion and physiological reactions occur at the same time. In this theory, the body is less involved compared to the other theory.

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Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Motivation

Intrinsic motivation is based on the internal factors such as organismic needs. Extrinsic motivation involves external incentives such as rewards and punishments.

Self-Regulation: The Successful Pursuit of Goals

Self-regulation is the process by which a person completely controls their behavior in order to pursue important objectives.

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Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Abraham Maslow proposed a hierarchy of needs that must be satisfied in the following order: physiological needs, safety, love and belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization. The strongest needs are at the base. This states that their need for food overrules their need for love. Self-actualization is known to be the most important of Maslow’s needs and motivation to develop one’s full potential as a human.

Self Determination Theory

Edward Deci and Richard Ryan state that their self-determination theory asserts that there are three basic organismic needs: competence, relatedness and autonomy.

Competence which is met when we feel that our desires are brought out. Which involves self-efficacy and mastery. Relatedness is the need to engage in relations with others. Autonomy is the sense that we are in control of our own life, being independent and self-reliant.

This theory maintains one of the most important aspects of healthy motivation is to freely do what we want to do.

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Optimum Arousal Theory

The Yerkes-Dodson Law states that performance is best under moderate arousal rather than low or high. The relationship between arousal and performance is one reason why individuals in many professions are forced to overlearn procedures.

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Obesity

Obesity is a genetic component. Another factor of weight is a set point, which is determined by the quantity of fat stored in the body.

Disordered Eating

Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder that involves the relentless pursuit of thinness through starvation. Characteristics of anorexia nervosa:

·         Weight less than 85% of what is considered normal

·         Intense fear of gaining weight

·         Distorted body image

·         Lack of menstruation

Bulimia nervosa is the eating disorder in which an individual consistently follows a binge-and-purge eating pattern. Because this occurs in a normal weight range, so it’s often difficult to detect. This can lead to complications like a chronic sore throat, kidney problems, dehydration, and gastrointestinal disorders. This begins in late adolescence or early adulthood.

Binge Eating Disorder (BED) is characterized by recurrent episodes of consuming large amounts of food during when the person feels lack of control over eating.

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The Biology of Hunger

The stomach tells the brain how full it is and the quantity of nutrients. The hormone cholecystokinin (CCK) helps start the digestion of food, travels through the bloodstream to the brain, and signals us to stop eating.

Three key chemical substances play into hunger, eating, and satiety: glucose, insulin, and leptin. Glucose is a huge factor because the brain depends on sugar for energy. One of the receptors, in the brain, triggers hunger. The receptors in the liver, stores excess sugar and releases in to blood. The hormone insulin which also plays a role into glucose level. The hormone leptin decreases food intake and increase energy expenditure or metabolism.

The lateral hypothalamus involves in stimulating eating and ventromedial hypothalamus is involved in reducing hunger and restricts eating.

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Drive Reduction Theory
Motivation could be constructed through drive and need. A drive is the arousal state when you have a physiological need. A need is the deprivation that causes the energy for the drive to eliminate or reduce the deprivation.

Drive do not always follow from needs, they could also come out of nowhere.

Drive reduction theory explains as a drive strengthens, we motivate ourselves to reduce it. The goal of drive reduction is homeostasis, the body’s tendency to maintain a steady state.

Majority of psychologists believe that this theory does not provide a framework for understanding motivation because most people often behave in ways that increase a drive.

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Motivation is what forces someone to behave, think, and feel the way they do. This is seen by psychologists to have various theories about why people are motivations.

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The Evolutionary Approach

In early psychology, the evolutionary theory was the primary approach towards the role of motivation and Ethology was also utilized to describe it.

An instinct is an unlearned biological pattern of behavior that is assumed universal. By a sign stimulus, an instinct is set in motion.

According to these psychologists, motivation for sex, aggression, achievement, and other behaviors are from that evolutionary history and similarities amongst humans are shared through these roots

Evolutionary approaches emphasizes the passing of genetics, which leads to these theories having to focus on the domains of life.

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Psychologists have suggested that coping with life's difficulties is one way in which adults may develop. For adults, taking an active approach to developing oneself may be an important motivator in development.

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Cognitive development refers to how thought, intelligence, and language processes change as people mature. Cognition refers to the way individuals think and also their cognitive skills and abilities.

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Prenatal Development:
Germinal period - weeks 1 &2: The germinal period begins with conception. After 1 week and any cell divisions, the zygote is made up of 100 to 50 cells. By the end of 2 weeks, the mass of cells has attached to the uterine wall.

Embryonic period - weeks 3 through 8: The rate of cell differentiation intensifies, support systems for the cells develop, and the beginnings of organs appear. By the end of this period, the heart begins to beat, the arms and legs become more differentiated, the face starts to form, and the intestinal tract appears.

Fetal period - months 2 through 9: At 2 months, the fetus is the size of a kidney bean and  has started to ove around. 4 moths, the fetus is 5 inches long and weighs about 5 pounds. The last 3 months of pregnancy is the time when organ functioning increases and the fetus puts on considerable weight and size, adding baby fat.

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Erikson's 3 stages of socioemotional développement in adulthood are intimacy vs. isolation (early adulthood), generativity vs. stagnation (middle adulthood), and integrity vs. despair ( late adulthood). A special concern, beginning when individual's are in their 50s, is the challenge of understanding life's meaning.

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Nature refers to a person's biological inheritance, especially his or hers genes; nurture refers to the individual's environmental and social experiences.

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In cross-sectional studies, a number of people of different ages are assessed at one point in time, and differences are noted.

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Socioemotional process involves changes in an individual's relationship with other people, in emotions, and in personality. An infant's smile in response the her mother's touch, a girl's development of assertiveness, an adolescent's joy at the senior prom, a young man's aggressiveness in sport, and an older couple's affection for each other all reflect the role of socioemotional processes.

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Cognitive process involves changes in an individual's thought, intelligence, and language. Observing a colorful mobile as it swings above a crib, constructing a sentence about the future, imaging oneself as a movie star, memorizing a new telephone number - these activités reflect the role of cognitive processes in development.

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Physical process involves changes in an individual's biological nature. Genes inherited from parents; the hormonal changes of puberty and menopause; and changes throughout life in the brain, height and weight, and motor skills - all of these reflect the developmental role of biological processes. Such biological growth processes are called maturation.

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Development refers to the pattern of continuity and change in human capabilities that occurs throughout the course of life.

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Problem solving is the mental process of finding an appropriate way to attain a goal when the goal is not readily available.
1. Find and frame problems. Finding and framing problems involves asking questions in creative ways and "seeing" what others do not
2. Develop good problem-solving strategies.
Subgoals are intermediate goals or intermediate problems that put us in a better position for reaching the final goal or solution.
Algorithms are strategies that guarantee a solution to a problem. Algorithms come in different forms, such as formulas, instructions, and the testing if all possible solutions.
Heuristics are shortcuts strategies or guidelines that suggest a solution to the problem but do not guarantee an answer.
3. Evaluate solutions
Testing out a solution that you believe to be correct to see if it actually works.
4. Rethink and Redefine problems and solutions overtime good problem solvers tend to strive for a more effective and efficient solution for the problem or question at hand

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Reasoning and decision making
Reasoning is the mental activity of transforming information to reach conclusions. Its involved in problem solving and decision making. Inductive reasoning involves reasoning from specific observations to make generalizations. Deductive reasoning is reasoning from a general case that we know to be true to a specific instance
Decision making involves evaluating alternates and choosing between them.
Biases and heuristics
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for and use information that supports our ideas rather than refutes them.
Hindsight bias is our tendency ti report falsely after the fact, that we accurately predicted an outcome, it is sometimes referred to as the "I knew it all along effect"
Availability heuristic refers to a prediction about the probability of an event based on the ease of recalling or imagining similar events.
Base rate fallacy is the tendency to ignore information about general principles in favor of very specific but vivid information
Representatives heuristic is the tendency to make judgments about a group on physical appearances or the match between a person and ones stereotype of a group rather than on available base rate information

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Intelligence is an all purpose ability to do well on cognitive task, to solve problems, and to learn from experience. psychologist measure intelligence using test that produce a score known as the persons IQ or intelligence quotient. the criteria for a good iq test involve validity which is the extent to which a est measures what it us intended to measure, the reliability which is the extent to which a test yields a consistent reproducible measure of performance, and the standardization which involves the development of uniform procedures for administering and scoring a test, and the creation of norm for the test. Binet developed the concept of mental age, which i an individuals level of mental development relative to that of others. German psychologist William stern devised the term intelligence quotient IQ in 1912 which is an individuals mental age multiplied by 100.
normal distribution is a symmetrical, bellshaped curve, with a majority of the scores falling in the middle of the possible range and few scores appearing toward the extremes of the range. Most iq test tended to be culturally biased. favoring the more prominent culture. culture fair test are intelligence test that are intended to be culturally unbiased

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Concepts are mental categories that are used to group objects, events, and characteristics. Humans use this ability to help categorize similar things in our world, for example, we know that both apples and oranges and both fruits, even though they may differ in one way ir another we still recognize that they belong to mgether because we have a concept of what a fruit may be. Concepts are important because they allow us to generalize, associate experiences and objects, they aid our memory by making it more efficient so we dont have to reinvent the wheel every time we come across a piece of information , and it provides clues on how to react to a particular object or experience.
Prototype model emphasizes that when people evaluate wheter given an item reflects a certain concept, they compare the item with the most typical item(s) in that category and look for a "family resemblance" with that item's properties

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Thinking critically and creatively
Critical thinking means thinking reflectively and productively and evaluating the evidence
Mindfulness means being alert and mentally present for ones everyday activities.
open-mindedness means being receptive to other ways of looking at things
Creativity is the ability to think about something in novel and unusual ways and to devise unconventional solutions to problems.
Divergent thinking is thinking that produces many solutions to the same problem
convergent thinking is thinking that produces the single best solution to a problem.

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An obstacle to problem solving:becoming fixated fixation involves using prior strategy and failing to look at a problem from a fresh new perspective. Functional fixedness occurs when individuals fail to solve a problem because they are fixated on a thing's usual functions

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Chapter 8: Thinking, Intelligence, and Language

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Chapter 8: Thinking, Intelligence, and Language

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Thinking involves manipulating information mentally by forming concepts, solving problems, making decisions and reflecting in a critical or creative manner
Intelligence is an all-purpose ability to do well on cognitive task, to solve problems, and to learn from experience
Language is a form of communication- whether spoken, written, or signed- that is based on a system of symbols.

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Generalization is the tendency of a new stimulus that is similar to the original conditioned stimulus to elicit a response that is similar to the conditioned response. Generalization has value in preventing learning from being tied to specific stimuli.
Discrimination is the process of learning to respond to certain stimuli and not others.

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An unconditioned stimulus (UCS) is a stimulus that produces a response without prior learning; food was the UCS in Pavlov's experiments.
An unconditioned response (UCR) is an unlearned reaction that is automatically elicited by the UCS. Unconditioned responses are involuntary; they happen in response to a stimulus without conscious effort. In Pavlov's experiment, salivating in response to food was the UCR.
A conditioned stimulus(CS) is a previously neutral stimulus that eventually elicits a conditioned response after being paired with the unconditioned stimulus.
The conditioned response(CR) is the learned response to the conditioned stimulus that occurs after CS-UCS pairing.

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Extinction is the weakening of the conditioned response when the unconditioned stimulus is absent.

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Classical conditioning is a learning process in which a neutral stimulus becomes associated with a meaningful stimulus and acquires the capacity to elicit a similar response.
Pavlov's Studies
Ivan Pavlov was a Russian physiologist that is known for his work with dogs. In his experiments he routinely placed meat powder in a dog's mouth causing the dog to salivate. The dog reacted to a number of stimulus that had to do with food.

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Behaviorism is a theory of learning that focuses solely on observable behaviors, discounting the importance of such mental activity as thinking, wishing, and hoping. Behavioral psychologists define learning as relatively stable, observable changes in behavior. The behavioral approach has emphasized general laws that guide behavior change and make sense of some of the puzzling aspects of human life.