Midterm 3: Psychological Well-being + Prosocial Behaviour
Minimal group paradigm
People have a natural tendency to sort themselves into groups based on completely arbiturary categories.
2 types of people:
Maximizers and satisfiers
Maximizers
People who want to achieve the best in life and not satisfied with anything but the best of things.
By normal logic, these people should be the happinest, but they are not.
Being a maximizer comes at the cost of your psychological well-being. The more you tend to maximize, the more miserable you'll be.
Satisfiers
People who are contempt with what they have as long as it is enough for them to get by.
Maximizer Comparison Study and concept
Maximizers were made to do a task and told that they were doing better/worse than somebody. Compared to satisfers, they are much more affected by the comparison as their ability decreases and their negative emotion increases.
2 foundations of well-being by Aristotle
Hedonia and Eudaimonia
Hedonia
Pleasure and positive emotionality.
Includes pleasure and happiness.
Eudaimonia
Psychological flourishing,
includes meaningfulness.
2 processes of pleasure
Anticipatory pleasure: wanting, motivation, eagerness, etc.
Consumatory pleasre: enjoying, liking, etc.
Stimulus dependent, pleasure is there because of a stimulus.
4 ways of framing happiness:
1. Aggregate pleasure: summary of all the pleasure experienced in a singler period in time. However, it is flowed in the sense that our memory is not porportionate to real life.
2. Cognitive pleasure: likeing without stimulus, experiencing pleasure via cognition, without something actually there to make you happy.
3. Liking without wanting: to be contempt with present circumstances without the "what is"
4. Happiness as base-line motivation, being more approach driven is associated with positive emotionality.
Duka
A concept in Buddism where no matter what, everything you do is driven by you lacking in something and being unsatisfied with it.
The solution is to change your relationship with desire to seek satisfaction in what is already there.
EEG Approach Motivation Study and concept
EEG used to look at the difference (alpha frequency) in signals between the left/side side of the frontal lobes of the brain. Activity on the left side is associated with more approach motivation, and more positive emotionality is associated with More correlation on the left side of the brain to approach motivation.
But not all appraoch motivation is positive. Anger is a negative emotion and it creates the strongest EEG signals.
Hedonic Treadmill
A cycle of happiness.
You want something, you get something, you like it so you are happy, you become habituated to it and your happiness goes back to baseline, repeat.
Life is a series of "ooo"s and "ahhh"s.
Evolution and the Hedonic Treadmill
Evolution has designed us to be on this treadmill. It increased anticipatory pleasure and decreased concsumatory pleasure and the amount of time we get to experience pleasure because it would be a bad thing to be contempt for too long.
Negative feelings are amplified. We are hyper-vigilant to threat and biased to fear so that we can overprepare for danger.
We are led to believe happiness is found in the pursuit of rewards to engage you in the treadmill.
Ways to be happy despite the Hedonic Treadmill
1. Focusing on stuff
2. Interventions and therapy
3. Aging
A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind Study and concept
People were asked multiple times throughout a day what they were doing, how focused they were and how happy they were. They found that different activties have different amounts of happiness, but for every activity, the more focused someone was on a task, the happier they are.
Concept: The primacy effect of direct experience
The Primacy Effect of Direct Experience.
There is something primary about direct experience, and that primary-ness is very pleasureable. When you get distracted, you float away from direct reality.
Therapy Meta-analysis
Studied level of neurotisicm and extroversion before and after different types of therapy. Every type of therapy increased extroversion and decreased neurotiscism. The change was pretty stable for long period of time. Big predictors include the person's relationship with the therapist and time they spent in therapy.
Big 5 personality changes as you age:
Openess: decreases
Conscientiousness: increases
Agreeableness: increases
Extroversion: group vitality increases and group dominence decreases.
Neurotiscism: decreases.
Longitudinal Happiness Study and concept.
Followed different groups of people over a period of time and probed them for how happy they felt. The most happy group were people in their 70's and 80's. The most unhappy were in their early 20's.
Concept: people get happier as they age.
Socioemotional Selectivity Theory
People get happier as they age because they are confronted with their own mortality, so they decide to focus on the happier and more positive aspects of their life.
Memory Reconsolidation
The idea that when memory is retreived, it enters a state for a period of time (4-6 hours) when it could be manipulated and changed before it gets stored back into long-term memory.
What type of memory do we remember most?
Emotionally arousing memories, which tend to be negative memories. They derive from a neurotransmitter so you could potentially decrease negative emotion from a memory by surpressing the neurotransmitter.
Memory Propranolo Experiment and Concept
People were shown a negative picture or a neutral picture. The next day, they were given a placebo or the propranolo. The next day for a memory test, those that took the drug did just as well as those that didn't.
Concept: memory reconsolidation
Would people want to alter bad memories?
They tend to not. There is something about bad memories that give them meaning and we want to connect more with reality/truth more than getting pleasure.
Happiness and the Meaning of Life Study and concept
People were asked how much questionares really measure happiness and meaning-of-life and which queations correlate to happiness and meaning. There is a high correlation, but they have different predictors.
Concept: meaning of life is different from happiness.
Altruism
The act of helping others at your own expense
Social-Exchange Theory
the idea that every interaction you have is.a transaction aimed at maximizing your own rewards and limiting your costs.
In this theory, it suggests that there is no true altruism in the world.
2 types of rewards
External rewards: rewards provided by others by which you give to get.
Internal rewards: rewards you give to yourself, like self-satisfaction.
Egoism
The motive to maximize your own rewards and benefits. The opposite of altruism.
Social norms that incourage prosocial/altruistic behaviour
Reciprocity trick/norm, social responsibility norm
Reciprocity norm
The expectation that people will help you if you help them. Sort of like an investment.
Most effective when reciprocating to help from others publicly.
Social responsibility norm
The expectation that people will help those dependent of them and in need of help without any sort of payback.
In the West, there is the societal expectation that you get what you deserve, so if someone is a victim of circumstance, they will be helped. But if not, they don't deserve help.
Evolutionary theory and altruism
Suggests that we are genetically predisposed to helping behaviour because cooperation with others helps us reproduce and survive
Mechanisms for overcoming selfishness:
Kin selection, genes working reciprocity norm, mutually supportive altruists being more likely to survive.
Empathy
Putiing yourself in someone else's shoes, understanding/sharing what they are feeling.
Selfish and unselfish motivations for altruism
Selfish: being distressed when seeing someone in distress, egoistic motivation to reduce your own distress, behavior to reduce the distress.
Non-selfish: empathy for someone else's distress, altruistic motivation to reduce someone else's distress, behaviour to reduce another's distress.
Bystander Effect
The phenomenon that people are less likely to help if there are other bystanders who are not helping.
They are less likely to notice the distress, less likely to interpret the situation as in need of help, less likely to assume responsibility.
People are more likely to help when:
Someone they like, they are in a wealthy country, they are in a big city, they are not in a hurry, someone else helps as well, they are like us.
Who helps?
Some people are reliably more helpful than others. However, personality does not predict who helps, only how they were react in different situations. Context can more accurately predict who is going to help.
For example, men help more in potentially dangerous situations.
How to increase helping:
Undoing restraints on helping and socializing altruism
Socializing pro-social behaviour
1. Countering in-group biases: Moral inclusions, moral exclusions
2. Offer role models of altruism
3. Attribute helping behaviour to altruism
4. Learning about altruism
Moral inclusions
Regarding others as people to whom your morals apply to.
Moral exclusions
Perceptions that there are certain people outside your moral concern.
The opposite of moral inclusion.
Undoing restriants on helping
Reduce ambiguity to increase responsibility, increase guilt and concern for self-image.
Overjustification Effect
When more than enough rewards are given, people attribute altruistic behaviour to external rewards rather than inner motive.
Don't reward people too much and let them think that they are doing it to be nice.