Cognitive Changes During Adulthood

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PSY-358 Adult Development and Aging

Topic 2 – Cognitive Changes during Adulthood

 

Directions: This assignment will require you to type directly in this worksheet. Part I will require you to research cognitive related changes during adulthood. In each box, describe 3-4 cognitive changes that generally occur during that age-range (include things such as memory, attention, structural change, processing speed, executive functioning, and neurotransmission). Part II, requires that you answer the follow-up questions. Please delete the examples in red.

A minimum of three resources are required. Your textbook may serve as one resource. Make sure the references are current and cited both with your chart and referenced in the reference section.

Part I: General Cognitive Changes

Age Range Brain Development/Cognitive Changes
Emerging Adulthood through Early Adulthood

(approx. 17-25-ish)

 

 EXAMPLES:

The prefrontal cortex is still developing, which influences reasoning, judgement, and problem solving …

 

The limbic system, which serves as the reward system (e.g. linked to risk taking)…

 

Synaptic pruning…
Early Adulthood

Through Middle Adulthood

(25-45-ish)

  

 
Middle Adulthood

through late adulthood

(45-ish through death)

  

 

 

Part II: Follow-up Questions

In 150-250 words, please answer the following questions:

· During what age range do we see the most dramatic cognitive changes occurring?

· Choose (and explain how) at least two factors that might exacerbate the cognitive changes above. Examples: Lack of sleep, binge drinking.

· What can be done to offset some of these cognitive changes (chose one example from your chart and include both preventive and accommodating ideas/tips). Examples: Nutrition and creativity.

· What was your biggest take-away from this activity? What changes might you make now?

 

References:

Full APA references belong here

Social Cognitive Theory

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Chapter 13

SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY: APPLICATIONS, RELATED THEORETICAL CONCEPTIONS, AND CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH

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© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. This presentation may be used and adapted for use in classes using the fourteenth edition of Personality. It may not be re-distributed except to students enrolled in such classes and in such case must be password protected to limit access to students enrolled in such classes. Students may not re-distribute portions of the original presentation.

 

QUESTIONS TO BE ADDRESSED IN THIS CHAPTER

How do knowledge structures – especially cognitive “schemas” – contribute to personality functioning and help to explain individual differences?

How do personal goals and standards of self-evaluation differ from one person to another, and how do these differences relate to motivation and emotional life?

What is the role of self-efficacy beliefs and other self-referent thinking processes in psychological disorders and therapeutic change?

What are some scientific challenges that were not addressed in the original formulations of social-cognitive theory and how have they been addressed by contemporary developments in personality theory?

COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF PERSONALITY: BELIEFS, GOALS, AND EVALUATIVE STANDARDS

BELIEFS ABOUT THE SELF AND SELF-SCHEMAS

Schemas: knowledge structures that guide and organize the processing of info

Example: new song on the radio sounds structured because one has acquired schemas for song structures

Schemas guide one’s interpretation of the sounds that comprise the song

Music from a different culture might sound chaotic!

COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF PERSONALITY: BELIEFS, GOALS, AND EVALUATIVE STANDARDS

BELIEFS ABOUT THE SELF AND SELF-SCHEMAS

Markus (1977) : many of our most important schemas concern ourselves

People form cognitive generalizations about the self just as they do about other things

Different people develop different self-schemas

Self-schemas may account for the relatively unique ways in which idiosyncratic individuals think about the world around them

COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF PERSONALITY: BELIEFS, GOALS, AND EVALUATIVE STANDARDS

BELIEFS ABOUT THE SELF AND SELF-SCHEMAS

Self-Schemas and Reaction-Time Methods

Reaction-time measures: experimental methods in which an experimenter records not only the content of a person’s response, but also how long it takes the person to respond

People who possess a self-schema with regard to a given domain of social life should be faster in responding to questions regarding that life domain

COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF PERSONALITY: BELIEFS, GOALS, AND EVALUATIVE STANDARDS

BELIEFS ABOUT THE SELF AND SELF-SCHEMAS

Self-Schemas and Reaction-Time Methods

Markus (1977) identified people who possessed a self-schema regarding independence

Participants rated themselves as high or low on independence

Participants indicated the degree to which the personality characteristic was important to them

Those who had an extreme high or low self-rating and thought independence/dependence was important were judged as schematic

Participants then asked to rate whether a series of adjectives (some of which were semantically related to independence/dependence) were descriptive of themselves

Schematics made these judgments faster

COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF PERSONALITY: BELIEFS, GOALS, AND EVALUATIVE STANDARDS

BELIEFS ABOUT THE SELF AND SELF-SCHEMAS

Self-Schemas and Reaction-Time Methods

Andersen and Cyranowski (1994): women with differing sexual self-schemas would process interpersonal information differently and function differently in their sexual and romantic relationships

Women asked to rate themselves on a list of 50 adjectives, 26 of which were used to form a Sexual Self-Schema Scale (e.g., uninhibited, loving)

Asked to respond to measures that asked about sexual experiences and romantic involvement

COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF PERSONALITY: BELIEFS, GOALS, AND EVALUATIVE STANDARDS

BELIEFS ABOUT THE SELF AND SELF-SCHEMAS

Self-Schemas and Reaction-Time Methods

Andersen and Cyranowski found that women with high scores on the Sexual Self-Schema Scale (particularly those with positive sexual self-schemas)

Were more sexually active

Experienced greater sexual arousal and sexual pleasure

Were more able to be involved in romantic love relationships

“Co-schematics (women who had both positive and negative schemas)” found to experience

High levels of involvement with sexual partners

High levels of sexual anxiety

COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF PERSONALITY: BELIEFS, GOALS, AND EVALUATIVE STANDARDS

BELIEFS ABOUT THE SELF AND SELF-SCHEMAS

Self-Schemas and Reaction-Time Methods

People tend to live complex lives in which they develop a number of different self-schemas

Different situations may cause different self-schemas to be part of the working self-concept: the subset of self-concept that is in working memory at any given time

Info about the self that is in consciousness, and guides behavior, at any given time changes dynamically as people interact with the ever-changing events of the social world

COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF PERSONALITY: BELIEFS, GOALS, AND EVALUATIVE STANDARDS

BELIEFS ABOUT THE SELF AND SELF-SCHEMAS

Self-Based Motives and Motivated Information Processing

Self-schemas motivate people to process information in particular ways

People often are biased toward positive views of the self, which can be explained by positing a self-enhancement motive

People also may be motivated to experience themselves as being consistent and predictable, reflecting a self-verification motive

COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF PERSONALITY: BELIEFS, GOALS, AND EVALUATIVE STANDARDS

BELIEFS ABOUT THE SELF AND SELF-SCHEMAS

Self-Based Motives and Motivated Information Processing

What happens when the two motives conflict?

Evidence suggests we generally prefer positive feedback but prefer negative feedback in relation to negative self-views

Positive life events can be bad for one’s health if they conflict with a negative self-concept and disrupt one’s negative identity

There are individual differences in this regard

We may be more oriented toward self-enhancement in some relationships and self-verification in other relationships

CURRENT APPLICATIONS

SELF-SCHEMAS AND HISTORY OF SEXUAL ABUSE

Meston, Rellini, and Heiman (2006) hypothesized that abuse experiences may alter self-schemas and do so in a long-lasting manner

Conducted a study whose participants were 48 women with a history of child sexual abuse

Also studied a group of 71 women who had not suffered from abuse experiences and who thus served as control participants.

To measure sexual self-schemas, Meston et al. administered the sexual self-schema scale in which people report on their perceptions of their own sexuality

Women with a history of abuse believed themselves to be less romantic and passionate; that is, they had lower scores on the romantic/passionate items of the sexual self-schema measure

Women who had experienced abuse years earlier had more negative emotional experiences in the present day

Women with lower romantic/passionate self-schemas reported more negative emotional experiences

COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF PERSONALITY: BELIEFS, GOALS, AND EVALUATIVE STANDARDS

LEARNING VERSUS PERFORMANCE GOALS

Different goals may lead to different patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior

Goals may be the cause of what one would interpret as different personality styles

Two ways of thinking about goals:

Learning goal: think about the task and all you can learn from it

Peformance goal: have the aim of

showing people how smart you are

avoiding embarrassment when you don’t know something

making a good impression

COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF PERSONALITY: BELIEFS, GOALS, AND EVALUATIVE STANDARDS

LEARNING VERSUS PERFORMANCE GOALS

Elliott and Dweck (1988) induced learning versus performance goals among grade school students performing a cognitive task

Some told that they were performing a task that would sharpen mental skills

Others told they were performing a task that would be evaluated by experts

Students’ beliefs in their ability on the task (i.e., their efficacy beliefs) were also manipulated

People who had a combination of performance goals and low beliefs in their ability were less likely than others to develop useful strategies on the task

COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF PERSONALITY: BELIEFS, GOALS, AND EVALUATIVE STANDARDS

LEARNING VERSUS PERFORMANCE GOALS

Elliott and Dweck (1988) recorded the degree to which people spontaneously expressed negative emotions while working on the task

Performance goal participants expressed much tension and anxiety when performing the task

“My stomach hurts” (Elliott & Dweck, 1988, p. 10)

Performance goals provides insight into what we commonly call “test anxiety”

Dweck’s social-cognitive analysis suggests that one might intervene by trying to change people’s patterns of thinking

COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF PERSONALITY: BELIEFS, GOALS, AND EVALUATIVE STANDARDS

LEARNING VERSUS PERFORMANCE GOALS

Causes of Learning versus Performance Goals: Implicit Theories

Implicit theories: those we possess, that guide our thinking, but that we may not usually state in words

Implicit theories of interest to Dweck and colleagues: whether or not psychological attributes are changeable

Entity theory: a particular characteristic or trait is viewed as fixed

Incremental theory: a particular characteristic or trait is believed to be malleable or open to change

COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF PERSONALITY: BELIEFS, GOALS, AND EVALUATIVE STANDARDS

LEARNING VERSUS PERFORMANCE GOALS

Causes of Learning versus Performance Goals: Implicit Theories

Children with an entity view of intelligence tend to set performance goals

If intelligence is fixed, then one interprets activities as a “performance” in which intelligence is evaluated

Children with an incremental view of intelligence tend to set learning goals

If intelligence can be increased, then natural to set the learning goal of acquiring experiences that increase it

COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF PERSONALITY: BELIEFS, GOALS, AND EVALUATIVE STANDARDS

LEARNING VERSUS PERFORMANCE GOALS

Causes of Learning versus Performance Goals: Implicit Theories

Tamir, John, Srivastava, and Gross, 2007 study

Students about to enter college were tested about whether they believed emotions to be malleable and controllable vs. fixed and uncontrollable

As hypothesized, students with incremental (malleable) beliefs concerning emotion showed better emotion regulation than did those with entity (fixed) beliefs

Throughout the first term, relative to those with entity beliefs concerning emotion, those with incremental beliefs received increasing social support from new friends

By the end of the freshman year, those with incremental beliefs were found to have more positive moods and generally better levels of adjustment than those with entity beliefs

COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF PERSONALITY: BELIEFS, GOALS, AND EVALUATIVE STANDARDS

LEARNING VERSUS PERFORMANCE GOALS

Causes of Learning versus Performance Goals: Implicit Theories

Blackwell, Trzesniewski, and Dweck (2007): If one could turn entity theorists into incremental theorists, one should be able to reduce test anxiety and boost performance

Enrolled 7th-graders in an educational intervention designed to induce an incremental theory of intelligence

Students learned that the human brain changes when people study, growing new connections among neurons that increase a person’s mental abilities (a separate group did not receive this instruction)

By the end of the year, students who had been exposed to the intervention began to outperform the other students

Personality and the Brain: Goals

Are goals and evaluative standards distinct biologically from other kinds of thoughts?

D’Argembeau et al. (2009) asked participants to imagine future outcomes that either were or were not personal goals for them

(e.g., Future doctors imagined becoming a doctor and going deep-sea fishing)

Participants were in a brain scanner while imagining these two types of outcomes.

Personality and the Brain: Goals

D’Argembeau et al. (2009), cont’d.

Two brain regions were more active when people thought about personal goals than about future activities that were not goals for them

Medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC)

Posterior cingulate cortex (PCC)

Why significant?

Personality and the Brain: Goals

Describe various diagnoses of psychological disorders

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Competency

In this project, you will demonstrate your mastery of the following competencies:

· Describe various diagnoses of psychological disorders

· Explain the contributions and limitations of various methods of assessment of psychological conditions

· Compare various treatment approaches

Scenario

With graduation on the near horizon, Jamal is excited about completing his psychology degree. He is anticipating a highlight of his academic journey; the Psychology Department has asked Jamal and a few of his peers to engage in a panel presentation that will spotlight their knowledge on a topic relevant to abnormal psychology. Jamal is honored to have been asked to participate in the presentation and hopes to use this opportunity to add some valuable artifacts to his career ePortfolio.

As Jamal prepares the content of his presentation, he considers the role of research and practice in mental health. Likewise, Jamal considers the various biomedical and psychological approaches to treating psychological disorders, including the ethical factors that impact treatment. In addition, he considers the ways in which social support can promote education and awareness about psychological disorders. Lastly, Jamal considers the many ways in which we can enhance compassion and empathy for people who struggle with psychological disorders and perhaps help to humanize (and normalize) aspects of abnormal behavior.

For this project, you will be presenting along with Jamal and must create a presentation that includes speaker notes. Your Module Five Milestone, along with your reading assignments, will support you in developing your speaker notes.

Supporting Materials

Module Five Milestone: Refer to your milestone and milestone feedback before completing your project. Reading: FAQ: How Can I Make an Effective PowerPoint Presentation? This Shapiro Library FAQ resource provides simple tips for creating an effective PowerPoint presentation. Project Two Template: You may use this PowerPoint template to create your presentation for Project Two. Psychology Research Guide: This resource was created to help you find psychology related content. Textbook: Abnormal Psychology, “DSM-5 Quick Guide” begins on p. XV: This resource outlines the various psychological topics that you have encountered in this course. Purdue OWL: This resource is provided to assist you with referencing resources according to APA standards.

Directions

Select a psychological disorder that you’ve examined in this course and that interests you. You may use Google Slides or PowerPoint to complete your presentation and speaker notes. Support your answers with credible sources when appropriate and address the rubric criteria listed below in your slides. Include 50 to 100 words to describe each slide (excluding transition slides) in the speaker notes. Remember to access the Shapiro Library FAQ resource linked in Supporting Materials for guidelines to making an effective PowerPoint presentation.

Introduction

· Introduce a psychological disorder that is of interest to you.

· Discuss the biological, psychological, and/or social relevance of examining this disorder.

· Provide a brief overview of the clinical attributes of this disorder (e.g., diagnostic features, prevalence rates, biopsychosocial impacts).

· Provide a brief overview of the points that you will address in your presentation. Consider using the belowfollowing subject headings to structure your presentation. Get your audience excited about your topic!

· As suggested in the Shapiro Library FAQ resource linked in Supporting Materials, use the following tips in creating your presentation:

· Plan ahead

· Be consistent

· Keep it simple

· Keep it short

· Complement your content

Part One: Biopsychosocial Considerations

· Discuss the biological (e.g., neuroanatomical, neuroendocrine) correlates of the disorder.

· Discuss the psychological (e.g., cognitive, affective) correlates of the disorder.

· Discuss the social (e.g., interpersonal) correlates of the disorder.

· Explain the implications of cultural variation on the assessment of the disorder.

· Explain the implications of cultural variation on the treatment of the disorder.

· Discuss the role of the community in promoting access to treatment for the disorder.

Part Two: Diagnostic/Evaluative Considerations

· Explain the strengths and limitations of the clinical assessments designed to evaluate the disorder.

· Discuss challenges related to reliability and validity in the assessment of the disorder.

· Explain the concept of diagnosis by exclusion, using the selected disorder as an example.

· Articulate how assessments contribute to diagnosis by exclusion.

· Explain the relationship between the publication process of the DSM, the contribution of research in mental health, and the practice of clinicians.

Part Three: Therapeutic Considerations

· Explain the strengths and limitations of various therapeutic approaches designed to treat the disorder.

· Discuss the relevance of non-pharmacological (e.g., complementary/alternative) approaches in the treatment of the disorder.

· Discuss the balance between “do no harm” and duty to treat.

Conclusion

· Summarize the most relevant takeaways of your presentation.

· Discuss the attributes of the disorder (e.g., biopsychosocial, diagnostic, therapeutic) that you want your audience to remember most.

· In what ways does the information you’ve shared enhance what we know about the disorder?

· In what ways does the content that you’ve shared contribute to our biological, psychological, and/or social well-being?

What to Submit

To complete this project, you must submit the following:

A Google Slides or PowerPoint presentation reflecting the Shapiro Library FAQ: How Can I Make an Effective PowerPoint Presentation? Be sure to include 50 to 100 words of relevant speaker’s notes for each slide. There should be a minimum of 21 slides, with sources cited according to APA style.

Explain the role of nature and nurture in the humanistic approach.

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Overview

As Abraham Maslow said in The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance, “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail” (1966). In previous modules, we have learned about psychoanalysis, the new wave of psychoanalysis, and the trait tradition. In this module, we have learned about the humanistic approach. This approach challenges a potential cognitive bias in psychoanalysis that treats behavior as pathology, or something that can be diagnosed and treated. For this journal, we will step outside of the pathology lens on behavior and focus on the role of happiness, self-improvement, and compassion.

Prompt

For your journal, use the Module Four Journal Template to answer the following questions in about 2 to 5 sentences each. Specifically, you must address the following rubric criteria:

  • Analyzing Theory
    • Describe how humanism differs from the personality theories you have studied so far.
    • Explain the role of nature and nurture in the humanistic approach.
    • Describe the role of emotional intelligence in the humanistic approach.
  • Applying Theory to Society
    • Explain the role of systemic issues in society, such as a lack of equity, access, or opportunity in the hierarchy of needs.
    • The final course in your degree program will challenge you to think about your role as an agent of social change. Explain how the humanistic approach generally, or Maslow’s hierarchy specifically, relates to your initial thoughts about being an agent of social change in your community. You can think about how humanism influences your approach to systemic issues or the role that being an agent of social change has on your views of self-actualization.
    • Locate and summarize one external article that investigates limitations of Maslow’s hierarchy and systemic issues in society.
  • Applying Theory to Self
    • Thinking about the top of Maslow’s hierarchy, explain what self-actualization means for you. You can focus your answer as narrowly or holistically to your life experience as you would like. Consider what role school or your career has on your answer. Does success in those areas help you achieve self-actualization? Is it something else?

Guidelines for Submission

Submit your completed Module Four Journal Template. Sources should be cited according to APA style.