SOSC1980 Psychology and Everyday Life

Introduction
Instructor: Michelle.Yik@ust.hk
TA: sosc1980@ust.hk

Introduction

I. COMMON METRIC
A. What is Psychological Adjustment?

Modeled after the term adaptation in biology, which refers to

efforts by a species to ____________________ in its
environment.
Adjustment refers to the psychological processes through
which people ____________________ the demands and
challenges of everyday life.
Everyday demands are diverse, ranging from intrapersonal
dynamics, through interpersonal relations, to developmental
transitions.
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B. Personality Psychology Dynamics of

Adjustment

The Latin __________ denotes the mask worn by the players

in ancient Greek dramas the actors portrayal of a comic
figure.

What did psychologists say?

Carl Rogers: Personality refers to _______________, an organized,

permanent, subjectively perceived entity which is at the heart of our
experiences.
Gordon Allport: Personality refers to which an individual really is, an
____________________ that determines the nature of the persons
interactions with the world.
Erik Erikson: Personality is the outcome of several
____________________ that each individual has to go through.
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Murray & Kluckhohn (1953) argued that every individual is,

in certain respects, like __________ other persons, like
__________ other persons, like __________ other person.

Personality psychologists (or personologists) study the

similarities and differences between individuals
_________________________.
Personality represents those characteristics of the person that
account for consistent pattern of feelings, thinking, and
behaving (Pervin & John, 2001).
In this course, we study how personality affects peoples
patterns of adjustment, how people are affected by emotion,
and how people cope with emotion.
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C. Social Psychology Interpersonal Realm

A cash penalty of $100 will be charged for each mobile phone ringing in
lecture.

How can I make you attend every single lecture?

How are you going to choose group mates to complete a group project?

In this course, we study the adjustments that people make in their social
relationships, exploring such topics as individuals perception of the
others, friendship, romantic relationship, and intimate relationship.
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D. Is our behavior determined by our Personality or

by the Social Environment we are in?

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Personality
Emotion
Coping
Psychological
Adjustment
- Gender
- Work
The Self
Romantic
Love

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E. Simply Common Sense?

Hindsight Bias
The tendency to exaggerate, after learning an outcome, your ability to
have predicted the result.
Also known as ____________________ phenomenon.

Practical Implications:
Psychology = Common Sense?
What do psychologists do?

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II. THE SCIENTIFIC APPROACH

Major Issues:

What is your research question?

What is the appropriate method to answer the question?

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A. Assessing Group Differences

A psychologist wished to know whether men are more

outgoing than women at UST. She administered a
questionnaire to a random sample of 100 men and a random
sample of 100 women.

Gender: MeanM versus MeanF

What is the effect of Culture on personality (McCrae et al.,

1998)?

HK Chinese versus
Chinese immigrants after 1985 versus
Chinese Immigrants before 1986 versus
Europeans
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B. Assessing Associations (Correlations)

A physician was interested in finding out if there was any

relationship between head circumference and IQ.

Folklore?

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Plots

IQ

IQ

Head Size

IQ

Head Size

Head Size

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Napoleon Syndrome
What is the relationship between Height and IQ?

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A statistical procedure used for determining whether there is a

__________ between two variables.
Correlation coefficients: Range from 1.00 through 0.00 to
+1.00
Direction __________
Magnitude

|.10| __________
around |.30| __________
|.50| __________

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Similarities between Husbands and Wives

Demographic variables
Attitudes / Values

Personality variables

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C. Assessing Causality (Experimentation)

Research Question?

Similarities & Differences between the 2 clips?

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Independent Variables (IV)

Variables that are manipulated by the researcher and whose effects
are measured and compared.
Each IV is associated with n levels / conditions / treatments.

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Dependent Variables (DV)

Variables that measure the effect of the independent variables on the
participants.

Extraneous Variables (EV)

Variables, other than the independent variables, which influence the
DV (viz., rating in our experiment). Also called confounding
variables.

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The Paradox
_______________ Validity: The extent that the experimenter is able
to establish the cause-effect relationship between the IV and the DV,
with EVs controlled.
_______________ Validity: The extent that the experimenter is able
to generalize the experimental results to the outside world.

A Word of Caution
Informed Consent
Debriefing

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