Psychology is the study of behavior.
Answering questions from the online textbook is retrieval practice, which has been shown to be effective.
What has psychology done for me lately?
Sleep deprivation
Sleep deprivation’s effects:
- Reduced brain activity (e.g. frontal cortex)
- Increased stress hormones (e.g. cortisol) which makes people irritable and anxious
- Increased amygdala activation (sets off stress and fight or flight response)
- Decreased activity in the hippocampus
- Decreased concentration
- Mood swings
- Hallucinations, visual and auditory (if sleep deprivation is extreme — 2-3 days)
Hartmann & Pritchard (2018): More sleep disturbance correlates with more courses dropped and a lower GPA.
First impressions
We form first impressions all the time, especially in college.
- Snap judgements we make converge with information that others tell us based on more solid information.
- They save us time.
- They often do pick up on meaningful info.
- But they can be problematic (based on preconceived notions).
- Humans don’t like admitting they’re wrong, so snap judgements are highly resistant to change.
- They can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: they change how we behave towards someone else, and then they behave differently towards us.