Tom Farsides ATP PAID 5: Biological Aspects of Personality The unconscious “Children perceive inaccurately, are very little conscious of their inner states

Tom FarsidesATP PAID 5: Biological Aspects of Personality

The unconscious

“Children perceive inaccurately, are very little conscious of their inner states and retain fallacious recollections of occurrences. Many adults are hardly better.”

Murray (1938, p. 15)


Lecture contents

• Pervin’s illustrative phenomena

• Subliminal perception

• Subliminal conditioning

• Automaticity

• The psychdynamic unconscious

• Telling more than we can know


Pervin’s “illustrative phenomena”

1. Subliminal perception

2. Implicit memory

3. Dissociative phenomena

4. Blindsight

5. Hypnosis

6. Subliminal listening

7. Telling more than we know

8. Implicit conditioning

9. Automatic processing

10. Repression

11. Implicit thought


1. Subliminal perception

• Drawn “nature scene” had more “ducks” after subliminal prime (Eagle et al., 1966. See also Poetzl, 1917)

• Self-esteem and memory tapes equally believed but not shown to be effective (Greenwald et al., 1991)

• Only “habitual” responses to subliminal perception.


8. Subliminal conditioning (Diven, 1937)

• Participants presented with word and then told to say whatever word came to mind.

• Responses to the prime “Barn” (CS) were accompanied by an electric shock (US).

• All participants showed anxiety (GSR) to “barn”: UR CR.• Only half of the participants could identify that the word

“Barn” preceded the shock.• Conditioning without awareness of the Conditioned

Stimulus (CS) or the CS-US (“Barn”-Shock) association.• Conditioned anxiety generalised to words associated with

“Barn” (e.g., “sheep”)


“8. plus 1.” (Katkin et al., 2001)

• Subliminal snake and spider pictures presented.• Electric shock following certain pictures.• Better than chance predictions of when shock would

follow.• Participants who were best able to detect their heartbeat

predicted best.• “Hunches” and “gut feelings” as ‘semi-consciously’

perceived conditioned responses to subliminally (unconsciously) perceived stimuli?

• See next slide.


“8. plus 1.” Weins et al. (2003): Sequencophobia!

• Picture-shock pairings in Katkin et al. (2001) not random.• When randomised, could not be predicted better than

chance.• Increased prediction only at the time the shock expected.• Some participants reported not consciously realising the

sequence-shock link, therefore...• “Hunches” still based on conditioned responses, but to

certain times (trial order), not to subliminally perceived snakes and spiders.


9. Automaticity 1Automatic influences on impression formation

See ‘priming’ from the “Perceiving Persons” lecture. Context priming of trait terms influences interpretation of

another’s behaviour (e.g., Higgins’ et al.’s 1977 adventurer)

See ‘primes and prejudice (?)’ from the “Perceiving Groups” lecture. Priming group characteristics or stereotype content elicits ‘full’

group stereotype activation (e.g., Devine, 1999) and possible use in evaluations (e.g., Lepore & Brown, 1997)


9. Automaticity 2Automatic influences on behaviour

See ‘priming’ from the “Perceiving Persons” lecture. Context priming of traits, stereotypes, or motives elicit trait,

stereotype, or motive consistent behaviour (e.g., Bargh et al.’s 1996 rude participants)

Internal (intentional) and external (automatic) sources of behavior-relevant cognitions that automatically create a tendency to engage in that behavior.

Source: Bargh & Chartrand (1999)


The psychodynamic unconscious


Poetzl (1917)

• Subliminal pictoral presentation.

• Dream reports next day include presented material.

• Later replicated with free association and perception (projection?).

• Evidence of unconscious processing.

• But a nightmare for psychoanalytic theory?


Defence Mechanisms

Repression, plus

‘Supplementary’ defence mechanisms: Denial, isolation, projection, rationalization, reaction

formation, sublimation, displacement.


Sublimininal Psychodynamic Activation Method (SPAM)

Silverman & Weinberger (1985)• Subliminal mother-merge messages to alleviate anxiety

and promote therapeutic progress.

Silverman et al. (1978)• Subliminal Oedipal conflict enhancement (alleviation)

worsened (improved) performance.

Patton (1992)• Existing eating disorder exacerbated from subliminal

mother-desertion message.


Projection: A New AccountFrom Newman et al. (1997)

Seeing in others the traits most fear and loath in self. E.g., Mean, evil, unkind, obnoxious, lazy, selfish.

Suppression protects self, but only by making the trait ‘hyper-accessible’ in unconsciousness.

In turn, this leads to increased application of the trait to others.

People with a repressive style attribute these traits in particular to others, from an ambiguous descriptive paragraph, but deny as self-descriptive (instead stressing their opposite characteristics).


The psychodynamic and cognitive unconscious: Differences

Dynamic

1. Content focus: Motive & wishes

2. Defensive mechanisms

3. Distinctly irrational

4. Special conditions to make conscious.

Cognitive

1. Content focus: Cognitions

2. No defensive mechanisms

3. Equivalent rationality

4. Usual laws of perception and memory.

Possibility of a continuum of (un)consciousness


7. Telling more than we can know

• Title of Nisbett & Wilson (1977). Psy. Rev., 84, 231-279.

• Understanding of own behaviour often poor Remember Asch, Milgram

• Using lay theories, not adequate introspection.

• How true for any given self-report measure (e.g., trait)?

• Need to match level of specificity E.g., trait measures to predict a class of behaviour E.g., attitude to a specific behaviour to predict that behaviour

• Even so, is recall and recognition up to the job?


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Tom Farsides ATP PAID 5: Biological Aspects of Personality The unconscious “Children perceive inaccurately, are very little conscious of their inner states