PSYCHOLOGY AT CAYUGA

DONALD SANZOTTA

PROFESSOR, PSYCHOLOGY

 Email:SANZOTTA@cayuga.edu 

Biographical

Course Information (under construction)

Psychology 214 Selected Topics

Psychology 215 Child Psychology

Psychology101 Introductory Psychology

This is the home page of "Psychology Today" magazine:

Psychology Today Online

Here is the general site for the APA:

American Psychological Association Home 

Here is the American Psychological Association Monitor Homepage:

APA Monitor

Here is an OK EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE site.

Here is the booklet on  Coping with Test Anxiety

This is a fun site:     http://www.emode.com/

Reinventing class discussion online

Here is an American PSYCHIATRIC ASSOCIATION site that includes DSM IV classifications  Clinical Resources Practice 

Ten of the most interesting psychology experiments in the last fifty years.

• 1953. Eugene Averinsky. As a graduate student, he monitored his son’s EEG readings while his son was asleep. He discovered the connection between dreaming and REM sleep.
• 1967. Martin Seligman. Using dogs, shocking them when they could not escape, he developed the concept of Learned Helplessness and how it is connected to depression in humans.
• 1968. Robert Rosenthal. He demonstrated "expectancy effects," or the self-fulfilling prophecy, using labels for students as "gifted," and known only to the teacher. The students had been labeled at random, but by the end of the school year their I.Q. scores had increased significantly.
• 1973. David Rosenhan. In this controversial experiment, he had people say they had heard voices and needed to be admitted to mental hospitals. Even though these pseudopatients never acted crazy, they were all admitted, and reported on how mental patients were treated.
• 1973. Solomon Snyder. This neuroscientist discovered how receptor sites and neurotransmitters work in the brain, particularly the endorphins that relate to addiction when taken as narcotic drugs.
• 1979. Mary Ainsworth. Her attachment theory experiments using "The Strange Situation" with year -old babies made "secure attachment" a goal of most parents over the last twenty-five years.
• 1980. Judith Wallerstein. Her influential longitudinal study of children of divorce identified a "sleeper effect" of emotional issues these children face later in life. This altered the way experts think about the long-term effects of divorce on children.
• 1983. David Spiegel. To his own surprise, he demonstrated that women with terminal breast cancer lived twice as long as similarly diagnosed controls if they were in a psychological support group.
• 1985. Rober Ader. Using rats, he showed that it was possible to classically condition their immune systems. Prior to this it was thought that the nervous system and the immune system did not interact.
• 1989. Walter Mischel. With four year-olds as subjects, he uses the "marshmallow test" ("You can have one now or wait until I get back and have two.") to show that delay of gratification has longitudinal predictive value for success later in life.

Take the brain quiz.

1. T F Humans have the largest brains of all animals.

2. T F In general, men have larger brains than women.

3. T F There are no pain receptors in the brain.

4. T F At birth, you have all the neurons you will ever have.

5. T F Electrical energy builds on one side of the synaptic gap and arcs across to the other side to travel through the brain.

6. T F The upper and forward sections of the human brain are the most primitive.

7. T F Two or three drinks containing alcohol will destroy brain cells.

8. T F Neuron connections can be increased through intellectual stimulation.

9. T F Most of us only use about ten percent of our brain.

10. T F Post-concussion syndrome requires a head injury where the person is knocked out.

Brain Quiz – Answers and explanations.

1. False. Humans do not have the largest brains of all animals. Generally, the larger the head, the larger the brain. There is a rough correlation between brain weight and body weight between species, and usually, the closer the ratio the more intelligent the animal.
2. True. Men have larger brains than women because they have larger heads. Probably, this has very little significance within any species, since big people are not smarter than little people. Gender differences and cognitive function is still an interesting area of research, but it probably does not involve brain size.
3. True. The brain does not feel pain. You cannot have a brain ache, but there are pain receptors in the skull and sinuses, and that is where your headache comes from.
4. True. When you are born, all your neurons are present. Connections grow and multiply, but neurons do not regenerate.
5. False. Electrical energy does not arc or spark across synaptic gaps; it is carried across by those important neurotransmitter chemicals.
6. False. The upper and forward sections are very advanced, and are involved with the ability to think ahead, personality, and social control of emotions.
7. False. Contrary to popular belief, small to moderated amounts of alcohol do not destroy neurons, but they do alter brain chemistry, and alcohol abuse can permanently damage chemical balances.
8. True. There is evidence that an intellectually stimulating environment, particularly in early development, can increase the complexity of axon-dendrite connections.
9. False. The human brain is a well-integrated, fully functioning organ with some redundancy built-in, but no useless parts.
10. False. Post-concussion syndrome can involve cognitive impairment, headaches, nausea, depression, and fatigue. Even mild head injuries and whiplash where the person never loses consciousness can cause these symptoms.