Unit 5 Seminar – Controversies in Psychology Thursday, 9:00pm

 Factors affecting IQ scores  Environmental factors  Education level  SES status  Individual factors – motivation, mood, stress level  Culture Bias  Language  Definitions  Attitudes, motivation, values  Culture – Fair Testing  Advantages/Disadvantages

 Present in almost every psychological topic  Social vs Genetic influences  Some common areas of debate  Intelligence  High genetic prevalence  Also dependent on social factors such as education and income level  Personality  Addiction  Children of alcoholics/drug addicts are more likely to abuse alcohol later in life  Psychological disorders  Depression, OCD, Schizophrenia – all shown to have genetic tendencies

 Present in legal terms since 13 th century  Only 1% of defendants use the insanity defense – only 20% of those cases are acquitted  A defense asserted by an accused in a criminal prosecution to avoid liability for the commission of a crime because, at the time of the crime, the person did not appreciate the nature or quality or wrongfulness of the acts.  A mental institution is the option besides prison  Attempted Reagan assassination  Issues of controversy  Legal vs medical  Limits those who cannot afford good legal services  Free will cannot be explored in medical terms

 Topics such as life after death, esp, reincarnation, ghosts and spirits, astrology, out of body experiences explored  Popularity and respectability of the field continues to decline  Lack of funding for research  Lack of solid research with controlled variables

 Subliminal messaging  seek to attack our subconscious – in other words, we are processing the information but not in a way that we are aware of- we are processing them in our subconscious- because we are not attending to them  Heuristic persuasion  appeals to habits and emotions – people use heuristics or rules of thumb when determining what to believe  Informational Influences  occurs when a person’s behavior is influenced by another’s behavior because the latter provides information about what is good or true.  Buzz words  Product placement  when companies pay to have their product placed in the media

 Social psychology Research  methodological technique whereby a participant is not made fully aware of the specific purposes of the study or is misinformed as part of the study  Milgram’s obedience study  Deception in reality tv?  Debriefing to address ethical concerns