Media Archive: Psychology

VHS Color 58/87 Min 2003

(VT 9488 – VT 9489) Presents short segments selected and edited in collaboration with Harvey Schulman, Amanda Napolitano, Kari Selby, and Jamie Smith of the Ohio State University. Printed material available through IMS. See titles for descriptions. Not subtitled or closed captioned. (Worth Publishers)

VT 9488, Tape 1

VT 9489, Tape 2

Neural Communication

(VT 9488) #1: Media Archive: Psychology, Neuroscience Section. Depicts how neural communication works, illustrating simulated action potentials traveling from one neuron to another. Demonstrates how an action potential from an excitatory neuron can create an excitatory postsynaptic potential in the target neuron. Discusses the differences between action potentials in myelinated axons and unmyelinated axons.

Brain Structures

(VT 9488) #2: Media Archive: Psychology, Neuroscience Section. Looks at an animated 3-dimensional model of the brain to show various brain structures in relation to each other. Shows how the optic nerve connects the eyes to the brain and the different lobes of the brain.

Brain Imaging

(VT 9488) #3: Media Archive: Psychology, Neuroscience Section. Depicts a simulated imaging room where PET, MRI and CT machines are located. Demonstrates an MRI scan.

Muller–Lyer Illusion

(VT 9488) #4: Media Archive: Psychology, Sensation and Perception Section. Demonstrates the classic Muller-Lyer visual illusion in which an individual looks at two lines that are identical in size and thinks the one with outward pointing arrowheads is longer than the one with inward pointing arrowheads.

Depth Cues

(VT 9488) #5: Media Archive: Psychology, Sensation and Perception Section. Demonstrates depth cues by using the moon illusion in which the moon appears to be smaller when it is high in the sky as opposed to when it is close to the horizon. Depicts the actual path along which the moon travels and then the lunar path as perceived by subjects.

Pavlov’s Discovery of Classical Conditioning

(VT 9488) #6: Media Archive: Psychology, Learning Section. Recreates Pavlov’s experiment on the salivation response in dogs, which led to the development of classical conditioning.

Watson’s Little Albert

(VT 9488) #7: Media Archive: Psychology, Learning Section. Presents scenes from Watson’s famous experiment on emotional conditioning with Little Albert, demonstrating basic principles of conditioning and generalization.

Thorndike’s Puzzle Box

(VT 9488) #8: Media Archive: Psychology, Learning Section. Recreates the experiments that Thorndike performed on cats in puzzle boxes (boxes in which the cat could escape only by using a series of levers) in order to examine how animals learn. These experiments led to the development of Thorndike’s law of effect, which states that an action that results in a favorable effect is more likely to be repeated, while an action that results in an unfavorable effect is less likely to be repeated.

B. F. Skinner Interview

(VT 9488) #9: Media Archive: Psychology, Learning Section. Shows pigeons in a Skinner lab responding to words and other stimuli and having the desired response reinforced by food. Indicates that human behavior can also be shaped by reinforcement. In an interview, B.F. Skinner discusses how a variable ratio schedule of reinforcement is used in gambling machines and argues that individuals gamble because of the type of reinforcement they receive. Skinner also discusses his opinion that free will is an illusion and that behavior can be explained by other causes.

Cognitive Maps

(VT 9488) #10: Media Archive: Psychology, Learning Section. Demonstrates how animals use cognitive maps or mental representations of the world around them to help them locate food and water sources.

Bandura’s Bobo Doll Experiment

(VT 9488) #11: Media Archive: Psychology, Learning Section. Presents Albert Bandura narrating a video of one of his experiments in which he showed how much modeled aggression a child learned just by watching others perform aggressive acts.

Harlow’s Studies on Dependency in Monkeys

(VT 9488) #12: Media Archive: Psychology, Development Section. Discusses Harry Harlow’s experiments on infant monkeys to demonstrate attachment development. Shows footage from his original experiments wherein an infant monkey is given two “mothers”, one made of wire that provides food, and one made of cloth. Shows that the monkey spends the most time with the cloth “mother”. In another experiment the monkey is placed in an novel environment. Only when the cloth “mother” is placed in the environment does the monkey feel secure and able to explore the environment.

Testing Competency in the Newborn

(VT 9488) #13: Media Archive: Psychology, Development Section. Discusses the Apgar scale, the most common scale used for assessing newborns for anything that might warrant medical attention.

Reflexes in the Newborn

(VT 9488) #14: Media Archive: Psychology, Development Section. Discusses some of the automatic responses that babies are born with, such as breathing, blinking, swallowing, sucking, rooting, and the Babbinsky reflex. Some researchers believe these reflexes were critical during an earlier stage of human evolution when infants had to cling to their mothers.

Object Permanence

(VT 9488) #15: Media Archive: Psychology, Development Section. Discusses the concept of object permanence, defined as the knowledge that objects exist even when they are out of view. Shows children of different ages to demonstrate how object permanence develops during the first year of life. Demonstrates the “A not B error”, a common mistake young children make after they develop object permanence, in which a child looks for a toy where he originally found it rather than where he observed it being hidden.

Stranger Anxiety

(VT 9488) #16: Media Archive: Psychology, Development Section. Focuses on social development and the anxiety infants begin to display in the presence of strangers at approximately six months of age.

Morelli’s Strange–Situation Test

(VT 9488) #17: Media Archive: Psychology, Development Section. Discusses the strange-situation test, in which the researcher measures a baby’s reaction to being separated and then reunited with a caregiver. By measuring the infant’s reaction in a strange-situation test, a researcher is able to determine if a baby is securely attached. Footage of infants’ reactions demonstrates that cross-culturally infants react very similarly to a strange-situation test.

Piaget’s Conservation Task

(VT 9488) #18: Media Archive: Psychology, Development Section. Focuses on Piaget’s third stage of development, known as concrete operational stage, when a child is able to think logically about concrete events. Shows a child participating in Piaget’s conservation task, which is used to measure if a child has attained this level of development by measuring whether a child understands that an object or thing can change while still retaining its underlying identity.

Body Part Counting System

(VT 9488) #19: Media Archive: Psychology, Development Section. Explains the twenty-seven body part counting system that is used by the Oksapmin people of Papua, New Guinea to represent numbers.

Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development – Trust Versus Mistrust

(VT 9488) #20: Media Archive: Psychology, Development Section. Discusses the first stage of development in Erik Erikson’s psychosocial eight-stage theory of development, which is concerned with the resolution of the conflict of trust versus mistrust. Explains the type of caregiving that produces both trust and mistrust in infants.

Chomsky’s View of Language Development

(VT 9488) #21: Media Archive: Psychology, Thinking and Language Section. Explains Noam Chomsky’s theory of language development, which is that humans have an inborn predisposition for language and grammar. Gives examples of sentences that are grammatically different when words are removed at the end of the sentence. Humans are able to understand the sentences as meaning two different things without explicitly learning the grammatical rules that make the sentences different.

Gleason’s Wug Test

(VT 9488) #22: Media Archive: Psychology, Thinking and Language Section. Discusses the Wug Test, which was developed by Jean Gleason. The Wug test uses words that do not exist in order to test whether or not children can apply the rules of their language to unfamiliar words. Fake words are used to eliminate the possibility of previous exposure to the words and to give support to the tenet that learning alone is not enough to explain grammar use. Depicts a psychologist administering the Wug test to a child, who demonstrates his ability to apply the rules of grammar to the nonsense words used in the test.

Neisser’s Selective Attention Test

(VT 9488) #23: Media Archive: Psychology, Memory Section. Presents a portion of the actual tape Neisser showed to subjects in his selective attention test. Selective attention is a person’s ability to pay attention to only certain aspects of an experience. In Neisser’s selective attention test, subjects were shown images of three men in black shirts passing a basketball to each other superimposed on images of three men in white shirts passing a basketball. The subjects were instructed to press a key each time they saw a man in a black shirt pass the ball.

Aging and Memory

(VT 9488) #24: Media Archive: Psychology, Memory Section. Discusses research on aging and memory, focusing on experiments with time-based and event-based prospective memory. Researchers found significant memory differences between younger and older adults in the time-based experiment task, but in the event-based experiment task, no memory differences were found.

Clive Wearing – Living Without Memory

(VT 9488) #25: Media Archive: Psychology, Memory Section. Discusses an extreme form of memory deficit in the case of Clive Wearing, who is incapable of making new memories due to viral encephalitis. Clive and his wife discuss his condition.

Self-Stimulation in Rats

(VT 9489) #26: Media Archive: Psychology, Motivation Section. Demonstrates how the lateral hypothalamus can affect behavior. Shows a rat in a chamber with an electrode placed in the lateral hypothalamus region of its brain. When the rat presses a lever that sends a weak electrical current that stimulates the lateral hypothalamus and then receives a reward to reinforce its behavior, the rat eventually presses the lever constantly, at the expense of critical activities such as eating and drinking.

Reading Nonverbal Communication

(VT 9489) #27: Media Archive: Psychology, Emotion Section. Deals with the detection of nonverbal communication. Shows a woman talking on the phone. Using nonverbal cues, the viewer is to decide to whom she might be talking. In another case a woman tells two different versions of her life story and the viewer is to decide which story is a lie based on nonverbal information.

Ekman’s Studies on Facial Expressions of Emotion

(VT 9489) #28: Media Archive: Psychology, Emotion Section. Describes the multiple roles of the human face and its primary importance in conveying emotion. Paul Ekman describes how people in different cultures use facial expressions to show the six basic emotions (surprise, fear, disgust, anger, happiness and sadness) with great similarity. Concludes that evolution, not learning, is responsible for our facial expressions.

Schizophrenic Brain, The

(VT 9489)#29: Media Archive: Psychology, Psychological Disorders Section. Shows the differences in brain characteristics of a schizophrenic patient when compared to the brain of his normal identical twin. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) of the schizophrenic brain shows larger amounts of spinal fluid in the space between the brain and the skull in comparison to the normal twin. Illustrates the brain abnormalities related to schizophrenia and the often-observed brain shrinkage in schizophrenic patients.

Mind of the Psychopath, The

(VT 9489) #30: Media Archive: Psychology, Psychological Disorders Section. Presents the definition of and specific behaviors related to psychopathy, and the ongoing research on this subject. Dr. Robert Hare describes his lexical decision paradigm that was used to examine how psychopaths process information differently than other individuals. In the lexical decision paradigm, a person decides if a string of letters forms a word. The words presented in Dr. Hare’s experiment were either neutral or emotionally negative in connotation. Results showed that in contrast to normal individuals, psychopaths seem to process emotionally laden words in the same way that they process neutral words.

Multiple Personality Disorder

(VT 9489) #31: Media Archive: Psychology, Psychological Disorders Section. Presents a man with multiple personality disorder who describes his life and struggles. While some psychologists agree that the disorder is culturally created and not a true psychological disorder, results of evoked potentials in the brains of multiples showed different patterns of activity in response to stimuli presented to different personalities of the same individual. These results suggest that actual bodily changes occur when different personalities surface, supporting the claim that it is a valid psychological disorder that merits further research.

Gender Identity Disorder

(VT 9489) #32: Media Archive: Psychology, Psychological Disorders Section. Presents a man with gender identity disorder who describes his feelings of confusion and discomfort with being born biologically as a woman but always feeling psychologically as though he were a man. He talks about his feelings one year after his reassignment surgery.

Mood Disorders

(VT 9489) #33: Media Archive: Psychology, Psychological Disorders Section. Focuses on depression and mania through discussion with individuals who suffer from the disorder and from a psychological and biological perspective. Describes treatments, medications and their actions, asserting that successful treatment lies in the application of both medical and psychological methods.

Schizophrenia

(VT 9489) #34: Media Archive: Psychology, Therapy Section. Discusses the medical treatment of schizophrenia and notes that all the medications act on the neurotransmitter dopamine. Demonstrates the effectiveness of anti-psychotic medications by showing two separate interviews with a young schizophrenic patient, one before medication and one after four weeks of treatment with medication.

Treatment of Drug Addiction

(VT 9489) #35: Media Archive: Psychology, Therapy Section. Features a recovering drug addict talking about his addiction to crack cocaine. He entered a treatment center and has been clean for four years. He discusses the skills he learned that were helpful in accomplishing and maintaining his sobriety goal.

Early Treatment of Mental Disorders

(VT 9489) #36: Media Archive: Psychology, Therapy Section. Discusses some of the most popular forms of treatments for mental disorders used during the first half of the twentieth century.

Electroconvulsive Therapy

(VT 9489) #37: Media Archive: Psychology, Therapy Section. Discusses the use of electroconvulsive therapy for severely depressed patients who do not respond to conventional methods of treatment.

Stress on the Job

(VT 9489) #38: Media Archive: Psychology, Stress and Health Section. Discusses the physiological response to stress and the use of the neurotransmitter GABA and other treatments.

Selye’s Stress Response Studies

(VT 9489) #39: Media Archive: Psychology, Stress and Health Section. Features Dr. Hans Selye of the University of Montreal as he describes his early theories of stress and how he conceptualizes the positive role of stress in his own life.

Takooshian’s Psychology of Bystanders

(VT 9489) #40: Media Archive: Psychology, Social Psychology Section. Details studies done by Takooshian on the reaction of bystanders to events in which one individual is victimized. Studies show that the presence of others has inhibiting effects on each of us that lead us not to help, but rather to look to others to render assistance, and that people who are alone are more likely to help another person who is in trouble.

Milgram’s Obedience Studies

(VT 9489) #41: Media Archive: Psychology, Social Psychology Section. Shows footage from Stanley Milgram’s study on social obedience in which participants were told to administer shocks to another participant who was actually a confederate of Milgram’s and not receiving a real shock. Milgram was interested in seeing if a person would continue to administer shock when ordered, even when they believed that the recipient of the shock was harmed. Shows one of the participants under obvious distress but continuing to give the shock.

Schachter’s Affiliation Experiment

(VT 9489) #42: Media Archive: Psychology, Social Psychology Section. Discusses Stanley Schachter’s experiment on the desire of the individual to have contact with others in high-fear versus low-fear situations. He found that fear is a powerful motivator for social cohesion.

VT 9488	Tape 1	Segments 1 – 25
VT 9489	Tape 2	Segments 26 – 42