After breaking up with her boyfriend, Tanya says, “I don’t think I have control over what is happening in my life”.
Which of the following statements would describe Tanya?
C. Locus of control is a concept proposed by Julian Rotter as a part of his social learning theory of personality. Those with external locus of control attribute their successes and failures to external factors, for example luck, fate, etc. They believe that outcomes are largely out of their control. Those with an internal locus of control believe that success and failures are determined by their own action and abilities. There is some evidence suggesting that people with a high external locus are prone to more psychological problems. People with a high internal locus of control tend to be more successful. People with an external locus of control may be more prone to develop an equivalent of learned helplessness. For a given subject, locus of control may differ based on the issue considered. Consider the example – a person may feel that the political situation in his country is uncontrollable (external), but his own personal situation may be considered to be well under his control (internal).
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A girl of age 2 years searches for her father when he leaves the room and is delighted when he enters the room.
Which of the following phenomena explains this behaviour?
A. Object permanence is the understanding that an object tends to exist even when it cannot be seen or touched. Piaget argued that very young infants did not have a concept of durability of objects, that is ‘out of sight is out of mind’. He claimed that the concept of object permanence was achieved by infants only during the late sensorimotor stage (at around 9 months). More recently this has been challenged by some studies (Hood and Willatts), which state that infants may start developing object permanence even as early as 5 months. Semiotic function is the process where children start to use a symbol or sign to represent an object. For example drawing is a semiotic function which may signify something in the real world. Semiotic function emerges during the preoperational stage. Syllogistic reasoning is the process by which a logical conclusion is formed from two ideas. For example crows are birds (premise 1); birds lay eggs (premise 2); therefore crows lay eggs (conclusion). This is developed during the stage of concrete operations. Centration is the tendency to focus on just one aspect of a problem, neglecting other important features. Centration is considered to be one of the basic flaws in cognition, which leads to the inability of the child to understand the concept of conservation in preoperational stage. Hypotheticodeductive reasoning is considered to be the highest order of reasoning, where a person can develop a hypothesis and test it to reach conclusions. This function usually develops in the formal operational stage according to Piaget.
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In Harlow’s classical study of rhesus monkeys, the baby rhesus monkeys preferred soft-clothed, non-feeding surrogate mothers to hard, wire mesh, but food-providing surrogate mothers. This illustrated the concept of:
D. Harry Harlow in his famous experiments in the 1950s separated rhesus monkeys from their mothers during their first weeks of life. Harlow substituted a surrogate mother made from wire or cloth for the real mother. The infants preferred the cloth-covered surrogate mother, which provided contact comfort, to the wire-covered surrogate, which provided food but no contact comfort. Harlow suggested that the infant monkeys depended on its mother not only for nourishment, but also for physical warmth and emotional security, which he termed ‘contact comfort’. This is an important concept in attachment. Harlow’s experiment refuted the hypothesis that attachment occurs as a result of positive reinforcement to feeding. Imprinting is associated with Konrad Lorenz and geese. Harlow was not an object relation theorist; Klein, Fairburn, and Guntrip are considered to be object relation analysts.
Predictors of delinquency include which of the following?
E. Farrington et al. (see reference below) in their Cambridge study in delinquent behaviour identified the following predictors of delinquency:
Ryan is late for his WPBA meeting with his supervisor. After waiting for half an hour at the bus stop, he realizes that all buses in this route have been cancelled due to bad weather. He swears and kicks a can of Coke lying on the ground in anger.
Which of the following would best explain this behaviour?
C. John Dollard’s frustration–aggression hypothesis states that aggression invariably stems from frustration and frustration in turn leads to aggression by arousing an individual. But frustrated individuals may react in various ways including resignation, depression, and despair. As a corollary not all aggression results from frustration, for example aggression exhibited during sporting activities such as boxing.
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