Notes on "Introduction to Psychology"

WIP

Week 2 / Language acquisition

The biological capacity to learn language has a clock on it. There's a critical period you have to do it, or you'll never be fully successful. This is true both for second languages and also studies of deaf children learning sign language for first languages.

Week 5 / Behavioral genetics

What makes people different?

• Heritability: Proportion of variance due to genetic differences
• Shared Environment: Proportion of variance due to environment shared by family members
• Non-Shared Environment: Proportion of variance due to all other factors
• Note: Heritability + Shared Environment + Non-Shared Environment (=1) counts for all the differences.

Conclusion:

• There is high heritability for intelligence, personality, religiosity, happiness, etc (within groups). In others words, e.g. for happiness, there's a genetically determined range of how happy you're likely to be.
• Almost all the remaining variance, is due to non-shared environment. IQ correlates with genetically unrelated adults who were raised in the same family is about zero.

Week 6 / Judgments about past events are skewed

(In the context of happiness) Endings matter so much that a good ending can override a whole lot of bad and a bad ending can destroy a whole lot of good.

Readings

• TODO