Understanding Human Behaviour

Summary:

The note summarises the key topics covered in the Understanding Human Behaviour Online MCQ Test (2). The topics include human-animal relationships, physical appearance-related societal issues, terror management theory, social influence and prosocial behaviour, placebo effect, child attachment, and attachment. The note emphasizes covering the main and relevant information necessary for the test. It advises students to study these notes in order to be well-prepared for the upcoming test.

Excerpt:

Understanding Human Behaviour

Human-animal relationships
• The benefits of pet ownership include improvements to physical and mental health, emotional stability and social support
• Financial cost
• Disadvantages: miss out on overnight trips or long visits with friends, losing a pet = emotional trauma, unresolved behavioural problems: relinquishment & owner guilt
• Also, dog attacks, transmittable diseases, cat scratch fever
• We put ourselves through this because of attachment, social support, biophilia
• Biophilia – innate attraction to living things, criticism of this is you can’t develop research questions to test in a laboratory or even in a normal environment to see if this is correct (vague)
• If looking at a fish tank is enough for stress reduction, why bother with a pet?

Attachment theory:
• Proximity seeking – stays close to the caregiver
• Secure base – a child goes out and explores but comes back to the caregiver
• haven – caregiver provides a child with protection from perceived threats or frightening situations
• Separation distress – the child becomes upset when the caregiver is not available to him or her
• In some studies, pet-owner relationships have all of these, but in other studies, not all components are present
• There are evolutionary benefits to child-caregiver attachments
• Qualitative difference between inter-human attachments and pet-owner attachments

Social support theory:
• Social support positively impacts physical and psychological health outcomes
• Not having social support means you are more likely to have negative physical and psychological health outcomes
• Dual Functions: confidante who unconditionally accepts owner – listens to problems and never judges you & facilitator of social interactions with other humans – taking the dog out for a walk and people stop you to pet dog, compliment dog or talk about the resemblance to a past dog
• Criticism of this is you can’t develop research questions to test in a laboratory or even in a normal environment to see if this is correct (vague)