Psychology 3724F/G Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Positive Illusions, Mean Absolute Difference, Telepathy

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 3724F/G
• Professor: Lorne Campbell

Document Summary

Week 9 chapter 8 reading minds, partners, and relationships. Reality: research suggests that, in general, people tend to be positively biased about their partners and relationships, positive illusion- my partner is better than most, but! Judgements of partners and relationships seem to be systematically biased in a positive direction. Combinations of bias and accuracy: 1: perfect correlation, very accurate, 2: still tracking very high, still perfect correlation, but there"s a positive bias (partners see people more positively than they see themselves ) In general, greater positive directional bias is associated with higher relationship quality (fletcher. Physiology of mind reading: when mind-reading, stronger accuracy is associated with activity in the prefrontal cortex (e. g. , areas associated with attributions) and elements of the mirror neuron system (zaki et al. , 2009) Increases in oxytocin improves mind-reading (domes et al. , 2007) Target closeness: mind-reading accuracy varies depending on how well a person knows the target (thomas & fletcher,