Psychology 1000 Chapter Notes - Chapter 6: Circadian Rhythm, Seasonal Affective Disorder, Unconscious Mind

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Dr.Mike

Document Summary

Most common measure of consciousness is by self-report, this offers insight into a person"s subjective experiences, but it isn"t always verifiable. Physiological measures (like eeg recordings of brain) can be used to determine relationships between bodily states and mental processes, but this is objective. Behavioural measures (like performance on special tasks) can be used, but it is also objective. Cognitive psychologists reject notion of an unconscious mind driven by instinctive urges and repressed conflicts. Instead, they view conscious and unconscious mental life as complementary forms of information processing. Controlled (effortful) processing voluntary use of attention and conscious effort: more flexible and open to change. Automatic processing facilitates divided attention ability to perform more than one activity at the same time. It becomes more difficult when tasks require similar mental resources (shadowing experiments) Unconscious processes can have an emotional and motivational flavour.