PSYCO105 Lecture Notes - Lecture 31: Prefrontal Cortex, Linguistic Relativity, Grammatical Gender
1 May 2018
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Guest Lecture; Children’s Self-Regulation in Context; Understanding the impact of parenting.
❏Self-regulation → Do not need to control, it is goal oriented. (You don’t need to remind yourself to stay
awake when studying).
❏“Cool” Self-Regulation → Operate in emotionally neutral contexts, situations of cognitive load and executive
functions.
❏“Hot” Self-Regulation → Operate in emotionally and motivationally arousing situations. There is a delay of
gratification and emotion regulation.
❏Prefrontal cortex is the area associated with self-regulation and is the last cortex to develop.
Parenting
❏Sensitivity; prompt & appropriate responding to children’s behaviour and emotional availability
❏Harsh Discipline → Coercive behaviours used to control children’s behaviours.
Rejection versus Harsh Discipline
❏People with harsh discipline but low sensitivity are more likely to have behavioural problems while people
with harsh discipline but high sensitivity are less likely to have behavioural problems.
Guest Lecture #2: Language and Thought (and Development)
❏Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or linguistic relativity hypothesis
❏Language one habitually uses affects how one conceptualizes the world.
❏Example; In spanish, there are two words that describe the word “to be” which changes
meaning because of the time period. One describes a long time period and the other is a
short period of time about being therefore changing the meaning.
❏Example; in english hand and arm are different therefore conceptually distinguished, but in
polish hand and arm are the same word therefore conceptually the same.
❏Examples: Colour terms; grammatical gender.
❏Developmentally;
❏Young children (3-5 years old) might not show these effects
❏Think these effects is because they haven’t been using the language long enough.
❏Older Children (8-10 ) might show these effects
❏Effects of language of thought (to form a habit) will typically show up at the age of 9.
Pitch Metaphors
❏Basic test of linguistic relativity.
❏Languages often use spatial metaphors to refer to the extreme ends of pitch.
❏High/low → English, Greek Chinese
❏Thin/Thick → farsi, Turkish, Zapotec Mayan.
❏Thin is associated with high note
❏Thick note associated with low note.
Pitch Metaphors Study
❏Researched if the use of metaphors influences the difficulty/ease to learn association between visuospatial
image and pitch of a note.
❏Design → Showed participants image and heard a note and were asked if they went together (yes or no)
❏Phase 1: 11 stimuli, but given no feedback.
❏Phase 2; 80 stimuli, with feedback after 12 stimuli with a smile face (right) or sad face (wrong) to
motivate them to get as many as they can correct.
❏Participants screened for Farsi/Turkish knowledge
❏Assigned one of three image conditions;
❏High/low lines w/ high and low sounds
❏Thin/Thick lines w/ skinny lines or fat lines w/ high and low sounds.
Document Summary
Guest lecture; children"s self-regulation in context; understanding the impact of parenting. Self-regulation do not need to control, it is goal oriented. (you don"t need to remind yourself to stay awake when studying). Cool self-regulation operate in emotionally neutral contexts, situations of cognitive load and executive functions. Hot self-regulation operate in emotionally and motivationally arousing situations. There is a delay of gratification and emotion regulation. Prefrontal cortex is the area associated with self-regulation and is the last cortex to develop. Sensitivity; prompt & appropriate responding to children"s behaviour and emotional availability. Harsh discipline coercive behaviours used to control children"s behaviours. People with harsh discipline but low sensitivity are more likely to have behavioural problems while people with harsh discipline but high sensitivity are less likely to have behavioural problems. Guest lecture #2: language and thought (and development) Language one habitually uses affects how one conceptualizes the world.
