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Class 12 Psychology Quick Revision notes Chapter 7 Social Influence And Group Processes

FACTS THAT MATTER
NATURE AND FORMATION OF GROUPS
Group: Organised system of two or more people who interact and are interdependent, have common motives, have a set of role relationships among members and have norms that regulate the behaviour of its members.
Features:
1. Collection of people with common goals and motives.
2. Two or more people: perceive themselves as belonging to the group—each group is unique.
3. Members are interdependent.
4. Members interact with each other directly or indirectly.
5. Members satisfy needs through joint association—influence each other.
6. Set of norms and roles—specific functions for each member, adhere to norms on how one must behave, expected behaviour, etc.
Advantages:
We are simultaneously members of different groups; different groups satisfy different needs but could create pressures due to competing demands and expectations.
1. Security: Groups reduce insecurity
• being with people—sense of comfort/protection.
• people feel stronger—less vulnerable to threats.
2. Status: Recognised group gives feeling of power and importance.
3. Self-esteem: Feeling of self-worth and positive social identity.
• member of prestigious group enhances* self-concept.
4. Goal Achievement: Group helps to attain some goals which can’t be attained alone (power in the majority).
5. Provides Knowledge and Information: Broadens views, helps supplement information.
6. Satisfaction of Psychological and Social Needs: Like sense of belongingness—giving and receiving attention, love and power.
Group Formation:
Some form of contact and interaction between people is needed.
1. Proximity: Closeness and repeated interactions with the same people (get to know their interests, attitudes and background).
2. Similarity: People prefer consistency—consistent relationship (reinforces and validates opinions and values; feel we’re right).
3. Common Motives and Goals: Groups facilitate goal attainment.
Stages of group formation (Tuck man):
1. Forming: Member’s first meet—there is uncertainty about group and goal and how it will be achieved. they try to get to know each other—there is excitement and apprehension.
2. Storming: Intra-group conflict—about how the goal is to be achieved, who’s the leader and who will perform what task (hierarchy of leadership and how to achieve goal is developed.
3. Norming: Develop norms related to group behaviour (development of a positive group identity).
4. Performing: Structure of the group has evolved and is accepted (towards goal achievement); at this is the last stage of group development.
5. Adjourning: Once the function is over the group may be disbanded.
Notes:
— Groups do not always proceed in a systematic manner.
— Stages could even take place simultaneously.
— Groups can go back and forth between stages or skip a few stages.
Group Structure: Over time there are regularities in distribution of tasks, responsibilities assigned to members and status of members.
Elements:
1. Roles: Socially defined expectation that individuals in given situations are expected to fulfil, i.e., typical behaviour that depicts a person in a given social context.
(i) Role Expectations: Behaviour expected of someone in a particular role.
2. Norms (unspoken rules): Expected standards of behaviour and beliefs established, agreed upon and enforced by group members.
3. Status: Relative social position given to group members by others.
(i) Ascribed (given due to one’s seniority) or achieved (because of expertise or hard work).
(ii) Members of a group—enjoy status, and want to be members of prestigious groups.
(iii) Within groups, different members have different prestige and status.
4. Cohesiveness: Togetherness, binding or mutual attraction among members
(i) More Cohesiveness: Members start thinking, feeling and acting as a social unit (no isolated individuals); there is an increased desire to remain in group (we feeling- sense of belongingness).
(iii) Extreme cohesiveness leads to group think and is negative.
Types of Groups:
Primary Group:
Pre-existing formation that are usually given to a person. People usually remain a part of it through their lifetime.
Includes face-to-face interaction and close physical proximity. Member share warm, emotional bonds.
Central to person’s functioning; major role in developing values and ideals.
Boundaries are less permeable—can’t choose membership, join or leave easily.
Example: Family, religion, caste.
Secondary Group:
Groups which individuals join by choice.
Relationships among members are more impersonal, indirect and less frequent.
These may or may not be short-lived.
It is easy to leave and join another group.
Example: Political party.
Formal Group:
Functions, based to be performed are explicitly stated.
Formation based on specific rules or laws and members have defined roles. Set of norms help establish order.
Example: Office, university.
Informal Group:
Roles of each member not so definite and specified. Close relationship among members exist.
Formation not based on rules and laws.
Example: peer group.
In group:
One’s own group—‘we’ (e.g., India).
Members in the group—similar, viewed favourably, have desired traits.
Out group:
Another group—‘they’ (e.g., Pakistan).
Member of out-group—viewed
differently, negatively in comparison to in group.
Influence of Group on Individual Behaviour:
1. Social Loafing: This is the reduction in individual effort when working on a collective task.
— Individual performing an activity with the others as part of a larger group.
— Individuals work less hard in a group than alone.
— Don’t know much effort each one is putting in.
— Presence of others leads to arousal; motivates individuals to enhance their performance (only when a person’s efforts are individually evaluated).
Causes of Social Loafing:
(a) Members feel less responsible for the overall task and thus exert less effort.
(b) Performance of the group isn’t compared with other groups.
(c) Motivation decreases as contributions are not individually evaluated.
(d) No/improper co-ordination between members.
(e) Belonging to the same group is not important for members (it is only aggregate of individuals).
Can be reduced by:
(a) Making effort of each person identifiable.
(b) Increasing pressure to work hard—make members committed, motivated.
(c) Increase apparent importance and value of task.
(d) Make them feel their Individual contribution is important.
(e) Strengthen group cohesiveness—increase motivation for successful group outcome.
2. Group Polarisation: Groups are likely to take more extreme decisions than individuals would take alone
• strengthening of group’s initial position because of groups interaction.
• dangerous repercussions—groups may take extreme position (very weak to very strong decisions).
Causes of group Polarization:
(a) In the company of like-minded people, you’re likely to hear newer arguments favouring your view-points.
(b) Bandwagon effect—when you find others sharing your view-point, you feel your view is validated by the public.
(c) When people have similar views as you, you’re likely to perceive them as in-group (start identifying with them, show conformity—views become strengthened).
Social Influences: Those processes whereby our attitudes and behaviours are influences by the real or imagined presence of other people.
Kelman.
Identification: Influence process based on agreement or identity seeking. Internalisation: Process based on information seeking.
1. Conformity:
— Most indirect form of social influence.
— Tendency to follow norms is natural and spontaneous (norms are unwritten informal rules: provide information about what is expected from people in a situation; allows the group of function smoothly).
— People feel uncomfortable if they’re ‘different’ (could lead to dislike/disapproval or some form of social punishment) (deviants/non-conformists).
— Following norms is the easiest way to avoid disapproval.
— Norms reflect the views and beliefs of the majority (feel majority is likely to be right). — Experiments on conformity by Sherif (Autokinetic effect) and Asch (Asch technique)
(condition determining the extent of conformity—degrees of conformity determined by situation-specific factors).
Determinants of Conformity:
(a) Size of Group: More conformity when group is small.
(b) Size of Minority: Larger the minority, lesser the conformity (more is the deviance).
(c) Nature of the Task: more conformity when there are objective questions.
(d) Public/Private Expression of Behaviour: More conformity in public and less conformity in private expression.
(e) Personality: Conforming personality—tendency to change behaviour according to what others do (others are independent, don’t look for norms to decide how to behave in a situation—highly intelligent people are confident).
Conformity occurs because of:
(a) Informational influence (that results from accepting evidence, not reality. Rational conformity- learn through observing other’s actions)
(b) Normative influence (based on desire to be accepted and admired—conform because deviation could lead to rejection/non-acceptance. Majority determines final decision but at times ifTniriority is firm and uncompromising it doubts on the majority’s minds).
2. Compliance: Extreme condition forcing the person to accept influence (of a significant other) and behave in a particular way in response to a request from another person/group even in the absence of a norm. Why do we comply—easier way out of the situation more polite.
Factors used to make others comply:
(i) ‘Foot in the Door’ Technique: Being by making small request that one can’t refuse move on to bigger ones-once you comply with the first request, feel uncomfortable refusing the second one.
(ii) ‘Deadline* Technique: A ‘last date’ is announced until an offer is available—make people hurry so they can’t miss the opportunity. More (the one actually required), usually granted.
(iii) ‘Door in the Face Technique: Being with a large request and when this is refused move onto making a smaller request (the one actually required), usually granted.
3. Obedience
— Response to a person in authority.
— Direct and explicit form of social influence (someone has requested and you comply).
— If disobeyed, one is likely to get punished from people in authority; thus, one to obey as people in authority have effective means for enforcing order.
— Milgram’s experiment: Even ordinary people are willing to harm innocent people if ordered by someone in authority.
Why do people obey (after knowing the effects)?
(a) Feel they are not responsible for their own action and that they are simply carrying out orders from an authority.
(b) Authority is powerful and possesses symbol of status, and thus difficult to resist.
(c) Authority increases commands from lesser to greater levels (initial obedience binds followers for commitment and once you obey small orders you start obeying bigger orders as you feel committed to the authority).
(d) Events move at such a fast speed that there is no time to think, one just obeys orders, e.g., riots
Co-operation and Competition:
Co-operation:
When groups work together to achieve shared goals.
No individual rewards. Only group rewards exist.
Co-operative goals—each attains his/ her goal only if other members attain their.
There is respect for one another’s ideas and members are more friendly. There is more co-ordination.
Competition:
When group-members try to maximize their own benefits.
They work for self-interest and individual reward.
Competitive goals—each gets his/her goal only if others don’t attain their.
Leads to conflict and disharmony. More group cohesion and solidarity within ones group.
Determinants of Co-operation and Competition:
(a) Reward Structure:
Co-operative reward structure promotes interdependence; reward possible only if all contribute.
Competitive reward structure—only one gets the award.
(b) Interpersonal Communication: Good interpersonal communication increases co-operation (facilitates interaction, discussion, convinces each other and increases learning about each other).
(c) Reciprocity: People feel obligated to return the behaviour they get (initial co¬operation leads to increased co-operation and initial competitiveness leads to competition).
Social Identity: Aspect of our self-concept which is based on our group membership (tells us about one’s position in the larger social contact and helps us located ourselves in society)
— derives from groups we are a part of.
— includes personal attributes and attributes we share with others.
— acquires certain attributes from interaction with others in society.
— identification with social groups is important for self-concept.
— provides members with a shared set of values, beliefs and goal about ourselves and others
— in-group—group with which you identify yourself (start showing favouritism towards it. Rate it above out-group and devaluate out group—basis of intergroup conflicts).
Intergroup Conflicts:
Conflict: This is process in which either an individual or a group perceives others as having opposing interest and both try to contradict each other (‘we’ and ‘they’ feeling-are strong)
— belief that ‘others’ will protect only its own interests.
— both try to exert power on one another.
— when groups are more aggressive than individuals, it leads to escalation of conflict.
— costly human price in conflicts.
Causes:
(a) Lack of communication or Faulty Communication: It leads to suspicion and lack of trust.
(b) Relative Deprivation: Compare oneself to members of the other group:
— don’t have what you desire: others have it.
— not doing well in comparison to others: deprivation depression.
(c) Belief that one is better than the other: What one partly believes should be done (if it does not happen—then members accuse one another and small differences are magnified. This leads to increased conflict).
(d) Desire for Retaliation: For harm done in the past.
(e) No Respect for Others Norms: Feeling that other group does not respect norms of my group and violates them because of malevolent intent.
(f) Biased Perception: Feeling of ‘the/ and ‘we’.
(g) People are more aggressive and competitive in groups than on their own (due to competition over scarce resources).
(h) Perceived Inequity: Equity—distribution of rewards in proportion to individual’s contributions (you feel irritated and exploited if you contribute more and are rewarded less).
Notes:
— Conflicts between groups leads to series of social and cognitive processes—hardens the stand of each side (ingroup polarization).
— Coalition of like-minded parties increases apprehension. .
— Misperceptions and biased interpretations increase conflicts.
Murphy—Conflicts begin in the minds of men.
Structural Level: Increase in poverty rates, inequality, limited political and social opportunity, economic and social stratification.
Group Level: Social identity, unequal power relations, resources.
Individual Level: Beliefs, biased attitudes, personality characteristics (there is progression along a continuum of violence—butterfly effect).
Consequences (Deutsch):
(a) Communication becomes poor between groups (lack of trust—breakdown in communication leads to suspicion).
(b) Groups start magnifying their differences and perceive their behaviour as fair and others as unfair.
(c) Each side tries to increase its own power and legitimacy, thus the conflict shifts from smaller to larger ones.
(d) Once conflict starts, other factors lead to escalation of conflict (in-group opinion is hardened, out-group is threatened and when other parties choose sides, the conflict is further escalated).
Conflict Resolution Strategies:
1. Introduction of Superordinate Goals: Superordinate goals reduce conflict and are mutually beneficial to both sides, thus sides work co-operatively.
2. Altering Perceptions: Through persuasion, educational and media appeal portrayal of groups differently. Also promoting empathy for others should be taught.
3. Increasing Intergroup Contact: By involving groups on neutral grounds through community projects and events they become more appreciative of each other’s stand. Contacts need to be maintained, supported over a period of time to be successful.
4. Redrawing Group Boundaries: Group boundaries create condition where boundaries are redefined; perceive themselves as belonging to a common group.
5. Negotiations: Reciprocal communication so as to reach an agreement in situation where there is a conflict.
(i) Conflict can be resolved through negotiations and third party interventions.
(ii) Groups try finding mutually acceptable solutions.
(iii) When negotiation doesn’t work then mediation (both parties reach a voluntary agreement and focus discussions on relevant issues) or arbitration (third party has the authority to give a decision after hearing both parties) by a is used.
6. Structural Solutions: Redistributing societal resources according to principles based on justice.
Principles of justice—equality (allocating equally to everyone), need (allocating on the basis of one’s need) and equity (allocating on the basis of contribution).
7. Respect for other Group’s Norms: To respect and be sensitive to the strong norms of various social and ethnic groups, especially in India where many communal riots have occurred due to insensitivity of one religious group towards another.
Group think (Irving Janis)
(i) Cohesion can lead to a tendency to make irrational and uncritical decision—group allows -its concerns for unanimity.
(ii) Appearance of consensus or unanimous agreement—each member believes that all members agree upon a particular decision, no one expresses dissenting opinion (undermine cohesion of group, makes him/her unpopular).
(iii) Exaggerated sense of its own power, ignores real world cues, out of touch with reality— occurs in socially homogenous, cohesive, isolated, do not consider alternatives, decision have high cost.
(iv) Prevention-encouraging and rewarding critical thinking and disagreement, encouraging groups to present alternative courses of action, inviting outside experts to evaluate group decision, encouraging seeking feedback from trusted others.
WORDS THAT MATTER
• Authority: The right inherent in a position (e.g., managerial) to give orders and to except the orders to be obeyed.
• Cohesiveness: All forces (factors) that cause group-members to remain in the group.
• Competition: Mutual striving between two individuals or groups for the same objective.
• Compliance: A form of social influence in which one er more persons, not holding authority, accept direct requests from one or more others.
• Conformity: A type of social influence in which individuals change their attitudes or behaviours in order to adhere to existing social norms.
• Group: Two or more persons who interact with one another, have shared goals, are interdependent, and consider themselves as members of group.
• Groupthink: A mode of thinking in which the group members desire to reach unanimous agreement overrides the wish to adopt proper, rational, decision-making procedures; an example of group polarisation.
• In-group: The social group to which an individual perceives himself or herself as belonging (‘us’). The group with which one identifies. The other groups are out-groups.
• Obedience: Confirming behaviour in reaction to the commands of others.
• Out-group: Any group of which an individual is not a member.
• Primary Group: Group in which each member is personally known to each of the other members, and in which the members, at least on occasion, meet face-to-face.
• Proximity: The principle of Gestalt psychology that stimuli close together tend to be perceived as a group.
• Roles: An important concept in social psychology which refers to the behaviour expected of an individual in accordance with the position he/she holds in a particular society.
• Social Influence: The process by which the actions of an individual or group affect the behaviours of others.
• Social Inhibition: Social restraint on conduct.
• Social Loafing: In a group, each additional individual puts in less effort, thinking that others will be putting in their effort.
• Social Support: Information from other people that one is loved and cared for, esteemed and valued, and part of a network of communication and mutual obligation.
• Status: Social rank within a group.
• Structure: The enduring form and composition of a complex system or phenomenon. Contrast with function, which is a process of a relatively brief duration, arising out of structure.

Class 12 Psychology Quick Revision notes Chapter 6 Attitude And Social Cognition

FACTS THAT MATTER
Social Psychology is a branch of Psychology which investigates how the behaviour of individuals is affected by others and the social environment.
We form attitudes or develop ways of thinking about specific topics and people. We form impressions about persons we meet. We are also interested in why people behave in the ways they do-attribution.
The combination of social processes like attitude, impression formation, attribution and pro social behaviour is called social cognition.
Social cognition refers to the mental activities related to the gathering and interpretation of information about the social world.
Social cognition of all’ the individuals is affected by the social environment (Societal conditions in the society peace, harmony, trust or aggression, frustration, disharmony and distrust towards individuals, groups, peoples, relationship and social issues.)
Because of social influences, people form attitudes or ways of thinking about specific topics and people. Impression formation is when we make inferences about personal qualities of people we meet. Attribution is when we assign causes to the behaviour shown in specific social situation.
Attitude:
• Attitude is a state of the mind, a set of views or thoughts, regarding some topic (called the ‘attitude object’), which have an evaluative feature (positive, negative or neutral quality).
• The thought component is referred to as the cognitive aspect, the emotional component is known as the effective aspect, and the tendency to act is called the behavioural (or conative) aspect. A-B-Ocomponents (Affective-Behavioural-Cognitive components) of attitude.
Beliefs refer to the cognitive component of attitudes and form the ground on which attitudes stand, such as belief in God, or belief in democracy as a political ideology.
Values are attitudes or beliefs that contain a ‘should’ or ‘ought’ aspect, such as moral or ethical values. One example of a value is hard work or honesty. Values are formed when a particular belief or attitude becomes an inseparable part of the person’s outlook on life.
Features of Attitude:
(i) Valence (positivity or negativity).
(ii) Extremeness indicates how positive or negative an attitude is.
(iii) Simplicity or Complexity (multiplexity) refers to how many attitudes there are within a broader attitude. An attitude system is said to be ‘simple’ if it contains only one or a few attitudes and ‘complex’ if it is made up of many attitudes.
(iv) Centrality: This refers to the role of a particular attitude in the system much more than non-central (or peripheral) attitudes would.
Attitude Formation:
In general, attitudes are learned through one’s own experiences, and through interaction With others.
Process of Attitude Formation:
• Association, e.g., a positive attitude towards a subject is learned through the positive association between a teacher and a student.
• Reward or punishment increases/decreases the further development of that attitude.
• Modelling observing others being rewarded or punished for expressing thoughts, or showing behaviour of a particular kind towards the attitude object.
• Group or Cultural norms through the norms of our group or culture which may become part of our social cognition, in the form of attitude.
• Exposure to information, e.g., positive and negative attitudes are formed through the media.
Factors that Influence Attitude Formation:
(i) Family and School Environment particularly in the early years of life.
(ii) Reference Groups indicate the norms regarding acceptable behaviour/ways of thinking, reflect learning of attitudes through cultural norms, noticeable during beginning of adolescence.
(iii) Personal Experiences (direct).
(iv) Media-related Influences. Technological advances have made audio-visual media, school level textbook and the Internet very powerful sources of information
Attitude Change:
Attitudes that are still in the formative stage, and are more like opinions, are much more likely to change compared to attitude that have become firmly established and have become a part of the individual’s values.
1. Balance or P-O-X triangle (Fritz Heider) represents the relationships between three aspects or components of attitude.
• P is the person whose attitude is being studied,
• O is another person
• X is the topic towards which the attitude is being studied (attitude object). It is also possible that all three are persons. The basic idea is that an attitude changes if there is a state of imbalance between the P-O attitude, O-X attitude, and P-X attitude. This is because imbalance is logically uncomfortable.
Imbalance is found when all three sides are negative, or two sides are positive, and one side is negative. Balance is found when all three sides are positive or two sides are negative, and one side is positive.
2. Cognitive Dissonance (Leon Festinger) emphasises on the cognitive component. Cognitive components of an attitude must be ‘constant’ (opposite of‘dissonant’), i.e., they should be logically in line with each other. If an individual finds, that two cognitions in an attitude dissonant, then one of them will be changed in the direction of consonance.
Both balance and cognitive dissonance are examples of cognitive consistency which means that two components or elements of the attitude, or attitude system, must be in the same direction. If this does not happen, then the person experiences a kind of mental discomfort, i.e. the sense that ‘something is not quite right’ in the attitude system.
3. The Two-Step Concept (S.M. Mohsin): According to him, attitude change takes place in the form of two steps:
(i) The target of change (person whose attitude is to be changed) identifies with the source (person through whose influence the attitude is to be changed). Identification means that the target and the source have a mutual regard and attraction.
(ii) The source himself/herself shows an attitude change, by actually changing him/her behaviour towards the attitude object. Observing the source’s changed attitude and behaviour, the target also shows an attitude change through behaviour. This is a kind of imitation or observational learning.
Factors that Influence Attitude Change:
• Characteristics of the Existing Attitude: All four properties of attitudes mentioned earlier, namely, valence (positively or negatively), extremeness, simplicity or complexity (multiplexity), and centrality or significance of the attitude, determine attitude, determine attitude change. Positive, less extreme, peripheral (less significant) and simpler attitudes are easier to change.
In addition, one must also consider the direction and extent of attitude change. Congruent (same direction of the existing attitude) or incongruent (direction opposite). Moreover, an attitude may change in the direction of the information that is presented, or in a direction opposite to that of the information presented.
• Source Characteristics: Source credibility and attractiveness. Attitudes are more likely to change when the message comes from a highly credible source rather than from a low- credible source.
• Message Characteristics: Attitudes will change when the amount of information that is
given about the topic is just enough, neither too much nor too little. Whether the message contains a rational or an emotional appeal, also makes a difference. The motives activated by the message and the mode of spreading the message (face-to-face transmission is more effective than indirect transmission).
• Target Characteristics: Qualities of the target, such as persuasibility (open and flexible personality), strong prejudices, self-esteem, more willing because they base their attitude on more information and thinking.
Attitude-Behaviour Relationship:
Psychologists have found that there would be consistency between attitudes and behaviour when—
(i) the attitude is strong and occupies a central place in the attitude system.
(ii) the person is aware of his/her attitude.
(iii) there is very little or no external pressure for the person to behave in a particular way.
Prejudice and Discrimination:
Prejudices are usually negative attitudes against a particular group, and in many cases, may be based on stereotypes (the cognitive component) about the specific group. A stereotype is a cluster of ideas regarding the characteristics of a specific group. The cognitive component of prejudice is frequently accompanied by dislike or hatred, the affective components of prejudice are more difficult to change.
Sources of Prejudice:
• Learning: Prejudice can also be learned through association, reward and punishment, observing others, group or cultural norms and exposure to information that encourages prejudice. The family, reference groups, personal experiences and the media may play a role in the learning of prejudices. People who learn prejudiced attitudes may develop a ‘prejudiced personality’.
• A strong Social Identity and in Group Bias: Individual who have a strong sense of social identity and have a very positive attitude towards their own group boost this attitude by holding negative attitudes towards other groups.
• Scapegoating: This is a phenomenon by which the majority group places the blame on minority group for its own social, economic or political problems. The minority is too weak or too small in number to defend itself against such accusation.
• Kernel of Truth Concept: Sometimes people may continue to hold stereotypes because they think that there must be some truth, or ‘Kernel of truth’ in which everyone says about the other group.
• Self-fulfilling Prophecy: The group that is the target of prejudice is itself responsible for continuing the prejudice by behaving in ways that justify the prejudice or confirm the negative expectation.
Strategies for Handling Prejudice
The strategies for handling prejudice would be effective if they aim at:
(a) minimising opportunities for learning prejudices,
(b) changing such attitudes,
(c) de-emphasising a narrow social identity based on the in-group, and
(d) discouraging the tendency towards self-fulfilling prophecy among the victims of prejudice.
These goals can be accomplished through:
• Education and information dissemination, for correcting stereotypes related to specific target groups, and tackling the problem of a strong in-group bias.
• Increasing intergroup contact that allows for direct communication, removal of mistrust between the groups, and discovery context, there is close interaction and they are not different in power or status.
• Highlighting individual identity rather than group identity, thus weakening the importance of group (both in-group and out-group) as a basis of evaluating the other person.
Social Cognition refers to all those psychological processes that deal with the gathering and processing of information related to social objects (processes that help in understanding, explaining and interpreting social behaviour). Social cognition is guided by mental units called schemata.
SCHEMAS and Stereotypes
A schema is defined as a mental structure that provides a framework, set of rules or guidelines for processing information about any object. Schemata (or ‘schemas’) are the basic units stored in our memory, and function as shorthand ways of processing information, thus reducing the time and mental effort required in cognition.
Schemata that function in the form of categories are called prototypes, which are the entire set of schemata or qualities that help us to define an object completely. In social cognition, category-based schemata, that are related to groups of people, are called stereotypes (over generalized, are not directly verified). The inferences you have drawn are not the result of your logical thinking or direct experience, but are based on pre-conceived ideas about a particular group.
Impression Formation and Attribution:
The process of coming to know a person can be broadly divided into two parts— (a) Impression formation and (b) Attribution. The person who forms the impression is called perceiver. (Response to information about the qualities of the target, organises this information, and draws inferences about the target). The individual about whom the impression is formed is called the target.
Impression Formation and attribution are influenced by:
• the nature of information available to the perceiver,
• social schemats in the perceiver (including stereotypes),
• personality characteristics of the perceiver, and
• situational factors.
Impression Formation
The process of impression formation consists of the following three sub-processes:
(a) Selection: we take into account only some bits of information about the target person
(b) Organisation: the selected information is combined in a systematic way
(c) Inference: we draw a conclusion about what kind of person the target is
• The order or sequence in which information is presented affects the kind of impression formed.
• Primacy effect, the information presented first has a stronger effect than the information presented at the end. In Recency effect, the perceiver may be asked to pay attention to all the information whatever information comes at the end may have a stronger influence. ,
• Halo effect, a tendency to think that a target person who has one set of positive qualities must also be having other specific positive qualities that are associated with the first set.
Attribution of Causality:
• Bernard Weiner: When we assign a cause to a person’s behaviour, we can broadly classify the cause as being internal (something within the person) or external (something outside the person). Stable factors are those causes that do not change with the time, while unstable factors are those that do.
• Fundamental Attribution Error: There is an overall tendency for people to give greater weight age to internal or dispositional factors, than to external or situational factors. Indians tend to make more external (situational) attributions than Americans do.
• There is a difference between the attribution made for success, and the attribution made for failure. In general, people attribute success to internal factors, such as their ability or hard work. They attribute failure to external factors, such as bad luck, the difficulty of the task, and so on.
• Actor-Observer Effect-A distinction is also found between the attribution that a person makes for his/her own positive and negative experiences (actor-role), and the attribution made for another person’s positive and negative experiences (observer-role, external).
Behaviour in the Presence of Others:
In 1897, Norman Triplett observed that individuals saw better performance in the presence of others than when they are performing the same task alone because of the eagerness to get praise or reward is stronger.
Social Facilitation:
(i) Zajone performance on specific tasks is influenced by the mere presence of others because the person experience arousal, which makes the person react in a more, intense manner.
(ii) Evaluation apprehension (Cottrell): The person will be praised if the performance is good (reward), or criticised if it is bad (punishment). We wish to get praise and avoid criticism, therefore we try to perform well and avoid mistakes.
(iii) Nature of the task in the case a simple or familiar task, the person is sure of performing well and the eagerness to get praise or reward is stronger. In case of complex or new task, the person may be afraid of making mistakes. The fear of criticism or punishment is stronger. So the individual performs worse in the presence of others than he/she does when alone.
(iv) If the others are also performing the same task, this is called a situation of co-action. In this situation, there is social comparison and competition.
Social Loafing: The larger the group, the less effort each member puts in. This phenomenon is based on diffusion of responsibility.
Pro-social Behaviour: Pro-social behaviour is very similar to ‘altruism’, which means doing something for or thinking about the welfare of others without any self-interest.
Characteristics:
• Aim to benefit or do good to another person or other person,
• Be done without expecting anything in return,
• Be done willingly by the person, and not because of any kind of pressure, and
• Involve some difficulty or ‘cost’ to the person giving help.
Factors influencing Pro-social Behaviour:
• Based on an inborn, natural tendency in human beings to help other members of their own species. ”
• Influenced by Learning: Individual who are brought up in a family environment that sets examples of helping others praises helpfulness.
• Cultural Factors: Some cultures actively encourage people to help the needy and distressed. In cultures that encourage independence, individual will show less pro-social behaviour, because people are expected to take care of themselves.
• When the situation activates certain social norms that require helping others.
(a) Social responsibility: We should help anyone who needs help, without considering other factors.-
(b) Reciprocity: We should help those who have helped us in the past.
(c) Equity: We should help others whenever we find that it is fair to do so.
• Expected reactions of the person who is being helped. For example, people might be unwilling to give money, to a needy person because they feel that the person might feel insulted.
• Individuals who have a high level of empathy, that is, the capacity to feel the distress of the person who is to be helped, such as Baba Saheb Amte and Mother Teresa. Pro-social behaviour is also more likely in situations that arouse empathy, such as the picture of starving children in a famine.
• Factors such as a bad mood, being busy with one’s own problems or feeling that the person to be helped is responsible for his/her own situation (that is when an internal attribution is made for the need state of the other person).
• When the number of bystanders is more than one. This phenomenon is called diffusion of responsibility. On the other hand, if there is only bystander, this person is more likely to take the responsibility and actually help the victim.
WORDS THAT MATTER
• Actor-observer Effect: The tendency to make different attributions for one’s own experience or behaviour in case of another person (observer).
• Arbitration: Explaining our own or others behaviour by pointing out the causes.
• Arousal: The tension experienced at the thought of others being present and/or performance being evaluated.
• Attitudes: States of the mind, thoughts or ideas regarding a topic, containing cognitive, affective and behavioural components.
• Attitude Object: The target of an attitude.
• Attribution: Explaining our own or others’ behaviour by pointing out the cause(s).
• Balance: The state of an attitude system in which the attitudes between a person (P) and another individual (O), the person (P) and the attitude object (X), and between the other individual (O) and the attitude object (X) are in the same direction, or logically consistent with each other.
• Beliefs: The cognitive component of the thoughts or ideas regarding a topic.
• The centrality of Attitude: The extent to which a specific attitude affects the entire attitude system.
• Cooperation: Groups work together to achieve shared goals, we refer to it as cooperations.
• Conflict: A state of disturbance or tension resulting from opposing motives, drives, needs or goals.
• Co-action: A situation in which many people are performing the same task individually in the presence of others.
• Cognitive Consistency: A state in which thoughts or ideas are logically in line with each other.
• Cognitive Dissonance: The state of an attitude system in which two cognitive elements are logically contradictory, or inconsistent.
• Congruent Attitude Change: Attitude change in the same direction as that of the existing attitude.
• Congruent altitude change: Altitude change in the same direction as that of the existing attitude.
• Discrimination: Behaviour that shows a distinction between two or more persons, often on the basis of person or person membership of a particular group.
• Diffusion of Responsibility: The thought that when others are present, one person alone will not be held responsible for doing or not doing something; other members are also responsible and will, therefore, do the task.
• Empathy: Reacting to another’s feeling with an emotional response that is similar to the others feelings.
• Extremeness of attitude: It refers to how far an attitude is from the neutral point.
• Evaluation Apprehension: The fear of being evaluated negatively by others who are present.
• Fundamental Attribution Error: The tendency to attribute internal causes more than external cause for behaviour.
• Halo Effect: The tendency to link positive qualities with other positive qualities about which information is not available.
• Identity: The distinguishing character of the individual, who each of us is; what our roles are, and what we are capable of.
• Identification: The process of feeling one with another person, usually resulting from liking or extreme regard for the other person.
• Intergroup conflict: A process in which either an individual or a group perceives that others have opposing interest and both try to contradict each other.
• Kernel of Truth: The small element of truth that may be perceived in over-generalised clusters of beliefs about groups (stereotypes).
• Negotiation: Reciprocal communications so as to reach an agreement in situation in which there is a conflict.
• Norms: Standards of test performance that permit the comparison of one person’s score on the test to the scores of others who have taken the same test.
• Persuasibility: The degree to which people can be made to change their attitudes.
• Prejudice: A prejudgment, usually a negative attitude that is unverified, and is often towards a group.
• Primary Effect: The stronger role of information that comes first.
• Pro-social Behaviour: Behaviour that does good to another person, is done without any pressure from outside, and without any exception of a reward or return.
• Prototype: A schema in the form of a category representing all the possible qualities of an object or a person.
• Recency Effect: The stronger role of information that comes last.
• Scapegoating: Placing the blame on a group for something that has gone wrong, because the blamed group cannot defend itself.
• Schema: A mental structure that guides social (and other) cognition.
• Self-fulfilling Prophecy: Behaving in a way that confirms the prediction others make.
• Simplicity or Complexity (Multiplexity) of Attitude: Whether the whole attitude consists of a single or very few sub-attitudes (simple), or contains many sub-attitudes (multiplex).
• Social Loafing: In a group, each additional individual puts in less effort, thinking that
others will be putting in their effort.
• Social Cognition: The process through which we notice, interpret, remember, and later use social information. It helps in making sense of other people and ourselves.
• Social Facilitation: The tendency for people’s performance to improve in the presence of others, or an audience.
• Social facilitations: The tendency for people’s performance to improve in the presence of others, or an audience.
• Superordinate goals: A mutually beneficial to both parties, hence both groups worl cooperatively.
• Stereotype: An over-generalised and unverified prototype about a particular group.
• Valence of Attitude: Whether an attitude is positive or negative.
• Values: Enduring beliefs about ideal modes of behaviour or end-state of existence. Attitudes that have a strong evaluative and ought aspect.

Class 12 Psychology Quick Revision notes Chapter 5 Therapeutic Approaches And Counselling

FACTS THAT MATTER
Psychotherapy is a voluntary relationship between the one seeking treatment or the
client and the one who treats or the therapist.
1. Purpose: To help the client to solve the psychological problems being faced by her or him.
2. Aim: To change the maladaptive behaviours, decrease the sense of personal distress, and help the client to adapt better to his/her environment.
3. The relationship is conducive for building the trust of the client so that problems may be freely discussed.
Characteristics:
1. There is systematic application of principles underlying the different theories of therapy.
2. Only persons who have received practical training under expert supervision can practise psychotherapy.
3. The situation involved a therapist and client who seeks and receives help for his/her emotional problems (this person is the focus of attention in the therapeutic process).
4. The interaction of the therapist and the client results in the consolidation or formation of the therapeutic relationship. This is a confidential, interpersonal, and dynamic relationship.
Goals:
(i) Reinforcing client’s resolve for betterment.
(ii) Lessening emotional pressure.
(iii) Unfolding the potential for positive growth.
(iv) Modifying habits.
(v) Changing thinking patterns.
(vi) Increasing self-awareness.
(vii) Improving interpersonal relations and communication.
(viii) Facilitating decision-making.
(ix) Becoming aware of one’s choices in life.
(x) Relating to one’s social environment in a more creative and self-aware manner.
Therapeutic Relationship:
The special relationship between the client and the therapist is known as the therapeutic
relationship or alliance.
Components:
1. Contractual Nature of the Relationship: Two willing individuals, the client and the therapist, enter into a partnership which aims at helping the client overcome his/ her problems.
2. Limited Duration of the Therapy: This alliance lasts until the client becomes able to deal with his/her problems and take control of his/her life.
Properties:
(i) It is a trusting and confiding relationship.
(ii) The high level of trust enables the client to unburden herself/himself to the therapist and confide her/his psychological and personal problems to the latter.
Classification of Psychothe
A. PSYCHODYNAMIC THERAPY (Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Neo-Freudians) Methods of Eliciting the Nature of Intrapsychic Conflict:
1. Free Association:
(i) Therapeutic relationship is established, client feels comfortable—therapist makes client lie down on the couch, close their eyes and asks them to speak whatever comes to mind without censoring it.
(ii) Client is encouraged to freely associate one thought with another (free association).
(iii) Censoring supere go and the watchful ego are kept in abeyance—client speaks whatever comes to mind in a relaxed and trusting atmosphere.
(iv) Therapist does not interrupt; the free flow of idea, desires and conflicts of the unconscious, which had been suppressed by the ego, emerge into the conscious mind.
2. Dream Analysis:
(i) Client is asked to write down his/her dreams upon waking up.
(ii) Drams are symbols of the unfulfilled desires of the unconscious.
(iii) Dreams use symbols which signify intrapsychic forces because they are indirect expressions and hence would not alert the ego.
(iv) If unfulfilled desires are expressed directly, the ever-vigilant ego would suppress them, leading to anxiety.
(v) Symbols are interpreted according to an accepted convention of translation as the indicators of unfulfilled desires and conflicts.
Modality of Treatment:
(a) Transference: The client starts identifying the therapist with the authority figures of the past, usually childhood.
(i) The therapist maintains a non-judgmental and permissive attitude and allows the client to continue with this process of emotional identification.
(ii) Transference Neurosis: The therapist becomes a substitute for that person in the present—the client acts out the frustrations, anger, fear, that he/she harboured towards that person in the past, but could not express at the time.
• Positive Transference: The client idolizes, or falls in love with the therapist, and seeks the therapist’s approval.
• Negative Transference: The client has feelings of hostility, anger and resentment*towards the therapist.
(b) Resistance: The client opposes the progress of therapy in order to protect himself/herself from the recall of painful unconscious memories.
(i) Conscious Resistance: The client deliberately hides some information
(ii) Unconscious Resistance: The client becomes silent during the therapy session, recalls trivial details without recalling the emotional ones, misses appointments, and comes late for therapy sessions.
(iii) The therapist overcomes the resistance by repeatedly confronting the patient about it and by uncovering emotions such as anxiety, fear 0’r shame, which are causing the resistance.
(c) Interpretation: The therapist uses the unconscious material that has bee n uncovered to make the client aware of the psychic contents and conflicts which, have led to the occurrence of certain events, symptoms and conflicts.
(i) Subtle process, the pinnacle of psychoanalysis.
(ii) Two analytical techniques:
• Confrontation: The therapist points out to the client an aspect of his/her psyche that must be faced by the client.
• Clarification: The therapist brings a vague or confusing event into sharp focus by separating and highlighting important details about the event from unimportant ones.
Working Through: The repeated process of using confrontation, clarification and interpretation.
(i) Helps the patient understand the source of the problem and to integrate the uncovered material into his/her ego.
Insight: A gradual process wherein the unconscious memories are repeatedly integrated into conscious awareness; these unconscious events and memories are re-experienced in transference and are worked through.
(i) End-point of psychoanalysis, client gains a new understanding on him/ herself- conflicts of the past, defence mechanisms and physical symptoms are no longer present.
(ii) Intellectual Insight: The client starts understand herself/himself better at an intellectual level.
(iii) Emotional Insight: The emotional understanding, acceptance of one’s irrational reaction to the unpleasant events o the past, and the willingness to change emotionally as well as making the change.
Duration of Treatment
• Lasts of several years with a one-hour session for 4-5 days per week.
• Intense treatment, three phases.
(i) Initial Phase: Client becomes familiar with the routines, establishes a therapeutic relationship, and recollects the superficial material from the consciousness about the past and present.
(ii) Middle Phase: Characterised by transference, resistance on the part
of the client, and confrontation, clarification and working through on the therapist’s part; all these processes finally lead to insight.
(iii) Third Phase: Termination; the relationship with the analyst is dissolved and the client prepares to leave the therapy.
B. BEHAVIOUR THERAPY
• Focused on the behaviour and thoughts of the client in the present.
• The past is relevant only to the extent of understanding the origins of the faulty behaviour and thought patterns, not relieved.
• Behaviour therapies are clinical application of learning theories.
• Consists of a large set of specific techniques and interventions—symptoms of the client and the clinical diagnosis are the guiding factors in the selection of the specific techniques or interventions to be applied.
• Open therapy, i.e., the therapist shares his/her method with the client.
Method of Treatment:
(i) The client is interviewed with a view to analyse his/her behaviour patterns.
(ii) Behavioural analysis is conducted to find:
(a) Malfunctioning Behaviours: Behaviours which cause distress to the client.
(b) Antecedent Factors: Those causes which predispose the person to indulge in that behaviour
(c) Maintaining Factors: Those factors which lead to the persistence of the faulty behaviour.
(iii) Aim: To eliminate the faulty behaviours and substitute them with adaptive behaviour patterns.
(a) Antecedent Operations: Control behaviour by changing something that precedes such a behaviour.
(b) Establishing Operations: Induce a change in behaviour by increasing or decreasing the reinforcing value of a particular consequence.
(c) Consequent Operation: i.e., Giving reinforcement eg. Praise.
Behavioural Techniques:
1. Negative Reinforcement: Following an undesired response with an outcome that is painful or not liked.
2. Aversive Conditioning: Repeated association of undesired response with an aversive consequence present reality.
3. Positive Reinforcement: Given to increase the deficit if an adaptive behaviour occurs rarely.
4. Token Economy: Give a token as a reward every time a wanted behaviour occurs, which can be collected and exchanged for a reward.
5. Differential Reinforcement: Unwanted behaviour can be reduced (negative reinforcement) and wanted behaviour (positive reinforcement) can be increased simultaneously.
The other method is to positively reinforce the wanted behaviour and ignore the unwanted behaviour—less painful and equally effective.
6. Systematic Desensitization: A technique introduced by Wolpe for treating phobias or irrational fears.
(i) The client is interviewed to elicit fear provoking situations.
(ii) With the client, the therapist prepares a hierarchy of anxiety—provoking stimuli with the least anxiety-provoking stimuli at the bottom.
(iii) The therapist relaxes the client and asks the client to think about the least anxiety-provoking situation.
(iv) The client is asked to stop thinking of the situation if tension is felt.
(v) Over sessions, the client is able to imagine more severe fear provoking situations while maintaining the relaxation.
(vi) The client gets systematically desensitized to the fear.
Operates on the principle of reciprocal inhibition—the presence of two mutually opposing forces (relaxation response vs. anxiety-provoking scene) at the same time, inhibits the weaker force.
The client is able to tolerate progressively greater levels of anxiety because of his/her relaxed state.
7. Modelling: The procedure wherein the client learns to behave in a certain way by observing the behaviour of a role model or the therapist who initially acts as the rok; model. Vicarious learning, learning by observing others, is used and through a process of rewarding small changes in the behaviour, the client gradually learns to acquire the behaviour of the model.
C. COGNITIVE THERAPY
1. Rational Emotive Therapy (RET) (Albert Ellis):
• Irrational beliefs mediate between the antecedent events and their consequences.
• The first step in RET is the antecedent-belief-consequence (ABC) analysis.
Antecedent events, which caused the psychological distress, are noted.
(ii) Client is interviewed to find out irrational beliefs, which distorting the
(iii) The therapist encourages this by being accepting, empathic, genuine and warm to the client.
(iv) The therapist conveys by his/her words and behaviours that he/she is not judging the client and will continue to show the same positive feelings towards the client even if the client is rude or confides all the ‘wrong’ things that he/she may have done or thought about. This is the unconditional positive regard which the therapist has for the client.
The clinical formulation is an ongoing process. Formulations may require reformulations as clinical insights are gained in the process of therapy. Distorted perception of the antecedent event due to the irrational belief leads to the consequence, i.e., negative emotions and behaviours.
• Non-directive questioning: Process by which irrational beliefs are refuted by the therapist.
(i) Nature of questioning is gentle, without probing or being directive.
(ii) Make the client think deeper into his/her assumptions about life and problems.
• Client changes the irrational beliefs by making a change in his/her philosophy about life—rational belief system replaces the irrational belief system.
2. Aaron Beck’s Cognitive Therapy:
(i) Childhood experiences provided by the family and society develop core schemes or systems, which include beliefs and action patterns in the individual.
(ii) Critical events in the individual’s life trigger the core, leading to the development of negative automatic thoughts.
(iii) Negative thoughts are persistent irrational thoughts characterised by cognitive distortions.
(iv) Dysfunctional Cognitive Structures: Patterns of thought which are general in nature but which distort the reality in a negative manner.
(v) Repeated occurrence of these thoughts leads to the development of feelings of anxiety and depression.
• The therapist uses questioning, which is gentle, non-threatening disputation of the client’s beliefs and thoughts.
• The questions make the client think in a direction opposite to that of the negative automatic thoughts whereby she/he gains insight into the nature of her/his dysfunctional schemas, and is able to alter her/his cognitive structures.
3. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT):
• Short, comprehensive, effective treatment for a wide range of psychological disorders such as anxiety, depression, panic attacks and borderline personality.
• Adopts a biopsychosocial approach to the delineation of psychopathology.
• Combines cognitive therapy with behavioural techniques.
• Rationate—distress has its origins in the biological, psychological, and social realms.
• Addresses the biological (relaxation procedures), psychological (behaviour and cognitive therapy) and social (environmental manipulations) aspects.
D. Humanistic-Existential Therapy
Self-actualizationn is defined as an innate force that moves the person to become more complex, balanced, and integrated; integrated means a sense of whole, being a complete person.
1. Self-actualization requires free emotional expression:
(a) The family and society curb emotional expression, as it is feared that a free expression of emotions can harm society by unleashing destructive forces.
(b) When emotionally expression is curbed, destructive behaviour and negative emotions by thwarting the process of emotional integration.
2. Healing occurs when the client is able to perceive the obstacles to self-actualization in his/her life and is able to remove them.
3. Therapy creates a permissive, non-judgemental and accepting atmosphere in which the client’s emotions can be freely expressed.
4. The client has the freedom and responsibility to control his/her own behaviour; the therapist is merely a facilitator and guide. The chief aim of the therapy is to expand the client’s awareness.
1. Existential Therapy Logotherapy(VictorFrankl):
• Treatment for the soul.
• Meaning making: Process of finding meaning even in life-threatening circumstances, the basis of which is a person’s quest for finding the spiritual truth of one’s existence.
• Spiritual Unconscious: The storehouse of love, aesthetic awareness and values of life.
• Existential Anxiety: Neurotic anxiety of spiritual origin (spiritual anxieties leading to meaninglessness).
• Goal: To help the patients find meaning and responsibility in their life irrespective of their life circumstances.
• The therapist emphasizes the unique nature of the patient’s life and is open (shares his/her feeltngs, values and own existence).
• Emphasis is on here and now, the therapist reminds the client about the immediacy of the present.
2. Client-centered Therapy (Carl Rogers):
• Introduced the concept of self and freedom and choice as the core of one’s being.
• Provides a warm relationship in which the client can reconnect with his/her disintegrated feelings.
• The therapist:
(i) Shows empathy—understands the client’s experience as if it were his/her own—sets up an emotional resonance between client and therapist.
(ii) Warmth—the client feels secure and can trust the therapist.
(iii) Has unconditional positive regard, i.e., total acceptance of the client as he/she is, indicates that the positive warmth of the therapist is not dependent on what the client reveals or does in the therapy sessions.
• Client feels secure enough to explore his/her feelings; therapist reflects the feelings of the client in a non-judgemental manner the reflection is achieved by rephrasing the statements of the client, i.e., seeking simple clarifications to enhance the meaning of the client’s statements.
3. Gestalt Therapy (Frederick and Laura Pearl):
• Goal: To increase an individual’s self-awareness and self -acceptance.
• Client is taught to recognize the bodily processes and the emotions that are being blocked out from awareness.
• Therapist encourages the client to act out fantasies about feelings and conflicts can also be used in group settings.
E. BIOMEDICAL THERAPY
Prescription of medicines is done by psychiatrists (qualified medical doctors who have specialized in the understanding, diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders). The nature of medicines used depends on the nature of the disorder:
(i) Anti-psychotic drugs—severe mental disorders (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder).
(ii) Milder drugs—common mental disorders (generalized anxiety, reactive depression).
Cause side-effects which need to be understood and monitored—essential that medication is given under proper medical supervision.
ELECTRO-CONVULSIVE THERAPY (ECT)
(i) Mild electric shock given via electrodes to the brain of the patient to induce convulsions.
(ii) The shock is given by the psychiatrist only when necessary for the improvement of the patient.
(iii) Not a routine treatment and is given only when drugs are not effective
Factors Contributing to Healing:
1. Techniques adopted by the therapist and the implementation of the same with the client, e.g., CBT for an anxious client—relaxation procedures and cognitive restructuring contribute to the healing.
2. The therapeutic alliance, which is formed between the therapist and the patient/ client, has healing properties, because of the regular availability of the therapist, and the warmth and empathy provided by the therapist.
3. Catharsis: A process of emotional unburdening by a client when he/she is being interviewed in the initial sessions of therapy to understand the nature of the problem.
4. Non-specific Factors: These factors occur across different systems of psychotherapy and across different clients/patients and different therapists.
(i) Patient Variables (motivation for change, expectation of improvement).
(ii) Therapist Variables (positive nature, good mental health, absence of unresolved emotional conflicts).
Ethics in Psychotherapy:
1. Informed consent needs to be taken.
2. Confidentiality of the client should be maintained.
3. Alleviating personal distress should be the goal of all attempts of the therapist.
4. Integrity of the practitioner-client relationship is important.
5. Respect for human rights and dignity.
6. Professional competence and skills are essential.
F. ALTERNATIVE THERAPIES Yoga:
• An ancient Indian technique detailed in the Ashtanga Yoga of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.
• Refers to only the asanas (body posture component) or to pranayama (breathing practices).
• Techniques enhance well-being, mood, attention, mental focus, and stress tolerance.
• Reduces the time to go to sleep and improves the quality of sleep.
• Proper training by a skilled teacher and 30-minute practice everyday maximises the benefits.
Meditation refers to the practice of focusing attention on breath or on an object or thought of a mantra.
A. Sudarshana Kriya Yoga (SKY)
(i) Rapid breathing techniques induce hyperventilation.
(ii) Beneficial, low risk, low cost.
(iii) Used as a public health intervention technique to alleviate PTSD in survivors of mass disasters.
(iv) Reduces depression (research conducted at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS).
(v) Reduces stress levels in substance abuse patients, e.g., alcoholics.
B. Kundalini Yoga
(i) Effective in treatment of mental disorders and OCD.
(ii) Combines prandyama (breathing techniques) with chanting of mantras.
C. Vipasana Meditation
(i) Mindfulness-based meditation; no fixed object or thought to hold to attention.
(ii) Person passively observes the various bodily sensations and thoughts that are passing through in his or her awareness.
(iii) Helps prevent repeated episodes of depression.
(vi) Helps patients process emotional stimuli better and prevents biases in the processing of these stimuli.
Rehabilitation of the Mentally 111:
• Aim: to empower the patient to become a productive member of society to the maximum extent possible.
• Many patients suffer from negative symptoms such as disinterest and lack of motivation to do work or to interact with people—rehabilitation is required to help such patients become self-sufficient.
• In rehabilitation, the patients are given:
(i) Occupational Therapy: teaches skills such as candle making, paper bag making and weaving to help them to form a work discipline
(ii) Social Skills Training: Develops interpersonal skills through role play, imitation and instruction; objective is to teach the patient to function in a social group.
(iii) Cognitive Retraining: Improves the basic cognitive functions of attention, memory and executive function.
(iv) Vocational Therapy: Once the patient improves sufficiently, gains skills necessary to undertake productive employment.
WORDS THAT MATTER
• Alternative Therapy: Alternative treatment possibilities to the conventional during treatment or Psychotherapy, e.g. yoga, Meditation etc.
• Behaviour Therapy: Therapy based on the principles of behaviouristic learning theories in order to change the maladaptive behaviour.
• Biomedical Therapy: Refer to medicines which are prescribed to treat Psychological disorders.
• Client-centered (Rogerian) Therapy: The therapeutic approach developed by Carl Rogers in which therapist helps clients to clarify their true feeling and come to value who they are.
• Cognitive Therapies: Forms of therapy focused on changing distorted and maladaptive patterns of thought.
• Counselling: A board name for a wide variety of procedures for helping individuals achieve adjustments, such as the giving of advice, therapeutic discussion, the administration and interpretation of tests, and vocational assistance.
• Counselling Interview: An interview whose purpose is counselling or providing guidance in the area of personality, vocational choice, etc.
• Electro Convulsive Therapy (ECT): Commonly called ‘shock treatment’. A biological treatment for unipolar depression in which electrodes attached to a patient’s head send an electric current through the brain, causing a convulsion. It is effective in the treatment of cases of several depression that fail to respond to drug therapy.
• Empathy: Reacting to another’s feelings with an emotion response that is similar to the other’s feeling.
• Free Association: A psychodynamic technique in which the patient describes verbally any thought, feeling or image that comes to mind, even if it seems unimportant.
• Gestalt Therapy: An approach to therapy that attempts to integrate a client’s thoughts, feelings and behaviour into a unified whole.
• Humanistic Therapy: A therapy in which the underlying assumption is that people have control over their behaviour, can make choices about their lives, and are essentially responsible for solving their own problems.
• Modelling: A process of learning in which an individual acquires responses by observing and imitating others.
• Psychodynamic Therapy: First suggested by Frend. Therapy based on the premise that the primary sources of abnormal behaviour are unresolved past conflicts and the possibility that unacceptable unconscious impulses will enter consciousness.
• Psychotherapy: The use of any psychological technique in the treatment of mental/ psychological disorder or maladjustment.
• Rational Emotive Therapy (RET): A therapeutic system developed by Albert Ellis. It seeks to replace irrational problem-provoking outlooks with more realistic ones.
• Rehabilitation: Restoring an individual to normal or a satisfactory a state as possible, following an illness, criminal episode, etc.
• Resistance: In psychoanalysis, attempts by the patient to block treatment.
• Self-actualisation: A- state of self-fulfillment in which people realise their highest potential in their own unique way.
• Systematic Desensitisation: A form of behavioural therapy in which phobic client learns to induce a relaxed state and then exposed to stimuli that elicit fear or phobia.
• Therapeutic Alliance: The special relationship between the client and the therapist; contractual nature of the relationship and limited duration of the therapy are its two major components.
• Transference: Strong positive or negative feelings toward the therapist on the part of individual undergoing psychoanalysis.
• Unconditional Positive Regard: An attitude of acceptance and respect on the part of an observer, no matter what the other person says or does.

Class 12 Psychology Quick Revision notes Chapter 4 Psychological Disorders

FACTS THAT MATTER
Concept of Abnormality and Psychological disorders:
The term ‘abnormal’ with its prefix ab (away from), generally signify the deviance or variation from the normal.
Anything not normal must, therefore, be abnormal. But acquiring insight into what we consider normal, expected behaviour is difficult enough, understanding human behaviour beyond the normal range is quite challenging.
Normal and abnormal behaviour are subjective terms. These terms are qualitative and matter of degree because drawing a sharp line between then is not possible.
The study of Psychopathology is a search for why people behave, think and feel in unexpected, sometimes bizzare and typically self defeating ways.
Several characteristics are considered in evaluating whether a behaviour is abnormal: violation of social norms, personal distress, disability or dysfunction, dangerous behaviour (4Ds), unexpectedness and statistical infrequency. Each characteristics tells some thing about what can be considered abnormal, but conception change with time, making it impossible to offer a simple definition that captures abnormality in its totality.
Classification of Psychological factors: Classification refers to a list of categories of specific Psychological disorders grouped into various classes on the basis of some shared characteristics.
Main Classification.
ICD-10: Developed by WHO. This is official classification in India.
The classification is based op symptoms under one broad heading i.e. Mental disorders. DSMIV: Developed by APA. It is multi-axial. It is very comprehensive because classification is based on biological Psychological social factors, cause and prognosis of disorders.
Importance: These classification provide standard vocabulary standard vocabulary through which professionals universally can converse.
It also helps in understanding the cause and diagnosis of mental disorders.
Recurring Theories to Study Abnormal Behaviour:
1. Ancient theory suggests some people possessed by supernatural and magical forces such as evil spirits. Exorcism (removing the evil residing in the individual through prayer) is still commonly used. Shaman or medicine man has contact with supernatural forces, medium of communication between human and spirits.
2. Biological/Organic approach links defective biological processes to maladaptive behaviour.
3. According to psychological approach problems caused by inadequacies in the way an individual thinks, feels and perceives.
Historical Background:
(a) Ancient Greek philosophers (Hippocrates, Socrates, Plato) developed organismic approach—viewed disturbed behaviour arising out of conflicts between emotion and reason.
Galen—temperament affected by imbalance in four humours, similar to tridoshas.
(b) Middle ages, superstition and demonology—people with mental problems, were associated to demons.
St. Augustine wrote about feelings, mental anguish and conflict—laid groundwork for modem psychodynamic theories.
(c) Renaissance Period—increased humanism and curiosity about behaviour.
Johann Weyer—disturbed interpersonal relationships as cause of psychic disorders, mentally disturbed required medical not theological treatment.
(d) Age of Reason and Enlightenment (17th /18th centuries)- growth of scientific method replaced faith and dogma, contributed to Reform movement
Increased compassion for those suffering—reform of asylums, deinstitutionalization, emphasized community care.
(e) Recent years—convergence of approaches, resulted in interactional biopsycho-social approach.
Factors Underlying Abnormal Behaviour
I. Biological Factors (faulty genes, endocrine imbalances, malnutrition) affect normal development and functioning—behaviour has a biochemical or physiological basis. Abnormal activity by neuro-transmitters (transmission of messages between neurons) leads to specific psychological disorders.
(i) Anxiety disorders (Low activity of gamma amino butyric acid (GABA).
(ii) Depression (Low activity of serotonin).
(iii) Schizophrenia (excess activity of dopamine).
Scientific evidence links genetic factors to depression, anxiety, mood disorders, schizophrenia, mental retardation—unable to identify the specific genes, no single gene responsible for a particular behaviour—cannot alone account for a mental disorder.
II. Psychological and interpersonal factors affect abnormal behaviour.
• Maternal deprivation (separation from mother, lack of warmth in early years).
• Faulty parent-child relationships (rejection, overprotection, over-permissiveness, faulty discipline)
• Maladaptive family structures (inadequate or disturbed family).
• Severe stress.
Psychological Models:
1. Psychodynamic Model (Freud):
(i) Behaviour determined by unconscious psychological forces—abnormal symptoms, the result of conflicts between these internal, dynamic forces.
(ii) Three central forces shape personality—instinctual needs, drives and impulses (Id), rational thinking (ego) and moral standards (super go).
(iii) Abnormal behaviour—a symbolic expression of unconscious mental conflicts traced to early childhood or infancy.
2. Behavioural Model:
(i) Behaviours are learned through classic (temporal association between two events), operant (behaviour followed by a reward), conditioning and social (imitating other’s behaviour) learning.
(ii) Psychological disorders—the result of learning maladaptive ways of behaving.
3. Cognitive Model:
(i) Abnormal functioning results from cognitive problems:
— Irrational and inaccurate assumptions and attitudes.
— Thinking in illogical ways, making over-generalisations (broad, negative conclusions on the basis of a single insignificant event).
4. Humanistic-Existential Model:
(i) Human beings born with a natural tendency to self-actualise, i.e., fulfil the potential for growth.
(ii) Existentialists believe that individuals from birth have total freedom to give meaning of existence—those who shirk from responsibility live empty, inauthentic, dysfunctional lives.
WORDS THAT MATTER
• Abnormal Psychology: Serenities study of abnormal behaviour. By using scientific Techniques, Psychology attempts to describe, explain and predict abnormal behaviour.
• Anti-Social Behaviour: refers to any behaviour that is considered harmful or disruptive within a group or society. Aspects of behaviour such as aggression or deserimination would fall into this category.
• Anorexia nervosa: Disorder involving severe loss of body weight, accompanied by an intense fear of gaining weight or becoming ‘fat’.
• Anxiety: A state of psychic distress characterized by fear, apprehension, and physiological arousal.
• Anxiety Disorders: Disorders in which anxiety is a central symptom. The disorder is characterized by feelings of vulnerability, apprehension, or fear.
• Autism: Pervasive developmental disorder beginning in infancy and involving a wide range of abnormalities, including deficits in language, perceptual, and motor development, defective reality testing, and social withdrawal.
• Delusions: Irrational beliefs that are held despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
• De-institutionalisation: Movement whose purpose is to remove from care-giving institution such as large mental hospitals all those patients who do not present a clear danger to others or to themselves and to provide treatment sheltered living conditions for them in the community.
• Depersonalization Disorder: Dissociative disorder in which there is a loss of the sense of self.
• Diathesis-stress Model: A view that the interaction of factors such as biological predisposition combined with life stress may cause a specific disorder.
• Dissociation: A split in consciousness whereby certain thoughts, feelings, and behaviour operate independently from others.
• Exorcism: Religiously inspired treatment procedure designed to drive out evil spirits or forces from a ‘possessed’ person.
• Eating disorders: A term which refers to a serious disruption of the eating habits or the appetite. The main types of eating disorders are Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa and Binge eating.
• Genetics: A branch of Biology referring or relating to genes. Inherited genes are basic unit of inheritance.
• Hallucination: A false perception which has a compulsive sense of the reality of objects although relevant and adequate stimuli for such perception is lacking. It is an abnormal phenomenon.
• Hypochondriasis: A psychological disorder in which the individual is dominated by preoccupation with bodily processes and fear of presumed diseases despite reassurance from doctor that no physical illness exists.
• Hyperactivity: Condition characterised by overactive, poorly controlled behaviour and lack of concentration.
• Main symptom of ADHD: Severe and frequent problems of either or both attention to tasks or hyperactive and impulsive behaviour.
• Mental retardation: Subnormal intellectual functioning associated with impairment in adaptive behaviour and identified at an early age.
• Mood Disorder: Disorder affecting one’s emotional state, including depression and bipolar disorder.
• Neurotransmitter: Chemicals that carry message across the synapse to the dendrite (and sometimes the cell body) of a receiver neurone.
• Norms: A generalised expectation shared by most members of a group or culture that underlies views of what is appropriate within that group.
In terms of Psychological testing norms are standards of test performance that permit the comparison of one person’s score on the test to the scores of others who have taken the same test. This is the criteria to compare or typical score of an average group.
• Obsessive-compulsive Disorder: A disorder characterised by obsession or compulsions.
• Phobia: A strong, persistent. And irrational fear of some specific object or situation that presents little or no actual danger to a person.
• Post-traumatic Stress Disorder: Patterns of symptoms involving anxiety reactions, tension, nightmares, and depression following a disaster such as an earthquake or a flood.
• Schizophrenia: A group of psychotic reactions characterised by the breakdown of integrated personality functioning, withdrawal from reality, emotion blunting and distortion, and disturbances in thought and behaviour.
• Somatoform disorder: Condition involving physical complaints or disabilities occurring in the absence of any identifiable organic cause.
• Substance Abuse: The use of any drug or chemical to modify mood or behaviour that results in impairment.
• Syndrome: Group or pattern of symptoms that occur together in a disorder and represent the typical picture of the disorder

Class 12 Psychology Quick Revision notes Chapter 3 Human Strengths And Meeting Life Challenges

FACTS THAT MATTER
Basic features of stress:
Stress is a part of life. Stress is neither a stimulus nor a response but an ongoing transactional process between the individual and the environment.
Life is full of challenges. Such as challenges posed by examination to students, challenges about a carrier, think of a child who loses his/her parents, a young women who loses her husband in an accident or children who are physically or mentally challenged and so on.
All of us try to meet these challenges in our own way.
Life challenges are not necessarily stressful. Much depends how a challenge is viewed. Stress is like electricity which provides energy but too high or too little energy, becomes hazardous. Similarly too much stress or too little stress have adverse effect for our well-being, optimum stress is healthy.
Stress have two levels: Eustress-that is good, healthy, positive inspiring and motivating. Distress: It is negative, unhealthy demotivating and causes our body’s wear and tear.
• Nature of stress: The word stress has its origin in the latin word ‘strictus’, meaning tight or narrow and stringer, the verb meaning to tighten.
These root words reflect the internal feelings of tightness and constriction of muscles and breathing, a common sign of stress.
The reaction of external stressor is called strain.
Stress functions as a causes as well as effects.
Hans seyle, the father of modem stress researches, defined stress as the non specific response of the body to any demand.
Many researchers do not agree with sayle on his concept of general and non specific responses. They believe that different individuals may have different characteristic modes of responses.
• Signs and symptoms of stress: There are individual differences in coping pattern of stress response and therefore the warning signals or signs also vary in its intensity.
The signs of stress are very much dependent on how individual views them or its dimension
i. e. Intensity duration, predictability or complexity.
The warning signs and its manifestation as symptoms of stress can be physical, emotional, cognitive and behavioural.
• Life Challenges and adjustment: Life is a big challenge. It presents a continuous chain of struggle for existence and survival for example if one aspires to join civil services, one works very hard but is not selected one may change one’s goal and feel inclined to join lecturership in any university.
By restoring to such means one protects ones self from the possible injury to ones ego, failure or frustration. It is sort of shifting to more defensive position in order to face the challenge of circumstances after getting failure in earlier attempt or attempts.
This special virtue and strength of the living organism is termed as adjustment.
“Adjustment is a process by which living organism maintains a balance between its need and the circumstances that influence the satisfaction of these needs.”
• Different stressors may produce different patterns of stress reaction.
• Stress is embedded in the ongoing process that involves individuals interacting with
their social and cultural environment. Stress is a dynamic mental/cognitive state. It is a disruption in homeostasis/imbalance that gives rise to resolution of the imbalance/ restoration of homeostasis.
• Perception of stress is dependent on an individual’s cognitive appraisal of events and the resources available to deal with them.
Primary Appraisal: Primary appraisal refers to the perception of a new or changing environment as positive, neutral or negative in its consequences. Negative events are appraised for their possible harm, threat or challenge.
(i) Harm appraisals is the assessment of the damage that has already been done by an event.
(ii) Threat appraisals is the assessment of possible future damage that may be brought about by the event.
(iii) Challenge appraisals are associated with more confident expectations of the ability to cope with the stressful event, the potential to overcome and even profit from the event.
Secondary Appraisal: Secondary appraisal refers to that assessment of one’s coping abilities resources and whether they will be sufficient to meet the harm, threat or challenge of the event. These resources may be mental, physical, personal or social. If he/she thinks one has a positive attitude, health, skills and social support to deal with the crises, he/she will feel less stressed.
Appraisals are very subjective and will depend on many factors:
(i) Past experience of dealing with such a stressful condition: If one has handled similar situations very successfully in the past, they would be less threatening for him/her.
(ii) Whether the stressful event is perceived as controllable, i.e., whether one has mastery
or control over a situation.
REACTIONS OF STRESS
1. Physiological: Arousal plays a key role in stress related behaviours.
The hypothalamus initiates action along two pathways:
(i) The first pathway involves the autonomic nervous system. The adrenal gland releases large amount of catecholamines (epinephrine and norepinephrine) into the blood stream. This leads to physiological changes seen in fight-or-flight response.
(ii) The second pathway involves the pituitary gland which secrets the corticosteroid (cortisol) which provides energy.
2. Emotional reaction of Stress: Negative emotions such as fear, anxiety, embarrassment, anger, depression or even denial.
3. Behavioural reaction of Stress: Depending on the nature of the stressful event; confrontative action against the stress or (fight) or withdrawal from the threatening event (flight).
4. Cognitive reaction of Stress: Beliefs about the harm or threat an event poses, its causes or controllability. These include responses such as inability to concentrate, and intrusive, repetitive or morbid thoughts.
Stresses which people experience also vary in terms of intensity (low intensity vs. high intensity), duration (short term vs. long term), complexity (less complex vs. more complex) and predictability (unexpected vs. predictable).
Types of Stress
A. Physical and Environmental Stress: Demands that change the state of our body
(overexert ourselves physically, lack a nutritious diet, suffer an injury, or fail to get enough sleep).
Environmental stresses are aspects of our surroundings that are often unavoidable such as air pollution, crowding, noise, heat of the summer, winter cold, disasters.
B. Psychological Stress: These are stresses that we generate ourselves in our minds. These are personal and unique to the person experiencing them and are internal sources of stress. We worry about problems, feel anxiety, or become depressed.
(i) Frustration results from the blocking of needs and motives by something or someone that hinders us from achieving a desired goal (social discrimination, low grades).
(ii) Conflicts may occur between two or more incompatible need or motives.
Pressure (Exceptations)
(a) Internal pressure stem from beliefs based upon expectations from inside us to ourselves
(b) Social pressure may be brought about from people who make excessive demands on us. Also, there are people with whom we face interpersonal difficulties.
C. Social stress: Social stress is caused due to social interaction.
Social events like death or illness in the family, strained relationships, trouble with neighbours, rapid social change, poverty, discrimination, poor societal conditions are example of social stress.
SOURCES OF STRESS There vary widely from person to person.
1. Life Events: Major life events can be stressful, because they disturb our routine and cause upheaval. If several of these life events that are planned (e.g., moving into a new house) or unpredicted (e.g., break-up of a long-term relationship) occur within a short period of time, we find if difficult to cope with them and will be more prone to the symptoms of stress.
2. Hassles: Personal stresses we endure as individuals, due to the happenings in our daily life. These daily hassles may sometimes have devastating consequences for the individual who is often the one coping alone with them as others may not even be aware of them as outsiders.
3. Traumatic Events: Variety of extreme events (fire, train or road accident, robbery, earthquake, tsunami). The effects of these events may occur after some lapse of time and sometimes persist as symptoms of anxiety, flashbacks, dreams and intrusive thoughts, etc. Severe trauma can also strain relationships. Professional help will be needed to cope with them.
Effects of Stress of Psychological Functioning and Health
1. Emotional Effects: Experience mood swings, show erratic behaviour that may alienate them from family and friends, start a vicious circle of decreasing confidence, leading to more serious emotional problems.
2. Physiological Effects: Increases the production of certain hormones, such as adrenaline and cortisol. These hormones produce marked changes in heart-rate, blood-pressure levels, metabolism and physical activity. Helps us function more effectively when we are under pressure for short periods of time, it can be extremely damaging to the body in the long-term effects.
3. Cognitive Effects: If pressures due to stress continue, one may suffer from mental overload. This suffering from high level of stress can rapidly cause individuals to lose their ability to make sound decisions, poor concentration, and reduced short-term memory capacity.
4. Behavioural Effects: Disrupted sleep patterns, increased absenteeism , reduced work performance.
Burn out: State of physical, emotional and psychological exhaustion.
Stress and health: Stress nfay play a role in 50 to 70% of all physical illness, primarily through its effect on the immense system.
By draining out resources and keeping us off balance physiological, stress upsets our complex internal chemistry.
It may interfere with efficient operation of our immune system-the mechanism through which our body recognised and destroy potentially harmful substances and intruders such as bacteria, virus and fungi known as antigens. When stress is prolonged, it affects physical health and impairs psychological functioning.
The physical exhaustion fatigue, in the signs of chromic fatigue weakness and low energy. The mental exhaustion appears in the form of irritability, anxiety, feeling of helplessness and hopelessness.
This state of physical emotional and psychological exhaustion is known as burnout which leads to poor health.
General Adaptation Syndrome gave by Hans Seyle:
1. Alarm Reaction Stage: The presence of a noxious stimulus or stressor leads to activation of the adrenal-pituitary-cortex system. This triggers the release of hormones producing the stress response. Now the individual is ready for fight or flight.
2. Resistance Stage: If stress is prolonged, the resistance stage begins. The parasympathetic nervous system calls for more cautious use of the body’s resources. The organism makes efforts to cope with the threat, as through confrontation.
3. Exhaustion stage: Continued exposure to the same stressor or additional stressors drains the body of its resources and leads to the third stage of exhaustion. The physiological systems involved in alarm reaction and resistance become ineffective and susceptibility to stress-related diseases such as high blood-pressure becomes more likely.
Criticisms of GAS: Assigning a very limited role to psychological factors in stress.
Psychoneuroimmunology focuses on the links between the mind, the brain, the immune system.
How does the immune system work? The white blood cells (leckocytes) within the immune (antigens) such as viruses leads to the production of antibodies.
(i) T cells: destroy invaders, T-helper cells increase immunological activity (attacked by HIV).
(ii) B cell: produce antibodies.
(iii) Natural killer cells: involve in the fight against both viruses and tumours.
Stress can affect natural killer cell cytotoxicity, which is of major importance in the defence against various infections and cancer. Reduced levels of natural killer cell cytotoxicity have been found in people who are highly stressed. Stressed individuals may be more likely to expose themselves to pathogens, which are agents causing physical illness.
Stress and life style: Researches are indicating that the current leading causes of premature deaths are attributable to a significant degree to characteristics that make-up each person’s lifestyle.
Life style refers to the overall patterns of decision and behaviours that determine health and quality of life.
Stressed individuals may be more likely to expose themselves to pathogens which are agents causing illness. Stressed people have poor nutritional habits, steep less and are likely to engage in smoking and alcholial abuse.
Researches revealed that health promoting behaviour like balanced diet, regular exercise,
family support etc play important role in good health.
Coping is a dynamic situation-specific reaction to stress. It is a set of concrete responses to stressful situations or events that are intended to resolve the problem and reduce stress.
Endler and Parker:
1. Task-oriented Strategy: Obtaining information about the stressful situation and about alternative courses of action and their probable outcome; deciding priorities and acting so as to deal directly with the stressful situation.
2. Emotion-oriented Strategy: Efforts to maintain hope and to control one’s emotion;
venting feelings of anger and frustration, or deciding that nothing can be done to change
things.
3. Avoidance-oriented Strategy: Denying or minimizing the seriousness of the situation;
conscious suppression of stressful thoughts and their replacement by self protective ‘
thoughts.
Lazarus and Folkman:
1. Problem-focused strategies attack the problem itself, with behaviours designed to gain information, to alter the event, and to alter belief and commitments. They increase the person’s awareness, level of knowledge, and range of behavioural and cognitive coping options. They can act to reduce the threat value of the event.
2. Emotion-focused strategics call for psychological changes designed primarily to limit the degree of emotional disruption caused by an event, with minimal effort to alter the event itself.
Stress Management Techniques:
1. Relaxation Techniques: Reduces symptoms of stress and decreases the incidence of illnesses such as high blood-pressure and heart diseases. Starts from the lower part of the body and progresses up to the facial muscles in such a way that the whole body is relaxed.
Deep breathing is used along with muscle relaxation to calm the mind and relax the body.
2. Meditation Procedures: A sequence of learned techniques for re focusing of attention that brings about an altered state of consciousness. Such a thorough concentration that the meditator becomes unaware of any outside stimulation and reaches a different state of consciousness.
3. Bio-feedback: Monitors and reduces the physiological aspects of stress by providing feedback about current physiological activity and is often accompanied by relaxation training.
(i) Developing an awareness of the particular physiological response.
(ii) Learning w7ays of controlling that physiological response in quiet conditions.
(iii) Transferring that control into the conditions of everyday life.
4. Creative Visualization: Creative visualization is a subjective experience that uses imagery and imagination. Before visualizing one must set oneself a realistic goal, as it helps build confidence. It is easier to visualize if one’s mind is quiet, body relaxed and eyes are closed.
5. Cognitive Behavioural Techniques: These techniques aim to inoculate people against stress. Stress inoculation training is one effective method developed by Meichenbaum. Replace negative and irrational thoughts with positive and rational ones, i.e., Follow through.
(i) Assessment involves discussing the nature of the problem and seeing it from the view-point of the person/client.
(ii) Stress reduction involves learning the techniques of reducing stress such as relaxation and self-instruction.
6. Exercise: can provide an active outlet for the physiological arousal experienced in response to stress. Improves the efficiency of the heart, enhances the function of the lungs, maintains good circulation, lowers blood pressure, reduces fat in the blood, improves the body’s immune system.
Promoting, Positive, Health and Well-being.
(i) Stress Resistant Personality (Kobasa):
People with high levels of stress but low levels of illness share three characteristics, which are referred to as the personality traits of hardiness (a set of beliefs about oneself, the world, and how they interact).
(i) Commitment (personal commitment to work, family, hobbies and social life).
(ii) Control (control over sense of purpose and direction in life).
(iii) Challenge (changes in life as normal and positive rathr than as a threat).
(6) Life skills are abilities for adaptive and positive behaviour that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life.
1. Assertiveness: Helps to communicate clearly and confidently, our feelings, needs, wants and thoughts. It is the ability to say ‘no’ to a request, to state an opinion without being self-conscious, or to express emotions.
2. Time Management: Learning how to plan time and delegate can help to relieve the pressure. The central principle of time management is to spend your tie doing the things that you value, or that help you to achieve your goals.
3. Rational Thinking: When we are stressed, we have an inbuilt selective bias to attend to negative thoughts and images from the past, which affect our perception of the present and the future. Challenging your distorted thinking and irrational beliefs, driving out potentially intrusive negative anxiety-provoking thoughts, and making positive statements.
4. Improving Relationships: The key to a sound lasting relationship is communication. Listening to what the other person is saying, expressing how you feel and what you think, and accepting the other person’s opinions and feelings, even if they are different from your own.
5. Self-care: If we keep ourselves healthy, firm and relaxed, we are better prepared . physically and emotionally to tackle the stresses of everyday life. Our breathing patterns
reflect our state of mind and emotions. Rapid and shallow breathing from high in the chest, with frequent sighs.
6. Overcoming Unhelpful Habits: Unhelpful habits such as perfectionism, avoidance, procrastination, etc. are strategies that help to cope in the short term hut which make one more vulnerable to stress.
(c) Health is a state of complete physical, mental, social and spiritual well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Positive health comprises the following constructs: “a healthy body; high quality of personal relationships; a sense of purpose in life; self-regard, mastery of life’s tasks; and resilience to stress, trauma and change.” –
1. Diet: A balanced diet can life one’s mood, give more energy, feed muscles, improve circulation, prevent illness, strengthen the immune system and make one feel better to cope with stresses of life.
2. Exercise: Regular exercise plays an important role in managing weight and stress, and —¦
is shown to have a positive effect on reducing tension, anxiety and depression.
3. Positive Attitude: Some of the factors leading to a positive attitude are—having a fairly accurate perception of reality; a sense of purpose in life and responsibility; acceptance and tolerance for different viewpoints of others, taking credit for success, accepting blame for failure, being open to new ideas, having a sense of hour with the ability to laugh at oneself.
4. Positive Thinking: Optimism, which is the inclination to expect favourable life outcomes, has been linked to psychological and physical well-being.
(d) Social Support: The existence and availability of people on whom we can rely upon, people who let us know that they care about, value, and love us. Perceived support, i.e., the quality of social support is positively related to health and well-being, whereas social network, i.e., the quantity of social support is unrelated to well-being, because it is very time-consuming and demanding to maintain a large _
social network. Social support may be in the form of tangible support or assistance involving material aid, such as money, goods, services, etc. Family and friends also provide informational support about stressful events.
Resilience and Health: Resilience is a dynamic developmental process referring to the maintenance of positive adjustment under challenging life conditions. It has been described as the capacity to ‘bounce back’ in the face of stress and adversity. Resilience has recently been defined in terms of three resources—I HAVE (social and interpersonal strengths), I AM (inner strengths), I CAN (interpersonal and problem-solving skills).
Examination Anxiety (evaluative apprehension/stress) involves feelings of tension or uneasiness that occur before, during or after an examination. Many people find it helpful in some ways, as it can be motivating and create the pressure that is needed to stay focused on one’s performance. High stress can interfere with the student’s preparation, concentration and performance. Spend enough time for study, overview and weigh one’s strengths and weaknesses, discuss difficulties with teacher and classmates, plan a revision timetable, condense notes, space out revision periods, and most importantly on the examination day concentrate on staying calm.
Adjustment and adaptation:
“Adjustment is a continuous process by which a person varies his behaviour to produce a more harmonious relationship between himself and his environment.”
Adjustment helps us keeping balance between our need and the capacity to meet these needs.
Adjustment is a subjective process. It is always related to some object and it varies from culture to culture.
Adjustment is the end product of coping.
Adaptation is structural or functional change that enhances the organisms survival value.
• It is a biological mechanism.
• In general adaptation is a term used in biological sciences for learning new ways for survival where as adjustment is psychological process to cope with the demands of the self and the environment.
Contemporary Psychologists have shown increasing interest in understanding what makes life good and meaningful.
Positive Psychology systematically investigates the positive aspects that is the strengths and virtues of human beings such as wisdom and knowledge curiosity,love,emotionalintelligenceetc, courage Bravery,industry,integrity justice Loyalty,Equity,Leadership Temerance Selfcontrol,prudence,Modesty Transcendence Excellencegratitude,Hope,optimism,zest,
WORDS THAT MATTER
• Adaptation: Structural or functional change that enhances the organism’s survival value.
• Alarm Reaction: The first stage of the general adaptation syndrome characterized by an
emergency reaction involving the mobilization of energy through adrenal and sympathetic activity.
• Appraisal: Refers to evaluation and interpretation.
• Arousal: The tension experienced at the thought of others being present, and/or performance being evaluated.
• Conflict: A state of disturbance in which resulting from opposing motivates, drives, needs or goals.
• Coping: The process of trying to manage demands that are appraised as taxing or exceeding one’s resources.
• Exhaustion: State in which energy resources have been used up and responsiveness is reduced to a minimum.
• General Adaptation syndrome (GAS): It consists of two phases—an alarm phase during which the organism makes efforts to cope with the threat, resistance phase during which the organism makes efforts to cope with the threat as through confrontation and an exhaustion phase which occurs if the organism fails to overcome the threat and depletes its physiological resources.
• Hardiness: It is a set of beliefs about oneself, the world, and how they interact. It has three characteristics, i.e., commitment, control and challenge.
• Homoeostasis: A state of physiological balance within the body.
• Life Skills: Abilities for adaptive and positive behaviour that enable individuals to deal effectively with the environment.
• Lifestyle: In the context of health psychology, the overall pattern of decision and behaviours that determine health and quality of life.
• Meditation: A technique of turning one’s concentration inward and achieving an altered state of consciousness.
• Optimism: The tendency to seek out, remember and expect pleasurable experiences.
• Positive Health: It includes a healthy body, good interpersonal relationship, a sense of purpose in life, and resilience to stress, trauma and change.
• Psychoneuroimmunology: Interaction among behavioural, neuroendocrine and immunological processes of adaptation.

Self And Personality –   Notes for Class 12 Psychology

FACTS THAT MATTER
• Self refers to the totality of an individuals conscious experiences, ideas thoughts and feelings with regard to her self or him self.
• The study of self and personality help us to understand ourselves as well as others.
• The structure of self can be understood in terms of identity of the intended and the development of personal and social self.
• Personal identity refers to those attributes of a person that make him/her different from others.
• Social identity refers to those aspects of a person that link him/her to a social or cultural group or are derived from it.
Self refers to the totality of an individual’s conscious experiences, ideas, thoughts and feelings with regard to himself or herself.
• Subject:
Who does something (actor).
Self actively engages in the process of knowing itself.
• Object:
Which gets affected (consequence).
Self gets observed and comes to be known.
• Kinds of Self:
(i) Formed as a result of the interaction of the biological self with the physical and sociocultural environment.
(ii) Biological self developed |is a result of our biological needs.
• Personal Self:
Primarily concerned with oneself.
Emphasis comes to be laid on those aspects of life that relate only to the concern the person, such as personal freedom, personal responsibility, personal achievement, or personal comforts.
• Social/Familial/Relational Self
Emerges in relation with others.
Emphasises such aspects of life as co-operation, unity, affiliation, sacrifice, support or sharing. This self values family and social relationship.
• Self-concept is the way perceive ourselves and the ideas we hold about our competencies and attributes. A person’s self-concept can be found out by asking the person about himself herself.
• Self-esteem is the value judgement of a person about himself/herself.
1. Assessment present a variety of statements to a person and ask him/her to indicate the extent to which those statements are true for him or her.
2. By 6 to 7 years, children have formed self-esteem in four areas—academic, social and physical/athletic competence, and physical appearance become more refined with age.
3. Overall self-esteem: It is the capacity to view oneself in terms of stable disposition and combine separate self-evaluations into a general psychological image of oneself.
4. Self-esteem has a strong relationship with our everyday behaviour. Children with low self-esteem in all areas often display anxiety, depression, and increasing anti-social behaviour.
5. Warm and positive parenting helps in development of high self-esteem among children- allows them to know they are accepted as competent and worthwhile.
• Self-efficacy is the extent to which a person believes they themselves control their life outcomes or the outcomes are controlled by luck or fate or other situational factors.
1. A person who believes that he/she has the ability or behaviour required by a particular situation demonstrates high self-efficacy.
2. The notion of self-efficacy is based on Bandura’s social learning theory. He showed that children and adults learned behaviour by observing and imitating others.
3. People’s expectations of achievement also determine the type of behaviour in which they would engage, as also the amount of risk they would undertake.
4. Strong sense of self-efficacy allows people to select, influence, and even construct the circumstances of their own life; also feel less fearful.
5. Society, parents and own positive experiences can help in the development of a strong sense of self-efficacy by presenting positive models during the formative years of children.
• Self-regulation refers to the ability to organize and monitor one’s own behaviour.
1. People who are able to change their behaviour according to the demands of. the environment are high on self-monitoring.
2. Self-control is learning to delay or refer the gratification of needs.
3. Will-power is the ability to respond to situational pressure with resistance and control over ourselves.
4. Self-control plays a key role in the fulfilment of a long-term goal.
5. Indian culture tradition provides certain effective mechanisms (fasting in vrata or roza and non-attachment with worldly things) for developing self-control.
• Techniques of self-control:
1. Observation of own behaviour: provides necessary information that may be used to change, modify or strengthen certain aspects of self.
2. Self-instruction: instructs ourselves to do something and behave the way we want to.
3. Self-reinforcement: rewards behaviours that have pleasant outcomes.
CULTURE AND SELF:
• Indian
Shifting nature of boundary between self and other (individual self and social self).
Does not clear dichotomies.
Collectivistic culture: Self is generally not separated from one’s own group; rather both remain in a state of harmonious co-existence.
• Western
Boundary is relatively fixed.
Holds clear dichotomies between self and other, man and nature, subjective and objective.
Individualistic Culture: Self and the group exist as two different entities with clearly defined boundaries; individual members of the group maintain their individuality.
CONCEPT OF PERSONALITY
• Personality refers to unique and relatively stable qualities that characterized an individual’s behaviour across different situation over a period of time.
1. Derived from persona (Latin), the mask used by actors in Roman theatre for changing their facial make-up.
2. Once we are able to characterize someone’s personality, we can predict how that person will probably behave in a variety of circumstances.
3. An understanding of personality allows us to deal with people in realistic and acceptable ways.
Features of Personality:
1. Personality has both physical and psychological components.
2. Its expression in terms of behaviour is fairly unique in a given individual.
3. Its main features do not easily change with time.
4. It is dynamic in the sense that some of its features may change due to internal or external situational demands; adaptive to situations.
APPROACHES TO STUDY PERSONALITY
• TYPE APPROACHES
1. Hippocrates (Greek Physician)
(i) Proposed a typology of personality based on fluid or humour.
(ii) Classified people into four types (i.e., sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic and choleric); characterised by specific behavioural features.
2. Charak Samhita (Treatise on Ayurveda)
(i) Classifies people into the categories of vata, pitta and kapha on the basis of three humoural elements called tridosha.
(ii) Each refers to a type of temperament, called prakriti (basic nature) of a person.
3. Typology of personality based on the trigunas, i.e. , sattva, rajas, and tamas.
— Sattva guna—cleaniness, truthfulness, dutifulness, detachment, discipline.
— Rajas guna—intensive activity, desire for sense gratification, dissatisfaction,envy, materialism.
— Tamas guna—anger, arrogance, depression, laziness, helplessness
All the three gunas are present in every person in different degrees—the dominance of . any guna leads to a particular type of behaviour.
4. Sheldon
Using body built and temperament as the main basis for classification:
(i) Endomorphic (fat, soft and round)—relaxed and sociable.
(ii) Mesomorphic (strong musculature, rectangular, strong body build)—energetic and courageous.
(iii) Ectomorphic (thin, long, fragile)—brainy, artistic and introverted.
— Limited use in predicting behaviour—simple and similar to stereotypes.
5. Jung
Grouped people into two types, widely recognized.
(i) Introverts: People who prefer to be alone, tend to avoid others, withdraw themselves in the face of emotional conflicts, and are shy.
(ii) Extraverts: Sociable, outgoing, drawn to occupations that allow dealing directly with people, and react to stress by trying to lose themselves among people and social activity.
6. Friedman and Roesenman
Tried to identify psycho-social risk factors and discovered types.
(i) Type-A (susceptible to hypertension and coronary heart disease): Highly motivated, impatience, feel short of time, be in a great hurry, and feel like being always burdened with work. Such people find it difficult to slow down and relax,
(ii) Type-B The absence of Type-A traits.
Moris continued this research and identified:
(iii) Type-C (prone to cancer): Co-operative, unassertive patient, suppress negative emotion, show compliance to authority.
(iv) Type-D (prone to depression).
Personality typologies are usually too simplistic as human behaviour is highly complex and variable. Assigning people to a particular personality type is difficult. People do not fit into such simple categorization schemes so neatly.
TRAIT APPROACHES
A trait is considered as a relatively enduring attribute or quality on which one individual differ another. They are:
Relatively Stable over Time
— Generally consistent across situations.
— Their strengths and combination vary across individuals leading to individual differences in personality.
1. Allport’s Trait Theory (Gordon Allport)
(i) Individuals possess a number of traits—dynamic in nature and determine behaviour.
(ii) Analysed words people use to describe themselves—provided a basic for understanding human personality—and categorized them into—
— Cardinal Traits: highly generalized disposition, indicates the goal around . which a person’s entire life revolves, e.g., Hitler’s Nazism.
— Central Traits: less pervasive in effect, but still quite generalized disposition. e.g., sincere.
— Secondary trai least generalized characteristics of a person, e.g., likes mangoes.
(iii) The way an individual reacts to a situation depends on his/her traits.
(iv) People sharing the same traits might express them in different ways.
2. Personality Factors (Raymond Cattell)
(i) Identified primary traits from descriptive adjectives found in language.
(ii) Applied factor analysis, a statistical technique to discover the common structure on which people differ from each other.
— Source or Primary Traits (16): stable, building blocks of personality— described in terms of opposing tendencies.
— Surface Traits: result out of the interaction of source traits.
(iii) Developed Sixteen Personality Factor (16PF) Questionnaire for the assessment of personality.
3. Eysenck’s Theory (H.J. Eysenck)
(i) Reduced personality into, two broad dimensions which are biologically and genetically based and subsume a number of specific traits.
— Neuroticism (anxious, moody, touchy, restless) us. Emotional stability (calm, even tempered, reliable)—the degree to which people have control over their feelings.
— Extraversion (active, gregarious, impulsive, thrill seeking) vs. Introversion (passive, quiet, caution, reserved)—the degree to which people are socially outgoing or socially withdrawn.
(ii) Later proposed a third dimension, Psychoticism (hostile, electric, and antisocial) vs. Sociability, considered to interact with the other two dimensions.
(iii) Developed Eysenck Personality Questionnaires to study dimensions
(iv) Useful in understanding the personality profile of people across cultures
(v) Consistent with the analysis of personality traits found in different languages and methods
• Psycho-dynamic Approach (Sigmund Freud)
A Levels of Conciousness
1. Conscious—thoughts, feelings and action of which people are aware.
2. Preconscious-—mental activity which people may become aware only if they attend to it closely.
3. Unconscious—mental activity that people are aware of.
(i) A reservoir of instinctive or animal drives—stores all ideas and .wishes that arise from sexual desires.
(ii) Cannot be expressed openly and therefore are repressed or concealed from conscious awareness.
(iii) Constant struggle to find a socially acceptable way to express unconscious awareness.
(iv) Unsuccessful resolution of conflicts results in abnormal behaviour Approaches to the Unconscious
1. Free Association—a method in which a person is asked to openly share all the thoughts, feelings and ideas that come to his/her mind.
2. Dream Analysis.
3. Analysis of Errors—mispronunciations, forgetting.
Psycho-analysis is a therapeutic procedure, the basic goal which is to bring repressed unconscious material to consciousness, thereby helping people to live in a more self-aware and integrated manner.
B Structure of Personality
1. Freud gave an imaginary division of mind it believed in internal dynamics which can be inferred from the ways people behave.
2. Three competing forces—i.e. id, ego and superego influence behaviour relative strength of each structure determines a person’s stability.
• Id:
1. Source of a person’s instinctual energy—deals with immediate gratification of primitive needs, sexual desires and aggressive impulses.
2. Works on the pleasure principle, which assumes that people seek pleasure and try to avoid pain.
3. Demanding, unrealistic and does not care for moral values, society, or other individuals.
4. Energised by instinctual forces, life (sexual) instinct (libido) and death instinct.
• Ego:
1. Seeks to satisfy an individual’s instinctual needs in accordance with reality.
2. Works on the reality principle, and directs the id towards more appropriate ways of behaving.
3. Patient and reasonable.
• Superego:
1. Moral branch of mental functioning.
2. Tells the id and ego whether gratification in a particular instance is ethical
3. Controls the id by internalising the parental authority the process of socialisation. According to Freud personality is Biological determined. It is instinctive. Life instinct and death instinct determine behaviour.
• Life instinct is dominant in human behaviour.
C Ego Defence Mechanisms
1. A defence mechanism is a way of reducing anxiety by distorting reality unconsciously.
2. It defends the ego against the awareness of the instinctual reality.
3. It is normal and adaptive; people who use mechanism are often unaware of doing so.
(i) Repression: Anxiety provoking behaviours or thoughts are totally dismissed by the unconscious. ‘
(ii) Projection: People attributes their own traits to others.
(iii) Denial: A person totally refuses to accept reality.
(iv) Reaction Formation: A person defends against anxiety by adopting behaviours opposite to his/her true feelings.
(v) Rationalisation: A person tries to make unreasonable feelings or behaviour seem reasonable and acceptable.
D Stages of Personality/Psychosexual Development (Five Stage Theory of Personality)
1. The core aspects of personality are established early, remain stable throughout life, and can be changed only with great difficulty.
2. Problems encountered at any stage may arrest development, and have long-term effect on a person’s life.

• Oedipus Complex (Male)
Love for mother, hostility towards the father, and fear of punishment or castration by the father.
Accepts his father’s relationship with his mother and models his own behaviour after his father.
• Electra Complex (Female)
Attaches her love to the father and tries to symbolically marry him and raise a family.
Identifies with her mother and copies her behaviour as a means of getting (or sharing in) her father’s affection.
Resolution of Complex
1. Identification with same sex parent.
2. Giving up sexual feeling for sex parent.
Failure of a child to pass successfully through a stage leads to fixation to that stage. The child’s development gets arrested at an earlier stage.
Regression occurs when a person’s resolution of problems at any stage of development is less than adequate. People display behaviours typing of a less mature stage of development.
• Post-Freudian Approach Neo-analytic or Post-Freudian View
(i) Less prominent role to sexual and aggressive tendencies of the Id.
(ii) Expansion of the concept ego.
(iii) Emphasis on human qualities of creativity, competence, and problem-solving.
1. Carl Jung: Aims and Aspirations are the source of energy
(i) Saw human being as guided by aims and aspirations.
(ii) Analytical Psychology; personality consists of competing forces and structures within the individual (that must be balanced) rather than between the individual and the demand of society, or between the individual and reality.
(iii) Collective unconscious consisting of archetypes or primordial images; not individually acquired, but are inherited—found in myths, dreams and arts of all mankind.
(iv) The self-strive for unity and oneness; for achieving which, a person must become increasingly aware of the wisdom available in one’s personal and collective unconscious, and must learn to live harmony with it.
2. Karen Horney: Optimism
(i) Optimistic view of human life with emphasis on human growth and self actualisation
(ii) Challenge to Freud’s treatment of women as inferior—each sex has attributes to be admire by the other, and neither sex can be viewed as superior or inferior; countered that women were more likely to be affected by social and cultural factors than by biological factors.
(iii) Psychological disorders were caused by disturbed interpersonal relationship during childhood.
(iv) When parent’s behaviour toward a child is indifferent, discouraging and erratic, the child feels insecure and a feeling called basic anxiety results—deep resentment toward parents or basic hostility occur due to this anxiety.
3. Alfred Adler: Lifestyle and Social Interest source of energy-attainment of personal goals.
(i) Individual Psychology: human behaviour is purposeful and goal directed.
(ii) Each one of us has the capacity to choose and create.
(iii) Personal goals, goals that provide us with security and help us in overcoming the feelings of inadequacy, are the sources of our motivation.
(iv) Every individual suffers from the feeling of inadequacy and guilt, i.e., inferiority complex, which arise from childhood.
4. Erich Fromm: The Human Concerns
(i) Social orientation viewed human beings as social beings who could be understood in terms of their relationship with others.
(ii) Character traits (personality) develop from our experiences with their individuals.
(iii) Psychological qualities such as growth from our experiences of potentials resulted from A desire for freedom. And striving for justice and truth.
(iv) People’s dominant character traits in a given work as forces in shaping the social processes and the culture itself
5. Erik Erikson: Search for Identity
(i) Rational, conscious ego processes in personality development.
(ii) Development is viewed as a lifelong process, and ego identity is granted a central place in this process.
(iii) Identity crisis at the adolescent age—young people must generate for themselves a central perspective and a direction that can give them a meaningful sense of unity and purpose.
• Criticism to Psychodynamic Theories 
1. The theories are largely based on case studies; they lack a rigorous scientific basis.
2. They use small and a typical individual as samples for advancing generalisations.
3. The concepts are not properly defined, and it is difficult to submit them to scientific testing.
4. Freud has used males as the prototype of all human personality development and overlooked female experiences and perspectives.
• Behavioural Approach 
1. Focus on learning of stimulus—response connection and their reinforcement.
2. Personality is the response of an individual as sample for advancing generalization.
3. The concepts are not properly defined, and it is difficult to submit them to scientific testing.
4. Freud has used males as the prototype of all human personality development and overlooked females experiences and perspective.
• Cultural Approach
1. Considers personality as an adaptation of individuals or group to the demand of their ecology and culture.
2. A group’s economic maintenance system plays a vital role in the origin of cultural and behavioural variations.
3. The climatic conditions, the nature of terrain of the habitat and the availability of food determine people’s settlement patterns, social structures, division of labour, and other features such as child-rearing practices. Economic maintenance system.
4. These elements constitute a child’s overall learning environment—skills, abilities, behavioural styles, and value priorities are viewed as strongly linked to these features.
• Humanistic Approach Carl Rogers
1. Fully functioning individual—fulfilment is the motivating force for personality development (people try to express their capabilities, potentials and talents to the fullest extent possible).
2. Assumptions about human behaviour:
(i) It is goal-oriented and worthwhile.
(ii) People (who are innately good) will almost always choose adaptive, self-actualising behaviour.
3. People are constantly engaged in the process of actualising their true self.
4. Ideal self is the self that a person would like to be—correspondence between ideal and real self = happiness, discrepancy = dissatisfaction.
5. People have tendency to maximize self-concept through self-actualisation.
6. Personality development is a continuous process.
7. Role of social influences in the development of self-concept—positive social conditions lead to a high self-concept and self-esteem, generally flexible and open to new experiences.
8. An atmosphere of unconditional positive regard must be created in order to ensure enhancement of people’s self-concept.
9. Client-centered therapy that Rogers developed basically attempts to create this condition.
• Abraham Maslow
1. Attainment of self-actualisation, a state in which people have reached their own fullest potential.
2. Optimistic and positive view of man who has the potentialities for love, joy and to do creative work.
3. Human beings are considered free to shape their lives and to self-actualisation.
4. Self-actualisation becomes possible by analysing the motivations that govern our life.
• Characteristics of Healthy Person
1. Healthy become aware of themselves, their feelings, and their limits; accept themselves, and what they make of their own responsibility; have ‘the courage to be’.
2. They experience the ‘here-and-now’; are not trapped.
3. They do not live in the past or dwell in the future through anxious expectation and distorted defences.
• Assessment of Personality
A formal effort aimed at understanding personality of an individual is termed as personality assessment.
Assessment refers to the procedures used to evaluate or differentiate people on the basis of certain characteristics.
The goal of assessment is to understand and predict behaviour with minimum error and maximum accuracy.
Besides promoting our understanding, assessment is also useful for diagnosis, training, placement, counselling, and other purposes.

Self-Report Measures:
• It was Allport who suggested that the best method to assess a person is by asking her/him about herself himself.
• Fairly structured measures, based on theory that require subjects to give verbal responses using some kind of rating scale.
• The method requires the subject to objectively report her/his own feeling with respect to various items. Responses are accepted at face value, scored in quantative terms and interpreted on basis of norms for the test.
• eg. MMPI, EPQ, 16 PF —> Direct technique
Projective Techniques:
• Direct methods of personality assessment cannot uncover the unconscious part of our behaviour.
• Techniques based on assumption that a less structured or unstructured stimulus or situation will allow the individual to project her/his feelings, desires and needs on to that situation. These projections are interpreted by experts.
• E.G. RORSCHACH Inkblot test, thematic apperception test, sentence completion test, Draw-a-person test.
—> Indirect technique
Besides promoting our understanding assessment is also useful for diagnosis, training, placement, counselling and other purposes.
MINNESOTA MULTIPHASIC PERSONALITY INVENTORY
—> Developed by HATHAWAY and McKINLEY
—> Effective in identifying varieties of psychopathology
—> Revised version is MMPI-2
—> Consists of 567 statements. The subject has to judge each statement as ‘true’ or ‘false’.
—> The test is divided into 10 sub scales which seek to diagnose hypochondriasis, depression, hysteria, psychopathic deviant, masculinity-feminity, paranoia, psychasthenia, schizophrenia, mania and social introversion.
—>In India, Mallick and Joshi have developed Jodhpur Muitiphasic Personality Inventory. (JMPI)
EYSENCK PERSONALITY QUESTIONNAIRE
—> Developed by Eysenck
—> Initially assessed 2 dimensions of personality: hitroversion-Extraversion and emotionally stable-emotionally unstable. Emotional stability instability.
—>These dimensions are characterised by 32 personality traits.
—> Later on, Eysenck added a third dimension, called psychoticism. It is linked to psychopathology-sociability.
—> It represents a lack of feeling for others, a tough manner of interacting with people, and a tendency to defy social conventions. A person scoring high on this dimension tends to be hostile, egocentric and antisocial.
WORDS THAT MATTER
• Alienation: The feeling of not being part of society or a group.
• Anal stage: The second of Freud’s psycho-sexual stages, which occurs during the child’s second year. Pleasure is focused on the anus and on retention and expulsion of faeces.
• Antisocial Personality: A behavioural disorder characteristics by truancy, delinquency, promiscuity, theft, vandalism, fighting, violation of common social rules, poor work record, impulsiveness, irrationality, aggressiveness, reckless behaviour, and inability to plan ahead. The particular pattern of behaviour varies from individual to individual.
• Archetypes: Jung’s term for the contents of the collective unconscious; images or symbols
expressing the inherited patterns for the organization of experience. ”
• Cardinal Trait: According to All port, a single trait that dominates an individual’s entire personality.
• Central Traits: The major trait considered in forming an impression of others.
• Client centred therapy: The theraphentic approach developed by Carl Rogers in which therapist helps clients to clarify their true feelings and come to value who they are.
• Collective Unconscious: Inherited portion of the unconscious, as postulated by Carl Jung. The unconscious shared by all human beings.
• Defence Mechanisms: According to Freud, ways in which the ego unconsciously tries
to cope with unacceptable id impulses, as in repression, projection, reaction formation, sublimation, rationalisation, etc.
• Deinstitutionalisation: The transfer of former mental patients from institution into the community.
• Ego: The part of the personality that provides a buffer between the id and the outside.
• Evolution apprehension: The fear of being evaluated negatively by others who are present (an audience).
• Extraversion: One of the dimensions of personality in which interests are directed outward to nature and other people rather than inwards to the thoughts and feelings of self (introvert).
• Humanistic Approach: The theory that people are basically good and tend to grow to higher levels of functioning.
• Id: According to Freud, the impulsive and unconscious part of the psyche that operates through the pleasure principle toward the gratification of instinctual drives. The Id is conceived as the true unconscious, or the deepest part of the psyche.
• Ideal Self: The kind of person we would like to be. Also called ego-ideal/idealized self-image.
• Identity: The distinguishing character of the individual—who each of us is, what our roles are, and what we are capable of.
• Inferiority Complex: According to Adler, a complex developed by adults who have not been able to overcome the feelings of inferiority they developed as children, when they were small and limited in their knowledge about the world.
• Interview: Verbal interaction between a respondent and a researcher to gather information about the respondent.
• Introversion: One of the dimensions of personality in which interests are directed inwards
rather than outwards (extrovert).
• Latency Period: In Freud’s theory of psycho-sexual stages, the period between the phallic stage and the mature genital stage (period from age 4 to 5 to about 12) during which interest in sex is sublimated.
• Libido: Freud introduced this term. In Freud’s treatment, libido was quite simply a direct or indirect sexual expression.
• Meta needs: In the hierarchy of needs, those at the top, such as self-actualisation, self-esteem, aesthetic needs, and the like, which can only be satisfied when lower order needs are satisfied.
• Observational Method: A method in which researcher observes phenomenon that occurs naturally without being able to manipulate.
• Oedipus Complex: The Freudian concept in which the young child develops an intense desire to replace the parent of the same sex and enjoy that affection of the opposite sex parent.
• Personal Identity: Awareness of oneself as a separate, distinct being.
• Phallic Stage: Third of Freud’s psycho-sexual stages (at about age five) when pleasure is focused on the genitals and both males and females experience the ‘Oedipus complex’.
• Projection: A defence mechanism; the process of unwittingly attributing one’s own traits, attitudes, or subjective processes to others.
• Projective Techniques: The utilization of vague, ambiguous, unstructured stimulus objects or situation in order to elicit the individual’s characteristic modes of perceiving his/ her world or of behaving in it.
• Psycho-dynamic Approach: Approach that strives for explanation in terms of motives, or drives.
• Psycho-dynamic Therapy: First suggested by Freud; therapy based on the premise that the primary sources of abnormal behaviour are resolved past conflicts and the possibility that unacceptable unconscious impulses will enter consciousness.
• Rationalisation: A defence mechanism that occurs when one attempts to explain failure or shortcoming by attributing them to more acceptable causes.
• Reaction Formation: A defence mechanism in which a person denies a disapproved motive through giving strong expression to its opposite.
• Regression: A defence mechanism that involves a return to behaviours characterized of an earlier stage in life. The term is also used in statistics, in which with the help of correlation prediction is made.
• Repression: A defence mechanism by which people push unacceptable, anxiety provoking thoughts and impulses into the unconscious to avoid confronting them directly. In short it is unconscious forgetting.
• Repression: A defence mechanism by which people push unacceptable, anxiety-provoking thoughts and impulses into the unconscious to avoid confronting them directly. [Unconscious forgetting]
• Self-actualization: A state of self-fulfillment in which people realise their highest potential in their own unique way.
• Self-efficacy: Bandura’s term for the individual’s beliefs about his or her own effectiveness; the exception that one can master a situation and produce positive outcomes.
• Self-esteem: The individual’s personal judgment of his or her own worth; one’s attitude toward oneself along a positive-negative dimension.
• Self-regulation: It refers to our ability to organise and monitor our own behaviour.
• Social Identity: A person’s definition of who he or she is; includes personal attributes (self¬concept) along with membership in various groups.
• Super Ego: According to Freud, superego is the final personality structure to develop; it represents society’s standards of right and wrong as handed down by person’s parents, teachers, and other important figures.
• Surface Traits: R.B. Cattell’s term for clusters of observable trait elements (response) that seems to go together. Factor analysis of the correlations reveals source traits.
• Trait: A relatively persistent and consistent behaviour pattern manifested in a wide range of circumstances.
• Trait Approach: An approach to personality that seeks to identify the basic traits necessary to describe personality.
• Type Approach: Explanation of personality based on broad categories which are mostly determined by body constitution and temperament.
• Typology: Ways of categorising individuals into discrete categories or types e.g., Type-A personality.
• Unconscious: In psychoanalytic theory, characterising any activity or mental structure which a person is not aware of.
• Values: Enduring beliefs about ideal modes of behaviour or end-state of existence; attitudes that have a strong evaluative and ‘ought’ aspect.

Class 12 Psychology Quick Revision notes Chapter 1 Intelligence And Aptitude

• Individual differences refer to distinctiveness and variations among people’s characteristics and behaviour patterns.
• Approaches explaining individual differences in psychological functioning.
1. Trait Approach: Personal traits cause change in behaviours. INTERNALFACTORS
2. Situationism is a view which states that situations and circumstances in which one is
placed to influence one’s behaviour. EXTERNALFACTORS
3. The situationist perspective views human behaviour relatively more as a result of influence of external (situational) factors than personality traits.
• Assessment:
1. Predict future behaviour intervention to affect a change in behaviour.
2. First step in understanding a psychological attribute.
• Formal Assessment: Objective, standardised, organised’psychologists are trained in making formal assessment.
• Inforinal Assessment: It varies from case to case/one assessor to another—open to subjective interpretation.
• Attributes:
1. Attributes chosen for assessment depend upon the purpose, e.g, improvement of a weak student intellectual strengths and weaknesses are measured.
2. An attribute will be said to exist in a person only if it can be measured by using scientific procedures.
• Some Domains of Psychological Attributes


• Assessment Methods

1. Wechsler:
• Definition: The global and aggregate capacity of an individual to think rationally, act purposefully, and to deal effectively with his/her environment.
• Understood intelligence in terms of its functionality, i.e., its value for adaption to the environment.
• Intelligence test most widely used.
2. Gardner and Sternberg:
• An intelligent individual not only adapts to the environment but also actively modifies or shapes it.
• Approaches to Study Intelligence

A. Psychometric Approach:
1. Uni/One-Factor Theory (Alfred Binet):
• Definition: The ability to judge well, understand well, and reason well.
• First psychologist who formalised the concept of intelligence in terms of mental operations.
• Differentiating more intelligent from less intelligent individuals.
• Conceptualised intelligence as consisting of one similar set of abilities which can be used for solving any or every problem in an individual’s environment.
2. Two-Factor Theory (Charles Spearman) 1927:
• Employed a statistical method called factor analysis.
• Intelligence consists of a general factor (G-factor) and specific factors (S-factor).
(i) G-Factor: It includes mental operations which are primary and common to all performances.
(ii) S-Factor: It includes specific abilities which allow individuals to excel in their respective domains
3. Theory of Primary Mental Abilities (Louis Thurstone):
(i) Verbal Comprehension (grasping meaning of words, concepts, and ideas).
(ii) Numerical Abilities (speed and accuracy in numerical and computational skills).
(iii) Spatial Relations (visualizing patterns and forms).
(iv) Perceptual Speed To speed in perceiving details).
(v) Word Fluency (using words fluently and flexibly).
(vi) Memory (accuracy in recalling information).
(vii) Inductive Reasoning (deriving general rules from presented facts).
4. Hierarchical Model of Intelligence (Arthur Jensen):
Abilities operates at two levels:
Level I – Associative learning. outputisequaltoinput,rotememory
Level II – Cognitive competence. outputismorethaninput
5. Structure of Intellect Model (J.P. Guilford) 1988:
• Classifies intellectual traits among three dimensions—operations, contents and products
(i) Operation: what the respondent does, e.g., cognition, memory retention.
(ii) Contents: the nature of materials or information on which intellectual
• operations are performed, e.g., visual, auditory.
(iii) Products: the form in which information is processed by the respondent, e.g., relations, systems, transformations.
• Classification includes 6x5x6 categories—the model has 180 cells.
• Each cell is expected to have at least one (can have more than one) factor or ability and is described in terms of all three dimensions.
B. Information-Processing Approach:
1. Theory of Multiple Intelligences (Howard Gardner):
• Intelligence is not a single entity; distinct types of intelligences exist independent of each other.
• Different types of intelligences interact and work together to find a solution to a problem.
• Studied persons who had shown exceptional abilities in their respective areas and described eight types of intelligence.
(i) Linguistic: The capacity to use language fluently and flexibly to express one’s thinking and understand other. Persons high on this ‘word-smart’, eigi, poets and writers.
(ii) Logical-Mathematical: Skills in problem solving, thinking logically and critically and abstract reasoning , eigi, scientists.
(iii) Spatial: The abilities involved in forming, using and transforming mental images (visual images and patterns), eigi, sculptors, painters, architects, interior decorators.
(iv) Musical: The capacity to produce, create and manipulate musical rhythms and patterns.
(v) Bodily-Kinaesthetic: The use of the whole body or portions of it creatively and
flexibly for display, construction of products and problem solving, eigi, athletes, dancers, actors. .
(vi) Interpersonal: Skill of an individual to understand the needs, motives feelings and behaviours of other people for better understanding and relationship. High among psychologists counsellors politicians.
(vii) INTRA PERSONAL: Refers to the awareness of one’s own feelings, motives, desires, knowledge of one’s internal strengths and limitations and using that knowledge to effectively relate to others, eigi, philosophers.
(viii) Naturalistic: Complete awareness of our relationship with the natural world and sensitivity to the features of the natural world, eigi, botanists, zoologists.
2. Triarchic Theory of Intelligence (Robert Sternberg) 1985:
• Definition: The ability to adapt, to shape and select environment to accomplish one’s goals and those of one’s society and culture.
• Three Basic Types of Intelligence:
(i) Componential Intelligence/Analytical Intelligence: The analysis of informa¬tion to solve problems
Three components:
(a) Knowledge Acquisition—responsible for learning and acquisition of the ways of doing things.
(b) Meta or Higher Order Component—planning concerning what to do and how to do it.
(c) Performance Component—actually doing things .
(ii) Experiential/Creative Intelligence: Using past experiences creatively to solve novel problems.
— Ability to integrate different experiences in an original way to make new discoveries and inventions.
— Quickly find out what information is crucial in a given situation.
(iii) Contextual/Practical Intelligence: The ability to deal with environmental demands encountered on a daily basis—
— may be called ‘street smartness’ or ‘business sense’
— easily adapt to their present environment/select a more favourable environment, modify the environment to fit their needs.
3. Planning, Attention-arousal and Simultaneous-Successive (PASS) Model of Intelligence (J.P. Das, Jack Nagliery, Kirby) 1994
• Intellectual activity involves the interdependent functioning of three neurological systems, called the functional units of brain
• These units are responsible for—
(i) Arousal/Attention:
— Arousal and attention enable a person to process information.
— An optimal level of arousal focuses our attention to the relevant aspects of a problem.
— Too much or too little arousal would interfere with attention and attend to stimuli.
(ii) Simultaneous and Successive Processing:
— Simultaneous: Perceive the relations among various concepts and integrate – them into a meaningful pattern for comprehension, e.g., RSPM.
— Successive: Remember all the information serially so that the recall of one leads to the recall of another, e.g., learning of digits, letters. .
(iii) Planning:
— Allows us to think of the possible courses of action, implement them to reach a target, and evaluate their effectiveness.
— If a plan does not work, it is modified to suit the requirements of the task or situation.
• These PASS processes operate on a knowledge base developed either formally (by reading, writing, and experimenting) or informally from the environment.
• These processes are interactive and dynamic in nature, yet each has its own distinctive function.
Cognitive Assessment System (CAS) (Das and Nagliery):
• Battery of tests meant for individuals between 5-18 years of age.
• Consists of verbal as well as non-verbal tasks that measure basic cognitive functions presumed to be independent of schooling.
• Results of assessment can be used to remedy cognitive deficits of children with learning problems.
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN INTELLIGENCE:
The evidence for hereditary influences on intelligence comes mainly from studies on twins and adopted children.

CORRELATION OF INTELLIGENCE
• Separated early in childhood-—show considerable similarity in their intellectual, personality and behavioural characteristics.
• Adopted Children—children’s intelligence is more similar to their biological rather than adoptive parents.
• Role of Environment—as children grow in age, their intelligence level tends to move closer to that of their adoptive parents.
• Disadvantaged Children—adopted into families with higher socio-economic status exhibit a large increase in their intelligence scores.
1. Environmental deprivation lowers intelligence while rich nutrition, good family background, and quality schooling increases intelligence.
2. There is a general consensus among psychologists that intelligence is a product of complex interaction of heredity (nature) and environment (nurture).
3. Heredity sets a range within which an individual’s development is actually shaped by the support and opportunities of the environment.
• Assessment of Intelligence
1905: Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon made the first successful attempt to formally measure intelligence.
1908: Gave the concepts of Mental Age (MA) is the measure of a person’s intellectual development relative to people of her/his age-group.
Chronological Age (CA) is the biological age from birth.
Retardation was being two mental age years below the chronological age.
1912: William Stern, a German psychologist, devised the concept of Intelligence Quotient (IQ). IQ refers to ratio between MA and CA. Formula—mental age divided by chronological age, and multiplied by 100 (to avoid the decimal point).
• Average IQ in the population is 100, irrespective of age.
• Frequency distribution for the IQ scores tends to approximate a bell-shaped curve, called the normal curve—symmetrical around the central value, called the mean.

VARIATIONS IN INTELLIGENCE
1. Intelligence Deficiency (Mentally Retarded/Challenged):
The American Association on Mental Deficiency (AAMD) views mental retardation as significantly sub-average general intellectual functioning existing concurrently with deficits in adaptive behaviour and manifested during the developmental period.
In order to be judged as mentally retarded, a person must show:
(i) Significantly sub average intellectual functioning, e.g., IQ below 70.
(ii) Deficits in adaptive behaviour or the capacity to be independent and deal effectively with one’s environment.
Deficits must be observed during the developmental period, i.e., between 0-18 years.

Mild retardation—development is typically slower than that of their peers but they can function quite independently, hold jobs and families. Level of retardation increases—lag behind their peers in language and motor skills, need to be trained in self-care skills and simple social and communication skills.
2. Intellectual Giftedness:
Lewis Term an (1925): Study to show how intelligence was related to occupational success and life adjustment. These individual show higher performance because of their outstanding potentialities.
Giftedness is exceptional general ability shown in superior performance in a wide variety of areas.
• Teacher’s perspective: depends on a combination of high ability, high creativity and high commitment.
• Early signs of intellectual superiority: during infancy show larger attention span, good memory, sensitivity to environmental changes, early appearance of language skills.
• Other characteristics are advanced logical thinking and problem solving, high speed in processing information, high-level creative thinking, high self-esteem, independence.
• Incorrect to equate with brilliant academic performance: each gifted student possesses different strengths, personalities and characteristics, e.g., athletes.
Talent refers to remarkable ability in a specific field, e.g., social, and are often called prodigies.
Types of Intelligence Tests,
Individual or Group Test

Culture-Fair or Culture-Biased Tests

Verbal, Non-verbal or performance Tests

CULTURE AND INTELLIGENCE
A major characteristic of intelligence is that it helps individuals to adapt to their environment. The cultural environment provides a context for intelligence to develop. ‘
Culture is a collective system of customs, beliefs, attitudes and achievements in art and literature.
Sternberg:
• Notion of contextual or practical intelligence implies that intelligence is a product of culture.
Vygotsky (Russian psychologist):
• Culture provides a social context in which people live, grow and understand the world around them.
• Elementary mental functions (e.g., walking, crying) are Universal; the manner in which higher mental functions such as problem-solving and thinking operate are largely culture produced.

• Equal attention given to cognitive and non-cognitive processes and their integration:
(i) Cognitive capacity (sensitivity to context, understanding, discrimination, problem-solving and effective communication).
(ii) Social competence (respect for social order, commitment to elders, the young and the needy, concern about others and recognising others perspectives).
(iii) Emotional competence (self-regulation and self-monitoring of emotions, honesty, politeness, good conduct and self-evaluation).
(iv) Entrepreneurial competence (commitment, persistence, patience, hard work, vigilance and goal-directed behaviour).
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Emotional intelligence is a set of skills that underlie accurate appraisal, expression and regulation of emotions. It is the feeling side of intelligence.
(i) Emotional Quotient (EQ) is used to express emotional intelligence in the same way as IQ is used to express intelligence.
(ii) Salovey and Mayer: The ability to monitor one’s own and other’s emotions, to discriminate among them and to use the information to guide one’s thinking and actions.
SPECIAL ABILITIES
Aptitude indicates an individual’s capacity to acquire some specific knowledge or skill after training.
(i) People with similar intelligence differed widely in acquiring certain knowledge or skills, called aptitudes.
(ii) With proper training, these abilities can be considerably enhanced.
Interest is a preference for a particular activity; aptitude is the potentiality to perform that activity.
(i) In order to be successful in a particular field, a person must have both aptitude and interest.
Aptitude Tests

• Creativity refers to the ability to produce ideas, objects and problem solutions that are novel and appropriate.
• It refers to the ability to think in novel and unusual ways and to came up with unique solutions to problems.
• Creativity involves the production of same thing new and original it may be an idea, object or solution to a problem.
• Creativity can get manifested in different levels and in different areas.
• Everyday creativity/Day to day creativity. It could be reflected in day to day activities like writing, teaching, storytelling, flower arrangement, dance etc.
• Special talent creativity/Higher order creativity. It is related to outstanding creative achievements e.g. inventions and discoveries.
• Creativity is always reality oriented, appropriate, constructive and socially desirable.
• Everyday creativity could be seen in terms of the level and the areas in which they exhibit creativity and that all may not be operating at the same level.
• Researches suggest that children mostly express their imagination through physical activities and in non-verbal ways, although when language and intellectual functions are fully developed and store of knowledge is adequately available then creativity is expressed through verbal modes too.
• There is no disagreement that creativity in determined by both heredity and environment.
• Limits of the creative potential are set by heredity.
• Environmental factors stimulate the development of creativity.
• No amount of training can transform an average person to develop special talent creativity or higher order creativity like Tagore, Einstein or Shakespear.
CREATIVITY AND INTELLIGENCE:
• Certain level of intelligence in necessary to be creative, but a high level of intelligence, however does not ensure that a person would certainly be creative.
• Researchers have found that both high and law level of creativity can be formed in highly intelligent children and also children of average intelligence.
• Relation between creativity and intelligence is positive.

• Aptitude: A combination of characteristics indicative of individual’s potential to acquire some specific skills with training.
• Aptitude Tests: Tests meant to measure individual’s potential to predict future performance.
• Beliefs: The cognitive component of the thoughts or ideas regarding a topic.
• Case Study: An intensive study of an individual or a situation to develop general principles about behaviour.
• Cognition: The process of knowing. The mental activities association with thought, decision making, language, and other higher mental processes.
• Cognitive Assessment System: A battery of tests designed to measure the four PASS (Planning-Attention-Simultaneous-Successive) process.
• Componential Intelligence: In Sternberg’s triarchic theory, it refers to ability to think critically and analytically.
• Contextual Intelligence: In Sternberg’s triarchic theory, it is the practical intelligence
used in solving everyday problems.
• Creativity: The ability to produce ideas, objects, and problem solutions that are novel and appropriate.
• Culture-fair Test: A test that does not discriminate examinees on the basis of their culture
experiences.
• Emotional Intelligence: A cluster of traits or abilities relating to the emotional side of life abilities such as recognising and managing one’s own emotions, being able to motivate oneself and restrain one’s impulses, recognising and managing others’ emotions, and handling interpersonal relationship in an effective manner. It is expressed in the form of an emotional quotient (EQ) score.
• Experiential Intelligence: In Sternberg’s triarchic theory, it is the ability to use past experiences creatively to solve novel problems.
• Factor Analysis: Mathematical procedure, involving correlations, for sorting trait terms or test responses into clusters or factors; used in the development of test designed to discover basic personality traits. It identifies items that are homogeneous or internally consistent and independent of others.
• Fluid Intelligence: Ability to perceive complex relationship, reason abstractly, and solve
problems.
• Genetics: The study of how the qualities of living things are passed on in their genes.
• Group Test: A test designed to be administered to more than one individual at the same time, in contrast to individual test.
• Individual Differences: Distinctiveness and unique variations among people’s characteristics and behaviour patterns.
• Individual Test: A test that must be given to a single individual at a time, typically by a specially trained person. The Binet and Wechsler intelligence tests are examples of individual test.
• Intellectual Giftedness: Exceptional general intellectual efficiency shown in superior performance in a wide range of tasks.
• Intelligence: The capacity to understand the world, to think rationally, and to use resources efficiency when faced with challenges.
• Intelligence Quotient (IQ): An index derived from standardised intelligence tests
indicating a ratio of mental age to chronological age.
• Intelligence Test: Test designed to. measure person’s level of intelligence.
• Interest: An individual’s preference for one or more specific activities.
• Interview: Purposeful conversation through face to face interaction.
• Mental Age (MA): A measure of intellectual functioning combined with varying degrees of deficits in adaptive behaviour.
• Mental Retardation: Sub-average intellectual functioning combined with varying degrees
of deficits in adaptive behaviour.
• Normal Probability Curve: A symmetrical, bell-shaped frequency distribution. Most scores are found near the middle and fewer and fewer 6ccur towards the extremes. Many psychological characteristics are distributed in this manner.
• Norms: Standards of test performance that permit the comparison of one person’s score on the test to the scores of others who have taken the same test.
• Observational Method: Employing systematic, organised and objective procedures to record behavioural phenomena occurring naturally in real time.
• Observation method: Employing systematic organised and objective procedures to record
behavioural phenomena occurring naturally.
• Performance Test: A test in which the role of language is minimised, the task requiring overt motor responses other than verbal.
• Planning: In Das PASS model of intelligence, it involves goal setting, strategy selection, and monitoring of goal-oriented.
• Problem-solving Behaviour: The activity and mental processes involved in overcoming the obstacles, physical or conceptual, which lie between an animal and its goal.
• Psychological Test: An objective and standardised in instrument for measuring an individual’s mental and behavioural traits; used by psychologists to help people make decisions about their lives and understand more about themselves.
• Self-awareness: Insight into one’s own motives, potential and limitation.
• Sensitivity: Tendency to respond to very low levels of physical stimulation. –
• Simultaneous Processing: Cognitive processing in the PASS model that involves integrating elements of the stimulus situation into composite and meaningful patterns.
• Situationism: A principle which states that situations and circumstances outside oneself have the power to influence behaviour.
• Successive Processing: Cognitive processing in the PASS model where elements of the stimulus situation are responded to sequentially.
• Values: Refers to the enduring beliefs about an ideal made of behaviour.
• Verbal Test: Test in which a subject’s ability understand in making and use words and concepts is important in paking the required responses.

Class 12 Geography – India: People and Economy Quick Revision notes Chapter 22 Geographical Perspective on Selected Issues and Problems

Environmental Pollution
Environmental pollution is the release of substances and energy from waste products of human activities. It is of various types. Thus, they are classified on the basis of medium through which pollutants are transported and diffused.
The classification of pollution are as follows:

1. Water pollution
2. Air pollution
3. Noise pollution
4. Land pollution

Water Pollution
Quality of water is majorly degraded by a number of factors i.e. indiscriminate use of water by fast growing population and expansion of industries. No surface water is found in pure form in rivers, canals, lakes, etc as all the water sources contain small quantities of suspended particles, organic and inorganic substances. Water becomes polluted, when quantity of these substances increases in it. It becomes unsuitable for human uses and its self purifying capacity declines.
There are two sources of water pollution:

• Natural Erosion, landslides, decay and decomposition of plants and animals, etc are natural sources that make water polluted.
• Human Industrial, agricultural and cultural activities of human beings make water polluted.
  Water pollution created from human beings are major problem in modern times. Industrial activities of pollution.

Sources of Pollution in the Ganga and the Yamuna Rivers

Most of the industrial wastes, e.g. polluted waste water, poisonous gases, chemical residuals numerous heavy metals, dust, smoke, etc are disposed off in running water, lakes, reservoirs, rivers and other water bodies and thus, destroy the bio-system of these waters. Major culprits are leather, pulp and paper, textiles and chemicals industries.
Today use of various types of chemicals like inorganic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides are common in agriculture. These chemicals pollute surface water such as rivers, lakes, tanks as well as groundwater by infiltrating into the soil. These fertilizers increase the amount of nitrate content of surface waters. Besides this, cultural activities such as pilgrimage, religious fairs, tourism, etc also cause water pollution. In India, almost all surface water sources are contaminated and unfit for human consumption.

1. Air pollution is responsible for many diseases related to our respiratory, nervous and circulatory systems.
2. Air pollution is responsible for creating smoky fog over cities which is known as urban smog. It has negative effects on human health.
3. Air pollution is also responsible for acid rain. First rain after summer in urban areas always shows high acidic nature of rain water i.e. it shows lower pH level than the subsequent rain.

Noise Pollution
Noise pollution refers to a noise that causes a condition which is unbearable and uncomfortable to human beings. This noise can be from various sources. It is a recent phenomenon which became a serious concern only after a variety of technological innovations. The level of steady noise is measured by sound level expressed in terms of decibels (dB).
Factories, mechanised construction and demolition works, automobiles and aircrafts are major sources of noise that cause noise pollution. Apart from these, there are also some periodic sources of noise pollution such as sirens, loudspeakers in different festivals and programmes and other activities of different communities. Noise produced by traffic is a major source of noise pollution. It creates a huge inconvenience to the people. Intensity and nature of noise made by traffic is dependent on various factors such as type of vehicle (aircraft, train vehicle, etc)/ condition of road and condition of vehicle (in case of automobiles).
In sea traffic, the noise; pollution is limited to the harbour because of loading and unloading activities of containers. Noise pollution from industries is also a serious problem but its intensity varies because of some factors such as type of industry, types of machines and tools, etc.
The intensity of noise pollution decreases as distance from source of pollution (Industrial areas, arteries of transportation, airport, etc) increases. Thus, noise pollution is location specific.
Effects of Noise Pollution
Noise pollution is a major cause of anxiety, tension and some other mental problems and disorders among people in many metropolitan and big cities in India.
Urban Waste Disposal
Overcrowding, congestion, increasing population, improper infrastructure and facilities to support this population, lack of sanitation, foul air, etc are some features of urban areas. Mismanagement of solid wastes and environmental pollution caused by them has now become a major problem.Solid wastes are a variety of old and used articles,for e.g. stained small pieces of metals, broken glass wares, plastic containers, polythene bags,ashes, floppies, CDs, etc dumped at different places.
These discarded materials are also known as refuses, garbage and rubbish,etc and are disposed off from two sources i.e. household or domestic establishments and industrial or commercial establishments. Public lands or private  contractor’s sites are used to disposed off household or domestic wastes. Low lying public grounds (landfill areas) are used to disposed off industrial solid wastes by public (municipal) facilities. Industries, thermal power houses and building constructions and demolitions are contributing with more turn out of ashes and debris in solid wastes.
Disposal of industrial wastes has increased because of the concentration of industrial units in and around urban centres. Urban waste is a bigger problem in small towns and cities than metropolitan cities in the country. About 90% of solid waste is collected and disposed off successfully in Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore and other metropolitan cities. About 30-50% solid wastes in other towns and cities in country is not collected and disposed off properly. It is a major problem because it accumulates on streets, in open spaces between houses and in wastelands and can cause various health problems.
Impacts of Improper Management of Solid wastes
Improper management of solid wastes has following impacts:

1. Solid wastes are threat to human health and can cause various diseases. It creates foul smell and it harbours flies and rodents that can cause typhoid, diphtheria, diarrhoea, malaria, cholera and other diseases.
2. Solid waste can create inconvenience rapidly if they are not properly handled. Wind and rain water can splitted it and cause a discomfort to people.
3. Industrial solid waste can cause water pollution by dumping it into water bodies. Drains carrying untreated sewage also result into various health problems.
4. Untreated waste release various poisonous biogases such as methane in air by slow fermentation process. These wastes are resources as energy can be generated from them! By compositing these wastes, problem of energy could be solved as well as its management in urban areas.

Rural-Urban Migration
Movement of people from rural area to urban area are caused by various factors such as high demand for labour in urban areas, low job opportunities in rural areas and disparities in terms of development in rural and urban areas. Smaller and medium cities provide low opportunities which force people to bypass these small cities and directly come to the mega cities for their livelihood.
Mostly daily wage workers like, welders; carpenter, etc move to another cities for work, periodically and provide remittances to their families for daily consumption, health care, schooling of children, etc. This has improved their early abject situation into a better one. Simultaneously, due to temporary and transferable job situation, these labourers and their families hear the pain of separation of their near and dear ones.
Sometimes these workers also face difficulty in assimilation to the new culture and environment. Due to these menial jobs at low wages in informal sector in urban areas, the spouses are left behind in
rural areas to look after children and elderly people. Thus, the rural-urban migration stream is dominated by the males.
Trend of Urbanisation in the World
Currently, about 54% of the world’s 7 billion (2011) population lives in urban areas of world . This proportion of urban population will increase in future. It is estimated that between 2025 to 2030, this percentage would be grown with 1.44% per year. This high urban population will pressurise governments to optimise infrastructure facilities in urban areas for giving a standard quality of life.
It is estimated that by 2050, about two-thirds of the world’s population will live in urban areas. It would create a high pressure on existing infrastructure and sanitation, health, crime problems and urban poverty.
There are various factors responsible for growth of urban population:

1. When high birth rate and low morality rate increase.
2. Net in-migration or movement of people from other areas.
3. Reclassification of urban areas to encompass formerly rural settlements.

In India there is a estimation that about 60% India’s urban population has increased after 1961. About 29% of this growth has been caused by rural-urban migration.
Problems of Slums

• Settlement geography differentiate the two concepts namely urban or urban centres and rural. They are also defined differently in different countries.
• These two are differentiated by their functions but sometimes interdependent on each other. These two concepts are also divided in terms of their separate cultural, economic and technological aspects.
• According to 2001 census, about 72% of India’s population is rural (according to 2011, rural population is 68.84%). Most of these rural areas are still in poor conditions and perform primary activities.
• According to Mahatama Gandhi, villages are ideal republics. These work as supplement to the core urban centre forming its hinterland.
• Urban areas are more developed in terms of the socio-economic, politico-cultural, etc than other areas.
• Urban areas have farm house, high income of people and their localities, wide roads, street lights, water and sanitation facilities, lawns, well developed green belts, parks, playgrounds and other facilities, provisions for individual security and right of privacy.
• Apart from these attractions urban areas also have slums, jhuggi jhopari’ clusters and colonies of shanty-structures.
• These are environmentally incompatible and degraded areas of the cities. These are occupied by the migrants who were forced to migrate from rural areas to urban areas for employment and livelihood. But because of high rent and high costs of land, they could not afford proper housing and start to live in these areas.

Characteristics of Slums
Slums have following characteristics:

1. Slums are least choice residential areas that have broken down house, bad hygienic conditions, poor ventilation and does not have basic facilities like drinking water, light and toilet facilities, etc.
2. Slums are overcrowded with people and have many narrow street patterns prone to serious hazards from fire.
3. Most of the slum dwellers works for low wages, high risk-prone and unorganised sectors of the urban economy.
4. They face various health related problems such as malnutrition, illness and prone to various diseases. They are not able to send their children school to provide them education because of low level of income.
5. Dwellers are vulnerable to drug abuse, alcoholism, crime, vandalism, escapism, apathy and social exclusion because of poverty.

Land Degradation
The limited availability and deterioration of quality of land, both are responsible to exert pressure on agricultural land.Soil erosion, water logging, salinisation and alkalinisation of land lead to land degradation which declines productivity of land. In simple words, temporary or permanent decline in productive capacity of the land is known as land degradation. All degraded land may not be considered as wasteland. But if process of degradation is not checked, then a degraded land may be converted into wasteland. Natural and man-made processes, both degrade the quality of land.
Classification of Wastelands

• National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA) It is an organisation responsible for classification of wastelands in India. It classifies wastelands by using remote sensing techniques on the basis of the processes that have created them.
• Wasteland Caused by Natural Agents Gullied/ ravinous land, desertic or coastal sand, barren rocky areas, steep sloping land, glacial areas, etc are types of wastelands caused by the natural agents. These are considered as wastelands caused by natural agents.
• Wasteland Caused by Natural as well as Human Factors Water logged and marshy areas, land affected by salinity and alkalinity and land with and without scrubs which are degraded by the natural as well as human factors are included in this category.
• Wastelands Caused by Man-made Processes Shifting cultivation area, degraded land under plantation crops, degraded forests, degraded pastures and mining and industrial wastelands are some types of wastelands that are degraded because of human action.

Class 12 Geography – India: People and Economy Quick Revision notes Chapter 21 International Trade

Changing Patterns of the Composition of India’s Exports

• During recent years, a change has been recorded in the composition of commodities in India’s international trade. There is a decline in the share of agriculture and allied products whereas shares of petroleum and crude products and other commodities have increased. The share of petroleum products has increased mainly because of the rise in petroleum prices and increase in the petroleum refining capacity of India.
• A huge decline is registered in the export of traditional items like, coffee, spices, tea, pulses, etc due to the tough international competition. Though an increase has been registered in floricultural products, fresh fruits, marine products and sugar, etc. But manufacturing sector alone accounted for 68% of India’s total value of export in 2010-11.
• The major competitors of India are China and other East Asian countries. Apart from this, the gems and jewellery are other commodities that have larger share in India’s international trade.

Changing Patterns of the Composition of India’s Import

• During 1950s and 1960s, India faced serious food shortage, thus the country had to import food grain, capital goods, machinery and equipments at large scale.
• The balance of payment was adverse as imports were more than export inspite of all the efforts of imports substitution.
• After 1970s, the success of green revolution discontinued the food grain import. But the energy crises of 1973 replaced the import of food grains by fertilizers and petroleum as the prices of petroleum had been raised.
• Besides, other imported goods were machine and equipment, special steel, edible oil and chemicals.
•  According to economic Survey 2011-12, petroleum products have registered a rapid increase in import goods.
• It is a raw material for petrochemical industries and also used as fuel. The increase signifies the tempo of rising industrialisation and improvement in standard of living.
• Periodic price rise of petroleum in the international market may be another reason for this increase.
• Import of capital goods like non-electrical machinery, transport equipment, manufactures of metals and machine tools registered a steady increase. This increase could be because of increasing demand in the export oriented industrial and domestic sectors.
• Import of food and allied products registered a decrease because of a sudden decline in imports of edible oils.
• Pearls and semi-precious stones, gold and silver, metalliferrous ores and metal scrap, non-ferrous metals, electronic goods, etc are other important items of India’s import.

Direction of Trade

• India is a trading partner with most of the countries and major trading blocks of the world.
• India has goal to double its share in international trade within the next 5 years. To achieve this objective, India has started to adopt suitable measures which includes import liberalisation, reduction in import duties, de-licensing and change from process to product patents.
• India has created an example in terms of percentage of Asia and ASEAN (Association of South-east Asian Nations) in total trade of world has increased. It was 33.3% in 2000-01 and it increased to 57.3% in the 2011-12 . In contrast to this, the share of Europe and America decreased from 42.5% to 30.8%. This has helped India to survive during the global crisis in Europe and America.
• With the development of India’s trade direction, India’s trading share with different countries also changed. During 2003 -04, USA was India’s largest trading partner. Now UAE has displaced USA as it was India’s largest trading partner during 2010-11.
• After UAE, China is the second largest trading partner with India continuing this position from 2008-09 to 2010-11. USA has sliped to third position.
• India’s foreign trade is mainly carried through oceanic and air routes. Foreign trade via land route is only limited to the neighbouring countries such as Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Sea ports as Gateways of International Trade

• India has a long history of international trade via sea ports as it has long coastline and is opened to sea from three sides. Water provides smooth surface and cheap transport without any hinderance.
• India has developed many ports on its coast. These ports are named with suffix ‘pattan’ meaning port. It is interesting to know that India has more sea ports on West coast than its East coast.
• After coming of the European traders and colonisation of the country by the British, the Indian ports have emerged as gateways of international trade.
• There are some parts which have very vast area of influence and some have limited area of influence.

Major and Minor ports

• At present, India has 12 major and 185 minor or intermediate ports. For major ports, central Government is responsible for deciding the policies and regulate their functions and for minor ports, State Government is responsible for the same functions stated above.
• A larger port of total traffic is handled by major ports, e.g. about 71% of the India’s oceanic traffic was handled by the the 12 major ports during 2008-09.
• The Britishers used these ports to export natural resources of India; particularly from their hinterland but this trend was discontinued after 1947.
• The India lost its two very important ports i.e. Karachi port to Pakistan and Chittagong port to Bangladesh (erstwhile East-Pakistan). But India recovered successfully from this loss by opening many new ports, for instance, Kandla in the West and the Diamond harbour near Kolkata on river Hugli in the East.
• Today, large volumes of domestic and international trade are handled by these Indian ports. Most of the ports are equipped with modem infrastructure.
• Previously, it was expected that government agencies are responsible for the development and modernisation of Indian ports. But it was considered that there is a need to increase the functions and bring these ports at par with the international ports. Thus, private entrepreneurs have been invited for the modernisation of ports in the country.
• The cargo handling capacity of Indian ports increased from 20 million tonnes in 1951 to more than 600tnillion tonnes at present.

Important Ports
Some of the Indian ports along with their hinterlands are as follows:
Kandla Port

• This port is situated at the head of Gulf of Kuchchh. The main objectives of this major port are to serve the needs of Western and North-Western ports of the country and also to reduce the pressure at Mumbai port.
• This port is mainly designed to receive large quantities of petroleum and petroleum products and fertilizers.
• To reduce the pressure at Kandla port, an offshore terminal named Vadinar has also been developed.
• Due to confusion in demarcation of the boundary, hinterland of one port may overlap with that of the other.

Mumbai Port

• This is a natural harbour and the biggest port of India.
• The location of this port is closer to the general routes from the countries of Middle East, Mediterranean Countries, North Africa, North America and Europe, where the major share of country’s overseas trade is carried out.
• This port is extended over a large area with the length of 20 km and width of 6-10 km with 54 berths and has the country’s largest oil terminal.
• The main hinterlands of this port are Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and some parts of Rajasthan.

Jawaharlal Nehru Port

• This satellite port is located at Nhava Sheva. It was developed to relieve the pressure at the Mumbai port.
• It is the largest container port in India.

Marmagao Port

• It is located at the entrance of the Zuari estuary which is a natural harbour in Goa. It gained significance after its remodelling in 1961 to handle iron-ore exports to Japan.
• Construction of Konkan railway extended its hinterland, e.g. Karnataka, Goa, Southern Maharashtra constitute its hinterland.

New Mongalore Port

• It is mainly used to export iron-ore and iron concentrates, and other commodities like fertilizers, petroleum products, edible oils, coffee, tea, wood pulp, yam, granite stone, molasses, etc.
• It is located in Karnataka which is its major hinterland.

Kochchi Port

• This port is popularly known as ‘Queen of the Arabian sea’.
• It is a natural harbour and situated at the head of Vembanad Koyal.
• Kochchi port is located close to the Suez-Colombo route.
• It serves the needs of Kerala, Southem-Kamataka, and South-Western Tamil Nadu.

Kolkata Port

• It is located on the Hugli river 128 km inland from the Bay of Bengal. This port was developed by the British as it was once the capital of British India.
• The port has lost its significance considerably on account of the diversion of exports to the other ports such as Vishakhapatnam, Paradwip and satellite port, Haldia.
• It is also facing the problem of silt accumulation in the Hugli river, which hinders the link to the sea.
• Its hinterland covers Uttar Pradesh, Bihar,
  Jharkhand, West Bengal, Sikkim and the North-Eastern states.
• It also provides port facilities to our neighbouring land-locked countries such as Nepal and Bhutan.

Haldia Port

• It is located 105 km downstream from Kolkata.
• It has been constructed to reduce the congestion at Kolkata port.
• It handles bulk cargo like iron-ore, coal, petroleum, petroleum products and fertilizers, jute, jute products, cotton, and cotton yarn, etc.

Paradwip Port

• The port is located in the Mahanadi delta and it is about 100 km far from Cuttack.
• It has advantage of having the deepest harbour, thus it is best suited to handle very large vessels.
• It mainly handles large scale export of iron-ore.
• Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand constitute its hinterland.

Vishakhapatnam Port

• It is a land locked harbour situated in Andhra Pradesh.
• It is connected to the sea by a channel which is cut through solid rock and sand.
• To handle various commodities like iron-ore, petroleum and general cargo an outer harbour has been developed.
• Andhra Pradesh is the main hinterland for this port.

Chennai Port

• The artificial harbour of Chennai is one of the oldest ports on the eastern coast.
  It was built in 1859.
• Because of the shallow water near the coast, it is not suitable for large ships.
• Tamil Nadu and Puducherry constitute its hinterland.

Ennore Port

• This newly developed port, is situated 25 km north of Chennai.
• It was developed to minimise the pressure at Chennai port.

Tuticorin Port

• It is another port which was developed to relieve the pressure of Chennai port.
• This port handles a number of commodities like coal, salt, food grains, edible oils, sugar, chemicals and petroleum products.

Airports
Air transport plays a significant role in the international trade of a nation.
The advantages are follows:

1. Air transport is very useful for handling high value or perishable goods over long distance.
2. It takes less time to transport cargo.

The disadvantages are as follows:

1. Air transportation is very costly.
2. It is not suitable for the transportation of heavy and bulky commodities.

Thus, having these disadvantages air transport is not/less preferred for international trade as compared to oceanic routes. At present, there are 12 international airports. They are; Ahmedabad, Amritsar, Bengalura, Chennai, Delhi, Goa, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Kochchi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Thiruvananthapuram. Apart from these, there are 112 domestic airports in India.

Class 12 Geography – India: People and Economy Quick Revision notes Chapter 20 Transport And Communication

Means of Transport
There are various ways means of transportation by which human beings move goods, commodities, ideas etc from one place to another place. Major means of transportation are as follows:
Land Transport
Transportation of people and goods by road transport is not new in India. Since ancient times, pathways and unmetalled roads have been in use for this purpose. With the technological advancement, there are now metalled roads, railways, cableways and pipelines for movement of large volume of goods and passengers.
Road Transport
India has its count in countries which is having largest road networks worldwide. India has a total road length of 42.3 lakhs km that places it among the countries which has largest road network.
Road transport carries about 85% of passenger and 70% of freight traffic every year. Road transport is preferable for short distance travel. The first attempt to improve and modernise road network was made in 1943 with ‘Nagpur Plan.’ But due to lack of coordination among princely states and British India, it remained unimplemented.
The second attempt was made after independence with twenty year road plan (1961) to improve the conditions of roads in India but still roads continue to concentrate in and around urban centres and rural and remote areas remained less connected by road.
For the purpose of construction and maintenance, roads are classified as National Highways (NH), State Highways (SH), Major District Roads and Rural Roads:
National Highways

• NH referred to roads which are constructed and maintained by central government.
• National Highways are meant for inter-state transport and movement of defence men and material in strategic areas.
• In 2008-09, total length of National Highways was 70934 km which was 19700 km in 1951.
• These highways connect the state capitals, major cities, important ports, railways junctions, etc and carry’ about 40% of the road traffic despite they constitute only 1.67% of total road length.
• The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI – 1^95) is an autonomous body, under the Ministry of Surface Transport which is entrusted with the responsibility of development, maintenance, operation and for the improvement of the quality of national Highways.

National Highways Development Projects

• Golden Quadrilateral It is 5846 km long 4/6 lane, high density corridor. It was meant to connect India’s four big metro cities of Delhi-Mumbai- Chennai-Kolkata. It will deduct the time-distance and cost of movement among the mega cities of India. Its construction help ip reducing the time distance and cost of movement among mega cities considerably.
• North-South and East-West corridors The North-South corridor is a 4076 km long highway which is meant to connect Srinagar in Jammu and Kashmir with Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu including Kochchi-Salem Spur. The East-West corridor is 3640 km long road which aims to connect Silchar in Assam with the port town of Porbandar in Gujarat.

State Highways
These roads are connected to the National Highways and join the state capitals with district headquarters and other important towns. Their share in the total road length is about 4%. State governments are responsible to construct and maintain these highways.
District Roads
These roads connect district headquarters and other important nodes in the district. They account for 60.83% of the total road length of the country.
Rural Roads
These roads provide links in the rural areas. About 33.86% of the total road length in India are categorised as rural roads.
Other Roads
These include Border Roads and International highways:

Border Roads These are strategically important roads along the Northern and North-Eastern boundary of the country. Border Road Organisation (BRO) is responsible for construction and maintenance of these roads. It was established in May 1960 with the aim to accelerate economic development and strengthening defence preparedness through rapid and coordinated improvement of strategically important border roads.
BRO’s major achievement is construction of roads in high altitude mountainous terrain joining Chandigarh with Manali (Himachal Pradesh) and Leh (Ladakh). This road is located at the average height of 4270 meters above mean sea level.
The total length of border roads was 40450 km in 2005 which was constructed by BRO. Besides the construction and maintenance of roads in strategically sensitive areas. The BRO also undertakes snow clearance in high altitude area.
International Highways They are constructed with the aim to promote harmonious relationship with neighbouring countries and provide an effective connection with India.
Density of Roads

• The distribution of roads is not uniform in the country. Density of roads (length of roads per 100 sq km of area) is the method to compare the network of roads of one area to another area. The national average road density is 125.02 km (2008).
• The density of roads is influenced by nature of terrains, and level of economic development. As most of the Northern states and major Southern states have high density of roads (e.g. Uttar Pradesh has highest road density of 532.27 km), whereas Himalayan region, North-Eastern region, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan have low density of roads (e.g. Jammu and Kashmir has lowest road density of 10.04 km).
• Quality of roads, besides density, is also better in plains as compared to high altitude areas, rainy and forested regions.

Rail Transport

• India has one of the longest railway network in the world. On one hand, it facilitates the movement of freight and passengers and on the other hand, it contributes to the growth of economy. Mahatama Gandhi said, the Indian railways, “brought people of diverse cultures together to contribute to India’s freedom struggle”
• In 1853, the first Indian railway was started from Bombay to Thane covering a distance of 34 km.
• Being the largest Government undertaking in India, Indian Railways network is 64460 km long (31th March, 2011).
• To reduce the pressure of this large size railway from a centralised railway management system, Indian Railway system has been divided into seventeen zones.

These are as follows:
Railway Zone Headquarters

1.	Central	Mumbai CST
2.	Eastern	Kolkata
3.	East Central	Hojipur
4.	East Coast	Bhubaneswar
5.	Northern	New Delhi
6.	North-Central	Allahabad
7.	North-Eastern	Gorakhpur
8.	North East Frontier	Maligaon (Guwahati)
9.	North-Western	Jaipur
10.	Southern	Chennai
11.	South Central	Secunderabad
12.	South-Eastern	Kolkata
13.	South East Central	Bilaspur
14.	South-Western	Hubli
15.	Western	Mumbai (Church Gate)
16.	West Central	Jabalpur
17.	Metro	Kolkata

Gauges in Indian Railways
Indian Railways has been divided into three
categories. On the basis of the width of the track of Indian railways as follows:

• Broad Gauge In broad gauge, the distance between rails is 1.676 metre. The total length of broad gauge lines is 55188 km in 2011.
• Metre Gauge In metre gauge, the distance between the rails is 1 metre. The total length of metre gauge is 6809 km in 2011.
• Narrow Gauge In narrow gauge, the distance between the rails is 0.762 metres or 0.610 metres. The total length of narrow gauge line is 2463 km in 2011. This category of railway lines is mostly found in the hilly areas.

Indian Railways has taken major steps to improve the performance of this means of transport like:

1. To convert the metre and narrow gauges to broad gauge.
2. Replacement of steam engine by diesel and electric engines which may help in keeping the environment clean.
3. Introduction of metro rail in Kolkata and Delhi, etc.

Development of railways in India was started by the Britishers and after the independence, scenario has been changed by extending railway routes to other areas. Konkan railways along the western coast which provide a direct line between Mumbai and Mangalore was a significant development in this regard.
Konkan Railway is one of the important achievements of Indian Railways which was constructed in 1998. It is a 760 km long rail route which connects Roha in Maharashtra to Mangalore in Karnataka. It is considered an engineering marvel. Railway is still the most important means of transport for the masses. In the hill states, North-Eastern states, central part of India and Rajasthan, railway network is relatively less dense.
Water Transport
Water transport is the cheapest means of transport for carrying heavy and bulky material as well as passenger services. It is a fuel efficient and eco-friendly mode of transport. The water transport is of two types:

1. Inland Waterways
2. Oceanic Waterways

Inland Waterways
Before the introduction of railways, inland waterways was the chief mode of transport. But, now it is losing its significance due to:

1. Tough competition from road and railway transport.
2. Diversion of river water for irrigation purposes made them non-navigable in large parts of their courses.

India has 14500 km of navigable waterways which accounts for about 1% of country’s transportation.
It includes rivers, canals backwater, creeks etc. At present 3700 km of major rivers are navigable by mechanised flat bottom vessels, but out of it only 2000 are actually used. Similiarly, out of 4800 km of the network of navigable canal, only 900 km is navigable by mechanised vessels.
The Inland Waterways Authority which was setup in 1986 is responsible for the development, maintenance and regulation of national waterways in the country. Currently, there are three inland waterways which are considered as national waterways by the authority. Description of these waterways are as follows:
National Waterways of India

Oceanic RoutesTen other inland waterways have been identified by inland waterways authority. The backwaters (Kadal) of Kerala has special significance which not only provides transport but also attract tourists here. The famous Nehru Trophy Boat Race (Vallamkali) is also held in the backwaters.

• These play an important role in the transport sector of India’s economy.
• India’s vast coastline of about 7,517 km (including islands) easily facilitates this type of transport. There are twelve major and 185 minor ports which provide infrastructural support to these routes.
• About 95% of India’s foreign trade by volume and 70% by value moves through ocean routes.
• These routes give international trade service as well as provide transportation between the islands and the rest of the country.

Air Transportation
Air transport facilitates the fastest movement of goods and passengers from one place to another place. It is good for long distances and areas which have uneven terrain and climatic conditions. Air transport in India was started in 1911 with a short distance, (10 km) airmail operation from Allahabad to Nairn.
The Airport Authority of India is responsible for providing safe, efficient air traffic and aeronautical communication services in the Indian Air space. Now it manages 126 airports including 11 international, 86 domestic and 29 civil enclaves at defence air fields. There are two corporations, Air India and Indian Airlines which manage air transport in India. Both corporations were nationalised in 1953. Now many private companies have also started passenger services.
Air India
It is a corporation of India which provides International Air Service for both passengers and cargo traffic. It connects all the continents of the world through its services.
Indian Airlines
Indian Airlines, the largest state owned domestic carrier changed its names to ‘Indian by dropping’ word ‘Airlines’ in 8th December, 2005. The new brand name ‘Indian’ now appears on both sides of the fuselage. The logo depicting IA which was used to be display on orange tail is now replaced by a new logo. New logo is apartly visible blue wheel and is inspired by the Sun Temple at Konark (Odisha), symbolising timeless motion, convergence and divergence. It also represents strength as well as trust that has stood the test of time.
History of Indian Airlines

• 1911-Air transport in India was launched between Allahabad and Naini.
• 947-Air transport was provided by four major companies namely Indian National Airways, Tata Sons Limited, Air Services of India and Deccan Airways.
• 1951-Four more companies joined the services i.e. Bharat Airways, Himalayan Aviation Limited, Airways India and Kalinga Airlines.
• 1953-Air transport was nationalised and two corporations, Air India international and Indian Airlines were formed. Now, Indian Airlines is known as Indian.
• Pawan Hans is the major organisation in India which provides helicopter services in hilly areas, for tourism in North-Eastern sector and mainly to petroleum sector and tourism.

Oil And Gas Pipelines
Pipelines are convenient and best means of transporting liquids and gases over long distances. These can also transport solids after converting them into slurry. Oil India Limited (OIL) is responsible for exploration, production and transportation of crude oil and natural gas.
Its one of the major achievement is the construction of Asia’s first cross country pipeline. This pipeline covers a distance of 1157 km from Naharkatiya oil field in Assam to Barauni refinery in Bihar. In 1966, this pipeline was further extended to Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh.
In Western region of India, OIL also constructed extensive network of pipelines – Ankleshwar-Koyali, Mumbai High-Koyal and Hazira-Vijaipur-Jagdishpur (HVJ) pipelines. Recently, a pipeline is also constructed from Salaya (Gujarat) to Mathura (Uttar Pradesh). It is 1256 km long pipeline which transport crude oil from Gujarat to Punjab (Jalandhar) via Mathura. Construction of a 660 km long pipeline from Numaligarh to Siliguri is also in progress.
Communication Networks
A number of communication cum-transportation means have been used since human history, for e.g. messages ware delivered by beating drum or hollow tree trunks, giving indication through smoke or fire or with the help of fast runners. Development in the field of science and technology brought many revolutionary inventions in means of communication like post office, telegraph, printing press, telephone, satellite, etc.
On the basis of scale and quality, the mode of communication can be divided into following categories:
Personal Communication System

• The most advanced and best means among all personal communication system is internet which is widely used in urban cities.
• E-mail is the main source through which a user can directly connect with others and can also get access to the world of knowledge and information.
• Use of internet is increasing for e-commerce and carrying out money transactions.
• The internet is like a huge control warehouse of data, with detailed information on various items.
• It is a cheaper mode of communication which provides an efficient access to information at a comparatively low cost.
• Letters, telephone, fax are also used for personal communication.

Mass Communication System Radio

• Radio broadcasting was started in 1923 by Radio Club of Bombay. Within short time, it gained immense popularity and became a part of every househod in India.
• After seeing its popularity, the government of India, in 1930 took the control of this mode of communication under Indian Broadcasting System.
• It was changed to All India Radio in 1936 and to Akashwani in 1957.
• It broadcasts various programmes related to information, education, entertainment and special news bulletins on special session of parliament and state legislature.

Television (TV)

• Television (TV) broadcasting has emerged as the most effective audio-visual medium for disseminating information and educating masses.
• First television broadcasting was started in National Capital in 1959. Till 1972, it was the only urban place where TV services were available.
• After 1972, several other centres became operational. In 1976, TV broadcasting services were separated by All India Radio and got a separate identity as Doordarshan (DD).
• Its revolutionary development began after the launch of INSAT-IA (National Television -D1) when Common National Programmes (CNP) were started for the entire network and its services were extended to the backward and remote rural areas.

Satellite Communication
Satellite is an advanced mode of communication. They also regulate the use of other means of communication. From economic and strategic point of view, use of satellite is very vital for the country as these give continuous and synoptic view larger area. Various operations can be done through satellite images, e.g. weather forcast, monitoring of natural calamities, surveillance of border areas, etc.
There are two satellite system in India on the basis of configuration and purposes:
Indian National Satellite System (INSAT)
This was established in 1983. It is a multi-purpose satellite system for telecommunication, meteorological observatioon and for various other data and programmes.
Indian Remote Sensing Satellite System (IRS)

• The IRS satellite system started in India with the launch of IRS-IA in March 1988 from Vaikanour in Russia.
• India has also developed her indigenous launching vehicle PSLV (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle).
• These remote sensing satellites collect data in several spectral band and transmit them to ground stations which is very useful in the management of natural resources and other various purposes.
• The National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA) at Hyderabad is responsible for facilitating for acquisition of data and its processing.