UPHESC Assistant Professor Psychology 2025 PYQs

Concept: Eudaimonic well-being (Aristotle; Ryan & Deci; Ryff) is living in line with one's true self – realising one's potential.

1. Hedonic = pleasure, positive affect, life satisfaction (subjective well-being).
2. Eudaimonic = 'daimon' (true self) → self-realisation, meaning, growth.
3. Glory, pride or mere achievement are not its core.

Short trick: Hedonic – Happy feelings; Eudaimonic – rEalising the self.

Concept: EI is the ability to perceive, understand, use and regulate emotions in oneself and others.

1. Goleman's domains: self-awareness, self-regulation (managing emotions), self-motivation, empathy (recognising others' emotions), handling relationships.
2. A, B and D map directly onto these domains.
3. Merely 'feeling complex emotional ideas' is not an EI ability – EI is about recognising, understanding and managing emotions.

Short trick: EI = Know – Manage – Motivate – Empathise – Relate.

Concept: Hans Selye (1936/1956) described the body's non-specific response to any stressor as the General Adaptation Syndrome.

1. Stage 1 – Alarm reaction (sympathetic/adrenal mobilisation).
2. Stage 2 – Resistance (coping, high arousal sustained).
3. Stage 3 – Exhaustion (resources depleted → disease of adaptation).
4. Lazarus gave the cognitive appraisal (transactional) model; Solomon the opponent-process theory.

Short trick: Selye's GAS = A-R-E: Alarm, Resistance, Exhaustion.

Concept: Vroom's VIE theory has three separate beliefs: Expectancy (effort → performance), Instrumentality (performance → reward) and Valence (value of reward).

1. (A) describes Expectancy – true.
2. (R) describes Instrumentality – also true.
3. They are two independent links of the model; the belief that performance will be rewarded does not explain why effort is believed to raise performance.

Short trick: E: effort→performance; I: performance→reward; V: value of reward. Motivation = E × I × V.

Concept: Distributive bargaining assumes a fixed amount of resources (a 'fixed pie') to be divided – a win–lose situation.

1. One party's gain is the other's loss (zero-sum).
2. Integrative/collaborative bargaining tries to 'expand the pie' for win–win outcomes.
3. Third-party negotiation involves mediators, arbitrators, conciliators.

Short trick: Fixed pie → divide it → Distributive.

Concept: PTSD follows exposure to a traumatic event and is marked by re-experiencing, avoidance, negative mood/cognition and hyperarousal.

1. Intrusive memories, flashbacks and nightmares = re-experiencing.
2. Avoiding reminders of the trauma = avoidance cluster.
3. Phobia – irrational fear of an object/situation without a trauma memory; panic disorder – unexpected panic attacks.

Short trick: Trauma + flashbacks/nightmares + avoidance = PTSD.

Concept: The five-stage creative process (Wallas extended by Csikszentmihalyi): Preparation → Incubation → Insight → Evaluation → Elaboration.

1. Preparation – immersing in the problem.
2. Incubation – ideas churn below awareness.
3. Insight – the 'Aha!' moment (Wallas: illumination).
4. Evaluation – judging whether the idea is worth pursuing; Elaboration – working it out in detail.

Short trick: P-I-I-E-E: Prepare, Incubate, Insight, Evaluate, Elaborate.

Concept: Heuristics are mental shortcuts or rules of thumb that give quick, usually adequate, but not guaranteed solutions (Tversky & Kahneman).

1. Examples: availability, representativeness, anchoring-and-adjustment.
2. Framing, hindsight and overconfidence are specific biases, often produced by heuristics.
3. Algorithms, in contrast, guarantee a solution step by step.

Short trick: Rule of thumb = Heuristic; step-by-step guarantee = Algorithm.

Concept: A syllogism draws a necessary conclusion from two premises – the classic form of deductive reasoning (general → particular).

1. Example: All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal.
2. Inductive reasoning goes from particular observations to a probable general rule.
3. 'Declarative' refers to a type of memory/knowledge, not reasoning.

Short trick: Syllogism → Deduction (Aristotle's logic).

Concept: Gestalt psychologists held that perceptual organisation is innate – the brain spontaneously organises sensations into wholes.

1. Laws of proximity, similarity, closure, continuity, Prägnanz work without learning.
2. They opposed the empiricist (Helmholtz) view that organisation is learned.
3. The 'partly innate, partly learned' view is a later interactionist position, not Gestalt.

Short trick: Gestalt = nativist: organisation comes naturally.

Concept: Prototype models (Rosch; Posner & Keele) say we compare a stimulus with an idealised, abstract best example of the category.

1. Template matching – compares with an exact stored copy; fails with variations.
2. Distinctive feature models (Gibson, Selfridge's Pandemonium) – detect component features.
3. Computational approach (Marr) – stages of visual computation.

Short trick: Ideal / best example = Prototype.

Concept: Apparent motion is perception of movement when no actual movement of the object occurs.

1. Stroboscopic/phi movement – successive still images seen as motion (films).
2. Induced motion – a stationary object seems to move because its frame moves (moon behind clouds).
3. Autokinetic effect – a still light in a dark room seems to wander.
4. Physical movement is real motion, not apparent.

Short trick: Apparent = SIA (Stroboscopic, Induced, Autokinetic); physical = real.

Concept: Retrieval-induced forgetting (Anderson, Bjork & Bjork, 1994): practising retrieval of some items impairs later recall of related, unpractised items.

1. Retrieving target items strengthens them.
2. Competing related items are actively inhibited during retrieval.
3. That inhibition is exactly why retrieval itself causes forgetting – R explains A.

Short trick: Recall one, suppress its rivals → RIF.

Concept: Stimulus generalisation: stimuli similar to the CS also evoke the CR; the more similar, the stronger (generalisation gradient).

1. Little Albert feared the white rat and then other white furry objects.
2. Higher-order conditioning – a well-learned CS acts as a US for a new neutral stimulus.
3. Pseudo-conditioning – response to a new stimulus due merely to sensitisation by the US, without pairing.

Short trick: Similar stimulus → same response = generalisation; different response = discrimination.

Concept: Retroactive interference: new learning works backwards and disrupts recall of older learning.

1. Proactive interference – old learning disrupts recall of new learning.
2. Retrograde amnesia is loss of memories before brain injury – a clinical condition.
3. Primacy effect – better recall of the first items in a list.

Short trick: RETRO = new blocks old (backward); PRO = old blocks new (forward).

Concept: Procedural memory (skills, habits) is a form of implicit, non-declarative memory expressed without conscious recollection.

1. Declarative (explicit) memory = episodic + semantic; consciously recalled ('knowing that').
2. Non-declarative (implicit) memory = procedural skills, priming, classical conditioning ('knowing how').
3. Riding a cycle or typing is done without consciously retrieving the steps.

Short trick: Declare = say it consciously; Procedure = just do it.

Concept: When reinforcement follows a fixed number of responses, it is a fixed-ratio schedule – here FR-20.

1. Ratio = number of responses; interval = time elapsed.
2. Fixed = same each time; variable = changes around an average.
3. Every 20th press rewarded → fixed + ratio → FR-20 (piece-work pay).

Short trick: Count of responses fixed → FR; time fixed → FI.

Concept: Retroactive inhibition – later learning impairs retention of earlier learning – is a backward form of negative transfer.

1. (A) True: new learning hampers old learning, i.e., a negative effect of one learning on another.
2. (R) True: Ebbinghaus's curve shows forgetting increasing with time.
3. But (R) speaks of decay over time, while (A) is due to interference by new learning – so R does not explain A.

Short trick: Interference ≠ decay: both true, no causal link.

Concept: Bandura's four processes of modelling: Attention → Retention → (Motor) Reproduction → Motivation.

1. Attention – notice the model's behaviour.
2. Retention – store it as images/verbal codes.
3. Reproduction – have the ability to perform it.
4. Motivation – vicarious/expected reinforcement decides whether it is performed.

Short trick: ARRM: Attention, Retention, Reproduction, Motivation.

Concept: The corpus callosum is the largest commissure – about 200 million axons linking the left and right cerebral hemispheres.

1. Cutting it (split-brain surgery, Sperry & Gazzaniga) isolates the two hemispheres.
2. Basal ganglia – movement control; limbic system – emotion and memory.
3. Cerebral cortex – outer grey matter layer.

Short trick: Callosum = 'callous/tough body' bridge between hemispheres.