Psychology

In the structuralism period, associated with Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener, psychology was defined as the scientific study of the structure of conscious experience. Structuralists broke the mind into its basic elements, such as sensations, images and feelings, and studied them through trained introspection in the laboratory.

Growth is a quantitative, physical change in size, height, weight and body parts. It stops at maturity. Development is a broader, qualitative and continuous change across the whole life span. It covers physical, cognitive, emotional and social change, and it brings improved functioning and maturity.

Perceptual constancies are the tendency to perceive objects as stable and unchanging in size, shape, brightness and colour, even though the sensory image changes with distance, angle or lighting. Examples are size constancy (a car looks the same size as it recedes), shape constancy (a door looks rectangular when ajar) and brightness or colour constancy.

In Milgram's experiment (1963), participants were told to give increasing electric shocks to a "learner" whenever he made errors. About 65 percent went all the way to the maximum 450 volts, and every participant went to at least 300 volts, even when the learner protested. It showed that ordinary people obey legitimate authority even when it conflicts with their conscience. Obedience was higher when the authority was close and the victim was distant, and lower when others refused.

The essential features of learning are:

• It is a change in behaviour or potential behaviour.
• The change is relatively permanent, not temporary (not caused by fatigue or drugs).
• It results from experience, practice or training, not from maturation alone.
• It is a continuous, lifelong process.
• It is goal-directed and is influenced by motivation.
• It cannot be observed directly but is inferred from performance.

The motivational cycle is the sequence by which a need leads to behaviour and then to satisfaction:

1. A need arises from a deficiency, creating a drive (tension).
2. The drive produces goal-directed behaviour, often with a search for the incentive.
3. The goal is achieved, so the need is satisfied and tension is reduced.
4. Equilibrium is restored until a new need arises, and the cycle repeats.

For example, hunger leads to a drive, searching for food, eating and relief.

Encoding is the first stage of memory. It converts incoming information into a form that can be stored in the brain. It can be visual (images), acoustic (sounds) or semantic (meaning). Attention, rehearsal, organisation and linking to existing knowledge make encoding more effective.

The elements of thought are:

• Mental images: pictures in the mind of sights, sounds or other experiences.
• Concepts: mental categories of objects, events or ideas that share common features.
• Language and symbols: words and signs that represent ideas and allow reasoning and communication.
• Propositions: statements that link concepts.
• Schemas and rules: organised knowledge structures used in solving problems.

Empathy is the ability to understand and share another person's feelings and to see a situation from their point of view. It has a cognitive part (understanding their perspective) and an emotional part (feeling with them). It builds trust, helps cooperation and communication, and encourages helping behaviour. It is different from sympathy, which is feeling sorry for someone.

The objective approach (for example, inventories such as the MMPI or the 16PF) has these strengths:

• It is standardised, with fixed items, scoring and norms.
• Scoring is objective and free of the examiner's bias.
• It is reliable and valid, which can be statistically checked.
• It is quick and economical, and can be given to groups.
• Results can be compared across individuals and quantified.

Long-term memory (LTM) is the relatively permanent store of information, with very large capacity and potentially unlimited duration, from minutes to a lifetime. Information moves into it from short-term memory through rehearsal, meaningful organisation and encoding.

Types

1. Explicit (declarative) memory: facts and events that can be consciously recalled.
   • Episodic memory is memory of personal events tied to time and place, such as last birthday.
   • Semantic memory is general knowledge and meanings, such as the capital of Nepal.
2. Implicit (non-declarative) memory: expressed in performance without conscious recall.
   • Procedural memory covers skills and habits, such as riding a bicycle.
   • It also includes priming and classically conditioned responses.

Functions

• It stores knowledge, skills and experiences over long periods.
• It supports learning, because new information is linked to what is already known.
• It provides a base for language, reasoning, problem solving and decision making.
• It gives a sense of personal identity and continuity.
• It allows automatic performance of skills without conscious effort.

Reinforcement is any event or stimulus that follows a response and increases the probability that the response will be repeated (operant conditioning, Skinner).

Negative reinforcement is not punishment. Punishment decreases behaviour, while both kinds of reinforcement increase it.

Creativity is the ability to produce ideas, solutions or products that are both original and useful or appropriate. It involves divergent thinking: fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration.

Factors influencing creativity

1. Intelligence and cognitive ability: a basic level of intelligence and knowledge is needed.
2. Personality traits: openness to experience, curiosity, independence, risk-taking, tolerance of ambiguity and persistence.
3. Motivation: intrinsic motivation promotes creativity, while heavy external pressure and rewards can reduce it.
4. Knowledge and expertise: a strong knowledge base provides material for new combinations.
5. Environment and family: a supportive, open and encouraging family, school or workplace helps. Rigid rules and fear of failure reduce creativity.
6. Culture and resources: freedom, time, access to materials and exposure to diverse ideas.
7. Thinking style: divergent thinking, and avoidance of mental sets and functional fixedness.
8. Emotional state: positive mood and low anxiety help creative thinking.

Applied psychology uses psychological principles to solve practical problems. Its main fields are:

• Clinical and counselling psychology: assessment, diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders, and guidance for personal problems.
• Educational psychology: learning, teaching methods, assessment and student motivation.
• Industrial/organizational psychology: selection, training, motivation, leadership, morale and workplace stress.
• Health psychology: the link between behaviour and health, stress management and lifestyle change.
• Social psychology: attitudes, group behaviour, prejudice and influence, used in marketing and community work.
• Forensic psychology: the application of psychology in the legal system, such as offender assessment and testimony.
• Consumer psychology: buyer behaviour, advertising and branding.
• Sports psychology: improving performance, confidence and concentration in athletes.
• Environmental and military psychology: human behaviour in built environments and in defence settings.

Psychosocial issues are problems arising from the interaction of a child's psychological development with the social environment. According to Erikson, childhood involves these crises:

1. Trust versus mistrust (infancy): consistent, loving care builds trust. Neglect creates insecurity.
2. Autonomy versus shame and doubt (toddlerhood): children want independence. Over-control or harsh criticism creates shame.
3. Initiative versus guilt (preschool): children begin to plan and play. Excessive punishment creates guilt.
4. Industry versus inferiority (school age): children learn skills and compete. Repeated failure or criticism leads to inferiority.

Common issues in childhood include:

• Attachment problems such as separation anxiety.
• Peer relations such as bullying, rejection and difficulty in making friends.
• Family problems such as conflict, divorce, neglect, abuse and poor parenting.
• Behavioural and emotional problems, including aggression, hyperactivity, fear and low self-esteem.
• School adjustment problems, such as academic pressure and learning difficulties.
• Gender role and identity issues and poverty or child labour in some contexts.

Supportive parenting, school and community help children to resolve these issues.

Motivation is the internal process that arouses, directs and sustains behaviour towards a goal. It results from needs, drives and incentives and explains why people act and how hard they try.

Implications for managers

• Understand employee needs. Use theories such as Maslow's hierarchy, Herzberg's two-factor theory and McClelland's needs to match rewards to what people value.
• Design jobs well. Job enrichment, autonomy, variety and meaningful work raise intrinsic motivation.
• Set clear goals. Specific, challenging goals with feedback (goal-setting theory) improve performance.
• Link rewards to performance. Fair pay, bonuses, promotion and recognition strengthen the effort-reward link (expectancy and equity theories).
• Treat people fairly. Perceived inequity reduces motivation.
• Provide a supportive environment. Good working conditions, participation in decisions, training and good leadership improve commitment.
• Motivated employees show higher productivity, lower absenteeism and turnover, and stronger satisfaction and loyalty.

Subjective well-being (SWB) is a person's own evaluation of their life. It has an affective part (frequent positive emotions and few negative ones) and a cognitive part (life satisfaction). It is commonly described as happiness.

Importance

• It is linked to better physical health, stronger immunity and longer life.
• It improves mental health and resilience to stress and lowers the risk of depression.
• It promotes better relationships, cooperation and social engagement.
• At work it brings higher productivity, creativity and job satisfaction, and lower absenteeism and turnover.
• It is a key indicator of a person's and a society's quality of life, beyond income alone, so it guides policy.

Projective tests are personality assessment techniques in which the person is shown an ambiguous, unstructured stimulus (inkblots, pictures, incomplete sentences) and asked to respond freely. They are based on the projective hypothesis of psychoanalytic theory: when people interpret vague material, they project their own unconscious needs, conflicts, motives, fears and feelings onto it. Because the test has no obvious "right" answer, the person is less able to fake responses.

How they measure personality

1. An ambiguous stimulus is presented.
2. The person gives free, unrestricted responses.
3. The examiner interprets the content, style, themes, emotional tone and recurring patterns.
4. From these, the examiner infers underlying motives, conflicts, defences and the overall personality structure.

Main tests

• Rorschach Inkblot Test: ten symmetrical inkblots. The person says what they see. Scoring considers location (whole or part), determinants (form, colour, movement) and content, and gives insight into emotional functioning and thought processes.
• Thematic Apperception Test (TAT): the person tells a story about pictures of ambiguous social scenes. The hero's needs, the pressures on the hero and the outcome reveal the person's motives (such as achievement, power and affiliation).
• Sentence completion test: the person completes stems such as "I feel afraid when...". The answers reveal attitudes and conflicts.
• Word association test and Draw-a-Person / House-Tree-Person test: free associations and drawings reveal underlying feelings.

Strengths

• They explore unconscious and hidden aspects of personality.
• They are hard to fake.
• They provide rich, in-depth information, and are useful in clinical settings and for people with low verbal ability.

Limitations

• Scoring and interpretation are subjective.
• They have low reliability and validity.
• They require a trained examiner, and they take time.
• Norms are limited and results may be influenced by the examiner.

They are best used with other methods such as interviews and objective inventories.

Stress is the body's physical, emotional and behavioural reaction to demands or threats (stressors) that the person perceives as exceeding their coping resources. Selye described it as the general adaptation syndrome, with the stages of alarm, resistance and exhaustion. Stress can be positive (eustress) or negative (distress).

Causes (stressors)

1. Environmental: noise, crowding, pollution, disasters, and economic or political uncertainty.
2. Personal and life events: death or illness in the family, divorce, marriage, moving, financial problems.
3. Work-related: overload or underload, role conflict and ambiguity, deadlines, poor relations with colleagues or boss, job insecurity, poor working conditions and lack of control.
4. Social and family: conflict, loneliness and lack of support.
5. Psychological: frustration, conflict between motives, pressure to achieve, perfectionism, and personality factors such as Type A behaviour and low self-esteem.
6. Daily hassles: traffic, queues and small irritations that accumulate.

Consequences

• Physical: headaches, high blood pressure, heart disease, ulcers, weakened immunity, fatigue, sleep problems.
• Psychological: anxiety, irritability, depression, poor concentration and burnout.
• Behavioural: substance use, aggression, changes in eating, withdrawal and accidents.
• Organisational: lower performance and productivity, absenteeism, turnover, poor decisions and conflict.

Coping includes relaxation, exercise, time management, social support, counselling and a positive outlook. Organisations can help with job redesign, clear roles and wellness programmes.

Memory dysfunctions are disturbances in the ability to encode, store or retrieve information. They arise from brain injury, disease, drugs, stress or psychological trauma.

Types

1. Amnesia: partial or total loss of memory.
   • Retrograde amnesia is loss of memory for events before the injury or trauma.
   • Anterograde amnesia is inability to form new long-term memories after the onset, as in Korsakoff's syndrome or after hippocampal damage.
   • Psychogenic (dissociative) amnesia is loss of personal memories, usually after severe stress, without organic damage.
   • Infantile amnesia is the normal inability to recall early childhood events.
2. Dementia and Alzheimer's disease: progressive loss of memory and thinking, caused by degeneration of brain cells, usually in old age. It starts with recent memory and later affects language, judgement and daily activity.
3. Korsakoff's syndrome: memory loss caused by chronic alcoholism and thiamine deficiency, often with confabulation (filling gaps with invented memories).
4. Paramnesia and confabulation: distorted memory or false memories that the person believes to be true.
5. Hypermnesia: abnormally vivid or exaggerated recall.
6. Dissociative identity disorder and fugue: memory gaps linked to different identities, or to sudden travel with loss of identity.
7. Forgetting disorders and tip-of-the-tongue: temporary retrieval failure, repression and distortion.

Treatment includes medication, memory training, cognitive therapy, counselling and support for the family.

Emotion is a complex state of feeling that involves physiological arousal, subjective experience (feeling), cognitive appraisal and expressive behaviour. Examples are joy, fear, anger, sadness and surprise. It prepares the person to act and shapes thinking and social interaction.

Applications of emotions in organisations

1. Emotional intelligence (EI). Managers and employees who can recognise and manage their own and others' emotions lead, communicate and resolve conflict better.
2. Leadership. Leaders who show enthusiasm, empathy and confidence inspire and motivate followers.
3. Motivation and job satisfaction. Positive emotions raise commitment, engagement and organisational citizenship, while negative emotions lead to withdrawal, absenteeism and turnover.
4. Decision making and creativity. Positive mood supports creative and flexible thinking, while moderate negative mood can support careful analysis. Strong emotions can distort judgement.
5. Teamwork and conflict. Emotional contagion spreads moods in groups. Empathy and emotional control reduce conflict and improve cooperation.
6. Customer service. Employees show required emotions (emotional labour), such as a friendly smile. Excess emotional labour can cause burnout and emotional dissonance.
7. Recruitment and selection. EI is increasingly assessed in hiring and promotion.
8. Negotiation. Reading others' emotions and controlling one's own helps in bargaining.
9. Stress, health and well-being. Understanding emotions helps in managing stress, burnout and workplace violence.
10. Organisational culture. Rules about emotional display influence morale and climate.

Managers should therefore encourage a positive climate, train employees in EI, provide support and manage the level of emotional labour.

(a) Personality trait and its importance

A personality trait is a relatively stable and enduring pattern of thinking, feeling and behaving that distinguishes one person from another and appears consistently across situations and over time (for example, conscientiousness, shyness or sociability).

Importance:

• It explains and helps to predict behaviour.
• It affects job performance, teamwork, leadership and career success.
• It guides selection, placement, training and counselling.
• It helps in understanding individual differences and in improving self-awareness.

(b) The Big Five model

The Big Five (the five-factor model, OCEAN) describes personality along five broad dimensions:

1. Openness to experience: imaginative, curious and creative, with a preference for variety. At the low end people are conventional and practical.
2. Conscientiousness: organised, dependable, disciplined and achievement-oriented. At the low end people are careless and impulsive.
3. Extraversion: sociable, talkative, energetic and assertive. At the low end people are introverted and reserved.
4. Agreeableness: cooperative, trusting, warm and helpful. At the low end people are competitive and suspicious.
5. Neuroticism (emotional stability): the tendency to experience anxiety, worry and moodiness. Low neuroticism means calm and secure.

(c) How the Big Five predicts work behaviour

• Conscientiousness is the best predictor of job performance across most jobs, as well as of reliability and low absenteeism.
• Extraversion predicts success in sales, management and team roles.
• Openness predicts creativity, learning and adaptability to change.
• Agreeableness predicts teamwork, helpfulness and customer service, but may reduce assertiveness in negotiation.
• Low neuroticism (emotional stability) predicts better stress handling, job satisfaction and performance under pressure.

Organisations use the model for selection, team building, training and leadership development.

(d) Ideal personality from the case

The ideal profile for John's workplace performance would be:

• High conscientiousness, kept in balance. John's attention to detail is an asset, but it should not become over-analysis that delays deadlines.
• Low neuroticism, which means emotional stability and good stress tolerance. This is John's main weakness.
• Moderate to high extraversion and good agreeableness, for comfortable teamwork and collaboration.
• Moderate to high openness, for creativity, but focused on project goals.
• Assertiveness, for handling conflict and taking leadership.

John already has many strengths (conscientiousness, creativity, cooperation). The recommended stress management, assertiveness and time management training would move him towards this profile.

Sensation is the basic process of detecting stimuli from the environment by the sense organs and passing the raw information to the brain. Perception is the process of organising, interpreting and giving meaning to those sensations. Sensation is physiological and passive, while perception is psychological and depends on past experience, learning and attention.

Emotion is a complex state of feeling that involves physiological arousal, subjective experience and expressive behaviour, such as joy, fear or anger.

Key characteristics:

• It has a subjective feeling of pleasantness or unpleasantness.
• It involves physiological changes, such as heart rate and breathing.
• It produces expressive behaviour in the face, voice and body.
• It is usually triggered by a stimulus and involves cognitive appraisal.
• It is temporary, varies in intensity and motivates action.

Covert behaviours are internal mental activities that cannot be directly observed by others. They can only be inferred from what a person says or does, or measured by special instruments. Examples are thinking, remembering, imagining, dreaming, feeling and perceiving. By contrast, overt behaviours, such as walking and speaking, can be seen directly.

The primary goals of psychology are:

1. Describe behaviour and mental processes: observe and record what happens.
2. Explain why they occur: develop theories about causes.
3. Predict future behaviour from current knowledge.
4. Control (modify) behaviour: change it in useful ways, for example through therapy or training.

Some texts add a fifth goal, to improve people's lives and well-being.

Hunger is a primary (biological or physiological) motive because it is inborn, unlearned and arises from a bodily need for food. It is essential for survival, so unmet hunger creates a strong drive that must be satisfied, and it is found in all humans and animals regardless of culture or learning.

Chronic stress is stress that continues over a long period, with no clear end and little chance of relief.

Characteristics:

• It is long-lasting (weeks, months or years) and ongoing.
• It leads to persistent physical and emotional strain: fatigue, sleep problems, anxiety or depression, and a weakened immune system.
• It can lead to health problems such as hypertension and heart disease, and to burnout.
• The person often feels helpless and unable to escape.

Example: prolonged financial hardship, a stressful job with constant pressure, or caring for a seriously ill family member for years.

Shaping is an operant conditioning technique in which a new or complex behaviour is taught by reinforcing successive approximations of the target behaviour. The trainer rewards responses that come closer and closer to the desired behaviour until the full behaviour is performed.

Its impact on learning is that it makes it possible to teach behaviours that would rarely occur naturally. It breaks complex tasks into small steps, gives immediate feedback, and helps in training animals, teaching children and skills, and in therapy. An example is training a rat to press a lever, or a child to write.

No, recall and recognition are not the same.

• Recall is retrieving information from memory without any cue or option being presented, as in an essay or fill-in-the-blank question.
• Recognition is identifying previously learned information when it is presented, as in a multiple-choice question.

Recognition is generally easier than recall because the presented item acts as a retrieval cue. Recall requires the person to search for and produce the information, which is more demanding.

The prenatal stage is the period of development from conception to birth, lasting about 266 to 280 days (nine months). It has three phases:

1. Germinal stage (0 to 2 weeks): the zygote forms, divides and implants in the uterine wall.
2. Embryonic stage (2 to 8 weeks): the major organs and body systems form. It is the most sensitive period for damage from teratogens.
3. Fetal stage (9 weeks to birth): the organs mature and the fetus grows in size and weight.

Development in this stage is influenced by the mother's health, nutrition, and exposure to alcohol, drugs, disease and stress.

Conformity is the tendency to change one's attitudes, beliefs or behaviour so that they match the norms or expectations of a group, either because of real or imagined group pressure.

It may arise from normative influence (the wish to be accepted and avoid rejection) or informational influence (the belief that the group knows better). Asch's line-judgement experiments are the classic demonstration. For example, an employee who starts dressing and speaking like the rest of the team to fit in is conforming.

Forgetting by inhibition (interference theory) holds that we forget not because memory traces fade, but because other learned material competes with and blocks the recall of the target material. Retrieval is inhibited when similar memories interfere with one another.

There are two types.

(a) Proactive inhibition. Old learning interferes with the recall of new learning. Example: after years of using one phone number or password, a person finds it hard to remember a new one because the old one keeps coming up.

(b) Retroactive inhibition. New learning interferes with the recall of old learning. Example: after learning a new software system, an employee cannot recall the steps of the old system.

Interference is greatest when the two sets of material are similar (e.g., two foreign languages learned one after another), and it is reduced when learning is spaced out, material is well organised, and sleep follows learning. McGeoch and Underwood's experiments with nonsense syllables and word lists support this explanation.

Attitude is a relatively stable and learned tendency to evaluate a person, object, idea or event favourably or unfavourably, and to respond to it in a consistent way. It has three components (the ABC model): Affective (feelings), Behavioural (action tendency) and Cognitive (beliefs and thoughts).

Formation of attitudes

• Direct experience: Pleasant or unpleasant personal contact with the object (e.g., good service at a bank creates a positive attitude toward it).
• Classical conditioning: An object repeatedly paired with a pleasant or unpleasant stimulus acquires that emotional meaning (e.g., a brand paired with attractive celebrities in advertisements).
• Operant conditioning (instrumental learning): Attitudes expressed and then rewarded are strengthened; those punished are weakened.
• Observational learning (modelling): Children and adults copy the attitudes of parents, teachers, peers and role models.
• Social and cultural influences: Family, religion, caste, school, peer group, and the norms of society shape attitudes.
• Mass media: Television, social media and advertising present information and opinions that shape attitudes.
• Mere exposure: Repeated exposure to a stimulus increases liking for it.
• Information and cognitive processing: Attitudes are built from facts and beliefs gathered about the object.

Gestalt principles of perceptual organization. Gestalt psychologists (Wertheimer, Koffka, Kohler) argued that "the whole is different from the sum of its parts": the mind organizes sensory input into meaningful wholes by inborn rules, rather than perceiving separate bits. The overarching law is Pragnanz (good form): we perceive the simplest, most stable and most meaningful organization possible.

Main principles

1. Figure-ground: We separate a stimulus into an object that stands out (figure) and its background (ground), as in Rubin's vase-faces picture.
2. Proximity: Objects close together are seen as a group.
3. Similarity: Objects alike in colour, shape or size are grouped together.
4. Closure: We fill gaps in incomplete figures to see a complete object (e.g., a broken circle seen as a circle).
5. Continuity: We prefer to see smooth, continuous lines and patterns rather than abrupt changes.
6. Common fate: Elements moving in the same direction are seen as one group.
7. Symmetry and simplicity: Symmetrical, simple shapes are perceived as unified wholes.

These principles are widely used in logo design, advertising, packaging and web design.

No, the halo effect and stereotyping are not the same, although both are perceptual biases that distort how we judge people.

Halo effect: A single positive (or negative) trait of a person colours our overall impression, so we assume that the person has other good (or bad) qualities as well. Example: a well-dressed, articulate candidate is assumed to be intelligent and hardworking.

Stereotyping: We judge a person on the basis of the group (gender, ethnicity, caste, age, profession) to which he or she belongs, and attribute to the individual the generalised traits of that group. Example: assuming that older workers cannot learn new technology.

Key differences

Effects on person perception: Both cause inaccurate, unfair and over-simplified judgements. In organizations they distort performance appraisal, interviews and selection, lead to discrimination and favouritism, reduce diversity, create self-fulfilling prophecies, and damage morale. They can be reduced by using structured interviews, objective criteria, multiple raters, training in awareness, and by judging individuals on specific evidence.

Problem-solving is the mental process of finding a way to reach a goal when the path to it is not immediately obvious. It involves understanding the problem, generating possible solutions, choosing and applying one, and evaluating the result.

Approaches to problem-solving

1. Trial and error: Different responses are tried until one works (Thorndike's cat). Simple but slow and wasteful when there are many alternatives.
2. Algorithms: A step-by-step procedure that guarantees a correct solution if followed (e.g., a mathematical formula). Reliable, but time-consuming for complex problems.
3. Heuristics: Mental shortcuts or rules of thumb that are quick but not guaranteed. Examples are means-end analysis (reducing the gap between current state and goal through sub-goals), working backward, and analogies.
4. Insight: Sudden "aha" understanding after restructuring the problem (Kohler's chimpanzees). It depends on reorganizing the elements of the problem rather than gradual steps.
5. Understanding / restructuring approach (Gestalt): Seeing the problem in a new way to overcome fixation, such as functional fixedness and mental set.

Comparison: Algorithms are accurate but slow; heuristics are fast but may be wrong; trial and error needs no knowledge but is inefficient; insight is creative but unpredictable. In practice, people combine these approaches depending on the complexity and time available.

Raymond Cattell and John Horn proposed that general intelligence consists of two broad abilities.

Fluid intelligence (Gf): The ability to reason, solve new problems, see relationships and think abstractly, independent of learning and culture. It depends on neurological functioning, peaks in early adulthood and gradually declines with age. Examples: solving puzzles, pattern recognition, new logical problems.

Crystallized intelligence (Gc): Knowledge and skills acquired through education and experience, such as vocabulary, general knowledge and professional expertise. It depends on culture and learning, and continues to grow or remain stable well into old age.

How they explain intelligence: Fluid intelligence is the raw capacity to learn and reason; it is "invested" in learning to build crystallized intelligence. Together they account for individual differences in performance and for the age pattern of intelligence: young people do well on novel, speed-based tasks, while older people excel at tasks using accumulated knowledge and judgement. This explains why intelligence appears to decline on some tests but not on others, and why both abilities should be measured in education and employee selection.

Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to perceive, understand, use and manage one's own emotions and those of others in order to think clearly, build relationships and handle pressure. The concept was introduced by Salovey and Mayer and popularised by Daniel Goleman.

Components (Goleman's model)

1. Self-awareness: Recognising one's own emotions, strengths, weaknesses and their effect on others.
2. Self-regulation: Controlling impulses and disruptive moods, staying calm, adaptable and trustworthy.
3. Motivation: Inner drive to achieve for the sake of achievement, with optimism and commitment despite setbacks.
4. Empathy: Understanding other people's feelings and viewpoints and responding sensitively.
5. Social skills: Managing relationships, communicating, influencing, resolving conflict and building teams.

The first three are personal competence and the last two are social competence. High EI contributes to leadership, teamwork, customer service and better stress management at work.

Human development is the scientific study of the systematic changes and continuities that occur in a person from conception to death, covering physical, cognitive, emotional, social and personality growth.

Baltes' principles of life-span development. Paul Baltes proposed a life-span perspective with the following principles.

1. Development is lifelong: No age period dominates; change occurs throughout life from infancy to old age.
2. Development is multidimensional: It has biological, cognitive and socio-emotional dimensions that interact.
3. Development is multidirectional: Within each dimension, some abilities grow while others decline at the same time (e.g., vocabulary increases while processing speed slows).
4. Development involves gains and losses: Growth always includes loss, and loss includes growth; the balance shifts toward loss in later life.
5. Plasticity: Abilities can be modified through training and experience, though the capacity for change decreases with age.
6. Development is multiply influenced (contextual): It is shaped by normative age-graded influences (e.g., puberty, retirement), normative history-graded influences (e.g., wars, the 2015 earthquake, pandemics) and non-normative life events (e.g., an accident, job loss).
7. Historical embeddedness: Development depends on the historical and cultural context in which a person lives.
8. Selection, optimization and compensation (SOC): People manage gains and losses by selecting goals, optimizing the means to reach them, and compensating for lost abilities.
9. Multidisciplinary: Psychology, biology, sociology and other fields together are needed to understand development.

These principles imply that organizations and families should support continuous learning and adapt expectations to each stage of life.

Classical conditioning is a form of learning in which a neutral stimulus, through repeated pairing with an unconditioned stimulus that naturally produces a response, comes to produce a similar response by itself. It was discovered by Ivan Pavlov through his experiments on dogs.

Key terms

• Unconditioned stimulus (UCS): Naturally triggers a response (food).
• Unconditioned response (UCR): Natural reaction (salivation to food).
• Neutral stimulus (NS): Initially produces no response (bell).
• Conditioned stimulus (CS): The neutral stimulus after learning (bell).
• Conditioned response (CR): Learned response to the CS (salivation to the bell).

Phases

1. Before conditioning: UCS produces UCR; the NS produces no response.
2. During conditioning (acquisition): The NS is repeatedly paired with the UCS shortly before it (bell then food), so the association is formed.
3. After conditioning: The NS has become a CS and alone produces the CR (bell produces salivation).

Related processes and laws

• Extinction: The CR weakens and disappears when the CS is repeatedly presented without the UCS.
• Spontaneous recovery: After a rest, the extinguished CR reappears briefly when the CS is presented.
• Generalization: Stimuli similar to the CS also produce the CR.
• Discrimination: The organism learns to respond only to the specific CS and not to similar stimuli.
• Higher-order conditioning: A CS acts as a UCS to condition a new stimulus.

Laws: Law of contiguity (the CS and UCS must occur close together in time, ideally with the CS just before), law of frequency (repeated pairings strengthen the association), law of intensity (a stronger UCS or CS gives faster conditioning), and law of extinction/recovery as described above.

Applications: Advertising (pairing products with pleasant images), treatment of phobias, taste aversion and building positive workplace associations.

Personality traits are relatively stable, enduring characteristics or patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that distinguish one individual from another and that appear consistently across situations and over time. Examples are extraversion, conscientiousness and emotional stability.

Major trait approaches

• Allport: Cardinal, central and secondary traits.
• Cattell: 16 source traits (16PF).
• Eysenck: Extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism.
• Big Five (OCEAN): Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism.

How understanding traits helps in assessing employees' work behaviour

1. Selection and placement: Matching traits to job demands, for example extraversion for sales roles and conscientiousness for accounting and audit roles.
2. Predicting performance: Conscientiousness is the most consistent predictor of job performance across occupations; emotional stability predicts stress tolerance.
3. Leadership: Extraversion, openness and emotional stability are linked with leadership emergence and effectiveness.
4. Team building: Balancing agreeable and assertive members improves cooperation and reduces conflict.
5. Motivation and job satisfaction: Knowing employees' traits helps managers design suitable jobs, rewards and communication styles.
6. Training and development: Traits suggest how people learn and how they will respond to change, feedback and pressure.
7. Predicting behaviour: Traits help forecast absenteeism, turnover, ethical conduct and counterproductive behaviour.
8. Counselling and career planning: Employees can be guided toward roles fitting their dispositions.

Caution: Behaviour also depends on the situation, so traits should be used with other information (skills, experience, tests and interviews), and tests must be valid, reliable and fair, not used to discriminate.

Psychology is the scientific study of behaviour and mental processes. Its scope is very broad because it covers all aspects of human and animal experience, from the biological to the social.

Fields of psychology (scope)

1. Biological (physiological) psychology: How the brain, nervous system, hormones and genes influence behaviour.
2. Cognitive psychology: Perception, attention, memory, thinking, language, problem-solving and decision-making.
3. Developmental psychology: Physical, cognitive and social change from conception to old age.
4. Social psychology: How people think about, influence and relate to one another: attitudes, conformity, prejudice, group behaviour and aggression.
5. Personality psychology: Individual differences, traits and the development and assessment of personality.
6. Clinical and counselling psychology: Diagnosis, treatment and prevention of mental disorders and help with adjustment problems.
7. Educational psychology: Learning, teaching methods, motivation, assessment and special education.
8. Industrial and organizational psychology: Selection, training, motivation, leadership, job satisfaction, stress and productivity at work.
9. Consumer and marketing psychology: Buyer behaviour, perception of brands and the effects of advertising.
10. Health psychology: Stress, coping, lifestyle and the link between mind and body.
11. Abnormal psychology: Causes and types of psychological disorders.
12. Other fields: Sports psychology, forensic psychology, environmental psychology, community psychology and engineering psychology.

Aims within this scope: to describe, explain, predict and control behaviour. Because it draws on biology, sociology, medicine and management, psychology is useful in everyday life, business, education, health, law and national development.

(a) The adolescent phase of life

Adolescence is the transitional stage between childhood and adulthood, roughly from 12 to 19 years (about 10 to 21 by some definitions), beginning with puberty. It involves rapid physical growth and sexual maturation, development of abstract and critical thinking, search for identity (Erikson's "identity versus role confusion"), increasing independence from parents and growing importance of peers. G. Stanley Hall called it a period of "storm and stress" because of emotional ups and downs and conflict. Dipak, aged 15, is in middle adolescence.

(b) Common psychological and social challenges of adolescents

Psychological:

• Identity confusion and uncertainty about who they are.
• Low self-esteem and negative body image.
• Emotional instability, mood swings, anxiety and depression.
• Academic and examination stress.
• Risk-taking behaviour, such as substance use.

Social:

• Peer pressure and the need to fit in.
• Conflict with parents over independence and control.
• Social anxiety, bullying and loneliness.
• Pressure from social media, including comparison with others and cyberbullying.
• Romantic relationships and gender-role expectations.

Dipak shows many of these: declining grades, withdrawal, social media pressure, low self-esteem, social anxiety, depressive symptoms and strained family relationships.

(c) Potential consequences if the challenges are not addressed

• Persistent depression and anxiety, possibly leading to self-harm or suicidal thoughts.
• Falling academic performance, school dropout and weak career prospects.
• Social isolation and difficulty forming healthy relationships.
• Unresolved identity confusion, leading to poor self-concept and role confusion in adulthood.
• Deteriorating family relationships and constant arguments.
• Escape into excessive screen use, addiction, substance abuse or other risky behaviour.
• Long-term mental health problems and lower life satisfaction.

(d) Strategies Dipak can use

1. Seek support: Talk with a school counsellor or psychologist; seek professional help for anxiety or depressive symptoms.
2. Open communication with parents: Share feelings calmly; parents can also learn to give guidance and not control, so that trust is rebuilt.
3. Healthy use of social media: Limit screen time, unfollow accounts that cause comparison, and remember that online images are curated.
4. Build self-esteem: Set realistic goals, recognise his strengths and celebrate small achievements.
5. Develop social skills and friendships: Gradually join group activities, clubs or sports, and choose supportive friends.
6. Stress management: Regular exercise, sleep, relaxation, mindfulness and hobbies.
7. Academic planning: A study schedule and help from teachers to recover his performance.
8. Cognitive restructuring: Challenge negative thoughts ("I am not good enough") with realistic ones, as taught in cognitive behavioural therapy.
9. Identity exploration: Explore interests, values and future goals with mentors or career counselling.

The developmental perspective studies how people change and stay the same over the life span, from conception to death, in physical, cognitive, emotional and social areas. It looks at stages, the effects of heredity and environment, and the continuity or discontinuity of change, to explain behaviour at different ages.

Freud's psychodynamic approach divides the mind into three levels of consciousness:

1. Conscious: Thoughts and feelings a person is aware of at the moment.
2. Preconscious: Material that is not now in awareness but can easily be recalled.
3. Unconscious: Repressed desires, fears and memories that are outside awareness but strongly influence behaviour.

Sternberg's triarchic theory has three components:

1. Analytical (componential) intelligence: Problem solving, reasoning and academic ability.
2. Creative (experiential) intelligence: Dealing with new situations and generating new ideas.
3. Practical (contextual) intelligence: Adapting to, shaping and selecting everyday environments, or "street smarts".

Principles of life-span development (Baltes):

1. Development is lifelong, with no age period dominating.
2. It is multidimensional (biological, cognitive and socio-emotional).
3. It is multidirectional, with gains and losses at the same time.
4. It is plastic, since capacities can change with experience.
5. It is multi-contextual, influenced by history, culture and settings.
6. It involves growth, maintenance and regulation of loss.
7. It is multidisciplinary, studied by many fields.

Common biases and errors in problem solving:

• Mental set (functional fixedness): sticking to a familiar method or seeing objects only in their usual use.
• Confirmation bias: looking only for information that supports one's existing belief.
• Availability heuristic: judging likelihood by how easily examples come to mind.
• Representativeness heuristic: judging by similarity to a stereotype and ignoring base rates.
• Anchoring: relying too heavily on the first piece of information received.
• Overconfidence: overestimating the correctness of one's own solution.
• Hindsight bias: believing after the event that the outcome was predictable.
• Framing effect: choices change with how the problem is worded.
• Irrelevant information and poor problem representation: wrongly defining the problem or being distracted by unimportant details.

An illusion is a misperception of a real external stimulus. For example, the Müller-Lyer lines look unequal though they are equal, or a rope in dim light looks like a snake. It is common and can happen to anyone.

A hallucination is a perception without any external stimulus, such as hearing voices or seeing people who are not there. It arises within the mind and is usually linked to mental disorders (e.g. schizophrenia), drugs or extreme fatigue.

In short, an illusion distorts something that is present, while a hallucination creates something that is absent.

A concept is a mental category or idea that groups objects, events or qualities that share common features, such as "chair", "fruit" or "justice". It lets us organise knowledge, treat new items as members of a known class, and think and communicate efficiently without handling every instance separately.

Concepts may be concrete (table) or abstract (freedom), and are formed by experience, abstraction and generalisation. They are the building blocks of thinking, reasoning and problem solving.

The Big Five (Five Factor Model, Costa and McCrae) describes personality in five broad, relatively stable dimensions, remembered by OCEAN:

• Openness to experience: imaginative, curious, open to new ideas.
• Conscientiousness: organised, disciplined, dependable, goal-oriented.
• Extraversion: sociable, assertive, energetic, talkative.
• Agreeableness: cooperative, trusting, warm, helpful.
• Neuroticism: tendency toward anxiety, moodiness and emotional instability (low score means emotional stability).

Monocular cues are depth cues that need only one eye:

• Relative size: smaller objects appear farther away.
• Interposition (overlap): an object that blocks another appears nearer.
• Linear perspective: parallel lines appear to converge in the distance.
• Texture gradient: texture becomes finer with distance.
• Aerial (atmospheric) perspective: distant objects look hazy and bluish.
• Height in the visual field: objects higher up (toward the horizon) appear farther.
• Light and shadow: shading gives shape and depth.
• Motion parallax: nearby objects seem to move faster than distant ones when we move.
• Accommodation: the eye's lens muscle effort signals distance.

Creativity is the ability to produce ideas, products or solutions that are both original (novel) and useful or appropriate. It involves divergent thinking, fluency, flexibility and originality.

Example: a Nepali entrepreneur turning discarded plastic bottles into low-cost planters or building material, solving a waste problem in a new and practical way.

Howard Gardner (1983) proposed that intelligence is not a single general ability but a set of relatively independent intelligences:

1. Linguistic: sensitivity to words and language (writers, lawyers).
2. Logical-mathematical: reasoning, numbers and problem solving (scientists, accountants).
3. Spatial: visualising and manipulating space and images (architects, pilots).
4. Musical: sensitivity to rhythm, pitch and tone (musicians).
5. Bodily-kinaesthetic: skilled use of the body and hands (athletes, surgeons, dancers).
6. Interpersonal: understanding and working with others (managers, teachers).
7. Intrapersonal: understanding one's own feelings, motives and strengths.
8. Naturalistic: recognising and classifying plants, animals and natural patterns (farmers, botanists).

Gardner later discussed a possible ninth, existential intelligence. The theory implies that people have different profiles of strengths, so education and job placement should recognise varied talents.

Thus STM is mainly about holding information, whereas working memory emphasises using that information for ongoing mental tasks.

The main methods of problem solving differ as follows:

• Trial and error: trying different responses until one works, with no systematic plan. It is simple but slow and wasteful for complex problems (e.g. trying keys on a lock).
• Algorithm: a step-by-step procedure that guarantees a correct solution if followed (e.g. a mathematical formula). It is accurate but may be time-consuming.
• Heuristics (rules of thumb): mental shortcuts that are quick and often work but do not guarantee success. Examples include means-end analysis (reducing the gap between present and goal state), working backward, and breaking the problem into subgoals.
• Insight: a sudden realisation of the solution after restructuring the problem, often following a period of impasse or incubation (the "aha" experience).
• Analogy: applying the solution of a similar, previously solved problem to the new one.

In summary, algorithms are reliable but slow, heuristics are fast but fallible, trial and error is unsystematic, and insight is sudden and restructuring in nature.

Classical conditioning was discovered by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. It is learning in which a neutral stimulus becomes able to produce a response after being paired repeatedly with a stimulus that naturally produces that response.

Pavlov's experiment: In dogs, food (UCS) naturally produced salivation (UCR). A bell (neutral stimulus) produced no salivation. When the bell was sounded just before the food many times, the bell alone began to produce salivation. The bell became the conditioned stimulus (CS) and salivation to it the conditioned response (CR).

Key terms:

• UCS: stimulus that naturally triggers a response (food).
• UCR: unlearned response (salivation to food).
• CS: formerly neutral stimulus (bell).
• CR: learned response to the CS.

Basic processes:

• Acquisition: the CS-UCS pairing builds the association; the CS should come just before the UCS.
• Extinction: the CR fades when the CS is repeatedly presented without the UCS.
• Spontaneous recovery: the extinguished CR reappears after a rest period.
• Generalisation: similar stimuli also produce the CR.
• Discrimination: the response is limited to the specific CS.

Applications: emotional reactions and phobias (Watson's Little Albert), advertising that links a product with pleasant feelings, and therapies such as systematic desensitisation.

Personality assessment methods fall mainly into objective and projective approaches.

Objective approach

Uses structured, standardised tests with fixed questions and fixed response options (true/false, yes/no, rating scales). Scoring is mechanical and compared with norms, so results are reliable and free of examiner bias.

• Examples: MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory), 16PF (Cattell), NEO-PI (Big Five), Eysenck Personality Questionnaire.
• Strengths: easy to administer to groups, objective scoring, high reliability.
• Limitations: depends on honest self-report, so it is open to faking and social desirability bias; it may not reach unconscious aspects.

Projective approach

Based on psychoanalytic theory. The person is given an ambiguous stimulus and asked to interpret it, and is assumed to project unconscious feelings, needs and conflicts onto it. Responses are open-ended.

• Examples: Rorschach Inkblot Test, Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), sentence completion test, draw-a-person test.
• Strengths: reveals hidden motives and is hard to fake.
• Limitations: scoring and interpretation are subjective, so reliability and validity are lower; it needs a trained examiner.

In short, objective tests measure conscious, self-reported traits, while projective tests probe unconscious dynamics.

Stress is the body's and mind's response to demands (stressors) that are perceived as taxing or exceeding one's resources.

Causes (stressors)

• Personal and life events: death of a loved one, illness, marriage, divorce, financial trouble.
• Daily hassles: traffic, deadlines, noise, minor irritations.
• Work-related: overload, tight deadlines, role conflict and ambiguity, job insecurity, poor supervisor relations, lack of control.
• Environmental: crowding, pollution, noise, disasters.
• Social: family conflict, discrimination, loneliness.
• Personality and cognitive factors: Type A behaviour, pessimism, perfectionism.
• Frustration and conflict: blocked goals and competing motives.

Consequences

• Physical: headache, fatigue, high blood pressure, heart disease, ulcers, weakened immunity, sleep problems.
• Psychological: anxiety, depression, irritability, anger, poor concentration, burnout.
• Behavioural: substance use, withdrawal, aggression, absenteeism, lower performance, poor decisions.
• Organisational: lower productivity and morale, turnover, accidents and health costs.

Moderate stress (eustress) can motivate performance, but prolonged distress is harmful and requires coping such as exercise, time management, relaxation, social support and counselling.

The cognitive perspective studies mental processes, namely how people perceive, attend, remember, think, reason, solve problems and use language. It emerged in the 1950s-60s as a reaction to strict behaviourism.

Major features

• Focus on mental processes: behaviour is explained by internal thinking, not only by stimulus and response.
• Information-processing view: the mind is like a computer that takes in (input), stores, transforms and retrieves information (output).
• Role of schemas and interpretation: people actively construct meaning, and their beliefs and expectations shape perception and behaviour.
• Learning as active: learners organise knowledge, use insight and cognitive maps (Tolman, Köhler, Bandura).
• Scientific and experimental methods: inferences about the mind are drawn from reaction time, memory tests and problem-solving tasks.
• Emphasis on individual differences in thinking: the same event may be viewed differently by different people.
• Applications: cognitive therapy (Beck, Ellis) treats disorders by changing faulty thoughts; it also informs education, decision making and human-computer interaction.

Key contributors include Piaget, Neisser, Bruner and Simon.

Attribution is the process by which people explain the causes of behaviour, whether their own or others'. Harold Kelley's (1967) covariation model says that people judge whether behaviour is due to internal (dispositional) or external (situational) causes by looking at how the behaviour varies across three kinds of information.

Three dimensions

1. Consensus: do other people behave the same way in the same situation? High consensus points to an external cause; low consensus to an internal cause.
2. Distinctiveness: does the person behave this way only in this situation, or in many? High distinctiveness points to an external cause; low to an internal cause.
3. Consistency: does the person behave this way in this situation over time? High consistency supports a stable attribution (internal or external); low consistency suggests a temporary cause.

Resulting attributions

• Internal (person): low consensus, low distinctiveness, high consistency.
• External (situation): high consensus, high distinctiveness, high consistency.
• Circumstantial (special occasion): low consistency.

Example: An employee, Ram, misses a deadline. If other employees meet it (low consensus), Ram misses most deadlines (low distinctiveness) and often does so (high consistency), the manager attributes it to Ram himself.

Applications for managers

• Performance appraisal: check consensus, distinctiveness and consistency before blaming a person, which reduces unfair evaluations.
• Feedback and discipline: handle poor performance by training or discipline if it is internal, and by changing resources, workload or procedures if it is external.
• Reducing biases: managers tend toward the fundamental attribution error (over-attributing to the person) and self-serving bias; Kelley's model encourages balanced judgement.
• Employee motivation: attributing success to effort and ability, and failure to fixable causes, encourages employees to keep trying.
• Conflict resolution: understanding whether conflicts come from personalities or from the situation helps in choosing solutions.
• Selection and promotion: consistent high performance across situations suggests ability worth rewarding.
• Customer and team relations: helps interpret complaints and team behaviour accurately.

Operant conditioning (Skinner) holds that behaviour is shaped by its consequences: reinforcement (positive or negative) increases a behaviour, punishment and extinction decrease it. In organisations this means rewards such as bonuses, praise and promotions, and the use of reinforcement schedules.

Social learning theory (Bandura) holds that people learn by observing and imitating models, through attention, retention, reproduction and motivation, and are guided by self-efficacy and self-regulation. Learning can occur vicariously, without personally experiencing the consequence.

Comparison

Choice: social learning is better suited to foster effective behaviours, though best combined with reinforcement. Justification:

• Efficient training: employees learn complex skills, such as handling customers or safety procedures, by watching skilled colleagues and role models, avoiding costly trial and error.
• Vicarious reinforcement: seeing a coworker rewarded for good behaviour motivates others without every individual needing a reward.
• Builds self-efficacy and internal motivation: employees develop confidence and self-regulation, producing durable behaviour even without constant supervision.
• Spreads organisational culture and ethics: leaders and mentors act as models, shaping values at scale.
• Wide applicability: works through mentoring, demonstrations, simulations and on-the-job coaching for large workforces.
• Operant limits: it needs continual monitoring and reward delivery, may lead to performance only when rewards are present, and punishment can create fear and low morale.

Operant methods remain useful for reinforcing the behaviour once learned, so an effective manager uses social learning to teach and operant reinforcement to sustain, but social learning is the stronger primary approach.

Memory can be improved with strategies for encoding, storing and retrieving information.

1. Mnemonics (memory aids)

• Acronyms and acrostics: e.g. VIBGYOR for rainbow colours.
• Method of loci: link items to familiar places along a route.
• Peg-word and keyword methods: link new items to numbered pegs or sound-alike images.
• Rhymes and imagery: vivid, unusual images are remembered better.

2. Chunking: group items into meaningful units, e.g. a phone number as 3-3-4 digits, which stretches short-term capacity.

3. Elaborative rehearsal: relate new material to existing knowledge and meaning, rather than rote repetition (maintenance rehearsal). Deeper processing (Craik and Lockhart) gives stronger memory.

4. Organisation: use outlines, hierarchies, concept maps and categories.

5. Distributed (spaced) practice: study in several short sessions instead of cramming; revise at increasing intervals.

6. Overlearning and repeated retrieval: keep practising after mastery; self-testing and recall are more effective than rereading.

7. Over-time methods such as SQ3R: Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review, a structured study approach.

8. Context and state cues: study and recall in similar settings or moods (encoding specificity).

9. Minimising interference: avoid studying similar material back to back, and revise before sleep to reduce retroactive interference.

10. Healthy lifestyle: adequate sleep consolidates memory; exercise, good nutrition, stress reduction and attention (avoiding multitasking) help.

11. Teaching others and meaningful association: explaining the material and using real-life examples strengthens understanding and recall.

Combined use of these techniques gives the best results.

Adolescence (roughly 12-19 years) is the transition from childhood to adulthood; adulthood is the long period afterwards, divided into early (20-40), middle (40-60) and late adulthood.

Features of adolescence

• Physical: puberty, rapid growth, sexual maturation, hormonal changes.
• Cognitive: abstract and hypothetical thinking (Piaget's formal operations), idealism, questioning of authority.
• Emotional: mood swings, heightened emotionality and self-consciousness.
• Social: peer influence becomes strong; desire for independence from parents.
• Identity formation: the main task (Erikson's identity versus role confusion), including career and value choices.

Hazards of adolescence

• Identity confusion and low self-esteem, body-image worries.
• Peer pressure leading to smoking, alcohol and drug use.
• Risky sexual behaviour, early pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.
• Conflict with parents, delinquency and aggression.
• Academic stress, exam anxiety, depression and suicide risk, eating disorders.
• Internet and social-media overuse.

Features of adulthood

• Early adulthood: establishing career, marriage or partnership, parenthood, intimacy versus isolation (Erikson); peak physical strength.
• Middle adulthood: peak career and responsibility, caring for children and ageing parents, generativity versus stagnation; gradual physical decline, menopause.
• Late adulthood: retirement, reduced physical and sensory abilities, reflection on life, integrity versus despair.

Hazards of adulthood

• Job stress, unemployment, financial burden, work-family conflict.
• Marital discord, divorce and parenting difficulties.
• Midlife crisis, lifestyle diseases (hypertension, diabetes, heart disease), substance abuse.
• In old age: chronic illness, memory decline and dementia, loneliness, loss of spouse and friends, dependency, depression.

Understanding these features and hazards allows families, institutions and organisations to give guidance, counselling and support at each stage.

1) Components and types of emotions

Components of emotion

• Physiological: bodily arousal such as heartbeat, sweating and hormonal changes (autonomic nervous system).
• Cognitive (subjective experience): the conscious feeling and appraisal of the situation, e.g. "I am being treated unfairly".
• Behavioural (expressive): facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice and actions such as shouting or withdrawing.

Types of emotions

• Primary (basic) emotions: joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust (Ekman); Plutchik adds trust and anticipation.
• Secondary emotions: blends of primary ones, such as guilt, shame, pride, jealousy, love, envy.
• Positive and negative emotions: pleasant (joy, pride, interest) versus unpleasant (anger, fear, sadness).
• Also: moods (longer, less intense) and emotional labour (displayed versus felt emotions) are related concepts at work.

2) Applications of emotions in organisations

• Selection and hiring: emotional intelligence is considered when choosing employees, especially for service and leadership roles.
• Decision making: emotions influence judgement; positive moods foster creativity and optimism, while negative moods encourage careful analysis.
• Motivation: emotions energise effort; recognition and pride raise motivation.
• Leadership: leaders who express enthusiasm and empathy inspire followers.
• Interpersonal conflict and negotiation: managing anger and understanding others' emotions helps resolve disputes.
• Customer service and emotional labour: employees must display appropriate emotions to customers.
• Job satisfaction, performance and absenteeism: emotional states affect attitudes, turnover and withdrawal.
• Deviant workplace behaviour: negative emotions can produce lateness, sabotage and aggression.
• Team dynamics and creativity: shared emotions create group morale.
• Stress and well-being management: recognising and regulating emotions reduces burnout.

3) Most relevant applications in the case The most relevant are interpersonal conflict management, deviant workplace behaviour / job performance, and stress and emotional regulation.

• Hari's anger and sadness toward his supervisor came from pressure and escalated into verbal altercations, which is an emotion-driven conflict.
• His negative emotions led to lateness and deliberately missed deadlines, a form of withdrawal and deviant behaviour that harmed the organisation.
• Both are rooted in poor emotional management by Hari and by his supervisor, so emotional intelligence and regulation are the central lessons.

4) Example scenario of how it could be applied The organisation could train Hari and his supervisor in emotional intelligence and conflict management. In a facilitated meeting, the supervisor first listens and acknowledges Hari's pressure ("I understand the deadlines are heavy"), and Hari expresses his concerns calmly instead of arguing. Together they agree on a realistic workload, a priority list and short weekly check-ins. Hari uses regulation techniques such as pausing, deep breathing and breaks when frustrated, and the company offers counselling or stress-management support. As a result, tension falls, deadlines are met, attendance improves and losses stop.