PSYCH 1101

What is the myelin sheath composed of?

glial cells (support cells found in the nervous system)

What are the pros/cons of EEG measurement?

good temporal resolution but poor spatial resolution

Explain the phrase "form follows function."

if we want to know how something works, we need to know what it's working for

Explain the phrase "chance is lumpy"

people fail to understand that in small numbers, randomness can override probability

dogmatism

people's tendency to cling to their assumptions

What did Gordon Allport suggest after studying stereotyping, prejudice, and racism following the civil rights movement?

prejudice was the result of a perceptual error that was every bit as natural and unavoidable as an optical illusion

What did a recent study in which the brains of both professional and novice pianists were scanned as they made complex finger movements reveal?

professional pianists had less activity in the parts of the brain that guide these finger movements

relativism

psychological phenomena are likely to vary considerably across cultures and should be viewed only in the context of a specific culture

What is the correlation coefficient when two variables have a perfect negative correlation?

r=-1

What is the correlation coefficient when two variables are uncorrelated?

r=0

What is the correlation coefficient when two variables have a perfect positive correlation?

r=1

sensory neurons

receive info from the external world and convey it to the brain via the spinal cord

A good instrument is _____ and _____.

reliable and powerful

What does functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allow scientists to do?

scan a brain to determine which parts of the brain are active during various tasks

What did Wundt believe?

scientific psychology should focus on analyzing consciousness

What approach did Wundt and students adopt?

structuralism: the analysis of basic elements that constitute the mind

Why was phrenology quickly discredited?

was correct with the idea that different parts of the brain are specialized for specific physiological functions, but took this idea to an absurd extreme

When are behaviors unlikely to be influenced by demand characteristics?

when people don't know that the demand and behavior are related

When are results statistically significant?

when there is less than a 5% chance that a result would happen if random assignment had failed

What three qualities make people unusually difficult to study?

complexity, variability, and reactivity

What is the correlation coefficient when two variables are negatively correlated?

-1<r<0

What did Wundt research?

-tried to analyze the stream of consciousness using introspection -attempted to carefully describe the feelings associated with elementary perceptions -used reaction times to examine a distinction between the perception and interpretation of a stimulus

How did French physicians Jean-Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet study patients with hysteria?

-when patients were put into a trancelike state through the use of hypnosis, their symptoms disappeared -patients behaved like two different people in the waking and hypnotic states

What is the correlation coefficient when two variables are positively correlated?

0<r<1

What is the observation of dorm rooms, bedrooms, offices, even FB profile pages, reliably correlated with?

"Big 5" personality characteristics

What crucial insight did French surgeon Paul Broca's study of M. Leborgne lead to?

-M. Leborgne suffered damage to small part of left side of brain (now known as Broca's area) -couldn't speak and could only say the syllable "fan" -understood everything that was said to him and was able to communicate through gestures -damage to a specific part of the brain impaired a specific mental function therefore the brain and mind are closely linked

What are the three key questions of psychology?

-What are the bases of perception, thoughts, memories, and feelings, or our subjective sense of self? -How does the mind usually allow us to function effectively in the world? -Why does the mind occasionally function so ineffectively in the world?

How did Wundt and Titchener's approaches differ?

-Wundt emphasized the relationship between elements of consciousness -Titchener focused on identifying the basic elements themselves

What did Aristotle believe? What did he argue for?

-believed that the child's mind was a tabula rasa (blank slate) on which experiences were written -argued for philosophical empiricism

Describe the conditioning chamber that came to be known as the Skinner box.

-box has a lever and a food tray -a hungry rat could get food by pressing a lever -when a rat was put in the box, it would wander around and usually press the lever by accident and a food pellet would drop into the tray -the rate of bar pressing would increase dramatically and remain high until the rat was no longer hungry

What was the speed camera lottery and what did it reveal? Why was it not an effective way to study the effect?

-built a speedometer where speeders pay tickets and legal drivers can win ticket money -revealed that probabilistic reward is very good at motivating behavior -in order to really study effect, a similar set-up would be needed that only punished and not rewarded

What did biologist Marie Jean Pierre Flourens do and discover?

-conducted experiments in which he surgically removed parts of the brain from dogs, birds, and other animals -found that their actions and movements differed from those of animals with intact brains

What are the three main methods of studying developmental psychology?

-cross-sectional (e.g. compare 3 yr olds to 5 yr olds) -longitudinal (e.g. look at kids at age 3, then again at age 5) -twin studies (identical vs. fraternal, reared together vs. reared apart)

What are the pros/cons of fMRI measurement?

-decent spatial resolution -poor temporal resolution (signal lags) -expensive, can be uncomfortable

transcranial magnet stimulation (TMS)

-electromagnetic induction over scalp -disrupts neuronal activity in targeted region

What did Gall do?

-examined brains and observed that mental ability often increases with larger brain size and decreases with damage to the brain -developed the theory of phrenology

Describe the case study of Henry Molaison (H.M.)

-fell off bike and began having seizures -surgery to stop seizures removed part of his brain *included what we now know as the hippocampus -after operation, was unable to store any long term memories *could remember childhood before accident but couldn't make any new declarative memories *never lost ability to learn new motor skills

What were the ideas of G. Stanley Hall?

-focused on development and education -was strongly influenced by evolutionary thinking -believed that as children develop, the pass through the stages that repeat the evolutionary history of the human race

Sir Frederic Bartlett

-gave people stories to remember and carefully observed the kinds of errors they made when they tried to recall them at a later time -found that research participants often remembered what should have happened or what they expected to happen rather than what actually did happen

What are the defining features of the slug Alypsia californica?

-has neurons that are ~1mm -can learn through behavioral conditioning

Why do people seek connections where there are none?

-human brain is really good at making connections -when you present people with random info, they see patterns when there aren't any

functional MRI

-measure of blood flow to areas of brain -correlational (but can be paired with experimental task)

What are some of the more important rights of nonhuman research participants?

-must ensure appropriate consideration of the animal's comfort, health, and humane treatment -can only subject an animal to pain/stress if justified and no alternate methods are available -must perform all surgical procedures under anesthesia and minimize animal's pain

How do modern psychologists view nativism and philosophical empiricism?

-neither is entirely true -still debating exactly how much influence "nature" and "nurture" each have

What are the pros/cons of TMS measurement?

-penetration is limited to 5-6 cm -minor side effects (headaches, scalp discomfort, rare chance of seizure)

What did John Broadus Watson believe?

-private experience was too vague to be an object of scientific inquiry -human behavior is powerfully influenced by the environment -goal was to predict and control behavior in ways that benefit society

What are the problems with self-reporting methods of collecting data?

-social desirability: saying what you think people want to hear -dishonesty -lack of insight/access to info being studied

What did René Descartes argue for?

-the body and mind are fundamentally different things (dualism) -suggested that the mind influences the body through a tiny structure near the bottom of the brain known as the pineal gland

How did Hermann von Helmholtz measure the speed of responses?

-trained participants to respond when he applied a stimulus and recorded their reaction time -found that people generally took longer to respond when their toe was stimulated than when their thigh was stimulated -estimated how long it took a nerve impulse to travel to the brain

What are 3 basic principles that all research involving human subjects should follow?

1. research should show respect for persons 2. research should be beneficial 3. research should be just

Why is the failure to sample randomly not a fatal flaw?

1. sometimes the similarity of the sample and the population doesn't matter 2. when the ability to generalize a result is important, psychologists perform a direct replication 3. sometimes the similarity of the sample and the population is simply a reasonable starting assumption

How are psychological processes adaptive?

they promote the welfare and reproduction of organisms that engage in those processes

Who brought structuralism to the U.S.?

Edward Titchener, who studied with Wundt for two years in the early 1890s

Who were among the first to think about fundamental questions about how the mind works?

Greek thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle

Who do historians generally credit the emergence of psychology to?

Wilhelm Wundt, Helmholtz's research assistant

Who developed the approach known as functionalism?

William James

Who opened the first lab exclusively devoted to psychological studies?

Wundt, at the University of Leipzig

third variable problem

a causal relationship between two variables cannot be inferred from the naturally occurring correlation between them because of the ever-present possibility of third-variable correlation

correlation coefficient

a mathematical measure of both the direction and strength of a correlation, symbolized by the letter r

What is the axon covered by in many neurons?

a myelin sheath (insulating layer of fatty material)

phrenology

a now defunct theory that specific mental abilities and characteristics are localized in specific regions of the brain

What did German psychologist Kurt Lewin argue?

a person's behavior in the world could be predicted best by understanding the person's subjective experience of the world

consciousness

a person's subjective experience of the world and mind

psychoanalytic theory

an approach developed by Freud that emphasizes the importance of unconscious mental processes in shaping feelings, thoughts, and behaviors

humanistic psychology

an approach to human nature that emphasizes the positive potential of human beings

power

an instrument's ability to detect small magnitudes of the property

What did Margaret Floy Washburn argue?

animals also have conscious mental experiences

structuralism

applying methods of physiology to psychology

behaviorism

approach that advocated that psychologists restrict themselves to the scientific study of objectively observable behavior

demand characteristics

aspects of an observational setting that cause people to behave as they think someone else wants or expects

What does Freud's psychoanalysis theory focus on?

bringing unconscious material into conscious awareness to better understand psychological disorders

How did French physician Franz Joseph Gall think that brains and minds were linked?

by size rather than glands

absolutism

culture makes little to no difference for most psychological phenomena

Gestalt psychology

emphasizes that we often perceive the whole rather than the sum of its parts

What did Noam Chomsky point out?

even young children generate sentences they have never heard before and therefore could not possibly be learning language by reinforcement

What is the gold standard of science?

experimentation

operationalizing

explaining what you mean by something and what you'll do

What did Sigmund Freud theorize?

many of the problems of the hysteric patients he studied could be traced to the effects of painful childhood experiences that the person could not remember

electroencephalography (EEG)

measures electrical activity in the brain

What did Plato argue in favor of?

nativism

What is one way that psychologists avoid the problem of demand characteristics?

naturalistic observation

Why did the psychoanalytic theory become quite controversial?

suggested that understanding a person's thoughts, feelings, and behavior required a thorough exploration of the person's early sexual experiences and unconscious sexual desires

empiricism

the belief that accurate knowledge can be acquired through observation

dualism

the belief that while bodies are physical, minds are immaterial

What did the Holocaust lead psychologists to examine?

the conditions under which people can influence each other to think and act in inhuman or irrational ways

Skinner's principle of reinforcement

the consequences of behavior determine whether it will be more or less likely to occur again

What do all of our subjective experiences arise from?

the electrical and chemical activity of our brains

synapse

the junction or region between the axon of one neuron and the dendrites or cell body of another

What did British psychologist Donald Broadbent show by studying what happens when people try to pay attention to several things at once?

the limited capacity to handle incoming info is a fundamental feature of human cognition

What did British philosopher Thomas Hobbes argue?

the mind and body aren't different things at all: the mind is what the body does

What were Broca and Flourens the first to demonstrate?

the mind is grounded in a material substance, the brain

axon

the part of a neuron that carries info to other neurons, muscles, or glands

cell body/soma

the part of a neuron that coordinates information- processing tasks and keeps the cell alive

dendrite

the part of a neuron that receives info from other neurons and relays it in the cell body

What did Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget study?

the perceptual and cognitive errors of children in order to gain insight into the nature and development of the human mind

nativism

the philosophical view that certain kinds of knowledge are innate

functionalism

the study of the purpose mental processes serve in enabling people to adapt to their environment

reliability

the tendency for an instrument to produce the same measurement whenever it is used to measure the same thing

Sir Francis Bacon argued that two ancient and all-too-human tendencies are the hallmarks of natural/intuitive thinking and therefore the enemies of critical thinking. What were these tendencies?

the tendency to see what we expect or want to see and the tendency to ignore what we can't see

philosophical empiricism

the view that all knowledge is acquired through experience