AP Psych Commonly Missed Terms Quiz 2
Confirmation bias
A tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence
Proactive interference
Difficulty in learning new information because of already existing information
Negative reinforcement
Increasing behaviors by stopping or reducing negative stimuli, such as shock. (Not a punishment)
Explicit memory
Memory of facts and experiences that one can consciously know and "declare." Also known as declarative memory
Learned helplessness
The hopelessness and passive resignation an animal or human learns when unable to avoid repeated aversive events
Discrimination
(1) in classical conditioning, the learned ability to distinguish between a conditioned stimulus and stimuli that do not signal an unconditioned stimulus or (2) unjustifiable negative behavior toward a group and its members
Disorders
A mental or behavioral pattern or anomaly that causes either suffering or an impaired ability to function in ordinary life (disability), and which is not a developmental or social norm.
Yerkes-Dodson Law
An empirical relationship between arousal and performance dictating that performance increases with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a point
Cocktail party effect
Describes the the ability to focus your hearing on one specific thing even though noise is all around you
Morpheme
In a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or a part of a word (such as a prefix)
Phoneme
In language, the smallest distinctive sound unit
Defense mechanism
In psychoanalytical theory, the ego's protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality
Misinformation effect
Incorporating misleading information into one's memory of an event
Declarative memory
Same as explicit memory
State-dependent memory
The phenomenon through which memory retrieval is most efficient when an individual is in the same state of consciousness as they were when the memory was formed
Recency effect
The principle that the most recently presented items or experiences will most likely be remembered best
Generalization
The tendency, once a response has been conditioned, for stimuli similar to the conditioned stimulus to elicit similar responses
