A.P. Psychology Unit 1-14 Vocabulary

Choice Blindness

An equally astonishing form of inattention. App: When someone is asked to taste two jars of jam, indicate their preference, and then tasted again their preferred jam and explained their preference. The thing is they don't notice that they were actually "retasting" their nonpreferred jam.

Informed consent

An ethical principle that research participants be told enough to enable them to choose whether they wish to participate. App: Brenda and Sanjay told their test subjects what was going to happen during the experiment before they agreed to be in it.

Punishment

An event that tends to decrease the behavior that it follows. App: Bill use to bite Ana and he got yelled at but when he does not bite Ana, Bill gets a sticker.

Reciprocity Norm

An exception that people will help, not hurt, those who have helped them. App: Tally was a homeless man and he found a backpack with $330 lost by an Arizona State University student going to buy a car. Tally gave it to the social service agency where he volunteered. To reciprocate Tally's help, the student thanked him with a reward.

Social-Responsibility Norm

An expectation that people will help those needing their help. App: People who attend weekly religious services often are admonished to practice the social-responsibility norm, and sometimes they do.

Double blind procedure

An experimental procedure in which both the research participants and the research staff are ignorant about whether the research participants have received the treatment or a placebo. Commonly used in drug-evaluation studies. App: Justin was on commercials where he was asked which beverage tastes better and he was not told which cup contains the target beverage.

Theory

An explanation using an integrated set of principles that organizes observations and predicts behaviors or events. App: Erikson did a bunch of experiments and formed the Erikson's Theory of Psychosocial Development.

Inferiority Complex

An idea proposed by Adler; an unrealistic feeling of general inadequacy caused by actual or supposed inferiority in one sphere, sometimes marked by aggressive behavior in compensation. App: Adler believed that much of our behavior is driven by efforts to conquer childhood inferiority feelings that trigger our strivings for superiority and power.

Phi Phenomenon

An illusion of movement created when two or more adjacent lights blink on and off in quick succession. App: Lighted signs exploit this with a succession of lights that creates the impression of, say, a moving arrow.

Afterimages

An impression of a vivid sensation (especially a visual image) retained after the stimulus has ceased. App: After looking at a flag that is yellow areas, green areas, and black areas, then looking at something white, one will see the flag with blue to fill in the yellow areas, red to fill in the green areas, and white to fill in the black areas.

Anterograde Amnesia

An inability to form new memories. App: A man was involved in a car crash and was hospitalized. After he woke up, he could not form new memories.

Retrograde Amnesia

An inability to retrieve information from one's past. App: A woman was involved in an accident and was hospitalized. After she woke up, she could not remember any thing from her past.

Long-Term Potentiation (LTP)

An increase in a cell's firing potential after brief, rapid stimulation. Believed to be a neural basis for learning and memory. App: Several lines of evidence confirm that LTP is a physical basis for memory.

Personality

An individual's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. App: We have considered biological influences on personality, personality development across life span, and personality related aspects of learning

Primary Reinforcer

An innately reinforcing stimulus, such as one that satisfies a biological need. App: Getting food when hungry or having a painful headache go away is innately satisfying.

Biopsychosocial approach

An integrated approach that incorporates biological, psychological, and social-cultural levels of analysis. App: Alex saw that he could be a pro musician because his family were musicians. He learns better with songs and he has a teacher that can teach him every genre of music.

Unstructured Interview

An interview in which questions are not prearranged. App: Traditional unstructured interviews do provide a sense of someone's personality- their expressiveness, warmth, and verbal ability, for example.

Structured Interviews

An interview process that asks the same job-relevant questions of all applicants, each of whom is rated on established scales. App: Unlike casual conversation aimed at getting a feel for someone, this offers a disciplined method of collecting information.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

An introspective self-report questionnaire designed to indicate psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. App: It has been taken by more than 2 million people a year, mostly for counseling, leadership training, and work-team development.

Relative Size

An object that appears larger than another object believed to be of the same size appears closer. App: There are two rectangular buildings. The closer one see bigger than the farther one but in actuality, they both are the same size.

Token Economy

An operant conditioning procedure in which people earn a token of some sort for exhibiting a desired behavior and can later exchange the tokens for various privileges or treats. App: When people display appropriate behavior, such as getting out of bed, washing, dressing, eating, talking coherently, cleaning up their rooms, or playing cooperatively, they receive a token or plastic coin as a positive reinforcer.

Shaping

An operant conditioning procedure in which reinforcers guide behavior toward closer and closer approximations of the desired behavior. App: One could make a hungry rat press a bar which would gradually guide the rat's actions toward the desired behavior.

Hollow face illusion

An optical illusion in which the perception of a concave mask of a face appears as a normal convex face. App: People will mistakenly perceive the inside of a mask as a protruding face.

Critical Period

An optimal period early in the life of an organism when exposure to certain stimuli or experiences produces normal development. App: In many animals, attachments based on familiarity form during a critical period.

Habituation

An organism's decreasing response to a stimulus with repeated exposure to it. App: If a sea slug's withdrawal response diminishes when squirted by water in choppy water.

Gestalt

An organized whole. Gestalt psychologists emphasized our tendency to integrate pieces of information into meaningful wholes. App: The individual elements of a Necker cube are nothing but eight blue circles, each containing three converging white lines. When we view these elements all together, however, we see a cube that sometimes reverses direction.

Transgender

An umbrella term describing people whose gender identity or expression differs from that associated with their birth sex. App: Some transgender persons express their gender identity by dressing as a person of the other biological sex typically would.

Norm

An understood rule for accepted and excepted behavior. Norms prescribe "proper" behavior. App: Many South Asians use only the right hand's fingers for eating.

Norm

An understood rule for accepted and expected behaviors. Norms prescribe "proper" behaviors. App: Each cultural group evolves its own norms - the rules for accepted and expected behavior.

Prejudice

An unjustifiable and usually negative attitude toward a group and its members. Prejudice generally involves stereotyped beliefs, negative feelings, and a predisposition to discriminatory action. App: Prejudice means "prejudgment."

Information Processing Models

Analogies that compare human memory to a computer's operations. App: It's basically steps that detail the process of turning information into memories.

Evolutionary Perspective

Analysis about how feeling facilitated the survival of our ancestors' genes; How nature selects traits that promote the perpetuation of one's genes. App: Fear helped Donna choose to run away from danger.

Bottom-up Processing

Analysis that begins with sensory receptors and works up to the brain's integration of sensory information. App: It enables our sensory systems to detect lines, angles, and colors that form flower and leaves.

Stimulus

Any event or situation that evokes a response. App: We learn that a flash of lightning signals an impending crack of thunder; when lightning flashes nearby, we start to brace ourselves.

Aggression

Any physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt or destroy. App: Prejudice hurts but aggression often hurts more.

Aggression

Any physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt or destroy. App: In surveys, men admit to more aggression than women do.

Psychophysiological Illness

Any stress-related physical illness. APP: Some examples are hypertension and headaches.

Behavior

Anything an organism does - any action we can observe and record. App: Stuart studies everyday after school.

Somatosensory cortex

Area at the front of the parietal lobes that registers and processes body touch and movement sensations. App: Stimulate a point on the top of this band of tissue and a person may report being touched on the shoulder; stimulate some point on the side and the person may feel something on the face.

Association areas

Areas of the cerebral cortex that are not involved in primary motor or sensory functions; rather, they are involved in higher mental functions such as learning, remembering, thinking, and speaking. App: In this regions, neurons are busy with higher mental functions- many of the tasks that make us human.

Spillover Effect

Arousal spills over from one event to the next APP: Schachter and Singer injected college men with the hormone epinephrine which triggers feelings of arousal to explore spillover effect

Infantile Amnesia

As adults, our conscious memory of our first three years is blank. App: In one study, events children experienced and discussed with their mother at age 3 were 60 percent remembered at age 7 but only 34 percent remembered at age 9.

Exhaustion

As time passes with no relief from stress. Your body's reserves begin to run out. APP At exhaustion, you are more vulnerable to illness or even in extreme cases death.

Random assignment

Assigning participants to experimental and control conditions by chance, thus minimizing preexisting differences between those assigned to the different groups. App: Brandon used putting names into a hat and picking them to choose who would be in the experimental group and the control group.

Ethnocentrism

Assuming the superiority of one's ethnic group. App: It is an example of prejudice.

Emotion-Focused Coping

Attempting to alleviate stress by avoiding or ignoring a stressor and attending to emotional needs related to one's stress reaction. App: If we cannot get along with a family member no matter what we do, we may search for stress relief by reaching out to friends for support and comfort.

Problem-Focused Coping

Attempting to alleviate stress directly-by changing the stressor or the way we interact with that stressor. App: We tend to use problem-focused strategies when we feel a sense of control over a situation and think we can change the circumstances, or at least change ourselves to deal with the circumstances more capably.

Dispositional Attribution

Attributing the behavior to the person's stable, enduring traits. App: A student fails an examination. The student's parents think it is because of the student not paying enough attention in her studies.

Situational Attribution

Attributing the behavior to the situation. App: Veronica trips on the sidewalk and drops her laptop. The laptop broke and Veronica's mom blames the sidewalk for being too uneven.

Source Amnesia

Attributing to the wrong source an event we have experienced, heard about, read about, or imagined. (Also called source misattribution.) Source amnesia, along with the misinformation effect, is at the heart of many false memories. App: Bob thought that he was robbed by a thief after reading about many burglaries when he just misplaced his wallet.

Auditory Nerve

Axons of hair cells converge to form this nerve; sends neural messages (via the thalamus) to the auditory cortex in the brain's temporal lobe. App: It sends impulses to the thalamus.

Semantically (Semantic Encoding)

Based on the meaning of the words. App: "The girl put the _______ on the table" the blank should be filled in with the word doll and people remembered it better.

Two-Word Stage

Beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly in two-word statements

Babbling Stage

Beginning at about 4 months, the stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language.

Respondent Behavior

Behavior that occurs as an automatic response to some stimulus. App: When someone jumps out of hiding and shouts "Boo!," the person or people walking scream in fright.

Operant Behavior

Behavior that operates on the environment, producing consequences. App: People associate one's behavior that act on the environment to produce rewarding or punishing stimuli.

Counterconditioning

Behavior therapy procedures that use classical conditioning to evoke new responses to stimuli that are triggering unwanted behaviors;include exposure therapies and aversive conditioning. App: Counterconditioning pairs the trigger stimulus (in case, the enclosed space of the elevator) with a new response (relaxation) that is incompatible with fear.

Exposure Therapies

Behavioral techniques, such as systematic desensitization and virtual reality exposure therapy, that treat anxieties by exposing people (in imagination or actual situations) to the things they fear and avoid. App: As people can habituate to the sound of a train passing their new apartment, so, with repeated exposure, can they become less anxiously responsive to things that once petrified them.

Subliminal

Below one's absolute threshold for conscious awareness. App: Under certain conditions, you can be affected by stimuli so weak that you don't consciously notice them.

Maturation

Biological growth processes that enable orderly changes in behavior, relatively uninfluenced by experience. App: We stand before walking.

Genetic relatives

Biological parents and siblings. App: For any given trait, we can therefore ask whether adopted children are more like their biological parents, who contributed their genes, or their adoptive parents, who contribute a home environment.

Resolution phase

Body gradually returns to its unaroused state as the engorged genital blood vessels release their accumulated blood. App: During this phase, male enters refractory period

Sigmund Freud

Born 1856 and died 1939; father of the Psychoanalytic School of Psychology; emphasized the way our unconscious thought processes and our emotional responses to childhood experiences affect our behavior; divided personality into id, ego, superego; proposed five psychosexual stages: id, ego, and superego; proposed five psychosexual stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital; used free association. App: He developed defense mechanisms: sublimation, repression, regression, reaction formation, projection, rationalization, displacement, and denial.

Howard Gardner

Born 1943 and is still alive; proposed eight distinct intelligences: naturalistic, linguistic, logical mathematical, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, body kinesthetic, and spatial. App: He says the computer programmer, the poet, the street-smart adolescent who becomes a crafty executive, and the basketball team's point guard exhibit different kinds of intelligence.

Robert Sternberg

Born 1949 and is still alive; proposed a triarchic theory of three intelligences - analytical (academic problem solving) intelligence, creative intelligence, and practical intelligence; developed five (expertise, imaginative thinking skills, venturesome personality, intrinsic motivation and a creative environment) components of creativity. App: He agreed with Gardner's idea of multiple intelligence.

Francis Bacon

Born in 1561 and died in 1626. On of the founders of modern science. He has influence in experiments of today's psychological science. He was fascinated by the human mind and its fallings. He wrote Novum Organuum and foresaw research findings on our noticing and remembering events that confirm our beliefs. English psychologist

John Locke

Born in 1632 and died in 1704; British philosopher; suggested at birth the mind is a tabula rasa (blank slate) on which experience writes; it is through our experiences we learn to perceive the world. App: He helped form modern empiricism.

John Locke

Born in 1632. He is a British political philosopher. He wrote a one-page essay on "our own abilities" for an upcoming discussion with friends. After 20 years and hundreds of pages, he had completed one of history greatest late paper, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in which he famously argued that the mind at birth is a tubula rasa- "a blank slate" - on which experience writes. This idea helps form modern empiricism.

William Molyneux

Born in 1656 and died in 1698; he wondered whether " a man born blind, and now adult, taught his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere" could, if made to see, visually distinguish the two. App: His hypothetical case was put to the test with a few dozen adults who, though blind by birth, have gained sight. They could not visually recognize objects that were familiar by touch.

Immanuel Kant

Born in 1724 and died in 1804; German philosopher. App: He maintained that knowledge comes from our inborn ways of organizing sensory experience.

Ernst Weber

Born in 1795 and died in 1878; developed Weber's law regarding the constant percentage of the difference threshold. App: He noted this law in the nineteenth century.

Gustav Fechner

Born in 1801 and died in 1887; German scientist and philosopher; studied the concept of absolute thresholds. App: He developed the field of psychophysics.

Charles Darwin

Born in 1809 and died in 1882; pondered the incredible species variation he encountered; influenced William James; Wrote On the Origin of Species; it explained the evolutionary process of natural selection; English biologist; explained diversity in animals by proposing the evolutionary process of natural selection; believed that nature selects traits that best enable an organism to survive and reproduce in a particular environment. App: His principle of natural selection to understand the roots of behavior and mental processes.

Francis Galton

Born in 1822 and died in 1911; believed intelligence was purely hereditary; developed a rudimentary intelligence test. App: He wondered if it might be possible to measure "natural ability" and to encourage those of high ability to mate with one another.

Phineas Gage

Born in 1823 and died in 1860; railroad worker who, in 1848, had a tapping iron shot through his brain; he survived but developed emotional difficulties; he became irritable, profane, and dishonest after recovering from his injury. App: He got a job as a stagecoach driver.

William James

Born in 1842 and died in 1910; American philosopher - psychologist; functionalist; wrote one of the first introductory psychology texts, Principles of Psychology. App: When we ride a bike after a lot of practice, it becomes semi-automatic, freeing us to focus our attention on other things. As we do so, we experience what the early psychologist William James called a continuous "stream of consciousness," which each moment flowing into the next.

Ivan Pavlov

Born in 1849 and died in 1936; Russian physiologist; pioneered the study of learning. App: He discovered classical conditioning in his studies of the digestion in dogs.

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Born in 1850 and died in 1909; German psychologist; developed the forgetting (retention) curve by learning nonsense syllables; he discovered the spacing effect. App: He was the first person to describe the learning curve.

Sigmund Freud

Born in 1856 and died in 1939; Australian psychologist; His views on unconscious sexual conflicts and the mind's defenses against its own wishes and impulses; Father of the Psychoanalytic School of Psychology; he discovered manifest content and latent content. App: He made the Freud's wish-fulfillment dream theory.

Alfred Binet

Born in 1857 and died in 1911; developed the first modern intelligence test for the French school system measuring a child's mental age (Stanford-Binet); assumed intelligence increases with age. App: Binet personally leaned toward an environmental explanation.

Charles Spearman

Born in 1863 and died in 1945; proposed a general intelligence (g); helped develop factor analysis. App: Spearman also found that those who score high in one area, such as verbal intelligence, typically score higher than average in other areas, such as spatial or reasoning ability.

Albert Adler

Born in 1870 and died in 1937; Neo-Freudian; stressed importance of striving for superiority and power; believed social factors not sexual factors are more important in child development; birth order, inferiority and superiority complex, compensation. App: He struggled to overcome childhood illnesses and accidents.

Edward Thorndike

Born in 1874 and died in 1949; American behaviorists; studied how cats got out of a "puzzle box"; developed law of effect - behavior is controlled by its consequence. App: B.F. Skinner elaborated on Thorndike's law of effect.

Carl Jung

Born in 1875 and died in 1961; Neo-Freudian; divided the unconscious mind into the collective and personal unconscious. App: He believed we have archetypes and because of the collective unconscious explains why, many people, spiritual concern are deeply rooted and different cultures have similar myths and images.

Louis Terman

Born in 1877 and died in 1956; revised Binet's test (Stanford-Binet intelligence test) for use in the United States; conducted a longitudinal study of high intelligence children. App: He extended the upper end of the test's range from teenagers to "superior adults."

John B. Watson

Born in 1878 and died in 1958; American behaviorist; dismissed introspection and redefined psychology as " the scientific study of observable behavior";with his associate (Rosalie Rayner), conditioned "Baby Albert" to fear a white rat; father of behaviorism. App: He suggested how people respond to stimuli (behavior) rather than inner thoughts, feelings, and motives.

Karen Horney

Born in 1885 and died in 1952; Neo-Freudian; suggested childhood anxiety triggers our desire for love and security; among the first to challenge the obvious male bias in Freud's theories; believed people feel anxious because they feel isolated and helpless in a hostile world. App: She countered "penis envy" for women with "womb envy" for men.

L.L. Thurstone

Born in 1887 and died 1955; identified seven clusters of primary abilities. App: He was one of Spearman's early opponents.

David Wechsler

Born in 1896 and died in 1981; developed the Wechsler adult intelligence scale (WAIS) and the Wechsler intelligence scale for children (WISC). App: The WAIS contains verbal and performance (nonverbal) subtests.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

Born in 1897 and died in 1941; American linguist; developed theory of language determinism suggesting language is a key determinant of thinking.

Carl Rogers

Born in 1902 and died in 1987; humanist; believed people are basically good and endowed with self-actualizing tendencies; developed person centered perspective (also called client centered perspective); a growth promoting climate requires three conditions: genuineness: people are genuine and open with their feelings, acceptance: people show unconditional positive regard towards others (an attitude of total acceptance towards another person), empathy: they share an mirror others' feelings and reflect their meanings; drew attention to ways the current environmental influences can nurture or limit our growth potential; stressed the importance of having our needs for love and acceptance satisfied; develop client centered therapy which focuses on the person's conscious self-perceptions; a nondirective therapy in which the therapist listens without judging or interpreting; stressed therapist should exhibit acceptance, genuineness, and empathy; stressed active listening; empathetic listening to which the listener echoes restates and clarifies what the client says; therapist should show unconditional positive regard. App: A therapist should show a caring accepting non-judgmental attitude.

B.F. Skinner

Born in 1904 and died in 1990; American behaviorist; dismissed introspection and redefined psychology as " the scientific study of observable behavior"; studied how consequences shape behavior; used operant chamber. App: He believed external influences shape behavior NOT internal thoughts or feelings.

Ernest Hilgard

Born in 1904 and died in 2001; American psychologist; discovered the dissociative theory - hypnosis involves both social influence and a dual processing state where consciousness is split allowing thoughts and behaviors to occur simultaneously called dissociation. App: He tested whether a hypnotized person would exhibit pain when his or her arm was placed in an ice bath. But asked to press a key if some part of her felt the pain, she did so. To Hilgard, this was evidence of dissociation or divided consciousness.

Raymond Cattell

Born in 1905 and died in 1998; 16 Trait Personality Inventory/factor analysis; surface traits appear in clusters. App: He said solving novel logic problems- decreases beginning in the twenties and thirties, slowly up to age 75 or so, then more rapidly, especially after age 85.

Solomon Asch

Born in 1907 and died in 1996; studied conformity and how group pressure distorted judgement; subjects conformed in their perception of line lengths when confederates in the group purposely gave the incorrect answers. App: He did the experiment in 1955 and the subjects followed the majority at least once.

Abraham Maslow

Born in 1908 and died in 1970; humanist; overall need to fulfill one's potential; believed psychology should study healthy and creative people rather than troubled ones; developed a hierarchy of needs theory (physiological, safety, belongingness and love, esteem, self-actualization, and self-transcendence needs); drew attention to ways the current environmental influences can nurture or limit our growth potential. App: He stressed the importance of having our needs for love and acceptance satisfied.

Dimitri Belyaev

Born in 1917 and died in 1985; Russian scientist; wondered how our human ancestors had domesticated dogs from their equally wild wolf forebears. App: He domesticated foxes in a longitudinal study lasting over 30 generations.

Leon Festinger

Born in 1919 and died in 1989; developed the cognitive dissonance theory where we act to reduce the discomfort (dissonance) we feel when two of our thoughts (cognition) are inconsistent with each other. App: He also found the social comparison theory.

George A. Miller

Born in 1920 and died in 2012; American cognitive psychologist; a founder of the cognitive psychology field; proposed short-term memory is limited to seven +/- two bits of information App: He found the importance of the number 7.

Torsten Wiesel

Born in 1924 and is still alive; did work on feature detectors; received a Nobel Prize for their work on feature detectors. App: He worked with David Hubel.

Albert Bandura

Born in 1925 and is still alive; Ukrainian psychologist; social-cognitive perspective (social learning); suggested people learn through observation and modeling; researcher of observational learning by studying children imitating adults hitting a "Bobo doll"; suggested observers experience vicarious reinforcement and vicarious punishment when observing others; propose the social cognitive perspective in which behavior is influenced by the interaction between people's traits and their social context; reciprocal determinism. App: He found the interacting influences of behavior, internal cognition, and the environment.

Albert Bandura

Born in 1925 and is still alive; social-cognitive perspective (social learning); suggested people learn through observation and modeling; researcher of observational learning by studying children imitating adults hitting a "Bobo doll"; suggested observers experience vicarious reinforcement and vicarious punishment when observing others; propose the social cognitive perspective in which behavior is influenced by the interaction between people's traits and their social context; reciprocal determinism. App: he found the interacting influences of behavior, internal cognition, and the environment.

David Hubel

Born in 1926 and died in 2013; did work on feature detectors; received a Nobel Prize for their work on feature detectors. App: He worked with Torsten Wiesel.

Noam Chomsky

Born in 1928 and is still alive; American linguist, philosopher, and cognitive scientist; Studied innate language development and universal grammar.

Richard Atkinson

Born in 1929 and is still alive; American professor; proposed an information processing model in order to explain our memory forming processes; proposed original short-term/long term memory theory. App: He worked alongside Richard Shiffrin to create this model

Stanley Milgram

Born in 1933 and died in 1984; studied obedience where subjects, following the orders of an experimenter, "shocked" a confederate. App: 2/3 of the subjects did go all the way with the shocks though it was predicted that only 1/1000 would really do it.

Philip Zimbardo

Born in 1933 and is still alive; conducted studies in role playing where college students played the roles of prison guards and prisoners (Stanford Prison Experiment). App: He said, "When ordinary people are put in a novel, evil place, such as most prisons, Situation Win, People Lose."

Micheal Gazzaniga

Born in 1939 and is still alive; American psychologist; divided the brains of cats and monkeys in this manner with no serious ill effects. App: He and Sperry Rogers pioneered and studied split brain research helping to understand the functioning of both hemispheres.

Richard Shiffrin

Born in 1942 and is still alive; American professor proposed an information processing model to attempt to explain our memory forming processes; proposed original short-term/long term memory theory. App: He worked alongside Richard Atkinson to create this model

Martin Seligman

Born in 1942 and still alive; has called for research on human strengths and human flourishing; positive psychology: the scientific study of optimal human functioning; aims to discover and promote strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive. App: He researched learned helplessness in animals

Paul Costa

Born in 1942 and still alive; personality psychologist; developed Big Five Trait theory of conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness, and extraversion. App: He worked with Robert McCrae.

Elizabeth Loftus

Born in 1944 and is still alive; American cognitive psychologist; studied how eyewitness memories can be influenced by questioning; researched how information can be incorporated into one's memory (misinformation effect). App: She conducted extensive research on the malleability of human memory.

Carol Dweck

Born in 1946 and is still alive; reports believing intelligence is biologically set and unchanging can lead to a "fixed mindset"; believing intelligence is changeable, a "growth mindset" results in a focus of learning and growing. App: She developed interventions that effectively teach young teens that the brain is like a muscle that grows stronger with use as neuron connections grow.

Robert McCrae

Born in 1949 and still alive; personality psychologist; developed Big Five Trait theory of conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness, and extraversion. App: He worked with Paul Costa.

Authoritative

Both demanding and responsive APP- Exert control by setting rules and enforcing them but also explain reasons for rules

NREM-1

Brief (about 5 minutes) sleep; may cause hallucinations and hypnagogic sensations. App: The waves are medium speed and size in EEG scans.

Nerves

Bundled axons that form neural "cables" connecting the central nervous system with muscles, glands, and sense organs. App: Bundles a million axons into a single cable carrying the messages each eye sends to the brain.

Sleep Spindles

Bursts of rapid, rhythmic brain wave activity. App: One relaxes more deeply and begin about 20 minutes of NREM-2 sleep, with its periodic sleep spindles.

Carcinogens

Cancer causing substances App: It was shown in a rat study on how stress can weaken immune system. Carcinogens are present in tobacco.

Collective Unconscious

Carl Jung's concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species' history. App: He believed we also have a collective unconscious, or archetypes, derived from our species' universal experiences.

Glial cells (glia)

Cells in the nervous system that support, nourish, and protect neurons; they may also play a role in learning and thinking. App: Glial cells are worker bees because they provide nutrients and insulate the myelin, guide neural connections, and mop up ions and neurotransmitters.

Therapeutic Lifestyle Change

Changes to life-style such as aerobic exercise, adequate sleep, light exposure, social connection, anti-rumination, and nutritional supplements that aim to relieve stress and depression

Hormones

Chemical messengers that are manufactured by the endocrine glands travels through the bloodstream and affect other tissues. App: When hormones act on the brain, they influence our interest in sex, food, and aggression

Neurotransmitters

Chemical messengers that cross the synaptic gap betwwen neurons. When released by the synapse and blind to receptor sites o the receiving neuron, thereby influencing whethere that neuron will generate a neural impulse. App: Within 1/1000th of a second, the neurotransmitter molecules cross the synaptic gap and bind to receptor sites on the receiving neuron.

Animistic Thinking

Children in Piaget's preoperational stage believe that inanimate objects, such as the sun, flowers, and clouds, have feelings. App: For example, a preschool child demonstrates animistic thinking when he says "The sun is happy today," or "The flowers are sad because they need water."

Competence Vs Inferiority

Children learn the pleasure of applying themselves to tasks, or they feel inferior

Acronym

Chunking information into a more familiar form by creating a word from the first letters of the to-be-remembered items. App: HOMES for the five Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior.

Belief Perseverance

Clinging to one's initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited.

Evidence-Based Practice

Clinical decision making that integrates the best available research with clinical expertise and patient characteristics and preferences. App: Available therapies "should be rigorously evaluated" and then applied by clinicians who are mindful of their skills and of each patient's unique situation.

State-Dependent Memory

Closely related to context-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. App: What we learn in one state- be it drunk or sober- may be more easily recalled when we are again in that state.

Lazarus

Cognitive appraisal sometimes without our awareness- defines emotion . APP: The sound is "just the wind."

Aaron Beck

Cognitive therapist who believes that changing people's thinking can change their functioning. He sought to reverse clients' catastrophizing beliefs about themselves, their situations, and their futures.

Addiction

Compulsive craving of drugs or certain behaviors (such as gambling) despite known adverse consequences. App: In recent years, teens have become addicted to Snapchat so they cannot stop using it.

Rumination

Compulsive fretting; overthinking about our problems and their causes. App: It- staying focused on a problem (thanks to the continuous firing of a frontal lobe area that sustains attention)- can be adaptive.

Schemas

Concepts that organize and allow us to interpret unfamiliar information. App: Without the cues of pink or blue, people will struggle over whether to call the new baby a "he" or "she." But told an infant is "David," people (especially children) may perceive "him" as bigger stronger than if the same infant is called "Diana".

Person-Situation Controversy

Conflict concerning whether the person or the situation is more influential in determining a persons behavior/personality. App: When we explore this person-situation controversy, we look for genuine personality traits that persist over time and across situations.

The Big 5 Factor

Consists of conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness, extraversion; it provides the most useful information about personality variation. App: Paul Costa, Robert McCrae, and others shows that where we fall on these five dimensions.

Reconsolidation

Constructing memories as one encodes them, and every time one "replay" a memory, one replace the original with a slightly modified version. App: To some degree, "all memory is false."

Substance Use Disorder

Continued substance craving and use despite significant life disruption and/or physical risk. App: Substance use disorder can result in changes in brain circuits and the changes may persist after quitting use of the substance (thus leading to strong cravings when exposed to people and situations that triggers memories of drug use).

Self-regulating

Controlling or maintaining the rate or speed of (a machine or process) so that it operates properly itself without intervention from external bodies. App: Rather than acting as blueprints that lead to the same result no matter the context.

Broca's Area

Controls language expression; an area of the frontal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere, that directs the muscle movements involved speech

Wernicke's Area

Controls language reception- a brain area involved in language comprehension and expression; usually in the left temporal lobe.

Transduction

Conversion of one form of energy into another. In sensation, the transforming of stimulus energies, such as sights, sounds, and smells, into neural impulses our brain can interpret. App: To receive senses, we go through three stages: receiving, transforming, and delivering the information to the brain.

Social Script

Culturally modeled guide for how to act in various situations. App: When we find ourselves in new situations, uncertain how to behave, we rely on social scripts.

Habituation

Decreasing responsiveness with repeated stimulation. As infants gain familiarity with repeated exposure to a visual stimulus, their interest wanes and they look away sooner. App: The novel stimulus gets attention when first presented. With repetition, the response weakens.

NREM-3

Deep sleep state; about 30 minutes; hard to awaken; sleepwalking may occur; bedwetting also may occur; can miss thunder during the night. App: The waves are called delta waves and they are larger and slower than NREM-2 waves.

Intelligence Quotient (IQ)

Defined originally as the ratio of mental age (ma) to chronological age (ca) multiplied by 100 (thus, IQ=(ma/ca) x 100). On contemporary intelligence tests, the average performance for a given age is assigned a score of 100, with scores assigned to relative performance above or below average. App: The original IQ formula worked fairly well for children but not adults.

Standardization

Defining uniform testing procedures and meaningful scores by comparison with the performance of a pretested group. App: When one takes a test following the same procedures, one's score can e compared with the sample's scores to determine you position relative to others.

Monocular Cues

Depth cues, such as interposition and linear perspective, available to either eye alone. App: With only one eye, the images casted on the right and left retinas won't have much difference.

Binocular Cues

Depth cues, such as retinal disparity, that depend on the use of two eyes. App: Because a human's eyes are 2 and half inches apart, one's retinas receive slightly different images of the world.

Attributional Style

Describes how they tend to, often unconsciously, explain various life events to themselves. App: Students whose attributional style is pessimistic - who attribute poor performance to their lack of ability or to situations enduringly beyond their control.

Amplitude (audition)

Determines a sound's loudness. App: The higher the amplitude, the louder the sound.

PYY

Digestive tract hormone; sends "I'm not hungry" signals to the brain. App: PYY is secreted into the blood by cells lining the lower small intestine (the ileum) and the colon.

Sensory Adaptation

Diminished sensitivity as a consequence of constant stimulation. App: When we are constantly exposed to a stimulus that does not change, we become less aware of it because our nerve cells fire less frequently.

Projection

Disguising one's own threatening impulses by attributing them to others. App: "The thief thinks everyone else is a thief" (an El Salvadoran saying).

Neophobia

Dislike of things unfamiliar. App: This neophobia surely was adaptive for our ancestors by protecting them from potentially toxic substances.

Dissociative Disorders

Disorders in which conscious awareness becomes separated (dissociated) from previous memories, thoughts, and feelings. App: These disorders of consciousness, in which a person appears to experience a sudden loss of memory or change in identity, often in response to an overwhelmingly stressful situation.

Neural Activity Theory

Dream theory that says "REM sleep triggers neural activity that evokes random visual memories, which our sleeping brain weaves into stories." Critical consideration is that "the individual's brain is weaving the stories, which still tells us something about the dreamer." App: Dreams are the brain's attempt to make sense of random activity.

Freud's Wish-Fulfillment Theory

Dream theory that says "dreams provide a "psychic safety valve"- expressing otherwise unacceptable feelings; contain manifest (remembered) content and a deeper layer of latent content- a hidden meaning." Critical consideration is that it "lacks any scientific support; dreams may be interpreted in many different ways." App: Adult dreams could be "traced back by analysis to erotic wishes." Thus, a gun might be a disguised representation of a penis.

Cognitive Development Theory

Dream theory that says that "dream content reflects dreamers' cognitive development- their knowledge and understanding." Critical consideration is that it "does not address the neuroscience of dreams. App: Dreams overlap with waking cognition and feature coherent speech. They simulate reality by drawing on our concepts and knowledge.

Information Processing

Dream theory that says that "dreams help us sort out the day's events and consolidate our memories." The critical consideration is that we sometimes dream about things we have not experienced. App: People who hear unusual phrases or learn to find hidden visual images before bedtime remember less the next morning if awakened every time they begin REM sleep than they do if awakened during other sleep stages.

Physiological Function Dream Theory

Dream theory that says that "regular brain simulation from REM sleep may help develop and preserve neural pathways." Critical consideration is that "this does not explain why we experience meaningful dreams." App: Infants, whose neural networks are fast developing, spend much of their abundant sleep time in REM sleep.

Depressants

Drugs (such as alcohol, barbiturates, and opiates) that reduce neural activity and slow body functions. App: It is a type of psychoactive drug.

Stimulants

Drugs (such as caffeine, nicotine, and the more powerful amphetamine) that excite neural activity and speed up body functions. App: People use stimulants to feel alert, lose weight , or boost mood or athletic performance.

Barbiturates

Drugs that depress central nervous system activity, reducing anxiety but impairing memory and judgment. App: Barbiturates such as Nembutal, Seconal, and Amytal are sometimes prescribed to induce sleep or reduce anxiety.

Amphetamines

Drugs that stimulate neural activity, causing speeded-up body functions and associated energy and mood changes. App: Common amphetamines are nicotine, cocaine, methamphetamine, and ecstasy.

Antianxiety Drugs

Drugs used to control anxiety and agitation. App: It depresses the central nervous system activity.

Antidepressant Drugs

Drugs used to treat depression, anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and posttraumatic stress disorder. (Several widely used antidepressant drugs are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors - SSRIs.) App: The label is a bit of a misnomer now that these drugs are increasingly being used to successfully treat anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder.

Antipsychotic Drugs

Drugs used to treat schizophrenia and other forms of severe thought disorder. App: An example of this drug is chlorpromazine (Thorazine) and it dampens responsiveness to irrelevant stimuli.

Functionalism

Early of school thought promoted by James and influenced by Darwin; explored how mental and behavioral processes function- how they enable the organism to adapt, survive and flourish. App: Jose and Jill had a system to make the house function; Jose would make the money and go shopping while Jill did all the housework.

Structuralism

Early school thought promoted by Wundt and Titchener; used introspection to reveal the structure of the human mind. App: Daisy saw and touched a peach and thought that it is fuzzy, soft, and yellow-orange.

Telegraphic Speech

Early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram-"go car"- using mostly nouns and verbs

Active Listening

Empathic listening in which the listener echoes, restates, and clarifies. A feature of Rogers' client-centered therapy. App: Active listening is now an accepted part of therapeutic counseling practices in many high schools, colleges, and clinics.

Sigmund Freud

Emphasized the ways emotional responses to childhood experiences and our unconscious thought processes affect our behavior. His ideas was the basis of Freudian psychology and psychodynamic approach. He had a theory about personality. His views on unconscious sexual conflicts and the mind's defenses against its own wishes and impulses. Australian psychologist

Freudian Psychology

Emphasized the ways our unconscious thought processes and our emotional responses to childhood experiences affect our behavior. App: Jack got burnt by fire when he was a child so when he grow older, he was afraid of fire.

Visual perception track

Enables us "to think about the world" - to recognize things and to plan future actions. App: It allows us to notice different details such as shape, size, color, and other dimensional aspects.

Shallow Processing

Encoding on a basic level based on the structure or appearance of words. App: Encodes basic things such as word's letters or at a more intermediate level a word's sound

Deep Processing

Encoding semantically, based on the meaning of the words; tends to yield the best retention. App: In Craik's and Tulving's experiment, the deeper, semantic processing triggered by the third question yielded a much better memory than did the shallower processing elicited by the second question or the very shallow processing elicited by question 1.

Effortful Processing

Encoding that requires attention and conscious effort. App: This is how we encode explicit memories.

Testing Effect

Enhanced memory after retrieving, rather than simply rereading, information. Also sometimes referred to as a retrieval practice effect or test-enhanced learning. App: One effective way to distribute practice is repeated self-testing, a phenomenon that researchers Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke have called the testing effect.

Testing effect

Enhanced memory after retrieving, rather than simply rereading, information. Also, sometimes referred to as a retrieval practice effect of test-enhanced learning. App: Shawn repeatedly took the SAT and he remembered most of the information.

Availability Heuristic

Estimation the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory; if instances come readily to mind (perhaps because of their vividness), we presume such events are common. App: Casinos entice us to gamble by signaling even small wins with bells and lights-making them vividly memorable-while keeping big losses soundlessly invisible.

Environment

Every external influence, from prenatal nutrition to the people and things around us. App: If someone has friends that does drugs, the person may do drugs too.

Narcissism

Excessive self-love and self-absorption. App: After tracking self-importance across the last several decades, Jean Twenge found that what she calls Generation Me is expressing more narcissism by agreeing more often with statements such as, "If I ruled the world, it would be a better place," or "I think I am a special person."

Plateau phase

Excitement peaks as breathing, pulse,and blood pressure rates continue to increase. App: The penis becomes fully engorged and some fluid may appear at its tip. Vaginal secretion continues to increase

Histrionic Personality Disorder

Exhibits dramatic or impulsive behaviors; attention-getting.

Divergent Thinking

Expands the number of possible problem solutions (creative thinking that diverges in different directions). App: Creativity tests requires this kind of thinking

Dysthymia

Experience a mildly depressed mood more often than not for at least two years.

Olfaction

Experiences of smell. App: You inhale something of whatever or whoever it is you smell.

Placebo effect

Experimental results caused by expectations alone; any effect on behavior caused by the administration of an inert substance or condition, which is assumed to be an active agent. App: Anita volunteered for a study to determine effectiveness of a new cold drug. After she took the drug, she felt better. Later, she learned that she in the placebo group.

Lateral Hypthalamus

Experiments during the 1960s suggested that activity long the sides of the hypothalamus (the lateral hypothalamus) brings on hunger. When electrically stimulated there, well-fed animals would begin to eat; when the area is destroyed, even starving animals had no interest in food. App: Late twentieth century research helped explain this behavior. If a rat is deprived of food and its blood sugar levels wane, the lateral hypothalamus will churn out the hunger triggering hormone orexin. When given orexin, rats become ravenously hungry.

Social-Culture Perspective

Explore how expressions of feelings or actions vary across cultural contexts. App: Santiago expresses happiness by giving presents to orphaned children.

Schizoid Personality Disorder

Expresses eccentric or odd behaviors; emotionless disengagement.

Edward Titchener

Faculty of Cornell University; introduced structuralism; Wundt's Student; received Ph.D. in 1892; He aimed to discover the structural elements of mind. He engaged people in self-reflective introspection, training them to report elements of their experience as they looked at a rose, listened to a metronome, smelled a scent, or tasted a substance was his method. Thought that inside information is what we know more about than we could learn from external observation.

Change Blindness

Failing to notice changes in the environment. App: By selectively riveting our attention on their left hand's dramatic act, we fail to notice changes made with their right hand during the magic trick.

Inattentional Blindness

Failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere. App: People were shown a 1-minute video in which images of three black-shirted men tossing a basketball were superimposed over the images of three white-shirted players. They were suppose to click a key whenever the black-shirts got the basketball. A woman walks through but is not seen by the experimentees.

Delusions

False beliefs, often of persecution of grandeur, that may accompany psychotic disorders. App: Those with paranoid tendencies are particularly prone to delusions of persecution.

Hallucination

False sensory experience, such as seeing something in the absence of an external visual stimulus. App: A person with schizophrenia may have hallucinations (sensory experiences without sensory stimulation).

Hallucinations

False sensory experiences, such as seeing something in the absence of an external visual stimulus. App: One may have a sensation of falling (at which moment one's body may suddenly jerk) or of floating weightlessly.

Agoraphobia

Fear or avoidance of situations, such as crowds or wide open places, where one has felt loss of control and panic. App: Given such fear, people may avoid being outside the home, in a crowd, on a bus, or on an elevator.

Avoidant Personality Disorder

Fearful sensitivity to rejection; withdrawn.

Attribute

Feelings, often influenced by our beliefs, that predispose us to respond in a particular way to objects, people, and events. App: If we believe someone is threatening us, we may feel fear and anger toward the person and act defensively.

Cilia

Fine hairlike projections from cells. App: It alerts hair cells.

Ventricles

Fluid-filled brain areas App: MRI brain scans can reveal large sections of this in some patients who have schizophrenia, a disabling psychological disorder.

Central Executive

Focuses attention on and pulls information from long-term memory to help make sense of new information. App: It's like the manager of the brain.

Neo-Freudians

Followers of Freud who formed an inner circle around their strong-minded leader; pioneering psychoanalysts. App: They accepted Freud's basic ideas but broke off from Freud in two important ways.

Emerging Adulthood

For some people in modern cultures, a period from the late teens to mid-twenties, bridging the gap between adolescent dependence and full independence and responsible adulthood. App: No longer adolescents, these emerging adults, having not yet assumed full adult responsibilities and independence, feel "in between."

B lymphocytes

Form in the bone marrow and release antibodies that fight bacterial infections. APP: It is part of immune system affected by age nutrition genetics body temperature and stress.

T lymphocytes

Form in the thymus and other lymphatic tissue and attack cancer cells, viruses, and foreign substances APP: It is part of immune system affected by age nutrition genetics body temperature and stress.

René Descartes

Frenchman who agreed with Socrates and Plato about the existence of innate ideas and mind's being "entirely distinct from body" and able to survive its death. frail but brilliant. His concept of mind forced him to conjecture, as people have ever since, how the immaterial mind and physical body communicate. A scientist and philosopher. came up with the idea of "animal spirits" was in the brain. He was right about nerve paths being important and enable reflexes. Lived in 1595 and died in 1650.

Psychoanalysis

Freud's theory of personality that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts; the techniques used in treating psychological disorders by seeking to expose and interpret unconscious tensions. App: Basic to Freud's theory was his belief that the mind is mostly hidden.

Type A

Friedman and Rosenman's term for competitive hard-driving impatient verbally aggressive and anger prone people. App: They are more likely to suffer from a heart attack.

Type B

Friedman and Rosenman's term for easygoing, relaxed people. APP: They are less likely to suffer from a heart attack.

Overgeneralizing

From Chomsky's Universal Grammar; Many errors young children make result from overgeneralizing logical grammatical rules, such as adding -ed to make the past tense. (from de Cuevas, 1990)

Mirror Neurons

Frontal lobe neurons that some scientists believe fire when performing certain actions or when observing another doing so. The brain's mirroring of another's action may enable imitation and empathy. App: When a monkey grasps, holds, or tears something, these neurons fire.

Orgasm

Further increases in breathing pulse blood pressure rates pulse rate surges from 70 to 115 beats in a minute. App: Muscle contraction all over the body

Self Esteem

Gauge of how valued and accepted we feel. App: Person with a high self esteem will be healthier

Proximity

Geographic nearness; friendship's most powerful predictor. App: Proximity provides opportunities for aggression, but much more often it breeds liking.

Individualism

Giving priority to one's own goals over group goals and defining one's identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications. App: Individualists are usually from North America, Western Europe, Australia, or New Zealand.

Collectivism

Giving priority to the goals of one's group (often one's extended family or work group) and defining one's identity accordingly. App: If set adrift in a foreign land as a collectivist, you might experience a greater loss of identity.

Task Leadership

Goal-oriented leadership that sets standards, organizes work, and focuses attention on goals. App: Being goal-oriented, task leaders are good at keeping a group centered on its mission.

GRIT

Graduated and Reciprocated Initiatives in Tension - Reduction - a strategy designed to decrease international tensions. App: In applying GRIT, one side first announces its recognition of mutual interests and its intent to reduce tensions.

Semantics

Grammatical rules guide us in deriving meaning from sounds.

Social Leadership

Group-oriented leadership that builds teamwork, mediates conflict, and offers support. App: Social leaders often have a democratic style: They delegate authority and welcome the participation of team members.

Ethics

Guidelines for proper and responsible behavior. App: Holly feeds, washes, and cleans up after her animal test subjects.

Visual action track

Guides our moment-to-moment movements. App: It helps us to walk to a fridge get out food, then put the food on a plate, after microwave it, and they eat it.

Obese

Having too much body fat; defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a body mass index of 30 or more. App: Significant obesity increases the risk of diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, gallstones, arthritis, and certain types of cancer, thus increasing health care costs and shortening life expectancy.

Wilhelm Wundt

He established the first psychology laboratory at the University of Leipzig, Germany. He was seeking to measure "atoms of the mind" - the fastest and simplest mental processes. He staffed psychology's first graduate students. Teacher of Edward Bradford Titchener and G. Stanley Hall. Father of psychology. Promoted structuralism.

Sensorineural Hearing Loss

Hearing loss caused by damage to the cochlea's receptor cells or to the auditory nerves; also called nerve deafness. App: Some diseases can cause senorineural hearing loss but more often the culprits are biological changes linked with heredity, aging, and prolonged exposure to ear-splitting noise or music.

Conduction Hearing Loss

Hearing loss caused by damage to the mechanical system that conducts sound waves to the cochlea. App: This is a less common form of hearing loss.

Insulin

Hormone secreted by pancreas; controls blood glucose. App: It allows the body to use sugar from glucose.

Lateralization

How some neural functions, or cognitive processes tend to be more dominant in one hemisphere than the other. App: It is apparent after brain damage.

Optimal Arousal Theory

Humans are motivated to maintain a comfortable level of arousal. App: Optimal arousal theory helps explain the Yerkes-Dodson law, which states that performance is best when arousal or stimulation is not too high, and not too low.

Ghrelin

Hunger-arousing hormone; partner of leptin. App: Sleep deprivation increases ghrelin production and decreases leptin production.

Leptin

Hunger-suppressing hormones; partner of ghrelin. App: Sleep deprivation increases ghrelin production and decreases leptin production.

Orexin

Hunger-triggering hormone secreted by hypothalamus. App: It also regulates wakefulness and arousal.

Aphasia

Impairment of language, usually caused by left-hemisphere damage either to Broca's area(impairing speaking) or to Wernicke's area(impairing understanding).

Social Facilitation

Improved performance on simple or well-learned tasks in the presence of others. App: Triplett's finding is called social facilitation.

Intimacy

In Erikson's theory, the ability to form close, loving relationships; a primary developmental task in late adolescence and early adulthood. App: Erikson contended that the adolescent identity stage is followed in young adulthood by a developing capacity for intimacy.

Egocentrism

In Piaget's theory, the preoperational child's difficulty taking another's point of view. App: Asked to "show Mommy your picture," 2-year-old Gabriella holds the picture up facing her own eyes.

Preoperational Stage

In Piaget's theory, the stage (from about 2 to about 6 or 7 years of age) during which a child learns to use language but does not yet comprehend the mental operations of concrete logic. App: For a 5-year-old, the milk that seems "too much" in a tall, narrow glass may become an acceptable amount if poured into a short, wide glass.

Sensorimotor Stage

In Piaget's theory, the stage (from birth to about 2 years of age) during which infants know the world mostly in terms of their sensory impressions. App: As their hands and limbs begin to move, they learn to make things happen.

Concrete Operational Stage

In Piaget's theory, the stage of cognitive development (from about 6 or 7 to 11 years of age) during which children gain the mental operations that enable them to think logically about concrete events. App: Given concrete materials, they begin to grasp conservation.

Formal Operational Stage

In Piaget's theory, the stage of cognitive development (normally beginning about age 12) during which people begin to think logically about abstract concepts. App: They can ponder hypothetical propositions and deduce consequences: If this, then that.

Grammar

In a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others. In a given language, semantics is the set of rules for deriving meaning from sounds, and syntax is the set of rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences.

Phoneme

In a language, the smallest distinctive sound unit.

Morpheme

In a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or a part of a word (such as a prefix)

Experimental group

In an experiment, the group that is exposed to the treatment, that is, to one version of the independent variable. App: Sally let David watch T.V. while doing homework and Donnie just did homework. Experimental group is David.

Control group

In an experiment, the group that is not exposed to the treatment; contrasts with the experimental group and serves as a comparison for evaluating the effect of the treatment. App: Sally let David watch T.V. while doing homework and Donnie just did homework. Control group is Donnie.

Conditioned Response (CR)

In classical conditioning, a learned response to a previously neutral (but now conditioned) stimulus (CS). App: The dog associating the tone and the food is a CR.

Neutral Stimulus (NS)

In classical conditioning, a stimulus that elicits no response before conditioning. App: In one experiment, Pavlov paired NS - events the dog could see or hear but didn't associate with food - with food in the dog's mouth.

Unconditioned Stimulus (US)

In classical conditioning, a stimulus that unconditionally - naturally and automatically - triggers a response (UR). App: In the experiment, the food was an US.

Conditioned Stimulus (CS)

In classical conditioning, an originally irrelevant stimulus that, after association with an unconditioned stimulus (US), comes to trigger a conditioned response (CR). App: The stimulus that used to be neutral is the CS.

Unconditioned Response (UR)

In classical conditioning, an unlearned, naturally occurring response (such as salivation) to an unconditioned stimulus (US) (such as food in the mouth). App: In the experiment, drooling was an UR.

Acquisition

In classical conditioning, the initial stage, when one links a neutral stimulus begins triggering the conditioned response. In operant conditioning, the strengthening of a reinforced response. App: To understand acquisition of the stimulus-response relationship, Pavlov and his associates had to confront the question of timing: How much time should elapse between presenting the NS (the tone, the light, the touch) and the US (the food)?

Discrimination

In classical conditioning, the learned ability to distinguish between a conditioned stimulus and stimuli that do not signal an unconditioned stimulus. App: Pavlov's dogs learned to respond to the sound of a particular tone and not to other tones.

Self

In contemporary psychology, assumed to be the center of personality, the organizer of our thoughts, feelings, and actions. App: One way to think of self is the concept of possible selves put forth by Hazel Markus and her colleagues.

Place Theory

In hearing, the theory that links the pitch we hear with the place where the cochlea's membrane is stimulated. App: The brain determines a sound's pitch by recognizing the specific place (on the membrane) that is generating the neural signal.

Frequency Theory

In hearing, the theory that the rate of nerve impulses traveling up the auditory nerve matches the frequency of a tone, thus enabling us to sense its pitch. App: The brain reads pitch by monitoring the frequency of neural impulses traveling up the auditory nerve.

Time

In memory, it is common and automatic for a person to remember the sequence of events; this is why it is possible to retrace your steps. App: When Spongebob forgot his name tag, he decided to retrace his steps to eventually find it.

Generativity Vs Stagnation

In middle age people discover a sense of contributing to the world, usually through family and work, or they may feel a lack of purpose

Secure Attachment

In mom's presence baby normally feels comfortable but without mome they feel distressed. App: 60% of infants display secure attachment

Operant Chamber

In operant conditioning research, a chamber (also known as a Skinner box) containing a bar or key that an animal can manipulate to obtain a food or water reinforcer; attached devices record the animal's rate of bar pressing or key pecking. App: For his pioneering studies, Skinner designed this.

Variable-Ratio Schedule

In operant conditioning, a reinforcement schedule that reinforces a response after an unpredictable number of responses. App: This is what a slot-machine player's and a fly-casting angler's experience- unpredictable reinforcement- and what makes gambling and fly fishing so hard to extinguish even when both are getting nothing for something.

Variable-Interval Schedule

In operant conditioning, a reinforcement schedule that reinforces a response at unpredictable time intervals. App: Like the longed-for responses that finally reward persistence in rechecking e-mail or Facebook, it tends to produce slow, steady responding.

Fixed-Ratio Schedule

In operant conditioning, a reinforcement schedule that reinforces a response only after a specified number of responses. App: Coffee shops may reward us with a free drink after every 10 purchased.

Fixed-Interval Schedule

In operant conditioning, a reinforcement schedule that reinforces a response only after a specified time has elapsed. App: People check more frequently for the mail as the delivery time approaches.

Discriminative Stimulus

In operant conditioning, a stimulus that elicits a response after association with reinforcements (in contrast to related stimuli not associated with reinforcement). App: When experimenters reinforced pigeons for pecking after seeing a human face, but not after seeing other images, the pigeon's behavior showed that it could recognize human faces.

Reinforcement

In operant conditioning, any event that strengthens the behavior it follows. App: What is being reinforced depends on the animal and the conditions.

Behavioral Approach

In personality theory, this perspective focuses on the effects of learning on our personality development. App: We are conditioned to repeat certain behaviors, and we learn by observing and imitating others.

Free Association

In psychoanalysis, a method of exploring the unconscious in which the person relaxes and says whatever comes to mind, no matter how trivial or embarrassing. App: Freud turned to this after some early unsuccessful trials with hypnosis.

Interpretation

In psychoanalysis, the analyst's noting supposed dream meanings, resistances, and other significant behaviors and events in order to promote insight. App: The analyst may also offer an explanation of how this resistance fits with other pieces of your psychological puzzle, including those based on analysis of your dream content.

Resistance

In psychoanalysis, the blocking from consciousness of anxiety-laden material. App: They hint that anxiety lurks and you are defending against sensitive material.

Transference

In psychoanalysis, the patient's transfer to the analyst of emotions linked with other relationships (such as love or hatred for a parent). App: By exposing such feelings, you may gain insight into your current relationships.

Repression

In psychoanalytic theory, the basic defense mechanism that banishes from consciousness anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories. App: Freud proposed that people repress painful or unacceptable memories to protect our self-concept and to minimize anxiety.

Repression

In psychoanalytic theory, the basic defense mechanism that banishes from consciousness anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories. App: Repression is often incomplete, repressed urges may describes a sampling of seven other well-known defense mechanisms.

Defense Mechanisms

In psychoanalytic theory, the ego's protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality. App: Defense mechanisms protect our self-understanding.

Embodied Cognition

In psychological science, the influence of bodily sensations, gestures, and other states on cognitive preferences and judgments. App: As we attempt to decipher our world, our brain blends inputs for multiple channels.

Grit

In psychology, grit is passion and perseverance in the pursuit of long-term goals. App: Those who become highly successful tend also to be conscientious, well-connected, and doggedly energetic.

Grit

In psychology, grit is passion and perseverance in the pursuit of long-term goals. App: What distinguishes extremely successful individuals from their equally talented peers, notes Duckworth, is grit.

Catharsis

In psychology, the idea that releasing aggressive energy relieves aggressive urges. APP: Experimenters report that sometimes when people retaliate against a provoker, they may indeed calm down.

Auditory Cortex

In the brain's temporal lobe; the temporal lobe, which the lower lobe of the cerebral hemisphere just forward of the occipital lobe. App: The part of the brain that is concerned with hearing.

Ions

In the neuron's chemistry-to-electricity process, ions are exchanged. App: In the neuron's chemistry-to-electricity process, ions are exchanged.

Perceptual adaptation

In vision, the ability to adjust to an artificially displaced or even inverted visual field. App: If one puts on glasses that shifts the apparent location of objects 40 degrees to the left. When one first puts them on and toss a ball to a friend, it sails off to the left. After a few minutes, one will be able to adjust and become accurate at throwing the ball.

Misinformation Effect

Incorporating misleading information into one's memory of an event. App: Exposed to misleading information, we tend to misremember.

Positive Reinforcement

Increasing behaviors by presenting positive reinforcers. A positive reinforcer is any stimulus that, when presented after a response, strengthens the response. App: Pet a dog that comes when one calls it; pay the person who paints one's house.

Negative Reinforcement

Increasing behaviors by stopping or reducing negative stimuli. A negative reinforcer is any stimulus that, when removed after a response, strengthens the response. (Negative reinforcement is not punishment.) App: Take painkillers to end pain; fasten seat belt to end loud beeping.

Settling Point/ Set Range

Indicates the level at which a person's weight settles in response to caloric intake and energy use. App: Set points don't explain why psychological factors influence hunger.

Normative Social Influence

Influence resulting from a person's desire to gain approval to avoid disapproval. App: We are sensitive to social norms - understood rules for accepted and excepted behavior - because the price we pay for being different can be severe.

Informational Social Influence

Influence resulting from one's willingness to accept others' opinions about reality. App: As Rebecca Denton demonstrated in 2004, sometimes it pays to assume others are right and to follow their lead.

Self-Reference Effect

Information deemed "relevant to me" is processed more deeply and remains more accessible. App: Asked how well certain adjectives describes one , he or she will remember the words better.

Top-down Processing

Information processing guided by higher-level mental processes, as when we construct perceptions drawing on our experience and expectations. App: Using this we interpret what our senses detect.

Social Anxiety Disorder

Intense fear of social situations, leading to avoidance of such. (Formerly called social phobia.) App: This social anxiety disorder, an intense fear of being scrutinized by others, avoid potentially embarrassing social situations, such as speaking up, eating out, or going to parties - or will sweat or tremble when doing so.

Assimilation

Interpreting our new experiences in terms of our existing schemas. App: Having a simple schema for dog, a toddler may call all four-legged animals, dogs.

Truth Vs Mistrust

Issue from infancy to one year where if needs are dependably met, infants develop a sense of trust.

Ganglion Cells

Its axons twine together like the strands of a rope to form the optic nerve. App: It is activated by bipolar cells.

Representativeness Heuristic

Judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match particular prototypes; may lead us to ignore other relevant information. App: People usually think of an Ivy League university professor when someone tells him or her to guess whether which person is more likely to be short, slim, and likes to read poetry: an Ivy League university professor or a truck driver?

Observational Learning

Learning by observing others. Also called social learning. App: As a child sees his sister burn her fingers on a hot stove, he learns not to touch it.

Associative Learning

Learning that certain events occur together. The events may be two stimuli (as in classical conditioning) or a response and its consequences (as in operant conditioning). App: The sea slug associates the squirt with an impending shock; the seal associates slapping and barking with a herring treat.

Latent Learning

Learning that occurs but is not apparent until there is an incentive to demonstrate it. App: Children may learn from watching a parent but demonstrate the learning only much later, as needed.

Cornea

Light enters through here; protects the eye and bends light to provide focus. App: It is the surface of the eye.

Excitatory signal

Like pushing a neuron's accelerator; depolarize the cell membrane, increasing the likelihood that the neurons will fire. App: It helps neurons fire.

Inhibitory signal

Like pushing its brake; prevents action potentials by hyper polarizing the target cell. App: It keeps neurons from firing.

Hair Cells

Lines the surface; movement triggers impulses in the adjacent nerve cells. App: It produces an electrical signal.

Paul Broca

Lived in 1824 and died in 1880; French physician; led to the discovery of specialized neural network and their integration. App: He discovered Broca's area in the left side of the brain responsible for speaking

Carl Wernicke

Lived in 1848 and died in 1905; German investigator; discovered the specialized language brain areas. App: He discovered Wernicke's area is responsible for speech comprehension.

Roger Sperry

Lived in 1913 and died in 1994; American psychologist; divided the brains of cats and monkeys in this manner, with no serious ill effects. App: He and Micheal Gazzaniga pioneered and studied split brain research helping to understand the functioning of both hemispheres.

Semicircular Canals

Located in the inner ear and are responsible for our sense of balance. App: It is connected to the canals with the cochlea, contain fluid that moves when your head rotates or tilts.

Introspection

Looking inward; A method of self-observation in which participants report their thoughts and feelings. App: People show look on their inside to sort out their feels to find themselves.

Insecure Attachment

Marked by anxiety or avoidence of trusting relationships App: 40% of infants display insecure attachment

Hierarchy Of Needs

Maslow's pyramid of human needs, beginning at the base with physiological needs that must first be satisfied before higher-level safety needs and then psychological needs become active. App: The hierarchy starts with physiological needs, then goes to safety needs, belongingness and love needs, esteem needs, self-actualization needs, and lastly, self-transcendence.

Self-Transcendence

Meaning, purpose, and communion beyond the self. App: Last part of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Decibels

Measurement of sound. App: Zero decibels represents the absolute threshold for hearing.

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM)

Medicine different from the conventional medicine like tablets. Not scientifically accepted. App: Some examples are acupuncture, meditation, and etc..

Mnemonics

Memory aids, especially those techniques that use vivid imagery and organizational devices. App: To help them encode lengthy passages and speeches, ancient Greek scholars and orators developed this technique.

Explicit Memory

Memory of facts and experiences that one can consciously know and "declare." (Also called declarative memory.) App: Atkinson and Shiffrin's model focused on how we process our explicit memories.

Declarative Memory

Memory of facts and experiences that one can consciously know and "declare." (Also called explicit memory.) App: The ability to recall one's address is an example of this.

Excitement Phase

Men's and women's genital areas become engorged with blood. App: A woman's vagina expands and secretes lubricant, and her breast and nipples may enlarge

Intelligence

Mental quality consisting of the ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new situations. App: Intelligence is different in different places in the world.

Psychedelic

Mind-manifesting; another name for hallucinogens. App: Psychedelic drugs distort perceptions and evoke sensory images in he absence of sensory input.

Psychodynamic Theories

Modern-day approaches that view personality with a focus on the unconscious and the importance of childhood experiences. App: These theories are descended from Freud's historical psychoanalytic theory, but the modern-day approaches differ in important ways.

Free Radicals

Molecules that are toxic to neurons. App: Bats and other animals with high waking metabolism burn a lot of calories, producing a lot of free radicals.

Approach avoidance

Must choose a goal that has attractive and unattractive features App: One must choose between buying a new cell phone and work extra hours to pay for it or do not buy a new cell phone and don't work extra hours.

Double approach-avoidance

Must choose between 2 alternatives, both of which have positive and negative features App: One must choose between 2 colleges you like but both have cons though.

Approach-approach

Must choose between 2 attractive goals App: One has to choose between spending time with a busy friend or go to a concert.

Avoidance-avoidance

Must choose between 2 unattractive options, "lesser of 2 evils" App: One has to choose between cleaning your room or studying for an exam.

Mirror-Image Preceptions

Mutual view often held by conflicting people, as when each side itself ethical and peaceful and views the other side as evil and aggressive. App: Mirror-image perceptions can often feed a vicious cycle of hostility.

Sleepwalking

NREM-3 sleep disorder characterized by walking or moving about during sleep. App: Sleepwalking are usually childhood disorders and run in families.

Sleep Talking

NREM-3 sleep disorder where sleeper garbles or nonsensically talks. App: Sleep talking are usually childhood disorders and also run in families.

Convergent Thinking

Narrows the available problem solutions to determine the single best solution. App: Intelligence tests, which typically demand a single correct answer, requires this kind of thinking.

Chameleon Effect

Natural mimicry, unconsciously imitating other's expressions, postures, and voice tones. App: Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh captured this mimicry, which they called the chameleon effect.

Feature Detectors

Nerve cells in the brain that respond to specific features of the stimulus, such as shape, angle, or movement. App: It is in the occipital lobe's visual cortex receive information from individual ganglion cells in the retina.

Volley Principle

Neural cells can alternate firing; firing in rapid succession, they can achieve a combined frequency above 1000 waves per second. App: Place theory best explains how we sense high pitches, frequency theory best explains how we sense low pitches, and combination of place and frequency seems to handle the pitches in the intermediate range.

Limbic system

Neural system (including the hippocampus, amygdala, and hypothalamus) located below the cerebral hemispheres; associated with emotions and drives. App: It is between the oldest and newest brain areas.

Sensory (afferent) neurons

Neurons that carry incoming information from the sensory receptors to the brain and spinal cord. App: When someone touches an hot object, these neurons cause them to withdraw because the heat hurts them.

Motor (efferent) neurons

Neurons that carry outgoing information from the brain and spinal cord to the muscles and glands. App: Speaking is one way to use these neurons.

Interneurons

Neurons within the brain and spinal cord that communicate internally and intervene between the sensory inputs and motor outputs. App: There are billions and billions of interneurons.

Serotonin

Neurotransmitter that affects mood, hunger, sleep, and arousal. App: It undersupplies if one has depression.

Dopamine

Neurotransmitter that influences movement, learning, attention, and emotion. App: It oversupplies if person has schizophrenia.

Acetylcholine (Ach)

Neurotransmitter; plays a role in learning a memory; the messenger at every junction between motor neurons (which carry information from the brain and spinal cord to the body's tissues) and skeletal muscles. When Ach is released to our muscles. When Ach is released to our muscle cell receptors, the muscle contracts. App: If Ach transmission is blocked, as happens during some kinds of anesthesia, the muscles can't contract.

NREM Sleep

Non-rapid eye movement sleep: encompasses all sleep stages except for REM sleep. App: There are different stages of NREM and they are called NREM-1, NREM-2, and NREM-3.

Secondary Sex Characteristics

Nonreproductive sexual traits, such as female breasts and hips, male voice quality, and body hair.

Inferential statistics

Numerical data that allow one to generalize - to infer from sample data the probability of something being true of a population. App: Based on a school of all girls getting better score on the test than boys, girls are smarter than boys.

Descriptive statistics

Numerical data used to measure and describe characteristics tendency and measures of variation. App: Finding the mean of a piece of data.

Linear Perspective

Objects and the spaces between them look smaller as they become more distant. Thus, parallel lines appear to converge as they recede into the distance. App: The picture looks bigger closer and smaller as it goes farther when everything is parallel.

Interposition

Objects that are obscured by other objects are perceived as being farther away. App: If one sees two cubes and one is in front of the other, one cube will partially block his or her view of the other cube.

Naturalistic observation

Observing and recording behavior in naturally occurring situations without trying to manipulate and control the situation. App: Robert observed Rebecca in her home.

Central Route Persuasion

Occurs when interested people focus on the arguments and respond with favorable thoughts. App: It occurs mostly when people are naturally analytical or involved in the issue

Peripheral Route Persuasion

Occurs when people are influenced by incidental cues, such as a speaker's attractiveness. App: A perfume ad may lure us with images of beautiful or famous people in love.

Preconscious

Of or associated with a part of the mind below the level of immediate conscious awareness, from which memories and emotions that have not been repressed can be recalled. App: Some of these thoughts we store temporarily from which we can retrieve them into conscious awareness.

Rationalization

Offering self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening unconscious reasons for one's actions. App: A habitual drinker says she drinks with her friends "just to be sociable."

Postural Sway

One of the items assessed on the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale; swaying back and forth when standing upright. App: To some extent, we are all open to suggestion. When people stand upright with their eyes closed and are told that they are swaying back and forth, most will indeed sway a little.

Cocktail Party Effect

One's ability to attend to only one voice among many (while also being able to detect your own name in an unattended voice). App: When someone has a party, that someone can only hear one person at a time. If a guest calls out the name of the person, the host will be able to respond.

Self-Esteem

One's feelings of high or low self-worth. App: High self-esteem pays dividends.

Self-Efficacy

One's sense of competence and effectiveness. App: Children's academic self-efficacy - their confidence that they can do well in a subject - predicts school achievement.

Opiates

Opium and its derivatives, such as morphine and heroin; they depress neural activity, temporarily lessening pain and anxiety. App: When repeatedly flooded with artificial endorphins, it's own opiates.

Syntax

Ordering words into sentences

Chunking

Organizing items into familiar, manageable units; often occurs automatically. App: It allows us to recall information more easily.

Vestibular Sac

Organs in the inner ear that connect the semicircular canals, and contribute to the body's sense of balance. App: It is connected to the cochlea.

Fluid Intelligence

Our ability to reason speedily and abstractly; tends to decrease during late adulthood. App: Despite lesser fluid intelligence, older adults also show increased social reasoning, such as by taking multiple perspectives, appreciating knowledge limits, and thus offering wisdom in times of social conflict.

Crystallized Intelligence

Our accumulated knowledge and verbal skills; tends to increase with age. App: With age, we gain vocabulary knowledge.

Consciousness

Our awareness of ourselves and our environment. App: It helps us act in our long-term interests rather than merely seeking short-term pleasure and avoiding pain.

Consciousness

Our awareness of ourselves. App: It is one part of the dual processing that our two-track minds.

Protein molecule

Our body's building blocks. App: When turned on, genes provide the code for creating this.

Adaptability

Our capacity to learn new behaviors that help us cope with changing circumstances. App: Bob learns to flip a switch to turn on lights.

Gender Identity

Our sense of being male or female. App: Catherine senses that she is a female.

Identity

Our sense of self; according to Erikson, the adolescent's task is to solidify a sense of self by testing and integrating various roles. App: For both adolescents and adults, group identities are often formed by how we differ from those around us.

Language

Our spoken, written, or signed words and the way we combine them to communicate meaning.

Adaptation Level Phenomenon

Our tendency to form judgement relative to a neutral level defined by our prior experience. APP: We adjust our natural levels based on our experiences.

Serial Position Effect

Our tendency to recall best the last (a recency effect) and first items (a primacy effect) in a list. App: This effect can leave us wondering why we have large holes in our memory of a list of recent events.

Spotlight Effect

Overestimating others' noticing and evaluating our appearance, performance, and blunders (as if we presume a spotlight shines on us). App: Thomas Gilovich demonstrated this effect by having individual Cornell University students don Barry Manilow T-shirts before entering a room with other students and the t-shirt wearing students thought that half their peers would notice the shirt.

Overjustification

Overuse of bribes;when an expected external incentive such as money or prizes decreases a person's intrinsic motivation to perform a task. App: Leading people to see their actions as externally controlled rather than internally appealing.

Authoritarian

Parents impose rules and expect obedience App- Don't interrupt, Keep room clean, Dont stay out late or you'll be grounded

Permissive

Parents submitting to their child's desire APP- They make few demands and use little punishment

Hammer, Anvil, Stirrup

Part of the middle ear; picks up vibrations and transmits them to the cochlea. App: The hammer picks up vibrations. Then the anvil carries it to the stirrup, which transmits them to the cochlea.

Panic Attack

People experiences episodes of intense dread.

Valance

People have placed emotional experience along the two dimension which is positive versus negative valence. APP: It shows emotion is also based on conscious experience.

Reward Theory of Attraction

People like those whose behavior is rewarding to us, and people will continue relationships that offer more rewards than costs. App: When people live or work in close proximity with us, it costs less time and effort to develop friendship and enjoy its benefits.

Hypnotherapists

People who use hypnosis in psychotherapy App: They try to help patients harness their own healing powers.

Flat Affect

People with schizophrenia lapsing into emotionless state

Theory of Mind

People's ideas about their own and other's mental states - about their feelings, perceptions, and thoughts, and the behaviors these might predict. App: Preschoolers, although still egocentric, develop this ability to infer others' mental states when they begin forming a theory of mind.

Feel Good, Do Good Phenomenon

People's tendency to be helpful when already in a good mood. APP: Happiness doesn't just feel good, it does good.

Lightness/Brightness Constancy

Perceiving an object as having a constant brightness even while its illumination varies. App: If one looks at a cube with three blue circles, and look at it with a different brightness he or she will still see it with a constant brightness.

Stroboscopic Movement

Perceiving continuous movement in rapid series of slightly varying images. App: Flip books of a stick figure dribbling a basketball.

Color Constancy

Perceiving familiar objects as having consistent color, even if changing illumination alters the wavelengths reflected by the object. App: If one view an isolated tomato through a paper tube, its color would seem to change as the light- and thus the wavelengths reflected from its surface- changed. But if you viewed that tomato as one item in a bowl of fresh fruit and vegetables, its color would remain roughly constant as the lighting shifts.

Size Constancy

Perceiving objects a having a constant size, even when we see its tiny image from two blocks away. App: When Gil sees someone walking towards them, then Gil sees the same person walking away from him. The person walking away from Gil looking will seem the same size as when they were walking towards Gil.

Perceptual Constancy

Perceiving objects as unchanging (having consistent shapes, size, lightness, and color) even as illumination and retinal images change. App: Regardless of the viewing angle, distance, and illumination, we can identify people and things in less time than it takes to draw a breath, a feat that would be monumental challenge for even advanced computers and that has intrigued researchers for decades.

Shape Constancy

Perceiving the form of familiar objects as constant even while our retinas receiving changing images of them. App: When a door opens, we perceive it as a rectangle even though it becomes more trapezoidal.

Sleep

Periodic, natural loss of consciousness - as distinct from unconsciousness resulting fro a coma, general anesthesia, or hibernation (Adapted from Dement, 1999). App: As one adapts to all the equipment, one grows tired and, in an unremembered moment, slips into sleep.

Criterion

Pertinent behavior; a principle or standard by which something may be judged or decided. App: People have to pass a criterion to get a driver's license.

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS)

Physical and cognitive abnormalities in children caused by a pregnant woman's heavy drinking. In severe cases, signs include a small, out-of-proportion head and abnormal facial features. App: For 1 in about 800 infants, the effects are visible as FAS, marked by lifelong physical and mental brain abnormalities.

Telomeres

Pieces of DNA at the ends of chromosomes. APP: Shortening of telomeres in women who suffered enduring stress as caregivers for children with serious disorders. Shortening of telomeres are a normal part of the aging process. When telomeres get too short the cell dies.

Dorothea Dix

Pioneerer in Therapy unit; Reformer; led the way to humane treatment of those with psychological disorders. was helped by Philippe Pinel.

Charles Darwin

Pondered the incredible species variation he encountered; influenced William James; Wrote On the Origin of Species; it explained the evolutionary process of natural selection; English biologist.

Occipital lobes

Portion of the cerebral cortex lying at the back of the head; includes the auditory areas, each receive information from the visual fields. App: It receives information from the visual fields.

Parietal lobes

Portion of the cerebral cortex lying at the top of the head and toward the rear; receives sensory input for touch and body position. App: It receives sensory input for touch and body position.

Frontal lobes

Portion of the cerebral cortex lying just behind the forehead; involved in speaking and muscle movements and in making plans and judgments. App: It helps people to make plans and judgments.

Temporal lobes

Portion of the cerebral cortex lying roughly above the ears; includes the auditory areas, each receiving information primarily from the opposite ear. App: It receiving information from primarily from the opposite ear.

Posttraumatic Growth

Positive psychological changes as a result of struggling with extremely challenging circumstances and life crises. App: Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun found this.

Prosocial Behavior

Positive, constructive, helpful behavior. The opposite of antisocial behavior. App: Many business organizations effectively use behavior modeling to help new employees learn communications, sales, and customer service skills.

Initiative vs guilt

Preschoolers learn to initiate task and carry out plans, or they feel guilty about their new efforts to be independent

Biomedical Therapy

Prescribed medications or procedures that act directly on the person's physiology. App: The other classification for today's therapies.

Hippocampus

Processes conscious memories; plays an important role in spatial navigation; within the brain's medial temporal lobe and forms an important part of the limbic system. App: Animals or humans who lose this part of the brain to surgery or injury also lose their ability to form new memories of facts and events.

Leptin

Protein hormone secreted by fat cells; when abundant, causes brain to increase metabolism and decrease hunger. App: It helps regulate energy balance by inhibiting hunger.

Hallucinogens

Psychedelic ("mind-manifesting") drugs, such as LSD, that distort perceptions and evoke sensory images in the absence of sensory input. App: Some are synthetic, such as LSD and MDMA, while others are natural substances, such as marijuana.

Anxiety Disorders

Psychological disorders characterized by distressing, persistent anxiety or maladaptive behaviors that reduce anxiety. App: Generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and phobias are three of five anxiety disorders.

Mood Disorders

Psychological disorders characterized by emotional extremes. See major depressive disorder, mania, and bipolar disorder. App: The emotional extremes of mood disorders come in two principal forms: major depressive disorder, and bipolar disorder.

Personality Disorders

Psychological disorders characterized by inflexible and enduring behavior patterns that impair social functioning. App: Anxiety is a feature of one cluster of these disorders, such as a fearful sensitivity to rejection that predisposes the withdrawn avoidant personality disorder.

Basic research

Pure science that aims to increase the scientific knowledge base. App: The discovery of x-rays led to the study of bone fractures.

REM Sleep

Rapid eye movement sleep; a recurring sleep state during which vivid dreams commonly occur. Also known as paradoxical sleep, because the muscles are relaxed (except for minor twitches) but other body systems are active. App: Aserinsky had discovered this after being awakened during a period of fast, jerky eye movements accompanied by energetic brain activity and reporting about having a dream.

Paradoxical Sleep

Rapid eye movement sleep; a recurring sleep state during which vivid dreams commonly occur. The muscles are relaxed (except for minor twitches) but other body systems are active. App: Aserinsky had discovered this after being awakened during a period of fast, jerky eye movements accompanied by energetic brain activity and reporting about having a dream.

Insomnia

Recurring problems in falling or staying asleep. App: No matter what their normal need for sleep, 1 in 10 adults, and 1 in 4 older adults, complain of insomnia.

Integrity Vs Despair

Reflecting on his or her life, an older adult may feel a sense of satisfaction and failure

Denial

Refusing to believe or even perceive painful realities. App: A partner denies evidence of his loved one's affair.

Partial (Intermittent) Reinforcement

Reinforcing a response only part of the time; results in slower acquisition of a response but much greater resistance to extinction than does continuous reinforcement. App: The learning is slower to appear.

Continuous Reinforcement

Reinforcing the desired response every time it occurs. App: With this type of reinforcement, learning occurs rapidly, which makes this the best choice for mastering a behavior.

Catatonia

Remain motionless for hours and then become irritated.

Replication

Repeating the essence of a research study, usually with different participants in different situations, to see whether the basic finding extends to other participants and circumstances. App: Eric did looked at how Erikson's Theory of Psychosocial Development experiment exactly how Erikson did it.

Longitudinal Study

Research in which the same people are restudied and retested over a long period.

Emotion

Response of the whole organism, involving physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience. App- heart pounding quickened pace and conscious experiences

Multiple scelroses

Results if myelin sheath degenerates, which communication to muscles slows with eventual loss of muscle control. App: Ron had multiple scelroses and now he cannot control his right arm.

Nondeclarative Memory

Retention independent of conscious recollection. (Also called implicit memory.) App: The ability to ride a bike is an example of this.

Implicit Memory

Retention independent of conscious recollection. (Also called nondeclarative memory.) App: Our implicit memories include procedural memory for automatic skills and classically conditioned association among stimuli.

Cones

Retinal receptor cells that are concentrated near the center of the retina and that function in daylight or in well-lit conditions. The cones detect fine detail and give rise to color sensations. App: They allows to see that the leaves on a flower is green.

Rods

Retinal receptor cells that detect black, white, and gray; necessary for peripheral and twilight vision, when cones don't respond. App: They can activate bipolar cells by chemical signals.

Regression

Retreating to a more infantile psychosexual stage, where some psychic energy remains fixated. App: A little boy reverts to the oral comfort of thumb sucking in the car on the way to his first day of school.

Self-Disclosure

Revealing intimate aspects of oneself to others. App: Another vital ingredient of loving relationships is self disclosure.

Person-Centered Perspective (Client-Centered Perspective)

Roger's idea that held a growth-promoting climate required three conditions. App: The three conditions are genuineness, acceptance, and empathy.

Ivan Pavlov

Russian physiologist; pioneered the study of learning.

Positive Symptoms

Schizophrenic; experience hallucinations, talk in disorganized, preluded ways, and exhibit inappropriate laughter tears and rage.

Negative Symptoms

Schizophrenic; toneless voices, expressionless faces, mute and rigid bodies.

Applied research

Scientific study that aims to solve practical problems. App: The study of if pilots should be armed or not.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Self-focused and self-inflating.

Preconventional Morality

Self-interest obey rules to avoid punishment or gain concrete rewards

Subjective Well-Being

Self-perceived happiness or satisfaction with life. Used along with measures of objective well-being to evaluate people's quality of life. APP: It uses physical and economic indicators.

General Adaption Syndrome (GAS)

Selye's concept of the body's adaptive response to stress in three phases- alarm,resistance, exhaustion. APP: This syndrome shows that although the human body copes well with temporary stress, prolonged stress can damage it.

Hypnagogic sensations

Sensations of falling or floating that are sometimes later incorporated into memories. App: People who claim to have been abducted by aliens-often shortly after getting into bed-commonly recall being floated off of or pinned down on their beds.

Musical

Sensitivity to pitch, melody, rhythm and tone. These people can sing in tune, keep time to music and listen to musical selections with discernment. Ex: Composer, singer

Nociceptors

Sensory receptors that detect hurtful temperatures, pressure, or chemicals. App: If someone steps on a thumbtack, then he or she will feel the pain through these receptors.

Estrogens

Sex hormones, such as estradiol, secreted in greater amounts by females than by males and contributing to female sex characteristics. In nonhuman female mammals, estrogen levels peak during ovulation, promoting sexual receptivity. App: In experiments, researchers can stimulate receptivity by injecting female animals with an estrogen.

Light and Shadow

Shadow can create the appearance of curving surfaces or there dimensions, giving the impression of depth. App: Shadows help lets people see how deep something is.

Superordinate Goals

Shared goals that override differences among people and require their cooperation. App: Sherif accomplished making two separate camp groups that dislike each other become friends by giving them superordinate goals.

Displacement

Shifting sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person. App: A little girl kicks the family dog after her mother sends her to her room.

Psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud's therapeutic technique. Freud believed the patient's free associations, resistances, dreams, and transferences-and the therapist's interpretations of them- released previously repressed feelings, allowing the patient to gain self-insight. App: Few clinicians today practice therapy as Freud did, but his work deserves discussion as part of the foundation for treating psychological disorders.

Binge-Eating Disorder

Significant binge-eating episodes, followed by distress, disgust, or guilt, but without the compensatory purging or fasting that marks bulimia nervosa. App: Those who do significant binge eating, followed by remorse-but do not purge, fast or exercise excessively-are said to have binge-eating disorder.

Behavioral Feedback Perspective

Similar to the facial feedback effect it is the tendency for people to have similar behaviors. APP: During an interview, if people are lying they might turn their head away.

Zajonc;LeDoux

Some embodied responses happen instantly, without conscious appraisal APP: We automatically feel startled by a sound in the forest before labelling it as a threat

Pop-Out

Some stimuli that is so powerful, so strikingly distinct; we don't choose to attend to these stimuli rather they draw our eye and demand our attention. App: When we notice an angry face in a crowd of happy faces.

Ecologically Revelant

Something similar to stimuli associated with sexual activity in the natural environment, such as the stuffed head of a female quail. App: In human females, enhanced bloodflow produces the red blush of flirtation and sexual excitation.

Masking Stimulus

Something that interrupts the brain's processing before conscious perception. App: In a typical experiment, the image or word is quickly flashed, then replaced by another stimulus to halt the consciousness from perceiving the images.

Triarchic Theory

Sternberg proposed a theory of three intelligences. App: The three intelligences are analytical (academic problem-solving) intelligence, creative intelligence, and practical intelligence.

Stressor

Stress describing threats or challenges . APP: Ben was under a lot of stress because of a dangerous truck ride.

Glucocorticoid Stress Hormones

Stress hormones that are released during a fight or flight situation. APP: Glucocorticoids are the ones drawing up blueprints for new aircraft carrier needed for the war effort

Aristotle

Student of Plato. born in 384 B.C.E. and died in 322 B.C.E. Greek philosopher. He derived principles fro careful observations. Aristotle said knowledge is not preexisting; instead it grows from the experiences stored in our memories. Teacher of Alexander the Great

Plato

Student of Socrates. born in 428 B.C.E. and died in 348 B.C.E. Teacher of Aristotle. was a Greek philosopher. found that the mind is separable from body and continues after the body dies, and that knowledge is innate- born within us.

Psychosurgery

Surgery that removes or destroys brain tissue in an effort to change behavior. App: A type of psychosurgery is lobotomy.

Aerobic Exercise

Sustained exercise that increases heart and lung fitness; may also alleviate depression and anxiety. App: An example is running.

Jean Piaget

Swiss biologist; the last century's most influential observer of children.

Reaction Formation

Switching unacceptable impulses into their opposites. App: Repressing angry feelings, a person displays exaggerated friendliness.

Alarm Reaction

Sympathetic nervous system is suddenly activated. Heart rate zooms. Blood is diverted to your skeletal muscles. Feel the faintness of shock. APP: It is phase 1 of the GAS.

Socrates

Teacher of Plato. born in 469 B.C.E. and died 399 B.C.E. was a Greek philosopher. found that the mind is separable from body and continues after the body dies, and that knowledge is innate- born within us.

Stress Inoculation Training

Teaches people to restructure their thinking in stressful situations.

Supercell Clusters

Teams of cells App: It responds to more complex patterns when feature detectors cells pass information to other cortical areas.

Identity Vs Role Confusion

Teenagers work at refining a sense of self by testing roles and then integrating them to form a single identity, or they become confused about who they are

Relative Motion

Tendency to perceive stable (stationary) objects to be moving as we move. The nearer an object, the faster it seems to move. App: When one is ride in a car and they see a house, instead of seeing the house in one place, he or she see it as a blur like it is moving.

Déjà Vu

That eerie sense that "I've experienced this before." Cues from the current situation may unconsciously trigger retrieval of an earlier experience. App: Some wonder, "How could I recognize a situation I'm experiencing for the first time?" Others may think of reincarnation or precognition.

Cerebellum

The "little brain" at the rear of the brianstem; functions include processing sensory input, coordinating movement output and balance, and enabling nonverbal learning and memory. App: If one damages this part of the brain, they will have difficulty walking, keeping their balance, and shaking hands.

Social Identity

The "we" aspect of our self-concept; the part of our answer to "Who I am?" that comes from our group memberships. App: For international students, for those of a minority ethnic group, for people with a disability, for those on a team, a social identity often forms around their distinctiveness.

DSM-5

The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical manual of Mental Disorders. Fifth Edition; a widely used system for classifying psychological disorders. App: In this new DSM edition, some diagnostic labels have changed.

Moon Illusion

The Moon looks up to 50 percent larger when near the horizon than when high in the sky. App: For at least 22 centuries, scholars have debated this question.

Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)

The WAIS is the most widely used intelligence test; contains verbal and performance (nonverbal) subtests. App: It consists of 15 subtests, including similarities, vocabulary, block design, and letter-number sequencing.

Telepathy

The ability to communicate mind-to-mind. App: It is believed by some that twins can communicate with each other by mind to mind.

Self-Control

The ability to control impulses and delay short-term gratification for greater long-term rewards. App: It temporarily weakens after an exertion, replenishes with rest, and becomes stronger with exercise.

Precognition

The ability to perceive future events, such as unexpected death in the month. App: Ida saw that Steven would win the lottery on December 23, 2011 and he did.

Clairvoyance

The ability to perceive remote events, such as a house on fire in another state. App: Kurt saw that there would be a robbery of a bank in another country.

Spatial

The ability to perceive the world accurately and to recreate or transform aspects of that world. These people often have acute sensitivity to visual details, can draw their ideas graphically , and can orient themselves easily in 3D space. Ex: Sculptor, architect, surveyor

Emotional Intelligence

The ability to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions. App: John Mayer, Peter Salovey, and David Caruso found this type of intelligence.

Creativity

The ability to produce novel and valuable ideas. App: Studies suggest that certain level or aptitude- a score above 120 on standard intelligence test- supports creativity.

Delayed Gratification

The ability to put off something mildly fun or pleasurable now, in order to gain something that is more fun, pleasurable, or rewarding later.

Blindsight

The ability to respond to visual stimuli without consciously perceiving them. This condition can occur after certain types of brain damage. App: A woman suffered brain damage that left her unable to recognize and discriminate objects visually. However, she acted like she could see.

Depth Perception

The ability to see objects in three dimensions although the images that strike the retina are two-dimensional; allows us to judge distance. App: The idea that depth perception is partly innate was discovered by Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk.

Logical-Mathematical

The ability to see the intelligence of numbers and logic, ability to handle chains of reasoning and to recognize patterns and order. These people think in terms of cause and effect and can create and test hypotheses. Ex: Mathematician, scientist

Interpersonal

The ability to understand people and relationships. These people can perceive and respond to moods, temperaments, intentions, and the desires of others. Ex: Politician, salesperson, religious leader

Naturalist

The ability to understand, categorize, and explain patterns encountered in the natural world. These people observe, interpret, and construct meaning from the natural world. Ex: Botanist, farmer, rancher

Linguistic

The ability to use language, sensitivity to the order of things. These people can argue, persuade, entertain, or instruct through the spoken word. Ex: Poet, translator

Bodily-Kinesthetic

The ability to use the body skillfully and handle objects adroitly. These are hands-on people with good tactile sensitivity. Ex: Athlete, dancer, surgeon

Gender Typing

The acquisition of a traditional masculine or feminine role. App: Children organize themselves into "boy worlds" and "girl worlds," each guided by rules for what boys and girls do.

Cognitive Learning

The acquisition of mental information, whether by observing events, by watching others, or through language. App: Observational learning, one form of cognitive learning, lets us learn from others' experiences.

Priming

The activation, often unconsciously, of certain associations thus predisposing one's perception, memory, or response. App: In a typical experiment, the image or word is quickly flashed, then replaced by a masking stimulus that interrupts the brain's processing before conscious perception.

Priming

The activation, often unconsciously, of particular associations in memory. App: Seeing or hearing the word rabbit primes associations with hare, even though we may not recall having seen or heard rabbit.

Pupil

The adjustable opening in the center of the eye through which light enters. App: The pupil is controlled by the iris.

Intensity

The amount of energy in a light or sound wave, which we perceive as brightness or loudness, as determined by the wave's amplitude. App: Intensity influences brightness.

Relative Luminance

The amount of light an object reflects relative to its surroundings. App: White paper reflects 90 percent of the light falling on it; black paper, only 10 percent.

Second Darwinian Revolution

The application of evolutionary principles to psychology. App: Today, Darwin's theory lives on in this revolution.

Industrial p0 orgaizational (I/O) psychology

The application of psychological concepts and methods to optimizing human behavior in workplaces. App: It looks at how the business affects the individuals that are part of it.

Industrial-Organizational (I/O) Psychology

The application of psychological concepts and methods to optimizing human behavior in workplaces. App: It looks at how the business affects the individuals that are part of it.

Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS)

The application of repeated pulses of magnetic energy to the brain; used to stimulate or suppress brain activity. App: Unlike ECT, the rTMS procedure produces no seizures, memory loss, or other serious side effects.

Mean

The arithmetic average of a distribution, obtained by adding the scores and then dividing by the number of scores. App: The average American family has 2.5 children.

Object Permanence

The awareness that things continue to exist even when not perceived. App: By 8 months, infants begin exhibiting memory for things no longer seen.

Medulla

The base of the brainstem; controls heartbeat and breathing. App: It sits on the pons.

Positive Transfer

The bettering or embellishing of current learning by former learning. App: Previously learned information (Latin) often facilitates our learning of new information (French).

Genes

The biochemical units of heredity that make up the chromosomes; segments of DNA capable of synthesizing proteins. App: They form the words of the chapters in one's life.

Circadian Rhythm

The biological clock; regular bodily rhythms (for example, of temperature and wakefulness) that occur on a 24-hour cycle. App: As morning approaches, body temperature rises, then peaks during the day, dips for a time in the early afternoon (when many people take siestas), and begins to drop again in the evening.

Primary Sex Characteristics

The body structures (ovaries, testes, and external genitalia) that make sexual reproduction possible.

Endocrine system

The body's "slow" chemical communication system; a set of glands that secrete hormones into the bloodstream. App: The pancreas regulates the level of sugar in the blood.

Basal Metabolic Rate

The body's resting rate of energy expenditure. App: We humans (and other species, too) vary in our basal metabolic rate, a measure of how much energy we use to maintain basic body functions when our body is at rest.

Nervous system

The body's speedy, electrochemical communication network, consisting of all the nerve cells of the peripheral and central nervous systems. App: It controls the movement of the body.

Central nervous system (CNS)

The brain and the spinal cord. App: It is the body's decision maker.

Plasticity

The brain's ability to change, especially during childhood, by reorganizing after damage or by building new pathways based on experience. App: Under the surface of our awareness, the brain is constantly changing, building new pathways as it adjusts to little mishaps and new experiences.

Neural networks

The brain's neurons cluster into work groups. App: Neurons network it nearby neurons with which they can have short, fast connections.

Thalamus

The brain's sensory control center, located on top of the brainstem; it directs messages to the sensory receiving areas in the cortex and transmits replies to the cerebellum and medulla. App: It receives information from all the senses except smell and routes it to the higher brain regions that deal with seeing, hearing, tasting, and touching.

Personal Space

The buffer zone we like to maintain around our bodies. App: If someone invades our personal space - the portable buffer zone we like to maintain around our bodies - we feel uncomfortable.

Cell body

The cell's life-support center. App: It protects the nucleus and provides the things the cell needs to survive.

Fovea

The central focal point in the retina, around which the eye's cones cluster. App: Many have their own hotline to the brain: Each one transmits to a single bipolar cell that helps relay the cone's individual message to the visual cortex, which devotes a large area to input from the fovea.

Middle Ear

The chamber between the eardrum and cochlea containing three tiny bones (hammer, anvil, and stirrup) that concentrate the vibrations of the eardrum on the cochlea's oval window. App: It picks up vibrations and transmit them to the cochlea.

Psychosexual Stages

The childhood stages of development (oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital) during which, according to Freud, the id's pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct erogenous zones. App: Each stage offers its own challenges, which Freud saw as conflicting tendencies.

Coronary Heart Disease

The clogging of the vessels that nourish the heart muscle; leading cause of death in many developed countries. App: Hypertension and a family history of the disease increase the risk of coronary heart disease.

Oval Window

The cochlea's membrane; vibrates jostling the fluid that fills the tube. App: It connected to the cochlea.

Rehearsal

The cognitive process in which information is repeated over and over as a possible way of learning and remembering it. App: A person can do this by saying aloud or thinking of material repeatedly until it becomes a part of the working memory.

Genome

The complete instructions for making an organism, consisting of all the genetic material in that organism's chromosomes. App: It showed that humans have a common sequence within our DNA.

Medical Model

The concept that diseases, in this case psychological disorders, have physical causes that can be diagnosed, treated, and in most cases, cured, often through treatment in a hospital. App: The medical perspective has gained credibility from recent discoveries that genetically influenced abnormalities in brain structure and biochemistry contribute to many disorders.

Extrasensory Perception (ESP)

The controversial claim that perception can occur apart from sensory input; includes telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition. App: Nearly half of Americans believe that there are people with ESP.

Social Clock

The culturally referred timing of social events such as marriage, parenthood, and retirement

Companionate Love

The deep affectionate attachment we feel for those with whom our lives are intertwined. App: As love matures, it becomes a steadier companionate love.

Fetus

The developing human organism from 9 weeks after conception to birth. App: During the sixth month, organs such as the stomach have developed enough to give the fetus a good chance of survival if born prematurely.

Embryo

The developing human organism from about 2 weeks after fertilization through the second month. App: The zygote's inner cells become the embryo.

Range

The difference between the highest and lowest scores in a distribution. App: 3 dogs was the highest number and 0 dogs was the lowest number in the amount of dogs in a household.

Levels of analysis

The differing complementary views, from biological to psychological to social-cultural, for analyzing an given phenomenon. App: Jeanne will succeed in getting into pro golf because she has great posture, she does not lose focus easily, and she knows all the pro golfers techniques.

Hue

The dimension of color that is determined by the wavelength of light; what we know as the color names blue, green, and so forth. App: Tulip's have green leaves.

Extinction

The diminishing of a conditioned response; occurs in classical conditioning when an unconditioned stimulus (US) does not follow a conditioned stimulus (CS); occurs in operant conditioning when a response is no longer reinforced. App: The dogs salivated less and less when they heard the tone but there was no food.

Withdrawal

The discomfort and distress that follow discontinuing an addictive drug or behavior. App: Regular users often try to fight their addiction, but abruptly stopping the drug may lead to the undesirable side of withdrawal.

Retroactive Interference

The disruptive effect of new learning on the recall of old information. App: If someone sings new lyrics to the tune of an old song, you may have trouble remembering the original words.

Proactive Interference

The disruptive effect of prior learning on the recall of new information. App: One's well-rehearsed Facebook password may interfere with your retrieval of your newly learned copy machine code.

Wavelength

The distance from the peak of one light or sound wave to the peak of the next. Electromagnetic wavelengths vary from the short blips of cosmic rays to the long pulses of radio transmission. App: It can determine a flower's hue.

Sympathetic nervous system

The division of the autonomic nervous system that arouses; its parasympathetic division calms. App: If something alarms or challenges one, the system will accelerates one's heartbeat, raises one's blood pressure, slows one's digestion, raises one's blood sugar, and cools one with perspiration, making one alert and ready for action.

Parasympathetic nervous system

The division of the autonomic nervous system that calms the body, conserving its energy. App: When the stress subsides, one's system will produce the opposite effects, conserving energy as it calms you by decreasing one's heartbeat, lowering one's blood sugar, and so forth.

Somatic nervous system

The division of the peripheral nervous system that controls the body's skeletal muscles. Also called the skeletal nervous system. App: As the bell rings, one's nervous system reports to one's brain the carries instructions back, triggering your body to rise from your seat.

Pituitary glands

The endocrine system's most influential gland. Under the influence of the regulates growth and controls other endocrine glands. App: The gland can influence one's brain and behavior.

Culture

The enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, values, and traditions shared by a group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next. App: America has many traditions.

Culture

The enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, values, and traditions shared by a group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next. App: Human nature, notes Roy Baumeister, seems designed for culture.

Group Polarization

The enhancement of a group's prevailing inclinations through discussion within the group. App: In each case, the beliefs and attitudes we bring to a group grow stronger as we discuss them with like-minded others.

Independent variable

The experimental factor that is manipulated; the variable whose effect is being studied. App: Student's age is manipulated in a study of student's memory.

Validity

The extent to which a test measures or predicts what it is supposed to. App: Does teaching about drug reduce the use of it?

Validity

The extent to which a test measures or predicts what it is supposed to. App: High reliability does not ensure a test's validity.

Content Validity

The extent to which a test samples the behavior that is of interest. App: The road test for a driver's license has content validity because it samples the tasks a driver routinely faces.

Reliability

The extent to which a test yields consistent results, as assessed by the consistency of scores on two halves of the test, on alternate forms of the test, or on retesting. App: They may use the same test or they may split the test in half to see whether odd-question scores and even-question scores agree.

Endorphins

"Morphine within" - natural opiate-like neurotransmitters linked to pain control and to pleasure. App: "Runner high" is made by these neurotransmitters.

Reward center

"Pleasure centers" App: In a meticulous series of experiments, Olds went to locate other centers.

Outgroup

"Them" - those perceived as different of apart from our ingroup. App: People outside your circle are this group.

Ingroup

"Us" - people with whom we share a common identity. App: We mentally draw a circle to define us.

Psychokinesis

"mind over matter"; the supposed ability to move objects by mental effort alone. App: Stella used her mind to levitate a table.

Moral Institutions

"quick gut feelings, or affectively laden intuitions APP- mind makes moral judgments as it makes aesthetic judgments quickly and automatically.

Mary Whiton Calkins

(1863-1930) Student of William James; became president of american psychological association (1905); completed her doctoral studies but Harvard refused to award her a Ph.D because, at the time they didn't grant doctoral degrees to women. First girl to take psychology's graduate seminar in Harvard. She refused to get her Ph.D. from Radcliffe college. was a distinguished memory researcher.

Humanistic Perspective

(A historically important approach) understands how feelings affect a person's potential for growth. App: Robert became more open-minded after being angry and learning why someone would take his stuff.

Alcohol Use Disorder

(Popularly known as alcoholism). Alcohol use marked by tolerance, withdrawal, and a drive to continue problematic use. App: Girls and young women (who have less of a stomach enzyme that digests alcohol) can become addicted to alcohol more quickly than boys and young men do, and they are at risk for lung, brain, and liver damage at lower consumption levels.

Psychodynamic Perspective

(evolved from Freud's psychoanalysis) An approach within psychology based on the work of Sigmund Freud, emphasizing unconscious conflict, primitive sexual instinct, and early childhood experiences. App: Stella is wary of men because when she was younger her dad beat her up.

Teratogens

(literally, "monster maker") agents, such as chemicals and viruses, that can reach the embryo or fetus during prenatal development and cause harm. App: This is one reason pregnant women are advised not to drink alcoholic beverages.

Stranger Anxiety

The fear of strangers that infants commonly display, beginning by about 8 months of age. App: They may greet strangers by crying and self-protectively reaching for familiar caregivers.

Zygote

The fertilized egg; it enters a 2-week period of rapid cell division and develops into an embryo. App: About 10 days after conception, the zygote attaches to the mother's uterine wall, beginning approximately 37 weeks of the closest human relationship.

Imagination Inflation

The finding that imagining an event which never happened can increase confidence that it actually occurred. App: Digitally altered photos have produced this imagination inflation.

Menarche

The first menstrual period.

Selective Attention

The focusing of conscious awareness on a particular stimulus. App: The cocktail party effect is one's ability to attend only one voice among many (while also being able to detect one's own name in an unattended voice).

Glucose

The form of sugar that circulates in the blood and provides the major source of energy for body tissues. When its level is low, we feel hunger. App: If your blood glucose level drops, you won't consciously feel this change, but your stomach, intestines, and liver will signal your brain to motivate eating.

Neurogenesis

The formation of new neurons. App: This process has been found in adult mice, birds, monkeys, and humans.

Prefrontal cortex

The forward part of the frontal lobes enables judgment, planning, and processing of new memories. App: People with damaged frontal lobes may have intact memories, high scores on intelligence tests, and great cake-baking skills.

Sexual Response Cycle

The four stages of sexual responding described by Masters and Johnson-excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution. App: Everyone goes through these stages.

Amplitude (vision)

The height of a wave; determines the intensity of light waves. App: The higher the height of the wave, the brighter the color and the smaller the height of the wave, the duller the color.

Cerebrum

The hemispheres that contribute 85 percent of the brain's weight. App: Newer neural networks within this brain function form specialized work teams that enable our perceiving, thinking, and speaking.

Learned Helplessness

The hopelessness and passive resignation an animal or human learns when unable to avoid repeated aversive events. App: Dogs were strapped in a harness and given repeated shocks, with no opportunity to avoid them. Later, when placed in another situation where they could escape the punishment by simply leaping a hurdle, the dogs cowered as if without hope.

Melatonin

The hormones produced by the pineal gland and it induces sleep. App: The SCN decreases its production of melatonin in the morning and increases it in the evening.

Erogenous Zones

The id's pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct pleasure-sensitive areas of the body. App: It goes through a series of psychosexual stages.

Drive-Reduction Theory

The idea that a physiological need creates an aroused tension state (a drive) that motivates an organism to satisfy the need. App: With a few exceptions, when a physiological need increases, so does psychological drive-an aroused, motivated state.

Rape Myth

The idea that some women invite or enjoy rape and get "swept away" while being "taken." App: In actuality, rape is traumatic, and it frequently harms women's reproductive and psychological health.

Localization of function

The idea that various brain regions have particular functions. App: The cerebellum coordinates voluntary movements such as posture, balance, coordination, and speech, resulting in smooth and balanced muscular activity.

Empiricism

The idea that what we know comes from experience and that observation and experimentation enable scientific knowledge App: Bob knew that when one blends baking soda and vinegar together, it will bubble up rapidly because he did it for a science project.

Sensory Memory

The immediate very brief recording of sensory information in the memory system. App: A immediate flash of an alphabet is flashed before your sight and is sent to the memory system.

Sleep Paralysis

The immobility that may occasionally linger as one awakens form REM sleep, producing a disturbing experience. App: One's motor cortex is active during REM sleep, but one brainstem blocks its messages. This leaves one's muscles relaxed, so much so that, except for an occasional finger, toe, or facial twitch, one is essentially paralyzed.

Fixation

The inability to see a problem from a new perspective; an impediment to problem solving.

Inner Ear

The innermost part of the ear, containing the cochlea, semicircular canals, and vestibular sacs. App: It sends the neural impulses into the brain's temporal lobe.

Reciprocal Determinism

The interacting influences of behavior, internal cognition, and environment. App: Bandura views the person-environment interaction as reciprocal determinism.

Cognitive neuroscience

The interdisciplinary study of the brain activity linked with cognition (including perception, thinking, memory, and language). App: Cognitive neuroscientists help us find new ways to understand ourselves and to treat disorders such as depression.

Cognitive neuroscience

The interdisciplinary study of the brain activity linked with cognition (including perception, thinking, memory, and language.) App: Cognitive neuroscientists help us find new ways to understand ourselves and to treat disorders such as depression.

Mental Processes

The internal, subjective experiences we infer from behavior - sensations, perceptions, dreams, thoughts, beliefs, and feelings. App: Michelle does everything in God's name because she believes in him.

Interaction

The interplay that occurs when the effect of one factor (such as environment) depends on another factor (such as heredity). App: As two children grow older, the more naturally outgoing child more often seeks activities and friends that encourage further social confidence.

Cerebral cortex

The intricate fabric of interconnected neural cells covering the cerebral hemispheres; the body's ultimate control and information-processing center. App: It is one's brain's thinking crown, one's body's ultimate control and information-processing center.

Synapse

The junction between the axon tip of the sending neuron and the dendrite or cell body of the receiving neuron. The tiny gap at this junction is called the synaptic gap or cleft. App: It connects the axon of one neuRon to dendrites of another neuron.

Science

The key word in psychology's definition. App: The study of behavior and mental processes is psychology.

Social Intelligence

The know-how involved in successfully comprehending social situations. App: People with high social intelligence can read social situations the way a skilled football player reads the defense or seafarer reads the weather.

Corpus callosum

The large band of neural fibers connecting the two brain hemispheres and carrying messages between them. App: It can be cut with no serious effect.

Delta Waves

The large, slow brain waves associated with deep sleep. App: In a NREM-3 state, the brain emits these waves.

Ego

The largely conscious, "executive" part of personality that , according to Freud, mediates among the demands of the id, superego, and reality. The ego operates on the reality principle, satisfying the id's desires in ways that will realistically bring pleasure rather than pain. App: The ego contains our partly conscious perception, thoughts, judgments, and memories

Threshold

The level of stimulation required to trigger a neural impulse. App: If a minimum intensity the combined signals trigger an action potential.

Retina

The light-sensitive inner surface of the eye, containing the receptor rods and cones plus layers of neurons that begin the processing of visual information. App: It is a multilayered tissue on the eyeball's sensitive inner surface.

Nature-Nurture Issue

The long standing controversy over the relative contributions that genes and experience make to the development of psychological traits and behaviors. Today's science sees traits and behaviors arising from interaction of nature and nurture. App: Intelligence is debatable whether it is nature or nuture.

Deindividuation

The loss of self-awareness and self-restraint occurring in group situations that foster arousal and anonymity. App: Deindividuation thrives, for better or for worse, in many different settings.

THC

The major active ingredient in marijuana; triggers a variety of effects, including mild hallucinations. App: Whether smoked (getting to the brain in about 7 seconds) or eaten (causing its peak concentration to be reached at a slower, unpredictable rate), THC produces a mix of effects.

Median

The middle score in a distribution; half the scores are above it and half are below it. App: The person in the C range is the exact middle person.

Just Noticeable Differences (JND)

The minimum difference between two stimuli required for detection 50 percent of the time. App: It increases with the size of the stimulus.

Difference Threshold

The minimum difference between two stimuli required for detection 50 percent of the time. We experience the difference threshold as a just noticeable difference (or jnd). App: The difference threshold increases with the size of the stimulus.

Absolute Threshold

The minimum stimulation needed to detect a particular stimulus 50 percent of the time. App: To test one's absolute threshold for sounds, a hearing specialist would expose each of your ears to varying sound levels.

Groupthink

The mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives. App: Later studies showed that groupthink - fed by overconfidence, conformity, self-justification, and group polarization -contributed to other fiascos as well.

Mode

The most frequently occurring score(s) in a distribution. App: Most families in Vermont own a pet.

Testosterone

The most important of the male sex hormones.

Testostrone

The most important of the male sex hormones. Both males and females have it but the additional testosterone in males stimulates the growth of the male sex organs in the fetus and the development of the male sex characteristics during puberty. App: Castrated male rats gradually lose much of their interest in receptive females.

Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)

The most widely researched and clinically used of fall personality tests. Originally developed to identify emotional disorders (still considered its most appropriate use), this test is now used for many other screening purposes. App: The classic personality inventory is the MMPI but it assesses "abnormal" personality tendencies rather than normal personality traits.

Rorschach Inkblot Test

The most widely used projective test, a set of 10 inkblots, designed by Hermann Rorschach; seeks to identify people's inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots. App: Some clinicians cherish the Rorschach, even offering Rorschach-based assessments of criminals' violence potential to judges.

Basilar Membrane

The motion causes ripples in this area; bending the hair cells lining its surface, not unlike the wind bending a wheat field; supports the Corti. App: It aids in translating sound vibrations into electrical signals.

Affiliation Need

The need to belong. App: Basic human motivation for survival

Optic Nerve

The nerve that carries neural impulses from the eye to the brain. App: The ganglion cells' axons twine together like the strands of a rope to form this nerve.

Axon

The neuron extension that passes messages through its branches to other neurons or to muscles of glands; speak. App: It passes messages away from the cell body to other neurons, muscles, or glands.

Cerebral hemispheres

The newest and highest; the two halves of the brain. App: It controls the opposite side of the body.

Frequency

The number of complete wavelengths that pass a point in a given time (for example, per second). App: Long waves have low frequency and low pitch which short waves have high frequency and high pitch.

Barnum Effect

The observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. App: It was named in honor of master showman P.T. Barnum's dictum, "We've got something for everyone."

Brainstem

The oldest part and central core of the brain, beginning where the spinal cord swells as it enters the skull; the brainstem is responsible for automatic survival functions. App: It is the brain's oldest and innermost region.

Figure-Ground

The organization of the visual field into objects (the figures) that stand out from their surroundings (the ground). App: Among the voices you hear at a party, the one you attend to becomes the figure; all others are part of the ground.

Dependent variable

The outcome factor; the variable that may change in response to manipulations of the independent variable. App: Amount learned depends on amount of sleep.

Superego

The part of personality that , according to Freud, represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgment (the conscience) and for future aspirations. App: The superego focuses on how we ought to behave.

Autonomic nervous system (ANS)

The part of the peripheral nervous system that controls the glands and the muscles of the internal organs (such as the heart). Its sympathetic division arouses; its parasympathetic division calms. App: This system can be consciously overridden, but usually operates on its own.

Illusory Correlation

The perception of a relationship where none exists. App: Larry spills Coke on himself. after leaving one specific cafe. He later refuses to go there, afraid of spilling on himself again.

External Locus of Control

The perception that chance or outside forces beyond our personal control determine our fate. App: Some religions believe that a god controls our destiny.

Relative Deprivation

The perception that we are worse off relative to those with whom we compare ourselves. APP: During World War II US Air Corps soldiers experienced a relatively rapid promotion rate but many individual soldiers were frustrated about their own comparatively slow promotion rates.

Internal Locus of Control

The perception that you control your own fate. App: Some people think that they can do what they want to do with their life.

Grouping

The perceptual tendency to organize stimuli into coherent groups. App: There are three examples of this proximity, continuity, and closure.

Puberty

The period of sexual maturation, during which a person becomes capable of reproducing.

Memory

The persistence of learning over time through the encoding, storage, and retrieval of information. App: Research on memory's extremes has helped us understand how memory works.

Resilience

The personal strength that helps most people cope with stress and recover from adversity and even trauma. App: Faced with unforeseen trauma, most adults exhibit resilience.

Tip of The Tongue

The phenomenon of failing to retrieve a word from memory, combined with partial recall and the feeling that retrieval is imminent. App: When someone knows a word but he or she cannot say it.

Mere Exposure Effect

The phenomenon that repeated exposure to novel stimuli increases liking them. App: Proximity breeds liking partly because of the mere exposure effect.

Stress Reaction

The physical and emotional responses to a situation involving stress. APP- Ben's response to the truck ride.

Set Point

The point at which an individual's "weight thermostat" is supposedly set. When the body falls below whis weight, an increase in hunger and a lowered metabolic rate may act to restore the lost weight. App: In this way, rats (and humans) tend to hover around a stable weight, or set point, influenced in part by heredity.

Blind Spot

The point at which the optic nerve leaves the eye, creating a "blind" spot because no receptor cells are located there. App: Close one eye and one won't see a black hole because the brain fills in the hole.

Resting potential

The positive-outside/negative-inside state. App: An dormant axon fluid interior has mostly negatively charged ions and the outside fluid on an axon's membrane has mostly positively charged ions.

Debriefing

The post-experimental explanation of a study, including its purpose and any deceptions, to its participants. App: Randy and Daisy told what happened in the experiment and why the experiment occurred to their test subjects.

Minority Influence

The power of one or two individuals to sway majorities. App: When you are the minority, you are far more likely to sway the majority if you hold firmly to your position and don't waffle.

Conservation

The principle (which Piaget believed to be a part of concrete operational reasoning) that properties such as mass, volume, and number remain the same despite changes in the forms of objects. App: Before age 6, children lack the concept of conservation.

Frustration-Aggression Principle

The principle that frustration - the blocking of an attempt to achieve some goal - creates anger, which can generate aggression. App: In laboratory experiments, however, those made miserable have often made others miserable which is this phenomenon.

Dual Processing

The principle that information is often simultaneously processed on separate conscious and unconscious tracks. App: When looking at a bird flying, we are consciously aware of the result of our cognitive processing but not of our subprocessing of the bird's color, form, movement, and distance.

Dual processing

The principle that information is often simultaneously processed on separate conscious and unconscious tracks. App: When looking at a bird flying, we are consciously aware of the result of our cognitive processing but not of our subprocessing of the bird's color, form, movement, and distance.

Sensory Interaction

The principle that one sense may influence another, as when the smell of food influences its taste. App: Smell+texture+taste=flavor.

Yerkes-Dodson Law

The principle that performance increases with arousal only up to a point, beyond which performance decreases. App: We have since learned that optimal arousal levels depend the task as well, with more difficult tasks requiring lower arousal for best performance.

Pleasure Principle

The principle that the id operates on. App: It seeks immediate gratification.

Weber's Law

The principle that to be perceived as different, two stimuli must differ by a constant minimum percentage (rather than a constant amount). App: This law states that for an average person to perceive difference, two stimuli must differ by a constant minimum percentage.

Natural Selection

The principle that, among the range of inherited trait variations, those contributing to reproduction and survival will most likely be passed on to succeeding generations. App: Giraffes have long necks because the ones with shorter necks could not eat from tall trees so the giraffes with shorter necks died.

Natural selection

The principle that, among the range of inherited trait variations, those contributing to reproduction and survival will most likely be passed on to succeeding generations. App: Giraffes have long necks because the ones with shorter necks could not eat from tall trees so the giraffes with shorter necks died.

Reality Principle

The principle the ego operates on. App: It controls the pleasure-seeking activity of the id in order to meet the demands of the external world.

Imprinting

The process by which certain animals form strong attachments during an early-life critical period. App: Konrad Lorenz explored this rigid attachment process, called imprinting.

Sensation

The process by which our sensory receptors and nervous system receive and represent stimulus energies from our environment. App: When looking on a friend, one's sensation is normal: his or her senses detect the same information one would, and they transmit that information to one's brain.

Accommodation

The process by which the eye's lens changes shape to focus near or far objects on the retina. App: The lens become more round when object is near and the lens become more elongated when object is far.

Stress

The process by which we perceive and respond to certain events called stressors that we appraise as threatening or challenging. App: A momentary stress can mobilize the immune system for fending off infections and healing wounds.

Identification

The process by which, according to Freud, children incorporate their parent's values into their developing superegos. App: Freud believed that identification with the same-sex parent provides what psychologists now call our gender identity- our sense of being male or female.

Depolarization

The process during the action potential when sodium is rushing into the cell causing the interior to become more positive and causing another axon channel to open, and then another, like a line of falling dominos, each tripping the next. App: The first section of the axon opens its gates, rather like sewer covers flipping open, and positively charged sodium ions flood through the cell membrane.

Learning

The process of acquiring new and relatively enduring information or behaviors. App: By learning, we humans are able to adapt to our environments.

Retrieval

The process of getting information out of memory storage. App: It is the part of the information-processing model that says we must get the information back out later; This occurs when you are taking a test you are retrieving your stored information

Modeling

The process of observing an imitating a specific behavior. App: We learn our native languages and various other specific behaviors by observing and imitating others.

Perception

The process of organizing and interpreting sensory information, enabling us to recognize meaningful objects and events. App: One may recognize people from their hair, gait, voice, or particular physique, just not their face.

Storage

The process of retaining encoded information over time. App: It is the part of the information-processing model that says we must retain that information; Before a final you hope that you have a year's worth of information engraved into your memory

Hypnotic Induction

The process undertaken by a hypnotist to establish the state or conditions required for hypnosis to occur. App: The hypnotist invites one to sit back, fix one's gaze on a spot high on the wall, and relax. In a quiet voice the hypnotist suggests, "Your eyes are growing tired ... Your eyelids are becoming heavy ... now heavier and heavier ... They are beginning to close ... You are becoming more relaxed ..." and so on.

Neuroadaptation

The process where the user's brain chemistry adapts to offset the drug effect. App: People who continue to use alcohol and some other drugs (marijuana is an exception) need more of the alcohol and drug to get the desired high.

Encoding

The processing of information into memory system - for example, by extracting meaning. App: It is the part of the information-processing model that says we must get information into our brain; It's like cramming information and concepts before a test.

Parallel Processing

The processing of many aspects of a problem simultaneously; the brain's natural mode of information processing for many functions, including vision. Contrasts with the step-by-step (serial) processing of most computers and of conscious problem solving. App: When one looks at a bird flying, we are parallel processing the bird's movement, form, depth, and color.

Parallel Processing

The processing of many aspects of a problem simultaneously; the brain's natural mode of information processing for many functions. Contrast with step-by-step (serial) processing for many functions. App: As you enter a mall, you simultaneously process information about the people you see, the sounds of voices, and the movement of peoples actions.

Heritability

The proportion of variation among individuals that we attribute to genes. The heritability of a trait may vary, depending on the range of populations and environments studied. App: If the heritability of intelligence is 50 percent, that does not mean that one's intelligence is 50 percent genetic.

Heritability

The proportion of variation among individuals that we can attribute to genes. The heritability of a trait may vary, depending on the range of populations and environments studied. App: Estimates of the heritability of intelligence - range from 50 to 80 percent.

Spontaneous Recovery

The reappearance, after a pause, of an extinguished conditioned response. App: It suggested to Pavlov that extinction was suppressing the CR rather than eliminating it.

Cognitive revolution

The rebellion of a second group of psychologists during the 1960s.

Long-Term Memory

The relatively permanent and limitless storehouse of the memory system. Includes knowledge, skills, and experiences. App: The information moves into this section for later retrieval; It can be said that for psychology we should store our information into this memory so that we can do well on the AP exam.

Alpha waves

The relatively slow brain waves of a relaxed, awake state. App: When closing one's eyes, researchers in the next room sees on the EEG the relatively slow alpha waves of one's awake but relaxed state.

Umami

The savory meat taste; best experienced as a flavor enhancer monosodium glutamate (MSG). App: It is produced by many nucleotides and amino acids.

Psychology

The science of behavior and mental processes. App: People study the mind of humans and animals to understand our behaviors.

Cognitive psychology

The scientific study of all mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating. App: Sometimes our cognitive processing systems get overloaded and we have selected information to process further.

Social psychology

The scientific study of how we think about, influence, and relate to one another. App: Social group prejudice is manifested in people's unfavorable attitudes towards a particular social group.

Social Psychology

The scientific study of how we think about, influence, and relate to one another. App: They study the social influences that explain why the same person will act differently in different situations.

Positive psychology

The scientific study of human functioning, with the goals of discovering and promoting strengths and virtues that help individuals and communities to thrive. App: Levi was plagued by negative thoughts so he thought of three things he was grateful for each day. After a couple weeks, Levi became more positive.

Behavioral psychology

The scientific study of observable behavior, and its explanation by principles of learning. App: An owner rings a bell and gives a dog food and repeated so when the dog hears the bell, she will salivated even though the owner stopped giving her food after the ring.

Positive Psychology

The scientific study of optimal human functioning; aims to discover and promote strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive. App: Seligman proposed this type of psychology.

Biological psychology

The scientific study of the links between biological (genetic, neural, hormonal) and psychological processes. (Some biological psychologists call themselves behavioral neuroscientists, neuropsychologists, behavior geneticists, physiological psychologists, or biopsychologists.) App: An owner rings a bell and gives a dog food and repeated so when the dog hears the bell, she will salivated even though the owner stopped giving her food after the ring.

Biological psychology

The scientific study of the links between biological (genetic, neural, hormonal) and psychological processes. (Some biological psychologists call themselves behavioral neuroscientists, neuropsychologists, behavior geneticists, physiological psychologists, or biopsychologists.) App: Caitlyn thought that different species of animal can be studied and compared.

Psychometrics

The scientific study of the measurement of human abilities, attitudes, and traits. App: The interest test is used to test areas of motivation, aptitude, and knowledge.

Measures of Variation (Variance)

The score that encompasses the difference of a whole set of scores: range and standard deviation. App: Moses found that there is a range of 100 in the amount of food a dieting person eats.

Vestibular Sense

The sense of body movement and position, including the sense of balance. App: The biological gyroscopes for this sense of equilibrium are in the inner ear.

Audition

The sense or act of hearing. App: We hear a wide range of sounds, but the ones we hear best are those sound with frequencies in a range corresponding to that of the human voice.

Synesthesia

The senses become joined in a phenomenon where one sensation produces another. App: One may here sad music and see blue.

Peripheral nervous system (PNS)

The sensory and motor neurons that connect the central nervous system to the rest of the body. App: It is responsible for gathering information and transmitting CNS decisions to other body parts.

Synaptic gap/ cleft

The separator of an axon terminal to a receiving neuron; less than 1 millionth of an inch wide. App: The space between a receiving neuron and a axon terminal.

X-chromosome

The sex chromosomes found in both men and women.

Y-chromosome

The sex chromosomes found only in males.

Gender

The socially constructed roles and characteristics by which a culture defines male and female. App: Guided by our culture, our gender influences our social development.

One-Word Stage

The stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words.

Personality psychology

The study of an individual's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. App: Freud came up with a stage theory of personality called the psychosexual stages of development.

Experimental Psychology

The study of behavior and thinking using the experimental method. App: Billy and Brenda allowed one person to sleep for 8 hours and another person to sleep for 4 hours and found that the one who slept for 4 hours did worse on the exam.

Phrenology

The study of bumps on the skull. App: German physician Franz Gall proposed that it could reveal a person's mental abilities and character traits.

Epigenetics

The study of environmental influences on gene expression that occur without a DNA change. App: Although genes have the potential to influence development, environmental triggers genetic expression.

Psychoneuroimmunology

The study of how psychological neural and endocrine processes together affect the immune system and resulting health. APP: Thoughts and feelings psycho influence your brain neuro which influences endocrine hormones that affect your disease-fighting immune system

Educational psychology

The study of how psychological processes affect and can enhance teaching and learning. App: A psychologist watches how a group of psychology students do in school.

Social-cultural psychology

The study of how situations and cultures affect our behavior of thinking. App: Native Americans believed in there is spiritual philosophy that trees can speak if one listens to them.

Parapsychology

The study of paranormal phenomena, including ESP and psychokinesis. App: Parapsychologist perform scientific experiments searching for possible ESP and other paranormal phenomena.

Psychophysics

The study of relationships between the physical characteristics of stimuli, such as their intensity, and our psychological experience of them. App: Looking at color differences to see color tolerances for industrial purposes.

Psychopharmacology

The study of the effects of drugs on mind and behavior. App: Thanks to drug therapy-and to efforts to minimize involuntary hospitalization and to support people through community mental health programs-the resident population of mental hospitals is a small fraction of what it was a half-century ago.

Evolutionary psychology

The study of the evolution of behavior and mind, using principles of natural selection. App: "Fight or flight" is how humans dealt with stress in the past. Today, stress cannot be dealt with sprinting of fighting. The stress strains our nervous system and immune system.

Evolutionary psychology

The study of the evolution of behavior and mind, using principles of natural selection. App: "Fight or flight" is how humans dealt with stress in the past. Today, stress cannot be dealt with sprinting or fighting. The stress strains our nervous system and immune system.

Behavior genetics

The study of the relative power and limits of genetic and environmental influences on behavior. App: They study our differences and weigh the effects and interplay of heredity and environment.

Molecular genetics

The subfield of biology that studies the molecular structure and function of genes. App: It seeks to identify specific genes influencing behavior.

Predictive Validity (Criterion-Related Validity)

The success with which a test predicts the behavior it is designed to predict; it assessed by computing the correlation between test scores and the criterion behavior. App: Aptitude could have predictive validity.

Normal Curve

The symmetrical, bell-shaped curve that describes the distribution of many physical and psychological attributes. Most scores fall near the average, and fewer scores lie near the extremes. App: No matter what we measure - height, weight, or mental aptitude- people's scores tend to form this roughly symmetrical shape.

Kinesthesia

The system for sensing the position and movement of individual body parts. App: Important sensors in one's joints, tendons, and muscles enable kinesthesia.

REM Rebound

The tendency for REM sleep to increase following REM sleep deprivation (created by repeated awakenings during REM sleep). App: Most other mammals also experience REM rebound, suggesting that the causes and functions of REM sleep are deeply biological.

Bystander Effect

The tendency for any given bystander to be less likely to give aid if other bystanders are present. App: Researchers and their assistants took 1497 elevator rides in three cities and "accidentally" dropped coins or pencils in front of 4813 fellow passengers. When alone with the person in need, 40 percent helped; in the presence of 5 other bystanders, only 20 percent helped.

Spacing Effect

The tendency for distributed study or practice to yield better long-term retention than is achieved through massed study or practice. App: This is a better strategy instead of cramming in all test material and concepts the night before a test.

Regression Toward The Mean

The tendency for extreme or unusual scores to fall back (regress) toward their average. App: Extraordinary happenings (feeling low) tend to be followed by more ordinary ones (a return to our more usual state).

Fundamental Attribution Error

The tendency for observers, when analyzing others' behavior, to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate the impact of personal disposition. App: We overestimate the influence of personality and underestimate the influence of situations.

Belief Bias

The tendency for one's preexisting beliefs to distort logical reasoning, sometimes by making invalid conclusions seem valid; or, valid conclusions seem invalid

Social Loafing

The tendency for people in a group to exert less effort when pooling their efforts toward attaining a common goal than when individually accountable. App: Bibb Lantané and his colleagues described this diminished effort as social loafing.

Just-World Phenomenon

The tendency for people to believe the world is just and that people therefore get what they deserve and deserve what they get. App: We commonly teach our children - that good is rewarded and evil is punished.

Foot-In-The-Door Phenomenon

The tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request. App: Chinese captors knew that people who agreed to a small request would find it easier to comply later with a larger one.

Facial Feedback Effect

The tendency of facial muscle states to trigger corresponding feelings such as fear,anger, or happiness. APP: No matter the culture or nationality everyone has the same facial expressions part of universal language.

Overconfidence

The tendency to be more confident than correct- to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments.

Hindsight bias

The tendency to believe, after learning and outcome, that one would have foreseen it. (Also, known as the I-knew-it-all-along-phenomenon.) App: Billy didn't study until the last minute and he took the test. When Billy received the test, he got a B. After, he told his friends that he knew he passed the test.

Ingroup Bias

The tendency to favor our own group. App: Even arbitrarily creating us-them groups by tossing a coin creates this bias.

Closure

The tendency to group disconnected pieces of information into meaningful whole. App: If there are three circles are complete but partially blocked by an (illusory) triangle. Add nothing more than little line segments to close of the circles and your brain stops constructing a triangle. Such principles usually help us construct reality

False Consensus Effect

The tendency to overestimate the extent to which others share our beliefs and our behaviors. App: Troy Baumeister and his colleagues found that people tend to see their foibles and attitudes in others, a phenomenon that Freud called projection that today's researchers call the false consensus effect.

Interview Illusion

The tendency to people who are interviewing an individual to overrate their ability to interview and choose the best candidate. App: Richard Nisbett has labeled interviewers' overrating their discernment.

Continuity

The tendency to perceive a series of stimuli as an unified form when they appear to represent a continuous pattern. App: The pattern could be a series of alternating semicircles, but we perceive it as two continuous lines - one wavy, one straight.

Proximity

The tendency to perceive objects as belonging together when they are close to one another. App: One will not see six separate lines but three sets of two lines.

Relative Height

The tendency to perceive objects higher in our field as farther away. App: There is a tall tower and a small stand. One would think the tall tower is farther from them and the small stand is closer to them.

Mood-Congruent Memory

The tendency to recall experiences that are consistent with one's current good or bad mood. App: If you've had a bad evening- your date never showed, your Chicago Cubs hat disappeared, your TV went out 10 minutes before the end of a show- your gloomy mood may facilitate recalling other bad times.

Other-Race Effect

The tendency to recall faces of one's own race more accurately than faces of other races. Also called the cross-race effect or the own-race bias. App: Our greater recognition for faces of our own race emerges during infancy, between 3 and 9 months of age.

Functional Fixedness

The tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions; an impediment to problem solving.

Generalization

The tendency, once a response has been conditioned, for stimuli similar to the conditioned stimulus to elicit similar responses. App: A dog conditioned to salivate when rubbed would also drool a bit when scratched or when touched on a different body part and the tendency to respond likewise to stimuli similar to the CS is called generalization.

Cannon-Bard Theory

The theory that an emotion-arousing stimulus simultaneously triggers physiological responses and the subjective experience of emotions. App: emotion and action occurs at the same time

Tabula Rasa

The theory that at birth the (human) mind is a "blank slate" without rules for processing data, and that data is added and rules for processing are formed solely by one's sensory experiences. App: Babies does not know anything about the world so they cannot do anything but as they get older, they get experience and know things.

Gender Schema Theory

The theory that children learn from their cultures a concept of what it means to be male and female and that they adjust their behaviors accordingly. App: Gender Schema Theory combines social learning theory with cognition.

Opponent-Process Theory

The theory that opposing retinal processes (red-green, yellow-blue, white-black) enable color vision. For example, some cells are stimulated by green and inhibited by red; others are stimulated by red and inhibited by green. App: In the retina and in the thalamus, some neurons turned "on" by red but turned "off" by green because the messages travel through the same tube so both cannot come out at the same time.

James-Lange Theory

The theory that our experience of emotion is our awareness of our physiological responses to emotion-arousing stimuli. App We feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, or afraid because we tremble

Social Exchange Theory

The theory that our social behavior an exchange process, the aim of which is to maximize benefits and minimize costs. App: Accountants call this cost-benefit analysis while philosophers call it utilitarianism.

Scapegoat Theory

The theory that prejudice offers an outlet for anger by providing someone to blame. App: Following 9/11, some outraged people lashed out at innocent Arab-Americans.

Young-Helmholtz Trichromatic (Three-Color) Theory

The theory that the retina contains three different color receptors—one most sensitive to red, one to green, one to blue—which combined can produce the perception of any color. App: Some people have color-deficient vision lack functioning red- or green-sensitive cones, or sometimes both. They see monochromatic (one color) or dichromatic (two color) instead of trichromatic, making it impossible to distinguish the red and green in a color-deficiency test.

Gate-Control Theory

The theory that the spinal cord contains a neurological "gate" that blocks pain signals or allows them to pass on to the brain. The "gate" is opened by the activity of pain signals traveling up small nerve fibers and is closed by activity in larger fibers or by information coming from the brain. App: Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall provided a useful model for the gate-control theory.

NREM-2

20 minutes; has periodic appearance of sleep spindles; may sleep-talk during this stage. App: The waves are slower and larger than NREM-1 waves but faster and smaller than NREM-3 waves.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

The theory that we act to reduce the discomfort (dissonance) we feel when two of our thoughts (cognition) are inconsistent. For example, when we become aware that our attitudes and our actions clash, we can reduce the resulting dissonance by changing our attitudes. App: To relieve such tension, according to Leon Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory, we often bring our attitudes into line with our actions.

Attribution Theory

The theory that we explain someone's behavior by crediting either the situation or the person's disposition. App: Fritz Heider proposed this theory.

Social Learning Theory

The theory that we learn social behavior by observing and imitating and by being rewarded or punished. App: "Big boys don't cry, Alex."

Moral Reasoning

The thinking that occurs as we consider right and wrong Whether a person should steal medicine to save one's life

Curiosity, Skepticism, and Humility

The three main components in the scientific attitude. Curiosity: a passion to explore and understand without misleading or being misled. Skeptical: an attitude to doubt an general of particular object. Humility: an awareness of our own vulnerability to error and an openness to surprises and new perspectives. App: Son wants to observe apes but doesn't go to the zoo but to Africa.

Menopause

The time of natural cessation of menstruation; also refers to the biological changes a woman experiences as her ability to produce declines.

Adolesence

The transition period from childhood to adulthood, extending from puberty to independence. App: In some cultures, where teens are self-supporting, this means that adolescence hardly exist.

Lens

The transparent structure behind the pupil that changes shape to help focus images one the retina. App: Once the image goes through the lens, it is flipped upside-down.

Lymphocytes

The two types of white blood cells that are part of the body's immune system. APP: There are B lymphocytes and T lymphocytes.

Culture

The type of world you live in. The external factors which are what you are raised by A westrenized culture might make someone want to be independent today but in an asian culture, obedience is very important.

Behaviorism

The view that psychology (1) should be an objective science that (2) studies behavior without reference to mental processes. Most research psychologist today agree with (1) but not with (2). App: Parents reward children that do the right things like going to the bathroom on the potty.

Framing

The way an issue is posed; how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgments

Stanford-Binet

The widely used American revision (by Terman at Stanford University) of Binet's original intelligence test. App: For Terman, intelligence test revealed the intelligence with which a person was born.

Flynn Effect

The worldwide phenomenon where intelligence test performance is improving. App: This was amazing considering that college entrance aptitude scores were dropping during the 1960s and 1970s.

Productive Language

Their ability to produce words, matures after their receptive language.

Receptive Language

Their ability to understand what is said to and about them.

Social Influence Theory of Hypnosis

Theory that says hypnotic phenomena are extensions of everyday social behavior and not unique to hypnosis, and that the subjects are playing the role of the "good subject" by behaving the way they believe subjects should. App: The more an actor likes and trusts the hypnotist, the more he or she allows that person to direct their attention and fantasies.

Group Therapy

Therapy conducted with groups rather than individuals, permitting therapeutic benefits from group interaction. App: It does not provide the same degree of therapist involvement with each client.

Psychodynamic Therapy

Therapy deriving from the psychoanalytic tradition that views individuals as responding to unconscious forces and childhood experiences, and that seeks to enhance self-insight. App: They try to help people understand their current symptoms.

Behavior Therapy

Therapy that applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors. App: Proponents of behavior therapy, however, doubt the healing power of self-awareness.

Cognitive Therapy

Therapy that teaches people new, more adaptive ways of thinking; based on the assumption that thoughts intervene between events and our emotional reactions. App: The cognitive therapies assume that our thinking colors our feelings.

Family Therapy

Therapy that treats the family as a system. Views an individual's unwanted behaviors as influenced by, or directed at, other family members. App: We struggle to differentiate ourselves from our families, but we also need to connect with them emotionally.

Critical thinking

Thinking that does not blindly accept arguments and conclusions. Rather, it examines assumptions, assesses the source, discerns hidden values, evaluates evidence, and assesses conclusions. App: Carson is trying to be an objective manager as possible when settling a dispute by summarizing the alternatives, with fairness to all sides to a disagreement.

Law Of Effect

Thorndike's principle that behaviors followed by favorable consequences become more likely, and that behaviors followed by unfavorable consequences become less likely. App: Rewarded behavior is likely to recur.

Chromosomes

Threadlike structures made of DNA molecules that contain the genes. App: The plans for your own book of life run to 46 chapters-23 donate by your mother's egg and 23 by your father's sperm.

Lesion

Tissue destruction. A brain lesion is a naturally or experimentally caused destruction of brain tissue. App: Tiny clusters of brain cells can be selectively lesion by scientists, leaving the surrounding tissue unharmed.

Two - Factor Theory (Schachter-Singer)

To experience emotion one must be physically aroused and cognitively label the arousal App: It was invented by Schachter and Singer.

Autonomy Vs Shame and Doubt

Toddlers learn to exercise their will and do things for themselves or they doubt their abilities

Sublimation

Transferring of unacceptable impulses into socially valued motives. A man with aggressive urges becomes a surgeon.

Psychotherapy

Treatment involving psychological techniques; consists of interactions between a trained therapist and someone seeking to overcome psychological difficulties or achieve personal growth. App: One of today's therapies classification.

Identical twins (monozygotic twins)

Twins who develop from a single fertilized egg that splits in two, creating two genetically identical organisms. App: They are clones who share not only the same genes but the same conception and uterus, and usually the same birth date and cultural history.

Fraternal twins (dizygotic twins)

Twins who develop from separate fertilized eggs. They are genetically no closer than brothers and sisters, but they share a fetal environment. App: Shared genes can translate into shared experiences so both twins have a 30 percent chance of being affected by the same disease.

Amygdala

Two lima-bean-sized neural clusters in the limbic system; linked to emotion. App: It causes a cat to prepare to attack, hiss with its back arched, its pupils dilated, and its hair on end.

Automatic Processing

Unconscious encoding of incidental information, such as space, time, and frequency and of well-learned information, such as word meanings. App: It produces implicit memories.

Tend and Befriend

Under stress people would after provide support to others and bond with and seek support from others. App: Woman seem more inclined to this response demonstrated in the outpouring of help after natural disasters.

Pons

Under the medulla; helps coordinate movements. App: If a cat's brainstem is severed from the rest of the brain above it, the animal will still breathe and live and even run, climb, and groom.

Discrimination

Unjustifiable negative behavior toward a group and its members. App: To not date a person because of his or her race.

Altruism

Unselfish regard for the welfare of others. App: In rescuing his jailer, Dirk Willems exemplified altruism.

Conventional Morality

Uphold laws and rules to gain social approval or maintain social order

Social-Cognitive Perspective

Views behavior as influenced by the interaction between people's traits (including their thinking) and their social context. App: Albert Bandura proposed this personality view to emphasize the interaction of our traits with our situations.

Outer Ear

Visible part of the ear; channels the waves through the auditory canal to the eardrum. App: The sound waves enter the outer ear.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

A belief that leads to its own fulfillment. App: People may confirm themselves by influencing the other country to react in ways that seem to justify them.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

A belief that leads to its own fulfillment. It can have both positive and negative effects: within the context of this unit, self-fulfilling prophecy occurs when a person's expectations of another person leads that person to behave in the expected way as noted by Rosenthal and Jacobson; these researchers tested the effects of the self-fulfilling prophecy in an unidentified school called "Oak School". The researchers informed elementary school teachers that about 20 percent of their students were academically gifted "spurters". In reality, Rosenthal and Jacobson randomly selected the "spurters". App: At the end of the year, the teachers demonstrated a self-fulfilling prophecy when they reported that the "spurters" were more curious, happier, and better adjusted than the other students. The "spurters" academic performance proved to be consistent with their teacher's biased expectations. They achieved high grades and made substantial gains in IQ points.

Retinal Disparity

A binocular cue for perceiving depth; by comparing images from the two eyeballs, the brain computes distance - the greater the disparity (difference) between the two images, the closer the object. App: When one holds their two index fingers about half an inch apart, directly in front of the nose, and one's retinas will receive quite different views. If one closes one eye and then the other, one can see the difference.

Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT)

A biomedical therapy for severely depressed patients in which a brief electric current is sent through the brain of an anesthetized. App: When ECT was first introduced in 1938, the wide-awake patient was strapped to a table and jolted with roughly 100 volts of electricity to the brain, producing racking convulsions and brief unconsciousness.

Therapeutic Alliance

A bond of trust and mutual understanding between a therapist and client, who work together constructively to overcome the client's problem. App: One U.S. National Institute of Mental Health depression-treatment study confirmed that the most effective therapists were those who were perceived as most emphatic and caring and who established the closest therapeutic bonds with their clients.

Psychiatry

A branch of medicine dealing with psychological disorders; practiced by physicians who sometimes provide medical (for example, drug) treatments as well as psychological therapy. App: Elena diagnosed that Bill had Borderline Personality Disorder.

Counseling psychology

A branch of psychology that assists people with problems in living (often related to school, work, or marriage) and achieving greater well-being. App: Time assessed and diagnosis severe psychopathology.

Community psychology

A branch of psychology that studies how people interact with their social environments and how social institutions affect individuals and groups. App: The community of Johns Creek seeks to expand "helping" beyond traditional psychotherapy to promote wellness.

Psychodynamic psychology

A branch of psychology that studies how unconcious drives and conflicts influence behavior, and uses that information to treat people with psychological disorders. App: Obsessive hand washing can linked to a trauma in childhood that now causes this behavior.

Developmental Psychology

A branch of psychology that studies physical, cognitive, and social change throughout the life span. App: There are three major issues that is the focus of development psychology and they are nature and nurture, continuity and stages, and stability and changes.

Developmental psychology

A branch of psychology that studies physical, cognitive, and social change throughout the lifespan. App: Children think differently than adults. Development is therefore biologically based and changes as the child matures.

Clinical psychology

A branch of psychology that studies, assesses, and treats people with psychological disorders. App: Robert is helping Dorothy with her depression so she can keep her job and friends.

Interpersonal Psychotherapy

A brief (12- to 16-session) variation of psychodynamic therapy that has effectively treated depression.

Operational Definition

A carefully worded statement of the exact procedures (operations) used in a research study. For example, human intelligence may be operationally defined as what an intelligence test measures. App: "Sleep deprived" could be defined as "x hours less" than the person's natural sleep. These exact descriptions will allow anyone to reproduce the experiment.

Unconditional Positive Regard

A caring, accepting, nonjudgmental attitude, which Carl Rogers believed would help clients to develop self-awareness and self-acceptance. App: Given a nonjudgmental, grace-filled environment that provides unconditional positive regard, people may accept even their worst traits and feel valued and whole.

Trait

A characteristic pattern of behavior or a disposition to feel and act, as assessed by self-report inventories and peer reports. App: That experience ultimately led Allport to do what Freud did not to do - to describe personality in terms of fundamental traits - people's characteristic behaviors and conscious motives.

Norepinephrine (Noradrenalin)

A chemical released from the sympathetic nervous system in response to stress; affects other organs of the body, it is also referred to as a stress hormone. App: It helps us think clearer by increasing in the amount of oxygen going to our brain.

Psychoactive Drug

A chemical substance that alters perceptions and moods. App: A drug's overall effect depends not only on its biological effects but also on the psychology of the user's expectations, which vary with social and cultural contexts.

Psychological Conflict

A choice is required b/t actions or goals that are perceived as incompatible App: It is when one has to choose between two things.

SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors)

A class of antidepressants prescribed for depression and anxiety disorders. They work by increasing the amount of the neurotransmitter serotonin.

Flashbulb Memory

A clear memory of an emotionally significant moment of event. App: When we long remember exciting or shocking events, such as our first kiss or our whereabouts when learning of a loved one's death.

Cochlea

A coiled, bony, fluid-filled tube in the inner ear; sound waves traveling through the cochlear fluid trigger nerve impulses. App: The sound waves travel from one hole and out from another hole.

Flow

A completely involved, focused state of consciousness, with diminished awareness of self and time, resulting from optimal engagement of one's skills. App: Between the anxiety of being overwhelmed and stressed, and the apathy of being underwhelmed and bored, lies a zone in which people experience this.

DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid)

A complex molecule containing the genetic information that makes up the chromosomes. App: It makes up the chromosomes

Instinct

A complex, unlearned behavior that is rigidly patterned throughout a species. App: Human behavior, too, exhibits certain unlearned fixed patterns, including infant's innate reflexes for rooting and sucking.

Standard deviation

A computed measure of how much scores vary around the mean score. App: A class had a mean score of 75%. The teacher calculated the standard deviation of the other test scores and found a very small standard deviation, which suggested that most students scored very close to 75%.

Schema

A concept or framework that organizes and interprets information. App: To this end, the maturing brain builds schemas.

Savant Syndrome

A condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has an exceptional specific skill, such as in computation or drawing. App: Rainman (Kim Peek) is a savant.

Equity

A condition in which people receive from a relationship in proportion to what they give to it. App: One key to a gratifying and enduring relationship is equity.

Intellectual Disability

A condition of limited mental ability, indicated by an intelligence score of 70 or below and difficulty in adapting to the demands of life. (Formerly referred to as mental retardation.) App: American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities guidelines specify performance that is approximately two standard deviations below average.

Down Syndrome

A condition of mild to severe intellectual disability and associated physical disorders caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21. App: Most Chilean children with Down Syndrome attend separate schools for children with special needs.

Split brain

A condition resulting from surgery that isolates the brain's two hemispheres by cutting the fibers (mainly those of the corpus callosum) connecting them. App: People with this condition had their personality and intellect hardly affected.

Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT)

A confrontational cognitive therapy, developed by Albert Ellis, that vigorously challenges, people's illogical, self-defeating attitudes and assumptions. App: Change people's thinking by revealing the "absurdity" of their self-defeating ideas, the sharp-tongued Ellis believed, and you will change their self-defeating feelings and enable healthier behaviors.

Stroop Effect

A demonstration of interference in the reaction time of a task. App: Someone is asked to say the color of letters, which is a easy task, but it slows if, say green letters form the conflicting word RED.

Case Study

A descriptive technique in which one individual or group is studied in depth in the hope of revealing universal principles App: Maya would look at others to see how they react.

Achievement Motivation

A desire for significant accomplishment, for mastery of skills or ideas, for control, and for attaining a high standard. App: Psychologist Henry Murray defined this type of motivation.

Intrinsic Motivation

A desire to perform a behavior effectively for its own sake. App: In experiments, children have been promised a payoff for playing with an interesting puzzle or toy.

Extrinsic Motivation

A desire to perform a behavior to receive promised rewards or avoid threatened punishment. App: A student takes a class just for the credits and not for his or her interest.

Cochlear Implant

A device for converting sounds into electrical signals and stimulating the auditory nerve through electrodes threaded into the cochlea. App: It is the only way to restore hearing for people with nerve deafness .

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PSTD)

A disorder characterized by haunting memories, nightmares, social withdrawal, jumpy anxiety, numbness of feeling, and/or insomnia that lingers for four weeks or more after a traumatic experience. App: PTSD symptoms have also reported by survivors of accidents, disasters, and violent and sexual assaults (including an estimated two-thirds of prostitutes).

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

A disorder characterized by unwanted repetitive thoughts (obsessions) and/or actions (compulsions). App: We all may at times be obsessed with senseless or offensive thoughts that will not go away.

Conversion Disorder

A disorder in which a person experiences very specific genuine physical symptoms for which no physiological basis can be found. (Also called functional neurological symptom disorder.) App: One rare type of disorder, more common in Freud's day than in ours, is conversion disorder, so called because anxiety presumably is converted into a physical symptom.

Illness Anxiety Disorder

A disorder in which a person interprets normal physical sensations as symptoms of a disease. (Formerly called hypochondriasis.) App: Somatic symptom and related disorders send people not to a psychologist or psychiatrist but to a physician, which is especially true to those who experience this illness anxiety disorder.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

A disorder that appears in childhood and is marked by significant deficiencies in communication and social interaction, and by rigidly fixated interests and repetitive behaviors. App: Once believed to affect 1 in 2500 children, ASD now affects 1 in 110 American children and about 1 in 100 in Britain.

Confounding variable

A factor other than the independent variable that might produce an effect in an experiment. App: The amount of word in letters.

Myelin sheath

A fatty tissue layer segmentally encasing the axons of some neurons; enables vastly greater transmission speed as neural impulses hop from one sausage-like node to the next. App: It covers the axon of some neurons and helps speed neural impulses.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)

A form of psychotherapy developed by Francine Shapiro that emphasizes the role of distressing memories in some mental health disorders. It is an evidence-based therapy used to help with the symptoms of PTSD.

General Intelligence (g)

A general intelligence factor that, according to Spearman and others, underlies specific mental abilities and therefore measured by every task on an intelligence test. App:

Stereotype

A generalized (sometimes accurate but often overgeneralized) belief about a group of people. App: Jocks are stupid and bullies.

Huntington's Disease

A genetic disease with no cure. Symptoms include loss of control over muscle movement and severe mood and behavioral changes.

Electra Complex

A girl's sexual desires toward her father and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival mother. App; Some psychoanalysts in Freud's era believed that girls experienced a parallel to the Oedipus complex.

Cortisol

A glucocorticoid stress hormone the outer part of the adrenal glands secretes. App: It saves us when we are under stress.

Scatterplot

A graphed cluster of dots, each of which represents the values of two variables. The slope of the points suggests the direction of the relationship between the two variables. The amount of scatter suggests the strength of the correlation (little scatter indicates high correlation). App: Amount of exercise and amount of energy is positive.

Cohort

A group of people from a given time period. App: Scientist can retest the same cohort over a period of years.

Humanistic Psychology

A historically signficant perspective that emphasized the growth potential of healthy people. App: Rowanda was feeling down so her friend told her to focus on her strengths not her faults.

Epinephrine (adrenaline)

A hormone secreted by the adrenal medulla upon stimulation by the central nervous system in response to stress, as anger or fear, and acting to increase heart rate, blood pressure, cardiac output, and carbohydrate metabolism. (fight) App: It allows people to do superhuman actions like lifting a car.

Client-Centered Therapy

A humanistic therapy, developed by Carl Rogers, in which the therapist uses techniques such as active listening within a genuine, accepting, empathic environment to facilitate client's growth. (Also called person-centered therapy.) App: It focuses on the person's conscious self-perceptions.

Ghrelin

A hunger-arousing hormone secreted by an empty stomach. App: The remaining stomach then produces much less ghrelin, and the person's appetite lessens.

Visual Cliff

A laboratory device for testing depth perception in infants and young animals. App: Gibson wondered if a toddler peering over the rim perceive the dangerous drop-off and draw back. The result was that they refused to crawl out onto the glass.

AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome)

A life-threatening, sexually transmitted infection caused by the human immunodeficiency virus. APP: AIDS depletes the immune system, leaving the person vulnerable to infections.

Nucleus accumbens

A limbic system reward centers; in front of the hypothalamus; App: It was discovered in many other species, including dolphins and monkeys.

Polygraph

A machine that measures several of the physiological responses APP: It is used to detect lies; the problems are physiological arousal is same from one emotion to another and many innocent people respond with heightened tension to accusation by ex-rape victims.

Glutamate

A major excitatory neurotransmitter; involved in memory. App: Oversupply of glutamate can overstimulate the brain, producing migraines or seizures (which is why some people avoid MSG, monosodium glutamate, in food).

GABA (Gamma- aminobutyric acid)

A major inhibitory neurotransmitter. App: Seizures, tremors, and insomnia causes a undersupply of these neurotransmitters.

Mental Age

A measure of intelligence test performance devised by Binet; the chronological age that most typically corresponds to a given level of performance. Thus, a child who does as well as the average 8-year-old is said to have a mental age of 8. App: Children with below-average mental ages, such as 9-year-olds who perform at the level of typical 7-year-olds, would struggle with age-appropriate schoolwork.

Recall

A measure of memory in which the person must retrieve information learned earlier, as on a fill-in-the-blank test. App:In one experiment, people who had graduated 25 years earlier could not recall many of their old classmates, but they could recognize 90 percent of their pictures and names.

Recognition

A measure of memory in which the person need only identify items previously learned, as on a multiple-choice test. App: Our recognition memory is impressively quick and vast.

Relearning

A measure of memory that assesses the amount of time saved when learning material again. App: Our speed of relearning also reveals memory.

Correlation

A measure of the extent to which two factors vary together, and thus of how well either factor predicts the other. App: The amount of food eaten and the amount of fat gained is positive.

Concept

A mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people. App: The concept of chair includes many items- a baby's high chair, a reclining chair, a dentist's chair-all of which are sitting.

Prototypes

A mental image or best example of a category. Matching new items to a prototype provides a quick and easy method for sorting items into categories (as when comparing feathered creatures to a prototypical bird, such as a robin). App: When someone thinks of the concept of something to sit on, the prototype is usually a chair.

Perceptual Set

A mental predisposition to perceive one thing but not another. App: Perceptual set can influence what we hear, taste, feel, and see.

Cognitive Map

A mental representation of the layout of one's environment. For example, after exploring a maze, rats act as it they have learned a cognitive map of it. App: Students have a layout of their school.

Intelligence Test

A method for assessing an individual's mental aptitudes and comparing them with those of others, using numerical scores. App: Tests after a unit is an intelligence test.

Algorithm

A methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem. Contrasts with the usually speedier-but also more error-prone-use of heuristics. App: Step-by-step algorithms can be laborious and exasperating.

Hierarchies

A mnemonic device that is composed of a few broad concepts divided and subdivided into narrower concepts and facts. App: Organizing knowledge in hierarchies helps us retrieve information efficiently, as Gordon Bower and his colleagues demonstrated by presenting words either randomly or grouped in categories.

Peg-Word System

A mnemonic device that links words with numbers to help understand the words better by associating a number and a word or a letter and a word together. App: One is bun.

Agonist

A molecule that by binding to a receptor site, stimulates a response. App: Some opiate drugs are agonists anD produce a temporary "high" by amplifying normal sensations of arousal or pleasure.

Antagonist

A molecule that, by binding to a receptor site, inhibits or blocks a response. App: Small injections of botulin - Botox - smooth wrinkles by paralyzing the underlying facial muscles.

Echoic Memory

A momentary sensory memory of auditory stimuli; if attention is elsewhere, sounds and words can still be recalled within 3 or 4 seconds. App: One can recover the last few words from one's mind's echo chamber if his or her attention veers and is asked, "What did I just say?"

Iconic Memory

A momentary sensory memory of visual stimuli; a photographic or picture-image memory lasting no more than a few tenths of a second. App: For a few tenths of a second, our eyes register a photographic or picture-image memory of a scene, and we can recall any part of it in amazing detail.

Bipolar Disorder

A mood disorder in which a person alternates between the hopelessness and lethargy of depression and the overexcited state of mania. (Formerly called manic-depressive disorder). App: Adolescent mood swings, from rage to bubbly, can, when prolonged, produce a bipolar diagnosis.

Major Depressive Disorder

A mood disorder in which a person experiences, in the absences of drugs or another medical condition, two or more weeks with five or more symptoms, at least one of which must be either depressed mood or loss of interest or pleasure. App: To sense what major depression feels like, suggest some clinicians, imagine combining the anguish of grief with the sluggishness of bad jet lag.

Mania

A mood disorder marked by a hyperactive, wildly optimistic state. App: If depression is living in slow motion, mania is fast forward.

Eugenics

A much-criticized nineteenth-century movement that proposed measuring human traits and using the results to encourage only smart and fit people to reproduce. App: Francis Galton proposed this.

Motivation

A need or desire that energizes and directs behavior. App: It arises from the interplay between nature (the bodily "push") and nurture (the "pulls" from our thought processes and culture).

Neuron

A nerve cell; the basic building block of the nervous system. App: It sends electrical signals as messages.

Reticular formation

A nerve network that travels through the brainstem and thalamus and plays an important role in controlling arousal. App: As the spinal cord's sensory input flow up to the thalamus, some of it travels through this part of the brain, which filters incoming stimuli and relays important information to other brain areas.

Hippocampus

A neural center located in the limbic system; helps process explicit memories for storage. App: It is the brain's equivalent of a "save" button for explicit memories.

Action potential

A neural impulse; a brief electrical charge that travels down an axon. App: Sending a message causes a brief electrical charge that travels down an axon.

Hypothalamus

A neural structure lying below (hypo) the thalamus; it directs several maintenance activities (eating, drinking, body temperature), helps govern the endocrine system via the pituitary gland, and is linked to emotion and reward. App: Some clusters in the hypothalamus influence hunger.

Major Neurocognitive Disorder (formerly Dementia)

A neurocognitive disorder believed to be caused by aphasia, apraxia, agnosia, or a disturbance in executive functioning. Symptoms include cognitive decline in learning and memory, language, executive function, complex attention, perceptual-motor, and social cognition.

Alzheimer's Disease

A neurocognitive disorder caused by genetic mutation. Symptoms include a decline in memory and learning; a decline in cognition.

Tardive Dyskinesia

A neurological syndrome characterized by repetitive, involuntary, purposeless movements caused by the long-term use of certain drugs called neuroleptics used for psychiatric, gastrointestinal, and neurological disorders.

Dendrite

A neuron's bushy, branching extensions that receive messages and conduct impulses toward the cell body; listen. App: It receives messages from other cells.

All-or-none response

A neuron's reaction of either finding (with a full-strength response) of not firing. App: Guns wither fire or they don't.

Reuptake

A neurotransmitter''s reabsorption by the sending neuron. App: The sending neuron absorbs excess neurotransmitter molecules to send them out later.

Working Memory

A newer understanding of short-term memory that focuses on conscious, active processing of incoming auditory and visual-spatial information, and of information retrieved from long-term memory. App: One uses working memory to link the information one is reading with previously stored information.

Suprachiasmatic Nucleus (SCN)

A pair of cell clusters in the hypothalamus that controls circadian rhythm. In response to light, the SCN causes the pineal gland to adjust melatonin production, thus modifying our feelings of sleepiness. App: It is a pair of grain-of-rice-sized, 10,000-cell clusters in the hypothalamus.

Adrenal glands

A pair of endocrine glands that sit just above the kidneys and secrete hormones (epinephrine and norepinephrine) that help arouse the body in times of stress. App: Its hormones increase heart rate, blood pressure, and blood sugar, providing us with a surge of energy, known as the fight-or-flight response.

Procedural Memory

A part of long-term memory that is responsible for knowing how to do things, as known as motor skills; subset of implicit memory, sometimes referred to as unconscious memory or automatic memory. Riding a bike, walking, and talking, are examples of needing our procedural memory.

Reinforcement Schedule

A pattern that defines how often a desired response will be reinforced. App: It can vary depending on how one reinforces the response.

Conflict

A perceived incompatibility of actions, goals, or ideas. App: The elements of conflict are much the same, whether we are speaking of nations at war, cultural groups feuding within a society, or partners sparring in a relationship.

McGurk Effect

A perceptual phenomenon that demonstrates an interaction between hearing and vision in speech perception. App: One will see the mouth movements for ga while hearing ba we may perceive da.

Critical Period

A period during someone's development in which a particular skill or characteristic is believed to be most readily acquired.

Critical Period

A period during someone's development in which a particular skill or characteristic is believed to be most readily acquired. App: Sensory restrictions on infant cats, monkeys, and humans suggest that there is this period for normal sensory and perceptual development.

Refactory Period

A period of inactivity after neuron has fired. App: The neuron pumps the positive charged sodium ions back outside.

Temperament

A person's characteristic emotional reactivity and intensity. App: Is attachment style the result of parenting or the result of genetically influenced temperament?

Antisocial Personality Disorder

A personality disorder in which a person (usually a man) exhibits a lack of conscience for wrongdoing, even toward friends and family members. May be aggressive an ruthless or a clever con artist. App: The person (sometimes called a sociopath or a psychopath) is typically a male whose lack of conscience becomes plain before age 15, as he begins to lie, steal, fight, or display unrestrained sexual behavior.

Projective Test

A personality test, such as the Rorschach, that provides ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of one's inner dynamics. App: Its aim is to provide this "psychological X-ray" by asking test-takers to describe an ambiguous stimulus or tell a story about it.

Borderline Personality Disorder

A pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts. Some of these contexts include frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment, identity disturbance, and recurrent suicidal behavior.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

A popular integrative therapy that combines cognitive therapy (changing self-defeating thinking) with behavior therapy (changing behavior). App: It seeks to make people aware of their irrational negative thinking, to replace it with new ways of thinking, and to practice the more positive approach in everyday settings.

Incentives

A positive or negative environmental stimulus that motivates behavior. App: We are pushed by our need to reduce drives and we are pulled by incentives.

Cocaine

A powerful and addictive stimulant, derived from the coca plant, producing temporarily increased alertness and euphoria. App: It enters the bloodstream quickly, producing a rush of euphoria that depletes the brain's supply of neurotransmitters dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine.

LSD

A powerful hallucinogenic drug; also known as acid (lysergic acid diethylamide). App: The emotions of an LSD trip vary from euphoria to detachment to panic.

Methamphetamine

A powerfully addictive drug that stimulates the central nervous system, with speeded-up body functions and associated energy and mood changes; over time, appears to reduce baseline dopamine levels. App: Methamphetamine triggers the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which stimulates brain cells that enhance energy and mood, leading to eight hours or so of heightened energy and euphoria.

Sexual Dysfunction

A problem that consistently impairs sexual arousal or functioning. App: Some sexual dysfunctions are erectile disorder and premature ejaculation in males and female orgasmic disorder in women.

Meta-Analysis

A procedure for statistically combining the results of many different research studies. App: Meta-analysis give us the bottom-line results of lots of studies.

Higher-Order Conditioning

A procedure in which the conditioned stimulus in one conditioning experience is paired with a new neutral stimulus creating a second (often weaker) conditioned stimulus. For example, an animal that has learned that a tone predicts food might then learn that a light predicts the tone and begin responding to the light alone. (Also called second-order conditioning.) App: Through higher-order conditioning, a new NS can become a new CS.

Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

A projective test in which people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes. App: Henry Murray introduced this test.

Schizophrenia

A psychological disorder characterized by delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, and/or diminished or inappropriate emotional expression. App: Literally translated, it means "split mind."

Psychosis

A psychological disorder in which a person loses contact with reality, experiencing irrational ideas and distorted perceptions. App: It is the chief example of a psychosis, a psychotic disorder marked by irrationality and lost contact with reality.

Somatic Symptom Disorder

A psychological disorder in which the symptoms take a somatic (bodily) form without apparent physical cause. (See conversion disorder and illness anxiety disorder.) App: One person may have a variety of complaints -vomiting, dizziness, blurred vision, difficulty in swallowing.

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

A psychological disorder marked by the appearance by age 7 of one or more of three key symptoms: extreme inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. App: If taken for a psychological evaluation, Todd may be diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, as are some 11 percent of American 4- to 17- year-olds who display its key symptoms.

Lobotomy

A psychosurgical procedure once used to calm uncontrollably emotional or violent patients. The procedure cut the nerves connecting the frontal lobes to the emotion-controlling centers of the inner brain. App: Portuguese physician Egas Moniz developed what became the best-known psychosurgical operation: the lobotomy.

Personality Inventory

A questionnaire (often with true-false or agree-disagree items) on which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors; used to assess selected personality traits. App: Personality inventories assess several traits at once.

Mutation

A random error in gene replication that leads to a change. App: Nature has indeed selected advantageous variations form the new gene combinations produced at each human conception and error that sometimes result.

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)

A rare dissociative disorder in which a person exhibits two or more distinct and alternating personalities. Formerly called multiple personality disorder. App: Each personality has its own voice and mannerisms.

Self-Serving Bias

A readiness to perceive oneself favorably. App: It is one of psychology's most provocative and firmly established recent conclusions concerns the potent self-serving bias.

Wernicke's area

A region of the brain concerned with the comprehension of language, located in the cortex of the dominant temporal lobe; it helps with understanding. App: Damage to this section disrupts understanding.

Broca's area

A region of the brain concerned with the production of speech, located in the cortex of the dominant frontal lobe; it helps with speaking. App: Damage to this section disrupts speaking.

Skewed distribution

A representation of scores that lack symmetry around their average value. App: The income of a family.

Experiment

A research method in which an investigator manipulates one or more factors (independent variables) to observe the effect on some behavior or mental process (the dependent variable). By random assignment of participants, the experimenter aims to control other relevant variables. App: Rachel wanted to see how a baby would react toward a picture and a video.

Id

A reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that, according to Freud, strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives. The id Operates on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification. App: To envision an id-dominated person, think of a newborn infant crying our for satisfaction, caring nothing for the outside world's conditions and demands.

Refactory Period

A resting period after orgasm, during which a man cannot achieve another orgasm. App: It occurs during the resolution phase in both genders.

Iris

A ring of muscle tissue that forms the colored portion of the eye around the pupil and controls the size of the pupil opening. App: It can constrict or dilate in response to inner emotions.

Tinnitus

A ringing-in-the-ears sensation. App: People with hearing loss often experience the sound of silence: phantom sounds.

Random Sample

A sample that fairly represents a population because each member has an equal chance of inclusion. App: Blake buys a lottery ticket to get his child into a magnet club. He is put in Group A and was chosen form a hat.

Stereotype Threat

A self-confirming concern that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype. App: Claude Steele, Joshua Aronson, and Spencer observed this self-fulfilling stereotype threat with Black students and when the Black students took verbal aptitude tests, they performed worse.

Dream

A sequence of images, emotions, and thoughts passing through a sleeping person's mind. Dreams are notable for their hallucinatory imagery, discontinuities, and incongruities, and for the dreamer's delusional acceptance of the content and later difficulties remembering it. App: We spend six years of our life in dreams, many of which are anything but sweet.

CT (computed tomography) scan

A series of X-ray photographs taken from different angles and combined by computer into a composite representation of a slice of the brain's structure. (Also called CAT scan.) App: It examines the brain by taking X-ray photographs that can reveal brain damage.

Successive Approximations

A series of rewards that provide positive reinforcement for behavior changes that are successive steps towards the final desired behavior. App: By making rewards contingent on desired behaviors, researchers and animal trainers gradually shape complex behaviors.

Role

A set of expectations (norms) about a social position, defining how those in the position ought to behave. App: When you adopt a new role -when you leave middle school and start high school, become a college student, or begin a new job - you strive to follow the social prescriptions.

Role

A set of expectations (norms) about a social position, defining how those in the position ought to behave. App: In psychology, as in theater, a role refers to a cluster of prescribed actions, the behaviors we expect of those who occupy a particular social position.

Gender Role

A set of expected behaviors for males or for females. App: Gender roles vary over time and place.

Heuristic

A simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error-prone than algorithms. App: People can eliminate the number of options in the "SPLOYOCHYG" by grouping letters that often appear together

Reflex

A simple, automatic response to a sensory stimulus, such as the knee-jerk response. App: When one see someone about to punch him or her, he or she will flinch or blink.

Measures of central tendency

A single score that represents a whole set of scores: mean, median, and mode. App: Lauren found that the average amount of diapers babies uses a year is 3650.

Social Trap

A situation in which the conflicting parties, by each rationally pursuing their self-interest rather than the good of the group, become caught in mutually destructive behavior. App: " It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest" (Adam Smith).

Night Terrors

A sleep disorder characterized by high arousal and an appearance of being terrified; unlike nightmares, night terrors occur during NREM-3 sleep, within two or three hours of falling asleep, and are seldom remembered. App: They may sit up or walk around, talk incoherently, experience doubled heart and breathing rates, and appear terrified.

Sleep Apnea

A sleep disorder characterized by temporary cessations of breathing during sleep and repeated momentary awakenings. App: Despite feeling fatigued and depressed - and hearing their mate's complaints about their loud "snoring" - many are unaware of their disorder.

Narcolepsy

A sleep disorder characterized by uncontrollable sleep attacks. The sufferer may lapse directly into REM sleep, often at inopportune times. App: In severe cases, the person collapses directly into a brief period of REM sleep, with loss of muscular tension.

Factitious Disorder (formerly Munchausen's Syndrome)

A somatic disorder where patients deliberately create or exaggerate symptoms of an illness in several ways. They may lie about or mimic symptoms, hurt themselves to bring on symptoms, or alter diagnostic tests.

Disscociation

A split in consciousness, which allows some thoughts and behaviors to occur simultaneously with others. App: Ernest Hilgard hypnotic dissociation as a vivid form of everyday mind splits- similar to doodling while listening to a lecture or typing the end of a sentence while starting a conversation.

Tolerance

A state in which increasing doses are needed to produce an effect. App: Using sleeping pills and alcohol can aggravate the problem, reducing REM sleep and leaving the person with next-day blahs. This can lead to tolerance.

Correlation coefficient

A statistical index of the relationship between two variables (from -1.0 to +1.0). App: Someone's age and their income level is +.20 so the correlation is slightly positive.

Factor Analysis

A statistical procedure that identifies clusters of related items (called factors) on a test; used to identify different dimensions of performance that underlie a person's total score. App: One example is spatial ability or verbal skill.

Statistical significance

A statistical statement of how likely it is that an obtained result occurred by chance. App: Flipping a coin has a 50 % chance of landing on head or tails.

Nicotine

A stimulating and highly addictive psychoactive drug in tobacco. App: Those addicted to nicotine find it very hard to quit because tobacco products are as powerfully and quickly addictive as heroin and cocaine.

Conditioned Reinforcer

A stimulus that gains its reinforcing power through its association with a primary reinforcer; also known as a secondary reinforcer. App: It gets its power through learned association with primary reinforcers.

Oxytocin

A stress-moderating hormone associated with pair bonding in animals and released by cuddling, massage, and breast feeding in humans. APP: Why women more often respond to stress by nurturing and banding together?

Cross-Sectional Study

A study in which people of different ages are compared with one another.

Cross Sectional Studies

A study in which people of different ages are compared with one another. App: Researchers have consistently found that older adults give fewer correct answers on intelligence tests than do younger adults.

SQ3R

A study method incorporating five steps: Survey, Question, Read, Retrieve, Review. App: Britney surveyed the chapter. Then, she asked ten questions. After, she read and answered the questions. Furthermore, Britney recalled the answers and answered the questions again.

Health Psychology

A subfield of psychology that provides psychology's contribution to behavioral medicine. APP: It can prevent illness and promote health.

Representative Sample

A subset of the population carefully chosen to represent the proportion diversity of the population as a whole. App: The group of friends Angela chose for her survey.

Insight

A sudden realization of a problem's solution. App: Ten-year-old Johnny Appleton's insight solved a problem that had stumped construction workers: how to rescue a young robin that had fallen into a narrow 30-inch-deep hole in a cement-block wall.

Insight

A sudden realization of a problem's solution; contrasts with strategy-based solutions. App: Teams of researchers have identified brain activity associated with sudden flashes of this problem solving.

Posthypnotic Suggestion

A suggestion made during a hypnosis session, to be carried out after the subject is no longer hypnotized; used by some clinicians to help control undesired symptoms and behaviors. App: They have helped alleviate headaches, asthma, and stress-related skin disorders.

Fight or flight

A surge of energy caused by increase heart rate, blood pressure, and blood sugar by epinephrine and norepinephrine. App: If a person encountered a bear, then he or she would attack the bear or run away.

Normal curve

A symmetrical, bell-shaped curve that describes the distribution of many types of data; most scores fall near the mean (68% fall within one standard deviation of it) and fewer and fewer near the extremes. App: The score on an intelligence test.

Psychological Disorder

A syndrome marked by a clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior. (Adapted from American Psychiatric Association, 2013.) App: Disturbed, or dysfunctional, behaviors are maladaptive - they interfere with normal day-to-day life.

Ecstasy (MDMA)

A synthetic stimulant and mild hallucinogen. Produces euphoria and social intimacy, but with short-term health risks and longer-term harm to serotonin-producing neurons and to mood and cognition. App: As an amphetamine derivative, Ecstasy triggers dopamine release, but its major effect is releasing stored serotonin and blocking its reuptake, thus prolonging serotonin's feel-good flood.

Biofeedback

A system for electronically recording, amplifying, and feeding back information regarding a subtle physiological state, such as blood pressure or muscle tension. App: Biofeedback instruments mirror the results of a person's own efforts, thereby allowing the person to learn techniques for controlling a particular physiological response.

Biofeedback

A system of recording, amplifying, and feeding back information about the subtle physiological response many controlled by the autonomic nervous system. App: A decade of study revealed only limited effectiveness, with biofeedback working best on tension headaches.

360-Degree Feedback

A system or process in which employees receive confidential, anonymous feedback from the people who work around them. App: If one joins an organization that practices this, one will rate oneself, one's manager, and one's other colleagues, and one will be rated by one's manager, other colleagues, and customers.

Survey

A technique for ascertaining the self-reported attitudes or behaviors of a particular group, usually by questioning a representative, random sample of the group. App: Mary got her employees a questionnaire where they were asked to answer the questions.

fMRI (functional MRI)

A technique for revealing bloodflow and, therefore, brain activity by comparing successive MRI scans. These scans brain function as well as its structure. App: It can reveal the brain's functioning as well as its structure.

MRI (magnetic resonance imaging)

A technique that uses magnetic fields and radio waves to produce computer-generated images of soft tissue. MRI scans show brain anatomy. App: It have revealed a larger-than-average neural area in the left hemisphere of musicians who display perfect pitch.

Mental Set

A tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past. App: Indeed, solutions that worked in the past often do work on new problems.

Homeostasis

A tendency to maintain a balanced or constant internal state; the regulation of any aspect of body chemistry, such as blood glucose, around a particular level. App: If our body temperature cools, blood vessels constrict to conserve warmth, and we feel driven to put on more clothes or seek a warmer environment.

Confirmation Bias

A tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence. App: Peter Watson demonstrated this tendency by giving British university students the three-number sequence 2-4-6 and asking them to guess the rule he had used to devise the series.

Empirically Derived Test

A test (such as the MMPI) developed by testing a pool of items and then selecting those that discriminate between groups. App: Like Binet's items, the MMPI were empirically derived.

Achievement Test

A test designed to assess what a person has learned. App: The AP Exam is an achievement test.

Aptitude Test

A test designed to predict a person's future performance; aptitude is the capacity to learn. App: A college entrance exam is an aptitude test - a "thinly disguised intelligence test."

Hypothesis

A testable prediction, often implied by a theory. App: If Lucas eats breakfast, then he will perform better on a math exam than students who do not eat breakfast.

Terror-Management Theory

A theory of death-related anxiety; explores people's emotional and behavioral responses to reminders of their impending death. App: Nearly 300 experiments testing their terror-management theory show that thinking about one's mortality provokes various terror-management defenses.

Signal Detection Theory

A theory predicting how and when we detect the presence of a faint stimulus (signal) amid background stimulation (noise). Assumes that there is no single absolute threshold and that detection depends partly on a person's experience, expectations, motivation, and alertness. App: Signal detection theorists seek to understand why people respond differently to the same stimuli.

Eardrum

A tight membrane;in the middle ear that vibrates in response to sound waves. App: It is a tympanic membrane.

Pitch

A tone's experienced highness or lowness; depends on frequency. App: Sound waves produced by a violin are much shorter and faster than those produced by a cello or a bass guitar.

Spinal cord

A two-way information highway connecting the peripheral nervous system and the brain. App: Ascending neural fibers send up sensory information, and descending fibers send back motor-control information.

Aversive Conditioning

A type of counterconditioning that associates an unpleasant state (such as nausea) with an unwanted behavior (such as drinking alcohol).

Systematic Desensitization

A type of exposure therapy that associates a pleasant, relaxed state with gradually increasing anxiety-triggering stimuli. Commonly used to treat phobias. App: Wolpe assumed, as did Jones, that you cannot be simultaneously anxious and relaxed.

Operant Conditioning

A type of learning in which behavior is strengthened if followed by a reinforcer or diminished if followed by a punisher. App: Organisms associate their own actions with consequences.

Classical Conditioning

A type of learning in which one learns to link two or more stimuli and anticipate events. App: Ivan Pavlov explored this phenomenon from his early twentieth-century experiments.

Insight Therapies

A variety of therapies that aim to improve psychological functioning by increasing a person's awareness of underlying motives and defenses. App: Psychodynamic and humanistic therapies are often referred to as insight therapies.

(WISC) Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children

A version of the WAIS for school-age children. App: There is a version for preschool children.

Cognitive neural prosthetics

A very versatile method for assisting paralyzed patients and patients with amputations. App: A paralyzed 25-year-old man was able to mentally control a TV, draw shapes on a computer screen and play video games- all thanks to an aspirin-sized ship with 100 microelectrodes recording activity in his motor cortex.

PET (positron emission tomography) scan

A visual display of brain activity that detects where a radioactive form of glucose goes while the brain performs a given task. App: Active neurons are glucose hogs, and after a person receives temporarily radioactive glucose, it can track the gamma rays released by this "food for thought" as the person performs a given task.

Biological Perspective

A way of looking thing in a way to find how brain circuits that cause us to feel a certain feeling or how heredity and experience influence our individual differences in reactions. App: Samantha gets angry when others talks bad about her family and friends.

Behavioral Perspective

A way that sees which external stimuli trigger certain responses or acts; A way of seeing psychology that advocates an expanded view of the principles that are the foundation of the school behaviorism. App: Brad drinks to make himself feel better.

Cognitive Perspective

A way to see how our interpretation of a situation affects our feelings of how our feelings affect our thinking; An approach within psychology that focuses on the impact of human thought reasoning, intelligence, and memory. App: Stephen could not see the joy in anything because he was depressed.

Light Exposure Therapy

A way to treat seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and certain other conditions by exposure to artificial light. SAD is a type of depression that occurs at a certain time each year, usually in the fall or winter.

Intrapersonal

Access to one's emotional life as a means of understanding oneself and others. These people can easily access their own feelings, discriminates among different emotional states, and use this to enrich and guide their lives. Ex: Therapist, social worker

Basic Trust

According to Erik Erikson, a sense that world is predictable and trustworthy; said to be formed during infancy by appropriate experiences with responsive caregivers. App: Erik attributed basic trust not to environment or inborn temperament, buy to early parenting.

Oedipus Complex

According to Freud, a boy's sexual desires toward his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father. App: After the Greek legend of Oedipus, who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother.

Fixation

According to Freud, a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, in which conflicts were unresolved. App: A person who had been either orally overindulged or deprived (perhaps by abrupt, early weaning) might fixate at the oral stage.

Unconscious

According to Freud, a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories. According to contemporary psychologists, information processing of which we are unaware. App: It is like the part of the iceberg that is underwater.

Manifest Content

According to Freud, the remembered story line of a dream (as distinct from its latent, or hidden, content). App: Lexy remembers that she was dancing the tango in her dream.

Latent Content

According to Freud, the underlying meaning of a dream (as distinct from its manifest content). App: Although mos dreams have no overt sexual imagery, Freud nevertheless believed that most adult dreams could be "traced back by analysis to erotic wishes." Thus, a gun might be a disguised representation of a penis.

Self-Actualization

According to Maslow, one of the ultimate psychological needs that arises after basic physical and psychological needs are met and self-esteem is achieved; the motivation to fulfill one's potential. App: Having achieved self-esteem, we ultimately seek self-actualization.

Unconditional Positive Regard

According to Rogers, an attitude of total acceptance toward another person. App: When people are accepting, they offer unconditional positive regard. It is a profound relief to drop our pretenses, confess our worst feeling, and discover that we are still accepted.

Postconventional Morality

Actions reflect belief in basic rights and self-defined ethical principles

Short-Term Memory

Activated memory that holds a few items briefly, such as the seven digits of a phone number while dialing, before the information is stored or forgotten. App: This is where we encode it through rehearsal; Dory(Finding Nemo) has an issue with maintaining this type of memory

Bipolar Cells

Activates by a spark of neural signals and it activates neighboring ganglion cells. App: It actives from impulses from rods and cones.

Ventromedical Hypothalamus

Activity in the second center-the lower mid-hypothalamus (the ventromedial hypothalamus) that depresses hunger, Stimulate this area and an animal will stop eating; destroy it and the animal's stomach and intestines will process food more rapidly, causing it to become extremely fat. App: After these mid hypothalamus lesions, rats eat more often, produce more fat, and use less fat for energy, rather like a miser who runs every bit of extra money to the bank and resists taking any out. This discovery explains why some patients with tumors near the base of the brain (the hypothalamus) eat.

Accommodation

Adapting our current understandings (schemas) to incorporate new information. App: The child soon learns that the original dog schema is too broad and accommodates by refining the category.

Reward deficiency syndrome

Addictive disorders that stem from malfunctions in natural brain systems for pleasure and well-being. App: People genetically predisposed to this disorder may crave whatever provides the missing pleasure or relieves negative feelings.

Conformity

Adjusting our behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard. App: Suggestibility and mimicry are subtle types of conformity.

Universal Grammar

All languages do share some basic elements.

Self-Concept

All our thoughts and feelings about ourselves, in answer to the question, "Who am I?" App: By the end of childhood, at about age 12, most children have developed a self-concept.

Self-Concept

All our thoughts and feelings about ourselves, in answer to the question, "Who am I?" App: For Maslow and Rogers a central feature of personality is one's self-concept.

Cognition

All the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating. App: The brain is a huge cognition system.

Cognition

All the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating. App: Jean Piaget studied children's cognitive development.

Population

All those in a group being studied, from which samples may be drawn. (Except for national studies, this does not refer to a country's whole population.) App: Andrew's classmates are his population for his experiment.

Coping

Alleviating stress using emotional, cognitive, or behavioral methods. App: In order to cope with problems in our lives, we need to learn how to alleviate the stress.

Selectively permeable

Allows certain molecules or ions to pass through it by means of active or passive transport. App: A tightly guarded facility, the axon's surface is very selective about what it allows through its gates.

Second-Order Conditioning

Also known as higher-order conditioning; A procedure in which the conditioned stimulus in one conditioning experience is paired with a new neutral stimulus creating a second (often weaker) conditioned stimulus. For example, an animal that has learned that a tone predicts food might then learn that a light predicts the tone and begin responding to the light alone. App: It is the money gained from a job.

Abraham Maslow

American Humanistic psychologist leader; found both Freudian psychology and behaviorism too limiting.

Carl Rogers

American Humanistic psychologist leader; found both Freudian psychology and behaviorism too limiting.

William James

American Philosopher-psychologist; He thought it would be fruitful to consider the evolved functions of our thoughts and feelings. He was influenced by evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin. He assumed that thinking, like smelling, developed because it was adaptive. Promoted functionalist; taught Mary Whiton Calkins; admitted Mary; tutored her alone; wrote many articles; introduced psychology to the educated public.

John B. Watson

American behaviorist; dismissed introspection and redefined psychology as " the scientific study of observable behavior"; demonstrated conditioned responses on a baby.

B.F Skinner

American behaviorist; dismissed introspection and redefined psychology as " the scientific study of observable behavior"; studied how consequences shape behavior.

Organizational Psychology

An I/O psychology subfield that examines organizational influences on worker satisfaction and productivity and facilitates organizational change. App: Organizational psychologists modify jobs and supervision in ways that boost morale and productivity.

Human Factors Psychology

An I/O psychology subfield that explores how people and machines interact and how machines and physical environments can be made safe and easy to use. App: Georgia designed products to improve safety and ease of use.

Human Factors psychology

An I/O psychology subfield that explores how people and machines interact and how machines and physical environments can be made safe and easy to use. App: Georgia designed products to improve safety and ease of use.

Personnel Psychology

An I/O psychology subfield that focuses on employee recruitment, selection, placement, training, appraisal, and development. App: Personnel psychologists match people with jobs, by identifying and placing well-suited candidates.

Near-Death Experience

An altered state of consciousness reported after a close brush with death (such as through cardiac arrest); often similar to drug-induced hallucinations. App: Many describe visions of tunnels, bright lights or being of lights, a replay of old memories, and out-of-body sensations.

Electroencephalogram (EEG)

An amplified recording of the waves of electrical activity sweeping across the brain's surface. These waves are measured by electrodes placed on the scalp. App: Studying an EEG of the brain's activity is like studying a car engine by listening to its hum.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder

An anxiety disorder in which a person is continually tense, apprehensive, and in a state of autonomic nervous system arousal. App: The symptoms of this disorder are commonplace; their persistence, for six months or more, is not.

Phobia

An anxiety disorder marked by a persistent, irrational fear and avoidance of a specific object, activity, or situation. App: Acrophobia is the fear of heights.

Panic Disorder

An anxiety disorder marked by unpredictable, minutes-long episodes of intense dread in which a person experiences terror and accompanying chest pain, choking, or other frightening sensations. Often followed by worry over a possible next attack. App: Panic strikes, wreaks havoc, and disappears.

Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy

An anxiety treatment that progressively exposes people to electronic simulations of their greatest fears, such as airplane flying, spiders, and public speaking. App: Wearing a head-mounted display unit that projects a three-dimensional virtual world, you would view a lifelike series of scenes that would view a lifelike series of scenes that would be tailored to your particular fear and shift as your head turned.

Eclectic Approach

An approach to psychotherapy that, depending on the client's problems, uses techniques from various forms of therapy. App: many psychotherapists describe themselves as taking eclectic approach, using blend of psychotherapies.

Motor cortex

An area at the rear of the frontal lobes that controls voluntary movements. App: This region in the left and right hemispheres cause movements of specific body parts on the opposite side of the body.

Passionate Love

An aroused state of intense positive absorption in another, usually present at the beginning of a love relationship. App: The two-factor theory of emotion can help us understand this intense positive absorption in another.

Context Effects

An aspect of cognitive psychology that describes the influence of environmental factors on one's perception of a stimulus. App: If someone hears "eels on a wagon," then it is likely that he or she will perceive the first word as "wheels." However, if someone hears "eels is on the orange," then it is likely that he or she will perceive the first word as "peels."

Space

An automatic process that allows one to encode the place on a page or in one's notebook where certain material appears. App: One visualizes the location of the information on this page.

Frequency

An automatic process that allows one to keep track of how many things happen. App: When you suddenly realize, this is the third time you ran into her today.

Anorexia Nervosa

An eating disorder in which a person (usually an adolescent female) maintains a starvation diet despite being significantly (15 percent or more) underweight. App: People with anorexia - usually adolescents and 9 times out of 10 females - drop significantly below normal weight.

Bulimia Nervosa

An eating disorder in which a person alternates binge eating (usually of high-calorie foods) with purging (by vomiting or laxative use), excessive exercise, or fasting. App: Unlike anorexia, bulimia is marked by weight fluctuations within or above normal ranges, making the condition easy to hide.

Intuition

An effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning. App: When making each day's hundreds of judgments and decisions, we seldom take the time and effort to reason systematically and just follow this.

Attachment

An emotional tie with another person; shown in young children by their seeking closeness to the caregiver and showing distress on separation. App: Infants become attached to those - typically their parents - who are comfortable and familiar.

Sexual Orientation

An enduring sexual attraction toward members of either one's own sex ( homosexual orientation), the other sex (herterosexual orientation), or both sexes (bisexual orientation).

Taste Aversion

When an animal associates the taste of a certain food with symptoms caused by a toxic, spoiled, or poisonous substance. App: When a rat tastes food and if it gets sickened after sampling the new food, they avoid it.

Halo Errors

When one's overall evaluation of an employee, or of a personal trait such as friendliness, biases ratings of specific work-related behaviors, such as reliability. App: It is a bias of performance appraisal.

Recency Effect

When someone remember the end the best; the finish. App: When your manager is introducing co-workers and you only remember the last person introduced.

Primacy Effect

When someone remembers the first item; the beginning. App: When your manager is introducing co-workers and you only remember the first person introduced.

Rooting Reflex

When something touches a baby's cheek, that baby turns toward that touch open their mouth and vigorously root for a nipple App- what causes a baby to get food

Phantom Limb Sensations

When the brain misinterprets the spontaneous central nervous system activity that occurs in the absence of normal sensory input, the brain creates pain. App: As the dreamer may see with eyes close, so some 7 in 10 amputees may feel pain or movement in nonexistent limbs.

Linguistic Determinism

Whorf's hypothesis that language determines the way we think.

Margaret Floy Washburn

Wrote The Animal Mind. Became the first woman to be psychology's first female psychology Ph.D. Became the second female APA president in 1921.

G. Stanley Hall

Wundt's American student. Establish the first formal U.S. psychology laboratory, at Johns Hopkins University.

Intimacy Vs Isolation

Young adults struggle to form close relationships and to gain the capacity for intimate love, or they feel socially inclined

Relaxation Response

Your personal ability to make your body release chemicals and brain signals that make your muscles and organs slow down and increases blood flow to the brain. App: According to Benson, relaxation practiced once or twice daily has lasting stress-reducing benefits.

Resistance

Your temperature, blood pressure and respiration remain high. Your adrenal glands pump hormones into your bloodstream. You are fully engaged. APP: It is phase 2 of GAS.

Zone of proximal development

Zone between what a child can and can't do its also what a child can do with help APP Created by Vygotsky; 3rd grader can't take psych but an 8th grader can with some help.

Sampling bias

a flawed sampling process that produces an unrepresentative sample. App: Don had selected a sample of her friends for her questionnaire.

Hypnosis

a social interaction in which one person (the subject) responds to another person's (the hypnotist) suggestions that certain perceptions, feelings, thoughts, or behaviors will spontaneously occur. App: After a few minutes of this hypnotic induction, you may experience this.

Humanistic Theories

view personality with a focus on the potential for healthy personal growth. App: In contrast to Freud's study of the base motives of "sick" people, these humanistic theorists focused on the ways people strive for self-determination and self-realization.