GEN PSYCH FINAL- UCA
Extinction
Disappearance of memories or behaviors from storage in brain
explanation
Explains why behavior occurs
long term memory
Memory of past events and facts about the world
Nature vs Nurture
Nature is your genes.The physical and personality traits determined by your genes stay the same irrespective of where you were born and raised. Nurture refers to your childhood, or how you were brought up
objective personality test
a self-report questionnaire that clearly asks about a wide range of behaviors and feelings and assesses several traits at once
axon
a single long wire that sends electrical signal from the soma to other neurons
Deviation
a statistic obtained by dividing a person's test score by the average test score of people in the same age group and then multiplying the quotient by 100
location & function of the corpus callosum
a thick bundle of fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain.
Biological/ Evolutionary
a way of looking at psychological issues by studyibg physical basis for animal and human behavior
perceptual constancy
is perceiving objects as having constant shape, size, and color regardless of changes in perspective, distance, and lighting.
stimulus generalization
learning that occurs when stimuli that are similar but not identical to the conditioned stimulus produce the conditioned response
Sensorimotor
learns world through their movements and sensations
Receptors
locations where neurotransmitters fit like a key in a lock to activate postsynaptic neurons
culture-fair
meaning that the score is not biased by the test taker's cultural and social background
anxiety disorders
mental disorders characterized by excessive worry, fears, or avoidance
Cognitivism
mental processes involved in different aspects of thinking
how communication by neurons is accomplished
neurons communicate through synapses, neurotransmitters and receptor sites all working together.
partial reinforcement
the process of randomly rewarding an organism for making a response on only some of the occasions it makes it
Minimizing physical or psychological pain to subjects
subjects cannot be harmed.
Cognitive
the perspective that is concerned with understanding
How many animals are weighed against benefits to society in research on animals
-there has to be a balance between the 2. -animals rights cannot be compromised past a certain line
Correlation Research
-Determines if a relationship exists between two or more variables, if so, to what degree. -Can be used as the first step before an experiment begins.
sensory memory
-Sensory information is stored -allows individuals to retain impressions of sensory information after the original stimulus has ceased.
Survey
-a data collection tool used to gather information about individuals. -Commonly used in psychology research to collect self report data from study participants.
alfred binets contribution to the study of intelligence
-published the first modern intelligence test.. -goal was to identify students who needed special help in coping with the school curriculum
What an action potential is and how it is accomplished
-the change in electrical potential associated with the passage of an impulse along the membrane of a muscle cell or nerve cell. -accomplished by the movement of chemicals
Gestalt principles (figure/ground)
-visual perception developed by German psychologists in the 1920s. -These theories attempt to describe how people tend to organize visual elements into groups or unified wholes when certain principles are applied.
Attachment
A deep and enduring emotional bond the connects one person to another across time and space. This does not have to be reciprocal; the first development is usually between child and caregiver
Case Study
A detailed observation of a single individual or group
working memory
A form of memory that contains both storage and processing mechanisms
short term memory
A memory store containing whatever currently inhabits the conscious mind
Conditioned stimulus (CS)
A previously neutral stimulus that begins to elicit the unconditioned response after being paired with an unconditioned stimulus.
temporal lobe
A region of the cerebral cortex responsible for hearing and language.
Attitude
A set of emotions, beliefs, and behaviors toward a particular object, person, thing, or event
Cognitive Dissonance
A situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors. This produces a feeling of mental discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance
discontinuity theory
A theory of personality that suggests that in the course of development an organism experiences genuine transformations or changes so that it reaches successively higher levels of organization
Attribution
Action of regarding something as being caused by a person or things
debriefing
After the study has been completed, the researchers should inform the participants of its purpose and the methods they used.
Control
Applying behavior to make a behavior occur or not occur
Psychoanalysis/Psychodynamic
Argued that our psychological experience is the product of the conflict between our id and the superego.
Fundamental Attribution Error
Concept that, in contrast to interpretations of their own behavior, people tend to emphasize the agent's internal characteristics, rather than external factors, in explaining other people's behavior.
Asch's research on conformity
He demonstrated conformity using a line discrimination task. The results demonstrated that the social pressure of the majority influenced the behavior of the individual participants, despite the ability of the participants to correctly perform the line-comparison task. This is an normative influence
Milgram's research on obedience
He was trying to distinguish between the personal and situational attributions in administering punishment. Milgram's participants believed that they were actually causing physical pain to the learner
Gestalt
Human experience is more than the sum of the component parts.
How crystalized abilities change over time
Increase throughout young adulthood and middle age, and then plateaus, showing little or no growth into old age
Situational Attribution
People infer that a person's behavior is due to situational factors such as the weather
Personal Attribution
People infer that an event or a person's behavior is due to personal factors such as traits, abilities, or feelings.
continuity theory
People try to maintain same basic structure throughout their lives. As they age, they make decision to adapt to external changes and internal changes of aging
the major functions of the right hemisphere
Recognizes faces, expresses emotions, is creative and controls the left side of the body
Gender-Typing
Refers to any association of objects, activities, roles, or traits with one sex or the other in ways that conform to cultural stereotypes. Types can be either masculine and/or feminine
variable interval
Reward after a changing/random amount of time passes
variable ratio
Reward after a randomly chosen instance of targeted behavior
fixed interval
Reward based on fixed amount of time that has passed.
fixed ratio
Reward for a certain ratio of instances of desired behavior. Award given for desired number of instances of behavior.
Paiget's stages of cognitive development theory (in order)
Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete Operational, and Formal Operational
how transduction is accomplished by the ear
Takes sound vibration and transducts it into electrical energy that moves the eardrum so you can hear.
retrieval
The act of obtaining information placed in storage
Multicultural Diversity
The culture and diversity has to be taken into account because studies can only make sense and be valid when context is taken into account.
How transduction is accomplished by the eye
The eye projects an image onto the retina which changes the projected image into a collection of electrical signals.
sensation
The process of converting sensory information into neural information.
perception
The processing of neural sensory information.
Positive psychology
The scientific study of the things that makes people strive as individuals
encoding
The transformation of real-world energy such as light and sound into an electrical code that can be stored and processed by the brain
sociocultural therapy
Therapy based on family structure and communication Treatments include: Family Therapy, Group Therapy, Self-Help
Terman's contributions to intelligence testing in the U.S.
Using a system of scoring proposed by the German psychologist William Stern, Terman's Stanford-Binet test assigned each test taker a numerical score that could be used to make direct comparisons across individuals with normal, below normal, and above normal mental abilities: the IQ or intelligence quotient.
Self-serving bias
We accept our successes as a product of personal characteristics and losses as due to situational variables
Prediction
When and what circumstances does the behavior occur and not occur
storage
Where information is placed to be later retrieved
amnesia
a deficit in memory caused by brain damage, disease, or psychological trauma
stimulus discrimination
a differentiation between two similar stimuli when only one of them is consistently associated with the unconditioned stimulus
Limbic system
a group of midbrain structure that contributes to our emotional experience
mental age
a measure of intelligence test performance devised by Binet; the chronological age that most typically corresponds to a given level of performance
continuous reinforcement
a method of learning that compels an individual or an animal to repeat a certain behavior
Hypothalamus
a midbrain structure that is essential to motivated behaviors such as feeding or fighting.
semantic memory
a network of associated facts and concepts that make up our general knowledge of the world
psychotic disorder
a psychological disorder in which a person loses contact with reality, experiencing irrational ideas and distorted perceptions i.e. schizophrenia
peripheral nervous system
all nerves outside the cns (autonomic and somatic)
conditioned response (CR)
an unconditioned response to that was elicted by the presentation of a conditioned stimulus
unconditined stimulus (US)
any stimulus that can evoke a response without the organism going through any previous learning
behaviorism
argues that psychology's goal should be to study directly observable behavior and to understand how the events in the external environment produce behavior.
projective personality test
assessment instruments based on the psychodynamic perspective that are sensitive to the examiner's beliefs and are a way to examine the unconscious
Concrete
begin to think logically, concept of conservation
Preoperational
begin to think symbolically and learn to use words and pictures to represent objects
Formal
begins to think abstractly and reason about hypothetical problems
humanistic
believes the goal of psychology to be understanding human strengths, aspirations, conscious experience, free will, and potential.
External Validity
believing the world is responsible for everything
Internal Validity
believing you have control over your life and successes.
Central nervous system
brain and spinal cord
dendrites
branching neural fibers that collect inputs from other neurons
Neurotransmitters
chemical messengers manufactured by one neuron that communicate with other neurons via synapses
description
clear understanding of when & where behavior occurs
difference between correlation and causation
correlation does not equal causation. Causation indicates that one event is the result of the occurrence of the other event.
problem-solving strategies
creativity, algorithms, heuristics, insight a process in which a person begins at an initial state and moves through a series of intermediate states to arrive at a desired state
Extinction (operant conditioning)
decreases in the frequency of a behavior when the behavior is no longer reinforced
Goals of science
description, explanation, prediction, control
punishment
doing something to detract that person from repeating that action
Medical Therapies
drug therapy, electroconvulsive therapy, and psychosurgery - generally designed to correct a physical condition that is believed to be the cause of a psychological disorder.
spearmans g factor
existence of a broad mental capacity that influences performance on cognitive ability measures
difference between an experimental condition and a controlled condition
experimental condition is one in which variables are changed to see the effects while a control condition is one in which nothing changes so that normal conditions are observed.
situational attribution
factors outside the person doing the action, such as peer pressure
the major functions of the left hemisphere
has to do with math and logic and controls the right side of the body.
multifactor models
implies the presence of a single continuous variable, which can cause a trait to manifest itself
reconstructive memory
in which the act of remembering is influenced by various other cognitive processes including perception, imagination, semantic memory and beliefs, amongst others.
monocular cues
include size, any depth cue that can be processed by using one eye alone.
how fluid abilities change over the life span
increase in development throughout young adulthood, but slowly declines beginning in middle-adulthood
difference between independent variable and dependent variable
independent variables do not change while dependent ones do as they are manipulated
self-actualization
involves making "the full use and exploitation of talents, capacities, potentialities"
Experimental Research
involves manipulating one variable to determine if changes in one variable cause changes in another variable.
stereotype
is a belief about a certain group of people
prejudice
is a feeling about a person based on their membership in a group
diffusion of responsibility
is a sociopsychological phenomenon whereby a person is less likely to take responsibility for action or inaction when others are present
unconditioned response (UR)
is an unlearned response that occurs naturally in reaction to the unconditioned stimulus
Validity
of an exam is determined by how well it measures or predicts what it was intended to assess.
Big Five Theory of Personality
openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism
soma
part of the neuron that contains machinery to keep the neuron alive and functioning (cell body)
difference between a positive and negative correlation
positive correlation is when variables all increase or decrease together. Negative correlation is when variables differ.
defense mechanisms
processes by which the ego reduces anxiety
mood disorders
psychological disorders characterized by emotional extremes
personality disorders
psychological disorders characterized by inflexible and enduring behavior patterns that impair social functioning
Thalamus
receives incoming sensory information passes the information onto the limbic system and the cortex
informed consent
subject must know what they are participating in before.
Reliability
refers to the consistency of a test across the entire measurement and different test-taking occasions.
reinforcement
reinforces the behavior and influences it to continue
naturalistic observation
research method in which behavior is studied in natural settings without intervention or manipulation
What is psychology?
scientific study of individual behaviors and influencing factors
ego
seeks compromise
bystandard effect
social psychological phenomenon in which individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when other people are present
frontal lobe
the area of the front of the brain that is implicated in impulse control and personality
discrimination
the behavior is observed in the presence of stimuli used during training, but not in their absence
generalization
the behavior occurs in the presence of stimuli not present during training
self-efficacy
the beliefs an individual holds concerning his or her skills and ability to perform certain acts.
episodic memory
the collection of past personal experiences that occurred at a particular time and place
id
the desire to find physical satisfaction and fulfill biological needs
Separation Anxiety
the excessive fear or anxiety about separation from the home or attachment figure
endocrine system
the glands that secrete hormones into the bloodstream
occipital lobe
the lobe at the posterior corner of the brain, concerned primarily with basic visual processing
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)
the most widely-used objective personality inventory, primarily utilized to help diagnose psychological disorders, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder
superego
the need to meet demands of society
parietal lobe
the part of the cortex that contains the primary somatosensory cortex . center of the brain
external locus of control
the perception that chance or outside forces beyond your personal control determine your fate.
internal locus of control
the perception that you control your own fate
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)
the standard classification of mental disorders used by mental health professionals. It has been revised many times with the most recent including post-traumatic stress disorder, under trauma and stressor-related disorders
classical conditioning
the training of a biologically inherited behavior that is triggered by a specific evolutionarily important environmental event to occur in the presence of a new stimulus.
transduction
the transformation of one kind of energy into another kind of energy
substance-related disorders
the use of psychoactive drugs for months or years in ways that harm the user or others
psychological therapy
therapy based on psychological principles (rather than on the biomedical approach); often called "psychotherapy" i.e. cognitive, behavioral, client-centered
the synapse
tiny gap between two neurons where chemical transmission of neural messages occur
binocular cues
visual information taken in by two eyes that enable us a sense of depth perception