Psych 101 Duke Exam 2

Emotional mimicry

2-3 week old infants mimic adult facial expressions

Group

A collection of people who have something in common that distinguishes them from others.

Language acquisition device (LAD)

A collection of processes that facilitate language learning

Heuristic

A fast and efficient strategy that may facilitate decision making but does not guarantee that a solution will be reached

Pidgin

A form of speech that adopts a simplified grammar and limited vocabulary of language, used for communications among speakers of two different languages.

Reasoning

A mental activity that consists of organizing information or beliefs into a series of steps to reach conclusions

Concept

A mental representation that groups or categorizes shared features of related objects, events, or other stimuli

Intrinsic motivation

A motivation to take actions that are themselves rewarding.

Extrinsic motivation

A motivation to take actions that lead to reward.

Category-specific deficit

A neurological syndrome that is characterized by an inability to recognize objects that belong to a particular category, although the ability to recognize objects outside the category is undisturbed

Display rule

A norm for the appropriate expression of emotion.

Persuasion

A phenomenon that occurs when a person's attitudes or beliefs are influenced by a communication from another person.

Normative influence

A phenomenon that occurs when another person's behavior provides information about what is appropriate.

Informational influence

A phenomenon that occurs when another person's behavior provides information about what is true.

Deindividualism

A phenomenon that occurs when immersion in a group causes people to become less aware of their individual values.

Creole

A pidgin language that evolves to the point at which it becomes the primary language of the people who speak it

Prejudice

A positive or negative evaluation of another person based on their group membership.

Emotion

A positive or negative experience that is associated with a particular pattern of physiological activity.

Frustration-aggression hypothesis

A principle stating that animals aggress when their goals are frustrated.

Means-ends analysis

A process of searching for the means or steps to reduce differences between the current situation and the desired goal

Morphological rules

A set of rules that indicate how morphemes can be combined to form words.

Phonological rules

A set of rules that indicate how phonemes can be combined to produce speech sounds.

Syntactical rules

A set of rules that indicate how rules can be combined to form phrases and sentences.

Grammar

A set of rules that specify how the units of language can be combined to produce meaningful messages.

Equity

A state of affairs in which the cost-benefit ratios of two partners are roughly equal.

Deviation IQ

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

Genetic dysphasia

A syndrome characterized by an inability to learn the grammatical structure of language despite having otherwise normal intelligence

Language

A system for communicating with others using signals that are combined according to rules of grammar and that convey meaning.

Foot-in-the-door technique

A technique that involves making a small request and following it with a larger request.

Drive-reduction theory

A theory suggesting that organisms are motivated to reduce their drives.

Algorithm

A well-defined sequence of procedures or rules that guarantees a solution to a problem

beat gestures

least understood gestures, can emphasize words or reveal emotional state, temporal (fillers, like "ums")

Symmetry

people in all cultures seem to prefer faces and bodies that are bilaterally symmetrical because they are a sign of good health.

Compliance

responding favorably to an explicit request by another person

Intelligence

the ability to use one's mind to solve novel problems and learn from experience

Belief bias

the idea that people's judgements about whether to accept conclusions depend more on how believable the conclusions are than on whether the arguments are logically valid

Practical reasoning

the process of figuring out what to do, or reasoning directed toward action

Prospect theory

the theory that people choose to take on risk when evaluating potential losses and avoid risks when evaluating potential gains

Cooperation

Behavior by two or more individuals that leads to mutual benefit.

Reciprocal altruism

Behavior that benefits another with the expectation that those benefits will be returned in the future.

Altruism

Behavior that benefits another without benefiting oneself.

Aggression

Behavior whose purpose is to harm another.

Orgasm phase

Breathing becomes extremely rapid and the pelvic muscles begin a series of rhythmic contractions.

Reappraisal

Changing one's emotional experience by changing the way one thinks about the emotion-eliciting stimulus.

Age

Characteristics such as large eyes, high eyebrows, and a small chin make people look immature or "baby faced." Immature features are preferred for females while mature features are preferred for males.

Decision

Choice that affects our behavior.

3 C's

Communication, connect, cooperate

Norms

Customary standards for behavior that are widely shared by members of a culture.

Descriptive norms

Describe what people do do

Syllogistic reasoning

Determining whether a conclusion follows from two statements that are assumed to be true

aphasia

Difficulty in producing or comprehending language

Cognitive enhancers

Drugs that improve the psychological processes that underlie intelligent performance

Dispositional attribution

Explanations in terms of personal characteristics.

Situational attribution

Explanations in terms of situational factors.

System 1 thinking

Fast, effortless, parallel, associative, learns slowly, emotional (automatic)

Shared environment

Features of the environment that are experienced by all relevant members of a household

Plateau phase

Heart rate and muscle tension increase further.

Surface structure

How a sentence is worded

Pragmatics

How language is used

Body shape

In most cultures, male bodies are considered attractive when they are shaped like a triangle and female bodies are considered attractive when they are shaped like an hour-glass.

Intensification

Involves exaggerating the expression of one's emotion, as when a person pretends to be pleased by an unwanted gift.

Masking

Involves expressing one emotion while feeling another, as when a judge tries not to betray contempt for lawyers as they make their cases.

Deintensification

Involves muting the expression of one's emotion, as when the loser of a contest tries to look a bit disappointed rather than totally devastated.

Neutralizing

Involves showing no expression of the emotion one is feeling, as when a card player tries to keep a "poker face" despite having been dealt a winning hand.

semantics

Language forms or symbols that convey meaning.

Conscious motivations

Motivations of which people are aware.

Unconscious motivations

Motivations of which people are not aware.

Excitement phase

Muscle tension and blood flow increase in and around the sexual organs, heart and respiration rates increase, and blood pressure rises.

Resolution phase

Muscles relax, blood pressure drops, and the body returns to its resting state.

Accuracy motivation

Need to be right

Approval motivation

Need to belong

Theorizing

One of the best ways to "mind read" is to generate explanations for behavior.

Injunctive norms

Prescribe what you should do (usually explicit)

Theoretical reasoning (or discursive reasoning)

Reasoning directed toward arriving at a belief

Common Sense Theory

Response is caused by emotion "my heart is pounding because I am scared"

Optimism bias

a bias whereby people believe that, compared with other people, they are more likely to experience positive events and less likely to experience negative events in the future

Framing effects

a bias whereby people give different answers to the same problem depending on how the problem is phrased (or framed)

Sunk-cost fallacy

a framing effect in which people make decisions about a current situation based on what they have previously invested in the situation

Representativeness heuristic

a mental shortcut that involves making a probability judgment by comparing an object or event to a prototype of the object or event

Heritability coefficient

a statistic (commonly denoted as h^2) that describes the proportion of the difference between people's scores that can be explained by differences in their genes

Ratio IQ

a statistic obtained by dividing a person's mental age by the person's physical age and then multiplying the quotient by 100

Confirmation bias

a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence

Exemplar theory

a theory of categorization that argues that we make category judgments by comparing a new instance with stored memories for other instances of the category

Code-switching

alternative use of two or more languages or varieties of languages

judgement

conclusion drawn from evidence we have at hand.

Nonshared environment

features of the environment that are not experienced by all relevant members of a household

Emblems

gestures that stand for a specific verbal meaning

Iconic gestures

gestures with a form that represents the concept about which a speaker is talking

Fast mapping

The process whereby children can map a word onto an underlying concept after only a single exposure.

Social cognition

The processes by which people come to understand others.

Linguistic relativity hypothesis

The proposal that language shapes the nature of thought

Metabolism

The rate at which energy is used in the body.

Morphemes

The smallest meaningful units of language.

Phoneme

The smallest unit of sound that is recognizable as speech rather than as random noise.

Human sexual response cycle

The stages of physiological arousal during sexual activity.

Emotion regulation

The strategies people use to influence their own emotional experiences.

Social psychology

The study of the causes and consequences of sociality.

Homeostasis

The tendency for a system to take action to keep itself in an optimal state.

Common knowledge effect

The tendency for group discussions to focus on information that all members share.

Group polarization

The tendency for groups to make decisions that are more extreme than any member would have made alone.

Groupthink

The tendency for groups to reach consensus in order to facilitate interpersonal harmony.

Diffusion of responsibility

The tendency for individuals to feel diminished responsibility for their actions when they are surrounded by others who are acting the same way.

Mere exposure effect

The tendency for liking to increase with the frequency of exposure.

Self-fulfilling prophecy (Pygmalion Effect)

The tendency for people to behave as they are expected to behave.

Social loafing

The tendency for people to expend less effort when in a group than when alone.

Perceptual confirmation

The tendency for people to see what they expect to see.

Subtyping

The tendency for people who receive disconfirming evidence to modify their stereotypes rather than abandon them.

Loss aversion

The tendency to care more about avoiding losses than about achieving equal-size gains.

Conformity

The tendency to do what others do simply because others are doing it.

Obedience

The tendency to do what powerful people tell us to do.

Correspondence bias (fundamental attribution error)

The tendency to make a dispositional attribution even when we should instead make a situational attribution.

Actor-observer effect

The tendency to make situational attributions for our own behaviors while making dispositional attributions for the identical behavior of others.

Functional fixedness

The tendency to perceive the functions of objects as unchanging

Cannon-Bard Theory

The theory that a stimulus simultaneously triggers activity in the body and emotional experience in the brain.

James-Lange theory

The theory that a stimulus triggers activity in the body, which in turn produces an emotional experience in the brain. "I am scared because my heart is pounding"

Facial feedback hypothesis

The theory that emotional expressions can cause the emotional experiences they signify.

Universality hypothesis

The theory that emotional expressions have the same meaning for everyone.

Two-factor theory of emotion

The theory that emotions are based on inferences about the causes of physiological arousal.

Terror management theory

The theory that people cope with their existential terror by developing a cultural worldview.

Norm of reciprocity

The unwritten rule that people should benefit those who have benefited them.

Nativist theory

The view that language development is best explained as an innate, biological capacity

Identical twins (or monozygotic twins)

Twins who develop from the splitting of a single egg that was fertilized by a single sperm

Fraternal twins (or dizygotic twins)

Twins who develop from two different eggs that were fertilized by two different sperm

Cumulative Cultural Evolution

We create things that then get evolved.

Conjunction Fallacy

When people think that two events are more likely to occur together than either individual event

Door-in-the-face technique

An influence strategy that involves getting someone to deny an initial request.

Drive

An internal state caused by physiological needs.

Emotional expression

An observable sign of an emotional state.

Cognitive dissonance

An unpleasant state that arises when a person recognizes the inconsistency of his or her actions, attitudes, or beliefs.

Deep structure

The meaning of a sentence

Avoidance motivation

The motivation not to experience a negative outcome.

Approach motivation

The motivation to experience a postive outcome.

Need for achievement

The motivation to solves worthwhile problems.

Theory of mind

Ability to attribute mental fates belief, intents, desires to oneself and others. Others have different beliefs, intentions, and desires than our own.

Shared intentionality

Acting and thinking together

Individual intentionality

Acting intentionally, understanding intentions for competition

Anorexia nervosa

An eating disorder characterized by an intense fear of being overweight and a severe restriction of food intake.

Bulimia nervosa

An eating disorder characterized by binge eating followed by a compensatory behavior.

Binge eating disorder

An eating disorder characterized by recurrent and uncontrolled episodes of eating a large number of calories in a short time.

Belief

An enduring piece of knowledge about an object or event.

Attitude

An enduring positive or negative evaluation of an object or event.

Appraisal

An evaluation of the emotion-relevant aspects of a stimulus.

Companionate love

An experience involving affection, trust, and concern for a partner's well-being.

Passionate love

An experience involving feelings of euphoria, intimacy, and intense sexual attraction.

Attribution

An inference about the cause of a person's behavior.

Heuristic persuasion

The process by which attitudes or beliefs are changed by appeals to habit or emotion.

Systematic persuasion

The process by which attitudes or beliefs are changed by appeals to reason.

Kin selection

The process by which evolution selects for individuals who cooperate with their relatives.

Stereotyping

The process by which people draw inferences about others based on their knowledge of the categories to which others belong.

Analogical problem solving

The process of solving a problem by finding a similar problem with a known solution and applying that solution to the current problem

Requirements for language

Shared, rule-governed, generative

Temporal patterning

Sincere expressions appear and disappear smoothly over the course of a few seconds, whereas insincere expressions tend to have abrupt onsets and offsets.

Morphology

Sincere expressions involve the so-called reliable muscles, which are those that people cannot easily control. /how speech sounds go together

Symmetry

Sincere expressions tend to be a bit more symmetrical than insincere expressions, which is why a slightly lopsided smile suggests insincerity.

Duration

Sincere expressions tend to last between a half second and 5 seconds; expressions of much longer duration tend to be insincere.

System 2 thinking

Slow, effortful, serial, rule-based, learns quickly, neutral (controlled)

Two-factor theory of intelligence

Spearman's theory suggesting that a person's performance on a test is due to a combination of general ability and skills that are specific to the test

Cultural intelligence hypothesis

Species-unique social cognitive skills lead the way in human ontogeny.

Telegraphic speech

Speech that is devoid of function morphemes and consists mostly of content words

Moebius Syndrome

Syndrome that effects cranial nerves causing labial paresis, tongue weakness, feeding problems, mask-like face

Sharing

Tendency to mirror what others are feeling

Prototype

The "best" or "most typical" member of a category

Crystallized intelligence

The ability to apply knowledge that was acquired through experience

Social influence

The ability to change or direct another person's behavior.

Emotional intelligence

The ability to reason about emotions and to use emotions to enhance reasoning

Fluid intelligence

The ability to solve and reason about novel problems

Bystander intervention

The act of helping strangers in an emergency situation.

Hedonic principle

The claim that people are motivated to experience pleasure and avoid pain.

Rational choice theory

The classical view that we make decisions by determining how likely something is to happen, judging the value of the outcome, and then multiplying the two

Availability bias

The concept that items that are more readily available in memory are judged as having occurred more frequently

Family resemblance theory

The concept that members of a category have features that appear to be characteristic of category members but may not be possessed by every member

Comparison level

The cost-benefit ratio that people believe they deserve or could attain in another relationship.

Stereotype threat

The fear of confirming the negative beliefs that others may hold

Stereotype threat

The fear of confirming the negative beliefs that others may hold.

Deictic gestures

use of pointing, showing, or reaching for something to call attention to or indicate an object or event