Psychology 100 Exam 3
What does an IQ of 100 represent?
average IQ
How can confirmation bias affect clinical treatments?
confirmation bias can lead to mistaken diagnoses being passed on to and accepted by other clinicians without their validity being questioned, a process referred to as diagnostic momentum.
What is mood-congruent memory?
consistency between a person's emotional state with the broader situations and circumstances being experienced by the persons at that time
What are some of the physiological consequences of long-term stress?
consistent and ongoing increase in heart rate, and the elevated levels of stress hormones and of blood pressure, can take a toll on the body. This long-term ongoing stress can increase the risk for hypertension, heart attack, or stroke.
What is transduction?
conversion of one form of energy to another, happens in snestion with our sensory organs
What are covert and overt orienting? How do they differ from one another?
covert: directing attention without physical change overt: physical directing attention, goals affect it
How does culture contribute to diagnosing disorders?
culture affects the way in which people describe their symptoms, such as whether they choose to describe emotional or physical symptoms. Essentially, it dictates whether people selectively present symptoms in a "culturally appropriate" way that won't reflect badly on them
What are some of the objections that people have raised to the DSM-5?
descriptive but not explanatory, thresholds are arbitrary, co-morbidity (many patients meeting criteria)
Distinguish between exact/direct replications and conceptual replications.
direct replication is the repetition of an experimental procedure to as exact a degree as possible Conceptual replication is the use of different methods to repeat the test of a hypothesis or experimental result
Describe multiple reasons that a study may fail to replicate.
discovery of an unknown effect, inherent variability in the system, inability to control complex variables, substandard research practices, and, quite simply, chance
What are generalization and discrimination?
discrimination-the same organism responds differently to different stimuli-means that you discriminate in your reactions to the 2 different animals. In generalization, on the other hand, the organism has the same reaction to different stimuli
Distinguish between operant and classical conditioning.
operant-involves behaviors that aren't automatically triggered classical conditioning-triggers an automated response to exposed stimuli
Smell: What is anosmia?
Anosmia is the partial or full loss of smell. Anosmia can be a temporary or permanent condition.
temporal precedence
IV manipulation precedes DV
Generativity
can say novel things (new words, metaphors, poetry)
What is sensory adaptation?
when a stimulus is constant and unchanging
Describe how positive affect may affect disease.
"Positive affect" refers to one's propensity to experience positive emotions and interact with others and with life's challenges in a positive way.
What is a gene-environment interaction?
"a different effect of an environmental exposure on disease risk in persons with different genotypes," or, alternatively, "a different effect of a genotype on disease risk in persons with different environmental exposures."
Be able to distinguish among and give examples of positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment, and negative punishment.
(+)-spanking a child when he throws a tantrum, something is added to the mix (spanking) to discourage a bad behavior (throwing a tantrum). (-)-removing restrictions from a child when she follows the rules With positive punishment, you add something unpleasant in response to a behavior. With negative punishment something good is being taken away as a result of the individual's undesirable behavior like losing access to a toy, or being grounded
You should be familiar with Broadbent's filter model, Treisman's Attenuation Model and Late Selection Models of attention.
-Broadbent's: posits that stimuli are filtered, or selected to be attended to, at an early stage during processing. A filter can be regarded as the selector of relevant information based on basic features, such as color, pitch, or direction of stimuli. -Treisman's Attenuation: participants are asked to simultaneously repeat aloud speech played into one ear (called the attended ear) whilst another message is spoken to the other ear -Late Selection: argue that information is selected after processing for meaning, as opposed to during the earlier stages of processing
Describe multiple reasons that a person whose spouse has schizophrenia is statistically more likely to also have schizophrenia than the general public is. Describe multiple reasons that women may be diagnosed with depression at higher rates than men.
-Genetic factors: a predisposition to schizophrenia can run in families. -Biochemical factors: certain biochemical substances in the brain are involved, including dopamine. -Family relationships. -Stress. -Alcohol and other drug use.
What is encoding specificity? What are several things that can act as retrieval cues?
A Retrieval Cue is a prompt that help us remember. When we make a new memory, we include certain information about the situation that act as triggers to access the memory. For example, when someone is introduced to us at a party, we don't only store the name and appearance of the new acquaintance in our memory.
Describe the results of the Open Science Collaboration's 2015 reproducibility project.
A replication project with 100 studies from three journals that reported significant results found that only 37% (36/97) of published significant results could be replicated
What does it mean that Psychology has WEIRD samples?
A significant number of participants in behavioral science experiments continue to represent the Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) society, which covers only about 5% of the human population
What does it mean for a correlation to be positive or negative? Strong or weak?
A weak (+) correlation would indicate that while both variables tend to go up in response to one another, the relationship is not very strong. A strong (-) correlation, on the other hand, would indicate a strong connection between the two variables, but that one goes up whenever the other one goes down
Describe the ways that drugs can act as agonists and antagonists
Agonists are substances that bind to synaptic receptors and increase the effect of the neurotransmitter. Antagonists also bind to synaptic receptors but they decrease the effect of the neurotransmitter
What is cultural relativism?
Anthropologists have tried to adopt a sense of empathy for the cultures they study. This has led to cultural relativism, the principle of regarding and valuing the practices of a culture from the point of view of that culture
Describe some evidence for the role of genetic contributions to classical conditioning.
Conditioning accounts for a lot of learning, both in humans and nonhuman species. However, biological factors can limit the capacity for conditioning. Two good examples of biological influences on conditioning are taste aversion and instinctive drift.
Distinguish between the astonishing hypothesis and dualism. How does each view the relationship between mind and body?
Astonishing Hypothesis - "a person's mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make them up and influence them. dualism. Dualism is the view that the mind and body both exist as separate entities. This form of dualism or duality proposes that the mind controls the body, but that the body can also influence the otherwise rational mind, such as when people act out of passion.
What are biomedical therapies? You should be familiar with ECT, deep brain stimulation, and the medications.
Biomedical therapies include drug therapy, electroconvulsive therapy, and psychosurgery. ECT: involves a brief electrical stimulation of the brain while the patient is under anesthesia. Deep brain stimulation: a neurosurgical procedure that uses implanted electrodes and electrical stimulation to treat movement disorders associated with Parkinson's disease, essential tremor, dystonia and other neurological conditions.
What is blindsight? Why does it occur? What can it tell about the distinction between sensation & perception?
Blindsight results from damage to an area of the brain called the primary visual cortex, blindsight is a simple example of sensation dissociated from perception which leaves an experience (sensation) of objects in the visual field
How can individual differences affect both bottom-up and top-down components of a perceptual experience?
Bottom-up processing refers to processing sensory information as it is coming in. ... Top-down processing, on the other hand, refers to perception that is driven by cognition. Your brain applies what it knows and what it expects to perceive and fills in the blanks
What are p-hacking and HARKing?
P-hacking: the process of manipulating - perhaps unconsciously HARKing: to have origin in or be reminiscent of a past event or condition; recall or evoke
What does Kuhl demonstrate about how bilingualism affects language learning in the first year of life? What do the multiple manipulations of the study demonstrate about learning in real life, over a video, and with an audio signal only?
Children who speak two languages fluently often have an easier time learning new vocabulary and categorizing words. Apart from language development, being bilingual children can also have improved listening, information processing, and problem-solving skills
What are some challenges/limitations to drug treatments for mental illness?
Chronic use of some drugs can lead to both short- and long-term changes in thebrain, ... Drugs that can cause mental health problems:.
How do conditioned taste aversions differ from other forms of classical conditioning?
Conditioned taste aversions can develop even when there is a long delay between the neutral stimulus (eating the food) and the unconditioned stimulus (feeling sick). In classical conditioning, conditioned food aversions are examples of single-trial learning.
What is contralateral organization?
Contralateral is a term that references the opposite side of something.
What are learning styles?
Learning styles are a popular concept in psychology and education and are intended to identify how people learn best. These styles are visual, auditory, reading/writing, and kinesthetic
Distinguish between fluid and crystallized intelligence. Give an example of a task that would tap into each.
Crystallized: ability to utilize skills and knowledge acquired via prior learning, for ex: knowing how to ride a bike or read a book. Ex of the use of fluid intelligence include solving puzzles and coming up with problem-solving strategies. fluid involves the ability to solve problems and reason about things independent of previously existing knowledge.
How can examining distributions of data reveal insights about them?
Descriptive statistics simply give a general picture of the scores in a given group. They include the measures of central tendency and the measures of variability
What is the DSM?
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-manual of mental disorders and their symptoms, guides diagnosis by presenting criteria to evaluate
What are dichotic listening and shadowing tasks? Why are they useful for studying attention?
Dichotic: headphones are put on with 2 diff inputs for each ear, one sounds is ignored while other is attended Shadowing tasks:a task in which a participant repeats aloud a message word for word at the same time that the message is being presented, often while other stimuli are presented in the background. It is mainly used in studies of attention.
What are dispositional and situational factors?
Dispositional-internal factors, ways in which we differ from each other Situational-external factors that influence our behavior
How are divided attention tasks typically administered?
Divided attention occurs when mental focus is on multiple tasks or ideas at once. Also known as multitasking, individuals do this all the time. ... Divided attention does decrease the amount of attention being placed on any one task or idea if there are multiple focuses going on at once.
Distinguish between EPSPs and IPSPs
EPSPs are depolarizing currents that causes the membrane potential to become more + and closer to the threshold of excitation while IPSPs are hyperpolarizing currents that cases the membrane potential to become more - and further away from the threshold of excitation
Can we use effect size as a measure of a study's importance? Why or why not?
Effect size helps readers understand the magnitude of differences found, whereas statistical significance examines whether the findings are likely to be due to chance
What is effect size? How does it differ from a p-value?
Effect size is the main finding of a quantitative study. While a P value can inform the reader whether an effect exists, the P value will not reveal the size of the effect.
Describe how exercise and meditation affect coping with stress.
Exercise and other physical activity produce endorphins—chemicals in the brain that act as natural painkillers—and also improve the ability to sleep, which in turn reduces stress. Meditation, acupuncture, massage therapy, even breathing deeply can cause your body to produce endorphins.
What are the Big 5 personality traits? You should be comfortable listing them by name and describing them.
Extraversion: tendency to be talkative, sociable, and to enjoy others; dominant style Agreeableness: tendency to agree and go along w others rather than to assert to one's opinions and choices Conscientousness: tendency to be careful, on time, to follow rules, hardworking Neuroticism: tendency to frequently experience (-) emotions such as anger, worry, and sadness/sensitive Openness: tendency to appreciate new ideas, arts, feelings, values, or behaviors
How do expectations affect perception? You should be familiar with the rat-man study and what it reveals about perception.
Fiigure also demonstrated the importance of expectation in inducing, found participants were significantly more likely to perceive the ambiguous picture as a rat if they had had prior exposure to animal pictures.
Describe the influence of genes, shared environment, and nonshared environment affect personality.
Genes, via their influences on morphology and physiology, create a framework within which the environment acts to shape the behavior of an individual. The difference between shared and non-shared environments is that shared environments refer to common experiences between siblings such as living conditions, while non-shared refers to separate experiences such as friends, teachers, etc. which each sibling has independent of the other.
Describe the Milgram study.
Goal is to test the extent of humans' willingness to obey orders from an authority figure. Participants were told by an experimenter to administer increasingly powerful electric shocks to another individual.
How do babies become sensitive to the sounds of their languages? How can researchers study this? Describe how habituation can be used to assess the age at which babies lose the ability to distinguish between phonemes that aren't used in the language they are being raised in. How is this similar to the study that showed how infants can distinguish among monkey faces?
Habituation is a decrease in response to a stimulus after repeated exposure to the same stimulus. It's been shown that infants habituate to different stimuli, and they use this habituation to draw conclusions and learn about their environment, researchers have shown that babies set up the phoneme categories for their native language between six and twelve months of age.
What health behaviors can improve academic performance?
Health behaviors such as sleep and physical activity have been associated with increased cognitive performance and better grades
What did the IBS study on environmental factors during treatment demonstrate?
IBS is likely due to three key factors, which are environmental factors, psychosocial factors, and gut physiology. These three factors may work independently or in combination. Below are some examples of these factors.
What are some limitations to self-report measures?
If a person is unaware of the psychological processes that underlie her or his motivations, behaviors, or feelings, those motivations, behaviors, and feelings can't accurately be reported.
What is the synapse? Describe how neurotransmitters affect post-synaptic cells.
In a chemical synapse, the action potential causes release of neurotransmitter molecules into the synaptic cleft. Through binding to postsynaptic receptors, the neurotransmitter can cause excitatory or inhibitory postsynaptic potentials by depolarizing or hyperpolarizing, respectively, the postsynaptic membrane.
Distinguish between continuous and partial reinforcement and the situations they are most useful for.
In a continuous schedule every instance of a desired behavior is reinforced, whereas partial schedules only reinforce the desired behavior occasionally. Partial reinforcement schedules are described as either fixed or variable, and as either interval or ratio
How do collectivistic and individualistic cultures differ in their use of the self-serving bias?
In individualistic cultures, people are considered "good" if they are strong, self-reliant, assertive, and independent. This contrasts with collectivist cultures where characteristics like being self-sacrificing, dependable, generous, and helpful to others are of greater importance
How does the timing of the reinforcer affect the effectiveness of the conditioning?
In operant conditioning, a fixed-ratio schedule reinforces behavior after a specified number of correct responses. This kind of schedule results in high, steady rates of responding.
Describe two pieces of empirical evidence for plasticity in somatosensory cortex.
In somatosensory cortex, distinct patterns of sensory use or disuse elicit multiple, functionally distinct forms of map plasticity. ... Plasticity occurs in response to peripheral lesions, passive sensory experience, and training on sensory tasks and is correlated with sensory perceptual learning.
How do assumptions about illumination affect perception of color?
In the domain of color vision, we know of effects that can result in large discrepancies between the subjective percept and what one would expect from the wavelengths present in the stimulus. For instance, the local—patterned—background of a colored line can strongly shift the color appearance of that line . The brain is always solving an inverse problem when deducing the color of an object from the spectral information given by the eyes. Specifically, it has to discount the wavelengths of the illuminant on an ongoing basis—a phenomenon known as "color constancy"—which can lead to dramatic shifts in the perceived color of suitably designed stimul
How does observational learning relate to culture?
In these places, people are more likely to bare their teeth, furrow their brows, point or gesture, and yell. Such patterns of behavior are learned. Often, adults are not even aware that they are, in essence, teaching psychology—because the lessons are happening through observational learning.
Distinguish between "independent self" and "interdependent self"
Individualists are more likely to define themselves in terms of an independent self. This means that people see themselves as A) a unique individual with a stable collection of personal traits, and B) that these traits drive behavior. By contrast, people from collectivist cultures are more likely to identify with the interdependent self. This means that people see themselves as A) defined differently in each new social context and B) social context, rather than internal traits, are the primary drivers of behavior
Distinguish between individualistic and collectivistic cultures, and between vertical and horizontal dimensions
Individualists, such as most people born and raised in Australia/United States, define themselves as individuals. They seek personal freedom and prefer to voice their own opinions and make their own decisions. By contrast, collectivists—such as most people born and raised in Korea/Taiwan— are more likely to emphasize their connectedness to others. They are more likely to sacrifice their personal preferences if those preferences come in conflict with the preferences of the larger group. They can be further divided into vertical and horizontal dimensions.
What is some evidence that language cannot be entirely learned through behaviorist principles (ie., conditioning)?
It is not physically possible for every piece of language spoken by a child to be reinforced (positively or negatively) by an adult
Describe the main findings of the "Weapon Bias" article. You should be familiar with the methods and results of the study represented in Figure 2 and the dual-process model of weapon bias (depicted in Figure 3).
Judging to see race has an impact on bias, integrating intentional & unintentional aspects of behavior are dual processing theories-explain how and why behavior is driven by automatic versus intentionally controlled aspects of thought dual process: when people have full control of their behavior, they respond as intended, when control is impaired, automatic impulse drives response
Distinguish between MZ and DZ twins
Monozygotic (MZ) or identical twins result from a single fertilised ovum and therefore share all genes, whereas dizygotic (DZ) or fraternal twins are the result of the implantation of two separate fertilised ova and generally share about 50% of genes and are no more alike than other siblings.
Give several examples of multisensory integration.
Multisensory integration, also known as multimodal integration, is the study of how information from the different sensory modalities (such as sight, sound, touch, smell, self-motion, and taste) may be integrated by the nervous system.imagine if you witnessed a car collision. You could describe the stimulus generated by this event by considering each of the senses independently; that is, as a set of unimodal stimuli. Your eyes would be stimulated with patterns of light energy bouncing off the cars involved.
What is myelin? What role does it serve?
Myelin is an insulating layer, or sheath that forms around nerves, including those in the brain and spinal cord. Made up of protein and fatty substances, myelin sheath allows electrical impulses to transmit quickly and efficiently along the nerve cell
Define the previously neutral stimulus, UR, US, CR, and CS. What does each correspond to in Pavlov's classic experiment? You should be comfortable identifying those five components in examples of classical conditioning (e.g., the mean professor example, bullying in math class example, etc)
Neutral stim-stimulus that produces no response other than catching your attention UR-unlearned response to a stimulus US-any stimulus that can naturally and automatically trigger a response without prior learning or practice CR-learned response to a stimulus that was previously neutral CS-a neutral stimulus that is repeatedly associated with an unconditioned stimulus until it acquires the ability to elicit a response that it previously did not
Describe how hearing, touch, smell, and touch affect our perception of flavor.
Once an odor is experienced along with a flavor, the two become associated; thus, smell influences taste and taste influences smell. In most cases, haptic touch will involve the engagement of kinesthesis (awareness of movement) and proprioception (awareness of bodily position).
How do projective tests differ from objective measures?
Objective tests are more personal and reveal deeper issues than projective test and rely on an individual's personal responses and are relatively free of rater bias. Projective measures are founded in psychoanalytic theories of personality and involve using ambiguous stimuli to reveal inner aspects of an individual's personality.
What is second-order conditioning?
conditioning that occurs when an existing conditioned stimulus serves as an unconditioned stimulus for a new conditioned stimulus.
Describe the nature of the literature on learning styles.
People differ in styles of learning, instruction via preferred styles facilities learning.
Symptoms and regions of damage for Phineas Gage, patients with Capgras delusion, prosopagnosia, Broca's aphasia, "split-brain" patients, and hemifield neglect
Phineas Gage-result of the damage the frontal lobe of his brain, affecting personality Capgras-belief that someone has been replaced by an imposter Prosopagnosia-impaired face processing Broca's Aphasia-Damage to a discrete part of the brain in the left frontal lobe (Broca's area) of the language-dominant hemisphere has been shown to significantly affect the use of spontaneous speech and motor speech control. Split Brain- cluster of neurological abnormalities arising from the partial or complete severing or lesioning of the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerves that connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Hemifield neglect-failure to attend to one side of visual space following parietal damage, neglect occurs on opposite side of injury
How does the sympathetic response differ for psychological and physiological stressors? (hint: trick question).
Physiological changes induced by the sympathetic nervous system include accelerating the heart rate, widening bronchial passages, decreasing motility of the large intestine, dilating the pupils, and causing perspiration, in sympathetic, when the body is stressed, the SNS contributes to what is known as the "fight or flight" response. The body shifts its energy resources toward fighting off a life threat, or fleeing from an enemy. The SNS signals the adrenal glands to release hormones called adrenalin (epinephrine) and cortisol.
Describe how language learning progresses in infants and children. You should be familiar with the ages at which they become sensitive to speech sounds, make vowel sounds, babble, and produce first words. What kinds of words are learned first? What types of errors are common?
Pre-Talking-takes place from birth to around six months of age. Babbling Phase-occurs from around six to eight months old. Holophrastic-occurring between nine and eighteen months old, infant begins to learn and speak single words. fluency and setting develops later
What are some solutions that have been proposed to deal with the WEIRD sample problem?
Proactive interference make it challenging to remember information in its entirety without missing out on certain pieces. Explore the definition of proactive interference, some examples, related concepts, and the strength of different interferences.
What does it mean to say "Psychological studies are not about you"? What factors should you consider as you decide whether a particular study is relevant to you?
Psychology is a science of populations without telling us about one person but can tell us about how changes in behavior might affect the well-being of whole populations-better suited for broader applications other than just the individual.
Explain how our expectations and prior experience affect flavor perception.
Pure taste sensations include sweet, sour, salty, bitter, savory and, debatably, fat. Cells that recognize these flavors reside in taste buds located on the tongue and the roof of the mouth. When food and drink are placed in the mouth, taste cells are activated and we perceive a flavor
Describe multiple reasons that incidence of mental illness may be increasing.
Rates of mood disorders and suicide-related outcomes have increased among adolescents and young adults, and the rise of social media may be to blame. Mental health problems are on the rise among adolescents and young adults, and social media may be a driver behind the increase
Why is random assignment a key feature of experimental design?
Random assignment is important in experimental research because it helps to ensure that the experimental group and control group are comparable and that any differences between the experimental and control groups are due to random chance
How can regression to the mean lead to the appearance of improvement in clinical trials?
Regression to the mean is a widespread statistical phenomenon with potentially serious implications for health care. It can result in wrongly concluding that an effect is due to treatment when it is due to chance. Ignorance of the problem will lead to errors in decision making.
How can relearning measure memory?
Relearning measures how much time it takes the subject to come up to a certain level of competence.
How do we evaluate the reliability and validity of personality tests?
Reliability can be estimated by comparing different versions of the same measurement. Validity is harder to assess, but it can be estimated by comparing the results to other relevant data or theory
How do STM and LTM differ?
STM-short duration, limited capacity LTM-long duration, unlimited capacity
Distinguish between self-reports and informant ratings. Which trait is rated the most similarly by informants and self-reports? The most differently?
Self-report measures are based on the subject scoring themselves along a continuum for different questions, while informant ratings are based on scores given by a third party that is close to the subject. Both are subject to certain biases, but they are generally both considered to have strong validity.
What are semantic networks? How can they be tested using priming?
Semantic priming arises because the brain makes use of relations among similar or related stimuli in addition to using past experiences with the same stimulus.
You should be familiar with the role of serotonin and norepinephrine in depression and dopamine in schizophrenia, and understand how drugs that treat them work.
Serotonin helps regulate mood, anxiety, and other functions and norepinephrine helps mobilize the brain for action and can improve energy and attentiveness, Dopamine regulates mood and muscle movement and plays a vital role in the brain's pleasure and reward systems
You should be very familiar with the phases of an action potential (including the movement of ions and the change in electrical charge associated with it).
Step 1 - Resting Potential. Sodium and potassium channels are closed. Step 2 - Depolarization. Sodium channels open in response to a stimulus.. Step 3 - Repolarization. Na+ channels close and K+ channels open. Step 4 - Resting Conditions. Na+ and K+ channels are closed.
What does it mean for a finding to be statistically significant?
Statistical significance is the likelihood that the difference in conversion rates between a given variation and the baseline is not due to random chance
Data from twin studies to understand things about genetic and environmental influences on intelligence.
Studies show that IQ scores of identical twins may be more similar than those of fraternal twins. Siblings who were raised together in the same environment have more similar IQs than those of adopted children who were brought up in the same household.
What prevents neurotransmitters in the synapse from acting on the post-synaptic cell indefinitely?
Synaptic inhibition is mediated by two basic circuit configurations—feedback and feedforward. Feedback inhibition occurs when excitatory principal neurons synapse onto inhibitory interneurons, which project back to the principal neurons and inhibit them (negative-feedback loop).
Distinguish between System 1 and System 2 thinking.
System 1: fast automatic, no sense of voluntary control System 2: slow effortful, requires attentions
Describe evidence that emotions are associated with particular patterns of physiological changes
The most obvious signs of emotional arousal involve changes in the activity of the autonomic system. Thus, increases or decreases in heart rate, cutaneous blood flow (blushing or turning pale), piloerection, sweating, and gastrointestinal motility can all accompany various emotions.
What is the Implicit Association Task? What are the benefits of using it rather than an explicit measure of attitudes?
The Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures the strength of associations between concepts (e.g., black people, gay people) and evaluations (e.g., good, bad) or stereotypes (e.g., athletic, clumsy). The main idea is that making a response is easier when closely related items share the same response key.
What are the two serial position effects? What do they each reveal about memory?
The Primacy Effect: Items that are presented at the beginning of a list are recalled with greater accuracy than items in the middle of a list. The Recency Effect: Items that appear at the end of a list are also more likely to elicit better recall than items presented in the middle of a list.
How does the action potential propagate down the axon?
The action potential travels down the axon as the membrane of the axon depolarizes and repolarizes. Nodes of Ranvier are gaps in the myelin along the axons; they contain sodium and potassium ion channels, allowing the action potential to travel quickly down the axon by jumping from one node to the next.
What is the autonomic nervous system? What types of functions does it serve?
The autonomic nervous system regulates certain body processes, such as blood pressure and the rate of breathing. This system works automatically (autonomously), without a person's conscious effort. Disorders of the autonomic nervous system can affect any body part or process.
Describe the biopsychosocial view of coping with and managing stress.
The biopsychosocial (BPS) model of challenge and threat is the prevailing theoretical framework linking cognitive (i.e. stress appraisals), physiological (i.e. ANS reactivity), and behavioral (i.e. performance) responses to performance stress in adults
What is the critical period hypothesis? Describe how it has been studied
The critical period hypothesis states that the first few years of life is the crucial time in which an individual can acquire a first language if presented with adequate stimuli, and that first-language acquisition relies on neuroplasticity.
You should be familiar with some of the genetic and environmental factors that predispose people to develop schizophrenia. What is the evidence that it is partially genetic? What is the evidence that it is not solely genetic? You should be comfortable creating and interpreting data that relate to the diathesis stress model.
The exact causes of schizophrenia are unknown. Research suggests a combination of physical, genetic, psychological and environmental factors can make a person more likely to develop the condition. Some people may be prone to schizophrenia, and a stressful or emotional life event might trigger a psychotic episode.
What is the fundamental attribution error? How is it used?
The fundamental attribution error is where we incorrectly attribute a persons actions. For ex, when someone cuts us off on the road, we may think its because of their personality-They are simply not a nice person. However, the error occurs when that action is actually attributed to the situation.
Are some people left brained and others right brained?
The idea that there are right-brained and left-brained people is a myth. with different personalities and talents, there's no reason to believe these differences can be explained by the dominance of one half of the brain over the other half.
What is linguistic relativity? Describe empirical evidence for it. How does linguistic relativity differ from linguistic determinism?
The influence of language on culture is called Linguistic Relativism Linguistic Determinism suggests that one's language determines the ways one's mind constructs categories.
Describe the roles of Na+ and K+ during the action potential
The inward flow of Na+ ions increases the concentration of + charged cations in the cell and causes depolarization, where the potential of the cell is higher than the cell's resting potential. The Na+ channels close at the peak of the action potential, while K+ continues to leave the cell.
What are the benefits of self-report measures?
The main advantage of self-report is that it is a relatively simple way to collect data from many people quickly and at low cost and it can be collected in various ways to suit the researcher's needs.
Do people use only 10% of their brains?
The notion that a person uses only 10 percent of their brain is a myth. fMRI scans show that even simple activities require almost all of the brain to be active. While there is still a lot to learn about the brain, researchers continue to fill in the gaps between fact and fiction
Describe the process of sensory transduction in the gustatory system
The number of taste buds within papillae varies, with each bud containing several specialized taste cells (gustatory receptor cells) for the transduction of tastestimuli. These receptor cells release neurotransmitters when certain chemicals in ingested substances (such as food) are carried to their surface in saliva.
How can environmental factors affect our perception of pain?
The perception of, expression of, and reaction to pain are influenced by genetic, developmental, familial, psychological, social and cultural variables. Psychological factors, such as the situational and emotional factors that exist when we experience pain, can profoundly alter the strength of these perceptions.
Describe what the asthma/albuterol/placebo study suggests about the limits of placebos.
The placebo effect is difficult to measure, since any favorable response to placebo may be related to other factors, such as spontaneous remission. There are complementary theories to explain it, such as conditioning and expectancy. In addition, the placebo effect induces neurobiological changes in the brain. For example with asthma, the placebo treatment may make asthma patients feel better but not actaully lessen disease, according to a new study.
Distinguish between presynaptic and postsynaptic neurons
The presynaptic neuron is the cell that sends information (transmits chemical messages). The postsynaptic neuron is the cell that receives information (receives chemical messages)
What factors might incentivize researchers to engage in poor research practices?
The top three influencing factors on scientific misconduct were individual morality. pressure for promotion, and pressure for publishing articles. > than 50% of researchers thought the pressure for promotion, publication, and external funding were high or very high.
Explain how the sympathetic response is beneficial in some situations but not in others.
The sympathetic nervous system directs the body's rapid involuntary response to dangerous or stressful situations. A flash flood of hormones boosts the body's alertness and heart rate, sending extra blood to the muscles
What is the anchoring effect? Describe empirical evidence that even irrelevant/impossible numbers can serve as anchors
The tendency for a person to rely heavily on the first piece of information they receive when making decisions. Cognitive bias: A systematic error in thinking that affects people's judgment and decisionmaking.
What is a neuron? Be able to label and identify the major parts
There are approx. 100 billion neurons in the brain, each with 3 components: the dendrites, soma, and axon.
What are the three criteria that characterize personality traits?
There are three criteria that are characterize personality traits: (1) consistency, (2) stability, and (3) individual differences.
Distinguish between false-positives (Type I errors) and misses/false-negatives (Type II errors).
There are two errors that could potentially occur: Type I error (false positive): the test result says you have coronavirus, but you actually don't. Type II error (false negative): the test result says you don't have coronavirus, but you actually do
Describe research on "split brain" patients. What do they tell us about lateralization in the brain? You should be comfortable describing how a split brain patient would describe or draw a visual scene.
There is evidence of specialization of function—referred to as lateralization—in each hemisphere, mainly regarding differences in language functions. The left hemisphere controls the right half of the body, and the right hemisphere controls the left half of the body.
What does evaluating compliance rates across the Milgram variations reveal about what affects behavior?
Unlike obedience, in which the other individual is in a position of authority, compliance does not rely upon being in a position of power or authority over others. Compliance involves changing your behavior in some way because someone else requested you to do so.
What are the advantages and limitations of informant ratings?
Valuable when self report is impossible to collect or when their validity is suspect, limitations includes that the level of relevant info that is available to the rater, as they lack full access to the thoughts, feelings, and motives of the person they are rating.
How do we use contextual information to help us understand language?
Verbal context refers to the text or speech surrounding an expression (word, sentence, or speech act). Verbal context influences the way an expression is understood; hence the norm of not citing people out of context.
What consequences do WEIRD samples have for internal and external validity?
WEIRD samples represent a very narrow slice of the world's population (12%)
How does Weber's law relate to JNDs?
Weber's Law, also sometimes known as the Weber-Fechner Law, suggests that the just noticeable difference is a constant proportion of the original stimulus. Using this information, you could then use Weber's law to predict the just noticeable difference for other sound levels
What is the McGurk effect?
a categorical change in auditory perception induced by incongruent visual speech, resulting in a single percept of hearing something other than what the voice is saying.
What is the Stroop task? What does it reveal about attention?
a clear illustration of people's capacity for selective attention and the ability of some stimuli to escape attentional control, appears to cast light into the essential operations of cognition, offering clues to fundamental cognitive processes and their neuro-cognitive architecture, also utilized to investigate various psychiatric and neurological disorders.
Duality of Patterning
a finite number of meaningless units combine in infinite ways to create meaning (sounds combine to form words -> combine to form sentences, etc
You should be familiar with the Posner task and what it demonstrates about attention.
a neuropsychological test often used to assess attention. Formulated by Michael Posner, it assesses a person's ability to perform an attentional shift. Location based attention- being able to focus our attention on different locations and the ability to respond to different stimuli.
Be familiar with the four features that contribute to the American Psychiatric Association's definition of psychological disorders.
a physiological condition is a condition that consists of: -significant disturbances in thoughts, feelings, or behaviors, -disturbances reflecting some kind of biological, physiological, or developmental dysfunction, -disturbances lead to significant distress or disability in one's life, -disturbances do not reflect expected or culturally approved responses to certain events
You should be familiar with the diathesis-stress model and how it relates to our theme "complex outcomes have multiple causes"
a psychological theory that attempts to explain behavior as a predisposition vulnerability together with stress from life experiences.
correlational study
a research project designed to discover the degree to which two variables are related to each other
What is the Baker/baker paradox? Why might it occur?
a theory that helps explain the strengths and weaknesses of human memory, since our memories are so visual, we associate information more strongly with visual cues: a researcher shows two people the same photograph of a face and tells one of them that the guy is a baker and the other that his last name is Baker. A couple of days later, the researcher shows the same two subjects the same photograph and asks for the accompanying word.
Displacement
ability to talk about things remote in place and time (e.g., history, distant events)
What is an absolute threshold and a just noticeable difference?
absolute threshold for sound, for example, would be the lowest volume level that a person could detect. The just noticeable difference would be the smallest change in volume that a person could sense
What are registered reports? How can they help avoid some of the practices that lead to the replication crisis, and what benefit do they offer beyond pre-registration?
acceptance prior to data collection, they collect large sample size with large collaborations to get varied samples
Distinguish between acquisition, extinction, and spontaneous recovery.
acquisition-initial stage of the learning or conditioning process extinction-gradual weakening of a conditioned response that results in the behavior decreasing or disappearing spontaneous recovery-the reappearance of the conditioned response after a rest period or period of lessened response.
Cognitive psychologists love cocktail parties. Why does that listening situation provide insights about attention
active listening builds strong relationships and allows us to listen and focus on specific tasks or sounds
What are some advantages and limitations of behavioral measures of personality?
advantages are that behavior is sampled directly and not subject to the types of response biases (e.g., self-enhancement bias, reference group effect) that can distort scores on objective tests. disadvantages include that they can be expensive, may be inaccurate, could result in a lack of diversity in the workplace and could create a false sense of confidence in a candidate.
Describe evidence for the predictive validity of personality (e.g., academic settings and with advertising)
advertising: found links between personality traits and likes, generated ads based on lies and therefore users were more likely to click on and buy products that were advertised to themselves
Why are schemas helpful?
allow us to take shortcuts in interpreting the vast amount of information that is available in our environment
Describe research that distinguishes between the functions of the amygdala and the hippocampus.
amyglada: emotional responses, especially fear, atypically reactivity hippocampus: memory, navigation (sensory)
What are confounds? How can participant demands, experimenter expectations, and the placebo effect act as confounds? How can double-blind procedures avoid the confounds?
an "extra" variable that you didn't account for. They can ruin an experiment and give you useless results; basically are extra IVs that are having a hidden effect on your DVs. Confounding makes it impossible to differentiate that variable's effects in isolation from its effects in conjunction with other variables. The purpose of blinding is to minimise bias. Random assignment of participants to the different groups only helps to eliminate confounding variables present at the time of randomisation, thereby reducing selection bias.
Given the number of variables that affect factors like income or mortality, how can we assess the unique contributions of IQ (above and beyond other variables)?
an IQ is a score derived from one of several different standardized tests designed to assess intelligence
What is an IRB? How does it provide ethical safeguards for research? You should be familiar with the concepts of informed consent, deception, and debriefing.
an Institutional Review Board is group that has been formally designated to review and monitor biomedical research involving human subjects. In accordance with FDA regulations, an IRB has the authority to approve, require modifications in (to secure approval), or disapprove research. informed consent: researchers working with human participants describe their research project and obtain the subjects' consent to participate in the research based on the subjects' understanding of the project's methods and goals. deception: misleading or tricking participants about the purpose or direction of the study debriefing:researcher explains the purpose of the study, explains the use of deception (if any was used), encourages the participant to ask questions about the study, and allows the researcher to address any harm to the participant that may have resulted from their participation in the study.
What is an action potential?
an all-or-nothing response that occurs when there is change in the charge or potential of the cell from its resting membrane potential (-70mV) in a more positive direction, which is depolarization
What is shaping?
an operant conditioning procedure in which reinforcers guide behavior toward closer and closer approximations of the desired behavior
What are descriptive norms? How can they affect behavior?
any of various consensual standards (social norms) that describe how people typically act, feel, and think in a given situation.
What are descriptive norms? How do they affect behavior?
any of various consensual standards (social norms) that describe how people typically act, feel, and think in a given situation.
What is the representativeness heuristic?
assuming a category is accurately represented by an individual category member ex: global climate change, one place doesn't define every places conditions
What is the representativeness heuristic? Describe an example of it in action.
assuming category is accurately represented by an individual category member, assumption that categories are uniform
How can concepts of priming be applied to stereotyped thinking?
attention to a response increases the frequency of that response, even if the attended response is undesired. The attention given to these response or behaviors primes them for later activation.
What is implicit bias?
attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner
Define "resting membrane potential." How many mV is the resting potential of an average neuron? How does the concentration of ions inside and outside the cell affect the resting voltage?
base collective drive force on several ions, the resting membrane potential of a neuron is about -70 mV- this means that the inside of the neuron is 70 mV less than the outside. At rest, there are relatively more sodium ions outside the neuron and more potassium ions inside that neuron.
Describe the basic procedure of the Asch conformity study. Give a few examples of factors that influence participant responses (culture, age, etc). Describe methodological changes that increase conformity and those that decrease conformity.
basic procedure: only real participant was one person, 3 other people would say their answer before him out loud, asking which line was longer and they all answered wrong, causing him to answer it wrong as well. Conformity is reduced with the presence of an ally; choosing groups of participants that share similar views may prevent individuals from feeling alone and thus staying quiet. Conformity is increased when an individual finds a task or topic difficult or confusing.
psychoanaylsis/psychodynamic therapy
behavior is influenced by irrational & unconscious drives, true feeling revealed through indirect measures in dreams, speech, errors, projective tests (inkblot)
How can superstition be explained via principles of operant conditioning?
behaviors & outcomes need to be casual related in order to become associated, behavior may correlate with outcome without having caused it
Describe some ways we can overcome stereotyped thinking in real world settings.
being aware of biases, systems to alert biased behavior, set up situations where biases don't work (blind judging, grading, scientific review), and safeguards (like avoiding fatigue)
Describe the effects of birth order on intelligence.
birth order does not affect intelligence, and that differences in intelligence observed in previous trials are most likely due to external factors such as parents' intelligence or economic disadvantages more often faced by larger families.
perception without awareness of sensation
blindsight perception of visual info with conscious experience
Distinguish between bottom-up and top-down processing.
bottom-up is when we build up perception from the individual pieces, while the stimuli we've experienced in the past will influence how we process new ones is top-down processing.
What is the vestibular system?
comprised of three semicircles/fluid bone filled structures containing cells that respond to changes in the head's orientation in space
covariance
changes in IV associated with changes in DV
What is an operational definition?
defining the variable as it exists in the present study
What are open data and open materials? How can they contribute to overcoming the replication crisis?
data that anyone can access, use and share: Data sharing encourages more connection and collaboration between researchers, which can result in important new findings within the field.
What is the relationship between emotional intelligence, agreeableness, and intelligence?
emotional intelligence=intelligence (g)+agreeableness r=0.81
What is the levels of processing effect?
encoding (acquisition of information), storage (maintenance of the information) and retrieval (use of the information that was stored)
Be familiar with the stages of memory (sensory, STM, LTM) and the processes within (attention, maintenance rehearsal, encoding, storage, retrieval).
encoding: info is transferred into memory representations storage: retention of encoded info encoding--> storage--> retrieval
What are personality traits?
enduring patterns of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and oneself that are exhibited in a wide range of social and personal contexts
random assignment
ensures no pre-existing differences between groups
What are randomized controlled trials? Why are they the "gold standard" for assessing whether a treatment is effective?
evaluate efficacy of therapy, treatment must be significantly greater than natural improvement
Describe and be able to distinguish between the following types of memory: explicit, implicit, episodic, semantic, priming, classical conditioning, procedural.
explicit-conscious long-term memory easily and intentionally recalled and recited implicit-both unconscious and unintentional episodic-conscious recollection of a personal experience that contains information on what has happened and also where and when it happened semantic-the memory of meaning, understanding, general knowledge about the world, priming-the introduction of one stimulus influences how people respond to a subsequent stimulus classical conditioning-learned association between neutral stimulus and a stimulus that elicits an automatic response procedural-type of long-term memory involving how to perform different actions and skills
Be familiar with fMRI and EEG as methods for studying the brain.
fMRI-relies on blood flow and measures changes in O2 levels in blood EEG-measures electrical activity of brain has much greater temporal resolution
What is retrograde amnesia? How does it affect memory for information prior to and after the injury/inducing event?
failing to retrieve or store info, can form new memories of all typed but lost prior episodic memories
Describe fixed ratio schedules, variable ratio schedules, fixed interval schedules, and variable interval schedules.
fixed ratio:a schedule of reinforcement where a response is reinforced only after a specified number of responses variable ratio: a schedule of reinforcement where a response is reinforced after an unpredictable number of responses variable interval: reinforcement is given to a response after specific amount of time has passed(an unpredictable amount of time), but this amount of time is on a changing/variable schedule.
Cognitive focused Therapy
focuses on habitual ways of thinking, helps patients identify problematic automatic thoughts filtering-noticing & focusing on neg examples (substituting better ones-cognitive restructuring) overgeneralization-drawing conclusions from too few examples
Behavior therapy
focuses on role of basic learning processes (conditioning) to change behavior exposure therapy: effective for treating phobias & anxiety
Humanistic Therapy
focuses on value of self-esteem & self-direction; people need physiological support from others, based on conscious insights techniques: paraphrase, invite clarification, reflect feelings
What are opportunity costs? How do they relate to principles of operant conditioning?
forgone benefit that would have been derived from an option not chosen. Considering the value of opportunity costs can guide individuals and organizations to more profitable decision-making.
Be able to name, locate, and describe the key roles of: frontal lobe, occipital lobe, parietal lobe, temporal lobe, amygdala, hippocampus, fusiform gyrus, Broca's area, primary auditory cortex, cerebellum, thalamus, hypothalamus, brainstem, motor cortex, somatosensory cortex
frontal-reasoning, personality, planning occipital-vision parietal-processing and interpreting somatosensory input & coordination temporal-processing affect/emotions, language, and certain aspects of visual perception. fusiform gyrus-base of temporal lobe, important in recognizing faces Broca's area-speech production thalamus-relay motor and sensory signals to the cerebral cortex hypothalamus-maintain homeostasis brain stem-regulation of heart rate, breathing, sleeping, and eating motor cortex-regions of cortex are devoted to specific regions in body somatosensory cortex-receives tactile information from the body, including sensations such as touch, pressure, temperature, and pain
What is lateralization?
functions reside primarily on one side of the brain, ex: left side is responsible for languageContralateral is a term that references the opposite side of something.
Why are psychologists justified in combining the responses from multiple different tasks in determining g? How does this relate to the positive manifold?
g represents 1 single property of the brain, "mental energy" that varies between people and is the result of different genetic makeups. Even if there isn't one fundamental process driving everything, all the subtests correlate (+) together and a g-factor appears. g is a general factor of intelligence. Positive manifold is the idea that all the variables are positively correlated, which allows us to find a g-factor
What is g?
general intelligence, construct that represents shared info in multiple cognitive tests
What are habituation and dishabituation? Give several real-world examples.
habituation: is a decrease in response (arbitrarily defined in this schematic example) with repeated presentation of the stimulus dishabituation: restoration to full strength of a response that has become weakened by habituation
perception without sensation
hallucinations induced by drugs & illness
What is the WAIS?
he Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) is an intelligence test first published in 1955 and designed to measure intelligence in adults and older adolescents
What is social cognition?
how people perceive and think about their social world
What did Sperling's classic study reveal about sensory memory?
human beings store a perfect image of the visual world for a brief moment, before it is discarded from memory
What is latent inhibition?
idea that familiar stimuli are harder to turn into CS
What are the benefits of multisensory integration?
improving the ability to detect an external event, localizing it in space and using it as a target for a superior colliculus-mediated orientation response.
What are independent and dependent variables? Control and experimental groups?
in an controlled experiment, an IV (the cause) is systematically manipulated and the DV (the effect) is measured; any extraneous variables are controlled. An experimental group is the group that receives the variable being tested in an experiment. The control group is the group in an experiment that does not receive the variable you are testing.
What is the Flynn effect? Describe several reasons it may be occurring.
increase in intelligence test scores over time, could be caused by better nutrition, fewer toxins & infectious diseases, test familiarity, modern complexities, and greater stimulation
How can habituation be used to test preverbal infants? Describe infant research on face perception that makes use of principles of habituation.
increased attention following habituation increases that infant noticed a change, measure-looking & sucking rates, infants are better at discriminating monkey faces than adults
What does it mean that a reinforcer or a punisher is positive or negative?
increases or decreases likelihood for behavior
What is one of the things that accounts for individual variability in perception of #TheDress?
individual variation in colour perception
limitations on drug treatments
individual variation, takes time to work, side effects
pluralistic ignorance
individuals falsely believe in others in their group differ in attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors i.e. binge drinking, gang violence
What does it mean that personality traits reflect a continuous distribution?
individuals must be consistent in how they express that trait -- e.g., if they are talkative at home, they must also be talkative at work.
What is multimodal perception?
info from one sense has the potential to influence how we perceive info from another.
How is it possible that intelligence can be both highly heritable and still be substantially influenced by environmental factors?
intelligence is .88 heritable. However, despite the fact that it is that heritable, the environment plays an important factor in determining intelligence. For example if you grew up in an area where you accidentally ended up with lead in your bloodstream then your intelligence would decrease.
What are internal and external validity? How are they affected by random sampling and random assignment?
internal validity relates to how well a study is conducted (its structure), external validity relates to how applicable the findings are to the real world. Random assignment enhances the internal validity of the study, it ensures that there are no systematic differences between the participants in each group-helping you conclude that the outcomes can be attributed to the independent variable Random sampling enhances the external validity or generalizability of your results, because it helps ensure that your sample is unbiased
Distinguish between dispositional and situational attributions.
internal/dispositional attribution: people infer that an event or a person's behavior is due to personal factors such as traits, abilities, or feelings. In an external/situational attribution: people infer that a person's behavior is due to situational factors.
What is inattentional blindness?
is the failure to notice something that is completely visible because of a lack of attention
Describe the relationship between social support and coping with stress.
it appears that positive social support of high quality can enhance resilience to stress, help protect against developing trauma-related psychopathology, decrease the functional consequences of trauma-induced disorders, such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and reduce medical morbidity and mortality.
What does it mean that the Big 5 model is data-driven? How does this relate to factor analysis?
it is an analyzed test in which words correlated with each other and formed clusters of adjectives describe a particular trait.
Describe how IQ relates to income, mortality, and job performance.
job performance: high complexity job=more IQ mortality: people with higher IQ=lower chance of death income: parents wealth=better education, nutrition & opportunities so higher income and higher IQ
What is classical conditioning?
learned association between neutral stimulus and a stimulus that elicits an automatic response
What is aphasia?
loss of ability to understand or express speech, caused by brain damage.
Define "depolarize"
loss of the difference in charge between the inside and outside of the plasma membrane of a muscle or nerve cell due to a change in permeability and migration of sodium ions to the interior
What is a heritability coefficient?
measure derived from the correlation coefficient and the extent to which a trait or characteristic is inherited. e.g. intelligence has a heritability coefficient of about .5, which means that about 50% of the differences in intelligence between people is due to heridity.
What does a digit span test measure?
measure of verbal short term and working memory that can be used in two formats, Forward Digit Span and Reverse Digit Span. This is a verbal task, with stimuli presented auditorily, and responses spoken by the participant and scored automatically by the software.
What are heuristics?
mental shortcuts/strategies for making rapid judgments
Give evidence that motivation affects encoding more than retrieval
motivated participants generate more possible items to familiarize themselves with during memory retrieval than less motivated participants-Persistent retrieval is the idea that motivated participants generate more possible items from the study materials. By doing so, they cause a recall task to become more like a recognition task
What are facets within Big 5 traits? You don't need to memorize them, but should be familiar with facets relate to traits.
need for achievement and condition, authoritarianism, narcissism, self-esteem, optimism
What are "treatment illusions"? Why can we not assume that a treatment is effective if patients improve after receiving the treatment?
non-specific treatment effects e.g. consequence of having "a plan" (akin to placebo), self serving biases, natural improvement: patients tend to seek out treatment when they are sickest
What neurotransmitters are implicated in mood disorders? In Schizophrenia?
norepinephrine and serotonin, important in bodily functions that are disrupted in mood disorders, including appetite, sex drive, sleep, arousal, norepinephrine activity.
You should be familiar with the following social forces: normative and informational influences, diffusion of responsibility, and pluralistic ignorance.
normative influence: operating when people go along with the crowd because they are concerned about what others think of them informational influence: when we go along with the crowd with people that are a source of information diffusion of responsibility: phenomenon whereby a person is less likely to take responsibility for action or inaction when other bystanders or witnesses are present pluralistic ignorance: belief that one's personal attitudes are different from the majorities' attitudes
You should be familiar with the variations of the Milgram study and what they suggest about the causes for compliance.
obedience study: tests the extent of humans' willingness to obey orders from an authority figure. Participants were told by an experimenter to administer increasingly powerful electric shocks to another individual.
strong internal validity
only difference between groups is manipulation of IV, there are random assignments to groups and confounds are removed
What is the Scapegoat treatment?
pair chemotherapy with novel food to avoid forming association between nausea and familiar food
Be familiar with the Bargh/Doyen research on age-related priming
people primed with words associated with the stereotype of the elderly (e.g. retirement) actually walked more slowly than people who were shown other words unrelated to the elderly.
What is the framing effect? Describe empirical evidence that including irrelevant choices can affect the buying decision people make.
people will be influenced by the different semantic descriptions of the same issue, and have different risk preferences indicating that people make decisions based on the potential value of losses and gains rather than the final outcome.
What does it mean that DSM disorders are polythetic and categorical?
poly: same diagnosis can have different symptoms cat: disorders are characterized as present vs absent
Describe some shortcomings with the Myers-Briggs test. You should be able to comment on both its reliability and validity.
poor validity: weak correlations among answers that are supposed to be measured the same type, and there are weak relationships with real-world outcomes
What is hopelessness theory?
postulates that a particular type of negative thinking leads to a sense of hopelessness, which then leads to depression
What is retrieval practice? How can you implement it in studying for this course (hint: you're doing it right now. Whoa. Meta.)
process of searching for and finding info in memory
Distinguish between random sampling and random assignment. Which one affects the ability to draw cause-and-effect conclusions and which one affects the ability to generalize from the sample to the population?
random sampling refers to how you select individuals from the population to participate in your study, it is cause and effect. Random assignment refers to how you place those participants into groups and or treatment conditions. (such as experimental vs. control)
What is chunking?
refers to the process of taking individual pieces of information and grouping them into larger units. By grouping each data point into a larger whole, you can improve the amount of information you can remember
Describe rumination.
repetitive and passive focus on that fact that one is depressed and dwelling on depressed symptoms, rather than distracting oneself from the symptoms to address them in an active problem solving manner
Describe the main findings of the "Misconceptions of Memory" article. You should be able to describe both the independent and dependent variables.
research on human memory suggests that the motivation to remember is considered more effective when it rises before rather than after information is encoded
What is the law of effect?
responses with pleasant affects aren't automatically triggered responses with unpleasant effects become less likely
What is the file drawer problem/publication bias?
results not supporting the hypotheses of researchers often go no further than the researchers' file drawers, leading to a bias in published research.
Vision: Distinguish between rods and cones. Where in the eye does transduction occur? What is agnosia?
rods are responsible for our ability for our ability to see in dim light conditions while cones provide us with ability to see color and fine detail whnenteh bright is lighter
Comment on the validity of self-report measures. What are some real world outcomes associated with self-reported personality traits?
self-report studies have validity problems. Patients may exaggerate symptoms in order to make their situation seem worse, or they may under-report the severity or frequency of symptoms in order to minimize their problems
How do the ideas raised in the "Weapon Bias" article relate to the concepts of spreading activation in semantic networks? How does it relate to system I and system II thinking?
semantic association with race plays a role in weapon bias but we do not know if they act identically to emotional responses
What are schemas? How can they affect memory?
semantic memory structures that help people organize new information they encounter. In addition they may help a person reconstruct bits and pieces of memories that have been forgotten.
Distinguish between sensation & perception.
sensation: sensory organs (involved w hearing/taste) respond to external stimuli. Perception: making sense of stimuli
Distinguish between sensory neurons, motor neurons, and interneurons
sensory neurons help us process info coming in from the world around us motor neurons allow us to initiate movement & behavior interneurons process the sensory input from our environment into meaningful representations, plan the appropriate behavioral response, and connect the motor neurons to execute these behavior plans.
Distinguish between sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory.
sensory-up your ability to process and recall what you see short term-anything that happened 5 min ago, short duration, limited capacity long term-long duration, unlimited capacity
What are mood disorders?
severe disturbances in mood and emotions-most often depression, but also mania and elation
What are some of the physiological correlates of major depressive disorder?
significant weight loss, difficulty falling asleep, psychomotor agitation, fatigue or loss of energy, feelings of worthlessness, difficulty concentrating, suicidal ideation
What is maintenance rehearsal?
simple repetition (without elaboration) of items that need to be remembered in order to prevent them fading from short-term memory, as when a person repeats a telephone number over and over while searching for a pen and paper to write it down.
How can eyetracking be used to study how an individual's goals affects their overt orienting?
since it monitors the locations of fixations
Touch: What type of receptors transduce tactile stimuli? What are the somatosensory homunculus and the somatosensory map?
somatosensation receptors (includes our ability to touch, temp, and pain) transduces physical stimuli into electrical potentials that can be processed by the brain
What are phonemes?
sounds that distinguish meaning in a particular language
Distinguish between temporal and spatial resolution in neuroimaging. Which methods provide good resolution of each type?
spatial resolution refers to the capacity a technique has to tell you exactly which area of the brain is active, while temporal resolution describes its ability to tell you exactly when the activation happened
What is the threshold of excitation?
specific membrane potential a neuron must reach in order to initiate an action potential (-50mV) once neuron reaches this threshold the action potential is triggered
What is preregistration? How can it help avoid some of the practices that lead to the replication crisis?
specifying all hypotheses & methodological choices in writing prior to data collection, it reduces RDoF, can not p-hack or HARK and reduces publication bias
What is a factor analysis?
statistical procedure to identify relationships among a set of items
Describe multiple reasons that people with mental disorders may not seek treatment.
stigma, lack of knowledge, cost, worry about consequences, not thinking it will help, too busy
What is psychopathology?
study of physiological disorders, including their symptoms, causes, and treatments
You should be familiar with the Strayer et al studies on distracted driving and the results they showed.
suggest that telephone conversations reduce the amount of attention which can be devoted to the driving task, thus impairing performance. This is inferred from the fact that peripheral factors, such as motor interference from holding the phone, can be ruled out.
Distinguish between deep structure and surface structure of language. How does this relate to our discussion of memory?
surface structure refers to the words / language we use to represent the deep structure, deep structure is what you wish to express and surface structure how you express it in with the help of words and sentence.
What are sustained attention, divided attention, and selective attention?
sustained: ability to attend to a stimulus or activity over a long period of time. selective: ability to attend to a specific stimulus or activity in the presence of other distracting stimuli. divided: ability to attend different stimuli or attention at the same time
Distinguish between the sympathetic and parasympathetic response. What situations is each beneficial for?
sympathetic nervous system prepares the body for the "fight or flight" response during any potential danger. parasympathetic nervous system inhibits the body from overworking and restores the body to a calm and composed state.
Describe research showing people are not accurate at intuiting others' mental states (Angela hit the man with the ball study) and behaviors (Reed College study)
tapping test results: tappers are likely to underestimate the difficulty of the task, relies on our ability to intuit the mental state of others (which may not be accurate) Reading others minds: speaker gives ambitious sentence-"angela hit the man with the ball" and listener guesses which interpretation the speaker intended, speaker guess accuracy about 72% whereas actual was 62%, overhearer guess about listener accuracy was 56%
What is categorical perception?
tendency of listeners to perceive speech sounds according to the phonemic categories of their native language
What are objective tests of personality?
test that measures an individual's characteristics in a way that is not influenced by the examiner's own beliefs, said to be independent of rater bias.
What is the all-or-none law?
the action potential is either going to fire and complete itself once it gets over that threshold of excitation or it will not go at all
What is co-morbidity?
the co-occurence of two disorders
Hearing: Where does transduction occur?
the cochlea
What is the self-serving bias? How it is used?
the common habit of a person taking credit for positive events or outcomes, but blaming outside factors for negative events. This can be affected by age, culture, clinical diagnosis, and more. It tends to occur widely across populations. By attributing positive events to personal characteristics, you get a boost in confidence. By blaming outside forces for failures, you protect your self-esteem and absolve yourself from personal responsibility.
How can so-called "third variables" complicate the interpretation of a correlation? Come up with a real world example.
the fact that an observed correlation between two variables may be due to the common correlation between each of the variables and a third variable rather than any underlying relationship (in a causal sense) of the two variables with each other. A type of confounding in which a third variable leads to a mistaken causal relationship between two others. For instance, cities with a greater number of churches have a higher crime rate.
What are researcher degrees of freedom?
the fact that each researcher has many choices to make. ... It implies that there are "good research practices" and there are "questionable research practices." The latter ones you should not engage in as a researcher.
true experiment
the researcher manipulates the Independent Variable(s) to observe its effect on some behavior or cognitive process (the dependent variable) while using random assignment of participants to groups in order to control external factors from influencing the results.
What is a schedule of reinforcement?
the rules that determine how often an organism is reinforced for a particular behavior
What is hindsight bias?
the tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that one would have foreseen it
What is framing? Try to come up with a real world example where it might occur.
the way an issue is phrased influences judgement. You frame situations for your personal benefit or without thinking. The way you received in education was in a frame. When you listen to any proposal, story, or negotiation, it's all done through a frame.
Why are adoption studies and twin studies useful for understanding the relationship between genes and environments?
they aim to reveal the importance and separate the effects of environmental and genetic influences for traits and phenotypes and showing the importance of unique environments when studying trait presentation.
Describe critical periods in language learning.
time during early postnatal life when the development and maturation of functional properties of the brain, its 'plasticity', is strongly dependent on experience or environmental influences.
How do psychologists typically define intelligence?
to acquire, manipulate, and apply knowledge in capacity
What is the person-situation debate?
traits reflect general patterns which may not hold in specific situations
Describe some risk factors for major depressive disorder.
unemployment, earning less than 20,000 per year, being divorced or widowed
What is the availability heuristic? Describe empirical evidence for the contributions of "vividness" affecting availability.
use to judge frequency/likelihood, events that are easy to bring to mind (available) are judged to occur more frequently. What makes something available is having heard about the recently, vividness, fluency of recall
What is anchoring? Try to come up with a real world example where it might occur.
using a reference point to guide decision making. For example, if you first see a T-shirt that costs $1,200 - then see a second one that costs $100 - you're prone to see the second shirt as cheap.
How does human language differ from animal communication, such as that of vervets, honeybees, and gorillas? Be familiar with displacement, duality of patterning, and generativity.
vervet monkey: learns signals from others, can use signals to lie honeybee: waggle dance (angle of dandy:source direction, length of waggle;distance, enthusiasm of waggle: value), innate gorilla: knows 100 sings, can identify objects and make requests
What is the refractory period?
very difficult to initiate another action potential-cell needs high level of stimulation to open Na+ channels again
How can our associations with color and strength affect how placebos work? How does this relate to semantic networks?
we associate drug colors with specific effects that stretch far beyond brand recognition-once we've tricked our brains into making the association, it becomes real, semantic networks do their job in linking/categorizing the color to represent a relationship
What does it mean that attention has a limited capacity?
we cannot process all available info
What is confirmation bias? Describe empirical evidence for it.
we seek info that fits our expectations or favors information that confirms previously existing beliefs or biases. For example, imagine that a person holds a belief that left-handed people are more creative than right-handed people.
What is conformity?
widespread tendency to act and think like the people around us
