AP Psych Commonly Missed Terms Quiz 2

Confirmation bias

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

Proactive interference

Difficulty in learning new information because of already existing information

Negative reinforcement

Increasing behaviors by stopping or reducing negative stimuli, such as shock. (Not a punishment)

Explicit memory

Memory of facts and experiences that one can consciously know and "declare." Also known as declarative memory

Learned helplessness

The hopelessness and passive resignation an animal or human learns when unable to avoid repeated aversive events

Discrimination

(1) in classical conditioning, the learned ability to distinguish between a conditioned stimulus and stimuli that do not signal an unconditioned stimulus or (2) unjustifiable negative behavior toward a group and its members

Disorders

A mental or behavioral pattern or anomaly that causes either suffering or an impaired ability to function in ordinary life (disability), and which is not a developmental or social norm.

Yerkes-Dodson Law

An empirical relationship between arousal and performance dictating that performance increases with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a point

Cocktail party effect

Describes the the ability to focus your hearing on one specific thing even though noise is all around you

Morpheme

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

Phoneme

In language, the smallest distinctive sound unit

Defense mechanism

In psychoanalytical theory, the ego's protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality

Misinformation effect

Incorporating misleading information into one's memory of an event

Declarative memory

Same as explicit memory

State-dependent memory

The phenomenon through which memory retrieval is most efficient when an individual is in the same state of consciousness as they were when the memory was formed

Recency effect

The principle that the most recently presented items or experiences will most likely be remembered best

Generalization

The tendency, once a response has been conditioned, for stimuli similar to the conditioned stimulus to elicit similar responses