PSY 150 Chapter 1

Research designed to find solutions to specific personal or social problems.

Applied research

The use of mental processes to perceive and mentally represent the world, think, and engage in problem solving and decision making.

Cognition

The approach to psychology that focuses on the nature of consciousness and on mental processes such as sensation and perception, memory, problem solving, decision making, judgment, language, and intelligence.

Cognitive perspective

In experiments, groups whose members do not obtain the treatment, while other conditions are held constant.

Control groups

An association or relationship among variables, as we might find between height and weight or between study habits and school grades.

Correlation

The school of psychology that emphasizes the uses or functions of the mind and behavior rather than just the elements of experience.

Functionalism

The culturally defined concepts of masculinity and femininity.

Gender

To extend from the particular to the general; to apply observations based on a sample to a population.

Generalize

The school of psychology that emphasizes the tendency to organize perceptions into wholes and to integrate separate stimuli into meaningful patterns.

Gestalt psychology

A relationship between two variables in which one variable increases as the other decreases.

Negative correlation

A bogus treatment that has the appearance of being genuine.

Placebo

A complete group of organisms or events.

Population

A relationship between variables in which one variable increases as the other also increases.

Positive correlation

The school of psychology that asserts that much of our behavior and mental processes is governed by unconscious ideas and impulses that have their origins in childhood conflicts.

Psychoanalysis

Scientific study of behavior and mental processes.

Psychology

Undertaken because the researcher is interested in the research topic. Has no immediate application to personal or social problems and has therefore been characterized as research for its own sake.

Pure research

A sample drawn so that each member of a population has an equal chance of being selected to participate.

Random sample

A stimulus that follows a response and increases the frequency of the response.

Reinforcement

Repeat, reproduce, copy.

Replicate

Part of a population.

Sample

An approach to acquiring or confirming knowledge that is based on gathering measurable evidence through observation and experimentation. Evidence is often obtained to test hypotheses.

Scientific method

A source of bias that may occur in research findings when participants are allowed to choose for themselves a certain treatment in a scientific study.

Selection factor

A school of psychology in the behaviorist tradition that includes cognitive factors in the explanation and prediction of behavior;formerly termed social-learning theory.

Social-cognitive theory

The view that focuses on the roles of ethnicity, gender, culture, and socioeconomic status in behavior and mental processes.

Sociocultural perspective

A sample drawn so that identified subgroups in the population are represented proportionately in the sample.

Stratified sample

The school of psychology that argues the mind consists of three basic elements - sensations, feelings and images - that combine to form experience.

Structuralism

A method of scientific investigation in which a large sample of people answer questions about their attitudes or behavior.

Survey

In experiments, a condition received by participants so that its effects may be observed.

Treatment

A source of bias or error in research reflecting the prospect that people who offer to participate in research studies differ systematically from people who do not.

Volunteer bias

A scientific method in which organisms are observed in their natural environments.

Naturalistic observation

The school of psychology that defines psychology as the study of observable behavior and studies relationships between stimuli and responses.

Behaviorism

The approach to psychology that seeks to understand the nature of the links between biological processes and structures such as the functioning of the brain, the endocrine system, and heredity, on the one hand, and behavior and mental processes, on the other.

Biological perspective

In experimental technology, being unaware of whether one has received a treatment or not.

Blind

A carefully drawn biography that may be obtained through interviews, questionnaires, and psychological tests.

Case study

A number between +1.00 and -1.00 that expresses the strength and direction (positive or negative) of the relationship between two variables.

Correlation coefficient

A mathematical method of determining whether one variable increases or decreases as another variable increases or decreases. For example, there is a correlation between intelligence test scores and grades in school.

Correlational method

An approach to the examination of arguments based on skepticism, logical analysis, and insistence upon the importance of empirical evidence.

Critical thinking

To elicit information about a completed procedure.

Debrief

A measure of an assumed effect of an independent variable.

Dependent variable

A study in which neither the participants nor the observers know who has received the treatment.

Double-blind study

A science that obtains evidence by experience or experimentation.

Empirical science

Moral; referring to one's system of deriving standards for determining what is moral.

Ethical

A group characterized by common features such as cultural heritage, history, race, and language.

Ethnic group

The view that our behavior and mental processes have been shaped, at least in part, by natural selection as our ancestors strived to meet prehistoric and historic challenges.

Evolutionary perspective

The view that people are free and responsible for their own behavior.

Existentialism

A scientific method that seeks to confirm cause-and-effect relationships by introducing independent variables and observing their effects on dependent variables.

Experiment

In experiments, groups whose members obtain the treatment.

Experimental groups

A condition in which a researcher expects or desires a certain outcome in a research study, possibly affecting the outcome.

Experimenter bias

The philosophy and school of psychology that asserts that people are conscious, self-aware, and capable of free choice, self-fulfillment, and ethical behavior.

Humanism

Within the science of psychology, a specific statement about behavior or mental processes that is testable through research.

Hypothesis

A condition in a scientific study that is manipulated so that its effects may be observed.

Independent variable

A participant's agreement to participate in research after receiving information about the purposes of the study and the nature of the treatments.

Informed consent

In Gestalt psychology, the sudden reorganization of perceptions, allowing the sudden solution of a problem.

Insight

An inborn pattern of behavior that is triggered by a particular stimulus.

Instinctive

Deliberate looking into one's own cognitive processes to examine one's thoughts and feelings and to gain self-knowledge.

Introspection

Formulations of apparent relationships among observed events. Allow us to derive explanations and predictions.

Theories