Help
Options
Didn't know it?
click below
click below
Knew it?
click below
click below
Don't Know
Remaining cards (0)
Know
retry
shuffle
restart
0:00
Embed Code - If you would like this activity on your web page, copy the script below and paste it into your web page.
Normal Size Small Size show me how
Normal Size Small Size show me how
PSYCH 1301
EXAM 1 - 3 DEFINITIONS
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| REPLICATION | THE PROCESS OF REPEATING A STUDY TO VERIFY RESEARCH FINDINGS |
| BEHAVIORISM | SCHOOL OF PSYCHOLOGY THAT VIEWS OBSERVABLE, MEASURABLE BEHAVIOR AS THE APPROPRIATE SUBJECT MATTER FOR PSYCHOLOGY |
| EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY | SCHOOL OF PSYCHOLOGY THAT STUDIES HOW HUMANS HAVE ADAPTED THE BEHAVIORS REQUIRED FOR SURVIVAL |
| CASE STUDY | A DESCRIPTIVE RESEARCH METHOD IN WHICH A SINGLE INDIVIDUAL OR A SMALL NUMBER OF PERSONS ARE STUDIED IN GREAT DEPTH |
| VARIABLE | ANY CONDITION OR FACTOR THAT CAN BE MANIPULATED, CONTROLLED, OR MEASURED |
| PLACEBO | AN INERT OR HARMLESS SUBSTANCE GIVEN TO THE CONTROL GROUP IN AN EXPERIMENT AS A CONTROL FOR THE PLACEBO EFFECT |
| BIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY | THE SCHOOL OF PSYCHOLOGY THAT LOOKS FOR LINKS BETWEEN SPECIFIC BEHAVIORS AND EQUALLY SPECIFIC BIOLOGICAL PROCESSES THAT OFTEN HELP EXPLAIN INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCE. |
| POPULATION | THE ENTIRE GROUP OF INTEREST TO RESEARCHERS, TO WHICH THEY WISH TO GENERALIZE THEIR FINDINGS. |
| NEURON | A SPECIALIZED CELL THAT CONDUCTS IMPLUSES THROUGH THE NERVOUS SYSTEM AND CONTAINS THREE MAJOR PARTS. |
| MYELIN SHEATH | THE WHITE FATTY COATING WRAPPED AROUND SOME AXONS THAT ACTS AS AN INSULATION |
| SYNAPSE | THE JUNCATION WHERE THE AXON TERMINAL OF A SENDING NEURON COMMUNICATES WITH A RECEIVING NEURON. |
| SYMPATHETIC NERVOUS SYSTEM | THE DIVISION OF THE AUTONOMIC NERVOUS SYSTEM THAT MOBLIZED THAT BODY'S RESOURCES DURING STRESS AND EMERGENCIES, PREPARING THE BODY FOR ACTION. |
| SAMPLE | A PART OF A POPULATION THAT IS STUDIED TO REACH CONCLUSIONS ABOUT THE ENTIRE POPULATION |
| NATURALISTIC RESEARCH | A DESCRIPTIVE RESEARCH METHOD IN WHICH RESEARCHERS OBSERVE AND RECORD BEHAVIOR IN ITS NATURAL SETTING, WITHOUT ATTEMPTING TO INFLUENCE OR CONTROL IT. |
| PERCEPTION | THE PROCESS BY WHICH THE BRAIN ACTIVELY ORGANIZED AND INTERPRETS SENSORY INFORMATION |
| SENSATION | THE PROCESS THROUGH WHICH THE SENES PICK UP VISUAL, AUDITORY, AND OTHER SESNORY STIMULI AND TRANSMIT THEM TO THE BRAIN |
| ABSOULTE THRESHOLD | THE MINIMUM AMOUNT OF SENSORY STIMULATION THAT CAN BE DETECTED 50% OF THE TIME |
| DIFFERENCE THRESHOLD | A MEASURE OF THE SMALLEST INCREASE OR DECREASE IN A PHYSICAL STIMULUS THAT IS REQUIRED TO PRODUCE A DIFFERENCE |
| COLOR BLINDNESS | THE INABLIITY TO DISTINGUISH CERTAIN COLORS FROM ONE ANOTHER |
| Circadian Rhythm | Within each 24-hour period, the regular fluctuation from high to low points of certain bodily functions and behaviors. |
| Subjective Night | The time during a 24-hour period when the biological clock is telling a person to go to sleep. |
| REM Rebound | The increased amount of REM sleep that occurs after REM deprivation; often associated with unpleasant dreams or nightmares. |
| NREM Sleep | Non-rapid eye movement sleep, four sleep stages and is characterized by slow, regular respiration and heart rate, little body movement, an absence of rapid eye movements, and blood pressure and brain ists of activity that are at their 24-hour low points. |
| Insomnia | A sleep disorder characterized by difficulty falling or staying asleep, by waking too early, or by sleep that is light, restless, or of poor quality. |
| Sleep Apnea | A sleep disorder characterized by periods during sleep when breathing stops and the individual must awaken briefly to breath. |
| Lucid Dream | A dream that an individual is aware of dreaming and whose content the individual is often able to influence while the dream is in progress. |
| Manifest Content | Freud’s term for the content of a dream as recalled by the dreamer. |
| Latent Content | Freud’s term for the underlying meaning of a dream. |
| Substance Abuse | Continued use of a substance after several episodes in which use of the substance has negatively affected an individual’s work, education, and social relationships. |
| Psychoactive Drugs | Any substance that alters mood, perception, or thought; called a controlled substance if approved for medical use. |
| Drug tolerance | A condition in which the user becomes progressively less affected by the drug and must take increasingly larger doses to maintain the same effect or high. |
| Learning | A relatively permanent change in behavior, knowledge, capability, or attitude that is acquired through experience and cannot be attributed to illness, injury or maturation. |
| Negative Reinforcement | The termination of an unpleasant condition after a response, which increases the probability that the response will be repeated. |
| Shaping | An operant conditioning technique that consists of gradually molding a desired behavior (response) by reinforcing any movement in the direction of the desired response, thereby gradually guiding the responses toward the ultimate goal. |
| Biofeedback | The use of sensitive equipment to give people precise feedback about internal physiological processes so that they can learn, with practice, to exercise control over them. |
| Cognitive Processes | Mental processes such as thinking, knowing, problem solving, remembering, and forming mental representations. |
| Memory | The process of encoding, storage, consolidation, and retrieval of information. |
| Encoding | The process of transforming information into a form that can be stored in memory. |
| Storage | The process of keeping or maintaining information in memory. |
| Retrieval | The process of burning to mind information that has been stored in memory. |
| Sensory Memory | The memory system that hold information from the senses for a period of time ranging from only a fraction of a second to about 2 seconds. |
| Chunking | A memory strategy that involves grouping or organizing bits of information into larger units, which are easier to remember. |
| Rehersal | The act of purposely repeating information to maintain it in short term memory. |
| Short-term Memory | The memory system that codes information according to sound and holds about seven (from five to nine) items for less than 30 seconds without rehearsal; also called working memory. |
| Semantic Memory | The type of declarative memory that stores general knowledge, or objective facts and information. |
| Flashbulb Memory | An extremely vivid memory of the conditions surrounding one’s first hearing the news of a surprising, shocking, or highly emotional event. |
| Repression | Completely removing unpleasant memories from one’s consciousness, so that one is no longer aware that a painful even occurred. |
| Dementia | State of mental deterioration characterized by impaired memory and intellect and by altered personality and behavior. |
| Amnesia | A partial or complete loss of memory due to loss of consciousness, brain damage, or some psychological cause. |
| Motivated Forgetting | Forgetting through suppression or repression in an effort to protect oneself from material that is painful, frightening, or otherwise unpleasant. |
| Developmental Psychology | The study of how humans grow, develop, and change throughout the lifespan. |
| Scheme | Piget’s term for a cognitive structure or concept used to identify and interpret information. |
| Psychosocial Stages | Erickson’s eight developmental stages for the entire lifespan; each is defined by a conflict that must be resolved satisfactorily for healthy personality development to occur. |
| Temperament | A person’s behavioral style or characteristic way of responding to the environment. |
| Attachment | The strong affectionate bond a child forms with the mother or primary caregiver. |
| Separation Anxiety | The fear and distress shown by a toddler when the parent leaves, occurring from 8 to 24 months and reaching a peach between 12 and 18 months. |
| Stanger Anxiety | A fear of strangers common in infants at about 6 months and increasing in intensity until about 12 months, and then declining in the second year. |
| Adolescence | The developmental stage that begins at puberty and encompasses the period from the end of childhood to the beginning of adulthood. |
| Successful Aging | Maintaining one’s physical health, mental abilities, social competence, and overall satisfaction with life as one gets older. |
| Motivation | All the processes that initiate, direct, and sustain behavior. |
| Incentive | An external stimulus that motivates behavior (for example, money, or fame). |
| Arousal | A state of alertness and mental and physical activation. |
| Work Motivation | The conditions and processes responsible for the arousal, direction, magnitude, and maintence of effort of workers on the job. |
| BMI | Body Mass Index. A measure of weight relative to height. |
| Anorexia Nervosa | An eating disorder characterized by an overwhelming, irrational fear of gaining weight or becoming fat, compulsive dieting to the point of self-starvation, and excessive weight loss. |
| Bulimia Nervosa | An eating disorder characterized by repeated and uncontrolled (and often secretive) episodes of binge eating. |
| Sexual Response Cycle | The four phases - excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution-that make up the human sexual response in both males and females, according to Masters and Johnson. |
| James-Lang Theory | The theory that emotional feelings result when an individual becomes aware of a physiological response to an emotion – provoking stimulus (for example, feeling fear because of trembling). |
| Stress | The physiological and psychological response to a condition that threatens or challenges a person and requires some form of adaptation or adjustment. |
| Fight or Flight Response | A response to stress in which the sympathetic nervous system and the endocrine glands prepare the body to fight or flee. |
| Hassles | Little stressors, including the irritating demands that can occur daily, that may cause more stress than major life changes do. |
| Approach-Avoidance Conflict | A conflict arising when the same choice has both desirable and undesirable features. |
| PTSD | A prolonged and severe stress reaction to a catastrophic event or to severe, chronic stress. |
| GAS | The predictable sequence of reaction (alarm, resistance, and exhaustion stages) that organisms show in response to stressors. |
| Type A behavior pattern | A behavior pattern marked by a sense of time urgency, impatience, excessive competitiveness, hostility, and anger; considered a risk factor in coronary heart disease. |
| Type B behavior pattern | A behavior pattern marked by a relaxed, easygoing approach to life, without the time urgency, impatience, and hostility of the Type A pattern. |
| Personality | A person’s characteristic patterns of behaving, thinking, and feeling. |
| Conscious | The thoughts, feelings, sensations, or memories of which a person is aware at any given moment. |
| Unconscious | For Freud, the primary motivating force of human behavior, containing repressed memories as well as instincts, wishes, and desires that have never been conscious. |
| ID | The unconscious system of the personality, which contains the life and death instincts and operates on the pleasure principle; source of the libido. |
| Ego | In Freud’s theory, the logical, rational, largely conscious system of personality, which operates according to the reality principle. |
| Superego | The moral system of the personality, which consist of the conscience and the ego ideal. |
| Displacement | The event that occurs when short-term memory is filled to capacity and each new, incoming item pushes out an existing item, which is then forgotten. |
| Repression | Completely removing unpleasant memories from one’s consciousness, so that one is no longer aware that a painful event occurred. |
| Unconditional Positive Regard | Unqualified caring and nonjudgmental acceptance of another. |
| Trait | A personal characteristic that is stable across situations and is used to describe or explain personality. |
| Projective Test | A personality test in which people respond to inkblots, drawings of ambiguous human situations, or incomplete sentences by projecting their inner thoughts, feelings, fears, or conflicts onto the test materials. |
Created by:
deannica
Popular Psychology sets