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Appendix A Vocab
Psych Terms
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Abnormal Psychology | The study of abnormal mental processes and behavior. |
| Agoraphobia | The fear of being away from a safe place, such as your home. |
| Amnesia | Loss of memory, whether partially or completley. |
| Anorexia Nervosa | An eating disorder in which an individual starves him or herself in order to lose weight. |
| Antianxiety Drugs | Drugs that are most often used to treat anxiety, such as Valium or Xanax. |
| Antidepressants | Drugs that are most often used to treat depression, such as Prozac, Zoloft, or Paxil. |
| Antipsychotic Drugs | Drugs that are used to treat psychosis (e.g. schizophrenia), such as Restoril. |
| Anxiety Disorders | A category of mental disorders in which all share a symptom of an extreme fear or anxiety. They include phobias, panic attacks with or without agoraphobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder. |
| Attribution Theory | A psychological theory that offers explanation of social or individual behavior. |
| Awareness | How conscious you are of yourself or materials and things within your environment. |
| Behavior Therapy | A form of therapy in which conditioning techniques are applied to change or eliminate a problematic behavior. |
| Biological Atruism | A selfless act made on the behalf of another in order to attempt to save that person's life, even though your own life may be at risk. |
| Bipolar Disorder | A mental disorder in which a person experiences a series of extreme highs and lows that are often unpredictable in nature, formerly called manic-depressive illness, usually occuring over months rather than within one day or week. |
| Brainstorming | A problem- solving strategy in which you come up with as many possible solutions as you can, usually within a certain period of time. |
| Bulimia Nervosa | An eating disorder in which an individual eats large amounts of food and then purges in order to lose weight. |
| Catastrophizing | Blowing a small problem out of proportion and turning it into an inescapable disaster. |
| Central Nervous System | A system of the body consisting of the spinal column and the brain. |
| Chromosomes | The structures within every cell that carry the genes. |
| Chunk | A unit of information containing small bits of information stored in the memory. |
| Cingulotomy | A surgery that destroys a small part of the brain known to be involved in emotionality. It's used as a last resort for those suffering severe OCD and major depression who have not responded to drugs or psychotherapy. |
| Classical Conditioning | The process by which a normally neutral stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus, eliciting a response in an individual due to its association with a stimulus that already elicits a similar response. |
| Client-Centered Therapy | A humanistic therapy approach in which the client is the focus of the therapy session. |
| Cognitive Processes | Processes that allow you to understand your environment and how the environment affects you and in turn how you affect the environment. |
| Cognitive Therapy | A form of therapy that employs the premise that rational, realistic, and constructive thinking can reduce the occurance of or entirely get rid of a problematic behavior. |
| Compliance | Yielding to another person's wishes without modifying your true beliefs. |
| Compulsion | A repetitive ritual behavior in OCD that is used to reduce anxiety. |
| Conscious | The term used to describe your active awareness. |
| Consciousness | Level of awareness. |
| Conventional Morality | The second stage of the moral thought process in which adolescents begin to uphold laws because they understand the concept of rules and that they should be obeyed. This is also the stage in which adolescents start doing good out of caring for others. |
| Cyclothymia | A milder form bipolar disorder. People with cyclothymia suffer mood swings between mania and depression, but they are not as extreme. |
| Deductive Reasoning | A form of reasoning that uses premises that guarantee to be followed by a conclusion of truth. |
| Delusions | False, and often outlandish, ideas that a person believes to be true, not consistent with the person's cultural context. |
| Diffusion of Responsibility | An event that takes places when a group of people are witnessing the same emergency, yet certain people do not offer assistance because other people are present, therefore diffusing their need to act. |
| Dissociative Disorders | A category of mental disorders in which the disorders are characterized by the separating of a persons awareness from his conscious memory. These include dissociative amnesia and identity disorder. |
| Dysthymia | A less severe form of depression that is not disabling but still produces feelings of despair and pervasive lack of pleasure. |
| Eating Disorders | A category of mental disorders in which the disorders are characterized by excessive over eating, undereating, overexercising, or purging as a result of fear of gaining weight. They include anorexia and bulimia. |
| Ego | A component of personality that seeks to gain pleasure; it operates on the rality principle where impulses are controlled when situations aren't favorable for meeting its demands. |
| Electroencephalograph | A device used to measure brain waves, otherwise known as an EEG. |
| Event- Related Potential | Minute electrical changes that are studied to localize brain activity. |
| Explicit Memory | The storage location for information you intentionally work to remember. |
| Factitious Disorders | A category of mental disorders in which the disorders are characterized by a person's attempt to fake physical or psychological illnesses. |
| Free Association | Used in therapy that requires the pt to talk about whatever comes to mind no matter how relevant, the thought is. This is used along with dream analysis and childhood memory evaluation, attempt to help pt's understand themselves and their actions. |
| Habituation | The most basic form of learning in which an individual turns his attention to new objects and away from already discovered objects. |
| Hallucinations | False sensory perceptions that a person believes to be real. |
| Hypnosis | A procedure meant to create an altered state of consciousness in which a hypnotist suggests changes in feelings, perceptions, thoughts, or behavior of the subject. |
| ID | A component of personality that wants immediate gratification of physical distress such as hunger, thirst and sexual tension. |
| Implicit Memory | The storage location for information you remember but did not intentionally store for future use. |
| Impulse Control Disorders | A category of mental disorders in which the disorders are marked by an inability to resist an impulse to act in a behavior that is harmful. These include kleptomania, pyromania, pathological gambling, and explosive disorder. |
| Inductive Reasoning | A form of reasoning that uses premises to predict an outcome or conclusion that is probably true, though there is a possibility the conclusion is false. |
| Long-Term Memory | The memory that stores all information the mind wishes to keep for the long term, information that may be retrieved and used in the future. |
| Major Depression | A mood disorder involving interruptions in an individual's behavior, emotion, cognition, and body function. |
| Mania | A period of extreme exhilaration wherein the individual is full of energy, high self-esteem, creativity, and ambition. |
| Menopause | A time of physical change in women in which menstruation ceases and the ovaries stop producing estrogen. |
| Mnemonics | Strategies, such as a rhyme or formula, that are used to improve the memory and help you retain and retrieve the information by making use of the information already stored in your long-term memory. |
| Mood Disorders | A category of mental disorders in which the disorders are characterized by extreme changes in mood, such as major depresseion, cyclothymia, dysthymia, and bipolar disorder. |
| Mood Stabilizers | Drugs that work to stabilize a person's mood, reducing or getting rid of extreme mood swings. |
| Operant Conditioning | A process by which an individual's response is followed by a consequence and that consequence teacher her either to repeat the response or to decrease it's occurence. |
| Overgeneralizing | Taking a thought or belief and irrationally expanding it to areas that would otherwise be unaffected. |
| Panic Disorder | An anxiety disorder in which an individual suffers recurring panic attacks. |
| Personality Disorder (Definition) | A category of mental disorders in which the disorders are a result of maladaptive patterns that disrupt a person's ability to function in everyday life and/or cause extreme distress. |
| Personality Disorder (Examples) | Narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, paranoid personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, obsessive compulsive personality disorder, and avoidant personality disorder. |
| Phobia | An exaggerated and unrealistic fear that incapacitates the sufferer. |
| Postconventional Morality | The third stage of moral thought in which an adolescent will act according to his or her own basic ethical principles. |
| Posttraumatic Stress Disorder | An anxiety disorder that develops following a traumatic experience, such as near-death, rape, war, or natural disasters. PTSD includes reliving dreams, thoughts, irritablity, insomnia, inability to concentrate, depression, and detachment from others. |
| Preconscious | The part of the mind that stores memories that you do not have a use for at the present moment but that you can retrieve in the future if needed. |
| Preconventional Morality | The first stage of the moral thought process in which a child will obey the rules and choose to do right only to avoid punishment or gain a reward for acting "good". |
| Psychological Altruism | A selfless act made for the benefit of another that does not reward you in any way. |
| Psychosurgery | A method of treatment that involves destroying the part of the brain thought to be responsible for the mental disorder. |
| Psychotic Disorders | A category of mental disorders in which the disorders are marked by delusions, hallucinations, or extreme emotional disturbances. They include schizophrenia and delusional disorder. |
| Reference Group | Groups we identify with when we need to understand our own opinions and analyze our behavior or reactions to situations. |
| Reinforcement | Rewards and punishments. |
| REM Sleep | A stage of sleep in which your brain is just as active as it is when you are wide-awake during the day. |
| Repressed Memory | A memory that has been involuntarily pushed to the unconcious and that the individual is unaware of. |
| Schemata | Cognitive structures stored in memory that are abstract representations of events, objects, and relationships in the real world. |
| Schizophrenia | A mental disorder in which an individual loses touch with reality, suffers hallucinations and delusions, and is unable to carry out many daily activites. |
| Scripts | Schemata or abstract cognitive representations of events and social interactions. |
| Self-Perception | A theory that concludes that we make the same judgements about ourselves, use the same processes, and make the same errors as we do when making judgements about others. |
| Sensory Memory | The memory that briefly stores incoming impressions. |
| Sexual and Gender-Identity Disorders | A category of mental disorders in which the disorders are marked by abnormal behavior regarding sexual functioning. They include sadomasochism, exhibitionism, psychosexual dysfunction, fetishism and transsexualism. |
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tatarek11
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