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Psych 122 - Test 2
Chapters 5-7
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Natural Selection | The process by which certain adaptive characteristics emerge over generations. |
| Evolutionary Personality Theory | An area of study applying biological evolutionary theory to human personality. |
| Behavioral Genomics | They study of how genes affect behavior. |
| Temperament | Stable individual differences in emotional reactivity. |
| Sensation Seeking | A tendency to seek out highly stimulating actives and novelty. |
| Neurotransmitter | A chemical used by nerves to communicate. |
| Prozac | A drug that blocks reabsorption of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain and thus elevates moods and alters emotional reaction patterns. |
| Hemispheric Activity | The level of activity within one cerebral hemisphere (left or right). |
| Eugenics | The movement begun by Francis Galton that encouraged preserving or purifying the gene pool of the elite in order to improve human blood lines. |
| Nonshared Environmental Variance | Features of the environment that children raised in the same home experience differently. |
| Schizophrenia | A condition whose symptoms include distorted reality, odd emotional reactions, and sometimes paranoia and/or delusions. |
| Bipolar Disorder (Also called Manic-depression) | A disorder in which an individual swings regularly between bouts of wildly enthusiastic energy and bouts of hopeless depression. |
| Kin Selection | The idea that increasing the likelihood for the family members of an individual to survive increases the likelihood that the individual's genes will be carried on to the next generation even if the individual did not reproduce him or herself. |
| Bisexuality | Sexual attraction to both men and women. |
| Ménière's Disease | An inner-ear disorder that can produce disabling dizziness, nausea, and auditory disturbances. |
| Alzheimer's Disease | A disease of the brain's cerebral cortex, primarily affecting elderly people, that causes altered behavior and memory loss. |
| Biological Determinism | The belief that an individual's personality is completely determine by biological factors (and especially by genetic factors). |
| Psychopharmacology | The study of the role of drugs and other toxic substances in causing and treating psychiatric disturbance. |
| Tropism | The tendency to seek out specific types of environments. |
| Somatotypology | W.H. Sheldon's theory relating body type to personality characteristics. |
| Mesomorph | According to W.H. Sheldon, a somatotype describing muscular, large boned, athletic types of people. |
| Ectomorph | According to W.H. Sheldon, a somatotype describing slender bookworm types of people. |
| Endomorph | According to W.H. Sheldon,a somatotype describing overweight, good-natured types of people. |
| Sociobiology | The study of the influence of evolutionary biology on individual responses regarding social matters. |
| Attachment | The close bond that forms shortly after birth between an infant and the mother (or other caregiver). |
| Survival of the Fittest | The concept that species evolve because those individuals who cannot compete well in the environments in which they live tend to be less successful in growing up and producing offspring. |
| Social Darwinism | The idea that societies and cultures naturally compete for survival of the fittest. |
| Human Genome Project | An effort to identify each of the thousands of genes in our chromosomes. |
| Partial Reinforcement | A reward that occurs after some but not all occurrences of a behavior. |
| Classical Conditioning | The concept that after the repeated pairing of an unconditional stimulus that elicits an unconditioned response and a neutral stimulus, the previously neutral stimulus can come to elicit the same response as the unconditioned stimulus. |
| Generalization | The tendency for similar stimuli to evoke the same response. |
| Discrimination | The concept that a conditioned response will not occur for all possible stimuli, indicating that an animal can learn to tell the difference between different stimuli. |
| Extinction | The process by which the frequency of the organism's producing a response gradually decreases when the response behavior is no longer followed by the reinforcement. |
| Behaviorism | The learning approach to psychology introduced by John Watson that emphasizes the study of observable behavior. |
| Systematic Desensitization | Gradually extinguishing a phobia by causing the feared stimulus to become dissociated from the fear response. |
| Reinforcement | An event that strengthens a behavior and increases the likelihood of repeating the behavior in the future. |
| Law of Effect | Edward Thorndyke's concept that the consequence of a behavior will either strengthen or weaken the behavior (If the result is satisfaction, this strengthens the connection between stimulus and response, but if it is pain then the connection is weakened). |
| Operant Conditioning | The changing of a behavior by manipulating its consequences. |
| Shaping | The process in which undifferentiated operant behaviors are gradually changed or shaped into a desired behavior pattern by the reinforcement of successive approximations, so that the behavior more and more resembles the target behavior. |
| Skinner Box | An enclosure in which an experimenter can shape the behavior of an animal by controlling reinforcement and accurately measuring the responses of the animal. |
| Negative Reinforcement | An aversive (punishment) event that ends if a behavior is performed, making it more likely for that behavior to be preformed in the future. |
| Radical Determinism | The belief that all human behavior is caused and that humans have no free will. |
| Habits | In learning theory, simple associations between a stimulus and a response. |
| Primary Drive | A fundamental innate (natural) motivator of behavior, specifically hunger, thirst, sex, or pain. |
| Social Learning Theory | A theory that proposes that habits are built up in terms of a hierarchy of secondary drives. |
| Habit Hierarchy | In social learning theory, a learned hierarchy of likelihood that a person will produce particular responses in particular situations. |
| Secondary Drives | In social learning theory, drives that are learned by association with the satisfaction of primary drives. |
| Approach-Avoidance Conflict | A term used by Dollard and Miller to describe a conflict between primary and secondary drives that occurs when a punishment results in the conditioning of a fear response to a drive. |
| Approach-Approach Conflict | A term used by Dollard and Miller to describe a conflict in which a person is drawn to two equally attractive choices. |
| Avoidance-Avoidance Conflict | A term used by Dollard and Miller to describe a conflict in which a person is faced with two equally undesirable choices. |
| Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis | The theory that aggression is the result of blocking, or frustrating, a person's efforts to attain a goal. |
| Act Frequency Approach | Assessing personality by examining the frequency with which a person performs certain observable actions. |
| Gestalt Psychology | An approach to psychology that emphasizes perception and thought suggesting that the whole may be greater than the sum of its parts. |
| Gestalt | A German word for pattern or configuration. |
| Field Theory | KurtLewin's approach to personality, suggesting that behavior is determined by complex interactions among a person's internal psychological structure, the forces of the external environment, & the structural relationships b/w the person & the environment. |
| Life Space | In Kurt Lewin's theory, all the internal and external forces that act on an individual. |
| Contemporaneous Causation | Behavior is caused at the moment of its occurrence by all the influences that are present in the individual at that moment. |
| Cognitive Style | An individual's distinctive, enduring way of dealing with everyday tasks of perception and problem solving. |
| Field Dependence | The extent to which an individual's problem solving is influenced by salient but irrelevant aspects of the context in which the problem occurs. |
| Field Independence | The extent to which an individual's problem solving is NOT influence by salient (whats most important) but irrelevant aspects of the context in which the problem occurs. |
| Cognitive Complexity | The extent to which a person comprehends, utilizes, & is comfortable w/ a greater number of distinctions into which an entity/event is analyzed, & the extent to which the person can integrate these elements by drawing connections/relationships among them. |
| Learning Style | The characteristic way in which an individual approaches a task or skill to be learned. |
| Schema | A cognitive structure that organizes knowledge and expectations about one's environment. |
| Script | A schema that guides behavior in social situations. |
| Categorization | The perceptual process by which highly complex ensembles of information are filtered into a small number of identifiable and familiar objects and entities. |
| Stereotype | A schema or belief about the personality traits that tends to be a characteristic of members of a particular group. |
| Situated Social Cognition | Social-cognitive process that change with changes in the situation. |
| Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) | A disorder in which a person has atypical attentional processes. |
| Rejection Sensitivity | A personality variable capturing the extent to which an individual is overly sensitive to cues (signals) that he or she is being rejected by another. |
| Personal Construct Theory | The approach to personality proposed by George Kelly that emphasizes the idea that people actively try hard to understand the world and construct their own theories about human behavior. |
| Role Construct Repertory Test | An assessment instrument designed by George Kelly to evoke a person's own personal construct system by making comparisons among triads of important people in the life of the person being assessed. |
| Social Intelligence | The idea that individuals differ in their level of mastery of the particular cluster of knowledge and skills that are relevant to interpersonal situations. |
| Emotional Intelligence | The set of emotional abilities specific to dealing with other people. |
| Multiple Intelligences | Howard Gardner's theory that claims that all human beings have at least seven different ways of knowing about the world and that people differ from one another in the relative strengths of each of these seven ways. |
| Emotion Knowledge | The ability to recognize and interpret emotions in the self and others. |
| Explanatory Style | A set of cognitive personality variables that captures a person's habitual means of interpreting events in his or her life. |
| Defensive Pessimism | The approach of anticipating a poorer outcome, thus reducing anxiety and actually improving performance in a risky situation. |
| Learned Helplessness | The term used by Martin Seligman to describe a situation in which repeated exposure to unavoidable punishment leads an organism to accept later punishment even when it is avoidable. |
| Cognitive Intervention | Teaching people to change their thought processes. |
| Learned Optimism | A term used to describe an optimistic style that people can be trained to achieve. |
| Outcome Expectancy | The expected consequence of a behavior that is the most significant influence on whether or not a person will reproduce an observed behavior, also, the extent to which an individual expects his performance to have a positive result. |
| Reinforcement Value | The extent to which an individual values the expected reinforcement of an action. |
| Behavior Potential | A term used by Julian Rotter to describe the likelihood that a particular behavior will occur in a specific situation. |
| Specific Expectancy | According to Julian Rotter, the expectancy that a reward will follow a behavior in a particular situation. |
| Generalized Expectancy | According to Julian Rotter, expectancies that are related to a group of situations. |
| Secondary Reinforcement | According to Dollard and Miller, a conditioned reinforcement; a previously neutral stimulus that becomes a reinforcer following its paring with a primary reinforcer. |
| Psychological Situation | According to Julian Rotter, the individual's unique combination of potential behaviors and the value of these behaviors to the individual. |
| Locus of Control | In Julian Rotter's theory, the variable that measures the extent to which an individual habitually attributes outcomes to factors internal to the self versus external to the self. |
| Internal Locus of Control | According to Julian Rotter, the generalized expectancy that an individual's own actions lead to desired outcomes. |
| External Locus of Control | According to Julian Rotter, the belief that things outside of the individual determine whether desired outcomes occur. |
| Self-System | A system by which a person perceives, evaluates, and regulates his or her own behavior so that it is appropriate to the environment and effective in achieving goals. |
| Observation Learning | Learning by an individual that occurs by watching others preform the behavior, with the individual neither performing the behavior nor being directly rewarded or punished for the behavior. |
| Vicarious Learning | Learning achieved by watching the experiences of another person. |
| Self-Regulation | Monitoring one's own behavior as a result of one's internal processes of goals, planning, and self-reinforcement. |
| Self-Efficacy | An expectancy or belief about how competently one will be able to enact a behavior in a particular situation. |
| Turing Test | A standard test by which to judge whether a computer can adequately simulate a human; in this test, first proposed by Alan Turing, a human judge interacts with two hidden others and tries to decide which is the human and which is the computer. |
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