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Psych & Soc
MCAT Study Cards
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Ethnocentrism | Tendency to judge others by standards in own culture |
| Social Facilitation Effect | performing simple tasks better when other people are present |
| Bystander Effect | Person less likely to provide help when other bystanders are present |
| Social Loafing | Exert less effort if being evaluated as a group |
| Groupthink | desire for harmony results in a perspective without alternative viewpoints |
| Dramaturgical Perspective | Imagine ourselves playing certain roles when interacting with others |
| Functionalism | Society is a living organism with different parts and organs, social institutions larger scale |
| Manifest Functions | intended and obvious consequences of a structure |
| Latent Functions | unintended consequences |
| Social Dysfunction | undesirable consequences and reduction social structure |
| Symbolic Interactionism | Society is built from micro interactions |
| Social constructionism | human actors create a reality instead of discovering one that has internal validity, social institutions are a larger scale |
| Fundamental Attribution Error | underestimate the impact of a situation and overestimate a person's character |
| Self-serving bias | success to ourselves, and failure to others |
| Optimism Bias | Bad things happen to others but not to ourselves |
| False Consequences | everyone agrees with what we do |
| Prejudice | thoughts, acts, and feelings not based on experience |
| Stereotype | Oversimplified ideas based on characteristics of people |
| Scapegoat | who aggression may be displaced to |
| Self-fulfilling prophecy | behaviors that affirm a stereotype |
| Sanctions | rewards and punishments for behaviors in accord with, or against norms |
| Agents of Socialization | family, school, peer groups, workplace, religion, gov, media, and tech |
| Assimilation | forsake aspects of a culture to adopt those of a different culture |
| Amalgation | majority and minority groups form a new group |
| Multiculturalism | Equal standing for all cultures |
| Self-Esteem | evaluating one's self-worth |
| looking glass self | sense of self develops from perception of others: Charles Horton Cooley |
| Self-Efficacy | A belief in one's own competence |
| Locus of Control | Ability to influence outcomes by self and surroundings: Julian Rotter |
| self-identity | knowledge and understanding of self |
| personal identity | age, disability, religion (demographics) |
| justification of effort | modify attitude to what someone says (salesman tactic) |
| public declaration | to please others and adapt to what they say |
| role-playing | stanford prison experiment type of research |
| social cognitive therapy | reactions about thoughts, not the event itself |
| behavioral therapy | conditioning to reshape behaviors |
| humanistic therapy | healthy personality development, carl rogers |
| sublimation | channeling negative behavior into something positive |
| regression | reverting to less sophisticated behavior |
| displacement | redirecting aggressive or sexual impulses |
| rationalization | intellectually justifying one's behavior |
| projection | attributing unacceptable thoughts and feelings to another person |
| reaction formation | expressing opposite of what one feels |
| repression | lack of recall of something emotionally painful |
| denial | refuse to acknowledge a memory |
| overconfidence | overestimating accuracy of knowledge |
| belief perseverance | tendency to cling to beliefs despite the presence of evidence (anti-vaxxers) |
| belief bias | tendency to judge arguments based on what we believe about conclusions than the logic (fundamentalist republicans) |
| confirmation bias | tend to only seek information that confirms what one believes ignoring refuting beliefs |
| mental set | fixate on solution that worked in the past though it may not apply to the current problem |
| long term memory | indefinite capacity (hippocampus) |
| short term memory | 7 +/- 2 items, 20s (hippocampus) |
| echoic memory | sound, 3-4s |
| iconic memory | visual info (prefrontal cortex) |
| sensory memory | decays very quickly (prefrontal cortex) |
| avoidance | person performs behavior to ensure aversive stimulus not presented |
| escape | get away from aversive stimulus by engaging in a behavior |
| selective attention | the process by which one input is attended to and the rest are tuned out |
| divided attention | ability to perform multiple tasks simultaneously |
| cocktail party effect | occurs when words of importance are immediately detected |
| Broca's area | speech and language production |
| Wernicke's area | language comprehension |
| limbic system | controls basic emotions |
| hippocampus | short term and long term memory |
| prefrontal cortex | sound and sensory memory |
| Alertness and Arousal | the ability to remain attentive to what is going on (run by reticular formation) |
| Heuristics | performing mental shortcuts to solve a problem |
| algorithm | step by step procedure to solve a problem |
| trial and error | repeated, varied attempts to solve a problem |
| nonassociative learning | repeatedly exposed to one stimulus |
| habituation | learning to tune out other processes |
| sensitization | increase responsiveness due to repeated application |
| dishabituation | no longer accustomed to a stimulus |
| associative learning | one object or event is closely related to another |
| classical conditioning | 2 stimuli paired in a certain way to change response |
| acquisition | learning a conditioned response |
| generalization | stimuli other than conditioned stimuli elicit response |
| spontaneous recovery | extinct conditioned response occurs when conditioned stimulus is presented after some time |
| extinction | conditioned and unconditioned stimulus no longer paired together and do not produce conditioned response |
| discrimination (classical conditioning) | ability to separate conditioned stimulus from other stimuli |
| operant conditioning | reinforcement and punishment to mold behavior and cause associative learning |
| reinforcement | increase likelihood of behavior |
| positive (operant conditioning) | adding stimulus |
| negative (operant conditioning) | removing stimulus |
| punishment | decreasing the likelihood of a behavior |
| Anxiety | excessive worry, uneasiness, apprehension and fear with psych and phys symptoms |
| mood disorder | disturbance in mood or affect |
| personality disorder | behavior that departs from social norms |
| parkinson's disease | cell death in basal ganglia and substantia nigra, tremor, slow movement |
| residual schizophrenia | previously met symptoms of schizo but now lighter |
| paranoid schizophrenia | delusions and hallucinations |
| catatonic schizophrenia | stupor and immobility with peculiar behavior |
| undifferentiated schizophrenia | meets basic criteria for schizo but not any subtype |
| psychotic disorder | loss of contact with reality |
| dissociative disorder | disruption in memory and identity |
| eating disorder | disruption in eating patterns |
| neurocognitive disorder | decline in memory and problem solving |
| Alzheimer's disease | dementia and anterograde amnesia, plaques |
| sleep disorder | interruption of sleep pattern |
| somatoform disorder | symptoms cannot be explained by a medical condition |
| social behaviorism | mind and self emerge through process of communicating with others |
| attribution theory | consistency, distinctiveness, consensus either internally or externally |
| conflict theory | competition for limited resources, social disruption not stability |
| cognitive dissonance theory | conflict or inconsistency between internal attitudes and external behaviors |
| psycholanalytical theory | personality shaped by unconscious |
| superego | moralistic goals |
| id | source energy and instincts, pleasure principle |
| ego | logical planning, controls consciousness |
| altruism | practice of selfless concern for the well-being of others |
| absolute threshold of sensation | the min intensity of stimulus needed to detect a particular stimulus 50% of the time |
| Weber's Law | quantification of the perception of change in a a given stimulus |
| vestibular fsystem | balance and spacial orientation (inner ear) |
| signal detection theory | how we make decision under conditions of uncertainty. what is important and what is noise |
| bottom-up processing | stimulus influences our perception |
| top-down processing | background knowledge influences perception |
| Dopamine | neurotransmitter released when pleasure is experienced. Sent to amygdala and hippocampus |
| Stressors | significant life changes, catastrophic events, daily hassles, ambient |
| Hormones released during stress | via endocrine system: norepinephrine, epinephrine and cortisol |
| cerebellum | coordinate movement |
| conformity | peer pressure, the tendency for people to bring behavior to line with group norms |
| central processing | lasting attitude change, interested in topic |
| peripheral processing | don't care about the topic, temporary attitude change |
| reciprocal determinism | interaction between a person's behavior, personal factors, and environment: Bandura |
| stigma | extreme disapproval or discrediting of individual by society either social or self |
| evolutionary game theory | those who best fit to environment will survive |
| vehicular control | what exp group does without directly desired impact |
| positive control | treatment with known response |
| negative control | group with no response expected |
| internal validity | extent to which a causal conclusion based on the stid is warranted |
| external validity | whether results of study can be generalized to other situations and people |
| confounding variable | change in dependent variable |
| temporal confounds | time related confounding variable |
| material cutlure | objects involved in a certain way of life |
| non-material culture | elements of a culture that are not physical |
| social norm | expectations that govern what behavior is acceptable in a group |
| social group | subset of a population that maintains social interactions |
| symbolic culture | non-material culture that consists of elements of culture that have meaning only in the mind |
| urbanization | increase of proportion of people living in specified urban areas |
| globalization | increase of interaction and integration of goods, services, and people on a global scale |
| spatial inequality | unequal access to resources and variable quality of life based on geographical area |
| global inequality | disparity between regions and nations evidenced by GDP, natural resources, and access to healthcare |
| residential segregation | social inequality on a local scale, the separation of demographic groups into different geographical areas |
| food deserts | places where it is hard to find affordable healthy food |
| social class | a system of stratification of groups based on similarities in social standing |
| upward mobility | moving up in the class system through education, marriage, etc.. |
| downward mobility | going down in the class system through unemployment, divorce, etc... |
| intragenerational mobility | moving upward in the class system within one individual's life |
| intergenerational mobility | moving upward in the class system within a few generations |
| meritocracy | advancement is based solely on the achievements of an individual |
| cultural capitol | set of non-monetary social factors that lead to social mobility like dress, accent, manners, etc... |
| social capitol | individual's social networks and connections that may confer economic and personal benefits |
| social reproduction | the transmission of social inequality from one generation to the nexts |
| social exclusion | impoverished people are often excluded from opportunities |
| primary reinforcer/punisher | harness physiological needs and drive for survival to increase or decrease the likelihood of a behavior |
| secondary reinforcer/punisher | money, grades, fines etc |
| fixed ratio | rewards are provided after a specified number of responses |
| variable ratio | rewards are provided after an unpredictable number of responses |
| fixed interval | rewards are provided after a specified time interval |
| variable interval | rewards are provided after an unpredictable amount of time |
| mirror neurons | fired when someone completes an action and when they observe someone completing an action |
| attraction | factors that draw members of society together |
| aggression | conflict and competition between individuals |
| attachment | relationships between individuals |
| social support | finding help through social connections |
| inclusive fitness | an individual's overall level of success at passing on genes |
| front stage self | encompasses a behavior that a player performs in front of an audience |
| back stage self | players are together but no audience is present |
| group polarization | interactions and discussions of a group are stronger than the attitudes of its original memebers |
| peer pressure | social influence exerted by one's peer to act in a way that is acceptable or similar to the peer's behavior |
| deindividualization | people lose awareness of their individuality and instead immerse themselves in the mood or activities of a crowd |
| obedience | behavioral changes made in response or demand by an authority figure |
| the big 5 factor model | obedience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism |
| behaviorist theory | personality is constructed by a series of learning experiences |
| humanistic theory | people continually seek experiences that make them feel better |
| reference group | provides individual with model for appropriate actions, values and worldviews |
| oral stage | Age: 1, nursing and oral stimulation |
| anal stage | Age: 2, toilet training |
| phallic stage | Age: 3-6, gender and sexual identification |
| latent stage | Age: 7-12, social development pleasures put aside for school |
| genital stage | Age: adolescence and beyond, mature sexuality |
| Trust vs. mistrust | Age: infancy to 1.5, lasting ideas of trust according to actions of parents |
| autonomy vs. shame and doubt | Age: 1.5-3, competency to carry out self-care |
| initiative vs. guilt | Age: 3-5, ability to execute a plan or activity |
| industry vs inferiority | Age: 5-12, immersed in more complex social environment |
| identity vs role confusion | Age: 12-18, different possibilities of roles in society |
| intimacy vs. isolation | Age: 18-40, forming emotionally significant relationships with others |
| generativity vs. stagnation | Age: 40-65, determine extent to which an individual wants to give back |
| integrity vs. despair | Age: 65+, develop sense of how life was lived - evaluation |
| current developmental level | Vygotsky: tasks that children can perform without help from others |
| potential developmental level | Vygotsky: the most advanced tasks that a child can perform with guidance from others |
| zone of proximal development | Vygotsky: all skills that can be achieved with help |
| Preconventional morality | Kohlberg; Stage 1: punishment; Stage 2: reward |
| conventional morality | Kohlberg; Stage 3: social disapproval; Stage 4: rule following |
| postconventional morality | Kohlberg; Stage 5: social contract; Stage 6: universal ethics |
| dispositional attribution | assigning cause to an inherent quality or desire |
| situational attribution | deciding that environmental forces are in control |
| cognition | a wide range of internal mental activites |
| perception | the organization and identification of sensory inputs |
| cerebral cortex | informational processing |
| Sensorimotor stage | Piaget; Age: birth-2; object permanence and separating oneself from objects |
| Preoperational stage | Piaget; Age: 2-7; learn to use language, egocentric, think literally |
| Concrete operational stage | Piaget; Age: 7-11; children become more logical in thinking, inductive reasoning and conservation |
| Formal operational stage | Piaget; Age: 11-older; deductive reasoning, think abstractly |
| learning theory | language is a form of behavior and is learned through operant conditioning |
| nativist theory | language development is innately human and all people have a neural cognitive system |
| interactionist theory | human brain develops so that it can be receptive to new language input, environmental and innate biology |
| bias | tendency to think a particular way |
| amygdala | responsible for fear and anger, and learning the basis of reward or punishment |
| James-Lange theory | emotion is physiologically-based |
| Cannon-Bard theory | emotional and physiological reactions are experienced simultaneously |
| Schacter-Singer theory | for cognitive appraisal one takes into account both the physiological response and the situational cues |
| drive reduction theory | people are motivated to take action to lessen a state of arousal |
| incentive theory | people are motivated by external rewards |
| cognitive theories | people behave based on their expectations |
| affective component | a person's feelings or emotions about an object, person, or event |
| behavioral component | influence that attitudes have on behavior |
| cognitive component | beliefs or knowledge about a specific object or interest |
| Factors of attitude change | behavior change, characteristics of the message, characteristics of the target, social factor |
| Hormones released during stress | epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol |
| Epinephrine and norepinephrine | increase heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate |
| Cortisol | increases blood glucose |
| Signal detection theory | how an organism differentiates important or meaningful stimuli from those that are not of interest to the environment |
| principle of nearness | Gestalt; cluster of objects will be perceived as a distinct group |
| principle of similarity | Gestalt; objects with a shared feature will be perceived as a single group |
| principle of common region | Gestalt; objects sharing a common background even without nearness or similarity will be perceived as a group |
| principle of continuity | Gestalt; ambiguous stimulus perceived according to the simplest of its common forms |
| principle of closure | Gestalt; perceive whole shapes even when they are not actually present in the stimulus |
| parallel processing | the use of multiple pathways to convey information about a single stimulus |
| feature detection | cells that respond to particular areas of visual stimuli which are integrated to produce an object as a whole |
| propioception | position by assessing through spindle (balance) |
| kinesthia | movement (behavioral) |
| Depressants | decrease CNS, HR, BP, and processing speed |
| stimulants | increase CNS, HR, BP, and processing speed |
| Hallucinogens | distorted perception, increase sensations |
| Opiates | decrease CNS, HR, BP pain relief |
| routes of drug entry | oral, inhalation, and injection |
| theory of primary mental abilities | (7) LL Thunstein |
| theory of multiple intelligence | (7-9) Howard Gardner, each person posses at least eight intelligences excelling in some and faltering in others |
| triarchic theory of intelligence | (3) Robert Sternber, analytical intelligence, creative intelligence, and practical intelligence |
| Solomon Asch | conformity experiment, if people change behavior based on what other people say (bar size experiment) |
| Milgram experiments | obedience shock experiments (derive from Nazi theory) |
| spreading activation | searching for associative networks to retrieve specific information |
| serial position effect | individuals are more likely to recall first and last items presented |
| visuospatial sketchpad | repetition of images to aid in encoding memory |
| social stratification | people are categorized by their demographics by society |
| anomie | an individual that feels disconnected from the larger community |
| Mead's Theory; I | present and future |
| Mead's Theory; me | in the past, the knowledge about society |
| reaction formation | emotions and impulses that are anxiety inducing are perceived to be unacceptable or hyperbolic |
| social constructionism | examines the development of jointly constructing understandings of the world |
| psychophysics | relationship between stimuli and sensations and perceptions |
| cones | color, bright light |
| rods | low light |
| fluid intelligence | reasoning and problem solving |
| crystallized intelligence | acquired knowledge and the ability to retrieve it |
| Spearman | theory of general intelligence, there is a common fxn among intellectual activities called the "g" |
| Stage 1 Sleep | low frequency alpha waves and twitching |
| Stage 2 Sleep | spindles and K-complexes |
| Stage 3 and 4 Sleep | low frequency delta waves and slow wave sleep |
| REM Sleep | partial paralysis, vivid dreaming, alpha and beta waves |
| suprachiasmatic nucleus | body's master clock in the hypothalamus |
| melatonin | hormone released by the brain's pineal gland |
| latent content | hidden meaning of a dream |
| manifest content | storyline of a dream |
| Cartwright's theory on dreaming | dreams reflect life events that are important to us |
| declarative memory | the type of long-term memory that stores facts and events like a lock combo |
| procedural memory | memory of how to do things like riding a bike |
| Dyssomnia | sleep disorders that affect the amount, quality and timing of sleep |
| parasomnia | sleep disorders that are marked by irregular behavior |
| insomnia | the failure to get enough sleep at night |
| benzodiazepenes and barbiturates | increasing GABA activity and help with anxiety |
| semantic encoding | using the sensory input that has certain meaning or context to encode and create memories |
| serial recall | people tend to recall items or events in the order which they occurred |
| proactive interference | forgetting of info due to interference from previous knowledge |
| retroactive interference | newly learned info interferes with the encoding or recall of previously learned info |
| Sapir-Whorf Theory | the structure of a person's language influences the way she perceives the world |
| left hemisphere | dominate the functions of speech, language processing, comprehension and logical reasoning |
| right hemisphere | interprets emotional tones of speech but cannot process words and meaning independently |
| universal emotions | fear, anger, happiness, surprise, joy, disgust, and sadness |
| Actetylcholine | muscle action and memory |
| beta-endorphin | pain and pleaasure |
| dopamine | mood, sleep and learning |
| GABA | brain function and sleep |
| glutamate | memory and learning |
| norepinephrine | heart, intestines (suppress appetite) and alertness |
| serotonin | mood and sleep |
| CT scan | taking a number of xrays of a part of someone's body usually used for tumor detection or brain bleed |
| PET scan | injected or drinks with mildly radioactive substance and a live picture of the rain is taken, can monitor bloodflow |
| MRI | strong magnetic field, different density tissues give off different signals |
| fMRI | tracks blood flow and oxygen levels |
| Mischel | similarities in behavior in similar situations: marshmallow study |
| unconditioned stimulus | biologically significant stimulus such as food or pain that elicits an unconditioned response |
| conditioned stimulus | previously neutral stimulus that is paired with an unconditioned stimulus to elicit a response |
| unconditioned response | naturally occurring biological response |
| conditioned response | new response to the previously neutral conditioned stimulus |
| Bandura | observational learning; Bobo doll experiment |
| in group bias | preference and affinity to one's in group in order to improve self-esteem or feel superior |
| Dispositional attribution | blaming the victim for something that may not be their fault |
| stereotype threat | the experience of anxiety or concern where a person has the potential to confirm a negative stereotype about their social group |
| social network | social structure that exists between individuals or organizations, composed of nodes and ties |
| Scales of Intelligence percentage break-up | 0.1, 2, 14, 38% |
| impression management | a goal-directed conscious or unconscious process where people attempt to influence perceptions about other things or people. |
| culture lag | notion that culture takes time to catch up with technological innovations |
| culture shock | personal disorientation a person may feel when experiencing an unfamiliar way of life |
| intersectionality | race, gender, and age |
| culture transmission | the way a group of people tend to pass on or learn information |
| culture diffusion | spread of cultural beliefs and social activities from one group to another |
| social cognitive theory | portions of an individual's knowledge acquisition can be related to observing others within the context of social interactions |
Created by:
missmartian
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