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APA Glossary
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| A | B |
| Abnormal psychology | The area of psychological investigation concerned with understanding the nature of individual pathologies of mind, mood, and behavior. |
| Absolute threshold | The minimum amount of physical energy needed to produce a reliable sensory experience; operationally defined as the stimulus level at which a sensory signal is detected half the time. |
| Accommodation | The process by which the ciliary muscles change the thickness of the lens of the eye to permit variable focusing on near and distant objects. |
| Accommodation | According to Piaget, the process of restructuring or modifying cognitive structures so that new information can fit into them more easily; this process works in tandem with assimilation. |
| Acquisition | The stage in a classical conditioning experiment during which the conditioned response is first elicited by the conditioned stimulus. |
| Action potential | The nerve impulse activated in a neuron that travels down the axon and causes neurotransmitters to be released into a synapse. |
| Acute stress | A transient state of arousal with typically clear onset and offset patterns. |
| Addiction | A condition in which the body requires a drug in order to function without physical and psychological reactions to its absence; often the outcome of tolerance and dependence. |
| Ageism | Prejudice against older people, similar to racism and sexism in its negative stereotypes. |
| Aggression | Behaviors that cause psychological or physical harm to another individual. |
| Agoraphobia | An extreme fear of being in public places or open spaces from which escape may be difficult or embarrassing. |
| AIDS | Acronym for acquired immune deficiency syndrome, a syndrome caused by a virus that damages the immune system and weakens the body's ability to fight infection. |
| Algorithm | A step |
| All | or |
| Altruism | Prosocial behaviors a person carries out without considering his or her own safety or interests. |
| Alzheimer's disease | A chronic organic brain syndrome characterized by gradual loss of memory, decline in intellectual ability, and deterioration of personality. |
| Amacrine cells | Cells that integrate information across the retina; rather than sending signals toward the brain, amacrine cells link bipolar cells to other bipolar cells and ganglion cells to other ganglion cells. |
| Ambiguity | A perceptual object that may have more than "one interpretation. |
| Amnesia | A failure of memory caused by physical injury, disease, drug use, or psychological trauma. |
| Amygdala | The part of the limbic system that controls emotion, aggression, and the formation of emotional memory. |
| Analytic psychology | A branch of psychology that views the person as a constellation of compensatory internal forces in a dynamic balance. |
| Anchoring heuristic | An insufficient adjustment up or down from an original starting value when judging the probable value of some event or outcome. |
| Animal cognition | The cognitive capabilities of nonhuman animals; researchers trace the development of cognitive capabilities across species and the continuity of capabilities from nonhuman to human animals. |
| Anorexia nervosa | An eating disorder in which an individual weighs less than 85 percent of her or his expected weight but still controls eating because of a self |
| Anticipatory coping | Efforts made in advance of a potentially stressful event to overcome, reduce, or tolerate the imbalance between perceived demands and available resources. |
| Anxiety | An intense emotional response caused by the preconscious recognition that a repressed conflict is about to emerge into consciousness. |
| Anxiety disorders | Mental disorders marked by physiological arousal, feelings of tension, and intense apprehension without apparent reason. |
| Apparent motion | A movement illusion in which one or more stationary lights going on and off in succession are perceived as a single moving light; the simplest form of apparent motion is the phi phenomenon. |
| Archetype | A universal, inherited, primitive, and symbolic representation of a particular experience or object. |
| Assimilation | According to Piaget, the process whereby new cognitive elements are fitted in with old elements or modified to fit more easily; this process works in tandem with accommodation. |
| Association cortex | The parts of the cerebral cortex in which many high |
| Attachment | Emotional relationship between a child and the "regular caregiver. |
| Attention | A state of focused awareness on a subset of the available perceptual information. |
| Attitude | The learned, relatively stable tendency to respond to people, concepts, and events in an evaluative way. |
| Attribution theory | A social |
| Attributions | Judgments about the causes of outcomes. |
| Audience design | The process of shaping a message depending on the audience for which it is intended. |
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bluepenguin527
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