AP Psych Vocab Unit 5 1st Vocab Quiz

Health Psychology

A subfield of psychology that explores the impact of psychological, behavioral, and cultural factors on health and wellness.

Psychoneuroimmunology

The study of how psychological, neural, and endocrine processes together affect our immune system.

Stress

The process by which we perceive and respond to certain events, called stressors, that we appraise as threatening or challenging.

General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS)

Selye's concept of the body's adaptive response to stress in three phases: alarm, resistance, exhaustion.

Coronary Heart Disease

Clogging of the vessels that nourish the heart muscle; leading cause of death in many developed countries.

Tend-and-Befriend Theory

Under stress, people may nurture themselves and others and bond with and seek support from others.

Catharsis

In psychology, the idea that 'releasing' aggressive energy (through action or fantasy) relieves aggressive urges.

Coping

Alleviation of stress using emotional, cognitive, or behavioral methods.

Problem-focused Coping

Attempting to alleviate stress directly by changing the stressor or the way we interact with that stressor.

Emotion-focused Coping

Attempting to alleviate stress by avoiding or ignoring a stressor and attending to emotional needs related to our stress reaction.

Mindfulness Meditation

A reflective practice in which people attend to current experiences in a nonjudgmental and accepting manner.

Personal Control

Our sense of controlling our environment rather than feeling helpless.

Self-Control

The ability to control impulses and delay short-term gratification for greater long-term rewards.

Positive Psychology

The scientific study of human flourishing, with the goals of promoting strengths and virtues that foster well-being, resilience, and positive emotions.

Subjective Well-being

Self-perceived happiness or satisfaction with life, used along with measures of objective well-being to evaluate people's quality of life.

Resilience

The personal strength that helps people cope with stress and recover from adversity and even trauma.

Feel-good, do-good phenomenon

People's tendency to be helpful when in a good mood.

Adaptation-level phenomenon

Our tendency to form judgments relative to a neutral level defined by our prior experience.

Gratitude

An appreciative emotion people often experience when they benefit from others' actions or recognize their own good fortune.

Aerobic Exercise

Sustained exercise that increases heart and lung fitness; also helps alleviate anxiety.

Hypertension

Chronic high blood pressure; increases risk of heart disease.

Immune Suppression

Reduction of immune system's efficiency; body is more vulnerable to disease.

Eustress/Distress

Stress as positive and motivating (E) or negative and debilitating (D).

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)

Experiences that influence long-term stress response and negatively impact health and well-being, e.g., abuse or other trauma.

Fight-Flight-Freeze Response

Automatic physiological survival mechanism triggered by the sympathetic nervous system in response to threats.

Well-being

Self-perceived happiness of general life satisfaction.

Signature Strengths

An individual's most prominent, authentic, and energizing character traits.

Virtues

Core, universally valued character strengths that foster human thriving, e.g., wisdom, courage, humanity.

Character Strengths

Positive personality traits that reflect human goodness and foster well-being; 24 distinct capacities for thinking, feeling, and behaving.

Meditation

self-regulation practices that train attention and awareness to bring mental processes under greater voluntary control

Alarm/Resistance/exhaustion

Hans Selye's three phases in GAS; 1. sympathetic system is activated 2. temperature, blood pressure, respiration, and endocrine system remain high 3. vulnerability to illness, disease, and death