Psychology Terminology Flashcards for PSYCH 111 Exam 2

Instinct Theory (of motivation)

environmental releasers trigger fixed response patterns; things in environment are "releasers" which lead to instinctual pre-programmed responses

-Ex: a baby is motivated to live, it naturally sucks on its mother's nipple to gain nutrition to survive

Drive reduction theory (of motivation)

the notion that physiological needs arouse tension that motivates action; when our bodies need something, we get motivated to change that feeling

-Ex: feel hungry - eat something, feel tired - sleep

Arousal theory (of motivation) & Yerkes-Dodson Law

strive to maintain an optimal level of arousal, seek stimulation if bored, relaxation if excited

- Yerkes-Dodson law: do best when they're in intermediate zone with the right level of arousal

Incentive theory (of motivation)

incentives and rewards are the driving forces behind people's choices and behaviors

Maslow's hierarchy of needs (& order)

Maslow's pyramid of human needs that must be satisfied before higher-level safely needs and then psychological needs become active

Order from top to bottom

-Self-transcendence needs

-Self-actualization needs

-Esteem needs

-Belongingness and love needs

-Safety needs

-Physiological needs

Maslow's hierarchy of needs: Self-Transcendence needs

Need to find meaning and identity beyond the self

Maslow's hierarchy of needs: Self-actualization needs

need to live up to our fullest and unique potential

Maslow's hierarchy of needs: esteem needs

need for self-esteem, achievement, competence, and independence; need for recognition and respect from others

Maslow's hierarchy of needs: belongingness and love needs

need to love and be loved, to belong and be accepted, need to avoid loneliness and separation

Maslow's hierarchy of needs: safety needs

need to feel that the world is organized and predictable; need to feel safe

Maslow's hierarchy of needs: physiological needs

need to satisfy hunger and thirst

Glucose (role it plays in hunger)

the form of sugar that circulates in the blood and provides the major source of energy for body tissue

-eating increases glucose levels in the bloodstream, when blood glucose is low, people become hungry. Food raises glucose - reduces hunger and eating

Hypothalamus

brain structure that regulates body temperature, release of hormones, and monitors glucose levels

Lateral hypothalamas

"hunger center", if stimulated by these cells, animals will eat and eat. If destroyed, animals will starve to death

Ventromedial hypothalamus

"satiation center", stimulate this and animals will not eat. If destroyed, animal eats and eats

Leptin (hormone)

secreted by fat cells; sends signals to brain diminishing reward for food

Ghrelin (hormone)

secreted by empty stomach; sends hunger signals to brain

PPY (hormone)

secreted by digestive tract; sends "not hungry" signals to brain

Eating disorder: obesity

having an excess amount of body fat

-54% of Americans overweight, 19% obese. BMI = adjusts weight according to height

Eating disorder: anorexia nervosa

eat way too little to maintain a healthy weight

-Mostly women, higher among college students, partly genetic, partly cultural

Eating disorder: bulimia nervosa

binge and purge. Overeating followed by vomiting, laxatives, etc.

-almost mostly women

Fallon and Rozin study of bodyweight and self image

ideal body image; with college students (male and female)

-Asked: which image is ideal for your sex? And which comes closest to your own body?

-Studied 500 U of Pennsylvania students

-Results: women’s ideal weight was less than their actual weight

-Men’s ideal and actual weight matched up more closely

-Also, women thought that men preferred women to be thinner than the men actually did

Social Motives (power, belongingness, affiliation, intimacy, achievement)

-Power: a strong desire to acquire prestige and influence over other people

-Belongingness: desire to belong and be accepted

-Affiliation: desire to establish and maintain social contacts

-Intimacy: desire for close relationships characterized by open and intimate communication

-Achievement: a strong desire to accomplish difficult tasks, outperform others, and excel

Intrinsic motivation

motivation to engage in a behavior because of the inherent satisfaction of the activity rather than the desire for a reward or specific outcome (ex: eating, watching cartoons)

Extrinsic motivation

a desire to perform a behavior due to promised rewards or threats of punishment

-Ex: working, doing chores

Well-defined problems

completely specified starting conditions, goal state, and methods for achieving the goal (ex: geometry proofs)

Ill-defined problems

some aspects are not completely specified; those that do not have clear goals, solution paths, or expected solutions (choosing a career, winning a war, fixing the economy, writing a great novel, etc.)

Algorithms

completely specified sequence of steps that is guaranteed to produce an answer (like a recipe); usually guaranteed to produce the correct answer, but may be slow or laborious

Heuristics

short cut/"Rule of thumb", never guaranteed to produce correct answer, but usually quick and easy

-Ex: trial and error

Difference reduction (or hill climbing heuristic)

At any point, select the operator that moves you closer to the goal state: is new state more similar to goal?

(in hill climbing you never choose an operator that moves you away from the goal)

-Using the hill-climbing method, a person generally picks what appears to be the most direct route to the goal at each step. If this choice proves to be incorrect, the person might choose an alternative method to see if it achieves the goal faster.

Importance of problem representation

For many problems, the representation is the key to problem solving; Right representation makes it easier, wrong representation makes it harder to solve (ex: Algebra word problems easier as equations)

Analogous problems/solving problems by analogy

Retrieve a representation of a problem from memory that is similar (or even isomorphic) to the problem you currently face

-If you already solve the old problem you may be able to solve the new (analogous) problem as well

-Unfortunately, people tend to miss deep (structural) similarities between problems because they tend to focus on surface similarities and differences

Mental set

the tendency to approach a problem in a particular way, especially a way that has been successful in the past but may or may not be helpful (or could actually hurt) in solving a new problem

Functional fixedness (fixation)

see an object as having only a fixed, familiar function (ex: you might view a thumbtack as something that can only be used to hold paper to a cork-board)

Representativeness heuristic

a mental shortcut that we use when estimating probabilities. When we're trying to access how likely a certain event is, we often make our decision by assessing how similar it is to an existing mental prototype

-ex: thinking that because someone is wearing a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase, that they must be a lawyer, because they look like the stereotype of a lawyer.

Availability heuristic

a tendency to estimate the likelihood of an event in terms of how easily instances of it can be recalled; often works well if the items that are more available (easier to recall) are actually more frequent or probable

-For example, plane crashes can make people afraid of flying. However, the likelihood of dying in a car accident is far higher than dying as a passenger on an airplane

Framing effect

the same information presented in different forms can lead to different decisions (ex: ground beef - 75% lean = will buy, 25% fat = won't buy

Overconfidence effect

when people's subjective confidence in their own ability is greater than their objective (actual) performance

Anchoring effect

the tendency to use the initial value as a reference point in making a numerical estimate

-ex: the initial price offered for a used car sets the standard for the rest of the negotiation. Here, prices lower than the initial price seem like a good deal, even if they are still higher than the car's actual value. As a result, our perception of reality is distorted, and our decisions are biased)

Prototypes

a mental image or best example of a category

Insight problems

a problem that requires the examinee to shift his or her perspective to view the problem in a novel way in order to achieve the solution

-insight occurs when a solution to a problem presents itself quickly and without warning. It is the sudden discovery of the correct solution following incorrect attempts based on trial and error.

Arbitrarily symbolic

no connection between symbol and concepts; words do not have to look or sound like what they describe (ex: nothing about the word Tree that's like the thing "tree")

Generative property of language

Using rules of language (our internalized knowledge) we can create an unlimited number of utterances

-Limited number of words - but they can be combined in unlimited ways

-Syntactic rules govern how words can be combined - and how those sequences indicate meanings - so we can understand a limitless supply of novel combinations

Phonemes

sounds of language; smallest meaningful unit of language, different languages use different set of phonemes (about 45 in english), Cake (c) and (k) have same phoneme, different letters

Vowel

airflow is largely obstructed; lips/tongue position matters a lot, Eeee vs. ahhhh

Consonants

the airflow is partially or fully obstructed

Stop consonants

ba/da/ta; a temporary blockage of airflow and then a quick release

Voicing

vibration of the vocal cords

Morphemes/Morphology

the smallest meaningful parts of the words. Words are made up of one or more morphemes. Changes in morphemes lead to changes in word meaning (ex: cat (one morpheme, mono-morphemic), (ex: cats (two morphemes, cat + plural)

Syntax

rules used to put words together for a sentence; governs how words are combined into larger units such as phrases and sentences (sentence = noun phrase + verb phrase)

Broca's aphasia

language PRODUCTION, left FRONTAL lobe; damage = slow, halting speech, simple grammar, no function words (be, of, the) comprehension largely intact (ex: "I...I...ca...cad...cat"

Wernicke's Aphasia

language COMPREHENSION, left TEMPORAL lobe; damage = fluent speech production, nonsense speech, made up words, lost ability to comprehend spoken words (ex: "I like want an apple" —> "Marble is red gophratic")

Conduction Aphasia

damage to connections between Broca's area and Wernicke's area: less severe damage to language ability, but trouble monitoring speech and repeating back sentences

Linguistic determinism

language strongly affects the way we think; the structure of anyone's native language strongly influences or fully determines the worldview they will acquire as they learn the language

Linguistic relativity

milder interpretation; thoughts and behavior are influenced by language

Sapir/Whorf Hypothesis

strong interpretation, thoughts and behavior are determined by language (people who speak different languages see the world differently, based on the language they use to describe it)

Studies of color naming

Berlin and Kay (1969): tested strong form of linguistic relativism (linguistic determinism); Berlin and Kay found that there are eleven specific colors that all languages derive their color terms from

-Follows a hierarchy:

Two color terms: black and white

-Three terms: black, white, red

-Additional color words in this order

-Yellow-blue-green, then brown, then purple, pink, orange, gray

-Berlin and Kay's work proposed that the basic color terms in a culture, such as black, brown, or red, are predictable by the number of color terms the culture has. All cultures have terms for black/dark and white/bright. If a culture has three color terms, the third is red.

Codability

how easily a concept can be described in a given language; if you have a word for concept X it's a lot easier to encode that concept

The problem of language acquisition (what must be learned): Learn phonemes & parsing into phonemes & words

need to learn the phonemes of your language: each phoneme is a perceptual category, then need to segment the continuous stream of speech into the right phonemes (chop it up into basic units of language: phonemes/syllables)

-no clear divisions between phonemes or words in speech

Learning rules (language)

must learn how words are combined (grammar), must generalize to novel sentences (so can't just memorize wordings), need to acquire rules that can applied to new sentences

Learn language without negative feedback about grammar/pronunciation

suggests linguistic universals; adults usually do not correct children's grammar or pronunciation (only correct meaning), Furthermore, correcting grammar/pronunciation does not seem to help (much), kids correct themselves despite little negative feedback

Language development: phonemes

infants can discriminate all phonemes from all languages during 1st year, gradually lose non-relevant discriminations (not important in their own language)

-lose ability to distinguish sounds not relevant to our language at about 8 months

Motherese

Adults help kids with high pitch, slow rate, exaggerated intonation, limited vocabulary

Holophrastic stage

one word utterances, no syntax, need context (gestures, affect to disambiguate), under generalization and overgeneralization for first 75 words, do understand some phrases

_(one-word stage happens around 12 months)

Telegraphic stage

two word utterances, correct use of word order (subject-action and action-object), can convey a lot of information succinctly (like a telegraph)

-(two-word stage happens around 24 months)

Learning rules: past tense

u shaped curve for irregular past (went), initially use appropriate form (went), learn rule (added-ed) and overgeneralize (goed), relearn correct past tense (went)

Learning rules: nonsense words

learn general rules that apply to new cases, 4-5 year olds know plural of "wug" is "wugs", past tense of "rick" is "ricked", implies language learning is generative, not just imitation

Johnson and Newport study of second language learners

Tested for critical period effect in normal subjects

-Chinese or Korean speakers came to US at various ages learned English

-Are the early learners always better than the older/later learners?

-All had 10 years experience speaking English, all were motivated to learn

-Tested on ability to distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical English sentences (easy test for native speaker)

-The little boy is speak to a policeman

-The farmer bought two pig at the market

-Results: native passers have an advantage over second langue learner on grammatical tasks has even been found in second language learners who are highly proficient, working as authors and professors

Koko the gorilla

Patterson raised a gorilla named Koko since 1972, taught Koko sign language, Koko uses a structure - is creative and spontaneous in her language, Koko now has a vocabulary of over 1000 signs and understands even more spoken English, Koko invented her own new compound signs (ex: finger-bracelet for ring)

Kanzi the bonobo chimp

Pygmy chimps, but not shorter than common chimp, Kanzi's mother was in a language learning study at a lab in Georgia, Taught to communicate using symbols on a computer (lexigrams), Not trying to teach Kanxi, but he observed while he clung to his mother, Kanzi did much better than his mother (critical period?)

Clever Hans (anthropomorphism) problem

The phenomenon of (human or animal) test subjects' actions in psychological studies being affected by the experimenter's expectations. Typically, special care is taken to prevent the subjects from giving the right answer without solving the real task.

-Ex: if he asked the horse a question such as "What is 12 + 12", the horse would tap its hoof 24 times

-Hans (the horse) solved calculations by tapping numbers with his hoof in order to answer questions. Later on, it turned out that the horse was able to give the correct answer by reading the microscopic signals in the face of the questioning person

Freud's topographical model

-Split the mind into three parts

1) Conscious: part of the mind we can directly access-open awareness

2) Preconscious: part of the mind that is not in consciousness currently, but can be accessed

3) Unconscious: Vast portion of the mind to which we have no direct access, but it does influence behavior

Freud's structural model

The core functions of the mind are carried out by three related systems: the ego, id, and superego

Psychoanalysis

a set of psychological theories and methods of therapy founded by Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis revolves around the belief that everyone has unconscious thoughts, feelings, desires, and memories. Psychoanalysis therapy is used to release repressed emotions and experiences

The "Id"

Instincts - focused on immediate gratification and biological needs. Operates on the pleasure principle, Id is in the unconscious

The "ego"

Reality - balances Id’d desire and superego’s morality. Uses reality principle to find what is practical; referrer between the Id and the world

The "Superego"

Morality - focused on laws and moral judgment. The conscience punishes bad behavior, the “shoulds” - what parents, law, and society dictate

Pleasure Principle

the tendency of people to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Freud argued that people will sometimes go to great lengths to avoid even momentary pain, particularly at times of psychological weakness or vulnerability

Reality principle

tendency of the ego to postpone gratification until it can find an appropriate outlet

-ex: a person who is dieting, but chooses not to give into hunger cravings

Freudian slips

When you say one thing but mean another

-exposes the unconscious

-Ex: Deciding whether to hire a particular man for a job - man happened to be very attractive - one of the women was discussing his qualifications and concluded by saying that she thought that Mr.X would be a "really good BED for the job, I mean really good bet for the job"

Dream analysis (&Freud's view)

-another way ego lets off steam from the id is expressing unacceptable wishes in the form of dreams

-Freud: saw dreams as simple fulfillments - defenses are down, id wishes slip out into expression

Manifest content

according to Freud - the remembered story line of the dream , the conscious content, "literal" meaning

Latent content

according to Freud -unconscious, "figurative" meaning of dreams ("hidden meaning")

Psychosexual stages: oral stage

if we weaned too early, become FIXATED and indulge oral habits. Also seek symbolic forms of gratification (passive, dependent, demanding like a nursing infant)

Psychosexual stages: anal stage

toilet trained in hash way might become Stubborn, rigid, (anal-retentive) OR, conversely, messy, disorganized (anal expulsive)

Psychosexual stages: phallic stage

from too much or too little masturbation. Self-centered, vain, arrogant, need attention

Psychosexual stages: latency stage

experiences regarding development of intellectual, creative, interpersonal, and athletic skills

Psychosexual stages: genital stage

(puberty on)

Person begins to enter healthy heterosexual relationships.

Childhood trauma may lead to: homosexuality, asexuality, or fetishism.

Fixation (Freud)

a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, in which conflicts were unresolved

Oedipus complex

according to Freud, a boy's sexual desires toward his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father

Defense mechanisms: repression

the unconscious exclusion or holding back feelings (ex: you forget about chores you are supposed to do on the weekend allowing yourself to enjoy the company of friends instead)

Defense mechanisms: denial

refusing to accept that a feeling is present or that an event occurred (ex: get cheated on and just deny any evidence)

Defense mechanisms: projection

attributing one's undesirable traits or actions to others, so they become the problem instead of you (ex: get cheated on and make fun of friend who got cheated on)

Defense mechanisms: reaction formation

take actions opposite to feelings in order to deny the reality of the feelings (ex: get cheated on and act extremely affectionate towards your partner)

Defense mechanisms: Rationalization

creating intellectually acceptable arguments for thoughts or behaviors to hide the actual anxiety - causing impulses (ex: get cheated on and realize that your partner must have been bored and it makes sense)

Defense mechanisms: regression

reverting to the comfort of behaviors of an earlier stage of development (ex: get cheated on and throw a tantrum and curl up into the fetal position and cry)

Defense mechanisms: displacement

substituting a less-threatening object for the subject of a hostile or sexual impulse (ex: get cheated on get angry and fight with your roommate who told you)

Defense mechanisms: sublimation

transforming unacceptable behaviors into acceptable ones. (ex: a very aggressive person might become a professional athlete)

Humanistic theories

Carl Rogers, contrast to Freud, view human nature as essentially positive; -stresses that human beings are inherently good, and that basic needs are vital to human behaviors

Real self

your beliefs/perceptions of what you are really like