PSYC Final (unit 4)

Flashcards covering key vocabulary from lecture notes on the limbic system, memory, emotions, and various neurological disorders.

Limbic System

A system of the brain that regulates emotions, behavior, motivation, long-term memory, and the sense of smell, with a big role in emotional responses and memory formation. Includes the amygdala, hippocampus, hypothalamus, thalamus, and mammillary bodies.

Stress Immunization

The concept that exposure to repeated stress can build resistance to it later in life.

Intracranial Self-Stimulation (ICSS)

A method involving rats self-administering electrical impulses to their brains by pressing a lever, used to study the brain's reward system, including pleasure, motivation, and reinforcement.

Wanting

The craving for a reward or feeling, associated with dopaminergic pathways like the mesolimbic dopamine system, where dopamine drives this craving even if the reward is no longer pleasurable.

Liking

Pleasure derived from a reward or feeling, primarily associated with opioids, endocannabinoids, and GABA, rather than dopamine.

Zeitgeber

Cues from the environment that help set and regulate circadian rhythms, synchronizing the environment with activity and resetting the clock for deviations in the 24-hour cycle, typically light/dark stimuli.

Free-running

When a subject maintains its own sleep-wake cycle in the absence of external cues, demonstrating an inherent circadian rhythm.

Phase Shift

A change in the timing of the natural sleep-wake cycle, caused by factors like light exposure, sleep disorders, or lifestyle habits, resulting in sleeping and waking earlier or later than usual.

Entrainment

The body's adjustment to match the external world, particularly aligning to 24-hour rhythms, which can be impaired by light pollution.

Nocturnal

Active during the night.

Diurnal

Active during the day.

REM sleep

Rapid eye movement sleep, characterized by vivid dreaming and muscle inactivity, with fast brain waves similar to those when awake.

NREM sleep

Non-rapid eye movement sleep, a deep sleep state with slower brain activity, including slow and large delta waves, during which muscle movements, such as talking or teeth grinding, can occur, and dreams are less vivid but may include night terrors.

Atonia

Loss of muscle tone during REM sleep that prevents the body from acting out dreams. Too much atonia during wakefulness can lead to narcolepsy.

Narcolepsy

A disorder affecting the brain's ability to regulate sleep-wake cycles, causing subjects to uncontrollably fall asleep, often due to a deficiency in hypocretin.

Cataplexy

A condition associated with narcolepsy where the subject suddenly loses all muscle tone due to strong emotions while remaining awake.

Klüver-Bucy Syndrome

A rare neurological disorder caused by damage to the medial temporal lobes (amygdala and hippocampus), resulting in symptoms such as no fear/sense of danger, eating everything (even non-foods), inappropriate sexual behavior, putting everything in the mouth, and visual agnosia.

Frontal Lobotomy

A procedure that involves severing connections between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system, historically used to treat psychiatric conditions, resulting in significant and damaging effects on behavior, personality, and cognition.

Autonomic Response (Emotion)

Physical reactions (faster heartbeat) to stimuli, controlled by the hypothalamus and gut-related systems.

Subjective Feelings (Emotion)

How we feel to stimuli, processed by the amygdala and frontal lobe.

Cognition (Emotion)

Thoughts about what is happening, processed by the cerebral cortex.

Alarm (Stress Response)

The initial reaction to a stressor, such as a fast heartbeat.

Adaptation (Stress Response)

The body adjusting and stabilizing to ongoing stress.

Exhaustion (Stress Response)

The stage where long-term stress can lead to illness.

Suprachiasmatic Nuclei (SCN)

The master circadian clock that regulates melatonin release, which is influenced by light signals.

Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)

A form of depression in winter caused by low levels of sunlight, which doesn’t entrain the circadian rhythm.

Ascending Reticular Activating System (ARAS)

A network of neurons in the brainstem that maintains wakefulness and alertness.

Noradrenergic System

Located in the locus coeruleus in the brainstem; releases norepinephrine in the brain for attention, learning, and wakefulness.

Learning

How we acquire knowledge, skills, behaviors, and memories. Involves changes in the brain's structure and function as a result of experience and engages the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia, and cerebellum.

Memory

The ability to recall and recognize past experiences, the process of how the brain encodes, stores, and retrieves information, essential for learning, decision-making, and adapting to the environment, and involves the hippocampus, amygdala, prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia, and cerebellum.

Implicit Memory

Unconscious memory demonstrates knowledge without explicitly retrieving info.

Explicit Memory

Conscious memory that can be retrieved and indicated that they know the info.

Declarative Memory

The ability to recall details like facts, time, place, and circumstances of an event, often lost in dementia.

Procedural Memory

Memory for actions and sequences of movements like riding a bike.

Episodic Memory

Own memories related to specific events, times, or places.

Reconsolidation

The process in which previously consolidated memories can be updated, implying that memories can be changed by new experiences.

Theory of Mind

The ability to recognize and understand other people's mental states like beliefs, intentions, and emotions, fundamental for social interactions, and can be disrupted in disorders like autism.

Self-Recognition

The ability to recognize oneself separately from others and be aware of one's own characteristics like emotions, actions, and existence.

Self-Regulation

The ability to control one's emotions, behaviors, and thoughts in pursuit of long-term goals, involving the ability to manage impulses and emotional responses based on stimuli.

Apraxia

Disorder of inability to perform purposeful movements or tasks despite having the ability, caused by the brain's inability to plan and execute voluntary movements.

Synesthesia

Cross-wiring of senses in which one sense can evoke perception of another, such as perceiving letters or numbers as having specific colors.

Dyskinesia

Condition of involuntary, uncontrolled movements of the body caused by Parkinson's, medications, genetics, disease, stroke, or brain injury.

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS)

A medical procedure that involves planting a device (pacemaker) to deliver electrical impulses to specific areas of the brain, used to treat neurological conditions like Parkinson's and tremors.

Neuroleptics (Antipsychotics)

A class of drugs used to manage psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia by helping to control hallucinations, delusions, and agitation.

Constraint-Induced Therapy

Rehab after stroke by restricting the intact limb to strengthen the impaired limb.

Long-Term Potentiation (LTP)

Repeated activation of a synapse makes it stronger and more efficient. Considered a cellular mechanism for learning and memory.

Lateralization

Some processes and abilities are more dominant in one hemisphere than the other.

Positive Symptoms (Schizophrenia)

Symptoms added to normal functions, such as hallucinations, delusions, disordered thought processes, and bizarre behavior.

Negative Symptoms (Schizophrenia)

Symptoms involving reductions or losses of normal functions, such as social withdrawal, blunted emotional responses, loss of pleasurable feelings, reduced motivation, poor focus on tasks, and reduced speech and movement.

circadian

daily

infradian

less than a day

ultradian

more than a day

circannual

yearly

prefrontal cortex

regulates emotional responses and involved in self control, adaptive behaviors and decision making

wanting is craving and liking is pleasure

difference between wanting and liking