Psyc 289 Final Prep - Lecture Notes Flashcards

Flashcards for Psyc 289 Final Prep based on lecture notes from Athabasca University. These flashcards cover key concepts from all chapters, focusing on psychology as a natural science.

Psyche

The soul, spirit, or mind, as distinguished from the body.

Descartes

Argued for the dualism of mind and body and believed that processes such as memory and emotions were properties of the body.

Wilhelm Wundt

Established the first formal laboratory for research in psychology at the University of Leipzig and the first journal devoted to publishing research on psychology.

Structuralism

Analyze consciousness into its basic elements and investigate how these elements are related.

Functionalism

Investigate the function or purpose of consciousness, rather than its structure.

Introspection

The careful, systematic self-observation of one’s own conscious experience.

William James

An American scholar who wanted to understand the flow of consciousness, referring to it as the stream of consciousness.

Behavioralism

A theoretical orientation based on the premise that scientific psychology should study only observable behavior.

Watsonian Behaviorism

A theoretical orientation based on the premise that scientific psychology should study only observable behaviour.

Behavior

Any overt response or activity by an organism.

Stimulus

Any detectable input from the environment.

Psychoanalytic theory

Attempts to explain personality, motivation, and mental disorders by focusing on unconscious determinants of behavior.

Unconscious

Thoughts, memories, and desires that are well below conscious awareness but still affect behavior.

B. F. Skinner

Argued that people were controlled by their environment and that free will is an illusion.

Humanism

Emphasizes the unique qualities of humans, especially their freedom and their potential for personal growth.

Humanistic Psychology

The study of the unique aspects of the human experience.

Psychoanalytic Perspective

Unconscious motives and memories govern personality and mental disorders.

Who established the first psychology lab in Canada?

James Baldwin

Applied Psychology

The branch of psychology concerned with everyday practical problems.

Clinical Psychology

The branch of psychology concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of psychological problems and disorders.

Cognition

Referring to the mental processes involved in acquiring knowledge.

Donald Hebb

Proposed that human learning takes place by neurons forming new connections and paved the way for cognitive revolution.

Cell assemblies

Create cognitive units which facilitate behavior.

Ethnocentrism

The tendency to view one's own group as superior and as the standard for judging the worth of foreign ways.

Three main areas of interest in positive psychology

Positive subjective experiences, positive individual traits, and positive institutions and communities.

Psychology

The science that studies behavior and the physiological and cognitive processes that underlie it; it is the profession that applies the accumulated knowledge of this science to practical problems.

Cognitive Psychology

The study of how people think, perceive, learn, and retrieve information.

Personality Psychology

Focuses on patterns of thought, feelings, and behaviors that make people unique.

Experimental Psychology

Encompasses the traditional core topics that psychology focused on in its first half-century as a science.

Psychometrics

Measurements of aptitude, achievement, ability, and intelligence.

Physiological Psychology

Focuses on the relationship between the brain and neural functions and biological responses.

Empiricism

The premise that knowledge should be acquired through observation.

Culture

Widely shared customs, beliefs, values, norms, institutions, and other products of a community that are transmitted socially across generations.

SQ3R

Survey, Question, Read, Recite, and Review.

Critical Thinking

The use of cognitive skills and strategies that increase the probability of a desirable outcome.

Three goals of the scientific enterprise

Measurement and description, understanding and prediction, and application and control.

Hypothesis

A tentative statement about the relationship between two or more variables.

Variables

Any measurable conditions, events, characteristics, or behaviors that are controlled or observed in a study.

Theory

A system of interrelated ideas used to explain a set of observations.

Five steps in scientific investigations

Formulate a testable hypothesis, select a research method, collect the data, analyze the data, and report the findings.

Operational definition

Describes the actions or operations that will be used to measure or control a variable.

Data collection techniques

Which are procedures for making observations and measurements.

Experiment

Is a research method in which the investigator manipulates a variable under carefully controlled conditions and observes whether any changes occur in a second variable as a result.

Independent Variable

A condition or event that an experimenter varies in order to see its impact on another variable.

Dependent Variable

he variable that is thought to be affected by manipulation of the independent variable.

Experimental Group

Consists of the subjects who receive some special treatment in regard to the independent variable.

Control Group

Consists of similar subjects who do not receive the special treatment given to the experimental groups.

Extraneous variables

Are any variables other than the independent variable that seem likely to influence the dependent variable in a specific study.

Confounding variables

Occurs when two variables are linked together in a way that makes it difficult to sort out their specific effects.

Random assignment

Occurs when all subjects have an equal chance of being assigned to any group or condition in the study.

Between-subjects design

When two or more independent groups of subjects are exposed to a manipulation of an independent variable.

Within-subjects design

When subjects serve as their own control group.

Interaction

Means that the effects of one variable depend on the effect of another.

Field experiments

Are done in the real world.

The experiment

Is a powerful research method that permits conclusions about cause-and-effect relationships, offering control to isolate relationships between variables.

Naturalistic observation, case studies, and surveys.

Three descriptive research methods

Statistics

Is the use of mathematics to organize, summarize, and interpret numerical data.

Descriptive Statistics

Are used to organize and summarize data.

Central Tendency

Is summarizing numerical data researchers often want to know what constitutes a typical or average score.

Median

Is the score that falls exactly in the center of a distribution of scores.

Mean

Is the arithmetic average of the scores in a distribution.

Mode

Is the most frequent score in a distribution.

Variability

Refers to how much scores in a data set vary from each other and from the mean.

Standard deviation

Is an index of the amount of variability in a set of data.

Percentile score

Indicates the percentage of people who score at or below a particular score.

Correlation

Exists when two variables are related to each other.

Correlation coefficient

Is a numerical index of the degree of relationship between two variables.

Positive Correlation

Indicates that two variables co-vary in the same direction.

Negative correlation

Indicates that two variables co-vary in the opposite direction.

inferential statistics

Are used to interpret data and draw conclusions.

Statistical significance

Is said to exist when the probability that the observed findings are due to chance is very low.

Replication

Is the repetition of a study to see whether the earlier results are duplicated.

Meta-analysis

Is the combination of the statistical results of many studies of the same question yielding an estimate of the size and consistency of a variable's effects.

Sampling Bias

Exists when a sample is not representative of the population from which it was drawn.

Placebo effects

Occurs when participant expectations lead them to experience some change even though they receive empty, fake, or ineffectual treatment.

Social desirability bias

Which is a tendency to give socially approved answers to questions about oneself.

Experimenter Bias

Occurs when a researcher's expectations or preferences about the outcome of a study influence the results obtained.

Sample

Is the collection of subjects selected for observation in an empirical study.

Population

Is the much larger collection of animals or people that researchers generalize about.

Social desirability bias

which is a tendency to give socially approved answers to questions about oneself.

Response set

Is a tendency to respond to questions in a particular way that is unrelated to the content of the questions.

Halo effect

Occurs when one's overall evaluation of a person, object, or institution spills over to influence more specific ratings.

Double-blind

A research strategy in which neither subjects nor experimenters know which subjects are in the experimental or control groups.

Internet-mediated research

Term for Studies in which data collection is done using the web

Journal

A periodical that publishes technical and scholarly material, usually in a narrowly defined area of inquiry.

Anecdotal Evidence

Personal stories about specific incidents and experiences.

Glia cells

Cells in the nervous system that support, nourish, and protect neurons.

Neurons

Individual cells in the nervous system that receive, integrate, and transmit information.

Axon

A long, thin fiber that transmits signals away from the soma to other neurons or to muscles and glands.

Terminal buttons

Small knobs that secrete chemicals called neurotransmitters.

Synapse

A junction where information is transmitted from one neuron to another.

Neural impulse

Positively charged ions and negatively charged ions flow back and forth across the cell membrane but do not cross at the same rate.

Resting potential

Of a neuron is its stable, negative charge when the cell is inactive.

Resting potential rate

(-70 MV)

Action Potential

The change in polarity of a neuron that results from the inflow of positively charged ions and the outflow of negatively charged ions.

Absolute refractory period

The minimum length of time after an action potential during which another action potential cannot begin.

Postsynaptic potential

A voltage change at a receptor site on a postsynaptic cell membrane .

Reuptake

a process in which neurotransmitters are sponged up from the synaptic cleft by the presynaptic neuron.

How neural networks are formed

Just like people, neural networks learn from experience, not from programming

Synaptic pruning

Refers to the process by which extra neurons and synaptic connections are eliminated to increase the efficiency of neuronal transmissions.