Year 2 EPPP

teratogen

drugs, chemicals, infectious diseases, and environmental factors—that cause structural or functional congenital disabilities in a developing embryo or fetus - largest effect during the first eight weeks of development

infantile amnesia

memories for events before age 3 or 4 are notoriously unstable and are forgotten; the age of the earliest memory is not completely universal;

james-lange theory of emotion

• notice a physiological change (heart rate increasing) and have a behavior change (imagining attacking someone) and therefore you must be angry (label emotion) - physiological or behavioral change first then label emotion

Cannon-Bard Theory

• Change in physiology, behavior, subjective feelings, and cognitive appraisal occur separately, BUT SIMULTANEOUSLY 

Schachter-Singer Two-Factor Theory

• physiological arousal determines the strength of the emotion, while cognitive appraisal identifies the emotion label

Cognitive appraisal theory

emotional experiences are shaped by how individuals interpret or “appraise” the meaning of events rather than the events themselves

Bell and Ainsworth (1972) - The results of their research indicated that a mother's prompt and consistent response to her infant's crying during the first few months of the infant's life:

is associated with a decrease in the amount of infant crying in subsequent months

event recording

a direct observation method in behavioral psychology used to count every instance of a specific behavior within a set timeframe

situational sampling

a research method used to observe behavior across a range of natural contexts or to assess individuals' experiences in real-time within their everyday environments

interval recording

a direct observational, discontinuous data collection method in psychology (often in Applied Behavior Analysis - ABA) that divides an observation session into smaller, equal time segments to measure how often or long a target behavior occurs - ideal for high-rate behaviors that are difficult to track individually or for monitoring behaviors over long periods

sequential analysis

a set of techniques used to identify patterns in behavior over time by analyzing categorical, observed data. It is used to discover how specific behaviors (e.g., mother-son interaction) follow one another

A listener is most likely to process a persuasive message peripherally (i.e., use the "peripheral route") if she is:

in a good mood

Amygdala

• Function: It functions as an "emotional sentinel" or early warning system, scanning sensory input for threats. It also links memories to emotional responses, ensuring highly emotional experiences are remembered vividly.

• Fear & Anxiety: It is heavily involved in triggering fear responses, such as increased heart rate and muscle tension. Overactivity in this region is linked to anxiety disorders and PTSD.

• Social Processing: It helps interpret emotions in others, such as recognizing fear in facial expressions.

Thalamus

• Sensory Relay: Directs visual, auditory, taste, and touch signals to the appropriate regions of the brain for interpretation. Note: Smell is the only sense that completely bypasses the thalamus.

• Motor Control: Modulates and refines motor signals, coordinating voluntary movements.

• Consciousness & Sleep: Plays a critical role in regulating states of arousal, alertness, and the initiation of sleep.

• Learning & Emotion: Heavily involved in memory processing and emotional regulation

Hippocampus

• Memory Consolidation: Essential for turning new information into enduring, long-term memories.

• Spatial Navigation: Acts as an internal GPS, creating mental maps to help you navigate familiar and unfamiliar environments.

• Learning: Helps you acquire new facts, understand your environment, and flexibly apply past experiences to new situations

Lazarus's (1991) cognitive appraisal theory (learned in health psych)

emotions are not triggered directly by events, but rather by our mental evaluation (appraisal) of a situation's significance to our well-being (primary appraisal: threat or challenge?) (secondary appraisal: can i cope?)

diathesis-stress

mental disorders result from an interaction between a pre-existing predisposition (diathesis) and environmental life stress

Affect, behavior, and cognitions have been identified as the three components of:

attitudes

imaginary audience

subconscious, belief held by adolescents that everyone else is constantly observing and evaluating them

peer pressure reaches its peak in intensity during

early adolescence (ages 13 to 15)

tactile agnosia

parietal lobe and somatosensory cortex

depressive attributional style

iinternal (it's my fault), stable (it will last forever), and global (it affects all areas of my life) factors.

Amitriptyline

increases norepinephrine and serotonin levels

demand characteristics

subtle cues in an experiment or study that inadvertently reveal the researcher's hypothesis. When participants pick up on these hints, they often subconsciously change their behavior to fit what they think the experimenter expects of them, which compromises the validity of the research.

Amblyopia

reduced visual acuity that is not caused by optical or retinal impairments

Neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development differ from Piaget's theory in terms of their:

emphasis on information processing

experiment-wise error

Type 1 error increase

type 1 error

false positive

type 2 error

false negative

automatic thoughts

spontaneously triggered by a specific circumstance and accompanied by an emotional reaction

hypertension

high blood pressure

Hawthorne effect

a psychological phenomenon where individuals modify their behavior, often improving their performance, simply because they know they are being observed or studied by researchers

Rosenthal effect

a psychological phenomenon where higher expectations lead to improved performance, while low expectations lead to decreased performance

Differential attrition

when participant dropout rates vary systematically between study groups (e.g., treatment vs. control). This heavily threatens a study's internal validity, because the remaining participants in one group may no longer be comparable to those in the other

The age of onset of separation anxiety varies from child to child but is usually between six and eight months of age. It then peaks in intensity at about ______ months and thereafter declines.

14 to 18

Cluster sampling

selecting units rather than individuals

skin-conductance response

It is a sensitive indicator of autonomic nervous system arousal often linked to emotion, attention, and cognitive processing

Attribution theory

psychological framework explaining how people interpret the causes of events and behaviors

Dissonance theory

people experience mental discomfort when holding conflicting beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors

Gyorgy Gergely (1994) - focused on the development of self-awareness and how infants use visual cues—such as contingent reactivity in a mirror—to form a self-concept

mirror self-recognition

External validity

generalizability of research results to the broader population

internal validity

study demonstrates a true cause-and-effect relationship, ensuring results are not due to confounding variables or methodological errors

statistical power

the probability that a test will correctly reject a false null hypothesis

statistical significance

a mathematical measure that determines if the results of an experiment or study are genuine or simply a product of random chance

Authoritative parents

(high warmth/high control)

Permissive parents

(high warmth/low control)

Authoritarian parents

(low warmth/high control)

randomized block ANOVA

a researcher identifies an extraneous variable (called a blocking variable) that is likely to affect the dependent variable

striatum

ecognized as the key subcortical structure responsible for the habit formation and automaticity associated with procedural memories.

Wernicke's area

responsible for language comprehension

cerebral cortex

the brain's outermost layer of gray matter. Known for its wrinkled appearance, it plays a vital role in complex functions like memory, thinking, learning, reasoning, consciousness, and sensory processing

Psychological reactance

an automatic, unpleasant motivational reaction that occurs when you perceive your freedom, autonomy, or choices are being threatened. It is the classic "don’t tell me what to do" reflex

parametric statistical tests

statistical methods that assume sample data comes from a population that follows a specific probability distribution, usually a normal distribution

basal ganglia

a collection of deep subcortical brain structures primarily responsible for motor control, action selection, and habit formation - the caudate nucleus and the putamen

atropine

blocks muscarinic acetylcholine receptors

neostigmine

preventing the breakdown of acetylcholine, thereby increasing muscle stimulation

albumin

a vital protein produced by the liver that circulates in the blood. It is essential for maintaining fluid balance—preventing blood from leaking into tissues—and transports important substances like hormones, vitamins, and enzymes throughout the body

four sources of self-efficacy beliefs

prior accomplishments, observations of others, verbal persuasion, and emotional and physiological states

Central Limit Theorem

when you collect sufficiently large independent samples from a population, the distribution of the sample means will follow a normal (bell-curve) distribution, regardless of the population's underlying shape

androgen

responsible for arousal in both females and males

Prosopagnosia

inability to recognize familiar faces - the junction of the occipital and temporal lobes

aphasia

a neurological disorder caused by brain damage that impairs your ability to speak, write, and understand both spoken and written language

leptokurtic distribution

more "peaked" than normal

Piaget secondary circular reaction

an action done by the baby that gets a repeatable, pleasurable, or interesting response from an object or another person.

socioemotional selectivity theory

a life-span theory of motivation stating that as people perceive their time left in life as shrinking—typically due to aging—they shift from future-oriented goals to present-oriented, emotionally meaningful ones

complex partial seizure

remains localized and produces a loss of consciousness

what would increase the power of a statistical test?

increasing alpha

retrograde amnesia

the inability to recall events, information, or experiences from before the onset of an injury, illness, or psychological trauma

one-way ANOVA

a statistical test used to determine whether there are statistically significant differences between the means of three or more independent groups

storm and stress theory

adolescent mental health proposes that most adolescents experience extensive physical, social, and psychological turmoil - not universal - most adolescents are stable

high expressed emotion

a qualitative measure of the family environment, characterized by intense, negative, and critical communication styles

What is the difference between a true experiment and a quasi-experiment?

random assignment of participants

Chi-square test of independence

analyze categorical data (such as voting preferences: Republican vs. Democrat) across two or more independent groups

In a positively skewed distribution of scores_____

Mean > Median > Mode

In a negatively skewed distribution of scores

Mode > Median > Mean

Bem's self-perception theory (1972)

individuals determine their own attitudes, emotions, and internal states by observing their own overt behavior and the circumstances under which it occurs

Kubler-Ross (1969)

5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance

mood lability

rapid, exaggerated, and often uncontrollable shifts in emotional state

dorsal root ganglia

nodule-like clusters of sensory nerve cell bodies located along the spinal nerves just outside the spinal cord

central sulcus

he groove that separates the frontal lobe from the parietal lobe and lies adjacent to the primary somatosensory cortex

Self-verification theory

ocial psychological concept proposing that people are motivated to have others view them in the exact same way they view themselves

gain-loss theory

our evaluation of others is not just based on the absolute amount of reward we receive, but on the change in that reward

animistic thinking

cognitive, often pre-operational, belief that inanimate objects—such as toys, nature, or natural phenomena—possess lifelike qualities, emotions, agency, and human-like intentions

rod cells - eye

sensitive to light

inoculation - attitude change

In the context of attitude change, "inoculation" refers to building resistance to future persuasive attacks by exposing individuals to a weakened counterargument, prompting them to generate their own counterarguments

positron emission tomography (PET)

measures neurochemicals in the brain

transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)

uses magnetic fields to stimulate nerve cells in the brain. It is primarily used to treat major depressive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)

magnetoencephalography (MEG)

highly precise tracking of when and where brain events occur, MEG is primarily used for surgical planning, particularly in complex epilepsy and brain tumor cases

Bed nucleus of the stria terminalis

a crucial basal forebrain structure acting as an integration hub for anxiety, stress responses, and social behavior, often considered part of the "extended amygdala". It regulates long-lasting, sustained fear/anxiety (unpredictable threats) and activates the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis, distinguishing its role from the amygdala's immediate threat response.

Membrane potential

general term for any difference in electrical charge (voltage) across a cell membrane.

Resting potential

refers to the stable, inactive membrane potential of a resting neuron

Action potential

rapid, temporary reversal of the membrane potential that travels along an axon as an electrical signal

Threshold of excitation

the specific voltage level a membrane must reach to trigger an action potential.

the best conclusion that can be drawn about the effects of maternal depression on infant development is that children of depressed mothers:

are at higher risk for psychopathology and may show symptoms of disturbance as early as three months of age

avoidance–avoidance conflict

ambivalence with two bad options - Alternate between the two options, first choosing one and then the other

approach-approach conflict

ambivalence with two good options - Alternate between the two options, first choosing one and then the other

ferber method

The Ferber method (often called "Ferberizing") is a form of graduated extinction. Rather than letting a baby cry entirely without intervention or immediately rushing to soothe them, parents are taught to wait for progressively longer, specific periods of time before entering the room to comfort the infant without picking them up.

Kruskall-Wallis test

a non-parametric statistical method used to compare three or more independent groups. Acting as the non-parametric alternative to a one-way ANOVA, it tests whether the medians of your groups differ significantly without assuming the data follows a normal distribution.

Vygotsky's sociocultural theory - private speech

self-directed speech that guides the child's behavior.

In a normally shaped distribution, the percentile rank equivalent of a z-score of +2.0 is approximately

97.5