General Psychology – Exam 1 Review

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms and concepts from the lecture notes to prepare for the exam.

Industrial Psychologist

Applies psychological principles to workplace issues such as productivity, personnel selection, and employee training.

Human Factors Psychologist

Designs products, machines, and work settings to fit human abilities and promote safety and efficiency. They examines human abilities, limitations, behaviors, and processes in order to inform human-centered designsexamine

Forensic Psychologist

Uses psychological expertise in legal contexts, including competency evaluations and jury selection.

Counseling Psychologist

Helps people cope with everyday problems, career decisions, and life transitions.

Personality Psychologist

Studies individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving.

Experimental Psychologist

Conducts laboratory research on basic psychological processes such as learning, memory, and sensation.

Consumer Psychologist

Investigates how thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and perceptions influence purchasing behavior.

Learning

A relatively permanent change in behavior or knowledge due to experience.

Evolutionary Psychology

Perspective that behaviors and mental processes have developed through natural selection to solve adaptive problems.

Generalization (Classical Conditioning)

Tendency to respond to stimuli that are similar to the conditioned stimulus.

Counterconditioning

Replacing an unwanted response to a stimulus with a desired response by associating the stimulus with a new, positive one.

Narcolepsy

Sleep disorder marked by sudden, uncontrollable sleep attacks, often directly into REM sleep.

Sleep Apnea

Breathing interruptions during sleep causing frequent awakenings and daytime fatigue.

Insomnia

Persistent difficulty falling or staying asleep.

Sleep Terrors (Night Terrors)

Episodes of intense fear during deep NREM sleep, usually without memory of the event.

Discrimination (Social)

Behavioral unfair treatment of individuals based on group membership.

Prejudice

Negative attitude toward members of a group based solely on their membership.

Social Learning

Acquiring behaviors by observing and imitating others.

Social Categorization

Classifying people into groups, often leading to in-group/out-group distinctions.

Social Facilitation

Improved performance on simple tasks in the presence of others.

Information Processing (Social)

How people perceive, interpret, and remember information about themselves and others.

REM Sleep & Neurotransmitters

REM is regulated by acetylcholine and inhibited by serotonin and norepinephrine activity.

Psychodynamic Perspective

Views behavior as driven by unconscious motives and conflicts rooted in childhood.

Humanistic-Existential Perspective

Emphasizes personal growth, self-actualization, free will, and meaning.

Biological Perspective

Explains behavior in terms of brain structures, neurochemistry, and genetics.

Sociocial Psychologist

Focuses on how social and cultural factors influence behavior and mental processes.

Shaping

Gradually training behavior by reinforcing successive approximations toward the desired response.

Modeling

Learning a behavior by watching and imitating a live or symbolic model.

Heredity

Transmission of genetic characteristics from parents to offspring.

Thalamus (Memory)

Relay station that helps form and retrieve visual and verbal memories by directing sensory information to cortex.

Hypnosis

Altered state of focused attention, heightened suggestibility, and reduced peripheral awareness.

Reinforcement

Any consequence that increases the likelihood a behavior will recur.

Punishment

Consequence that decreases the likelihood of a behavior reoccurring.

Conditioned (Secondary) Reinforcer

Stimulus that gains reinforcing power through association with primary reinforcers (e.g., money).

Unconditioned (Primary) Reinforcer

Naturally reinforcing stimulus that satisfies biological needs (e.g., food).

Unity (Perceptual Organization)

Tendency to group elements that create a sense of completeness or oneness.

Similarity (Gestalt)

We group objects that share visual characteristics such as color or shape.

Common Fate

Elements moving in the same direction are seen as belonging together.

Continuity

Perceiving smooth, continuous patterns rather than discontinuous ones.

Proximity

Objects close to each other are perceived as part of the same group.

Figure-Ground

Perceptual distinction between the main object (figure) and its background (ground).

Bottom-Up Processing

Analyzing raw sensory data to build perception without prior knowledge.

Stages of Memory

Encoding → Storage → Retrieval.

Stages of Sleep

NREM-1 (theta waves), NREM-2 (sleep spindles), NREM-3 (delta waves), REM (beta-like waves).

Latent Learning

Learning that occurs without reinforcement and is not demonstrated until incentive appears.

Goals of Psychology

Describe, explain, predict, and control behavior and mental processes.

Serial-Position Effect

Tendency to recall items at the beginning and end of a list better than those in the middle.

Stereotyping

Generalizing characteristics to all members of a group, often oversimplified and resistant to change.

Phenotype

Observable physical and behavioral traits resulting from genotype–environment interaction.

Genotype

An individual’s genetic makeup inherited from parents.

Dominant Human Sense

Vision provides most information about our environment.

Implicit Memory

Retention of learned skills without conscious recollection (procedural).

Explicit Memory

Memory of facts and experiences that one can consciously declare.

Social Connectedness & Violent Games

Strong social ties can buffer or reduce negative aggression effects of violent video game play.

Depth Perception

Ability to judge distance and three-dimensional relations using monocular and binocular cues.

Prospective Memory

Remembering to perform actions in the future, such as appointments or tasks.

Short-Term Memory

Limited-capacity store (about 7±2 items) holding information briefly, around 15–30 seconds.

Paired Associates

Learning technique involving memorizing items in linked pairs (e.g., foreign word and translation).

Adaptation (Evolution)

Inherited characteristic that increases an organism’s chance of survival and reproduction.

Mutation

Random change in DNA that can introduce new genetic variation.

Infantile Amnesia

Inability to recall episodic memories from early childhood (typically before age 3).

Dissociative Amnesia

Memory loss for personal information due to psychological trauma, not brain injury.

Retrograde Amnesia

Loss of memories for events that occurred before a head injury or illness.

Anterograde Amnesia

Inability to form new long-term memories after brain damage.

Psychology

Scientific study of behavior and mental processes.

Sigmund Freud

Austrian neurologist regarded as the father of psychoanalysis.