AP Psychology Exam Review

Frontal Lobe

Part of the cerebral cortex, involved in desicion making, planning, and personality

Parietal Lobe

Processes senses of touch, tempature, pain, and spatial awareness

Occipital Lobe

Processes visual information

Temporal Lobe

Responsible for processing auditory information and memory.

Hippocampus

Forms and new memories, inside of the temporal lobe

Amygdala

Controls emotions, especially fear and aggression.

Cerebellum

Coordinating voluntary movements like speech.

Hypothalamus

Maintain homeostasis, control endocrine system via the pituitairy gland. Crutial in regulating various functions like tempature, hunger, thirst, sleep, mood, release of hormones.

Cerebral Cortex

Outer layer of the brain, responsible for higher brain functions like thought, reasoning, memory, and sensory perception. Divided into four lobes (frontal, parietal, occipital, temporal).

Brain Plasticity

Ability of the brain to chaange and adapt. Brains capacity to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. This allows it to recover from injury, learn new information, and adjust to new information.

Hypothesis

tenative explanation, must be able to be supported or rejected (falsifiable)

Oporational definition

clear, precise definition of your variables. Allows replication and collection of reliable data.

Qualitive data

descriptive data (ex: eye color)

Quantitive data

numerical data

Population

Everyone the research could apply to

Sample

the people or person specifically chosen for your study

Double blind

Neither participant or experimenter know what condition people are assigned to

Humanist

Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, believe that we choose most of our behaviors and these choices are guided by psychological, emotional, or spiritual needs.

Psychodynamic

Believe that the unconscious mind controls much of our thought and action

Biopsychology / neuroscience

Explain human thought and behavior strictly in terms of biological processes

Evolutionary (Darwinian)

Examine human thought and actions in terms of natural selection

Behavioral

Explain human thought and behavior in terms of conditioning. Look strictly at observable behaviors and at human and animal responses to different kinds of stimuli.

Cognitive

Examine human thought and behavior in terms of how we interpret, process, and remember environmental events. The rules that we use to view the world are important to cognitive developmental theory

Sociocultural

Look at how our thoughts and behaviors vary among cultures. Emphasize the influence culture has on the way we think and act.

Biopsychosocial

Acknowledges human thinking behavior results from combinations of biological psychological and social factors.

Confirmation bias

Searching for, interpreting, favor, and recall information that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs

Mean

The average of a data set. Adding all the values and dividing by the count.

Median

Middle value in an ordered data set

Mode

The value that appears most in a data set.

Positively skewed

Majority of scores are clustered at the left side

Negatively skewed

Data clusters on the right

Standard deviation

How much a spread out set of scores is around the average

Correlation coefficient

Statistical measure ranging from -1 to +1 that quantifies the strength and direction of the relationship between two variables.

Meta-analysis

Research method that uses statistical techniques to combine and analyze data from multiple independent studies, calculating a comprehensive “effect size” to determine the overall strength of a phenomenon.

Informed assent

Affirmative, voluntary agreement by a person who is not legally capable of providing consent to participate in a psychological research or treatment.

Dendrites

Root-like parts of the cell that stretch out from cell body. Dendrites grow to make synaptic connections with other neurons

Cell body / soma

Contains nucleus and other parts of cell needed to sustain its life.

Axon

Wire-like structure ending in the terminal buttons that extends from the cell body

Myelin sheath

Fatty covering around the axon of some neurons that speeds neural impulses. Multiple sclerosis occurs when the myelin sheath detiorates around other neurons, interfering with neural transmission.

Terminal buttons

Branched ends of the axon that contain neurotransmitters

Neurotransmitters

Chemicals contained in termina buttons that enable neurons to communicate. Neurotransmitters fit into receptor sites on the dendrites of neurons like a key fits into a lock.

Synapse

Space between the terminal buttons of one neuron and the dendrites of the next neuron.

Dopamine

Motor movement and alertness

Seretonin

Mood control

Norepinephrine

Alertness, arousal

Glutamate

Excitatory neurotransmitter, involved in memory

GABA

Important inhibitory neurotransmitter

Endorphins

Pain control

Substance P

Pain perception

Acetylcholine

Motor movement

Sensory / affrent neurons

Take information from the senses to the brain

Interneurons

Take the message and send them elsewhere in the brain or on to efferent neurons

Motor / efferent neurons

Take information from the brain to the rest of the body

Adrenaline

Fight or flight

Leptin

Weight regulation, suppresses hunger

Ghrelin

Motivates eating, increases hunger

Melatonin

Triggers sleep and wakefulness

Oxytocin

Promotes good feelings like trust and bonding

Pons

Connects hindbrain with the mid and forebrain. Also involved in control of facial expressions.

Midbrain

Between the hindbrain and the forebrain and integrates some types of sensory information and muscle movements.

Reticular formation

Netlike connection of cells throughout the midbrain that control general body arousal and the ability to focus our attention. If this does not function we fall into a deep coma

Forebrain

Control what we think of as thought and reason. Inside have thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdala, hippocampus.

Left hemisphere

Gets sensory messages and controls the motor functions of the right half of the body. Spoken language center

Right hemisphere

Gets sensory messages and controls motor functions of left side of body

Conscious level

Information about yourself and your environment you are not currently aware of.

Nonconcious level

Body processes controlled by your mind that we are not ever aware of. For example heart beat, respiration, digestion

Preconscious level

Information about yourself or your environment that you are not currently thinking about but you could be. Ex: what was your favorite toy as a child

Subconscious level

Information we are not consciously aware of but we know must exist due to behavior.

Unconscious level

Some events and feelings are unacceptable to our conscious mind and are repressed into the unconscious mind

Agonists

Drugs that occupy receptors and activate them

Antagonists

Drugs that occupy receptors but do not activate them. Antagonists block receptor activation by agonists.

Stimulants

Speed up body processes. Caffine, cocaine, amphetamines, nicotine.

Depressants

Slow down body systems. Alcohol, barbiturates, anxiolytics.

Hallucinogens

Cause changes in perceptions of reality. LSD, peyote, marijuana.

Opiates

Painkillers and mood elevators. Morphine, heroin, methadone, fentanyl.

Prosopagnosia

Inability to recognize faces

Transduction

Translation of incoming stimuli into neural signals

Cones

Activates by color

Rods

Black and white

Amplitude

Height of the wave, determines the loudness or the sounds

Frequency

Length of the waves, determines the pitch

Place theory

The hair cells in the cochlea respond to different frequencies of sound based on where they are located in the cochlea. Some bend in response to high pitches and some to low. We sense pitch because the hair cells move in different places in the cochlea.

Frequency theory

Accurately describes how hair cells sense the upper rage of pitches but not the lower tones. Lower tones are sensed by the rate at which the cells fire. Frequency theory states that we sense pitch because the hair cells fire at different rates in the cochlea.

Conduction deafness

Occurs when something goes wrong with the system of conducting the sound to the cochlea.

Nerve / sensorineural deafness

Hair cells in the cochlea are damaged, usually by loud noise.

Top down processing

Perceive by filling in gaps in what we sense.

Bottom-up processing

Instead of using our experience to perceive an object, we use only the features of the object itself to build a complete perception.

Perceptual set

Predisposition to perceiving something in a certain way.

Proximity

Objects that are close together are more likely to be perceived as belonging in the same group.

Similarity

Objects that are similar in appearance are more likely to be perceived as belonging in the same group

Continuity

Objects that are arranged in a continuous line or curve are more likely to be perceived as belonging in the same group

Closure

Objects that make up a recognizable image are more likely to be perceived as belonging in the same group even if the image contains gaps that the mind needs to fill in.