Psychology Exam 3 Review: Language, Social Psychology, Motivation, Emotion & Intelligence

Language

Written or oral system of communication that uses symbols and has rules for their use.

Phoneme

Smallest distinctive sound unit in a language.

Morpheme

The smallest unit of meaning; may be a word (free morpheme) or part of a word (bound morpheme).

Semantics

Set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences in a given language.

Pragmatics

Rules for the appropriate use of language in particular contexts. The social use of language.

Critical Period

A limited time in which an event can optimally occur; learning a language is easiest early in life.

Whole Object Constraint

A new word labels whole object, not a feature of the object.

Fast Mapping

The process of rapidly learning a new word simply by detecting the difference between a familiar word and an unfamiliar word.

Grammar

System of rules governing the structure and use of language, including word formation and sentence structure.

Syntax

Structure of a language and the rules of grammar.

McGurk Effect

Visual information about a speaker's mouth can change the speech sound a listener perceives; phoneme perception is multimodal.

Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

Chomsky's proposed inborn capacity that enables children to acquire language rules.

Infant-directed speech

The high pitched, simplified and repetitive ways adults speak to infants.

Naming explosion

Rapid vocabulary growth after about 50 words, around 18 months, often 50-100+ new words per month.

Expansion

Adult repeats a child's utterance in a longer, grammatically complete form.

Recasting

Adult reformulates a child's utterance with corrected grammar while preserving its meaning.

Overextension

Use of a single word to cover many different things; e.g., 'doggie' for dogs, cats and squirrels.

Underextension

Using a word too narrowly; e.g., 'cat' refers only to the family cat.

Overregularization

Speech errors in which children treat irregular forms of words as if they were regular; e.g., 'sleeped.'

Holophrastic speech

One-word utterances used to convey a whole idea or sentence.

Telegraphic speech

Short, mostly content-word utterances omitting function words; e.g., 'want cookie.'

Nativist theory of language development

Language acquisition relies on an inborn biological capacity; Chomsky proposed a language acquisition device.

Behaviorist theory of language development

Language is learned through reinforcement (operant conditioning) and imitation (observational learning).

Interactionist theory of language development

Language develops through interaction between biological readiness and social/environmental experience.

Social Psychology

How people's thoughts, feelings and behavior are influenced by other people.

Attribution

An explanation about the cause of behavior, both in others and in ourselves.

Dispositional attribution

Cause of behavior within an individual.

Situational attribution

Cause of behavior outside of an individual.

Fundamental Attribution Error

Over-attributing behavior of others to dispositional causes and downplaying situational causes.

Actor-observer bias

Attributing others' behaviors as dispositional (stable) but our own behavior as situational (fleeting), especially negative behaviors.

Attitudes

Evaluations of something as good or bad; three components: affective, behavioral, cognitive.

Robbers Cave study

Competition produced intergroup conflict; shared, superordinate goals requiring cooperation were most effective in reducing hostility.

Cognitive Dissonance

Strong tension and discomfort when attitudes conflict with behavior or with other strongly held attitudes; people seek to reduce the inconsistency.

Festinger and Carlsmith: $1 versus $20

The $1 group experienced more dissonance because the small payment provided insufficient justification for lying; they changed their evaluation of the boring task.

Milgram obedience experiment

Participants were instructed to deliver escalating simulated shocks up to 450 volts; 26 of 40 (65%) went to the maximum in the classic study.

Asch conformity study

Participants sometimes gave an obviously incorrect line judgment to match a unanimous group.

Normative social influence

Conforming to gain approval or avoid rejection, even if privately disagreeing.

Stanford Prison Experiment

Simulated prison roles were associated with harmful role-conforming behavior; interpretation is controversial because of methodological and ethical problems.

Deindividuation

Reduced self-awareness and personal accountability in a group or anonymous setting, which may loosen normal restraints.

Bystander effect

People are less likely to help when other bystanders are present.

Diffusion of responsibility

When others are present, each person feels less personally responsible for taking action.

Groupthink

Group decision-making impaired by pressure for consensus and suppression of dissent.

Group Polarization

Group discussion tends to strengthen members' initial attitudes or decisions toward more extreme positions.

Prejudice

Negative attitude or evaluation toward someone based on membership in a group.

Stereotypes

Generalized beliefs about the characteristics of members of a group.

Out-group homogeneity effect

Tendency to see members of an out-group as more alike than members of one's own group.

Ultimate attribution error

Tendency to explain out-group negative behavior as dispositional and positive behavior as situational, favoring the in-group.

Proximity Effect

People physically near one another are more likely to interact and develop attraction.

Familiarity and attraction

Repeated exposure often increases liking (mere-exposure effect).

Similarity and attraction

Shared attitudes, interests and values tend to increase interpersonal attraction.

Halo effect of beauty

Assuming attractive people also possess other desirable traits, without evidence.

Motivation

A need or desire that energizes behavior and directs it towards a goal.

Emotion

Affective responses (feelings) that are linked to changes in behavior and physiology.

Instincts

Inborn, inflexible, goal-directed behavior that is characteristic of an entire species.

Drive

An internal state that pushes you to reach a goal; tension induced by need.

Drive reduction theory

Motivation reduces tension from biological needs and restores homeostasis; does not explain all stimulation-seeking behaviors.

Homeostasis

A tendency to maintain a balanced or constant internal state.

Arousal theory

Human motivation aims to seek optimum levels of arousal, not to eliminate it.

Cognitive theory of motivation

Explains motivation through forces inside and outside us, including intrinsic and extrinsic motives.

Intrinsic motivation

Engaging in activities because they are enjoyable, personally rewarding, or fulfill beliefs and expectations.

Extrinsic motivation

Engaging in activities to reduce biological needs or obtain external incentives.

Maslow hierarchy of needs

Lower needs are generally addressed before higher needs: physiological, safety, belonging, esteem and self-actualization.

Self-actualization

People realize their highest potential in their own unique way; use their talents to the fullest.

James-Lange Theory

Physiological activity comes before emotional experience; emotion is recognizing and labeling physiological experience.

Two-Factor Theory

Schachter: emotion combines physical arousal with a cognitive label; context shapes the interpretation.

Cannon-Bard Theory

Emotional experience and bodily arousal occur simultaneously after an emotion-triggering stimulus.

Circumplex model of emotion

Emotions vary along two dimensions: arousal (calm to excited) and valence (negative to positive).

Pretty lady on a swinging bridge study

Men may misattribute fear-related physiological arousal from a frightening bridge to romantic attraction; illustrates misattribution of arousal.

Set point

The particular body weight that is easiest for an animal to maintain; varies by individual.

How does set point relate to weight loss?

The slides say set point may rise with prolonged overeating but does not readily fall with undereating, making maintenance of weight loss difficult.

Intelligence

Mental abilities needed to select, adapt to, and shape environments; includes memory, reasoning, problem-solving and communication.

Alfred Binet and intelligence testing

Developed tasks in early-1900s France to identify children needing educational help; viewed intelligence as malleable.

Mental age

Age level corresponding to a child's performance on cognitive tasks.

Intelligence Quotient (IQ)

Originally mental age divided by chronological age, multiplied by 100: IQ = (MA/CA) × 100.

Modern IQ scores

Age-standardized scores with mean 100; unlike the original ratio IQ, scores compare performance with an age-matched norm group.

Standardization

Defining scores by comparing to the performance of a pretested 'standardization group.'

Normal curve

Symmetrical bell-shaped distribution; most scores are near average and fewer are near extremes.

Reliability

The extent to which a test yields consistent results.

Validity

The extent to which a test measures or predicts what it is supposed to.

Predictive validity

Success with which a test predicts the behavior it is designed to predict; e.g., IQ scores predict academic performance.

Intellectual impairment

Slides describe intellectual impairment as limited mental ability, IQ below 70 and difficulty adapting to life demands; modern diagnosis also requires adaptive-function deficits.

Genius (IQ)

Often informally defined as an IQ around 140 or above; this cutoff is not a formal diagnosis.

Factor Analysis

Statistical procedure that identifies clusters of related items (called factors) on a test.

Spearman general intelligence (g)

Factor believed to underlie specific mental abilities and measured by every task on an intelligence test.

Multiple Intelligences

Gardner proposed separable, independent intelligences, including linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal and naturalist.

Savant syndrome

Condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has an amazing specific skill, such as computation or drawing.

Creativity

Ability to generate original, useful ideas or solutions.

Fluid intelligence

Capacity to reason and solve novel problems without relying mainly on learned knowledge.

Crystallized intelligence

Accumulated knowledge and skills gained through learning and experience.

Genetic and environmental influences on IQ

More genetically similar people tend to have more similar IQs; shared environments also contribute, and IQ is not fixed.

Heritability

Proportion of variation in a trait within a population under particular conditions associated with genetic differences; not the genetic percentage of an individual's trait.

Eugenics

The use of selective breeding to increase the general intelligence of the population.

Historical misuse of heritability

Eugenics and forced sterilization treated intelligence as fixed and used group differences to justify discrimination; within-group heritability does not prove genetic causes of between-group differences.

Flynn Effect

IQ improving at the rate of about 3 points per decade, as reported in the slides; suggests environmental influences.

Stereotype threat

Concern about confirming a negative stereotype can produce anxiety and interfere with test performance.