Psychology: Gender Development, Conditioning, Cognition, and Language

Comprehensive practice flashcards featuring key vocabulary and definitions across gender development, classical and operant conditioning, cognition, heuristics, and language acquisition.

Sex Assigned at Birth

The sex a physician declares an individual to be at birth based on physical genitalia.

Gender Identity

An individual's subjective sense of their own gender, often (but not always) male or female.

Sex

Physiological markers that indicate maleness or femaleness, including chromosomes, hormones, and internal and external anatomy.

Intersex

The condition of having an unusual combination of sex chromosomes, sex hormones, and sexual anatomy (also referred to by some as Differences in Sexual Development, or DSD).

Transgender

Having a gender identity that differs from what is typically associated with one's natal sex assignment.

Cisgender

Having congruence between one's gender identity and natal sex assignment.

Gender Confirmation Surgery

Surgical procedures designed to bring an individual's existing physical sexual characteristics into alignment with their gender identity.

Trans Man

A man whose natal sex assignment was female.

Trans Womyn

A womyn whose natal sex assignment was male.

Hijra

A gender construction in South Asian cultures wherein individuals who were born male reject that identity and live as a recognized third gender.

Two-Spirit

A gender identity in Native American cultures (such as the Crow nation) where an individual assigned male at birth embodies both masculine and feminine qualities.

Learning

A lasting change in behavior (bx) or mental processes that results from experience.

Habituation

Learning not to respond to the repeated presentation of a stimulus.

Classical Conditioning

A process by which a neutral stimulus acquires the capacity to elicit a response originally elicited by another stimulus (also known as Pavlovian conditioning).

Unconditioned Stimulus (UCS)

A stimulus that automatically leads to a response prior to any training.

Unconditioned Response (UCR)

A response that is naturally occurring, reflexive, and automatically produced with the presentation of an unconditioned stimulus (UCS) prior to any training.

Conditioned Stimulus (CS)

A neutral stimulus that becomes paired with the unconditioned stimulus (UCS) during classical conditioning to elicit a learned response.

Conditioned Response (CR)

A learned response that is produced by a conditioned stimulus (CS) in anticipation of the arrival of the unconditioned stimulus (UCS).

Acquisition (Classical Conditioning)

The initial stage of classical conditioning during which a previously neutral stimulus begins to acquire the ability to elicit a conditioned response.

Extinction (Classical Conditioning)

The weakening of a conditioned association in the absence of an unconditioned stimulus.

Spontaneous Recovery

The reappearance of an extinguished conditioned response after a time delay.

Stimulus Generalization (Classical Conditioning)

The extension of a conditioned response to stimuli that are similar to the conditioned stimulus.

Stimulus Discrimination (Classical Conditioning)

Learning to respond to one stimulus but not to stimuli that are similar.

Conditioned Taste Aversion

A biologically predisposed learned association of gastrointestinal symptoms with ingestion stimuli, even when sickness occurs hours after consumption.

Exposure Therapy

A behavioral technique used to treat phobias that pairs a feared stimulus with a lack of negative consequences and with relaxation.

Thorndike's Law of Effect

The principle that behavior is strengthened if repeatedly followed by reinforcement and weakened if repeatedly followed by punishment.

Reinforcement

Anything that, when it follows a behavior, increases an organism's tendency to perform that behavior.

Positive Reinforcement

Reinforcement that involves adding something pleasurable or desired following a behavior.

Negative Reinforcement

Reinforcement that involves subtracting or removing something unpleasant or unwanted following a behavior.

Reinforcement Contingencies

The circumstances or rules that determine whether behaviors lead to the presentation of particular consequences.

Punishment

A consequence which, when it follows a behavior, decreases the likelihood of that behavior recurring.

Positive Punishment

The presentation or addition of an aversive stimulus following an unwanted behavior to decrease its occurrence.

Negative Punishment

The removal or subtraction of a pleasurable stimulus following an unwanted behavior to decrease its occurrence.

Discriminative Stimulus

A stimulus situation that sets the stage for a behavior to be followed by reinforcement or punishment by signaling what behavior will produce what response.

Shaping

An operant conditioning procedure that involves reinforcing successive approximations of a desired behavior.

Cognition

All the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.

Thinking

Creating and/or manipulating mental representations, or information in your brain.

Concept

A mental representation of a category of items or ideas.

Schema

A mental representation of how concepts relate to each other.

Prototype

A mental image or best example of a category.

Algorithm

A problem-solving procedure or formula that guarantees a correct outcome if applied correctly.

Heuristic

A cognitive strategy used as a shortcut to solve complex mental tasks that does not guarantee a correct solution.

Availability Heuristic

A judgment based on how easily we can call something to mind, rather than actual data or statistics.

Representativeness Heuristic

A judgment based on the assumption that something categorized shares all features with other category members, ignoring base rates and statistical data.

Confirmation Bias

The tendency to search for information that supports your preconceptions and to ignore or distort evidence that contradicts them.

Framing

In decision making, the tendency to be influenced by the way information is presented.

Anchoring

The tendency to rely on the first piece of information encountered when making a decision or estimation.

Productivity (Language)

The ability to combine words into new sentences that express an unlimited variety of ideas.

Phoneme

A unit of sound in language; includes vowel and consonant sounds.

Morpheme

The smallest meaningful unit of language.

Content Morpheme

A morpheme that conveys primary meaning, including nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.

Grammatical Morpheme

A morpheme that provides grammatical structure, such as articles, conjunctions, and some prefixes and suffixes.

Transformational Grammar

A system for converting a deep structure into a surface structure.

Deep Structure

The underlying logic or meaning of a sentence.

Surface Structure

The sequence of words as they are actually spoken or written.

Overextension

A childhood language error where a word is applied too broadly to objects that share a physical trait (such as saying "ball" for anything round).

Underextension

A childhood language error where a word is applied too narrowly (such as using "doll" only for one specific doll).

Overregularization

The application of regular grammatical rules to words that are irregular in childhood language development.

Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

An innate biological capacity to learn the rules of language, proposed by Noam Chomsky under the nativist position.

Optimal Period Hypothesis

The interactionist view that environmental input is important, but biology determines when an individual must receive particular information in order to make use of it.