Psychology Vocabulary Flashcards

Flashcards covering key vocabulary from psychology lecture notes.

Contemporary Psychology

The scientific study of behavior and mental processes.

Case Study

A research method in which one person is studied in depth.

Correlations

A measure of the extent to which two factors vary together.

Illusory Correlation

The perception of a relationship where none exists.

Placebo Effect

Positive expectations can lead to real results.

Occipital Lobe

The part of the cerebral cortex that processes visual information

Sensory Neurons

Transmit messages from sensory receptors to the brain and spinal cord.

Acetylcholine

A neurotransmitter; its deficit is associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

PET Scan

Imaging technique that monitors the brain’s glucose consumption to identify activity.

Sympathetic Nervous System

The division of the autonomic nervous system that arouses the body, mobilizing its energy in stressful situations.

Hypothalamus

A neural structure lying below the thalamus; it directs several maintenance activities (eating, drinking, body temperature), helps govern the endocrine system via the pituitary gland, and is linked to emotion.

Sensation

The process by which our sensory receptors and nervous system receive and represent stimulus energies from our environment.

Perception

The process of organizing and interpreting sensory information, enabling us to recognize meaningful objects and events.

Difference Thresholds

The minimum difference between two stimuli required for detection 50% of the time.

Vestibular Sense

The sense of body movement and position, including the sense of balance; located in the semicircular canals.

Classical Conditioning

A type of learning in which one learns to link two or more stimuli and anticipate events.

Extinction

The diminishing of a conditioned response.

Skinner Box

An operant conditioning chamber, containing a bar or key that an animal can manipulate to obtain a food or water reinforcer; attached devices record the animal's rate of bar pressing or key pecking.

Observational Learning

Learning by observing others.

Teratogen

An agent, such as a chemical or virus, that can reach the embryo or fetus during prenatal development and cause harm.

Nature vs Nurture

The longstanding controversy over the relative contributions that genes and experience make to the development of psychological traits and behaviors.

Telegraphic Speech

Speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram -- using mostly nouns and verbs.

Availability Heuristic

A mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision.

Representativeness Heuristic

Judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes.

Overconfidence Phenomenon

The tendency to be more confident than correct.

Social Psychology

The theory that our behavior is affected by situational factors.

Social Facilitation

Improved performance on simple or well-learned tasks in the presence of others.

Cognitive Dissonance

The theory that we act to reduce the discomfort (dissonance) we feel when two of our thoughts (cognitions) are inconsistent.

Groupthink

The mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives.

Fundamental Attribution Error

The tendency for observers, when analyzing others' behavior, to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate the impact of personal disposition.

Achievement

What a person has learned, in contrast to a person's potential ability.

Aptitude

A test designed to predict a person's future performance.

Crystallized Intelligence

Our accumulated knowledge and verbal skills; tends to increase with age.

Motivation

A need or desire that energizes and directs behavior.

Learned Helplessness

The hopelessness and passive resignation an animal or human learns when unable to avoid repeated aversive events.

Disorders

A syndrome marked by a clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior.

Negative stigmas associated with mental health disorders.

Dangers of Diagnostic Labeling

Client-Centered Therapy

A humanistic therapy, developed by Carl Rogers, in which the therapist uses techniques such as active listening within a genuine, accepting, empathic environment to facilitate clients’ growth.

Psychiatrist

A branch of medicine dealing with psychological disorders; practiced by physicians who sometimes provide medical (for example, drug) treatments as well as psychological therapy.

Psychopharmacology

The study of the effects of drugs on mind and behavior.

DSM-V

The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition; a widely used system for classifying psychological disorders.

Clinical Psychologists

Therapists who hold a doctorate (Ph.D.) in psychology.

Exposure Therapy

Behavior therapy techniques, such as systematic desensitization and virtual reality exposure therapy, that treat anxieties by exposing people (in imagination or actual situations) to the things they fear and avoid.

Systematic Desensitization

A type of exposure therapy that associates a pleasant relaxed state with gradually increasing anxiety-triggering stimuli. Commonly used to treat phobias.

Psychoanalytic Perspective

Sigmund Freud's theory of personality; also, a therapeutic technique that attempts to provide insight into thoughts and actions by exposing and interpreting unconscious motives and conflicts.

Big Five Personality Traits

A system for assessing traits using five dimensions: conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness, and extraversion.