PSY200 Final Exam Vocab Review

Adherence

In health, it is the ability of a patient to maintain a health behavior prescribed by a physician. This might include taking medication as prescribed, exercising more, or eating less high-fat food.

Behavioral medicine

A field similar to health psychology that integrates psychological factors (e.g., emotion, behavior, cognition, and social factors) in the treatment of disease. This applied field includes clinical areas of study, such as occupational therapy, hypnosis, rehabilitation or medicine, and preventative medicine.

Biofeedback

The process by which physiological signals, not normally available to human perception, are transformed into easy-to-understand graphs or numbers. Individuals can then use this information to try to change bodily functioning (e.g., lower blood pressure, reduce muscle tension).

Biomedical Model of Health

A reductionist model that posits that ill health is a result of a deviation from normal function, which is explained by the presence of pathogens, injury, or genetic abnormality.

Biopsychosocial Model of Health

An approach to studying health and human function that posits the importance of biological, psychological, and social (or environmental) processes.

Chronic disease

A health condition that persists over time, typically for periods longer than three months (e.g., HIV, asthma, diabetes).

Control

Feeling like you have the power to change your environment or behavior if you need or want to.

Emotion-focused coping

Coping strategy aimed at reducing the negative emotions associated with a stressful event.

General Adaptation Syndrome

A three-phase model of stress, which includes a mobilization of physiological resources phase, a coping phase, and an exhaustion phase (i.e., when an organism fails to cope with the stress adequately and depletes its resources).

Health

According to the World Health Organization, it is a complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

Health behavior

Any behavior that is related to health—either good or bad.

Hostility

An experience or trait with cognitive, behavioral, and emotional components. It often includes cynical thoughts, feelings of emotion, and aggressive behavior.

Mind–body connection

The idea that our emotions and thoughts can affect how our body functions.

Problem-focused coping

A set of coping strategies aimed at improving or changing stressful situations.

Psychoneuroimmunology

A field of study examining the relationship among psychology, brain function, and immune function.

Psychosomatic medicine

An interdisciplinary field of study that focuses on how biological, psychological, and social processes contribute to physiological changes in the body and health over time.

Resilience

The ability to “bounce back” from negative situations (e.g., illness, stress) to normal functioning or to simply not show poor outcomes in the face of adversity. In some cases, resilience may lead to better functioning following the negative experience (e.g., post-traumatic growth).

Self-efficacy

The belief that one can perform adequately in a specific situation.

Social integration

The size of your social network, or number of social roles (e.g., son, sister, student, employee, team member).

Social support

The perception or actuality that we have a social network that can help us in times of need and provide us with a variety of useful resources (e.g., advice, love, money).

Stress

A pattern of physical and psychological responses in an organism after it perceives a threatening event that disturbs its homeostasis and taxes its abilities to cope with the event.

Stressor

An event or stimulus that induces feelings of stress.

Type A Behavior

Characterized by impatience, competitiveness, neuroticism, hostility, and anger.

Type B Behavior

Represented by less competitive, aggressive, and hostile behavior patterns.

Ambulatory assessment

An overarching term to describe methodologies that assess the behavior, physiology, experience, and environments of humans in naturalistic settings.

Daily Diary method

A methodology where participants complete a questionnaire about their thoughts, feelings, and behavior of the day at the end of the day.

Day reconstruction method (DRM)

A methodology where participants describe their experiences and behavior of a given day retrospectively upon a systematic reconstruction on the following day.

Ecological momentary assessment

An overarching term to describe methodologies that repeatedly sample participants’ real-world experiences, behavior, and physiology in real time.

Ecological validity

The degree to which a study finding has been obtained under conditions that are typical for what happens in everyday life.

Electronically activated recorder (EAR)

A methodology where participants wear a small, portable audio recorder that intermittently records snippets of ambient sounds around them.

Experience-sampling method

A methodology where participants report on their momentary thoughts, feelings, and behaviors at different points in time over the course of a day.

External validity

The degree to which a finding generalizes from the specific sample and context of a study to some larger population and broader settings.

Full-cycle psychology

A scientific approach whereby researchers start with an observational field study to identify an effect in the real world, follow up with laboratory experimentation to verify the effect and isolate the causal mechanisms, and return to field research to corroborate their experimental findings.

Generalize

The ability to arrive at broad conclusions based on a smaller sample of observations. For these conclusions to be true the sample should accurately represent the larger population from which it is drawn.

Internal validity

The degree to which a cause-effect relationship between two variables has been unambiguously established.

Linguistic inquiry and word count

A quantitative text analysis methodology that automatically extracts grammatical and psychological information from a text by counting word frequencies.

Lived day analysis

A methodology where a research team follows an individual around with a video camera to objectively document a person’s daily life as it is lived.

White coat hypertension

A phenomenon in which patients exhibit elevated blood pressure in the hospital or doctor’s office but not in their everyday lives.

Confounds

Factors that undermine the ability to draw causal inferences from an experiment.

Correlation

Measures the association between two variables, or how they go together.

Dependent variable

The variable the researcher measures but does not manipulate in an experiment.

Independent variable

The variable the researcher manipulates and controls in an experiment.

Longitudinal study

A study that follows the same group of individuals over time.

Operational definitions

How researchers specifically measure a concept.

Participant demand

When participants behave in a way that they think the experimenter wants them to behave.

Quasi-experimental design

An experiment that does not require random assignment to conditions.

Random assignment

Assigning participants to receive different conditions of an experiment by chance.

Collective efficacy

The shared beliefs among members of a group about the group’s ability to effectively perform the tasks needed to attain a valued goal.

Imaginal performances

When imagining yourself doing well increases self-efficacy.

Performance experiences

When past successes or failures lead to changes in self-efficacy.

Self-regulation

The complex process through which people control their thoughts, emotions, and actions.

Self-report measure

A type of questionnaire in which participants answer questions whose answers correspond to numerical values that can be added to create an overall index of some construct.

Task-specific measures of self-efficacy

Measures that ask about self-efficacy beliefs for a particular task (e.g., athletic self-efficacy, academic self-efficacy).

Verbal persuasion

When trusted people (friends, family, experts) influence your self-efficacy for better or worse by either encouraging or discouraging you about your ability to succeed.

Vicarious performances

When seeing other people succeed or fail leads to changes in self-efficacy.

Cause-and-effect

Related to whether we say one variable is causing changes in the other variable, versus other variables that may be related to these two variables.

Confidence interval

An interval of plausible values for a population parameter; the interval of values within the margin of error of a statistic.

Distribution

The pattern of variation in data.

Margin of error

The expected amount of random variation in a statistic; often defined for 95% confidence level.

Parameter

A numerical result summarizing a population (e.g., mean, proportion).

Population

A larger collection of individuals that we would like to generalize our results to.

P-value

The probability of observing a particular outcome in a sample, or more extreme, under a conjecture about the larger population or process.

Random assignment

Using a probability-based method to divide a sample into treatment groups.

Random sampling

Using a probability-based method to select a subset of individuals for the sample from the population.

Sample

The collection of individuals on which we collect data.

Statistic

A numerical result computed from a sample (e.g., mean, proportion).

Statistical significance

A result is statistically significant if it is unlikely to arise by chance alone.

3 parts of general adoption syndrome

resourcefulness, coping, exhaustion