Psychology Review: Learning, Memory, Development, Social, Gender, Personality, I/O, Disorders, and Therapies

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the key terms, definitions, and psychological concepts from the lecture notes on Learning, Memory, Development, Social Psychology, Gender, Personality, I/O Psychology, Psychological Disorders, and Therapies.

Applied behavioral analysis (AKA behavior modification)

The use of operant conditioning principles to change human behavior.

Classical conditioning

Learning process in which a neutral stimulus becomes associated with an innately meaningful stimulus and acquires the capacity to elicit a similar response.

Operant conditioning (AKA instrumental conditioning)

A form of associative learning in which the consequences of a behavior change the probability of the behavior’s recurrence.

Discrimination

The process of learning to respond to certain stimuli and not others (classical). Responding appropriately to stimuli that signal that a behavior will or will not be reinforced (operant).

Extinction

The weakening of the conditioned response when the unconditioned stimulus is absent (classical). Decreases in the frequency of a behavior when the behavior is no longer reinforced (operant).

Generalization

The tendency of a new stimulus that is similar to the original conditioned stimulus to elicit a response that is similar to the conditioned response (classical). Performing a reinforced behavior in a different situation (operant).

Habituation

Decreased responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated presentations.

Latent learning (AKA implicit learning)

Unreinforced learning that is not immediately reflected in behavior.

Learned helplessness

An organism’s learning through experience with negative stimuli that it has no control over negative outcomes.

Observational learning

Learning that involves observing and imitating another’s behavior.

Schedules of reinforcement

Specific patterns that determine when a behavior will be reinforced.

Spontaneous recovery

The process in classical conditioning by which a conditioned response can recur after a time delay, without further conditioning.

Shaping

Rewarding successive approximations of a desired behavior.

Anterograde amnesia

A memory disorder that affects the retention of new information and events.

Episodic memory

The retention of information about the where, when, and what of life’s happenings—that is, how individuals remember life’s episodes.

Encoding

The first step in memory; the process by which information gets into memory storage.

Explicit memory (AKA declarative memory)

The conscious recollection of information, such as specific facts or events and, at least in humans, information that can be verbally communicated.

Implicit memory (AKA nondeclarative memory)

Memory in which behavior is affected by prior experience without a conscious recollection of that experience.

Flashbulb memory

The memory of emotionally significant events that people often recall with more accuracy and vivid imagery than everyday events.

Interference theory

The theory that people forget not because memories are lost from storage but because other information gets in the way of what they want to remember.

Priming

The activation of information that people already have in storage to help them remember new information better and faster.

Procedural memory

Memory for skills.

Schema

A preexisting mental concept or framework that helps people to organize and interpret information. Schemas from prior encounters with the environment influence the way individuals encode, make inferences about, and retrieve information.

Semantic memory

A person’s knowledge about the world, including their areas of expertise; general knowledge, such as of things learned in school; and everyday knowledge.

Sensory memory

Memory system that involves holding information from the world in its original sensory form for only an instant, not much longer than the brief time it is exposed to the visual, auditory, and other senses.

Serial position effect

The tendency to recall the items at the beginning and end of a list more readily than those in the middle.

Working memory

A combination of components, including short-term memory and attention, that allow individuals to hold information temporarily as they perform cognitive tasks; a kind of mental workbench on which the brain manipulates and assembles information to guide understanding, decision making, and problem solving.

Assimilation

An individual’s incorporation of new information into existing knowledge.

Accommodation

An individual’s adjustment of schemas to include new information.

Authoritarian parenting

A restrictive, punitive style in which the parent exhorts the child to follow the parent’s directions.

Authoritative parenting

A parenting style that encourages the child to be independent but still places limits and controls on behavior.

Neglectful parenting

A parenting style characterized by a lack of parental involvement in the child’s life.

Permissive parenting

A parenting style characterized by the placement of few limits on the child’s behavior.

Sensorimotor stage

Piaget’s first stage of cognitive development, lasting from birth to about $2$ years of age, during which infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences with motor (physical) actions.

Preoperational stage

Piaget’s second stage of cognitive development, lasting from about $2$ to $7$ years of age, during which thought is more symbolic than sensorimotor thought.

Concrete operational stage

Piaget’s third stage of cognitive development, lasting from about $7$ to $11$ years of age, during which the individual uses operations and replaces intuitive reasoning with logical reasoning in concrete situations.

Formal operational stage

Piaget’s fourth stage of cognitive development, which begins at $11$ to $15$ years of age and continues through the adult years; it features thinking about things that are not concrete, making predictions, and using logic to come up with hypotheses about the future.

Temperament

An individual’s behavioral style and characteristic ways of responding.

Executive function

Higher-order, complex cognitive processes, including thinking, planning, and problem solving.

Secure attachment

The ways that infants use their caregiver, usually their mother, as a secure base from which to explore the environment.

Insecure attachment

Infants do not use the caregiver as a secure base from which to explore; instead, they experience their relationship with the caregiver as unstable and unreliable. The two types of insecure attachment are avoidant and anxious/ambivalent (also called preoccupied).

Object permanence

Piaget’s term for the crucial accomplishment of understanding that objects and events continue to exist even when they cannot directly be seen, heard, or touched.

Attribution theory

The view that people are motivated to discover the underlying causes of behavior as part of their effort to make sense of the behavior.

Bystander effect

The tendency of an individual who observes an emergency to help less when other people are present than when the observer is alone.

Cognitive dissonance

An individual’s psychological discomfort (dissonance) caused by having two inconsistent thoughts.

Conformity

A change in a person’s behavior to coincide more closely with a group standard.

Deindividuation

The reduction in personal identity and erosion of the sense of personal responsibility when one is part of a group.

Elaboration likelihood model

Theory identifying two ways to persuade: a central route and a peripheral route.

Fundamental attribution error

Observers’ overestimation of the importance of internal traits and underestimation of the importance of external situations when they seek explanations of an actor’s behavior.

Mere exposure effect

The phenomenon that the more individuals encounter someone or something, the more probable it is that they will start liking the person or thing even if they do not realize they have seen it before.

Representativeness heuristic

The tendency to make judgments about group membership based on physical appearance or the match between a person and one’s stereotype of a group rather than on available base rate information.

Self-fulfilling prophecy

Social expectations that cause an individual to act in such a way that expectations are realized.

Social contagion

Imitative behavior involving the spread of actions, emotions, and ideas.

Social identity theory

Tajfel’s theory that social identity, based on group membership, is a crucial part of self-image and a valuable source of positive feelings about oneself.

Stereotype threat

An individual’s fast-acting, self-fulfilling fear of being judged based on a negative stereotype about their group.

Gender identity

A person’s deeply held personal sense of being a boy/man, girl/woman, both, neither, or fluid.

Gender roles

Roles that reflect the expectations for how people should think, act, and feel, depending on the gender they are perceived to be.

Social role theory

Eagly’s theory of gender development that, while acknowledging the physical differences between men and women, argues that these differences color social expectations and create social structures that limit opportunities for both genders.

Sex chromosomes

In humans, the pair of genes (XX or XY) that can classify a person as female or male.

Sexual orientation

The direction of an individual’s erotic interests.

Gender similarities hypothesis

Hyde’s proposition that men and women (and boys and girls) are much more similar than they are different.

Big five factors of personality

The five broad traits that are thought to describe the main dimensions of personality: neuroticism (emotional instability), extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

Projective test

A personality assessment test that presents individuals with an ambiguous stimulus and asks them to describe it or tell a story about it—to project their own meaning onto the stimulus.

Self-efficacy

The belief that one can accomplish a given goal or task and produce positive change.

Unconditional positive regard

Rogers’s construct referring to the individual’s need to be accepted, valued, and treated positively regardless of the person’s behavior.

Self-report test

A method of measuring personality characteristics that directly asks people whether specific items describe their personality traits; also called an objective test or an inventory.

Face validity

The extent to which a test item appears to fit the particular trait it is measuring.

MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory)

The most widely used and researched empirically keyed self-report personality test.

Empirically keyed test

A type of self-report test that presents many questionnaire items to two groups that are known to be different in some central way.

Hawthorne effect

The tendency of individuals to perform better simply because of being singled out and made to feel important.

Flow

The optimal experience of a match between one’s skills and the challenge of a task.

Continuance commitment

A kind of job commitment deriving from the employee’s perception that leaving the organization would be too costly, both economically and socially.

Halo effect

A bias, common in performance appraisals, that occurs when a rater gives an employee the same rating on all of the items being evaluated, even though the individual varies across the dimensions being assessed.

Performance appraisal

The evaluation of a person’s success at meeting an organization’s goals.

Strengths-based management

A management style emphasizing that maximizing an employee’s existing strengths is much easier than trying to build such attributes from the ground up.

Transactional leader

An individual in a leadership capacity who emphasizes the exchange relationship between the worker and the leader and who applies the principle that a good job should be rewarded.

DSM-5-TR

The text revision of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders;the major classification of psychological disorders in the United States.

Medical model

The view that psychological disorders are medical diseases with a biological origin.

Comorbidity

When two or more disorders are experienced at the same time.

Hallucinations

Sensory experiences that occur in the absence of real stimuli.

Delusions

False, unusual, and sometimes magical beliefs that are not part of an individual’s culture.

Major depressive disorder (MDD)

Psychological disorder involving a significant depressive episode and depressed characteristics, such as lethargy and hopelessness, for at least $2$ weeks.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)

Psychological disorder in which the individual has anxiety-provoking thoughts that will not go away and/or urges to perform repetitive, ritualistic behaviors to prevent or produce some future situation.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

Psychological disorder that develops through exposure to a traumatic event, a severely oppressive situation, physical or emotional abuse, or a natural or an unnatural disaster.

Generalized anxiety disorder

An anxiety disorder marked by persistent anxiety for at least $6$ months and in which the individual is unable to specify the reasons for the anxiety.

Borderline personality disorder (BPD)

Psychological disorder characterized by a pervasive pattern of instability in interpersonal relationships, self-image, and emotions and by marked impulsivity beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts.

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)

A common psychological disorder in which the individual exhibits one or more of the following: inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity.

Autism spectrum disorder

A neurodevelopmental disorder involving persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across a variety of settings as well as restrictive repetitive behaviors, interests, and activities.

Vulnerability-stress hypothesis or diathesis-stress model (AKA diathesis-stress model)

Theory suggesting that preexisting conditions—such as genetic characteristics, personality dispositions, or experiences—may put a person at risk of developing a psychological disorder.

Cognitive-behavior therapy

A therapy that combines cognitive therapy and behavior therapy with the goal of developing self-efficacy.

Cultural humility

Taking a humble and respectful attitude toward those from other cultures and acknowledging that one cannot know all there is to know about another person’s cultural experience.

Evidence-based practice

Integration of the best available research with clinical expertise in the context of client characteristics, culture, and preferences.

Systematic desensitization

A method of behavior therapy that treats anxiety by teaching the client to associate deep relaxation with increasingly intense anxiety-producing situations.

Therapeutic alliance

The relationship between the therapist and client; an important element of successful psychotherapy.

Electroconvulsive therapy

A treatment sometimes used for depression that sets off a seizure in the brain.