Unit 0: Modules 2-8 Scientific Foundations of Psychology

What is cognitive psychology?

the study of mental processes, such as occur when we perceive, learn, remember, think, communicate, and solve problems and how emotion interact in anxiety, depression, and other disorders

What is cognitive neuroscience?

the interdisciplinary study of the brain activity linked with cognition (including perception, thinking, memory, and language) studying brain activity underlying mental activity

How is psychology defined today?

the science of behavior and mental processes

Describe the nature-nurture issue.

long-standing controversy over the relative contributions that genes and experiences make to the development of psychological traits and behaviors

What is natural selection, and who pioneered this idea?

the principle that inherited traits that better enable an organism to survive and reproduce in a particular environment will (in competition with other trait variations) most likely be passed on to succeeding generations; Charles Darwin

What is culture?

enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, values, and traditions shared by a group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next

What is positive psychology?

scientific study of human flourishing, with goals of discovering and promoting strengths and virtues that help individuals and communities thrive; Martin Seligman

What is the biopsychosocial approach?

an integrated approach that incorporates biological, psychological, and social-cultural viewpoints; incorporates three viewpoints to offer a more complete picture of any given behavior or mental process

What is behavioral psychology?

scientific study of observable behavior and its explanation by principles of learning

What is biological psychology?

scientific study of links between biology (genetic, neural, hormonal) and psychological processes

What is psychodynamic psychology?

branch of psychology that studies how unconscious drives and conflicts influence behavior and uses that info to treat people with psychological disordersW

What is socio-cultural psychology?

study of how situations and cultures affect our behavior and thinking

What is the behavioral perspective?

how we learn observable responses

What is the biological perspective?

how the body and brain enable emotions, memories, and sensory experiences; how our genes and environment influence individual differences

What is the cognitive perspective?

how we encode, process, store, and retrieve information

What is evolutionary psychology?

how the natural selection of traits has promoted the survival of genes

What is humanistic psychology?

how we achieve personal growth and self-fulfillment

What is the psychodynamic perspective?

how behavior springs from unconscious drives and conflicts

What is the social-cultural perspective?

how behavior and thinking vary across situations and cultures

How does psychology influence modern culutre?

transforms and alters the way people think and act

What is hindsight bias?

the tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that one would have foreseen it (knew it all along)

What is overconfidence?

we tend to think we know more than we do; we tend to be more confident than correct; we overestimate the value of common sense thinking and accuracy of our beliefs/judgements

What is perceiving order in random events?

we have a built-in eagerness to make sense of our world; even in random data, we find patterns

What is the foundation of all science?

scientific attitude that combines curiosity, skepticism, and humility, armed withe the scientific method

What is a theory?

an explanation using an integrated set of principles that organizes observations and predicts behaviors or events; summarizes and simplifies; produces testable predictions

What is a hypothesis?

a testable prediction, often implied by a theory; such predictions specified what results would support the theory and what results would disconfirm it

What is an operational definition?

carefully worded statement of the exact procedures (operations) used in a research study

What is replication?

repeating the essence of a research study, usually with different participants in different situations, to see whether the basic finding can be reproduced. if they get similar results, confidence in the finding’s reliablilty grows

What is a case study?

descriptive technique in which 1 individual or group is studies in-depth in the hope of revealing universal principles; in-depth analysis

What is naturalistic observation?

descriptive technique of observing and recording behavior in naturally occurring situations without trying to manipulate or control the situation

What is a survey?

descriptive technique for obtaining self-reported attitudes or behaviors of a particular group

What is sampling bias?

flawed sampling process that produces an unrepresentative sample

What is the population in research?

all those in a group being studied, from which samples may be drawn

What is a random sample/selection?

sample that fairly represents a population because each member has an equal chance of inclusion

Describing behavior is the first step to ____ ___

predicting it

What is correlation?

measure of the extent to which two factors vary together, and thus how well either factor predicts the other; reveals relationships but doesn’t explain them

What is a correlation coefficient?

a statistic index of the relationship between two things (from -1 to 1) that reveals the extent to which two things relate

What are variables when discussing correlation?

anything that can vary and is feasible and ethical to measure

What are scatter plots?

graphed cluster of dots, each representing values of two variables

What is meant by positive correlation?

two sets of info tend to rise or fall together

What is meant by a negative correlation?

two sets of info relating inversely

What is meant by regression toward the mean?

tendency for extreme or unusual scores or events to fall back toward the average; average are more typical than extreme results

What is an experimental group?

in an experiment, the group exposed to treatment, that is, to one version of the independent variable

What is an experiment?

research method in which an investigator manipulates 1+ factors to observe the effect on some behavior or mental process

What is a control group?

in an experiment, group not exposed to treatment; contrasts with the experimental group and serves as comparison for evaluating the effect of the treatment

What is random assigment?

assigning participants to experimental and control groups by chance, thus decreasing preexisting differences between groups

What is a double-blind procedure?

experimental procedure in which both research participants and research staff are ignorant about whether the research participants have received the treatment or a placebo; neither the participants or the researchers can bias the results

What is the placebo effect?

experimental results caused by expectation alone

What is an independent variable?

in an experiment, the factor that is manipulated

What is a dependent variable?

in an experiment, the outcome that is measured

What is a confounding variable?

factor other than the factor being studied that might influence a study’s results

Whatis validity?

the extent to which a test or an experiment measures or predicts what it is supposed to do; testing what is supposed to be tested

What does the experimenter intend in a laboratory environment?

to be simplified reality, one that simulates and controls important features of everyday life; lets psychologists recreate psychological forces under controlled conditions

What two issues emerge when debating if it is morally acceptable to use animals in research?

whether it is right to place the well-being of humans above other animal and what safeguards should protect the well-being of animals in research

What are the four main ethics codes when working with humans?

obtain potential participants’ informed consent

protect participants from greater than usual harm and discomfort

keep information about the individuals confidential

fully debrief people

What are descriptive statistcs?

numerical data used to measure and describe characteristics of groups

What is a histogram?

bar graph depicting a frequency distribution

What is the mode?

most frequently occurring score(s) in a distribution

What is the mean?

arithmetic average of a distribution obtained by sum of scores/ # of scores

What is the median?

middle score in a distribution

What is a skewed distribution?

representation of scores that lack symmetry over the average value

What is meant by the amount of variation in the data?

how similar or diverse the scores are

What type of variability is more reliable, high or low?

low variability

What is the range?

difference of the highest and lowest scores in a distribution

What is the standard deviation?

computed measure of how much scores vary around the mean score

What are inferential statistics?

numerical data that allow one to generalize— to infer from sample data the probability of something being true of a population

What is statistical significance?

statistical statement of how likely it is that an obtained result occurred by chance; not making much of a finding unless the odds of it occurring by chance, if no real effect exists, are less than 5%