Foundations of Psychology and Health Research Methods

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering key concepts from Foundations of Psychology and Health Research Methods, including theoretical perspectives, cognitive science, learning, memory, statistics, qualitative analysis, and research ethics.

Structuralism

An early psychological perspective associated with Edward Titchener that sought to analyze and identify the basic constituent elements of conscious experience using trained introspection.

Functionalism

An early school of psychology championed by William James that focused on understanding the purpose and adaptive function of mental processes and behavior in helping organisms survive in their environments.

Inclusive Fitness

An evolutionary principle defined as an individual's own direct reproductive success combined with their positive contribution to the reproductive success of genetically related individuals.

Phoneme

The smallest distinguishable and functional unit of speech sound in a given language.

Morpheme

The smallest unit of language that carries meaning, including root words, prefixes, and suffixes (e.g., 'un-' or '-ing').

Generative Grammar

Noam Chomsky's theoretical framework positing a finite system of innate linguistic rules that enables speakers to generate and comprehend an infinite number of novel sentences.

Broca's Aphasia

A language disorder caused by damage to the left frontal lobe resulting in slow, effortful, and non-fluent speech production, while language comprehension remains relatively intact.

Wernicke's Aphasia

A language disorder caused by temporal lobe damage characterized by fluent, effortless speech production that lacks coherent meaning, accompanied by severe deficits in language comprehension.

Theory of Mind

The cognitive capacity to recognize and understand that other people hold distinct thoughts, beliefs, desires, emotions, and intentions that differ from one's own.

Functional Fixedness

A cognitive bias in problem-solving involving a tendency to perceive an object solely in terms of its standard, familiar utility rather than considering alternative applications.

Availability Heuristic

A cognitive shortcut where an individual evaluates the frequency, probability, or likelihood of an event based on how readily relevant instances come to mind.

Representativeness Heuristic

A decision-making shortcut in which people judge the probability of an outcome by assessing its degree of similarity to a mental prototype, often neglecting baseline statistical rates.

WEIRD Sample

An acronym representing Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic populations; research overreliance on these groups restricts the cross-cultural generalizability of findings.

Extinction (Classical Conditioning)

The gradual reduction and eventual disappearance of a conditioned response ($\text{CR}$) when a conditioned stimulus ($\text{CS}$) is repeatedly presented without the unconditioned stimulus ($\text{US}$).

Spontaneous Recovery

The re-emergence of an extinguished conditioned response following a period of rest or delay without any further pairings of the conditioned and unconditioned stimuli.

Latent Inhibition

A classical conditioning phenomenon where prior non-reinforced pre-exposure to a neutral stimulus retards or slows the rate of subsequent conditioned learning to that cue.

Preparedness

The evolutionary predisposition that makes certain species biologically primed to form specific stimulus associations (e.g., taste aversions) much more readily than others.

Negative Reinforcement

An operant conditioning procedure that increases the future likelihood of a behavior by removing, terminating, or avoiding an unpleasant or aversive stimulus.

Latent Learning

Learning that takes place in the absence of explicit reinforcement or reward and remains unexpressed until an environmental contingency or incentive motivates its demonstration.

Chunking

The recoding or organizing of individual pieces of information into larger, familiar, and meaningful units, effectively expanding the functional capacity of short-term memory.

Misinformation Effect

A post-event memory distortion occurring when exposure to incorrect, misleading, or suggestive details compromises the accuracy of an individual's original recall.

Proactive Interference

A memory retrieval failure in which previously acquired knowledge or memories interfere with the acquisition and recall of newly learned material.

Retroactive Interference

A memory retrieval impairment wherein freshly encoded information blocks, overwrites, or compromises the access to older, previously stored memories.

Transduction

The biological process in which sensory receptors convert physical or chemical energy from the environment into electrochemical neural impulses.

Place Theory of Pitch

A theory of hearing stating that the perception of acoustic pitch is determined by the specific anatomical position along the basilar membrane in the cochlea that undergoes maximal displacement.

Sublimation

A psychodynamic defense mechanism whereby unconscious, socially unacceptable sexual or aggressive impulses are redirected into constructive, socially valued activities.

Reaction Formation

A psychodynamic defense mechanism wherein an individual defends against anxiety-provoking thoughts or impulses by adopting and outwardly demonstrating their exact opposite.

Self-Efficacy

Albert Bandura's concept denoting an individual's internal conviction in their personal capability to execute the actions required to produce specific performance attainments.

Self-Determination Theory

A motivational framework emphasizing that human growth, vitality, and intrinsic motivation require the ongoing fulfillment of three basic psychological needs: competence, autonomy, and relatedness.

Activation-Synthesis Theory

A neurobiological model of dreaming proposing that dreams represent the cerebral cortex's attempt to synthesize, structure, and interpret random bursts of neural activity generated by the brainstem during REM sleep.

Developmental Niche

A theoretical model conceptualizing child development within culture through three interacting subsystems: physical and social settings, cultural child-rearing customs, and parental ethnotheories.

Emic Perspective

An approach in cross-cultural psychology focused on understanding behavior, mental concepts, and cultural patterns from the internal viewpoint of a specific cultural community.

Etic Perspective

A cross-cultural psychological approach that examines and compares phenomena across distinct cultures using universal, culture-general criteria and frameworks.

Acculturation

The psychological, behavioral, and cultural changes that unfold when individuals or groups experience continuous, sustained contact with a culture different from their heritage background.

Paired-Samples t-Test

A parametric statistical procedure used to compare the means of two related conditions or repeated measures gathered from the same group of participants in a within-subjects design.

Independent-Groups t-Test

A parametric statistical test that evaluates whether the mean scores on a continuous dependent variable differ significantly between two unrelated, mutually exclusive groups.

Pearson's Correlation Coefficient ($r$)

A standardized parametric statistic bounded between $-1$ and $+1$ that evaluates the strength, magnitude, and direction of a linear relationship between two continuous variables.

Coefficient of Determination ($r^2$)

The square of Pearson's $r$ representing the proportion of variance shared or mutually accounted for between two linearly related variables.

Restriction of Range

A sampling phenomenon occurring when the observed variance of one or both variables is artificially truncated or constrained, resulting in a deflated correlation estimate.

Confidence Interval

A calculated interval estimate that, across repeated random sampling using the same procedure, encompasses the fixed true population parameter in a specified percentage (e.g., $95\%$) of constructions.

Cohen's $d$

A standardized effect size metric representing the mean difference between two conditions divided by the standard deviation, interpreted via guidelines of $0.20$ (small), $0.50$ (medium), and $0.80$ (large).

$p$-Value

The conditional probability of obtaining a test statistic at least as extreme as the observed value, assuming the null hypothesis ($H_0$) and test assumptions are true.

Type I Error

A statistical decision error involving the incorrect rejection of a true null hypothesis ($H_0$), generating a false positive outcome with probability set by alpha ($\alpha$).

Type II Error

A statistical error occurring when a test fails to reject a false null hypothesis ($H_0$), resulting in a false negative outcome with probability designated by beta ($\beta$).

Statistical Power

The probability of correctly rejecting a false null hypothesis for a given effect size, design, and alpha level, quantitatively expressed as $1 - \beta$.

Chi-Square Test of Goodness of Fit

A nonparametric statistical test assessing whether the observed frequency distribution across categories of a single nominal variable significantly deviates from expected counts under a theoretical model.

Chi-Square Test of Independence

A nonparametric test evaluating whether two categorical variables arranged in a contingency table possess a statistically significant systematic association in the population.

Odds Ratio ($\text{OR}$)

A comparative effect size measure calculated as the odds of an event in a primary interest group divided by the odds of that event in a comparison baseline group, where $\text{OR} = 1$ denotes equal odds.

Saturation

The methodological threshold in qualitative research at which additional data collection and iterative coding generate no new conceptual insights, themes, or properties.

Grounded Theory

An inductive qualitative research methodology in which theoretical models are iteratively developed and refined directly from ongoing comparative analysis of empirical data.

Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA)

A qualitative approach focused on detailed, in-depth exploration of how individuals make personal, psychological sense of major lived experiences.

Triangulation

A methodological strategy enhancing research rigour by cross-verifying findings across multiple data collection methods, theoretical lenses, investigators, or data sources.

Member Checking

A qualitative verification technique where researchers provide analytic accounts, interview transcripts, or interpreted themes back to participants to evaluate factual and interpretive authenticity.

Reflexivity

The explicit, continuous critical self-examination by qualitative researchers of how their personal values, socio-cultural background, and preconceptions influence the research process and findings.

Non-Maleficence

A foundational bioethical principle requiring researchers to prevent, minimize, and avoid inflicting unnecessary physical, psychological, legal, or social harms upon study participants.

Simpson's Paradox

A statistical anomaly where an association or trend observed within distinct individual subgroups disappears or reverses direction when the datasets are pooled together.

$p$-Hacking

The questionable practice of running numerous post-hoc statistical analyses, altering stopping criteria, or filtering data points until a non-significant result crosses the $p < .05$ threshold.

HARKing

An acronym for 'Hypothesizing After the Results are Known', which involves presenting an exploratory post-hoc hypothesis derived from observed data as if it were an a priori prediction.