Psychology Lecture Notes: Consciousness, Memory, Cognition, Learning, Emotion, Motivation, and Lifespan Development

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the core psychological concepts, principles, and theories presented throughout the lecture notes.

Consciousness

Personal awareness of mental activities, internal sensations, and external environment.

Phenomenology

How things seem to the conscious person.

Intentionality

The property of consciousness being directed toward an object.

Unity

The basic property of consciousness characterized by resistance to division.

Selectivity

The capacity of consciousness to include some objects but not others, exemplified by the cocktail party phenomenon.

Transience

The property of consciousness describing its tendency to change.

Minimal Consciousness

A low-level kind of sensory awareness and responsiveness.

Full Consciousness

A consciousness of oneself, such as thinking about the act of driving while driving a car.

Self-Consciousness

A distinct level of consciousness where the self is treated as an object, demonstrated by mirror self-recognition in toddlers and monkeys.

Expectancy Theory

The theory that alcohol effects can be produced by people's expectations of how alcohol will influence them in particular situations.

Alcohol Myopia

A condition that results when alcohol hampers attention, leading people to respond in simple ways to complex situations.

REM Sleep

A stage of sleep characterized by rapid eye movement and a high level of brain activity where dreaming occurs most often.

Activation-Synthesis Model

The dream theory stating that dreams are produced when the brain attempts to make sense of random neural activity during sleep.

Neurocognitive Theory

The dream theory stating that dreams are simulations created by the same brain default network that supports imagination and daydreaming when we are awake.

Threat-Simulation Theory

An evolutionary theory proposing that the purpose of dreams is to simulate threatening situations and practice escape and avoidance.

Parasomnias

Undesired arousal or actions during sleep or sleep transitions, characterized by a lack of conscious awareness and amnesia.

Posthypnotic Amnesia

The failure to retrieve memories following hypnotic suggestions.

Hypnotic Analgesia

The reduction of pain through hypnosis in people who are susceptible to hypnosis.

Iconic Memory

The fast-decaying sensory store of visual information.

Echoic Memory

The fast-decaying sensory store of auditory information.

Serial Position Effect

The phenomenon where the first and last items in a series are more likely to be recalled than the middle items.

Anterograde Amnesia

The inability to transfer new information from the short-term store into the long-term store.

Consolidation

The process by which memories become stable in the brain through recalling, thinking about, and talking about a memory.

Reconsolidation

The process where recalled memories become vulnerable to disruption and require stabilizing again.

Encoding Specificity Principle

The principle stating that an effective reminder helps re-create the specific way in which information was initially encoded.

Explicit Memory

The act of consciously or intentionally retrieving past experiences.

Implicit Memory

The influence of past experiences on later behavior without an effort to remember them or awareness of the recollection.

Suggestibility

The tendency to incorporate misleading information from external sources into personal recollections.

Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis

The hypothesis proposed by Benjamin Whorf that language shapes the nature of thought.

Algorithm

A step-by-step procedure that, when followed correctly, produces a solution.

Heuristic

A general problem-solving shortcut or rule of thumb that saves time and mental effort but does not guarantee a correct solution.

Functional Fixedness

A type of mental set that occurs when we have difficulty seeing an object as useful for another action.

Rational Choice Theory

The classical view that decisions are made by determining how likely something is to happen, judging the value of the outcome, and multiplying the two.

Sunk-Cost Fallacy

The tendency for people to make decisions about a current situation based on what they have already invested.

Illusion of Explanatory Depth

An illusion that occurs when people overestimate the depth of their understanding, potentially undermining reasoning and truth assessment.

Conditioned Taste Aversions

An evolutionary-influenced form of classical conditioning that requires only one pairing, allows hours between stimuli, and demonstrates biological preparedness.

Law of Effect

Thorndike's principle that responses followed by a satisfying effect become strengthened and more likely to recur, and vice versa.

Chaining

An operant conditioning technique in which a complex behavioral sequence is learned.

Learned Helplessness

Passive behavior produced by exposure to inescapable, uncontrollable aversive events, based on the cognitive expectation that behavior has no effect on the environment.

Focalism

Overestimating the emotional impact of a future event because of focusing on that event and neglecting everything else in life.

Immune Neglect

Overestimating future happiness because of underestimating our ability to cope with negative events.

Alexithymia

A cluster of cognitive and emotional processing deficits observed by Stifneos and Nemiah, defined as an inability to describe feelings or differentiate among them.

James-Lange Theory

The theory that stimuli trigger activity in the ANS, which in turn produces an emotional experience in the brain.

Cannon-Bard Theory

The theory that stimuli simultaneously trigger activity in the ANS and emotional experience in the brain.

Two-Factor Theory

The theory that stimuli trigger a general state of physiological arousal, which is then interpreted as a specific emotion depending on the occasion.

Display Rules

Norms for the control of appropriate emotional expression, using techniques like intensification, deintensification, masking, and neutralizing.

Self-Efficacy

A subjective, self-constructed judgment of belief in your ability to accomplish a specific task with your skills.

Terror Management Theory

A theory developed by Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and Solomon (rooted in Ernest Becker's work) studying awareness of death and cultural buffers against it.

Teratogen

Any substance that can cause or raise the risk for a birth defect in a baby during the prenatal period.

Cephalocaudal Rule

The top-bottom motor development rule stating that motor skills tend to emerge in sequence from the head to the feet.

Proximodial Rule

The inside-out motor development rule stating that motor skills tend to emerge in sequence from the center to the periphery.

Scale Error

An error that occurs when a child misperceives the size relationship between a real-world object and its miniature version.

Object Permanence

The understanding that objects continue to exist even when they are out of sight or not visible.

Assimilation

The process by which infants apply their existing schemas in novel situations.

Accommodation

The process by which infants revise their existing schemas considering new information.

Egocentrism

Difficulty taking another person's perspective, observed during Piaget's preoperational stage.

Conservation

The notion that an object's quantitative properties do not vary despite changes in its appearance.

Temperament

A biologically based pattern of attentional and emotional reactivity that is variable and stable.

Socioemotional Selectivity Theory

The lifespan theory stating that younger adults focus on future-pertinent information, whereas older adults focus on positive emotional satisfaction in the present.