AP PSYCHOLOGY VOCAB UNITS 12-14

Psychological Disorder

a syndrome marked by a clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior.

Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

a psychological disorder marked by the appearance by age 7 of one or more of three key symptoms; extreme inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity.

Medical Model

the concept that diseases, in this case psychological disorders, have physical causes that can be diagnosed, treated, and, in most cases, cured often through treatment in a hospital.

DSM-5

the American Psychiatric Association's

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition; a widely used system for classifying psychological disorders.

Anxiety Disorders

psychological disorders characterized by distressing, persistent anxiety or maladaptive behaviors that reduce anxiety.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder

an anxiety disorder in which a person is continually tense, apprehensive, and in a state of autonomic nervous system arousal.

Panic Disorder

an anxiety disorder marked by unpredictable minutes-long episodes of intense dread in which a person experiences terror and accompanying chest pain, choking, or other frightening sensations. Often followed by worry over a possible next attack.

Phobia

an anxiety disorder marked by a persistent, irrational fear and avoidance of a specific object, activity, or situation.

Social Anxiety Disorder

intense fear of social situations, leading to avoidance of such. (Formerly called social phobia)

Agoraphobia

fear or avoidance of situations, such as crowds or wide open spaces, where one has felt loss of control and panic.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

a disorder characterized by unwanted repetitive thoughts (obsessions) and/or actions (compulsions).

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

a disorder characterized by haunting memories, nightmares, social withdrawal, jumpy anxiety, numbness of feeling, and/or insomnia that lingers for four weeks or more after a traumatic experience.

Post-Traumatic Growth

positive psychological changes as a result of struggling with extremely challenging circumstances and life crises.

Mood Disorders

psychological disorders characterized by emotional extremes.

Major Depressive Disorder

a mood disorder in which a person experiences, in the absence of drugs or a another medical condition, two or more weeks with five or more symptoms, at least one of which must be either (1) depressed mood, or (2) lost of interest or pleasure.

Mania

a mood disorder marked by a hyperactive, wildly optimistic state.

Bipolar Disorder

a mood disorder in which a person alternates between the hopelessness and lethargy of depression and the overexcited state of mania. (formerly called manic- depressive disorder.)

Rumination

compulsive fretting; overthinking about our problems and their causes.

Schizophrenia

a group of severe disorders characterized by delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, and/or diminished or inappropriate emotional expression.

Psychosis

a psychological disorder in which a person loses contact with reality, experiencing irrational ideas and distorted perceptions.

Delusions

false beliefs, often of persecution or grandeur, that may accompany psychotic disorders.

Hallucinations

false sensory experience, such as seeing something in the absence of an external visual stimulus.

Somatic Symptom Disorder

psychological disorder in which the symptoms take a somatic (bodily) form without apparent physical cause.

Conversion Disorder

a disorder in which a person experiences very specific genuine physical symptoms for which no psychological basis can be found. (Also called functional neurological symptom disorder)

Illness Anxiety Disorder

a disorder in which a person interprets normal physical sensations as symptoms of the disease. (Formerly called hypochondriasis)

Dissociative Disorders

disorders in which conscious awareness becomes separated (dissociated) from previous memories, thoughts, and feelings.

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)

a rare dissociative disorder in which a person exhibits two or more distinct and alternating personalities. Formerly called multiple personality disorder.

Anorexia Nervosa

an eating disorder in which a person (usually an adolescent female) maintains a starvation diet despite being significantly (15 percent or more) underweight.

Bulimia Nervosa

an eating disorder in which a person alternates binge eating (usually of high- calorie foods) with purging (by vomiting or laxative use), excessive exercise, or fasting.

Binge-Eating Disorder

significant binge-eating episodes, followed by distress, disgust, or guilt, but without the compensatory purging, fasting, or excessive exercise that marks bulimia nervosa.

Personality Disorders

psychological disorders characterized by inflexible and enduring behavior patterns that impair social functioning.

Antisocial Personality Disorder

a personality disorder in which a person (usually a man) exhibits a lack of conscience for wrongdoing, even toward friends and family members. May be aggressive and ruthless or a clever con artist.

Psychotherapy

treatment involving psychological techniques; consists of interactions between a trained therapist and someone seeking to overcome psychological difficulties or achieve personal growth.

Biomedical Therapy

prescribed medications or medical procedures that act directly on the patient's physiology.

Eclectic Approach

an approach to psychotherapy that, depending on the client's problems, uses techniques from various forms of therapy.

Psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud's therapeutic technique. Freud believed the patient's free associations, resistances, dreams, and transferences - and the therapist's interpretations of them - released previously repressed feelings, allowing the patient to gain self-insight.

Resistance

in psychoanalysis, the blocking from consciousness of anxiety-laden material.

Interpretation

in psychoanalysis, the analyst's noting supposed dream meanings, resistances, and other significant behaviors and events in order to promote insight.

Transference

in psychoanalysis, the patient's transfer to the analyst of emotions linked with other relationships (such as love or hatred for a parent).

Psychodynamic Therapy

therapy deriving from the psychoanalytic tradition that views individuals as responding to unconscious forces and childhood experiences, and that seeks to enhance self-insight.

Insight Therapies

a variety of therapies that aim to improve psychological functioning by increasing a client's awareness of underlying motives and defenses.

Client-Centered Therapy

a humanistic therapy, developed by Carl Rogers, in which the therapist uses techniques such as active listening within a genuine, accepting, empathic environment to facilitate client's growth.

Active Listening

empathic listening in which the listener echoes, restates, and clarifies. A feature of Roger's client-centered therapy.

Unconditional Positive Regard

a caring, accepting, nonjudgmental attitude, which Carl Rogers believed would help clients to develop self-awareness and self-acceptance.

Behavior Therapy

therapy that applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors.

Counterconditioning

a behavior therapy procedure that used classical conditioning to evoke new responses to stimuli that are triggering unwanted behaviors; includes exposure therapies and aversive conditioning.

Exposure Therapies

behavioral techniques, such as systematic desensitization and virtual reality exposure therapy, that treat anxieties by exposing people (in imagination or actual situations) to the things they fear and avoid.

Systematic Desensitization

a type of exposure therapy that associates a pleasant relaxed state with gradually increasing anxiety-triggering stimuli. Commonly used to treat phobias.

Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy

an anxiety treatment that progressively exposes people to electronic simulations of their greatest fears, such as airplane flying, spiders, or public speaking.

Aversive Conditioning

a type of counterconditioning that associates an unpleasant state (such as nausea) with an unwanted behavior (such as drinking alcohol).

Token Economy

an operant conditioning procedure in which people earn a token of some sort for exhibiting a desired behavior and can later exchange the tokens for various privileges or treats.

Cognitive Therapy

therapy that teaches people new, more adaptive ways of thinking and acting; based on the assumption that thoughts intervene between events and our emotional reactions.

Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT)

a confrontational cognitive therapy, developed by Albert Ellis, that vigorously challenges people's illogical, self-defeating attitudes and assumptions.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

a popular integrative therapy that combines cognitive therapy (changing self- defeating thinking) with behavior therapy (changing behavior).

Group Therapy

therapy conducted with groups rather than individuals, permitting therapeutic benefits from group interaction.

Family Therapy

therapy that treats the family as a system. Views an individual's unwanted behaviors as influenced by, or directed at, other family members.

Regression Toward the Mean

the tendency for extreme or unusual scores to fall back (regress) toward their average.

Meta-Analysis

a procedure for statistically combining the results of many different research studies.

Evidence-Based Practice

clinical decision-making that integrates the best available research with clinical expertise and patient characteristics and preferences.

Therapeutic Alliance

a bond of trust and mutual understanding between a therapist and client, who work together constructively to overcome the client's problem.

Resilience

the personal strength that helps most people cope with stress and recover from adversity and even trauma.

Psychopharmacology

the study of the effects of drugs on mind and behavior.

Antipsychotic Drugs

drugs used to treat schizophrenia and other forms of severe thought disorder.

Antianxiety Drugs

drugs used to control anxiety and agitation.

Antidepressant Drugs

drugs used to treat depression, anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and posttraumatic stress disorder. (example: selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors - SSRIs.)

Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT)

a biomedical therapy for severely depressed patients in which a brief electric current is sent through the brain of an anesthetized patient.

Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS)

the application of repeated pulses of magnetic energy to the brain; used to stimulate or suppress brain activity.

Psychosurgery

surgery that removes or destroys brain tissue in an effort to change behavior.

Lobotomy

a now-rare psychosurgical procedure once used to calm uncontrollably emotional or violent patients. The procedure cut the nerves connecting the frontal lobes to the emotion-controlling centers of the inner brain.

Sigmund Freud

Austrian neurologist and psychotherapist; first to emphasize the significance of unconscious processes in normal and neurotic behavior; founder of psychoanalysis as both a theory of personality and a therapeutic practice

Carl Rogers

American psychologist and among the founders of the humanistic approach (or client-centered approach) to psychology; widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of psychotherapy

Mary Cover Jones

American development psychologist and pioneer of behavior therapy; known for her famous study with Peter and the rabbit, in which she used techniques that were later refined and developed into exposure therapies (exposure therapies are now the most widely used types of behavior therapies)

Joseph Wolpe

praised Mary Cover Jones as "the mother of behavior therapy," and refined her experimental techniques 30 years after her work to develop exposure therapies, which are now the most widely used types of behavior therapies

B.F. Skinner

leading American behaviorist psychologist; promoted the view that the proper aim of psychology should be to predict behavior and hence be able to control it; applied the results of his studies to the development of programmed learning and to educational practice

Albert Ellis

American psychologist who created rational-emotive behavior therapy (REBT); believed that many problems simply arise from irrational thinking, and can be overcome by therapy that approaches them rationally

Aaron Beck

American psychiatrist who is considered the founder of cognitive therapy; his pioneering theories are widely used in the treatment of clinical depression

Social Psychology

the scientific study of how we think about, influence, and relate to one another.

Attribution Theory

the theory that we explain someone's behavior by crediting either the situation or the person's disposition.

Fundamental Attribution Error

the tendency for observers, when analyzing another's behavior, to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate the impact of personal disposition.

Attitude

feelings, often influenced by our beliefs, that predispose us to respond in a particular way to objects, people, and events.

Peripheral Route Persuasion

occurs when people are influenced by incidental cues, such as a speaker's attractiveness.

Central Route Persuasion

occurs when influenced people focus on the arguments and respond with favorable thoughts.

Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon

the tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request.

Role

a set of expectations (norms) about a social position, defining how those in the position ought to behave.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

the theory that we act to reduce the discomfort (dissonance) we feel when two of our thoughts (cognitions) are inconsistent. For example, when we become aware that our attitudes and our actions clash, we can reduce the resulting dissonance by changing our attitudes.

Conformity

adjusting our behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard.

Normative Social Influence

influence resulting from a person's desire to gain approval or avoid disapproval.

Informational Social Influence

influence resulting from one's willingness to accept others' opinions about reality.

Social Facilitation

stronger responses on simple or well- learned tasks in the presence of others.

Social Loafing

the tendency for people in a group to exert less effort when pooling their efforts toward attaining a common goal than when individually accountable.

Deindividuation

the loss of self-awareness and self- restraint occurring in group situations that foster arousal and anonymity.

Group Polarization

the enhancement of a group's prevailing inclinations through discussion within the groups.

Groupthink

the mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives.

Culture

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

Norm

an understood rule for accepted and expected behavior. Norms prescribe "proper" behavior.

Prejudice

an unjustifiable and usually negative attitude toward a group and its members. Prejudice generally involves stereotyped beliefs, negative feelings, and a predisposition to discriminatory action.

Stereotype

a generalized (sometimes accurate but often overgeneralized) belief about a group of people.

Discrimination

unjustifiable negative behavior toward a group and its members.

Just-World Phenomenon

the tendency for people to believe the world is just and that people therefore get what they deserve and deserve what they get.

Ingroup

"Us" - people with whom we share a common identity.