psy200 midterm

What are Clinical Psychologists?

Psychologists who help people with psychological disorders adjust to the demands of life. They evaluate problems such as anxiety and depression through interviews and psychological tests. They help clients resolve problems and change self-defeating behavior.

What are Counseling Psychologists?

They are, like clinical psychologists, they use interviews and tests to define their clients’ problems. Their clients typically have adjustment problem but not serious psychological disorders.

What are School Psychologists?

Psychologists are employed by school systems to identify and assists students who have problems that interfere with learning. They help schools make decisions about the placement of students in special classes. 

What are Developmental Psychologists?

They are Psychologists that study the changes - physical, cognitive, social and emotion - that occur throughout the lifespan. They attempt to sort out the influences of heredity and the environment on development

What are Personality Psychologists?

They are Psychologists that identify and measure human traits and determine influences on human thought processes, feelings, and behavior. They are particularly concerned with issues such as anxiety, aggression, sexual orientation and gender roles. 

What are Social Psychologists?

They are psychologists that are concerned with the nature and causes of individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and behavior in social situations.

What are Environmental Psychologists?

They are psychologists that study the ways people and the environment— the natural environment and the human-made environment— influence one another.

What are Experimental Psychologists?

They are psychologists that specialize in basic processes such as the nervous system, sensation, and perception, learning and memory, thought, motivation, and emotion. 

What are Industrial Psychologists?

They are psychologists who focus on the relationships between people and work

What are Organizational Psychologists?

They are psychologists who study the behavior of people in organizations such as businesses.

What are Human Factors Psychologists?

They are psychologists who make technical systems such as automobile dashboards and computers keyboards more user-friendly.

What are Consumer Psychologists?

They are psychologists who study the behavior of shoppers in an effort to predict and influence their behavior. They advise store managers on how to lay out the aisles of a supermarket in ways that boosts impulse buying, how to arrange window displays to attract customers and how to make newspaper ads and TV commercials more persuasive. 

What are Health Psychologists?

They are psychologists who study the effects of stress on health problems such as headaches, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. They also guide clients toward more healthful behavior patterns, such as exercising and quitting smoking. 

What are Forensic Psychologists?

They are psychologists who apply psychology to the criminal justice system. They deal with legal matters such as whether a defendant was sane when the crime was committed. Furthermore, they may also treat psychologically ill offenders, consult with attorneys on matters such as picking a jury, and analyze offenders’ behavior and mental processes. They may conduct research on matters ranging from evaluation of eyewitness testimony to methods of interrogation. 

What are Sports Psychologists?

They are psychologists that help athletes concentrate on their performance and not on the crowd, use cognitive strategies such as positive visualization (imaging themselves making the right moves) to enhance performance, and avoid choking under pressure. 

What is the definition of learning?

Relatively permanent change in behavior or knowledge that results from experience or practice

What are the primary beliefs of Evolutionary Psychologists?

The ways in which adaptation and natural selection are connected with mental processes and behavior

Behavior patterns evolve and can be transmitted genetically from generation to generation

What is Generalization?

The tendency for a CR to be evoked by stimuli that are similar to the stimulus to which the response was conditioned. For example, Pavlov demonstrated this by getting his dog to salivate when it was shown a circle. Then later the dog salivated in response to being shown closed geometric figures, even squares.

What is Counter Conditioning? 

It is a behavioral therapy technique where a pleasant (positive) stimulus is paired with a fear-evoking (negative) stimulus in order to replace fear or anxiety with relaxation or pleasure.

How does counter conditioning work?

Based on classical conditioning (Pavlov’s model).

The goal is to “retrain” the person’s response — to make the fearful stimulus trigger calm feelings instead of fear.

The fear response (a conditioned response) is weakened by pairing the feared stimulus with something enjoyable or soothing (a new unconditioned stimulus).

What are examples of sleep disorders?

Insomnia
Narcolepsy
Sleep Apnea
Sleep terrors
Bed-wetting
Sleepwalking

What is insomnia?

A sleep disorder that appears in about 30% of American adults in any given year. Older adults are more likely to have this than younger adults because of a greater incidence of health problems and pain—factors that may make it more difficult to get comfortable in bed. Sleeping less than 6 hours per night may increase the risks of anxiety, depression, diabetes, hypertension, and Alzheimer disease. Trying to get to sleep can compound sleep problems by spurring activity of the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system and tensing muscles. You cannot force or will yourself to go to sleep. You can set the stage for sleep by relaxing when you are tired. 

What is Narcolepsy?

When someone can fall asleep suddenly—any time, anywhere. This afflicts as many as 100,00 people in the USA and seems to run in families. They last about 15 minutes or so, after which the person feels refreshed and is thought to be a disorder of REM-sleep functioning.

What is Sleep Paralysis?

A person cannot move during the transition from consciousness to sleep, and hallucinations (as a person or object sitting on the chest) may occur

What is Sleep Apnea?

It is a dangerous sleep disorder in which the air passages are obstructed. People with this can stop breathing periodically, up to several hundred times per night. Can cause the person to sit up and gasp for air before falling back asleep. 

What are 3 deep-sleep disorders?

Sleep terrors
Bed-wetting
Sleepwalking

What are Sleep terrors?

A deep-sleep disorder where It is more similar to nightmares but are more severe that occurs during REM sleep. It usually occurs during the first 2 sleep cycles of the night, whereas nightmares are more likely to occur toward morning. The person can experience a surge in the heart and respiration rates, the person may suddenly sit up, talk incoherently, and thrash about. They are never fully awake, returns to sleep, and may recall a vague image as of someone pressing upon the chest. They are often decreased by a minor tranquilizer at bedtime, which reduces the amount of time spent in stage 4 sleep. 

What is Bed-wetting?

A deep-sleep disorder where Involuntary urination happens, during sleep, probably reflects immaturity of the nervous system. In most cases, it resolves itself well before adolescence, often by age 8. 

What is Sleepwalking (somnambulism)?

A deep-sleep disorder where walking or performing activities while still asleep.

What is Prejudice?

An attitude toward a group that leads people to evaluate members of that group negatively even if they never met them. 

What is Discrimination?

Hostile behavior directed against groups toward whom one is prejudiced

What is Social Learning?

Learning by observing and imitating others’ behaviors

What is Social Categorization?

The process of classifying people into groups based on shared characteristics (e.g., race, gender, age, etc.)

What is Social Facilitation?

The process by which a person’s performance is increased when other members of a group engage in similar behavior.

What is Information Processing?

The way the mind encodes, stores, and retrieves information — like a computer system.

How is REM Sleep related to Neurotransmitters?

REM sleep is associated with Acetylcholine (ACh) and involves the pons and reticular formation. It is crucial for dreaming and memory consolidation.

What is the Psychodynamic perspective?

Freud’s perspective, which emphasizes the importance of unconscious motives and conflicts as forces that determine behavior.

What is the Biological perspective?

A perspective in which it seeks to understand the nature of the links between biological processes and structures such as the functioning of the brain, the endocrine system, and heredity, on the one hand, and behavior and mental processes on the other. Basically behavior is shaped by genes, the brain, and body chemistry.

What is the Cognitive perspective?

A perspective that focuses on how we think, remember, and process information

What is the Humanistic-Existential perspective?

Humanism stresses on human capacity for self-fulfillment, roles of consciousness, self-awareness, self-awareness, and decision-making. Existentialism stresses on free choice and hold people responsible for the choices made.

What is the Sociocultural perspective?

The perspective that focuses on the roles of ethnicity, gender, culture, and socioeconomic status in behavior and mental processes.

What is Shaping?

Procedure for teaching complex behaviors that at first reinforces approximations of the targeted behavior. Successive approximations, which is, behaviors that are progressively closer to a target behavior.

What is modeling?

Relies on observation learning, clients observe and then imitate people who approach and cope with the objects or situations that the client fear.

What is heredity?

The transmission of traits from parent to offspring by means of genes.

Functions of thalamus in forming visual and verbal memories