AP Psychology - "New" Vocabulary (Units 1-14)

Behavior Feedback Effect

The tendency of behavior to influence our own and others' thoughts, feelings, and actions

Other-Race Effect

The tendency to recall faces of one's own race more accurately than faces of other races

Relational Aggression

An act of aggression (physical or verbal) intended to harm a person's relationship or social standing

Affiliation Need

The need to build relationships and to feel part of a group

Yerkes-Dodson Law

The principle that performance increases with arousal only up to a point, beyond which performance decreases

Self-Efficacy

Researched by Albert Bandura; beliefs concerning one's ability to perform the behaviors needed to achieve desired outcomes; your personal control

Anterograde Amnesia

An inability to form new memories

Deep Processing

Encoding semantically, based on the meaning of the words; tends to yield the best retention

Encoding Specificity Principle

The idea that cues and contexts specific to a particular memory will be most effective in helping us recall it

Episodic Memory

Explicit memory of personally experienced events; one of our two conscious memory systems

Retrograde Amnesia

An inability to retrieve information from one's past

Testing Effect

Enhanced memory after retrieving, rather than simply rereading, information. Also referred to as a retrieval practice effect or test-enhanced learning

Sequential Processing

Processing one aspect of a problem at a time; generally used to process new information or to solve difficult problems

Emerging Adulthood

A period from about age 18 to the mid-twenties, when many in Western cultures are no longer adolescents but have not yet achieved full independence as adults

Epigenetics

"Above" or "in addition to" genetics; the study of environmental influences on gene expression that occur without a DNA change

Intersex

A condition present at birth due to unusual combinations of male and female chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy; possessing biological sexual characteristics of both sexes

Olfaction

The sense of smell

Blindsight

A condition in which a person can respond to a visual stimulus without consciously experiencing it

Change Blindness

Failing to notice changes in the environment; a form of inattentional blindness

All-Or-None Response

A neuron's reaction of either firing (with a full-strength response) or not firing

Hippocampus

A neural center located in the limbic system; helps process explicit (conscious) memories of facts and events for storage

Memory Consolidation

The neural storage of a long term memory

Reuptake

A neurotransmitter's reabsorption by the sending neuron

Dual Processing

The principle that information is often simultaneously processed on separate conscious and unconscious tracks

Mindfulness Meditation

A reflective practice in which people attend to current experiences in a nonjudgmental and accepting manner

Higher-Order Conditioning

A procedure in which the conditioned stimulus in one conditioning experience is paired with a new neutral stimulus, creating a second (often weaker) conditioned stimulus. For example, an animal that has learned that a tone predicts food might then learn that a light predicts the tone and begin responding to the light alone. (Also called second-order conditioning)

Instinctive Drift

The tendency for a conditioned response to drift back toward instinctive behavior

Reinforcement

In operant conditioning, any event that strengthens the behavior it follows

Reinforcement Schedule

A pattern that defines how often a desired response will be reinforced