Gen Psych Final Exam Study Guide

What photoreceptors allow us to see in low light?

rods

Who was the first female president of the American Psychological Association?

Mary Calkins

The conversion from sensory stimulus energy to action potential is called what?

transduction

Who was the first African American to earn his PhD in psychology in the U.S.?

Francis Sumner

Who is the founder of psychology?

Wilhem Wundt

What are the most plentiful cells in the brain?

glial cells

A condition in which signals from the sensory organs are processed in the wrong cortical areas of the brain.

Synesthesia

What are the sensory receptors located on the tongue?

taste buds

What is the oval window - be able to describe it.

A membrane-covered opening from the middle ear to the cochlea of the inner ear

What is physical dependence and how might a person experience it?

Involves changes in normal bodily functions

Which lobe of the brain contains the primary visual cortex?

the occipital lobe

What are the goals of psychology?

explain, predict, control

What describes our awareness of internal and external stimuli?

consciousness

What minimizes error and leads to dependable generalizations?

the scientific method

What is located in the hypothalamus and controls the timing of the sleep-wake cycle?

suprachiasmatic nucleus

What area of the ear contains the ossicles?

middle ear

What stage of sleep contains sleep spindles and k-complexes?

stage 2 sleep

A jarring of the brain in which minor damage to neurons and blood vessels occur.

concussion

What are frightening reoccurring dreams in REM sleep?

nightmares

What facilitates the activity of the neurotransmitter system?

agonists

What is sensory adaptation?

Adapting to become used to the environment around you and the sensations that come from the environment

What are specialized cells in the nervous system that send and receive information?

neurons

What is the definition of psychology?

the scientific study of human cognitions, behaviors, and emotions.

What photoreceptor is responsible for color vision?

cones

What is a well-developed set of ideas that propose an explanation for what is observed?

theory

What are the approaches of research in psychology?

Clinical/case study, naturalistic observation, survey, archival research, longitudinal research, & cross-sectional research

What is manipulated or controlled by the experimenter?

independent variable

What part of the neuron makes it possible for neurons to interact?

terminal ends/buttons

What part of the neuron acts as an insulator for the axon?

myelin sheath

What are the purposes of the glia cells?

Nourishment, insulation, direct growth of neurons, waste removal

What is the resting potential of a neuron?

-70 mV

What is the brief shift in a neuron's electrical charge that travels down the axon?

action potential

What lobe of the brain contains the motor cortex, the prefrontal cortex, and Broca's area?

frontal lobe

What are cycles that take place over a 24 hour period (e.g. the sleep-wake cycle)?

Circadian rhythms

How often do we cycle through the distinct stages of sleep?

four to six, Approximately every 90-100 minutes

What stage or stages of sleep is made up of primarily delta wave sleep?

stage 3 & stage 4 sleep (REM)

When do you usually sleep walk?

Stage 4

What type of insomnia is where you are able to fall asleep but wake up around 3 AM and are unable to go back to sleep?

Early termination insomnia

When you have an emotional need for the drug.

psychological dependence

What drugs are classified as depressants?

Ethanol (alcohol), barbiturates, benzodiazepines, sedative hypnotics, minor tranquilizers, narcotic analgesics

What drugs are classified as stimulants?

Psychomotor stimulants, amphetamines, Ritalin cocaine, Methylxanthines, caffeine, nicotine

What theory of color vision says we have three types of cones: red, green, and blue, and explains color vision in the eye?

trichromatic theory of color

What are the causes of conductive hearing loss?

Age, Genetics, Exposure to extreme noise, Illness, Damage due to toxins

What are associated with the sense of touch?

pressure, temperature and pain.

What are the proprioceptive senses?

Kinesthetic sense, Vestibular sense

What gestalt grouping is where our brain's automatically complete a picture or fill in blank spaces so we can perceive the whole picture?

Continuity principle

What is it called when lines of equal length are perceived as unequal?

Muller-Lyer illusion

What is the definition of learning?

is a relatively permanent change in behavior that results from experience

Anna went to dogsit for a friend. When she picked up a magazine to read, the dog ran to the corner. She noticed throughout the day that when she picked up the magazine the dog would hide. Her friend later told Anna that she rolls up a magazine to pop the puppy on the nose if he poops in the house. The magazine is the [blank].

Conditioned stimulus

Food is a [blank]. What kind of reinforcement is food?

Primary reinforcer

Which type of schedule is called fixed because the amount time the organism must wait remains constant?

Fixed-interval

Each time he reads a text from his girlfriend, Hunter feels affirmation and love (and a quick hit of dopamine). After some time, he begins to feel that way when he hears the notification sound. Identify the conditioned response in this scenario.

Feeling of affirmation/love & the hit of dopamine

Who developed the Law of Effect which says responses are learned when they are followed by a satisfying state of affairs?

E.L. Thorndike

Upon completing his chores, without complaining, Myer is given an additional 30 minutes to play fortnight before bed. This is an example of ______.

Positive reinforcement

What theory is largely voluntary, goal directed, and controlled by its consequences and was developed by B.F. Skinner?

Operant conditioning

Who studied the aggression in children based on models with the bobo doll study?

Albert Bandura

What fire when we see someone carrying out an action or we do the action?

Mirror neurons

When "Little Albert" became afraid of all furry things, not just the rat he was originally conditioned to fear. This was an example of ______________ _______________.

Stimulus generalization

What is the tendency for people to acquire complex, abstract concepts without awareness or intention?

Implicit learning

What is a sudden mental reorganization of the elements of a problem causing the solution to be obvious or partially obvious; the "ah-ha" phenomena?

Insight learning

When would you not use a heuristic?

When you have plenty of time

What is A belief that the event just experienced was predictable

Hindsight bias

What is practical intelligence?

Street smarts

What type of thinking is this an example of: Kristen brainstorms and applies creative thinking as she prepares for her marketing presentation?

Creative intelligence

What is a communication system that involves using words and systematic rules to organize those words to transmit information from one individual to another?

Language

Virginia has had a stroke, as a result she is unable to produce language. What area of her brain has been affected by her stroke?

Broca's area

What are the three criteria of language?

Semanticity, productivity, and displacement

What is a category or grouping of linguistic information, objects, ideas, or life experiences?

Concept

What is described as the ability to recognize and regulate our own and other's emotions?

Emotional intelligence

What is the capacity to understand and adjust to the world in which we live?

Intelligence

Which French psychologist developed an intelligence test that measured general mental ability and emphasized abstract reasoning?

Alfred Binet

What level of intellectual disability, has basic reading and writing skills; functional self-care skills; and requires some oversight?

Moderate disability

Identify the memory stage that matches the following description. Pamela has been practicing her dance routines all day so that she will remember them when the recital starts in 3 months. She is hoping memory consolidation will help the routines "stick in her mind."

Memory encoding

What is described as a memory we try consciously to remember and recall?

Explicit memory

There are four main brain structures that are involved in memory function. They are the amygdala, hippocampus, cerebellum, and [blank].

Prefrontal cortex

What is retrograde amnesia?

Unable to recall events that occurred before the amnesia

Which memory-enhancing strategy is Demetrius using in the following scenario? Ms. Watson is helping her sophomore geometry class study for a test by having them share with each other the strategies they use to remember formulas for the perimeter and area of various shapes. Demetrius says that if he forgets how to compute the area of a rectangle, he just looks at the tiles on the classroom floor: Each tile is a foot square (12" x 12") and there are 20 rows of 24 tiles each, which makes 480 tiles or 480 square feet in the classroom floor.

Elaborative rehearsal

What is described as a temporary storage system that processes incoming sensory memory?

Short-term memory (STM)

What are the three types of encoding?

Acoustic, visual, and semantic

Who discovered the magic number 7 +/- 2, which is the amount of information we can hold in our short-term memory?

George Miller

Who studied memory and used himself as his own subject, he discovered the memory curve and the forgetting curve.

Hermann Ebbinghaus

LTM usually requires __________ and _____________ to encode most information.

Effort and rehearsal

What type of memory is for how to tie you shoes or remembering how to ride a bike?

Implicit memory

Julie is discussing her favorite movie, but she cannot remember the name of the main actor. She knows the name; she just cannot come up with it at that moment.

Blocking

Thomas is learning Spanish for the first time, however he already speaks Hindi. Whenever he wants to think of the Hindi word for water, all he can think of is the Spanish word for water

Retroactive interference

s the following an example of assimilation, accommodation, or a new schema creation? Liam has a schema of birds. He sees a penguin and does not recognize it as a bird. He changes his schema so that penguins can be in it.

Accommodation

Consider the following scenario:(1) Adrian is spending time with family and friends because she intends to enjoy the days of life she has left. (2) Adrian still has trouble believing she is sick. (3) Adrian often wonders what might have happened had she sought medical treatment sooner. (4) The fact that she is leaving behind two small children makes Adrian mad. (5) Adrian finds it difficult to interact with people at work, so she stays at home staring at a turned-off television. Identify the sentence that describes the depression stage of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' stages of grief.

Sentence 5

In Erik Erikson's theory what stage is described by teenagers who are working at refining a sense of self by testing roles and then integrating them to form a single identity, or they become confused about who they are?

Stage 5: Identity vs. Confusion

In Erik Erikson's theory what stage is described by children who lean the pleasure of applying themselves to tasks or they feel inferior?

Description of Task

In Piaget's theory what stage is characterized by ecogcentrism, pretend play, animistic thinking, and language?

Pre-operational stage of cognitive development

In Piaget's theory what stage is characterized by conservation and mathematical transformations?

Concrete operational stage of cognitive development

What experiment tested the delay of gratification?

The Marshmallow Test

Who developed the stages of moral development?

Lawerence Kohlberg

What are the two ways the brain develops its complexity?

By producing way more brain cells than can possibly survive and creating a fierce competition for these brain cells for survival

What basic need was studied using baby monkeys?

Attachment

What is the primary social achievement of childhood?

Self-concept

What are the parenting styles that we discussed?

Authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and unresolved

What is a state of deprivation?

A need

What is a psychological expression of motivation derived from an internal need state?

A drive

What is a discrepancy between a present state and a desired state?

A want