Untitled Flashcards Set
Consciousness
Levels of consciousness:
1. Minimal consciousness: a low-level kind of sensory awareness and responsiveness that occurs when the mind inputs sensations and may output behavior
2. Full consciousness: know and are able to report your mental state
3. Self-consciousness: distinct level of consciousness in which the person’s attention is drawn to the self as an object
Phenomenology: the study of how things seem to the conscious person
Mind-body problem: the issue of how the mind is related to the brain and body
Default network
Transience: the phenomenon of forgetting or the gradual decay of memories over time
Dichotic listening: a psychological test commonly used to investigate selective attention and the lateralization of brain function within the auditory system
Basic properties of consciousness:
1. Consciousness has intentionality (always about something)
2. Consciousness has unity (the ability to integrate information from all the body’s senses into one coherent whole).
3. Consciousness has selectivity (it includes some objects but not others).
4. Consciousness has transience: has the tendency to change
Thought suppression: the conscious avoidance of a thought
Dual process theories:
Sleep disorders:
- Sleep apnea: a disorder in which the person stops breathing for brief periods while asleep
- Somnambulism: occurs when a person arises and walks around while asleep
- Narcolepsy: a disorder in which sudden sleep attacks occur in the middle of waking activity
- Sleep Paralysis: the experience of waking up unable to move
- Sleep Terrors: abrupt awakenings with panic and intense emotional arousal
EEG patterns over sleep stages
System 1 and system 2
Repression: A mental process that removes unacceptable thoughts and memories from consciousness and keeps them in the unconscious.
Circadian rhythm: A naturally occurring 24-hour cycle
REM sleep: A stage of sleep characterized by rapid eye movements and a high level of brain activity
Activation-synthesis model: The theory that dreams are produced when the brain attempts to make sense of random neural activity that occurs during sleep
Emotions and Motivation
Two factor theory of emotion (Schacter & Singer): stimuli trigger a general state of physiological arousal, which is then interpreted as a specific emotion
James-Lange theory of emotion: feelings are simply the perception of one’s own physiological responses to a stimulus. We are sad because we cry.
Cannon-Bard theory of emotion: stimulating events trigger feelings and physical reactions that occur at the same time. For example, seeing a snake might prompt both the feeling of fear (an emotional response) and a racing heartbeat (a physical reaction).
Valence: The general goodness/badness of something. All emotions have valence.
Arousal: a state of physiological and psychological activation characterized by increased alertness, alertness, and readiness for action
Display rules
Emotional accuracy/
lie detection: We’re really bad at detecting lies, but very good at telling them. Ability is dependent on age, practice, physiognomy, attractiveness.
Mimicry
Universality hypothesis of emotion: the hypothesis that across the globe, everyone has the same core emotions
Affective forecasting:
Reappraisal: changing one’s emotional experience by changing the way one thinks about the emotion-eliciting experience
Repression:
Emotion regulation: the strategies people use to influence their own emotional experience
Homeostasis: the tendency for a system to take action to keep itself in equilibrium
Drive theory: the primary motivation is to reduce their drives
Instinct theory: a psychological theory that suggests that all humans are born with innate behaviors that drive their actions
Human sexual response cycle: the stages of physiological arousal during sexual activity
Evolutionary mismatch: the idea that traits that were adaptive in an ancestral environment may be maladaptive in a modern environment
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:
Intrinsic motivation: a motivation to take actions that are themselves rewarding
Extrinsic motivation: a motivation to take actions that are not themselves rewarding but that lead to reward
Facial feedback: suggests that when we make a facial expression, the sensory feedback from our muscles to our brain can contribute to or intensify the corresponding emotion
Motivation states
Loss aversion: a cognitive bias in which the same situation is perceived as worse if it is framed as a loss, rather than a gain.
Language and thought
Language: A system for communicating with others using signals that are combined according to rules of grammar and that convey meaning
Grammar: a set of rules that specify how the units of language can be combined to produce meaningful messages
Behaviorists: children learn language primarily through imitation, reinforcement, and environmental stimuli
nativists view of language development: humans are born with an innate ability to acquire language
Morphemes: the smallest meaningful units of language
Phonemes: the smallest units of speech that distinguish one word from another
Stages of language acquisition
1. Babbling: 1-12 months
2. One word stage: 12-21 months
3. Two word stage: 21-36 months
4. Combinatorial explosion
Syntactic rules: indicate how words can be combined to form phrases and sentences
Morphological: indicate how morphemes can be combined to form words
phonological : indicate how phonemes can be combined to form words
Benefits of bilingualism
Functions of Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas
Broca’s area:
· Planning and coordinating the movements involved in speech production
· Generating and organizing grammar
· Processing and understanding language, especially in relation to syntax and sentence structure
Wernicke's area:
· Processing auditory signals related to language
· Converting sounds into meaningful words
· Understanding the grammar and syntax of sentences
· Integrating language with other cognitive functions, such as memory and attention
Linguistic relativity hypothesis: the idea that language shapes the nature of thought
Prospect theory: people choose to take on risks when evaluating potential losses and to avoid risks when evaluating potential gains
Conjunction fallacy: people think that two events are more likely to occur together than either individual event
Availability heuristic: a rule of thumb that items that are more readily available in memory are judged as occurring more frequently
Sunk cost fallacy: a framing effect in which people make decisions about a current situation on the basis of what they have previously invested in the situation.
Framing effect: occur when people give different answers to the same problem depending on how the problem is framed
Representative heuristic: a mental shortcut that involves making a probability judgement by comparing an object or event with a prototype of an event
People
Charles Darwin
Clark Hull: believed that behavior was one of the ways that an organism maintains this balance. Based on this idea, Hull suggested that all motivation arises as a result of these biological needs
Abraham Maslow
Noam Chomsky: main theory is that humans are born with an innate ability to learn language
Voltaire: Emotions are the enemy of logic and reason
Hume: Reason should always be the servant of emotion