100 Psychology terms

SERIAL POSITION EFFECT: Recall first and last items.

CLOSURE: Gestalt psychology: people tend to perceive incomplete stimulus as a whole

PROXIMITY: Elements are placed close together, as a result we tend to perceive them as one.

FIGURE GROUND: Figure is the focal point; ground is the background. Sometimes it depends on what is the figure and ground since they can become ambiguous.

RECIPROCITY NORM: If someone helps another person, that individual is expected to return the favor.

GROUP POLARIZATION: After discussion topic, group member’s beliefs become MORE EXTREME than prior to discussion. (Doesn’t mean bad thing, it is great for self-help groups).

CONFIRMATION BIAS: The tendency for a person to look for info that supports their beliefs, while ignoring or dismissing evidence that doesn’t support it.

BELIEF PERSEVERENCE: The tendency for individuals to hold onto belief even after being presented with info that discredits it.

SELF SERVING BIAS: The tendency to overstate one’s role when there’s a positive outcome and understate it in a when there’s a negative outcome. (like politicians)

STEREOTYPE THREAT: The anxiety that members of a group feel if they believe that their performance will confirm a negative stereotype.

FOOT-IN-THE-DOOR PHENOMEMON: A request is made, individual agrees, a larger request is then made to the individual, that individual is more likely to accept the LARGER request after accepting the smaller request.

DOOR-IN-THE-FACE: A larger request is made, individual denies the large request, then SMALLER request is made of the individual, the individual is more likely to accept the SMALLER request after denying the larger one.

HOSTILE AGGRESION: The end goal is physical harm. (Beats up the lover of his wife)

INSTRUMENTAL AGRESSION: Used to achieve some other means. (beats up to steal wallet).

AFFERENT (SENSORY): Send info at the brain. EFFERENT (MOTOR) NEURONS: Control movements, exits the brain.

LONG TERM POTENTIATION: “A process by which synaptic connections between neurons become stronger with frequent activation” (review flashcards over and over).

AROUSAL: State of alertness and/or being awake.

- Sympathetic NS: Increased heart rate (response to stress flight or fight)à Parasympathetic calms body down after a stressor

- Reticular Formation: Controls arousal and focus (In brain stem)

AROUSAL THEORY (OF MOTIVATION): “people are motivated to engage in a given behavior to raise or lower their arousal level.”

-          YERKES-DODSON LAW: People perform their best at a moderate level of arousal. If it’s too high or too low performance decreases.

COMMON SENSE THEORY: Stimulus kicks in leading to an emotion (response) and emotion leads to the arousal.

JAMES-LANGE THEORY: Stimulus is presented then arousal kicks in and that leads to emotion.

CANNON-BARD THEORY: Stimulus presented, and emotion and arousal happen at the same time.

SCHACHTER-SINGER TWO FACTOR THEORY: Stimulus causes arousal and there is this cognitive appraisal evaluating stimulus which leads to emotion.

ZAJONC & LEDOUX: Cognition does not always perceive an emotional response.

LAZARUS COGNITIVE APPRAISAL THEORY: You are presented with a stimulus; brain is going to evaluate stimulus and what’s going to happen it you’ll have the emotion and arousal happen at the same time.

CEREBELLUM: Leads with motor control and balance. If damaged, you’ll be able to move your feet and hands around but not have coordination to play something like the guitar or keyboard. Slur speech and stumbling happen when alcohol gets to this point. Plays role in muscle memory (procedural memory= muscle memory).

BROCA’S AREA: Produces speech (muscle movement). Damage leads to expressive aphasia: complete or partial loss of speech.

WENICKE’S AREA: Interprets spoken language. Damage leads to receptive aphasia: Inability to comprehend spoken language.

ANGULAR GYRUS: Takes visual stimuli and turns it into auditory info. Damage: unable to read and write.

INATTENTIONAL BLINDNESS: Failing to notice a recognizable stimulus b/c one’s attention is focused elsewhere.

COCKTAIL PARTY EFFECT: A person’s ability to focus on one stimulus while ignoring all of the others. (type of selective attention).

COGNITIVE MAPS (TOLMAN): A mental representation of the layout of one’s environment.

APPROACH-APPROACH CONFLICT: Choice between TWO desirable outcomes.

AVOIDANCE-AVOIDANCE CONFLICT: Choice between TEO undesirable outcomes.

APPROACH-AVOIDANCE: When one event/goal has attractive AND unattractive features.

MULTIPLE APPROACH-AVOIDANCE CONFLICT: Choice between TWO or more options that both have desirable and undesirable features.

HABITUATION: “the diminishes effectiveness of a stimulus in eliciting a response, following repeated exposure to the stimulus”

ALGORITHM: A step-by-step procedure that guarantees solving a problem. Disv: slow.

FRAMING: presenting a problem, question, or situation in a way that impacts how that issue is perceived.

SOURCE AMNESIA/SOURCE MISATTRIBUTION: Incorrectly identifying where a memory came from.

CHUNKING: Organizing info into meaningful units to be stores into memory. (Acronyms)

FUNCTIONAL FIXEDNESS: A cognitive bias that limits a person’s ability to use an object in a way other than its intended purpose.

MENTAL SET: When an individual uses a solution that WORKED in the past on a current problem, which may or may not help solve the current problem.

RECIPROCAL DETERMINIMS (BANDURA!!!): Belief that one’s thoughts, behavior, and environment all influence one another.

EXTERNAL LOCUS CONTROL (ROTTER’S): One’s perception that chance or outside forces control their fate.

INTERNAL LOCUS OF CONTROL (ROTTER’S): Perception that an individual can control their own fate.

LEARNED HELPLESSNESS EXPERIMENT (SELIGMAN): 3 groups of dogs receiving shocks, control group, one that jumped to the other side with no shock, other that accepted their fate.

LEARNED HELPLESSNESS: When one feels as if they are unable to change the outcome of their situation after repeated aversive eventsà pessimistic outlook.

-          POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: like to challenge individual’s beliefs, encourage them to argue w/ themselves.

HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY (ROGERS AND MASLOW): Looks at helping people achieve happiness, meaningful life, and self-fulfillment. (Self-improvement).

MASLOW’S HIERARCHY OF NEEDS: Start at the bottom with our biological needs, one that need is satisfied we can move on to the top (next need) with the ultimate goal being self-actualization: “fulfilling one’s highest potential”

SELF CONCEPT: “how do you see yourself?” à ideal self & real self (result leads to incongruence and stress, how do we take it to a congruence?)

-          UNCONDITIONAL POSITIVE REGARD: Person is fully accepting towards another individual even if their behavior is not accepting.

SELF ESTEEM (ROGERS): high congruenceà high self-esteem: Feelings of self-worth.

-          NARCISSM: An inflated view of oneself leads to attention seeking and exploitative behavior.

MEAN: Average (add, divided by the number of #) “the mean is X in relation to blah, blah”

MEDIAN: Middle #

MODE: Occurs most frequently.

RANGE: largest-lowest

STANDAR DEVIATION: How close the values in a data set are to the mean.

-          Large deviation: wider curve, farthest from the mean. “The scores in the blude data ser are more VARIED than the scores in the red data set”: small deviation closest to mean, more vertical, thinner.

“WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING OPTIONS HAS THE GREATEST STANDARD DEVIATION?” SHORTCUT: Calculate the range, the largest one is the answer.

“The data in GROUP B is MORE Varied than the data in GROUP A” (When SD is larger)

CIRCADIAN RHYTHM: Biological cycles that occur approximately every 24 hours.

-          Wakefulness, body temperature.

 REM SLEEP (RAPID EYE MOVEMENT): Where most dreams occur. Arm and leg muscles are really relaxed, can’t move them, but brain is very active, produces BETA waves (same waves as when you are awake).

CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSATION.

ONLY EXPERIMENTS CAN PRIVE CAUSE AND EFFECT!

CORRELATION COEFFICIENT (R-VALUES): The further from 0, the stronger the relationship. EX. R value of -.86 has a stronger relationship than the R value of .5.

Has to fall in between -1 & 1!!! (CAN BE .9, .8, .-7…)

AUTHORATIVE: Strong discipline but very supportive.

AUTHORITARIAN: Little/lack of support and strong discipline.

PERMISSIVE: Very supportive, weak discipline.

NEGLECTFUL: Little/Lack of support, weak discipline.

REPRESSION: Blocking banishing memories from one’s mind.

REGRESSION: Behaving in a way that helped relieve anxiety in the past.

DISPLACEMENT: Taking one’s anger out on something less threatening.

PROJECTION: Attributing one’s own undesirable feelings onto others.

DENIAL: Refusing to accept that what’s currently happening is actually happening.

SUBLIMINATION: Redirecting one’s unacceptable (possibly sexual or aggressive) impulses through more socially acceptable outlets.

RATIONALIZATION: When an individual makes an excuse to justify their behavior.

REACTION FORMATION: When one acts in the opposite manner of their true feelings.

KOHLBER’S MORAL DEVELOPMENT:

I.                   PRECONVENIONAL:

1)      Obedience & punishment stage: person makes moral decisions based on trying to avoid punishments and negative consequences.

2)      Individualism & exchange: person makes moral decisions based on “what’s in it for me?”

II.                 CONVENTIONAL:

3)      Good Boy/Good Girl: individual makes moral decisions based on what others think.

4)      Law & Order: makes moral decisions based on society as a whole.

III.               POST CONVENTIONAL:

5)      Social contract: individuals don’t want to break the law b/c they believe it to be good and important, however, they believe there are times or occasions where laws should be broken such as when one’s natural rights are at stake.

6)      Universal Ethical principles: recognize laws are important however the democratic process does not always lead to the changes necessary to protect individuals. So civil disobedience can/should be used to advocate for change.

PIAGET’S STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

A)     SENSORIMOTOR (0-2): object permanence (8 mo), world is experiences & understood through the 5 senses. Stranger anxiety.

B)     PREOPERATIONAL (2-7): being to use words and images to represent objects, ideas, events, and feelings. Egocentrism: a child assumes people experience way same way they do. Pretend Play. Animism: believe that inanimate objects have feelings (you hurt my doll!). Artificialism: belief that parts of the environment are created by people (clouds are white b/c someone painted them that way)

C)    CONCRETE OPERATIONAL (7-11): Understands conservation: awareness that physical quantities do not change in amount when they are altered in appearance. Basic logic: where one draws valid conclusions after particular rules are laid out to be followed.

D)    FORMAL OPERATIONAL (12+): Understands sarcasm: where people tend to say the opposite of what’s true often at the expense of someone else. Abstract thinking: ideas that are not concrete or tangible (like beliefs, emotions). Metacognition: thinking about thinking. Strategy formation: planning out a course of action. Manipulate info and/or objects in one’s mind without seeing it/them (doing math in your head). Hypothetical thinking: questions not based on reality. Not every adult gets to this stage.

ERIKSON’S PSYCHOSOCIAL DEVELOPMENT:

1)      TRUST VS. MISTRUST: Infancy (0-1): if a caregiver nurtures, provides care, sees world as safe, if not, then child will grow to have trust issues and complicated relationship with others—an insecurity.

2)       AUTONOMY VS. SHAME: Early childhood (1-2): Can lead to feelings of inadequacy, low self-esteem.

3)      INITIATIVE VS. GUILT: Preschool (3-5): one takes control of their environment.

4)      INDUSTRY VS. INFERIORITY: School age (6-11): kids discover what their good at, feelings of confidence or industry, if they are not as good as others, they can feel inferiorà anxiety/ depression.

5)      IDENTITY VS. ROLE CONFUSION: Adolescence (12-18): who am I? How do others see me?

6)      INITMACY VS. ISOLATION: Young adulthood (19-40): one can settle down and enjoy life or end up being alone and isolated.

7)      GENERATIVITY VS. STAGNATION: Middle adulthood (40-65): leaving behind a legacy.

8)      INTEGRITY VS. DESPAIR: Maturity (65 to death): Am I happy with whom I’ve become?

ABSOLUTE THRESHOLD: “The minimum amount of stimulation requires to trigger the sensation of touch, taste, smell, vision, OR hearing” OR “the smallest detectable level of stimulus (that you’re only able to detect 50% of the time).

DIFFERENCE THRESHOLD (JEST NOTICEABLE DIFFERENCE): The minimum CHANGE intensity of a stimulus needed to detect that a change has taken place. (and we’re only able to detect this minimum change 50% of the time).

ADRENAL GLANDS (ENDOCRINE SYSTEM: the body’s slow messenger system): secret the hormones norepinephrine & epinephrine (adrenaline) which provide more oxygen to our muscles, which energizes us to attack OR flee (FLIGHT-OR-FLIGHT!).

HANS SELYE’S GENERAL ADAPTATION SYNDROME (G.A.S):

1)      Alarm stage:

a.      Sympathetic NS

b.     Adrenaline

                                                              i.      Flight-or-flight Response

2)      Resistance Stage: Body is trying to return to homeostasis.

a.      Parasympathetic NS kicks in, but some Alarm Stage effects (like blood pressure) are still present.

b.     NOTE COLLEGE B: one’s physiological arousal is still going to be heightened more than normal at this stage OR that one’s physiological arousal may begin to stabilize through the resistance process.

3)      Exhaustion Stage:

a.      Body’s resources depletedàBody starts to break downà risk of serious illnesses. (body begins to shut down).

PROSPECTIVE MEMORY: Remembering to perform a task at the original time you intended to do that task. (taking a pill daily).

SOCIAL LOAFING: when an individual puts forth less effort while working on a group, than when working alone. EX. Group projects.

COCKTAIL PARTY EFFECT: our ability to tune into a single voice from many conversations going on in a noisy room.

THE NEURON (Messengers that communicate things throughout the body) FIRING PROCESS: Dendrites receive neurotransmitters from other neurons telling them to fire or not to fire.

-          If this neuron receives the right type of neurons and a threshold is met, it will fire, this is called the All or nothing, OR all or none principle.

-          Neurons that have myelin are going to have a faster transmission of the neurotransmitter.

-          When neuron is firing is called Action potential

-          When neuron is not firing is called Resting potential

NEUROTRANSMITTERS:

§  Acetylcholine (Ach): Stimulates muscle contraction, deals with movement. Comes up a lot!

§  Dopamine: Seeks out pleasure: tells your brain to remember this moment b/c it’s awesome or important!

§  Serotonin: Regulates our MOODS (happiness/sadness).

§  Epinephrine/Norepinephrine: Fight/flight response

§  GABA: Inhibits neurons from firing. Helps regulate daily sleep-wake cycles.

§  Endorphins: Reduces pain.

§  Glutamate: Used in MEMORY, learning, movement.

DISPLAY RULES: cultural rules/ norms that distinguish how one should express emotions.

GROUPTHINK: When members of a group “tend to accept a viewpoint or conclusion that represents a perceived group consensus, whether or not the group members believe it to be valid, correct, or optimal.”

COGNITIVE DISSONANC: mental [strain] that results from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes” This strain/dissonance needs to be reduced.

SCHEMA: The different categories that we organize info into our brains.

SELF FULFILLING PROPHECY: An expectation about a situation that impacts an individual’s behavior in such a way that leads to those expectations becoming a reality.

BIG FIVE PERSONALITY TRAITS: OCEAN:

i)                    OPENNESS

ii)                  CONSCIENTIOUSNESS

iii)                EXTRAVERSION

iv)                AGREEABLENESS

v)                  NEUROTICSM

CROSS SECTIONAL VS LONGITUDINAL STUDIES: LS: When a researcher studies the same group of participants year after year. Take more time. Cost more. CS: Look at different groups of people all at the same time.

THE DEVELOPMENT STAGE THEORISTS

1)      Kohlberg’s Moral Development

2)      Piaget’s Cognitive Development

3)      Erikson’s Psychosocial

4)      Freud’s Psychosexual stages

CONTEXT DEPDENDENT MEMORIES: The tendency to retrieve memories that correspond to the physical setting that we’re in.

MOOD CONGRUENT MEORIES: The tendency to retrieve memories that correspond to the mood that we’re in.

STATE DEPENDENT: Tendency to retrieve memories that correspond to the state (e.g. wide awake/sleepy, drunk, high, MOOD, etc.) that we’re in.

ENCODING FAILURE: The three-stage processing model (Atkinson-Shiffrin)

-          ENCODING: Inputs hit senses (your sensory memory) and can disappear forever or go into your working memory (7+ or -2 items), if there is a rehearsal of it, the memory is encoded, and it goes into your long term memory.

ICONIC MEMORY (in sensory memory): Deals with vision sight that can last for a second and disappear or go into your working memory.

ECHOIC MEMORY (in sensory memory): Deals with sounds that can last for a second pr two and disappear or go into your working memory.

LONG TERM MEMORY

a)      IMPLICIT (Non declarative): with conscious recall. Procedural: muscle memory. Priming: when something in the environment shapes your beliefs or actions.

b)     EXPLICIT (declarative): with conscious recall. Episodic: events. Semantics: facts.

MASS VS. DISTRIBUTED PRACTICE: M: Cramming. DP: spatial practice leads to better recall.

FIXED-KNOW when the reinforcement will occur.

VARIABLE-DON’T KNOW when the reinforcement will occur.

CONVERGENT THINKING: Finding ONE best solution.

DIVERGENT THINKING: Finding creative or multiple solutions.

PREFRONTAL CORTEX: (Phineas Gage) Personality, decision making.

MOTOR CORTEXT: controls muscle movement

PARIETAL LOBE: includes somatosensory cortex that’s your touch sensations. Processes numbers in the left hemisphere and in the right hemisphere it processes spatial information.

OCCIPITAL LOBE: visual cortex, sight/vision is processed.

TEMPORAL LOBE: where sound is processed.

SOCIAL FACILITATION: the tendency for one to perform easy or well-learned tasks better in the presence of others.

SOCIAL INHIBITION: The tendency for one to perform more difficult or less practiced tasks more poorly in the presence of others.

OPERANT CONDITIONING:

I.                   Positive reinforcement: Rewards are given in order to get a behavior to occur again.

II.                  Negative reinforcement:  The removal of an aversive stimulus.

III.                Positive punishment: The ADDITION of something unpleasant in order to stop a behavior.

IV.               Negative punishment: the REMOVAL of something pleasant in order to stop a behavior.

V.                 EXPLICIT (declarative): with conscious recall. Episodic: events. Semantic: facts.

FLUID INTELLIGENCE: The ability to solve new problems & reasons abstractly. Declines w/ age. EX. Escape rooms.

CRYSTALIZED INTELLIGENCE: The accumulation of facts, knowledge, and skills over a lifetime. Increases w. age.

DEINDIVIDUATION: When a group setting causes one to lose their self-awareness and abandon their normal restraints.

SELF EFFICACY: How capable or confident a person feels in their ability to complete a task.

HEURISTICS: Bias. A rule of thumb strategy for making quick gut decisions.

-          Representative Heuristic: A rule of thumb strategy used to make quick gut decisions based off of stereotypes of a group.

-          Availability Heuristic: A rule of thumb strategy used to make quick decisions based off info that comes to mind easily.

INTRINSIC MOTIVATION: The desire to perform a task comes from WITHIN the individual.

EXTRINSIC MOTIVATION: The desire to perform a task comes from an EXTERNAL reward. (Money).

-          INCENTIVE MOTIVATION: When people like to do things based off of rewards and when they are discouraged to do things based on punishments.

OVERJUSTIFICATION EFFECT: A phenomenon in which a person becomes less internally motivated to pursue an activity after they are rewarded (extrinsic motivation) for something that they ALREADY love to do (intrinsic motivation).

CONFORMITY: Where someone changes their beliefs or behavior to align with a group.

-          Normative social influence: when someone conforms b/c they want to FIT in with the group, even though they may not agree.

-          Informational social influence: When someone conforms b/c they think the group is ACTUALLY RIGHT.

PROACTIVE INTERFERANCE:

O ld info interfering w/ new

RETROACTIVE INTERFERENCE:

N ew info interfering w/ old

OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING, SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY, MODELING (Bandura: Bobo doll): Where an individual learns how to behave or act by watching others.

CASE STUDY: Where a researcher studies one individual or a small group of individuals. NOT generalizable.

SURVEY: when people self-report information. Cheap but too many confounding variables. Disv: Social desirability bias (when people provide certain answers to make themselves look good). Volunteer bias.

NATURALISTIC OBSERVATION: When a researcher records behavior in a naturally occurring setting without trying to get involved or manipulate the setting or the variables. Describes behavior but does NOT explain it.

CORRELATION: looks at relationships. The relationship between two variables.

EXPERIMENT: A research method in which an experiment can determine cause and effect through the manipulation of a(n) independent variable(s).

RANDOM SAMPLE: You have a population and from that population your draw your sample. Names in a hat, or names in a computer (random # generator). Allows differences in the data.

HYPOTHEISS: A prediction. “IF students drink caffeine before a test, THEN their test scores will improve.”

INDEPENDENT VARIABLE: The variable manipulated by researcher.

DEPENDENT VARIABLE: What is being measured.

COUNFOURNDING/THIRD/LURKING VARIBAKES: A confounding variable “is an extraneous variable whose presence affects the variables being studies so that the results you get do not reflect the actual relationship between the” independent & dependent variables.

OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS: A detailed description of the steps, variables, and procedures.

1)      Amount

2)      Time/duration

3)      Change

REALIABILITY: Replication

VALIDITY: Did the researcher measure what they set out to measure?

RANDOM ASSIGNMENT: Is once you have your sample participants, then you assign them randomly to the experimental group or control group. Pulling names out of hat.

PARTICIPANT OR SUBJECT VARIABLES: which have to deal with a person’s sex, age, weight, height, skill level, intelligence, prior knowledge.

SINGLE BLIND STUDY: Participants don’t know whether they are in the experimental or control group. But the researcher does. Participants don’t know if they are receiving the placebo or the actual experiment. Prevents Errors.

DOUBLE BLIND STUDY: Neither the participant to researchers knows who’s in what group. It prevents research bias.

PLACEBO: physically similar to a​ treatment, but it lacks any active​ ingredients, so it should not by itself produce any effects.

STATISTICAL SIGNIFICANCE: There is a high probability that the independent variable causes changes in the dependent variable. The results of the study did not likely occur by chance.

P-VALUE: P<.05= statistically significant                    P>.05 NOT statistically significant

ETHICAL CONCERNS:

1)      No coercion (Allowed to quit)

2)      Informed consent (warned of risks)

3)      Minimal harm

4)      Debriefing (deception)

5)      Confidentiality

 MINOCULAR AND BINOCULAR CUES

TRICHROMATIC THEORY OF COLOR

OPPONENT PROCESSING THEORY OF COLOR

Which hemisphere does the brain processes what each eye sees?

How split-brain patients process visual info?

FEATURE DETECTORS: that detect color motion and form depth.

BLIND SPOT: Caused by the optic nerve exiting the eye.

DEPTH PERCEPTION:

TRANSDUCTION: the conversion of one form of energy into another form of energy.

RODES: see black and white images. Detect images in low light.

CONES: see color

PHOTORECEPTOR CELLS

RETINAL DISPARITY:

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION:

PHONEMES & MORPHEMES:

ILLUSORY CORRELATION:

ATTRIBUTION (SOCIAL PSYCH):

TYPES OF PERSUASION:

MYELIN SHEATH:

SENSORY ADAPTATION:

BASILAR MEMBRANE:

PAVLOV:

DRIVE REDUCTION THEORY:

HUNGER: