Comprehensive Study Guide for Introductory Psychology
Neural Structures and Biological Communication
Neuron: The fundamental building block of the nervous system. It is a basic nerve cell responsible for transmitting information via a combination of electrical and chemical signals.
Dendrites: These are the branchlike extensions of a neuron. Their primary function is to receive incoming messages from other neurons and conduct them toward the cell body.
Axon: A long, fiber-like extension of the neuron that carries electrical impulses away from the cell body toward other neurons, muscles, or glands.
Myelin Sheath: A layer of fatty tissue that covers and insulates the axon. Its purpose is to increase the speed at which neural impulses are transmitted down the axon.
Action Potential: A brief electrical charge or impulse that travels down the axon. This is the mechanism by which neurons send information.
Synapse: The tiny, microscopic gap that exists between the axon terminal of the sending neuron and the dendrite or cell body of the receiving neuron. This is the site where neurotransmitters cross to pass signals.
Neurotransmitter: Chemical messengers that travel across the synaptic gap to carry signals from one neuron to the next.
Reuptake: A process in which the sending neuron reabsorbs excess neurotransmitters from the synapse after they have performed their signaling function.
Specific Neurotransmitters and Their Functions
Dopamine: A neurotransmitter tied to several critical functions including movement, learning, attention, and the reward system of the brain. * Low levels: Associated with Parkinson's disease. * High levels: Linked to schizophrenia.
Serotonin: A neurotransmitter responsible for regulating mood, hunger, and sleep cycles. * Low levels: Frequently linked to depression.
Acetylcholine (ACh): A neurotransmitter that plays a vital role in enabling muscle contraction and is heavily involved in the formation and retrieval of memory.
GABA (Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid): The primary inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain. Its main function is to calm neural activity.
Glutamate: The primary excitatory neurotransmitter. It is fundamentally linked to cognitive functions such as memory and learning.
Endorphins: Natural, opiate-like neurotransmitters that act as painkillers. They are typically released by the brain in response to physical stress or vigorous exercise.
Brain Structures and Systems
Hippocampus: A structure located within the limbic system that is primarily responsible for the formation and processing of new explicit memories.
Amygdala: Two lima-bean-sized neural clusters in the limbic system that are linked to emotional processing, specifically fear and aggression.
Hypothalamus: A brain structure that directs several maintenance activities, including hunger, thirst, and body temperature. It also helps govern the endocrine system via the pituitary gland and is linked to emotion and reward.
Thalamus: Often referred to as the brain's "sensory switchboard." It is responsible for receiving sensory information and relaying it to the high brain regions (cortex), with the notable exception of the sense of smell.
Psychological Research Methods and Experimental Design
Independent Variable (IV): The experimental factor that is manipulated by the researcher; the variable whose effect is being studied.
Dependent Variable (DV): The outcome factor or behavior being measured; the variable that may change in response to manipulations of the independent variable.
Operational Definition: A clear, specific, and carefully worded description of the exact procedures (operations) used to measure or define a research variable.
Random Assignment: The process of assigning participants to experimental and control groups by chance, thus minimizing preexisting differences between the different groups.
Control Group: In an experiment, the group that is not exposed to the treatment (the independent variable). This group serves as a baseline for comparison to evaluate the effect of the treatment.
Placebo Effect: Experimental results caused by expectations alone; any effect on behavior caused by the administration of an inert substance or condition, which the recipient assumes is an active agent.
Single-Blind Procedure: A research design in which the participants do not know whether they are in the experimental group (receiving the treatment) or the control group (receiving a placebo).
Double-Blind Procedure: An experimental procedure in which both the research participants and the research staff are ignorant (blind) about whether the participants have received the treatment or a placebo. This is used to reduce researcher and participant bias.
Confounding Variable: An outside factor other than the independent variable that might produce an effect in an experiment, potentially influencing the results if not properly controlled.
Reliability: The extent to which a research study or measurement tool yields consistent results over time.
Validity: The extent to which a test or experiment measures or predicts what it is actually supposed to measure or predict.
Ethical Guidelines in Research
APA Ethical Guidelines: The American Psychological Association establishes principles for ethical research involving human participants, including: * Informed Consent: Ensuring participants are told enough to enable them to choose whether they wish to participate. * Right to Withdraw: Participants must be free to leave the study at any time. * Confidentiality: Keeping participant data private. * Protection from Harm: Ensuring participants are not put at unnecessary physical or psychological risk. * Debriefing: Explaining the true nature of the research to the participant after the experiment is completed, especially if deception was used.
Memory Processes and Systems
Encoding: The initial process of getting information into the memory system, such as through extracting meaning.
Storage: The process of retaining encoded information over a period of time.
Retrieval: The process of getting information back out of memory storage.
Sensory Memory: The immediate, very brief recording of sensory information in the memory system. * Iconic Memory: Brief sensory memory of visual stimuli. * Echoic Memory: Brief sensory memory of auditory stimuli.
Short-Term Memory (STM): Activated memory that holds a few items briefly before the information is stored or forgotten. * Duration: Approximately . * Capacity: Approximately items.
Working Memory: A newer understanding of short-term memory that focuses on active, conscious processing of incoming auditory and visual-spatial information, and of information retrieved from long-term memory.
Long-Term Memory (LTM): The relatively permanent and practically limitless storehouse of the memory system, including knowledge, skills, and experiences.
Types of Long-Term Memory
Explicit (Declarative) Memory: Memory of facts and experiences that one can consciously know and "declare." * Episodic Memory: Specific memories of personally experienced events (autobiographical events). * Semantic Memory: Memory of general knowledge, facts, and concepts.
Implicit (Nondeclarative) Memory: Retention of learned skills or classically conditioned associations independent of conscious recollection. * Procedural Memory: A type of implicit memory involving motor skills and habits (e.g., how to ride a bike).
Factors Influencing Memory and Retrieval
Encoding Specificity Principle: The idea that cues and contexts specific to a particular memory will be most effective in helping us recall it.
Priming: The activation, often unconscious, of certain associations, thus predisposing one's perception, memory, or response.
Chunking: Organizing items into familiar, manageable, and meaningful units; often occurs automatically to aid memory.
Mnemonics: Memory aids, especially those techniques that use vivid imagery and organizational devices (e.g., acronyms).
Spacing Effect: The tendency for distributed study or practice to yield better long-term retention than is achieved through massed study (cramming).
Testing Effect: Enhanced memory after retrieving, rather than simply rereading, information. Also sometimes referred to as a retrieval practice effect.
Forgetting and Memory Distortion
Proactive Interference: The forward-acting disruptive effect of prior learning on the recall of new information (old info blocks new).
Retroactive Interference: The backward-acting disruptive effect of new learning on the recall of old information (new info blocks old).
Misinformation Effect: Occurs when misleading information has corrupted one's memory of an event.
Source Amnesia: Attributing to the wrong source an event we have experienced, heard about, read about, or imagined. Also called source misattribution.
Anterograde Amnesia: An inability to form new memories following a brain injury or trauma.
Retrograde Amnesia: An inability to retrieve information from one’s past (memories formed before the injury).
Repression: In psychoanalytic theory, the basic defense mechanism that banishes from consciousness anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories.
Cognition, Problem Solving, and Intelligence
Algorithm: A methodical, logical rule or step-by-step procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem.
Heuristic: A simple thinking strategy or "rule of thumb" that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently. While faster than algorithms, heuristics are more error-prone.
Confirmation Bias: A tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence.
Functional Fixedness: The tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual or intended functions; an impediment to creative problem-solving.
IQ (Intelligence Quotient): Defined originally as the ratio of mental age to chronological age multiplied by . * Formula:
Developmental Psychology
Developmental Psychology: A branch of psychology that studies physical, cognitive, and social change throughout the entire lifespan.
Nature vs. Nurture Debate: The longstanding controversy over the relative contributions that genes (nature) and experience (nurture) make to the development of psychological traits and behaviors.
Continuity vs. Stages Debate: The debate regarding whether development is a gradual, continuous process (like riding an escalator) or a sequence of separate, distinct stages (like climbing a ladder).
Stability vs. Change Debate: The debate over whether our individual traits remain constant as we age (stability) or fluctuate and evolve over time (change).
Prenatal Development and Infancy
Zygote: The fertilized egg; it enters a 2-week period of rapid cell division and develops into an embryo. Duration: .
Embryo: The developing human organism from about after fertilization through the second month ().
Fetus: The developing human organism from after conception to birth.
Teratogens: Agents, such as chemicals, drugs, or viruses, that can reach the embryo or fetus during prenatal development and cause harm.
Habituation: Decreasing responsiveness with repeated stimulation. As infants gain familiarity with repeated exposure to a visual stimulus, their interest wanes and they look away sooner.
Attachment: An emotional tie with another person; shown in young children by their seeking closeness to the caregiver and showing distress on separation. Styles include secure and insecure attachment.
Critical Period: An optimal period early in the life of an organism when exposure to certain stimuli or experiences produces normal development (e.g., for language or attachment).
Developmental Theorists
Jean Piaget: A pioneering cognitive development theorist who proposed children progress through four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.
Erik Erikson: A theorist who proposed a theory of psychosocial development, consisting of 8 stages of crises, such as "identity vs. role confusion" during adolescence.
Lawrence Kohlberg: A theorist who described the development of moral reasoning through three levels: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional.
Gender Identity: A person's inner sense of being male, female, or another identity, which may or may not correspond with their biological sex.
Principles of Learning and Conditioning
Learning: A relatively permanent change in an organism's behavior due to experience.
Associative Learning: Learning that certain events occur together. The events may be two stimuli (as in classical conditioning) or a response and its consequences (as in operant conditioning).
Classical Conditioning: A type of learning in which one learns to link two or more stimuli and anticipate events. * Unconditioned Stimulus (US): A stimulus that naturally and automatically triggers a response (e.g., food). * Unconditioned Response (UR): An unlearned, naturally occurring response to an unconditioned stimulus (e.g., salivation when food is in the mouth). * Conditioned Stimulus (CS): An originally irrelevant (neutral) stimulus that, after association with an unconditioned stimulus, comes to trigger a conditioned response. * Conditioned Response (CR): A learned response to a previously neutral (but now conditioned) stimulus. * Acquisition: The initial stage in classical conditioning; the phase when one links a neutral stimulus and an unconditioned stimulus so that the neutral stimulus begins triggering the conditioned response. * Extinction: The diminishing of a conditioned response; occurs in classical conditioning when an unconditioned stimulus does not follow a conditioned stimulus. * Spontaneous Recovery: The reappearance, after a pause, of an extinguished conditioned response. * Generalization: The tendency, once a response has been conditioned, for stimuli similar to the conditioned stimulus to elicit similar responses. * Discrimination: The learned ability to distinguish between a conditioned stimulus and stimuli that do not signal an unconditioned stimulus.
Operant Conditioning: A type of learning in which behavior is strengthened if followed by a reinforcer or diminished if followed by a punisher. * Reinforcement: Any event that strengthens the behavior it follows. * Positive Reinforcement: Increasing behaviors by presenting positive stimuli (adding something good). * Negative Reinforcement: Increasing behaviors by stopping or reducing negative stimuli (removing something bad). * Punishment: An event that tends to decrease the behavior that it follows. * Positive Punishment: Administering an aversive stimulus (adding something bad). * Negative Punishment: Withdrawing a rewarding stimulus (removing something good).
Social Psychology and Group Dynamics
Attribution Theory: The theory that we explain someone's behavior by crediting either the situation or the person's disposition.
Fundamental Attribution Error: The tendency for observers, when analyzing another's behavior, to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate the impact of personal disposition.
Attitude: Feelings, often based on our beliefs, that predispose us to respond in a particular way to objects, people, and events.
Cognitive Dissonance: The theory that we act to reduce the discomfort (dissonance) we feel when two of our thoughts (cognitions) are inconsistent or when our actions and attitudes clash.
Conformity: Adjusting one's behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard (famously studied by Solomon Asch).
Obedience: Following orders or commands, often from an authority figure (famously studied in Stanley Milgram’s shock experiments).
Social Facilitation: Improved performance on simple or well-learned tasks in the presence of others.
Social Loafing: The tendency for people in a group to exert less effort when pooling their efforts toward attaining a common goal than when individually accountable.
Deindividuation: The loss of self-awareness and self-restraint occurring in group situations that foster arousal and anonymity.
Groupthink: The mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives.
Group Polarization: The enhancement of a group's prevailing inclinations through discussion within the group.
Prejudice: An unjustifiable (and usually negative) attitude toward a group and its members. Prejudice generally involves stereotyped beliefs, negative feelings, and a predisposition to discriminatory action.
Discrimination: Unjustifiable negative behavior toward a group and its members.
Stereotype: A generalized (sometimes accurate but often overgeneralized) belief about a group of people.
Bystander Effect: The tendency for any given bystander to be less likely to give aid if other bystanders are present (studied by Darley and Latané).
Personality, Motivation, and Emotion
Personality: An individual's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.
Psychoanalytic Theory: Sigmund Freud’s theory that personality is the result of unconscious conflicts among biological impulses and social restraints. Components include: * Id: Unconscious energy that strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives (pleasure principle). * Ego: The largely conscious "executive" part of personality that mediates among the demands of the id, superego, and reality (reality principle). * Superego: The part of personality that represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgment (the conscience).
Defense Mechanisms: The ego's protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality (e.g., repression, denial, projection).
Humanistic Theory: A perspective that emphasizes the potential for healthy personal growth and self-actualization (focused on Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow).
Trait Theory: A perspective that views personality as a compilation of stable characteristics or traits. * The Big Five: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
Social-Cognitive Perspective: Proposed by Albert Bandura, this views behavior as influenced by the interaction between people's traits (including their thinking) and their social context.
Self-Efficacy: One's belief in their own ability to succeed in specific situations or accomplish a task (Bandura).
Locus of Control: The perception of whether control over life events is internal (one controls their own fate) or external (chance or outside forces determine fate).
Motivation: A need or desire that energizes and directs behavior.
Drive-Reduction Theory: The idea that a physiological need creates an aroused tension state (a drive) that motivates an organism to satisfy the need to maintain homeostasis.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: A pyramid of human needs, beginning at the base with physiological needs that must first be satisfied before higher-level safety needs and then psychological needs become active, culminating in self-actualization.
Intrinsic Motivation: A desire to perform a behavior effectively for its own sake, driven by internal rewards like interest or enjoyment.
Extrinsic Motivation: A desire to perform a behavior to receive promised rewards or avoid threatened punishment (external rewards like money or grades).
James-Lange Theory: The theory that our experience of emotion is our awareness of our physiological responses to emotion-arousing stimuli (arousal comes before emotion; e.g., "We feel afraid because we tremble").
Schachter-Singer Two-Factor Theory: To experience emotion, one must (1) be physically aroused and (2) cognitively label the arousal.
Psychological Disorders
Psychological Disorder: A syndrome marked by a clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that is deviant, distressful, and dysfunctional.
Medical Model: The concept that diseases, in this case psychological disorders, have physical causes that can be diagnosed, treated, and, in most cases, cured, often through treatment in a hospital.
Biopsychosocial Model: A contemporary perspective that assumes biological, psychological, and social-cultural factors combined and interact to produce psychological disorders.
DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders): The American Psychiatric Association's widely used system for classifying psychological disorders.
Anxiety Disorders: Psychological disorders characterized by distressing, persistent anxiety or maladaptive behaviors that reduce anxiety. * Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD): An anxiety disorder in which a person is continually tense, apprehensive, and in a state of autonomic nervous system arousal. * Panic Disorder: An anxiety disorder marked by unpredictable, minutes-long episodes of intense dread in which a person experiences terror and accompanying chest pain, choking, or other frightening sensations (panic attacks). * Phobia: An anxiety disorder marked by a persistent, irrational fear and avoidance of a specific object, activity, or situation.
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD): A disorder characterized by unwanted repetitive thoughts (obsessions) and/or actions (compulsions).
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): A disorder characterized by haunting memories, nightmares, social withdrawal, jumpy anxiety, numbness of feeling, and/or insomnia that lingers for four weeks or more after a traumatic experience.
Major Depressive Disorder: A mood disorder in which a person experiences, in the absence of drugs or another medical condition, two or more weeks with five or more symptoms, at least one of which must be either (1) depressed mood or (2) loss of interest or pleasure.
Bipolar Disorder: A mood disorder in which a person alternates between the hopelessness and lethargy of depression and the overexcited state of mania.
Schizophrenia: A psychological disorder characterized by delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, and/or diminished, inappropriate emotional expression. * Delusions: False beliefs, often of persecution or grandeur, that may accompany psychotic disorders. * Hallucinations: False sensory experiences, such as seeing something in the absence of an external visual stimulus or hearing voices.
Personality Disorders: Psychological disorders characterized by inflexible and enduring behavior patterns that impair social functioning. * Antisocial Personality Disorder: A personality disorder in which a person (usually a man) exhibits a lack of conscience for wrongdoing, even toward friends and family members; may be aggressive and ruthless or a clever con artist. * Borderline Personality Disorder: A disorder involving a pattern of instability in moods, self-image, and interpersonal relationships.
Somatic Symptom Disorder: A psychological disorder in which the symptoms take a somatic (bodily) form without apparent physical cause.
Dissociative Disorders: Disorders in which conscious awareness becomes separated (dissociated) from previous memories, thoughts, and feelings.
Questions & Discussion
Question: A newborn turns its head toward a touch on the cheek, looking for a nipple. This reflex is called: * A) Rooting reflex * B) Grasp reflex * C) Moro reflex * D) Babinski reflex
Answer: A) Rooting reflex