Psychology

ALL PSYCH. NOTES:

Def. of psychology: scientific study of behavior and mental processes

(considered science because of the systematic methods used to draw conclusions, behavior as in what can physically/directly be observed. Mental processes as in thoughts, feelings, and motives that we experience privately and cannot be observed)

Attitudes of Psychological frame of mind: 

Critical thinking: process of thinking deeply/actively, asking questions, evaluating evidence

Curiosity: wanting to know why something is the way it is

Skepticism: questioning what others know, and wanting evidence before accepting information

Objective: process of trying to see things for how they how they really are rather than how the observer wants them to be seen

Empirical method: gaining knowledge through observation of events, collecting data, and logical reasoning

Wilhelm Wundt: founded first psychology lab, academic discipline of psychology

Structuralism: Wundt’s approach to discovering the basic elements, or structures, of mental processes

William James: psychologist who helped bring the ideas to America (functionalism)

Functionalism: James’s approach to mental processes, emphasizing the functions and purposes of the mind and behavior in the individuals adaptation to the environment

Natural Selection: Darwin’s principle of an evolutionary process in which organisms that are best adapted to their environment will survive and produce offspring

Biological Approach: focuses on brain and nervous system

Neuroscience: The scientific study of the structure, function, development, genetics, and biochemistry of the nervous system, emphasizing that the brain and nervous system are central to understanding behavior, thought, and emotion.

Behavioral approach: focuses on the scientific study of observable behavioral responses and their environmental determinants.

Psychodynamic approach: focuses on unconscious thought, the conflict between biological drives (such as the drive for sex) and society’s demands, and early childhood family experiences.

Sigmund Freud: psychologist that is founder of psychodynamic approach (developed psychoanalysis, the therapeutic technique which involves unlocking a personas unconscious conflicts by talking about their childhood, dreams, feelings, etc

Humanistic approach: focuses on a person’s positive qualities, the capacity for positive growth, and the freedom to choose any destiny.

Cognitive approach: focuses on the mental processes involved in knowing: how we direct our attention, perceive, remember, think, and solve problems.

Evolutionary approach: focuses on evolutionary ideas such as adaptation, reproduction, and natural selection as the basis for explaining specific human behaviors.

Sociocultural approach: focuses on the ways in which social and cultural environments influence behavior.

Biopsychosocial approach: A perspective on human behavior that asserts that biological, psychological, and social factors are all significant ingredients in producing behavior. All of these levels are important to understanding human behavior.

Types of psychological research:

Descriptive: finding the basic dimensions of a variable

Experimental: establishes causal relationships between variables

Correlational:discovers relationships between variables

Psychological approach to focus on:

 industrial/organizational: psychology applies findings in the workplace

 Community: concerned with providing accessible care for people with psychological problems. Community based mental health centers are one means of delivering such services as outreach programs.

school/educational: concerns children’s learning and adjustment in school. School psychologists will test children, make recommendations about a child's placement, and work on educational planning teams.

cross cultural: studies the role of culture in understanding behavior, thought, and emotion, with a special interest in whether psychological phenomena are universal or culture specific.

sensation and perception: focus on the physical systems and psychological processes of vision, hearing, touch, and smell that allow us to experience the world

Chapter 2:

Nervous system: The body’s electrochemical communication circuitry.

Characteristics of the nervous system: Complexity, integration, adaptability, electrochemical transmission, 

Plasticity: The brain’s special capacity for change.

Afferent nerves: aka sensory nerves; nerves that carry information about the external environment to the brain and spinal cord via sensory receptors.

Efferent nerves: aka motor nerves; nerves that carry information out of the brain and spinal cord to other areas of the body.

Neural networks: networks of nerve cells that integrate sensory input and motor output.

The two primary divisions of the nervous system: 

central (brain and spinal chord) 

peripheral (network of nerves that connects the brain and spinal cord to other parts of the body.)

Divisions of peripheral nervous system:

 somatic: both sensory and motor nerves which convey information from the skin and muscles to the central nervous system about conditions such as pain and temperature, and the motor nerves, whose function is to tell muscles what to do.

 autonomic: takes messages to and from the body’s internal organs, monitoring such processes as breathing, heart rate, and digestion.

Two parts of the autonomic nervous system: 

sympathetic (arouses the body to mobilize it for action and thus is involved in the experience of stress. Fight-or-flight response) 

parasympathetic (calms the body.)

Stress: responses of individuals to environmental stressors (begins with fight or flight response)

Corticosteroids: stress hormones that get released when under stress, it makes our brain focus on what needs to be done right then and there

Acute stress: momentary stress that occurs in response to life experiences

chronic stress: stress that goes on continuously

Neurons: nerve cells that convey information within the nervous system

Glial cells: most common cell in the nervous system, which provides support, nutritional benefits, and other functions

Cell body: part of the neuron that contains the nucleus, which directs the manufacture of substances that the neuron needs for growth and maintenance

Dendrites: Treelike fibers projecting from a neuron, which receive information and orient it toward the neuron’s cell body.

Axon:  part of the neuron that carries information away from the cell body toward other cells.

myelin sheath: layer of fat cells that encases and insulates most axons. Can speed up transmission of nerve pulses      (Multiple sclerosis is a degenerative disease of the nervous system which can occur if myelin is not maintained.)

Resting potential: stable, negative charge of an inactive neuron. (between -60 and -75 millivolts)

Action potential: brief wave of positive electrical charge that sweeps down the axon. When this happens, the neuron is “firing”

All or nothing principle: idea that once the electrical impulse reaches a certain level of intensity (its threshold), it fires and moves all the way down the axon without losing any intensity.

Cerebellum: consists of two rounded structures which play a role in motor coordination

Neurotransmitters: Chemical substances that are stored in very tiny sacs within the neuron’s terminal buttons and involved in transmitting information across a synaptic gap to the next neuron

Chapter 3:

Ophthalmology: study of the eyes structure, function, diseases

Audiology: science concerned with hearing

Neurology: scientific study of nervous system

Stimuli: all the objects and events that surround us

Sensation:  process of receiving stimulus energies from the external environment and changing those energies into neural energy (biological processing that occurs between our sensory system and the environment)

Perception: process of organizing and interpreting sensory information so that it makes sense (our experience of the sensation processes in action)

Bottom up processing: The operation in sensation and perception in which sensory receptors register information about the external environment and send it up to the brain for interpretation

Top-down processing: The operation in sensation and perception, launched by cognitive processing at the brain’s higher levels, that allows the organism to sense what is happening and to apply that framework to information from the world

Sensory receptors: Specialized cells that detect stimulus information and transmit it to sensory (afferent) nerves and the brain.

Photoreception: detection of light, perceived as sight

Mechanoreception: detection of pressure, vibration, movement, perceived as touch, hearing, and equilibrium

Chemoreception: detection of chemical stimuli, perceived as smell and taste

Synesthesia: describes the experience in which one sense includes an experience in another sense

Absolute threshold: minimum amount of stimulus energy that a person can detect.

Signal detection theory: approach to perception that focuses on decision making about stimuli in the presence of uncertainty.

Selective attention: act of focusing on a specific aspect of experience while ignoring others.

Inattentional blindness: the failure to detect unexpected events when attention is engaged by a task

Difference threshold: degree of difference that must exist between two stimuli before the difference is detected.

Sensory adaptation: change in the responsiveness of the sensory system based on the average level of surrounding stimulation.

Cornea: clear membrane at front of eye (focuses the light that enters the eye)

Retina: The multilayered light-sensitive surface in the eye that records electromagnetic energy and converts it to neural impulses for processing in the brain.

Rods: The receptor cells in the retina that are sensitive to light but not very useful for color vision.

Cones: The receptor cells in the retina that allow for color perception.

Perceptual set: A predisposition or readiness to perceive something in a particular way.

Visual cortex: Located in the occipital lobe, the part of the cerebral cortex involved in vision.

trichromatic theory: Theory stating that color perception is produced by three types of cone receptors in the retina that are particularly sensitive to different, but overlapping, ranges of wavelengths.

Opponent-process theory: stating that cells in the visual system respond to complementary pairs of red-green and blue-yellow colors; a given cell might be excited by red and inhibited by green, whereas another cell might be excited by yellow and inhibited by blue.

Figure-ground relationship: The principle by which we organize the perceptual field into stimuli that stand out (figure) and those that are left over (ground).

Gestalt psychology: A school of thought interested in how people naturally organize their perceptions according to certain patterns.

Size constancy: recognition that an object remains the same size even though the retinal image of the object changes

Kinesthetic senses: Senses that provide information about movement, posture, and orientation.

Vestibular sense: Sense that provides information about balance and movement.

Semicircular canals: Three fluid-filled circular tubes in the inner ear containing the sensory receptors that detect head motion caused when an individual tilts or moves the head and/or the body.

Apparent movement: The perception that a stationary object is moving.

Auditory nerve: The nerve structure that receives information about sound from the hair cells of the inner ear and carries these neural impulses to the brain’s auditory areas.

Binding: In the sense of vision, the bringing together and integration of what is processed by different neural pathways or cells.

Binocular cues: Depth cues that depend on the combination of the images in the left and right eyes and on the way the two eyes work together.

Convergence: A binocular cue to depth and distance in which the muscle movements in an individual’s two eyes provide information about how deep and/or far away something is.

Depth perception: The ability to perceive objects three dimensionally.

Difference threshold: The degree of difference that must exist between two stimuli before the difference is detected.

Feature detectors: Neurons in the brain’s visual system that respond to particular features of a stimulus

Frequency theory: Theory on how the inner ear registers the frequency of sound, stating that the perception of a sound’s frequency depends on how often the auditory nerve fires.

Gestalt psychology: A school of thought interested in how people naturally organize their perceptions according to certain patterns.

Inner ear: The part of the ear that includes the oval window, cochlea, and basilar membrane and whose function is to convert sound waves into neural impulses and send them to the brain.

Kinesthetic senses: Senses that provide information about movement, posture, and orientation.

Middle ear: The part of the ear that channels and amplifies sound through the eardrum, hammer, anvil, and stirrup to the inner ear.

Monocular cues: Powerful depth cues available from the image in one eye, either the right or the left.

Olfactory epithelium: The lining of the roof of the nasal cavity, containing a sheet of receptor cells for smell.

Opponent-process theory: Theory stating that cells in the visual system respond to complementary pairs of red-green and blue-yellow colors; a given cell might be excited by red and inhibited by green, whereas another cell might be excited by yellow and inhibited by blue.

Optic nerve: The structure at the back of the eye, made up of axons of the ganglion cells, that carries visual information to the brain for further processing.

Outer ear: The outermost part of the ear, consisting of the pinna and the external auditory canal.

Parallel processing: The simultaneous distribution of information across different neural pathways.

Perceptual constancy: The recognition that objects are constant and unchanging even though sensory input about them is changing.

Place theory: Theory on how the inner ear registers the frequency of sound, stating that each frequency produces vibrations at a particular spot on the basilar membrane

Semicircular canals: Three fluid-filled circular tubes in the inner ear containing the sensory receptors that detect head motion caused when an individual tilts or moves the head and/or the body.

Sensory adaptation: A change in the responsiveness of the sensory system based on the average level of surrounding stimulation.

Signal detection theory: An approach to perception that focuses on decision making about stimuli in the presence of uncertainty.

Subliminal perception: The detection of information below the level of conscious awareness.

Thermoreceptors: Sensory nerve endings under the skin that respond to changes in temperature at or near the skin and provide input to keep the body’s temperature at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Vestibular sense: Sense that provides information about balance and movement.

Visual cortex:Located in the occipital lobe, the part of the cerebral cortex involved in vision.

Volley principle:Principle addressing limitations of the frequency theory of hearing, stating that a cluster of nerve cells can fire neural impulses in rapid succession, producing a volley of impulses.

Weber’s law:The principle that two stimuli must differ by a constant minimum percentage (rather than a constant amount) to be perceived as different.

Figure and Ground perceptual principle: The principle by which we organize the perceptual field into stimuli that stand out (figure) and those that are left over (ground).

Retinal Disparity perceptual principle:  the fact that the left and right fields of vision provide slightly different visual images when focusing on a single object

Linear Perspective perceptual principle: objects that are farther away take up less space on the retina. Things that appear smaller are perceived to be further away. 

Texture gradient perceptual principle: texture becomes denser and finer the further away it is from the view.

Chapter 4:

William James: psychologists who described the mind as “stream of consciousness”

Stream of consciousness: describes the mind as a continuous flow of changing sensations, images, thoughts, and feelings.

Metacognition: term used today by psychologists to describe the process by which we think about thinking

Consciousness: An individual’s awareness of external events and internal sensations under a condition of arousal, including awareness of the self and thoughts about one’s experiences.

Awareness: part of our consciousness that includes the self and thoughts about ones experience

Arousal: part of consciousness that is the psychological state of being engaged with the environment

Reticular activating system: A network of structures including the brain stem, medulla, and thalamus that determine arousal, one aspect of consciousness.

Theory of mind: Individuals’ understanding that they and others think, feel, perceive, and have private experiences.

Autism spectrum disorder: A neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits in social communication and social interaction across a variety of settings as well as restrictive repetitive behaviors, interests, and activities.

Higher level consciousness: involves controlled processing in which individuals actively focus their efforts on attaining a goal, very alert

Lower level consciousness: includes automatic processing that requires little attention, as well as daydreaming

Altered states of consciousness: can be produced by drugs, trauma, fatigue, hypnosis, and sensory deprivation

Subconscious awareness: can occur when people are awake, as well as when they are sleeping and dreaming

No awareness: freud's belief that some unconscious thoughts are too laden with anxiety and other negative emotions for consciousness to admit them

Controlled processes: The most alert states of human consciousness, during which individuals actively focus their efforts toward a goal.

Executive function: Higher-order, complex cognitive processes, including thinking, planning, and problem solving.

Automatic processing: States of consciousness that require little attention and do not interfere with other ongoing activities.

Biological rhythms: Periodic physiological fluctuations in the body, such as the rise and fall of hormones and accelerated/decelerated cycles of brain activity, that can influence behavior.

Circadian rhythms: Daily behavioral or physiological cycles that involve the sleep/wake cycle, body temperature, blood pressure, and blood sugar level.

Chapter 5

Learning: A systematic, relatively permanent change in behavior that occurs through experience.

Behaviorism: A theory of learning that focuses solely on observable behaviors, discounting the importance of such mental activity as thinking, wishing, and hoping.

Associative learning: Learning that occurs when an organism makes a connection, or an association, between two events.

Conditioning: process of learning these associations

classical conditioning: organisms learn the difference between 2 stimuli, which leads to them learning how to anticipate events (Learning process in which a neutral stimulus becomes associated with an innately meaningful stimulus and acquires the capacity to elicit a similar response.)

operant conditioning: organisms learn the association between a behavior and a consequence, such as an award. (A form of associative learning in which the consequences of a behavior change the probability of the behavior’s occurrence.)

Observational learning: Learning that occurs through observing and imitating another’s behavior.

Ivan Pavlov: russian psychologist who came up with idea of classical conditioning

Unconditioned stimulus: A stimulus that produces a response without prior learning.

Unconditioned response: An unlearned reaction that is automatically elicited by the unconditioned stimulus.

conditioned stimulus: A previously neutral stimulus that eventually elicits a conditioned response after being paired with the unconditioned stimulus.

conditioned response: The learned response to the conditioned stimulus that occurs after a conditioned stimulus–unconditioned stimulus pairing.

Acquisition: The initial learning of the connection between the unconditioned stimulus and the conditioned stimulus when these two stimuli are paired.

Generalization (classical conditioning): The tendency of a new stimulus that is similar to the original conditioned stimulus to elicit a response that is similar to the conditioned response.

Discrimination (classical conditioning): The process of learning to respond to certain stimuli and not others.

Extinction (classical conditioning): The weakening of the conditioned response when the unconditioned stimulus is absent.

Spontaneous recovery: The process in classical conditioning by which a conditioned response can recur after a time delay, without further conditioning.

aversive conditioning: A form of treatment that consists of repeated pairings of a stimulus with a very unpleasant stimulus.

Counterconditioning: A classical conditioning procedure for changing the relationship between a conditioned stimulus and its conditioned response.

Shaping: Rewarding successive approximations of a desired behavior.

Reinforcement: The process by which a stimulus or an event (a reinforcer) following a particular behavior increases the probability that the behavior will happen again.

Insight learning: A form of problem solving in which the organism develops a sudden insight into or understanding of a problem’s solution.

Chapter 6:

Amnesia: The loss of memory.

Anterograde amnesia: A memory disorder that affects the retention of new information and events.

Atkinson-shiffrin theory: 

Autobiographical memory: A special form of episodic memory, consisting of a person’s recollections of their life experiences.

connectionism/parallel distributed processing (PDP): The theory that memory is stored throughout the brain in connections among neurons, several of which may work together to process a single memory.

Decay theory: Theory stating that when an individual learns something new, a neurochemical memory trace forms, but over time this trace disintegrates; suggests that the passage of time always increases forgetting.

Divided attention: Concentrating on more than one activity at the same time.

Elaboration: The formation of a number of different connections around a stimulus at a given level of memory encoding.

Encoding: The first step in memory; the process by which information gets into memory storage.

Episodic memory: The retention of information about the where, when, and what of life’s happenings—that is, how individuals remember life’s episodes.

Executive attention: The ability to plan action, allocate attention to goals, detect errors and compensate for them, monitor progress on tasks, and deal with novel or difficult circumstances.

Explicit memory: The conscious recollection of information, such as specific facts or events and, at least in humans, information that can be verbally communicated.

Flashbulb memory: The memory of emotionally significant events that people often recall with more accuracy and vivid imagery than everyday events.

Implicit memory: Memory in which behavior is affected by prior experience without a conscious recollection of that experience.

Interference theory: The theory that people forget not because memories are lost from storage but because other information gets in the way of what they want to remember.

Levels of processing: A continuum of memory processing from shallow to intermediate to deep, with deeper processing producing better memory.

Long term memory: A relatively permanent type of memory that stores huge amounts of information for a long time.

Memory: The retention of information or experience over time as the result of three key processes: encoding, storage, and retrieval.

Motivated forgetting: Forgetting that occurs when something is so painful or anxiety-laden that remembering it is intolerable.

Priming: The activation of information that people already have in storage to help them remember new information better and faster.

Proactive interference: Situation in which material that was learned earlier disrupts the recall of material that was learned later.

Procedural memory: Memory for skills.

Prospective memory: Remembering information about doing something in the future; includes memory for intentions.

Retrieval: The memory process that occurs when information that was retained in memory comes out of storage.

retroactive interference: Situation in which material that was learned later disrupts the retrieval of information that was learned earlier.

retrograde amnesia: Memory loss for a segment of the past but not for new events.

Retrospective memory: Remembering information from the past.

Schema: A preexisting mental concept or framework that helps people to organize and interpret information. Schemas from prior encounters with the environment influence the way individuals encode, make inferences about, and retrieve information.

Script: A schema for an event, often containing information about physical features, people, and typical occurrences.

Semantic memory: A person’s knowledge about the world.

Sensory memory: Memory system that involves holding information from the world in its original sensory form for only an instant, not much longer than the brief time it is exposed to the visual, auditory, and other senses.

Serial position effect: The tendency to recall the items at the beginning and end of a list more readily than those in the middle.

Short term memory: Limited-capacity memory system in which information is usually retained for only as long as 30 seconds unless strategies are used to retain it longer.

Storage: The retention of information over time and how this information is represented in memory.A preexisting mental concept or framework that helps people to organize and interpret information. Schemas from prior encounters with the environment influence the way individuals encode, make inferences about, and retrieve information.

Sustained attention: The ability to maintain attention to a selected stimulus for a prolonged period of time.

Tip of the tongue phenomenon: A type of effortful retrieval associated with a person’s feeling that they know something (say, a word or a name) but cannot quite pull it out of memory.

Working memory: A combination of components, including short-term memory and attention, that allow individuals to hold information temporarily as they perform cognitive tasks; a kind of mental workbench on which the brain manipulates and assembles information to guide understanding, decision making, and problem solving.

Chapter 7

Algorithms:Strategies—including formulas, instructions, and the testing of all possible solutions—that guarantee a solution to a problem.

Artificial intelligence:A scientific field that focuses on creating machines capable of performing activities that require intelligence when they are done by people.

Availability heuristic:A prediction about the probability of an event based on the ease of recalling or imagining similar events.

Base rate neglect: The tendency to ignore information about general principles in favor of very specific but vivid information.

Cognition:The way in which information is processed and manipulated in remembering, thinking, and knowing.

Concept: A mental category that is used to group objects, events, and characteristics.

Confirmation bias:The tendency to search for and use information that supports one’s ideas rather than refutes them.

Convergent thinking:Thinking that produces the single best solution to a problem.

Creativity:The ability to think about something in novel and unusual ways and to devise unconventional solutions to problems.

Culture-fair tests:Intelligence tests that are intended to be culturally unbiased.

Decision making: The mental activity of evaluating alternatives and choosing among them.

deductive reasoning:Reasoning from a general case that is known to be true to a specific instance.

Divergent thinking:Thinking that produces many solutions to the same problem.

Dyslexia:A learning disability characterized by difficulty with learning to read fluently and with accurate comprehension, despite normal intelligence.

Eugenics:The belief in the possibility of improving the human species by discouraging reproduction among those with less desirable characteristics and enhancing reproduction among those with more desirable characteristics, such as high intelligence.

Fixation: Using a prior strategy and failing to look at a problem from a fresh new perspective.

Functional fixedness: Failing to solve a problem as a result of fixation on a thing’s usual functions.

Gifted:Possessing high intelligence (an IQ of 130 or higher) and/or superior talent in a particular area.

Heritability:The proportion of observable differences in a group that can be explained by differences in the genes of the group’s members.

Heuristics: Shortcut strategies or guidelines that suggest a solution to a problem but do not guarantee an answer.

Hindsight bias:The tendency to report falsely, after the fact, that one has accurately predicted an outcome.

Inductive reasoning: Reasoning from specific observations to make generalizations.

Infinite generativity: The ability of language to produce an endless number of meaningful sentences.

Intellectual disability:A condition of limited mental ability in which an individual has a low IQ, usually below 70 on a traditional intelligence test, and has difficulty adapting to everyday life.

Intelligence:All-purpose ability to do well on cognitive tasks, to solve problems, and to learn from experience.

Intelligence quotient: An individual’s mental age divided by chronological age multiplied by 100.

Language:A form of communication—whether spoken, written, or signed—that is based on a system of symbols.

Loss aversion:The tendency to strongly prefer to avoid losses compared to attempting to acquire gains.

Mental age:An individual’s level of mental development relative to that of others.

Mindfulness:The state of being alert and mentally present for one’s everyday activities.

Morphology:A language’s rules for word formation.

Normal distribution:A symmetrical, bell-shaped curve, with a majority of test scores (or other data) falling in the middle of the possible range and few scores (or other data points) appearing toward the extremes.

Open-mindedness:The state of being receptive to other ways of looking at things.

Phonology:A language’s sound system.

Pragmatics: The useful character of language and the ability of language to communicate even more meaning than is verbalized.

Problem solving:The mental process of finding an appropriate way to attain a goal when the goal is not readily available.

Prototype model: A model emphasizing that when people evaluate whether a given item reflects a certain concept, they compare the item with the most typical item(s) in that category and look for a “family resemblance” with that item’s properties.

Reasoning:The mental activity of transforming information to reach conclusions.

Reliability:The extent to which a test yields a consistent, reproducible measure of performance.

Representativeness heuristic: The tendency to make judgments about group membership based on physical appearances or the match between a person and one’s stereotype of a group rather than on available base rate information.

Semantics:The meaning of words and sentences in a particular language

Standardization:The development of uniform procedures for administering and scoring a test, and the creation of norms (performance standards) for the test.

Subgoals: Intermediate goals or problems to solve that put one in a better position for reaching a final goal or solution.

Syntax: A language’s rules for combining words to form acceptable phrases and sentences

Thinking: The process of manipulating information mentally by forming concepts, solving problems, making decisions, and reflecting critically or creatively.

Triarchic theory of intelligence: Sternberg’s theory that intelligence comes in three forms: analytical, creative, and practical.

validity:The soundness of the conclusions that a researcher draws from an experiment. In the realm of testing, the extent to which a test measures what it is intended to measure.

Cognitive psychology: label for approaches that explain observable behavior by investigating mental processes/structures

Chapter 8

Accommodation: An individual’s adjustment of their schemas to new information.

Assimilation: An individual’s incorporation of new information into existing knowledge.

Authoritarian parenting: A restrictive, punitive parenting style in which the parent exhorts the child to follow the parent’s directions and to value hard work and effort.

Authoritative parenting: A parenting style that encourages the child to be independent but that still places limits and controls on behavior.

Concrete operational stage: Piaget’s third stage of cognitive development, lasting from about 7 to 11 years of age, during which the individual uses operations and replaces intuitive reasoning with logical reasoning in concrete situations.

Core knowledge approach: A perspective on infant cognitive development that holds that babies are born with domain-specific knowledge systems.

Cross-sectional approach:

Cross-sectional design: A research design in which a group of people is assessed on a psychological variable at one point in time.

Development: The pattern of continuity and change in human capabilities that occurs throughout life, involving both growth and decline.

Emerging adulthood: The transitional period from adolescence to adulthood, spanning approximately 18 to 25 years of age.

Executive function: Higher-order, complex cognitive processes, including thinking, planning, and problem solving.

Formal operational stage: Piaget’s fourth stage of cognitive development, which begins at 11 to 15 years of age and continues through the adult years; it features thinking about things that are not concrete, making predictions, and using logic to come up with hypotheses about the future.

Gender: The social and psychological aspects of being male, female, both, or neither.

Gender identity: A person’s inner concept of themselves in relation to the ideas of being male, female, both, or neither.

Gender roles: Roles that reflect the society’s expectations for how people of different genders should think, act, and feel.

Gender similarities hypothesis: Hyde’s proposition that people of different genders are much more similar than they are different.

Infant attachment: The close emotional bond between an infant and its caregiver.

Limbic system: A set of subcortical brain structures central to emotion, memory, and reward processing.

Longitudinal study: A special kind of systematic observation, used by correlational researchers, that involves obtaining measures of the variables of interest in multiple waves over time.

Nature: An individual’s biological inheritance, especially genes.

Neglectful parenting: A parenting style characterized by a lack of parental involvement in the child’s life.

Nurture: An individual’s environmental and social experiences.

Object permanence: Piaget’s term for the crucial accomplishment of understanding that objects and events continue to exist even when they cannot directly be seen, heard, or touched.

Permissive parenting: A parenting style characterized by the placement of few limits on the child’s behavior.

Preferential looking: A research technique that involves giving an infant a choice of what object to look at.

Preoperational stage: Piaget’s second stage of cognitive development, lasting from about two to seven years of age, during which thought is more symbolic than sensorimotor thought.

Prosocial behavior: Behavior that is intended to benefit other people.

Puberty: A period of rapid skeletal and sexual maturation that occurs mainly in early adolescence.

Representativeness heuristic:

Resilience: A person’s ability to recover from or adapt to difficult times.

Secure attachment: The ways that infants use their caregiver, usually their mother, as a secure base from which to explore the environment.

Sensorimotor stage: Piaget’s first stage of cognitive development, lasting from birth to about two years of age, during which infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences with motor (physical) actions.

Sexual orientation: The direction of an individual’s erotic interests, today viewed as a continuum from exclusive male–female relations to exclusive same-gender relations.

Temperament: An individual’s behavioral style and characteristic way of responding.

Wisdom: Expert knowledge about the practical aspects of life.

Chapter 9

Androgens: The class of sex hormones that predominates in males, produced by the testes in males and by the adrenal glands in all people.

Asexual: A person experiences a lack of sexual attraction to others and may feel no sexual orientation.

Broaden-and-build model: Fredrickson’s model of positive emotion, stating that the function of positive emotions lies in their effects on an individual’s attention and ability to build resources.

Cannon-Bard theory: The proposition that emotion and physiological reactions occur simultaneously.

Display rules: Sociocultural standards that determine when, where, and how emotions should be expressed.

Drive: An aroused state that occurs because of a physiological need.

Emotion: Feeling, or affect, that can involve physiological arousal (such as a fast heartbeat), conscious experience (thinking about being in love with someone), and behavioral expression (a smile or grimace).

Estrogens: The class of sex hormones that predominates in females, produced mainly by the ovaries.

Extrinsic motivation: Motivation that involves external incentives such as rewards and punishments.

Facial feedback hypothesis: The idea that facial expressions can influence emotions and reflect them.

Hierarchy of needs: Maslow’s theory that human needs must be satisfied in the following sequence: physiological needs, safety, love and belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization.

Homeostasis: The body’s tendency to maintain an equilibrium, or steady state.

Human sexual response pattern: According to Masters and Johnson, the characteristic sequence of physiological changes that humans experience during sexual activity, consisting of four phases: excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution.

Instinct: An innate (unlearned) biological pattern of behavior that is assumed to be universal throughout a species.

Intrinsic motivation: Motivation based on internal factors such as organismic needs (competence, relatedness, and autonomy), as well as curiosity, challenge, and fun.

James-Lange theory: The theory that emotion results from physiological states triggered by stimuli in the environment.

Motivation: The force that moves people to behave, think, and feel the way they do.

Need: A deprivation that energizes the drive to eliminate or reduce the deprivation.

Negative affect: Negative emotions such as anger, guilt, and sadness.

Pansexual: A person’s sexual attractions do not depend on the biological sex, gender, or gender identity of others.

Polygraph: A machine, commonly called a lie detector, that monitors changes in the body, and is used to try to determine whether someone is lying.

Positive affect: Pleasant emotions such as joy, happiness, and interest.

Self-actualization: The motivation to develop one’s full potential as a human being—the highest and most elusive of Maslow’s proposed needs.

Self-determination theory: Deci and Ryan’s theory asserting that all humans have three basic, innate organismic needs: competence, relatedness, and autonomy.

Self-regulation: The process by which an organism effortfully controls its behavior in order to pursue important objectives.

Set point: The weight maintained when the individual makes no effort to gain or lose weight.

Sexual orientation: The direction of an individual’s erotic interests, today viewed as a continuum from exclusive male–female relations to exclusive same-gender relations.

Two-factor theory of emotion: Schachter and Singer’s theory that emotion is determined by two factors: physiological arousal and cognitive labeling.

Yerkes-Dodson law: The psychological principle stating that performance is best under conditions of moderate arousal rather than either low or high arousal.

Chapter 10

Archetypes: Jung’s term for emotionally laden ideas and images in the collective unconscious that have rich and symbolic meaning for all people.

Behavioral genetics: The study of the inherited underpinnings of behavioral characteristics.

Big five factors of personality: The five broad traits that are thought to describe the main dimensions of personality: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (emotional instability).

Cognitive affective processing systems: Mischel’s theoretical model for describing that individuals’ thoughts and emotions about themselves and the world affect their behavior and become linked in ways that matter to that behavior.

Collective unconscious: Jung’s term for the impersonal, deepest layer of the unconscious mind, shared by all human beings because of their common ancestral past.

Conditions of worth: The standards that the individual must live up to in order to receive positive regard from others.

Defense mechanisms: Tactics the ego uses to reduce anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.

Ego: The Freudian structure of personality that deals with the demands of reality.

Empirically keyed test: A type of self-report test that presents many questionnaire items to two groups that are known to be different in some central way.

Face validity: The extent to which a test item appears to fit the particular trait it is measuring.

Humanistic perspectives: Theoretical views stressing a person’s capacity for personal growth and positive human qualities.

Id: The part of the person that Freud called the “it,” consisting of unconscious drives; the individual’s reservoir of sexual energy.

Individual psychology: Adler’s view that people are motivated by purposes and goals and that perfection, not pleasure, is thus the key motivator in human life.

Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory (MMPI): The most widely used and researched empirically keyed self-report personality test.

Oedipus complex: According to Freud, a boy’s intense desire to replace his father and enjoy the affections of his mother.

Personality: A pattern of enduring, distinctive thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that characterize the way an individual adapts to the world.

Projective test: A personality assessment test that presents individuals with an ambiguous stimulus and asks them to describe it or tell a story about it—to project their own meaning onto the stimulus.

Psychodynamic perspectives: Theoretical views emphasizing that personality is primarily unconscious (beyond awareness).

Reinforcement sensitivity theory: A theory proposed by Jeffrey Gray identifying two biological systems linked to learning associations between behaviors and rewards or punishers. The behavioral activation system is sensitive to learning about rewards. The behavioral inhibition system is sensitive to learning about punishers

Rorschach inkblot test: A famous projective test that uses an individual’s perception of inkblots to determine their personality.

Self-efficacy: The belief that one can master a situation and produce positive change.

Self-report test: Also called an objective test or an inventory, a method of measuring personality characteristics that directly asks people whether specific items describe their personality traits.

Social cognitive perspective: Theoretical views emphasizing conscious awareness, beliefs, expectations, and goals.

Subjective well-being: A person’s assessment of their own level of positive affect relative to negative affect, and an evaluation of their life in general.

Superego: The Freudian structure of personality that serves as the harsh internal judge of the individual’s behavior; what is often referred to as conscience.

Thematic apperception test (TAT): A projective test that is designed to elicit stories that reveal something about an individual’s personality.

Trait theories: Theoretical views stressing that personality consists of broad, enduring dispositions (traits) that tend to lead to characteristic responses.

Unconditional positive regard: Rogers’s construct referring to the individual’s need to be accepted, valued, and treated positively regardless of their behavior.

Chapter 11

Affectionate love/compassionate love: Love that occurs when an individual has a deep, caring affection for another person and desires to have that person near.

Aggression: Social behavior whose objective is to harm someone, either physically or verbally.

Altruism: Giving to another person with the ultimate goal of benefiting that person, even if it incurs a cost to oneself.

Attitudes: An individual’s opinions and beliefs about people, objects, and ideas—how the person feels about the world.

Attribution theory: The view that people are motivated to discover the underlying causes of behavior as part of their effort to make sense of the behavior.

bystander effect: The tendency of an individual who observes an emergency to be less likely to help when other people are present than when the observer is alone.

cognitive dissonance: An individual’s psychological discomfort (dissonance) caused by two inconsistent thoughts.

Conformity: A change in a person’s behavior to coincide more closely with a group standard.

Deindividuation: The reduction in personal identity and erosion of the sense of personal responsibility when one is part of a group.

Discrimination:An unjustified negative or harmful action toward a member of a group simply because the person belongs to that group.

Egoism:Giving to another person to ensure reciprocity; to gain self-esteem; to present oneself as powerful, competent, or caring; or to avoid social and self-censure for failing to live up to society’s expectations.

Elaboration likelihood model: Theory identifying two ways to persuade: a central route and a peripheral route.

Empathy: A feeling of oneness with the emotional state of another person.

Ethnocentrism: The tendency to favor one’s own ethnic group over other groups.

False consensus effect: Observers’ overestimation of the degree to which everybody else thinks or acts the way they do.

Fundamental attribution error: Observers’ overestimation of the importance of internal traits and underestimation of the importance of external situations when they seek explanations of another person’s behavior.

Group polarization effect: The solidification and further strengthening of an individual’s position as a consequence of a group discussion or interaction.

Groupthink: The impaired group decision making that occurs when making the right decision is less important than maintaining group harmony.

Informational social influence: The influence other people have on us because we want to be right.

Investment model: A model of long-term relationships that examines the ways that commitment, investment, and the availability of attractive alternative partners predict satisfaction and stability in relationships.

Mere exposure effect: The phenomenon that the more individuals encounter someone or something, the more probable it is that they will start liking the person or thing even if they do not realize they have seen it before.

Microaggression:Everyday, subtle, and potentially unintentional acts that communicate bias to members of marginalized groups.

Normative social influence: The influence other people have on us because we want them to like us.

Obedience: Behavior that complies with the explicit demands of the individual in authority

Overt aggression: Physical or verbal behavior that directly harms another person.

Person perception: The processes by which an individual uses social stimuli to form impressions of others.

Positive illusions: Favorable views of the self that are not necessarily rooted in reality.

Prejudice:An unjustified negative attitude toward an individual based on the individual’s membership in a group.

Relational aggression: Behavior that is meant to harm the social standing of another person.

Risky shift: The tendency for a group decision to be riskier than the average decision made by the individual group members.

Romantic love/passionate love: Love with strong components of sexuality and infatuation, often predominant in the early part of a love relationship.

self-fulfilling prophecy: Social expectations that cause an individual to act in such a way that the expectations are realized.

Self-perception theory: Bem’s theory on how behaviors influence attitudes, stating that individuals make inferences about their attitudes by perceiving their behavior.

Self-serving bias: The tendency to take credit for one’s successes and to deny responsibility for one’s failures.

Social cognition: The area of social psychology exploring how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information.

Social comparison: The process by which individuals evaluate their thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and abilities in relation to others.

Social contagion: Imitative behavior involving the spread of behavior, emotions, and ideas.

Social exchange theory: The view of social relationships as involving an exchange of goods, the objective of which is to minimize costs and maximize benefits.

Social facilitation: Improvement in an individual’s performance because of the presence of others.

Social identity: The way individuals define themselves in terms of their group membership.

Social identity theory: The view that social identity is a crucial part of self-image and a valuable source of positive feelings about oneself.

Social loafing:Each person’s tendency to exert less effort in a group because of reduced accountability for individual effort.

Social psychology: The study of how people think about, influence, and relate to other people.

Stereotype: A generalization about a group’s characteristics that does not consider any variations from one individual to another.

Stereotype threat: An individual’s fast-acting, self-fulfilling fear of being judged based on a negative stereotype about their group.

Systemic racism: Systems, structures, and procedures in a society that disadvantage a racial group and privilege another.

Chapter 12

Abnormal behavior: Behavior that is deviant, maladaptive, or personally distressful over a relatively long period of time.

Anorexia nervosa: Eating disorder that involves the relentless pursuit of thinness through starvation.

Antisocial personality disorder:

Anxiety disorders: Disabling (uncontrollable and disruptive) psychological disorders that feature motor tension, hyperactivity, and apprehensive expectations and thoughts.

Applied behavior analysis: The use of operant conditioning principles to change human behavior.

Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder: One of the most common psychological disorders of childhood, in which individuals show one or more of the following: inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity.

Binge-eating disorder: Eating disorder characterized by recurrent episodes of consuming large amounts of food during which the person feels a lack of control over eating.

Bipolar disorder: Mood disorder characterized by extreme mood swings that include one or more episodes of mania, an overexcited, unrealistically optimistic state.

Bulimia nervosa: Eating disorder in which an individual (typically female) consistently follows a binge-and-purge eating pattern.

Catatonia: State of immobility and unresponsiveness, lasting for long periods of time.

Comorbidity:The simultaneous presence of two or more disorders in one person. The conditions are referred to as “comorbid.”

Delusions: False, unusual, and sometimes magical beliefs that are not part of an individual’s culture.

Depressive disorders:Mood disorders in which the individual suffers from depression—an unrelenting lack of pleasure in life.

Dissociative amnesia: Dissociative disorder characterized by extreme memory loss that is caused by extensive psychological stress.

Dissociative disorder: psychological disorders that involve a sudden loss of memory or change in identity due to the dissociation (separation) of the individual’s conscious awareness from previous memories and thoughts.

Dissociative identity disorder: Formerly called multiple personality disorder, a dissociative disorder in which the individual has two or more distinct personalities or selves, each with its own memories, behaviors, and relationships.

DSM-5: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), 5th ed.; the major classification of psychological disorders in the United States.

Flat affect: The display of little or no emotion—a common negative symptom of schizophrenia.

Generalized anxiety disorder: Psychological disorder marked by persistent anxiety for at least six months, and in which the individual is unable to specify the reasons for the anxiety.

Hallucinations:Sensory experiences that occur in the absence of real stimuli.

Major depressive disorder: Psychological disorder involving a major depressive episode and depressed characteristics, such as lethargy and hopelessness, for at least two weeks.

Medical model: The view that psychological disorders are medical diseases with a biological origin.

Obsessive compulsive disorder: Disorder in which the individual has anxiety-provoking thoughts that will not go away and/or urges to perform repetitive, ritualistic behaviors to prevent or produce some future situation.

Panic disorder: Anxiety disorder in which the individual experiences recurrent, sudden onsets of intense apprehension or terror, often without warning and with no specific cause.

Personality disorders:

Post-traumatic stress disorder: Anxiety disorder that develops through exposure to a traumatic event, a severely oppressive situation, cruel abuse, or a natural or unnatural disaster.

Psychosis: A state in which a person’s perceptions and thoughts are fundamentally removed from reality.

Psychotherapy:A nonmedical process that helps individuals with psychological disorders recognize and overcome their problems.

Referential thinking: Ascribing personal meaning to completely random events.

Risk factors: Characteristics, experiences, or exposures that increase the likelihood that a person will develop a psychological disorder.

Schizophrenia:Severe psychological disorder characterized by highly disordered thought processes; individuals suffering from schizophrenia may be referred to as psychotic because they are so far removed from reality.

Somatic symptom/related disorders:Psychological disorders characterized by bodily symptoms that either are very distressing or interfere with a person’s functioning along with excessive thoughts, feeling, and behaviors about the symptoms.

Social anxiety disorder/related disorders: An intense fear of being humiliated or embarrassed in social situations.

Specific phobia: Psychological disorder in which an individual has an irrational, overwhelming, persistent fear of a particular object or situation.

vulnerability -stress hypothesis /diathesis-stress model: A theory holding that preexisting conditions (genetic characteristics, personality dispositions, experiences, and so on) put an individual at risk of developing a psychological disorder.

Chapter 13

Psychological approach to therapy:  psychological therapy is an approach which uses talking, interpreting, listening, rewarding, challenging, modeling, etc

Clinical psychology: An area of psychology that integrates science and theory to prevent and treat psychological disorders.

Psychotherapy: A nonmedical process that helps individuals with psychological disorders recognize and overcome their problems.

Biological approach to therapy: approach with a more medical standpoint, relates diseases with specific medications

Biological therapies: Also called biomedical therapies, treatments that reduce or eliminate the symptoms of psychological disorders by altering aspects of body functioning.

Psychiatrist: medical doctors who specialize in treating psychological disorders

Sociocultural approach to therapy: approaches the person as if they are a part of a system of relationships in which are controlled by social and cultural factors.

Sociocultural therapy: Treatments that acknowledge the relationships, roles, and cultural contexts that characterize an individual’s life, often bringing them into the therapeutic context.

Evidence based practice: Integration of the best available research with clinical expertise in the context of client characteristics, culture, and preferences.

Therapeutic alliance: The relationship between the therapist and client—an important element of successful psychotherapy.

Psychodynamic therapies: Treatments that stress the importance of the unconscious mind, extensive interpretation by the therapist, and the role of early childhood experiences in the development of an individual’s problems.

Psychoanalysis: Freud’s therapeutic technique for analyzing an individual’s unconscious thoughts.

Humanistic therapies: Treatments that uniquely emphasize people’s self-healing capacities and that encourage clients to understand themselves and to grow personally.

Client-centered therapy (Rogerian therapy or nondirective therapy): Also called Rogerian therapy or nondirective therapy, a form of humanistic therapy, developed by Rogers, in which the therapist provides a warm, supportive atmosphere to improve the client’s self-concept and to encourage the client to gain insight into problems.

Behavior therapies: Treatments, based on behavioral and social cognitive theories, that use principles of learning to reduce or eliminate maladaptive behavior.

Systematic desensitization: A behavior therapy that treats anxiety by teaching the client to associate deep relaxation with increasingly intense anxiety-producing situations.

Cognitive therapies: Treatments emphasizing that cognitions (thoughts) are the main source of psychological problems; therapies that attempt to change the individual’s feelings and behaviors by changing cognitions.

Cognitions: thoughts

Cognitive restructuring: concept for changing thoughts caused by maladaptive behavior

Cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT): A therapy that combines cognitive therapy and behavior therapy with the goal of developing the client’s self-efficacy.

Integrative therapy: Using a combination of techniques from different therapies based on the therapist’s judgment of which particular methods will provide the greatest benefit for the client.

Biological therapies: treatments that reduce symptoms of psychological disorders by altering aspects of body functioning

Drug therapy: type of treatment that involves medicine

Antianxiety drugs: Commonly known as tranquilizers, drugs that reduce anxiety by making individuals calmer and less excitable.

Antidepressant drugs: Drugs that regulate mood.

Lithium: The lightest of the solid elements in the periodic table of elements, widely used to treat bipolar disorder.

Antipsychotic drugs: Powerful drugs that diminish agitated behavior, reduce tension, decrease hallucinations, improve social behavior, and produce better sleep patterns in individuals with a severe psychological disorder, especially schizophrenia.

Electroconvulsive therapy: Also called shock therapy, a treatment, sometimes used for depression, that sets off a seizure in the brain.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation: magnet current to affect the brain as a treatment for those who don’t respond well to other treatment options

Cross-cultural competence: A therapist’s assessment of their abilities to manage cultural issues in therapy and the client’s perception of those abilities.

Chapter 14

Health psychology: A subfield of psychology that emphasizes psychology’s role in establishing and maintaining health and preventing and treating illness.

The Stages of change model: Theoretical model describing a five-step process by which individuals give up bad habits and adopt healthier lifestyles.

Precontemplation: stage in which individuals are not ready to think about change/not aware that change is needed

Contemplation: stage in which individuals acknowledge they have a problem but are not ready to enforce a change

Preparation/determination: stage in which individuals are preparing to take action

Action/willpower: stage in which individuals commit to making a behavioral change and enact a plan

Maintenance: individuals are successful in continuing their behavior change over time

General adaptation syndrome (alarm, resistance, exhaustion): Selye’s term for the common effects of stressful demands on the body, consisting of three stages: alarm, resistance, and exhaustion.

Stress and the immune system: stress allows people to be vulnerable to infections

Psychoneuroimmunology: A new field of scientific inquiry that explores connections among psychological factors (such as attitudes and emotions), the nervous system, and the immune system.

Stress and cardiovascular disease: stress causes increased risk for heart issues

Type A behavior pattern: A cluster of characteristics—including being excessively competitive, hard-driven, impatient, and hostile—that is related to a higher incidence of heart disease.

Type B behavior pattern: A cluster of characteristics—including being relaxed and easygoing—that is related to a lower incidence of heart disease.

Type D behavior pattern: A cluster of characteristics—including being generally distressed, having negative emotions, and being socially inhibited—that is related to adverse cardiovascular outcomes.

Stress and cancer: stress increases risk of cancer

Stress and prejudice: prejudice (and discrimination) lead to increased stress

Health disparities: refers to preventable differences in physical and psychological functioning that are experienced by socially disadvantaged groups

Cognitive appraisal (primary vs secondary): Individuals’ interpretation of the events in their life as harmful, threatening, or challenging and their determination of whether they have the resources to cope effectively with the events. 

Primary cognitive appraisal: individuals interpret whether an event involves harm/loss/threat/challenge

Secondary cognitive appraisal: individuals evaluate their resources and determine how effectively they can cope with an event

Coping: Managing taxing circumstances, expending effort to solve life’s problems, and seeking to master or reduce stress.

Problem focused coping: The coping strategy of squarely facing one’s troubles and trying to solve them.

Emotion focused coping: The coping strategy that involves responding to the stress that one is feeling—trying to manage one’s emotional reaction—rather than focusing on the root problem itself.

Positive reappraisal: Reinterpreting a potentially stressful experience as positive, valuable, or even beneficial

Optimism: people with this trait engage with life from a place of strength can have a strong role in coping, 

Hardiness: A personality trait characterized by a sense of commitment rather than alienation and of control rather than powerlessness; a perception of problems as challenges rather than threats