2 Psychology Vocabulary

Personality

  • Stage Theories: Psychosexual stages focus on different erogenous zones.
  • Fixation: Getting stuck in a psychosexual stage.
  • Pleasure Principle: Seeking immediate gratification.
  • Reality Principle: Delaying gratification based on real-world constraints.
  • Moral Principle: Internalized societal standards of right and wrong.
  • Defense Mechanisms: Repression, denial, displacement, projection, reaction formation, regression, rationalization, intellectualization, sublimation.
  • Collective Unconscious: Shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species' history.
  • Archetypes: Universal, symbolic representations of particular types of person, object, idea, or experience.
  • Big 5: primary/secondary traits, cardinal disposition
  • Hereditability: The proportion of variation among individuals that we can attribute to genes.
  • Temperament: A person's characteristic emotional reactivity and intensity.
  • Somatotype Theory: Theory that body shape predicts personality.
  • Reciprocal Determinism: Interaction between behavior, internal personal factors, and environmental influences.
  • Locus of Control: Belief about whether outcomes are controlled by internal factors or external forces.
  • Conditional Positive Regard: Affection given only when certain conditions are met.
  • Projective Test: Personality test providing ambiguous stimuli to trigger projection of inner thoughts.
  • Examples: Rorschach, TAT, MMPI.

Testing

  • Standardized: Administered and scored in a consistent manner.
  • Reliability: Consistency of a test's results.
  • Validity: Extent to which a test measures what it is supposed to measure.
  • Aptitude: Predicts future performance.
  • Achievement: Measures what has been learned.
  • Power test: assesses the level of performance under no time constraints.
  • Speed test: assesses the level of performance under time constraints.
  • Crystallized Intelligence: Accumulated knowledge and verbal skills.
  • Fluid Intelligence: Ability to reason speedily and abstractly.
  • G Factor: General intelligence factor.
  • Multiple Intelligence: the idea that people vary in their ability levels across different domains of intellectual skill.
  • EQ: measure of a person's emotional intelligence.
  • Stanford-Binet IQ Test: Intelligence test.
  • Wechsler: Intelligence test.
  • Flynn Effect: Rise in average IQ scores over generations.

Abnormal Psychology

  • Insane: Legal term for those not responsible for their actions.
  • DSM-V: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
  • Eclectic: Approach using various forms of therapy.
  • Anxiety Disorders: Generalized anxiety disorder, phobias, OCD, Panic disorder, PTSD.
  • Somatoform Disorders: Conversion disorder, hypochondria.
  • Dissociative Disorders: DID, amnesia, fugue.
  • Mood Disorders: Depression, cognitive triad, attribution theory, bipolar disorder, SAD.
  • Schizophrenia: Acute vs. chronic, positive and negative symptoms, disorganized, paranoid, undifferentiated, catatonic.
  • Dopamine Hypothesis: Excess dopamine linked to schizophrenia.
  • Diathesis-Stress Model: Genetic predisposition combined with environmental stressors.

Therapy

  • Deinstitutionalization: Moving people with psychological or developmental disabilities from long-term institutions into community-based settings
  • Preventative Efforts: efforts to prevent psychological disorders from developing in the first place.
  • Free Association: Saying whatever comes to mind.
  • Dream Analysis: Interpreting dreams.
  • Resistance: Blocking anxiety-laden material from consciousness.
  • Transference: Transferring feelings from past relationships onto the therapist.
  • Client-Centered Therapy: Emphasizing empathy and unconditional positive regard.
  • Active Listening: Echoing, restating, and clarifying.
  • Counterconditioning: Pairing an unwanted behavior with a new, more desirable behavior.
  • Systematic Desensitization: Gradually exposing someone to feared stimuli.
  • Flooding: exposure to feared stimuli to the maximum intensity.
  • Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Changing thought patterns and behaviors.
  • Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy: Challenging irrational beliefs.
  • Electroshock Therapy: shock therapy.
  • Types of therapists: psychiatrist, counseling psychologist, clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst.

Social Psychology

  • Attitude: Feelings, ideas, and beliefs that affect behavior.
  • Central vs. Peripheral Route to Persuasion: Central is content-based, peripheral is based on superficial cues.
  • Cognitive Dissonance: Discomfort when attitudes and behavior conflict.
  • Foot-in-the-Door: Agreeing to a small request makes one more likely to agree to a larger one later.
  • Door-in-the-Face: Large request followed by a smaller, more reasonable request.
  • Norms of Reciprocity: Responding to a positive action with another positive action.
  • Attribution Theory: Explaining someone's behavior by crediting either the situation or the person's disposition.
  • Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Belief that leads to its own fulfillment.
  • Fundamental Attribution Error: Underestimating situational influences and overestimating dispositional influences.
  • False Consensus Effect: Overestimating the extent to which others share our beliefs and behaviors.
  • Self-Serving Bias: Attributing success to internal factors and failures to external factors.
  • Just-World Bias: Belief that people get what they deserve.
  • Stereotype: Generalized belief about a group of people.
  • Prejudice: Unjustifiable attitude toward a group.
  • Ethnocentrism: Evaluating other cultures according to the standards of one's own culture.
  • Discrimination: Unjustifiable negative behavior toward a group.
  • In-group/Out-group: "Us" vs. "them".
  • Superordinate Goals: Shared goals that override differences.
  • Bystander Effect: Tendency to be less likely to help if others are present.
  • Diffusion of Responsibility: Reduction in feelings of responsibility when others are present.
  • Social Facilitation: Improved performance on simple tasks in the presence of others.
  • Social Impairment: Worse performance on difficult tasks in the presence of others.
  • Conformity: Adjusting behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard.
  • Asch Line Study: Study on conformity.
  • Obedience: Following orders from an authority figure.
  • Milgram Experiment: Study on obedience.
  • Social Loafing: Reduced effort when working in a group.
  • Group Polarization: Enhancement of prevailing attitudes through discussion.
  • Groupthink: Suppressing dissenting opinions in a group.
  • Deindividuation: Loss of self-awareness and self-restraint in group situations.
  • Zimbardo Prison Experiment: Study on the effects of roles and power.