All Content from Practice Exam Flashcards
Various Correct Disorders/Treatments
OCD: exposure and response prevention
Social Anxiety: systematic desensitization
Depression: cognitive therapy
Borderline personality disorder: dialectical behavior therapy
Encopresis
Encopresis, also known as paradoxical diarrhea) is voluntary or involuntary fecal soiling in children who have usually already been toilet trained. Persons with encopresis often leak stool into their undergarments.
This term is usually applied to children, and where the symptom is present in adults, it is more commonly known as fecal leakage (FL), fecal soiling or fecal seepage
The standard behavioral treatment for functional encopresis, which has been shown to be highly effective is a motivational system such as a contingency management system
Autism
Characterized by:
Intolerance of change
Communication problems
Ritualistic repetitive behavior
Weak attachment to others
Exemplification
Exemplification means using examples to explain, convince, or amuse
Distal and Proximal Stimulus
The process of perception begins with an object in the real world, termed the distal stimulus or distal object.[2] By means of light, sound or another physical process, the object stimulates the body’s sensory organs. These sensory organs transform the input energy into neural activity—a process called transduction.[2][6] This raw pattern of neural activity is called the proximal stimulus.[2] These neural signals are transmitted to the brain and processed.[2] The resulting mental re-creation of the distal stimulus is the percept. Perception is sometimes described as the process of constructing mental representations of distal stimuli using the information available in proximal stimuli.
An example would be a person looking at a shoe. The shoe itself is the distal stimulus. When light from the shoe enters a person’s eye and stimulates their retina, that stimulation is the proximal stimulus.[7] The image of the shoe reconstructed by the brain of the person is the percept. Another example would be a telephone ringing. The ringing of the telephone is the distal stimulus. The sound stimulating a person’s auditory receptors is the proximal stimulus, and the brain’s interpretation of this as the ringing of a telephone is the percept. The different kinds of sensation such as warmth, sound, and taste are called “sensory modalities”.[6][8]
Purposive Behaviorism
Edward Tolman
Purposive behaviorism is a branch of psychology that was introduced by Edward C. Tolman. It combines the objective study of behavior while also considering the purpose or goal of behavior.[1] Tolman thought that learning developed from knowledge about the environment and how the organism relates to its environment.[2] Tolman’s goal was to identify the complex cognitive mechanisms and purposes that guided behavior.[3] His theories on learning went against the traditionally accepted stimulus-response connections (see classical conditioning) at this time that were proposed by other psychologists such as Edward Thorndike. Tolman disagreed with Watson’s behaviorism, so he initiated his own behaviorism, which became known as purposive behaviorism.
Tolman’s purposive behaviorism focused on meaningful behavior, or molar behavior, such as kicking a ball. This focus was in contrast to simple muscle movements aka molecular behavior such as flexing of the leg muscle. Tolman regarded the molecular behavior as fairly removed from human perceptual capacities for a meaningful analysis of behavior. This approach of Tolman’s was first introduced in his book, Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men, published in 1932.[4] To Tolman, it was obvious that all actions of behavior are goal-oriented, including those for animals.[5] The main difference between behaviorism and Tolman’s purposive behaviorism is that behavior is goal oriented.
Sign-Gestalt Learning (Tolman)
In his Sign Gestalt Theory, he put forth the notion that there are three parts to learning which work together as a gestalt. These are the “significant” or goal of behavior, the “sign” or signal for action, and “means-end relations” which were internal processes and relationships. He believed learning is an accumulation of these sign gestalts, and that they are then configured into cognitive maps. Input about the environment, which is ongoing, also influences behavior in that it causes certain gestalts to be selected or not, in relation to the individuals purpose or goals, and other factors. In this sense, learning is unique to each individual
Erich Fromm
A German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was associated with what became known as the Frankfurt School of critical theory.[1]
Karen Horney
Neo-Freudian
Proposed confrontation, avoidance, and seeking social support are the ways that people cope with anxiety
Further, she disagreed with Freud about inherent differences in the psychology of men and women and traced such differences to society and culture rather than biology.
Edward Titchener
Structuralist
Structuralism (based on writings of Wilhelm Wundt):
Titchener said that only observable events constituted science and that any speculation concerning unobservable events has no place in society
Cooperative Learning
Involves joint effort among students
Semantics and sentence parsing
Pragmatic Language
Rules for Social Language
Social Referencing
Begins to look to others’ emotions before acting
Ex.: Looking at mother to see how she responds to something (like a cat) and then deciding how to respond
Animism
Animism is the religious worldview that natural physical entities—including animals, plants, and often even inanimate objects or phenomena—possess a spiritual essence
Animism can be said to be the experience of being part of the living biosphere (or even the whole “animate” universe). In this sense, something that is “animate” is simply something that is “alive,” and to be an animist is to believe things to be alive that others perceive as “inanimate.”
Centrism
In politics, centrism or the centre describes a political outlook or specific position that involves acceptance or support of a balance of a degree of social equality and a degree of social hierarchy or social inequality; whilst opposing political changes which would result in a significant shift of society either strongly to the left or the right.[1] Centrism emphasizes meritocracy.
Parkinson’s Disease
Failure of dopamine produced in the substantia nigra to reach the basal ganglia of the cerebral hemispheres
Resulting Symptoms: tremor, rigidity, akinesia (the inability to initiate movement due to difficulty selecting and/or activating motor programs in the central nervous system), disturbances of posture
Athetosis
Athetosis is a symptom characterized by slow, involuntary, convoluted, writhing movements of the fingers, hands, toes, and feet and in some cases, arms, legs, neck and tongue
Athetosis is a symptom primarily caused by the marbling, or degeneration of the basal ganglia.[citation needed] This degeneration is most commonly caused by complications at birth or by Huntington’s Disease
Huntington’s Disease
Myoclonus
Myoclonus (pron.: /maɪˈɒklənəs/) is a brief, involuntary twitching of a muscle or a group of muscles. It describes a medical sign and, generally, is not a diagnosis of a disease. Brief twitches are perfectly normal. The myoclonic twitches are usually caused by sudden muscle contractions; they also can result from brief lapses of contraction. Contractions are called positive myoclonus; relaxations are called negative myoclonus. The most common time for people to encounter them is while falling asleep (hypnic jerk), but myoclonic jerks are also a sign of a number of neurological disorders. Hiccups are also a kind of myoclonic jerk specifically affecting the diaphragm. When a spasm is caused by another person it is known as a “provoked spasm”. Shuddering attacks with babies also fall in this category.
Myoclonic jerks may occur alone or in sequence, in a pattern or without pattern. They may occur infrequently or many times each minute. Most often, myoclonus is one of several signs in a wide variety of nervous system disorders such as multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, subacute sclerosing panencephalitis and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), serotonin toxicity, some cases of Huntington’s disease, some forms of epilepsy, and occasionally in intracranial hypotension. Some researchers indicate that jerks persistently may even cause early tremors.
In almost all instances in which myoclonus is caused by central nervous system disease it is preceded by other symptoms; for instance, in CJD it is generally a late-stage clinical feature that appears after the patient has already started to exhibit gross neurological deficits.
Fixed Action Patterns
Result from innate releasing mechanisms
Foraging
Foraging is searching for and exploiting food resources. It affects an animal’s fitness because it plays an important role in an animal’s ability to survive and reproduce.[1] Foraging theory is a branch of behavioral ecology that studies the foraging behavior of animals in response to the environment where the animal lives.
Since an animal’s environment is constantly changing, the ability to adjust foraging behavior is essential for maximization of fitness. Studies in social insects have shown that there is a significant correlation between learning and foraging performance.[3] In nonhuman primates, young individuals learn foraging behavior from their peers and elders by watching other group members forage and by copying their behavior.[4] Observing and learning from other members of the group ensure that the younger members of the group learn what is safe to eat and become proficient foragers.
One measure of learning is ‘Foraging innovation’—an animal consuming new food, or using a new foraging technique in response to their dynamic living environment.[5] Foraging innovation is considered learning because it involves behavioral plasticity on the animal’s part. The animal recognizes the need to come up with a new foraging strategy and introduce something it has never used before to maximize his or her fitness (survival). Forebrain size has been associated with learning behavior. Animals with larger brain sizes are expected to learn better.[5] A higher ability to innovate has been linked to larger forebrain sizes in North American and British Isle birds according to Lefebvre et al. (1997).[6] In this study, bird orders that contained individuals with larger forebrain sizes displayed a higher amount of foraging innovation. Examples of innovations recorded in birds include following tractors and eating frogs or other insects killed by it and using swaying trees to catch their prey.[5]
Prostaglandin
A prostaglandin is any member of a group of lipid compounds that are derived enzymatically from fatty acids and have important functions in the animal body. Every prostaglandin contains 20 carbon atoms, including a 5-carbon ring.
They are mediators and have a variety of strong physiological effects, such as regulating the contraction and relaxation of smooth muscle tissue.[1] Prostaglandins are not endocrine hormones, but autocrine or paracrine, which are locally acting messenger molecules. They differ from hormones in that they are not produced at a discrete site but in many places throughout the human body. Also, their target cells are present in the immediate vicinity of the site of their secretion (of which there are many).
The prostaglandins, together with the thromboxanes and prostacyclins, form the prostanoid class of fatty acid derivatives, a subclass of eicosanoids.
Autonomic Nervous System
Primarily deals with visceral muscles and glands