Barron's: Chapter 5 - States of Consciousness Flashcards
Consciousness
- our level of awareness about ourselves and our environment
Levels of consciousness
- we experience different levels of consciousness in our daily life without being totaly aware of the experience
Conscious level
- The information about yourself and your environment you are currently aware of. Your conscious level right now is probably focusing on these words and their meanings
Nonconscious level
- Body processes controlled by your mind that we are not usually (or ever) aware of. Right now, your nonconscious is controlling your heartbeat, respiration, digestion and so on
Preconscious level
- Information about yourself or your environment that you are not currently thinking about )not in your conscious level) but you could be. If I asked you to remember your favorite toy as a child, you could bring that preconscious memory into your conscious level
Subconscious level
- Information that we are not consciously aware of but we know must exist due to behavior. The behaviors demonstrated in examples of priming and mere-exposure effect suggest some information is accessible to this level of consciousness but not to our conscious level
Unconscious level
- Psychoanalytic psychologists believe some events and feelings are unacceptable to our conscious mind and are repressed into the unconscious mind. Many psychologists object to this concept as difficult or impossible to prove.
Sleep
- a state of consciousness because, while we are asleep, we are less aware of ourselves and our environment than we are when we are in our normal awake state
Sleep cycles
- our typical pattern of sleep
Sleep stages
- 4 stages which starts from falling asleep then end with waking up
REM sleep
- dreams usually occur
Sleep disorders
- isolated periods of disruption in our sleep
Insomnia
- a person who has persistent problems getting to sleep or staying asleep at night
Narcolepsy
- people who suffer from periods of intense sleepiness and may fall asleep at unpredictable and inappropriate times
Sleep apnea
- causes a person to stop breathing for short periods of time during the night
Night terrors
- usually affect children, and most do not remember the episode when they wake up
Dreams
- series of story-like images we experience as we sleep
Freudian dream interpretation
- a method to uncover the repressed information in the unconscious mind
Activation-synthesis dream theory
- looks at dreams first as biological phenomena
Information-processing dream theory
- points out that stress during the day will increase the number and intensity of dreams during the night
Hypnosis
- the induction of a state of consciousness in which a person apparently loses the power of voluntary action and is highly responsive to suggestion or direction
Posthypnotic amnesia
- when people report forgetting events that occurred while they were hypnotized
Posthypnotic suggestion
- a suggestion that a hypnotized person behave in a certain way after he or she is brought out of hypnosis
Role theory of hypnosis
- states that hypnosis is not an alternate state of consciousness at all
State theory of hypnosis
- hypnosis meets some parts of the definition for an altered state of consciousness
Dissociation theory of hypnosis
- hypnosis causes us to divide our consciousness voluntarilyo
Psychoactive drugs
- chemicals that change the chemistry of the brain (and the rest of the body) and induce an altered state of consciousness
Agonists
- drugs that mimic neurotransmitters
Antagonists
- drugs that block neurotransmitters
Tolerance
-a physiological changed that produces a need for more ot the same drug in order to achieve the same effect
Withdrawal
- getting symptoms when stopping the use of a drug you are addicted to
Stiumlants
- speed up body processes, such as caffeine, cocaine, amphetamines, and nicotine
Depressants
- slow down the same body systems that stimulants speed up, such as alcohol, barbiturates, and anxiolytics
Hallucinogens (also called psychedelics)
- drugs that cause changes in perceptions of reality including sensory hallucinations, loss of identity, and vivid fantisies
Opiates
- act as agonists for endorphin and thus are powerful painkillers and mood elevators, such as morphine, heroin, methadone, and codeine
William James
- author of the first psychology textbook
Sigmund Freud
- he emphasized dream interpretation as a method to uncover the repressed information in the unconscious mind
Ernest Hilgard
- he created the dissociation theory of hypnosis
mere-exposure effect
- occurs when we prefer stimuli we have seen before over novel stimuli, even it we do not consciously remember seeing the old stimuli