Ch 1 - The Foundations of Psychological Science Flashcards
The tendency to believe claims because they seem true or because it would be nice if they were true.
What is uncritical acceptance?
The tendency to notice information that fits one’s expectations, while forgetting or ignoring discrepancies.
What is confirmation bias?
Unfounded belief held without evidence or in spite of falsifying evidence.
What is superstition?
Unfounded belief system that seems to be based on science.
What is pseudoscience?
An objective approach to answering questions that relies on careful observations and experiments.
What is science?
A person highly trained in the methods, factual knowledge, and theories of psychology.
What is a psychologist?
In research, an animal whose behaviour is studied to derive principles that may apply to human behaviour.
What is the animal model?
A psychologist who specializes in the treatment of psychological and behavioural disturbances or who does research on such disturbances.
What is a clinical psychologist?
A psychologist who specializes in the treatment of milder emotional and behavioural disturbances.
What is a counseling psychologist?
A medical doctor with additional training in the diagnosis and treatment of mental and emotional disorders.
What is a psychiatrist?
A mental health professional (usually a medical doctor) trained to practice psychoanalysis?
What is a psychoanalyst?
A mental health professional who specializes in helping people with problems that do not involve serious mental disorders.
What is a counselor?
An empirical investigation structured to answer questions about the world in a systematic and intersubjective fashion (i.e., observations can be reliably confirmed by multiple observers)
What is scientific observation?
Study of sensations and personal experience analyzed as basic elements.
What is structuralism?
Any physical energy that an organism senses.
What is a stimulus?
An old term describing the inability of introspectionists to become subjectively aware of some mental processes; an early term describing the cognitive unconscious.
What is imageless thought?
Personal observation of your own thoughts, feelings, and behaviour.
What is introspection?
The part of the mind of which we are subjectively unaware and that is not open to introspection.
What is cognitive unconscious?
Study of thinking, learning, and perception in whole units, not by analysis into parts.
What is gestalt psychology?
School of psychology that considers behaviours in terms of active adaptations.
What is functionalism?
Darwin’s thoery that evolution favours those plants and animals best suited to their living conditions.
What is natural selection?
School of thought in psychology that emphasizes study of observable actions over study of the mind.
What is behaviorism?
Any muscular action, glandular activity, or other identifiable aspect of behaviour.
What is response?
A behaviorist approach that rejects both introspection and any study of mental events, such as thinking, as inappropriate topics for scientific psychology.
What is radical behaviorism?
In Freudian theory, the parts of the mind that are beyond awareness, especially conflicts, impulses, and desires not directly known to a person.
What is dynamic unconscious?
Freudian approach to psychotherapy emphasizing the exploration of the unconscious using free association, dream interpretation, resistance, and transference to uncover unconscious conflicts.
What is psychoanalysis?
Psychologists who accept the broad features of Freud’s theory but have revised the theory to include the role of cultural and social factors while still accepting some of its basic concepts.
Neo-Freudians
Any theory of behaviour that emphasizes internal conflicts, motives, and unconscious forces.
What is psychodynamic theory?
The study of information processing, thinking, reasoning, and problem solving.
What is cognitive psychology?
Defining a scientific concept by stating the specific actions or procedures used to measure it. For example, hunger might be defined as the number of hours of food deprivation.
What is operational definition?
The idea that all behaviour has prior causes that would completely explain one’s choices and actions if all such causes were known.
What is determinism?
The ability to freely make choices that are not controlled by genetics, learning, or unconscious forces; the idea that human beings are capable of making choices or decisions themselves.
What is free will?
Study of people as inherently good and motivated to learn and improve.
What is humanistic psychology?
The process of fully developing personal potentials.
What is self-actualization?
The scientific study of behaviour and mental processes.
What is psychology?
The approach acknowledging that biological, psychological, and social factors interact to influence human behaviour and mental processes.
What is the biopsychosocial model?