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?
The attempt to explain behaviour in terms of underlying biological principles.
What is the biological perspective?
Approach that emphasizes inherited, adaptive aspects of behaviour and mental processes.
What is evolutionary psychology?
The broader field of biopsychologists and others who study the brain and nervous system, such as biologists and biochemists.
What is neuroscience?
The traditional view that behaviour is shaped by psychological processes occurring at the level of the individual.
What is the psychological perspective?
The focus on the importance of social contexts in influencing the behaviour of individuals.
What is the social perspective?
Rules that define acceptable and expected behaviour for members of a group.
What are social norms?
A tendency for females and female-related issues to be underrepresented in research, whether psychological or otherwise.
What is gender bias in research?
The idea that behaviour must be judged relative to the values of the culture in which it occurs.
What is cultural relativity?
In scientific research, the process of naming and classifying.
What is description?
In psychology, being able to state the causes of a behaviour.
What is understanding?
In psychology, an ability to accurately forecast behaviour.
What is prediction?
In psychology, altering conditions that influence behaviour.
What is control?
In psychology, a type of reflection involving the support of beliefs through scientific explanation and observation.
What is critical thinking?
The deliberate attempt to uncover how a commonsense belief or scientific theory might be false.
What is falsification?
A form of critical thinking based on careful measurement, controlled observation, and repeatable results.
What is the scientific method?
Predicted outcome of an experiment, or an educated guess about the relationship between variables.
What is a hypothesis?
Comprehensive explanation of observable events.
What is a theory?
Information that is provided by participants about their own thoughts, emotions, or behaviours, typically on a questionnaire or during an interview.
What is self-report data?
Descriptive research method in which participants are asked the same question.
What is a survey?
The entire group of people from which a sample is drawn.
What is a population?
A subset of a population being studied.
What is a sample?
A small, randomly selected part of a larger population that accurately reflects the characteristics of the whole population.
What is a representative sample?
A subpart of a larger population that does not accurately reflect the characteristics of the whole population.
What is a biased sample?
Deliberate tendency to provide polite, socially acceptable responses.
What is social desirability?
Data that come from watching participants and recording their behaviour.
What is observational data?
Observing behaviour as it unfolds in natural settings.
What is naturalistic observation?
Observing behaviour in situations that have been set up by the researcher.
What is structured observation?
Changes in an organism’s behaviour brought about by an awareness of being observed.
What is observer effect?
The tendency of an observer to distort observations of perceptions to match his or her expectations.
What is observer bias?
Data that come from participants’ physiological processes (including measures of the brain and heart, muscles, and the production of hormones).
What is physiological data?
Factor or characteristic manipulated or measured in research.
What is a variable?
A study in which the investigator manipulates at least one variable while measuring at least one other variable.
What is an experiment?
Variable manipulated by the researcher in an experiment.
What is the independent variable?
The element of an experiment that measures any effect of the manipulation.
What is the dependent variable?
A condition or factor that may change and is excluded from influencing the outcome of the experiment.
What is an extraneous variable?
Humans (also referred to as participants) or animals whose behaviour is investigated in an experiment.
What are experimental subjects?
Humans whose behaviour is investigated in an experiment.
What are participants?
Group that receives the treatment the study is designed to test.
What is the experimental group?
Subjects in an experimental study who do not receive the treatment being investigated.
What is the control group?
Use of chance to place subjects in experimental and control groups.
What is random assignment?
The type of experimental results that would rarely occur by chance alone.
What is statistically significant?
A statistical technique for combining the results of many studies on the same subject.
What is meta-analysis?
Changes in the behaviour of study participants caused by the unintended influence of their own expectations.
What is research participant bias?
Changes in behaviour due to participants’ expectations that a drug (or other treatment) will have some effect.
What is the placebo effect?
Inactive substance or treatment that is distinguishable from a real, active substance or treatment.
What is a placebo?
Research in which the subjects do not know which treatment they receive.
What is a single-blind study?
Changes in participants’ behaviour caused by the unintended influence of a researcher’s actions.
What is researcher bias?
A prediction that prompts people to act in ways that make the prediction come true.
What is a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Research in which neither the observer nor the subjects know which subjects received which treatment.
What is a double-blind study?
A descriptive study in which researchers wish to compare groups of people, but cannot randomly assign them to groups.
What is a quasi-experimental study?
Descriptive study that quantifies the degree to which events, measures, or variables are associated.
What is correlational research?
The existence of a consistent systematic relationship between two events, measures, or variables.
What is correlation?
A statistical index ranging from -1.00 to +1.00 that indicates the direction and degree of correlation.
What is the correlation coefficient?
The act of causing some effect.
What is causation?
In-depth analysis of the behaviour of one person or a small number of people.
What is case study (clinical method)?
