Exam Terms Flashcards
Social Identity Theory
A theory of the social processes by which people come to identify with particular groups and separate themselves from others
Social Constructionism
Theory that the ways in which we understand the world are not just ‘natural’, but are ‘constructed’ between people in everyday social interactions.
Minimal Group
Groups set up in Social Identity Theory research to identify the minimum conditions necessary for group identities to form.
Embodiment
Indicates that we live in and through our bodies and that we simultaneously experience our bodies physically and biologically as well as socially and psychologically.
Core Identity
The central identity that individuals have to achieve from different aspects of their identities if they are to be psychologically healthy.
Theory Of Mind
The ability to explain and predict the actions both of oneself and others; the ability to put oneself mentally in the place of another.
Natural Selection
The process whereby physical and behavioural characteristics which enable survival (and the genes which code for these) are passed on to descendants.
Sexual Selection
The process whereby physical and behavioural characteristics which promote reproductive success (and the genes which code for these) are passed on to descendants.
Reciprocal Altruism
A term used in evolutionary psychology to explain the evolution of behaviour benefiting others who are not kin and where the altruist benefits directly.
Behaviourism
The tradition that advocates that psychology should be a science of behaviour, without reference to mental states that cannot be observed.
Socio-Cultural perspective
A perspective on learning which stresses that learning involves the use of tools and artefacts and is embedded within the context of interpersonal relationships, which in turn are embedded in social and cultural systems.
Operant Conditioning
A variety of instrumental conditioning that traditionally has been studied in a Skinner box.
Classical Conditioning
Learning arising from a pairing of two events outside the control of the animal.
Category Learning
The learning that occurs when people come to understand that certain objects or entities belong together in particular categories.
Neurotransmitter
A chemical that is released from a neuron and influences a neighbouring cell.
Phenotype
The physical structure and behaviour of an animal that arises from the interaction of the genotype and the environment.
Genotype
The collection of all of the genes within the cell of a given individual.
Action Potential
A brief and sudden change in electrical voltage in a cell and the means by which information is transmitted by neurons.
Brain Lesions
Damage to a region of the brain, for example in an accident or in surgery.
Trait Theories of Personality
Propose a hierarchical structure for personality built from traits and clusters of traits.
Psychometrics
Measures individual differences using tests constructed to high standards of reliability and validity.
Heritability
The proportion of variability in a trait or psychological measure within a population that can be accounted for by genetic inheritance.
Extraversion
The act, state, or habit of being predominantly concerned with obtaining gratification from what is outside the self
Implicit personality theories
Lay theories about personality that people use to attribute motives and to describe themselves and others.
Gibson’s direct perception
Perception without the need for integration with stored knowledge.
Bottleneck theories of attention
Theory that suggests a ‘bottleneck’ in the attentional system such that only a small amount of the available sensory information can pass through.
Limited capacity attention
A hypothetical construct used to explain why it is not possible to process all incoming information simultaneously.
Attentional Spotlight
A metaphor for allocation of attention. Whatever falls within the attentional spotlight receives relatively more processing.
Top-Down Processing
Information flowing ‘down’ from stored knowledge which can influence the interpretation of sensory information.
Fundamental attribution error
The tendency, when explaining the behaviour of other people, to favour internal rather than external attributions.
Attribution Theory
A theory which supposes that people attempt to understand the behaviour of others by attributing feelings, beliefs, and intentions to them.
Schema
A mental structure containing knowledge relating to a particular kind of object.
Stereotype
A mental representation of a person as more like a ‘typical’ member of a social category than the person actually is. Seen as an inevitable consequence of the basic cognitive process of overgeneralization.
Self-Serving Bias
An information processing bias which serves the perceiver’s interests in some way, for example the tendency to attribute one’s success to internal causes and failure to external causes.
Autobiographical memory
Episodes remembered from our individual life, including biographical information and past experiences.
Flashbulb Memory
An autobiographical memory for the personal circumstances during which we first learn of a very surprising and emotionally arousing event.
Encoding specificity principal
The notion that retrieval of information from memory depends on an overlap or matching of the cues that are available at retrieval with those registered at encoding.
Episodic Memory
A subsystem of long- term memory concerned with personal episodes or events which include information about the place and the time in which they were acquired.
Levels of processing
The theory that the retention of material in memory is dependent on how deeply it is processed at encoding.
Collective memories
A pool of past important events to create shared or collective memories.
Self-actualization
The human desire for self-fulfilment and developing one’s potential.
Defence Mechanism
Largely unconscious processes for avoiding inner conflict and the anxiety this creates.
Personal Constructs
Term used by Kelly to refer to the bipolar discriminations underlying the ways in which a person makes sense of his/her world.
Psychodynamics
Internal psychic conflict between different forces or aspects of the self and the defences and distortions this may involve.
Oedipal Conflict
Oedipal conflict arises during the phallic phase when a boy comes unconsciously to regard his father as rival for his mother’s affection.
