Final Exam Flashcards
Umwelt
The sensations you feel by virtue of being a biological organism.
Umwelt includes pleasure, pain, heat, cold, and all the bodily sensations.
Mitwelt
What you think and feel as a social being.
Your emotions and thoughts about other people and the emotions and thoughts directed at you make up Mitwelt.
Eigenwelt
psychological experience, or Eigenwelt. In a sense, this is the experience of experience itself. It consists of how you feel and think when you try to understand yourself, your own mind, and your own exis- tence. Eigenwelt includes introspection
Angst
The unpleasant feelings caused by contemplating these concerns is called existential anxiety, or Angst.
Angst can be analyzed into three separate sensations: anguish, forlornness, and despair.
Geworfenheit or “Thrown-ness”
This term refers to the time, place, and circumstances into which you happened to be born.
Your experience clearly depends on whether you were “thrown” into a medieval slave society, or a 17th-century Native American society, or an early-21st-century industrialized society.
An important basis of your experience is your thrown-ness—Heidegger used the German word Geworfenheit.
Conditions of Worth
Feelings that other people value you only if you are smart, successful, attractive, or good.
You believe you are valuable only if certain things about you are true, then you may distort your perception of reality to believe them, even if they are not true. If you think you are valuable only if your behavior conforms to certain rules and expecta- tions, you may lose your ability to choose what to do
Unconditional positive regard
A person who has experienced unconditional positive regard from parents and other important people in life does not develop such conditions of worth. This leads to a life free from existential anxiety, because the person is confident of her value. She does not need to follow rules, because her sense of innate goodness leads her to make the right choices.
Personal constructs
One’s cognitive (thinking) system assembles one’s various construals of the world into individually held theories.
in turn, then help determine how new experiences are construed
Flow
The totally absorbing experience of engaging in an activity that is valuable for its own sake.
In flow, mood is slightly elevated and time seems to pass quickly.
The best state of experience is one in which challenges and capabilities are balanced, attention is focused, and time passes quickly.
Arises when the challenges and activity presents are well matched with your skills.
Autotelic
Activities enjoyable for their own sake (video games, dancing, playing sports)
Outgroup Homogeneity Bias
One’s own group naturally seems to contain individuals who differ widely from each other. But members of groups to which one does not belong seem to be “all the same.”
Emics
Elements that make cultures different
Etics
Elements common to all cultures
Tightness-Loosness
Tolerance of deviations from cultural norms, population density and diversity, e.g., Tokyo & Birmingham, AL
Contrasts cultures that tolerate very little deviation from proper behavior (tight cultures) with those that allow fairly large deviations from cultural norms (loose cultures)
Complexity v. Simplicity
Differene between “modern, industrial, affluent cultures [and] the simpler cultures, such as the hunters and gatherers, or the residents of a monastery”
Individualism v. Collectivism
People in collectivist cultures are said to regard society and relations with others as more important, relative to individual experience and gain, compared with people in individualistic cultures.
Openness
Involves an “intellectual orientation” (e.g., ideas, values, aesthetics, fantasy). RWF: higher intelligence and education, drug use, superstition, and art appreciation.
Conscientiousness
Involves “level of responsibility” (achieving, dutifulness, competence). RWF: stable employment, valued by employers, and unlikely to commit crimes.
Agreeableness
Involves “getting along with others”
(e.g., altruism, compliance, gentleness, tender-mindedness). RWF: happiness, stable relationships, well-adjusted, and well-liked.
Extraversion
Involves being “outward directed”
(e.g., gregarious, assertive, thrill-seeking). Related to RWF like many friendships, happiness, alcohol consumption, and infidelity.
Neuroticism
Entails “negative emotions”
(e.g., anxiety, anger, depression). Related to real-world facts (RWF) like mental illness diagnosis, criminal behavior, and social instability (short-term relationships).
Behaviorism
All of behavior stems from the rewards and punishments in past and present environments.
Self-actualization
Refers to a theory of Abraham Maslow’s that humans are motivated by the desire to fully realize their inner potentials, “to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”
Determinism
A self system in which an individual’s actions are determined by, and also change, the environment, which in turn affects the self system.
Free Will
The realization that only
your present experience matters is the basis of free will
Phenomenology
One’s conscious experience of the world
Existentialism
Breaks experience into three types: experience of the external world, social experience, and introspective experience-of-experiencing.
Existentialism also claims that existence has no meaning beyond what each person gives it.
Humanism
People are basically good and inherently motivated to self-actualize
Empiricism
A belief that all knowledge comes from experience
Associationism
A belief that paired stimuli will come to be experienced as one
Hedonism
The belief that the goal of life is “gentle pleasure”
Tabula Rasa
John Locke thought the human mind started out at birth like a blank slate, or tabula rasa.
Thorndike’s Law of Effect
Learning from experience
-Puzzle box w. cats
Classical Conditioning
Affects emotions, feelings, and physiological responses
Events become associated not merely because they occurred together, but because the meaning of one event has changed the meaning of another
(Pavlov)
Operant Conditioning
Affects behavior and how one “operates” in one’s environment.
If an animal or a person performs a behavior, and the behavior is followed by a good result—a reinforcement—the behavior becomes more likely. If the behavior is followed by a punishment, it becomes less likely
Expectancy value
Behavioral decisions are determined not just by the presence or size of reinforcements, but also by beliefs about the likely successful results.
Efficacy
A belief about the self, about what the person is capable of doing.
Habit Hierarchy
The behavior you are most likely to perform at a given moment resides at the top of your habit hierarchy, while your least likely behavior is at the bottom.
Dollard and Miller theorized that the effect of rewards, punishments, and learning is to rearrange the habit hierarchy.
Drive
A state of tension that is reduced by achieving a goal
Primary drives include those for food, water, physical comfort, avoidance of physical pain, sexual gratification
Secondary drives include positive drives for love, prestige, money, and power, as well as negative drives such as the avoidance of fear and of humiliation
Drive-Reduction
For a reward to have the power to encourage the target behavior, the reward must satisfy a need
Frustration/Aggression Hypothesis
The natural, biological reac- tion of any person (or animal, for that matter) to being blocked from a goal, is to be frustrated, with the resulting urge to lash out and injure. The more important the blocked goal, the greater is the frustration, and the greater the aggressive impulse.
Displacement
Defense mechanism in which (in order to reduce anxiety) an emotion or urge is redirected from one object towards another.
Approach/avoidance hypothesis
Tendencies to approach or avoid a goal that is both attractive and dreaded (e.g., a bungee jump) may change over time.
Bobo Doll
Bandura
A child who watches an adult hit the doll is likely to later hit the doll as well, especially if the child sees the adult rewarded for the aggressive behavior
Anxiety
Anticipate danger, escape harm
Attachment Theory
A theoretical perspective that draws on psychoanalytic thought to describe the development and importance of human attach-
ments to emotionally significant other people.
Anxious-ambivalent
Anxious-ambivalent - inconsistent attachment, chaotic, children are hypervigilant about mother.
Avoidant
Rebuffed by mother, children are hostile and defiant.
Schemas
Includes all of one’s ideas about the self, organized into a coherent system
categories
Situationism
Behavior is primarily determined by the immediate situation and that personality traits are not very important.
Object relations theory
The analysis of interpersonal relationships
