P Flashcards
A type of cutaneous receptor organ that is sensitive to contact and vibration
- It consists of a nerve fiber ending surrounded by concentric layers of connective tissue
- These are found in the fingers, the hairy skin, the tendons, and the abdominal membrane [Filippo Pacini (1812 - 1883), Italian anatomist]
Pacinian Corpuscle
An unpleasant sensation due to damage to nerve tissue, stimulation of free nerve endings, or excessive stimulation (eg; extremely loud sounds)
- It is elicited by stimulation of pain receptors, which occur in groups throughout the body, but also involves various cognitive, affective, and behavioral factors
- This may also be a feeling of severe distress and suffering resulting from acute anxiety, loss of a loved one, or other psychological factors
- Psychologists have made important contributions to understanding this by demonstrating the psychosocial and behavioral factors in the etiology, severity, exacerbation, maintenance, and treatment of both physical and mental type
Pain
A somatoform disorder characterized by severe, prolonged pain that significantly interferes with a person’s ability to function
- The pain cannot be accounted for solely by a medical condition, and it is not feigned or produced intentionally
Pain Disorder
A technique used in studying learning in which participants learn syllables, words, or other items in pairs and are later presented with one half of each pair to which they must respond with the matching half
Paired Associates Learning
In behavioral studies, the juxtaposing of two events in time
- For example, if a tone is presented immediately before a puff of air to the eye, the tone and the puff here been paired
Pairing
The study of certain psychological processes in contemporary humans that are believed to have originated in earlier stages of human and, perhaps, nonhuman animal evolution
- These include unconscious processes, such as the collective unconscious
Paleopsychology
Terminal care that focuses on symptom control and comfort instead of aggressive, cure oriented intervention
- This is the basis of the hospice approach
- Emphasis is on careful assessment of the patient’s condition throughout the end phase of life in order to provide the most effective medications and other procedures to relieve pain
Palliative Care
An obsolete name for paralysis, still used in such compound names as cerebral palsy
Palsy
A sudden, uncontrollable fear reaction that may involve terror, confusion, and irrational behavior, precipitated by a perceived threat (eg; earthquake, fire, or being stuck in an elevator)
Panic
A sudden onset of intense apprehension and fearfulness, in the absence of actual danger, accompanied by the presence of such physical symptoms as palpitations, difficulty in breathing, chest pain or discomfort, choking or smothering sensations, excessive perspiration, and dizziness
- This occurs in a discrete period of time and often involves fears of going crazy, losing control, or dying
Panic Attack
An anxiety disorder characterized by recurrent, unexpected panic attacks that are associated with (a) persistent concern about having another attack, (b) worry about the possible consequences of the attacks, or (c) significant change in behavior related to the attacks (eg; avoiding situations, not going out alone)
Panic Disorder
A circular network of nerve centers and fibers in the brain that is associated with emotion and memory
- It includes such structures as the hippocampus, fornix, anterior thalamus, cingulate gyrus, and parchippocampal gyrus
Papez Circuit
Any of the four types of swelling on the tongue
- In humans, some 200 fungiform papillae are toward the front of the tongue; 10-14 foliate papillae are on the sides; 7-11 circumvallate papillae are on the back; and filiform papillae, with no taste function, cover most of the tongue’s surface
Papilla
- A model, pattern, or representative example, as of the functions and interrelationships of a process, a behavior under study, or the like
- A set of assumptions, attitudes, concepts, values, procedures, and techniques that constitutes a generally accepted theoretical framework within, or a general perspective of, a discipline
Paradigm
A ridge (gyrus) on the medial (inner) surface of the temporal lobe of cerebral cortex, lying over the hippocampus
- It is a component of the limbic system thought to be involved in spatial or topographic memory
Parahippocampal Gyrus
In parapsychology, the movement of objects in the absence of contact sufficient to explain the motion
- The phenomenon is closely related to that of psychokinesis, which involves manipulation of objects by thought alone
Parakinesis
The vocal but nonverbal elements of communication by speech, such as tone and stress, volume and speed of delivery, voice quality, hesitations, and nonlinguistic sounds, such as sighs or groans
- These paralinguistic cues help shape the total meaning of an utterance, for example, by conveying the fact that a speaker is angry when this would not be apparent from the same words written down
- In some uses, this term is extended to include gestures, facial expressions, and other aspects of body language
Paralanguage
An illusion of movement of objects in the visual field when the head is moved from side to side
- Objects beyond a point of visual fixation appear to move in the same direction as the head movement; those closer seem to move in the opposite direction
- This provides a monocular cue for depth perception
Parallax
Any model of cognition based on the idea that the representation of information is distributed as patterns of activation over a richly connected set of hypothetical neural units that function interactively and in parallel with one another
Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP)
Any of the axons of the small, grainlike neurons that form the outermost layer of the cerebellar cortex
Parallel Fiber
Play in which a child is next to others and using similar objects but still engaged in his or her own activity
Parallel Play
Information processing in which two or more sequences of operations are carried out simultaneously by independent processors
- A capacity for this in the human mind would account for people’s apparent ability to carry on different cognitive functions At the same time, as, for example, when driving a car while also listening to music and having a conversation
- The term is usually reserved for processing at a higher, symbolic level, as opposed to the level of individual neural units described in models of parallel distributed processing
Parallel Processing
- A numerical constant that characterizes a population with respect to some attribute, for example, the location of its central point
- An argument of a function
Parameter
Statistical procedures that are based on assumptions about the distribution of the attribute (or attributes) in the population being tested
Parametric Statistics