PSY1011 Exam Flashcards
From which Greek word is ‘psychology’ derived?
Psyche
What is the term given to society’s general beliefs about psychology, that are usually untrue and acquired through media?
Pop psychology
People mutually influence each others’ behaviour
Reciprocal determinism
A perspective, believed by Socrates + Plato, in which the mind and body are separate
Dualism
A perspective, believed by Aristotle + Locke, in which the mind and body are connected
Monoism
Birth date of psychology
1879
An approach concerned with the structure of the mind
Structuralism
An approach concerned with the purpose of mental processes
Functionalism
An approach concerned with exploring the unconscious mind
Psychodynamic
An approach concerned with what is literally observable and measurable
Behaviourism
The idea that our senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are
Naive realism
The fact that it’s easy to find confirmation for a theory if you’re specifically looking for it
Confirmation bias
What are the nine subfields of psychology?
Clinical neuropsych, clinical psych, counselling psych, community psych, educational psych, forensic psych, health psych, organisational psych, and sport psych
Non-Associative Learning
Habituation and Sensitisation
Becoming less sensitive to a stimuli due to repeated exposure
Habituation
Becoming more sensitive to a stimuli over time
Sensitisation
Associative Learning
Classical and operant conditioning
Jean Piaget’s 4 stages of cognitive development
Sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational
The effort by an organism to exist in harmony with its environment
Equilibrium
Mental representations of a category, object, event, or person
Schema
Fitting new experiences into existing schemas
Assimilation
Modifying schemas to fit new information
Accomodation
The ability to recognise that important properties of an object remain the same despite a change in appearance
Conservation
An animal bonds in a critical period after birth and takes on the behavioural characteristics of the caregiver
Imprinting
Kohlberg Level One
Pre-morality
Kohlberg Level Two
Conventional morality
Kohlberg Level Three
Post-conventional morality
2 major divisions of the nervous system
Central nervous system and peripheral nervous system
The central nervous system:
Brain and spinal cord
2 systems of the peripheral nervous system
Somatic and autonomic
2 branches of the autonomic nervous system
Sympathetic and Parasympathetic
The brain’s ability to change, adapt, and reorganise itself
Neuroplasticity
4 lobes of the brain
Frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital
Type of glial cell that makes up the myelin sheath
Oligodendrocyte
Part of the neuron that receives messages
Dendrite
Part of the neuron that sends messages
Axon
Stress as a positive, motivating force
Eustress
The internal processes that occur as people try to adjust to or deal with events and situations
Stress
Stimuli that threaten to disrupt an individual’s functioning and cause them to make adjustments to compensate for the disruption
Stressors
Attempting to alter or eliminate a source of stress
Problem-focused coping
Attempting to control the negative emotional consequences of a stressor
Emotion-focused coping
Cells that produce antibodies
B-Cells
Cells that mature in the Thymus and kill other cells
T-Cells
The diagnosis for when a body attacks healthy cells
Autoimmune disease
The diagnosis for when the immune system stops working
Immunosuppression
An approach that contends that memory is passive
Passivist approach
An approach that proposes that we actively influence our memories
Activist approach
Memories held by a group of people
Collective memory
Memories of specific events
Episodic memory
Memories of movements and habits
Procedural memory
General knowledge and facts about the world
Semantic memory
Memories needing a conscious effort to remember
Explicit memory
Memories automatically remembered
Implicit memory
2 types of sensory memory
Iconic and echoic
The principle which explains that memories are more easily retrieved if the external conditions at the time of retrieval are similar to that when they were encoded
Encoding specificity
The reactivation or reconstruction of information from memory
Retrieval
Generating previously remembered information
Recall
Selecting previously remembered information from an array of options
Recognition
Anti-psychotics
Neuroleptics
Tranquilisng drugs
Anxiolytics
The tendency to stick to our initial beliefs even when evidence contradicts them
Belief perserverance
Tendency to see patterns in meaningless data
Patternicity
Roughly how many neurons are in a brain?
85 billion
Around how many neural connections are in a brain?
160 trillion
The term given to the fact that our memory is surprisingly good in some situations and bad in others
Paradox of memory
A false but subjectively compelling memory
Memory illusion
A memory in which we see ourselves as an outside observer would
Observer memory
A memory in which we see the world through our own visual field
Field memory
How much information a system can hold
Span
How long a system can hold information
Duration
The longer we wait, the more our memories fade
Decay
Memories getting in the way of each other
Interference
New learning hampering earlier learning
Retroactive inhibition
Earlier learning hampering new learning
Proactive inhibition
Organising material into meaningful groupings
Chunking
3 levels of processing
Visual, phonological and semantic
The tendency to remember stimuli which appear early in a list
Primacy effect
The tendency to remember stimuli which appear late in a list
Recency effect
The tendency to remember distinctive stimuli that stand out
von Restorff effect
Our ability to identify a stimulus more easily or more quickly when we have previously encountered similar syimuli
Priming
3 major stages of memory
Encoding, storage and retrieval
The process of getting information into our memory
Encoding
The process of keeping information in our memory
Storage
The process of fetching information from our memory
Retrieval
The physical trace of memory in the brain
Engram
Lost memories from our past
Retrograde amnesia
Lost ability to form new memories
Anterograde amnesia
Knowledge about our own memory abilities and limitations
Meta-memory skills
Emotional memories so vivid that we seem to be able to recall them in extreme detail
Flashbulb memories
A lack of clarity about the origin of a memory
Source monitoring confusion
mistakenly forgetting one of ‘our’ ideas actually originated with someone else
Cryptomnesia
Sudden, spontaneous understanding
Insight
Learning that isn’t directly observable
Latent learning
We are evolutionarily predisposed to fear certain stimuli
Preparedness
Assuming that psychological phenomena are the same across all cultures
Absolutism
Assuming that all human behaviour is culturally patterened
Relativism
Assuming that all basic psychological processes are common to the human species as a whole
Universalism
Studying the behaviour of a culture from the perspective of a native
Emic approach
Studying the behaviour of a culture from the perspective of an outsider
Etic approach
The process of adapting to a culture other than the one originally identified with
Acculturation
