PSYCH CARDS Flashcards
Kurt Lewin
- developed the theory of association, the forerunner of behaviorism
- association is grouping things together based on the fact that they occur together in time and space.
- organisms associate certain behaviors with certain rewards and certain cues with certain situations
- this idea is basically what Pavlov later proved experimentally
Walden Two and Beyond Freedom and Dignity
- books written by Skinner
- discusses the control of human behavior rather than rat behavior
Instrumental conditioning
another name for operant conditioning
Who created balance theory
-Fritz Heider
Who created congruity theory
Charles Osgood and Percy Tannenbaum
Who created cognitive dissonance theory
Leon Festinger
Victor Vroom
- Applied Tolman’s Performance= Expectation X Value to individual behavior in large organizations
- individuals who are lowest on the totem pole do not expect to receive company incentives, so these carrots do little to motivate them
John Atkinson
- suggested a theory of motivation in which people who set realistic goals with intermediate risk sets feel pride with accomplishment, and want to succeed more than they fear failure.
- But, because success is so important, these people are unlikely to set unrealistic goals or to persist when success is unlikely
Yerkes Dodson effecr
- in terms of arousal, simple tasks have the optimal arousal toward the high end
- for complex tasks, the optimal level of arousal is toward the low end, so that the individual is not too anxious to perform well
- the optimal arousal for any type of task is never at the extremes
- on a graph, the optimal arousal looks like an inverted U-curve, with lowest performance at the extremes of arousal
Undergeneralization
-the failure to generalize a stimulus
Response learning
-the form of learning in which one links together chains of stimuli and responses. One learns what to do in response to particular triggers
Perceptual or concept learning
- learning about something in general rather than learning-specific stimulus-response chains. An individual learned about something rather than any particular response.
- ex: Tolman’s rats’ cognitive maps
Automatic conditioning
-evoking responses of the automatic nervous system through training
State dependent learning
-what a person learned in one state is best recalled in that state
Social learning theory
-individuals learn through their culture. People learn what are acceptable and unacceptable behaviors through interacting in society
John Garcia
- performed classical conditioning experiments in which it was discovered that animals are programmed through evolution to make certain connections
- studied “conditioned nausea” with rats and found that invariably nausea was perceived to be connected with food or drink
- he was unable to condition a relationship between nausea and a neutral stimulus.
- this extremely strong connection that animals form between nausea and food has been used to explain why humans can become sick only one time from eating a particular food and are never able to eat that food again
- the connection is so automatic, so it needs little conditioning
- called the Garcia effect and especially strong in children
Positive transfer and negative transfer
- previous learning that makes it earlier to learn another task later (positive)
- previous learning that makes it more difficult to learn a new task (negative)
Educational psychology
- concerned with how people learn in educational settings
- examines things like student and teacher attributes and instructional processes in the classroom
- educational psychologists are frequently employed by schools and help when students have academic or behavioral problems
Cooperative learning
-involves students working on a project together in small groups
Surface structure v deep structure
- surface: the way that words are organized
- Deep: the underlying meaning
Reading and Writing (similarly processed in the brain as what)
-processed in the same regions of the brain as producing and understanding speech
-Whorfian hypothesis
- has been used as an argument for the importance of nonsexist language
- But, it has been found that culture that don’t have words for certain colors can still recognize them, so it is unclear to what extent language really affects our perceptions
Vygotsky and Luria
- Russia’s best known psychologists
- studied the development of word meanings and found them to be complex and altered by interpersonal experience
- they asserted that language is a tool involved in (not just a byproduct of) the development of abstract thinking
Charles Osgood
- studied semantics (word meanings)
- created semantic differential charts, which allowed people to plot the meanings of words on graphs
- results showed that people with similar backgrounds and interests plotted words similarly
- this indicated that words have similar connotations (implied meaning) for cultures or subcultures