psych definitions Flashcards
Absolute poverty
Deprivation of basic human needs including access to food, water, shelter, safety. Was set as $1.25/day in 2005 by the World Bank.
Acquisition
The phase of conditioning in which the conditioned stimulus is paired with the unconditioned stimulus and the animal is learning to give a condi-tioned response.
Adrenal medulla
Gland just above the kidneys that releases: epinephrine, norepinephrine, dopamine, enkephalin
Aggression
Acts carried out either with an intention to cause harm or to increase rela-tive social dominance.
Altruism
Acting for the good of others at one’s own expense and with no expecta-tion of benefit.
Alzheimer’s disease
Most common form of dementia. No cure, develops with age and worsens as it progresses, eventually fatal. Starts with simple absent-mindedness, then deepening confusion and eventual debilitating cognitive deficits.
Anterior pituitary
Gland that releases: growth hormone, thyroid stimulating hormone, adre-nocoricotropic hormone, beta-endorphin, follicle stimulating hormone, luteinizing hormone, prolactin
Anxiety disorders
Excessive anxiety or fear. Includes Generalized anxiety disorder, Phobias, Panic, OCD, PTSD
Assimilation
Process of one culture or language beginning to resemble that of another group.
Attachment theory
Study of long-term relationships, especially between infants and their pri-mary caregiver. Includes several attachment patterns: secure, anxious, avoidant, ambivalent, disorganized
Attitudes, components
A positive or negative feeling towards something or someone. Consists of Emotion (I like wine); Behavior (I will drink wine if offered); Cognition (I know red wine is good for my heart)
Attraction
A process between two people which draws them together and leads to friend-ship and romance.
Attribution theory
A process of explaining what happens by attributing causes to the environ-ment, or attributing certain thoughts or feelings to other people.
Auditory pathway
Outer ear, auditory canal, tympanic membrane, middle ear (malleus, incus, stapes), inner ear (cochlea), Organ of Corti, Vestibulocochlear nerve, thalamus, temporal lobe
Avoidance learning
A behavior prevents a negative stimulus (e.g. pressing a lever before the noise starts keeps it silent)
Behaviorist perspective of personality
Personality is a learning process of operant conditioning controlled by the environment. People have response tendencies which create behav-ior patterns. Childhood not the crucial period as the environment-based learning continues through life.
Biases
Cognitive or motivational forces that result in repeated, systematic devia-tions from rational judgment. (e.g. availability heuristic, congruence bias, outcome bias)
Biological perspective of personality
Personality reflects the functioning of physiological processes in the brain. Influenced by hormone levels, neurotransmitter levels, size and development of various brain structures. Associated with Eysenck’s Three Factor Model
Body dysmorphic disorder
Somatoform disorder in which the patient has excessive concern with a perceived defect or deficiency in their body.
Brain study methods
Electrophysiology (EEG), Neuroimaging (PET, fMRI), Effects of brain damage (strokes)
Brainstem
Part of the CNS that connects the spinal cord to the brain. Medulla obl-ongata, pons, and midbrain (mesencephalon). Regulates the CNS, controls sleep cycle, heart rate, breathing, eating, etc.
Bystander effect
The more individuals are present, the less likely someone will offer help.
Cannon-Bard theory
Emotional expression is hypothalamus, emotional feeling is dorsal thala-mus. Physiological arousale and subjective feeling are independent and simultaneous.
Central route processing
A method of shaping attitudes that asks the audience to think more, to analyze the content of the message. Depends on the cognitive ability and motivation of the audience.
Cerebellum
Coordination, precision, timing of movement (gait, posture, complex tasks like typing or playing the piano)
Cerebrum
Uppermost part of the brain including the cerebral cortex (front lobe, parietal lobe, temporal lobe, occipital lobe) and subcortical structures (hip-pocampus, basal ganglia, olfactory bulb)
Circadian rhythm
A built-in rhythm of an organism that is roughly 24hrs long but can adjust to external stimuli. Present in plants, animals, fungi, bacteria.
Classical conditioning
A form of learning that pairs neutral stimuli with natural stimuli in which the learner is able to pair this neutral stimuli with the response normally given to the natural stimuli (ring a bell and a dog salivates)
Cognitive dissonance
Mental discomfort when someone holds two contradictory beliefs at once.
Cognitive theories
Motivation is based on cognitive process. For example, to reduce cognitive of motivation dissonance, or in goal-setting theory to reach a particular end state.
Concrete operational stage
Piaget Stage 3: 7-11 yrs. Child can solve problems in a logical fashion. Can begin to understand induction, but still have trouble with deduction.
Conditional reinforcement
A stimulus that an organism learns to desire due to its pairing with another reinforcer (e.g. money or a clicker noise in dog training)
Conditioned response
A response to a conditioned stimulus which usually mimics an uncondi-tioned response. (e.g. salivating in response to food is an unconditioned response; salivating in response to a bell is a conditioned response.)
Conditioned stimuli
A neutral stimulus that is paired with an unconditioned stimulus and comes to elicit the response. (e.g. the bell before the food)
Conflict theory
A variety of approaches to sociology that focus on inequality between social groups and the power differentials that exist between them. Most strongly associated with Karl Marx.
Conformity
Matching behavior to social norms as a result of direct or unconscious pressure. Conforming behavior occurs both in groups and while alone.
Consciousness altering drugs
Drugs that cross the blood-brain barrier to have an effect on the central nervous system. Common categories: anxiolytics, euphoriants, stimulants, depressants, hallucinogens
Conversion disorder
Somatoform disorder in which a patient suffers numbness, blindness or paralysis with no identifiable medical cause.
Cultural capital
Non-economic assets that provide value to an individual and that can pro-mote social mobility (e.g. education, dress, attractiveness, humor)
Cultural relativism
An attempt to study societies while minimizing ethnocentric bias.
Deindividuation
When an individual loses a sense of self-awareness when in a group.
Demographic shift
The increase in the median age of a country due to rising life expectancy and/ or reduced birth rate. Has happened in nearly every country in the world as it becomes more economically developed.
Depression
A low mood that leaves subject feeling sad, hopeless, worried. Characterized by disruptions to sleep and eating and loss of pleasure.
Deviance
Actions that violate social norms, either explicit rules (e.g. committing a crime) or informal mores (e.g. being atheist in a religious society).
Diencephalon
Region of embryonic neural tube that leads to the thalamus, subthalamus, hypothalamus, epithalamus.
Discrimination
When an animal learns to responsed to one conditioned stimulus but gives either a different response or no response at all to a slightly different stimulus.
Dissociative disorders
Mental disorders involving breakdown in memory, awareness and identity. Includes dissociative identity disorder (formerly multiple personality disor-der), dissociative amnesia, and depersonalization disorder
Divided attention
The ability of the brain to perform multiple tasks at once (such as driving a car and talking on the phone). The brain has limited attention resources and as multiple tasks are added, especially in the same modality (listening to the radio and listening to a conversation), performance drops.
Dramaturgical approach
A perspective on sociology that focuses on the context of human behavior rather than the causes, viewing everyday social interactions as a form of per-formance in which people are playing roles.
Drive reduction theory
Motivation results from an organism’s desire to reduce a drive (hunger, thirst, sex)
Elaboration likelihood model
A process of persuasion in which attitudes are influenced both by high elaboration factors (e.g. evaluating and processing information) and low elaboration ones (e.g. the attractiveness of the person making the appeal).
Emotion components
Cognition: evaluation of events, Physiology: bodily responses, Motivation: motor responses an emotion generates, Expression: facial and vocal signals of the feeling, Feelings: subjective experience of the emotion.
Endocrine organs
Hypothalamus, Pineal Gland, Pituitary, Thyroid, Adrenal Medulla, Testes, Ovaries
Environmental justice
The effort to fairly distribute environmental benefits (clean water, park-land) and environmental burdens (industrial facilities, pollution) across all of society.
Erikson stages of psychosocial identity development
0-2 yrs, Hopes, Trust vs. Mistrust; 2-4 yrs, Will, Autonomy vs. Shame; 4-5 yrs, Purpose, Initiative vs. Guilt; 5-12 yrs; Competence, Industry vs. Inferiority; 13-19 yrs, Fidelity, Identity vs. Role Confusion; 20-39, Love, Intimacy vs. Isolation; 40-64 yrs, Care, Generativity vs. Stagnation; 65-death, Wisdom, Ego Integrity vs. Despair
Escape learning
A behavior stops a negative stimulus (e.g. silencing an obnoxious noise to encourage a lever press)
Ethnocentrism
The process of judging another culture by the values and standards of your own culture.
Extinction
When the conditioned stimulus stops generating a conditioned response.
Eysenck’s three factor model
Model of personality based on activity of reticular formation and lim-bic system. Personality made up of 1. Extraversion 2. Neuroticism 3. Psychoticism.
Feature detection
Specialized nerve cells in the brain respond to particular features such as edges, angles, or movement. These feature detection neurons fire in response to images that have specific characteristics.
Fertility
The average number of expected children born to a woman assuming that the woman will survive from birth to the end of her reproductive life.
Fixed interval
Reinforcement after the first response, after a fixed time has elapsed (e.g. after a food pellet is given, no food pellets will be dispensed for 5 minutes. After 5 minutes, the first lever press will get a food pellet)
Fixed ratio
Reinforcement after a fixed number of responses (e.g. a food pellet after every 5 lever presses)
Foot in the door phenomenon
Getting someone to agree to a small request increases the likelihood they will then agree to a much larger one.
Formal operational stage
Piaget Stage 4: Age 11 onwards. Can do hypothetical and deductive rea-soning and think about abstract concepts.
Freud stages of psychosexual identity development
Oral: 0-1yr, oral fixation is a passive immature personality > Anal: 1-3yr, anal fixation is obsessively neat/organized personality > Phallic: 3-6yr, fixation can be oedipus complex > Latency: 6-12yr, fixation leads to sexual unfulfillment > Genital: puberty-death, fixation leads to frigidity, impotence
Front stage vs. back stage
Front stage: how a person behaves when an audience is present, adhering to certain conventions for the audience; Back stage: how a person behaves when no audience is present
Functionalism
A large-scale sociological approach that analyzes particular social struc-tures and functions that influence society as a whole.
Fundamental attribution error
Overvaluing a personality-based explanation rather than environmental explanations. For example, explaining that members of an ethnic group must be poor because they are all lazy, rather than environmental impedi-ments to their ability to get out of poverty.
Generalization
When a new stimulus that is similar to a conditioned stimulus comes to generate the same or similar response.
Gestalt principles
Laws of perceptual organization that guide the brain in making a whole out of sensory parts.
Globalization
Interconnection and interdependence across national boundaries, involv-ing the exchange of culture, ideas, goods, etc.
Group polarization
Groups tend to make decisions that are more extreme than the initial atti-tudes of the individual members.
Groupthink
A breakdown in decision making in which groups value coherence and loy-alty to the in group over critical analysis of the decisions.
Hair cells
Sensory receptors in the organ of Corti on the basilar membrane. Located in the cochlea of the inner ear. The hairs detect sound as vibrations in the tectorial membrane.
Heuristics in problem solving
A quick way to solve a problem using experience when a full exhaustive search would be impossible. Generates results that may not be the best. (e.g. rule of thumb, educated guess, intuition, common sense, stereotypes)
