Psychology Midterm
Mind/body problem
A fundamental psychological issue: Are mind and body separate and distinct, or is the mind simply the physical brain’s subjective experience?
Culture
The beliefs, values, rules, norms, and customs that exist within a group of people who share a common language and environment.
nature/nurture debate
Stream of consciousness
A phrase coined by William James to describe each person’s continuous series of ever-changing thoughts
nature/nurture debate
Arguments concerning whether psychological characteristics are biologically innate or acquired through education, experience, and culture.
Functionalism
An approach to psychology concerned with the adaptive purpose or function of mind and behavior.
Natural selection
In evolutionary theory, the idea that those who inherit characteristics that help them adapt to their particular environments have a selective advantage over those who do not
Diversity and inclusion
The value and practice of ensuring that psychological science represents the experiences of all humans
Biopsychosocial model
An approach to psychological science that integrates biological factors, psychological processes, and social-contextual influences in shaping human life and behavior
Distributed practice
Learning material in several bursts over a prolonged time frame.
Retrieval-based learning
Learning new information by repeatedly recalling it from long-term memory
Elaborative interrogation
Learning by asking yourself why a fact is true or a process operates the way it does
Self-explanation
Reflecting on your learning process and trying to make sense of new material in your own words
Interleaved practice
Switching between topics during studying
Accuracy
The degree of which an experimental measure is free from error
Bayesian statistics
A class of statistics that combines existing beliefs (prioris) with new data to update the estimated likelihood that a belief is true (posterior)
Case study
A descriptive research method that involves the intensive examination of an atypical person or organization
Central tendency
A measure that represents the typical response or the behavior of a group as a whole
Confound
Anything that affects a dependent variable and that may unintentionally vary between the experimental conditions of a study
Construct validity
The extent to which variables measure what they are supposed to measure
Control group
The participants in an experiment who receive no intervention or who receive an intervention that is unrelated to the independent variable being investigated
Correlation coefficient
A descriptive statistic that indicates the strength and direction of the relationship between two variables
Third variable problem
A problem that occurs when the researcher cannot directly manipulate variables; as a result, the researcher cannot be confident that another, unmeasurable variable is not the actual cause of differences in the variables of interest
Variability
In a set of number, how widely dispersed the values are from each other and from the mean
Variable
Something in the world that can bary and that a researcher can manipulate, measure, or both
Central nervous system
The brain and the spinal cord
Peripheral nervous system
All nerve cells in the body that are not part of the central nervous system. The peripheral nervous system includes the somatic and autonomic nervous systems
Neurons
The basic units of the nervous system; cells that receive, integrate, and transmit information. They operate through electrical impulses, communicate with other neurons through chemical signals, and form neural networks
Dendrites
Branchlike extensions of the neuron that detect information from other neurons
Cell body
The site in the neuron where information from thousands of other neurons is collected and integrated
Somatic nervous system
A component of the peripheral nervous system; it transmits sensory signals and motor signals between the central nervous system and the skin, muscles, and joints
Autonomic nervous system
A component of the peripheral nervous system; it transmits sensory signals and motor signals between the central nervous system and the body’s glands and internal organs
Sympathetic division
A division of the autonomic nervous system; it prepares the body for action.
Parasympathetic division
A division of the autonomic nervous system; it returns the body to its resting state
Cerebellum
A large, convoluted protuberance at the back of the brain stem; it is essential for coordinated movement and balance
Working memory
The limited-capacity cognitive system that temporarily stores and manipulates information for current use
Suggestibility
The development of biased memories from misleading information
Source misattribution
Memory distortion that occurs when people misremember the time, place, person, or circumstances involved with a memory
Source amnesia
A type of misattribution that occur when people have a memory for an event but cannot remember where they encountered the information
Serial position effect
The finding that the ability to recall items from a list depends on the order of presentation, such that items presented early or late in the list are remember better than those in the middle
Sensory memory
A memory system that very briefly stores sensory information in close to its original sensory form
Semantic memory
Memory for facts independent of personal experience
Schemas
Cognitive structures in long-term memory that help us perceive, organize, and understand information
Retrograde amnesia
A condition in which people lose past memories, such as memories for events, fact,s people, or even personal information
Retroactive interference
Interference that occurs when new information inhibits the ability to remember old information
Retrieval-induced forgetting
Impairment of the ability to recall an item in the future after receiving a related item from long-term memory
Retrieval cue
Any stimulus that promotes memory recall
Reconsolidation
The re-storage of memory after retrieval
Prospective memory
Remembering to do something at some future time
Procedural memory
A type of implicit memory that involves skills and habits
Proactive interference
Interference that occurs when prior information inhibits the ability to remember new information
Priming
A facilitation in the response to a stimulus due to recent experience with that stimulus or a related stimulus
Persistence
The continual recurrence of unwanted memories
Mnemonics
Learning aids or strategies that improve recall through the use of retrieval cues
Absentmindedness
The inattentive or shallow encoding of events
Amnesia
A deficit in long-term memory – resulting from disease, brain injury or psychological trauma – in which the individual loses the ability to retrieve vast quantities of information
Anterograde amnesia
A condition in which people lose the ability to form new memories
Blocking
The temporary inability to remember something
Chunking
Organizing information into meaningful units to make it easier to remember
Consolidation
The gradual process of memory storage in the brain
Cryptomnesia
A type of misattribution that occurs when people think they have come up with a new idea yet have retrieved a stored idea and failed to attribute the idea to its proper source
Encoding
The process by which the perception of a stimulus or event gets transformed into a memory
Encoding specificity principle
The idea that any stimulus that is encoded along with an experience can later trigger a memory of the experience
Episodic memory
Memory for one’s past experiences that are identified by a time and place
Explicit memory
Memory that is consciously retrieved
Flashbulb memories
Vivid episodic memories for the circumstances in which people first learned of a surprising and consequential or emotionally arousing event
Implicit memory
Memory that is expressed through responses, actions, or reactions
Long-term memory
The storage of information that lasts from minutes to forever
Long-term potentiation
Strengthening of a synaptic connection, making the postsynaptic neurons more easily activated by presynaptic neurons
Memory
The ability to store and retrieve information
Memory bias
The changing of memories over time so that they become consistent with current beliefs or attitudes
False positive
A result that occurs when there is no real effect but a study produces a statistically significant result by chance
HARKing
“Hypothesizing after the results are known” instea dof generating a theory before running the study and analyzing the results
hypothesis
A specific, testable prediction, narrower than the theory it is based on
Independent variable
The variable that is manipulated in a research study
Inferential statistics
Set of procedures that enable researchers to decide whether differences between two or more groups are probably just chance variations or whether they reflect true differences in the populations being compared
Institutional review boards
Groups of people responsible for reviewing proposed research to ensure that it meets the accepted standards of science and provides for the physical and emotional well-being of research participants
External validity
The degree to which the findings of a study can be generalized to other people, settings, or situations
Internal validity
The degree to which the effects observed in an experiment are due to the independent variable and not to confounds
Mean
A measure of central tendency that is the arithmetic average of a set of numbers
Median
A measure of central tendency that is the value in a set of numbers that falls exactly halfway between the lowest and highest values
Meta-analysis
A “study of studies” that combines the findings of multiple studies to arrive at a conclusion
mode
A measure of central tendency that is the most frequent score or value in a set of numbers
Naturalistic observation
A type of descriptive study in which the researcher is a passive observer, separated from the situation and making no attempt to change or alter ongoing behavior
Operational definition
A definition that qualifies (describes) and quantifies (measures) a variable so the variable can be understood objectively
Participant observation
A type of descriptive study in which the researcher is involved in the situation
P-hacking
Testing the same hypothesis using statistical tests in different variations until one produces a statistically significant result
Population
Everyone in the group or experimenter is interested in
Preregistration
Documenting a study’s hypotheses, methods, and analysis plan ahead of time and publishing it on a time-stamped website
Questionable research practices
Practices that unintentionally make the research less replicable
Random assignment
Placing research participants into the conditions of an experiment in such a way that each participant has an equal chance of being assigned to any level of the independent variable
Reliability
The degree to which a measure is stable and consistent over time
Replication
Repetition of a research study to confirm or contradict the results
Standard deviation
A statistical measure of how far away each value is, on average from the mean
Theory
Model of interconnected ideas or concepts that explains what is observed and makes predictions about future events. Theories are based on empirical evidence
Self-report methods
Methods of data collection in which people are asked to provide information about themselves, such as in surveys or questionnaires.
Scientific method
A systematic and dynamic procedures of observing and measuring phenomena, used to achieve the goals of description, prediction, control, and explanation; it involved an interaction among research, theories, and hypotheses.
Scatterplot
A graphical depiction of the relationship between two variables
Sample
A subset of a population
Research
A scientific process that involves the careful collection, analysis and interpretation of data
Experimentation aversion
A tendency for people to prefer to receive an untested treatment than to participate in randomized study to evaluate the effectiveness of the treatment