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Reflex
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An automatic, stereotyped movement produced as the direct result of a stimulus.
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Knowlton
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Psychologist who deviced an experiement in which subjects in a weather prediction task are given multidimensional stimuli composed from a set of three playing cards and asked to classify them into one of two categories, “chance of rain” or “chance of sun”; cards had fixed probability; Parkinson’s disease patients had problems in learning the task but described it later like normal while amnesic patients learned the task like normal but could not describe it later.
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Thorndike
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Psychologist who used a “puzzle-box” to study operant behavior in cats; theorized that cats learned to escape his "puzzle-box" by trial and error, that is, by performing various responses in a blind mechanical way until some action was effect in freeing it from the box; postulated the law of effect to account for the behavior of the cats.
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Formation of attitudes...________ with other people who hold a certain attitude.
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INTERACTING
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Adrenal Gland
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Controlled by sympathetic nerve fibers; secretes epinephrine, norepinephrine, cortisol, and aldosterone.
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Behavioral adaptations
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These adaptations include increased arousal, alertness and vigilance, improved cognition, and focused attention, euphoria or dysphoria and enhanced analgesia along with concurrent inhibition of feeding and reproductive function.
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Lateral group
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The corticospinal tract, the corticobulbar tract, and the rubrospinal tract.
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Analgesia
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Loss of physical discomfort that’s induced in response to chronic pain or during activities that are important to survival.
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Testosterone
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The principal male sex steroid hormone.
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Limbic system
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Hypothetical functional system that controls emotional behavior and expression and certain forms of memory; includes the amygdala.
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Groupthink
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Occurs when people place MORE IMPORTANCE ON MAINTAINING GROUP COHESIVENESS THAN ON ASSESSING THE FACTS of the problem with which the group is concerned
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Situational cause
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Cause of behavior attributed to EXTERNAL FACTORS, such as delays, the action of others, or some other aspect of the situation
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Prejudice
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NEGATIVE ATTITUDE held by a person about the members of a particular social group
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Small intestine
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Section of digestive tract between stomach and large intestine which produces pancreatic juice and bile; most of digestion occurs here as nutrients are absorbed from food.
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Bile
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Fluid by-product of liver which flows to small intestines; important for waste removal and breaking down starches, proteins and fats.
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Skinner box
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Apparatus invented, by B.F. Skinner; this box was essentially a means of gathering a lot of data about the learning behavior of rats and pigeons in as short a time as possible; consisted simply of a box in which the animal was placed, a lever and dispenser for food pellets; attached to the lever is a recording device, to tell the experimenter how many times and at what point the lever is pressed by the animal.
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Mesolimbic Dopaminergic Pathway
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Virtually any reinforcement involves dopaminergic activation of this pathway.
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Law of effect
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Thorndike's theory that behaviour consistently rewarded will be stamped in as learned behaviour,and behaviour that brings about discomfort will be stamped out.
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Pepsin
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Enzyme produced in stomach that breaks down proteins in food.
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Vertebrate muscle
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Smooth, cardiac and skeletal/ striated muscle.
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Stressor
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A stimulus or situation that produces a stress response.
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Patient N.A.
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This patient had a discrete diencephalic lesion produced by profound amnesia; a 22-year-old U.S. airman in 1960; patient was assembling a model airplane in his barracks room while his roommate, unbeknown to him, was making thrusts and parries with a miniature fencing foil behind his chair; patient turned suddenly and was stabbed through the right nostril; foil penetrated the cribriform plate and took an upward course into the left forebrain; MRI showed damage to the left thalamus and both mammillary bodies; before accident patient was very intelligent (I.Q. 124); became difficult for patient to learn new declarative information but learning nondeclarative information was easy; patient experienced strong anterograde amnesia; had problems presenting material verbally.
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Autonomic emotional response
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This emotional response controlls activation of sympathetic nervous system (e.g. increased heart rate) and inhibition of the parasympathetic nervous system (e.g. less blood to GI tract)
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Implicit memory
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Memories people are not consciously aware of, but that can affect their subsequent performance and behavior; evident when the performance of a subject on a task is improved despite the inability of the subject to consciously recollect memories which facilitate to the task; also known as nondeclarative memory.
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Somatotopic organization
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A topographically organized mapping of parts of the body that are represented in a particular region of the brain; medial to medial and lateral to lateral.
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Huntington’s Disease
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Neuronal degeneration in the caudate nucleus and the putamen, especially of GABAergic and acetylcholinergic neurons.
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Smooth Muscle
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Nonstriated muscle innervated by the autonomic nervous system, found in the walls of blood vessels, in the reproductive tracts, in sphincters, within the eye, in the digestive system, and around hair follicles; in intestines, uterus etc...
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System variable
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A characteristic variable that is controlled by a regulatory mechanism; for example, temperature in a heating system.
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Homeostasis
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The process by which the body's substances and characteristics (such as temperature and glucose level) are maintained at their optimal level.
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Ventral
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"Toward the belly"; with respect to the central nervous system, in a direction perpendicular to the neuraxis toward the bottom of the skull or the front surface of the body.
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Door-in-the-face-technique
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Asking for a large commitment and being refused, and then ASKING FOR A SMALL COMMITMENT
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Obedience
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Changing one's behavior at the COMMAND OF AN AUTHORITY FIGURE
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Self-fulfilling prophecy
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The TENDENCY OF ONE'S EXPECTATIONS TO AFFECT ONE'S BEHAVIOR in such a way as to make the expectation more likely to occur
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Social identity
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The part of the self-concept including one's view of self as a member of a particular social category
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Implicit personality theory
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Sets of assumptions about how different types of people, personality traits, and actions are related to each other
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Anterograde amnesia
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Amnesia for events that occur after some disturbance to the brain, such as head injury or certain degenerative brain diseases.
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Eye-blink conditioning
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A form of classical conditioning in which animals are trained to blink in response to a signal stimulus (CS) like light or tone. Typically, the light/tone is played just before a puff of air (UCS) to the eyelid. This results in the animal blinking (UCR). Eventually, the animal blinks (CR) in response to the light/tone alone.
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Red nucleus
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Large nucleus of the midbrain that receives inputs from the cerebellum and motor cortex and sends axons to motor neurons in the spinal cord; responsible for controlling movement and expression.
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Motor neuron synapse
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Junction between the terminal button of an axon and the membrane of another motor neuron.
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Learning
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The act or experience of one that learns knowledge or skill acquired by instruction or study modification of a behavioral tendency by experience (as exposure to conditioning).
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Vegetative symptoms
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Symptoms in which eating and sleeping decline (trouble falling asleep at night and trouble waking in the early morning).
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Dorsal
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"Toward the back"; with respect to the central nervous system, in a direction perpendicular to the neuraxis toward the top of the head or the back.
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Ipsilateral
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Located on the same side of the body.
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Hydrochloric acid
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Acid produced in stomach that breaks down proteins in food.
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Prefrontal cortex
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Brain region that provides ability to plan, reason, concentrate, and adjust behavior, (right response for the right circumstances).
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Correctional mechanism
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In a regulatory process, the mechanism that is capable of changing the value of the system variable and restoring it to its set point.
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Parathyroid
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Tiny glands located in the neck which secrete calcetonin as well as a hormone that regulates the level of calcium in the blood.
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Conditioned Emotional Response (CER)
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A classically conditioned response that occurs when a neutral stimulus is followed by an aversive stimulus; usually includes autonomic, behavioral, and endocrine components such as changes in heart rate, freezing, and secretion of stress-related hormones; not an emotional response.
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Stimulation of amygdala
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During this type of treatment, patients report feeling afraid.
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Caudate nucleus
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A telencephalic nucleus; one of the two input nuclei of the basal ganglia along with the putamen; involved with control of voluntary movement.
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Alzheimer’s disease
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Symptoms of this disease start with minor forgetfulness and progress to more serious memory loss, confusion, depression, restlessness, hallucinations, delusions, and disturbances of eating, sleeping, and other daily activities; associated with a widespread atrophy of the cerebral cortex, hippocampus, and other areas; most heavily damaged area is the entorhinal cortex.
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Norm of reciprocity
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Assumption that if someone does something for a person, that person should do something for the other in return
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Consumer psychology
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Branch of psychology that STUDIES THE HABITS OF CONSUMERS IN THE MARKETPLACE, including compliance
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Fundamental attribution error (actor-observer bias)
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The tendency to OVERESTIMATE THE INFLUENCE OF INTERNAL FACTORS in determining behavior while underestimating situational factors
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Habituation of aplysia
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The result of repeated stimulation of aplysia’s gills with brief jet of seawater; can weaken withdrawal reflex
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Working memory
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Memory of what has just been perceived and what is currently being thought about; consists of new information and related information that has recently been retrieved from long-term memory.
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Matching/ Non-matching to sample
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This program tests the short-term memory using a non-repeating sequence of arbitrary symbols. A sample stimulus (symbol) is presented in the center of the screen. Following an observing response the stimulus will either vanish (memory trial) or stay on the screen (simultaneous trial). After a delay, which may be zero, the sample stimulus reappears around the edge of the screen along with 1 (in the case of a non-matching trial) or 1-3 (in the case of a matching trial) novel stimuli. For a non-matching trial the subject must touch the novel stimulus to receive reinforcement, for a matching trial the subject must touch the sample stimulus. Monkeys with hippocampus damage performed both of these tasks proorly but the former task was especially delayed.
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Anterior Commissure
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A thin white fiber bundle between the olfactory areas of each hemisphere; larger in homosexual men and in heterosexual women and smaller in heterosexual men.
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Alpha-fetoprotein
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Produced in the liver and brain of a fetus and excreted into the amniotic fluid; levels tends to increase in the amniotic fluid when a fetus has open neural tube defect or abdominal wall defect.
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Possible causes of Parkinson’s Disease
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Hereditary tendency for lower dopamine;brain converts MPTP to MPP+.
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Gamma motor neuron
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A neuron whose axons form synapses with intrafusal muscle fibers.
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Extrafusal muscle fibers
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One of the muscle fibers responsible for the force exerted by the contraction of a skeletal muscle.
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Vestibulospinal tract
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Bundle of axons that travels from the vestibular nuclei to the gray matter of the spinal cord; controls postural movements in response to information from the vestibular system.
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Supplementary motor cortex
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Region of the motor association cortex in the dorsal and dorsomedial frontal lobe; rostral to the primary motor cortex.
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Testis
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One of the male gonads located in the scrotal sac that are the site of sperm and testosterone production.
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Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)
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A brief electrical shock, applied to the head, that results in an electrical seizure; used therapeutically to alleviate severe depression.
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Entorhinal cortex
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A region of the limbic cortex that provides the major source of input to the hippocampal formation.
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Three components of an attitude
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the Affective (emotional) componentthe Behavioral componentthe Cognitive component
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Cognitive dissonance is lessened by:
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Changing the conflicting behavior, changing the conflicting attitude, or forming a new attitude to justify the behavior
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Charles Whitman
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In 1966, this man climbed a tower at the University of Texas and began to indiscriminantly kill people with a rifle; post-mortem autopsy of his brain revealed a large tumor which extended into the temporal lobe and compressed the amygdala.
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Motor homunculus
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A deformed map of the body drawn on the primary motor cortex that shows which brain areas control different body parts.
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Lateral corticospinal tract
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The system of axons that originates in the motor cortex and terminates in the contralateral ventral gray matter of the spinal cord; controls movements of the distal limbs.
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Activational effect
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The effect of a hormone that occurs in the fully developed organism; may depend on the organism's prior exposure to the organizational effects of hormones.
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Sexually dimorphic behavior
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A behavior that has different forms or that occurs with different probabilities or under different circumstances in males and females.
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Nondeclarative or procedural memory
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Memory whose formation does not depend on the hippocampal formation; a collective term for perceptual, stimulus-response, and motor memory; the nonconscious or implicit ability to express and practice learned information.
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Excitatory Postsynaptic Potenial (EPSP)
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A measure of the decrease in the difference in electrical potential between the outside and inside of the neuron; a postsynaptic change in membrane potential that promotes firing of an action potential in the postsynaptic cell, by bringing the membrane potential toward the threshold potential.
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Ventromedial nucleus of the hypothalamus (VMH)
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Large nucleus of the hypothalamus that plays an essential role in female sexual behavior; located near the walls of the third ventricle; connected to PAG.
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Medial Preoptic Nucleus/ Area (MPA)
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Area which plays an essential role in male sexual behavior (destruction, stimulation, physiological recordings, c-fos); receives somatosensory information from genitals through connections with reticular formation and medial amygdala.
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bis
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bisexual.
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endorphins
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pain and pleasure
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Hierarchial Organization
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receptors-->thalamic nuclei-->primary sensory cortex-->secondary sensory cortex-->association cortex
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rehearsal systemRight Hemisphere
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Corsi Span
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perception
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orginizing sensations into menaingful objects and events
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matching
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identifying pairs (or triplets, quadruplets and so on)of participants who measure similarily on a characteristic that is related to the dependent variable and then randomly assigning each of these participants to seperate experimental conditions
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Hypersomnia
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TOO much sleep:I have hypersomnia...Urges to sleep during the day...even during important things such as work
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Neurological disorders
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disorders affecting the brain
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masking
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obscuring, partially or completely, one sensory process by another, as the dulling of the sense of taste by smoking
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Plasticity
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The brain's capacity for modification, as evident in brain reorganization following damage (especially in children) and in experiments on the effects of experience on brain development.
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evolutionary approach
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The evolutionary approach emphasizes how behavior and mental processes emergeas generation-to-generation adaptations to help organisms survive in theirenvironments, in other words, through natural selection.
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Preeclampsia
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a disease of pregnancy characterized by high blood pressure, weight gain, swollen joints, and protein in the urine; unless it is corrected, it can lead to convulsions and coma
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NOTE:Consciousness was the first main concern of psychologists
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cephalocaudal rule
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the "top-to-bottom" rule that describes the tendency for motor skills to emerge in sequence from the head to feet
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confirmation bias:
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supporting results recalled more often
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variable-ratio schedules
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unpredictable number of responses (gambling)
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LAD
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Language acquisition deviceA built in mechanism for acquiring language
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What psychologist is associated with the belief that disorders are a result of enmeshed family patterns
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Minuchin
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Type A Personality
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competitive, hard driving, impatient, verbally aggressive, and anger prone people
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Recurrent binging and purging episodes that occur at least 2x/week for 3 months.
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Bulimia Nervosa
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Amygdala
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Evaluates sensory info, linked to fear responses, emotional events
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mid-life crisis
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state of physical and psychological distress that arises when developmental tasks threaten to overwhelm a person's internal resources and social support system
no evidence that midlife has exceptional stress
midlife crisis NOT a universal experience
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Rehearsal is the conscious repetition of info a person wants to rememver either in the short or long term rehearsal is part of
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effortful processing
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Radial Kerototomy
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vision improving technique that cuts into the cornea
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Comparision Level
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The cost-benefit ratio that people believe they deserve or could attain in another relationship.
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The Inner Ear
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Contains the cochlea, semicircular canals, and vestibular sacs.
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Participant Bias
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can occur when experimental conditions influence participants behavior or mental processes.
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Experiment
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A controlled test of a hypothesis where the researcher manipulates a variable.
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Independent variable
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The variable being manipulated or thought to cause the effect of interest or cause a change in the dependent variable.
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APA style
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Rules lead to standardized papers, everyone knows what to expect and where to find various types of information. Every experimental paper will have a method section, reference etc. -Can be boring and lead to conformist writing
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primary reinforcers
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one satisfying biological needs such as hunger and thirst
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racial memory
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feelings, patterns of thought, and experience that have been transmitted from generation to generation and that deeply influence the mind and behavior
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John B. Watson
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believes mental processes are not suitable subject for scientific study because they cannot be observed; psychology should redefine itself as science of behavior; launches behaviorism and contributes to growth of animal research
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Attachment Patterns
Insecure-Ambivalent
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-Child exhibits anger at the mother while seeking to be close to her
-10% in USA
-at home, parent inconsistently responds to child's emotional needs.
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opium
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One of the opiates, the dried, milky juice obtained from the immature fruit of the opium poppy; an addictive narcotic that produces euphoria and drowsiness while reducing pain.
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panic disorder
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a disorder characterized by the sudden occurence of multiple psychological and physiological symptoms that contribute to a feeling of stark terror. 8-12% of pop report having occasional panic attack. 3.5% have reoccurring unpredictable 2X more likely in women
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Motor Cortex
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- function of the cortex- controls voluntary movements
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do fluid and crystallized intelligence correlate?
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highly - r=+.7
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Weber's Law
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the senses detect the relative (not the absolute) magnitude of change
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Primary vs. Secondary reinforcers
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o Primary vs. secondary reinforcers – Primary reinforcers are things that are innately good. For animals, it’s basically food. As you get older, there are secondary reinforcers (in an of themselves have no money but they allow you to get something else) – Like money or grades.
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whether we control our environment or our environment controls us
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personal control
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the tendency to view the world from one's own perspective without recognizing that others may have different points of view
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egocentrism
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Unconscious level
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Consists of all aspects of our personalities of which we are unaware
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achievement tests
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test designed to determine a person's level of knowledge in a give subject area. It concentrates on the specific material a person has learned
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Parasympathetic Nervous System
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Slows actions down, conserves bodily resources.
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disorient
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to cause to lose perception of time, place, or one's personal identity.
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pain d/o
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- Usually there is an abrupt onset, and pain may increase in intensity over weeks or months. A long history of medical and surgical attention is common, as this tends to be a chronic (and sometimes disabling) d/o Psychological factors are deemed to have an important role in the pathogenesis. Peak onset 30-50 years old; it is 2x as common in women.
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Define Source Misattribution
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the inability to distinguish an actual memory of an event from information you learned elsewhere about the event
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amphetamine
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a type of stimulant often used to stay awake or to reduce appetite
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Rules of Syntax
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• Some sequences of words are allowed, but
others are not
• Guide our grammar
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Social learning theorists
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theorists who emphasized thinking as a cause of personality
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BONUS POINT
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the name of the subject was Wallace and Williams was the experimenter
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Gestalt Psychology
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the theory that the whole of personal experience is different from the sum of its parts. Goes off of ordinary observations instead of trained observations.
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Systematic error- the deviation of the group means from the grand mean, or the mean score of all individuals in all groups. Systematic variance is small when the difference between group means is small.
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Repeated measures ANOVA
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Which form of therapy is most likely to emphasize the importance of examining a person's role within a social system?
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Family Therapy
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Signal detection theory
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an observation that the response to a stimulus depends both on a person's sensitivity to the stimulus in the presence of noise and on a person's response criterion
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factorial design
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the type of design in which two or more independent variables on a dependent variable is assessed. Several hypotheses are tested.
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What are the psychological and emotional causes of eating disorders?
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personality traits associated with anorexia = perfectionism, obsessiveness, approval-seeking, low self-esteem, withdrawal, irritability, and black-or-white thinking the feelings of being overwhelmed and powerless in teen years makes us want to control something in our life
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internal working model of attachment
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the child's mental representation of the self, of attachment figures, and of relationships in general that is constructed by its experiences with caregivers; this model guides children's interactions with caregivers and other people in infancy and at older ages
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Accomodation in Piaget's theory
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schemas are altered to fit experiences that can't be assimilated
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Subject loss (attrition) poses a problem for a random groups design because
(a) extraneous variables are always more likely to affect those who stay in.
(b) participants may inadvertently change their natural group designations during testing (i.e., imp
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(c) group equivalence established at the sample selection stage may be lost.
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You are visiting New York City for the first time. You stop a man on the sidewalk and ask for directions to the Empire State Building. The man responds, “How well do you know Manhattan?” He is probably trying to figure out whether you share
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b. community membership.
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Variable ratio schedule of reinforcement
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Schedule of reinforcement in which the number of responses required for reinforcement is different for each trial or eventEx: reading contest â whoever reads the most books gets a gift card
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What is the clearest sign of retireval failure theory?
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tip of the tounge phenomenon
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2 outcomes of interaction
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None, one or all of the main effects may be significant, and ther eis no significant intercative effect.Or there IS a significant interactive effect.
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DSM criteria for Dysthymic Disorder (DD)
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-depressed mood for most of the day, for more days than not, for at least 1 year-must be accompanied by or more symptoms: poor appettie or overeating, insomnia or hypersomnia, low energy or fatigue, low self-esteem, poor concentration or difficulty making decisions
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What is the most universal way of conveying emotion, other than speaking?
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facial expressions - they are so universal that people who are blind from birth show common facial expressions associated with joy, sadness, fear, and anger
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personality
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an individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling and acting
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