Introduction to Psychology CLEP
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- Who is Wilhelm Wundt?
- Set up the first psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany.
- What did Structuralists believe?
- That consciousness was made up of basic elements that were combined in different ways to produce different perceptions.
- What is introspection?
- Involves reporting on one's own conscious thoughts and feelings.
- Who is Edward Titchener?
- He set up the first psychology lab in the U.S.
- What did Functionalists believe?
- That consciousness, and behavior in general, helped people and animals adjust to their environment.
- Focus on understanding how physiological and biochemical processes might produce psychological phenomena.
- Biological Approach
- Thoughts, feelings, and behaviors stem from the interaction of innate drives and society's restrictions on the expression of those drives.
- Psychodynamic approach.
- Who said the most important urges are the sexual and aggressive ones?
- Sigmund Freud
- Explain behavior primarily in terms of learned responses to predictable patterns of environmental stimuli.
- Behaviorist approach.
- Who studied classical conditioning?
- Pavlov.
- Who studied operant conditioning?
- Skinner.
- The "cause" is represented by what?
- Independent variable.
- The "effect" represents what?
- Dependent variable.
- What is a blind study?
- If subjects do not know whether they're receiving the drug or the placebo.
- Who does not know about the placebo in a double-blind study?
- The subjects and the experimenters.
- Involves assessing the relationship between two variables.
- Correlational studies.
- Means that high scores on one variable tend to be paired with high scores on the other variable.
- Positive relationship.
- Means that high scores on one variable tend to be paired with low scores on the other variable.
- Negative relationship.
- Describes the strength of a relationship.
- Correlation coefficient.
- Involve in-depth analysis of only one person.
- Case Studies.
- Studied as it occurs in real-life settings.
- Naturalist observation.
- Agreement among observers is a measure of what?
- Inter-judge reliability.
- Concerned with how communication happens and how behavior is influenced by it.
- Behavioral neuroscience.
- Detect heat, or light, or touch and then pass information about those stimuli on to the brain.
- Sense receptors.
- Pathways for communication of sense receptors.
- Neurons.
- Take in information from body tissues and sense organs, and transmit it to the spinal cord and brain.
- Sensory Neurons
- Send information in the opposite direction.
- Motor Neurons.
- Communicate with other neurons.
- Interneurons (associative neurons)
- Short, bushy fibers that take information in from outside the cell.
- Dendrites
- Long fibers that pass info. along to other nerve cells, to glands, or to muscles.
- Axons
- A fatty tissue that surrounds the axon and accelerates tranmission of info.
- Myelin sheath.
- Electrically charged atoms.
- Ions
- Maintained because the axon's membrane won't let positive ions into the cell unless the cell receives a signal from the dendrites.
- Resting potential
- The neuron pumps out the sodium ions and can then fire again.
- Refractory Period
- Junction where the end of one neuron meets the beginning of another.
- Synapse
- Helps control arousal and sleep.
- Serotonin
- Drugs that mimic a particular neurotransmitter or make more of it available by blocking its reuptake.
- Agonists
- Drugs that block.
- Antagonists
- Includes the sensory and motor neurons.
- Peripheral nervous system.
- System that carries info. from muscles, sense organs, and skin to the central nervous system and messages from the system to the skeletal muscles.
- Somatic nervous system
- Regulates the body's internal environment.
- Autonomic nervous system
- Prepares you for action
- Symphathetic nervous system.
- Deactivates the systems mobilized.
- Parasympathetic nervous system.
- Controls breathing and heartbeat.
- Brainstem
- Receives info. about touch, taste, sight, and hearing
- Thalamus
- Controls arousal and sleep
- Reticular formation
- Coordination of voluntary movement
- Cerebellum
- Processes memory
- Hippocampus
- Influences fear and anger
- Amygdala
- Influences hunger, thirst, and sexual behavior
- Hypothalamus
- Influences the release of hormones from other glands
- Pituitary gland
- Motor, cognitive, and sensory processes.
- Cerebral cortex
- Play a part in coordinating movement and in higher level thinking
- Frontal lobes
- Where is the Broca's area and what does it affect?
- Frontal lobe, speech speed.
- Where is the Wernicke's area and what does it affect?
- Frontal lobe, understanding.
- Sensor of touch.
- Pariental Lobes
- Involved in hearing
- Temporal lobes
- Areas involved in vision.
- Occipital lobes.
- Area of psychology that addresses the topic of sensation.
- Psychophysics.
- Minimum stimulation needed for a given person to detect a given stimulus.
- Absolute threshold.
- Smallest difference a person can detect.
- Just noticeable difference (difference threshold)
- Threshold increases in proportion to the intensity or magnitude of the stimuli.
- Weber's Law
- Predisposes us to attend to stimuli that matter to us and not attend to stimuli that don't.
- Sensory Adaptation
- Illustrates that our ideas about reality have to be chosen, organized, and interpreted, not simply detected.
- Selective attention
- Shows that the mind fills in the gaps in our sensations.
- Gestalt psychologists
- Require both eyes.
- Binocular cues
- One cue to distance.
- Retinal disparity.
- The extent to which the eyes must turn inward to view an object.
- Convergence
- Requires only one eye.
- Monocular cues.
- Fact that parallel lines appear to converge as they get farther away.
- Linear perspective.
- Refers to the apparent movement of stable objects as we ourselves move.
- Motion parallax (relative motion)
- Influence judgments of depth.
- Texture gradients
- Predispositions to perceive one thing and not another.
- Perceptual sets
- From simple sensory receptors to more complex neural networks.
- Bottom-up fashion
- From expectations, motives, and contextual cues to raw sensory data.
- Top-down fashion.
- State of being aware
- Consciousness
- Predictability stems from their being synchronized with the parts of the day.
- Circadian rhythm
- Brain waves cycle through a series of ___ stages every ___ minutes or so.
- Five, 90
- Electrical currents in the brain as shown graphically on an EEG.
- Brain waves
- The five stages of sleep.
- Hypnogogic, sleep spindles, delta waves, slow-wave sleep, and stage 2 repeats
- The sleeper appears calm and relaxed despite a great deal of cortical activity.
- Paradoxical sleep.
- Recurring difficulty in falling asleep or staying asleep.
- Insomnia
- Sudden uncrontrollable attacks of sleep during waking hours
- Narcolepsy
- Stop breathing intermittently during sleep
- Sleep apnea
- The images that actually appear to the dreamer.
- Manifest content of a dream.
- A "forbidden" sexual or aggressive wish that the dreamer would repress if awake.
- Latent content.
- Brain's neurons fire randomly during sleep in this theory.
- Activation-sythesis theory.
- Claim that dreams are a way to consolidate information.
- Information-processing
- Heightened state of motivation
- Hypnosis
- A split in consciousness
- Dissociation
- Produce a state of consciousness that is different from "normal" consciousness by mimicking, inhibiting, or stimulating the activity of neurotransmitters.
- Psychoactive drugs.
- A relatively enduring change in behavior that is the product of experience.
- Learning
- Which group first began studying learning and wanted to focus only on observable events
- behaviorists
- Expectations and the ability to represent events mentally.
- Cognitive factors
- Occurs when the repeated presentation of a single stimulus produces an enduring change in behavior.
- Non-associative learning
- Occurs when the repeated or long-lasting presentation of an intense stimulus increases the response to a weaker stimulus.
- Sensitization
- Involves the learning of a connection either between two stimuli or between a response and a stimulus.
- Associative learning
- Produces changes in responding by pairing two stimuli together.
- Classical conditioning (Pavlovian conditioning)
- Involves learning an association between a stimulus and a response that follows it.
- Operant conditioning.
- Always involves a decrease in the target behavior.
- Punishment
- Rules for determining when reinforcement will be given.
- Reinforcement
- We can learn operant behaviors indirectly.
- Observational learning
- Ability to learn vicariously
- Models
- Can be thought of as the mental activities involved in solving problems.
- Cognition
- Mental rules of thumbs
- Heuristics
- You're asking yourself how similar or "representative" one event is of a class of events.
- Representativeness heuristic.
- Involves judging the likelihood that an event will happen in terms of how readily you can bring an instance of it to mind.
- Availability Heuristic.
- Refers to people's tendency to look for info. that will support their beliefs.
- Confirmation bias
- The inability to see new uses for familiar objects.
- Functional fixedness.
- Rules for combining morphemes in meaningful ways.
- Syntax.
- One-word stage.
- Babbling stage
- Two-word stage.
- Telegraphic speech
- Attempted to explain language development in terms of operant conditioning principles.
- B.F. Skinner
- Claimed that children have a language acquisition device.
- Noam Chomsky
- A fleeting awareness of whatever the senses have detected.
- Sensory Memory
- The info. that can be kept in the mind long enough to solve problems.
- Short-term memory (working memory)
- Deliberate, though sometimes automatic and unconscious, methods used for getting info. into long-term memory.
- Mnemonic strategies.
- Rehearsal
- repetition
- Chunking
- Grouping
- About how well you solve problems.
- Intelligence.
- First to develop an intelligence test.
- Alfred Binet.
- Mental age divided by chronological age multiplied by 100.
- Intelligence quotient.
- He labeled general intelligence "g".
- Charles Spearman
- What is nature vs. nurture?
- "Nature" refers to our biological, genetic heritage, whereas "nurture" refers to environmental effects on our development.
- The psychological process that energizes and directs behavior.
- Motivation
- Often used to illustrate how these factors can impact the occurrence and expression of a motive.
- Hunger
- The part of the brain that seems to be most important for monitoring hunger-related signals.
- Hypothalamus.
- Responsible for stopping hunger.
- Ventromedial Hypothalamus
- Responsible for increasing hunger.
- Lateral hypothalamus
- The weight our own body works to maintain.
- Set point
- An increase or decrease in heart rate.
- Physiological arousal.
- Perceiving a stimulus that has relevance to one's well-being will generate arousal and a subjective emotional experience simultaneously.
- Cannon-Bard theory
- The perception of a stimulus causes arousal first, which then causes you to feel an emotion.
- James-Lange theory
- The activity of facial muscles tells us whether we're happy or not.
- Facial Feedback Hypothesis
- Says that the quality of an emotional experience depends on how arousal is labeled.
- Stanley Schacter's Two Factor theory
- Deals with systematic, predictable changes in thinking and behavior over the lifespan.
- Developmental pscychology
- Involve comparing people of different ages at the same point in time.
- Cross-sectional studies
- Means that it cannot be determined whether differences across age groups are due to changes in age itself, or to differences in the periods of time.
- Confounded
- Involve tracking the behavior of a single cohort over long period of time.
- Longitudinal studies
- In which people of different ages are followed over a long period of time.
- Cross-Sequential study
- Describes how children's thinking changes as they get older.
- Piaget's theory
- Children think only in terms of what they can sense and what they can do.
- Sensorimotor stage
- The understanding that objects continue to exist even when their presence can't be sensed.
- Object Permanence
- Don't use logical reasoning, but instead reason intuitively.
- Pre-operational stage.
- The understanding that some quantitative aspects of objects don't change just because the object's appearance has been transformed in some way.
- Conservation
- They have trouble seeing things from other people's perspectives.
- Egocentric
- Think logically but only about things that are "concrete"
- Concrete operational stage
- Thinking, or the logic of science, can think abstractly.
- Formal Operational
- A child understands the world in one particular way and then sees something happen that can't fit into that understanding.
- Disequilibrium.
- Involves understanding events in terms of your current scheme.
- Assimiliation
- Relies heavily on the idea that tension is necessary for change.
- Erikson's theory of psycho-social development
- Sharing wisdom and experience with other people.
- Generativity
- Taking care of only their own deteriorating physcial and mental abilities.
- Stagnation.
- Share the common beliefs that people's behavior is motivated largely by unconscious needs.
- Psychoanalytic theories
- Describes people as having two fundamental needs or motives: sex and aggression.
- Freud's theory of psychoanalysis
- Refers to the biological part of our personality.
- Id
- Do what feels good and do it now.
- The Pleasure Principle
- The rational, realistic part of our personality involves learning, problem-solving, and reasoning.
- Ego
- Do what will get our needs met and without getting hurt.
- The Reality Principle
- The social part of our personality that allows us to get along with other people.
- Superego
- Do what's right, and don't do what's wrong.
- The Morality Principle
- From the Freudian perspective, these objects are symbolic or metaphorical reminders of things the person wants, but can't allow themselves to have.
- Phobias
- Periods of life defined by parts of the body that do the most to make you feel good.
- Psychosexual stages
- Often used as an example of this approach.
- Carl Roger's self theory
- How people think about themselves and their relations with the world around them.
- Cognition
- How people think, how people behave, and what their environment is like
- Reciprocal determinism
- Measuring the many, many ways in which people differ, reducing those many ways down to a more manageable subset.
- Individual-difference approach
- Big Five Personality traits
- Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism
- Used to identify traits for which scores correlate highly with each other.
- Factor analysis
- Stage child enters after oral and anal stages.
- Phallic stage.
- The branch of psychology that deals with psychological disorders.
- Abnormal psychology
- Unusual feelings of dread, fearfulness, or terror.
- Anxiety Disorders
- Feel persistent, but are unaware of its source.
- Generalized anxiety disorder
- Involves unpredictable, minutes-long episodes of terror that have a sudden onset.
- Panic Disorder
- Characterized by depression, mania, or both.
- Mood Disorders
- Characterized by feelings of hopelessness, sadness, and discouragement.
- Major depressive disorder
- Feature the fragmentation of personality.
- Dissociative disorders
- Unable to remember personally relevant info.
- Dissociative amnesia
- Travels away from home or work suddenly and unexpectedly, can't recall his or her past.
- Dissociative fugue
- Multiple personality disorder
- Dissociative identity disorder
- A disorder involving symptoms of psychosis.
- Schizophrenia
- Exhibit delusions of grandeur or persecution.
- Paranoid Schizophrenics
- Exhibit disorganized speech or behavior, and innappropriate emotional responses.
- Disorganized schizophrenics
- Exhibit odd motor activity.
- Catatonic Schizophrenia
- Senselessly repeating back words someone else has just said.
- Echolalia
- Exhibit symtpoms of any type of schizophrenia, but do not meet the specific criteria for having one of the other forms.
- Undifferentiated schizophrenia
- The individual has physical symptoms usually associated with some sort of disease or physical disorder.
- Somatoform disorders.
- Involve impaired motor functioning or impaired sensory functioning that can't be attributed to any neurological problems.
- Conversion disorders
- Characterized by patterns of behavior or thinking that are clearly and substantially inconsistent with the expectations of one's culture.
- Personality disorders.
- A person who is extremely suspicious and distrustful.
- Paranoid personality.
- Tramples on the right of others, is impulsive, and lacks a conscience.
- Antisocial personality.
- Has trouble maintaining relationships and has a wide fluctuations in both self-image and emotional behaviors.
- Borderline personality disorder.
- Needs undue admiration and praise.
- Narcissistic personality
- Focuses on the possibility that unconscious conflicts cause anxiety that is dealt with in a maladaptive way.
- Psychoanalytic approach.
- Explains abnormal behavior in terms of abnormal patterns of thinking.
- Cognitive approach.
- The problem behavior itself is the problem.
- Learning or behavioral approach.
- Problems arise when urges come up against social pressure to squelch them.
- Psychoanalytic thinking
- Involves having the individual relax as much as possible and say whatever comes to mind.
- Free Association
- Emphasis is more on what's happening now and what the client wants to change for the future.
- Humanistic therapies.
- Assume that something going on inside an individual is responsible for abnormal behavior.
- Cognitive therapies.
- Rely on using principle of classical and operant conditioning to change problem behaviors directly.
- Behavioral therapies
- Involves conditioning a new response that's incompatible with an old response.
- Counterconditioning.
- A procedure where anxiety is gradually replaced with relaxation.
- Systematic desensitizaiton.
- Where a person goes straight into the fear-provoking situation without intermediate steps.
- Flooding
- An unpleasant response becomes associated with what would normally be a pleasant activity.
- Aversive Conditioning.
- Rely on drugs or surgery.
- Biological or medical therapies.
- Has to do with how the behavior of individuals is influenced by other people.
- Social psychology
- Refers to how we process info. about other people.
- Social cognition.
- Deals with types of explanations people generate for others' behavior.
- Attribution theory
- Explain behavior in terms of factors inside a person.
- Dispositional attributions
- Explain behavior in terms of factors outside the person.
- Situational attributions
- Observers tend to attribute others' behavior to dispositions.
- Actor-observer difference.
- If you behave in a way that's inconsistent with your attributes, it will produce tension.
- Cognitive dissonance theory.
- About the direct and indirect pressures exerted by others to change someone's attitudes or behaviors.
- Social influence.
- Asked participants to judge which of three lines on a piece of paper was the same length as the fourth line.
- Solomon Asch
- Pressure to comply with the norm.
- Normative Social Influence.
- What other people do simply provides info. about how to behave.
- Informational social influence.
- Demonstrated that people can be incredibly susceptible to the demands of authority.
- Stanley Milgram.
- Aggression is always the product of frustration and frustration always leads to aggression according to this.
- Frustration-aggression hypothesis.
- Our goal in life is to maximize our rewards and minimize our costs according to this.
- Social-exchange theory. (Minimax principle)
- We're obligated to help people who need our help.
- Social responsibility norm.
- We're obligated to help those who have helped us.
- Reciprocity norm.
- Refers to the consistency of people's scores on a test.
- Reliability.
- Coefficients larger than ___ are generally considered adequate evidence of reliability.
- +.70
- How well does the test correlate with itself?
- Internal consistency
- Measure of reliability.
- Cronbach's alpha
- Whether the test looks as though it's measuring what it's supposed to.
- Face validity.
- Refers to how well scores on the test predict actual behavior.
- Predictive validity.
- Refers to whether scores on the questionnaire are related in expected ways.
- Construct validity.
- Most common occuring score.
- Mode
- Allow you to make inferences about populations based on the characteristics of your sample.
- Inferential statistics.