| A | B |
|---|
| spontaneous recovery | the reappearance of a response (a Conditioned Response; CR) that had been extinguished |
| preconventional morality | At this level of moral development, a child may not take a piece of candy from a store because he is afraid of being punished |
| ethnocentrism | belief that your society, group, or culture is superior to all others. |
| dissociative fugue | "traveling amnesia"; type of disorder in which a person suffers a bout of amnesia and then flees their home and identity. Often the person will travel far away from their home, assume a new identity, and live as a different person until they "snap" out of their amnesic state. |
| absolute threshold | the smallest amount of a stimulus that you can detect: EX. For vision the absolute threshold is a person can see the flicker of a candle 30 miles away on a clear, dark night |
| hierarchy of needs | "PSBES"; shown as a pyramid. Forming the base are the Physiological Needs that are essential for survival. This includes the need for oxygen, water, and food. It is only when the lower-level needs are met to some degree that you can move up to fulfill other needs. The second level is composed of Safety and Security needs. The third level refers to Love and Belonging Needs. This might mean having a partner or spouse, friends, family. The fourth level is composed of Esteem Needs, which may include the need for recognition, respect, dignity, confidence. The fifth and highest level is the need for Self-Actualization - the continuous need to fulfill one's potential and be the best person one can possibly be. |
| assimilation | cognitive process of fitting new information into existing schemas. This means that when you are faced with new info, you make sense of it by referring to what you already know. EX. a child calls an orange a "ball" because the think all round objects are balls. |
| Noam Chomsky | LAD; said the human brain has a distinct area in the brain that functions specifically to help us learn language |
| availability heuristic | mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to mind. For EX. after 9/11 people were afraid to fly on planes (when it is more likely a person will die in a car crash) |
| negative reinforcement | (B.F. Skinner & operant conditioning term); negative doesn't mean "bad;"One of the best ways to remember negative reinforcement is to think of it as something being subtracted from the situation Ex. You close a window to shout out loud traffic noise. |
| John Garcia & taste aversion | psychologist John Garcia fed flavored water (a previously neutral stimulus) to lab rats. Several hours later, the rats were injected with a substance (the UCS) that made them ill. Later, when the rats were offered the flavored water, they refused to drink it |
| REM sleep | "paradoxical sleep"; associated with dreaming |
| rods vs. cones | rods responsible for black and white (night) vision & peripheral vision; Cones involved in color vision; highest concentration of cones at the fovea |
| criteria for diagnosing mental disorders | U-M-A-D; Unjustifiable, maladaptive, atypical, disturbing (and distressing) |
| Intrinsic motivation vs. extrinsic motivation | Intrinsic motivation arise from within the individual, such as doing a complicated cross-word puzzle purely for the personal gratification of solving a problem; vs. Extrinsic motivation arise from outside of the individual and often involve rewards such as trophies, money |
| critical period | a window of opportunity: Genie Secret of a Wild Child put the theory that there is a critical period for language acquisition to the test. |
| object permanence | a child's ability to know that objects continue to exist even though they can no longer be seen or heard |
| frustration-aggression principle | argues that frustration can lead to aggressive behavior |
| social facilitation | The tendency for people who are being watched or observed to perform better than they would alone on simple tasks (or tasks they know how to do very well due to repetition) |
| parenting styles | Diana Baumrind identified 3 parenting styles 1) permissive (laissez-faire); 2) authoritative (democratic); and 3) authoritarian (rhymes with "totalitarian") |
| Han Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome | or GAS, is a term used to describe the body's short-term and long-term reactions to stress. Stressors in humans include such physical stressors as starvation, being hit by a car, or suffering through a traumatic event |
| Schachter's Two Factor Theory | suggests that emotion comes from a combination of a state of arousal (physiological state) and a cognitive label that makes best sense of the situation the person is in. EX. 1. I see a strange man walking toward me. 2. My heart is racing and I am trembling. 3. My rapid heart rate and trembling are caused by fear. 4. I am frightened! |
| token economy | EX. Patients in a hospital are rewarded with tokens for exhibiting and performing desired behaviors. The tokens are then used to purchase things that the patient wants. For example, extra time watching TV or playing a video game. In this way, patients learn to "modify" their "behavior" in order to receive tokens |
| cognitive dissonance | describe the feeling of discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs. |
| fundamental attribution error | When it comes to other people, we tend to attribute causes to internal factors such as personality characteristics and ignore or minimize the power of the situation |
| self-fulfilling prophecy | prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true |
| projective personality test | a personality test, such as the Rorschach or TAT, that provides ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of one's inner feelings |
| functional fixedness | the tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions |
| procedural memory | (aka nondeclarative memory) memory of skills |
| proactive interference | Old information interferes with recalling new info (means loss of new information) PORN |
| hallucination | false sensory perception. EX. hearing voices, seeing things that don't really exist |
| diffusion of responsibility | aka bystander effect |
| internal locus of control vs. external locus of control | the perception that you control your own fate vs.the perception that chance or outside forces beyond your personal control determine your fate |
| observational learning | aka social learning theory; BoBo Doll experiment |
| Strange Situation | Mary Ainsworth studied attachments between mother and child; Secure; insecure; ambivalent; avoidant attachments |
| law of closure | Gestalt principle of perception: we tend to ignore gaps and complete contour lines |
| inattentional blindness | when we fail to notice a fully-visible, but unexpected object because attention was engaged on another task, event, or object. |
| contact comfort | Harry Harlow's BIG IDEA: baby monkeys preferred the wire "mother" covered in soft terry cloth |
| law of conservation | EX. Show a child eight ounces of water in a short fat glass and eight ounces in a tall thin glass, the child who does NOT understand law of conservation will say the tall, skinny glass has MORE water in it. |
| egocentric vs. theory of mind | egocentric (Piaget term) describes a child who can NOT understand someone's else perspective vs. theory of mind (occurs when a child DOES understand other people have unique perspectives and thoughts |
