Chapter 1
The kind of study used to study a single person (or small group of people) or an unusual phenomena in great depth.
what is a case study?
The two structures that make up the central nervous system.
What are the brain and spinal cord?
The approach in psychology that emphasizes the importance of observable behaviors and downplays the importance of thoughts and emotions.
What is behaviorism?
This field of psychology emphasizes psychology’s role in establishing and maintaining health and preventing and treating illness.
What is health psychology?
An area of psychology that integrates science and theory to prevent and treat psychological disorders.
what is Clinical Psychology?
He is considered the founder of psychology, because he was the first to treat psychology as a science (and use the scientific method)
Who is Wilhelm Wundt?
The lobe responsible for processing visual information.
What is the occipital lobe?
A term used in classical conditioning to represent something in the environment that causes no reaction in a person (or animal).
What is a neutral stimulus?
A phenomena that occurs when there are many people available to help a stranger but none of them do stop to help the stranger.
What is the bystander effect?
A therapist using this approach thinks it's important to understand a client's childhood and wants to help their client become more aware of their unconscious conflicts and beliefs.
What is psychoanalytic (or psychodynamic) therapy?
A type of research used to determine whether and how two variables change together but cannot determine if one variable causes changes in the other.
What is correlational research?
The part of the limbic system most associated with processing fear and anger.
What is the amygdala?
The process of gradually learning a complex behavior through the reinforcement of each of its small steps, such as teaching rats to play basketball.
What is shaping?
The tendency to overestimate the importance of a person's traits in explaining their behavior while underestimating the impact of the environment (e.g., assuming someone who is loud in the library is rude and inconsiderate).
What is the fundamental attribution error?
A book that lists and describes all clinically recognized mental disorders and provides information such as: criteria for diagnosis; how the disorder may appear differently across cultures; how common the disorder is.
What is the DSM-V? (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)
The technique psychologists use that involves dividing people into a control group and experimental group so these two groups are evenly split before the experiment begins.
What is random assignment?
The part of the neuron that;
- receives information
- carries information over long distances
- refers to a fatty layer that protects and maximizes the speed of the signal
- refers to the small gap between the sending and receiving neuron.
What are the:
-Dendrites
- Axon
-Myelin Sheath
- Synapse?
An example of this form of operant conditioning might be when your parents tell you that you don't need to do your regular chores for a month because you've been helping your sibling so much (i.e., they want you to keep helping your sibling).
What is negative reinforcement?
A practical way to reduce or manage one's stress by acting on the stressor (e.g., creating and following a budget if you feel stressed about money).
What is problem focused coping?
The technique used in behavior therapy to help people overcome their phobias by gradually and gently introducing them to things related to the phobia and eventually to the actual object or situation that produces the fear.
What is systematic desensitization?
The variable a psychologist manipulates in order to determine whether it causes changes in another variable (identify each of these two variables; e.g., studying more to improve test performance).
What is the independent variable (the one being manipulated) and the dependent variable (the one that is affected by the changes in the independent variable)
The neurotransmitter key in maintaining the brain's neuroplasticity (and low levels of the neurotransmitter are associated with depression).
What is serotonin?
The difference between classical and operant conditioning.
What is involuntary behavior (classical) vs voluntary behavior (operant)?
Some research indicates that stress can negatively and profoundly affect the functioning of the immune system. The field of study that examines this relationship, i.e., the relationship and interactions between psychological factors, the immune system and the nervous system is known as this.
What is psychoneuroimmunology?
The three criteria used to determine whether a behavior is abnormal and a brief definition of each.
What are: maladaptive (interferes with daily functioning); deviant (very atypical - different than social norms); personally distressful (emotional discomfort)