Bio
This brain imaging technique measures changes in blood oxygen levels to show real-time brain activity, and was used in Antonova's study of spatial memory.
What is fMRI?
Tajfel's (1971) minimal group study found that boys awarded more points to members of this group — the one they had been randomly assigned to — even when it cost their own group points overall.
What is the in-group?
This model of memory, proposed by Atkinson & Shiffrin (1968), describes memory as a linear process moving through sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory.
What is the Multi-Store Model?
This cognitive theorist proposed that depression stems from a "cognitive triad" of negative automatic thoughts about the self, the world, and the future.
Who is Aaron Beck?
This term describes the tendency for participants to answer questions in a way they think will be viewed favourably by others, rather than honestly.
What is social desirability bias?
This landmark case study patient lost the ability to form new episodic and semantic memories after his hippocampus was surgically removed, though his procedural memory remained intact.
Who is H.M. (Milner, 1966)?
In Bandura, Ross & Ross's (1961) study, children who observed an adult model behaving aggressively toward this inflatable toy were significantly more likely to imitate that aggression themselves.
What is the Bobo doll?
In Loftus & Palmer's (1974) study, participants estimated significantly higher car speeds when this type of question — one that subtly suggests a particular answer — used the verb "smashed" instead of "hit."
What is a leading question?
In Sherif's (1954) Robbers Cave Experiment, this term describes a goal that required the competing "Eagles" and "Rattlers" groups to cooperate — such as fixing the camp's broken water supply truck — and was shown to reduce intergroup hostility.
What is a superordinate goal?
This unethical research practice involves manipulating statistical analyses — for example, removing inconvenient participants until a result becomes significant — to produce misleading "false positive" findings.
What is p-hacking?
In Antonova's (2011) study, this drug acted as an antagonist by blocking acetylcholine receptors, reducing hippocampal activation during a virtual reality spatial memory task.
What is scopolamine?
Steele & Aronson (1995) found that African American participants scored significantly lower on a verbal test when told it was diagnostic of ability, but performed equally to European American participants when told it wasn't — demonstrating this psychological phenomenon.
What is stereotype threat?
This cognitive bias, demonstrated by Tversky & Kahneman's (1974) multiplication task, occurs when an initial piece of information disproportionately influences a later judgment or estimate.
What is anchoring (bias)?
This model of attraction holds that we are drawn to people we perceive as similar to ourselves, and predicts that friends and partners will rate each other as more similar than they may objectively be — even when actual similarity is lower.
What is the similarity-attraction model?
Unlike statistical generalisability, this term describes whether a study's findings can reasonably be applied to other similar contexts, and is the more appropriate concept for evaluating small-sample qualitative research.
What is transferability (inferential generalisability)?
Draganski's (2004) juggling study demonstrated this process, in which grey matter increased in jugglers' brains during training and then decreased again three months after they stopped.
What is neuroplasticity (specifically neural pruning)?
Berry's (1967) cross-cultural replication of the Asch paradigm found that the Temne of Sierra Leone, described by this cultural dimension, conformed at significantly higher rates than the more individualistic Inuit of Baffin Bay.
What is collectivism (collectivist culture)?
Warrington & Shallice's (1974) case study of patient KF, who had impaired verbal short-term memory but intact visual memory after brain damage, provided evidence for this component of the Working Memory Model.
What is the phonological loop?
Applied to Caspi et al.'s (2003) research on the short 5-HTT allele, this model proposes that MDD develops from the interaction between a genetic/biological predisposition and exposure to environmental stressors.
What is the diathesis-stress model?
This sampling bias occurs when a particular group is systematically excluded from a study altogether — for example, a study on relationship breakdown that only recruits unhappy couples, leaving out those in healthy relationships.
What is ascertainment bias?
In Meaney et al.'s (1988) rat study, low maternal grooming silenced the gene responsible for glucocorticoid receptors — not by altering DNA structure, but through this process, which affects gene expression via environmental influence.
What is epigenetics?
Chiu et al. (2009) found that showing Chinese participants a joint presentation of an American advert next to a Chinese one (rather than the American advert alone) increased their perception of Americans as higher in this cultural dimension.
What is individualism?
Sparrow et al. (2011) found that participants recalled information less well when they believed a computer would save it for them, coining this term (sometimes called the "Google effect") for reduced encoding due to reliance on external digital storage.
What is digital amnesia?
In Beck's model, when Mary doesn't get a text back and concludes "he must be cheating on me," she is demonstrating this specific cognitive distortion, where a conclusion is drawn despite a lack of, or even contradictory, evidence.
What is arbitrary inference?
Explaining memory purely as an information-processing system, or explaining a complex behaviour through biology alone, are both criticised for this — oversimplifying a phenomenon by ignoring contributions from other levels of analysis (cognitive, sociocultural, etc.).
What is reductionism?