Brain Systems
Cortical areas lying toward the back and top of the brain; involved in touch sensation and in perceiving spatial relationships.
Parietal Lobes
The form of psychodynamic therapy developed by Sigmund Freud. The goal is to release conflicts and memories from the unconscious.
Psychoanalysis
A four-part process that involves physiological arousal, subjective feelings, cognitive interpretation, and behavioral expression - all of which interact, rather than occurring in a linear sequence.
Emotion
One of the three basic tasks of memory, involving the retention of encoded material over time.
Storage
A property exhibited by a test that measures what it purports to measure.
Validity
The tendency of each brain hemisphere to exert control over different functions, such as language or perception of spatial relationships.
Cerebral Dominance
Psychotherapies that focus on communicating and verbalizing emotions and motives to understand their problems.
Talk therapies
The counterproposal that an emotional feeling and an internal physiological response occur at the same time.
Cannon-Bard theory
The second of three memory stages, and the most limited in capacity. It preserves recently perceived events or experiences for less than a minute without rehearsal.
Working Memory
A property exhibited by a test on which people get about the same scores when they take the test more than once.
Test-retest reliability
The band of nerve cells that connects the two cerebral hemispheres.
Corpus Callosum
Treatments that focus on altering the brain, especially with drugs, psychosurgery, or electroconvulsive therapy.
Biomedical therapies
The proposal that an emotion-provoking stimulus produces a physical response that, in turn, produces an emotion.
James-Lange theory
A division of LTM that stores explicit information; also known as fact memory. This has two subdivisions: episodic memory and semantic memory.
Declarative memory
A property exhibited by a test that accurately measure performance of the test taker against a specific learning goal.
Criterion Validity
Cortical regions throughout the brain that combine information form various other parts of the brain.
Association Cortex
Cortical regions
Therapies based on psychological principles; often called psychotherapy.
Psychological therapies
Theory of emotion which theorizes that emotions have pairs. When one is triggered, the other is suppressed.
Opponent-process theory
A subdivision of declarative memory that stores memory for personal events, or "episodes"
Episodic Memory
A measure of reliability in which a test is split into two parts and an individual's scores on both halves are compared.
Split-half reliability
A division of the peripheral nervous system that carries sensory information to the central nervous system and also sends voluntary messages to the body's skeletal muscles.
Somatic Nervous System
Treatment techniques based on the assumption that people have a tendency for positive growth and self-actualization, which may be blocked by an unhealthy environment that can include negative self-evaluation and criticism from others.
Humanistic Therapies
A device that records or graphs many measures of physical arousal, such as heart rate, breathing, perspiration, and blood pressure. Often called a lie detector, even though it is really an arousal detector.
Polygraph
The inability to form memories for new information (as opposed to retrograde amnesia, which involves the inability to remember information previously stored in memory).
Anterograde Amnesia
A numerical score on an intelligence test, originally computed by dividing the person's mental age by chronological age and multiplying by 100.