Historical Schools
The scientific study of the mind and behavior
What is Psychology
The subfield that diagnoses, assesses, and treats individuals with psychological disorders.
What is Clinical Psychology?
Evidence that is gathered through direct, objective observation and measurement rather than personal belief.
What is Empirical Evidence
The ethics panel responsible for reviewing research proposals to protect human participants from harm
What is an Institutional Review Board / IRB?
A research method where a scientist studies an individual or small group in extreme depth, often used for rare conditions
What is a Case Study?
The perspective that focuses exclusively on observable actions while ignoring internal thoughts.
What is Behaviorism?
The domain that studies how memory, problem-solving, language, and decision-making function
What is Cognitive Psychology?
A specific, testable prediction derived from a broader theory
What is a Hypothesis?
The ethical requirement that participants must be told the risks and procedures of a study before agreeing to join
What is Informed Consent?
A numerical measure showing that as one variable increases, another variable consistently decreases.
What is a Negative Correlation?
School of though that personality is driven by unconscious conflicts, childhood experiences, and the interaction of the Id, Ego, and Superego
What is Psychoanalytic/Psychodynamic Theory?
The field investigating how physical, mental, and social traits change across a human's entire lifespan.
What is Developmental Psychology?
The scientific principle requiring research procedures and results to be clear enough that another team can repeat the study to check for consistent findings.
What is Replicability/Verifiability?
The mandatory procedure where researchers explain the true purpose and any deceptions of an experiment to participants right after it finishes
What is Debriefing?
The cardinal rule of correlational research regarding cause and effect
What is "Correlation does not prove causation"?
The school of thought famous for the principle that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" and explains how the brain fills in missing perceptual details
What is Gestalt Psychology?
The branch that studies how our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the presence of other people
What is Social Psychology?
The process of defining a vague concept (like "stress") into a specific, measurable metric (like "heart rate in BPM").
What is an Operational Definition?
A subset of participants chosen so that their demographics accurately reflect the larger population being studied.
What is a Representative Sample?
A study design where neither the subjects nor the experimenters measuring them know who received the actual treatment or placebo.
What is a Double-Blind Study?
The school of thought pioneered by Maslow and Rogers that emphasizes individual free will, human potential, and personal growth
What is Humanism/Humanistic Psychology?
The perspective that argues human behavior evolved because specific traits helped our ancient ancestors survive and reproduce
What is Evolutionary Psychology?
The variable in an experiment that the researcher intentionally manipulates to see if it causes a change.
What is the Independent Variable?
If a study's setting and tasks closely mimic conditions found in everyday real life, it is said to have high ____ validity.
What is Ecological Validity?
A research design that re-tests and follows the exact same cohort of people over a long period of time.
What is Longitudinal Research?