A/B
Research done in an effort to discover a new or more effective way to solve a specific practical problem.
applied research
Psychologists who focus on helping people deal with ongoing situations, or on the adjustment from one situation to another.
counseling psychologists
An approach to psychology that is critical of cultural influences on gender and gender differences in behavior.
feminist psychology
The acknowledgment that different explanations for a phenomenon can complement one another.
levels of explanation
Explanations that seek to describe an immediate cause of a trait, behavior, or mental process.
proximate explanations
The actual application of discovered techniques to solve specific practical problems.
applied practice
A shared set of beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and customs belonging to a specific group or community.
culture
A kind of proximate explanation that seeks to identify a specific problem as the cause of a trait, behavior, or mental process.
functional explanations
The contents of conscious experience, including sensations, perceptions, thoughts, and emotions.
mind
A form of psychotherapy coined by Sigmund Freud that seeks to help clients gain more insight into their unconscious thoughts, behaviors, and motivations.
psychoanalysis
The use of psychological principles to solve practical problems, typically by influencing behavior or changing the environment to match existing behavior.
applied psychology
The philosophical position that the mind and the body are entirely separate from one another.
dualism
An early movement in psychology whose proponents believed that an understanding of a behavior or process’ function was critical to understanding its operation.
functionalism
The view that some forms of knowledge are inborn, or innate.
nativism
One of the first strategies to make inferences about the contents of the mind, it was an effort to standardize the way that people reported their own experiences.
systematic introspection
Any observable action, including words, gestures, responses, and more that can be repeated, measured, and are affected by a situation to produce or remove some outcome. ___________ can also refer to biological activity, including actions on the cellular level.
behavior
An approach to clinical psychology that uses different therapeutic techniques based on their effectiveness for the current situation.
eclectic approach
An approach to psychology that emphasizes the ability of humans to make their own choices and realize their own potential.
humanistic psychology
The principle that traits which contribute to improvements in survival and reproduction are more likely to be passed down to later generations.
natural selection
Research that attempts to take basic findings and turn them into solutions for practical problems.
translational research
The view that all human behavior is controlled by genetic and biological influences.
biological determinism
The view that knowledge arises directly from experience.
empiricism
An approach to studying cultural influences that emphasizes examining how multiple social identities intersect at the level of the individual person to alter their experiences.
intersectional approach
An outgrowth of humanistic psychology, it studies specific virtues of the human experience, including topics such as happiness, trust, charity, and gratitude.
positive psychology
Explanations that seek to describe the reasons why a trait, behavior, or mental process exists by appealing to its role in the process of evolution.
ultimate explanations