Research Methods &
Biology in Psychology
Biology in Psychology
The domain of psychology that examines personality, emotions, relationships, and the influence of social situations.
What is Social/personality Psychology?
The parenting style that would say "Because I said so!" when their children question their rules.
This quality of sound waves determines the loudness of the sound.
What is Amplitude?
This stimulus (metronome) produces an conditioned response (drooling) after conditioning.
What is an Conditioned Stimulus?
The effect that you have better memory for items at the beginning of the list.
What is the Primacy Effect?
The variable that is manipulated by the researcher in an experiment.
What is the Independent Variable?
The attachment style of a child who shows no distress when a caregiver leaves, and avoids the caregiver when they return.
What is an Avoidant Attachment Style?
Correctly perceiving objects as staying the same in their size, shape, color, and lightness, across viewing conditions.
What is Object Constancy?
A form of punishment where a good outcome is removed to decrease the likelihood of a behavior.
What is Negative Punishment?
Type of long-term memory that describes your personal experience.
What is Episodic Memory?
The brain area responsible for rational thought, decision-making, impulse control and human social cognition.
What is the Prefrontal cortex / Frontal lobe?
A prenatal developmental period where no major new structures form.
What is the Fetal Period?
The processing, organization, and interpretation of sensory information in the brain.
What is Perception?
The approach established by John Watson that psychology needs to focus on what could be directly observed and measured.
What is Behaviorism?
A form of long-term memory that holds unconscious memories that are expressed through your behavior.
What is Implicit Memory?
A new field in which researchers look at how closely environment affects gene expression.
What is Epigenetics?
Early in development, the brain forms more connections than it will use. This process makes brain processing more efficient.
What is Neural Pruning?
A type of perception processing due to the complex analysis of prior experiences and expectations within the brain.
What is Top-down Processing?
The process when the conditioned stimulus (metronome) is no longer paired with the unconditioned stimulus (food), and the conditioned response is weakened.
What is Extinction?
A condition in which people lose the ability to access memories they had before a brain injury.
What is Retrograde Amnesia?
The nervous system division that arouses the body and prepares it for action in stressful situations.
What is the Sympathetic Nervous System?
In updating a schema, the process of changing an old schema or create a new one when the new experience does not fit.
What is Accommodation?
The smallest change in a stimulus that you can detect.
What is a Difference Threshold?
Learning that occurs when stimuli that are similar but not identical to the conditioned stimulus produce the conditioned response.
What is Stimulus Generalization?
A mental framework used to organize knowledge about the world in long-term memory.
What is a Schema?