A wildlife researcher sits quietly in a blind to count how many times wild chimpanzees share food with non-relatives without intervening.
What is Naturalistic Observation?
After an action potential fires down an axon, tiny chemical messengers cross the synaptic gap to bind to receptor sites on a receiving neuron.
What are Neurotransmitters?
During a therapy session, Maya's counselor helps her trace her current fear of commitment back to suppressed childhood memories of her parents' divorce.
What is Psychoanalysis?
An individual experiences sudden, uncontrolled attacks of overwhelming sleepiness during the middle of normal daytime activities
What is Narcolepsy?
A study tracks high school students and finds that as the total hours spent scrolling social media per day increases, their overall daily mood rating scores steadily decline.
What is a Negative Correlation?
To ensure that high-anxiety and low-anxiety students are distributed equally between a meditation group and a control group, researchers draw names out of a hat.
What is Random Assignment?
Multiple sclerosis involves the deterioration of this fatty tissue layer insulating the axon, causing neural signals to slow down or fail.
What is the Myelin Sheath?
While focused intently on a telephone conversation while walking down the street, a person walks directly past a street performer in a giant bear suit without noticing them.
Inattentional Blindness?
When explaining why a patient developed severe depression, a doctor considers their family genetic history, negative thought patterns, and recent job loss together.
What is the Biopsychosocial Approach?
While walking through a dark alley, Maya hears a loud noise; her heart races, her pupils dilate, and her digestion slows down due to this division of the autonomic nervous system.
What is the Sympathetic Nervous System?
Early structuralists relied on introspection to explore consciousness, but later behaviorists rejected these self-reports because they could not be independently tested or verified through this standard of scientific measurement.
What is Objective Measurement?
This dream theory proposes that dreams are simply the brain's attempt to synthesize and make sense of random bursts of internal neural activity originating in the brainstem.
What is Activation-Synthesis Theory?
A stroke patient loses the ability to form new long-term memories, though their older memories remain intact, suggesting damage to this limbic structure.
What is the Hippocampus
After taking a prescription painkiller daily for six months, a patient requires double the original dosage to achieve the same degree of pain relief.
What is Drug Tolerance?
A night-shift worker struggles with chronic insomnia because their body temperature and melatonin production are misaligned with their artificial daytime sleep schedule, disrupting this 24-hour biological clock.
What is the Circadian Rhythm?
A patient who abruptly stops using heavy doses of alcohol after years of dependence experiences severe tremors, hallucinations, and rapid heart rate. These acute physiological reactions are collectively classified as this phenomenon.
What is Withdrawal?
Immediately after an action potential fires, voltage-gated potassium channels open to let positive ions rush out of the cell while sodium channels reset, preventing the neuron from firing another signal for a brief moment. Neurologists refer to this temporary recovery window by this term.
What is Refractory Period?
This dream theory suggests that dreaming serves an essential functional role by helping process and consolidate the day's experiences into long-term memory storage.
What is Information-Processing Theory?
A therapist refuses to diagnose clients with disorders or direct their choices, choosing instead to provide unconditional positive regard and help them achieve self-actualization. This clinician is practicing under this school of thought.
What is Humanistic Psychology (or Humanism)?
While caffeine and nicotine speed up neural activity and body functions, alcohol and barbiturates decrease central nervous system activity, distinguishing these two major drug classes.
What are Stimulants and Depressants?
Neuroscientists track both the structure of the brain and real-time changes in oxygenated blood flow while a participant completes a complex decision-making task using this imaging technology.
What is a Functional MRI (fMRI)?
A blind individual's visual cortex reorganizes over time to process input from their fingertips as they learn to read Braille, demonstrating this brain ability.
What is Neuroplasticity
To prevent experimenter expectations from subtly influencing how researchers record participant behavior during a clinical trial, the study ensures that neither the participants nor the observing assistants know who received the active drug.
What is a Double-Blind Procedure?
Following an accident, a patient can smoothly execute well-practiced motor routines like typing on a keyboard, but struggles to plan new multi-step sequences or suppress the urge to blurt out random thoughts due to damage in this brain area.
What is the Prefrontal Cortex?
A patient who suffered a stroke can point to a cup with their right hand when the word "CUP" is flashed briefly in their right visual field, but claims they saw nothing when "CUP" is flashed exclusively to their left visual field. This patient has likely undergone this surgical procedure.
What is a Split-Brain Surgery (or Corpus Callosum Transection)?