Chapter 1: Introduction
This is the study of observing and controlling behavior.
What is behaviorism?
Often called an "educated guess," this is a testable prediction about the relationship between variables.
What is a hypothesis?
This is activated during stressful situations to help you fight or flee for your life.
What is the sympathetic nervous system?
A runaway railroad spike through his frontal lobe in 1848 turned this polite foreman into an irritable stranger, proving the brain localizes personality.
Who is Phinneas Gage?
This perspective focuses on how mental activities help an organism adapt to its environment and is associated with James, Dewey and Pierce.
What is functionalism?
A way to see real-world behavior.
What is naturalistic observation?
This fatty substance covers the axon, insulating it and allowing neural signals to travel more quickly.
What is the myelin sheath?
Observation, Question, Hypothesis, Experiment, Analysis, Conclusion.
What is the scientific method?
This subfield focuses broadly on changes across three domains: physical attributes, cognitive skills, and moral reasoning.
What is developmental psychology?
Unlike studies that track people over time, this method takes a slice across multiple age groups at once, giving psychologists an "across-the-board" snapshot.
What is cross-sectional research?
Like a bridge between two halves.
What is the corpus collosum?
The belief that the full moon changes behavior is an example of this.
What is an illusory correlation?
While one field treats the trauma of an injury, this field focuses on why patients refuse to follow their physical therapy routines.
What is health psychology?
Starting with the general law that stress triggers the sympathetic nervous system, a researcher concludes that a skydiver’s heart rate will spike, using this thinking process.
What is deductive reasoning?
Together, they are the ridges and grooves of the brain.
What are sulci and gyri?
Rather than mimicking a brain chemical, this class of medication acts like a biological roadblock, binding to a receptor site to completely stop a neurotransmitter from firing.
What is an agonist?
This school of psychological thought's fatal flaw was its reliance on a subjective 13-letter process.
What is structuralism?
Acting as the ethical gatekeepers of research in academia, this holds the power to shut down study before a single human participant is ever recruited.
What is an IRB?
This peripheral network governs smooth muscles and internal organs, constantly balancing its built-in acceleration and braking systems to maintain homeostasis.
A researcher can observe a participant's physical traits directly, but this underlying inherited makeup isn't visible.
What is genotype?