Introduction to Psychology
This scientific field studies behavior and mental processes.
psychology
This research method involves observing and recording behavior without manipulating variables.
observational research
These specialized cells transmit information throughout the nervous system using electrical and chemical signals.
neurons
This naturally recurring state of reduced responsiveness involves characteristic brain activity and is essential to normal functioning.
Sleep
This process detects physical energy from the environment and converts it into neural signals.
sensation
This perspective emphasizes how unconscious conflicts and early childhood experiences influence behavior.
psychodynamic perspective
In an experiment testing whether caffeine improves memory, this variable is manipulated by the researcher.
independent variable
This branch of the autonomic nervous system activates the body's fight-or-flight response.
sympathetic nervous system
This stage of sleep is associated with vivid dreaming, rapid eye movements, and temporary paralysis of most skeletal muscles.
REM sleep
This term describes the minimum stimulation needed for a person to detect a stimulus approximately 50% of the time.
absolute threshold
This psychological perspective examines how behavior and mental processes help organisms adapt to their environments.
evolutionary perspective
Researchers find that people who exercise more tend to report lower stress. Why can they not conclude that exercise directly causes lower stress based on this correlation alone?
inability to establish causation from correlation alone
This neurotransmitter is strongly associated with reward processing, motivation, and movement, and its loss is implicated in Parkinson's disease.
dopamine
This internal biological clock helps regulate the approximately 24-hour cycle of sleeping and waking.
circadian rhythm
Rods
Introspection, which was used by Edward Titchener to study the elements of the mind, involves
what is looking inward and reporting your immediate sensations, images, and feelings?
Participants are randomly assigned to either receive a new treatment or receive a placebo. The primary purpose of random assignment is to reduce this problem by distributing preexisting participant differences across groups.
participant bias or confounding due to preexisting differences
After damage to this brain structure, a person has difficulty forming new explicit long-term memories, even though some short-term memory and procedural learning abilities remain intact.
hippocampus
A person who regularly consumes caffeine develops a reduced response to the same amount and needs more to achieve the original effect. This phenomenon is called this.
tolerance
When viewing an ambiguous image, your expectations and prior experiences influence what you believe you see. This illustrates this type of processing.
top-down processing
The birth of psychology is often attributed to Wilhelm Wundt because he pioneered the investigation of mental processes using
what is the scientific method?
A study finds a strong relationship between ice cream sales and drowning incidents. Both increase during summer. This third variable offers a plausible explanation for the relationship between the other two variables.
confounding variable, such as warmer weather or seasonal temperature
A patient can understand spoken language but struggles to produce fluent, meaningful speech after a stroke. Damage to this brain region is most likely responsible.
Broca's area
After several nights of insufficient sleep, a person sleeps longer and experiences increased amounts of the sleep stages their body has been missing. This phenomenon illustrates the body's tendency to compensate for lost sleep.
sleep rebound
According to this principle of perceptual organization, people tend to perceive objects that are close together as belonging to the same group.
Gestalt principle of proximity