Emotion & Motivation (Ch. 10)
As you open your front door, your heart suddenly pounds at the exact same time you feel a surge of intense fear upon seeing a bear on your porch. Which theory of emotion does this describe?
What is the Cannon-Bard theory?
When walking home alone down a dark, unfamiliar street at night, your sympathetic nervous system instantly triggers the initial "fight-or-flight" response. According to Hans Selye, you have entered this first stage of the GAS.
What is alarm?
You are tempted to grab a cookie from the break room that belongs to your boss, but your rational mind weighs the consequences and decides to wait until lunch. According to Freud, this reality-bound decision-maker in your psyche is the __________.
What is the ego?
Your new roommate loves trying strange exotic foods, travels spontaneously, and spends hours painting abstract art. On the Big Five personality inventory, they would score exceptionally high on this dimension.
What is Openness to Experience?
You notice that you tend to become much closer friends with the classmate who happens to sit right next to you every day in lecture than anyone else in the room. This rule of interpersonal attraction is driven by __________.
What is proximity?
When looking at a photograph of a smiling friend, you notice there is no crinkling around the corners of their eyes. According to researchers, this kind of fake smile is contrasted with a true, felt __________ smile.
What is a Duchenne smile?
ou get pulled over by the police for speeding, pause for a second, and immediately ask yourself: "Do I have the money to pay this ticket, or can I fight it in traffic court?" Evaluating your options and coping resources like this is known as what type of appraisal?
What is secondary appraisal?
Instead of forcing a troubled client to strictly follow a rigid checklist of rules, a humanistic therapist encourages them to explore their own unique path and realize their full potential. What concept is this demonstrating?
What is self-actualization?
A researcher hands out a 100-item questionnaire about social habits and runs a statistical analysis to see which items cluster together, successfully shrinking down the data into a few core personality factors. This statistical technique is called...
What is factor analysis?
After surviving a horrifying car crash, a driver completely blocks out all memory of the actual impact as a way to manage overwhelming anxiety using this defense mechanism.
What is repression?
Before stepping up to give a high-stakes presentation, your heart is racing so fast that you blank on your notes and bomb the talk. This scenario is a real-world illustration of poor performance caused by excessively high levels of arousal under what psychological concept?
What is Yerkes-Dodson law?
Clue: Instead of crying about failing her midterm, Sarah sets up a meeting with her professor, redesigns her study schedule, and forms a tutoring group. By tackling the root of the problem directly, Sarah is engaging in this type of coping.
What is problem-focused coping?
A child watches an older sibling act aggressively on the playground, copies those behaviors, and subsequently faces a harsh reaction from peers, which alters how they behave next time. This continuous interaction between behavior, environment, and internal thoughts is the concept of _________.
What is reciprocal determinism?
Longitudinal studies show that as people transition from their turbulent early twenties into their thirties and forties, they tend to become significantly more organized, disciplined, and reliable—reflecting an increase in this specific Big Five trait.
What is Conscientiousness?
Instead of just looking at the event itself, a researcher hooks participants up to heart-rate monitors and measures hormone and corticosteroid levels to track their bodily reactions to a crisis. The researcher is using this approach to stress.
What is stress as a response?
Daya breaks up with her partner and is convinced she will be completely miserable forever and never find love again. Daya is falling victim to this concept of emotion.
What is durability bias?
A college student pushes themselves through an intense, grueling semester of working two jobs and taking 18 credits, but by finals week they completely crash, catch the flu and suffer severe mental burnout. They have entered this stage of the GAS.
What is exhaustion?
Rather than focusing on a detailed, case-by-case biography of a single person, personality researchers study broad dimensions like the Big Five across thousands of people worldwide, fitting in with this approach to personality.
What is the nomothetic approach?
An employer uses a pseudo-scientific personality assessment method from the 1700s that attempts to judge a candidate's mental traits by measuring the external bumps and shapes of their skull. This debunked method is __________.
What is phrenology?
An employee who secretly harbors deep feelings of professional inadequacy constantly accuses their co-workers of being insecure and incompetent. Projecting their own flaws outward like this is an example of __________.
What is projection?
On a first date, you take your crush on a terrifying roller coaster ride. Their heart rate spikes, and because they attribute that leftover physical arousal to your charming company, they feel an intense spark of attraction. This is a real-world example of which theory of emotion?
What is two-factor theory of emotion?
While major life events get a lot of attention, researchers find that dealing with a high frequency of daily minor annoyances—like losing your keys, traffic jams, and rude emails—takes an even greater toll on our mental health via this specific scale.
What is the Hassles scale?
Radical behaviorists argue that personality is simply a bundle of acquired habits and that this core human experience is entirely an illusion, since our actions are completely determined by environmental conditioning.
What is free will (or free will determinism)?
A friend argues that trait theory is useless because you acted introverted at a party on Friday but outgoing at a family dinner on Sunday. Trait theorists counter this criticism by explaining that traits are designed to predict this statistical outcome across many contexts rather than a single isolated moment.
What is aggregate behavior?
A patient suffering from chronic pain decides to completely abandon conventional medical treatments and use unproven herbal remedies instead. The patient is using this type of medicine.
What is alternative medicine?