Chapt1-3
What is the definition of psychology?
Psychology is the scientific study of the behavior of individual organisms and how environmental, physiological, mental, social, and cultural events influence these behaviors.
What is the difference between sensation and perception?
Sensation is the process of collecting sensory information from the outside world through the five senses and perception is the actual mental experience fo the sensory information.
What is classical conditioning?
Classical conditioning is also known as respondent conditioning, Pavlovian conditioning, and associative learning. It involves the training of a biologically inherited behavior that is triggered by a specific evolutionary important environmental event to occur in the presence of a new stimulus.
What is IQ conceptually based on?
Mental age and deviations
What is the definition of psychological disorders?
A pattern of thoughts, feelings, and behavior that are deviant, disordered, dysfunctional, and/or dangerous
What is each psychological perspective?
Gestalt, psychodynamic, behaviorism, humanistic, positive psychology, and biological are the perspectives (give me the definitions).
Gestalt: psychology's goal should be to study experience as a whole rather than the sum of its parts
Behaviorism: psychology's goal should be to study directly observable behavior and to understand how the events in the environment outside the organism produce behavior
Psychodynamic: our psychological experience is the product of the conflict between our id and our superego
Humanism: psychology's goal should be to understand human strengths, aspirations, conscious experience, free will, and potential
Positive Psych: the subfield of psychology that aims to understand the strengths, virtues, and values of human behavior
Bio-psycho-social-cultural: this perspective is inclusive of the many factors that work together to influence behavior
What are the stages of Piaget's cognitive developmental theory?
Sensorimotor: infant explores the world through direct sensory and motor contact. Object permanence and separation anxiety develop during this stage.
Preoperational: the child uses symbols to represent objects but does not reason logically; the child is egocentric.
Concrete operational: the child can think logically about concrete objects and can thus add and subtract; also understands conservation
Formal operational: the adolescent can reason abstractly and think in hypothetical terms
What is the difference between generalization and discrimination?
Discrimination occurs when a behavior is observed in the presence of stimuli used during training but not in its absence. Generalization, on the other hand, occurs when a CR is observed in the presence of stimuli that were not present during training.
What is the difference between the validity and the reliability of a test?
Vanity of an exam is determined by how well it measures or predicts what it was intended to assess; reliability refers tot he consistency of a test across the entire measurement and different test-taking occasions.
What is the purpose of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-IV?
It is a standard classification of mental disorders used by mental health professionals.
What is the difference between each research method?
Here are the methods: naturalistic observation, case study, survey, experimental research, and correlational research
Naturalistic observation: behavior is observed and recorded in the context where it typically occurs with as little interference from the researchers as possible
Case study: is a detailed observation of a single individual or group of individuals
Correlational: involves the measurement and comparison of two or more variables
Experimental: is a situation in which the level of one or more independent variables have been changed, while holding as many other variables constant as possible
What is the definition of attachment?
Attachment is the association that infants make between their caregiver, nourishment, and comfort; this process is integral to cognitive and social development
What is encoding?
Encode: the transformation of real world energy, such as light and sound, into an electrical code that can be stored and processed by the brain.
What are the four components of emotion?
An environmental event or trigger a physiological change, and a cognitive interpretation of the experience.
What are examples of medical therapies?
Medications, electro-convulsive therapy, and psychosurgery
What are the functions of the limbic system, thalamus, and hypothalamus?
Thalamus: is a midbrain structure that receives incoming sensory information and passes the information on to the limbic system and the cortex
Hypothalamus: midbrain structure that is essential to motivated behaviors, such as feeding or fighting
What is gender typing?
Gender typing is the process of developing an identity through learned gender roles.
What is working memory and how does it differ from short-term memory?
Working memory is a form of memory that contains both storage and processing mechanisms where short-term memory is a memory store containing whatever currently inhabits the conscious mind.
What is the big five of personality?
Extraversion, openness, agreeableness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness
What are examples of psychological therapies?
Cognitive, behavioral, and client centered
What are the major functions of the frontal lobe, the parietal lobe, the occipital lobe, and the temporal lobe?
Frontal lobe: implicated in impulse control and personality
Parietal lobe: processes visual locations and contains the primary somatosensory cortex
Occipital lobe: concerned primarily with the basic visual processing
Temporal lobe: allows us to recognize visual objects, such as faces
What is transduction?
Transduction is the transformation of one kind of energy into another kind of energy.
What is consciousness?
Consciousness is the awareness of whatever is presently happening in your mind.
What is the definition of self-actualization and self-efficacy?
Self efficacy is the beliefs an individual holds concerting his or her skills and ability to perform certain acts while self-actualization involves making "the full use and exploration of talents, capacities, and potentialities."
What is the definition of an attitude?
An attitude is the emotional and cognitive evaluations that we attach to people, places, objects, and ideas