Bio & Senses
These branching fibers of a neuron receive messages from other cells and conduct impulses toward the cell body.
What are Dendrites?
The tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence.
What is Confirmation Bias?
This bias involves overestimating personal traits and underestimating the situation when explaining someone else’s behavior.
What is the Fundamental Attribution Error?
In the Big Five (OCEAN), this trait describes someone who is organized, careful, and disciplined.
What is Conscientiousness?
This hunger hormone is secreted by an empty stomach and tells the brain "I'm hungry."
What is Ghrelin?
This "master gland" of the endocrine system is controlled by the hypothalamus and regulates growth and other glands.
What is the Pituitary Gland?
This "magical number" represents the average capacity of short-term memory (plus or minus two).
What is Seven?
The uncomfortable tension we feel when our behaviors (like skipping a workout) clash with our attitudes (wanting to be healthy).
What is Cognitive Dissonance?
Albert Bandura’s term for the interacting influences of behavior, internal cognition, and environment.
What is Reciprocal Determinism?
This law suggests that performance is best under conditions of moderate arousal rather than either low or high arousal.
What is the Yerkes-Dodson Law?
In classical conditioning, this is the learned response to a previously neutral (but now conditioned) stimulus.
What is the Conditioned Response (CR)?
A mental shortcut that helps us make judgments based on how easily specific examples come to mind.
What is the Availability Heuristic?
The tendency for people in a group to exert less effort when pooling their efforts toward a common goal.
What is Social Loafing?
This psychodynamic defense mechanism involves shifting sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person.
What is Displacement?
This theory of emotion argues that an event triggers physiological arousal first, which we then interpret as an emotion.
What is the James-Lange Theory?
This brain structure in the limbic system is vital for processing new explicit memories for storage.
What is the Hippocampus?
This phenomenon explains why we tend to remember the first and last items in a list better than the middle ones.
What is the Serial Position Effect?
This phenomenon occurs when a group's shared desire for harmony overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives.
What is Groupthink?
Carl Rogers believed this attitude of total acceptance toward another person was essential for a healthy self-concept.
What is Unconditional Positive Regard?
Secreted by fat cells, this hormone acts to decrease appetite and increase energy expenditure.
What is Leptin?
This binocular depth cue relies on the brain calculating the difference between the two images it receives from each eye.
What is Retinal Disparity?
Located in the left frontal lobe, this brain area directs the muscle movements involved in speech production.
What is Broca’s Area?
The tendency to see members of an outgroup as "all the same" while seeing your ingroup as diverse.
What is Out-group Homogeneity Bias?
This projective test asks people to tell stories about ambiguous pictures to uncover their unconscious motives.
What is the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)?
These cultural guidelines dictate how, when, and where various emotions should be expressed.
What are Display Rules?