ap psychology

• attribution theory: the tbrody that we explain someone’s behavior by crediting either the situation or the person’s disposition.
• fundamental attribution error : the tendency for observers, when analyzing others behavior, to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate the impact of personal disposition.
• conformity: adjusting our behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard.
• normative social influence: influence resulting from a persons desire to gain approval or avoid disapproval
• informational social influence: influence resulting from one’s willingness to be accept others opinions about reality.
• social facilitation: improved performance on simple or well-learned tasks in the pretense of others.
• social loafing: the tendency for people in a group to exert less effort when pooling their efforts toward attaining a common goal than when individually accountable.
• deindividuation: the loss of self awareness and self restraint occurring in group situations that foster arousal and anonymity.
• group polarization: the enhancement of a groups prevailing inclinations through discussion within the group.
• norm: an understood rule for accepted and expected behavior. Norms prescribe “proper” behavior.
• ingroup: “us”- people with whom we share a common tendency to favor our own group.
• outgroup: “them” - those perceived as different or apart from our ingroup.
• self-fulfilling prophecy: a belief that leads to its own fulfillment.
• superordinate goals: shared goals that override differences among people and require their cooperation.
• psychoanalysis: frueds theory of personality that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts.
• unconscious: according to frued, a reservior of mostly acceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories. Today, information processing of which we are unaware.
• oedipes complex: according to fried, a boys sexual desires toward his mother and feeling of jealousy and hatred for the rival father (in girls, it’s the electra complex).
• ego: the largely conscious “executive“ part of personality that, according to frued, mediates among the demands of the id, superego, and reality.
• superego: the part of the personality that, according to freud, represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgement (the conscious) and for future aspirations.
• id: a reservoir of unconscious psychics energy that, according to frued, strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive desires.
• fixation: according to frued, a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, in which conflicts were unresolved.
• collective unconscious: carl jung’s concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species history.
• self-actualization: according to maslow, one of the ultimate psychological needs that arise after basic physical and psyc needs are met and self-esteem is achieved; the motivation to fulfill one’s potential.
• unconditional positive regard: a caring, accepting, nonjudgemental attitude, which carl rodgers believed would help clients develope self-awareness and self-acceptance.
• self-concept: all our thoughts and feelings about yourself in an answer to the question, “who am i?”
• trait: a characteristic pattern of behavior or a disposition to feel and act, as assessed by self-report inventories.
• spotlight effect: overstimulating/overestimating others noticing and evaluating our appearance, performance, and blunders (as if we presume a spotlight shines on only us).
• self-efficacy: one’s sense of competence and effectiveness.
• self-serving bias: a readiness to perceive oneself favorably.
• individualism: giving priority to one’s own goals over group goals and defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications.
• collectivism: giving priority to the goals of one’s group (often one’s extended family or work group) and defining one’s identity accordingly.
• sensation: the process by which our sensory receptors and nervous system receive and represent stimulus energies from our environmen.
• perception: the process of organizing and interpreting sensory information, enabling us to recognize meaningful objects and events.
• bottom-up processin: analysis that begins with the sensory receptors and works up to the brains integration of sensory information.
• top-down processing: information processing guided by higher-level mental processes, as when we construct perceptions drawings on our experience and expectations.
• in-attentional blindness: failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere.
• change blindness: failing to notice the environment.
• transduction: conversion of one form of energy, into another; in sensation, the transforming of stimulus energies, such as sights, sounds, and smells, into neural impulses our brain can interpre.
• absolute threshold: the minimum stimulation needed to detect a particular stimulus 50% of the time.
• priming: the activation, often unconsciously, of certain associations, thus predisposing one’s perception, memory, or response.