psych unit 4 - learning

• learning: a process that produces a relatively enduringchange in behavior or knowledge due to past experience
• stimulus: something in environment that causes some type of response or reaction
• response: behavior that occurs as a result of presence of stimuli
• conditioning: the process of learning associations between environmental events and behavioral responses
• biological preparedness: humans are biologically prepared t oinherit intense fears that have been dangerous over the course of human evolution
• conditioned taste aversions: backwards classical conditioning - organism learns in one trial to avoid a food whose ingestion is followed by illness
• instinctive drift: learned behavior drifts toward instinctive behavior
• behaviorism: the attempt to understand observable activity in terms of observable stimuli and responses
• john b. watson ran a little albert experiment where he conditioned little albert to fear rat-looking things
• Intrinsic motivation: a desire to perform a behavior effectively for its own sake
• Extrinsic motivation: a desire to perform a behavior to receive promised rewards or avoid threatened punishment
• Mirror neurons: frontal lobe neurons that some scientists believe fire when we perform certain actions or observe another doing; may enable imitation and empathy
• Habituation: decreasing responsiveness with repeated exposure to a stimulus
• Reinforcement: any event that strengthens the behavior it follows
• Discriminative stimulus: a stimulus that elicits a response after association with reinforcement (in contrast to related stimuli not associated with reinforcement)
• Biofeedback: a system for electronically recording, amplifying, and feeding back information regarding a subtle physiological state, such as blood pressure or muscle tension
• Problem-focused coping: attempting to alleviate stress directly by changing the stressor or the way we interact with that stressor
• Emotion-focused coping: attempting to alleviate stress by avoiding or ignoring a stressor and attending to emotional needs related to our stress reaction
• Personal control: our sense of controlling our environment rather than feeling helpless
• External locus of control: the perception that chance or outside forces beyond our personal control determine our fate
• Internal locus of control: the perception that we control our own fate
• Self-control: the ability to control impulses and delay short-term gratification for greater long-term rewards