Psychology

• Observational research involves observing and recording behavior in natural settings without intervening or manipulating variables.
• Intellectual disability is a condition of limited mental ability, an IQ of 70 or below.
• Cognition is all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.
• A prototype is a mental image or best example of a category.
• A concept is a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people
• An algorithm is a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem.
• A heuristic is a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently;
• Insight is a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem
• Conformation bias is a tendency to search for information that confirms one's preconceptions.
• Fixation is the inability to see a problem from a new perspective
• A mental set is a tendency to approach a problem in a particular way, especially a way that has been successful in the past but may or may not be helpful in solving a new problem
• Functional fixedness is the tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions; an impediment to problem solving
• Representativeness Heuristic is the judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes
• Availability Heuristic is estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory
• Overconfidence is the tendency to be more confident than correct--to overestimate the accuracy of one's beliefs and judgments
• Framing is the way an issue is posed
• Belief bias is the tendency for one's preexisting beliefs to distort logical reasoning
• Belief perseverance is clinging to one's initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited
• A phoneme is in a spoken language, the smallest distinctive sound unit
• A morpheme is in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning;
• Semantics is the set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes
• Syntax is the rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences in a given language
• Breakdown of Question Categories

  • history – (prologue)
  • methods and approaches – (chapter 1)
  • biological bases of behavior – (chapter 2, 3, 14)
  • sensation and perception – (chapter 5, 6)
  • states of consciousness – (chapter 7)
  • learning – (chapter 8)
  • cognition – (chapter 9, 10)
  • motivation and emotion – (chapter 12, 13)
  • developmental psychology – (chapter 4)
  • personality – (chapter 15)
  • testing and individual differences – (chapter 11)
  • abnormal psychology – (chapter 16)
  • treatment of psychological disorders – (chapter 17)
  • social psychology – (chapter 18)
• Frances Galton


  Maintained that personality and ability depend almost entirely on genetic inheritance (human traits are inherited)
• Charles Darwin


  Theory of evolution, survival of the fittest-origin of the species
• William Wundt


  Introspection-psychology became the scientific study of conscious experience (rather than science); father of modern or scientific psychology; structuralism was the approach and introspection was the methodology
• John Watson


  Founder of behaviorism; generalization; applied classical conditioning skills to advertising; most famous for Little Albert experiment, where he first trained Albert to be afraid of rats and then to generalize his fear to all small, white animals
• Alfred Adler


  Neo-Freudian; believed that childhood social, not sexual, tensions are crucial for personality formation; believed that people are primarily searching or self-esteem and achieving the ideal self
• Carl Jung


  Disciple of Freud who extended his theories; believed in a collective unconscious as well as a personal unconscious that is aware of ancient archetypes which we inherit from our ancestors and we see in myths (young warrior, wise man of the village, loving mother, etc.); coined the terms introversion and extroversion
• Gordon Allport


  Three levels of traits-- 1. cardinal trait- dominant trait that characterizes your life, 2. central trait- common to all people, 3. secondary trait- surfaces in some situations and not in others
• Albert Ellis


  Father of Rational Emotive Therapy, which focuses on altering client's patterns of irrational thinking to reduce maladaptive behavior and emotion (like, "if I fail the AP exam my life will come to an end")
• Albert Maslow


  Humanist psychologist who said we have a series of needs which must be met; you can't achieve the top level, self-actualization, unless the previous levels have been achieved; from bottom to top the levels are physiological needs, safety, belonging, self-esteem, self-actualization; lower needs dominate and individual's motivation as long as they are unsatisfied
• Carl Rogers


  Humanistic psychologist who believed in unconditional positive regard; people will naturally strive for self-actualization and high self-esteem, unless society taints them; reflected back clients thoughts so that they developed a self-awareness or their feelings; client-centered therapy
• B.F. Skinner


  Operant conditioning-- techniques to manipulate the consequences of an organism's behavior in order to observe the effects of subsequent behavior; Skinner box; believed psychology was not scientific enough; wanted it to be believed everyone is born tableau rosa (blank slate); NOT concerned with unconscious or cause, only behavior
• Ivan Pavlov


  Father of classical conditioning-- an unconditional stimulus naturally elicits a reflexive behavior called an unconditional response, but with repeated pairings with a neutral stimulus, the neutral stimulus will elicit the response
• Noam Chomsky


  Believed there are an infinite number of sentences in a language and that humans have an inborn native ability to develop language; words and concepts are learned but the brain is hardwired for grammar and language
• Jean Piaget


  Four-stage theory of cognitive development-- sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, formal operational; two basic processes (assimilation and accommodation) work in tandem to achieve cognitive growth
• Erik Erikson


  People evolve through 8 states over the life span; each state is marked by psychological crisis that involves confronting "who am I"
• Lawrence Kohlberg


  His theory states that there are 3 levels of moral reasoning (pre-conventional, conventional, post-conventional) and each level can be divided into 2 stages
• Carol Gilligan


  Maintained the Kohlberg's work was developed only observing boys and overlooked potential differences between the habitual moral judgment of men and women