Psychology

• Episodic Memories: Recall of specific personal events and experiences.
• Semantic Memories: Storage of general knowledge, facts, and concepts.
• Positive punishment is a method of reducing unwanted behavior by adding an unpleasant stimulus after the behavior occurs
• Reinforcement is any consequence that increases the likelihood of an organism's future behavior whenever that behavior is preceded by a particular antecedent stimulus
• Antecedent stimulus something that comes before a behavior and is sometimes referred to as a trigger
• shortest to longest: reinforcer, mood, emotions
• Charles Darwin originally suggested that emotions are adaptive and function as communication through three principles, a) serviceable habits, b) antithesis, and c) direct action of the excited nervous system on the body.
• Serviceable habits emphasizes that the way emotions are expressed serves a purpose in nonhuman animals but not people
• Antithesis emphasizes how opposite emotions have opposite bodily expressions.
• Direct action of the excited nervous system on the body emphasizes how emotions result in perceivable changes in the nervous system
• the James-Lange sequence of events for an emotion are:

  James-Lange theory of emotionsPeople perceive a stimulus, express the emotion the stimulus evokes, and then identify their emotion.

  1. We perceive the physical stimulus from the natural environment. 
  2. We express the emotion publicly—physiological changes occur as a result of perceiving the physical stimulus (e.g., facial muscles contort; Cannon, 1927, p. 106). 
  3. We acknowledge the privately experienced emotion.
• Cannon-bard thalamic theory

  1. We perceive the physical stimulus in the environment. 
  2. We simultaneously produce bodily or facial expression changes and acknowledge the emotion.
• Action unit that describes how the eyebrows, mouth, cheeks, or eyes change with each expression
• There are four universal emotions: happy, anxious, surprise, and disgust.
• Emotional contagion, when people “catch” an emotion from another person
• Conditioned emotional response procedure is the process of linking an emotional response, through classical conditioning, to a neutral stimulus
• Frustrative events are situations in which rewards are not as quickly available as they once were or are omitted entirely
• Exteroceptive stimuli perceiving stimuli that come from outside the body
• Orosensroy stimuli flavour and texture stimulus in the mouth
• Interoceptive stimuli are sensory stimuli that are processed in the brain to produce an internal sensation
• The hypothalamus, insular cortex, amygdala, and cerebellum are integral to hunger
• Satiated means being satisfied or full
• Occasion setters—an internal state in this case that teaches us to eat when we’re hungry but not when we’re satiated
• There are three theories about why conditional responses occur: preparatory responding, stimulus substitution, and signal substitution
• Stimulus substitution theory id the conditional response should look the same as the unconditional response
• In signal substitution an artificial conditional stimulus substitutes for naturally occurring signals.
• The preparatory responding account emphasizes the adaptive properties of the conditional response
• Belongingness, or constrained learning, is a type of cue-consequence learning in which it is easier to condition some responses to certain outcomes
• Some animals are hermaphrodites, which means they have the ability to contribute sperm or receive sperm to fertilize eggs during a sexual encounter
• Pheromones are a type of chemical signal to indicate the reproductive status of a potential partner
• Mammals show differential olfactory (i.e., scent) sensitivity to pheromones during the phases of their menstrual cycle
• The Coolidge effect occurs when a habituated sexual response increases with a new animal.
• Habituation is a type of learning in which something is expose to repetitive behaviours and eventually stops responding to it