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| The outwardly observable acts of a person, alone or in a group |
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| The school of psychology that focuses on how a specific stimulus evokes a specific response |
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| A scientific study that focuses on a single participant, examining his or her psychological characteristics |
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| The type of psychologist who is trained to provide psychotherapy and to administer and interpret psychological tests |
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| The approach in psychology that blends cognitive psychology and neuroscience when attempting to specify how the brain gives rise to mental processes that store and process information |
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| The approach in psychology that attempts to characterize the mental events that allow information to be stored and operated on internally |
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| A group that is treated exactly the same way as the experimental group, except that the independent variable that is the focus of the study is not manipulated |
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| The type of psychologist who is trained to help people with issues that naturally arise during the course of life |
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| An interview after a study to ensure that the participant has no negative reactions as a result of participation and to explain why the study was conducted |
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| The aspects of the situation that is measured as the values of an independent variable are changed |
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| The participant is "blind" to the predictions of the study and the experimenter is "blind" to the group to which the participant has been assigned or to the condition that the participant is receiving |
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| The difference in the value of the dependent variable that arises from changes in the independent variable |
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| A group that receives the complete procedure that defines the experiment |
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| Experimenter Expectancy Effects |
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| Effects that occur when an investigators expectations lead him or her to treat participants in a way that encourages them to produce the expected results |
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| The approach in pscyhology that assumes that certain cognitive strategies and goals are so important that natural selection has built them into our brains |
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| The school of psychology that sought to understand how the mind helps individuals to adapt to the world around them, to function effectively in it |
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| A tentative idea that might explain a set of observations |
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| The aspect of the situation that is deliberately and independently varied while another aspect is measured |
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| The requirement that a potential participant in a study be told what he or she will be asked to do and advised of possible risks and benefits of the study before formally agreeing to take part |
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| An approach to understanding mental events that focuses on the idea that the whole is more than the sum of its parts |
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| The school of psychology that assumes people have postive values, free will, and deep inner creativity, the combination of which allow them to choose life-fullfilling paths to personal growth |
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| The technique of observing your mental events as, or immediately after, they occur |
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| Sets of operations that work together to carry out a function, such as attention, perception, or memory |
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| A statstical technique that allows researchers to combine results from different studies on the same topic in order to discover whether there is a relationship among variables |
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| A physician with special training in treating mental disorders |
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| A theory of mental events that specifies the continual push and pull interaction among conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings and specifies how such interactions affect behavior |
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| The science of the mind and behavior |
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| The technique of assigning participants randomly, that is, by chance, to the experimental and the control groups, so that members of the two groups are comparable in all relevant ways |
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| Consistency; data are reliable if the same values are obtained when the measurements are repeated |
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| A way to gather facts that will lead to the formulation and validation of a theory |
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| The school of psychology that sought to identify the basic elements of consciousness and to describe the rules and circumstances under which these elements combine to form mental structures |
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| A set of questions that people are asked about their beliefs, attitudes, preferences, or activities |
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| A research method is valid if it does in fact measure what it is supposed to measure |
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| An aspect of a situation that can vary, or change, specifically a characteristc of substance, quantity, or entity that is measureable |
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| The shifting change in charge that moves down the axon |
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| A study in which characteristics of children adopted at birth are compared to those of their adoptive parents or siblings versus their biological parents or siblings |
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| Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) |
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| Controls the smooth muscles in the body, some glandular functions, and many of the bodys self-regulating activites, such as digestion and circulation |
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| The sending end of the neuron; the long cablelike structure extending from the cell body |
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| Central Nervous System (CNS) |
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| The spinal cord and the brain |
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| Computer Assisted Tomography (CT) |
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| A neuroimaging technique that produces a three-dimensional image of brain structures using x rays |
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| The large bundle of axons that connects the two halves of the brain |
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| The treelike part of a neuron that receives messages from the axons of other neurons |
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| From different eggs and sharing only as many genes as any pair of siblings - on average, half |
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| Electroencephalograph (EEG) |
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| A tracing of brain waves of electrical fluctuation over time |
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| The brain lobes located behind the forehead; critically involved in planning, memory search, motor control, speech control, reasoning, and emotions |
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| A chemical that carries a signal from the terminal buttons of one neuron to the dendrite or cell body of another |
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| Brain-scanning techniques that produce a picture of the structure or functioning of regions of the brain |
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| The brain lobes at the back of the head; concerned entirely with different aspects of vision |
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| Parasympathetic Nervous System |
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| Part of the autonomic nervous system that is "next to" the sympathetic nervous system and that tends to counteract its effects |
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| The brain lobes at the top, rear of the brain; among their functions are attention, arithmetic, touch, and registering spatial location |
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| Peripheral Nervous System (PNS) |
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| The autonomic nervous system and the sensory-somatic nervous system |
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| The brains ability to change as a result of experience |
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| A site on a dendrite or cell body where a neurotransmitter molecule attaches itself; like a lock that is opened by one key, a receptor receives only one type of neurotansmitter |
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| The negative charge within a neuron when it is at rest |
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| The process by which surplus neurotansmitter in the synaptic cleft is reabsorbed back into the sending neuron so that the neuron can effectively fire again |
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| Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) |
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| A type of magnetic resonance imaging that detects the amount of oxygen being brought to particular places in the brain, which indicates how active those neurons are |
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| A type of cell that helps neurons to form both synapses and connections when the brain is developing, influences the communication among neurons, and generally helps in the "care and feeling" of neurons |
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| The degree to which the variability of a characteristic or ability in a population is due to genetics- given a specific environment |
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| An atom that has a postive or negative charge |
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| A region of impaired brain tissue |
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| A region of impaired brain tissue |
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| The four major parts of each cerebral hemisphere- occipital, temporal, parietal, and frontal; each lobe is present in each hemisphere |
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| Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) |
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| A technique that uses magnetic properties of atoms to take sharp pictures of the three-dimensional structure of the brain |
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| From the same egg and having virtually identical genes |
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| A fatty substance that helps impulses efficiently travel down the axon |
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| A cell that receives signals from sense organs or other neurons, processes these signals, and sends the signalst muscles, organs, or other neurons; the basic unit of the nervous system |
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| Selective Serotonin-Reuptake Inhibiter |
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| A chemical that blocks the reuptake of the neurotransmitter serotonin |
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| The flexible rope of neurons and their connections that runs inside the backbone |
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| A person whose corpus callosum has been severed for medical reasons, so that neural signals no longer pass from one cerebral hemisphere to the other |
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| A cause of brain damage that occurs when blood fails to reach part of the brain, and thus neurons in that area die |
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| Sympathetic Nervous System |
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| Part of the autonomic nervous system that readies an animal to fight or to flee by speeding up the heart, increasing breathing rate to deliver more oxygen, dilating the pupils, producing sweat, decreasing salivation, and relaxing the bladder |
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| The place where an axon of one neuron sends signals to the membrane of another neuron; the synapse includes the sending portions of an axon, the receiving portions of the receiving neuron, and the space between them |
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| The gap in the synapse between the axon of one neuron and the membrane of another across which communication occurs |
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| The brain lobes under the temples, in front of the ears; among its many functions are processing sound, entering new information into memory, storing visual memories, and comprehending language |
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| A structure at the end of the branch of an axon that can release chemicals into the space between neurons |
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| Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) |
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| A technique in which the brain is stimulated from outside by putting a coil on a persons head and delivering a magnetic pulse; the magnetic fields are so strong that they make neurons under the coil fire |
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| A study that compares identical and fraternal twins to determine the relative contribution of genes to variablity in a characteristic or ability |
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| The image left behind by a previous perception |
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| The inability to process sensory information |
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| The height of the peaks in a light wave or sound wave |
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| The art of focusing on particular information, which allows it to be processed more fully than what is not attended to |
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| A rebound period in which a person cannot pay attention to a second stimulus after having just paid attention to another one |
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Surprising perceptual phenomenon that occurs when a change in a visual stimulus is introduced and the observer does not notice it |
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| Smell and taste, which rely on sensing the presence of specific chemicals |
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| Cocktail Party Phenomenon |
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| The effect of not being aware of other people's conversations until your name is mentioned and then suddenly hearing it |
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| An acquired or inherited inability to distinguish two or more hues from each other or to sense hues at all |
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| A type of deafness caused by physical impairment of the outer or middle ear |
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| Cone shaped retinal receptor cells that respond most strongly to one of three wavelengths of light; the combined signals from cones that are most sensitive to different wavelengths play a key role in producing color vision |
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| The process that leads to increased sensitivity to light after being in the dark |
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| The condition of paying attention to more than one stimulus or to a stimulus presented in more than one modality |
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| The receptor cells with stiff hairs along the basilar membrane of the inner ear; when hairs moved, they produce neural signals that are sent to the brain and underlie auditory sensation |
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| Something that is likely to be wrongly perceived or interpreted by the senses |
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| The sense that registers the movement and position of the limbs |
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| Failure to provide the basic needs and requirements for a person |
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| A type of deafness that typically occurs when the hair cells are destroyed by loud sounds |
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| Opponent Process Theory of Color Vision |
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| The theory that for some pairs of colors, if one of the colors is present, it causes cells to inhibit sensing the complementary color in that location |
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| The result of neural processes that organize and interpret information conveyed by sensory signals |
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| How high or low a sound seems; higher frequencies of pressure waves produce the experience of higher pitches |
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| The phenomenon that occurs when the perceptual characteristics of a stimulus are sufficently different from the ones around it that it immediately comes to our attention |
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Neurological disorder characterized by the inability to recognize faces |
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| The inability to see the second instance of a stimulus when it appears soon after the first instance |
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| A sheet of tissue at the back of the eye containing cells that convert light to neutral signals |
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| Rod-shaped retinal receptor cells that are very sensitive to light but register only shades of grey |
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| The process of picking out and maintaining focus on a particular quality, object, or event, and ignoring other stimuli or characteristics of the stimuli |
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| The results of neural responses that occur after physical energy stimulates a receptor cell but before the stimulus is organized and interpreted by the brain |
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| Senses that produce the perception of the body and its position in space- specifically, kinesthetic sense, vestibular sense, touch, temperature sensitivity, pain, and possibly magnetic sense |
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| The distance between the arrival of peaks of a light wave or sound wave; shorter wavelengths correspond to higher frequencies |
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