Psych Exam 1

Front 1

What is the modern day definition of psychology?

Back 1

The scientific study of behavior and mental processes

Front 2

What is the nature vs. nurture issue?

Back 2

Controversy over the relative contributes of biology and experience

Front 3

Neuroscience

Back 3

How the body and the brain enable emotions.

Front 4

Psychodynamic

Back 4

How behavior springs from unconscious drives and conflicts

Front 5

Behavioral Genetics (personality)

Back 5

How much our genes and our environment influence our individual differences.

Front 6

Evolutionary (developmental)

Back 6

How the natural selection of traits promoted the survival of genes

Front 7

Behavioral

Back 7

How we learn observable responses.

Front 8

Cognitive

Back 8

How we encode, process, store, and receive information.

Front 9

Social

Back 9

How behavior and thinking vary across situations and cultures.

Front 10

Clinical Psychologist (Ph. D)

Back 10

Studies, assesses, and treas people with psychological disorders.

Front 11

Psychiatrist (M.D.)

Back 11

Medical professionals who use treatments like drugs and psychotherapy to treat people.

Front 12

Hindsight Bias

Back 12

After learning the outcome of an event, many people believe the could have predicted that very outcome.

Front 13

Case Study

Back 13

Examines one individual in depth in the hope of revealing things true of us all. (They show us what CAN happen, they often suggest directions for further study)

Front 14

Survey

Back 14

Method looks at many cases in less depth. Wording effects ever subtle changes in the order or wording of a question can have major effects.

Front 15

Naturalistic Observation

Back 15

Observing and recording the behavior and recoding patterns.

Front 16

Correlation

Back 16

When one trait or behavior accompanies another, we say the two correlate.

Front 17

Experiments

Back 17

Exploring cause and effect

Front 18

Independent Variable

Back 18

Factor manipulated by the experimenter. the effect is the focus of the study.

Front 19

Dependent Variable

Back 19

Factor that may change in response to an independent variable. Usually a behavior or an mental process.

Front 20

Encode

Back 20

Get information to the brain.

Front 21

Storage

Back 21

Retain the information.

Front 22

Retrieval

Back 22

Later get it back out

Front 23

Automatic Processing

Back 23

-While reading we automatically encode the place of a picture on a page
-We unintentionally note the events that take place in a day
-You keep track of how many times things happen to you

Front 24

Effortful Processing

Back 24

Commiting information to memory requires effort. Such processing leads to durable and accessible memories.
Some things that take more effort can become automatic with practice. Effortful -----> Automatic

Front 25

Rehearsal

Back 25

Conscious repetition

Front 26

Spacing Effect

Back 26

We retain information better when we rehearse over time.

Front 27

Serial Position Effect

Back 27

When your recall is better for the first and last items on a list, but poor on the middle items.

Front 28

Chunking

Back 28

Organizing items into familiar, manageable units.

Front 29

Sensory Memory

Back 29

Remembering information for a brief time.

Front 30

Working (short term) Memory

Back 30

We cant remember all sensory memories received, we select info. that is important to us and process it into our working memory.

Front 31

Long-Term Memory

Back 31

-Unlimited Capacity
-Stress hormones and memory

Front 32

Flashbulb Memory

Back 32

Heightened emotions = strong memories

Front 33

Explicit Memory

Back 33

Refers to facts & experiences that you consciously know and declare.

Front 34

Implicit Memory

Back 34

Learning an action while the individual doesn't know what he/she knows.

Front 35

Retrieval Cues

Back 35

Points you use to access the target information when you want to retrieve it later.

Front 36

Priming

Back 36

To retrieve a specific memory from the web of associations, you must first activate one of the strands the leads to it.

Front 37

State-Dependent Memory

Back 37

Emotions or moods serve as retrieval cues.

Front 38

Retrieval Failure

Back 38

= Tip of the Tongue moments.

Front 39

Encoding Failure

Back 39

Age can effect encoding efficiency

Front 40

Storage Decay

Back 40

After encoding something well, we sometimes later forget it. (spanish class)

Front 41

Repression

Back 41

A defense against anxiety by blocking out painful thoughts.

Front 42

Memory Construction

Back 42

We may construct a false memory of what actually happened.