Professional Documents
Culture Documents
True experimental methods require an experimental AND control group AND must have random assignment; it’s quasi-
experimental if assignment isn’t random
Social learning theory = modeling behavior and observation; AKA observational learning
Environmental Psychology Paradigm = behavior explained through environmental stressors
Specific Real Area Bias = using people from one area alone fails to explain if results are generalizable
Self Serving Bias = attributing your successes to talent and your failures to circumstance
Berkson’s Fallacy = the control group is likely different than standard if they’re also hospital patients
Systematic desensitization = method used in CBT and by behaviorists to expose people to their triggers to rid them of the
phobias
Psychoanalytic = unconscious mind issues
Humanistic = Rodgers and Maslow’s ideas, related to self fulfillment and unconditional positivity
Social cognitive = Bandura’s ideas on behavior by modeling
Socialization is the way that a society instills values and norms into members of the group
Meritocracy is social stratification totally based on merit not structural conditions
Reliability is reproducibility of results, the ability of a machine to make the same measurements repeatedly
Validity is meeting requirements of the scientific method including randomization and consistency, the accuracy of
measurement like measuring a 70 lbs man to be 70 lbs
Social facilitation is the positive effect on performance of well practiced things in front of a crowd
Social loafing is the fact that everyone puts in less effort in a group
Deindividuation is the loss of self awareness and sense of responsibility when in a crowd
Drive Reduction Theory is the idea that motivation for behavior is to reduce drive to meet unmet needs
Arousal Theory motivation for behavior is to obtain optimal arousal not too much or too little
Incentive Theory motivation for behavior is to receive an award
The anterior pituitary secretes adrenocorticotropic hormone to induce glucocorticoid release (cortisol)
Thermoregulation is done by the hypothalamus and the brainstem
Long term potentiation is the strengthening of synapses which causes more signal transmission
Within subject design takes repeated measurements with the same subject to reduce variability and increase power;
Between subject design compares the measurements of participants
Non Parametric Statistical Analyses are used when working with nominal/categorical or ranked data
Unbalanced design uses unequal sized treatment groups
Neuronal migration is the movement of new neurons from ventricular zones during embryo development
Informational Social Influence causes a willingness to accept others opinions and uncertainty in our own perceptions
Merton’s Strain Theory a person is deviant when there’s unequal ability achieve social goals
Retreatism people reject conventional paths and cultural goals and drops out of society
Ritualism rejecting cultural goals but acception conventional behaviors
Folkways are casual informal societal norms
Mores are common formal norms related to morality
Gambler’s Fallacy is the belief that the probability of independent events change depending of the sequence of events
preceding them
Predictor Variable this is the correlation study equivalent of an independent variable
Ciliary muscles control the bend of the lens
Masking hypothesis latent variables can be masked when you are measuring something if what you’re testing is too general
Other Race Effect inability to distinguish the faces of people of other races
Attribution is inference about the causes of an event or someone’s behavior
Correspondence Bias is the tendency to make dispositional attributions to others when situational attributions are
appropriate
Eysenck’s concept of personality is PEN, Psycoticism, extraversion, neuroticism
Fatigue Effects: the decrease in performance of participants after repeated measures
Practice Effects: increase in performance after repeated measures
Gibson’s Visual Cliff development of baby’s depth perception
Demand Characteristics if a person figures out the point of the experiment they may behave how they think the researcher
wants them to behave to support the hypothesis
Framing the way we think about a situation affects our decisions pertaining to it
Insight a sudden realization of how to solve a problem
Na+ starts and action potential
Diagnostic Expansion extending medical diagnoses to a larger group
Role strain difficulty fulfilling demands of a particular role
Role Conflict difficulty fulfilling demands of multiple roles simultaneously
Serial Processing is processing information one at a time in order
Parallel Processing processing multiple things at the same time like auditory and visual stimuli
Difference Threshold is the same as Just Noticeable Difference
Hidden Curriculum the non class information that is delivered to students about social norms and cultural attitudes
Manifest Function intended function Latent Function the byproducts of social structures
Functionalism can also be called structural functionalism
Language Acquisition Theories
o Learning perspective is the behaviorist approach by operant conditioning
o Nativist perspective is chomsky’s idea that there’s an innate mechanism that allows kids to learn language easily
biologically
o Interactionist perspective is that both biological and social factors contribute to acquisition
Instinctive Drift is the phenomenon that learned behavior reverts to innate behavior when the reward is removed
Flashbulb memory gets worse with age
Cognitive dissonance theory says that we change the way that we think about things to align with our actions due to
discomfort caused by incongruity between our values and our actions
An Aggregate is a collection of people that live near each other but don’t identify as a group
Primary group closely emotionally attached people Secondary members linked by a common goal
Tetrads are the most unstable groups they become two dyads in most cases
Generational Status is the status referring to whether a person was born in the country they reside and how many
generations their family has lived their if they were, first generation means parents are foreign
Differential Association Theory interactions with people who do deviant things causes deviance in that person
Conflict theory says that deviance is a protest of the lower classes against structures that benefit the priviledged
Expectancy Violation Theory when a person’s expectations for an interaction are violated it causes an arousal that the
person interprets as either positive or negative depending on their past relations with the person and affects the way that they
interact with that person. A violation of expectation could be making eye-contact with the person next to you on an elevator
Ego Depletion is when you’re finite mental resources have been exhausted and your self control is low
Eidetic Memory is the rare ability to store very detailed visual memories
Habituation is when you get used to a repeat stimulus
Episodic Buffer is the portion of the working memory that provides the sequencing for auditory and visual working memory
for the central executive
Feminization of Poverty a fact that the proportion of the worlds poverty is increasingly held by women in part due to an
increase in the number of single parent female led households and restriction on jobs that women can hold
Generalized Other is the idea of society as a whole and is useful for when people are thinking about how society might view
them
Hegemony is when elites legitimate their dominance and secure the support of those beneath them
Emic Approach is when you take the interpretations individuals have of the situation as a matter of fact in psychological
research
Anhedonia the inability to feel pleasure
Mysophobia is the fear of germs or contamination
If somebody is doing something that continues or propagates a cultural practice then they are actively involves in the
promotion or reproduction of it
Obedience requires an explicit demand or expectation it can’t be unspoken
If observation of participants if part of data collection then the researcher must be involved in the phenomenon being studied
Symbolic Racism is not supporting overt racism, but not believing in structural or institutional racism
Prejudice Theory is the idea that racism comes from competition with outgroups
Social Control Theory is a functionalist theory that socialization and social learning/modeling of behaviors causes people
not to want to break the rules because that would be antisocial and that’s how people gain the self control not to be deviant
Second Shift the unequal division of labor within the household toward women, this is a part of conflict and feminist theory
Increasing average income is the bigest thing you can do to improve health outcomes in less developed countries
Measurement Bias when the means of quantifying a phenomenon targets the qualities of a certain group you are no longer
measuring what you set out to measure and making it seem like that thing is more common in the group that is targeted by
this process
Depressive Realism the idea that people who are depressed are so because they think more realistically
fMRI measures cerebral blood flow to isolate neuron activity in specific brain regions
Stereotype threat doesn’t apply to surverys it has to be a performance or behavior related thing
PET Scan measures regional cerebral bloodflow
Galvanic skin response is the skin conductivity test used to measure stress or sympathetic arousal
Thalamus is the sensory relay center of the brain
Precentral gyrus of the frontal lobe is involved in the motor cortex
PostCentral gyrus of the parietal lobe is involved with the somatosensory cortex
Subject Variable is the characteristics of individuals that make participants unique
The Path of Visual cues from eyes to brain
o Receptor → Optic Nerve → Lateral Geniculate Nucleus → Striate Cortex
Medial Geniculate Nucleus is a part of the auditory pathway whereas the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus is a part of the visual
pathway
Positive Illusions Bias is having an inflated assessment of your own abilities
Anchoring Bias initial info causes you to make judgements about later info, this is what causes a lot of bias in studies,
because data collected in preliminary experiments will flavor the way that you think about and construct the rest of the
project
The 2 dimensions of emotion are arousal, the deactivated/activatedness of the emotion and valence, the range of
unpleasant/pleasantness of the emotion; an emotional state high in arousal and valence would be a very positive very
activated emotion like extreme excitement about something happy
Social Obedience is obeying orders against your personal views or morals
Miscegenation is mixing racial or ethnic groups by intimate relations
Glutamate activates the postsynaptic receptors involved with long term potentiation
Fragile X and Turner’s Syndrome are developmental disorders
Huntington’s Disease is a heritable brain disorder
The inner hair cells of the cochlea transduce auditory signals
Hair cells in the semicircular canals transduce vestibular info about balance and orientation
The outer hair cells of the cochlea amplify auditory signal mechanically
Assimilation theory is the idea that immigrants take on the cultural traits of their new country
Social Desirability Bias is that people have a tendency to report things that make them look better
Overgeneralization is when a researcher sees a pattern as much broader than it actually extends, so the pattern is there for
the study that they’ve done, but their study is less generalizable than they believe
Maturation of subjects can cause errors due to adolescents changing over time
Selection Bias is when the way that you chose people for the experimental and control group causes error
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis is Lou Gehrig’s Disease which causes the nerves controlling voluntary muscle control to
degenerate
Multiple Sclerosis is an autoimmune disorder in which the myelin sheaths of the CNS neurons are eaten up
1 in 4 people have a diagnosable mental disorder if you include drug abuse
Schizophrenics have excess dopamine
Conversion Disorder is when psychological symptoms convert to unexplained somatic ones
Approach Avoidance Test is an estimate of the strength of aversion by starving subjects and offering them food connected
with an aversive stimulus
Working Memory is controlled by the frontal lobe
Medical institutions aren’t designed to treat those who don’t consider themselves sick
Urbanization is bad for health
Archival Research is coming through old data to find patterns
Elaborative Rehearsal is repeating something to rote memorize it
Maintenance Rehearsal is repeating something to keep it memorized
Tactful Blindness is an idea of Goffman that says that people ignore other’s blunders and farts especially in cases that
would threaten their presented self
Face is the mask that we maintain in order to present ourselves in the way we want to be perceived
Contact Hypothesis is Gordon Allport’s idea that the more we come in contact with a group the less prejudice we feel
toward them
Stigma Extension is when we assume limitations of a person beyond their disability, like if someone is in a wheelchair then
their boss might think that they are incapable of mental tasks as well
Epistemic Authority is the idea that for certain situations only certain people who have experience with something can claim
knowledge about what the experience is like; think racism or sexism, you don’t know what it’s like until you’re in the
position
Liminal means in a state of transition
Eclectic means that something is pulled from a wide variety of fields
Gestalt principle of Figure Ground is that the way that we view an image depends on what we consider to be the
background and the foreground
Culture of Poverty is Oscar Lewis’ idea that sometimes social systems trap people in poverty, because they don’t get the
training or education necessary to escape poverty, poverty and the behaviors that go along with it are the only thing they
know
Cultural Capital are the resources a community provides that allow social mobility or cultural acceptance; think about
learning a new language or travelling, a good example of this would be the rich freeman in that greek story that doesn’t
understand the culture of the rich properly so he makes a lot of mistakes and they won’t accept him because of it
Karen Horney is the one who critiqued Penis Envy
The Stress Response has 3 steps:
o Alarm Reaction → Resistance → Exhaustion
Secularization Thesis is the idea that religion becomes less important as nations gain more income
Antidepressants are serotonin/epinephrine agonists or reuptake inhibitors
Psychomotor stimulants are dopamine agonists
Anxiolytics are norepinephrine antagonists or GABA agonists
Antipsychotics/Neuroleptics are dopamine antagonists
The Glass Escalator is specific to men getting quick promotion is female-dominated fields, it is when men enter a pink
collar job and quickly move up the ranks relative to their female peers
You must have the symptoms for 2 weeks before you can be diagnosed with major depressive disorder
Continuity Theory says that old people maintain the activities and traits of earlier in life when old
Disengagement Theory says that old people withdraw from society and past relationships as they age
MARXISM IS NOT A SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IF IT SEEMS LIKE MARXISM ITS CONTROL THEORY
Cerebellum is involved in coordinated motor tasks and muscle memory
The Cochlea itself is not a part of the nervous system but the cochlear nerve is
If a person is comparing themselves or modifying themselves to fit into a certain group then that group is a reference group
not a peer group
Peer Group is basically anyone that is your age
Reference Group is a group of people that you compare yourself to or aspire to be like; it seems like this is the answer more
often than not when it’s one of the options
Misinformation Effect the effect that information received after an event will cause a memory to be reformed inaccurately
Core nations provide goods to every level of nation and the other two provide material resources to the core nations
Benzodiazepines are commonly prescribed depressants; short acting ones are for insomnia and long acting ones are for
anxiety
The Conceptual Act Model of Emotion says that there are 2 fundamental components to emotion; core affect which is like
energetic, or feeling good/bad, which can exist independent of the specific emotion and a cognitive component which is
some interpretation of the current situation that causes the emotion; shame would be feeling bad about oneself (core
affect:feels bad; about oneself:cognitive component)
o Event → Label Core Affect → Emotion + Physiological Response
Glutamate: The most common excitatory neurotransmitter, required for consciousness, provided by the Reticular
activating system which itself is super responsible for consciousness
GABA: Used in the brain, it is the most common inhibitory Neurotransmitter
Glycine: Used in the spinal cord, it is the most common inhibitory neurotransmitter outside of the brain
Acetylcholine: Basilis and septal nuclei in the frontal lobe secrete this to the lower motor neurons, also this is the
neurotransmitter used to trigger muscle contractions
Histamine: hypothalamus secretes this on the cerebral cortex
Norepinephrine: This is released from the locus coeruleus in the Pons and is released on the cerebral cortex
Serotonin: released all over the brainstem by raphe nuclei to the cerebral cortex and other parts of the nervous system; most
important to note it comes from the brainstem
Dopamine: from the Ventral tegmental area and the substantia nigra; dopamine from the hypothalamus controls the pituitary
gland by the tuberoifundibular pathway to regulate prolactin secretion by inhibiting its release from the anterior pituitary;
o Issues with dopamine secretion in the substantia nigra affect motor planning and cause parkinsons
o Dopamine issues in teh ventral tegmental area affect the prefrontal cortex and cause schizophrenia by issues with all
parts of the mesolimbic pathway
Functionalism is a macro perspective by Durkheim and Parsons
Conflict theory is a macro perspective of Marx and Weber
Social Constructionism is a macro or micro perspective
Symbolic interactionism is a micro perspective by Cooley and Mead
Rational Choice and Exchange Theory is a micro perspective
Feminism is a macro or micro approach
Mead’s “Me” is the person that others expect you to be like the well behaved part of you and the “I” is the one that does what
is best for them
James Lange theory: emotions are interpretations of physiological arousal
Cannon-Bard Theory: you feel the arousal and emotion at the same time
Schachter-Singer (Two-Factor) Theory: The body is aroused you interpret the situation and decide what emotion that is; so if
you had the same arousal but saw a cat vs an alligator you would be excited vs afraid
Lazarus (Cognitive Appraisal) Theory: emotional experience depends on whether we label the situation as good or bad. In
this theory the appraisal precedes the cognitive labeling of the emotion, and simultaneously stimulates the physiological
arousal and emotional experience
MC,M,R,P goes from superficial to deep describing the level of mechanoreceptors in the skin, MC Meissinheiner’s
corpuscles M merkel disk R ruffini endings P pacinian corpuscle or lamellar corpuscle
Meissinheiner’s corpuscles are in the papillary dermis, needs changing stimuli to fire, senses light touch or stretch and is
important for grip control
o A hair follicle receptor is like a meissinheiner’s corpuscle but for hairy skin instead of hairless skin
Merkel Disks are in the papillary dermis or stratum basale, needs sustained stimuli to fire, and senses light touch, pressure,
and fine details
Ruffini endings are in the reticular dermis, needs sustained stimuli to fire, senses deep stretch and has a large receptive field
Pacinian Corpuscle/Lamellar Corpuscle is in the hypodermis, need constantly changing stimuli to fire, senses deep vibration
and deep pushes or pokes
Hemisphere differences
o Left
Language
Analysis
Logic
Math
o Right
Emotional tone of language
Creativity
Spatial processing
Big picture
Spreading of activation theory is the one where basically there's a sematic hierarchy or network and things that you remember
pull up other memories as well
actor-observor bias applies even when the person is close to you
The human stress response isn't specific to a certain type of stressor
If something increases compliance then it is likely to increase obedience too
If two different measures of the same trait/behavior/idea have converging values, then the validity of the tests is increased
If two measurements by the same method measuring the same thing produce the same value then the reliability of the
measure is increased
Social activities are not the same as social ties and cannot explain social benefits
Neighborhood segregation creates physical boundaries between people causing closed networks to develop their own cultures
Cerebellum controls coordinated motor tasks and habit forming
The Cochlea is not a part of the nervous system, but the cochlear nerve is
Race and gender discrimination manifest in similar ways
Dysthmia is persistent depressive disorder and you have to have it for 2 years to be diagnosed
Dopamine is a catecholamine
House money effect is that when people have made money they’re more willing to assume risk because they don’t view the
new money as theirs yet
The baby boomers were caused by increased fertility rate after world war 2
If a person is missing memories from events that they find stressful but everything else is fine then its probably due to a
dissociative disorder and is not some kind of amnesia
If the us health disadvantage existed for all social classes that would contradict the socioeconomic gradient in health, because
the premise is based on the idea that each step up in class is associated with a rise in health, so if everyone has a disadvantage
that would go against it
Implicit attitudes tests are based on the idea that if your memory schemas hold an implicit attitude that it will take longer for
you to answer, most importantly remember that this is caused by a schema and information that goes against the schema or
along with it. Memory schemas are organized clusters of knowledge
The way that people think about things is the cognitive component of their attitude, their justifications for their actions and
emotions basically. So if someone is questioned about what they think about fat people and how they get the way they are
then they are showing the cognitive component of their attitudes about fat people
Social desirability is an issue that sometimes makes online responses better than in person interviews or telephone surveys
because people will want to seem better than they are if they’re interacting with someone
Hallucinogens are the least addictive type of drugs
Conflict theorists are obsessed with class, so stratification is really important to them when determining the reason for things,
usually disparities
Response bias is also called survey bias and its when people don’t answer surveys or stuff like that honestly
Hindsight bias is when you think that you had a suspicion about something all along once you know that something was a
certain way even though you didn’t like someone thinking that they thought their neighbor was weird after they find out he
was a serial killer but really they thought he was a normal dude
Music perception, visuospatial skills and emotion processing are mainly done on the right side of the brain
Language including vocabulary skills is in the left side of the brain
A person with high emotional intelligence is able to delay gratification for long term rewards, because they are self aware and
can perceive express, understand and manage their emotions enough to know what is best to do
CBT is the systematic modification and assessment of individual behavior
Dopamine does have euphoric effects so if there was a dopamine agonist it would increase the intensity of euphoria,
dopamine is more related to euphoria than hallucinations
Group norms of critical evaluation and dissent are good for preventing group think
If someone was studying how something affects escape learning they would see how long it took for a participant to perform
a response that would terminate an undesirable stimulus not avoid it
Acquisition is the beginning phase of an classical conditioning experiment, its when you are making the association between
two things/ I think this is the analog of shaping in operant conditioning
Something becomes medicalized when there is an official medical definition of it and a medical treatment option for it, so
smoking would be medicalized as an addictive behavior that can be treated with pharmaceuticals
The Thomas Theorem is that the way that if a person defines a situation as real then they are real in their consequences,
basically the way that people interpret things determines the actions that they take not the way that things actually are. Ex: If
a drunk guy at a bar thinks that people are talking shit about them when they’re really just laughing about a work story, it
doesn’t matter that they weren’t actually talking about him he’s still gonna deck them.
Hindbrain is Reticular formation, medulla oblongata, cerebellum and pons
o Reticular Formation regulates mood appetite sex and dreams with seratonin
o Medulla Oblongata regulates heart and lungs and monitors oxygen
o Cerebellum: balance, muscle activity, habits
o Pons relays between medulla and thalamus
Septal nuclei: pleasure seeking
Hippocampus doesn’t deal in implicit memory
Fornix is the relay system for the limbic system
There are only four parts of the cerebral cortex: frontal, occipital, parietal, temporal
Marginal poverty is when an individual can’t find or keep a job
Structural poverty is poverty that is caused by society structures rather than individual decisions/traits/etc.
Optic disk is a raised disk on the retina at the point where it connects to the optic nerve which has no receptors so it is a
blindspot
Microglia are like macrophages for the central nervous system
Astrocytes nourish brain in cns storing glucose and stuff like that
Oligodendrocytes are glial cells like microglia or astrocytes or schwann cells, but they are used for myelination in the central
nervous system, so schwann cells for PNS; Oligodendrocytes for CNS
Social reproduction is the perpetuation of inequalities through social institutions, i.e the poor stay poor and the rich get richer
Anomie is when social norms break down leading to a disconnect between individual and community
The I is the selfish one, the me is the good boi
Social capital is the social network benefits that you have; like getting into the doctor quickly cause you know the guy even
though everyone else has to wait forever
Proactive interference requires information previously stored in long term memory preventing new information
Retroactive interference is when new information blocks old
James lange theory of emotion is that arousal is followed by emotion it doesn’t require interpretation
8-9 year olds are in the concrete operational stage, 5-6 is preoperational
If a solid portion ~10% of individuals that could be in a study are taken out of an analysis due to any reason then that could
be a methodological limitation of the study
Psychophysical discrimination testing is when you show how perceptual illusions impact our judgements of the nature of
stimuli
Operational span testing is the test of the general capacity of working memory with something like having to solve a math
problem and then seeing a word in that order a bunch of times and in the end you have to say what words followed the
numbers that you’re shown again
Feature detectors are groups or individual neurons that detect specific features of something like the color or the shape
Context effects are how the environment that you find something in affects the way that you see it or understand it
N1 hallucination, hypnic jerks, theta waves; N2 sleep spindle k complexes, theta waves; N3/4 delta waves, slow wave sleep,
this is when bed wetting happens if it does most of the time
Neuroleptics exacerbate negative symptoms
Shadowing is when you have to repeat information from an ear you’re paying attention to or not paying attention to
Seeing a word with a missing letter and being able to identify it based on the sentence that it comes in is not a gestalt thing
In operant conditioning studies the motivational state of the subject is operationally defined by depriving the subject of some
desirable stimulus item for a period of time
The thing that causes the most loss in validity in survey questions is decay of episodic memory if they need to recount
memories of something that happened
The theory that uses community values to explain behavior is incentive theory, because its about external drivers
Researchers focused on an evolutionary perspective of human motivation in terms of eating behavior then they would want to
see hunger ratings while looking at pictures of food to see about how high calorie foods make you want to eat
Place theory is that based on where a sound stops vibrating on the basilar membrane determines the pitch of the noise
Negative priming requires implicit memory
Alzheimer’s is bad for verbal fluency and negative priming
Isolation from people being driven away would be a dependent stressor, because it is something caused by the person that has
negative impacts on the person
If you want to know whether or not a behavior is modeled or already had you would need a detailed biography of the people
that you are testing
The me is the socialized good boi, and the I is the bad boy who does what he wants
Vertical mobility may be up or down
Formal operational starts at 11/12, concrete operational starts ~8, preoperational starts ~2