|
 Psychology | The science of behavior and mental processes |
| Positive Psychology | A field of research that focuses on people's positive experiences and characteristics, such as happiness, optimism, and resilience. |
| Biological Psychologists | Psychologists who analyze the biological factors influencing behavior and mental processes. |
| Developmental Psychologists | Psychologists who seek to understand, describe, and explore how behavior and mental processes change over a lifetime. |
| Cognitive Psychologists | Psychologists who study the mental processes underlying judgment, decision making, problem solving, imagining, and other aspects of human thought or cognition. Also called experimental psychologists. |
| Clinical And Counseling Psychologists | Psychologists who seek to assess, understand, and change abnormal behavior. |
| Educational Psychologists | Psychologists who study methods by which instructors teach and students learn and who apply their results to improving those methods |
| School Psychologists | Psychologists who test IQ's, diagnose students' academic problems, and set up programs to improve students' achievement |
| Forensic Psychologists | Psychologists who assist in jury selection, evaluate defendants mental competence to stand trial, and deal with other issues involving psychology and the law. |
| Psychodynamic Approach | A view developed by Freud that emphasizes the interplay of unconscious mental processes in determining human thought, feelings, and behavior. |
| Behavioral Approach | An approach to psychology emphasizing that human behavior is determined mainly by what a person has learned, especially from rewards and punishments. |
| Critical Thinking | The process of assessing claims and making judgments on the basis of well-supported evidence. |
| Hypothesis | In scientific research, a prediction stated as a specific, testable proposition about a phenomenon. |
| Variable | A factor or characteristic that is manipulated or measured in research |
| Theory | An integrated set of propositions that can be used to account for, predict, and even suggest ways of controlling certain phenomena |
| Naturalistic Observation | The process of watching without interfering as a phenomenon occurs in the natural environment. |
| Case Study | A research method involving the intensive examination of some phenomenon in a particular individual, group, or situation. |
| Survey | A research method that involves giving people questionnaires or special interviews designed to obtain descriptions of their attitudes, beliefs, opinions, and intentions. |
| Control Group | In an experiment, the group that receives no treatment or provides some other baseline against which to compare the performance or response of the experimental group. |
| Independent Variable | The variable manipulated by the researcher in an experiment. |
| Dependent Variable | In an experiment, the factor affected by the independent variable. |
| Placebo | A physical or psychological treatment that contains no active ingredient but produces an effect because the person receiving it believes it will. |
| Experimenter Bias | A confounding variable that occurs when an experimenter unintentionally encourages participants to respond in a way that supports the hypothesis. |
| Double-Blind Design | A research design in which neither the experimenter nor the participants know who is in the experimental group and who is in the control group. |
| Sampling | The process of selecting participants who are members of the population that the researcher wishes to study. |
| Correlation Coefficient | A statistic, r, that summarizes the strength and direction of a relationship between two variables. |
| Statistically Significant | Referring to a correlation, or a difference between two groups, that is larger than would be expected by chance. |
| Nervous System | A complex combination of cells whose primary function is to allow an organism to gain information about what is going on inside and outside the body and to respond appropriately. |
| Neuron | Fundamental unit of the nervous system; nerve cell. |
| Glial Cells | Cells in the nervous system that hold neurons together and help them communicate with one another. |
| Axon | A fiber that carries signals from the body of a neuron out to where communication occurs with other neurons. |
| Dendrite | A neuron fiber that receives signals from the axons of other neurons and carries those signals to the cell body. |
| Synapse | The tiny gap between neurons across which they communicate |
| Myelin | A fatty substance that wraps around some axons and increases the speed of action potentials. |
| Neurotransmitters | Chemicals that assist in the transfer of signals from one neuron to another. |
| Central Nervous System | The parts of the nervous system encased in bone, including the brain and the spinal cord. |
| Autonomic Nervous System | A subsystem of the peripheral nervous system that carries messages between the central nervous system and the heart, lungs, and other organs and glands. |
| Cerebellum | The part of the hindbrain whose main functions include controlling finely coordinated movements and storing memories about movement, but which may also be involved in impulse control, emotion, and language. |
| Thalamus | A forebrain structure that relays signals from most sense organs to higher levels in the brain and plays an important role in processing and making sense out of this information. |
| Hippocampus | A structure in the forebrain associated with the formation of new memories. |
| Cerebral Cortex | The outer surface of the brain |
| Corpus Callosum | A massive bundle of fibers that connects the right and left cerebral hemispheres and allows them to communicate with each other. |
| Dopamine | A neurotransmitter used in the parts of the brain involved in regulating movement and experiencing pleasure. |
| Serotonin | A neurotransmitter used by cells in parts of the brain involved in the regulation of sleep, mood, and eating. |
| Sensations | Messages from the senses that make up the raw information that affects many kinds of behavior and mental processes. |
| Amplitude | The difference between the peak and the baseline of a waveform. |
| Wavelength | The distance from one peak to the next in a waveform |
| Frequency | The number of complete waveforms, or cycles, that pass by a given point in space every second. |
| Cornea | The curved, transparent, protective layer through which light rays enter the eye. |
| Pupil | An opening in the eye, just behind the cornea, through which light passes. |
| Iris | The colorful part of the eye, which constricts or relaxes to adjust the amount of light entering the eye. |
| Retina | The surface at the back of the eye onto which the lens focuses light rays. |
| Rods | Highly light-sensitive, but color-insensitive, photoreceptors in the retina that allow vision even in dim light. |
| Cones | Photoreceptors in the retina that help us to distinguish colors. |
| Blind Spot | The light-insensitive point at which axons from all of the ganglion cells converge and exit the eyeball |
| Optic Chiasm | Part of the bottom surface of the brain where half of each optic nerves fibers cross over to the opposite side of the brain. |
| Trichromatic Theory | A theory of color vision identifying three types of visual elements, each of which is most sensitive to different wavelengths of light. |
| Opponent-Process Theory | A theory of color vision stating that color-sensitive visual elements are grouped into red-green, blue-yellow, and black-white elements |
| Perception | The process through which people take raw sensations from the environment and interpret them, using knowledge, experience, and understanding of the world, so that the sensations become meaningful experiences. |
| Psychophysics | An area of research focusing on the relationship between the physical characteristics of environmental stimuli and the psychological experiences those stimuli produce. |
| Signal-Detection Theory | A mathematical model of what determines a person's report that a near-threshold stimulus has or has not occurred. |
| Just-Noticeable Difference | The smallest detectable difference in stimulus energy |
| Relative Size | A depth cue whereby larger objects are perceived as closer than smaller ones. |
| Texture Gradient | A graduated change in the texture, or grain, of the visual field, whereby objects with finer, less detailed textures are perceived as more distant. |
| Top-Down Processing | Aspects of recognition that are guided by higher-level cognitive processes and psychological factors such as expectations. |
| Parallel Distributed Processing | An approach to understanding object recognition in which various elements of the object are thought to be simultaneously analyzed by a number of widely distributed, but connected, neural units in the brain. |
| Classical Conditioning | A procedure in which a neutral stimulus is repeatedly paired with a stimulus that elicits a reflex or other response until the neutral stimulus alone comes to elicit a similar response. |
| Unconditioned Stimulus | A stimulus that elicits a response without conditioning |
| Unconditioned Response | The automatic or unlearned reaction to a stimulus |
| Conditioned Stimulus | The originally neutral stimulus that, through pairing with the unconditioned stimulus, comes to elicit a conditioned response. |
| Conditioned Response | The response that the conditioned stimulus elicits |
| Extinction | The gradual disappearance of operant behavior due to elimination of rewards for that behavior. |
| Spontaneous Recovery | The reappearance of the conditioned response after extinction and without further pairings of the conditioned and unconditioned stimuli |
| Stimulus Generalization | A phenomenon in which a conditioned response is elicited by stimuli that are similar but not identical to the conditioned stimulus. |
| Operant Conditioning | A process through which an organism learns to respond to the environment in a way that produces positive consequences and avoids negative ones |
| Positive Reinforcers | Stimuli that strengthen a response if they follow that response. |
| Negative Reinforcers | The removal of unpleasant stimuli, such as pain. |
| Primary Reinforcers | Reinforcers that meet an organism's basic needs, such as food and water. |
| Latent Learning | Learning that is not demonstrated at the time it occurs |
| Observational Learning | Learning how to perform new behaviors by watching others |
| Encoding | The process of acquiring information and entering it into memory. |
| Storage | The process of maintaining information in memory over time |
| Retrieval | The process of recalling information stored in memory |
| Episodic Memory | Memory of an event that happened while one was present. |
| Semantic Memory | A type of memory containing generalized knowledge of the world. |
| Explicit Memory | The process in which people intentionally try to remember something |
| Implicit Memory | The unintentional influence of prior experiences |
| Maintenance Rehearsal | Repeating information over and over to keep it active in short-term memory. |
| Elaborative Rehearsal | A memorization method that involves thinking about how new information relates to information already stored in long-term memory. |
| Parallel Distributed Processing (Pdp) Models | Memory models in which new experiences change one's overall knowledge base. |
| Selective Attention | The focusing of mental resources on only part of the stimulus field |
| Short-Term Memory | The maintenance component of working memory, which holds unrehearsed information for a limited time. |
| Chunks | Stimuli that are perceived as one unit or as a meaningful grouping of information. |
| Long-Term Memory | ) A relatively long-lasting stage of memory whose capacity to store new information is believed to be unlimited. |
| Primacy Effect | A characteristic of memory in which recall of the first two or three items in a list is particularly good. |
| Recency Effect | A characteristic of memory in which recall is particularly good for the last few items in a list. |
| Context-Dependent Memory | Memory that can be helped or hindered by similarities or differences between the context in which it is learned and the context in which it is recalled. |
| State-Dependent Memory | Memory that is aided or impeded by a person's internal state. |
| Anterograde Amnesia | A loss of memory for any event that occurs after a brain injury |
| Retrograde Amnesia | A loss of memory for events prior to a brain injury. |
| Mnemonics | Strategies for placing information in an organized context in order to remember it. |
| Consciousness | Awareness of external stimuli and one's own mental activity. |
| Nonconscious Level | A level of mental activity that is inaccessible to conscious awareness. |
| Preconscious Level | A level of mental activity that is not currently conscious but of which we can easily become conscious. |
| Unconscious Level | A level of mental activity that influences consciousness but is not conscious. |
| Altered State Of Consciousness | A condition in which changes in mental processes are extensive enough that a person or others notice significant differences in psychological and behavioral functioning. |
| d Eye Movement (Rem) Sleep | A stage of sleep in which brain activity and other functions resemble the waking state but that is accompanied by rapid eye movements and virtual muscle paralysis. |
| Insomnia | A sleep disorder in which a person feels tired during the day because of trouble falling asleep or staying asleep at night. |
| Narcolepsy | A daytime sleep disorder in which a person switches abruptly from an active, often emotional waking state into several minutes of REM sleep |
| Sleep Apnea | A sleep disorder in which people briefly but repeatedly stop breathing during the night. |
| Night Terror | Horrific dream that causes rapid awakening from stage 3 or 4 sleep and intense fear for up to thirty minutes. |
| Nightmare | Frightening dream that takes place during REM sleep. |
| Circadian Rhythm | A cycle, such as waking and sleeping, that repeats about once a day. |
| Lucid Dreaming | Awareness that a dream is a dream while it is happening. |
| Psychoactive Drug | Substance that acts on the brain to create some psychological effect. |
| Psychopharmacology | The study of psychoactive drugs and their effects |
| Depressant | Psychoactive drug that inhibits the functioning of the central nervous system. |
| Stimulant | Psychoactive drug that has the ability to increase behavioral and mental activity. |
| Opiate | Psychoactive drug, such as opium, morphine, or heroin, that produces sleep-inducing and pain-relieving effects |
| Hallucinogen | Psychoactive drug that alters consciousness by producing a temporary loss of contact with reality and changes in emotion, perception, and thought |