Psychology Chapter 1
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Created by:
karlianneseri on September 1, 2011
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30 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 Psychology | The scientific study of mind and behavior. |
| Mind | Our private inner experience of perceptions, thoughts, memories, and feelings. |
| Behavior | Observable actions of human beings and nonhuman animals. |
| Nativism | The philosophical view that certain kinds of knowledge are innate or inborn. |
| Philosophical Empiricism | The philosophical view that all knowledge is acquired through experience. |
| Phrenology | A now defunct theory that specific mental abilities and characteristics, ranging from memory to the capacity for happiness, are localized in specific regions of the brain. |
| Physiology | The study of biological processes, especially in the human body. |
| Stimulus | Sensory input from the environment. |
| Reaction Time | The amount of time taken to respond to a specific stimulus. |
| Consciousness | A person's subjective experience of the world and the mind. |
| Structuralism | The analysis of the basic elements that constitute the mind. |
| Introspection | The subjective observation of one's own experience. |
| Functionalism | The study of the purpose mental processes serve in enabling people to adapt to their environment. |
| Natural Selection | Charles Darwin's theory that the features of an organism that help it survive and reproduce are more likely than other features to be passed on to subsequent generations. |
| Hysteria | A temporary loss of cognitive or motor functions, usually as a result of emotionally upsetting experience. |
| Unconscious | The part of the mind that operates outside o the conscious awareness but influences conscious thoughts, feelings, and actions. |
| Psychoanalytic Theory | Sigmund Freud's approach to understanding human behavior that emphasizes the importance of unconscious mental processes in shaping feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. |
| Psychoanalysis | A therapeutic approach that focuses on bringing unconscious material into conscious awareness to better understand psychological disorders. |
| Humanistic Psychology | An approach to understanding human nature that emphasizes the positive potential of human beings. |
| Behaviorism | An approach that advocates that psychologists restrict themselves to the scientific study of objectively observable behavior. |
| Response | An action of physiological change elicited by a stimulus. |
| Reinforcement | The consequences of a behavior that determine whether it will be more likely that the behavior will occur again. |
| Illusions | Errors of perception, memory, or judgment in which subjective experience differs from objective reality. |
| Gestalt Psychology | A psychological approach that emphasizes that we often perceive the whole rather than the sum of the parts. |
| Cognitive Psychology | The scientific study of mental processes, including perception, thought, memory, and reasoning. |
| Behavioral Neuroscience | An approach to psychology that links psychological processes to activities in the nervous system and other bodily processes. |
| Cognitive Neuroscience | A field that attempts to understand the links between cognitive processes and brain activity. |
| Evolutionary Psychology | A psychological approach that explains mind and behavior in terms of the adaptive value of abilities that are preserved over time by natural selection. |
| Social Psychology | A subfield of psychology that studies the causes and consequences of interpersonal behavior. |
| Cultural Psychology | The study of how cultures reflect and shape the psychological processes of their members. |
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