Introduction to Psychology CLEP

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Who is Wilhelm Wundt?: Set up the first psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany.
What did Structuralists believe?: That consciousness was made up of basic elements that were combined in different ways to produce different perceptions.
What is introspection?: Involves reporting on one's own conscious thoughts and feelings.
Who is Edward Titchener?: He set up the first psychology lab in the U.S.
What did Functionalists believe?: That consciousness, and behavior in general, helped people and animals adjust to their environment.
Focus on understanding how physiological and biochemical processes might produce psychological phenomena.: Biological Approach
Thoughts, feelings, and behaviors stem from the interaction of innate drives and society's restrictions on the expression of those drives.: Psychodynamic approach.
Who said the most important urges are the sexual and aggressive ones?: Sigmund Freud
Explain behavior primarily in terms of learned responses to predictable patterns of environmental stimuli.: Behaviorist approach.
Who studied classical conditioning?: Pavlov.
Who studied operant conditioning?: Skinner.
The "cause" is represented by what?: Independent variable.
The "effect" represents what?: Dependent variable.
What is a blind study?: If subjects do not know whether they're receiving the drug or the placebo.
Who does not know about the placebo in a double-blind study?: The subjects and the experimenters.
Involves assessing the relationship between two variables.: Correlational studies.
Means that high scores on one variable tend to be paired with high scores on the other variable.: Positive relationship.
Means that high scores on one variable tend to be paired with low scores on the other variable.: Negative relationship.
Describes the strength of a relationship.: Correlation coefficient.
Involve in-depth analysis of only one person.: Case Studies.
Studied as it occurs in real-life settings.: Naturalist observation.
Agreement among observers is a measure of what?: Inter-judge reliability.
Concerned with how communication happens and how behavior is influenced by it.: Behavioral neuroscience.
Detect heat, or light, or touch and then pass information about those stimuli on to the brain.: Sense receptors.
Pathways for communication of sense receptors.: Neurons.
Take in information from body tissues and sense organs, and transmit it to the spinal cord and brain.: Sensory Neurons
Send information in the opposite direction.: Motor Neurons.
Communicate with other neurons.: Interneurons (associative neurons)
Short, bushy fibers that take information in from outside the cell.: Dendrites
Long fibers that pass info. along to other nerve cells, to glands, or to muscles.: Axons
A fatty tissue that surrounds the axon and accelerates tranmission of info.: Myelin sheath.
Electrically charged atoms.: Ions
Maintained because the axon's membrane won't let positive ions into the cell unless the cell receives a signal from the dendrites.: Resting potential
The neuron pumps out the sodium ions and can then fire again.: Refractory Period
Junction where the end of one neuron meets the beginning of another.: Synapse
Helps control arousal and sleep.: Serotonin
Drugs that mimic a particular neurotransmitter or make more of it available by blocking its reuptake.: Agonists
Drugs that block.: Antagonists
Includes the sensory and motor neurons.: Peripheral nervous system.
System that carries info. from muscles, sense organs, and skin to the central nervous system and messages from the system to the skeletal muscles.: Somatic nervous system
Regulates the body's internal environment.: Autonomic nervous system
Prepares you for action: Symphathetic nervous system.
Deactivates the systems mobilized.: Parasympathetic nervous system.
Controls breathing and heartbeat.: Brainstem
Receives info. about touch, taste, sight, and hearing: Thalamus
Controls arousal and sleep: Reticular formation
Coordination of voluntary movement: Cerebellum
Processes memory: Hippocampus
Influences fear and anger: Amygdala
Influences hunger, thirst, and sexual behavior: Hypothalamus
Influences the release of hormones from other glands: Pituitary gland
Motor, cognitive, and sensory processes.: Cerebral cortex
Play a part in coordinating movement and in higher level thinking: Frontal lobes
Where is the Broca's area and what does it affect?: Frontal lobe, speech speed.
Where is the Wernicke's area and what does it affect?: Frontal lobe, understanding.
Sensor of touch.: Pariental Lobes
Involved in hearing: Temporal lobes
Areas involved in vision.: Occipital lobes.
Area of psychology that addresses the topic of sensation.: Psychophysics.
Minimum stimulation needed for a given person to detect a given stimulus.: Absolute threshold.
Smallest difference a person can detect.: Just noticeable difference (difference threshold)
Threshold increases in proportion to the intensity or magnitude of the stimuli.: Weber's Law
Predisposes us to attend to stimuli that matter to us and not attend to stimuli that don't.: Sensory Adaptation
Illustrates that our ideas about reality have to be chosen, organized, and interpreted, not simply detected.: Selective attention
Shows that the mind fills in the gaps in our sensations.: Gestalt psychologists
Require both eyes.: Binocular cues
One cue to distance.: Retinal disparity.
The extent to which the eyes must turn inward to view an object.: Convergence
Requires only one eye.: Monocular cues.
Fact that parallel lines appear to converge as they get farther away.: Linear perspective.
Refers to the apparent movement of stable objects as we ourselves move.: Motion parallax (relative motion)
Influence judgments of depth.: Texture gradients
Predispositions to perceive one thing and not another.: Perceptual sets
From simple sensory receptors to more complex neural networks.: Bottom-up fashion
From expectations, motives, and contextual cues to raw sensory data.: Top-down fashion.
State of being aware: Consciousness
Predictability stems from their being synchronized with the parts of the day.: Circadian rhythm
Brain waves cycle through a series of ___ stages every ___ minutes or so.: Five, 90
Electrical currents in the brain as shown graphically on an EEG.: Brain waves
The five stages of sleep.: Hypnogogic, sleep spindles, delta waves, slow-wave sleep, and stage 2 repeats
The sleeper appears calm and relaxed despite a great deal of cortical activity.: Paradoxical sleep.
Recurring difficulty in falling asleep or staying asleep.: Insomnia
Sudden uncrontrollable attacks of sleep during waking hours: Narcolepsy
Stop breathing intermittently during sleep: Sleep apnea
The images that actually appear to the dreamer.: Manifest content of a dream.
A "forbidden" sexual or aggressive wish that the dreamer would repress if awake.: Latent content.
Brain's neurons fire randomly during sleep in this theory.: Activation-sythesis theory.
Claim that dreams are a way to consolidate information.: Information-processing
Heightened state of motivation: Hypnosis
A split in consciousness: Dissociation
Produce a state of consciousness that is different from "normal" consciousness by mimicking, inhibiting, or stimulating the activity of neurotransmitters.: Psychoactive drugs.
A relatively enduring change in behavior that is the product of experience.: Learning
Which group first began studying learning and wanted to focus only on observable events: behaviorists
Expectations and the ability to represent events mentally.: Cognitive factors
Occurs when the repeated presentation of a single stimulus produces an enduring change in behavior.: Non-associative learning
Occurs when the repeated or long-lasting presentation of an intense stimulus increases the response to a weaker stimulus.: Sensitization
Involves the learning of a connection either between two stimuli or between a response and a stimulus.: Associative learning
Produces changes in responding by pairing two stimuli together.: Classical conditioning (Pavlovian conditioning)
Involves learning an association between a stimulus and a response that follows it.: Operant conditioning.
Always involves a decrease in the target behavior.: Punishment
Rules for determining when reinforcement will be given.: Reinforcement
We can learn operant behaviors indirectly.: Observational learning
Ability to learn vicariously: Models
Can be thought of as the mental activities involved in solving problems.: Cognition
Mental rules of thumbs: Heuristics
You're asking yourself how similar or "representative" one event is of a class of events.: Representativeness heuristic.
Involves judging the likelihood that an event will happen in terms of how readily you can bring an instance of it to mind.: Availability Heuristic.
Refers to people's tendency to look for info. that will support their beliefs.: Confirmation bias
The inability to see new uses for familiar objects.: Functional fixedness.
Rules for combining morphemes in meaningful ways.: Syntax.
One-word stage.: Babbling stage
Two-word stage.: Telegraphic speech
Attempted to explain language development in terms of operant conditioning principles.: B.F. Skinner
Claimed that children have a language acquisition device.: Noam Chomsky
A fleeting awareness of whatever the senses have detected.: Sensory Memory
The info. that can be kept in the mind long enough to solve problems.: Short-term memory (working memory)
Deliberate, though sometimes automatic and unconscious, methods used for getting info. into long-term memory.: Mnemonic strategies.
Rehearsal: repetition
Chunking: Grouping
About how well you solve problems.: Intelligence.
First to develop an intelligence test.: Alfred Binet.
Mental age divided by chronological age multiplied by 100.: Intelligence quotient.
He labeled general intelligence "g".: Charles Spearman
What is nature vs. nurture?: "Nature" refers to our biological, genetic heritage, whereas "nurture" refers to environmental effects on our development.
The psychological process that energizes and directs behavior.: Motivation
Often used to illustrate how these factors can impact the occurrence and expression of a motive.: Hunger
The part of the brain that seems to be most important for monitoring hunger-related signals.: Hypothalamus.
Responsible for stopping hunger.: Ventromedial Hypothalamus
Responsible for increasing hunger.: Lateral hypothalamus
The weight our own body works to maintain.: Set point
An increase or decrease in heart rate.: Physiological arousal.
Perceiving a stimulus that has relevance to one's well-being will generate arousal and a subjective emotional experience simultaneously.: Cannon-Bard theory
The perception of a stimulus causes arousal first, which then causes you to feel an emotion.: James-Lange theory
The activity of facial muscles tells us whether we're happy or not.: Facial Feedback Hypothesis
Says that the quality of an emotional experience depends on how arousal is labeled.: Stanley Schacter's Two Factor theory
Deals with systematic, predictable changes in thinking and behavior over the lifespan.: Developmental pscychology
Involve comparing people of different ages at the same point in time.: Cross-sectional studies
Means that it cannot be determined whether differences across age groups are due to changes in age itself, or to differences in the periods of time.: Confounded
Involve tracking the behavior of a single cohort over long period of time.: Longitudinal studies
In which people of different ages are followed over a long period of time.: Cross-Sequential study
Describes how children's thinking changes as they get older.: Piaget's theory
Children think only in terms of what they can sense and what they can do.: Sensorimotor stage
The understanding that objects continue to exist even when their presence can't be sensed.: Object Permanence
Don't use logical reasoning, but instead reason intuitively.: Pre-operational stage.
The understanding that some quantitative aspects of objects don't change just because the object's appearance has been transformed in some way.: Conservation
They have trouble seeing things from other people's perspectives.: Egocentric
Think logically but only about things that are "concrete": Concrete operational stage
Thinking, or the logic of science, can think abstractly.: Formal Operational
A child understands the world in one particular way and then sees something happen that can't fit into that understanding.: Disequilibrium.
Involves understanding events in terms of your current scheme.: Assimiliation
Relies heavily on the idea that tension is necessary for change.: Erikson's theory of psycho-social development
Sharing wisdom and experience with other people.: Generativity
Taking care of only their own deteriorating physcial and mental abilities.: Stagnation.
Share the common beliefs that people's behavior is motivated largely by unconscious needs.: Psychoanalytic theories
Describes people as having two fundamental needs or motives: sex and aggression.: Freud's theory of psychoanalysis
Refers to the biological part of our personality.: Id
Do what feels good and do it now.: The Pleasure Principle
The rational, realistic part of our personality involves learning, problem-solving, and reasoning.: Ego
Do what will get our needs met and without getting hurt.: The Reality Principle
The social part of our personality that allows us to get along with other people.: Superego
Do what's right, and don't do what's wrong.: The Morality Principle
From the Freudian perspective, these objects are symbolic or metaphorical reminders of things the person wants, but can't allow themselves to have.: Phobias
Periods of life defined by parts of the body that do the most to make you feel good.: Psychosexual stages
Often used as an example of this approach.: Carl Roger's self theory
How people think about themselves and their relations with the world around them.: Cognition
How people think, how people behave, and what their environment is like: Reciprocal determinism
Measuring the many, many ways in which people differ, reducing those many ways down to a more manageable subset.: Individual-difference approach
Big Five Personality traits: Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism
Used to identify traits for which scores correlate highly with each other.: Factor analysis
Stage child enters after oral and anal stages.: Phallic stage.
The branch of psychology that deals with psychological disorders.: Abnormal psychology
Unusual feelings of dread, fearfulness, or terror.: Anxiety Disorders
Feel persistent, but are unaware of its source.: Generalized anxiety disorder
Involves unpredictable, minutes-long episodes of terror that have a sudden onset.: Panic Disorder
Characterized by depression, mania, or both.: Mood Disorders
Characterized by feelings of hopelessness, sadness, and discouragement.: Major depressive disorder
Feature the fragmentation of personality.: Dissociative disorders
Unable to remember personally relevant info.: Dissociative amnesia
Travels away from home or work suddenly and unexpectedly, can't recall his or her past.: Dissociative fugue
Multiple personality disorder: Dissociative identity disorder
A disorder involving symptoms of psychosis.: Schizophrenia
Exhibit delusions of grandeur or persecution.: Paranoid Schizophrenics
Exhibit disorganized speech or behavior, and innappropriate emotional responses.: Disorganized schizophrenics
Exhibit odd motor activity.: Catatonic Schizophrenia
Senselessly repeating back words someone else has just said.: Echolalia
Exhibit symtpoms of any type of schizophrenia, but do not meet the specific criteria for having one of the other forms.: Undifferentiated schizophrenia
The individual has physical symptoms usually associated with some sort of disease or physical disorder.: Somatoform disorders.
Involve impaired motor functioning or impaired sensory functioning that can't be attributed to any neurological problems.: Conversion disorders
Characterized by patterns of behavior or thinking that are clearly and substantially inconsistent with the expectations of one's culture.: Personality disorders.
A person who is extremely suspicious and distrustful.: Paranoid personality.
Tramples on the right of others, is impulsive, and lacks a conscience.: Antisocial personality.
Has trouble maintaining relationships and has a wide fluctuations in both self-image and emotional behaviors.: Borderline personality disorder.
Needs undue admiration and praise.: Narcissistic personality
Focuses on the possibility that unconscious conflicts cause anxiety that is dealt with in a maladaptive way.: Psychoanalytic approach.
Explains abnormal behavior in terms of abnormal patterns of thinking.: Cognitive approach.
The problem behavior itself is the problem.: Learning or behavioral approach.
Problems arise when urges come up against social pressure to squelch them.: Psychoanalytic thinking
Involves having the individual relax as much as possible and say whatever comes to mind.: Free Association
Emphasis is more on what's happening now and what the client wants to change for the future.: Humanistic therapies.
Assume that something going on inside an individual is responsible for abnormal behavior.: Cognitive therapies.
Rely on using principle of classical and operant conditioning to change problem behaviors directly.: Behavioral therapies
Involves conditioning a new response that's incompatible with an old response.: Counterconditioning.
A procedure where anxiety is gradually replaced with relaxation.: Systematic desensitizaiton.
Where a person goes straight into the fear-provoking situation without intermediate steps.: Flooding
An unpleasant response becomes associated with what would normally be a pleasant activity.: Aversive Conditioning.
Rely on drugs or surgery.: Biological or medical therapies.
Has to do with how the behavior of individuals is influenced by other people.: Social psychology
Refers to how we process info. about other people.: Social cognition.
Deals with types of explanations people generate for others' behavior.: Attribution theory
Explain behavior in terms of factors inside a person.: Dispositional attributions
Explain behavior in terms of factors outside the person.: Situational attributions
Observers tend to attribute others' behavior to dispositions.: Actor-observer difference.
If you behave in a way that's inconsistent with your attributes, it will produce tension.: Cognitive dissonance theory.
About the direct and indirect pressures exerted by others to change someone's attitudes or behaviors.: Social influence.
Asked participants to judge which of three lines on a piece of paper was the same length as the fourth line.: Solomon Asch
Pressure to comply with the norm.: Normative Social Influence.
What other people do simply provides info. about how to behave.: Informational social influence.
Demonstrated that people can be incredibly susceptible to the demands of authority.: Stanley Milgram.
Aggression is always the product of frustration and frustration always leads to aggression according to this.: Frustration-aggression hypothesis.
Our goal in life is to maximize our rewards and minimize our costs according to this.: Social-exchange theory. (Minimax principle)
We're obligated to help people who need our help.: Social responsibility norm.
We're obligated to help those who have helped us.: Reciprocity norm.
Refers to the consistency of people's scores on a test.: Reliability.
Coefficients larger than ___ are generally considered adequate evidence of reliability.: +.70
How well does the test correlate with itself?: Internal consistency
Measure of reliability.: Cronbach's alpha
Whether the test looks as though it's measuring what it's supposed to.: Face validity.
Refers to how well scores on the test predict actual behavior.: Predictive validity.
Refers to whether scores on the questionnaire are related in expected ways.: Construct validity.
Most common occuring score.: Mode
Allow you to make inferences about populations based on the characteristics of your sample.: Inferential statistics.

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