Chapter 01- What is Psych
Terms
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- Pyschology
- The discipline concerned with behavior and mental processes and how they are affected by an organism's physical state, mental state, and external environment.
- Empirical
- Relying on or derived from observation, experimentation, or measurement.
- Wilhelm Wundt
- Was trained in medicine and philosophy, promoted a method called trained introspection, in which volunteers were taught to carefully observe, analyze, and describe their own sensations, mental images, and emotional reactions.
- Trained Introspection
- breaking behaviour down to its most basic elements by observing, analyzing, and describing ones on sensations, mental images, and emotional reactions.
- Functionalism
- Emphasizing the function of behavior, instead of its analysis and description.
- William James
- Functionalism leader who asked how various actions help a person or animal adapt to the environment.
- Sigmund Freud
- Created a practice which became known as psychoanalysis.
- Psychoanalysis
- A theory of personality and a method of psychotherapy, originally formulated by Sigmund Freud, that emphasizes unconcious motives and conflicts.
- Biological Perspective
- A psychological approach that emphasizes bodily events and changes associated with actions, feelings, and thoughts.
- Evolutionary Psychology
- A field of psychology emphasizing evolutionary mechanisms that may help explain human commonalities in cognition, developement, emotion, social practices, and other areas of behavior.
- Learning Perspective
- A psychological approach that emphasizes how the environment and experience affect a person's or animal's actions; it includes behaviorism and social-cognitive learning theories.
- Behaviorists
- Focus on the environmental rewards and punishers that maintain or discourage specific behaviors.
- Social cognitive learning theorists
- Combine elements of behaviorism with research on thoughts, values, and intentions.
- Cognitive Perspective
- A psychological approach that emphasizes mental processes in perception, memory, language, problem solving, and other areas of behavior.
- Sociocultural Perspective
- A psychological approach that emphasizes social and cultural influences on bevior.
- Psychodynamic Perspective
- A pyschological approach that emphasizes unconscious dynamics within the individual, such as inner forces, conflicts, or the movement of instintual energy.
- Humanist Psychology
- A psychological approach that emphasizes free will, personal growth, resilience, and the achievment of human potential.
- Psychological Practice
- Providing health or mental-health services.
- Basic Psychology
- The study of psychological issues in order to seek knowledge for its own sake rather than for its practical application.
- Applied Psychology
- The study of psychological issues that have a direct practical significance; also, the application of psychological findings.
- Counseling Psychologists
- Generally help people deal with problems of everyday life such as test anxiety, family conflicts, or low job motivation.
- School Psychologist
- Work with parents, teachers, and students to enhance students' performance and resolve emotional difficulties.
- Clinical Psychologist
- Diagnose, treat, and study mental or emotional problems.
- Psychotherapists
- Someone who does any kind of psychotherapy.
- Psychiatrist
- A medical doctor that has done a three year residency in psychiatry under supervision of a psychiatrist. Diagnose and treat mental disorders.
- Critical Thinking
- The ability and willingness to assess claims and make objective judgments on well support reasons and evidence rather than emotion or anecdote.
- Hypothesis
- A statement that attempts to predict or to account for a set of phenomena.
- Operational Definition
- A precise defintion of a term in a hypothesis which specifies the operations for observing and measuring the process or phenomenon being defined.
- Principle of falsifiability
- The principle that a scientific theory must make predicitions that are specific enough to expose the theory to the possibility of disconfirmation.
- Theory
- An organized system of assumptions and principles that purports to explain a specified set of phenomena and their interrelationships.
- Replicate
- Replication is an essential part of the scientific process because what seems to be a phenomenon turns out to be a bullshit.
- Descriptive methods
- Methods that yield descriptions of behavior but not necessarily causal explanations
- Case study
- A detailed description of a particular individual being studied or treated.
- Observational study
- a study in which the researcher carefully and systematically observes and records behavior without interfering with the behavior;it may involve either naturalistic or lab observation
- naturalistic observation
- how people or animals act in their normal surroundings
- Lab observation
- making observations in a lab
- Psychological tests
- procedure used to measure and evaluate personality traits, emotional states, aptitutes, interests, abilities and values.
- Standardize
- to develop uniform procedures for giving and scoring a test
- norms
- in tests, established stardards of performance
- reliability
- in tests, the consistency of test scores from one time and place to another
- validity
- ability of a test to measure what it was designed to measure
- surveys
- questionnaires and interviews that ask people directly about their experiences, attitudes and opinions
- representative sample
- a group (target market) of individuals selected from a population for study
- volunteer bias
- shortcoming of findings derived from a sample of volunteers
- correlational study
- a descriptive study that looks for consistent relationship between two phenomena
- correlation
- a measure of how strong 2 variables are related
- variables
- characteristic of behavior that can be measured or described by a numeric scale
- positive correlation
- an assoc between increases in one variable and increases in the other (both go up/down)and likewise in decreases
- negative correlation
- an association between increases in one variable and decreases in another (one up the other down)
- coefficient correlation
- a measure of correlation that ranges in value from -1.00 to +1.00. Perfection is 1
- experiment
- a controlled test of hypothesis in which the researcher manipulates one variable to discover its effect on the other
- informed consent
- most voluntarily consent to participate and must know enough about the study to make an intelligent decision
- independent variable
- a variable that experimenters manipulate
- dependent variable
- a variable that is dependent on the independent variable
- control condition
- a comparison condition in which subjects are not exposed to the same treatment as those in the xperimental condition
- experimental and control groups
- the groups in studies are assigned to either of these
- random assignment
- a procedure for randomly assigning people to an experiment
- placebo
- an inactive substance or fake treatment used as a control in an experiment
- single blind study
- an experiment in which subjects do not know which control group they're in
- experimenter effects
- unintended changes in behavior due to cues inadvertenly given by the experimenter
- double blind study
- neither participant nor experimenter know which group is the control or experimental
- field research
- research conducted in a natural setting
- descriptive statistics
- statistics that organize and summarize research data (averages etc)
- arithmethic mean
- an average
- standard deviation
- indicates the average difference between scores and a distribution and their mean
- inferential statistics
- statistical proc. that allow researchers to draw inferences about study results
- significance tests
- statistical test that assess how likely it is tha a study's results ocurred merely by chance
- cross sectional study
- a study in which individual of different ages are compared at a given time
- longitudinal study
- a study in which individuals are followed an peridiocally reassesed over time (stalked)
- meta analysis
- a proc. for combining and analyzing data from many studies; it determines how much of a variation in scores in all studies can be explained by a particular variable