This site is 100% ad supported. Please add an exception to adblock for this site.

Chapter 01- What is Psych

Terms

undefined, object
copy deck
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

Deck Info

70

permalink