TASC Psychology flashcards
TASC Psychology · Build recall with a focused review session.
32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.
- Introspection
- A method in which trained observers report their own conscious thoughts and sensations; used by Wundt and Titchener to analyze mental experience into basic elements.
- Structuralism
- Titchener's early school that sought to break conscious experience into its fundamental components, such as sensations and feelings, using controlled introspection.
- Functionalism
- William James's school that focused on how mental processes and behaviors help organisms adapt to their environments, influenced by evolutionary theory.
- Psychoanalytic perspective
- Freud's approach holding that unconscious conflicts, childhood experiences, and motives shape behavior; it emphasizes defense mechanisms and psychosexual development.
- Behaviorism
- The school asserting psychology should study only observable behavior, explaining learning through stimulus-response associations and environmental consequences rather than mental states.
- Humanistic perspective
- An approach emphasizing free will, personal growth, and self-actualization; Rogers stressed unconditional positive regard and Maslow proposed a hierarchy of needs.
- Cognitive perspective
- An approach viewing people as information processors; it studies attention, memory, language, and problem solving as internal mental operations.
- Biopsychology
- A perspective explaining behavior and mental processes through the nervous system, neurotransmitters, hormones, and genetic inheritance.
- Neuron structure
- Dendrites receive signals, the soma integrates them, the axon conducts impulses, and terminal buttons release neurotransmitters into the synapse.
- Independent variable
- The factor a researcher deliberately manipulates in an experiment; its effect on the dependent variable is measured while other variables are controlled.
- Random assignment
- Placing participants into experimental conditions by chance, which distributes individual differences across groups and supports causal conclusions.
- Correlational design
- A study measuring the relationship between two variables without manipulation; it reveals association and direction but cannot establish causation.
- Confounding variable
- An uncontrolled factor that varies along with the independent variable and can produce a misleading apparent effect on the dependent variable.
- Central nervous system
- The brain and spinal cord; it integrates sensory information and coordinates responses, while the peripheral nervous system links it to the body.
- Neurotransmitter
- A chemical released from terminal buttons that crosses the synapse and binds to receptors on another neuron, exciting or inhibiting it.
- Genotype versus phenotype
- Genotype is an organism's genetic makeup; phenotype is the observable expression of those genes resulting from genetic and environmental interaction.
- Classical conditioning
- A learning process in which a neutral stimulus paired repeatedly with an unconditioned stimulus comes to elicit a conditioned response on its own.
- Operant conditioning
- Skinner's principle that behavior is shaped by its consequences: reinforcement increases the likelihood of a response, punishment decreases it.
- Positive versus negative reinforcement
- Both increase behavior; positive reinforcement adds a rewarding stimulus, while negative reinforcement removes or avoids an aversive stimulus.
- Extinction
- The gradual weakening and disappearance of a conditioned response when the conditioned stimulus is repeatedly presented without the unconditioned stimulus.
- Spontaneous recovery
- The reappearance of a previously extinguished conditioned response after a rest period, showing that extinction suppresses rather than erases learning.
- Variable-ratio schedule
- A reinforcement schedule delivering reward after an unpredictable number of responses; it produces high, steady response rates resistant to extinction.
- Fixed-ratio schedule
- A reinforcement schedule rewarding every nth response; it yields high response rates with a brief pause immediately after each reinforcement.
- Working memory
- A limited-capacity system that briefly holds and manipulates information for current tasks; capacity is commonly cited as about seven items.
- Encoding, storage, retrieval
- The three memory processes: encoding converts information into a usable form, storage maintains it, and retrieval brings it back into awareness.
- Serial position effect
- The tendency to recall the first items (primacy, from long-term memory) and last items (recency, from short-term memory) of a list better than middle items.
- Classical conditioning terms
- An unconditioned stimulus naturally elicits an unconditioned response; a conditioned stimulus acquires the ability to elicit a conditioned response through pairing.
- Piaget's stages
- Four cognitive stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational; object permanence develops during the sensorimotor stage.
- Object permanence
- The understanding that objects continue to exist when out of sight; it develops during Piaget's sensorimotor stage, typically in infancy.
- Erikson's psychosocial stages
- Eight lifespan stages, each defined by a crisis such as trust versus mistrust or identity versus role confusion, resolved with either a favorable or unfavorable outcome.
- Mean versus median
- The mean is the arithmetic average and is pulled by extreme scores; the median is the middle score and resists outliers.
- Normal distribution
- A symmetric, bell-shaped distribution in which about 68 percent of scores fall within one standard deviation of the mean and about 95 percent within two.