Psychology flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Absolute refractory period

Brief interval after an action potential during which voltage-gated sodium channels are inactivated, so no new action potential can be generated regardless of stimulus strength; it enforces one-way propagation.

Weber's law

The just-noticeable difference between two stimuli is a constant proportion of the original stimulus intensity (ΔI/I = k), so discrimination becomes harder as baseline intensity rises.

Two-factor theory of emotion

Schachter and Singer's proposal that emotional experience requires both physiological arousal and a cognitive label; identical arousal can yield different emotions depending on situational interpretation.

Yerkes-Dodson law

Performance improves with arousal up to an optimal point, then declines; the optimal arousal level is lower for complex or novel tasks and higher for simple, well-learned tasks.

Negative reinforcement

An operant procedure in which a behavior is strengthened because it removes or prevents an aversive stimulus, such as taking aspirin to end a headache; distinct from punishment.

Working memory components

Baddeley's model comprises the phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, central executive, and episodic buffer; capacity is roughly four chunks, far less than long-term store.

Encoding specificity principle

Retrieval is best when cues present at recall match those encoded with the memory; this underlies context-dependent and state-dependent memory effects.

Availability heuristic

Judging frequency or probability by how easily examples come to mind; vivid, recent, or emotionally salient events are overestimated, distorting risk judgments.

Object permanence

Piaget's sensorimotor achievement, typically late in the first year, in which the infant knows objects continue to exist when out of sight; its absence explains the A-not-B error.

Zone of proximal development

Vygotsky's range between what a learner can do alone and what they can do with guidance; instruction within this zone with scaffolding promotes development.

Authoritative parenting

Baumrind's style combining high warmth and responsiveness with high, reasoned behavioral expectations; it is associated with the best social and academic outcomes.

Identity versus role confusion

Erikson's adolescent psychosocial stage in which exploration of values, beliefs, and occupational roles yields a coherent identity or, if unresolved, confusion about self.

Fundamental attribution error

The tendency to overattribute others' behavior to dispositional traits while underestimating situational factors, especially when explaining negative outcomes of people outside one's group.

Cognitive dissonance

Festinger's aversive state arising when attitudes and behavior conflict; people reduce it by changing the attitude, adding consonant cognitions, or trivializing the inconsistency.

Bystander effect

Helping decreases as the number of witnesses increases, driven by diffusion of responsibility and pluralistic ignorance; intervention rises when one person is clearly designated.

Groupthink

Janis's mode of defective decision-making in cohesive groups that suppress dissent, feel invulnerable, and stereotype outsiders; prevention includes devil's advocacy and anonymous input.

Big Five model

Five-factor trait taxonomy: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism; derived from lexical and factor-analytic research and stable across adulthood.

Standard error of measurement

An index of score imprecision equal to the test's standard deviation times the square root of one minus reliability; it defines the confidence band around an observed score.

Reciprocal determinism

Bandura's view that behavior, personal cognition, and environment continuously influence one another, rejecting unidirectional causation in personality and social learning.

Criterion validity

The degree to which test scores predict a relevant outcome measured at the same time (concurrent) or later (predictive), such as job performance or diagnosis.

Diathesis-stress model

Disorder emerges when a preexisting vulnerability (genetic, temperamental, cognitive) is activated by environmental stress; neither factor alone is sufficient, explaining variable outcomes.

Negative symptoms of schizophrenia

Deficits such as flat affect, alogia, avolition, anhedonia, and asociality; they predict poorer functional outcome than positive symptoms and respond less well to antipsychotics.

Borderline personality disorder

Cluster B disorder marked by unstable relationships, identity disturbance, affective instability, impulsivity, and recurrent self-harm or suicidality, often linked to childhood adversity.

Posttraumatic stress disorder

Trauma-related disorder with intrusion, avoidance, negative mood/cognitions, and hyperarousal persisting more than one month; symptoms must cause impairment and follow a qualifying event.

Exposure and response prevention

Behavioral treatment for OCD in which patients confront feared triggers while refraining from rituals, allowing anxiety to habituate and extinction of compulsive behavior to occur.

Cognitive triad

Beck's model of depression: negative views of the self, the world, and the future; cognitive therapy targets these automatic thoughts and underlying schemas.

Tarasoff duty to protect

Legal principle that a therapist who identifies a serious threat to an identifiable third party may have a duty to warn or otherwise protect, overriding confidentiality.

Common factors

Therapeutic elements shared across orientations, such as alliance, empathy, expectations, and rationale; they account for substantial outcome variance beyond specific techniques.

Internal validity

The extent to which a study's design supports a causal claim that the independent variable produced the observed change, ruling out confounds and alternative explanations.

Type II error

Failing to reject a false null hypothesis, that is, missing a real effect; its probability is beta, and power (1 − beta) increases with sample size and effect size.

Factorial ANOVA

An analysis testing effects of two or more independent variables on a continuous outcome, yielding main effects plus interaction effects showing whether one factor's effect depends on another.

Informed consent

Ethical and legal requirement to disclose purpose, procedures, risks, benefits, alternatives, and confidentiality limits, and to obtain voluntary agreement before research or treatment.