Karnataka II PUC Psychology (KSEAB) flashcards
Karnataka II PUC Psychology (KSEAB) · Build recall with a focused review session.
33 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.
- Psychology
- The scientific study of behaviour and mental processes, covering both observable actions and internal states such as thoughts, feelings, and motives.
- Structuralism
- Wundt and Titchener's school that analysed conscious experience into basic elements using trained introspection, aiming to reveal the structure of the mind.
- Functionalism
- William James's school that focused on how mental processes help organisms adapt to their environment, emphasising purpose and practical consequences rather than elements.
- Behaviourism
- Watson and Skinner's approach that restricts psychology to observable, measurable behaviour and rejects the study of subjective mental states as unscientific.
- Hypothesis
- A testable, tentative statement predicting a relationship between variables, which the researcher accepts or rejects on the basis of collected evidence.
- Independent variable
- The variable deliberately manipulated or varied by the researcher to observe its effect on the dependent variable in an experiment.
- Correlation coefficient
- A statistic ranging from -1 to +1 that indicates the strength and direction of a relationship between two variables without implying causation.
- Informed consent
- An ethical requirement that participants be told the purpose and procedures of a study and voluntarily agree to take part before data collection begins.
- Object permanence
- Piaget's sensorimotor achievement in which the child understands that objects continue to exist even when they are out of sight.
- Teratogens
- Harmful environmental agents such as alcohol, certain drugs, infections, or radiation that can damage the developing embryo or fetus during pregnancy.
- Conservation
- Piaget's concept that quantity, mass, or volume remains unchanged despite changes in appearance; achieved in the concrete operational stage around age seven.
- Absolute threshold
- The minimum intensity of a stimulus that can be detected reliably, conventionally defined as the level detected on 50% of presentations.
- Perceptual constancy
- The tendency to perceive objects as stable in size, shape, and brightness despite changes in the retinal image caused by distance or angle.
- Gestalt closure
- A perceptual principle stating that people mentally complete figures with gaps, perceiving an incomplete pattern as a whole, coherent object.
- Classical conditioning
- Pavlov's learning process in which a neutral stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus after repeated pairing with an unconditioned stimulus, eliciting a conditioned response.
- Negative reinforcement
- A consequence in which an unpleasant stimulus is removed after a response, thereby increasing the likelihood that the response will recur.
- Observational learning
- Bandura's learning by watching models; it requires attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation, and can occur without direct reinforcement.
- Spontaneous recovery
- The reappearance of a previously extinguished conditioned response after a rest period, showing that extinction suppresses rather than erases the association.
- Working memory
- The limited-capacity system that holds and manipulates information during cognitive tasks, corresponding to short-term memory plus active processing.
- Chunking
- A memory strategy that groups separate items into larger meaningful units, increasing the amount of information held in short-term memory.
- Retroactive interference
- Forgetting caused by newly learned material disrupting the recall of previously learned information, as when new phone numbers displace old ones.
- Availability heuristic
- A mental shortcut in which the probability of an event is judged by how easily relevant examples come to mind rather than by actual base rates.
- Functional fixedness
- A cognitive obstacle in which a person can see an object only in its usual role, blocking novel uses needed to solve a problem.
- Divergent thinking
- Thinking that generates many varied and original ideas from a single starting point; it is a core component of creativity and open-ended problem solving.
- Intrinsic motivation
- The drive to engage in an activity for its own sake, because it is interesting or enjoyable, rather than for external reward or pressure.
- Two-factor theory
- Schachter and Singer's view that emotion results from physiological arousal together with a cognitive label interpreting that arousal in context.
- Yerkes–Dodson law
- The principle that performance is best at a moderate level of arousal; the optimal level is lower for complex tasks than for simple ones.
- Deviation IQ
- An intelligence score expressing how far a person's performance lies from the age-group mean, using standard deviation units; mean is 100 and SD is 15.
- Multiple intelligences
- Gardner's theory that intelligence comprises relatively independent abilities such as linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, interpersonal, and bodily-kinesthetic.
- Big Five traits
- The five broad personality dimensions of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, identified through factor analysis of trait ratings.
- Reciprocal determinism
- Bandura's principle that personal factors, behaviour, and the environment influence one another continuously in a two-way, mutually shaping relationship.
- Groupthink
- A deterioration of group decision quality in which pressure for unanimity suppresses dissent and critical evaluation of alternatives is avoided.
- Social loafing
- The tendency for individuals to expend less effort on a collective task when their individual contributions cannot be identified or evaluated.