PSEB SS Psychology flashcards
PSEB SS 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.
- Structuralism
- Early school founded by Titchener that used introspection to analyze consciousness into basic elements such as sensations, images, and feelings.
- Functionalism
- School associated with William James that focused on how mental processes help organisms adapt to their environment and function in daily life.
- Behaviourism
- School holding that psychology should study only observable behaviour, exemplified by Watson and Skinner, rejecting introspection and unconscious mental explanation.
- Independent variable
- The variable that an experimenter deliberately manipulates or varies to observe its effect on the dependent variable in an experiment.
- Correlation coefficient
- A statistic ranging from -1.00 to +1.00 that indicates the strength and direction of a linear relationship between two variables.
- Informed consent
- Ethical requirement that participants be told the purpose, procedures, risks, and right to withdraw before agreeing to take part in research.
- Neuron
- Nerve cell that receives, integrates, and transmits information; it has dendrites, a soma, an axon, and terminal buttons.
- Amygdala
- Limbic system structure involved in processing emotion, especially fear and threat detection, and in emotional learning such as conditioned fear.
- Sympathetic nervous system
- Division of the autonomic nervous system that mobilizes the body for fight-or-flight, increasing heart rate, breathing, and glucose release.
- Classical conditioning
- Learning in which a neutral stimulus comes to elicit a response after being repeatedly paired with a stimulus that already produces that response.
- Operant conditioning
- Learning in which behaviour is strengthened or weakened by its consequences, such as reinforcement and punishment, as described by Skinner.
- Observational learning
- Learning by watching others; Bandura identified attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation as necessary processes in modeling behaviour.
- Working memory
- Baddeley's limited-capacity system for holding and manipulating information, comprising the phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, central executive, and episodic buffer.
- Serial position effect
- Tendency to recall the first (primacy) and last (recency) items of a list better than middle items, reflecting long-term and short-term memory.
- Proactive interference
- Forgetting in which previously learned material disrupts the recall of newly learned information, for example an old phone number blocking a new one.
- Functional fixedness
- A cognitive obstacle in which a person can think of an object only in its usual function, hindering novel problem solving such as the candle problem.
- Availability heuristic
- Judging the likelihood of an event by how easily examples come to mind, which can distort probability estimates after vivid or recent events.
- Phoneme
- The smallest unit of sound in a language that can distinguish meaning, such as the /p/ and /b/ in pat and bat.
- James-Lange theory
- Theory proposing that emotion arises from physiological arousal and behaviour; we feel afraid because we run, not the reverse.
- Two-factor theory
- Schachter and Singer's theory that emotion results from physiological arousal plus a cognitive label interpreting that arousal in context.
- Yerkes-Dodson law
- Inverted-U principle that performance is best at moderate arousal, with optimal level depending on task difficulty, lower for complex tasks.
- Defence mechanisms
- Unconscious strategies the ego uses to reduce anxiety, including repression, projection, displacement, rationalization, and reaction formation.
- Big Five model
- Trait model describing personality with five dimensions: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, remembered as OCEAN.
- Locus of control
- Rotter's concept distinguishing internal beliefs that outcomes depend on one's actions from external beliefs that luck or others control outcomes.
- General adaptation syndrome
- Selye's three-stage response to prolonged stress: alarm, resistance, and exhaustion, with exhaustion increasing vulnerability to illness.
- Problem-focused coping
- Coping strategy that directly targets the source of stress by planning, seeking information, or taking action to change the situation.
- Fundamental attribution error
- Overestimating dispositional causes and underestimating situational causes when explaining other people's behaviour, while excusing one's own.
- Bystander effect
- The finding that individuals are less likely to help in an emergency when others are present, partly due to diffusion of responsibility.
- Subjective well-being
- A person's evaluation of life including high life satisfaction, frequent positive affect, and relatively infrequent negative affect.
- Burnout
- Prolonged occupational stress syndrome marked by emotional exhaustion, depersonalization or cynicism, and reduced sense of personal accomplishment.
- Personal space
- The invisible portable area around a person that regulates interpersonal distance, described by Hall as intimate, personal, social, and public zones.
- Crowding
- A subjective feeling of insufficient space and unwanted social contact; unlike density, it depends on perception, control, and context.