AP Psychology FRQ Terms Flashcards

13872101550	Acetylcholine (LMM)	A neurotransmitter that enables learning and memory and also triggers muscle contraction	0
13872101551	arousal theory	A theory of motivation suggesting that people are motivated to maintain an optimal level of alertness and physical and mental activation.	1
13872101552	availability heuristic	estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory; if instances come readily to mind (perhaps because of their vividness), we presume such events are common	2
13872101553	belief perseverance	clinging to one's initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited	3
13872101554	Big Five Personality Traits	openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism	4
13872101555	Extraversion	A personality dimension describing someone who is sociable, gregarious, and assertive	5
13872101556	circadian rhythm	the biological clock; regular bodily rhythms (for example, of temperature and wakefulness) that occur on a 24-hour cycle	6
13872101557	cognitive dissonance	unpleasant mental experience of tension resulting from two conflicting thoughts or beliefs	7
13872101558	context dependent memory	The theory that information learned in a particular situation or place is better remembered when in that same situation or place.	8
13872101559	Correlation	A measure of the extent to which two factors vary together, and thus of how well either factor predicts the other. Can range from -1 to +1. Negative correlations the variables rise and fall inversely, positive correlations variables rise and fall together. Negative does not mean weak and positive does not mean strong	9
13872101560	Deindividuation (sports crowd)	the loss of self-awareness and self-restraint occurring in group situations that foster arousal and anonymity	10
13872101561	difference threshold	the minimum difference between two stimuli required for detection 50 percent of the time	11
13872101562	distributed practice	spacing the study of material to be remembered by including breaks between study periods	12
13872101563	divergent thinking (New solutions to problems)	a type of creative thinking in which one generates new solutions to problems	13
13872101564	Dopamine (MALR)	A neurotransmitter associated with movement, attention and learning and the brain's pleasure and reward system.	14
13872101565	drive-reduction theory	the idea that a physiological need creates an aroused tension state (a drive) that motivates an organism to satisfy the need	15
13872101566	encoding failure	the inability to recall specific information because of insufficient encoding of the information for storage in long-term memory	16
13872101567	episodic memory	A category of long-term memory that involves the recollection of specific events, situations and experiences.	17
13872101568	ethics in research (CCDP)	informed consent protection from harm/discomfort maintain confidentiality debriefing	18
13872101569	experiment	A research method in which an investigator manipulates one or more factors to observe the effect on some behavior or mental process	19
13872101570	correlational research	research that seeks to identify whether an association or relationship between two factors exists. Does not manipulate variables.	20
13872101571	explicit memory	memory of facts and experiences that one can consciously know and "declare" (also called declarative memory)	21
13872101572	external locus of control	the perception that chance or outside forces beyond your personal control determine your fate.	22
13872101573	extrinsic motivation	a desire to perform a behavior to receive promised rewards or avoid threatened punishment	23
13872101574	GAS exhaustion phase	body runs out of adaption energy stores for adjusting to stressor, and disease resistance drops below normal; if we can stay in the stress it can have a negative effect	24
13872101575	gender roles	sets of behavioral norms assumed to accompany one's status as male or female	25
13872101576	gestalt principle of proximity	we group nearby figures together	26
13872101577	implicit memory	Memories we don't deliberately remember or reflect on consciously	27
13872101578	incentive theory	A theory of motivation stating that behavior is directed toward attaining desirable stimuli and avoiding unwanted stimuli.	28
13872101579	intrinsic motivation	a desire to perform a behavior effectively for its own sake	29
13872101580	normative social influence (gain social approval)	influence resulting from a person's desire to gain approval or avoid disapproval	30
13872101581	operational definition	a statement of the procedures used to define research variables. Must be recordable/countable/measurable.	31
13872101582	overjustification effect	The effect of promising a reward for doing what one already likes to do. The person may now see the reward, rather than intrinsic interest, as the motivation for performing the task.	32
13872101583	positive reinforcement	Increasing behaviors by presenting positive stimuli, such as food. A positive reinforcer is any stimulus that, when presented after a response, strengthens the response.	33
13872101584	postconventional moral reasoning	Kohlberg's third level of moral reasoning, emphasizing moral principles	34
13872101585	prefrontal cortex (TPL)	processing center in the frontal lobe responsible for thinking, planning, and language	35
13872101586	proactive interference	Being unable to retrieve new information because old information gets in the way	36
13872101587	procedural memory	a type of implicit memory that involves motor skills and behavioral habits (tying shoes, eating with a fork)	37
13872101588	prospective memory	remembering to do things in the future	38
13872101589	random assignment	assigning participants to experimental and control conditions by chance, thus minimizing preexisting differences between those assigned to the different groups	39
13872101590	random selection	A way of ensuring that a sample of people is representative of a population by giving everyone in the population an equal chance of being selected for the sample	40
13872101591	retinal disparity	a binocular cue for perceiving depth	41
13872101592	retroactive interference	Unable to retrieve old information because of newly encoded information	42
13872101593	selective attention	the focusing of conscious awareness on a particular stimulus	43
13872101594	self-efficacy	one's sense of competence and effectiveness in a specific task.	44
13872101595	self-fulfiling prophecy	a prediction or expectation about our future behavior that is likely to come true because we believe it and thus act in ways that make it come true	45
13872101596	Serotonin	A neurotransmitter helps mood and appetite. Increase in it helps depression as it is a mood booster.	46
13872101597	social facilitation	improved performance on simple or well-learned tasks in the presence of others, decreased performance on difficult or non well-learned tasks	47
13872101598	state-dependent memory	The theory that information learned in a particular state of mind (e.g., depressed, happy, somber) is more easily recalled when in that same state of mind.	48
13872101599	statistical significance	a statistical statement of how likely it is that an obtained result occurred by chance. Measured by p-value. To say something is statistically significant it must have a p value of less than .05 (p=<.05)	49
13872101600	sympathetic nervous system	the division of the autonomic nervous system that arouses the body, mobilizing its energy in stressful situations	50
13872101601	Yerkes-Dodson Law	the principle that performance increases with arousal only up to a point, beyond which performance decreases	51
13872101602	cognitive restructuring	a therapeutic approach that teaches clients to question the automatic beliefs, assumptions, and predictions that often lead to negative emotions and to replace negative thinking with more realistic and positive beliefs	52
13872101603	kinesthetic sense	sense of the location of body parts in relation to the ground and each other	53
13872101604	basilar membrane	A structure that runs the length of the cochlea in the inner ear and holds the auditory receptors, called hair cells.	54
13872101605	somatosensory cortex	area at the front of the parietal lobes that registers and processes body touch and movement sensations	55
13872101606	motor neurons (efferent)	neurons that carry outgoing information from the brain and spinal cord to the muscles and glands	56
13872101607	Heuristic	a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error-prone than algorithms	57
13872101608	secondary reinforcer	any reinforcer that becomes reinforcing after being paired with a primary reinforcer, such as praise, tokens, or gold stars	58
13872101609	Algorithm	A methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem.	59
13872101610	social loafing	the tendency for people in a group to exert less effort when pooling their efforts toward attaining a common goal than when individually accountable	60
13872101611	Habituation	decreasing responsiveness with repeated stimulation. As infants gain familiarity with repeated exposure to a visual stimulus, their interest wanes and they look away sooner.	61
13872101612	alarm stage of GAS	organism recognizes stress, begins to respond. Fight or flight and sympathetic nervous system engages	62
13872101613	authoritarian parenting	style of parenting in which parent is rigid and overly strict, showing little warmth to the child	63
13872101614	identity vs. role confusion	Erikson's stage during which teenagers and young adults search for and become their true selves	64
13872101615	unconditional positive regard	according to Rogers, an attitude of total acceptance toward another person	65
13872101616	elaborative rehearsal	the linking of new information to material that is already known	66
13872101617	central route persuasion	going through rational mind, persuading using logic and evidence.	67
13872101618	source amnesia	attributing to the wrong source an event we have experienced, heard about, read about, or imagined	68
13872101619	fluid intelligence	our ability to reason speedily and abstractly; tends to decrease during late adulthood	69
13872101620	agoraphobia	fear or avoidance of situations, such as crowds or wide open places, where one has felt loss of control and panic	70
13872101621	Ethnocentrism	Belief in the superiority of one's nation or ethnic group.	71
13872101622	Rods	retinal receptors that detect black, white, and gray; necessary for peripheral and twilight vision, when cones don't respond	72
13872101623	Broca's area	speech production (mouth movement)	73
13872101624	gestalt principle of closure	we fill in gaps to create a complete, whole object	74
13872101625	double blind research	a research study in which both the researcher and the participants are unaware of the predicted outcome	75
13872101626	myelin sheath	A layer of fatty tissue segmentally encasing the fibers of many neurons; enables vastly greater transmission speed of neural impulses as the impulse hops from one node to the next.	76
13872101627	punishment	an event that decreases the behavior that it follows	77
13872101628	Endorphins	natural, opiate-like neurotransmitters linked to pain control and to pleasure	78
13872101629	Introversion (introvert)	dimension of personality in which people tend to withdraw from excessive stimulation	79
13872101630	cognitive map	a mental representation of the layout of one's environment	80
13872101631	cocktail party effect	ability to attend to only one voice among many	81
13872101632	Cerebellum	the "little brain" at the rear of the brainstem; functions include processing sensory input and coordinating movement output and balance	82
13872101633	observational learning	learning by observing others	83
13872101634	Human Factors	interaction with people and machines	84
13872101635	reticular formation	alertness and arousal	85
13872101636	predictive validity	Refers to the function of a test in predicting a particular behavior or trait.	86
13872101637	semantic memory	general knowledge	87
13872101638	serial position effect	our tendency to recall best the last and first items in a list	88
13872101639	functional fixedness	the tendency to perceive an item only in terms of its most common use (not thinking outside the box)	89
13872101640	operant conditioning	a type of learning in which behavior is strengthened if followed by a reinforcer or diminished if followed by a punisher	90
13872101641	Reinforcement	any event that strengthens the behavior it follows	91
13872101642	Conformity	compliance with standards, rules, or laws.	92
13872101643	figure-ground (objects standing out from their surroundings)	the organization of the visual field into objects that stand out from their surroundings	93
13872101644	occipital lobe	A region of the cerebral cortex that processes visual information	94
13872101645	Use of Phonemes	in language, the smallest distinctive sound unit /k/ for cat	95
13872101646	Modeling	learning by imitating others; copying behavior	96
13872101647	age and language acquisition	older students are less successful in acquiring a language.	97
13872101648	foveal vision	sharp central vision	98
13872101649	feature detectors	cells in the cortex that specialize in extracting certain features of a stimulus	99
13872101650	compliance	the tendency to agree to do things requested by others	100
13872101651	crystallized intelligence	our accumulated knowledge and verbal skills; tends to increase with age	101
13872101652	motor cortex	controls voluntary movements	102
13872101653	conditioned response	a learned response to a previously neutral stimulus	103
13872101654	inattentional blindness	a failure to perceive objects that are not the focus of attention	104
13872101655	mnemonic devices	strategies for enhancing memory	105
13872101656	external cues	time of day, social cues, sight and smell of food	106