Behavioral Sciences Flashcards
A formalized ceremony that usually involves specific material objects, symbolism, and additional mandates on acceptable behavior.
Ritual
A portion of the brainstem that relays information between the cortex and medulla, regulates sleep, and carries some motor and sensory information from the head and neck.
Pons
The investment people make in their society in return for economic or collective rewards.
Social Capital
Self-centered view of the world in which one is not necessarily able to understand the experience of another person; seen in Piaget’s preoperational stage.
Egocentrism
A theory that states that the body will adapt to counteract repeated exposure to stimuli, such as seeing afterimages or ramping up the sympathetic nervous system in response to a depressant.
Opponent-Process Theory
A portion of the cerebrum that is associated with emotion and memory; includes the amygdala and hippocampus.
Limbic System
The phenomenon of a stereotype creating an expectation of a particular group, which creates conditions that lead to confirmation of this stereotype.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
The minimum distance necessary between two points of stimulation on the skin such that the points will be felt as two distinct stimuli.
Two-Point Threshold
Perception of a stimulus below a threshold (usually the threshold of conscious perception).
Subliminal Perception
The nonmaterial culture that represents a group of people; expressed through ideas and concepts.
Symbolic Culture
The ability to tell where one’s body is in space.
Proprioception
In operant conditioning, the process of conditioning a complex behavior by rewarding successive approximations of the behavior.
Shaping
A society in which advancement up the social ladder is based on intellectual talent and achievement.
Meritocracy
The tendency to perform at a different level based on the fact that others are around.
Social Facilitation
A psychotic disorder characterized by gross distortions of reality and disturbances in the content and form of thought, perception, and behavior.
Schizophrenia
The art of searching for and exploiting food resources.
Foraging
Disorders that involve worry, unease, fear, and apprehension about future uncertainties based on real or imagined events that can impair physical and psychological health.
Anxiety Disorders
The changing of behavior of an individual based on a command from someone seeing as an authority figure.
Obedience
A sudden increase in response to a stimulus, usually due to a change in the stimulus or the addition of another stimulus; sometimes called resensitization.
Dishabituation
A cognitive bias in which one focuses on information that supports a given solution, belief, or hypothesis, and ignores evidence against it.
Confirmation Bias
Change in neural connections caused by learning or a response to injury.
Neuroplasticity
The ethical tenet that the physician has a responsibility to act in the patient’s best interest.
Beneficence
The phenomenon of retaining larger amounts of information when the amount of time between sessions of relearning is increased.
Spacing Effect
Emotions that are recognized by all cultures; includes happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, contempt, and surprise.
Universal Emotions
A psychological and physiological state of being awake and reactive to stimuli; nearly synonymous with alertness.
Arousal
Sleep disorder in which a person may cease to breathe while sleeping; may be due to obstruction or a central (neurological) cause.
Sleep Apnea
The practice of making judgments about other cultures based on the values and beliefs of one’s own culture.
Ethnocentrism
The minimum difference in magnitude between two stimuli before one can perceive this different; also called a difference threshold.
Just-Noticeable Difference (jnd)
An organized pattern of thought and behavior; one of the central concepts of Piaget stages of cognitive development.
Schema
The ability to simultaneously analyze and combine information regarding multiple aspects of a stimulus, such as color, shape, and motion.
Parallel Processing
A time during which environmental input has a maximal impact on the development of a particular ability.
Sensitive Period
In Freudian psychoanalysis, the part of the unconscious mind focused on idealism, perfectionism, and societal norms.
Superego
In the dramaturgical approach, the setting where players are free from their role requirements and not in front of the audience; back stage behaviors may not be deemed appropriate or acceptable and are thus kept invisible from the audience.
Back Stage
The process by which a connection is made between two stimuli or a stimulus and a response; examples include classical conditioning and operant conditioning.
Associative Learning
The observation that, when in a group, individuals are less likely to respond to a person in need.
Bystander Effect
A state of normlessness; anomic conditions erode social solidarity by means of excessive individualism, social inequality, and isolation.
Anomie
The way in which words are organized to create meaning.
Syntax
The sense of “touch,” which contains multiple modalities: pressure, vibration, pain, and temperature.
Somatosensation
Groups of people within a culture that distinguish themselves from the primary culture to which they belong.
Subcultures
Sleep disorder in which one carries out actions in his or her sleep; also called sleepwalking.
Somnambulism
A period of at least two weeks in which there is a prominent and persistent depressed mood or lack of interest and at least four other depressive symptoms.
Depressive Episode
The tendency to better remember items presented at the beginning or end of a list; related to the primary and recency effects.
Serial Position Effect
The number of cases of a disease per population in a given period of time; usually, cases per 1000 people per year.
Prevalence
The phenomenon of first impressions of a person being more important than subsequent impressions.
Primacy Effect
A portion of the limbic system that is important for memory and learning.
Hippocampus
The phenomenon in which the most recent information we have about an individual is most important in forming our impressions.
Recency Effect
The ethical tenet that the physician has a responsibility to avoid interventions in which the potential for harm outweighs the potential for benefit.
Nonmaleficence
Sleep stage in which the eyes move rapidly back and forth and physiological arousal levels are more similar to wakefulness than sleep; dreaming occurs during this stage.
Rapid Eye Movement (REM) Sleep
Consists of NREM sleep stages 3 and 4; also called delta-wave sleep.
Slow-Wave Sleep
Philosophies that drive large numbers of people to organized to promote or resist social change.
Social Movements
The ethical tenet that the physician has the responsibility to respect patients’ choices about their own healthcare.
Autonomy
A shortcut in decision-making that relies on the information that is most readily available, rather than the total body of information on a subject.
Availability Heuristic
In operant conditioning, the use of an aversive stimulus designed to decrease the frequency of an undesirable behavior.
Punishment
A time during development during which exposure to language is essential for eventual development of effective use of language; between 2 years of age and puberty.
Critical Period
A defense mechanism by which an individual deals with stress by reverting to an earlier developmental state.
Regression
An irrationally based positive or negative attitude toward a person, group, or thing, formed prior to actual experience.
Prejudice
Concept seen in quantitative analysis performed by a child; develops when a child is able to identify the difference between quantity by number and actual amount, especially when faced with identical quantities separated into varying pieces.
Conservation
A brain region located in the inferior frontal gyrus of the frontal lobe (usually in the left hemisphere); largely responsible for the motor function of speech. Damage causes Broca’s aphasia, a loss of the motor function of speech, resulting in intact understanding with an inability to correctly produce spoken language.
Broca’s Area
State of consciousness in which one is aware, able to think, and able to respond to the environment; nearly synonymous with arousal.
Alertness
Knowledge that an object does not cease to exist even when the object cannot be seen; a milestone in cognitive development.
Object Permanence
A socioeconomic condition of low resource availability; in the United States, the poverty line is determined by the government’s calculation of the minimum income requirements for families to acquire the minimum necessities of life.
Poverty
The minimum of stimulus energy needed to activate a sensory system.
Absolute Threshold
Cognitive capacity to understand relationships or solve problems using information acquired during schooling and other experiences.
Crystallized Intelligence
The alignment of physiological processes with the 24-hour day, including sleep-wake cycles and some elements of the endocrine system.
Circadian Rhythm
In Freudian psychoanalysis, the part of the unconscious resulting from basic, instinctual urges for sexuality and survival; operates under the pleasure principle and seeks instant gratification.
Id
The physical items one associates with a given cultural group.
Material Culture
Theory that distinguishes between two major types of groups: communities (Gemeinschaften), which share beliefs, ancestry, or geography; and society (Gesellschaften), which work together toward a common goal.
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft
Misuse of grammar characterized by universal application of a rule, regardless of exceptions; seen in children during language development.
Errors of Growth
Disorders that involve a perceived separation from identity or the environment.
Dissociative Disorders
The study of functions and behaviors associated with specific regions of the brain.
Neuropsychology
Societal rules that define the boundaries of acceptable behavior.
Norms
A portion of the brainstem that regulates vital functions including breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure.
Medulla Oblongata
In Jungian psychoanalysis, the part of the unconscious mind that is shared among all humans and is a result of our common ancestry.
Collective Unconscious
The guide by which most psychological disorders are characterized, described, and diagnosed; currently in its fifth edition (DSM-5, published May 2013).
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)
The ability to attend to multiple stimuli simultaneously and to perform multiple tasks at the same time.
Divided Attention
The transition from high birth and mortality rates to lower birth and mortality rates, seen as a country develops from a preindustrial to an industrialized economic system.
Demographic Transition
The cognitive bias that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.
Just-World Hypothesis
A brain region located in the superior temporal gyrus of the temporal lobe (usually in the left hemisphere); largely responsible for language comprehension. Damage causes Wernicke’s aphasia, a loss of language comprehension, resulting in fluid production of language without meaning.
Wernicke’s Area
A form of associative learning in which a neutral stimulus becomes associated with an unconditioned stimulus such that the neutral stimulus alone produces the same response as the unconditioned stimulus; the neutral stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus.
Classical Conditioning
A form of learning in which behavior is modified as a result of watching others.
Observational Learning
A status with which a person is most identified.
Master Status
The tendency for groups to make decisions based on ideas and solutions that arise within the group without considering outside ideas and ethics; based on pressure to conform and remain loyal to the group.
Groupthink
Ways for the brain to infer missing parts of an image when the image is incomplete.
Gestalt Principles
The number of new cases of a disease per population at risk in a given period of time; usually, new cases per 1000 at-risk people per year.
Incidence
In Freudian psychoanalysis, the part of the unconscious mind that mediates the urges of the id and superego; operates under the reality principle.
Ego
A model that explains social interaction and decision-making as a game, including strategies, incentives, and punishments.
Game Theory
An altered state of consciousness in which a person appears to be awake but is, in fact, in a highly suggestible state in which another person or event may trigger actions by the person.
Hypnosis
The inability to identify uses for an object beyond its usual purpose.
Functional Fixedness
In medical ethics, the tenet that the physician has a responsibility to treat similar patients with similar care, and to distribute healthcare resources fairly.
Justice
A rule of thumb or shortcut that is used to make decisions.
Heuristic
A portion of the brain that controls balance, motor coordination, breathing, digestion, and general arousal processes.
Hindbrain
A defense mechanism by which individuals suppress urges by unconsciously converting them into their exact opposites.
Reaction Formation
