Chapter 1 – Key Terms – Introduction: Principles of Psychology

Question 1

psychology

Answer 1

The scientific study of the mind and behavior.

Question 2

Aristotle

Answer 2

An ancient Greek teacher who was a keen observer of animals and humans and was interested in sensory illusions.

Question 3

Plato

Answer 3

An ancient Greek philosopher who was skeptical of our senses and stressed reliance on logic and reasoning.

Question 4

Rene Descartes

Answer 4

A Renaissance philosopher who built a system of knowing about reality that does not rely on our fallible senses.

Question 5

empiricist philosophers

Answer 5

A group of British philosophers, including John Locke, who believed we are dependent on our unreliable senses to learn about the world.

Question 6

John Locke

Answer 6

A seventeenth-century British empiricist philosopher who believed that the mind of a newborn baby is a “tabula rasa” that is molded by experience.

Question 7

Charles Darwin

Answer 7

The discoverer of evolution by natural selection who argued that all human behaviors must have had beginnings in earlier ancestors.

Question 8

Margaret Floy Washburn

Answer 8

A psychologist who described the behavior of many animals, relating them to the human mind.

Question 9

natural selection

Answer 9

The process by which mutations that improve survival and reproduction accumulate in subsequent generations, changing a species over time.

Question 10

psychophysics

Answer 10

The study of how physical events, such as lights and sounds, affect our senses.

Question 11

Wilhelm Wundt

Answer 11

A German physiologist who established the first research laboratory in psychology and wrote the first psychology textbook.

Question 12

structuralism

Answer 12

The introspective analysis of the human mind by breaking it down into the simplest kinds of experience, and then asking how these simple experiences come together to produce more complex experiences.

Question 13

William James

Answer 13

An American psychologist who emphasized the adaptive function of behaviors and mental processes to help survival and reproduction.

Question 14

functionalism

Answer 14

A broad school of thought in psychology that insisted that mental processes like consciousness must serve a practical, adaptive purpose.

Question 15

behaviorism

Answer 15

The perspective that psychologists should study only observable behavior and not subjective mental events.

Question 16

Ivan Pavlov

Answer 16

A Russian physiologist who described classical conditioning, such as how ringing a bell before giving food to a dog would eventually result in the dog learning to salivate at just the sound of the bell.

Question 17

Edward Thorndike

Answer 17

A behaviorist who studied how dogs and cats learn to escape from puzzle boxes.

Question 18

John B. Watson

Answer 18

A behaviorist who insisted that psychology should be an objective experimental branch of natural science concerned only with observable behavior.

Question 19

B. F. Skinner

Answer 19

A behaviorist who rejected the study of any mental events and felt that the brain fell outside the field of psychology.

Question 20

Gestalt psychologists

Answer 20

A group of German psychologists who insisted that the entire perception we experience is more than just the sum of the parts.

Question 21

Max Wertheimer

Answer 21

An influential pioneer in Gestalt psychology.

Question 22

Wolfgang Köhler

Answer 22

An influential pioneer in Gestalt psychology.

Question 23

cognitive psychology

Answer 23

The study of the internal mental processes, specifically how we acquire and process information and gain knowledge.

Question 24

neuroscience

Answer 24

The study of the nervous system, which includes the brain and spinal cord and all of their connections in the body.

Question 25

hysteria

Answer 25

A mental disorder diagnosed until the 1930s, believed to be caused by a malfunctioning uterus.

Question 26

Mary Whiton Calkins

Answer 26

The first female president of the American Psychological Association and a professor at Wellesley College. She completed the requirements for a doctorate at Harvard but was never awarded the degree.

Question 27

Mary Cover Jones

Answer 27

An early psychologist who studied the development of children and pioneered the technique of desensitization for phobias.

Question 28

Francis Sumner

Answer 28

The first African American awarded a doctorate in psychology, in 1920 from Clark University. He went on to chair the psychology department at Howard University.

Question 29

Kenneth Clark

Answer 29

A pioneering African American psychologist who developed the Clark Doll Test along with his wife, Mamie Phipps Clark.

Question 30

Mamie Phipps Clark

Answer 30

A pioneering African American psychologist who developed the Clark Doll Test along with her husband, Kenneth Clark.

Question 31

subliminal

Answer 31

Referring to the stimulus that a person is unaware of having perceived.