Final Study Guide Flashcards
(118 cards)
1
Q
What is the scientific explanation?
A
Observations and measurements to explain phenomena
2
Q
Problems in the practice of science: (3)
A
- Can be biased
- Locked behind paywalls
- Hard to reproduce old studies
3
Q
What is the importance of pre registration?
A
Deciding on what and how you will research before starting your study to reduce potential faked results and increase validity
4
Q
What does it mean to say that a study is “underpowered”?
A
The sample size is too low to receive accurate results
5
Q
Correlation v Causation
A
- Very hard to prove causation
- Correlation just shows some relationship
6
Q
Fallibility (and the problem w unfalsifiable theories)
A
A theory has to be specific enough where it can be proven wrong
7
Q
Three dimensions of methods
A
- Multiple methods yield reliable conclusions
- Reliance on single methods yields limited ability to draw conclusions
- Progress comes from “triangulating”–looking across multiple levels of analysis, using various methods
8
Q
Peripheral vs Central Nervous System
A
- Central nervous system is brain and spinal cord
- Peripheral nervous system is all nerves elsewhere in the body
9
Q
Localization v Plasticity
A
Neuroplasticity: the ability of the nervous system to change its activity in response to intrinsic or extrinsic stimuli by reorganizing its structure, functions, or connections
Localization: The idea that certain parts of the brain are responsible for certain functions
10
Q
Basic structures of the brain associated with psychological functioning
A
- Left vs. right hemisphere: Anything in your field of vision right of your nose is sent to your left hemisphere and vice versa
11
Q
Types of imaging methods (CAT fMRI etc)
A
- Measuring brain activity (EEG)
- Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)
- Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)
12
Q
Structure of a neuron (axon, dendrite, etc)
A
- Cell body
- Axon
- Dendrites
13
Q
Cell body
A
contains genetic information, maintains neuron’s structure, provides energy to drive activities
14
Q
Axon
A
long tail-like structure, carries electrical impulses which are the means of communication within the brain and from the brain to the body
15
Q
Dendrites
A
Little finger like things, receive the electrical impulses that are then carried by the axons
16
Q
Primary neurotransmitters and their functions (how certain drugs act by increasing or decreasing these)
A
Serotonin
Norepinephrine
GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid)
Endorphins
Dopamine
17
Q
Serotonin
A
Plays an important role in regulating mood, sleep, impulsivity, aggression, and appetite
18
Q
Norepinephrine
A
Affects eating habits (simulates the intake of carbs) and plays a major role in alertness and wakefulness, and fight-or-flight
19
Q
GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid)
A
Is the main inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain (low GABA linked to generalized anxiety disorder)
20
Q
Endorphins
A
Relief from pain or the stress of vigorous exercise and produce feelings of pleasure and well-being (responsible for pleasure of sex/orgasm, eating appetizing foods, etc.)
21
Q
Dopamine
A
- Many drugs will increase or decrease dopamine
- We know that cocaine and amphetamines act by boosting dopamine. Some hypothetical examples to illustrate their action…
1. Been doing crystal meth for a week straight? That much dopamine-boosting and you’ll get amphetamine psychosis (delusions and hallucinations)
2. Didn’t touch the crystal meth, but still having delusions and hallucinations? Schizophrenia can be improved by the use of drugs that reduce dopamine
3. But don’t go too far…Not enough dopamine and you might get tardive dyskinesia (uncontrollable bodily movements-twitching and shaking)
4. Having uncontrollable bodily movement but you didn’t take dopamine-reducing drugs? Parkinson’s Disease can be treated by increasing the levels of dopamine in your brain, bringing your body to a temporary rest
22
Q
Just Noticeable Difference
A
The amount something needs to be changed in order for the difference to be noticeable >50% of the time
23
Q
Transduction
A
The process of turning environmental information into neural impulses
24
Q
Binocular v Monocular Depth cues
A
- Binocular depth cues: Images giving slightly different info to each eye,
- Convergence: At close distances how much your eye is “crossed” gives the brain info about depth
25
Gestalt properties of object perception
1. Patterns and grouping and what stands out
2. Our brain wants to complete the object
26
The Mcgurk effect
“ba” “ba” “ba” but visual clues affect our perception of sounds
27
Sleep Stage 1 and associated brain waves:
- Brief transition stage when first falling asleep (hypnagogia)
- Hypnagogia
28
Hypnagogia
1. The transition from sleep to wakefulness
2. Can include vivid hallucinations, thoughts, and dreams
3. For some, can include sleep paralysis
29
Sleep Stage 2 through stages 3/4 (slow-wave sleep) and associated brain waves:
- Successively deeper stages of sleep
- Characterized by and increasing percentage of slow, irregular, high-amplitude delta waves
30
Cycle back
Upon reaching stages 3/4 and after about 80 to 100 minutes of total sleep time, sleep lightens returns through stages 2
31
What happens during REM sleep?
- Characterized by EEG patterns
- Muscles most relaxed
- Rapid eye movements occur
- Dreams occur
- 4 or 5 sleep cycles occur in a typical night’s sleep (70-110 mins/cycle)
32
Primary theories as to why we sleep:
1. Restoration: Evidence that body is recuperating at a genetic level
2. Memory consolidation/neural synthesis: Connections that are important are linked, strengthened; We perform better when rested
33
Common sleep disorders
Insomnia, Sleep Apnea, Narcolepsy, Sleep Paralysis, Night Terrors, Somnambulism (sleep walking)
34
Freud three part structure of the mind:
1. Id
2. Ego
3. Superego
35
Id
The part of our personality that forms our most primitive impulses:
Completely unconscious and driven by pleasure principles–the desire for immediate gratification of our sexual and aggressive urges
36
Ego
The ego is the conscious controller or decision-maker of personality
It is based off the reality principle–the idea that we must delay gratification of our basic motivations until the appropriate time and appropriate outlet
The balance between the id and the superego
37
Superego
Represents our sense of morality
Tells us what we shouldn’t do, and the obligations and duties of society
The superego strives for perfection, and when we fail to live up to its demands, we feel guilty
38
Freud's stages of psychosexual development (and associated ages)
1. Oral stage (birth - 1 year)
2. Anal Stage (1-3 years)
3. Phallic Stage (3-5 Years)
4. Oedipus Complex
5. Latency stage (5-Puberty)
6. Genital Stage
39
Oral stage
Mouth is associated with sexual pleasure
40
Anal Stage
- Anus is associated with pleasure
- Toilet training can lead to fixation if not handled correctly
- Fixation can lead to retentive or expulsive behaviors in adulthood, or a personality characterized by compulsiveness, such as a person too concerned with neatness and order
(In everyday life, some still refer to these people as anal)
41
Phallic Stage
- Focus of pleasure shifts to the genitals
- Oedipus complex (boys) or Electra complex (girls) occurs at this stage
- Fixation can lead to excessive masculinity in males and the need for attention or domination in females (coined the term “penis envy”)
42
Oedipus Complex
- Mom is nice, like love for mother beyond just normal love
- But this “Dad” guy is always up in my business…
(a) Envy towards father
(b) He must die
(c) Dad is source of competition
(d) Boy starts to realize that his father could castrate him
Dad wins
Thoughts of sex leave for a while
(e) Realizes if he can’t beat his father, he should join him
Internalizes ideas of his father etc.
43
Latency stage
- Sexuality is repressed
- Children participate in hobby, school, same-sex friendships, derives pleasure from those
44
Genital Stage
Sexual reawakening from someone outside the family
45
The stages of memory:
Sensory input → sensory memory (unattended info is lost) → Short-term memory (unrehearsed info is lost) → Long-term memory (some info may be lost over time)
46
What happens in a dichotic listening task?
It requires the subject to listen and repeat a audio clip coming in one ear while another clip is being played into the other
Found most people are able to do this
47
What is inattentional blindness?
When a person fails to recognize an unexpected stimulus purely due to lack of attention rather than any visual deficits
48
Primacy/recency effects
People are most likely to remember the first and last things of something and forget the middle
49
Encoding specificity (context dependent memory/scuba study)
An individual's ability to remember is improved when they are in the same context that they learned the information in
50
Three main types of learning:
Habituation
Classical (Pavlovian)
Operant conditioning
51
Habituation
The decline in our tendency to respond to stimuli that are familiar due to repeated exposure
Example: someone who lives in NYC getting used to all the sirens and honking
52
Classical (Pavlovian)
The learning of an association based on repeated presentation of a paired stimuli
Example: Hear a tone and get shocked, eventually you will be conditioned to fear the tone
53
Operant conditioning
Based on reward and punishment
Behavior that is rewarded will likely be repeated while behavior that is punished will not
54
What is spontaneous recovery?
After extinction, it is the reemergence of a CR after some time has passed
55
What is stimulus generalization?
It occurs when stimuli that are similar to the CS also cause the CR, however, the more dissimilar, the less likely it will cause the CR
56
The Garcia Effect - what it is and why it was an important demonstration
Conditioned taste aversions that develop when food is associated with a negative stimulus
57
Punishment and negative reinforcement
Negative reinforcement is the removal of something to increase a behavior
Punishment is either adding an aversive stimulus or removing a pleasant stimulus to decrease a behavior
58
What are display rules?
A social group or cultural norm that distinguish how one should express themselves
Example: Happy at someone’s wedding, somber at a funeral, etc.
59
What are primary function of emotions?
They motivate future behaviors
Because we wanna feel happy or satisfied we strive to experience those emotions again
60
What sort of evidence would be needed to argue that something like emotions are universal?
Facial muscles and expressions have shown that they are automatic and not really a conscious decision
61
What do researchers think that there is evidence for the universality of some emotional expression?
Facial action coding system (FACS)
- Identify facial muscle movement
- Certain muscle patterns correspond to different emotions
- Duchene smile
62
What is emotional valuation, and how do values placed on emotional states differ between cultures (especially Eastern v Western cultures)
- In Western more individualistic cultures, more emphasis on high-arousal emotions, more expressive
- In Eastern more collectivist cultures, more emphasis on low-arousal emotions, less expressive
63
What is free riding?
It is a market failure that occurs when those who benefit from public
64
What is diffusion of responsibility?
Refers to the decreased responsibility of action each member of a group feels when they are in a group vs. individually
65
Know the basic definition of empathy, and how we know psychopaths might not have it:
Empathy: “The experience of feelings, chiefly emotions, similar to those in kind expressed by or known to exist in another.”
Psychopaths exhibit aggressive narcissism: Failure to understand moral implications
66
Know the difference between the moral theories of consequentialism and deontology:
Deontology judges an action solely based on what happened vs. consequentialism that looks at the consequences and the aftermath
67
Piaget’s stages of sensorimotor development (and their associated ages):
1. Sensorimotor stage (0-2 years old)
2. Preoperational (2-7 years old)
3. Concrete Operational (7-11 years old)
4. Formal Operational (11+ years old)
68
Sensorimotor stage (0-2 years old)
Coordination of sense with motor responses, sensory curiosity about the world, object permanence developed, language used for demands and cataloging
69
Preoperational (2-7 years old)
Symbolic thinking, use of proper syntax and grammar to express concepts, imagination and intuition are strong, but abstract thoughts are still difficult, conservation is very raw still
70
Concrete Operational (7-11 years old)
Concepts attached to concrete situations.
Time, space, and quantity are understood and can be applied, but not as independent concepts
71
Formal Operational (11+ years old)
Theoretical, hypothetical, and counterfactual thinking.
Abstract logic and reasoning. Strategy and planning become possible.
Concepts learned in one context can be applied to another
72
Object permanence
You know an object exists even if it can’t be sensed (seen or heard)
73
Conservation problems
A child before the concrete operational stage would believe that there is an increase in water if you poured water from a wide glass to a tall skinny glass
74
Challenges to Piaget’s theory:
- Children are capable of many operational aspects earlier than Piaget thought
-Did not account for social or cultural factors in a child’s development
75
What is bounded rationality?
We look for shortcuts in our daily lives that may decrease optimization
76
What are heuristics, and what is their relationship to biases?
Mental shortcuts that allow us to make fast decisions. However, they can lead to cognitive biases as these fast decisions are non-logical
77
Anchoring
Our tendency to believe the first piece of information we see, and framing is how that information is presented to us
78
What do “system 1” and “system 2” describe?
System 1 is intuitive, unconscious, fast, impulsive
System 2 is logical, thought-out, more effortful, deliberative
79
What is gambler’s fallacy?
When someone believes a certain event is more likely to happen based on previous outcomes for independent things
9 heads in a row, gambler’s fallacy would be to think surely the next one is tails
80
What is confirmation bias?
The tendency to seek out and interpret new evidence as confirming one’s prior beliefs or values
81
What is motivated skepticism?
When we apply more skepticism to claims that go against our beliefs
Flat earth video
82
What is the “g” refer to in intelligence theory?
The idea that there is a single underlying factor that can account for the positive correlation between cognitive activities
83
What is the average IQ and what does the distribution look like (what percent fall in +/- 1 standard dev)
Average score is 100, 68% fall within one standard deviation which is 15 points
84
What is the Flynn effect, and why wasn't it obvious for a while?
It is the finding that average human IQ has increased over time
Could just be because nutrition and more accessible education are improving
Sort of stalled in developed countries
85
How heritable is IQ?
Somewhat heritable
Also environmental factors
86
What ways have been shown to improve IQ in children? (and what ways don't work)
In early childhood:
- Nutrition found in breastmilk
- A year of training mothers to provide enriched cognitive environments
- Interactive reading
- Sending children to preschool
In school aged children:
- Teaching children a musical instrument
87
Big 5 personality traits (OCEAN) and their basic descriptions
- Openness to experience: Likes variety vs. likes routine
- Conscientiousness: Organized vs. disorganized
- Extraversion: Seek out interaction vs. opposite
- Agreeableness: Helpful vs. uncooperative
- Neuroticism: Worried vs. calm
88
Lexical hypothesis
Took as many adjectives from the dictionary as possible and sorted them into “buckets” that help narrow down these terms
89
What does valid and reliable means in terms of measurement?
Reliability is the consistency of something
Validity is the accuracy of something
90
What are the most stable personality traits?
Big 5 generally stable
91
Differential v absolute stability
Differential stability is the change seen from person to person
Absolute stability is on average the amount of change seen in a population
92
Projective v objective tests
- Projective tests are not reliable nor valid because they can yield different results from different people analyzing your responses
- Objective tests are reliable, primarily questionnaires: Stable over many years
93
Milgram experiment and what it was intended to show:
Showed that people were highly obedient
Every time they got an answer wong they had to deliver a shock to someone, voltage would increase over time and oftentimes people would stay for a long period of time well after the shocks became lethal
94
Dunning Kruger effect
Scale of confidence in subject compared to actual knowledge
People who are beginners with little experience have very high confidence in their knowledge despite in reality knowing very little
95
The better than average effect and some ways it's been shown:
The tendency for people to perceive their attributes and abilities as better than they really are
96
Explicit v implicit attitudes (and how implicit have been measured)
Explicit attitudes are the ones we are willing to report
Implicit attitudes are our internal beliefs, not immediately consciously available: Can be tested via response time to see how strong the implicit thought is
97
Conformity and the Asch experiment
Revealed the degree to which a person’s own opinions are influenced by those of a group
Group decision are often more extreme than the beliefs of any individual member
98
Basic theories about humor
Play/mock aggression proven to be the best reason for why something is funny
99
Benefits of laughter
- Lowers stress and anger
- Boosts mood
- Bring us together
- We rarely laugh alone
100
The affective and cognitive contents of happiness/how they are assessed?
Affective component: how happy would you say things are these days?
Cognitive component: how satisfied are you with your life these days?
Often tested through questionnaires
101
Which nations are lower/higher in happiness/life satisfaction and what might be the causes?
- Often richer countries are happier
- Wealthier countries have more resources and more opportunities
102
How might you summarize the empirical findings on the relationship between money and happiness?
1. Need a certain amount of money for basic needs like food
(i) You will be unhappy if you can’t pay for food or are always stressed about rent, etc.
2. After a while happiness begins to plateau
103
What strategies might be used to improve happiness?
1. Interact with people
- Even basic social interactions proven to increase happiness
2. Live in the moment
- People are often less happy after they let their mind wander
3. Favor relative over absolute
- Would rather make less money and have it be more than everyone else than make more money but be paid less
4. Seek experiences instead of material stuff
5. Spend money on others
6. Be grateful
7. Smile
8. Find religion or something similar
9. Mind your “Peaks” and “Ends”
- Studies showed happiness depends more on the peak moment of something and the end
104
Perception of Taste
- What you believe changes what you taste
- Expectations can alter how you experience what something tastes like
Ex. Expensive vs. cheap wine (people will think expensive tastes better)
105
Why is blushing likely an adaptive signal?
- We blush in reaction to something
- People who blush are perceived as more trustworthy: Signal that you follow social norms
106
What ages are our Musical Tastes Are Set (on average)?
- Age 13 (for girls)
- Age 14 (for boys)
107
Why does pain caused intentionally feel more painful?
- Social creatures so we are sensitive to what others do towards us
- The same strength shock, people say hurts more when it is done intentionally vs. unintentionally
108
Taste sensitivity is related to political orientation
- More likely to be politically conservative if you are easily grossed out
- Supertasters are more easily grossed out
- Whether someone is a supertaster or not does in fact affect whether someone is conservative or liberal
109
Hedonic happiness
A philosophical belief that pursuing pleasurable experiences, and avoiding painful ones will lead to happiness
110
Kin selection
behaviors where organisms sacrifice their own fitness to enhance the survival of relatives who share their genes, thus promoting gene propagation within a family
111
Reciprocal altruism
Organisms performing altruistic acts with the expectation of future reciprocation, aiding survival and genetic success in non-kin relationships, while the notion of organisms as mere "vehicles" for gene survival is a debated perspective in evolutionary biology that overlooks the organism's role beyond gene propagation
112
Top-down processing
the brain uses prior knowledge, expectations, and experiences to interpret and make sense of incoming sensory information
113
Wernicke's Area vs Broca's Area
-Responsible for the comprehension of language, located in the posterior section of the superior temporal gyrus, and its damage leads to Wernicke's aphasia, characterized by fluent but nonsensical speech and impaired understanding.
-Responsible for speech production and grammatical arrangement, with damage causing Broca's aphasia, where speech becomes non-fluent, laborious, and grammatically simplified, though comprehension remains relatively intact.
114
Reconstructive memory
refers to the process where memories are influenced by various factors like emotions, current beliefs, and personal biases when they are recalled
114
Reproductive memory
the exact retrieval of stored information, which doesn’t account for memory distortion
114
Episodic memory
refers to personal experiences, but the discrepancy in this case involves memory reconstruction, not just retrieval of an event
114
Flashbulb memory
vivid and detailed recollections of significant, often emotional, events
114
Personality traits are continuous rather than
discrete
