Vocabulary

Absolute threshold: The smallest amount of stimulation needed for detection by a sense.
Acceptance and commitment therapy: A therapeutic approach designed to foster nonjudgmental observation of one’s own mental processes.
Action Potential: A transient all-or-nothing electrical current that is conducted down the axon when the membrane potential reaches the threshold of excitation.
Agnosia: Loss of the ability to perceive stimuli.
Agoraphobia: A sort of anxiety disorder distinguished by feelings that a place is uncomfortable or may be unsafe because it is significantly open or crowded.
Agreeableness: A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be compassionate, cooperative, warm, and caring to others. People low in agreeableness tend to be rude, hostile, and to pursue their own interests over those of others.
Alogia: A reduction in the amount of speech and/or increased pausing before the initiation of speech.
Anchoring: The bias to be affected by an initial anchor, even if the anchor is arbitrary, and to insufficiently adjust our judgments away from that anchor.
Anhedonia: Loss of interest or pleasure in activities one previously found enjoyable or rewarding.
Anhedonia/amotivation: A reduction in the drive or ability to take the steps or engage in actions necessary to obtain the potentially positive outcome.
Anosmia: Loss of the ability to smell.
Anxiety: A mood state characterized by negative affect, muscle tension, and physical arousal in which a person apprehensively anticipates future danger or misfortune.
Attributional style: The tendency by which a person infers the cause or meaning of behaviors or events.
Audition: Ability to process auditory stimuli. Also called hearing.
Auditory canal: Tube running from the outer ear to the middle ear.
Auditory hair cells: Receptors in the cochlea that transduce sound into electrical potentials.
Autobiographical memory: Memory for the events of one’s life.
Automatic thoughts: Thoughts that occur spontaneously; often used to describe problematic thoughts that maintain mental disorders.
Axon: Part of the neuron that extends off the soma, splitting several times to connect with other neurons; main output of the neuron.
Biases: The systematic and predictable mistakes that influence the judgment of even very talented human beings.
Binocular disparity: Difference is images processed by the left and right eyes.
Binocular vision: Our ability to perceive 3D and depth because of the difference between the images on each of our retinas.
Biological vulnerability: A specific genetic and neurobiological factor that might predispose someone to develop anxiety disorders.
Blocking: In classical conditioning, the finding that no conditioning occurs to a stimulus if it is combined with a previously conditioned stimulus during conditioning trials. Suggests that information, surprise value, or prediction error is important in conditioning.
Blood Alcohol Content (BAC): Blood Alcohol Content (BAC): a measure of the percentage of alcohol found in a person’s blood. This measure is typically the standard used to determine the extent to which a person is intoxicated, as in the case of being too impaired to drive a vehicle.
Bottom-up processing: Building up to perceptual experience from individual pieces.
Bounded awareness: The systematic ways in which we fail to notice obvious and important information that is available to us.
Bounded ethicality: The systematic ways in which our ethics are limited in ways we are not even aware of ourselves.
Bounded rationality: Model of human behavior that suggests that humans try to make rational decisions but are bounded due to cognitive limitations.
Bounded self-interest: The systematic and predictable ways in which we care about the outcomes of others.
Bounded willpower: The tendency to place greater weight on present concerns rather than future concerns.
Brain Stem: The “trunk” of the brain comprised of the medulla, pons, midbrain, and diencephalon.
Broca’s Area: An area in the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere. Implicated in language production.
Catatonia: Behaviors that seem to reflect a reduction in responsiveness to the external environment. This can include holding unusual postures for long periods of time, failing to respond to verbal or motor prompts from another person, or excessive and seemingly purposeless motor activity.
Categorize: To sort or arrange different items into classes or categories.
Central Nervous System: The portion of the nervous system that includes the brain and spinal cord.
Cerebellum: The distinctive structure at the back of the brain, Latin for “small brain.”
Cerebrum: Usually refers to the cerebral cortex and associated white matter, but in some texts includes the subcortical structures.
Chemical senses: Our ability to process the environmental stimuli of smell and taste.
Chronic stress: Discrete or related problematic events and conditions which persist over time and result in prolonged activation of the biological and/or psychological stress response (e.g., unemployment, ongoing health difficulties, marital discord).
Circadian Rhythm: Circadian Rhythm: The physiological sleep-wake cycle. It is influenced by exposure to sunlight as well as daily schedule and activity. Biologically, it includes changes in body temperature, blood pressure and blood sugar.
Classical conditioning: The procedure in which an initially neutral stimulus (the conditioned stimulus, or CS) is paired with an unconditioned stimulus (or US). The result is that the conditioned stimulus begins to elicit a conditioned response (CR). Classical conditioning is nowadays considered important as both a behavioral phenomenon and as a method to study simple associative learning. Same as Pavlovian conditioning.
Cochlea: Spiral bone structure in the inner ear containing auditory hair cells.
Cognitive bias modification: Using exercises (e.g., computer games) to change problematic thinking habits.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT): A family of approaches with the goal of changing the thoughts and behaviors that influence psychopathology.
Comorbidity: Describes a state of having more than one psychological or physical disorder at a given time.
Conditioned compensatory response: In classical conditioning, a conditioned response that opposes, rather than is the same as, the unconditioned response. It functions to reduce the strength of the unconditioned response. Often seen in conditioning when drugs are used as unconditioned stimuli.
Conditioned response: A learned reaction following classical conditioning, or the process by which an event that automatically elicits a response is repeatedly paired with another neutral stimulus (conditioned stimulus), resulting in the ability of the neutral stimulus to elicit the same response on its own.
Conditioned response (CR): The response that is elicited by the conditioned stimulus after classical conditioning has taken place.
Conditioned stimulus (CS): An initially neutral stimulus (like a bell, light, or tone) that elicits a conditioned response after it has been associated with an unconditioned stimulus.
Cones: Photoreceptors of the retina sensitive to color. Located primarily in the fovea.
Confounds: Factors that undermine the ability to draw causal inferences from an experiment.
Conscientiousness: A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be careful, organized, hardworking, and to follow rules.
Consciousness: Consciousness: the awareness or deliberate perception of a stimulus
Consolidation: The process occurring after encoding that is believed to stabilize memory traces.
Context: Stimuli that are in the background whenever learning occurs. For instance, the Skinner box or room in which learning takes place is the classic example of a context. However, “context” can also be provided by internal stimuli, such as the sensory effects of drugs (e.g., being under the influence of alcohol has stimulus properties that provide a context) and mood states (e.g., being happy or sad). It can also be provided by a specific period in time—the passage of time is sometimes said to change the “temporal context.”
Continuous distributions: Characteristics can go from low to high, with all different intermediate values possible. One does not simply have the trait or not have it, but can possess varying amounts of it.
Contralateral: Literally “opposite side”; used to refer to the fact that the two hemispheres of the brain process sensory information and motor commands for the opposite side of the body (e.g., the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body).
Corpus Callosum: The thick bundle of nerve cells that connect the two hemispheres of the brain and allow them to communicate.
Correlation: Measures the association between two variables, or how they go together.
Cue overload principle: The principle stating that the more memories that are associated to a particular retrieval cue, the less effective the cue will be in prompting retrieval of any one memory.
Cues: Cues: a stimulus that has a particular significance to the perceiver (e.g., a sight or a sound that has special relevance to the person who saw or heard it)
Dark adaptation: Adjustment of eye to low levels of light.
Delusions: False beliefs that are often fixed, hard to change even in the presence of conflicting information, and often culturally influenced in their content.
Dendrites: Part of a neuron that extends away from the cell body and is the main input to the neuron.
Dependent variable: The variable the researcher measures but does not manipulate in an experiment.
Depressants: Depressants: a class of drugs that slow down the body’s physiological and mental processes.
Diagnostic criteria: The specific criteria used to determine whether an individual has a specific type of psychiatric disorder. Commonly used diagnostic criteria are included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, 5th Edition (DSM-5) and the Internal Classification of Disorders, Version 9 (ICD-9).
Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT): A treatment often used for borderline personality disorder that incorporates both cognitive-behavioral and mindfulness elements.
Dialectical worldview: A perspective in DBT that emphasizes the joint importance of change and acceptance.
Dichotic listening: A task in which different audio streams are presented to each ear. Typically, people are asked to monitor one stream while ignoring the other.
Differential threshold (or difference threshold): The smallest difference needed in order to differentiate two stimuli. (See Just Noticeable Difference (JND))
Diffuse Optical Imaging (DOI): A neuroimaging technique that infers brain activity by measuring changes in light as it is passed through the skull and surface of the brain.
Discriminative stimulus: In operant conditioning, a stimulus that signals whether the response will be reinforced. It is said to “set the occasion” for the operant response.
Disorganized behavior: Behavior or dress that is outside the norm for almost all subcultures. This would include odd dress, odd makeup (e.g., lipstick outlining a mouth for 1 inch), or unusual rituals (e.g., repetitive hand gestures).
Disorganized speech: Speech that is difficult to follow, either because answers do not clearly follow questions or because one sentence does not logically follow from another.
Dissociation: Dissociation: the heightened focus on one stimulus or thought such that many other things around you are ignored; a disconnect between one’s awareness of their environment and the one object the person is focusing on
Distinctiveness: The principle that unusual events (in a context of similar events) will be recalled and recognized better than uniform (nondistinctive) events.
Dopamine: A neurotransmitter in the brain that is thought to play an important role in regulating the function of other neurotransmitters.
Dorsal pathway: Pathway of visual processing. The “where” pathway.
Early adversity: Single or multiple acute or chronic stressful events, which may be biological or psychological in nature (e.g., poverty, abuse, childhood illness or injury), occurring during childhood and resulting in a biological and/or psychological stress response.
Electroencephalography (EEG): A neuroimaging technique that measures electrical brain activity via multiple electrodes on the scalp.
Empirical methods: Approaches to inquiry that are tied to actual measurement and observation.
Encoding: The initial experience of perceiving and learning events.
Encoding specificity principle: The hypothesis that a retrieval cue will be effective to the extent that information encoded from the cue overlaps or matches information in the engram or memory trace.
Engrams: A term indicating the change in the nervous system representing an event; also, memory trace.
Episodic memory: The ability to learn and retrieve new information or episodes in one’s life.
Episodic memory: Memory for events in a particular time and place.
Ethics: Professional guidelines that offer researchers a template for making decisions that protect research participants from potential harm and that help steer scientists away from conflicts of interest or other situations that might compromise the integrity of their research.
Euphoria: Euphoria: an intense feeling of pleasure, excitement or happiness.
Experimenter expectations: When the experimenter’s expectations influence the outcome of a study.
Exposure therapy: A form of intervention in which the patient engages with a problematic (usually feared) situation without avoidance or escape.
External cues: Stimuli in the outside world that serve as triggers for anxiety or as reminders of past traumatic events.
Extinction: Decrease in the strength of a learned behavior that occurs when the conditioned stimulus is presented without the unconditioned stimulus (in classical conditioning) or when the behavior is no longer reinforced (in instrumental conditioning). The term describes both the procedure (the US or reinforcer is no longer presented) as well as the result of the procedure (the learned response declines). Behaviors that have been reduced in strength through extinction are said to be “extinguished.”
Extraversion: A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be sociable, outgoing, active, and assertive.
Facets: Broad personality traits can be broken down into narrower facets or aspects of the trait. For example, extraversion has several facets, such as sociability, dominance, risk-taking and so forth.
Factor analysis: A statistical technique for grouping similar things together according to how highly they are associated.
False memories: Memory for an event that never actually occurred, implanted by experimental manipulation or other means.
Fear conditioning: A type of classical or Pavlovian conditioning in which the conditioned stimulus (CS) is associated with an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US), such as a foot shock. As a consequence of learning, the CS comes to evoke fear. The phenomenon is thought to be involved in the development of anxiety disorders in humans.
Fight or flight response: A biological reaction to alarming stressors that prepares the body to resist or escape a threat.
Five-Factor Model: (also called the Big Five) The Five-Factor Model is a widely accepted model of personality traits. Advocates of the model believe that much of the variability in people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can be summarized with five broad traits. These five traits are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
Flashback: Sudden, intense re-experiencing of a previous event, usually trauma-related.
Flashbulb memory: Vivid personal memories of receiving the news of some momentous (and usually emotional) event.
Flat affect: A reduction in the display of emotions through facial expressions, gestures, and speech intonation.
Flavor: The combination of smell and taste.
Flexible Correction Model: Flexible Correction Model: the ability for people to correct or change their beliefs and evaluations if they believe these judgments have been biased (e.g., if someone realizes they only thought their day was great because it was sunny, they may revise their evaluation of the day to account for this “biasing” influence of the weather)
Foils: Any member of a lineup (whether live or photograph) other than the suspect.
Framing: The bias to be systematically affected by the way in which information is presented, while holding the objective information constant.
Free association: In psychodynamic therapy, a process in which the patient reports all thoughts that come to mind without censorship, and these thoughts are interpreted by the therapist.
Frontal Lobe: The front most (anterior) part of the cerebrum; anterior to the central sulcus and responsible for motor output and planning, language, judgment, and decision-making.
Functional capacity: The ability to engage in self-care (cook, clean, bathe), work, attend school, and/or engage in social relationships.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI): Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): A neuroimaging technique that infers brain activity by measuring changes in oxygen levels in the blood.
G: Short for “general factor” and is often used to be synonymous with intelligence itself.
Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD): Excessive worry about everyday things that is at a level that is out of proportion to the specific causes of worry.
Goal-directed behavior: Instrumental behavior that is influenced by the animal’s knowledge of the association between the behavior and its consequence and the current value of the consequence. Sensitive to the reinforcer devaluation effect.
Grandiosity: Inflated self-esteem or an exaggerated sense of self-importance and self-worth (e.g., believing one has special powers or superior abilities).
Gustation: Ability to process gustatory stimuli. Also called taste.
Habit: Instrumental behavior that occurs automatically in the presence of a stimulus and is no longer influenced by the animal’s knowledge of the value of the reinforcer. Insensitive to the reinforcer devaluation effect.
Hallucinations: Perceptual experiences that occur even when there is no stimulus in the outside world generating the experiences. They can be auditory, visual, olfactory (smell), gustatory (taste), or somatic (touch).
Hallucinogens: Hallucinogens: substances that, when ingested, alter a person’s perceptions, often by creating hallucinations that are not real or distorting their perceptions of time.
Heuristics: cognitive (or thinking) strategies that simplify decision making by using mental short-cuts
HEXACO model: The HEXACO model is an alternative to the Five-Factor Model. The HEXACO model includes six traits, five of which are variants of the traits included in the Big Five (Emotionality [E], Extraversion [X], Agreeableness [A], Conscientiousness [C], and Openness [O]). The sixth factor, Honesty-Humility [H], is unique to this model.
Hypersomnia: Excessive daytime sleepiness, including difficulty staying awake or napping, or prolonged sleep episodes.
Hypnosis: Hypnosis: the state of consciousness whereby a person is highly responsive to the suggestions of another; this state usually involves a dissociation with one’s environment and an intense focus on a single stimulus, which is usually accompanied by a sense of relaxation
Hypnotherapy: Hypnotherapy: The use of hypnotic techniques such as relaxation and suggestion to help engineer desirable change such as lower pain or quitting smoking.
Hypotheses: A logical idea that can be tested.
Implicit Associations Test: Implicit Associations Test (IAT): A computer reaction time test that measures a person’s automatic associations with concepts. For instance, the IAT could be used to measure how quickly a person makes positive or negative evaluations of members of various ethnic groups.
Inattentional blindness: The failure to notice a fully visible, but unexpected, object or event when attention is devoted to something else.
Inattentional deafness: The auditory analog of inattentional blindness. People fail to notice an unexpected sound or voice when attention is devoted to other aspects of a scene.
Independent: Two characteristics or traits are separate from one another-- a person can be high on one and low on the other, or vice-versa. Some correlated traits are relatively independent in that although there is a tendency for a person high on one to also be high on the other, this is not always the case.
Independent variable: The variable the researcher manipulates and controls in an experiment.
Instrumental conditioning: Process in which animals learn about the relationship between their behaviors and their consequences. Also known as operant conditioning.
Integrative or eclectic psychotherapy: Also called integrative psychotherapy, this term refers to approaches combining multiple orientations (e.g., CBT with psychoanalytic elements).
Integrative or eclectic psychotherapy: Also called integrative psychotherapy, this term refers to approaches combining multiple orientations (e.g., CBT with psychoanalytic elements).
Intelligence: An individual’s cognitive capability. This includes the ability to acquire, process, recall and apply information.
Internal bodily or somatic cues: Physical sensations that serve as triggers for anxiety or as reminders of past traumatic events.
Interoceptive avoidance: Avoidance of situations or activities that produce sensations of physical arousal similar to those occurring during a panic attack or intense fear response.
IQ: Short for “intelligence quotient.” This is a score, typically obtained from a widely used measure of intelligence that is meant to rank a person’s intellectual ability against that of others.
Jet Lag: Jet Lag: The state of being fatigued and/or having difficulty adjusting to a new time zone after traveling a long distance (across multiple time zones).
Just noticeable difference (JND): The smallest difference needed in order to differentiate two stimuli. (see Differential Threshold)
Law of effect: The idea that instrumental or operant responses are influenced by their effects. Responses that are followed by a pleasant state of affairs will be strengthened and those that are followed by discomfort will be weakened. Nowadays, the term refers to the idea that operant or instrumental behaviors are lawfully controlled by their consequences.
Lexical hypothesis: The lexical hypothesis is the idea that the most important differences between people will be encoded in the language that we use to describe people. Therefore, if we want to know which personality traits are most important, we can look to the language that people use to describe themselves and others.
Light adaptation: Adjustment of eye to high levels of light.
Limbic System: Includes the subcortical structures of the amygdala and hippocampal formation as well as some cortical structures; responsible for aversion and gratification.
Longitudinal study: A study that follows the same group of individuals over time.
Magnetic resonance imaging: A set of techniques that uses strong magnets to measure either the structure of the brain (e.g., gray matter and white matter) or how the brain functions when a person performs cognitive tasks (e.g., working memory or episodic memory) or other types of tasks.
Mechanoreceptors: Mechanical sensory receptors in the skin that response to tactile stimulation.
Melatonin: Melatonin: A hormone associated with increased drowsiness and sleep.
Memory traces: A term indicating the change in the nervous system representing an event.
Mindfulness: Mindfulness: a state of heightened focus on the thoughts passing through one’s head, as well as a more controlled evaluation of those thoughts (e.g., do you reject or support the thoughts you’re having?)
Mindfulness: A process that reflects a nonjudgmental, yet attentive, mental state.
Mindfulness-based therapy: A form of psychotherapy grounded in mindfulness theory and practice, often involving meditation, yoga, body scan, and other features of mindfulness exercises.
Misinformation effect: When erroneous information occurring after an event is remembered as having been part of the original event.
Misinformation effect: A memory error caused by exposure to incorrect information between the original event (e.g., a crime) and later memory test (e.g., an interview, lineup, or day in court).
Mnemonic devices: A strategy for remembering large amounts of information, usually involving imaging events occurring on a journey or with some other set of memorized cues.
Mock witnesses: A research subject who plays the part of a witness in a study.
Multimodal perception: The effects that concurrent stimulation in more than one sensory modality has on the perception of events and objects in the world.
Myelin Sheath: Fatty tissue, that insulates the axons of the neurons; myelin is necessary for normal conduction of electrical impulses among neurons.
Nervous System: The body’s network for electrochemical communication. This system includes all the nerves cells in the body.
Neurodevelopmental: Processes that influence how the brain develops either in utero or as the child is growing up.
Neurons: Individual brain cells
Neuroticism: A personality trait that reflects the tendency to be interpersonally sensitive and the tendency to experience negative emotions like anxiety, fear, sadness, and anger.
Neurotransmitters: Chemical substance released by the presynaptic terminal button that acts on the postsynaptic cell.
Nociception: Our ability to sense pain.
Norm: Assessments are given to a representative sample of a population to determine the range of scores for that population. These “norms” are then used to place an individual who takes that assessment on a range of scores in which he or she is compared to the population at large.
Observational learning: Learning by observing the behavior of others.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD): A disorder characterized by the desire to engage in certain behaviors excessively or compulsively in hopes of reducing anxiety. Behaviors include things such as cleaning, repeatedly opening and closing doors, hoarding, and obsessing over certain thoughts.
Occipital Lobe: The back most (posterior) part of the cerebrum; involved in vision.
Odorants: Chemicals transduced by olfactory receptors.
Olfaction: Ability to process olfactory stimuli. Also called smell.
Olfactory epithelium: Organ containing olfactory receptors.
Openness to Experience: A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to seek out and to appreciate new things, including thoughts, feelings, values, and experiences.
Operant: A behavior that is controlled by its consequences. The simplest example is the rat’s lever-pressing, which is controlled by the presentation of the reinforcer.
Operant conditioning: See instrumental conditioning.
Operational definitions: How researchers specifically measure a concept.
Opponent-process theory: Theory proposing color vision as influenced by cells responsive to pairs of colors.
Ossicles: A collection of three small bones in the middle ear that vibrate against the tympanic membrane.
Overconfident: The bias to have greater confidence in your judgment than is warranted based on a rational assessment.
Panic disorder (PD): A condition marked by regular strong panic attacks, and which may include significant levels of worry about future attacks.
Parietal Lobe: The part of the cerebrum between the frontal and occipital lobes; involved in bodily sensations, visual attention, and integrating the senses.
Participant demand: When participants behave in a way that they think the experimenter wants them to behave.
Pavlovian conditioning: See classical conditioning.
Perception: The psychological process of interpreting sensory information.
Peripheral Nervous System: All of the nerve cells that connect the central nervous system to all the other parts of the body.
Personality: Enduring predispositions that characterize a person, such as styles of thought, feelings and behavior.
Personality traits: Enduring dispositions in behavior that show differences across individuals, and which tend to characterize the person across varying types of situations.
Person-centered therapy: A therapeutic approach focused on creating a supportive environment for self-discovery.
Person-situation debate: The person-situation debate is a historical debate about the relative power of personality traits as compared to situational influences on behavior. The situationist critique, which started the person-situation debate, suggested that people overestimate the extent to which personality traits are consistent across situations.
Phantom limb: The perception that a missing limb still exists.
Phantom limb pain: Pain in a limb that no longer exists.
Photo spreads: A selection of normally small photographs of faces given to a witness for the purpose of identifying a perpetrator.
Pinna: Outermost portion of the ear.
Placebo effect: When receiving special treatment or something new affects human behavior.
Positron emission tomography: A technique that uses radio-labelled ligands to measure the distribution of different neurotransmitter receptors in the brain or to measure how much of a certain type of neurotransmitter is released when a person is given a specific type of drug or does a particularly cognitive task.
Positron Emission Tomography (PET): A neuroimaging technique that measures brain activity by detecting the presence of a radioactive substance in the brain that is initially injected into the bloodstream and then pulled in by active brain tissue.
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD): A sense of intense fear, triggered by memories of a past traumatic event, that another traumatic event might occur. PTSD may include feelings of isolation and emotional numbing.
Prediction error: When the outcome of a conditioning trial is different from that which is predicted by the conditioned stimuli that are present on the trial (i.e., when the US is surprising). Prediction error is necessary to create Pavlovian conditioning (and associative learning generally). As learning occurs over repeated conditioning trials, the conditioned stimulus increasingly predicts the unconditioned stimulus, and prediction error declines. Conditioning works to correct or reduce prediction error.
Preparedness: The idea that an organism’s evolutionary history can make it easy to learn a particular association. Because of preparedness, you are more likely to associate the taste of tequila, and not the circumstances surrounding drinking it, with getting sick. Similarly, humans are more likely to associate images of spiders and snakes than flowers and mushrooms with aversive outcomes like shocks.
Primary auditory cortex: Area of the cortex involved in processing auditory stimuli.
Primary somatosensory cortex: Area of the cortex involved in processing somatosensory stimuli.
Primary visual cortex: Area of the cortex involved in processing visual stimuli.
Priming: Priming: the activation of certain thoughts or feelings that make them easier to think of and act upon
Principle of inverse effectiveness: The finding that, in general, for a multimodal stimulus, if the response to each unimodal component (on its own) is weak, then the opportunity for multisensory enhancement is very large. However, if one component—by itself—is sufficient to evoke a strong response, then the effect on the response gained by simultaneously processing the other components of the stimulus will be relatively small.
Processing speed: The speed with which an individual can perceive auditory or visual information and respond to it.
Psychoanalytic therapy: Sigmund Freud’s therapeutic approach focusing on resolving unconscious conflicts.
Psychodynamic therapy: Treatment applying psychoanalytic principles in a briefer, more individualized format.
Psychological vulnerabilities: Influences that our early experiences have on how we view the world.
Psychomotor agitation: Increased motor activity associated with restlessness, including physical actions (e.g., fidgeting, pacing, feet tapping, handwringing).
Psychomotor retardation: A slowing of physical activities in which routine activities (e.g., eating, brushing teeth) are performed in an unusually slow manner.
Psychopathology: Illnesses or disorders that involve psychological or psychiatric symptoms.
Punisher: A stimulus that decreases the strength of an operant behavior when it is made a consequence of the behavior.
Quantitative law of effect: A mathematical rule that states that the effectiveness of a reinforcer at strengthening an operant response depends on the amount of reinforcement earned for all alternative behaviors. A reinforcer is less effective if there is a lot of reinforcement in the environment for other behaviors.
Quasi-experimental design: An experiment that does not require random assignment to conditions.
Random assignment: Assigning participants to receive different conditions of an experiment by chance.
Reappraisal, or Cognitive restructuring: The process of identifying, evaluating, and changing maladaptive thoughts in psychotherapy.
Recoding: The ubiquitous process during learning of taking information in one form and converting it to another form, usually one more easily remembered.
Reinforced response: Following the process of operant conditioning, the strengthening of a response following either the delivery of a desired consequence (positive reinforcement) or escape from an aversive consequence.
Reinforcer: Any consequence of a behavior that strengthens the behavior or increases the likelihood that it will be performed it again.
Reinforcer devaluation effect: The finding that an animal will stop performing an instrumental response that once led to a reinforcer if the reinforcer is separately made aversive or undesirable.
Renewal effect: Recovery of an extinguished response that occurs when the context is changed after extinction. Especially strong when the change of context involves return to the context in which conditioning originally occurred. Can occur after extinction in either classical or instrumental conditioning.
Retina: Cell layer in the back of the eye containing photoreceptors.
Retrieval: The process of accessing stored information.
Retroactive interference: The phenomenon whereby events that occur after some particular event of interest will usually cause forgetting of the original event.
Rods: Photoreceptors of the retina sensitive to low levels of light. Located around the fovea.
SAD performance only: Social anxiety disorder which is limited to certain situations that the sufferer perceives as requiring some type of performance.
Schema: A mental representation or set of beliefs about something.
Schema (plural: schemata): A memory template, created through repeated exposure to a particular class of objects or events.
Selective listening: A method for studying selective attention in which people focus attention on one auditory stream of information while deliberately ignoring other auditory information.
Semantic memory: The more or less permanent store of knowledge that people have.
Sensation: The physical processing of environmental stimuli by the sense organs.
Sensory adaptation: Decrease in sensitivity of a receptor to a stimulus after constant stimulation.
Shape theory of olfaction: Theory proposing that odorants of different size and shape correspond to different smells.
Signal detection: Method for studying the ability to correctly identify sensory stimuli.
Social anxiety disorder (SAD): A condition marked by acute fear of social situations which lead to worry and diminished day to day functioning.
Social Learning Theory: The theory that people can learn new responses and behaviors by observing the behavior of others.
Social models: Authorities that are the targets for observation and who model behaviors.
Social zeitgeber: Zeitgeber is German for “time giver.” Social zeitgebers are environmental cues, such as meal times and interactions with other people, that entrain biological rhythms and thus sleep-wake cycle regularity.
Socioeconomic status (SES): A person’s economic and social position based on income, education, and occupation.
Soma: Cell body of a neuron that contains the nucleus and genetic information, and directs protein synthesis.
Somatosensation: Ability to sense touch, pain and temperature.
Somatotopic map: Organization of the primary somatosensory cortex maintaining a representation of the arrangement of the body.
Sound waves: Changes in air pressure. The physical stimulus for audition.
Spatial Resolution: A term that refers to how small the elements of an image are; high spatial resolution means the device or technique can resolve very small elements; in neuroscience it describes how small of a structure in the brain can be imaged.
Specific vulnerabilities: How our experiences lead us to focus and channel our anxiety.
Split-brain Patient: A patient who has had most or all of his or her corpus callosum severed.
Spontaneous recovery: Recovery of an extinguished response that occurs with the passage of time after extinction. Can occur after extinction in either classical or instrumental conditioning.
Standardize: Assessments that are given in the exact same manner to all people . With regards to intelligence tests standardized scores are individual scores that are computed to be referenced against normative scores for a population (see “norm”).
Stereotype threat: The phenomenon in which people are concerned that they will conform to a stereotype or that their performance does conform to that stereotype, especially in instances in which the stereotype is brought to their conscious awareness.
Stimulants: Stimulants: a class of drugs that speed up the body’s physiological and mental processes.
Stimulus control: When an operant behavior is controlled by a stimulus that precedes it.
Storage: The stage in the learning/memory process that bridges encoding and retrieval; the persistence of memory over time.
Suicidal ideation: Recurring thoughts about suicide, including considering or planning for suicide, or preoccupation with suicide.
Superadditive effect of multisensory integration: The finding that responses to multimodal stimuli are typically greater than the sum of the independent responses to each unimodal component if it were presented on its own.
Synapses: Junction between the presynaptic terminal button of one neuron and the dendrite, axon, or soma of another postsynaptic neuron.
Synaptic Gap: Also known as the synaptic cleft; the small space between the presynaptic terminal button and the postsynaptic dendritic spine, axon, or soma.
System 1: Our intuitive decision-making system, which is typically fast, automatic, effortless, implicit, and emotional.
System 2: Our more deliberative decision-making system, which is slower, conscious, effortful, explicit, and logical.
Systematic observation: The careful observation of the natural world with the aim of better understanding it. Observations provide the basic data that allow scientists to track, tally, or otherwise organize information about the natural world.
Tastants: Chemicals transduced by taste receptor cells.
Taste aversion learning: The phenomenon in which a taste is paired with sickness, and this causes the organism to reject—and dislike—that taste in the future.
Taste receptor cells: Receptors that transduce gustatory information.
Temporal Lobe: The part of the cerebrum in front of (anterior to) the occipital lobe and below the lateral fissure; involved in vision, auditory processing, memory, and integrating vision and audition.
Temporal Resolution: A term that refers to how small a unit of time can be measured; high temporal resolution means capable of resolving very small units of time; in neuroscience it describes how precisely in time a process can be measured in the brain.
Theories: Groups of closely related phenomena or observations.
Thought-action fusion: The tendency to overestimate the relationship between a thought and an action, such that one mistakenly believes a “bad” thought is the equivalent of a “bad” action.
Top-down processing: Experience influencing the perception of stimuli.
Trance States: Trance: a state of consciousness characterized by the experience of “out-of-body possession,” or an acute dissociation between one’s self and the current, physical environment surrounding them.
Transduction: The conversion of one form of energy into another.
Trichromatic theory: Theory proposing color vision as influenced by three different cones responding preferentially to red, green and blue.
Tympanic membrane: Thin, stretched membrane in the middle ear that vibrates in response to sound. Also called the eardrum.
Unconditional positive regard: In person-centered therapy, an attitude of warmth, empathy and acceptance adopted by the therapist in order to foster feelings of inherent worth in the patient.
Unconditioned response (UR): In classical conditioning, an innate response that is elicited by a stimulus before (or in the absence of) conditioning.
Unconditioned stimulus (US): In classical conditioning, the stimulus that elicits the response before conditioning occurs.
Ventral pathway: Pathway of visual processing. The “what” pathway.
Vestibular system: Parts of the inner ear involved in balance.
Vicarious reinforcement: Learning that occurs by observing the reinforcement or punishment of another person.
Weber’s law: States that just noticeable difference is proportional to the magnitude of the initial stimulus.
Working memory: The ability to maintain information over a short period of time, such as 30 seconds or less.