Psychology Chapter 5 Quiz

Chapter 1: Psychology Yesterday and Today

• Psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud believed behaviors stem from unconscious desires and conflicts. Psychoanalysis is a form of therapy aimed at resolving these conflicts.
• Behaviorism: This approach emphasizes observable behaviors, focusing on research findings from animal studies. Edward Thorndike and Ivan Pavlov contributed to this perspective, with Pavlov's experiments on classical conditioning demonstrating the association of stimuli. John B. Watson conducted the "Little Albert" experiment illustrating classical conditioning in humans. B.F. Skinner developed operant conditioning, which is learning through reinforcement (positive and negative). Albert Bandura described learning through social observation, especially in children.
• Humanistic Psychology: This perspective highlights human capacity for growth, personal choice, and unique qualities.
• Cognitive Psychology: Ulric Neisser coined the term cognitive psychology to refer to the study of how people process information and think. Cognitive psychologists initially compared the human mind to a computer.

Chapter 2: Psychology as a Science

• Correlation Analyses: Psychologists analyze correlations to understand relationships between variables.
• Positive correlation: When one variable increases, the other tends to increase.
• Negative correlation: When one variable increases, the other tends to decrease.
• No correlation: No apparent relationship between variables.
• Correlation Coefficient (r): A numerical value that represents the strength and direction of a correlation.
• +/- 1 indicates perfect correlations
• 0 indicates no correlation
• Correlation Does Not Imply Causation: Correlation methods identify relationships but do not determine cause-and-effect relationships.
• Experimental Analyses: To establish cause and effect, experiments manipulate variables and observe their effects.

Post-Analyses: Publishing and Building a Theory

• Research Ethics Boards (REBs): Ethical oversight committees that protect participants' rights in psychological studies. REBs review research protocols to ensure ethical conduct.
• Ethical Considerations for Animal Research: Studies using animals must adhere to ethical guidelines, such as minimizing harm to the animals and using the fewest animals possible.
• Statistical Significance (p-value): A measure of the probability that research results are due to chance alone. A p-value less than 0.05 usually denotes statistically significant results in psychology.

Chapter 4: Developmental Psychology

• Research Methods:
• Cross-sectional research: Compares different age groups at one point in time.
• Longitudinal research: Studies the same group over an extended period.
• Cohort-sequential design: Combines cross-sectional and longitudinal methods to address cohort effects. This gives a better understanding of the development process.

Prenatal Development and Heredity

• Prenatal Development: The period of development from conception to birth, which includes the germinal, embryonic, and fetal stages.
• Genes: Building blocks of inheritance in humans. The combination of inherited genes (genotype) determines the observable characteristics of the individual (phenotype).
• Teratogens: External factors (substances or diseases) that can negatively influence prenatal development.

Physical Development

• Brain Development: Includes the proliferation and pruning of synapses and the growth of physical brain structures. Synaptic pruning is the loss of unnecessary connections between neurons.
• Growth Trends: Cephalocaudal (head-to-toe) development and proximodistal (center-outward) development are the basic growth patterns.

Motor Development and the Senses

• Motor Milestones: Developmental sequences regarding physical abilities.
• Sensory Development: Senses develop and mature through time, and different senses mature at different rates.

Cognitive Development

• Piaget's Theory: A theory which suggests stages of cognitive development (sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, formal operational).
• Information processing theory: An alternative perspective to Piaget's theory, focusing on how individuals process, store, and retrieve information throughout their lifetime.

Social and Emotional Development

• Temperament: Inherited behavioural tendencies that influence responses in different settings.
• Erikson's Stages: Stages of psychosocial development, including infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. The stages have potentially positive and/ or negative outcomes.

Adolescence

• Physical Development: Puberty and the physical changes associated with it.
• Cognitive Development: Formal operational thought; thinking more abstractly, hypothetically, and deductively.
• Moral Development: Kohlberg's stages of moral development are based on moral reasoning.

Adulthood

• Physical Changes: Physical decline, physiological changes (e.g. menopause).
• Social and Emotional Development: Erikson's stages for adulthood focus on intimacy, generativity (concern for future generations, and integrity).

Chapter 5: Sensation and Perception

• Sensation: The process of receiving stimuli through sensory receptors.
• Perception: The process of organizing and interpreting sensory information.
• Sensory Receptors: Specialized cells that convert stimuli into neural impulses.
• Threshold of Sensation: Absolute threshold (smallest detectable stimulus) and difference threshold (minimum detectable difference in stimulus).
• Sensory Adaptation: Reduced response to a constant stimulus.
• Chemical Senses (smell and taste): Stimuli are chemicals in the air or food; Receptor cells trigger neural impulses processed in the brain.
• Somatosensory system (touch, pressure, temperature, pain): Different receptors respond to different kinds of stimulation.
• The Auditory Sense: Sound waves are vibrations in the air that are perceived as sounds.
• The Visual Sense: Light waves, transformed into neural impulses in the retina.
• Gestalt Laws of Perception: Describe how we group and organize elements into patterns (figure and ground, proximity, similarity, continuity, closure).
• Depth Perception: How we perceive distance and three-dimensional information. Binocular cues and monocular cues contribute to depth perception.
• Illusions: Misinterpretations of sensory information.