AP Psych 1st Semester Vocabulary

A mental predisposition to perceive one thing and not another

Underestimating the impact of the situation& overestimating the impact of personal disposition

Tendency for people who have 1st agreed to a small request to comply later w/ a larger request

The division of the automatic nervous system that calms the body, conserving its energy

Early school of psychology that used introspection to explore the elements of the human mind

Repeating the essence of a research study to check for reliability & validity your hypothesis

Loss of self-awareness & self-restraint occurring in group situations (arousal & anonymity)

The minimum stimulation needed to detect a particular stimulus 50 percent of the time

Sleep disorder: temporary cessations of breath during sleep & consequent momentary reawakenings

Neurons that carry outgoing info. from the central nervous system to the muscles & glands

Drugs that stimulate neural activity, causing speeded-up body functions, energy & mood changes

Principle that, to be perceived as different, two stimuli must differ by a constant minimum %

School of psychology that focused on how organism adapt, survive, and flourish

According to Freud, the remembered story line of a dream

Knowledge comes from experience via the senses, & science flourishes through observation

The activation, often unconsciously, of particular associations in memory

The sensory & motor neurons that connect the central nervous system to the rest of the body

Split in consciousness, which allows thoughts & behaviors to occur simultaneously with others

Tendency to believe, after learning the outcome, that one would have foreseen it

The proportion of variation among individuals that we can attribute to genes

Analysis that begins w/sense receptors and works up to brain’s integration of sensory info.

The experimental factor in psychology, the behavior or mental process – that is being measured

Binocular cue for depth – the greater the difference between two images, the closer the object

The tendency for vision to dominate the other senses

Enhancement of a group’s prevailing attitudes through discussion within the group

Influence resulting from one’s willingness to accept other’s opinions about reality

A person’s characteristic emotional reactivity and intensity

The processing of information into the memory system – for example, by extracting meaning