Copy of `APA - Psychology terms`

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APA - Psychology terms Category: Health and Medicine > Psychological and medical terms Date & country: 31/03/2017, USA Words: 638

Crystallized intelligence
The facet of intelligence involving the knowledge a person has already acquired and the ability to access that knowledge; measures by vocabulary, arithmetic, and general information tests.

Counterconditioning
A technique used in therapy to substitute a new response for a maladaptive one by means of conditioning procedures.

Countertransference
Circumstances in which a psychoanalyst develops personal feelings about a client because of perceived similarity of the client to significant people in the therapist's life.

Covariation principle
A theory that suggests that people attribute a behavior to a causal factor if that factor was present whenever the behavior occurred but was absent whenever it did not occur.

Creativity
The ability to generate ideas or products that are both novel and appropriate to the circumstances.

Correlation coefficient
(r) A statistic that indicates the degree of relationship between two variables.

Correlational methods
Research methodologies that determine to what extent two variables, traits, or attributes are related.

Counseling psychologist
Psychologist who specializes in providing guidance in areas such as vocational selection, school problems, drug abuse, and marital conflict.

Corpus callosum
The mass of nerve fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the cerebrum.

Coping
The process of dealing with internal or external demands that are perceived to be threatening or overwhelming.

Convergence
The degree to which the eyes turn inward to fixate on an object.

Control procedures
Consistent procedures for giving instructions, scoring responses, and holding all other variables constant except those being systematically varied.

Controlled processes
Processes that require attention; it is often difficult to carry out more than one controlled process at a time.

Context of discovery
The initial phase of research, in which observations, beliefs, information, and general knowledge lead to a new idea or a different way of thinking about some phenomenon.

Context of justification
The research phase in which evidence is brought to bear on hypotheses.

Contextual distinctiveness
The assumption that the serial position effect can be altered by the context and the distinctiveness of the experience being recalled.

Contingency management
A general treatment strategy involving changing behavior by modifying its consequences.

Contact hypothesis
The idea that direct contact between hostile groups alone will reduce prejudice.

Consistency paradox
The observation that personality ratings across time and among different observers are consistent, while behavior ratings across situations are not consistent.

Contact comfort
Comfort derived from an infant's physical contact with the mother or caregiver.

Confounding variable
A stimulus other than the variable an experimenter explicitly introduces into a research setting that affects a participant's behavior.

Consciousness
A state of awareness of internal events and of the external environment.

Consensual validation
The mutual affirmation of conscious views of reality.

Conservation
According to Piaget, the understanding that physical properties do not change when nothing is added or taken away, even though appearances may change.

Conformity
The tendency for people to adopt the behaviors, attitudes, and values of other members of a reference group.

Cones
Photoreceptors concentrated in the center of the retina that are responsible for visual experience under normal viewing conditions and for all experiences of color.

Conditioned response
(CR) In classical conditioning, a response elicited by some previously neutral stimulus that occurs as a result of pairing the neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus.

Conditioned stimulus
(CS) In classical conditioning, a previously neutral stimulus that comes to elicit a conditioned response.

Conditioning
The ways in which events, stimuli, and behavior become associated with one another.

Conditioned reinforcers
In classical conditioning, formerly neutral stimuli that have become reinforcers.

Compliance
A change in behavior consistent with a communication source's direct requests.

Concepts
Mental representations of kinds or categories of items or ideas.

Cognitive therapy
A type of psychotherapeutic treatment that attempts to change feelings and behaviors by changing the way a client thinks about or perceives significant life experiences.

Collective unconscious
The part of an individual's unconscious that is inherited, evolutionarily developed, and common to all members of the species.

Comorbidity
The experience of more than one disorder at the same time.

Complementary colors
Colors opposite each other on the color circle; when additively mixed, they create the sensation of white light.

Cognitive science
The interdisciplinary field of study of the approach systems and processes that manipulate information.

Cognitive psychology
The study of higher mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, and thinking.

Cognitive map
A mental representation of physical space.

Cognitive perspective
The perspective on psychology that stresses human thought and the processes of knowing, such as attending, thinking, remembering, expecting, solving problems, fantasizing, and consciousness.

Cognitive processes
Higher mental processes, such as perception, memory, language, problem solving, and abstract thinking.

Cognitive behavior modification
A therapeutic approach that combines the cognitive emphasis on the role of thoughts and attitudes influencing motivations and response with the behavioral emphasis on changing performance through modification of reinforcement contingencies.

Cognitive dissonance
The theory that the tension-producing effects of incongruous cognitions motivate individuals to reduce such tension.

Cognitive appraisal theory of emotion
A theory stating that the experience of emotion is the joint effect of physiological arousal and cognitive appraisal, which serves to determine how an ambiguous inner state of arousal will be labeled.

Cognition
Processes of knowing, including attending, remembering, and reasoning; also the content of the processes, such as concepts and memories.

Cognitive appraisal
With respect to emotions, the process through which physiological arousal is interpreted with respect to circumstances in the particular setting in which it is being experienced; also, the recognition and evaluation of a stressor to assess the demand, the size of the threat, the resources available for dealing with it, and appropriate coping strategies.

Closure
A perceptual organizing process that leads individuals to see incomplete figures as complete.

Cognitive development
The development of processes of knowing, including imagining, perceiving, reasoning, and problem solving.

Clinical social worker
A mental health professional whose specialized training prepares him or her to consider the social context of people's problems.

Clinical psychologist
An individual who has earned a doctorate in psychology and whose training is in the assessment and treatment of psychological problems.

Client-centered therapy
A humanistic approach to treatment that emphasizes the healthy psychological growth of the individual; based on the assumption that all people share the basic tendency of human nature toward self-actualization.

Clinical ecology
A field of psychology that relates disorders such as anxiety and depression to environmental irritants and sources of trauma.

Circadian rhythm
A consistent pattern of cyclical body activities, usually lasting 24 to 25 hours and determined by an internal biological clock.

Classical conditioning
A type of learning in which a behavior (conditioned response) comes to be elicited by a stimulus (conditioned stimulus) that has acquired its power through an association with a biologically significant stimulus (unconditioned stimulus).

Client
The term used by clinicians who think of psychological disorders as problems in living, and not as mental illnesses, to describe those being treated.

Chronic stress
A continuous state of arousal in which an individual perceives demands as greater than the inner and outer resources available for dealing with them.

Chronological age
The number of months or years since an individual's birth.

Chunking
The process of taking single items of information and recoding them on the basis of similarity or some other organizing principle.

Child-directed speech
A special form of speech with an exaggerated and high-pitched intonation that adults use to speak to infants and young children.

Cerebrum
The region of the brain that regulates higher cognitive and emotional functions.

Cerebellum
The region of the brain attached to the brain stem that controls motor coordination, posture, and balance as well as the ability to learn control of body movements.

Cerebral cortex
The outer surface of the cerebrum.

Cerebral hemispheres
The two halves of the cerebrum, connected by the corpus callosum.

Case study
Intensive observation of a particular individual or small group of individuals.

Catharsis
The process of expressing strongly felt but usually repressed emotions.

Central nervous system
(CNS) The part of the nervous system consisting of the brain and spinal cord.

Centration
A thought pattern common during the beginning of the preoperational stage of cognitive development; characterized by the child's inability to take more than one perceptual factor into account at the same time.

Bystander intervention
Willingness to assist a person in need of help.

Brain stem
The brain structure that regulates the body's basic life processes.

Brightness
The dimension of color space that captures the intensity of light.

Broca's area
The region of the brain that translates thoughts into speech or sign.

Bulimia nervosa
An eating disorder characterized by binge eating followed by measures to purge the body of the excess calories.

Bottom-up processing
Perceptual analyses based on the sensory data available in the environment; results of analyses are passed upward toward more abstract representations.

Body image
The subjective experience of the appearance of one's body.

Bipolar disorder
A mood disorder characterized by alternating periods of depression and mania.

Blocking
A phenomenon in which an organism does not learn a new stimulus that signals an unconditioned stimulus, because the new stimulus is presented simultaneously with a stimulus that is already effective as a signal.

Biomedical therapies
Treatments for psychological disorders that alter brain functioning with chemical or physical interventions such as drug therapy, surgery, or electroconvulsive therapy.

Biopsychosocial model
A model of health and illness that suggests that links among the nervous system, the immune system, behavioral styles, cognitive processing, and environmental factors can put people at risk for illness.

Bipolar cells
Nerve cells in the visual system that combine impulses from many receptors and transmit the results to ganglion cells.

Biofeedback
A self-regulatory technique by which an individual acquires voluntary control over nonconscious biological processes.

Biological constraints on learning
Any limitations on an organism's capacity to learn that are caused by the inherited sensory, response, or cognitive capabilities of members of a given species.

Biological perspective
The approach to identifying causes of behavior that focuses on the functioning of the genes, the brain, the nervous system, and the endocrine system.

Between-subjects design
A research design in which different groups of participants are randomly assigned to experimental conditions or to control conditions.

Belief-bias effect
A situation that occurs when a person's prior knowledge, attitudes, or values distort the reasoning process by influencing the person to accept invalid arguments.

Behavioral rehearsal
Procedures used to establish and strengthen basic skills; as used in social-skills training programs, requires the client to rehearse a desirable behavior sequence mentally.

Behaviorism
A scientific approach that limits the study of psychology to measurable or observable behavior.

Behaviorist perspective
The psychological perspective primarily concerned with observable behavior that can be objectively recorded and with the relationships of observable behavior to environmental stimuli.

Behavior modification
The systematic use of principles of learning to increase the frequency of desired behaviors and/or decrease the frequency of problem behaviors.

Behavior therapy
See behavior modification.

Behavioral confirmation
The process by which people behave in ways that elicit from others specific expected reactions and then use those reactions to confirm their beliefs.

Behavioral data
Observational reports about the behavior of organisms and the conditions under which the behavior occurs or changes.

Behavioral measures
Overt actions and reactions that are observed and recorded, exclusive of self-reported behavior.

Behavior analysis
The area of psychology that focuses on the environmental determinants of learning and behavior.

Axon
The extended fiber of a neuron through which nerve impulses travel from the soma to the terminal buttons.

Basic level
The level of categorization that can be retrieved from memory most quickly and used most efficiently.

Basilar membrane
A membrane in the cochlea that, when set into motion, stimulates hair cells that produce the neural effects of auditory stimulation.

Behavior
The actions by which an organism adjusts to its environment.

Autonomic nervous system
(ANS) The subdivision of the peripheral nervous system that controls the body's involuntary motor responses by connecting the sensory receptors to the central nervous system (CNS) and the CNS to the smooth muscle, cardiac muscle, and glands.

Availability heuristic
A judgment based on the information readily available in memory.

Aversion therapy
A type of behavioral therapy used to treat individuals attracted to harmful stimuli; an attractive stimulus is paired with a noxious stimulus in order to elicit a negative reaction to the target stimulus.