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

Auditory cortex
The area of the temporal lobes that receives and processes auditory information.

Auditory nerve
The nerve that carries impulses from the cochlea to the cochlear nucleus of the brain.

Automatic processes
Processes that do not require attention; they can often be performed along with other tasks without interference.

Audience design
The process of shaping a message depending on the audience for which it is intended.

Attributions
Judgments about the causes of outcomes.

Association cortex
The parts of the cerebral cortex in which many high-level brain processes occur.

Attention
A state of focused awareness on a subset of the available perceptual information.

Attitude
The learned, relatively stable tendency to respond to people, concepts, and events in an evaluative way.

Attribution theory
A social-cognitive approach to describing the ways the social perceiver uses information to generate causal explanations.

Apparent motion
A movement illusion in which one or more stationary lights going on and off in succession are perceived as a single moving light; the simplest form of apparent motion is the phi phenomenon.

Archetype
A universal, inherited, primitive, and symbolic representation of a particular experience or object.

Assimilation
According to Piaget, the process whereby new cognitive elements are fitted in with old elements or modified to fit more easily; this process works in tandem with accommodation.

Anxiety
An intense emotional response caused by the preconscious recognition that a repressed conflict is about to emerge into consciousness.

Anxiety disorders
Mental disorders marked by physiological arousal, feelings of tension, and intense apprehension without apparent reason.

Animal cognition
The cognitive capabilities of nonhuman animals; researchers trace the development of cognitive capabilities across species and the continuity of capabilities from nonhuman to human animals.

Anorexia nervosa
An eating disorder in which an individual weighs less than 85 percent of her or his expected weight but still controls eating because of a self-perception of obesity.

Anticipatory coping
Efforts made in advance of a potentially stressful event to overcome, reduce, or tolerate the imbalance between perceived demands and available resources.

Amnesia
A failure of memory caused by physical injury, disease, drug use, or psychological trauma.

Amygdala
The part of the limbic system that controls emotion, aggression, and the formation of emotional memory.

Analytic psychology
A branch of psychology that views the person as a constellation of compensatory internal forces in a dynamic balance.

Anchoring heuristic
An insufficient adjustment up or down from an original starting value when judging the probable value of some event or outcome.

Amacrine cells
Cells that integrate information across the retina; rather than sending signals toward the brain, amacrine cells link bipolar cells to other bipolar cells and ganglion cells to other ganglion cells.

Alzheimer's disease
A chronic organic brain syndrome characterized by gradual loss of memory, decline in intellectual ability, and deterioration of personality.

All-or-none law
The rule that the size of the action potential is unaffected by increases in the intensity of stimulation beyond the threshold level.

Altruism
Prosocial behaviors a person carries out without considering his or her own safety or interests.

AIDS
Acronym for acquired immune deficiency syndrome, a syndrome caused by a virus that damages the immune system and weakens the body's ability to fight infection.

Algorithm
A step-by-step procedure that always provides the right answer for a particular type of problem.

Aggression
Behaviors that cause psychological or physical harm to another individual.

Agoraphobia
An extreme fear of being in public places or open spaces from which escape may be difficult or embarrassing.

Ageism
Prejudice against older people, similar to racism and sexism in its negative stereotypes.

Addiction
A condition in which the body requires a drug in order to function without physical and psychological reactions to its absence; often the outcome of tolerance and dependence.

Acute stress
A transient state of arousal with typically clear onset and offset patterns.

Action potential
The nerve impulse activated in a neuron that travels down the axon and causes neurotransmitters to be released into a synapse.

Acquisition
The stage in a classical conditioning experiment during which the conditioned response is first elicited by the conditioned stimulus.

Absolute threshold
The minimum amount of physical energy needed to produce a reliable sensory experience; operationally defined as the stimulus level at which a sensory signal is detected half the time.

Accommodation
The process by which the ciliary muscles change the thickness of the lens of the eye to permit variable focusing on near and distant objects.

Accommodation
According to Piaget, the process of restructuring or modifying cognitive structures so that new information can fit into them more easily; this process works in tandem with assimilation.

Abnormal psychology
The area of psychological investigation concerned with understanding the nature of individual pathologies of mind, mood, and behavior.