GRE Psychology Subject Test 432 Questions with Verified Answers
Ablation - CORRECT ANSWER A surgically induced brain lesion.
Absolute refractory
... [Show More] period - CORRECT ANSWER The period that follows the onset of an action potential. During this period, a nerve impulse cannot be initiated
Absolute threshold - CORRECT ANSWER The minimum of stimulus energy needed to activate a sensory system.
Accommodation - CORRECT ANSWER A principle of Piaget's theory of cognitive development. It occurs when cognitive structures are modified because new information or new experiences do not fit into existing cognitive structures.
Acetylcholine - CORRECT ANSWER A neurotransmitter found in both central and peripheral nervous systems linked to Alzheimer's disease and used to transmit nerve impulses to the muscles, respectively.
Acrophobia - CORRECT ANSWER A specific phobia that is an irrational fear of heights.
ACT model (Adaptive Control of Thought) - CORRECT ANSWER A model that describes memory in terms of procedural and declarative memory.
Actor-observer effect - CORRECT ANSWER The tendency of actors to see observer behavior as due to external factors (situational factors) and the tendency of observers to attribute actors' behaviors to internal characteristics (dispositional characteristics).
Adrenaline - CORRECT ANSWER A hormone that increases energy available for "fight or flight" reactions (also known as epinephrine).
Afterimages - CORRECT ANSWER A visual sensation that appears after prolonged or intense exposure to a stimulus.
Agnosia - CORRECT ANSWER Impairments in perceptual recognition.
Agoraphobia - CORRECT ANSWER An irrational fear of being in places or situations where escape might be difficult.
All-or-none law - CORRECT ANSWER A law about nerve impulses stating that when depolarization reaches the critical threshold (-50 millivolts) the neuron is going to fire, each time, every time.
Alternate-form method - CORRECT ANSWER In psychometrics, it is the method of using two or more different forms of a test to determine the reliability of a particular test.
Altruism - CORRECT ANSWER A form of helping behavior where the person's intent is to benefit someone else at some cost to him- or herself.
Amnesia - CORRECT ANSWER A dissociative disorder where individuals are unable to recall past experience, but this inability is not due to a neurological disorder.
Analogy of inoculation - CORRECT ANSWER McGuire's analogy that people can be psychologically inoculated against the "attack" of persuasive communications by first exposing them to a weakened attack.
Analyses of Variance (anovas) - CORRECT ANSWER A statistical method to compare the means of more than two groups by comparing the between-group variance to the within-group variance.
Anchoring - CORRECT ANSWER A cognitive term (a heuristic) that refers to the tendency of people to make decisions based on reference points, or standards used to make judgements.
Anima (animus) - CORRECT ANSWER An archetype from Jung's theory referring to the feminine behaviors in males, and the masculine behaviors in females.
Anorexia nervosa - CORRECT ANSWER An eating disorder characterized by a refusal to maintain a minimal normal body weight.
Anterograde amnesia - CORRECT ANSWER Memory loss for new information following brain injury.
Anti-social personality disorder - CORRECT ANSWER A personality disorder characterized by a pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others.
Aphagia. - CORRECT ANSWER An impairment in the ability to eat.
Aphasias - CORRECT ANSWER Language disorders, which are associated with Broca's and Wernicke's areas in the brain.
Apparent motion - CORRECT ANSWER An illusion that occurs when two dots flashed in different locations on a screen seconds apart are perceived as one moving dot.
Apraxia - CORRECT ANSWER An impairment in the organization of voluntary action.
Archetypes - CORRECT ANSWER The building blocks for the collective unconscious referred to in Jung's theory of personality.
Assimilation - CORRECT ANSWER A principle of Piaget's theory of cognitive development. It is the process of understanding new information in relation to prior knowledge, or existing schemata.
Association area - CORRECT ANSWER Areas in the brain that integrate information from different cortical regions
Atkinson-Shiffin model - CORRECT ANSWER A model of memory that involves three memory structures (sensory, short-term and long-term), and the processes that operate these memory structures.
Attachment bond - CORRECT ANSWER Evidence of a preference for the primary caregiver and a wariness of strangers.
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADD/HD) - CORRECT ANSWER A disorder characterized by developmentally atypical inattention and/or impulsivity-hyperactivity.
Attribution theory - CORRECT ANSWER Fritz Heider's theory that people tend to infer the causes of other people's behavior as either dispositional (related to the individual) or situational (related to the environment).
Authoritarian parenting style - CORRECT ANSWER A parenting style tending to use punitive control methods and lacking emotional warmth.
Authoritative parenting style - CORRECT ANSWER A parenting style tending to have reasonably high demands for child compliance coupled with emotional warmth.
Autism - CORRECT ANSWER A disorder whose essential features are lack of responsiveness to other people, gross impairment in communication skills, and behaviors and interests that are repetitive, inflexibly routined and stereotyped.
Autokinetic effect - CORRECT ANSWER An illusion that occurs when a spot of light appears to move erratically in a dark room, simply because there is no frame of reference.
Availability heuristic - CORRECT ANSWER A decision-making short-cut that people tend to use when trying to decide how likely something is based upon how easily similar instances can be imagined .
Aversion therapy - CORRECT ANSWER A behavioral therapy of pairing unpleasant stimuli with undesirable behavior.
Balance theory - CORRECT ANSWER Fritz Heider's consistency theory that is concerned with balance and imbalance in the ways in which three elements are related
Behavioral contracts - CORRECT ANSWER A therapeutic technique that is a negotiated agreement between two parties that explicitly stipulates the behavioral change that is desired and indicates consequences of certain acts.
Behavioral-stimulants - CORRECT ANSWER A class of drugs that increase behavioral activity by increasing motor activity or by counteracting fatigue, and which are thought to stimulate receptors for dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin.
Békésy's traveling wave theory - CORRECT ANSWER Proposed by Von Békésy, the theory holds that high frequency sounds maximally vibrate the basilar membrane near the beginning of the cochlea close to the oval window and low frequencies maximally vibrate near the apex, or tip of the cochlea.
Between-subjects design - CORRECT ANSWER An experimental design whereby each subject is exposed to only one level of each independent variable.
Binocular disparity (stereopsis) - CORRECT ANSWER A cue for depth perception that depends on the fact that the distance between the eyes provides two slightly disparate views of the world that, when combined, give us a perception of depth.
Bi-polar disorders - CORRECT ANSWER A mood disorder characterized by both depression and mania.
Boomerang effect - CORRECT ANSWER In theories of attitude persuasion, it is an attitude change in the opposite direction of the persuader's message.
Borderline personality disorder - CORRECT ANSWER A personality disorder characterized by an instability in interpersonal behavior, mood and self-image that borders on psychosis.
Bottom-up processing (data-driven processing) - CORRECT ANSWER Information processing that occurs when objects are recognized by the summation of the components of incoming stimulus to arrive at the whole pattern.
Brightness - CORRECT ANSWER The subjective impression of the intensity of a light stimulus.
Brightness contrast - CORRECT ANSWER In brightness perception, it refers to a when a particular luminance appears brighter when surrounded by a darker stimulus than when surrounded by a lighter stimulus.
Broca's aphasia - CORRECT ANSWER Impairments in producing spoken language associated with lesions to Broca's area.
Bulimia nervosa - CORRECT ANSWER An eating disorder that involves binge eating and excessive attempts to compensate for it by purging, fasting, or excessive exercising.
Bystander effect - CORRECT ANSWER It is the reluctance of people to intervene to help others in emergency situations when other people also witness the situation.
Cannon-Bard theory - CORRECT ANSWER A theory of emotions stating that awareness of emotions reflects our physiological arousal and our cognitive experience of emotion.
Case study - CORRECT ANSWER An experimental method used in developmental psychology to take a very detailed look at development by studying a small number of individuals. This is also called the clinical method.
Centration - CORRECT ANSWER A term from Piaget's theory, it is the tendency for pre-operational children to be able to focus on only one aspect of a phenomenon.
Chi-square test - CORRECT ANSWER A statistical method of testing for an association between two categorical variables. Specifically, it tests for the equality of two frequencies or proportions.
Chlorpromazine - CORRECT ANSWER An anti-psychotic drug thought to block receptor sites for dopamine, making it effective in treating the delusional thinking, hallucinations and agitation commonly associated with schizophrenia.
Circadian rhythms - CORRECT ANSWER Internally generated rhythms that regulate our daily cycle of waking and sleeping, approximating a 24-hour cycle.
Classical conditioning - CORRECT ANSWER Also known as respondent conditioning, it is a result of learning connections between different events.
Claustrophobia - CORRECT ANSWER An irrational fear of closed places.
Client-centered therapy, person-centered therapy, and sometimes non-directive therapy - CORRECT ANSWER Carl Rogers' therapeutic technique that is based on the idea that clients have the freedom to control their own behavior, and that the client is able to reflect upon his or her problems, make choices and take positive action.
Clustering - CORRECT ANSWER A technique to enhance memory by organizing items into conceptually-related categories
Cognitive dissonance theory - CORRECT ANSWER Leon Festinger's consistency theory that people are motivated to reduce dissonant elements or add consonant elements to reduce tension.
Cognitive map - CORRECT ANSWER A mental representation of a physical space
Color constancy - CORRECT ANSWER Refers to the fact that the perceived color of an object does not change when we change the wavelength of the light we see.
Compensation - CORRECT ANSWER A defense mechanism whereby something is done to make up for something that is lacking
Conception - CORRECT ANSWER Takes place in the fallopian tubes where the ovum or egg cell is fertilized by the male sperm cell.
Conditioned response - CORRECT ANSWER In classical conditioning, it is the learned response to a conditioned stimulus.
Conditioned stimulus - CORRECT ANSWER In classical conditioning, it a neutral stimulus that has been paired with an unconditioned stimulus to elicit a conditioned response.
Confounding variables - CORRECT ANSWER Unintended independent variables
Connectionism - CORRECT ANSWER Also called parallel distribution processing, it is a theory of information processing that is analogous to a complex neural network.
Consistency theories - CORRECT ANSWER Theoretical perspectives from social psychology that hold that people prefer consistency between attitudes and behaviors, and that people will change or resist changing attitudes based upon this preference.
Construct validity - CORRECT ANSWER A type of validity that refers to how well a test measures the intended theoretical construct.
Content validity - CORRECT ANSWER A type of validity that refers to how well the content items of a test measure the particular skill or knowledge area that it is supposed to measure.
Control group design - CORRECT ANSWER A technique of treating experimental and control groups equally in all respects, except that one group is exposed to the treatment in the experiment, and the other group is not exposed to the treatment.
Conversion disorders - CORRECT ANSWER Disorders characterized by unexplained symptoms affecting voluntary motor or sensory functions. Conversion disorder used to be referred to as "hysteria."
Correlation coefficients - CORRECT ANSWER A type of descriptive statistic that measures to what extent, if any, two variables are related.
Counterbalancing - CORRECT ANSWER A method of controlling the potential effects of unintended independent variables (e.g., order effects) by making sure that the experimental and control groups are similar in all respects expect for in the independent variable being measured.
Counter-transference - CORRECT ANSWER In psychoanalysis, it occurs when the therapist experiences emotions in response to the patient's transference.
Criterion validity - CORRECT ANSWER How well the test can predict an individual's performance on an established test of the same skill or knowledge area.
Cross-sectional studies - CORRECT ANSWER An experimental method used in developmental psychology to compare different groups of individuals at different ages.
Crystallized intelligence - CORRECT ANSWER Proposed by Raymond Cattell, it is a type of intelligence that uses knowledge acquired as a result of schooling or other life experiences.
Cynophobia - CORRECT ANSWER A specific phobia referring to an irrational fear of dogs.
Decay theory - CORRECT ANSWER A theory that holds that if the information in long-term memory is not used or rehearsed it will eventually be forgotten.
Declarative memory - CORRECT ANSWER Sometimes called fact memory, it is memory for explicit information.
Defense mechanisms - CORRECT ANSWER In Freud's structural dynamic model of personality, they are unconscious mechanisms that deny, falsify or distort reality.
Delusions - CORRECT ANSWER False beliefs, discordant with reality, that are maintained in spite of strong evidence to the contrary.
Demand characteristics - CORRECT ANSWER Cues that suggest to subjects what the researcher expects from research participants.
Dementia praecox - CORRECT ANSWER The word literally means "split mind", and was used to refer to what is now known as schizophrenia.
Dementias - CORRECT ANSWER A neurological disorder characterized by a loss in intellectual functioning.
Dependent variable - CORRECT ANSWER A measurement of the response that is expected to vary with differences in the independent variable
Depersonalization disorder - CORRECT ANSWER A dissociative disorder that involves a sense of detachment from the self despite an intact sense of reality.
Depolarization - CORRECT ANSWER The second stage in the firing cycle, occurs when the membrane's electrical charge decreases—anytime the membrane's voltage moves toward a neutral charge of 0 millivolts.
Descriptive statistics - CORRECT ANSWER Statistics concerned with organizing, describing, quantifying, and summarizing a collection of actual observations.
Deviation quotients - CORRECT ANSWER A deviation IQ score that tells us how far away a person's score is from the average score for that person's particular age group.
Diathesis-stress model - CORRECT ANSWER A framework explaining the causes of mental disorders as an interaction between biological causal factors (a predisposition toward developing a specific mental disorder) and psychological causal factors (excessive stress).
Difference threshold - CORRECT ANSWER The amount of difference that there must be between two stimuli before they are perceived to be different.
Diploid cells - CORRECT ANSWER Cells that contain 23 pairs of chromosomes.
Discriminative stimulus - CORRECT ANSWER In operant conditioning, it is a stimulus condition that indicates that the organism's behavior will have consequences.
Displacement - CORRECT ANSWER A defense mechanism that refers to the pent-up feelings (often hostility) discharged on objects and people less dangerous than those objects or people causing the feelings.
Dissociative disorders - CORRECT ANSWER A disorder that is characterized by an avoidance of stress by escaping from personality identity.
Dissociative fugue - CORRECT ANSWER A dissociative disorder that involves amnesia plus a sudden, unexpected move away from one's home or location of usual daily activities.
Dissociative Identity Disorder - CORRECT ANSWER A dissociative disorder characterized by two or more personalities that recurrently take control of a person's behavior (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder).
Dissonance theory - CORRECT ANSWER The tendency to change thoughts or behavior in response to perceived inconsistencies.
Distal stimulus - CORRECT ANSWER In perception, it is the actual object or event out there in the world, as opposed to its perceived image.
Domain-referenced testing - CORRECT ANSWER Sometimes called criterion-referenced testing, it is concerned with the question of what the test-taker knows about a specified content domain.
Dopamine hypothesis - CORRECT ANSWER A biochemical explanation for schizophrenia suggesting that the delusions, hallucinations and agitation associated with schizophrenia arise from an excess of dopamine activity at certain sites in the brain.
Double-bind hypothesis - CORRECT ANSWER A psychosocial theory of schizophrenia holding that people with schizophrenia received contradictory messages from primary caregivers during childhood, and that these contradictory messages led them to see their perceptions of reality as unreliable.
Double-blinding - CORRECT ANSWER A research design that controls for the influence of the researcher and research participants since neither group knows which participants are in the control group and which participants are in the experimental group.
Down's syndrome - CORRECT ANSWER A set of physiological conditions, including severe mental retardation, resulting from an extra 21st chromosome.
Duplexity, or duplicity theory of vision - CORRECT ANSWER The theory holding that the retina contains two kinds of photoreceptor.
Echoic memory - CORRECT ANSWER Auditory memory
Ego psychology - CORRECT ANSWER A branch of psychoanalytic theory that emphasizes the role of the ego as autonomous.
Eidetic memory - CORRECT ANSWER Memory for images.
Elaborative rehearsal - CORRECT ANSWER The process of organizing information and associating it with what you already know to get information into long-term memory.
Electroencephalograph (EEG) - CORRECT ANSWER It records a gross average of the electrical activity in different parts of the brain.
Embryonic stage - CORRECT ANSWER The third stage during prenatal development, it refers to the period during which the embryo increases in size dramatically, begins to develop a human appearance with limb motion, produces androgen in the testes of male embryos, and develops nerve cells in the spine.
Emmert's law - CORRECT ANSWER A law describing the relationship between size constancy and apparent distance—the farther away the object appears to be, the more the scaling device in the brain will compensate for its retinal size by enlarging our perception of the object.
Empathy - CORRECT ANSWER It is the ability to vicariously experience the emotions of another, and it is thought by some social psychologists to be a strong influence on helping behavior.
Encoding - CORRECT ANSWER The process of putting new information into memory.
Encoding specificity theory - CORRECT ANSWER A theory that recall is best if the context at recall approximates the context during the original encoding.
Endorphins - CORRECT ANSWER Peptides that are natural pain killers produced in the brain
Episodic memory - CORRECT ANSWER A type of declarative memory, episodic memory refers to memories for particular events, or episodes, from personal experience.
Equity theory - CORRECT ANSWER A theory stating that individuals strive for fairness and feel uncomfortable when there is a perception of a lack of fairness.
Eros - CORRECT ANSWER In Freud's structural dynamic model of personality, it refers to the life instincts that serve the purpose of individual survival (hunger, thirst, and sex).
Ethology - CORRECT ANSWER The study of animals in their natural environment.
Exchange theory - CORRECT ANSWER The tendency to evaluate interactions and relationships in terms of relative costs and benefits.
External validity - CORRECT ANSWER In research methodology, it refers to how generalizable the results of an experiment are.
Extinction - CORRECT ANSWER In operant conditioning, it is when a conditioned stimulus is repeatedly not reinforced and as a result, the conditioned response is no longer produced as consistently.
Extirpation - CORRECT ANSWER A process of removing various parts of the brain, and then observing the behavioral consequences.
Extrinsic motivation - CORRECT ANSWER Behavior that is motivated by some external reward.
Face validity - CORRECT ANSWER A type of validity that refers to whether test items appear to measure what they are supposed to measure.
Factor analysis - CORRECT ANSWER A statistical technique using correlation coefficients to reduce a large number of variables to a few factors.
Fechner's law - CORRECT ANSWER A law that expresses the relationship between the intensity of the sensation and the intensity of the stimulus, and states that sensation increases more slowly as intensity increases.
Fetal period - CORRECT ANSWER The last stage of prenatal development, its onset is marked by the beginning of measurable electrical activity in the brain.
Fictional finalism - CORRECT ANSWER A concept in Alfred Adler's theory of personality, it is the notion that an individual is motivated more by his or her expectations of the future based on a subjective or fictional estimate of life's values, than by past experiences.
Field independence-field dependence - CORRECT ANSWER A personality style characterized by an ability/inability to distinguish experience from its context.
Fight or flight responses - CORRECT ANSWER The emotional experience associated with the sympathetic nervous system and managed by the hypothalamus during high arousal.
Figure - CORRECT ANSWER A concept in visual perception referring to the integrated visual experience that stands out at the center of attention.
Fixation - CORRECT ANSWER From psychoanalytic theory, it is an inability to successfully proceed through a stage in development because of an overindulgence or frustration.
Fixed action pattern - CORRECT ANSWER A behavior that is relatively stereotyped and appears to be species-typical.
Fixed-interval (FI) - CORRECT ANSWER In operant conditioning, it is when behavior is reinforced on the first response after a fixed period of time has elapsed since the last reinforcement.
Fixed-ratio (FR) - CORRECT ANSWER In operant conditioning, it is when behavior is reinforced after a fixed number of responses.
Flooding - CORRECT ANSWER A behavioral modification technique used to treat anxiety disorders by exposing the client to the anxiety-producing stimulus.
Fluid intelligence - CORRECT ANSWER Proposed by Raymond Cattell, it is a type of intelligence that refers to the ability to quickly grasp relationships in novel situations and make correct deductions from them (e.g., solving analogies).
Follicle stimulating hormone - CORRECT ANSWER A hormone that is secreted by the pituitary gland to stimulate the growth of an ovarian follicle, which is a small protective sphere surrounding the egg or ovum.
Free association - CORRECT ANSWER A psychoanalytic technique where the client says whatever comes to his or her mind regardless of how personal, painful, or seemingly irrelevant it may appear to be so that the analyst and patient together can reconstruct the nature of the client's original conflict.
Frequency - CORRECT ANSWER In sound perception, it is the number of sound wave cycles per second.
Frequency theory - CORRECT ANSWER A theory suggesting that the basilar membrane of the ear vibrates as a whole, that the rate of vibration equals the frequency of the stimulus and that the vibration rate is directly translated into the appropriate number of neural impulses per second.
Functional autonomy - CORRECT ANSWER A given activity or form of behavior may become an end or a goal in itself, regardless of its original reason for existence.
Functional fixedness - CORRECT ANSWER An impediment to effective problem solving because of an inability to use a familiar object in an unfamiliar way.
Functionalism - CORRECT ANSWER A system of thought in psychology that was concerned with studying how mental processes help individuals adapt to their environments.
Fundamental attribution error - CORRECT ANSWER The tendency to attribute individual characteristics as causes of others' behaviors and situational characteristics to one's own behavior.
g - CORRECT ANSWER Proposed by Charles Spearman, this is an individual difference in intelligence that refers to a general, unitary factor of intelligence.
GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) - CORRECT ANSWER A neurotransmitter that produces inhibitory postsynaptic potentials and is thought to play an important role in stabilizing neural activity in the brain.
Garcia effect - CORRECT ANSWER Named after researcher John Garcia, it is basically food aversion that occurs when people attribute illness to a particular food.
Gate theory of pain - CORRECT ANSWER A theory that proposes that there is a special "gating" mechanism located in the spine that can turn pain signals on or off, thus affecting whether we perceive pain.
Generation-recognition model - CORRECT ANSWER Model that proposes that recall tasks tap the same basic process of accessing information in memory as recognition tasks, but also requires an additional processing step.
Genes - CORRECT ANSWER Located on the chromosomes, they are the basic units of hereditary transmission.
Germinal period - CORRECT ANSWER A period of rapid cell division during prenatal development that lasts approximately 2 weeks, and ends with the implantation of the cellular mass into the uterine wall.
Gonadoptropic hormones - CORRECT ANSWER Hormones produced by the pituitary glad during puberty that activate a dramatic increase in the production of hormones by the testes or ovaries.
Ground - CORRECT ANSWER A concept in visual perception that refers to the background against which the figures appear.
Group polarization - CORRECT ANSWER A tendency for group discussion to enhance the group's initial tendencies towards riskiness or caution.
Groupthink - CORRECT ANSWER A tendency of decision-making groups to strive for consensus at the expense of not considering discordant information.
Hallucinations - CORRECT ANSWER Perceptions that are not due to external stimuli but have a compelling sense of reality.
Halo effect - CORRECT ANSWER In social psychology, it is the tendency to generalize from one attribute or characteristic to another person's entire personality.
Haloperidol (Haldol) - CORRECT ANSWER An antipsychotic drug thought to block receptor sites for dopamine, making it effective in treating the delusional thinking, hallucinations and agitation commonly associated with schizophrenia.
Haploid cells - CORRECT ANSWER Cells that contain 23 single chromosomes. The gametes (sperm and egg cells) are haploid.
Hawthorne effect - CORRECT ANSWER The tendency of people to behave differently if they know that they are being observed.
Homeostasis - CORRECT ANSWER A term referring to those self-regulatory processes that maintain a stable equilibrium.
Humanism - CORRECT ANSWER A system of thought that arose in opposition to both psychoanalysis and behaviorism, and is characterized by a belief in the notion of free will and the idea that people should be considered as wholes rather than in terms of stimuli and responses (behaviorism) or instincts (psychoanalysis).
Hyperpolarization - CORRECT ANSWER An increase in the membrane potential that decreases the possibility of generating a nerve impulse.
Hypochondriasis - CORRECT ANSWER A disorder that causes an individual to be preoccupied with fears that he or she has a serious disease, based on a misinterpretation of one or more bodily signs or symptoms.
Hypothesis - CORRECT ANSWER A tentative and testable explanation of the relationship between two or more variables.
Iconic memory - CORRECT ANSWER Visual memory.
Id - CORRECT ANSWER In Freud's structural dynamic model of personality, it is the source, the reservoir, of all psychic energy.
Idiographic - CORRECT ANSWER An approach to studying personality that focuses on individual case studies.
Illumination - CORRECT ANSWER A physical, objective measurement that is simply the amount of light falling on a surface.
Illusory correlation - CORRECT ANSWER An apparent correlation that is perceived, but does not really exist.
Imprinting - CORRECT ANSWER An attachment bond between a organism and an object in the environment.
Independent variable - CORRECT ANSWER The variable whose effect is being studied.
Induced motion - CORRECT ANSWER An illusion of movement occurring when everything around the spot of light is moved.
Inferential statistics - CORRECT ANSWER Statistics concerned with making an inference from the sample involved in the research to the population of interest in order to provide an estimate of popular characteristics.
Innate releasing mechanism (IRM) - CORRECT ANSWER A mechanism in the animal's nervous system that serves to connect the stimulus with the right response.
Insomnia - CORRECT ANSWER A disturbance affecting the ability to fall asleep and/or stay asleep.
Instincts - CORRECT ANSWER In Freud's structural dynamic model of personality, these are inner representations of a psychological excitation or wish, and are the propelling aspects of Freud's dynamic theory of personality.
Intensity - CORRECT ANSWER In sound perception, it is the amplitude or height of the air-pressure wave and it is related to loudness.
Interneurons - CORRECT ANSWER Neurons located in the spinal cord that connect sensory neurons with motor neurons to form the reflex arc.
Interposition - CORRECT ANSWER Also called overlap, it refers to the cue for depth perception when one object (A) covers or overlaps another object (B), and we see object (A) as being in front.
Interval scale - CORRECT ANSWER A scale of measurement using actual numbers (not ranks).
Intrinsic motivation - CORRECT ANSWER Motivation by some reward that is inherent to the task.
IQ - CORRECT ANSWER A well-known measure of intelligence aptitude using an equation comparing mental age to chronological age.
Isomorphism - CORRECT ANSWER A theory that suggests that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the object in the perceptual field and the pattern of stimulation in the brain.
James-Lange theory of emotions - CORRECT ANSWER A theory that people become aware of their emotions after they notice their physiological reactions to some external event.
Just-world hypothesis - CORRECT ANSWER The tendency to believe that the world is fair; that is, that people who are good are rewarded while people who are bad are punished
Klinefelter's syndrome - CORRECT ANSWER The possession of an extra X chromosome in males that leads to sterility and often to mental retardation.
Language acquisition device (LAD) - CORRECT ANSWER Proposed by Noam Chomsky, this is an innate, biologically-based mechanism that helps us understand rule structures in language.
Lateral inhibition - CORRECT ANSWER In visual perception, it is the process of inhibiting the response of adjacent retinal cells resulting in the sharpening and highlighting of the borders between dark and light areas.
Law of closure - CORRECT ANSWER From Gestalt Psychology, it is the tendency for people to perceive complete figures even when the actual figures are not complete.
Law of good continuation - CORRECT ANSWER From Gestalt Psychology, it is the tendency for elements appearing to follow in the same direction (such as a straight line or a simple curve) to be grouped together.
Law of prägnanz - CORRECT ANSWER From Gestalt Psychology, it is the tendency for perceptual organization to be as "good"—as regular, simple and symmetric—as possible. [Show Less]