January 2012
24 posts
1 tag
Personalities and Stress
Type A - competitive, hard-driving, impatient, verbally aggressive, and anger-prone people
Type B - easygoing and relaxed people
Type A are more likely to be affected by illnesses associated with stress:
Coronary Heart Disease - the clogging of the vessels that nourish the heart muscle; the leading cause of death in the United States
Psychophysiological Illness - mind-body illness; any...
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General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) - Selye’s concept of the body’s adaptive response to stress in 3 stages:
Alarm Reaction - this is when your body begins to respond to the stress and your nervous system becomes active
Resistance - stress hormones such as adrenaline start to set in so you can do what needs to be done
Exhaustion - your body becomes exhausted from continuous stress and...
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Stress - the process by which we perceive and respond to certain events, called stressors, that we appraise as threatening or challenging
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Health Psychology - a sub-field of psychology’s contribution to behavioral medicine
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Behavioral Medicine - an indisciplinary field that integrates behavioral and medical knowledge and applies knowledge to health and disease
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Creativity
the ability to provide novel valuable ideas
5 Components of creativity:
Expertise - a well developed base of knowledge
Imaginative Thinking Skills - the ability to see things in a new ways to recognized patterns and make connections
Venturesome Personality - tolerated ambiguity and risk, preserves in overcoming obstacles, and seek new experiences rather than following the pack
...
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Intelligence Disabilities
Savant Syndrome - a condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has an exceptional specific skill, such as in computation or drawing
Mental Retardation - a condition of limited mental ability, indicated by an intelligence score below 70 and difficulty in adapting to the demands of life; varies from mild to profound
Down Syndrome - a condition of retardation and associated...
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Intelligence Test
a method for assessing an individual’s mental aptitudes and comparing them with those of others, using numerical scores
Mental Age - a measure of intelligence test performance devised by Binet; the chronological age that most typically corresponds to a given level of performance. Thus, a child who does as well as the average 8-year-old is said to have a mental age of 8
Stanford-Binet -...
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Intelligence
mental quality consisting of the ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new situations
General Intelligence - a general intelligence factor that Spearman and others believed underlies specific mental ability and is therefore measured by everyday tasks
Analytical (academic problem solving) Intelligence - assessed by intelligence tests, which present...
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Near-Death Experience - an altered state of consciousness reported after a close brush with death; often similar to drug induced hallucinations
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Hypnosis - a social interaction in which one person suggests to another that certain perceptions, feelings, thoughts, or behaviors will spontaneously occur
Fun Fact: if you don’t want to be hypnotized then no one can ever hypnotize you because you’ve already shut off your mind to the hypnosis. Only people who are interested and love the feeling of losing control can be hypnotized.
...
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REM Rebound - the tendency of REM sleep to increase following REM sleep deprivation (created by repeated awakenings during REM sleep)
Theory:
You can tell when you’ve had REM Rebound because those are the nights when you just have dream after dream and don’t feel rested at all.
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Dream - a sequence of images, emotions, and thought passing through a sleeping person’s mind. Dreams are notable for their hallucinatory imagery, discontinuities, and incongruities, and for the dreamer’s delusional acceptance of the content and later difficulties in remembering it.
Help in remembering what you dreamed: as soon as you wake up, think about your dream, telling yourself...
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Night Terrors - a sleep disorder characterized by high arousal and an appearance of being terrified; unlike nightmares, night terrors occur during Stage 4 sleep within 2 or 3 hours of sleep and are seldom remembered
So you’re not dreaming when you have night terrors.
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Sleep Apnea - a sleep disorder characterized by temporary cessations of breathing during sleep and consequent momentary rewakeness (i.e. snoring)
If you have a big problem with snoring then you should see your doctor because that means you’re having a hard time breathing during sleep and you could die.
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Narcolepsy - as a sleep disorder characterized by uncontrollable sleep attacks. The sufferer may lapse directly into REM sleep, often in inappropriate times
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Insomnia - recurring problems in falling or staying asleep
Just so you know, everyone has a hard time falling asleep on a regular basis so just because you’re awake at like 11, that doesn’t mean you have insomnia. Sorry to break it to you but insomnia is a serious thing where you literally don’t sleep for days. If you just have a hard time falling asleep at 10 or 11 then...
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Hallucinations - false sensory experiences, such as seeing something in the absence of an external visual stimulus
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Sleep - periodic, natural, reversible loss of consciousness
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Drugs
Psychoactive Drug - a chemical substance that alters perceptions and mood
Tolerance - the diminishing effect with regular use of the same dose of drug, requiring the user to take larger and larger doses before experiencing the drug’s effect
Withdrawal - the discomfort and distress that follows discontinuing the use of an addictive drug
Physical Dependence - a physiological need for a...
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Stages of Sleep
REM Sleep - rapid eye movement sleep, a recurring sleep stage during which vivid dreams commonly occur. Also known as paradoxical sleep because the muscles are relaxed (besides random twitches) but other body systems are active
Non-REM Sleep - sleep where your body still has movement. These are the times when you move around in bed and make noises.
Stage 1 - the transition period to the next 3...
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Biological Rhythms
periodic physiological (both mental and physical) fluctuations
Annual Cycles - migration, hibernation, depression in winter (lack of sunshine is what depresses us in the winter)
Twenty-Eight-Day Cycles - female menstruation (males go through a similar cycle with their hormones every twenty-eight days)
Twenty-Four-Hour Cycles - alertness (usually not until at least 9am-10am), temperature,...
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Fantasy-Prone Personality - someone who imagines and recalls experiences with lifelike vividness and who spends a considerable amount of time fantasizing
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Consciousness - our awareness of ourselves and our environments
December 2011
11 posts
3 tags
Observational Learning - learning by watching
Modeling - observing and imitating behavior
Note: This happens a lot in children. Growing up in a violent household can cause a young child to be violent also because they are modeling the behavior they see the parent doing. It’s best to expose the child to Prosocial Behavior.
Prosocial Behavior - positive, constructive, helpful behavior
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Overjustification Effect - getting a reward for something you already like to do
Example: Players of football in high school love football more than a professional athlete would. You enjoy it because you WANT to do it, not because you HAVE to do it to get the reward.
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Latent Learning - learning that occurs without being noticed
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Behaviorism Mini Lesson
Behaviorism - the view that psychology 1.) should be an objective science 2.) studies behavior without reference to mental processes
Note: Most research psychologists today agree with 1.) but not with 2.)
Experiment:
Let’s say that Tony is scared of loud noises, we associate a bunny with a loud noise which makes Tony scared of the bunny even when a loud noise isn’t present. This...
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Perceptual Constancy - perceiving objects as unchanging and the retinal images will change
Example: Staring at a picture with a certain image and colors on it for 30 seconds or more and it starts to change color or when looking away to the wall, the image is on the wall but the opposite colors (not sure if I explained that too well)
Perceptual Adaptation - in vision, the ability to adjust to an...
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Selective Attention - the focusing of conscious awareness on a particular stimulus, as in the cocktail party effect
Example: When your parents ignore you because of whatever it is they’re doing
Cocktail Party Effect - being able to pay attention to one person speaking when multiple sounds and images are going on around you
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Sensory Adaptation - diminished sensitivity as a consequence of constant stimulation
Example: Walking into someone’s house and you can tell a difference in smell when the person who lives there can’t tell what smell you’re talking about
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Psychophysics - the study of relationships between the physical characteristics of stimuli, such as their insensity, and our psychological experience of them
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Different Types of Processing
Bottom - Up Processing - analysis that begins with the sense receptors and works up to the brain’s integration of sensory information
Exmaple: Walking into a room and first identifying what type of room it is and then realizing it’s because of certain items. This is a living room because it has a coffee table, a couch, and a TV.
Top - Down Processing - information processing guided...
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Sensation - the process by which our sensory receptors and nervous systen receive and represent stimulus energies in our environment
Example: We pick these things up with our 5 senses
Perception - the process of organizing and interpreting sensory information, enabling us to recognize meaningful objects and events
Example: Interpretation of sensation
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Take this personality test →
Once you’ve completed it and gotten your code, look up in google the code and then the world result. It’s legitimate.
November 2011
23 posts
2 tags
Repression - a defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories of consciousness
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Interference with Knowledge
Proactive Interference - the disruptive effect of prior learning on the recall of new information
Example: Once someone has changed their number, their old number is replaced in your brain and if you tried to remember it, you wouldn’t be able to. Or you’d have a hard time.
Retroactive Interference - the disruptive effect of new learning on the recall of old information
Example: Lets...
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Mood-Congruent Memory - remembering things in a certain way because of your current mood
This happens to me all the time:
My boyfriend will be sending me lovely tweets and then in a certain moment I’ll be sad about something else, like my weight or something, and then when I reread the tweets they don’t give me the same feeling I had earlier when I was in a better mood.
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Memory Used on Tests
Recall - memory in which a person must retrieve information learned earlier, as in a fill-in-the-blank test
Recognition - memory in which the person only needs to identify items previously learned, as in a multiple choice test
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Different Types of Memory Compared
Short-term Memory - activated memory that holds about 7 subjects + or - 2 more that is either later stored or forgotten if not considered important
Long-term Memory - a limitless storehouse for memories that will never be forgotten
Working Memory - processing briefly stored memory and using it
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Personality Drawing Quizzes
Draw a picture of a pig or a house the submit it to me and I will tell you a little about yourself :)
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Are you Right or Left brained? →
Write your result when you reblog!
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Different Sides of the Brain
Left
logical
math
analytical
language
controls right side of the body
Right
spatial
creative
fantasy
perception
musical
emotion
controls left side of body
Take the quiz linked after this post to see which side of the brain you are more dominant on!
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Hippocampus - search engine for your short term memory
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Sections in the Brain
Frontal Lobes - just behind the forehead; involved in speaking, muscle movements, and making plans
Parietal Lobes - lying at the top of the head and toward the rear; includes Sensory Cortex
Occipital Lobes - the back of the head; includes the visual areas, which receives auditory information from opposite visual fields
Temporal Lobes - above the ears; includes the auditory areas, each receives...
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Hypothalamus - hormones and emotions linked with hormones
“arousal”
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Amygdela - controls emotion
This is the little guy to get mad at when you’re feeling negative emotions.
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Reticular Formation - in the brainstem and plays an important role in controlling arousal
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Neurotransmitters - messengers to the brain
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Endorphin - morphine within
natural opiate-like neurotransmitters linked to pain and pleasure.
