Glossary

GLOSSARY
LETTER “A”
A-B-A design:
Experimental design in which participants first experience the baseline condition (A), then experience the experimental treatment (B), and then return to the baseline (A).
Abnormal psychology:
The area of psychological investigation concerned with understanding the nature of individual pathologies of mind, mood, and behavior.
Accommodation:
The process bywhich the ciliary muscles change the thickness of the lens of the eye to permit variable focusing on near and distant objects.
Acquisition:
The stage in a classical conditioning experiment during which the conditioned response is first elicited by the conditioned stimulus.
Action potential:
The nerve impulse activated in a neuron that travels down the axon and causes neurotransmitters to bereleased into a synapse.
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.
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 bedifficult or embarrassing.
Altruism:
Prosocial behaviors a person carries out without considering his or her own safety or interests.
Alzheimer's disease:
A chronic organic brain syndrome characterized by gradual loss of memory, decline in intellectual ability, and deterioration of personality.
Amnesia:
A failure of memory caused by physical injury, disease, drug use, or psychological trauma.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.
Animal cognition:
The cognitive capabilities of nonhuman animals; researchers trace the development ofcognitive capabilities across species and the continuity of capabilities from nonhuman to human animals.
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.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.
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:
Thelearned, 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.
Auditory cortex:
The area of the temporal lobes that receives and processes auditory information.
Auditory nerve:
The nerve that carries impulses from thecochlea 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.
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 theCNS to the smooth muscle, cardiac muscle, and glands.
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.
LETTER “B”
Basic level:
The level of categorization that can be retrieved from memory most quickly and used most...