Psychology Vocabulary Terms

1. Aggression: Behaviors that cause psychological or physical harm to another individual. 2. Attributions: Judgments about the cause of outcomes. 3. Behaviorism: A scientific approach that limits the study of psychology to measurable or observable behavior. 4. Chunking: The process of taking single items of information and recording them on the basis of similarity or some other organizing principle. 5. Cognition: Process of knowing, including, attending, remembering and reason; also the content of the process, such as concepts and memories. 6. Conformity: The tendency for people to adopt the behaviors, attitudes, and values of other members of a reference group. 7. Declarative memory: Memory for information such as facts and events. 8. Dendrites: The branched fibers of neurons that receive incoming signals. 9. Encoding: The process by which a mental representation is formed in memory. 10. Fixation: A state in which a person remains attached to objects or activities more appropriate for an earlier stage of angry mental development. 11. Functionalism: The perspective on mind and behavior that focuses on the examination of their functions in an organisms interactions with its environment. 12. Ground: The backdrop or background areas of the visual field, against which figures stand out. 13. Hallucinations: False perceptions that occur in the absence of objective stimulation. 14. Heredity: The biological transmission of traits from parents to offspring. 15. Hypnosis: An altered state of awareness characterized by deep relaxation, susceptibility to suggestions, and changes in perception, memory, motivation and self-control. 16. Iconic Memory: Sensory memory in the visual domain; allows large amounts of information to be stored for very brief durations. 17. Incentives: External stimuli or rewards that motivate behavior. 18. Illusion: An experience of a stimulus pattern in a manner that is demonstrably incorrect but shared by others in the same perceptual environment. 19. Impulsive Aggression: Emotion-driven aggression produced in reaction to situations in the heat of the moment. 20. Learning-Performance Distinction: The difference between what has been learned and what is expressed in overt behavior. 21. Mood Disorder: A mood disturbance such as severe depression or depression altering with mania. 22. Observational Learning: The process of learning new responses by watching the behavior of another.

23. Pain: The bodys response to noxious stimuli that are intense enough to cause, or threaten to cause tissue or emotional damage. 24. Perception: The process that organizes information in the sensory image and interprets it as having been produced by properties of objects or events in the external world. 25. Phobia: A persistent and irrational fear of a specific object, activity or situation that is excessive and unreasonable, given the reality of the threat.