-            Absolute threshold: the minimum stimulation needed to detect a particular stimulus 50% of the time.

-            Acetylcholine: a neurotransmitter that enables learning and memory and also triggers muscle contraction

-            Achievement motivation: a desire for significant accomplishment for mastery of things, people, or ideas, for attaining a high standard.

-            Aggression: any physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt or destroy.

-            Algorithm: a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem. Contrasts with the usually speedier- but also more error-prone-use of heuristics.

-            Alpha waves: the relatively slow brain waves of a relaxed, awake state

-            Altruism: unselfish regard for the welfare of others.

-            Amygdale: 2 lima bean-sized neural clusters that are components of the limbic system and are linked to emotion.

-            Automatic processing: unconscious encoding of incidental information, such as space, time, and frequency, and of well-learned infor, such as word meanings.

-            Availability heuristic: estimating the likelihood of events based on the availability in memory. If instances come readily to mind, we presume such events are common.

-            Barbiturates: drugs that depress the activity of the central nervous system, reducing anxiety but impairing memory and judgments.

-            Belief perseverance: lighting to one's initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited.

-            Binocular cues: depth cues, such as retinal disparity and convergence, that depend on the use of 2 eyes

-            Biological psychology a branch of psy concerned with the links between biology and behavior.

-            Blind spot: the point at which the optic nerve waves the eye, creating a blind spot because no receptor cells are located there.

-            Bottom-up processing analysis that begins with the sensory receptors and works up to the brain's integration of sensory info.

-            Cannon-bard theory: the theory that an emotion-rousing stimulus simultaneously trigger (1) physical responses and (2) the subjective exp of emotion.

-            Central nervous sys: the brain and spinal cord.

-            Chunking :organizing items into familiar, manageable units, often occurs automatically.

-            Classical conditioning: a type of learning in which an organism comes to associate stimuli. A neutral stimulus that signals an unconditioned stimulus begins to produce a response that anticipates and prepares for the unconditioned stimulus.

-            Cognition: all the mental activities associates with thinking, knowing, remembering and communicating.

-            Collective unconscious: Carl Jung's concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species' history.

-            Concept" a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas or people.

-            Conditioned reinforce: a stimulus that gains its reinforcing power through its association with a primary reinforce

-            Conditioned response: in classical conditioning, the learned response to a previously neutral but now conditioned stimulus.

-            Condition stimulus : in classical conditioning, an originally irrelevant stimulus that, after association with an unconditioned stimulus, comes to trigger a conditioned response.

-            Cones: retinal receptor cells that are concentrated near the center of the retina and that function in daylight or in well lit conditions. The cones detect fine detail and give rise to color sensations.

-            Confirmation bias: a tendency to search for info that confirms one's preconceptions.

-            Conflict: a perceived incompatibility of actions, goals, or ideas

-            Consciousness: our awareness, of ourselves and our environment.

-            Continuous reinforcement: reinforcing the desired response every time in occurs

-            Convergence: a binocular cue for perceiving depth, the extent to which the eyes converge inward when looking at an object. The greater the inward strain, the closer the object

-            Creativity: the ability to produce novel and valuable ideas.

-            Defense mechanism: in psychoanalytic theory, the ego's protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.

-            Delta waves: the large, slow brain waves associated with deep sleep.

-            Depressants: drug (alcohol, barbiturates, pirates) that reduce neural activity and slow body functions.

-            Depth perception: the ability to see objects in three dimensions although the images that strike the retina are two dimensional, allows us to judge distance.

-            Difference threshold" the minimum difference between two stimuli required for detection fifty percent of the time. We exp the dif threshold as a just noticeable dif/

-            Displacement: psychoanalytic defense mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person, as when redirecting anger toward a safer outlet.

-            Effortful processing encoding that requires attention and conscious effort.

-            Ego: the largely conscious, executive part of personality that, according to Freud, meditates among the demands of the id, superego and reality. The ego operates on the reality. The ego operates on the reality principle, satisfying the id's desires in ways that will realistically bring pleasure rather than pain.

-            Emotion: a response of the whole organism, involving physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious exp.

-            Emotional intelligence: the ability to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions.

-            Encoding: the processing of info into the memory sys, for example, by extracting meaning.

-            Explicit memory : memory of facts and exp that one can consciously know and declare.

-            Extrasensory perception: the controversial claim that perception can occur apart from sensory input. Said to include telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition

-            Extrinsic motivation: a eerie to perform a behavior due to promised rewards or threats of punishment.

-            Factor analysis: a statistical procedure that identifies clusters of related items on a testl used to identify different dimensions of performace that underlie one's total score.

-            Figure-ground: the organization of the visual field into objects that stand out from their surroundings

-            Flashbulb memory: a clear memory of an emotionally significant moment of event

-            Frequency: the number of complete wavelengths that pass a point in a giving time.

-            Frustration-aggression principle: the principle that frustration - the blocking of an attempt to achieve some goal-creates anger, which can generate aggression.

-            Functional fixedness: the tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functional an impediment to problem solving.

-            General intelligence: a general intelligence factor that according to Spearman and others underlies specific mental abilities and is therefore measured by every task on an intelligence test.

-            Gestalt: an organized whole. Gestalt psychologists emphasized our tendency to integrate pieces of info into meaningful wholes.

-            Hallucinations: false sensory exp, such as seeing something in the absence of an external visual stimulus.

-            Hallucinogens: psychedelic drugs, such as lsd, that distort perceptions and evoke sensory images in the absence of sensory input.

-            heuristic a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently usually speedier but also more error-prone than algorithms

-            Hierarchy of needs: maslow's pyramid of human needs, beginning at the base with physiological needs that must first be satisfied before higher level safety needs and then psychological needs become active.

-            Hippocampus: a nerral center located in the limbic system that helps process explicit memories for storage.

-            Hue: the dimension of color that is determined by the wavelength of light: what we know as color names blue green...

-            Id: contains a reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that, according to freud, thrives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives. The id operates on the leisure princely, demanding immediate gratification.

-            Implicit memory retention independent of conscious recollection

-            Incentive: a positive or negative environmental stimulus that motivates behavior.

-            Insomnia: recurring problems in falling staying asleep.

-            Intelligence: mental quality consisting of the ability to learn from exp, solve problems and use knowledge to adapt to new situations.

-            Intelligence quotient: defined originally as the ratio of mental age to chronological age multiplied by 100. On contemporary intelligence tests, the average performance for a given age is assigned a score of 100.

-            Intensity: the amount of energy in a light or sound wave, which we perceive as brightness or loudness, as determined by the wave's amplitude.

-            Intrinsic motivation: a desire to perform a behavior for its own sake.

-            James Lange theory: the theory that our exp of emotion is our awareness of our physiological responses to emotion-arousing stimuli.

-            Kinesthesia: the sys for sensing the position and movement of individual body parts.

-            Language: our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning.

-            Latent content: according to Freud, the underlying meaning of a dream. Freud believed that a dream's latent content functions as a safety valve.

-            Latent learning: learning that occurs but is not apparent until there is an incentive to demonstrate it.

-            Law of effect: Thorndike's principle that behaviors followed by favorable consequences become more likely, and that behaviors followed by unfavorable consequences become less likely.

-            Learning: a relatively permanent change in an organism's behavior due to exp.

-            Long term memory: the relatively permanent and limitless storehouse of the memory sys. Includes knowledge, skills, and exp.

-            Long term potentiation: an increase in a synapse's firing potential after brief, rapid stimulation. Believed to be a neural basis for learning and memory.

-            Memory: the persistence of learning over time through the storage and retrieval of info.

-            Mental age: a measure of intelligence test performance devised by Binet, the chronological age that most typically corresponds to a giving level performance. Thus, a child who does as well as the average 8-yr-old is said to have a mental age of 8.

-            Mental set: a tendency to approach a problem in a particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past.

-            Mnemonics: memory aids, especially those techniques that use vivid imagery and organizational devices.

-            Monocular cues: depth cues, such as interposition and linear perspective, available to either eye alone.

-            Morpheme: in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning may be a word or a part of a word.

-            Motivation: a need or desire that energizes and directs behavior.

-            Narcolepsy: a sleep disorder characterized by uncontrollable sleep attacks. The sufferer may lapse directly into REM sleep, often at inopportune times.

-            Nature-nurture issue: the longstanding controversy over the relative contributions that genes and exp make to the development of psychological traits and behaviors.

-            Negative reinforcement: increasing behaviors by stopping or reducing negative stimuli, such as shock. A negative reinforecer is any stimulus that, when removed after a response, strengthens the response.

-            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 two or three hours of falling asleep, and are seldom remembered.

-            Operant conditioning: a type of learning in which behavior is strengthened if followed by a reinforce of diminished if followed by a punisher.

-            Opiates: opium and its derivatives, such as morphine and heroin, they depress neural activity temporarily lessening pain and anxiety

-            Partial reinforcement: reinforcing a response only part of the time results in slower acquisition of a response but much greater resistance to extinction than does continuous reinforcement.

-            Perception: the process of organizing and interpreting sensory info, enabling us to recognize meaningful objects and events.

-            Perceptual constancy perceiving objects as unchanging even as illumination and retinal images change.

-            Personality: an individual's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.

-            Phoneme: in a language, the smallest distinctive sound unit.

-            Pitch: a tone's experienced highness or lowness depends on frequency.

-            Positive reinforcement: increasing behaviors by presenting positive stimuli, such as food. A positive reinforce is any stimulus that, when presented after a response, strengthens the response.

-            Priming: the activation, often unconsciously, of certain associations, thus predisposing one's perception, memory, or response.

-            Proactive interference: the disruptive effect of prior learning on the recall of new info.

-            Projection: psychoanalytic defecse meachansism by which ppl disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others.

-            Prototype: a mental image or best eg of a category. Matching new items to the prototype provides a quick and easy method for including items in a category.

-            Psychoactive drugL a chemical substance that alters perceptions and mood.

-            Psychoanalysis: frud's theory of personality and therapeutic technique that ttributes thoughts and actions to uncounscious motives and conflects. Freud believed the patent's free associations, resistacnces, dreams, and transferences and the therapists' interpretations of them-released previously repressed feelings, allowing the patient to gain self-insight.

-            Psychology: the scientific study of behavior and mental precesses.

-            Psychosexual stages: the childhood stages of development (oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital) during which, according to freud, the id's ;easure seeking energies focus on disticnet erogenous zones.

-            Recall: a measure of memory in which the person must retrieve info learned earlier, as on a fill in the blank test.

-            Regression: psychoanalytic defecse mechanism in which an individual faced with anxiety retreats to a more infatile psychosexual stage, where some psychic energy remains fixated.

-            Rehearsal: the conscious repetiotion of inf, either to maintain it in consciousness or to endcode it for storage.

-            Reinforce: in oerant conditoing, any event that strengthens the behaviors it follows.

-            Reliability: the extent to which a test yelds consistent results, as assessed by the consistency of scores on two halves of the test, on alternate forms of the test, or on retesting.

-            Rem rebound: the tendency for rem sleep to incress following rem sleep deviation

-            Rem sleep : repid eye movement sleep, a recurring sleep stage during which vivid dreams commonly occur. Also known as paradoxical slep, because the muscles are relaxed but other body sys are active

-            Repression: in psychoanalytic theory, the basic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness.

-            Retinal disparity: a binocular cue for perceiving depth: by conring images from the two eyeballs, the brain computes distance=the greater the disparity between the two images, the closer the object.

-            Retrieval: the process of getting infoout of memory storage.

-            Retroactive interference the disruptive effect of new learning on the recall of onld info.

-            Rods: retinal receptor that detect black whote and gray, necessary for peripheral and twilight vision, whehn cones don't respond.

-            Schema: a concept or framework that organizes and interprets info.

-            Selective attention: the focusing of conscous awareness on a particular stimulus, as in the cocktail party effect.

-            Self actualization: according to Maslow, the ultimate psychological neen that arises afeter basic phussical and psychological needs are met and self esteem is achieved, the motivation to fulfill one;s potential

-            Self - concept: a sense of one;s identity and personal worth. All our thoughts and feelings about orselves, in answer to the question who am i

-            Semantic encoding: the encoding of meaning, including the meaning of words

-            Semantics: the set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences in a given language, also the study of meaning.

-            Sensation: the process by which our sensory receptors and nervous sys receive and represent stimulus energies from our environment.

-            Sensory adaptation: diminished sensitivity as a consequence of sonstant stimulation.

-            Sensory memory : the immediate, very brieg recording of sensory info in the memory sys.

-            Serial position effect: our tendnency to recall best the last and first items in a list

-            shaping an operant conditioning procedure in which reinforcers, guide behavior toward closer and closer approximations of the desired behavior.

-            Short term memory : activated memory that holds a few items briefly, such as the seven digits of a fone number wihile dialing, before the in is stored and forgotten

-            Social cognitive perstective: views behavior as influenced by the interaction between persons and their social context.

-            Social learning theory: the theory that we learn social behavior by observing and imitating and by being rewarded or punished.