General Psychology Cheat Sheet

Chap. 9
Psychological Assessment: The use of specified procedures to evaluate abilities, behaviors and personal qualities, measurement of individual differences because the majority of assessments specify how an individual is different from or similar to other people on a given dimension
Sir Francis Galton: Hereditary genius in 1869,
Galton’s Ideas of Intelligence: Differences are quantifiable, Differences form a bell shaped curve or normal distribution, Intelligence(mental ability) can be measure by objective tests, Correlations(extent to which two sets of test scores were related), Eugenics Movement (improving human species by applying evolutionary theory to encouraging biologically superior people to interbreed while discouraging biologically inferior people from having offspring)
Reliability: Stability, consistency of scores produced by an instrument
Test/Retest Reliability: Test given on 2 separate occasions, measured by a correlation, a perfectly reliable test yields a correlation coefficient of 1.00+
Parallel Forms: Different versions of a test, reduces the effects of direct practice of test questions, memory of test questions and desire of an individual to appear consistent from one test to the next
Internal Consistency: Degree to which test yields similar scores across it’s different parts
Split-Half Reliability: A measure of the correlation between test takers performance on different halves, Odd vs even numbers on a test
Validity: Extent to which a test measures what it was intended to measure
Content Validity: The test measures the full range of the domain of interest
Criterion Validity (predictive validity): psychologists compare a person’s score on the test with his or her score on some other standard
Construct Validity: The degree to which it adequately measures the underlying construct * Reliability is measured by the degree to which a test correlates with itself, and validity is measured by the degree to which the test correlates with something external * A test that is not reliable is usually also not valid because a test that cannot predict itself will be unable to predict anything else
Norms: Standards based on measurements of a large group of people
Standardization: Uniform procedures for treating each participant in research
Intelligence: The global capacity to profit experience and to go beyond given information about the environment
Alfred Binet and Theophile Simon: Mental and Chronological age
Lewis Terman: Stanford Binet Intelligence scale (1916), Intelligence Quotient (IQ), IQ was a numerical, standardized measure of intelligence, William Stern named it Wechsler Intelligence Scale: Bellevue Hospital Ny-stopped dependence on verbal skills for S-B test. Wechsler-Bellevue test PERFORMANCE, non verbal test. Nonverbal IQ. Now WAdultIntelligenceScale-IV=five subtests(Verbal comprehension: similarities, vocab-Perpceptual Reasoning:blockshapes, picture completing-Working memory:digit span, arithmetic-Process Speed:symbol,cancellation- Mental Retardation: Age of onset is before 18 years of age, IQ score of 70-75 or below, demonstrated limitations in 2 or more adaptive life skills Learning Disorders: A large discrepancy between an individuals measured IQ and his or her achievements Giftedness: IQ score above 130, Joseph Renzulli Three ring conception (Ability, creativity, task commitment) Psychometrics: Field of psychology that specializes in mental testing in any of its facets, including personality assessments, intelligence evaluation and aptitude measurement Factor Analysis: a statistic procedure that detects a smaller number of dimensions, clusters or factors within a larger set of independent variables Charles Spearman: Discovered that the performance of individuals on each of a variety of intelligence tests was highly correlated, a factor of general intelligence underlying all intelligent performances Raymond Cattel: Crystallized Intelligence (involves the knowledge a person has already acquired and the ability to access that knowledge) vs. Fluid Intelligence (the ability to see complex relationships and solve problems) Sternbergs Triarchic Theory: Robert Sternberg, Analytical Intelligence (basic information processing skills), Creative Intelligence (Ability to deal with novel vs. routine problems), Practical Intelligence (Ability to adapt to new and different context and to select and shape context) Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences: Howard Gardner, 8 intelligences (mathematical, linguistic, naturalistic, musical, spatial, bodily kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal) Emotional Intelligence: EQ vs. IQ, 4 Major Components: 1. The ability to perceive, appraise, and express emotions accurately and appropriately 2. The ability to use emotions to facilitate thinking 3. The ability to understand and analyze emotions and to use emotional knowledge effectively 4. The ability to regulate one’s emotions to promote both emotional and intellectual growth Henry Goddard: Advocated mental testing of all immigrants and the selective exclusion of those who were found to be “mentally defective” Heritability Estimate: Based on the proportion of the variability in test scores on that trait that can be traced to genetic factors Claude Steel: Argued that people’s performances on ability tests is influenced by Stereotype threat (the threat of being at risk for confirming a negative stereotype of one’s group Divergent Thinking: The ability to generate a variety of unusual solutions to a problem Convergent Thinking: The ability to gather together different sources of information to solve a problem Harold Stevenson: Hard work vs Innate ability Creativity: Ability to generate ideas or products that are novel and appropriate
Goal of psychological assessment: To make as accurate assessments as possible
Three ethical concerns: Fairness of test-based decisions, Utility of tests for evaluating education, Implications of using test scores to categorize people

Chap. 10 * Developmental Psychology: Interaction between physical and psychological processes, Stages of growth from conception throughout the entire life span * Normative Investigations: seek to describe a characteristic of a specific age or developmental stage * Developmental Age: the chronological age at which most people show the particular level of physical or mental development demonstrated by that child * Longitudinal Design: a research design in which the same participants observed repeatedly. Sometimes over many years * Cross Sectional Design: a research method in which groups of participants of different chronological ages are observed and compared at a given time * Physical Development: the bodily changes, maturation and growth that occur in an organism starting with conception and continuing across the life span * Prenatal and Childhood Development: Zygote (the single cell that results when a sperm fertilizes an egg), Embryo, Fetus * Prenatal Period: The moment of conception until birth * Germinal Stage: The first 2 weeks after formation of the zygote, cells attach to mothers uterus wall * Embryonic Stage: 3rd through the 8th week of prenatal development, cells begin to become specialized to different organs * Fetal Stage: The end of the 8th week through the birth of the child, reaches full development * Teratogen: Any environmental factor that causes structural abnormalities in the fetus * Babies Prewired for Survival: Well suited to respond to adult caregivers and to influence their social environment, Robert Fantz (top heavy patterns), Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk (how children respond to depth information, visual cliff) * Maturation: Age-related physical and behavioral changes characteristic of a species. Continuing influence of heredity throughout development * Puberty: Attainment of sexual maturity * Menarche: The onset of menstruation * Limbic system: Regulates emotional processes * Frontal Lobes: The areas responsible for planning and control of emotions * Physical Changes in Adulthood: Vision, Hearing, and Reproductive and Sexual Function * Cognitive Development: Development of the process of knowing, imagining, perceiving, reasoning, and problem-solving * Nature versus Nurture: John Locke (empiricism, human development to experience, nurture) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (nature, child brings into the world a mold that shapes development) * Building Blocks of Developmental Change: Assimilation (New cognitive elements are fitted in with old elements or modified to fit more easily), Accommodation (Restructuring cognitive structures so that new information can fit into them more easily) * Schemes: The mental structures that enable individuals to interpret the world * Piaget Stages:Sensorimotor Stage: 0-2 years old, Object permanence, Preoperational Stage: 2-7 years old, Egocentrism (child’s inability to take the perspective of another person, Centration (tend to focus attention on only one aspect of a situation and disregard other relevant aspects, Concrete Operations Stage: 7-11 years old, Conservation , Reversibility, allow children to replace physical action with mental action, Formal Operations Stage: 11 years to adulthood, Abstract and hypothetical thinking * Infant Cognition: Infants as young as 3 months have developed aspects of object permanence, Renee Baillargeon * Children’s Foundational Theories: Frameworks for initial understanding, children accumulate their experiences into of the properties of mental states into * Social and Cultural Influences: Lev Vygotsky, Internalization (They absorb intelligence from their social context that has a major impact on how cognition unfolds over time) * Intelligence: “Crystallized” intelligence, “Fluid” intelligence, Wisdom (expertise in the fundamental practices of life), Warner Schaie * Phonemes: The minimal meaningful units of speech that allow people to distinguish one word from another * Infant Directed Speech or Child Direct Speech: Adults tend to slow down their rate of speech and use an exaggerated, high pitched intonation * Noam Chomsky: Argued that children are born with mental structures that facilitate the comprehension and production of language * Cross Linguistically: Study language acquisition across many languages * Social Development: How individual’s social interactions and expectations change across the life span * Selective Optimization with Compensation: Paul and Margaret Baltes * Memory: Research on Alzheimer’s disease * Grammar: Rules of language * Syntax: Morpheme * Semantics: Lexical meaning * Pragmatics * Perceiving Speech and Words: Phonemes (Child-directed speech) * Learning New Words * Acquiring Grammar: Noam Chomsky (Children are born with mental structures that facilitate comprehension and production of language), Dan Slobin(Children bring innate constraints to the task of learning a particular language, Language-making capacity), Overregularization (a grammatical error, usually appearing during early language development, in which rules of the language are applied too widely, resulting in incorrect linguistic forms) * Erik Erikson: Psychosocial Stages: Trust vs. Mistrust, Autonomy vs. Self-doubt, Initiative vs. Guilt, Competence vs. Inferiority, Identity vs. Role Confusion, Intimacy vs. Isolation, Generativity vs. Stagnation, Ego-integrity vs. Despair * Socialization: Lifelong process through which an individual’s behavior patterns, values, standards, skill, attitudes and motives are shaped to conform to those seen as socially desirable * Temperament: Biologically based levels of emotional and behavioral response to the environment, Jerome Kagan * Attachment: An intense, enduring, social-emotional relationship * Konrad Lorenz: Imprinting (Occurs rapidly during a critical period of development and cannot easily be modified) * John Bowlby: Internal working model (Structure that gathers together a child’s history of interactions with his or her caretakers, the interactions that yielded * Attachment & Mary Ainsworth: Strange Situation Test: Mary Airworthy-strange situation test –record behavior of child with mother then stranger, in strange room. Find securely attached vs. insecurely attached avoidant vs. insecurely attached ambivalent resistant * Parenting Styles: Intersection of the 2 dimensions of demandingness and responsiveness is most effective * Contact Comfort and Social Experience: Harry Harlow’s monkeys (Contact comfort), Stephen Suomi (Cross-fostering) * Experience of Adolescence: G. Stanley Hall (Storm and Stress: a unique tumultuous period of life characterized by extreme mood swings and unpredictable difficult behavior ), Anna Freud, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, Erik Erikson (Independence) * Intimacy: Capacity to make a full commitment, Selective social interaction theory, Laura Carstensen * Generativity: Commitment beyond one’s self and one’s partner, George Vaillant * Sex Differences: Biologically based characteristics that distinguish males and females * Gender: Psychological phenomenon referring to learned sex-related behaviors and attitudes * Gender Identity: An individual’s sense of maleness or femaleness, Includes awareness and acceptance of one’s sex * Gender Roles: Patterns of behavior regarded as appropriate for males and females in a particular society * Acquisition of Gender Roles: Eleanor Maccoby * Morality: A system of beliefs, values, and underlying judgments about the rightness or wrongness of human acts * Lawrence Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development and Reasoning: Preconventional, Conventional, Principled * Carol Gilligan: Women’s morality is based on a standard of caring for others, Men’s morality is based on a standard of justice * Successful Aging: Selective Optimization with Compensation (Optimization, Compensation)