Free MCAT Psych/Soc Exam Flashcards

States that the smallest detectable difference between two stimuli (the just-noticeable difference) is a constant proportion of the original stimulus's intensity, not a fixed amount. A heavier object needs a larger absolute change than a lighter one before the difference becomes noticeable.

Explains that detecting a faint stimulus depends on both sensory sensitivity and a decision criterion, since background noise can be mistaken for the signal. Responses are classified as hits, misses, false alarms, and correct rejections rather than as simple all-or-none detection.

A decrease in responsiveness to a constant, unchanging stimulus over time, such as no longer noticing a smell after being in a room for a while. It keeps the sensory system tuned to changes in the environment instead of continually reporting stable background input.

Bottom-up processing builds a perception starting only from raw incoming sensory data. Top-down processing starts from existing knowledge, expectations, or context and uses that to interpret the same sensory data.

A set of principles, such as proximity, similarity, and closure, describing how the mind groups individual sensory elements into organized wholes. The core idea is that perception forms a meaningful overall pattern rather than being assembled piece by piece from isolated fragments.

Selective attention concentrates processing resources on one input while filtering out competing stimuli. Divided attention splits limited cognitive resources across two or more tasks at once, which usually lowers performance on each task.

A four-stage theory, sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational, describing how children's reasoning changes with age. Each stage marks a qualitative shift in how a child understands objects, symbols, logic, and abstract ideas.

Heuristics are mental shortcuts, such as judging likelihood by how easily examples come to mind (availability) or by resemblance to a prototype (representativeness), that speed up judgments but can produce systematic errors. Two related biases are overconfidence, which is overestimating the accuracy of one's own judgments, and belief perseverance, which is holding onto a belief even after the evidence for it is discredited.

An internal biological clock that regulates alertness, hormone release, and the sleep-wake cycle on a roughly 24-hour pattern. Disrupting this rhythm, such as through shift work or jet lag, is linked to sleep-wake disorders and impaired daytime functioning.

Sensory memory briefly holds a high-capacity trace of incoming stimuli, working memory actively holds and manipulates a small amount of information, and long-term memory stores information relatively permanently. Information must be encoded and consolidated to move from working memory into long-term storage.

The James-Lange theory holds that a physiological response occurs first and the brain interprets it afterward as an emotion. The Cannon-Bard theory holds that the physiological response and the subjective emotional experience occur at the same time, independently of each other.

Proposes that experiencing an emotion requires both physiological arousal and a cognitive label that interprets the cause of that arousal. The same arousal state can be experienced as different emotions depending on which label the situation prompts.

The cognitive process of evaluating a potential stressor. Primary appraisal judges whether the situation is irrelevant, benign, or threatening, and secondary appraisal judges whether the person has the resources to cope with it. How a stressor is appraised, not just its objective severity, shapes the emotional and physiological stress response that follows.

Neurons communicate by releasing neurotransmitter molecules across a synapse to receptors on the next neuron, which can excite or inhibit that neuron's firing. Different neurotransmitters have distinct roles: dopamine is tied to reward and movement, serotonin to mood, sleep, and appetite, and GABA is the brain's main inhibitory neurotransmitter.

The forebrain, including the cerebral cortex and limbic structures, supports higher cognition, emotion, and sensory integration. The midbrain relays sensory and motor signals, and the hindbrain, made up of the medulla, pons, and cerebellum, regulates basic survival functions and motor coordination.

Endocrine glands release hormones into the bloodstream that act more slowly and broadly than neurotransmitters, shaping mood, stress response, growth, and longer-term behavior patterns. The hypothalamus links the nervous and endocrine systems by controlling hormone release from the pituitary gland.

The trait perspective describes personality as a stable combination of measurable characteristics, such as the Big Five dimensions. The psychoanalytic perspective instead explains personality as the product of unconscious conflicts and drives shaped during early development.

The biomedical model explains a psychological disorder mainly through biological causes, such as genetics or neurochemistry. The biopsychosocial model instead treats the disorder as arising from the interaction of biological, psychological, and social factors together.

Drive reduction theory explains motivation as behavior aimed at reducing an internal state of biological need, such as hunger. Incentive theory instead explains motivation as being pulled toward external rewards, independent of any internal deficit.

Describes the mental discomfort that arises when a person holds two conflicting beliefs, or when their behavior contradicts a belief they hold. People often resolve that discomfort by shifting their attitude to match the behavior rather than changing the behavior itself.

The bystander effect is a reduced likelihood of helping in an emergency as the number of onlookers increases, largely from diffusion of responsibility. Social loafing is reduced individual effort on a group task specifically because responsibility for the outcome is shared with others.

Groupthink occurs when a group's desire for harmony suppresses dissent and leads to a poor decision. Group polarization occurs when discussion strengthens a group's initial leaning, pushing members toward a more extreme version of the view they already held.

Explains deviance as a consequence of society applying a "deviant" label to a person or act, rather than the act itself being inherently deviant. Once labeled, a person may internalize that identity and behave in ways that reinforce it.

The family, peer groups, mass media, schools, and workplace are the primary channels through which a person learns the norms, values, and roles of their society. Different agents dominate at different life stages, from family in early childhood to the workplace in adulthood.

Habituation is a decrease in response to a repeated, harmless stimulus over time. Dishabituation is the recovery of the response to that original stimulus after a new, different stimulus is presented, showing the earlier decline was learned rather than simple sensory fatigue.

Acquisition is the initial learning phase in which a neutral stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus through repeated pairing with an unconditioned stimulus. Extinction is the fading of the conditioned response once that pairing stops, and spontaneous recovery is the conditioned response briefly reappearing later without further pairing.

Reinforcement increases the future likelihood of a behavior, while punishment decreases it. Both can be positive, adding a stimulus, or negative, removing a stimulus, so negative reinforcement still increases behavior by taking an aversive stimulus away.

Fixed schedules deliver reinforcement after a set number of responses (ratio) or a set amount of time (interval), producing predictable patterns such as a pause after each reward. Variable schedules deliver reinforcement after an unpredictable number of responses or amount of time, which produces steadier responding that is more resistant to extinction; variable-ratio schedules yield the highest response rates.

Observational learning is acquiring a new behavior by watching a model perform it, without needing direct reinforcement of one's own actions. Mirror neurons, which activate both when performing an action and when watching someone else perform it, are proposed as part of the brain's biological basis for this kind of learning.

Describes two routes to persuasion: the central route, which relies on carefully evaluating the actual arguments, and the peripheral route, which relies on superficial cues such as a speaker's likability. Attitude change formed through the central route tends to be more durable and resistant to counterarguments.

Persuasion depends on message characteristics, such as source credibility and argument quality, on target characteristics, such as prior knowledge, mood, and motivation to think the message through, and on social factors, such as group norms and pressure to conform. Changing the behavior first can also shift the attitude, as in role-playing or the foot-in-the-door technique.

Self-efficacy is a person's belief in their own ability to succeed at a specific task. Locus of control is the broader belief about whether outcomes in life generally result from one's own actions, an internal locus, or from external forces like luck and other people, an external locus.

An eight-stage lifespan theory in which each stage presents a psychosocial conflict to resolve, such as trust vs. mistrust in infancy and identity vs. role confusion in adolescence. Successfully resolving a stage's conflict is proposed to build a strength that supports healthy development in later stages.

Cooley's concept that self-concept develops through imagining how others perceive and judge us, then internalizing that imagined judgment as part of our own identity. Self-identity is therefore shaped socially, through others, rather than forming in isolation.

The tendency to explain someone else's behavior by pointing to their personality or disposition while underweighting the influence of their situation. This bias is typically weaker when people explain their own behavior, where situational factors get more credit.

Ethnocentrism is judging another culture's practices by the standards of one's own culture, often treating it as superior. Cultural relativism instead evaluates a culture's practices within its own context and standards rather than against an outside benchmark.

Stereotype threat is impaired performance that results from the anxiety of possibly confirming a negative stereotype about one's group. Self-fulfilling prophecy is a broader pattern in which an expectation about a person or group causes behavior that ends up making that expectation come true.

Ascribed status is assigned at birth or involuntarily, such as being born into a particular family or social class. Achieved status is gained through a person's own choices and effort, such as earning a professional credential.

Role conflict occurs when the demands of two or more different roles a person holds compete with each other, such as being both a parent and an employee. Role strain occurs when the demands within a single role are difficult to meet, even without another role competing for time or energy.

Goffman's model treats social life as a performance in which people manage impressions of themselves for an audience. The front-stage self is the presented, audience-facing performance, while the back-stage self is how a person behaves when no audience is present.

Individual discrimination is unfair treatment carried out by one person against another based on group membership. Institutional discrimination is unfair treatment built into the routine policies and practices of organizations or social institutions, even without any single biased individual.

Functionalism views society as a system of interdependent parts that work together to maintain stability. Conflict theory views society as shaped by competition between groups for power and resources. Symbolic interactionism focuses on how individuals create meaning through everyday interactions and shared symbols.

Medicalization is the process by which a condition or behavior once treated as a moral or social issue becomes defined and treated as a medical problem. The sick role, described by Talcott Parsons, is the set of social expectations placed on someone recognized as ill, such as being excused from normal duties while being expected to seek treatment and try to get well.

Culture lag is the gap that appears when material culture, such as new technology, changes faster than the nonmaterial culture of norms, laws, and values needed to manage it. Culture shock is the personal disorientation someone feels when suddenly immersed in an unfamiliar culture.

Assimilation describes a minority group adopting the customs and values of the dominant culture, gradually reducing its distinct group identity. Multiculturalism describes different cultural groups maintaining their distinct identities and practices side by side within one society.

Describes a society's typical shift from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates as it industrializes, passing through a stage of rapid population growth in between. The model is used to explain differing population growth rates across countries at different stages of development.

Push factors are unfavorable conditions, such as conflict or poverty, that drive people to leave their origin location. Pull factors are favorable conditions, such as job opportunities or safety, that draw people toward a destination.

Explains that social movements are more likely to form when people feel deprived relative to some comparison group or to their own expectations, not simply when they experience objective hardship. A group can be materially better off than in the past and still mobilize if the gap between what it has and what it expected grows.

Cultural capital consists of non-financial assets, such as education, knowledge, and tastes, that help a person advance socially. Social capital consists of the value gained from a person's network of relationships and social connections.

Absolute poverty is lacking the minimum resources needed to meet basic survival needs, defined by a fixed threshold. Relative poverty is having substantially less than the typical standard of living in one's own society, defined by comparison rather than a fixed minimum.