vocab
  • Empiricism- philosophy, empiricism is a theory of knowledge which asserts that knowledge arises from experience
  • Structuralism-Structuralism is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field (for instance, mythology) as a complex system of interrelated parts.
  • Functionalism-Functionalism is a memory of a philosophical basis for much empirical research in psychology and cognitive science, which says that “mental states are constituted by their casual relations to one another and to sensory inputs and behavioral outputs”
  • Psychology-Psychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the scientific study of mental functions and behavior.
  • Nature-nurture issue-The nature versus nurture debates concern the relative importance of an individual's innate qualities versus personal experiences in determining or causing individual differences in physical and behavioral traits.
  • Natural selection-Natural selection is the process by which favorable heritable traits become more common in successive generations of a population of reproducing organisms, and unfavorable heritable traits become less common, due to differential reproduction of genotypes.
  • Basic research-Basic research, fundamental research (sometimes pure research), is research carried out to increase understanding of fundamental principles.
  • Applied research-Applied research: is research accessing and using some part of the research communities' (the academy's) accumulated theories, knowledge, methods, and techniques, for a specific, often state, commercial, or client driven purpose.
  • Clinical psychology-Clinical psychology includes the scientific study and application of psychology for the purpose of understanding, preventing, and relieving psychologically-based distress or dysfunction and to promote subjective well-being and personal development.[
  • Psychiatry-Psychiatry is a medical specialty devoted to the treatment, study and prevention of mental disorder.


  • Hindsight bias-is the inclination to see events that have occurred as more predictable than they in fact were before they took place.
  • Critical thinking- is purposeful and reflective judgment about what to believe or do in response to observations, experience, verbal or written expressions, or arguments.
  • Theory- is a unifying principle that explains a body of facts and the laws based on them.
  • Hypothesis-An educated guess
  • Operational definition-is a demonstration of a process
  • Case study-is one of several ways of doing research whether it be social science related or even socially related
  • Survey-are used to collect quantitative information about items in a population.
  • False consensus effect- is the tendency for people to project their way of thinking onto other people.
  • Population-a collection of human beings with similar characteristic
  • Random sample-is one chosen by a method involving an unpredictable component.
  • Naturalistic observation- is a method of observation, that involves observing subjects in their natural habitats
  • Correlation coefficient-indicates the strength and direction of a linear relationship between two random variables.
  • Scatterplot-is a type of display using Cartesian coordinates to display values for two variables for a set of data.
  • Illusory correlation-Illusory correlation is the phenomenon of seeing the relationship one expects in a set of data even when no such relationship exists.

  • Experiment-a method of investigating causal relationships among variables.
  • Double-blind procedure-used to prevent research outcomes from being influenced by either the placebo effect or the observer bias.
  • Placebo effect-is a phenomenon in which a physiologically inert treatment, or placebo, improves a patient's condition relative to similar patients who receive no treatment
  • Experimental condition-
  • Control condition-
  • Random assignment-parcipitants are assigned to a group by chance
  • Independent variable-the one that is being changed for study
  • Dependent variable-is not being changing for study


  • Mode- most commonly occuring number
  • Mean- average
  • Median-middle number in a set of data
  • Range-from the lowest # of data to the top
  • Standard deviation- how much scores vary around the median
  • Statistical significance- signafacance of statistics
  • Culture- a group of people from a region
  • Bias-a water dru m
  • Ethics- ethnic beliefs


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