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| Surgical procedure that severs fibers connecting the frontal lobes of the brain from the underlying thalamus. Created by neurosurgeon Egas Moniz. |
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| Mental Shortcut that helps us to streamline our thinking and make sense of our world. |
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| Heuristic that involves judging the probability of an event by its superficial similarity to a prototype. |
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| How common a characteristic or behavior is in the general population. (IE: When we say alcoholism has a 5% base rate in the US, we mean that about 1 in 20 Americans are alcoholics at any given time.) |
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| Heuristic that involves estimating the likelihood or an occurrence based on the ease with which it comes to our minds. |
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| A variety of systematic errors in thinking. |
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| Tendency to overestimate how well we could have successfully forecasted known outcomes. |
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| Tendency to overestimate our ability to make correct predictions. |
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| Naturalistic Observation: |
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| Watching behavior in a real-world setting. |
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| Extent to which we can generalize findings to real-world settings. |
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| Extent to which we can draw cause-and-effect inferences from a study. |
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| Research design that examine one person or a small number of people in depth, often over an extended period of time. |
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| Demonstrations that a given psychological phenomenon can occur. |
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| Research design that examines the extent to which two variables are associated. |
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| Grouping of points on a two-dimensional graph in which each dot represents a single person's data. |
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| Perception of a statistical association between two variables where none exists. |
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| Research design characterized by random assignment of participants to conditions and manipulation of an independent variable. |
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| Randomly sorting participants into two groups. |
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| In an experiment, the group of participants that receive the manipulation. |
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| In an experiment, the group of participants that doesn't receive the manipulation. |
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| Variable that an experimenter manipulates. |
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| Variable that an experimenter measures to see whether the manipulation has had an effect. |
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| Any difference between the experimental and control groups other than the independent variable. |
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| Investigation of the consistency of patterns of results across large numbers of studies conducted in different laboratories. |
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| Tendency for negative findings to remain unpublished. |
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| Improvement resulting from the mere expectation of improvement. |
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| Blind (in terms of participants in an experiment): |
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| Unaware of whether one is in the control group or experimental group. |
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| Harm resulting from the mere expectation of harm. |
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| Experimenter expectancy effect: |
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| Phenomenon in which researchers' hypotheses lead them to unintentionally bias the outcome of a study. |
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| When neither researchers nor participants are aware of who's in the experimental or control group. |
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| Phenomenon in which participants' knowledge that they're being studied can affect their behavior. |
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| Cues that participants pick up from a study that allow them to generate guesses regarding the researcher's hypotheses. |
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| Procedure that ensure every person in a population has an equal chance of being chosen to participate. |
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| Consistency of measurement. |
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| Extent to which a measure assesses what it purports to measure. |
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| Tendencies of research participants to distort their responses to questionnaire items. |
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| Informing research participants of what is involved in a study before asking them to participate. |
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| Application of mathematics to describing and analyzing data. |
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| Measure of the "central" scores in a data set, or where the group tends to cluster. |
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| Average; A measure of central tendency. |
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| Middle score in a data set; a measure of central tendency |
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| Most frequent score in a data set; a measure of central tendency. |
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| Measure of how loosely or tightly bunched scores are. |
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| Difference between the highest and the lowest scores; a measure of dispersion. |
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| Measure of dispersion that takes into account how far each data point is from the mean. |
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| Mathematical methods that allows us to determine whether we can generalize findings from our sample to the full population. |
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| What are some characteristics of naturalistic observation? |
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| Watching behavior in a real-world setting. High in external validity. Low in internal validity- determining cause and effect exactly. |
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| Why are case studies conducted? |
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| * Existence proofs. * Oppurtunity to study rare conditions. * Useful insights. * Good for generating hypotheses. |
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| What are major disadvantages of case studies? |
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| Case studies can lead to wrong conclusions. Plural of anecdote is not fact. |
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| Explain the three types of correlations (positive, neutral/zero, and negative). |
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| Positive: As the value of one variable goes up, another goes up too. Neutral/Zero: Two variables are unrelated. Negative correlation: As one variable goes up, another goes down. |
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| What does a correlation coefficient tell us? |
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| It tells us how sure we are of a correlation. It is typically between -1, 0, and 1. +.27 versus -.27 are the same amount of right, just in different directions. |
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| Why do researchers square the correlation coeffecient? |
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| To find out the difference between two correlated variables. IE: SAT scores and GPA differ by about r = .4. That makes it 16% of the differences in grades are explained by SAT scores. |
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| Identify the type of correlation in this statement: The higher the quality of a state's daycare program, the higher the reported rate of child abuse. |
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| Identify the type of correlation in this statement: Adults who ate frosted flakes as a kid had half the cancer rate of those who never ate the cereal. |
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| Why aren't self-report measure preferable? |
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| * Self-reports assume that respondents have enough insight in their traits to report. * Assume that participants will be honest. * Naive realism may apply. |
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| Be aware of ethical concerns when using humans or animals in research. |
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