Glossary ❮ 333Engrams—memory traces of information encoded in
your brain that you acquire during life.
Episodic memories—personal experiences that
become consolidated into your long-term memory.
Equipotentiality—discredited theory that any
be havior can be taught to any organism.
Equivalent-form reliability—when two different
versions of a test on the same material are given
and the scores are highly correlated.
Escape behavior—behavior that terminates an ongo-
ing event; negative reinforcement.
ESP (extrasensory perception)—controversial claim
that perception can occur apart from sensory input.
Ethical guidelines—suggested rules for acting
responsibly and morally when conducting research
or in clinical practice.
Ethnocentrism—belief that your culture or social
group is superior to others.
Ethologists—scientists who study animal behavior
and how it has evolved in different species.
Eustress—physiological and emotional arousal that
may be productive and motivating.
Evoked potentials—EEGs resulting from a response
to a specific stimulus presented to the subject.
Evolutionary approach—psychological perspective
concerned with how natural selection favored
behaviors that contributed to survival and spread
of our ancestors’ genes.
Evolutionary psychologists—psychoanalysts who
take a Darwinian approach to the study of human
behavior.
Excitatory neurotransmitter—chemical secreted at
terminal button that causes the neuron on the
other side of the synapse to generate an action
potential (to fire).
Exhaustion stage—third stage of Selye’s general
adaptation theory when our resistance to illness
decreases and we are susceptible to many stress-
related disorders.
Existential therapies—focus on helping clients find
purpose and meaning in their lives with an empha-
sis on individual freedom and responsibility.
Experimental group—in a controlled experiment,
the subgroup of the sample that receives the treat-
ment or independent variable.
Experimenter bias—a phenomenon that occurs when
a researcher’s expectations or preferences about the
outcome of a study influence the results obtained.
Explicit memory (declarative memory)—long- term
memory of facts and experiences we consciously
know and can verbalize.
External locus of control—based on Julian Rotter’s
research, the belief that what happens to you is due
to fate, luck, or others.Extinction—the weakening of a response. In classi-
cal conditioning it’s the removal of the UCS, and
in operant conditioning it occurs when the rein-
forcement for the behavior is removed.
Extravert (also extrovert)—originally described by
Jung, a person who exhibits the traits of sociability,
and positive affect, and prefers to pay attention to
the external environment.
Extrinsic motivation—the desire to perform a
behavior for a reward or avoid punishment.
Face validity—a measure of the extent to which con-
tent of a test, on its surface, seems to be meaning-
fully related to what is being tested.
Factor analysis—a statistical procedure that identi-
fies common factors among groups of items by
determining which variables have a high degree of
correlation.
False consensus bias—the tendency of a person to
perceive his or her own views as representative of
a consensus.
Farsighted—too little curvature of the cornea and/or
lens, focusing the image behind the retina so distant
objects are seen more clearly than nearby objects.
Feature detectors—individual neurons in the pri-
mary visual cortex/occipital lobes that respond to
specific features of a visual stimulus.
Feature extraction (pattern recognition)—when new
information comes into sensory storage, we actively
search through long-term memory in an effort to
find a match for these new raw data.
Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS)— a cluster of abnor-
malities that occurs in babies of mothers who drink
alcoholic beverages during pregnancy.
Fetus—the developing human organism from about
nine weeks after conception to birth when organ
systems begin to interact, and sex organs and sense
organs become refined.
Fictional final goals—according to Adler’s person-
ality theory, these direct our behavior and, since
largely unattainable, need to be modified over time.
Fight-or-flight response—physiological reaction that
help ready us to fight or to flee from a dangerous situ-
ation; activation of the sympathetic nervous system.
Fixation—(for problem solving) an inability to look
at a problem from a fresh perspective, using a prior
strategy that does not lead to success; (in Freud’s
theory) continuing to engage in behaviors associ-
ated with an earlier stage of development.
Fixed interval—schedule of reinforcement in which
the first response after a specific time has passed is
reinforced.
Fixed ratio—schedule of reinforcement in which rein-
forcement is presented after a set number of responses
have been made since the previous reinforcement.BM.indd 333 27-05-2018 15:32:46