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Neuron—the basic unit of structure and function of your nervous system. Neurons perform three major functions: receive information, process it, and transmit it to the rest of your body.

Neuropsychologists—neuroscientists who explore the relationships between brain/nervous systems and behavior. Neuropsychologists are also called biological psychologists or biopsychologists, behavioral geneticists, physiological psychologists, and behavioral neuroscientists.

Neuroticism—Eysenck’s personality dimension that measures our level of instability, how moody, anxious, and unreliable we are; as opposed to stability, how calm, even-tempered, and reliable we are.

Neurotransmitters—chemical messengers released by the terminal buttons of the presynaptic neuron into the synapse.

Night terrors—most frequently childhood sleep disruptions from stage 4 sleep characterized by a bloodcurdling scream and intense fear.

Nightmares—are frightening dreams that occur during REM sleep.

Nodes of Ranvier—spaces between segments of myelin on the axons of neurons.

Nomothetic methods—personality techniques such as tests, surveys, and observations that focus on variables at the group level, identifying universal trait dimensions or relationships between different aspects of personality.

Nonconscious—level of consciousness devoted to processes completely inaccessible to conscious awareness such as blood flow, filtering of blood by kidneys, secretion of hormones, and lower level processing of sensory information such as detecting edges, estimating size and distance of objects, recognizing patterns, etc.

Non-declarative (implicit) memory—retention without conscious recollection of learning the skills and procedures to do things thought to be stored in the cerebellum.

Non-REM or NREM sleep—sleep stages 1–4 during which rapid eye movements do NOT occur.

Normal distribution—bell-shaped curve that represents data about how lots of human characteristics are dispersed in the population.

Normative social influence—going along with the group, even if you do not agree with their decisions, because you desire to gain their social approval.

Norms—(in social psychology), rules either implicit or explicit that govern the behavior of group members; (in testing), scores established from the test results of the representative sample, which are then used as a standard for assessing the performances of subsequent test takers.

Object permanence—awareness that objects still exist when out of sight; milestone of Piaget’s sensorimotor period, 0–2 years.

Observational learning—learning that takes place by watching and imitating others’ behavior.

Obsession—an involuntary recurring thought, idea, or image.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder—recurrent, unwanted thoughts or ideas and compelling urges to engage in repetitive ritual-like behavior.

Occipital lobes—region in the back of the cerebral cortex that is the primary area for processing visual information.

Olfaction—chemical sense of smell with receptors in a mucous membrane (olfactory epithelium) on the roof of the nasal cavity that transduce chemical energy of dissolved molecules to electrochemical energy of neural impulses.

Omission training—removal of a rewarding consequence that follows a voluntary behavior thereby decreasing the probability the behavior will be repeated.

Operant conditioning—learning that occurs when an active learner performs certain voluntary behavior and the consequences of the behavior (pleasant or unpleasant) determine the likelihood of its recurrence.

Operational definition—a description of the specific procedure used to determine the presence of a variable (such as a smile for happiness).

Opponent-process theory—proposed mechanism for color vision with opposing retinal processes for red-green, yellow-blue, white-black. Some retinal cells are stimulated by one of a pair and inhibited by the other.

Opponent-process theory of emotions—following a strong emotion, an opposing emotion counters the first emotion lessening the experience of that emotion. On repeated occasions,