• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Token economy—a program used in institutions in which a person’s acceptable behavior is reinforced with tokens that can be exchanged for special privileges or goods.

Tolerance—condition in which diminished effectiveness of drug necessitates larger dosages to produce desired effect.

Top-down processing—information processing guided by preexisting knowledge or expectations to construct perceptions; concept-driven.

Trace conditioning—in classical conditioning, the CS is presented first, removed, then the UCS is presented.

Trait—a relatively permanent and stable characteristic that can be used to predict behavior.

Transduction—transformation of stimulus energy to the electrochemical energy of neural impulses.

Transference—in psychoanalaysis, the venting of emotions both positive and negative by patients; treating their analyst as the symbolic representative of someone important in their past.

Triadic reciprocality model of personality—Bandura’s scheme that our personal traits, the environment and our behavior all interact to account for our behavior.

Trial and error—trying possible solutions and discarding those that fail to solve the problem.

Triarchic theory of intelligence—Robert Sternberg’s idea of three separate and testable intelligences: analytical (facts), practical (“street smarts”), creative (seeing multiple solutions).

Trichromatic theory—proposed mechanism for color vision with cones that are differentially sensitive to different wavelengths of light; each color seen results from a specific ratio of activation among the three types of receptors.

Turner syndrome—a group of symptoms in females with only one X sex chromosome, including shortness, sterility, webbed neck, and difficulty with calculations.

Type A personalities—hard-driving, competitive, impatient, and ambitious individuals.

Type B personalities—more relaxed and calm individuals.

Unconditional positive regard—Rogers’s term for acceptance, value, and love from others independent of how we behave.

Unconditioned response (UCR)—in classical conditioning, the unlearned, naturally occurring response to the unconditioned stimulus.

Unconditioned stimulus (UCS)—in classical conditioning, the stimulus that naturally and automatically triggers the reflexive unconditioned response (UR).

Unconscious—the level of consciousness of which we are unaware, that may include unacceptable feelings, wishes, and thoughts not directly available to conscious awareness, according to psychodynamic psychologists/psychoanalysts. According to cognitive psychologists, the unconscious is the level of consciousness that parallel processes information of which we are unaware.

Unconsciousness—characterized by loss of responsiveness to the environment resulting from disease, trauma, or anesthesia.

Undifferentiated schizophrenia—simple schizophrenia characterized by fragments of the symptoms of other, different types of schizophrenia.

Uninvolved parenting style—characterized by few demands, low responsiveness, little communication, and general detachment from a child’s life.

Validity—the extent to which an instrument measures or predicts what it is supposed to.

Variability—the spread or dispersion of a set of research data or distribution.

Variable interval—schedule of reinforcement in which responses are reinforced after varying lengths of time.

Variable ratio—schedule of reinforcement in which reinforcement is presented after a varying number of responses.

Vestibular sense—body sense of equilibrium with hairlike receptors in semicircular canals and vestibular sac in the inner ear.

Visual capture—dominance of vision when there is a conflict among senses.

Visual encoding—the encoding of pictorial images into our memory.

Weber’s law—difference thresholds increase in proportion to the size of the stimulus.

Wernicke’s area—region in left temporal lobe that plays role in understanding language and making meaningful sentences.

Weschler intelligence tests—the most widely used measurement of intelligence; three age-related individual