Adaptive: Behaviours that promote survival and reproduction.
Attachment: The strong emotional bond between a baby and their carer. chances of recieving help.
Case Study: A research method that involves looking in detail at a single person, event or organisation.
Cognition: This refers to our higher mental processes such as believing, acquiring knowledge and perceiving.
Control: Control refers to the extent to which an experimenter can claim that the behaviour recorded in experiment is as a result of the independent variable.
Correlation: A measure of the extent to which two variables are related. For example, a positive correlation is when two variables increase together and a negative correlation is when one variable increases and the other one decreases.
Demand Characteristics: Features within an experiment that give away the experiment's aim. This can lead to participants displaying artificial behaviour in order to please the experimenter.
Ecological Validity: Whether a psychological method/technique corresponds to its equivalent in an everyday natural setting. Laboratory settings are often low in Ecological Validity and therefore behaviour is unnatural.
Ethics: To do with rights and wrongs. Psychologists must follow ethical guidelines to reduce the chances of deception/ danger/damage. Ethical Guidelines are laid down by the British Psychological Society.
Only being able to interpret the a situation from your own point of view.
Extraneous Variables: These are variables that are controlled by the experimenter because they may interfere with the investigation. For instance in an experiment measuring the effect of noise on perfomance, temperature may be controlled because it may be possible that temperature could affect participants' performance.
Gender Bias: When people are treated differently or unfairly because of their gender.
Gender Identity: The part of your self concept that identifies with a gender. "I am a girl."
Hypothesis: When Psychologists conduct experiments they formulate hypotheses. Hypotheses are both testable statements and predictments. The experiment is designed to test the hypotheses.
Informed Consent: One of the ethical guidelines. It is when an experimenter asks a participant's full permission before they take part in the research.
Laboratory: A very controlled and often artificial environment where experiments take place.
Natural Experiment: When the Independent variable in an experiment is naturally occuring and is not manipulated by the experimenter. E.g. Gender
Observation: A research method that involves watching people.
Operant Conditioning: A type of learning that takes place because of the consequences - punishment and reinforcement.
Participant: A person who is measured/questioned/observed within research.
Qualitative measures: Techniques for obtaining information that assume that the meaning of the information is the most important thing. Methods include interviews, case studies, observation. Measures are usually descriptive and interpretation can be subjective.
Quantitative measures: An approach to psychological information that is primarily concerned with the collection of numerical information.
Reductionism: An argument that takes the view that an event, behaviour or phenomenon can be understood as nothing but its component parts. E.g. stimulus – response. This argument ignores deeper explanations and is simplistic.
Reliability: Consistency of measure. How likely an experimental design is to produce the same results if used again in the same circumstances.
Validity: The extent to which a psychological technique really assesses what it intends to measure.
Variable: Anything that varies. In a psychology experiment any measure of performance or behaviour taken in a study is referred to as a variable.Independent variable (iv): Manipulated by a psychologist.Dependent variable (dv): Measured by a psychologist attachment – a two-way emotional bond in which