PSYC 342 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Menstruation, Endometrium, Corpus Luteum

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 342
• Professor: Jens C Pruessner

Document Summary

Cognition is a term referring to the mental processes involved in gaining knowledge and comprehension, including perceiving, learning, remembering, but also knowing, judging and problem-solving. Example: anger can inhibit rational thinking and cause us to react impulsively. Example: stress and learning been looked at intensively, layman assumption is that stress impairs memory but not necessarily! Role for hormones in cognition: perception, memory, moral decision main, general cognitive abilities, perception. Study: cutting stress off at the pass: reducing vigilance and responsiveness to social threat by manipulating attention (baldwin, preussner: part 1: Dot probe task: investigates all sorts of behavioral tendencies/preferences. A simple reaction task where you have to look for a speci c target (dot) either appearing on left or right side of screen and then must indicate which side it appeared on. However, before target appears, two faces (either happy/positive or sad/angry/negative) appear on either side of the screen.