Psychology^intro

Id The primitive, unconscious part of the personality that operates irrationally and acts on impulse to pursue pleasure.

Identification and recognition Two ways of attaching meaning to percepts.

Illusion An experience of a stimulus pattern in a manner that is demonstrably incorrect but shared by others in the same perceptual environment.
Implosion therapy A behavioral therapeutic technique that exposes a client to anxiety-provoking stimuli, through his or her own imagination, in an attempt to extinguish the anxiety associated with the stimuli.

Impulsive aggression Emotion-driven aggression produced in reaction to situations in the “heat of the moment.”

Independent variable In experimental settings, the stimulus condition whose values are free to vary independently of any other variable in the situation.

Inductive reasoning A form of reasoning in which a conclusion is made about the probability of some state of affairs, based on the available evidence and past experience.

Inferences Missing information filled in on the basis of a sample of evidence or on the basis of prior beliefs and theories.

Inferential statistics Statistical procedures that allow researchers to determine whether the results they obtain support their hypotheses or can be attributed just to chance variation.

Informational influence Group effects that arise from individuals' desire to be correct and right and to understand how best to act in a given situation.

In-group bias An evaluation of one's own group as better than others.

In-groups The groups with which people identify as members.

Inhibitory inputs Information entering a neuron signaling it not to fire.

Insanity The legal (not clinical) designation for the state of an individual judged to be legally irresponsible or incompetent.

Insight therapy A technique by which the therapist guides a patient toward discovering insights between present symptoms and past origins.

Insomnia The chronic inability to sleep normally; symptoms include difficulty in falling asleep, frequent waking, inability to return to sleep, and early-morning awakening.

Instinctual drift The tendency for learned behavior to drift toward instinctual behavior over time.

Instrumental aggression Cognition-based and goal-directed aggression carried out with premeditated thought, to achieve specific aims.

Intelligence quotient (IQ) An index derived from standardized tests of intelligence; originally obtained by dividing an individual's mental age by chronological age and then multiplying by 100; now directly computed as an IQ test score.

Intelligence The global capacity to profit from experience and to go beyond given information about the environment.

Interdependent construals of self Conceptualization of the self as part of an encompassing social relationship; recognizing that one's behavior is determined, contingent on, and, to a large extent organized by what the actor perceives to be the thoughts, feelings, and actions of others.

Interference A memory phenomenon that occurs when retrieval cues do not point effectively to one specific memory.

Internal consistency A measure of reliability; the degree to which a test yields similar scores across its different parts, such as on odd versus even items.

Internalization According to Vygotsky, the process through which children absorb knowledge from the social context.

Intimacy The capacity to make a full commitment—sexual, emotional, and moral—to another person