The field of psychology can be likened to a prism with many unique, albeit related facets — i.e., various theoretical orientations which serve as both the foundation for an explanation of psychological phenomenon and the basis for further research questions. These varying, and sometimes conflicting perspectives, also have associated implications…

Distortions in judgments and decisions — Cognitive bias is a term that refers to the ways in which the human mind is inclined to process information in ways that may lead to inaccurate or distorted outcomes (Haselton, Nettle & Andrews, 2005). These biases represent systematic patterns of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment and thus…

Semantic Memory, Schemas, and Scripts — Tulving (1972) first defined semantic memory as “a mental thesaurus of organized knowledge a person possesses about words and other verbal symbols, their meanings and referents, about relations among them, and about rules, formulas and algorithms for the manipulation of these symbols, concepts and relations” (p. 386). This vast array…

The strengthening of behavior which results from reinforcement is appropriately called ‘conditioning’. In operant conditioning we ‘strengthen’ an operant in the sense of making a response more probable or, in actual fact, more frequent. — B. F. Skinner — Reinforcement refers to “the process by which a stimulus or event strengthens or increases the probability of a behavior or an event that follows” (Santrok, 2003, p. 280). In other words, a reinforcer is anything that strengthens the behavior that leads to it. Reinforcement can be further subdivided into categories…