Maslow, Abraham(1908 - 1970)
American humansitic psychologist, co-founder of the Humanistic approach with Carl Rogers. Maslow believed that we are all biologically driven to achieve self-actualisation, or become all that we can become. Needs are of two kinds, deficency needs and growth needs. We first have to achieve deficency needs before turning to growth needs. Both are contained in what is called Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Deficency needs include bodily or physiological, saftey, esteem, cognitive and self-actualisation needs. If our deficency needs cannot be met, the humanistic approach would say that we are psychologically unwell. Once deficency needs are met, and we turn to the satisfaction of our growth needs, any frustrastion of these can lead to 'a syndrome of decay' and we can fall back into poor psychological health.
Measurement of attitudes
Social psychologists use indirect measures and direct measures to quantify our attitudes and to discover our strength of feelings towards stimuli.
Another reason for measuring attitudes is that if the effectiveness of attempts to change attitudes is to be assessed; an objective measure of a person's attitude before and after the attempt to change is needed.
Mechanistic
Another criticism of behaviourism, mechanistic means we merely respond to our environment, having little control over it. Behaviourism favours an ABC model of behaviour viz. Antecedent -> Behaviour -> Consequences .
The biological approach can also be accused as being mechanistic. It sees our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours as being driven by neurons, hormones etc. It underplays the influence of cognitions, our environment, and our social world on our behaviours.
Mediational processes
Another name for our cognitions, or information processes, of perception, attention, language, memory, and thinking. They are mediational because they come between stimulus and response.
Memory
Helps us to organise, store, retrieve, and recognise information about our world. Input to memory called encoding (viz. acoustic, visual, semantic).. Types of memory. STM (Miller, 1956: +7 units/chunks long). LTM: Types, episodic memory (your autobiographical memory, Tulving, 1972) episodic memories easy to remember. Semantic memory is our general knowledge about our world), more difficult to remember. Where all your knowledge about psychology should be!
Mental representation
How we think about our world.
Miller, George
A cognitive psychologist, Miller is famous for his work into our immediate memory span, or size of short - term memory. He wrote a paper in 1956 entitled '7+2: the Magical Number 7' in which he said that our immediate memory span, or what we can hold in STM is between 5 and 9 (7+2) chunks (units) of information at any one time. The poor storage capacity of STM is one of the reasons phones nowadays have their own memory. We human beings are unable to hold in STM long mobile/land line phone numbers. You'd need to carry them in a diary the size of a small slab! Numbers are around 11 chunks or units long. Too much man. To better remember a long number we chunk it up 0179523428 (11 chunks) becomes 01795 523478 (3 or 4 chunks), Say it to realise why. You are also using acoustic encoding to store it better in your STM.
Mode
How something is done or conducted.
Motor neurons
Motor neurons (also called efferent neurons) carry messages from the brain and spinal cord to our muscles and glands.
Myelin sheath
Protects axons. Damage to the myelin sheath that runs up inside our spinal cord is linked to Multiple Sclerosis. Neural transmission up and down the spine is made more difficult because of this damage, and made worse by the inner bone of our spine. This rubs against the 'hole', making transmissions to and from the brain to various parts of the body increasingly more problematic for the MS sufferer. Body movement and coordination becomes increasingly more difficult.
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