availability

Examples of availability in the following topics:

• Decision Making

  • In psychology, availability is the ease with which a particular idea can be brought to mind.
  • When people estimate how likely or how frequent an event is on the basis of its availability, they are using the availability heuristic. 
  • Dramatic, violent deaths are usually more highly publicized and therefore have a higher availability. 
  • It involves starting from a readily available number—the "anchor"—and shifting either up or down to reach an answer that seems plausible.
  • Lotteries take advantage of the availability heuristic: winning the lottery is a more vivid mental image than losing the lottery, and thus people perceive winning the lottery as being more likely than it is.

• Heuristics and Cognitive Biases

  • There are several types of heuristics used to save time when drawing conclusions about large amounts of information, including availability, representativeness, and similarity heuristics.
  • An availability heuristic involves estimating how common an event is based on how easily we can remember the event occurring previously.
  • The availability heuristic leads to people overestimating the occurrence of situations they are familiar with.
  • Since the media covers these "spectacular" occurrences more often, and with more emphasis, they become more available to our memory.

• Appraisal Theory of Emotion

  • The perception of a threat then triggers the secondary appraisal—judgment of the options available to cope with the stressor—as well as perceptions of how effective such options will be.
  • According to Lazarus' cognitive-mediational theory, upon encountering a stressor, a person judges its potential threat (via primary appraisal) and then determines if effective options are available to manage the situation (via secondary appraisal).
  • Stress is likely to result if a stressor is perceived as threatening and few or no effective coping options are available.

• Reasoning and Inference

  • Abductive reasoning is based on creating and testing hypotheses using the best information available.
  • Examples of abductive reasoning include a doctor making a diagnosis based on test results and a jury using evidence to pass judgment on a case: in both scenarios, there is not a 100% guarantee of correctness—just the best guess based on the available evidence.

• Undergraduate and Graduate Study in Psychology

  • Only people with doctoral degrees are called "psychologists," but people with master's or bachelor's degrees also have many career options available.

• Coping with Stress

  • While psychologists disagree on the specific classification of the hundreds of coping strategies available today, distinctions are often made among various contrasting strategies.
  • Culture and surroundings also affect what coping strategies are practically available and socially acceptable.

• Stimulants

  • Some may be legally available only by prescription.
  • Due to their availability and fast-acting effects, amphetamines are prime candidates for abuse.

• Chromosomes and Genes

  • Genetic counseling is available for families in order to determine if any abnormalities exist that may be passed along to offspring.

• How the Body Responds to Stress

  • If glycogen reserves were the only energy source available, neural functioning could not be maintained once the reserves became depleted due to the nervous system's high requirement for glucose.
  • Additionally, these hormones increase oxygen availability to cells by increasing the heart rate and dilating the bronchioles.

• Executive Function and Control

  • A prepotent response is a response for which immediate reinforcement (positive or negative) is available or is associated with that response.