Vocabulary

5α-reductase: An enzyme required to convert testosterone to 5α-dihydrotestosterone.
Abducens nucleus: A group of excitatory motor neurons in the medial brainstem that send projections through the VIth cranial nerve to control the ipsilateral lateral rectus muscle. In addition, abducens interneurons send an excitatory projection across the midline to a subdivision of cells in the ipsilateral oculomotor nucleus, which project through the IIIrd cranial nerve to innervate the ipsilateral medial rectus muscle.
Absolute threshold: The smallest amount of stimulation needed for detection by a sense.
Acetylcholine: An organic compound neurotransmitter consisting of acetic acid and choline. Depending upon the receptor type, acetycholine can have excitatory, inhibitory, or modulatory effects.
Active-constructive responding: Demonstrating sincere interest and enthusiasm for the good news of another person.
Adaptations: Evolved solutions to problems that historically contributed to reproductive success.
Affective forecasting: Predicting how one will feel in the future after some event or decision.
Afferent nerve fibers: Single neurons that innervate the receptor hair cells and carry vestibular signals to the brain as part of the vestibulocochlear nerve (cranial nerve VIII).
A-fibers: Fast-conducting sensory nerves with myelinated axons. Larger diameter and thicker myelin sheaths increases conduction speed. Aβ-fibers conduct touch signals from low-threshold mechanoreceptors with a velocity of 80 m/s and a diameter of 10 μm; Aδ-fibers have a diameter of 2.5 μm and conduct cold, noxious, and thermal signals at 12 m/s. The third and fastest conducting A-fiber is the Aα, which conducts proprioceptive information with a velocity of 120 m/s and a diameter of 20 μm.
Aggression: Any behavior intended to harm another person who does not want to be harmed.
Aggression: A form of social interaction that includes threat, attack, and fighting.
Agnosia: Loss of the ability to perceive stimuli.
Agreeableness: A core personality trait that includes such dispositional characteristics as being sympathetic, generous, forgiving, and helpful, and behavioral tendencies toward harmonious social relations and likeability.
Agreeableness: A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be compassionate, cooperative, warm, and caring to others. People low in agreeableness tend to be rude, hostile, and to pursue their own interests over those of others.
Allodynia: Pain due to a stimulus that does not normally provoke pain, e.g., when a light, stroking touch feels painful.
Altruism: A motivation for helping that has the improvement of another’s welfare as its ultimate goal, with no expectation of any benefits for the helper.
Altruism: A desire to improve the welfare of another person, at a potential cost to the self and without any expectation of reward.
Anal sex: Penetration of the anus by an animate or inanimate object.
Analgesia: Pain relief.
Androgyny: Having both feminine and masculine characteristics.
Anecdotal evidence: An argument that is based on personal experience and not considered reliable or representative.
Animism: The belief that everyone and everything had a “soul” and that mental illness was due to animistic causes, for example, evil spirits controlling an individual and his/her behavior.
Anomalous face overgeneralization hypothesis: Proposes that the attractiveness halo effect is a by-product of reactions to low fitness. People overgeneralize the adaptive tendency to use low attractiveness as an indicator of negative traits, like low health or intelligence, and mistakenly use higher-than-average attractiveness as an indicator of high health or intelligence.
Anosmia: Loss of the ability to smell.
Apartheid: A political system with policies that promote segregation of the basis of race. The word means “apartness” in Afrikaans, and the system was in use in South Africa from the 1950s through the 1990s.
Archival research: A type of research in which the researcher analyses records or archives instead of collecting data from live human participants.
Aromatase: An enzyme that converts androgens into estrogens.
Arousal: cost–reward model: An egoistic theory proposed by Piliavin et al. (1981) that claims that seeing a person in need leads to the arousal of unpleasant feelings, and observers are motivated to eliminate that aversive state, often by helping the victim. A cost–reward analysis may lead observers to react in ways other than offering direct assistance, including indirect help, reinterpretation of the situation, or fleeing the scene.
Aspartate: An excitatory amino acid neurotransmitter that is widely used by vestibular receptors, afferents, and many neurons in the brain.
Asylum: A place of refuge or safety established to confine and care for the mentally ill; forerunners of the mental hospital or psychiatric facility.
Attachment behavioral system: A motivational system selected over the course of evolution to maintain proximity between a young child and his or her primary attachment figure.
Attachment behaviors: Behaviors and signals that attract the attention of a primary attachment figure and function to prevent separation from that individual or to reestablish proximity to that individual (e.g., crying, clinging).
Attachment figure: Someone who functions as the primary safe haven and secure base for an individual. In childhood, an individual’s attachment figure is often a parent. In adulthood, an individual’s attachment figure is often a romantic partner.
Attachment patterns: (also called “attachment styles” or “attachment orientations”) Individual differences in how securely (vs. insecurely) people think, feel, and behave in attachment relationships.
Attitude: A psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor.
Attitude: A way of thinking or feeling about a target that is often reflected in a person’s behavior. Examples of attitude targets are individuals, concepts, and groups.
Attraction: The psychological process of being sexually interested in another person. This can include, for example, physical attraction, first impressions, and dating rituals.
Attractiveness halo effect: The tendency to associate attractiveness with a variety of positive traits, such as being more sociable, intelligent, competent, and healthy.
Audition: Ability to process auditory stimuli. Also called hearing.
Auditory canal: Tube running from the outer ear to the middle ear.
Auditory hair cells: Receptors in the cochlea that transduce sound into electrical potentials.
Authoritative: A parenting style characterized by high (but reasonable) expectations for children’s behavior, good communication, warmth and nurturance, and the use of reasoning (rather than coercion) as preferred responses to children’s misbehavior.
Autobiographical reasoning: The ability, typically developed in adolescence, to derive substantive conclusions about the self from analyzing one’s own personal experiences.
Automatic: A behavior or process has one or more of the following features: unintentional, uncontrollable, occurring outside of conscious awareness, and cognitively efficient.
Availability heuristic: A heuristic in which the frequency or likelihood of an event is evaluated based on how easily instances of it come to mind.
Availability heuristic: The tendency to judge the frequency or likelihood of an event by the ease with which relevant instances come to mind.
Balancing between goals: Shifting between a focal goal and other goals or temptations by putting less effort into the focal goal—usually with the intention of coming back to the focal goal at a later point in time.
Basking in reflected glory: The tendency for people to associate themselves with successful people or groups.
Behaviorism: The study of behavior.
Big data: The analysis of large data sets.
Big Five: A broad taxonomy of personality trait domains repeatedly derived from studies of trait ratings in adulthood and encompassing the categories of (1) extraversion vs. introversion, (2) neuroticism vs. emotional stability, (3) agreeable vs. disagreeableness, (4) conscientiousness vs. nonconscientiousness, and (5) openness to experience vs. conventionality. By late childhood and early adolescence, people’s self-attributions of personality traits, as well as the trait attributions made about them by others, show patterns of intercorrelations that confirm with the five-factor structure obtained in studies of adults.
Bigotry: An unreasonable opinion or prejudice against a category of people.
Binocular advantage: Benefits from having two eyes as opposed to a single eye.
Binocular disparity: Difference is images processed by the left and right eyes.
Binocular vision: Our ability to perceive 3D and depth because of the difference between the images on each of our retinas.
Biopsychosocial model: A model in which the interaction of biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors is seen as influencing the development of the individual.
Bisexual: Attraction to two sexes.
Blind to the research hypothesis: When participants in research are not aware of what is being studied.
Blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD): The signal typically measured in fMRI that results from changes in the ratio of oxygenated hemoglobin to deoxygenated hemoglobin in the blood.
Bottom-up processing: Building up to perceptual experience from individual pieces.
Bystander intervention: The phenomenon whereby people intervene to help others in need even if the other is a complete stranger and the intervention puts the helper at risk.
Capitalization: Seeking out someone else with whom to share your good news.
Case study: An in-depth and objective examination of the details of a single person or entity.
Catharsis: Greek term that means to cleanse or purge. Applied to aggression, catharsis is the belief that acting aggressively or even viewing aggression purges angry feelings and aggressive impulses into harmless channels.
Cathartic method: A therapeutic procedure introduced by Breuer and developed further by Freud in the late 19th century whereby a patient gains insight and emotional relief from recalling and reliving traumatic events.
Central nervous system: The part of the nervous system that consists of the brain and spinal cord.
Central route to persuasion: Persuasion that employs direct, relevant, logical messages.
C-fibers: C-fibers: Slow-conducting unmyelinated thin sensory afferents with a diameter of 1 μm and a conduction velocity of approximately 1 m/s. C-pain fibers convey noxious, thermal, and heat signals; C-tactile fibers convey gentle touch, light stroking.
Chameleon effect: The tendency for individuals to nonconsciously mimic the postures, mannerisms, facial expressions, and other behaviors of one’s interaction partners.
Character strength: A positive trait or quality deemed to be morally good and is valued for itself as well as for promoting individual and collective well-being.
Chemical senses: Our ability to process the environmental stimuli of smell and taste.
Chromosomal sex: The sex of an individual as determined by the sex chromosomes (typically XX or XY) received at the time of fertilization.
Chronic pain: Persistent or recurrent pain, beyond usual course of acute illness or injury; sometimes present without observable tissue damage or clear cause.
Cisgender: When a person’s birth sex corresponds with his/her gender identity and gender role.
Cochlea: Spiral bone structure in the inner ear containing auditory hair cells.
Cochlea: Snail-shell-shaped organ that transduces mechanical vibrations into neural signals.
Cognitive psychology: The study of mental processes.
Coital sex: Vaginal-penile intercourse.
Collective memory: Knowledge that is shared among members of a group about the historical experiences of that group.
Collective self-esteem: Feelings of self-worth that are based on evaluation of relationships with others and membership in social groups.
Collective self-worth: The idea that a person's self-worth is influenced by the treatment of and perceptions about a group to which that person belongs.
Collectivism: The cultural trend in which the primary unit of measurement is the group. Collectivists are likely to emphasize duty and obligation over personal aspirations.
Color-blind race ideology: A belief that racism is a past-- rather than a current-- phenomenon. Also, the idea that the best way to eliminate discrimination is to ignore categorical differences between people and their experiences.
Commitment: The sense that a goal is both valuable and attainable
Common knowledge effect: The tendency for groups to spend more time discussing information that all members know (shared information) and less time examining information that only a few members know (unshared).
Common-pool resource: A collective product or service that is freely available to all individuals of a society, but is vulnerable to overuse and degradation.
Commons dilemma game: A game in which members of a group must balance their desire for personal gain against the deterioration and possible collapse of a resource.
Compensatory reflexes: A stabilizing motor reflex that occurs in response to a perceived movement, such as the vestibuloocular reflex, or the postural responses that occur during running or skiing.
Complex experimental designs: An experiment with two or more independent variables.
Conceptual Replication: A scientific attempt to copy the scientific hypothesis used in an earlier study in an effort to determine whether the results will generalize to different samples, times, or situations. The same—or similar—results are an indication that the findings are generalizable.
Conditioned aversions and preferences: Likes and dislikes developed through associations with pleasurable or unpleasurable sensations.
Cones: Photoreceptors that operate in lighted environments and can encode fine visual details. There are three different kinds (S or blue, M or green and L or red) that are each sensitive to slightly different types of light. Combined, these three types of cones allow you to have color vision.
Cones: Photoreceptors of the retina sensitive to color. Located primarily in the fovea.
Confederate: An actor working with the researcher. Most often, this individual is used to deceive unsuspecting research participants. Also known as a “stooge.”
Confederate: An actor working with the researcher. Most often, this individual is used to deceive unsuspecting research participants. Also known as a “stooge.”
Confidante: A trusted person with whom secrets and vulnerabilities can be shared.
Conformity: Changing one’s attitude or behavior to match a perceived social norm.
Conformity: Changing one’s attitude or behavior to match a perceived social norm.
Conscience: The cognitive, emotional, and social influences that cause young children to create and act consistently with internal standards of conduct.
Conscientiousness: A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be careful, organized, hardworking, and to follow rules.
Conscious goal activation: When a person is fully aware of contextual influences and resulting goal-directed behavior.
Consciousness: Awareness of ourselves and our environment.
Continuous distributions: Characteristics can go from low to high, with all different intermediate values possible. One does not simply have the trait or not have it, but can possess varying amounts of it.
Contrast: Relative difference in the amount and type of light coming from two nearby locations.
Contrast gain: Process where the sensitivity of your visual system can be tuned to be most sensitive to the levels of contrast that are most prevalent in the environment.
Cooperation: The coordination of multiple partners toward a common goal that will benefit everyone involved.
Correlation: A measure of the association between two variables, or how they go together.
Correlational research: A type of descriptive research that involves measuring the association between two variables, or how they go together.
Cost–benefit analysis: A decision-making process that compares the cost of an action or thing against the expected benefit to help determine the best course of action.
Cover story: A fake description of the purpose and/or procedure of a study, used when deception is necessary in order to answer a research question.
C-pain or Aδ-fibers: C-pain fibers convey noxious, thermal, and heat signals
Critical race theory: Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a critical framework that emerged as an intervention in the 1970s to explain how racism and other tools of oppression shape law and society. Building on the pioneering work of activists and legal scholars like Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Mari Matsuda, CRT has influenced social scientists in fields outside of legal studies including education, sociology, public health, and psychology. The framework provides a foundation for understanding racism as systemic, the ideologies that reinforce and maintain racist structures, and the value of perspectives and theories grounded in the experiences of oppressed and marginalized peoples. For an introduction to CRT, we recommend Delgado & Stefancic, 2012. To learn more about the intersections of psychology and CRT see Jones, 1998; Adams & Salter, 2011, and Salter & Adams, 2013.
Cross-cultural psychology (or cross-cultural studies): An approach to researching culture that emphasizes the use of standard scales as a means of making meaningful comparisons across groups.
Cross-cultural studies (or cross-cultural psychology): An approach to researching culture that emphasizes the use of standard scales as a means of making meaningful comparisons across groups.
C-tactile fibers: C-tactile fibers convey gentle touch, light stroking
Cultural differences: An approach to understanding culture primarily by paying attention to unique and distinctive features that set them apart from other cultures.
Cultural intelligence: The ability and willingness to apply cultural awareness to practical uses.
Cultural psychology: An approach to researching culture that emphasizes the use of interviews and observation as a means of understanding culture from its own point of view.
Cultural relativism: The principled objection to passing overly culture-bound (i.e., “ethnocentric”) judgements on aspects of other cultures.
Cultural relativism: The idea that cultural norms and values of a society can only be understood on their own terms or in their own context.
Cultural script: Learned guides for how to behave appropriately in a given social situation. These reflect cultural norms and widely accepted values.
Cultural similarities: An approach to understanding culture primarily by paying attention to common features that are the same as or similar to those of other cultures
Culture: A pattern of shared meaning and behavior among a group of people that is passed from one generation to the next.
Culture of honor: A culture in which personal or family reputation is especially important.
Cunnilingus: Oral stimulation of the female’s external sex organs.
Cutaneous senses: The senses of the skin: tactile, thermal, pruritic (itchy), painful, and pleasant.
Dark adaptation: Adjustment of eye to low levels of light.
Dark adaptation: Process that allows you to become sensitive to very small levels of light, so that you can actually see in the near-absence of light.
Decomposed games: A task in which an individual chooses from multiple allocations of resources to distribute between him- or herself and another person.
Defeminization: The removal of the potential for female traits.
Deliberative phase: The first of the two basic stages of self-regulation in which individuals decide which of many potential goals to pursue at a given point in time.
Demand characteristics: Subtle cues that make participants aware of what the experimenter expects to find or how participants are expected to behave.
Demasculinization: The removal of the potential for male traits.
Deoxygenated hemoglobin: Hemoglobin not carrying oxygen.
Dependent variable: The variable the researcher measures but does not manipulate in an experiment.
Depolarization: A change in a cell’s membrane potential, making the inside of the cell more positive and increasing the chance of an action potential.
Depolarized: When receptor hair cells have mechanically gated channels open, the cell increases its membrane voltage, which produces a release of neurotransmitter to excite the innervating nerve fiber.
Descending pain modulatory system: A top-down pain-modulating system able to inhibit or facilitate pain. The pathway produces analgesia by the release of endogenous opioids. Several brain structures and nuclei are part of this circuit, such as the frontal lobe areas of the anterior cingulate cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, and insular cortex; and nuclei in the amygdala and the hypothalamus, which all project to a structure in the midbrain called the periaqueductal grey (PAG). The PAG then controls ascending pain transmission from the afferent pain system indirectly through the rostral ventromedial medulla (RVM) in the brainstem, which uses ON- and OFF-cells to inhibit or facilitate nociceptive signals at the spinal dorsal horn.
Descriptive norm: The perception of what most people do in a given situation.
Detection thresholds: The smallest amount of head motion that can be reliably reported by an observer.
Differential threshold (or difference threshold): The smallest difference needed in order to differentiate two stimuli. (See Just Noticeable Difference (JND))
Diffusion of responsibility: When deciding whether to help a person in need, knowing that there are others who could also provide assistance relieves bystanders of some measure of personal responsibility, reducing the likelihood that bystanders will intervene.
Dihydrotestosterone (DHT): A primary androgen that is an androgenic steroid product of testosterone and binds strongly to androgen receptors.
Directional goals: The motivation to reach a particular outcome or judgment.
Directional tuning: The preferred direction of motion that hair cells and afferents exhibit where a peak excitatory response occurs and the least preferred direction where no response occurs. Cells are said to be “tuned” for a best and worst direction of motion, with in-between motion directions eliciting a lesser but observable response.
Discrimination: Discrimination is behavior that advantages or disadvantages people merely based on their group membership.
Discrimination: Unjust or prejudicial treatment of a category of people, or of an individual based on their belonging to a category of people.
Dizygotic twins: Twins conceived from two ova and two sperm.
DNA methylation: Covalent modifications of mammalian DNA occurring via the methylation of cytosine, typically in the context of the CpG dinucleotide.
DNA methyltransferases (DNMTs): Enzymes that establish and maintain DNA methylation using methyl-group donor compounds or cofactors. The main mammalian DNMTs are DNMT1, which maintains methylation state across DNA replication, and DNMT3a and DNMT3b, which perform de novo methylation.
Dorsal pathway: Pathway of visual processing. The “where” pathway.
Durability bias: A bias in affective forecasting in which one overestimates for how long one will feel an emotion (positive or negative) after some event.
Ecological validity: The degree to which a study finding has been obtained under conditions that are typical for what happens in everyday life.
Effortful control: A temperament quality that enables children to be more successful in motivated self-regulation.
Ego: Sigmund Freud’s conception of an executive self in the personality. Akin to this module’s notion of “the I,” Freud imagined the ego as observing outside reality, engaging in rational though, and coping with the competing demands of inner desires and moral standards.
Ego-depletion: The exhaustion of physiological and/or psychological resources following the completion of effortful self-control tasks, which subsequently leads to reduction in the capacity to exert more self-control.
Egoism: A motivation for helping that has the improvement of the helper’s own circumstances as its primary goal.
Electronically activated recorder (EAR): A methodology where participants wear a small, portable audio recorder that intermittently records snippets of ambient sounds around them.
Empathic concern: According to Batson’s empathy–altruism hypothesis, observers who empathize with a person in need (that is, put themselves in the shoes of the victim and imagine how that person feels) will experience empathic concern and have an altruistic motivation for helping.
Empathy: The ability to vicariously experience the emotions of another person.
Empathy–altruism model: An altruistic theory proposed by Batson (2011) that claims that people who put themselves in the shoes of a victim and imagining how the victim feel will experience empathic concern that evokes an altruistic motivation for helping.
Empiricism: The belief that knowledge comes from experience.
Enculturation: The uniquely human form of learning that is taught by one generation to another.
Endocrine gland: A ductless gland from which hormones are released into the blood system in response to specific biological signals.
Endorphin: An endogenous morphine-like peptide that binds to the opioid receptors in the brain and body; synthesized in the body’s nervous system.
Epigenetics: The study of heritable changes in gene expression or cellular phenotype caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence. Epigenetic marks include covalent DNA modifications and posttranslational histone modifications.
Epigenetics: Heritable changes in gene activity that are not caused by changes in the DNA sequence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
Epigenome: The genome-wide distribution of epigenetic marks.
Epistemological violence: A form of scientific or academic racism in which observers interpret empirical data in ways that problematize or suggest the inferiority of racial and cultural Others, even when the data allow for equally viable alternative interpretations (Teo, 2010).
Error management theory (EMT): A theory of selection under conditions of uncertainty in which recurrent cost asymmetries of judgment or inference favor the evolution of adaptive cognitive biases that function to minimize the more costly errors.
Estrogen: Any of the C18 class of steroid hormones, so named because of the estrus-generating properties in females. Biologically important estrogens include estradiol and estriol.
Ethnocentric bias (or ethnocentrism): Being unduly guided by the beliefs of the culture you’ve grown up in, especially when this results in a misunderstanding or disparagement of unfamiliar cultures.
Ethnographic studies: Research that emphasizes field data collection and that examines questions that attempt to understand culture from it's own context and point of view.
Etiology: The causal description of all of the factors that contribute to the development of a disorder or illness.
Eugenics: The practice of selective breeding to promote desired traits.
Evaluative priming task: An implicit attitude task that assesses the extent to which an attitude object is associated with a positive or negative valence by measuring the time it takes a person to label an adjective as good or bad after being presented with an attitude object.
Evolution: Change over time. Is the definition changing?
Exact Replication (also called Direct Replication): A scientific attempt to exactly copy the scientific methods used in an earlier study in an effort to determine whether the results are consistent. The same—or similar—results are an indication that the findings are accurate.
Experience sampling methods: Systematic ways of having participants provide samples of their ongoing behavior. Participants' reports are dependent (contingent) upon either a signal, pre-established intervals, or the occurrence of some event.
Explicit attitude: An attitude that is consciously held and can be reported on by the person holding the attitude.
Exteroception: The sense of the external world, of all stimulation originating from outside our own bodies.
Extraversion: A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be sociable, outgoing, active, and assertive.
Extrinsic motivation: Motivation stemming from the benefits associated with achieving a goal such as obtaining a monetary reward.
Facets: Broad personality traits can be broken down into narrower facets or aspects of the trait. For example, extraversion has several facets, such as sociability, dominance, risk-taking and so forth.
Factor analysis: A statistical technique for grouping similar things together according to how highly they are associated.
Falsified data (faked data): Data that are fabricated, or made up, by researchers intentionally trying to pass off research results that are inaccurate. This is a serious ethical breach and can even be a criminal offense.
Family Stress Model: A description of the negative effects of family financial difficulty on child adjustment through the effects of economic stress on parents’ depressed mood, increased marital problems, and poor parenting.
Fellatio: Oral stimulation of the male’s external sex organs.
Feminization: The induction of female traits.
Field experiment: An experiment that occurs outside of the lab and in a real world situation.
Five stages of psychosexual development: Oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital.
Five-Factor Model: (also called the Big Five) The Five-Factor Model is a widely accepted model of personality traits. Advocates of the model believe that much of the variability in people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can be summarized with five broad traits. These five traits are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
Fixed action patterns (FAPs): Sequences of behavior that occur in exactly the same fashion, in exactly the same order, every time they are elicited.
Flashbulb memory: A highly detailed and vivid memory of an emotionally significant event.
Flavor: The combination of smell and taste.
Flourishing: To live optimally psychologically, relationally, and spiritually.
Foot in the door: Obtaining a small, initial commitment.
Forgiveness: The letting go of negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors toward an offender.
Free rider problem: A situation in which one or more individuals benefit from a common-pool resource without paying their share of the cost.
Functional distance: The frequency with which we cross paths with others.
Functionalism: A school of American psychology that focused on the utility of consciousness.
Fundamental attribution error: The tendency to emphasize another person’s personality traits when describing that person’s motives and behaviors and overlooking the influence of situational factors.
Gamma-aminobutyric acid: A major inhibitory neurotransmitter in the vestibular commissural system.
Gaze stability: A combination of eye, neck, and head responses that are all coordinated to maintain visual fixation (fovea) upon a point of interest.
Gender: The psychological and sociological representations of one’s biological sex.
Gender identity: Personal depictions of masculinity and femininity.
Gender roles: Societal expectations of masculinity and femininity.
Gender schemas: Organized beliefs and expectations about maleness and femaleness that guide children’s thinking about gender.
Gene: A specific deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequence that codes for a specific polypeptide or protein or an observable inherited trait.
Gene Selection Theory: The modern theory of evolution by selection by which differential gene replication is the defining process of evolutionary change.
Genome-wide association study (GWAS): A study that maps DNA polymorphisms in affected individuals and controls matched for age, sex, and ethnic background with the aim of identifying causal genetic variants.
Genotype: The DNA content of a cell’s nucleus, whether a trait is externally observable or not.
Gestalt psychology: An attempt to study the unity of experience.
Glutamate: An excitatory amino acid neurotransmitter that is widely used by vestibular receptors, afferents, and many neurons in the brain.
Goal: The cognitive representation of a desired state (outcome).
Gonadal sex: The sex of an individual as determined by the possession of either ovaries or testes. Females have ovaries, whereas males have testes.
Good genes hypothesis: Proposes that certain physical qualities, like averageness, are attractive because they advertise mate quality—either greater fertility or better genetic traits that lead to better offspring and hence greater reproductive success.
Goodness of fit: The match or synchrony between a child’s temperament and characteristics of parental care that contributes to positive or negative personality development. A good “fit” means that parents have accommodated to the child’s temperamental attributes, and this contributes to positive personality growth and better adjustment.
Gradually escalating commitments: A pattern of small, progressively escalating demands is less likely to be rejected than a single large demand made all at once.
Gratitude: A feeling of appreciation or thankfulness in response to receiving a benefit.
Group cohesion: The solidarity or unity of a group resulting from the development of strong and mutual interpersonal bonds among members and group-level forces that unify the group, such as shared commitment to group goals.
Group polarization: The tendency for members of a deliberating group to move to a more extreme position, with the direction of the shift determined by the majority or average of the members’ predeliberation preferences.
Groupthink: A set of negative group-level processes, including illusions of invulnerability, self-censorship, and pressures to conform, that occur when highly cohesive groups seek concurrence when making a decision.
Gustation: Ability to process gustatory stimuli. Also called taste.
Gustation: The action of tasting; the ability to taste.
Hair cells: The receptor cells of the vestibular system. They are termed hair cells due to the many hairlike cilia that extend from the apical surface of the cell into the gelatin membrane. Mechanical gated ion channels in the tips of the cilia open and close as the cilia bend to cause membrane voltage changes in the hair cell that are proportional to the intensity and direction of motion.
Health: The complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being—not just the absence of disease or infirmity.
Health behaviors: Behaviors that are associated with better health. Examples include exercising, not smoking, and wearing a seat belt while in a vehicle.
Helpfulness: A component of the prosocial personality orientation; describes individuals who have been helpful in the past and, because they believe they can be effective with the help they give, are more likely to be helpful in the future.
Helping: Prosocial acts that typically involve situations in which one person is in need and another provides the necessary assistance to eliminate the other’s need.
Hemoglobin: The oxygen-carrying portion of a red blood cell.
Heterosexual: Opposite-sex attraction.
Heuristics: A mental shortcut or rule of thumb that reduces complex mental problems to more simple rule-based decisions.
Heuristics: Mental shortcuts that enable people to make decisions and solve problems quickly and efficiently.
HEXACO model: The HEXACO model is an alternative to the Five-Factor Model. The HEXACO model includes six traits, five of which are variants of the traits included in the Big Five (Emotionality [E], Extraversion [X], Agreeableness [A], Conscientiousness [C], and Openness [O]). The sixth factor, Honesty-Humility [H], is unique to this model.
Highlighting a goal: Prioritizing a focal goal over other goals or temptations by putting more effort into the focal goal.
Histone acetyltransferases (HATs) and histone deacetylases (HDACs): HATs are enzymes that transfer acetyl groups to specific positions on histone tails, promoting an “open” chromatin state and transcriptional activation. HDACs remove these acetyl groups, resulting in a “closed” chromatin state and transcriptional repression.
Histone modifications: Posttranslational modifications of the N-terminal “tails” of histone proteins that serve as a major mode of epigenetic regulation. These modifications include acetylation, phosphorylation, methylation, sumoylation, ubiquitination, and ADP-ribosylation.
Homosexual: Same-sex attraction.
Hormone: An organic chemical messenger released from endocrine cells that travels through the blood to interact with target cells at some distance to cause a biological response.
Hostile attribution bias: The tendency to perceive ambiguous actions by others as aggressive.
Hostile expectation bias: The tendency to assume that people will react to potential conflicts with aggression.
Hostile perception bias: The tendency to perceive social interactions in general as being aggressive.
Hot cognition: The mental processes that are influenced by desires and feelings.
Humility: Having an accurate view of self—not too high or low—and a realistic appraisal of one’s strengths and weaknesses, especially in relation to other people.
Humorism (or humoralism): A belief held by ancient Greek and Roman physicians (and until the 19th century) that an excess or deficiency in any of the four bodily fluids, or humors—blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm—directly affected their health and temperament.
Hyperpolarization: A change in a cell’s membrane potential, making the inside of the cell more negative and decreasing the chance of an action potential.
Hyperpolarizes: When receptor hair cells have mechanically gated channels close, the cell decreases its membrane voltage, which produces less release of neurotransmitters to inhibit the innervating nerve fiber.
Hypothesis: A logical idea that can be tested.
Hypothesis: A possible explanation that can be tested through research.
Hysteria: Term used by the ancient Greeks and Egyptians to describe a disorder believed to be caused by a woman’s uterus wandering throughout the body and interfering with other organs (today referred to as conversion disorder, in which psychological problems are expressed in physical form).
Identical twins: Two individual organisms that originated from the same zygote and therefore are genetically identical or very similar. The epigenetic profiling of identical twins discordant for disease is a unique experimental design as it eliminates the DNA sequence-, age-, and sex-differences from consideration.
Identity: Sometimes used synonymously with the term “self,” identity means many different things in psychological science and in other fields (e.g., sociology). In this module, I adopt Erik Erikson’s conception of identity as a developmental task for late adolescence and young adulthood. Forming an identity in adolescence and young adulthood involves exploring alternative roles, values, goals, and relationships and eventually committing to a realistic agenda for life that productively situates a person in the adult world of work and love. In addition, identity formation entails commitments to new social roles and reevaluation of old traits, and importantly, it brings with it a sense of temporal continuity in life, achieved though the construction of an integrative life story.
Impact bias: A bias in affective forecasting in which one overestimates the strength or intensity of emotion one will experience after some event.
Implemental phase: The second of the two basic stages of self-regulation in which individuals plan specific actions related to their selected goal.
Implicit Association Test: An implicit attitude task that assesses a person’s automatic associations between concepts by measuring the response times in pairing the concepts.
Implicit association test (IAT): A computer-based categorization task that measures the strength of association between specific concepts over several trials.
Implicit attitude: An attitude that a person cannot verbally or overtly state.
Implicit measures of attitudes: Measures of attitudes in which researchers infer the participant’s attitude rather than having the participant explicitly report it.
Independent: Two characteristics or traits are separate from one another-- a person can be high on one and low on the other, or vice-versa. Some correlated traits are relatively independent in that although there is a tendency for a person high on one to also be high on the other, this is not always the case.
Independent self: The tendency to define the self in terms of stable traits that guide behavior.
Independent variable: The variable the researcher manipulates and controls in an experiment.
Individual differences: Ways in which people differ in terms of their behavior, emotion, cognition, and development.
Individualism: The cultural trend in which the primary unit of measurement is the individual. Individualists are likely to emphasize uniqueness and personal aspirations over social duty.
Informational influence: Conformity that results from a concern to act in a socially approved manner as determined by how others act.
Interaural differences: Differences (usually in time or intensity) between the two ears.
Interdependent self: The tendency to define the self in terms of social contexts that guide behavior.
Interest-convergence: The tendency for White (or dominant group) engagement in racial progress to emerge when it aligns with the interests of the dominant group.
Interindividual-intergroup discontinuity: The tendency for relations between groups to be less cooperative than relations between individuals.
Interoception: The sense of the physiological state of the body. Hunger, thirst, temperature, pain, and other sensations relevant to homeostasis. Visceral input such as heart rate, blood pressure, and digestive activity give rise to an experience of the body’s internal states and physiological reactions to external stimulation. This experience has been described as a representation of “the material me,” and it is hypothesized to be the foundation of subjective feelings, emotion, and self-awareness.
Intersectionality: The idea that social identities can overlap. For instance, a person could be "Canadian", "Indigenous" and "a woman".
Intersex: Born with either an absence or some combination of male and female reproductive organs, sex hormones, or sex chromosomes.
Intersexual selection: A process of sexual selection by which evolution (change) occurs as a consequences of the mate preferences of one sex exerting selection pressure on members of the opposite sex.
Intrasexual competition: A process of sexual selection by which members of one sex compete with each other, and the victors gain preferential mating access to members of the opposite sex.
Intrinsic motivation: Motivation stemming from the benefits associated with the process of pursuing a goal such as having a fulfilling experience.
Introspection: A method of focusing on internal processes.
Invasive Procedure: A procedure that involves the skin being broken or an instrument or chemical being introduced into a body cavity.
Just noticeable difference (JND): The smallest difference needed in order to differentiate two stimuli. (see Differential Threshold)
Kin selection: According to evolutionary psychology, the favoritism shown for helping our blood relatives, with the goals of increasing the likelihood that some portion of our DNA will be passed on to future generations.
Laboratory environments: A setting in which the researcher can carefully control situations and manipulate variables.
Lateral inhibition: A signal produced by a neuron aimed at suppressing the response of nearby neurons.
Lateral rectus muscle: An eye muscle that turns outward in the horizontal plane.
Lateral vestibulo-spinal tract: Vestibular neurons that project to all levels of the spinal cord on the ipsilateral side to control posture and balance movements.
Lesions: Abnormalities in the tissue of an organism usually caused by disease or trauma.
Levels of analysis: Complementary views for analyzing and understanding a phenomenon.
Lexical hypothesis: The lexical hypothesis is the idea that the most important differences between people will be encoded in the language that we use to describe people. Therefore, if we want to know which personality traits are most important, we can look to the language that people use to describe themselves and others.
Light adaptation: Adjustment of eye to high levels of light.
Machiavellianism: Being cunning, strategic, or exploitative in one’s relationships. Named after Machiavelli, who outlined this way of relating in his book, The Prince.
Maladaptive: Term referring to behaviors that cause people who have them physical or emotional harm, prevent them from functioning in daily life, and/or indicate that they have lost touch with reality and/or cannot control their thoughts and behavior (also called dysfunctional).
Manipulation check: A measure used to determine whether or not the manipulation of the independent variable has had its intended effect on the participants.
Marginalized: To treat a person or group as socially inferior, peripheral, or unimportant.
Marley Hypothesis: These lines from “Buffalo Soldier” by Bob Marley and the Wailers provide a brief statement of the Marley Hypothesis: the suggestion that White denial of racism reflects a collectively cultivated ignorance of the role that racism has played in U.S. society throughout its history.
Masculinization: The induction of male traits.
Masochism: Receiving pain from another person to experience pleasure for one’s self.
Masturbation: Tactile stimulation of the body for sexual pleasure.
Maternal behavior: Parental behavior performed by the mother or other female.
Mechanically gated ion channels: Ion channels located in the tips of the stereocilia on the receptor cells that open/close as the cilia bend toward the tallest/smallest cilia, respectively. These channels are permeable to potassium ions, which are abundant in the fluid bathing the top of the hair cells.
Mechanoreceptors: Mechanical sensory receptors in the skin that response to tactile stimulation.
Medial vestibulo-spinal tract: Vestibular nucleus neurons project bilaterally to cervical spinal motor neurons for head and neck movement control. The tract principally functions in gaze direction and stability during motion.
Mere-exposure effect: The notion that people like people/places/things merely because they are familiar with them.
Mere-exposure effect: The tendency to prefer stimuli that have been seen before over novel ones. There also is a generalized mere-exposure effect shown in a preference for stimuli that are similar to those that have been seen before.
Mesmerism: Derived from Franz Anton Mesmer in the late 18th century, an early version of hypnotism in which Mesmer claimed that hysterical symptoms could be treated through animal magnetism emanating from Mesmer’s body and permeating the universe (and later through magnets); later explained in terms of high suggestibility in individuals.
Monozygotic twins: Twins conceived from a single ovum and a single sperm, therefore genetically identical.
Mood-congruent memory: The tendency to be better able to recall memories that have a mood similar to our current mood.
Morph: A face or other image that has been transformed by a computer program so that it is a mixture of multiple images.
Motivated skepticism: A form of bias that can result from having a directional goal in which one is skeptical of evidence despite its strength because it goes against what one wants to believe.
Motivation: The psychological driving force that enables action in the course of goal pursuit.
Multimodal perception: The effects that concurrent stimulation in more than one sensory modality has on the perception of events and objects in the world.
Narcissism: A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), a need for admiration, and lack of empathy.
Narrative identity: An internalized and evolving story of the self designed to provide life with some measure of temporal unity and purpose. Beginning in late adolescence, people craft self-defining stories that reconstruct the past and imagine the future to explain how the person came to be the person that he or she is becoming.
Natural selection: Differential reproductive success as a consequence of differences in heritable attributes.
Naturalistic observation: Unobtrusively watching people as they go about the business of living their lives.
Need for closure: The desire to come to a decision that will resolve ambiguity and conclude an issue.
Need to belong: A strong natural impulse in humans to form social connections and to be accepted by others.
Negative state relief model: An egoistic theory proposed by Cialdini et al. (1982) that claims that people have learned through socialization that helping can serve as a secondary reinforcement that will relieve negative moods such as sadness.
Neural impulse: An electro-chemical signal that enables neurons to communicate.
Neural plasticity: The ability of synapses and neural pathways to change over time and adapt to changes in neural process, behavior, or environment.
Neuroscience methods: A research method that deals with the structure or function of the nervous system and brain.
Neuroticism: A personality trait that reflects the tendency to be interpersonally sensitive and the tendency to experience negative emotions like anxiety, fear, sadness, and anger.
Neurotransmitter: A chemical messenger that travels between neurons to provide communication. Some neurotransmitters, such as norepinephrine, can leak into the blood system and act as hormones.
Neurotransmitters: A chemical compound used to send signals from a receptor cell to a neuron, or from one neuron to another. Neurotransmitters can be excitatory, inhibitory, or modulatory and are packaged in small vesicles that are released from the end terminals of cells.
Nociception: The neural process of encoding noxious stimuli, the sensory input from nociceptors. Not necessarily painful, and crucially not necessary for the experience of pain.
Nociception: Our ability to sense pain.
Nociceptors: High-threshold sensory receptors of the peripheral somatosensory nervous system that are capable of transducing and encoding noxious stimuli. Nociceptors send information about actual or impending tissue damage to the brain. These signals can often lead to pain, but nociception and pain are not the same.
Nonconscious goal activation: When activation occurs outside a person’s awareness, such that the person is unaware of the reasons behind her goal-directed thoughts and behaviors.
Noninvasive procedure: A procedure that does not require the insertion of an instrument or chemical through the skin or into a body cavity.
Normative influence: Conformity that results from a concern for what other people think of us.
Noxious stimulus: A stimulus that is damaging or threatens damage to normal tissues.
Obedience: Responding to an order or command from a person in a position of authority.
Obedience: Responding to an order or command from a person in a position of authority.
Objective social variables: Targets of research interest that are factual and not subject to personal opinions or feelings.
Observational learning: Learning by observing the behavior of others.
Observational learning: Learning by observing the behavior of others.
Ocial touch hypothesis: Proposes that social touch is a distinct domain of touch. C-tactile afferents form a special pathway that distinguishes social touch from other types of touch by selectively firing in response to touch of social-affective relevance; thus sending affective information parallel to the discriminatory information from the Aβ-fibers. In this way, the socially relevant touch stands out from the rest as having special positive emotional value and is processed further in affect-related brain areas such as the insula.
Oculomotor nuclei: Includes three neuronal groups in the brainstem, the abducens nucleus, the oculomotor nucleus, and the trochlear nucleus, whose cells send motor commands to the six pairs of eye muscles.
Oculomotor nucleus: A group of cells in the middle brainstem that contain subgroups of neurons that project to the medial rectus, inferior oblique, inferior rectus, and superior rectus muscles of the eyes through the 3rd cranial nerve.
Odorants: Chemicals transduced by olfactory receptors.
Olfaction: The sense of smell; the action of smelling; the ability to smell.
Olfaction: Ability to process olfactory stimuli. Also called smell.
Olfactory epithelium: Organ containing olfactory receptors.
Omnivore: A person or animal that is able to survive by eating a wide range of foods from plant or animal origin.
Open ended questions: Research questions that ask participants to answer in their own words.
Openness to Experience: A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to seek out and to appreciate new things, including thoughts, feelings, values, and experiences.
Operationalization: The process of defining a concept so that it can be measured. In psychology, this often happens by identifying related concepts or behaviors that can be more easily measured.
Operationalize: How researchers specifically measure a concept.
Opponent Process Theory: Theory of color vision that assumes there are four different basic colors, organized into two pairs (red/green and blue/yellow) and proposes that colors in the world are encoded in terms of the opponency (or difference) between the colors in each pair. There is an additional black/white pair responsible for coding light contrast.
Opponent-process theory: Theory proposing color vision as influenced by cells responsive to pairs of colors.
Oral sex: Cunnilingus or fellatio.
Orthonasal olfaction: Perceiving scents/smells introduced via the nostrils.
Ossicles: A collection of three small bones in the middle ear that vibrate against the tympanic membrane.
Ostracism: Excluding one or more individuals from a group by reducing or eliminating contact with the person, usually by ignoring, shunning, or explicitly banishing them.
Ostracism: Being excluded and ignored by others.
Other-oriented empathy: A component of the prosocial personality orientation; describes individuals who have a strong sense of social responsibility, empathize with and feel emotionally tied to those in need, understand the problems the victim is experiencing, and have a heightened sense of moral obligations to be helpful.
Otoconia: Small calcium carbonate particles that are packed in a layer on top of the gelatin membrane that covers the otolith receptor hair cell stereocilia.
Otolith receptors: Two inner ear vestibular receptors (utricle and saccule) that transduce linear accelerations and head tilt relative to gravity into neural signals that are then transferred to the brain.
Outgroup: A social category or group with which an individual does not identify.
Oxygenated hemoglobin: Hemoglobin carrying oxygen.
Oxytocin: A nine amino acid mammalian neuropeptide. Oxytocin is synthesized primarily in the brain, but also in other tissues such as uterus, heart and thymus, with local effects. Oxytocin is best known as a hormone of female reproduction due to its capacity to cause uterine contractions and eject milk. Oxytocin has effects on brain tissue, but also acts throughout the body in some cases as an antioxidant or anti-inflammatory.
Oxytocin: A peptide hormone secreted by the pituitary gland to trigger lactation, as well as social bonding.
Pain: Defined as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage,” according to the International Association for the Study of Pain.
Paraphilic disorders: Sexual behaviors that cause harm to others or one’s self.
Parasympathetic nervous system (PNS): One of the two major divisions of the autonomic nervous system, responsible for stimulation of “rest and digest” activities.
Parental behavior: Behaviors performed in relation to one’s offspring that contributes directly to the survival of those offspring
Participant variable: The individual characteristics of research subjects - age, personality, health, intelligence, etc.
Paternal behavior: Parental behavior performed by the father or other male.
Perceived social support: A person’s perception that others are there to help them in times of need.
Perception: The psychological process of interpreting sensory information.
Peripheral nervous system: The part of the nervous system that is outside the brain and spinal cord.
Peripheral route to persuasion: Persuasion that relies on superficial cues that have little to do with logic.
Personal distress: According to Batson’s empathy–altruism hypothesis, observers who take a detached view of a person in need will experience feelings of being “worried” and “upset” and will have an egoistic motivation for helping to relieve that distress.
Personality: Enduring predispositions that characterize a person, such as styles of thought, feelings and behavior.
Personality traits: Enduring dispositions in behavior that show differences across individuals, and which tend to characterize the person across varying types of situations.
Person-situation debate: The person-situation debate is a historical debate about the relative power of personality traits as compared to situational influences on behavior. The situationist critique, which started the person-situation debate, suggested that people overestimate the extent to which personality traits are consistent across situations.
Phantom limb: The perception that a missing limb still exists.
Phantom limb pain: Pain in a limb that no longer exists.
Phantom pain: Pain that appears to originate in an amputated limb.
Phenotype: The pattern of expression of the genotype or the magnitude or extent to which it is observably expressed—an observable characteristic or trait of an organism, such as its morphology, development, biochemical or physiological properties, or behavior.
Phenotypes: Observable traits, such as hair or eye color, that are result of genetic and environmental interactions.
Photoactivation: A photochemical reaction that occurs when light hits photoreceptors, producing a neural signal.
Pinna: Visible part of the outer ear.
Pinna: Outermost portion of the ear.
Placebo effect: Effects from a treatment that are not caused by the physical properties of a treatment but by the meaning ascribed to it. These effects reflect the brain’s own activation of modulatory systems, which is triggered by positive expectation or desire for a successful treatment. Placebo analgesia is the most well-studied placebo effect and has been shown to depend, to a large degree, on opioid mechanisms. Placebo analgesia can be reversed by the pharmacological blocking of  opioid receptors. The word “placebo” is probably derived from the Latin word “placebit” (“it will please”).
Planning fallacy: A cognitive bias in which one underestimates how long it will take to complete a task.
Pluralistic ignorance: Relying on the actions of others to define an ambiguous need situation and to then erroneously conclude that no help or intervention is necessary.
Positive psychology: The science of human flourishing. Positive Psychology is an applied science with an emphasis on real world intervention.
Positron: A particle having the same mass and numerically equal but positive charge as an electron.
Practitioner-Scholar Model: A model of training of professional psychologists that emphasizes clinical practice.
Prejudice: An evaluation or emotion toward people based merely on their group membership.
Prejudice: Having a bias or opinion about a person based on assumptions rather than actual experience.
Prevention focus: One of two self-regulatory orientations emphasizing safety, responsibility, and security needs, and viewing goals as “oughts.” This self-regulatory focus seeks to avoid losses (the presence of negatives) and approach non-losses (the absence of negatives).
Primary auditory cortex: Area of the cortex involved in processing auditory stimuli.
Primary somatosensory cortex: Area of the cortex involved in processing somatosensory stimuli.
Primary visual cortex: Area of the cortex involved in processing visual stimuli.
Primary visual cortex (V1): Brain region located in the occipital cortex (toward the back of the head) responsible for processing basic visual information like the detection, thickness, and orientation of simple lines, color, and small-scale motion.
Primed: A process by which a concept or behavior is made more cognitively accessible or likely to occur through the presentation of an associated concept.
Priming: The process by which exposing people to one stimulus makes certain thoughts, feelings or behaviors more salient.
Priming: The process by which exposing people to one stimulus makes certain thoughts, feelings or behaviors more salient.
Principle of inverse effectiveness: The finding that, in general, for a multimodal stimulus, if the response to each unimodal component (on its own) is weak, then the opportunity for multisensory enhancement is very large. However, if one component—by itself—is sufficient to evoke a strong response, then the effect on the response gained by simultaneously processing the other components of the stimulus will be relatively small.
Prisoner’s dilemma: A classic paradox in which two individuals must independently choose between defection (maximizing reward to the self) and cooperation (maximizing reward to the group).
Progesterone: A primary progestin that is involved in pregnancy and mating behaviors.
Progestin: A class of C21 steroid hormones named for their progestational (pregnancy-supporting) effects. Progesterone is a common progestin.
Progress: The perception of reducing the discrepancy between one’s current state and one’s desired state in goal pursuit.
Prohormone: A molecule that can act as a hormone itself or be converted into another hormone with different properties. For example, testosterone can serve as a hormone or as a prohormone for either dihydrotestosterone or estradiol.
Prolactin: A protein hormone that is highly conserved throughout the animal kingdom. It has many biological functions associated with reproduction and synergistic actions with steroid hormones.
Promotion focus: One of two self-regulatory orientations emphasizing hopes, accomplishments, and advancement needs, and viewing goals as “ideals.” This self-regulatory focus seeks to approach gains (the presence of positives) and avoid non-gains (the absence of positives).
Proprioceptive: Sensory information regarding muscle position and movement arising from receptors in the muscles, tendons, and joints.
Pro-social: Thoughts, actions, and feelings that are directed towards others and which are positive in nature.
Prosocial behavior: Social behavior that benefits another person.
Prosocial personality orientation: A measure of individual differences that identifies two sets of personality characteristics (other-oriented empathy, helpfulness) that are highly correlated with prosocial behavior.
Prototype: A typical, or average, member of a category. Averageness increases attractiveness.
Proximity: Physical nearness.
Psychogenesis: Developing from psychological origins.
Psychological adaptations: Mechanisms of the mind that evolved to solve specific problems of survival or reproduction; conceptualized as information processing devices.
Psychological reactance: A reaction to people, rules, requirements, or offerings that are perceived to limit freedoms.
Psychopathy: A pattern of antisocial behavior characterized by an inability to empathize, egocentricity, and a desire to use relationships as tools for personal gain.
Psychophysics: Study of the relationships between physical stimuli and the perception of those stimuli.
Psychophysiological methods: Any research method in which the dependent variable is a physiological measure and the independent variable is behavioral or mental (such as memory).
Punishment: Inflicting pain or removing pleasure for a misdeed. Punishment decreases the likelihood that a behavior will be repeated.
Racism: A system of advantage and disadvantage based on social, historical, and cultural constructions of race and ethnicity (Jones, 1997/1998; Tatum 1997; Wellman 1993).
Random assignment: Assigning participants to receive different conditions of an experiment by chance.
Rational self-interest: The principle that people will make logical decisions based on maximizing their own gains and benefits.
Realism: A point of view that emphasizes the importance of the senses in providing knowledge of the external world.
Received social support: The actual act of receiving support (e.g., informational, functional).
Receptor: A chemical structure on the cell surface or inside of a cell that has an affinity for a specific chemical configuration of a hormone, neurotransmitter, or other compound.
Reciprocal altruism: According to evolutionary psychology, a genetic predisposition for people to help those who have previously helped them.
Reciprocity: The act of exchanging goods or services. By giving a person a gift, the principle of reciprocity can be used to influence others; they then feel obligated to give back.
Redemptive narratives: Life stories that affirm the transformation from suffering to an enhanced status or state. In American culture, redemptive life stories are highly prized as models for the good self, as in classic narratives of atonement, upward mobility, liberation, and recovery.
Reflexivity: The idea that the self reflects back upon itself; that the I (the knower, the subject) encounters the Me (the known, the object). Reflexivity is a fundamental property of human selfhood.
Relational aggression: Intentionally harming another person’s social relationships, feelings of acceptance, or inclusion within a group.
Relationship bank account: An account you hold with every person in which a positive deposit or a negative withdrawal can be made during every interaction you have with the person.
Replacement fantasy: Fantasizing about someone other than one’s current partner.
Representativeness heuristic: A heuristic in which the likelihood of an object belonging to a category is evaluated based on the extent to which the object appears similar to one’s mental representation of the category.
Research confederate: A person working with a researcher, posing as a research participant or as a bystander.
Research participant: A person being studied as part of a research program.
Retina: Cell layer in the back of the eye containing photoreceptors.
Retronasal olfaction: Perceiving scents/smells introduced via the mouth/palate.
Ritual: Rites or actions performed in a systematic or prescribed way often for an intended purpose. Example: The exchange of wedding rings during a marriage ceremony in many cultures.
Rods: Photoreceptors that are very sensitive to light and are mostly responsible for night vision.
Rods: Photoreceptors of the retina sensitive to low levels of light. Located around the fovea.
Sadism: Inflicting pain upon another person to experience pleasure for one’s self.
Safer-sex practices: Doing anything that may decrease the probability of sexual assault, sexually transmitted infections, or unwanted pregnancy; this may include using condoms, honesty, and communication.
Sample Size: The number of participants in a study. Sample size is important because it can influence the confidence scientists have in the accuracy and generalizability of their results.
Samples of convenience: Participants that have been recruited in a manner that prioritizes convenience over representativeness.
Schema: A mental model or representation that organizes the important information about a thing, person, or event (also known as a script).
Scientific method: A method of investigation that includes systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.
Scientist-practitioner model: A model of training of professional psychologists that emphasizes the development of both research and clinical skills.
Security of attachment: An infant’s confidence in the sensitivity and responsiveness of a caregiver, especially when he or she is needed. Infants can be securely attached or insecurely attached.
Self as autobiographical author: The sense of the self as a storyteller who reconstructs the past and imagines the future in order to articulate an integrative narrative that provides life with some measure of temporal continuity and purpose.
Self as motivated agent: The sense of the self as an intentional force that strives to achieve goals, plans, values, projects, and the like.
Self as social actor: The sense of the self as an embodied actor whose social performances may be construed in terms of more or less consistent self-ascribed traits and social roles.
Self-construal: The extent to which the self is defined as independent or as relating to others.
Self-control: The capacity to control impulses, emotions, desires, and actions in order to resist a temptation and adhere to a valued goal.
Self-esteem: The extent to which a person feels that he or she is worthy and good. The success or failure that the motivated agent experiences in pursuit of valued goals is a strong determinant of self-esteem.
Self-expansion model: Seeking to increase one’s capacity often through an intimate relationship.
Self-regulation: The processes through which individuals alter their emotions, desires, and actions in the course of pursuing a goal.
Semicircular canals: A set of three inner ear vestibular receptors (horizontal, anterior, posterior) that transduce head rotational accelerations into head rotational velocity signals that are then transferred to the brain. There are three semicircular canals in each ear, with the major planes of each canal being orthogonal to each other.
Sensation: The physical processing of environmental stimuli by the sense organs.
Sensitization: Increased responsiveness of nociceptive neurons to their normal input and/or recruitment of a response to normally subthreshold inputs. Clinically, sensitization may only be inferred indirectly from phenomena such as hyperalgesia or allodynia. Sensitization can occur in the central nervous system (central sensitization) or in the periphery (peripheral sensitization).
Sensory adaptation: Decrease in sensitivity of a receptor to a stimulus after constant stimulation.
Sex: An organism’s means of biological reproduction.
Sex determination: The point at which an individual begins to develop as either a male or a female. In animals that have sex chromosomes, this occurs at fertilization. Females are XX and males are XY. All eggs bear X chromosomes, whereas sperm can either bear X or Y chromosomes. Thus, it is the males that determine the sex of the offspring.
Sex differentiation: The process by which individuals develop the characteristics associated with being male or female. Differential exposure to gonadal steroids during early development causes sexual differentiation of several structures including the brain.
Sexual attraction: The capacity a person has to elicit or feel sexual interest.
Sexual consent: Permission that is voluntary, conscious, and able to be withdrawn at any time.
Sexual fluidity: Personal sexual attributes changing due to psychosocial circumstances.
Sexual literacy: The lifelong pursuit of accurate human sexuality knowledge, and recognition of its various multicultural, historical, and societal contexts; the ability to critically evaluate sources and discern empirical evidence from unreliable and inaccurate information; the acknowledgment of humans as sexual beings; and an appreciation of sexuality’s contribution to enhancing one’s well-being and pleasure in life.
Sexual orientation: A person’s sexual attraction to other people.
Sexual selection: The evolution of characteristics because of the mating advantage they give organisms.
Sexual strategies theory: A comprehensive evolutionary theory of human mating that defines the menu of mating strategies humans pursue (e.g., short-term casual sex, long-term committed mating), the adaptive problems women and men face when pursuing these strategies, and the evolved solutions to these mating problems.
Shape theory of olfaction: Theory proposing that odorants of different size and shape correspond to different smells.
Shared mental model: Knowledge, expectations, conceptualizations, and other cognitive representations that members of a group have in common pertaining to the group and its members, tasks, procedures, and resources.
Shunning: The act of avoiding or ignoring a person, and withholding all social interaction for a period of time. Shunning generally occurs as a punishment and is temporary.
Signal detection: Method for studying the ability to correctly identify sensory stimuli.
Situational identity: Being guided by different cultural influences in different situations, such as home versus workplace, or formal versus informal roles.
Social attribution: The way a person explains the motives or behaviors of others.
Social cognition: The study of how people think about the social world.
Social cognition: The way people process and apply information about others.
Social comparison: The process of contrasting one’s personal qualities and outcomes, including beliefs, attitudes, values, abilities, accomplishments, and experiences, to those of other people.
Social construct: Something that is not found in objective reality but it, instead, the result of a common shared understanding. Social constructs are defined and given meaning by a particular society.
Social facilitation: Improvement in task performance that occurs when people work in the presence of other people.
Social facilitation: When performance on simple or well-rehearsed tasks is enhanced when we are in the presence of others.
Social identity: A person’s sense of who they are, based on their group membership(s).
Social identity theory: A theoretical analysis of group processes and intergroup relations that assumes groups influence their members’ self-concepts and self-esteem, particularly when individuals categorize themselves as group members and identify with the group.
Social influence: When one person causes a change in attitude or behavior in another person, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
Social integration: Active engagement and participation in a broad range of social relationships.
Social loafing: The reduction of individual effort exerted when people work in groups compared with when they work alone.
Social neuroscience: An interdisciplinary field concerned with identifying the neural processes underlying social behavior and cognition.
Social or behavioral priming: A field of research that investigates how the activation of one social concept in memory can elicit changes in behavior, physiology, or self-reports of a related social concept without conscious awareness.
Social proof: The mental shortcut based on the assumption that, if everyone is doing it, it must be right.
Social psychology: The branch of psychological science that is mainly concerned with understanding how the presence of others affects our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Social referencing: The process by which one individual consults another’s emotional expressions to determine how to evaluate and respond to circumstances that are ambiguous or uncertain.
Social reputation: The traits and social roles that others attribute to an actor. Actors also have their own conceptions of what they imagine their respective social reputations indeed are in the eyes of others.
Social support: A social network’s provision of psychological and material resources that benefit an individual.
Social touch hypothesis: Proposes that social touch is a distinct domain of touch. C-tactile afferents form a special pathway that distinguishes social touch from other types of touch by selectively firing in response to touch of social-affective relevance; thus sending affective information parallel to the discriminatory information from the Aβ-fibers. In this way, the socially relevant touch stands out from the rest as having special positive emotional value and is processed further in affect-related brain areas such as the insula.
Social value orientation (SVO): An assessment of how an individual prefers to allocate resources between him- or herself and another person.
Sociometer model: A conceptual analysis of self-evaluation processes that theorizes self-esteem functions to psychologically monitor of one’s degree of inclusion and exclusion in social groups.
Somatogenesis: Developing from physical/bodily origins.
Somatosensation: Ability to sense touch, pain and temperature.
Somatosensory cortex: Consists of primary sensory cortex (S1) in the postcentral gyrus in the parietal lobes and secondary somatosensory cortex (S2), which is defined functionally and found in the upper bank of the lateral sulcus, called the parietal operculum. Somatosensory cortex also includes parts of the insular cortex.
Somatotopic map: Organization of the primary somatosensory cortex maintaining a representation of the arrangement of the body.
Somatotopically organized: When the parts of the body that are represented in a particular brain region are organized topographically according to their physical location in the body (see Figure 2 illustration).
Sound waves: Changes in air pressure. The physical stimulus for audition.
Spatial resolution: The degree to which one can separate a single object in space from another.
Spinothalamic tract: Runs through the spinal cord’s lateral column up to the thalamus. C-fibers enter the dorsal horn of the spinal cord and form a synapse with a neuron that then crosses over to the lateral column and becomes part of the spinothalamic tract.
Standard scale: Research method in which all participants use a common scale—typically a Likert scale—to respond to questions.
State of vulnerability: When a person places him or herself in a position in which he or she might be exploited or harmed. This is often done out of trust that others will not exploit the vulnerability.
Stereocilia: Hairlike projections from the top of the receptor hair cells. The stereocilia are arranged in ascending height and when displaced toward the tallest cilia, the mechanical gated channels open and the cell is excited (depolarized). When the stereocilia are displaced toward the smallest cilia, the channels close and the cell is inhibited (hyperpolarized).
Stereotypes: Our general beliefs about the traits or behaviors shared by group of people.
Stereotyping: A mental process of using information shortcuts about a group to effectively navigate social situations or make decisions.
Stereotyping: Holding a generalized belief about an entire group of people, and often making a flawed generalization about an individual based solely on that person’s membership in a group.
Stigmatized group: A group that suffers from social disapproval based on some characteristic that sets them apart from the majority.
Strange situation: A laboratory task that involves briefly separating and reuniting infants and their primary caregivers as a way of studying individual differences in attachment behavior.
Structuralism: A school of American psychology that sought to describe the elements of conscious experience.
Subjective social variables: Targets of research interest that are not necessarily factual but are related to personal opinions or feelings
Subjective well-being: The scientific term used to describe how people experience the quality of their lives in terms of life satisfaction and emotional judgments of positive and negative affect.
Superadditive effect of multisensory integration: The finding that responses to multimodal stimuli are typically greater than the sum of the independent responses to each unimodal component if it were presented on its own.
Supernatural: Developing from origins beyond the visible observable universe.
Support support network: The people who care about and support a person.
Survey method: One method of research that uses a predetermined and methodical list of questions, systematically given to samples of individuals, to predict behaviors within the population.
Survey research: A method of research that involves administering a questionnaire to respondents in person, by telephone, through the mail, or over the internet.
Sympathetic nervous system (SNS): One of the two major divisions of the autonomic nervous system, responsible for stimulation of “fight or flight” activities.
Syndrome: Involving a particular group of signs and symptoms.
Synesthesia: The blending of two or more sensory experiences, or the automatic activation of a secondary (indirect) sensory experience due to certain aspects of the primary (direct) sensory stimulation.
Systemic approaches: Approaches to understanding racism that emphasize the roles that societal factors—historical, cultural, legal, political, and economic—have played in organizing who is at the top or bottom of a society’s racial hierarchy.
Target cell: A cell that has receptors for a specific chemical messenger (hormone or neurotransmitter).
Tastants: Chemicals transduced by taste receptor cells.
Taste receptor cells: Receptors that transduce gustatory information.
Teamwork: The process by which members of the team combine their knowledge, skills, abilities, and other resources through a coordinated series of actions to produce an outcome.
Temperament: Early emerging differences in reactivity and self-regulation, which constitutes a foundation for personality development.
Temporal resolution: The degree to which one can separate a single point in time from another.
Terror management theory (TMT): A theory that proposes that humans manage the anxiety that stems from the inevitability of death by embracing frameworks of meaning such as cultural values and beliefs.
Testosterone: The primary androgen secreted by the testes of most vertebrate animals, including men.
The Age 5-to-7 Shift: Cognitive and social changes that occur in the early elementary school years that result in the child’s developing a more purposeful, planful, and goal-directed approach to life, setting the stage for the emergence of the self as a motivated agent.
The “I”: The self as knower, the sense of the self as a subject who encounters (knows, works on) itself (the Me).
The “Me”: The self as known, the sense of the self as the object or target of the I’s knowledge and work.
The norm of reciprocity: The normative pressure to repay, in equitable value, what another person has given to us.
The rule of scarcity: People tend to perceive things as more attractive when their availability is limited, or when they stand to lose the opportunity to acquire them on favorable terms.
The triad of trust: We are most vulnerable to persuasion when the source is perceived as an authority, as honest and likable.
Theory of mind: Emerging around the age of 4, the child’s understanding that other people have minds in which are located desires and beliefs, and that desires and beliefs, thereby, motivate behavior.
Theory of mind: Children’s growing understanding of the mental states that affect people’s behavior.
Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: The inability to pull a word from memory even though there is the sensation that that word is available.
Top-down processing: Experience influencing the perception of stimuli.
Torsion: A rotational eye movement around the line of sight that consists of a clockwise or counterclockwise direction.
“Traitement moral” (moral treatment): A therapeutic regimen of improved nutrition, living conditions, and rewards for productive behavior that has been attributed to Philippe Pinel during the French Revolution, when he released mentally ill patients from their restraints and treated them with compassion and dignity rather than with contempt and denigration.
Transduction: The mechanisms that convert stimuli into electrical signals that can be transmitted and processed by the nervous system. Physical or chemical stimulation creates action potentials in a receptor cell in the peripheral nervous system, which is then conducted along the axon to the central nervous system.
Transduction: The conversion of one form of energy into another.
Transgender: A person whose gender identity or gender role does not correspond with his/her birth sex.
Transgender female (TGF): A transgender person whose birth sex was male.
Transgender male (TGM): A transgender person whose birth sex was female.
Trephination: The drilling of a hole in the skull, presumably as a way of treating psychological disorders.
Trichromacy theory: Theory that proposes that all of your color perception is fundamentally based on the combination of three (not two, not four) different color signals.
Trichromatic theory: Theory proposing color vision as influenced by three different cones responding preferentially to red, green and blue.
Trigger features: Specific, sometimes minute, aspects of a situation that activate fixed action patterns.
Tympanic membrane: Ear drum, which separates the outer ear from the middle ear.
Tympanic membrane: Thin, stretched membrane in the middle ear that vibrates in response to sound. Also called the eardrum.
Ultimatum game: An economic game in which a proposer (Player A) can offer a subset of resources to a responder (Player B), who can then either accept or reject the given proposal.
Vagus nerve: The 10th cranial nerve. The mammalian vagus has an older unmyelinated branch which originates in the dorsal motor complex and a more recently evolved, myelinated branch, with origins in the ventral vagal complex including the nucleus ambiguous. The vagus is the primary source of autonomic-parasympathetic regulation for various internal organs, including the heart, lungs and other parts of the viscera. The vagus nerve is primarily sensory (afferent), transmitting abundant visceral input to the central nervous system.
Value judgment: An assessment—based on one’s own preferences and priorities—about the basic “goodness” or “badness” of a concept or practice.
Value-free research: Research that is not influenced by the researchers’ own values, morality, or opinions.
Vasopressin: A nine amino acid mammalian neuropeptide. Vasopressin is synthesized primarily in the brain, but also may be made in other tissues. Vasopressin is best known for its effects on the cardiovascular system (increasing blood pressure) and also the kidneys (causing water retention). Vasopressin has effects on brain tissue, but also acts throughout the body.
Ventral pathway: Pathway of visual processing. The “what” pathway.
Vergence angle: The angle between the line of sight for the two eyes. Low vergence angles indicate far-viewing objects, whereas large angles indicate viewing of near objects.
Vestibular compensation: Following injury to one side of vestibular receptors or the vestibulocochlear nerve, the central vestibular nuclei neurons gradually recover much of their function through plasticity mechanisms. The recovery is never complete, however, and extreme motion environments can lead to dizziness, nausea, problems with balance, and spatial memory.
Vestibular efferents: Nerve fibers originating from a nucleus in the brainstem that project from the brain to innervate the vestibular receptor hair cells and afferent nerve terminals. Efferents have a modulatory role on their targets, which is not well understood.
Vestibular system: Parts of the inner ear involved in balance.
Vestibular system: Consists of a set of motion and gravity detection receptors in the inner ear, a set of primary nuclei in the brainstem, and a network of pathways carrying motion and gravity signals to many regions of the brain.
Vestibulocochlear nerve: The VIIIth cranial nerve that carries fibers innervating the vestibular receptors and the cochlea.
Vestibuloocular reflex: Eye movements produced by the vestibular brainstem that are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction to head motion. The VOR functions to maintain visual stability on a point of interest and is nearly perfect for all natural head movements.
Vestibulo-ocular reflex: Coordination of motion information with visual information that allows you to maintain your gaze on an object while you move.
Violence: Aggression intended to cause extreme physical harm, such as injury or death.
Voltage: The difference in electric charge between two points.
Weber’s law: States that just noticeable difference is proportional to the magnitude of the initial stimulus.
WEIRD cultures: Cultures that are western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.
What pathway: Pathway of neural processing in the brain that is responsible for your ability to recognize what is around you.
Where-and-How pathway: Pathway of neural processing in the brain that is responsible for you knowing where things are in the world and how to interact with them.