Vocabulary

Ability model: An approach that views EI as a standard intelligence that utilizes a distinct set of mental abilities that (1) are intercorrelated, (2) relate to other extant intelligences, and (3) develop with age and experience (Mayer & Salovey, 1997).
Adaptation: The fact that after people first react to good or bad events, sometimes in a strong way, their feelings and reactions tend to dampen down over time and they return toward their original level of subjective well-being.
Adherence: In health, it is the ability of a patient to maintain a health behavior prescribed by a physician. This might include taking medication as prescribed, exercising more, or eating less high-fat food.
Adoption study: A behavior genetic research method that involves comparison of adopted children to their adoptive and biological parents.
Agender: An individual who may have no gender or may describe themselves as having a neutral gender.
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.
Ambivalent sexism: A concept of gender attitudes that encompasses both positive and negative qualities.
Automatic: Automatic biases are unintended, immediate, and irresistible.
Aversive racism: Aversive racism is unexamined racial bias that the person does not intend and would reject, but that avoids inter-racial contact.
Behavioral genetics: The empirical science of how genes and environments combine to generate behavior.
Behavioral medicine: A field similar to health psychology that integrates psychological factors (e.g., emotion, behavior, cognition, and social factors) in the treatment of disease. This applied field includes clinical areas of study, such as occupational therapy, hypnosis, rehabilitation or medicine, and preventative medicine.
Benevolent sexism: The “positive” element of ambivalent sexism, which recognizes that women are perceived as needing to be protected, supported, and adored by men.
Bigender: An individual who identifies as two genders.
Binary: The idea that gender has two separate and distinct categories (male and female) and that a person must be either one or the other.
Biofeedback: The process by which physiological signals, not normally available to human perception, are transformed into easy-to-understand graphs or numbers. Individuals can then use this information to try to change bodily functioning (e.g., lower blood pressure, reduce muscle tension).
Biomedical Model of Health: A reductionist model that posits that ill health is a result of a deviation from normal function, which is explained by the presence of pathogens, injury, or genetic abnormality.
Biopsychosocial Model of Health: An approach to studying health and human function that posits the importance of biological, psychological, and social (or environmental) processes.
Blatant biases: Blatant biases are conscious beliefs, feelings, and behavior that people are perfectly willing to admit, are mostly hostile, and openly favor their own group.
“Bottom-up” or external causes of happiness: Situational factors outside the person that influence his or her subjective well-being, such as good and bad events and circumstances such as health and wealth.
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.
Chronic disease: A health condition that persists over time, typically for periods longer than three months (e.g., HIV, asthma, diabetes).
Cisgender: A term used to describe individuals whose gender matches their biological sex.
Collective efficacy: The shared beliefs among members of a group about the group’s ability to effectively perform the tasks needed to attain a valued goal.
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.
Conscientiousness: A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be careful, organized, hardworking, and to follow rules.
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.
Control: Feeling like you have the power to change your environment or behavior if you need or want to.
Correlation: A measure of the association between two variables, or how they go together.
Daily hassles: Irritations in daily life that are not necessarily traumatic, but that cause difficulties and repeated stress.
Descriptive norm: The perception of what most people do in a given situation.
Developmental intergroup theory: A theory that postulates that adults’ focus on gender leads children to pay attention to gender as a key source of information about themselves and others, to seek out possible gender differences, and to form rigid stereotypes based on gender.
Discrimination: Discrimination is behavior that advantages or disadvantages people merely based on their group membership.
Emotion: An experiential, physiological, and behavioral response to a personally meaningful stimulus.
Emotion coherence: The degree to which emotional responses (subjective experience, behavior, physiology, etc.) converge with one another.
Emotion fluctuation: The degree to which emotions vary or change in intensity over time.
Emotional intelligence: The ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions. (Salovey & Mayer, 1990). EI includes four specific abilities: perceiving, using, understanding, and managing emotions.
Emotion-focused coping: Coping strategy aimed at reducing the negative emotions associated with a stressful event.
Empirical methods: Approaches to inquiry that are tied to actual measurement and observation.
Ethics: Professional guidelines that offer researchers a template for making decisions that protect research participants from potential harm and that help steer scientists away from conflicts of interest or other situations that might compromise the integrity of their research.
Extraversion: A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be sociable, outgoing, active, and assertive.
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.
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.
Flourishing: To live optimally psychologically, relationally, and spiritually.
Forgiveness: The letting go of negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors toward an offender.
Four-Branch Model: An ability model developed by Drs. Peter Salovey and John Mayer that includes four main components of EI, arranged in hierarchical order, beginning with basic psychological processes and advancing to integrative psychological processes. The branches are (1) perception of emotion, (2) use of emotion to facilitate thinking, (3) understanding emotion, and (4) management of emotion.
Functional distance: The frequency with which we cross paths with others.
Gender: The cultural, social, and psychological meanings that are associated with masculinity and femininity.
Gender constancy: The awareness that gender is constant and does not change simply by changing external attributes; develops between 3 and 6 years of age.
Gender discrimination: Differential treatment on the basis of gender.
Gender identity: A person’s psychological sense of being male or female.
Gender roles: The behaviors, attitudes, and personality traits that are designated as either masculine or feminine in a given culture.
Gender schema theory: This theory of how children form their own gender roles argues that children actively organize others’ behavior, activities, and attributes into gender categories or schemas.
Gender stereotypes: The beliefs and expectations people hold about the typical characteristics, preferences, and behaviors of men and women.
Genderfluid: An individual who may identify as male, female, both, or neither at different times and in different circumstances.
Genderqueer or gender nonbinary: An umbrella term used to describe a wide range of individuals who do not identify with and/or conform to the gender binary.
General Adaptation Syndrome: A three-phase model of stress, which includes a mobilization of physiological resources phase, a coping phase, and an exhaustion phase (i.e., when an organism fails to cope with the stress adequately and depletes its resources).
Gratitude: A feeling of appreciation or thankfulness in response to receiving a benefit.
Happiness: The popular word for subjective well-being. Scientists sometimes avoid using this term because it can refer to different things, such as feeling good, being satisfied, or even the causes of high subjective well-being.
Health: The complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being—not just the absence of disease or infirmity.
Health: According to the World Health Organization, it is a complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
Health behavior: Any behavior that is related to health—either good or bad.
Health behaviors: Behaviors that are associated with better health. Examples include exercising, not smoking, and wearing a seat belt while in a vehicle.
Heritability coefficient: An easily misinterpreted statistical construct that purports to measure the role of genetics in the explanation of differences among individuals.
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.
Hostile sexism: The negative element of ambivalent sexism, which includes the attitudes that women are inferior and incompetent relative to men.
Hostility: An experience or trait with cognitive, behavioral, and emotional components. It often includes cynical thoughts, feelings of emotion, and aggressive behavior.
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.
Hypotheses: A logical idea that can be tested.
Imaginal performances: When imagining yourself doing well increases self-efficacy.
Implicit Association Test: Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures relatively automatic biases that favor own group relative to other groups.
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.
Informational influence: Conformity that results from a concern to act in a socially approved manner as determined by how others act.
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.
Life satisfaction: A person reflects on their life and judges to what degree it is going well, by whatever standards that person thinks are most important for a good life.
Machiavellianism: Being cunning, strategic, or exploitative in one’s relationships. Named after Machiavelli, who outlined this way of relating in his book, The Prince.
Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT): A 141-item performance assessment of EI that measures the four emotion abilities (as defined by the four-branch model of EI) with a total of eight tasks.
Mere-exposure effect: The notion that people like people/places/things merely because they are familiar with them.
Mind–body connection: The idea that our emotions and thoughts can affect how our body functions.
Mixed and Trait Models: Approaches that view EI as a combination of self-perceived emotion skills, personality traits, and attitudes.
Model minority: A minority group whose members are perceived as achieving a higher degree of socioeconomic success than the population average.
Narcissism: A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), a need for admiration, and lack of empathy.
Negative feelings: Undesirable and unpleasant feelings that people tend to avoid if they can. Moods and emotions such as depression, anger, and worry are examples.
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.
Normative influence: Conformity that results from a concern for what other people think of us.
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.
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.
Ostracism: Being excluded and ignored by others.
Perceived social support: A person’s perception that others are there to help them in times of need.
Performance assessment: A method of measurement associated with ability models of EI that evaluate the test taker’s ability to solve emotion-related problems.
Performance experiences: When past successes or failures lead to changes in self-efficacy.
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.
Positive feelings: Desirable and pleasant feelings. Moods and emotions such as enjoyment and love are examples.
Positive psychology: The science of human flourishing. Positive Psychology is an applied science with an emphasis on real world intervention.
Prejudice: Prejudice is an evaluation or emotion toward people merely based on their group membership.
Problem-focused coping: A set of coping strategies aimed at improving or changing stressful situations.
Pro-social: Thoughts, actions, and feelings that are directed towards others and which are positive in nature.
Proximity: Physical nearness.
Psychoneuroimmunology: A field of study examining the relationship among psychology, brain function, and immune function.
Psychopathy: A pattern of antisocial behavior characterized by an inability to empathize, egocentricity, and a desire to use relationships as tools for personal gain.
Psychosomatic medicine: An interdisciplinary field of study that focuses on how biological, psychological, and social processes contribute to physiological changes in the body and health over time.
Quantitative genetics: Scientific and mathematical methods for inferring genetic and environmental processes based on the degree of genetic and environmental similarity among organisms.
Received social support: The actual act of receiving support (e.g., informational, functional).
Resilience: The ability to “bounce back” from negative situations (e.g., illness, stress) to normal functioning or to simply not show poor outcomes in the face of adversity. In some cases, resilience may lead to better functioning following the negative experience (e.g., post-traumatic growth).
Right-wing authoritarianism: Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) focuses on value conflicts but endorses respect for obedience and authority in the service of group conformity.
Schemas: The gender categories into which, according to gender schema theory, children actively organize others’ behavior, activities, and attributes.
Self-categorization theory: Self-categorization theory develops social identity theory’s point that people categorize themselves, along with each other into groups, favoring their own group.
Self-efficacy: The belief that you are able to effectively perform the tasks needed to attain a valued goal.
Self-efficacy: The belief that one can perform adequately in a specific situation.
Self-regulation: The complex process through which people control their thoughts, emotions, and actions.
Self-report assessment: A method of measurement associated with mixed and trait models of EI, which evaluates the test taker’s perceived emotion-related skills, distinct personality traits, and other characteristics.
Self-report measure: A type of questionnaire in which participants answer questions whose answers correspond to numerical values that can be added to create an overall index of some construct.
Sex: Biological category of male or female as defined by physical differences in genetic composition and in reproductive anatomy and function.
Sexual harassment: A form of gender discrimination based on unwanted treatment related to sexual behaviors or appearance.
Sexual orientation: Refers to the direction of emotional and erotic attraction toward members of the opposite sex, the same sex, or both sexes.
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.
Social and emotional learning (SEL): The real-world application of EI in an educational setting and/or classroom that involves curricula that teach the process of integrating thinking, feeling, and behaving in order to become aware of the self and of others, make responsible decisions, and manage one’s own behaviors and those of others (Elias et al., 1997)
Social dominance orientation: Social dominance orientation (SDO) describes a belief that group hierarchies are inevitable in all societies and even good, to maintain order and stability.
Social identity theory: Social identity theory notes that people categorize each other into groups, favoring their own group.
Social integration: The size of your social network, or number of social roles (e.g., son, sister, student, employee, team member).
Social integration: Active engagement and participation in a broad range of social relationships.
Social learning theory: This theory of how children form their own gender roles argues that gender roles are learned through reinforcement, punishment, and modeling.
Social support: A social network’s provision of psychological and material resources that benefit an individual.
Social support: The perception or actuality that we have a social network that can help us in times of need and provide us with a variety of useful resources (e.g., advice, love, money).
Stereotype Content Model: Stereotype Content Model shows that social groups are viewed according to their perceived warmth and competence.
Stereotypes: Stereotype is a belief that characterizes people based merely on their group membership.
Stress: A pattern of physical and psychological responses in an organism after it perceives a threatening event that disturbs its homeostasis and taxes its abilities to cope with the event.
Stressor: An event or stimulus that induces feelings of stress.
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.
Subjective well-being: The name that scientists give to happiness—thinking and feeling that our lives are going very well.
Subjective well-being scales: Self-report surveys or questionnaires in which participants indicate their levels of subjective well-being, by responding to items with a number that indicates how well off they feel.
Subtle biases: Subtle biases are automatic, ambiguous, and ambivalent, but real in their consequences.
Support support network: The people who care about and support a person.
Systematic observation: The careful observation of the natural world with the aim of better understanding it. Observations provide the basic data that allow scientists to track, tally, or otherwise organize information about the natural world.
Task-specific measures of self-efficacy: Measures that ask about self-efficacy beliefs for a particular task (e.g., athletic self-efficacy, academic self-efficacy).
Theories: Groups of closely related phenomena or observations.
“Top-down” or internal causes of happiness: The person’s outlook and habitual response tendencies that influence their happiness—for example, their temperament or optimistic outlook on life.
Transgender: A term used to describe individuals whose gender does not match their biological sex.
Twin studies: A behavior genetic research method that involves comparison of the similarity of identical (monozygotic; MZ) and fraternal (dizygotic; DZ) twins.
Type A Behavior: Type A behavior is characterized by impatience, competitiveness, neuroticism, hostility, and anger.
Type B Behavior: Type B behavior reflects the absence of Type A characteristics and is represented by less competitive, aggressive, and hostile behavior patterns.
Verbal persuasion: When trusted people (friends, family, experts) influence your self-efficacy for better or worse by either encouraging or discouraging you about your ability to succeed.
Vicarious performances: When seeing other people succeed or fail leads to changes in self-efficacy.
Well-being: The experience of mental and physical health and the absence of disorder.