Vocabulary

Ablation: Surgical removal of brain tissue.
Absolute threshold: The smallest amount of stimulation needed for detection by a sense.
Acceptance and commitment therapy: A therapeutic approach designed to foster nonjudgmental observation of one’s own mental processes.
Action potential: A transient all-or-nothing electrical current that is conducted down the axon when the membrane potential reaches the threshold of excitation.
Action Potential: A transient all-or-nothing electrical current that is conducted down the axon when the membrane potential reaches the threshold of excitation.
Action-Oriented Research: Research that generates knowledge through participatory university/community partnerships in the hope of bringing about social change.
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.
Adaptation: Focuses on interactions between persons and their environments to better understand why behavior that is effective in one setting may not be useful in others.
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.
Affect: Feelings that can be described in terms of two dimensions, the dimensions of arousal and valence (Figure 2). For example, high arousal positive states refer to excitement, elation, and enthusiasm. Low arousal positive states refer to calm, peacefulness, and relaxation. Whereas “actual affect” refers to the states that people actually feel, “ideal affect” refers to the states that people ideally want to feel.
Affective forecasting: Predicting how one will feel in the future after some event or decision.
Agnosia: Loss of the ability to perceive stimuli.
Agonists: A drug that increases or enhances a neurotransmitter’s effect.
Agoraphobia: A sort of anxiety disorder distinguished by feelings that a place is uncomfortable or may be unsafe because it is significantly open or crowded.
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.
Alogia: A reduction in the amount of speech and/or increased pausing before the initiation of speech.
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.
Ambulatory assessment: An overarching term to describe methodologies that assess the behavior, physiology, experience, and environments of humans in naturalistic settings.
Anhedonia: Loss of interest or pleasure in activities one previously found enjoyable or rewarding.
Anhedonia/amotivation: A reduction in the drive or ability to take the steps or engage in actions necessary to obtain the potentially positive outcome.
Anosmia: Loss of the ability to smell.
Antagonist: A drug that blocks a neurotransmitter’s effect.
Anterograde amnesia: Inability to form new memories for facts and events after the onset of amnesia.
Anxiety: A mood state characterized by negative affect, muscle tension, and physical arousal in which a person apprehensively anticipates future danger or misfortune.
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.
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.
Attitude: A psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor.
Attributional style: The tendency by which a person infers the cause or meaning of behaviors or events.
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 memory: Memory for the events of one’s life.
Automatic: Automatic biases are unintended, immediate, and irresistible.
Automatic: A behavior or process has one or more of the following features: unintentional, uncontrollable, occurring outside of conscious awareness, and cognitively efficient.
Automatic thoughts: Thoughts that occur spontaneously; often used to describe problematic thoughts that maintain mental disorders.
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.
Aversive racism: Aversive racism is unexamined racial bias that the person does not intend and would reject, but that avoids inter-racial contact.
Awareness: A conscious experience or the capability of having conscious experiences, which is distinct from self-awareness, the conscious understanding of one’s own existence and individuality.
Axial plane: See “horizontal plane.”
Axon: Part of the neuron that extends off the soma, splitting several times to connect with other neurons; main output of the neuron.
Axon: Part of the neuron that extends off the soma, splitting several times to connect with other neurons; main output of the neuron.
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.
Basal ganglia: Subcortical structures of the cerebral hemispheres involved in voluntary movement.
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.
Behaviorism: The study of behavior.
Big Five: Five, broad general traits that are included in many prominent models of personality. The five traits are neuroticism (those high on this trait are prone to feeling sad, worried, anxious, and dissatisfied with themselves), extraversion (high scorers are friendly, assertive, outgoing, cheerful, and energetic), openness to experience (those high on this trait are tolerant, intellectually curious, imaginative, and artistic), agreeableness (high scorers are polite, considerate, cooperative, honest, and trusting), and conscientiousness (those high on this trait are responsible, cautious, organized, disciplined, and achievement-oriented).
Bigotry: An unreasonable opinion or prejudice against a category of people.
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.
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).
Biological vulnerability: A specific genetic and neurobiological factor that might predispose someone to develop anxiety disorders.
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.
Blocking: In classical conditioning, the finding that no conditioning occurs to a stimulus if it is combined with a previously conditioned stimulus during conditioning trials. Suggests that information, surprise value, or prediction error is important in conditioning.
Blood Alcohol Content (BAC): Blood Alcohol Content (BAC): a measure of the percentage of alcohol found in a person’s blood. This measure is typically the standard used to determine the extent to which a person is intoxicated, as in the case of being too impaired to drive a vehicle.
“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.
Bottom-up processing: Building up to perceptual experience from individual pieces.
Brain stem: The “trunk” of the brain comprised of the medulla, pons, midbrain, and diencephalon.
Brain Stem: The “trunk” of the brain comprised of the medulla, pons, midbrain, and diencephalon.
Broca’s Area: An area in the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere. Implicated in language production.
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.
Callosotomy: Surgical procedure in which the corpus callosum is severed (used to control severe epilepsy).
Cartesian catastrophe: The idea that mental processes taking place outside conscious awareness are impossible.
Case study: A thorough study of a patient (or a few patients) with naturally occurring lesions.
Catatonia: Behaviors that seem to reflect a reduction in responsiveness to the external environment. This can include holding unusual postures for long periods of time, failing to respond to verbal or motor prompts from another person, or excessive and seemingly purposeless motor activity.
Categorize: To sort or arrange different items into classes or categories.
Cell membrane: A bi-lipid layer of molecules that separates the cell from the surrounding extracellular fluid.
Central Nervous System: The portion of the nervous system that includes the brain and spinal cord.
Cerebellum: The distinctive structure at the back of the brain, Latin for “small brain.”
Cerebellum: The distinctive structure at the back of the brain, Latin for “small brain.”
Cerebral cortex: The outermost gray matter of the cerebrum; the distinctive convoluti characteristic of the mammalian brain.
Cerebral hemispheres: The cerebral cortex, underlying white matter, and subcortical structures.
Cerebrum: Usually refers to the cerebral cortex and associated white matter, but in some texts includes the subcortical structures.
Cerebrum: Usually refers to the cerebral cortex and associated white matter, but in some texts includes the subcortical structures.
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.
Chronic disease: A health condition that persists over time, typically for periods longer than three months (e.g., HIV, asthma, diabetes).
Chronic stress: Discrete or related problematic events and conditions which persist over time and result in prolonged activation of the biological and/or psychological stress response (e.g., unemployment, ongoing health difficulties, marital discord).
Chutes and Ladders: A numerical board game that seems to be useful for building numerical knowledge.
Circadian Rhythm: Circadian Rhythm: The physiological sleep-wake cycle. It is influenced by exposure to sunlight as well as daily schedule and activity. Biologically, it includes changes in body temperature, blood pressure and blood sugar.
Classical conditioning: The procedure in which an initially neutral stimulus (the conditioned stimulus, or CS) is paired with an unconditioned stimulus (or US). The result is that the conditioned stimulus begins to elicit a conditioned response (CR). Classical conditioning is nowadays considered important as both a behavioral phenomenon and as a method to study simple associative learning. Same as Pavlovian conditioning.
Cochlea: Spiral bone structure in the inner ear containing auditory hair cells.
Cognitive bias modification: Using exercises (e.g., computer games) to change problematic thinking habits.
Cognitive psychology: The study of mental processes.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT): A family of approaches with the goal of changing the thoughts and behaviors that influence psychopathology.
Collective memory: Knowledge that is shared among members of a group about the historical experiences of that group.
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.
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
Community Psychology: A field that goes beyond an individual focus and integrates social, cultural, economic, political, and environmental influences to promote system level, second order change.
Community-Based Participatory Research: Research that involves power sharing between researchers and the community members as issues for action are defined and change interventions launched.
Comorbidity: Describes a state of having more than one psychological or physical disorder at a given time.
Concrete operations stage: Piagetian stage between ages 7 and 12 when children can think logically about concrete situations but not engage in systematic scientific reasoning.
Conditioned compensatory response: In classical conditioning, a conditioned response that opposes, rather than is the same as, the unconditioned response. It functions to reduce the strength of the unconditioned response. Often seen in conditioning when drugs are used as unconditioned stimuli.
Conditioned response: A learned reaction following classical conditioning, or the process by which an event that automatically elicits a response is repeatedly paired with another neutral stimulus (conditioned stimulus), resulting in the ability of the neutral stimulus to elicit the same response on its own.
Conditioned response (CR): The response that is elicited by the conditioned stimulus after classical conditioning has taken place.
Conditioned stimulus (CS): An initially neutral stimulus (like a bell, light, or tone) that elicits a conditioned response after it has been associated with an unconditioned stimulus.
Cones: Photoreceptors of the retina sensitive to color. Located primarily in the fovea.
Conformity: Changing one’s attitude or behavior to match a perceived social norm.
Confounds: Factors that undermine the ability to draw causal inferences from an experiment.
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: Having knowledge of something external or internal to oneself; being aware of and responding to one’s surroundings.
Conscious experience: The first-person perspective of a mental event, such as feeling some sensory input, a memory, an idea, an emotion, a mood, or a continuous temporal sequence of happenings.
Conscious goal activation: When a person is fully aware of contextual influences and resulting goal-directed behavior.
Consciousness: Consciousness: the awareness or deliberate perception of a stimulus
Consciousness: Awareness of ourselves and our environment.
Conservation problems: Problems pioneered by Piaget in which physical transformation of an object or set of objects changes a perceptually salient dimension but not the quantity that is being asked about.
Consolidation: The process occurring after encoding that is believed to stabilize memory traces.
Consolidation: Process by which a memory trace is stabilized and transformed into a more durable form.
Contemplative science: A research area concerned with understanding how contemplative practices such as meditation can affect individuals, including changes in their behavior, their emotional reactivity, their cognitive abilities, and their brains. Contemplative science also seeks insights into conscious experience that can be gained from first-person observations by individuals who have gained extraordinary expertise in introspection.
Context: Stimuli that are in the background whenever learning occurs. For instance, the Skinner box or room in which learning takes place is the classic example of a context. However, “context” can also be provided by internal stimuli, such as the sensory effects of drugs (e.g., being under the influence of alcohol has stimulus properties that provide a context) and mood states (e.g., being happy or sad). It can also be provided by a specific period in time—the passage of time is sometimes said to change the “temporal context.”
Contingency management: A reward or punishment that systematically follows a behavior. Parents can use contingencies to modify their children’s behavior.
Continuous development: Ways in which development occurs in a gradual incremental manner, rather than through sudden jumps.
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.
Contralateral: Literally “opposite side”; used to refer to the fact that the two hemispheres of the brain process sensory information and motor commands for the opposite side of the body (e.g., the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body).
Contralateral: Literally “opposite side”; used to refer to the fact that the two hemispheres of the brain process sensory information and motor commands for the opposite side of the body (e.g., the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body).
Control: Feeling like you have the power to change your environment or behavior if you need or want to.
Converging evidence: Similar findings reported from multiple studies using different methods.
Coronal plane: A slice that runs from head to foot; brain slices in this plane are similar to slices of a loaf of bread, with the eyes being the front of the loaf.
Corpus Callosum: The thick bundle of nerve cells that connect the two hemispheres of the brain and allow them to communicate.
Correlation: Measures 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.
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.
Cue overload principle: The principle stating that the more memories that are associated to a particular retrieval cue, the less effective the cue will be in prompting retrieval of any one memory.
Cues: Cues: a stimulus that has a particular significance to the perceiver (e.g., a sight or a sound that has special relevance to the person who saw or heard it)
Culture: Shared, socially transmitted ideas (e.g., values, beliefs, attitudes) that are reflected in and reinforced by institutions, products, and rituals.
Daily Diary method: A methodology where participants complete a questionnaire about their thoughts, feelings, and behavior of the day at the end of the day.
Daily hassles: Irritations in daily life that are not necessarily traumatic, but that cause difficulties and repeated stress.
Dark adaptation: Adjustment of eye to low levels of light.
Day reconstruction method (DRM): A methodology where participants describe their experiences and behavior of a given day retrospectively upon a systematic reconstruction on the following day.
Decay: The fading of memories with the passage of time.
Declarative memory: Conscious memories for facts and events.
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.
Delusions: False beliefs that are often fixed, hard to change even in the presence of conflicting information, and often culturally influenced in their content.
Dendrite: Part of a neuron that extends away from the cell body and is the main input to the neuron.
Dendrites: Part of a neuron that extends away from the cell body and is the main input to the neuron.
Dependent variable: The variable the researcher measures but does not manipulate in an experiment.
Depressants: Depressants: a class of drugs that slow down the body’s physiological and mental processes.
Depth perception: The ability to actively perceive the distance from oneself of objects in the environment.
Descriptive norm: The perception of what most people do in a given situation.
Diagnostic criteria: The specific criteria used to determine whether an individual has a specific type of psychiatric disorder. Commonly used diagnostic criteria are included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, 5th Edition (DSM-5) and the Internal Classification of Disorders, Version 9 (ICD-9).
Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT): A treatment often used for borderline personality disorder that incorporates both cognitive-behavioral and mindfulness elements.
Dialectical worldview: A perspective in DBT that emphasizes the joint importance of change and acceptance.
Dichotic listening: A task in which different audio streams are presented to each ear. Typically, people are asked to monitor one stream while ignoring the other.
Differential threshold (or difference threshold): The smallest difference needed in order to differentiate two stimuli. (See Just Noticeable Difference (JND))
Diffuse optical imaging (DOI): A neuroimaging technique that infers brain activity by measuring changes in light as it is passed through the skull and surface of the brain.
Diffuse Optical Imaging (DOI): A neuroimaging technique that infers brain activity by measuring changes in light as it is passed through the skull and surface of the brain.
Diffusion: The force on molecules to move from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration.
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.
Directional goals: The motivation to reach a particular outcome or judgment.
Discontinuous development: Discontinuous development
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.
Discriminative stimulus: In operant conditioning, a stimulus that signals whether the response will be reinforced. It is said to “set the occasion” for the operant response.
Disorganized behavior: Behavior or dress that is outside the norm for almost all subcultures. This would include odd dress, odd makeup (e.g., lipstick outlining a mouth for 1 inch), or unusual rituals (e.g., repetitive hand gestures).
Disorganized speech: Speech that is difficult to follow, either because answers do not clearly follow questions or because one sentence does not logically follow from another.
Dissociation: Dissociation: the heightened focus on one stimulus or thought such that many other things around you are ignored; a disconnect between one’s awareness of their environment and the one object the person is focusing on
Dissociative amnesia: Loss of autobiographical memories from a period in the past in the absence of brain injury or disease.
Distinctiveness: The principle that unusual events (in a context of similar events) will be recalled and recognized better than uniform (nondistinctive) events.
Distractor task: A task that is designed to make a person think about something unrelated to an impending decision.
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.
Dopamine: A neurotransmitter in the brain that is thought to play an important role in regulating the function of other neurotransmitters.
Dorsal pathway: Pathway of visual processing. The “where” pathway.
Drive state: Affective experiences that motivate organisms to fulfill goals that are generally beneficial to their survival and reproduction.
Drug diversion: When a drug that is prescribed to treat a medical condition is given to another individual who seeks to use the drug illicitly.
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.
Early adversity: Single or multiple acute or chronic stressful events, which may be biological or psychological in nature (e.g., poverty, abuse, childhood illness or injury), occurring during childhood and resulting in a biological and/or psychological stress response.
Ecological: Understanding the relationships between people and their social environments (e.g., families, groups, communities, and societies).
Ecological momentary assessment: An overarching term to describe methodologies that repeatedly sample participants’ real-world experiences, behavior, and physiology in real time.
Ecological Perspective: A consideration of individual, group, community, and ecological contextual factors when examining phenomena of interest.
Ecological validity: The degree to which a study finding has been obtained under conditions that are typical for what happens in everyday life.
EEG: (Electroencephalography) The recording of the brain’s electrical activity over a period of time by placing electrodes on the scalp.
Effortful control: A temperament quality that enables children to be more successful in motivated self-regulation.
Ego defenses: Mental strategies, rooted in the ego, that we use to manage anxiety when we feel threatened (some examples include repression, denial, sublimation, and reaction formation).
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.
Electroencephalography (EEG): A neuroimaging technique that measures electrical brain activity via multiple electrodes on the scalp.
Electroencephalography (EEG): A neuroimaging technique that measures electrical brain activity via multiple electrodes on the scalp.
Electronically activated recorder, or EAR: A methodology where participants wear a small, portable audio recorder that intermittently records snippets of ambient sounds around them.
Electrostatic pressure: The force on two ions with similar charge to repel each other; the force of two ions with opposite charge to attract to one another.
Emotion-focused coping: Coping strategy aimed at reducing the negative emotions associated with a stressful event.
Emotions: Changes in subjective experience, physiological responding, and behavior in response to a meaningful event. Emotions tend to occur on the order of seconds (in contract to moods which may last for days).
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–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.
Empirical methods: Approaches to inquiry that are tied to actual measurement and observation.
Empiricism: The belief that knowledge comes from experience.
Encoding: Process by which information gets into memory.
Encoding: The initial experience of perceiving and learning events.
Encoding specificity principle: The hypothesis that a retrieval cue will be effective to the extent that information encoded from the cue overlaps or matches information in the engram or memory trace.
Engrams: A term indicating the change in the nervous system representing an event; also, memory trace.
Enzyme: A protein produced by a living organism that allows or helps a chemical reaction to occur.
Enzyme induction: Process through which a drug can enhance the production of an enzyme.
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.
Epigenome: The genome-wide distribution of epigenetic marks.
Episodic memory: The ability to learn and retrieve new information or episodes in one’s life.
Episodic memory: Memory for events in a particular time and place.
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).
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.
Eugenics: The practice of selective breeding to promote desired traits.
Euphoria: Euphoria: an intense feeling of pleasure, excitement or happiness.
Eureka experience: When a creative product enters consciousness.
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.
Excitatory postsynaptic potentials: A depolarizing postsynaptic current that causes the membrane potential to become more positive and move towards the threshold of excitation.
Experience-sampling method: A methodology where participants report on their momentary thoughts, feelings, and behaviors at different points in time over the course of a day.
Experimenter expectations: When the experimenter’s expectations influence the outcome of a study.
Explicit attitude: An attitude that is consciously held and can be reported on by the person holding the attitude.
Exposure therapy: A form of intervention in which the patient engages with a problematic (usually feared) situation without avoidance or escape.
External cues: Stimuli in the outside world that serve as triggers for anxiety or as reminders of past traumatic events.
External validity: The degree to which a finding generalizes from the specific sample and context of a study to some larger population and broader settings.
Extinction: Decrease in the strength of a learned behavior that occurs when the conditioned stimulus is presented without the unconditioned stimulus (in classical conditioning) or when the behavior is no longer reinforced (in instrumental conditioning). The term describes both the procedure (the US or reinforcer is no longer presented) as well as the result of the procedure (the learned response declines). Behaviors that have been reduced in strength through extinction are said to be “extinguished.”
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.
False memories: Memory for an event that never actually occurred, implanted by experimental manipulation or other means.
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.
Fear conditioning: A type of classical or Pavlovian conditioning in which the conditioned stimulus (CS) is associated with an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US), such as a foot shock. As a consequence of learning, the CS comes to evoke fear. The phenomenon is thought to be involved in the development of anxiety disorders in humans.
Feelings: A general term used to describe a wide range of states that include emotions, moods, traits and that typically involve changes in subjective experience, physiological responding, and behavior in response to a meaningful event. Emotions typically occur on the order of seconds, whereas moods may last for days, and traits are tendencies to respond a certain way across various situations.
Fight or flight response: A biological reaction to alarming stressors that prepares the body to resist or escape a threat.
First-Order Change: Involves minor changes that lead to small, short-term improvements by focusing exclusively on the individuals.
First-person perspective: Observations made by individuals about their own conscious experiences, also known as introspection or a subjective point of view. Phenomenology refers to the description and investigation of such observations.
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.
Flashback: Sudden, intense re-experiencing of a previous event, usually trauma-related.
Flashbulb memory: Vivid personal memories of receiving the news of some momentous (and usually emotional) event.
Flashbulb memory: A highly detailed and vivid memory of an emotionally significant event.
Flat affect: A reduction in the display of emotions through facial expressions, gestures, and speech intonation.
Flavor: The combination of smell and taste.
Flexible Correction Model: Flexible Correction Model: the ability for people to correct or change their beliefs and evaluations if they believe these judgments have been biased (e.g., if someone realizes they only thought their day was great because it was sunny, they may revise their evaluation of the day to account for this “biasing” influence of the weather)
Flourishing: To live optimally psychologically, relationally, and spiritually.
Foils: Any member of a lineup (whether live or photograph) other than the suspect.
Forgiveness: The letting go of negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors toward an offender.
Formal operations stage: Piagetian stage starting at age 12 years and continuing for the rest of life, in which adolescents may gain the reasoning powers of educated adults.
Free association: In psychodynamic therapy, a process in which the patient reports all thoughts that come to mind without censorship, and these thoughts are interpreted by the therapist.
Frontal Lobe: The front most (anterior) part of the cerebrum; anterior to the central sulcus and responsible for motor output and planning, language, judgment, and decision-making.
Frontal lobe: The front most (anterior) part of the cerebrum; anterior to the central sulcus and responsible for motor output and planning, language, judgment, and decision-making.
Full-cycle psychology: A scientific approach whereby researchers start with an observational field study to identify an effect in the real world, follow up with laboratory experimentation to verify the effect and isolate the causal mechanisms, and return to field research to corroborate their experimental findings.
Functional capacity: The ability to engage in self-care (cook, clean, bathe), work, attend school, and/or engage in social relationships.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI): Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): A neuroimaging technique that infers brain activity by measuring changes in oxygen levels in the blood.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): A neuroimaging technique that infers brain activity by measuring changes in oxygen levels in the blood.
Functionalism: A school of American psychology that focused on the utility of consciousness.
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.
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).
Generalize: Generalizing, in science, refers to the ability to arrive at broad conclusions based on a smaller sample of observations. For these conclusions to be true the sample should accurately represent the larger population from which it is drawn.
Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD): Excessive worry about everyday things that is at a level that is out of proportion to the specific causes of worry.
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.
Goal: The cognitive representation of a desired state (outcome).
Goal-directed behavior: Instrumental behavior that is influenced by the animal’s knowledge of the association between the behavior and its consequence and the current value of the consequence. Sensitive to the reinforcer devaluation effect.
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.
Grandiosity: Inflated self-esteem or an exaggerated sense of self-importance and self-worth (e.g., believing one has special powers or superior abilities).
Gratitude: A feeling of appreciation or thankfulness in response to receiving a benefit.
Gray matter: The outer grayish regions of the brain comprised of the neurons’ cell bodies.
Gustation: Ability to process gustatory stimuli. Also called taste.
Gyri: (plural) Folds between sulci in the cortex.
Gyrus: A fold between sulci in the cortex.
Habit: Instrumental behavior that occurs automatically in the presence of a stimulus and is no longer influenced by the animal’s knowledge of the value of the reinforcer. Insensitive to the reinforcer devaluation effect.
Hallucinations: Perceptual experiences that occur even when there is no stimulus in the outside world generating the experiences. They can be auditory, visual, olfactory (smell), gustatory (taste), or somatic (touch).
Hallucinogens: Hallucinogens: substances that, when ingested, alter a person’s perceptions, often by creating hallucinations that are not real or distorting their perceptions of time.
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: 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.
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.
Heritability coefficient: An easily misinterpreted statistical construct that purports to measure the role of genetics in the explanation of differences among individuals.
Heuristics: A mental shortcut or rule of thumb that reduces complex mental problems to more simple rule-based decisions.
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.
High-stakes testing: Settings in which test scores are used to make important decisions about individuals. For example, test scores may be used to determine which individuals are admitted into a college or graduate school, or who should be hired for a job. Tests also are used in forensic settings to help determine whether a person is competent to stand trial or fits the legal definition of sanity.
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.
Homeostasis: The tendency of an organism to maintain a stable state across all the different physiological systems in the body.
Homeostatic set point: An ideal level that the system being regulated must be monitored and compared to.
Honeymoon effect: The tendency for newly married individuals to rate their spouses in an unrealistically positive manner. This represents a specific manifestation of the letter of recommendation effect when applied to ratings made by current romantic partners. Moreover, it illustrates the very important role played by relationship satisfaction in ratings made by romantic partners: As marital satisfaction declines (i.e., when the “honeymoon is over”), this effect disappears.
Horizontal plane: A slice that runs horizontally through a standing person (i.e., parallel to the floor); slices of brain in this plane divide the top and bottom parts of the brain; this plane is similar to slicing a hamburger bun.
Hostility: An experience or trait with cognitive, behavioral, and emotional components. It often includes cynical thoughts, feelings of emotion, and aggressive behavior.
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.
Hypersomnia: Excessive daytime sleepiness, including difficulty staying awake or napping, or prolonged sleep episodes.
Hypnosis: Hypnosis: the state of consciousness whereby a person is highly responsive to the suggestions of another; this state usually involves a dissociation with one’s environment and an intense focus on a single stimulus, which is usually accompanied by a sense of relaxation
Hypnotherapy: Hypnotherapy: The use of hypnotic techniques such as relaxation and suggestion to help engineer desirable change such as lower pain or quitting smoking.
Hypothalamus: A portion of the brain involved in a variety of functions, including the secretion of various hormones and the regulation of hunger and sexual arousal.
Hypotheses: A logical idea that can be tested.
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.
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: Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures relatively automatic biases that favor own group relative to other groups.
Implicit Associations Test: Implicit Associations Test (IAT): A computer reaction time test that measures a person’s automatic associations with concepts. For instance, the IAT could be used to measure how quickly a person makes positive or negative evaluations of members of various ethnic groups.
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.
Implicit motives: These are goals that are important to a person, but that he/she cannot consciously express. Because the individual cannot verbalize these goals directly, they cannot be easily assessed via self-report. However, they can be measured using projective devices such as the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT).
Inattentional blindness: The failure to notice a fully visible, but unexpected, object or event when attention is devoted to something else.
Inattentional deafness: The auditory analog of inattentional blindness. People fail to notice an unexpected sound or voice when attention is devoted to other aspects of a scene.
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: A model or view of the self as distinct from others and as stable across different situations. The goal of the independent self is to express and assert the self, and to influence others. This model of self is prevalent in many individualistic, Western contexts (e.g., the United States, Australia, Western Europe).
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.
Individualistic Perspective: A focus on the individual where the influence of larger environmental or societal factors is ignored.
Information processing theories: Theories that focus on describing the cognitive processes that underlie thinking at any one age and cognitive growth over time.
Informational influence: Conformity that results from a concern to act in a socially approved manner as determined by how others act.
Inhibitory postsynaptic potentials: A hyperpolarizing postsynaptic current that causes the membrane potential to become more negative and move away from the threshold of excitation.
Instrumental conditioning: Process in which animals learn about the relationship between their behaviors and their consequences. Also known as operant conditioning.
Integrative or eclectic psychotherapy: Also called integrative psychotherapy, this term refers to approaches combining multiple orientations (e.g., CBT with psychoanalytic elements).
Integrative or eclectic psychotherapy: Also called integrative psychotherapy, this term refers to approaches combining multiple orientations (e.g., CBT with psychoanalytic elements).
Interdependence: Because everything is connected, changing one aspect of an environment will have many ripple effects.
Interdependent self: A model or view of the self as connected to others and as changing in response to different situations. The goal of the interdependent self is to suppress personal preferences and desires, and to adjust to others. This model of self is prevalent in many collectivistic, East Asian contexts (e.g., China, Japan, Korea).
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.
Interference: Other memories get in the way of retrieving a desired memory
Internal bodily or somatic cues: Physical sensations that serve as triggers for anxiety or as reminders of past traumatic events.
Internal validity: The degree to which a cause-effect relationship between two variables has been unambiguously established.
Interoceptive avoidance: Avoidance of situations or activities that produce sensations of physical arousal similar to those occurring during a panic attack or intense fear response.
Intersectionality: The idea that social identities can overlap. For instance, a person could be "Canadian", "Indigenous" and "a woman".
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.
Ion channels: Proteins that span the cell membrane, forming channels that specific ions can flow through between the intracellular and extracellular space.
Ionotropic receptor: Ion channel that opens to allow ions to permeate the cell membrane under specific conditions, such as the presence of a neurotransmitter or a specific membrane potential.
Jet Lag: Jet Lag: The state of being fatigued and/or having difficulty adjusting to a new time zone after traveling a long distance (across multiple time zones).
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.
Lateralized: To the side; used to refer to the fact that specific functions may reside primarily in one hemisphere or the other (e.g., for the majority individuals, the left hemisphere is most responsible for language).
Law of effect: The idea that instrumental or operant responses are influenced by their effects. Responses that are followed by a pleasant state of affairs will be strengthened and those that are followed by discomfort will be weakened. Nowadays, the term refers to the idea that operant or instrumental behaviors are lawfully controlled by their consequences.
Lesion: A region in the brain that suffered damage through injury, disease, or medical intervention.
Letter of recommendation effect: The general tendency for informants in personality studies to rate others in an unrealistically positive manner. This tendency is due a pervasive bias in personality assessment: In the large majority of published studies, informants are individuals who like the person they are rating (e.g., they often are friends or family members) and, therefore, are motivated to depict them in a socially desirable way. The term reflects a similar tendency for academic letters of recommendation to be overly positive and to present the referent in an unrealistically desirable manner.
Levels of Analysis: Complementary frameworks 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.
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.
Light adaptation: Adjustment of eye to high levels of light.
Limbic system: Includes the subcortical structures of the amygdala and hippocampal formation as well as some cortical structures; responsible for aversion and gratification.
Limbic System: Includes the subcortical structures of the amygdala and hippocampal formation as well as some cortical structures; responsible for aversion and gratification.
Linguistic inquiry and word count: A quantitative text analysis methodology that automatically extracts grammatical and psychological information from a text by counting word frequencies.
Lived day analysis: A methodology where a research team follows an individual around with a video camera to objectively document a person’s daily life as it is lived.
Longitudinal study: A study that follows the same group of individuals over time.
Lordosis: A physical sexual posture in females that serves as an invitation to mate.
Magnetic resonance imaging: A set of techniques that uses strong magnets to measure either the structure of the brain (e.g., gray matter and white matter) or how the brain functions when a person performs cognitive tasks (e.g., working memory or episodic memory) or other types of tasks.
Malingering: Fabrication or exaggeration of medical symptoms to achieve secondary gain (e.g., receive medication, avoid school).
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.
Mechanoreceptors: Mechanical sensory receptors in the skin that response to tactile stimulation.
Medial temporal lobes: Inner region of the temporal lobes that includes the hippocampus.
Melatonin: Melatonin: A hormone associated with increased drowsiness and sleep.
Memory traces: A term indicating the change in the nervous system representing an event.
Mere-exposure effects: The result of developing a more positive attitude towards a stimulus after repeated instances of mere exposure to it.
Metabolism: Breakdown of substances.
Metabolite: A substance necessary for a living organism to maintain life.
Mind–body connection: The idea that our emotions and thoughts can affect how our body functions.
Mindfulness: A process that reflects a nonjudgmental, yet attentive, mental state.
Mindfulness: Mindfulness: a state of heightened focus on the thoughts passing through one’s head, as well as a more controlled evaluation of those thoughts (e.g., do you reject or support the thoughts you’re having?)
Mindfulness-based therapy: A form of psychotherapy grounded in mindfulness theory and practice, often involving meditation, yoga, body scan, and other features of mindfulness exercises.
Misinformation effect: When erroneous information occurring after an event is remembered as having been part of the original event.
Misinformation effect: A memory error caused by exposure to incorrect information between the original event (e.g., a crime) and later memory test (e.g., an interview, lineup, or day in court).
Mixed-Methods Research: Thoughtful combining of qualitative and quantitative data collection methods.
Mnemonic devices: A strategy for remembering large amounts of information, usually involving imaging events occurring on a journey or with some other set of memorized cues.
Mock witnesses: A research subject who plays the part of a witness in a study.
Model minority: A minority group whose members are perceived as achieving a higher degree of socioeconomic success than the population average.
Mood-congruent memory: The tendency to be better able to recall memories that have a mood similar to our current mood.
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.
Motor cortex: Region of the frontal lobe responsible for voluntary movement; the motor cortex has a contralateral representation of the human body.
Multimodal perception: The effects that concurrent stimulation in more than one sensory modality has on the perception of events and objects in the world.
Myelin: Fatty tissue, produced by glial cells (see module, “Neurons”) that insulates the axons of the neurons; myelin is necessary for normal conduction of electrical impulses among neurons.
Myelin Sheath: Fatty tissue, that insulates the axons of the neurons; myelin is necessary for normal conduction of electrical impulses among neurons.
Myelin sheath: Substance around the axon of a neuron that serves as insulation to allow the action potential to conduct rapidly toward the terminal buttons.
Nature: The genes that children bring with them to life and that influence all aspects of their development.
Need for closure: The desire to come to a decision that will resolve ambiguity and conclude an issue.
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.
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.
Nervous System: The body’s network for electrochemical communication. This system includes all the nerves cells in the body.
Neural impulse: An electro-chemical signal that enables neurons to communicate.
Neurodevelopmental: Processes that influence how the brain develops either in utero or as the child is growing up.
Neurons: Individual brain cells
Neuropsychoanalysis: An integrative, interdisciplinary domain of inquiry seeking to integrate psychoanalytic and neuropsychological ideas and findings to enhance both areas of inquiry (you can learn more by visiting the webpage of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society at http://www.neuropsa.org.uk/).
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 substance produced by a neuron that is used for communication between neurons.
Neurotransmitters: Chemical substance released by the presynaptic terminal button that acts on the postsynaptic cell.
Neurotransmitters: Chemical substance released by the presynaptic terminal button that acts on the postsynaptic cell.
Nociception: Our ability to sense pain.
Nomenclature: Naming conventions.
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.
Normative influence: Conformity that results from a concern for what other people think of us.
Nucleus: Collection of nerve cells found in the brain which typically serve a specific function.
Numerical magnitudes: The sizes of numbers.
Nurture: The environments, starting with the womb, that influence all aspects of children’s development.
Obedience: Responding to an order or command from a person in a position of authority.
Object permanence task: The Piagetian task in which infants below about 9 months of age fail to search for an object that is removed from their sight and, if not allowed to search immediately for the object, act as if they do not know that it continues to exist.
Object relations theory: A modern offshoot of the psychodynamic perspective, this theory contends that personality can be understood as reflecting mental images of significant figures (especially the parents) that we form early in life in response to interactions taking place within the family; these mental images serve as templates (or “scripts”) for later interpersonal relationships.
Observational learning: Learning by observing the behavior of others.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD): A disorder characterized by the desire to engage in certain behaviors excessively or compulsively in hopes of reducing anxiety. Behaviors include things such as cleaning, repeatedly opening and closing doors, hoarding, and obsessing over certain thoughts.
Occipital lobe: The back most (posterior) part of the cerebrum; involved in vision.
Occipital Lobe: The back most (posterior) part of the cerebrum; involved in vision.
Odorants: Chemicals transduced by olfactory receptors.
Olfaction: Ability to process olfactory stimuli. Also called smell.
Olfactory epithelium: Organ containing olfactory receptors.
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.
Operant: A behavior that is controlled by its consequences. The simplest example is the rat’s lever-pressing, which is controlled by the presentation of the reinforcer.
Operant conditioning: See instrumental conditioning.
Operational definitions: How researchers specifically measure a concept.
Opponent-process theory: Theory proposing color vision as influenced by cells responsive to pairs of colors.
Oppositional defiant disorder: A childhood behavior disorder that is characterized by stubbornness, hostility, and behavioral defiance. This disorder is highly comorbid with ADHD.
Ossicles: A collection of three small bones in the middle ear that vibrate against the tympanic membrane.
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.
Panic disorder (PD): A condition marked by regular strong panic attacks, and which may include significant levels of worry about future attacks.
Parent management training: A treatment for childhood behavior problems that teaches parents how to use contingencies to more effectively manage their children’s behavior.
Parietal lobe: The part of the cerebrum between the frontal and occipital lobes; involved in bodily sensations, visual attention, and integrating the senses.
Parietal Lobe: The part of the cerebrum between the frontal and occipital lobes; involved in bodily sensations, visual attention, and integrating the senses.
Participant demand: When participants behave in a way that they think the experimenter wants them to behave.
Pathologizes: To define a trait or collection of traits as medically or psychologically unhealthy or abnormal.
Pavlovian conditioning: See classical conditioning.
Perception: The psychological process of interpreting sensory information.
Peripheral Nervous System: All of the nerve cells that connect the central nervous system to all the other parts of the body.
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-centered therapy: A therapeutic approach focused on creating a supportive environment for self-discovery.
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.
Pharmacokinetics: The action of a drug through the body, including absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion.
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.
Phonemic awareness: Awareness of the component sounds within words.
Photo spreads: A selection of normally small photographs of faces given to a witness for the purpose of identifying a perpetrator.
Phrenology: A now-discredited field of brain study, popular in the first half of the 19th century that correlated bumps and indentations of the skull with specific functions of the brain.
Piaget’s theory: Theory that development occurs through a sequence of discontinuous stages: the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages.
Pinna: Outermost portion of the ear.
Placebo effect: When receiving special treatment or something new affects human behavior.
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.
Polypharmacy: The use of many medications.
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.
Positron emission tomography: A technique that uses radio-labelled ligands to measure the distribution of different neurotransmitter receptors in the brain or to measure how much of a certain type of neurotransmitter is released when a person is given a specific type of drug or does a particularly cognitive task.
Positron Emission Tomography (PET): A neuroimaging technique that measures brain activity by detecting the presence of a radioactive substance in the brain that is initially injected into the bloodstream and then pulled in by active brain tissue.
Positron emission tomography (PET): A neuroimaging technique that measures brain activity by detecting the presence of a radioactive substance in the brain that is initially injected into the bloodstream and then pulled in by active brain tissue.
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD): A sense of intense fear, triggered by memories of a past traumatic event, that another traumatic event might occur. PTSD may include feelings of isolation and emotional numbing.
Practitioner-Scholar Model: A model of training of professional psychologists that emphasizes clinical practice.
Prediction error: When the outcome of a conditioning trial is different from that which is predicted by the conditioned stimuli that are present on the trial (i.e., when the US is surprising). Prediction error is necessary to create Pavlovian conditioning (and associative learning generally). As learning occurs over repeated conditioning trials, the conditioned stimulus increasingly predicts the unconditioned stimulus, and prediction error declines. Conditioning works to correct or reduce prediction error.
Prejudice: Prejudice is an evaluation or emotion toward people merely based on their group membership.
Prejudice: Having a bias or opinion about a person based on assumptions rather than actual experience.
Preoperational reasoning stage: Period within Piagetian theory from age 2 to 7 years, in which children can represent objects through drawing and language but cannot solve logical reasoning problems, such as the conservation problems.
Preoptic area: A region in the anterior hypothalamus involved in generating and regulating male sexual behavior.
Preparedness: The idea that an organism’s evolutionary history can make it easy to learn a particular association. Because of preparedness, you are more likely to associate the taste of tequila, and not the circumstances surrounding drinking it, with getting sick. Similarly, humans are more likely to associate images of spiders and snakes than flowers and mushrooms with aversive outcomes like shocks.
Prevention: The focus on actions that stop problems before they happen by engaging in environmental change.
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).
Primacy of the Unconscious: The hypothesis—supported by contemporary empirical research—that the vast majority of mental activity takes place outside conscious awareness.
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.
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: Priming: the activation of certain thoughts or feelings that make them easier to think of and act upon
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.
Problem-focused coping: A set of coping strategies aimed at improving or changing stressful situations.
Processing speed: The speed with which an individual can perceive auditory or visual information and respond to it.
Progress: The perception of reducing the discrepancy between one’s current state and one’s desired state in goal pursuit.
Projective hypothesis: The theory that when people are confronted with ambiguous stimuli (that is, stimuli that can be interpreted in more than one way), their responses will be influenced by their unconscious thoughts, needs, wishes, and impulses. This, in turn, is based on the Freudian notion of projection, which is the idea that people attribute their own undesirable/unacceptable characteristics to other people or objects.
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).
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.
Psychic causality: The assumption that nothing in mental life happens by chance—that there is no such thing as a “random” thought or feeling.
Psychoactive drugs: A drug that changes mood or the way someone feels.
Psychoanalytic therapy: Sigmund Freud’s therapeutic approach focusing on resolving unconscious conflicts.
Psychodynamic therapy: Treatment applying psychoanalytic principles in a briefer, more individualized format.
Psychological vulnerabilities: Influences that our early experiences have on how we view the world.
Psychomotor agitation: Increased motor activity associated with restlessness, including physical actions (e.g., fidgeting, pacing, feet tapping, handwringing).
Psychomotor retardation: A slowing of physical activities in which routine activities (e.g., eating, brushing teeth) are performed in an unusually slow manner.
Psychoneuroimmunology: A field of study examining the relationship among psychology, brain function, and immune function.
Psychopathology: Illnesses or disorders that involve psychological or psychiatric symptoms.
Psychophysics: Study of the relationships between physical stimuli and the perception of those stimuli.
Psychosexual stage model: Probably the most controversial aspect of psychodynamic theory, the psychosexual stage model contends that early in life we progress through a sequence of developmental stages (oral, anal, Oedipal, latency, and genital), each with its own unique mode of sexual gratification.
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.
Psychotropic drug: A drug that changes mood or emotion, usually used when talking about drugs prescribed for various mental conditions (depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, etc.).
Punisher: A stimulus that decreases the strength of an operant behavior when it is made a consequence of the behavior.
Qualitative changes: Large, fundamental change, as when a caterpillar changes into a butterfly; stage theories such as Piaget’s posit that each stage reflects qualitative change relative to previous stages.
Qualitative Methods: Methods involving collecting data that typically consists of words that provide comprehensive descriptions of participants’ experiences.
Quantitative changes: Gradual, incremental change, as in the growth of a pine tree’s girth.
Quantitative genetics: Scientific and mathematical methods for inferring genetic and environmental processes based on the degree of genetic and environmental similarity among organisms.
Quantitative law of effect: A mathematical rule that states that the effectiveness of a reinforcer at strengthening an operant response depends on the amount of reinforcement earned for all alternative behaviors. A reinforcer is less effective if there is a lot of reinforcement in the environment for other behaviors.
Quantitative Methods: Methods involving collecting data in the form of numbers using standardized measures in an attempt to produce generalizable findings.
Quasi-experimental design: An experiment that does not require random assignment to conditions.
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.
Realism: A point of view that emphasizes the importance of the senses in providing knowledge of the external world.
Reappraisal, or Cognitive restructuring: The process of identifying, evaluating, and changing maladaptive thoughts in psychotherapy.
Reciprocal altruism: According to evolutionary psychology, a genetic predisposition for people to help those who have previously helped them.
Recoding: The ubiquitous process during learning of taking information in one form and converting it to another form, usually one more easily remembered.
Reference group effect: The tendency of people to base their self-concept on comparisons with others. For example, if your friends tend to be very smart and successful, you may come to see yourself as less intelligent and successful than you actually are. Informants also are prone to these types of effects. For instance, the sibling contrast effect refers to the tendency of parents to exaggerate the true extent of differences between their children.
Reinforced response: Following the process of operant conditioning, the strengthening of a response following either the delivery of a desired consequence (positive reinforcement) or escape from an aversive consequence.
Reinforcer: Any consequence of a behavior that strengthens the behavior or increases the likelihood that it will be performed it again.
Reinforcer devaluation effect: The finding that an animal will stop performing an instrumental response that once led to a reinforcer if the reinforcer is separately made aversive or undesirable.
Reliablility: The consistency of test scores across repeated assessments. For example, test-retest reliability examines the extent to which scores change over time.
Renewal effect: Recovery of an extinguished response that occurs when the context is changed after extinction. Especially strong when the change of context involves return to the context in which conditioning originally occurred. Can occur after extinction in either classical or instrumental conditioning.
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.
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).
Resting membrane potential: The voltage inside the cell relative to the voltage outside the cell while the cell is a rest (approximately -70 mV).
Retina: Cell layer in the back of the eye containing photoreceptors.
Retrieval: Process by which information is accessed from memory and utilized.
Retrieval: The process of accessing stored information.
Retroactive interference: The phenomenon whereby events that occur after some particular event of interest will usually cause forgetting of the original event.
Retrograde amnesia: Inability to retrieve memories for facts and events acquired before the onset of amnesia.
Reward value: A neuropsychological measure of an outcome’s affective importance to an organism.
Right-wing authoritarianism: Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) focuses on value conflicts but endorses respect for obedience and authority in the service of group conformity.
Rods: Photoreceptors of the retina sensitive to low levels of light. Located around the fovea.
SAD performance only: Social anxiety disorder which is limited to certain situations that the sufferer perceives as requiring some type of performance.
Sagittal plane: A slice that runs vertically from front to back; slices of brain in this plane divide the left and right side of the brain; this plane is similar to slicing a baked potato lengthwise.
Satiation: The state of being full to satisfaction and no longer desiring to take on more.
Schema: A mental representation or set of beliefs about something.
Schema: A mental model or representation that organizes the important information about a thing, person, or event (also known as a script).
Schema (plural: schemata): A memory template, created through repeated exposure to a particular class of objects or events.
Scientist-practitioner model: A model of training of professional psychologists that emphasizes the development of both research and clinical skills.
Second-Order Change: Involves initiating more structural, long-term, and sustainable transformational changes.
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.
Selective listening: A method for studying selective attention in which people focus attention on one auditory stream of information while deliberately ignoring other auditory information.
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-control: The capacity to control impulses, emotions, desires, and actions in order to resist a temptation and adhere to a valued goal.
Self-efficacy: The belief that one can perform adequately in a specific situation.
Self-enhancement bias: The tendency for people to see and/or present themselves in an overly favorable way. This tendency can take two basic forms: defensiveness (when individuals actually believe they are better than they really are) and impression management (when people intentionally distort their responses to try to convince others that they are better than they really are). Informants also can show enhancement biases. The general form of this bias has been called the letter-of-recommendation effect, which is the tendency of informants who like the person they are rating (e.g., friends, relatives, romantic partners) to describe them in an overly favorable way. In the case of newlyweds, this tendency has been termed the honeymoon effect.
Self-regulation: The processes through which individuals alter their emotions, desires, and actions in the course of pursuing a goal.
Semantic memory: The more or less permanent store of knowledge that people have.
Sensation: The physical processing of environmental stimuli by the sense organs.
Sensorimotor stage: Period within Piagetian theory from birth to age 2 years, during which children come to represent the enduring reality of objects.
Sensory adaptation: Decrease in sensitivity of a receptor to a stimulus after constant stimulation.
Shape theory of olfaction: Theory proposing that odorants of different size and shape correspond to different smells.
Sibling contrast effect: The tendency of parents to use their perceptions of all of their children as a frame of reference for rating the characteristics of each of them. For example, suppose that a mother has three children; two of these children are very sociable and outgoing, whereas the third is relatively average in sociability. Because of operation of this effect, the mother will rate this third child as less sociable and outgoing than he/she actually is. More generally, this effect causes parents to exaggerate the true extent of differences between their children. This effect represents a specific manifestation of the more general reference group effect when applied to ratings made by parents.
Signal detection: Method for studying the ability to correctly identify sensory stimuli.
Social anxiety disorder (SAD): A condition marked by acute fear of social situations which lead to worry and diminished day to day functioning.
Social cognition: The study of how people think about the social world.
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 constructivism: Social constructivism proposes that knowledge is first created and learned within a social context and is then adopted by individuals.
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 Justice: Involves the fair distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges that provide equal opportunities for education, health care, work, and housing.
Social Justice Orientation: Engaging in research and action with consideration of achieving the fair distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges that provide equal opportunities for education, health care, work, and housing.
Social Learning Theory: The theory that people can learn new responses and behaviors by observing the behavior of others.
Social models: Authorities that are the targets for observation and who model 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 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).
Social zeitgeber: Zeitgeber is German for “time giver.” Social zeitgebers are environmental cues, such as meal times and interactions with other people, that entrain biological rhythms and thus sleep-wake cycle regularity.
Sociocultural theories: Theory founded in large part by Lev Vygotsky that emphasizes how other people and the attitudes, values, and beliefs of the surrounding culture influence children’s development.
Socioeconomic status (SES): A person’s economic and social position based on income, education, and occupation.
Sodium-potassium pump: An ion channel that uses the neuron’s energy (adenosine triphosphate, ATP) to pump three Na+ ions outside the cell in exchange for bringing two K+ ions inside the cell.
Soma: Cell body of a neuron that contains the nucleus and genetic information, and directs protein synthesis.
Soma: Cell body of a neuron that contains the nucleus and genetic information, and directs protein synthesis.
Somatosensation: Ability to sense touch, pain and temperature.
Somatosensory (body sensations) cortex: The region of the parietal lobe responsible for bodily sensations; the somatosensory cortex has a contralateral representation of the human body.
Somatotopic map: Organization of the primary somatosensory cortex maintaining a representation of the arrangement of the body.
Sound waves: Changes in air pressure. The physical stimulus for audition.
Spatial resolution: A term that refers to how small the elements of an image are; high spatial resolution means the device or technique can resolve very small elements; in neuroscience it describes how small of a structure in the brain can be imaged.
Spatial Resolution: A term that refers to how small the elements of an image are; high spatial resolution means the device or technique can resolve very small elements; in neuroscience it describes how small of a structure in the brain can be imaged.
Specific vulnerabilities: How our experiences lead us to focus and channel our anxiety.
Spines: Protrusions on the dendrite of a neuron that form synapses with terminal buttons of the presynaptic axon.
Split-brain patient: A patient who has had most or all of his or her corpus callosum severed.
Split-brain Patient: A patient who has had most or all of his or her corpus callosum severed.
Spontaneous recovery: Recovery of an extinguished response that occurs with the passage of time after extinction. Can occur after extinction in either classical or instrumental conditioning.
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.
Stereotypes: Our general beliefs about the traits or behaviors shared by group of people.
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.
Stimulants: Stimulants: a class of drugs that speed up the body’s physiological and mental processes.
Stimulus control: When an operant behavior is controlled by a stimulus that precedes it.
Storage: The stage in the learning/memory process that bridges encoding and retrieval; the persistence of memory over time.
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.
Structural model: Developed to complement and extend the topographic model, the structural model of the mind posits the existence of three interacting mental structures called the id, ego, and superego.
Structuralism: A school of American psychology that sought to describe the elements of conscious experience.
Subcortical: Structures that lie beneath the cerebral cortex, but above the brain stem.
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.
Suicidal ideation: Recurring thoughts about suicide, including considering or planning for suicide, or preoccupation with suicide.
Sulci: (plural) Grooves separating folds of the cortex.
Sulcus: A groove separating folds of the cortex.
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.
Synapse: Junction between the presynaptic terminal button of one neuron and the dendrite, axon, or soma of another postsynaptic neuron.
Synapse: The tiny space separating neurons.
Synapses: Junction between the presynaptic terminal button of one neuron and the dendrite, axon, or soma of another postsynaptic neuron.
Synaptic gap: Also known as the synaptic cleft; the small space between the presynaptic terminal button and the postsynaptic dendritic spine, axon, or soma.
Synaptic Gap: Also known as the synaptic cleft; the small space between the presynaptic terminal button and the postsynaptic dendritic spine, axon, or soma.
Synaptic vesicles: Groups of neurotransmitters packaged together and located within the terminal button.
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.
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.
Tastants: Chemicals transduced by taste receptor cells.
Taste aversion learning: The phenomenon in which a taste is paired with sickness, and this causes the organism to reject—and dislike—that taste in the future.
Taste receptor cells: Receptors that transduce gustatory information.
Temperament: Early emerging differences in reactivity and self-regulation, which constitutes a foundation for personality development.
Temporal lobe: The part of the cerebrum in front of (anterior to) the occipital lobe and below the lateral fissure; involved in vision, auditory processing, memory, and integrating vision and audition.
Temporal Lobe: The part of the cerebrum in front of (anterior to) the occipital lobe and below the lateral fissure; involved in vision, auditory processing, memory, and integrating vision and audition.
Temporal Resolution: A term that refers to how small a unit of time can be measured; high temporal resolution means capable of resolving very small units of time; in neuroscience it describes how precisely in time a process can be measured in the brain.
Temporal resolution: A term that refers to how small a unit of time can be measured; high temporal resolution means capable of resolving very small units of time; in neuroscience it describes how precisely in time a process can be measured in the brain.
Temporally graded retrograde amnesia: Inability to retrieve memories from just prior to the onset of amnesia with intact memory for more remote events.
Terminal button: The part of the end of the axon that form synapses with postsynaptic dendrite, axon, or soma.
Theories: Groups of closely related phenomena or observations.
Theory of mind: Children’s growing understanding of the mental states that affect people’s behavior.
Third-person perspective: Observations made by individuals in a way that can be independently confirmed by other individuals so as to lead to general, objective understanding. With respect to consciousness, third-person perspectives make use of behavioral and neural measures related to conscious experiences.
Thought-action fusion: The tendency to overestimate the relationship between a thought and an action, such that one mistakenly believes a “bad” thought is the equivalent of a “bad” action.
Threshold of excitation: Specific membrane potential that the neuron must reach to initiate an action potential.
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” 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.
Top-down processing: Experience influencing the perception of stimuli.
Topographic model: Freud’s first model of the mind, which contended that the mind could be divided into three regions: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. (The “topographic” comes from the fact that topography is the study of maps.)
Trance States: Trance: a state of consciousness characterized by the experience of “out-of-body possession,” or an acute dissociation between one’s self and the current, physical environment surrounding them.
Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS): A neuroscience technique that passes mild electrical current directly through a brain area by placing small electrodes on the skull.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS): A neuroscience technique whereby a brief magnetic pulse is applied to the head that temporarily induces a weak electrical current that interferes with ongoing activity.
Transduction: The conversion of one form of energy into another.
Transverse plane: See “horizontal plane.”
Trichromatic theory: Theory proposing color vision as influenced by three different cones responding preferentially to red, green and blue.
Twin studies: A behavior genetic research method that involves comparison of the similarity of identical (monozygotic; MZ) and fraternal (dizygotic; DZ) twins.
Tympanic membrane: Thin, stretched membrane in the middle ear that vibrates in response to sound. Also called the eardrum.
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.
Unconditional positive regard: In person-centered therapy, an attitude of warmth, empathy and acceptance adopted by the therapist in order to foster feelings of inherent worth in the patient.
Unconditioned response (UR): In classical conditioning, an innate response that is elicited by a stimulus before (or in the absence of) conditioning.
Unconditioned stimulus (US): In classical conditioning, the stimulus that elicits the response before conditioning occurs.
Unconscious: Not conscious; the part of the mind that affects behavior though it is inaccessible to the conscious mind.
Universalism: Universalism proposes that there are single objective standards, independent of culture, in basic domains such as learning, reasoning, and emotion that are a part of all human experience.
Validity: Evidence related to the interpretation and use of test scores. A particularly important type of evidence is criterion validity, which involves the ability of a test to predict theoretically relevant outcomes. For example, a presumed measure of conscientiousness should be related to academic achievement (such as overall grade point average).
Ventral pathway: Pathway of visual processing. The “what” pathway.
Vestibular system: Parts of the inner ear involved in balance.
Vicarious reinforcement: Learning that occurs by observing the reinforcement or punishment of another person.
Visual hemifield: The half of visual space (what we see) on one side of fixation (where we are looking); the left hemisphere is responsible for the right visual hemifield, and the right hemisphere is responsible for the left visual hemifield.
Weber’s law: States that just noticeable difference is proportional to the magnitude of the initial stimulus.
White coat hypertension: A phenomenon in which patients exhibit elevated blood pressure in the hospital or doctor’s office but not in their everyday lives.
White matter: The inner whitish regions of the cerebrum comprised of the myelinated axons of neurons in the cerebral cortex.
Working memory: The ability to maintain information over a short period of time, such as 30 seconds or less.