Vocabulary

Adaptations: Evolved solutions to problems that historically contributed to reproductive success.
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.
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 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.
Antisocial personality disorder: Counterpart diagnosis to psychopathy included in the third through fifth editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM; APA, 2000). Defined by specific symptoms of behavioral deviancy in childhood (e.g., fighting, lying, stealing, truancy) continuing into adulthood (manifested as repeated rule-breaking, impulsiveness, irresponsibility, aggressiveness, etc.).
Anxiety: A mood state characterized by negative affect, muscle tension, and physical arousal in which a person apprehensively anticipates future danger or misfortune.
Assent: When minor participants are asked to indicate their willingness to participate in a study. This is usually obtained from participants who are at least 7 years old, in addition to parent or guardian consent.
Attachment behavioral system: A motivational system selected over the course of evolution to maintain proximity between a young child and his or her primary attachment figure.
Attachment behaviors: Behaviors and signals that attract the attention of a primary attachment figure and function to prevent separation from that individual or to reestablish proximity to that individual (e.g., crying, clinging).
Attachment figure: Someone who functions as the primary safe haven and secure base for an individual. In childhood, an individual’s attachment figure is often a parent. In adulthood, an individual’s attachment figure is often a romantic partner.
Attachment patterns: (also called “attachment styles” or “attachment orientations”) Individual differences in how securely (vs. insecurely) people think, feel, and behave in attachment relationships.
Attrition: When a participant drops out, or fails to complete, all parts of a study.
Automatic: Automatic biases are unintended, immediate, and irresistible.
Aversive racism: Aversive racism is unexamined racial bias that the person does not intend and would reject, but that avoids inter-racial contact.
Behavioral 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.
Bidirectional relations: When one variable is likely both cause and consequence of another variable.
Big-C Creativity: Creative ideas that have an impact well beyond the everyday life of home or work. At the highest level, this kind of creativity is that of the creative genius.
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.
Chronic disease: A health condition that persists over time, typically for periods longer than three months (e.g., HIV, asthma, diabetes).
Chutes and Ladders: A numerical board game that seems to be useful for building numerical knowledge.
Cohort effects: When research findings differ for participants of the same age tested at different points in historical time.
Collective efficacy: The shared beliefs among members of a group about the group’s ability to effectively perform the tasks needed to attain a valued goal.
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 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.
Conformity: Changing one’s attitude or behavior to match a perceived social norm.
Conscientiousness: A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be careful, organized, hardworking, and to follow rules.
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.
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.
Control: Feeling like you have the power to change your environment or behavior if you need or want to.
Convergent thinking: The opposite of divergent thinking, the capacity to narrow in on the single “correct” answer or solution to a given question or problem (e.g., giving the right response on an intelligence tests).
Cross-sectional research: A research design used to examine behavior in participants of different ages who are tested at the same point in time.
Daily hassles: Irritations in daily life that are not necessarily traumatic, but that cause difficulties and repeated stress.
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.
Discontinuous development: Discontinuous development
Discrimination: Discrimination is behavior that advantages or disadvantages people merely based on their group membership.
Dishabituation: When participants demonstrated increased attention (through looking or listening behavior) to a new stimulus after having been habituated to a different stimulus.
Divergent thinking: The opposite of convergent thinking, the capacity for exploring multiple potential answers or solutions to a given question or problem (e.g., coming up with many different uses for a common object).
Elicited imitation: A behavioral method used to examine recall memory in infants and young children.
Emotion-focused coping: Coping strategy aimed at reducing the negative emotions associated with a stressful event.
Error management theory (EMT): A theory of selection under conditions of uncertainty in which recurrent cost asymmetries of judgment or inference favor the evolution of adaptive cognitive biases that function to minimize the more costly errors.
Event-related potentials (ERP): The recording of participant brain activity using a stretchy cap with small electrodes or sensors as participants engage in a particular task (commonly viewing photographs or listening to auditory stimuli).
Evolution: Change over time. Is the definition changing?
External cues: Stimuli in the outside world that serve as triggers for anxiety or as reminders of past traumatic events.
Extraversion: A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be sociable, outgoing, active, and assertive.
Facets: Broad personality traits can be broken down into narrower facets or aspects of the trait. For example, extraversion has several facets, such as sociability, dominance, risk-taking and so forth.
Factor analysis: A statistical technique for grouping similar things together according to how highly they are associated.
Fight or flight response: A biological reaction to alarming stressors that prepares the body to resist or escape a threat.
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.
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.
Gene Selection Theory: The modern theory of evolution by selection by which differential gene replication is the defining process of evolutionary change.
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).
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.
Habituation: When participants demonstrated decreased attention (through looking or listening behavior) to repeatedly-presented stimuli.
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.
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.
Hostility: An experience or trait with cognitive, behavioral, and emotional components. It often includes cynical thoughts, feelings of emotion, and aggressive behavior.
Imaginal performances: When imagining yourself doing well increases self-efficacy.
Implicit Association Test: Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures relatively automatic biases that favor own group relative to other groups.
Independent: Two characteristics or traits are separate from one another-- a person can be high on one and low on the other, or vice-versa. Some correlated traits are relatively independent in that although there is a tendency for a person high on one to also be high on the other, this is not always the case.
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.
Informed consent: The process of getting permission from adults for themselves and their children to take part in research.
Institutional Review Boards (IRBs): A committee that reviews and approves research procedures involving human participants and animal subjects to ensure that the research is conducted in accordance with federal, institutional, and ethical guidelines.
Internal bodily or somatic cues: Physical sensations that serve as triggers for anxiety or as reminders of past traumatic events.
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.
Intersexual selection: A process of sexual selection by which evolution (change) occurs as a consequences of the mate preferences of one sex exerting selection pressure on members of the opposite sex.
Interview techniques: A research method in which participants are asked to report on their experiences using language, commonly by engaging in conversation with a researcher (participants may also be asked to record their responses in writing).
Intrasexual competition: A process of sexual selection by which members of one sex compete with each other, and the victors gain preferential mating access to members of the opposite sex.
Involuntary or obligatory responses: Behaviors in which individuals engage that do not require much conscious thought or effort.
Latent inhibition: The ability to filter out extraneous stimuli, concentrating only on the information that is deemed relevant. Reduced latent inhibition is associated with higher creativity.
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.
Little-c creativity: Creative ideas that appear at the personal level, whether the home or the workplace. Such creativity needs not have a larger impact to be considered creative.
Longitudinal research: A research design used to examine behavior in the same participants over short (months) or long (decades) periods of time.
Mind–body connection: The idea that our emotions and thoughts can affect how our body functions.
Model minority: A minority group whose members are perceived as achieving a higher degree of socioeconomic success than the population average.
Motor control: The use of thinking to direct muscles and limbs to perform a desired action.
Multicultural experiences: Individual exposure to two or more cultures, such as obtained by living abroad, emigrating to another country, or working or going to school in a culturally diverse setting.
Natural selection: Differential reproductive success as a consequence of differences in heritable attributes.
Nature: The genes that children bring with them to life and that influence all aspects of their development.
Neuroticism: A personality trait that reflects the tendency to be interpersonally sensitive and the tendency to experience negative emotions like anxiety, fear, sadness, and anger.
Normative influence: Conformity that results from a concern for what other people think of us.
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: The understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be directly observed (e.g., that a pen continues to exist even when it is hidden under a piece of paper).
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.
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.
Openness to experience: One of the factors of the Big Five Model of personality, the factor assesses the degree that a person is open to different or new values, interests, and activities.
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.
Originality: When an idea or solution has a low probability of occurrence.
Panic disorder (PD): A condition marked by regular strong panic attacks, and which may include significant levels of worry about future attacks.
Performance experiences: When past successes or failures lead to changes in self-efficacy.
Personality: Enduring predispositions that characterize a person, such as styles of thought, feelings and behavior.
Personality traits: Enduring dispositions in behavior that show differences across individuals, and which tend to characterize the person across varying types of situations.
Person-situation debate: The person-situation debate is a historical debate about the relative power of personality traits as compared to situational influences on behavior. The situationist critique, which started the person-situation debate, suggested that people overestimate the extent to which personality traits are consistent across situations.
Phonemic awareness: Awareness of the component sounds within words.
Piaget’s theory: Theory that development occurs through a sequence of discontinuous stages: the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages.
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.
Practice effect: When participants get better at a task over time by “practicing” it through repeated assessments instead of due to actual developmental change (practice effects can be particularly problematic in longitudinal and sequential research designs).
Prejudice: Prejudice is an evaluation or emotion toward people merely based on their group membership.
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.
Problem-focused coping: A set of coping strategies aimed at improving or changing stressful situations.
Psychological adaptations: Mechanisms of the mind that evolved to solve specific problems of survival or reproduction; conceptualized as information processing devices.
Psychological vulnerabilities: Influences that our early experiences have on how we view the world.
Psychoneuroimmunology: A field of study examining the relationship among psychology, brain function, and immune function.
Psychopathy: Synonymous with psychopathic personality, the term used by Cleckley (1941/1976), and adapted from the term psychopathic introduced by German psychiatrist Julius Koch (1888) to designate mental disorders presumed to be heritable.
Psychophysiological responses: Recording of biological measures (such as heart rate and hormone levels) and neurological responses (such as brain activity) that may be associated with observable behaviors.
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.
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.
Quantitative changes: Gradual, incremental change, as in the growth of a pine tree’s girth.
Recall memory: The process of remembering discrete episodes or events from the past, including encoding, consolidation and storage, and retrieval.
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.
Remote associations: Associations between words or concepts that are semantically distant and thus relatively unusual or original.
Research design: The strategy (or “blueprint”) for deciding how to collect and analyze research information.
Research methods: The specific tools and techniques used by researchers to collect information.
Resilience: The ability to “bounce back” from negative situations (e.g., illness, stress) to normal functioning or to simply not show poor outcomes in the face of adversity. In some cases, resilience may lead to better functioning following the negative experience (e.g., post-traumatic growth).
Right-wing authoritarianism: Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) focuses on value conflicts but endorses respect for obedience and authority in the service of group conformity.
SAD performance only: Social anxiety disorder which is limited to certain situations that the sufferer perceives as requiring some type of performance.
Self-categorization theory: Self-categorization theory develops social identity theory’s point that people categorize themselves, along with each other into groups, favoring their own group.
Self-efficacy: The belief that you are able to effectively perform the tasks needed to attain a valued goal.
Self-efficacy: The belief that one can perform adequately in a specific situation.
Self-regulation: The complex process through which people control their thoughts, emotions, and actions.
Self-report measure: A type of questionnaire in which participants answer questions whose answers correspond to numerical values that can be added to create an overall index of some construct.
Sensorimotor stage: Period within Piagetian theory from birth to age 2 years, during which children come to represent the enduring reality of objects.
Sequential research designs: A research design that includes elements of cross-sectional and longitudinal research designs. Similar to cross-sectional designs, sequential research designs include participants of different ages within one study; similar to longitudinal designs, participants of different ages are followed over time.
Sexual selection: The evolution of characteristics because of the mating advantage they give organisms.
Sexual strategies theory: A comprehensive evolutionary theory of human mating that defines the menu of mating strategies humans pursue (e.g., short-term casual sex, long-term committed mating), the adaptive problems women and men face when pursuing these strategies, and the evolved solutions to these mating problems.
Social anxiety disorder (SAD): A condition marked by acute fear of social situations which lead to worry and diminished day to day functioning.
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 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).
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.
Solidity principle: The idea that two solid masses should not be able to move through one another.
Specific vulnerabilities: How our experiences lead us to focus and channel our anxiety.
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.
Strange situation: A laboratory task that involves briefly separating and reuniting infants and their primary caregivers as a way of studying individual differences in attachment behavior.
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.
Subtle biases: Subtle biases are automatic, ambiguous, and ambivalent, but real in their consequences.
Task-specific measures of self-efficacy: Measures that ask about self-efficacy beliefs for a particular task (e.g., athletic self-efficacy, academic self-efficacy).
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.
Triarchic model: Model formulated to reconcile alternative historic conceptions of psychopathy and differing methods for assessing it. Conceives of psychopathy as encompassing three symptomatic components: boldness, involving social efficacy, emotional resiliency, and venturesomeness; meanness, entailing lack of empathy/emotional-sensitivity and exploitative behavior toward others; and disinhibition, entailing deficient behavioral restraint and lack of control over urges/emotional reactions.
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.
Unusual uses: A test of divergent thinking that asks participants to find many uses for commonplace objects, such as a brick or paperclip.
Verbal persuasion: When trusted people (friends, family, experts) influence your self-efficacy for better or worse by either encouraging or discouraging you about your ability to succeed.
Verbal report paradigms: Research methods that require participants to report on their experiences, thoughts, feelings, etc., using language.
Vicarious performances: When seeing other people succeed or fail leads to changes in self-efficacy.
Vignette: A short story that presents a situation that participants are asked to respond to.
Violation of expectation paradigm: A research method in which infants are expected to respond in a particular way because one of two conditions violates or goes against what they should expect based on their everyday experiences (e.g., it violates our expectations that Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff but does not immediately fall to the ground below).
Voluntary responses: Behaviors that a person has control over and completes by choice.