Vocabulary

Ability model: An approach that views EI as a standard intelligence that utilizes a distinct set of mental abilities that (1) are intercorrelated, (2) relate to other extant intelligences, and (3) develop with age and experience (Mayer & Salovey, 1997).
Absolute stability: Consistency in the level or amount of a personality attribute over time.
Abstinence: Avoiding any sexual behaviors that may lead to conception.
Acceptance and commitment therapy: A therapeutic approach designed to foster nonjudgmental observation of one’s own mental processes.
Active person–environment transactions: The interplay between individuals and their contextual circumstances that occurs whenever individuals play a key role in seeking out, selecting, or otherwise manipulating aspects of their environment.
Active-constructive responding: Demonstrating sincere interest and enthusiasm for the good news of another person.
Adaptation: The fact that after people first react to good or bad events, sometimes in a strong way, their feelings and reactions tend to dampen down over time and they return toward their original level of subjective well-being.
Adherence: In health, it is the ability of a patient to maintain a health behavior prescribed by a physician. This might include taking medication as prescribed, exercising more, or eating less high-fat food.
Adoption: To take in and raise a child of other parents legally as one’s own.
Affective forecasting: Predicting how one will feel in the future after some event or decision.
Age effects: Differences in personality between groups of different ages that are related to maturation and development instead of birth cohort differences.
Age identity: How old or young people feel compared to their chronological age; after early adulthood, most people feel younger than their chronological age.
Age in place: The trend toward making accommodations to ensure that aging people can stay in their homes and live independently.
Age of viability: The age at which a fetus can survive outside of the uterus.
Agender: An individual who may have no gender or may describe themselves as having a neutral gender.
Aggression: Any behavior intended to harm another person who does not want to be harmed.
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 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.
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.
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.
Ambivalent sexism: A concept of gender attitudes that encompasses both positive and negative qualities.
Amnesia: The loss of memory.
Amygdala: A brain structure in the limbic system involved in fear reactivity and implicated in the biological basis for social anxiety disorder.
Amygdala: A region located deep within the brain in the medial area (toward the center) of the temporal lobes (parallel to the ears). If you could draw a line through your eye sloping toward the back of your head and another line between your two ears, the amygdala would be located at the intersection of these lines. The amygdala is involved in detecting relevant stimuli in our environment and has been implicated in emotional responses.
Anal sex: Penetration of the anus by an animate or inanimate object.
Anchoring: The bias to be affected by an initial anchor, even if the anchor is arbitrary, and to insufficiently adjust our judgments away from that anchor.
Androgyny: Having both feminine and masculine characteristics.
Anecdotal evidence: An argument that is based on personal experience and not considered reliable or representative.
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.
Animism: The belief that everyone and everything had a “soul” and that mental illness was due to animistic causes, for example, evil spirits controlling an individual and his/her behavior.
Anomalous face overgeneralization hypothesis: Proposes that the attractiveness halo effect is a by-product of reactions to low fitness. People overgeneralize the adaptive tendency to use low attractiveness as an indicator of negative traits, like low health or intelligence, and mistakenly use higher-than-average attractiveness as an indicator of high health or intelligence.
Antagonist: A drug that blocks a neurotransmitter’s effect.
Antisocial: A pervasive pattern of disregard and violation of the rights of others. These behaviors may be aggressive or destructive and may involve breaking laws or rules, deceit or theft.
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 state of worry or apprehension about future events or possible danger that usually involves negative thoughts, unpleasant physical sensations, and/or a desire to avoid harm.
Anxiety: A mood state characterized by negative affect, muscle tension, and physical arousal in which a person apprehensively anticipates future danger or misfortune.
Anxiety disorder: A group of diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) classification system where anxiety is central to the person’s dysfunctioning. Typical symptoms include excessive rumination, worrying, uneasiness, apprehension, and fear about future uncertainties either based on real or imagined events. These symptoms may affect both physical and psychological health. The anxiety disorders are subdivided into panic disorder, specific phobia, social phobia, posttraumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder.
Anxious-avoidant: Attachment style that involves suppressing one’s own feelings and desires, and a difficulty depending on others.
Anxious-resistant: Attachment style that is self-critical, insecure, and fearful of rejection.
Archival research: A type of research in which the researcher analyses records or archives instead of collecting data from live human participants.
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.
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.
Asylum: A place of refuge or safety established to confine and care for the mentally ill; forerunners of the mental hospital or psychiatric facility.
Attachment behavioral system: A motivational system selected over the course of evolution to maintain proximity between a young child and his or her primary attachment figure.
Attachment behaviors: Behaviors and signals that attract the attention of a primary attachment figure and function to prevent separation from that individual or to reestablish proximity to that individual (e.g., crying, clinging).
Attachment figure: Someone who functions as the primary safe haven and secure base for an individual. In childhood, an individual’s attachment figure is often a parent. In adulthood, an individual’s attachment figure is often a romantic partner.
Attachment patterns: (also called “attachment styles” or “attachment orientations”) Individual differences in how securely (vs. insecurely) people think, feel, and behave in attachment relationships.
Attachment theory: Theory that describes the enduring patterns of relationships from birth to death.
Attitude: A psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor.
Attitude: A way of thinking or feeling about a target that is often reflected in a person’s behavior. Examples of attitude targets are individuals, concepts, and groups.
Attraction: A connection between personality attributes and aspects of the environment that occurs because individuals with particular traits are drawn to certain environments.
Attraction: The psychological process of being sexually interested in another person. This can include, for example, physical attraction, first impressions, and dating rituals.
Attractiveness halo effect: The tendency to associate attractiveness with a variety of positive traits, such as being more sociable, intelligent, competent, and healthy.
Attributional style: The tendency by which a person infers the cause or meaning of behaviors or events.
Attrition: When a participant drops out, or fails to complete, all parts of a study.
Attrition: A connection between personality attributes and aspects of the environment that occurs because individuals with particular traits drop out from certain environments.
Audience design: Constructing utterances to suit the audience’s knowledge.
Authoritarian parenting: Parenting style that is high is demandingness and low in support.
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.
Authoritative parenting: A parenting style that is high in demandingness and high in support.
Authority stage: Stage from approximately 2 years to age 4 or 5 when parents create rules and figure out how to effectively guide their children’s behavior.
Autobiographical narratives: A qualitative research method used to understand characteristics and life themes that an individual considers to uniquely distinguish him- or herself from others.
Autobiographical reasoning: The ability, typically developed in adolescence, to derive substantive conclusions about the self from analyzing one’s own personal experiences.
Automatic: A behavior or process has one or more of the following features: unintentional, uncontrollable, occurring outside of conscious awareness, and cognitively efficient.
Automatic: Automatic biases are unintended, immediate, and irresistible.
Automatic empathy: A social perceiver unwittingly taking on the internal state of another person, usually because of mimicking the person’s expressive behavior and thereby feeling the expressed emotion.
Automatic process: When a thought, feeling, or behavior occurs with little or no mental effort. Typically, automatic processes are described as involuntary or spontaneous, often resulting from a great deal of practice or repetition.
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.
Availability heuristic: The tendency to judge the frequency or likelihood of an event by the ease with which relevant instances come to mind.
Average life expectancy: Mean number of years that 50% of people in a specific birth cohort are expected to survive. This is typically calculated from birth but is also sometimes re-calculated for people who have already reached a particular age (e.g., 65).
Aversive racism: Aversive racism is unexamined racial bias that the person does not intend and would reject, but that avoids inter-racial contact.
Avoidant: A pervasive pattern of social inhibition, feelings of inadequacy, and hypersensitivity to negative evaluation.
Barrier forms of birth control: Methods in which sperm is prevented from entering the uterus, either through physical or chemical barriers.
Basic-level category: The neutral, preferred category for a given object, at an intermediate level of specificity.
Basking in reflected glory: The tendency for people to associate themselves with successful people or groups.
Behavioral medicine: A field similar to health psychology that integrates psychological factors (e.g., emotion, behavior, cognition, and social factors) in the treatment of disease. This applied field includes clinical areas of study, such as occupational therapy, hypnosis, rehabilitation or medicine, and preventative medicine.
Benevolent sexism: The “positive” element of ambivalent sexism, which recognizes that women are perceived as needing to be protected, supported, and adored by men.
Biases: The systematic and predictable mistakes that influence the judgment of even very talented human beings.
Bidirectional: The idea that parents influence their children, but their children also influence the parents; the direction of influence goes both ways, from parent to child, and from child to parent.
Bidirectional relations: When one variable is likely both cause and consequence of another variable.
Big data: The analysis of large data sets.
Big Five: A broad taxonomy of personality trait domains repeatedly derived from studies of trait ratings in adulthood and encompassing the categories of (1) extraversion vs. introversion, (2) neuroticism vs. emotional stability, (3) agreeable vs. disagreeableness, (4) conscientiousness vs. nonconscientiousness, and (5) openness to experience vs. conventionality. By late childhood and early adolescence, people’s self-attributions of personality traits, as well as the trait attributions made about them by others, show patterns of intercorrelations that confirm with the five-factor structure obtained in studies of adults.
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).
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.
Bigender: An individual who identifies as two genders.
Binary: The idea that gender has two separate and distinct categories (male and female) and that a person must be either one or the other.
Biofeedback: The process by which physiological signals, not normally available to human perception, are transformed into easy-to-understand graphs or numbers. Individuals can then use this information to try to change bodily functioning (e.g., lower blood pressure, reduce muscle tension).
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: A model in which the interaction of biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors is seen as influencing the development of the individual.
Biopsychosocial Model of Health: An approach to studying health and human function that posits the importance of biological, psychological, and social (or environmental) processes.
Birth cohort: Individuals born in a particular year or span of time.
Bisexual: Attraction to two sexes.
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.
Blended family: A family consisting of an adult couple and their children from previous relationships.
Blind to the research hypothesis: When participants in research are not aware of what is being studied.
Boomerang generation: Term used to describe young adults, primarily between the ages of 25 and 34, who return home after previously living on their own.
Borderline: A pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity.
Borderline Personality Disorder: This personality disorder is defined by a chronic pattern of instability. This instability manifests itself in interpersonal relationships, mood, self-image, and behavior that can interfere with social functioning or work. It may also cause grave emotional distress.
“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.
Bounded awareness: The systematic ways in which we fail to notice obvious and important information that is available to us.
Bounded ethicality: The systematic ways in which our ethics are limited in ways we are not even aware of ourselves.
Bounded rationality: Model of human behavior that suggests that humans try to make rational decisions but are bounded due to cognitive limitations.
Bounded self-interest: The systematic and predictable ways in which we care about the outcomes of others.
Bounded willpower: The tendency to place greater weight on present concerns rather than future concerns.
Bystander intervention: The phenomenon whereby people intervene to help others in need even if the other is a complete stranger and the intervention puts the helper at risk.
Capitalization: Seeking out someone else with whom to share your good news.
Case study: An in-depth and objective examination of the details of a single person or entity.
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.
Category: A set of entities that are equivalent in some way. Usually the items are similar to one another.
Catharsis: Greek term that means to cleanse or purge. Applied to aggression, catharsis is the belief that acting aggressively or even viewing aggression purges angry feelings and aggressive impulses into harmless channels.
Cathartic method: A therapeutic procedure introduced by Breuer and developed further by Freud in the late 19th century whereby a patient gains insight and emotional relief from recalling and reliving traumatic events.
Central route to persuasion: Persuasion that employs direct, relevant, logical messages.
Cervix: The lower portion of the uterus that connects to the vagina.
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.
Child abuse: Injury, death, or emotional harm to a child caused by a parent or caregiver, either intentionally or unintentionally.
Childfree: Term used to describe people who purposefully choose not to have children.
Childless: Term used to describe people who would like to have children but are unable to conceive.
Chromosomal sex: Also known as genetic sex; defined by the 23rd set of chromosomes.
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.
Cisgender: When a person’s birth sex corresponds with his/her gender identity and gender role.
Cisgender: A term used to describe individuals whose gender matches their biological sex.
Clitoris: A sensitive and erectile part of the vulva; its main function is to initiate orgasms.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT): Psychotherapy approach that incorporates cognitive techniques (targeting unhelpful thoughts) and behavioral techniques (changing behaviors) to improve psychological symptoms.
Cognitive bias modification: Using exercises (e.g., computer games) to change problematic thinking habits.
Cognitive failures: Every day slips and lapses, also called absentmindedness.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT): A family of approaches with the goal of changing the thoughts and behaviors that influence psychopathology.
Cohabitation: Arrangement where two unmarried adults live together.
Coherence: Within attachment theory, the gaining of insight into and reconciling one’s childhood experiences.
Cohort: Group of people typically born in the same year or historical period, who share common experiences over time; sometimes called a generation (e.g., Baby Boom Generation).
Cohort effects: When research findings differ for participants of the same age tested at different points in historical time.
Cohort effects: Differences in personality that are related to historical and social factors unique to individuals born in a particular year.
Coital sex: Vaginal-penile intercourse.
Collective self-esteem: Feelings of self-worth that are based on evaluation of relationships with others and membership in social groups.
Collectivism: Belief system that emphasizes the duties and obligations that each person has toward others.
Common ground: Information that is shared by people who engage in a conversation.
Common knowledge effect: The tendency for groups to spend more time discussing information that all members know (shared information) and less time examining information that only a few members know (unshared).
Comorbidity: Describes a state of having more than one psychological or physical disorder at a given time.
Complex experimental designs: An experiment with two or more independent variables.
Concept: The mental representation of a category.
Conception: Occurs typically within the fallopian tube, when a single sperm fertilizes an ovum cell.
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.
Confederate: An actor working with the researcher. Most often, this individual is used to deceive unsuspecting research participants. Also known as a “stooge.”
Confidante: A trusted person with whom secrets and vulnerabilities can be shared.
Conformity: Changing one’s attitude or behavior to match a perceived social norm.
Conformity: Changing one’s attitude or behavior to match a perceived social norm.
Conscience: The cognitive, emotional, and social influences that cause young children to create and act consistently with internal standards of conduct.
Conscientiousness: A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be careful, organized, hardworking, and to follow rules.
Consciousness: The quality or state of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind.
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.
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.
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).
Convoy Model of Social Relations: Theory that proposes that the frequency, types, and reciprocity of social exchanges change with age. These social exchanges impact the health and well-being of the givers and receivers in the convoy.
Correlation: A measure of the association between two variables, or how they go together.
Correlational research: A type of descriptive research that involves measuring the association between two variables, or how they go together.
Corresponsive principle: The idea that personality traits often become matched with environmental conditions such that an individual’s social context acts to accentuate and reinforce their personality attributes.
Cortisol: A hormone made by the adrenal glands, within the cortex. Cortisol helps the body maintain blood pressure and immune function. Cortisol increases when the body is under stress.
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.
Counterfactual thinking: Mentally comparing actual events with fantasies of what might have been possible in alternative scenarios.
Cover story: A fake description of the purpose and/or procedure of a study, used when deception is necessary in order to answer a research question.
Cowper's glands: Glands that produce a fluid that lubricates the urethra and neutralizes any acidity due to urine.
Cross-sectional design: Research method that involves observation of all of a population, or a representative subset, at one specific point in time.
Cross-sectional research: A research design used to examine behavior in participants of different ages who are tested at the same point in time.
Cross-sectional studies: Research method that provides information about age group differences; age differences are confounded with cohort differences and effects related to history and time of study.
Cross-sectional study/design: A research design that uses a group of individuals with different ages (and birth cohorts) assessed at a single point in time.
Crowds: Adolescent peer groups characterized by shared reputations or images.
Crystallized intelligence: Type of intellectual ability that relies on the application of knowledge, experience, and learned information.
Cultural relativism: The idea that cultural norms and values of a society can only be understood on their own terms or in their own context.
Culture of honor: A culture in which personal or family reputation is especially important.
Cumulative continuity principle: The generalization that personality attributes show increasing stability with age and experience.
Cunnilingus: Oral stimulation of the female’s external sex organs.
Daily hassles: Irritations in daily life that are not necessarily traumatic, but that cause difficulties and repeated stress.
Defensive coping mechanism: An unconscious process, which protects an individual from unacceptable or painful ideas, impulses, or memories.
Delusions: False beliefs that are often fixed, hard to change even in the presence of conflicting information, and often culturally influenced in their content.
Demand characteristics: Subtle cues that make participants aware of what the experimenter expects to find or how participants are expected to behave.
Departure stage: Stage at which parents prepare for a child to depart and evaluate their successes and failures as parents.
Dependent: A pervasive and excessive need to be taken care of that leads to submissive and clinging behavior and fears of separation.
Dependent variable: The variable the researcher measures but does not manipulate in an experiment.
Depth perception: The ability to actively perceive the distance from oneself of objects in the environment.
DES: Dissociative Experiences Scale.
Descriptive norm: The perception of what most people do in a given situation.
Developmental intergroup theory: A theory that postulates that adults’ focus on gender leads children to pay attention to gender as a key source of information about themselves and others, to seek out possible gender differences, and to form rigid stereotypes based on gender.
Deviant peer contagion: The spread of problem behaviors within groups of adolescents.
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.
DID: Dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder, is at the far end of the dissociative disorder spectrum. It is characterized by at least two distinct, and dissociated personality states. These personality states – or ‘alters’ - alternately control a person’s behavior. The sufferer therefore experiences significant memory impairment for important information not explained by ordinary forgetfulness.
Differential stability: Consistency in the rank-ordering of personality across two or more measurement occasions.
Differential susceptibility: Genetic factors that make individuals more or less responsive to environmental experiences.
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: 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.
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: A disruption in the usually integrated function of consciousness, memory, identity, or perception of the environment.
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).
Dizygotic twins: Twins conceived from two ova and two sperm.
Dopamine: A neurotransmitter in the brain that is thought to play an important role in regulating the function of other neurotransmitters.
Downward comparison: Making mental comparisons with people who are perceived to be inferior on the standard of comparison.
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.
Dunning-Kruger Effect: The tendency for unskilled people to be overconfident in their ability and highly skilled people to underestimate their ability.
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 validity: The degree to which a study finding has been obtained under conditions that are typical for what happens in everyday life.
Effortful control: A temperament quality that enables children to be more successful in motivated self-regulation.
Ego: Sigmund Freud’s conception of an executive self in the personality. Akin to this module’s notion of “the I,” Freud imagined the ego as observing outside reality, engaging in rational though, and coping with the competing demands of inner desires and moral standards.
Ego 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 idea that people have a limited pool of mental resources for self-control (e.g., regulating emotions, willpower), and this pool can be used up (depleted).
Egoism: A motivation for helping that has the improvement of the helper’s own circumstances as its primary goal.
Elder abuse: Any form of mistreatment that results in harm to an elder person, often caused by his/her adult child.
Electroencephalogram: A measure of electrical activity generated by the brain’s neurons.
Electronically activated recorder (EAR): A methodology where participants wear a small, portable audio recorder that intermittently records snippets of ambient sounds around them.
Elicited imitation: A behavioral method used to examine recall memory in infants and young children.
Emergency contraception: A form of birth control used in a variety of circumstances, such as after unprotected sex, condom mishaps, or sexual assault.
Emerging adulthood: A new life stage extending from approximately ages 18 to 25, during which the foundation of an adult life is gradually constructed in love and work. Primary features include identity explorations, instability, focus on self-development, feeling incompletely adult, and a broad sense of possibilities.
Emotion regulation: The ability to recognize emotional experiences and respond to situations by engaging in strategies to manage emotions as necessary.
Emotional intelligence: The ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions. (Salovey & Mayer, 1990). EI includes four specific abilities: perceiving, using, understanding, and managing emotions.
Emotion-focused coping: Coping strategy aimed at reducing the negative emotions associated with a stressful event.
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.
Empty Nest: Feelings of sadness and loneliness that parents may feel when their adult children leave the home for the first time.
Endophenotypes: A characteristic that reflects a genetic liability for disease and a more basic component of a complex clinical presentation. Endophenotypes are less developmentally malleable than overt behavior.
Engagement: Formal agreement to get married.
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.
Epididymis: A twisted duct that matures, stores, and transports sperm cells into the vas deferens.
Epigenetics: Heritable changes in gene activity that are not caused by changes in the DNA sequence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
Episodic memory: The ability to learn and retrieve new information or episodes in one’s life.
Erogenous zones: Highly sensitive areas of the body.
Etiology: The causal description of all of the factors that contribute to the development of a disorder or illness.
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.
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).
Event-related potentials (ERP): Measures the firing of groups of neurons in the cortex. As a person views or listens to specific types of information, neuronal activity creates small electrical currents that can be recorded from non-invasive sensors placed on the scalp. ERP provides excellent information about the timing of processing, clarifying brain activity at the millisecond pace at which it unfolds.
Evocative person–environment transactions: The interplay between individuals and their contextual circumstances that occurs whenever attributes of the individual draw out particular responses from others in their environment.
Excitement phase: The activation of the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system defines this phase of the sexual response cycle; heart rate and breathing accelerate, along with increased blood flow to the penis, vaginal walls, clitoris, and nipples.
Exemplar: An example in memory that is labeled as being in a particular category.
Experience sampling methods: Systematic ways of having participants provide samples of their ongoing behavior. Participants' reports are dependent (contingent) upon either a signal, pre-established intervals, or the occurrence of some event.
Explicit attitude: An attitude that is consciously held and can be reported on by the person holding the attitude.
Exposure therapy: A form of intervention in which the patient engages with a problematic (usually feared) situation without avoidance or escape.
Exposure treatment: A technique used in behavior therapy that involves a patient repeatedly confronting a feared situation, without danger, to reduce anxiety.
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.
Fallopian tubes: The female’s internal sex organ where fertilization is most likely to occur.
False-belief test: An experimental procedure that assesses whether a perceiver recognizes that another person has a false belief—a belief that contradicts reality.
Family of orientation: The family one is born into.
Family of procreation: The family one creates, usually through marriage.
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.
Family systems theory: Theory that says a person cannot be understood on their own, but as a member of a unit.
Fantasy proneness: The tendency to extensive fantasizing or daydreaming.
Fear of negative evaluation: The preoccupation with and dread of the possibility of being judged negatively by others.
Fear of positive evaluation: The dread associated with favorable public evaluation or acknowledgment of success, particularly when it involves social comparison.
Fellatio: Oral stimulation of the male’s external sex organs.
Field experiment: An experiment that occurs outside of the lab and in a real world situation.
Fight or flight response: The physiological response that occurs in response to a perceived threat, preparing the body for actions needed to deal with the threat.
Fight or flight response: A biological reaction to alarming stressors that prepares the body to resist or escape a threat.
Five stages of psychosexual development: Oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital.
Five-Factor Model: (also called the Big Five) The Five-Factor Model is a widely accepted model of personality traits. Advocates of the model believe that much of the variability in people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can be summarized with five broad traits. These five traits are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
Five-Factor Model: Five broad domains or dimensions that are used to describe human personality.
Fixed action patterns (FAPs): Sequences of behavior that occur in exactly the same fashion, in exactly the same order, every time they are elicited.
Fixed mindset: The belief that personal qualities such as intelligence are traits that cannot be developed. People with fixed mindsets often underperform compared to those with “growth mindsets”
Flashback: Sudden, intense re-experiencing of a previous event, usually trauma-related.
Flat affect: A reduction in the display of emotions through facial expressions, gestures, and speech intonation.
Flourishing: To live optimally psychologically, relationally, and spiritually.
Fluid intelligence: Type of intelligence that relies on the ability to use information processing resources to reason logically and solve novel problems.
Folk explanations of behavior: People’s natural explanations for why somebody did something, felt something, etc. (differing substantially for unintentional and intentional behaviors).
Foot in the door: Obtaining a small, initial commitment.
Foreclosure: Individuals commit to an identity without exploration of options.
Foreskin: The skin covering the glans or head of the penis.
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.
Foster care: Care provided by alternative families to children whose families of orientation cannot adequately care for them; often arranged through the government or a social service agency.
Four-Branch Model: An ability model developed by Drs. Peter Salovey and John Mayer that includes four main components of EI, arranged in hierarchical order, beginning with basic psychological processes and advancing to integrative psychological processes. The branches are (1) perception of emotion, (2) use of emotion to facilitate thinking, (3) understanding emotion, and (4) management of emotion.
Framing: The bias to be systematically affected by the way in which information is presented, while holding the objective information constant.
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.
Frog Pond Effect: The theory that a person’s comparison group can affect their evaluations of themselves. Specifically, people have a tendency to have lower self-evaluations when comparing themselves to higher performing groups.
Functional capacity: The ability to engage in self-care (cook, clean, bathe), work, attend school, and/or engage in social relationships.
Functional distance: The frequency with which we cross paths with others.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging: A measure of changes in the oxygenation of blood flow as areas in the brain become active.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): Entails the use of powerful magnets to measure the levels of oxygen within the brain that vary with changes in neural activity. That is, as the neurons in specific brain regions “work harder” when performing a specific task, they require more oxygen. By having people listen to or view social percepts in an MRI scanner, fMRI specifies the brain regions that evidence a relative increase in blood flow. In this way, fMRI provides excellent spatial information, pinpointing with millimeter accuracy, the brain regions most critical for different social processes.
Functional neuroanatomy: Classifying how regions within the nervous system relate to psychology and behavior.
Fundamental attribution error: The tendency to emphasize another person’s personality traits when describing that person’s motives and behaviors and overlooking the influence of situational factors.
G: Short for “general factor” and is often used to be synonymous with intelligence itself.
g or general mental ability: The general factor common to all cognitive ability measures, “a very general mental capacity that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings—‘catching on,’ ‘making sense of things,’ or ‘figuring out’ what to do” (Gottfredson, 1997, p. 13).
Gender: The psychological and sociological representations of one’s biological sex.
Gender: The cultural, social, and psychological meanings that are associated with masculinity and femininity.
Gender constancy: The awareness that gender is constant and does not change simply by changing external attributes; develops between 3 and 6 years of age.
Gender discrimination: Differential treatment on the basis of gender.
Gender identity: A person’s psychological sense of being male or female.
Gender identity: Personal depictions of masculinity and femininity.
Gender roles: Societal expectations of masculinity and femininity.
Gender roles: The behaviors, attitudes, and personality traits that are designated as either masculine or feminine in a given culture.
Gender schema theory: This theory of how children form their own gender roles argues that children actively organize others’ behavior, activities, and attributes into gender categories or schemas.
Gender schemas: Organized beliefs and expectations about maleness and femaleness that guide children’s thinking about gender.
Gender stereotypes: The beliefs and expectations people hold about the typical characteristics, preferences, and behaviors of men and women.
Genderfluid: An individual who may identify as male, female, both, or neither at different times and in different circumstances.
Genderqueer or gender nonbinary: An umbrella term used to describe a wide range of individuals who do not identify with and/or conform to the gender binary.
General Adaptation Syndrome: A three-phase model of stress, which includes a mobilization of physiological resources phase, a coping phase, and an exhaustion phase (i.e., when an organism fails to cope with the stress adequately and depletes its resources).
General population: A sample of people representative of the average individual in our society.
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.
Glans penis: The highly sensitive head of the penis, associated with initiating orgasms.
Global subjective well-being: Individuals’ perceptions of and satisfaction with their lives as a whole.
Good genes hypothesis: Proposes that certain physical qualities, like averageness, are attractive because they advertise mate quality—either greater fertility or better genetic traits that lead to better offspring and hence greater reproductive success.
Goodness of fit: The match or synchrony between a child’s temperament and characteristics of parental care that contributes to positive or negative personality development. A good “fit” means that parents have accommodated to the child’s temperamental attributes, and this contributes to positive personality growth and better adjustment.
Gradually escalating commitments: A pattern of small, progressively escalating demands is less likely to be rejected than a single large demand made all at once.
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.
Group cohesion: The solidarity or unity of a group resulting from the development of strong and mutual interpersonal bonds among members and group-level forces that unify the group, such as shared commitment to group goals.
Group level: A focus on summary statistics that apply to aggregates of individuals when studying personality development. An example is considering whether the average score of a group of 50 year olds is higher than the average score of a group of 21 year olds when considering a trait like conscientiousness.
Group polarization: The tendency for members of a deliberating group to move to a more extreme position, with the direction of the shift determined by the majority or average of the members’ predeliberation preferences.
Groupthink: A set of negative group-level processes, including illusions of invulnerability, self-censorship, and pressures to conform, that occur when highly cohesive groups seek concurrence when making a decision.
Growth mindset: The belief that personal qualities, such as intelligence, can be developed through effort and practice.
Habituation: When participants demonstrated decreased attention (through looking or listening behavior) to repeatedly-presented stimuli.
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).
Happiness: A state of well-being characterized by relative permanence, by dominantly agreeable emotion ranging in value from mere contentment to deep and intense joy in living, and by a natural desire for its continuation.
Happiness: The popular word for subjective well-being. Scientists sometimes avoid using this term because it can refer to different things, such as feeling good, being satisfied, or even the causes of high subjective well-being.
Health: The complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being—not just the absence of disease or infirmity.
Health: According to the World Health Organization, it is a complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
Health behavior: Any behavior that is related to health—either good or bad.
Health behaviors: Behaviors that are associated with better health. Examples include exercising, not smoking, and wearing a seat belt while in a vehicle.
Hedonic well-being: Component of well-being that refers to emotional experiences, often including measures of positive (e.g., happiness, contentment) and negative affect (e.g., stress, sadness).
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.
Heterogamy: Partnering with someone who is unlike you in a meaningful way.
Heterogeneity: Inter-individual and subgroup differences in level and rate of change over time.
Heterosexual: Opposite-sex attraction.
Heterotypic stability: Consistency in the underlying psychological attribute across development regardless of any changes in how the attribute is expressed at different ages.
Heuristics: cognitive (or thinking) strategies that simplify decision making by using mental short-cuts
Heuristics: A mental shortcut or rule of thumb that reduces complex mental problems to more simple rule-based decisions.
Heuristics: Mental shortcuts that enable people to make decisions and solve problems quickly and efficiently.
HEXACO model: The HEXACO model is an alternative to the Five-Factor Model. The HEXACO model includes six traits, five of which are variants of the traits included in the Big Five (Emotionality [E], Extraversion [X], Agreeableness [A], Conscientiousness [C], and Openness [O]). The sixth factor, Honesty-Humility [H], is unique to this model.
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.
Histrionic: A pervasive pattern of excessive emotionality and attention seeking.
Homogamy: Partnering with someone who is like you in a meaningful way.
Homophily: Adolescents tend to associate with peers who are similar to themselves.
Homosexual: Same-sex attraction.
Homotypic stability: Consistency of the exact same thoughts, feelings, and behaviors across development.
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.
Hormonal forms of birth control: Methods by which synthetic estrogen or progesterone are released to prevent ovulation and thicken cervical mucus.
Hormones: Chemicals released by cells in the brain or body that affect cells in other parts of the brain or body.
Hostile attribution bias: The tendency of some individuals to interpret ambiguous social cues and interactions as examples of aggressiveness, disrespect, or antagonism.
Hostile attribution bias: The tendency to perceive ambiguous actions by others as aggressive.
Hostile expectation bias: The tendency to assume that people will react to potential conflicts with aggression.
Hostile perception bias: The tendency to perceive social interactions in general as being aggressive.
Hostile sexism: The negative element of ambivalent sexism, which includes the attitudes that women are inferior and incompetent relative to men.
Hostility: An experience or trait with cognitive, behavioral, and emotional components. It often includes cynical thoughts, feelings of emotion, and aggressive behavior.
Hot cognition: The mental processes that are influenced by desires and feelings.
Humility: Having an accurate view of self—not too high or low—and a realistic appraisal of one’s strengths and weaknesses, especially in relation to other people.
Humorism (or humoralism): A belief held by ancient Greek and Roman physicians (and until the 19th century) that an excess or deficiency in any of the four bodily fluids, or humors—blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm—directly affected their health and temperament.
Hypersomnia: Excessive daytime sleepiness, including difficulty staying awake or napping, or prolonged sleep episodes.
Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis: A system that involves the hypothalamus (within the brain), the pituitary gland (within the brain), and the adrenal glands (at the top of the kidneys). This system helps maintain homeostasis (keeping the body’s systems within normal ranges) by regulating digestion, immune function, mood, temperature, and energy use. Through this, the HPA regulates the body’s response to stress and injury.
Hypothesis: A possible explanation that can be tested through research.
Hypothesis: A logical idea that can be tested.
Hysteria: Term used by the ancient Greeks and Egyptians to describe a disorder believed to be caused by a woman’s uterus wandering throughout the body and interfering with other organs (today referred to as conversion disorder, in which psychological problems are expressed in physical form).
Identity: Sometimes used synonymously with the term “self,” identity means many different things in psychological science and in other fields (e.g., sociology). In this module, I adopt Erik Erikson’s conception of identity as a developmental task for late adolescence and young adulthood. Forming an identity in adolescence and young adulthood involves exploring alternative roles, values, goals, and relationships and eventually committing to a realistic agenda for life that productively situates a person in the adult world of work and love. In addition, identity formation entails commitments to new social roles and reevaluation of old traits, and importantly, it brings with it a sense of temporal continuity in life, achieved though the construction of an integrative life story.
Identity achievement: Individuals have explored different options and then made commitments.
Identity diffusion: Adolescents neither explore nor commit to any roles or ideologies.
Image-making stage: Stage during pregnancy when parents consider what it means to be a parent and plan for changes to accommodate a child.
Impact bias: A bias in affective forecasting in which one overestimates the strength or intensity of emotion one will experience after some event.
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 association test (IAT): A computer-based categorization task that measures the strength of association between specific concepts over several trials.
Implicit attitude: An attitude that a person cannot verbally or overtly state.
Implicit measures of attitudes: Measures of attitudes in which researchers infer the participant’s attitude rather than having the participant explicitly report it.
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).
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 variable: The variable the researcher manipulates and controls in an experiment.
Individual differences: Psychological traits, abilities, aptitudes and tendencies that vary from person to person.
Individual level: A focus on individual level statistics that reflect whether individuals show stability or change when studying personality development. An example is evaluating how many individuals increased in conscientiousness versus how many decreased in conscientiousness when considering the transition from adolescence to adulthood.
Individualism: Belief system that exalts freedom, independence, and individual choice as high values.
Industrialized countries: The economically advanced countries of the world, in which most of the world’s wealth is concentrated.
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.
Ingroup: A social group to which an individual identifies or belongs.
Ingroup: Group to which a person belongs.
Inhibitory functioning: Ability to focus on a subset of information while suppressing attention to less relevant information.
Insomnia: A sleep disorder in which there is an inability to fall asleep or to stay asleep as long as desired. Symptoms also include waking up too early, experience many awakenings during the night, and not feeling rested during the day.
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.
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).
Intelligence: An individual’s cognitive capability. This includes the ability to acquire, process, recall and apply information.
Intention: An agent’s mental state of committing to perform an action that the agent believes will bring about a desired outcome.
Intentionality: The quality of an agent’s performing a behavior intentionally—that is, with skill and awareness and executing an intention (which is in turn based on a desire and relevant beliefs).
Interdependent stage: Stage during teenage years when parents renegotiate their relationship with their adolescent children to allow for shared power in decision-making.
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.
Interpretive stage: Stage from age 4or 5 to the start of adolescence when parents help their children interpret their experiences with the social world beyond the family.
Intersex: Born with either an absence or some combination of male and female reproductive organs, sex hormones, or sex chromosomes.
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).
Intimate partner violence: Physical, sexual, or psychological abuse inflicted by a partner.
Intra- and inter-individual differences: Different patterns of development observed within an individual (intra-) or between individuals (inter-).
Introitus: The vaginal opening to the outside of the body.
Involuntary or obligatory responses: Behaviors in which individuals engage that do not require much conscious thought or effort.
IQ: Short for “intelligence quotient.” This is a score, typically obtained from a widely used measure of intelligence that is meant to rank a person’s intellectual ability against that of others.
Joint attention: Two people attending to the same object and being aware that they both are attending to it.
Joint family: A family comprised of at least three generations living together. Joint families often include many members of the extended family.
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.
Labia majora: The “large lips” enclosing and protecting the female internal sex organs.
Labia minora: The “small lips” surrounding and defining the openings of the vagina and urethra.
Laboratory environments: A setting in which the researcher can carefully control situations and manipulate variables.
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.
Learned helplessness: The belief, as someone who is abused, that one has no control over his or her situation.
Lesions: Damage or tissue abnormality due, for example, to an injury, surgery, or a vascular problem.
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 views for analyzing and understanding a phenomenon.
Lexical hypothesis: The lexical hypothesis is the idea that the most important differences between people will be encoded in the language that we use to describe people. Therefore, if we want to know which personality traits are most important, we can look to the language that people use to describe themselves and others.
Lexicon: Words and expressions.
Life course theories: Theory of development that highlights the effects of social expectations of age-related life events and social roles; additionally considers the lifelong cumulative effects of membership in specific cohorts and sociocultural subgroups and exposure to historical events.
Life domains: Various domains of life, such as finances and job.
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.
Life satisfaction: The degree to which one is satisfied with one’s life overall.
Life span theories: Theory of development that emphasizes the patterning of lifelong within- and between-person differences in the shape, level, and rate of change trajectories.
Linguistic intergroup bias: A tendency for people to characterize positive things about their ingroup using more abstract expressions, but negative things about their outgroups using more abstract expressions.
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.
Local dominance effect: People are generally more influenced by social comparison when that comparison is personally relevant rather than broad and general.
Longitudinal research: A research design used to examine behavior in the same participants over short (months) or long (decades) periods of time.
Longitudinal studies: Research method that collects information from individuals at multiple time points over time, allowing researchers to track cohort differences in age-related change to determine cumulative effects of different life experiences.
Longitudinal study/design: A research design that follows the same group of individuals at multiple time points.
Lucid dreams: Any dream in which one is aware that one is dreaming.
Machiavellianism: Being cunning, strategic, or exploitative in one’s relationships. Named after Machiavelli, who outlined this way of relating in his book, The Prince.
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.
Maladaptive: Term referring to behaviors that cause people who have them physical or emotional harm, prevent them from functioning in daily life, and/or indicate that they have lost touch with reality and/or cannot control their thoughts and behavior (also called dysfunctional).
Malingering: Fabrication or exaggeration of medical symptoms to achieve secondary gain (e.g., receive medication, avoid school).
Manipulation: A connection between personality attributes and aspects of the environment that occurs whenever individuals with particular traits actively shape their environments.
Manipulation check: A measure used to determine whether or not the manipulation of the independent variable has had its intended effect on the participants.
Marriage market: The process through which prospective spouses compare assets and liabilities of available partners and choose the best available mate.
Masochism: Receiving pain from another person to experience pleasure for one’s self.
Mastery goals: Goals that are focused primarily on learning, competence, and self-development. These are contrasted with “performance goals” that are focused on the quality of a person’s performance.
Masturbation: Tactile stimulation of the body for sexual pleasure.
Maturity principle: The generalization that personality attributes associated with the successful fulfillment of adult roles increase with age and experience.
Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT): A 141-item performance assessment of EI that measures the four emotion abilities (as defined by the four-branch model of EI) with a total of eight tasks.
Medial prefrontal cortex: An area of the brain located in the middle of the frontal lobes (at the front of the head), active when people mentalize about the self and others.
Menstruation: The process by which ova as well as the lining of the uterus are discharged from the vagina after fertilization does not occur.
Mentalizing: The act of representing the mental states of oneself and others. Mentalizing allows humans to interpret the intentions, beliefs, and emotional states of others.
Mere-exposure effect: The notion that people like people/places/things merely because they are familiar with them.
Mere-exposure effect: The tendency to prefer stimuli that have been seen before over novel ones. There also is a generalized mere-exposure effect shown in a preference for stimuli that are similar to those that have been seen before.
Mesmerism: Derived from Franz Anton Mesmer in the late 18th century, an early version of hypnotism in which Mesmer claimed that hysterical symptoms could be treated through animal magnetism emanating from Mesmer’s body and permeating the universe (and later through magnets); later explained in terms of high suggestibility in individuals.
Metabolism: Breakdown of substances.
Mimicry: Copying others’ behavior, usually without awareness.
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-based therapy: A form of psychotherapy grounded in mindfulness theory and practice, often involving meditation, yoga, body scan, and other features of mindfulness exercises.
Mirror neurons: Neurons identified in monkey brains that fire both when the monkey performs a certain action and when it perceives another agent performing that action.
Mixed and Trait Models: Approaches that view EI as a combination of self-perceived emotion skills, personality traits, and attitudes.
Model minority: A minority group whose members are perceived as achieving a higher degree of socioeconomic success than the population average.
Modern family: A family based on commitment, caring, and close emotional ties.
Monozygotic twins: Twins conceived from a single ovum and a single sperm, therefore genetically identical.
Mood disorder: A group of diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) classification system where a disturbance in the person’s mood is the primary dysfunction. Mood disorders include major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, dysthymic and cyclothymic disorder.
Mood-congruent memory: The tendency to be better able to recall memories that have a mood similar to our current mood.
Moratorium: State in which adolescents are actively exploring options but have not yet made identity commitments.
Morph: A face or other image that has been transformed by a computer program so that it is a mixture of multiple images.
Motivated skepticism: A form of bias that can result from having a directional goal in which one is skeptical of evidence despite its strength because it goes against what one wants to believe.
Motor control: The use of thinking to direct muscles and limbs to perform a desired action.
Mullerian ducts: Primitive female internal sex organs.
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.
Multigenerational homes: Homes with more than one adult generation.
Myotonia: Involuntary muscular movements, such as facial grimaces, that occur during the excitement phase of the sexual response cycle.
Narcissism: A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), a need for admiration, and lack of empathy.
Narcissistic: A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy.
Narrative identity: An internalized and evolving story of the self designed to provide life with some measure of temporal unity and purpose. Beginning in late adolescence, people craft self-defining stories that reconstruct the past and imagine the future to explain how the person came to be the person that he or she is becoming.
Natural forms of birth control: Methods that rely on knowledge of the menstrual cycle and awareness of the body.
Naturalistic observation: Unobtrusively watching people as they go about the business of living their lives.
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.
Need to belong: A strong natural impulse in humans to form social connections and to be accepted by others.
N-Effect: The finding that increasing the number of competitors generally decreases one’s motivation to compete.
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.
Neglect: Failure to care for someone properly.
Neurodevelopmental: Processes that influence how the brain develops either in utero or as the child is growing up.
Neuroendocrinology: The study of how the brain and hormones act in concert to coordinate the physiology of the body.
Neuroimaging techniques: Seeing and measuring live and active brains by such techniques as electroencephalography (EEG), computerized axial tomography (CAT), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
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.
Nightmares: An unpleasant dream that can cause a strong negative emotional response from the mind, typically fear or horror, but also despair, anxiety, and great sadness. The dream may contain situations of danger, discomfort, psychological or physical terror. Sufferers usually awaken in a state of distress and may be unable to return to sleep for a prolonged period of time.
Non-industrialized countries: The less economically advanced countries that comprise the majority of the world’s population. Most are currently developing at a rapid rate.
Norm: Assessments are given to a representative sample of a population to determine the range of scores for that population. These “norms” are then used to place an individual who takes that assessment on a range of scores in which he or she is compared to the population at large.
Normative influence: Conformity that results from a concern for what other people think of us.
Nuclear families: A core family unit comprised of only the parents and children.
Numerical magnitudes: The sizes of numbers.
Nurture: The environments, starting with the womb, that influence all aspects of children’s development.
Nurturing stage: Stage from birth to around 18-24 months in which parents develop an attachment relationship with child and adapt to the new baby.
Obedience: Responding to an order or command from a person in a position of authority.
Obedience: Responding to an order or command from a person in a position of authority.
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.
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.
Objective social variables: Targets of research interest that are factual and not subject to personal opinions or feelings.
Observational learning: Learning by observing the behavior of others.
Obsessive-compulsive: A pervasive pattern of preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and mental and interpersonal control, at the expense of flexibility, openness, and efficiency.
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: This anxiety disorder is characterized by intrusive thoughts (obsessions), by repetitive behaviors (compulsions), or both. Obsessions produce uneasiness, fear, or worry. Compulsions are then aimed at reducing the associated anxiety. Examples of compulsive behaviors include excessive washing or cleaning; repeated checking; extreme hoarding; and nervous rituals, such as switching the light on and off a certain number of times when entering a room. Intrusive thoughts are often sexual, violent, or religious in nature...
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.
OECD countries: Members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, comprised of the world’s wealthiest countries.
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.
Operationalization: The process of defining a concept so that it can be measured. In psychology, this often happens by identifying related concepts or behaviors that can be more easily measured.
Operationalize: How researchers specifically measure a concept.
Oppositional defiant disorder: A childhood behavior disorder that is characterized by stubbornness, hostility, and behavioral defiance. This disorder is highly comorbid with ADHD.
Optimal level: The level that is the most favorable for an outcome.
Oral sex: Cunnilingus or fellatio.
Orgasm phase: The shortest, but most pleasurable, phase of the sexual response cycle.
Orgasmic platform: The tightening of the outer third of the vaginal walls during the plateau phase of the sexual response cycle.
Originality: When an idea or solution has a low probability of occurrence.
Ostracism: Being excluded and ignored by others.
Ostracism: Excluding one or more individuals from a group by reducing or eliminating contact with the person, usually by ignoring, shunning, or explicitly banishing them.
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.
Outgroup: Group to which a person does not belong.
Outgroup: A social group to which an individual does not identify or belong.
Ovaries: The glands housing the ova and producing progesterone, estrogen, and small amounts of testosterone.
Overconfident: The bias to have greater confidence in your judgment than is warranted based on a rational assessment.
Ovulation: When ova travel from the ovaries to the uterus.
Oxytocin: A nine amino acid mammalian neuropeptide. Oxytocin is synthesized primarily in the brain, but also in other tissues such as uterus, heart and thymus, with local effects. Oxytocin is best known as a hormone of female reproduction due to its capacity to cause uterine contractions and eject milk. Oxytocin has effects on brain tissue, but also acts throughout the body in some cases as an antioxidant or anti-inflammatory.
Oxytocin: A neurotransmitter that regulates bonding and sexual reproduction.
Panic disorder (PD): A condition marked by regular strong panic attacks, and which may include significant levels of worry about future attacks.
Paranoid: A pervasive distrust and suspiciousness of others such that their motives are interpreted as malevolent.
Paraphilic disorders: Sexual behaviors that cause harm to others or one’s self.
Parent management training: A treatment for childhood behavior problems that teaches parents how to use contingencies to more effectively manage their children’s behavior.
Participant variable: The individual characteristics of research subjects - age, personality, health, intelligence, etc.
Pathologizes: To define a trait or collection of traits as medically or psychologically unhealthy or abnormal.
Penis: The most prominent external sex organ in males; it has three main functions: initiating orgasm, and transporting semen and urine outside of the body.
Perceived social support: A person’s perception that others are there to help them in times of need.
Performance assessment: A method of measurement associated with ability models of EI that evaluate the test taker’s ability to solve emotion-related problems.
Peripheral route to persuasion: Persuasion that relies on superficial cues that have little to do with logic.
Permissive parenting: Parenting that is low in demandingness and high in support.
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: A person’s relatively stable patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior.
Personality: Characteristic, routine ways of thinking, feeling, and relating to others.
Personality disorders: When personality traits result in significant distress, social impairment, and/or occupational impairment.
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–environment transactions: The interplay between individuals and their contextual circumstances that ends up shaping both personality and the environment.
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.
Pharmacokinetics: The action of a drug through the body, including absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion.
Pharmacotherapy: A treatment approach that involves using medications to alter a person’s neural functioning to reduce psychological symptoms.
Phonemic awareness: Awareness of the component sounds within words.
Physical abuse: The use of intentional physical force to cause harm.
Piaget’s theory: Theory that development occurs through a sequence of discontinuous stages: the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages.
Planning fallacy: A cognitive bias in which one underestimates how long it will take to complete a task.
Plateau phase: The phase of the sexual response cycle in which blood flow, heart rate, and breathing intensify.
Plethysmography: The measuring of changes in blood - or airflow - to organs.
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.
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).
Pregnancy: The time in which a female carries a developing human within her uterus.
Prejudice: Prejudice is an evaluation or emotion toward people merely based on their group membership.
Prejudice: An evaluation or emotion toward people based merely 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.
Prevalence: The number of cases of a specific disorder present in a given population at a certain time.
Primacy of the Unconscious: The hypothesis—supported by contemporary empirical research—that the vast majority of mental activity takes place outside conscious awareness.
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: A stimulus presented to a person reminds him or her about other ideas associated with the stimulus.
Priming: The process by which exposing people to one stimulus makes certain thoughts, feelings or behaviors more salient.
Primitive gonads: Reproductive structures in embryos that will eventually develop into ovaries or testes.
Problem-focused coping: A set of coping strategies aimed at improving or changing stressful situations.
Processing speed: The time it takes individuals to perform cognitive operations (e.g., process information, react to a signal, switch attention from one task to another, find a specific target object in a complex picture).
Processing speed: The speed with which an individual can perceive auditory or visual information and respond to it.
Projection: A social perceiver’s assumption that the other person wants, knows, or feels the same as the perceiver wants, know, or feels.
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.
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.
Prostate gland: A male gland that releases prostatic fluid to nourish sperm cells.
Prototype: A typical, or average, member of a category. Averageness increases attractiveness.
Proximity: The relative closeness or distance from a given comparison standard. The further from the standard a person is, the less important he or she considers the standard. When a person is closer to the standard he/she is more likely to be competitive.
Proximity: Physical nearness.
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.
Psychogenesis: Developing from psychological origins.
Psychological abuse: Aggressive behavior intended to control a partner.
Psychological control: Parents’ manipulation of and intrusion into adolescents’ emotional and cognitive world through invalidating adolescents’ feelings and pressuring them to think in particular ways.
Psychological essentialism: The belief that members of a category have an unseen property that causes them to be in the category and to have the properties associated with it.
Psychological reactance: A reaction to people, rules, requirements, or offerings that are perceived to limit freedoms.
Psychological vulnerabilities: Influences that our early experiences have on how we view the world.
Psychometric approach: Approach to studying intelligence that examines performance on tests of intellectual functioning.
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.
Psychopathy: A pattern of antisocial behavior characterized by an inability to empathize, egocentricity, and a desire to use relationships as tools for personal gain.
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.
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.).
PTM: Post-traumatic model of dissociation.
Punishment: Inflicting pain or removing pleasure for a misdeed. Punishment decreases the likelihood that a behavior will be repeated.
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.
Quickening: The feeling of fetal movement.
Random assignment: Assigning participants to receive different conditions of an experiment by chance.
Reactive person–environment transactions: The interplay between individuals and their contextual circumstances that occurs whenever attributes of the individual shape how a person perceives and responds to their environment.
Reappraisal, or Cognitive restructuring: The process of identifying, evaluating, and changing maladaptive thoughts in psychotherapy.
Recall: Type of memory task where individuals are asked to remember previously learned information without the help of external cues.
Recall memory: The process of remembering discrete episodes or events from the past, including encoding, consolidation and storage, and retrieval.
Received social support: The actual act of receiving support (e.g., informational, functional).
Reciprocal altruism: According to evolutionary psychology, a genetic predisposition for people to help those who have previously helped them.
Reciprocity: The act of exchanging goods or services. By giving a person a gift, the principle of reciprocity can be used to influence others; they then feel obligated to give back.
Recognition: Type of memory task where individuals are asked to remember previously learned information with the assistance of cues.
Recurrent dreams: The same dream narrative or dreamscape is experienced over different occasions of sleep.
Redemptive narratives: Life stories that affirm the transformation from suffering to an enhanced status or state. In American culture, redemptive life stories are highly prized as models for the good self, as in classic narratives of atonement, upward mobility, liberation, and recovery.
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.
Reflexivity: The idea that the self reflects back upon itself; that the I (the knower, the subject) encounters the Me (the known, the object). Reflexivity is a fundamental property of human selfhood.
Refractory period: Time following male ejaculation in which he is unresponsive to sexual stimuli.
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.
Relational aggression: Intentionally harming another person’s social relationships, feelings of acceptance, or inclusion within a group.
Relationship bank account: An account you hold with every person in which a positive deposit or a negative withdrawal can be made during every interaction you have with the person.
Reliablility: The consistency of test scores across repeated assessments. For example, test-retest reliability examines the extent to which scores change over time.
Remote associations: Associations between words or concepts that are semantically distant and thus relatively unusual or original.
Replacement fantasy: Fantasizing about someone other than one’s current partner.
Representativeness heuristic: A heuristic in which the likelihood of an object belonging to a category is evaluated based on the extent to which the object appears similar to one’s mental representation of the category.
Research confederate: A person working with a researcher, posing as a research participant or as a bystander.
Research 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.
Research participant: A person being studied as part of a research program.
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).
Resolution phase: The phase of the sexual response cycle in which the body returns to a pre-aroused state.
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.
Sadism: Inflicting pain upon another person to experience pleasure for one’s self.
Safer-sex practices: Doing anything that may decrease the probability of sexual assault, sexually transmitted infections, or unwanted pregnancy; this may include using condoms, honesty, and communication.
Safer-sex practices: Doing anything that may decrease the probability of sexual assault, sexually transmitted infections, or unwanted pregnancy; these may include using condoms, honesty, and communication.
Safety behaviors: Actions people take to reduce likelihood of embarrassment or minimizing anxiety in a situation (e.g., not making eye contact, planning what to say).
Samples of convenience: Participants that have been recruited in a manner that prioritizes convenience over representativeness.
Sandwich generation: Generation of people responsible for taking care of their own children as well as their aging parents.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: The hypothesis that the language that people use determines their thoughts.
Satisfaction: Correspondence between an individual’s needs or preferences and the rewards offered by the environment.
Satisfactoriness: Correspondence between an individual’s abilities and the ability requirements of the environment.
Schema: A mental model or representation that organizes the important information about a thing, person, or event (also known as a script).
Schema: A mental representation or set of beliefs about something.
Schemas: The gender categories into which, according to gender schema theory, children actively organize others’ behavior, activities, and attributes.
Schizoid: A pervasive pattern of detachment from social relationships and a restricted range of expression of emotions in interpersonal settings.
Schizophrenia: This mental disorder is characterized by a breakdown of thought processes and emotional responses. Symptoms include auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking. Sufferers from this disorder experience grave dysfunctions in their social functioning and in work.
Schizotypal: A pervasive pattern of social and interpersonal deficits marked by acute discomfort with, and reduced capacity for, close relationships as well as perceptual distortions and eccentricities of behavior.
SCID-D: Structural Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Dissociative Disorders.
Scientific method: A method of investigation that includes systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.
Scrotum: The sac of skin behind and below the penis, containing the testicles.
Second shift: Term used to describe the unpaid work a parent, usually a mother, does in the home in terms of housekeeping and childrearing.
Secure attachments: Attachment style that involves being comfortable with depending on your partner and having your partner depend on you.
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.
Selection: A connection between personality attributes and aspects of the environment that occurs whenever individuals with particular attributes choose particular kinds of environments.
Selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs): A class of antidepressant medications often used to treat SAD that increase the concentration of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain.
Self as autobiographical author: The sense of the self as a storyteller who reconstructs the past and imagines the future in order to articulate an integrative narrative that provides life with some measure of temporal continuity and purpose.
Self as motivated agent: The sense of the self as an intentional force that strives to achieve goals, plans, values, projects, and the like.
Self as social actor: The sense of the self as an embodied actor whose social performances may be construed in terms of more or less consistent self-ascribed traits and social roles.
Self-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 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-enhancement effect: The finding that people can boost their own self-evaluations by comparing themselves to others who rank lower on a particular comparison standard.
Self-esteem: The feeling of confidence in one’s own abilities or worth.
Self-esteem: The extent to which a person feels that he or she is worthy and good. The success or failure that the motivated agent experiences in pursuit of valued goals is a strong determinant of self-esteem.
Self-evaluation maintenance (SEM): A model of social comparison that emphasizes one’s closeness to the comparison target, the relative performance of that target person, and the relevance of the comparison behavior to one’s self-concept.
Self-expansion model: Seeking to increase one’s capacity often through an intimate relationship.
Self-perceptions of aging: An individual’s perceptions of their own aging process; positive perceptions of aging have been shown to be associated with greater longevity and health.
Self-report assessment: A method of measurement associated with mixed and trait models of EI, which evaluates the test taker’s perceived emotion-related skills, distinct personality traits, and other characteristics.
Self-report measure: A type of psychological test in which a person fills out a survey or questionnaire with or without the help of an investigator.
Semen: The fluid that sperm cells are transported within.
Seminal vesicles: Glands that provide sperm cells the energy that allows them to move.
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.
Serotonin norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs): A class of antidepressant medications often used to treat SAD that increase the concentration of serotonin and norepinephrine in the brain.
Sex: Biological category of male or female as defined by physical differences in genetic composition and in reproductive anatomy and function.
Sex: An organism’s means of biological reproduction.
Sexual abuse: The act of forcing a partner to take part in a sex act against his or her will.
Sexual attraction: The capacity a person has to elicit or feel sexual interest.
Sexual consent: Permission that is voluntary, conscious, and able to be withdrawn at any time.
Sexual dysfunctions: A range of clinically significant impairments in a person’s ability to experience pleasure or respond sexually as outlined by the sexual response cycle.
Sexual fluidity: Personal sexual attributes changing due to psychosocial circumstances.
Sexual harassment: A form of gender discrimination based on unwanted treatment related to sexual behaviors or appearance.
Sexual literacy: The lifelong pursuit of accurate human sexuality knowledge, and recognition of its various multicultural, historical, and societal contexts; the ability to critically evaluate sources and discern empirical evidence from unreliable and inaccurate information; the acknowledgment of humans as sexual beings; and an appreciation of sexuality’s contribution to enhancing one’s well-being and pleasure in life.
Sexual orientation: A person’s sexual attraction to other people.
Sexual orientation: Refers to the direction of emotional and erotic attraction toward members of the opposite sex, the same sex, or both sexes.
Sexual response cycle: Excitement, Plateau, Orgasm, and Resolution.
Sexually transmitted infections (STIs): Infections primarily transmitted through social sexual behaviors.
Shared mental model: Knowledge, expectations, conceptualizations, and other cognitive representations that members of a group have in common pertaining to the group and its members, tasks, procedures, and resources.
Shunning: The act of avoiding or ignoring a person, and withholding all social interaction for a period of time. Shunning generally occurs as a punishment and is temporary.
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.
Simulation: Imaginary or real imitation of other people’s behavior or feelings.
Simulation: The process of representing the other person’s mental state.
Single parent family: An individual parent raising a child or children.
Situation model: A mental representation of an event, object, or situation constructed at the time of comprehending a linguistic description.
Skene’s glands: Also called minor vestibular glands, these glands are on the anterior wall of the vagina and are associated with female ejaculation.
Sleep deprivation: A sufficient lack of restorative sleep over a cumulative period so as to cause physical or psychiatric symptoms and affect routine performances of tasks.
Sleep paralysis: Sleep paralysis occurs when the normal paralysis during REM sleep manifests when falling asleep or awakening, often accompanied by hallucinations of danger or a malevolent presence in the room.
Sleep-wake cycle: A daily rhythmic activity cycle, based on 24-hour intervals, that is exhibited by many organisms.
Social and emotional learning (SEL): The real-world application of EI in an educational setting and/or classroom that involves curricula that teach the process of integrating thinking, feeling, and behaving in order to become aware of the self and of others, make responsible decisions, and manage one’s own behaviors and those of others (Elias et al., 1997)
Social anxiety: Excessive anticipation and distress about social situations in which one may be evaluated negatively, rejected, or scrutinized.
Social anxiety disorder (SAD): An anxiety disorder marked by severe and persistent social anxiety and avoidance that interferes with a person’s ability to fulfill their roles in important life domains.
Social anxiety disorder (SAD): A condition marked by acute fear of social situations which lead to worry and diminished day to day functioning.
Social attribution: The way a person explains the motives or behaviors of others.
Social brain: The set of neuroanatomical structures that allows us to understand the actions and intentions of other people.
Social brain hypothesis: The hypothesis that the human brain has evolved, so that humans can maintain larger ingroups.
Social categorization: The act of mentally classifying someone into a social group (e.g., as female, elderly, a librarian).
Social category: Any group in which membership is defined by similarities between its members. Examples include religious, ethnic, and athletic groups.
Social cognition: The way people process and apply information about others.
Social cognition: The study of how people think about the social world.
Social comparison: The process of contrasting one’s personal qualities and outcomes, including beliefs, attitudes, values, abilities, accomplishments, and experiences, to those of other people.
Social comparison: The process by which people understand their own ability or condition by mentally comparing themselves to others.
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 facilitation: Improvement in task performance that occurs when people work in the presence of other people.
Social facilitation: When performance on simple or well-rehearsed tasks is enhanced when we are in the presence of others.
Social identity theory: A theoretical analysis of group processes and intergroup relations that assumes groups influence their members’ self-concepts and self-esteem, particularly when individuals categorize themselves as group members and identify with the group.
Social identity theory: Social identity theory notes that people categorize each other into groups, favoring their own group.
Social influence: When one person causes a change in attitude or behavior in another person, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
Social integration: Active engagement and participation in a broad range of social relationships.
Social integration: The size of your social network, or number of social roles (e.g., son, sister, student, employee, team member).
Social learning theory: This theory of how children form their own gender roles argues that gender roles are learned through reinforcement, punishment, and modeling.
Social loafing: The reduction of individual effort exerted when people work in groups compared with when they work alone.
Social network: Network of people with whom an individual is closely connected; social networks provide emotional, informational, and material support and offer opportunities for social engagement.
Social networks: Networks of social relationships among individuals through which information can travel.
Social neuroscience: An interdisciplinary field concerned with identifying the neural processes underlying social behavior and cognition.
Social or behavioral priming: A field of research that investigates how the activation of one social concept in memory can elicit changes in behavior, physiology, or self-reports of a related social concept without conscious awareness.
Social proof: The mental shortcut based on the assumption that, if everyone is doing it, it must be right.
Social psychology: The branch of psychological science that is mainly concerned with understanding how the presence of others affects our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Social referencing: The process by which one individual consults another’s emotional expressions to determine how to evaluate and respond to circumstances that are ambiguous or uncertain.
Social reputation: The traits and social roles that others attribute to an actor. Actors also have their own conceptions of what they imagine their respective social reputations indeed are in the eyes of others.
Social support: 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 support: A subjective feeling of psychological or physical comfort provided by family, friends, and others.
Social support: A social network’s provision of psychological and material resources that benefit an individual.
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.
Socioemotional Selectivity Theory: Theory proposed to explain the reduction of social partners in older adulthood; posits that older adults focus on meeting emotional over information-gathering goals, and adaptively select social partners who meet this need.
Sociometer model: A conceptual analysis of self-evaluation processes that theorizes self-esteem functions to psychologically monitor of one’s degree of inclusion and exclusion in social groups.
Solidity principle: The idea that two solid masses should not be able to move through one another.
Somatogenesis: Developing from physical/bodily origins.
Somatosensory cortex: A portion of the parietal cortex that processes sensory information from the skin.
Specific abilities: Cognitive abilities that contain an appreciable component of g or general ability, but also contain a large component of a more content-focused talent such as mathematical, spatial, or verbal ability; patterns of specific abilities channel development down different paths as a function of an individual’s relative strengths and weaknesses.
Specific vulnerabilities: How our experiences lead us to focus and channel our anxiety.
Standardize: Assessments that are given in the exact same manner to all people . With regards to intelligence tests standardized scores are individual scores that are computed to be referenced against normative scores for a population (see “norm”).
State: When a symptom is acute, or transient, lasting from a few minutes to a few hours.
Stepfamily: A family formed, after divorce or widowhood, through remarriage.
Stereotype Content Model: Stereotype Content Model shows that social groups are viewed according to their perceived warmth and competence.
Stereotype threat: The phenomenon in which people are concerned that they will conform to a stereotype or that their performance does conform to that stereotype, especially in instances in which the stereotype is brought to their conscious awareness.
Stereotypes: Stereotype is a belief that characterizes people based merely on their group membership.
Stereotypes: The beliefs or attributes we associate with a specific social group. Stereotyping refers to the act of assuming that because someone is a member of a particular group, he or she possesses the group’s attributes. For example, stereotyping occurs when we assume someone is unemotional just because he is man, or particularly athletic just because she is African American.
Stereotypes: Our general beliefs about the traits or behaviors shared by group of people.
Stereotyping: A mental process of using information shortcuts about a group to effectively navigate social situations or make decisions.
Stigmatized group: A group that suffers from social disapproval based on some characteristic that sets them apart from the majority.
Strange situation: A laboratory task that involves briefly separating and reuniting infants and their primary caregivers as a way of studying individual differences in attachment behavior.
Stress: A threat or challenge to our well-being. Stress can have both a psychological component, which consists of our subjective thoughts and feelings about being threatened or challenged, as well as a physiological component, which consists of our body’s response to the threat or challenge (see “fight or flight response”).
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.
Stress reaction: The tendency to become easily distressed by the normal challenges of life.
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.
Subjective age: A multidimensional construct that indicates how old (or young) a person feels and into which age group a person categorizes him- or herself
Subjective social variables: Targets of research interest that are not necessarily factual but are related to personal opinions or feelings
Subjective well-being: The scientific term used to describe how people experience the quality of their lives in terms of life satisfaction and emotional judgments of positive and negative affect.
Subjective well-being: The name that scientists give to happiness—thinking and feeling that our lives are going very well.
Subjective well-being scales: Self-report surveys or questionnaires in which participants indicate their levels of subjective well-being, by responding to items with a number that indicates how well off they feel.
Subtle biases: Subtle biases are automatic, ambiguous, and ambivalent, but real in their consequences.
Successful aging: Includes three components: avoiding disease, maintaining high levels of cognitive and physical functioning, and having an actively engaged lifestyle.
Suicidal ideation: Recurring thoughts about suicide, including considering or planning for suicide, or preoccupation with suicide.
Superior temporal sulcus: The sulcus (a fissure in the surface of the brain) that separates the superior temporal gyrus from the middle temporal gyrus. Located in the temporal lobes (parallel to the ears), it is involved in perception of biological motion or the movement of animate objects.
Supernatural: Developing from origins beyond the visible observable universe.
Support support network: The people who care about and support a person.
Survey method: One method of research that uses a predetermined and methodical list of questions, systematically given to samples of individuals, to predict behaviors within the population.
Survey research: A method of research that involves administering a questionnaire to respondents in person, by telephone, through the mail, or over the internet.
Sympathetic nervous system: A branch of the autonomic nervous system that controls many of the body’s internal organs. Activity of the SNS generally mobilizes the body’s fight or flight response.
Synapse: The tiny space separating neurons.
Synchrony: Two people displaying the same behaviors or having the same internal states (typically because of mutual mimicry).
Syndrome: Involving a particular group of signs and symptoms.
Syntax: Rules by which words are strung together to form sentences.
System 1: Our intuitive decision-making system, which is typically fast, automatic, effortless, implicit, and emotional.
System 2: Our more deliberative decision-making system, which is slower, conscious, effortful, explicit, and logical.
Teamwork: The process by which members of the team combine their knowledge, skills, abilities, and other resources through a coordinated series of actions to produce an outcome.
Temperament: A child’s innate personality; biologically based personality, including qualities such as activity level, emotional reactivity, sociability, mood, and soothability.
Temperament: Early emerging differences in reactivity and self-regulation, which constitutes a foundation for personality development.
Temporal parietal junction: The area where the temporal lobes (parallel to the ears) and parieta lobes (at the top of the head toward the back) meet. This area is important in mentalizing and distinguishing between the self and others.
Terror management theory (TMT): A theory that proposes that humans manage the anxiety that stems from the inevitability of death by embracing frameworks of meaning such as cultural values and beliefs.
Tertiary education: Education or training beyond secondary school, usually taking place in a college, university, or vocational training program.
Testicles: Also called testes—the glands producing testosterone, progesterone, small amounts of estrogen, and sperm cells.
The Age 5-to-7 Shift: Cognitive and social changes that occur in the early elementary school years that result in the child’s developing a more purposeful, planful, and goal-directed approach to life, setting the stage for the emergence of the self as a motivated agent.
The “I”: The self as knower, the sense of the self as a subject who encounters (knows, works on) itself (the Me).
The “Me”: The self as known, the sense of the self as the object or target of the I’s knowledge and work.
The norm of reciprocity: The normative pressure to repay, in equitable value, what another person has given to us.
The rule of scarcity: People tend to perceive things as more attractive when their availability is limited, or when they stand to lose the opportunity to acquire them on favorable terms.
The triad of trust: We are most vulnerable to persuasion when the source is perceived as an authority, as honest and likable.
Theory of mind: Emerging around the age of 4, the child’s understanding that other people have minds in which are located desires and beliefs, and that desires and beliefs, thereby, motivate behavior.
Theory of mind: Children’s growing understanding of the mental states that affect people’s behavior.
Theory of mind: The human capacity to understand minds, a capacity that is made up of a collection of concepts (e.g., agent, intentionality) and processes (e.g., goal detection, imitation, empathy, perspective taking).
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.
“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.
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.)
Traditional family: Two or more people related by blood, marriage, and—occasionally-- by adoption.
Trait: When a symptom forms part of the personality or character.
“Traitement moral” (moral treatment): A therapeutic regimen of improved nutrition, living conditions, and rewards for productive behavior that has been attributed to Philippe Pinel during the French Revolution, when he released mentally ill patients from their restraints and treated them with compassion and dignity rather than with contempt and denigration.
Transformation: The term for personality changes associated with experience and life events.
Transgender: A person whose gender identity or gender role does not correspond with his/her birth sex.
Transgender: A term used to describe individuals whose gender does not match their biological sex.
Transgender female (TGF): A transgender person whose birth sex was male.
Transgender male (TGM): A transgender person whose birth sex was female.
Trauma: An event or situation that causes great distress and disruption, and that creates substantial, lasting damage to the psychological development of a person.
Trephination: The drilling of a hole in the skull, presumably as a way of treating psychological disorders.
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.
Trigger features: Specific, sometimes minute, aspects of a situation that activate fixed action patterns.
Trimesters: Phases of gestation, beginning with the last menstrual period and ending about 40 weeks later; each trimester is roughly 13 weeks in length.
Two-parent family: A family consisting of two parents—typical both of the biological parents-- and their children.
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.
Typicality: The difference in “goodness” of category members, ranging from the most typical (the prototype) to borderline members.
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.
Under-determined or misspecified causal models: Psychological frameworks that miss or neglect to include one or more of the critical determinants of the phenomenon under analysis.
Uninvolved parenting: Parenting that is low in demandingness and low in support.
Unusual uses: A test of divergent thinking that asks participants to find many uses for commonplace objects, such as a brick or paperclip.
Upward comparisons: Making mental comparisons to people who are perceived to be superior on the standard of comparison.
Urethra: The tube that carries urine and semen outside of the body.
Uterus: Also called the womb—the female’s internal sex organ where offspring develop until birth.
Vagina: Also called the birth canal—a muscular canal that spans from the cervix to the introitus, it acts as a transport mechanism for sperm cells coming in, and menstrual fluid and babies going out.
Vagus nerve: The 10th cranial nerve. The mammalian vagus has an older unmyelinated branch which originates in the dorsal motor complex and a more recently evolved, myelinated branch, with origins in the ventral vagal complex including the nucleus ambiguous. The vagus is the primary source of autonomic-parasympathetic regulation for various internal organs, including the heart, lungs and other parts of the viscera. The vagus nerve is primarily sensory (afferent), transmitting abundant visceral input to the central nervous system.
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).
Vas deferens: A muscular tube that transports mature sperm to the urethra.
Vasectomy: A surgical form of birth control in males, in which the vas deferens is intentionally damaged.
Vasopressin: A nine amino acid mammalian neuropeptide. Vasopressin is synthesized primarily in the brain, but also may be made in other tissues. Vasopressin is best known for its effects on the cardiovascular system (increasing blood pressure) and also the kidneys (causing water retention). Vasopressin has effects on brain tissue, but also acts throughout the body.
Verbal report paradigms: Research methods that require participants to report on their experiences, thoughts, feelings, etc., using language.
Vestibular glands (VGs): Also called major vestibular glands, these glands are located just to the left and right of the vagina, and produce lubrication to aid in sexual intercourse.
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).
Violence: Aggression intended to cause extreme physical harm, such as injury or death.
Visual perspective taking: Can refer to visual perspective taking (perceiving something from another person’s spatial vantage point) or more generally to effortful mental state inference (trying to infer the other person’s thoughts, desires, emotions).
Vivid dreams: A dream that is very clear, where the individual can remember the dream in great detail.
Voluntary responses: Behaviors that a person has control over and completes by choice.
Vulva: The female’s external sex organs.
WEIRD cultures: Cultures that are western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.
Wolffian ducts: Primitive male internal sex organs.
Working memory: The ability to maintain information over a short period of time, such as 30 seconds or less.
Working memory: Memory system that allows for information to be simultaneously stored and utilized or manipulated.
Working models: An understanding of how relationships operate; viewing oneself as worthy of love and others as trustworthy.
Zygote: Fertilized ovum.