Vocabulary

Absolute stability: Consistency in the level or amount of a personality attribute over time.
Action Potential: A transient all-or-nothing electrical current that is conducted down the axon when the membrane potential reaches the threshold of excitation.
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.
Adoption study: A behavior genetic research method that involves comparison of adopted children to their adoptive and biological parents.
Age effects: Differences in personality between groups of different ages that are related to maturation and development instead of birth cohort differences.
Agender: An individual who may have no gender or may describe themselves as having a neutral gender.
Agreeableness: A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be compassionate, cooperative, warm, and caring to others. People low in agreeableness tend to be rude, hostile, and to pursue their own interests over those of others.
Ambivalent sexism: A concept of gender attitudes that encompasses both positive and negative qualities.
Attraction: A connection between personality attributes and aspects of the environment that occurs because individuals with particular traits are drawn to certain environments.
Attrition: A connection between personality attributes and aspects of the environment that occurs because individuals with particular traits drop out from certain environments.
Authoritative: A parenting style characterized by high (but reasonable) expectations for children’s behavior, good communication, warmth and nurturance, and the use of reasoning (rather than coercion) as preferred responses to children’s misbehavior.
Autobiographical memory: Memory for the events of one’s life.
Axon: Part of the neuron that extends off the soma, splitting several times to connect with other neurons; main output of the neuron.
Basic-level category: The neutral, preferred category for a given object, at an intermediate level of specificity.
Behavioral genetics: The empirical science of how genes and environments combine to generate behavior.
Benevolent sexism: The “positive” element of ambivalent sexism, which recognizes that women are perceived as needing to be protected, supported, and adored by men.
Bigender: An individual who identifies as two genders.
Binary: The idea that gender has two separate and distinct categories (male and female) and that a person must be either one or the other.
Birth cohort: Individuals born in a particular year or span of time.
Blocking: In classical conditioning, the finding that no conditioning occurs to a stimulus if it is combined with a previously conditioned stimulus during conditioning trials. Suggests that information, surprise value, or prediction error is important in conditioning.
Brain Stem: The “trunk” of the brain comprised of the medulla, pons, midbrain, and diencephalon.
Broca’s Area: An area in the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere. Implicated in language production.
Categorize: To sort or arrange different items into classes or categories.
Category: A set of entities that are equivalent in some way. Usually the items are similar to one another.
Central Nervous System: The portion of the nervous system that includes the brain and spinal cord.
Cerebellum: The distinctive structure at the back of the brain, Latin for “small brain.”
Cerebrum: Usually refers to the cerebral cortex and associated white matter, but in some texts includes the subcortical structures.
Cisgender: A term used to describe individuals whose gender matches their biological sex.
Classical conditioning: The procedure in which an initially neutral stimulus (the conditioned stimulus, or CS) is paired with an unconditioned stimulus (or US). The result is that the conditioned stimulus begins to elicit a conditioned response (CR). Classical conditioning is nowadays considered important as both a behavioral phenomenon and as a method to study simple associative learning. Same as Pavlovian conditioning.
Cohort effects: Differences in personality that are related to historical and social factors unique to individuals born in a particular year.
Concept: The mental representation of a category.
Conditioned compensatory response: In classical conditioning, a conditioned response that opposes, rather than is the same as, the unconditioned response. It functions to reduce the strength of the unconditioned response. Often seen in conditioning when drugs are used as unconditioned stimuli.
Conditioned response (CR): The response that is elicited by the conditioned stimulus after classical conditioning has taken place.
Conditioned stimulus (CS): An initially neutral stimulus (like a bell, light, or tone) that elicits a conditioned response after it has been associated with an unconditioned stimulus.
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.
Consolidation: The process occurring after encoding that is believed to stabilize memory traces.
Context: Stimuli that are in the background whenever learning occurs. For instance, the Skinner box or room in which learning takes place is the classic example of a context. However, “context” can also be provided by internal stimuli, such as the sensory effects of drugs (e.g., being under the influence of alcohol has stimulus properties that provide a context) and mood states (e.g., being happy or sad). It can also be provided by a specific period in time—the passage of time is sometimes said to change the “temporal context.”
Continuous distributions: Characteristics can go from low to high, with all different intermediate values possible. One does not simply have the trait or not have it, but can possess varying amounts of it.
Contralateral: Literally “opposite side”; used to refer to the fact that the two hemispheres of the brain process sensory information and motor commands for the opposite side of the body (e.g., the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body).
Corpus Callosum: The thick bundle of nerve cells that connect the two hemispheres of the brain and allow them to communicate.
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.
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.
Cue overload principle: The principle stating that the more memories that are associated to a particular retrieval cue, the less effective the cue will be in prompting retrieval of any one memory.
Cumulative continuity principle: The generalization that personality attributes show increasing stability with age and experience.
Dendrites: Part of a neuron that extends away from the cell body and is the main input to the neuron.
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.
Differential stability: Consistency in the rank-ordering of personality across two or more measurement occasions.
Diffuse Optical Imaging (DOI): A neuroimaging technique that infers brain activity by measuring changes in light as it is passed through the skull and surface of the brain.
Discriminative stimulus: In operant conditioning, a stimulus that signals whether the response will be reinforced. It is said to “set the occasion” for the operant response.
Distinctiveness: The principle that unusual events (in a context of similar events) will be recalled and recognized better than uniform (nondistinctive) events.
Effortful control: A temperament quality that enables children to be more successful in motivated self-regulation.
Electroencephalography (EEG): A neuroimaging technique that measures electrical brain activity via multiple electrodes on the scalp.
Encoding: The initial experience of perceiving and learning events.
Encoding specificity principle: The hypothesis that a retrieval cue will be effective to the extent that information encoded from the cue overlaps or matches information in the engram or memory trace.
Engrams: A term indicating the change in the nervous system representing an event; also, memory trace.
Episodic memory: Memory for events in a particular time and place.
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.
Exemplar: An example in memory that is labeled as being in a particular category.
Extinction: Decrease in the strength of a learned behavior that occurs when the conditioned stimulus is presented without the unconditioned stimulus (in classical conditioning) or when the behavior is no longer reinforced (in instrumental conditioning). The term describes both the procedure (the US or reinforcer is no longer presented) as well as the result of the procedure (the learned response declines). Behaviors that have been reduced in strength through extinction are said to be “extinguished.”
Extraversion: A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be sociable, outgoing, active, and assertive.
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.
Family Stress Model: A description of the negative effects of family financial difficulty on child adjustment through the effects of economic stress on parents’ depressed mood, increased marital problems, and poor parenting.
Fear conditioning: A type of classical or Pavlovian conditioning in which the conditioned stimulus (CS) is associated with an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US), such as a foot shock. As a consequence of learning, the CS comes to evoke fear. The phenomenon is thought to be involved in the development of anxiety disorders in humans.
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.
Flashbulb memory: Vivid personal memories of receiving the news of some momentous (and usually emotional) event.
Frontal Lobe: The front most (anterior) part of the cerebrum; anterior to the central sulcus and responsible for motor output and planning, language, judgment, and decision-making.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI): Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): A neuroimaging technique that infers brain activity by measuring changes in oxygen levels in the blood.
Gender: The cultural, social, and psychological meanings that are associated with masculinity and femininity.
Gender constancy: The awareness that gender is constant and does not change simply by changing external attributes; develops between 3 and 6 years of age.
Gender discrimination: Differential treatment on the basis of gender.
Gender identity: A person’s psychological sense of being male or female.
Gender roles: The behaviors, attitudes, and personality traits that are designated as either masculine or feminine in a given culture.
Gender schema theory: This theory of how children form their own gender roles argues that children actively organize others’ behavior, activities, and attributes into gender categories or schemas.
Gender 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.
Goal-directed behavior: Instrumental behavior that is influenced by the animal’s knowledge of the association between the behavior and its consequence and the current value of the consequence. Sensitive to the reinforcer devaluation effect.
Goodness of fit: The match or synchrony between a child’s temperament and characteristics of parental care that contributes to positive or negative personality development. A good “fit” means that parents have accommodated to the child’s temperamental attributes, and this contributes to positive personality growth and better adjustment.
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.
Habit: Instrumental behavior that occurs automatically in the presence of a stimulus and is no longer influenced by the animal’s knowledge of the value of the reinforcer. Insensitive to the reinforcer devaluation effect.
Heritability coefficient: An easily misinterpreted statistical construct that purports to measure the role of genetics in the explanation of differences among individuals.
Heterotypic stability: Consistency in the underlying psychological attribute across development regardless of any changes in how the attribute is expressed at different ages.
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.
Homotypic stability: Consistency of the exact same thoughts, feelings, and behaviors across development.
Hostile attribution bias: The tendency of some individuals to interpret ambiguous social cues and interactions as examples of aggressiveness, disrespect, or antagonism.
Hostile sexism: The negative element of ambivalent sexism, which includes the attitudes that women are inferior and incompetent relative to men.
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.
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.
Instrumental conditioning: Process in which animals learn about the relationship between their behaviors and their consequences. Also known as operant conditioning.
Law of effect: The idea that instrumental or operant responses are influenced by their effects. Responses that are followed by a pleasant state of affairs will be strengthened and those that are followed by discomfort will be weakened. Nowadays, the term refers to the idea that operant or instrumental behaviors are lawfully controlled by their consequences.
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.
Limbic System: Includes the subcortical structures of the amygdala and hippocampal formation as well as some cortical structures; responsible for aversion and gratification.
Longitudinal study/design: A research design that follows the same group of individuals at multiple time points.
Manipulation: A connection between personality attributes and aspects of the environment that occurs whenever individuals with particular traits actively shape their environments.
Maturity principle: The generalization that personality attributes associated with the successful fulfillment of adult roles increase with age and experience.
Memory traces: A term indicating the change in the nervous system representing an event.
Misinformation effect: When erroneous information occurring after an event is remembered as having been part of the original event.
Mnemonic devices: A strategy for remembering large amounts of information, usually involving imaging events occurring on a journey or with some other set of memorized cues.
Myelin Sheath: Fatty tissue, that insulates the axons of the neurons; myelin is necessary for normal conduction of electrical impulses among neurons.
Nervous System: The body’s network for electrochemical communication. This system includes all the nerves cells in the body.
Neurons: Individual brain cells
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.
Neurotransmitters: Chemical substance released by the presynaptic terminal button that acts on the postsynaptic cell.
Observational learning: Learning by observing the behavior of others.
Occipital Lobe: The back most (posterior) part of the cerebrum; involved in vision.
Openness to Experience: A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to seek out and to appreciate new things, including thoughts, feelings, values, and experiences.
Operant: A behavior that is controlled by its consequences. The simplest example is the rat’s lever-pressing, which is controlled by the presentation of the reinforcer.
Operant conditioning: See instrumental conditioning.
Parietal Lobe: The part of the cerebrum between the frontal and occipital lobes; involved in bodily sensations, visual attention, and integrating the senses.
Pavlovian conditioning: See classical conditioning.
Peripheral Nervous System: All of the nerve cells that connect the central nervous system to all the other parts of the body.
Personality: Enduring predispositions that characterize a person, such as styles of thought, feelings and behavior.
Personality traits: Enduring dispositions in behavior that show differences across individuals, and which tend to characterize the person across varying types of situations.
Person–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.
Positron Emission Tomography (PET): A neuroimaging technique that measures brain activity by detecting the presence of a radioactive substance in the brain that is initially injected into the bloodstream and then pulled in by active brain tissue.
Prediction error: When the outcome of a conditioning trial is different from that which is predicted by the conditioned stimuli that are present on the trial (i.e., when the US is surprising). Prediction error is necessary to create Pavlovian conditioning (and associative learning generally). As learning occurs over repeated conditioning trials, the conditioned stimulus increasingly predicts the unconditioned stimulus, and prediction error declines. Conditioning works to correct or reduce prediction error.
Preparedness: The idea that an organism’s evolutionary history can make it easy to learn a particular association. Because of preparedness, you are more likely to associate the taste of tequila, and not the circumstances surrounding drinking it, with getting sick. Similarly, humans are more likely to associate images of spiders and snakes than flowers and mushrooms with aversive outcomes like shocks.
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.
Punisher: A stimulus that decreases the strength of an operant behavior when it is made a consequence of the behavior.
Quantitative genetics: Scientific and mathematical methods for inferring genetic and environmental processes based on the degree of genetic and environmental similarity among organisms.
Quantitative law of effect: A mathematical rule that states that the effectiveness of a reinforcer at strengthening an operant response depends on the amount of reinforcement earned for all alternative behaviors. A reinforcer is less effective if there is a lot of reinforcement in the environment for other behaviors.
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.
Recoding: The ubiquitous process during learning of taking information in one form and converting it to another form, usually one more easily remembered.
Reinforcer: Any consequence of a behavior that strengthens the behavior or increases the likelihood that it will be performed it again.
Reinforcer devaluation effect: The finding that an animal will stop performing an instrumental response that once led to a reinforcer if the reinforcer is separately made aversive or undesirable.
Renewal effect: Recovery of an extinguished response that occurs when the context is changed after extinction. Especially strong when the change of context involves return to the context in which conditioning originally occurred. Can occur after extinction in either classical or instrumental conditioning.
Retrieval: The process of accessing stored information.
Retroactive interference: The phenomenon whereby events that occur after some particular event of interest will usually cause forgetting of the original event.
Schemas: The gender categories into which, according to gender schema theory, children actively organize others’ behavior, activities, and attributes.
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.
Semantic memory: The more or less permanent store of knowledge that people have.
Sex: Biological category of male or female as defined by physical differences in genetic composition and in reproductive anatomy and function.
Sexual harassment: A form of gender discrimination based on unwanted treatment related to sexual behaviors or appearance.
Sexual orientation: Refers to the direction of emotional and erotic attraction toward members of the opposite sex, the same sex, or both sexes.
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 Learning Theory: The theory that people can learn new responses and behaviors by observing the behavior of others.
Social models: Authorities that are the targets for observation and who model behaviors.
Social referencing: The process by which one individual consults another’s emotional expressions to determine how to evaluate and respond to circumstances that are ambiguous or uncertain.
Soma: Cell body of a neuron that contains the nucleus and genetic information, and directs protein synthesis.
Spatial Resolution: A term that refers to how small the elements of an image are; high spatial resolution means the device or technique can resolve very small elements; in neuroscience it describes how small of a structure in the brain can be imaged.
Split-brain Patient: A patient who has had most or all of his or her corpus callosum severed.
Spontaneous recovery: Recovery of an extinguished response that occurs with the passage of time after extinction. Can occur after extinction in either classical or instrumental conditioning.
Stimulus control: When an operant behavior is controlled by a stimulus that precedes it.
Storage: The stage in the learning/memory process that bridges encoding and retrieval; the persistence of memory over time.
Stress reaction: The tendency to become easily distressed by the normal challenges of life.
Synapses: Junction between the presynaptic terminal button of one neuron and the dendrite, axon, or soma of another postsynaptic neuron.
Synaptic Gap: Also known as the synaptic cleft; the small space between the presynaptic terminal button and the postsynaptic dendritic spine, axon, or soma.
Taste aversion learning: The phenomenon in which a taste is paired with sickness, and this causes the organism to reject—and dislike—that taste in the future.
Temperament: Early emerging differences in reactivity and self-regulation, which constitutes a foundation for personality development.
Temporal Lobe: The part of the cerebrum in front of (anterior to) the occipital lobe and below the lateral fissure; involved in vision, auditory processing, memory, and integrating vision and audition.
Temporal Resolution: A term that refers to how small a unit of time can be measured; high temporal resolution means capable of resolving very small units of time; in neuroscience it describes how precisely in time a process can be measured in the brain.
Theory of mind: Children’s growing understanding of the mental states that affect people’s behavior.
Transformation: The term for personality changes associated with experience and life events.
Transgender: A term used to describe individuals whose gender does not match their biological sex.
Twin studies: A behavior genetic research method that involves comparison of the similarity of identical (monozygotic; MZ) and fraternal (dizygotic; DZ) twins.
Typicality: The difference in “goodness” of category members, ranging from the most typical (the prototype) to borderline members.
Unconditioned response (UR): In classical conditioning, an innate response that is elicited by a stimulus before (or in the absence of) conditioning.
Unconditioned stimulus (US): In classical conditioning, the stimulus that elicits the response before conditioning occurs.
Vicarious reinforcement: Learning that occurs by observing the reinforcement or punishment of another person.