Vocabulary

Absolute threshold: The smallest amount of stimulation needed for detection by a sense.
Acceptance and commitment therapy: A therapeutic approach designed to foster nonjudgmental observation of one’s own mental processes.
Action Potential: A transient all-or-nothing electrical current that is conducted down the axon when the membrane potential reaches the threshold of excitation.
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.
Adoption study: A behavior genetic research method that involves comparison of adopted children to their adoptive and biological parents.
Agender: An individual who may have no gender or may describe themselves as having a neutral gender.
Aggression: Any behavior intended to harm another person who does not want to be harmed.
Agnosia: Loss of the ability to perceive stimuli.
Agonists: A drug that increases or enhances a neurotransmitter’s effect.
Alogia: A reduction in the amount of speech and/or increased pausing before the initiation of speech.
Ambivalent sexism: A concept of gender attitudes that encompasses both positive and negative qualities.
Ambulatory assessment: An overarching term to describe methodologies that assess the behavior, physiology, experience, and environments of humans in naturalistic settings.
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.
Anhedonia: Loss of interest or pleasure in activities one previously found enjoyable or rewarding.
Anhedonia/amotivation: A reduction in the drive or ability to take the steps or engage in actions necessary to obtain the potentially positive outcome.
Anosmia: Loss of the ability to smell.
Antagonist: A drug that blocks a neurotransmitter’s effect.
Anterograde amnesia: Inability to form new memories for facts and events after the onset of amnesia.
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.).
Apartheid: A political system with policies that promote segregation of the basis of race. The word means “apartness” in Afrikaans, and the system was in use in South Africa from the 1950s through the 1990s.
Attributional style: The tendency by which a person infers the cause or meaning of behaviors or events.
Audience design: Constructing utterances to suit the audience’s knowledge.
Audition: Ability to process auditory stimuli. Also called hearing.
Auditory canal: Tube running from the outer ear to the middle ear.
Auditory hair cells: Receptors in the cochlea that transduce sound into electrical potentials.
Authoritative: A parenting style characterized by high (but reasonable) expectations for children’s behavior, good communication, warmth and nurturance, and the use of reasoning (rather than coercion) as preferred responses to children’s misbehavior.
Autobiographical memory: Memory for the events of one’s life.
Autobiographical reasoning: The ability, typically developed in adolescence, to derive substantive conclusions about the self from analyzing one’s own personal experiences.
Automatic: Automatic biases are unintended, immediate, and irresistible.
Automatic thoughts: Thoughts that occur spontaneously; often used to describe problematic thoughts that maintain mental disorders.
Availability heuristic: The tendency to judge the frequency or likelihood of an event by the ease with which relevant instances come to mind.
Aversive racism: Aversive racism is unexamined racial bias that the person does not intend and would reject, but that avoids inter-racial contact.
Avoidant: A pervasive pattern of social inhibition, feelings of inadequacy, and hypersensitivity to negative evaluation.
Awareness: A conscious experience or the capability of having conscious experiences, which is distinct from self-awareness, the conscious understanding of one’s own existence and individuality.
Axon: Part of the neuron that extends off the soma, splitting several times to connect with other neurons; main output of the neuron.
Balancing between goals: Shifting between a focal goal and other goals or temptations by putting less effort into the focal goal—usually with the intention of coming back to the focal goal at a later point in time.
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.
Behaviorism: The study of 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.
Biases: The systematic and predictable mistakes that influence the judgment of even very talented human beings.
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.
Bigender: An individual who identifies as two genders.
Bigotry: An unreasonable opinion or prejudice against a category of people.
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.
Binocular disparity: Difference is images processed by the left and right eyes.
Binocular vision: Our ability to perceive 3D and depth because of the difference between the images on each of our retinas.
Blatant biases: Blatant biases are conscious beliefs, feelings, and behavior that people are perfectly willing to admit, are mostly hostile, and openly favor their own group.
Blocking: In classical conditioning, the finding that no conditioning occurs to a stimulus if it is combined with a previously conditioned stimulus during conditioning trials. Suggests that information, surprise value, or prediction error is important in conditioning.
Blood Alcohol Content (BAC): Blood Alcohol Content (BAC): a measure of the percentage of alcohol found in a person’s blood. This measure is typically the standard used to determine the extent to which a person is intoxicated, as in the case of being too impaired to drive a vehicle.
Borderline: A pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity.
“Bottom-up” or external causes of happiness: Situational factors outside the person that influence his or her subjective well-being, such as good and bad events and circumstances such as health and wealth.
Bottom-up processing: Building up to perceptual experience from individual pieces.
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.
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.
Catatonia: Behaviors that seem to reflect a reduction in responsiveness to the external environment. This can include holding unusual postures for long periods of time, failing to respond to verbal or motor prompts from another person, or excessive and seemingly purposeless motor activity.
Categorize: To sort or arrange different items into classes or categories.
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.
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.
Character strength: A positive trait or quality deemed to be morally good and is valued for itself as well as for promoting individual and collective well-being.
Chemical senses: Our ability to process the environmental stimuli of smell and taste.
Chronic 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).
Chunk: The process of grouping information together using our knowledge.
Chutes and Ladders: A numerical board game that seems to be useful for building numerical knowledge.
Circadian Rhythm: Circadian Rhythm: The physiological sleep-wake cycle. It is influenced by exposure to sunlight as well as daily schedule and activity. Biologically, it includes changes in body temperature, blood pressure and blood sugar.
Cisgender: A term used to describe individuals whose gender matches their biological sex.
Classical conditioning: Describes stimulus-stimulus associative learning.
Classical conditioning: The procedure in which an initially neutral stimulus (the conditioned stimulus, or CS) is paired with an unconditioned stimulus (or US). The result is that the conditioned stimulus begins to elicit a conditioned response (CR). Classical conditioning is nowadays considered important as both a behavioral phenomenon and as a method to study simple associative learning. Same as Pavlovian conditioning.
Cochlea: Spiral bone structure in the inner ear containing auditory hair cells.
Cognitive bias modification: Using exercises (e.g., computer games) to change problematic thinking habits.
Cognitive psychology: The study of mental processes.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT): A family of approaches with the goal of changing the thoughts and behaviors that influence psychopathology.
Collective memory: Knowledge that is shared among members of a group about the historical experiences of that group.
Collective self-worth: The idea that a person's self-worth is influenced by the treatment of and perceptions about a group to which that person belongs.
Collectivism: Belief system that emphasizes the duties and obligations that each person has toward others.
Color-blind race ideology: A belief that racism is a past-- rather than a current-- phenomenon. Also, the idea that the best way to eliminate discrimination is to ignore categorical differences between people and their experiences.
Commitment: The sense that a goal is both valuable and attainable
Common ground: Information that is shared by people who engage in a conversation.
Comorbidity: Describes a state of having more than one psychological or physical disorder at a given time.
Concept: The mental representation of a category.
Concrete operations stage: Piagetian stage between ages 7 and 12 when children can think logically about concrete situations but not engage in systematic scientific reasoning.
Conditioned compensatory response: In classical conditioning, a conditioned response that opposes, rather than is the same as, the unconditioned response. It functions to reduce the strength of the unconditioned response. Often seen in conditioning when drugs are used as unconditioned stimuli.
Conditioned response (CR): The response that is elicited by the conditioned stimulus after classical conditioning has taken place.
Conditioned stimulus (CS): An initially neutral stimulus (like a bell, light, or tone) that elicits a conditioned response after it has been associated with an unconditioned stimulus.
Cones: Photoreceptors of the retina sensitive to color. Located primarily in the fovea.
Conformity: Changing one’s attitude or behavior to match a perceived social norm.
Confounds: Factors that undermine the ability to draw causal inferences from an experiment.
Conscience: The cognitive, emotional, and social influences that cause young children to create and act consistently with internal standards of conduct.
Conscious experience: The first-person perspective of a mental event, such as feeling some sensory input, a memory, an idea, an emotion, a mood, or a continuous temporal sequence of happenings.
Conscious goal activation: When a person is fully aware of contextual influences and resulting goal-directed behavior.
Consciousness: Consciousness: the awareness or deliberate perception of a stimulus
Consciousness: Awareness of ourselves and our environment.
Conservation problems: Problems pioneered by Piaget in which physical transformation of an object or set of objects changes a perceptually salient dimension but not the quantity that is being asked about.
Consolidation: The process occurring after encoding that is believed to stabilize memory traces.
Consolidation: Process by which a memory trace is stabilized and transformed into a more durable form.
Contemplative science: A research area concerned with understanding how contemplative practices such as meditation can affect individuals, including changes in their behavior, their emotional reactivity, their cognitive abilities, and their brains. Contemplative science also seeks insights into conscious experience that can be gained from first-person observations by individuals who have gained extraordinary expertise in introspection.
Context: Stimuli that are in the background whenever learning occurs. For instance, the Skinner box or room in which learning takes place is the classic example of a context. However, “context” can also be provided by internal stimuli, such as the sensory effects of drugs (e.g., being under the influence of alcohol has stimulus properties that provide a context) and mood states (e.g., being happy or sad). It can also be provided by a specific period in time—the passage of time is sometimes said to change the “temporal context.”
Continuous development: Ways in which development occurs in a gradual incremental manner, rather than through sudden jumps.
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.
Correlation: Measures the association between two variables, or how they go together.
Critical race theory: Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a critical framework that emerged as an intervention in the 1970s to explain how racism and other tools of oppression shape law and society. Building on the pioneering work of activists and legal scholars like Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Mari Matsuda, CRT has influenced social scientists in fields outside of legal studies including education, sociology, public health, and psychology. The framework provides a foundation for understanding racism as systemic, the ideologies that reinforce and maintain racist structures, and the value of perspectives and theories grounded in the experiences of oppressed and marginalized peoples. For an introduction to CRT, we recommend Delgado & Stefancic, 2012. To learn more about the intersections of psychology and CRT see Jones, 1998; Adams & Salter, 2011, and Salter & Adams, 2013.
Cue overload principle: The principle stating that the more memories that are associated to a particular retrieval cue, the less effective the cue will be in prompting retrieval of any one memory.
Cues: Cues: a stimulus that has a particular significance to the perceiver (e.g., a sight or a sound that has special relevance to the person who saw or heard it)
Daily Diary method: A methodology where participants complete a questionnaire about their thoughts, feelings, and behavior of the day at the end of the day.
Dark adaptation: Adjustment of eye to low levels of light.
Day reconstruction method (DRM): A methodology where participants describe their experiences and behavior of a given day retrospectively upon a systematic reconstruction on the following day.
Decay: The fading of memories with the passage of time.
Declarative memory: Conscious memories for facts and events.
Deliberative phase: The first of the two basic stages of self-regulation in which individuals decide which of many potential goals to pursue at a given point in time.
Delusions: False beliefs that are often fixed, hard to change even in the presence of conflicting information, and often culturally influenced in their content.
Dendrites: Part of a neuron that extends away from the cell body and is the main input to the neuron.
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.
Depressants: Depressants: a class of drugs that slow down the body’s physiological and mental processes.
Depth perception: The ability to actively perceive the distance from oneself of objects in the environment.
Descriptive norm: The perception of what most people do in a given situation.
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.
Diagnostic criteria: The specific criteria used to determine whether an individual has a specific type of psychiatric disorder. Commonly used diagnostic criteria are included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, 5th Edition (DSM-5) and the Internal Classification of Disorders, Version 9 (ICD-9).
Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT): A treatment often used for borderline personality disorder that incorporates both cognitive-behavioral and mindfulness elements.
Dialectical worldview: A perspective in DBT that emphasizes the joint importance of change and acceptance.
Dichotic listening: A task in which different audio streams are presented to each ear. Typically, people are asked to monitor one stream while ignoring the other.
Differential threshold (or difference threshold): The smallest difference needed in order to differentiate two stimuli. (See Just Noticeable Difference (JND))
Diffuse Optical Imaging (DOI): A neuroimaging technique that infers brain activity by measuring changes in light as it is passed through the skull and surface of the brain.
Discontinuous development: Discontinuous development
Discrimination: Discrimination is behavior that advantages or disadvantages people merely based on their group membership.
Discrimination: Unjust or prejudicial treatment of a category of people, or of an individual based on their belonging to a category of people.
Discriminative stimulus: In operant conditioning, a stimulus that signals whether the response will be reinforced. It is said to “set the occasion” for the operant response.
Disorganized behavior: Behavior or dress that is outside the norm for almost all subcultures. This would include odd dress, odd makeup (e.g., lipstick outlining a mouth for 1 inch), or unusual rituals (e.g., repetitive hand gestures).
Disorganized speech: Speech that is difficult to follow, either because answers do not clearly follow questions or because one sentence does not logically follow from another.
Dissociation: Dissociation: the heightened focus on one stimulus or thought such that many other things around you are ignored; a disconnect between one’s awareness of their environment and the one object the person is focusing on
Dissociative amnesia: Loss of autobiographical memories from a period in the past in the absence of brain injury or disease.
Distinctiveness: The principle that unusual events (in a context of similar events) will be recalled and recognized better than uniform (nondistinctive) events.
Dopamine: A neurotransmitter in the brain that is thought to play an important role in regulating the function of other neurotransmitters.
Dorsal pathway: Pathway of visual processing. The “where” pathway.
Drive state: Affective experiences that motivate organisms to fulfill goals that are generally beneficial to their survival and reproduction.
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 momentary assessment: An overarching term to describe methodologies that repeatedly sample participants’ real-world experiences, behavior, and physiology in real time.
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-depletion: The exhaustion of physiological and/or psychological resources following the completion of effortful self-control tasks, which subsequently leads to reduction in the capacity to exert more self-control.
Electroencephalography (EEG): A neuroimaging technique that measures electrical brain activity via multiple electrodes on the scalp.
Electronically activated recorder, or EAR: A methodology where participants wear a small, portable audio recorder that intermittently records snippets of ambient sounds around them.
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.
Empirical methods: Approaches to inquiry that are tied to actual measurement and observation.
Empiricism: The belief that knowledge comes from experience.
Encoding: The initial experience of perceiving and learning events.
Encoding: Process by which information gets into memory.
Encoding: The pact of putting information into memory.
Encoding specificity principle: The hypothesis that a retrieval cue will be effective to the extent that information encoded from the cue overlaps or matches information in the engram or memory trace.
Engrams: A term indicating the change in the nervous system representing an event; also, memory trace.
Enzyme: A protein produced by a living organism that allows or helps a chemical reaction to occur.
Enzyme induction: Process through which a drug can enhance the production of an enzyme.
Episodic memory: Memory for events in a particular time and place.
Episodic memory: The ability to learn and retrieve new information or episodes in one’s life.
Epistemological violence: A form of scientific or academic racism in which observers interpret empirical data in ways that problematize or suggest the inferiority of racial and cultural Others, even when the data allow for equally viable alternative interpretations (Teo, 2010).
Ethics: Professional guidelines that offer researchers a template for making decisions that protect research participants from potential harm and that help steer scientists away from conflicts of interest or other situations that might compromise the integrity of their research.
Eugenics: The practice of selective breeding to promote desired traits.
Euphoria: Euphoria: an intense feeling of pleasure, excitement or happiness.
Exemplar: An example in memory that is labeled as being in a particular category.
Experience-sampling method: A methodology where participants report on their momentary thoughts, feelings, and behaviors at different points in time over the course of a day.
Experimenter expectations: When the experimenter’s expectations influence the outcome of a study.
Exposure therapy: A form of intervention in which the patient engages with a problematic (usually feared) situation without avoidance or escape.
External validity: The degree to which a finding generalizes from the specific sample and context of a study to some larger population and broader settings.
Extinction: Decrease in the strength of a learned behavior that occurs when the conditioned stimulus is presented without the unconditioned stimulus (in classical conditioning) or when the behavior is no longer reinforced (in instrumental conditioning). The term describes both the procedure (the US or reinforcer is no longer presented) as well as the result of the procedure (the learned response declines). Behaviors that have been reduced in strength through extinction are said to be “extinguished.”
Extrinsic motivation: Motivation stemming from the benefits associated with achieving a goal such as obtaining a monetary reward.
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.
First-person perspective: Observations made by individuals about their own conscious experiences, also known as introspection or a subjective point of view. Phenomenology refers to the description and investigation of such observations.
Five-Factor Model: Five broad domains or dimensions that are used to describe human personality.
Flashbulb memory: A highly detailed and vivid memory of an emotionally significant event.
Flashbulb memory: Vivid personal memories of receiving the news of some momentous (and usually emotional) event.
Flat affect: A reduction in the display of emotions through facial expressions, gestures, and speech intonation.
Flavor: The combination of smell and taste.
Flexible Correction Model: Flexible Correction Model: the ability for people to correct or change their beliefs and evaluations if they believe these judgments have been biased (e.g., if someone realizes they only thought their day was great because it was sunny, they may revise their evaluation of the day to account for this “biasing” influence of the weather)
Flourishing: To live optimally psychologically, relationally, and spiritually.
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.
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.
Frontal Lobe: The front most (anterior) part of the cerebrum; anterior to the central sulcus and responsible for motor output and planning, language, judgment, and decision-making.
Full-cycle psychology: A scientific approach whereby researchers start with an observational field study to identify an effect in the real world, follow up with laboratory experimentation to verify the effect and isolate the causal mechanisms, and return to field research to corroborate their experimental findings.
Functional capacity: The ability to engage in self-care (cook, clean, bathe), work, attend school, and/or engage in social relationships.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI): Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): A neuroimaging technique that infers brain activity by measuring changes in oxygen levels in the blood.
Functionalism: A school of American psychology that focused on the utility of consciousness.
G: Short for “general factor” and is often used to be synonymous with intelligence itself.
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.
Generalize: Generalizing, in science, refers to the ability to arrive at broad conclusions based on a smaller sample of observations. For these conclusions to be true the sample should accurately represent the larger population from which it is drawn.
Gestalt psychology: An attempt to study the unity of experience.
Goal: The cognitive representation of a desired state (outcome).
Goal-directed behavior: Instrumental behavior that is influenced by the animal’s knowledge of the association between the behavior and its consequence and the current value of the consequence. Sensitive to the reinforcer devaluation effect.
Goodness of fit: The match or synchrony between a child’s temperament and characteristics of parental care that contributes to positive or negative personality development. A good “fit” means that parents have accommodated to the child’s temperamental attributes, and this contributes to positive personality growth and better adjustment.
Grandiosity: Inflated self-esteem or an exaggerated sense of self-importance and self-worth (e.g., believing one has special powers or superior abilities).
Gratitude: A feeling of appreciation or thankfulness in response to receiving a benefit.
Gustation: Ability to process gustatory stimuli. Also called taste.
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.
Habituation: Occurs when the response to a stimulus decreases with exposure.
Hallucinations: Perceptual experiences that occur even when there is no stimulus in the outside world generating the experiences. They can be auditory, visual, olfactory (smell), gustatory (taste), or somatic (touch).
Hallucinogens: Hallucinogens: substances that, when ingested, alter a person’s perceptions, often by creating hallucinations that are not real or distorting their perceptions of time.
Happiness: The popular word for subjective well-being. Scientists sometimes avoid using this term because it can refer to different things, such as feeling good, being satisfied, or even the causes of high subjective well-being.
Heritability coefficient: An easily misinterpreted statistical construct that purports to measure the role of genetics in the explanation of differences among individuals.
Heuristics: cognitive (or thinking) strategies that simplify decision making by using mental short-cuts
Highlighting a goal: Prioritizing a focal goal over other goals or temptations by putting more effort into the focal goal.
Histrionic: A pervasive pattern of excessive emotionality and attention seeking.
Homeostasis: The tendency of an organism to maintain a stable state across all the different physiological systems in the body.
Homeostatic set point: An ideal level that the system being regulated must be monitored and compared to.
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.
Humility: Having an accurate view of self—not too high or low—and a realistic appraisal of one’s strengths and weaknesses, especially in relation to other people.
Hypersomnia: Excessive daytime sleepiness, including difficulty staying awake or napping, or prolonged sleep episodes.
Hypnosis: Hypnosis: the state of consciousness whereby a person is highly responsive to the suggestions of another; this state usually involves a dissociation with one’s environment and an intense focus on a single stimulus, which is usually accompanied by a sense of relaxation
Hypnotherapy: Hypnotherapy: The use of hypnotic techniques such as relaxation and suggestion to help engineer desirable change such as lower pain or quitting smoking.
Hypothalamus: A portion of the brain involved in a variety of functions, including the secretion of various hormones and the regulation of hunger and sexual arousal.
Hypotheses: A logical idea that can be tested.
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.
Implemental phase: The second of the two basic stages of self-regulation in which individuals plan specific actions related to their selected goal.
Implicit Association Test: Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures relatively automatic biases that favor own group relative to other groups.
Implicit Associations Test: Implicit Associations Test (IAT): A computer reaction time test that measures a person’s automatic associations with concepts. For instance, the IAT could be used to measure how quickly a person makes positive or negative evaluations of members of various ethnic groups.
Implicit learning: Occurs when we acquire information without intent that we cannot easily express.
Implicit memory: A type of long-term memory that does not require conscious thought to encode. It's the type of memory one makes without intent.
Inattentional blindness: The failure to notice a fully visible, but unexpected, object or event when attention is devoted to something else.
Inattentional deafness: The auditory analog of inattentional blindness. People fail to notice an unexpected sound or voice when attention is devoted to other aspects of a scene.
Incidental learning: Any type of learning that happens without the intention to learn.
Independent variable: The variable the researcher manipulates and controls in an experiment.
Individual differences: Ways in which people differ in terms of their behavior, emotion, cognition, and development.
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.
Ingroup: Group to which a person belongs.
Instrumental conditioning: Process in which animals learn about the relationship between their behaviors and their consequences. Also known as operant conditioning.
Integrative or eclectic psychotherapy: Also called integrative psychotherapy, this term refers to approaches combining multiple orientations (e.g., CBT with psychoanalytic elements).
Integrative or eclectic psychotherapy: Also called integrative psychotherapy, this term refers to approaches combining multiple orientations (e.g., CBT with psychoanalytic elements).
Intelligence: An individual’s cognitive capability. This includes the ability to acquire, process, recall and apply information.
Intentional learning: Any type of learning that happens when motivated by intention.
Interest-convergence: The tendency for White (or dominant group) engagement in racial progress to emerge when it aligns with the interests of the dominant group.
Interference: Other memories get in the way of retrieving a desired memory
Internal validity: The degree to which a cause-effect relationship between two variables has been unambiguously established.
Intersectionality: The idea that social identities can overlap. For instance, a person could be "Canadian", "Indigenous" and "a woman".
Intrinsic motivation: Motivation stemming from the benefits associated with the process of pursuing a goal such as having a fulfilling experience.
Introspection: A method of focusing on internal processes.
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.
Jet Lag: Jet Lag: The state of being fatigued and/or having difficulty adjusting to a new time zone after traveling a long distance (across multiple time zones).
Just noticeable difference (JND): The smallest difference needed in order to differentiate two stimuli. (see Differential Threshold)
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.
Lexicon: Words and expressions.
Life satisfaction: A person reflects on their life and judges to what degree it is going well, by whatever standards that person thinks are most important for a good life.
Light adaptation: Adjustment of eye to high levels of light.
Limbic System: Includes the subcortical structures of the amygdala and hippocampal formation as well as some cortical structures; responsible for aversion and gratification.
Linguistic inquiry and word count: A quantitative text analysis methodology that automatically extracts grammatical and psychological information from a text by counting word frequencies.
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.
Lived day analysis: A methodology where a research team follows an individual around with a video camera to objectively document a person’s daily life as it is lived.
Longitudinal study: A study that follows the same group of individuals over time.
Lordosis: A physical sexual posture in females that serves as an invitation to mate.
Magnetic resonance imaging: A set of techniques that uses strong magnets to measure either the structure of the brain (e.g., gray matter and white matter) or how the brain functions when a person performs cognitive tasks (e.g., working memory or episodic memory) or other types of tasks.
Marginalized: To treat a person or group as socially inferior, peripheral, or unimportant.
Marley Hypothesis: These lines from “Buffalo Soldier” by Bob Marley and the Wailers provide a brief statement of the Marley Hypothesis: the suggestion that White denial of racism reflects a collectively cultivated ignorance of the role that racism has played in U.S. society throughout its history.
Mechanoreceptors: Mechanical sensory receptors in the skin that response to tactile stimulation.
Medial temporal lobes: Inner region of the temporal lobes that includes the hippocampus.
Melatonin: Melatonin: A hormone associated with increased drowsiness and sleep.
Memory traces: A term indicating the change in the nervous system representing an event.
Metabolism: Breakdown of substances.
Metacognition: Describes the knowledge and skills people have in monitoring and controlling their own learning and memory.
Mindfulness: Mindfulness: a state of heightened focus on the thoughts passing through one’s head, as well as a more controlled evaluation of those thoughts (e.g., do you reject or support the thoughts you’re having?)
Mindfulness: 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.
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.
Model minority: A minority group whose members are perceived as achieving a higher degree of socioeconomic success than the population average.
Motivation: The psychological driving force that enables action in the course of goal pursuit.
Multimodal perception: The effects that concurrent stimulation in more than one sensory modality has on the perception of events and objects in the world.
Myelin Sheath: Fatty tissue, that insulates the axons of the neurons; myelin is necessary for normal conduction of electrical impulses among neurons.
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.
Nature: The genes that children bring with them to life and that influence all aspects of their development.
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.
Nervous System: The body’s network for electrochemical communication. This system includes all the nerves cells in the body.
Neural impulse: An electro-chemical signal that enables neurons to communicate.
Neurodevelopmental: Processes that influence how the brain develops either in utero or as the child is growing up.
Neurons: Individual brain cells
Neurotransmitter: A chemical substance produced by a neuron that is used for communication between neurons.
Neurotransmitters: Chemical substance released by the presynaptic terminal button that acts on the postsynaptic cell.
Nociception: Our ability to sense pain.
Nonassociative learning: Occurs when a single repeated exposure leads to a change in behavior.
Nonconscious goal activation: When activation occurs outside a person’s awareness, such that the person is unaware of the reasons behind her goal-directed thoughts and behaviors.
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.
Numerical magnitudes: The sizes of numbers.
Nurture: The environments, starting with the womb, that influence all aspects of children’s development.
Obedience: Responding to an order or command from a person in a position of authority.
Object permanence task: The Piagetian task in which infants below about 9 months of age fail to search for an object that is removed from their sight and, if not allowed to search immediately for the object, act as if they do not know that it continues to exist.
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.
Occipital Lobe: The back most (posterior) part of the cerebrum; involved in vision.
Odorants: Chemicals transduced by olfactory receptors.
OECD countries: Members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, comprised of the world’s wealthiest countries.
Olfaction: Ability to process olfactory stimuli. Also called smell.
Olfactory epithelium: Organ containing olfactory receptors.
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.
Operant conditioning: Describes stimulus-response associative learning.
Operational definitions: How researchers specifically measure a concept.
Opponent-process theory: Theory proposing color vision as influenced by cells responsive to pairs of colors.
Ossicles: A collection of three small bones in the middle ear that vibrate against the tympanic membrane.
Outgroup: Group to which a person does not belong.
Overconfident: The bias to have greater confidence in your judgment than is warranted based on a rational assessment.
Paranoid: A pervasive distrust and suspiciousness of others such that their motives are interpreted as malevolent.
Parietal Lobe: The part of the cerebrum between the frontal and occipital lobes; involved in bodily sensations, visual attention, and integrating the senses.
Participant demand: When participants behave in a way that they think the experimenter wants them to behave.
Pavlovian conditioning: See classical conditioning.
Perception: The psychological process of interpreting sensory information.
Perceptual learning: Occurs when aspects of our perception changes as a function of experience.
Peripheral Nervous System: All of the nerve cells that connect the central nervous system to all the other parts of the body.
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.
Person-centered therapy: A therapeutic approach focused on creating a supportive environment for self-discovery.
Phantom limb: The perception that a missing limb still exists.
Phantom limb pain: Pain in a limb that no longer exists.
Pharmacokinetics: The action of a drug through the body, including absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion.
Phenotypes: Observable traits, such as hair or eye color, that are result of genetic and environmental interactions.
Phonemic awareness: Awareness of the component sounds within words.
Piaget’s theory: Theory that development occurs through a sequence of discontinuous stages: the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages.
Pinna: Outermost portion of the ear.
Placebo effect: When receiving special treatment or something new affects human behavior.
Polypharmacy: The use of many medications.
Positive feelings: Desirable and pleasant feelings. Moods and emotions such as enjoyment and love are examples.
Positive psychology: The science of human flourishing. Positive Psychology is an applied science with an emphasis on real world intervention.
Positron emission tomography: A technique that uses radio-labelled ligands to measure the distribution of different neurotransmitter receptors in the brain or to measure how much of a certain type of neurotransmitter is released when a person is given a specific type of drug or does a particularly cognitive task.
Positron Emission Tomography (PET): A neuroimaging technique that measures brain activity by detecting the presence of a radioactive substance in the brain that is initially injected into the bloodstream and then pulled in by active brain tissue.
Practitioner-Scholar Model: A model of training of professional psychologists that emphasizes clinical practice.
Prediction error: When the outcome of a conditioning trial is different from that which is predicted by the conditioned stimuli that are present on the trial (i.e., when the US is surprising). Prediction error is necessary to create Pavlovian conditioning (and associative learning generally). As learning occurs over repeated conditioning trials, the conditioned stimulus increasingly predicts the unconditioned stimulus, and prediction error declines. Conditioning works to correct or reduce prediction error.
Prejudice: Prejudice is an evaluation or emotion toward people merely based on their group membership.
Prejudice: Having a bias or opinion about a person based on assumptions rather than actual experience.
Preoperational reasoning stage: Period within Piagetian theory from age 2 to 7 years, in which children can represent objects through drawing and language but cannot solve logical reasoning problems, such as the conservation problems.
Preoptic area: A region in the anterior hypothalamus involved in generating and regulating male sexual behavior.
Preparedness: The idea that an organism’s evolutionary history can make it easy to learn a particular association. Because of preparedness, you are more likely to associate the taste of tequila, and not the circumstances surrounding drinking it, with getting sick. Similarly, humans are more likely to associate images of spiders and snakes than flowers and mushrooms with aversive outcomes like shocks.
Prevention focus: One of two self-regulatory orientations emphasizing safety, responsibility, and security needs, and viewing goals as “oughts.” This self-regulatory focus seeks to avoid losses (the presence of negatives) and approach non-losses (the absence of negatives).
Primary auditory cortex: Area of the cortex involved in processing auditory stimuli.
Primary somatosensory cortex: Area of the cortex involved in processing somatosensory stimuli.
Primary visual cortex: Area of the cortex involved in processing visual stimuli.
Priming: Priming: the activation of certain thoughts or feelings that make them easier to think of and act upon
Priming: A stimulus presented to a person reminds him or her about other ideas associated with the stimulus.
Principle of inverse effectiveness: The finding that, in general, for a multimodal stimulus, if the response to each unimodal component (on its own) is weak, then the opportunity for multisensory enhancement is very large. However, if one component—by itself—is sufficient to evoke a strong response, then the effect on the response gained by simultaneously processing the other components of the stimulus will be relatively small.
Processing speed: The speed with which an individual can perceive auditory or visual information and respond to it.
Progress: The perception of reducing the discrepancy between one’s current state and one’s desired state in goal pursuit.
Promotion focus: One of two self-regulatory orientations emphasizing hopes, accomplishments, and advancement needs, and viewing goals as “ideals.” This self-regulatory focus seeks to approach gains (the presence of positives) and avoid non-gains (the absence of positives).
Pro-social: Thoughts, actions, and feelings that are directed towards others and which are positive in nature.
Psychoactive drugs: A drug that changes mood or the way someone feels.
Psychoanalytic therapy: Sigmund Freud’s therapeutic approach focusing on resolving unconscious conflicts.
Psychodynamic therapy: Treatment applying psychoanalytic principles in a briefer, more individualized format.
Psychological 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.
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.
Psychopathology: Illnesses or disorders that involve psychological or psychiatric symptoms.
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.
Psychophysics: Study of the relationships between physical stimuli and the perception of those stimuli.
Psychotropic drug: A drug that changes mood or emotion, usually used when talking about drugs prescribed for various mental conditions (depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, etc.).
Punisher: A stimulus that decreases the strength of an operant behavior when it is made a consequence of the behavior.
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.
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.
Quasi-experimental design: An experiment that does not require random assignment to conditions.
Racism: A system of advantage and disadvantage based on social, historical, and cultural constructions of race and ethnicity (Jones, 1997/1998; Tatum 1997; Wellman 1993).
Random assignment: Assigning participants to receive different conditions of an experiment by chance.
Realism: A point of view that emphasizes the importance of the senses in providing knowledge of the external world.
Reappraisal, or Cognitive restructuring: The process of identifying, evaluating, and changing maladaptive thoughts in psychotherapy.
Recoding: The ubiquitous process during learning of taking information in one form and converting it to another form, usually one more easily remembered.
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.
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.
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.
Relational aggression: Intentionally harming another person’s social relationships, feelings of acceptance, or inclusion within a group.
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.
Retina: Cell layer in the back of the eye containing photoreceptors.
Retrieval: The process of accessing stored information.
Retrieval: Process by which information is accessed from memory and utilized.
Retroactive interference: The phenomenon whereby events that occur after some particular event of interest will usually cause forgetting of the original event.
Retrograde amnesia: Inability to retrieve memories for facts and events acquired before the onset of amnesia.
Reward value: A neuropsychological measure of an outcome’s affective importance to an organism.
Right-wing authoritarianism: Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) focuses on value conflicts but endorses respect for obedience and authority in the service of group conformity.
Rods: Photoreceptors of the retina sensitive to low levels of light. Located around the fovea.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: The hypothesis that the language that people use determines their thoughts.
Satiation: The state of being full to satisfaction and no longer desiring to take on more.
Schema: A mental representation or set of beliefs about something.
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.
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.
Scientist-practitioner model: A model of training of professional psychologists that emphasizes the development of both research and clinical skills.
Security of attachment: An infant’s confidence in the sensitivity and responsiveness of a caregiver, especially when he or she is needed. Infants can be securely attached or insecurely attached.
Selective listening: A method for studying selective attention in which people focus attention on one auditory stream of information while deliberately ignoring other auditory information.
Self 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-control: The capacity to control impulses, emotions, desires, and actions in order to resist a temptation and adhere to a valued goal.
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-regulation: The processes through which individuals alter their emotions, desires, and actions in the course of pursuing a goal.
Semantic memory: The more or less permanent store of knowledge that people have.
Sensation: The physical processing of environmental stimuli by the sense organs.
Sensitization: Occurs when the response to a stimulus increases with exposure
Sensorimotor stage: Period within Piagetian theory from birth to age 2 years, during which children come to represent the enduring reality of objects.
Sensory adaptation: Decrease in sensitivity of a receptor to a stimulus after constant stimulation.
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.
Shape theory of olfaction: Theory proposing that odorants of different size and shape correspond to different smells.
Signal detection: Method for studying the ability to correctly identify sensory stimuli.
Situation model: A mental representation of an event, object, or situation constructed at the time of comprehending a linguistic description.
Social brain hypothesis: The hypothesis that the human brain has evolved, so that humans can maintain larger ingroups.
Social construct: Something that is not found in objective reality but it, instead, the result of a common shared understanding. Social constructs are defined and given meaning by a particular society.
Social dominance orientation: Social dominance orientation (SDO) describes a belief that group hierarchies are inevitable in all societies and even good, to maintain order and stability.
Social identity theory: Social identity theory notes that people categorize each other into groups, favoring their own group.
Social 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 networks: Networks of social relationships among individuals through which information can travel.
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 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.
Soma: Cell body of a neuron that contains the nucleus and genetic information, and directs protein synthesis.
Somatosensation: Ability to sense touch, pain and temperature.
Somatotopic map: Organization of the primary somatosensory cortex maintaining a representation of the arrangement of the body.
Sound waves: Changes in air pressure. The physical stimulus for audition.
Spatial Resolution: A term that refers to how small the elements of an image are; high spatial resolution means the device or technique can resolve very small elements; in neuroscience it describes how small of a structure in the brain can be imaged.
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.
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”).
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.
Stereotyping: Holding a generalized belief about an entire group of people, and often making a flawed generalization about an individual based solely on that person’s membership in a group.
Stimulants: Stimulants: a class of drugs that speed up the body’s physiological and mental processes.
Stimulus control: When an operant behavior is controlled by a stimulus that precedes it.
Storage: The stage in the learning/memory process that bridges encoding and retrieval; the persistence of memory over time.
Structuralism: A school of American psychology that sought to describe the elements of conscious experience.
Subjective well-being: The name that scientists give to happiness—thinking and feeling that our lives are going very well.
Subjective well-being scales: Self-report surveys or questionnaires in which participants indicate their levels of subjective well-being, by responding to items with a number that indicates how well off they feel.
Subtle biases: Subtle biases are automatic, ambiguous, and ambivalent, but real in their consequences.
Suicidal ideation: Recurring thoughts about suicide, including considering or planning for suicide, or preoccupation with suicide.
Superadditive effect of multisensory integration: The finding that responses to multimodal stimuli are typically greater than the sum of the independent responses to each unimodal component if it were presented on its own.
Synapse: The tiny space separating neurons.
Synapses: Junction between the presynaptic terminal button of one neuron and the dendrite, axon, or soma of another postsynaptic neuron.
Synaptic Gap: Also known as the synaptic cleft; the small space between the presynaptic terminal button and the postsynaptic dendritic spine, axon, or soma.
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.
Systematic observation: The careful observation of the natural world with the aim of better understanding it. Observations provide the basic data that allow scientists to track, tally, or otherwise organize information about the natural world.
Systemic approaches: Approaches to understanding racism that emphasize the roles that societal factors—historical, cultural, legal, political, and economic—have played in organizing who is at the top or bottom of a society’s racial hierarchy.
Tastants: Chemicals transduced by taste receptor cells.
Taste aversion learning: The phenomenon in which a taste is paired with sickness, and this causes the organism to reject—and dislike—that taste in the future.
Taste receptor cells: Receptors that transduce gustatory information.
Temperament: Early emerging differences in reactivity and self-regulation, which constitutes a foundation for personality development.
Temporal Lobe: The part of the cerebrum in front of (anterior to) the occipital lobe and below the lateral fissure; involved in vision, auditory processing, memory, and integrating vision and audition.
Temporal Resolution: A term that refers to how small a unit of time can be measured; high temporal resolution means capable of resolving very small units of time; in neuroscience it describes how precisely in time a process can be measured in the brain.
Temporally graded retrograde amnesia: Inability to retrieve memories from just prior to the onset of amnesia with intact memory for more remote events.
Tertiary education: Education or training beyond secondary school, usually taking place in a college, university, or vocational training program.
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.
Theories: Groups of closely related phenomena or observations.
Theory of mind: Children’s growing understanding of the mental states that affect people’s behavior.
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.
Third-person perspective: Observations made by individuals in a way that can be independently confirmed by other individuals so as to lead to general, objective understanding. With respect to consciousness, third-person perspectives make use of behavioral and neural measures related to conscious experiences.
Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: The inability to pull a word from memory even though there is the sensation that that word is available.
“Top-down” or internal causes of happiness: The person’s outlook and habitual response tendencies that influence their happiness—for example, their temperament or optimistic outlook on life.
Top-down processing: Experience influencing the perception of stimuli.
Trance States: Trance: a state of consciousness characterized by the experience of “out-of-body possession,” or an acute dissociation between one’s self and the current, physical environment surrounding them.
Transduction: The conversion of one form of energy into another.
Transfer-appropriate processing: A principle that states that memory performance is superior when a test taps the same cognitive processes as the original encoding activity.
Transgender: A term used to describe individuals whose gender does not match their biological sex.
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.
Trichromatic theory: Theory proposing color vision as influenced by three different cones responding preferentially to red, green and blue.
Twin studies: A behavior genetic research method that involves comparison of the similarity of identical (monozygotic; MZ) and fraternal (dizygotic; DZ) twins.
Tympanic membrane: Thin, stretched membrane in the middle ear that vibrates in response to sound. Also called the eardrum.
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.
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.
Ventral pathway: Pathway of visual processing. The “what” pathway.
Vestibular system: Parts of the inner ear involved in balance.
Vicarious reinforcement: Learning that occurs by observing the reinforcement or punishment of another person.
Violence: Aggression intended to cause extreme physical harm, such as injury or death.
Weber’s law: States that just noticeable difference is proportional to the magnitude of the initial stimulus.
White coat hypertension: A phenomenon in which patients exhibit elevated blood pressure in the hospital or doctor’s office but not in their everyday lives.
Working memory: The form of memory we use to hold onto information temporarily, usually for the purposes of manipulation.
Working memory: The ability to maintain information over a short period of time, such as 30 seconds or less.