Vocabulary

Accommodation: Changing one's beliefs about the world and how it works in light of new experience.
Active-constructive responding: Demonstrating sincere interest and enthusiasm for the good news of another person.
Adaptation: The fact that after people first react to good or bad events, sometimes in a strong way, their feelings and reactions tend to dampen down over time and they return toward their original level of subjective well-being.
Agreeableness: A core personality trait that includes such dispositional characteristics as being sympathetic, generous, forgiving, and helpful, and behavioral tendencies toward harmonious social relations and likeability.
Altruism: A motivation for helping that has the improvement of another’s welfare as its ultimate goal, with no expectation of any benefits for the helper.
Appraisal structure: The set of appraisals that bring about an emotion.
Appraisal theories: Evaluations that relate what is happening in the environment to people’s values, goals, and beliefs. Appraisal theories of emotion contend that emotions are caused by patterns of appraisals, such as whether an event furthers or hinders a goal and whether an event can be coped with.
Arousal: cost–reward model: An egoistic theory proposed by Piliavin et al. (1981) that claims that seeing a person in need leads to the arousal of unpleasant feelings, and observers are motivated to eliminate that aversive state, often by helping the victim. A cost–reward analysis may lead observers to react in ways other than offering direct assistance, including indirect help, reinterpretation of the situation, or fleeing the scene.
Awe: An emotion associated with profound, moving experiences. Awe comes about when people encounter an event that is vast (far from normal experience) but that can be accommodated in existing knowledge.
Big-C Creativity: Creative ideas that have an impact well beyond the everyday life of home or work. At the highest level, this kind of creativity is that of the creative genius.
“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.
Bystander intervention: The phenomenon whereby people intervene to help others in need even if the other is a complete stranger and the intervention puts the helper at risk.
Capitalization: Seeking out someone else with whom to share your good news.
Chills: A feeling of goosebumps, usually on the arms, scalp, and neck, that is often experienced during moments of awe.
Confusion: An emotion associated with conflicting and contrary information, such as when people appraise an event as unfamiliar and as hard to understand. Confusion motivates people to work through the perplexing information and thus fosters deeper learning.
Convergent thinking: The opposite of divergent thinking, the capacity to narrow in on the single “correct” answer or solution to a given question or problem (e.g., giving the right response on an intelligence tests).
Coping potential: People's beliefs about their ability to handle challenges.
Cost–benefit analysis: A decision-making process that compares the cost of an action or thing against the expected benefit to help determine the best course of action.
Diffusion of responsibility: When deciding whether to help a person in need, knowing that there are others who could also provide assistance relieves bystanders of some measure of personal responsibility, reducing the likelihood that bystanders will intervene.
Divergent thinking: The opposite of convergent thinking, the capacity for exploring multiple potential answers or solutions to a given question or problem (e.g., coming up with many different uses for a common object).
Egoism: A motivation for helping that has the improvement of the helper’s own circumstances as its primary goal.
Empathic concern: According to Batson’s empathy–altruism hypothesis, observers who empathize with a person in need (that is, put themselves in the shoes of the victim and imagine how that person feels) will experience empathic concern and have an altruistic motivation for helping.
Empathy–altruism model: An altruistic theory proposed by Batson (2011) that claims that people who put themselves in the shoes of a victim and imagining how the victim feel will experience empathic concern that evokes an altruistic motivation for helping.
Facial expressions: Part of the expressive component of emotions, facial expressions of emotion communicate inner feelings to others.
Functionalist theories of emotion: Theories of emotion that emphasize the adaptive role of an emotion in handling common problems throughout evolutionary history.
g or general mental ability: The general factor common to all cognitive ability measures, “a very general mental capacity that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings—‘catching on,’ ‘making sense of things,’ or ‘figuring out’ what to do” (Gottfredson, 1997, p. 13).
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.
Helpfulness: A component of the prosocial personality orientation; describes individuals who have been helpful in the past and, because they believe they can be effective with the help they give, are more likely to be helpful in the future.
Helping: Prosocial acts that typically involve situations in which one person is in need and another provides the necessary assistance to eliminate the other’s need.
Impasse-driven learning: An approach to instruction that motivates active learning by having learners work through perplexing barriers.
Interest: An emotion associated with curiosity and intrigue, interest motivates engaging with new things and learning more about them. It is one of the earliest emotions to develop and a resource for intrinsically motivated learning across the life span.
Intrinsically motivated learning: Learning that is “for its own sake”—such as learning motivated by curiosity and wonder—instead of learning to gain rewards or social approval.
Kin selection: According to evolutionary psychology, the favoritism shown for helping our blood relatives, with the goals of increasing the likelihood that some portion of our DNA will be passed on to future generations.
Knowledge emotions: A family of emotions associated with learning, reflecting, and exploring. These emotions come about when unexpected and unfamiliar events happen in the environment. Broadly speaking, they motivate people to explore unfamiliar things, which builds knowledge and expertise over the long run.
Latent inhibition: The ability to filter out extraneous stimuli, concentrating only on the information that is deemed relevant. Reduced latent inhibition is associated with higher creativity.
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.
Little-c creativity: Creative ideas that appear at the personal level, whether the home or the workplace. Such creativity needs not have a larger impact to be considered creative.
Multicultural experiences: Individual exposure to two or more cultures, such as obtained by living abroad, emigrating to another country, or working or going to school in a culturally diverse setting.
Negative feelings: Undesirable and unpleasant feelings that people tend to avoid if they can. Moods and emotions such as depression, anger, and worry are examples.
Negative state relief model: An egoistic theory proposed by Cialdini et al. (1982) that claims that people have learned through socialization that helping can serve as a secondary reinforcement that will relieve negative moods such as sadness.
Openness to experience: One of the five major factors of personality, this trait is associated with higher curiosity, creativity, emotional breadth, and open-mindedness. People high in openness to experience are more likely to experience interest and awe.
Openness to experience: One of the factors of the Big Five Model of personality, the factor assesses the degree that a person is open to different or new values, interests, and activities.
Originality: When an idea or solution has a low probability of occurrence.
Other-oriented empathy: A component of the prosocial personality orientation; describes individuals who have a strong sense of social responsibility, empathize with and feel emotionally tied to those in need, understand the problems the victim is experiencing, and have a heightened sense of moral obligations to be helpful.
Personal distress: According to Batson’s empathy–altruism hypothesis, observers who take a detached view of a person in need will experience feelings of being “worried” and “upset” and will have an egoistic motivation for helping to relieve that distress.
Pluralistic ignorance: Relying on the actions of others to define an ambiguous need situation and to then erroneously conclude that no help or intervention is necessary.
Positive feelings: Desirable and pleasant feelings. Moods and emotions such as enjoyment and love are examples.
Prosocial behavior: Social behavior that benefits another person.
Prosocial personality orientation: A measure of individual differences that identifies two sets of personality characteristics (other-oriented empathy, helpfulness) that are highly correlated with prosocial behavior.
Reciprocal altruism: According to evolutionary psychology, a genetic predisposition for people to help those who have previously helped them.
Relationship bank account: An account you hold with every person in which a positive deposit or a negative withdrawal can be made during every interaction you have with the person.
Remote associations: Associations between words or concepts that are semantically distant and thus relatively unusual or original.
Satisfaction: Correspondence between an individual’s needs or preferences and the rewards offered by the environment.
Satisfactoriness: Correspondence between an individual’s abilities and the ability requirements of the environment.
Self-expansion model: Seeking to increase one’s capacity often through an intimate relationship.
Specific abilities: Cognitive abilities that contain an appreciable component of g or general ability, but also contain a large component of a more content-focused talent such as mathematical, spatial, or verbal ability; patterns of specific abilities channel development down different paths as a function of an individual’s relative strengths and weaknesses.
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.
Surprise: An emotion rooted in expectancy violation that orients people toward the unexpected event.
“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.
Trait curiosity: Stable individual-differences in how easily and how often people become curious.
Under-determined or misspecified causal models: Psychological frameworks that miss or neglect to include one or more of the critical determinants of the phenomenon under analysis.
Unusual uses: A test of divergent thinking that asks participants to find many uses for commonplace objects, such as a brick or paperclip.