Vocabulary

Ability model: An approach that views EI as a standard intelligence that utilizes a distinct set of mental abilities that (1) are intercorrelated, (2) relate to other extant intelligences, and (3) develop with age and experience (Mayer & Salovey, 1997).
Absolute stability: Consistency in the level or amount of a personality attribute over time.
Acceptance and commitment therapy: A therapeutic approach designed to foster nonjudgmental observation of one’s own mental processes.
Active person–environment transactions: The interplay between individuals and their contextual circumstances that occurs whenever individuals play a key role in seeking out, selecting, or otherwise manipulating aspects of their environment.
Adherence: In health, it is the ability of a patient to maintain a health behavior prescribed by a physician. This might include taking medication as prescribed, exercising more, or eating less high-fat food.
Affect: Feelings that can be described in terms of two dimensions, the dimensions of arousal and valence (Figure 2). For example, high arousal positive states refer to excitement, elation, and enthusiasm. Low arousal positive states refer to calm, peacefulness, and relaxation. Whereas “actual affect” refers to the states that people actually feel, “ideal affect” refers to the states that people ideally want to feel.
Affective forecasting: Predicting how one will feel in the future after some event or decision.
Age effects: Differences in personality between groups of different ages that are related to maturation and development instead of birth cohort differences.
Age identity: How old or young people feel compared to their chronological age; after early adulthood, most people feel younger than their chronological age.
Agonists: A drug that increases or enhances a neurotransmitter’s effect.
Agoraphobia: A sort of anxiety disorder distinguished by feelings that a place is uncomfortable or may be unsafe because it is significantly open or crowded.
Agreeableness: A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be compassionate, cooperative, warm, and caring to others. People low in agreeableness tend to be rude, hostile, and to pursue their own interests over those of others.
Agreeableness: A core personality trait that includes such dispositional characteristics as being sympathetic, generous, forgiving, and helpful, and behavioral tendencies toward harmonious social relations and likeability.
Alogia: A reduction in the amount of speech and/or increased pausing before the initiation of speech.
Altruism: A motivation for helping that has the improvement of another’s welfare as its ultimate goal, with no expectation of any benefits for the helper.
Anecdotal evidence: A piece of biased evidence, usually drawn from personal experience, used to support a conclusion that may or may not be correct.
Anhedonia: Loss of interest or pleasure in activities one previously found enjoyable or rewarding.
Anhedonia/amotivation: A reduction in the drive or ability to take the steps or engage in actions necessary to obtain the potentially positive outcome.
Animism: The belief that everyone and everything had a “soul” and that mental illness was due to animistic causes, for example, evil spirits controlling an individual and his/her behavior.
Antagonist: A drug that blocks a neurotransmitter’s effect.
Antisocial: A pervasive pattern of disregard and violation of the rights of others. These behaviors may be aggressive or destructive and may involve breaking laws or rules, deceit or theft.
Anxiety: A mood state characterized by negative affect, muscle tension, and physical arousal in which a person apprehensively anticipates future danger or misfortune.
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.
Asylum: A place of refuge or safety established to confine and care for the mentally ill; forerunners of the mental hospital or psychiatric facility.
Attitude: A way of thinking or feeling about a target that is often reflected in a person’s behavior. Examples of attitude targets are individuals, concepts, and groups.
Attitude: A psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor.
Attraction: A connection between personality attributes and aspects of the environment that occurs because individuals with particular traits are drawn to certain environments.
Attraction: The psychological process of being sexually interested in another person. This can include, for example, physical attraction, first impressions, and dating rituals.
Attributional style: The tendency by which a person infers the cause or meaning of behaviors or events.
Attrition: A connection between personality attributes and aspects of the environment that occurs because individuals with particular traits drop out from certain environments.
Autobiographical narratives: A qualitative research method used to understand characteristics and life themes that an individual considers to uniquely distinguish him- or herself from others.
Autobiographical reasoning: The ability, typically developed in adolescence, to derive substantive conclusions about the self from analyzing one’s own personal experiences.
Automatic: A behavior or process has one or more of the following features: unintentional, uncontrollable, occurring outside of conscious awareness, and cognitively efficient.
Automatic thoughts: Thoughts that occur spontaneously; often used to describe problematic thoughts that maintain mental disorders.
Availability heuristic: A heuristic in which the frequency or likelihood of an event is evaluated based on how easily instances of it come to mind.
Average life expectancy: Mean number of years that 50% of people in a specific birth cohort are expected to survive. This is typically calculated from birth but is also sometimes re-calculated for people who have already reached a particular age (e.g., 65).
Avoidant: A pervasive pattern of social inhibition, feelings of inadequacy, and hypersensitivity to negative evaluation.
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.
Behavioral medicine: A field similar to health psychology that integrates psychological factors (e.g., emotion, behavior, cognition, and social factors) in the treatment of disease. This applied field includes clinical areas of study, such as occupational therapy, hypnosis, rehabilitation or medicine, and preventative medicine.
Behaviorism: The study of behavior.
Big Five: A broad taxonomy of personality trait domains repeatedly derived from studies of trait ratings in adulthood and encompassing the categories of (1) extraversion vs. introversion, (2) neuroticism vs. emotional stability, (3) agreeable vs. disagreeableness, (4) conscientiousness vs. nonconscientiousness, and (5) openness to experience vs. conventionality. By late childhood and early adolescence, people’s self-attributions of personality traits, as well as the trait attributions made about them by others, show patterns of intercorrelations that confirm with the five-factor structure obtained in studies of adults.
Big Five: Five, broad general traits that are included in many prominent models of personality. The five traits are neuroticism (those high on this trait are prone to feeling sad, worried, anxious, and dissatisfied with themselves), extraversion (high scorers are friendly, assertive, outgoing, cheerful, and energetic), openness to experience (those high on this trait are tolerant, intellectually curious, imaginative, and artistic), agreeableness (high scorers are polite, considerate, cooperative, honest, and trusting), and conscientiousness (those high on this trait are responsible, cautious, organized, disciplined, and achievement-oriented).
Biofeedback: The process by which physiological signals, not normally available to human perception, are transformed into easy-to-understand graphs or numbers. Individuals can then use this information to try to change bodily functioning (e.g., lower blood pressure, reduce muscle tension).
Biological vulnerability: A specific genetic and neurobiological factor that might predispose someone to develop anxiety disorders.
Biomedical Model of Health: A reductionist model that posits that ill health is a result of a deviation from normal function, which is explained by the presence of pathogens, injury, or genetic abnormality.
Biopsychosocial model: A model in which the interaction of biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors is seen as influencing the development of the individual.
Biopsychosocial Model of Health: An approach to studying health and human function that posits the importance of biological, psychological, and social (or environmental) processes.
Birth cohort: Individuals born in a particular year or span of time.
Blind to the research hypothesis: When participants in research are not aware of what is being studied.
Borderline: A pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity.
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.
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.
Cathartic method: A therapeutic procedure introduced by Breuer and developed further by Freud in the late 19th century whereby a patient gains insight and emotional relief from recalling and reliving traumatic events.
Causality: In research, the determination that one variable causes—is responsible for—an effect.
Central route to persuasion: Persuasion that employs direct, relevant, logical messages.
Chameleon effect: The tendency for individuals to nonconsciously mimic the postures, mannerisms, facial expressions, and other behaviors of one’s interaction partners.
Chronic disease: A health condition that persists over time, typically for periods longer than three months (e.g., HIV, asthma, diabetes).
Chronic stress: Discrete or related problematic events and conditions which persist over time and result in prolonged activation of the biological and/or psychological stress response (e.g., unemployment, ongoing health difficulties, marital discord).
Chutes and Ladders: A numerical board game that seems to be useful for building numerical knowledge.
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.
Cohort: Group of people typically born in the same year or historical period, who share common experiences over time; sometimes called a generation (e.g., Baby Boom Generation).
Cohort effects: Differences in personality that are related to historical and social factors unique to individuals born in a particular year.
Collectivism: Belief system that emphasizes the duties and obligations that each person has toward others.
Commitment: The sense that a goal is both valuable and attainable
Comorbidity: Describes a state of having more than one psychological or physical disorder at a given time.
Concrete operations stage: Piagetian stage between ages 7 and 12 when children can think logically about concrete situations but not engage in systematic scientific reasoning.
Conditioned response: A learned reaction following classical conditioning, or the process by which an event that automatically elicits a response is repeatedly paired with another neutral stimulus (conditioned stimulus), resulting in the ability of the neutral stimulus to elicit the same response on its own.
Confidante: A trusted person with whom secrets and vulnerabilities can be shared.
Conformity: Changing one’s attitude or behavior to match a perceived social norm.
Conformity: Changing one’s attitude or behavior to match a perceived social norm.
Confounds: Factors that undermine the ability to draw causal inferences from an experiment.
Conscientiousness: A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be careful, organized, hardworking, and to follow rules.
Conscious goal activation: When a person is fully aware of contextual influences and resulting goal-directed behavior.
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.
Continuous development: Ways in which development occurs in a gradual incremental manner, rather than through sudden jumps.
Continuous distributions: Characteristics can go from low to high, with all different intermediate values possible. One does not simply have the trait or not have it, but can possess varying amounts of it.
Control: Feeling like you have the power to change your environment or behavior if you need or want to.
Convoy Model of Social Relations: Theory that proposes that the frequency, types, and reciprocity of social exchanges change with age. These social exchanges impact the health and well-being of the givers and receivers in the convoy.
Correlation: In statistics, the measure of relatedness of two or more variables.
Correlation: A measure of the association between two variables, or how they go together.
Correlation: Measures the association between two variables, or how they go together.
Corresponsive principle: The idea that personality traits often become matched with environmental conditions such that an individual’s social context acts to accentuate and reinforce their personality attributes.
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.
Cross-sectional studies: Research method that provides information about age group differences; age differences are confounded with cohort differences and effects related to history and time of study.
Cross-sectional study/design: A research design that uses a group of individuals with different ages (and birth cohorts) assessed at a single point in time.
Crowds: Adolescent peer groups characterized by shared reputations or images.
Crystallized intelligence: Type of intellectual ability that relies on the application of knowledge, experience, and learned information.
Cultural display rules: These are rules that are learned early in life that specify the management and modification of emotional expressions according to social circumstances. Cultural display rules can work in a number of different ways. For example, they can require individuals to express emotions “as is” (i.e., as they feel them), to exaggerate their expressions to show more than what is actually felt, to tone down their expressions to show less than what is actually felt, to conceal their feelings by expressing something else, or to show nothing at all.
Cultural relativism: The idea that cultural norms and values of a society can only be understood on their own terms or in their own context.
Culture: Shared, socially transmitted ideas (e.g., values, beliefs, attitudes) that are reflected in and reinforced by institutions, products, and rituals.
Culture of honor: A culture in which personal or family reputation is especially important.
Cumulative continuity principle: The generalization that personality attributes show increasing stability with age and experience.
Daily hassles: Irritations in daily life that are not necessarily traumatic, but that cause difficulties and repeated stress.
Data (also called observations): In research, information systematically collected for analysis and interpretation.
Deductive reasoning: A form of reasoning in which a given premise determines the interpretation of specific observations (e.g., All birds have feathers; since a duck is a bird, it has feathers).
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.
Dependent: A pervasive and excessive need to be taken care of that leads to submissive and clinging behavior and fears of separation.
Dependent variable: The variable the researcher measures but does not manipulate in an experiment.
Depth perception: The ability to actively perceive the distance from oneself of objects in the environment.
Descriptive norm: The perception of what most people do in a given situation.
Deviant peer contagion: The spread of problem behaviors within groups of adolescents.
Diagnostic criteria: The specific criteria used to determine whether an individual has a specific type of psychiatric disorder. Commonly used diagnostic criteria are included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, 5th Edition (DSM-5) and the Internal Classification of Disorders, Version 9 (ICD-9).
Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT): A treatment often used for borderline personality disorder that incorporates both cognitive-behavioral and mindfulness elements.
Dialectical worldview: A perspective in DBT that emphasizes the joint importance of change and acceptance.
Differential stability: Consistency in the rank-ordering of personality across two or more measurement occasions.
Differential susceptibility: Genetic factors that make individuals more or less responsive to environmental experiences.
Diffusion of responsibility: When deciding whether to help a person in need, knowing that there are others who could also provide assistance relieves bystanders of some measure of personal responsibility, reducing the likelihood that bystanders will intervene.
Directional goals: The motivation to reach a particular outcome or judgment.
Discontinuous development: Discontinuous development
Discrimination: Discrimination is behavior that advantages or disadvantages people merely based on their group membership.
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.
Distribution: In statistics, the relative frequency that a particular value occurs for each possible value of a given variable.
Dopamine: A neurotransmitter in the brain that is thought to play an important role in regulating the function of other neurotransmitters.
Drive state: Affective experiences that motivate organisms to fulfill goals that are generally beneficial to their survival and reproduction.
Durability bias: A bias in affective forecasting in which one overestimates for how long one will feel an emotion (positive or negative) after some event.
Early adversity: Single or multiple acute or chronic stressful events, which may be biological or psychological in nature (e.g., poverty, abuse, childhood illness or injury), occurring during childhood and resulting in a biological and/or psychological stress response.
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.
Egoism: A motivation for helping that has the improvement of the helper’s own circumstances as its primary goal.
Emerging adulthood: A new life stage extending from approximately ages 18 to 25, during which the foundation of an adult life is gradually constructed in love and work. Primary features include identity explorations, instability, focus on self-development, feeling incompletely adult, and a broad sense of possibilities.
Emotion: An experiential, physiological, and behavioral response to a personally meaningful stimulus.
Emotion coherence: The degree to which emotional responses (subjective experience, behavior, physiology, etc.) converge with one another.
Emotion fluctuation: The degree to which emotions vary or change in intensity over time.
Emotional intelligence: The ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions. (Salovey & Mayer, 1990). EI includes four specific abilities: perceiving, using, understanding, and managing emotions.
Emotion-focused coping: Coping strategy aimed at reducing the negative emotions associated with a stressful event.
Emotions: Changes in subjective experience, physiological responding, and behavior in response to a meaningful event. Emotions tend to occur on the order of seconds (in contract to moods which may last for days).
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.
Empirical: Concerned with observation and/or the ability to verify a claim.
Empirical methods: Approaches to inquiry that are tied to actual measurement and observation.
Empiricism: The belief that knowledge comes from experience.
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: The ability to learn and retrieve new information or episodes in one’s life.
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.
Etiology: The causal description of all of the factors that contribute to the development of a disorder or illness.
Eugenics: The practice of selective breeding to promote desired traits.
Evaluative priming task: An implicit attitude task that assesses the extent to which an attitude object is associated with a positive or negative valence by measuring the time it takes a person to label an adjective as good or bad after being presented with an attitude object.
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.
Experimenter expectations: When the experimenter’s expectations influence the outcome of a study.
Explicit attitude: An attitude that is consciously held and can be reported on by the person holding the attitude.
Exposure therapy: A form of intervention in which the patient engages with a problematic (usually feared) situation without avoidance or escape.
External cues: Stimuli in the outside world that serve as triggers for anxiety or as reminders of past traumatic events.
Extraversion: A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be sociable, outgoing, active, and assertive.
Extrinsic motivation: Motivation stemming from the benefits associated with achieving a goal such as obtaining a monetary reward.
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.
Fact: Objective information about the world.
Factor analysis: A statistical technique for grouping similar things together according to how highly they are associated.
Falsify: In science, the ability of a claim to be tested and—possibly—refuted; a defining feature of science.
Feelings: A general term used to describe a wide range of states that include emotions, moods, traits and that typically involve changes in subjective experience, physiological responding, and behavior in response to a meaningful event. Emotions typically occur on the order of seconds, whereas moods may last for days, and traits are tendencies to respond a certain way across various situations.
Fight or flight response: A biological reaction to alarming stressors that prepares the body to resist or escape a threat.
Five-Factor Model: Five broad domains or dimensions that are used to describe human personality.
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.
Fixed action patterns (FAPs): Sequences of behavior that occur in exactly the same fashion, in exactly the same order, every time they are elicited.
Flashback: Sudden, intense re-experiencing of a previous event, usually trauma-related.
Flashbulb memory: A highly detailed and vivid memory of an emotionally significant event.
Flat affect: A reduction in the display of emotions through facial expressions, gestures, and speech intonation.
Fluid intelligence: Type of intelligence that relies on the ability to use information processing resources to reason logically and solve novel problems.
Foot in the door: Obtaining a small, initial commitment.
Foreclosure: Individuals commit to an identity without exploration of options.
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.
Four-Branch Model: An ability model developed by Drs. Peter Salovey and John Mayer that includes four main components of EI, arranged in hierarchical order, beginning with basic psychological processes and advancing to integrative psychological processes. The branches are (1) perception of emotion, (2) use of emotion to facilitate thinking, (3) understanding emotion, and (4) management of emotion.
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.
Functional capacity: The ability to engage in self-care (cook, clean, bathe), work, attend school, and/or engage in social relationships.
Functionalism: A school of American psychology that focused on the utility of consciousness.
Fundamental attribution error: The tendency to emphasize another person’s personality traits when describing that person’s motives and behaviors and overlooking the influence of situational factors.
G: Short for “general factor” and is often used to be synonymous with intelligence itself.
General Adaptation Syndrome: A three-phase model of stress, which includes a mobilization of physiological resources phase, a coping phase, and an exhaustion phase (i.e., when an organism fails to cope with the stress adequately and depletes its resources).
Generalize: In research, the degree to which one can extend conclusions drawn from the findings of a study to other groups or situations not included in the study.
Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD): Excessive worry about everyday things that is at a level that is out of proportion to the specific causes of worry.
Gestalt psychology: An attempt to study the unity of experience.
Global subjective well-being: Individuals’ perceptions of and satisfaction with their lives as a whole.
Goal: The cognitive representation of a desired state (outcome).
Gradually escalating commitments: A pattern of small, progressively escalating demands is less likely to be rejected than a single large demand made all at once.
Grandiosity: Inflated self-esteem or an exaggerated sense of self-importance and self-worth (e.g., believing one has special powers or superior abilities).
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.
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).
Health: The complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being—not just the absence of disease or infirmity.
Health: According to the World Health Organization, it is a complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
Health behavior: Any behavior that is related to health—either good or bad.
Health behaviors: Behaviors that are associated with better health. Examples include exercising, not smoking, and wearing a seat belt while in a vehicle.
Hedonic well-being: Component of well-being that refers to emotional experiences, often including measures of positive (e.g., happiness, contentment) and negative affect (e.g., stress, sadness).
Helpfulness: A component of the prosocial personality orientation; describes individuals who have been helpful in the past and, because they believe they can be effective with the help they give, are more likely to be helpful in the future.
Helping: Prosocial acts that typically involve situations in which one person is in need and another provides the necessary assistance to eliminate the other’s need.
Heterogeneity: Inter-individual and subgroup differences in level and rate of change over time.
Heterotypic stability: Consistency in the underlying psychological attribute across development regardless of any changes in how the attribute is expressed at different ages.
Heuristics: Mental shortcuts that enable people to make decisions and solve problems quickly and efficiently.
Heuristics: A mental shortcut or rule of thumb that reduces complex mental problems to more simple rule-based decisions.
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.
Highlighting a goal: Prioritizing a focal goal over other goals or temptations by putting more effort into the focal goal.
High-stakes testing: Settings in which test scores are used to make important decisions about individuals. For example, test scores may be used to determine which individuals are admitted into a college or graduate school, or who should be hired for a job. Tests also are used in forensic settings to help determine whether a person is competent to stand trial or fits the legal definition of sanity.
Histrionic: A pervasive pattern of excessive emotionality and attention seeking.
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.
Homophily: Adolescents tend to associate with peers who are similar to themselves.
Homotypic stability: Consistency of the exact same thoughts, feelings, and behaviors across development.
Honeymoon effect: The tendency for newly married individuals to rate their spouses in an unrealistically positive manner. This represents a specific manifestation of the letter of recommendation effect when applied to ratings made by current romantic partners. Moreover, it illustrates the very important role played by relationship satisfaction in ratings made by romantic partners: As marital satisfaction declines (i.e., when the “honeymoon is over”), this effect disappears.
Hostile attribution bias: The tendency of some individuals to interpret ambiguous social cues and interactions as examples of aggressiveness, disrespect, or antagonism.
Hostility: An experience or trait with cognitive, behavioral, and emotional components. It often includes cynical thoughts, feelings of emotion, and aggressive behavior.
Hot cognition: The mental processes that are influenced by desires and feelings.
Humorism (or humoralism): A belief held by ancient Greek and Roman physicians (and until the 19th century) that an excess or deficiency in any of the four bodily fluids, or humors—blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm—directly affected their health and temperament.
Hypersomnia: Excessive daytime sleepiness, including difficulty staying awake or napping, or prolonged sleep episodes.
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.
Hypothesis: A tentative explanation that is subject to testing.
Hypothesis: A possible explanation that can be tested through research.
Hysteria: Term used by the ancient Greeks and Egyptians to describe a disorder believed to be caused by a woman’s uterus wandering throughout the body and interfering with other organs (today referred to as conversion disorder, in which psychological problems are expressed in physical form).
Identity: Sometimes used synonymously with the term “self,” identity means many different things in psychological science and in other fields (e.g., sociology). In this module, I adopt Erik Erikson’s conception of identity as a developmental task for late adolescence and young adulthood. Forming an identity in adolescence and young adulthood involves exploring alternative roles, values, goals, and relationships and eventually committing to a realistic agenda for life that productively situates a person in the adult world of work and love. In addition, identity formation entails commitments to new social roles and reevaluation of old traits, and importantly, it brings with it a sense of temporal continuity in life, achieved though the construction of an integrative life story.
Identity achievement: Individuals have explored different options and then made commitments.
Identity diffusion: Adolescents neither explore nor commit to any roles or ideologies.
Impact bias: A bias in affective forecasting in which one overestimates the strength or intensity of emotion one will experience after some event.
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: An implicit attitude task that assesses a person’s automatic associations between concepts by measuring the response times in pairing the concepts.
Implicit attitude: An attitude that a person cannot verbally or overtly state.
Implicit measures of attitudes: Measures of attitudes in which researchers infer the participant’s attitude rather than having the participant explicitly report it.
Implicit motives: These are goals that are important to a person, but that he/she cannot consciously express. Because the individual cannot verbalize these goals directly, they cannot be easily assessed via self-report. However, they can be measured using projective devices such as the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT).
Independent: Two characteristics or traits are separate from one another-- a person can be high on one and low on the other, or vice-versa. Some correlated traits are relatively independent in that although there is a tendency for a person high on one to also be high on the other, this is not always the case.
Independent self: A model or view of the self as distinct from others and as stable across different situations. The goal of the independent self is to express and assert the self, and to influence others. This model of self is prevalent in many individualistic, Western contexts (e.g., the United States, Australia, Western Europe).
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.
Individual level: A focus on individual level statistics that reflect whether individuals show stability or change when studying personality development. An example is evaluating how many individuals increased in conscientiousness versus how many decreased in conscientiousness when considering the transition from adolescence to adulthood.
Individualism: Belief system that exalts freedom, independence, and individual choice as high values.
Induction: To draw general conclusions from specific observations.
Inductive reasoning: A form of reasoning in which a general conclusion is inferred from a set of observations (e.g., noting that “the driver in that car was texting; he just cut me off then ran a red light!” (a specific observation), which leads to the general conclusion that texting while driving is dangerous).
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.
Inhibitory functioning: Ability to focus on a subset of information while suppressing attention to less relevant information.
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.
Interdependent self: A model or view of the self as connected to others and as changing in response to different situations. The goal of the interdependent self is to suppress personal preferences and desires, and to adjust to others. This model of self is prevalent in many collectivistic, East Asian contexts (e.g., China, Japan, Korea).
Internal bodily or somatic cues: Physical sensations that serve as triggers for anxiety or as reminders of past traumatic events.
Interoceptive avoidance: Avoidance of situations or activities that produce sensations of physical arousal similar to those occurring during a panic attack or intense fear response.
Interpersonal: This refers to the relationship or interaction between two or more individuals in a group. Thus, the interpersonal functions of emotion refer to the effects of one’s emotion on others, or to the relationship between oneself and others.
Intra- and inter-individual differences: Different patterns of development observed within an individual (intra-) or between individuals (inter-).
Intrapersonal: This refers to what occurs within oneself. Thus, the intrapersonal functions of emotion refer to the effects of emotion to individuals that occur physically inside their bodies and psychologically inside their minds.
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.
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.
Letter of recommendation effect: The general tendency for informants in personality studies to rate others in an unrealistically positive manner. This tendency is due a pervasive bias in personality assessment: In the large majority of published studies, informants are individuals who like the person they are rating (e.g., they often are friends or family members) and, therefore, are motivated to depict them in a socially desirable way. The term reflects a similar tendency for academic letters of recommendation to be overly positive and to present the referent in an unrealistically desirable manner.
Levels of analysis: In science, there are complementary understandings and explanations of phenomena.
Levels of analysis: Complementary views for analyzing and understanding a phenomenon.
Lexical hypothesis: The lexical hypothesis is the idea that the most important differences between people will be encoded in the language that we use to describe people. Therefore, if we want to know which personality traits are most important, we can look to the language that people use to describe themselves and others.
Life course theories: Theory of development that highlights the effects of social expectations of age-related life events and social roles; additionally considers the lifelong cumulative effects of membership in specific cohorts and sociocultural subgroups and exposure to historical events.
Life span theories: Theory of development that emphasizes the patterning of lifelong within- and between-person differences in the shape, level, and rate of change trajectories.
Longitudinal studies: Research method that collects information from individuals at multiple time points over time, allowing researchers to track cohort differences in age-related change to determine cumulative effects of different life experiences.
Longitudinal study: A study that follows the same group of individuals over time.
Longitudinal study/design: A research design that follows the same group of individuals at multiple time points.
Lordosis: A physical sexual posture in females that serves as an invitation to mate.
Machiavellianism: Being cunning, strategic, or exploitative in one’s relationships. Named after Machiavelli, who outlined this way of relating in his book, The Prince.
Magnetic resonance imaging: A set of techniques that uses strong magnets to measure either the structure of the brain (e.g., gray matter and white matter) or how the brain functions when a person performs cognitive tasks (e.g., working memory or episodic memory) or other types of tasks.
Maladaptive: Term referring to behaviors that cause people who have them physical or emotional harm, prevent them from functioning in daily life, and/or indicate that they have lost touch with reality and/or cannot control their thoughts and behavior (also called dysfunctional).
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.
Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT): A 141-item performance assessment of EI that measures the four emotion abilities (as defined by the four-branch model of EI) with a total of eight tasks.
Mesmerism: Derived from Franz Anton Mesmer in the late 18th century, an early version of hypnotism in which Mesmer claimed that hysterical symptoms could be treated through animal magnetism emanating from Mesmer’s body and permeating the universe (and later through magnets); later explained in terms of high suggestibility in individuals.
Metabolism: Breakdown of substances.
Mind–body connection: The idea that our emotions and thoughts can affect how our body functions.
Mindfulness: A process that reflects a nonjudgmental, yet attentive, mental state.
Mindfulness-based therapy: A form of psychotherapy grounded in mindfulness theory and practice, often involving meditation, yoga, body scan, and other features of mindfulness exercises.
Mixed and Trait Models: Approaches that view EI as a combination of self-perceived emotion skills, personality traits, and attitudes.
Mood-congruent memory: The tendency to be better able to recall memories that have a mood similar to our current mood.
Moratorium: State in which adolescents are actively exploring options but have not yet made identity commitments.
Motivated skepticism: A form of bias that can result from having a directional goal in which one is skeptical of evidence despite its strength because it goes against what one wants to believe.
Motivation: The psychological driving force that enables action in the course of goal pursuit.
Narcissism: A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), a need for admiration, and lack of empathy.
Narcissistic: A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy.
Narrative identity: An internalized and evolving story of the self designed to provide life with some measure of temporal unity and purpose. Beginning in late adolescence, people craft self-defining stories that reconstruct the past and imagine the future to explain how the person came to be the person that he or she is becoming.
Nature: The genes that children bring with them to life and that influence all aspects of their development.
Need for closure: The desire to come to a decision that will resolve ambiguity and conclude an issue.
Need to belong: A strong natural impulse in humans to form social connections and to be accepted by others.
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.
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.
Neuroticism: A personality trait that reflects the tendency to be interpersonally sensitive and the tendency to experience negative emotions like anxiety, fear, sadness, and anger.
Neurotransmitter: A chemical substance produced by a neuron that is used for communication between neurons.
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.
Null-hypothesis significance testing (NHST): In statistics, a test created to determine the chances that an alternative hypothesis would produce a result as extreme as the one observed if the null hypothesis were actually true.
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.
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.
Objective: Being free of personal bias.
Objective social variables: Targets of research interest that are factual and not subject to personal opinions or feelings.
Observational learning: Learning by observing the behavior of others.
Obsessive-compulsive: A pervasive pattern of preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and mental and interpersonal control, at the expense of flexibility, openness, and efficiency.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD): A disorder characterized by the desire to engage in certain behaviors excessively or compulsively in hopes of reducing anxiety. Behaviors include things such as cleaning, repeatedly opening and closing doors, hoarding, and obsessing over certain thoughts.
OECD countries: Members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, comprised of the world’s wealthiest countries.
Openness to Experience: A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to seek out and to appreciate new things, including thoughts, feelings, values, and experiences.
Operational definitions: How researchers specifically measure a concept.
Operationalization: The process of defining a concept so that it can be measured. In psychology, this often happens by identifying related concepts or behaviors that can be more easily measured.
Ostracism: Being excluded and ignored by others.
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.
Panic disorder (PD): A condition marked by regular strong panic attacks, and which may include significant levels of worry about future attacks.
Paranoid: A pervasive distrust and suspiciousness of others such that their motives are interpreted as malevolent.
Participant demand: When participants behave in a way that they think the experimenter wants them to behave.
Performance assessment: A method of measurement associated with ability models of EI that evaluate the test taker’s ability to solve emotion-related problems.
Peripheral route to persuasion: Persuasion that relies on superficial cues that have little to do with logic.
Personal distress: According to Batson’s empathy–altruism hypothesis, observers who take a detached view of a person in need will experience feelings of being “worried” and “upset” and will have an egoistic motivation for helping to relieve that distress.
Personality: Characteristic, routine ways of thinking, feeling, and relating to others.
Personality: Enduring predispositions that characterize a person, such as styles of thought, feelings and behavior.
Personality disorders: When personality traits result in significant distress, social impairment, and/or occupational impairment.
Personality traits: Enduring dispositions in behavior that show differences across individuals, and which tend to characterize the person across varying types of situations.
Person-centered therapy: A therapeutic approach focused on creating a supportive environment for self-discovery.
Person–environment transactions: The interplay between individuals and their contextual circumstances that ends up shaping both personality and the environment.
Person-situation debate: The person-situation debate is a historical debate about the relative power of personality traits as compared to situational influences on behavior. The situationist critique, which started the person-situation debate, suggested that people overestimate the extent to which personality traits are consistent across situations.
Pharmacokinetics: The action of a drug through the body, including absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion.
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.
Placebo effect: When receiving special treatment or something new affects human behavior.
Planning fallacy: A cognitive bias in which one underestimates how long it will take to complete a task.
Pluralistic ignorance: Relying on the actions of others to define an ambiguous need situation and to then erroneously conclude that no help or intervention is necessary.
Polypharmacy: The use of many medications.
Population: In research, all the people belonging to a particular group (e.g., the population of left handed people).
Positron emission tomography: A technique that uses radio-labelled ligands to measure the distribution of different neurotransmitter receptors in the brain or to measure how much of a certain type of neurotransmitter is released when a person is given a specific type of drug or does a particularly cognitive task.
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD): A sense of intense fear, triggered by memories of a past traumatic event, that another traumatic event might occur. PTSD may include feelings of isolation and emotional numbing.
Practitioner-Scholar Model: A model of training of professional psychologists that emphasizes clinical practice.
Prejudice: An evaluation or emotion toward people based merely on their group membership.
Preoperational reasoning stage: Period within Piagetian theory from age 2 to 7 years, in which children can represent objects through drawing and language but cannot solve logical reasoning problems, such as the conservation problems.
Preoptic area: A region in the anterior hypothalamus involved in generating and regulating male sexual behavior.
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).
Primed: A process by which a concept or behavior is made more cognitively accessible or likely to occur through the presentation of an associated concept.
Probability: A measure of the degree of certainty of the occurrence of an event.
Probability values: In statistics, the established threshold for determining whether a given value occurs by chance.
Problem-focused coping: A set of coping strategies aimed at improving or changing stressful situations.
Processing speed: The time it takes individuals to perform cognitive operations (e.g., process information, react to a signal, switch attention from one task to another, find a specific target object in a complex picture).
Processing speed: The speed with which an individual can perceive auditory or visual information and respond to it.
Progress: The perception of reducing the discrepancy between one’s current state and one’s desired state in goal pursuit.
Projective hypothesis: The theory that when people are confronted with ambiguous stimuli (that is, stimuli that can be interpreted in more than one way), their responses will be influenced by their unconscious thoughts, needs, wishes, and impulses. This, in turn, is based on the Freudian notion of projection, which is the idea that people attribute their own undesirable/unacceptable characteristics to other people or objects.
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).
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.
Pseudoscience: Beliefs or practices that are presented as being scientific, or which are mistaken for being scientific, but which are not scientific (e.g., astrology, the use of celestial bodies to make predictions about human behaviors, and which presents itself as founded in astronomy, the actual scientific study of celestial objects. Astrology is a pseudoscience unable to be falsified, whereas astronomy is a legitimate scientific discipline).
Psychoactive drugs: A drug that changes mood or the way someone feels.
Psychoanalytic therapy: Sigmund Freud’s therapeutic approach focusing on resolving unconscious conflicts.
Psychodynamic therapy: Treatment applying psychoanalytic principles in a briefer, more individualized format.
Psychogenesis: Developing from psychological origins.
Psychological control: Parents’ manipulation of and intrusion into adolescents’ emotional and cognitive world through invalidating adolescents’ feelings and pressuring them to think in particular ways.
Psychological reactance: A reaction to people, rules, requirements, or offerings that are perceived to limit freedoms.
Psychological vulnerabilities: Influences that our early experiences have on how we view the world.
Psychometric approach: Approach to studying intelligence that examines performance on tests of intellectual functioning.
Psychomotor agitation: Increased motor activity associated with restlessness, including physical actions (e.g., fidgeting, pacing, feet tapping, handwringing).
Psychomotor retardation: A slowing of physical activities in which routine activities (e.g., eating, brushing teeth) are performed in an unusually slow manner.
Psychoneuroimmunology: A field of study examining the relationship among psychology, brain function, and immune function.
Psychopathology: Illnesses or disorders that involve psychological or psychiatric symptoms.
Psychopathy: A pattern of antisocial behavior characterized by an inability to empathize, egocentricity, and a desire to use relationships as tools for personal gain.
Psychophysics: Study of the relationships between physical stimuli and the perception of those stimuli.
Psychosomatic medicine: An interdisciplinary field of study that focuses on how biological, psychological, and social processes contribute to physiological changes in the body and health over time.
Psychotropic drug: A drug that changes mood or emotion, usually used when talking about drugs prescribed for various mental conditions (depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, etc.).
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.
Quasi-experimental design: An experiment that does not require random assignment to conditions.
Random assignment: Assigning participants to receive different conditions of an experiment by chance.
Reactive person–environment transactions: The interplay between individuals and their contextual circumstances that occurs whenever attributes of the individual shape how a person perceives and responds to their environment.
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.
Recall: Type of memory task where individuals are asked to remember previously learned information without the help of external cues.
Reciprocal altruism: According to evolutionary psychology, a genetic predisposition for people to help those who have previously helped them.
Reciprocity: The act of exchanging goods or services. By giving a person a gift, the principle of reciprocity can be used to influence others; they then feel obligated to give back.
Recognition: Type of memory task where individuals are asked to remember previously learned information with the assistance of cues.
Redemptive narratives: Life stories that affirm the transformation from suffering to an enhanced status or state. In American culture, redemptive life stories are highly prized as models for the good self, as in classic narratives of atonement, upward mobility, liberation, and recovery.
Reference group effect: The tendency of people to base their self-concept on comparisons with others. For example, if your friends tend to be very smart and successful, you may come to see yourself as less intelligent and successful than you actually are. Informants also are prone to these types of effects. For instance, the sibling contrast effect refers to the tendency of parents to exaggerate the true extent of differences between their children.
Reflexivity: The idea that the self reflects back upon itself; that the I (the knower, the subject) encounters the Me (the known, the object). Reflexivity is a fundamental property of human selfhood.
Reinforced response: Following the process of operant conditioning, the strengthening of a response following either the delivery of a desired consequence (positive reinforcement) or escape from an aversive consequence.
Reliablility: The consistency of test scores across repeated assessments. For example, test-retest reliability examines the extent to which scores change over time.
Representative: In research, the degree to which a sample is a typical example of the population from which it is drawn.
Representativeness heuristic: A heuristic in which the likelihood of an object belonging to a category is evaluated based on the extent to which the object appears similar to one’s mental representation of the category.
Research confederate: A person working with a researcher, posing as a research participant or as a bystander.
Research participant: A person being studied as part of a research program.
Resilience: The ability to “bounce back” from negative situations (e.g., illness, stress) to normal functioning or to simply not show poor outcomes in the face of adversity. In some cases, resilience may lead to better functioning following the negative experience (e.g., post-traumatic growth).
Reward value: A neuropsychological measure of an outcome’s affective importance to an organism.
SAD performance only: Social anxiety disorder which is limited to certain situations that the sufferer perceives as requiring some type of performance.
Sample: In research, a number of people selected from a population to serve as an example of that population.
Satiation: The state of being full to satisfaction and no longer desiring to take on more.
Schema: A mental model or representation that organizes the important information about a thing, person, or event (also known as a script).
Schema: A mental representation or set of beliefs about something.
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.
Scientific theory: An explanation for observed phenomena that is empirically well-supported, consistent, and fruitful (predictive).
Scientist-practitioner model: A model of training of professional psychologists that emphasizes the development of both research and clinical skills.
Selection: A connection between personality attributes and aspects of the environment that occurs whenever individuals with particular attributes choose particular kinds of environments.
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-control: The capacity to control impulses, emotions, desires, and actions in order to resist a temptation and adhere to a valued goal.
Self-efficacy: The belief that one can perform adequately in a specific situation.
Self-enhancement bias: The tendency for people to see and/or present themselves in an overly favorable way. This tendency can take two basic forms: defensiveness (when individuals actually believe they are better than they really are) and impression management (when people intentionally distort their responses to try to convince others that they are better than they really are). Informants also can show enhancement biases. The general form of this bias has been called the letter-of-recommendation effect, which is the tendency of informants who like the person they are rating (e.g., friends, relatives, romantic partners) to describe them in an overly favorable way. In the case of newlyweds, this tendency has been termed the honeymoon effect.
Self-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-perceptions of aging: An individual’s perceptions of their own aging process; positive perceptions of aging have been shown to be associated with greater longevity and health.
Self-regulation: The processes through which individuals alter their emotions, desires, and actions in the course of pursuing a goal.
Self-report assessment: A method of measurement associated with mixed and trait models of EI, which evaluates the test taker’s perceived emotion-related skills, distinct personality traits, and other characteristics.
Sensorimotor stage: Period within Piagetian theory from birth to age 2 years, during which children come to represent the enduring reality of objects.
Shunning: The act of avoiding or ignoring a person, and withholding all social interaction for a period of time. Shunning generally occurs as a punishment and is temporary.
Sibling contrast effect: The tendency of parents to use their perceptions of all of their children as a frame of reference for rating the characteristics of each of them. For example, suppose that a mother has three children; two of these children are very sociable and outgoing, whereas the third is relatively average in sociability. Because of operation of this effect, the mother will rate this third child as less sociable and outgoing than he/she actually is. More generally, this effect causes parents to exaggerate the true extent of differences between their children. This effect represents a specific manifestation of the more general reference group effect when applied to ratings made by parents.
Social and cultural: Society refers to a system of relationships between individuals and groups of individuals; culture refers to the meaning and information afforded to that system that is transmitted across generations. Thus, the social and cultural functions of emotion refer to the effects that emotions have on the functioning and maintenance of societies and cultures.
Social and emotional learning (SEL): The real-world application of EI in an educational setting and/or classroom that involves curricula that teach the process of integrating thinking, feeling, and behaving in order to become aware of the self and of others, make responsible decisions, and manage one’s own behaviors and those of others (Elias et al., 1997)
Social anxiety disorder (SAD): A condition marked by acute fear of social situations which lead to worry and diminished day to day functioning.
Social attribution: The way a person explains the motives or behaviors of others.
Social cognition: The study of how people think about the social world.
Social cognition: The way people process and apply information about others.
Social constructivism: Social constructivism proposes that knowledge is first created and learned within a social context and is then adopted by individuals.
Social influence: When one person causes a change in attitude or behavior in another person, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
Social integration: Active engagement and participation in a broad range of social relationships.
Social integration: The size of your social network, or number of social roles (e.g., son, sister, student, employee, team member).
Social network: Network of people with whom an individual is closely connected; social networks provide emotional, informational, and material support and offer opportunities for social engagement.
Social proof: The mental shortcut based on the assumption that, if everyone is doing it, it must be right.
Social psychology: The branch of psychological science that is mainly concerned with understanding how the presence of others affects our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Social referencing: This refers to the process whereby individuals look for information from others to clarify a situation, and then use that information to act. Thus, individuals will often use the emotional expressions of others as a source of information to make decisions about their own behavior.
Social reputation: The traits and social roles that others attribute to an actor. Actors also have their own conceptions of what they imagine their respective social reputations indeed are in the eyes of others.
Social support: A social network’s provision of psychological and material resources that benefit an individual.
Social support: The perception or actuality that we have a social network that can help us in times of need and provide us with a variety of useful resources (e.g., advice, love, money).
Social zeitgeber: Zeitgeber is German for “time giver.” Social zeitgebers are environmental cues, such as meal times and interactions with other people, that entrain biological rhythms and thus sleep-wake cycle regularity.
Sociocultural theories: Theory founded in large part by Lev Vygotsky that emphasizes how other people and the attitudes, values, and beliefs of the surrounding culture influence children’s development.
Socioeconomic status (SES): A person’s economic and social position based on income, education, and occupation.
Socioemotional Selectivity Theory: Theory proposed to explain the reduction of social partners in older adulthood; posits that older adults focus on meeting emotional over information-gathering goals, and adaptively select social partners who meet this need.
Somatogenesis: Developing from physical/bodily origins.
Specific vulnerabilities: How our experiences lead us to focus and channel our anxiety.
Standardize: Assessments that are given in the exact same manner to all people . With regards to intelligence tests standardized scores are individual scores that are computed to be referenced against normative scores for a population (see “norm”).
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: Our general beliefs about the traits or behaviors shared by group of people.
Stereotyping: A mental process of using information shortcuts about a group to effectively navigate social situations or make decisions.
Stigmatized group: A group that suffers from social disapproval based on some characteristic that sets them apart from the majority.
Stress: A pattern of physical and psychological responses in an organism after it perceives a threatening event that disturbs its homeostasis and taxes its abilities to cope with the event.
Stress reaction: The tendency to become easily distressed by the normal challenges of life.
Stressor: An event or stimulus that induces feelings of stress.
Structuralism: A school of American psychology that sought to describe the elements of conscious experience.
Subjective age: A multidimensional construct that indicates how old (or young) a person feels and into which age group a person categorizes him- or herself
Subjective social variables: Targets of research interest that are not necessarily factual but are related to personal opinions or feelings
Subjective well-being: The scientific term used to describe how people experience the quality of their lives in terms of life satisfaction and emotional judgments of positive and negative affect.
Successful aging: Includes three components: avoiding disease, maintaining high levels of cognitive and physical functioning, and having an actively engaged lifestyle.
Suicidal ideation: Recurring thoughts about suicide, including considering or planning for suicide, or preoccupation with suicide.
Supernatural: Developing from origins beyond the visible observable universe.
Synapse: The tiny space separating neurons.
Syndrome: Involving a particular group of signs and symptoms.
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.
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.
The norm of reciprocity: The normative pressure to repay, in equitable value, what another person has given to us.
The rule of scarcity: People tend to perceive things as more attractive when their availability is limited, or when they stand to lose the opportunity to acquire them on favorable terms.
The triad of trust: We are most vulnerable to persuasion when the source is perceived as an authority, as honest and likable.
Theories: Groups of closely related phenomena or observations.
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.
Thought-action fusion: The tendency to overestimate the relationship between a thought and an action, such that one mistakenly believes a “bad” thought is the equivalent of a “bad” action.
Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: The inability to pull a word from memory even though there is the sensation that that word is available.
“Traitement moral” (moral treatment): A therapeutic regimen of improved nutrition, living conditions, and rewards for productive behavior that has been attributed to Philippe Pinel during the French Revolution, when he released mentally ill patients from their restraints and treated them with compassion and dignity rather than with contempt and denigration.
Transformation: The term for personality changes associated with experience and life events.
Trephination: The drilling of a hole in the skull, presumably as a way of treating psychological disorders.
Trigger features: Specific, sometimes minute, aspects of a situation that activate fixed action patterns.
Type A Behavior: Type A behavior is characterized by impatience, competitiveness, neuroticism, hostility, and anger.
Type B Behavior: Type B behavior reflects the absence of Type A characteristics and is represented by less competitive, aggressive, and hostile behavior patterns.
Type I error: In statistics, the error of rejecting the null hypothesis when it is true.
Type II error: In statistics, the error of failing to reject the null hypothesis when it is false.
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.
Universalism: Universalism proposes that there are single objective standards, independent of culture, in basic domains such as learning, reasoning, and emotion that are a part of all human experience.
Validity: Evidence related to the interpretation and use of test scores. A particularly important type of evidence is criterion validity, which involves the ability of a test to predict theoretically relevant outcomes. For example, a presumed measure of conscientiousness should be related to academic achievement (such as overall grade point average).
Value: Belief about the way things should be.
Well-being: The experience of mental and physical health and the absence of disorder.
Working memory: The ability to maintain information over a short period of time, such as 30 seconds or less.
Working memory: Memory system that allows for information to be simultaneously stored and utilized or manipulated.