| abnormal behavior | Behavior that is deviant, maladaptive, or personally distressful over a long period of time.
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| absolute threshold | The minimum amount of stimulus energy that a person can detect.
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| accommodation | An individual's adjustment of a schema to new information.
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| acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) | A disease caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), a sexually transmitted infection that destroys the body's immune system.
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| acquisition | (classical conditioning)The initial learning of the stimulus–response link, which involves a neutral stimulus being associated with an unconditioned stimulus and becoming the conditioned stimulus that elicits the conditioned response.
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| action potential | The brief wave of electrical charge that sweeps down the axon during the transmission of a nerve impulse.
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| activation-synthesis theory | Theory stating that dreaming occurs when the cerebral cortex synthesizes neural signals generated from activity in the lower part of the brain.
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| addiction | Either a physical or a psychological dependence, or both, on a drug.
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| adrenal glands | Important endocrine glands that are instrumental in regulating moods, energy level, and the ability to cope with stress.
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| aerobic exercise | Sustained exercise, such as jogging, swimming, or cycling, that stimulates heart and lung functioning.
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| affectionate love | Also called companionate love; the type of love that occurs when individuals desire to have the other person near and have a deep, caring affection for the person.
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| affective commitment | The employee's emotional attachment to his or her place of work.
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| afferent nerves | Sensory nerves that transport information to the brain.
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| agonist | A drug that mimics or increases a neurotransmitter's effects.
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| agoraphobia | A cluster of fears centered on public places and on an inability to escape or to find help should one become incapacitated.
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| alcoholism | A disorder that involves long-term, repeated, uncontrolled, compulsive, and excessive use of alcoholic beverages and that impairs the drinker's health and social relationships.
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| algorithms | Strategies that guarantee a solution to a problem.
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| all-or-none principle | Once an electrical impulse reaches a certain level of intensity, it fires and moves all the way down the axon without losing any of its intensity.
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| altruism | An unselfish interest in helping someone else.
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| amnesia | The loss of memory.
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| androgens | The class of sex hormones that predominate in males; they are produced by the testes in males and by the adrenal glands in both males and females.
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| anorexia nervosa | An eating disorder that involves the relentless pursuit of thinness through starvation.
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| antagonist | A drug that blocks a neurotransmitter's effects.
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| anterograde amnesia | A memory disorder that affects the retention of new information and events.
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| antianxiety drugs | Commonly known as tranquilizers; drugs that reduce anxiety by making individuals calmer and less excitable.
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| antidepressant drugs | Drugs that regulate mood.
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| antipsychotic drugs | Powerful drugs that diminish agitated behavior, reduce tension, decrease hallucinations, improve social behavior, and produce better sleep patterns in people who have a severe psychological disorder, especially schizophrenia.
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| anxiety disorders | Psychological disorders that feature motor tension, hyperactivity, and apprehensive expectations and thoughts.
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| apparent movement | The perception that a stationary object is moving.
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| applied behavior analysis (behavior modification) | The application of operant conditioning principles to change human behavior.
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| approach coping | Directly confronting a problem with active attempts to solve it.
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| archetypes | The name Jung gave to the emotionally laden ideas and images that have rich and symbolic meaning for all people.
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| artificial intelligence (AI) | The science of creating machines capable of performing activities that require intelligence when they are done by people.
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| assimilation | An individual's incorporation of new information into existing knowledge.
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| association cortex | Region of the cerebral cortex in which the highest intellectual functions, including thinking and problem solving, occur; also called association areas.
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| associative learning | Learning in which a connection, or an association, is made between two events.
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| Atkinson-Shiffrin theory | The view that memory storage involves three separate systems: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory.
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| attachment | The close emotional bond between an infant and its caregiver.
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| attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) | Psychological disorderin which the individual shows one or more of the following characteristics over a period of time: inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity.
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| attitudes | Opinions and beliefs about people, objects, and ideas.
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| attribution theory | Theory that views people as motivated to discover the underlying causes of behavior as part of their effort to make sense of the behavior.
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| auditory nerve | Nerve that carries neural impulses to the brain's auditory areas.
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| authoritarian parenting | A restrictive, punitive parenting style in which the parent exhorts the child to follow the parent's directions and to value hard work and effort.
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| authoritative parenting | A parenting style that encourages children's independence (but still places limits and controls on their behavior); it includes extensive verbal give-and-take, and warm and nurturing interactions with the child.
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| autobiographical memory | A special form of episodic memory consisting of a person's recollections of his or her life experiences.
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| automatic processes | States of consciousness that require little attention and do not interfere with other ongoing activities.
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| autonomic nervous system | The division of the PNS that communicates with the body's internal organs. It consists of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.
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| availability heuristic | A prediction about the probability of an event based on the ease of recalling or imagining similar events.
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| aversive conditioning | (classical conditioning) Treatment that consists of repeated pairings of the undesirable behavior with aversive stimuli to decrease the behavior's rewards.
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| avoidant coping | Coping with a problem by trying one's best to ignore it.
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| axon | The part of the neuron that carries information away from the cell body to other cells.
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| barbiturates | Depressant drugs that decrease the activity of the central nervous system.
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| basal ganglia | Large clusters of neurons, located above the thalamus and under the cerebral cortex, that work with the cerebellum and the cerebral cortex to control and coordinate voluntary movements.
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| behavior | Everything we do that can be directly observed.
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| behavioral approach | A psychological perspective emphasizing the scientific study of observable behavioral responses and their environmental determinants.
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| behaviorism | A theory of learning that focuses solely on observable behaviors, discounting the importance of such mental activity as thinking, wishing, and hoping.
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| behavior modification | The application of operant conditioning principles to change human behaviors; especially to replace unacceptable, maladaptive behaviors with acceptable, adaptive behaviors.
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| behavior therapies | Therapies that use principles of learning to reduce or eliminate maladaptive behavior.
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| behavioral medicine | An interdisciplinary field that focuses on developing and integrating behavioral and biomedical knowledge to promote health and reduce illness.
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| big five factors of personality | The "supertraits" that are thought to describe the main dimensions of personality—specifically, neuroticism (emotional instability), extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.
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| binding | The bringing together and integration of what is processed through different pathways or cells.
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| binocular cues | Depth cues that are based on the combination of the images on the left and right eyes and on the way the two eyes work together.
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| biographical inventory | A type of job-screening test that involves asking the candidate about life experiences that seem verifiable.
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| biological approach | A psychological perspective that examines behavior and mental processes through a focus on the body, especially the brain and nervous system.
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| biological rhythms | Periodic physiological fluctuations in the body.
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| biological therapies | Treatments to reduce or eliminate the symptoms of psychological disorders by altering the way an individual's body functions.
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| bipolar disorder | A mood disorder characterized by extreme mood swings that include one or more episodes of mania (an overexcited, unrealistically optimistic state).
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| bottom-up processing | Processing that begins with sensory receptors registering environmental information and sending it to the brain for analysis and interpretation.
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| brain stem | The region of the brain that includes most of the hindbrain (excluding the cerebellum) and the midbrain.
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| broaden-and-build model | A model emphasizing that the key to the adaptiveness of positive emotional states lies in their effects on our attention and our ability to build resources.
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| bulimia nervosa | An eating disorder in which the individual consistently follows a binge-and-purge eating pattern.
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| burnout | An extremely distressed psychological state in which a person experiences emotional exhaustion and little motivation for work.
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| bystander effect | The tendency of an individual who observes an emergency to help less when other people are present than when the observer is alone.
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| Cannon-Bard theory | Theory stating that emotion and physiological reactions occur simultaneously.
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| case study | An in-depth look at a single individual; also known as a case history.
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| catatonia | A state of immobility and unresponsiveness.
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| catatonic schizophrenia | A type of schizophrenia characterized by bizarre motor behavior that sometimes takes the form of a completely immobile stupor.
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| catharsis | The release of anger or aggressive energy by directly or vicariously engaging in anger or aggression; the catharsis hypothesis states that behaving angrily or watching others behave angrily reduces subsequent anger.
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| cell body | The part of the neuron that contains the nucleus, which directs the manufacture of substances that the neuron needs for growth and maintenance.
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| central nervous system (CNS) | The brain and spinal cord.
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| cerebral cortex | Highest level of the forebrain, where the highest mental functions, such as thinking and planning, take place.
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| chromosomes | Threadlike structures that contain genes and DNA. Humans have 23 chromosome pairs in the nucleus of every cell. Each parent contributes one chromosome to each pair.
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| circadian rhythm | A daily behavioral or physiological cycle, such as the sleep/wake cycle.
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| classical conditioning | Learning by which a neutral stimulus becomes associated with a meaningful stimulus and acquires the capacity to elicit a similar response.
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| classical model | Model stating that all instances of a concept share defining properties.
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| client-centered therapy | Rogers's humanistic therapy in which the therapist provides a warm, supportive atmosphere to improve the client's self-concept and encourage the client to gain insight about problems.
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| cognition | The way in which information is processed and manipulated in remembering, thinking, and knowing.
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| cognitive affective processing systems (CAPS) | According to Mischel, a set of interconnected cognitive systems through which an individual's thoughts and emotions about self and the world become linked together in ways that matter to behavior.
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| cognitive appraisal | Individuals' interpretation of the events in their lives as harmful, threatening, or challenging and their determination of whether they have the resources to cope effectively with the events.
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| cognitive approach | A psychological perspective that focuses on the mental processes involved in knowing: how we direct our attention, perceive, remember, think, and solve problems.
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| cognitive dissonance | A concept developed by Festinger; an individual's psychological discomfort (dissonance) caused by two inconsistent thoughts.
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| cognitive theory of dreaming | Theory proposing that dreaming can be understood by applying the same cognitive concepts that are used in studying the waking mind.
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| cognitive therapies | Therapies emphasizing that individuals' cognitions, or thoughts, are the main source of abnormal behavior and psychological problems.
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| cognitive-behavior therapy | Therapy consisting of a combination of cognitive therapy and behavior therapy; self-efficacy is an important goal of cognitive-behavior therapy.
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| collective unconscious | Jung's term for the impersonal, deepest layer of the unconscious mind, shared by all human beings because of their common ancestral past.
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| concepts | Mental categories that are used to group objects, events, and characteristics.
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| concrete operational stage | The third Piagetian stage of cognitive development (approximately 7 to 11 years of age), in which thought becomes operational and intuitive reasoning is replaced by logical reasoning in concrete situations.
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| conditioned response (CR) | The learned response to the conditioned stimulus that occurs after the pairing of a conditioned stimulus and an unconditioned stimulus.
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| conditioned stimulus (CS) | A previously neutral stimulus that eventually elicits the conditioned response after being associated with the unconditioned stimulus.
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| cones | The receptors in the retina that process information about color.
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| confederate | A person who is given a role to play in a study so that social context can be manipulated.
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| confirmation bias | The tendency to search for and use information that supports, rather than refutes, our ideas.
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| conformity | Change in a person's behavior to coincide more closely with a group standard.
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| connectionism (parallel distributed processing—PDP) | The theory that memory is stored throughout the brain in connections between neurons, several of which may work together to process a single memory.
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| consciousness | Awareness of external events and internal sensations, including awareness of the self and thoughts about one's experiences; this awareness occurs under a condition of arousal.
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| continuance commitment | A kind of job commitment that derives from the employee's perception that leaving the organization would be too costly, both economically and socially.
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| control group | A comparison group that is as much like the experimental group as possible and is treated in every way like the experimental group except for the manipulated factor.
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| controlled processes | The most alert states of consciousness.
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| convergent thinking | Thinking that produces one correct answer; characteristic of the type of thinking required on traditional intelligence tests.
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| coping | Managing taxing circumstances, expending effort to solve life's problems, and seeking to master or reduce stress.
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| corpus callosum | The large bundle of axons that connects the brain's two hemispheres.
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| correlational research | A research strategy that identifies the relationships between two or more variables in order to describe how these variables change together.
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| counterconditioning | A classical conditioning procedure for weakening a conditioned response by associating the fear-provoking stimulus with a new response that is incompatible with the fear.
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| couples therapy | Group therapy with married or unmarried couples whose major problem lies within their relationship.
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| creativity | The ability to think about something in novel and unusual ways and come up with unconventional solutions to problems.
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| critical thinking | The process of thinking reflectively and productively, as well as evaluating evidence.
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| crystallized intelligence | An individual's accumulated information and verbal skills.
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| culture-fair tests | Intelligence tests that are intended to be culturally unbiased.
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| decay theory | Theory stating that when something new is learned, a neurochemical memory trace is formed, but over time this trace tends to disintegrate.
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| decision making | Evaluating alternatives and making choices among them
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| deductive reasoning | Reasoning from the general to the specific.
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| defense mechanisms | The ego's protective methods for reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.
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| deindividuation | The reduction of personal identity and erosion of the sense of personal responsibility that can arise when one is part of a group.
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| delusions | False, sometimes even preposterous, beliefs that are not part of the person's culture.
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| dendrites | Branches of a neuron that receive and orient information toward the cell body; most neurons have numerous dendrites.
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| deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) | A complex molecule that contains genetic information; makes up chromosomes.
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| dependent variable | A factor that can change in an experiment in response to changes in the independent variable.
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| depressants | Psychoactive drugs that slow down mental and physical activity.
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| depressive disorders | Mood disorders in which the individual suffers from depression (an unrelenting lack of pleasure in life).
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| depth perception | The ability to perceive objects three dimensionally.
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| descriptive statistics | Mathematical procedures that are used to describe and summarize sets of data in a meaningful way.
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| development | The pattern of continuity and change in human capabilities that occurs throughout the course of life.
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| diathesis-stress model | A model of schizophrenia that proposes a combination of biogenetic disposition and stress as the cause of the disorder.
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| difference threshold | The smallest difference in stimulation required to discriminate one stimulus from another 50 percent of the time; also called just noticeable difference.
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| discrimination | In social psychology,an unjustified negative or harmful action toward a member of a group simply because he or she is a member of that group.
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| discrimination | (classical conditioning) The process of learning to respond to certain stimuli and not to others.
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| discrimination | (operant conditioning) The tendency to respond to stimuli that signal that a behavior will or will not be reinforced.
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| disorganized schizophrenia | A type of schizophrenia in which an individual has delusions and hallucinations that have little or no recognizable meaning.
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| display rules | Sociocultural standards that determine when, where, and how emotions should be expressed.
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| dissociative amnesia | A dissociative disorder involving extreme memory loss caused by extensive psychological stress.
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| dissociative disorders | Psychological disorders that involve a sudden loss of memory or change in identity.
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| dissociative fugue | A dissociative disorder in which the individual not only develops amnesia but also unexpectedly travels away from home and assumes a new identity.
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| dissociative identity disorder (DID) | Formerly called multiple personality disorder, this is the most dramatic but least common dissociative disorder; individuals suffering from this disorder have two or more distinct personalities or selves.
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| distributional error | A common error in performance ratings, so called because it refers to ratings that fail to use the entire rating scale.
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| divergent thinking | Thinking that produces many answers to the same question; characteristic of creativity.
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| dominant-recessive genes principle | The principle that, if one gene of a pair governing a given characteristic (such as eye color) is dominant and one is recessive, the dominant gene overrides the recessive gene. A recessive gene exerts its influence only if both genes in a pair are recessive.
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| double-blind experiment | An experiment that is conducted so that neither the experimenter nor the participants are aware of which participants are in the experimental group and which are in the control group until after the results are calculated.
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| downsizing | A dramatic cutting of the workforce that is anincreasingly popular business strategy to enhance profitability.
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| dream analysis | The psychotherapeutic technique used to interpret a person's dream. Psychoanalysts believe that dreams contain information about the individual's unconscious thoughts and conflicts.
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| drive | An aroused state that occurs because of a physiological need.
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| DSM-IV | Abbreviation for theDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition; the current version of the APA's major classification of psychological disorders.
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| dysthymic disorder | A depressive disorder that is generally more chronic and has fewer symptoms than major depressive disorder.
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| ecological validity | The extent to which an experimental design is representative of the real-world issues it is supposed to address.
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| efferent nerves | Motor nerves that carry the brain's output.
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| ego | The Freudian structure of personality that deals with the demands of reality.
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| egoism | Giving to another person to ensure reciprocity; to gain self-esteem; to present oneself as powerful, competent, or caring; or to avoid social and self-censure for failing to live up to society's expectations.
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| elaboration | Extensiveness of processing at any given level of memory.
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| elaboration likelihood model | Theory identifying two ways by which a communication can be persuasive—a central route and by a peripheral route.
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| electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) | Commonly called shock therapy; a treatment used for severely depressed individuals that causes a seizure to occur in the brain.
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| emerging adulthood | The transition from adolescence to adulthood.
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| emotion | Feeling, or affect, that can involve physiological arousal, conscious experience, and behavioral expression.
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| emotion-focused coping | Responding to the emotional aspects of stress rather than focusing on the problem causing the stress.
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| empathy | A feeling of oneness with the emotional state of another person.
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| empirically keyed test | A type of test that presents a host of questionnaire items to groups of people who are already known to differ in some central way (such as individuals with a psychological disorder versus mentally healthy individuals).
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| encoding | The process by which information gets into memory storage.
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| endocrine system | A set of glands that regulate the activities of certain organs by releasing their chemical products (hormones) into the bloodstream.
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| episodic memory | The retention of information about the where, when, and what of life's happenings.
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| ergonomics (human factors) | A field that combines engineering and psychology and that focuses on understanding and enhancing the safety and efficiency of the human–machine interaction.
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| estrogens | The main class of female sex hormones, produced principally by the ovaries.
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| ethnic gloss | Using an ethnic label, such as "African American" or "Latino," in a superficial way that portrays the ethnic group as more homogeneous than it really is.
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| ethnocentrism | The tendency to favor one's own ethnic group over other groups.
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| evolutionary approach | A psychological perspective that uses evolutionary ideas such as adaptation, reproduction, and "survival of the fittest" as the basis for explaining specific human behaviors.
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| exercise | Structured activities whose goal is to improve health.
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| experiment | A carefully regulated procedure in which one or more variables believed to influence the behavior being studied are manipulated while all other variables are held constant.
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| experimental group | A group in the research study whose experience is manipulated.
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| experimenter bias | The influence of the experimenter's own expectations on the outcome of the research.
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| expertise | The quality of having a particular talent—that "something special"—for the things that one does in a particular domain.
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| explicit memory (declarative memory) | The conscious recollection of information, such as specific facts or events and, at least in humans, information that can be verbally communicated.
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| extinction | (classical conditioning) The weakening of the conditioned response in the absence of the unconditioned stimulus.
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| extinction | (operant conditioning) The situation where, because a previously reinforced behavior is no longer reinforced, there is a decreased tendency to perform the behavior.
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| extrinsic motivation | Motivation that involves external incentives such as rewards and punishments.
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| face validity | The extent to which a test item appears to be valid to those who are completing it.
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| facial feedback hypothesis | The idea that facial expressions can influence emotions as well as reflect them.
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| false consensus effect | Overestimation of the degree to which everybody else thinks or acts the way we do, stemming from the use of our own outlook or situation to predict that of others.
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| family therapy | Group therapy with family members.
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| feature detectors | Neurons in the brain's visual system that respond to particular features of a stimulus.
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| figure-ground relationship | Principle by which individuals organize the perceptual field into stimuli that stand out (figure) and those that are left over (background, or ground).
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| fixation | Using a prior problem-solving strategy and failing to look at a problem from a fresh, new perspective.
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| flashbulb memory | The memory of emotionally significant events that people often recall more accurately and vividly than everyday events.
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| flat affect | A negative symptom in which theperson shows little or no emotion, speaks without emotional inflection, and maintains an immobile facial expression.
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| flow | The optimal experience of a match between our skills and the challenge of a task.
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| fluid intelligence | An individual's ability to reason abstractly.
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| forebrain | The highest level of the brain. Key structures in the forebrain are the limbic system, thalamus, basal ganglia, hypothalamus, and cerebral cortex.
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| formal operational stage | The fourth and final Piagetian stage of cognitive development (emerging from about 11 to 15 years of age), in which thinking becomes more abstract, idealistic, and logical.
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| free association | The psychoanalytic technique of having individuals say aloud whatever comes to mind.
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| frequency theory | Theory stating that perception of a sound's frequency depends on how often the auditory nerve fires.
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| frontal lobe | The part of the cerebral cortex just behind the forehead that is involved in the control of voluntary muscles, intelligence, and personality.
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| functional fixedness | A type of fixation in which individuals fail to solve a problem because they are fixated on a thing's usual functions.
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| functionalism | An early school of psychology that was concerned with the functions and purposes of the mind and behavior in individuals' adaptation to the environment.
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| fundamental attribution error | The tendency for observers to overestimate the importance of internal traits and underestimate the importance of external situations when they seek explanations of an actor's behavior.
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| gate-control theory of pain | The spinal column contains a neural gate that can be open (allowing the perception of pain) or closed (blocking the perception of pain).
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| gender roles | Expectations for how females and males should think, act, and feel.
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| general adaptation syndrome (GAS) | Selye's term for the common effects on the body when demands are placed on it. The GAS consists of three stages: alarm, resistance, and exhaustion.
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| generalization | (classical conditioning)The tendency of a new stimulus that is similar to the original conditioned stimulus to elicit a response that is similar to the conditioned response.
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| generalization | (operant conditioning)The tendency to give the same response to similar stimuli.
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| generalized anxiety disorder | An anxiety disorder that consists of persistent anxiety for at least 6 months; the individual with this disorder cannot specify the reasons for the anxiety.
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| genes | The units of hereditary information. They are short segments of chromosomes, composed of DNA.
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| genotype | An individual's genetic heritage; his or her actual genetic material.
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| gestalt psychology | School of psychology emphasizing that people naturally organize their perceptions according to certain patterns.
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| gestalt therapy | Perls's humanistic therapy in which the therapist challenges clients to help them become more aware of their feelings and face their problems.
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| gifted | Descriptive of individuals who have an IQ of 130 or higher and/or superior talent in a particular area.
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| glial cells | Cells that provide support and nutritional benefits in the nervous system.
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| group polarization effect | The solidification and further strengthening of an individual's position as a consequence of a group discussion.
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| groupthink | Group members' impaired decision making and avoidance of realistic appraisal to maintain group harmony.
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| habituation | Decreased responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated presentations. Habituation is used in infant research to examine if an infant can discriminate between an old stimulus and a new one.
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| hallucinations | Sensory experiences in the absence of real stimuli.
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| hallucinogens | Psychoactive drugs that modify a person's perceptual experiences and produce visual images that are not real.
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| halo effect | A common error in performance ratings that occurs when the rater gives the person the same rating on overall items, even though there is actual variability.
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| hardiness | A trait characterized by a sense of commitment and control and a perception of problems as challenges rather than threats.
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| Hawthorne effect | The tendency of individuals to perform better simply because of being singled out and made to feel important.
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| health behaviors | Practices that have an impact on physical well-being.
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| health psychology | A field that emphasizes psychology's role in establishing and maintaining health and in preventing and treating illness.
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| heritability | The proportion of the IQ differences in a population that is attributed to genetic differences.
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| heuristics | Shortcut strategies or guidelines that suggest, but do not guarantee, a solution to a problem.
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| hierarchy of needs | Maslow's view that individuals' main needs are satisfied in the following sequence: physiological, safety, love and belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization.
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| hindbrain | The lowest portion of the brain, consisting of the medulla, cerebellum, and pons.
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| hindsight bias | The tendency to report falsely, after the fact, that we accurately predicted an outcome.
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| homeostasis | The body's tendency to maintain an equilibrium, or steady state.
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| hormones | Chemical messengers manufactured by the endocrine glands.
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| human sexual response pattern | Identified by Masters and Johnson, the four phases of physical reactions that occur in humans as a result of sexual stimulation. These phases are excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution.
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| humanistic approach | A psychological perspective that emphasizes a person's positive qualities, capacity for positive growth, and the freedom to choose any destiny.
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| humanistic perspectives | Views of personality that stress the person's capacity for personal growth, freedom to choose a destiny, and positive qualities.
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| humanistic therapies | Therapies that encourage clients to understand themselves and to grow personally. The humanistic therapies are unique in their emphasis on self-healing capacities.
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| human relations approach | Emphasizes the psychological characteristics of workers and managers, stressing the importance of such factors as morale, attitudes, values, and humane treatment of workers.
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| hypnosis | An altered state of consciousness or simply a psychological state of altered attention and expectation, in which the individual is unusually receptive to suggestions.
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| hypothalamus | Small forebrain structure involved in regulating eating, drinking, and sex; directing the endocrine system; and monitoring emotion, stress, and reward.
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| hypothesis | An idea that is arrived at logically from a theory. It is a prediction that can be tested.
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| id | The Freudian structure of personality that consists of unconscious drives and is the individual's reservoir of psychic energy.
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| identity versus identity confusion | Erikson's fifth psychological stage in which adolescents face the challenge of finding out who they are, what they are all about, and where they are going in life.
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| implementation intentions | Specific strategies (such as setting specific plans and goals) for dealing with the challenges of making a life change.
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| implicit memory (nondeclarative memory) | Memory in which behavior is affected by prior experience without that experience being consciously recollected.
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| independent variable | The manipulated experimental factor in an experiment.
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| individual psychology | The term for Adler's approach, which views people as motivated by purposes and goals and as striving for perfection over pleasure.
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| inductive reasoning | Reasoning from the specific to the general or from the bottom-up.
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| indulgent parenting | A parenting style in which parents are involved with their children but place few limits on them.
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| inferential statistics | Mathematical methods that are used to indicate whether data sufficiently support or confirm a research hypothesis.
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| infinite generativity | The ability to produce an infinite number of sentences using a relatively limited set rules.
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| informational social influence | The influence other people have on us because we want to be right.
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| inner ear | Consists of oval window, cochlea, and basilar membrane.
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| insight learning | A form of problem solving in which the organism develops a sudden insight into or understanding of the problem's solution.
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| insight therapy | A therapy that encourages insight and self-awareness; includes the psychodynamic and humanistic therapies.
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| instinct | An innate (unlearned), biological pattern of behavior that is assumed to be universal throughout a species.
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| instinctive drift | The tendency of animals to revert to instinctive behavior that interferes with learning.
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| integrative therapy | A combination of techniques from different therapies based on the therapist's judgment of which particular techniques will provide the greatest benefit for the client.
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| integrity test | A type of job-screening examination that is designed to assess whether a candidate will likely be dishonest on the job.
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| intelligence | Problem-solving skills and the ability to adapt to and learn from life's everyday experiences.
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| intelligence quotient (IQ) | An individual's mental age divided by chronological age multiplied by 100.
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| interference theory | Theory stating that people forget not because memories are lost from storage but because other information gets in the way of what they want to remember.
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| internal validity | The extent to which changes in the dependent variable are due to the manipulation of the independent variable.
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| intrinsic motivation | Motivation that is based on internal factors such as organismic needs (autonomy, competence, and relatedness), as well as curiosity, challenge, and effort.
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| investment model | A model emphasizing the ways that commitment, investment, and the availability of attractive alternative partners predict satisfaction and stability in relationships.
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| James-Lange theory | Theory stating that emotion results from physiological states triggered by stimuli in the environment.
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| job analysis | The process of generating a description of what a job involves, including the knowledge and skills that are necessary to carry out the job's functions.
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| job crafting | The physical and cognitive changes individuals can make within the constraints of a task to make the work their own.
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| job evaluation | Scientific determination of the monetary value of a particular occupation, which relies on experts' decisions as to the standing of an occupation in terms of compensable factors.
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| job satisfaction | The extent to which a person is content in his or her job.
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| job stress | The experience of stress on the job and in the workplace setting.
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| kinesthetic senses | Senses that provide information about movement, posture, and orientation.
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| KSAOs (KSAs) | Common elements in a person-oriented job analysis; an abbreviation for knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics.
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| language | A form of communication, whether spoken, written, or signed, that is based on a system of symbols.
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| latent learning (implicit learning) | Unreinforced learning that is not immediately reflected in behavior.
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| law of effect | Thorndike's principle that behaviors followed by positive outcomes are strengthened, whereas behaviors followed by negative outcomes are weakened.
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| learned helplessness | The phenomenon of learning through experience that outcomes are not controllable.
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| learning | A relatively permanent change in behavior that occurs through experience.
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| leisure | The pleasant times before or after work when individuals are free to pursue activities and interests of their own choosing, such as hobbies, sports, and reading.
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| levels of processing | The idea that coding occurs on a continuum from shallow to deep, with deeper processing producing better memory.
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| limbic system | Loosely connected network of structures—including the amygdala and hippocampus—that play important roles in memory and emotion.
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| lithium | A drug that is widely used to treat bipolar disorder.
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| longitudinal design | A special kind of systematic observation that involves obtaining measures of the variables of interest in multiple waves over time.
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| long-term memory | A relatively permanent type of memory that stores huge amounts of information for a long time.
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| major depressive disorder (MDD) | A mood disorder indicated by a major depressive episode and depressed characteristics, such as lethargy and hopelessness, lasting at least 2 weeks.
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| mean | A statistical measure of central tendency that is calculated by adding all the scores and then dividing by the number of scores.
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| median | A statistical measure of central tendency that falls exactly in the middle of a distribution of scores after they have been arranged (or ranked) from highest to lowest.
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| medical model | A biological approach that describes psychological disorders
as medical diseases with a biological origin.
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| memory | The retention of information over time the processes of encoding, storage, and retrieval.
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| mental age (MA) | An individual's level of mental development relative to that of others.
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| mental processes | The thoughts, feelings, and motives that each of us experiences privately but that cannot be observed directly.
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| mental retardation | A condition of limited mental ability in which the individual has a low IQ, usually below 70, has difficulty adapting to everyday life, and has an onset of these characteristics in the so-called developmental period.
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| mentoring | A relationship between an experienced employee and a novice in which the more experienced employee serves as an advisor, a sounding board, and a source of support for the newer employee.
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| mere exposure effect | The outcome that the more we encounter someone or something (a person, a word, an image), the more likely we are to start liking the person or thing even if we do not realize we have seen it before.
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| meta-analysis | A method that allows researchers to combine the results of several different studies on a similar topic in order to establish the strength of an effect.
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| midbrain | Located between the hindbrain and forebrain, a region in which many nerve-fiber systems ascend and descend to connect the higher and lower portions of the brain.
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| middle ear | Consists of eardrum, hammer, anvil, and stirrup.
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| mindfulness | Being alert and mentally present for one's everyday activities.
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| Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) | The most widely used and researched empirically keyed self-report personality test.
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| mnemonics | Specific visual and/or verbal memory aids.
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| mode | A statistical measure of central tendency; the score that occurs most often.
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| monocular cues | Depth cues that are available from the image in either eye.
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| mood disorders | Psychological disorders in which there is a primary disturbance in mood (prolonged emotion that colors the individual's entire emotional state). Two main types are the depressive disorders and bipolar disorder.
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| morphology | A language's rules for word formation.
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| motivated forgetting | An act of forgetting something because it is so painful or anxiety-laden that remembering it is intolerable.
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| motivation | The force that moves people to behave, think, and feel the way they do.
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| motor cortex | Area of the cerebral cortex that processes information about voluntary movement.
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| myelin sheath | The layer of fat cells that encases and insulates most axons. The myelin sheath speeds up the transmission of nerve impulses.
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| natural selection | An evolutionary process that favors organisms' traits or characteristics that are best adapted to reproduce and survive.
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| naturalistic observation | Observation of behavior in real-world settings with no effort made to manipulate or control the situation.
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| nature | An organism's biological inheritance.
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| need | A deprivation that energizes the drive to eliminate or reduce the deprivation.
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| negative punishment | A behavior decreases when a positive stimulus is removed from it.
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| negative reinforcement | Following a behavior with the removal of an aversive (unpleasant) stimulus to increase the frequency of the behavior.
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| neglectful parenting | A parenting style in which parents are uninvolved in their child's life.
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| nervous system | The body's electrochemical communication circuitry, made up of billions of neurons.
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| neural networks | Networks of nerve cells that integrate sensory input and motor output.
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| neurons | Nerve cells that are specialized for processing information. Neurons are the basic units of the nervous system.
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| neuroscience | The scientific study of the structure, function, development, genetics, and biochemistry of the nervous system.
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| neurotransmitters | Chemicals that carry information across the synaptic gap from one neuron to the next.
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| noise | Irrelevant and competing stimuli.
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| normal distribution | A symmetrical, bell-shaped curve with a majority of the scores falling in the middle of the possible range and few scores appearing toward the extremes of the range.
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| normative commitment | The sense of obligation an employee feels toward the organization because of the investment the organization has made in the person's personal and professional development.
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| normative social influence | The influence that other people have on us because we want them to like and approve of us.
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| nurture | An organism's environmental experience.
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| obedience | Behavior that complies with the explicit demands of the individual in authority.
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| observational learning | Learning that occurs when a person observes and imitates another's behavior; also called imitation or modeling.
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| obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) | An anxiety disorder in which the individual has anxiety-provoking thoughts that will not go away (obsession) and/or urges to perform repetitive, ritualistic behaviors to prevent or produce some future situation (compulsion).
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| occipital lobe | The part of the cerebral cortex at the back of the head that is involved in vision.
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| Oedipus complex | In Freud's theory, a young boy's intense desire to replace his father and enjoy the affections of his mother.
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| olfactory epithelium | A sheet of receptor cells for smell that lines the roof of the nasal cavity.
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| open-mindedness | Being receptive to the possibility of other ways of looking at things.
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| operant conditioning | Also called instrumental conditioning; a form of learning
in which the consequences of behavior change the probability of the behavior's occurrence.
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| operational definition | An objective description of how a research variable is going to be measured and observed.
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| opiates | Opium and its derivatives; they depress the central nervous system's activity.
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| opponent-process theory | Theory stating that cells in the visual system respond to red-green and blue-yellow colors; a given cell might be excited by red and inhibited by green, whereas another might be excited by yellow and inhibited by blue.
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| organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) | Discretionary actions on the part of an employee that promote organizational effectiveness but are not part of the person's formal responsibilities.
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| organizational culture | An organization's shared values, beliefs, norms, and customs.
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| organizational identity | Employees' feelings of oneness with the organization and its goals.
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| orientation | A program by which an organization introduces newly hired employees to the organization's goals, familiarizes them with its rules and regulations, and lets them know how to get things done.
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| outer ear | Consists of pinna and external auditory canal.
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| overlearning | A key goal of training by which trainees practice after they have achieved a level of acceptable skill at some task so that the skill has become automatic.
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| pain | The sensation that warns us that damage to our bodies is occurring.
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| panic disorder | An anxiety disorder marked by recurrent sudden onsets of intense apprehension or terror.
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| papillae | Bumps on the tongue that contain taste buds, the receptors for taste.
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| parallel processing | The simultaneous distribution of information across different neural pathways.
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| paranoid schizophrenia | A type of schizophrenia that is characterized by delusions of reference, grandeur, and persecution.
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| parasympathetic nervous system | The division of the autonomic nervous system that calms the body.
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| parietal lobe | Area of the cerebral cortex at the top of the head that is involved in registering spatial location, attention, and motor control.
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| perception | The brain's process of organizing and interpreting sensory information to give it meaning.
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| perceptual constancy | Recognition that objects are constant and unchanging even though sensory input about them is changing.
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| perceptual set | A predisposition, or readiness, to perceive something in a particular way.
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| performance appraisal | The evaluation of a person's success at his or her job.
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| peripheral nervous system (PNS) | The network of nerves that connects the brain and spinal cord to other parts of the body. It is divided into the somatic nervous system and the autonomic nervous system.
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| personality | A pattern of enduring, distinctive thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that characterize the way an individual adapts to the world.
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| personality disorders | Chronic, maladaptive cognitive-behavioral patterns that are thoroughly integrated into the individual's personality.
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| personological and life story perspectives | Approaches to personality emphasizing that the way to understand the person is to focus on his or her life history and life story—aspects that distinguish that individual from all others.
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| phenotype | The expression of an individual's genotype in observable, measurable characteristics.
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| phobic disorder | Commonly called phobia, an anxiety disorder in which the individual has an irrational, overwhelming, persistent fear of a particular object or situation.
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| phonics approach | An approach to learning to read that emphasizes basic rules for translating written symbols into sounds.
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| phonology | A language's sound system.
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| physical dependence | The physiological need for a drug, accompanied by unpleasant withdrawal symptoms, such as pain and craving, when the drug is discontinued.
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| pituitary gland | An important endocrine gland at the base of the skull that controls growth and regulates other glands.
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| place theory | The theory of hearing that states that each frequency produces vibrations at a particular spot on the basilar membrane.
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| placebo | A harmless, inert substance that may be given to participants instead of a presumed active agent, such as a drug, and that has no specific physiological effect.
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| placebo effect | The situation where participants' expectations, rather than the experimental treatment, produce an experimental outcome.
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| plasticity | The brain's special capacity for modification and change.
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| polygraph | A machine that monitors bodily changes thought to be influenced by emotional states; it is used by examiners to try to determine whether someone is lying.
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| population | The entire group about which the investigator wants to draw conclusions.
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| positive illusions | Positive views of oneself that are not necessarily deeply rooted in reality.
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| positive psychology movement | The push for a stronger emphasis on research involving the experiences that people value, the traits associated with optimal capacities for love and work, and positive group and civic values.
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| positive punishment | A behavior decreases when it is followed by an unpleasant stimulus.
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| positive reinforcement | Following a behavior with a rewarding stimulus to increase the frequency of the behavior.
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| post-traumatic growth | Improvements individuals can see in themselves as a result of a struggle with negative life events.
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| post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) | An anxiety disorder that develops through exposure to a traumatic event, severely oppressive situations, severe abuse, and natural and unnatural disasters.
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| preferential looking | A test of perception that involves giving an infant a choice of what object to look at and that is used to determine whether infants can distinguish between objects.
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| prejudice | An unjustified negative attitude toward an individual based on the individual's membership in a group.
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| preoperational stage | The second Piagetian stage of cognitive development (approximately 2 to 7 years of age), in which thought becomes more symbolic than in the sensorimotor stage but the child cannot yet perform operations.
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| preparedness | The species-specific biological predisposition to learn in certain ways but not others.
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| primary reinforcement | The use of reinforcers that are innately satisfying.
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| priming | A type of implicit memory process involving the activation of information that people already have in storage to help them remember new information better and faster.
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| proactive interference | Situation in which material that was learned earlier disrupts the recall of material learned later.
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| problem solving | An attempt to find an appropriate way of attaining a goal when the goal is not readily available.
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| problem-focused coping | The cognitive strategy of squarely facing one's troubles and trying to solve them.
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| procedural memory | Memory for skills.
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| projective test | Personality assessment tool that presents individuals with an ambiguous stimulus and then asks them to describe it or tell a story about it; in other words, to project their own meaning onto it.
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| prosocial behavior | Behavior that is intended to benefit other people.
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| prospective memory | Remembering information about doing something in the future.
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| prototype model | Modelemphasizing that when people evaluate whether a given item reflects a certain concept, they compare the item with the most typical item(s) in that category and look for a "family resemblance."
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| psychoactive drugs | Substances that act on the nervous system to alter consciousness, modify perceptions, and change moods.
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| psychoanalysis | Freud's therapeutic technique for analyzing an individual's unconscious thoughts. Freud believed that clients' current problems could be traced to childhood experiences, many of which involved conflicts about sexuality.
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| psychodynamic approach | A psychological perspective emphasizing unconscious thought, the conflict between biological instincts and society's demands, and early family experiences.
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| psychodynamic perspectives | Views of personality as primarily unconscious (that is, beyond awareness) and as developing in stages. Most psychoanalytic perspectives emphasize that early experiences with parents play a role in sculpting personality.
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| psychodynamic therapies | Therapies that stress the importance of the unconscious mind, extensive interpretation by the therapist, and the role of experiences in the early childhood years. The goal of the psychodynamic therapies is to help individuals recognize their maladaptive ways of coping and the sources of their unconscious conflicts.
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| psychological dependence | The strong desire to repeat the use of a drug for emotional reasons, such as a feeling of well-being and stress reduction.
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| psychology | The scientific study of behavior and mental processes.
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| psychoneuroimmunology | The field that explores connections among psychological factors (such as attitudes and emotions), the nervous system, and the immune system.
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| psychopathology | The study of mental illness.
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| psychophysics | The field that studies links between the physical properties of stimuli and a person's experience of them.
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| psychosurgery | A biological therapy that involves removal or destruction of brain tissue to improve an individual's adjustment.
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| psychotherapy | The nonmedical process used by mental health professionals to help individuals recognize and overcome their problems.
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| puberty | A period of rapid skeletal and sexual maturation that occurs mainly in early adolescence.
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| punishment | A consequence that decreases the likelihood a behavior will occur.
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| random assignment | The assignment of participants to research groups by chance.
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| random sample | A sample that gives every member of the population an equal chance of being selected.
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| range | A statistical measure of variability that is the distance between the highest and lowest scores.
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| rational-emotive behavior therapy (REBT) | A therapy based on Ellis's assertion that individuals develop a psychological disorder because of their beliefs, especially those that are irrational and self-defeating; the goal of REBT is to get clients to eliminate self-defeating beliefs by rationally examining them.
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| reasoning | The mental activity of transforming information to reach conclusions.
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| referential thinking | Ascribing personal meaning to completely random events.
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| reflective speech | A technique in which the therapist mirrors the client's own feelings back to the client.
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| reinforcement | The process by which a stimulus or an event strengthens or increases the probability of a behavior or an event that it follows.
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| relapse | A return to former unhealthy patterns.
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| reliability | The extent to which a test yields a consistent, reproducible measure of performance.
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| REM sleep | Rapid eye movement sleep; stage 5 of sleep, in which dreaming occurs.
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| research participant bias | The influence of research participants' expectations on their behavior within an experiment.
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| resilience | A person's ability to recover from or adapt to difficult times.
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| resistance | The psychoanalytic term for the client's unconscious defense strategies that prevent the analyst from understanding the person's problems.
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| resting potential | The stable, negative charge of an inactive neuron.
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| reticular formation | A midbrain system that consists of a diffuse collection of neurons involved in stereotypical behaviors, such as walking, sleeping, or turning to attend to a sudden noise.
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| retina | The light-sensitive surface in the back of the eye that records what we see and converts it to neural impulses for processing in the brain.
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| retrieval | The memory process of taking information out of storage.
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| retroactive interference | Situation in which material learned later disrupts the retrieval of information learned earlier.
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| retrograde amnesia | A memory disorder that involves memory loss for a segment of the past but not for new events.
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| retrospective memory | Remembering the past.
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| risky shift | The tendency for a group decision to be riskier than the average decision made by individual group members.
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| rods | The receptors in the retina that are sensitive to light but are not very useful for color vision.
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| role conflict | The kind of stress that arises when a person tries to meet the demands of more than one important life role, such as worker and mother.
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| romantic love | Also called passionate love; the type of love that has strong components of sexuality and infatuation and often predominates in the early part of a love relationship.
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| Rorschach inkblot test | A widely used projective test that uses an individual's perception of inkblots to determine his or her personality.
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| sample | The subset of the population chosen by the investigator for study.
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| schedules of reinforcement | Timetables that determine when a behavior will be reinforced.
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| schema | A concept or framework that already exists at a given moment in a person's mind and that organizes information and provides a structure for interpreting it.
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| schizophrenia | A severe psychological disorder that is characterized by highly disordered thought processes.
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| science | In psychology, the use of systematic methods to observe, describe, predict, and explain behavior.
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| scientific management | The managerial philosophy that emphasizes the worker as a well-oiled machine and the determination of the most efficient methods for performing any work-related task.
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| script | A schema for an event.
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| secondary reinforcement | The use of reinforcers that are learned or conditioned.
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| secure attachment | An important aspect of socioemotional development in which infants use the caregiver, usually the mother, as a secure base from which to explore the environment.
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| selective attention | Focusing on a specific aspect of experience while ignoring others.
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| self-actualization | The highest and most elusive of Maslow's needs; the motivation to develop one's full potential as a human being.
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| self-concept | A central theme in Rogers's and other humanists' views; self-concept refers to individuals' overall perceptions and assessments of their abilities, behavior, and personalities.
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| self-determination theory | A theory of motivation that proposes that three basic, organismic needs (competence, autonomy, and relatedness) characterize intrinsic motivation.
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| self-efficacy | The belief that one can master a situation and produce positive outcomes.
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| self-objectification | The tendency to see oneself primarily as an object in the eyes of others.
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| self-perception theory | Bem's theory about the connection between attitudes and behavior; stresses that individuals make inferences about their attitudes by perceiving their behavior.
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| self-regulation | The process by which an organism pursues important objectives, centrally involving getting feedback about how we are doing in our goal pursuits.
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| self-report test | Also called an objective test or inventory, a type of test that directly asks people whether specific items (usually true/false or agree/disagree) describe their personality traits.
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| self-serving bias | The tendency to take credit for one's successes and to deny responsibility for one's failures.
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| semantic memory | A person's knowledge about the world.
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| semantics | The meaning of words and sentences in a particular language.
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| semicircular canals | Structure in the inner ear containing the sensory receptors that detect head motion.
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| sensation | The process of receiving stimulus energies from the environment.
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| sensorimotor stage | The first Piagetian stage of cognitive development (birth to about 2 years of age), in which infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences (such as seeing and hearing) with motor (physical) actions.
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| sensory adaptation | A change in the responsiveness of the sensory system based on the average level of surrounding stimulation.
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| sensory memory | Information from the world that is held in its original form only for an instant, not much longer than the brief time it is exposed to the visual, auditory, and other senses.
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| sensory receptors | Specialized cells that detect stimulus information and transmit it to sensory (afferent) nerves and the brain.
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| serial position effect | The tendency for items at the beginning and at the end of a list to be recalled more readily than those in the middle of the list.
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| set point | The weight maintained when no effort is made to gain or lose weight.
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| sexual harassment | Unwelcome behavior or conduct of a sexual nature that offends, humiliates, or intimidates another person.
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| sexual orientation | The direction of the person's erotic interests, whether heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual.
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| sexually transmitted infections (STIs) | Infections that are contracted primarily through sex—vaginal intercourse as well as oral-genital and anal-genital sex.
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| shaping | Rewarding approximations of a desired behavior.
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| short-term memory | A limited-capacity memory system in which information is retained for only as long as 30 seconds unless strategies are used to retain it longer.
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| signal detection theory | The theory about perception that focuses on decision making about stimuli in the presence of uncertainty; detection depends on a variety of factors besides the physical intensity of the stimulus and the sensory abilities of the observer.
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| social cognitive behavior view of hypnosis | Perspective that views hypnosis as a normal state in which the hypnotized person behaves the way he or she believes a hypnotized person should behave.
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| social cognitive perspectives | Approaches to personality emphasizing conscious awareness, beliefs, expectations, and goals; social cognitive psychologists explore the person's ability to reason; to think about the past, present, and future; and to reflect on the self.
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| social comparison | The process by which individuals evaluate their thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and abilities in relation to other people.
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| social contagion | Imitative behavior involving the spread of behavior, emotions, and ideas.
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| social exchange theory | A theory based on the notion of social relationships as involving an exchange of goods, the objective of which is to minimize costs and maximize benefits.
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| social facilitation | Improvement in an individual's performance because of the presence of others.
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| social identity | The way individuals define themselves in terms of their group membership.
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| social identity theory | Tajfel's theory that social identities are a crucial part of individuals' self-image and a valuable source of positive feelings about themselves.
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| social loafing | Each person's tendency to exert less effort in a group because of reduced accountability for individual effort.
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| social psychology | The study of how people think about, influence, and relate to other people.
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| social support | Information and feedback from others that one is loved and cared for, esteemed and valued, and included in a network of communication and mutual obligation.
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| sociocultural approach | A psychological perspective that examines the ways in which the social and cultural environments influence behavior.
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| somatic nervous system | The division of the PNS consisting of sensory nerves, whose function is to convey information to the CNS, and motor nerves, whose function is to transmit information to the muscles.
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| somatosensory cortex | Area of the cerebral cortex that processes information about body sensations.
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| spontaneous recovery | The process in classical conditioning by which a conditioned response can recur after a time delay without further conditioning.
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| stages of change model | Five-step model that describes the process by which individuals give up bad habits and adopt healthier lifestyles.
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| standard deviation | A statistical measure of variability that involves how much the scores vary on the average around the mean of the sample.
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| standardization | Developing uniform procedures for administering and scoring a test, as well as creating norms for the test.
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| standardized test | A test that requires people to answer a series of written or oral questions or sometimes both.
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| stereotype | A generalization about a group's characteristics that does not consider any variations from one individual to another.
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| stereotype threat | An individual's fast-acting, self-fulfilling fear of being judged on the basis of a negative stereotype about his or her group.
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| stimulants | Psychoactive drugs that increase the central nervous system's activity.
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| storage | Retention of information over time and the representation of information in memory.
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| stream of consciousness | James's concept that the mind is a continuous flow of changing sensations, images, thoughts, and feelings.
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| strengths-based management | A management style emphasizing that maximizing an employee's existing strengths is much easier than trying to build such attributes from the ground up.
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| stress | The response of individuals to changes in circumstances and events that threaten their coping abilities.
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| stressors | Circumstances and events that threaten individuals and tax their coping abilities.
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| stress management programs | Programs that teach individuals to appraise stressful events, to develop skills for coping with stress, and to put these skills into use in everyday life.
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| structuralism | An early school of psychology that attempted to identify the structures of the human mind.
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| structured interview | A kind of interview in which candidates are asked specific questions that methodically seek to get truly useful information for the interviewer.
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| subgoaling | Setting intermediate goals or defining intermediate problems in order to be in a better position to reach the final goal or solution.
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| subliminal perception | The detection of information below the level of conscious awareness.
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| superego | The Freudian structure of personality harshly judges the morality of our behavior.
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| suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) | A small structure in the brain that synchronizes its own rhythm with the daily cycle of light and dark based on input from the retina.
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| sympathetic nervous system | The division of the autonomic nervous system that arouses the body.
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| synapses | Tiny junctions between two neurons, generally where the axon of one neuron meets the dendrites or cell body of another neuron.
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| syntax | A language's rules for the way words are combined to form acceptable phrases and sentences.
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| systematic desensitization | A method of behavior therapy based on classical conditioning that treats anxiety by getting the person to associate deep relaxation with increasingly intense anxiety-producing situations.
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| temperament | An individual's behavioral style and characteristic way of responding.
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| temporal lobe | The portion of the cerebral cortex just above the ears that is involved in hearing, language processing, and memory.
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| thalamus | Forebrain structure that functions as a relay station to sort information and send it to appropriate areas in the forebrain for further integration and interpretation.
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| Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) | A projective test designed to elicit stories that reveal something about an individual's personality.
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| theory | A broad idea or set of closely related ideas that attempt to explain certain observations.
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| theory of planned behavior | Model for effective change incorporating the theory of reasoned action but adding the person's perceptions of control over the outcome.
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| theory of reasoned action | Model suggesting that effective change requires individuals to have specific intentions about their behaviors, as well as positive attitudes about the new behavior, and to perceive that their social group looks on the behavior positively.
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| Theory X managers | Managers who assume that work is innately unpleasant and that people have a strong desire to avoid it; such managers believe that employees need direction, dislike responsibility, and must be "kept in line."
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| Theory Y managers | Managers who assume that engaging in effortful behavior is natural to human beings, and who recognize that people seek out responsibility and that motivation can come from allowing them to suggest creative and meaningful solutions.
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| therapeutic alliance | The relationship between the therapist and client.
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| thermoreceptors | Sensory receptors, located under the skin, that respond to changes in temperature at or near the skin and provide input to keep the body's temperature at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
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| thinking | Manipulating information mentally, as when we form concepts, solve problems, make decisions, and reflect in a creative or critical manner.
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| thinking outside the box | Exploring new ways of approaching tasks and challenges and finding solutions.
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| third variable problem | The situation where an extraneous variable that has not been measured accounts for the relationship between two others.
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| 360-degree feedback | A method of performance appraisal whereby employee's performance is rated by a variety of individuals, including himself or herself, a peer, a supervisor, a subordinate, and perhaps a customer or client.
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| tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (TOT state) | The "effortful retrieval" that occurs when people are confident that they know something but cannot pull it out of memory.
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| tolerance | The need to take increasing amounts of a drug to produce the same effect.
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| top-down processing | Processing of perceptual information that starts out with cognitive processing at the higher levels of the brain.
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| training | Teaching a new employee the essential requirements to do the job well.
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| trait | An enduring personality characteristic that tends to lead to certain behaviors.
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| trait theories | Theories stating that personality consists of broad, enduring dispositions (traits) that tend to lead to characteristic responses.
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| tranquilizers | Depressant drugs that reduce anxiety and induce relaxation.
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| transactional leader | An individual in a leadership capacity who emphasizes the exchange relationship between the worker and the leader and who applies the principle that a good job should be rewarded.
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| transduction | The process of transforming physical energy into electrochemical energy.
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| transference | The psychoanalytic term for the client's relating to the analyst in ways that reproduce or relive important relationships in the client's life.
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| transformational leader | An individual in a leadership capacity who is concerned not with enforcing the rules but with changing them.
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| triarchic theory of intelligence | Sternberg's theory that there are three main types of intelligence: analytical, creative, and practical.
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| trichromatic theory | Theory stating that color perception is produced by three types of receptors (cone cells in the retina) that are particularly sensitive to different, but overlapping, ranges of wavelengths.
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| two-factor theory of emotion | Schachter and Singer's theory that emotion is determined by two main factors: physiological arousal and cognitive labeling.
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| Type A behavior pattern | A cluster of characteristics—such as being excessively competitive, hard-driven, impatient, and hostile—related to the incidence of heart disease.
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| Type B behavior pattern | A cluster of characteristics—such as being relaxed and easygoing—related to good health.
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| unconditional positive regard | Rogers's term for accepting, valuing, and being positive toward another person regardless of the person's behavior.
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| unconditioned response (UCR) | An unlearned response that is automatically elicited by an unconditioned stimulus.
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| unconditioned stimulus (UCS) | A stimulus that produces a response without prior learning.
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| unconscious thought | Freud's concept of a reservoir of unacceptable wishes, feelings, and thoughts that are beyond conscious awareness.
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| undifferentiated schizophrenia | A type of schizophrenia that is characterized by disorganized behavior, hallucinations, delusions, and incoherence.
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| validity | The soundness of the conclusions we draw from an experiment. In the realm of testing, validity specifically refers to the extent to which a test measures what it is intended to measure.
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| variable | Anything that can change.
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| vestibular sense | Senses that provide information about balance and movement.
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| visual illusion | A discrepancy between reality and the perceptual representation of it.
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| volley principle | Modification of frequency theory stating that a cluster of nerve cells can fire neural impulses in rapid succession, producing a volley of impulses.
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| waigawa system | A management system dedicated to the idea thatwhen the corporation faces a difficult problem, all rank-related concerns are temporarily set aside so that anyone from any level of the organization can have input.
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| Weber's law | The principle that two stimuli must differ by a constant minimum percentage (rather than a constant amount) to be perceived as different.
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| well-being therapy (WBT) | A short-term, problem-focused, directive therapy that encourages clients to accentuate the positive.
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| whole-language approach | An approach to learning to read that stresses that reading instruction should parallel a child's natural language learning; so reading materials should be whole and meaningful.
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| wisdom | Expert knowledge about the practical aspects of life.
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| working memory | A three-part system that temporarily holds information as people perform cognitive tasks. Working memory is a kind of mental "workbench" on which information is manipulated and assembled to help individuals perform other cognitive tasks.
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| Yerkes-Dodson law | Principle stating that performance is best under conditions of moderate arousal rather than low or high arousal.
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