| Influences that our early experiences have on how we view the world. | Psychological vulnerabilities |
| Following the process of operant conditioning, the strengthening of a response following either the delivery of a desired consequence (positive reinforcement) or escape from an aversive consequence. | Reinforced response |
| Social anxiety disorder which is limited to certain situations that the sufferer perceives as requiring some type of performance. | SAD performance only |
| A condition marked by acute fear of social situations which lead to worry and diminished day to day functioning. | Social anxiety disorder (SAD) |
| How our experiences lead us to focus and channel our anxiety. | Specific vulnerabilities |
| The tendency to overestimate the relationship between a thought and an action, such that one mistakenly believes a “bad” thought is the equivalent of a “bad” action. | Thought-action fusion |
| Loss of interest or pleasure in activities one previously found enjoyable or rewarding. | Anhedonia |
| The tendency by which a person infers the cause or meaning of behaviors or events. | Attributional style |
| Discrete or related problematic events and conditions which persist over time and result in prolonged activation of the biological and/or psychological stress response (e.g., unemployment, ongoing health difficulties, marital discord). | Chronic stress |
| Single or multiple acute or chronic stressful events, which may be biological or psychological in nature (e.g., poverty, abuse, childhood illness or injury), occurring during childhood and resulting in a biological and/or psychological stress response. | Early adversity |
| Inflated self-esteem or an exaggerated sense of self-importance and self-worth (e.g., believing one has special powers or superior abilities). | Grandiosity |
| Excessive daytime sleepiness, including difficulty staying awake or napping, or prolonged sleep episodes. | Hypersomnia |
| Increased motor activity associated with restlessness, including physical actions (e.g., fidgeting, pacing, feet tapping, handwringing). | Psychomotor agitation |
| A slowing of physical activities in which routine activities (e.g., eating, brushing teeth) are performed in an unusually slow manner. | Psychomotor retardation |
| Zeitgeber is German for “time giver.” Social zeitgebers are environmental cues, such as meal times and interactions with other people, that entrain biological rhythms and thus sleep-wake cycle regularity. | Social zeitgeber |
| A person’s economic and social position based on income, education, and occupation. | Socioeconomic status (SES) |
| Recurring thoughts about suicide, including considering or planning for suicide, or preoccupation with suicide. | Suicidal ideation |
| A reduction in the amount of speech and/or increased pausing before the initiation of speech. | Alogia |
| A reduction in the drive or ability to take the steps or engage in actions necessary to obtain the potentially positive outcome. | Anhedonia/amotivation |
| Behaviors that seem to reflect a reduction in responsiveness to the external environment. This can include holding unusual postures for long periods of time, failing to respond to verbal or motor prompts from another person, or excessive and seemingly purposeless motor activity. | Catatonia |
| False beliefs that are often fixed, hard to change even in the presence of conflicting information, and often culturally influenced in their content. | Delusions |
| The specific criteria used to determine whether an individual has a specific type of psychiatric disorder. Commonly used diagnostic criteria are included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, 5th Edition (DSM-5) and the Internal Classification of Disorders, Version 9 (ICD-9). | Diagnostic criteria |
| Behavior or dress that is outside the norm for almost all subcultures. This would include odd dress, odd makeup (e.g., lipstick outlining a mouth for 1 inch), or unusual rituals (e.g., repetitive hand gestures). | Disorganized behavior |
| Speech that is difficult to follow, either because answers do not clearly follow questions or because one sentence does not logically follow from another. | Disorganized speech |
| A neurotransmitter in the brain that is thought to play an important role in regulating the function of other neurotransmitters. | Dopamine |
| The ability to learn and retrieve new information or episodes in one’s life. | Episodic memory |
| A reduction in the display of emotions through facial expressions, gestures, and speech intonation. | Flat affect |
| The ability to engage in self-care (cook, clean, bathe), work, attend school, and/or engage in social relationships. | Functional capacity |
| Perceptual experiences that occur even when there is no stimulus in the outside world generating the experiences. They can be auditory, visual, olfactory (smell), gustatory (taste), or somatic (touch). | Hallucinations |
| A set of techniques that uses strong magnets to measure either the structure of the brain (e.g., gray matter and white matter) or how the brain functions when a person performs cognitive tasks (e.g., working memory or episodic memory) or other types of tasks. | Magnetic resonance imaging |
| Processes that influence how the brain develops either in utero or as the child is growing up. | Neurodevelopmental |
| A technique that uses radio-labelled ligands to measure the distribution of different neurotransmitter receptors in the brain or to measure how much of a certain type of neurotransmitter is released when a person is given a specific type of drug or does a particularly cognitive task. | Positron emission tomography |
| The speed with which an individual can perceive auditory or visual information and respond to it. | Processing speed |
| Illnesses or disorders that involve psychological or psychiatric symptoms. | Psychopathology |
| The ability to maintain information over a short period of time, such as 30 seconds or less. | Working memory |
| A pervasive pattern of disregard and violation of the rights of others. These behaviors may be aggressive or destructive and may involve breaking laws or rules, deceit or theft. | Antisocial |
| A pervasive pattern of social inhibition, feelings of inadequacy, and hypersensitivity to negative evaluation. | Avoidant |
| A pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity. | Borderline |
| A pervasive and excessive need to be taken care of that leads to submissive and clinging behavior and fears of separation. | Dependent |
| Five broad domains or dimensions that are used to describe human personality. | Five-Factor Model |
| A pervasive pattern of excessive emotionality and attention seeking. | Histrionic |
| A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy. | Narcissistic |
| A pervasive pattern of preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and mental and interpersonal control, at the expense of flexibility, openness, and efficiency. | Obsessive-compulsive |
| A pervasive distrust and suspiciousness of others such that their motives are interpreted as malevolent. | Paranoid |
| Characteristic, routine ways of thinking, feeling, and relating to others. | Personality |
| When personality traits result in significant distress, social impairment, and/or occupational impairment. | Personality disorders |
| A pervasive pattern of detachment from social relationships and a restricted range of expression of emotions in interpersonal settings. | Schizoid |
| A pervasive pattern of social and interpersonal deficits marked by acute discomfort with, and reduced capacity for, close relationships as well as perceptual distortions and eccentricities of behavior. | Schizotypal |
| Counterpart diagnosis to psychopathy included in the third through fifth editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM; APA, 2000). Defined by specific symptoms of behavioral deviancy in childhood (e.g., fighting, lying, stealing, truancy) continuing into adulthood (manifested as repeated rule-breaking, impulsiveness, irresponsibility, aggressiveness, etc.). | Antisocial personality disorder |
| Synonymous with psychopathic personality, the term used by Cleckley (1941/1976), and adapted from the term psychopathic introduced by German psychiatrist Julius Koch (1888) to designate mental disorders presumed to be heritable. | Psychopathy |
| Model formulated to reconcile alternative historic conceptions of psychopathy and differing methods for assessing it. Conceives of psychopathy as encompassing three symptomatic components: boldness, involving social efficacy, emotional resiliency, and venturesomeness; meanness, entailing lack of empathy/emotional-sensitivity and exploitative behavior toward others; and disinhibition, entailing deficient behavioral restraint and lack of control over urges/emotional reactions. | Triarchic model |
| A therapeutic approach designed to foster nonjudgmental observation of one’s own mental processes. | Acceptance and commitment therapy |
| Thoughts that occur spontaneously; often used to describe problematic thoughts that maintain mental disorders. | Automatic thoughts |
| Using exercises (e.g., computer games) to change problematic thinking habits. | Cognitive bias modification |
| A family of approaches with the goal of changing the thoughts and behaviors that influence psychopathology. | Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) |
| Describes a state of having more than one psychological or physical disorder at a given time. | Comorbidity |
| A treatment often used for borderline personality disorder that incorporates both cognitive-behavioral and mindfulness elements. | Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) |
| A perspective in DBT that emphasizes the joint importance of change and acceptance. | Dialectical worldview |
| A form of intervention in which the patient engages with a problematic (usually feared) situation without avoidance or escape. | Exposure therapy |
| In psychodynamic therapy, a process in which the patient reports all thoughts that come to mind without censorship, and these thoughts are interpreted by the therapist. | Free association |
| Also called integrative psychotherapy, this term refers to approaches combining multiple orientations (e.g., CBT with psychoanalytic elements). | Integrative or eclectic psychotherapy |
| Also called integrative psychotherapy, this term refers to approaches combining multiple orientations (e.g., CBT with psychoanalytic elements). | Integrative or eclectic psychotherapy |
| A process that reflects a nonjudgmental, yet attentive, mental state. | Mindfulness |
| A form of psychotherapy grounded in mindfulness theory and practice, often involving meditation, yoga, body scan, and other features of mindfulness exercises. | Mindfulness-based therapy |
| A therapeutic approach focused on creating a supportive environment for self-discovery. | Person-centered therapy |
| Sigmund Freud’s therapeutic approach focusing on resolving unconscious conflicts. | Psychoanalytic therapy |
| Treatment applying psychoanalytic principles in a briefer, more individualized format. | Psychodynamic therapy |
| The process of identifying, evaluating, and changing maladaptive thoughts in psychotherapy. | Reappraisal, or Cognitive restructuring |
| A mental representation or set of beliefs about something. | Schema |
| In person-centered therapy, an attitude of warmth, empathy and acceptance adopted by the therapist in order to foster feelings of inherent worth in the patient. | Unconditional positive regard |
| Constructing utterances to suit the audience’s knowledge. | Audience design |
| Information that is shared by people who engage in a conversation. | Common ground |
| Group to which a person belongs. | Ingroup |
| Words and expressions. | Lexicon |
| A tendency for people to characterize positive things about their ingroup using more abstract expressions, but negative things about their outgroups using more abstract expressions. | Linguistic intergroup bias |
| Group to which a person does not belong. | Outgroup |
| A stimulus presented to a person reminds him or her about other ideas associated with the stimulus. | Priming |
| The hypothesis that the language that people use determines their thoughts. | Sapir-Whorf hypothesis |
| A mental representation of an event, object, or situation constructed at the time of comprehending a linguistic description. | Situation model |
| The hypothesis that the human brain has evolved, so that humans can maintain larger ingroups. | Social brain hypothesis |
| Networks of social relationships among individuals through which information can travel. | Social networks |
| Rules by which words are strung together to form sentences. | Syntax |
| A social perceiver unwittingly taking on the internal state of another person, usually because of mimicking the person’s expressive behavior and thereby feeling the expressed emotion. | Automatic empathy |
| An experimental procedure that assesses whether a perceiver recognizes that another person has a false belief—a belief that contradicts reality. | False-belief test |
| People’s natural explanations for why somebody did something, felt something, etc. (differing substantially for unintentional and intentional behaviors). | Folk explanations of behavior |
| An agent’s mental state of committing to perform an action that the agent believes will bring about a desired outcome. | Intention |
| The quality of an agent’s performing a behavior intentionally—that is, with skill and awareness and executing an intention (which is in turn based on a desire and relevant beliefs). | Intentionality |
| Two people attending to the same object and being aware that they both are attending to it. | Joint attention |
| Copying others’ behavior, usually without awareness. | Mimicry |
| Neurons identified in monkey brains that fire both when the monkey performs a certain action and when it perceives another agent performing that action. | Mirror neurons |
| A social perceiver’s assumption that the other person wants, knows, or feels the same as the perceiver wants, know, or feels. | Projection |
| The process of representing the other person’s mental state. | Simulation |
| Two people displaying the same behaviors or having the same internal states (typically because of mutual mimicry). | Synchrony |
| The human capacity to understand minds, a capacity that is made up of a collection of concepts (e.g., agent, intentionality) and processes (e.g., goal detection, imitation, empathy, perspective taking). | Theory of mind |
| Can refer to visual perspective taking (perceiving something from another person’s spatial vantage point) or more generally to effortful mental state inference (trying to infer the other person’s thoughts, desires, emotions). | Visual perspective taking |
| A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be compassionate, cooperative, warm, and caring to others. People low in agreeableness tend to be rude, hostile, and to pursue their own interests over those of others. | Agreeableness |
| A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be careful, organized, hardworking, and to follow rules. | Conscientiousness |
| Characteristics can go from low to high, with all different intermediate values possible. One does not simply have the trait or not have it, but can possess varying amounts of it. | Continuous distributions |
| A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be sociable, outgoing, active, and assertive. | Extraversion |
| Broad personality traits can be broken down into narrower facets or aspects of the trait. For example, extraversion has several facets, such as sociability, dominance, risk-taking and so forth. | Facets |
| A statistical technique for grouping similar things together according to how highly they are associated. | Factor analysis |
| (also called the Big Five) The Five-Factor Model is a widely accepted model of personality traits. Advocates of the model believe that much of the variability in people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can be summarized with five broad traits. These five traits are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. | Five-Factor Model |
| The HEXACO model is an alternative to the Five-Factor Model. The HEXACO model includes six traits, five of which are variants of the traits included in the Big Five (Emotionality [E], Extraversion [X], Agreeableness [A], Conscientiousness [C], and Openness [O]). The sixth factor, Honesty-Humility [H], is unique to this model. | HEXACO model |
| Two characteristics or traits are separate from one another– a person can be high on one and low on the other, or vice-versa. Some correlated traits are relatively independent in that although there is a tendency for a person high on one to also be high on the other, this is not always the case. | Independent |
| The lexical hypothesis is the idea that the most important differences between people will be encoded in the language that we use to describe people. Therefore, if we want to know which personality traits are most important, we can look to the language that people use to describe themselves and others. | Lexical hypothesis |
| A personality trait that reflects the tendency to be interpersonally sensitive and the tendency to experience negative emotions like anxiety, fear, sadness, and anger. | Neuroticism |
| A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to seek out and to appreciate new things, including thoughts, feelings, values, and experiences. | Openness to Experience |
| Enduring predispositions that characterize a person, such as styles of thought, feelings and behavior. | Personality |
| Enduring dispositions in behavior that show differences across individuals, and which tend to characterize the person across varying types of situations. | Personality traits |
| The person-situation debate is a historical debate about the relative power of personality traits as compared to situational influences on behavior. The situationist critique, which started the person-situation debate, suggested that people overestimate the extent to which personality traits are consistent across situations. | Person-situation debate |
| Consistency in the level or amount of a personality attribute over time. | Absolute stability |
| The interplay between individuals and their contextual circumstances that occurs whenever individuals play a key role in seeking out, selecting, or otherwise manipulating aspects of their environment. | Active person–environment transactions |
| Differences in personality between groups of different ages that are related to maturation and development instead of birth cohort differences. | Age effects |
| A connection between personality attributes and aspects of the environment that occurs because individuals with particular traits are drawn to certain environments. | Attraction |
| A connection between personality attributes and aspects of the environment that occurs because individuals with particular traits drop out from certain environments. | Attrition |
| Individuals born in a particular year or span of time. | Birth cohort |
| Differences in personality that are related to historical and social factors unique to individuals born in a particular year. | Cohort effects |
| The idea that personality traits often become matched with environmental conditions such that an individual’s social context acts to accentuate and reinforce their personality attributes. | Corresponsive principle |
| A research design that uses a group of individuals with different ages (and birth cohorts) assessed at a single point in time. | Cross-sectional study/design |
| The generalization that personality attributes show increasing stability with age and experience. | Cumulative continuity principle |
| Consistency in the rank-ordering of personality across two or more measurement occasions. | Differential stability |
| The interplay between individuals and their contextual circumstances that occurs whenever attributes of the individual draw out particular responses from others in their environment. | Evocative person–environment transactions |
| A focus on summary statistics that apply to aggregates of individuals when studying personality development. An example is considering whether the average score of a group of 50 year olds is higher than the average score of a group of 21 year olds when considering a trait like conscientiousness. | Group level |
| Consistency in the underlying psychological attribute across development regardless of any changes in how the attribute is expressed at different ages. | Heterotypic stability |
| Consistency of the exact same thoughts, feelings, and behaviors across development. | Homotypic stability |
| The tendency of some individuals to interpret ambiguous social cues and interactions as examples of aggressiveness, disrespect, or antagonism. | Hostile attribution bias |
| A focus on individual level statistics that reflect whether individuals show stability or change when studying personality development. An example is evaluating how many individuals increased in conscientiousness versus how many decreased in conscientiousness when considering the transition from adolescence to adulthood. | Individual level |
| A research design that follows the same group of individuals at multiple time points. | Longitudinal study/design |
| A connection between personality attributes and aspects of the environment that occurs whenever individuals with particular traits actively shape their environments. | Manipulation |
| The generalization that personality attributes associated with the successful fulfillment of adult roles increase with age and experience. | Maturity principle |
| The interplay between individuals and their contextual circumstances that ends up shaping both personality and the environment. | Person–environment transactions |
| The interplay between individuals and their contextual circumstances that occurs whenever attributes of the individual shape how a person perceives and responds to their environment. | Reactive person–environment transactions |
| A connection between personality attributes and aspects of the environment that occurs whenever individuals with particular attributes choose particular kinds of environments. | Selection |
| The tendency to become easily distressed by the normal challenges of life. | Stress reaction |
| The term for personality changes associated with experience and life events. | Transformation |
| Five, broad general traits that are included in many prominent models of personality. The five traits are neuroticism (those high on this trait are prone to feeling sad, worried, anxious, and dissatisfied with themselves), extraversion (high scorers are friendly, assertive, outgoing, cheerful, and energetic), openness to experience (those high on this trait are tolerant, intellectually curious, imaginative, and artistic), agreeableness (high scorers are polite, considerate, cooperative, honest, and trusting), and conscientiousness (those high on this trait are responsible, cautious, organized, disciplined, and achievement-oriented). | Big Five |
| Settings in which test scores are used to make important decisions about individuals. For example, test scores may be used to determine which individuals are admitted into a college or graduate school, or who should be hired for a job. Tests also are used in forensic settings to help determine whether a person is competent to stand trial or fits the legal definition of sanity. | High-stakes testing |
| The tendency for newly married individuals to rate their spouses in an unrealistically positive manner. This represents a specific manifestation of the letter of recommendation effect when applied to ratings made by current romantic partners. Moreover, it illustrates the very important role played by relationship satisfaction in ratings made by romantic partners: As marital satisfaction declines (i.e., when the “honeymoon is over”), this effect disappears. | Honeymoon effect |
| These are goals that are important to a person, but that they cannot consciously express. Because the individual cannot verbalize these goals directly, they cannot be easily assessed via self-report. However, they can be measured using projective devices such as the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). | Implicit motives |
| The general tendency for informants in personality studies to rate others in an unrealistically positive manner. This tendency is due a pervasive bias in personality assessment: In the large majority of published studies, informants are individuals who like the person they are rating (e.g., they often are friends or family members) and, therefore, are motivated to depict them in a socially desirable way. The term reflects a similar tendency for academic letters of recommendation to be overly positive and to present the referent in an unrealistically desirable manner. | Letter of recommendation effect |
| The theory that when people are confronted with ambiguous stimuli (that is, stimuli that can be interpreted in more than one way), their responses will be influenced by their unconscious thoughts, needs, wishes, and impulses. This, in turn, is based on the Freudian notion of projection, which is the idea that people attribute their own undesirable/unacceptable characteristics to other people or objects. | Projective hypothesis |
| The tendency of people to base their self-concept on comparisons with others. For example, if your friends tend to be very smart and successful, you may come to see yourself as less intelligent and successful than you actually are. Informants also are prone to these types of effects. For instance, the sibling contrast effect refers to the tendency of parents to exaggerate the true extent of differences between their children. | Reference group effect |
| The consistency of test scores across repeated assessments. For example, test-retest reliability examines the extent to which scores change over time. | Reliablility |
| The tendency for people to see and/or present themselves in an overly favorable way. This tendency can take two basic forms: defensiveness (when individuals actually believe they are better than they really are) and impression management (when people intentionally distort their responses to try to convince others that they are better than they really are). Informants also can show enhancement biases. The general form of this bias has been called the letter-of-recommendation effect, which is the tendency of informants who like the person they are rating (e.g., friends, relatives, romantic partners) to describe them in an overly favorable way. In the case of newlyweds, this tendency has been termed the honeymoon effect. | Self-enhancement bias |
| The tendency of parents to use their perceptions of all of their children as a frame of reference for rating the characteristics of each of them. For example, suppose that a mother has three children; two of these children are very sociable and outgoing, whereas the third is relatively average in sociability. Because of operation of this effect, the mother will rate this third child as less sociable and outgoing than they actually are. More generally, this effect causes parents to exaggerate the true extent of differences between their children. This effect represents a specific manifestation of the more general reference group effect when applied to ratings made by parents. | Sibling contrast effect |
| Evidence related to the interpretation and use of test scores. A particularly important type of evidence is criterion validity, which involves the ability of a test to predict theoretically relevant outcomes. For example, a presumed measure of conscientiousness should be related to academic achievement (such as overall grade point average). | Validity |
| Feelings of self-worth that are based on evaluation of relationships with others and membership in social groups. | Collective self-esteem |
| The tendency for groups to spend more time discussing information that all members know (shared information) and less time examining information that only a few members know (unshared). | Common knowledge effect |
| The solidarity or unity of a group resulting from the development of strong and mutual interpersonal bonds among members and group-level forces that unify the group, such as shared commitment to group goals. | Group cohesion |
| The tendency for members of a deliberating group to move to a more extreme position, with the direction of the shift determined by the majority or average of the members’ predeliberation preferences. | Group polarization |
| A set of negative group-level processes, including illusions of invulnerability, self-censorship, and pressures to conform, that occur when highly cohesive groups seek concurrence when making a decision. | Groupthink |
| Excluding one or more individuals from a group by reducing or eliminating contact with the person, usually by ignoring, shunning, or explicitly banishing them. | Ostracism |
| Knowledge, expectations, conceptualizations, and other cognitive representations that members of a group have in common pertaining to the group and its members, tasks, procedures, and resources. | Shared mental model |
| The process of contrasting one’s personal qualities and outcomes, including beliefs, attitudes, values, abilities, accomplishments, and experiences, to those of other people. | Social comparison |
| Improvement in task performance that occurs when people work in the presence of other people. | Social facilitation |
| A theoretical analysis of group processes and intergroup relations that assumes groups influence their members’ self-concepts and self-esteem, particularly when individuals categorize themselves as group members and identify with the group. | Social identity theory |
| The reduction of individual effort exerted when people work in groups compared with when they work alone. | Social loafing |
| A conceptual analysis of self-evaluation processes that theorizes self-esteem functions to psychologically monitor of one’s degree of inclusion and exclusion in social groups. | Sociometer model |
| The process by which members of the team combine their knowledge, skills, abilities, and other resources through a coordinated series of actions to produce an outcome. | Teamwork |
| Automatic biases are unintended, immediate, and irresistible. | Automatic bias |
| Aversive racism is unexamined racial bias that the person does not intend and would reject, but that avoids inter-racial contact. | Aversive racism |
| Blatant biases are conscious beliefs, feelings, and behavior that people are perfectly willing to admit, are mostly hostile, and openly favor their own group. | Blatant biases |
| Discrimination is behavior that advantages or disadvantages people merely based on their group membership. | Discrimination |
| Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures relatively automatic biases that favor own group relative to other groups. | Implicit Association Test |
| Prejudice is an evaluation or emotion toward people merely based on their group membership. | Prejudice |
| Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) focuses on value conflicts but endorses respect for obedience and authority in the service of group conformity. | Right-wing authoritarianism |
| Self-categorization theory develops social identity theory’s point that people categorize themselves, along with each other into groups, favoring their own group. | Self-categorization theory |
| Social dominance orientation (SDO) describes a belief that group hierarchies are inevitable in all societies and even good, to maintain order and stability. | Social dominance orientation |
| Social identity theory notes that people categorize each other into groups, favoring their own group. | Social identity theory |
| Stereotype Content Model shows that social groups are viewed according to their perceived warmth and competence. | Stereotype Content Model |
| Stereotype is a belief that characterizes people based merely on their group membership. | Stereotypes |
| Subtle biases are automatic, ambiguous, and ambivalent, but real in their consequences. | Subtle biases |
| The ability, typically developed in adolescence, to derive substantive conclusions about the self from analyzing one’s own personal experiences. | utobiographical reasoning |
| A broad taxonomy of personality trait domains repeatedly derived from studies of trait ratings in adulthood and encompassing the categories of (1) extraversion vs. introversion, (2) neuroticism vs. emotional stability, (3) agreeable vs. disagreeableness, (4) conscientiousness vs. nonconscientiousness, and (5) openness to experience vs. conventionality. By late childhood and early adolescence, people’s self-attributions of personality traits, as well as the trait attributions made about them by others, show patterns of intercorrelations that confirm with the five-factor structure obtained in studies of adults. | Big Five |
| Sigmund Freud’s conception of an executive self in the personality. Akin to this module’s notion of “the I,” Freud imagined the ego as observing outside reality, engaging in rational though, and coping with the competing demands of inner desires and moral standards. | Ego |
| Sometimes used synonymously with the term “self,” identity means many different things in psychological science and in other fields (e.g., sociology). In this module, I adopt Erik Erikson’s conception of identity as a developmental task for late adolescence and young adulthood. Forming an identity in adolescence and young adulthood involves exploring alternative roles, values, goals, and relationships and eventually committing to a realistic agenda for life that productively situates a person in the adult world of work and love. In addition, identity formation entails commitments to new social roles and reevaluation of old traits, and importantly, it brings with it a sense of temporal continuity in life, achieved though the construction of an integrative life story. | Identity |
| An internalized and evolving story of the self designed to provide life with some measure of temporal unity and purpose. Beginning in late adolescence, people craft self-defining stories that reconstruct the past and imagine the future to explain how the person came to be the person that he or she is becoming. | Narrative identity |
| Life stories that affirm the transformation from suffering to an enhanced status or state. In American culture, redemptive life stories are highly prized as models for the good self, as in classic narratives of atonement, upward mobility, liberation, and recovery. | Redemptive narratives |
| The idea that the self reflects back upon itself; that the I (the knower, the subject) encounters the Me (the known, the object). Reflexivity is a fundamental property of human selfhood. | Reflexivity |
| The sense of the self as a storyteller who reconstructs the past and imagines the future in order to articulate an integrative narrative that provides life with some measure of temporal continuity and purpose. | Self as autobiographical author |
| The sense of the self as an intentional force that strives to achieve goals, plans, values, projects, and the like. | Self as motivated agent |
| The sense of the self as an embodied actor whose social performances may be construed in terms of more or less consistent self-ascribed traits and social roles. | Self as social actor |
| The extent to which a person feels that he or she is worthy and good. The success or failure that the motivated agent experiences in pursuit of valued goals is a strong determinant of self-esteem. | Self-esteem |
| The traits and social roles that others attribute to an actor. Actors also have their own conceptions of what they imagine their respective social reputations indeed are in the eyes of others. | Social reputation |
| Cognitive and social changes that occur in the early elementary school years that result in the child’s developing a more purposeful, planful, and goal-directed approach to life, setting the stage for the emergence of the self as a motivated agent. | The Age 5-to-7 Shift |
| The self as knower, the sense of the self as a subject who encounters (knows, works on) itself (the Me). | The “I” |
| The self as known, the sense of the self as the object or target of the I’s knowledge and work. | The “Me” |
| Emerging around the age of 4, the child’s understanding that other people have minds in which are located desires and beliefs, and that desires and beliefs, thereby, motivate behavior. | Theory of mind |
| A trusted person with whom secrets and vulnerabilities can be shared. | Confidante |
| A measure of the association between two variables, or how they go together. | Correlation |
| The complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being—not just the absence of disease or infirmity. | Health |
| Behaviors that are associated with better health. Examples include exercising, not smoking, and wearing a seat belt while in a vehicle. | Health behaviors |
| Being cunning, strategic, or exploitative in one’s relationships. Named after Machiavelli, who outlined this way of relating in his book, The Prince. | Machiavellianism |
| A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), a need for admiration, and lack of empathy. | Narcissism |
| Targets of research interest that are factual and not subject to personal opinions or feelings. | Objective social variables |
| The process of defining a concept so that it can be measured. In psychology, this often happens by identifying related concepts or behaviors that can be more easily measured. | Operationalization |
| Being excluded and ignored by others. | Ostracism |
| A pattern of antisocial behavior characterized by an inability to empathize, egocentricity, and a desire to use relationships as tools for personal gain. | Psychopathy |
| The act of avoiding or ignoring a person, and withholding all social interaction for a period of time. Shunning generally occurs as a punishment and is temporary. | Shunning |
