Week 3 Day 1

Vocabulary flashcards reviewing core topics from PSY 345 Week 3 Day 1, covering study validity, self-concept, the three perspectives on the self (Social Actor, Motivated Agent, Autobiographical Author), cultural narratives, and course logistics.

The "Me" (Self-Concept)

The self as an object of thought, representing an individual's mental representation of who they are, including perceived personality traits, personal attributes, social roles, physical features, and explicit self-knowledge.

The "I" (Ontological Self / Experiencing Agent)

The self as subject, acting as the active, experiencing agent engaging in conscious thought, observation, and executive control, encompassing conscious reflections, implicit memories, unconscious drives, and emotional states.

Dramaturgical Perspective

The theoretical view asserting that human selfhood is constructed around performing social roles before an audience of others.

Need to Belong

A fundamental evolutionary drive to monitor social standing and maintain group membership to ensure survival and cohesion.

Self-Recognition

A developmental milestone emerging by age $2$ wherein toddlers demonstrate recognition of themselves, such as in a mirror.

Possessive Linguistics

The emergence of early self-referential language concepts in toddlers, such as using "me" and "mine".

Social Self-Evaluative Emotions

Emotions like shame and guilt that serve social-monitoring functions by signaling when behavior threatens group standing.

Social Reputation

An individual's subjective internal perception of how they are viewed and evaluated by others.

Structural Composition

The structural formula defining social reputation: $\text{Social Reputation} = \text{Central Traits} + \text{Social Roles}$.

Central Traits

Core baseline personality dimensions that are highly stable and resistant to rapid intentional change.

Social Roles/Actions

Malleable observable behaviors and social positions that can be changed to alter how one is perceived by others.

Motivated Agent

The self conceptualized as an intentional force that purposefully formulates, pursues, and executes specific goals, values, plans, and life projects.

Theory of Mind

The cognitive understanding, developed around age $4$, that both oneself and other individuals possess internal mental states—including desires, beliefs, motives, and intentions—that directly cause and explain observable actions.

Age 5–7 Shift

A developmental transition occurring between ages $5$ and $7$ where children shift from immediate, reactive impulses to becoming systematic, strategic, and intentional goal-pursuers.

Self-Esteem

An individual's overall evaluative assessment of their intrinsic worthiness and goodness as a human being.

Motivated Agency

The operational pursuit of personal goals and values, which directly links to self-esteem as successful goal attainment elevates self-esteem while systematic failure diminishes it.

Autobiographical Author

The self conceptualized as an internal storyteller who continuously reconstructs the personal past and imagines or anticipates the future to generate an integrated life narrative.

Psychological Purpose of Autobiographical Author

Synthesizing past experiences and future expectations into a narrative to provide an individual's life with continuity, structural unity, meaning, and purpose.

Autobiographical Reasoning

The reflective cognitive process wherein an individual analyzes personal life events to derive substantive, overarching conclusions about their identity.

Mechanism of Autobiographical Reasoning

The cognitive process that allows individuals to interpret why past choices occurred, connect disparate life events, and derive self-knowledge from personal history.

Psychological Function of Personal Narratives

Structuring life events into a coherent personal narrative promotes psychological adjustment, coping, and resilience following negative or traumatic experiences.

Self-Selection into a Study

Occurs when individuals autonomously decide whether to volunteer or sign up for a research project.

Threat of Self-Selection into a Study

Threatens External Validity because a self-selected sample may have unique characteristics that cannot be generalized to outside populations.

Self-Selection into Experimental Conditions

Occurs when participants inside a study choose which experimental group or condition they join.

Threat of Self-Selection into Experimental Conditions

Threatens Internal Validity because it destroys random assignment and prevents unequivocal attribution of effects to the independent variable.

Internal Validation

The first step in evaluating study validity, assessing whether a study was conducted rigorously, confounds were controlled, and causal conclusions are valid.

External Validation

Evaluated after internal validity is established to examine whether findings replicate across different samples, populations, settings, and environments.

Observer Bias

Occurs when a researcher's personal expectations or biases shape how the study is conducted, data is collected, or behavior is evaluated.

Demand Characteristics

Occurs when research participants become aware of the study's purpose and alter their behavior based on perceived expectations.