Psychology Research and Concepts - flashcards

Absolute stability

Consistency in the level or amount of a personality attribute over time.

Active person-environment transactions

The interplay between individuals and their contextual circumstances that occurs whenever individuals play a key role in seeking out, selecting, or otherwise manipulating aspects of their environment.

Age effects

Differences in personality between groups of different ages that are related to maturation and development instead of birth cohort differences.

Attraction

A connection between personality attributes and aspects of the environment that occurs because individuals with particular traits are drawn to certain environments.

Attrition

A connection between personality attributes and aspects of the environment that occurs because individuals with particular traits drop out from certain environments.

Birth cohort

Individuals born in a particular year or span of time.

Cohort effects

Differences in personality that are related to historical and social factors unique to individuals born in a particular year.

Corresponsive principle

The idea that personality traits often become matched with environmental conditions such that an individual's social context acts to accentuate and reinforce their personality attributes.

Cross-sectional study/design

A research design that uses a group of individuals with different ages (and birth cohorts) assessed at a single point in time.

Cumulative continuity principle

The generalization that personality attributes show increasing stability with age and experience.

Differential stability

Consistency in the rank-ordering of personality across two or more measurement occasions.

Evocative person-environment transactions

The interplay between individuals and their contextual circumstances that occurs whenever attributes of the individual draw out particular responses from others in their environment.

Group level

A focus on summary statistics that apply to aggregates of individuals when studying personality development.

Heterotypic stability

Consistency in the underlying psychological attribute across development regardless of any changes in how the attribute is expressed at different ages.

Homotypic stability

Consistency of the exact same thoughts, feelings, and behaviors across development.

Hostile attribution bias

The tendency of some individuals to interpret ambiguous social cues and interactions as examples of aggressiveness, disrespect, or antagonism.

Individual level

A focus on individual level statistics that reflect whether individuals show stability or change when studying personality development.

Longitudinal study/design

A research design that follows the same group of individuals at multiple time points.

Manipulation

A connection between personality attributes and aspects of the environment that occurs whenever individuals with particular traits actively shape their environments.

Maturity principle

The generalization that personality attributes associated with the successful fulfillment of adult roles increase with age and experience.

Person-environment transactions

The interplay between individuals and their contextual circumstances that ends up shaping both personality and the environment.

Reactive person-environment transactions

The interplay between individuals and their contextual circumstances that occurs whenever attributes of the individual shape how a person perceives and responds to their environment.

Selection

A connection between personality attributes and aspects of the environment that occurs whenever individuals with particular attributes choose particular kinds of environments.

Stress reaction

The tendency to become easily distressed by the normal challenges of life.

Transformation

The term for personality changes associated with experience and life events.

Autobiographical reasoning

The ability, typically developed in adolescence, to derive substantive conclusions about the self from analyzing one's own personal experiences.

Big Five

A broad taxonomy of personality trait domains repeatedly derived from studies of trait ratings in adulthood.

Ego

Sigmund Freud's conception of an executive self in the personality.

Identity

A developmental task for late adolescence and young adulthood involving exploring alternative roles, values, goals, and relationships and eventually committing to a realistic agenda for life.

Narrative identity

An internalized and evolving story of the self designed to provide life with some measure of temporal unity and purpose.

Redemptive narratives

Life stories that affirm the transformation from suffering to an enhanced status or state.

Reflexivity

The idea that the self reflects back upon itself.

Self as autobiographical author

The sense of the self as a storyteller who reconstructs the past and imagines the future.

Self as motivated agent

The sense of the self as an intentional force that strives to achieve goals.

Self as social actor

The sense of the self as an embodied actor whose social performances may be construed in terms of more or less consistent self-ascribed traits and social roles.

Self-esteem

The extent to which a person feels that he or she is worthy and good.

Social reputation

The traits and social roles that others attribute to an actor.

The Age 5-to-7 Shift

Cognitive and social changes that occur in the early elementary school years.

The "I"

The self as knower, the sense of the self as a subject.

The "Me"

The self as known, the sense of the self as the object or target.

Theory of mind

The child's understanding that other people have minds in which are located desires and beliefs.

Agreeableness

A personality trait that reflects a person's tendency to be compassionate, cooperative, warm, and caring to others.

Conscientiousness

A personality trait that reflects a person's tendency to be careful, organized, hardworking, and to follow rules.

Continuous distributions

Characteristics can go from low to high, with all different intermediate values possible.

Extraversion

A personality trait that reflects a person's tendency to be sociable, outgoing, active, and assertive.

Facets

Narrower aspects of a broad personality trait.

Factor analysis

A statistical technique for grouping similar things together according to how highly they are associated.

Five-Factor Model

A widely accepted model of personality traits that summarizes variability in people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors with five broad traits.

HEXACO model

The HEXACO model is an alternative to the Five-Factor Model. The HEXACO model includes six traits, five of which are variants of the traits included in the Big Five (Emotionality [E], Extraversion [X], Agreeableness [A], Conscientiousness [C], and Openness [O]). The sixth factor, Honesty-Humility [H], is unique to this model.

Independent

Two characteristics or traits are separate from one another.

Lexical hypothesis

The idea that the most important differences between people will be encoded in the language that we use to describe people.

Neuroticism

A personality trait that reflects the tendency to be interpersonally sensitive and to experience negative emotions.

Openness to Experience

A personality trait that reflects a person's tendency to seek out and appreciate new things.

Personality

Enduring predispositions that characterize a person, such as styles of thought, feelings, and behavior.

Personality traits

Enduring dispositions in behavior that show differences across individuals.

Person-situation debate

A historical debate about the relative power of personality traits as compared to situational influences on behavior.

Big Five

Five broad general traits included in many models of personality.

High-stakes testing

Settings in which test scores are used to make important decisions about individuals.

Honeymoon effect

The tendency for newly married individuals to rate their spouses in an unrealistically positive manner.

Implicit motives

Goals that are important to a person, but that he/she cannot consciously express.

Letter of recommendation effect

The tendency for informants in personality studies to rate others in an unrealistically positive manner.

Projective hypothesis

The theory that when people are confronted with ambiguous stimuli, their responses will be influenced by their unconscious thoughts, needs, wishes, and impulses.

Reference group effect

The tendency of people to base their self-concept on comparisons with others.

Reliability

The consistency of test scores across repeated assessments.

Self-enhancement bias

The tendency for people to see and/or present themselves in an overly favorable way.

Sibling contrast effect

The tendency of parents to use their perceptions of all of their children as a frame of reference for rating the characteristics of each of them.

Validity

Evidence related to the interpretation and use of test scores.

Cause-and-effect

Related to whether one variable is causing changes in another variable.

Confidence interval

An interval of plausible values for a population parameter.

Distribution

The pattern of variation in data.

Generalizability

Related to whether the results from the sample can be generalized to a larger population.

Margin of error

The expected amount of random variation in a statistic.

Parameter

A numerical result summarizing a population.

Population

A larger collection of individuals that we would like to generalize our results to.

P-value

The probability of observing a particular outcome in a sample, or more extreme.

Random assignment

Using a probability-based method to divide a sample into treatment groups.

Random sampling

Using a probability-based method to select a subset of individuals for the sample from the population.

Sample

The collection of individuals on which we collect data.

Statistic

A numerical result computed from a sample.

Statistical significance

A result is statistically significant if it is unlikely to arise by chance alone.

Ambulatory assessment

Methodologies that assess humans' behavior, physiology, experience, and environments in naturalistic settings.

Daily Diary method

A methodology where participants complete a questionnaire about their thoughts, feelings, and behavior at the end of the day.

Day reconstruction method (DRM)

A methodology where participants retrospectively describe their experiences and behavior of a given day.

Ecological momentary assessment

Methodologies that repeatedly sample participants' real-world experiences, behavior, and physiology in real-time.

Ecological validity

The degree to which a study finding has been obtained under conditions that are typical for what happens in everyday life.

Electronically activated recorder, or EAR

A methodology where participants wear a small, portable audio recorder that intermittently records snippets of ambient sounds around them.

Experience-sampling method

A methodology where participants report on their momentary thoughts, feelings, and behaviors at different points in time over a day.

External validity

The degree to which a finding generalizes from a study's specific sample and context to some larger population and broader settings.

Full-cycle psychology

A scientific approach whereby researchers start with an observational field study, follow up with laboratory experimentation, and return to field research to corroborate their findings.

Generalize

To arrive at broad conclusions based on a smaller sample of observations.

Internal validity

The degree to which a cause-effect relationship between two variables has been unambiguously established.

Linguistic inquiry and word count

A quantitative text analysis methodology that automatically extracts grammatical and psychological information from a text by counting word frequencies.

Lived day analysis

A methodology where a research team follows an individual with a video camera to objectively document a person's daily life.

White coat hypertension

A phenomenon in which patients exhibit elevated blood pressure in the hospital or doctor's office but not in their everyday lives.

Confounds

Factors that undermine the ability to draw causal inferences from an experiment.

Correlation

Measures the association between two variables.

Dependent variable

The variable the researcher measures but does not manipulate in an experiment.

Experimenter expectations

When the experimenter's expectations influence the outcome of a study.

Independent variable

The variable the researcher manipulates and controls in an experiment.

Longitudinal study

A study that follows the same group of individuals over time.