SOCPSY 3Y03: Applied Social Psychology

Vocabulary practice flashcards defining foundational terms, core theories, research designs, and practical applications from Applied Social Psychology lecture notes.

Applied Social Psychology (Oskamp, 1984)

The applications of social psychological methods, theories, principles, or research findings to the understanding or solution of social problems.

Applied Social Psychology (Textbook Definition)

The branch of social psychology that draws on social psychological theories, principles, methods, and research evidence to contribute to (a) the understanding of social and practical problems, and (b) the development of intervention strategies for improving the functioning of individuals, groups, organizations, communities, and societies.

Basic Social Psychology

The pursuit of understanding social phenomena for the sake of understanding them, primarily focused on developing and testing theories, and typically adopting a deductive approach.

Action Research

A cyclical process founded by Kurt Lewin involving planning, action, evaluation, and feedback, based on the principle that social research should directly lead to social action and meaningful change.

Engaged Research

An applied social psychology approach in which the researcher becomes active within an organization.

Theory

A principle formed to explain or understand particular phenomena through a set of assumptions and propositions based on careful examination of data.

Parsimony

A criterion for evaluating theories that emphasizes simplicity and ease of knowledge translation, requiring ideas to be broadly translatable and understandable.

Cognitive Dissonance

A psychological state that occurs when an individual holds cognitions that are inconsistent with each other, such as nurses experiencing a clash between their values and workplace realities.

Attribution Theory

The cognitive process of assigning causal explanations to behaviour, classifying causes as situational (caused by the environment) or dispositional (caused by internal individual factors).

True Experiment

A research design used to determine whether one variable leads to change in another, strictly requiring a control group, an experimental group, manipulation of an independent variable, and random assignment of participants.

Intervention

A strategy or procedure intended to influence the behaviour of people for the purpose of improving their functioning with respect to some social or practical problem.

Program Logic Model

A clear and concise planning framework used in intervention design to specify the problem, outline the solution, and define the intervention's goals.

Social Anxiety

Marked fear or anxiety about one or more social situations in which an individual is exposed to possible scrutiny by others, affecting between $7\%$ and $13\%$ of Canadians.

Self-Presentation Theory (SPT)

A clinical framework positing that social anxiety occurs when an individual experiences high self-presentational motivation combined with low self-efficacy, generating negative outcome expectancies.

Hopelessness Theory of Depression

A model stating that depression emerges when a vulnerable person faces negative environmental circumstances and makes stable and global attributions regarding those events.

Labelling Effect

A clinical bias wherein preexisting psychiatric labels influence how practitioners, peers, and educators perceive and interpret an individual's symptoms and behaviours.

Anchoring Effect and Confirmation Bias

A dual diagnostic trap where clinicians become unable to deviate from an initial diagnostic hypothesis because they selectively seek out and interpret evidence that confirms that original label.

Mass Media

Technology-driven and usually profit-driven methods of communicating meaningful information between one source and many recipients or many sources and many recipients.

Fright Reactions

Potentially intense and long-term emotional distress, anxiety, depression, or nightmares experienced by children who are exposed to frightening media prior to the age of $11$.

Social Cognition Theory (Bandura)

A theoretical model proposing that vicarious learning requires four interrelated processes: attention, representational processes, behavioural production processes, and motivational processes.

Cultivation Theory

A media theory stating that heavy consumption of television shapes how individuals view the world by acting as an echo chamber and primary agent of socialization.

Bystander Effect

The psychological phenomenon in which individuals are less likely to intervene and offer help during an emergency when other people are present, driven by the diffusion of responsibility.

Multisystemic Therapy (MST)

An intervention for violent youth that accounts for immediate social contexts and the therapeutic process by attempting to influence multiple social systems, including family and neighbourhood.

The Reid Technique

An accusatory, interrogator-led interrogation process comprising factual analysis, a behavioural analysis interview, and a nine-step interrogation phase.

Juror Partiality

An attitudinal and behavioural bias that can potentially alter a juror's verdict, categorized into interest, specific, generic, or normative prejudice.

Community Psychology

A discipline concerned with the relationships of individuals with communities and society that integrates research with action to understand and enhance quality of life, emphasizing social welfare, community mental health, and prevention.

Sense of Community (McMillan and Chavis)

A positive orientation composed of four key elements: membership, influence, integration and fulfillment of needs, and shared emotional connection.

Stimulus Overload (Milgram)

A psychological state in dense populations that prompts six defensive retreat strategies: rushing interactions, prioritizing attention, removing personal elements, erecting barriers, using filters, and creating specialized agencies.

Stigma (Goffman)

An attribute possessed by an individual that society views as problematic, leading to a 'spoiled identity' and social disconnect.

Cultural Taxonomy (Hofstede)

A cross-cultural framework based on data from over 50 countries identifying four core dimensions of culture: Individualism vs. Collectivism, Power Distance, Masculinity vs. Femininity, and Uncertainty Avoidance.

Social Axioms

Culturally acquired expectations and fundamental premises that are considered so obvious that people take them for granted without giving them a second thought.

Contact Hypothesis (Allport, 1954)

The proposition that prejudice may be reduced by equal status contact between majority and minority groups pursuing common goals, especially when supported by institutional authority, custom, or law.

Resource Dilemma

A conflict in which an individual must decide between acting in their own self-interest regarding resource use or acting in the collective interest of the community that also depends on the resource.

Social Design

The collaborative practice of working with people rather than for them to plan and manage environments, guided by six core goals: matching, satisfaction, behaviour change, personal control, social support, and imageability.