Psychology Final

Chapter 12 (Social Psychology, Health and Stress), Chapter 15, Chapter 16

Personality

An individual's characteristic style of behaving, thinking, and feeling.

Self-report

A method in which people provide subjective information about their own thoughts, feelings, or behaviors, typically via questionnaire or interview

Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)

A well-researched clinical questionnaire used to assess personality and psychological problems.

Projective tests

Tests designed to reveal inner aspects of individuals' personalities by analysis of their responses to a standard series of ambiguous stimuli.

Rorschach Inkblot Test

A projective technique in which respondents' inner thoughts and feelings are believed to be revealed by analysis of their responses to a set of unstructured inkblots.

Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

A projective technique in which respondents' underlying motives, concerns, and the way they see the social world are believed to be revealed through analysis of the stories they make up about ambiguous pictures of people.

Trait

A relatively stable disposition to behave in a particular and consistent way.

Big Five

The traits of the five-factor model: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Psychodynamic approach

An approach that regards personality as formed by needs, strivings, and desires largely operating outside of awareness - motives that also can produce emotional disorders.

Id

The part of the mind contained the drives present at birth; it is the source of our bodily needs, wants, desires, and impulses, particularly our sexual and aggressive drives.

Superego

The mental system that reflects the internalization of cultural rules, mainly learned as parents exercise their authority.

Ego

The component of personality, developed through contact with the external world, that enables us to deal with life's practical demands.

Defense mechanisms

Unconscious coping mechanisms that reduce the anxiety generated by threats from unacceptable impulses.

Self-actualizing tendency

the human motive toward realizing our inner potential.

Existential approach

A school of thought that regards personality as being governed by an individual's ongoing choices and decisions in the context of the realities of life and death.

Social-cognitive approach

An approach that views personality in terms of how the person thinks about the situations encountered in daily life and behaves in response to them.

Person-situation controversy

The question of whether behavior is caused more by personality or by situational factors.

Personal constructs

Dimensions people use in making sense in their experiences

Outcome expectancies

A person's assumptions about the likely consequences of a future behavior.

Locus of control

A person's tendency to perceive the control of rewards as internal to the self or external in the environment.

Self-concept

A person's explicit knowledge of his or her own behaviors, traits, and other personal characteristics.

Self-verification

The tendency to seek evidence to confirm the self-concept.

Self-esteem

The extent to which an individual likes, values, and accepts the self.

Self-serving bias

People's tendency to take credit for their successes but downplay responsibility for their failures.

Narcissism

A trait that reflects a grandiose view of the self, combined with a tendency to seek admiration from and exploit others.

Social psychology

The study of the causes and consequences of sociality.

Aggression

Behavior whose purpose is to harm another.

Frustration-aggression hypothesis

A principle stating that animals aggress when their goals are frustrated.

Proactive aggression

Aggression that is planned and purposeful.

Reactive aggression

Aggression that occurs spontaneously in response to a negative affective state.

Cooperation

Behavior by two or more individuals that leads to mutual benefit.

Group

A collection of people who have something in common that distinguishes them from others.

Prejudice

A positive or negative evaluation of another person based on his or her group membership.

Common knowledge effect

The tendency for group discussions to focus on information that all members share.

Group polarization

The tendency of groups to make decisions that are more extreme than any member would have made alone.

Groupthink

The tendency of groups to reach consensus in order to facilitate interpersonal harmony.

Deindividuation

A phenomenon in which immersion in a group causes people to become less concerned with their personal values.

Diffusion of responsibility

The tendency of individuals to feel diminished responsibility for their actions when surrounded by others who are acting the same way.

Social loafing

The tendency of people to expend less effort when in a group than when alone.

Bystander intervention

The act of helping strangers in an emergency situation.

Altruism

Intentional behavior that benefits another at a potential cost to oneself.

Kin selection

The process by which evolution selects for individuals who cooperate with their relatives.

Reciprocal altruism

Behavior that benefits another with the expectation that those benefits will be returned in the future.

Mere exposure effect

The tendency for liking of a stimulus to increase with the frequency of exposure to that stimulus.

Homophily

The tendency for a system to take action to keep itself in equilibrium.

Passionate love

An experience involving feelings of euphoria, intimacy, and intense sexual attraction.

Companionate love

An experience involving affection, trust, and concern for a partner's well-being.

Comparison level for alternatives

The cost-benefit ratio that a person believes he or she could attain in another relationship.

Equity

A state of affairs in which the cost-benefit ratios of two partners are roughly equally favorable.

Social cognition

The processes by which people come to understand others.

Category-based inferences

Inferences based on information about the categories to which a person belongs.

Target-based inferences

Inferences based on information about individual's behavior.

Stereotyping

The process of drawing inferences about individuals based on their category membership.

Behavioral confirmation

The tendency of targets to behave as observers expect them to behave.

Stereotype threat

The target's fear of confirming an observer's negative stereotypes.

Perceptual confirmation

The tendency of observers to see what they expect to see.

Subtyping

The tendency of observers to think of targets who disconfirm stereotypes as "exceptions to the rule."

Attributions

An inference about the cause of a person's behavior.

Correspondence bias

The tendency to make a dispositional attribution even when we should instead make a situational attribution.

Actor-observer effect

The tendency to make situational attributions for our own behaviors while making dispositional attributions for the identical behavior of others.

Social influence

The ability to change or direct another person's behavior.

Overjustification effect

An effect that occurs when a reward decreases a person's intrinsic motivation to perform a behavior.

Reactance

An unpleasant feeling that arises when people feel they are being coerced.

Norms

Customary standards for behavior that are widely shared by members of a culture.

Norm of reciprocity

The unwritten rule that people should benefit those who have benefited them.

Normative influence

A phenomenon in which another person's behavior provides information about what is appropriate.

Door-in-the-face technique

An influence strategy that involves getting someone to accept a small request by first getting them to refuse a large request.

Conformity

The tendency to do what others do.

Obedience

The tendency to do what authorities tell us to do.

Attitude

An enduring positive or negative evaluation of stimulus.

Belief

An enduring piece of knowledge about a stimulus.

Informational influence

A phenomenon that occurs when another person's behavior provides information about what is good or true.

Persuasion

A phenomenon that occurs when a person's attitudes or beliefs are influenced by a communication from another person.

Systematic persuasion

The process by which attitudes or beliefs are changed by appeals to reason.

Heuristic persuasion

The process by which attitudes or beliefs are changed by appeals to habit or emotion.

Foot-in-the-door technique

A technique that involves making a small request and following it with a larger request.

Cognitive dissonance

An unpleasant state that arises when a person recognizes the inconsistency of his or her actions, attitudes, or beliefs.

Stressors

Specific events or chronic pressures that place demands on a person or threaten the person's well-being.

Stress

The physical and psychological response to internal or external stressors.

Health psychology

The subfield of psychology concerned with how psychological factors influence the causes and treatment of physical illness and the maintenance of health.

Chronic stressors

Sources of stress that occur continuously or repeatedly.

Fight-or-flight response

An emotional and physiological reaction to an emergency that increases readiness for action.

General adaptation syndrome (GAS)

A three-stage physiological response that appears regardless of the stressor that is encountered.

Telomeres

Caps at the ends of the chromosomes that prevent the chromosomes from sticking to each other.

Telomerase

An enzyme that rebuilds telomers at the tips of chromosomes.

Immune system

A complex response system that protects the body from bacteria, viruses, and other foreign substances.

Lymphocytes

White blood cells that produce antibodies that fight infection, including T cells and B cells.

Type A behavior pattern

The tendency toward easily aroused hostility, impatience, a sense of time urgency, and competitive achievement strivings.

Burnout

A state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion resulting from long-term involvement in an emotionally demanding situation and accompanied by lowered performance and motivation.

Repressive coping

Avoiding feelings, thoughts, or situations that are reminders of a stressor and maintaining an artificially positive viewpoint.

Rational coping

Facing a stressor and working to overcome it.

Reframing

Finding a new or creative way to think about a stressor that reduces its threat.

Stress inoculation training (SIT)

A reframing technique that helps people cope with stressful situations by developing positive ways to think about the situations.

Meditation

The practice of intentional contemplation.

Relaxation therapy

A technique for reducing tension by consciously relaxing muscles of the body.

Relaxation response

A condition of reduced muscle tension, cortical activity, heart rate, breathing rate, and blood pressure.

Biofeedback

The use of an external monitoring device to obtain information about a bodily function and then to possibly gain control over that function.

Social support

The aid gained through interacting with others.

Psychosomatic illness

An interaction between mind and body that can produce illness.

Somatic symptom disorders

The set of psychological disorders in which people with at least one bodily symptom display significant health-related anxiety, express disproportionate concerns about their symptoms, and devote time and energy to their symptoms or health concerns.