Social Psych Exam 2

emotions

A brief, specific response, involving appraisals, experiences, expressions, and physiology, that helps people meet goals, including social goals.

Appraisals

The interpretation an individual gives to a situation that gives rise to the experience of the emotion

Focal emotions

An emotion that is especially common within a particular culture.

Reappraise 

The process of reinterpreting the causes of an emotion and its meaning for the individual.

Social Functional Theory 

The broad idea that emotions coordinate social interactions in ways that enable people to meet social opportunities and challenges.

Broaden and build hypothesis

The idea that positive emotions broaden thoughts and actions, helping people build social resources 

Affective Forecasting

Predicting future emotions, such as whether an event will result in happiness, anger, or sadness and for how long

Immune Neglect

the tendency to ignore our ability to respond productively to stress and other potential sources of unhappiness

Focalism

A tendency to focus too much on a central aspect of an event while neglecting the possible impact of peripheral considerations or extraneous events.

duration neglect

The relative unimportance of the length of an emotional experience, whether pleasurable or unpleasant, in retrospective assessments of the overall experience

Attitude

An evaluation of an object in a positive or negative fashion that includes three components: affect, cognition, and behavior.

Linkert scale

A numerical scale used to assess people’s attitudes; a scale that includes a set of possible answers with labeled anchors on each extreme.

Response Latency

The amount of time it takes to respond to a stimulus, such as an attitude question.

Implicit attitude measures 

An indirect measure of attitudes that doesn’t involve self-report 

cognitive consistency theories

impact of behavior on attitudes reflects our powerful tendency to justify or ratationalize our behaviors and to minimze any inconsistencies between our attitudes and actions 

Cognitive dissonance theory 

The theory that inconsistency between a person’s thoughts, sentiments, and actions creates an aversive emotional state (dissonance) that leads to efforts to restore consistency.

effort Justification

The tendency to reduce dissonance by justifying the time, effort, or money devoted to something that turned out to be unpleasant or disappointing.

Induced ( forced) compliance

Subtly compelling people to behave in a manner that is inconsistent with their beliefs, attitudes, or values in order to elicit dissonance and therefore a change in their original attitudes and values.

Dissonance

 psychological discomfort a person feels when holding two or more contradictory beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors

self-perception theory

The theory that people come to know their own attitudes by looking at their behavior and the context in which it occurred and then inferring what their attitudes must be.

System Justification theory

The theory that people are motivated to see the existing sociopolitical system as desirable. fair, and legitimate

Terror management theory (TMT)

The theory that people deal with the potentially crippling anxiety associated with the inevitability of death by striving for symbolic immortality through preserving valued cultural worldviews and by believing they have lived up to their culture’s standards.

Elaboration Likelihood model ( ELM)

A model of persuasion that maintains that there are two routes to persuasion: the central route and the peripheral route.

central route 

A route to persuasion wherein people think carefully and deliberately about the content of a persuasive message, attending to its logic and the strength of its arguments as well as to related evidence and principles.

peripheral route

A route to persuasion wherein people attend to relatively easy-to-process, superficial cues related to a persuasive message, such as its length or the expertise or attractiveness of the source of the message.

source characteristics

characteristics of the person who delivers a persuasive message, such as attractiveness, credibility, and certainty.

sleeper effect 

An effect that occurs when a persuasive message from an unreliable source initially exerts little influence but later causes attitudes to shift.

message characteristics

Aspects or content of a persuasive message, including the quality of the evidence and the explicitness of its conclusions.

identifiable victim effect

The tendency to be more moved by the vivid plight of a single individual than by the struggles of a more abstract number of people.

audience characteristics

Characteristics of those who receive a persuasive message, including need for cognition, mood, and age.

agenda control

effort by the media to emphasize certain events and topics, thereby shaping which issues and events people think are important 

Hostile Media Phenomenon

The tendency for people to see media coverage as biased against their own side and in favor of their opponents’ side.

thought polarization hypothesis

The hypothesis that more extended thought about a particular issue tends to produce a more extreme, entrenched attitude.

attitude inoculation 

Small attacks on people’s beliefs that engage their prexisiting attitudes, prior commitments and background knowledge, enabling them to counteract a subsequent larger attack and thus resist persuasion 

Social influence

The many ways people affect one another, including changes in attitudes, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors resulting from the comments, actions, or even the mere presence of others

Compliance

Responding favorably to an explicit request from another person

Conformity

Changing one’s belief or behavior to more closely aligned with those of others in response to explicit or implicit pressures (real or imagine) parentheses to do so

Obedience

In an unequal power relationship submitting to the demands of the person in authority

Informational social influence

The influence of other people that results from taking the comments or actions as a source of information about what is correct proper or effective

Normative social influence

The influence of other people that come from the desire to avoid their disapproval and other social sanctions

Internalization

Private acceptance of a proposition, orientation or ideology

Foot in the door technique

The compliance person involves making an initial small request with which nearly everyone complies followed by larger request involving the real behavioral interest

Pluralistic ignorance

A phenomenon where by people acting ways that conflict with their true attitudes or beliefs because they don’t believe others don’t share them. When a great many people do so the behavior reinforces the erroneous group norm.

Descriptive norm

The behavior exhibited by most people in a given context

Prescriptive norms

The way a person is supposed to behave in a given context also called injunctive norm

Norm of reciprocity

A norm dictating that people should provide benefits to who benefit them

Reciprocal concession technique

A compliance approach that involves asking someone for a very large favor that will certainly be refused, and then following the request for one for a smaller favor, (which tends to be seen as a concession the target was compelled to honor)

Negative state relief hypothesis

Idea that people engagement are in action such as agree to request to relieve their negative feelings and feel better about themselves