PSYC FINAL EXAM Flashcards
Definitions
Audience design
Constructing utterances to suit the audience’s knowledge.
Common ground
Information that is shared by people who engage in a conversation.
Ingroup
Group to which a person belongs.
Lexicon
Words and expressions.
Linguistic intergroup bias
A tendency for people to characterize positive things about their ingroup using more abstract expressions, but negative things about their outgroups using more abstract expressions.
Outgroup
Group to which a person does not belong.
Priming
A stimulus presented to a person reminds him or her about other ideas associated with the stimulus.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
The hypothesis that the language that people use determines their thoughts.
Situation model
A mental representation of an event, object, or situation constructed at the time of comprehending a linguistic description.
Social brain hypothesis
The hypothesis that the human brain has evolved, so that humans can maintain larger ingroups.
Social networks
Networks of social relationships among individuals through which information can travel.
Syntax
Rules by which words are strung together to form sentences.
Automatic empathy
False-belief test
Folk explanations of behavior
People’s natural explanations for why somebody did something, felt something, etc. (differing substantially for unintentional and intentional behaviors).
Intention
An agent’s mental state of committing to perform an action that the agent believes will bring about a desired outcome.
Intentionality
The quality of an agent’s performing a behavior intentionally—that is, with skill and awareness and executing an intention (which is in turn based on a desire and relevant beliefs).
Joint attention
Two people attending to the same object and being aware that they both are attending to it.
Mimicry
Copying others’ behavior, usually without awareness.
Mirror neurons
Neurons identified in monkey brains that fire both when the monkey performs a certain action and when it perceives another agent performing that action.
Projection
A social perceiver’s assumption that the other person wants, knows, or feels the same as the perceiver wants, know, or feels.
Simulation
The process of representing the other person’s mental state.
Synchrony
Two people displaying the same behaviors or having the same internal states (typically because of mutual mimicry).
Theory of mind
The human capacity to understand minds, a capacity that is made up of a collection of concepts (e.g., agent, intentionality) and processes (e.g., goal detection, imitation, empathy, perspective taking).
Visual perspective taking
Can refer to visual perspective taking (perceiving something from another person’s spatial vantage point) or more generally to effortful mental state inference (trying to infer the other person’s thoughts, desires, emotions).
Basic-level category
The neutral, preferred category for a given object, at an intermediate level of specificity.
Category
A set of entities that are equivalent in some way. Usually the items are similar to one another.
Concept
The mental representation of a category.
Exemplar
An example in memory that is labeled as being in a particular category.
Psychological essentialism
The belief that members of a category have an unseen property that causes them to be in the category and to have the properties associated with it.
Typicality
The difference in “goodness” of category members, ranging from the most typical (the prototype) to borderline members.
Authoritative
A parenting style characterized by high (but reasonable) expectations for children’s behavior, good communication, warmth and nurturance, and the use of reasoning (rather than coercion) as preferred responses to children’s misbehavior.
Effortful control
A temperament quality that enables children to be more successful in motivated self-regulation.
Family Stress Model
A description of the negative effects of family financial difficulty on child adjustment through the effects of economic stress on parents’ depressed mood, increased marital problems, and poor parenting.
Conscience
The cognitive, emotional, and social influences that cause young children to create and act consistently with internal standards of conduct.
Gender schemas
Organized beliefs and expectations about maleness and femaleness that guide children’s thinking about gender.
Goodness of fit
The match or synchrony between a child’s temperament and characteristics of parental care that contributes to positive or negative personality development. A good “fit” means that parents have accommodated to the child’s temperamental attributes, and this contributes to positive personality growth and better adjustment.
Security of attachment
An infant’s confidence in the sensitivity and responsiveness of a caregiver, especially when he or she is needed. Infants can be securely attached or insecurely attached.
Social referencing
The process by which one individual consults another’s emotional expressions to determine how to evaluate and respond to circumstances that are ambiguous or uncertain.
Temperament
Early emerging differences in reactivity and self-regulation, which constitutes a foundation for personality development.
Theory of mind
Children’s growing understanding of the mental states that affect people’s behavior.
