Page 656 - Understanding Psychology

Glossary sleepwalking–survey
sleepwalking walking or carrying out behaviors while still asleep (p. 188)
social cognition a subfield of social psychology that focuses on cognitive processes and how we perceive, store, and retrieve information about social interactions (p. 519)
social facilitation an increase in performance in front of a crowd (p. 549)
social functions responses directed toward satisfying the emotional needs of members (p. 547)
social inhibition a decrease in performance in the pres- ence of a crowd (p. 549)
socialization the process of learning the rules of behavior of the culture within which an individual is born and will live (p. 81)
social learning form of learning in which the organism observes, explores, and imitates the behavior of others (p. 259)
social learning theory theory that individuals develop by interacting with others (p. 107)
social loafing the tendency for people to work less hard when sharing the workload with others than when they are working alone (p. 569)
social psychology a broad field of psychology that seeks to explain how our thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and behaviors are influenced by interactions with others (p. 519)
social support information that leads someone to be- lieve that he or she is cared for, loved, respected, and part of a network of communication and mutual obliga- tion (p. 428)
social trap a situation that occurs when individuals in a group decide not to cooperate (p. 567)
sociogram a diagram that represents relationships within a group, especially likes and dislikes of members for other members (p. 552)
somatic nervous system (SNS) the division of the peripheral nervous system that controls voluntary move- ment of skeletal muscles (p. 158)
somatoform disorder a psychological disorder marked by a pattern of recurring physical symptoms for which there is no apparent physical cause (p. 461)
source trait a stable characteristic that can be considered to be at the core of personality (p. 401)
spermarche a period during which males achieve first ejaculation (p. 96)
spinal cord the bundle of nerves within the spine that runs down the length of the back and transmits most messages back and forth between the body and brain (p. 156)
spontaneous recovery the reappearance of an extin- guished conditioned response after some time has passed (p. 245)
sports psychology a branch of psychology that studies athletics and athletic performance (p. 615)
stagnation a discontinuation of development and a desire to recapture the past, characteristic of some middle-aged people (p. 135)
standard deviation a measure of variability that describes an average distance of every score from the mean of the scores (p. 52)
state-dependent learning the idea that we recall infor- mation more easily when we are in the same physiolog- ical or emotional state or setting as when we originally encoded the information (p. 284)
statistically significant effect that has a low probability of having arisen by chance (p. 54)
statistics the branch of mathematics concerned with sum- marizing and making meaningful inferences from collec- tions of data (p. 48)
stereotype a set of assumptions about people in a given category, either positive or negative, often based on half- truths and nontruths (pp. 530, 587)
stimulation value the ability of a person or participant to interest or expose another to new ideas and experiences (p. 523)
stimulus any aspect of or change in the environment to which an organism responds (p. 208)
storage the process of placing encoded information into relatively permanent mental storage for later recall (p. 274)
stranger anxiety the fear of strangers that infants com- monly display (p. 76)
stratified sample a sample group of a larger population in which subgroups within the larger population are repre- sented proportionally (p. 37)
stress a person’s physical and mental reaction to his or her inability to cope with a certain tense event or situation (p. 413)
stressor an event or situation that produces stress (p. 414) stress reaction the body’s response to a stressor (p. 414) structuralist a psychologist who studied the basic elements
that make up conscious mental experiences (p. 16) sublimation the process of redirecting sexual impulses into learning tasks (p. 82); redirecting a forbidden desire into
a socially acceptable desire (p. 383)
subliminal messages brief auditory or visual messages
that are presented below the absolute threshold so that
their chance of perception is less than 50 percent (p. 226) subliminal perception the ability to notice stimuli that
affect only the unconscious mind (p. 227)
superego the part of the personality that is the source of conscience and counteracts the socially undesirable
impulses of the id (p. 380)
surface trait a stable characteristic that can be observed in
certain situations (p. 401)
survey a research method in which information is obtained
by asking many individuals a fixed set of questions about their attitudes or behavior (p. 38)
642 Glossary