| Constructing utterances to suit the audience’s knowledge. | Audience design |
| Information that is shared by people who engage in a conversation. | Common ground |
| Group to which a person belongs. | Ingroup |
| Words and expressions. | Lexicon |
| 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. | Linguistic intergroup bias |
| Group to which a person does not belong. | Outgroup |
| A stimulus presented to a person reminds him or her about other ideas associated with the stimulus. | Priming |
| The hypothesis that the language that people use determines their thoughts. | Sapir-Whorf hypothesis |
| A mental representation of an event, object, or situation constructed at the time of comprehending a linguistic description. | Situation Model |
| The hypothesis that the human brain has evolved, so that humans can maintain larger ingroups. | Social brain hypothesis |
| Networks of social relationships among individuals through which information can travel. | Social networks |
| Rules by which words are strung together to form sentences. | Syntax |
| A social perceiver unwittingly taking on the internal state of another person, usually because of mimicking the person’s expressive behavior and thereby feeling the expressed emotion. | Automatic empathy |
| An experimental procedure that assesses whether a perceiver recognizes that another person has a false belief—a belief that contradicts reality. | False-belief test |
| People’s natural explanations for why somebody did something, felt something, etc. (differing substantially for unintentional and intentional behaviors). | Folk explanations of behavior |
| An agent’s mental state of committing to perform an action that the agent believes will bring about a desired outcome. | Intention |
| 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). | Intentionality |
| Two people attending to the same object and being aware that they both are attending to it. | Joint attention |
| Copying others’ behavior, usually without awareness | Mimicry |
| Neurons identified in monkey brains that fire both when the monkey performs a certain action and when it perceives another agent performing that action. | Mirror neurons |
| A social perceiver’s assumption that the other person wants, knows, or feels the same as the perceiver wants, know, or feels. | Projection |
| The process of representing the other person’s mental state. | Simulation |
| Two people displaying the same behaviors or having the same internal states (typically because of mutual mimicry). | Synchrony |
| 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). | Theory of mind |
| 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). | Visual perspective taking |
| The neutral, preferred category for a given object, at an intermediate level of specificity. | Basic-level category |
| A set of entities that are equivalent in some way. Usually the items are similar to one another. | Category |
| The mental representation of a category. | Concept |
| An example in memory that is labeled as being in a particular category. | Exemplar |
| 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. | Psychological essentialism |
| The difference in “goodness” of category members, ranging from the most typical (the prototype) to borderline members. | Typicality |
| A numerical board game that seems to be useful for building numerical knowledge. | Chutes and Ladders |
| Piagetian stage between ages 7 and 12 when children can think logically about concrete situations but not engage in systematic scientific reasoning. | Concrete operations stage |
| Problems pioneered by Piaget in which physical transformation of an object or set of objects changes a perceptually salient dimension but not the quantity that is being asked about. | Conservation problems |
| Ways in which development occurs in a gradual incremental manner, rather than through sudden jumps. | Continuous development |
| The ability to actively perceive the distance from oneself of objects in the environment. | Depth perception |
| Discontinuous development | Discontinuous development |
| Piagetian stage starting at age 12 years and continuing for the rest of life, in which adolescents may gain the reasoning powers of educated adults. | Formal operations stage |
| Theories that focus on describing the cognitive processes that underlie thinking at any one age and cognitive growth over time. | Information processing theories |
| The genes that children bring with them to life and that influence all aspects of their development. | Nature |
| The sizes of numbers. | Numerical magnitudes |
| The environments, starting with the womb, that influence all aspects of children’s development. | Nurture |
| The Piagetian task in which infants below about 9 months of age fail to search for an object that is removed from their sight and, if not allowed to search immediately for the object, act as if they do not know that it continues to exist. | Object permanence task |
| Awareness of the component sounds within words. | Phonemic awareness |
| Theory that development occurs through a sequence of discontinuous stages: the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages. | Piaget’s theory |
| Period within Piagetian theory from age 2 to 7 years, in which children can represent objects through drawing and language but cannot solve logical reasoning problems, such as the conservation problems. | Preoperational reasoning stage |
| Large, fundamental change, as when a caterpillar changes into a butterfly; stage theories such as Piaget’s posit that each stage reflects qualitative change relative to previous stages. | Qualitative changes |
| Gradual, incremental change, as in the growth of a pine tree’s girth. | Quantitative changes |
| Period within Piagetian theory from birth to age 2 years, during which children come to represent the enduring reality of objects. | Sensorimotor stage |
| Theory founded in large part by Lev Vygotsky that emphasizes how other people and the attitudes, values, and beliefs of the surrounding culture influence children’s development. | Sociocultural theories |
| Endophenotypes | A characteristic that reflects a genetic liability for disease and a more basic component of a complex clinical presentation. Endophenotypes are less developmentally malleable than overt behavior. |
| Event-related potentials (ERP) | Measures the firing of groups of neurons in the cortex. As a person views or listens to specific types of information, neuronal activity creates small electrical currents that can be recorded from non-invasive sensors placed on the scalp. ERP provides excellent information about the timing of processing, clarifying brain activity at the millisecond pace at which it unfolds. |
| Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) | Entails the use of powerful magnets to measure the levels of oxygen within the brain that vary with changes in neural activity. That is, as the neurons in specific brain regions “work harder” when performing a specific task, they require more oxygen. By having people listen to or view social percepts in an MRI scanner, fMRI specifies the brain regions that evidence a relative increase in blood flow. In this way, fMRI provides excellent spatial information, pinpointing with millimeter accuracy, the brain regions most critical for different social processes. |
| Social brain | The set of neuroanatomical structures that allows us to understand the actions and intentions of other people. |
| 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. |
| Conscience | The cognitive, emotional, and social influences that cause young children to create and act consistently with internal standards of conduct. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Conscience | The cognitive, emotional, and social influences that cause young children to create and act consistently with internal standards of conduct. |
| 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. |
| Cultural display rules | These are rules that are learned early in life that specify the management and modification of emotional expressions according to social circumstances. Cultural display rules can work in a number of different ways. For example, they can require individuals to express emotions “as is” (i.e., as they feel them), to exaggerate their expressions to show more than what is actually felt, to tone down their expressions to show less than what is actually felt, to conceal their feelings by expressing something else, or to show nothing at all. |
| Interpersonal | This refers to the relationship or interaction between two or more individuals in a group. Thus, the interpersonal functions of emotion refer to the effects of one’s emotion on others, or to the relationship between oneself and others. |
| Intrapersonal | This refers to what occurs within oneself. Thus, the intrapersonal functions of emotion refer to the effects of emotion to individuals that occur physically inside their bodies and psychologically inside their minds. |
| Social and cultural | Society refers to a system of relationships between individuals and groups of individuals; culture refers to the meaning and information afforded to that system that is transmitted across generations. Thus, the social and cultural functions of emotion refer to the effects that emotions have on the functioning and maintenance of societies and cultures. |
| Social referencing | This refers to the process whereby individuals look for information from others to clarify a situation, and then use that information to act. Thus, individuals will often use the emotional expressions of others as a source of information to make decisions about their own behavior. |
| Attachment behavioral system | A motivational system selected over the course of evolution to maintain proximity between a young child and his or her primary attachment figure. |
| Attachment behaviors | Behaviors and signals that attract the attention of a primary attachment figure and function to prevent separation from that individual or to reestablish proximity to that individual (e.g., crying, clinging). |
| Attachment figure | Someone who functions as the primary safe haven and secure base for an individual. In childhood, an individual’s attachment figure is often a parent. In adulthood, an individual’s attachment figure is often a romantic partner. |
| Attachment patterns | (also called “attachment styles” or “attachment orientations”) Individual differences in how securely (vs. insecurely) people think, feel, and behave in attachment relationships |
| Strange situation | A laboratory task that involves briefly separating and reuniting infants and their primary caregivers as a way of studying individual differences in attachment behavior. |
| Crowds | Adolescent peer groups characterized by shared reputations or images. |
| Deviant peer contagion | The spread of problem behaviors within groups of adolescents. |
| Differential susceptibility | Genetic factors that make individuals more or less responsive to environmental experiences. |
| Foreclosure | Individuals commit to an identity without exploration of options. |
| Homophily | Adolescents tend to associate with peers who are similar to themselves. |
| Identity achievement | Individuals have explored different options and then made commitments |
| Identity diffusion | Adolescents neither explore nor commit to any roles or ideologies. |
| Moratorium | State in which adolescents are actively exploring options but have not yet made identity commitments. |
| Psychological control | Parents’ manipulation of and intrusion into adolescents’ emotional and cognitive world through invalidating adolescents’ feelings and pressuring them to think in particular ways. |
| Collectivism | Belief system that emphasizes the duties and obligations that each person has toward others. |
| Developed countries | The economically advanced countries of the world, in which most of the world’s wealth is concentrated. |
| Developing countries | The less economically advanced countries that comprise the majority of the world’s population. Most are currently developing at a rapid rate. |
| Emerging adulthood | A new life stage extending from approximately ages 18 to 25, during which the foundation of an adult life is gradually constructed in love and work. Primary features include identity explorations, instability, focus on self-development, feeling incompletely adult, and a broad sense of possibilities. |
| Individualism | Belief system that exalts freedom, independence, and individual choice as high values. |
| OECD countries | Members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, comprised of the world’s wealthiest countries |
| Tertiary education | Education or training beyond secondary school, usually taking place in a college, university, or vocational training program. |
| Age identity | How old or young people feel compared to their chronological age; after early adulthood, most people feel younger than their chronological age. |
| Autobiographical narratives | A qualitative research method used to understand characteristics and life themes that an individual considers to uniquely distinguish him- or herself from others. |
| Average life expectancy | Mean number of years that 50% of people in a specific birth cohort are expected to survive. This is typically calculated from birth but is also sometimes re-calculated for people who have already reached a particular age (e.g., 65). |
| Cohort | Group of people typically born in the same year or historical period, who share common experiences over time; sometimes called a generation (e.g., Baby Boom Generation). |
| Convoy Model of Social Relations | Theory that proposes that the frequency, types, and reciprocity of social exchanges change with age. These social exchanges impact the health and well-being of the givers and receivers in the convoy. |
| Cross-sectional studies | Research method that provides information about age group differences; age differences are confounded with cohort differences and effects related to history and time of study. |
| Crystallized intelligence | Type of intellectual ability that relies on the application of knowledge, experience, and learned information. |
| Fluid intelligence | Type of intelligence that relies on the ability to use information processing resources to reason logically and solve novel problems. |
| Global subjective well-being | Individuals’ perceptions of and satisfaction with their lives as a whole. |
| Hedonic well-being | Component of well-being that refers to emotional experiences, often including measures of positive (e.g., happiness, contentment) and negative affect (e.g., stress, sadness). |
| Heterogeneity | Inter-individual and subgroup differences in level and rate of change over time. |
| Inhibitory functioning | Ability to focus on a subset of information while suppressing attention to less relevant information. |
| Intra- and inter-individual differences | Different patterns of development observed within an individual (intra-) or between individuals (inter-). |
| Life course theories | Theory of development that highlights the effects of social expectations of age-related life events and social roles; additionally considers the lifelong cumulative effects of membership in specific cohorts and sociocultural subgroups and exposure to historical events. |
| Life span theories | Theory of development that emphasizes the patterning of lifelong within- and between-person differences in the shape, level, and rate of change trajectories. |
| Longitudinal studies | Research method that collects information from individuals at multiple time points over time, allowing researchers to track cohort differences in age-related change to determine cumulative effects of different life experiences. |
| Processing speed | The time it takes individuals to perform cognitive operations (e.g., process information, react to a signal, switch attention from one task to another, find a specific target object in a complex picture). |
| Psychometric approach | Approach to studying intelligence that examines performance on tests of intellectual functioning. |
| Recall | Type of memory task where individuals are asked to remember previously learned information without the help of external cues. |
| Recognition | Type of memory task where individuals are asked to remember previously learned information with the assistance of cues. |
| Self-perceptions of aging | An individual’s perceptions of their own aging process; positive perceptions of aging have been shown to be associated with greater longevity and health. |
| Social network | Network of people with whom an individual is closely connected; social networks provide emotional, informational, and material support and offer opportunities for social engagement. |
| Socioemotional Selectivity Theory | Theory proposed to explain the reduction of social partners in older adulthood; posits that older adults focus on meeting emotional over information-gathering goals, and adaptively select social partners who meet this need. |
| Subjective age | A multidimensional construct that indicates how old (or young) a person feels and into which age group a person categorizes him- or herself |
| Successful aging | Includes three components: avoiding disease, maintaining high levels of cognitive and physical functioning, and having an actively engaged lifestyle. |
| Working memory | Memory system that allows for information to be simultaneously stored and utilized or manipulated. |
