Glossary of Terms

Psychology 30: Glossary of Terms

Accommodation: In Piaget's cognitive theory, accommodation refers to changes in existing ways of thinking in response to encounters with new stimuli or events.

Altruism: An unselfish concern for another person.

Assimilation: In Piaget's cognitive theory, assimilation is the process through which people understand an experience in terms of their current state of cognitive development and way of thinking.

Attachment: An intense emotional relationship that is specific to two people, that endures over time, and in which prolonged separation from the partner is accompanied by stress and sorrow (Gross and McIlveen, 1998, p. 328).

Biotechnology: Biological science when applied, especially to genetic engineering and DNA technology.

Cephalocaudal trend: A newborn's head is about one-fourth of its body length; a two-year-old's head is only one-fifth of its body length. This pattern of growth is called the cephalocaudal trend (Lefton, Boyes and Ogen, 2000, p. 339).

Cloning: To make a copy of.

Cognition: Includes all the mental processes that are used to obtain knowledge or to become aware of the environment. Cognition encompasses perception, imagination, judgement, memory, and language. It includes the processes people use to think, decide, and learn.

Culture: Culture can be defined as a program of shared rules that govern the behaviour of people in a community or society, and a set of values and beliefs shared by most members of that community that are passed from one generation to another.

Ego: According to the psychoanalytic perspective on human development, the ego is the part of the personality that is rational and reasonable. Providing a reality check for the demands of the id, the ego acts as a buffer between the outside world and the primitive id. The ego operates on the “reality principle”, in which instincts are restrained in order to maintain the safety of the individual and help integrate the individual into society.

Embryonic period: The embryonic period is the period of prenatal development that occurs from two to eight weeks after conception.

Ethnicity: Ethnic character, background, or affiliation.

Exosystem: Surrounding the microsystems is the exosystem, which includes all the external networks, such as community structures and local educational, medical, employment, and communications systems that influence the microsystem.

Fetal period: The fetal period is the period of development that begins two months after conception and lasts for seven months, on the average.

Gender: Gender refers to culturally constructed distinctions between masculinity and femininity. Individuals are born female or male; however, they become feminine and masculine through complex developmental processes that take years to unfold.

Genetics: The study of how heredity works and, in particular, of genes. A gene is a section of a long deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecule. It carries information for the construction of a protein or part of a protein.

Genetic engineering: Genetic engineering is the alteration of an organism's genetic instructions through the insertion of additional genes. In humans, genetic engineering involves adding normal genes, either directly via a blood transfusion or bone marrow transplant or directly into a cluster of cells, thereby enabling the body to replace ailing cells with healthy ones.

Germinal period: The germinal period of development is the first two weeks of development. It is characterized by rapid cell division, the beginning of cell differentiation, and implantation of the blastocyst into the uterine wall.

Heredity: The process of transmitting biological traits from parent to offspring through genes, the basic units of heredity. Heredity also refers to the inherited characteristics of an individual, including traits such as height, eye colour, and blood type.

Heuristics: Heuristics are rules of thumb people follow in order to make judgements quickly and efficiently. People use judgemental heuristics to deal with the large amount of social information with which we are faced.

Id: According to the psychoanalytic perspective on human development, the id is the raw, unorganized, inborn part of personality that is present at birth. It represents primitive drives related to hunger, sex, aggression and irrational impulses. The id operates according to the “pleasure principle”, in which the goal is to maximize satisfaction and reduce tension.

Macrosystem: The macrosystem influences all other systems. It includes cultural values, political philosophies, economic patterns, and social conditions.

Maturation: The predetermined unfolding of genetic information.

Microsystem: Microsystems are the systems that intimately and immediately shape human development. Interactions among the microsystems, as when parents and teachers coordinate their efforts to educate the child, take place through the mesosystem.

Nature/nurture: Nature refers to traits, abilities, and capacities that are inherited from one's parents. Nature encompasses any factor that is produced by the predetermined unfolding of genetic information, a process known as maturation. These genetic inherited influences are at work as we move from the one celled organism that is created at the moment of conception to the billions of cells that make up a fully-formed human being. Nurture refers to the environmental influences that shape behaviour. Some of these influences may be biological, such as the impact of a pregnant mother's substance abuse on the fetus, or the amount and kind of food available to children. Other environmental influences are more social, such as the ways parents discipline their children and the effects of peer pressure on adolescents (Feldman, 2000, p. 10).

Perception: Perception is more than the sum of all the sensory input supplied by our eyes, ears and other receptors. It is the active selection, organization, and interpretation of such input.

Personality: Personality is a particular pattern of behaviour and thinking prevailing across time and situations that differentiates one person from another.

Privation: The failure to develop an attachment to any individual. In humans, it is usually (but not necessarily) associated with children reared in institutions, either from or shortly after birth.

Proximodistal trend: Another growth pattern, the proximodistal trend, has growth moving from the centre (proximal part) of the body outward to the more “distant” extremities, that is, the head and torso grow before the arms, legs, hands, and feet.

Psychology: Psychology is the science of human thought and behaviour.

Reflex: An involuntary response to a stimulus.

Reliability: The extent to which research yields the same results each time it is applied to the same issue.

Social cognition: Focuses on the way in which our thoughts are affected by the immediate social context, and in turn how our thoughts affect social behaviour.

The approach can be summarized as follows:
• people take cognitive shortcuts such as stereotyping in order to minimize the cognitive load
• •we develop schemata that represent our knowledge about ourselves, others and our roles in the social world. Once formed, schemas bias our judgement
• schemata become more complex and organized over time and are harder to change (Cardwell, 1996, p. 218).

Social perception: The process by which someone infers other people's motives and intentions from observing their behaviour and deciding whether the causes of the behaviour are internal or situational. Social perception helps people make sense of the world, organize their thoughts quickly, and maintain a sense of control over the environment. It helps people feel competent, masterful, and balanced because it helps them predict similar events in the future (Lefton et al., 2000, p. 457).

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS): The term ‘sudden infant death' is more a description after the fact than a diagnosis of cause. Despite decades of research, the root cause of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is still unknown. In all probability, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome results from a combination of factors (characteristics of the mother, characteristics of birth, situation at death, and sleeping conditions), and each factor adds slightly to the overall risk for certain infants who, for unknown genetic reasons, are vulnerable.

Superego: According to the psychoanalytic perspective on human development, the superego represents a person's conscience, incorporating distinctions between right and wrong. It develops around age five or six and is learned from an individual's parents, teachers, and other significant figures.

Temperament: Every individual is born with a distinct genetically-based set of psychological tendencies or dispositions. These tendencies, which together are called temperament, affect and shape virtually every aspect of the individual's developing personality. Temperament, and therefore personality, is not merely genetic. It begins in the multitude of genetic instructions that guide the development of the brain and then is affected by the prenatal environment (Berger, 2000, p. 219).

Teratogens: The broad range of substances (such as drugs and pollutants) and conditions (such as severe malnutrition and extreme stress) that increase the risk of prenatal abnormalities.

Validity: The extent to which a research methodology measures what it is supposed to measure (Baron, Earhard and Ozier, 1998, p. 4)