Personality Terms Chapter 16

Front 1

Personality Processes

Back 1

Processes (e.g., perception, thought, motivation, and emotion) in which individuals differ.

Front 2

Priming

Back 2

Concepts that have been activated recently.

Front 3

Chronic Accessibility

Back 3

Concepts in our cognitive systems that are constantly primed and reprimed.

Front 4

Rejection Sensitivity

Back 4

Personality disposition in which a person will likely interpret any ambiguous signals as confirmation that his or her partner is about to walk out.

Front 5

Hostility

Back 5

Accessibility of ideas that cause some people to perceive an ambiguous situation as threatening.

Front 6

Perceptual Defense

Back 6

The ability to screen information that might make the individual anxious or uncomfortable.

Front 7

Well-defended

Back 7

The ability to ignore and even fail to perceive small social slights.

Front 8

Repression-sensitization Scale

Back 8

Byrne's instrument to measure the extent to which people are relatively defensive or sensitive in their perception of potentially threatening information.

Front 9

Consciousness

Back 9

Whatever an individual has in mind at the moment.

Front 10

Sensory-perceptual Buffer

Back 10

The first stage of information processing in which nearly all stimulus information is held in unprocessed form, for a very short period of time (also called a perceptual buffer).

Front 11

Short-term Memory

Back 11

The second stage of information processing, in which the person is consciously aware of a small amount of information (about seven "chunks") as long as that information continues to be actively processed.

Front 12

Chunk

Back 12

Any piece of information that can be thought of as a unit. It can vary with learning and experience; the capacity of short-term memory is seven chunks, plus or minus two.

Front 13

Working Memory

Back 13

The third stage of information processing, which contains a large amount of information, including a representation of the current environment, in easily accessible form that is just out of consciousness.

Front 14

Long-term Memory

Back 14

The final stage of information processing, in which a nearly unlimited amount of information can be permanently stored in an organized manner; this information may not always be accessible, however, depending on how it is stored and how it was looked for.

Front 15

Funder's Fifth Law

Back 15

The purpose of education is to assemble new chunks.

Front 16

Cognitive Unconscious

Back 16

Information about which the individual has knowledge without realizing they do.

Front 17

Dual Process Models

Back 17

Theoretical models that contrast the roles of conscious and unconscious thought.

Front 18

Cognitive-experiential Self-theory (CEST)

Back 18

Perspective that people use two major psychological systems (rational and experiential) simultaneously to adapt to the world.

Front 19

Rational System

Back 19

Includes language, logic, and systematized, factual knowledge.

Front 20

Experiential System

Back 20

Tied closely to emotion and assumed to be the way that other animals think.

Front 21

Goals

Back 21

The ends that one desires.

Front 22

Strategies

Back 22

The means that the individual uses to achieve his or her goals.

Front 23

Idiographic Goals

Back 23

Goals that are unique to the individuals who pursue them.

Front 24

Current Concern

Back 24

A goal, hope, or worry that resides in working memory and tends to periodically come into consciousness.

Front 25

Personal Project

Back 25

Efforts that people put into goals.

Front 26

Life Tasks

Back 26

Organizing goals people pursue at particular times of their life.

Front 27

Personal Strivings

Back 27

Long-term goals that can organize broad areas of a person's life.

Front 28

Nomothetic Goalss

Back 28

The relatively small number of essential motivations that almost everyone pursues.

Front 29

Achievement Motivation

Back 29

A tendency to direct one's thoughts and behavior toward striving for excellence.

Front 30

Affiliation Motivation

Back 30

The tendency to direct thoughts and behavior toward finding and maintaining close and warm emotional relationships

Front 31

Goals Circumplex

Back 31

A representation of goals in terms of their arrangement around a circle, reflecting the similarities and differences between goals.

Front 32

Judgement Goals

Back 32

Seeking to judge or validate an attribute in oneself.

Front 33

Development Goals

Back 33

The desire to actually improve oneself, to become smarter, more beautiful, or more popular.

Front 34

Entity Theories

Back 34

An individual's belief that personal qualities such as intelligence and ability are unchangeable.

Front 35

Incremental Theories

Back 35

The belief that intelligence and ability can change with time and experience.

Front 36

Script

Back 36

Knowledge of what to do in a certain condition.

Front 37

Strategy

Back 37

A sequence of activities that progress toward a goal.

Front 38

Characteristic Adaptations

Back 38

Generalized scripts.

Front 39

Defensive Pessimism

Back 39

An individual's tendency to expect the worst so that the individual can be pleasantly surprised when the worst does not happen.

Front 40

Procedural Knowledge

Back 40

Knowledge pertaining to how to do something.

Front 41

Appraisal

Back 41

The stage in which a stimulus is judged as emotionally relevant.

Front 42

Big Three of Emotions

Back 42

Finding that all emotion terms were either negative, positive, or neutral.

Front 43

Affect Intensity

Back 43

Level at which individuals typically experience emotion.

Front 44

Emotional Intelligence

Back 44

The degree to which one accurately perceives emotions in oneself and others, and the ability to which one can control and regulate one's own emotions.

Front 45

Set Point

Back 45

One's general inclination toward happiness, based in part on the heritable traits of extraversion and neuroticism.

Front 46

Self-schema

Back 46

The cognitive structure that is hypothesized to contain a person's knowledge about himself or herself and to direct relevant thought.