Psychology Terms Starting With 'S'

Browse through our collection of psychological terms and their definitions.

Terms Starting with "S"

2928 terms
Schaie’s stages of cognitive development

Schaie’s stages of cognitive development a stage theory in which human cognitive processes are posited to develop within up to five periods during the lifespan. In the first, the acquisitive stage, an individual’s primary cognitive task is to acquire knowledge and intellectual skills. Corresponding to developmental approaches such as that of Jean Piaget, this stage occurs from infancy through adolescence. The achieving stage occurs next, in young adulthood, during which an individual’s primary cognitive task is to achieve personal goals (e.g., starting a family, establishing a career) by applying the intellectual skills learned during the acquisitive stage. The individual then uses those skills in middle adulthood, during the responsible stage, to manage increasingly complex situations arising from family, community, and career responsibilities. This stage may by followed by the executive stage, during which some middle-aged adults may achieve a high level of intellectual functioning characterized by a broadened focus on societal rather than on exclusively personal concerns and by an ability to set priorities as well as to assimilate conflicting information. Finally, in the reintegrative stage, individuals in late adulthood apply their intellectual skills to reexamine their life experiences and priorities and to focus their attention on tasks of great personal meaning. Memory storage and retrieval and the speed of other cognitive functions may decline, but general cognitive ability continues to develop during this stage. Also called Schaie’s stages of adult cognitive development. See also Seattle Longitudinal Study. [proposed in the 1970s by K. Warner Schaie (1928–  ), U.S. psychologist]

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schizophrenia

schizophrenia n. a psychotic disorder characterized by disturbances in thinking (cognition), emotional responsiveness, and behavior, with an age of onset typically between the late teens and mid-30s. Schizophrenia was first formally described in the late 19th century by Emil Kraepelin, who named it dementia praecox; in 1908, Eugen Bleuler renamed the disorder schizophrenia (Greek, “splitting of the mind”) to characterize the disintegration of mental functions associated with what he regarded as its fundamental symptoms of abnormal thinking and affect. According to DSM–IV–TR, the characteristic disturbances must last for at least 6 months and include at least 1 month of active-phase symptoms comprising two or more of the following: delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior, or negative symptoms (e.g., lack of emotional responsiveness, extreme apathy). These signs and symptoms are associated with marked social or occupational dysfunction. Some have argued (beginning with Bleuler) that disorganized thinking (see formal thought disorder; schizophrenic thinking) is the single most important feature of schizophrenia, but DSM–IV–TR and its predecessors have not emphasized this feature, at least in their formal criteria. DSM–5 retains essentially the same criteria but emphasizes that delusions, hallucinations, or disorganized speech must be among the symptoms required for diagnosis. It also eliminates the five distinct subtypes of schizophrenia previously described in DSM–IV–TR: catatonic schizophrenia, disorganized schizophrenia, paranoid schizophrenia, residual schizophrenia, and undifferentiated schizophrenia. —schizophrenic adj.

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self

self n. the totality of the individual, consisting of all characteristic attributes, conscious and unconscious, mental and physical. Apart from its basic reference to personal identity, being, and experience, the term’s use in psychology is wide-ranging. According to William James, self can refer either to the person as the target of appraisal (i.e., one introspectively evaluates how one is doing) or to the person as the source of agency (i.e., one attributes the source of regulation of perception, thought, and behavior to one’s body or mind). Carl Jung maintained that the self gradually develops by a process of individuation, which is not complete until late maturity is reached. Alfred Adler identified the self with the individual’s lifestyle, the manner in which he or she seeks fulfillment. Karen D. Horney held that one’s real self, as opposed to one’s idealized self-image, consists of one’s unique capacities for growth and development. Gordon W. Allport substituted the word proprium for self and conceived of it as the essence of the individual, consisting of a gradually developing body sense, identity, self-estimate, and set of personal values, attitudes, and intentions. Austrian-born U.S. psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut (1913–1981) used the term to denote the sense of a coherent, stable (yet dynamic) experience of one’s individuality, continuity in time and space, autonomy, efficacy, motivation, values, and desires; he believed that this sense emerges through healthy narcissistic development empathically supported by the significant figures in one’s early life and that, conversely, narcissistic developmental failure leads to a fragile or incoherent sense of self. See self psychology. See also false self; multiple selves; phenomenal self; sense of self; true self.

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self-help group

self-help group a group composed of individuals who meet on a regular basis to help one another cope with a life problem. Unlike therapy groups, self-help groups are not led by professionals, do not charge a fee for service, and do not place a limit on the number of members. They provide many benefits that professionals cannot provide, including friendship, mutual support, experiential knowledge, identity, a sense of belonging, and other by-products of a positive group process. Each group also develops its own ideology or set of beliefs about the cause of and best means to address the problem that brings members together; the ideology is unique to that group and serves as an aid or “antidote” to its particular type of problem. For instance, the ideology of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) includes the belief that alcoholism is a lifelong problem and that the first step in addressing it (see twelve-step program) is for group members to admit that they do not have control over their drinking. Of the various types of self-help groups, AA represents only one; it falls into a broader category of groups whose focal problem is addiction or compulsive behavior (e.g., Gamblers Anonymous). Other types of self-help groups include those focused on a life stress or transition (e.g., Compassionate Friends), those focused on mental health concerns (e.g., National Alliance on Mental Illness), and those focused on a particular physical disease or disorder (e.g., the National Multiple Sclerosis Society). See also mutual support group; support group.

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social-cognitive theory

social-cognitive theory an extension of social learning theory to include the effects of cognitive processes, such as conceptions, judgment, and motivation, on an individual’s behavior and on the environment that influences him or her. Rather than passively absorbing knowledge from environmental inputs, individuals actively influence their learning by interpreting the outcomes of their actions, which then affects their environments and their personal factors, which in turn inform and alter subsequent behavior. Emphasis on this interaction of behavioral, environmental, and personal factors is thus a major hallmark of the theory. Although Julian Rotter, Austrian-born U.S. personality psychologist Walter Mischel (1930–  ), and many others have proposed different social-cognitive perspectives, the one introduced by Albert Bandura in 1986 remains most prominent and has been applied to a wide range of topics (e.g., personality development and functioning, the understanding and treatment of psychological disorders, organizational training programs, education, health promotion strategies, advertising and marketing). A central tenet of Bandura’s social-cognitive theory is that people seek to develop a sense of agency and to exert control over important events in their lives, a sense that is affected by factors such as their self-efficacy, outcome expectations, goals, and self-evaluation. Despite the distinction between social-cognitive theory and social learning theory, many individuals use the terms synonymously. Also called cognitive-social learning theory.

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sociometric status

sociometric status 1. in sociometry, the relative interpersonal position of a member within a group as determined by other group members. 2. in measures of peer acceptance among children and adolescents, any of several profiles assigned to an individual based on peer ratings of (a) his or her social preference (i.e., number of the individual’s nominations as most liked minus the number of nominations as least liked) and (b) his or her social impact (i.e., number of the individual’s nominations as most liked plus number of nominations as least liked). In research reported in 1982, likability was related to peer perception of a child’s cooperativeness, supportiveness, and physical attractiveness, whereas dislike was related to peer perception of a child’s disruptiveness and aggression. Among status types, a popular child received both high social preference and high social impact scores. A rejected child received both low social preference and low social impact scores. An average child scored at the mean for social preference and social impact. A neglected child (typically called an isolate) received a low social impact score but was neither actively liked nor actively disliked by peers. A controversial child received high social impact scores and mean overall social preference scores but was above the mean for both positive and negative preference ratings. Later studies have proposed subtypes for some of these status profiles—for example, subdividing peer-rejected status into aggressive-rejected child and withdrawn-rejected child. [proposed in 1982 by U.S. psychologists John D. Coie (1937–  ), Kenneth A. Dodge (1954–  ), and Heide Coppotelli]

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spacing effect

spacing effect a cognitive phenomenon in which distributing to-be-learned information across time in short, interrupted study sessions leads to better long-term retention than continuous, massed sessions. In other words, distributed practice is more beneficial than massed practice. For example, a student preparing for a Spanish vocabulary exam on Thursday would remember more by studying the Spanish–English word pairs during brief sessions (e.g., 1 hour each) on consecutive prior days (e.g., Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday) than by cramming study into a single session in one day. The spacing effect has been demonstrated with a wide range of learning paradigms, materials, and participants, but the precise mechanisms underlying it remain unclear. Various explanations have been offered, such as the consolidation theory, which proposes that people notice repetitions of items and create a second representation of the item when they encounter it again; the deficient processing theory, which suggests that people pay more attention to spaced repetitions of an item because the item is thus not as active in memory; the encoding variability theory, which suggests that the contextual information stored with an item varies over time, so that a greater variety of information is stored with spaced presentations, resulting in multiple (or stronger) retrieval routes; and the study-phase retrieval theory, which states that people notice repetitions of items and retrieve the earlier presentation of an item when they encounter it again. Also called distributed-practice effect. See also lag effect; primacy effect; recency effect. [first described in 1885 by Hermann Ebbinghaus]

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specific phobia

specific phobia an anxiety disorder, formerly called simple phobia, characterized by a marked and persistent fear of a specific object, activity, or situation (e.g., dogs, blood, flying, heights). The fear is traditionally defined as excessive or unreasonable and is invariably triggered by the presence or anticipation of the feared object or situation, which is either avoided or endured with marked anxiety or distress. In DSM–IV–TR, specific phobias are classified into five subtypes: (a) animal type, which includes fears of animals or insects (e.g., cats, dogs, birds, mice, ants, snakes); (b) natural environment type, which includes fears of entities in the natural surroundings (e.g., heights, storms, water, lightning); (c) blood-injection-injury type, which includes fears of seeing blood or an injury and of receiving an injection or other invasive medical procedure; (d) situational type, which includes fear of public transportation, elevators, bridges, driving, flying, enclosed places (see claustrophobia), and so forth; and (e) other type, which includes fears that cannot be classified under any of the other subtypes (e.g., fears of choking, vomiting, or contracting an illness; children’s fears of clowns or loud noises). DSM–5 retains these subtypes, but it omits the traditional characterization that each fear type must be excessive or unreasonable to meet diagnostic criteria, stipulating instead that the fear must arise out of proportion to the actual danger posed by the feared object or situation or to its context. A fear of loud noises, for example, would be considered understandable if experienced in the context of a war zone and thus would not qualify as a specific phobia.

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structuralism

structuralism n. 1. a movement considered to be the first school of psychology as a science, independent of philosophy. Usually attributed to Wilhelm Wundt, but probably more strongly and directly influenced by Edward Bradford Titchener, structuralism defined psychology as the study of mental experience and sought to investigate the structure of such experience through a systematic program of experiments based on trained introspection. Also called structural psychology. 2. a movement in various disciplines that study human behavior and culture that enjoyed particular currency in the 1960s and 1970s. The movement took its impetus from the radically new approach to linguistic analysis pioneered by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). Against the prevailing historical and comparative approaches, Saussure maintained that a language is a closed system that must be approached through the detail of its internal structure; linguistic signs (written or spoken words) acquire meaning not through their relationships to external referents but through their structural relationships to other signs in the same system (see arbitrary symbol). The meaning of any particular use of language is therefore grounded in the total abstract system of that language, which is largely defined by a pattern of functional contrasts between elements (see binary feature; minimal pair). The structuralist model of language was extended to cover essentially all social and cultural phenomena, including human thought and action, in the work of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009). For structuralists in anthropology and the other social sciences, there is a connection between the events of the lived world and a deeper structure of abstract relationships and ideas that provides meaning to the events. Structuralist explanations play down individual autonomy and agency, positivistic science, and linear-time causation in favor of explanations in terms of structural and systemic influences operating in the present to produce rule-governed behavior, the true nature of which can be revealed as the underlying structures are revealed. In the 1960s, structuralist ideas exerted a major influence on literary studies; they also provided a basic intellectual framework for the new field of semiotics, which studies the ways in which verbal and nonverbal signs acquire meaning within particular codes of signification. During subsequent decades, structuralism increasingly gave way to poststructuralism.

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