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California Psychological Inventory (CPI) A commonly used personality test, aimed especially at high-school and college students, that tests for traits such as dominance, sociability, responsibility, and so on.
cannabinoid (CB) receptors Receptors in the midbrain which are sensitive to endogenously produced substances that chemically resemble the active ingredient in marijuana.
case markers Indicators used by a language to relate a word and the "action" in the sentence, for example, whether the word identifies the source of the action, the receiver of the action, and so on. In most languages, case markers occur as function morphemes; very often they serve as suffixes at the ends of noun content morphemes.
case study An observational study in which one person is studied intensively. See also single-case experiment.
catatonic schizophrenia A subcategory of schizophrenia. Its main symptoms are peculiar motor patterns, such as periods in which the patient is immobile and maintains strange positions for hours on end.
catch trials Trials in a signal detection experiment in which no signal is presented. These trials ensure that the observer is taking the task seriously and truly trying to determine whether a signal is present or not.
categorical scale A scale that divides responses into categories that are not numerically related. See also interval scale, nominal scale, ordinal scale, ratio scale.
causal ambiguity A status in which there is no way to determine which of several causes actually produced an observation. In circumstances of causal ambiguity, no conclusions about causes can be drawn.
causal attribution A step of inferring or concluding what the cause of an observation was.
CB receptors See cannabinoid (CB) receptors.
CCK See cholecystokinin.
cell body The portion of the cell that contains the metabolic machinery which keeps the cell alive and able to function.
central nervous system (CNS) The brain and spinal cord.
central route to persuasion The processes involved in attitude change when someone cares about an issue and devotes resources to thinking about the issue. This route depends on evidence and good arguments, and is contrasted with the peripheral route.
central trait A trait that is associated with many other attributes of the person who is being judged. Warmth and coldness are central because they are important in determining overall impressions.
CER See conditioned emotional response.
cerebellum Two small hemispheres that form part of the hindbrain and control muscular coordination and equilibrium.
cerebral cortex The outermost layer of the gray matter of the cerebral hemispheres.
childhood amnesia The failure to remember the events of our very early childhood. This is sometimes ascribed to massive change in retrieval cues, sometimes to different ways of encoding memories in early childhood.
choice reaction time A measure of the speed of mental processing in which the subject has to choose between one of several responses depending on which stimulus is presented.
cholecystokinin (CCK) A hormone released by the duodenum that appears to send a "stop eating" message to the brain.
chromatic colors Colors that have a discernible hue. These are in contrast to the achromatic colors, which include black, the various shades of gray, and white.
chromosomes Structures in the nucleus of each cell that contain the genes, the units of hereditary transmission. A human cell has forty-six chromosomes, arranged in twenty-three pairs. One of these pairs consists of the sex chromosomes. In males, one member of the pair is an X chromosome, the other a Y chromosome. In females, both members are X chromosomes. See also gene, X chromosome.
chunking A process of reorganizing (or recoding) materials in memory that permits a number of items to be packed into a larger unit.
circadian rhythm A rhythm that spans about a twenty-four-hour day, such as that of the sleep-waking cycle. Circadian rhythms in humans originate from a clock circuit in the hypothalamus that is set by information from the optic nerve about whether it is day or night.
classical antipsychotics Drugs (such as Thorazine and Haldol) that operate by blocking receptors for dopamine; these drugs seem to be effective in treating many schizophrenic patients' positive symptoms, such as thought disorders and hallucinations. Also called major tranquillizers and neuroleptics.
classical conditioning A form of learning in which a previously neutral stimulus, the conditioned stimulus (CS), is paired with an unconditioned stimulus (US) regardless of what the animal does. In effect, what has to be learned is the relation between these two stimuli. See also instrumental conditioning.
classical psychoanalysis The method developed by Sigmund Freud which assumes that a patient's ills stem from unconscious defenses against unacceptable urges that date back to early childhood.
clinical observation A source of data in which one observes patients with some biological or psychological problem and seeks to draw conclusions from this about normal brain or mental functioning.
CNS See central nervous system.
cochlea A coiled structure in the inner ear that contains the basilar membrane whose deformation by sound-produced pressure stimulates the auditory receptors.
cocktail-party effect The effect one experiences in settings such as noisy parties, where one tunes in to the voice of the person one is talking to and filters out the other voices as background noise. This phenomenon is often taken as the model for studying selective attention.
cognitive components Capacities or skills regarded as the building blocks of more complex intellectual performance. A cognitive component approach to intelligence proposes that differences among individuals can best be understood in terms of each individual's level of skill, fluency, or efficiency in these various cognitive components.
cognitive dissonance An inconsistency among some experiences, beliefs, attitudes, or feelings. According to dissonance theory, this sets up an unpleasant state that people try to reduce by reinterpreting some part of their experiences to make them consistent with the others.
cognitive rehabilitation Techniques involving new strategies that enable a person to function normally despite mental problems or biological damage.
cognitive science A multidisciplinary attempt to address questions about the mind by integrating what we know from psychology, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, and computer science.
cognitive therapy An approach to therapy that tries to change some of the patient's habitual modes of thinking about herself, her situation, and her future. It is related to behavioral therapy because it regards such thought patterns as a form of behavior.
collateral sprouts New branches grown on previously damaged axons, allowing some recovery of function.
collective unconscious A set of primordial stories and images, hypothesized by Carl Jung to be shared by all of humanity, and which he proposed underlie and shape our perceptions and desires.
collectivism A cultural pattern in which people are considered to be fundamentally interdependent and obligations within one's family and immediate community are emphasized. Many of the societies of Latin America, and most of the cultures of Asia and Africa, are collectivist. See also individualism.
color circle A means of representing the visible hues, arranged in a circle according to perceptual similarity.
color disk A two-dimensional object allowing one to display two of the dimensions of color: saturation and hue. Saturation is represented by radius (with achromatic colors at the center of the disk and fully saturated colors at the periphery), and hue is represented by angular position around the disk.
color solid A three-dimensional object allowing one to display all three dimensions of color: brightness, saturation, and hue. Brightness is represented by height (with black at the bottom and white at the top), saturation by radius (with achromatic colors at the center of the solid and fully saturated colors at the periphery), and hue by angular position around the solid.
communal relationships Relationships in which another's gains are seen as our own, and so there is no "keeping track" of who owes what to whom.
companionate love A state of emotion (usually contrasted with romantic love) characterized by the affection we feel for those whose lives are deeply intertwined with our own.
comparative approach See comparative method.
comparative method A research method in which one makes systematic comparisons among different species in order to gain insights into the function of a particular structure or behavior, or the evolutionary origins of that structure or behavior.
compensatory reaction An internally produced response through which the body seeks to reduce the effects of some external influence by producing a reaction opposite in its characteristics to those of the external influence. For example, the body produces an increase in pain sensitivity in response to the decrease in pain sensitivity caused by morphine, thereby canceling out morphine's reaction and so producing drug tolerance.
complementary colors Two colors that, when additively mixed with each other in the right proportions, produce the sensation of gray.
compulsions See obsessive-compulsive disorder.
computerized tomography scan See CT scan.
concept A class or category that subsumes a number of individual instances. An important way of relating concepts is through propositions, which make some assertion that relates a subject (e.g., chickens) and a predicate (e.g., lay eggs).
concordance The probability that a person who stands in a particular familial relationship to a patient (e.g., an identical twin) has the same disorder as the patient.
concrete operations period In Piaget's theory, the period from ages six or seven to about eleven. At this time, the child has acquired mental operations that allow him to abstract some essential attributes of reality, such as number and substance, but these operations are as yet applicable only to concrete events and cannot be considered entirely in the abstract.
conditional statements Statements of the format "if . . . then . . .," such as "If he calls me, then we can go to the movies." Called conditional because the "if" clause states the condition under which the "then" clause is guaranteed to be true.
conditioned emotional response (CER) A type of conditioned response that involves a complex set of behaviors characterizing fear. In many cases, the CER is measured by its capacity to interrupt other ongoing behaviors.
conditioned reflex See conditioned response.
conditioned reinforcer An initially neutral stimulus that acquires reinforcing properties through pairing with another stimulus that is already reinforcing.
conditioned response (CR) A response elicited by some initially neutral stimulus, the conditioned stimulus (CS), as a result of pairings between that CS and an unconditioned stimulus (US). This CR is typically not identical with the unconditioned response though it often is similar to it. See also conditioned stimulus (CS), unconditioned response (UR), unconditioned stimulus (US).
conditioned stimulus (CS) In classical conditioning, the stimulus which comes to elicit a new response by virtue of pairings with the unconditioned stimulus. See also conditioned response (CR), unconditioned response (UR), unconditioned stimulus (US).
cones Visual receptors that respond to greater light intensities and give rise to chromatic (color) sensations.
confabulation Sincere but false recollections, usually produced when one encounters a gap in the memory record and (unwittingly) tries to fill this gap.
confidence interval An interval around a sample mean within which the population mean is likely to fall. In common practice, the largest value of the interval is 2 standard errors above the mean and the smallest value is 2 standard errors below it.
confirmation bias The tendency to seek evidence to support one's hypothesis rather than to look for evidence that will undermine the hypothesis.
confirmed hypothesis A hypothesis that has been tested many times and each time has made successful predictions.
confounds Variables within a study that might influence the pattern of results and thereby introduce ambiguity regarding why the results are as they are.
connectionist model A model of how information in memory is retrieved that relies on distributed representations. In a distributed representation, a concept is conveyed by a pattern of activation across an entire network, rather than by the activation of a single node. In such models, processing depends on having just the right links between concepts, at just the right strengths.
content morphemes Morphemes that carry the main burden of meaning (e.g., strange). This is in contrast to function morphemes that add details to the meaning but also serve various grammatical purposes (e.g., the suffixes s and er, the connecting words and, or, if, and so on).
context reinstatement A step aimed at improving someone's ability to remember, by putting her back into the same mental and physical state that she was in during the initial learning.
contingency management A form of behavior therapy in which the environment is structured such that certain behaviors are reliably followed by well-defined consequences.
contralateral control The pattern in which movements on the right side of the body are controlled by the left half of the brain, while movements on the left side of the body are controlled by the right half of the brain. Contralateral control is seen in nearly all vertebrate nervous systems.
control group A group to which the experimental manipulation is not applied.
control system A mechanism that can change the operation of some process or machine in response to feedback.
conversion disorder Formerly called conver
convolutions The wrinkles visible in the cortex that allow the enormous surface area of the human cortex to be stuffed into the relatively small space of the skull.
cornea The eye's transparent outer coating.
corpus callosum A bundle of fibers that connects the two cerebral hemispheres.
correct negative One of the four possible outcomes in a detection task. If the signal is not present and the person says so, this is a correct negative. See miss.
correlation The tendency of two variables to vary together. If one goes up as the other goes up, the correlation is positive; if one goes up as the other goes down, the correlation is negative.
correlational studies Studies in which the investigator is seeking to observe the relationship among variables that were in place prior to the study (as opposed to factors that the investigator creates or manipulates).
correlation coefficient (r) A number that expresses both the size and the direction of a correlation, varying from +1.00 (perfect positive correlation) through 0.00 (absence of any correlation) to –1.00 (perfect negative correlation).
correlation matrix A data table reporting the correlations among multiple variables.
correspondence problem In a moving display, the difficulty in determining which aspects of the display now visible correspond to which aspects of the display visible a moment ago.
cortex The outermost layer of an organ in the body.
cortisol A substance secreted by the adrenal glands in response to stress.
counterbalance A procedural step through which an experiment is arranged so that possible confounds will have an equal effect on all conditions, and thus cannot influence the comparison between conditions.
courtship rituals Particular behaviors that announce an organism's reproductive availability and intentions.
covariation See correlation.
CPI See California Psychological Inventory.
cranial nerves The twelve pairs of nerves that enter and exit directly from the hindbrain. These nerves control movements of the head and neck, carry sensations from them including vision, olfaction, and audition, and regulate the various glandular secretions in the head.
creative intelligence The form of intelligence alleged by some authors as essential for devising new ideas or new strategies. Often contrasted with analytic intelligence or practical intelligence.
critical period A period in the development of an organism when it is particularly sensitive to certain environmental influences. Outside of this period, the same environmental influences have little effect (e.g., the period during which a duckling can be imprinted). After embryonic development, this phenomenon is rarely all-or-none. As a result, most developmental psychologists prefer the term sensitive period.
critical period hypothesis The proposal that certain skills must be gained or ideas acquired at a particular age or developmental stage. A related, but less rigid proposal is the sensitive period hypothesis, which suggests that the skills are just more likely to be gained during that stage.
critical ratio A score, usually a z-score, that determines whether an investigator will accept or reject the null hypothesis. If a test score exceeds the critical ratio, the null hypothesis is rejected.
cross-cultural method The study of the relation between a culture's beliefs and practices and the typical personality characteristics of its members. See also sociocultural approach.
crystallized intelligence The repertoire of information, cognitive skills, and strategies acquired by the application of fluid intelligence to various fields. This is said to increase with age, in some cases into old age. See also fluid intelligence.
CT (computerized tomography) scan A technique for examining brain structure in living humans by constructing a composite X-ray picture based on views from all different angles. Also called CAT (computerized axial tomography) scan.
cultural display rules Learned but deeply ingrained conventions that govern what facial expressions of emotion may or may not be shown in what contexts.
cupboard theory A hypothesis about the infant's attachment to the primary caregiver; according to this theory, the attachment is motivated largely by the fact that the mother is a source of nourishment (whether through breast or bottle).
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