Accommodation When existing schemas change on the basis of new information

Affect heuristic The tendency to rely on automatically occurring affective responses to stimuli to guide our judgments of them

Affective forecasting Our attempts to predict how future events will make us feel

Anchoring and adjustment The tendency to weight initial information too heavily and thereby insufficiently move our judgment away from it

Assimilation A process in which our existing knowledge influences new conflicting information to better fit with our existing knowledge, thus reducing the likelihood of schema change

Associational learning When an object or event comes to be associated with a natural response, such as an automatic behavior or a positive or negative emotion

Automatic cognition Thinking that occurs out of our awareness, quickly, and without taking much effort

Availability heuristic The tendency to make judgments of the frequency of an event, or the likelihood that an event will occur, on the basis of the ease with which the event can be retrieved from memory

Bias blind spot The tendency to believe that our own judgments are less susceptible to the influence of bias than those of others

Cognitive accessibility The extent to which a schema is activated in memory and thus likely to be used in information processing

Cognitive reappraisal Altering an emotional state by reinterpreting the meaning of the triggering situation or stimulus

Conditioning The ability to connect stimuli (things or events in the environment) with responses (behaviors or other actions)

Confirmation bias The tendency for people to seek out and favor information that confirms their expectations and beliefs

Controlled cognition When we deliberately size up and think about something; for instance, another person

Counterfactual thinking The tendency to think about events according to what might have been

Depressive realism The tendency for people who are depressed to make social judgments about the future that are less positively skewed and often more accurate than those who do not have depression

False consensus bias The tendency to overestimate the extent to which other people hold similar views to our own

False consciousness The acceptance of one’s own low status as part of the proper and normal functioning of society

Falsifiable When the outcome of the research can demonstrate empirically either that there is support for the hypothesis (i.e., the relationship between the variables was correctly specified) or that there is actually no relationship between the variables or that the actual relationship is not in the direction that was predicted

Framing effects occur when people’s judgments about different options are affected by whether they are framed as resulting in gains or losses.

Frustration The emotion that results from feeling that we are not obtaining the important goals that we have set for ourselves

Misattribution of arousal When people incorrectly label the source of the arousal that they are experiencing

Mood congruence effects When we are more able to retrieve memories that match our current mood

Mood-dependent memory The tendency to better remember information when our current mood matches the mood we were in when we encoded that information

Observational learning When people learn by observing the behavior of others

Observational research Research that involves making observations of behavior and recording those observations in an objective manner

Operant learning The principle that experiences that are followed by positive emotions (reinforcements or rewards) are likely to be repeated, whereas experiences that are followed by negative emotions (punishments) are less likely to be repeated

Optimistic bias The tendency to believe that positive outcomes are more likely to happen than negative ones, particularly in relation to ourselves versus others

Optimistic explanatory style A way of explaining current outcomes affecting the self in a way that leads to an expectation of positive future outcomes

Overconfidence bias The tendency to be overconfident in our own skills, abilities, and judgments

Planning fallacy The tendency to overestimate the amount that we can accomplish over a particular time frame

Prefrontal cortex The part of the brain that lies in front of the motor areas of the cortex and that helps us remember the characteristics and actions of other people, plan complex social behaviors, and coordinate our behaviors with those of others

Priming A technique in which information is temporarily brought into memory through exposure to situational events, which can then influence judgments entirely out of awareness

Processing fluency The ease with which we can process information in our environments

Projection bias The tendency to assume that others share our cognitive and affective states

Proscriptive norms Rules which tell the group members what not to do

Reconstructive memory bias When we remember things that match our current beliefs better than those that don’t and reshape those memories to better align with our current beliefs

Representativeness heuristic When we base our judgments on information that seems to represent, or match, what we expect will happen, while ignoring more informative base-rate information

Schema A knowledge representation that includes information about a person, group, or situation

Self-efficacy The belief in our ability to carry out actions that produce desired outcomes

Self-fulfilling prophecy A process that occurs when our expectations about others lead us to behave toward those others in ways that make our expectations come true

Self-handicapping When we make statements or engage in behaviors that help us create a convenient external attribution for potential failure

Self-regulation The process of setting goals and using our cognitive and affective capacities to reach those goals