voice in males; and pubic hair and underarm hair
in both.Selective attention—focusing of awareness on a spe-
cific stimulus (while excluding others) in sensory
memory.
Self-actualization—the realization of our true intel-
lectual and emotional potential (according to
Maslow).
Self archetype—according to Jung, our sense of
wholeness or unity.
Self-awareness—consciousness of oneself as a person.
Self-concept—our overall view of our abilities,
behavior, and personality or what we know about
ourselves.
Self-efficacy—how competent and able we feel to
accomplish tasks; an expectation of success.
Self-esteem—how worthy we think we are.
Self-fulfilling prophecy—a tendency to let our
preconceived expectations of others influence
how we treat them and thus evoke those very
expectations.
Self-referent encoding—determining how new
information relates to us personally.
Self-report methods—most common personality
assessment technique, involves person answering a
series of questions such as a personality question-
naire or supplying information about himself or
herself.
Self-serving bias—our tendency to take personal
credit for our achievements and blame failures on
situational factors; to perceive ourselves favorably.
Semantic encoding—information processed for
meaning into short-term memory and long-term
memory.
Semantic memories—a type of long-term memory
that includes general knowledge, objective facts,
and vocabulary.
Semantic networks—model of long-term memory
with more irregular and distorted systems than
strict hierarchies, with multiple links from one
concept to others.
Semantics—a set of rules we use to derive meaning
from morphemes, words, and sentences.
Sensation—the process by which we detect physical
energy from our environment and encode it as
neural signals.
Sensorimotor stage—Piaget’s first stage (0–2 years)
during which the infant experiences the world
through senses and action patterns; progresses
from reflexes to object permanence and symbolic
thinking.
Sensory adaptation—a temporary decrease in sensi-
tivity to a stimulus that occurs when stimulation is
unchanging.
Sensory memory—primitive, brief type of memory
that holds incoming information just long enough
for further processing.
Sensory receptor—cell typically in sense organs that
initiates action potentials which then travel along
sensory/afferent neurons to the CNS.
Separation anxiety—a set of fearful responses, such
as crying, arousal, and clinging to the caregiver,
that infants exhibit when the caregiver attempts to
leave the infant.
Serial position effect—the tendency to remember
and recall information that comes at the beginning
(primacy effect) and at the end of a list of words
(recency effect) more easily than those in the
middle.
Serotonin—a neurotransmitter associated with
arousal, sleep, appetite, moods, and emotions.
Lack of serotonin is associated with depression.
Set point—a preset natural body weight, determined
by the number of fat cells in our body.
Sex-linked traits—recessive genes located on the X
chromosome with no corresponding gene on the Y
chromosome result in expression of recessive trait
more frequently in males.
Sexual orientation—the direction of an individual’s
sexual interest.
Sexual response cycle—Masters and Johnson’s four
stages of bodily response during sex: excitement,
plateau, orgasm, and resolution.
Shadow—according to Jung represents our baser
instinctual urges we attempt to keep hidden from
others.
Shallow processing—encoding into memory super-
ficial sensory information without making it rele-
vant which seldom results in enduring memory.
Shaping—positively reinforcing closer and closer
approximations of a desired behavior through
operant conditioning.
Short-term memory—also called working memory,
which can hold about seven unrelated items for
about 20 to 30 seconds without rehearsal.
Simultaneous conditioning—in classical condition-
ing the CS and UCS are paired together at the
same time; weaker conditioning technique than
the ideal delayed conditioning.Glossary Ü 335