Personality Ch 5 vocabulary
Terms
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- natural selection
- the process by which certain adaptive characteristics emerge over generations
- evolutionary personality theory
- an area of study applying biological evolutionary theory to human personality
- behavioral genomics
- study of how genes affect behavior
- temperament
- stable individual differences in emotional reactivity
- electrodermal measures
- measures that monitor the electrical activity of the skin with electrodes
- sensation seeking
- tendency to seek out highly stimulating activities and novelty
- neurotransmitter
- a chemical used by nerves to communicate
- prozac
- a drug that blocks reabsorption of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain and thus elevates moods and alters emotional reaction patterns
- hemispheric activity
- level of activity within one cerebral hemisphere
- eugenics
- movement begun by Francis Galton that encouraged preserving or purifying the gene pool of the elite in order to improve human blood lines
- nonshared environmental variance
- features of the environment that children raised in the same home experience differently
- schizophrenia
- a condition whose symptoms include distorted reality, odd emotional reactions and sometimes paranoia and/or delusions
- Manic Depression
- a disorder in which an individual swings regularly between bouts of wildly enthusiastic energy and bouts of hopeless depression
- kin selection
- the idea that increasing the likelihood for the family members of an individual to survive increases the likelihood that the individual's genes will be carried on to the next generation even if the individual did not reproduce him or herself
- bisexuality
- sexual attraction to both men and women
- meniere's disease
- an inner ear disorder that can produce disabling dizziness nausea and auditory disturbances
- Alzheimer's disease
- a disease of the brain's cerebral cortex, primarily affecting elderly people, that causes altered behavior and memory loss
- biological determinism
- the belief that an individual's personality is completely determined by biological factors (and especially by genetic factors)
- psychopharmacology
- the study of the role of drugs and other toxic substances in causing and treating psychiatric disturbance
- tropism
- the tendency to seek out specific types of environments
- somatotypology
- W.H.Sheldon's theory relationg body type to personality characteristics
- mesomorph
- according to W.H. Sheldon, a somatotype describing muscular large boned athletic types of people
- ectomorph
- according to W.H. Sheldon a somatotype describing slender bookworm types of people
- endomorph
- according to W.H. Sheldon a somatotype describing orverweight good natured types of people
- sociobiology
- the study of the influence of evolutionary biology on individual responses regarding social matters
- attachment
- the close bodn that forms shortly after birth between an infant and the mother
- survival of the fittest
- the concept that species evolve because those individuals who cannot compete well in the environment in which they live tend to be less successsful in growing up and producing offspring
- social darwinism
- the idea that societies and cultures naturally compete for survival of the fittest
- human genome project
- an effort to identify each of the thousands of genes in our chromosomes