| adjustment | The psychological process of adapting to, coping with, and managing the challenges of everyday life.
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| behavior | Everything that people do that can be directly observed.
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| bibliotherapy | The fancy term for using self-help books.
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| clinical and counseling psychology | The specialization in psychology that involves evaluating and treating people who have psychological problems.
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| contexts | The historical, economic, social, and cultural factors and settings that influence us.
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| control group | The group that is as much like the experimental group as possible and is treated in every way like the experimental group except for the manipulated factor.
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| correlational research | Research in which the goal is to describe the strength of the relationship between two or more events or characteristics.
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| critical thinking | The process of thinking reflectively, productively, and evaluating the evidence.
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| cross-cultural studies | Involve a comparison of a culture with one or more other cultures.
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| culture | Refers to the behavior patterns, beliefs, and all other products of a group of people that are passed on from generation to generation.
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| dependent variable | The factor that can change in an experiment in response to changes in the independent variable.
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| ecological theory | Bronfenbrenner's theory that people's lives are influenced by five environmental systems: microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem.
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| ethnicity | Is rooted in cultural heritage, nationality characteristics, race, religion, and language.
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| experiment | A carefully regulated procedure in which one or more factors believed to influence the behavior being studied are manipulated while all other factors are held constant.
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| experimental group | The group whose experience is manipulated in an experiment.
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| gender | Involves the psychological and sociocultural dimensions of being female or male.
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| hypothesis | A prediction that can be tested.
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| independent variable | The manipulated, influential, experimental factor in an experiment.
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| inferences | Conclusions that people draw from behavior.
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| mental processes | Consist of thoughts, feelings, and motives that each person experiences privately but cannot be observed directly.
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| psychiatry | A branch of medicine practiced by physicians who have specialized in abnormal behavior and psychotherapy.
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| psychology | The scientific study of behavior and mental processes.
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| random assignment | When researchers assign participants to experimental and control groups by chance.
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| scientific method | A four-step process of conceptualizing a problem, collecting research information (data), analyzing data, and drawing conclusions.
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| subjective well-being | The scientific term for how people evaluate their lives in terms of their happiness and life satisfaction.
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| theory | A broad idea or set of closely related ideas that attempt to explain certain observations.
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