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Key Terms
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anxiety  A vague, highly unpleasant feeling of fear and apprehension.
attribution theory  The concept that individuals are motivated to discover the underlying causes of their own behavior or performance in their effort to make sense of it.
career self-concept theory  Super's theory that individuals' self-concepts play a central role in their career choices and that in adolescence individuals first construct their career self-concept.
developmental career choice theory  Ginzberg's theory that and adolescents go through three career-choice stages: fantasy, tentative, and realistic.
extrinsic motivation  Response to external incentives such as rewards and punishments.
failure syndrome  Having low expectations for success and giving up at the first sign of difficulty.
flow  Csikszentmihalyi's concept that describes optimal life experiences, which he believes occur most often when people develop a sense of mastery and are absorbed in a state of concentration when they are engaged in a activity.
helpless orientation  An outlook in which individuals focus on their personal inadequacies often attribute their difficulty to a lack of ability, and display negative affect (including boredom and anxiety). This orientation undermines performance.
intrinsic motivation  Internal motivational factors such as self-determination, curiosity, challenge, and effort.
mastery orientation  An outlook in which individuals focus on the task rather than on their ability, have positive affect, and generate solution-oriented strategies that improve performance.
performance orientation  An outlook in which individuals are concerned with performance outcome rather than performance process. For performance-oriented students, winning is what matters.
personality type theory  Holland's belief that an effort should be made to match an individual's career choice with his or her personality.
self-efficacy  The belief that one can master a situation and produce positive outcomes.
self-handicapping strategies  Some adolescents deliberately do not try in school, put off studying until the last minute, and use other self-handicapping strategies so that if their subsequent performance is at a low level, these circumstances, rather than lack of ability, will be seen as the cause.







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