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Script—a schema for an event.

Seasonal affective disorder—a mood disorder characterized by depression, lethargy, sleep disturbances, and craving for carbohydrates; generally occurs during the winter, when the amount of daylight is low, and is sometimes treated with exposure to bright lights.

Second order conditioning—learning procedure in which a well-learned conditioned stimulus is paired with a new neutral stimulus resulting in a similar conditioned response.

Secondary motive—internal mechanism directing learned behavior as being desired, such as power and wealth.

Secondary reinforcer—something seen as rewarding because it is associated with a primary reinforcer.

Secondary sex characteristics—the nonreproductive sexual characteristics including developed breasts in females; facial hair, Adam’s apple, and deepened voice in males; and pubic hair and underarm hair in both.

Selective attention—focusing of awareness on a specific stimulus (while excluding others) in sensory memory.

Self-actualization—the realization of our true intellectual 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 questionnaire or supplying information about himself/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.

Semantics—a set of rules we use to derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences.

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.

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 yrs) 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 sensitivity 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.