Glossary

cognitive perspective

Cognition refers to the mental processes that take place in the brain, so cognitive perspective refers to how someone perceives and thinks about the world.

emotional state

Psychologists tend to differentiate between traits (which are long term or enduring tendencies) and states (which are more temporary or fleeting). An ‘emotional state’ is therefore the fleeting emotion you might experience from moment to moment as you go through any given day.

hominids

Erect, bipedal, primate mammals of the group Hominidae, which includes great apes (e.g. gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees) and humans, including their recent, extinct ancestral forms.

interpersonally

Psychologists call behaviour that happens between people when they interact ‘interpersonal behaviour’.

narrator

Someone who tells a story, including a character who tells the story in a work of fiction.

schemata

Plural of the word schema, coming from the Greek word meaning ‘figure’. Mental structures that organise different types of information and the relationship between them.

Bruner (1990)

You may wonder what it means when you see an authors name and a date next to it like this. A name and date beside it in brackets, signifies that the information has come from an academic source. It tells you who wrote the source information and the year they wrote it in, and the full reference to what they wrote can be found in the reference section for this course.