Recognize cognition as the mental work involved in attention, perception, memory, language, problem solving, and decision-making. Trace how a person’s interpretation of a situation can change what they do next.

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Break emotion into subjective feeling, bodily arousal, expression, and action tendency. Compare examples where the same behavior could reflect different emotions, or the same emotion could lead to different behaviors.

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Use development to describe psychological change across the lifespan, not just childhood. Reason about how age, experience, timing, and life stage can shape behavior, thinking, emotion, and relationships.

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Identify how immediate situations, social roles, relationships, institutions, and cultural norms shape behavior. Practice adding context to a human question so it does not treat behavior as if it happens in a vacuum.

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Understand psychological constructs as abstract ideas, such as stress, intelligence, attachment, self-esteem, or prejudice, that cannot be observed directly. Practice separating the construct itself from the behaviors or reports used as evidence for it.

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Compare traits, which describe relatively stable patterns, with states, which describe temporary conditions. Use examples like anxiety, confidence, and mood to decide whether a question is about a lasting tendency, a momentary experience, or both.

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Turn an abstract construct into observable signs, survey items, tasks, ratings, or behavioral indicators. Practice writing operational definitions that make a vague idea specific enough to study without pretending the measure is the whole construct.

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Use construct validity to ask whether evidence really matches the psychological construct being studied. Compare weak and stronger indicators, and reason why serious psychologists often use multiple measures instead of relying on one behavior or one question.

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Reason through how personal characteristics and situations work together to shape behavior. Use examples where the same person acts differently across contexts, or the same context affects people differently.

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Rewrite broad everyday questions like “Why are people so rude online?” into precise psychological questions naming a behavior, construct, context, group, and time frame. Practice making questions clearer without jumping ahead to unsupported conclusions.

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Review this chapter with practice based on your mistakes.