Chapter 6 - Middle Childhood

Cyberbullying

Systematic harassment conducted through electronic media.

Shame

A feeling of being personally humiliated.

Reactive aggression

A hostile or destructive act carried out in response to being frustrated or hurt.

Aggression

Any hostile or destructive act.

Self-esteem

Evaluating oneself as either "good" or "bad" as a result of comparing the self to other people.

Bully-victims

Exceptionally, aggressive children (with externalizing disorders ) who repeatedly bully and get victimized.

Empathy

Feeling the exact emotion that another person is experiencing.

Guilt

Felling upset about having caused harm to a person or about having violated one's internal standard of behavior.

Working memory

In information-processing theory, the limited-capacity gateway system, containing all the materials that we can keep in awareness at a single time. The material in this system is either processed for more permanent storage lost.

Moral sidengagement

Rationalizing moral or ethical lapses by invoking justifications, such as "He deserved that".

Prosocial behavior

Sharing, helping, and caring actions.

Induction

The ideal discipline style for socializing prosocial behavior, which involves getting a child who has behaved hurtfully to empathize with the pain he has caused the other person.

Body mass index (BMI)

The ratio of a person's weight to height; the main indicator of overweight or underweight.

Middle Childhood

The second phase of childhood, comprising the ages from roughly 7 to 12 years.

Hostile attributional bias

The tendency of highly aggressive children to see motives and actions as threatening when they are benign.

Executive functions

abilities that allow us to plain and direct our thinking and control our immediate impulses.

Childhood obesity

A body mass index at or above the 95th percentile compared to the U.S. norms established for children in the 1970s.

Frontal lobes

The area at the front uppermost part of the brain, responsible for reasoning and planning our actions.

Emotion regulation

The capacity to manage one's emotional state.

Relational aggression

A hostile or destructive act designed to cause harm to a person's relationships.

Proactive aggression

A hostile or destructive act initiated to achieve a goal.

Selective attention

A learning strategy in which people manage their awareness so as to attend only to what is relevant and to filter out unneeded information.

Rehearsal

A learning strategy in which people repeat information to embed it in memory.

Externalizing tendencies

A personality style that involve acting ln one's immediate I pulses and behaving disruptively and aggressively.

Internalizing tendencies

A personality style that involved intense fear, social inhibition, and often depression.

Bullying

A situation in which one or more children (or adults) harass or target a specific child for systematic abuse.

Sympathy

A state necessary for acting prosocially, involving feeling upset for a person who needs help.

Learned helplessness

A state that develops when a person feels incapable of affecting the outcome of events, and so give up without trying.

Self awareness

The capacity to observe our abilities and actions from an outside frame or referend and to reflect on our inner state.