Dealing with a problem; handling a problem triggered by a challenging or threatening situation actively or passively. Active or problem-focused coping involves cognitive effort to master and adverse situation, while passive or emotion-focused coping results in minimising or avoiding the stressor. As a protective factor, successful problem-focused coping is typified by recognizing a particular situation …
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Coordination
The maintenance of a particular relationship between components of an action system. Coordination most typically refers to the timing of movement, although some authors have applied the term to describe spatial relationships as well. Interlimb coordination refers to the maintenance of a particular pattern of timing between the movements of different limbs. Intralimb coordination refers …
Coordinative structure
A term introduced by Nikolai A. Bernstein (1896-1966) to indicate a functional grouping of muscles spanning a number of joints that is flexibly assembled to achieve a specific goal. Also referred to as a synergy or functional generator. It is seen as a solution to the degrees-of-freedom problem in that muscles are not controlled as …
Conversations
Informal exchanges of feelings, observations, opinions, or ideas between two or more people. See Co-regulation, Communication, Conversational context, Mutual gaze, On-line emergence, Proximal processes, Shared reference, Utterances
Cooing
The soft, pleasant, vocalic sounds that an infant begins to make at about three months, possibly indicating happiness and social communication, and an element of vocal play. See Alert wakefulness, Babbling, Communication, Palate, Reflexive (vegetative) vocalizations, Social development
Conversational context
A context in which two or more individuals are participating in a conversation, usually taking turns at occupying the roles of speaker and listener. Typically, such contexts are informal and loosely structured. See Communication, Context (of expression), Context (interview), Conversations, Mutual gaze, Reciprocity
Convergent validity
The converse of discriminant validity. An aspect of construct validity, in which measures of constructs that theoretically should be related to each other are shown, in fact, to be related to each other (i.e., you should be able to show a correspondence or convergence between similar constructs). Thus, the operationalization of a hypothetical construct should …
Conversation analysis
Anapproach to the study of human social interaction and conversation. It was developed by the sociologist Harvey Sacks andcolleagues Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson, influenced by HaroldGarfinkel’s ethnomethodology (see Heritage, 2008). See Content analysis, Discourse analysis, Narrative, Qualitative research Heritage, J. (2008). Conversationanalysis as social theory. In B. Turner (Ed.), The new Blackwell companionto …
Convergent evolution
The independent evolution of similar features, structures or functions in unrelated species or other taxonomic groups due to living in the same kind of environment. It often occurs due to similarity of function such as the evolution of wings in the ancestors of bats, birds and flies and which serve an analogous function (viz., flight). …
Controlled attention
An effortful process of attention that records the stimulus to be attended to and its neighboring events, and whose latency depends on practice and task difficulty. See Attention, Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Focused attention.