Do you know how people think? If understanding how people think and you want to help people escape their fear and confusion, you might be interested in Psychology. If you would like to be able to discuss and read about psychology in English, you’ll benefit from a psychology-related glossary like the one below.
Glossary
- abrecation
- The expression and consequent release of a previously repressed emotion, achieved through reliving the experience that caused it.
- accommodation
- The process of modifying a structure in order to assimilate new elements.
- acute stress
- A transient state of arousal with typically clear onset and offset patterns.
- adequacy
- The concordance between the temperament of a child and characteristics or environmental constraints.
- alexithymia
- A personality construct characterized by the sub-clinical inability to identify and describe emotions in the self.
- algolagnia
- Desire for sexual gratification through inflicting pain on oneself or others; sadomasochism.
- analyse, analyze
- To study or examine something in detail in order to understand or explain it.
- analytical
- Relating to or using analysis or logical reasoning.
- animism
- The attribution of a soul to plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena.
- anorexia nervosa
- A psychiatric disorder characterized by an unrealistic fear of weight gain, self-starvation, and conspicuous distortion of body image.
- anxiety
- An intense emotional response caused by the preconscious recognition that a repressed conflict is about to emerge into consciousness.
- aphonia
- Loss of the voice resulting from disease, injury to the vocal cords, or various psychological causes, such as hysteria.
- assess
- Evaluate or estimate the nature, ability, or quality of.
- assimilation
- Process integration of external elements to a given structure.
- attitude
- An enduring, learned predisposition to behave in a consistent way toward a given class of objects, events, or people.
- attribution
- The process by which people use information to make inferences about the causes of behavior or events.
- autohypnosis
- The process or result of self-induced hypnosis.
- behavior
- The way in which one acts or conducts oneself toward others.
- Behaviorism
- The theory that human and animal behavior can be explained in terms of conditioning, without appeal to thoughts or feelings, and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior patterns.
- behaviour
- The way or manner in which one conducts oneself.
- Behavioural Approach
- The behavioral approach is based on the concept of explaining behavior through observation, and the belief that our environment is what causes us to behave differently or suffer illnesses.
- bipolar disorder
- A mental illness that brings severe high and low moods and changes in sleep, energy, thinking, and behavior.
- butterfly effect
- Notion that an effect or a trivial thing can have serious consequences if it causes an imbalance and causes other changes that create a big upheaval.
- causality
- Causality, or causation, is the relation between an event and a second event, where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first.
- centration
- The tendency to focus on only one aspect of a situation, problem or object.
- cerebral dominance
- The normal tendency for one half of the brain, usually the left cerebral hemisphere in right-handed people, to exercise more control over certain functions than the other.
- child development
- Child development refers to the biological, psychological and emotional changes that occur in human beings between birth and the end of adolescence, as the individual progresses from dependency to increasing autonomy.
- classical conditionning
- A learning process that occurs when two stimuli are repeatedly paired.
- clinical psychologist
- A mental health professional with highly specialized training in the diagnosis and psychological treatment of mental illness.
- code switching
- When a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation.
- cognition
- The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.
- cognitive consistency
- The tendency to seek consistency in one’s thinking.
- cognitive dissonance
- A condition of conflict or anxiety resulting from inconsistency between one’s beliefs and one’s actions, such as opposing the slaughter of animals and eating meat.
- cognitive psychology
- The study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity and thinking.
- cognitive science
- The interdisciplinary scientific study of the mind and its processes.
- cohort
- Group of people born a few years apart and exposed to the same historical and social conditions.
- conformism
- Seeking orthodoxy in thoughts and belief.
- consolability
- The degree of relief or alleviation of grief, sadness, anger, pain afforded by touch.
- consultation
- A meeting of physicians to evaluate a patient’s case and treatment.
- coping
- Expending conscious effort to solve personal and interpersonal problems, and seeking to master, minimize or tolerate stress or conflict.
- dependance
- The real need of the organism, or something that individuals can not provide for themselves.
- discrimination
- Treating people less fairly because they belong to a different group.
- disposition
- A natural or acquired habit or characteristic tendency in a person or thing.
- dissociative disorder
- A personality disorder marked by a disturbance in the integration of identity, memory, or consciousness.
- dream state
- A state of sleep characterized by rapid eye movement.
- egocentrism
- An inability on the part of a child to see any point of view other than his or her own.
- emotion
- An affective state of consciousness in which joy, sorrow, fear, hate is experienced.
- empathic listening
- A way of listening and responding to another person that improves mutual understanding and trust.
- empathy
- The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
- ethnocentrism
- Belief in the superiority of one’s own ethnic group.
- evidence
- The available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid.
- Evolutionary Psychology
- An approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective.
- experimental method
- The experimental method is a scientific method of enquiry that emphasizes the control, observation, and measurement of variables in research. .
- expressive language disorder
- A communication disorder in which there are difficulties with verbal and written expression.
- flooding
- A therapy for phobias in which clients are exposed, with their permission, to the stimuli most frightening to them.
- frustration
- The feeling of being upset or annoyed because of an inability to change or achieve something.
- habituation
- A decrease in response to a stimulus after repeated presentations.
- halo effect
- The tendency for an impression created in one area to influence opinion in another area.
- Humanistic Psychology
- A psychological perspective that emphasizes the study of the whole person and stresses the importance of growth and self-actualization..
- hypermnesia
- Exceptionally exact or vivid memory, especially as associated with certain mental illnesses.
- ideal self
- An evolving construct which represents the goals and aspirations of an individual.
- illness
- A disease or period of sickness affecting the body or mind.
- insight
- The capacity to gain an accurate and deep intuitive understanding of a person or thing.
- intergenerational
- Between generations, between different age layers.
- internalizing
- Make attitudes or behavior part of one’s nature by learning or unconscious assimilation.
- interpersonal relationships
- Relations between persons.
- intervention
- Any measure whose purpose is to improve health or alter the course of disease.
- intrapsychic conflict
- An emotional clash of opposing impulses within oneself, for example, of the id versus the ego or the ego versus the superego.
- intuition
- The ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.
- lucid dreaming
- The view that conscious awareness of dreaming is a learnable skill that can enable dreamers to control the direction and content of their dreams.
- memory
- The process in which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved.
- mental
- Involving the mind or an intellectual process.
- mental disability
- A mental anomaly that causes either suffering or an impaired ability to function in ordinary life, and which is not developmentally or socially normative.
- mental distress
- A range of symptoms and experiences of a person’s internal life that are commonly held to be troubling, confusing or out of the ordinary.
- mental health
- Psychological well-being and satisfactory adjustment to society and to the ordinary demands of life.
- mental illness
- Any of various disorders in which a person’s thoughts, emotions, or behaviour are so abnormal as to cause suffering to himself, herself, or other people.
- mental process
- The process of thinking or remembering.
- mind
- The human consciousness that originates in the brain and is manifested especially in thought, perception, emotion, will, memory, and imagination.
- narcissism
- It is used to describe a person characterized by egotism, vanity, pride, or selfishness.
- neurosis
- A class of functional mental disorders involving distress but neither delusions nor hallucinations, whereby behavior is not outside socially acceptable norms.
- neurotic
- Suffering from, caused by, or relating to neurosis.
- nonverbal communication
- The process of communication through sending and receiving visual cues between people.
- observation
- The action or process of observing something or someone carefully or in order to gain information.
- obsessive–compulsive disorder
- An anxiety disorder characterized by intrusive thoughts that produce uneasiness, apprehension, fear, or worry; by repetitive behaviors aimed at reducing the associated anxiety.
- operant conditioning
- A type of learning where behavior is controlled by consequences.
- operant extinction
- When a behavior no longer produces predictable consequences, its return to the level of occurrence it had before operant conditioning.
- outcome
- The way a thing turns out; a consequence.
- paranoia
- A mental condition characterized by delusions of persecution, unwarranted jealousy, or exaggerated self-importance, typically elaborated into an organized system.
- perception
- A process by which an organism becomes aware of and interprets external stimuli.
- perception bias
- A perception bias is a psychological tendency to lose objectivity in perception of people and situations.
- personality
- The sum total of all the behavioural and mental characteristics by means of which an individual is recognized as being unique.
- persuasion
- The action or fact of persuading someone or of being persuaded to do or believe something.
- phobia
- An extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something.
- phoneme
- Perceptually distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another.
- placebo
- A simulated or otherwise medically ineffectual treatment for a disease or other medical condition intended to deceive the recipient.
- placebo effect
- A beneficial effect, produced by a placebo drug or treatment, that cannot be attributed to the properties of the placebo itself, and must therefore be due to the patient’s belief in that treatment.
- prejudice
- An unfavorable opinion or feeling formed beforehand or without knowledge, thought, or reason.
- prenatal development
- The process in which a human embryo or fetus gestates during pregnancy, from fertilization until birth.
- preoperational stage
- A stage between the ages of 2 and 7 that is characterized by a difficulty taking the point of view of others.
- primacy effect
- The increased ability to remember the first items in a list.
- profiling
- The recording and analysis of a person’s psychological and behavioral characteristics to assist in identifying a particular subgroup of people.
- prosopagnosia
- A disorder of impaired face perception.
- pruning
- Elimination process of synapses, dendrites and certain nerve pathways rarely used or redundant.
- Psychoanalysis
- A method of studying the mind and treating mental and emotional disorders based on investigating the role of the unconscious mind.
- Psycholinguistics
- The study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language.
- psychological nativism
- The view that certain skills or abilities are native or hard-wired into the brain at birth.
- psychologist
- A specialist in psychology.
- Psychology
- The scientific study of all forms of human and animal behaviour, sometimes concerned with the methods through which behaviour can be modified.
- psychosis
- A severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality.
- psychosocial development
- The development of the personality, and the acquisition of social attitudes and skills, from infancy through maturity.
- punishment
- The infliction or imposition of a penalty as retribution for an offense.
- pygmalion effect
- The phenomenon in which the greater the expectation placed upon people, the better they perform.
- realism
- The quality or fact of representing a person, thing, or situation accurately or in a way that is true to life.
- recency effect
- The principle that the most recently presented items or experiences will most likely be remembered best.
- reinforcement
- Anything that increases the likelihood that a response will occur.
- resilience
- Is an individual’s tendency to cope with stress and adversity.
- respondent conditioning
- A type of conditioning, first studied by Pavlov, in which a previously neutral stimulus elicits a response as a result of pairing it a number of times with a natural stimulus for that response.
- retrograde amnesia
- Amnesia caused by a trauma such as concussion, in which the memory loss relates to material learnt before the trauma.
- schizophrenia
- A long-term mental disorder involving faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, and withdrawal from reality and social relationships.
- self-actualization
- The realization or fulfillment of one’s talents and potentialities.
- self-awareness
- The capacity for introspection and the ability to recognize oneself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals.
- self-esteem
- Confidence in one’s own worth or abilities; self-respect.
- self-monitoring
- The ability to observe yourself and know when you are doing an activity act according to a standard.
- sensory motor stage
- The first stage of Piaget’s theory lasts from birth to approximately age two and is centered on the infant trying to make sense of the world.
- slip of the tongue
- A mistake in speaking where one word is substituted for another.
- social constructs
- Conceptions of things based on common perceptions by members of a society, not objective reality.
- social identity
- The portion of an individual’s self-concept derived from perceived membership in a relevant social group.
- social norm
- Socially accepted rules of behaviour and conduct which are prescribed by society and expected of an individual by that society.
- sociodrama
- A dramatic play in which several individuals act out assigned roles for the purpose of studying and remedying problems in group or collective relationships.
- stereotype
- Believing that people of a certain group, race or religion all have the same characteristics when they don’t.
- stimulus
- Any phenomenon that causes a reaction or response in an organism.
- stress
- A state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or very demanding circumstances.
- stuttering
- A speech disorder characterized by spasmodic repetition of the initial consonant or syllable of words and frequent pauses or prolongation of sounds.
- survey research
- A method for collecting information or data as reported by individuals through the use of questionnaires.
- therapy
- The treatment of disease or disorders, as by some remedial, rehabilitative, or curative process.
- unconscious
- The part of the mind that is inaccessible to the conscious mind but that affects behavior and emotions.
- unconscious mind
- That part of the mind wherein psychic activity takes place of which the person is unaware.
- variables
- Factors or conditions that affect or may affect the known behavior of an individual or a group.
- welfare
- The health, happiness, and fortunes of a person or group.
- withdrawal
- Estrangement and isolation from others.
