My Psychology Glossary

22 Psychology terms

Hi, my name is Cassyopee Cerat, I am 19 years old. I have been studying Social Science at St-Jerome College, for two years now. I really like Psychology and reading books about that topic are my passion. The glossary that I have made could be useful for the students already studying Psychology, for the new students in this field of study or simply for people how want to learn about that topic. Each word in this glossary is related to the basic notions of Psychology and each of them is part of the vocabulary commonly used in this field. Indeed, these words have been specially chosen because their use is unfamiliar to non-experts. By learning the meaning of the words that are in the glossary, you could learn a lot about Psychology and the different term that is used to this field. (All the sources that I have use came from this website: http://fieldrelated.com/psychology.php?sel=2)

abrecation: The expression and consequent release of a previously repressed emotion, achieved through reliving the experience that caused it.
acute stress: A transient state of arousal with typically clear onset and offset patterns.
analyse: To study or examine something in detail in order to understand or explain it.
anxiety: An intense emotional response caused by the precocious recognition that a repressed conflict is about to emerge into consciousness.
attitude: The learned, relatively stable tendency to respond to people, concepts, and events in an evaluative way.
attribution: The process by which people use information to make inferences about the causes of behavior or events.
behaviorism: The theory or doctrine that human or animal psychology can be accurately studied only through the examination and analysis of objectively observable and quantifiable behavioral events, in contrast with subjective mental states.
causality: Causality is the relation between an event (the cause) and a second event (the effect), where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first.
centration: Which refers to 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 (e.g., handedness and language) than the other.
classical conditionning: A learning process that occurs when two stimuli are repeatedly paired.
clinical psychologist: A clinical psychologist is a mental health professional with highly specialized training in the diagnosis and psychological treatment of mental illness, including obsessive compulsive disorder.
cognitive psychology: The study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity and thinking.
coping: Coping is expending conscious effort to solve personal and interpersonal problems, and seeking to master, minimize or tolerate stress or conflict.
correlational method: A statistical method, most often used in clinical and other applied areas of psychology, to study the relationship which exists between one characteristic and another in an individual.
discrimination: Treating people less fairly because they belong to a different group.
emotion: An affective state of consciousness in which joy, sorrow, fear, hate, or the like, is experienced, as distinguished from cognitive and volitional states of consciousness.
empathy: The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
humanistic psychology: Humanistic psychology was instead focused on each individual's potential and stressed the importance of growth and self-actualization.
ideal self: An evolving construct which represents the goals and aspirations of an individual.
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 process: The process of thinking or remembering.