This glossary contains the words people can use to describe every term of psychology.
biofeedback
noun
A technique for teaching the control of autonomic functions, such as the rate of heartbeat or breathing, by recording the activity and presenting it (usually visually) so that the person can know the state of the autonomic function he or she is learning to control.
Example: Some other techniques that have been used in behavior therapy are contingency contracting, response costs, token economies, biofeedback, and using shaping and grading task assignments.
fr: biofeedback
clairvoyance
noun
The supposed faculty of perceiving things or events in the future or beyond normal sensory contact.
Example: Among these phenomena are: trance and unconsciousness, sickness, death, clairvoyance, dreams, apparitions of the dead, wraiths, hallucinations, echoes, shadows and reflections.
fr: voyance
cognition
noun
The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.
Example: It appears unduly insistent on the primacy of certain conceptual connections between cognition and language.
fr: cognition
connectionism
noun
An artificial intelligence approach to cognition in which multiple connections between nodes (equivalent to brain cells) form a massive interactive network in which many processes take place simultaneously. Certain processes in this network, operating in parallel, are grouped together in hierarchies that bring about results such as thought or action.
Example: Connectionism and constructivism originally stem from separate disciplines ( mathematics and psychology, respectively).
fr: connexionnisme
cybernetics
noun
The science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things.
Example: Once a hierarchical order of open systems had come into being, natural selection, operating on the elaboration of new hierarchies and new cybernetics, became capable of generating states of greater heterogeneity with integrative systemic control.
fr: cybernétique
drapetomania
noun
Psychiatric diagnosis for a slave who do not want to be a slave.
Example: There is no record of Epictetus having suffered from drapetomania.
fr: drapétomanie
Dysaesthesia
noun
Pathology, a disagreeable sensation such as burning or itching arising from impairment of the nervous system.
Example: Pain experienced by patients significantly decreased and some had improved dysaesthesia.
fr: dysesthésie
empirism
noun
The theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience. Stimulated by the rise of experimental science, it developed in the 17th and 18th centuries, expounded in particular by John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume.
Example: It is a system of empiricism and materialism, remarkable only for teaching free will.
fr: empirisme
eugenics
noun
The study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable. Developed largely by Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race, it fell into disfavor only after the perversion of its doctrines by the Nazis.
Example: As early as 1869, Francis Galton, who founded the eugenics Laboratory (which in 1905 became a Department of University College under the direction of Karl Pearson), recommended a programme of what later became called positive and negative eugenics.
fr: eugénisme
freudian
adjective
Relating to or influenced by Sigmund Freud and his methods of psychoanalysis, especially with reference to the importance of sexuality in human behavior.
Example: In the light of a freudian interpretation, the inclusion of paranoia and other personality afflictions surface unconscious anxieties, which leads on to sexuality in the Gothic.
fr: freudien
gyrus
noun
A ridge or fold between two clefts on the cerebral surface in the brain.
Example: For Geschwind had been careful enough to note that the angular gyrus is needed even for visual - visual (indeed, for any non - limbic) associations.
fr: gyrus
heuristic
adjective
Enabling a person to discover or learn something for themselves.
Example: Lakatos illustrated the notion of the positive heuristic with the story of Newton's early development of his gravitational theory.
fr: heuristique
hybrid
noun
The offspring of two plants or animals of different species or varieties, such as a mule (a hybrid of a donkey and a horse).
Example: Some hybrids, however, are as fertile as pure-bred plants.
fr: hybride
introspection
noun
Examination of and attention to your own ideas, thoughts, and feelings.
Example: Pepper, Roots , p.88 Pepper, Modern Environmentalism , p.192 The modern environmental movement was rooted in these early attempts to recapture the romantic essence and vital force of nature and regenerate aspects that had descended into a state of melancholy and introspection.
fr: introspection
logotherapy
noun
A highly directive existential psychotherapy that emphasizes the importance of meaning in the patient's life especially as gained through spiritual values.
Example: Though logotherapy wasn't intended to deal with severe disorders, Frankl believed that logotherapy could benefit even those suffering from schizophrenia.
fr: logothérapie
neurology
noun
The branch of medicine or biology that deals with the anatomy, functions, and organic disorders of nerves and the nervous system.
Example: The main reason has been its long standing commitment (still evident in some quarters) to the idea that each of the different forms of functional psychosis is really a distinct type of brain disease, equivalent to those studied in neurology.
fr: neurologie
paradigm
noun
A typical example or pattern of something; a model.
Example: Raymond Williams came to think that a splitting of the discipline was increasingly likely, since cultural materialism and radical semiotics were not compatible with the dominant paradigm of literary study: "For these necessarily include the paradigm itself as a matter for analysis, rather than as a governing definition of the object of knowledge.".
fr: paradigme
psychoanalysis
noun
A system of psychological theory and therapy which aims to treat mental disorders by investigating the interaction of conscious and unconscious elements in the mind and bringing repressed fears and conflicts into the conscious mind by techniques such as dream interpretation and free association.
Example: Popper used it to show that Freud's psychoanalysis was non-science because any behaviour could be explained by the theory and so there could be no refutation.
fr: psychanalyse
repression
noun
A mental process by which distressing thoughts, memories, or impulses that may give rise to anxiety are excluded from consciousness and left to operate in the unconscious.
Example: Conflicts create anxieties that are dealt with by defence mechanisms like repression, displacement, projection and denial.
fr: répression
stimulus
noun
A thing or event that evokes a specific functional reaction in an organ or tissue.
Example: The causal chain between stimulus and response had a kind of inevitability, an independence from processes which we would normally regard as mental: it by - passed our knowledge of the friend's personality, history, and basic assumptions about human motivation, the orderliness of conduct, and so forth.
