Psychology Glossary
Psychology Glossary
20 terms
This glossary can help people who are studying in psychology because these are words that we often use in psychology. There are lots of terms you need to understand if your field of study is psychology Also, there are lots of disorders that you need to learn the meaning of.
- Borderline Personality Disorder
- a mental health condition characterized by intense emotional instability, impulsive behaviors, and turbulent relationships, often resulting from a deep fear of abandonment and an unstable self-image.
- Classical conditioning
- a learning process that occurs when two stimuli are repeatedly paired: a response that is at first elicited by the second stimulus is eventually elicited by the first stimulus alone.
- Cognition
- The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.
- Coping mechanisms
- strategies that individuals use to deal with stress and difficult situations. These can be healthy, such as seeking social support, or unhealthy, like substance abuse.
- Defense mechanisms
- psychological strategies brought into play by individuals, groups, and even nations to cope with reality and to maintain the self-image. They often operate unconsciously and can include denial, repression, and rationalization.
- Dissociative identity disorder
- a severe form of dissociation, a mental process which produces a lack of connection in a person's thoughts, memory, and sense of identity.
- Dopamine
- a neurotransmitter that plays a major role in reward-motivated behavior.
- Emotional intelligence
- the ability to identify and manage one's own emotions and the emotions of others. It is generally said to include at least three skills: emotional awareness, the ability to harness emotions and apply them to tasks like thinking and problem solving, and the ability to manage emotions, which includes regulating one's own emotions when necessary and cheering up or calming down other people.
- Empathy
- The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
- Experimental method
- a method of conducting research by designing experiments in which variation is deliberately introduced and its results observed, particularly such a method in which one or more variables are manipulated while one or more others are measured or controlled, in order to infer the correlation and causation.
- Free association
- a practice in the psychoanalytic therapy where a patient says whatever comes to mind without censorship as a way to explore the unconscious mind.
- Halo effect
- The tendency for an impression created in one area to influence opinion in another area.
- Illness
- A disease or period of sickness affecting the body or mind.
- Lucid dreaming
- A dream in which a person is aware that they are dreaming and can often control action in the dream.
- Panic disorder
- an anxiety disorder characterized by recurring severe panic attacks. It may also include significant behavioral changes lasting at least a month and worry about the implications or concern about having other attacks.
- Phobia
- An extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something.
- Psychoanalysis
- A system of psychological theory and therapy that aims to treat mental conditions 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.
- Psychosis
- A collection of symptoms that affect the mind, where there has been some loss of contact with reality.
- Schizophrenia
- Any of a group of mental health conditions tending to have a serious impact upon personal, interpersonal, and occupational functioning, of which typical features are the occurrence of hallucinations and delusions, eccentric speech and behavior, and diminished emotional expression and purposeful activity.
- Self-awareness
- Conscious knowledge of one's own character, feelings, motives, and desires.