94 terms

Psychology Glossary

The key vocabulary of Psychology, each term defined in plain language. Start learning in the Psychology subject, or drill these terms as flashcards.

Anchoring: Relying too heavily on the first piece of information encountered when making a judgement.
Anxiety disorder: A condition marked by excessive, persistent anxiety or fear that interferes with daily life.
Attachment: The enduring emotional bond between people, especially the early bond between a child and caregiver.
Availability heuristic: Judging how likely something is by how easily examples come to mind.
Big Five: Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism — dimensions, not types.
Biopsychosocial model: The view that health and illness result from the interaction of biological, psychological, and social factors.
Brainstem: Region controlling breathing, heart rate, and other vital functions.
Broaden-and-build: Fredrickson’s theory that positive emotions widen thinking and build lasting personal resources.
Bystander effect: The tendency for individuals to be less likely to help when others are present, partly through diffusion of responsibility.
Case study: In-depth examination of one person or situation; valuable for rare phenomena, weak for generalising.
Cerebellum: Region supporting coordination, balance, and timing.
Character strengths: Cultivable positive traits such as courage, kindness, and curiosity, catalogued in the VIA framework.
Circadian rhythm: The roughly 24-hour internal clock that governs the sleep-wake cycle.
Cognitive behavioural therapy: An evidence-based talking therapy that targets unhelpful thought and behaviour patterns; developed from Aaron Beck’s cognitive therapy.
Conformity: Changing behaviour or opinion to match a group.
Consciousness: Awareness of oneself and one’s surroundings; the subjective experience of being.
Contact hypothesis: The idea that contact between groups under the right conditions reduces prejudice.
Cultural psychology: The study of how culture shapes perception, self, and behaviour.
Depression: A mood disorder involving persistent low mood, loss of interest, and other symptoms beyond ordinary sadness.
Diffusion of responsibility: The weakening of personal responsibility to act when it is shared among many people.
DSM-5: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition (2013), a widely used classification system.
Emotion: A response combining physiology, subjective experience, interpretation, and action tendency.
Encoding: Converting experience into a form memory can hold.
Episodic memory: Memory for experienced events, with their context.
Eudaimonia: A deep sense of a life well lived, tied to meaning, growth, and engagement rather than mere pleasure.
Evolutionary psychology: The study of how mental traits may have been shaped by natural selection.
Experiment: A design manipulating a variable while controlling others; the basis for causal claims.
Extrinsic motivation: Motivation arising from outside the activity — pay, grades, approval.
Fight-or-flight response: The body’s automatic physiological reaction to a perceived threat.
Flourishing: Wellbeing in the full sense — feeling good and functioning well.
Flow: A state of complete absorption in a challenging activity where action and awareness merge.
Frontal lobe: Region associated with planning, decision-making, and self-control.
Fundamental attribution error: The tendency to overestimate personality and underestimate the situation when explaining others’ behaviour.
General intelligence: The idea, denoted g, that a common factor underlies performance across many mental tasks.
Habit loop: The cue, routine, and reward cycle through which habits form and repeat.
Hedonic adaptation: The tendency to return toward a baseline level of happiness after good or bad events.
Heuristic: A mental shortcut that usually works well but can systematically misfire.
Hypothesis: A specific, testable prediction.
In-group/out-group bias: The tendency to favour members of one’s own group over those of other groups.
Inattentional blindness: Failing to notice a visible but unexpected object because attention is focused elsewhere.
Intelligence quotient: A score from standardized tests intended to measure aspects of cognitive ability, relative to peers.
Interleaving: Mixing related topics rather than completing one at a time.
Intrinsic motivation: Motivation arising from the activity itself — interest, enjoyment, meaning.
Linguistic relativity: The debated idea that the language one speaks influences how one thinks.
Long-term memory: Storage with no practical capacity limit.
Longitudinal study: Following the same people over an extended period.
Mental disorder: A pattern of thoughts, feelings, or behaviours causing significant distress or impairment, as defined by clinical criteria.
Mental health continuum: The idea that mental health ranges along a spectrum for everyone, rather than a simple well-or-ill divide.
Misinformation effect: The distortion of memory for an event caused by misleading information encountered afterward.
Moral intuition: A fast, automatic sense of right or wrong that often precedes conscious reasoning.
Motivation: What initiates and sustains goal-directed behaviour.
Multiple intelligences: Howard Gardner’s proposal that intelligence comes in several distinct kinds rather than one.
Neuron: A nerve cell communicating electrically along its length and chemically between cells.
Neuroplasticity: The nervous system's capacity to change through experience; continues throughout life.
Neuroscience: The study of the nervous system itself — neurons, circuits, chemistry, structure.
Neurotransmitter: A chemical messenger carrying signals across the gap between neurons.
Obedience: Complying with the instructions of an authority figure.
Perception: The brain’s active construction of experience from sensory input — not a passive recording of the world.
PERMA: Seligman’s model of wellbeing: Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment.
Personality: Enduring patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving shaped by biology and experience.
Positive psychology: The scientific study of wellbeing, strengths, and the conditions that let people and communities flourish.
Post-traumatic growth: Positive change some people report after struggling with adversity; not guaranteed and not a benefit of trauma.
Prejudice: A negative attitude toward a group and its members, often based on stereotypes.
Procedural memory: Memory for how to do things, often difficult to articulate.
Psychiatry: A medical specialty diagnosing and treating mental illness, able to prescribe medication.
Psychology: The scientific study of mind, behaviour, and mental processes.
Psychotherapy: Treatment of mental-health difficulties through structured conversation with a trained professional.
PTSD: Post-traumatic stress disorder: lasting distress after trauma, formally recognised in the DSM-III in 1980.
Reciprocity: The social pull to return a favour, which persuaders can exploit.
Reconstructive memory: The idea that remembering rebuilds an experience from fragments rather than replaying a stored recording, making memory prone to error.
REM sleep: A stage of sleep marked by rapid eye movement and vivid dreaming.
Replication: Independent researchers repeating a study and obtaining a comparable result.
Replication crisis: The finding that a substantial share of published results did not reproduce, and the methodological reforms that followed.
Resilience: The capacity to adapt and recover in the face of stress or adversity — something that can be built.
Retrieval: Reconstructing a memory when it is needed.
Retrieval practice: Testing yourself rather than reviewing; strengthens memory more than re-exposure.
Scientific method: Observation, question, hypothesis, design, data, analysis, conclusion, replication.
Selective attention: Focusing mental resources on some information while filtering out the rest.
Self-Determination Theory: An account identifying autonomy, competence, and relatedness as supports for durable motivation.
Semantic memory: Memory for facts and meanings, detached from where they were learned.
Sensory memory: A brief hold on raw input, long enough for attention to select something.
Situationism: The view that behaviour is strongly shaped by circumstances, not just character.
Social identity: The part of a person’s self-concept derived from membership in social groups.
Social learning: Learning behaviour by observing and imitating others, as in Bandura’s work.
Social proof: Looking to others’ behaviour as a guide for how to act, especially amid uncertainty.
Social psychology: The study of how people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviour are influenced by others.
Spaced practice: Distributing study across days rather than massing it.
Stigma: Negative, often inaccurate beliefs and attitudes that lead to discrimination against people with mental illness.
Storage: Maintaining a memory over time.
Subjective wellbeing: How people evaluate their own lives, combining life satisfaction with positive and negative emotion.
Theory: A broad explanation supported by substantial accumulated evidence.
Trait: A tendency across many situations; never a prediction about any single action.
WEIRD samples: Research participants who are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic — unusual, not universal.
Working memory: The limited store holding and manipulating current information.

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