Glossary of Psychological Terms
Definitions of terms used in psychology, psychometric testing and occupational assessment, organised alphabetically.
F-Scale
A questionnaire developed during the classic study of the “authoritarian personality” to measure a person's tendency toward authoritarianism (the F stands for fascism). Based on clinical work and social surveys, its designers held that someone prone to authoritarian, rigidly conventional attitudes and preoccupied with power and submission to authority would score high, while a more open, flexible person would score low. See also: California F Scale.
Fabulation
The telling of fantastic, invented stories as though they were true, done knowingly rather than involuntarily — distinct from confabulation, in which someone with a genuine memory disturbance believes their invented account to be accurate.
Face recognition
The study of the perceptual and cognitive processes involved in recognising faces — an increasingly prominent area of research within both cognition and perception, with applications ranging from clinical neuropsychology to security technology.
Face validity
The extent to which a psychological test or measurement procedure appears, on its face, to be relevant to what it claims to measure — a relatively weak form of validity compared with construct or predictive validity.
Face-to-face group
A social-psychological term for a small group of people in close enough physical proximity that each person can interact directly with every other member; such groups are generally limited to around six to eight people.
Facework
In social psychology, the social rituals and behaviours people use to preserve or enhance their public image (“save face”), sometimes at the expense of expressing genuine emotion.
Facilitation
A general term meaning to make something easier, applied either to the performance of a behaviour or to the transmission of a nerve impulse. See also: social facilitation, the specific effect of an audience or co-actors on performance.
Factor analysis
A statistical technique for analysing complex patterns of correlation among a large set of scores, in order to identify a smaller number of underlying factors that account for those correlations — widely used in the development of personality and intelligence tests.
Faith healing
An attempt to cure illness through non-rational belief rather than medical treatment, most often religious in nature. There is some evidence that faith healing can influence psychosomatic illness, where psychological factors play a significant role, but far less support for any effect on purely organic disease.
False memory syndrome
The experience of having a vivid, sincerely held memory of an event that did not actually happen, sometimes arising through suggestion, particularly in therapeutic or investigative contexts; a topic of considerable controversy in memory research and the legal system.
Family therapy
A form of psychotherapy in which the family, rather than a single individual, is treated as the unit of concern, based on the premise that an individual's apparent neurosis may actually be a symptom of disturbed relationships within the family system.
Fantasy
A deliberate exercise of the imagination, typically to enjoy pleasurable, wish-fulfilling images, though fantasy induced by drugs or occurring involuntarily can also be distressing rather than pleasant.
Father figure
A person perceived as standing in for one's actual father, becoming the object of emotions originally directed at him; more broadly, an older person, usually in a position of authority, with whom one identifies and from whom one seeks approval and guidance.
Fear of failure
An anxiety aroused when a person feels pressure to succeed, particularly prevalent among people with a strong underlying need for achievement.
Fear of success
A motive, first studied mainly in women, to avoid excelling or succeeding — particularly in competition with men — because socialisation has led the person to see such achievement as violating expected gender roles; now recognised as relevant to men as well, and sometimes difficult to distinguish from fear of failure.
Fechner's law
Named for German physicist and psychologist Gustav Fechner: the principle that as the physical intensity of a stimulus increases, the intensity a person perceives increases only proportionally more slowly, expressed mathematically as S = k log R (perceived intensity as a logarithmic function of physical intensity). One of the earliest attempts to express a psychological phenomenon mathematically, it emerged from the psychophysics research that helped establish psychology as an experimental science in the 1870s.
Feedback
A concept borrowed from cybernetics, describing the relationship between a system's output and its input, where information about output is fed back to regulate future input. Widely applied in programmed learning and teaching-machine design, and more generally in any process where knowledge of results shapes subsequent performance.
Feeling tone
The overall pleasantness or unpleasantness of the sensation produced by a given person, object or situation.
Feminism
A social movement and set of viewpoints committed to eliminating prejudice and unequal treatment based on sex, and to advancing women's interests and equality more broadly.
Feral child
A child said to have been raised by animals in the wild, largely isolated from human contact. Such accounts are part of popular psychology folklore and are generally regarded with considerable scepticism by researchers.
Field
In psychology, a term sometimes used for the whole set of interdependent factors within an organism's environment that together give rise to a particular piece of behaviour, drawing on an analogy with the physical concept of a field of force.
Field dependence-independence
The idea that people rely on one of two distinct cognitive styles, tied to distinct personality patterns, when orienting themselves within their environment (or “field”): field-independent people rely less on surrounding visual cues, while field-dependent people rely on them more heavily for orientation and judgement.
Field work
Any study of human or animal behaviour carried out outside a laboratory or formal experimental setting, in the subject's natural environment.
Fight-or-flight reaction
Originally a zoological term for the built-in behavioural choices an animal has when confronted by an intruder into its territory; extended to describe the human physiological and behavioural response to perceived threat, though the human version is considerably more complex than the phrase's common, oversimplified use suggests. Inability to either fight or flee in the face of a threat is considered a frequent trigger for stress.
Figural after-effect
A perceptual distortion in which viewing a second pattern after a different first pattern causes the same figure-ground relationships seen in the first to be perceived, at least partially, in the second.
Figure-and-ground
A principle holding that perception requires the perceptual field to be organised into a figure, distinguished against a relatively uniform background (ground). The figure is usually the element receiving attention, though figure and ground can reverse, as vividly illustrated by ambiguous figures such as reversible-image illusions.
Fixed action pattern
A more contemporary ethological term for what was traditionally called instinct — a largely innate, stereotyped behavioural sequence triggered by a specific stimulus.
Fixed-alternative
Describing a test or questionnaire item that requires a respondent to choose an answer from a fixed set of given alternatives, as opposed to an open-ended response.
Flattening of affect
A notable weakness or absence of emotional expression in situations where a stronger emotional response would ordinarily be expected; a clinical sign often associated with schizophrenia and certain other conditions.
Flicker fusion frequency
See critical flicker frequency — the point at which a flickering light is perceived as steady.
Flight into illness
A term from clinical psychology for developing symptoms of illness as an unconscious way of escaping an underlying conflict; some social scientists have proposed this as a significant contributing factor in mental illness among people facing severe socioeconomic disadvantage.
Folie à deux
French for “insanity of two”: a delusion shared by two people, typically a couple or close pair who live together and reinforce each other's mistaken belief.
Forced-choice technique
A testing method in which a respondent must select one option from a fixed set of alternatives, even if none of the options feels fully accurate or appropriate to their own view.
Forensic psychology
The application of psychological research and theory to legal issues, including criminal behaviour, jury decision-making, and the reliability of eyewitness testimony.
Formal operations
The fourth and final stage in Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development, spanning roughly ages 12 to 16, during which a person becomes capable of abstract reasoning, hypothetical thinking and formal logical deduction.
Fraternal twins
See dizygotic twins — twins developing from two separately fertilised eggs, genetically no more alike than ordinary siblings.
Free association
A core technique Freud developed for psychoanalysis, in which the patient is asked to voice whatever thoughts and images come to mind, following their own train of thought without guidance or censorship from the analyst. Over time, patterns within these associations can reveal underlying areas of unconscious conflict.
Free-floating anxiety
A chronic state of anxiety that cannot be traced to any specific source, and which can attach itself, seemingly arbitrarily, to almost any object, thought or situation.
Frequency
Either the number of cycles per second of a light or sound wave (relevant to phenomena such as pitch and colour perception), or, in statistics, the number of times a particular value or event occurs within a data set.
Frequency distribution
A statistical tabulation showing how often each value, or range of values, occurs within a data set, often displayed as a table or graph.
Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939)
The founder of psychoanalysis, whose work spans a therapeutic technique, a theory of personality, and a broader social philosophy. Freud's ideas developed partly out of his own self-analysis, notably his troubled reaction to his father's death, which led him toward his unconscious ambivalence about his father and about his own Jewish identity — material that shaped The Interpretation of Dreams, widely regarded as his most original and influential book. Drawing on his own experience and clinical work with patients, he developed a theory of personality centred on the formative importance of early childhood in shaping the ego, superego and id and their ongoing interplay in adult life. In later works, including Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents, he extended his thinking to society at large, arguing that repression, and the resulting neurosis, is an inevitable cost of civilised life. While individual elements of Freud's theory remain hotly contested by both Freudians and critics, his broader influence in bringing unconscious and irrational forces into mainstream understanding of human behaviour is widely acknowledged.
Freudian slip
A slip of the tongue that Freud, who held that nothing in human behaviour is truly random or accidental, interpreted as a meaningful clue revealing a repressed unconscious conflict. See also: parapraxis, the broader category of such unintentional errors.
Frustration-aggression hypothesis
The proposition that frustration reliably leads to aggression in both animals and humans, and that aggression is always preceded by some frustration. Subsequent research has identified enough exceptions to both halves of this claim that the exceptions are now considered at least as theoretically important as the general pattern.
Fugue
From the Latin for “flight”: an extended period of amnesia during which a person leaves home, forgets their past, and begins a new, often quite different, life elsewhere. Once the underlying unconscious conflict driving the amnesia is resolved, the person typically recovers their original memory and identity, and in turn forgets the fugue period itself.
Functional autonomy
A concept from Gordon Allport describing how a behaviour originally performed to reach some external goal can become rewarding, and pursued, for its own sake — relevant to how extrinsic motivation can, over time, become genuinely intrinsic. For example, a child who initially practises an instrument only to satisfy parental demands may come to enjoy playing purely for its own sake.
Functional disorder
An emotional or behavioural disturbance that cannot be attributed to any identifiable physical or organic cause. As a rough rule of thumb, such disturbances have traditionally been classed as neuroses, with organically caused disorders classed as psychoses — though this is a considerable oversimplification of a complex and still incompletely understood distinction.
Functionalism
A school of psychology emphasising the functions or purposes of mental activity — what the mind does and why — rather than its content or structure, which was the focus of its historical rival, structuralism.
Fundamental attribution error
The pervasive tendency, when explaining someone else's behaviour, to overestimate the influence of their personal characteristics (disposition) and underestimate the influence of their situation or social environment.
