Primary attachments
The earliest and, typically, most enduring emotional bonds a person forms with others, usually with parents or primary caregivers in infancy.
Glossary of Psychological Terms
Definitions of terms used in psychology, psychometric testing and occupational assessment, organised alphabetically.
Paired associates
A technique used in learning research in which words are presented to a participant in pairs; afterward, the participant is given only the first word of each pair and asked to recall the second.
Palsy
A form of paralysis, often accompanied by uncontrollable trembling, resulting from damage to the nervous system.
Paper-and-pencil test
Any test or assessment procedure, including many projective techniques, that requires written answers rather than, for example, verbal responses or performance-based tasks.
Paradigm
A detailed model or example that serves as a pattern for understanding a broader class of phenomena; in the philosophy of science, a term popularised by Thomas Kuhn for the dominant theoretical framework accepted within a field at a given time.
Paradoxical sleep
A stage of sleep marked by high levels of electrical brain activity alongside deeply relaxed muscles and difficulty waking the sleeper; the brain-wave pattern recorded resembles that of someone awake, and the stage is typically accompanied by the rapid eye movements associated with vivid dreaming (REM sleep).
Parakinesis
A term used in parapsychology for the apparent movement of physical objects by unexplained means, without any conventional physical force being applied.
Parallax
The perceived movement of objects relative to one another as the eyes or head move: objects nearer than the point of fixation appear to move in the opposite direction to the movement, while objects beyond it appear to move in the same direction, with nearer objects appearing to move faster. An important cue used in depth perception.
Parallel distributed processing
See connectionism — the model of cognitive processing as operating simultaneously across a distributed network, rather than in a single sequential stream.
Parameter
Mathematically, a constant within an equation that determines the specific shape of a curve; in psychology, a constant that shapes the curve of a particular psychological function, such as a learning curve. Often confused, incorrectly, with “perimeter.”
Parametric statistics
Statistical methods and tests that assume the underlying data follow a normal distribution.
Paranoia
A psychotic condition characterised by delusions, especially delusions of grandeur and delusions of persecution. Outside the specific content of these delusions — which a person may defend vigorously and, at times, with superficially plausible reasoning — someone with paranoia can often function and behave quite normally.
Paranormal
Describing psychological events or experiences that appear not to be explicable by currently understood scientific principles; the central subject matter of parapsychology.
Parapraxis
Apparent minor errors of behaviour, such as forgetting a familiar name or a slip of the tongue; in psychoanalytic thought, such slips are known as Freudian slips and are held to reveal underlying unconscious material.
Parapsychology
The branch of study concerned with paranormal phenomena, particularly claims of extrasensory perception, and with attempting to extend recognised scientific methods and principles to account for them. Between 1927 and 1965, researcher J. B. Rhine directed an influential research laboratory at Duke University investigating such phenomena; the main criticism of this body of work is that experiments claiming to demonstrate paranormal effects have generally failed to be replicated by independent researchers outside the original lab. See also: replication.
Parkinson's Law
The wry management maxim that work expands to fill the time available for its completion, proposed by British writer C. Northcote Parkinson.
Part method
A learning technique in which material is broken down into smaller sections, learned separately, and then combined into the whole. Compare with whole method.
Partial reinforcement
See intermittent reinforcement — rewarding a response only some of the time rather than every time.
Participant observation
A research technique, used across the social sciences, in which a researcher becomes an accepted, embedded member of the group they wish to study, observing behaviour from within rather than from a detached outside vantage point.
Passive-aggressive personality
A personality pattern in which anger and hostility are expressed indirectly, often through oscillating between extreme dependence on, and covert aggression toward, other people — for example, someone who is chronically, passively late to meetings with people they resent, provoking anxiety and frustration in others without open confrontation.
Paternalism
Treating adults as though they were children, by withholding from them the information, autonomy or power needed to make decisions that affect their own lives, ostensibly for their own good.
Pathological
Abnormal in the specific sense of being diseased or disordered, rather than merely unusual or statistically rare.
Patriarchy
A society or social group in which men hold the primary positions of authority and leadership. Contrast with matriarchy.
Patrilineal
Describing a society or social group in which lineage, descent or inheritance is traced through the father's side of the family. Contrast with matrilineal.
Pattern recognition
The cognitive (and, in artificial systems, computational) process of identifying meaningful patterns, shapes or regularities within a stream of sensory input or data.
PDP
An abbreviation for parallel distributed processing — see that entry.
Peak experience
In humanistic psychology, a rare, intensely powerful moment of emotional and spiritual fulfilment in which a person feels a profound sense of unity with themselves and the world — considered by Abraham Maslow to represent a moment of self-actualisation.
Pecking order
Originally, the hierarchy of dominance formed among farmyard hens through repeated pecking, with the most-pecked hen occupying the lowest status. Now used loosely, and somewhat imprecisely, to describe status hierarchies within human groups.
Pediatric
See paediatric — relating to the medical care of infants and children.
Peer group
A social group whose members interact on a broadly equal footing, typically of similar age or status — a concept especially significant during childhood and adolescence, when peer influence on behaviour and identity is particularly strong.
Pellagra
A nutritional deficiency disease (caused by inadequate niacin) whose most visible symptom is a characteristic skin condition, but which can also produce psychological symptoms, particularly depression, alongside gastrointestinal and neurological effects.
Penology
The study of criminal behaviour, punishment, and the treatment and rehabilitation of offenders within the justice system.
Percentile
In statistics, one of the hundred equal divisions of a ranked distribution of scores; the ninetieth percentile, for instance, is the score below which 90 per cent of all scores in the distribution fall.
Perception
The process by which the brain receives the continuous flow of sensory information from the sense organs and organises this raw input into a coherent, meaningful understanding of the surrounding environment.
Perceptual defence
A mechanism by which a person unconsciously protects their ego from unpleasant or threatening perceptions, either by misperceiving them as less threatening or unpleasant than they actually are, or by failing to consciously perceive them at all.
Perseveration
The tendency for a particular thought, word or behaviour to recur repeatedly, even in the absence of any clear triggering stimulus and despite serving no obvious ongoing purpose; often associated with certain forms of brain damage.
Person perception
The process by which people form initial impressions of others and then progressively build them out into a fuller, more coherent overall judgement of that person's character.
Persona
From the Latin word for a theatrical mask: Carl Jung's term for the conscious, outward-facing aspects of personality that a person presents and employs in everyday social interaction, as distinct from their deeper, more private inner self.
Personal space
In social psychology, the area immediately surrounding a person that they experience as psychologically “theirs,” such that any uninvited intrusion into it tends to be perceived as hostile, threatening or simply uncomfortable. The size of this preferred space varies considerably between individuals and across cultures. Not to be confused with territoriality, which concerns a fixed physical location rather than a zone that travels with the person.
Personality
The sum total of the factors that make a given human being both distinctly individual and recognisably human — the patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving shared broadly across humanity, combined with the particular configuration of these elements that makes each person unique. Personality theorists generally emphasise both the integrated, dynamic nature of personality as a whole and the significant role of unconscious processes, which may be largely hidden from the individual themselves while remaining at least partly visible to other people.
Peter Principle
A satirical management observation, from Laurence J. Peter, that in a hierarchy people tend to be promoted based on their success in their current role until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent — and then remain stuck there.
Petit mal
See epilepsy — the milder form of epileptic seizure, producing only brief lapses in awareness rather than full convulsions.
PGR
An abbreviation for psychogalvanic reflex, the American equivalent of the British term galvanic skin response.
Phantom limb
The persistent sensation of feeling, including sometimes pain, in a limb that has been amputated. Proposed explanations include the slow adjustment of a person's existing self-image or body schema to the sudden physical change, and the possibility that neural pathways originally linking the missing limb to the brain remain active in some altered form.
Phenomenology
A philosophical approach advocating the direct study of conscious experience through careful introspection, as it presents itself to a particular observer, without imposing external theoretical assumptions onto that experience.
Phenomenon
Anything that presents itself to, or can be perceived by, an observer — any occurrence or fact capable of being directly observed or experienced.
Phenotype
The observable outcome of the interaction between a person's genotype (their inherited genetic potential) and their environment. Since a person's underlying genetic potential can never be directly observed — only its expression in actual behaviour and characteristics — everything we can observe about a person, from before birth onward, is technically a phenotype.
Phenylketonuria
A serious, hereditary form of intellectual disability caused by the body's inability to properly metabolise the amino acid phenylalanine, which then accumulates to toxic levels; now routinely screened for in newborns and managed through strict dietary control.
Phi phenomenon
The perceptual impression of movement created by a rapid, well-timed sequence of otherwise static visual stimuli — in its simplest form, two lights flashed on and off in quick succession, with the right interval between them, creating the illusion that a single light is moving between the two points. This illusion underlies the perceived movement in film, animation and neon signage, and was identified at the start of the twentieth century by the earliest Gestalt psychologists, shortly after the emergence of the film industry.
Philosophy
The systematic, disciplined attempt to understand the fundamental nature of reality, knowledge, ethics and existence, using reasoned argument rather than empirical experiment alone.
Phobia
An excessive, persistent and irrational fear of a specific object, activity or situation, generally regarded as a form of anxiety disorder.
Photographic memory
See eidetic imagery — the rare capacity, most commonly observed in children, to retain and recall an unusually detailed and vivid visual image of a scene after only brief exposure.
Phrenology
A now-discredited theory, first proposed in the eighteenth century, holding that a person's intellectual and psychological abilities could be assessed by examining the bumps and contours of their skull, on the assumption that specific brain regions governed specific abilities and that larger regions (and therefore larger corresponding bumps) meant greater ability in that area. Though now regarded as pseudoscience, phrenology is credited with helping to popularise the broader, ultimately valid idea that specific brain regions are linked to specific psychological functions.
Physiognomy
Historically, the now-discredited practice of attempting to infer psychological characteristics from the structure of a person's face, sometimes practised alongside phrenology; the term today refers more neutrally simply to a person's facial features and structure.
Physiological psychology
The branch of psychology concerned with the physiological, particularly neural and hormonal, processes that underlie behaviour and mental experience.
Phylogeny
The evolutionary history and development of an entire species over time. Contrast with ontogeny, the developmental history of a single individual organism.
Pilot study
A small-scale trial run of an experiment or survey, conducted to assess whether a larger, full-scale version is worth pursuing, and often used specifically to test and refine the proposed research methodology.
PK
An abbreviation for psychokinesis — see that entry.
PKU
An abbreviation for phenylketonuria — see that entry.
Placebo
An inactive substance, disguised to appear identical to an active treatment — for example, a sugar pill given to the control group in a drug trial, or to a patient who will not benefit medically from an active drug but psychologically benefits from feeling they are receiving treatment. See also: placebo effect.
Placebo effect
The measurable positive response people show to an inactive placebo treatment, as though it were pharmacologically active — for instance, patients reporting feeling better after being given a sugar pill with no active ingredient. The term is sometimes extended more broadly to describe any positive response people show simply from feeling that they are being attended to or cared for, at which point it closely overlaps with the Hawthorne effect.
Plantar reflex
The automatic downward curling of the toes when the sole of the foot is stroked, which typically replaces the earlier Babinski reflex at around age two as the nervous system matures.
Plateau
See learning plateau — a temporary flattening in the rate of improvement during skill acquisition.
Play therapy
The use of structured or unstructured play within psychotherapy with children, both to aid diagnosis and as a treatment in its own right: the child is encouraged, through play, to achieve a catharsis of emotions that they may not yet have the verbal capacity to express directly.
Pluralistic ignorance
A social situation in which most individuals privately doubt or reject a belief or norm that they nonetheless believe, mistakenly, is held by everyone else in their group — leading each person to conform outwardly to a consensus that, in reality, barely exists.
Poggendorff illusion
A visual illusion in which a straight diagonal line, interrupted by two parallel vertical bars, appears to be misaligned or discontinuous even though it is, in fact, perfectly straight.
Polymorphism
The process, in some organisms such as frogs or butterflies, of passing through distinctly different physical forms over the course of development — for example, from larva to adult.
Population
In statistics, the total set of cases or individuals from which a smaller sample is drawn for study, and about which the researcher ultimately wishes to draw broader conclusions.
Positive reinforcement
In conditioning, the strengthening of a given response by following it with a rewarding consequence.
Positivism
The philosophical position that genuine scientific knowledge is limited strictly to what can be directly observed and empirically verified, excluding speculation about unobservable causes or metaphysical claims.
Possession
The subjective feeling of being taken over or controlled by an external force or entity. In Western culture, this experience is generally treated as a symptom of psychosis; in other cultural and religious contexts, closely related experiences are understood as religious ecstasy or spiritual possession.
Post-hypnotic suggestion
An instruction given to a person while under hypnosis that they carry out after emerging from the hypnotic trance, typically without any conscious awareness of where the instruction originated.
Post-modernism
A broad intellectual position holding that the detached, purely objective observer assumed by traditional Western science and scholarship does not really exist — that all observation and knowledge are shaped by the observer's social and cultural position. Within psychology, this view is reflected particularly in social cognition research and in social constructionism.
Postconventional morality
The third and highest level in Lawrence Kohlberg's stage theory of moral development, at which moral behaviour is governed not by fear of punishment or by social convention, but by a self-chosen, consciously reasoned system of ethical principles. Kohlberg's research suggested that not everyone reaches this level of moral reasoning.
Postpartum depression
Depression occurring in the period following childbirth, thought to be caused by a combination of hormonal changes, sleep deprivation, and the psychological and social demands of new parenthood.
Potlatch
A ceremonial custom among Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, including the Kwakwaka'wakw, involving the ritual giving away or destruction of personal property as a means of displaying and achieving social status. The term is occasionally borrowed in social-science writing to describe conspicuous, status-driven consumption in other cultures, including modern Western society.
Prägnanz
In Gestalt psychology, the principle that perception tends toward simplicity, harmony, meaningfulness and the best possible “fit” or “goodness” of form — for example, a battered old coin glimpsed in dim light will still tend to be perceived as a simple, regular circular object.
Precognition
A claimed form of extrasensory perception in which a person appears to have knowledge of a future event that could not have been logically inferred or predicted through ordinary means.
Preconscious
In psychoanalysis, mental content that is not present in conscious awareness at a given moment but that can be readily and deliberately recalled when needed. Compare with the unconscious, whose contents are not so easily accessible.
Predictive validity
See construct validity — specifically, the extent to which a test's scores successfully predict a person's future performance or outcomes on a related measure.
Prejudice
An attitude, opinion or belief, held with strong emotional conviction, that remains largely resistant to reasoned argument or contrary evidence. Though the term can technically apply to positive as well as negative pre-judgements, it is used almost exclusively in a negative sense, particularly regarding unfair judgements of social or ethnic groups.
Preoperational stage
The second of Jean Piaget's stages of cognitive development, spanning roughly ages 2 to 7, during which a child's thinking is intuitive rather than logical, and is characterised by magic thinking, a tendency toward anthropomorphism, and egocentricity.
Propositional representations
A widely used concept in cognitive psychology, sometimes described as “the language of the mind”: abstract, language-like symbolic units thought to form a universal underlying code in which thought and reasoning occur, independent of a person's specific native spoken language.
Presentation of self
A concept associated with Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman. See impression management.
Pretest
See pilot study — a preliminary, small-scale trial of a research procedure.
Prevision
A term closely related to precognition, used within the study of extrasensory perception for the claimed experience of directly “seeing” future events, popularly referred to as “second sight.”
Primacy effect
The finding that, other things being equal, the first item or items in a sequence tend to be remembered better than those in the middle. Compare with recency effect, the corresponding advantage for the most recent items.
Primal therapy
A form of psychotherapy developed in the United States by Arthur Janov, in which the therapist first deliberately intensifies a patient's distress, then encourages them to relive painful childhood feelings that were never fully expressed at the time. Releasing these feelings through an intense, cathartic “primal scream” is claimed to clear the way for healthier adult psychological functioning, though the approach lacks strong scientific support.
Primary colours
The small set of colours that can be combined to produce the full range of other hues: in traditional usage, blue, yellow and red, along with black and white, though the specific set used varies by context (for instance, additive light versus pigment mixing).
Primary process
In psychoanalysis, the unconscious operations of the id, governed entirely by the pleasure principle, in its constant drive to find some way of achieving immediate gratification for its underlying needs and impulses.
Principle of parsimony
See Occam's razor — the preference for the simplest adequate explanation among competing alternatives.
Prisoner's dilemma
A scenario drawn from game theory, widely used by social psychologists to study bargaining and cooperative behaviour. Two suspects are arrested and questioned separately: if one confesses and the other does not, the confessor goes free while the other takes the full blame; if both confess, both receive a moderate sentence; if neither confesses, both benefit from a lighter outcome than if both had confessed — yet each has an individual incentive to confess regardless of what the other does, creating a tension between individual and collective rationality.
Proactive inhibition
The detrimental effect that earlier learning can have on the recall of material learned subsequently. Compare with retroactive inhibition, in which later learning instead interferes with recall of earlier material.
Probability
In statistics, a numerical measure of how likely a given event is to occur, relative to the likelihood of alternative possible events — for example, the probability of rolling any particular number on a fair six-sided die is one in six.
Procedural knowledge
Practical, “how-to” knowledge — the conscious or unconscious knowledge of how to perform an action or skill. Compare with declarative knowledge, factual “knowing that” knowledge.
Programmed learning
A system of self-paced instruction, grounded in the principles of operant conditioning, in which material to be learned is broken into small, sequential steps, with the learner given feedback on their mastery of each step before moving to the next.
Projection
In psychoanalysis, a defence mechanism in which a person unconsciously attributes to other people feelings or impulses that are actually their own, but which are too threatening to the ego to be consciously acknowledged as one's own.
Projective techniques
Assessment procedures designed to uncover a person's unconscious motivations, anxieties and conflicts by presenting them with relatively unstructured, ambiguous stimuli — as in the Rorschach inkblot test or the Thematic Apperception Test — onto which the respondent is thought to unconsciously project material that could not otherwise be directly and consciously acknowledged.
Proprioceptors
Sensory receptors that provide the brain with information about the body's own movement, position and orientation in space. Found in the semicircular canals of the inner ear, where they contribute to balance, and in the muscles and joints, where they produce kinaesthetic sensation.
Protocol
The original, detailed written record of an experiment, or the notes and materials generated during a clinical interview, diagnosis or course of treatment.
Proximity
See contiguity and continuity — Gestalt principles concerning how closeness in space or time influences perceptual grouping.
Proximodistal
Literally “close to distant”: describes the pattern of physical maturation in humans and animals in which development proceeds from the central axis of the body outward toward the extremities. See also: cephalocaudal, the corresponding head-to-tail developmental pattern.
Psyche
The ancient Greek term for the animating life force, historically translated first as “soul,” later as “mind,” and in some modern usage as “self” — the root of terms such as psychology and psychiatry.
Psychedelic
A term applied to drugs, such as certain hallucinogens, that appear to intensify perception and expand consciousness in dramatic ways; by extension, also applied to colour schemes, lighting or art intended to evoke similar sensory effects.
Psychiatrist
A licensed physician who specialises in psychiatry, the medical treatment of mental illness, and who is qualified, unlike most psychologists, to prescribe medication.
Psychiatry
The branch of medicine concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. Psychiatry's subject matter overlaps substantially with clinical psychology, but the two differ in training and orientation: psychiatrists are trained as physicians, with a medical model of psychological disturbance and the ability to prescribe medication, whereas clinical psychologists typically have no medical training, cannot prescribe drugs, and are more likely to view normal and abnormal behaviour as lying along the same continuum rather than being categorically distinct.
Psychic
In general use, relating to the properties of the mind; in popular usage, describing a person claimed to possess spiritual, telepathic or other extrasensory abilities.
Psychic determinism
The theory that no psychological event, thought or behaviour is truly accidental or random, but always has a definite underlying cause, even if that cause is unconscious and not apparent to the person themselves. Freud proposed this as a foundational, guiding principle of psychoanalysis.
Psychical research
An older, more traditional term for parapsychology.
Psychoactive drug
Any substance capable of altering mood, behaviour or conscious mental processes — technically including substances as mild as caffeine, though the term is generally reserved for drugs with more dramatic psychological effects, including hallucinogens and other mind-altering substances, whether used medically or recreationally.
Psychoanalysis
A form of psychotherapy invented and developed by Sigmund Freud, placing central emphasis on uncovering and understanding unconscious motivation. Any later variant of psychoanalysis, however far it has diverged from strict Freudian theory, still shares this core principle. Psychoanalysis is among the most demanding and time-intensive forms of psychotherapy, typically requiring years of frequent sessions, during which powerful underlying conflicts and emotions may surface.
Psychoanalyst
A psychotherapist specifically trained in the theory and clinical techniques of psychoanalysis, typically after first qualifying as a physician, psychiatric social worker or psychologist. A typical psychoanalytic training program lasts around four years and includes the trainee undergoing their own personal analysis.
Psychobabble
A term introduced in the 1970s by writer R. D. Rosen for superficial, pseudo-scientific jargon offered as a quick, simplistic fix for genuine emotional needs or problems — packaged with just enough borrowed psychological terminology to sound credible.
Psychoceramics
A tongue-in-cheek term for the study of eccentric, unfounded or crackpot ideas about human psychology and behaviour.
Psychodiagnostics
Originally referred to attempts to infer personality from external physical features, such as physiognomy or graphology; the term now more commonly encompasses legitimate, well-established projective techniques used in clinical assessment.
Psychodrama
A technique, developed by American psychiatrist Jacob L. Moreno, used in both diagnosis and psychotherapy, in which a person acts out particular scenes from their life, typically in front of other patients and therapists, in order to bring underlying personal and social conflicts into the open. See also: sociometry, another of Moreno's contributions.
Psychodynamics
See dynamic psychology — the study of the underlying motivational forces shaping behaviour.
Psychogalvanic reflex
The American equivalent term for the British galvanic skin response.
Psychohistory
The application of modern psychological theory to the interpretation of historical events and figures. The field is most closely associated, in both popular and academic thinking, with psychobiography — the retrospective psychoanalysis of historical figures, a genre Freud himself helped originate with his study of Leonardo da Vinci. Beyond psychobiography, psychohistorical inquiry has also opened up broader lines of research, including the historical development of psychological concepts themselves (such as mind, insanity, childhood, and the unconscious) and the social psychology of large-scale demographic and attitudinal change over time.
Psychokinesis
In parapsychology, the claimed ability to move physical objects or otherwise influence the physical environment purely through mental effort, without any physical intermediary.
Psycholinguistics
The study of the relationship between the structure, nature and use of language and the underlying psychological processes of the people who use it — spanning language acquisition, comprehension, production and the cognitive representation of language.
Psychological field
See life space — Kurt Lewin's term for the total set of physical and psychological factors shaping a person's behaviour at a given moment.
Psychologist's fallacy
An error in which a psychologist (or observer more generally) mistakenly assumes that their own perspective, motivations or mental state are also present in, or explain, someone else's mind.
Psychology
The scientific study of the mind and behaviour, encompassing how people think, feel, perceive, learn, develop and interact with others, and drawing on methods ranging from controlled laboratory experiments to naturalistic observation and clinical case study.
Psychometrics
The field concerned with the theory and technique of psychological measurement, including the design, validation and scoring of tests and measures of psychological characteristics such as intelligence, aptitude and personality.
Psychomotor
Relating to the influence of mental processes on muscular movement and physical action — as in “psychomotor skills” or “psychomotor retardation.”
Psychopathology
Literally, the pathology of the psyche: the study of psychological disorders, their symptoms, and their underlying causes and development.
Psychophysics
The study of the relationship between physical stimuli from the external world and the subjective sensations and perceptions they produce. These questions remain as central to experimental psychology today as they were when first systematically studied in the earliest psychological laboratories, established in the 1870s. See also: Wundt, Wilhelm.
Psychosis
A severe psychological disorder, disruptive enough to interfere significantly with a person's everyday functioning and sometimes requiring institutional treatment, and generally characterised by a significant loss of contact with shared, consensual reality. While some psychoses have clear organic causes, such as brain damage, others have historically been understood by some psychologists as an extreme form of neurosis; more recent research has increasingly emphasised the role of biochemical factors in at least some forms of psychosis, such as schizophrenia.
Psychosomatic
From the Greek psyche (mind) and soma (body): describing physical disorders in which psychological or emotional stress produces genuine physiological symptoms. Conditions such as certain forms of asthma and stomach ulcers have long been considered at least partly psychosomatic, though some argue that, given the close interconnection of mind and body, virtually every illness has some psychosomatic dimension.
Psychosurgery
Surgery performed on the brain with the specific aim of treating a severe psychological disorder, of which lobotomy is the best-known and now largely abandoned historical example.
Psychotherapist
A person who practises psychotherapy — typically a psychiatrist, clinical psychologist or psychiatric social worker, though in many jurisdictions no specific legal qualification is required to use the title or offer psychotherapy services.
Psychotherapy
The use of psychological, rather than primarily medical, techniques to treat psychological disturbance. The four broad theoretical traditions underlying most forms of psychotherapy are the behaviouristic, cognitive, humanistic and psychoanalytic approaches, with numerous variants, hybrids and integrative approaches developed from these foundations.
Pygmalion effect
See Rosenthal effect — the tendency for a person's performance to improve when others (such as a teacher) hold and communicate higher expectations of them.
