According to the American psychologist ABRAHAM MASLOW. the ongoing striving to fulfil one’s capacities that is a sign of psychological health.

A term and a technique invented by the American PSYCHIATRIST J.L.Moreno. It is an attempt to measure what people in a group think and feel about each other.

The PROBABILITY that the results of a study could have occurred by chance. The highest probability acceptable to current convention is 5 in 100. or a 0.05 level of significance. See also NULL HYPOTHESIS.

The ability to feel with someone. An emotional experience, as opposed to EMPATHY.

The SELF a person believes himself to be. One’s self-image is a composite of many things and may bear little relation to any OBJECTIVE assessment of oneself or the assessment of others. The self-image begins very early in life and is probably, to a large extent, physical. This early BODY IMAGE can stay with a person for the rest of his life, so that as a normal-sized (or even tall) adult he may think of himself as small because, when his body image was being formed, he was small in relation to his peers. The judgements of other people are also important in the formation of the self-image. but even though a person’s social contacts, and therefore the judgements made of him. may change greatly in later life, he may still think of himself in terms of the earlier judgements.

See HIGHER-ORDER CONDITIONING.

The PERCEPTION of depth or distance usually due to the merging of the two slightly different images that appear on the RETINA of each eye.

Usually denotes a CULTURE within a culture which shares the main features of the parent culture while retaining special characteristics of its own.

A term introduced by the nineteenth century American psychologist William James, whose brother Henry James is considered to be the first writer of ‘stream of consciousness’ novels. The term was intended to emphasise the continuous nature of a person’s CONSCIOUS experience as opposed to a contemporary trend in PSYCHOLOGY to divide CONSCIOUSNESS into separate units for study.

From the island of Serendip in Gulliver’s Travels’, the experience of finding one thing while looking for another: true in varying degrees of major figures in the study of the human condition, like FREUD and PAVLOV. Also found in users of dictionaries.