A version of the THEMATIC APPERCEPTION TEST adapted for children.

Transferring a skill learned on one side of the body to the other side. For example, right-footed people learning to kick with their left feet.

See LATERALITY

Named after Joseph Babinski, a French neurologist, this is a normal reflex that occurs in infants below the age of two and then disappears, where the toes curl upwards when the sole of the foot is stroked. If the Babinski reflex reappears in adulthood it is a sign of a disorder in the nervous system.

According to the American psychologist Fritz Heider, people have a tendency towards compatibility in their beliefs because incompatibility causes tension. For example, if you believe someone is gentle and you see him acting violently, your beliefs are in a state of imbalance. You would strive to balance them again by consciously reducing the violence of the act or the person’s responsibility for it, or adjusting your previous belief in the person’s gentleness.

See COGNITIVE DISSONANCE.

The final stage in the process of PERCEPTION, where the object being perceived is in the forefront of one’s ATTENTION and is clearly recognised or understood.

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL term for the behaviour of people who feel a need to conform to the attitudes or actions of a group they identify with.

In SOCIAL SCIENCE vernacular, the term is used to describe increasing support for a popular movement where more and more people want to ‘join the bandwagon’.

A set of mutually supportive beliefs held by an individual or group.

Brain waves associated with mental activity rather than with resting. They appear as shallower and more frequent than those of the alpha rhythm.

A neurological theory of EMOTION which proposes that stimuli from the environment trigger responses in the HYPOTHALAMUS which alert both the brain and the autonomic nervous system. The key point of this theory, in contrast to the JAMES LANGE THEORY, is that the feelings associated with emotion come from the hypothalamus and these feelings are experienced first before we recognise them cognitively.

Used in scientific theorising to indicate something that seems to work, though nobody knows how it works or what goes on inside the ‘box’. It is often used as an analogy for the brain, or in a more general sense, for any EXPERIMENT where the input is controlled, the output is observed and an inference is made from one to the other to account for what has happened in between.