One of the founders of GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY. His primary contribution was his work on INSIGHT LEARNING with apes, during which he discovered the aha reaction.

See CONVERSION HYSTERIA.

The term for the process assumed to take place in the BRAIN which results in each of the CEREBRAL HEMISPHERES specialising in particular psychological operations.

Sometimes described as ‘learning how to learn’: a generalised approach to problems in which animals or people carry over to a new learning situation the responses and strategies they learned in a previous situation. TRANSFER OF TRAINING results from a learning set.

The principle, suggested by the British COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGIST Lloyd Morgan in 1894. that any interpretation of an animal’s BEHAVIOUR must be the simplest possible to account for what is observed. Thus an explanation requiring a higher psychological functioning should not be offered if a lower will suffice. A special case of OCCAM’S RAZOR.

A concept introduced by Nikolaas Tinbergen, a European pioneer of ETHOLOGY. His observations of stickleback fish led him to wonder how male sticklebacks, who never saw a female until they were sexually mature, knew to chase away certain sticklebacks (i.e. males) and to woo others (i.e. females). The fish were reacting to the presence of red colouring on the male’s belly or its absence on the female’s. This was the mechanism that released their INNATE response.

The first large-scale survey of human sexual BEHAVIOUR, carried out in the United States in the 1940’s and 1950’s by Alfred Kinsey. Still regarded by some as an illuminating pioneer work despite heavy criticism of its methodology.

A term suggested by Edward De Bono to describe an attempt to solve a problem by looking at it from various angles rather than head-on, thus allowing the problem to be reconceptualised and perhaps solved by a previously unacceptable or unthought-of solution. A form of HEURISTIC.

A type of PSYCHOSURGERY, where the frontal lobes are severed from the main part of the BRAIN. Formerly used as a last resort for severe DEPRESSION but much less common now.

A Swiss PSYCHOANALYST and one of FREUD’S earliest colleagues. For about six years they were very close and Freud regarded Jung as the heir apparent to the movement he had founded. Jung was a PSYCHIATRIST of some status and, importantly for Freud, a Christian, the son of a Protestant minister. Jung left the Freudian movement in 1914 and founded his own, largely because he could not accept Freud’s uncompromising stand on the fundamental importance of sex in the origin of NEUROSIS. Jung’s interests were also more mystically inclined than Freud’s devotion to rationality could tolerate Jung studied practically everything from alchemy to yoga.

See especially COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS, INTROVERSION and EXTRAVERSION.