The minimum amount of difference that a subject can detect between two stimuli.

Accepting external ideas or values as one’s own to the point of not being aware of their origins. The best known example of this concept is the SUPEREGO where the values of the parents and the parent society are internalised into the developing PERSONALITY.

A PERSONALITY characlerislic in which a person manipulates others for his own gain. Named after the political theories of the fifteenth-century Italian statesman and writer.

FORGETTING the memories of earliest CHILDHOOD, explained by PSYCHOANALYSIS as REPRESSION. The non-existence of language with which to ‘fix’ experience in the MEMORY is also suggested as a cause, as is simply the immaturity of the nervous system.

See THRESHOLD.

The use of HYPNOSIS in PSYCHOTHERAPY.

Used to describe both the act of committing someone to an institution, such as a mental hospital, and the state of an inmate of such a place who has adapted to it so thoroughly that he is incapable of living outside it.

The idea that punishment for wrong doing is absolute and inevitable: that even if undetected, wrongdoing will be followed by retribution in the form of accidents or bad luck imposed on the miscreant by a higher power, like God. According to PIAGET, such thinking is typical of EGOCENTRIC children below the age of 8.

See INOCULATION.

An earlier form of the term WORK PSYCHOLOGY, still widely used in the United States.