More recent term for INSTINCT.

The use of handwriting as a kind of PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUE where a person’s handwriting is analysed for whatever it may reveal about his or her PERSONALITY.

The statistical process of combining individual scores into categories or ranking them as, for example, PERCENTILES.

A term sometimes used in SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY to denote the attempt to capture the essential elements of a real-life situation in an experimental form rather than trying to reconstruct the real-life situation (or MUNDANE REALISM) exactly.

See, for example, PRISONER’S DILEMMA.

Disturbed BEHAVIOUR of animals in an EXPERIMENT when they are faced with an impossible problem. This PHENOMENON was discovered by PAVLOV when he rewarded a dog with food for responding (by salivating) to a circle and then withheld the reward when the stimulus was an ellipse. Pavlov gradually made the two stimuli more and more alike. When the point was reached at which the dog could no longer discriminate the circle from the ellipse the animal lashed out in a frenzy of wild and random behaviour. Whether this behaviour can be equated with human NEUROSIS is a matter of long-standing dispute among psychologists.

A slip of the tongue, which FREUD, who denied the existence of randomness or accident in the way a person behaves, interpreted as a clue from the UNCONSCIOUS about a REPRESSED conflict.

See also PARAPRAXIS.

See EPILEPSY.

A constant rate of change between two conditions or VARIABLES.

French term meaning ‘insanity of two’ referring to a DELUSION shared by two people, who usually live together.

In EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, the weakening of a CONDITIONED RESPONSE. This is accomplished either by presenting the CONDITIONED STIMULUS without the UNCONDITIONED STIMULUS, or by withholding REINFORCEMENT from the conditioned response.