Glossary of Psychological Terms
Definitions of terms used in psychology, psychometric testing and occupational assessment, organised alphabetically.
Unconditioned stimulus
A stimulus that reliably produces an unconditioned response from the very start of a conditioning procedure, before any learned association has been established — for example, food producing salivation.
Unconscious
The most important concept within dynamic psychology, and psychoanalysis in particular: the region of the psyche holding impulses and desires too threatening to be allowed into consciousness, and which have therefore been repressed or otherwise kept from entering it. The effects of this repression are expressed, in consciousness, as neurotic behaviour. Freud did not discover the unconscious, and never claimed to have done so, but he did more than anyone to systematically probe its dynamic relationship with the conscious mind, and to expose the considerable degree of irrationality underlying human affairs.
Unconscious motivation
Motivation for a thought, feeling or action that originates outside a person's conscious awareness, so that the person may sincerely believe their behaviour is driven by entirely different, consciously acknowledged reasons — a foundational assumption of psychoanalytic theory.
Underachiever
A person who fails to reach the level of achievement expected of them given their apparent ability. Sometimes used in education to describe someone judged not to be trying hard enough relative to their potential. Contrast with overachiever.
Undoing
In psychoanalysis, a defence mechanism in which a person performs some, often ritualised, act in the unconscious hope of magically reversing or cancelling out an earlier act that continues to disturb them. Considered the underlying mechanism behind obsessive-compulsive neurosis, the classic literary example being Lady Macbeth's guilt-driven hand-washing.
Utilitarianism
The philosophical position holding that the practical usefulness of an idea, action or policy is the sole legitimate criterion of its value — an approach that, applied uncritically to the study of human behaviour, has at times constrained deeper understanding by favouring what appears immediately useful over what is actually true.
