Psychology & Neuroscience

Establish methods and the nervous system before learning, perception, memory, and development. Connect theories and experiments to those processes, then study individual differences, social behavior, and clinical applications.

Methods and the History of Psychology

Understand research methods and evidence before comparing psychological schools.

Research Methods and Evidence

Psychology connects theories of mind and behavior to measurements, observations, and experiments. A famous study is a starting point for evaluating a claim, not a substitute for its subsequent evidence.

• Operationalization, reliability, and validity — specify how a construct is measured. Reliability concerns consistency; validity concerns whether the interpretation of a measure is justified. A consistently measured score can still be a poor measure of the intended construct.

• Research designs — case studies, observations, surveys, longitudinal studies, and experiments answer different questions. Random assignment can support causal comparisons within an experiment; representative sampling addresses a different question about the population being studied.

• Research ethics — participation ordinarily requires informed, voluntary consent and the right to withdraw. Researchers should minimize harm, protect confidentiality, and obtain appropriate ethical review. Deception requires specific justification and debriefing; a memorable result does not by itself justify a study’s methods. Consent exceptions are constrained by professional standards rather than left to convenience.¹ Researchers should also explain relevant risks and limits of confidentiality, handle sensitive records carefully, and disclose conflicts of interest. Ethical review takes participants’ circumstances into account; methodological usefulness alone does not justify exposing people to avoidable harm.

• Confounding and demand characteristics — associations may reflect other causes, and participants may respond to what they infer the investigator expects. Design, masking where feasible, and appropriate comparison conditions matter alongside statistical analysis.

• Replication and generalization — assess whether an effect recurs and whether it extends across populations, tasks, and settings. A single successful or unsuccessful replication does not settle every version of a theory.

• Preregistration and transparency — specifying hypotheses and analysis plans before observing outcomes distinguishes planned tests from later exploration. Preregistration does not guarantee good measurement or design; deviations and exploratory analyses should be reported clearly.²

• Hawthorne effect — productivity increased among workers at the Hawthorne plant apparently because they were being observed, not due to specific environmental changes; the term now broadly means behavior changes due to awareness of being studied. The original studies’ methodology has been substantially critiqued. The studies are usually associated with the Western Electric Hawthorne Works in the 1920s–30s, and later meta-analyses questioned the original interpretation of the results.

  • Hawthorne Works — The Hawthorne Works was a Western Electric factory in Illinois famous for studies that suggested workers changed behavior when they knew they were being observed. Those studies gave rise to the term Hawthorne effect.

  • The Hawthorne Effect — The Hawthorne Effect is the tendency for people to change behavior when they know they are being observed. The name comes from industrial studies at a Western Electric plant in Hawthorne, where productivity seemed to rise under altered conditions and added attention.

• Placebo effect — improvement in a patient’s condition attributable to the belief that an inert treatment is effective, rather than to any pharmacological action; placebo responses can produce measurable physiological changes (endorphin release, altered immune markers); nocebo effect: negative expectations worsen outcomes; open-label placebos (patients told the pill is inert) can still produce benefits; relevant to randomized controlled trials, whose comparator may be placebo, an active treatment, usual care, or another appropriate control depending on the research question and clinical context.³

• Polygraph — an instrument that simultaneously records multiple physiological responses (heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, galvanic skin response) under the theory that deception produces characteristic autonomic arousal; also called a “lie detector”; widely used in U.S. law enforcement and security screening, but the scientific consensus (National Academy of Sciences, 2003) is that its validity is insufficient for reliable lie detection because the measured arousal is not specific to deception; results are generally inadmissible as evidence in U.S. federal courts; associated with John Larson and Leonarde Keeler in the 1920s. It was developed in Berkeley by John Larson and August Vollmer and later refined by Leonarde Keeler. In practice it compares responses to relevant and control questions, and variants such as the Silent Talker have been proposed.

• expert judgment
  • experts — Experts are people whose professional judgments may be tested in court by standards such as Frye and Daubert, and whose predictions were studied by Tetlock and the Good Judgment Project. The clue set also points to expert systems, Delphi questionnaires, and expert witnesses.

• American Psychological Association — This organization publishes the APA style manual used widely in behavioral sciences and encourages a citation format that places the date after the author’s name. Its ethics code is associated with psychology rather than psychiatry.

• Experimental bias
  • observer-expectancy effect — The observer-expectancy effect occurs when a researcher’s expectations unconsciously influence participants or outcomes in an experiment. Double-blind designs are meant to reduce this kind of bias, which is often illustrated by the Clever Hans case.
• Behavioral genetics

  • twin studies — Twin studies compare monozygotic and dizygotic twins to estimate the relative effects of genes and environment. Researchers often model them with the ACE framework, and famous examples include the Minnesota study and other longitudinal investigations.

  • Twins

    • Identical twins — Identical twins are a standard subject in behavioral genetics because their shared DNA helps isolate heredity from environment. They are often contrasted with fraternal twins when researchers study heritability and development.
• research methods

  • replicability — Replicability is the standard that later researchers should be able to obtain similar results when repeating an experiment. It is central to the replication crisis and to criticisms of behavioral priming studies.

  • WEIRD sample

    • WEIRD — An acronym for Western, Educated, Industrial(ized), Rich, and Democratic populations. In social science and psychology, it refers to the overrepresentation of convenience samples from affluent Western university populations, especially college-student subjects, and is used to criticize the unrepresentative sampling that dominates many experiments.
• Experimental Psychology — Experimental psychology is the branch of psychology focused on laboratory methods and experimentation, with subfields such as child, educational, social, developmental, physiological, and comparative psychology. Edward Titchener’s major work on the subject was a four-volume text built around student and teacher manuals for the laboratory method.

  • electric shock — An electric shock is the painful stimulus used in classic obedience and learning experiments. It appears in references to Milgram’s experiment, learned helplessness, and anti-shock campaigns such as those targeting the Judge Rotenberg Center.

  • introspection — Introspection is the psychological method of examining one’s own conscious thoughts and feelings. It was central to early experimental psychology under Wundt and Titchener before later behaviorists criticized it as unreliable.

• observation — Observation, or measurement, is the act that in quantum mechanics can collapse a state and is limited by the uncertainty principle. In psychology it is also a basic data-collection method, often contrasted with experimentation and divided into naturalistic and systematic forms.

• psychology — Psychology is the study of mind, behavior, and mental processes, and Wilhelm Wundt is often treated as the founder of experimental psychology. Its schools and approaches include Gestalt psychology, behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and social psychology, with figures such as William James, Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, and Stanley Milgram often appearing as clues.

• deception detection
  • lie detection — Lie detection is the attempt to determine whether a person is telling the truth, often associated with polygraphs and microexpression reading. Historical methods include measuring physiological responses or even the old rice-chewing test.

Schools of Psychology

• Structuralism — Wilhelm Wundt founded the first psychology laboratory (Leipzig, 1879); aimed to identify basic elements of conscious experience through introspection. Edward Titchener brought the school to America.
  • Edward Bradford Titchener — Edward Bradford Titchener was a British-born structuralist psychologist and student of Wilhelm Wundt who brought Wundt’s work to America and helped make it influential in English. He founded an influential Cornell psychology program, emphasized introspection, warned against “stimulus error,” and analyzed consciousness into sensations and their context. He is also associated with the coining of “empathy.”

• Edward Titchener — Wundt’s student; founded the American school of structuralism at Cornell; introduced the term “structuralism”; emphasized introspective analysis of mental contents into sensations, images, and affections.

• Functionalism — William James (Principles of Psychology, 1890); focused on the purpose of mental processes rather than their structure; influenced by Darwinian evolution. Opposed Wundt’s atomism.

• Psychoanalysis — Sigmund Freud proposed that unconscious drives (especially sexual and aggressive) shape behavior; emphasized the id (pleasure principle), ego (reality principle), and superego (moral conscience). Defense mechanisms include repression, projection, rationalization, and reaction formation.

  • abreaction — Abreaction is the process of recovering a repressed experience and releasing the emotions tied to it.

  • Anal character
    • Anal-expulsive — The anal-expulsive personality type in Freudian theory is associated with recklessness, defiance, and disorganization. It is one of the classic oral and anal character types used to describe personality development.
  • Anal fixation
    • Obsession with organization or excessive neatness — This is the anal-retentive fixation, a Freudian psychosexual term associated with excessive orderliness, cleanliness, or control. It is one of the classic oral, anal, phallic, latent, and genital stages or fixations discussed in psychoanalysis.

  • Anna Freud — Anna Freud was a pioneer of child psychoanalysis and the daughter of Sigmund Freud. She is associated with defense mechanisms, signal anxiety, and Technique of Child Analysis, and is frequently clued through her work with Little Hans and the Wolf Man.

  • Bruno Bettelheim — Bruno Bettelheim was an Austrian-American child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst best known for writings on autism, fairy tales, and disturbed children. His works include The Uses of Enchantment, which interprets fairy tales through Freudian ideas, Freud and Man’s Soul, The Empty Fortress, and Love Is Not Enough. He is associated with the discredited “refrigerator mother” theory, and later accounts challenged his personal and academic claims.

  • Castration anxiety — Castration anxiety is the Freudian fear of bodily retaliation, tied to the Oedipus complex and contrasted with penis envy.

  • Civilization and Its Discontents — Civilization and Its Discontents is Sigmund Freud’s 1930 essay on why civilization or culture makes people unhappy by repressing instinct, aggression, and libido. It develops the contrast between Eros and Thanatos, discusses the pleasure principle, guilt, and the tension between instinct and the restraints of civilized life, critiques the “oceanic feeling,” and uses Roman archaeology as a metaphor for layered memory.

  • Donald Winnicott — Donald Winnicott was a British psychoanalyst associated with object relations theory and the ideas of the true self and false self. He is especially known for the concepts of transitional objects and the holding environment in child development.

  • drives and instincts
    • Pleasure principle — In Freudian psychology, the pleasure principle is the drive toward immediate gratification and the reduction of psychic tension, seeking to avoid pain or tension. It is contrasted with the reality principle and appears in Freud’s discussions of constancy, dreams, and Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It is often linked in introductory descriptions to the id, though it is distinct from it.

  • ego — In Freudian psychology, the ego is the part of the psyche shaped by the reality principle and mediates between the id and the superego, balancing instinct, moral restraint, and reality. The term appears in Freud’s The Ego and the Id and in discussions of defense mechanisms and selfhood; it also occurs in earlier philosophical and psychological writing, including Stirner’s critique of fixed ideals and Husserl’s phenomenology.

  • Electra complex — The Electra complex is Jung’s name for the female counterpart to the Oedipus complex. It describes a girl’s unconscious desire to replace her mother and possess her father, a concept linked to penis envy and the phallic stage.

  • Freudian analysts
    • Ernest Jones — Ernest Jones was a Welsh psychoanalyst who founded the British Psycho-Analytical Society. He wrote an authoritative biography of Freud and a study of Hamlet and Oedipus.
      • Hamlet and Oedipus — Hamlet and Oedipus is Ernest Jones’s Freudian study linking Shakespeare’s Hamlet to the Oedipus complex. The book reads the play through themes of unconscious conflict, matricide, and psychological symbolism.

  • libido — Libido is the psychosexual energy Freud associated with desire and the id. Jung broadened the term, but in quizbowl it usually refers to sex drive or instinctual energy.

  • Lou Andreas-Salomé — Lou Andreas-Salomé was a writer and early psychoanalyst associated with Nietzsche, Paul Rée, and Rilke. She is remembered for works on narcissism and for memoiristic accounts of her intellectual circle.

  • Melanie Klein — Melanie Klein was an Austrian-British psychoanalyst and a founder of object relations theory. She emphasized early infant fantasy, play therapy, projective identification, and the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, and she famously clashed with Anna Freud over whether the superego exists from birth.

  • mirror stage — In Lacan’s mirror stage, the ego forms through identification with one’s reflected image around six months of age. Lacan tied this stage to the formation of an ideal-I and to the infant’s first relation to the Symbolic. The mirror stage is a psychoanalytic period important for recognizing oneself as an external object.

  • neo-Freudianism

    • Herbert “Harry” Stack Sullivan — Herbert “Harry” Stack Sullivan was an American psychiatrist associated with interpersonal psychiatry and neo-Freudian thought. He wrote Schizophrenia as a Human Process, developed ideas such as the prototaxic, parataxic, and syntaxic modes, and coined “significant other.”

    • Wilhelm Reich — Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian psychoanalyst and eccentric social theorist known for orgone energy, body armor, and vegetotherapy. He linked sexual repression to fascism and neurosis, wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascism, and later became notorious for orgone accumulators and government action against his devices and books. His work sits at the fringe of psychoanalysis and pseudoscience.

      • Modern Education and Will Therapy — The cited works, Modern Education and Will Therapy, point to the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich.

      • Orgone — Orgone was Wilhelm Reich’s supposed cosmic life energy, which he linked to sexuality and health. He claimed to store it in an orgone accumulator, the device that later helped bring him into conflict with regulators.

      • vegetotherapy — Vegetotherapy is Wilhelm Reich’s body-centered therapeutic method, designed to break through muscular armor and emotional repression. It is tied to his larger psychoanalytic system, along with his claims about orgone energy and the causes of fascism and neurosis.

  • oceanic feeling — An oceanic feeling is the sense of boundlessness or unity with the universe discussed by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud says the idea came from Romain Rolland and treats it as a possible source of religious feeling.

  • Princess Marie Bonaparte — Princess Marie Bonaparte was a French princess and psychoanalyst who worked with Freud and wrote on female sexuality. She is also associated with research on female orgasm and with helping Freud escape the Nazis.

  • psychoanalyst — This profession is held by psychoanalysts such as Spielvogel in Philip Roth and by Zack Busner in Alan Sillitoe’s fiction. It is the line of work of characters who listen to confessions, interpret mental life, and appear in modern novels as analysts of troubled narrators.

  • Psychoanalysts
    • Otto Rank — Otto Rank was an Austrian psychoanalyst and one-time Freud disciple who broke with Freud and was expelled from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. He is known for The Trauma of Birth, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, and Will Therapy, and earlier wrote on the artist, the hero myth, and the will. He later emphasized the “here and now” in therapy and wrote about art, mythology, and the fear of death and life.

      • birth trauma — Otto Rank’s birth trauma theory argued that the original anxiety of separation from the womb shapes later neurosis. He developed the idea in opposition to Freud’s emphasis on the Oedipus complex.

      • The Trauma of Birth — The Trauma of Birth is Otto Rank’s psychoanalytic work arguing that anxiety and neurosis originate in the transition from the womb to the outside world. The book broke with Freud and is associated with perinatal psychology and the idea of a pre-Oedipal stage.

    • Takeo Doi — Takeo Doi was a Japanese psychoanalyst and critic of Ruth Benedict who wrote The Anatomy of Dependence. He is best known for the concept of amae, a dependent or indulgent relationship that he treated as central to Japanese social behavior.
  • psychosexual development
    • Oedipus complex — The Oedipus complex is Freud’s idea that a child has unconscious sexual desire for the opposite-sex parent and rivalry with the same-sex parent. It is tied to castration anxiety, penis envy, and the formation of the superego, and Carl Jung proposed the Electra complex as a female analogue. Critics such as Malinowski, Horney, and Deleuze and Guattari challenged its universality and family-centered assumptions.
  • Psychosexual stages

    • anal stage — The anal stage is Freud’s second psychosexual stage, associated with toilet training in early childhood. Fixation at this stage was said to produce either anal-retentive orderliness or anal-expulsive messiness.

    • oral — The oral stage is Freud’s earliest psychosexual stage and is characterized by dependency and pleasure centered on the mouth. It is often linked with later oral fixations such as smoking, nail biting, overeating, and drinking.

  • repetition compulsion — Repetition compulsion is Freud’s term for the tendency to reenact traumatic or painful experiences rather than simply seek pleasure. It is a central idea in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where Freud links it to the death drive and the child’s fort-da game.

  • Structural model of the psyche

    • superego — The superego is Freud’s moral and internalized regulatory part of the psyche, opposed to the id and shaped by social rules and parental authority. It is often described as the conscience or “over-I” that judges behavior and enforces ideals and prohibitions.

    • transference — Transference is the psychoanalytic phenomenon in which a patient projects feelings from earlier relationships onto the therapist. Lacan’s scheme distinguishes symbolic, imaginary, and real forms of this process, and countertransference names the analyst’s emotional response to it.

  • Sándor Ferenczi — Hungarian psychoanalyst closely associated with Freud but later known for innovations in technique and theory. He wrote Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, served as president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, and collaborated with Otto Rank. He is also associated with empathy in therapy, unconventional ideas about childhood trauma, the “confusion of tongues,” and clinical touching as part of treatment.

  • The Myth of the Birth of the Hero — Otto Rank’s The Myth of the Birth of the Hero is a psychoanalytic study of heroic birth myths and their recurring family patterns. It compares figures such as Sargon, Moses, Hercules, Lohengrin, and Jesus while drawing on Freudian ideas.

  • the uncanny — The uncanny is Freud’s concept for the eerie feeling that arises when something familiar becomes strangely unfamiliar. It is tied to repetition, doubles, repressed fear, and the return of hidden anxieties, especially in Freud’s discussion of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman.”

  • the unconscious — The unconscious is the hidden part of the mind in psychoanalysis and related philosophy, associated with Freud, Jung, and Lacan. It is often discussed as a source of slips, dreams, repression, and symbolic language.

  • therapeutic technique
    • free association — Free association is a psychoanalytic technique in which the patient speaks spontaneously and uncensored. It also names the political compact linking the United States with Palau, Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands in exchange for defense and military access.
  • Unconscious mind — The unconscious mind is the part of the psyche Freud associated with repressed thoughts, dreams, and slips of the tongue. Jung also described a collective form of it containing inherited images and patterns.
    • unconscious — The unconscious is the part of the mind that lies outside direct introspection, making its contents inaccessible to the person who has it. In Freudian theory, dreams draw heavily on repressed material from the unconscious, and death instincts are placed there as well.

  • Wilfred Bion — Wilfred Bion was a British psychoanalyst and group theorist associated with the Tavistock Institute and the study of group processes. His Experiences in Groups distinguishes between work groups and basic-assumption groups and uses the notion of O for ultimate truth.

  • William Stekel — William Stekel was an Austrian psychoanalyst of Polish origin who broke with Freud and later tried to restore their association. His surname is glossed in the evidence as meaning ‘little stick.’

  • Object relations theory — British school (Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, Ronald Fairbairn): psychological development driven by internalized representations of self and others (objects); Winnicott’s transitional object (security blanket) as bridge between inner and outer reality.

  • Freudian psychosexual stages — oral, anal, phallic (Oedipus/Electra complex), latency, genital. Fixation at any stage was said to produce characteristic adult traits.

  • association — Association is the connection of two ideas or items, and in psychology it names free association, the uncensored speaking technique used in psychoanalysis. The term also appears in tests of implicit bias and in memory tasks that pair names with faces.

  • Freud — Freud refers to the family of Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud, key figures in psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams and Civilization and Its Discontents, while Anna Freud advanced child psychoanalysis and defense mechanisms.
    • death drive — Freud’s idea of an inborn drive toward self-destruction or a return to an inorganic, calm state. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he contrasts it with Eros and the pleasure principle, and treats aggression as one outward expression of the impulse.
  • Studies in Hysteria — Studies in Hysteria is the 1895 Freud and Breuer work that set out the ‘talking cure’ and is often treated as an early psychoanalytic text. It grew out of their work with hypnotic treatment and Josef Breuer’s earlier therapeutic method.

• Neo-Freudians — Carl Jung (collective unconscious, archetypes, introversion/extraversion), Alfred Adler (inferiority complex, birth order), Karen Horney (basic anxiety, cultural factors in neurosis), Erik Erikson (psychosocial development), Erich Fromm (see below).

• Behaviorism — argued psychology should study only observable behavior; rejected introspection. John B. Watson (“Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” 1913). B.F. Skinner extended behaviorism through operant conditioning.

• Humanistic psychology — Carl Rogers (person-centered therapy, unconditional positive regard) and Abraham Maslow (hierarchy of needs, self-actualization); emphasized conscious experience, free will, and human potential. Rose partly in reaction to behaviorism and psychoanalysis. It is associated above all with Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, including Rogers’s client-centered therapy and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
  • Human Potential Movement — The Human Potential Movement was a mid-20th-century countercultural psychological and therapeutic trend associated with the Esalen Institute. It emphasized self-actualization, encounter groups, and therapies influenced by humanistic psychology and Gestalt methods.

• Cognitive revolution — 1950s–1960s shift toward studying mental processes (perception, memory, language, reasoning) as information processing. Key figures: Ulric Neisser (Cognitive Psychology, 1967), George Miller (“The Magical Number Seven,” 1956), Noam Chomsky (critique of Skinner’s language account).

• Gestalt psychology — Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, Kurt Koffka; “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”; principles of perceptual organization: proximity, similarity, closure, continuity, figure-ground. It is a German school of psychology often linked to the phi phenomenon and the law of Prägnanz, and it later influenced therapy and broader perception research.
  • apparent motion
    • phi phenomenon — The phi phenomenon is a Gestalt illusion in which rapid succession of still images or stationary lights creates the perception of motion. It is closely associated with Max Wertheimer and the early study of apparent movement, and it is often contrasted with beta movement. Gestalt psychologists used it to explain apparent movement in film and signage.
  • figure-ground perception

    • figure — In Gestalt psychology, a figure is the object of attention that stands out from the background. The Rubin vase is a classic example of figure-ground reversal, where the same image can be seen as either vase or faces.

    • figure and ground — Figure and ground are Gestalt psychology terms for the perceiver’s division of a scene into the object of attention and its background. They are illustrated by reversible images such as Rubin’s vase and other multistable figures.

  • law of common fate — The law of common fate is a Gestalt grouping principle in which objects moving together are perceived as belonging together. It explains why a flock of birds or school of fish is seen as a single unit.

  • Law of Pragnanz — The law of Pragnanz is the Gestalt principle that perceptual experience tends toward the simplest, most regular, or “best” form. It appears in psychology questions alongside ideas about good figures and visual organization.

  • Prägnanz — Prägnanz is a Gestalt principle that the mind tends to organize perception into the simplest, most regular, and most coherent whole. It grew out of early Gestalt studies of movement and is often summarized as the law of good form. Wertheimer described it as a tendency toward conciseness or precision in grasping a whole.

  • Similarity — Similarity is the relation or measure of commonality or likeness between things, often contrasted with difference and used in psychology, classification, and mathematical geometry. It appears in Gestalt theory and organization, in interpersonal attraction, in Tversky’s feature-based comparison work, and alongside proximity, complementarity, and categorization; in geometry it refers to figures with proportional sides and equal angles.

• Max Wertheimer — co-founder of Gestalt psychology; the phi phenomenon (apparent motion from two alternating stationary lights) was his paradigm case that perception cannot be reduced to individual elements. He also wrote Experimental Studies of the Perception of Movement and Productive Thinking, and formulated the Gestalt principle of pragnanz.

• Wolfgang Köhler — Gestalt co-founder; studied insight learning in chimpanzees on Tenerife; argued for isomorphism between brain fields and perceived forms; authored The Mentality of Apes (1917). He was a German Gestalt psychologist and one of the school’s co-founders alongside Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka. He is also known for studies of insight learning in chimpanzees on Tenerife, especially the chimpanzee Sultan, and for work on transposition and the phi phenomenon.

• Kurt Koffka — Gestalt co-founder; brought Gestalt ideas to American psychology via Principles of Gestalt Psychology (1935). He was associated with Wolfgang Köhler and Max Wertheimer, wrote The Growth of the Mind, and later helped bring Gestalt theory to the United States through Principles of Gestalt Psychology.

• Evolutionary psychology — applies Darwinian principles to psychological traits; argues many cognitive and social tendencies are adaptations. Associated with David Buss, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby. It is often contrasted with the standard social science model and has been especially associated with John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, and David Buss.
  • Coolidge effect
    • the Coolidge effect — The Coolidge effect is the increased sexual responsiveness of males to novel mates after prior copulation. Its name comes from the famous anecdote involving President Calvin Coolidge and a rooster on a farm.

  • Leda Cosmides and John Tooby — Leda Cosmides and John Tooby are evolutionary psychologists known for arguing that the mind contains specialized adaptations. They coauthored work in The Adapted Mind and are associated with research on the Wason selection task.

  • Stephen Pinker — Stephen Pinker is a cognitive scientist and evolutionary psychologist known for The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate, and The Better Angels of Our Nature. His work argues for universal grammar, declining violence, and a more naturalistic view of mind and language. He is also associated with popular writing on taboo language and with debates about Chomsky, innate structures, and human nature. His books have drawn both acclaim and criticism from linguists and social theorists.
    • The Language Instinct — The Language Instinct is Stephen Pinker’s book arguing that humans possess an innate capacity for language. It includes chapters on mentalese, language acquisition, and critiques of Whorfian determinism and standard social science models.
• Analytical Psychology — Analytical psychology is the school of psychology founded by Carl Jung. It focuses on dreams, the personal unconscious, and the motivations beneath conscious behavior.
  • anima and animus — In Jungian psychology, the anima and animus are the complementary unconscious images of femininity in men and masculinity in women. They are the feminine and masculine counterparts that inhabit the unconscious and are part of Jung’s larger system of archetypes, often paired with the shadow and persona.
    • animus or anima — In Jungian theory, the animus and anima are the inner masculine and feminine aspects of the psyche. They are tied to the unconscious self and represent an individual’s inner opposite.

  • Animus — In Jungian psychology, the animus is the masculine aspect of the female psyche. Clarissa Pinkola-Estés uses the concept in her work on folklore and feminine psychology, where it appears as both a protective and a threatening figure.

  • archetypes — In Jungian psychology, archetypes are recurring primordial images or patterns in the collective unconscious. Common examples include the anima, animus, Shadow, Self, Child, and Syzygy, and they also influenced archetypal literary criticism through figures like Northrop Frye.

  • Carl Gustav Jung — Swiss psychologist and founder of analytical/analytic psychology. Jung developed the ideas of the collective unconscious, archetypes, individuation, introversion and extraversion, and related figures such as the shadow, anima, and animus; he also coined synchronicity. He broke with Freud over theoretical differences, including libido, and his work on personality types influenced later systems such as Myers-Briggs. Notable works include Psychological Types, Psychology and Alchemy, and Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, the last illustrating his interpretation of cultural imagery through psychological patterns.

    • Analytic psychology — Analytic psychology is Carl Jung’s school of psychology, developed in opposition to Freud’s psychoanalysis. It emphasizes the personal unconscious, dreams, and the symbolic interpretation of psychic life.

    • anima — Anima is Carl Jung’s archetype for the feminine inner personality of a man. Clues often mention its levels of development named Eve, Helen, Mary, and Sophia, and its contrast with animus.

    • Man and His Symbols — Man and His Symbols is Carl Jung’s 1961 popular introduction to his ideas, published near the end of his life. The book explains Jungian notions of the unconscious, dreams, and symbols for a general audience.

    • Memories, Dreams, Reflections — Memories, Dreams, Reflections is Carl Jung’s autobiography, assembled from his own reminiscences and editorial help from his secretary. The book presents Jung’s life and ideas in a partly mediated, partly self-authored form.

    • Psychological Types — Psychological Types is Carl Jung’s 1921 book that introduced the introvert-extravert distinction. It also develops the sensing-intuition and thinking-feeling pairings that became central to later personality typing.

    • Psychology of the Unconscious — Psychology of the Unconscious is Carl Jung’s work on libido, myth, and symbolic transformation, later associated with the title Symbols of Transformation. It is often treated as an early landmark in Jung’s break with Freud and expands analysis beyond narrowly sexual interpretation.

  • Collective unconscious — Carl Jung’s idea of a shared, inherited layer of the psyche containing archetypes and common symbolic patterns, contrasted with the personal unconscious. It was used to explain recurring myths, synchronicity, and universal images across cultures, as an inherited reservoir of shared human memories, feelings, and thought patterns.

  • individuation — Individuation is the Jungian process by which the psyche develops toward wholeness. It involves bringing material from the personal and collective unconscious into consciousness.

  • shadow — In Jungian psychology, the shadow is the part of the psyche formed by repressed instincts, weaknesses, and other unwanted traits. It is a key archetype in dreams and in Jung’s account of personality. The word also appears in the title of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth and in many other non-psychological contexts. A shadow is the dark region cast when light is blocked.

  • synchronicity — Synchronicity is Carl Jung’s idea that unrelated events can line up in a meaningful way, even though they are not causally connected.

  • Jung’s archetypes — collective unconscious contains universal primordial images: persona (social mask), shadow (repressed self), anima/animus (contrasexual elements), self (totality); individuation is the process of integrating these.

• Wilhelm Wundt — founded experimental psychology (1879 Leipzig lab); structuralism; introspection; also developed Völkerpsychologie (cultural/folk psychology) in later career. He is also associated with apperception, reaction-time experiments, and works such as Principles of Physiological Psychology and Folk Psychology. He taught students including Edward Titchener and Hugo Münsterberg.

• Sigmund Freud — psychoanalysis; unconscious; id/ego/superego; psychosexual stages. Austrian founder of psychoanalysis and author of The Interpretation of Dreams, Civilization and Its Discontents, Moses and Monotheism, and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. His work is also associated with dream interpretation, repression, the Oedipus complex, the death drive, and case studies such as Studies on Hysteria and “Irma’s injection.”

  • Beyond the Pleasure Principle — Freud’s 1920 essay, also known as Jenseits des Lustprinzips, on repetition compulsion and the death instinct (Thanatos). It contrasts Eros with Thanatos, and is famous for the fort/da game and for arguing that observations of play, hatred, and destructiveness reveal pressures beyond simple pleasure-seeking.

  • Dora — Dora is the pseudonym Freud used for Ida Bauer, the patient in his famous case study of hysteria. Her analysis became one of Freud’s best-known examples of hysteria, free association, and dream interpretation.

  • dream interpretation
    • latent content — Latent content is Freud’s term for the hidden, symbolic meaning beneath a dream’s manifest content. It names the unconscious wishes and drives that dream interpretation tries to uncover.

  • Eros and Thanatos — Eros and Thanatos are Freud’s paired instincts for love and death, often translated as the life and death drives. They also appear in later psychoanalytic discussions, including Melanie Klein’s descriptions of opposing life and death pulsations.

  • Irma’s injection — “Irma’s Injection” is Freud’s dream of a party visit in which Dr. M administers an injection to the patient Irma. Freud interpreted it as a wish-fulfillment dream that displaced blame for a failure of treatment.

  • Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious — Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious is Freud’s 1905 study of humor, wit, and the unconscious. It argues that jokes release psychic energy and reveals how humor can expose hidden or tendentious impulses.

  • Little Hans — Little Hans was the Freud case study of a five-year-old boy whose fear of horses was interpreted as evidence for the Oedipus complex. The boy’s phobia was linked to castration anxiety and to his relation with his parents, especially his father and mother.

  • oral stage — The oral stage is Freud’s first psychosexual stage, lasting from birth to roughly eighteen months. It is associated with pleasure through the mouth, and fixation on it can be linked to behaviors such as smoking, overeating, and dependency.

  • patients of Sigmund Freud — Patients of Sigmund Freud are the famous case-study figures used to illustrate psychoanalysis, including the Wolf Man, Little Hans, and Anna O. Freud used them to develop ideas such as repression, castration anxiety, and deferred action.

  • Phallic stage — The phallic stage is Freud’s third psychosexual stage, occurring roughly between ages three and six. It is associated with the Oedipus and Electra complexes and ends with the child identifying with a parent and internalizing morality.

  • Psychoanalytic concepts
    • Freudian slip — A Freudian slip, or parapraxis, is an apparently accidental error in speech or writing. In psychoanalytic terms, it is taken to reveal an unconscious thought or desire.
  • psychoanalytic theory
    • penis envy — Penis envy is Freud’s theory that girls unconsciously desire the male sexual organ, a claim Karen Horney later criticized and answered with her own theory of womb envy. The concept is often tied to early childhood psychosexual development and to later arguments about gender identity and resentment of the mother.
  • Psychosexual stages

    • Freud’s psychosexual stages — Freud’s five psychosexual stages are oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. They form his classic developmental sequence from infancy through adulthood.

    • genital stage — In Freud’s psychosexual theory, the genital stage is the final stage beginning at puberty. It is the point at which sexual urges are directed toward other people rather than inward or toward earlier developmental fixations.

  • religion
    • The Future of an Illusion or Die Zukunft einer Illusion — Freud’s The Future of an Illusion is a 1927 critique of religious belief. It argues that belief in God expresses human helplessness and projects an idealized father figure.
  • The Interpretation of Dreams — Sigmund Freud’s foundational psychoanalytic work on dream interpretation, wish fulfillment, dream symbolism, and latent versus manifest content. It analyzes the famous Irma dream, also called Irma’s Injection, and examples such as the Wolf Man, Little Hans, and the botanical monograph dream. The book is a central text for ideas including condensation, displacement, secondary revision, and the Oedipus complex.
    • Irma — Irma is the patient in Freud’s famous “Irma’s injection” dream from The Interpretation of Dreams. The dream became a key example in psychoanalysis because Freud treated it as a window into guilt, wish fulfillment, and unconscious desire.

  • The Psychopathology of Everyday Life — The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is Freud’s 1901 study of parapraxes, slips, and mistaken actions. It is the “Mistake Book” in his trio of major works on the unconscious, and it helped popularize the idea of the Freudian slip.

  • The Rat Man — Freud’s case study of an army officer who developed an obsessive fear of rat torture and the harm it might bring to loved ones. The nickname comes from the patient’s fixation on rats as a source of punishment and contamination. It was an early psychoanalytic case study and later influenced Lacan’s reflections on neurosis and fantasy.
    • The Ratman — This character is a military officer and patient whose obsessive fear centers on a torture involving rats and on a nightmare punishment imagined for his father. The figure comes from Sigmund Freud’s case study commonly known as ‘The Rat Man.’

  • Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality — Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is Freud’s study of childhood sexuality and libido. It introduces ideas such as sublimation, psychosexual development, and the Oedipus complex.

  • Totem and Taboo — Totem and Taboo is Sigmund Freud’s collection of essays on the origins of religion, taboo, and kinship prohibitions. Drawing on Frazer, it links totemism and incest avoidance to animism, magic, and the psychology of neurosis.

  • Moses and Monotheism — Sigmund Freud’s 1939 final major work on the origins of religion. It uses psychoanalytic ideas to explain Judaism’s development through trauma, guilt, and collective memory, and argues that Moses was an Egyptian nobleman associated with Akhenaten’s Aten cult. Freud controversially reimagines Moses’s origins, claiming that the Israelites murdered their leader before the religion transformed around him, and extends the idea of religion spreading through the subordination of peoples to father figures.
• William James — functionalism; Principles of Psychology (1890); pragmatism; stream of consciousness; also proposed the James-Lange theory of emotion (bodily changes precede and constitute emotion: “we feel afraid because we run”).

  • Principles of Psychology — William James’s Principles of Psychology is a landmark 1890 psychology text. It includes discussions of the stream of thought and helped define early American psychology.

  • The Principles of Psychology — The Principles of Psychology is William James’s influential 1890 textbook on mental life and the philosophy of mind. It is famous for the idea of stream of consciousness and for its treatment of habit, emotion, memory, and the automaton theory.

• Abraham Maslow — hierarchy of needs; self-actualization; humanistic psychology.

  • peak experiences — Peak experiences are Maslow’s term for moments of intense joy, transcendence, or ecstatic fulfillment. He discussed them alongside self-actualization and in the book Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences. They are presented as brief, memorable moments of extraordinary psychological intensity.

  • Toward a Psychology of Being — Toward a Psychology of Being is Abraham Maslow’s 1962 work expanding on self-actualization and the hierarchy of needs. It discusses peak experiences, B-cognition, creativity, and the qualities of healthy human beings.

  • Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — already covered; note that self-transcendence was added above self-actualization in Maslow’s later writings, though the five-level pyramid is the canonical version. It is Abraham Maslow’s theory of human motivation, classically arranged from physiological needs to safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization.

    • Abraham Harold Maslow — Abraham Harold Maslow was a humanistic psychologist best known for the hierarchy of needs, which culminates in self-actualization. He also wrote about peak experiences, metamotivation, and B-values, and taught at Brandeis University. His ideas helped define humanistic psychology and were laid out in works such as Motivation and Personality, Toward a Psychology of Being, and The Farther Reaches of Human Nature.

    • basic needs and growth needs — Maslow’s hierarchy divides human motivation into basic needs and growth needs.

    • Deficit needs — Deficit needs are Maslow’s lower-level needs, the needs that motivate people when they are not satisfied. They include physiological, safety, belonging, and esteem needs.

    • Esteem — Esteem is Maslow’s need for respect, confidence, and recognition from oneself and others. It is the level just below self-actualization in the hierarchy of needs.

    • esteem needs — Esteem needs are Maslow’s needs for recognition, respect, competence, and self-worth. They are placed above safety and belonging needs and below self-actualization in Maslow’s hierarchy.

    • Physiological needs — Physiological needs are the base of Maslow’s hierarchy and include essentials such as air, food, water, sleep, and sex. They are the survival-level needs that must be met before higher levels of motivation.

    • Safety needs — Safety needs, also called security needs, are the second level in Maslow’s hierarchy after physiological needs. They concern stability, protection, and freedom from threat.

    • safety, belonging, and esteem needs — In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the levels below self-actualization include safety, belonging, and esteem needs. These categories describe the social and security-related needs that must be met before higher-level fulfillment.

    • self-actualization — Self-actualization is Maslow’s highest need, describing the fulfillment of one’s potential and the basis for peak experiences. It is associated with health, autonomy, realistic perception, and the later idea of self-transcendence.

• Carl Rogers — person-centered therapy; unconditional positive regard; congruence (therapist authenticity); empathic understanding; Q-sort method for measuring self-concept; On Becoming a Person (1961). Carl Ransom Rogers was a humanistic psychologist who also wrote Freedom to Learn and A Way of Being, and linked healthy development to becoming fully functioning and living the good life; he also described the actualizing tendency.

  • On Becoming a Person — Carl Rogers’s 1961 book subtitled A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. It is his best-known book on client-centered therapy and develops his humanistic view of therapy, emphasizing genuine, validating interaction with clients. It presents ideas such as the actualizing tendency, congruence, unconditional positive regard, and the therapist’s role in creating a helping relationship.

  • unconditional positive regard — Unconditional positive regard is Carl Rogers’s term for accepting a person without judgment. In client-centered therapy, Rogers treated it as a basic condition for healthy psychological growth and the absence of conditions of worth.

• Alfred Adler — inferiority complex and compensatory striving for superiority; birth order; individual psychology; early break with Freud. Austrian neo-Freudian psychologist; he stressed social motives over sexual ones and opened Vienna’s first child guidance clinic. He also discussed the fictional final goal.
  • Adlerian psychology
    • inferiority complex — An inferiority complex is Adler’s term for a persistent feeling of inadequacy or weakness. In quizbowl, it is often linked to overcompensation and to Alfred Adler’s split from Freud over the causes of neurosis.

  • inferiority — Inferiority is the feeling of inadequacy or lack of self-esteem often linked to Alfred Adler’s inferiority complex. Erik Erikson’s stage of industry versus inferiority uses it for the school-age years, when competence is either developed or undermined.

  • The Neurotic Character — The Neurotic Character is an early work by Alfred Adler that explains personality in teleological terms. It develops Adler’s ideas about inferiority, overcompensation, and the masculine protest.

• Karen Horney — proposed three neurotic coping strategies: moving toward people (compliance), moving against people (aggression), moving away from people (detachment); emphasized cultural and relational factors over Freud’s biology. A German-born neo-Freudian psychoanalyst, she argued that neuroses stem from disturbed interpersonal relationships, childhood conflict, and social factors rather than instinct alone. She is associated with feminist psychology, basic anxiety, criticism of Freud’s penis envy, and the idea of womb envy; she wrote The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, Our Inner Conflicts, and Neurosis and Human Growth, and helped found the American Journal of Psychoanalysis.

• Erich Fromm (1900–1980) — German-American psychoanalyst and social psychologist; synthesized Freudian and Marxist thought; argued in Escape from Freedom (1941) that modern individuals flee the burden of freedom into authoritarianism, conformity, or destructiveness; The Art of Loving (1956) treated love as a skill and social practice; coined the concept of the authoritarian character (sadomasochistic submission to authority combined with domination of subordinates); emphasized that character is shaped by socioeconomic conditions, distinguishing him from classical Freudians. He was also a German-born social critic associated with the Frankfurt School who later emigrated to the United States. Other major works include The Sane Society and Man for Himself.
  • Escape from Freedom — Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom argues that people flee autonomy through authoritarianism, destructiveness, or automaton conformity. The book links this fear of freedom to the appeal of Nazism and presents Fromm’s humanistic alternative to modern social alienation.
• Bruno Bettelheim (1903–1990) — Austrian-American psychoanalyst; survived Dachau and Buchenau; directed the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago; The Uses of Enchantment (1976) argued that fairy tales perform psychoanalytic work for children by externalizing inner conflicts; controversially attributed childhood autism to emotionally cold “refrigerator mothers” — a theory now discredited; his broader clinical methods have also been reassessed after posthumous revelations about abusive practices; The Empty Fortress (1967) is his major clinical work on autism.

  • Children of the Dream — Children of the Dream is Bruno Bettelheim’s study of childrearing in Israeli kibbutzim. It argues that communal upbringing shapes personality and social development.

  • Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations — Bruno Bettelheim’s “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations” is a 1943 essay based on his observations in concentration camps. It analyzes how trauma and tyranny shape collective and individual behavior under Nazi imprisonment.

  • Love is Not Enough — Love Is Not Enough is Bruno Bettelheim’s study of emotionally disturbed children, originally published with photographs and built around observations of school and home life. It argues that affection alone is insufficient and draws lessons from cases like Stuart and from routines such as meals and supervised recreation.

  • The Uses of Enchantment — The Uses of Enchantment is Bruno Bettelheim’s Freudian reading of fairy tales, subtitled The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. It argues that stories like ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ and ‘The Frog King’ help children work through developmental conflicts.

  • The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales — Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales reads classic fairy tales through a Freudian lens. It discusses stories such as “Hansel and Gretel,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” and “The Queen Bee.”

• Viktor Frankl — existential/logotherapy; Man’s Search for Meaning (1946); experiences in Nazi concentration camps; will to meaning as primary motivator; not a major empirical researcher but a major cultural influence on humanistic/existential psychology. He was an Austrian psychiatrist who founded logotherapy, the Third Viennese School of psychotherapy. He is also known for emphasizing meaning, purpose, and responsibility as responses to existential emptiness.
  • Logotherapy — Logotherapy is Viktor Frankl’s school of psychotherapy centered on the human search for meaning. It is associated with concepts such as noödynamics, paradoxical intention, and Frankl’s account of maintaining freedom of attitude even in Auschwitz.
    • Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy — Man’s Search for Meaning is Viktor Frankl’s account of surviving Nazi concentration camps and the psychological stages of that experience. It also introduces logotherapy, with its emphasis on meaning, responsibility, and tragic optimism.
  • Man’s Search for Meaning — Man’s Search for Meaning is Viktor Frankl’s classic account of concentration camp experience and the basis for his logotherapy. It develops themes like tragic optimism, responsibility, and the search for purpose under suffering.

• Association tests — Association tests measure how subjects respond to a stimulus with a first word or reaction and how long the response takes. They may be free or controlled, and they are used to study mental associations.

• History of psychology

  • Edwin Boring — Edwin Boring was an American psychologist and one of the early historians of psychology. He wrote A History of Experimental Psychology and The Physical Dimensions of Consciousness.

  • Granville Stanley Hall — Granville Stanley Hall was an early American psychologist who founded the first psychology laboratory and journal in the United States and helped organize the APA. He is known for Adolescence, the doctrine of recapitulation, and the idea of adolescent “storm and stress.”

• child psychoanalysis
  • Melanie Klein — The Psychoanalysis of Children is Melanie Klein’s foundational work in child psychoanalysis and object relations theory. Klein is associated with play therapy, projective identification, and the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions.
• Dream interpretation
  • interpreting dreams — Interpreting dreams is the supernatural skill associated with Joseph, Daniel, and other biblical and classical figures who explain visions. The nonbiblical side of the clue points to Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica, a major ancient work on dream interpretation.
• Feminist psychoanalysis
  • Mother-daughter development
    • The Reproduction of Mothering — Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering argues that gender roles and masculine dominance are shaped by early family relations. The book focuses on how boys and girls develop identities through their relationships to mothers and fathers.
• Interpersonal psychoanalysis
  • Harry Stack Sullivan — Harry Stack Sullivan was an American psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and psychologist who extended Freud’s ideas into an interpersonal theory of psychiatry. He is especially associated with the self-system, prototaxic-parataxic-syntaxic modes of experience, and clinical work on schizophrenia. He founded the journal Psychiatry and argued that therapy should be a face-to-face interpersonal exchange.

• Jacques Lacan — Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst known for the mirror stage, the Real/Symbolic/Imaginary triad, and his dense seminars and Ecrits. He recast Freud through structuralist language, introduced the objet petit a, and is often linked to the Borromean knot and the idea that the ego is formed through misrecognition.

• Josef Breuer
  • Studies on Hysteria
    • Anna O — Anna O., whose real name was Bertha Pappenheim, was an early and famous patient of Josef Breuer in the history of psychoanalysis. Her case became associated with hypnosis, catharsis, and the notion of transference.
• psychoanalytic concepts
  • womb envy — Womb envy is the psychoanalytic idea that men resent women’s ability to bear children. The term appears in feminist and post-Freudian discussions of gendered compensation and technology, often as a counterpart to Freud’s penis envy.
• psychoanalytic theory
  • defense mechanisms — Defense mechanisms are unconscious psychological strategies that protect the ego from anxiety and help cope with difficult feelings. Anna Freud discussed them, and George Vaillant later classified them. Examples include repression, projection, denial, reaction formation, sublimation, humor, and anticipation.

    • Denial — Denial is the first stage of grief, and a defense mechanism in which a person refuses to accept an unpleasant or unwelcome reality, such as insisting that a clear loss or failure is not really happening.

    • inhibitions — Inhibition is the suppression of behavior or response, the opposite of excitation in conditioning terminology. It appears in Freud’s writings and in concepts such as latent and reactive inhibition.

    • Intellectualization — Intellectualization is a defense mechanism in which a person distances themself from emotion by focusing on abstract, rational analysis of an event or distressing experience. It is often described as overthinking or reducing an unwanted feeling into cold, analytical reasons to avoid experiencing it. A related form of this defense is rationalization, which offers seemingly logical explanations to cover emotional motives.

    • Introjection — Introjection is a psychological defense mechanism in which a person internalizes outside values, standards, or traits as part of the self. It is often described as taking in external attributes so they no longer feel wholly outside the ego.

    • Rationalization — Rationalization is a defense mechanism in which a person invents an acceptable explanation for behavior driven by less acceptable motives. It is the kind of self-justifying excuse someone offers when trying to make a failure or bad action seem reasonable.

    • reaction formation — Reaction formation is a Freudian defense mechanism in which a person behaves in a way opposite to their true feelings. Anna Freud discussed this mechanism as part of her study of defense mechanisms.

    • repression — Repression is the Freudian defense mechanism that pushes unwanted desires or memories out of consciousness. Marcuse and Foucault both use the term in broader critiques of social control, including repressive desublimation and the repressive hypothesis.

    • splitting — Splitting is a defense mechanism in which people are seen as entirely good or entirely bad, often described as black-and-white thinking. It is commonly associated with borderline personality disorder and may also appear in narcissistic personality disorder.

    • The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense — Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense explains how the ego uses defense mechanisms to manage anxiety and internal conflict. The book drew on her clinical work with children and became a foundational text in psychoanalytic theory.

    • Undoing — Undoing is a Freudian defense mechanism in which a person symbolically cancels an unacceptable thought or feeling through a compensatory act. A compulsive cleaning ritual after a conflict is a standard example.

  • id — In Freud’s model of the psyche, the id is the primitive reservoir of instinctual drives, including libido and the death instinct. It seeks immediate gratification and operates by the pleasure principle, alongside the ego and superego.

  • Young Man Luther — Young Man Luther is Erik Erikson’s psychoanalytic study of Martin Luther’s development and identity crisis. It interprets Luther’s famous tower experience, his call to St. Anne, and his break from Catholicism in Wittenberg.
• Individual Psychology — Individual psychology is Alfred Adler’s school of psychology, developed in opposition to Freud. It emphasizes the uniqueness of each person and the drive toward superiority, success, and compensation for feelings of inferiority.
  • Alfred W. Adler — Alfred Adler was the Austrian psychologist who founded individual psychology and coined the term inferiority complex. His work emphasized birth order, fictional final goals, and the idea that people compensate for feelings of weakness through a style of life.
• educational psychology
  • E. L. Thorndike — E. L. Thorndike was an American psychologist associated with Columbia Teachers College and early studies of instrumental learning. He is especially known for the law of effect and the law of exercise, and his puzzle-box experiments made him a foundational figure in educational psychology.

• Julian Rotter — Julian Rotter was a social learning theorist best known for developing the concept of locus of control. His work in Social Learning and Clinical Psychology emphasized expectancy and the value placed on outcomes as guides to behavior.

• Existential psychology
  • Rollo May — Rollo Reese May was an American existential psychologist and psychoanalyst associated with the William Alanson White Institute in New York City. He wrote about anxiety, authenticity, human development, and the “daimonic” in works such as The Meaning of Anxiety, Love and Will, and The Courage to Create, and he co-authored Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology.
• ethology

  • fixed action pattern — An innate, species-specific behavioral sequence that is triggered by a sign stimulus or releaser and then runs to completion, even if circumstances change. Konrad Lorenz studied it in animals such as greylag geese and stickleback fish, and Eibl-Eibesfeldt extended the idea to human gestures such as the eyebrow flash. Classic examples include male sticklebacks attacking red-bellied models and greylag geese rolling displaced eggs back to the nest.

  • Konrad Lorenz — Konrad Lorenz was an Austrian ethologist known for imprinting studies on greylag geese and for his work with Niko Tinbergen on fixed action patterns and the innate releasing mechanism. He also wrote King Solomon’s Ring, On Aggression, and Man Meets Dog.
    • King Solomon’s Ring — King Solomon’s Ring is a book by Konrad Lorenz, the ethologist famous for imprinting studies and for work on greylag geese. Lorenz’s name is also tied to innate releasing mechanisms, fixed action patterns, and the famous goose photograph that helped make animal behavior studies widely recognizable.

  • Konrad Zacharias Lorenz — Konrad Zacharias Lorenz was an Austrian ethologist and Nobel laureate known for imprinting and fixed action patterns. His books include King Solomon’s Ring and On Aggression.

  • territoriality — Territoriality is the behavior in which an animal defends an area against rivals of the same species. It is often shown through scent marking and is discussed through effects like the dear enemy and nasty neighbor phenomena.
• Mating systems
  • Monogamy — Monogamy is the mating or marriage system in which one individual has only one partner at a time, often for life. It is commonly contrasted with polygamy and is especially associated with many bird species. The term also appears in discussions of social arrangement and relational fidelity.

• The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology — This John Dewey essay attacks the idea of a simple stimulus-response chain in psychology. It uses the reflex arc to argue that perception and action form a unified circuit rather than separate events.

• Viktor Emil Frankl — Viktor Emil Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who developed logotherapy. In Man’s Search for Meaning, he described camp life and argued that meaning can be found even in suffering.

• Alexander Bain — Alexander Bain was a Scottish philosopher and early psychologist associated with empiricism and associationism. He wrote The Senses and the Intellect and The Emotions and the Will, and he founded the journal Mind.

• Pierre Janet — Pierre Janet was a French psychologist and neurologist who studied hysteria, traumatic memory, hypnosis, and dissociation. His work under Jean-Martin Charcot helped establish ideas that later influenced psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

Historical Classifications and Contested Traditions

Study discarded classifications and historical controversies in their research context, apart from current accounts of mind and behavior.

• Phrenology
  • Franz Joseph Gall — Franz Joseph Gall was the German physician who founded phrenology, the pseudoscience that linked skull bumps to mental traits. He developed it with Johann Spurzheim and became associated with a broader 19th-century interest in measuring human anatomy for character analysis.
• Eugenics
  • Kallikak family — The Kallikak family was the fabricated and later discredited pedigree used in Henry Herbert Goddard’s 1912 eugenics study of hereditary feeble-mindedness. Goddard claimed the line descended from a Revolutionary War soldier and a tavern girl, and contrasted a supposedly “good” line with a “bad” line; accounts also mention the Vineland training school and the patriarch Martin. The name was said to come from Greek roots meaning “good-bad.”
• Anti-psychiatry
  • Ronald D. Laing — Ronald D. Laing was a Scottish psychiatrist associated with anti-psychiatry and with the view that schizophrenia must be understood within a person’s social and family context. He wrote The Divided Self and Sanity, Madness and the Family, works that helped shape later family therapy debates.
• Dr. Fredric Wertham — Fredric Wertham was the psychiatrist who argued that comic books harmed children and helped inspire the Comics Code Authority. He is especially known for Seduction of the Innocent and for claims about Batman, Robin, and Wonder Woman.

Neurons, Brains, and Biological Foundations

Build from neurons and signaling to brain systems.

Neuroscience Basics

The Neuron

• Neuron structure — cell body (soma), dendrites (receive signals), axon (transmits signals), myelin sheath (speeds conduction), terminal buttons (release neurotransmitters). Schwann cells form myelin in the peripheral nervous system; oligodendrocytes in the central nervous system.

• Action potential — an all-or-nothing electrical impulse generated when the membrane potential crosses threshold (~−55 mV). Depolarization (Na+ influx) followed by repolarization (K+ efflux); the brief refractory period prevents backward transmission.

• Resting potential — approximately −70 mV maintained by the Na+/K+ pump (3 Na+ out, 2 K+ in per cycle).

• Synapse — the junction between two neurons. Neurotransmitters are released from presynaptic vesicles into the synaptic cleft and bind postsynaptic receptors. Excitatory postsynaptic potentials (EPSPs) depolarize; inhibitory postsynaptic potentials (IPSPs) hyperpolarize.

• Reuptake and degradation — neurotransmitters are cleared by reuptake transporters (target of SSRIs, cocaine, amphetamines) or enzymatic breakdown (e.g., acetylcholinesterase degrades acetylcholine; MAO degrades monoamines).

• Neurons

  • axon hillock — The axon hillock is the junction where a neuron’s cell body meets its axon. It is the site of signal summation that helps determine whether an action potential will be generated.

Key Neurotransmitters

• Dopamine — reward, motivation, motor control; implicated in schizophrenia (excess) and Parkinson’s disease (deficit in substantia nigra). Mesolimbic pathway: reward; mesocortical: cognition; nigrostriatal: movement. It is a catecholamine neurotransmitter.

• Serotonin (5-HT) — mood, sleep, appetite; most neurons originate in the raphe nuclei. Depleted in depression; SSRIs block reuptake.

• Norepinephrine (noradrenaline) — arousal, attention, fight-or-flight; locus coeruleus is the primary source.

• Acetylcholine (ACh) — muscle contraction (neuromuscular junction), memory, autonomic function; loss of ACh neurons in the basal forebrain is associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

• GABA — the main inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain; benzodiazepines and alcohol enhance GABA-A receptor activity. It is gamma-aminobutyric acid, synthesized from glutamate by glutamic acid decarboxylase, and it also acts through GABA-B receptors; barbiturates also target its signaling.

• Glutamate — the main excitatory neurotransmitter; NMDA receptors are key to synaptic plasticity and learning. Excessive glutamate leads to excitotoxicity. Also called glutamic acid; its monosodium salt is monosodium glutamate (MSG). It activates AMPA and kainate receptors in addition to NMDA receptors, is converted to GABA by decarboxylation, and appears in clues about astrocyte signaling and domoic acid poisoning.

• Endorphins — endogenous opioids released during exercise and stress; bind opioid receptors and reduce pain. They are natural opioid peptides produced in the body, especially in the pituitary, and are also associated with pleasure, runner’s high, and laughter.
  • Endorphin — Endorphins are naturally occurring opioid peptides in the brain and pituitary that help reduce pain and produce feelings of euphoria. They are often mentioned with the placebo effect, runner’s high, stress relief, and the body’s response to pain or heroin-like effects.
• Glutamate receptors
  • NMDA receptors — NMDA receptors are glutamate-gated ion channels important for synaptic plasticity and the formation of long-term potentiation. They are blocked by magnesium at resting potential, can be activated by glycine and D-serine as co-agonists, and are targets of drugs like memantine and ketamine-like antagonists.
• Neurotransmission
  • Dale’s principle — Dale’s principle states that a neuron releases the same neurotransmitter set at all of its synaptic outputs. Co-transmission is an exception to this rule, as in some striatal GABA neurons.

Brain Anatomy

• Cerebral cortex — the outermost layer of the cerebrum; folded into gyri (ridges) and sulci (grooves). Divided into left and right hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum. It underlies higher cognitive functions and voluntary movement.

• Frontal lobe — executive function, planning, voluntary movement (primary motor cortex), and Broca’s area (speech production, left hemisphere). The prefrontal cortex is central to decision-making and impulse control.
  • prefrontal cortex — The prefrontal cortex is the front part of the frontal lobes responsible for executive function, planning, decision-making, and working memory. Clues may mention the anterior cingulate cortex, chandelier cells, or the avian HVC as an analog of this higher-order brain region.
• Parietal lobe — somatosensory processing (primary somatosensory cortex), spatial awareness, and integration of sensory information. It sits behind the frontal lobe and is important for spatial cognition, proprioception, and sensory integration. It is associated with two-point discrimination, and damage to it can disrupt coordinated reaching and other body awareness tasks.
  • Parietal — The parietal lobe of the brain is associated with touch and bodily sensation, including pressure, pain, and temperature. It helps control body sensations and is often paired in neuroscience questions with the somatosensory cortex.

• Temporal lobe — auditory processing, language comprehension (Wernicke’s area, left hemisphere), and memory (hippocampus sits beneath the temporal lobe). It lies beneath the lateral (Sylvian) fissure and contains the primary auditory cortex. It is also involved in object recognition; the fusiform gyrus is part of it, and lesions there can cause prosopagnosia.

• Occipital lobe — primary visual cortex and visual processing. It receives visual input through the lateral geniculate nucleus and is classically associated with the dorsal and ventral visual streams.

• Limbic system — emotional and memory circuits: amygdala (fear, emotional memory), hippocampus (encoding new declarative memories), hypothalamus (homeostasis, hormonal control of pituitary), cingulate cortex. The limbic system is the brain network associated with emotion, motivation, olfaction, and memory. Its major components include the amygdala (fear, emotional memory), hippocampus (encoding new declarative memories), hypothalamus (homeostasis, hormonal control of the pituitary), cingulate cortex, and fornix. It is a set of older brain structures associated with smell, emotion, memory, and sexual behavior, sometimes treated as a fifth lobe and called the visceral brain.
  • amygdala — The amygdala is an almond-shaped limbic structure in the medial temporal lobe that plays a central role in fear, aggression, and emotional learning. Its basolateral region is often discussed in memory consolidation and conditioning, and lesions or calcification from Urbach-Wiethe disease can disrupt fear recognition.

• Basal ganglia — clusters of nuclei (caudate, putamen, globus pallidus) involved in motor control and habit learning; disrupted in Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease. They are connected with the cerebral cortex, thalamus, and brainstem, and include the striatum, subthalamic nucleus, and substantia nigra. They are involved in fine motor control, action selection, learning, and emotion, and are classically described in terms of the direct and indirect pathways.

• Thalamus — the brain’s relay station; routes sensory information to appropriate cortical areas (except olfaction). It is part of the diencephalon and helps regulate sleep and consciousness.

• Cerebellum — coordination, fine motor control, motor learning, and some cognitive functions. It is the hindbrain region behind the brainstem, literally the “little brain.” It helps maintain posture, balance, and equilibrium, and its key structures include the vermis, arbor vitae, deep nuclei, and Purkinje cells.

• Brainstem — midbrain, pons, and medulla oblongata; controls vital functions (breathing, heart rate, arousal) and houses reticular activating system. It connects the brain to the spinal cord, and many cranial nerves emerge from it; it also includes structures used in auditory and baroreceptor reflex pathways.

• Broca’s area vs. Wernicke’s area — Broca’s area (inferior frontal gyrus, left): speech production; damage causes Broca’s (expressive) aphasia — halting, effortful speech. Wernicke’s area (posterior superior temporal gyrus, left): language comprehension; damage causes Wernicke’s (receptive) aphasia — fluent but nonsensical speech.

• Corpus callosum — the large white-matter bundle connecting the two cerebral hemispheres; severed in split-brain surgeries to treat intractable epilepsy; its absence (callosal agenesis) produces surprisingly subtle deficits in some cases. It is often discussed in alien hand syndrome and callosal agenesis.

• Reticular activating system (RAS) — network in the brainstem reticular formation projecting to the thalamus and cortex; controls arousal, alertness, and sleep-wake transitions; general anesthetics partly act here.

• Cortical homunculus (Penfield) — Wilder Penfield’s map of the sensory and motor cortices showing the distorted “little man” whose body regions are represented proportionally to their innervation density, not their physical size; hands and lips are disproportionately large.

• medial temporal lobe
  • hippocampus
    • the hippocampus — The hippocampus is a medial temporal-lobe structure involved in memory formation and declarative learning. It includes the dentate gyrus and Cornu Ammonis fields, and is often discussed in connection with Alzheimer’s disease and limbic-system function.
• Visual cortex
  • ocular dominance columns — Ocular dominance columns are stripes in the visual cortex that respond preferentially to input from one eye or the other. Hubel and Wiesel associated them with visual plasticity and with shifts in cortical organization after eye deprivation.
• hippocampus
  • dentate gyrus — The dentate gyrus is the hippocampal region where adult neurogenesis occurs and where place-cell and memory clues often point. It is part of the limbic system and is implicated in the circuitry damaged in H.M.’s amnesia and in hippocampal theta rhythms.
• hypothalamus
  • arcuate nucleus — The arcuate nucleus is a hypothalamic nucleus also called the infundibular nucleus. It contains neurons involved in neuropeptide Y, agouti-related peptide, CART, somatostatin, and TIDA signaling.
• laterality
  • left-handedness — Left-handedness is the trait of using the left hand more naturally or preferentially than the right, a relatively rare laterality often contrasted with right-handedness. It is sometimes discussed in studies of hemispheric symmetry, combat advantage, and social stigma in language such as “sinister.” One record also notes a physics use in connection with left-chiral particles such as neutrinos.

Neuroplasticity and Learning

• Synaptic plasticity — synapses strengthen or weaken with use. Long-term potentiation (LTP) — persistent strengthening from repeated stimulation; the leading cellular model of memory. Long-term depression (LTD) is the complementary weakening process; both LTP and LTD are key mechanisms in synaptic plasticity and are often linked to memory formation.
  • long-term potentiation — Long-term potentiation is the persistent strengthening of synapses after high-frequency stimulation. It is a major model for learning and memory and is tied to NMDA receptors, AMPA receptors, CaMKII, CREB, and synaptic plasticity.

• Long-term depression (LTD) — the counterpart to LTP; synapses weaken with low-frequency stimulation; critical for motor learning in the cerebellum and for clearing outdated synaptic traces.

• Hebb’s rule — “neurons that fire together wire together”; repeated co-activation strengthens synaptic connections. It was proposed by Donald Hebb, a Canadian psychologist, in The Organization of Behavior, which also introduced the idea of cell assemblies.

• Neurogenesis — new neurons are generated in the adult hippocampus (dentate gyrus) and olfactory bulb; role in learning and mood regulation is an active area of research.

• Mirror neurons — neurons in primate premotor cortex (area F5) that fire both when an animal performs an action and when it observes the same action; discovered in macaques by Rizzolatti and colleagues; proposed role in imitation and empathy in humans, though the human evidence is more indirect and contested. They are often invoked in discussions of imitation, empathy, and theory of mind, though their role in human social cognition remains debated. The classic example comes from macaque premotor cortex area F5, where Rizzolatti and colleagues found neurons that fired both when an animal performed an action and when it observed the same action.

• neuroplasticity — The nervous system’s ability to reorganize and adapt in response to experience through lasting changes in neural pathways and synaptic strength. It includes cortical remapping after injury or sensory loss and is often discussed through experiments on monkeys, rats, and hippocampal learning; Hebb’s rule and case studies of extreme recovery are standard examples.

Related Concepts and Applications

• Neuroscience
  • Cognitive neuroscience
    • Vilayanur S. Ramachandran — Indian-American neuroscientist at UC San Diego known for work on phantom limbs, mirror boxes, visual perception, autism, and mirror neurons, including the “broken mirrors” theory. He is also associated with the kiki-bouba effect and with unusual hallucinations during sleep paralysis. He wrote Phantoms in the Brain and A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness.

  • connectome — A connectome is a complete map of the neurons in a brain and the connections among them. Researchers build it with methods such as MRI tractography, brainbow labeling, and large-scale tracing projects like EyeWire.

  • depolarization — Depolarization is the initial phase of an action potential, when sodium ions enter a cell and the membrane potential becomes less negative. It is the change in membrane voltage that starts a nerve impulse and can trigger positive feedback opening of additional sodium channels.

  • Eric Kandel — Eric Kandel is the Columbia neuroscientist who won the 2000 Nobel Prize for work on memory. His research on Aplysia helped explain the gill-withdrawal reflex and the biological basis of memory formation.

  • Hormones
    • oxytocin — Oxytocin is a posterior-pituitary nonapeptide known for stimulating uterine contractions and milk let-down. It is often called the “love hormone” because it is linked to bonding, trust, and maternal behavior.

  • Marr-Albus theory — The Marr-Albus theory is a model of motor learning in the cerebellum. It explains how parallel fibers and climbing fibers act on Purkinje cells, a process later linked to long-term depression.

  • NMDA receptor — The NMDA receptor is a glutamate-gated ion channel important in synaptic plasticity, learning, and memory. It is blocked by magnesium at resting potential and is a major target of drugs such as ketamine and PCP.
• Reward system
  • nucleus accumbens — The nucleus accumbens is a ventral striatum structure that receives dopaminergic input from the ventral tegmental area. It helps assign motivational salience, or “wanting,” to rewards and is divided into shell and core regions. It is often discussed with the olfactory tubercle as part of the ventral striatum, with a major role in reward and pleasure.
• Cognitive neuroscience
  • event-related potential — An event-related potential is a measured brain voltage response to a specific stimulus, often discussed through components like the N400 or N170. It is a standard tool in cognitive neuroscience for timing perceptual and language processing.

Methods in Neuroscience

Connect measurements of brain activity to anatomy, behavior, and the limits of each measurement method.

• fMRI, EEG, and PET — three major brain imaging methods: fMRI measures BOLD (blood-oxygen-level-dependent) signal as a proxy for neural activity, high spatial resolution; EEG records scalp electrical potentials, high temporal resolution but poor spatial resolution; PET uses radioactive tracers to measure blood flow or neurotransmitter binding.

• Electroencephalography
  • event-related potentials — Event-related potentials are EEG responses time-locked to a stimulus or thought, such as the N400, P300, and mismatch negativity. They are studied in cognitive neuroscience as indicators of perception, attention, and other higher-level processing.
• neuroscience techniques
  • optogenetics — Optogenetics is a neuroscience technique that uses light-sensitive proteins to activate or inhibit specific cells with precise timing. It is closely associated with channelrhodopsin, halorhodopsin, and Karl Deisseroth’s work.

Learning, Memory, and Cognition

Connect learning and memory mechanisms to attention and cognition.

Learning and Conditioning

• Classical (Pavlovian) conditioning — Ivan Pavlov discovered conditioned reflexes in dogs: neutral stimulus (bell) paired with unconditioned stimulus (food) eventually elicits conditioned response (salivation) alone. Key terms: acquisition, extinction, spontaneous recovery, generalization, discrimination.

• Higher-order conditioning — a conditioned stimulus is used to condition a new neutral stimulus, without direct pairing with the unconditioned stimulus; demonstrates that conditioning can chain beyond first-order associations. It is a form of classical conditioning in which one conditioned stimulus is used to condition another neutral stimulus, so the second stimulus can elicit a response without direct pairing with the unconditioned stimulus.

• Operant (instrumental) conditioning — B.F. Skinner; behavior is shaped by its consequences. Positive reinforcement (add reward), negative reinforcement (remove aversive), positive punishment (add aversive), negative punishment (remove reward). Schedules of reinforcement: fixed-ratio, variable-ratio (most resistant to extinction), fixed-interval, variable-interval.

• Shaping — reinforcing successive approximations toward a target behavior (Skinner).

• Observational (social) learning — Albert Bandura’s Bobo doll experiment (1961): children who observed an adult model behaving aggressively toward a Bobo doll subsequently imitated that aggression; demonstrated learning without direct reinforcement. Foundation of social learning theory.

• Latent learning — Edward Tolman showed that rats learn maze layouts without reinforcement; proposed cognitive maps.

• Insight learning — Wolfgang Köhler showed chimpanzees (Sultan) solved novel problems (stacking boxes, joining sticks) through apparent sudden reorganization rather than trial and error.

• Thorndike’s law of effect — Edward Thorndike (1898): responses followed by satisfying consequences are more likely to recur; responses followed by discomfort are less likely; derived from puzzle box experiments in which cats learned to escape by trial and error; foundational to operant conditioning.

• Yerkes-Dodson law — (Robert Yerkes and John Dodson, 1908) performance is an inverted-U function of arousal: too little or too much arousal impairs performance; optimal arousal is lower for complex tasks than for simple tasks. It is usually drawn as an inverted-U curve relating arousal and performance.

• Learned helplessness — (Martin Seligman and Steven Maier, 1967) dogs exposed to inescapable shocks later failed to escape shocks when escape was possible; proposed as an animal model of depression; Seligman later developed the cognitive reformulation (attributional style) and, still later, positive psychology.

• Self-efficacy (Bandura, 1977) — an individual’s belief in their capacity to execute specific behaviors to produce given outcomes; distinct from self-esteem; predicts motivation, effort, and persistence; central to social cognitive theory.

• Hermann Ebbinghaus — first to study memory experimentally using nonsense syllables; described the forgetting curve (rapid initial loss, then leveling off) and the spacing effect (distributed practice beats massed practice); used himself as sole subject. Hermann Ebbinghaus was a German psychologist; he is also associated with the serial position effect.

• Ivan Pavlov — classical conditioning; Nobel Prize 1904 (for digestion research, not conditioning). He was a Russian physiologist whose dog experiments with bells and salivation led to the idea of conditioned reflexes. His work also included contiguity and transmarginal inhibition.

  • Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov — Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov was the Russian physiologist and psychologist who won the 1904 Nobel Prize in Medicine for work on digestion. He is best known for classical conditioning, in which he paired a bell with food so dogs would salivate. His name is also associated with discussions of transmarginal inhibition and the mistranslated term that became the standard word for the conditioned response.

  • Ivan Petrovich Pavlov — Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was the Russian physiologist whose work with dogs led to classical conditioning. He won the 1904 Nobel Prize for research on digestion, and his name is attached to the bell-and-salivation experiments.

• John B. Watson — behaviorism manifesto; Little Albert study; “father of behaviorism.” John B. Watson was an American psychologist who founded behaviorism and helped define it through the Little Albert experiment with Rosalie Rayner. He argued against introspection, treated psychology as the study of observable behavior, and is also associated with the Kerplunk experiment and work on sub-vocal speech. He later worked in advertising, and his Johns Hopkins career ended after a scandal involving his lab assistant.

  • Harvey Carr — Harvey Carr was John B. Watson’s collaborator on the “kerplunk” rat-maze experiment. Clues about him usually connect that work to behaviorism, Little Albert, and Watson’s “chain of responses” theory.

  • the Kerplunk experiment — The Kerplunk experiment was a John Watson rat-conditioning study in which maze length was altered and the rats’ behavior supposedly made a distinctive sound. It is recalled alongside Watson’s broader behaviorist work, including Little Albert.

• B.F. Skinner — operant conditioning; Skinner box; Verbal Behavior (1957); radical behaviorism. He also wrote Walden Two and Beyond Freedom and Dignity, and developed the cumulative recorder, teaching machines, and the air crib; his work on verbal behavior introduced terms such as tacts, mands, and autoclitics.

  • Aircrib — The Aircrib was B. F. Skinner’s air-conditioned, soundproof baby enclosure for his daughter. It used warmed air and enclosed walls to create a germ-free environment, and was often confused with the more famous Skinner box.

  • Beyond Freedom and Dignity — Beyond Freedom and Dignity is B. F. Skinner’s 1971 behaviorist argument that social engineering and environmental control can replace the empty notions of autonomous freedom and dignity. It extends the project of Walden Two by treating behavior as something shaped by contingencies of reinforcement.

  • Science and Human Behavior — Science and Human Behavior is a 1952 book by B. F. Skinner. In it, Skinner rejects mentalist explanations and argues against individualism and personal responsibility as guides to progress.

  • Verbal Behavior — Verbal Behavior is B. F. Skinner’s 1957 attempt to explain language through operants such as tacts and mands. It became famous for Noam Chomsky’s critical review, which challenged behaviorist explanations of language acquisition.

  • Walden Two — B. F. Skinner’s 1948 behaviorist utopian novel about an experimental planned community run by planners and managers. The book imagines a society shaped by behaviorist principles and was inspired by Bacon’s New Atlantis and Thoreau’s Walden. It influenced real-life intentional communities and is often paired with Beyond Freedom and Dignity as part of Skinner’s later work.

• Albert Bandura — social learning theory; Bobo doll; self-efficacy concept. Stanford psychologist whose social learning theory emphasized reciprocal determinism and observational learning; also associated with the Bobo doll experiment, moral disengagement, and behavior modeling therapy.
  • Bobo doll experiment — Albert Bandura’s Bobo doll experiment showed that children can learn aggression by observing adult models. It became a classic demonstration of social learning theory, vicarious reinforcement, and imitation rather than catharsis.

    • bobo doll — The Bobo doll was the inflatable toy used by Albert Bandura in his classic observational-learning experiment on aggressive behavior. Children imitated adult models by hitting the doll with a mallet, helping demonstrate social learning.

    • bobo dolls — Bobo dolls are inflatable toys used in Albert Bandura’s social learning experiments, especially the study in which children watched adults aggressively attack the dolls and then imitated that behavior.

    • the Bobo doll experiment — The Bobo doll experiment was Albert Bandura’s classic study of observational learning and aggression. Children who watched adults attack a toy clown were more likely to imitate the aggressive behavior themselves.

• Classical conditioning — Classical conditioning is a learning process in which a neutral stimulus becomes associated with a biologically significant one, so that one stimulus comes to elicit a response after being paired with another. It is identified with Pavlov’s bell-and-dog and bell-and-food experiments, Little Albert, and concepts such as extinction, latent inhibition, and the Rescorla-Wagner model.

  • a conditioned stimulus — A conditioned stimulus is a formerly neutral stimulus that, after pairing with reinforcement, elicits a learned response. In the example, the tone makes the dog salivate even without food.

  • Delay conditioning — Delay conditioning is a form of classical conditioning in which the conditioned stimulus begins before the unconditioned stimulus and continues until it starts. It is often described as the most effective temporal arrangement in Pavlovian learning.

  • Little Albert experiment — John B. Watson’s classical-conditioning study demonstrating conditioned fear in an infant. A white rat and other furry objects were paired with loud noises so that the child would learn to fear them. It became a famous and controversial example of behaviorism, and is often linked to Rosalie Rayner and Mary Cover Jones’s later attempts to reverse the fear response.

    • a white rat — The classic Little Albert conditioning experiment used a white rat as the neutral stimulus paired with a loud noise. The child later generalized his fear to other furry or white objects, including dogs, cotton, and a Santa Claus mask.

    • Little Albert — Little Albert was the infant used by John Watson and Rosalie Rayner in a famous classical conditioning experiment. He was conditioned to fear furry white objects, including a rat and even Santa Claus imagery.

  • respondent — A respondent is the person who answers or reacts to a stimulus, especially in classical conditioning. In legal usage, it is the opposing party in a case brought by a petitioner or plaintiff.

  • Sensory preconditioning — Sensory preconditioning is a classical conditioning effect in which two neutral stimuli are linked before one is paired with a reward. As a result, the second stimulus can later trigger a response even though it was never directly conditioned with the reinforcer.

  • Transmarginal inhibition — Transmarginal inhibition is Pavlov’s term for the drop in responsiveness that occurs under overwhelming or excessive stimulation. It is a condition where a subject reacts less strongly to a stimulus after it becomes too intense.

  • unconditioned response — An unconditioned response is an innate reaction that occurs naturally to a stimulus, such as a dog salivating when food is placed in its mouth. In classical conditioning, it is the reflexive response used in Pavlov-style examples before any learned association has formed.

  • unconditioned stimulus — An unconditioned stimulus is a naturally effective stimulus that triggers a reflex without training, like food causing a dog to salivate. In Pavlov’s experiments, the meat is the classic example of this kind of stimulus.
• Habit
  • Habits — Habits are repeated behaviors or routines that become automatic through practice. Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is a well-known self-help book organized around them.
• Learning
  • conditioning — Conditioning is the behavioral learning process in which responses are acquired or modified through association. It appears in Pavlov’s dogs, Little Albert, the Rescorla-Wagner model, extinction and spontaneous recovery, and operant learning in Skinner boxes. Quizbowl usually asks for the broader phenomenon rather than a specific subtype unless the clue set narrows it.

    • Latent inhibition — Latent inhibition is a learning phenomenon in which prior exposure to a stimulus without reinforcement makes later conditioning to that stimulus slower. It is often discussed in relation to classical conditioning, perceptual learning, and the Rescorla-Wagner model.

    • spontaneous recovery — Spontaneous recovery is the sudden return of a conditioned response after extinction. In Pavlovian conditioning, dogs can briefly resume salivating after the bell-and-food association has been removed.

  • imprinting — Imprinting is an early-life learning process in which an animal rapidly forms a lasting attachment or recognition pattern, famously studied by Konrad Lorenz in geese and ducklings.
    • filial imprinting — Filial imprinting is the critical-period learning process by which young animals form a lasting attachment to a parent or surrogate. Konrad Lorenz’s goose studies are the classic example, and the effect is often discussed in relation to mate choice and species-specific recognition.
  • Non-associative learning
    • habituation — Habituation is a form of non-associative learning in which repeated exposure to a stimulus reduces the response. It appears in studies of Aplysia, infant looking-time experiments, and dual-process theories alongside sensitization.
  • Maze — A maze is an apparatus or puzzle in which a subject must find a route out or through a network of paths. In psychology, mazes such as the Hebb-Williams maze or the water maze are used in learning and behavior experiments.
• Aversive stimuli
  • electric shocks — Electric shocks were the painful stimulus used in Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments and related studies on learned helplessness. The same stimulus appears in classic social psychology work by Seligman, Schachter, and others on anxiety, stress, and obedience.
• Learning theory

  • associationism — Associationism is a school of psychology that explains learning and thought through links among simple ideas or events. It influenced later work on memory and behavior, and Gestalt psychology reacted against its reduction of perception to mental associations.

  • Garcia effect — The Garcia effect is the learned aversion to a food after it is associated with illness. It is another name for conditioned taste aversion, a classic finding in psychology.

  • Operant conditioning — Operant conditioning is a form of learning in which behavior is shaped by its consequences, especially reinforcement and punishment. It is strongly associated with B. F. Skinner, Skinner boxes, and Thorndike’s law of effect, and is also linked to reward-based learning in psychology and AI.

    • escape conditioning — Escape conditioning is a form of operant conditioning in which a response is reinforced because it stops an ongoing negative stimulus.

    • Law of Effect — The Law of Effect is Edward Thorndike’s principle that responses followed by satisfying consequences are more likely to recur. It arose from puzzle-box experiments and became a cornerstone of behaviorism. Later psychologists and behaviorists such as Robert H. Herrnstein and John Watson discussed or criticized the law in terms of reward and reinforcement. Quizbowl clues often frame it as the idea that pleasurable outcomes strengthen behavior.

    • Negative reinforcement — Negative reinforcement is an operant conditioning method in which a behavior increases because an unpleasant stimulus is removed. It is often confused with punishment, but it strengthens behavior rather than suppressing it.

    • partial reinforcement — Partial reinforcement is a reinforcement schedule in which rewards are given only some of the time rather than after every response. Schedules such as fixed-ratio and variable-interval are classic examples, and this pattern tends to produce greater resistance to extinction.

    • Positive punishment — Positive punishment is an operant-conditioning term for adding an unpleasant stimulus to reduce a behavior. It contrasts with reinforcement, which increases behavior rather than discouraging it.

    • Positive reinforcement — Positive reinforcement is the process of increasing a behavior by rewarding it when it occurs. In behavioral psychology, it raises the likelihood that the rewarded action will happen again.

    • Premack principle — The Premack principle is an operant-conditioning idea that uses a more probable behavior to reinforce a less probable one. It is often illustrated with animals being allowed to do a preferred activity, such as drinking or wheel running, as a reward for a less preferred task.

    • reinforcement — Reinforcement is the operant-conditioning process in which a consequence makes a behavior more likely to occur again. In biology, the same word can also refer to reproductive isolation that strengthens barriers between diverging populations when they come back into contact.

  • Operant conditioning schedules
    • a variable ratio schedule — A variable ratio schedule is a reinforcement schedule in which reward comes after an unpredictable number of responses. It is especially resistant to extinction, and classic examples include gambling and fishing.

  • stimulus — A stimulus is anything that affects behavior or produces a response, and in classical conditioning it may be conditioned or unconditioned. The term is central to discussions of learning, perception, and psychophysics.

  • Edward Lee Thorndike — Edward Lee Thorndike was a pioneering psychologist of learning and education associated with connectionism and early learning theory. He developed the law of effect from animal experiments, especially studies of cats escaping puzzle boxes, and this principle holds that rewarded behavior is more likely to recur. His work included Animal Intelligence, Educational Psychology, and The Measurement of Intelligence, and he also helped identify the halo effect.
• maze learning
  • mazes — Mazes are winding structures used in psychology experiments on learning, memory, and spatial navigation, especially in studies of rats and mice. Common variants include T-, Y-, radial-arm, water, and oases mazes, and they are closely associated with Tolman’s cognitive maps.
• Behavioral psychology
  • Richard Herrnstein — Richard Herrnstein was a Harvard psychologist known for the matching law in behavioral psychology. He also coauthored an influential 1971 work arguing for an emerging intelligence-based caste system.
• behaviors — Behaviors are the actions studied by ethology and by behaviorism, the psychological school associated with John Watson and B. F. Skinner. Examples include mating, feeding, communication, and learned actions such as birdsong and bat echolocation.

  • behavioral — Behavioral approaches focus on observable action and learned decision patterns, and the label also appears in behavioral economics. In therapy, the behavioral-cognitive tradition is associated with Beck’s work on negative automatic thoughts and the cognitive triad. In game theory, the word can describe strategies that match the structure of a mixed strategy under perfect recall.

  • behaviorists — Behaviorists are psychologists associated with behaviorism, the school that emphasizes observable responses to rewards and punishments. John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner are central figures in this approach, which was sharply criticized by Noam Chomsky.

  • Clark Leonard Hull — Clark Leonard Hull was a behaviorist who sought to make psychology more quantitative through hypothetico-deductive, mathematically oriented stimulus-response learning theory. His work emphasized drive reduction, reinforcement, deprivation, habit strength, and rigorous experimental methods in learning research, with equations linking motivation to deprivation and habit strength.

  • Classical behaviorism
    • John Broadus Watson — John Broadus Watson was the behaviorist psychologist who conducted the “Little Albert” experiment with Rosalie Rayner and promoted stimulus-response psychology. He also performed the “kerplunk” maze experiment and is often called the founder of behaviorism.

  • Edward Thorndike — Edward Thorndike was an early American behaviorist known for puzzle-box experiments with cats and for the law of effect. He also wrote about reading instruction, intelligence testing, and the halo effect.

  • Edward Tolman — Edward Tolman was the behaviorist psychologist who developed purposive behaviorism and the idea of the cognitive map. His maze experiments with rats were meant to study learning and cognition rather than simple stimulus-response conditioning.

  • John B(roadus) Watson — John B. Watson was an early behaviorist who helped found behaviorism and promoted the idea of predicting and controlling behavior. He is best known for the Little Albert experiment and for a book on child raising that warned parents against excessive affection.

  • kerplunk experiment — The kerplunk experiment was J. B. Watson and Harvey Carr’s rat-maze study, in which shortening a straight alley made trained rats crash into the end wall. It was used to argue for a chain of responses and kinesthetic feedback rather than Thorndike’s law of effect.

  • punishment — Punishment is the infliction of an aversive consequence, often discussed in contrast to reinforcement in psychology and social theory. Quizbowl clues connect it to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, capital punishment, corporal punishment, and theories of social control.
    • negative punishment — Negative punishment is an operant conditioning method that reduces a behavior by taking away a desirable stimulus after the behavior occurs. Examples include losing access to rewards, having privileges removed, or having something liked taken away when someone misbehaves.
• Animal learning
  • T-maze — A T-maze is a T-shaped behavioral apparatus used in experiments on animals. Researchers place stimuli in the two arms of the maze to study choice and learning.

• Edward Chace Tolman — Edward Chace Tolman was a behaviorist known for cognitive maps, intervening variables, and the distinction between learning and performance. His rat-maze experiments helped establish latent learning and a purposive form of behaviorism.

• Edward L. Thorndike — Edward L. Thorndike was an American psychologist associated with connectionism and the Law of Effect. He is remembered for puzzle-box experiments with cats and for early work on intelligence testing and educational psychology.

Cognition

• cognition — Cognition is the faculty for gathering, processing, and using information. The strong version of linguistic relativism says language determines cognition, while weaker views say language merely influences it. Related philosophers of mind debates include embodied and embedded cognition.
  • cognitive biases — Cognitive biases are systematic errors in judgment and thinking that distort perception, memory, and decision-making. They are often linked to heuristics and to quick System 1 judgments that can slip past System 2. Common examples include confirmation bias, hindsight bias, anchoring, the conjunction fallacy, the halo effect, and the just-world hypothesis.

    • Anchoring bias — Anchoring bias is the tendency to rely too heavily on an initial piece of information when making judgments. Kahneman and Tversky studied it with classic experiments showing how arbitrary starting numbers shape later estimates.

    • framing — Framing is the way a decision or situation is presented so that different wording changes how people interpret it. In social science, it is closely associated with Kahneman and Tversky’s work on choice under uncertainty, while in construction it refers to the structural skeleton of a building.

    • hot hand fallacy — The hot hand fallacy is the mistaken belief that a person is more likely to succeed after a recent success than after a failure. It is often discussed in the context of basketball shooting streaks and contrasted with the gambler’s fallacy.

    • status quo bias — Status quo bias is the preference for keeping things as they are rather than changing the current baseline. It is closely related to inertia and was identified in work by William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser.

  • imagination — Imagination is the mental faculty behind created worlds, literary theory about nationalism, and C. Wright Mills’s sociological imagination. Romantic writers such as Coleridge and Blake contrasted imagination with fancy, and Yeats later echoed that distinction in praising Blake.

  • magical thinking — Magical thinking is the belief that thoughts or actions can influence events without a normal causal connection. It appears in superstition and is a feature of Piaget’s preoperational stage.

  • priming — Priming is the psychological effect in which exposure to one stimulus influences a later response. It appears in semantic and lexical studies, including classic experiments with word recognition and reaction time. The concept is often discussed in connection with Stroop interference, event-related designs, and the replication controversy surrounding social-priming studies. It is a standard topic in cognitive psychology.

  • thinking — Thinking is the general mental process discussed by works from Sapir-Whorf to Daniel Kahneman. It also appears in clues about Rodin’s The Thinker and Descartes’ cogito.
• cognitive psychology — Cognitive psychology studies mental processes such as memory, language, and problem solving. It grew out of Gestalt psychology and helped inspire the broader information-processing view of the mind.

  • cognitive — Cognitive psychology studies mental processes such as memory, perception, and thought. The adjective also appears in terms like cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, cognitive science, and cognitive behavioral therapy.

  • Donald Norman — Donald Norman is a design theorist and cognitive psychologist best known for popularizing user-centered design and usability engineering, and for the concept of affordances. His book The Design of Everyday Things argues that design failures are usually the designer’s fault and explains how everyday objects such as doors, turn signals, and interfaces can be made easier to use. He is also associated with the idea that modern fears around technology can be learned helplessness.

  • fuzzy trace theory — Fuzzy trace theory is a theory of cognition developed by Valerie Reyna and Charles Brainerd. It distinguishes verbatim memory from gist memory and is often used to explain risky decision making.

  • heuristics — Heuristics are mental shortcuts or rules of thumb used to simplify judgment and problem solving. Common examples include the availability and representativeness heuristics, which can lead to cognitive bias.

  • Heuristics
    • Gerd Gigerenzer — Gerd Gigerenzer is a German psychologist known for fast-and-frugal heuristics and the idea of an adaptive toolbox. His work on ecological rationality criticizes the assumption that people are simply irrational.

  • reaction time — Reaction time is the interval between a stimulus and a subject’s response, and it is a standard measure in cognitive psychology. It appears in tasks such as Stroop, go/no-go, mental rotation, and the implicit-association test.

  • Roger Shepard — Roger Shepard was a cognitive scientist who studied psychological space and developed non-metric multidimensional scaling. He is also remembered for illusions and the Shepard tone, which seems endlessly to rise or fall in pitch.

• inhibition — In psychology, inhibition is the restraint of an impulse or drive, with older uses in learning theory and psychoanalysis describing interference or superego control. It can also refer to suppression in chemistry or physiology, such as reducing a reaction rate or counteracting a muscle response.

• schemas — Schemas, or schemata, are mental structures or cognitive frameworks that organize experience and information into categories and help interpret it. In psychology they are associated with Piaget and Bartlett, and with processes such as assimilation and accommodation, as well as studies of memory and expectation. Kant uses the term for the mediating links between concepts and appearances, and later writers applied it to patterned behavior and musical formulas.

Memory

• memory — Memory is the mental process of storing, retaining, and retrieving information. Major forms include sensory, short-term, working, long-term, and flashbulb memory. Classic reference points include the Atkinson-Shiffrin model and studies by Ebbinghaus, Miller, Sperling, and Luria. It is central to cognitive models and amnesia-related questions.
  • accident recall
    • car crashes — Car crashes are a common example of automobile accidents and collisions, and they appear in both art and psychology clues. The term can point to traffic fatalities, the deaths of celebrities, or experimental studies about how people remember accidents.
  • Autobiographical memory
    • childhood amnesia — Childhood amnesia is the inability of most adults to remember events from early childhood, usually before about age three. Psychologists have linked it to hippocampal development, memory fragmentation, and the early shaping of autobiographical memory.
  • Declarative memory
    • episodic memory — Episodic memory is the form of declarative memory for personally experienced events, often contrasted with semantic memory. Endel Tulving linked it to mental time travel and autonoetic consciousness, and related clues mention autobiographical recall and scrub-jay food caching.

  • engram — An engram is a hypothetical memory trace or persistent neural change that stores information after experience. The term appears in psychology and was also adopted in Scientology for a recorded painful mental image.

  • eyewitness testimony — Eyewitness testimony is the courtroom account given by someone who claims to have observed a crime or event. Social-psychology clues often connect it to misinformation effects, weapon focus, and the distinction between estimator and system variables.
    • eyewitnesses — Eyewitnesses are people who testify about events they saw, and psychology has shown that their memories can be distorted by suggestibility, weapon focus, and the misinformation effect. Gary Wells and Elizabeth Loftus are closely associated with research on how lineups and questioning affect their accuracy. Classic work by Hugo Münsterberg and later experiments by Loftus and Palmer demonstrated how unreliable these reports can be. Courtroom identification procedures now often account for the ways witnesses misremember crimes.
  • false memories — False memories are recollections of events that never happened, or of details distorted beyond recognition. Psychologists such as Elizabeth Loftus studied them with paradigms like the DRM list and the “lost in the mall” technique, showing how suggestion can implant confident but inaccurate recall.
    • Elizabeth F. Loftus — Elizabeth F. Loftus is a psychologist known for research on false memories and the misinformation effect. Her work includes the lost-in-the-mall paradigm and classic studies showing how wording can alter eyewitness memory.

  • flashbulb memories — Flashbulb memories are vivid recollections of emotionally charged events that people often feel certain are accurate. The term was introduced by Brown and Kulik, and later studies found that these memories can be confident yet imperfect.

  • flashbulb memory — A flashbulb memory is an unusually vivid autobiographical memory formed around a shocking or highly consequential event. Classic examples include remembering where one was during 9/11 or the Kennedy assassination.

  • forgetting memories — Forgetting memories is the loss of stored information, whether from interference, retrieval failure, or neurological damage. It is a major symptom of amnesia, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease, and it was famously studied by Ebbinghaus in his work on forgetting curves.

  • Herman Ebbinghaus — Herman Ebbinghaus was a psychologist known for studying memory, forgetting, and overlearning. His work is associated with the forgetting curve, the serial position curve, and experiments using nonsense syllables.

  • Interference
    • retroactive interference — Retroactive interference is mnemonic interference in which newer information disrupts recall of older material. It is the opposite direction of interference from proactive effects.
  • Memory traces
    • engrams — Engrams are the physical traces or biological changes that store memory in the brain. The term appears in discussions of memory, hidden painful experiences, and experiments such as the Morris water maze and radial arm maze.

  • misinformation effect — The misinformation effect is the tendency for memory to be altered after an event, especially when people later encounter misleading information. It is associated with Elizabeth Loftus, whose work showed that post-event suggestions can become folded into a witness’s recollection.

  • Primacy — Primacy is the memory effect in which items presented earlier are recalled better than those presented later. It is often discussed alongside recency when describing serial-position effects.

  • procedural memory — Procedural memory is a type of long-term implicit memory used for learned skills and routines. It is the kind of memory that usually survives amnesia better than explicit recall.

  • Recency effect — The recency effect is the tendency to remember the items at the end of a list best. It is commonly discussed together with the primacy effect as part of serial-position effects in memory.

  • rehearsal — Rehearsal is a memory strategy that involves repeating information to move it into long-term memory. It is a form of verbal repetition associated with maintenance processing and short-term memory.

  • serial position effects
    • Primacy effect — The primacy effect is the tendency to remember items at the beginning of a list better than items in the middle. It is a standard memory-recency contrast effect in recall studies.
  • short-term memory — Short-term memory temporarily holds information before it is either lost or transferred onward. It is associated with Miller’s seven-plus-or-minus-two capacity, chunking, and the Atkinson-Shiffrin model, and it overlaps with the idea of working memory.
    • seven plus or minus two — Miller’s “magical number” is seven plus or minus two, the classic estimate for how many items fit in short-term memory. The idea is closely tied to chunking and later work on the limits and distortion of human memory.

  • Traces — Traces are the memory representations invoked by fuzzy-trace theory and by multiple-trace accounts of memory. In syntax, traces are silent positions left behind by movement, such as wh-movement or contraction-related displacement.

  • Types of memory
    • memories — Memories are mental stores of past experiences, and psychologists distinguish durable long-term memory from the more limited short-term kind. Clues include amnesia, rehearsal, the serial position effect, flashbulb memories, and the misinformation effect.
  • working memory — Working memory is the limited-capacity, temporary system used to hold and manipulate information over short periods of time. Baddeley and Hitch’s model includes a central executive, a phonological loop, and a visuospatial sketchpad; Cowan’s model treats it as a few items kept in an accessible state. It is often associated with Miller’s seven-plus-or-minus-two idea and distinguished from long-term memory.

    • Alan Baddeley — Alan Baddeley is the psychologist who, with Graham Hitch, developed the multicomponent model of working memory. His model includes the phonological loop, the visuospatial sketchpad, and the central executive.

    • phonological loop — The phonological loop is the part of working memory that briefly stores and rehearses spoken information. In Baddeley and Hitch’s model, it works with the central executive, visuospatial sketchpad, and episodic buffer.

• Memory phenomena
  • deja vu — Déjà vu is the eerie feeling that a new experience has happened before, a term also used for Olivia Rodrigo’s song about believing a former lover is repeating shared moments with someone else. In neuroscience, it is associated with temporal lobe epilepsy, migraines with aura, and abnormal synchronization involving the rhinal cortices and hippocampus.

• Sensory memory — very brief retention of sensory information: iconic memory (visual, ~0.5 s; studied by Sperling) and echoic memory (auditory, ~3–4 s).

• Short-term / working memory — limited capacity (~7 ± 2 items, per Miller 1956); maintained by active rehearsal. Working memory model (Baddeley and Hitch): phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, central executive, and episodic buffer.

• Long-term memory — potentially unlimited, long-lasting storage. Divided into explicit (declarative) memory: episodic (personal events) and semantic (facts, concepts). Implicit (nondeclarative) memory: procedural (skills, habits), priming, and conditioning.

• H.M. (Henry Molaison) — patient whose bilateral hippocampal removal (1953) by surgeon William Beecher Scoville eliminated new episodic memory formation (anterograde amnesia) while sparing older memories and procedural learning; the most studied neurological case in history; studied for decades by Brenda Milner.

• Patient K.C. (Kent Cochrane) — amnesic patient with hippocampal damage who retained semantic memory but had no episodic memory whatsoever (could not mentally time-travel to past or future events); helped distinguish episodic from semantic memory systems.

• Clive Wearing — British musician with severe anterograde and retrograde amnesia from herpes encephalitis; retains procedural memory for piano playing and conducting, demonstrating the hippocampus-independent nature of procedural memory.

• Encoding specificity — memories are best retrieved in conditions matching encoding (Tulving and Thomson, 1973). State-dependent memory: recall is better in the same physical/emotional state as encoding.

• Forgetting — Ebbinghaus forgetting curve (1885): memory declines rapidly then levels off; rehearsal and the spacing effect improve retention. Interference: proactive (old interferes with new) and retroactive (new interferes with old). Forgetting is the loss of information from memory over time or through retrieval failure. It is associated with cue-dependent recall and the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.

• Elizabeth Loftus — demonstrated that memory is reconstructive, not reproductive; misinformation effect; false memories can be implanted; landmark work on eyewitness testimony reliability. Her “lost in the mall” study showed that ~25% of participants could be induced to “remember” a false childhood event. Her work with John Palmer on car-crash wording showed that the language used in questioning can change eyewitness estimates and recollections.

• Serial position effect — items at the beginning (primacy effect) and end (recency effect) of a list are recalled better than middle items; primacy attributed to long-term storage via rehearsal; recency attributed to short-term memory; originally described by Ebbinghaus and formalized by Murdock (1962).

• Brenda Milner — neuropsychologist who conducted most of the foundational studies with H.M.; established the hippocampus’s role in declarative memory; also discovered that procedural memory is hippocampus-independent. She is a pioneering Canadian neuropsychologist whose work with H.M. showed that different kinds of memory can be dissociated. Her studies also made her a foundational figure in neuropsychology and in research on how the brain’s hemispheres interact.

• learning and memory
  • Karl Lashley — Karl Lashley was an American psychologist known for work on learning and memory and for challenging simple connectionist accounts of mind. He is associated with the search for engrams, and with the principles of mass action and equipotentiality in rat maze experiments.
• déjà vu — Déjà vu is the eerie sense that a present experience has been encountered before, also called paramnesia. It is often linked to temporal-lobe epilepsy and has inspired films, songs, and other pop-culture titles.

Attention and Perception

• attention and perception
  • Stroop test — The Stroop test asks subjects to name the ink color of a word while suppressing the word’s meaning, creating interference in attention and reaction time. Variants include emotional and reverse Stroop tasks, and the effect is a classic measure of selective attention.
• Selective attention — Cherry’s cocktail party effect: we can focus on one auditory stream while monitoring others for significance (e.g., one’s own name breaks through). Dichotic listening experiments (Colin Cherry, 1953) established this; subjects shadowed one ear and could report little from the unattended channel except physical features.
  • cocktail party effect — The cocktail party effect is the ability to focus on one conversation in a noisy setting while still noticing salient unattended stimuli, such as one’s own name. It is a classic topic in studies of selective attention.

• McGurk effect — audiovisual speech illusion (McGurk and MacDonald, 1976): when the sound “ba” is dubbed onto a video of lips saying “ga,” most listeners perceive “da”; demonstrates that speech perception is multimodal, not purely auditory. The classic effect was described by McGurk and MacDonald in 1976. It is often presented with the sound “ba” dubbed onto a video of lips saying “ga,” which many listeners perceive as “da.”

• Stroop effect — naming the ink color of a color word is slower when word and color conflict (e.g., the word RED printed in blue ink); demonstrates automaticity of reading and attentional interference; classic paradigm in cognitive psychology since John Ridley Stroop (1935). The incongruent condition is slower than congruent or neutral conditions and is widely used to assess selective attention and cognitive inhibition.
  • J. Ridley Stroop — J. Ridley Stroop is the psychologist whose name is attached to the color-word interference task now called the Stroop test. In the task, reaction time increases when a word naming a color is printed in a different ink color.

• Phonics and decoding — phonics instruction connects written letters or letter groups (graphemes) to speech sounds (phonemes); readers use these correspondences to sound out unfamiliar words. Phonemic awareness concerns identifying and manipulating sounds in spoken language. Connecting that sound awareness to print supports the development of word reading.⁴

• Saccades and reading — saccades are rapid shifts of gaze between fixations. During reading, the eyes repeatedly move to new positions in the text instead of tracking it smoothly; some movements return to earlier material. Eye-tracking experiments use fixation durations and saccade destinations to study visual attention and word processing.⁴

• Inattentional blindness — failure to notice unexpected stimuli when attention is engaged elsewhere; classic demonstration: Simons and Chabris gorilla experiment (1999). It is classically illustrated by the gorilla experiment, in which subjects counting basketball passes miss the person in the gorilla suit.

  • dressed in a gorilla suit — Being dressed in a gorilla suit is the classic invisible-figure stunt used in inattentional blindness experiments. The same setup appears in psychology demos and in Cabaret’s “If You Could See Her” joke about a woman in a gorilla costume.

  • gorilla suit — A gorilla suit is a costume often used to represent a gorilla or other ape-like character. It appears in the classic inattentional blindness experiment in which viewers count basketball passes while a person in the costume walks through the scene.

• Change blindness — failure to detect changes in a visual scene across interruptions.

• Signal detection theory — distinguishes sensitivity (d’) from response criterion (β); separates perceptual sensitivity from decision bias. Developed by Green and Swets.

• Gestalt perception principles — proximity, similarity, closure, continuity, figure-ground, common fate govern how elements are grouped into percepts.

• Weber’s law — the just-noticeable difference (JND) is a constant proportion of the original stimulus intensity; formalized into Fechner’s law and later Stevens’ power law.

• Synesthesia — a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory pathway involuntarily triggers an experience in another modality; the most common form is grapheme-color synesthesia (individual letters or numbers perceived as inherently colored); also includes lexical-gustatory (words have flavors), chromesthesia (sounds trigger colors), and others; estimated to occur in roughly 1 in 23 people; studied as a window into cross-modal perception, metaphor, and the binding problem in neuroscience; artists and musicians including Vladimir Nabokov and Duke Ellington are notable reported synesthetes. It is also discussed as a window into cross-modal perception, metaphor, and the binding problem in neuroscience; proposed mechanisms include cross-wiring and disinhibited feedback. Reported examples include grapheme-color synesthesia, lexical-gustatory synesthesia, and chromesthesia, and notable reported synesthetes include Vladimir Nabokov, Duke Ellington, and György Ligeti.

  • Chromesthesia — Chromesthesia is the condition in which sounds, especially music, evoke the perception of colors. The term literally means colored hearing.

  • Synaesthesia — Synaesthesia is a condition in which stimulation of one sense produces experiences in another, such as hearing colors or seeing sounds. It has been associated with artists and composers such as Wassily Kandinsky and Scriabin, and researchers have studied the grapheme-color form of the condition.

• Attention

  • Anne Treisman — Anne Treisman was a psychologist who revised Broadbent’s filter model into attenuation theory, which weakens rather than fully blocks unattended input. She also developed feature integration theory with Garry Gelade to explain how attention binds features into perceived objects.

  • features — Features are the basic elements processed by Anne Treisman’s theory of attention, which proposes that they are first detected automatically and then combined into a unified perception. In language and archaeology contexts, the same word can also denote the component units or discovered objects being described.

• auditory perception
  • auditory stimuli — Auditory stimuli are sounds detected by the ear and studied in selective-attention experiments such as dichotic listening and shadowing tasks. They are central to the cocktail party effect, where a listener focuses on one sound source while ignoring others.
• auditory illusions
  • Yanny and Laurel — This viral audio illusion made listeners argue over whether they heard “Yanny” or “Laurel.” It was compared to other ambiguous sound clips because the perceived word shifts with frequency emphasis.
• visual attention
  • looking — Looking is the action emphasized in Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and in developmental psychology’s preferential-looking methods. It can refer more broadly to visual attention, gaze, and perception.
• Subliminal perception
  • subliminal message — A subliminal message is a signal or advertisement intended to register without conscious awareness. The clue wording points to content that flashes too briefly or is otherwise hidden from the conscious mind.
• Face perception

  • face recognition — Face recognition is the ability to identify and process human faces, and it is strongly associated with the fusiform gyrus. Damage to this ability produces prosopagnosia, or face blindness, and the Thatcher effect shows how orientation can disrupt it.

  • facial recognition — Facial recognition is the ability to identify or distinguish people from their faces, and it is impaired in prosopagnosia. Clues often mention the fusiform face area, the N170 ERP component, the cross-race effect, and AI systems used for photo tagging or surveillance.

  • human faces — Human faces are a central object of study in perception, recognition technology, and social cognition. They are analyzed by methods ranging from principal components and Haar-like features to fusiform gyrus specialization, the Thatcher effect, and prosopagnosia. Faces also appear in consumer technology such as Face ID and in visual tests like smiley-face pain scales. The topic connects neuroscience, computer vision, and everyday recognition.

• perception and cognition

  • apperception — Apperception is the mind’s recognition of its own representations as belonging to the self. In psychology and education it also refers to the process by which ambiguous stimuli are organized into conscious interpretation, as in the Thematic Apperception Test.

  • the Uncanny Valley — The Uncanny Valley is Masahiro Mori’s hypothesis that near-human figures can feel eerie when they are almost, but not quite, human. It is often discussed in relation to robots, prosthetics, puppets, and computer-generated characters.

• Sensation
  • taste — Taste, or gustation, is the sense detected by receptors on the tongue and papillae and is one component of flavor along with smell. Quizbowl clues often tie it to umami, PROP and PTC sensitivity, and Garcia’s taste-aversion experiments.
• sensation and perception
  • perception — Perception is the general faculty by which we receive and interpret information from the senses, including sight and hearing. The topic appears in debates over naive realism, the adverbial theory, and the idea that perception can be informationally encapsulated.
    • Ambiguous figures
      • Duck-rabbit — The duck-rabbit is a classic ambiguous drawing that can be seen as either a duck or a rabbit, depending on which aspect or perspective one notices. It was used by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations to contrast seeing-as with seeing-that, and by earlier visual theorists; Thomas Kuhn also used it to illustrate shifts in interpretation without any change in the underlying image.
    • Color vision
      • Christine Ladd-Franklin — Christine Ladd-Franklin was a psychologist and logician known for an evolutionary theory of color vision. Her work is associated with the three-stage development of vision and with color categories such as black-white, red-green, and blue-yellow.

    • Gestalt theory — Gestalt theory is the psychological approach that holds perception and memory are organized into meaningful wholes. It is associated with the law of prägnanz and with founders such as Wertheimer, Koffka, and Köhler.

    • hallucinations — Hallucinations are false sensory perceptions that can appear in dreams, drug experiences, or psychiatric illness. Quizbowl often links them to fear toxins, psychedelics, or vision sequences in video games and fiction.

    • illusions — Illusions are misleading perceptions or beliefs, including cognitive illusions in judgment and optical illusions in vision. They are often used in philosophy and psychology to discuss bias, ambiguity aversion, and mistaken interpretation of sensory input. The Müller-Lyer illusion is a standard example of the visual kind.

      • Joseph Jastrow — Joseph Jastrow was an early American psychologist known for popularizing visual illusions such as the duck-rabbit and the Necker cube. He taught at Wisconsin, wrote The Mind’s Eye and Fact and Fable in Psychology, and was the first American to earn a doctorate in psychology.

      • Muller-Lyer illusion — The Müller-Lyer illusion makes two equal-length lines appear different in length when they are capped by arrows or angle shapes pointing inward or outward. It is a classic example in the psychology of perception.

    • Molyneux’s Problem — Molyneux’s problem asks whether a blind person who gains sight can immediately tell a cube from a sphere by vision alone. John Locke discussed it in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding after reports connected to William Cheselden.

    • opponent-process theory — Opponent-process theory explains color vision through opposing pairs such as black and white, yellow and blue, and red and green. It was also used by Solomon and Corbit to explain addiction and emotional rebound, building on Ewald Hering’s work.

    • optical illusion — An optical illusion is a deceptive image or pattern that causes perception to differ from physical reality. Examples include the Muller-Lyer figure, the Fraser spiral, and ambiguous figures like the vase-or-faces drawing.

    • optical illusions — Optical illusions are images or patterns that cause normal visual processing to produce a false perception. Examples include the Müller-Lyer illusion, Necker cube, Rubin vase, Ponzo illusion, and the phi phenomenon. They are often discussed in connection with Gestalt ideas such as figure-ground reversal, lateral inhibition in the retina, the autokinetic effect, and studies of culturally conditioned perception.

      • Müller-Lyer illusion — The Müller-Lyer illusion is a classic optical illusion in which two equal-length lines appear different because of arrowheads at their ends. It is often used to illustrate Gestalt principles of perception.

      • Ponzo illusion — The Ponzo illusion is an optical illusion in which converging lines make identical objects appear different in size. It is often demonstrated with a boy and a dog placed against a perspective cue that distorts judgment.

      • Rubin vase — The Rubin vase is a classic optical illusion that flips between a vase and two faces depending on whether the viewer treats the figure or the ground as dominant. It is one of the best-known examples used in Gestalt psychology and in studies of how perception can misread size, shape, and depth.

      • Zollner illusion — The Zollner illusion is a visual illusion in which parallel lines appear to diverge when crossed by short diagonal strokes. It is a classic example of how line orientation can distort perceived geometry.

    • Pattern recognition
      • pareidolia — Pareidolia is the tendency to perceive meaningful patterns, especially faces, in vague or inanimate stimuli. It is often treated as a subset of apophenia and is behind seeing images in toast, sockets, rock formations, or hearing hidden messages backward.

    • sensory deprivation — Sensory deprivation is the reduction of external sensory input, often produced in dark flotation tanks with salt water. It is associated with the Ganzfeld effect, where reduced stimulation can make hallucinations more likely.

    • subliminal perception
      • subliminal — Subliminal stimuli are presented below the threshold of conscious awareness. The term is used for messages or signals meant to influence perception without being consciously noticed.

    • uncanny valley — The uncanny valley is the discomfort people feel when a humanoid robot or image becomes almost, but not quite, humanlike. Masahiro Mori coined the term to describe a sharp dip in familiarity before near-human figures become fully appealing.

    • sight
      • vision — Vision is the faculty of sight, and by extension the ability to foresee or imagine a future goal. It can also mean a long-term objective or an especially striking supernatural image.
        • Night Vision — Night vision is the ability or technology that lets people see better in low light, and in Minecraft it is brewed from an awkward potion and a golden carrot.
  • proprioception — Proprioception is the sense of the body’s position and movement in space, supplied by receptors in muscles, tendons, and the inner ear. Oliver Sacks’s “The Disembodied Lady” and studies of the posterior parietal cortex both use it as a key example of bodily awareness.
    • Golgi tendon organ — The Golgi tendon organ is a proprioceptive receptor located at the muscle-tendon junction. It mediates the reflex that inhibits excessive tension, opposing the stretch reflex.

  • smell — The sense by which odor molecules are detected through the nose and processed by the olfactory bulb and cranial nerve I (the olfactory nerve). It is mediated by olfactory receptor neurons and the olfactory receptors in the nose, with the cribriform plate and olfactory bulbs and glomeruli often mentioned in relation to it. Loss of smell is called anosmia. Research on smell includes the B-SIT and the Nobel-winning work of Linda Buck and Richard Axel on odor receptors; it is also associated with molecular vibration theories and pheromones.

  • Color — Color is the visual property perceived by cone cells and described by hue, saturation, and brightness, or by hue, value, and intensity. It is determined by light wavelength and is commonly stored in computer images as RGB values in three bytes per pixel. Related topics include trichromatic and opponent-process theories, color blindness, the Stroop effect, and philosophical examples such as Hume’s missing shade of blue, Locke’s inverted spectrum, and the grue/bleen distinction. The word also names the quantum color charge in QCD that quarks carry, and appears in art theory and abstract painting in works such as Albers’s Interaction of Color and Rothko’s color field paintings.

  • psychophysics — Psychophysics studies the quantitative relationship between physical stimuli and perceived sensations. It is associated with Fechner and Weber, and uses methods such as forced-choice tasks and staircase procedures.

    • Ernst Heinrich Weber — Ernst Heinrich Weber was a pioneer of psychophysics who studied the just noticeable difference and the two-point threshold. His work led to Weber’s law, which relates sensory discrimination to a constant proportion of the stimulus.

    • Fechner’s law — Fechner’s law states that sensation grows as the logarithm of stimulus intensity. It is a foundational psychophysical rule built on Weber’s law and the just-noticeable difference.

    • Gustav Fechner — Gustav Fechner was a German physicist and psychologist who helped found psychophysics with Weber. He is known for Fechner’s law, which relates sensation to the logarithm of stimulus intensity, and for works on aesthetics and philosophical speculations about plant souls.

    • Gustav Theodor Fechner — This German psychologist helped found psychophysics with Ernst Weber and is known for the law relating stimulus intensity to sensation. His work also includes aesthetics experiments, writings on the soul of plants, and the spiritual speculation of Zend-Avesta.

    • just-noticeable difference — The just-noticeable difference is the smallest change in a stimulus that a subject can reliably detect. It is a central concept in psychophysics and is closely tied to Weber’s law and threshold experiments.

    • Stevens’ power law — Stevens’ power law is a psychophysical relationship stating that perceived sensation scales as a constant times stimulus magnitude raised to an exponent. It is often presented as a more general alternative to Fechner’s law.

• Visual perception
  • depth perception — Depth perception is the visual ability to judge distance and see the world in three dimensions. Gibson and Walk’s visual cliff experiment used a checkerboard pattern beneath glass to test whether infants had this ability.
    • visual cliff — An infant psychology apparatus designed by Eleanor Gibson and R. D. Walk to test depth perception. It uses a transparent surface over an apparent drop; crawling infants are placed at the apparent edge to see whether they refuse to cross, as a classic demonstration of early perceptual abilities and depth perception around crawling age.

  • Mach bands — Mach bands are a visual illusion in which edges between adjacent areas of different brightness appear exaggerated. The effect is explained by lateral inhibition and is named for physicist Ernst Mach.

  • Motion perception
    • Persistence of Vision — Persistence of vision is the retinal effect that lets successive images blend into the appearance of continuous motion. It is a standard explanation for why moving pictures seem to move, and it is also the title of a Star Trek: Voyager episode.
  • Purkinje effect — The Purkinje effect is the increased sensitivity of the retina to shorter wavelengths at low light levels. It describes the shift in perceived brightness and color as vision changes from cone-dominated daylight conditions to rod-dominated night vision.
• eye movements — Eye movements are the motions tracked in studies of attention, reading, and dream sleep, including saccades and rapid eye movements. They also appear in the clinical technique EMDR and in field sobriety testing through nystagmus.

Cognitive Biases and Judgment

• Kahneman and Tversky — developed prospect theory (losses loom larger than equivalent gains; Kahneman 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics) and catalogued systematic heuristics and biases.

• Availability heuristic — frequency or probability judged by ease of examples coming to mind; leads to overestimating vivid or recent events. It is associated with Tversky and Kahneman’s work.

• Representativeness heuristic — probability judged by resemblance to a prototype; produces base-rate neglect and the conjunction fallacy (Linda problem).

• Anchoring — initial values disproportionately influence subsequent estimates. Kahneman and Tversky studied it in the heuristics-and-biases program, and experiments show that irrelevant starting numbers can skew guesses.

• Confirmation bias — tendency to seek, interpret, and remember information that confirms existing beliefs.

• Wason selection task — Peter Wason (1966): given four cards showing E, K, 4, 7 and the rule “if a card has a vowel on one side, it has an even number on the other,” most people correctly choose E but incorrectly choose 4 rather than 7; reveals confirmation bias and difficulty with falsification logic; performance improves dramatically when framed in social/deontic terms (Cosmides’s cheater-detection results). The Wason selection task is a classic psychology puzzle in which people test conditional rules by choosing which cards to turn over. It is famous for showing that many subjects struggle with modus ponens and especially modus tollens when reasoning about falsification. In Wason’s 1966 version, the cards showed E, K, 4, and 7, and the rule was “if a card has a vowel on one side, it has an even number on the other”; most people choose E and incorrectly choose 4 rather than 7. Performance improves dramatically when the task is framed in social or deontic terms, as in Cosmides’s cheater-detection results.

• Dunning-Kruger effect — low-ability individuals tend to overestimate their competence; highly skilled individuals may underestimate relative to peers. Subsequent replication debates have refined (but not eliminated) the core finding. It is named for David Dunning and Justin Kruger and is often discussed alongside related errors in metacognition and self-assessment.

• System 1 and System 2 (Kahneman) — System 1: fast, automatic, intuitive, heuristic-driven; System 2: slow, deliberate, effortful, rule-based; popularized in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011); the framework synthesizes decades of heuristics-and-biases research.

• Prospect theory — Kahneman and Tversky (1979): people evaluate outcomes as gains/losses relative to a reference point; loss aversion (losses ~2× more impactful than equivalent gains); the value function is S-shaped, concave for gains, convex for losses; probability weighting overweights small probabilities. It is a behavioral economics model describing choices under risk and often associated with framing effects.
  • Amos Tversky — Amos Tversky was an Israeli psychologist who co-founded prospect theory with Daniel Kahneman. He also worked on anchoring and adjustment, the Asian disease framing problem, and research on ambiguity aversion and comparative ignorance.

• Instinct — in ethology, a fixed, innate, species-typical behavior pattern triggered by a specific stimulus (a sign stimulus or releaser); associated with Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen, who described fixed action patterns (FAPs): stereotyped behavioral sequences that once initiated run to completion; imprinting (Lorenz) is a critical-period form of learning resembling instinct; in psychology, the concept was central to Freud (Eros and Thanatos) but largely replaced in behavioral science by more fine-grained accounts of motivation and learning.

• Daniel Kahneman — behavioral economics; heuristics and biases; prospect theory (with Tversky); Thinking, Fast and Slow; Nobel Prize in Economics 2002. Related clues include the Linda problem, the endowment effect, loss aversion, and System 1 versus System 2.

• Amos Tversky — co-developed heuristics and biases program with Kahneman; would likely have shared Nobel.

• game theory
  • cooperation
    • The Evolution of Cooperation — The Evolution of Cooperation is Robert Axelrod’s book on the emergence of teamwork and strategic reciprocity. It uses iterated prisoner’s dilemma tournaments and the tit-for-tat strategy to show how cooperation can persist among self-interested players.
• judgment and decision making

  • Philip Tetlock — Philip Tetlock is a University of Pennsylvania psychologist known for Superforecasting and for research on how “foxes” tend to outperform “hedgehogs” in political prediction. His work on judgment and forecasting includes the Good Judgment Project and studies of expert accuracy.

  • Dual-process theory
    • Thinking, Fast and Slow — Thinking, Fast and Slow is Daniel Kahneman’s popular book about the mind’s two systems: the quick, intuitive System 1 and the slower, deliberative System 2. It became famous for examples like the Linda problem and for showing how people rely on mental shortcuts.
  • Fallacies
    • Conjunction fallacy — The conjunction fallacy is the error of judging a specific event as more probable than a broader one that contains it. It is commonly illustrated by the Linda problem from behavioral psychology.
  • heuristics — Heuristics are quick mental shortcuts or rules of thumb used in judgment and decision-making. Common examples include the availability and representativeness heuristics, which can be efficient but also produce systematic biases.
• Implicit bias testing
  • implicit association test — The Implicit Association Test is a reaction-time task developed by Greenwald and Banaji to measure unconscious associations such as racial bias. It became famous through Harvard’s Project Implicit and has drawn both widespread use and criticism.
• implicit cognition
  • implicit — Implicit bias refers to unconscious associations or prejudices that influence judgment without deliberate awareness. The term also appears in the Implicit Association Test and in theories of implicit learning and memory.

• Impostor — An impostor is someone who is falsely posing as another person or hiding their true identity. The impostor phenomenon gave rise to impostor syndrome, in which capable people feel like frauds and fear being exposed.

• decision making

  • bounded rationality — Bounded rationality is Herbert Simon’s idea that decision-makers are limited by available information, time, and cognitive capacity. Instead of maximizing perfectly, people often satisfice or rely on heuristics that produce workable but not optimal choices.

  • choice — Choice is the general activity studied in work on rational decision-making, including the Allais paradox and framing effects. Thaler and Sunstein’s Nudge popularized choice architecture, while Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice discusses overload from too many options.

  • heuristic — A heuristic is a rule-of-thumb shortcut used to reach a quick judgment or solution. Examples include the availability heuristic in psychology and greedy strategies in algorithms.
    • representative heuristic — The representative heuristic is the tendency to judge likelihood by how well something matches a stereotype or prototype. Kahneman and Tversky associated it with errors such as the taxi-cab problem.
  • Iowa gambling task — The Iowa gambling task is a psychology experiment designed to test the somatic marker hypothesis. Subjects choose from decks with different reward and penalty patterns, and the task is used to study decision-making under risk.
• reasoning errors
  • cognitive bias — Cognitive bias refers to systematic errors in judgment caused by shortcuts in thinking. Examples include the halo effect, illusory superiority, the hot hand fallacy, and confirmation bias.

    • biases — Biases are systematic distortions in judgment or reporting, such as confirmation bias, recency bias, and response bias. They are also central to discussions of heuristics and to feminist epistemology’s critique of androcentric science.

    • Fixedness — Fixedness is the cognitive bias that prevents people from seeing new uses for familiar objects. Karl Duncker’s candle problem is the classic test of functional fixedness, and the broader idea is often discussed alongside mindset research.

    • gambler’s fallacy — The gambler’s fallacy is the mistaken belief that past random outcomes make a contrary result more likely soon. It is especially familiar in games of chance such as roulette, where probabilities do not change because of recent streaks; it also leads people to think a streak of tails makes heads due, even though independent trials do not change the odds.

    • hindsight bias — Hindsight bias is the tendency to believe, after an event occurs, that it was more predictable than it really was. It produces the familiar “I knew it all along” reaction and is often treated as a self-serving bias.

• Heuristics and biases
  • Anchoring and adjustment — Anchoring and adjustment is a judgment heuristic in which people start from an initial reference point and then revise it insufficiently. Kahneman and Tversky described it as a cause of estimates being pulled toward an arbitrary starting number.
• Behavioral economics

  • Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky — Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were the Israeli psychologists who developed prospect theory. Their work on heuristics, framing, anchoring, and loss aversion reshaped behavioral economics and judgment under uncertainty. They are also associated with the cognitive miser model of decision making and with classic experiments showing that people simplify probabilistic reasoning.

  • Dishonesty — Dishonesty is the general concept of not telling the truth or engaging in deceptive behavior. The topic is associated with Dan Ariely’s work, including The Honest Truth About Dishonesty and later retracted research.

  • sunk-cost effect — The sunk-cost effect is the tendency to keep investing in a failing choice because of previously spent time, money, or effort. It is illustrated by continuing a bad vacation or project simply to avoid feeling that earlier losses were wasted.

Language

• Language acquisition
  • Genie — Genie is the Disney character voiced by Robin Williams in Aladdin, famous for his blue appearance, loud personality, and the song “Friend Like Me.” The same word can also refer to the alleged Sinbad movie figure in internet conspiracy lore. Genie is also the pseudonym given to the severely isolated feral-child case studied for its lessons about language acquisition and critical periods. That case remains one of psychology’s best-known examples of the effects of extreme deprivation.

• Chomsky’s universal grammar — argued that children’s rapid, error-constrained language acquisition implies an innate language acquisition device (LAD); the poverty of the stimulus argument. Opposed Skinner’s operant account of language.

• Linguistic relativity (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) — strong version (language determines thought) is largely rejected; weak version (language influences certain cognitive processes) has empirical support, especially in color perception and spatial reasoning. Named for linguist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf.

• Critical period — language acquisition is most efficient before puberty; evidence from feral children (e.g., “Genie”) and second-language learning. A critical period is a developmental window when certain abilities are most easily acquired. It is especially associated with language learning, where the window is thought to close after childhood. Research on birds, cats, and humans links this period to imprinting, ocular dominance, and native-language phoneme acquisition, and it is associated with Eric Lenneberg’s hypothesis about language development.

• Augmentative and alternative communication
  • Facilitated communication — Facilitated communication is a discredited technique in which an assistant helps a nonverbal person point to letters or type on a keyboard. It was once promoted for autistic or otherwise disabled speakers, but critics argue the facilitator unconsciously supplies the message.
• Psycholinguistics

  • bilingualism — Bilingualism is the knowledge or use of more than one language, and multilingualism extends that idea to several languages. It is often studied through code-switching, receptive language ability, and how speakers organize L1 and L2 systems in the mind. Research on this topic has linked it to executive control and neural efficiency, though findings are debated.

  • speech perception — Speech perception is the process by which listeners interpret acoustic speech signals as language. It is associated with the McGurk effect, categorical perception, voice onset time, and the TRACE model.

  • tip-of-the-tongue — The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon is the frustrating feeling of being unable to retrieve a known word or name despite partial recall. It is a standard term in psycholinguistics and memory research.

• Roger Brown — Roger Brown was a Harvard social psychologist who studied early language acquisition and wrote A First Language. He is also associated with the T-V distinction and with work on flashbulb memory and color terms.

• speech disorders
  • stuttering — Stuttering is a speech disorder marked by involuntary repetition, prolongation, or blocking of syllables and sounds. It is the condition the University of Iowa’s “Monster Study” tried to induce in children with harsh negative feedback.
• Steven Pinker

  • The Better Angels of Our Nature — The Better Angels of Our Nature is Steven Pinker’s book arguing that violence has declined over the long term in human history. Pinker is also known for The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate, and Words and Rules, which defend an evolutionary account of innate language and criticize tabula rasa views of human nature. His work makes him a prominent cognitive scientist and popular defender of Enlightenment optimism.

  • The Blank Slate — The Blank Slate is Steven Pinker’s critique of the idea that human nature is wholly shaped by environment. He argues against the noble savage, the ghost in the machine, and tabula rasa, while presenting an evolutionary account of the mind in books such as The Language Instinct and Words and Rules. Pinker’s work helped popularize cognitive science for a general audience.

Related Concepts and Applications

• Cognitive control
  • executive functions — Executive functions are the higher-order cognitive processes that support planning, inhibition, and flexible control of behavior. They are commonly tested with tasks like the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and are often modeled by Norman and Shallice’s supervisory attentional system.
• cognitive science — Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of the mind, drawing on psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and philosophy. Its clue set often includes David Marr’s levels of analysis and related work on rituals and cognition.
  • embodied cognition — Embodied cognition is the theory that mental activity depends on the body and its interaction with the environment.

• creativity — Creativity is the capacity to produce original and worthwhile ideas, and psychologists study it through measures like the Torrance Tests and Guilford’s unusual-uses tasks. It is also linked to divergent thinking, insight, and the creative process.

• Daniel Dennett
  • Consciousness Explained — Consciousness Explained is Daniel Dennett’s 1992 book arguing for the multiple-drafts model of mind. It attacks the Cartesian theater with tools like heterophenomenology and the contrast between Orwellian and Stalinesque theories of perception.
• Eating behavior
  • eating food — Eating food is the activity at the center of eating-disorder clues, delayed gratification studies, and hunger hormones like ghrelin. It also appears in religious and cultural questions involving Bel, food offerings, and mukbangs.
• Ecological psychology
  • affordances — Affordances are the opportunities for action that an environment or object offers a user, a term associated with James J. Gibson. Don Norman popularized the idea of perceived affordances in design, especially for objects like buttons and door handles.
• spatial cognition
  • cognitive maps — Cognitive maps are mental representations of the external world, especially spatial layouts and routes. Edward Tolman introduced the idea through studies of latent learning in rats, and later writers such as Kevin Lynch extended it to human settings.
• thought suppression
  • white bear — The white bear is a classic example in thought-suppression experiments, where trying not to think about it makes it more salient.

Emotion, Consciousness, and Development

Distinguish emotion, awareness, and development through their theories and evidence.

Emotion and Affect

• James-Lange vs. Cannon-Bard theory of emotion — James-Lange: peripheral physiological changes are the emotion; Cannon-Bard (Walter Cannon and Philip Bard): emotional experience and physiological arousal occur simultaneously via the thalamus; Cannon’s critiques of James-Lange (same physiological state for different emotions, viscera too slow) drove later theories.

• Schachter-Singer two-factor theory (1962) — emotion = physiological arousal + cognitive label; misattribution of arousal is possible (excitation transfer); Dutton and Aron’s bridge study (men on a swaying bridge rated an interviewer as more attractive) is a classic demonstration.

• Affective studies
  • affect theory — Affect theory is a philosophical and social-scientific approach centered on emotion, sensation, and intensity. Associated with thinkers such as Lauren Berlant, it is often discussed through the affective turn and through Brian Massumi’s reading of Deleuze and Guattari.
• basic emotions
  • disgust — Disgust is the emotion tied to revulsion, facial gaping, nose wrinkling, and a rejection of spoiled or harmful things. It is often discussed in work by Paul Rozin, Paul Ekman, and Jonathan Haidt, and in moral psychology as a force that can intensify judgments.
• Pain theories
  • gate control theory — Gate control theory is a model of pain perception proposed by Melzack and Wall in 1965. It holds that signals at the spinal cord can modulate pain, helping explain why some stimuli can inhibit transmission from smaller pain fibers.
• loneliness — Loneliness is the condition or feeling of social isolation, a subject of recent public-health concern and of works such as The Well of Loneliness and A History of Loneliness. The clue set also points to public discussion of a loneliness epidemic that intensified during COVID-era isolation.
  • Alone — Alone is a recurring title word in works about loneliness, including Sherry Turkle’s meditation on technology and Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. It also titles Marshmello’s breakout song, which centers on isolation and the desire to return home.
• Emotion research
  • Paul Ekman — Paul Ekman is a psychologist known for identifying microexpressions, studying universal facial expressions, and developing the Facial Action Coding System with Wallace Friesen. His work on lie detection and basic emotions became widely influential in psychology and security screening.
• Emotion theories

  • Cannon-Bard theory — The Cannon-Bard theory says that an emotional stimulus produces autonomic arousal and the conscious feeling of emotion at the same time. It locates the process in subcortical brain activity.

  • Schachter two-factor theory — Schachter’s two-factor theory explains emotion as the product of physiological arousal plus a cognitive label or appraisal of the situation. The theory is associated with Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer.

  • two-factor theory of emotion — The two-factor theory of emotion, or Schachter-Singer theory, says that emotion arises from physiological arousal combined with a cognitive label. It was supported by classic experiments involving adrenaline injections and later bridge studies linking arousal to romantic interpretation.

• Facial expression
  • facial expressions — Facial expressions are the visible movements used to communicate emotion, and Paul Ekman’s work on them helped popularize the study of microexpressions. The FACS system, the POFA set, and research on universal emotions all point to this area of nonverbal communication.

    • smile — A smile is a facial expression that can be genuine or fake, with the genuine type using muscles around both the mouth and eyes. In art history, an archaic smile appears on kouroi and related archaic Greek sculpture.

    • smiling — Smiling is a facial expression associated with happiness and positive affect. The psychology clues mention Duchenne smiles, the orbicularis oculi, and Ekman’s universal expressions. It is also contrasted with laughing or grinning in art and film clues, including the Mona Lisa.

• emotional intelligence — Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize, manage, and use one’s own emotions and those of others. It became widely known through Daniel Goleman’s popular writing and is often contrasted with IQ.

• positive psychology — Positive psychology is a branch of psychology that studies happiness, meaning, and optimal human flourishing rather than only dysfunction. It is strongly associated with Martin Seligman and with ideas like learned helplessness, flow, and character strengths. Its other major figures include Carl Rogers and Barbara Fredrickson, whose broaden-and-build theory emphasizes well-being. It is often treated as a later offshoot of humanistic psychology.

  • flow — Flow is the state of complete absorption in an activity, often described as being “in the zone.” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi associated it with intense focus, a balance of challenge and skill, and the loss of self-consciousness.

  • grit — Grit is Angela Duckworth’s personality trait of passion and perseverance toward long-term goals. It is often discussed as a predictor of achievement, classroom performance, and resilience.

  • happiness — Happiness is the emotional state often treated in psychology and philosophy as subjective well-being, pleasure, or flourishing. Quizbowl clues may connect it to utilitarianism, positive psychology, Bhutan’s gross national happiness, the pleasure principle, or Sanskrit concepts like sukha and ānanda.

  • Martin E. P. Seligman — Martin E. P. Seligman is an American psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania known for the theory of learned helplessness and the positive psychology movement. His work emphasizes mental wellness and happiness rather than only psychiatric disorder. He coauthored Character Strengths and Virtues and helped develop the PERMA model of happiness.

  • Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was a Hungarian psychologist known for the concept of flow. His work on creativity and optimal experience argued that people are most engaged when challenge and skill are balanced.

• emotion — Emotions are psychological and social-scientific affective states such as fear, anger, happiness, guilt, euphoria, and sadness, used to explain arousal and decision-making. Major theories and approaches associated with them include James-Lange, Cannon-Bard, Schachter-Singer, appraisal theories, somatic-marker ideas, affective forecasting, and action tendencies. Related work includes Paul Ekman’s microexpressions, Robert Plutchik’s wheel of emotions, and studies of fear and misattribution of arousal.

  • affect — Affect is the term for the experience and expression of emotion in psychology and related theory. It appears in affect theory, affective computing, and work by thinkers such as Silvan Tomkins, Sara Ahmed, and Brian Massumi. The concept is contrasted with feelings and emotions in some theories, and it can be studied through heuristics and models of judgment. It also names the outward display of emotional states, including the idea of flat affect.

  • anger — Anger is the emotion discussed by Stoic and literary writers as a response to injury, betrayal, and the desire for revenge. It is the feeling at the center of Seneca’s De ira and of works such as Look Back in Anger and the Angry Young Men movement.
    • Fury — Fury is the word used for the violent rage or anger referred to in the clues. It also appears in titles such as the Fritz Lang film Fury and Mad Max: Fury Road.
  • arousal — Arousal is a state of physiological and psychological alertness or activation. In psychology it appears in the Yerkes-Dodson law, Schachter-Singer theory, misattribution studies, and work on attention, memory, and performance.
    • misattribution of arousal — Misattribution of arousal is the psychological error of confusing physiological arousal with romantic or sexual attraction. Classic studies include Dutton and Aron’s suspension-bridge experiment and later work placing people near a roller coaster. The effect was also explored in early experiments by Schachter and Singer, who showed that people may label arousal using the wrong emotion.
      • crossing a bridge — Crossing a bridge is a classic arousal-transfer example in social psychology. In studies of this kind, people who were on a shaky or suspension bridge were more likely to misattribute their heightened arousal.

  • fear — Fear is the emotion of a known, specific threat, often contrasted with anxiety. Quizbowl clues range from Little Albert and systematic desensitization to literary references like Prufrock, Dune’s “litany against fear,” and books or games that use Fear as a title.

  • grief — Grief is the emotion of loss commonly experienced after death, and it is the subject of the Kübler-Ross five-stage model. It also appears in literary titles and in psychological diagnoses such as prolonged grief disorder.

  • guilt — Guilt is the feeling of moral wrongdoing or remorse after an offense. It is central to Freudian psychology, Erikson’s developmental stages, and debates over collective responsibility such as war guilt.

  • Hate — Hate is a powerful negative emotion often treated as the opposite of love and as a motive for violence or prejudice. Orwell made it central to the ritualized fear and conformity of 1984, and Sternberg describes it as a form of negation of intimacy with a narrative component.

  • jealousy — Jealousy is the emotion in Othello that Iago repeatedly calls the green-eyed monster. It is also the title of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel La Jalousie, a key example of the nouveau roman.

  • nostalgia — Nostalgia is the feeling of longing for home or the past, and it titles films by Tarkovsky, Hollis Frampton, and Patricio Guzmán. The term was coined in medical writing to describe homesickness, and later scholars discussed forms such as Ostalgie.

  • physiological arousal — Physiological arousal is the heightened bodily state tied to activation of the autonomic nervous system and cortical response to stimuli. It appears in studies of emotion, social facilitation, and the misattribution experiments associated with Schachter and Singer, Dutton and Aron, and Yerkes and Dodson.

  • Stanley Schachter — Stanley Schachter was an American psychologist known for work on emotion, affiliation, and obesity. He is especially associated with the two-factor theory of emotion and with studies done with Jerome Singer and Leon Festinger. His research on epinephrine injections helped show that emotion depends on physiological arousal plus cognitive interpretation. Other clues include the Schachter-Singer experiment and his work on cognitive dissonance in When Prophecy Fails.

  • suspense — Suspense is a feeling of anxious uncertainty while awaiting an outcome or decision. In film theory, Alfred Hitchcock was known as the “master of suspense” and contrasted it with surprise.

  • theories of emotion — Theories of emotion try to explain how feelings such as happiness and fear arise from bodily arousal, cognition, and expression. Famous examples include the James-Lange, Cannon-Bard, Schachter-Singer, and facial-feedback accounts.
    • James-Lange theory — The James-Lange theory of emotion holds that physiological reactions to a stimulus come first and the feeling of emotion follows. In the classic formulation, fear arises after the body’s response, not before it.
• emotional expression
  • crying — Crying, or weeping, is the shedding of tears as an emotional or ritual act. Mythology and film often use it as a sign of grief, mourning, or supernatural punishment.
• Daniel Goleman
  • Emotional Intelligence — Emotional Intelligence is Daniel Goleman’s 1995 book arguing that emotional self-control and social awareness matter as much as traditional IQ. It popularized the idea of an ‘EQ’ and linked success to recognizing and managing feelings.
• motivation — Motivation is the psychological drive that initiates and sustains goal-directed behavior. It appears in business and industrial psychology through ideas like Herzberg’s hygiene factors, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and motivational interviewing. The concept also includes push-and-pull factors, reactance, and metamotivation. It is a standard topic in human factors psychology and in theories of employee performance.

  • Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is the motivational theory arranged as a pyramid culminating in self-actualization. It places basic physiological and safety needs below esteem and self-fulfillment, and later inspired Alderfer’s ERG model.

  • drives — Drives are Freudian motivations or urges such as Eros and Thanatos, and the term also appears in learning theory through drive reduction. Psychology questions may connect them to Clark Hull, Kenneth Spence, and Daniel Pink’s discussion of autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

  • needs — Needs are psychological requirements or motivations, classically arranged by Abraham Maslow into a hierarchy topped by self-actualization. Related theories include Clayton Alderfer’s ERG model, Henry Murray’s press-and-needs framework, and Karen Horney’s neurotic needs.

Consciousness and Altered States

• Sleep and circadian rhythms — sleep pressure builds during wakefulness, while an approximately 24-hour circadian clock coordinates timing with environmental cues such as light. Sleep cycles between non-REM stages N1, N2, and N3 and REM sleep. N3 is deep, slow-wave sleep; REM combines rapid eye movements with marked skeletal-muscle relaxation and vivid dreaming. Sleep is an active physiological state, not a shutdown of the brain.⁵

• altered states of consciousness
  • Astral projection — Astral projection is an out-of-body experience in which a nonphysical body is said to leave the physical body and travel independently. It is often described with a silver cord linking the spirit to the sleeping body and is associated with occult or ESP traditions.
• Brain waves

  • beta waves — Beta waves are brain waves in the 13 to 30 hertz range. They are associated with alertness or anxiety rather than sleep or deep relaxation.

  • delta waves — Delta waves are large, slow brain waves associated with deep non-REM sleep. They dominate stages 3 and 4 of sleep and can also appear in coma or other profoundly altered states of consciousness.

• Psychedelic research
  • Timothy Leary — Harvard psychologist and major advocate of LSD, known for popularizing “turn on, tune in, drop out.” He is associated with psychedelic research at Harvard, the Harvard Psilocybin Project, the Concord Prison Experiment, later countercultural politics in California, virtual reality, and a dramatic prison escape in the early 1970s.
• sleep phenomena
  • dreams — Dreams are the states of sleeping imagination studied in oneirology and interpreted differently by Freud and Jung. They also appear in biblical interpretation through Joseph’s reading of Pharaoh’s dreams. Clues can also point to Native traditions such as the Pacific Northwest dreamer religion and the Ojibwe dreamcatcher.
• sleep — Sleep is the reversible state of reduced consciousness marked by cycles of non-REM and REM stages, with dreaming commonly associated with REM. Scientific clues often mention sleep pressure, adenosine, melatonin, polysomnography, apnea, narcolepsy, and disorders such as Kleine-Levin syndrome.
  • dreaming — Dreaming is the sleep-related mental activity that occurs during sleep, especially during REM cycles. It is associated with REM sleep, lucid dreams, Freud, and the oneiroi, and in fiction it can be a space where characters create or experience vivid, seemingly real events. Shakespeare clues often connect it with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, and Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech.
    • Lucid dreaming — Lucid dreaming is the state of becoming aware that you are dreaming while the dream is still happening, while asleep. It can include deliberate control of dream events and is often associated with reality testing or reality checks; Stephen LaBerge linked it to techniques such as MILD and WBTB.

  • Rapid Eye Movement Sleep — Rapid eye movement sleep is the dreaming stage of sleep, marked by rapid eye movements, muscle atonia or temporary paralysis, irregular breathing, and desynchronized brain waves. Vivid dreams often occur in this stage. It recurs in cycles, typically begins about 90 minutes after falling asleep, and often shows rebound after deprivation. It is also associated with memory consolidation, especially for motor skills.

  • bedtime — Bedtime is the nightly practice of going to sleep at a regular hour, often discussed with ideas like bedtime procrastination and revenge bedtime procrastination. The clue set also links it to children’s reading rituals and to debates about control over one’s schedule.
• Consciousness
  • Altered states
    • psychedelic — Psychedelic comes from Greek for “showing the soul,” and it can refer to altered mental states, hallucinogens, or the bright, surreal aesthetics associated with 1960s counterculture.
  • The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind — Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind argues that early humans lacked modern subjective self-awareness. It proposes that the mind once operated through divided “speaking” and “listening” functions and uses ancient texts such as the Iliad as evidence.
    • bicameral mind — The bicameral mind is Julian Jaynes’s controversial theory that early human consciousness operated by hearing commands from a seemingly external right hemisphere. Jaynes developed the idea in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
• hypnosis — An altered state of consciousness characterized by heightened suggestibility and trance-like responsiveness. Its study was shaped by James Braid, who helped give the phenomenon a medical and psychological framework. Its history runs from Mesmer’s animal magnetism and Braid’s eye-fixing to later psychological theories of dissociation, social roles, and hypermnesia; it is also associated with stage demonstrations and the Gouffé affair.
  • hypnotism — Hypnotism is the practice of altering a subject’s mental state by focused attention, a technique once linked to Franz Anton Mesmer’s animal magnetism. It appears in literature as a means of suspended animation or control, as in Poe’s account of M. Valdemar.

    • animal magnetism — Animal magnetism was Franz Mesmer’s discredited theory of an invisible fluid or force influencing living beings. Mesmerism claimed that manipulating this force could restore bodily and mental health.

    • Franz Mesmer — Franz Mesmer was the German physician whose ideas about animal magnetism gave rise to mesmerism. His name became associated with hypnosis and trance-like states.

    • Phineas Parkhurst Quimby — Phineas Parkhurst Quimby was a Maine-based healer associated with mesmerism, hypnosis, and the New Thought movement. His ideas about healing through positive thought influenced later figures such as Warren Felt Evans and were discussed in connection with Mary Baker Eddy.

• Julian Jaynes — Julian Jaynes was the psychologist best known for The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. His controversial theory claimed that early humans lacked modern introspection and instead experienced divine voices as external commands.

• Susan Blackmore — Susan Blackmore is a writer and psychologist best known for The Meme Machine, which popularized Richard Dawkins’s idea of memes. She also wrote about psychic claims and skepticism in Test Your Psychic Powers.

• Circadian rhythms
  • entrainment cues
    • Zeitgebers — Zeitgebers are external cues that synchronize circadian rhythms. Light is the classic example, but other environmental signals such as activity and sleep can also act as entrainment cues.
• sleep physiology
  • Sleep spindles — Sleep spindles are brief bursts of higher-frequency brain activity that occur during stage N2 sleep. They are commonly paired in sleep science clues with K-complexes.

Development

Cognitive Development (Piaget)

• Jean Piaget — proposed four stages of cognitive development based on schemas, assimilation, and accommodation. Jean Piaget was a Swiss developmental psychologist and epistemologist who studied how children build knowledge. His theory names the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages, and he also discussed object permanence.

  • Egocentrism — Egocentrism is Piaget’s term for a child’s inability to take another person’s perspective. It is associated with preoperational thought, the three mountains task, and adolescent ideas like the imaginary audience and personal fable.

  • Equilibration — In Piaget’s developmental psychology, equilibration is the process by which a child balances new information with existing cognitive structures. It is often described as the coordination of assimilation and accommodation.

  • Pre-operational stage
    • pre-operational — The pre-operational stage is Piaget’s second stage of cognitive development, following sensorimotor and lasting roughly from ages two to seven. Children in this stage can use symbols and language but still lack concrete logic and another person’s point of view.
  • Stages of cognitive development

    • formal operational — The formal operational stage is Piaget’s final stage of cognitive development, marked by abstract reasoning, hypothetico-deductive thinking, and metacognition. It is the stage tested by tasks involving balances, pendulums, and other measures of formal thought.

    • preoperational — The preoperational stage is Piaget’s second stage of cognitive development, occurring roughly from ages two to seven. It is marked by egocentrism, animism, symbolic thought, and an inability to fully grasp conservation.

  • Sensorimotor stage (0–2 years): knowledge through action; object permanence develops (~8 months). The sensorimotor stage is Jean Piaget’s first stage of cognitive development, covering roughly the first two years of life. It is associated with developing object permanence and with early action-based schemes before the preoperational stage.
    • Object permanence — Piaget’s term for the understanding that objects continue to exist when out of sight; develops around 8 months in the sensorimotor stage; its apparent absence earlier may partly reflect motor limitations, as shown by Baillargeon’s violation-of-expectation studies.

  • Preoperational stage (2–7 years): symbolic/language use; egocentrism (three-mountain task); animism; lacks conservation. Piaget’s second stage of cognitive development.

  • Concrete operational stage (7–11 years): logical thinking about concrete objects; conservation mastered; seriation and classification. In Piaget’s theory, this stage typically follows the preoperational stage and precedes formal operational thought. It is associated with decentration, reduced egocentrism, and the ability to apply logic to concrete problems.
    • Conservation (Piaget) — understanding that quantity is unchanged by changes in shape or arrangement; mastered in concrete operations; classic demonstrations use clay balls and liquid in containers; preoperational children “fail” conservation tasks.
  • Formal operational stage — in Piaget’s theory, emerging around adolescence, the capacity for abstract, systematic, and hypothetical reasoning. Performance varies by task, experience, culture, and education rather than appearing universally at one fixed age. Piaget’s final stage of cognitive development. It is usually associated with adolescence and abstract thought, and is the stage in which deductive and hypothetical reasoning emerge most clearly.
    • Formal operations — Formal operations is Piaget’s stage in which children begin to think abstractly and handle symbolic or verbal logic.

• Criticisms of Piaget — underestimated children’s abilities; stages less discrete than proposed; cultural and social factors underweighted.

• Theory of mind — understanding that others have beliefs, desires, and intentions different from one’s own; typically assessed by the false-belief task (Wimmer and Perner, 1983); develops around age 4; delayed in autism spectrum disorder; linked to prefrontal and temporoparietal junction function. The concept is often illustrated with the Sally-Anne test and discussed in relation to Premack and Woodruff’s work on mindreading, as well as autism-related mindblindness.
  • Sally-Anne test — The Sally-Anne test is a classic psychology task used to measure theory of mind in children. In the false-belief setup, one character moves an object while another is absent, and the subject must predict where the first character will look.
• Lev Vygotsky — zone of proximal development; social/cultural learning. Soviet developmental psychologist and a pioneer of social constructivism. He wrote Thought and Language, emphasized cultural mediation, inner speech, and the role of social interaction in learning, and helped found cultural-historical psychology with Alexander Luria; he also argued that egocentric speech supports later thinking.
  • Thought and Language — Thought and Language is Lev Vygotsky’s book on the relation between cognition and speech. It criticizes Piaget and argues that inner speech develops from external social speech.

• Vygotsky — emphasized social and cultural context; zone of proximal development (ZPD): gap between what a child can do alone vs. with guidance; scaffolding.

• adaptation
  • Accommodation — Accommodation is the adaptive process of adjusting behavior or a mental schema to fit new information or a new situation. In Piaget’s psychology, it is the revision of an old mental schema to fit new information, contrasted with assimilation. In linguistics, presupposition accommodation is the process by which listeners add a presupposition to the common ground. In eye physiology, it is the adjustment of the lens curvature that lets vision shift between near and far objects.
• Piagetian theory
  • Piaget’s stages of cognitive development — Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development are sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. They describe the progression from infant action to abstract reasoning.
    • preoperational period — The preoperational period is Piaget’s second major stage of cognitive development, following the sensorimotor stage. It runs roughly from ages two to seven and is marked by egocentrism, weak conservation, and imaginative but not yet reversible thinking.
  • schemes — In Piaget’s theory, schemes are the mental structures children build from experience to organize actions and understanding. They are modified through assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration.
• child development
  • toys — Toys recur as clues for ballets and developmental psychology, from The Nutcracker to Coppélia. They also appear in studies of object permanence, forbidden toys, transitional objects, and the Bobo doll experiment.

Psychosocial Development (Erikson)

• Erik Erikson’s eight stages — each stage presents a conflict whose resolution shapes personality. Key stages: Trust vs. Mistrust (infancy), Autonomy vs. Shame/Doubt (toddler), Initiative vs. Guilt (preschool), Industry vs. Inferiority (school age), Identity vs. Role Confusion (adolescence), Intimacy vs. Isolation (young adult), Generativity vs. Stagnation (middle adult), Ego Integrity vs. Despair (late adult).

• Erik Erikson — eight psychosocial stages across the lifespan.

• Erik Erikson

  • Childhood and Society — Childhood and Society is Erik Erikson’s book on psychosocial development, including the famous eight stages of man. It uses case material and historical reflection to link early environment, infantile sexuality, and later identity formation.

  • Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development
    • Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development — Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development divides life into eight stages, each marked by a central conflict. Its familiar crises include trust versus mistrust, identity versus role confusion, intimacy versus isolation, and generativity versus stagnation.

  • Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence — Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence is Erik Erikson’s psychohistorical study of Mohandas Gandhi. The work examines Gandhi’s nonviolent politics and his psychological development, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

  • identity development
    • identity crisis — An identity crisis is the psychological conflict in which a person loses a stable sense of self. Erik Erikson made the term famous in his account of adolescent development, and James Marcia later linked it to statuses such as moratorium and foreclosure.

  • initiative versus guilt — Initiative versus guilt is Erik Erikson’s early-childhood psychosocial stage. It centers on children’s growing motor and social abilities and on learning limits without developing excessive guilt.

  • psychosocial stages
    • ego identity and despair — Erikson’s final psychosocial stage contrasts ego identity with despair. Successful resolution produces a sense of fulfillment, while failure leads to regret and hopelessness.
  • Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History — Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History is Erik Erikson’s psychobiography of Martin Luther. It uses Luther’s religious rebellion and identity struggle to illustrate Erikson’s idea of the identity crisis.
• identity formation
  • James Marcia — James Marcia was a developmental psychologist associated with identity formation in adolescence. He is best known for expanding Erikson’s work into four identity statuses: diffusion, foreclosure, moratorium, and achievement.

Attachment (Bowlby and Ainsworth)

• John Bowlby — evolutionary-ethological theory of attachment; infants have an innate need for proximity to a caregiver; internal working models guide future relationships.
  • Bowlby’s attachment phases — pre-attachment (0–6 weeks), attachment-in-the-making (6 weeks–6–8 months), clear-cut attachment (6–8 months to 18–24 months; separation anxiety and stranger wariness peak), formation of a reciprocal relationship (18–24 months onward).

• Mary Ainsworth — Strange Situation procedure identified four attachment patterns: secure (explores freely, distressed by separation, reassured on return), anxious-avoidant (indifferent to caregiver, avoids reunion), anxious-ambivalent/resistant (clingy, not soothed on return), and disorganized (inconsistent; associated with maltreatment). Mary Ainsworth was the developmental psychologist who created the Strange Situation to study infant attachment. Her work identified patterns such as secure, anxious-avoidant, and anxious-ambivalent attachment, building on Bowlby’s theory.

• Harlow’s monkeys — infant rhesus monkeys preferred a cloth surrogate “mother” over a wire surrogate that provided food; demonstrated importance of contact comfort over mere feeding in attachment.

• Harry Harlow — attachment research via surrogate-mother monkey studies; also infamous for isolation chamber (“pit of despair”) experiments demonstrating devastating effects of social deprivation; studies now considered unethical. He was a psychologist known for attachment research on rhesus monkeys and for the controversial surrogate-mother experiments. He also devised the rape rack, and his work at Wisconsin explored the effects of social deprivation on infant monkeys.

  • pit of despair — Harry Harlow’s isolation chamber for rhesus monkeys, designed to induce extreme depression and social deprivation. It was used in experiments to prevent normal movement and social contact, leaving the animals deeply distressed. The device had steep, barren walls and a rounded bottom, creating a cramped vertical chamber.

  • Harry Frederick Harlow — Harry F. Harlow was a psychologist famous for experiments on rhesus monkeys, including wire-and-cloth surrogate mothers and the “pit of despair.” His work on contact comfort and attachment strongly influenced later theories of maternal bonding.

• Child neglect
  • Neglect — Neglect is a parenting style or harmful caregiving pattern in which a child’s basic needs are not adequately met. It is often discussed alongside attachment problems and Harlow’s monkey experiments.
• monkeys — Monkeys appear in the Ramayana through Hanuman and the vanaras of Kishkindha, who build the bridge to Lanka and serve Rama. The category also fits classical and experimental psychology clues, from Harlow’s deprivation studies to de Waal’s capuchin fairness experiment.
  • macaques
    • rhesus monkeys — Rhesus monkeys, or rhesus macaques, are the primates Harry Harlow used in attachment experiments such as the surrogate mother studies and the pit of despair. They also show up in space-history clues through the monkey Albert and in blood-group clues through the rhesus factor.

Moral Development

• Kohlberg’s stages — preconventional (obedience/self-interest), conventional (conformity/law and order), postconventional (social contract/universal principles); used Heinz dilemma. Carol Gilligan argued the model is gender-biased, undervaluing an “ethic of care.”
  • Heinz dilemma — Kohlberg’s vignette in which a man must decide whether to steal a drug to save his dying wife; used to classify participants’ stage of moral reasoning by the justifications they give, not the yes/no answer.
• Carol Gilligan — In a Different Voice (1982); critiqued Kohlberg for using male samples; proposed that women more often reason through an ethic of care (relationships, context) vs. the ethic of justice (rules, rights) Kohlberg emphasized.
  • In a Different Voice — In a Different Voice is Carol Gilligan’s feminist critique of Kohlberg’s moral development theory. It argues that women’s moral reasoning is often organized around an ethics of care rather than an ethics of justice.

• Lawrence Kohlberg — moral development stages; Harvard; student of Piaget; died 1987. Known for the Heinz dilemma and a model of moral growth divided into pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional stages; later criticized by Carol Gilligan.

• moral psychology

  • Heinz’s dilemma — Heinz’s dilemma is a classic moral psychology scenario about whether Heinz should steal a costly drug to save his wife. It is often used to discuss moral reasoning and the justification behind ethical choices rather than the answer itself.

  • moral — Moral judgment and moral development are central topics in psychology and philosophy, from Kohlberg’s six-stage model to Haidt’s moral foundations theory. The adjective also appears in discussions of moral injury, moral luck, and related critiques of ethical behavior under pressure.

Related Concepts and Applications

• developmental psychology
  • adolescence — Adolescence is Erik Erikson’s stage of identity versus role confusion, when a person works toward a stable sense of self. In developmental psychology it is linked to theory-of-mind tasks, identity formation, and the broader transition from childhood to adulthood.
    • Adolescent — An adolescent is a person who has reached puberty but not yet adulthood, usually placed by the World Health Organization between ages 10 and 19. The word comes from a Latin root meaning “growing up.”
  • attachment theory — Attachment theory studies the emotional bond between infants and caregivers and how early caregiver relationships shape later emotional development. Developed by John Bowlby and expanded by Mary Ainsworth, it is classically associated with the Strange Situation and attachment styles such as secure, avoidant, ambivalent/anxious-ambivalent, anxious-avoidant, and disorganized attachment; later research also extended it to adult relationships.
    • Anxious-avoidant attachment
      • Anxious-avoidant — Anxious-avoidant attachment is marked by emotional distance from caregivers. Children with this pattern often show little distress when the caregiver leaves and remain aloof on reunion.

    • John Bowlby — John Bowlby was a British psychologist best known for attachment theory. Working with Mary Ainsworth, he helped develop the strange situation and argued that maternal deprivation can produce separation anxiety.

    • Mothers — Mothers are female parents and primary attachment figures studied in psychology, anthropology, literature, and social protest. The topic is associated with Ainsworth’s Strange Situation, Harlow and Lorenz’s studies of attachment and imprinting, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, Freud’s family theory, poems about Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg, and artists’ models and family relationships such as Anna McNeill Whistler and Frieda Hughes’ connection to Plath.

    • Strange Situation — The Strange Situation is Mary Ainsworth’s attachment test for infants, used to classify secure, avoidant, and ambivalent patterns from separation and reunion behavior. It is often linked to the visual cliff, object permanence, and other infant-development studies by Piaget, Gibson, and related psychologists.

  • birth — Birth is the event of a baby leaving the womb. In mythology it is linked to Zeus, Hera, Eileithyia, and heroic births such as Heracles and Dionysus; related stories include Zeus producing Athena and Dionysus, Nut separating from Geb, and Inanna’s rescue from the underworld. It also appears in psychoanalytic discussions of Otto Rank’s theory of the trauma of birth, and it titles poetry by Mina Loy, Warsan Shire, and Philip Larkin.

  • development — Development is the broad process that proceeds through stages in psychology, economics, and music theory. In psychology it appears in Piaget, Erikson, Kohlberg, and Vygotsky, while in sonata form it names the unstable middle section between exposition and recapitulation.

  • Erik Erikson — Erik Erikson was a psychoanalyst and psychologist known for his eight-stage theory of psychosocial development. His work on identity development is associated with Young Man Luther, and his books include Young Man Luther and Insight and Responsibility.

  • family effects
    • birth order — Birth order is the sibling-position variable psychologists study when discussing firstborn advantages, middle-child effects, and Adler’s ideas of dethronement. It also appears in arguments about confluence models, family-size effects, and fraternal birth-order effects.
  • Infancy
    • Infants — Infants are very young human subjects studied in developmental psychology, especially in work on attachment, perception, object permanence, and depth perception. Classic examples include Ainsworth’s Strange Situation, Piaget’s sensorimotor theory and object permanence, the visual cliff, and preferential-looking studies. The term also appears in contexts such as Qur’anic charity and naming customs, the ritual sacrifice of aqiqah, Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” and novels and essays about childhood.
  • parenting — Parenting is the practice of raising and caring for one’s children, a topic studied through attachment, responsiveness, and demandingness. The clues point to Diana Baumrind, Mary Ainsworth, Donald Winnicott, and Benjamin Spock as major figures in its psychology.
    • parents — Parents are the people who raise children, and developmental psychology often studies their influence on attachment, autonomy, and emotional development. Clues may point to Baumrind’s parenting styles, Winnicott’s “good enough” parenting, or Bowlby and Ainsworth’s attachment theories.
  • Piagetian stages
    • concrete operational — Piaget’s concrete operational stage is the third major stage of cognitive development, usually associated with ages seven through eleven. In this period, children develop conservation and more logical thinking about classes, hierarchies, and other concrete relationships.
  • Psychosocial development

    • Erik Erikson — Erik Erikson was a psychoanalyst and developmental theorist who studied under the Freuds. He coined the term identity crisis and developed the eight-stage theory of psychosocial development, sometimes called the Eight Ages of Man. His works include Childhood and Society, Young Man Luther, and Gandhi’s Truth, with psychohistorical studies of Luther and Gandhi.

    • Erik Homburger Erikson — Erik Homburger Erikson was a German-born psychologist and psychoanalyst known for the eight-stage theory of psychosocial development and the concept of an identity crisis. He wrote psychohistorical studies of figures such as Martin Luther and Gandhi, and his books include Childhood and Society and Young Man Luther, both reflecting his interest in human development across the lifespan.

  • Sociocultural theory
    • Lev Semyonovitch Vygotsky — Lev Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist and educational theorist known for the Zone of Proximal Development. He is also associated with scaffolding, the idea that learners can do more with guidance than they can alone.
  • playing — Playing is the childhood activity studied by developmental psychologists in forms such as parallel, sociodramatic, and collaborative play. It also appears in the phrase “playing in the dark,” the title of Toni Morrison’s book on racial imagination.

• Jerome Kagan — Jerome Kagan was a developmental psychologist known for studies of infant temperament and emotion. He wrote works such as Personal Development, Galen’s Prophecy, What Is Emotion?, and Three Seductive Ideas.

• Mary Pipher
  • Reviving Ophelia — Reviving Ophelia is Mary Pipher’s bestselling book about adolescent girls and the pressures that distort their self-image and development. Drawing on interviews and observations, it argues for self-respect and identity in what Pipher calls a girl-poisoning culture.
• primitive reflexes
  • Moro reflex — The Moro reflex is an infant startle response in which the arms extend and then draw back after a sudden drop or loud noise. It is used in neurologic assessment of newborns along with other primitive reflexes.
• Kindchenschema
  • cuteness — Cuteness is an aesthetic response associated with rounded, infant-like features and the Konrad Lorenz kindchenschema. It is closely tied to Japanese kawaii culture and to the sense that cute things seem appealingly powerless.

Personality, Intelligence, and Social Behavior

Compare accounts of personality, intelligence, and social behavior.

Personality

• Personality psychology
  • Big Five traits
    • conscientiousness — Conscientiousness is one of the Big Five personality traits and is associated with discipline, hard work, and thoughtfulness. It is also used in the HEXACO model and is closely linked to grit in Duckworth’s research.

  • Hans Eysenck — Hans Eysenck was a personality psychologist known for the P-E-N model of psychoticism, extraversion, and neuroticism. He also developed a personality questionnaire and wrote on intelligence, heredity, and trait theory.

  • Hans Jürgen Eysenck — Hans Jürgen Eysenck was a controversial British psychologist best known for the PEN model of personality. He and his wife Sybil developed a questionnaire centered on extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism.

  • Introversion and extroversion — In Carl Jung’s theory of personality types, introversion and extroversion are paired attitudes described in Psychological Types (1921). Introversion is a more inward, reserved orientation that favors solitary inward focus, while extroversion is an outward, socially engaged orientation associated with drawing energy from social interaction. The distinction is also echoed in Myers-Briggs typing.

  • perfectionism — Perfectionism is a personality and social-psychological trait marked by excessively high standards and concern with mistakes. It is often divided into normal and neurotic forms, or into self-oriented, other-oriented, and socially prescribed forms.

  • personality — Personality is the set of characteristic behavioral traits and patterns that make an individual seem introverted, extroverted, or otherwise distinctive. Quizbowl clues include the Big Five, the Myers-Briggs test, Cattell’s sixteen-factor model, the MMPI, and ego depletion as resistance against one’s traits.
    • narcissism — Narcissism is a trait or disorder marked by excessive self-regard, grandiosity, and a need for admiration. Freud wrote about it in 1914, and later psychologists such as Kohut, Kernberg, and Lasch used it to describe both personality pathology and broader cultural attitudes.

  • psychopathy — Psychopathy is a personality disorder associated with impaired empathy, manipulativeness, and shallow affect, and it is often grouped with narcissism and Machiavellianism in the dark triad. The clues reference Hare’s PCL-R, Cleckley, and debates over the relation between psychopathy and sociopathy.

  • Raymond Cattell — Raymond Cattell was a psychologist known for factor analysis and for distinguishing fluid from crystallized intelligence. He also developed the 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire, usually shortened to 16PF, and wrote on the scientific analysis of personality.

  • Somatotype — A somatotype is William Sheldon’s system for classifying body build into endomorphic, mesomorphic, and ectomorphic types. Sheldon also linked these body types to personality in his related theory of temperament.

  • Type A behavior pattern
    • type A personality — Type A personality refers to a trait pattern marked by impatience, competitiveness, urgency, and hostility. It was studied for possible links to coronary heart disease, especially in the work of Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman.

  • Introvert — An introvert is someone whose attention is directed inward toward reflection, ideas, and internal experience. In Jungian and MBTI language, it contrasts with extraversion and is often described as withdrawn or less socially outgoing.

  • locus of control — Locus of control is the psychological concept describing whether people see life outcomes as controlled by internal or external forces. Julian Rotter coined the term, and Bandura’s self-efficacy work often contrasts internal and external varieties of it.
    • Control — In social science, control is the sense that outcomes are governed by oneself rather than outside forces, as in Rotter’s locus of control. The word also appears in sociology and criminology in phrases like social control and in theories about controlling images.
  • personalities — Personalities are enduring patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that are often grouped into types or trait systems. The Myers-Briggs test and the Big Five are both cited here as ways of classifying these human characteristics.
• personality theory
  • Trait theory — Trait theory is Gordon Allport’s influential approach to personality, emphasizing enduring dispositions and categories such as cardinal, central, and secondary traits. Allport also appears in clues about The Nature of Prejudice, Functional Autonomy, and his collaboration with Leo Postman on rumor.

    • Gordon Allport — American Harvard psychologist and early pioneer of trait psychology associated with trait theory and humanistic psychology. He distinguished nomothetic and idiographic approaches to personality, organized traits into cardinal, central, and secondary levels, and is associated with the concept of functional autonomy. His works include Personality: A Psychological Interpretation and The Nature of Prejudice. He also studied rumor transmission, prejudice, and religion in social psychology, including the least-effort explanation of rumor.

    • Gordon W. Allport — Gordon W. Allport was an American psychologist known for his trait theory of personality. He classified dispositions as cardinal, central, or secondary and wrote Letters from Jenny.

  • W. H. Sheldon — W. H. Sheldon was an American psychologist known for a body-type theory that tried to link physique with temperament and mental traits. He is also associated with photographic atlases of Yale and Vassar students, including Atlas of Men and Atlas of Women.
• personality traits

  • Big Five — The Big Five is a personality theory built from lexical analysis of trait language. Its standard dimensions are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

  • Big Five model — The Big Five model, also called the Five Factor Model, organizes personality into traits such as openness, agreeableness, and neuroticism. It is often summarized by the acronym OCEAN and traces back to work by Tupes, Christal, and later Lewis Goldberg.

  • Big Five traits
    • extroversion — Extroversion, also called extraversion, is the Big Five personality trait associated with sociability, energy, and outward-directed behavior. It is the E in the OCEAN model and is often contrasted with introversion.
  • introversion — Introversion is the personality trait of turning inward, preferring one’s internal life over outward social stimulation. It is often contrasted with extraversion and appears in Jungian and Myers-Briggs style descriptions of temperament. Some psychologists and personality researchers discuss it as a dimension rather than a disorder.
• personality tests

  • Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory — The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory is a widely used true-false personality test developed in the 1940s at the University of Minnesota to assess clinical traits and psychopathology. It is a standard clinical assessment instrument for older adolescents and adults, using validity scales and clinical scales to profile patterns associated with depression, paranoia, hysteria, hypomania, psychopathic deviance, and schizophrenia. Later versions include the MMPI-2, MMPI-3, and the shorter RF form.

  • Myers-Briggs personality test — The Myers-Briggs personality test is a widely used personality inventory based on Jungian typology. It sorts people into sixteen letter-coded types using paired preferences such as introversion versus extroversion and thinking versus feeling.

• personality typology
  • Keirsey Temperament Sorter — The Keirsey Temperament Sorter is a personality instrument closely related to the Myers-Briggs system. It groups people into artisans, guardians, idealists, and rationals using four rings of temperament traits.

• Big Five (OCEAN) — the dominant dimensional model of personality: Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism; derived from lexical hypothesis and factor analysis; more empirically supported than type-based models (MBTI).

• MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) — the most widely used clinical personality assessment; developed by Hathaway and McKinley (1940s); empirically keyed (scales built from items distinguishing criterion groups from normals); current version is MMPI-3; includes validity scales to detect faking.

• Rorschach inkblot test — projective personality test developed by Hermann Rorschach (1921); respondents describe ambiguous inkblots; responses coded for content, location, and determinants; psychometric validity debated; the Exner Comprehensive System attempted standardization. It typically uses a standard series of symmetric black-and-white and colored inkblot cards, and respondents say what they think they see in them. The test has been used to infer personality traits from these responses, and John Exner’s system became influential in American clinical practice, alongside separate European interpretive traditions.

• Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) — Henry Murray and Christiana Morgan (1935); projective test using ambiguous pictures; subjects narrate stories; used to assess implicit motives (achievement, power, affiliation); validity for clinical diagnosis is contested.

• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) — a widely used personality typology instrument developed by Isabel Briggs Myers and Katharine Cook Briggs in the 1940s, based on Carl Jung’s theory of psychological types; classifies respondents into 16 types along four dichotomies: Extraversion/Introversion, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling, Judging/Perceiving; popular in corporate training and personal development but criticized by psychologists for poor test-retest reliability, false dichotomies, and failure to predict behavior as well as the empirically derived Big Five (OCEAN) model; not widely accepted in academic personality research.

• Self-concept

  • Self-esteem — Self-esteem is a person’s evaluation of their own worth as a human being, commonly measured by the Rosenberg scale. It figures in social-psychological debates over implicit versus explicit worth, the sociometer theory, and claims that efforts to raise it can backfire or correlate with narcissism.

  • the self — The self is the sense of one’s own identity, awareness, and worth. Psychologists and philosophers connect it to the mirror test, Mead’s “I” and “me,” Winnicott’s false self, and Maslow’s self-actualization.

• Somatotypes
  • endomorph — An endomorph is Sheldon’s body-type category for a rounder, softer physique. Sheldon linked this somatotype with temperament theories in early-20th-century psychology.
• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator — The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a personality test based on Carl Jung’s psychological types and divided into four dichotomies, including introversion versus extroversion, sensing versus intuition, and judging versus perceiving. Developed in the 1940s by Isabel Briggs Myers and Katherine Cook Briggs, it sorts people into sixteen types. It remains popular in business settings, though psychologists often criticize it as pseudoscientific.

  • Isabel Briggs Myers — Isabel Briggs Myers co-created the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator with her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs. She later developed her ideas in Gifts Differing and used them in personality research and fiction.

  • Myers and Briggs — The M and B in MBTI stand for Myers and Briggs, the pair associated with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The system traces back to Jungian personality theory but was standardized in its modern form by Isabel Briggs Myers and Katharine Cook Briggs.

• transactional analysis — Transactional analysis is Eric Berne’s psychological model of communication and personality. It divides behavior into Parent, Adult, and Child ego states and is associated with the slogan “I’m OK, you’re OK.”

  • Eric Berne — Eric Berne was a Canadian psychiatrist who developed transactional analysis. He is best known for Games People Play and for introducing concepts such as ego states and the analysis of social ‘games’.

  • inner child — The inner child is a psychological concept associated with transactional analysis and Eric Berne. It refers to a more childlike part of the personality that is ideally balanced by the parent ego state.

  • I’m OK, You’re OK — I’m OK, You’re OK is Thomas A. Harris’s bestseller about transactional analysis. The book presents interpersonal behavior through adult, parent, and child ego states.

• Psychological testing
  • personality tests
    • Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 — The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 is a long true-or-false personality test used in clinical assessment and sometimes criticized in employee screening. It includes validity measures such as a lie scale and produces profile scores on clinical dimensions like depression and paranoia.
  • projective tests — Projective tests are psychological tests that use ambiguous stimuli to reveal aspects of personality. The Rorschach inkblot test and the Thematic Apperception Test are classic examples.

    • Hermann Rorschach — Hermann Rorschach was the Swiss psychologist best known for the inkblot test that bears his name. The Rorschach test uses symmetrical ambiguous images to probe projection and interpretation.

    • Thematic Apperception Test — Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is a projective psychological/personality test developed by Henry A. Murray and Christiana D. Morgan. Subjects are shown ambiguous pictures on cards and asked to invent stories about them; it is often used to probe anxiety, relationships, personal conflict, and Murray’s ideas of needs and presses. Criticisms have noted possible bias from race, age, and testing conditions, and some versions include a blank card.

• Big Five personality traits

  • Agreeableness — Agreeableness is one of the Big Five personality traits. It describes warmth, cooperativeness, and concern for other people and their well-being.

  • neuroticism — Neuroticism is the Big Five trait associated with negative emotions, stress sensitivity, anxiety, and depression. It is also called negative affectivity and appears in work by Karen Horney and Hans Eysenck. Its study has been linked to defense mechanisms, cognitive failure, and the mental-noise hypothesis.

  • openness to experience — Openness to experience is the Big Five personality trait associated with imagination, curiosity, and divergent thinking. It is often linked with political liberalism and with Carl Rogers’s ideal of the fully functioning person.

• identity
  • self — The self is the psychological sense of personal identity, often contrasted with the false self or ideal self in theories by Winnicott, Kohut, Rogers, Cooley, and Bandura. In Buddhism, anatta denies a permanent self and explains personhood through changing aggregates rather than an enduring essence.

Intelligence and Measurement

• Binet and Simon (1905) — developed the first practical intelligence test to identify students needing academic support in France; introduced mental age.

• IQ — intelligence quotient. Stern formula: (mental age / chronological age) × 100. Modern IQ tests (Wechsler) use deviation IQ (mean 100, SD 15). It is a standardized score intended to estimate cognitive ability, with 100 as the usual median. It is associated with tests such as the Stanford-Binet and with ideas like g factor and the Flynn effect, and Mensa admits people with very high IQ scores. The concept developed from early work by Binet and Simon.

• Gardner’s multiple intelligences — proposed 8+ relatively independent intelligences (linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalist). Not widely accepted in psychometrics.

• Sternberg’s triarchic theory — proposes analytic, creative, and practical aspects of intelligent behavior and emphasizes adaptation to context. Its measurement and distinctness from general intelligence remain debated.

• Flynn effect — IQ scores have risen substantially across generations in many countries (James Flynn); causes debated (nutrition, education, abstract thinking demands). It is named for James Flynn, and the trend has required periodic renorming of IQ tests. The rise has been observed across much of the world, and some developed countries have seen it slow or reverse.
  • James Robert Flynn — James Robert Flynn is the New Zealand scholar whose name is attached to the Flynn effect, the long-term rise in measured IQ scores across generations. Clues may also reference his work with William Dickens on environmental effects on intelligence despite high heritability.
• Heritability of IQ — twin and adoption studies suggest heritability of ~50–80% in adults; gene-environment interplay is significant and heritability estimates do not apply to group differences.
  • Arthur Jensen — Arthur Jensen was a Berkeley psychologist whose 1969 writing argued that IQ differences between racial groups had a genetic basis. He became closely identified with attempts to use standardized testing to explain unequal average educational and intellectual outcomes.

• Stanford-Binet intelligence scale — first American IQ test, adapted by Lewis Terman at Stanford from Binet-Simon (1916); introduced the ratio IQ formula; current edition (SB5) uses deviation IQ like the Wechsler scales.

• Wechsler scales — David Wechsler developed the WAIS (adults), WISC (children), and WPPSI (preschool); yield a Full-Scale IQ plus index scores (verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning, working memory, processing speed); use deviation IQ (mean 100, SD 15).

• Stereotype threat (Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, 1995) — awareness of a negative stereotype about one’s group depresses performance on relevant tests.
  • Claude Steele — Claude Steele is the social psychologist known for work on stereotype threat and self-affirmation theory. With Joshua Aronson, he showed that black students performed worse on a test when it was presented as diagnostic of intellectual ability. His research also emphasized protecting the self from threats to competence or identity. That work has become central to discussions of achievement gaps and identity-based performance effects.

• Spearman’s g — general intelligence factor extracted by factor analysis; positive manifold: all cognitive tests tend to correlate; Cattell further split g into fluid intelligence (gf: novel reasoning, peaks in young adulthood) and crystallized intelligence (gc: accumulated knowledge and skills, relatively stable with age); the Gf-Gc model was extended by John Horn and John Carroll into the CHC theory.

• intelligence testing

  • Alfred Binet — French psychologist born in 1857 who studied intelligence in children, helped found the first French psychological laboratory at the Sorbonne, and with Théodore Simon developed an early intelligence test that became associated with the Binet-Simon and Stanford-Binet traditions. His work also included hypnosis, memory, and studies of chess players; his IQ-style scoring used mental age compared with biological age.

  • Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon — The first modern IQ test is usually credited to Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon, who published the Binet-Simon scale in 1905.

  • Army Alpha and Army Beta — Army Alpha and Army Beta were group intelligence tests developed to classify American soldiers during World War I. They became early examples of mass-administered IQ-style testing.

  • Charles Yerkes — Charles Yerkes was a psychologist who revised Binet’s scale into a total-point system. He then used it to develop the Army Alpha and Beta tests for military recruits.

  • David Wechsler — David Wechsler was a psychologist known for creating widely used intelligence tests that extended beyond the original Binet scale, including the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children. His tests separate verbal and performance abilities and introduced the deviation IQ concept.

  • H. H. Goddard — H. H. Goddard helped popularize Binet’s intelligence scale in America and coined the term moron. He later used IQ testing in eugenic arguments for excluding immigrants as feeble-minded.

  • intelligence tests — Intelligence tests are examinations designed to measure reasoning ability or IQ, often summarized by scores from instruments like the Stanford-Binet or WAIS. Common examples include Raven’s Progressive Matrices and the Kaufman batteries, and their scores are discussed in relation to the g factor and the Flynn effect.
    • Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale — The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale is a widely used intelligence test for adults. Its scoring includes verbal, performance, and overall measures, and it is commonly abbreviated WAIS.

  • IQ test — An IQ test measures cognitive performance or intelligence and is scored so that 100 is the median. Alfred Binet designed an early version in 1905 to identify students needing extra help, and Lewis Terman revised it into the familiar 1916 form. David Wechsler later developed a scoring system for adults. The Flynn effect refers to rising average scores over time, and scores are often discussed in relation to Mensa eligibility. Marilyn vos Savant is often noted for an exceptionally high reported score on this type of exam.

  • IQ tests — IQ tests are standardized measures of intelligence whose scores are often called intelligence quotients. Common references include the Stanford-Binet, Raven’s Progressive Matrices, the Flynn effect, and the use of high scores for Mensa eligibility.
    • Stanford-Binet test — The Stanford-Binet test is an early intelligence test revised by Lewis Terman from the Binet-Simon scale. It became a major intelligence scale and a foundational measure in intelligence testing, used to standardize IQ-style measurement across age groups and once used to classify recruits.

  • Lewis Madison Terman — Lewis Madison Terman was a Stanford psychologist who adapted the Binet-Simon intelligence test into the Stanford-Binet. He is also associated with the IQ score, mental testing, and studies of gifted children.

  • nonverbal tests
    • performance test — A performance test is a nonverbal intelligence test that measures what a person can do rather than what they can say. It is a standard contrast to verbal tests in psychometrics.

  • Raven’s Progressive Matrices — Raven’s Progressive Matrices is a nonverbal intelligence test built from visual pattern completion problems. It was designed to be relatively culture-fair and became widely used in military and psychological testing.

  • Stanford-Binet — The Stanford-Binet is a long-running intelligence test, especially associated with children’s testing. It combines the name of French psychologist Alfred Binet with Stanford University, where Lewis Terman revised it. Originally developed in France, it became the best-known IQ test in the United States.

  • Theodore Simon — Theodore Simon was a French psychologist who worked with Alfred Binet on revising early intelligence tests. His work on abnormal children helped inspire later developmental psychology, including Jean Piaget’s interests. He collaborated on the Binet–Simon scale before its Stanford revision.

  • William Stern — William Stern was the German psychologist who introduced the intelligence quotient by relating mental age to chronological age. His work built on earlier intelligence testing by Alfred Binet.
• Psychometrics

  • Cattell — The surname Cattell belongs to two important psychometricians, James McKeen Cattell and Raymond Cattell. James McKeen Cattell was an early psychologist and journal founder, while Raymond Cattell is known for fluid and crystallized intelligence and the 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire.

  • Intelligence testing
    • Henry Herbert Goddard — An American psychologist and eugenicist known for The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness. He directed research at the Vineland Training School, studied the Kallikak family, argued that feeble-mindedness was hereditary, and used Binet tests at Ellis Island to claim that many immigrants fit the category he called a “moron.” He is also associated with popularizing the term “moron” in work on intelligence and heredity.

  • Louis Leon Thurstone — Louis Leon Thurstone was a psychologist known for factor-analyzing intelligence into seven primary mental abilities. He also developed the law of comparative judgment, which helped shape psychometrics and theories of measurement.

  • Charles Spearman — Charles Spearman was a psychometrician known for the g factor and for early factor analysis. He also lends his name to Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient, the rho statistic used for monotonic relationships.

• Raymond Bernard Cattell — Raymond B. Cattell was a British-American psychologist known for the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire and the Culture Fair Intelligence Test. He also distinguished fluid from crystallized intelligence and developed the scree test in factor analysis.

• intelligence — Intelligence is the cognitive faculty measured by IQ tests and discussed in terms of g factor, fluid and crystallized ability, multiple intelligences, and emotional intelligence. Its study includes the Stanford-Binet and Wechsler scales, plus debates over the Flynn effect and the claims of The Bell Curve.

  • being a genius — Being a genius is the trait of exceptional intelligence often associated with children who advance rapidly in school. The clues mention Ender Wiggin, Matilda, and other gifted child protagonists.

  • crystallized intelligence — Crystallized intelligence is the ability to use knowledge and information learned previously. It depends heavily on education and contrasts with fluid intelligence.

  • g factor — The g factor is Charles Spearman’s name for the common underlying ability that correlates performance across different tests of intelligence. It is often discussed as a general intelligence factor extracted through factor analysis.

  • IQ and socioeconomic status
    • The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life — The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life is Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s controversial study of IQ, social class, and alleged heredity in intelligence. The title alludes to the normal distribution of intelligence and to the book’s claim that IQ predicts socioeconomic outcomes and a so-called cognitive elite. It is also known for its discussion of race, poverty, and intelligence distributions.

  • Lewis Terman — Lewis Terman was an American psychologist associated with Stanford and the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. He popularized IQ testing, revised the Binet-Simon test for American use, and studied gifted children longitudinally.

  • Multiple intelligences
    • Howard Gardner — Howard Gardner is the psychologist who proposed the theory of multiple intelligences in Frames of Mind. His work broadened the idea of intelligence beyond standardized test performance to include areas such as interpersonal and naturalistic intelligence.
      • Frames of Mind — Frames of Mind is Howard Gardner’s influential book introducing the theory of multiple intelligences. It helped popularize the idea that intelligence is made up of distinct capacities rather than a single general ability.
• multiple intelligences
  • Howard Earl Gardner — Howard Earl Gardner is the Harvard psychologist best known for developing the theory of multiple intelligences. His books include Frames of Mind and Five Minds for the Future, and he has also written about the App Generation.
• Stephen Jay Gould
  • The Mismeasure of Man — The Mismeasure of Man is Stephen Jay Gould’s critique of biological determinism in intelligence testing. It attacks craniometry, IQ reification, and fraudulent studies such as Cyril Burt’s twin research, and later discussed The Bell Curve.
• Neuropsychological tests
  • Wisconsin Card Sorting Task — The Wisconsin Card Sorting Task is a neuropsychological test of executive function in which subjects sort cards by changing rules involving color, shape, or number. It is especially sensitive to frontal lobe and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex damage.
• Robert Mearns Yerkes — Robert Mearns Yerkes was a psychologist known for work on the relationship between arousal and performance. He is also remembered for the Army Alpha and Beta intelligence tests used in World War I and for the Yerkes-Dodson law.

Social Psychology

• Social psychology — Social psychology studies how people think, feel, and behave in social settings and how other people influence those processes. It includes phenomena such as social facilitation, social comparison, social exchange, heuristics, confirmation bias, and the fundamental attribution error, and is associated with Kurt Lewin and Albert Bandura. It also connects to research on social capital and social networks.

  • affluenza — Affluenza is a portmanteau for the supposed pathology of consumerism and overindulgence among the wealthy. It entered public debate after being invoked in the Ethan Couch DUI manslaughter case and in books criticizing material excess.

  • attitude — An attitude is a person’s evaluative stance toward an object, idea, or behavior, often described as a like or dislike. Social psychologists link attitudes to action through theories associated with Fishbein and Ajzen, and Allport defined it as a mental and neural state of readiness.

  • attitude formation
    • self-perception theory — Self-perception theory is Daryl Bem’s account of how people infer their beliefs from their own behavior. It was developed as an answer to cognitive dissonance theory, especially in cases where attitudes are not already clearly fixed.

  • attitudes — Attitudes are psychological evaluations, feelings, or judgments toward an object, person, or idea. They are often discussed through the ABC model and the central versus peripheral routes of persuasion in social psychology.

  • attribution — In psychology, this is the process of explaining behavior or events by assigning causes, often through internal versus external explanations. Common clues include Harold Kelley’s covariation model, Bernard Weiner’s dimensions, and the fundamental attribution error. Self-serving and group-serving biases are standard extensions of the same idea.

  • Attribution biases
    • just-world hypothesis — The just-world hypothesis is the belief that people generally get what they deserve, so bad outcomes are read as evidence of bad character. Melvin Lerner’s studies on the just-world phenomenon are standard references for this bias, and later work has used it to explain victim-blaming, especially reactions to rape or other crime victims.

  • Barnum effect — The Barnum effect, also called the Forer effect, is the tendency to accept vague personality descriptions as highly accurate. It is often cited in discussions of psychics and generic readings that feel personally tailored.

  • conformity experiments
    • the autokinetic effect — The autokinetic effect is the apparent movement of a stationary point of light in darkness, caused by the eye’s own motion and perceptual uncertainty. Muzafer Sherif used it in a famous conformity experiment, and later writers have linked it to UFO reports and suggestion.
  • Crowd psychology

    • Crowds and Power — Elias Canetti’s major study of mass psychology and collective behavior. It ranges from fear of being touched to packs, lament, crowd types, commands, rulers, the dynamics of the survivor and the crowd, and paranoia, drawing on examples such as Schreber and Hitler to explain why people follow power.

    • Gustave Le Bon — Gustave Le Bon was a French social psychologist best known for The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. He argued that individuals lose rationality in crowds and become highly suggestible under the influence of leaders and contagion.

  • Cyberball — Cyberball is a video game featuring a futuristic version of American football. It is also the software used in social psychology experiments on ball-tossing and social exclusion.

  • cyranoids — Cyranoids are people who repeat words supplied through an earpiece, a technique used in social psychology experiments. The name comes from Cyrano de Bergerac, whose literary role as an intermediary inspired the term.

  • deindividuation — Deindividuation is the loss of self-awareness and personal responsibility that can happen in groups, especially under anonymity. It is often used to explain crowd behavior and group violence.

  • diffusion of responsibility — Diffusion of responsibility is the tendency for people in a group to feel less personally accountable for action. It helps explain the bystander effect, where each person assumes someone else will help. Classic experiments on the phenomenon include the smoke-filled room study and the screaming woman recordings. It also overlaps with groupthink and social loafing.
    • responsibility — Responsibility is the sense of personal stake in an outcome that can be diffused in group settings, as in the bystander effect. Darley and Latané used smoke-filled-room experiments and other studies to show how shared responsibility reduces intervention.
  • Experimental methods
    • confederates — In psychology experiments, confederates are people who are secretly working with the researchers while pretending to be ordinary participants. They are used in classic studies of conformity, obedience, and bystander behavior such as the Asch and Milgram experiments.
  • Field experiments
    • Lost Letter experiment — The lost letter experiment is a social psychology test in which stamped, addressed letters are left in public places to measure whether strangers mail them. Stanley Milgram used it to study attitudes toward different social groups, including hostile and sympathetic ones.

  • Fundamental attribution error — The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to explain other people’s behavior in terms of stable traits or character while underestimating situational causes. Lee Ross coined the term, and classic experiments by Jones and Harris found that readers still inferred a writer’s real attitude toward Castro even when the essay topic was assigned by coin flip. It is closely associated with correspondence bias and actor-observer bias.

  • implicit bias — Implicit bias is a relatively automatic form of prejudiced judgment or behavior that can operate outside conscious awareness. Psychologists discuss it through measures such as the Implicit Association Test and in research on hostile and benevolent sexism.

  • Kurt Lewin — Kurt Lewin was a German-born pioneer of social psychology known for field theory, force field analysis, and the idea that behavior is a function of person and environment. His work also included action research, the three-stage model of change, and classic studies of leadership styles and group dynamics.

  • Kurt Zadek Lewin — Kurt Zadek Lewin was a founder of social psychology who developed force field analysis and the idea of life space. He is also known for describing change as a three-step process of unfreezing, changing, and refreezing.

  • leadership — Leadership is the ability to guide a group, and theorists have analyzed it through trait, situational, transactional, and transformational models. Classic discussions include Kurt Lewin’s autocratic, democratic, and laissez-faire styles and later work on the leadership gap faced by women.

  • Lee Ross — Lee Ross was a Stanford social psychologist known for work on the fundamental attribution error and the false consensus effect. He also coauthored The Person and the Situation and studied hostile media effects with Vallone and Lepper.

  • Mere-exposure effect — The mere-exposure effect is the tendency to prefer things simply because they are familiar. Robert Zajonc studied it with nonsense words, Chinese characters, and other repeated stimuli.

  • Milgram Experiment — The Milgram experiment tested obedience to authority by having ‘teachers’ administer electric shocks to a ‘learner’ under an experimenter’s orders. Its best-known result was that many participants continued to the maximum shock level even when the setup was altered in later variations.

  • Milgram’s Obedience Experiment — Milgram’s obedience experiment asked whether people would obey authority even when they believed they were harming another person with electric shocks. Its results are commonly cited in discussions of compliance, conscience, and the “just following orders” defense.

  • minimal group paradigm — The minimal group paradigm is Henri Tajfel’s method for studying how arbitrary distinctions create ingroups and outgroups. It is classically demonstrated by experiments that divide participants on meaningless criteria, such as supposed art preferences.

  • moral psychology
    • Jonathan Haidt — Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist known for social intuitionism and moral foundations theory. He has also written about political polarization and campus culture in The Righteous Mind and The Coddling of the American Mind, the latter coauthored with Greg Lukianoff. He has criticized campus “safe spaces” and is associated with New York University.
  • obedience — Obedience is the social-psychological phenomenon tested by Stanley Milgram’s shock experiments at Yale. The topic is often linked to following authority, the agentic state, and later critiques by researchers such as Thomas Blass and Gina Perry.

    • Milgram obedience experiment — The Milgram obedience experiment tested subjects’ willingness to follow authority by having them administer apparently painful electric shocks to a learner. It is associated with Yale, the agentic state, and later variants that altered proximity or setting without changing the basic obedience result.

    • Stanley Milgram experiment — The Stanley Milgram experiment tested obedience by asking volunteers to administer escalating electric shocks to a learner under an experimenter’s instruction. The study is remembered for the surprisingly high rate of compliance despite visible distress, and it became one of psychology’s best-known demonstrations of authority pressure.

  • Obedience to Authority — Obedience to Authority is the concept studied by Stanley Milgram in his famous shock experiment. It concerns compliance with commands from an authority figure even when those commands cause harm.
    • The Milgram experiment — The Milgram experiment tested obedience to authority by having subjects administer apparent electric shocks to a learner when instructed by an experimenter. The study, conducted at Yale and named for Stanley Milgram, is famous for showing how far participants would go under pressure.
  • Parasocial interaction
    • parasocial relationships — Parasocial relationships are one-sided attachments that audiences form toward media figures, celebrities, or online personalities. The concept was coined by Horton and Wohl and later measured with scales emphasizing familiarity, imagined communication, and role-model perception.

  • Phillip Zimbardo — Philip Zimbardo is the psychologist behind the Stanford prison experiment and a major commentator on the Abu Ghraib scandal. He also wrote The Time Paradox and explored broken windows theory through a vandalized car study.

  • poses — Poses are the fixed bodily positions discussed in social-psychology work on “power posing.” They also matter in voguing and in the documentary title Strike a Pose.

  • Robert Zajonc — Robert Zajonc was a social psychologist known for the mere-exposure effect and for research on social facilitation. His work argued that the presence of others can increase arousal and alter performance, especially on easy tasks.

  • social comparison theory — Social comparison theory, proposed by Leon Festinger, says people evaluate themselves by comparing with others. It is often discussed alongside conformity experiments and ideas such as the similarity hypothesis.

  • Social facilitation
    • Norman Triplett — Norman Triplett is usually credited with the first social psychology experiment, showing that cyclists and children performed faster when observed by others.
  • social identity theory
    • Henri Tajfel — Henri Tajfel was a social psychologist known for the minimal group experiments, which showed how easily in-groups and out-groups form. His work helped shape social identity theory, developed with John Turner.

  • social loafing — Social loafing is the tendency for individuals to exert less effort when working in a group than when working alone. Classic demonstrations include Ringelmann’s rope-pulling study and Latané and Darley’s bystander-related experiments.

  • Stereotyping

    • stereotype — A stereotype is a rigid, oversimplified generalization about a group. The term originally referred to a fixed metal printing plate, and in psychology it is often discussed in the context of stereotype threat.

    • stereotypes — Stereotypes are overgeneralized, simplified generalizations or beliefs about categories of people and social groups. They are studied in social psychology for effects such as stereotype threat, including work by Steele and Aronson, and in models that rate groups along dimensions such as warmth and competence. Lippmann popularized the modern sense of the word, which is also associated with prejudicial shorthand in public discourse.

  • The Robber’s Cave Experiment — Sherif’s Robber’s Cave Experiment studied prejudice and conflict by dividing 22 boys into the Eagles and the Rattlers at an Oklahoma park. Competitive tasks produced hostility, and later superordinate goals helped the groups cooperate again.

  • William McDougall — William McDougall was a pioneering social psychologist known for arguing that human behavior is shaped by instinctive drives. He wrote Introduction to Social Psychology and Body and Mind, the latter subtitled A History and Defense of Animism.
• Cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957) — discomfort from holding contradictory cognitions; motivates attitude or behavior change. Classic study: Festinger and Carlsmith paid participants $1 or $20 to lie; $1 group changed attitudes more.

  • cognitive dissonance theory — Cognitive dissonance theory, developed by Leon Festinger, explains the discomfort caused by holding contradictory beliefs or by justifying actions after the fact. It is classically illustrated by experiments involving forced choice, trivial payment, and attitude change after lying.

  • effort justification effect — The effort justification effect is a form of cognitive dissonance reduction in which people value goals more after expending substantial effort toward them. It explains why people may revise attitudes to align with actions that were costly or difficult to perform.

  • Elliot Aronson — Elliot Aronson is a social psychologist known for the jigsaw classroom, the pratfall effect, and classic work on cognitive dissonance. His experiments and textbooks helped popularize the idea that ordinary people can do foolish things without being “crazy.”

• Fundamental attribution error (FAE) — (Lee Ross, 1977) tendency to overattribute others’ behavior to internal dispositions and underweight situational factors; also called correspondence bias; the classic demonstration used essay studies where subjects attributed pro-Castro attitudes even when told the author was assigned the topic.

• Halo effect — tendency to let one positive (or negative) trait color overall judgments of a person; Edward Thorndike coined the term in 1920; teachers’ physical attractiveness biases academic assessments of students. It is a cognitive bias in which one favorable impression spills over into judgments about unrelated traits; later studies by Nisbett and Wilson examined the influence of attractiveness and friendliness on evaluations.

• Groupthink (Irving Janis, 1972) — highly cohesive groups suppress dissent and critical evaluation in favor of consensus; illustrated by case studies of Bay of Pigs, Challenger disaster; symptoms include illusion of invulnerability, collective rationalization, and self-censorship.

• Bystander effect (Latané and Darley, 1968) — in emergencies, the presence of other people reduces the probability that any individual will intervene; two mechanisms: diffusion of responsibility and pluralistic ignorance; motivated by the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese, though the original newspaper claim that 38 witnesses “did nothing” has been revised by historical scholarship. A classic demonstration is the smoke-filled room study.

  • bystander effect or bystander apathy or Kitty Genovese effect or Kitty Genovese syndrome — The bystander effect is the tendency for individuals to be less likely to help when other observers are present. It is often discussed through the Kitty Genovese case and the related ideas of diffusion of responsibility and pluralistic ignorance.

  • Catherine Susan Genovese — Catherine Susan Genovese was a New York woman murdered in 1964 by Winston Moseley. Her case became famous in discussions of the bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility, though later retellings exaggerated the number of witnesses. It also inspired Harlan Ellison’s story

  • Darley-Batson Experiment — The Darley-Batson, or Good Samaritan, experiment studied Princeton divinity students who encountered a person apparently in need while hurrying between buildings. It showed that subjects were much more likely to help when they thought they had extra time, linking bystander behavior to convenience and situational pressure.

• Muzafer Sherif — Robbers Cave experiment; realistic conflict theory; autokinetic effect studies on norm formation. He also developed social judgment theory and was a Turkish-American social psychologist.
  • Robbers Cave experiment — Muzafer Sherif’s study of intergroup conflict among two groups of boys at a summer camp in Oklahoma. It is known for the Eagles and the Rattlers and for showing that superordinate goals can reduce hostility between groups.
• Solomon Asch — conformity line studies; also documented the primacy effect in impression formation (early traits outweigh later ones). His line-judging experiment used confederates who gave wrong answers, and his prestige-suggestion work compared the same statement when attributed to Jefferson or Lenin. He also studied impression formation and trait judgments.
  • conformity experiment
    • Asch conformity experiment — A classic conformity study by Solomon Asch in which subjects judged line lengths while confederates intentionally gave the same wrong answer. The experiment tested whether people would conform to a unanimous majority even when the correct answer was obvious, and many participants matched the group’s incorrect choice, showing the power of social pressure. It is often described as a landmark precursor to later obedience experiments.
• Leon Festinger — cognitive dissonance theory; also conducted participant-observation study of a doomsday cult (When Prophecy Fails, 1956) founding work in cult psychology. He also developed social comparison theory and is associated with the peg-turning experiment with Carlsmith, in which smaller payment led participants to later describe the task as more fun.
  • When Prophecy Fails — When Prophecy Fails is Leon Festinger’s classic study of cognitive dissonance in a UFO-centered cult whose predicted apocalypse never came. The book follows Dorothy Martin, disguised as Marian Keech, and examines how believers responded when their prophecy failed.

• Bibb Latané — bystander effect research with Darley; also social impact theory (influence proportional to number, strength, and immediacy of sources). He was a social psychologist. With John Darley, he studied the bystander effect in the smoke-filled room experiment.

• Stanley Milgram — obedience to authority experiments; ethical controversy. His best-known study was the Yale shock experiment with teachers and learners, which used a fake shock setup. He also studied the small world problem, cyranoids, the lost letter experiment, and the idea of the familiar stranger.
  • obedience to authority experiment
    • Stanley Milgram’s obedience to authority experiment — Stanley Milgram’s obedience to authority experiment asked whether ordinary people would continue delivering shocks when ordered by an authority figure. The study, inspired in part by the Eichmann trial, became famous for the high proportion of participants who obeyed.
• Philip Zimbardo — Stanford Prison Experiment; situationist account of behavior; subsequent methodological criticism. An American psychologist, he conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment, randomly assigning student volunteers as guards or inmates; the study was halted after only a few days when participants quickly adopted abusive and submissive roles. He also wrote The Lucifer Effect and The Time Paradox, studied deindividuation, broken windows, and the bystander effect, and founded the Shyness Clinic.
  • The Lucifer Effect — The Lucifer Effect is Philip Zimbardo’s book about how situational power and authority can lead ordinary people to act evilly. It draws on the Stanford Prison Experiment and on Zimbardo’s reflections on Abu Ghraib, and its subtitle is Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.
    • The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil — The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil is Philip Zimbardo’s book on how situations can drive ordinary people toward cruelty. It draws on the Stanford prison experiment and discusses Abu Ghraib as well as deindividuation, the fundamental attribution error, and the power of systems over individual morality.

• Body Language — Body language is the broad category of nonverbal communication that includes facial expressions, gestures, and posture. The phrase also names a Tom Kennedy game show built around celebrity pantomime and guessing.

• nonverbal communication

  • eye-contact — Eye contact is the act of directing one’s gaze at another person’s face, a basic form of nonverbal communication. It is studied in psychology for effects on attention, trust, infant preference, and autism diagnosis.

  • gestures — Gestures are nonverbal communicative actions such as waving, pointing, or giving a thumbs-up. They include emblem, indexical, beat, deictic, and metaphoric types, and they often accompany speech. Researchers have linked them to prosody, language development, and emoji use in digital communication.

• prejudice and authoritarianism
  • The Authoritarian Personality — The Authoritarian Personality is a collaborative work by Theodor Adorno and other Frankfurt School thinkers. It uses personality testing, including the F-scale, to explain how prejudiced individuals can be drawn to fascist or repressive politics.
• prosocial behavior
  • Altruism — Altruism is behavior in which one helps others at a cost to oneself. In biology and social science, it is often discussed through kin selection, Hamilton’s rule, reciprocal altruism, and the dictator game. The term is associated with Auguste Comte’s idea of living for others, and Durkheim treated altruistic suicide as one type of suicide.
    • altruistic behavior — Altruistic behavior is action that benefits others rather than the actor, even at personal cost. The topic appears in work by Batson and in explanations of reciprocal or competitive altruism.
• psychological manipulation
  • Gaslighting — Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation that makes someone doubt their own perceptions, memories, or reality. The term comes from the 1944 film Gaslight and now appears in political and pop-culture phrases such as “gatekeep, girlboss.”
• psychology of humor
  • humor — Humor is the social and linguistic phenomenon that produces laughter through incongruity, superiority, relief, or benign violation. It also appears in quizbowl through theories by Bergson and Raskin, as well as in comedy forms like Ben Jonson’s character-based plays.
    • laughter — Laughter is the bodily and social response to humor, incongruity, or release of tension, and philosophers from Hobbes to Bergson have analyzed why people laugh. The topic also appears in studies of chimpanzee facial displays and ritual or religious behavior. Quizbowl clues often connect laughter to relief theory, mockery, and the social correction of deviance. Bergson’s essay on the comic and Freud’s ideas about psychic release are especially common references.
• romantic attraction
  • falling in love — Falling in love is the romantic and psychological process of developing intense affection for another person. The clues point to both popular songs about the phrase and Stendhal’s comparison of the feeling to crystallization.
• Social cognition

  • empathy — Empathy is the ability to understand another person’s feelings or perspective by putting oneself in that person’s situation. Psychology and philosophy debates around empathy include its measurement, its relation to altruism, and criticisms that it can be biased or manipulative.

  • thin-slicing — Thin-slicing is the ability to make surprisingly accurate judgments from very small amounts of information. The term is associated with work by Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal and is often cited in discussions of intuition and rapid social perception.

• Attraction
  • physical attractiveness — Physical attractiveness is a socially judged quality often linked to symmetry, halo effects, and higher perceived social value. Psychology studies connect it with faster processing, misattribution of arousal, and stronger relationship preferences under the matching hypothesis.
• Self-fulfilling prophecy
  • Pygmalion effect — The Pygmalion effect is the finding that higher expectations can improve performance. It is closely associated with the Rosenthal and Jacobson study sometimes described as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• persuasion
  • elaboration likelihood model — The elaboration likelihood model is Petty and Cacioppo’s dual-process theory of persuasion. It says persuasion can follow a central route or a peripheral route depending on how much a message is elaborated.
• persuasion techniques
  • Low-Ball Technique — The low-ball technique is a persuasion strategy that begins with an attractive offer and then raises the cost after commitment. It is often discussed as a variant of the foot-in-the-door approach.
• Attribution bias
  • self-serving bias — Self-serving bias is the tendency to interpret one’s actions and traits in a favorable way. It leads people to see themselves as more competent, friendly, and less biased than others.
    • better-than-average effect
      • Lake Wobegon effect — The Lake Wobegon effect is the tendency to rate oneself as above average, also called the better-than-average effect. The name comes from Garrison Keillor’s fictional town where everyone is imagined to be above average.
    • defensive attribution
      • The moderator knows that I was correct, he just hates me — This is a defensive reaction in which someone rationalizes an incorrect answer by blaming the moderator’s bias rather than their own mistake.
• Attribution theory
  • causal attribution — Causal attribution is the social-psychological process of inferring why events happen or why people act as they do. It is studied through ideas such as the fundamental attribution error, the covariation model, and self-serving bias.
• Height stereotypes
  • Napoleon complex — The Napoleon complex is the stereotype that short people, especially men, overcompensate for their height with aggression or assertiveness. The name comes from Napoleon Bonaparte, though the concept is a popular colloquial term rather than a clinical diagnosis.
• intergroup relations
  • contact hypothesis — The contact hypothesis is the idea that prejudice can decrease when members of different groups interact under favorable conditions. Allport is often credited with popularizing it, especially through the role of equal status and common goals.
• interpersonal attraction
  • pratfall effect — The pratfall effect is the idea that a competent person becomes more likable after making a blunder, while an incompetent person may become less likable. Elliot Aronson demonstrated it in an experiment involving a spilled cup of coffee.
• frustration-aggression theory
  • frustration — Frustration is the state of being blocked from reaching a goal, and Miller and Dollard used it in their frustration-aggression theory. In contract law, frustration of purpose excuses performance when an unexpected event makes the bargain radically different.

• Carol — Carol Gilligan, Carol Dweck, and Carol Tavris are psychologists and writers often paired in quizbowl with moral development, mindset, and cognitive bias. Gilligan is known for In a Different Voice and criticism of Kohlberg, Dweck for fixed and growth mindsets and the “power of yet,” and Tavris for Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me). The name can also point to Carol Moseley-Braun in history questions, so the exact Carol usually depends on context.

• gender and psychology
  • neurosexism — Neurosexism is the claim that biological differences between male and female brains justify stereotypes about women. The term was popularized by Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender.
• gender differences
  • Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus — Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus is John Gray’s 1993 self-help book about supposed differences between the sexes in relationships. It popularized the idea that men retreat to a cave under stress and inspired a short-lived television adaptation.

Sexuality

• Sexuality studies
  • sexology — Sexology is the study of human sexuality, including sexual behavior, desire, arousal, pleasure, erotic behavior, and social attitudes toward sex. Major names associated with the field include Magnus Hirschfeld, Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Alfred Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, and Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality treats human sexuality as a major subject.

    • Alfred C. Kinsey — Alfred C. Kinsey was an Indiana zoologist whose studies of sexual behavior became highly controversial. He published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.

    • female orgasm — Female orgasm is the sexual response discussed by Elisabeth Lloyd in her book arguing against its status as a direct adaptation. The topic also appears in debates over Freudian ideas and distinctions between vaginal and clitoral orgasm.

    • Human sexuality research
      • Alfred Charles Kinsey — Alfred Charles Kinsey was an American biologist and sexologist who pioneered research on human sexuality at Indiana University. He wrote the influential Kinsey Reports on male and female sexual behavior, created the Kinsey scale of sexual orientation, and was associated with the Institute for Sex Research that bears his name.

    • John Money — John Money was a sexologist known for arguing that gender identity was shaped by nurture rather than nature and for coining the term gender role. He became notorious for advising that Bruce Reimer be raised as a girl after a circumcision accident, a case later known as that of David Reimer. His published accounts claimed the reassignment was successful, though later reports contradicted that narrative.

    • Psychopathia Sexualis — Psychopathia Sexualis is Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s 1886 study of sexual deviance, organized into general pathology and 237 case histories. It helped popularize terms like sadism and masochism and classifies behaviors such as homosexuality as anomalies.

    • The Kinsey Institute for Sex Research — The Kinsey Institute for Sex Research is an Indiana University center in Bloomington known for its major collections on human sexuality. It is long associated with June Reinisch and with holding one of the world’s largest pornography archives.

    • William Masters and Virginia Johnson — William Masters and Virginia Johnson were pioneering sex researchers who studied human sexual response together. Their work identified the four-stage sexual response cycle and later led to influential sex-therapy treatments.
• paraphilias

  • Zootophile, mascot or costumer — A zootophile is someone who is attracted to animals, while mascot and costumer are broader terms for people who wear animal-themed suits or characters. The clues emphasize that liking fursuits does not necessarily imply a sexual relationship.

  • Necrophilia — Necrophilia is sexual attraction to or contact with dead bodies. The clues also reference related literary and artistic usages, including Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily and Pietro Pajetta’s The Hatred.

  • Autoerotic asphyxiation — Autoerotic asphyxiation is self-strangulation used during masturbation. It is sometimes discussed in connection with ambiguous celebrity deaths and risky sexual behavior.

  • Sexual masochism
    • masochism — Masochism is sexual gratification derived from receiving pain or abuse. The term comes from the novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.

  • voyeurism — Voyeurism is the sexual practice of deriving arousal from watching others undress or engage in intimate acts. The term also titles Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel The Voyeur, a classic nouveau roman built around ambiguity and surveillance.

  • fetish — A fetish is an object or fixation believed to hold special power, and in psychology it means an irrational sexual attachment to a nonsexual object or body part. The term also appears in Marx’s criticism of commodity fetishism and in older religious uses for objects thought to possess supernatural force.
• Paraphilic disorders
  • Frottage — A paraphilia involving sexual gratification from rubbing a clothed or naked body against another person, often as a covert act in crowded public places.
• Sex therapy
  • Dr. Ruth Westheimer — Dr. Ruth Westheimer was a famous sex therapist, advice-book author, and media personality known for her frank, playful style and blunt advice on relationships and sexuality. Born Karola Siegel in Frankfurt, she spent time in Israel before moving to the United States, where she became widely known through radio and television, including her long-running talk-show persona and books such as Sex for Dummies.
• Sexual behavior
  • masturbation — Masturbation is the sexual practice that appears in debates over religion, morality, and medicine, from Jewish law and Maimonides to Islamic fiqh and anti-masturbation tracts like Onania. Quizbowl clues also reference films such as American Beauty, Due Date, and There’s Something About Mary.
• Sexual orientation

  • asexual — Asexuality is an orientation marked by not experiencing sexual attraction, and many asexual people also identify as aromantic. Marvel’s Gwenpool and DC’s Connor Hawke are cited as early comic-book characters explicitly identified with this orientation.

  • Homosexuality — Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction to people of the same sex, and it has also been described as same-sex attraction or orientation. It was long treated as a psychiatric disorder before being removed from the DSM, and it was later studied through scales such as Kinsey’s. The topic appears in the work of Michel Foucault, Adrienne Rich, and other theorists of sexuality and power, as well as in social and legal history including Stonewall, the Mattachine Society, and Obergefell v. Hodges. Debates over its biology, psychology, and social history were associated with figures such as Freud and Evelyn Hooker, and historical references often include Oscar Wilde’s conviction for gross indecency and Alan Turing’s legal persecution for same-sex conduct; other named figures include Tony Kushner, Marcel Proust, André Gide, and queer literature more broadly.

  • lesbianism — Lesbianism is the sexual orientation of women attracted primarily to other women. Quizbowl clues often connect it to works like The Price of Salt, Fun Home, and The Color Purple, as well as the language of butch and femme identity.

• sexual orientation conversion practices
  • conversion therapy — Conversion therapy is a pseudoscientific practice that claims to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. It has been rejected by major medical organizations and has been widely condemned in response to cases involving coercive treatment of LGBTQ+ youth.
• sexual response
  • Orgasm — An orgasm is the sexual response named in these clues, including the feminist critique of Freud’s distinction between clitoral and vaginal orgasm. The same word also appears in cocktail names and in phrases for mass peace demonstrations.
• Sexual imprinting
  • Westermarck effect — The Westermarck effect is reverse sexual imprinting: people raised closely together in early childhood tend not to become sexually attracted to each other later. It is often cited in discussions of incest avoidance and communal childrearing systems.
• sexual orientation change efforts
  • gay conversion therapy — Gay conversion therapy is a controversial practice that claims to change a person’s sexual orientation from gay to straight. It has been promoted by groups such as NARTH and is associated with the language of ex-gay ministries and pray-the-gay-away camps.

Disorders and Applied Psychology

Connect disorders and applications to the psychological processes involved.

Brain Disorders and Clinical Neuroscience

• Phineas Gage (1848) — railroad worker survived a tamping iron through his frontal lobes; reported personality changes (impulsive, profane); a seminal case linking frontal lobes to personality and social behavior. Some specific behavioral claims in popular accounts exceed what the primary records document.

• Paul Broca’s patient Tan — Louis Victor Leborgne, who could only utter the syllable “tan”; autopsy revealed a left frontal lesion; Broca presented the case in 1861 as evidence for cerebral localization of speech; the lesion site is now called Broca’s area (Brodmann area 44/45).

• Urbach-Wiethe disease — a rare condition causing bilateral amygdala calcification; patient S.M. (studied by Ralph Adolphs and Antonio Damasio) showed no fear response to snakes, spiders, or threatening situations; foundational evidence for the amygdala’s role in fear processing.

• Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasias — classic descriptions contrast effortful, nonfluent speech with fluent but poorly comprehended language. Modern lesion and imaging evidence supports distributed language networks rather than two isolated centers.

• Anterograde vs. retrograde amnesia — inability to form new memories vs. loss of memories formed before the injury. H.M.’s case established hippocampal role in anterograde declarative memory.

• Prosopagnosia — inability to recognize faces despite intact vision and general object recognition; associated with fusiform face area damage. It can result from temporal-lobe damage, especially lesions involving the fusiform gyrus.

• Hemispatial neglect — failure to attend to stimuli on the side contralateral to a parietal lesion, typically the right parietal lobe causes left neglect.

• Parkinson’s disease — loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra; symptoms: resting tremor, bradykinesia, rigidity, postural instability. Treated with levodopa (L-DOPA).

• Alzheimer’s disease — most common dementia; hallmark pathology: amyloid-beta plaques and neurofibrillary tangles (tau protein); early loss of cholinergic neurons in basal forebrain (nucleus basalis of Meynert).

• Capgras delusion — belief that a familiar person has been replaced by an identical impostor; associated with right hemisphere lesions disrupting the link between face recognition and emotional familiarity; explained by Ramachandran as disconnection between fusiform face area and amygdala.

• Phantom limb — sensation that an amputated limb is still present; Vilayanur Ramachandran used a mirror box to treat phantom limb pain by creating the visual illusion of the missing limb; evidence for cortical remapping after amputation.

• Huntington’s disease — autosomal dominant neurodegenerative disorder caused by CAG trinucleotide repeat expansion in the HTT gene on chromosome 4; progressive destruction of striatum (caudate and putamen); symptoms: chorea, psychiatric changes, dementia; onset typically in middle age.

• Antipsychotics (neuroleptics) — first-generation (typical) antipsychotics (e.g., haloperidol, chlorpromazine) block D2 dopamine receptors; second-generation (atypical) antipsychotics (e.g., clozapine, risperidone) also block serotonin (5-HT2A) receptors, with lower extrapyramidal side-effect risk.

• Somatic marker hypothesis (Antonio Damasio) — emotions and bodily signals guide decision-making; patients with ventromedial prefrontal cortex damage show impaired real-life decisions despite intact reasoning (Iowa Gambling Task); Descartes’ Error (1994).

• Split-brain lateralization details — left hemisphere: language, serial/analytical processing, right visual field; right hemisphere: spatial processing, face recognition, holistic processing, left visual field; isolated right hemisphere can understand simple language but cannot speak; Gazzaniga extended Sperry’s work to human subjects and coined the “left brain interpreter” concept.

• Antonio Damasio — somatic marker hypothesis; Descartes’ Error (1994); The Feeling of What Happens; studied patients with vmPFC lesions.

• Paul Broca — localized speech production to inferior frontal gyrus; Broca’s aphasia; also contributed to physical anthropology. He was a French physician and anatomist whose work helped establish modern brain surgery and neuroscience; his name is attached to Broca’s area in the inferior frontal gyrus.

• Carl Wernicke — localized language comprehension to posterior temporal gyrus; Wernicke’s aphasia; also described Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome (thiamine deficiency with anterograde amnesia and confabulation).

• Roger Sperry — split-brain research; Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1981.

• Wilder Penfield — neurosurgeon who mapped the cortical homunculus by electrically stimulating cortex during awake brain surgery; patients reported sensations or movements corresponding to specific body parts; homunculus reveals disproportionate representation of hands, lips, and tongue.

• Neuropsychology
  • Alexander Luria — Alexander Luria was a Soviet neuropsychologist and student of Vygotsky whose work helped establish neuropsychology. He is especially associated with The Mind of a Mnemonist, his study of journalist Solomon Shereshevsky’s extraordinary memory.
• Memory disorders
  • amnesia — Amnesia is a loss of memory, often discussed in anterograde and retrograde forms. It appears in both neurological case studies like H.M. and in fictional treatments such as Mulholland Drive, The Truman Show, and the Amnesia horror games.

    • amnesias — Amnesias are disorders marked by partial or total loss of memory. They are often grouped among psychological or neurological problems caused by dysfunction in the cerebrum.

    • Henry Molaison — Henry Molaison, often known as HM, became a famous case in memory research after surgery on his hippocampi left him with profound amnesia. He was studied for decades as a key patient in research on episodic memory and motor learning.

Psychological Disorders and the DSM

• Classification, Clinical Assessment, and Critique

  • DSM — the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association. DSM-5 (2013) replaced DSM-IV’s multiaxial system; DSM-5-TR published 2022. It is the standard American reference for psychiatric diagnosis and organizes disorders into major diagnostic categories, including paraphilic disorders and culture-bound syndromes. Later editions revised its diagnostic categories and removed homosexuality as a disorder.

  • Diathesis-stress model — psychological disorders result from the interaction of a biological or psychological predisposition (diathesis) with environmental stressors; explains why not everyone with a genetic risk factor develops a disorder.

  • Clinical psychology
    • Body-focused repetitive behaviors
      • Trichotillomania — Trichotillomania is the compulsive, repetitive pulling out of one’s own hair. It can involve scalp hair, eyebrows, eyelashes, or other body hair.
    • cognitive therapy
      • Aaron Beck — Aaron Temkin Beck was a psychiatrist who pioneered cognitive therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy. He developed the cognitive triad for depression and is especially known for the Beck Depression Inventory and the hopelessness scale, along with other widely used scales for depression and related symptoms.
    • Homosexuality and psychology
      • Evelyn Hooker — Evelyn Hooker was an American psychologist whose work challenged the idea that homosexuality was inherently pathological. Her 1950s study compared homosexual and heterosexual men and found no clear psychological differences, helping undermine psychiatric pathologizing of gay men.
  • Cultural syndromes
    • Amok — Amok is the term for a sudden murderous frenzy associated with Malay usage and later literary treatments. Stefan Zweig also used it as the title of a novella about obsession and self-destruction.
  • psychiatry
    • Anti-psychiatry

      • Ronald David Laing — R. D. Laing was a psychiatrist associated with deinstitutionalization and Kingsley Hall. He argued in The Divided Self that insanity could be a rational response to an insane world and to contradictory family messages.

      • Thomas Szasz — Thomas Szasz was a Hungarian-born psychiatrist and critic of psychiatry best known for The Myth of Mental Illness. He argued against the therapeutic state and questioned whether mental illness was a medical disease at all. His writings also include attacks on drug prohibition and involuntary treatment.

        • The Myth of Mental Illness — The Myth of Mental Illness is Thomas Szasz’s anti-psychiatry critique of labeling human problems as medical disease. It argues that many psychiatric diagnoses are social judgments rather than objective illness categories.

    • catatonia — Catatonia is a psychomotor syndrome marked by motor immobility or greatly reduced movement, mutism, withdrawal, abnormal posturing or movement, waxy flexibility, and negativism; it can also include echolalia and lack of response to external stimuli. It is often associated with schizophrenia or depression, and severe cases may show a dramatic response to lorazepam or electroconvulsive therapy.

    • delusions — Delusions are fixed false beliefs that persist despite contrary evidence, and in schizophrenia they can include delusions of control or persecution. Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds also uses the word in a broader social sense, especially for mass financial manias and bubbles.

    • Homosexuality and the DSM
      • removing homosexuality from the DSM — This refers to the American Psychiatric Association’s removal of homosexuality from the DSM in the 1970s. The change is linked to Kinsey’s work, Evelyn Hooker’s research, and later activism and debate over the classification of sexual orientation.

    • hysteria — Hysteria was a historical psychiatric diagnosis once used especially for women and linked to the idea of a wandering womb. Freud and Breuer’s case studies of Anna O. and Emmy von N. made it a major topic of early psychoanalysis.

    • monomania — Monomania is a pathological obsession with a single idea or object. The term is used for characters such as Ahab and for forms of singular, consuming fixation in older psychiatric language.

    • Thomas Stephen Szasz — Thomas Stephen Szasz was a Hungarian-American psychiatrist best known for attacking the medical model of mental illness. In The Myth of Mental Illness, he argued that many psychiatric diagnoses are not grounded in a physical disease process.
  • psychopathology
    • neurosis — A category of psychological disorder associated with anxiety, stress, and maladaptive coping. In psychoanalytic and related theories, it was distinguished from psychosis by the absence of delusions and hallucinations, and was discussed by Freud, Adler, Horney, and Rogers in terms of conflict, the real self versus the ideal self, or conflicting interpersonal strategies.
  • Psychiatric disorders
    • Paranoia — Paranoia is a disorder marked by extreme distrust and the feeling that others are plotting against you. Psychology clues may divide it into forms involving hallucinations, personality disturbance, or delusional thinking.
  • Psychiatric syndromes
    • glass delusion — The glass delusion was a medieval psychiatric condition in which sufferers believed they were made of glass and therefore fragile. It is famously associated with Charles VI of France and other rulers who feared being touched or shattered.
• Mood, Anxiety, and Related Conditions
  • Major depressive disorder — depressed mood or anhedonia most of the day for ≥2 weeks plus additional symptoms (sleep, appetite, concentration changes, worthlessness, suicidal ideation). Also called clinical depression, depression, major depression, or unipolar disorder. It is often distinguished from dysthymia and other chronic mood disorders; common associated features include the Beck cognitive triad, the Hamilton rating scale, postpartum and seasonal specifiers, and treatment with SSRIs, tricyclic antidepressants, MAOIs, or electroconvulsive therapy.

    • Black Dog — The black dog is a metaphor for depression famously associated with Winston Churchill and later popularized by Lord Moran. The phrase also appears in music, including the Led Zeppelin song ‘Black Dog’ and Arlo Parks’s ‘Black Dog.’

    • depressed — Depressed refers to a state of clinical depression or low mood. A 2020 book titled How to Be Depressed by George Scialabba reflects on living with that condition and on his experiences with treatment.

  • Bipolar disorder — cycles of depression and mania (Bipolar I: full manic episodes; Bipolar II: hypomania). Also called manic depression, manic-depressive illness, or bipolar affective disorder; associated with cyclothymia, rapid cycling, and mixed states, and commonly treated with lithium carbonate or anticonvulsant mood stabilizers. It has also been linked with creativity, and Kay Redfield Jamison helped popularize it through clinical writing and memoir.

  • Schizophrenia — positive symptoms (hallucinations, delusions, disorganized thought), negative symptoms (flat affect, alogia, avolition); dopamine hyperactivity hypothesis; typically emerges in late adolescence/early adulthood. Its diagnosis has also been shaped by first-rank symptoms and controversial political and social uses of the label.

    • catatonic schizophrenia — Catatonic schizophrenia is a subtype of schizophrenia marked by severe psychomotor disturbance, including immobility, strange postures, stupor, and waxy flexibility. It can also alternate between near-complete rigidity and episodes of excessive motor activity.

    • paranoid schizophrenia — Paranoid schizophrenia is a subtype of schizophrenia marked by delusions, hallucinations, and themes of persecution or grandiosity. The broader disorder was associated with Eugen Bleuler, Kurt Schneider’s first-rank symptoms, and treatment with clozapine.

  • Anxiety disorders — generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), panic disorder, specific phobias, social anxiety disorder, agoraphobia. They are a class of mental disorders marked by excessive fear, tension, or worry.

    • Agoraphobia — Agoraphobia is the fear of situations where escape might be difficult or embarrassing, such as malls, stadiums, or crowded public places. It is often simplified as a fear of open spaces, though that description is incomplete.

    • anxiety — Anxiety is a state of excessive fear or worry, and it underlies disorders such as generalized and social anxiety disorder, as well as phobias and PTSD. Clues for it include the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, buspirone as a treatment, and Freud’s idea of free-floating apprehension.

    • Illness anxiety
      • Hypochondria — Hypochondria is the persistent and unfounded belief that one has a serious illness, often accompanied by excessive worry over normal bodily sensations. It is frequently linked in clue sets to obsessive-compulsive tendencies, anxiety, and famous historical or literary sufferers.

    • panic attack — A panic attack is a sudden episode of overwhelming anxiety with physical symptoms such as chest pain, nausea, sweating, and numbness. It can occur with panic disorder and may be triggered by phobias or substances such as marijuana.

    • phobias — Phobias are anxiety disorders marked by excessive fear of specific objects or situations. They are associated with treatment by systematic desensitization and with classic psychology experiments such as Little Albert and Little Peter.

      • Acrophobia — Acrophobia is an extreme irrational fear of heights. Clues often describe panic on ladders, chairs, stairs, or glass floors, and distinguish it from vertigo, which is more about spinning sensations.

      • Claustrophobia — Claustrophobia is the fear of enclosed or confined spaces. It is classically associated with discomfort in tight rooms, MRI scans, and other constricted settings.

      • Hematophobia — Hematophobia is the fear of blood. It is a specific phobia and one of the classic examples of a medical or psychological fear term.

      • Phobia — A phobia is an intense, irrational fear or anxiety about a specific object, situation, or activity. Examples include fears of heights, open spaces, or the number thirteen.

      • Thanatophobia — Thanatophobia is an excessive fear of death. In Don DeLillo’s White Noise, it is the condition treated by the experimental drug Dylar; Babette takes the drug in hopes of suppressing her obsessive dread of dying, which the novel presents as a central modern anxiety.

  • Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) — moved to its own chapter in DSM-5; intrusive obsessions drive compulsive behaviors.

  • depressive disorders
    • Dysthymic disorder — A chronic, mild depressive condition marked by low mood, low energy, and hopelessness. It lasts for at least two years and is distinguished by the absence of a major depressive or manic episode.
  • mood disorders
    • Anhedonia — Anhedonia is the inability to feel pleasure, a symptom often discussed in connection with mood disorders. The term comes from Greek roots meaning ‘without pleasure.’
  • Specific phobias

    • Technophobia — Technophobia is a fear or dislike of complex devices, especially computers. It also names a west coast quizbowl gathering and the tournament mentioned in the source material.

    • triskaidekaphobia — Triskaidekaphobia is the fear of the number thirteen.

  • obsessive-compulsive disorders
    • Obsessive-compulsive disorder — Obsessive-compulsive disorder is an anxiety-related condition marked by intrusive obsessions and repetitive compulsions such as hand-washing, checking, hoarding, and skin-picking. It is sometimes associated with PANDAS in children and is commonly treated with clomipramine; exposure and response prevention and the Yale-Brown scale are associated with its assessment and treatment.
  • somatic symptom and related disorders
    • conversion disorder — Conversion disorder is a condition in which neurological-like sensory or motor symptoms appear without an identifiable organic cause. It was historically called hysteria and was interpreted by Freud as a conversion of repressed psychic energy into bodily symptoms.

  • Rumination — Rumination is a pattern of repetitive, stuck thinking often discussed in OCD, especially in relation to “pure O” presentations. It can also name a digestive disorder in which food is regurgitated, rechewed, and reingested.

  • eating disorders
    • Orthorexia nervosa — Orthorexia nervosa is an eating disorder marked by obsessive concern with eating only healthy or “clean” foods. It is often linked to restrictive diets and was named by Steven Bratman.
  • addiction — Addiction is a compulsive disorder of reward and dependence, often involving drugs, alcohol, or gambling. Quizbowl clues often mention delta-FosB, the nucleus accumbens, dopamine, withdrawal, Rat Park, rational choice theory, and motivational interviewing as a treatment approach. In the DSM-5, gambling is the only behavioral addiction explicitly recognized.
    • drug addiction — Drug addiction is a dependence on psychoactive substances that produces tolerance and withdrawal. Clues may mention Rat Park, the reward pathway, rational addiction theory, or literary characters such as Mary Tyrone and Violet Weston.
• Development, Cognition, Personality, and Sleep

  • Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) — persistent deficits in social communication; restricted, repetitive behaviors; spectrum reflects wide variation in support needs. DSM-5 collapsed previous subtypes (Asperger’s, PDD-NOS) into a single spectrum.

  • ADHD — inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity; must be present before age 12 in multiple settings. It is a neurodevelopmental disorder usually beginning in childhood. Older sources may call it ADD. Common treatments include stimulant medications such as methylphenidate (Ritalin), Adderall, Dexedrine, and Vyvanse, as well as atomoxetine.

  • Personality disorders — enduring, inflexible patterns across DSM-5 Cluster A (odd/eccentric: paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal), Cluster B (dramatic: antisocial, borderline, histrionic, narcissistic), Cluster C (anxious: avoidant, dependent, obsessive-compulsive). They were historically placed on Axis II, and treatments like DBT are especially associated with borderline personality disorder.

    • borderline personality disorder — Borderline personality disorder is marked by unstable emotions, an unstable sense of self, and a fear of abandonment. It is treated with dialectical behavior therapy and is associated with self-harm, suicide attempts, and splitting in relationships.

    • Cluster B personality disorders

      • antisocial personality disorder — Antisocial personality disorder is a Cluster B personality disorder marked by disregard for other people and impulsive behavior. It is associated with conduct disorder in youth and overlaps with many features of psychopathy.

      • histrionic personality disorder — Histrionic personality disorder is a Cluster B personality disorder marked by excessive attention-seeking and dramatic behavior. It is often contrasted with other disorders in the dramatic cluster and may be mentioned in dual-diagnosis or rapid-cycling prompts.

    • narcissistic personality disorder — Narcissistic personality disorder is a Cluster B personality disorder marked by grandiosity, need for admiration, and poor empathy. It is associated with the Dark Triad and with traits like excessive self-reference, and it is named for Narcissus from Greek myth.

    • Personality disorder — A personality disorder is a DSM category of enduring behavior patterns, including borderline, histrionic, dependent, and antisocial types. The clue about a remorseless, socially blaming man points to the same broad psychiatric category rather than a single named subtype.

    • schizoid personality disorder — Schizoid personality disorder is marked by detachment from social relationships and a restricted range of emotional expression. People with the disorder often prefer solitude, seem emotionally distant, and appear indifferent to praise or criticism.

    • schizotypal personality disorder — Schizotypal personality disorder is marked by eccentric behavior, odd beliefs, social isolation, and ideas of reference or paranormal thinking. It is often discussed as being on a spectrum with schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders.
  • autism research
    • Simon Baron-Cohen — Simon Baron-Cohen is the British psychologist known for the empathizing-systemizing theory of autism and the idea of an “extreme male brain.” He also developed the 50-question autism self-test and has been criticized for linking sex differences in cognition to autism-spectrum disorders.
  • autism spectrum
    • Autistic people — Autistic people are individuals on the autism spectrum, which includes conditions such as Asperger’s syndrome and PDD-NOS. Clues about them often mention advocacy by ASAN, Temple Grandin, Jim Sinclair, and the Spectrum 10K controversy.
  • Autism theories
    • refrigerator mothers — Refrigerator mothers was the discredited theory that cold, obsessive mothers caused autism and schizophrenia. The phrase is especially associated with Bruno Bettelheim and Leo Kanner, and it was later attacked by Bernard Rimland.
  • Neurodevelopmental disorders
    • Autism — Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder on a spectrum of social and communicative impairment, often diagnosed in early childhood. Tossups on it commonly mention Leo Kanner, ABA and EIBI therapy, the Sally-Anne false-belief test, stimming, and the now-discredited refrigerator-mother theory.

      • stimming — Stimming is repetitive movement, sound, or language often associated with autistic self-regulation and sensory coping. It is a common target of Applied Behavior Analysis, especially in critiques of behaviorist treatment.

      • Uta Frith — Uta Frith is a psychologist known for work on autism, including the Sally-Anne test and the idea of mindblindness. She also advanced the weak central coherence theory in Autism: Explaining the Enigma.

    • autism spectrum disorders — Autism spectrum disorders are neurodevelopmental conditions marked by social-communication difficulties, restricted interests, and repetitive behaviors. Commonly mentioned clues include stimming, the Sally-Anne test, Asperger syndrome, and the outdated label “high functioning” or “low functioning.” Writers and researchers have linked the condition to theories such as weak central coherence, theory-of-mind deficits, and mirror-neuron explanations. The DSM-5 no longer treats Asperger syndrome as a separate diagnosis.
      • Asperger’s syndrome — Asperger’s syndrome was a former autism-spectrum diagnosis marked by social and nonverbal communication difficulties, restricted interests, and repetitive behavior, with relatively preserved language and no intellectual impairment. It was originally described by the Austrian physician Hans Asperger in 1944 and was removed from the DSM-5.
  • Savant syndrome
    • Idiot savant — An idiot savant is a person with severe overall cognitive impairment who nevertheless has an exceptional ability in a narrow area such as mathematics or music. The term is often illustrated by Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man.
  • intellectual disability
    • moron — A moron was an obsolete psychological label for a person with mild intellectual disability or low intelligence. The word is now chiefly an insult meaning a stupid person or dolt.
  • Dementia screening
    • Mini-Mental State Examination — The Mini-Mental State Examination is a 30-point screening test for cognitive impairment and dementia. Its standard tasks include orientation to time and place, serial sevens, recall, spelling WORLD backward, and copying intersecting pentagons.
  • dissociative disorders
    • dissociative identity disorder — Dissociative identity disorder is the condition once called multiple personality disorder, in which a person has two or more distinct identities or personality states. It has been discussed in relation to hypnosis and to divisions between apparently normal and emotional parts of the self.
      • multiple personality — Multiple personality, now called dissociative identity disorder, is a condition in which a person exhibits more than one distinct identity or personality state. It is often discussed in connection with severe childhood trauma and figures such as Billy Milligan and Sybil.
    • fugue state — A dissociative disorder marked by sudden travel or wandering away from one’s usual surroundings, loss of autobiographical memory, and sometimes the adoption of a new identity. It is often triggered by severe stress and may last from days to a month, after which the person cannot recall the fugue period.
  • Impulse control disorders

    • Kleptomania — Kleptomania is an impulse-control disorder marked by an inability to resist stealing items that are not needed for personal use or value. It is a psychiatric condition rather than ordinary theft, and questions on it usually emphasize compulsive stealing.

    • pyromania — Pyromania is an impulse control disorder marked by an abnormal urge to start fires. It is distinguished from fire-setting for profit or politics, and the word also appears in the title of a Def Leppard album.

  • Sleep disorders

    • nightmares — Nightmares are frightening dreams or sleep disturbances often treated in art through images of demons, horses, and sleeping figures. Famous examples include Fuseli’s The Nightmare and later visual references to sleep paralysis and nocturnal terrors.

    • Parasomnias
      • sleep paralysis — Sleep paralysis is a phenomenon in which a person wakes unable to move, often while sensing a presence or pressure on the chest. It is commonly discussed alongside hypnopompic hallucinations, intruder visions, and folklore figures such as the night hag or incubus.
    • sleepwalking — Sleepwalking, or somnambulism, is a state in which a person performs actions while asleep but partly responsive. It appears in Macbeth, in Bellini’s opera La sonnambula, and in other literary works about night wandering and dreamlike action.
• Stress, Trauma, and Historical Contexts

  • Stress and anxiety — stress is a physical or mental response to an external demand or challenge. It can prompt useful action, but prolonged stress can impair well-being. Anxiety involves worry or apprehension that may persist without an immediate external threat. The distinction concerns the pattern and context of the response; ordinary stress should not automatically be labeled a psychological disorder.⁶

  • PTSD — trauma-related disorder; re-experiencing, avoidance, negative cognitions/mood, hyperarousal. It can follow severe trauma such as combat, disaster, car accidents, or violent crime. The condition was formally recognized in the DSM-III and became widely discussed through studies of returning Vietnam veterans; research has also reported reduced hippocampal volume.
    • Trauma — Trauma is psychological damage caused by a distressing event. It is the core concept behind PTSD, whose symptoms can include anxiety, flashbacks, and triggers. Related topics include EMDR therapy, Francine Shapiro, the CAPS assessment, Freyd’s betrayal trauma, and studies of inherited or intergenerational trauma by scholars such as Natan P. F. Kellermann and Daniel Schechter.
  • Occupational stress
    • occupational burnout — Occupational burnout is a work-related state marked by emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced personal accomplishment. Christina Maslach’s research and inventories are central to its study, especially in high-stress professions.
  • psychological stress — Psychological stress is the strain or pressure response associated with threats, demands, and coping failure. Quizbowl clues often cite Hans Selye’s general adaptation syndrome and the Holmes-Rahe scale of life change units.
    • stress response — The stress response is the body’s psychological and physiological reaction to threatening or demanding stimuli. It is associated with Hans Selye’s general adaptation syndrome, later work on coping responses, and the distinction between Type A and Type B behavior.

      • fight or flight — Fight or flight is the acute stress response that prepares an organism to confront or escape danger. Walter Cannon named the response, and epinephrine is one of the key hormones associated with it.

      • Fight-or-flight response — The fight-or-flight response is the autonomic stress reaction that prepares an organism to confront or escape danger. It is associated with arousal, hypervigilance, and rapid physiological activation.

  • Bessel van der Kolk
    • The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma — Bessel van der Kolk’s book on traumatic stress and healing, arguing that PTSD can live in the body as well as the mind. It promotes approaches such as yoga and other nonpharmaceutical treatments for restoring a sense of physical connection after trauma, and is often cited in discussions of EMDR, PTSD, and modern mental health culture.
  • Childhood trauma
    • Alice Miller — Alice Miller was a psychologist and psychoanalyst who wrote extensively about childhood trauma and child abuse. Her books include The Drama of the Gifted Child and Breaking Down the Wall of Silence.
  • Stress and trauma
    • Psychological shock
      • shock — Shock is a disruptive change or blow, and the term also names the psychological reaction to an overwhelming cultural difference. Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine attacks “disaster capitalism,” while Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock uses the word for anxiety produced by rapid change. In science, shock also refers to phenomena such as bow shock around Earth’s magnetosphere or termination shock in the solar wind.
  • trauma and captivity responses
    • Stockholm syndrome — Stockholm syndrome is a psychological response in which hostages or abuse victims develop loyalty or sympathy toward their captors. The term comes from the Norrmalmstorg robbery in Stockholm, and Patty Hearst is a famous example.
  • Trauma and abuse

    • Battered woman syndrome — Battered woman syndrome is a controversial legal and psychological concept associated with Lenore Walker. It is often discussed in self-defense cases and is linked to learned helplessness, a cycle of escalating violence, and abusive relationships.

    • Stockholm syndrome or capture-bonding — Stockholm syndrome, also called capture-bonding, is the psychological response in which a hostage develops sympathy for a captor. The name comes from a Stockholm bank robbery, and the term is often invoked in cases such as Patty Hearst and Elizabeth Smart.

  • suicide — Suicide is the act of intentionally ending one’s own life. It appears in Durkheim’s sociology and Camus’s philosophy, and in literary works by Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Anatomy of a Suicide, and for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. In Japanese history and culture, it is associated with seppuku, kamikaze attacks, and related acts of honor-driven self-destruction; it is also referenced in relation to Kurt Cobain and Joseph Goebbels.

  • Depression scales
    • BDI — The BDI, or Beck Depression Inventory, is a self-administered 21-item questionnaire used to measure depressive symptoms.
• Alfred Kinsey
  • Kinsey scale — The Kinsey scale is a 0-to-6 measure of sexual orientation, from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual. It comes from Alfred Kinsey’s sex research and his reports on male and female sexual behavior.

Applied Psychology

• Applied psychology
  • Forensic psychology — Forensic psychology applies psychological methods to criminal investigation and prosecution. It is often concerned with understanding the criminal mind and assisting the legal process.

    • lie detectors — Lie detectors, or polygraphs, are devices that estimate truthfulness by tracking physiological responses such as blood pressure and heartbeat during questioning. They are associated with early legal and psychological work by William Marston and later challenges to their reliability and admissibility in court.

    • serial killer — A serial killer is a murderer who commits multiple killings with cooling-off periods between them. The term is associated with FBI profiling work by Robert Ressler and examples such as Ted Bundy, Aileen Wuornos, Ed Gein, and the Zodiac Killer.

• industrial-organizational psychology — Industrial-organizational psychology applies psychological methods to workplaces, management, and human resources. Clues often mention the Hawthorne effect, Kurt Lewin, and issues such as hiring, motivation, and group behavior in corporate settings.

  • workplaces — Workplaces are the settings where people perform paid labor, and they are a major focus of industrial-organizational psychology and management research. Clues often point to theories of stress, motivation, and efficiency in offices, factories, and businesses.

  • Frederick Herzberg — Frederick Herzberg is a motivational theorist known for the two-factor theory. His model distinguishes hygiene factors from motivators, unlike the stage-based needs theories of Maslow and McClelland.

• occupational psychology
  • burnout — Burnout is a work-related state of exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced efficacy associated with chronic stress and overwork. It is strongly identified with Christina Maslach’s research and the Maslach Burnout Inventory.
    • Christina Maslach — Christina Maslach is a psychologist associated with research on burnout and the Maslach Burnout Inventory. Her work treats burnout as involving emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment.
• Popular psychology
  • Joyce Brothers — Joyce Brothers was a psychologist and media personality who became famous after winning on The $64,000 Question with boxing as her specialty. She turned that visibility into a career as an advice columnist and television figure, becoming one of the first widely recognized TV psychologists.
• Professions
  • psychologist — A psychologist studies behavior and mental processes, and the profession is also held by characters such as Frasier Crane, Tobias Funke, and Bob Newhart’s Bob Hartley. The clues contrast the role with psychiatrists and other doctor-like figures.
• Psychology of religion
  • The Varieties of Religious Experience — The Varieties of Religious Experience is William James’s 1902 collection of Gifford Lectures on the psychology of religion. It explores conversion, mysticism, the divided self, and the difference between healthy-mindedness and a sick soul.
• Hugo Munsterberg — Hugo Munsterberg was a German-born psychologist and an early pioneer of industrial and organizational psychology. His work on eyewitness testimony, film theory, and management includes On the Witness Stand, The Photoplay, and Psychology and Industrial Efficiency.

Psychotherapy and Psychological Interventions

Distinguish explanations of disorders from therapeutic traditions, intervention techniques, and their historical practitioners.

• Therapies — CBT (cognitive-behavioral therapy): challenges distorted thoughts and behaviors; gold standard for many disorders. Psychodynamic therapy: insight into unconscious conflicts. DBT (dialectical behavior therapy): Marsha Linehan; adapted CBT for borderline PD; skills: mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, interpersonal effectiveness. Exposure therapy: systematic desensitization for phobias (Wolpe). EMDR: evidence-based for PTSD.

• Arthur Janov
  • Primal scream — A primal scream is a loud, cathartic cry associated with Arthur Janov’s primal therapy. The term also names the Scottish rock band Primal Scream.
• behavior therapy

  • aversion therapy — Aversion therapy uses unpleasant stimuli, such as electric shocks, to condition a person to reject an unwanted behavior or substance. It was historically used in treating addictions and appears in fictionalized accounts of behavior modification.

  • Mary Cover Jones — Mary Cover Jones was an early behavior therapist whose “Little Peter” work used gradual exposure with food and a rabbit to reduce fear. Her desensitization studies helped inspire systematic desensitization, and she later led the Oakland Growth Study.

• Exposure therapy

  • systematic desensitization — Systematic desensitization is a behavioral therapy for phobias that introduces feared stimuli in a gradual hierarchy while teaching relaxation. It is associated with Joseph Wolpe and is often described as a form of exposure treatment.

  • desensitization — Desensitization is the reduced emotional response that can follow repeated exposure to violent or anxiety-provoking stimuli. It underlies treatments such as EMDR and Wolpe’s systematic desensitization.

• Mindfulness-based interventions
  • mindfulness — Mindfulness is the Buddhist-inspired practice of nonjudgmentally paying attention to the present moment, often linked to sati. The clues mention Jon Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness-based stress reduction, and debates over its use in therapy, education, and commerce.
• psychopharmacology
  • psychedelic drugs — Psychedelic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin alter perception and consciousness, and they are being studied for possible treatment of depression. Quizbowl clues often connect them to peak experiences, Carlos Castañeda, and other countercultural or spiritual writing.
• Psychotherapies
  • Gestalt therapy — Gestalt therapy is a holistic psychotherapy developed by Fritz Perls and Laura Perls that emphasizes awareness of the here and now. It is known for techniques such as the empty-chair exercise and for its association with the Gestalt idea that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
    • Fritz Perls — Fritz Perls was a German psychologist who, with Laura Perls, developed Gestalt therapy. He is also remembered for works such as In and Out the Garbage Pail and Ego, Hunger, and Aggression, and for appearing in the Gloria Tapes with Carl Rogers and Albert Ellis.
• psychotherapy — Psychotherapy is the general term for talk-based or conversational treatment of mental illness and other mental health problems. Major approaches include cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), person-centered/client-centered therapy, logotherapy, Freudian psychoanalysis, gestalt therapy, family therapy, and dialectical forms. Carl Rogers is associated with person-centered therapy and Viktor Frankl with logotherapy; the records also note the view that different methods may be similarly effective.

  • cognitive behavioral therapy — Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is a goal-oriented psychotherapy that combines cognitive restructuring with behavioral change. It targets maladaptive thought patterns and the behaviors they drive, with the core idea that changing a patient’s interpretations and assumptions can reduce distress. It is especially associated with treating anxiety disorders and is often used for depression, anxiety, and related disorders. Techniques include exposure and homework. It is associated with Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis and is often contrasted with older psychotherapies and with approaches like primal scream therapy.

  • eye movement desensitization and reprocessing — Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, is a controversial psychotherapy used to treat trauma and PTSD. It combines retelling traumatic memories with bilateral stimulation and was developed by Francine Shapiro.

  • group therapy
    • Emmanuel Movement — The Emmanuel Movement was a Boston-area religiously inspired mental health program founded in 1906 by Rev. Elwood Worcester. It offered free public treatment aimed at reducing neuroses through group therapy and related counseling methods.

  • person-centered therapy — Carl Rogers’s humanistic approach to psychotherapy, built around empathy, congruence, unconditional positive regard, and the patient’s actualizing tendency. It aims to help patients find their own solutions rather than being directed by the therapist.

  • Primal Therapy — Arthur Janov’s psychotherapy centered on reliving childhood trauma and releasing repressed pain through intense vocal expression. It became famous in the 1970s as a celebrity-associated form of therapy, attracting attention from John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and helped inspire the name of Tears for Fears.

  • rational emotive behavior therapy — Rational-emotive behavior therapy is Albert Ellis’s active-directive psychotherapy, built around the idea that irrational beliefs cause emotional distress. It is associated with changing irrational demands, often summarized as the “three basic musts,” into more rational beliefs.
    • Albert Ellis — Albert Ellis was a psychologist who developed rational emotive behavior therapy and the ABC model of emotion. His work attacked irrational beliefs through techniques such as disputing, shame-attacking exercises, and a famously combative style in therapy. He drew on thinkers like Epictetus and General Semantics while arguing against musturbation, catastrophizing, and awfulizing. Quizbowl clues also mention the Gloria Tapes and his early influence on Aaron Beck.
  • therapy — Therapy is the broad term for psychological treatment, including client-centered, cognitive-behavioral, and rational-emotive forms. It aims to alleviate mental disorders through approaches such as systematic desensitization, empathy, and structured behavior change.
• Role-playing techniques
  • role playing — Role playing is the practice of acting out behavior in assumed roles, used in education as sociodrama and in therapy as psychodrama. It also describes games such as Dungeons and Dragons, where players adopt characters and make decisions in a shared fictional setting.
• self-help
  • Barbara De Angelis — Barbara De Angelis is a self-help author and relationship expert associated with advice books about love and men. Her titles include Secrets About Men Every Woman Should Know and Are You the One for Me?

Experiments, Researchers, and Contested Claims

Place experiments and researchers within their methods and limitations.

Famous Experiments

• Pavlov’s dogs — classic conditioning of salivation to a bell; established the foundations of behavioral psychology. Ivan Pavlov (1890s–1900s).

• Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment (1954) — Muzafer Sherif divided boys at a summer camp into two groups (Rattlers and Eagles), fostered intergroup conflict through competition, then reduced hostility via superordinate goals requiring cooperation; demonstrated realistic conflict theory and the contact hypothesis requires cooperative interdependence.
  • Robber’s Cave Experiment — The Robber’s Cave Experiment studied prejudice and conflict among two groups of boys at Robbers Cave State Park. Sherif showed that rivalry could be reduced by superordinate goals, making the study a classic of Realistic Conflict Theory.

• Watson and Rayner — Little Albert (1920) — conditioned fear of a white rat in an infant by pairing it with a loud noise; demonstrated classical conditioning of emotional responses in humans. The child was never deconditioned; the study is widely regarded as profoundly unethical. The subject’s identity is disputed in the literature.

• Skinner box — an operant conditioning chamber used to study how schedules of reinforcement shape behavior in animals (rats, pigeons). It is associated with B. F. Skinner and is often described as a box with a lever that dispenses food pellets or other rewards; it is used to study reinforcement and extinction in animals.

• Milgram obedience studies (1963) — participants instructed by an authority figure to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to a “learner” (confederate); the originally reported 65% compliance to the maximum 450-V level has been debated by Gina Perry and others on grounds of participant debriefing and data fidelity. The studies remain a landmark in social psychology but are cited cautiously. Were deeply controversial ethically and led to major reforms in research ethics standards.
  • Stanley Milgram obedience experiment — Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment tested how far people would go in following authority when instructed to administer shocks. Its best-known result is that many participants continued despite the learner’s apparent distress.

• Asch conformity experiments (1951–1956) — participants gave clearly wrong answers on line-length judgments when confederates unanimously gave the wrong answer; ~75% conformed at least once; demonstrated power of social pressure on perception and judgment.

• Stanford Prison Experiment (Zimbardo, 1971) — college students assigned as “guards” or “prisoners” in a simulated prison; the experiment was halted after 6 days (not 14 as sometimes reported). Zimbardo served as “prison superintendent,” creating demand characteristics; subsequent critiques by Blum (2018) and primary-source analysis have substantially undermined its conclusions. Its influence on social psychology and ethics policy has been large, but replication is not possible and the original claims are contested. Zimbardo served as the “prison superintendent,” a role later criticized for creating demand characteristics. Later critiques, including Blum (2018) and primary-source analysis, substantially undermined its conclusions and its original claims remain contested; its influence on social psychology and ethics policy has nevertheless been large, and it is not replicable in the original form.

• Bobo doll study (Bandura, 1961) — see Observational Learning above.

• Festinger and Carlsmith cognitive-dissonance study (1959) — participants paid one dollar to endorse a dull task later rated it more favorably than those paid twenty dollars, interpreted as attitude change when external justification was insufficient.

• Rosenhan study (1973) — Rosenhan reported that pseudopatients who claimed hallucinations were admitted to psychiatric hospitals, then had difficulty shedding their diagnostic labels. This is a historical study about diagnosis and institutional interpretation, not a reliable estimate of present-day diagnostic accuracy. Both the conclusions and textbook retellings have attracted substantial criticism. The reported diagnoses were not identical across all pseudopatients.⁷

  • D. L. Rosenhan — D. L. Rosenhan was the psychologist who staged the famous pseudopatient experiment in mental institutions. His associates reported hearing voices like ‘hollow,’ ‘empty,’ and ‘thud,’ and the study argued that psychiatric labels can be highly subjective.

  • David L. Rosenhan — David L. Rosenhan was a psychologist best known for the experiment described in On Being Sane in Insane Places. His work used pseudo-patients in mental hospitals and is often cited in criticism of psychiatric diagnosis and institutional judgment.

  • David Rosenhan — David Rosenhan was the Stanford psychologist whose experiment on sanity in psychiatric hospitals exposed how staff could not reliably distinguish healthy confederates from patients. His work is associated with the paper “On Being Sane in Insane Places” and with critiques of the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness.

• Jane Elliott’s Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes experiment (1968) — teacher divided third graders by eye color and told one group they were superior; the “inferior” group’s performance and demeanor declined within a day; demonstrated rapid internalization of social hierarchy and prejudice; originally conducted the day after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

• Split-brain studies (Sperry and Gazzaniga, 1960s) — patients with severed corpus callosum showed that left and right hemispheres can operate independently; left hemisphere handles language and analytical tasks; right handles spatial/holistic processing. Roger Sperry received the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this work.

• Delay of gratification / marshmallow studies — early studies linked preschool waiting time to later outcomes. Watts, Duncan, and Quan’s 2018 conceptual replication found a smaller association with later achievement, substantially attenuated after accounting for family background, early cognitive ability, and the home environment. This narrows the interpretation; it neither establishes a causal effect of waiting nor shows that self-regulation is irrelevant.⁸

• animal cognition
  • ape language studies
    • Washoe — Washoe was the chimpanzee taught American Sign Language by the Gardners and became famous for seemingly using signs creatively. She was presented as an early nonhuman subject in debates about language acquisition after learning more than a hundred signs.
  • Clever Hans effect
    • Clever Hans — Clever Hans was the famous horse owned by Wilhelm von Osten who seemed able to count, spell, and do arithmetic. The horse was later shown by Oskar Pfungst and Carl Stumpf to be responding to subtle human cues rather than solving problems.
• social psychology experiments
  • Robbers Cave study — The Robbers Cave study was Muzafer Sherif’s field experiment on group conflict among Boy Scout-like teams called the Rattlers and Eagles. It is a classic demonstration of realistic conflict theory and intergroup hostility.

• Rosalie Rayner — Rosalie Rayner was the graduate student who helped John B. Watson carry out the Little Albert experiment. Watson later left Johns Hopkins after an affair with her, and the two later married.

• Obedience studies
  • Milgram shock/obedience/authority experiment — The Milgram obedience experiment tested how far ordinary people would go when instructed by an authority figure. Participants believed they were administering escalating electric shocks to a learner, making the study a classic example of obedience under pressure.
• social influence
  • Conformity — Conformity is the tendency to adjust one’s judgments or behavior to match group norms under social pressure. Classic studies include Asch’s line-length experiments, Sherif’s autokinetic effect experiments, and Kelman’s distinctions among compliance, identification, and internalization. It is often contrasted with obedience, which should not be confused with it.

    • Asch effect — The Asch effect is the tendency for people to conform to an obviously wrong group judgment. It comes from Solomon Asch’s line-judgment experiments, where subjects often matched the incorrect answers given by confederates.

    • bandwagon effect — The bandwagon effect is the tendency for people to adopt an opinion or behavior because others are doing so. In politics it describes voters shifting toward a perceived frontrunner, and it is closely associated with herd behavior and conformity.

    • Solomon Asch experiment — The Solomon Asch experiment is the classic conformity study in which subjects judged line lengths while surrounded by confederates giving wrong answers. The results showed that many people would conform to an obviously incorrect group judgment.

    • Solomon Asch’s experiment — Solomon Asch’s experiment is the classic conformity study in which subjects matched line lengths after confederates gave incorrect answers. It showed how majority pressure can override private judgment, especially in group settings.

  • deprogramming — Deprogramming is the controversial practice of trying to reverse cult indoctrination, sometimes by forcibly isolating a person and using intense psychological pressure. It is associated with Ted Patrick and became especially controversial in disputes over brainwashing and new religious movements.
• aggression — Aggression is hostile or violent behavior, a major topic in psychology and social learning research. The clues point to Bandura’s Bobo doll experiment, the frustration-aggression hypothesis, and theories linking media or cues to violent response. The concept also appears in measures such as the overt aggression scale and in studies of relational or indirect aggression. It is often discussed alongside aggression replacement training and related behavioral interventions.
  • Spite — Spite is a form of harmful behavior motivated by the desire to hurt another even at a cost to oneself. In literature and psychology alike, it is associated with vindictive or self-defeating aggression.
• Dolls — Dolls are toy figures and humanoid models used in psychology, literature, opera, fiction, and popular music. They were central to the Kenneth and Mamie Clark studies on racial preference and to Albert Bandura’s imitation experiment with the bobo doll, and they appear in false-belief research such as the Sally-Anne task, where a child predicts what another person thinks about a hidden object. In literature and drama, Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House compares herself to a doll, and Elizabethan drama uses doll as slang for a woman or prostitute. Other associated works and imagery include Coppelia, Petrushka, Pinocchio-related works, Elena Ferrante’s lost childhood dolls, Hans Bellmer’s surreal constructions, and decorative forms like kokeshi and darumas.
  • doll — A doll is a toy often used in psychology experiments on observational learning, especially the Bobo doll experiment. The same word also appears in folklore as the Matryoshka or Russian nesting doll.

• MKULTRA — The CIA’s secret Cold War mind-control program, begun in the 1950s, used LSD and other hallucinogens as well as hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and electroshock in efforts to influence behavior. It is associated with Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Frank Olson, and the agency’s destruction of records.

• addiction experiments
  • Rat Park — Rat Park is the famous psychology experiment that compared addictive behavior in isolated cages with behavior in a more stimulating environment. It is frequently cited in debates over addiction, drug dependence, and the role of environment in relapse and reward-seeking.
• self-control

  • delayed gratification — Delayed gratification is the ability to forgo an immediate reward for a better future one. Walter Mischel’s marshmallow experiment tested this capacity in children and linked it to later outcomes such as academic success.

  • delay of gratification
    • waiting — Waiting is the behavior tested by marshmallow-style self-control tasks and by situations that require a mandatory delay before action. It also titles works such as Waiting for Godot and Waiting for Lefty, which use the idea of suspense and deferred action. The same word appears in Ha Jin’s novel about Lin Kong’s long and frustrated attempt to divorce his wife.

  • ego depletion — Ego depletion is the claim that self-control draws on a limited mental resource that can be exhausted by prior acts of restraint. It is associated with Roy Baumeister and frequently discussed as a social-psychological theory that has faced replication problems.

  • Marshmallow test — Walter Mischel’s Stanford delay-of-gratification experiment asked children to wait for a preferred treat in order to receive a larger reward later: one treat immediately or two if they waited. It became a famous test of self-control and has been widely cited in discussions of long-term academic success and social science.
    • marshmallows — Marshmallows were used in Walter Mischel’s delayed-gratification experiment, where children could wait for two treats instead of one. Later replication studies found weaker links between waiting time and later achievement than the original study suggested.
• Wendell Johnson
  • Monster Study — The Monster Study was the 1939 University of Iowa experiment by Wendell Johnson and Mary Tudor on stuttering orphans in Davenport. It became infamous because one group received harsh negative speech therapy intended to test diagnosogenic theory.
• Sherif — Sherif is the surname of Muzafer Sherif and Carolyn Wood Sherif, the husband-and-wife psychologists associated with realistic conflict theory. It also appears in work on social judgment theory and the Robbers Cave experiment, including the study in which superordinate goals reduced conflict between the Rattlers and Eagles.

Key Figures Summary

• Martin Seligman — learned helplessness; later founded positive psychology (VIA character strengths, PERMA model of well-being); past APA president. He has also written on explanatory style and optimism.

• Walter Mischel — marshmallow test; also Person-Situation debate: argued (1968) that behavior is more situationally specific than trait theories predict; partly reconciled via interaction (personality × situation). He is associated with the delay-of-gratification literature and with Personality and Assessment, where he argued that behavior is strongly shaped by situation rather than fixed traits.
  • Stanford marshmallow experiment — The Stanford marshmallow experiment was Walter Mischel’s delayed-gratification study in which children could eat one treat now or wait for more later. It became famous as a test of self-control, though later research questioned how much it measured family background or trust in authority. Its shorthand clue is the snack itself, often marshmallows or a similar sweet.

• Henry Havelock Ellis — Henry Havelock Ellis was a British psychologist, physician, sexologist, and social reformer who helped pioneer sexology and advocate birth control and sex education. He wrote on criminology and helped introduce frank discussion of sexuality into fin-de-siècle Britain. His major work was the seven-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex, and he also wrote Sexual Inversion; both were controversial, with the former restricted in publication.

• psychologists
  • G. Stanley Hall — G. Stanley Hall was a pioneering American psychologist often credited with founding the study of adolescence in the United States. He founded the American Journal of Psychology, became the first Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard, and described adolescence as a period of “storm and stress.”
• psychology history
  • Mary Whiton Calkins — Mary Whiton Calkins was a pioneering American psychologist who studied at Harvard under William James and later taught at Wellesley College. She developed self-psychology, the paired-associate method, and became the first female president of the American Psychological Association.
• Psychology of music
  • Carl Stumpf — Carl Stumpf was a German psychologist and music theorist known for Tone Psychology and The Origins of Music. He also helped investigate Clever Hans and is associated with early comparative musicology and the psychology of tones.

• Ulric Neisser — Ulric Neisser was a German-American psychologist known as the father of cognitive psychology and the author of Cognitive Psychology. He also promoted ecologically valid experiments and studied how people remembered the Challenger explosion over time.

• Comparative psychology
  • Robert Yerkes — Robert Yerkes was a psychologist who helped develop Army Alpha and Army Beta while serving as president of the American Psychological Association during World War I. He is also known for primate research and for The Dancing Mouse, which helped establish mice as standard laboratory subjects.

• Daryl J. Bem — Daryl J. Bem was a Cornell social psychologist associated with self-perception theory, which holds that people infer their attitudes from their own behavior. He proposed the exotic-becomes-erotic theory, defended ganzfeld ESP experiments, and drew controversy for the paper “Feeling the Future,” which claimed evidence for precognition. He is also linked to work on gender schema through his wife Sandra Bem.

• psychology of religion
  • religious experiences — Religious experiences are episodes described as mystical, spiritual, or divine encounters, often treated as central data in the psychology of religion. William James associated them with qualities such as ineffability and noetic force, while later writers linked them to temporal-lobe phenomena and entheogens.
• Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
  • Kübler-Ross model — The model was introduced in On Death and Dying and describes how people process loss through five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. It is associated with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.
    • Elizabeth Kübler-Ross — Elizabeth Kübler-Ross was a psychiatrist and hospice pioneer best known for her five-stage model of grief. Her model lists denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance as responses to dying and loss.
  • On Death and Dying — On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross is a foundational thanatology text about grief and terminal illness. It is especially famous for the five stages of grief, ending with acceptance.
• Gregory Bateson
  • Steps to an Ecology of Mind — Steps to an Ecology of Mind is Gregory Bateson’s collection of essays on cybernetics, communication, and systems theory. It includes his discussions of double binds, logical types, and metalogues with his daughter.
• Neuroscientists
  • Roger Wolcott Sperry — Roger Wolcott Sperry won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work on split-brain patients and the functional specialization of the cerebral hemispheres. His research helped establish how the left and right sides of the brain process different kinds of information.

Parapsychology and Contested Claims

• Bridey Murphy — Bridey Murphy was the supposed reincarnation identity of Virginia Tighe, who spoke under hypnosis in Pueblo, Colorado, in 1952. The case helped spark a national craze for reincarnation stories before being exposed as a hoax.

• Parapsychology — Parapsychology is the study of purported psychic or scientifically unexplained phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis. It is associated with J. B. Rhine’s Duke University program and later patronage from Arthur Koestler’s estate.

  • Extrasensory Perception — Extrasensory perception, or ESP, is the alleged ability to gain information without using the known physical senses. Parapsychology has tested it with Zener cards and ganzfeld experiments, and related claims include telepathy, precognition, and remote viewing.

    • telepathy — Telepathy is the supposed ability to communicate thoughts directly from one mind to another. It is often discussed in parapsychology and in fiction as a form of extrasensory perception.

    • Clairvoyance — Clairvoyance is the supposed ability to perceive events at a distance or beyond normal sensory range. It is often listed alongside other forms of extrasensory perception.

  • precognition — Precognition is the supposed ability to perceive or know future events before they happen. It is treated as a paranormal power associated with characters such as Raven and Cassandra in the Iliad.

  • Zener cards — Zener cards are a deck of symbols used in tests of extrasensory perception. They were developed in the Duke parapsychology tradition and are commonly associated with guessing the correct symbols by chance.

  • Telekinesis — Telekinesis, also called psychokinesis, is the purported ability to move objects with the mind. It is a staple of paranormal fiction and is often discussed in connection with characters such as Carrie White and Jean Grey.

Psychology in Media and Cultural Commentary

Keep fictional portrayals and popular commentary separate from experimental methods and psychological theories.

• In Treatment — In Treatment is an HBO drama about psychologist Paul Weston and his weekly therapy sessions with patients. It was adapted from the Israeli series BeTipul and also features Paul’s own therapist, played by Dianne Wiest.

• Television psychologists
  • Dr. Phil McGraw — Dr. Phil McGraw is the television psychologist who became famous after appearing on Oprah and later hosted his own advice show. He is associated with self-help commentary, family counseling, and his trademark Texas drawl.
• Malcolm Gladwell
  • Blink — Blink is Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book about rapid cognition and intuitive judgments. It is often paired with his other popular works, especially Outliers and The Tipping Point.
• Eric Hoffer
  • The True Believer — The True Believer is Eric Hoffer’s analysis of mass movements and the psychology of fanaticism. It argues that frustrated, self-doubting people are drawn into collective causes and became famous for its discussion of totalitarian movements and conversion to fanaticism.