In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is attention. We are constantly bombarded with a steady stream of stimuli, both internal and external. Attention is the process by which we narrow our focus to certain pieces of information. This is necessary because our capacity to […]
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is thought-action fusion. Thought-action fusion (TAF) happens when people believe there is an equivalence between thoughts and actions. It was first described by researchers in relation to OCD, although it’s not exclusive to OCD. There are a couple
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week, we’ll look at cognitive vs. emotional (affective) empathy. Emotional empathy, known formally as affective empathy, refers to our ability to share the emotions of others. Cognitive empathy refers to our ability to infer and understand someone’s emotional experiences from
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is eustress vs. distress. The concepts of eustress and distress were first described by medical researcher Hans Selye, who defined stress as “the nonspecific response of the body to any demand made upon it.” He believed that stress
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence (EI) sounds like something that’s obviously good, useful, and important, and while that might be true when you consider it as a nebulous concept, when you dig a little bit and narrow it
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is atypical depression. “Atypical features” is a specifier that describes individual depressive episodes. While the name suggests it’s not particularly common, that’s not actually the case. The atypical name comes because of the way it differs from depression
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is enhanced cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT-E. I first heard of CBT-E recently in a post by Burnie of Quash Stigma Not Fat; it was a form of therapy she had done to treat her anorexia nervosa. I
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is moral typecasting. Moral typecasting is a concept first described in a 2009 paper by psychologists Kurt Grey and Daniel Wegner. Not everyone agrees that it’s actually a thing, but it’s an interesting idea. It involves casting people
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is concept creep. The term concept creep was first described by psychologist Nick Haslam in a 2016 paper. He wrote that there’s been semantic expansion (i.e. expanded definitions) of words representing various phenomena, so those words now encompass
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is cognitive mapping, the creation of mental maps for navigation. Some people are star navigators, while some can’t find their way out of a paper bag without a GPS. The reason for that likely has a lot to
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