In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week, we’re going to look at the psychology behind selfies. Smartphones and social media have given rise to the age of the selfie, which was the 2013 Oxford Languages Word of the Year. Back in the not-so-distant day, selfies just […]
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is rejection sensitive dysphoria. You may have heard of rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD), perhaps in the context of ADHD (attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder). I was going into writing this post thinking that it was a well-established thing, and 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 schema therapy. Schema therapy was developed by Dr. Jeffrey Young in the 1990s. Kind of like dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT), it’s based on cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), but developed to address the needs of people who weren’t
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is the five-factor model of personality. These factors are often referred to as the Big Five. Personality traits are characteristics that are stable across time and across contexts. The five-factor model includes five personality trait dimensions. These are:
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week we’re going to look at logical fallacies. Logical fallacies are reasoning errors that people make quite commonly when making arguments. While such fallacies don’t necessarily mean that the conclusion is wrong, they’re a weak link in the argument, and
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is belief perseverance. Belief perseverance is the tendency to hold onto beliefs even after the information that they’re based on is shown to be false. I’m a big fan of this line from a paper by Savion (2009):
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is the illusion of causality. The illusion of causality is a cognitive bias that makes us see causal relationships between things that aren’t actually related. This often comes into play in superstitions and pseudoscience. We naturally look for
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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 paraphilic disorders. Paraphilias involve atypical patterns of sexual arousal. Paraphilic disorders are a more extreme version of paraphilias, involving arousal patterns that are a) intense and persistent and b) cause significant distress or functional impairment or
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychological terms. This week’s term is melancholic depression, also known as depression with melancholic features. The word melancholia comes from the Greek for black bile, part of the ancient four humours medical belief system. In the 5th century BCE, Hippocrates first identified melancholia as
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is apophenia. Apophenia is a type of cognitive bias involving the tendency to find patterns where they don’t actually exist, i.e. in things that are unrelated or random. It was first described by neurologist Klaus Conrad in 1958
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