In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is the psychology of war atrocities. This post won’t go into any details of the atrocities themselves; rather, the focus is on what contributes to people becoming perpetrators. This post is based on a comprehensive paper on the […]
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is learned helplessness. Learned helplessness was first described by Martin Seligman, who is also the founder of positive psychology. It began with observations made during animal studies, and eventually became his theory of depression. While doing classical conditioning
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is heuristic. A heuristic (from the Greek “to discover”) is a mental rule of thumb or shortcut that allows our brains to process information and arrive at conclusions more quickly. I recently wrote about philosophical razors, which are
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is moralization. The term moralization was introduced by psychologist Paul Rozin in the late 1990s to describe the process by which people’s preferences are transformed into values. Rozin’s research looked at how, for some people, vegetarianism had become
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is psychological construct. In psychology, constructs are ways to describe patterns of behaviour or experiences so that they can be explored, investigated, and discussed. It’s a way of putting a name to things that don’t exist in a
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is double depression. This post uses a lot of abbreviations, which are summarized down at the bottom of this post. The term double depression is sometimes used to describe the state when two types of depression (major depressive
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is self-verification theory. Self-verification theory comes from social psychology, and it says that we want other people to see us the way we see ourselves. That might seem self-obvious, but what’s interesting is that this applies even when
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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 the psychology of cuteness. Whether your preference is human babies or babies of the animal variety, they’re cute. Even if the associated adults are rather unattractive, the babies just tug at the heartstrings, 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 emotion. This may seem like a rather obvious topic; after all, we all have emotions. But there’s actually more than meets the eye, so I thought it would be interesting to look a little closer. Emotions are
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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 Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger effect was first described by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger. It’s a type of cognitive bias that causes people to feel confident that they have greater knowledge or competence in an
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