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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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is addictive personality. The concept of an addictive personality, although often referred to in pop psychology, is actually less of a thing than you might think. For there to be an addictive personality, that would suggest that there
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is behavioural experiments. Behavioural experiments are a cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) technique to test out beliefs in real-world conditions. It’s like being your own social scientist. Behavioural experiments are commonly used in the treatment of anxiety disorders to test
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is critical thinking. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says that, while there are various different definitions, the basic underlying idea is “careful thinking directed to a goal.” Wikipedia describes critical thinking as “the analysis of facts to form
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Mental illness stigma is a very real problem. Those of us living with mental illness usually aren’t thrilled when people casually toss around mental illness diagnoses as adjectives, such as “she’s so bipolar”, “he’s so OCD”, or “everyone’s a little ADHD.” Yet, when it comes to narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), all of a sudden there
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is pop psychology. Wikipedia describes popular (pop) psychology as “the concepts and theories about human mental life and behavior that are purportedly based on psychology and that find credence among and pass muster with the populace.” Pop psychology is 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 the psychology of tyranny. History is filled with tyrants causing massive damage to humanity. Some of them take power by force, while others, like Adolf Hitler, were chosen by the people. How is it that people 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 euphemism treadmill. Psychologist and linguist Stephen Pinker coined the term euphemism treadmill in a 1994 article in the New York Times. It refers to a process by which words that are used as a euphemism for
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week we’re looking at the psychology behind conspiracy theories. This topic came up in a recent post by Andy of Eden in Babylon. In particular, the Q-Anon conspiracy theory has become quite popular, despite its utter absurdity. Then there’s the
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