In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is competitiveness. From an evolutionary perspective, competition is hardwired into us; living beings need to compete for limited resources in order to survive. For most of us, though, that isn’t too much of an issue, and the competitive […]
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is social isolation. Social isolation involves an objective removal from social contact and relationships, which may occur voluntarily or involuntarily. The term perceived social isolation is used to include a subjective sense of loneliness. While loneliness and social
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is herd behaviour. Are we people or sheeple? It turns out we’re actually a lot more sheeplish than we might like to think that we are, and herd behaviour is exhibited across a range of different contexts. Kameda
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Failure isn’t fun. There’s just no two ways about that. But what does that failure mean> I think that, particularly when mental illness is involved, it’s easy to leap from “I failed at [X]” to “I’m a failure.” But taking a step back, they’re not really the same thing. Fear of failure Fear of failure
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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 inner child. The concept of an inner child, or childlike aspect within each of us, has some roots in psychology, but it’s also a pop culture phenomenon. The first page of Google Scholar search results on
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s terms are anxiety vs. worry. Anxiety and worry are both normal human experiences, but when severe they can be elements of mental illness. Notably, generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) features both of them. People with high levels of neuroticism 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 rumination. According to the response styles theory, rumination involves the passive, repetitive focus on the nature of one’s own distress and its causes and potential consequences. It’s self-referential, meaning it’s focused on one’s own thoughts and feeling, rather
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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 the Stanford prison experiment. The Stanford prison experiment was a social psychology study carried out at Stanford University in 1971. Researchers randomly assigned Male student volunteers to be either “prisoners” or “guards” in a mock prison
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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 Freedom Techniques (EFT). Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) incorporates a number of different alternative healing approaches, including neuro-linguistic programming, acupuncture meridians, and energy medicine. It’s not generally accepted within mainstream psychology, and it’s been described as a
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I recently came across ring theory, an approach to supporting people in times of crisis, loss, and grief that involves the notion of comfort in, dump out. It was first described in an LA Times article by Susan Silk and Barry Goldman. The development of ring theory Ring theory was developed by clinical psychologist Susan
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