While psychological disorders are generally signaled by some form of abnormal behavior or thought process, abnormality can be difficult to define, especially since it varies from culture to culture. Psychologists have several standard approaches to defining abnormality for diagnostic purposes. One is the statistical approach, which evaluates behavior by determining how closely it conforms to or de…
As psychology has grown and changed throughout its history, it has been defined in numerous ways. As early as 400 B.C., the ancient Greeks philosophized about the relationship of personality characteristics to physiological traits. Since then, philosophers have proposed theories to explain human behavior. In the late 1800s the emergence of scientific method gave the study of psychology a new focus…
Psychophysics originated with the research of Gustav Fechner (1801-1887), who first studied the relationship between incoming physical stimuli and the responses to them. Psychophysicists have generally used two approaches in studying our sensitivity to stimuli around us: measuring the absolute threshold or discovering the difference threshold. In studying the absolute threshold using the method of…
Austrian psychotherapist Sigmund Freud described personality development during childhood in terms of stages based on shifts in the primary location of sexual impulses. During each stage libidinal pleasure is derived from a particular area of the body—called an erogenous zone—and the activities centered in that area. If the problems and conflicts of a particular stage are not adequat…
Psychosis may appear as a symptom of a number of mental disorders, including mood and personality disorders, schizophrenia, delusional disorder, and substance abuse. It is also the defining feature of the psychotic disorders (i.e., brief psychotic disorder, shared psychotic disorder, psychotic disorder due to a general medical condition, and substance-induced psychotic disorder). Patients sufferin…
The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSMIV) classifies psychosomatic illnesses under "Psychological Factors Affecting Physical Conditions." Physicians have been aware that people's mental and emotional states influence their physical well-being since the time of Hippocrates. In the twentieth century, the discoveri…
Psychosurgery involves severing or otherwise disabling areas of the brain to treat a personality disorder, behavior disorder or other mental illness. The most common form of psychosurgery is the lobotomy, where the nerves connecting the frontal lobes of the brain and the thalamus or hypothalamus are severed. Performed first in the late 1930s, by the 1940s lobotomies were recommended for patients d…
Psychoanalysis, the first modern form of psychotherapy, was called the "talking cure," and the many varieties of therapy practiced today are still characterized by their common dependence on a verbal exchange between the counselor or therapist and the person seeking help. The therapeutic interaction is characterized by mutual trust, with the goal of helping individuals change destruc…
Formerly, all psychological disorders were considered either psychotic or neurotic. Psychotic disorders were those that rendered patients unable to function normally in their daily lives and left them "out of touch with reality." They were associated with impaired memory, language, and speech and an inability to think rationally. Neurotic disorders, by comparison, were characterized …
The word puberty is derived from the Latin pubertas, which means adulthood. Puberty is initiated by hormonal changes triggered by a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, which stimulates the pituitary gland, which in turn activates other glands as well. These changes begin about a year before any of their results are visible. Both the male reproductive hormone testosterone and female hormone …
Ethel Dench Puffer was born in Framingham, Massachusetts, the eldest of four daughters. Her family was of native New England stock and highly educated by the standard of the era. After graduating from Smith College in 1891 at the age of 19 and teaching high school for one year in New Hampshire, Puffer returned to Smith as an instructor of mathematics, where she taught for the next three years whil…
Punishment is defined as the administration of aversive stimulus to reduce or eliminate unwanted behavior. It can be either physical or nonphysical. Punishment differs from negative reinforcement in that the latter increases the frequency of behavior by removing a negative event. Punishment can be as simple as giving electric shocks to lab rats to prevent them from touching a lever or as complex&#…
Little is known about pyromania. The term comes from the Greek words pyr (fire) and mania (madness). It is a rare condition, listed under the heading of impulse control disorders. Pyromania is not the same as arson (deliberate fire-setting), and not all arsonists (fire-setters) are pyromaniacs. Fires are often started by individuals with this disorder deliberately and with careful planning, rather…
Research psychologists can collect two kinds of information: quantitative data and qualitative data. Quantitative data are often represented numerically in the form of means, percentages, or frequency counts. Such data are often referred to as "measurement" data, referring to the fact that we often like to measure the amount or extent of some behavior, trait, or disposition. For exam…
Throughout human history, people have tended to divide each other into groups. Most often, physical characteristics are used to distinguish between groups, and the groups are called races. Some people have long believed that many characteristics about a person could be determined by simply looking at the person's race. Intelligence is one trait that has been studied in an attempt to correla…
Racism is most commonly used to describe the belief that members of one's own race are superior physically, mentally, culturally, and morally to members of other races. Racist beliefs provide the foundation for extending special rights, privileges, and opportunities to the race that is believed to be superior, and to withholding rights, privileges, and opportunities from the races believed …
Otto Rank was Sigmund Freud's closest collaborator for 20 years. Later, he strongly influenced the development of psychotherapy in the United States. He was the first psychoanalyst to examine mother-child relationships, including separation anxiety. He also was one of the first to practice a briefer form of psychotherapy, called "active therapy." His work, in contrast to ortho…
Rape is essentially an act of power and dominance. Although an estimated 15 to 40 percent of American women are victims of rape or attempted rape, men are raped as well. Women are more likely to be raped by someone they know; between 50 and 70 percent of all rapes occur within the context of a romantic relationship, and more than half the time the assault takes place in the victim's home. R…
First described in 1953 by Nathaniel Kleitman and Eugene Aserinsky, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is also called active sleep because the EEG (electroencephalogram) patterns in this stage are similar to the patterns during the awake stage. The four stages of slow-wave, or non-REM, sleep are accompanied by deep breathing, a relatively slow heartbeat, and lowered blood pressure. In contrast, levels…
Several varieties of rating scales have been developed. One common form of rating scale presents the rater with a spectrum of potential responses that includes antithetical elements at each end of a range of intermediate possibilities, on which the rater is expected to indicate the position that most accurately represents the rater's response to the subject in question. Another form of rati…
Rational-emotive behavior therapy (REBT) belongs to a class of therapies termed "cognitive-behavioral" therapies. The defining features of these therapies are an emphasis on achieving measurable goals by manipulating internal and external reinforcers. That is, cognitive-behavioral therapists help clients identify the thoughts and beliefs that might be prolonging their distress or anx…
Several categories of reaction time, such as simple reaction time, have been established and studied in experimental psychology. In a simple reaction time experiment, the subject is presented with one simple stimulus, such as a light, and instructed to perform one simple response, such as pressing a button. In a discrimination reaction time experiment, the subject is presented with one of two or m…
Readiness tests are commonly used in educational situations, and often include the measurement of cognitive, perceptual, emotional, motivational, and other factors involved in the learning process, in an attempt to determine if a student is in a position to benefit from a particular course of instruction. Readiness tests are based on the view, shared by almost all psychologists, that an individual…
Reality therapy was developed by William Glasser, who wrote a book of the same name in the 1960s. This type of counseling suggests that all psychiatric subjects have the same basic underlying problem, namely an inability to fulfill their essential needs. Specific problems, like alcoholism or misbehavior in school, are the symptoms and not the problem. Troublesome symptoms occur when a person canno…
Very often in Western culture, listening is considered to be the passive part of a conversation while speaking is seen as active. Reflective listening practices requires focus, intent, and very active participation. The term stems from work done by psychologist Carl Rogers who developed client-centered therapy. Rogers believed that by listening intently to the client, a therapist could determine b…
In a simple reflex, a sensory receptor initiates a nerve impulse in an afferent sensory nerve fiber which conducts it to the spinal cord. In the gray matter of the spinal cord, the afferent nerve impulse is fired over the synaptic gap to an efferent motor fiber which passes along the impulse to the appropriate muscle, producing the reflex. There are other reflexes which involve neural pathways con…
Rehabilitation begins once a debilitating condition has been evaluated and treatment is either in progress or completed. Impairments are evaluated for their effects on the individual's psychological, social, and vocational functioning. Depending on the type of disability involved, "self-sufficiency" may mean a full-time job, employment in a sheltered workshop, or simply an ind…
Rehearsal is a term used by memory researchers to refer to mental techniques for helping us remember information. Its technical meaning is not very different from our everyday use of the term. Actors rehearse their lines so that they won't forget them. Similarly, if we want to retain information over time, there are strategies for enhancing future recall. There are two main types of rehears…
Although Wilhelm Reich is remembered primarily for his legal battle with the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over their outlawing of his "orgone energy accumulator," his earlier works were influential in the development of psychoanalysis. In The Function of the Orgasm, published in German in 1927 and in English in 1942, Reich placed the drive for sexual fulfillment a…
In classical (Pavlovian) conditioning, where the response has no effect on whether the stimulus will occur, reinforcement produces an immediate response without any training or conditioning. When meat is offered to a hungry dog, it does not learn to salivate, the behavior occurs spontaneously. Similarly, a negative reinforcer, such as an electric shock, produces an immediate, unconditioned escape …