The type of counterconditioning most widely used for therapeutic purposes is systematic desensitization, which is employed to reduce or eliminate fear of a particular object, situation, or activity. An early example of systematic desensitization was an experiment that is also the first recorded use of behavior therapy with a child. In a paper published in 1924, Mary Cover Jones, a student of the p…
Covert sensitization was first described in the mid-1960s by psychologist Joseph Cautela as a new treatment for people who engage in undesirable behaviors. In the past 30 years it has been researched as a treatment for alcoholism, smoking, obesity, and various sexual deviations including pedophilia and exhibitionism. Covert sensitization discourages people from engaging in unwanted behaviors by cr…
Any human endeavor can involve creativity and is not limited to just the arts. Numerous theories of creativity were proposed by 20th-century psychologists, educators and other social scientists. Howard Gruber, who worked to understand creativity by studying the lives of famous innovators, found broad common characteristics:1) they engaged in a variety of activities within their chosen fields; 2) t…
Creativity tests, mostly devised during the past 30 years, are aimed at assessing the qualities and abilities that constitute creativity. These tests evaluate mental abilities in ways that are different from—and even diametrically opposed to—conventional intelligence tests. Because the kinds of abilities measured by creativity tests differ from those measured by intelligence quotient…
The term crisis intervention can refer to several different therapeutic approaches, which are applied in a variety of situations. The common denominator among these interventions, however, is their brief duration and their focus on improving acute psychological disturbances rather than curing long-standing mental disorders. Some common examples of crisis intervention include suicide prevention tel…
Although this term is used in a variety of contexts, the term is most closely associated with ethology, the study of animal behavior in its natural environment from the perspective of evolutionary adaptation. The critical period plays an important role in the concept of imprinting, first used by Konrad Lorenz in connection with the earliest process of social attachment in young animals. (However, …
Studies in this discipline attempt to expand the compass of psychological research beyond the few highly industrialized nations on which it has traditionally focused. While definitions of what constitutes a culture vary widely, most experts concur that "culture" involves patterns of behavior, symbols, and values. The prominent anthropologist Clifford Geertz has described culture as &…
A cross-sectional study is a research method where data are collected at the same time from people in different age categories. It contrasts with the method, known as longitudinal study, where the same group of subjects is studied over time. One weakness, or confounding variable, of the cross-sectional study is that its subjects, in addition to being different ages, are also born in different year…
A cult is a structured group, most of whose members demonstrate unquestioned loyalty to a dynamic leader. The cult leader governs most, if not all, aspects of the lives of his or her followers, often insisting that they break all ties with the world outside of the cult. Such groups are usually thought of in terms of religion, although other types of cults can and do exist. The proliferation of rel…
Culture-fair tests, also called culture-free tests, are designed to assess intelligence (or other attributes) without relying on knowledge specific to any individual cultural group. The first culture-fair test, called Army Examination Beta, was developed by the United States military during World War II to screen soldiers of average intelligence who were illiterate or for whom English was a second…
Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England. His father was a successful provincial physician, and his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), had been a distinguished intellectual figure. Young Darwin attended the Shrewsbury School, and his early failure to achieve academic distinction continued at Edinburgh University, where he studied medicine, and at Cambridge University, where he s…
Daydreams are a form of imagination. In daydreams, the person forms a mental image of a past experience or of a situation that he or she has never actually experienced. Some psychologists use the acronym TUIT (Task-Unrelated Images and Thoughts) to describe episodes of daydreaming. A daydream may be triggered by a situation, a memory, or a sensory input (sight, taste, smell, sound, touch). The day…
Deductive reasoning is a way of reasoning that relates two or more general concepts or conditions to a specific case. For example, a child learns that birds fly south in October, and that a robin is a bird, he will use deductive reasoning to conclude that a robin will fly south in October. Deductive reasoning is often confused with inductive reasoning, which uses a specific observation to reach a …
The concept of the defense mechanism originated with Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and was later elaborated by other psychodynamically oriented theorists, notably his daughter Anna Freud (1895-1982). Defense mechanisms allow negative feelings to be lessened without an alteration of the situation that is producing them, often by distorting the reality of that situation in some way. While they can help …
A delayed response experiment might include placing a stimulus object inside one of several similar opaque containers while the subject is watching but is restrained, and then allowing the subject to search for the object after a certain period of delay. Delayed response experiments have been conducted in the psychological study of both animals and (usually very young) humans. Some psychologists b…
Almost everyone, everyday, practices delay of gratification—whether deciding to skip dessert in order to lose weight or give up smoking in order to live longer. The ability to delay gratification is often a sign of emotional and social maturity. Young children, for example, find it more difficult to delay gratification than older children. When kindergartners in one study were offered a cho…
Delirious behavior ranges from mildly inappropriate to maniacal, and is a symptom of a number of disorders. Delirium has been classified into several varieties, based primarily on causal factors. As an example, alcohol-withdrawal delirium, which is also called delirium tremens or D.T.s (because of the characteristic tremor), is an acute delirium related to physical deterioration and the abrupt low…
Delusions are generally experienced by people suffering from a severe psychotic disorder, usually schizophrenia, although delusional thinking can occur in other types of patients (as the result of drug or alcohol abuse, for instance). Typical delusional ideas are categorized into delusions of grandeur, in which a person imagines for him or herself some God-given purpose or, in some cases, believe …
Dementia generally occurs in the elderly, although it can appear at any age. Several substantial studies have been done to determine its prevalence, and in 1991 a major study was conducted which found that dementia occurred in just over 1 percent of the population aged 65 to 74; in approximately 4 percent in ages 75 to 84; and more than doubling to 10.14 percent in persons 85 and over. Other studi…
Dendrites are one of two types of short, threadlike fibers that extend from the cell body of a nerve cell, or neuron. The other type are called axons. Dendrites receive electrochemical signals, which are known as postsynaptic potentials, from the axons of other neurons, and the information contained in these signals is fired across a synaptic gap or cleft about 0.02 microns or about 8 millionths o…
As the transmitter of inherited characteristics, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) replicates itself exactly and determines the structure of new organisms, which it does by governing the structure of their proteins. The Swiss researcher Friedrich Miescher first discovered DNA in 1869 when he extracted a substance (which he called nuclein) containing nitrogen and phosphorus from cell nuclei. The question…
Persons affected by dependent personality disorder have a disproportionately low level of confidence in their own intelligence and abilities and have difficulty making decisions and undertaking projects on their own. Their pervasive reliance on others, even for minor tasks or decisions, makes them exaggeratedly cooperative out of fear of alienating those whose help they need. They are reluctant to…
When conducting research, a psychologist typically takes two or more similar groups of people or animals and exposes them to different treatments or situations. Then the researcher monitors a behavior of interest to see whether that behavior differs from one group to the next. This measurement is the dependent variable. A single experiment may involve more than one dependent variable. When specify…
Depression may signify a mood, a symptom, or a syndrome. As a mood, it refers to temporary feelings of sadness, despair, and discouragement. As a symptom, it refers to these feelings when they persist and are associated with such problems as decreased pleasure, hopelessness, guilt, and disrupted sleeping and eating patterns. The entire syndrome is also referred to collectively as a depression or d…
We can determine the relative distance of objects in two different ways. One uses cues involving only one eye; the second requires two eyes. When something is far from us, we rely on monocular cues, those that require the use of only one eye. For closer objects, we use both monocular cues and binocular cues, those that necessitate both eyes. The ability to perceive depth seems to exist early in li…
Descartes was born in France, near the small village of Le Haye. From the age of 10, he attended the most prestigious school in France, the Royal Collège of La Flèche, graduating at the age of 16. After spending some time sampling the amusements of Parisian society, followed by a period of solitary studies in philosophy and mathematics, Descartes briefly served as a soldier on the ev…
Developed by Joseph Wolpe in the 1950s, desensitization is a treatment method which weakens the learned association between anxiety and feared objects or situations by strengthening another response—in this case, relaxation—that is incompatible with anxiety. Relaxation responses are strengthened through progressive relaxation training, first developed by Edmund Jacobson in the 1930s.…
Since ancient times, the origins of human behavior have been attributed to hidden or mystical forces. The Greek philosopher Democritus speculated, for example, that objects in our world consist of atoms; included among these "objects" was the soul, which was made of finer, smoother, and more spherical atoms than other physical objects. He rejected the concept of free will and claimed…
Developmental delay refers to any significant retardation in a child's physical, cognitive, behavioral, emotional, or social development. The two most frequent reasons for classing a child as having developmental delay involve those psychological systems for which there are good norms. This is especially true for motor development and language development. Because it is known that all child…
Also referred to as reading disability, reading difficulty, and dyslexia, developmental reading disorder is the most commonly diagnosed learning disability in the United States. Estimates of its prevalence vary widely, ranging from 4% of children—the figure given by the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual—to 20%, the figure given by a 1995 stud…