Dictionary

A psychological construct is a framework used to describe psychological phenomena, such as behavior, emotion, or experience. These things don’t have a physical presence, so …

Transference happens when people transfer their feelings onto their therapist or another authority figure.

Habituation involves responding less to a stimulus after you get used to it.

An action potential takes place when the voltage of a cell changes, allowing an electrical signal to travel down the axon toward the end of the cell.

The constancy principle suggests that psychic energy strives to stay in a steady, balanced state.

Explore our growing collection of psychology definitions and terms. A – B Abnormal Psychology Absolute Threshold Accommodation Action Potential Actualizing Tendency Acquisition Affirmations Assimilation Autocratic …

In Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, accommodation refers to the process by which people alter their existing schemas or create new schemas as a result …

Random selection refers to a process that researchers use to pick participants for a study. When using this method, every single member of a population …

Definition: Expectancy effects refer to changes in behavior that occur simply because the participant in an experiment believes that their behavior should change. In other …

The absolute threshold is the smallest amount of a stimulus that a person can detect 50% of the time. It can involve any of the …

A factorial design is a type of experiment that involves manipulating two or more variables. While simple psychology experiments look at how one independent variable …

In Carl Rogers’s theory of personality, the organismic valuing process refers to evaluating subjective experiences to determine their possible impact on self-improvement. The concept is …

Weber’s law, also sometimes referred to as Web-Fechner law, is a principle that quantifies how people perceive a change in a stimulus. According to Weber’s …