Core terms
The vocabulary of the inner life.
The concepts everyone half-knows — the unconscious, attachment, meaning, the shadow — set down in plain language, each tied to the thinkers who gave it shape.
The Unconscious
The reservoir of feelings, urges and memories that sit outside of awareness yet shape what we do.
Id, Ego & Superego
A model of the psyche as appetite, negotiator and conscience, forever in conversation.
Defense Mechanisms
The mind’s quiet strategies — denial, projection, repression — for keeping anxiety at a distance.
Transference
Redirecting feelings about people from your past onto someone in the present.
Repression
The mind's quiet way of pushing painful or unacceptable thoughts and feelings out of awareness, where they keep working unseen.
Reinforcement
Any consequence that makes a behavior more likely to happen again.
Punishment
An unwelcome consequence that follows a behavior and makes it less likely to happen again.
Shaping
Guiding someone toward a new behavior step by step, rewarding each small move that brings them closer to the goal.
Schedules Of Reinforcement
The timing and pattern of rewards — steady or unpredictable — that quietly determines how strongly a habit takes hold.
Operant Conditioning
Behavior is shaped by its consequences — what gets rewarded gets repeated.
Core Beliefs & Schemas
Deep rules about self, others and the world, often written in childhood.
Assimilation
Making sense of something new by fitting it into the ideas and patterns we already carry in our minds.
Accommodation
Reshaping our existing ideas when the world surprises us and our old way of understanding no longer fits.
Constructivism
The view that we don't simply absorb knowledge but actively build our own understanding through experience.
Basic Anxiety
Horney’s sense of feeling small and alone in a world that feels potentially hostile.
Neurotic Needs
The cravings — for approval, for love, for power or perfection — that we lean on too hard when early life left us feeling unsafe, until they quietly run our lives.
The Tyranny of the Should
The relentless inner list of how we ought to be — flawless, tireless, endlessly kind — that punishes us for falling short of an impossible standard.
Real vs. Idealized Self
The tension between who you authentically are and the perfect self you feel you should be.
The Idealized Self
The polished, perfect version of ourselves we imagine we must become, which slowly crowds out the real and ordinary person we actually are.
Introspection
The careful, disciplined practice of looking inward to observe and report your own thoughts, sensations, and feelings as they happen.
Sensation
The raw, immediate experience that arrives through the senses—a color, a sound, a touch—before the mind has made sense of it.
Apperception
The moment when something we notice is gathered into the clear center of attention and woven together with what we already know.
Consciousness
The ongoing stream of awareness in which everything we perceive, feel, and think comes together as our experience of the present.
Archetypes
Universal patterns — the Mother, the Hero, the Trickster — that recur across human imagination.
The Shadow
The disowned parts of ourselves we’d rather not see — and must, to become whole.
Persona
The social face we present to the world—the mask of roles and manners that lets us meet others while shielding what lies beneath.
Individuation
The lifelong work of becoming the whole, distinct person you already are underneath.
Collective Unconscious
A shared, inherited layer of the psyche holding humanity’s common symbols.
Stream of Consciousness
James’ image of the mind as a flowing river of thought, never the same twice.
Habit
The grooves of repeated action that make character — “the great flywheel of society.”
The Self
The sense of being a continuous person—the one who remembers, acts, and knows themselves as the same 'I' across a lifetime.
Will
The inner capacity to choose and commit to an action, holding attention on what we mean to do until we actually do it.
Inferiority
The deep-seated feeling of falling short or being small that begins in childhood and quietly shapes how we strive through life.
Compensation
The effort to make up for a felt weakness by building strength somewhere else, turning a sense of lack into a source of growth.
Lifestyle
The unique, often unspoken pattern of goals and beliefs we form early on and carry as our personal way of moving through the world.
Social Interest
The natural sense of belonging and care for others that draws us out of ourselves and toward the wider human community.
Splitting
The mind's habit of seeing someone or something as all good or all bad, because holding both at once feels too hard to bear.
Object Relations
The inner cast of important people we carry within us, formed early in life, that quietly shapes how we expect closeness and connection to feel.
Projective Identification
A way of placing a feeling we can't hold into another person, so that they begin to feel it too and act it out on our behalf.
Depressive Position
The hard-won maturity of recognizing that the people we love are whole and imperfect, holding both their good and bad sides together with care.
Transitional Object
The beloved blanket, teddy, or tune a child clings to — neither fully "me" nor fully "the world," it lives in the in-between space where comfort, play, and imagination first take hold.
True Self & False Self
The spontaneous, feeling core we are born with — and the compliant mask that can grow over it when we must please others to stay safe. Winnicott saw health as living from the true self.
Good-Enough Mother
Care that is reliable without being perfect. By meeting a baby's needs closely at first and then gently failing in small, bearable ways, a caregiver helps the child learn to trust and to be separate.
Holding Environment
The reliable, safe surround — physical and emotional — that lets a person relax and simply be. First a caregiver's arms and attention; later, the steady frame a therapist offers a client.
Conditioning
The way experience teaches us to respond, as a once-neutral signal comes to trigger a reaction through repeated pairing.
Stimulus
Any signal from the world around us — a sound, a sight, a touch — that can prompt a reaction in the body or mind.
Response
The reaction a person or animal gives when something in the world acts upon them, from a reflex to a learned habit.
Environment
The surroundings and experiences that shape who we become, which Watson believed mattered far more than inborn nature.
Sublimation
The way the mind can channel a difficult or forbidden urge into something useful or creative, turning raw feeling into work, art, or care.
Identification
The quiet process of taking in qualities of someone we admire or depend on, so that parts of them become part of who we are.
Law Of Effect
The simple principle that actions followed by a pleasing result tend to be repeated, while those followed by discomfort tend to fade.
Trial And Error
Learning by attempting, stumbling, and adjusting — slowly keeping what works and letting go of what doesn't.
Transfer Of Learning
The way a skill learned in one setting carries over to another, but only when the two situations truly share something in common.
Extinction
The gradual fading of a learned response once the signal that taught it is no longer followed by what we came to expect.
Generalization
The tendency for a response learned to one signal to spread to others that resemble it, so similar cues stir a similar reaction.
Reflex
An automatic, built-in response of the body to a stimulus—like a flinch or a blink—that happens before any thought is involved.
Self-Actualization
Becoming everything you are capable of becoming — the top of Maslow’s pyramid.
Congruence
When your outer expression matches your inner experience. Being genuinely yourself.
Empathy
The act of truly sensing another person's inner world as if it were your own, while never losing sight of the fact that it isn't.
Unconditional Positive Regard
Accepting a person fully, without conditions — the soil in which change can grow.
Self-Concept
The picture we hold of who we are — the steady sense of self woven from how we see ourselves and how others have seen us.
Hierarchy of Needs
From safety to belonging to esteem to growth — a ladder of human motivation.
Peak Experiences
Rare moments of awe and wholeness that feel timeless and complete.
Growth Needs
The deeper longings — for meaning, beauty, and becoming fully ourselves — that stir once our basic needs are met.
Identity Crisis
The unsettled, searching period — often in youth — when a person works to discover who they really are and where they belong.
Trust vs. Mistrust
The earliest chapter of life, in which a baby learns from steady, caring attention whether the world is a place that can be relied upon.
Generativity
The midlife pull to give something back — to raise, mentor, build, or create things that will outlast you and serve the next generation.
Ego Integrity
The quiet sense, arriving in later life, that one's days have added up to a whole worth having lived — and can be met with acceptance rather than regret.
Attachment Styles
Secure, anxious, avoidant — the early templates for how we bond and seek closeness.
The Secure Base
A trusted figure from which we venture out and to which we safely return.
The Strange Situation
A gentle laboratory scene of brief partings and reunions, designed to reveal how a young child draws on a parent as a safe base in an unfamiliar room.
Caregiver Sensitivity
A parent's knack for noticing what a child is feeling and responding to it warmly and in time — the soil in which secure attachment tends to grow.
Cognitive Distortions
Habitual thinking traps — catastrophizing, all-or-nothing — that bend reality.
Automatic Thoughts
The instant, unbidden interpretations that flash up before you notice them.
The Cognitive Triad
The three dark lenses of depression — a bleak view of oneself, of the world, and of the future — that color everything they touch.
Testing the Evidence
The practice of treating an upsetting thought as a claim to be examined rather than a fact to be obeyed, and asking what the evidence actually shows.
The Zone of Proximal Development
The fertile space between what a learner can do alone and what they can do with a little help — where real growth happens.
Scaffolding
The supportive guidance a teacher or parent offers while a skill is still wobbly, gradually withdrawn as the learner grows steady on their own.
Cultural Tools
The inherited instruments of thought — language, numbers, maps, stories — that a culture hands its children to help them make sense of the world.
Internalization
The way a child takes the voices and methods first shared with others and gradually makes them part of their own private thinking.
Self-Efficacy
The quiet belief that you can do the thing in front of you — the confidence that shapes whether you even try.
Modeling
The deeply human way we learn by watching others, picking up habits, skills, and attitudes simply by seeing them lived out.
Reciprocal Determinism
The idea that who you are, how you act, and the world around you are constantly shaping one another, so none of them is simply the cause or the effect.
Agency
The sense that you are an active doer in your own life, able to make choices and influence what happens rather than only being carried along by events.
Internal Working Model
The inner blueprint, built from our earliest bonds, that tells us what to expect from others and whether we can count on being met with care.
Separation Anxiety
The distress we feel when apart from someone we depend on, a natural signal of how deeply attachment matters to us.
ABC Model
The insight that it isn't events themselves but the beliefs we hold about them that shape how we end up feeling and acting.
Irrational Beliefs
The rigid demands and absolutes we quietly tell ourselves—musts, shoulds, and catastrophes—that turn ordinary setbacks into lasting distress.
Disputation
The practice of gently challenging our harshest beliefs, asking whether they are really true and trading them for ones that serve us better.
Unconditional Self-Acceptance
The choice to value yourself as a whole person regardless of your flaws or failures, rather than rating your worth by your performance.
The Will to Meaning
Frankl’s claim that our primary drive is not pleasure or power, but meaning.
Will To Meaning
The deep human drive to find purpose in our lives, which can sustain us even through hardship and suffering.
Responsibility
The understanding that we are answerable for how we respond to life, free in every situation to choose our own stance toward it.
Existential Vacuum
The hollow, bored or restless feeling when life seems to lack purpose.
Freedom
The capacity to shape our own lives through the choices we make—a gift that, as Rollo May and Erich Fromm both knew, can feel as heavy as it is liberating.
Anxiety
The unease we feel when something we value—our security, our sense of self, our very existence—seems under threat, and which Rollo May saw not as mere illness but as a signal that we are alive and facing a choice.
Courage
The willingness to act and to commit even while doubt and fear are still present, which Rollo May considered the quiet foundation that makes every other virtue possible.
Existential Guilt
The honest ache we feel when we sense we have left some part of our own potential unlived, which Rollo May understood not as a flaw to erase but as a call to live more fully.
Alienation
The sense of being cut off—from other people, from our own work, and even from ourselves—that Erich Fromm saw as a hidden cost of modern life.
Relatedness
Our deep need to feel connected to others and to belong, which Erich Fromm regarded as one of the most basic hungers of being human.
Productive Love
Love understood by Erich Fromm not as a feeling that simply happens to us but as an active practice of care, respect, knowledge, and responsibility for another person.
Field Theory
Kurt Lewin's idea that to understand someone's behavior we must look at the whole field of forces acting on them in the present moment, not just their past or their personality alone.
Life Space
Kurt Lewin's name for the total world as a person experiences it—everything, real or imagined, that influences how they think, feel, and act right now.
Force Field
Kurt Lewin's picture of any situation as a balance between the forces pushing us toward change and those holding us back, so that lasting change often means easing the resistance rather than simply pushing harder.
Group Dynamics
The study, pioneered by Kurt Lewin, of how people influence one another within a group and how the group itself takes on a life and momentum of its own.
Cognitive Dissonance
The uncomfortable tension Leon Festinger described that arises when our beliefs and our actions don't line up, nudging us to change one or the other to feel whole again.
Social Comparison
Leon Festinger's observation that, lacking an objective measure, we come to understand our own abilities and opinions by comparing ourselves with the people around us.
Justification
The way we quietly explain our choices to ourselves so they feel right—a process Leon Festinger showed can lead us to value most what cost us the most to obtain.
Belief Change
How a person comes to revise what they hold to be true, which Leon Festinger studied closely—finding that strongly held beliefs can grow even firmer when the evidence turns against them.
Conformity
The pull to align our judgments and behavior with those of the group, which Solomon Asch famously revealed can lead people to doubt even what they plainly see with their own eyes.
Group Pressure
The quiet pull we feel to go along with the people around us, even when our own eyes or judgment say otherwise.
Majority Influence
The way a larger group can sway what an individual says, thinks, or does simply by agreeing among themselves.
Impression Formation
How we piece together a whole sense of another person from just a handful of traits, with some qualities coloring all the rest.
Obedience
Our tendency to follow the commands of someone we see as in charge, sometimes even when those commands trouble our conscience.
Authority
The figures and institutions we treat as having the right to direct us, and the deference we readily grant them.
Agentic State
The mental shift in which a person stops feeling responsible for their actions and sees themselves merely as carrying out another's wishes.
Situational Pressure
The force of circumstances themselves, which can push ordinary people toward behavior they would never have chosen on their own.
Role
The part we are handed in a given setting, which can quietly reshape how we act once we step into it.
Deindividuation
The loosening of our usual sense of self within a crowd or uniform, which can free people to act in ways they otherwise would not.
Situation
The setting and conditions around us, whose power over behavior we tend to underestimate in favor of blaming character.
Bystander Effect
The surprising way people grow less likely to step in and help as the number of onlookers grows.
Traits
The stable, recurring patterns in how a person thinks, feels, and behaves that lend each of us a recognizable character.
Cardinal Traits
The rare, dominant qualities so central to a person that nearly everything they do seems to flow from them.
Proprium
The warm, felt core of selfhood — all the parts of experience a person recognizes as truly their own.
Contact Hypothesis
The idea that bringing different groups together under the right conditions can soften prejudice and build understanding between them.
Factor Analysis
A statistical method for finding the few hidden traits that explain why many different test scores tend to rise and fall together.
Source Traits
The deep, underlying factors of personality that give rise to the many surface qualities we observe in everyday behavior.
Fluid Intelligence
The ability to reason, see patterns, and solve unfamiliar problems on the spot, without relying on what you already know.
Crystallized Intelligence
The store of knowledge, skills, and vocabulary you gather over a lifetime and draw on to make sense of the world.
Temperament
The inborn emotional style that colors how a person reacts to the world, present from early in life and fairly steady over the years.
Extraversion
A personality dimension describing how much a person seeks out company, stimulation, and the lively energy of the outside world.
Neuroticism
A personality dimension describing how readily a person feels anxiety, worry, and other unsettling emotions.
Psychoticism
A personality dimension describing a tougher, more aloof and unconventional streak that can shade into impulsiveness or disregard for others.
Mental Age
A way of describing a child's thinking ability by the age group whose typical performance it matches, rather than by their birthday.
Intelligence Test
A set of standardized tasks designed to gauge a person's reasoning and problem-solving ability and compare it with others'.
Individual Differences
The study of how and why people reliably differ from one another in abilities, traits, and ways of thinking.
Psychological Assessment
The careful process of measuring a person's abilities, traits, or difficulties using tests, observation, and interviews.
Working Memory
The mind's small mental workspace where you hold and juggle a handful of things just long enough to use them.
Intelligence Quotient (IQ)
A single score that places a person's measured intelligence in relation to others of the same age.
Processing Speed
How quickly a person can take in simple information and respond to it, a quiet measure of mental efficiency.
Verbal Comprehension
The ability to understand words and ideas expressed in language and to reason with them.
Correlation
A measure of how closely two things move together, telling you whether they tend to rise and fall in step.
General Intelligence (g)
Charles Spearman's idea that a single underlying mental ability runs through all our different skills, so people who do well at one kind of task tend to do well at others.
Specific Ability
The particular talent a single task draws on by itself, such as a knack for words or numbers, that sits alongside our broader general intelligence.
The Forgetting Curve
Hermann Ebbinghaus's discovery that memory fades fastest in the first hours after learning and then slows, charting how quickly we let things slip away.
The Spacing Effect
The finding that we remember far more when we spread our study out over time than when we cram it all into one sitting.
Savings
The hidden trace of something once learned, measured by how much faster we relearn it the second time even after we think we have forgotten it.
Repetition
The simple act of going over material again and again, which Ebbinghaus showed gradually carves a memory deeper and makes it last.
Gestalt
The principle that the mind grasps a whole pattern at once rather than building it from separate parts, so the whole is more than the sum of its pieces.
Insight
The sudden moment when a problem rearranges itself in the mind and the answer simply appears, often after a stretch of being stuck.
The Phi Phenomenon
The illusion of movement we see when still images flash in quick succession, the trick of the eye that makes film and animation feel alive.
Perceptual Organization
The way the mind quietly groups what we see into shapes, figures, and patterns before we even notice it is doing so.
Perception
The mind's act of making sense of what reaches the senses, turning raw light and sound into a meaningful picture of the world.
Restructuring
The mental shift of seeing a problem in a new way, where the pieces stay the same but suddenly fit together differently.
Reconstructive Memory
Frederic Bartlett's insight that remembering is less like replaying a recording and more like rebuilding a story, shaped each time by what we expect and believe.
Gist
The overall meaning of an experience that we tend to keep, even as the exact details quietly fade or rearrange themselves over time.
Chunking
The mind's way of grouping small pieces of information into larger, meaningful units, so a long string of digits becomes a handful of familiar clusters we can actually hold.
The Magical Number Seven
George Miller's famous observation that our short-term memory can juggle only about seven items at once, give or take two, before things start slipping away.
Planning
The mind's ability to imagine a goal and lay out the steps to reach it, holding a future in view and shaping action toward it.
Cognition
The whole quiet machinery of the mind at work — perceiving, remembering, reasoning, and making sense of the world around us.
Ecological Validity
The idea that to truly understand the mind we should study it in the messy settings of everyday life, not only in the tidy isolation of the laboratory.
Universal Grammar
Noam Chomsky's proposal that every human is born with a deep, shared blueprint for language, which is why children everywhere learn to speak with such ease.
Linguistic Competence
The silent, underlying knowledge of a language a speaker carries within — the rules they grasp intuitively, even when they could never spell them out.
Linguistic Performance
Language as it actually comes out in the moment — the real sentences we speak, complete with the pauses, slips, and stumbles of everyday talk.
Language Acquisition Device
Chomsky's idea of an inborn mental faculty that lets a child take in the speech around them and, almost effortlessly, work out the grammar beneath it.
Anchoring
The way a first number or piece of information we encounter tugs at our judgment, pulling later estimates toward it even when it has no real bearing.
Availability Heuristic
Our habit of judging how likely something is by how easily examples spring to mind, so vivid or recent events can feel far more common than they are.
System 1
The fast, automatic, intuitive part of thinking that jumps to conclusions in an instant, often before we've noticed we were thinking at all.
System 2
The slow, effortful, deliberate side of the mind — the careful reasoning we summon when a problem demands real attention and patience.
Loss Aversion
Our deep tendency to feel the sting of a loss far more sharply than the pleasure of an equal gain, which quietly shapes the choices we make.
Representativeness Heuristic
The mental shortcut of judging something by how closely it resembles a familiar type, which can lead us to ignore plainer facts about how likely it really is.
Framing Effect
How the very same choice can feel different depending on the words it's wrapped in, so a decision can shift simply because of how the options are described.
Base Rate
The background frequency of something in the world — how common it actually is — which we tend to ignore when a vivid detail or stereotype pulls our attention away.
Suggestibility
Our tendency to absorb hints, leading questions, and others' accounts into our own memories, gradually mistaking what was suggested for what we lived.
False Memory
A recollection that feels real and certain yet describes something that never happened, showing how memory rebuilds the past rather than simply replaying it.
Misinformation Effect
The way misleading details encountered after an event can quietly rewrite a person's memory of what they originally saw.
Eyewitness Memory
What a witness recalls of an event — confident and compelling, yet far more fragile and open to distortion than courts and juries once assumed.
Flow
Complete absorption in a challenge that perfectly meets your skill — time disappears.
Challenge-Skill Balance
The sweet spot where a task stretches your abilities just enough — hard enough to hold your attention, but not so hard it overwhelms — where absorption tends to bloom.
Autotelic Experience
An activity worth doing for its own sake, where the doing itself is the reward rather than any prize waiting at the end.
Optimal Experience
Those rare, fully engaged moments when attention, action, and enjoyment align — the state Csikszentmihalyi called flow.
Learned Helplessness
The resigned belief, formed after repeated uncontrollable setbacks, that nothing you do will matter — so you stop trying even when escape becomes possible.
Explanatory Style
The habitual story we tell ourselves about why good and bad things happen, which shapes whether setbacks feel temporary and local or permanent and all-encompassing.
PERMA
Seligman's five building blocks of a flourishing life — positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.
Resilience
The capacity to bend under hardship without breaking, recovering and even growing through adversity rather than being defined by it.
Ethics of Care
A way of thinking about right and wrong that begins with relationships and responsibility to others, rather than with abstract rules and rights.
Voice
A person's authentic way of speaking their own experience and moral concerns — and the harm done when that voice is silenced or unheard.
Moral Reasoning
How people think through questions of right and wrong, weighing what they owe to themselves and to one another when values collide.
Justice and Care
Two voices in moral life — one reasoning through fairness and rules, the other through relationships and compassion — which Gilligan argued belong together.
Two-Factor Theory of Emotion
Emotion results from physiological arousal plus a cognitive interpretation of the situation.
Misattribution of Arousal
Mistaking the source of bodily arousal and assigning it to the wrong cause.
Affiliation Under Anxiety
The tendency to seek others, especially similar others, when anxious or uncertain.
Drive
An internal motivational state that pushes behavior toward reduction or satisfaction.
Approach-Avoidance Conflict
A situation where the same goal carries both attractive and threatening qualities.
Biofeedback
Using feedback about bodily processes to learn partial voluntary control over them.
Need for Achievement
A motive to meet standards of excellence and accomplish challenging goals.
Need for Power
A motive to influence, impact or have authority over others or events.
Need for Affiliation
A motive for warm, close and approving relationships with others.
Hebbian Learning
Learning as the strengthening of connections between neurons that are active together.
Cell Assembly
A network of neurons linked through repeated co-activation that can represent a perception, thought or action.
Sensory Deprivation
Reduced sensory input that affects cognition, emotion and arousal.
Drive Reduction
Behavior is motivated by internal drives and reinforced when those drives are reduced.
Habit Strength
The learned strength of a stimulus-response connection built through reinforcement.
Reaction Potential
The likelihood or strength of a response, based on factors such as drive and habit strength.
Behavioral Inhibition
A tendency to withdraw, pause or show caution in unfamiliar situations.
High Reactivity
A strong biological and emotional response to new or intense stimuli.
Delay of Gratification
The ability to postpone an immediate reward for a larger or more valued future one.
If-Then Signature
A stable pattern in which a person behaves one way in one situation and differently in another.
Hot and Cool Systems
A hot emotional system drives impulse; a cool cognitive system supports reflection and control.
Contact Comfort
Comfort and security gained from warm physical closeness to an attachment figure.
Maternal Deprivation
The loss or absence of adequate early caregiving and affection.
Social Isolation
A lack of normal social contact during development.
Divergent Thinking
Generating many possible answers or ideas from a single prompt.
Convergent Thinking
Narrowing possibilities toward the single best or correct answer.
Structure of Intellect
A model classifying intellectual abilities by operations, contents and products.
Discovery Learning
Learning by actively exploring and discovering principles rather than receiving facts passively.
Spiral Curriculum
Returning to core ideas repeatedly at increasing levels of complexity.
Modes of Representation
Knowledge can be represented through action, images or symbols.
Neodissociation
A theory that hypnosis can divide consciousness into partly separate control or monitoring systems.
Preconventional Morality
Moral reasoning based mainly on punishment, reward and personal consequences.
Conventional Morality
Moral reasoning based on rules, approval, duty and social order.
Postconventional Morality
Moral reasoning based on principles, rights and universal ethical commitments.
Quasi-Experiment
A study estimating causal effects without full random assignment.
Internal Validity
The degree to which a study supports a causal conclusion within its design.
External Validity
The degree to which findings generalize beyond the specific study context.
Mean Length of Utterance
A measure of early language development based on average utterance length, often in morphemes.
Telegraphic Speech
Early child speech that uses key content words while omitting many grammatical markers.
Tip-of-the-Tongue State
A retrieval experience where a person feels they know a word but cannot fully access it.
Mere Exposure Effect
Repeated exposure to a stimulus can increase liking for it.
Affective Primacy
Affect or preference can occur before conscious cognitive evaluation.
Social Facilitation
The presence of others affects performance, often improving simple tasks and impairing difficult ones.
Episodic Memory
Memory for personally experienced events situated in time and place.
Semantic Memory
General knowledge of facts, concepts and meanings independent of a specific episode.
Encoding Specificity
Memory retrieval is best when cues at recall match the information present during encoding.
Bounded Rationality
Human rationality is limited by information, time, attention and cognitive capacity.
Satisficing
Choosing an option that is good enough rather than optimal.
Problem Space
The set of possible states, actions and paths involved in solving a problem.
Correspondent Inference
Inferring a person's stable disposition from their observed behavior.
Fundamental Attribution Error
Overemphasizing personal traits and underemphasizing situations when explaining others' behavior.
Ingratiation
Self-presentation behavior aimed at gaining approval or liking.
Semantic Differential
A rating method using bipolar adjective scales to measure the connotative meaning of concepts.
Connotative Meaning
The emotional and evaluative associations a concept carries beyond its literal definition.
Evaluation-Potency-Activity
Three broad dimensions used to organize meanings: good-bad, strong-weak and active-passive.
Associative Network
Memory as a network of linked concepts, emotions and experiences.
Mood-Congruent Memory
The tendency to recall memories that match one's current mood.
Mental Imagery
Using internal images to represent and rehearse information or experience.
Covariation Model
A model of attribution using consensus, distinctiveness and consistency to infer causes.
Consensus
Whether other people behave similarly in the same situation.
Interdependence
A relationship structure where each person's outcomes are affected by the other's actions.
Split-Brain
A condition and research paradigm involving disconnection of the cerebral hemispheres, usually by cutting the corpus callosum.
Cerebral Lateralization
The specialization of functions in the left and right hemispheres of the brain.
Emergent Mind
The idea that mental properties emerge from organized brain processes and can influence behavior.
Cognitive Map
An internal representation of spatial or relational structure used to guide behavior.
Latent Learning
Learning that occurs without immediate reward and becomes visible when motivation appears.
Purposive Behaviorism
A behaviorist approach that treats behavior as goal-directed and guided by expectations.
Cronbach's Alpha
A statistic estimating the internal consistency of a scale or test.
Validity
The degree to which evidence supports the interpretation and use of test scores.
Aptitude-Treatment Interaction
Different people may benefit from different methods depending on their aptitudes.
Mindfulness
Paying attention to the present moment, on purpose and without judgment.
Radical acceptance
Fully accepting reality as it is, to stop suffering over what cannot be changed.
Emotion regulation
Skills for understanding, naming and shifting the intensity of strong feelings.
Psychological flexibility
Staying open and present while acting on your values, even with hard feelings.
Values
The directions you most want your life to move toward.
Acceptance
Making room for difficult thoughts and feelings instead of struggling against them.
Decentering
Standing back to watch thoughts as passing events, not facts about you.
Rumination
Getting stuck in repetitive, brooding loops of negative thought.
Body scan
Slowly moving attention through the body, part by part.
Trauma
A distressing event whose memory stays raw and intrudes on the present.
Reprocessing
Helping a stuck memory move into normal, less charged storage.
Role transition
A life change — new job, parenthood, loss — that strains how you function.
Awareness
Full contact with what you are sensing, feeling and doing right now.
Unfinished business
Feelings and situations left incomplete that keep pulling at the present.
Emotion
An adaptive signal carrying information about needs and meaning.
Bonding
The cycle of reaching for a partner and being responded to with safety.
Schema mode
The emotional state or "part" that takes over in a given moment.
Core emotional needs
Childhood needs for safety, connection and autonomy that, unmet, form schemas.
Mentalizing
Reading behavior in terms of underlying thoughts, feelings and intentions.
Compassion
Sensitivity to suffering paired with a commitment to relieve it.
Shame
The painful sense of being flawed or unworthy in others’ eyes.
Ambivalence
Wanting and not wanting change at the same time.
Change talk
The person’s own statements in favor of change.
Exceptions
The times the problem is absent or smaller — clues to a solution.
Solution-building
Constructing a path to a wanted future, step by small step.
Externalizing
Treating the problem as separate from the person, not part of who they are.
Dominant story
The thin, problem-saturated account that crowds out other truths.
Differentiation of self
Staying yourself, with your own thinking, inside intense family emotion.
Family emotional system
The web of reactivity that links a family across generations.
Boundaries
The invisible lines that define who is part of which family subsystem.
Reframing
Giving a behavior a new meaning so it can change.
Directive
A specific task the therapist assigns to shift a stuck pattern.
Parts
The inner sub-personalities that each carry their own feelings and roles.
Self-leadership
Leading from a calm, compassionate core Self.
Spontaneity
A fresh, adequate response to a new situation — the engine of change.
Role reversal
Stepping into another person’s position to see from their side.
Ego states
Parent, Adult and Child — the inner voices we speak from.
Games
Repetitive, hidden-agenda exchanges that end in familiar bad feelings.
Choice
The idea that we choose our behavior to meet basic needs.
Basic needs
Survival, love, power, freedom and fun — the drivers of behavior.
Creative expression
Letting inner experience take outward, made form.
Symbolic speech
Images that say what words cannot yet reach.
Ultimate concerns
The four givens every life must face: death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness.
Existential isolation
The unbridgeable gap between oneself and any other — and the longing for connection it leaves.
Utilization
Accepting and using whatever the patient brings — behavior, belief, even resistance — as a resource for change.
Indirect suggestion
Artfully vague language that lets a person’s own unconscious fill in the gaps, rather than direct commands.
Therapeutic trance
A focused inner state in which a person can reorganize experience and find new solutions.
Felt Sense
A vague, bodily-felt sense of a whole situation — more than emotion, not yet words — that can shift when you give it gentle attention.
Focusing
A step-by-step way of turning inward to make contact with the felt sense and let it unfold into insight and relief.
Experiencing
The flow of inner, felt experience as it happens — how deeply a person can sense and stay with what is going on inside.
Carrying Forward
The felt shift in which a stuck situation moves a step further on its own once it is sensed freshly — a small but real release.
Common Factors
The ingredients shared by all effective therapies — a strong relationship, hope, a believable rationale — that may matter more than the specific method.
Psychotherapy Integration
Drawing on more than one school of therapy, guided by what helps a given person change rather than loyalty to a single approach.
Coping Skills
Learnable, practical strategies — for thoughts, feelings and situations — that a person can use to handle stress and problems more effectively.
Consistency
The mind's drive for its many processes and goals to fit together; mental distress grows when they clash and pull in opposite directions.
Need Satisfaction
Meeting basic psychological needs — for attachment, control, pleasure and self-esteem; mental health depends on how well these are fulfilled.
Incongruence
The gap between what a person needs or intends and what they actually experience; in Grawe's model this gap is what generates symptoms.
SASB
Structural Analysis of Social Behavior — a precise map that places any interpersonal or self-directed act along axes of love–hate and freedom–control.
Interpersonal Copying
The way we re-enact early relationships — treating ourselves and others as our caregivers once treated us, or in reaction against it.
Gift of Love
Benjamin's idea that even self-defeating symptoms make sense as a hidden loyalty to a loved attachment figure from the past.
Working Alliance
The collaborative partnership between client and therapist — the quality of their teamwork, which predicts how well therapy goes.
Bonds, Goals, and Tasks
Bordin's three parts of the alliance: the emotional bond, agreement on what to work toward, and agreement on how to get there.
Rupture and Repair
The moments when the alliance frays — tension, withdrawal, disagreement — and the work of mending them, which can deepen trust.
From concept to question
A term is just an idea until you apply it to your own life.
Psipas turns each of these into a question you can actually answer.