Semantics is the study of meaning, reference, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines including philosophy, linguistics, and computer science.
Attention is the behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, whether considered subjective or objective, while ignoring other perceivable information. William James (1890) wrote that "Attention is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence." Attention has also been described as the allocation of limited cognitive processing resources. Attention is manifested by an attentional bottleneck, in term of the amount of data the brain can process each second; for example, in human vision, only less than 1% of the visual input data can enter the bottleneck, leading to inattentional blindness.
Categorization is the human ability and activity of recognizing shared features or similarities between the elements of the experience of the world, organizing and classifying experience by associating them to a more abstract group, on the basis of their traits, features, similarities or other criteria. Categorization is considered one of the most fundamental cognitive abilities, and as such it is studied particularly by psychology and cognitive linguistics.
A worldview or world-view is the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing the whole of the individual's or society's knowledge and point of view. A worldview can include natural philosophy; fundamental, existential, and normative postulates; or themes, values, emotions, and ethics.
Wishful thinking is the formation of beliefs based on what might be pleasing to imagine, rather than on evidence, rationality, or reality. It is a product of resolving conflicts between belief and desire.
Psychophysics quantitatively investigates the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they produce. Psychophysics has been described as "the scientific study of the relation between stimulus and sensation" or, more completely, as "the analysis of perceptual processes by studying the effect on a subject's experience or behaviour of systematically varying the properties of a stimulus along one or more physical dimensions".
In psychology, a projective test is a personality test designed to let a person respond to ambiguous stimuli, presumably revealing hidden emotions and internal conflicts projected by the person into the test. This is sometimes contrasted with a so-called "objective test" / "self-report test", which adopt a "structured" approach as responses are analyzed according to a presumed universal standard, and are limited to the content of the test. The responses to projective tests are content analyzed for meaning rather than being based on presuppositions about meaning, as is the case with objective tests. Projective tests have their origins in psychoanalysis, which argues that humans have conscious and unconscious attitudes and motivations that are beyond or hidden from conscious awareness.
The implicit-association test (IAT) is a controversial assessment in the field of social psychology intended to detect the strength of a person's subconscious association between mental representations of objects (concepts) in memory. It is commonly applied to assess implicit stereotypes held by test subjects, such as unconsciously associating stereotypically black names with words consistent with black stereotypes. The test's format is highly versatile, and has been used to investigate biases in racial groups, gender, sexuality, age, and religion, as well as assessing self-esteem.
Salience is the state or condition of being prominent. The Oxford English Dictionary defines salience as "most noticeable or important." The concept is discussed in communication, semiotics, linguistics, sociology, psychology, and political science. It has been studied with respect to interpersonal communication, persuasion, politics, and its influence on mass media.
Affect, in psychology, refers to the underlying experience of feeling, emotion or mood.
This glossary of education-related terms is based on how they commonly are used in Wikipedia articles. This page contains terms starting with A – C. Select a letter from the table of contents to find terms on other pages.
The salience of an item is the state or quality by which it stands out from its neighbors. Saliency detection is considered to be a key attentional mechanism that facilitates learning and survival by enabling organisms to focus their limited perceptual and cognitive resources on the most pertinent subset of the available sensory data.
Consensus-based assessment expands on the common practice of consensus decision-making and the theoretical observation that expertise can be closely approximated by large numbers of novices or journeymen. It creates a method for determining measurement standards for very ambiguous domains of knowledge, such as emotional intelligence, politics, religion, values and culture in general. From this perspective, the shared knowledge that forms cultural consensus can be assessed in much the same way as expertise or general intelligence.
Humans are motivated to assign causes to their actions and behaviors. Social psychology states that attribution is the process by which individuals explain the causes of behavior and events as being either external or internal. Models to explain this process are called attribution theory. Psychological research into attribution began with the work of Fritz Heider in the early 20th century, and the theory was further advanced by Harold Kelley and Bernard Weiner.
The methods of neuro-linguistic programming are the specific techniques used to perform and teach neuro-linguistic programming, a pseudoscience which teaches that people are only able to directly perceive a small part of the world using their conscious awareness, and that this view of the world is filtered by experience, beliefs, values, assumptions, and biological sensory systems. NLP argues that people act and feel based on their perception of the world and how they feel about that world they subjectively experience.
Priming is a phenomenon whereby exposure to one stimulus influences a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention. For example, the word NURSE is recognized more quickly following the word DOCTOR than following the word BREAD. Priming can be perceptual, associative, repetitive, positive, negative, affective, semantic, or conceptual. Research, however, has yet to firmly establish the duration of priming effects, yet their onset can be almost instantaneous.
Cultural consensus theory is an approach to information pooling which supports a framework for the measurement and evaluation of beliefs as cultural; shared to some extent by a group of individuals. Cultural consensus models guide the aggregation of responses from individuals to estimate (1) the culturally appropriate answers to a series of related questions and (2) individual competence in answering those questions. The theory is applicable when there is sufficient agreement across people to assume that a single set of answers exists. The agreement between pairs of individuals is used to estimate individual cultural competence. Answers are estimated by weighting responses of individuals by their competence and then combining responses.
Circles of Sustainability is a method for understanding and assessing sustainability, and for managing projects directed towards socially sustainable outcomes. It is intended to handle 'seemingly intractable problems' such as outlined in sustainable development debates. The method is mostly used for cities and urban settlements.
The New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (NZAVS) is a longitudinal study conducted in New Zealand. The NZAVS was started in 2009 by Chris Sibley, a professor in psychology at the University of Auckland. The NZAVS was inspired by major social surveys conducted internationally, such as the National Election Studies, the World Values Survey and the General Social Survey, and aims to provide a similar resource for New Zealand. As of November 8, 2016, the NZAVS research team had published 100 peer reviewed publications using data from the study.
Cultural differences can interact with positive psychology to create great variation, potentially impacting positive psychology interventions. Culture influences how people seek psychological help, their definitions of social structure, and coping strategies.
