Glossary ❮ 331a group of people who share a common language
and environment.
Daily hassles—everyday annoyances such as having
to wait on lines, arguing with a friend, etc.
Dark adaptation—increased visual sensitivity that
gradually develops when it gets dark.
Daydreaming—state of consciousness characterized
by focus on inner, private realities which can gen-
erate creative ideas or relieve boredom.
Decay theory—assumes that memories deteriorate as
time passes.
Declarative memory (explicit)—memory of facts
and experiences that you are consciously aware of
and can declare.
Deductive reasoning—reasoning from the general
to the specific.
Deep processing—involves attaching meaning and
creating associations between a new memory and
existing memories.
Defense mechanisms—unconscious, deceptive reac-
tions that protect the ego from unpleasant emo-
tions that are threatening, according to Freudian
theory. They become active when unconscious
instinctual drives of the id come into conflict with
prohibitions of the superego.
Deindividuation—loss of self-awareness and restraint
resulting from immersion in a group.
Deinstitutionalization—movement begun in 1950s
to remove patients who were not considered a
threat to themselves or the community from mental
hospitals.
Delayed conditioning—ideal training in classical
conditioning training where the CS precedes UCS
and briefly overlaps.
Delirium—neurocognitive disorder characterized by
impaired attention and lack of awareness of the
environment.
Delusion—fixed belief that is maintained even when
compelling evidence to the contrary is presented;
symptomatic of schizophrenia.
Demand characteristics—clues participants discover
about the purpose of the study that suggest how
they should respond.
Dendrites—branching tubular processes of a
neuron that have receptor sites for receiving
information.
Denial—Freudian defense mechanism, a refusal to
admit a particular aspect of reality.
Dependent variable (DV)—the behavior or mental
process that is measured in an experiment or quasi-
experiment (the effect).
Depressants—psychoactive drugs that reduce the
activity of the central nervous system and inducerelaxation; include sedatives such as barbiturates,
tranquilizers, and alcohol.
Depth perception—the ability to judge the distance
of objects.
Descriptive statistics—numbers that summarize a
set of research data obtained from a sample.
Developmental psychology—study of physical,
intellectual, social, and moral changes over the
entire life span from conception to death.
Deviation IQ—Wechsler’s procedure for computing
the intelligence quotient; compares a child’s score
with those received by other children of the same
chronological age.
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disor-
ders (DSM-5)—manual used by mental health
professionals for classifying psychological dis-
orders; published by the American Psychiatric
Association.
Diathesis-stress model—an account of the cause of
mental disorders based on the idea that mental
disorders develop when a person possesses a genetic
predisposition for a disorder, and later faces stress ors
that exceed his or her abilities to cope with them.
Difference threshold—minimum difference be tween
any two stimuli that a person can detect 50 percent
of the time.
Discrimination—in classical conditioning, the ability
to tell the difference between the CS and stimuli
similar to it that do not signal a UCS; in operant
conditioning refers to responding differently to
stimuli that signal that behavior will be reinforced
or not reinforced; in social psychology it refers to
unjustified behavior against an individual or group.
Disinhibition—a behavior therapy for phobias where
modeling is used.
Disorganized schizophrenia (hebephrenia)—a type
of schizophrenia characterized primarily by distur-
bances of thought and inappropriate affect—silly
behavior or absence of emotions.
Displacement—expressing feelings toward some-
thing or someone besides the target person, because
they are perceived as less threatening.
Display rules—culturally determined rules that pre-
scribe the appropriate expression of emotions in
particular situations.
Dispositional attributions—inferences that a per-
son’s behavior is caused by the person’s tendency
to think, feel, or act in a particular way.
Dissociation—experience of two or more streams of
consciousness cut off from each other.
Dissociative amnesia—repression of memory of a par-
ticularly troublesome event or period of time into the
unconscious mind; characterized by the inability to
remember important events or personal information.BM.indd 331 27-05-2018 15:32:46