Bihar BSEB Intermediate Psychology key terms

The scientific study of behaviour and mental processes, including how people think, feel, perceive, learn and act, and how biological, social and cultural factors shape these processes.

A method in which a person observes and reports their own inner experiences, thoughts and feelings. It was the main tool of early structuralist psychology but is limited by subjectivity and poor verifiability.

A school of thought holding that psychology should study only observable, measurable behaviour rather than inner mental states, and that learning occurs mainly through conditioning and reinforcement by the environment.

A school emphasising that perception and experience are organised wholes rather than sums of separate parts, so people perceive patterns, figures and meaningful totalities according to principles such as proximity, similarity and closure.

Freud's theory and therapy proposing that unconscious conflicts, drives and early childhood experiences shape personality and behaviour, and that making these conflicts conscious can relieve psychological distress.

The organised set of beliefs and feelings a person holds about their own qualities, abilities, roles and worth, which guides how they interpret experience and behave in social situations.

A person's belief in their own capacity to organise and carry out the actions needed to reach a particular goal. Strong beliefs support persistence, effort and coping with difficulty.

The relatively stable and distinctive pattern of thoughts, emotions and behaviours that characterises an individual and distinguishes them from others across situations and over time.

A relatively enduring disposition that predisposes a person to behave in a consistent way across many situations, such as sociability, conscientiousness or emotional stability.

An assessment in which ambiguous stimuli such as inkblots or incomplete sentences are presented, and the person's interpretations are assumed to reveal hidden needs, motives and conflicts.

The pattern of physiological, emotional and behavioural responses that occurs when a person appraises environmental demands as taxing or exceeding their personal resources to cope with them.

Selye's model describing a three-stage bodily response to prolonged stress: an alarm reaction, a resistance stage of sustained arousal, and exhaustion when resources are depleted, raising illness risk.

The cognitive and behavioural efforts a person makes to manage, reduce or tolerate internal and external demands that are appraised as stressful, including problem-focused and emotion-focused strategies.

Adaptive abilities such as self-awareness, decision making, problem solving, communication, interpersonal relations and managing emotions that help people deal effectively with everyday demands.

The capacity to maintain or regain psychological well-being and effective functioning when facing adversity, trauma or significant stress, drawing on personal and social resources.

A clinically significant pattern of disturbed thoughts, emotions or behaviour that causes distress or impaired functioning and is not merely an expected response to a stressful event.

A widely used diagnostic manual that groups mental disorders into categories with specified symptom criteria, duration requirements and exclusion conditions to guide consistent clinical diagnosis.

A group of conditions marked by excessive fear or worry that is disproportionate to the situation, persistent, and disruptive to daily functioning, including generalised anxiety, phobias and panic disorder.

A category of mental disorders in which disturbance of emotional state is the central feature, most commonly persistent low mood in depression or alternating elevated and depressed phases in bipolar disorder.

A treatment approach holding that distress arises from distorted or irrational beliefs, and that identifying and restructuring these thoughts reduces emotional disturbance and maladaptive behaviour.

Ellis's cognitive-behavioural therapy that disputes irrational beliefs and absolutist demands, replacing them with more realistic appraisals so that emotional and behavioural consequences become healthier.

A set of therapeutic techniques derived from learning principles that aims to change maladaptive behaviour directly through conditioning, reinforcement, exposure and skills training rather than by exploring unconscious conflicts.

A behaviour therapy in which a client learns relaxation and is then gradually exposed to a graded hierarchy of feared stimuli, so that anxiety is replaced by relaxation through counter-conditioning.

A psychoanalytic technique in which the client reports whatever comes to mind without censoring, allowing unconscious material and resistances to surface for interpretation by the therapist.

An unconscious strategy the ego uses to reduce anxiety from unacceptable impulses or threatening reality, such as repression, projection, rationalisation or displacement.

A learned tendency to evaluate an object, person or issue in a favourable or unfavourable way, involving cognitive, affective and behavioural components that predispose consistent responses.

The uncomfortable tension that arises when a person holds two inconsistent cognitions, or acts against their beliefs, motivating change in attitudes or beliefs to restore consistency.

The process of changing attitudes through communication, influenced by characteristics of the source such as credibility and attractiveness, features of the message, and the receiver's involvement and mood.

A negative or hostile attitude toward members of a group based solely on their group membership, typically involving stereotyped beliefs and emotional dislike that may lead to discrimination.

A generalised and oversimplified belief about the characteristics of members of a social group, which ignores individual differences and can bias perception, judgement and behaviour.

The process by which people explain the causes of their own and others' behaviour, for example attributing an outcome to internal dispositions or to external situational factors.

Voluntary action intended to benefit another person, such as helping, sharing or comforting, which is influenced by empathy, norms and situational factors like the presence of bystanders.

A change in belief or behaviour toward the group standard as a result of real or imagined group pressure, arising from informational or normative influence rather than direct command.

Compliance with the direct orders or instructions of an authority figure, which research shows can lead ordinary people to perform actions they would otherwise consider wrong.

The strength of the bonds and mutual attraction among group members, plus their commitment to group goals, which affects retention, morale and pressure toward uniformity.

The tendency for individuals to expend less effort on a task when working collectively than when working alone, especially when individual contributions cannot be identified.

The study of how physical settings such as noise, crowding, temperature and built design affect human behaviour, health and well-being, and how people in turn shape their environments.

A learning process in which a neutral stimulus repeatedly paired with an unconditioned stimulus comes to elicit a conditioned response, as in Pavlov's experiments with dogs and salivation.

A learning process in which the likelihood of a behaviour changes according to its consequences, increasing with reinforcement and decreasing with punishment, as described by Skinner.

An in-depth investigation of a single individual, group or situation using multiple sources of information, useful for rare phenomena but limited in generalisability to wider populations.