Psychology Glossary: C Index

The Cannon-Bard theory is one theory of emotion that argues that physical arousal does not have to occur before an emotion.

Gordon Allport described cardinal traits as those that dominate personality.

A case study involves taking an in-depth look at a single individual or group.

Catatonic schizophrenia is characterized by symptoms including excitement, stupor, and rigidity.

A catharsis is a type of emotional release that plays an important role in psychoanalytic therapy.

The central nervous system is made up of the brain and spinal cord.

The cerebellum is a major structure of the hindbrain that is located near the brainstem...

Chunking involves taking small units of information (chunks) and grouping them into larger units.

Classical conditioning is a learning technique that is often used in behavioral training.

Clinical psychology is the branch of psychology concerned with assessing and treating mental illness, abnormal behavior, and psychiatric problems...

Clustering is a way of organizing information in memory...

Cognition refers to all of the mental activities that are involved in learning, remembering, and using knowledge.

The term cognitive dissonance is used to describe the feeling of discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs. When there is a discrepancy between beliefs for behaviors, something must change in order to eliminate or reduce the dissonance.

Cognitive psychology is the branch of psychology that studies mental processes including how people think, perceive, remember, and learn...

Comparative psychology is the branch of psychology concerned with the study of animal behavior...

Compensation is a type of defense mechanisms that is used to protect the ego from anxiety.

The concrete operational stage occurs between the ages of 7 and 11.

In classical conditioning, the conditioned response is the learned response to the previously neutral stimulus...

In classical conditioning, the conditioned stimulus is previously neutral stimulus that, after becoming associated with the unconditioned stimulus, eventually comes to trigger a conditioned response...

A conditioned taste aversion can occur when eating a substance is followed by illness...

Erik Erikson described a conflict as a turning point in development.

The conscience is part of the superego that contains information about things that are seen as appropriate and inappropriate by authority figures.

In Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality, the conscious mind includes everything that inside of our awareness...

Consciousness refers to your individual awareness of your unique thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations and environment...

A correlation is a statistical measurement of the relationship between two variables...

Correlational studies are used to look for relationships between variables...

In mental health terms, a crisis refers not necessarily to a traumatic situation or event, but to a person’s reaction to an event...

Cross-sectional research is a type of research method often used in developmental psychology, but also utilized in many other areas including social science, education and other branches of science...

Crystallized intelligence involves all the knowledge and abilities acquired over a lifetime. This type of intelligence tends to grow as we get older.