Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
36 results found in Psychology.
- Awe (Awe Experience)
- Awe is an emotional response to perceived vastness — physical, conceptual, social, or spiritual — that requires a person to update their mental models to accommodate it. It blends wonder, reverence, a…
- Big Five Personality Traits (Big Five, Five-Factor Model, OCEAN Model)
- A widely used psychological model that describes human personality along five trait dimensions: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Originally deve…
- Biophilia (Biophilia Hypothesis)
- The hypothesis, popularized by biologist E. O. Wilson, that humans have an innate affinity for living things and natural systems, and that contact with nature is therefore a fundamental contributor to…
- Dunning-Kruger Effect
- A cognitive bias in which people with limited knowledge or competence in a domain overestimate their ability, while those with greater expertise tend to underestimate their relative skill. In accessib…
- Ekman Basic Emotions (Basic Emotions, Ekman's Six Basic Emotions)
- A taxonomy proposed by psychologist Paul Ekman that identifies six cross-culturally recognisable emotional expressions — happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise — as the building blocks…
- Emotional Mediation Hypothesis
- A theoretical account, originating in work by Palmer and colleagues, that explains cross-modal associations between sensory attributes (such as colors and musical timbres) as being mediated by shared …
- Episodic Memory (Autobiographical Memory, Personal Experience Memory)
- The memory of specific personal experiences and events, including details about what happened, where and when it occurred, and the emotions associated with it. Episodic memory allows people to mentall…
- Executive Function (Executive Functioning, Cognitive Control, Executive Control)
- A set of cognitive processes that enable goal-directed behavior, including planning, working memory, attention, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility. Executive functions allow individuals to …
- Facial Action Coding System (FACS)
- A comprehensive, anatomically based system for describing all visually discernible facial movements, originally developed by Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen in 1977. FACS decomposes facial expressions …
- Facial Affect (Facial Expression of Emotion, Emotional Facial Expression)
- The display of emotion through facial movements, including changes in the position of the eyebrows, eyes, mouth, and other facial features that communicate a person's emotional or mental state. Facial…
- Flow Theory (Flow State, Flow)
- A psychological theory proposed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describing the state of deep immersion and intrinsic enjoyment that occurs when a person is fully engaged in an activity whose challenge leve…
- Generative Thinking (Generative Cognition, Creative Problem Solving)
- Generative thinking is the cognitive ability to spontaneously produce novel ideas, solutions, or approaches to problems without external prompting. In the context of autism and cognitive accessibility…
- Inattentional Blindness (Perceptual Blindness)
- Inattentional blindness is the failure to notice a fully visible but unexpected object or feature when attention is directed elsewhere. It is distinct from change blindness (failure to notice a change…
- Interaction with Disabled Persons Scale (IDP Scale, IDP)
- A standardized 20-item attitudinal instrument developed by Gething and Wheeler (1992) and later validated by Forlin, Fogarty, and Caroll (1999), designed to measure both desirable and undesirable emot…
- Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (Maslow's Hierarchy, Hierarchy of Needs)
- A motivational theory in psychology proposed by Abraham Maslow that organises human needs into a hierarchical pyramid, from basic physiological needs at the base through safety, social belonging, este…
- Multiple Resource Theory (Wickens Multiple Resource Model)
- A cognitive psychology theory proposed by Christopher Wickens that explains how humans allocate attention across concurrent tasks. The theory posits that humans have separate pools of cognitive resour…
- Musical Emotion (Music-Induced Emotion, Emotional Response to Music)
- The emotional content perceived in, or felt in response to, a piece of music, typically analysed along dimensions such as valence and arousal or via categorical labels (cheerful, tense, calm, sad, ene…
- N-back Task (N-back, 2-back Task)
- A working-memory paradigm in which participants view or hear a sequence of stimuli (letters, digits, positions) and, on each trial, respond when the current stimulus matches the one presented N steps …
- Nature Relatedness (Nature Relatedness Scale, NRS, Nature Connectedness)
- A psychological construct describing the strength of a person's affective, cognitive, and experiential connection to the natural world. It is most often measured with the 21-item Nature Relatedness Sc…
- Operant Conditioning (Instrumental Conditioning, Operant Learning)
- A learning process in which behaviour is modified by its consequences — specifically, by reinforcement (rewards that increase the likelihood of the behaviour) or punishment (consequences that decrease…