Science / Psychiatry Glossary

Engram: A memory trace; a neurophysiological process that accounts for persistence of memory

Erotomania (De Clérambaults Syndrome): patient holds the delusional belief that someone else, usually of a higher social or professional status, is in love with them.

Ethnology: A science that concerns itself with the division of human beings into races and their origin, distribution, relations, and characteristics.

Euphoric Mood: exaggerated feeling of well-being. It is pathological.

Euthymic: Mood in the normal range, which implies the absence of depressed or elevated mood.

Expansive Mood: Lack of restraint in expressing ones feelings, frequently with an overvaluation of ones significance or importance. irritable Easily annoyed and provoked to anger.

Expressive Aphasia: difficulty in expressing thoughts in words whilst comprehension remains.

Extinction: The weakening of a reinforced operant response as a result of ceasing reinforcement. See also operant conditioning. Also, the elimination of a conditioned response by repeated presentations . . . View Full Definition

Extracampine Hallucination: hallucination occurring outside ones sensory field.

Extrapyramidal Symptoms (EPS): Movement disorders which can be a side effect of antipsychotic medications. They include acute dystonia, akathisia, parkinsonism and tardive dyskinesia.

Extraversion: A state in which attention and energies are largely directed outward from the self as opposed to inward toward the self, as in introversion.

Fantasy: An imagined sequence of events or mental images (e.g., daydreams) that serves to express unconscious conflicts, to gratify unconscious wishes, or to prepare for anticipated future events.

Flashback: A recurrence of a memory, feeling, or perceptual experience from the past.

Flat Affect: almost no emotional expression at all -the patient typically has an immobile face and monotonous voice.

Flight Of Ideas: speech consists of a stream of accelerated thoughts with abrupt changes from topic to topic and no central direction. the connections between the thoughts may be based on chance relationship . . . View Full Definition

Flooding: A behavior therapy procedure for phobias and other problems involving maladaptive anxiety, in which anxiety producers are presented in intense forms, either in imagination or in real life. T . . . View Full Definition

Folie À Deux: A shared psychotic disorder between 2 people, usually people who are mutually dependent upon each other.

Formal Thought Disorder: An inexact term referring to a disturbance in the form of thinking rather than to abnormality of content. See blocking; loosening of associations; poverty of speech.

Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27