autocrine

adj. describing or relating to a type of cellular signaling in which a chemical messenger is secreted by a cell into its environment and feeds back to elicit a response in the same cell. For example, some nerve cells have autoreceptors that are affected by neurotransmitter molecules released by the same cell. Compare endocrine; paracrine.

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Psychology term of the day

November 19th 2024

Bartlett test for equality of variance

a procedure used to determine whether variation across two or more groups is equivalent, this being a critical assumption in analysis of variance and many other parametric methods. The Bartlett test is sensitive to scores that are not from a normal distribution. [Maurice Stevenson Bartlett (1910–2002), British statistician]