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character type

1. see personality type.

2. in psychoanalytic theory, a personality type defined by the kinds of defense mechanism used (e.g., a phobic character) or by fixation at a particular stage in psychosexual development (e.g., an oral personality).

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Psychology term of the day

January 14th 2025

Kruskal–Shepard scaling

Kruskal–Shepard scaling

a type of multidimensional scaling applied to judgments of similarity or dissimilarity for pairs of items (e.g., cities). The dissimilarities are represented by distances between items in a highly dimensional space: Larger distances indicate greater dissimilarity. [William Henry Kruskal (1919–2005), U.S. statistician; Roger N. Shepard (1929–  ), U.S. experimental and cognitive psychologist]