confusional psychosis

a form of cycloid psychosis in which disturbances of cognitive processes are prominent and accompanied by a labile (highly changeable) emotional state characterized alternately by manifest anxiety, with the individual often misidentifying other people, and by mutism and greatly decreased movement. The latter differs from catatonic stupor in that self-care and spontaneity are preserved and negativism is absent. [defined by German psychiatrist Karl Leonhard (1904–1988)]

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Psychology term of the day

January 14th 2025

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]