critical life event

an event in life that requires major adjustment and adaptive behavior. Such events may be regarded in retrospect as unusually formative or pivotal in shaping attitudes and beliefs. Common critical life events include the death of a loved one, divorce, and unemployment. See also life events.

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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]