mescaline

n. a hallucinogen derived from the peyote cactus and long used by indigenous peoples of the southwestern United States and Central America as part of certain religious ceremonies. Its effects often include nausea and vomiting as well as visual hallucinations involving lights and colors; they have a slower onset than those of LSD and usually last 1 to 2 hours. Mescaline is the oldest classic hallucinogen known to Western science; its pharmacology was defined in 1896, and its structure was verified by synthesis in 1919. It is a substituted phenylethylamine, and its likely mechanism of action is via serotonin and dopamine receptors. Mescaline is classified by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration as a Schedule I controlled substance (see scheduled drug).

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Psychology term of the day

November 16th 2024

dendrogram

n. a type of treelike diagram used in hierarchical clustering. It lists all of the participants at one end and then directs branches out from those participants who are similar and connects them with a node that represents a cluster. A dendrogram could be used, for example, to cluster individuals into various categories of HIV risk, depending on their number of sexual partners, their frequency of unprotected sex, and the perceived risk of their partners. Individuals who had few sexual partners with little or no unprotected sex and who perceived little or no partner risk of HIV infection would be branched into a cluster that could be labeled low risk, whereas individuals with high values on these three variables would branch into a high-risk cluster, with other individuals presumably clustering into a medium-risk group.