object loss

in psychoanalytic theory, the actual loss of a person who has served as a good object, which precedes introjection and is involved in separation anxiety. Anxiety about the possible loss of a good object begins with the infant’s panic when separated from its mother. In this perspective, adult grief and mourning are related to object loss and separation anxiety in infancy and childhood, which often intensifies and complicates the grief reaction.

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Psychology term of the day

February 22nd 2025

emergent feature

an entity produced by the interaction of small or simple elements (e.g., short line segments) in the visual system, such an entity (e.g., a polygon) being more salient to human perception than are the elements themselves. In ergonomics, object displays are usually designed to make use of emergent features; the display configurations yield an overall image (e.g., a rectangle or pentagon) that can be perceived holistically by the operator of a machine system and therefore rapidly analyzed to assess the state of the system. When a component of the system is not in the appropriate or normal state, the image will be distorted, alerting the operator to potential problems.