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passive-aggressive personality disorder

a personality disorder of long standing in which ambivalence toward the self and others is expressed by such means as procrastination, dawdling, stubbornness, intentional inefficiency, “forgetting” appointments, or misplacing important materials. These maneuvers are interpreted as passive expressions of underlying negativism. The pattern persists even when more adaptive behavior is clearly possible; it frequently interferes with occupational, domestic, and academic success. This disorder was classified in the appendix of DSM–IV–TR and given an alternative name, negativistic personality disorder, in accordance with the theoretical proposals of Theodore Millon. Its mention has been retained in DSM–5.

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Psychology term of the day

February 22nd 2025

emergent feature

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.