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Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

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Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#91

Post by light_hue_1 »

> (19) No difference between groups. ... Authors are instead advised to write “no significant difference between groups” or “no significant correlation between variables.”

This is terrible advice. To the public, and often even to experts, "significant" doesn't mean "statistically significant" it means "big". We need to abolish this use of "significant" not promote it. Way too many papers show "significant" (statistically significant) results that are not significant (so minor as to be irrelevant). This is the #1 source of misleading headlines.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#92

Post by light_hue_1 »

> (47) Empirical data. “Empirical” means based on observation or experience. As a consequence, with the possible exception of information derived from archival sources, all psychological data are empirical (what would “non-empirical” psychological data look like?).

Nonsense. There are plenty of types of data that are not empirical. For example, data from simulations is not empirical data.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#93

Post by weego »

eimrine wrote: post #71

Isn't Psychology another term to avoid if we are havind a Neurophysiplogy term?

Yes.

The DSM 5 provides Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD, not to he confused as ASD which is autism). It's more commonly referred to as Sociopathy. Psychopathy is not an 'official' condition

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#94

Post by blacksmith_tb »

_8j50 wrote: post #33

> Furthermore, there are ample reasons to doubt whether “brainwashing” permanently alters beliefs This person needs to look at interviews of mk-ultra experiment survivors. Brainwashing is very real and permanent.

It also doesn't quite make sense, even if these techniques aren't any more serious than other kinds of indoctrination, we have abundant examples of indoctrination permanently altering beliefs - religious conversions, ideological movements, etc.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#95

Post by light_hue_1 »

jrm4 wrote: post #53
c7b wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, if your standard for a good definition is that it is readily apparent to the public at large , then pretty much every academic discipline will fail your rigour test. Even (or especially) mathematics. Which should make it clear that this is an unfair and useless standard to hold psychology up to.

Fair, "at large" is a bit extreme. This is a spectrum. But psychology appears to be far worse than the others, even reading from this paper. I'm a lawyer, and even law isn't this bad. "Symptoms are unobservable?"

This is basically the case in much of medicine.

Pain is not observable. It's reported. Loss of vision or hearing isn't observable, it's reported.

You can run tests to get an idea of whether any of these are happening. But you are not observing any of these symptoms. You're observing behavior and inferring what kinds of symptoms the person is experiencing and what degree.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#96

Post by adrian_b »

tantalor wrote: post #14
raxxorraxor wrote: post #4

Looks like Psychologists came up with something as complicated as the human mind. I found this very strange: Symptom: (under Oxymorons) (41) Observable symptom. This term, which appears in nearly 700 manuscripts according to Google Scholar, conflates signs with symptoms. Signs are observable features of a disorder; symptoms are unobservable features of a disorder that can only be reported by patients (Lilienfeld et a…

This has nothing to do with psychology. It's standard terminology used in medicine. > Symptoms cannot be seen and do not show up on medical tests. Some examples of symptoms are headache, fatigue, nausea, and pain. https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-term...

It is a standard terminology that is recent and only in English.

It has nothing to do with the original meanings of the words "symptom" and "sign" in English and other languages (where "symptom" is any sign of a disease, while "sign" is any sign of anything).

The standard medical terminology in other languages is "subjective symptoms" and "objective symptoms".

In my opinion, whoever has chosen these artificial and arbitrary meanings for the words "symptom" and "sign", both words being widespread in many European languages, where they are used with their old meanings, has made a very bad choice. Someone who wants new words should invent them, not change the traditional meanings of other words.

I wonder if this "sign" and "symptom" terminology is common for British English and American English, or it is used only in American English.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#97

Post by whythre »

jamesrcole wrote: post #25
alexb_ wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's crazy that we spend time thinking about minor bs like this instead of spending that effort trying to solve actual problems. This type of stuff is great for people who want to feel like they have made a positive change without actually having accomplished anything of value.

I think it’s worse than that. It makes people have to police their own thought about what they’re going to say, to avoid stumbling over one of the linguistic trip wires. I think that’s antithetical to creative thought.

It also gives power to bad actors who can take advantage of such ‘linguistic tripwires’ to invalidate or abuse others.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#98

Post by malfist »

eckza wrote: post #88
ndr wrote: post #86

> (27) The scientific method. Many science textbooks, including those in psychology, present science as a monolithic “method.” [...] Contrary to what most scientists themselves appear to believe, science is not a method; it is an approach to knowledge (Stanovich, 2012). Specifically, it is an approach that strives to better approximate the state of nature by reducing errors in inferences. Mmmh is this Psychology opti…

What about the rest of this, that you didn't quote, do you take issue with?

What about it?

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#99

Post by runarberg »

jrm4 wrote: post #27

If anything, I find this to be a, perhaps unintentional, damning indictment of psychology and psychiatry in general. If your discipline cannot clearly define things in a reasonably concrete and provable way, such that it is readily apparent to the patients and the public at large, and also such that the language effectively clarifies itself out of necessity, then much of what you do needs to be strongly questioned --…

This is not what the article concludes at all. Every item in this list is met with alternatives or justifications for careful considerations and nuance. If anything it celebrates psychology as a rich field while issuing a warning about specific problematic terms in use. This is no different from most other fields. Cosmology also has problematic terms such as Grand Unifying Theory, even the word planet has issues within the field of astronomy. This is not a damning indictment of respective fields, but a sign of maturity, growth, and healthy debate within the field.

Your example of “neyrodivergent” is a really bad example for your case. This term is a laypeople term that captures the notion that there is a variety in the way people think and behave, and as a society we tend to accommodate only a subset of this variety, leaving the rest (the neurodiverce individuals) in a harder then necessary situations. You don’t need to falsify it because it is not a scientific term. But if you wanted to disproof it, you would need to show that cognitive behavior doesn’t vary nearly as much as observable behavior, the very fact that autism exists should be evidence enough to justify this term.

I think you might be misunderstanding what falsifiability means for psychology or other social science (or any science that uses probability or population statistics in its theories for that matter). When you have a term that distinguishes a subgroup from a population, you don’t try to disprove it by looking at an individual, you look at the variance and compare it with the greater population. If there is no difference in the variance, then most likely you are using an unhelpful term.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#100

Post by strogonoff »

It is good to see awareness being raised of accidental philosophical positions, sometimes unwittingly assumed through word choice.

For example, I was starting to doubt whether anyone realizes that they make a leap whenever they imply physiology/biology is the cause of what happens in our consciousness (or indeed causes consciousness to happen), but entry 29 reassured me not all hope is lost (emphasis mine):

> Nevertheless, conceptualizing biological functioning as inherently more “fundamental” than (that is, causally prior to) psychological functioning, such as cognitive and emotional functioning, is misleading (Miller, 1996). The relation between biological variables and other variables is virtually always bidirectional. For example, although the magnitude of the P300 event-related potential tends to be diminished among individuals with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) compared with other individuals (Costa et al., 2000), this finding does not necessarily mean that the P300 deficit precedes, let alone plays a causal role in, ASPD. It is at least equally plausible that the personality dispositions associated with ASPD, such as inattention, low motivation, and poor impulse control, contribute to smaller P300 magnitudes (Lilienfeld, 2014).

I believe the equal likelihood of such reverse causality and its implications are severely underexplored in modern medicine.

Similarly appreciated the warning against accidentally assuming mind-body dualism (entry 40) and a fundamental point about natural sciences—that there is never definitive proof, only limited to various degrees models (entry 45).

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