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Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

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Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#221

Post by cochne »

l0b0 wrote: post #218

The "steep learning curve" entry is bizarre. Is it so difficult to envision that it's a straightforward analogue to real life? Climbing a steep mountain (that is, a steep slope or curve), if you manage (since a difficult traverse is going to turn away a lot of people, just like a steep learning curve), you are going to end up with a good view (or understanding of the field). It was never about a X=time, Y=distance ma…

Your disagreement with their assessment is exactly why they say it should not be used. There are two equally plausible interpretations, and as a technical term, theirs is correct, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#222

Post by rad88 »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #66
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could also refer to the difference between living in someone's spare room, couch surfing, or living in a camper van vs having a home (rented or bought).

> living in someone's spare room Children living with their parents don't own houses, but they aren't homeless either. Or adults for that matter. For a few years in college I lived in a spare room in my grandparent's house. I had no house of my own, but I certainly felt welcome and wasn't homeless by any means.

There is no meaning of "housed" that implies "owns a house".

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#223

Post by bawolff »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #138
bawolff wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm reminded of e.g. the term "neurodivergent." It's a good thing to look at, but how do you falsify it? Who can stand up and say "I'm definitely not neurodivergent?" If you can't do that, the term is not very helpful. I mean, that's not a diagnosis. If you mean just generally and not psychology specific then you are going to have to throw out most english adjectives. Like you can't falsify "im hungry", "im smart",…

I can easily identify whether or not I'm hungry... and probably whether or not I'm smart. I can't easily identify whether or not I'm neurodivergent, because I'm not sure what it means or what the opposite would look like. Does anybody know?

> I can't easily identify whether or not I'm neurodivergent, because I'm not sure what it means or what the opposite would look like. Does anybody know?

The people who are claiming to be neruodivergent would say its quite obvious to themselves (FWIW, the general definition is roughly ADHD or Autism, both of which have more concrete definitions). I was assuming the statement was about other people verifying the veracity of the statement not yourself.

Of course, i don't know how you can easily identify if you are actually hungry, when you can't even tell if you actually have a stomach or are just a brain in a vat/plugged into the matrix.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#224

Post by matheusmoreira »

wwtrv wrote: post #207
matheusmoreira wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This uncertainty stems from the lack of rigorous proof. Medicine these days is all about statistics and correlation. It's "we gave drug A to people with B and we observed effects C occurring D% of the time". In way too many cases there is no exact model or understanding of how things actually work, just inferences from observed effects.

That might still be preferable to coming up with theories explaining mechanisms we don't fully understand and then looking for data which might prove it. That might become especially problematic when scientists stake their entire careers on it. We might end up with situations similar the amyloid hypothesis which likely tuned out to be a dead end a huge waste time & resources.

> coming up with theories explaining mechanisms we don't fully understand and then looking for data which might prove it

Also known as the scientific method.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#225

Post by enduser »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #220
NickM wrote: post #167

Glad to see "chemical imbalance" make the list. It is very common to see people use terms like "dopamine hit", "endorphin rush", "low serotonin", etc. in ways that don't make scientific sense. I assume people do it to sound knowledgeable or to make it sound like their ideas are backed by science, but neurotransmitters are vastly more complicated and subtle in their effects than is implied by these kinds of usages, an…

I don't see anything wrong with the term "dopamine hit". It's the main neurotransmitter involved in the brain's reward system. Rewarding stimulus is exactly what is meant by popular use of the term. I really don't understand attempts to problematize the use of this term. Sure, there are other neurotransmitters involved and dopamine is also present in other systems and even in the rest of the body. Nobody denies that.

Despite what we have been taught—and what is still commonly stated—dopamine is what motivates behavior (motivational salience), not what makes us feel good after the behavior. Plenty of citations on Wikipedia if you want to dig.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#226

Post by lofatdairy »

Honestly, I'm a bit disappointed by the level of discourse this post has generated. I'm also an outspoken skeptic of findings in the field of psychology, but the article is quite well formed and well argued. If anything, accepting the nitpicking from a lot of these comments would result in psychology being _less_ rigorous and precise. A lot of psychology's problems comes from how readily available it seems to be to everyday experience. We're only 100 years from Lewis Terman and H. H. Goddard thinking they could measure intelligence by having people circle a face judged to be "more attractive", it's a young science and improving the rigor of how things are expressed is essential to advancement. Not only are a lot of these terms being used incorrectly, hence why this paper was even published, but because they carry a colloquial and historic baggage that don't reflect academic understandings, or even philosophical understandings of the epistemological concept of science. Words have definitions, and if two people don't share the same definition, then communication breaks down, research is misunderstood, and the field is worse off. This is for people operating within the field to consolidate knowledge, I don't know why people insist that lay understandings of language and a field of study need to be reflected in the terms of art.

To put it in terms that engineers are more likely to appreciate, a lot of these terms would be like "man-hours". Man-hours is obviously a useless term because it 1) implies that increasing workers scales production linearly, 2) implies each individual produces at the same rate, 3) inherits from a factory mode of production that engineers typically don't believe fits their situation, and 4) generally results in poor estimations of cost and delivery times. Obviously if you're trying to be productive as an engineer, your managers only using man-hours as a term invites ambiguity and worse working conditions. Same goes for things like the lay understanding of attention vs its specific meaning as an implementation template within deep learning, or even AI more broadly vs specific neural network techniques.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#227

Post by runarberg »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #220
NickM wrote: post #167

Glad to see "chemical imbalance" make the list. It is very common to see people use terms like "dopamine hit", "endorphin rush", "low serotonin", etc. in ways that don't make scientific sense. I assume people do it to sound knowledgeable or to make it sound like their ideas are backed by science, but neurotransmitters are vastly more complicated and subtle in their effects than is implied by these kinds of usages, an…

I don't see anything wrong with the term "dopamine hit". It's the main neurotransmitter involved in the brain's reward system. Rewarding stimulus is exactly what is meant by popular use of the term. I really don't understand attempts to problematize the use of this term. Sure, there are other neurotransmitters involved and dopamine is also present in other systems and even in the rest of the body. Nobody denies that.

> The goal of this article is to promote clear thinking and clear writing among students and teachers of psychological science by curbing terminological misinformation and confusion.

> We also do not address problematic terms that are restricted primarily to popular (“pop”) psychology, such as “codependency,” “dysfunctional,” “toxic,” “inner child,” and “boundaries,” as our principal focus is on questionable terminology in the academic literature. Nevertheless, we touch on a handful of pop psychology terms (e.g., closure, splitting) that have migrated into at least some academic domains.

I’m not aware that “dopamine hit” has migrated into some academic domains as it is kind of a slang among laypeople with the meaning of indulging in an activity they like. So I think “dopamine hit” specifically is out of scope for this article. “Chemical imbalance” on the other hand is a problematic term that has been used historically to promote inaccurate—and thoroughly disproved—models of mental illness. I guess the term is—somewhat worryingly—still being used among academics in the literature, and that’s why it was granted a place on this list.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#228

Post by Veen »

kensai wrote: post #185

I am surprised there is no mention of the word "histrionic" which is completely out-of-date and insulting to women.

'Histrionic' originates in the Latin 'histrionica,' which refers to actors and acting, supposedly because actors first came from the Greek colony of Histria on the Black Sea. I'm not sure why any of that is insulting to women.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#229

Post by colechristensen »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #220
NickM wrote: post #167

Glad to see "chemical imbalance" make the list. It is very common to see people use terms like "dopamine hit", "endorphin rush", "low serotonin", etc. in ways that don't make scientific sense. I assume people do it to sound knowledgeable or to make it sound like their ideas are backed by science, but neurotransmitters are vastly more complicated and subtle in their effects than is implied by these kinds of usages, an…

I don't see anything wrong with the term "dopamine hit". It's the main neurotransmitter involved in the brain's reward system. Rewarding stimulus is exactly what is meant by popular use of the term. I really don't understand attempts to problematize the use of this term. Sure, there are other neurotransmitters involved and dopamine is also present in other systems and even in the rest of the body. Nobody denies that.

The problem is the dumbing down of complex mechanisms into sound bites. Both dopamine and rewards systems are a lot more complicated than they're presented and not very well understood. But you can buy self-help/popsci books that give you very incorrect simplistic pictures of how these things work.

Maybe the term "dopamine hit" is fine when it's just that, but people base their whole understanding of their brain based on dopamine does this, seratonin does that, etc.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#230

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

The author is right from a medical perspective. There is a technical difference between observable signs and reported symptoms. Most people conflate both terms and there's nothing wrong with that but people in the field should understand the difference.
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