Concepts (page 15)

Hardiness is a cluster of characteristics said to distinguish people who stay well under heavy stress from people who do not, built on three components: commitment, meaning involvement in what one…

HARKing is hypothesising after the results are known: you run the study, look at what came out, and then write the paper as though the interesting result was what you had predicted all along…

Robert Vallerand's dualistic model says passion is not one thing with a volume dial. Two people equally devoted to the same activity can be devoted in structurally different ways, and the difference…

Heart rate variability is the beat-to-beat variation in the time between heartbeats. A healthy heart is not a metronome, and higher variability at rest generally reflects a flexible autonomic system…

Hedonic adaptation is the drift of satisfaction back towards its own baseline after a change in circumstances, upwards or downwards. Brickman and Campbell named the mechanism the hedonic treadmill…

Hedonic hunger is the pull towards food for its pleasure rather than for energy, the appetite that turns up in a person who has just eaten enough. The term is Michael Lowe and Meghan Butryn's, from…

Hick's Law is the finding that the time it takes to choose rises roughly with the logarithm of the number of equally likely options. William Edmund Hick published it in 1952 and Ray Hyman confirmed…

Once you know how something turned out, you lose the ability to reconstruct what you believed before you knew. The old belief is not retrieved, it is rebuilt out of the new one. The founding study…

Hospitality psychology is this publication's umbrella term for what makes a guest feel welcome, assembled from practitioner books rather than from a research literature. It has no founding study and…

Hypertext is text with embedded links to other text, a term Ted Nelson coined in 1965. Literary theorists of the 1980s and 1990s treated it as liberation from the linear authority of the printed…

Hypervigilance is attention spread across a whole environment, scanning for threat, rather than settled on a single task. The distinction that makes it worth holding is that it is not absent…

Hysteria was the nineteenth-century medical label for physical symptoms, such as paralysis or fits, that doctors attributed to the mind rather than to disease. Charcot's work in Paris and Breuer's…