Concepts (page 6)

Cognitive restructuring is the core technique of cognitive therapy: catch an automatic thought, test it against the evidence, and replace it with a more accurate one. The premise is that the feeling…

Cognitive training is doing structured mental exercises, usually on a screen and usually adaptive so they get harder as you improve, in the hope of raising a general ability such as attention…

Collective effervescence is Emile Durkheim's name, from The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), for the heightened state a group enters when it focuses on the same thing together, in physical…

Collective intelligence is a general factor in group performance, analogous to general intelligence in individuals: a group that does well on one kind of task tends to do well on others, and that…

Colonial psychiatry is psychiatry practised in and about colonised populations, and the racial theory of mind that came with it. This publication carries the term through two named figures on…

The light reaching your eye from a surface is that surface's colour multiplied by the colour of whatever is shining on it. Colour constancy is your brain estimating the illumination and subtracting…

Colour is a signal, and a signal means nothing outside a setting. The claim is not that a colour produces an effect, but that it carries whatever meaning it has acquired where the person happens to…

Not everyone knowing a thing, but the recursive state in which each knows the others know, and knows that they know, without limit. Thomas, DeScioli, Haque and Pinker showed that people treat this…

A common-value auction is a sale in which the prize is worth roughly the same to every bidder, but nobody knows exactly how much. Each bid rests on an estimate with some error in it, so the highest…

Kristin Neff's self-compassion questionnaire has six parts. Three ask about kind responses to your own failure, and three ask about harsh ones, which are then reverse-scored, so that answering "no"…

Compelling goals is the first of the six ingredients in Adam Alter's model of behavioural addiction: a goal set just out of reach, so that clearing it does not end the game but reveals the next bar…

Conditioned hunger is appetite produced by a learned signal rather than by a shortage of energy. A cue that has reliably come before food in the past, a time of day, a place, the end of a task…