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Library
The complete catalogue: search it, or filter by topic, type of piece and reading time. For an orientation rather than a catalogue, the front page is the place to begin.
42 pieces found
ConceptDefining ChangeFoundational
When we say that someone has changed, we may be describing a different state, behaviour, skill, belief, emotional response, identity, relationship or surrounding structure. These outcomes…
Read What Does It Mean for a Person to Change? first.
ConceptDefining ChangeFoundational
One observation cannot tell us whether we are seeing a temporary state, a recurring response or a relatively stable tendency. The difference depends not only on duration, but on whether a…
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ConceptDefining ChangeFoundational
Human change has no single clock. Some differences become visible within moments, others across repeated experiences, and some only across sustained or developmental observation.…
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ConceptDefining ChangeFoundational
Not everything that happens before a behaviour plays the same causal role. Some factors contribute broadly to producing an outcome, some enable the relevant causal process, some precipitate…
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ConceptEvidence and ExplanationFoundational
Researchers can measure constructs such as stress, motivation or identity only by deciding how those constructs will become observable. The resulting measure can provide evidence about the…
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ConceptEvidence and ExplanationFoundational
A variable can be associated with an outcome, help predict it, causally affect it, or operate through a particular mechanism. These are different scientific claims, and establishing one…
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ConceptEvidence and ExplanationFoundational
Mediation asks what lies on an intermediate pathway between a candidate cause and an outcome. Moderation asks when, where or for whom an effect differs. Mechanism asks how the effect is…
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ConceptEvidence and Explanation
Different causal pathways can converge on the same observed outcome. The outcome itself establishes neither that the underlying pathways are the same nor that they are different.
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ConceptEvidence and Explanation
A cause can be real without having a uniform consequence. The same causal influence can produce different effects under different conditions.
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ConceptEmbodiment and RegulationFoundational
Living organisms are continuously changing, yet many physiologically important conditions remain constrained within ranges compatible with functioning. Homeostasis explains how this…
Read Mind, Brain and Body Form One System first.
ConceptEmbodiment and RegulationFoundational
Living systems do not face the same demands from one moment to the next. Allostasis describes how regulatory activity can adjust to changing conditions and anticipated requirements,…
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ConceptEmbodiment and RegulationFoundational
The nervous system continuously processes information about conditions inside the body, but only some of that processing becomes consciously felt. Interoception describes this broader…
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ConceptEmbodiment and Regulation
Arousal tells us about activation. Valence tells us about affective quality. Neither one—and not even the two together—fully identifies an emotion. This Concept explains why these…
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ConceptEmbodiment and Regulation
Why signals related to bodily damage are not the same thing as the experience of pain. Nociception provides neural information about noxious events; pain is an experience emerging within…
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ConceptDevelopment and Individual Differences
Plasticity is the capacity of a system to change in response to experience, activity or altered conditions. That capacity makes development and learning possible, but it is neither…
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ConceptDevelopment and Individual Differences
Development contains periods when particular experiences have unusually strong effects. Sensitive periods increase responsiveness, while critical periods describe narrower windows in which…
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ConceptDevelopment and Individual Differences
Temperament describes early-emerging patterns in emotional reactivity, attention and self-regulation—but these patterns develop through continuing interaction with experience and context.
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ConceptLearning and MemoryFoundational
A cue repeatedly appears before an event, and later the cue changes behaviour. Calling that an association because the two things occurred together captures something real but explains too…
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ConceptLearning and MemoryFoundational
Classical conditioning occurs when experience with predictive relationships among events changes the significance of cues and how an organism later responds to them. Repeated pairing can…
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ConceptLearning and MemoryFoundational
Operant learning occurs when experience with relationships between behaviour and its consequences changes future behaviour. What matters is not simply what happens after an action, but the…
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ConceptLearning and MemoryFoundational
What changes behaviour, what carries value and what feels pleasurable are related questions—but they are not the same question.
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ConceptLearning and MemoryFoundational
Working memory names a limited set of processes that keep currently relevant information available while thought and action continue — a real constraint that no single number, model or test…
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ConceptLearning and MemoryFoundational
Context can become part of the learned conditions specifying when a relationship or response applies. That influence is conditional, not deterministic — and performance in one setting is…
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ConceptLearning and MemoryFoundational
Automatic behaviour is not simply unconscious or uncontrollable. Automaticity is a multidimensional profile of how learned processing operates with reduced dependence on deliberate control.
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ConceptPerception, Attention and BeliefFoundational
Salience names the unequal prominence of information in a competitive field — a relation among signal, context, learning, goals and bodily state, not a property stored inside an object.
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ConceptPerception, Attention and BeliefFoundational
Beliefs concern what we take to be true or real. Attitudes concern how we evaluate something. They can shape one another and influence behaviour, but they are not the same psychological…
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ConceptPerception, Attention and BeliefFoundational
Uncertainty does not mean knowing nothing. It describes situations in which available evidence constrains what can reasonably be inferred without uniquely determining what is true, what…
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ConceptEmotion, Value and MotivationFoundational
Valuation explains how possibilities come to matter differently under different conditions. This Concept shows why value changes with bodily state, goals, learning and context—and why…
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ConceptEmotion, Value and Motivation
Emotion-regulation strategies are best understood by what they do within an emotional episode. A strategy label identifies a possible process; it does not establish its mechanism, success…
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ConceptEmotion, Value and MotivationFoundational
Motivation is not one inner fuel level. This Concept explains why prioritizing, starting, exerting effort, persisting and stopping are different motivational functions—and why behaviour…
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ConceptAction and ControlFoundational
Executive functions name the coordination required when goals, rules or responses compete or change — a family of interacting processes, not one inner controller, and not scientific…
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ConceptAction and Control
Metacognition allows people to evaluate and regulate aspects of their cognition. It can reveal uncertainty, misunderstanding and possible error, but it does not provide complete…
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ConceptAction and Control
Risk concerns possible outcomes whose likelihoods can be represented or estimated. Uncertainty concerns what remains unknown, underspecified or difficult to assign reliable probabilities to.
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ConceptAction and Control
Counterfactual thought constructs alternatives to what actually happened. By imagining how events could have unfolded differently, people can evaluate causes, experience regret and identify…
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ConceptSelf, Identity and NarrativeFoundational
The sense of agency is the experience that you are initiating or controlling an action. It is constructed from intention, prediction, action and feedback—not supplied by intention alone.
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ConceptSelf, Identity and NarrativeFoundational
Identity is not organised in only one way. Who we understand ourselves to be can draw on personal characteristics, social memberships and the roles we occupy—and different parts of that…
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ConceptSelf, Identity and Narrative
Self-efficacy is not simply confidence or positive thinking. It is a judgment about whether you can organise and perform the actions a particular situation requires—and that judgment may…
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ConceptRelationships, Culture and PowerFoundational
An environment is more than a physical place. Behaviour is also shaped by other people, available information and the institutional rules that organise what can happen.
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ConceptPersistence, Transfer and Relapse
Learning that reduces an established response can be sensitive to the context in which it occurs. When testing later takes place outside that context, the earlier response may become more…
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ConceptPersistence, Transfer and Relapse
Spontaneous recovery is the return of a previously reduced response after time has passed following extinction or comparable new learning. It shows that reduced responding does not…
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ConceptPersistence, Transfer and Relapse
Reinstatement is the return of a previously extinguished response after post-extinction exposure to the relevant outcome, unconditioned stimulus or functionally equivalent event. The…
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ConceptDynamic Systems and Integrated ChangeFoundational
Behaviour is not always the final outcome of a causal process. What a person does can change the conditions, responses and information that shape what happens next. Reciprocal causation…
Read Human Behaviour Has Multiple Causes first.
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