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The word appeared in the psychological literature in 1982, when the academic journal Social Problems published an article entitled "Pronoia" by Dr. Fred H. Goldner of Queens College in New York City, in which Goldner described a phenomenon opposite to paranoia and provided numerous examples of specific persons who displayed such characteristics: [1] [2]
An antonym is one of a pair of words with opposite meanings. Each word in the pair is the antithesis of the other. A word may have more than one antonym. There are three categories of antonyms identified by the nature of the relationship between the opposed meanings.
[14] This definition enjoyed widespread currency for decades. However, this meaning was contested, notably by John B. Watson, who in 1913 asserted the methodological behaviorist view of psychology as a purely objective experimental branch of natural science, the theoretical goal of which "is the prediction and control of behavior."
A meaning explains the occurrence of a particular word in the sense that if there had been a different meaning to be expressed, a different word would probably have appeared. Meaning has certain advantages over ideas because they have the possibility to be located outside the skin, and thus, according to Skinner, meanings can be observed directly.
When the antiphrasal use is very common, the word can become an auto-antonym, [3] having opposite meanings depending on context. For example, Spanish dichoso [ 4 ] originally meant "fortunate, blissful" as in tierra dichosa , "fortunate land", but it acquired the ironic and colloquial meaning of "infortunate, bothersome" as in ¡Dichosas moscas ...
An unpaired word is one that, according to the usual rules of the language, would appear to have a related word but does not. [1] Such words usually have a prefix or suffix that would imply that there is an antonym, with the prefix or suffix being absent or opposite.
Reverse psychology is often used on children due to their high tendency to respond with reactance, a desire to restore threatened freedom of action. Questions have, however been raised about such an approach when it is more than merely instrumental, in the sense that "reverse psychology implies a clever manipulation of the misbehaving child". [5]
Antonyms are words with opposite or nearly opposite meanings. For example: hot ↔ cold, large ↔ small, thick ↔ thin, synonym ↔ antonym; Hypernyms and hyponyms are words that refer to, respectively, a general category and a specific instance of that category. For example, vehicle is a hypernym of car, and car is a hyponym of vehicle.