标题：Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases
source：journal.frontiersin.org | by Scott O. Lilienfeld, Katheryn C. Sauvigné, Steven Jay Lynn, Robin L. Cautin, Robert D. Latzman and Irwin D. Waldman
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(6) Bystander apathy. The classic work of (e.g., Darley and Latane, 1968; Latane and Rodin, 1969) underscored the counterintuitive point that when it comes to emergencies, there is rarely “safety in numbers.” As this and subsequent research demonstrated, the more people present at an emergency, the lower the likelihood of receiving help. In early research, this phenomenon was called “bystander apathy” (Latane and Darley, 1969) a term that endures in many academic articles (e.g., Abbate et al., 2013). Nevertheless, research demonstrates that most bystanders are far from apathetic in emergencies (Glassman and Hadad, 2008). To the contrary, they are typically quite concerned about the victim, but are psychologically “frozen” by well-established psychological processes, such as pluralistic ignorance, diffusion of responsibility, and sheer fears of appearing foolish.
(7) Chemical imbalance. Thanks in part to the success of direct-to-consumer marketing campaigns by drug companies, the notion that major depression and allied disorders are caused by a “chemical imbalance” of neurotransmitters, such as serotonin and norepinephrine, has become a virtual truism in the eyes of the public (France et al., 2007; Deacon and Baird, 2009). This phrase even crops up in some academic sources; for example, one author wrote that one overarching framework for conceptualizing mental illness is a “biophysical model that posits a chemical imbalance” (Wheeler, 2011, p. 151). Nevertheless, the evidence for the chemical imbalance model is at best slim (Lacasse and Leo, 2005; Leo and Lacasse, 2008). One prominent psychiatrist even dubbed it an urban legend (Pies, 2011). There is no known “optimal” level of neurotransmitters in the brain, so it is unclear what would constitute an “imbalance.” Nor is there evidence for an optimal ratio among different neurotransmitter levels. Moreover, although serotonin reuptake inhibitors, such as fluoxetine (Prozac) and sertraline (Zoloft), appear to alleviate the symptoms of severe depression, there is evidence that at least one serotonin reuptake enhancer, namely tianepine (Stablon), is also efficacious for depression (Akiki, 2014). The fact that two efficacious classes of medications exert opposing effects on serotonin levels raises questions concerning a simplistic chemical imbalance model.
(8) Family genetic studies. The phrase “family genetic studies” is commonly used in psychiatry to refer to designs in which investigators examine the familial aggregation of one or more disorders, such as panic disorder or major depression, within intact (i.e., non-adoptive) families (e.g., Weissman, 1993). Given that the familial aggregation of one or more disorders within intact families could be due to shared environment rather than—or in addition to—shared genes (Smoller and Finn, 2003), the phrase “family genetic study” is misleading. This term implies erroneously that familial clustering of a disorder is necessarily more likely to be genetic than environmental. It may also imply incorrectly (Kendler and Neale, 2009) that studies of intact families permit investigators to disentangle the effects of shared genes from shared environment. Twin or adoption studies are necessary to accomplish this goal.
(9) Genetically determined. Few if any psychological capacities are genetically “determined”; at most, they are genetically influenced. Even schizophrenia, which is among the most heri of all mental disorders, appears to have a heritability of between 70 and 90% as estimated by twin designs (Mulle, 2012), leaving room for still undetermined environmental influences. Moreover, data strongly suggest that schizophrenia and most other major mental disorders are highly polygenic. In addition, the heritability of most adult personality traits, such as neuroticism and extraversion, appears to be between 30 and 60% (Kandler, 2012). This finding again points to a potent role for environmental influences.
(10) God spot. Seizing on functional imaging findings that religious ideation is associated with activations in specific brain regions, such as circumscribed areas of the temporal lobe, some media and academic sources have referred to the discovery of a “God spot” in the human brain (Connor, 1997). Such language is scientifically dubious given that complex psychological capacities, including religious experiences, are almost surely distributed across several sprawling networks that themselves encompass multiple brain regions. Not surprisingly, studies of people undergoing mystical experiences have reported activation in many brain areas, including the temporal lobe, caudate, inferior parietal lobe, and insula (Beauregard and Paquette, 2006; Jarrett, 2014). As one researcher (Mario Beauregard) observed, “There is no single God spot localized uniquely in the temporal lobe of the human brain” (Biello, 2007, p. 43). The same absence of localizational specificity holds for claims regarding the identification of other purported brain regions, such as an “irony spot” or “humor spot” (Jarrett, 2014).
(11) Gold standard. In the domains of psychological and psychiatric assessment, there are precious few, if any, genuine “gold standards.” Essentially all measures, even those with high levels of validity for their intended purposes, are necessarily fallible indicators of their respective constructs (Cronbach and Meehl, 1955; Faraone and Tsuang, 1994). As a consequence, the widespread practice referring to even well-validated measures of personality or psychopathology, such as Hare’s (1991/2003) Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, as “gold standards” for their respective constructs (Ermer et al., 2012) is misleading (see Skeem and Cooke, 2010). If authors intend to refer to measures as “extensively validated,” they should simply do so.
(12) Hard-wired. The term “hard-wired” has become enormously popular in press accounts and academic writings in reference to human psychological capacities that are presumed by some scholars to be partially innate, such as religion, cognitive biases, prejudice, or aggression. For example, one author team reported that males are more sensitive than females to negative news stories and conjectured that males may be “hard wired for negative news” (Grabe and Kamhawi, 2006, p. 346). Nevertheless, growing data on neural plasticity suggest that, with the possible exception of inborn reflexes, remarkably few psychological capacities in humans are genuinely hard-wired, that is, inflexible in their behavioral expression (Huttenlocher, 2009; Shermer, 2015). Moreover, virtually all psychological capacities, including emotions and language, are modifiable by environmental experiences (Merzenich, 2013).
(13) Hypnotic trance. The notion that hypnosis is characterized by a distinct “trance state” remains one of the enduring myths of popular psychology (Lilienfeld et al., 2009). In a sample of 276 undergraduates, Green (2003; see also Green et al., 2006) found that participants gave high ratings (between 5 and 5.5 on 1–7 scale in two experimental conditions) to the item, “Hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness, quite different from normal waking consciousness” (p. 373). Perhaps not surprisingly, the phrase “hypnotic trance” continues to appear in numerous articles written for the general public (Brody, 2008) as well as in academic sources (Raz, 2011). Nevertheless, the evidence that hypnosis is a distinct “trance” state that differs qualitatively from waking consciousness is scant. There is no consistent evidence for distinctive physiological (e.g., functional brain imaging) markers of hypnosis (Lynn et al., 2007). Nor is there persuasive, or even especially suggestive, evidence that hypnosis is associated with unique behavioral features. For example, suggested responses, including hallucinations, amnesia, and pain reduction, can be achieved in the absence of a “hypnotic induction” and even when participants report being awake and alert (Lynn et al., 2015).
(14) Influence of gender (or social class, education, ethnicity, depression, extraversion, intelligence, etc.) on X. “Influence” and cognate terms, such as effect, are inherently causal in nature. Hence, they should be used extremely judiciously in reference to individual differences, such as personality traits (e.g., extraversion), or group differences (e.g., gender), which cannot be experimentally manipulated. This is not to say that individual or group differences cannot exert a causal influence on behavior (Funder, 1991), only that research designs that examine these differences are virtually always (with the rare exception of “experiments of nature,” in which individual differences are altered by unusual events) correlation or quasi-experimental. Hence, researchers should be explicit that when using such phrases as “the influence of gender,” they are almost always proposing a hypothesis from the data, not drawing a logically justified conclusion from them. This inferential limitation notwithstanding, the phrase “the influence of gender” alone appears in over 45,000 manuscripts in the Google Scholar database (e.g., Bertakis et al., 1995).
(15) Lie detector test. Surely one of the most pernicious misnomers in psychology, the term “lie detector test” is often used synonymously with the storied polygraph test. This test is misnamed: it is an arousal detector, not a lie detector (Saxe et al., 1985). Because it measures non-specific psychophysiological arousal rather than the fear of detection per se, it is associated with high false-positive rates, meaning that it frequently misidentifies honest individuals as dishonest (Lykken, 1998). In addition, the polygraph test is susceptible to false-negatives stemming from the use of physical (e.g., biting the tongue) and mental (e.g., performing complex mental arithmetic) countermeasures (Honts et al., 1994). This evidence notwithstanding, the mythical allure of the polygraph test persists. In one survey, 45% of undergraduates agreed that this test is an accurate detector of falsehoods (Taylor and Kowalski, 2010).
