Clinical and Motivational Phenomena

Groups the phenomena of the psychology atlas whose central finding concerns how expectation, threat or emotional release affects a person's wellbeing, motivation or behavior in a way most closely studied through clinical or therapeutic psychology, distinct from Medicine's own diagnosed conditions. Belongs here: the Nocebo Effect, in which a person's negative expectation about a treatment worsens its actual effect; Stockholm Syndrome, the disputed pop-psychology account of a hostage bonding with a captor; Catharsis, the purging of buried emotion associated with Freudian psychoanalysis; and Learned Helplessness, the diminished effort that follows repeated exposure to an uncontrollable aversive situation. A phenomenon whose distortion concerns ordinary private judgment, memory or the presence of other people, with no clinical or motivational dimension, is filed under one of the atlas's other psychological-phenomenon groups instead.