Psychology Glossary - E

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Ecological approach:

In environmental psychology, the study of behaviour settings in order to predict their effect on particular individuals.

Ego:

In Freudian psychology, one of the three fundamental components of the personality; in the baby, the ego develops out of the id from the age of about 6 months as a result of its life experiences, to become the locus of the emotions.

Ego development:

A collective term for the various stages of life during which a human being acquires and masters those functions necessary to deal with the world at large. The American psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson, has described ego development in terms of eight distinct, psychosocial stages which a human moves through during a lifetime life.

Encoding:

The extraction of information from a stimulus in order to form a memory trace.

EQ:

A term used to describe a person's ability to understand his or her own emotions and the emotions of others and to act appropriately based on this understanding. Then in 1995, psychologist Daniel Goleman popularized this term with his book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ.

Everyday reasoning:

A form of reasoning that is linked with practical action and is based on people’s ability to develop convincing arguments about everyday issues, and which is based on situation modelling.

Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI):

A questionnaire devised by the psychologist Hans Eysenck to capture the dimensions of personality in a questionnaire format for use in psychiatric diagnosis, using the extroversion-introversion and neuroticism-normality dimensions. See also EPQ.

Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ):

A modification of the Eysenck Personality Inventory, incorporating a third dimension, psychoticism to account for more of the variance in data.