D-Dh

Death Rate: the number of deaths per 1,000 people in the population in a year.

Debrief: information provided for a participant at the end of a study by the researcher.

During debriefing, the participants should be informed of the true aims of the study, if they have been deceived. Also participants should be able to raise any concerns they have and be given the right to withdraw data.

Decay Theory: the theory that memory traces fade away with time until their contents (memories) are no longer available.

Decentration: the ability to focus on more than one aspect of a problem, thus overcoming the problem of centration.

Jean Piaget (1946) stated that this type of thinking was typical of a child in the Pre-Operational stage of Cognitive Development. The ability to conserve is an example of the ability to decentre.

Declarative Knowledge: a subdivision of long-term memory - knowing that - distinct from procedural knowledge - knowing how to do something. Declarative knowledge includes episodic and semantic memory.

Deductive Reasoning: drawing a logical conclusion by applying a general law to a particular instance. Going from the general to the particular.

Definition of the Situation: is a fundamental concept in Symbolic Interactionism advanced by the American sociologist William Thomas (1923). It is a kind of collective agreement between people on the characteristics of a situation, and from there, how to appropriately react and fit into it.

Establishing a definition of the situation requires that the participants agree on both the frame of the interaction (its social context and expectations) and on their identities (the person they will treat each other as being for a given situation).

Deindividuation: the loss of a sense of personal identity that can occur when, for example, in a crowd or when wearing the cap and neck-to-ankle distinctive uniform of an organisation.

Deindividuation can have the effect of freeing someone from their more normal behaviour and either inducing conformity to majority influence or making it more likely the deindividuated person will pass into an agentic state of total obedience to a ‘higher authority’.

Demand Characteristics: features of an experiment which help participants work out what is expected of them and leads them to behave in certain predictable ways.

Ie: these features demand a certain response and, thus, end up acting as confounding variables.

Democracy: the aim of this political philosophy is to create ‘rule of the people’ - the people being those who are enfranchised by their society to vote.

In modern Western society this is achieved theoretically by the system of one person/one (secret) vote. However, the concept, in assuming everyone will vote with an independent mind, ignores power relationships and affiliative influences.

In Integrated SocioPsychology, the concept of Stratified Democracy is being developed as a more fluid and flexible application to represent people according to which vMEMES are dominant in their culture.

Democratic Centralism: a principle of Communist party organisation by which members take part in policy discussions and elections at all levels but must follow decisions made at higher levels.

Demography: the statistical study of human populations with regard to their size and structure - ie; their composition by sex, age, marital status, type of occupation and ethnic origin - and to the changes in these populations - ie: birth rates, death rates, migration, etc.

Dendrite: the branching, tree-like receptors attached to the soma of a neuron.

Dendrites are stimulated by neurotransmitters flowing across the synaptic gap from other (presynaptic) neurons.

Denial: one of the ego defence mechanisms first put forward by Sigmund Freud and documented by his daughter, Anna (1936).

In Integrated SocioPsychology, ego defence mechanisms are reframed as selfplex defence mechanisms.

Dependency: in World Sociology the theory explaining how Third World countries have been manipulated (via Colonialism) into becoming dependent on more powerful countries for investment, trade, aid, debt relief, charity, etc.

The concept was developed primarily by André Gunder Frank (1967, 1969).

Dependency Culture: a way of life where people (theoretically) become incapable of independence and rely on the state to meet their needs.

Dependency Ratio: the ratio of working to dependent members of society - ie: the proportion of children, the elderly, the unemployed, etc, to those who support them physically and through tax payments.

Dependent variable: see variable.

Depenetration: the reduction - or even abandonment - of self-disclosure in a relationship.

Depression: see Clinical Depression.

Deprivation: the state of having lost or been dispossessed.

There are several applications of the term in Psychology:-

• Attachments - the experience of bond disruption as a consequence of separation from an attachment figure for a period of time (repeated short-term separations or long-term separation
• Visual Deprivation - the removal of visual stimulation during early development results in permanent effects on the visual system
• Sleep Deprivation - the effect on performance of significant amounts of missed sleep

In Sociology the term is used more to mean the lack of economic support generally accepted as basic essentials of human experience - though the need for emotional support is also widely recognised amongst sociologists. Humanistic psychologists such as Abraham Maslow also clearly recognise that care, shelter and security are basic human needs necessary for the development of the individual’s potential. See Self-Actualisation and Hierarchy of Needs.

Deprivation Dwarfism: the sometime physical underdevelopment of children reared in isolation in institutions.

The condition was first identified by Elsie Widdowson (1951) who studied a group of orphanage children who were physically underdeveloped.The idea that emotional deprivation can result in physical underdevelopment fitted all but perfectly with John Bowlby’s (1951) theory of Maternal Deprivation and his statement (1953) that "...prolonged deprivation of a young child of maternal care may have grave and far reaching effects on his character...similar in form...to deprivation of vitamins in infancy."

Depth/Distance (Visual) Perception: the ability to experience the world in 3 dimensions by using monocular and binocular cues to assess depth and distance between objects.

Depth of Processing: the extent to which something is processed - not in terms of how much processing is done (repitition) but in terms of how much meaning is extracted.

Derived Etic: the use of a series of emic studies to build up a picture of a particular culture.

Descent Group: a group defined on the basis of descent from a common ancestor or ancestress.

The group can consist of children of the same father/mother, of grandchildren of the same grandmother/father, great-grandchildren of the same great-grandparent, etc, or of the descendents of these persons.

Descriptive Validity: is concerned with the truthfulness and accuracy of the data in research, how it was collected and how inferences were made from it.

Determinism: the view that an individual’s behaviour is shaped or controlled by internal or external forces rather than an individual’s will to do something.

Development: in Sociology and Anthropology, the process by which societies move from agrarian-based economies and social structures to become complex modern industrial societies.

Developmental Psychology: from conception and infancy to old age and death, the study of changes over people's lifespan.