F
F-Scale (Fascism Scale): The F-Scale is a personality test designed by Theodor Adorno,
Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson & Nevitt Sanford (1950) to measure the authoritarian
personality.
This personality type is defined by 9 traits that were believed to cluster together
as the result of (Psychodynamic) childhood experiences. These traits are conventionalism,
authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception, superstition
and stereotypy, power and ‘toughness’, destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity,
and exaggerated concerns over sexuality (sexual repression). In brief, the ‘authoritarian’
is predisposed to follow the dictates of a strong leader and traditional, conventional
values.
Family Systems Theory: an approach to treatment that emphasises the interdependency
of family members, rather than focusing on individuals in isolation from the family.
This theory underlies the most influential forms of contemporary Family Therapy.
Family Therapy: Family Therapy, sometimes referred to as Couple & Family Therapy
and/or Family Systems Therapy, is a branch of Psychotherapy that works with families
and couples in intimate relationships to nurture change and development. It tends
to view change in terms of the systems of interaction between family members. It
emphasises family relationships as an important factor in psychological health.
Fascism: is an authoritarian nationalist political ideology.
Fascists advocate the creation of a totalitarian single-party state that seeks the
mass mobilisation of a nation through indoctrination, physical education and family
policy including eugenics. Fascists seek to purge forces and ideas deemed to be the
cause of decadence and degeneration and produce their nation's rebirth based on commitment
to the national community, an organic unity where individuals are bound together
by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and ‘blood’. Fascists believe
that a nation requires strong leadership, singular collective identity, and the will
and ability to commit violence and wage war in order to keep the nation strong. Fascist
governments forbid and suppress opposition to the state.
Feminist Theory: Feminist Theory is the extension of Feminism into theoretical, or
philosophical discourse; it aims to understand the nature of gender inequality. It
examines women's social roles and lived experience, and feminist politics in a variety
of fields, such as Anthropology and Sociology, communication, Psychoanalysis, economics,
literary criticism, education and Philosophy.
Fertility: in Sociology the term is used to refer to the actual number of live births
in a certain population in one year.
In Evolutionary Psychology the term is used more to indicative the reproductive capability
of an individual or close group.
Filter Theory of Attention: according to Donald Broadbent's filter theory (1958),
people can attend to only one message at a time. Attention is modelled as a physical
channel that can allow only one message - identified by its physical characteristics
- to pass through into the processes of perception and short-term memory.
Flooding: a Behaviourist therapy which gives the client maximum exposure to a feared
stimulus until the fear subsides, thus extinguishing the learned
response. The exposure can be real or imagined.
Application of the technique needs to be finely judged as high anxiety is a critical
factor in the process. While the therapy has been famously successful in many instances,
debilitating stress reactions in some clients have made the technique controversial.
fMRI: functional magnetic resonance imaging is a technique that directly measures
the blood flow in the brain, thereby providing information on brain activity
Forebrain: that part of the brain comprising the cerebral cortex, the basal ganglia,
the limbic system and the thalamus. See also cerebrum.
Formation: the development
of a person's character, personality and motivations as a whole.
Frame of Reference: a structure of schemas (values, beliefs, memories) on which we
evaluate new information or development of thinking and form primary states and meta-states.
Freudian:
something derived from the work of Sigmund Freud or a follower of his work.
Freudo-Marxism: a loose designation of several mid-
20th-century schools of thought that have sought to synthesise the philosophy and
political economy of Karl Marx with the Psychoanalytic Theory of Sigmund Freud.
A critical question for these schools has been: why did Fascism have mass appeal?
The fact of that appeal confounded much of orthodox Marxist thought. The gist of
the answer Freudo-Marxists give is that the masses have internalised their oppression
as suppression. The internalisation of the upper class in the minds of the lower
class is as a kind of Superego keeping their need for self-expression repressed.
Front Region: see Back Region.
Functionalism: theories in Sociology and Social Anthropology which explain social
institutions primarily in terms of the functions they perform.
A function, in this context, is the consequences of one social activity or phenomenon
for the operation of another social activity, institution or society as a whole.
