Association (psychology)

Association in psychology refers to a connection between conceptual entities or mental states that results from the similarity between those states or their proximity in space or time. The idea stems from Plato and Aristotle, especially with regard to the succession of memories, and it was carried on by philosophers such as John Locke, David Hume, David Hartley, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and Alexander Bain. It finds its place in modern psychology in such areas as conditioning and in neural network models of memory.

Overview

The following discussion assumes the point of view of associationistic theory. Some modern theorists disagree with this approach; they argue that it is very misleading to try to understand mental or brain function as a network of associations .

Memory

Memory seems to operate as a sequence of associations: concepts, words and opinions are intertwined, so that stimuli such as a person’s face will call up the associated name. Understanding the relationships between different items is fundamental to episodic memory, and damage to the hippocampal region of the brain has been found to hinder learning of associations between objects.

Psychology

Psychology is the study of mind and behavior. It is an academic discipline and an applied science which seeks to understand individuals and groups by establishing general principles and researching specific cases. In this field, a professional practitioner or researcher is called a psychologist and can be classified as a social, behavioral, or cognitive scientist. Psychologists attempt to understand the role of mental functions in individual and social behavior, while also exploring the physiological and biological processes that underlie cognitive functions and behaviors.

Psychologists explore concepts such as perception, cognition, attention, emotion, intelligence, phenomenology, motivation, brain functioning, personality, behavior, and interpersonal relationships, including psychological resilience, family resilience, and other areas. Psychologists of diverse orientations also consider the unconscious mind. Psychologists employ empirical methods to infer causal and correlational relationships between psychosocial variables. In addition, or in opposition, to employing empirical and deductive methods, some—especially clinical and counseling psychologists—at times rely upon symbolic interpretation and other inductive techniques. Psychology has been described as a "hub science", with psychological findings linking to research and perspectives from the social sciences, natural sciences, medicine, humanities, and philosophy.

Scientific Research Publishing

Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP) is an academic publisher of peer-reviewed open-access electronic journals, conference proceedings, and scientific anthologies.As of December 2014, it offers 244English language open access journals in the areas of science, technology, business, economy, and medicine. Its principal place of business is in Wuhan, China.

The company has been accused of being a predatory open access publisher and of using email spam to solicit papers for submission. In 2014 there was a mass resignation of the editorial board of one of the company's journals, with the outgoing Editor-in-Chief saying of the publisher "For them it was only about making money. We were simply their 'front'."

Open access type

According to its website, SCIRP publishes fee-based open-access journals (Gold OA). Payments are incurred per article published. Authors are permitted to archive their work (Green OA). Preprint, postprint, and the publisher's PDF version may be used. According to the society's website, journals published are fully open access, with reuse rights based on CC-BY or CC BY-NC. All of its journals are archived by PORTICO.

Psychology (album)

Psychology (2005) is the first album by Discover America (Chris Staples) on Tooth & Nail Records. It was performed, produced, and fully recorded/engineered by Chris Staples.

Track listing

(all songs written by Chris Staples except where noted)

Association

Association may refer to:

Voluntary associations, groups of individuals who voluntarily enter into an agreement to accomplish a purpose:

Associations in various fields of study:

Association (object-oriented programming)

In object-oriented programming, association defines a relationship between classes of objects that allows one object instance to cause another to perform an action on its behalf. This relationship is structural, because it specifies that objects of one kind are connected to objects of another and does not represent behaviour.

In generic terms, the causation is usually called "sending a message", "invoking a method" or "calling a member function" to the controlled object. Concrete implementation usually requires the requesting object to invoke a method or member function using a reference or pointer to the memory location of the controlled object.

The objects that are related via the association are considered to act in a role with respect to the association, if object's current state in the active situation allows the other associated objects to use the object in the manner specified by the role. A role can be used to distinguish two objects of the same class when describing its use in the context of the association. A role describes the public aspects of an object with respect to an association.

Associative property

In mathematics, the associative property is a property of some binary operations. In propositional logic, associativity is a valid rule of replacement for expressions in logical proofs.

Within an expression containing two or more occurrences in a row of the same associative operator, the order in which the operations are performed does not matter as long as the sequence of the operands is not changed. That is, rearranging the parentheses in such an expression will not change its value. Consider the following equations:

Even though the parentheses were rearranged, the values of the expressions were not altered. Since this holds true when performing addition and multiplication on any real numbers, it can be said that "addition and multiplication of real numbers are associative operations".

Associativity is not to be confused with commutativity, which addresses whether a × b = b × a.

Associative operations are abundant in mathematics; in fact, many algebraic structures (such as semigroups and categories) explicitly require their binary operations to be associative.