Glossary of Terms

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• Anthropology: The study of human kind.
• Cognition: The mental activities involved in acquiring, retaining, and using knowledge.

• Concepts: The mental categories of objects or ideas based on properties that they share.

• Culture: Put simply, what humans do. A system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that the members of a society use to cope with one another and with their world and that are transmitted from generation to generation through learning.

• Cultural Anthropology: The study of humans as cultural beings. The study of specific contemporary human cultures, and of the underlying patterns of human culture in general.

• Classical Conditioning: The form of conditioning or learning first discovered by Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov noticed that dogs he worked with would salivate to any stimulus they learned to associate with food.

• Cultural Anthropology: The study of human behavior.
• DSM-IV: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
• Estrus: Greek, roughly translated as "frantic desire." A recurrent, restricted period of sexual receptivity in female mammals other than humans, marked by intense sexual urge.
• Fetishism: Sexual arousal in response to inanimate objects or body parts that are not typically associated with sexual arousal.
• Mental Image: A mental representation of objects or events that are not physically present.

• Mental or Psychological disorder: A pattern of behavior or psychological symptoms that causes significant personal distress, impairs the ability to function in one or more important areas of life, or both (DSM-IV, 1994).
• Operant: Psychologist B. F. Skinner's term for a voluntary behavior that operates on an organism's environment to produce consequences.

• Operant Conditioning: The system of conditioning studied and publicized by psychologist B. F. Skinner. In Operant Conditioning, an Operant behavior is any activity an organism pursues to interact with or operate on its environment.
• Paradigm: PEHR-uh-daim, from Greek paradeiknyai - to show side by side. A pattern or an example of something. The word also connotes the ideas of a mental picture and pattern of thought.

• Physical Anthropology: The study of humans as physical beings both past and present.

• Paraphilia: Any of several forms of nontraditional sexual behavior in which a person's sexual gratification depends on an unusual sexual experience, object, or fantasy. Unlike the person with a sexual dysfunction, a person with a paraphilia is often not psychologically distressed by it.

• Participant Observation:

• Psychology: The study of human cognition. Defined formally as the science of behavior and mental processes.

• Psychological or Mental disorder: A pattern of behavior or psychological symptoms that causes significant personal distress, impairs the ability to function in one or more important areas of life, or both (DSM-IV, 1994).
• Quicksand: Sand which has become supersaturated with water so that the grains are forced apart and no longer support any weight. Also known as thixotropy.

• Quicksander: A devotee of the quicksand fetish.
• Sexual Dysfunction: A consistent disturbance in sexual desire, arousal, or orgasm that causes psychological distress.
• Thinking: The manipulation of mental representations of information in order to draw inferences and conclusions.

• Thixotropy
• WAM: Wet And Messy sex fetish. A particular branch of sexual fetishism, largely undocumented or misunderstood, possibly unknown to the psychology community.