Psychology & Behaviour
Psychology & Behaviour — 20 high-frequency words, with pronunciation, collocations, easy-to-confuse words and four interactive exercises.
📌 In this lesson
🎯 Lesson goal
The vocabulary of the mind and habits 🧩, more and more common in exams and popular science writing. Twenty terms to talk about motivation, cognitive biases and resilience — with a warning to use them precisely, not as medical labels. 🚀
🗂️ Word Bank
Tap 🔊 to hear the British pronunciation. The IPA transcription is under each word.
📖 Words in context
Why we put things off · tap a highlighted word to hear it.
We tend to explain procrastination as laziness. Psychologists disagree: when we procrastinate, we are usually managing an emotion rather than a schedule.
The mechanism is straightforward. A task carries a trigger — fear of failure, boredom, the memory of a bad mark. Avoiding it produces immediate relief, and relief acts as reinforcement: the brain learns that avoidance works. Repeat this a dozen times and you have a habit. Add a teacher who says *you're just not a maths person*, and low expectations quietly become a self-fulfilling prophecy that erodes self-esteem.
The way out is unglamorous. Replace avoidance with a better coping strategy: reduce the task until starting costs almost nothing. Protect your attention span by removing the phone from the room. Treat difficulty as information rather than as a verdict — the mindset that predicts persistence. None of this requires extraordinary motivation, and all of it builds resilience. burnout, incidentally, works the same way in reverse: it is not weakness, but the price of ignoring well-being for too long.
🔗 Collocations & chunks
Words travel in pairs, not alone: learn the whole chunk.
| Chunk / collocation | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| break a habit | to stop a regular behaviour | It takes weeks to break a habit. |
| cope with pressure | to deal with stress | She copes with pressure remarkably well. |
| bounce back from failure | to recover after failing | Children bounce back from failure quickly. |
| raise awareness of | to help people understand an issue | The campaign raises awareness of burnout. |
| jump to conclusions | to decide too quickly without facts | Try not to jump to conclusions. |
| take something personally | to feel personally hurt by something | Don't take the feedback personally. |
⚠️ Easy-to-confuse words
| English word | Real meaning ✅ | Easy to mix up with ❌ |
|---|---|---|
| sensible | assennato | Not the same as “sensitive” (easily hurt or upset) |
| morbid | unhealthily interested in death | It has nothing to do with “soft” |
| comprehensive | complete, covering everything | Not “kind and sympathetic”: that is understanding |
| stress | pressure; emphasis on a word | Careful: to stress also means “to emphasise” |
🎚️ Register: when to use them
| Expression | Register | When to use it |
|---|---|---|
| He's so OCD about it. | informal and incorrect | avoid it: it uses a clinical label for an ordinary trait |
| He's very meticulous. | neutral | describes behaviour without diagnosing |
| Participants displayed avoidance behaviour. | academic | the right register in a research text |
| Evidence suggests a correlation, not a cause. | academic | the care that separates psychology from popular writing |
🚫 Common mistakes to avoid
| Mistake ❌ | Correct ✅ |
|---|---|
| I have a big stress. | I'm under a lot of stress. |
| He is depressed for the exam. | He's upset about the exam. |
| This argument is very sensible for me. | This topic is very sensitive for me. |
| She has a strong personality character. | She has a strong personality. |
🎮 Vocabulary gym
Four ways to practise the same 20 words. Your progress is saved on this device.
Tap the card to flip it.
Tap an English word, then its meaning. Eight pairs per round.
Complete the ten sentences with the right word. The clue under each sentence will help you.
- The task measures flexibility.💡 The task measures flexibility in thinking.
- is shaped by expectation.💡 The way we see things is shaped by expectation.
- Intrinsic lasts longer.💡 The inner drive to do something lasts longer.
- Positive shapes behaviour.💡 Rewards that strengthen a behaviour shape what we do.
- A forms faster than we think.💡 Something we do regularly forms faster than we think.
- Stress is the most common .💡 Stress is the most common thing that starts a reaction.
- Avoidance is a poor .💡 Avoiding problems is a poor way to deal with difficulty.
- can be learned.💡 The ability to recover from hard times can be learned.
- Constant comparison damages .💡 Constant comparison harms how much you value yourself.
- is not the same as agreement.💡 Understanding how others feel is not the same as agreeing.