Psychology Word Search With Brain, Memory and Research Lists

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Psychology Word Search

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0 of 16 words found

DSSENSATIONWIAE

PPSYCHOLOGYELSL

BWTDIDENTITYPTE

NANRESPONSEGEIN

XCOGNITIONXMRMR

AYAHXSBEOEPOCUS

OCORTEXLDLETELM

SVPNNMINDARIPUY

CFFEJOAOIHIVTSN

RHRUCLHACEMAIFM

DLARGWVHSTETOMA

SHCONDITIONINGE

RQINSBRAINTOFVR

HYPOTHESISNNNKF

DGVZINSTINCTQNN

This grid is wider and taller than its box. Slide it to see every letter.To drag, hold the first letter for a moment, then slide.Keyboard: Tab to the grid, arrow keys to move, Enter on the first and last letter.

MindMIND
BrainBRAIN
NeuronNEURON
CortexCORTEX
CognitionCOGNITION
InstinctINSTINCT
SensationSENSATION
PerceptionPERCEPTION
ConditioningCONDITIONING
StimulusSTIMULUS
ResponseRESPONSE
MotivationMOTIVATION
IdentityIDENTITY
ExperimentEXPERIMENT
HypothesisHYPOTHESIS
PsychologyPSYCHOLOGY

16 of 24 words from the Psychology Terms list.

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Answer key: Psychology Word Search

DSSENSATIONWIAE

PPSYCHOLOGYELSL

BWTDIDENTITYPTE

NANRESPONSEGEIN

XCOGNITIONXMRMR

AYAHXSBEOEPOCUS

OCORTEXLDLETELM

SVPNNMINDARIPUY

CFFEJOAOIHIVTSN

RHRUCLHACEMAIFM

DLARGWVHSTETOMA

SHCONDITIONINGE

RQINSBRAINTOFVR

HYPOTHESISNNNKF

DGVZINSTINCTQNN

MIND, BRAIN, NEURON, CORTEX, COGNITION, INSTINCT, SENSATION, PERCEPTION, CONDITIONING, STIMULUS, RESPONSE, MOTIVATION, IDENTITY, EXPERIMENT, HYPOTHESIS, PSYCHOLOGY

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All 190 words

Mind and Brain 26

Amygdala An almond-shaped part deep in the brain with an important role in fear and other feelings.
Axon The long fiber of a nerve cell that carries signals away from the cell body.
Brain The organ inside the skull that controls thought, movement and feeling.
Cerebellum The part at the back of the brain that keeps movement smooth and the body balanced.
Cerebrum The largest part of the brain, split into a left half and a right half.
Cognition All the ways of knowing: thinking, remembering, judging and solving problems.
Consciousness Being awake and aware of yourself and the world around you.
Cortex The outer layer of the brain, tied to language, learning, perception and planning.
Dendrite A branch of a nerve cell that receives signals from other cells.
Dream A story of images and feelings that the mind makes during sleep.
Ego In the theory of Freud, the part of the personality that deals with the real world.
Emotion A feeling such as joy or fear, with changes in the body, the face and the thoughts.
Frontal lobe The front part of each half of the brain, used for movement, planning and decisions.

Show all 190 words (177 more)

Mind and Brain, continued

Hemisphere One of the two halves, left and right, of the brain.
Hippocampus A part deep in the brain, shaped like a sea horse, that is important for forming memories.
Hypothalamus A small part at the base of the brain that is involved in hunger, thirst and sleep.
Instinct An inborn pattern of behavior shared by a whole species, such as nest building in birds.
Memory The power to store what you learn and bring it back to mind later.
Mind All the thinking, feeling and remembering that goes on inside a person.
Myelin The fatty coating around many nerve fibers. It helps signals travel faster.
Nerve A bundle of fibers that carries messages between the brain and the body.
Neuron A nerve cell. It carries signals through the body as tiny electrical pulses.
Plasticity The ability of the brain to change and rewire itself as a person learns.
Reflex A fast automatic reaction, such as blinking, that needs no thought.
Spinal cord The thick bundle of nerves inside the backbone that links the brain and the body.
Synapse The tiny gap where a signal passes from one nerve cell to the next.

Sensation and Perception 23

Adaptation Getting used to a steady signal, as when a smell fades after a few minutes.
Afterimage A picture that stays in view for a moment after the thing that caused it is gone.
Blind spot The small patch at the back of the eye with no light cells, where the nerve leaves.
Closure The rule that the mind fills in gaps, so a broken circle is seen as complete.
Cochlea The snail-shaped tube in the inner ear that turns sound waves into nerve signals.
Cone A light cell in the eye that needs bright light and gives information about color.
Gestalt From a German word for shape or form. We tend to see a whole pattern, not loose parts.
Hue The quality of a color that lets us name it red, green or blue.
Illusion A false reading by the senses, such as two equal lines that look unequal.
Iris The colored ring of muscle in the eye that controls how much light gets in.
Lens The clear part behind the colored ring of the eye that focuses light.
Optic nerve The cable of fibers that carries signals from the eye to the brain.
Perception The way the brain organizes signals from the senses and makes meaning of them.
Pitch How high or low a sound seems: the quality that orders notes on a musical scale.
Proximity The rule that things placed close together are seen as one group.
Pupil The dark opening in the middle of the eye that lets light in.
Receptor A cell that detects one kind of signal, such as light, heat or pressure.
Retina The layer at the back of the eye that turns light into nerve signals.
Rod A light cell in the eye that works in very dim light and gives no color information.
Sensation The first step of sensing: eyes, ears or skin pick up a signal and send it on.
Similarity The rule that things that look alike are seen as belonging together.
Threshold The weakest signal, such as the faintest sound, that a person can just detect.
Vision The sense of sight.

Learning and Behavior 22

Association A learned link between two things, such as a bell and dinner.
Behavior Anything a person or animal does that can be watched and measured.
Conditioning Learning in which a signal or a result becomes linked with a behavior.
Cue A signal that guides behavior or helps bring a stored fact back to mind.
Drive An inner push, such as hunger or thirst, to give the body what it lacks.
Extinction The fading of a learned behavior when the payoff stops coming.
Habituation Reacting less and less to a harmless signal that keeps repeating.
Imitation Copying what someone else does.
Imprinting Fast early learning in which a newly hatched chick follows the first moving thing it sees.
Incentive An outside prize or payoff that pulls a person toward an action.
Insight The sudden aha moment when the answer to a problem becomes clear.
Latent learning Knowledge picked up with no payoff that shows only later, when it is needed.
Modeling Showing a behavior so that a watcher can learn it by example.
Motivation The push, from inside or outside, that gets a person to act toward a goal.
Operant The name for a behavior that acts on the world and is changed by its results.
Punishment A result that follows a behavior and makes it less likely to happen again.
Reinforcement Anything that follows a behavior and makes it more likely to happen again.
Response What a person or animal does as a reaction to a signal.
Reward Something pleasant given after a behavior, such as a treat for a trick.
Shaping Teaching a new behavior by rewarding each small step toward it.
Stimulus Anything, such as a sound or a light, that causes a reaction.
Trial and error Solving a problem by trying one thing after another until something works.

Memory and Thinking 24

Algorithm A step-by-step method that is sure to solve a problem if followed exactly.
Chunking Grouping items into larger units, as when a phone number is split into three parts.
Concept A mental group of things that share features, such as the idea of a bird.
Creativity The ability to produce ideas that are both new and useful.
Encoding The first step of remembering: turning what you sense into a form the brain can keep.
Episodic memory Your record of events from your own life, such as your last birthday.
Forgetting Losing the ability to bring back something that was once learned.
Heuristic A quick rule of thumb for solving a problem. It is fast but can be wrong.
Hindsight bias The feeling, after an event, that you knew all along how it would turn out.
Imagery Pictures, sounds or other sense experiences that you form in your mind.
Intelligence The ability to learn from experience, solve problems and adapt to new situations.
Interference When old learning gets in the way of new learning, or new in the way of old.
Judgment The skill of weighing facts and forming an opinion or a decision.
Language A system of words and rules that people use to share meaning.
Mnemonic A trick, such as a rhyme, that helps you remember something.
Priming When meeting one thing makes a related thing come to mind faster.
Prototype The best or most typical example of a category, such as your mental picture of a bird.
Reasoning Thinking in logical steps from facts to a conclusion.
Recall To bring a fact back to mind with no hints, as on a fill-in-the-blank test.
Rehearsal Repeating information over and over to keep it in mind.
Retrieval The third step of remembering: getting kept information back out.
Schema A mental framework of what you know about a topic, used to make sense of new facts.
Semantic memory Your store of general facts, such as the meanings of words.
Storage The second step of remembering: keeping information over time.

Development and Personality 25

Adolescence The period of life between childhood and adulthood. It starts at about age 10 to 12.
Adulthood The period of life after a person has finished growing up.
Attachment The close bond between a baby and the person who cares for the baby.
Childhood The period of life from about age 2 until adolescence begins.
Conservation Knowing that an amount stays the same when its shape changes, as water in a tall glass.
Development The changes in body, thinking and social life from birth to old age.
Egocentrism In a young child, not yet being able to see things from the view of another person.
Environment Everything around a person that shapes them: family, school, friends and place.
Extraversion A leaning toward the outer world of people and things more than toward your own thoughts.
Gene The basic unit of heredity, passed from parent to child.
Heredity The passing of qualities from parents to their children through genes.
Hierarchy An order of levels. Maslow ranked human needs this way, with food and water at the base.
Identity The sense a person has of who they are.
Infancy The earliest period of life, from birth through about the first year.
Introversion A leaning toward the inner world of your own thoughts more than toward people and things.
Maturation The natural unfolding of growth that follows a built-in timetable.
Need Something a person must have to be well, such as food, safety or belonging.
Nurture Upbringing and experience: one side of a famous debate. The other side is heredity.
Personality The lasting pattern of thoughts, feelings and actions that makes each person unique.
Scaffolding Help from a teacher that is taken away bit by bit as the learner can do more alone.
Self-esteem How much a person values and likes himself or herself.
Stage One step in a fixed order of growth. Piaget described four for the thinking of children.
Temperament The basic style of reacting that shows early in life, such as calm or active.
Trait A lasting quality of a person, such as being shy or outgoing.
Unconscious In the theory of Freud, the part of the mind that works outside of awareness.

Research Methods 26

Bias A lean in one direction that makes a result less fair or less accurate.
Case study A detailed look at one person or one small group.
Control group The people in a study who do not get the change being tested, used for comparison.
Correlation A measure of how closely two things rise and fall together. It does not prove cause.
Data The facts and numbers collected in a study.
Debriefing Explaining the full purpose of a study to the people in it after it ends.
Ethics The rules of right conduct that protect the people and animals in a study.
Experiment A study in which the researcher changes one thing and measures what happens.
Hypothesis A prediction that can be tested by a study.
Interview A set of questions asked aloud to gather information from one person.
Mean The average: add all the scores, then divide by how many there are.
Median The middle score when all the scores are lined up in order.
Mode The score that turns up most often in a set.
Observation Carefully watching and recording what people or animals do.
Participant A person who takes part in a study.
Population The whole set of people a researcher wants to learn about.
Questionnaire A written list of questions that people answer about themselves.
Range The gap between the highest and the lowest score in a set.
Reliability How well a test gives the same result each time it is used.
Replication Repeating a study to see whether the same result turns up again.
Sample The smaller set of people who take part in a study, chosen from a larger set.
Statistics The branch of math used to sum up numbers and judge what they show.
Survey A study that asks many people the same set of questions.
Theory A set of connected ideas that explains many findings and predicts new ones.
Validity How well a test measures what it claims to measure.
Variable Anything in a study that can change or take different values.

Schools and Psychologists 23

Asch Solomon, known for conformity experiments that showed the pull of group pressure.
Behaviorism The school of thought that studies only actions that can be seen and measured.
Binet Alfred, the French psychologist who with a partner made the first practical intelligence test.
Calkins Mary Whiton, elected in 1905 as the first woman to lead the American Psychological Association.
Ebbinghaus Hermann, the German who pioneered the study of memory and found the forgetting curve.
Erikson Erik, whose theory of social growth has eight stages that span the whole of life.
Freud Sigmund, the Austrian doctor whose theory split the mind into the id, ego and superego.
Functionalism An early school that asked how the mind helps a person adapt, not what it is made of.
Introspection Looking inward and reporting on your own thoughts and feelings.
James William, the American whose 1890 book The Principles of Psychology shaped the field.
Jung Carl, the Swiss thinker who created the ideas of extraversion and introversion.
Maslow Abraham, the American psychologist who created a famous hierarchy of human needs.
Pavlov Ivan, the Russian scientist known for classical conditioning, found in work with dogs.
Piaget Jean, the Swiss psychologist who described four stages in how children think.
Psychologist A person trained in the scientific study of the mind and behavior.
Psychology The scientific study of the mind and behavior.
Rogers Carl, the American among the founders of humanistic psychology.
Skinner B. F., the American who studied operant conditioning with a box, a lever and a reward.
Structuralism An early school, usually credited to Wundt, that looked for the basic parts of the mind.
Thorndike Edward, the American known for the law of effect and the puzzle boxes he built.
Vygotsky Lev, the Russian psychologist famous for studying how children develop.
Watson John B., the American who set out behaviorism in 1913 and made it a school of thought.
Wundt Wilhelm, who in 1879 founded the first laboratory for psychological research, in Leipzig.

How this list was compiled: 190 psychology course words chosen and defined for this site, in eight themed lists plus a key terms list, an easy list and a hard list. Each of the 173 terms was read in the American Psychological Association's APA Dictionary of Psychology, https://dictionary.apa.org/, on 2026-09-19, and spellings were checked the same day in the American Heritage Dictionary, https://www.ahdictionary.com/; six terms it does not enter, such as Latent learning, follow the APA dictionary. The 17 psychologists are named by surname only and all died in or before 1996; the dates and findings in their clues were checked the same day in each person's English Wikipedia article, https://en.wikipedia.org/. This is course vocabulary only: no diagnosis, disorder, treatment, medicine or crisis word is listed. Clues are our own wording. Licence: own work

How it works

This psychology word search sorts 190 words into eight course units, from Mind and Brain to Schools and Psychologists, plus an easy and a hard list. The first puzzle hides 16 of 24 core terms, such as Neuron, Conditioning and Hypothesis, across and down.

Read the full guide

Pick the unit your class has reached

Under the puzzle, Start from a list has a list for each unit of a high school or first-year course. Sensation and Perception holds 23 words, from Rod and Cone to Afterimage. Research Methods holds 26, from Sample and Survey to Replication. Schools and Psychologists adds 17 surnames, Pavlov to Vygotsky.

Review a unit from the clues

Tick Show clues, not words. Students read "A quick rule of thumb for solving a problem. It is fast but can be wrong" and hunt for Heuristic. Each clue is a one-line meaning, so the sheet works as review before a unit test.

Easy Psychology Words suits day one of the course: 30 words of 3 to 5 letters, such as Mind, Trait and Bias.
Latent learning and 12 more two-part entries hide as one run, LATENTLEARNING: keep Learning and Behavior at 14 by 14 or larger, under More options.
Femur, Artery and the rest of the body are on the human body word search.

Questions and answers

Which psychologists are on the list?

Seventeen surnames of the past, from Wundt, who founded the first laboratory for psychological research in 1879, to Pavlov, Piaget, Skinner and Asch. Calkins is there too: in 1905 she was elected the first woman to lead the American Psychological Association.

Which psychology words are on the list?

The 190 words cover the brain, the senses, learning, memory, development, social psychology, research methods and 17 psychologists of the past. It is course vocabulary only: no diagnosis, disorder or treatment word is listed, and no living person is named.

Why is it spelled Extraversion, not Extroversion?

Extraversion is the form in the APA Dictionary of Psychology, so the puzzle follows it. The American Heritage Dictionary gives it as a variant of extroversion. Carl Jung, who created the pair extraversion and introversion, is in Schools and Psychologists.

How were the terms and meanings checked?

Every term was checked against its entry in the APA Dictionary of Psychology in September 2026; the clue wording is our own. Spellings were looked up in the American Heritage Dictionary, and the facts about the 17 psychologists come from Wikipedia, read the same day.

All 190 words

Mind and Brain 26

Mind and Brain, continued

Sensation and Perception 23

Learning and Behavior 22

Memory and Thinking 24

Development and Personality 25

Social Psychology 21

Research Methods 26

Schools and Psychologists 23

How it works

Pick the unit your class has reached

Review a unit from the clues

Questions and answers

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