Counter-suggestion

A comment or question that challenges a participant’s answer by highlighting a potential contradiction.  Counter-suggestions are commonly used in Piagetian clinical interviews and are designed to counteract the possible suggestive influence of a previous question. See Closed-end interviewing

Cortisol

A hormone, the primary glucocortoid (aka hydrocortisone), secreted by the adrenal cortex glands in response to any kind of physical or psychological stress.  Cortisol has a fundamental role in metabolism and is essential in maintaining normal physiological functions in the liver, heart and lungs, kidneys, the immune system and the brain.  Low or high levels …

Corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH)

A protein-like molecule or neuropeptide produced by the hypothalamus consisting of a chain of amino acids that functions like a hormone to stimulate the release of corticotrophin by the anterior pituitary gland.  From the pituitary gland, it travels to the outer part of the adrenal cortex that secretes cortiocosteroids (mainly glucocorticoids), which are cortisone-like hormones. …

Corticosteroids

Man-made versions of cortisol hormone or naturally produced in the adrenal cortex of the kidneys through being synthesised from cholesterol.  Steroids have anti-inflammatory properties involved in responses to stress.  They work by decreasing inflammation and reducing the activity of the immune system. To understand this, it is necessary to realise that Inflammation is a process …

Cortical lobes

Wernicke’s area See Agnosia, Anterior commissure, Aphasia, Cerebral cortex (or pallium), Cerebral cortex (functions), Cerebellum (development), Declarative (or explicit) and procedural memory, Double dissociation, Entorhinal cortex, Gyrus, Inferior parietal lobe (IPL), Parietal cortex, Primary motor cortex, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST)

Cortical plate

The term for the developing cortex in embryogenesis, before it contains all its cellular components and has differentiated into its mature structure. See Cajal-Retzius cells, Cerebral cortex (development), Embryogenesis

Cortical inhibition hypothesis

Associated with reflexology, it seemingly originated with the founding father of British neurology John Hughlings Jackson (1835-1911) and his idea of physiological inhibition or encephalization based on the brain possessing a hierarchical organisation such that ‘higher’ centers (i.e., the cortex) suppressed the expression of behaviors assumed to be controlled by lower’ centers (i.e., sub-cortical structures …