Relativism (or cultural relativism)

The anthropological doctrine originating with the Greek Sophists, and especially as espoused by J. Melville Herskovits (1895-1963), that the values and institutions of any culture are self-validating.  Thus, there are no universals in human behaviour or anything like a ‚aapsychic unity of mankind‚aa, and no universal standards of good, bad, right and wrong. The issue can …

Relative distance

The spatial relationships among objects and surfaces relative to each other and the observer that indicate which are nearer or farther (e.g., “the red ball is halfway between the yellow ball and the blue ball.”).  See Absolute distance, Allocentric search, Binocular disparity, Depth perception, Kinetic depth information, Pictorial depth cues

Reinforcer

A stimulus that has the power to alter the strength or probability of a behavior if it is made contingent on that behavior.  See Behavior modification, Discrimination, Escape learning, Mobile conjugate reinforcement, Operant (or instrumental) conditioning, Operant train task, Reinforcement schedule

Reification

To regard or treat an abstraction as if it had a concrete or material existence. Some have argued that IQ and the attention deficit hyperactivity syndrome, as well as some other medicalized behaviour disorders (e.g., Munchausen‚was syndrome by proxy), are examples of reification or rather a reification fallacy.

Reinforcement schedule

A well-defined procedure for reinforcing a given response only a certain proportion of the time it occurs.  See Behavior modification, Discrimination, Learning, Mobile conjugate reinforcement, Observational learning, Operant (or instrumental) conditioning, Operant train task, Reinforcer

Regulator (or regulatory) genes

Also known as a transacting element and a transcriptional regulatory element, it is a gene whose protein controls the activity and expression of one or more structural genes or metabolic pathways.  In the Jacob-Monod operon model, these hypothetical genes acted only as repressors, but in later models they were assigned both repressor and activator roles. …