confidentiality

n. a principle of professional ethics requiring providers of mental health care or medical care to limit the disclosure of a patient’s identity, his or her condition or treatment, and any data entrusted to professionals during assessment, diagnosis, and treatment. Similar protection is given to research participants and survey respondents against unauthorized access to information they reveal in confidence. See informed consent; Tarasoff decision. —confidential adj.

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Psychology term of the day

April 20th 2024

fuzzy set theory

an approach to set theory that allows gradations of membership in a set, instead of only assigning a 0 or a 1 that would indicate nonmembership or absolute membership, respectively. Some phenomena are more readily modeled with fuzzy set theory than conventional binary set theory. For example, in designation of a mental illness, fuzzy set theory may be employed to allow for cases in which individuals could be classified somewhere between having an absence and a full diagnosis of a particular condition.