Parapsychological glossary

DECLINE EFFECT: Term used to describe the gradual decrease in high hit performances in a parapsychological experiment, which can be noticeable within a single experiment, an experimental session or over a longer period of time; can also refer to the decline and disappearance of a parapsychic talent.

AGENT [AGENT]: The person in an AASW test who views the information representing the target image and who is to “send” or “transmit” that information to a percipient; in a telepathy test and in cases of spontaneous ASW, the person whose mental state is detected by a percipient. The term can sometimes also refer to the subject in a PK test.

GENERAL EXTRASENSORY PERCEPTION (AASW) [GENERAL EXTRASENSORY PERCEPTION (GESP)]: Neutral collective term for those cases of ASW in which the paranormally mediated information can come from the psyche of another person (in the form of telepathy) or from an objective event or circumstance (in the form of clairvoyance) or from both sources.

ANSAGE(N) [CALL]: (as a noun) the statement the percipient makes when trying to guess the target image in an ASW test; (as a verb) to make a statement/give an answer.

ASW CARDS [ESP CARDS]: Special cards introduced by J.B. Rhine for checking ASW; a standard pack contains 25 cards, each with five different symbols: circle, cross, square, star, wave.

OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCE (AKE) [OUT-OF-THE-BODY EXPERIENCE (OBE)]: An experience, which may be either spontaneous or volitionally induced, in which the focus of consciousness appears to be outside the physical body.

EXTRASENSORY PERCEPTION (ASW) [EXTRASENSORY PERCEPTION (ESP)]: Paranormal cognition; an acquisition of information relating to an external event, object or happening (whether psychic or physical, past, present or future) without a known sensory organ being involved.

PROOF-ORIENTED: Term for experiments that aim to obtain evidence for the existence of psi effects.

DIFFERENTIAL EFFECT: In an experiment in which subjects are tested under two different conditions, a) the tendency of subjects to overperform under one condition and underperform under the other condition (and vice versa), b) the tendency for the subject group as a whole to show more psi hits under one condition and more psi rivets under the other condition.

SINGLE PASS [TRIAL]: An experimentally defined smallest unit of measurement in a psi test: in an ASW experiment, it is usually understood to be the attempt to gain information about a single target object in a paranormal way; in a PK test, it is usually the individual events that are to be influenced.

REMOTE VIEWING: Term for a special experimental design used in connection with ASW, in which the recipient attempts to describe the environment in which the spatially distant transmitter is located.

GANZFELD [GANZFELD]: Term for a particular type of environment (or a technique for creating it) consisting of uniform, unstructured sensory stimulation; an audiovisual ganzfeld is created by placing halved ping-pong balls on the subject’s eyes, which are illuminated from the outside with a diffuse – often reddish – light source; at the same time, the subject receives “white noise” via headphones.

RANDOM EVENT GENERATOR (GZE) [RANDOM EVENT GENERATOR (REG)]: A mostly electronic apparatus containing a design element, e.g. a radioactive source, which can be used to generate a random sequence of states; used in automated psi tests to generate the target sequences; in PK tests, the GZE itself may represent the target system that is to influence the subject; also referred to as a random number generator (RNG).

CLOSED DECK: A procedure to generate the sequence of target images for each individual trial; the successive target images are not generated independently at random, but an already fixed number of target images are randomly shuffled, such as a pack of 25 ASW cards, each containing exactly five of the usual symbols.

CLAIRVOYANCE [CLAIRVOYANCE]: Paranormal acquisition of information that relates to an object or a simultaneously existing physical event; unlike telepathy, the information is said to come from an external physical source and not from the psyche of another person.

CRITICAL FRACTION (KB) [CRITICAL RATIO (CR)]: A mathematical expression used to decide whether the degree of observed deviation from random expectation in a psi experiment is significantly greater than the expected amount of random variation around the mean; the KB is obtained by dividing the observed deviation by the standard deviation; also referred to as the z-value. Critical Ratio of the Difference (CRd): A critical ratio is used to decide whether the hit counts that occur under two different conditions (or in two different subject groups) are significantly different from each other; obtained by dividing the difference between the two total hit counts by the standard deviation of the difference.

MACRO-PK [MACRO-PK]: Any psychokinetic effect whose detection does not depend on statistical analysis; sometimes also used to denote a PK target that is larger than quantum mechanical processes, which may include microorganisms, cubes, or even larger objects

MICRO-PK [MICRO-PK]: Any psychokinetic effect whose detection depends on statistical analysis; sometimes also used to denote a PK target consisting of a quantum mechanical system.

MEAN CHANCE EXPECTATION (MCE): The average (or “mean”) number of hits or the most likely score to be expected in a psi experiment under the null hypothesis, assuming that chance alone plays a role in arriving at the score.

OPEN DECK: An approach to creating a sequence of target images in which each successive target image is selected independently of all others; this is the case, for example, when a standard pack of ASW cards is “open”, i.e. each symbol present is not necessarily equally represented.

PARANORMAL [PARANORMAL]: Term for any phenomenon that in one or more respects goes beyond the limits of what appears to be physically possible on the basis of current scientific assumptions.

PARAPSYCHOLOGY [PARAPSYCHOLOGIE]: The scientific study of certain paranormal (or allegedly paranormal) phenomena, including especially ASW and PK.

PERCIPIENT [PERCIPIENT]: The person who experiences or “receives” an extrasensory influence or impression; also used for someone who is tested for ASW abilities.

POLTERGEIST [POLTERGEIST]: Collective term for disturbing incidents involving physical effects of alleged paranormal origin and suggesting a mischievous or destructive intent. The phenomena include events such as the inexplicable movement or destruction of objects, loud banging or knocking noises, electrical disturbances or fires flaring up. The term is mainly used in the Anglo-American language area.

POSITION EFFECT (PE) [POSITION EFFECT (PE)]: The tendency of scores observed in a psi experiment to vary systematically depending on where they appear on the protocol sheet of the individual experiment.

PRECOGNITION: A form of ASW that involves the perception of future events and cannot be inferred based on known initial data in the present.
PROCESS-ORIENTED: Term for experiments that aim to uncover dependencies between psi effects and other factors or variables.

PSI [PSI]: General term used either as a noun or adjective to denote ASW or PK.

PSI-HITTING: When psi manifests itself in such a way that the target object to which the subject is attuned is “hit” more often (in the form of a correct response in an ASW test or successful influence in a PK test) than would be expected under purely chance conditions.

PSI-MISSING: When psi manifests itself in such a way that the target object to which the subject is attuned is “missed” more often (in the form of an incorrect response in an ASW test or the failed influence in a PK test) than would be expected under purely chance conditions.

PSYCHOKINESIS [PSYCHOKINESIS]: Paranormal action; the psychic or mental influence on a physical system that cannot be fully explained using known physical energies.

RESPONSE BIAS: The tendency to respond or behave in predictable, non-random ways.

RETROACTIVE PK [RETROACTIVE PK]: a PK effect directed backwards in time; to say that event A was caused by retroactive PK is to say that A would not have happened in the way it actually did had it not been influenced by a later PK effect; sometimes abbreviated as retro PK; also called backward PK or time-shifted PK.

SHEEP-GOAT EFFECT (SBE) [SCHAF-BOCK-EFFECT (SGE)]: Term for the acceptance of the possibility that there is a correlation between the occurrence of ASW under certain experimental conditions and the actual hit performance in an ASW test; in a narrower sense, term for the tendency for subjects who do not reject this possibility (“sheep”) to perform above chance and those who reject this possibility (“goats”) to perform below chance.

CONFIDENCE CALL: An utterance that the subject is relatively certain is accurate and states so before comparing the utterance to the target. SPONTANEOUS CASE: Any parapsychic event that occurs spontaneously and often unanticipated in a natural situation – as distinct from experimentally provoked psi phenomena in the laboratory.

MAJORITY-VOTE TECHNIQUE (MV): The so-called repeated or multiple guess technique in ASW tests. The symbol most frequently mentioned by a respondent (or group of respondents) is called the “majority-vote” response for the target item in question, based on the assumption that this response is more likely to be correct than the one based on a single statement.

TELEPATHY [TELEPATHY]: The paranormal acquisition of information that extends to the thoughts, feelings, and actions of another conscious being.

FORCED-CHOICE TEST: Any ASW test in which the respondent must make a statement about fixed and previously known choices.

FREE-RESPONSE TEST: Any ASW test in which the choice of possible targets is relatively unlimited and unknown to the percipient; he can therefore reproduce any impression that comes to his mind.

STACKING EFFECT: A falsely high (or low) score on an ASW test when two or more subjects make statements about the same sequence of target symbols; it occurs as a result of a random overlap between the rate habits of the recipients and the peculiarities in the sequence of target symbols.

DISPLACEMENT: An ASW form exhibited by a percipient who consistently names a target symbol that is displaced by one (or more) position(s) in space or time with respect to the target symbol actually in question on the particular single pass. Backward displacement: Displacement in which the extrasensory target symbol precedes the actual target symbol by one, two or more positions (labeled -1, -2, etc.). Forward displacement: Displacement in which the actually sensed target symbol follows the actually intended target symbol by one, two or more positions (labeled +1, +2, etc.).

EXPERIMENTAL RUN [RUN]: A specified number of individual runs in a psi experiment.

EXPERIMENTER EFFECT: An experimental result that has nothing to do with the manipulation of the variable in question per se, but with the behavior of the experimenter himself, such as unintended communication with the subjects, or possibly a psi-mediated effect in accordance with a wishful thinking or particular motivation of the experimenter.

VARIANCE: A statistical term for the extent to which a group of scores are distributed or scattered around their mean; formally, this is taken to mean the average of the squared deviations from their mean; in parapsychology, this is usually taken to mean the dispersion of a group of scores around their theoretical mean (e.g. as MZE) rather than around their actual observed mean. Variance of the scores per test run [run-score variance]: The variance of the mean of the scores obtained in each trial run. Subject Variance: The variance of the mean of a subject’s total score.

RECURRENT SPONTANEOUS PSYCHOKINESIS (WSPK) [RECURRENT SPONTANEOUS PSYCHOKINESIS (RSPK)]: Term for paranormal physical effects that occur repeatedly over an extended period of time; mainly used as a technical term for poltergeist phenomena.

TARGET: In an ASW test, the object or process that the percipient is trying to identify by means of paranormally mediated information; in a PK test, the physical system (or a predetermined state thereof) that the subject is trying to influence or induce.

GOAL-ORIENTED: Term for the assumption that the intention of a test subject or an experimenter can be realized as economically as possible by means of Psi, regardless of the complexity of the physical system involved.