6,078 articles
Control freak
Control freak: informal term for a person with an obsessive need to control people and situations; coined around 1969-1970, not a clinical diagnosis, closest counterpart OCPD; linked to intolerance of uncertainty and workplace micromanagement.
Controversial Reddit communities
Controversial Reddit communities (controversial subreddits) are forums sanctioned or criticized for hateful or hostile content; Reddit uses quarantines and bans, notably against r/The_Donald, r/Incels, and r/fatpeoplehate, with mixed measured effects.
Controversy
Controversy: a large, long-lasting public disagreement sustained by opposed argumentative positions, also called public or scientific controversy. Defined by persistence, multiple actors, and value conflicts; measured computationally and linked to polarization and chilling effects.
Convention (norm)
Convention (norm): a self-sustaining behavioral regularity solving a coordination problem, analyzed by David Lewis (Convention, 1969), Peyton Young, and Bicchieri; distinct from injunctive social norms enforced by punishment.
Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriages
UN multilateral treaty (resolution 1763 (XVII), 7 November 1962; New York, 10 December 1962) requiring free consent to marriage, a legislated minimum age, and marriage registration; in force 9 December 1964, 56 parties.
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women
CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, is a 1979 UN treaty defining discrimination against women; 189 states parties, monitored by a 23-expert committee, with a 1999 Optional Protocol.
Conversation
Conversation: structured back-and-forth talk analyzed by conversation analysis (CA), founded by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson in the 1960s–1970s. Key concepts: turn-taking rules, adjacency pairs, and repair.
Coolie
Coolie: historical term for unskilled Asian laborers, especially Indian and Chinese indentured workers in colonial plantations; from Tamil kuli (wages); now widely a racial slur.
Coonass
Coonass (coon-ass) is a slang epithet for a Cajun, used chiefly in Louisiana and southeast Texas; offensive to some, a reclaimed badge of pride to others, with disputed etymology and contested legal status.
Coparenting
Coparenting is the support, solidarity, and coordination between adults sharing a child's upbringing, studied across intact, divorced, step-, and kinship families; dimensions include cooperation, conflict, and triangulation, with meta-analytic links to child adjustment.
Copenhagen Burnout Inventory
The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI) is a free 19-item questionnaire measuring burnout as exhaustion attributed separately to personal life, work, and client work, introduced by Danish researchers Tage Kristensen and colleagues in 2005.
Coping
Coping: the thoughts and behaviors used to manage stressful demands, rooted in the Lazarus and Folkman tradition. Covers problem- and emotion-focused strategies and meta-analytic evidence for CBT, mindfulness, and resiliency training.
Copts (أقباط)
Copts (أقباط, Aqbat) are Egypt's native Christians, chiefly of the Coptic Orthodox Church, about 10 percent of the population and the largest Christian minority in the Middle East, tracing their church to Mark in Alexandria and the 451 Chalcedon schism.
Copycat suicide
Copycat suicide (suicide contagion, Werther effect) is suicide imitating a publicized suicide. Named for Goethe's 1774 Werther; celebrity media reports raise subsequent suicides; Papageno-style recovery stories are protective.
Cordobazo
The Cordobazo was a worker and student uprising in Córdoba, Argentina, on 29 and 30 May 1969, against the military dictatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía.
Coretta Scott King
Coretta Scott King (1927-2006), American civil rights leader, author, and wife of Martin Luther King Jr.; founding president of the King Center, holiday campaign chair, and advocate for peace, women's rights, and anti-apartheid causes.
Cornelia Stuyvesant Vanderbilt
Cornelia Stuyvesant Vanderbilt (1900-1976), American heiress, only child of George and Edith Vanderbilt, inherited Biltmore Estate, opened Biltmore House to the public in 1930, later lived anonymously in England as Mary Goodsir.
Cornish people
Cornish people: the population of Cornwall, England, and those identifying as Cornish; 117,350 identified in Census 2021, recognized as a UK national minority in 2014, with a revived Cornish language.
Corrective feedback
Corrective feedback is any signal indicating a learner's error, given by teachers or automated systems so the learner can repair it; oral strategies include recasts, elicitation, and explicit correction.
Corrective rape
Corrective rape, also called curative rape, is a hate crime of raping lesbian or gender non-conforming people to "cure" their orientation; coined in South Africa, documented especially against black township lesbians, and contested as a term.
Cossacks
Cossacks (kozak, kazak) were self-governing armed steppe communities of the Russia-Poland-Tatar borderlands, later a hereditary military estate of the Russian Empire, revived today as registered state-service hosts in Russia and as a symbol of Ukrainian statehood.
Cottaging
Cottaging, British gay slang (also "tea-room") for seeking or having sex in public lavatories, dating to at least 1729, criminalized under s71 Sexual Offences Act 2003, declined after the 1980s.
CouchSurfing
Couchsurfing is a hospitality exchange and social travel platform founded in 2004, with 25 million members in 200,000+ cities, a paid membership since 2020, and free-stay, no-commercial-use rules; alternatives include BeWelcome, Trustroots, and Couchers.
Cougar (slang)
Cougar slang: an older woman who dates or pursues much younger men, attested by 2002, probably from Canada, popularized by Valerie Gibson's 2001 book; informal, often offensive, distinct from the wild cat.
Coulrophilia
Coulrophilia is attraction to clowns, usually a sexual fetish or paraphilia and the counterpart of coulrophobia. Coined in the late 1980s or 1990s from the uncertain root coulro-, it has online fetish communities and no DSM diagnosis.
Counseling psychology
Counseling psychology, an APA-recognized health service specialty (Division 17, Society of Counseling Psychology), emphasizes strengths, development, prevention, and career issues, contrasting with clinical psychology's focus on psychopathology; both share licensure in all 50 U.S. states.
Counterculture
Counterculture: the youth-based cultural dissent movement of the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, also called the hippie movement, opposing dominant social norms through communes, food co-ops, rock music, and antiwar protest; it peaked in the late 1960s and ended with the Vietnam War in 1975.
Counterculture of the 1960s
The counterculture of the 1960s (also called the hippie movement) was an alternative youth lifestyle of drugs, communal living, protest, and rock music centered on San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, peaking with the 1967 Summer of Love and fading by 1973.
Courtesan
Courtesan: a woman combining sexual commerce with artistic and elite companionship for wealthy patrons, distinct from ordinary prostitutes. Key figures include the Greek hetaira, the Italian cortigiana onesta, the Ming Chinese courtesan, and Edo Japan's oiran of Yoshiwara.
Courtship
Courtship is the social interaction through which people or animals develop a romantic bond in preparation for mating or marriage, spanning animal sexual displays, family-arranged betrothals, twentieth-century dating, and modern dating apps.