Category: R

  • Referential communication

    Communication that makes reference to objects or situations that cannot be experienced directly.  

  • Reference group

    In social psychology, a group that provides a person with attitudinal and behavioral standards.  

  • Reference delusion

    Characterized by a person associating great meaning to insignificant events, delusion. The unjustified belief that event, objects, or other persons have exaggerated significance: delusion. A delusion that causes the patient to read an unintended meaning into the acts or words of others. Usually the affected person interprets comments about others as being directed toward himself…

  • Reduplication

    One of the ways children simplify language by repeating a single syllable of a word in order to represent the whole word, e.g., “wa-wa” for water. Doubling of the heart sounds, which may be heard in healthly individuals and shows variation with respiration due to the slightly asynchronous closure of the heart valves. A doubling,…

  • Reduction mammoplasty

    Reconstruction of the breast through plastic surgery to reduce its size.  

  • Reduction division

    Heterotypic division. The first division of meiosis, in which the chromosome number is halved. The term is sometimes used as a synonym for the whole of meiosis.  

  • Reduction ab absurdum

    In law, an interpretation that would lead to results illogical or not intended.  

  • Reducing valve

    A device attached to an oxygen container to control the pressure of the oxygen delivered to a person. The reduces the pressure from its very high storage level to one suitable for delivery to the person.  

  • Reduced cholesterol (On food labels)

    A food that cannot contain more than one-fourth the cholesterol of the food it replaces, low cholesterol.  

  • Redistribution

    In physiology, the process by which a substance, such as a drug, is distributed through out the body from one area of concentration in order to achieve a uniform concentration systemically. The matching of care personnel resources to the population’s site of care. The term usually is used in discussing the maldistribution of in-hospital personnel…