Interactive map of official diagnostic manual usage worldwide & lexical/contextual analysis of risk-taking within psychological frameworks.
Countries officially mandating ICD but using DSM in clinics.
Risk-taking is a hyphenated compound word. These often denote a single concept. Risk-taking is not only a case of this. For the American Psychology Association, temporary compound words of the sort follow a naming convention inculcated in North American psychophiles1 so as to remove any ambiguity in a term’s usage within the academic and clinical community (Hyphenation Principles, 2019).
Giving the definition of the words risk and take along with their etymology is therefore inadequate in defining what exactly is Risk-taking in the context of a psychological principle. Furthermore, psychology is described as a scientific approach to understanding the mind of most ‘simple’ to complex organisms – stemming from biology, physiology and some branches of contemporary philosophy (Rebber2, 1985, my emphasis). It’s arguably a deeply human study. Simple organisms is a broad categorization, even for the 1980s.
The study of the mind of animals requires living beings who at least have one. One similar enough to ours so to accurately interpret the data gathered by observation or experimentation. This would narrow the definition down to a small list of living creatures whose common criterion is a likeness to the human mind. Arising from these purely human abstractions, it would be inadequate to define such a term as what psychological Risk-taking is for all homominded animals by what one group of English-speaking psychophilic group would describe it as, within the sole constraints of their academic governing body. Especially since there readily are other groups of psychophilic human animals with similar language to describe the same concept.
Finally, this assignment is a precursor to a likert-scale questionnaire, which has yet to demonstrate successful data collection and interpretation in any non-human animal species (citation needed?). The upcoming definition would need to operationalize human minds. Therefore, to adequately define Risk-taking in psychology, all diagnostic references used globally by all governing bodies (DSM, ICD, CFTMEA, GLADP, etc., …) have been compiled. The global interpretation of Risk-taking as defined by psychophilic authorities based on native languages was compiled.
1 Psycho-philia: Love for psyche. By extent, a longing to conform with the norms precedented by authority figures in the group, such as the researchers who define the terms and subsequently the practitioners who use them to offer relevant services to the public (e.g., psychologist in clinic or behavioural analysts for casinos). Not to be confused with Psychrophiles: psychrophilic organisms. Though some far Northern dwelling psychophiles could be considered by some of their endemic equatorial relatives to be psychrophiles as well.
2 Reber, A. S. (1985). Psychology. The penguin dictionary of psychology (pp. 593–593).