noun

• 1The action of disconnecting or separating or the state of being disconnected.

  ‘we in the West honour a long-standing dissociation between church and state’

  More example sentences

  • ‘For simplicity, the times separating association and dissociation events of the transcription factors are modeled as a random variable that follows a Poisson distribution.’
  • ‘Single stomach smooth muscle cells were isolated by enzymatic dissociation with trypsin and collagenase as described previously.’
  • ‘It is that dissociation that has so troubled us, so alienated us.’
  • ‘By this method, they were able to measure separately the formation and dissociation rates for a few applied voltages.’
  • ‘That complete dissociation from one's old life I found appalling.’
  • ‘Can we drop the alibi of ignorance - the endless insistence that we did not know - and resist the seductive lures of solipsism, of denial, of dissociation?’
  • ‘Such judgment is a kind of abstract dissociation from experience that directs our emotions into proper channels like a letter of complaint that defuses itself by its own propriety.’
  • ‘What Shiang herself experiences in Paris, as an almost accidental tourist who doesn't speak French, is severe dislocation and even dissociation.’
  • ‘This dissociation between the strength of the regional identity and its expression on the ideological plane is the locus of the flexibility and endurance of the movement.’
  • ‘Evidence of Amis' complete dissociation from contemporary culture has played out lately amid his spacy declarations concerning the internet.’
  • ‘It's true that the blockades are exciting, but what is truly exiting about the organization is that it brooks no dissociation between that excitement and our everyday lives.’
  • ‘The latter term is in dissociation from those scientific strategies which might be designated as statistical analysis of experimental behavior.’
  • ‘The oscillating effect necessarily draws upon all that is absent, creating an inevitable and disturbing condition of dissociation.’
  • ‘I wonder at Julian's severe dissociation of mind and body.’
  • ‘In Hobsbawm's case, its interest lies not in any dissociation, but in the connection between political loyalty and social accommodation.’
  • ‘But California's decades of dissociation from reality are catching up with it.’
  • ‘We were surprised to be able to distinguish the dissociation of fibers, as the fluorescence signal from fibers is only 9% of the total fluorescence from the virus.’

  Synonyms

  separation, disconnection, detachment, severance, divorce, uncoupling, split, setting apart

  View synonyms

  1. 1.1Chemistry The splitting of a molecule into smaller molecules, atoms, or ions, especially by a reversible process.
     ‘The energy required for a chemical reaction depends on the bond dissociation energy of the atoms comprising the molecules.’
     More example sentences

     • ‘In the case of diatomic molecules, the dissociation energy refers to the energy required to break the gaseous molecules into their constituent atoms.’
     • ‘Wigner's thesis contains the first theory of the rates of association and dissociation of molecules.’
     • ‘These phenomena ultimately depend on the molecular association and dissociation rate constants.’
     • ‘The presented study has revealed single-molecule dissociation data for RNA molecules of increasing structural complexity.’
  2. 1.2Psychiatry Separation of some aspects of mental functioning from conscious awareness, leading to a degree of mental dysfunction or to mental conditions including dissociative identity disorder.
     count noun ‘the dissociations that one can observe in neuropsychological patients’
     More example sentences

     • ‘Dissociative experiences are considered to range from the minor dissociations of everyday life to dissociative psychopathology, with higher scores on the DES indicating a greater degree of dissociation.’
     • ‘Even when the corpus callosum is intact, striking dissociations of consciousness can be demonstrated.’
     • ‘More recent thinking, again of researchers working with adults, has raised questions about the meaning of explicit-implicit dissociations in directed forgetting.’
     • ‘Two separate dissociations occurred in Experiments 1 and 2 involving repetition priming in the context of a trivia paradigm.’
     • ‘A social judgement task was used to index dissociations between implicit and explicit memory.’