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 normally related mental processes, resulting in one group functioning independently from the rest, leading in extreme cases to disorders such as multiple personality.
     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.’