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Definition of "fixate" []

  • To make fixed, stable, or stationary. (verb-transitive)
  • To focus one's eyes or attention on: fixate a faint object. (verb-transitive)
  • To command the attention of exclusively or repeatedly; preoccupy obsessively: "TV and newspapers were fixated on high-technology as the solution to almost everything” ( Jay Walljasper). (verb-transitive)
  • Psychology To attach (oneself) to a person or thing in an immature or neurotic fashion. (verb-transitive)
  • Psychology In classical psychoanalysis, to cause (the libido) to be arrested at an early stage of psychosexual development. (verb-transitive)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Use "fixate" in a sentence
  • "Mr. FEHRMAN: As a culture, we just kind of fixate on this idea of a writer who's alone and doing his work."
  • "For the 'fixate' (dashed line with asterisks) encoding condition, the eccentricity was calculated as the mean eccentricity of the most peripheral dot of a sample pair of dots. doi: 10.1371/journal. pone.0009918.g003"
  • "The difference in decoded locations (separations) for the 'fixate' and 'saccade' trials are plotted in Theoretical neuronal populations response to a pair of dots."