1920 Los Angeles Times 14 Aug. ii. 4/2 The professor, whose irreproachable superiority, fostered by psyching, brooked no delinquencies.

1934 J. Rorty Our Master's Voice xxv. 377 The publishers and broadcasters and their allies want this creative psyching of Mr. Throttlebottom to go right on.

1967 D. H. Efron et al. Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs 80 ‘Wild analysis’ and ‘psyching’—probing into one another's supposedly unconscious motives—characterized youth of previous generations.

1975 Time Out 16 May 13/2 None of the heavy ‘psyching’ or banal superstitions that I'd expected.

1990 Internat. H & E Monthly 92 No. 2. 29/3 The next step is to decide how much determination you are going to put into the exercises, this is called ‘psyching up’.

1991 N.Y. Times 8 Oct. b9/2 The general psyching-out the St. Louis Cardinals suffered in the 1987 World Series loss to the Twins.

2002 J. Itiel Sex Workers as Virtual Boyfriends 1 Until that moment, the psyching had been passive and therefore easy to accomplish.

1938 Nebraska State Jrnl. 22 Mar. 15/3 East is known to do considerable ‘psyching’ and in this hand his partner became afraid that the opening diamond bid had been a psychic.

1952 I. Macleod Bridge vii. 95 The other main rule for intelligent psyching is to read your partner's bid as phoney before the opponents find out, and to thicken the smoke screen.

1977 Washington Post 7 Sept. e9 In time the players realized that ‘psyching’ was not a dividend payer.

1999 M. Rosenberg Bridge, Zia..& Me vi. 134 Can psyching be a percentage action?.. The question of whether psyching is advisable is almost purely subjective.