The meaning of response is a reply to anything that has been done. How someone reacts to an ink blot on a card is an example of a reaction. 4. Noun: the response of objects to physical and chemical action. Response is used in psychology to describe how individuals or groups react to events or situations. If you ask people what they think will happen when they go to work tomorrow, you can learn a lot about them by watching how they respond. The response may be positive or negative; it may be active or passive; it may be verbal or non-verbal. In psychotherapy, the responses of patients are important factors in determining how successful the treatment will be. Response time is the amount of time it takes for an individual to respond after receiving an stimulus. For example, if you shake a bottle of liquid and listen for the sound it makes, you can estimate how fast it is moving by comparing the sound it makes to the size of the bottle. The speed with which it moves depends on its contents: thin liquids like water take less time than thick ones like milk. In physics, a response is any change in the state of a system caused by a perturbation or disturbance applied to that system. In other words, a response is any effect that occurs after an external force is applied to an object.