Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) practitioners will be the first to tell you that all personality types are created equal. There is no one best or worst personality type. And yet, even the most experienced type practitioners may admit that at times, they wish they had a different personality type. Do we just want what we don't have? Ladies, you will understand this analogy- if you have curly hair, what do you wish you had? Straight hair. If you have straight for, what do you spend hundreds of dollars trying to make your hair do? Be curly.I don't generally think there's a problem with type…
Psychology
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THE MBTI BLOG
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"Shhhh....I'm an ISTJ. Don't tell."
5 Nov 2009 | 6:32 pm -
The Obligatory Halloween-Themed Post- I'm Going as an ENFP This Year!
28 Oct 2009 | 10:46 pmAside from the fact that it's only 2 days until Halloween, and it's necessary for all bloggers to write a Halloween-themed post, I happen toLOVE Halloween. It is by far my favorite holiday.What's not to like? Dressing up as someone/something else? Randomly bugging neighbors you would normally never acknowledge? Getting to peek inside of your neighbors houses? FREE CANDY? The question of whether you will get a trick OR a treat? Wearing a mask so no one knows who you are? The ability to remain in character as long as you want? Making art out of vegetables? Watching "It's the Great Pumpkin,… -
Money, Money, Money, money, MONEY....and Type- a webinar.
19 Oct 2009 | 4:23 pmSorry...every time I talk about money I get "For the Love of Money" by The O'Jays in my head. Seriously, though, couldn't we all use a little bit of money advice these days?Well, the latest APT eChapter webinar talks about just that...The 8 Functions of MoneyUsing the Function Attitudes to Understand and Improve Your Money ManagementFacilitated by Ray Linder, MBA, Owner of Goodstewardship and APTi's Vice President of Finance TUESDAY, NOV. 10, 2009 at 3:30 p.m. EDT/ 12:30 PDT PLEASE CHECK DAY for PACIFIC RIM TIME ZONES (www.timeanddate.com) Friday in NZ, AUS, HK The program: Money can wreak… -
Guest Blog Sharing an Activity for the FIRO-B or FIRO- Business instrument
7 Oct 2009 | 7:25 pmReaders have submitted questions over the past few months asking for new activities to help create those wonderful "a ha" moments during training. Specifically, one reader asked for help with the FIRO instrument. Because she is certified to administer the MBTI, she is also qualified to purchase and administer the FIRO-B and new FIRO Business tools.I've asked Sherrie Hayne, a consultant with CPP, to share one of her favorite FIRO activities, and she was kind enough to agree. Sherrie is a MBTI Master Practitioner and is also a MBTI Certification Trainer. She has had extensive experience… -
More Ways to Extend Your MBTI Training Experience
5 Oct 2009 | 7:34 pmCheck out these great programs by APT International for ways to extend your MBTI training knowledge and acquire Continuing Education Credits for MBTI Master Practitioner status:___________________________________________Register now for the APT International Final Trainings 2009Application: Conflict Management is Self-Management: The Role of Psychological Type in Managing Conflict November 5 & 6, 2009in Seattle, Washington with Chuck PrattCost: $550 APTi Members, $610 Non-Members This two-day workshop will explore the connections between two powerful tools/models – psychological type…
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Scientific American - Mind & Brain
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Babies Already Have An Accent
6 Nov 2009 | 8:51 am[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.] How can you tell the difference between a French baby and a German baby? No, it’s not that one is wearing a saucy little beret while the other is tucked into tiny pair of lederhosen. Well, maybe that’s part of it. But a new study in the journal Current Biology shows that the babies actually sound different. Because the melody of an infant’s cry matches its mother tongue. [More] -
MIND Reviews: The Human Spark
6 Nov 2009 | 8:00 amTELEVISION The Human Spark [More] -
MIND Reviews: Brainy Gifts
6 Nov 2009 | 6:00 amCatch Some Slow Waves Zeo sleep monitor ($399) [More] -
True Love: How to Find It (preview)
5 Nov 2009 | 6:00 amAdapted from the book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives , by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler. Copyright © 2009 by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. http://www.connectedthebook.com/ Nicholas and his wife, Erika, like to joke that they had an arranged marriage, South Asia–style. Although they lived within four blocks of each other for two years and were both students at Harvard, their paths never crossed. Erika had to… -
How You Learn More from Success Than Failure
4 Nov 2009 | 6:00 amHave you ever bowled a string of strikes that seems like it came out of nowhere? There might be more to such streaks than pure luck, according to a study that offers new clues as to how the brain learns from positive and negative experiences.Training monkeys on a two-choice visual task, researchers found that the animals’ brains kept track of recent successes and failures. A correct answer had impressive effects: it improved neural processing and sent the monkeys’ performance soaring in the next trial. But if a monkey made a mistake in one trial, even after mastering the task, it…
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Psychology Today
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The Shrink Who Cracked
6 Nov 2009 | 11:31 amWhat we can learn from Fort Hood. -
The Career Path of a Shooter
6 Nov 2009 | 9:09 amThe frustrated rage behind the rampage. -
First Love
5 Nov 2009 | 9:00 pmThe romances of youth stay with us forever. -
Male Virginity Myths
5 Nov 2009 | 9:00 pmDon't assume boys have only one thing on their minds. -
Addictive Love
5 Nov 2009 | 9:00 pmRomeo and Juliet are not good role models.
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Personality
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Spree Shooting and Emotions
6 Nov 2009 | 5:18 pmWhy did Nidal Malik Hasan and other spree shooters murder their victims? One approach would concern the cybernetics of emotion involving recursive loops of shame and anger.Self-generated loops of shame alone are commonplace among those who blush easily. They report that the awareness of their blushing generates embarrassment, that in turn generates further blushing, and around and around, sometimes leading even to paralysis.Since normal emotions are extremely brief in duration, a few seconds, the idea of a feeling loop opens up a new area of exploration. Emotions that persist over time have… -
Murder, Malice, and Hope
6 Nov 2009 | 4:22 pmWe are made uncomfortable by the radomness in our lives. When something terrible happens we search for explanations in the same way that primitive people did when puzzled by the complexity of the universe. Why does one person kill another, or 13 others? The fact that murder has always been a routine phenomenon of human existence does not dispel the horror that it implies or our desire to reassure ourselves that we are less likely to die this way if only we can understand the "motive" for such acts. We can better grasp the idea of… -
The Case of Nidal Malik Hasan's Shooting at Fort Hood
6 Nov 2009 | 11:00 amI've been blogging about anger and repression for several weeks now, and the shooting at Fort Hood can figure into this discussion. My take on it is that Hasan was furious and he could not automatically repress this rage. The repression wasn't working because he was especially conscious of who he felt was tampering with his inner narrative. And this inner narrative was a confirming one most likely concerning something about his pride in being a Muslim and how he felt that this image of his identity-group was being attacked (and most likely in his mind, unjustly attacked). It was a rage that… -
What Is The Value Of A Life?
5 Nov 2009 | 8:16 pmI was once told that I shouldn't have kids, because the child could be born with Asperger's, like me. I answered with a question - "Would you have given the same advice to my parents?""Well," came the answer, "look at all the difficulties you've had, and the pain you've had to endure...surely you wouldn't wish that on a child." Well, it's true that living my life with Asperger's has often been difficult. Yes, I have dealt with my fair share of pain and rejection... In a perfect world I wouldn't want a child to go through the same issues. But I also had to… -
What is smart?
5 Nov 2009 | 5:07 pm"He's such a bright little boy!" My mother and her friends said things like that all the time, as they pointed to me when they thought I wasn't paying attention. Now that I'm grown, I can let them in on a secret: There was never a time when I didn't pay attention to grownups as a kid. I watched them really close, all the time. I may not have understood everything I heard, but I surely took it all in. But what did it mean? I got a new bike, and my mother said, "What a pretty red bicycle!" Everyone who saw it said the same thing. It was a nice, red bike. The attributes didn't change. It was…
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PsyBlog
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Why Do People Bother Voting?
31 Oct 2009 | 5:17 amWhy we overestimate the power of our own vote. It might seem like an undemocratic question but it's one that's always plagued me: why do I bother voting? Most people know their own tick in the box is hardly worth it when weighed against the effort involved in getting registered and actually going to vote, let alone when weighed against all the other people voting. Quattrone & Tversky (1984) had a hunch that there was another, more complex psychological reason that people vote, to go along with the usual explanations. Not only, they guessed, do people vote because of their democratic duty… -
The Truth About Self-Deception
27 Oct 2009 | 10:56 amCan we pull the wool over our own eyes or do we see through our mind games? In theory the one person we should never, ever, lie to is ourselves. Surely lying to ourselves is counter-productive? Like calmly and deliberately shooting yourself in the foot or taking a hot toasting fork and plunging it into your eye? But look around and it's not hard to spot the tell-tale symptoms of self-deception in other people. So perhaps we are also deceiving ourselves in ways we can't clearly perceive? But is that really possible and would we really believe the lies that we 'told' ourselves anyway? That's… -
How Rewards Can Backfire and Reduce Motivation
12 Oct 2009 | 6:49 amSurely one of the best ways to generate motivation in ourselves and others is by dangling rewards? Yet psychologists have long known that rewards are overrated. The carrot, of carrot-and-stick fame, is not as effective as we've been led to believe. Rewards work under some circumstances but sometimes they backfire. Spectacularly. Here is a story about preschool children with much to teach all ages about the strange effects that rewards have on our motivation. It's child's play Psychologists Mark R. Lepper and David Greene from Stanford and the University of Michigan were interested in testing… -
How to Make People Believe in Telepathy
7 Oct 2009 | 6:41 amHave you ever been thinking about someone and then moments later they've called you? Is that random coincidence or something more? People love to believe in supernatural powers like telepathy. At least one-third of Americans report a belief in extra-sensory perception (ESP), with a further 40% refusing to rule out the possibility. Surveys in Europe reveal similar figures with one study finding that almost two-thirds of people believe in some form of ESP (further figures on the NSF website). Psychologists are particularly interested in why people have these sorts of beliefs. One common… -
Are You a Liar?
1 Oct 2009 | 8:17 amDo people really lie 3 times within 10 minutes of meeting someone new? It's a statistic often quoted to show how callous and heartless people are. It's the kind of number the misanthrope TV doc Gregory House (played by Brit Hugh Laurie) should have tattooed across his forehead. But what kinds of lies are people telling? Are they covering up dastardly crimes or just oiling the social wheels? To find out let's have a look at the original research this number is based on. Feldman et al. (2002) told 121 participants they were going to have a chat with someone new for 10 minutes. Then half were…
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MindBlink Blog
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Free at Last!!
5 Nov 2009 | 9:54 amYay! I deleted my twitter account, and now I can think freely on here (sort of). Let's try... Hmm... yeah.Hmmmmm...... oooh yeah.HMMMMMMMM..... Ahhh~Ciao for now!Image: http://us.sanyo.com/Think-GAIA -
Oh, twitter... you annoy me so.
29 Oct 2009 | 7:34 pmOk... that's it. Somewhere in the internet world, there is an RSS fairy who keeps sending the feed from this blog to my twitter account. I have no idea how to get the darn application to stop sending them. Twitterfeed doesn't even have it on the feed list. Argh.... I no longer want to advertise every rant I write by having it show up as a tweet. Whatever happened to the old days when people just accidentally stumbled upon my site? I find self-promotion extremely uncomfortable, especially when I don't have much to say that's worthy of attention. That's what twitter was starting to feel like,… -
Reward without effort
29 Oct 2009 | 12:11 pmToday I'm wondering if there is any value in receiving an award if there was not much effort put into the achievement. There was an award ceremony yesterday at the high school. My son is an honor roll student who gets his grades with little or no effort (a concern of mine, but back to the point...) It did not mean much to him that there was such a ceremony and, therefore, shrugged it off as not important. Contrary to what other parents may think, my husband and I agree with our kids and do not push them to attend the events if they are not particularly proud of their accomplishments.On the… -
Quentin Tarantino, I know what you mean...
26 Jul 2009 | 9:38 pmIn this week's "The Week" magazine, Quentin Tarantino is quoted as saying:"When I'm doing a movie, I'm not doing anything else. It's all about the movie. Nothing can get in my way. The whole world can go to hell and burst into flames. I don't care. If you're climbing Mount Everest, you're not doing anything else. All your concerns, all the mundane things, family, any of that, it just--pfft--disappears."I know EXACTLY what he means by that, because I have that same trait. And it doesn't seem to be a choice. The project, whatever I'm working on, becomes my whole world and nothing else exists… -
Addressing the Wrong Issue - Is it really about race?
26 Jul 2009 | 7:51 amThe above statement by President Obama opened up the floodgates of criticism, as well as support, about whether he should have even gotten involved. Some say that racial profiling in America is an issue that needs to be brought up and discussed. But was this incident really about race?Here's a slightly different view:"My suspicion is that this was not about race, this was about power," said Richard Weinblatt, director of the Institute for Public Safety at Central Ohio Technical College. "In the old days, we used to call this 'contempt of cop.' This person was charged with 'contempt of cop'…
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World of Psychology
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5 Clues You Should Be Letting Go of Something
7 Nov 2009 | 2:41 amAwhile back I discussed Eileen Flanagan’s book, The Wisdom to Know the Difference. If you’d like to learn more about her, visit her website at www.EileenFlanagan.com. Therese: What are five clues you should be letting go of something? Eileen: 1. You find yourself repeating the same complaint to different people. We all get frustrated from time to time, but it’s not good for our mental or spiritual health to wallow in frustration. I remember once I got irritated with another mother at my kid’s nursery school after she did something that inconvenienced me. I complained… -
Best of Our Blogs: November 6, 2009
6 Nov 2009 | 7:06 amI’m attending the 25th Annual Rosalynn Carter Symposium on Mental Health Policy today, and I’ll write more about the inspirational work this organization has been doing for 25 years shortly (not just in Georgia, but throughout the entire country). The people who are attending this symposium — as well as the Carter Center itself — have done much to improve mental health care in the U.S., but it’s not something you hear enough about. It’s heartening so many great minds coming together to share best practices and ideas for improvement (especially at this… -
How Do You Treat Empty-Nest Depression?
6 Nov 2009 | 2:27 amSeveral mom friends of mine have lately come down with a bad case of “empty-nest depression” — moms who just dropped off their youngest offspring to college, or moms having difficulty keeping busy now that the youngest is in kindergarten all day. I googled the term “empty-nest depression” to see what I could find on this topic. I was surprised to see the Beyond Blue post I wrote in 2007 at the top of the search results. But, after reading it, I can see why it was so popular. I merely asked a question, and all of you answered it. On the comment box of that post… -
Bye Bye Asperger’s Syndrome?
5 Nov 2009 | 2:29 amIs the diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome — a mild form of autism mostly diagnosed in boys — heading the way of the dodo bird? A new article in the New York Times suggests that the new revision of the diagnostic manual — the DSM-V — is likely to do away with the diagnosis. How can you just delete an entire diagnosis and do away with a diagnostic label that hundreds of thousands of clinicians use everyday and millions identify with? If you’re the American Psychiatric Association, the folks behind the latest DSM revision, you can pretty much do anything you… -
Group Therapy for Binge Eating
4 Nov 2009 | 9:30 amBinge eating disorder is characterized by a person having frequent episodes of eating what others would consider an abnormally large amount of food, while at the same time feeling out of control — the personal feels like they are unable to control what or how much is being eaten. According to government statistics, people with binge eating disorder are considered clinically obese, but plenty of people can engage in binge eating while maintaining an average or less-than-obese weight. Binge eating disorder probably affects 2 to 3 percent of all adults. People with a binge eating problem…
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Psychology Today
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'Accents' in the womb? A brief note
7 Nov 2009 | 2:57 amImage via WikipediaMaking the news this week have been some findings that newborn babies imitate aspects of the 'accents' of their parents' language. What's striking about these findings is not that fetuses pick up information about language in the womb—there is already plenty of evidence for learning about auditory stimuli in the third trimester. The real significance of these findings is that newborns are showing an ability to imitate those aspects of the language they are destined to learn. This shows that they have considerable control over the articulatory system: the muscles in the… -
Leadership & Self Mastery: Body and life changes after attending Strozzi Institute leadership course
7 Nov 2009 | 2:01 amI wanted to bring you current about how I'm living up to the promises I made to myself after completing the Leadership in Action 1 course at the Strozzi Institute, Center for Leadership and Mastery. If you haven't read about that experience you can here. A good deal of what I learned is still running its course through me and has informed how I move through the world. I think sometimes when we take seminars or workshops we don't let them live in us and unfurl what has been wound around our lived patterns, unconscious habits, or repetitive thoughts. We just go about our business as usual. -
Could fantasy have prevented the Fort Hood slayings?
6 Nov 2009 | 11:32 pmIs it possible that fantasy or gaming could have prevented the brutal slayings at Fort Hood? Perhaps.The motive for the shooting wasn't clear. But Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the accused shooter, was said to have expressed some anger about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Too bad he did not find the proper venue to express that anger.The power of simulations and make-believe have been proven. By play-acting scenarios --- be it Civil War re-enactment, a model UN, the classic role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) or an online game like World of Warcraft (WoW) --- we can imagine… -
How to Survive an Active Shooter Incident such as Fort Hood
6 Nov 2009 | 9:23 pmGet out if you can. Hide safely. Call 911. Time is critical. I teach my public safety students how to come out with the most people alive, both citizens and responders, as a national instructor with APCO International. APCO is the largest public safety education organization in the world. Get out if it's safe to do so; hide and call is what I teach my own children. At APCO, we also teach shooter risk assessment within a community and communications strategy that saves lives during active shooter mayhem. However, in this moment I am also a… -
Why violence?
6 Nov 2009 | 8:03 pmWe bloggers for Psychology Today were asked to write a something in the wake of the Ft. Hood shootings, perhaps in hopes our individual offerings might add a small piece to the puzzle of understanding the profound complexity of social violence. Here is what came to my mind.I believe that most human violence is committed with a purpose in mind, for example:To get what is wanted,To make a statement,To make a change,To cause suffering,To end suffering,Or some combination of the above.At the time, in the moment, violence makes emotional sense to the perpetrator because it feels "right." It also…
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About.com Psychology
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What Can You Do With a Bachelor's Degree in Psychology?
5 Nov 2009 | 4:58 amWhile earning a graduate degree is required for many psychology jobs, the fact is that approximately 75% of students who earn a bachelor's degree in psychology do not go to graduate school. According to one study, only about 25% of psychology undergraduates end up working in a field that is closely related to their major. -
Tips for Writing a Last-Minute Paper
3 Nov 2009 | 4:00 amHave you ever scrambled to write a last-minute paper? -
Superego - Psychology Definition of the Week
2 Nov 2009 | 4:08 amDefinition: According to Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory of personality, the superego is the component of personality composed of our internalized ideals that we have acquired from our parents and from society. The superego works to suppress the urges of the id and tries to make the ego behave morally, rather than realistically. Interested in psychoanalytic theory? The Conscious and Unconscious Mind The Id, Ego and Superego The Life, Work and Theories of Sigmund Freud Image courtesy Piotr BiziorSuperego - Psychology Definition of the Week originally appeared on About.com Psychology on… -
Classic Psychology Experiments
30 Oct 2009 | 1:00 amPsychology's history is filled with fascinating studies and experiments that helped changed the way we think about ourselves and human behavior. Some of the most famous examples include Milgram's obedience experiment and Zimbardo's prison experiment. Explore some of these classic psychology experiments to learn more about some of the best-known research in psychology history. Read more...Classic Psychology Experiments originally appeared on About.com Psychology on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 08:00:56.Permalink | Comment | Email this -
What Is the Average Psychology Salary?
28 Oct 2009 | 12:00 amHave you ever wondered what the average salary is in the field of psychology? Whether you are still exploring different psychology careers or are interested in moving into a more advanced position in your field, potential earnings are an important consideration.
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organizational-psychology « WordPress.com Tag Feed
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What does it mean to be a scientist?
5 Nov 2009 | 12:29 pmI write this blog not just because I want to be a scientist of organisations. I write it because I’d like you to be one as well. It doesn’t involve a white coat or a microscope (although I borrow the imagery liberally, as you might have noticed.) What it involves mean different things to different people, but I think it comes down to a mindset. It means being curious about why things happen and why they don’t happen, and setting out to find out more about both. It means pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge, one tiny piece of data at a time. It means not believing… -
Learning about learning
3 Nov 2009 | 3:01 pmWe tend to think of learning as just something we do: a general skill that we can apply to anything, and that lets us generalise things we learn in one context to another context. Let’s take an example; if you learn, say, how to conduct a successful coaching session in a training room environment, it should be easy to transfer that skill to the real-life environments you will be faced with. This assumption, in fact, basically underlays every training and development programme in existence. You can probably see where this is going; like so many assumptions about the brain, we’ve… -
The Hawthorne Effect, or, a lesson in the power of a story
31 Oct 2009 | 10:39 amThe Hawthorne Effect is one of the most familiar stories in the history of organizational psychology. Like most familiar stories, it’s also a little bit wrong. The most famous of the experiments carried out in the General Electric Hawthorne Plant in the 1920s and 1930s to determine the best ways to increase productivity involved the lighting provided in workrooms. The researchers thought, not unreasonably, that increasing the level of lighting in the workrooms might increase the productivity of the workers, whether by allowing them to see better, keeping them more alert, or factors not… -
THAT’S ILLEGAL! (How Bad Bosses Breed Burdensome Laws)
18 Oct 2009 | 6:45 pmI recently saw an episode of the television series House, and the episode ended [SPOILER ALERT] with a termination. In the show, Dr. House decides for mental health reasons to give up his role as head of the department of diagnostics at his hospital. Predictably, his long term employee, Dr. Foreman, asks for the promotion to his position and gets it. There is one personal complication in Dr. Foreman’s new position. One of his new employees is also his girlfriend. The two doctors were able to manage the lines between their personal and professional… -
What managers - and work psychologists - get paid for
9 Oct 2009 | 8:00 pmEvery one would like to be a manager In my years of teaching at Universities, I found students queuing up to learn management and personnel psychology, industrial psychology, organizational psychology, etc. Few though, had any idea what management entailed. And they are horrified when they find out. . . . it is well paid, but . . . The financial rewards are high. Yes, the trappings of good clothes, assistants, and international travel are glamorous. I could say that “this is what is wanted in return for these goodies”. But that sounds like a bargain. You give us this – and we give…
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Work and Organizational Psychology Arena
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Object Relations, Work and the Self
15 Oct 2009 | 8:15 amObject Relations, Work and the Self By David P. Levine In this book, David P. Levine applies psychoanalytic object relations theory to understanding work motivation and the meaning of work. Drawing on the writings of authors such as Donald Winnicott, Otto Kernberg and Melanie Klein, he explores three factors central to our effort to understand work: guilt, greed and the self. Special attention is paid to the factors that determine the individual’s emotional capacity to do work that engages the self and its creative potential and to the related matter of impairment in that capacity. Chapters… -
The Joy of Work?
9 Sep 2009 | 2:09 amThe Joy of Work? Jobs, Happiness, and You By Peter Warr, Guy Clapperton Are you happy at work? Or do you just grin and bear it? We spend an average of 25% of our lives at work, so it’s important to make the best of it. The Joy of Work? looks at happiness and unhappiness from a fresh perspective. It draws on up-to-date research from around the world to present the causes and consequences of low job satisfaction and gives helpful suggestions and strategies for how to get more enjoyment from work. The book includes many interesting case studies about individual work situations, and features… -
Full Range Leadership Development
1 Sep 2009 | 7:02 pmFull Range Leadership Development Pathways for People, Profit and Planet By John J. Sosik, Dongil (Don) Jung It has been more than 20 years since Bernie Bass presented an integrated overview of full range leadership development. This has been the standard for providing leadership training around the world in business, military, religious and educational contexts. Penn State University’s master of leadership development program is directed by John J. Sosik and uses these transactional –transformational leadership paradigms as their foundation for their courses. This book can be used as a… -
Adverse Impact
18 Aug 2009 | 11:18 amAdverse Impact Implications for Organizational Staffing and High Stakes Selection Edited by James L. Outtz This text is the best single repository for a comprehensive examination of the scientific research and practical issues associated with adverse impact. Adverse impact occurs when there is a significant difference in organizational outcomes to the disadvantage of one or more groups defined on the basis of demographic characteristics such as race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, etc. This book shows, based on scientific research, how to design selection systems that minimize subgroup… -
Essential Life Coaching Skills
7 Aug 2009 | 12:07 amEssential Life Coaching Skills By Angela Dunbar Essential Life Coaching Skills provides a comprehensive guide to the complete range and depth of skills required to succeed as a life coach. Angela Dunbar uses theoretical background alongside practical examples to provide a clear understanding of what makes a successful life coach. This book focuses on seven essential skill sets that are necessary for effective life coaching, with each chapter giving specific examples of how these skills are used in life coaching, and how they can be developed and improved. The book also includes a…
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Mind Hacks
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2009-11-06 Spike activity
6 Nov 2009 | 12:00 amQuick links from the past week in mind and brain news: -
Psychologist says
5 Nov 2009 | 2:00 pmI've discovered that if you search for "says psychologist" on Google, you get a giant avalanche of wtf. I encourage you to try it for yourself, but here are a few of the highlights, all taken from headlines of news stories. Twitter makes you dumb, says psychologist Boys have it worse, says psychologist Faith schools breed terrorism, says psychologist Change is possible for gays, says psychologist Music tugs at monkeys' hearts, says psychologist Pakistan no longer fear failure, says psychologist Killer of 4 feared loss of love, says psychologist Britney has lost control and needs help, says… -
The mind and brain in 2010
5 Nov 2009 | 4:00 amThe latest issue of Wired UK has a cover feature on breaking ideas for 2010. Mind and brain innovations feature strongly and several are freely available online. I might immodestly recommend the piece on 'neurosecurity' and how researchers are having harden neural implants against hackers, as it was written by me. Regular readers will know we broke the story back in June, although it was great to have it selected as one of the 'ideas of the future' by Wired UK. There's also a fascinating piece on 'hyperopia' - a cognitive bias where people falsely assume they'll be happier in the future by… -
Señor Roboto
5 Nov 2009 | 12:00 amSome impressive graffiti of a brain-powered robot from the future, found on a wall near the Hospital San Vicente de Paúl in Medellín. -
Dr Smile
4 Nov 2009 | 2:00 pmThe Philip K. Dick novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch features a portable device which allows patients to consult with the virtual psychiatrist Dr Smile. If I'm not mistaken, the system seems to have re-invented by this research team: Virtual patient: a photo-real virtual human for VR-based therapy Stud Health Technol Inform. 2004;98:154-6. Kiss B, Benedek B, Szijártó G, Csukly G, Simon L, Takács B. A high fidelity Virtual Human Interface (VHI) system was developed using low-cost and portable computers. The system features real-time photo-realistic digital replicas of multiple…
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Cognitive Daily
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What's the best way to take a study break?
5 Nov 2009 | 1:20 pmGreta and I did our undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, or as a commonly-sold T-shirt on campus put it, "where fun goes to die." To say that Chicago didn't emphasize academics over a social life is to deny that people literally lived in the library (a full-scale campsite was found behind one of the stairwells in the stacks; students had been living there for months). It's not that the administration didn't try to encourage its students to socialize. The library did close at 10 p.m. on Friday nights. There was not one but two film societies, so often students had to choose… -
Can artificial sweeteners really help us lose weight?
4 Nov 2009 | 9:34 amMy SEED column this week focuses on artificial sweeteners. Can switching to artificial sweeteners help solve the obesity problem in the U.S.? Here's a snippet: Saunders says an August report from the American Heart Association (AHA) made it quite clear that excessive sugar consumption is dangerous, and he argues that sugar should be seen as a toxic substance. But how much is too much? The new AHA guidelines suggest limiting added sugar to no more than half of discretionary calories--calories consumed after basic nutritional needs are met. For the average male, Saunders says, this works out to… -
Anime film characters: Do we perceive the intended race, or our own?
3 Nov 2009 | 11:34 amOne of my favorite cartoons as a child was "Speed Racer." It featured an all-American boy (first name, "Speed," last name, "Racer") engaging in that most American of pastimes: driving fast cars. Except that "Speed Racer" wasn't really American; it was made in Japan, and the original Japanese voices were crudely overdubbed in English. Perhaps I can be excused for not noticing the Japanese origins of the show -- I was only 10 years old. Even now, as an adult looking back at those cartoons, the characters do seem awfully American-looking. Or perhaps that's just my Caucasian bias. Does everyone… -
Casual Fridays: Is political wishy-washiness a general phenomenon?
30 Oct 2009 | 3:05 pmPolitical opinion polls are very tricky. Answers to questions depend on the order they're asked in, and on precisely how they are phrased. If you ask people whether they're in favor of killing unborn children, you'll get a much different response than if you ask if there's any situation where women should be allowed to terminate a pregnancy. What's even more difficult is to assess public opinion on complex pending legislation. Most polls find that most Americans like the idea of requiring everyone to buy health insurance. But it's only a slim margin -- 56 to 41 percent. Kevin Drum cited a… -
Are older kids and adolescents really as good as adults at recognizing emotions in faces?
29 Oct 2009 | 1:53 pmTake a look at this face: Does it look more angry or fearful? It may be rather difficult to tell: About fifty percent of adults say faces like this are angry and fifty percent say it's fearful. However, for children, the story is different. Researchers have found that small children aren't as good as adults at recognizing emotions in faces. Young children would see this picture as more fearful than angry. However, most research has suggested that kids are just about as good as adults by the time they're five years old. But neuroscientists have consistently found that the portions of the brain…
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Channel N +
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Brain-Based Sex Differences
6 Nov 2009 | 8:30 amPink Brain, Blue Brain Mythbusting sex differences in the brain: author/neuroscientist Lise Eliot discusses her book. -
Cognitive Enhancement Debate
4 Nov 2009 | 8:30 am[U Mich library graffiti. Image by quinn.anya A Better Brain: The Ethics of Neuro-enhancement The neuroethics of cosmetic psychopharmacology. Four hypothetical situations (with real parallels) are debated by major thinkers on a panel at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism: a person who wants to take a drug for narcolepsy to stay awake in order to work more, a parent considering giving their child a psych med to help with social skills, healthy students who take “Rememberall, made by Hype Pharmaceuticals” to enhance studying, and memory dampening. Highlights. -
Participatory Research
2 Nov 2009 | 8:30 amHearing Our Voices: A Participatory Research Being involved in designing and carrying out an academic participatory research project on housing for people with severe psychiatric challenges. Research team members also reveal their personal experiences and symptoms of schizophrenia, and talk about the group program The Unsung Heroes. Includes video of the Making Our Voices Heard presentation, a powerful theatrical reading from their research findings [PDF script]. Lots more info at a luxe project web site with a photo essay, graphic novel (!), script & performances, travelling exhibit,… -
Social Neuroscience
28 Oct 2009 | 9:30 amConnected Minds: Loneliness, Social Brains and the Need for Community A recent release from the excellent RSA Vision lecture series: the leading expert in social neuroscience explains the subdiscipline. -
Office Stigma
26 Oct 2009 | 9:30 amOffice Life Not to be confused with The Office, this is an amusing series too. Mental health issues and stigma in the workplace are the focus. The Interview, The Breakdown, and The Return.
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The Last Psychiatrist
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Gossip Girl Is Going To Corrupt Someone
5 Nov 2009 | 6:25 amplease let it be me, please let it be me -
50% of American Kids Receive Food Stamps
3 Nov 2009 | 7:03 amMarx was right. America is finished. -
You Want To Be Don Draper? You Already Are
29 Oct 2009 | 2:13 pmOne of these is Dorian Gray, the other is the picture -
The New York Yankees: Mission Accomplished
26 Oct 2009 | 8:04 amThe House that George built. -
Shouting vs. Spanking
23 Oct 2009 | 4:59 amFake, fake, fake, fake...
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BPS Research Digest
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Psychology X-factor
6 Nov 2009 | 2:37 amClick Here for PollOnline Survey | Website Polls | Email Marketing | Crowdsourcing SoftwareView MicroPoll -
How to increase altruism in toddlers
5 Nov 2009 | 1:50 amSurely one of the most charming sights is of an adult struggling to reach an object, only for a toddler to pick up that object and hand it to the adult, as research has shown they so often will. Psychologists think such ingrained altruism has evolved as a consequence of our species' dependence on group living for survival. Supporting this account, Harriet Over and Malinda Carpenter have shown that subtle exposure to the sight of two apparently companionable dolls, stood side by side, is enough to increase the likelihood that an 18-month-old will help an adult pick up some dropped sticks.Sixty… -
CCTV cameras don't reassure, they frighten
4 Nov 2009 | 1:48 amPeople are no more fearful of crossing a street with a young male skinhead in it than they are a street with a smartly dressed woman present, unless, that is, a CCTV camera is overhead. The new finding appears to undermine one of the key justifications for Britain's network of 4.2 million surveillance cameras: that they provide reassurance to the public. It seems that the sight of a CCTV camera can have the opposite effect, cueing the perception of a threat. Dave Williams and Jobuda Ahmed presented 120 participants - shoppers in Hatfield - with pictures of a fictional town centre street… -
The Special Issue Spotter
3 Nov 2009 | 1:59 amWe trawl the world's journals so you don't have to:Precursors and diverse pathways to personality disorder in children and adolescents (Development and Psychopathology).The Society for Neuroscience, forty-year anniversary retrospective (Journal of Neuroscience).Motivational interviewing and psychotherapy (Journal of Clinical Psychology).Environmental psychology on the move (Journal of Environmental Psychology).Spatial working memory and imagery: From eye movements to grounded cognition (Acta Psychologica).Individual differences in emotion components and dynamics (Cognition and Emotion). -
Facial emotional expressions are universal and culturally specific
1 Nov 2009 | 9:00 pmEarlier this year a piece of emotion research provoked a rather heated reaction in some quarters after it claimed to show that, contrary to the writings of Charles Darwin, Paul Ekman and others, facial emotional expressions are not universal after all. "Seriously, is this all that it takes to be published in Current Biology? Sheesh," was the verdict of one incredulous online commenter to Reddit (a more considered critical reaction is here). Now, with a diplomat's tact, David Matsumoto and colleagues have presented new findings showing that facial emotional expressions start out universal, but…
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SharpBrains
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Digital Games for Physical, Cognitive and Behavioral Health
5 Nov 2009 | 1:35 pmThe Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) just announced more than $1.85 million in grants for research teams to study how digital games can improve players’ health behaviors and outcomes (both brain-based and behavioral). The press release: Nine Leading Research Teams Selected to Study How Digital Games Improve Players’ Health “Digital games are interactive and experiential, and so they can engage people in powerful ways to enhance learning and health behavior change, especially when they are designed on the basis of well-researched strategies,” said (UC Santa… -
Smart industry-research collaboration for working memory training
4 Nov 2009 | 8:26 amVery interesting announcement yesterday, by Lumos Labs and researchers Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl: “The Lumosity.com version of Dual N-Back replicates the training previously used in the lab while making it available online. The program will be used to facilitate further research in memory and intelligence training, with the Lumosity Research Platform supporting data collection and study administration.” “The online availability of the dual n-back task is a great step forward for our ongoing research and we are happy having found Lumos Labs as a competent… -
Brain Fitness Book: talks, interviews, reviews
30 Oct 2009 | 6:37 amNext Tuesday, November 3rd: I’ll be presenting the SharpBrains Guide to a business/ entrepreneurial audience at the San Francisco Chapter of the Association for Corporate Growth (you can register online). Description: While most of us have heard the phrase “use it or lose it,” very few understand what “it” means, or how to properly “use it” in order to improve brain function and fitness. This talk will provide an overview of the most recent research, guidelines and resources to “Use It and Improve It”, summarizing the main findings and… -
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Forum on the Future Impact of Neuroscience and Behavior Change
28 Oct 2009 | 11:59 amThe Robert Wood Johnson Foundation just announced a new initiative of their Pioneer portfolio: “On November 11-12, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), working with the Monitor Institute, will welcome a small group of researchers, academics, physicians and industry leaders in the fields of neurotechnology, neurodevelopment and behavior change for a “Forum on the Future Impact of Neuroscience and Behavior Change.” The question: what could neuroscience innovation mean for the future of health and health care? This blog post contains the list of participants (honored to be one)… -
Does Coffee Boost Brain/ Cognitive Functions Over Time?
24 Oct 2009 | 2:22 pmA few eternal questions: - Is caffeine good for the brain? - Does it boost cognitive functions? - Does it protect against dementia? There is little doubt that drinking that morning cup of coffee will likely increase alertness, but the main questions that research is trying to answer go beyond that. Basically: is there a sustained, lifetime, benefit or harm from drinking coffee regularly? The answer, so far, contains good news and bad news. The good news for coffee drinkers is that most of the long-term results are directionally more positive than negative, so no clear harm seems to occur. The…
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PsychSplash
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Dyslexia the Gift
4 Nov 2009 | 9:00 amURL: http://www.dyslexia.com/Why is Dyslexia a gift? For: ConsumersTopics: Behaviour Management, Child and Adolescent, Coaching, Educational Psychology, Pediatric Depression, Teaching, YouthFeatures: Advertising, Articles, Clinical Tools, Collaborative News, Databases, File Sharing, Forums, Information, Links, e-learning Why is Dyslexia a gift? Dyslexic people are visual, multi-dimensional thinkers. We are intuitive and highly creative, and excel at hands-on learning. Because we think in pictures, it is sometimes hard for us to understand letters, numbers, symbols, and written words. We can… -
Presentations of Science Base
3 Nov 2009 | 9:00 amURL: http://posbase.uib.no/posbase/index.phpThis is a prototype system containing presentations from experimental psychology. We hope that it can guide both students and teachers in gaining a deeper understanding within the field of psychology. For: Consumers, Students, TeachersTopics: Behaviour Management, Child and Adolescent, Coaching, Educational Psychology, Pediatric Depression, Teaching, Youth, Academia, Biological Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, Common Factors, Educational Psychology, Emotional Health, General Psychology, Health Psychology, Mental Health,… -
Stanley Milgram
2 Nov 2009 | 9:00 amURL: http://www.stanleymilgram.com/The purpose of this website is to be a source of accurate information about the life and work of one of the most outstanding social scientists of our time, the social psychologist Stanley Milgram. For: Consumers, Students, Teachers, StudentsTopics: Behaviour Management, Child and Adolescent, Coaching, Educational Psychology, Pediatric Depression, Teaching, Youth, Academia, Biological Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, Common Factors, Educational Psychology, Emotional Health, General Psychology, Health Psychology, Mental Health,… -
Obsessive Compulsive Foundation
26 Oct 2009 | 10:00 amURL: http://www.ocfoundation.org/The OCD Foundation has news, articles, and links dealing with obsessive compulsive disorder. For: Consumers, Students, Teachers, Students, Anyone, ConsumersTopics: Behaviour Management, Child and Adolescent, Coaching, Educational Psychology, Pediatric Depression, Teaching, Youth, Academia, Biological Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, Common Factors, Educational Psychology, Emotional Health, General Psychology, Health Psychology, Mental Health, Psychiatry, Psychology and Technology, Abnormal, Academia, Behaviour Management, Clinical… -
Children of Compulsive Hoarders
25 Oct 2009 | 10:00 amURL: http://www.childrenofhoarders.com/bindex.phpFor many, growing up in an environment of constant chaos and disorganization has effects that go far beyond living amongst the accumulation of possessions or not being able to have friends over. Our parents who hoard often hid behind closed blinds isolating themselves from the world outside. For: Consumers, Students, Teachers, Students, Anyone, Consumers, Anyone, Clinicians, Consumers, ResearchersTopics: Behaviour Management, Child and Adolescent, Coaching, Educational Psychology, Pediatric Depression, Teaching, Youth, Academia, Biological…
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The Tangled Neuron
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Another Video, Another Grim Portrayal
4 Nov 2009 | 4:18 amLast month, a group of people with memory loss, their families and doctors successfully petitioned the French Alzheimer’s Association to drop plans to promote a video of people who appeared to have very advanced dementia in dire situations. This week,... -
German Institute Cites Lack of Evidence for Alzheimer's Treatments
29 Oct 2009 | 5:04 pmThe Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Healthcare has issued a new report on Alzheimer's treatments. Comissioned by the German government, the report concludes: there is not enough proof that memantine (sold as Namenda in the U.S.) is effective in... -
Brain Fitness Trial Online
27 Oct 2009 | 3:02 pmBrain fitness is a controversial topic. Can you really prevent or slow memory loss by "training your brain?" Do improved scores on brain fitness programs translate to improved functionality in everyday life? There's not enough evidence to answer these questions.... -
Richard Taylor's New DVD
26 Oct 2009 | 8:52 amI just watched Richard Taylor’s new DVD “Be With Me Today.” The DVD is from his presentation to professionals at the Person-Centered Dementia Care Conference in Atlanta. In the 51 minute video, he talks about what caregivers (family and professional)... -
Q & A with John Zeisel, Author of I'm Still Here
7 Oct 2009 | 6:37 amLast spring, I read a book by John Zeisel, Ph.D. called I'm Still Here: A Breakthrough Approach to Understanding Someone Living with Alzheimer's . I liked how the book emphasized that some memories and abilities can remain intact in people...
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change therapy
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superior scribblers
6 Nov 2009 | 9:12 pmi want to thank janet riehl for passing on the superior scribbler award to me. it had been given to her by matilda butler and kendra bonnett who have a blog that supports women writing their memoirs. this is a great way to introduce you to some blogs that i haven’t mentioned much, or maybe not at all. so these are the people i’m passing the award on to. holly lisle sure needs no award; she’s one of the internet’s grande dames of the writing life, and it feels a little funny for a little blogger like me to be giving her an award. but nevermind. this novel writer (i think she… -
swans on a wordless wednesday
4 Nov 2009 | 8:58 pmimage by zenera -
arrest them! no, not the drunk guys
2 Nov 2009 | 1:17 ami’m doing NaNoWriMo again this year, this time determined to do all i can to make it to the 50,000 word count. so my blog posts may be sporadic, or short and sweet, or both. like this one. only it’s not sweet. at a walmart in lethbridge, told by a friend: a drunk native fellow ahead of me was buying 10 bottles of alcohol-containing hair treatment. i asked for the manager and asked him whether he was going to let that sale go through. he said there was nothing they could do. i checked the shelves and saw that this product was vastly overstocked compared to the non-ethanol products. i… -
rising up to end stigma
31 Oct 2009 | 8:18 amas you know, i am a proud member of the canadian mental health association. i am even prouder to announce that a participant advisory committee, that is, individuals who are using the services of the CMHA vancouver/burnaby branch, is hosting an event for people living with mental illness and those affected by it to talk about ways to fight the stigma and discrimination around mental illness. if you’re like me and get excited about grassroots initiatives, please come and visit! here is the full information rising up to end stigma please join us at our 2009 participants forum tuesday november… -
spiritual language
30 Oct 2009 | 6:55 pma while ago we talked about the lack of scripts for talking about mental illness (at least in “polite society”), and before that we had a conversation about how uncomfortable it can be to engage in peaceful communication. and now evan took up the topic the other day and asked how can we talk about our spiritual experience? “i find it hard to talk about spirituality,” he says. which is interesting: spirituality is a much talked-about topic, especially on the internet. so what’s the problem? let me attempt to summarize evan’s ideas: we don’t share a widely understood…
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Dr. Deb
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Seasonal Affective Disorder
6 Nov 2009 | 4:04 amQuestion: What is seasonal affective disorder?Answer: Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is a pattern of significant depressive symptoms that occur and then disappear with the changing of the seasons. SAD has also been called "Winter Depression" or "Winter Blues". The reason for these names is that SAD occurs when days get shorter around November and lasting until Spring.Question: What's the difference between seasonal affective disorder and other forms of depression?Answer: SAD is similar to other major depressions in its severity and symptoms; however, it occurs seasonally usually starting… -
New Medications From Psychology Today
1 Nov 2009 | 3:59 am -
Have A Stigma Free Halloween
24 Oct 2009 | 6:08 pmHalloween is one of the oldest recorded calendar events.The tradition started over two thousand years ago with The Celts, who believed that the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred on October 31st. So, on that "Hallow's Eve" they built bonfires and wore ghostly costumes to drive the evil spirits away, and carried a potato or turnip candle lantern to intimidate the demons around them.The National Alliance For Mental Illness reminds us that not only is it the season for ghosts and goblins, but also stigma. Costumes and seasonal attractions that feature psychos,… -
October 20th is US National Call-In Day For Health Care Reform
18 Oct 2009 | 9:15 amOctober 20 is National Call-In Day for Health Reform. If you'd like to contact your local Senator and Representative, you can follow these simple instructions. And you don't need to call on the 20th. I left my message already!Call: 877-264-4226Once connected:Press 1 to be connected to your SenatorsPress 2 to be connected to your Representative.Then you will be asked for your 5 digit zip code.In the case of the Senators, you will pick which one you want to be connected to.Leave your message: "Health Care Can't Wait.We need action on the health care reform NOW." -
Ralph, I Love You, But You're Kidding, Right?
10 Oct 2009 | 5:26 pmI love Ralph Lauren's designs. They are classic, urban and pure Americana. But I think the Ralph Lauren company went overboard with reshaping model Fillipa Hamilton’s figure via photoshop for their recent marketing campaign.Take a look and see the impossible body proportions.I understand that designers think clothes looks better framed on thin figures, but promoting such unrealistic body images does great harm.What do you think?Update From Ralph Lauren Company :"For over 42 years we have built a brand based on quality and integrity. After further investigation, we have learned that we are…
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UrbanMonk.Net
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The Strangest Paradox – Parental Influences
5 Nov 2009 | 3:47 pmThere is a strange paradox that exists inside most of us. Most people will have a good idea of just how much our parents, and our upbringing, affect us as adults. But there is a strange twist to what we have come to expect. Below is a basic description, with all the content taken out of it, leaving behind only the structure: My parents said I was a bad boy/girl. I want to be good. To be good, I cannot contradict my parents. It is wrong to make them wrong. Therefore, to be good, I have to be bad. Of course, this “bad” can be anything – stupid, worthless, ugly, fat, a liar, angry, the… -
Booster Technique: Inauthentic and Authentic Emotions
9 Oct 2009 | 8:49 pmWhen it comes to healing and understanding our negative emotions, there is one important thing to realise: Some of our feelings are inauthentic.They cover up other feelings, beliefs, and inner states. This might seem like a basic idea to understand, but the real difficulty comes in facing up to it – there is often a good reason we are covering them up in the first place. But there comes a time, when we are strong enough, to remove these defences and see what is underneath. What really needs to be healed? A Personal Example This might be better explained with an example. I’ve written many… -
How to Pursue Your Passion: Understand the Essence of Your Passion
23 Sep 2009 | 3:52 amEditor’s Note: This is a guest post by Celestine Chua of The Personal Excellence Blog. Thanks Celes! (If you haven’t discovered your passion yet, you might want to read Finding a Purpose and Passion in Life first.) Whenever my friends or my coachees talk to me about the topic of passion, they would often resign that their passions can only remain as a hobby. When I probe into the reason why, some of the most common comments I hear are “My passion can’t earn (much) money”, “It’s not feasible in this world” or “There are no avenues for me to… -
Observing Thought – Mindfulness
16 Sep 2009 | 12:46 pmEditor’s Note: This is a guest post by Kaushik of Beyond Karma. Thanks Kaushik! The mind is empty only when thought is not. Thought cannot come to an end save through passive watchfulness of every thought. In this awareness there is no watcher and no censor; without the censor, there is only experiencing. In experiencing there is neither the experiencer nor the experienced. The experienced is the thought, which gives birth to the thinker. Only when the mind is experiencing is there stillness, the silence which is not made up, put together; and only in that tranquility can the real come into… -
9/11 as Personal Ground Zero: Remembrance and Reconstruction
9 Sep 2009 | 5:38 pmEditor’s Note: This is a guest post by Paul Martin of Original Faith. Thanks Paul! Today I’m mostly bedridden – in my sixteenth year of a rare, incurable disease. On 9/11, although seriously disabled, I was still employed as a school counselor at an elementary school just up Columbia Pike from the Pentagon. The day began as follows. Explosion In Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington DC, the morning of September 11, 2001, was one in a string of clear, mild days that almost felt like the return of spring. As usual, I clicked off the news on my radio shortly before 8:30 AM and…
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ScienceDaily: Psychology News
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Hormone That Affects Finger Length Key To Social Behavior
7 Nov 2009 | 2:00 amResearch in the UK into the finger length of primate species has revealed that cooperative behavior is linked to exposure to hormone levels in the womb. -
Early Scents Really Do Get 'Etched' In The Brain
6 Nov 2009 | 2:00 pmCommon experience tells us that particular scents of childhood can leave quite an impression, for better or for worse. Now, researchers reporting the results of a brain imaging study show that first scents really do enjoy a "privileged" status in the brain. -
Psychiatric Impact Of Torture Could Be Amplified By Head Injury
5 Nov 2009 | 9:00 pmDepression and other emotional symptoms in survivors of torture and other traumatic experiences may be exacerbated by the effects of head injuries, according to a new study. The researchers found structural changes in the brains of former South Vietnamese political detainees who had suffered head injuries and clearly linked those changes to psychiatric symptoms often seen in survivors of torture. -
'Health-at-every-size' Approach Is Effective: Health-centered Weight Control Method Shows Promise
5 Nov 2009 | 8:00 pmMost weight-control strategies emphasize energy-restricted diets and increased physical activity -- and most are not effective over the long term. In a study of a "weight-acceptance" intervention, researchers found that there could be long-term beneficial effects on certain eating behaviors using a weight-acceptance intervention approach. -
Cancer Patients Want Honesty, Compassion From Their Oncologist
5 Nov 2009 | 5:00 pmWhat do patients want from their radiation oncologists? The most significant preference is that more than one-third of female cancer patients (37 percent) prefer to have their hands held by their radiation oncologists during important office visits, compared to 12 percent of men, according to a randomized study.
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PsycPORT.com
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Mental-health help on college campuses increases
2 Nov 2009 | 4:41 amNovember 02, 2009 Nov. 2--Mental-health counselors at La Salle University were feeling overwhelmed, their appointment books packed with students in need of help, seemingly more so than ever. -
Stereotypes can fuel teen misbehavior
16 Oct 2009 | 5:41 amOctober 16, 2009 WINSTON-SALEM, N.C., Oct 16, 2009 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Drinking. Drugs. Caving into peer pressure. When parents expect their teenagers to conform to negative stereotypes, those teens are in fact more likely to do so, according to new research by professor of psychology Christy Buchanan. -
US to ease way for veterans to get stress help
14 Oct 2009 | 5:41 amOctober 14, 2009 WASHINGTON - Female soldiers and others serving in dangerous roles behind the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan have long complained it was hard to prove their combat experience when applying for disability for post-traumatic stress disorder. -
Survey finds mental-health troubles rise in jobless
7 Oct 2009 | 5:41 amOctober 07, 2009 Oct. 7--Unemployed people are four times more likely to experience severe mental-health issues, including depression, than people with jobs, according to a survey released yesterday by the National Alliance on Mental Illness and Mental Health America. -
Fatty foods may improve a pilot's performance
6 Oct 2009 | 5:41 amOctober 06, 2009 GRAND FORKS, N.D. - Running a marathon, grab a carbohydrate bar. Lifting weights, gulp a protein shake. But climbing into a fighter jet? Butter-soaked lobster might help.
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Psychology / Psychiatry News From Medical News Today
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The Role Of Parental Control In Western And East Asian Countries
7 Nov 2009 | 12:00 amMany parents like to meddle in their children's lives. Sometimes this can be beneficial, if the meddling is in the form of parental guidance or setting rules. However, numerous studies have found that in Western countries, when parents are very controlling and dominating over their children, the children suffer psychologically. -
Beyond Medicine: Addressing Broader Roots Of Illness In Health Care Reform
6 Nov 2009 | 4:00 amResearch has clearly demonstrated that health and illness are determined by a complex interaction of biological, behavioral, psychological, socio-cultural and environmental factors, as well as a person's coping resources and access to health care. Each of these factors must be addressed if true health care reform is to be achieved. -
Haunted By War, Researchers Speak About PTSD For Remembrance Day
6 Nov 2009 | 2:00 amThey've seen horrors, experienced constant threats and survived traumatic events. Canada's military personnel often come back home with memories they'd rather forget. It's not scientifically understood why some soldiers develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) while others don't. However, many veterans simply don't ask for psychological help. -
Mental Health America Praises House Health Reform Bill
6 Nov 2009 | 1:00 amMental Health America today praised the House health reform bill (the Affordable Health Care for Americans Act, H.R. 3962) for taking ground-breaking steps to expand coverage and significantly improving access to mental health and substance use disorder treatment services. -
UK Puts Mental Health Of Refugees And Asylum Seekers At Risk
6 Nov 2009 | 1:00 amMind has found evidence that the UK's complex asylum seeker process, detention centres and aspects of UK life are actively worsening the mental health of refugees and asylum seekers. In two new reports, the charity shows how a lack of support and resources for refugees and asylum seekers is both exacerbating pre-existing mental health conditions and triggering them in the first place. In the
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Psych Central News
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Social Networking 3.0
6 Nov 2009 | 8:11 amThe information and cultural transformation spawned by social networking may soon upgrade to a new level of sophistication. According to authorities, new technology will allow automatic uploads of status updates and a variety of social and geographic information. European researchers are working to merge information pulled by ambient intelligence systems that use sensors and smart objects to create awareness of users’ whereabouts and activities to networking and messaging platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. Combined, the two technologies promise to provide an omnipresent or pervasive… -
TMS as Drug-Free Depression Treatment
6 Nov 2009 | 8:11 amTranscranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) is a FDA-approved, non-invasive antidepressant device-based treatment clinically proven for treatment of depression. Rush University Medical Center has opened a clinic that uses the TMS therapy system to deliver highly focused magnetic field pulses to a specific portion of the brain, the left prefrontal cortex, in order to stimulate the areas of the brain linked to depression. The repeated short bursts of magnetic energy introduced through the scalp excite neurons in the brain. Depression affects at least 14 million American adults each year. -
How to Web Enable Seniors
6 Nov 2009 | 8:10 amThe information age has arrived. Cell phones and word processors rule. However, for an important population segment, the ability to use new technology is obscure. The digital divide is problematic as a central tenet of health reform is the use of information technology to improve access, drive quality, and reduce costs. A new paper by Florida State University scientists outlines the barriers older adults experience and provides solutions for resolving the disconnect. In Current Directions in Psychological Science, Neil Charness and Walter R. Boot claim the key to including the aging… -
Helicopter Parenting Wrong for All Cultures
6 Nov 2009 | 8:09 amParenting is an incredibly rewarding albeit frequently challenging experience. Unfortunately issues from ‘over-parenting’ — where parents dominate their children’s life with the meddling often extending into adolescence and continuing until college entry — transcend geographic boundaries. Parents exert this control over their offspring for numerous reasons. And, to be fair, the behavior can be beneficial at times if the attention is some sort of parental guidance or rule-based boundary establishment. However, studies in Western countries have determined that obtrusive… -
Southpaws Have a Different View
5 Nov 2009 | 12:56 amFor centuries scientists have tried to explain why only 10 percent of the population is left-handed. Lefties have been the subject of jokes, ridicule and admiration and have been cast as wacky, offbeat, and out-of-the box personality types. New research suggests there may be some truth regarding the unique orientation of southpaws. According to scientists, there are areas in the brain devoted to our arms, legs, and various parts of our bodies. The distribution of these sites within our brain is known as “body maps” and there are some significant differences in these maps between left- and…
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PSYCHOLOGY NEWS - Google Blog Search
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Early Scents Really Do Get 'Etched' In The Brain | everyday psychology
6 Nov 2009 | 2:00 pmeveryday psychology · Home · everydaypsychology news aggregator · Archive. Early Scents Really Do Get 'Etched' In The Brain. Oleh: ScienceDaily: Psychology News. November 7, 2009 ... -
'Health-at-every-size' Approach Is Effective: Health-centered ...
5 Nov 2009 | 8:00 pmMost weight-control strategies emphasize energy-restricted diets and increased physical activity -- and most are not effective over the long term. In a study of a "weight-acceptance" intervention, researchers found that there could be ... -
Babies' Language Learning Starts From The Womb
5 Nov 2009 | 2:00 pmFrom their very first days, newborns' cries already bear the mark of the language their parents speak, reveals a new study. The findings suggest that infants begin picking up elements of what will be their first language in the womb, ... -
Thanks to Gratitude!
5 Nov 2009 | 12:58 pmThis article first appeared on Positive Psychology News. To see the original article, click here. To comment on this article, click here. Sherri Fisher, MAPP '06, M.Ed., CPBS, combines 25 years experience in PK-12 education with ... -
Positive Psychology News Daily » Gottman's “Art and Science of Love”
3 Nov 2009 | 1:12 pmIn the positive psychology world, Dr. John Gottman is well-known for his 5:1 ratio of positive to negative language and how it can predict successful relationships. But actually, much more than the 5:1 is important. ...
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Ionian Enchantment
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African science/skepticism blogrolling for October
2 Nov 2009 | 10:47 pmFor those of you new to my blog, I've for a long time now been trying to foster better cooperation and communication between those dedicated to science and reason on the African continent. Part of that initiative is our carnival, another is this blogroll (which is Africa wide, though it started as South African) and the last is our mailing list on Google Groups... So this is the updated blogroll - there are quite a few new blogs, which is a very good thing. If you know of any more, please let me know and please consider adding the blogroll to your own blog. Also, please do a post like this… -
Ionian Enchantment turns two...
2 Nov 2009 | 8:30 pmSo today is my 2nd blogiversary -- it was November 3rd, 2007 when I wrote my first post, ingeniously entitled "Welcome...". As I noted on the occasion of my first blogiversary, things haven't turned out as I thought it would, and my blog is much the better for it. While Ionian Enchantment has remained unabashedly intellectual/academic (read: nerdy) and while I've (almost) consistently steered clear of politics and other distractions, my remit has steadily expanded and my style has become quite a bit more informal. (I am told this is easier on the eyes, which confuses me a bit since academese… -
Carnival of the Africans #12
31 Oct 2009 | 8:08 amWelcome to another (somewhat late) edition of Carnival of the Africans the best and only carnival for African scientists, rationalists and skeptics... We start this month's edition with a few newcomers: The Academy of Science of South Africa launched a blog a while back and recently did a cool rundown of new papers in the South African Journal of Science. Geekery has posts on the top 10 craziest geek quotes and Geek God: Mark Shuttleworth. Hello Universe, This is Nessie writes about discrimination against atheists on the South African bench. Also new is Blaize (who is coming… -
Encephalon #77
28 Oct 2009 | 11:53 pmThe 77th edition of Encephalon (along with Grand Rounds) is out at Sharp Brains. Pieces to check out: Mind Hacks on the curious spike in brain activity at the moment of death (and how this may explain near death experiences), Neurophilosophy on how vision can alleviate pain, and The Neuroctitic on the same. -
Skeptics' Circle #122
28 Oct 2009 | 11:50 pmThe 122nd edition of the Skeptics' Circle is out at Young Australian Skeptics. My picks: Effort Sisyphus on how skepticism has improved his health, J. R. Braden of The Gaytheists on debating a creationist cousin, and The Skeptical Teacher on that silly claim that the LHC will be sabotaged from the future...
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Sports Are 80 Percent Mental
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Sports Science Weekly Gym Bag - 10-28-09
28 Oct 2009 | 9:25 pmWelcome to a World Series edition of the Weekly Sports Science Gym Bag, a collection of some of the best stuff I've found in the last week. A few more baseball stories are included, while you watch the Yankees lose in 6 games! The Overmanager: Why the New York Yankees' Joe Girardi is too smart for his own good To play in the NFL, you have to make a show of going to college. To play in the NBA, you have to get through high school. To sign a contract with a major league baseball team, all you have to do is convince someone you're 16, provided you weren't born in a country with… -
Running To The Right Beat
21 Oct 2009 | 8:29 pmWith the Fall marathon season in full swing, thousands of runners are gearing up for the big day. Just as important as their broken-in shoes and heart rate monitor is their source of motivation, inspiration and distraction: their tunes. Running with music has become so common that the two biggest names in both industries, Nike and Apple, have been joined at the hip with the Nike + iPod combination. So, what is it about music and running, or any exercise, that feels so right? Several recent studies try to chase down the connection between our ears and our feet. For the last 20 years,… -
Sports Science Weekly Gym Bag - 10-7-09
7 Oct 2009 | 7:56 amTime for another edition of the Sports Science Weekly Gym Bag. (Yes, a Wisconsin Badger football gym bag this week...they're 5-0!) If you ever run across something that you would like to share, just add it to the comments below! Marathon Runners Mull the ‘D Word’ This is the time of year, after marathoners have logged their longest miles, that any kind of pain, nagging or excruciating, can send runners into a panic about whether they will make it to the starting line. Or if they should even try... Faster tunes make you bike faster, even if it hurts a bit more Researchers have been… -
I Run, Therefore I Drink?
2 Oct 2009 | 1:44 pmHere’s a question for your buddies at the next golf outing or bowling league night: Are we more active because we drink more or do we drink more because we’re more active? Recent research showed that there is a correlation between the two, but could not offer a solid reason. Either way, another study claims the combination of moderate alcohol use and exercise will help our hearts more than just choosing one over the other. Michael French, a health economics professor at the University of Miami, and his colleagues dug into data from the 2005 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a… -
Sports Science Weekly Gym Bag - 9-28-09
28 Sep 2009 | 8:39 pmHere's a new feature of Sports Are 80 Percent Mental: A weekly round-up of some of the best blog posts, articles and other interesting stuff that I've found on sports science and fitness research. If you find anything else, please just add it as a comment to this post! Aging Muscles: 'Hard To Build, Easy To Lose' Have you ever noticed that people have thinner arms and legs as they get older? As we age it becomes harder to keep our muscles healthy. They get smaller, which decreases strength and increases the likelihood of falls and fractures. New research is showing how this happens —…
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Helping Psychology
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Antidepressants: Medications for Depression
6 Nov 2009 | 9:28 amAntidepressants are prescription medications that can help lessen the symptoms of depression. Depression is often caused by a chemical imbalance within the brain’s neurotransmitters.Two of these neurotransmitters that can affect behavior are called serotonin and norepinephrine. Not only do they control mood, but they also have an affect on other bodily functions like sleeping, eating, thinking and pain reception. Another neurotransmitter than can affect mood, among other things, is dopamine. Antidepressants help to restore the natural balance of these chemicals, thus reducing feelings… -
Dissociative Disorders: Types & Treatments
5 Nov 2009 | 10:33 amFour main types of dissociative disorders are currently identified and recognized by the psychiatric community. While certain symptoms are common between each type, each disorder has its own specific dissociative signs not shared with the other three. These disorders can also be comorbid with other mental illnesses and conditions, including one or more of the other dissociative disorders. Patients with any of the four types may experience loss of memory, detachment, anxiety, depression, and a distorted sense of one’s self or of others. The first type is called “Dissociative… -
Staking Emotional Vampires
4 Nov 2009 | 9:57 amBeware the emotional vampire; someone who can suck the life out of a room in mere minutes. Many believe vampires to be fictitious characters that only exist in novels and movies. There are people out there in the world, however, who thrive off of sucking the energy from others. These people are referred to as emotional vampires. Despite the efforts of these vampires to appear superior to others, the underlying cause of their emotional neediness often lies in the form of a poor self-image and low self-esteem, generally the result of a mental disorder or illness that may not be immediately… -
Postpartum Depression: Battling the Baby Blues
3 Nov 2009 | 7:47 pmPostpartum Depression (PPD) affects an estimated 5-25% of new mothers after childbirth. PPD can strike any time after birth and can last a few months to a year, or longer. It interferes with the mother’s ability to care for her baby or handle other daily tasks. Some of the risk factors include a family history of depression, marital problems, a weak support system, or an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy. Postpartum Depression is caused by physical changes, emotional factors and lifestyle influences. After childbirth, many women experience a dramatic drop in estrogen and progesterone… -
Procrastination: Breaking the Habit
2 Nov 2009 | 7:25 pmProcrastination is something that almost all students deal with at some point in their academic career. From the time our parents warned us about the consequences of not completing our homework we quickly understood the concept of procrastination. Putting off those not so fun tasks or waiting until the last minute to finish an assignment is a common problem, one that needs to be nipped in the bud. We’ve all put aside a dreaded job for a day or two, maybe even a week or longer. As psychology students we study complex human behavior problems and may rarely think about procrastination as a…
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Herd - the hidden truth about who we are
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Greatest Hits
4 Nov 2009 | 10:04 amLove this idea of Kevin Duncan's. A blog about a book he's written which reviews the best Marketing and Business books (1-page each).In other words, a blog that gives you the content of the book that you might or might not choose to pay for which itself gives you the content of the books it describes which you might or might not go on to read or re-read (phew!)Brilliant!Reminds me of that great Myles na gCopaleen gag about a (fictional) service that preloves your library's contents for you so you don't have. Think it's in this collection of his satirical columns… -
The main point of the Internet
26 Oct 2009 | 1:54 pmHugh coined this bon mot today and I think he's on to something. Not that anyone set out to design a thing which would achieve this for us...and of course, it also does other stuff, good and bad. No, the internet and all the associated technologies have turned out to be so powerful because they unleash our social souls....our incredible desire and need to live our lives in the company of others, to be social creatures. That's not just hanging out with others like us on social media platforms, or lurking fanboy/girl-like around our fave blogs or twitterers or even listening in… -
Books, kindle and social information
25 Oct 2009 | 12:14 pmLots of noise around Kindle and Sony's reader at the moment. I know that many folks like Gerd are big fans of them for reading business stuff from but me, I'm still very much analogue for longer text stuff, be it work or leisure.So today's Sunday Times has a great thought from Lynne Truss which suggests why the adoption of this kind of device might not be as rapid as their advocates might imagine (or hope). "I like to see what other people are reading on the bus or the train; how far they've got; whether they're enjoying it."In other words, part of… -
All Hail the Chubby Welshman
22 Oct 2009 | 7:16 amBIG PROPS to both the IPA and it President Rory Sutherland for two big initiatives in recent weeks which show a previously staid, establishment organisation taking big steps into the present.First, the IPA social initiative (which I've discussed here before) which a. acknowledged a problem with their previous attempts to engage with the issue b. opened itself up to the community to provide a correction c. embraced the recommendations of the community to engage in d. a conversational format for the session.While Rory wasn't directly involved here, his presence elsewhere is one… -
At the home of the beautiful game
21 Oct 2009 | 1:33 pmOne of the perks of a project I've been doing recently, is a chance to chew the fat about this brave new world with some old matesAnd to go to some really interesting places (thanks, Surinder for the pic). When you look into an empty stadium (such as the home of the BG), it's clear that the players are only the overture for the fans - the real stars of the football experienceWhich just gives me a chance to revisit this bit of tribalism...just listen to and watch the crowd
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eScienceNews: Psychology
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All dressed-up and nowhere to go
5 Nov 2009 | 9:45 pmParents who dress their children in inappropriate clothing could be inadvertently hampering their child's physical activity in childcare settings. The study, reported in BioMed Central's open access journal, International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, suggests that inadequate or inappropriate clothing could restrict children's outdoor play. read more -
The first casualty of war
5 Nov 2009 | 9:45 pmResearchers reporting in BioMed Central's open access journal Conflict and Health found that the discrepancy in media reporting of casualty numbers in the Iraq conflict can potentially misinform the public and contribute to distorted perceptions and gross underestimates of the number of civilians killed in the armed conflict. read more -
Mom was right: Nice guys don't always finish last
5 Nov 2009 | 12:41 pmPicture it: One jerk in a bar spends the night delivering bad come-ons to women. By the end of the evening, the women aren't receptive to even the nicest guys around. read more -
Early scents really do get 'etched' in the brain
5 Nov 2009 | 10:22 amCommon experience tells us that particular scents of childhood can leave quite an impression, for better or for worse. Now, researchers reporting the results of a brain imaging study online on November 5th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, show that first scents really do enjoy a "privileged" status in the brain. read more -
Parents just don't understand
5 Nov 2009 | 10:22 amMany parents like to meddle in their children's lives. Sometimes this can be beneficial, if the meddling is in the form of parental guidance or setting rules. However, numerous studies have found that in Western countries, when parents are very controlling and dominating over their children, the children suffer psychologically. It has also been suggested that this effect may not be as strong in East Asian countries — researchers have posited that certain aspects of East Asian culture may make children more accepting of their parents' intrusive behavior. In a new report in Current Directions…
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I Choose Change
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Crazy Psychotherapists? Maybe…
20 Oct 2009 | 10:17 am**UPDATE: THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED** (Warning: This is a shameless plug!) Some might think so since they’re giving away all the “tricks of the trade” for only $10 – that’s $100 less than they’d charge for a one-on-one session. Parents will leave home overwhelmed, frazzled, and “fed up!” but return lively, happy, and refreshed.That’s because, despite having fresh, yummy food in their belly, they’ll be filled with the latest parenting “know how” from FOUR Psychotherapists and Life Coaches, on hand to answer your questions. I Choose Change Counseling and Coaching… -
Calgon, Take Me Away!
7 Oct 2009 | 5:00 amRemember this video from the 70s with the lady exclaiming, “Calgon, take me away!”? Oh, the times I’ve uttered those words… At the end of a long day (or even at the beginning and middle of the day!), I’ve wanted to be whisked away into neverland, trading my chaos in for some peace and quiet. (Warning: Shameless Plug!) On October 24, we’ll be sweetening the pot a little bit by taking you away from the frustrations of parenting. Oh, I know, I know… a “worskhop” means work. But not this one! We’ll be feeding you, introducing… -
What Does it Mean To Be “Authentic”?
6 Oct 2009 | 12:00 pmphoto credit: Pandiyan Editor’s note: I originally posted this in October 2008. Now, one year later, I’m revisiting authenticity. Enjoy! I have found it – the definition of authenticity! Sure, there are plenty of Toms, Dicks, and Harrys out there who claim to know all about “authentic” life styles. They say, “Listen to me. I can guide you to happiness!” Then they charge you an arm and a leg. But I think I have found the real definition of authenticity. Here it is, for free I might add. (You’re welcome!) It comes by way of Brian Goldman, a… -
Who’s to Blame When Nobody Likes You?
13 Sep 2009 | 9:38 amphoto credit: stefernie “We cannot change our childhood. We can make sense of what has been repressed and forgotten…If we remain conscious of ourselves and of the pull of early models, even if hang-ups of various kinds remain, as inevitably they must, we have a better chance of creating satisfying relationships with our mates and secure relationships with our children…we are only doomed to repeat what has not been remembered, reflected upon, and worked through.” - Robert Karen Our relationships are reflections of our true self. The adage “you are who your… -
Love For Sale: How an Unhappy Adult is Created
9 Sep 2009 | 9:30 pmphoto credit: T Hall Like a deer in headlights. That’s how Mom looked when I asked, simply, “How do you show your son love?” There was a looooooong pause. Blinking. Total befuddlement. I waited. Waited. Waited. Then she said, “I’ve just been so angry at him lately. He intentionlly does things that make me mad. I can’t show him love right now.” Excuse me? You can’t do what? Because your son is acting like a mad man, you can’t show him love? (You know the kind of “mad man” behavior I’m talking about,…
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The Shrink Rap
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Visual, Perceptual Tricks Bamboozle Brain
5 Nov 2009 | 8:11 amWired.com heads to San Francisco’s Exploratorium to see four exhibits that explore the effects of visual illusions and perceptual phenomena. Source: Wired [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] -
Guide to cognitive behavioural therapy
5 Nov 2009 | 7:40 amAuthoritative information from the British Medical Journal on CBT, a psychotherapy used to treat depression, anxiety, panic attacks and obsessive-compulsive disorder Source: The Guardian, BMJ [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] -
Psychologists Suggest Ways to Include the Aging Population in the Technology Revolution
5 Nov 2009 | 6:49 amTechnology is no longer what it used to be: Computers have replaced typewriters and landlines are in rapid decline. Technological advances are being made every day, making many of our lives easier... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] -
Top 10 Tips for Stress-free geeks
4 Nov 2009 | 10:47 amTo mark Stress Free Awareness Day today a technologist at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), has revealed her Top 10 Tips to help technology geeks to... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] -
Battling football high-school head injuries
3 Nov 2009 | 9:14 pmVisit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy Source: NBC nightly news [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]
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Brain Blogger
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A Small Sip from the Fountain of Youth
6 Nov 2009 | 4:00 amThe search for eternal youth is as old as time itself. The theme of immortality winds its way through religion, mythology, poetry, fiction, and modern movies. Usually, stories of those who have achieved immortality expose the curse of eternal life, rather than the blessing of perpetual youth. While living forever may never be possible, life expectancy is steadily increasing, and healthier — that is, more youthful — aging may actually be possible. New research published in the medical journal The Lancet posits that most babies born since the year 2000 will live to be at least 100… -
Why So Serious About The Self?
3 Nov 2009 | 4:00 amYou have seen movies in which characters have acted violently. Many times, these characters also have a mental illness. Violence is one common stereotype of psychological disorders, along with rebellion and child-like behavior. In The Dark Knightand Me, Myself, and Irene, a character has multiple personality disorder, which is said to cause demonic or mean behavior. Harvey Dent develops a second, evil personality called Two-Face, while Charley Baileygates is known to lash out at random due to his other, less friendly, personality. In each character, mental illness is shown to bring out… -
Is Knowledge Power? Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing
31 Oct 2009 | 5:00 amThe completion of the sequencing of the human genome in 2003 was an outstanding scientific accomplishment. This achievement, together with advances in technology and the forces of capitalism and competition, has brought genetic testing directly to the consumer. However, this Pandora’s box is proving difficult to manage for many people. Direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic tests are marketed to consumers primarily through the Internet. Consumers are motivated by education, recreation, and preventive health care, but the answers obtained from the tests do not necessarily provide meaningful… -
Bruxism and the Brain
28 Oct 2009 | 5:00 amDo you grind your teeth at night? Bruxism is the technical term for teeth grinding or teeth clenching that usually occurs in sleep. Bruxism may lead to jaw pain, shoulder pain, ear ache, and all sorts of other physical ailments. Have you ever wondered why some people grind their teeth at night? Some people clench their jaw and grind their teeth during the day, but nocturnal or night-time bruxism is what I’m referring to right now. I know many people who grind their teeth in their sleep and they have to wear night guards to protect the enamel on their teeth. There are many theories behind… -
Are Physicians Spending Too Much Time Diagnosing Patients?
25 Oct 2009 | 5:00 amDizziness is responsible for nearly 3 million emergency room visits every year in the United States. In most of the cases, the dizziness is caused by a benign inner ear problem, or is the result of short-lived discomfort or distress, including anxiety, depression, or certain phobias. However, approximately 4% of patients that present to the emergency room complaining of dizziness are experiencing a stroke or transient ischemic attack. Since more than half of patients with dizziness who are experiencing a stroke show no other symptoms, misdiagnosis is frequent and common. Now, a study…
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PsyBlog
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Why Do People Bother Voting?
31 Oct 2009 | 5:17 amWhy we overestimate the power of our own vote. It might seem like an undemocratic question but it's one that's always plagued me: why do I bother voting? Most people know their own tick in the box is hardly worth it when weighed against the effort involved in getting registered and actually going to vote, let alone when weighed against all the other people voting. Quattrone & Tversky (1984) had a hunch that there was another, more complex psychological reason that people vote, to go along with the usual explanations. Not only, they guessed, do people vote because of their democratic duty… -
The Truth About Self-Deception
27 Oct 2009 | 10:56 amCan we pull the wool over our own eyes or do we see through our mind games? In theory the one person we should never, ever, lie to is ourselves. Surely lying to ourselves is counter-productive? Like calmly and deliberately shooting yourself in the foot or taking a hot toasting fork and plunging it into your eye? But look around and it's not hard to spot the tell-tale symptoms of self-deception in other people. So perhaps we are also deceiving ourselves in ways we can't clearly perceive? But is that really possible and would we really believe the lies that we 'told' ourselves anyway? That's… -
How Rewards Can Backfire and Reduce Motivation
12 Oct 2009 | 6:49 amSurely one of the best ways to generate motivation in ourselves and others is by dangling rewards? Yet psychologists have long known that rewards are overrated. The carrot, of carrot-and-stick fame, is not as effective as we've been led to believe. Rewards work under some circumstances but sometimes they backfire. Spectacularly. Here is a story about preschool children with much to teach all ages about the strange effects that rewards have on our motivation. It's child's play Psychologists Mark R. Lepper and David Greene from Stanford and the University of Michigan were interested in testing… -
How to Make People Believe in Telepathy
7 Oct 2009 | 6:41 amHave you ever been thinking about someone and then moments later they've called you? Is that random coincidence or something more? People love to believe in supernatural powers like telepathy. At least one-third of Americans report a belief in extra-sensory perception (ESP), with a further 40% refusing to rule out the possibility. Surveys in Europe reveal similar figures with one study finding that almost two-thirds of people believe in some form of ESP (further figures on the NSF website). Psychologists are particularly interested in why people have these sorts of beliefs. One common… -
Are You a Liar?
1 Oct 2009 | 8:17 amDo people really lie 3 times within 10 minutes of meeting someone new? It's a statistic often quoted to show how callous and heartless people are. It's the kind of number the misanthrope TV doc Gregory House (played by Brit Hugh Laurie) should have tattooed across his forehead. But what kinds of lies are people telling? Are they covering up dastardly crimes or just oiling the social wheels? To find out let's have a look at the original research this number is based on. Feldman et al. (2002) told 121 participants they were going to have a chat with someone new for 10 minutes. Then half were…
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BPS Research Digest
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Psychology X-factor
6 Nov 2009 | 2:37 amClick Here for PollOnline Survey | Website Polls | Email Marketing | Crowdsourcing SoftwareView MicroPoll -
How to increase altruism in toddlers
5 Nov 2009 | 1:50 amSurely one of the most charming sights is of an adult struggling to reach an object, only for a toddler to pick up that object and hand it to the adult, as research has shown they so often will. Psychologists think such ingrained altruism has evolved as a consequence of our species' dependence on group living for survival. Supporting this account, Harriet Over and Malinda Carpenter have shown that subtle exposure to the sight of two apparently companionable dolls, stood side by side, is enough to increase the likelihood that an 18-month-old will help an adult pick up some dropped sticks.Sixty… -
CCTV cameras don't reassure, they frighten
4 Nov 2009 | 1:48 amPeople are no more fearful of crossing a street with a young male skinhead in it than they are a street with a smartly dressed woman present, unless, that is, a CCTV camera is overhead. The new finding appears to undermine one of the key justifications for Britain's network of 4.2 million surveillance cameras: that they provide reassurance to the public. It seems that the sight of a CCTV camera can have the opposite effect, cueing the perception of a threat. Dave Williams and Jobuda Ahmed presented 120 participants - shoppers in Hatfield - with pictures of a fictional town centre street… -
The Special Issue Spotter
3 Nov 2009 | 1:59 amWe trawl the world's journals so you don't have to:Precursors and diverse pathways to personality disorder in children and adolescents (Development and Psychopathology).The Society for Neuroscience, forty-year anniversary retrospective (Journal of Neuroscience).Motivational interviewing and psychotherapy (Journal of Clinical Psychology).Environmental psychology on the move (Journal of Environmental Psychology).Spatial working memory and imagery: From eye movements to grounded cognition (Acta Psychologica).Individual differences in emotion components and dynamics (Cognition and Emotion). -
Facial emotional expressions are universal and culturally specific
1 Nov 2009 | 9:00 pmEarlier this year a piece of emotion research provoked a rather heated reaction in some quarters after it claimed to show that, contrary to the writings of Charles Darwin, Paul Ekman and others, facial emotional expressions are not universal after all. "Seriously, is this all that it takes to be published in Current Biology? Sheesh," was the verdict of one incredulous online commenter to Reddit (a more considered critical reaction is here). Now, with a diplomat's tact, David Matsumoto and colleagues have presented new findings showing that facial emotional expressions start out universal, but…
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The Frontal Cortex
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Crying Babies
6 Nov 2009 | 10:14 amThis is absolutely fascinating, yet another reminder that the structure of language infects everything. Here's Nell Greenfieldboyce, at NPR: The distinctive sounds of a newborn's first cries may be influenced by the mother tongue of its parents. A new study of over a thousand recorded cries from 30 French newborns and 30 German newborns found differences in the cries' melody patterns. French cries tended to have a rising melody, while the German cries tended to have a falling melody. The finding suggests that newborns just a few days old may already be trying to imitate the prevailing… -
Sleep
4 Nov 2009 | 2:53 pmAs a chronic insomniac, I'm always a little disturbed when I learn about the lingering cognitive effects of a bad night sleep: In a study at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in 2003, for example, scientists examined the cognitive effects of a week of poor sleep, followed by three days of sleeping at least eight hours a night. The scientists found that the "recovery" sleep did not fully reverse declines in performance on a test of reaction times and other psychomotor tasks, especially for subjects who had been forced to sleep only three or five hours a night. In a similar study in… -
The Gay Animal Kingdom, Part 2
3 Nov 2009 | 6:32 amThis is excellent news. Dan Delong will be back in the classroom today. I'm so relieved. Read the comments on this post... -
Temptation
3 Nov 2009 | 5:56 amWhy are we so dishonest? Why do we bad things, even when we know we're doing something bad? Ever since Adam and Eve ate that apple, we've assumed that there is something inherently tempting about sin. If left to our own devices, we'd all turn into men at a Vegas bachelor party, indulging in sex, drugs and slot machines. We'd loot and pillage and lie. Immorality feels good, which is why it's so hard being moral. Some people, of course, are made of stronger stuff, which is why they stay on the righteous path. Because they're better than us, they don't eat too much cake or cheat on their taxes. -
Arts Education
2 Nov 2009 | 11:05 amMichael Posner and Brenda Patoine make a neuroscientific case for arts education. They argue that teaching kids to make art has lasting cognitive benefits: If there were a surefire way to improve your brain, would you try it? Judging by the abundance of products, programs and pills that claim to offer "cognitive enhancement," many people are lining up for just such quick brain fixes. Recent research offers a possibility with much better, science-based support: that focused training in any of the arts--such as music, dance or theater--strengthens the brain's attention system, which in turn can…
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The Scientific Fundamentalist
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Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do
1 Nov 2009 | 6:48 pmOne of my all-time favorites among all the scientific papers that I have ever read in my life is “Why your friends have more friends than you do,” published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1991 by my old sociology friend Scott L. Feld, who is now Professor of Sociology at Purdue University. The title of Feld’s paper says it all, and here’s a little demonstration you can do to confirm his conclusion. List all of your friends. Then ask each of your friends how many friends they have. No matter who you are, whether you are a man or a woman, where you live, how… -
Why Dating Is Difficult in New York (or London)
25 Oct 2009 | 5:30 pmThe guest blogger and PT intern Jen Kim complains about the difficulties of dating in New York. No wonder she finds it difficult. Since 1966, it’s been mathematically proven that dating in New York is difficult.... In their 1966 paper entitled “Recognizing the Maximum of a Sequence” published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, John P. Gilbert and Frederick Mosteller offer a solution to a problem known as the “beauty contest problem.” This is how Gilbert and Mosteller describe the problem. Suppose a boy is to have a date with his choice of one… -
Predictably Irrational, Yes; Explainably Irrational, No II
18 Oct 2009 | 6:31 pmIn my last post, I review and highly recommend my fellow PT blogger Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational. The book is full of fascinating examples of how actual human behavior – the choices and decisions people make every day – deviates from the predictions of the standard economic theory. The book is entertaining and easy to read. As great as Predictably Irrational is, however, there is one word – a very important word – missing from the book: Why. This is my major criticism, not just of Ariely and Predictably Irrational, but of the entire field of… -
Predictably Irrational, Yes; Explainably Irrational, No I
11 Oct 2009 | 6:19 pmMy fellow PT blogger Dan Ariely is one of the most creative behavioral economists in the world today, one of the hotshots in currently the hottest academic field. Ariely is to behavioral economics what Steven Levitt (coauthor of Freakonomics) is to standard economics, simultaneously a superb and mind-bogglingly creative scientist and excellent communicator of their science to the general audience. As great as Dan Ariely is, however, he has one major flaw: He is not an evolutionary psychologist. The field of behavioral economics began in the late 1970s and early 1980s with… -
Do Married Women Want Their Husbands to Cheat?
4 Oct 2009 | 4:08 pmMarried women face a dilemma. It’s not that they want their husbands to cheat on them. But then again it’s not that they don’t want their husbands to cheat on them either. Once married to a man, it is in the reproductive interest of the woman to monopolize access to all of his resources (material or otherwise) so that he would invest them in her joint children with him. Any sexual relationship he may have with other women might potentially jeopardize her exclusive access to his resources, so obviously it is in her interest to make sure that he does not have sexual…
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We're Only Human...
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Close Encounters of the Rude Kind
5 Nov 2009 | 9:40 amOne of my personal crotchets is people who walk down busy city sidewalks without looking where they’re going. These days they might be texting on an electronic device, but it’s not the technology I object to. They could just as well be reading a book. What’s annoying is the expectation that the crowds will part, that all the other pedestrians will make the effort to get out of their way.This may be simple rudeness. But I suspect that some of these people truly believe they can skillfully multi-task even in a crowd. Well they can’t, and I’ve now got science to prove it. Finnish… -
Sneezing at health care reform
28 Oct 2009 | 7:31 amI ride a public bus to and from work, and today some of my fellow commuters were sneezing. My guess is that people sneeze on the bus ride every day, but I am especially mindful of any contagion at the moment. And well I should be. We’ve got the regular seasonal bug out there, plus the ominous swine flu on the horizon. And the airwaves and newspapers are filled with warnings about this year’s heightened risk for a flu pandemic. More than 30,000 have already been struck by swine flu, with more than 100 deaths.A stranger’s sneeze can be a good thing in a way. Think of it as a public… -
Another Roadside Distraction
6 Oct 2009 | 10:37 amWhen Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic Tim Page was in second grade, he and his classmates went on a field trip to Boston. They later wrote about the experience as a class assignment, and this is part of what the nine-year-old Page wrote:"Well, we went to Boston, Massachusetts through the town of Warrenville, Connecticut on Route 44A. It was very pretty and there was a church that reminded me of pictures of Russia from our book that is published by Time-Life. We arrived in Boston at 9:17. At 11 we went on a big tour of Boston on Gray Line 43, made by the Superior Bus Company like School Bus… -
"For just pennies a day"
25 Sep 2009 | 12:16 pmThere are so many things you can purchase or accomplish for just pennies a day. You can get lots of interesting magazine subscriptions, or a good life insurance plan—no physical required. You can adopt a needy child in Africa, or save the Earth from global warming. The “pennies a day” marketing scheme has been around a long time, and whoever came up with it showed extraordinary psychological insight. Indeed, science is only now beginning to demonstrate what these marketers sensed intuitively—that people are not entirely rational when it comes to processing numbers. What’s more, the… -
Changing the old dating rules
22 Sep 2009 | 8:41 amWomen are much choosier than men when it comes to romance. This is well known, but the reason for this gender difference is unclear. Evolutionary psychologists think it’s because, way back in prehistoric times, “dating” was much riskier for women. Men who made an ill-advised choice in the ancient version of a singles bar simply had one lousy night. Women who chose unwisely could end up facing years of motherhood.That’s less true today, yet women remain much more selective. Is this difference a vestige of our early ancestry? Or might it be totally unrelated to reproductive risk,…
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World of Psychology
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5 Clues You Should Be Letting Go of Something
7 Nov 2009 | 2:41 amAwhile back I discussed Eileen Flanagan’s book, The Wisdom to Know the Difference. If you’d like to learn more about her, visit her website at www.EileenFlanagan.com. Therese: What are five clues you should be letting go of something? Eileen: 1. You find yourself repeating the same complaint to different people. We all get frustrated from time to time, but it’s not good for our mental or spiritual health to wallow in frustration. I remember once I got irritated with another mother at my kid’s nursery school after she did something that inconvenienced me. I complained… -
Best of Our Blogs: November 6, 2009
6 Nov 2009 | 7:06 amI’m attending the 25th Annual Rosalynn Carter Symposium on Mental Health Policy today, and I’ll write more about the inspirational work this organization has been doing for 25 years shortly (not just in Georgia, but throughout the entire country). The people who are attending this symposium — as well as the Carter Center itself — have done much to improve mental health care in the U.S., but it’s not something you hear enough about. It’s heartening so many great minds coming together to share best practices and ideas for improvement (especially at this… -
How Do You Treat Empty-Nest Depression?
6 Nov 2009 | 2:27 amSeveral mom friends of mine have lately come down with a bad case of “empty-nest depression” — moms who just dropped off their youngest offspring to college, or moms having difficulty keeping busy now that the youngest is in kindergarten all day. I googled the term “empty-nest depression” to see what I could find on this topic. I was surprised to see the Beyond Blue post I wrote in 2007 at the top of the search results. But, after reading it, I can see why it was so popular. I merely asked a question, and all of you answered it. On the comment box of that post… -
Bye Bye Asperger’s Syndrome?
5 Nov 2009 | 2:29 amIs the diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome — a mild form of autism mostly diagnosed in boys — heading the way of the dodo bird? A new article in the New York Times suggests that the new revision of the diagnostic manual — the DSM-V — is likely to do away with the diagnosis. How can you just delete an entire diagnosis and do away with a diagnostic label that hundreds of thousands of clinicians use everyday and millions identify with? If you’re the American Psychiatric Association, the folks behind the latest DSM revision, you can pretty much do anything you… -
Group Therapy for Binge Eating
4 Nov 2009 | 9:30 amBinge eating disorder is characterized by a person having frequent episodes of eating what others would consider an abnormally large amount of food, while at the same time feeling out of control — the personal feels like they are unable to control what or how much is being eaten. According to government statistics, people with binge eating disorder are considered clinically obese, but plenty of people can engage in binge eating while maintaining an average or less-than-obese weight. Binge eating disorder probably affects 2 to 3 percent of all adults. People with a binge eating problem…
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idle thoughts
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The gaggle of economic sociopaths
3 Nov 2009 | 5:28 pmI am the last person to defend the behavior of the Wall Street tycoons who brought down the economy by their actions over the past eight years, but we were ill served by the publication of Neal Gabler's rant about the “economic sociopaths” of Wall Street (Boston Globe, October 31, 2009: A11).The diagnosis of a psychiatric condition (like those articulated in DSM-IV-R) should be done on an individual basis by a highly trained specialist. Such diagnoses should not be applied in a broad brush way to any subpopulation, even Wall Streeters deserve that amount of restraint. Though the phrase is… -
Allston shoudn't suffer on Harvard's account
3 Nov 2009 | 5:22 pmYour advice to Harvard points out the wrong strategy (Allston shouldn't suffer on Harvard's account, Boston Globe, October 28, 2009: A14).What Harvard should do is go full steam ahead on the Science Campus Development even if it means dipping into the endowment. This is exactly the time to do so.Money can be borrowed at reasonable rates and Harvard has impeccable collateral. It can buy more construction for the dollar in a recession. Stopping and restarting projects are more expensive than continuing on.Finally, counter-cyclical spending of this magnitude will give a big boost to the city,… -
Afghanistan
3 Nov 2009 | 5:19 pmYour two op-eds today ([Victor Sebestyen] Transcripts of Defeat & [Nicholas Kristof] More Schools, Not Troops, New York Times, October 29, 2009: A23) provide forceful counter-aguments to that of Max Boot a few days ago (Max Boot, There's No Substitute for Troops on the Ground, New York Times, October 22, 2009).It is clear that we do not have the stomach to put the necessary force on the ground. With 110,000 troops, the Russians were unsuccessful in "pacifying" Afghanistan. Counter insurgency experts estimate that 390,000 troops would be required (that's the Petraeus doctrine, not mine)to… -
Seeking the Home-Field Advantage in the Public Option
31 Oct 2009 | 2:13 pmThe trigger suggestion is insane (Seeking the Home-Field Advantage in the Public Option, New York Times, October 23, 2009).For nearly forty years, the Health Insurance industry has opposed improving coverage. They now claim that they can control costs and provide universal coverage. They are not to be believed.Only a competing public option system will do. The call for a trigger is absurd. If the industry had the will it could have done what it proposes sometime in the past forty years. It has not, giving them a few more years would be an unreasonable waste of time during which many would… -
There's No Substitute for Troops on the Ground
31 Oct 2009 | 2:11 pmThee may be no substitute for troops on the ground (Max Boot, There's No Substitute for Troops on the Ground, New York Times, October 22, 2009), but do we and NATO have enough troops? He points to the town of Nawa where 1000 marines have carried out a clear and hold policy. About 400 Afghan troops assist them.However there are 780 cities, towns and villages in Afghanistan. Do we have 780,000 troops to send east to hold and clear all those cities, towns and villages? I think not.Could we be more optimistic and argue that when half the cities, towns, and villages were secure and flourishing,…
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School Psychologist Blog Files
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Classroom Observations
1 Nov 2009 | 5:28 pmClassroom observations occur to document behaviors and to help provide insight to teachers. Teachers are teaching and are typically focused on the overall learning of the entire class. It is not possible for a teacher to catch all of the details of classroom while teaching. An outside observer, often a School Psychologist, can sit in the classroom and observe a student or the entire class. These insights can be used to help provide better instruction, create behavioral or academic interventions, or to document behaviors. When do classroom observations occur? - During a special education… -
Parents Helping to Prevent Bullying
10 Oct 2009 | 6:23 amBully prevention can occur at all levels. There are system wide programs that an entire school system can adopt. There are school wide programs designed to prevent and intervene when bullying occurs. Teacher awareness and prevention techniques can be employed. There are programs that focus on working individually with the bully and the victim. Bullying makes kids feel helpless and at times it can make parents of bullied kids feel helpless. Children who are bullied may feel scared, lonely, depressed, or angry. These are not emotions that we as parents want to see in our children. Prevention is… -
Academic Achievement Assessment vs. Classroom Assessment
24 Sep 2009 | 9:51 amTests used in Special Education Assessment to measure academic achievement are quite different than classroom based assessment in several ways. The main differences between the academic achievement tests such as the Woodcock Johnson III or Wechsler Individual Achievement Test and classroom based assessment are the intended purpose of the test, the way it is administered, and the scores obtained. The Purpose of a classroom assessment is to measure students learning of what is being taught in the classroom. Classroom assessments could be quizzes, chapter tests, midterms, or final exams. These… -
School Counseling vs. In-Depth Psychotherapy for Children
14 Sep 2009 | 6:03 pmThis article was written by a guest blogger from www.goodtherapy.orgOne of the staples of elementary schools across the country and around the world is the school counselor, a typically friendly and approachable figure who offers a space to talk about any problems or concerns and provide advice. School counselors are also usually found in junior high and high schools, and may in these later years focus more on guiding the course of academic schedules and helping out with college applications and other materials than with addressing emotional and mental concerns.These familiar figures can be… -
Triennial What?
26 Aug 2009 | 8:04 amThis word gets thrown around in Special Education. If your child is in special education, you need to know what a triennial evaluation is and what it means for your child.What is a Triennial Evaluation?Every three years a committee must convene to determine if the current disability category is appropriate. School systems are required to complete this review and if needed complete the triennial evaluation within three years from the original eligibility date. Three years from the initial eligibility is the triennial. Parents are invited to attend this review that will occur a few months…
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School Psychology Blog
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Study Tips – Get it wrong, and then get it right!
24 Oct 2009 | 6:10 pmDo Revision Questions First! New research has shown that getting things wrong actually facilitates learning (Scientific American, 20th October, 2009). Getting things wrong helps with memory and challenges the brain to learn. Students want to get the best mark on their final exams, but they need to challenge themselves to achieve their best. A lot of students make the mistake of writing volumes of study notes on each subject. This is a time consuming process and as the student is “copying” from another source, the amount of learning in this process is minimal. I have been telling students… -
Building the Parent – Child Relationship
20 Oct 2009 | 8:53 pmCupcake and a chat? It is important to build a positive relationship with our children. Life is busy and we often run from one activity to the next. However, one of my clients recently started having a special time with their daughter – they called it “cup cake time!” She took her to the local coffee shop and they enjoyed cup cakes together (and of course they talked!). Cup cakes are popular at the moment with all ages – but the magic is in the one on one time. Sometimes it is hard to connect with young people (especially if they are teenagers), so below are a few… -
VCE Study Skills Program
19 Oct 2009 | 10:32 pmTo be successful in VCE it is not only important to work hard but also to know how to study. It helps to be organised and motivated. Clear and well defined goals are essential. And you have to know how to study! Many students write out their notes and try to memorise them, but they are often distracted by the process of completing the notes, rather than learning effectively. It is essential that students remain motivated and are capable of dealing with the stress and anxiety that the final years of school will bring. School Psychology Services provides a focused VCE Coaching Program which… -
How to Deal with A Bully
7 Oct 2009 | 7:55 pmStop the Bully! Stop the Bully! Bullying is common within our society. It occurs at school, at home and in the work place. It is the nasty part of human nature. Bullying is about power. In particular it is about the abuse of power. Someone in a position of power seeks to control or influence another person. Why do people bully? Bullies are unhappy people. They try to influence others and cause others either emotional or physical pain. Why? – because they want others to suffer as much as they are and they want to have the illusion of feeling powerful. We should feel sorry for bullies, as… -
Career Counselling and Career Choice – What direction is best?
27 Sep 2009 | 3:48 amWhat career path do I take? Making a choice about career is a hard one- but if we can understand ourselves better, it makes the decision a lot easier. We will probably all change our career direction a few times in our lives; well that is what the statistics say! I started out with doing a Science Degree – not dreaming about ever becoming a Psychologist! They didn’t even have psychology as a subject when I went to high school. Yet during my Science Degree I learned to question the natural world and explore it further. I discovered that I loved learning, I loved the scientific approach and…
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Teaching High School Psychology
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Memory Studies on APA's OPL
6 Nov 2009 | 12:00 amBack on April 24th of this year (2009), we posted a blog entry with information on the APA's highly interactive Online Psychology Laboratory (OPL) (http://teachinghighschoolpsychology.blogspot.com/2009/03/opl.html). The laboratory has a number of memory activities for students to partake in. In fact, the memory unit is second only to sensation and perception for the amount of studies.Below you will find a listing of the seven studies currently on the OPL. Simply click on the item below to go to the study. Please be aware, the site requires teachers register and obtain a class ID.To register… -
My Testosterone Does What???
5 Nov 2009 | 12:22 pmApparently, our following of politics affects us in ways I was not previously aware of.In an October 21 article on Wired, the author examined the results of a study that measured the testosterone levels of men using their saliva. The result was that "liberal testosterone levels stayed stable, while those of male Republican voters plummeted. The latter also reported feeling submissive and unhappy." I will leave it to the reader to examine the research and whether or not to use it in class. -
Awareness Test Video Clips
5 Nov 2009 | 9:41 amI love my students. I share one thing with them and they share several videos back with me.This also shows how a good idea/principle can be taken from psychology and used in a variety of contexts. Perhaps Watson really began something when he left psych and went into advertising.A clip of the original awareness test--"a visual attention experiment conducted by Becklen and Cervone(1983) to show that the human mind has its limits. There is only so much the brain can process at a particular time and it must be selective in what it chooses to filter."Awareness test #1 (moonwalking… -
Short Term Memory Demonstration
5 Nov 2009 | 12:00 amGary Fisk from Georgia Southwestern State University, has developed a animated short-term memory demonstration. Students are asked to remember a sequence of numbers which grows from four to eleven digits. While rather simple, the animation gets the point across.The memory animation can be found at Dr. Fisk's personal website at http://garyfisk.com/anim/lecture_stm.swf. Dr. Fisk has created a number of other animations teachers may find useful. Go to http://garyfisk.com/anim/index.html for more information. -
Online Simon Game
4 Nov 2009 | 12:00 amWikipedia describes Simon as "an electronic game of rhythm and memory skill" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_%28game%29). The game was a pop culture phenomena of the 1980's with Milton Bradley selling millions. While not as sophisticated as the video/computer games of today, Simon can still be fun to play. For an online version of the game go to http://www.freegames.ws/games/kidsgames/simon/mysimon.htmYou can download a version of Simon at http://www.chunkypig.com/games/free-simon-game-online-download.php
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Advances in the History of Psychology
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Levi-Strauss Dies at 100
3 Nov 2009 | 9:26 amClaude Lévi-Strauss — the French structuralist anthropologist who was a leading light of the 1950s and 1960s — has passed away at the age of 100. Here are obituaries by Le Monde and by the New York Times. According to the Times, “Levi-Strauss was widely regarded as having reshaped the field of anthropology, introducing new concepts concerning common patterns of behavior and thought, especially myths, in primitive and modern societies. During his 6-decade-long career, he authored many literary and anthropological classics, including ”Tristes Tropiques” (1955),… -
Update: Baby Einstein DVDs to be refunded
26 Oct 2009 | 12:01 pmBreaking News: Two years ago, in August 2007, AHP reported the finding that “infants don’t learn language well from instructional videos.” This has since led to legal claims against Walt Disney Corporation and its Baby Einstein DVD product. Now Disney is offering to refund all purchases made in US, going back five years. This provides an opportunity to look back at our original coverage, which examined the issue from the perspective of parents’ hopes to help their children become as gifted as possible. This also included a detailed bibliography of histories of… -
New Issue of JHBS
22 Oct 2009 | 9:18 pmA new issue of the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences just been released online. Included in the October issue of the journal is an article detailing how post-World War II social scientists, associated with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), “consciously sought to create a scientific way of knowing that would bring unity to diversity” (p. 309) and thus reinforce democratic governance. Also featured is an article that recounts the the late-nineteenth century aesthetic research undertaken by Vernon Lee, a pseudonym adopted… -
Fechner Day!
22 Oct 2009 | 8:12 amAccording to legend, on this date in 1850, Gustav Theodor Fechner arose from his sleep armed with wholly new method to attack the problem studying the mind. Rather than relying on introspective reports of what was going on in people’s minds, scientists could, instead, vary the intensity of some external physical stimulus and ask the “participant” (as we now call them) whether s/he could detect any difference perceptually. For instance: “Does this weight seem heavier than that one?” “Does this light seem brighter or greener than that one?” “Does… -
Happy 150th Birthday John Dewey!
20 Oct 2009 | 9:19 am150 years ago today influential American philosopher, educator, and psychologist John Dewey was born. Over the course of his 92 years, Dewey made significant contributions to a number of fields. Dewey’s predominant philosophical and psychological concern was the relationship between the individual and society. This interest led Dewey, in the late-nineteenth century, to advocate educational reform and open the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, a venue where his education theories could be tested firsthand. Dewey was also a significant contributor to the philosophical…
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Cognitive Daily
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What's the best way to take a study break?
5 Nov 2009 | 1:20 pmGreta and I did our undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, or as a commonly-sold T-shirt on campus put it, "where fun goes to die." To say that Chicago didn't emphasize academics over a social life is to deny that people literally lived in the library (a full-scale campsite was found behind one of the stairwells in the stacks; students had been living there for months). It's not that the administration didn't try to encourage its students to socialize. The library did close at 10 p.m. on Friday nights. There was not one but two film societies, so often students had to choose… -
Can artificial sweeteners really help us lose weight?
4 Nov 2009 | 9:34 amMy SEED column this week focuses on artificial sweeteners. Can switching to artificial sweeteners help solve the obesity problem in the U.S.? Here's a snippet: Saunders says an August report from the American Heart Association (AHA) made it quite clear that excessive sugar consumption is dangerous, and he argues that sugar should be seen as a toxic substance. But how much is too much? The new AHA guidelines suggest limiting added sugar to no more than half of discretionary calories--calories consumed after basic nutritional needs are met. For the average male, Saunders says, this works out to… -
Anime film characters: Do we perceive the intended race, or our own?
3 Nov 2009 | 11:34 amOne of my favorite cartoons as a child was "Speed Racer." It featured an all-American boy (first name, "Speed," last name, "Racer") engaging in that most American of pastimes: driving fast cars. Except that "Speed Racer" wasn't really American; it was made in Japan, and the original Japanese voices were crudely overdubbed in English. Perhaps I can be excused for not noticing the Japanese origins of the show -- I was only 10 years old. Even now, as an adult looking back at those cartoons, the characters do seem awfully American-looking. Or perhaps that's just my Caucasian bias. Does everyone… -
Casual Fridays: Is political wishy-washiness a general phenomenon?
30 Oct 2009 | 3:05 pmPolitical opinion polls are very tricky. Answers to questions depend on the order they're asked in, and on precisely how they are phrased. If you ask people whether they're in favor of killing unborn children, you'll get a much different response than if you ask if there's any situation where women should be allowed to terminate a pregnancy. What's even more difficult is to assess public opinion on complex pending legislation. Most polls find that most Americans like the idea of requiring everyone to buy health insurance. But it's only a slim margin -- 56 to 41 percent. Kevin Drum cited a… -
Are older kids and adolescents really as good as adults at recognizing emotions in faces?
29 Oct 2009 | 1:53 pmTake a look at this face: Does it look more angry or fearful? It may be rather difficult to tell: About fifty percent of adults say faces like this are angry and fifty percent say it's fearful. However, for children, the story is different. Researchers have found that small children aren't as good as adults at recognizing emotions in faces. Young children would see this picture as more fearful than angry. However, most research has suggested that kids are just about as good as adults by the time they're five years old. But neuroscientists have consistently found that the portions of the brain…
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Denying AIDS and other oddities
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How to spot an AIDS denialist
3 Nov 2009 | 10:19 amRogues, pseudoscientists, snake oil peddlers – Seth Kalichman reveals the sinister tactics used by those who deny the link between HIV and AIDS in a new article in The New Humanist magazine.Imagine that you or someone you love just received an HIV positive test result. The news is devastating. After a short time you begin to face the diagnosis. You turn to the Internet for answers. Searching the words “AIDS diagnosis” brings up thousands of websites. A whirlwind of information spins your mind.One credible-looking website, Aids.org, reads: “There is no cure for AIDS. There are drugs… -
"Hello Professor, a Brent Leung is here to see you"
28 Oct 2009 | 7:33 pmHouse of Numbers continues to be the talk of AIDS Denialism. There are many lessons to be learned from the AIDS Denialist crockumentary House of Numbers. The real lesson for scientists is that just because a guy has a camera crew does not mean you should agree to be interviewed by him. Thinking twice before sitting down in front of a camera is a worthwhile lesson indeed. The October 15 issue of Nature, a magazine well known for its excellent book reviews, published a great story on the hazards of scientists appearing in documentaries gone wrong. Too bad the article came out after House of… -
Harvard Symposium on Denialism, Mistrust & Stigma
20 Oct 2009 | 6:05 pmDeath by denial:Symposium explores HIV denial, conspiracy theoriesBy Alvin Powell Harvard GazettePeople who deny that the HIV virus causes AIDS continue to persist in their beliefs despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, nurtured by the broad reach of the Internet and cherry-picked scientific claims, AIDS authorities said Monday.Researchers from Harvard, elsewhere in the United States, and South Africa convened at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts to decry HIV “denialism,” saying that the continued questioning of HIV’s role in AIDS harms those infected with the… -
Can Peter Duesberg be Trusted on Cancer?
9 Oct 2009 | 11:26 amThis week's News Week Magazine raises questions regarding Peter Duesberg's credibility as a cancer researcher. Duesberg is best known for his AIDS Denialism. What many may not know is that Peter Duesberg maintains a small laboratory privately funded by Robert Leppo where he researches potential causes of cancer.Peter Duesberg was among the first scientists to isolate cancer-causing genes and cancer-related retroviruses. Early in his career, Duesberg worked with other Berkeley scientists, including acclaimed molecular biologist G. Steve Martin, to discover the first cancer-causing… -
Moron AIDS Denialist Film House of Numbers: Notes from the show
1 Oct 2009 | 7:26 pmHaving seen the AIDS Denialist film House of Numbers, I must say that it is worse than anyone could imagine. The film misuses the words of leading AIDS scientists to raise doubts about whether HIV causes AIDS, the validity of HIV testing, and the benefits of HIV treatments. Context is everything, and House of Numbers creates an illusion of debate among scientists by placing scientists along side of pseudoscientists. All Doctors and Professors are equal in the eyes of Director Brent Leung.Contorting words to misrepresent reality is what AIDS Deniers do. Some AIDS Deniers must distort reality…
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Psychology of Media:
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What Courses Should I Take to Study Media Psychology?
4 Nov 2009 | 11:41 amWondering what courses make up a media psychology curriculum is common particularly among people thinking about the next steps in their education. Recently a young woman from Athlone High School for Girls in South Africa posed this question, so I am sharing my response here. It is exciting to hear that people all around the world are becoming aware of the importance of psychology in addressing media and technology in our daily lives. Media psychology, while based in psychology, is transdisciplinary. You will want a working understanding of several areas of… -
Pursuing a Career in Psychology, Education, and Interactive Media
25 Oct 2009 | 12:55 pmI always enjoy getting questions from people interested in integrating media applications into their field of study or in pursuing a career in media psychology. The questions come from around the world and are always full of enthusiasm for learning, the potential of media technologies, and making a positive contribution to society. It is always a chance for me to remember not only how much I love the field of media psychology, but why I think it is so very important. Media psychology is a broad field. Recently I received a question from a new graduate in the Middle East about how to follow a… -
Drucker and Facebook–Organizing for Change
19 Oct 2009 | 1:17 pmThere’s a story about the demise of Facebook in the Washington Post: Worldwide ebb for Facebook. I like the logic–when a company’s been around long enough for someone to make a movie out of it, then it’s probably on the downhill slide, even if they do get Justin Timberlake. That people are interested in something new shouldn’t be surprising to anyone in business, marketing or evolutionary psychology. Same ol’, same ol’ won’t cut it, especially in a world where expectations about the speed of change have reached new highs. But rather than… -
The Psychology of Website Design – PowerPoint Overview
17 Oct 2009 | 3:39 pmThis slide show was originally created for a presentation in 2006 but was updated for a group of student web site developers at NYU a few months ago. Web technologies continue to rocket along and the tools have become more flexible, innovative and sophisticated. The fundamental psychological issues of effective design, however, haven’t changed, because now, more than ever, information must be delivered with a client or user-centric perspective. Social media and extensive ability to interact and paricipate in new media has made us less tolerant of any medium, website or otherwise, that… -
Carried Away with Balloon Boy
15 Oct 2009 | 4:43 pmThis article was published on PsychologyToday.com in my blog “Positively Media.” The big story today was the six-year old boy who was carried away in the family weather balloon. It was the ONLY story on the news radio channel during my drive home from the post office and I arrived back at my desk to find an interview request about the ‘Boy in the Balloon’ story. Why do we care so much about this story that we are literally hanging on every word for hours? What creates such appeal? When children are in harm’s way, it triggers the nurturing parent in all of us.
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Neurophilosophy
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The illusion of time: Perceiving the effect before the cause
6 Nov 2009 | 9:50 amA novel temporal illusion, in which the cause of an event is perceived to occur after the event itself, provides some insight into the brain mechanisms underlying conscious perception. The illusion, described in the journal Current Biology by a team of researchers from France, suggests that the unconscious representation of a visual object is processed for around one tenth of a second before it enters conscious awareness. Chien-Te Wu and his colleagues at the Brain and Cognition Research Centre in Toulouse used a visual phenomenon called motion-induced blindness, in which a constantly… -
Phantom limbs can contort into impossible configurations
28 Oct 2009 | 11:37 amFOLLOWING the surgical removal of a body part, amputees often report sensations which seem to originate from the missing limb. This is thought to occur because the brain's model of the body (referred to as the body image) still contains a representation of the limb, and this leads to the experience that the missing limb is still attached to their body. Occasionally, amputees say that they cannot move their phantom limbs - they are perceived to be frozen in space, apparently because they cannot be seen. Yet, research shows that the body image is malleable and easily manipulated. And according… -
A pictorial history of neurotechniques
21 Oct 2009 | 2:20 pmTHE latest issue of Technology Review contains a photo essay by yours truly, called Time Travel Through the Brain, in which I look at how techniques used to investigate the brain have evolved during the 100 year history of modern neuroscience. The essay begins with a drawing by the great Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who used the staining method discovered by Camillo Golgi to establish that nervous tissue is composed of cells, then goes on to describe more recent methods such as fibre tracing, Brainbow and various types of microscopy.This image from the piece graced… -
Lasers used to write false memories onto the fruit fly brain
20 Oct 2009 | 9:55 amTHE humble fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) has the ability to learn and remember, and to make predictions about the outcome of its behaviours on the basis of past experience. Compared to a human brain, that of the fruit fly is relatively simple, containing approximately 250,000 cells. Even so, little is known about the anatomical basis of memory formation. The neural circuitry underlying memories in these insects has now been dissected. In an elegant new study published in the journal Cell, researchers from the University of Oxford show that aversive memories are dependent on… -
Mice navigate a virtual reality environment
18 Oct 2009 | 5:30 pmUSING an inventive new method in which mice run through a virtual reality environment based on the video game Quake, researchers from Princeton University have made the first direct measurements of the cellular activity associated with spatial navigation. The method will allow for investigations of the neural circuitry underlying navigation, and to a better understanding of how spatial information is encoded at the cellular level. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
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Science Of Small Talk
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Searching for the Perfect Victim
28 Oct 2009 | 11:36 amIn its most recent issue, Newsweek has a story on an ongoing string of unsolved murders in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. The victims in these cases have been poor, Black, and–in some instances at least–have had criminal records. I spoke with Krista Gesaman, the reporter who wrote the piece, and though my quotations in it are among the most obvious and least interesting aspects of the story, it's worth a read.The thrust of Gesaman's article is that various characteristics of the victims may help explain why the story has received far less attention than other, seemingly less serious (or, at… -
I'll Have What He's Having
21 Oct 2009 | 5:54 pmThe scene: New Orleans, the French Quarter. I'm out with college friends to celebrate the wedding weekend of a fellow buddy. It sounds like the set-up for a Vince Vaughn or Seth Rogen movie– with a lead-in like that, I'm sure you can envision any number of intriguing outcomes to the tale.Alas, you don't know me very well.Those who do would be quick to assure you that this story is less likely to end in Judd Apatow-inspired, plastic-bead-related debauchery, and more likely to segue into an admittedly overwrought psychological analysis of mundane daily life.So we're sitting around the table… -
Obama’s Pyrrhic Prize
9 Oct 2009 | 8:30 amIf my morning radio talk shows, workplace chatter, and Facebook news feed are to be trusted, the big topic of discussion this weekend is going to be Barack Obama's surprising win of the Nobel Peace Prize. Specifically, the first question most people are turning to–that is, after, wait, are you serious?–is whether this honor will help or hurt Obama politically.It's a social psychological question to be sure, especially since the awards committee seems to be using this selection as an attempt to encourage and bolster Obama's international agenda. And as with any effort at persuasion, you… -
Thou Shalt Not... Copulate?
29 Sep 2009 | 8:06 pmPublicity is a funny thing. Any press is good press, right? So I suppose I should be happy that my current place of employ is being covered by US News & World Report, The New York Times, and Huffington Post among other outlets. Why is Tufts in the news? Well, if you haven't yet heard, it's because our Office of Residential Life just instituted a formal policy prohibiting students from engaging in sexual activity while their roommate is present in the room.If nothing else, the rule certainly has inspired conversation and a number of questions. Like should a university be legislating… -
The Toolbox of Self-Deception, Part III
12 Sep 2009 | 10:27 amBelow, the third of three parts on the ubiquitous nature of self-deception in daily life; click here for Part I and here for Part II. When you stop to think about it (and that's what we psychologists are trained to do), we enlist an impressive array of cognitive tactics and behavioral gambits in the daily effort to feel good about ourselves. We carry around a veritable toolbox of self-deception, including well more individual tools than I can catalog here. What follows is but a sampling of the more common strategies we employ in the daily pursuit of positive self-regard... 5. …
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GPM - The MPG Illusion
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The REAL Final Clash for Clunkers Numbers
6 Nov 2009 | 7:58 pmGiven the doubts I expressed in this earlier post, I downloaded the NHTSA data and calculated the harmonic mean for the old and new vehicles in the 2009 Cash for Clunkers program.The harmonic mean prevents the MPG Illusion by first converting all car MPG values to gallons per mile (GPM), averaging GPM, and then converting it back to MPG.Here are the results:Old vehicles Reported Average MPG = 15.8Average GPM = 0.064082517Actual Average MPG = 15.6049New vehiclesReported Average MPG = 24.9Average GPM = 0.041966565Actual Average MPG = 23.8285Well, that final actual MPG figure is a full mile… -
Final Cash for Clunkers Numbers (But with Big Doubts)
6 Nov 2009 | 6:17 pmThe final Cash for Clunkers numbers are in:Old vehicles: 15.8 MPG on averageNew vehicles: 24.9 MPG on averageThat saves about 2 gallons of gas every 100 miles of driving, or 2 tons of CO2 every 10,000 miles of driving. There is an AP story ridiculing the fact that some pick up trucks were traded in for other pick up trucks with essentially the same MPG (a 15 MPG truck for a 16 MPG truck), but that loophole was obvious from the start. It was built in by design to support Detroit. The Feinstein/Schumer/Israel contingent tried to hold out for good size increases in MPG, but had to compromise… -
Trucks and Low Hanging Fruit
28 Oct 2009 | 7:09 pmMPG obscures the value of small MPG improvements on inefficient vehicles. Long haul trucks are a perfect example of the benefits of small MPG improvements. As this Greenbiz article notes, long haul trucks are low hanging fruit. The average truck gets 6 miles to the gallon; according to the article, technology exists that can double this number. A 6 MPG improvement may not sound impressive. A little reflection makes it obvious that this cuts gas consumption in half for a given distance of driving. And a little more math quantifies the gain:6 MPG = 16 Gallons per 100 miles12 MPG = 8 Gallons per… -
Proposed Rulemaking To Establish Light- Duty Vehicle Greenhouse Gas Emission Standards and Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards
16 Oct 2009 | 1:12 pmThe Federal Register has posted a new document from the EPA and NHTSA entitled: "Proposed Rulemaking To Establish Light-Duty Vehicle Greenhouse Gas Emission Standards and Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards" The document contains a very useful summary of past conversations about supplementing MPG with a measure of fuel consumption. I have cut and pasted three sections on how consumers think about MPG. Page numbers refer to the Federal Register numbering. The passages appear below. If you support the idea of making a gas consumption figure more salient to car buyers, you can comment on… -
DOE Report on Improving Fuel Economy Decisions
30 Sep 2009 | 1:23 pmThe Department of Energy has a comprehensive August 2009 draft report available for the public entitled:Reducing Oil Use and CO2 Emissions by Informing Consumers’ Fuel Economy Decisions: The Role for Clean CitiesA Discussion Paper for Clean Cities Coalitions and Stakeholders to Develop Strategies for the FutureThe authors describe the fact that consumers are confused about the relationship between fuel economy (miles per gallon) and fuel consumption (gallons per mile), which leads to inaccurate assessments of the value of fuel economy.Later in the report (pages 15-16), they note thatAnother…
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The Personality Analyst
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Libel in Fact: When are Data Good Enough?
1 Nov 2009 | 1:20 pmWhen are data good enough? Researchers and scholars often face this question. I face it as I examine responses from the 1964 Fact survey of psychiatrists.Last week I described some "wild analysis" on the part of several psychiatrists who responded to the poll. The psychiatrists were evaluating then-Senator Barry Goldwater's personality. The term, "wild analysis" refers to an evaluation of someone's personality based on unsubstantiated theory and/or implausible reasoning. Mr. Warren Boroson, the former managing editor of Fact at the time commented on last week's post: "The person… -
Libel in Fact: Wild Analysis in the Fact Poll
25 Oct 2009 | 1:51 pm"Wild analysis" was Sigmund Freud's 1910 term for the misapplication of his psychological theories to a psychotherapy patient. It might occur if the analyst in question misunderstood psychoanalytic theory (Freud's theory), or didn't know the person being analyzed well enough, or misapplied the theory out of some personal motivation. Wild analysis also refers to communicating a conclusion without regard to therapeutic tact.To update the concept a bit, one might say that wild analysis occurs when one person interprets another's mental life in a way that does not follow logically from… -
Libel in Fact: Agreement in the Fact Poll?
18 Oct 2009 | 5:19 pmIn past posts, I have been recounting the Goldwater v. Ginzburg libel trial. Fact magazine's September, 1964 issue was devoted to whether Senator Goldwater, who was then running for US President, was sufficiently mentally healthy to lead the nation. After losing the election, Senator Goldwater accused Fact's publisher and editor of defaming his character.The libel trial that followed provided real-life examples of the challenges surrounding accurate personality judgments and the ethics and laws that apply to such judgments. One issue at the trial was Fact magazine's poll of… -
Libel in Fact: For All Its Flaws, Was the Poll of Psychiatrists a Good Idea?
11 Oct 2009 | 5:18 pmDuring the 1964 US Presidential election, Fact magazine had polled psychiatrists as to then-Senator Barry Goldwater's mental health, asking whether he was fit to be president. Whatever you might think of Fact's poll - whether you believe it was so slanted as to be libelous, or whether it was reasonably fair -- is the idea to assess the psychology of presidential candidates a good one?Some of the responding psychiatrists found the idea repugnant. One M.D. from Richmond, VA wrote into the magazine:"What type of yellow rag are you operating? I have never in my life witnessed such a shabby… -
The Fact Poll: Thoughtful Remarks from Respondents
4 Oct 2009 | 1:08 pmLibel is a form of defamation of character - a harsh and untrue vilification of another. Many politicians and others today accuse one another of libel. To better understand libel, I have been examining a legal case concerning the issue - one that that involved the mental health community and presidential politics, and that went to the US Supreme Court.In that case, Goldwater v. Ginzburg, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater sued the publisher of Fact magazine who had, during Senator Goldwater's run for the US Presidency, conducted a psychiatric assessment of his character.More recently, I have…
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The Situationist
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The Corporate Situation of the Prison Population
6 Nov 2009 | 8:01 pmIn the video below, Free Speech TV’s news magazine program SourceCode looks inside the private prison boom, and at the growing opposition to for-profit private prisons, jails, and detention centers. Stephen Colbert recently parodied the trend. For a sample of related Situationist posts, see “Conference on the Free Market Mindset,” “The Situation of Solitary Confinement“The Situation of Punishment (and Forgiveness),” “Clarence Darrow on the Situation of Crime and Criminals,” “The Situation of Punishment,” “Why We Punish,” “The Situation of… -
Situationism in the Blogosphere – October 2009, Part I
5 Nov 2009 | 8:01 pmBelow, we’ve posted titles and a brief quotation from some of our favorite non-Situationist situationist blogging during October 2009 (they are listed in alphabetical order by source). From 3 Quarks Daily: “Lard Lesson: Why Fat Lubricates Your Appetite” “When you’ve spent the weekend splurging on greasy fast foods, your bathroom scale isn’t alone in reeling from the impact. Your brain does, too. New research shows just how saturated fat tricks us into eating more and elucidates the evolutionary basis for the propensity for poundage in developed nations. Our brain… -
Asymmetric Introspection and Extrospection
4 Nov 2009 | 8:07 pmSituationist Contributor Emily Pronin recently wrote a very helpful primer on her work on the difference between “How We See Ourselves and How We See Others,” which she published in Science. Here’s the abstract. People see themselves differently from how they see others. They are immersed in their own sensations, emotions, and cognitions at the same time that their experience of others is dominated by what can be observed externally. This basic asymmetry has broad consequences. It leads people to judge themselves and their own behavior differently from how they judge… -
The Interior Situation of Honesty (and Dishonesty)
3 Nov 2009 | 8:01 pmSeed magazine recently provided a terrific summary of fascinating research on the situation of honesty (here). Here are some excerpts. In a famous set of experiments in the 1970s, children were observed trick-or-treating in the suburbs. Some were asked their names and addresses upon arriving at a door, while some were asked nothing. All were instructed to take just one piece of candy from the bowl, but as soon as the owner of the home retreated into the kitchen, the children who hadn’t provided their names and addresses shoveled the candy into their bags, sometimes taking everything in the… -
Jim Sidanius, “Under Color of Authority: Terror, Intergroup Violence and ‘The Law’”
2 Nov 2009 | 8:01 pmJim Sidanius is a Professor in the departments of Psychology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His primary research interests include the political psychology of gender, group conflict, institutional discrimination and the evolutionary psychology of intergroup prejudice. At the second annual conference on Law and Mind Sciences, which took place im March of 2008, Professor Sidanius’s fascinating presentation was titled ““Under Color of Authority: Terror, Intergroup Violence and ‘The Law.’” Here’s the abstract: While instances of…
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Ulterior Motives
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Your actions affect what others do. Even when those others are infants.
30 Oct 2009 | 7:07 amWestern culture tends to focus on the individual and on individual rights. We assume that people have the right to do what they would like, at least as long as those actions don't interfere with others. But, what does it mean for one person's actions to affect the actions of another?<!--break-->Research by Henk Aarts, Peter Gollwitzer, and Ran Hassin described in a 2004 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that just watching or reading someone striving toward a goal can make you more likely to adopt that goal as well. In one study, for example, participants… -
Categories, essentialism, race, and culture.
27 Oct 2009 | 6:45 amPlacing something in a category and describing its properties have very different effects on the way we think about things. In my last post, I pointed out that calling someone a musician makes playing music seem much more central to their being-more essential-than just saying that they play music. What about categorizing people by their race?<!--break-->Throughout the world, racial, cultural, and ethnic differences are used to place people into different categories. Once we categorize people in this way, we automatically assume that they have the essence of this category. For example,… -
Categories, Essences, and Behavior Change
23 Oct 2009 | 9:03 amWhen we talk about things, we have to give them labels. Those labels end up having a big influence on the way that we think.. When we say that someone has depression, that seems to say more about them than just that they are sad, or have trouble sleeping, or has difficulty getting excited about positive events. The label suggests that there is something deep about that person that causes these symptoms. And in the case of depression, of course, it is true that having depression tends to cause all of these symptoms. <!--break-->Douglas Medin and Andrew Ortony wrote a chapter in the 1989… -
Trauma and the benefits of writing about it
20 Oct 2009 | 6:53 amPsychological trauma is bad for your health. The stress of abuse, violence, or the unexpected death of a loved one can cause all sorts of health problems. People suffering after these events may stop working effectively in school or at their jobs. They may lash out at friends, family, and coworkers. They may experience significant illnesses as stress depresses their immune systems.Why does psychological trauma have these long-lasting effects.?<!--break-->One reason for the stress of psychological trauma is that our representations of these traumatic events are fragmented. -
Unrealistic optimism about problem drinking is dangerous.
16 Oct 2009 | 9:00 amAn important part of everyone's self-concept is a sense of how we compare to others in our behaviors. A common observation is that many people are overly optimistic in their judgments about themselves relative to others. For example, on average, people think they are more likely to be successful in business than others, or to be less likely to suffer from serious illnesses than others. Not everyone can be more successful in business than others, of course, so somebody in that sample must be being too optimistic.What is the effect of this optimism on behavior?<!--break-->It is likely…
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National Institutes of Health (NIH) Podcast
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NIH Research Radio - October 30, 2009
30 Oct 2009 | 10:00 am#0096 Report from NIH Research Radio - Topics for Friday, October 30, 2009 Coming up in this episode an interview with the new NIH Director. Also, an historic perspective from nearly 70 years ago. But first a cocaine vaccine shows promise for treating addiction. Episode #0096 show notes Podcast archives -
NIH Research Radio - October 16, 2009
16 Oct 2009 | 10:00 am#0095 Report from NIH Research Radio - Topics for Friday, October 16, 2009 Coming up in this episode the importance of family history information from a health perspective. Also, important statistics on the prevalence of diabetes, plus ways to control it. But first racial disparities in breast cancer. Episode #0095 show notes Podcast archives -
NIH Research Radio - October 2, 2009
2 Oct 2009 | 10:00 am#0094 Report from NIH Research Radio - Topics for Friday, October 2, 2009 Coming up in this episode: a very special report on President Barak Obama's visit to the National Institutes of Health. To get some perspective first, we'll have reports on how medical research is shared over agencies, and among countries. But first we have early results on how the 2009 H1N1 vaccine is effective in children. Episode #0094 show notes Podcast archives -
NIH Research Radio - September 18, 2009
18 Sep 2009 | 10:00 am#0093 Report from NIH Research Radio - Topics for Friday, September 18, 2009 Coming up in this episode we're focusing on cancer. We'll have reports on cancer prevention in Africa, and signing up for breast cancer research in the US, plus we'll have an interview about a research initiative using modern genomic technologies to fight childhood cancers. But first, a recent study sheds light on low bone density in young women. Episode #0093 show notes Podcast archives -
NIH Research Radio - September 4, 2009
4 Sep 2009 | 10:00 am#0092 Report from NIH Research Radio - Topics for Friday, September 4, 2009 Coming up in this episode we'll be talking a lot about diabetes - a disease that affects nearly 24 million Americans. First, we'll hear how a couple of risk factors for the disease may be linked to some gene variants. Then, an update on the importance of controlling type 1 diabetes. And we'll wrap with an interview about family risk for the disease. But first a story about reducing depression in stroke survivors. Episode #0092 show notes Podcast archives
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Psychology Press - New Titles
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Individual Differences in Emotion Components and Dynamics
5 Nov 2009 | 10:06 pmA Special Issue of Cognition & Emotion Edited by Peter Kuppens, Jeroen Stouten, Batja Mesquita Our emotions define us as individuals: Each of us has unique ways of feeling and emotionally responding. In this Special Issue several contemporary approaches to emotion are used to gain insight in the ways people differ with regard to two of the most central features of emotions, their multicomponential and dynamical nature. Different theoretical perspectives on how individual differences in emotion should be considered and studied are offered by Russell, Feldman Barrett, Scherer, and Larsen. -
Phonology for Communication Disorders
4 Nov 2009 | 9:05 pmBy Martin J. Ball, Nicole Muller, Ben Rutter This textbook describes the approaches to phonology that are most relevant to communication disorders. It examines schools of thought in theoretical phonology, and their relevance to description, explanation and remediation in the clinical context. A recurring theme throughout the book is the distinction between phonological theories that attempt elegant, parsimonious descriptions of phonological data, and those that attempt to provide a psycholinguistic model of speech production and perception. This book introduces all the relevant areas of… -
The Psychology of Justice and Legitimacy
28 Oct 2009 | 9:28 pmEdited by D. Ramona Bobocel, Aaron C. Kay, Mark P. Zanna, James M. Olson In response to the international turmoil, violence, and increasing ideological polarization, social psychological interest in the topics of legitimacy and social justice has blossomed considerably. Social psychologists have explored the psychological underpinnings of people’s reactions to injustice and illegitimacy, including the behavioral and psychological consequences of the motivation to view individual outcomes and governmental systems as just and legitimate. Although injustice and illegitimacy are clearly related… -
The Development of Autobiographical Memory
28 Oct 2009 | 9:28 pmBy Hans J. Markowitsch, Harald Welzer Autobiographical memory constitutes an essential part of our personality, giving us the ability to distinguish ourselves as an individual with a past, present and future. This book reveals how the development of a conscious self, an integrated personality and an autobiographical memory are all intertwined, highlighting the parallel development of the brain, memory and personality. Focusing strongly on developmental aspects of memory and integrating evolutionary and anthropological perspectives, areas of discussion include: why non-human animals lack… -
Expository Discourse in Children, Adolescents, and Adults
27 Oct 2009 | 8:27 pmDevelopment and Disorders Edited by Marilyn A. Nippold, Cheryl M. Scott School success in the 21st century requires proficiency with expository discourse -- the use and understanding of informative language in spoken and written modalities. This occurs, for example, when high school students read their textbooks and listen to their teachers' lectures, and later are asked to demonstrate their knowledge of this complex topic through oral reports and essay examinations. Although many students are proficient with the expository genre, others struggle to meet these expectations. This book is…
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Psychology / Psychiatry News From Medical News Today
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The Role Of Parental Control In Western And East Asian Countries
7 Nov 2009 | 12:00 amMany parents like to meddle in their children's lives. Sometimes this can be beneficial, if the meddling is in the form of parental guidance or setting rules. However, numerous studies have found that in Western countries, when parents are very controlling and dominating over their children, the children suffer psychologically. -
Beyond Medicine: Addressing Broader Roots Of Illness In Health Care Reform
6 Nov 2009 | 4:00 amResearch has clearly demonstrated that health and illness are determined by a complex interaction of biological, behavioral, psychological, socio-cultural and environmental factors, as well as a person's coping resources and access to health care. Each of these factors must be addressed if true health care reform is to be achieved. -
Haunted By War, Researchers Speak About PTSD For Remembrance Day
6 Nov 2009 | 2:00 amThey've seen horrors, experienced constant threats and survived traumatic events. Canada's military personnel often come back home with memories they'd rather forget. It's not scientifically understood why some soldiers develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) while others don't. However, many veterans simply don't ask for psychological help. -
Mental Health America Praises House Health Reform Bill
6 Nov 2009 | 1:00 amMental Health America today praised the House health reform bill (the Affordable Health Care for Americans Act, H.R. 3962) for taking ground-breaking steps to expand coverage and significantly improving access to mental health and substance use disorder treatment services. -
UK Puts Mental Health Of Refugees And Asylum Seekers At Risk
6 Nov 2009 | 1:00 amMind has found evidence that the UK's complex asylum seeker process, detention centres and aspects of UK life are actively worsening the mental health of refugees and asylum seekers. In two new reports, the charity shows how a lack of support and resources for refugees and asylum seekers is both exacerbating pre-existing mental health conditions and triggering them in the first place. In the
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NIMH | Recent Updates
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NCDEU 2010: New Research Approaches for Mental Health Interventions
NCDEU is a scientific meeting that focuses on the latest developments in psychopharmacologic clinical trials research and related methodology. Co-sponsored by NIMH and the American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology (ASCP), the meeting brings together over 1200 academic and industry investigators, research pharmacists, and clinicians and provides state-of-the-art workshops, panels, posters, and other special sessions devoted to advancing clinical research. Through its highly successful New Investigator Program, NCDEU emphasizes the development of research careers for those relatively new… -
NIH Awards More than 50 Grants to Boost Search for Causes, Improve Treatments for Autism
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded more than 50 autism research grants, totaling more than $65 million, which will be supported with American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act) funds. These grants are the result of the largest funding opportunity for research on autism spectrum disorders (ASD) to date, announced in March 2009. -
Kids’ Brain Development Charted as They Grow Up
A landmark, multisite NIH-funded neuroimaging study of brain development in healthy, normally-developing children has posted its third release of data. This is the first release from the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study to include data from very young children – birth to 4 years old – and snapshots of brain chemistry at key developmental milestones. The data is accessible to qualified researchers via the NIH Pediatric MRI Data Repository website. -
Clinical Tests Begin on Medication to Correct Fragile X Defect
NIH-supported scientists at Seaside Therapeutics in Cambridge, Mass., are beginning a clinical trial of a potential medication designed to correct a central neurochemical defect underlying Fragile X syndrome, the most common inherited cause of intellectual disability. There has to date been no medication that could alter the disorder’s neurologic abnormalities. The study will evaluate safety, tolerability, and optimal dosage in healthy volunteers. -
Significant Weight Gain, Metabolic Changes Associated with Antipsychotic Use in Children
Many children and adolescents who receive antipsychotic medications gain a significant amount of weight and experience metabolic changes, according to NIMH-funded research published October 28, 2009, in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
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Child Psych
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Depression in Pre-Schoolers?
31 Oct 2009 | 7:05 amWhen researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine published the first longitudinal study of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) in preschool children, it came as a surprise to many that... -
What Mental Health Parity Means for You
12 Oct 2009 | 8:22 amThe outcome of health care reform currently under consideration in Congress is uncertain. Fortunately, legislation was passed last year to improve access to mental health services through health... -
You Asked: What Are the Effects of Rape?
28 Sep 2009 | 6:58 amThere are a wide range of short-term and long-term psychological effects that an individual victim may experience. The nature of the assault, use of a weapon, threats, violence, serious physical... -
Back to School Safety Tips
15 Sep 2009 | 1:04 pmThe National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has a safety fact sheet for older children going to and from school. It goes into detail about the usual stranger safety tips (for example, not... -
The Question ADHD Kids Dread Most
4 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pmSeptember is National Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Awareness Month. Most activities will happen during AD/HD Awareness Week (September 14-20). I think there may also be an Awareness Day...
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Litemind
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6 Productivity Principles to Live By (My Personal Productivity Manifesto)
27 Oct 2009 | 8:48 am -
How Can I Make Litemind More Useful for You?
8 Oct 2009 | 3:10 amWill you help me make this website better? Today, instead of providing new content, I’d like to ask you to speak your mind and take this quick survey. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes, and your feedback will give me invaluable ideas and insights on how I can make the website better for you. Two quick things about the survey: All 5 questions are optional. The more feedback I get the better, but feel free to answer only the questions you want. Also, the more thorough your answers are the better, but feel free to be as brief as you want. Any information you can… -
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
25 Sep 2009 | 6:55 am -
Overcome Fear of Failure, Part II — 6 Powerful Strategies You Can Use
9 Sep 2009 | 5:46 amIn the first part of this series, we focused on building an effective mindset for overcoming fear of failure. Now it’s time to get down to action: here are 6 powerful strategies you can use to conquer fear of failure right off the bat. 1. Acknowledge Your Fear -
Overcome Fear of Failure, Part I — Building the Right Mindset
26 Aug 2009 | 5:18 am
