December 2009
49 posts
Ten Psychology Studies from 2009 Worth Knowing... →
On "Variety Amnesia" →
…Researchers reporting in the Journal of Consumer Research think the trick is overcoming “variety amnesia”— our tendency to forget that we’ve been exposed to a variety of great things, be they people, food, music, movies, home furnishings or other—and instead focus our attention on the singular thing that no longer gives us the tingles. To shake ourselves free from this negative trap, we...
“Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the...”
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Study: Experiences make us happier than... →
…Another reason for increased happiness in experiences, the researchers found, was that people felt a greater sense of vitality or “being alive” during the experience and in reflection, Howell said.
“As nice as your new computer is, it’s not going to make you feel alive,” he said.
Most psychologists who study the phenomenon say people adapt to a new purchase...
Northwest Flight 253: The Psychology of Heroism... →
Jasper Schuringa, a passenger on Northwest Flight 253 to Detroit, helped prevent alleged bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from setting off an explosive device on the flight on Christmas Day. Would you have done the same?
Philip Zimbardo, a professor at Stanford University, thinks there’s a good chance you would have, and as one of the country’s sharpest observers of human behavior...
“The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our...”
– Eric Hoffer, Reflections On The Human Condition
The loneliness network (The Boston Globe) →
The holiday season is entering the home stretch, but flu season is just getting going. And so, we’re warned, the upcoming New Year’s parties and homeward airplane trips and visits to the mall to return our gifts won’t just mean encounters with crowds, they will mean opportunities for infection.
But even as public health officials exhort people to get their shots and sneeze into their sleeves, a...
“What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same...”
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Depression Fatigues Brain Reward Systems →
A new study suggests depressed patients appear to exhaust the brain areas related to positive emotions.
The investigation challenges prior thought that individuals with depression have less brain activity in areas associated with positive emotion.
Instead, the new data suggest similar initial levels of activity, but an inability to sustain them over time.
The new work is reported online this...
An interview with Victor Yalom →
An interesting read - an interview with psychotherapist Victor Yalom who, among other things, runs the website psychotherapy.net - and is Dr. Irvin Yalom’s son.
(This is an excerpt published in Contemporary Psychotherapy, Winter 2009, on http://contemporarypsychotherapy.org/. Interview conducted by Dr. Werner Kierski.)
What would you recommend to people who are about to embark on a...
“I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time;...”
– Charles Dickens
Happy Holidays, Readers.
Taking Mental Snapshots to Plumb Our Inner Selves... →
Psychologists have many ways to get inside our heads: they can give us questionnaires, track our eyes, time how long we take to respond to cues and measure the blood flow to our brains. But how close can these methods get to the texture of our inner lives?
Russell T. Hurlburt, a psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has spent decades refining another way to study the mind. Dr....
“[Psychoanalysis] is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself...”
– Karen Horney, Our Inner Conflicts
(via sometimesagreatnotion)
Feeling the pain of others (Neurophilosophy) →
HOW do you react when you see somebody else in pain? Most of us can empathize with someone who has been injured or is sick - we can quite easily put ourselves “in their shoes” and understand, to some extent, what they are feeling. We can share their emotional experience, because observing their pain activates regions of the brain which are involved in processing the emotional aspects...
Why do people dance? (The Guardian) →
The office party is in full swing, you’ve knocked back a few glasses of bubbly and edged on to the sticky dancefloor where Fred from accounts is looking strangely attractive as he struts out some wild moves. Nearby, Ian from IT is boogieing like nobody’s watching. What makes them so confident while your feet are shyly shifting from side to side? According to Dr Peter Lovatt,...
Can you really be "addicted" to shopping or using... →
Like a compulsive crack user desperately sucking on a broken pipe, we can’t get enough of addiction. We got hooked on the concept a few centuries back, originally to describe the compulsive intake of alcohol and, later, the excessive use of drugs like heroin and cocaine. Now it seems like we’re using it every chance we can get—applying the concept to any behavior that seems troublesome...
What does a doodle do? It boosts your memory and... →
You know you’re bored when you start shading in the squares of your notebook. Apparently it’s a habit that could be helping you to concentrate. In a neat little experiment, Jackie Andrade asked forty participants to listen to a monotone two and a half minute phone message about arrangements for a party. They were told the message would be dull, that there was no need to memorise it,...
Top Careers with a Psychology Degree →
(I know a lot of you who read the site regularly are either working on or have recently finished getting your degree in psychology. So, this is for all of you!)
Psychology as a part of medical field is getting huge attention at local as well as at an international level. This interesting field has received huge exposure in the job market, as a consequence of which students are showing great...
poetry as tonic, #14
The Night House Every day the body works in the fields of the world Mending a stone wall Or swinging a sickle through the tall grass- The grass of civics, the grass of money- And every night the body curls around itself And listens for the soft bells of sleep. But the heart is restless and rises From the body in the middle of the night, Leaves the trapezoidal bedroom With its thick, pictureless...
“Time heals what reason cannot.”
– Seneca
(thanks, Heather)
Branded a Cheat: On the Tiger Woods Scandal →
A fascinating look at the Tiger Woods scandal, and celebrity endorsements in general, from The New Yorker…
In other words, Woods has been presented as the embodiment of bourgeois virtues: dedication, hard work, single-mindedness. Indeed, when, in 2008, Woods won the U.S. Open while essentially playing on one leg, the Times’ David Brooks devoted a column to his extraordinary ability to...
Psychotherapy May Prevent Obesity in At-Risk Teens... →
Washington, DC (AHN) – Teenage girls “at risk” of becoming obese could benefit from educational psychotherapy, according to a new report.
Researchers with the National Institutes of Health said in a statement that girls who participated in what they call interpersonal psychotherapy may be able to prevent their body mass index from increasing over the course of a year, compared to girls who took...
Rejection massively reduces IQ (New Scientist) →
Rejection can dramatically reduce a person’s IQ and their ability to reason analytically, while increasing their aggression, according to new research.
“It’s been known for a long time that rejected kids tend to be more violent and aggressive,” says Roy Baumeister of the Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, who led the work. “But we’ve found that randomly...
“We find a place for what we lose. Although we know that after such a loss the...”
– Sigmund Freud
Psychiatry's civil war (New Scientist) →
When doctors disagree with each other, they usually couch their criticisms in careful, measured language. In the past few months, however, open conflict has broken out among the upper echelons of US psychiatry. The focus of discord is a volume called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, which psychiatrists turn to when diagnosing the distressed individuals who turn up...
robot-heart-politics:
allthingsalishan:nyminute:
“I think we have a wonderful marriage. I love my husband. He’s my best friend. But I always like to talk honestly about it because I think about other young couples who think there are no struggles to get here. And there are. That’s part of it. The message is - work through the struggles. Start out with somebody that you respect and that you...
A theory for toddlers' turbo-charged learning... →
Anyone who’s seen a toddler “at work” can tell that her learning style is a study in chaos. She moves from banging pots to tormenting the cat to demanding food to bursting into tears when she can’t open the back door and hurdle off the deck — all in the span of minutes. But when it comes to the daunting task of mastering language, that same child is a turbo-charged...
The Psychology and Power of False Confessions (APS... →
False confessions seem so illogical, especially for someone like Joseph Dick of the Norfolk Four, who got a double life sentence after confessing. Why do people confess to crimes they didn’t commit? Some do it for the chance at fame (more than 200 people confessed to kidnapping Charles Lindbergh’s baby), but many more do it for reasons that are far more puzzling to the average person. In the...
“It isn’t the things that are happening to us that cause us to suffer,...”
– Pema Chodron
The Psychology of Social Status (Scientific... →
Nobel Laureate economist, John Harsanyi, said that “apart from economic payoffs, social status seems to be the most important incentive and motivating force of social behavior.” The more noticeable status disparities are, the more concerned with status people become, and the differences between the haves and have-nots have been extremely pronounced during the economic recession of recent years. ...
Testosterone makes people more selfish, but only... →
What do you think a group of women would do if they were given a dose of testosterone before playing a game? Our folk wisdom tells us that they would probably become more aggressive, selfish or antisocial. Well, that’s true… but only if they think they’ve been given testosterone.
If they don’t know whether they’ve been given testosterone or placebo, the hormone...
“When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others...”
– Gertrude Stein
Postpartum Depression Strikes Fathers, Too (New... →
The pregnancy was easy, the delivery a breeze. This was the couple’s first baby, and they were thrilled. But within two months, the bliss of new parenthood was shattered by postpartum depression.
A sad, familiar story. But this one had a twist: The patient who came to me for treatment was not the mother but her husband.
A few weeks after the baby arrived, he had become uncharacteristically...
How Other People’s Unspoken Expectations Control... →
A good exercise for learning about yourself is to think about how other people might view you in different ways. Consider how your family, your work colleagues or your partner think of you.
Now here’s an interesting question: to what extent do you play up to these expectations about how they view you?
“It’s not too difficult to get the skeletons out of the closet with people,...”
– Robert A. Johnson
“Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by...”
– Thomas Hardy
The Fatter we Get, the Less We Seem to Notice →
A significant number of overweight and obese individuals believe their body weight to be appropriate or normal and are satisfied with their body size. Misperception of overweight status is most common among the poor vs wealthy, African Americans vs white Americans, and men vs women. The unfortunate consequence is that overweight individuals who perceive themselves to be of normal weight are less...
The psychology of gifts (Augusta Free Press) →
Is it really better to give than to receive?
“The average couple is unhappy six years before first attending therapy, at which...”
– Married (Happily) With Issues - NYTimes.com
poetry as tonic, #13
A Word on Statistics Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two. Unsure of every step: almost all the rest. Ready to help, if it doesn’t take long: forty-nine. Always good, because they cannot be otherwise: four — well, maybe five. Able to admire without envy: eighteen. Led to error by youth (which passes): sixty, plus or minus. Those not to be messed with:...
Loneliness is transmittable from person to person,... →
Although it may sound counterintuitive, loneliness can spread from one person to another, according to research being released Tuesday that underscores the power of one person’s emotions to affect friends, family and neighbors.
The federally funded analysis of data collected from more than 4,000 people over 10 years found that lonely people increase the chances that someone they know will...
Eight tips for knowing if you’re boring someone... →
“…less and less is life animated through personal discovery, intimacy with...”
– Kirk Schneider, Rediscovery of Awe
Think You're Multitasking? Think Again (NPR) →
“People can’t multitask very well, and when people say they can, they’re deluding themselves,” said neuroscientist Earl Miller. And, he said, “The brain is very good at deluding itself.”
Miller, a Picower professor of neuroscience at MIT, says that for the most part, we simply can’t focus on more than one thing at a time.
What we can do, he said, is...
Psychobabble turns ONE!
In all the craziness that was November, I entirely forgot to note the passing of the ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY of this site, which was November 13th. In that time, it’s grown from a small little place where I collected things (quotes and articles mostly) that I wanted to remember (and have easy access to) for my own professional use, into this surprisingly popular (and thus, far more...
Inside the mind of an actor (literally) →
How does an actor engage with the part they are playing? Fiona Shaw undergoes a brain scan while reciting TS Eliot to help shed some light on the mystery.
Patient Voices: O.C.D. (NYTimes.com) →
Nagging doubts, compulsions, concerns of contamination, obsessive hoarding: the symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder are numerous and varied. What is it like to live this way? How does one maintain a normal life? Six men and women speak about their battles with this disorder.
Surgery for Mental Ills Offers Both Hope and Risk... →
The great promise of neuroscience at the end of the last century was that it would revolutionize the treatment of psychiatric problems. But the first real application of advanced brain science is not novel at all. It is a precise, sophisticated version of an old and controversial approach: psychosurgery, in which doctors operate directly on the brain.
In the last decade or so, more than 500...