February 2010
46 posts
Does time dilate during a threatening situation? ... →
When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour,” said Albert Einstein, “it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute, and it’s longer than any hour.” Einstein was describing one of the most profound implications of his Theory of General Relativity - that the perception of time is subjective. This is something we all know from experience: time flies...
to clarify...
There has been a bit of negative discussion over my posting of the recent Newsweek article on anti-depressants, and I wanted to make sure I cleared a couple of things up.
First, just because I post a link, article, or quote on this site does not mean that I necessarily agree with or endorse the opinions of that article. The articles I link to are meant to inform and inspire thought/discussion,...
Neuroskeptic: A "Severe" Warning for Psychiatry →
A really great write-up that follows up with some legitimate questions about the study/article I posted a few minutes ago from Newsweek…
Imagine there was a nasty disease that affected 1 in 100 people. And imagine that someone invented a drug which treated it reasonably well. Good work, surely.
Now imagine that, for some reason, people decided that 10% of the population need to be taking...
The Depressing News About Antidepressants... →
Disclaimer: Posting a link to this article is meant to inspire thought and discussion about an important issue, but it is not meant to be taken as my own personal or professional opinion on the matter. If you take issue with the article or the research/book it’s based on, please contact Newsweek directly and express your opinion, as this article comes directly from their official website,...
January 2010
66 posts
Finding The Surprising Gaps in Your Self-Knowledge →
Why are people so blissfully ignorant of certain aspects of their personalities?
Take an everyday example: there are some infuriating people who are always late for appointments. A few of these people explain it by saying they are ‘laid-back’, while others seem unaware that they’re always late.
For laid-back people, their lateness is a part of their personality, they are aware...
Does Internet use reflect your personality? →
Using Eysenck’s classic personality test, Tosun and Lajunen found that students who scored high on extraversion (agreeing with statements like ‘I am very talkative’) tended to use the Internet to extend their real-life relationships, whereas students who scored high on psychoticism (answering ‘yes’ to statements like ‘does your mood often go up and down?’...
How To Communicate With Your Life: How to become... →
Itchy Skin Linked to Psychological Stress... →
Chronically itchy skin can take not only a physical toll but a psychological one as well, a new study suggests.
Research has linked various skin conditions, such as severe acne, psoriasis and eczema, to higher risks of depression, anxiety and stress in some individuals. But it has not been clear whether chronic itchiness — a common symptom of skin disorders — can cause its own...
Latest research: Psychodynamic psychotherapy more... →
Ah, sweet vindication! As a practitioner of (and strong believer in) psychodynamic therapy, I have to say, this is enormously exciting news. While we have long believed this to be true in our heart of hearts, it hasn’t always been so easy to prove empirically. But now? Read it and weep, Pfizer:
A new study finds psychodynamic psychotherapy is an effective intervention with long-lasting...
The social components of self-control →
For the most part, self-control is seen as an individual trait, a measure of personal discipline. If you lack self-control, then it’s your own fault, a character flaw built into the brain.
However, according to a new study by Michelle vanDellen, a psychologist at the University of Georgia, self-control contains a large social component; the ability to resist temptation is contagious. The...
“We bring home with us when we leave.”
– Colun McCann, Let the Great World Spin
How to Forget Fear →
Imagine if you could rewrite your mind as quickly as a document on your computer. No more painful memories, no phobias or ingrained fears, just a blank slate where the scars that mark each human life used to be. This may sound like the stuff of Hollywood fantasy but last month it came a step closer to reality at New York University. By manipulating memory a research team managed to remove a...
Finding a Better Way to Grieve (The New Yorker) →
A fascinating look at grief/loss in our culture, as well as an informative and intelligent piece on influential psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s life from the most recent New Yorker. Kübler-Ross, as you probably know, was the person behind the widely accepted (though now somewhat discredited) “stage theory”, the notion that both dying and grieving people passed through...
“A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there’s less of you.”
– Margaret Atwood
Possible New Nonaddictive Anti-Anxiety Drug?... →
Those of us who watch the drug development pipeline have been pining for a nonaddictive anti-anxiety drug. Occasionally there are glimmers of hope. One candidate is emapunil, aka XBD-173 or AC-5216. In 2004, there was an article in the British Journal of Pharmacology about this. That article described promising findings, in rats and mice. Now, there is an article in Science that finally show...
poetry as tonic, #18
Aubade - Philip Larkin
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what’s really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die. Arid interrogation: yet the dread Of dying, and being dead, Flashes afresh to...
Stereotypes: Why We Act Without Thinking (PsyBlog) →
Three classic experiments show how stereotypes can influence our behaviour without our knowledge.
Debate over cognitive, traditional mental health... →
Are Social Networks Messing with Your Head?... →
Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and their cousins have evolved from college fad to global ubiquity in seven short years. Whether they are good for our mental health is another matter.
“Someday, after mastering winds, waves, tides and gravity, we shall harness the...”
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Neuroskeptic: A Brief History of Bipolar Kids →
It depends who you ask. It’s “controversial”. Some say that, like schizophrenia, bipolar strikes in adolescence or after, and that pre-pubertal onset is extraordinarily rare. Others say that kids can be, and often are, bipolar, but their symptoms may differ from the ones seen in adults. You know a 20 year old’s manic when they stay up for 3 days straight writing a book...
Therapists Report Increase in Green Disputes →
As awareness of environmental concerns has grown, therapists say they are seeing a rise in bickering between couples and family members over the extent to which they should change their lives to save the planet.
In households across the country, green lines are being drawn between those who insist on wild salmon and those who buy farmed, those who calculate their carbon footprint and those who...
“I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.”
– William Stafford
Idle Minds and What They May Say about... →
…But now, for the first time, functional measures of the resting brain are providing new insights into network properties of the brain that are associated with IQ scores. In essence, they suggest that in smart people, distant areas of the brain communicate with each other more robustly than in less smart people.
Our Basic Human Pleasures - Food, Sex and Giving... →
Want to be happier in 2010? Then try this simple experiment, inspired by recent scholarship in psychology and neurology. Which person would you rather be:
Richard is an ambitious 36-year-old white commodities trader in Florida. He’s healthy and drop-dead handsome, lives alone in a house with a pool, and has worked his way through a series of gorgeous women. Richard’s job is stressful, but he...
Jenny McCarthy Dismisses Pediatrics Study on... →
Okay, come on, you can’t not love that headline. But it gets even better:
Earlier this week, research published in the peer-reviewed medical journal Pediatrics found no evidence that special diets have any influence on autistic children.
This was a blow to some parents of autistic children who had hoped for a cure, but things took a more tragic twist when Diane Sawyer of “ABC...
Think you have self-control? Careful. (Boston... →
One way to enhance self-control is to avoid tempting situations. The irony, according to a recent study, is that people who think they have more self-control allow themselves to get into more tempting situations and, as a result, are more likely to give in to temptation. For example, students who were made to feel fatigued were less confident in their ability to control fatigue and were less...
poetry as tonic, #17
Lines for Winter
Tell yourself as it gets cold and gray falls from the air that you will go on walking, hearing the same tune no matter where you find yourself— inside the dome of dark or under the cracking white of the moon’s gaze in a valley of snow. Tonight as it gets cold tell yourself what you know which is nothing but the tune your bones play as you keep going. And you will be...
Charity is Social (The Frontal Cortex) →
The real question, of course, is what this scanning experiment can teach us about the psychology of charity, apart from giving us a few new acronyms to reference. Here’s Hare, et. al.:
One basic hypothesis that has been proposed in behavioral economics is that the amount given to a charity depends solely on the giver’s preferences for that donation. The functional connectivity data...
Do TV psychologists deter people from seeking... →
Millions of TV viewers tuned in to watch Dr. Jennifer Melfi tend to mob boss Tony Soprano on HBO’s “The Sopranos,” and many of them may have been turned off to therapy because of it, says new research in the Journal of Clinical Psychology (Vol. 64, No. 3).
Study authors David Vogel, PhD, Douglas Gentile, PhD, and graduate student Scott Kaplan, all at Iowa State University,...
Famous People With a Degree in Psychology... →
Jerry Bruckheimer (television and movie producer): B.A. in psychology from the University of Arizona
Wes Craven (film director and writer): B.A. in psychology and education from Wheaton College
Gloria Estefan (singer and song-writer): B.A. in psychology from the University of Miami
Hugh Hefner (magazine publisher): B.A. in psychology from the University of Illinois
Katherine Hepburn...
Five emotions you never knew you had (New... →
Can you name the six basic emotions? Take a straw poll of your friends and we guarantee that you will find no consensus. Yet psychologists are unequivocal: joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust. These are the Big Six, quite literally, the in-your-face emotions - the ones that everyone the world over exhibits with the same dramatic and characteristic facial expressions. They have been the...
How to brag (BPS Research Digest) →
…Over a hundred undergrads were presented with the script of a conversation between two people - a ‘show-off’ called Avi who boasted about his A-grade in stats exams, and his friend. Crucially, there were four versions of the conversation, with each undergrad participant reading just one version. In two versions, the friend raised the topic of the exam before he either did or did...
Did NYU Professor Suffer Paternal Postnatal... →
Tuesday night NYU computer science professor Sam Roweis jumped to his death from his 16th floor balcony at 1 Washington Square Village. The 37-year-old had allegedly been arguing with his wife about how to care for their 15-month-old “sickly” twins. Police say this triggered his suicide.
Now the Daily News takes a look at who Roweis was, noting he had just started his professorship in...
“If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.”
– Spinoza
Seats of emotional intelligence found in the brain... →
Head injuries sustained by Vietnam veterans have revealed parts of the brain vital for two types of emotional intelligence.
Depending on the site of their injuries, the veterans studied were poor either at “experiential” emotional intelligence (the capacity to judge emotions in other people) or “strategic” emotional intelligence (the ability to plan socially appropriate...
“We’re wired for attachment in a world of impermanence…How we...”
– Robert Neimeyer, a psychologist at the University of Memphis who studies how people draw meaning from loss and grief
Heartbreak and Home Runs: The Power of First... →
This is another one of those articles where you really should make some time to follow the link and read the entire thing. It’s quite interesting:
…Beginning in our late teenage years and early 20s, we develop and internalize a broad, autobiographical narrative about our lives, spelling out who we were, are, and might be in the future, says Dan McAdams, a psychologist at Northwestern...
Learning to Sit with Depression (Psychology Today) →
…I find that one of the central problems most people have is that they do not know how to focus inwardly and create a quiet, safe space in which they can engage with their inner emotional suffering. We develop a plethora of secondary reactions of avoidance, resistance or plain resignation. We busy ourselves in activities, anything to avoid facing the inner reality of our anxiety or...
“All I know is this: nobody’s very big in the first place, and it looks to...”
– Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
“Of course, we can become psychologically unhinged for many reasons that are...”
– - The Americanization of Mental Illness
Such a fascinating article (originally posted yesterday) that I had to post something else from it.
Off Line, On Life (Psychology of Technology) →
…For the next three days, I slept great, was more attentive to my wife and kids, didn’t think about work for hours at a time, and just plain enjoyed myself immensely. I was, dare I say, living in the moment. I had just learned first hand that disconnecting from the virtual world enabled me to connect more deeply with the real world. Wow, I thought, I could get used to this.
That revelation...
A natural history of the Earworm - the song that... →
Earworms are those songs that get lodged in your cranium, playing over and over and over. There’s been surprisingly little published research on the phenomenon, although several popular science writers like Oliver Sacks have speculated about it. There’s also an ‘expert’ in the form of Professor James Kellaris at the University of Cincinnati, but his investigations all...
“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”
– Abraham Maslow
The Americanization of Mental Illness →
wolfandfox:
kateoplis:
For all our self-recrimination, we may have yet to face one of the most remarkable effects of American-led globalization. We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.