Clipmarks | Aribeth's 'psychology' clips

Minds and myths

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 11:04:03 GMT

clipped by: einbar
clipper's remarks: "..Other sciences certainly do have their own myths – just think of the story of Newton and the falling apple or Archimedes leaping out of the bath following his Eureka insight. Perhaps myths just seem more prominent in psychology because we tend to talk and write about our science in terms of studies rather than facts."

Clip Source: www.mindhacks.com

The September issue of The Psychologist has two excellent and freely available articles that smash the popular myths of scientific psychology.

Clip Source: www.thepsychologist.org.uk

Clip Source: www.mindhacks.com

The first examines the widely mythologised story of hole-in-the head celebrity Phineas Gage, and the other tackles commonly repeated stories of famous studies that don't stand up to scrutiny.

Gage, whose skull is pictured on the front cover, is legendary, but, as the article makes clear, there's actually a great deal we don't know about his life and the information that typically accompanies his story is based on only a very few sources.

The article on other myths in psychology focuses on some of the most widely incidents and studies in the field: the murder of Kitty Genovese, Asch's conformity experiments, Little Albert and the Hawthorne Effect.

Particularly interesting is a discussion of the role of myths in science and what benefit they bring to the study of the human mind:

Psychological tests

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:58:52 GMT

clipped by: JackieDel

Clip Source: www.bbc.co.uk

Explore your memory
Stretch your memory with fun challenges designed by experts. Duration: 20 minutes

Art and personality
Is there a connection between your personality type and the art that you like? Duration: 15 minutes

What sex is your brain?
Take the Sex ID test and find out more about 'brain sex' differences. Duration: 20 minutes

Do you see what I see? - Sagiv and Ward, UCL
Is Wednesday red? Take part in our experiment to test whether your senses overlap. Requires Flash 5
Duration: 10 minutes

Tags: psychology, personality, tests

Top 100 Mental Health and Psychology Blogs

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 09:56:46 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Clip Source: www.universityreviewsonline.com

Top 100 Mental Health and Psychology Blogs

Whether you work in the field of mental health or are simply interested in the subject, keeping abreast of the news, opinions and commentary within the online blogging community can be overwhelming. There are literally thousands of blogs that focus on mental health, running the gamut both in terms of focus as well as in quality.

Although it was difficult to narrow thousands of noteworthy resources down to the top 100, below is a categorized list of what we feel are the most popular, informative and/or unique mental health and psychology blogs on the Web

General Psychology

Cognitive Psychology

Forensic Psychology

Psychiatry

Neuroscience

Addiction

Anxiety

Austism

Bipolar Disorder

Depression

While any list of this kind is subject to oversights and omissions, it is our hope that with these top 100 sites you will find an excellent resource from which to educate yourself on mental health and psychology issues.

Tags: mental health, psychology, psychiatry

smart kids vs popular kids

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 12:26:42 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel. Some torture nerds for the same reason they pull the legs off spiders. Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feel better.But I think the main reason is that it's part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It's much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.

It's important for nerds to realize that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.<<

Interesting read.Written by someone who was considered to be a "nerd" at school.

Clip Source: www.paulgraham.com

there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.

Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time

it takes work to be popular

In a typical

school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison.

Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires. Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, they'll tend to become nerds.

that's why smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen

Nerds would find their unpopularity more bearable if it merely caused them to be ignored. Unfortunately, to be unpopular in school is to be actively persecuted.

Why?

Tags: school problems, bullies, psychology, essay, teenagers

Neurophysiology and Buddhism

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 08:09:50 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: <<<It is undeniable, however, that the false reification of that which we identify spuriously as 'self' — now acquiring the weighty imprimatur of modern science — has devastating implications for all brands of Theism.

Buddhism alone not merely encompasses this late-revealed truism, it makes it the basis of a new moral order that sees the annihilation of the self as the inelutable first step in our mastery of the existential predicament that doggedly besets us in this sorry world. A few concluding words — there remains a metaphysical (and theological) hiatus in dealing with 'being' without a reference to that other great existential puzzle — the transformative aspect of life that is generally subsumed under the title 'becoming'.>>>

Clip Source: lankaguardian.blogspot.com

The physical basis of the mind — the corporeal self — is a collection of dynamic units massively parallel in operation yet cross-linked and capable of a momentary holistic performance.

It would take us too far into the technicalities of neurophysiology to deepen our understanding of this vastly-complex neuronal system, but the message is clear — what is called the ‘self or ‘ego’ has no enduring epistemic basis. Indeed, about 99% of the work of the brain is unconscious or robotic. The interludes of awareness have a ‘personalised’ aspect that is mistaken for a permanent (and commanding) entity called the self.

extraordinary reduction of neurophysiological doctrine to tally with fundamental Buddhist thinking on these matters

world-renowned expert in these fields — Professor Francisco Varela — has declared himself a Buddhist and has made it his mission to effect a grand synthesis between the sophisticated formulations of neuroscience and the ancient truths of Buddhist psychology.

Tags: anatta, neurophysiology, buddhism

Emotional Pollution and the Cult of Feelings

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 23:47:51 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: <<<No matter how many self-help books and experts on talk shows insist that your feelings are "valid" and "appropriate," they cannot feel authentically like your own so long as they are mere reactions to someone else. If we allow the meaning of our lives to be subject to the vagaries of our reactions to the subtle emotional displays of others, we cannot help but fall into the present day quagmire of emotional pollution.

To feel genuine and empowered, like a person of substance, folks need to know more than whether their emotions are "appropriate." They need to know what they mean about the self. The meaning of our emotions cannot lie in how they feel, but in what they tell us about the current fidelity to your deepest values.>>>

Clip Source: blogs.psychologytoday.com

The popular psychology movement in the United States consists of hundreds of self-help books, magazines, Internet blogs, TV talk shows, and radio advice/call-in programs. The movement derives from an outdated form of psychotherapy based on the superficial doctrine that how you feel is who you are. Thus we live in a "cult of feelings," where what you feel has become at least as important as what you do.

Self-help books claim that to be "real" you have to explore all your feelings, without regard to the fact that "exploring" feelings amplifies and magnifies, i.e., distorts them, not to mention the fact that "exploring" your own feelings makes it difficult to see anyone else apart from your reaction to them.

People are now entitled to express every negative feeling they have, without regard to the effects on others,

result is a world rife with emotional pollution that divorces the superficial experience of emotions from their deeper meaning.

Tags: feelings, neurosis

A Breeze of Eastern Epistemology:Knowing What Exists

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 09:20:56 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: Here we stand in this proverbial and pre-verbal here-and-now, in the middle of Nothingness...
This is all there is...
And to ignore this "Now" would be the ignorance of un-awareness.
To ignore what's outside of this "Now" would be the ignorance of bliss...

Clip Source: blogs.psychologytoday.com

Ignorance, they say, is bliss.

But there are two kinds of ignorance - ignorance out of lack of conscious awareness and ignorance by conscious choice, ignorance of not knowing and ignorance of consciously ignoring that which cannot be known...

Which one is bliss?

Will you wake up tomorrow?

Who knows?! Don't you know that you can't know that which doesn't yet exist?!

Ignore the un-knowable...

And notice the Now that still exists...

The Buddhist doctrine of Sunyata (the doctrine of emptiness) is often misunderstood as a nihilistic doctrine of nothingness.

Buddhist psychology negates that which doesn't exist only to affirm that which still exists.

You've heard this before: the past has already happened, therefore it doesn't exist; the future hasn't happened, therefore it doesn't exist. Thus, there's nothing but Now...

So, here we stand, sandwiched between the Nothingness of the Past that's already gone and doesn't exist and the Future that hasn't yet happened and therefore doesn't exist...

Would you steal a buck? How about a can of soda?

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:49:33 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Fascinating read ! highly recommended

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

Unexpected and surprising connections are at the heart of the fascinating research conducted by Dan Ariely, who holds joint appointments in MIT's Media Lab and Sloan School of Management. His studies of behavioral economics have demonstrated in a variety of creative ways that people often make decisions that seem to defy logic--but they do so in very predictable, consistent ways.

Here's how the test worked: Ariely and his students went around and left six-packs of Coke in randomly selected dorm refrigerators all over campus. When he checked back in a few days, all of the Cokes were gone.

But when he later placed plates of six loose dollar bills in those same refrigerators, not a single bill was missing when he checked back. Even though the value was comparable--and thus the situations were supposed to be equivalent--people responded in opposite ways. Why is that?

Tags: economics, behavioral economics, psychology

What is a Confessing Sam?

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 16:36:46 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: Researchers ironically note that it is often just as difficult to know whether or not someone is telling the truth when they plead against themselves as when they plead for themselves.

Dr S M Kassin and two colleagues from the Department of Psychology at Williams College in Massachusetts report in the April, 2005 Law and Human Behaviour that when college students and police investigators judged 10 prison inmates confessing to crimes (half the confessions were true, half were false as they were concocted for the study), the students were more accurate than the police in determining who told the truth.

-More than 50 people confessed to having committed the famous and still unsolved Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles in 1947.
-At least six people have confessed to being the Zodiac Killer.
-At last count, 20 individuals have confessed to the 1996 murder of child beauty queen Jon Benet Ramsey.

Clip Source: www.theregister.co.uk

What is a confessing Sam?

"Confessing Sam" is the term in criminal psychology for a person who makes a false confession after a particularly widely publicised crime has taken place.

The first genuine Confessing Sam was Robert Hubert. In 1666, the Great Fire of London destroyed 80 per cent of the city. Hubert confessed to having started the fire by throwing a crude fire grenade through an open bakery window. At his trial it was proven that Hubert, a sailor, had not arrived in England until two days after the fire started, was never near the bakery where the fire started, and was so badly crippled that throwing anything was beyond him. If that were not enough, the bakery had no windows.

a perfect scapegoat

brought to trial, found guilty, and duly executed by hanging

Why does someone become a Confessing Sam?

mental illness, mental retardation, attention-seeking, publicity-seeking, or a combination

Often a psychiatric disorder

involving severe guilt feelings completely unrelated to the crime

The name-letter effect

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 10:47:07 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: “We’ve shown time and time again that people are attracted to people, places and things that resemble their names, without a doubt.”

In studies that make believers in free will squirm, Dr. Pelham’s team asserts that names and the letters in them are surprisingly influential in people’s lives. In one experiment, participants of both sexes evaluated a young woman more favorably when the number on the jersey she was wearing had been subliminally paired with their own names on a computer screen.

“Self-similarity is really one of the largest driving forces of behavior of social beings,” said Jeremy Bailenson, the director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab.

There are more prosaic reasons that people may feel connected to their Googlegängers, though. They may share a name because they belong to the same ethnic group, or their families may have had similar aspirations for them.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Names That Match Forge a Bond on the Internet

Why do so many feel a connection — be it kinship or competition — with utter strangers just because they share a name?

Social science, it turns out, has an answer. It is because human beings are unconsciously drawn to people and things that remind us of ourselves.

A psychological theory called the name-letter effect maintains that people like the letters in their own names (particularly their initials) better than other letters of the alphabet.

In studies involving Internet telephone directories, Social Security death index records and clinical experiments, Brett Pelham, a social psychologist, and colleagues have found in the past six years that Johnsons are more likely to wed Johnsons, women named Virginia are more likely to live in (and move to) Virginia, and people whose surname is Lane tend to have addresses that include the word “lane,” not “street.”

“It’s what we call implicit egotism,” Dr. Pelham

said.

Tags: psychology

The Rorschach Test

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 11:38:28 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: and the Presidential Rorschach Test...

Clip Source: www.uihealthcare.com

The Rorschach Test

Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922) was a Swiss Psychiatrist who is best known for devising the inkblot test that bears his name. He studied art as a secondary-school student earning the nickname Kleck, meaning "inkblot," because of his interest in sketching. Rorschach considered following his father in an art career, but was drawn to psychiatry, taking a deep interest in the then new field of psychoanalysis.

By 1918 he had started to experiment with the interpretation of inkblots by showing 15 accidental inkblots to patients and asking them, "What might this be?" The Rorschach test is based on the human tendency to project interpretations and feelings onto ambiguous stimuli. Rorschach held that a person's perceptual responses to inkblots could serve as clues to basic personality tendencies.

ignored at first

never experienced its success

died

before he could properly test and evaluate his invention

Artwork based on Rorschach inkblots and Jung mandala

Clip Source: www.thenation.com

Tags: personality tests, psychology, psychiatry

Political Junkies: Why it Feels Good to Be an Extremist

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 02:28:12 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: In The Political Brain, psychologist Drew Western summarizes fMRI experiments exploring the neuro-psychology of systematic bias and rationalization in the brains of political extremists. Finding ways to dismiss contradictory evidence triggers pleasant emotional releases in partisans' brains, eventually becoming a pleasurable, learned behavior.

Once partisans had found a way to reason to false conclusions, not only did neural circuits involved in negative emotions turn off, but circuits involved in positive emotions turned on.

The partisan brain didn't seem satisfied in just feeling better. It worked overtime to feel good, activating reward circuits that give partisans a jolt of positive reinforcement for their biased "reasoning."

These reward circuits overlap substantially with those activated when drug addicts get their "fix," giving new meaning to the term political junkie.
Clip Source: daily.sightline.org
How is it that even smart people can ignore a pile of evidence that contradicts their deeply-held beliefs. Why is it I get a rush when I'm making fun of a politician I don't agree with -- even if it's his flubs or quirks I'm mocking, not necessarily his ideas?
According to the research of Drew Western, political partisans -- and especially the smart, well-informed ones -- not only feel better when their brains downplay contradictory political information, they actually get a little emotional "high" when the brain (unconsciously) rejects evidence that contradicts their deeply held political beliefs.
In a series of brain scans of political partisans asked to consider contradictory statements by the politicians they supported, Western found that the brain reverted to the comfort zone of its long-held biases -- and doing so actually made people feel good.

Tags: science, politics, neuroscience, psychology, brain, reason, extremism, bias, beliefs

Fun Stuff for Jungians, Alchemists and Complexity Lovers

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 11:15:24 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Clip Source: web.ukonline.co.uk

CONTROLLING DEPRESSION - The Wrong Paradigm for the Job?

A COMPLEXITY-BASED MODEL OF SCHIZOPHRENIA

RAPTURE - TWO TYPES OF FEELING GOOD

COGNITIVE SYMMETRY-BREAKING

THE 'SECRET ADDICTION'

PSYCHOLOGICAL ENTROPY

LIMITS AND CHANGE

The Urge to Fly : On the Inner Techne of getting Earth into Air (July 2000)

What is Rta? An inner force of law : From Jung's Psychological Types

On the nature of Tao : From Jung's Psychological Types

The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man : From Jung's Civilization in Transition

A Review of Complex Theory : From Jung's The Structure and Function of the Psyche

C G Jung Analytical Psychology : its Theory and Practice The Tavistock Lectures (1935)

C G Jung The Transcendent Function : Para. 131 & 132, Volume 8 of the Collected Works (1957)

The Meaning of the Mandala - an Alchemical Treatise on the Opus Magnum

~ The New Alchemy Website ~

Tags: jung, analytic psychology, complexity, alchemy

Games People Play

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 13:03:19 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcwPoSExAiY

Clip Source: en.wikipedia.org

Games People Play (subtitle: The Psychology of Human Relationships) is a famous 1964 book by psychiatrist Eric Berne. Since its publication it has sold more than five million copies.^[1] The book describes both functional and dysfunctional social interactions.

In the first half of the book, Dr. Berne introduces transactional analysis as a way of interpreting social interactions. He describes three roles or ego-states, the Child, the Parent, and the Adult, and postulates that many negative behaviors can be traced to switching or confusion of these ego-states. Dr. Berne discusses procedures, rituals, and pastimes in social behavior, in light of this method of analysis.

The second half of the book catalogues a series of mind games, in which people interact through a patterned and predictable series of "transactions" which are superficially plausible

actually conceal motivations, include private significance to the parties involved, and lead to a well-defined predictable outcome,

Tags: transactional analysis

Animal hoarding:An expert illuminates the psychology behind this behavior

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 17:51:55 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: Hoarders often have major dysfunction in work, social and daily activities, reduced awareness of surroundings, and impaired ability to form close relationships with people. Contrary to what we originally thought, animal hoarding does not seem to be strongly associated with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and it is not yet defined as an independent psychological condition. Clinical evaluations indicate that it is often associated with a wide variety of psychological disorders, including borderline personality disorder.

Clip Source: www.msnbc.msn.com

Dr. Gary Patronek of the Animal Rescue League of Boston helps explain this unusual behavior.

Q: Why do people hoard animals?

It is quite common for animal hoarders to report very dysfunctional childhoods, characterized by inconsistent and unstable parenting if not outright abuse, during which animals were the only stable fixtures.

A dysfunctional childhood is correlated with a disordered attachment style. This can result in a controlling pattern of relationships, such as compulsive caregiving, as an adult. In this behavior pattern, a person selects someone with a sad or difficult life, and provides care obsessively, irrespective of whether the care is wanted or needed. This kind of behavior often characterizes the caregiving style of animal hoarders.

Q: What might trigger animal hoarding?

Animal hoarding

often begins after triggering events such as a loss of a stabilizing relationship, economic hardship, major health issues or other trauma.

Q: What are the symptoms of an animal hoarder?