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POPSDo our brains interpret our values and beliefs as facts (objective truths)?
Such messages caused activation in the brain region that is responsible for error detection. So in other words (and yes, I am grossly simplifying here), it was as if people's brain's were indicating "error, error, error; this message does not compute." This is consistent with research by Emily Pronin (psychology professor at Princeton University), which shows that people of all beliefs see their own beliefs as LESS biased than others. In other words, republicans see themselves as less biased, and so do democrats, and for that matter, so do mailman, coperate CEO's and homeless people. I think this goes a long way in explaining the depth and extent to which people defend their beliefs. Perhaps, Berger and Luckmann are right; we do live, in some sense, in alternative forms of reality. Sure, we all know a rock won't bite us and 2 + 2 = 4, but what I "know" (George W. Bush was lousy) is not what many Republicans "knows" (George W. Bush was a good president).
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POPSConditional parenting In 2004, two Israeli researchers, Avi Assor and Guy Roth, joined Edward L. Deci, a leading American expert on the psychology of motivation, in asking more than 100 college students whether the love they had received from their parents had seemed to depend on whether they had succeeded in school, practiced hard for sports, been considerate toward others or suppressed emotions like anger and fear. It turned out that children who received conditional approval were indeed somewhat more likely to act as the parent wanted. But compliance came at a steep price. First, these children tended to resent and dislike their parents. Second, they were apt to say that the way they acted was often due more to a “strong internal pressure” than to “a real sense of choice.” Moreover, their happiness after succeeding at something was usually short-lived, and they often felt guilty or ashamed.
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POPSNew theory for why we cry This new concept from Hasson "offers the most plausible hypothesis about the evolved function of tears and crying," said evolutionary psychologist David Buss at the University of Texas at Austin."Others have speculated about possible function of tears, but the notion that they operate through handicapping is highly original."
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POPSSomebodies and Nobodies: Understanding Rankism Examples of rankism based on pseudo rankings include the illicit hierarchies maintained by racism, sexism, ageism, classism, ableism, and heterosexualism (or, homophobia)--in short, the familiar isms that plague societies and that, one by one, are being discredited and dismantled. What can victims of rank abuse do to protect their dignity?Those abused on the basis of color unified against racism. Women targeted sexism and the elderly took aim at ageism. By analogy, "rankism" denotes abuses of power associated with rank. Once you have a name for it, you see it everywhere. More importantly, once you call it by name, everyone else will see it too, and perpetrators will find themselves on the defensive.
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POPSWhy do we hate Good-byes? I see you seeing me and I exist. I see you seeing me see you and we exist. Mutual re-cognition is the glue that holds us together, not merely as friends, but as individual selves. Good-byes are poignant preludes to the leave-takings and withdrawals that deprive our psyches of the sustenance they need to maintain our selfhood. As such, every good-bye is a premonition of disintegration, a foretaste of death, another step on the path to "adieu." Have you noticed that old folks tell the same stories over and over? They are desperately trying to shore up identities that, because of a paucity of recognition, are breaking down. By telling us their stories, they are staving off the disintegration of self, one day at a time. You can't really blame them--their struggle is at once heroic and tragic.One day, you too may need a comprehending ear to offset the recognition deficiencies that plague old-age... <<
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POPSA little science on positive energy ...positive or negative. It can't be measured with conventional methods, and that makes it all the more exciting and real to those who believe in it. One attempt to give respectability to the idea of positive energy that I recently came across involves a reference to Wilhelm Reich's orgone energy. Although I am tempted to regard talk of ‘positive energy' as superstitious mumbo-jumbo, I do have some sympathy for those who use the term. Psychological research has shown that we can verbally articulate only a fraction of what we experience. A radical response to the articulation gap would be just to refuse to talk about anything we can't put in concrete operational terms. If you come home from a party you hated and just say there was tremendous negative energy, perhaps that is ‘nuff said. Let others fill in the content to the satisfaction of their imagination. You, at least, pointed them in the right direction. <<
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POPSDoes a nation's mood lurk in its songs and blogs? “And it’s going to change the social sciences; that to me is very clear.” ... From another site, http://wefeelfine.org/ , they pulled more than nine million sentences that used some form of the verb feel — as in “I feel relieved” — from 2.3 million blogs from 2005 to 2009.They then rated the psychological charge, or “valence,” of a significant subset of the words on a 10-point scale: from triumphant (8.82) and love (8.72) down to disgusted (2.45) and suicide (1.25). Some of the findings were expected. Sept. 11, 2001, was rock bottom, for instance. Others were less so: the day that Michael Jackson died also lowered people’s mood significantly. Christmas and Valentine’s Day regularly popped as positive times, although words like “guilty” were associated with Christmas and “waste” and “lonely” with Valentine’s Day. “Now, these are bloggers, and they certainly are not representative of everyone,” Dr. Dodds said. “But the pattern is very pronounced.”
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POPSsmart kids vs popular kids 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.
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POPSA Breeze of Eastern Epistemology:Knowing What Exists 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...
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POPSWhat is a Confessing Sam? 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.
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POPSThe name-letter effect “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.
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POPSAnimal hoarding:An expert illuminates the psychology behind this behavior 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.
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POPSThe Fantastic in Art & Fiction >>Images were selected for their intrinsic relationship to the topic, because they illuminated an important dynamic, or quite simply because they were unusually striking.Though, inevitably, some familiar pieces will be found in these pages, we have attempted to favor rare or unusual works that, to our knowledge, have not been reproduced before. Hence the concomitant emphasis on book illustration, and on a wealth of images that have remained more or less invisible in canonical art histories. Because of its rich and varied modes of representation the Fantastic also lends itself quite easily to interdisciplinary approaches. Psychology and sociology, art and literary history, anthropology and folklore among other disciplines, can provide avenues of investigation useful in the study of such basic critical or analytical concepts for the Fantastic as repression, the uncanny, indeterminacy, or the postmodern.<<
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POPSCan You Predict Happiness? Take the simple act of eating a potato chip. In a series of experiments, Gilbert invited Harvard undergraduates to a lab stocked with potato chips, along with either sardines or chocolate. To compare expected versus actual enjoyment of the experience, one group of students was asked to predict how much they would enjoy the chips compared to the relatively better food (chocolate) or the worse food (sardines); this forecasting group was asked to imagine eating the chips before, after or instead of the alternatives. Students in another "experience" group were instructed to eat the chips and the other foods. Turns out that the other foods had no impact on the actual enjoyment of eating chips. "People who are simply imagining how much they're going to like chips imagine they're going to like them much more if they're eaten after sardines, than if they're eaten after chocolate," Gilbert says. "That's wrong."
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POPSColor Psychology Color psychology is concerned with the effects of color on mood, emotion, behavior.Colors are not only used for decorations or adding beauty to an object, but they can be used to determine personality traits to affect people’s mood and to effect on other people around you. Each colour is connected to various areas of our body and will affect us differently emotionally, physically, mentally, and spiritually. Several ancient cultures, including the Egyptians and Chinese, practiced chromotherapy, or using colors to heal. Chromotherapy is sometimes referred to as light therapy or colourology and is still used today as a holistic or alternative treatment. In this treatment: * Red was used to stimulate the body and mind and to increase circulation. * Yellow was thought to stimulate the nerves and purify the body. * Orange was used to heal the lungs and to increase energy levels. * Blue was believed to soothe illnesses and treat pain. I'll take red :-)
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POPSTheory of Sexual Selection:The Human Mind and the Peacock's Tale "There has been no genetic change since we were hunter-gatherers, but deep in the mind of modern man is a simple hunter-gatherer rule: strive to acquire power and use it to lure women who will bear heirs; strive to acquire wealth and use it to buy affairs with other men’s wives who will bear bastards . . . Wealth and power are means to women; women are means to genetic eternity. Likewise, deep in the mind of modern woman is the same hunter-gatherer calculator, too recently evolved to have changed much: strive to acquire a provider husband who will invest food and care in your children; strive to find a lover who can give those children first-class genes. Only if she is very lucky will they both be the same man . . . Men are to be exploited as providers of parental care, wealth and genes."
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POPSThe reality of married lovemaking "The challenge for couples is balancing a sense of intimacy and safety and security with a sense of unpredictability and creativity and eroticism," says Barry McCarthy, Ph.D., a psychology professor at American University in Washington, D.C. "When sexual intimacy is strong, making love plays a healthy 15 to 20 percent role in energizing your marriage. The paradox is that when sex is problematic, it plays an inordinately powerful, negative role in new marriages."
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POPSComplete List of PsychTests and quizzes There are 4 categories, career,I.Q.,personality,and relationships. There are the free tests, and of course many more available to members. I'm not sure of the conditions behind the membership tests, but so far I'm having enough fun with the free ones.
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