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POPSThe Psychology of Cyberspace John Suler, Ph.D. Department of Psychology, Science and Technology Center Rider University. There is a rapidly growing field of 'cyberpsychology': the contents here suggest some of the areas of focus. Clearly, business and marketing research are well represented in studies; another interesting area of study is the social site as a virtual laboratory for studying human personality, motivation,etc; related to the latter the pressing question of how internet relationships (e.g. friendship, group, lover) interact with individuals' lives beyond the internet.
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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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POPS"Violence is animalistic" meme reduces support for war More: Although right-wing authoritarians "typically show strong in-group bias and support for violence against out-groups, their heightened need to view themselves as non-animals makes them reticent to demonstrate violence when it is linked to animality," Motyl concludes. It should be noted that 104 of the 136 participants in the test were women. Before generalizing these results too widely, one would like to see them duplicated with a mostly male sample, preferably one from outside the walls of academia. Nevertheless, these are hopeful findings for those looking for ways to inspire peaceful resolutions to problems.
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POPSIt's gone! So where are the scores fallen ill or even (Oh, God!) dead? What was all this hype about? It's gone! Gone! ;) And no even traces left. Last week, Dr. Anne Schuchat, the director of immunization at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said, “Most states do have quite a lot of disease right now, and that’s unusual for this time of year.” “To say, Oh, all of us in New York are immune, we won’t have any more disease and we don’t need to take vaccine, is a dangerous conclusion to draw,” Dr. Cetron said. If some bureaucrats want to keep themselves busy, it's up to them. Only, please, not at our expense. Not at expense public well being and not at expense of our pockets. We have something else to do rather than than run in mortal panic with no possibility of hide from aggressive science-like manipulative psychological attacks.
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POPS"It’s The Vaccines Stupid!" "By countless scientific accounts, far more dangerous to human health than any reported incidences of Swine Flu are the dangers of severe health issues including paralysis, brain damage and even death arising from what is added to vaccines by virtually every major vaccine maker. Almost without exception, all commercial vaccines today contain various substances known as adjuvants designed to make the vaccine “work.” These adjuvants are the source of horrendous and sometimes deadly damage." More at source, make sure to read the article.
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POPSPraying May Increase Brain Power The concept of neurotheology presents an interesting take on the conventional belief that science and religion are opposites, housed in entirely different segments of the human mind and soul. Newberg’s studies show that there’s no specific area of the brain that responds to spiritual stimulation. Rather, “religious experiences fire neurons in several different parts of the brain, just like other events do.”
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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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POPSClimate Change, American Psychological Assn., and Psychopathology I hadn't realized that there was an intimate interface between Psychology and Global Climate Change, but once the premise is accepted, the abuses to follow become inevitable. I will not again review how badly the science has been politicized and how baldly the data has been manipulated in order to force predetermined conclusions; I would merely point out that so far none of the computer models have been able to predict the past, let alone the future; This really is a travesty. But what I find most breathtaking is people calling themselves "scientists" while refusing to release their methodology and, now, complicit in hiding even the raw data. Such people should be stripped of their tenure and accreditation .
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POPSPoverty Hurts Been waiting for science to confirm what I always knew & felt growing up in poverty. It's not just about the money, it's the pain that makes it traumatic. This article was life-validating.
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POPSResearcher: article is "a flat, unambiguous, factually incorrect misrepresentation" of my findings More: “When I saw the article my heart completely sank, and it made me really angry, given how sensitive this subject is. To be making claims like the Telegraph did, in my name, places all the blame on women, which is not what we were doing at all. I just felt really angry about how wrong they’d got this study.” Since I started sniffing around, and Sophia complained, the Telegraph have quietly changed the online copy of the article, although there has been no formal correction, and in any case, it remains inaccurate. But there is a second, less obvious problem. Repeatedly, unpublished work – often of a highly speculative and eye-catching nature – is shepherded into newspapers by the press officers of the British Psychological Society, and other organisations. A rash of news coverage and popular speculation ensues, in a situation where nobody can read the academic work.
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POPSWhy The Loudest are Often the Most Wrong This classic paper by Kruger and Dunning, Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments , examines the psychological reasons for the unfortunately common correlation between ignorance and confidence. We argue that when people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the mistaken impression that they are doing just fine. As Miller (1993) perceptively observed in the quote that opens this article, and as Charles Darwin (1871) sagely noted over a century ago, "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." ( PDF here .)
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POPSThe study of a lifetime: "What Makes Us Happy?" "Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human condition—and into the study’s longtime director, George Vaillant"
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POPSBad Dreams Are Good for You I had a dead set omen dream about a race horse winning the other night. Turned out to be a nightmare. (All is not lost. Dog food is on a special. I can still eat.)
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POPSWhat Makes Us Happy? Great article on the Grant Study, one of the most fascinating longitudinal studies. Based on 268 men who entered college in the 1930's.
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POPSYou May Think You Are An Amateur Psychologist "But psychology is actually based in science and psychologists learn the scientific basis of human behavior by observing, measuring, testing, and using statistics to show that what they find is reliable evidence and not just down to chance. "........................ "Of course I have feelings for you. You may not realize it but you project yourself to be hurting and neglected. It's as though you have this large void in your life that you are always trying to fill but it never gets filled. " People who are not psychologists should not presume to analyze others. Do yourself a favor and drop it.
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POPSReading changes brain as well as mind continues: The study, forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science, is one of a series in which Zacks and colleagues use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track real-time brain activity as study participants read and process individual words and short stories. Hey, pathworking and other forms of guided imagery actually do something measurable! Why, that means that role-playing games…umh…uh, oh.
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POPSConfidence game - The science of Trustworthiness Researchers have discovered that surprisingly small factors - where we meet someone, whether their posture mimics ours, even the slope of their eyebrows or the thickness of their chin - can matter as much or more than what they say about themselves. We size up someone's trustworthiness within milliseconds of meeting them, and while we can revise our first impression, there are powerful psychological tendencies that often prevent us from doing so - tendencies that apply even more strongly if we've grown close.
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