Psychology

If the legend is true, Aesop lived during the sixth century B.C. He was born a slave but was given his freedom as a reward for his wit and intelligence.   He never wrote anything down but the stories people remembered were so intriguing virtually every moralistic fable before him (and after) got attributed to him.  Now Aesop's Fables number in the 600s.   One of them, "The Crow and the Pitcher", highlights the 'necessity is the mother of invention' concept. A thirsty crow can't get his beak far enough down into a pitcher of water to drink, so he drops stones in until the water…

Having cancer takes a toll on the body but the emotional strains are considerable. The stresses of undergoing treatment, along with the impact it has on relationships with family and friends, can be overwhelming and it's common for people with cancer to need help learning how to cope with the many emotions that emerge after receiving a diagnosis.  When someone is in the middle of a grueling treatment regimen and still trying to mentally process the fact that they have cancer, it can be hard to feel as if anyone understands what they are going through. Toward that, the National Cancer…

If only there were a field that examines the spiritual, therapeutic and psychological aspects of human-nature relationships, I'd abandon my graduate studies in Theoretical Phys Ed and embrace this new discipline instead. Luckily, there is. For those of you dumb enough to have spent $80,000 for a two-year program in Environmental Journalism at Columbia but now can't (they closed it - even unlimited student loans reached a gullible student limit), Ecopsychology is here. Sure, environmental problems may seem like material ones - we simply need cows that burp less, plants that require fewer…

Is psychology a science?   Increasingly, the respect of science (and scientists) by the public has been dropping and a part of that reason is because the line of what science is has become fuzzy. If economics calls itself science, well, the public knows they don't know what they are talking about, so maybe it applies to climate science too. Is sociology science?  What about parapsychology? If the definition of science becomes relative, then so does acceptance of science, in a slippery slope world, so we can't expect people will accept FDA findings as science if political science is…

Most people do not want war in their backyard.  In geopolitics, people claim to love their neighbor but they still prepare to fight; Switzerland, the home of neutrality, still has hundreds of forts built into their mountains and young men are required to own a gun(1).  It isn't just military aspects.  In American academia, there has been a 25 year shift in political representation so now, with few conservative neighbors, it is easy to ridicule Republicans, conservatives or anyone not part of the ruling demographic.  It is easy because there is no 'neighbor' to look the…

Are psychopaths made in a certain way and unable to change? Perhaps, says Aina Gullhaugen, a psychologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, but there is a discrepancy between the formal characteristics of psychopathy and what she has experienced in meeting psychopaths - which is kind of like saying Stalin was not a psychopath if she had met him and he seemed different than what the DSM describes.Gullhaugen thought if psychopathic criminals are as hardened as traditional descriptions would have it, you would not find vulnerabilities and psychiatric disorders among them.…

While browsing facebook, I ran across a friend's posting of a link to a diagnostic test for autism and Asperger's that I hadn't run across before,The Ritvo Autism Asperger Diagnostic Scale-Revised (RAADS-R). According to the abstract, The Ritvo Autism Asperger Diagnostic Scale-Revised (RAADS-R) is a valid and reliable instrument to assist the diagnosis of adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). The 80-question scale was administered to 779 subjects (201 ASD and 578 comparisons). All ASD subjects met inclusion criteria: DSM-IV-TR, ADI/ADOS diagnoses and standardized IQ testing. Mean…

Erasmus University Rotterdam has announced that Dirk Smeesters, Professor of Consumer and Society at Rotterdam School of Management, has had two papers withdrawn after a report from the Inquiry Committee on Scientific Integrity looked into suspicions that the professor had committed scientific errors. Two articles were found to have irregularities with findings that, in a statistical sense, are highly unlikely. The raw data forming the basis of these articles was not available for inspection by third parties, and the professor indicated that he had selected data so that the sought-…

Wikipedia's user-generated content has made it the world's largest, and most derided, encyclopedia. Part of the openness model has also led to 'edit wars' when the anonymous "editors" disagree with each other. The dynamics of these conflicts provide an interesting window into collaborative content production and the emergence and resolution of conflicts in an online environment, say researchers led by Taha Yasseri of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Yasseri and co-authored identified Wikipedia pages that are either controversial, such as the articles for homosexuality and…

Should there be racial quotas in university admissions?  In jobs? What about gender quotas or political ones? America has more equality than any country in the world and so many organizations and institutions have elected to further relegate racial issues to the past by deemphasizing race or remove it entirely from their decision-making processes.  People will be hired on qualifications so everyone who wins knows they won for the right reasons. New surveys in psychology suggest that a color-blind approach may not be as effective as people believe it is. Basically, racism may be…