Psychology

Mabel and Shermer It took me a while to find this photo in my stream of thousands of photos because it's more than a month old. I've been reading Michael Shermer's latest book The Believing Brain for over a month now to review it for Countering and Science 2.0. I spent more than a month with Baron-Cohen's The Science of Evil. I try to be thorough and careful in my reading of books I review; I don't want to gloss over it and throw out a review that is, well, a throw-away. This means that their work tends to stay with me and percolate in…

Parents are always looking for new treatments to help their children with autism; it can be daunting to keep up with the multitude of new therapies constantly popping up on the internet, many with similar sounding names. There are several different “listening therapies” or auditory integrative training programs available online promising relief for autism symptoms. According to Sinha, Silove, Wheeler, and Williams (2006), “treatments to overcome variations in auditory sensitivity commonly encountered in people with autism have been developed and are collectively called auditory integration…

Empathy erosion is a logical response. You know it is. Or you wouldn't be able to eat meat. If you turn the dial up all the way on empathy, you end up like that strange offshoot of Hinduism, walking around with your mouth covered for fear a fly will fly in and you'll swallow it. You'll do silly things like only eat fruit after it's fallen on it's own to the ground cuz you don't want to hurt the tree. Come on. Really? Empathy erosion is a highly adaptive response that allows your survival. It allows you to kill the enemy and consequently survive. It lets you bonk the cow on the head and eat it…

An article on Science 2.0 addresses a new study  on just how easy it is to create false memories. According to the article, researchers "show a unique pattern of brain activity when false memories are formed – one that hints at a surprising connection between our social selves and memory." The conclusion of the article is that "social reinforcement could act on the amygdala to persuade our brains to replace a strong memory with a false one." (video on study available here.) We're all familiar with how people present at the same event can recall it in different ways, and…

The role of spirituality and religion in individuals' lives has been studied since the beginning of modern psychology. It's not been a consistent examination, nor always a useful one, but the desire to understand both why people believe in gods and how these religious beliefs can be adaptive and helpful in their lives is a relevant one, since over 70% of Americans profess religious beliefs. The psychological study of religious beliefs and practices frequently suffers from vagueness (and a failure to operationalize concepts and variables being measured), poor research measures (…

I hope you didn't see my first-to-worst performance in last night's hotties vs. nerds edition of ABC's WIPEOUT. If you did, you know what happened: after winning the round of 24 by almost a minute and then winning the round of 12 by the equivalent of a furlong, I got stuck in the round of six trying one element over and over -- the wrong way -- as people I had beaten in the first two rounds passed and eventually eliminated me. Nuts--'twas a very good shot at $50k that my family of four surviving on my writer's salary could've used. Anyway, while it just aired last night, it's been a bit…

 By James Todd (in italics) and Kim Wombles In January of this year, Dr. James Todd and I cowrote a piece on facilitated communication and the Wendrow case, "Facilitated Communication: A Price Too High To Pay." The tragic case of the Wendrow family, whose daughter received facilitated communication in the school system at the family's behest and who through facilitation accused her father of raping her, should be a cautionary tale for other families who are desperate for their non-verbal autistic children to communicate. Her parents were placed in jail, the family completely…

A study in Canada says Canadian pre-schoolers prefer to play with kids more like them. Are Canadian parents ingraining bias in their kids?  Or French-Canadians?  Hard to know. Participants were recruited from six daycares located in Montreal and its suburbs: 30 mostly second-generation Asian-Canadians and 30 French-Canadians. Children were paired with peers they had known for at least three months. According to the research team, social mores likely prompted a lack of interaction between cultures.    French-Canadian children used longer sentences when interacting with same…

One of my favorite songs of all time is "In the Garden." I know Willie's not got the prettiest of voices, but I love his version best of all. He lives hard and the gravel in his voice lends a depth to the content of the song that others don't quite have. garden 2004In my gardens, working in the dirt, tending the plants, I come as close to knowing the face of God that I ever will (and I say this as an atheist). Here, in the garden, the beauty of the world coupled with its randomness is made manifest and I am in awe. garden 2004The garden changes not only from day to day, but if you've…

Recently, I reviewed Simon Baron-Cohen's new book, The Science of Evil, and interviewed him concerning zero empathy, neurological disorders like autism spectrum disorders and personality disorders like narcissism, borderline, and psychopathy. The New York Times interviewed Baron-Cohen this week in a piece titled "From Hitler to Mother Theresa: Six Degrees of Empathy." The article links to a 60 item empathy quotient test online (20 are filler items); the test in the book contains only the 40 empathy questions. Last year, I wrote about Baron-Cohen's empathy and systemizing tests and how he…