Psychology

So, I try to put it into English what I think about life and mistakenness of current canonical paradigm about a life. There are several points, where the current paradigm is simply wrong. I have made some notices about it before, also, but I try to make a few things clear. There is such "law": The world in mechanical device, where no other qualities except the causality of events exist. Physics have no other essence. Kant told that there is no way to know thing-in-itself and many believe this elitary lie with all it's implications done long after Kant. I count a few ways the mechanical world…

Gardiner and Kosmitzki (2008) acknowledge their use of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model as the basis for the coverage of human development from a cultural perspective. It is the first theory that I will elaborate on. It seems readily apparent, at least to me, that the relationship between an individual and his or her environment is dynamic and reciprocal in nature. A person reacts to his or her environment and in doing so alters the environment. Bronfenbrenner’s theory, according to Gardiner and Kosmitzki, is at its essence this simple a proposition. Bronfenbrenner expounds this theory…

It's unfortunate but true that we tend to fall for all manner of woo, that we do a poor job of weeding out nonsense from sense. People will believe just about any crazy thing, especially if the person selling it makes really outlandish claims. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen booths selling the special magnetic bracelets or the salt crystal rocks that are supposed to heal everything. There’s a sucker out there for every con man, as long as the con man is willing to act like a fisherman and cast a wide net. It’s no wonder, either. Even well-intentioned, decent…

In the tragic Huntsville shootings reported in Nature News Feature (Life after Death. http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100512/full/465150a.html. Nature 465, 150-155; 2010), Amy Bishop, an Assistant Professor in the University of Alabama’s biology department, methodically shot her colleagues during a departmental meeting, killing three and seriously injury three others. Long after the shots rang out during that fateful departmental meeting, the ordeal still continues to haunt the victim’s families as well as students and trainees in the now shattered department. While colleagues pitch in to…

Matsumoto and Juang (2008) note that the research done in psychology is “limited to the research that generated them” and the cross-cultural psychology goes beyond typical psychological research in that it compares the variables across more than one culture (p. 29). Most psychological research done in the United States by its nature is culture-specific in that the participants tend to be American . I would offer that a psychologist in the United States conducting a research study will consider it a job well done if the sample is ethnically or racially diverse or approximates the population…

No one says, "I am in favor of pollution" but how would anyone know who really cares?   Body language, claims a new book. Professor Geoff Beattie, from The University of Manchester, says mismatches between gestures and speech will allow us to identify ‘green fakers’, regardless of what they actually say. His research for the Sustainable Consumption Institute used video recordings to examine the gestures and speech of people with differing views on the environment while they talked about carbon labeling, global warming and their lifestyles.  By examining their gestures, each speaker…

A CNN headline reads "Kids of lesbians have fewer behavioral problems, study suggests". Interesting, but wait... The study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, followed 78 lesbian couples who conceived through sperm donations... The involvement of mothers may be a contributing factor [to having fewer behavioral problems], in addition to the fact that the pregnancies were planned, Gartrell said. The children "didn't arrive by accident," she said. "The mothers were older... they were waiting for an opportunity to have children and age brings maturity and better parenting." What?…

“An overall cognitive deficit is not a defining feature of autism. “ –Amiet et al. (2008)…“Another difference between past and present autism diagnosis involves the presence of intellectual disabilities, adds Yeargin-Allsopp. During the 1960s and 1970s, the vast majority of those diagnosed with autism had an intellectual disability but today, only about 40% have one.” –from CMAJ This does not equate to an 80% figure of ID for those with autistic disorder, no matter how one parses the numbers. In fact Yeargin-Allsop’s 2003 study disconfirms the idea that most individuals with…

Using an implicit task, researchers monitored how people automatically responded to words – in this case, whether they find it easier to link words referring to their partner to words with pleasant or unpleasant meanings - and this told them how likely couples were to split up. Most research on relationship success has focused on how the people in the relationship feel about each other and  this is usually done by the obvious route - asking them. But people may not really know how happy they are, says Ronald D. Rogge, of the University of Rochester, and "to make things worse, a lot…

Are you a bold personality?  High self-esteem, action-oriented, eager, tenacious?  If so, you are more likely to be a religious extremist when anxiety occurs, according to findings by York University researchers in this month's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In a series of studies, over 600 participants were placed in anxiety-provoking or neutral situations and then asked to describe their personal goals and rate their degree of conviction for their religious ideals. This included asking participants whether they would give their lives for their faith or support…