Psychology

The phrase 'like herding cats' resonates with people for a reason; it's difficult to get them to do anything they don't already want to do. But they have no problem getting humans to do their bidding, according to a report published in Current Biology, which shows that even biologists are concerned about future feline-human relations. It seems crafty felines accelerate the filling of food dishes by sending a mixed signal: an urgent meowing coupled with an otherwise pleasant purr.  Humans find it annoying and difficult to ignore.   It's not April 1st or December so calibrate…

Nothing makes biologists happier than psychologists declaring things a product of evolution.   Now it turns out even social constructs like 'taking turns' have gotten some benefit from evolutions' 'invisible hand'. How so?   It spans across species so it must be evolution, say University of Leicester psychologists professor Andrew Colman and Dr Lindsay Browning, who carried out the simulations due to appear in the September issue of Evolutionary Ecology Research which they say helps explain the evolution of cooperative turn-taking. Professor Colman said, "In human groups, turn-…

In the 1980s, a popular hypothesis was that any number of people were suffering from trauma they knew nothing about; dissociative amnesia, or repressed memories. At issue is how to prove whether memories of trauma, such as childhood sexual abuse, could be repressed and then resurface later in life.  Overzealous therapists and willing victims led to any number of false allegations and the resulting damage to families can't be overstated.  Even a hint of child abuse is guilt in the minds of many. In 2006, a contest by Harvard University psychiatrists Harrison G. Pope and James Hudson…

A Science Of Human Language - Part #10 In this part of the series, commenced here, I give some concrete examples from various languages of how words can cue the category from which other words were, or are to be selected. "Can the Saussurean definition of grammar as a structured system of SIGNs be reinterpreted as a structured system of code + information?" Huang, Chen and Gau1, Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica. I suggest that the naturally-evolved grammar of every human language is, indeed, a system of codes and information.  Phrases and sentences in all spoken language, I…

Although possessing an undeniable bias against consciousness and mood altering drugs, courtesy of the 1960s and 1970s, I was curious to see what progress had been made utilizing these same substances to treat addictions.  Allegorically, we have vaccines derived from pathogens to prevent disease, thus grudgingly but also with a bit of morbid fascination, I can admit that hallucinogens and their derivatives might be effective in treating some individuals with certain addictions, and precedence seems to support this hypothesis. Until 1966, LSD was used experimentally to treat various…

A Science Of Human Language - Part #9 This series, which commenced here, is about quistic grammar, a semantic grammar.  It is called quistic grammar because it is based on the notion that all ideas can be reduced to simple questions, or the equivalent: simple statements which answer simple questions.  It is a grammar in which semantics - the meaning conveyed - is given primacy over syntax - the rules of word and sentence modification.  The semantic component of language is, I suggest,  coded in mental models: neural structures which we manipulate and which we compare to…

This is a funny question to ask.  Funny in that no one has ever asked this of me before, and yet a few moments of reflection reveal how utterly important such a question is. The simple answer is that no, I am not living the life expected or wished for.  As a child of the 50s and fan of “Dr. Kildare” and “Ben Casey”, I wanted desperately to be a surgeon.  Before I was 10 years old, my plans were laid – I would work at a big hospital and save lots of lives regardless of ability to pay.  I took the Hippocratic Oath to heart and believed in it completely.  Although I…

In Was Michael Jackson A Pedophile? we dismissed the idea that Michael Jackson was gay and the unlikeliness of his being a clinical pedophile along with being an autogynephile.  So what was he?  The idea behind erotic identity disorders—that sometimes the sexual object can be inverted into the self—was first proposed by two important Canadian sexual scientists, Kurt Freund and Ray Blanchard. In their seminal paper, they focused on a series of real cases of pedophilic sex offenders who each appeared to be erotically aroused by the idea that they were children. Two of the pedophiles…

The predictably massive postmortem analysis of Michael Jackson has focused on both his enormous talent and his spectacular strangeness. Although there is lively debate whether Jackson or Elvis Presley is the all time King of Pop, there is no question which of them is the King of Weird. Elvis Presley had his quirks—secret meetings with Nixon, shooting at television sets, and of course, drug abuse. But these did not compare with Michael Jackson's bizarre physical appearance, abetted by untold plastic surgeries; child-like speech; enjoyment in sleeping with (and perhaps "sleeping with") boys;…

University of Minnesota Medical School researcher Iris Borowsky, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues found that one in seven adolescents believe that it is highly likely that they will die before age 35, and this belief corresponded to more adolescents engaging in risky behaviors. Borowsky and colleagues analyzed data collected by the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a nationally representative sample of more than 20,000 youth in grades 7 through 12 during three separate study years. In the first set of interviews, nearly 15 percent of adolescents predicted they had a 50/50 chance or…