Psychology
You, too, may laugh in amusement at these Candid Camera style “experiments.” Yet, ruefully, I acknowledge that I might conform within minutes… well seconds?
Also, see this other well-known (among psychologists, anyway) “people are sheep” experiment by Solomon Asch. Would you trust your eyes or an authority’s pronouncement? Afterwards, many psychologists concluded that the perceived power of the “authority” has a huge effect on our compliance.
Here’s a gratifying update.
Two upstarts, Bert Hodges and Georgie Anne Geyer, reviewed the responses of participants in that “lines” experiment. They…
We instinctively experience situations as individuals or as part of a group. As David Brooks suggests today, the world is divided into those with an individualist or a collectivist mentality. Guess which group is larger.
Freedom to succeed. That powerful American dream attracts millions of people to the U.S. yet it is at odds with the way the Chinese and other Asians are primed to view life. Not that most people everywhere aren’t seeking a better life. It’s just that Americans view themselves in a situation. The lens through which Asians look at life is the situation, the…
Neuroscientist Tania Singer and her team recruited volunteers to play a game. Some were asked to play by the rules. Others were instructed to ignore them. To not play fair.
After all participants played the game together, they were then asked to observe each other in a second activity. Scientists measured some of the volunteers’ brain activity as they observed some of their former game opponents apparently being subjected to different levels of pain.
Result? The brain areas that signal pain became active in all who thought they were observing pain in others. This provides neural…
A new study by sociologists at the University of Maryland concludes that unhappy people watch more TV, while people who describe themselves as very happy spend more time reading and socializing. The study appears in the December issue of the journal “Social Indicators Research.”
Analyzing 30-years worth of national data from time-use studies and a continuing series of social attitude surveys, the Maryland researchers report that spending time watching television may contribute to viewers’ happiness in the moment, with less positive effects in the long run.
“TV doesn’t really seem to satisfy…
A doctoral thesis carried out at the University of Granada has proved that patients with serious anxiety disorders (panic disorder with and without agoraphobia, social anxiety disorder or generalized anxiety disorder) think they suffer more physiological (palpitations, sweating, irregular breathing, shaking of the hands and muscular tension …) than they really have. In other words, although many patients with anxiety disorders have orally reported very intense physiological symptoms in surveys and questionaires, they are hyporeactive when real measures of such symptoms are taken through…
ashley |
Heartbreak is more than just an emotional defeat; to some the pain is very real. At one point or another, everyone must experience this mind numbing feeling (unless you confine yourself to a house and never interact with even a pet) but that's not the norm and you're probably not reading this article if you've had that kind of sheltered life.
Heartbreak can be caused by many different circumstances and that's what makes this emotion easily recognized by nearly every person on the planet. It can result from the loss of a loved one, a partner, a friend and even a close pet. Or it can be…
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder(OCD) affects as much as 2 % of the population and is considered a psychiatric disorder. It is the number four psychiatric pathology in terms of frequency following phobias, disorders relating to alcohol and drugs, and depression.
People affected with OCD are obsessed with cleanliness, order, and symmetry or are overcome by doubts and irrational fears. In order to reduce their anxiety, they carry out rituals of tidying, washing or verification for several hours a day in the most serious cases.
These signs reflect major suffering and a serious handicap that often…
Patients whose nose has been destroyed by a tumor or injury carry a severe psychological and social burden. Esthetic reconstruction ranges among the most challenging tasks in plastic surgery. Helmut Fischer and Wolfgang Gubisch present the different options for nasal reconstruction surgery in the current issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International.
The authors present the case of a woman who had had a tumor removed from the tip of her nose 12 years previously. The tumor recurred and destroyed the woman's nose almost completely over the following 7 years.
The hope is that patients will not…
Aristotle figured out pretty early on that human beings are by their nature constantly pulled by two opposing forces: on the one hand their propensity to go after immediate rewards, even though they are often deleterious for them (akrasia, or “weakness of the will”); on the other hand the necessity to work for their long term welfare (eudaemonia, loosely translated as “happiness” but better understood as flourishing).
This is, of course, the stuff of countless novels and movies, not to mention the reason people go to therapy (sometimes successfully coupling the artistic with real life, as in…
If you own(ed) a digital video recorder like a Replay, you probably never felt so liberated. While watching a television show, it jumped over the entire block of commercials. You could send programs to friends over the internet and watch them in different parts of your house. It was a miracle of viewer-friendly technology and that's why it was under constant lawsuit pressure from large media companies.
A TiVo, on the other hand, has been allowed to co-exist peacefully, including financial backing from media companies, even though they have commercial skip. Why?…