What Your Facebook Photos Say About Your Personality The way your Facebook profile looks may suggest a lot about your personality, a new study finds. Researchers found that extroverts and neurotics both upload significant numbers of photos to their Facebook pages, but extroverts tend to change their profile cover photos, while neurotics tend to upload more photos per album. The investigators recruited more than 100 people between the ages of 17 and 55, and the participants completed questionnaires about their personality and demographics. More than 70 percent of the participants were women. The link between extroversion and the tendency to upload lots of photos may not seem surprising, but how can the same tendency be explained in neurotics, whom the researchers describe as people who are "characterized by a temperamental nature, being prone to stress and anxiety"? "As socially anxious individuals, they see Facebook [as] a safe place for self-expression and to compensate for their offline deficiencies," Eftekhar told Live Science.
Narcissism, Psychopathy, and Evil « mind.expressions DELANY DEAN, JD, PhD delanydean.com KC Mindfulness crimlawdoc@gmail.com Introduction: During both my professional careers (criminal law and psychology), two areas of particular interest to me have been psychopathy and narcissism. Underneath the superficial charm, the narcissist/psychopath always has a “me-first” mentality. A good non-technical book about this phenomenon is: The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout [the term “sociopath” is closely related to the term “psychopath”]. Some good web resources about the phenomenon known as “narcissistic rage” are in my “del.icio.us” links (click over in the side column on this blog, where it says “And, Check Out…”). Recently, Nature magazine published a great article [pdf] on the neuroscience of psychopaths, as investigated by an ingenious study being run by a group of Dutch researchers. “Although there is a higher number of psychopaths among violent criminals, a psychopath is not necessarily someone who is violent. Authoritarianism and Psychopathy
Check mates: A brief look at courtship requests (Part 2) | drmarkgriffiths In my previous blog on courtship requests (e.g., men asking for a woman’s phone number, men asking women out for a drink, etc.), I examined a number of Dr. Nicolas Guéguen’s studies on the effects that various factors had solicitation success. In this blog, I briefly overview such factors as the role of the weather, music, odour, clothes (uniform and colour), flowers, and social status. Weather: In a 2013 issue of Social Influence, Guéguen examined the effect of sunshine on romantic relationships (reasoning that sunny weather puts people in a better mood than non-sunny weather). Music: In a 2014 issue of Psychology of Music, Guéguen and his colleagues examined the extent to which music can play a role in sexual selection. Clothes (uniform): In a 2009 issue of the European Journal of Social Sciences, Guéguen carried out three experiments on whether men wearing a fireman’s uniform made women more receptive to a courtship request. Dr. Further reading Guéguen, N. (2009). Guéguen, N. (2011).
The Psychopath: The Mask of Sanity THE PSYCHOPATH - The Mask of Sanity Special Research Project of the Quantum Future School Imagine - if you can - not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools. Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world. How will you live your life? Provided you are not forcibly stopped, you can do anything at all.
What does a person's writing style say about their risk of suicide? Suicidal thoughts are relatively common whereas acts of suicide are, thankfully, far more rare. But this creates a dilemma – how to judge the risk of thoughts turning into action? A new study claims that an objective way is to use a computer programme to analyse a person's writing style. People who are having suicidal thoughts and who use more pronouns relating to the self (I, me, myself) than pronouns relating to others, are likely to take more time to recover, meaning they will be at risk for longer. Mira Brancu and her colleagues investigated 114 US students who'd referred themselves to an outpatient counselling centre at their university, and all of whom said they were having suicidal thoughts. A computer programme analysed the students' answers to these questions, counting the relative number of mentions of first-person pronouns compared with mentions of other people, including friends and family and people's names.
Political Ponerology Home Everyone Assumes You're Violent: Realities Of Being Bipolar | Cracked.com Mental illness is a lot like sex, in the sense that you hear about it all the time, but almost everything you hear is wrong. Just look at bipolar disorder -- a seemingly straightforward disorder that causes wildly veering periods of mania and depression. For reasons of laziness, and the generally low number of practicing psychiatrists who are also screenwriters, it's often portrayed by Hollywood as "generic crazy person's disease." We sat down with Wren Williams, a woman who suffers from bipolar disorder, and here's what she told us about living with one of the most stigmatized illnesses in the modern world: #5. Jack Hollingsworth/Photodisc/Getty Images There is no cure for bipolar disorder -- medication helps (and may save your life), but let me run down just a few of the delightful side effects I've experienced swallowing pills to try and balance my brain: *Tegretol, which I took for two years, made my arms and left leg go numb; *Topamax made everything taste like metal; #4. #3.
The people who are lost in time After a car crash, the patient reported that her memories were wiped clean each night. One morning in 2008, Naomi Jacobs, then 32, woke up with no recollection of her previous 17 years. It’s as if the memories of drug abuse, bankruptcy and homelessness had been wiped from her mind. In fact, she says her last memory was of going to sleep as a teenager in the bunk bed she used to share with her sister, and of thinking about her upcoming French exam. Eight weeks later her memories returned, but before they did, Jacobs says she had to negotiate the 21st Century world as her 15-year-old self. This meant learning to use “new” technologies like smart phones, but most challenging of all, it meant coming to terms with the fact that she had a 10-year-old son. Jacobs’ incredible story is told in her forthcoming book Forgotten Girl and you can hear her talk in this BBC interview. Split minds From a medical perspective, Jacobs’ memory loss is considered to be a case of dissociative amnesia.
How Children Become Narcissists -- Science of Us What makes people narcissistic? Psychologists aren't sure, but they think parental behavior is likely a big part of the story. At the moment, there are a couple of theories on this front: Social-learning theory posits that people are more likely to become narcissistic when their parents lavish them with praise and teach them, implicitly or explicitly, that they are better than others. In a new study in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, a team led by Eddie Brummelman of the University of Amsterdam decided to look at some data to see which story is better supported. The results, the researchers write, "support social learning theory and contradict psychoanalytic theory: Narcissism was predicted by parental overvaluation, not by lack of parental warmth." As of yet, proof-effective interventions to prevent or reduce narcissism in youth are lacking. As always, one study doesn't definitively prove anything, and as almost always, more research is needed.