How Other People’s Unspoken Expectations Control Us We quickly sense how others view us and play up to these expectations. A good exercise for learning about yourself is to think about how other people might view you in different ways. Consider how your family, your work colleagues or your partner think of you. Now here’s an interesting question: to what extent do you play up to these expectations about how they view you? This idea that other people’s expectations about us directly affect how we behave was examined in a classic social psychology study carried out by Dr Mark Snyder from the University of Minnesota and colleagues (Snyder et al., 1977). Feeling the attraction To test this in the context of interpersonal attraction they had male students hold conversations with female students they’d just met through microphones and headsets. So to manipulate this, just before the conversation, along with biographical information about the person they were going to meet, the men were given a photograph. Changing others’ behaviour
Your Mental Health is More Important Than Your Grades | Huffington Post Pursuing your degree? Feeling the pressure? It’s that time in the term, when the heat is turned up-between deadlines, exams and everything in between. If you are a student of today, you likely have a lot going on in the between. Ideas about “traditional” and “non-traditional” students have flipped, with increasing numbers of students being working professionals, juggling all kinds of demands, who want to earn new and advanced degrees. This isn’t the kind of stress that gives us enough juice to perform and stay on task (known as “eustress”). It’s no joke. Having taught at every grade level in education (yes, from Pre-K through doctoral students), and also worked with them in the therapy room, I’ve seen firsthand the perils we can face at each juncture of development. I started becoming worried about my students, who are professional adults seeking new and advanced degrees. It didn’t take long to discover some good and bad news. 1. 2. 3. 4. These Photos Perfectly Capture Mental Illness
How to Work Like the Masters | LifeRemix Written by Jay of Dumb Little Man. When I need work done on my car, I consult with a mechanic. When it's time to build a deck in the backyard, I will search for an expert and listen to what he says. So when it comes to life itself, why wouldn't you at least consider what experts think? With that, LifeRemix has done some homework and we're bringing you a list of things that you'll need to consider. Here are a handful of tips on working from the most popular productivity bloggers on the internet, along with bloggers on organization, the environment and more. From Wisebread: Achieve greatness fifteen minutes at a time. From Dumb Little Man: Gain 10 days per year by adjusting your sleep. From Zen Habits: Eliminate all but the essential tasks. From LifeDev: Take creative breaks. From The Happiness Project: Walk around the block. From No Impact Man: Let your TV rob someone else's time. From Success From the Nest: Don't let someone else define your creative process. From Pick the Brain: From Behance:
The Demoralized Mind © Robin Heighway-Bury/Alamy By John Schumaker / newint.org Our descent into the Age of Depression seems unstoppable. Three decades ago, the average age for the first onset of depression was 30. Today it is 14. Researchers such as Stephen Izard at Duke University point out that the rate of depression in Western industrialized societies is doubling with each successive generational cohort. By contrast to many traditional cultures that lack depression entirely, or even a word for it, Western consumer culture is certainly depression-prone. Contributing to the confusion is the equally insidious epidemic of demoralization that also afflicts modern culture. Existential disorder In the past, our understanding of demoralization was limited to specific extreme situations, such as debilitating physical injury, terminal illness, prisoner-of-war camps, or anti-morale military tactics. Moral net Consumption itself is a flawed motivational platform for a society. Culture proofing
7 Secrets of the Super Organized A few years ago, my life was a mess. So was my house, my desk, my mind. Then I learned, one by one, a few habits that got me completely organized. Am I perfect? So what’s the secret? Are these obvious principles? If your life is a mess, like mine was, I don’t recommend trying to get organized all in one shot. So here are the 7 habits: Reduce before organizing. If you take your closet full of 100 things and throw out all but the 10 things you love and use, now you don’t need a fancy closet organizer. How to reduce: take everything out of a closet or drawer or other container (including your schedule), clean it out, and only put back those items you truly love and really use on a regular basis. Write it down now, always.
13 Cognitive Biases That Really Screw Things Up For You | The Huffington Post The human brain is a natural wonder. It produces more than 50,000 thoughts each day and 100,000 chemical reactions each second. With this amount of processing power, you would think our judgment would be highly accurate, but that’s far from the case. Our judgments are often inaccurate because the brain relies on cognitive biases over hard evidence. Researchers have found that cognitive bias wreaks havoc by forcing people to make poor, irrational judgments: A Queensland University study found that blonde women earned, on average, 7% higher salaries than redheads and brunettes. A Duke study found that people with “mature” faces experienced more career success than those with “baby” faces. A Yale study found that female scientists were not only more likely to hire male scientists but they also paid them4,000 more than female scientists. Let’s explore some of the most common types of cognitive biases that entrench themselves in our lives. 1. 2. 3. 5. 6. 8. 9. 11. 12.
13 Things to Avoid When Changing Habits | Zen Habits “Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.” - Mark Twain Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on Twitter. I’ve learned a lot about changing habits in the last 2 1/2 years, from quitting smoking to taking up running and GTD and vegetarianism and waking early and all that. I could go on, of course, but you get the picture. I’ve not only learned a lot about what you should do when changing habits, but through my failures, I’ve learned about what not to do. And trust me, I’ve had lots of failures. I’ve found failures to be just as important as successes when trying to learn how to improve, especially when it comes to changing habits. I’ve done that, with one failure after another, and would like to share a few things I’ve learned to avoid when trying to change a habit. “Motivation is what gets you started. Taking on two or more habits at once. “We are what we repeatedly do.
The Breakdown of Empathy and the Political Right in America Photo Credit: a katz/Shutterstock In 1978, developmental psychologist Edward Tronick and his colleagues published a paper in the Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry that demonstrated the psychological importance of the earliest interactions between mothers and babies. The interactions of interest involved the playful, animated and reciprocal mirroring of each other’s facial expressions. Tronick’s experimental design was simple: A mother was asked to play naturally with her 6-month-old infant. When mothers stopped their facial responses to their babies, when their faces were still, babies first anxiously strove to reconnect with their mothers. When a primary caretaker (the still-face experiments were primarily done with mothers, not fathers) fails to mirror a child’s attempts to connect and imitate, the child becomes confused and distressed, protests, and then gives up. The pain of the still face in American society is present all around us.
10 simple ways to save yourself from messing up your life - Step Stop taking so much notice of how you feel. How you feel is how you feel. It’ll pass soon. What you’re thinking is what you’re thinking. It’ll go too. Adrian Savage is a writer, an Englishman, and a retired business executive, in that order. Read full content
Instability-in-Chief Psychiatrists are granted the authority to commit patients involuntarily to treatment based on three guiding principles: harm to self, harm to others, and evidence of significant mental deterioration to the extent that the individual is unable to practice self care in his/her own best interest. While the former risks can be ascertained by explicit threats made by the patient, the latter evidence is often gleaned from self-reported or eyewitness accounts of the patient’s concerning behaviors. To date, I have personally witnessed Donald Trump make threats against not just individuals but entire sovereign nations, and heard eyewitness accounts from individuals who report victimization at his hands. And yet, we as a nation stand paralyzed and in awe of a slow moving train wreck in progress. Yet again, our country and the world have been entrusted to a man who hasn’t demonstrated the mental and behavioral stability to keep himself, let alone the rest of us safe.
A Deep Dive Into the Blockbuster Study That Called Into Doubt a Lot of Psych Research Yesterday, Science published a blockbuster article about the state of, well, science. Since 2011, a group called the Open Science Collaboration, headed by the psychologist Brian Nosek, has been working to replicate 100 studies previously published in leading psychology journals — that is, to conduct these experiments again to see whether the same results would pop up. (The researchers set out to replicate even more, but for various reasons the final number was culled to 100.) What they found was rather alarming: In more than half of the studies the researchers attempted to redo, different results popped up, and among the ones that did replicate similar results, the findings were significantly less impressive than what was published the first time around. To understand why all this matters — and what it says about the exciting new science findings flashing into your news feeds seemingly every day — requires a bit of background. Overstated effects? No one really thinks that. P-hacking?
The cult of ignorance in the United States: Anti-intellectualism and the "dumbing down" of America -- Society's Child -- Sott.net © reddit.com There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture. It's the dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility. Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, says in an article in the Washington Post, "Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture; a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism." There has been a long tradition of anti-intellectualism in America, unlike most other Western countries. "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. John W.
Psychology History Compiled by Kathy Jo Hall (May 1997) Biography Theory Time Line Bibliography Carl R. Dr. Rogers is a leading figure within psychotherapy and developed a breaking theory of personality development. Rogers horizons began to expand when he encountered the Freudian psychoanalytic climate of the Institute for Child Guidance where he diagnosed and treated children. Rogers has authored over a hundred publications explaining his theory of personality development. Overview of Rogers Theory Theory of Personality Development Rogers' therapy was an extension of his theory of personality development and was known as client-centered therapy, since the basis of the therapy was designed around the client. In order for an individual to experience total self-actualization the therapist must express complete acceptance of the patient. 1.
Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. As is often the case with psychological studies, the whole setup was a put-on. In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. “Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.” A few years later, a new set of Stanford students was recruited for a related study. Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,” the researchers noted. The Stanford studies became famous. In a new book, “The Enigma of Reason” (Harvard), the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber take a stab at answering this question.