Interesting project by the APA! They recruited expert APA member-presenters to Skype with classrooms/students in the big mental health discussion. Here's the description of the project from the APA site:
"Giving students accurate and accessible information about mental health is the goal of a new APA partnership with Microsoft and Skype in the classroom. The three organizations have joined forces to create a series of Skype lessons that bring psychologists to classrooms nationwide to talk about mental health issues. The 50-minute Skype presentations are designed to increase students’ understanding of mental health issues and help reduce the stigma sometimes associated with seeking mental health care."
Looks fascinating! If you decide to participate, please let us all know how it goes in the comments section!
Here's an article examining the mental state of Muammar Qadhafi. It is an article from Scientific American, written by John Matson, based on an interview with Jerrold Post. Jerrold Post in a Professor of Psychiatry, political psychology and international affairs, and Director of the Political Psychology Program at George Washington University.
D. Post analyzes the long-time leader of Libya by providing evidence for narcissistic and borderline personality features in Qadhafi's statements and behaviors. It is an interesting examination of a very complex individual.
For teachers wishing to bring current events into the classroom, this article might provide an interesting way to discuss the definitions of "abnormality," the difficulty of diagnosis, and/or the characteristics of various personality disorders.
I'm guessing most of you who would be interested in this sort of thing already know this, but just a reminder that this Monday night's House is the two-hour season premiere. When we last left Dr. House he was checking into a mental hospital and that's the setting for the first episode.
Several scenes from the preview call to mind Jack Nicholson's performance in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" -- the knit cap, the basketball scene, being dragged away by aides and the "you guys are crazy" statement. I didn't see the Chief or Martini in the House preview, though, and it looks like one of my all-time faves Andre Braugher is taking a turn as the severe administrator (darned, no Nurse Ratched!).
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts in the comments below after the episode as well as what your students say if you have time for a class discussion. We can complain all we want about getting "the truth" out about psychology but for better or worse an episode of House will have a lot more viewers and influence.
Among Many Peoples, Little Genomic Variety. "But as analyses of genomes from dozens of distinct populations have rolled in -- French, Bantu, Palestinian, Yakut, Japanese -- that's not what scientists have found. Dramatic genome variation among populations turns out to be extremely rare."
Positive Is Negative. "Despite what all those self-help books say, repeating positive statements apparently does not help people with low self-esteem feel better about themselves. In fact, it tends to make them feel worse, according to new research."
In New York, Number of Killings Rises With Heat. Seven homicides in New York City. None connected in any way but this: They happened during the summer months, when the temperatures rise, people hit the streets, and New York becomes a more lethal place.
Get a Life, Holden Caulfield. "Some critics say that if Holden is less popular these days, the fault lies with our own impatience with the idea of a lifelong quest for identity and meaning that Holden represents ... Ms. Feinberg recalled one 15-year-old boy from Long Island who told her: “Oh, we all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’”
The return of trepanation? Trepanation, the ancient practice of drilling a hole in your skull to relieve pressure on the brain, is now being studied as a possible treatment for dementia.
Keeping an Open Mind to Animal Homosexuality. 'Sure, it’s widely recognized that the animal kingdom is full of male-on-male and female-on-female action, from fruit flies on up to bottlenose dolphins and, of course, Homo sapiens. But though the origins and evolutionary consequences of homosexuality are varied, biologists tend to oversimplify such behavior.
Do you have what it takes to be a NASA pillownaut? Great story (with pictures like the one at the top) of how research is done. Imagine telling your kids that your role in helping space research was spent lying in bed!
"Patients often have difficulty getting the help they need — partly because therapists tend to regard borderline patients as manipulative and demanding of an inordinate amount of time and attention." A nice column in the NYT by Jane Brody on borderline personality disorder. Questions can be left for a BPD expert here and she'll provide answers to some of them next week. "I am not trying to say cats are stupid, just they are different." A British researcher finds cats none too bright in her little tests. (No word as to whether she was clawed to death shortly after publishing her findings.)
One of the most celebrated findings in modern psychiatry — that a single gene helps determine one’s risk of depression in response to a divorce, a lost job or another serious reversal — has not held up to scientific scrutiny, researchers reported Tuesday.
Really, I swear this one will work! The next big weight-loss craze involves sprinkling stuff on your food to enhance the smell and taste ... so you eat less.
But now researchers are beginning to unearth clues as to how savants' formidable brains work, and that in turn is changing our view of what it means to be a savant. Also, see this related link of art done by savants (like the one at the top of this post).
How does language shape thinking? Great essay here by a Stanford prof whose research finds evidence for the old (and new again?) Whorf hypothesis.
Finally, I just found this (thanks to the fabulous Mindhacks) and haven't had a chance to check it out -- so please, if you do, leave your thoughts in the comments! -- but here is Weird Al and Al's Brain, a 3-D Journey into the Human Brain. (P.S. I love the t-shirt below if anyone's looking for the perfect birthday present ...)
Starting this week PitN will come out on a regular-ish schedule on Mondays and Thursdays. Like what you read? Post a comment below or send me (ashejones@gmail.com) a note! --Steve
"The larger point is that liberals and conservatives often form judgments through flash intuitions that aren’t a result of a deliberative process." -- Great column from Nicholas Kristof that examines various issues such as group polarization, moral values, disgust and more. There are also links to yourmorals.org (where one can take online tests in areas such as personality, war and peace, and disgust) and civilpolitics.org on moral psychology.
“Intelligence and academic achievement are very much under people’s control.” Another fascinating column by Kristof that looks at the work of Richard Nisbett (new book is Intelligence and How to Get It) on how groups such Asian-Americans, Jews and West Indian blacks "help debunk the myth of success as a simple product of intrinsic intellect."
"There is an old saying that two heads are better than one. In a fascinating new article in Psychological Science, Stefan Herzog and Ralph Hertwig turned the old aphorism on its head: One head can be nearly as good as two."(Scientific American)
From BoingBoing: "Stanford's Robert Sapolsky, one of the most interesting anthropologists I've heard lecture, gives us 90 minutes on the evolutionary basis for literal religious belief, "metamagical thinking," schizotypal personality and so on, explaining how evolutionarily, the mild schizophrenic expression we called "schizotypal personality" have enjoyed increased reproductive opportunities."
I used excerpts from the book in class this past semester with great success and now someone has typed in all 50 with brief synopses. Excellent! Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive (from Robert Cialdini et al.)
Utrecht University sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst surveyed 604 people about their friends and again seven years later, and found that only 48 percent of people’s original friends were still part of their network after that time period. (via Freakonomics)
Finally, Lehrer also discusses the above dancing video (also here if the link ist kaput) in relation to Stanley Milgram's experiment on conformity where he had confederates in New York City stop and look up and then compared the number of people who also stopped and looked. And the video below (also here) is a modern re-creation of that experiment.
The Society for Neuroscience (www.sfn.org) puts out a monthly publication called "Brain Briefings". The the short newsletter style briefings are designed to "explain how recent advances in basic neuroscience research are leading to clinical applications". Many times they include a variety of topics pertinent to psychology. The March edition discusses Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders.
Brain Briefing publications since 2006 can be found electronically at http://www.sfn.org/index.aspx?pagename=brainbriefings_main or you can have future editions sent to your school by sending a request with your full mailing address to publicinfo@sfn.org
A quick post to provide some links for talking about the recent swine flu outbreak in your psychology classes. I don't mean this to be a clearinghouse for general swine flu information, though this CNET site is a pretty amazing one-stop site for links to pages with all kinds of information. Please post links that you find on psychology and swine flu below!
Be careful of your sources: Swine flu: Twitter's power to misinform ("in the context of a global pandemic ... having millions of people wrap up all their fears into 140 characters and blurt them out in the public might have some dangerous consequences, networked panic being one of them.")
In the Durham Herald-Sun our local rising star Duke behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely (author of the positively reviewed book Predictably Irrational) suggests the fear may already be overblown. "Right now, this looks to me like over-excitement," said Ariely. "I hope I'm not proven wrong, but it's very possible there's a lot of over-reaction here."
The Sacramento Bee has more of the amazing photos that you see at the top of this post here and here.
My bookmarks are bursting at the seams! Many of these great links come via the incredible Mind Hacks blog featuring Vaughan Bell-- be sure to check it out regularly. Here's a few articles to get your week started:
Great interview of Judith Rich Harris by The Frontal Cortex's Jonah Lehrer. Harris was the textbook editor who put the psychology world in a tizzy in 1998 with the release of her book The Nurture Assumption, which challenged the standing belief that parents play a major role in the shaping of their children's personality. Wrong, said Harris, and she pointed out the flaws in a number of research studies to back her assertions. The book is now out in an expanded edition and is a definite must-read for psychology teachers.
There is a terrific (and lengthy!) article in this week's New Yorker by Atul Gawande about the effects of long-term solitary confinement. Gawande begins with the research of Harry Harlow on social isolation in his experiments with monkeys and then relates vivid anecotes that range from hormer hostage Terry Anderson to prisoner of war John McCain to a number of prisoners held in the American penal system for years in isolation. He also incorporates research of the effects of imprisonment on behavior and on the lack of efficacy of solitary confinement on the behavior of the other prisoners; there seems to be no impact on violence in the prisons when individuals are removed to isolation.
Gawande notes that the use of solitary confinement is largely a development of the last twenty years and also largely an American insitution, and he makes the argument that our ease with putting convicts in isolation made it easy to do the same to combatants held in Guantanamo Bay.
Gawande calls it "legalized torture." What would your students say? This would make a great end-of-the-course assignment to have students dig into the effects of isolation, social deprivation, mental illness rates in prison, etc.
Interesting project by the APA! They recruited expert APA member-presenters to Skype with classrooms/students in the big mental health discussion. Here's the description of the project from the APA site:
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