Category: Psychology

Positive psychology research asks whether experiencing fear is a central component of courage.

Imagine you are in this situation:

“I was sitting in a Tube carriage next to an attractive young woman who was reading a magazine. There was a guy sitting opposite me, who was kind of Neanderthal [and starts hassling the woman sat next to me].

Anyway, all the passengers on the Tube were aware of this. The Tube stops. He gets out of the doors – the thug. He walks off down the platform, we’re all quite happy he’s gone. Another passenger flips him a V-sign. The doors have closed, by the way, when he does this. And then the disaster happens – the doors reopen.

The thug runs back in. He’s six foot three, his muscles are so big they’re flexing against the Tube glass, and he just starts beating seven bells out of this fellow. And actually when you see physical violence or are on the receiving end of it, it’s very very nasty.

His fist went into the side of his head, blood came out, another fist, the guy goes down on the carriage floor, and the thug walks off very happy with himself. And I did nothing. The carriage was pretty full. But none of us did anything. It was terrible.”

Continue reading “What is Courage?”

This week, from my psychology notebook…

Soviet psychiatry

The Telegraph has a story suggesting the Russian psychiatric system may be returning to the abusive practices common during Soviet times. The article, called ‘Labelled mad for daring to criticise the Kremlin‘, tells the story of Larisa Arap who has been forcibly treated after publicising systematic abuses of patients at a clinic where she has been held. The Telegraph’s leader column goes on to say:

“Things are different in modern Russia, where, as we report in horrifying detail today, it takes only modest influence to secure the incarceration and chemical torture of a business rival, wealthy relative or prosecution witness, and where the sectioning of citizens hostile to the Kremlin seems set to become once more a fact of political life.”

Continue reading “Soviet Psychiatry | Miserable Middle-Aged Men | Satisfied Hairdressers | Jury Psychology”

A new website, bpr3.org, has been set up to highlight peer reviewed research – the process by which academics check each other’s work.

A discussion about ‘peer review’ is ongoing over at Cognitive Daily suggesting science bloggers should use an icon to indicate when they are discussing peer reviewed research. Peer review is simply the system academics use for checking each other’s work. Before research is published in peer reviewed journals it gets sent to other experts in the field to be checked. Peer review is seen as the academic gold standard.

Continue reading “Does ‘Peer Review’ Mean Anything to You?”

Right from the outset Steven Pinker, a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, is apologising for the title of his book: ‘How the Mind Works’. We do not yet know how the mind works, he explains. The ideas contained in his book are not, he admits, his own but culled from various other fields. But this is rather false modesty as reading on it soon becomes clear Pinker does indeed intend to tell us how the mind works, albeit one particular version.

Continue reading “How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker (Book Review)”

One book almost everyone interested in psychology will enjoy is Oliver Sack’s ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat‘. Sacks, a neurologist by training, describes some of the fascinating patients he has treated over the years. From the eponymous Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, through The Man Who Fell out of Bed, The Lost Mariner and The Dog Beneath the Skin, each chapter tells the story of ordinary human experience touched by unusual brain diseases.

Mercifully the narrative is devoid of medical terminology as what Sacks is most interested in is the patient’s perspective on the world. As a result the reader gains personal, subjective insight into the inability to recognise objects (visual agnosia), the experience of a dense amnesia stretching back decades (Korsakov’s), what it feels like to be completely disembodied and many other conditions.

Continue reading “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks (Review)”

Can group therapy work over the internet? A new study published in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics suggests it can be useful in some circumstances. Golkaramnay et al. (2007) examined its effectiveness on those who had been discharged after receiving inpatient care. The research aimed to find out if gains made during intensive inpatient care could be maintained once patients had been discharged.

The controlled study, carried out over 15 weeks, had a group meeting online for 90 minutes each week to participate in group internet chat therapy. Twelve months after discharge, patients were at a lower risk of a negative outcome compared to the control group (24.7% versus 38.5%).

This looks like an extremely cost-effective way of improving outpatient care. However, it does mean that patients need to be familiar and comfortable with internet chat, which may not be for everybody.

Continue reading “Group Therapy Online | Eye Movement Coupling | Macho Men Still Untrustworthy”

Our expectations about the world have all sorts of knock-on effects for how we behave. Take something as simple as eating and drinking. If I give you a glass of wine, telling you to expect a taste-explosion, unless you’re an expert, you’re likely to experience it as being tastier than if I told you it was some cheap rancid rubbish I had lying around.

Not only that, this expectation might well be passed on to other aspects of your behaviour, such as the amount of accompanying food you eat. Don’t believe me? Check out this experiment by Wansink, Payne and North (2007).

Continue reading “‘Good’ Wine Increases Food Consumption by 12%”