Category: Psychology

You can listen online to a five part series on Radio 4 that examines four of Freud’s works 100 years after they were first published. Each programme is only 15 minutes, but if you have to choose only two, then go for the first, ‘Sexual Aberrations’ and the last, ‘Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious’.

The question of why we laugh is one of those enigmas that’s always interesting to theorise on, but almost guaranteed never to provide a watertight answer. Still, Freud was one of the first to suggest that laughter was all about sharing our forbidden desires. We laugh because we’re hearing the unsayable, the unpalatable. That accounts for 98% of my jokes anyway.
Radio 4: Freudian Slips

Dr Petra Boynton (left), the sex and relationship psychologist, provides some useful criticism of self-help books in response to an article in the Guardian Weekend. She points out that the authors of these books are often not qualified in the relevant field, rely on anecdotal evidence rather than the established research and their advice can actually prove harmful.

But there are some good self-help books out there so how do you sort the wheat from the chaff? Check the author’s credentials and read on for Dr Boynton’s suggestions…
Self help or self harm?

When asked to estimate a three minute period of time, 20 year olds are significantly more accurate than the middle aged or elderly. Why? It seems that the elderly experience time more quickly than the young. Remember when you were a child and the summer holidays seemed to last forever? Perhaps as you get older, the reverse is true and the summer passes in what seems like a single month.

Raj Persaud discusses this strange effect with Professor Douwe Draaisma (left), whose latest book is reviewed by Steven Rose. Professor Draaisma has also carried out research into people’s lives flashing before their eyes.
All in the Mind

The heated debate on the average differences between the minds of men and women rumbles on. A perfectly rational and psychologically sound article published earlier this week in The Guardian elicited some furious letters from readers.

Helena Cronin makes all the usual and unassailable points about psychological sex differences and then draws evolutionary psychology into the argument. Whether you buy the evolutionary aspect of her argument or not – and many psychologists hate the evolutionary approach with a vengeance – the article does accurately represent the scientific evidence available.

None of the letters published in the paper criticised her science, one in fact admonished her for talking about science at all, saying:

“Helena Cronin is wrong to bring science into a discussion of the possible differences between the minds of men and women.”

The real subtext, of course, is political:

“There is much that is offensive in Helena Cronin’s attempts to rehash sexual stereotypes as scientific realities…”

By contrast, articles like this one entitled “It is official: Women are better drivers than men”, won’t even raise an eyebrow. And why should they?
From IC Wales

I need your help with some nominations for the most unusual research in psychology. Zimbardo’s prison experiments or Milgram’s compliance research are both unusual and strange in their own ways, but quite well known. What about all the other good stuff that’s crept in under the radar?

My personal favourite was done by David Rosenhan (left) who faked madness to get into a mental institution. Why? Just to show how little psychiatrists really knew (or even know?).

Nominate any ideas by emailing them to me. It would be good if you could find a link to some description of the research on the web.

Fad diets are now so numerous that when the latest is introduced, the media must whack the scepticism up to maximum to have any hope of people reading past the first sentence. And yet, they will write a safe few paragraphs in. And yet, they will say, their early skeptical stance giving way to advertorial. And yet, it works.

Being an adherent of the psychological approach, I’m a firm believer that which diet you choose has little effect on your average long-term weight. The main determinant is always going to be your attitude to eating and whether you really, at heart, want to lose weight.

The New York Times provides the perfect antidote to thinly disguised fad-diet marketing with George Saunders’, ‘Absolutely No-Anything Diet’:

“Of late, we have become an aggressive and greedy nation. I believe that soon the pendulum will swing back, and we will become an ashamed, repentant nation. What better way to express our total self-loathing than to all stop eating at once, denouncing the endless cycle of intake and output, the corrupt global system of planting, harvest and feast? I will be happy to show the way.”

I’ll start tomorrow.

From The Observer Food Monthly and The New York Times

After yesterday’s optimistic utopian visions, it is only fair to provide some balance with the reviews of two book that have more skeptical outlooks. Both authors are reaching the end of long careers and are firing warning shots across the bows of future generations.

Steven Rose asks some searching questions of neuroscience in his new book, The 21st Century Brain: Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind. Rose is unimpressed with the way modern neuroscience pokes around randomly in the hope of stumbling on useful drugs and brain mechanisms. He criticises the ‘laughably crude’ models of the brain that neuroscience employs. To this I only have the age-old retort: Does he have a better idea?

Meanwhile, Dr. Peter C. Whybrow criticises our materialistic culture. In, American Mania: When More Is Not Enough, Whybrow’s central ideas is that in our search for money, we are ignoring the one thing that can truly make us happy: our relationships with other people. He suggests that each individual needs to take a close look at their lives and see what comes first, money or people. The sad thing is that we frequently delude ourselves about our priorities – while the majority will say people come first, they still behave as if it is money. It’s probably hard-wired.
The New York Times review of Dr. Peter C. Whybrow’s book
The Guardian Review review of Steven Rose’s book

There are two lectures at the intellectual heart of this intelligent biopic of Alfred Kinsey, the sex researcher who dared to turn a scientific eye onto our sex lives. These reveal the two most important parts of Kinsey’s professional persona: His need to catalogue and collect and his desire to disseminate and educate.

The first lecture, given as a 30-year-old zoologist, was about the gall wasp. In describing his continuing obsession with collecting and cataloguing these insects, he demonstrates their infinite variety. In doing so, he prefigures his future findings on human sexual diversity.

Years later, after Kinsey marries and his interests have spread beyond gall wasps, he is giving a lecture on human sexuality – called a ‘marriage class’ to mollify prudish attitudes of the day. He asks a seemingly loaded question of a quivering undergraduate.

“Which part of the human body is able to increase in size by a factor of ten?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” the shocked young woman replies.

Kinsey quickly puts her out of her misery, supplying the answer – the iris – as well as the warning that she may be in for some considerable disappointment in future.

While the second example may well involve some artistic licence, it is characteristic of the warmth and humour with which this frequently shocking movie is infused. And shocking it is. Despite the passage of some fifty years since the publishing of Kinsey’s reports into human sexual behaviour we seem to have become much more knowledgeable about human sexuality, but perhaps no wiser. Much of the information that Kinsey gathered is now relatively common knowledge, but many of Kinsey’s methodologies would still be frowned upon.

Kinsey has been endlessly profiled in the build up to the release of this movies. Some of these are obsessed with addressing whether Kinsey was, in some sense, a hypocrite. The objective scientist is set up in opposition to the moral bankrupt. This is a nice juicy dichotomy for the writing of a feature article but relatively unimportant compared to what the film highlights; Kinsey’s impressive determination to scientifically catalogue human sexual behaviour, a genuine compassion for his participants and a single-minded determination to take us out of the sexual dark ages.

Whatever Kinsey’s faults – and a person is inevitably not perfect in every aspect of their lives or work – he should be judged on his best work. It’s always easy to criticise, to pick holes and knock things down. Having the strength to build a project of this magnitude from scratch and having the vision and courage to follow it through, that is something we can all aspire to.

Read a summary of Kinsey’s findings