Psychology
grrlscientist | July 26, 2006
"Why do I feel most alive when I am working myself to death?"
"I feel like I am missing some pieces of the puzzle."
"I don't even feel 39."
Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs at LiveJournal. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g.; sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in…
clock | July 21, 2006Survey questions themselves may affect behavior:
Simply asking college students who are inclined to take drugs about their illegal-drug use in a survey may increase the behavior, according to a study that's making researchers understandably nervous.
"We ask people questions, and that does change behavior," study co-author Gavan Fitzsimons, a marketing professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, said Thursday. The provocative effect, he added, can be "much greater than most of us would like to believe."
Read the rest, it is quite interesting. My first thought - can frequent…
clock | July 21, 2006
I wrote this on September 21, 2004, as a reaction to the misunderstanding of Lakoff's term "Nurturant Parent". Slightly edited (eliminated bad links and such).
Discussions of Lakoff's theory are going on in several places in the blogosphere, including on DailyKos and many other places...just Google it and you'll be floored. Spend some times reading the comments - there is some good thinking there.
There is something happening in these discussions that really bothers me. There is a number of people, including some who claim to have read "Moral Politics", who object to the use of family-based…
clock | July 12, 2006
This post was a response to a decent (though not too exciting) study and the horrible media reporting on it. As the blogosphere focused on the press releases, I decided to look at the paper itself and see what it really says. It was first posted on August 09, 2005. Under the fold...
I saw this on Pandagon first - a response to an article on NeuroImage about gender-specific voice recognition. Actually, it was not a response to the article itself (behind the subscription wall), but to the MSM reporting about the article. Soon, other bloggers chimed in, notably Feministing, Blondesense,…
clock | July 6, 2006I just finished listening to Fresh Air on NPR. Terry Gross had an interview with Geoffrey Nunberg whose book, Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show just came out. As you know, I am interested in the way the Right has appropriated English language in the US so I listened carefully. You can also hear the podcast (a little later today, I assume) and read a little excerpt from the book on the link above.
While most of what he said is pretty…
clock | July 6, 2006OK, today I'd like you to superimpose a couple of very different articles that all look at the difference between patriotism and nationalism, but each from a different angle and see if, and how, they inform each other. First, I'd like you to read one of my old posts (which I may decide to re-post here one day, but for now, check it out on my old blog) - Nationalism is not Patriotism. That would be a bare-bone introduction to political psychology of patriotism and nationalism:
Why is there a widespread belief that the difference between patriotism and nationalism is one of degree: loving one…
clock | July 3, 2006This is a quick, rough translation of an article that ran in a Serbian newspaper a few days ago. It is written by a professor of psychology at the University of Belgrade, Prof.Dr.Zarko Trebjesanin, whose book about psychology of Tesla just got published in Belgrade. Posthumous psychoanalyzing is always suspect, but it is usually harmless and fun:
Nikola Tesla's Personality - the Lonely Visionary
If we could imagine the modern world devoid of Tesla's discoveries, we'd be surprised at how impoverished it would be. The gigantic industries would be dead, factories empty, cities would be dark,…
clock | June 30, 2006
This post was initially published on September 16, 2004. It takes a critical look at some UCLA studies on brain responses of partisan voters exposed to images of Bush and Kerry:
Using M.R.I.'s to See Politics on the Brain
The researchers do not claim to have figured out either party's brain yet, since they have not finished this experiment. But they have already noticed intriguing patterns in how Democrats and Republicans look at candidates. They have tested 11 subjects and say they need to test twice that many to confirm the trend.
The Political Brain
Do liberals ''think'' with their…
clock | June 28, 2006
This is one a couple of posts about Creationism, written originally on May 1st, 2005.
Creationism Is Just One Symptom Of Conservative Pathology
I am not an "evolutionist". I am not a "Darwinist". I am a biologist. Thus, by definition, I am an evolutionary biologist. Although my research is in physiology and behavior, I would never be able to make any sense of my data (or even know what questions to ask in the first place) without evolutionary thinking.
As I am also interested in history and philosophy of biology, I consider myself a Darwinian. But not a "Darwinist" or "evolutionist" - those…
clock | June 26, 2006Bush Is Not Incompetent by George Lakoff:
Progressives have fallen into a trap. Emboldened by President Bush's plummeting approval ratings, progressives increasingly point to Bush's "failures" and label him and his administration as incompetent. Self-satisfying as this criticism may be, it misses the bigger point. Bush's disasters -- Katrina, the Iraq War, the budget deficit -- are not so much a testament to his incompetence or a failure of execution. Rather, they are the natural, even inevitable result of his conservative governing philosophy. It is conservatism itself, carried out according…
clock | June 25, 2006The Synapse, new carnival of neuroscience - from molecules to cognition and everything in-between - is the first carnival that originated here on SEED scienceblogs.com. Today, the first edition saw the light of day, so you should go over to Pure Pedantry to check it out. The homepage of the carnival, with archives, instructions for submission, etc., can be found here.
In two weeks, on July 9th, 2006, the carnival will be held here, on A Blog Around The Clock. Please send your entries to me by July 8th at midnight (Eastern Time). You can send your entries to: the DOT synapse DOT carnival…
clock | June 20, 2006Yes, I know that I am supposed to be the resident expert on all things temporal (check the name of this blog, after all), and I am actually very interested in the topic of subjective perception of time (in humans, among others), but I did not say anything about the latest study on the Aymara language in which the space-time metaphors are reversed in comparison to most/all (is it not all or is it really all?) other known languages. SEED just released an article on the topic as well.
Blogosphere covered the story quite a lot, but I was waiting for the real experts on this to chime in, and they…
grrlscientist | May 10, 2006
Fat Cat.
Orphaned image, resized (smaller).
Can obesity be a symptom of depression? I certainly think so, although I only have anecdotal evidence to support my opinion. To wit;
Based on what a chubby friend once told me, this is a vicious cycle; feeling depressed? Eat comfort foods, which leads to weight gain, which leads to more depression, which leads to eating more comfort foods, more weight gain, followed by deeper depression ..
On the other hand, a doctor once explained obesity to another friend of mine as resulting from additive behavior. But, he said, a food addiction not like an…
razib | April 16, 2006What people believe, what they say they believe and what they do may be wholly unrelated, but are never perfectly correlated. The only reason I note this is that I meet so many intelligent people who seem to assume a deep correlation between these distinct vectors.
neurontic | April 3, 2006I have spent most of my life losing keys, driver's licenses, cigarette lighters--even the occasional car. I couldn't tell you which direction is west to save my life. My math skills are abysmal. I'm clumsy, forgetful, and utterly useless when it comes to names.
I can, however, tell you that Elizabeth Barrett Browning was anorexic long before we had a word for it; calculus was invented by two men almost simultaneously (Isaac Newton and Gottfried Liebnez); and that Yale literary critic Harold Bloom thinks that Shakespeare is responsible for inventing the modern concept of humanity.
At times,…
neurontic | March 7, 2006In the wake of World War II, stunned by the German peoples adoption of Hitler's horrific vision of Aryan purity, psychologists set out to discover the mechanisms of social control. One of the most famous studies to emerge during this period was conducted by Gestalt Therapist Solomon Asch. In the early 1950s, Asch designed a series of studies, which became known as the Asch Conformity Experiments.
Asch recruited a group of students to participate in what he called a "vision test." Each participant was seated in a classroom filled with what he presumed to be fellow test subjects. In reality,…
neurontic | March 5, 2006As a born skeptic, I was always convinced that hypnosis was quack science. Then I reached the end of my tether. I'd promised myself I would quit smoking before I turned 30. In the months approaching my birthday, I still found myself sucking down a pack a day. I tried self-control. I tried tapering. I tried cold turkey. Nothing worked.
Unwilling to commit to regular Smokers Anonymous meetings, I decided to try hypnosis. Three hundred dollars later, I found myself in a small, dingy office sitting across from a maddeningly serene hypnotherapist with a shock of red hair. He led me through a…
neurontic | February 5, 2006Introversion is a loaded word. Just look it up in the dictionary and here's what you'll find:
Introversion: The state or tendency toward being wholly or predominantly concerned with and interested in one's own mental life
(Mirriam-Webster Online)
Doesn't sound so good, does it? Sounds downright narcissistic. And this is no accident. Sigmund Freud coined the term "introvert" to describe one of the traits associated with narcissism. In Freud's view, introverts were neurotics who had taken "a turn from reality to phantasy [sic]." According to Freud, introversion denoted "the turning away of the…
neurontic | February 3, 2006Psychology is supposed to be the empathetic science. So, it surprised me to learn that many psychologists believe the entire range of human feeling can be distilled down to a list of ten. On the off chance this list grew too unwieldy, it was subdivided into two categories: primary emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust; and secondary emotions: embarrassment, jealousy, guilt, and pride. (Steven Johnson, Mind Wide Open, 37) Let's say, for the sake of argument, that it was necessary to compile this emotional Top Ten list: who decided that "embarrassment" qualified, but…
razib | January 25, 2006Judith Rich Harris is author of The Nurture Assumption and the forthcoming No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality. Her controversial thesis is that parents don't matter, genes and peers do, in making you who you are as a person. You can read my Q & A with her over at my other website. Here is the paper (PDF) that started it all....