AU Blogspot

           Thanks to the BC Chronicle for permission to use this Photo.

“Everybody loves a winner,” or so we often hear, but it may not necessarily be true, especially at bowl time. According to Joseph Vandello and his colleagues at the University of South Florida (which incidentally boasts a pretty good football team), we like underdogs .

Vandello et al. presented participants with political and sports scenarios that led them to see one side as Goliath and the other as David. For example, participants read an historical article about the Israeli–Palenstinian conflict, but two groups saw different maps. One map showed Israel as smaller than Palestine (hence the underdog), while the other showed Palestine as smaller than Israel. Even though the students read identical essays, they consistently “sided” with the smaller territory they saw.

Why should we back the underdog?

We still have work to do in order to answer that question. Vandello et al. suggest that we have some sort of intrinsic sense of justice or fair play, but personally, I find this a bit hard to swallow. Human history rarely speaks about justice, but says a lot about power. Another suggestion is that we give “A” for effort. Underdogs seem to be trying harder. (more…)

 
               Thanks to Chris Gladis for permission to use this Photo.

Psychology studies that rely on deceiving participants have shown we often have little clue what’s going on in our own minds. But what about in everyday situations where trickery isn’t involved?

Here are four everyday situations - shopping, reading, watching TV and judging other people - and four experiments that show how little we know in each situation about what’s really going on in our minds (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977).

Shopping

For this study researchers set themselves up in a mall pretending to carry out a consumer survey on nightgowns and nylon stockings. Passersby were asked to evaluate what they were told were four different nightgowns and four different pairs of stockings. In fact, all four items were identical.

Quite by accident they discovered a positional effect for the identical goods: people seemed to prefer the item that was on the far right. In fact this effect was really obvious for the stockings. The right-most pair, although identical to the left-most was preferred by a factor of four to one.

When asked why they had chosen a particular item, no one mentioned its position. Even when experimenters suggested to people that the position might have an effect, most participants looked at best very confused and at worst utterly dismissive.

Result: these people didn’t have a clue why they preferred one identical pair of stockings over another.

Reading

In this study participants read a passage from the novel ‘Rabbit, Run’ by John Updike. The extract from the book involves an emotionally charged scene in which an alcoholic mother, while washing her baby in the bath, accidentally drowns and kills her.

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             Thanks to Mary Streepy for permission to use this Photo.

While spirit mediums and trance channellers come and go, there has never been anyone else quite like Catherine Elise Muller (more commonly known as Helene Smith). Born in Geneva, Switzerland in 1861, Catherine`s father was a Hungarian merchant with a talent for learning languages and her mother was prone to seeing “visions“. From an early age, Catherine had a vivid imagination and extremely intense daydreams. She would tell her parents of her visions of brightly coloured landscapes, bizarre images, and bright lights and openly speculated about being a changeling. It was in 1891 that she was first introduced to Spiritualism and quickly showed a remarkable talent for automatic writing. She also showed a knack for mediumship and communicated with different spirits (including the ghost of Victor Hugo). Table-tipping, spirit writing, clairvoyance, Catherine did it all. Her spirit guide, Count Cagliostro (more commonly known as “Leopold“) acted through her body and she claimed not to remember anything that occurred while she was in one of her trances . Surprisingly, Catherine never charged for her séances and supported herself as a shop-worker despite her growing fame throughout Geneva.

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Two of my most popular posts have been 12 Ways to Care for a Depressed Person and Things to Say to Someone with Depression. Why have they been popular? Judging from comments I’ve received, they struck a chord for the practical help in dealing with a depressed person. A view from the other side, so to speak.

Special thanks to tanakawho for permission to use this photo.

I’ve just read a very helpful article at Psych Central that is in the same vein. Helping Someone with a Mental Health Concern is written by psychiatrist John M. Grohol. Of particular interest to me are his insights on effective listening and empathizing with a mentally ill person. It is invaluable advice for someone in a caring role.

To read the article click here.

James Bishop
Creator of Finding Optimism 
Ashworth University Contributing Blogger

*Mr. James Bishop shares his personal experiences and insights dealing with mental health issues in his inspiring Finding Optimism Blog.  We are grateful to have James, joining us all the way from Australia, as a contributing blogger to our Ashworth student community.  Thanks James!

 
              Thanks to Jordan Garn for permission to use this Photo.

I have never liked the term “learning disability,” preferring instead to use the term “learning difference.” Is this just more PC-speak? It seems to me that the identification of somebody as “learning disabled” is rather arbitrary. We don’t refer to people as “athletically disabled” or “musically disabled,” and send them to remedial classes. A literate culture cares a lot about verbal and mathematical skills, but in other realities, these talents might not count for much. Should we ever be so stupid as to bomb ourselves, my guess is that the Hell’s Angel is more likely to survive the new world order than the accountant.

We know that many serious conditions have compensatory aspects that keep them in the population, such as the protection from malaria that is the flip side of sickle cell anemia, or the creativity that seems to correlate with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Obviously, not all conditions have such benefits, but it is interesting to consider the ones that do.

Having spent a lot of time with my two favorite people with dyslexia, Mr. F and Karen, I was always dazzled by what they did well. Yes, writing was a struggle, especially for Karen, whose love of public relations plopped her in some exceedingly challenging reporting classes in the journalism departments of her universities. No spell check on lab work? Catastrophe! But these struggles were always offset by some amazing creativity. Karen just had her first-year research project accepted for presentation at the prestigious International Public Relations Conference …do I sound like a proud Mom or what? (more…)

A classic 1931 experiment shows how the mechanics of our own problem-solving are often a puzzle to us.

The process of human creativity is both fascinating and, at the same time, mystifying. Understanding the mental processes of great thinkers offers an enormous reward to any who can replicate them: immortality. Perhaps if we really understood what was going through their minds, we too could create an object or idea that would live long after our deaths.

This idea motivated Brewster Ghiselin to collate the problem-solving processes of great thinkers and artists from Poincare to Picasso (Ghiselin, 1952). Unfortunately, as I mentioned in ‘The Hidden Workings of Our Minds‘, these great thinkers usually report being mere onlookers to their own mental processes. They seem unable to identify what prompted their discoveries and even, when they’re actually happening.

The problem is that these reports were usually made many years after the original thought processes. Picasso may simply have forgotten what prompted him to create the first ever cubist painting ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ (detail above). Perhaps if we’d asked him exactly what was going through his mind right after he painted it, the answer would have been more accurate.

A classic psychology study from 1931 suggests, though, that he still wouldn’t have been able to tell us what was going on in his mind. This experiment neatly demonstrates how we often don’t have a clue how we solve a problem.

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         Thanks to vieilles_annonces’ for permission to use this Photo.

On September 15, 1985, a seemingly innocent package was delivered to the home of Dr. James V. McConnell, then-professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.  His assistant, Nicklaus Suino, opened the package as Dr. McConnell looked on.  The resulting explosion resulted in Suino sustaining injuries to his arms and abdomen.  Dr. McConnell was more fortunate although he suffered a hearing loss as a result of the blast.  It remains unclear exactly why Theodore Kaczynski (a.k.a. the Unabomber) targeted Dr. McConnell as he had others in the scientific communit, but Dr. McConnell’s colorful career may provide a clue. 

Considered a maverick in his time, James V. McConnell’s career was marked by his unconventional research and outspokenness.  In his most famous research project, he classically conditioned Planaria (flatworms) to react to bright lights using electric shocks.  He then cut up his research subjects and fed them to other Planaria and he found that the cannibal Planaria learned to respond to the bright light more rapidly than control Planaria did.  In his classic paper Memory transfer through cannibalism in planaria which was published in the Journal of Neurophysiology, he suggested that memory was chemically based and that the memory transfer had been accomplished through what he termed memory RNA.  While it was an intriguing finding at the time, other researchers have not been able to replicate his results and the concept of memory transfer fell by the wayside. (more…)

 
           Special thanks to zorilla for permission to use this photo.

The human mind thrives on novelty. What was once a source of pleasure can become tedious after a time. Though our lives are full, boredom lurks around every corner because we innately long for new experiences. Yet boredom by its very nature is passive. In this idle state of mind, we may feel frustrated at our inability to channel our mental energy into productive or engaging tasks. We may even attempt to lose ourselves in purposeless or self-destructive pursuits. While this can be a sign of depression, it can also be an invitation issued from your mind, asking you to challenge yourself. Boredom can become the motivation that drives you to learn, explore the exotic, experiment, and harness the boundless creative energy within. (more…)

The photo on the left is real circa 1989: Tiananmen Square.  On the right, a doctored photo.  300 people were shown either a real or altered photo of two different protests, and then asked to recall what happened back then.  The point of this study was to show that altering a photograph will change how the events are actually remembered (in this case, as bigger and more violent.)  It’s important to emphasize that the subjects already had a memory of the events (from TV, etc)– so this photo actually changed their pre-existing memories, and they weren’t aware of it.

But, here’s the thing: these subjects weren’t actually at the original protests.  Their original memories also came from images– hopefully not altered images, but certainly selected images.  Right?  The TV newspeople didn’t pick the boring pictures, did they?  I get that doctored photos are bad.  But how much of our memories and knowledge of the past are largely determined not by “reality” but what, or how, we were shown it in the first place.  Obviously, a lot.  Therein lies the question: is it worse to see a doctored photo, or doctored reality?

Here’s an example: search your mind for recollections about the Tiananmen “episode” in 1989.  Can you remember anything– anything at all– other than that guy standing in front of the tanks?  Do you remember who was protesting? Why?  The question isn’t why you don’t remember anything, hell, it was 20 years ago and a solar system away; the question is why you do remember that guy.  Are you better off for knowing this?  Are you smarter?  Or do you carry the false impression that you know something about which you really know nothing?  That’s the Matrix– not only do you have false memories, but you get to feel good about being a knowledgeable, aware, citizen of the world. (more…)

           Thanks to James Tworow for permission to use this Photo.

When you change your attitude about something, do you know why? Psychologists have argued that the inner workings of our minds are largely hidden away from us. One aspect of this is the surprising finding that people are often unaware when they have changed their attitudes.

We may well, for example, be able to identify our current opinions on global warming. We might find it easy to say, “Yes, I think global warming is occurring and humans are to blame,” or, “No, it’s just a long-term trend that has nothing to do with humans”. But when our opinions change, by say watching Al Gore’s documentary, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, psychologists have found we are unlikely to be aware what changed our minds.

It gets weirder. In certain circumstances we may even be convinced that our attitude has never changed. So that we are convinced our ‘new’ attitude is the one we always had.

Whether or not this sounds far-fetched to you, the effect is dramatically demonstrated in an experiment carried out by Goethals and Reckman (1973).

Attitude change

High school students were asked their opinions on a variety of social issues, including on how children should be bussed to school and whether it would help with racial integration. The actual topic itself doesn’t matter for our purposes, what the experimenters were doing here is getting a measures of participants’ attitudes to a specific issue before the experimental manipulation.

A couple of weeks later the students were invited back for a further discussion on the bussing issue. This time, though, they were split into two groups, one that was pro- and one anti- the bussing issue. These, then, are our two experimental groups, along with a third control group, more of which, later.

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