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               Thanks to Angel Schatz for permission to use this Photo.

Answer the following questions, and don’t look at the next until you answer the previous: 

Does depression in kids raise their risk of violence? 

If a kid is violent, is it more or less likely they are depressed? 

If someone is depressed and violent, is it likely they are a kid? 

Can you define any of the nouns in the preceding questions? 

In a study called Perceived Dangerousness of Children With Mental Health Problems and Support for Coerced Treatment the perceptions of 1100 members of the public were evaluated, finding: 

“Children… with major depression were perceived (by 81% of the sample) as somewhat likely or very likely to be dangerous to themselves or others, compared with children with asthma (15%) or those with “daily troubles” (13%).”
and, later: 

“…compared with the child with “daily troubles,” the vignette child with depression was more than twice as likely to be assessed as dangerous toward others and ten times as likely to be assessed as dangerous toward himself or herself.”

Now, you lose no money assuming the public at large merely guess at probabilities.  So what they think may be right, wrong, both– who knows.  But whatever they think, it’s probably important to quote them correctly:

“The issue that was highlighted by this study that was really concerning to us was that Americans have linked depression in youth and violence, particularly violence towards others,” said Dr. Pescosolido [”distinguished professor of sociology, Indiana University.”] [emphasis mine, but, face it, really theirs.]

Well, no, that’s not what the public thinks, at least according to your study.  They think that depression leads to violence against themselves, and maybe towards others.  Only 9% thought violence towards others was very likely.  The majority thought violence towards others was not likely.  Right? (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.

Click here to read the rest of this entry… 

 
             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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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.

Click here to read the rest of this entry… 

         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…)