All Things Psychology

This blog is dedicated to anything related to the field of psychology, neuroscience, and psychiatry - past or present. I am a student studying cognitive sciences and started this blog in order to hold myself accountable and stay up to date regarding recent studies and things going on in the field. I try to update as much as possible and I am happy to answer any questions you may have to the best of my abilities.

[allthingspsychology]

Praise as Manipulation: 6 Reasons to Question Compliments

As long as another’s praise doesn’t sound patently insincere, you’re likely to welcome it. Being richly recognized for what you do—or who you are—just feels good. It’s wonderfully confirming, as reassuring as it is validating. Most of us thrive on compliments and flattery precisely because they can buoy us up, warm our hearts, and allay old fears and self-doubts.

But praise has its dark side, too. Much more than we typically realize, it can constitute a kind of verbal bribery, offered primarily to serve the interest of the person offering it. This post will suggest six ways that praise might be disbursed with the hidden intention of winning your favor, or wrangling something out of you—something you probably wouldn’t be willing to grant otherwise.

If you’re insecure, and so require external confirmation to feel worthwhile or good about yourself, you’ll be especially susceptible to (or a “target” for) disingenuous praise with invisible strings (or a price tag) attached to it. Such praise comes at a cost. Exploitive praisers prey on those with self-esteem deficiencies and seem to have radar for detecting them, They know exactly how to raise your confidence—and reduce your uncertainty—through flattering machinations ultimately designed not for your welfare but their own.

This is hardly to suggest that you should be suspicious (or paranoid) upon any instance of another’s positive acknowledgment. But at times it would be wise to consider whether the person praising you might not be craftily maneuvering for something in return—whether, essentially, their praise is a “set up.” Particularly if their compliments seem overblown, the chance of their having some ulterior motive to take advantage of you may be something you need to explore.

Here are six ways flatterers might, covertly, be scheming to “take you in”:

If they’re insecure themselves, praisers’ calculated compliments may be their preferred way of ingratiating themselves with you—or of fitting in better with a group of which you may be an important member. They may deliberately go out of their way to support or validate your viewpoint expressly to win your favor. To solidify (or “secure”) their relationship with you, they may profess that your stance on something is identical to theirs, or that they really admire you for how astute, smart or savvy you are.

If they want to get you (as it were) to the negotiating table, they may contrive to butter you up in advance, so you’ll be more inclined to agree to some bargain they wish to introduce you to—a “deal” that probably will benefit them substantially more than it will you. In shrewdly “seducing” you into feeling really special—whether it’s getting you to see yourself as substantially more intelligent, perceptive, popular, laudable, etc. than you ordinarily do—they may make you feel a certain indebtedness to them. And, without consciously realizing it, you may be more willing to make compromises with them, bend yourself to their will, or do their bidding when they suggest some “mutually beneficial arrangement."

Closely related to the above, they may have some specific favor they want to request of you. So to increase the odds that you’ll comply with their wishes, they’ll “gift” you with carefully calculated praise and flattery. In fact, you may end up (by way of reciprocation) feeling compelled to agree or acquiesce to their desires. It’s unfortunately all too easy to get taken advantage of if their praise—however exploitive in intent—fulfills some deep personal need (or longing) of yours. In such cases you may remain oblivious to their compliments not being nearly as genuine or authentic as, in the moment, they innocently appear.

If they’ve experienced a falling-out with you—especially involving their having behaved dishonestly or dishonorably with you—one way they might contrive to get back in your good graces is through finding things to praise you for. If they’re successful in making you feel supported or vindicated, you’re likely—or at risk for—feeling better about them. Their false praise—profuse and fulsome though it may be—can increase the probability that you’ll be willing toforgive them and renew a relationship that, for good reasons, you’d begun to distrust and may already have tried to end.

If they’re shameless or unethical—enough almost to justify the label psychopathic—they might offer you “fake praise” as a way of getting you to confide in them, or share with them privileged or highly personal information. Then, when they’ve succeeded in their duplicitous efforts to prompt you to disclose sensitive data, they’ll—aggressively or passive-aggressively—use it against you. Betraying your trust, they’ll take advantage of the superior position you’ve inadvertently put them in to pursue their own self-interested agenda. In the workplace this one-upmanship might enable them to “steal” the promotion that you, not they, would otherwise have received. Or it could lead to their surreptitiously compromising, or preempting, you in a large variety of other insidious ways. Trusting their praise—that is, their seeming to respect you and hold you in high regard—makes you prey to being tricked (or tripped up) by them. Through fictitious praise, they can insinuate themselves into your confidence and then, sadly, exploit it for all it’s worth.

The final reason I include here as an addendum, and in a necessarily qualified fashion, for it pertains to conditioning, or “programming,” children to act in particular ways. Planned complimenting in this context can relate as much to training a child for essentially pro-social purposes as to what I view as more flagrant—and clearly self-interested—forms of child manipulation. What I’d like to address is parents whose motives in selectively complimenting their child are blatantly egocentric. Many so-called “caregivers” praise their children not to encourage kinder, more considerate or virtuous behavior, but to reinforce conduct that simply makes them more compliant, pliable, or easier to deal with. So, if the child’s needs represent a nuisance or inconvenience for them, they may—through highly selective, manipulative praise—systematically encourage that child to refrain from sharing or asserting their thoughts, feelings, wants or needs. Indirectly, they may cause the child to feel that they’re good or worthy only when they’re focusing exclusively on the parent's needs. Rearing a child in this manner warrants being seen as psychologically abusive, for seeking to mold a child to conform to the parent's selfish desires forces the child to renounce their own quite legitimate wants and needs—unless, that is, they flat out rebel against such parental dictates, which, regrettably, has its own serious mental and emotional repercussions.

Short of becoming indiscriminately wary of others’ praise or flattery, it’s only prudent to consider whether they might have a hidden agenda in praising you. That way you can minimize the possibility that their seemingly trustworthy compliments aren’t really some sort of two-faced con.

[allthingspsychology]

Feminine Foes: New Science Explores Female Competition

A quick association exercise. What comes up when you hear the following words:

Competitiveness. Aggressiveness. Violence.

If you think of the word "male", you’re most likely not alone. The above features are frequently attributed to maleness and masculinity. On closer inspection it also becomes clear that male competitiveness, aggression and violence are often directed primarily at other males: on the battlefield, on the playing field, in the office, at the bar, or on the street. Charles Darwin long ago noticed the existence of intra-sexual competition between males; he also understood that the basic aim of all this male mayhem was to gain the attention and reproductive favor of females.

Influenced by Darwin (and by the fact that until recently most researchers were men), most of the research into intra-sexual competition has focused on the struggle between men to gain sexual access to women. Only in the 80s did science begin to investigate in earnest the same phenomenon on the other side of the gender divide: female competition for a suitable male. A host of studies in recent years have shown convincingly that the traditional view of women as passive and uncompetitive is wrong. Women, it turns out, are engaged in a competition of their own, aggressively jockeying for position in a battle to secure a suitable mate.

According to evolutionary theory, intra-sexual competition will concern mainly those traits that are attractive to the oppositesex. The American evolutionary psychologist David Buss found in the eighties that intra-sexual competition takes two primary forms: self-promotion and competitor derogation. Men demonstrate and promote their physical abilities and social status (masculine traits favored women). Women tend to promote their youth and physical attractiveness (feminine traits favored men). Men try to derogate their rivals by disparaging their economic and physical strength, while women criticize the age, appearance and character of their opponents.

Building on David Buss’s pioneering work, the Canadian researchers Maryanne Fisher and Anthony Cox discovered a few years ago two additional tactics commonly used in intra-sexual competition: mate manipulation and competitor manipulation.

Mate manipulation involves trying to end the race early when we are still in the lead, before our competition catches up. An example: If your boyfriend visits you at the office often, and then a very attractive and available coworker joins the office in a cubicle next to yours, you may be motivated to ask your guy to stop visiting you at work.

Competitor manipulation is analogous to arguing that a movie is not worth the price of admission. This can be achieved by bad mouthing the movie (for example if you tell someone bad things about the guy you're interested in) or raising the price of the ticket (as when you spend lavishly on your date to discourage competitors who can’t afford to match your largesse).

According to Joyce Benenson, a researcher at Emmanuel College in Boston, competition among women has three unique characteristics: first, because they have to protect their bodies from physical harm (so as not to interfere with present or future pregnancy and childbirth), women rely on veiled aggression towards other women (behind verbal gymnastics or under cover of the group) rather than physical confrontation.

Second, high status and very attractive women need less help and protection from other women and are less motivated to invest in other women (who represent potential competition). Thus, a woman who tries to distinguish or promote herself threatens other women and will encounter hostility. According to Benenson, a common way women deal with the threat represented by a remarkably powerful or beautiful woman is by insisting on standards of equality, uniformity, and sharing for all the women in the group and making these attributes the normative requirements of proper femininity.

Third, in extreme cases women may guard against potential competitors by means of social exclusion. If a new attractive woman shows up in the neighborhood (or school, or club), all the women in attendance may turn their backs on her, compelling her to withdraw from the scene, thus increasing their own chances with the surrounding males.

A number of recent studies provide further support for the existence of the 'female competition' phenomenon. For example, Jon Maner and James McNulty of Florida State discovered that women's testosterone levels went up when they (unknowingly) smelled t-shirts of ovulating young women, presumably in preparation for aggressive competition. Canadian researchers Tracy Vaillancourt and Aanchal Sharma, showed how women judge and condemn each other based on appearance. They arranged for female participants to interact with a young research assistant. Some of the participants saw the assistant dressed in revealing clothes while others saw her wearing jeans and a T-shirt. The researchers tracked participants’ responses to the assistant during the meeting and after she left the room. Results: The assistant was unanimously criticized when she wore revealing clothes and largely ignored when she wore regular attire. This study (and others) supports the evolutionary prediction: a more attractive woman (i.e., one who has more of what men like) will receive more hostility and less cooperation from other women because her presence threatens their own access to the evolutionary prize.

A central arena for competition between females is sexual behavior itself. Studies show that women tend to criticize and reject other women who are viewed by them as sexually promiscuous. The researcher Zhana Vrangalova and her colleagues at Cornell University recently surveyed 750 college students about their sexual behaviors and attitudes. Then, participants read a short description of a hypothetical person (of their own sex) who had either two (nonpermissive) or twenty (permissive) past sexual partners. Participants then rated this potential friend on several friendship-relevant outcomes. Results revealed that female participants, regardless of their own level of permissiveness, overwhelmingly preferred the nonpermissive potential friend. According to the researchers, this is because women want to guard their partners and because they fear socal stigma: if you go around with someone who’s known to be promiscuous (a “slut”), there is danger that the label will latch on to you, too.

This study and others align with the observation that women are often the chief enforcers of strict and sometimes cruel norms of female appearance and sexual behavior. For example, the ritual of female genital mutilation, still practiced in some Muslim countries in Africa, is primarily designed to make the girl into good ‘bride material’ for men. To that end, clitoridectomy reduces her ability to enjoy sex and therefore decreases the likelihood she’ll be tempted to cheat on her husband. Sewing the vaginal opening shut, which is often performed after the genital cutting, reduces the possibility that the girl will have sex before marriage, again benefitting the interests of the future husband. Still, this ceremony is managed, performed and enforced by women (mostly mothers and grandmothers).

Another example: Girls’ foot binding was a custom in China for over a thousand years (until it was outlawed in the early twentieth century). The ancient custom (which involved breaking the toes of the baby, folding them and binding the feet tightly for years) was valued primarily because women with small feet were considered more desirable sexually (in the eyes of men) and because a wife’s tiny, useless feet were evidence of the husband’s wealth (‘I’m so rich my woman doesn’t need to work; indeed she can’t’). In this case too, the main enforcers and managers were mothers and grandmothers.

The evolutionary explanation for these phenomena relies on the assumption that sex with a woman (and thus access to her uterus) is a biologically desirable and scarce resource for men. Among women of childbearing age, reducing the sexual 'supply' increases female bargaining power in the relationship economy. Thus, it pays for women to enforce sexual conservatism even at the cost of ostracizing and manipulating other women identified as permissive. Mothers and grandmothers, by the same logic, have a strong incentive to ensure that their daughters (who carry their genes) will become highly attractive to men, even at the price of causing them early suffering and mutilation.

Feminist psychology, however, argues that competition among females is driven primarily not by biological imperatives but rather by social mechanisms. According to this argument, cutthroat female competition is due mainly to the fact that women, born and raised in male-dominated society, internalize the male perspective (the “male gaze”) and adopt it as their own. The male view of women as primarily sexual objects becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. As women come to consider being prized by men their ultimate source of strength, worth, achievement and identity, they are compelled to battle other women for the prize.

In this sense, the feminist approach argues in effect that many women are beset by what Karl Marx called, 'false consciousness.' According to Marx, a factory worker who’s convinced that his enemy is another worker looking for a job has false consciousness because he does not understand that the true enemy is the owner of the factory, who sets workers against each other in order to subjugate them both and get rich on the value of their labor. Many women, according to this argument, refuse to see that the real threat to their achievement, power, value, and identity are not other women, but the male establishment that controls their lives.

Either way, female competition has a price, and not only on the political level. This competition produces much of the stress that interferes with the happiness of many women, especially young ones. Studies show that compared to men, women tend to be more sensitive to emotional information and are better at decoding subtly encoded social and interpersonal messages. In addition, women's sense of self-worth is based more on their friends’ opinions of them. This combination of acute awareness of--and sensitivity to--subtle social cues renders women more vulnerable to indirect interpersonal aggression.

For example, the researcher Christopher Ferguson of Stetson University in Florida and his colleagues asked participants to watch two television programs (with a svelte and chubby female star) and interact with a woman (in attractive or casual attire). They found that participants’ mood and self-image were not affected by the TV shows but significantly affected by the live encounters. Interacting with an attractive woman dressed in flattering clothing led the participants to feel distressed and negative about their bodies, especially if the encounters were held in the presence of an attractive man.

At the end of the day, the tendency to engage in intra-sex competition appears to be a part of our genetic hardware and a feature in the heritage of human culture. Our genes and social habits are not easy to change, certainly not overnight. But the first step toward changing a habit is becoming aware of it. To that end, men may want to ask whether ‘getting the girl’ is worth the spilled blood and broken bones, while women may do well to reflect on whether the goal of getting a man (and his sperm and support) justifies the competitive tactics of manipulating, shaming or ostracizing other women and the pain it causes them.

[allthingspsychology]

Infants Show Ability to Tell Friends From Foes

Jan. 8, 2014 — Even before babies have language skills or much information about social structures, they can infer whether other people are likely to be friends by observing their likes and dislikes, a new study on infant cognition has found.

The results offer a new window into humans' earliest understanding of the social world around them. It suggests that even nine-month-old infants can engage in reasoning about whether the people they observe are friends or not.

"This is some of the first evidence that young infants are tracking other people's social relationships," said Amanda L. Woodward, the William S. Gray Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the paper. The study "Friends or Foes: Infants Use Shared Evaluations to Infer Others' Social Relationships," was published online by Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

In this study, 64 nine-month-old infants were randomized into groups and then watched videos showing two adults. The adults each ate two foods and reacted in either a positive or a negative way to each food they ate. In some videos the adults shared the same reactions, while in others they reacted differently.

"We depicted evaluations of food because food may provide particularly salient social information," noted co-author Katherine D. Kinzler, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. "Eating with family and friends is inherently social, and so infants might be particularly inclined to use eating behaviors to make inferences about social relationships."

To investigate whether infants linked food reactions to social relationships, the experiment examined how the infants responded to subsequent videos, which showed the same adults acting either positively or negatively toward each other. In the video showing a positive interaction, the adults greeted each other with smiles and said "Hi!" in a friendly tone of voice. In the other video, the adults turned away from each other, crossed their arms and said "Hmp" in an unfriendly tone of voice.

The research team assessed the infants' reactions to the videos by measuring the amount of time the babies focused on the paused still screen at the end of each video. Two sets of trained observers coded the infants' attention. Researchers have found previously that the duration of a baby's gaze is related to how familiar or unexpected a situation seems to them. "When babies see something unexpected, they look longer, "explained Woodward. "It's out of place for them and they have to make sense of it."

The infants' responses to the videos suggested that they were surprised when adults who liked the same foods behaved negatively toward each other. They were also surprised when adults who disagreed about the foods behaved like friends.

The study's implication is that even at the early age of nine months, babies know that adults who agree with each other tend to act in a friendly way in other contexts. Infants in the study predicted that people who reacted similarly to the two foods were likely to be friends and were taken off-guard when the videos showed something different.

"This study raises questions on how babies think about who gets along and who doesn't," said lead author Zoe Liberman, a doctoral student in the University of Chicago Department of Psychology. "Parents will be interested to know that babies are keeping track of what's going on in the world around them and are making inferences about social interactions that we previously were not aware of before this study."

"I was surprised to find that babies at this age showed such strong responses," Woodward said.

The findings provide the first evidence that the roots of a critical aspect of social cognition, reasoning about other people's social interactions based on those people's likes and dislikes, can be traced to infancy, according to the authors. They plan future research to look at what other types of cues help infants make these social inferences.

[allthingspsychology]

Possession, Exorcism and Psychotherapy

Note: This is a long, incredibly compelling article if you are interested in the history of treating mental disorders. I highly suggest going to the page and reading the rest of the article HERE.

Abstract

For all of recorded history, almost all human beings have believed in a spiritual plane of existence that somehow interacts with people in their daily life. A common belief is that souls, spirits, and demons exist, and that evil spirits can invade people and cause illness, especially mental illness. Throughout history the preferred method for eliminating evil spirits has been some form of ritual invocation or exorcism. Rather than dying out, belief in spirits, demons, and the supernatural is widespread today, in both highly industrialized societies like the U.S. and in less technologically developed countries. An understanding of how these beliefs came about and how they are practiced today can help psychologists provide appropriate services for clients with such beliefs.   

Introduction

Could there ever be a situation in which a psychologist would be justified in conducting an exorcism for a client who was thought to be possessed by a demon? Although this scenario might sound unlikely, some psychologists have in fact conducted exorcisms in recent years. Given the widespread belief in the reality of supernatural phenomena such as demonic possession in America and throughout the world, psychologists need to have a basic understanding of why so many people believe in possession and participate in exorcism rituals. This article summarizes the history of belief in spirits and possession, the position of churches on the issue, and some psychological explanations for how exorcism could help "possessed" people.

Since ancient times most people have believed in the existence of spirits, and specifically a human soul, thought to be an invisible spirit that inhabits people while they are alive and survives the death of the body to live eternally in a spiritual world. The Greek word "psyche" means mind or soul, and is the root of the words psychology and psychiatry, which mean the study of the psyche and the treatment of the psyche, respectively (Stone, 1997). Today the soul is considered a religious or spiritual concept, and psychotherapy addresses not the soul but the mind and disordered or distressing feelings and behavior resulting from suboptimal mental functioning (Fancher, 1995). However, since most people believe in spirits and the soul (Taylor, 2003), psychologists should have a good understanding of how these beliefs developed and how they can affect the treatment of people with psychological disorders.

The idea that spirits can enter and control a person is as old as civilization, and historical, biblical, and archeological evidence indicates its presence in diverse forms and in almost all cultures (Eliade, 2004; Prins, 1990). "Religiomagical rituals are major forms of healing in nonindustrialized societies and provide the foundation for faith healing in our own" (Frank & Frank, 1991, p. 87). The earliest healers were shamans who believed in magic and the supernatural; many thought that evil spirits invaded people's bodies and made them disturbed (Stone, 1997). An exorcism is a ritual that is used to drive the devil, demons, or evil spirits from a person (Wilkinson, 2007). Harner (1990) stated that a form of exorcism exists in all shamanic cultures. Skulls that have been trepanned (bored with small holes, probably to release demons) date back to at least 5000 B.C.E. (Porter, 2003). Belief in spirit possession and exorcism has been documented in Babylonia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Greece, India, Ceylon, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Tibet, Korea, New Guinea, Brazil, Columbia, Haiti, the United States, and throughout Europe (Kiev, 1964). However, the possession phenomenon is not universal; it has not been found in certain tribal groups in the Philippines, the Malay Peninsula, or Australia (Ellenberger, 1970).

            "The view that supernatural forces can cause and cure illness stretches back to furthest antiquity" (Frank & Frank, 1991, p. 88). Exorcism is one form of supernatural healing. Since the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians (circa 3000 B.C.E.) the mentally abnormal have been treated with techniques like the laying on of hands, music and herbs, and a ritual of exorcism. In fact, spiritual and religious practices such as exorcism, faith healing, prayer, charms, amulets, and similar methods have been the most common treatments for mental illness throughout human history. "Between the years 200 and 1700, almost all mental disorders were understood in terms of demonic possession" (Wolpert, 2006, p. 163), and even today "spirit possession is the most common explanation of problems throughout the world" (Haley & Richeport-Haley, 2003, p. 20). 

            Non-Western societies often do not clearly distinguish between mental and bodily illnesses, or between natural and supernatural causes of illness. Supernatural causes may be described as soul loss, possession by an evil spirit, or the work of a sorcerer or ancestral ghost. It would be a mistake to think that such beliefs are found only in less industrialized countries: "Demonology continues to be a favored explanation for bizarre behavior even in modern, postindustrial, postfeminist, politically correct North America" (Bankart, 1997, p. 34). 

Supernatural Beliefs Are Widespread Today

The DSM-IV TR (American Psychiatric Association, 2000) describes several disorders involving spirits and possession in the appendix on culture-bound syndromes. For example, the phenomenon of Zar possession is common in many North African and Middle Eastern countries, including Egypt, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. Susto or "soul loss" is an illness that is said to result from the soul leaving the body, and affects Latinos in the U. S. and people in Mexico, Central America, and South America. The DSM-IV TR notes that similar beliefs are found in many parts of the world. Many Native American tribes believe in spirit possession, and healers often suck illness-causing spirit objects out of patients; the Tlingit have a verbal exorcism ritual (Hultkrantz, 1992). The phenomenon of Windigo psychosis (possession by a cannibalistic demon) is well established among the Northern Algonquin Indians. The Ainu community in Japan believes in demonic possession and exorcism; in Nicaragua and Honduras there is a possession state called Grisi Siknis; and trance possession is found in Voodoo as practiced in Haiti (Prins, 1990).

Belief in spirits, demons, and other supernatural entities is extremely common today, even in countries where much of the population is well educated, as shown by numerous surveys. For example, a 2005 poll found that 68 percent of Americans believe in the devil (O'Connor, 2005). Three other surveys with large representative samples taken since 2001 have all shown that roughly 70 percent of Americans say they believe in the devil, including a national Gallup survey in May 2007 (Newport, 2007).  According to a 2003 Harris survey, Americans harbor a wide variety of supernatural beliefs: 50% believe in ghosts, 31% believe in astrology, and 27% believe in reincarnation. Large majorities of the population say they believe in God (86%); angels (75%); and heaven (82%). Most Americans (84%) believe in the survival of the soul after death, 84% believe in miracles, and 68% believe in the devil (Taylor, 2003). Another 2003 poll found that 58% of Americans believe that the devil sometimes possesses people (Rice, 2003). 

Demons and Exorcism in the Hebrew and Christian Traditions

Due to the references to demonic possession and exorcism in the New Testament, these beliefs have been a part of Christianity since its beginning. Today exorcism is a recognized practice of Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox, and some Protestant denominations. The Church of England has an official exorcist in each diocese (Malia, 2001).

The ancient belief in spirits and souls leads logically to the belief in exorcism as a treatment for mental illness. If spirits exist, then maybe they can travel outside the body, and maybe evil spirits can invade healthy people and make them ill. This mind/body dualism is evident in the Hebrew Bible, which states that madness (shigeon) is caused by possession by evil spirits (Stone, 1997). "An evil spirit came upon Saul" and he tried to kill David (1 Samuel 21). Methods to avoid demons included fumigation (Lev. 16:12-13), wearing clothes with a blue thread (Num. 15:38) and posting demons-keep-away messages at the entryway of houses (Exodus 12:13). The medicine of the Old Testament is strictly supernatural and religious, and while methods to avoid demons are described, no treatments for the demon possessed are mentioned (Wolpert, 2006).

In the Greek New Testament the possibility of illness resulting from assault by evil spirits is widely assumed (Matt. 9:32-33; Matt. 12:22; Matt. 17:14-21; Mark 1:24; Mark 5:9; Mark 9:14-29; Luke 13:11; Acts 16:16). Jesus was Christianity's first great exorcist (Wilkinson, 2007). About one-fourth of all the healings of Jesus were exorcisms, and there are 26 references to exorcisms in the New Testament; for example, "Jesus preached and cast out devils" (Mark 1:39). There are 13 stories about demon possession involving Jesus, describing at least six separate episodes (Camille, 2006). Jesus exorcised evil spirits "with a word" (Matt. 8:16-17). In the entire New Testament there is no clear example of mental illness that is not attributed to demons and cured by any method other than exorcism.

Apparently at the time of Jesus all mental illness was attributed to demon possession, and Jesus always used exorcism to treat what today we would probably see as mental illness. Interestingly, according to the New Testament, Jesus was not the only one who was able to cast out demons; some other Jews also did it successfully (Matt. 12:27) and an unnamed person who was not a disciple was reported to cast out demons in Christ's name (Mark 9:37-38). While some modern liberal readers of the New Testament might like to think that Jesus healed by psychological means (faith healing) rather than literally exorcising demons, this interpretation is not supported by the text. For example, on one occasion (according to the story in Matt. 8:28-34) the demons cast out by Jesus entered a herd of pigs, who then cast themselves off a cliff and died. It is hard to see how metaphorical demons could drive a herd of pigs to suicide; the reader is clearly meant to understand that the demons were objectively real and powerful.

 Eventually Jesus gave his disciples and all believers the power to "discern spirits" (1 Cor. 12:10) and cast out unclean spirits (Mark 16:17; Matt. 10:1; Luke 9:1). For example, Paul removed a demon from a slave girl who told fortunes (Acts 16:16-24). Contemporary Christians who believe in demon possession as one cause of mental illness and exorcism as the proper treatment have clear justification in the text of the New Testament. Indeed, it would seem that any Christian who denied the objective existence of demonic possession and exorcism would find no basis for that belief in the text.

Exorcism in the Roman Catholic Tradition

Today many religions, churches, and folk healers accept the reality of visions, spirit possession, and exorcism (Porter, 2003),  but none have codified and institutionalized the practice of exorcism as much as the Roman Catholic Church (Wilkinson, 2007). The Catholic Church revised and renewed the rite of exorcism in 2000, and the importance of the rite was affirmed by Pope John Paul II, who is reported to have conducted three exorcisms himself. In 2005 Pope Benedict XVI spoke at a meeting of Italian exorcists and encouraged them to continue their important work (Washington Times, 2005). When the Church revised the exorcism rite the document included a new warning that psychiatric illness should not be confused with possession (Wilkinson, 2007). 

Catholic theology asserts the reality of demonic possession and exorcism and the Catholic Encyclopedia (New Advent, n.d.) notes that "Superstition ought not to be confounded with religion, . . . nor magic . . . with a legitimate religious rite" (n.p.). The Vatican's chief exorcist Amorth has said "where [religious] faith declines, superstition grows" (Wilkinson, 2007, p. 30). The differences between the supernatural beliefs of magic, superstition, and religion are not always clear. Superstition is usually considered an attenuated form of magic. Superstitions are a mixture of religious and magical beliefs, folklore, and historical events. Few people admit to being superstitious, because the word implies ignorance and pre-scientific thinking, but many people freely admit to holding supernatural beliefs (Singer & Singer, 1995).

Some people might propose that when Jesus cast out demons he was actually conducting faith healing of people with an illness such as epilepsy, schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder, or hysteria. However, the Catholic Encyclopedia (New Advent, n.d.) points out that Jesus did not confuse demonic possession with illness. For example, in Luke 13:32 Jesus expressly distinguished between the expulsion of evil spirits and the curing of disease. Similarly, a report by the Church of England states "One cannot dismiss the New Testament exorcisms as so much hysteria . . . . it simply will not do to dismiss this language as metaphor" (quoted in Malia, 2001, p. 27).

In 2005 the Vatican began offering training to its exorcists to help them distinguish between psychological disorders and possession by the devil; half a million Italians seek exorcisms each year, but most are not considered possessed (Nadeau, 2005). The Vatican's chief exorcist, Father Gabriele Amorth, made news when he announced "Of course the Devil exists . . . I am convinced that the Nazis were all possessed" (Pisa, 2006, n.p.). Amorth is said to have conducted over 30,000 exorcisms in his career.

Exorcism Exists in Many World Religions

Besides Judaism and Christianity, exorcism rituals are found in many religions around the world, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shintoism, and Islam. There are several references to possession by evil spirits and exorcism in the Qur'an. Some verses state that Satan can possess people and cause insanity (e.g., Surah Al-Baqarah 2:275). Islamic clergy say that real cases of possession are rare, but they do exist (Islam, 2007).

Some people are convinced that exorcism is gaining medical credibility. For example, in the United Kingdom psychiatrists are increasingly referring patients for private exorcisms, and a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists believes that evil spirits exist and can possess humans (Penman, 2007). Most of those exorcised by the Church of England are referred by registered psychiatrists; the Church has claimed an 80% success rate (Penman, 2007), although no documentation to support the claim is available; results are not published (Layton, 2006).  

Exorcism in Protestant Denominations in America

It is often thought that only the Roman Catholic Church practices exorcism, probably due to how it is usually portrayed in movies such as The Exorcist(1973), but some Protestant churches in the U.S. also recognize demonic possession and exorcism. Some of these churches perform exorcisms rarely, while others (particularly Pentecostal and other charismatic groups) perform it often. A conservative estimate is that there are at least five or six hundred evangelical exorcism ministries operating today in the U.S. (Cuneo, 2001). Many Latter-day Saints (Mormons) also believe in demonic possession and exorcism, although they call the ritual "the ordinance," and details about it are not publicized (Russell, 2006). 

Although there are scientific and psychological explanations for the symptoms of alleged demonic possession, not everyone has respect for science or psychology. Many Evangelical, Pentecostal, charismatic, and other conservative Christian churches do not take psychology seriously. Biblical literalists understandably resist attempts to explain human behavior without reference to the Bible. For example, Koch (1972) said he had seen over 500 cases of demonic activity in people's lives, and "exorcism in its spiritual essence stands justified by the New Testament as a legitimate means of helping the possessed" (p. 250). Another minister advised "If you decide that there could be demonic involvement, then it is wise to consider exorcism" (Collins, 1988, p. 571). Arguing against the behavioral approach of B. F. Skinner, Adams (1986, p. 41) said "Can angels and demons be controlled by man?" Other books by Christian counselors include Biblical Demonology (Unger, 1994) and Counseling and the Demonic (Bufford, 1995).

In Modern Psychotherapies (Jones & Butman, 1991, p. 155) the authors stated "there are such supernatural entities as God, angels, the devil, and demons." This book has been called "the standard classroom text for overviewing major theories of psychotherapy from a Christian perspective" (Kellemen, 2005, n.p.).

Excerpts from the textbook Introduction to Psychology and Counseling, which has been called "the standard Christian introduction to psychology" (Meier, Minirth, Wichern, & Ratcliff, 1991, n.p.) illustrate the fundamentalist Christian view: "The existence of supernatural evil forces is to be granted.  . . . demon possession can imitate epileptic seizures" (p. 46). "A precipitating factor in depression can be an attack by Satan" (p. 281). "Individuals with personality disorders may be thought to be demon-possessed" (p. 259). The authors advise that "in clinical counseling the presence of the demonic clearly stands out from other abnormal behavior" (p. 260) and they list eight characteristics of demon possession, including superhuman strength, the ability to perform supernatural acts, and a change of voice when the demon speaks. The authors note that "Demon-possessed individuals do not respond to therapy" (p. 260).

In an issue of the magazine Christianity Today readers were advised that "demonization may go hand in hand with a psychological disorder" (Tennant, 2001, p. 60) and natural causes should be ruled out before attempting to expel evil spirits. The author suggests that prayer will help determine whether true demons are involved. Well-known Evangelical minister Pat Robertson (2003) has written that "demonic oppression can cause depression . . . . what starts as depression can become oppression, then possession" (p. 249) and "not all drug addicts or alcoholics are demon possessed, but I do know that there are demonic spirits behind most addictions . . . they need to be delivered" (p. 239).

            Many Evangelical churches have streamlined exorcisms; "deliverance" ministers in Bakersfield, California conduct exorcisms during altar calls, in group meetings, and during private office visits (Barna, 2006). Some ministers routinely put diagnosed psychiatric patients through an exorcism called "whole personality deliverance;" one minister said "Demonic spirits are real. We need supernatural help" and another said "Spirits may cause psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia" (Barna, 2006, n.p.). According to one counselor, "It just seems logical if demons bothered folks once, they might still, and where better to hide in modern society than behind a DSM-IV diagnosis" (Timmins, 2006, p. 97).

Some Psychiatrists and Psychologists Practice Exorcism

Some psychiatrists and psychologists not only believe in the reality of demonic possession, they practice exorcism rituals. M. Scott Peck, who died in 2005, was a psychiatrist who described himself as a nondenominational Christian and became famous for his bestseller The Road Less Traveled (1978). In his last book, Glimpses of the Devil (2005) Peck revealed that he believed that possession is a genuine phenomenon, and that he had conducted exorcisms of some of his patients, in collaboration with priests. In the book Peck describes one patient whose symptoms "did not fit the established categories of psychiatric diagnosis, which was why, as a scientific-minded psychiatrist, I thought she might be possessed. . . . My instinct was that she likely required an exorcism" (Peck, 2005, p. 23).

            Even psychologists who scoff at the idea of demons would probably admit that certain clients who are resistant to psychotherapy and who think they are possessed may be helped to feel better by going through an exorcism ritual. However, conducting an exorcism is not considered to be within the scope of practice for psychologists, as several cases have affirmed.

            In 1993 Phoenix psychologist Kenneth Olson had his license revoked for unprofessional conduct after he performed an exorcism on a ten-year-old boy, using a Bible, holy water, a crucifix, and prayer. Olson, who said he had practiced exorcisms for 12 years, billed Arizona Child Protective Services $180 for the two-hour procedure; the state board said that exorcism is not recognized as a legitimate form of psychological treatment (Chicago Tribune, 1993). Olson sued the licensing board, and the case went to a federal appeals court, which dismissed Olson's suit (Churchill, 1999).

In 2001 Memphis, Tennessee psychologist Terry B. Davis had her license revoked after she told a client that demons were controlling her and conducted an exorcism ritual, asking the demon to leave (Ross, 2001). In 2003 a "Christian psychologist" in Missouri named Thomas DeVol faced loss of his license because a client complained that he invoked Jesus to cast out the client's demons; DeVol claimed that up to four percent of his clients were possessed by evil spirits (National Psychologist, 2004).

An unnamed charismatic psychiatrist who did exorcisms  (which he called "deliverance" work) told writer Michael Cuneo (2001) that counselors and psychologists should tell their clients that the exorcism is not part of their professional treatment, and the office should not be used for the ritual; "otherwise you'll be raked over the coals by lawyers" (Cuneo, 2001, p. 139). Today it is relatively easy to find someone who will conduct an exorcism, both within churches and outside any particular spiritual tradition. For example, Wanda Pratnicka, who describes herself as a therapist, exorcist, and parapsychologist, claims to have "30 years experience with 25,000 successfully performed exorcisms" (Pratnicka, 2007, n.p.).

[allthingspsychology]

Study Gives New Meaning to 'Let Your Fingers Do The Walking'

When you are typing away at your computer, you don’t know what your fingers are really doing.

That is the conclusion of a study conducted by a team of cognitive psychologists at Vanderbilt and Kobe universities. It found that skilled typists can’t identify the positions of many of the keys on the QWERTY keyboard and that novice typists don’t appear to learn key locations in the first place.

“This demonstrates that we’re capable of doing extremely complicated things without knowing explicitly what we are doing,” said Vanderbilt University graduate student Kristy Snyder, the first author of the study, which was conducted under the supervision of Centennial Professor of Psychology Gordon Logan.

A description of the research will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, which recently posted it online.

The researchers recruited 100 university students and members from the surrounding community to participate in an experiment. The participants completed a short typing test. Then, they were shown a blank QWERTY keyboard and given 80 seconds to write the letters in the correct location. On average, they typed 72 words per minute, moving their fingers to the correct keys six times per second with 94 percent accuracy. By contrast, they could accurately place an average of only 15 letters on a blank keyboard.

The fact that the typists did so poorly at identifying the position of specific keys didn’t come as a surprise. For more than a century, scientists have recognized the existence of automatism: the ability to perform actions without conscious thought or intention. Automatic behaviors of this type are surprisingly common, ranging from tying shoelaces to making coffee to factory assembly-line work to riding a bicycle and driving a car. So scientists had assumed that typing also fell into this category, but had not tested it.

What did come as a surprise, however, was a finding that conflicts with the basic theory of automatic learning, which suggests that it starts out as a conscious process and gradually becomes unconscious with repetition. According to the widely held theory – primarily developed by studying how people learn to play chess – when you perform a new task for the first time, you are conscious of each action and store the details in working memory. Then, as you repeat the task, it becomes increasingly automatic and your awareness of the details gradually fades away. This allows you to think about other things while you are performing the task.

Given the prevalence of this “use it or lose it” explanation, the researchers were surprised when they found evidence that the typists never appear to memorize the key positions, not even when they are first learning to type.

“It appears that not only don’t we know much about what we are doing, but we can’t know it because we don’t consciously learn how to do it in the first place,” said Logan.

Evidence for this conclusion came from another experiment included in the study. The researchers recruited 24 typists who were skilled on the QWERTY keyboard and had them learn to type on a Dvorak keyboard, which places keys in different locations. After the participants developed a reasonable proficiency with the alternative keyboard, they were asked to identify the placement of the keys on a blank Dvorak keyboard. On average, they could locate only 17 letters correctly, comparable to participants’ performance with the QWERTY keyboard.

According to the researchers, the lack of explicit knowledge of the keyboard may be due to the fact that computers and keyboards have become so ubiquitous that students learn how to use them in an informal, trial-and-error fashion when they are very young.

“When I was a boy, you learned to type by taking a typing class and one of the first assignments was to memorize the keyboard,” Logan recalled.

Co-authors on the study are Vanderbilt research analyst Jana Ulrich and Yuki Ashitaka and Hiroyuki Shimada at Kobe University in Japan. The research was funded by National Science Foundation grants BCS 0957074 and BCS 1257272.

[allthingspsychology]

Sports Psychology: Training Your Brain to Win

You’re watching Rafael Nadal dominate at the French Open. He’s tired, he’s stressed, he might even be injured, and you think to yourself, “How can I be that mentally tough when it matters most?”

You follow LeBron James all season long and marvel at how he manages to ratchet up his play, game after game, and you think, “I would love to be that driven and dedicated.”

We might not all have the physical gifts of Nadal or James but we can learn to think as they do to maximize the physical abilities we do possess and to conquer our goals.

Sports psychology is the scientific study of mind, emotion, and behavior as it relates to athletic performance and physical activity. The mental demands of rigorous competition can be enormous, making sports psychology a crucial part of any athlete’s training regimen. To quote coaching legend Phil Jackson, “Wisdom is always an overmatch for strength.” Hall of Famers and Olympic champions, backed by decades of empirical research, all agree that the proper use of sports psychology strategies can significantly improve any athlete’s performance.

Athletes who diligently train their minds play their best more consistently, experience greater enjoyment, and increase their odds of victory. As one progresses to the higher echelons of any sport, physical skills tend to balance out among competitors. How, then, does the athlete distinguish him- or herself from the pack? It is here where we discover that having a superior mindset is the key to gaining the upper-hand.

Important mental skills for athletic excellence include:

Supreme, unwavering confidence in your abilities

The ability to keep a laser-like focus when surrounded by distractions

The capacity to sustain a high level of motivation throughout a long season

The strength of will to conquer all anxiety, frustration, and discouragement

The power to bring your intensity to the next level when needed

Effective mental training tools include:

Clear and challenging short- and long-term goals

Visualization of making great plays and succeeding on the field

Positive, energetic language used to motivate yourself into a winning frame of mind

A consistent breath during all moments of action

Confident, upbeat body language to get the feeling of success in your body and mind

An athlete looking to improve his or her game can benefit can benefit from sports psychology at any time. Junior athletes can get a significant head start on their peers by developing their mental strength early on, rather than waiting until college or beyond. Seasoned pros can ensure they stay on top of their game, never letting themselves get complacent, by training their minds appropriately.

Sports psychology services can be applied in all scenarios. Specific examples include:

When the athlete wants to reach his or her full potential. By fine-tuning their game mentally and emotionally, he or she can eventually exceed even his or her greatest expectations.

When the athlete experiences any kind of setback, such as a mental block, performance plateau, prolonged slump, demotion, or injury.

When off-field issues or concerns begin to interfere with the athlete’s performance.

Your mentality will either hold you down or bring you up. Strive to master your mind rather than being mastered by it. If you don’t, you risk losing every game before it even starts. Think about how you can improve your performance in the following areas:

How you prepare mentally in practice and during training

How you maintain a winning mindset on the day of competition

How you manage your thoughts in the moment of action

How you deal with distractions

How you use the results of competition to build your character from event to event

How you communicate with others as a leader and a teammate

How you decompress after training and competition to stay fresh and avoid burnout

To excel in each of these areas, you’ll need a game plan. For example, when dealing with results, take the time to learn from every poor performance rather than brooding or trying to forget it. After a peak performance, write down specifically what you were thinking, feeling, and doing immediately before, during, and after the event. The next time you need a boost in confidence or motivation, refer back to the list.

However, while much can be accomplished on your own, working with a trained professional can be invaluable in mastering your mindset quickly and effectively. The sports psychologist works collaboratively with athletes to identify the challenges they face, the best ways to approach these challenges, and to put athletes in the optimal mental position to take charge of and accomplish their goals. The psychologist’s role parallels that of the coach and is just as pivotal in helping athletes achieve their full potential. Sports psychology is the key that can transform a weak performance into a brilliant one, and a good athlete into one of the best to have ever played the game.

[allthingspsychology]

Dozens of Labs Respond to Call to Bolster Reliability of Psychology Research

A large international group set up to test the reliability of psychology experiments has successfully reproduced the results of 10 out of 13 past experiments. The consortium also found that two effects could not be reproduced.

Psychology has been buffeted in recent years by mounting concern over the reliability of its results, after repeated failures to replicate classic studies. A failure to replicate could mean that the original study was flawed, the new experiment was poorly done or the effect under scrutiny varies between settings or groups of people.

To tackle this 'replicability crisis', 36 research groups formed the Many Labs Replication Project to repeat 13 psychological studies. The consortium combined tests from earlier experiments into a single questionnaire — meant to take 15 minutes to complete — and delivered it to 6,344 volunteers from 12 countries.

The team chose a mix of effects that represent the diversity of psychological science, from classic experiments that have been repeatedly replicated to contemporary ones that have not.

Ten of the effects were consistently replicated across different samples. These included classic results from economics Nobel laureate and psychologist Daniel Kahneman at Princeton University in New Jersey, such as gain-versus-loss framing, in which people are more prepared to take risks to avoid losses, rather than make gains; and anchoring, an effect in which the first piece of information a person receives can introduce bias to later decisions. The team even showed that anchoring is substantially more powerful than Kahneman’s original study suggested.

Encouraging outcomes “This is a really important initiative for psychology,” says Danny Oppenheimer, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose work was under scrutiny but who did not take part in the collaboration. “It means that the replicability problem, while by no means trivial, may not be as widespread as some critics of the field have suggested.” 

Project co-leader Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the Center of Open Science in Charlottesville, Virginia, finds the outcomes encouraging. “It demonstrates that there are important effects in our field that are replicable, and consistently so,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean that 10 out of every 13 effects will replicate.”

Kahneman agrees. The study “appears to be extremely well done and entirely convincing”, he says, “although it is surely too early to draw extreme conclusions about entire fields of research from this single effort”. Kahneman published an open letter in 2012 calling for a “daisy chain” of replications of studies on priming effects, in which subtle, subconscious cues can supposedly affect later behavior.

Of the 13 effects under scrutiny in the latest investigation, one was only weakly supported, and two were not replicated at all. Both irreproducible effects involved social priming. In one of these, people had increased their endorsement of a current social system after being exposed to money. In the other, Americans had espoused more-conservative values after seeing a US flag.

Social psychologist Travis Carter of Colby College in Waterville, Maine, who led the original flag-priming study, says that he is disappointed but trusts Nosek’s team wholeheartedly, although he wants to review their data before commenting further. Behavioral scientist Eugene Caruso at the University of Chicago in Illinois, who led the original currency-priming study, says, “We should use this lack of replication to update our beliefs about the reliability and generalizability of this effect”, given the “vastly larger and more diverse sample” of the Many Labs project. Both researchers praised the initiative.

Open documentation The Many Labs team, which was also coordinated by Richard Klein and Kate Ratliff from the University of Florida in Gainesville and Michelangelo Vianello from the University of Padua, Italy, found that the results were largely unaffected by the nationality of the volunteers or the setting of the experiments — whether delivered online or in a lab setting. When there was variation, it was limited to the large and obvious effects such as anchoring rather than the small and subtle ones such as being primed by seeing a flag.

This contradicts the frequently cited idea that some psychological studies, especially those on subtle social-priming effects, are hard to replicate because they are sensitive to factors such as the sample being studied or the skill of the original investigators. The fact that social priming studies have been hard to replicate ”has been difficult for me personally,” says Nosek, “because social priming is an area that’s important for my research”.

The plan for the Many Labs project was vetted by the original authors where possible, was documented openly, and was registered with the journal Social Psychology and its methods were peer-reviewed before any experiments were done. The results have now been submitted to the journal and are available online. “That sort of openness should be the standard for all research,” says Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, who is coordinating a similar collaborative attempt to verify a classic psychological effect not covered in the present study. “I hope this will become a standard approach in psychology.”

Oppenheimer says that other disciplines could benefit from Many Labs' approach. “Psychology isn't the only field that has had issues with replication in recent years.” 

This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on November 26, 2013.

[allthingspsychology]

The Psychology of Bitchiness: Women Use Slut Shaming As A Defense Tactic

A small Canadian study at McMaster University showed that women are more likely to be shrewdly hostile towards women who they regard as promiscuous. Tracy Vaillancourt, lead author of the study and psychologist at University of Ottawa, explained that this reaction is a form of unfriendliness that women often use, called “indirect aggression” — more commonly known as bitchiness or slut-shaming. 

To experimentally gauge this behavior, Vaillancourt and Ph.D student, Aanchal Sharma, observed 86 straight women who were paired off and made to think that they were participating in a study about female friendship. At some point a plainly dressed yet attractive, blonde woman with her hair in a bun — the “conservative confederate” — interrupted half of these pairs. The same woman also disrupted the other half, but was dressed in a low-cut blouse, short skirt, boots; and with her hair down. The experimenters called this less-traditional alter ego the “sexy confederate.”

Participants’ reactions were assessed and scored according to a “bitchiness” scale. Revealing body language such as eye rolling, glaring, looking the confederate up and down, and laughing sarcastically added to the score. The participants and scorers were approximately the same age range, between 20 and 25 years old.

One participant went as far as saying that the sexy confederate was dressed that way in order to have sex with the professor, Vaillancourt told The Atlantic. In another case, the sexy confederate hadn’t even left the room before someone burst out with a rude comment. Altogether, women’s reactions toward the sexy confederate scored much higher on the bitchiness scale in comparison to how they regarded the conservative confederate. Bitchiness also scored higher when the women were among friends rather than strangers.

Vaillancourt explained that men also exercise indirect aggression but not as often as women do, according to CBS News. "When we aggress against somebody, we do it indirectly. When men aggress against others, a lot of times it's direct, it's verbal," she said. "We exclude people from the peer group, we give the silent treatment … We'll spread rumors about the person, so we'll disparage their appearance, we'll suggest that they're promiscuous, those sorts of things."

Vaillancourt emphasized the importance of this research — it addresses a common social issue that hasn’t been scientifically studied up until this point. This behavior should be regarded as more than just mere pettiness because indirect aggression is an effective way of inflicting emotional harm. "We needed to have science to support what our anecdotal evidence is, and certainly I can appreciate that it is a little off-putting that women behave poorly, we don't like to be told the truth," she told CBS. "But it's important because we have girls who take their lives over this — about the way they're treated."

The wide use of online social networks has apparently allowed this form of bullying, such as slut-shaming or insults about a person's physique, to become even more rampant, making Vaillancourt’s work all the more relevant.

In another experiment from the same study, Vaillancourt showed a new group of women photographs of both the conservative and sexy confederate, as well as a photo of the sexy confederate that was doctored to make her look overweight. They found that women preferred not to be friends with the sexy confederate nor with the photoshopped version. They were also less inclined to introduce their boyfriends to her, or let their boyfriends spend time with either version of the sexy woman.

Altogether, women were three times more likely to introduce the buttoned-up, confederate woman to their boyfriend than the thin sexy one. Vaillancourt told The Atlantic that this difference revealed how women “are threatened by, disapprove of, and punish women who appear and/or act promiscuous.”

A study in the Review of General Psychology described the regard that women have towards other women’s apparent promiscuity as a form of cultural suppression of female sexuality that is mostly carried out by women. “The view that men suppress female sexuality received hardly any support and is flatly contradicted by some findings,” authors, Roy Baumeister and Jean Twenge, concluded. “Instead, the evidence favors the view that women have worked to stifle each other’s sexuality because sex is a limited resource that women use to negotiate with men, and scarcity gives women an advantage.”

Source: Vaillancourt T, Charma A. Intolerance of sexy peers: intrasexual competition among women. Aggressive Behavior. 2013.

[theatlantic]

As Babies We Knew Morality

New research supports the understanding that all people are born with a sense of good and bad. What does that say about altruism, community, and the capacity to kill one another?

Read more. [Image: Shutterstock]

[allthingspsychology]

Certain Fears Processed by Different Neuron Groups

In a mouse study conducted by researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, it was found that certain fears - physical pain, aggressive members of the same species and predators - activate different brain circuits, even though the mice reacted to the different threats identically.

Results of the study, which researchers say could help humans with phobias and panic attacks, are published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Bianca Silva worked with colleagues to carry out the work at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Italy, exposing mice to three threats:

Another aggressive mouse

A rat predator, or

A mild electric shock to the feet.

In all situations, the mice showed consistent fearful reactions to the threats by running away or freezing. However, the scientists mapped the brain activity of the mice and found that their brains showed certain differences.

A region in the brain called the ventromedial hypothalamus (VMH) showed different parts that "lit up," depending on the threat. The researchers say this region of the brain has "been implicated in feeding, sex and aggression."

Certain fears, certain circuits

When the mice were faced with another aggressive mouse, the bottom and sides of the VMH were activated. However, when faced with the predator (rat), the central and upper areas of the VMH lit up.

And when the team blocked only the "rat fear" areas with drugs, the mice were no longer afraid of the rat but still feared the mouse. According to the researchers, this shows that the mice rely on this brain circuit to process predator fear.

"We found that there seems to be a circuit for handling fear of predators - which has been described anatomically as a kind of defense circuit - but fear of members of the same species uses the reproductive circuit instead," says Silva, adding that "fear of pain goes through yet another part of the brain."

Potential treatment for phobias or panic attacks

According to the team, the human brain has similar circuits to those found in the mice.

Because we experience fears in a wide variety, these findings could help scientists develop treatments for certain phobias or panic attacks, simply by targeting the "relevant region" of the brain.

And the scientists have plans to dig deeper into how these fears work in the brain.

Cornelius Gross, who led the work at the EMBL, says that what his team is interested in is whether their results represent a mental state.

"If so," he says, "mice should be able to be in that state without expressing it in their behavior - do they re-live that fear, for example? These are not easy questions to ask in the mouse, but we're looking into them."

Gross told Medical News Today about the kind of interventions that could potentially help humans as a result of their findings:

"Our findings suggest that drugs that inhibit the predator circuit might block fear associated with predator-like threats or their memories in humans - the monsters of our nightmares, menacing military vehicles - while drugs that inhibit the reproductive circuit might block fear associated with socially threatening situations, such as public speaking that is enhanced in persons with anxiety disorders like social phobia."

Medical News Today recently reported on a study that suggested anxiety can cause the brain to transform neutral odors to negative ones, creating a "vicious cycle," whereby stress is heightened.

Written by Marie Ellis

[allthingspsychology]

The Dark Side of Psychology in Abuse and Interrogation

This week the Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP) and the Open Society Foundations (OSF) have published the most comprehensive study on the role of psychologists in the War on Terror. At 269 pages, the full report is as detailed as it is grim, concluding that American psychologists collaborated extensively with the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, and the CIA to develop a range of interrogation methods used in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay.

The list of methods is horrifying: beatings, exposure to extreme cold, shackling, repeated slamming into walls, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, exposure to prolonged white noise and yelling, forced nakedness, exploitation of phobias, slaps to the face and abdomen, cramped confinement, prolonged stress positions (such as having hands and feet chained to the floor), forced feeding via gastrointestinal tubing, sexual and religious humiliation, forcible restraint of the head, deprivation of basic items such as sheets, blankets and mattresses (termed "comfort items"), threats to the detainee’s family, asphyxiation, and waterboarding. 

The report documents how psychologists consulted with the military under the Orwellian euphemism of "safety officers". Their official role was to work in Behavioral Science Consultation Teams to "identify vulnerabilities of detainees and collaborate with interrogators in exploiting them". Psychologists were selected for these positions based on professional training in clinical and forensic psychology. Yet while clearly valuing these qualifications, the military classified the psychologists as "combatants" rather than health practitioners, a move which enabled them to bypass normal ethical standards.

Those ethical standards themselves are unclear. The American Psychological Association (APA) – the official professional body for psychologists in the US – officially rejects torture but it also supports the role of psychologists in interrogation: "It is consistent with the APA Ethics Code for psychologists to serve in consultative roles to interrogation and information-gathering processes for national-security related purposes". The APA has yet to indicate which, if any, of the methods listed in the IMAP/OSF report would be consistent with its ethical policy.

The position of the British Psychological Society is even less clear. On the one hand the Society condemns torture yet at the same time remains silent on whether psychologists can assist with interrogation or other military objectives. As with the APA's policy, the point at which interrogation becomes abuse is left unsaid, the boundaries of unethical conduct given room to move.

The report makes a number of concrete recommendations, calling for US president Barack Obama to apply more strict prohibitions on the use of "sleep deprivation, isolation, exploitation of fear, and other interrogation methods that violate international standards". It also urges the APA to clarify its ethical policy and "repudiate the report of its Presidential Task Force…that condones the participation of psychologists in interrogation".

These are undoubtedly vital reforms, but the facts uncovered by this study raise even more fundamental questions. In the quest for national security, is there a genuine balance to be met between the ideologies of "do no harm" and "prevent harm being done"? At what point (if any) is it morally acceptable for psychologists to be deployed as weapons of war? As important as it is for the psychological profession to clarify its policies on these issues, it is also not for psychologists alone to provide the answers. That responsibility is shared by all citizens of a free society.

[allthingspsychology]

In Animal Study, 'Cold Turkey' Withdrawal From Drugs Triggers Mental Decline

Nov. 8, 2013 — Can quitting drugs without treatment trigger a decline in mental health? That appears to be the case in an animal model of morphine addiction. Georgetown University Medical Center researchers say their observations suggest that managing morphine withdrawal could promote a healthier mental state in people.

"Over time, drug-abusing individuals often develop mental disorders," says Italo Mocchetti, PhD, a professor of neuroscience. "It's been thought that drug abuse itself contributes to mental decline, but our findings suggest that 'quitting cold turkey' can also lead to damage."

In the study published in the November issue of Brain, Behavior and Immunity and presented at Neuroscience 2013, Mocchetti and his research colleagues treated the animals with morphine, or allowed them to undergo withdrawal by stopping the treatment. Then, they measured pro-inflammatory cytokines, which can promote damage and cell death, and the protein CCL5, which has various protective effects in the brain.

"Interestingly, we found that treating the addicted animals with morphine both increased the protective CCL5 protein while decreasing pro-inflammatory cytokines, suggesting a beneficial effect," Mocchetti explains. The animals that ween't treated during withdrawal had the opposite results -- decreased CCL5 and increased levels of the damaging cytokines.

"From these findings, it appears that morphine withdrawal may be a causative factor that leads to mental decline, presenting an important avenue for research in how we can better help people who are trying to quit using drugs," concludes Mocchetti.

[allthingspsychology]

UGA Psychology Professor Learns What Monkeys See, Humans Do

A University of Georgia psychology professor is using monkeys to discover the basics of learning.

To see whether humans are alone in the ability pick up skills, Dorothy Fragaszy and other collaborating authors from around the world began studying humans’ closet ancestors, the primates.

Fragaszy is also the director of the Primate Cognition and Behavior Laboratory, a psychology department laboratory dedicated to answering psychological questions through the study of primates.

The study was funded by National Geographic, The LSB Leakey Foundation, a research organization dedicated to the study of human origin and the University of Georgia and took place in both South Africa and Fazenda Boa Vista and its adjacent lands in Brazil.

The study, published Oct. 7 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, a publication dedicated to topics such as biology, looked at a broad range of tool wielding primates, including the great apes.

The researchers looked specifically at orangutans and chimpanzees in South Africa. Fragaszy and her team focused on one of her personal favorites, the capuchin monkey, found in Brazil.

“The thrust of our work in this project is to understand how a young monkey becomes proficient at tools usage, things such as using rocks to crack open nuts,” Fragaszy said. “Despite what people think, tool usage is very uncommon. It's know to occur in only four species spontaneously in the wild. This includes great apes, capuchin monkeys and long tailed macaques.”

Fragaszy’s research focuses on how the capuchin monkeys learn the skills they need to use rocks as tools to gather food, including picking nuts, finding a large stone to break the nut on and finding a stone with the right weight to break open the nut.

“All capuchin monkeys are very manipulative, extractive and creative foragers. Their specialty is going after tough foods. Foods they have to catch, tear out of the earth or break open to get to,” Fragaszy said.

Like human children, Fragaszy said young capuchin monkeys watch older family and friends collect food, such as cracking nuts.

[allthingspsychology]

Inside the Cheaters Mind

A few years ago, acting on a tip, school administrators at Great Neck North High School, a prominent, academically competitive public school in Long Island, took a closer look at students’ standardized test scores. Some of them seemed suspiciously high. What’s more, some of the high scorers had registered to take the test well outside their home district. When the Educational Testing Service conducted a handwriting analysis on the suspect exams, they concluded that the same person had taken multiple tests, registering each time under a different name. In November, 2011, twenty students from schools in Nassau County were arrested and accused of cheating. The arrests, combined with the social prominence of the school and its students, made the case one of the most prominent cheating scandals in recent history.

When a student sits down at a test, he knows how to cheat, in principle. But how does he decide whether or not he’ll actually do it? Is it logic? An impulse? A subconscious reaction to the adrenaline in his blood and the dopamine in his brain? People cheat all the time. But why, exactly, do they decide to do it in the first place?

One early theory, promoted by the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, held that cheating is governed by our moral development: the more advanced we are, the less likely we are to cheat. According to Kohlberg, we pass through six stages as we grow older, during which we become progressively less egotistical and more practiced at reasoning through the problems of morality. With each step in development, we become less likely to cheat. Cheating, in other words, is the result of a lack of moral fortitude and education. Later views contended that people cheat based on the situation. In 1996, the psychologist and economist George Loewenstein presented a cold, rational formula: people weigh the benefits of the unethical action against the costs of committing it, and decide accordingly. That same year, the psychologists David Messick and Max Bazerman countered with a less precise, more emotional approach, positing that cheating is the result of a highly subjective reasoning process that includes three types of argument: how we think about the world, how we think about other people, and how we think about ourselves. Eight years later, Bazerman offered an addendum to his initial view. For the most part, he said, our decision to cheat or not cheat occurs on a subconscious level. It’s a result of situational forces of which we are hardly, if at all, aware.

Most modern research on cheating explores the subtle behavioral influences that form the noisy background to our daily choices. In a typical laboratory set-up to measure cheating behavior, people are placed in a situation where they think their actions are anonymous and where there is no chance of getting caught. In reality, of course, what they do is observed. As it turns out, almost anyone will cheat when given even minor, consciously imperceptible behavioral cues. For instance, in a series of three experiments, a group of psychologists found that lighting could affect cheating. In one study, participants in a dimly-lit room cheated more often than those in a lighter one. While both groups performed equally well on a set of math problems, students in the darker room self-reported that they correctly solved, on average, four more problems than the other group—earning $1.85 more as a result, since they were being paid for each correct answer. The authors suggested that the darkness created an “illusory anonymity”: even though you aren’t actually more anonymous in the dark than in the light, you feel as though you are, making you more likely to engage in behaviors you otherwise wouldn’t.

Similar effects have been observed with a variety of situational factors that don’t seem directly related to cheating. We cheat more, for instance, when we’re in a messy environment—one that has more signs of socially deviant behavior, like litter, graffiti, and other rubble. We’re also more likely to cheat when we think there’s more to go around, since there are plenty of resources and we believe that our own behavior won’t have much of an impact. We cheat, too, when we’re simply exposed to a statement that highlights determinism—when we’re told that our behavior is a result of genes and the environment, as opposed to free will. When we are placed in a position of perceived power, the likelihood of cheating also goes up. New research from the psychologists Andy Yap, Dana Carney, and colleagues suggests that people who assume expansive power poses, such as standing with their feet shoulder-width apart and their hands on their hips, become, consciously or not, more likely to steal money or cheat on a test. When they sit in expansive car seats, which allow them to spread out, instead of constricting them as a tighter seat would, they become more likely to commit a traffic violation during a driving simulation—and, in a real-world version, cars with more expansive drivers’ seats were more likely to be illegally double-parked. One recent study, out last month in the journalPsychological Science, even suggests that the common societal values of power and achievement can lead to cheating in and of themselves: they create a competitive mindset that in turn makes us more likely to engage in unethical self-promotional behavior. The results echo earlier findings that “achievement” goals—a focus on results, rather than on understanding—as opposed to “mastery” goals, increase cheating.

We also cheat more when we’re feeling tired, either physically or mentally. In a 2011study led by the cognitive psychologists Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely, researchers asked students to watch a video and either do nothing or actively ignore words that appeared on the screen at the same time. The students who made the effort to ignore the words cheated far more during a subsequent problem-solving task. Sleep deprivation led to similar results: individuals who were more tired became more likely to cheat in a work environment. We don’t cheat spontaneously when we’re sleepy or drained; it’s that, when the opportunity to cheat presents itself, we become increasingly more likely to take advantage of it, as our self-control is depleted. One possible reason for cheating on standardized tests? Most of them are held early in the morning on Saturdays, when students are at their sleep-deprived worst.

Most perniciously, cheating can become self-reinforcing. When we cheat, we have a tendency to rationalize the behavior. We can’t change the past, so we change our attitude and justify our actions. But that adjustment, while it may make us feel better, also makes us more likely to cheat again: we cheat, we rationalize it, we accept it, and we cheat once more. Recent research from Harvard University suggests that, in both hypothetical scenarios and real-world tasks, people who behave dishonestly are more likely to become morally disengaged from their environment and to forget moral rules, such as honor codes. Cheating, it seems, can cause a self-justifying temporary block on ethical information.

Fortunately, the same is true for preventing cheating: small shifts in the environment that seem unrelated to honesty but trigger self-reflection can make people less likely to cheat. If we know we’re being watched, for instance, we become less likely to behave dishonestly. Even subtle signs of surveillence are persuasive: mirrors or pictures of eyes can dissuade cheating. In one study, people contributed three times more money to a coffee-payment honesty box when they were under a poster of eyes, as opposed to one of flowers. And while having an honor code or other ethical-behavior standard in and of itself may not reduce cheating, it does help to bring such codes to mind before placing people in situations where cheating is possible. The psychologist Nina Mazar and colleagues found that simply asking students to write down the Ten Commandments lowered their rate of cheating, whether or not they could actually recall any of the commandments or were even religious. The phenomenon is known as the mere reminder effect. Cheating was likewise reduced when students saw a short honor-code statement (“I understand that this short survey falls under M.I.T.’s honor system”) on the top of a page before taking a test. Even asking someone to recall when they behaved immorally in the past reduces the likelihood of their cheating in the future.

Social norms, too, play an important role in the decision to cheat: if cheating seems more widely accepted, people are more likely to be dishonest; the reverse is true as well. In one set of experiments, psychologists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University found that if someone had obviously cheated, by finishing a problem-solving task much more quickly than would be possible had he completed it honestly, other people in the room became more likely to cheat as well—but only if they perceived the cheater to be like them. If the cheater seemed different—in this case, if he wore a rival school’s T-shirt—students became far less likely to cheat. In the case of the Long Island students, it seems that, while relatively few students actually cheated, most were aware that it was a regular occurrence. It was a student, in fact, who first brought the alleged cheating to the attention of a Great Neck counsellor. Cheating was a known, somewhat accepted norm; little wonder that it swept through five separate schools.

Those early theorists who thought of cheating as a matter of character and moral development, though, may not have been entirely wrong. No matter the circumstances, it appears that some people simply will not cheat. In Gino and Ariely’s 2011 work—the studies on self-control and mental fatigue—certain people didn’t cheat no matter how tired they became. Individuals who rated characteristics like honesty, fairness, and compassion as more important remained immune to the cheating temptation. A solid moral compass can, in other words, lead one safely through dim rooms with graffiti-covered walls.

[allthingspsychology]

The Psychology Of Online Comments

Several weeks ago, on September 24th, Popular Science announced that it would banish comments from its Web site. The editors argued that Internet comments, particularly anonymous ones, undermine the integrity of science and lead to a culture of aggression and mockery that hinders substantive discourse. “Even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader’s perception of a story,” wrote the online-content director Suzanne LaBarre, citing a recent study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison as evidence. While it’s tempting to blame the Internet, incendiary rhetoric has long been a mainstay of public discourse. Cicero, for one, openly called Mark Antony a “public prostitute,” concluding, “but let us say no more of your profligacy and debauchery.” What, then, has changed with the advent of online comments? Anonymity, for one thing. According to a September Pew poll, a quarter of Internet users have posted comments anonymously. As the age of a user decreases, his reluctance to link a real name with an online remark increases; forty per cent of people in the eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-old demographic have posted anonymously. One of the most common critiques of online comments cites a disconnect between the commenter’s identity and what he is saying, a phenomenon that the psychologist John Suler memorably termed the “online disinhibition effect.” The theory is that the moment you shed your identity the usual constraints on your behavior go, too—or, to rearticulate the 1993 Peter Steiner cartoon, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re not a dog. When Arthur Santana, a communications professor at the University of Houston, analyzed nine hundred randomly chosen user comments on articles about immigration, half from newspapers that allowed anonymous postings, such as the Los Angeles Times and the Houston Chronicle, and half from ones that didn’t, including USA Today and the Wall Street Journal, he discovered that anonymity made a perceptible difference: a full fifty-three per cent of anonymous commenters were uncivil, as opposed to twenty-nine per cent of registered, non-anonymous commenters. Anonymity, Santana concluded, encouraged incivility. On the other hand, anonymity has also been shown to encourage participation; by promoting a greater sense of community identity, users don’t have to worry about standing out individually. Anonymity can also boost a certain kind of creative thinking and lead to improvements in problem-solving. In a study that examined student learning, the psychologists Ina Blau and Avner Caspi found that, while face-to-face interactions tended to provide greater satisfaction, in anonymous settings participation and risk-taking flourished. Anonymous forums can also be remarkably self-regulating: we tend to discount anonymous or pseudonymous comments to a much larger degree than commentary from other, more easily identifiable sources. In a 2012 study of anonymity in computer interactions, researchers found that, while anonymous comments were more likely to be contrarian and extreme than non-anonymous ones, they were also far less likely to change a subject’s opinion on an ethical issue, echoing earlier results from the University of Arizona. In fact, as the Stanford computer scientist Michael Bernstein found when he analyzed the /b/ board of 4chan, an online discussion forum that has been referred to as the Internet’s “rude, raunchy underbelly” and where over ninety per cent of posts are wholly anonymous, mechanisms spontaneously emerged to monitor user interactions and establish a commenter’s status as more or less influential—and credible. Owing to the conflicting effects of anonymity, and in response to the changing nature of online publishing itself, Internet researchers have begun shifting their focus away from anonymity toward other aspects of the online environment, such as tone and content. The University of Wisconsin-Madison study that Popular Science cited, for instance, was focussed on whether comments themselves, anonymous or otherwise, made people less civil. The authors found that the nastier the comments, the more polarized readers became about the contents of the article, a phenomenon they dubbed the “nasty effect.” But the nasty effect isn’t new, or unique to the Internet. Psychologists have long worried about the difference between face-to-face communication and more removed ways of talking—the letter, the telegraph, the phone. Without the traditional trappings of personal communication, like non-verbal cues, context, and tone, comments can become overly impersonal and cold. But a ban on article comments may simply move them to a different venue, such as Twitter or Facebook—from a community centered around a single publication or idea to one without any discernible common identity. Such large group environments, in turn, often produce less than desirable effects, including a diffusion of responsibility: you feel less accountable for your own actions, and become more likely to engage in amoral behavior. In his classic work on the role of groups and media exposure in violence, the social cognitive psychologist Alfred Bandura found that, as personal responsibility becomes more diffused in a group, people tend to dehumanize others and become more aggressive toward them. At the same time, people become more likely to justify their actions in self-absolving ways. Multiple studies have also illustrated that when people don’t think they are going to be held immediately accountable for their words they are more likely to fall back on mental shortcuts in their thinking and writing, processing information less thoroughly. They become, as a result, more likely to resort to simplistic evaluations of complicated issues, as the psychologist Philip Tetlock has repeatedly found over several decades of research on accountability. Removing comments also affects the reading experience itself: it may take away the motivation to engage with a topic more deeply, and to share it with a wider group of readers. In a phenomenon known as shared reality, our experience of something is affected by whether or not we will share it socially. Take away comments entirely, and you take away some of that shared reality, which is why we often want to share or comment in the first place. We want to believe that others will read and react to our ideas. What the University of Wisconsin-Madison study may ultimately show isn’t the negative power of a comment in itself but, rather, the cumulative effect of a lot of positivity or negativity in one place, a conclusion that is far less revolutionary. One of the most important controls of our behavior is the established norms within any given community. For the most part, we act consistently with the space and the situation; a football game is different from a wedding, usually. The same phenomenon may come into play in different online forums, in which the tone of existing comments and the publication itself may set the pace for a majority of subsequent interactions. Anderson, Brossard, and their colleagues’ experiment lacks the crucial element of setting, since the researchers created fake comments on a fake post, where the tone was simply either civil or uncivil (“If you don’t see the benefits … you’re an idiot”). Would the results have been the same if the uncivil remarks were part of a string of comments on a New York Times article or a Gawker post, where comments can be promoted or demoted by other users? On Gawker, in the process of voting a comment up or down, users can set the tone of the comments, creating a surprisingly civil result. The readership, in other words, spots the dog at the other of the end of the keyboard, and puts him down. As the psychologists Marco Yzer and Brian Southwell put it, “new communication technologies do not fundamentally alter the theoretical bounds of human interaction; such interaction continues to be governed by basic human tendencies.” Whether online, on the phone, by telegraph, or in person, we are governed by the same basic principles. The medium may change, but people do not. The question instead is whether the outliers, the trolls and the flamers, will hold outsized influence—and the answer seems to be that, even protected by the shade of anonymity, a dog will often make himself known with a stray, accidental bark. Then, hopefully, he will be treated accordingly.

[allthingspsychology]

Babies Know When You're Faking

If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands! That's easy enough for children to figure out because the emotion matches the movement. But when feelings and reactions don't align, can kids tell there's something wrong? New research from Concordia University proves that they can - as early as 18 months.

In a study recently published in Infancy: The Official Journal of the International Society on Infant Studies, psychology researchers Sabrina Chiarella and Diane Poulin-Dubois demonstrate that infants can detect whether a person's emotions are justifiable given a particular context. They prove that babies understand how the meaning of an experience is directly linked to the expressions that follow.

The implications are significant, especially for caregivers. "Our research shows that babies cannot be fooled into believing something that causes pain results in pleasure. Adults often try to shield infants from distress by putting on a happy face following a negative experience. But babies know the truth: as early as 18 months, they can implicitly understand whichemotions go with which events," says psychology professor Poulin-Dubois.

To perform the research, she and PhD candidate Sabrina Chiarella recruited 92 infants at the 15 and 18-month mark. In a lab setting, the babies watched as an actor went through several scenarios in which emotional reactions went with or against pantomimed experiences. In one scenario, the researcher showed a mismatched emotion by being sad when presented with a desired toy. In another, she expressed an emotion that went with the experience by reacting in pain when pretending to hurt her finger.

At 15 months, the infants did not show a significant difference in reactions to these events, showing empathy through their facial expressions to all sad faces. This indicates that the understanding of the link between a facial expression following an emotional experience is an ability that has yet to develop at that stage.

At 18 months, however, the infants clearly detected when facial expressions did not match the experience. They spent more time looking at the researcher's face and checked back more frequently with the caregiver in the room with them so that they could gauge the reaction of a trusted source. They also showed empathy toward the person only when her sad face was justified;that is, only when the researcher was sad or in pain when she was supposed to be.

Chiarella explains that the indiscriminate show of concern to sad faces in the younger infants is an adaptive behaviour. "The ability to detect sadness and then react immediately has an evolutionary implication. However, to function effectively in the social world, children need to develop the ability to understand others' behaviours by inferring what is going on internally for those around them."

The researchers are currently examining whether infants who are exposed to an individual who is emotionally unreliable will affect in their willingness to help or learn from that individual.

[allthingspsychology]

I Forgot What? Healing Through Memories

A couple of weeks ago, my external life took a back seat to my internal life. Although my external life is pretty good these days, my internal life is pretty ugly. It is a series of traumatic experiences with emotions to match.

When it is time to pay attention to the internal life, it means my childhood memories are coming back.

And I had better pay attention. I had better be ready for some depression, some sadness, some anger that rivals a toddler’s tantrums, some anxiety and some intense exhaustion. Needless to say, the external life starts to slow down a bit.

Don’t get me wrong, the basic stuff still happens. The kids eat. They go to school. I go to work.

But phone calls get missed. The emails pile up. And obviously, the writing just doesn’t happen.

There are entire nights of staring at the wall. There are a lot of naps. There are many self-care visits to therapeutic practitioners.

Over the years, I have learned what it takes to face the memories. These coping mechanisms are critical to my recovery. If I don’t do them, there will be one result. I will get sick. I will get so sick that there will be no external life. Everything will stop. And as a single mother, that is simply not an option.

The latest memories are intense. As my coping mechanisms get stronger, so do the emotions I must address. These memories are clarifying a few things. First and foremost, I am accidentally alive. I already thought that. But now I know it for certain. The number of times I cheated death seem nothing short of miraculous. I was one heck of a kid.

More important, these memories are identifying some people in my childhood who may be helpful in putting my puzzle together. And for that, I am grateful.

I have been asked many times how the memory recovery process works. For me, it is a process. It is almost scientific. It starts the same way for every memory. I usually get joint pain. I call it “trauma body.” On the bad days, it can hurt to walk. When I was in my 20s, I thought I had arthritis. I probably did. It was arthritis caused by trauma.

Next, I get an unexplained burst of raw emotion. It could be any emotion. I will feel rage or extreme sadness which can provoke depression or suicidal thoughts. A turning point for my recovery process was the realization that these emotions were not associated with the present moment. Honestly, it is probably that realization that has saved my life.

Once the emotion passes, I start to get a glimpse of a place. It could be a place that I have already remembered. These days, after so many memories, it usually is. But the new memory will add a detail, a new person or a new aspect to the place.

The most surprising part of the internal process comes when my external life gets involved. Events from the present moment will serve as reminders of the past memory. I will try to remember a name only to hear it blurted out by a news anchor on the television. I will wonder what someone looked like only to meet an individual that looks just like him or her. I will drive by a house, and suddenly realize that the house is identical to the house in my memory.

When I least expect it, I’ll remember something that will start to piece together a scenario in my mind. At first, it will seem relatively innocent. Maybe it will be a friend or a group of friends or a family event. Maybe it will be a party or a gathering.

Within a day of that understanding, the reality of the memory will hit me like a ton of bricks. It will leave me stunned. My first reaction is always the same: How could I forget that?

When I started my recovery, I would get frustrated when the memory recovery would start. I used to see the memories as a problem to be solved. I used to see them as reliving my pain. I don’t anymore. Now, I see that my inner child feels comfortable enough to share new information with me. Now, I see memory recovery as another chance to heal from my trauma and integrate as a whole being.

Do I wish I could spend my adult life without this process? Sure. But I can’t keep my head in the sand. With every memory comes physical and emotional relief. I am healing on all levels. I don’t want to run away from that. I have been running for 30 years. It is time to remember. It is time to heal.