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Creating False Memories. Elizabeth F. Loftus In 1986 Nadean Cool, a nurse's aide in Wisconsin, sought therapy from a psychiatrist to help her cope with her reaction to a traumatic event experienced by her daughter. During therapy, the psychiatrist used hypnosis and other suggestive techniques to dig out buried memories of abuse that Cool herself had allegedly experienced. In the process, Cool became convinced that she had repressed memories of having been in a satanic cult, of eating babies, of being raped, of having sex with animals and of being forced to watch the murder of her eight-year-old friend. When Cool finally realized that false memories had been planted, she sued the psychiatrist for malpractice. In all four cases, the women developed memories about childhood abuse in therapy and then later denied their authenticity. My own research into memory distortion goes back to the early 1970s, when I began studies of the "misinformation effect.

" False Childhood Memories My research associate, Jacqueline E. Calorie Counter (CalorieLab) 10 Ways Our Minds Warp Time. How time perception is warped by life-threatening situations, eye movements, tiredness, hypnosis, age, the emotions and more… The mind does funny things to our experience of time. Just ask French cave expert Michel Siffre. In 1962 Siffre went to live in a cave that was completely isolated from mechanical clocks and natural light.

He soon began to experience a huge change in his perception of time. When he tried to measure out two minutes by counting up to 120 at one-second intervals, it took him 5 minutes. After emerging from the cave he guessed the trip had lasted 34 days. But you don’t have to hide out in a cave for a couple of months to warp time, it happens to us all the time. 1. People often report that time seems to slow down in life-threatening situations, like skydiving. But are we really processing more information in these seconds when time seems to stretch? To test this, Stetson et al. (2007) had people staring at a special chronometer while free-falling 50 metres into a net.

Rosenhan experiment. Rosenhan's study was done in two parts. The first part involved the use of healthy associates or "pseudopatients" (three women and five men, including Rosenhan himself) who briefly feigned auditory hallucinations in an attempt to gain admission to 12 different psychiatric hospitals in five different states in various locations in the United States. All were admitted and diagnosed with psychiatric disorders. After admission, the pseudopatients acted normally and told staff that they felt fine and had no longer experienced any additional hallucinations.

All were forced to admit to having a mental illness and agree to take antipsychotic drugs as a condition of their release. The average time that the patients spent in the hospital was 19 days. The study concluded "it is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals" and also illustrated the dangers of dehumanization and labeling in psychiatric institutions. The pseudopatient experiment[edit] Notes. Steven Pinker: Language as a Window into Human Nature. 7 Helpful Tips To Immediately Increase Your Confidence. Your rating: None Average: 3.7 (6 votes) 1.) Ask yourself, “What’s the worst that could happen?” Too often, we place excess importance on potential problems. We all have a certain amount of energy so let’s apply it to creating extraordinary relationships, advancing our careers and meeting our goals INSTEAD of wasting that energy worrying.

Take action on what you have control over and minimize risks for what you don’t. Then invest your energy wisely. 2.) 3.) 4.) 5.) 6.) 7.) Author's Bio: This article is based on the book, “Unstoppable Confidence” by Kent Sayre. Dreams: Night School. The Dream Robbers What happens when a rat stops dreaming ? In 2004, researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison decided to find out. Their method was simple, if a bit devilish. Step 1: Strand a rat in a tub of water. In this uncomfortable position, the rat is able to rest and eventually fall asleep. Step 2: After several mostly dreamless nights, the creature is subjected to a virtual decathlon of physical ordeals designed to test its survival behaviors. The dream-deprived rats flubbed each of the tasks. The surprise came during Step 3. What Dreams Are Made Of Dreaming is so basic to human existence, it's astonishing we don't understand it better.

Later came the idea that dreams are the cognitive echoes of our efforts to work out conflicting emotions. "There's nothing closer to a consensus on the purpose and function of dreaming than there's ever been," says Deirdre Barrett, a Harvard psychologist and editor of the forthcoming . A Theater of Threats Dreams may do the same thing. BBC Science | Human Body and Mind | Psychology Tests & Surveys. Voice Dialogue International. TCUP - The Collective Unconsciousness Project.

Psychology | Watch Free Documentaries Online - Page 5. Introduction to Psychology | Yale Video Course. How the Brain Stops Time. One of the strangest side-effects of intense fear is time dilation, the apparent slowing-down of time. It's a common trope in movies and TV shows, like the memorable scene from The Matrix in which time slows down so dramatically that bullets fired at the hero seem to move at a walking pace. In real life, our perceptions aren't keyed up quite that dramatically, but survivors of life-and-death situations often report that things seem to take longer to happen, objects fall more slowly, and they're capable of complex thoughts in what would normally be the blink of an eye. Now a research team from Israel reports that not only does time slow down, but that it slows down more for some than for others. Anxious people, they found, experience greater time dilation in response to the same threat stimuli.

An intriguing result, and one that raises a more fundamental question: how, exactly, does the brain carry out this remarkable feat? Was it scary enough to generate a sense of time dilation? The Phobia List. 7 Social Hacks For Manipulating People. 1. Whenever someone is angry and confrontational, stand next to them instead of in front of them. You won’t appear as so much of a threat, and they eventually calm down. 2. Open with “I need your help.” People don’t like the guilt of not helping someone out. When asking for a favor from someone, begin your request by saying “I need your help.” It greatly increases your chances of getting that favor done. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Highly Sensitive People Emotional Problems - Are You Too Sensitive. Photo Credit: George Doyle/Stockbyte Many years ago I had a falling-out with a girlfriend that proved so painful, I can hardly talk about it today. My friend (let's call her Mary) was a colorful television personality and had the world at her feet. She was engaged to a handsome European, and her face was plastered across the newspapers. I was working for 60 Minutes at the time, and we often met for lunch. Then one day her show was canceled and she asked me — casually, as though it didn't really matter — if I'd put her forward as a reporter for 60 Minutes.

Thinking she was as tough as she seemed and that she hardly needed my help anyway (I was certain she had many other job offers on the table), I answered that I was just a minion at 60 Minutes and that besides, they had millions of people hankering to work there. Mary never spoke to me again. HSPs are hardwired differently than the rest of the population. Still, not everyone is buying. TestYourself by PsychTests: Tests and quizzes on personality, IQ, love/relationships, career, health and attitudes/lifestyle. Professional quality online psychological assessments developed by the web's prominent testing experts. 15 Styles of Distorted Thinking. Revenge of the Introvert. After ten years as a psychologist practicing psychodynamic psychotherapy , I reclined on the couch of my own analyst feeling burdened by my chosen work.

After a day of seeing patients, I was drained. I had been trained to listen at many levels—words, emotions, unconscious disclosures—and I took all of that in and sorted it out in my mind. I was good at helping others discover and pursue what they wanted out of life. But at day's end I had no resources left to do it for myself. Then I heard myself say: "I don't like being a therapist. " Suddenly I felt free, loosed from expectations that never fit. As a card-carrying introvert , I am one of the many people whose personality confers on them a preference for the inner world of their own mind rather than the outer world of sociability. Over the past two decades, scientists have whittled down to five those clusters of cognitions, emotions, motivations, and behaviors that we mean by "personality" factors. Introversion in Action.

Psychology Today: Health, Help, Happiness + Find a Therapist. Personality Disorder Information. Focus on Brain Disorders - Bipolar Disorder - Introduction. Bipolar disorder is a type of mood disorder. Mood disorders are broadly divided into unipolar disorder and bipolar disorder. Read more about the difference between bipolar and unipolar disorder. Read more about mood disorders. Bipolar disorder (previously termed 'manic-depressive illness') is a relatively common and chronic psychiatric condition in which patients experience episodes of mania and depression, usually with intervening periods of relative mood stability.

Bipolar disorder is associated with cognitive and behavioural difficulties and in severe cases psychosis can present in both the manic and depressive states. Often beginning in adolescence or early adulthood, bipolar disorder has a profound negative effect on interpersonal, social, family and vocational outcomes and is a risk factor for substance abuse and suicide (Cassidy et al, 2001; Jamison, 2000; Maj et al, 2002).

Authors@Google: Steven Pinker. Personality Tests. Changing minds and persuasion -- How we change what others think, believe, feel and do. Consciousness and Its Place in Nature - Philosophy. When I learnt philosophy in the late '60s, I think it is fair to say that most philosophers were very much still under-labourers, in Locke's phrase, clearing away the nonsense that besets our thinking but not advancing many novel ideas of their own. Now, however, they explore realms of supposedly actual possible worlds, or even impossible ones; they contemplate the possibility that some contradictions are true; maybe some even count the number of angels on the end of a pin.

This volume presents arguments for and against another bizarre, but strangely prevalent idea: panpsychism, the notion that the fundamental stuff of the universe is somehow conscious. Commonsensically, we think of consciousness or sentience as a matter of having a specific and very complex set of physiological structures. We can map the sensors that are responsible for our tastes, say, and we can discover that cats lack a sense of sweetness.

But that is common sense. Or do they? References Nagel, T., 1979.