In Reading Facial Emotion, Context Is Everything. News In a close-up headshot, Serena Williams’ eyes are pressed tensely closed; her mouth is wide open, teeth bared. Her face looks enraged. Now zoom out: The tennis star is on the court, racket in hand, fist clenched in victory. She’s not angry. She’s ecstatic, having just beaten her sister Venus at the 2008 U.S. “Humans are exquisitely sensitive to context, and that can very dramatically shape what is seen in a face,” says psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University and Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard School of Medicine.
The paper—reviewing a handful of hundreds of studies supporting the authors’ position, says Barrett—refutes the contention that there are six to 10 biologically basic emotions, each encoded in a particular facial arrangement, which can be read easily in an image of a disembodied face by anyone, anywhere. Facial-emotional perception is influenced by many kinds of contexts, says the paper, including conceptual information and sense stimuli. Why We're at War With Ourselves: Understanding Racism as an Introduction to Psychology | Floating University. There's nothing inherently wrong with stereotypes. In fact, cognitive psychologists argue that we need them in order to survive.
For instance, that is how we know what is good to eat, and what is not. Yale professor Paul Bloom, argues in his Floating University lecture that "part of being a successful human is the ability to learn, and part of learning is making statistical generalizations on the basis of limited experience. " While the stereotypes we make about groups we are part of can be accurate and positive, we want to avoid certain stereotypes, "particularly ugly pernicious stereotypes," Bloom argues, "that are based on a person's sex, age, race, profession, religion, sexual orientation, and nationality. " These stereotypes tend to be based on biased information.
For instance, when the Soviet Union was America's ally during World War II, Americans tended to describe Russians as “brave and hard-working. " Watch the video here: The Evolution Of Cooperation Edge Master Class 2011. I have a second story induced by Steve's brilliant talk and by people who don't do violence, but imagine violence. It's a story of a Viennese professor who is walking in front of his department and sees there's a flag of mourning over the department. Somebody says to him, "Oh, my God, that's so bad, one of your colleagues has died. Who is it? " And the professor said, "I don't know, I'm equally happy about anybody.
" The title of my talk is "Evolution of Cooperation. " I asked my colleagues, the astrophysicists, when was the Big Bang? But now we come to biology and suddenly the precision of dating is no longer so accurate. The oldest number, which is debated, for the emergence of bacterial-based life is 3.8 billion years, but most people would rather be happy with 3.5 billion years. And then 1.8 billion. The other thing that I find fascinating about this event is that you don't know what they made their living on. Up to this point, evolution is mostly genetic evolution. Click to Enlarge.
Therapists are using virtual environments to help people work through phobias | snaplex.com. The Psychology of Occupy Wall Street. Some people will see anything they want to see in any particular movement or demonstration. Movements like Occupy Wall Street are like a Rorschach Inkblot Test — although it’s just ink on a piece of paper, you can see the future and the past in every blot. Psychologist and psychoanalyst Todd Essig sees what he wants to see in the movement. When contrasting it with the Tea Party, he idealizes the motivations and focus of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, as though they were all joined together in a common cause (other than the cause to agitate for change, something President Obama actually started more than 4 years ago).
What I have a hard time wrapping my head around is to understand how people who have such a deep understanding of psychology and insight can’t see how they turn such demonstrations into their own personal Rorschach test. For the record, I’m not a proponent of either the Tea Part of Occupy Wall Street. Xenophobia is nothing new, and the Tea Party hasn’t invented it. Reading, Writing, Empathy: The Rise of 'Social Emotional Learning' - Education. Marc Brackett never liked school. “I was always bored,” he says, “and I never felt like any of my teachers really cared.
I can’t think of anybody that made me feel inspired.” It’s a surprising complaint coming from a 42-year-old Yale research scientist with a 27-page CV and nearly $4 million in career funding. But Brackett knows that many kids feel the way he does about school, and he wants to do a complete emotional makeover of the nation’s schools. At a time of contentious debate over how to reform schools to make teachers more effective and students more successful, “social emotional learning” may be a key part of the solution.
Brackett quickly learned that developing empathy in kids requires working on their teachers first. But the curriculum doesn’t just exist as a separate subject— teachers are trained to integrate lessons in emotion into other subjects. Now in use in hundreds of schools around the country, RULER has been measurably successful. Why the change? Warren Fellow Examines Terrorist Psychology. Lisa Stampnitzky, a Warren Fellow from Oxford University, discusses an excerpt from her book-in-progress "Disciplining Terror: How Experts and Others Created 'Terrorism'" in Robinson Hall on Monday afternoon. Lisa Stampnitzky, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Warren Center for Studies in American History, discussed how to analyze terrorism from a critical perspective during a seminar held in Robinson Hall Monday afternoon.
The seminar, drawn from a chapter from her upcoming work “Disciplining Terror: How Experts and Others Created ‘Terrorism,’” focused on how the idea of terrorism entered the academic arena and the difficulties in deciding who is the “expert” in a field such as terrorism. Stampnitzky, who worked at Oxford University before her fellowship at Harvard, is a sociologist by training, completing her doctoral thesis on terrorist studies. Jeffrey C. Terrorism, as we define it today, is the use of violence or the threat of violence to intimidate, usually for some political end. Depression-Era Woodcuts by Lynd Ward, Father of the Graphic Novel. By Maria Popova What vintage woodcut engravings have to do with #OccupyWallStreet. Some time ago, we marveled at the work of graphic novel pioneer Lynd Ward (1905-1985), whose stunning wordless woodcuts sparked a new dawn of visual storytelling. The genre has since expanded across everything from Hollywood to serious nonfiction — cue in these 10 masterpieces of graphic nonfiction or the recent Richard Feynman graphic biography.
From the Library of America comes a fantastic celebration of Ward’s legacy: Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts collects the artist’s most seminal work in a treasure trove of woodcut goodness created between 1929 and 1937, incredibly costly and near-impossible to find prior to the publication of this volume. An introduction from the one and only Art Spiegelman adds an appropriate dose of entertaining snark and perceptive cultural commentary. The Library of America has an excellent interview with Spiegelman (PDF): Images courtesy of the Library of America Share on Tumblr. Limits of Imagination. Me: Our finite universe simply cannot continue our exponential growth rates for a million years. For trillions of years thereafter, possibilities will be known and fixed, and for each person rather limited. Bryan Caplan: He’s probably right for physical goods.
But why couldn’t the quality of life in virtual reality grow at 4% [per year] for ever? Let me try to explain (again). Imagine that in a million years, our descendants occupy all the 1070 atoms in our galaxy and its surrounding volume, and that it will take another million years to grow that number by a factor of ten, to 1071. Over the last million years they’ve also been searching the space of enjoyable virtual reality designs. Now in this context, imagine what it means for “imagination” to improve by 4% per year. And 529 years is tiny on a cosmological scale. It is also very hard to see how creatures with such subtle preferences would have adaptive advantages in a competitive future scenario.
A new discipline emerges: The psychology of science. You've heard of the history of science, the philosophy of science, maybe even the sociology of science. But how about the psychology of science? In a new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, San Jose State University psychologist Gregory J. Feist argues that a field has been quietly taking shape over the past decade, and it holds great promise for both psychology and science. "Science is a cognitive act by definition: It involves personality, creativity, developmental processes," says Feist -- everything about individual psychology. So what is the psychology of science?
Reviewing about two dozen articles, Feist mentions work in many psychological subspecialties. In its focus on such processes as problem-solving, memory, and creativity, cognitive psychology may be the most mature of the specialties in its relationship to the doing of science. But the new sub-discipline is also good for psychology. 5 Gifts of Being Highly Sensitive. Today I have the pleasure of interviewing Douglas Eby, M.A. /Psychology, who is a writer and researcher on the psychology of creative expression, high ability and personal growth. He is creator of the Talent Development Resources series of sites (including HighlySensitive.org) at I know many of you are “highly sensitive” and enjoy articles on that topic, so I am excited to pique his highly-sensitive brain today! Question: If you had to name the top five gifts of being highly sensitive, what would they be? Douglas: 1. One of the prominent “virtues” of high sensitivity is the richness of sensory detail that life provides.
Of course, people are not simply “sensitive” or “not sensitive” — like other qualities and traits, it’s a matter of degree. Years ago, I took a color discrimination test to work as a photographic technician, making color prints. 2. 3. 4. 5. Question: And, if you had to name five curses, what would they be? Douglas: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Dr. Related Articles. Reliability of Eyewitness Testimony: What We Learned From Troy Davis. The Complicated Psychology of Revenge. A few years ago a group of Swiss researchers scanned the brains of people who had been wronged during an economic exchange game. These people had trusted their partners to split a pot of money with them, only to find that the partners had chosen to keep the loot for themselves. The researchers then gave the people a chance to punish their greedy partners, and for a full minute, as the victims contemplated revenge, the activity in their brains was recorded. The decision caused a rush of neural activity in the caudate nucleus, an area of the brain known to process rewards (in previous work, the caudate has delighted in cocaine and nicotine use).
The findings, published in a 2004 issue of , gave physiological confirmation to what the scorned have been saying for years: Revenge is sweet. A thirst for vengeance is nothing if not timeless. In the past few years, psychological scientists have discovered many ways in which the practice of revenge fails to fulfill its sweet expectations. </i>*}