Psychology Information
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At the end of his second year of Harvard graduate school, neuroscientist and bestselling author Richard Davidson did something his colleagues suspected would mark the end of his academic career: He skipped town and went to India and Sri Lanka for three months to “study meditation.” In the ’70s, just as today, people tended to lump meditation into the new-age category, along with things like astrology, crystals, tantra and herbal “remedies.” But contrary to what his skeptics presumed, not only did Davidson return to resume his studies at Harvard, his trip also marked the beginning of Davidson’s most spectacular body of work: neuroscientific research indicating that meditation (and other strictly mental activity) changes the neuroplasticity of the brain. Thirty years later, Davidson is still researching and writing about the intersection of neuroscience and emotion — he currently teaches psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The scientific argument for being emotional
Rosenhan experiment
The Rosenhan experiment was a famous experiment into the validity of psychiatric diagnosis , conducted by psychologist David Rosenhan and published by the journal Science in 1973 under the title " On being sane in insane places ". [ 1 ] The study is considered an important and influential criticism of psychiatric diagnosis. [ 2 ] Rosenhan's study was done in two parts. The first part involved the use of healthy associates or "pseudopatients" (three women and five men) who briefly simulated 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.
the naked face
August 5, 2002 ANNALS OF PSYCHOLOGY Can you read people's thoughts just by looking at them? Some years ago, John Yarbrough was working patrol for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. It was about two in the morning.
How to Hack Your Brain
You are not who you think you are. Your personality and identity is significantly more malleable than you realize. With a few simple tricks, you can exploit your brain's innate functionality to change just about anything about yourself. Here's how.
Finding ways to relieve stress is absolutely crucial in today’s chaotic world. We need daily buffers to remind us that we are living, thinking, and feeling human beings, not just work-a-holic machines. If we don’t attend to our stress, we can very quickly build up unhealthy levels, sometimes leading to serious conditions like depression, anxiety disorders, heart disease, diabetes, gastrointestinal disorders, eating problems, insomnia, and substance abuse, as well as headaches, muscle pains, and fatigue. Because everyone experiences stress, and it is an unavoidable facet of life, we all need to find our own methods to cope with it.
50 Stress Relievers That Take 5 Minutes or Less
Classification of Emotions
Psychologists have yet to fully tackle the question “How many emotions do we have?” Part of the difficulty is because our experiences are so complex and involve so many different factors, so distinguishing one emotion from another is a lot like drawing lines of sand in the desert. It can be hard to determine where one emotions ends or another begins. Even when we analyze a commonsense emotion like “happiness” or “anger,” we know from everyday experience that these emotions come in many different degrees, qualities, and intensities.
The Misconception: All buttons placed around you do your bidding. The Truth: Many public buttons are only there to comfort you. You press the doorbell button, you hear the doorbell ring. You press the elevator button, it lights up. You press the button on the vending machine, a soft drink comes rattling down the chute. Your whole life, you’ve pressed buttons and been rewarded.
Placebo Buttons
P eople spend 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing, and this mind-wandering typically makes them unhappy. So says a study that used an iPhone Web app to gather 250,000 data points on subjects’ thoughts, feelings, and actions as they went about their lives. The research, by psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University, is described this week in the journal Science .