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Guest Post: The psychology of anthropomorphism, or why I felt empathy towards a piece of trash. In early January, the sidewalks in my neighborhood are lined with discarded Christmas trees. It’s the collective holiday hangover trash, and quite frankly it makes me sad; the trees mark the moment of winter where all that is left are several cheerless months of cold and drudgery. My dog, however, goes apeshit over them. He loves to sniff them. He loves to pee on them. On an early walk, as my dog lifted his leg on the eighth tree of the morning, I saw a tiny ornament clinging to its lowest branches. My first thought: “Oh, no no no. My second thought: “I will save you.”

My next thought: “What the hell was that?” When I got home, I did what any procrastinating science writer with a pile of deadlines would do: I put everything aside to try to figure out why I felt empathy for a piece of trash. I had a hunch that my attraction to Freddie (yes, by this time my trash had a name) had to do with the fact that he (and a gender) was shaped like an animal. Image Credits: All photos by Brooke Borel. The Science of What Makes an Introvert and an Extrovert. Front Desk. All Types New This Month Advanced Mobile Systems Initiative April 2014 - Brochure This brochure describes how the AMS initiative supports the mobile communication and mobile-computing needs of edge users.

Towards Quantitative Metrics for Architecture Models April 2014 - Presentation This presentation was part of the First International Workshop on Software Architecture Metrics, held at the 11th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture. On the Challenges in Extracting Metrics from Java Bytecode April 2014 - Presentation This presentation was part of the First International Workshop on Software Architecture Metrics, held at the 11th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture. Empirical Evaluation of the Understandability of Architectural Component Diagrams April 2014 - Presentation This presentation was part of the First International Workshop on Software Architecture Metrics, held at the 11th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture.

March 2014. Complete Table of Contents for Online Readings in Psychology and Culture. Research Randomizer: Free Random Sampling and Random Assignment. List of thought processes. Nature of thought[edit] Thought (or thinking) can be described as all of the following: An activity taking place in a: brain – organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals (only a few invertebrates such as sponges, jellyfish, adult sea squirts and starfish do not have a brain). It is the physical structure associated with the mind. mind – abstract entity with the cognitive faculties of consciousness, perception, thinking, judgement, and memory.

Having a mind is a characteristic of humans, but which also may apply to other life forms.[1][2] Activities taking place in a mind are called mental processes or cognitive functions.computer (see automated reasoning, below) – general purpose device that can be programmed to carry out a set of arithmetic or logical operations automatically. Types of thoughts[edit] Content of thoughts[edit] Types of thought (thinking)[edit] Listed below are types of thought, also known as thinking processes. Lists. Depressive realism. Evidence for[edit] Evidence against[edit] When asked to rate both their performance and the performance of another, non-depressed individuals demonstrated positive bias when rating themselves but no bias when rating others. Criticism of the evidence[edit] Some have argued that the evidence is not more conclusive because there is no standard for "reality," the diagnoses are dubious, and the results may not apply to the real world.[33] Because many studies rely on self-report of depressive symptoms, the diagnosis of depression in these studies may not be valid as self-reports are known to often be biased, necessitating the use of other objective measures.

See also[edit] References[edit] Jump up ^ Alloy,L.B., Abramson,L.Y. (1988). Further reading[edit] Rachel Adelson (April 2005). Love? Or Being In Love?