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Men, their perception of women, and their tools [Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge]

February 17, 2009 in Blogs, Brain & Behaviour by BrainAndBehaviour

Research out of Princeton University and noted at this past weekend’s annual AAAS meeting gives weight to an idea that cognitive and social scientists have tentatively considered for years: Given sufficient provocation, men view women as sex objects. Men are more likely to think of women as objects if they have looked at sexy pictures of females beforehand, psychologists said yesterday. Researchers used brain scans to show that when straight men looked at pictures of women in bikinis, areas of the brain that normally light up in anticipation of using tools, like spanners and screwdrivers, were activated. Scans of some of the men found that a part of the brain associated with empathy for other peoples’ emotions and wishes shut down after looking at the pictures. Susan Fiske, a psychologist at Princeton University in New Jersey, said the changes in brain activity suggest sexy images can shift the way men perceive women, turning them from people to interact with, to objects to act upon. This makes perfect sense, given that when males view pictures of NASCAR events, daffodils, and human waste, anecdotal evidence suggests that they are inclined to think of not only various power tools, but also limitless varieties of copulatory activity. In the study, Fiske’s team put straight men into an MRI brain scanner and showed them images of either clothed men and women, or more scantily clad men and women. When they took a memory test afterwards, the men best remembered images of bikini-clad women whose heads had been digitally removed. This is merely a symbolic leveling of the playing field. If men in lust-struck states are operating without benefit of their brains, then it is only just that the objects of their lust be rendered similarly decerebrate. In the final part of the study, Fiske asked the men to fill in a questionnaire that was used to assess how sexist they were. The brain scans showed that men who scored highest had very little activity in the prefrontal cortex and other brain regions that are involved with understanding another person’s feelings and intentions. “They’re reacting to these women as if they’re not fully human,” Fiske said. “Not fully human” is as likely to mean “superhuman” as “subhuman,” correct? Looks like further research is needed . Read the comments on this post…

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Men, their perception of women, and their tools [Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge]

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Facebook Friends [The Frontal Cortex]

February 1, 2009 in Blogs, Brain & Behaviour by BrainAndBehaviour

In the latest Seed , there’s an interesting dialogue between political scientist James Fowler and physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. I was particularly intrigued by their ruminations on the network dynamics of Facebook: JF: When we move from five friends in real life to 500 on Facebook, it’s not the case that we are having a close, deep relationship with each of those 500 friends. In fact, one of the intriguing things I’ve noticed about these online networks is that they have a property that’s different from realworld social networks. As you know, in the real world, popular people tend to be friends with popular people. But in these technological networks, as in metabolic networks, it’s just the opposite. The nodes with many, many links will tend to be linked to nodes with few links. ALB: Right. JF: It makes me wonder if the dynamics of online social networks are going to be reflective of realworld social networks. Because to a large extent, in your work and some of the work that I’ve done, we’re relying on the idea that what we see online is telling us something about the real world. But there’s a pretty fundamental difference. I’m not on Facebook, so take what follows with a hefty pinch of salt, but there’s some suggestive evidence that the brain might contemplate other people very differently when that person is a virtual Facebook “page” and not a flesh and blood individual, with a tangible physical presence. Humans, after all, are social primates, blessed and burdened with a set of paleolithic social instincts. We aren’t used to thinking about people as computerized abstractions. Consider this elegant experiment, led by neuroscientist Joshua Greene of Harvard. Greene asked his subjects a series of questions involving a runaway trolley, an oversized man and five maintenance workers. (It might sound like a strange setup, but it’s actually based on a well-known philosophical thought puzzle.) The first scenario goes like this: You are the driver of a runaway trolley. The brakes have failed. The trolley is approaching a fork in the track at top speed. If you do nothing, the train will stay left, where it will run over five maintenance workers who are fixing the track. All five workers will die. However, if you steer the train right⎯this involves flicking a switch and turning the wheel⎯you will swerve onto a track where there is one maintenance worker. What do you do? Are you willing to intervene and change the path of the trolley? In this hypothetical case, about ninety five percent of people agree that it is morally permissible to turn the trolley. The decision is just simple arithmetic: it’s better to kill fewer people. Some moral philosophers even argue that it is immoral to not turn the trolley, since such passivity leads to the death of four extra people. But what about this scenario: You are standing on a footbridge over the trolley track. You see a trolley racing out of control, speeding towards five workmen who are fixing the track. All five men will die unless the trolley can be stopped. Standing next to you on the footbridge is a very large man. He is leaning over the railing, watching the trolley hurtle towards the men. If you sneak up on the man and give him a little push, he will fall over the railing and into the path of the trolley. Because he is so big, he will stop the trolley from killing the maintenance workers Do you push the man off the footbridge? Or do you allow five men to die? The brute facts, of course, remain the same: one man must die in order for five men to live. And yet, almost nobody is willing to actively throw another person onto the train tracks. Greene argues that pushing the man feels wrong because the killing is direct: We are using our body to hurt his body. He calls it a personal moral situation, since it directly involves another person. In contrast, when we just have to turn the trolley onto a different track, we aren’t directly hurting somebody else. We are just shifting the trolley wheel: the ensuing death seems indirect. In this case, we are making an impersonal moral decision. What makes this thought experiment so interesting is that the fuzzy moral distinction⎯the difference between personal and impersonal decisions⎯is built into our brain. When the subjects were asked whether or not they should turn the trolley, a network of brain regions assessed the various alternatives, sent their verdict onwards to the prefrontal cortex, and the person chose the clearly superior option. Their brain quickly realized that it was better to kill one man than five men. However, when people were asked whether they would be willing to push a man onto the tracks, a separate network of brain areas was activated. These folds of gray matter⎯the superior temporal sulcus, posterior cingulate and medial frontal gyrus⎯are believed to be responsible for interpreting the thoughts and feelings of other people. As a result, these subjects automatically imagined how the poor man would feel as he plunged to his death on the train tracks below. They vividly simulated his mind, and concluded that pushing him was a capital crime, even if it saved the lives of five other men. Pushing a man off a bridge just felt wrong. What does this have to do with Facebook? I think it demonstrates how thinking about a person in physical terms – as someone we need to physically push – changes how the brain represents that person. When the person is a virtual abstraction, an impersonal representation on a computer screen, the brain treats them accordingly, and seems to invest them with less agency, emotion, etc. Perhaps – and this is a big perhaps, since nobody has done the scanning experiment – we make social decisions concerning many of our Facebook acquaintances using these “impersonal” brain areas. In other words, we might push a Facebook friend off a footbridge, but we’d never push a real friend. I don’t mean to criticize Facebook. I simply agree with Fowler: Facebook is a new experiment in human social interaction, and we shouldn’t be surprised that the network dynamics of Facebook don’t resemble the network dynamics of the real world, whatever that is. Read the comments on this post…

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Facebook Friends [The Frontal Cortex]

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by Vaughan

The Straight Dope on Learning Styles

January 28, 2009 in Blogs, Mind Hacks by Vaughan

The glorious truth is that people think and learn differently. Some people like words, but not pictures, some like movements rather than sounds. Why are people different? Who knows, perhaps because Allah loves wondrous variety . A funny thing is that we have the tendency to ignore this fact. Perhaps because empathy is difficult, perhaps because learning makes itself invisible . I have a dear friend, Cat, who doesn’t have visual imagery. When she thinks of a dog, for example, she doesn’t see one in her mind’s eye. She doesn’t see anything. When she dreams she rarely has pictures — she just knows what is happening in the dream. People often don’t believe this. They think that everyone must experience their inner world in pictures, the way they do. Sorry. People are just different. Some always see things when they imagine them, some don’t. Some people have a sense of pitch, some don’t. So it goes. So the idea of learning styles makes a lot of intuitive sense. Surely if we know that people think and learn differently, we should be able to design our teaching to take advantage of different learning styles. Right? This is where we hit problems. Are learners either primarily visual, auditory, kinesthetic (as claimed in NLP )? Or are they primarily analytic, creative or pragmatic (as proposed by Robert Sternberg ). Is the world made of Convergers, Divergers, Assimilators and Accomodators ? Maybe instead we should use the Myers-Briggs categories of Sensers, Intuitors, Thinkers and Feelers? Faced with these possibilities an academic psychologist has a standard set of questions they would like answered: can you really divide people up into a particular set of categories? Are the tests for these categories reliable; if you take the test twice will you come out the same both times? Are the categories you are trying to use related to how people learn? If you use a theory of learning styles, do people learn better? Can you use learning styles to predict who will benefit most from particular styles of instruction? Does using a learning styles system – any system – for teaching have other effects on learners or teachings, such as making them more confident or making them expend more effort? These questions stem from the way academic psychologists systematically approach topics: we like to establish the truth of psychological claims. If someone comes to us with a theory about learning styles we want to know (a) if learning styles really exist, (b) if they really are associated with better learning and also (c) if, when learning styles are taken into account, learning is better because of something about the specific learing style theory rather than just being a side effect of an increase in teacher confidence, effort or somesuch. So, what have academic psychologists found out about learning styles? We know that some of the supposed categories of learning styles are actually dimensions that vary continuously across the population. For example visual imagery: it is not that some people are visual thinkers, it is that most people have some visual imagery and a few have very strong imagery and a few, like my friend Cat, have less than average. We also know that people can change their learning styles over time, for different tasks and in different contexts. We also know that it is very difficult to prove that teaching that uses learning styles is better because of the particular theory of learning styles used, rather than merely because a learning style theory, any learning style theory, is being used and this makes people pay more attention to what they are doing. Learning styles seem intuitively sensible. Having thought about learning styles helps teachers improve their teaching and also helps increase their confidence and motivation. But there is no strong evidence that any one theory of learning styles is the best, or most true, compared to the others. Learning style theories can be useful without being true, and it isn’t clear that knowing the truth about the differences in how people learn will be immediately useful or produce a more useful theory of learning styles. This difference between truth and utility is a typical dilemma of psychology. Sadly, the headlines for this conclusion aren’t snappy. It is easier to say that “Some people are visual thinkers and others are auditory thinkers” than it is to say that “Thinking about presenting information in different sensory modalities will make your teaching more varied and help those you are teaching who have different preferences to yourself”. Using a learning style theory is great, but you lose a lot of flexibility and potential for change if you start to believe that the theory is based on proven facts about the way the world is, rather than just being a useful set of habits and suggestions which might, sometimes, help guide us through the maze of teaching and learning. Cross-posted at schoolofeverything.com Part of a series: #1 Learning Makes Itself Invisible #2 Learning Should Be Fun Image: jelly belly by House of Sims

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Now You See Him, Now You Don’t

January 27, 2009 in Blogs, Psychology Today by Psychology Today

When you’re mute and paralyzed and hooked up to machines and you didn’t used to be this way, people treat you differently. They don’t want to, and they might tell themselves they aren’t, but they do. They see only the helpless flesh, those hands and feet that someone else put into position for you — and you know and they know that anyoneat all could put your limbs into any position at all, could put them into a silly pose or a humiliating pose, and you couldn’t fight back. Most who see you in this state, even your loved ones, see only the flesh. First, they cry. Then as the days and weeks pass they start talking around you, and/or about you, as if you weren’t there. Some address you directly, but they appear nervous and even embarrassed as they do, enunciating as if you were a child. A relative of mine, whom onlookers see as a motionless 250-pound hillock under a floral-patterned sheet, is learning this right now, to his horror, day by day. A year ago, when he was only thirty, Jake had a brainstem stroke. He collapsed at work; colleagues who found him on the floor called 911. Jake was not expected to survive. According to the National Stroke Association, only 10 percent of strokes occur in the brainstem, which connects to the spinal cord and controls automatic functions such as breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, swallowing, and sleep patterns. Most such strokes are fatal. Jake’s wife, Ashley, rushed to the hospital and found him comatose. Doctors told her to expect the worst. And did the worst occur? That depends on what you consider "the worst." To Ashley, "the worst" meant death. But to some of those close to Jake and Ashley, "the worst" meant life: that is, life spent in a coma, or — if Jake ever awoke — as the quadriplegic that his doctors declared he would be: a sweet, smart, funny young man who could swallow only via machine, immobilized forever with what neurologists call "locked-in syndrome," a fully aware mind inhabiting a fully inert body. (Locked-in syndrome, for which there is no cure, gained notice in recent years after French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby suffered a brainstem stroke that left him utterly paralyzed but for one eyelid. Using that eyelid, Bauby dictated his memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly ; it became a bestseller and was made into a film last year.) Some folks seemed to feel that, for his own good, Jake was better off dead. Ashley was overjoyed when Jake regained consciousness a week or so after the stroke. The couple made eye contact and she squeezed his hand. He couldn’t squeeze back, but she knew he longed to. Ashley spent every possible hour at the hospital. She talked to Jake. She brought him an iPod filled with his favorite music — Coldplay, Gigi D’Agostino, Maroon 5. She placed one earbud into Jake’s ear, the other in her ear, clasped his hand and danced by his bedside. The first time she did this it was, she wrote in her blog that day, "the best dance of my life." After five months in the hospital, during which he experienced several emergencies that required brain surgery — part of his forehead was removed, then replaced with a plastic prosthetic — Jake was transported to a rehab center. Soon he’ll move into a cottage on his parents’ property, specially outfitted for his needs. Three people are required to turn Jake in bed. He makes rough sounds which only Ashley can interpret, and even then only a fraction of the time. He cannot register emotions, cannot frown or smile. A former executive, once the life of every party, he has been rendered largely invisible — a sensation that other disabled people have told me they share. And from this realm, stuck in such a literal way, from the mind that sees while some fail to see it, comes a message posted on Ashley’s blog, dictated to her via sounds and hand signals: "I am doing OK. Therapy has really helped me. I never thought I would eat again but it is going to happen. Last week I had ice cream twice and I loved it. I have some movement back in my right hand which was totally unfeeling and I am filled with hope recently at my many small improvements. Thank you for keeping me in your thoughts. My family is building me a place to live and my dad works very hard every day to get it done. And my mom makes food and drink for all the workers. I love my wife and my family and my friends. "Love, Jake." © 2009 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

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by Vaughan

Complex beginnings

January 27, 2009 in Blogs, Mind Hacks by Vaughan

The term ‘complex’, used to refer to a mental illness or psychological hang-up, has become so common as to have entered everyday language (e.g. ‘he has an inferiority complex’) but I only just recently found out about the origin of the concept. The following is from the epic and endlessly fascinating book The Discovery of the Unconscious by Henri Ellenberger, where he discusses the use of the ‘word association test’ in early 1900s psychiatry. The story takes us through some of the most important figures in the history of 19th and 20th century mind science. From p691: The test consisted of enunciating to a subject a succession of carefully chosen words; to each of them the subject had to respond with the first word that occurred to him; the reaction time was exactly measured… It was invented by Galton , who showed how it could be used to explore the hidden recesses of the mind. It was taken over and perfected by Wundt , who attempted to experimentally establish the laws of the association of ideas. Then Aschaffenberg and Kraepelin introduced the distinction of inner and outer associations; the former are associations according to meaning, the latter according to forms of speech and sound; they could also be called semantic and verbal associations. Kraepelin showed that fatigue caused a gradual shift toward a greater proportion of verbal associations. Similar effects were observed in fever and alcoholic intoxication. The same authors compared the results of the word association test in various mental conditions. Then a new path was opened by Ziehen who found that the reaction time was was longer when the stimulus word was to something unpleasant to the subject. Sometimes, by picking out several delayed responses, one could relate them to a common underlying representation that Ziehen called gefühlsbetonter Vorstellungskomplex (emotionally charged complex of representations), or simply a complex. Carl Jung later used the test extensively as a more rigorous alternative to Freudian free association and found some interesting results. In women, erotic complexes were in the foreground with complexes related to the family and dwelling, pregnancy, children and marital situation; in older women he detected complexes showing regrets about former lovers. In men, complexes of ambition, money and striving to succeed came before erotic complexes. The description comes from a chapter about Carl Jung, who was originally a psychoanalyst but broke away from Freud’s system and developed his own. Freud’s theories, with only a few exceptions, just seem to get loopier the more you read them. Jung is interesting because on the surface his ideas seem quite barmy but are often remarkably sensible when you understand them in more detail. Despite his interest in everything from ghosts to UFOs, he always maintained these were essentially psychological phenomena that reflected important aspects of our collective culture and subconcious mind. For example, I always thought his concept of the ‘collective unconscious’ was supposed to be some sort of semi-mystical psychic connection, but in fact, he was just describing much of what is now a premise of evolutionary psychology. Namely, that by nature of being human, we may share some inherited psychological structures, common symbols or ideas – such as what ‘motherhood’ entails – that can be seen in both common behaviours and in myths and stories throughout history.

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Ironic Thoughts [The Frontal Cortex]

January 22, 2009 in Blogs, Brain & Behaviour by BrainAndBehaviour

I know, I know, you’re probably sick of me prattling on about metacognition . If so, then feel free to skip this post. I’ve got a new article in the latest Seed (it’s a particularly good issue, I think, although it’s not yet online) on the virtues and vices of thinking about thinking: The game only has one rule, and it’s a simple one: Don’t think about white bears. You can think about anything else, but you can’t think about that. Ready? Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and banish the animals from your head. You just lost the game. Everyone loses the game. As Dostoevsky first observed, in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions: “Try to avoid thinking of a white bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” In fact, whenever we try to not think about something, be it white bears or a broken heart, that something gets trapped in the mind, stuck in the recursive loop of self-consciousness. The brain backfires; our attempt at repression turns into an odd fixation. This human frailty has profound consequences. Dan Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard, refers to the failure as an “ironic” mental process. Whenever we establish a mental goal⎯such as trying to not think about white bears⎯the goal is accompanied by an inevitable follow-up thought, as the brain checks to see if we’re making progress. The end result, of course, is that we obsess over the one thing we’re trying to avoid. Wegner argues that this ironic twitch is responsible for all sorts of afflictions, from anxiety disorder (we get anxious whenever we think about not getting anxious) to insomnia, which can occur when the drowsy brain checks to see if we’ve fallen asleep (and so we wake up). The mind is a disobedient machine. Although these perverse thoughts can be irritating⎯⎯wouldn’t it be nice to be able to fall asleep at will, like a cat?⎯they also reveal an essential feature of the human mind, which is that it doesn’t just think: it constantly thinks about how it thinks. We’re insufferably self-aware, like some post-modern novel, so that the brain can’t go for more than a few seconds before it starts calling attention to itself, reflecting on its own contents, thoughts and feelings. This even applies to thoughts we’re trying to avoid, which is why those white bears are so inescapable. The technical term for this is metacognition, and it’s a rather surreal skill. Imagine that M.C. Escher drawing of a hand drawing a hand, or a video camera making a movie of itself: The cortex is the same way, as it constantly transforms the subject at the center of consciousness⎯you⎯into yet another object contemplated by consciousness. Of course, like all things meta, the process can quickly spiral out of control. When a mind thinks about metacognition, it’s thinking about how it thinks about how it thinks. And so on. I then go on to discuss the benefits of metacognition… Read the comments on this post…

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To the big men go the women! [Gene Expression]

January 21, 2009 in Blogs, Brain & Behaviour by BrainAndBehaviour

Market forces affect patterns of polygyny in Uganda : Polygynous marriage is generally more beneficial for men than it is for women, although women may choose to marry an already-married man if he is the best alternative available. We use the theory of biological markets to predict that the likelihood of a man marrying polygynously will be a function of the level of resources that he has, the local sex ratio, and the resources that other men in the local population have. Using records of more than 1 million men in 56 districts from the 2002 Ugandan census, we show that polygynously married men are more likely to own land than monogamously married men, that polygynous marriages become more common as the district sex ratio becomes more female biased, that owning land is particularly important when men are abundant in the district, and that a man’s owning land most increases the odds of polygyny in districts where few other men own land. Results are discussed with reference to models of the evolution of polygyny. My piece for The Guardian , Monogamy: bucking the trend? , was fundamentally an argument against natural short term market forces. Read the comments on this post…

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To the big men go the women! [Gene Expression]

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Are toddlers incapable of learning from TV? [Cognitive Daily]

January 21, 2009 in Blogs, Brain & Behaviour by BrainAndBehaviour

There’s lots of evidence that most TV isn’t beneficial to toddlers, and it may even be harmful . But can’t kids learn from TV too? Isn’t that supposed to be what shows like Teletubbies, Barney, and Sesame street are all about? For older children, three and above, it does seem to be true that some learning can occur, but for two-year-olds and younger, the evidence tells a different story. Few studies have shown any evidence that two-year-olds can learn from TV anywhere near as well as they learn from real-world experiences. While they clearly can distinguish between nonsense programming and real shows, they don’t do much at all with the information presented in the shows. One study found they can’t imitate actions shown on TV as well as live actions, and another showed they don’t learn labels for objects from TV shows. Perhaps most intriguing are two studies, one by G.L. Troseth and J.S. DeLoache, and another by K.L. Schmitt and Daniel Anderson. In these experiments, two-year-olds were shown videos of experimenters hiding objects in a room. Then the toddlers were allowed into the room and told to find the object. Accuracy ranged from 44 percent to 25 percent, despite the fact that there were only from four to six possible hiding places in the room. Their performance was no better than if they had simply searched the room at random, with no video to help them. Many toddlers did seem to look in the right spot after watching the first video, but if the task was repeated with a different hiding place, they simply returned to the original spot, ignoring the new video evidence. Do toddlers just have difficulty translating from a small screen to full-sized reality? When Jim and Nora were toddlers, they loved Barney the Dinosaur, but cowered in fear when they saw a life-sized human in a Barney suit. Or maybe toddlers struggle with converting a two-dimensional television image into a three-dimensional physical space. Or perhaps they believe that the things on the TV inhabit their own tiny world inside the box, unrelated to the larger, outside world. Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

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Are toddlers incapable of learning from TV? [Cognitive Daily]

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by Vaughan

The shock of the few

January 21, 2009 in Blogs, Mind Hacks by Vaughan

Monsters existed in the 1800s. They were not mythical creatures, but children born with birth defects who were widely discussed in the medical literature and sometimes cruelly paraded in the travelling freak shows of the time. Curiously, one of the most popular explanations for these congenital deformities concerned the psychology of the expectant mother. If you had asked a 19th century doctor why some children were born with unusual bodies, or even fairly common birthmarks, you might have been told that they were caused by a frightening incident experienced by the mother during pregnancy. The theory, known as ‘ maternal impression ‘, suggested the trauma could symbolically imprint itself on the foetus. The 1896 book Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine described many such cases in their chapter on obstetric anomalies, and this is a fairly typical example: Parvin mentions an instance of the influence of maternal impression in the causation of a large, vivid, red mark or splotch on the face: “When the mother was in Ireland she was badly frightened by a fire in which some cattle were burned. Again, during the early months of her pregnancy she was frightened by seeing another woman suddenly light the fire with kerosene, and at that time became firmly impressed with the idea that her child would be marked.’ In another case history, a child with hydrocephalus with a “small and rabbit-shaped” face and deformed eyes is explained by the fact that a rabbit jumped at its mother during pregnancy where she was frightened by its ‘glare’. Perhaps one of the most curious cases was published in 1817 and concerned a recalcitrant father who denied being responsible for an unwanted pregnancy, causing the mother a great deal of distress. The child was later born, reportedly with the name of date of birth of his father clearly visible in his eyes. This is a curious mirror of the first, probably mythical, case of maternal impression, where Hippocrates reportedly saved the honour of an adulterous princess by explaining her dark skinned child as due to her having a portrait of a ‘negro’ in her room. Although the theory enjoyed a long and colourful life, it peacefully passed away in the late 19th century when it became clear that the mind of the mother had no influence on birthmarks or congenital deformities. For many years the psychological state of the expectant mother was thought to have virtually no effect on the developing child. But then the Soviet Union invaded Finland in 1939, and that all began to change. The quickly assembled Finnish force was vastly outnumbered and ominously outgunned but, unlike their Soviet counterparts, they were quick and comfortable in the Artic conditions and made swift and deadly attacks. In one of history’s great military victories, they defeated the Russians but suffered heavy losses. Many of the dead were young men, and many of the grieving were young pregnant women. Nearly 40 years later, two Finnish psychiatrists decided to look at the mental health of the children who grew up without fathers. They compared children born to women who grieved during pregnancy, to those born to women who lost their husbands after the child had been born. Their study , published in 1978, found that mothers who had lost their husbands during pregnancy were much more likely to have children who later developed schizophrenia. Many similar studies have found that severe maternal stress during pregnancy affects the developing brain of the child, increasing the risk of cognitive or psychiatric problems later in life, possibly due to the effect of the hormonal response of the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal ( HPA ) system. Thankfully, we no longer think of people as monsters, whatever their size, shape or mental state, and we have long banished the monstrous myths of ‘maternal impression’. But we do know that the mind of the mother is connected to the development of the unborn baby, and that maternal experiences can still echo through the life of the child.

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Would you take this Intro Psych Course? [Of Two Minds]

January 20, 2009 in Blogs, Brain & Behaviour by BrainAndBehaviour

From the syllabus: Why Psychology?! Psychology 100 is the most popular course at nearly every university and there’s a reason why. The science of psychology covers an amazing range of topics. After all, the mind can do many amazing things! Oh yeah, it also fulfils a GenEd requirement ;) Nearly everyone probably has a different idea of what psychology actually is. That’s not surprising since even people who have been in the field for many, many years still disagree what should be a part of psychology and what should not. Psychology covers topics ranging from depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia to how we generate and understand language, to why we have a particular cell in our brain dedicated to Halle Barry. Some ‘psychologists’ even study things like extra sensory perception (ESP) – although we won’t be studying that in this class (or probably any other class in the psych department). Our goals for this class will be for you to explore two basic ideas: 1.) What do Psychologists study? 2.) How does Psychology impact my day to day life? By investigating these two ideas through the course readings, attending and participating in class, and being diligent in your studying I hope that you will be able to both get a great grade in this course and understand what Psychology is. You will be able to critically explore its place in society as well as the media which so awfully messes it up most of the time. Is this way too much hand wavy b.s.? Or… would you rather see this as a replacement? General Information: This course is a general survey of the field of psychology. Topics include perception, learning, memory, thinking, motivation, emotion, personality, development, intelligence, therapy, psychopathology, and other areas of psychology. Read the comments on this post…

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Would you take this Intro Psych Course? [Of Two Minds]

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