Psychology

Thank you all respected and learned contributors for their very encouraging views and suggestions. I will try to match levels of consciousness with those of Damasio's framework. Thanks once again.

I agree with you DR Fabio Savastano

typo error in last paragraph. It should read Please also note that with the people I have talked to about cancer, many diagnosed and treated for cancer and family members, they have wished not to be defined by the diagnosis and/or treatment. For some the notion of survivorship, being identified as a cancer survivor, was not helpful in the time period post treatment.

Dear Maria and Pablo, thank you both for your immensely helpful comments. My experience in research on environmental attitudes tells me that beliefs and perceptions of environmental issues differ in a number of fundamental ways among western and non-western societies. I am currently attempting to investigate other factors which I believe have salient influences on environmental beliefs and behavior among traditional/ non-western societies which often gets overlooked in western environmental attitudes research. I am collecting some survey data on perceptions and responses to the threat of climate change in Nigeria at the moment and will very much appreciate collaborators for cross-cultural comparisons.

Thanks John for your answer! As fare as I know oxytocin could not be measured from saliva, only from blood, so it is not easy to do it without medical stuff. And research of course is not possibly nowerdays without an big amount of money, and/ or an institution. Perhaps it would be easier in german or in the USA.... No I am not looking for a specific book, but if you have a pdf file with german titels please send it to me. Best Gerald

Dear All Self-actualization is the highest order need in Maslow's Need Theory. Whether this need for self-actualization is spiritual or non-spiritual or both?

Thanks Alessandro!

Your question of how trust is built in psychotherapy and what can be done to facilitate the patient’s trust is a very good one. There are obviously many different pathways and the range of how patients develop trust in their therapist will vary tremendously from one patient (or more precisely, from one patient-therapist dyad) to another. The topic of trust is related to a widely discussed and extensively studied area: the therapeutic alliance (there are over 7000 studies on the alliance!). Your question could be re-framed as “What can therapists do to build a therapeutic alliance?” I believe that patients who come to therapy are generally motivated to solve their problems and master their conflicts and are therefore seeking ways to create safety in the therapeutic relationship. One of the ways they do so is by testing the therapist to see if s/he can be relied upon to help them with their problems. Many patients also coach their therapists in order to get the help they need. The extent to which the therapist is responsive to the patient’s testing and/or coaching will determine how quickly a trusting relationship is established. There are a number of clinical and research papers that you can find in my profile that describe the testing concepts more fully. My book, Transformative Relationships, describes the underlying theory, provides extensive clinical examples, and reviews the relevant research.

Can you in humans distinguish imagination and fantasy, imagination from hallucinogenic drug effects? How do we usefully apply imagination? @Cindy Boughner - I agree that one productive distinction, particularly in machine reasoning, may be to form some set of random associations, and create a set of deductions or extrapolations from those associations. These efforts now generally have a very limited scope - interesting, inventive chess play is easier to imagine than interesting creative storytelling. At the moment coding experience, the mechanism of storage, and providing directed action based on current situation and experience limit the expression of imagination.

Dear Vanajaa, Please try with PCVC a Ngo who works under the Prevention of violence against women and children. They have a website and work in Chennai.

Heather I'm glad you are over that adversity !

How do you measure the statement that visual skills are more in use now than before -and which skills are not needed now that were needed before? Which skills should be abandoned? Is this not confusing seeing with understanding. Are you talking about an increase or a decrease in visual literacy? We look at images but do we really SEE them in a fulsome way. Maybe be that is digital dementia. People can see what other places look like but do all people truly understand the detailed contexts of those images? Can they relate in a profound manner to what they see? How do we explain the fact that many people can not read a road map or an overland map? How many people really understand a graph? In spite of their dependence on technology - there are many cases of people getting hopelessly lost while driving their cars... In the not too distant past, in only parts of the world, the majority of the people who regularly depended on the images painted public walls in order to learn the messages of those images - the story content - probably did not read letters as well as they read the images. Can you be sure that people of today read images as well as their predecessors with such precise attention to context and detail. There is a great deal of visual illiteracy about. Designers of new technologies today are exhorted to try to design 'user-friendly' visual interfaces in order to make these technologies more accessible to Users. Although in some cases this is the case. However, if people don't know what they are looking at , I suppose that it hardly matters. Or does it?

hello... I say you that i do not adopt a particular psychotherapy for all the groups. you may say why? because different cultures has different ideas for example a culture may think a particular behavior moral or immoral, normal or abnormal, good or bad and etc... some of psychotherapies have universal rules because they have a universal scientific basis such as some cognitive behavior techniques but we must take into account that for example a cognitive behavior therapist may live in a culture different from the culture of this therapy, in these situations we must be flexible and take cultural based advices, remember we do not alter the therapy for example we do not take a new cognitive behavior therapy completely different from it's original, but we must do researches in the domain of cultural roots and do not act on common sense. hard researching is needed, and we must avoid take cultural techniques without doing research.

In reference to Susan's response above that website is excellent. In special education we would take the issues and say there are (a) causes and (b) contributing factors. Sam Kirk always used this approach in his textbooks every time he introduced a new chapter. The root causes may not be obvious. It is easy to "grab one factor" and then make a decision and I caution against that. Here is another example and it leads to circular thinking if the issue is not studied carefully; young men in World War I and World II who signed up in the armed services were studied in a large population in many ways. Most of them were malnourished (probably 1/2 ) because of the depression and poverty (no jobs). When they came home after W W I for example, they were sorted into "service related" and "Non-service related" and some were denied medical benefits if they were "non'service connected". The same thing happened after other wars when the kids came home and the current response was "there is no such thing as Agent Orange." Admiral Zumwalt was the one who had courage to address this. Today a service man or woman might come home with PTSD (this was called shell shocked in W W I). and the service person might be denied medical treatments (government sponsored) because "you had a preexisting condition". I am using this as an example that (a) the concepts change shell schocked studied by Menninger clinics to PTSD being studied today; responses are sometimes politically motivated and the science depends on the "budget". This may be obvious to many but I just wanted to point it out that "fuzzy" concepts of 1920 are identified in different ways today. The same thing happens in schools ; we make a false dichotomy between cognitive and affective and then set up programs based on the "fuzzy" definitions; in the 1970s in the U.S. it became popular to divide up egg crates in the school and some children would get the "behavioral program" and others would get the "academic program." I would object to this and say "treat them all as gifted." A lot of programatic decisions are made on "rationing" of resources and human services and we never take the time to use a scientific method in the way that Sam Kirk built special education programs. So when it comes to "bullying" knee jerk responses might prove counterproductive if not carefully thought through. Every response/program has its side-effects (some unintended).As a general rule of thumb I think we have limited tools so the aphorism is "measure with a micrometer and cut with a hacksaw."

Thanks so much, Gideon, Julia and John, I have forwarded the articles and scale to her, she is yetto get back to me. She is a well known singer and I believe the information will help her in her project.

Dear Paul, Many thanks for raising the question - it is as you say, an important issue that is largely ignored. The answer to the question as to why the natural history of common laboratory species isn't taught in psychology or neuroscience education is unfortunately that not many are interested and even fewer see this as something they should be interested in. Hence, there is no tradition or corpus of knowledge that gets passed down. Indeed one of the most revealing things about doing this survey came from sometimes very senior scientists, often working in the great universities of the world who took the trouble to write to say how they were genuinely offended to even be asked to say what they know about the animals they work with. I take this to be a reflection of what is the dominant ethos where common laboratory animals are concerned and that is that they are viewed as being no more than bags of physiology without social needs or natural history. On balance rat-based science is less harmed by this approach because housing rats in groups isn't so far away from the social conditions they would choose to live in - except of course these are normally family/clan based,mixed sex and they usually get a lot more room. There is also, as you say, very little rationale beyond 'that's the way it's always been done' for holding them in these cramped conditions. Group housing mice is however pathological for 4/5ths of a cage of 5 and 9/10ths of a cage of 10. This is because a dominant animal always emerges, who then precedes to constantly attack the other animals in their cage because they are now intruders in its territory - the attacked animals are behaviourally, physiologically and immunologically differentiated from the dominant animal doing the attacking and soon start to deteriorate. Hence, most studies using lab mice are conducted in animals that are mainly in such an unusual physiological condition that this only rarely exists in nature. There are more details about the social organisations of rats and the social organisations of mice in this paper - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23800730_Depression_as_an_evolutionary_adaptation_implications_for_the_development_of_preclinical_models?ev=prf_pub - although the descriptions of these are placed in the context of our thesis that these are not appropriate species to use in animal models of depression because depression is not a universal mammalian feature and their social structures do not predict that they are likely to have developed this as an adaptation. I hope we get to meet sometime. Best wishes Colin

Thank you

Very Interesting! However, I request you to help me understand your question better. Having said that, sharing my initial thought on the formula you have shared. It may be a good idea to define the parameters that EQ is assessing in the formula you have developed. Several schools of thought prevail on EQ or Emotional Intelligence. Market has to offer well- validated and scientific tools on EQ. So its important you create a differentiator. Mayer-Salovey's notion on this topic is quite well- accepted in the Indian Market. One of the assessments that I am aware about is the Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i) (Bar-On, 2006). This will give you some idea to design EQ styles and broaden from the existing categories of Autocrat and Democrat. Emotional Quotient is a behavioral component while IQ is a cognitive component. There are various kinds of intelligence. Stanford- Binet Formula for IQ may not be a good representation of EQ. You may want to look at other intelligence such as social intelligence etc. Also, behavioral competencies such as Critical Thinking (Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal) may be a score to be considered in EQ. In my corporate experience, Critical thinking as a concept serves as a bedrock for such behavioral competencies. You can look the web for papers on relation between Emotional Intelligence and Critical Thinking. Also, it may be a good idea to share the purpose of your research for gathering more specific inputs. Good Luck with your research!

Some great answers which really open the discussion. I think we are concerned about, or interested in, pornography because we perceive a recent explosion of porn availability and institutionalisation and because we fear it permeating society uncontrollably. And we conduct our thinking as if there were a possibility of porn not existing, as if fantasy and objectification is not an essential part of the human psyche. I think it is interesting to begin from the obverse assumption (as Niklaus points out) that porn has a history so long that it is irreducible from the human experience. What do we get from this view? If we are concerned that porn will somehow change the human experience, alter who we are as a society, we need to admit that sexual fantasy is more real than the 'individual' ego we perceive ourselves to be. Porn -- as a physical manifestation of sexual fantasy -- comes before society, is a precondition of society. Hence Lacan's infamous statement that "there is no sexual relationship" (only fantasy). Sexuality is most 'honest' and 'natural' in masturbation, because there is no imposition of fantasy on the other (the sexual partner). We have to rethink the Kantian position: is porn more truthful because it acknowledges the lie on which it functions? As uncomfortable as it seems, in this view, porn exposes the lie of the physical sexual relationship. Nonetheless, I have to agree with my Kantian colleague Bill Johnston, above, because the human mind is not predisposed to truth, the 'objectification' in pornography will unlikely reveal neither the reality of fantasy nor the fantasy of reality, but will be taken on as a new reality -- i.e. that the paradoxical truth revealed in porn will lose its paradox and therefor its value.

I would build upon the second part of Marcus’s answer (above) and reinforce the importance of not only having a clear research question, but also ensuring that the research model (i.e., the overall path diagram that enjoins the various exogenous and endogenous variables) being tested is grounded in (strong) theory. It is all too easy to go on ‘fishing expeditions’ when doing this kind of modelling; that is, adding new pathways here and there to improve the overall ‘fit’ of the model (see Albert’s post about goodness-of-fit indices). At risk of making a too-obvious comment, investing serious time developing a robust conceptual and theoretical understanding of the phenomena under investigation before performing the path analyses will be time very well spent.

Thanks

Hi Geir, To begin to answer this question, we have to go back to the origin of the word - I will please [God]- as well as to the brain. I would suggest to read the research :Fabrizio Benedetti, Helen S. Mayberg, Tor D. Wager, Christian S. Stohler, and Jon-Kar Zubieta, “Neurobiological Mechanisms of the Placebo Effect,” Journal of Neuroscience 25, no. 45 (November 9, 2005):10390-10402, doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3458-05.2005 SYMPOSIA AND MINI-SYMPOSIA. New research has shown that what is named the Mammalian and Universal brains in the LIFE biosystem model react most strongly to placebos. These are namely the areas of the anterior cingulate, left nucleus accumbens, right anterior insula, as well as the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of the Analytical brain, which is linked to awareness and short-term memory (and receives inputs from the ventrolateral PFC). In fact I personally believe that the psychological filters we live with (middle prefrontal cortex) either allow or block the placebo effect. We know that the placebo effect releases endorphins and is instantaneous which calls in other physical and subtle stuctures which I discuss in my book. yes the placebo effect is not only a vague term but has some strong physiological reality. Hope that helps!

Hello Brigitte, I don't have a clear idea about this formula. One thing i have learn when i was PhD student is that psychometric researchers don't like to use formulas which artificially corrected the observed score because they tend sur-estimate the real correlation between 2 tests. When i am able to use the 'real' scores, i prefer to not use a formula which transform them.. DIFF corrected seems to be an artificial score which has been calculated with a formula.. If you choose this method, I suggest you to follow the standard of APA: standard 1.17. “ When statistical adjustments, such as those for restriction of range or attenuation, are made, both adjusted and unadjusted coefficients and all statistics used in the adjustment should be reported.” (see Alem, 2005, page 5) Finnaly, i have publish an francophone article about that matter in 2005. I am going to put it on this site, in case you want to read it. The ref of the article is this one (unfortunatly, the journal did not exist anymore): Alem, J. (2005). ‘La mesure des gains en apprentissage selon la théorie classique, la théorie de la généralisabilité et la théorie de la réponse aux items’. Revue ATTADRISS, Revue de la Faculté des sciences de l’éducation, Université Med V-Souissi Rabat. Série N3, avril 2005, page 49-65. Yours, Jaouad