Psychology News- Psychology Video and Psychology News // Current

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You're Driving Me Crazy!

So often it's the pettiest problems that tear couples apart. How small irritants become big issues—and what to do about... more

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The Next Hacking Frontier: Your Brain?

Hackers who commandeer your computer are bad enough. Now scientists worry that someday, they’ll try to take over your brain.

In the past year, researchers have developed technology that makes it possible to use thoughts to operate a computer, maneuver a wheelchair, or even use Twitter — all without lifting a finger. But as neural devices become more complicated — and go wireless — some scientists say the risks of “brain hacking” should be taken seriously.

“Neural devices are innovating at an extremely rapid rate and hold tremendous promise for the future,” said computer security expert Tadayoshi Kohno of the University of Washington. “But if we don’t start paying attention to security, we’re worried that we might find ourselves in five or 10 years saying we’ve made a big mistake.”

Hackers tap into personal computers all the time — but what would happen if they focused their nefarious energy on neural devices, such as the deep brain stimulators currently used to treat Parkinson’s and depression, or electrode systems for controlling prosthetic limbs? According to Kohno and his colleagues, who published their concerns July 1 in Neurosurgical Focus, most current devices carry few security risks. But as neural engineering becomes more complex and more widespread, the potential for security breaches will mushroom.

For example, the next generation of implantable devices to control prosthetic limbs will likely include wireless controls that allow physicians to remotely adjust settings on the machine. If neural engineers don’t build in security features such as encryption and access control, an attacker could hijack the device and take over the robotic limb.

“It’s very hard to design complex systems that don’t have bugs,” Kohno said. “As these medical devices start to become more and more complicated, it gets easier and easier for people to overlook a bug that could become a very serious risk. It might border on science fiction today, but so did going to the moon 50 years ago.”

Some might question why anyone would want to hack into someone else’s brain, but the researchers say there’s a precedent for using computers to cause neurological harm. In November 2007 and March 2008, malicious programmers vandalized epilepsy support websites by putting up flashing animations, which caused seizures in some photo-sensitive patients.

“It happened on two separate occasions,” said computer science graduate student Tamara Denning, a co-author on the paper. “It’s evidence that people will be malicious and try to compromise peoples’ health using computers, especially if neural devices become more widespread.”

In some cases, patients might even want to hack into their own neural device. Unlike devices to control prosthetic limbs, which still use wires, many deep brain stimulators already rely on wireless signals. Hacking into these devices could enable patients to “self-prescribe” elevated moods or pain relief by increasing the activity of the brain’s reward centers.Hackers who commandeer your computer are bad enough. Now scientists worry that someday, they’ll try to take over your brain.... more

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1 day ago

More people commit suicide on a Wednesday

If you listen to popular songs, you might conclude there’s no day as depressing as a Monday. But a new study shows that... more

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14 hours ago

5 Tips To Boost Your Love Life

1. Abundance, or wealth-consciousness.
Anaїs Nin once said, "We do not see the world as it is; we see the world as we are." Thus you have the choice to see the world with a lens of wealth-consciousness or poverty-consciousness. Do you see scarcity, lack and limitation around you, or wealth, possibility and abundance?
The mindset you choose bears directly upon the success of your love life (and your success in general). Scarcity-consciousness - e.g. "all the good ones are taken" - begets neediness, and neediness is not attractive.
Big-heartedness and self-sufficiency, on the other hand, work much better. Even the Bible has something to say about that: "For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken away even that which he hath."
Seems kind of mean, but it's just the way of the world: wealth begets wealth. So even if you don't have a companion, act as if there is an unlimited supply of what you want available to you already.
And you know what? There is. Because even if only one thousandth of one percent of the 6.5 billion people in this world are cool enough to be eligible for your companionship, that's, oh, 65,000 folks. That's enough dates to tide you over for a whole month.
2. Enlightened self-interest.

This one has three words in it. 'Enlightened' means that you make decisions by considering the long-term consequences of your actions. Short-sighted decisions - e.g. "I know he's a bad boy, but it'll be so much fun" - usually end in tears and/or heartbreak.
'Self' means that your welfare takes priority, just like in the pre-flight announcement where they say put on your own oxygen mask first, then help others in the case of an emergency. To be able to take care of anyone else, you need to take care of you first. Simple, totally non-negotiable, and often neglected.
'Interest' means that you're signing up for your fulfillment and joy, not your pain. If a relationship is making you miserable and unhappy - like that of my friend Holly who was being put down and punched up by the man she was supporting financially - consider ending it. Because fulfillment is a feeling, not a person. So if you're not getting fulfilling feelings in a relationship, chances are you're with the wrong person.
3. The Be-Do-Have paradigm (vs. Have-Do-Be).
Many people think like this: "If I have a great partner, then I can do the things that people with partners do, and then I can be happy." That's actually the dog wagging the tail. The proper sequence is: "If I am a happy, self-sufficient, generous and charming person, then I will have a great life and do things that feel good and make me attractive, and then, as a pleasant side-effect, will have fabulous companions who are naturally attracted to my life."
Successful change begins at the level of identity and belief, so first, be the kind of person you want to be. From the right beliefs will flow the right actions, or te (the middle word from Tao Te Ching) naturally and effortlessly, from which will come right results.
4. Yin-Yang (Feminine-Masculine) Polarity
The Taoists say that two poles are necessary for energy to flow: the receptive or feminine yin and the projecting or masculine yang. We see this in nature: water runs from high to low; electricity flows between cathode and anode; magnetic force goes between north and south poles.
This is especially true of human relations. Without polarity, relationships fall flat, whether in heterosexual or same-sex couples: someone has to wear the pants.
As a man, if you take on too much yin, you risk turning into an indecisive wimp, which is not necessarily appealing to women. Having an open heart is great; just remember to keep your spine also.
As a woman, if you take on too much yang, you risk turning into a facsimile of a guy, which may be admirable but not necessarily attractive. Strength is great, but remember that femininity is what draws in the masculine.
5. Get out of your own way.1. Abundance, or wealth-consciousness. Anaїs Nin once said, "We do not see the world as it is; we see the world as we... more

singrrr
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1 day ago

Can sexist jokes lead to violence?

"A new study conducted at the University of Granada sought to find if sexist humor increased the likelihood of violence and... more

DeliaTheArtist
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1 day ago

Yes, I Suck: Self-Help Through Negative Thinking

In the past 50 years, people with mental problems have spent untold millions of hours in therapists' offices, and millions more reading self-help books, trying to turn negative thoughts like "I never do anything right" into positive ones like "I can succeed." For many people — including well-educated, highly trained therapists, for whom "cognitive restructuring" is a central goal — the very definition of psychotherapy is the process of changing self-defeating attitudes into constructive ones. But was Norman Vincent Peale right? Is there power in positive thinking? A study just published in the journal Psychological Science says trying to get people to think more positively can actually have the opposite effect: it can simply highlight how unhappy they are. The study's authors, Joanne Wood and John Lee of the University of Waterloo and Elaine Perunovic of the University of New Brunswick, begin with a common-sense proposition: when people hear something they don't believe, they are not only often skeptical but adhere even more strongly to their original position. A great deal of psychological research has shown this, but you need look no further than any late-night bar debate you've had with friends: when someone asserts that Sarah Palin is brilliant, or that the Yankees are the best team in baseball, or that Michael Jackson was not a freak, others not only argue the opposing position, but do so with more conviction than they actually hold. We are an argumentative species.

And so we constantly argue with ourselves. Many of us are reluctant to revise our self-judgment, especially for the better. In 1994, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published a paper showing that when people get feedback that they believe is overly positive, they actually feel worse, not better. If you try to tell your dim friend that he has the potential of an Einstein, he won't think he's any smarter; he will probably just disbelieve your contradictory theory, hew more closely to his own self-assessment and, in the end, feel even dumber. In one fascinating 1990s experiment demonstrating this effect — called cognitive dissonance in official terms — a team including psychologist Joel Cooper of Princeton asked participants to write hard-hearted essays opposing funding for the disabled. When these participants were later told they were compassionate, they felt even worse about what they had written. or the new paper, Wood, Lee and Perunovic measured 68 students on their self-esteem. The students were then asked to write down their thoughts and feelings for four minutes. Every 15 seconds during those four minutes, one randomly assigned group of the students heard a bell. When they heard it, they were supposed to tell themselves, "I am a lovable person."

Those with low self-esteem — precisely the kind of people who do not respond well to positive feedback but tend to read self-help books or attend therapy sessions encouraging positive thinking — didn't feel better after those 16 bursts of self-affirmation. In fact, their self-evaluations and moods were significantly more negative than those of the people not asked to remind themselves of their lovability. This effect can also occur when experiments are more open-ended. The authors cite a 1991 study in which participants were asked to recall either six or 12 examples of instances when they behaved assertively. "Paradoxically," the authors write, "those in the 12-example condition rated themselves as less assertive than did those in the six-example condition. Participants apparently inferred from their difficulty retrieving 12 examples that they must not be very assertive after all."

Wood, Lee and Perunovic conclude that unfavorable thoughts about ourselves intrude very easily, especially among those of us with low self-esteem — so easily and so persistently that even when a positive alternative is presented, it just underlines how awful we believe we are.In the past 50 years, people with mental problems have spent untold millions of hours in therapists' offices, and millions... more

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1 day ago

Vitamin D and Mental Health

It was with interest that I read Dr. Soram Khalsa's post on The Huffington Post about the Vitamin D epidemic in this country today. The medical doctor writes this:

As a board certified internist, I have chosen, for the last 30 years, to take a personalized approach in my practice of integrative medicine. I have worked with literally hundreds of herbs, vitamins and dietary supplements, to help my patients, often when drugs did not work. In all this time, I have not seen one nutritional supplement that has the power to affect human health as much as vitamin D. This is because Vitamin D is not actually a vitamin -- it is a hormone that has the ability to interact and affect more than 2,000 genes in the body.
Over my 30 years of practicing medicine, countless times I have had to deliver or discuss with a patient their sad and possibly terminal diagnosis. Diseases like cancer and heart disease are at best life altering, and most times life threatening. When I have this kind of difficult conversation with a patient, I often reflect that if their vitamin D level had been normal for the previous many years, maybe they would never have developed this disease.

Ideally, your health care provider is your partner in exploring your vitamin D status, but patients usually do not want to visit their doctor just to ask for a vitamin D level, and many doctors are not yet up to date on the importance of vitamin D. If you use the at-home test kit and your blood level of vitamin D is low, I would encourage you to discuss this information with your physician.

I found this particularly interesting because a few weeks ago, I spoke to a highly-recommended internist about my overall health. She had me get all kinds of blood work done, and in her summary, she wrote that most of my levels looked good with exception to my vitamin D. I had a substantial deficiency that she suspected could explain my symptoms of fatigue and sluggishness.

She gave me a prescription for a potent vitamin D tablet that I'm supposed to take weekly for 10 weeks, and get my blood retested at that point. If my levels look okay, she told me to take a supplement of at least 2000 IU daily. This is my third week taking the highly leaded vitamin D and I do feel more energetic and a tad less irritable (not that any family members would agree with me).

My internist and I talked about vitamin D for about 10 minutes in her office. She said that most of her patients lately had deficiencies lately, especially her female patients. She advised me that the best way to get it, of course, was sunlight, and that sunscreen actually blocks it from your system. And she's not totally pro-vitamin, either. She thinks that you are much better off eating healthy foods than taking supplements, that your body can't process the high levels of vitamins and minerals that are sold in health food aisles.

But vitamin D isn't found in any food, she explained, so that's why it's essential to take a supplement.

I've been wondering how vitamin D and mental illness are related, so I did a search and found that vitamin D does, indeed, play a role in mental illness based on these reasons from the Vitamin D Council's website:

Epidemiological evidence shows an association between reduced sun exposure and mental illness.
Mental illness is associated with low 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] levels.
Mental illness shows a significant comorbidity with illnesses thought to be associated with vitamin D deficiency.
Theoretical models (in vitro or animal evidence) exist to explain how vitamin D deficiency may play a causative role in mental illness.
Studies indicate vitamin D improves mental illness.
Here's even more details, according to the Vitamin D Council:
Mental illness has increased as humans have migrated out of the sun.
There is epidemiological evidence that associates vitamin D deficiency with mental illness. Two small reports studied the association of low 25(OH)D levels with mental illness and both were positive.It was with interest that I read Dr. Soram Khalsa's post on The Huffington Post about the Vitamin D epidemic in this country... more

singrrr
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1 day ago

Yes, I Suck: Self-Help Through Negative Thinking

In the past 50 years, people with mental problems have spent untold millions of hours in therapists' offices, and millions... more

larock
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1 day ago

More Troops' Kids Seeking Mental Help

Children of U.S. military troops sought outpatient mental health care 2 million times last year, double the number at the start of... more

EmperorThan
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2 days ago

Why Nice Guys Finish Last

Ricky Menezes, a 22-year-old from Marlborough, Mass., says he knows he will hook up with "about 20 girls" in the next... more

singrrr
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2 days ago

What Do Anger Management Tips Actually Accomplish?

How to deal with anger and become calmer more easily. Anger exercises are ways in which you realize what triggers your anger and... more

rootmug
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3 days ago

When your biggest problem is YOU!

It's not like I'm shooting myself in the foot," said Whitney. "It's more like I'm using my entire body for target practice. With guns in both hands." Whitney's problems began when economic chaos hit the advertising company where she was an editor.

As Whitney cut redundant prose from ad copy, her company cut redundant workers all around her. Whitney herself had always been a perfectionist who loved her work, but after the downsizing, her performance nose-dived.

She began to forget meetings, sleep past her alarm, accidentally forward highly personal e-mails to her boss. On the day she absentmindedly shredded a presentation she was about to deliver, Whitney came to see me.

"Do I have early-onset Alzheimer's?" she asked desperately. "Maybe ADD? A brain tumor? It's got to be something medical. Meanwhile, another client of mine -- I'll call her Olga -- was going through something similar in her relationship with her husband. "Jack is my life," she told me. "I couldn't go on without him."

Yet Olga made as many stupid mistakes at home as Whitney did at work. "I forget I've promised to pick him up after work," she told me. "When he says he needs space, I follow him around begging him to talk, and when he wants to be close, I shut down. What's wrong with me?" Maybe you've had an experience akin to these, a truck-with-no-brakes run of errors and foul-ups that wreak destruction in your life despite frantic efforts to regain control. In the midst of such madness, it can help immensely to know that there's a name for your pain. You may be using something psychologists call a counterphobic mechanism, a tendency to slide toward, not away from, something you fear.

Those of us who use plain English might call it self-sabotage -- and it can ruin your life. As counterintuitive as it might seem, these subconscious reflexes can be helpful. In these officially Troubled Times, it behooves us all to be aware of them and use them consciously and skillfully.

Anticipation, anticipation is making me late...

"One of my theories," says the evil Count in William Goldman's classic story "The Princess Bride," "is that pain involves anticipation." He then leaves the captive hero, Westley, chained next to the Machine, a torture device the Count has promised to use on Westley later.

An albino dungeon-keeper offers Westley a way out. "You deserve better than what's coming," he says in a moment of compassion. "Please let me kill you. You'll thank me, I swear." Only Westley's superhuman fortitude keeps him from accepting.

The Count's theory about anticipation is right on the money. And self-sabotage is the mind's way of accepting the albino's offer. Like Whitney or Olga, we may screw up in precisely the places we want most to succeed, not realizing that we're subconsciously trying to force a resolution, to stop the anxious feeling that's hanging over our heads, to lose the job rather than continue to worry about a pink slip.

To resolve the situation, we must first recognize that we're using counterphobic mechanisms. And that means punching through denial.It's not like I'm shooting myself in the foot," said Whitney. "It's more like I'm using my entire... more

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4 days ago

Saints & Sinners both find Moral Balance

"The idea works kind of like a moral meter and when it gets overfilled an individual commits some immoral acts as a way of... more

DeliaTheArtist
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4 days ago

Capitalism vs. Socialism: What makes us Happier?

"A new analysis of the happiness, or more specifically the "life satisfaction," of people living in parts of Europe in the 1990s as the Iron Curtain fell sheds more light on how our personal feelings of well-being respond to socialism, capitalism and big economic transitions.

The work, in short, suggests that our personal economic stability might be more important to life satisfaction (a measure of happiness or well-being) than the Gross Domestic Product, and the type of socioeconomic or political order in which we live. In other words, free market capitalism only works when it works. When it doesn't, some form of socialism (and its guarantees of employment, education and health care) can look attractive.

The research on former Communist-bloc nations was done by economist Richard Easterlin of the University of Southern California, a long-time scholar on "happiness economics." He is responsible for the "Easterlin Paradox," which concludes that more money makes us happier, but only up to a point. Once we are lifted out of poverty, more money does nothing to increase our happiness. A handful of economists disagree with this and say more money makes us more happy, though more slowly as our prosperity grows.

Anyhow, Easterlin's latest work focuses on life satisfaction (subjects were asked "All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?").

He finds that life satisfaction correlated in a bad way with the initial collapse of GDP (gross domestic product) after socialism was abandoned in 13 Eastern, Central and Southern European nations in the 1990s (including Russia, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic). During the transitional years, GDP fell by 50 to 85 percent of 1989 levels within a few years in a downturn that affected 400 million people. Later in the decade, GDP recovered slowly but life satisfaction didn't keep up. The social response to the downturn was bad in Russia, for instance, according to a 2005 study by Brainerd and Cutler, cited by Easterlin — more divorce, suicides, domestic violence, alcoholism and drug use.

It was not until 2005, when GDP recovered to early 1990 levels or better, that life satisfaction started to catch up, he found. The results are forthcoming in the August 2009 issue of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

It reminds one of candidate Bill Clinton's campaign mantra in 1992: "It's the economy, stupid." Only with more nuance.

Easterlin found that the opportunity to enjoy the economic freedoms of capitalism was less critical to life satisfaction than one's personal economic stability, and that rising GDP is not enough, after a downturn, to restore happiness.

More critical to happiness are everyday socio-economic matters such as "do we all have jobs?" and "do we have health care, old age care and child care?" and "will our family manage to stick together through this?""A new analysis of the happiness, or more specifically the "life satisfaction," of people living in parts of Europe... more

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4 days ago

The Tricky Psycology of Self Esteem

"If you already believe that, then it'll probably help your self-esteem to say it. But if you have low self-esteem — meaning you are the type of person such a self-help technique would be aimed at — it'll likely just make you feel worse, a new study finds.

The finding, reported by the BBC, is detailed in the journal Psychological Science.

However, self-esteem and its close cousin self-confidence are slippery research topics. Scientists don't even know to what extent they are inherited vs. fostered.

Many scientists have long assumed that a person's self-image was largely a product of environment, of what happens growing up. But it might instead be mostly inherited, a recent study of twins suggests. The research suggests self-confidence may be related to genetics as much as IQ is, according to an article in The Daily Mail.

It's an ongoing mystery worth solving because what one believes about oneself affects how life plays out. Students with high self-esteem are known to do better in school, for example, and it certainly is one useful ingredient for success later in life.

Oddly, however, a 2007 study found that we all have roughly the same amount of self-esteem — each of us just expresses it differently. So the "bull in the China shop" is just more blustery, not necessarily more confident, the thinking goes, and the seemingly meek may simply be quieter.

A slightly related study last year found that group pride — the boastful self-aggrandizing you see at a football game or a frat house — may be the product of individuals trying to mask insecurity and low social status.

Psychologists have found in recent years that high self-esteem is not always what it seems: Some people have plenty of self-esteem, but they don't seem to be certain about it; their view of themselves is, instead, fragile.

That was the conclusion of a study last year, reported in the Journal of Personality, which found that people with high self-esteem are less defensive, but only if their self-esteem is actually secure. "People with fragile high self-esteem compensate for their self-doubts by engaging in exaggerated tendencies to defend, protect and enhance their feelings of self-worth," said University of Georgia psychology professor Michael Kernis, who led the study.

Psych studies tend to trump previous psych studies with great frequency, however, and you can be confident that the last word on this topic has not been spoken.""If you already believe that, then it'll probably help your self-esteem to say it. But if you have low self-esteem... more

DeliaTheArtist
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4 days ago

Wind power may have its own environmental problems

Shinjuro Kondo, 76, who moved into his Japanese neighborhood 17 years ago, said, "Stiff shoulders, headaches, insomnia, hand... more

el_chivo
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4 days ago

Assessing the impact of cannabis use on trends in diagnosed schizophrenia

In conclusion, this study did not find any evidence of increasing schizophrenia or psychoses in the general population from 1996... more

JackHerer
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10 responses

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4 days ago

Scientist's mental state at issue in NYC hearing

To government psychiatrists, Aafia Siddiqui has been faking symptoms of mental illness, hoping to avoid a criminal trial on... more

Apocalipstick
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Is There Hope for the American Marriage?

Around the time of my parents' 50th wedding anniversary, I turned to my father at the dinner table one night and said, "It's amazing, Dad — 50 years, and you never once had an affair. How do you account for that?" He replied simply, "I can't drive."

Watching the governor of South Carolina cry like a little girl because his sexy e-mails got forwarded to his local newspaper, the State, made me wonder whether the real secret to a lasting marriage lies in limiting your means of escape. Whether you're putting the Buick Regal in reverse or hitting Send on a love note, you're busting out of your marriage, however temporarily, and soon enough there will be hell to pay. During the press conference in which he admitted his affair, Mark Sanford warbled that he had broken "God's law," a sentiment that served only to emphasize the narcissism that had gotten him in trouble. Wrestling with God's law had apparently been the subject of many sessions of his Bible-study group, a seminar that may have spent a little too much time on the Song of Solomon, given Sanford's e-mailed encomium of his lover's physique: "I love the curves of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of night's light." Finally a bit of prose that makes us long for the clinical precision of the Starr report. Sanford told reporters the affair had begun "very innocently," which reveals that he still hasn't been honest with himself about the willfulness of his actions. When a married man begins a secret, solicitous correspondence with a beautiful and emotionally needy single woman, he has already begun to cheat on his wife.

Just a week before, another blue-blazered elected official — Senator John Ensign of Nevada — was forced to make a similar confession, although he left God out of it, which must have been a nice break for the Almighty. Ensign had done "the worst thing" in his entire life, he confessed: "I violated the vows of my marriage." The mood on both occasions was funereal; it might have been touching to see two such buttoned-up guys welling with tears if the corpses weren't their political careers.

The one thing both men refused to admit was that, back in the heyday of these affairs, they must have been having a blast. These were two middle-aged, conservative Republican men who had said, To hell with being part of the Cialis generation (midlife sexuality depicted as an aging husband and wife reclining in ... side-by-side bathtubs? What is the drugmaker worried about — that randy Pa might jump in Ma's bath and break her hip?). Their actions were so willful and blatantly self-centered that the two of them could have credibly fashioned themselves as rebels, possibly even as heroes, if they could have just stopped crying. They weren't a couple of tools stuck in sexless marriages and making up for it with Internet porn. These guys had embarked on dangerously erotic rampages with real-life, unencumbered women, women who decidedly weren't ... Jenny and Darlene. The long-suffering wives, Fun Busters in Chief.

In the e-mails exchanged between the governor and his girlfriend, they trip over themselves to praise the other's virtues. She was "special and unique," "glorious"; he was a man of emotional generosity who "brought happiness and love to my life." These two humanitarians were engaged not only in worshipping each other's high-mindedness but also in destroying another woman's home, hobbling her children emotionally and setting her up for humiliation of a titanic proportion. The squalor and pain that resulted from the Sanford and Ensign midlife crises make manifest a bleak truth that the late writer Leonard Michaels once observed in his journal: "Adultery is not about sex or romance. Ultimately, it is about how little we mean to one another."Around the time of my parents' 50th wedding anniversary, I turned to my father at the dinner table one night and said,... more