Posts
May 11, 2012
+
3:30 PM | Airing your dirty laundry on Facebook - Endearing? Annoying? It may depend on your self-esteem
source
Though this Facebook fad (I know I know, it’s here to stay) has never truly caught on with me, I am certainly aware of its many benefits. Facebook is an amazing medium for sharing information – news, music, ridiculous youtube videos. You can use Facebook as a means for self-expression – to advertise aspects of your personality, your taste, your interests. With Facebook you can stay current with your nearest and dearest, even if they live across the country/world (or stalk just […]
Forest AL & Wood JV (2012). When social networking is not working: individuals with low self-esteem recognize but do not reap the benefits of self-disclosure on Facebook., Psychological science, 23 (3) 295-302. PMID: 22318997
Citation
April 18, 2012
+
2:30 PM | Using Social Psychology to Stay Healthy
source
Imagine the following scenario. You learn that a family member has been diagnosed with an illness. This illness has a genetic basis and as such, you could be at risk for it as well. There is, however, a screening for the genetic marker, and you can find out whether you are likely to develop this illness. Do you complete the screening or do avoid it?
Though few of us will face this specific scenario, many of us will face something similar. Heart disease runs in many families, as do
[...]
Citation
November 23, 2011
+
Source
Take a moment to think carefully about the answers to these questions:
Do you prefer when others dislike you?
Do you feel bad when you get positive feedback?
Do successes make you anxious?
Do you choose romantic partners that think poorly of you?
For many of you, these questions seem absurd, the answer a resounding no to all of them. Others, however, may be less sure. Why? Although common wisdom tells us that as humans we want, strive, and desperately need positive feedback
[...]
November 09, 2011
+
source
This was originally posted back in May. We thought some of our newer readers might be interested in this topic! Enjoy!
For months now a good friend has been trying to convince me to run a half marathon with him. Each time the conversation comes up I casually change the subject, check my phone for new messages, or look him in the face and say “heck no.” Why am I resistant to such a healthful, fun, and challenging event?
I have two reasons. First, I am by no means in shape.
[...]
October 28, 2011
+
Today we would like to present you with the another (terrific) guest bloggers. Joseph Williams is a graduate student in the cognitive psychology program at UC-Berkeley. Enjoy!
source
You’re about to read a 200-word science passage on sea otters so that you can successfully answer questions about it in a week’s time. What strategies would you use to study it? Which of these options would you choose? (a) reading it four times, (b) drawing out a concept map of all the key ideas, or (c)
[...]
October 26, 2011
+
4:01 PM | The power of red
source
Like most teenagers in suburbia I took a driver’s education class shortly after I earned my learner’s permit. Though I picked up critical driving tips, and got plenty of practice in the driver’s seat, one of the most interesting facts I learned concerned car insurance and the color red. According to my teacher, drivers with red cars had to pay higher insurance rates. Apparently this was due to the fact that people in red cars were more likely to speed. I’ve since learned that
[...]
October 12, 2011
+
source
I will never forget when the final installment of the Harry Potter series came out. Myself and a few of my closest friends from college, all big HP fans, were spending the weekend at my Mom’s house. Although I hadn’t seen these friends in 6 months, although there were a ton of activities to do in that region of upstate NY, although we were twenty five years old - we could not wait to see how J.K. Rowling was going to wrap up the series. The second we picked up the Deathly Hallows,
[...]
September 30, 2011
+
source
This post originally appeared back when PYM was just getting started. We thought our newer readers would be interested in this as well. Enjoy!
Many psychologists are interested in understanding personality – characteristics that can describe and explain how individuals think, feel, and behave across situations. Early work in the field of personality psychology sought to uncover the core dimensions on which people differ. To answer this question researchers looked to language [...]
+
The Stanford Prison Experiment is one of the most notorious psychology studies ever conducted. It was begun by Stanford Psychology professor Phil Zimbardo as a way to understand conflict between military guards and prisoners. Zimbardo set up a mock jail in his psychology lab, and then randomly assigned students to the role of guard or prisoner - roles they were expected to carry out for a two week period. After only six days the study was cut short, as the guards began to use unexpected [...]
September 28, 2011
+
source
Living in the San Francisco Bay Area provides many benefits: good food, great activities, incredible landscape. For me, however, the Bay Area is SOO special, because it caters to a fabulously diverse array of residents. For example, each year San Franciscans can take to the streets to herald in spring during the Cherry Blossom Festival in Japantown, celebrate the beauty of leather during Folsom Street Fair, or stomp their feet and slap their thighs to the music at the completely free
[...]
September 14, 2011
+
source
There are many theories about why individuals engage in heavy alcohol consumption. One general theory psychologists refer to is called the Dual Process Model. It holds that people have two different systems for processing information. The impulsive system automatically (quickly) evaluates stimuli in the environment in terms of emotion, and motivation, and (again quickly) pushes the individual to move toward or away from the stimuli. Alternatively, the reflective system focuses on
[...]
August 31, 2011
+
12:00 PM | Narcissists know they're narcissists
source
While positive self-views are generally considered healthy, adaptive, and attractive, OVERLY positive self-views often have social costs. For example, when I asked my friend’s boyfriend if his classes this semester were challenging, he responded as follows: “I’ve done better than EVERY OTHER student in EVERY SINGLE grad class that I’ve taken. I certainly don’t except my classes this semester to be a problem.” If you’re like me, this statement made you shudder. The sense [...]
August 26, 2011
+
12:00 PM | The Plastic Brain
Today we would like to present you with the second of our series of guest bloggers. Allyson Mackey is a graduate student in the neuroscience program at UC-Berkeley. Enjoy!
source
I was recently challenged by a colleague to come up with an example of a neuroscience finding that changed the way I live my life. I immediately thought of the now quite vast literature on neuroplasticity: the ability of our brains to change and adapt to new experiences. In this post, I’d like to propose that
[...]
August 03, 2011
+
source
Throughout my life I’ve been lucky to be friends with a diverse array of people, who have had quite varied past experiences. There are those few friends with "charmed" lives. Healthy family, happy home, found "the one" with little difficulty. There are others who have experienced major traumas. The loss of a parent, a debilitating rejection, chronic poverty. This variability has often made me wonder about the relationship between past experiences and whether one [...]
July 29, 2011
+
source
Perhaps you, our most interested and involved reader, have taken a look at the “About the Bloggers/Researchers” section of Psych Your Mind (PYM). Here you learned that we’re either doctoral candidates (Amie, Juli, and I) or post doctoral scholars (Michael) in psychology. Like many of my friends and family, you might be confused about what that actually means. For example, when I tell people that I’m a psychologist, they naturally assume that I’m a therapist and see clients. [...]
July 20, 2011
+
12:00 PM | Flexing the Muscle that is Self-Control
source
College was a busy time for me and by extension a trying period for my roommate Vanessa. Unlike the average 19 year old, Vanessa had assumed such adult-like habits as washing dishes directly after eating a meal, making regular trips to take out the trash, and refusing to live with scum and filth in general (God forbid). These healthy habits were by no means my own. I was just learning how to balance the demands of my two priorities: a heavy workload at NYU and a debaucherous social [...]
July 06, 2011
+
12:00 PM | Reflection without Rumination
sourc
After we go through a painful experience – a conflict with a friend, a break-up, a loss, we face a conundrum. On the one hand, reflection on the experience is essential. It allows us to gain insight, to understand the experience in new and important ways, to get over it. Yet, what once was healthy reflection can often turn into rumination – a toxic preoccupation with the experience that fosters negative emotion. In fact, rumination is believed to contribute to depressive episodes
[...]
June 22, 2011
+
source
In my last post I described a manipulation that was successful in boosting low self-esteem. Denise Marigold and colleagues directed participants to think less about the details of a partner’s compliment and more about the significance of the partner’s words. This compliment reframing catalyzed both an improvement in relationship satisfaction for individuals with low self-esteem, and an increase in self-esteem itself. Today I’d like to continue this thread with another set of
[...]
June 08, 2011
+
12:00 PM | Boosting Self-Esteem
source
Last week I presented research that evaluated the efficacy of positive self-statements (a form of affirmations) for changing self-esteem. Contrary to their reputation in pop-culture, Joanne Wood and colleagues found that positive self-statements backfire for participants low in self-esteem. When these participants repeated the statement “I am lovable” throughout a study session, they ended up being in a worse mood, and reporting even lower self-esteem than if they didn’t use the
[...]
June 03, 2011
+
source
Introductory psychology courses almost always include a lecture or two on Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory. This theory proposes that individuals learn social behavior by observing and imitating others. The theory has been applied most particularly to the learning of aggressive behavior.
In the classic “Bobo Doll” experiment child participants observed an adult interact aggressively with a plastic, blow-up doll. The adult hit the doll, kicked it, and even pummeled it [...]
June 01, 2011
+
12:00 PM | Positive Affirmations: Friend or Foe?
source
This morning I conducted a search for “positive affirmations” on amazon.com. These are positive statements individuals repeat to themselves in order to impress the message on their subconscious, convince themselves of the statement’s validity, and by extension bring about positive change. The website popped out 615 books relevant to positive affirmations. This tells me that 1) people are clearly writing about positive affirmations, and 2) if such an abundance of books on positive [...]
May 25, 2011
+
source
For months now a good friend has been trying to convince me to run a half marathon with him. Each time the conversation comes up I casually change the subject, check my phone for new messages, or look him in the face and say “heck no.” Why am I resistant to such a healthful, fun, and challenging event?
I have two reasons. First, I am by no means in shape. I get winded after five minutes at a light jog. The thought that my sorry body could take me 13 miles is unfathomable and
[...]
May 11, 2011
+
12:00 PM | One cookie or Two: Part 3
source
Today I will wrap up this mini-series on delay of gratification. What have you learned from parts 1 and 2? Delay of gratification is the ability to forgo an immediate, but less desirable reward, in order to receive a more desirable reward later. This ability is measured in childhood using the classic paradigm developed by Walter Mischel: Kids try to wait for two treats instead of having one immediately. Finally, you learned that performance during the delay task in childhood relates
[...]
May 04, 2011
+
12:00 PM | One cookie or two: Part 2
source
Last week I introduced you to work on delay of gratification – the ability to forgo an immediate, but less desirable reward, in order to obtain a more desirable reward later on. I described the way psychologists assess delay of gratification in childhood – with the famous delay (a.k.a. “marshmallow”) task.
If you didn’t read the prior post, or can’t remember the task, take a look back before reading on. A quick reminder…a child waits A LONG TIME, ALONE, with
[...]
April 29, 2011
+
source
Many psychologists are interested in understanding personality – characteristics that can describe and explain how individuals think, feel, and behave across situations. Early work in the field of personality psychology sought to uncover the core dimensions on which people differ. To answer this question researchers looked to language as they believed that all of the important dimensions of personality must be described within a culture’s lexicon.
Researchers, like Gordon [...]
April 27, 2011
+
12:00 PM | One cookie or two?
source
In early life we fixate on the here and now. We're driven solely by pleasure (e.g. food, social contact), and have no sense of the future consequences of our behavior. With age, however, we realize that some of those pleasures have costs. Sitting on the couch watching Jersey Shore sounds awesome, but it isn't going to help us score high on the SAT's. A tub of ice cream tastes phenomenal but it certainly isn't good for our health or our waist-line. With age we learn to [...]
April 20, 2011
+
12:00 PM | Why you might not like when others like you
Source
Take a moment to think carefully about the answers to these questions:
Do you prefer when others dislike you?
Do you feel bad when you get positive feedback?
Do successes make you anxious?
Do you choose romantic partners that think poorly of you?
For many of you, these questions seem absurd, the answer a resounding no to all of them. Others, however, may be less sure. Why? Although common wisdom tells us that as humans we want, strive, and desperately need positive feedback from the
[...]
April 13, 2011
+
12:00 PM | No dessert until you eat your vegetables!
source
As a child I had a love of sweets. Well maybe not just sweets, but junk food more generally. In fact one year I begged Santa for a bottle of ketchup at Christmas. Needless to say I didn’t get. Thanks Santa=( Like many parents, my Mom and Dad struggled to get me to eat full, balanced, healthy meals. I poked, prodded, and scattered the brown rice, fresh fish, and local veggies. I made many valiant attempts to trick my parents into believing I had consumed enough of the healthy stuff so [...]
1
28 Results
