Psychology and More

Later in the term, we will be studying sensation and perception and its relation to consciousness. The BBC has an article on what happens when we are left alone with an active perceptual system getting little external sensory stimulation. The terminology and attitude of the article are a bit dated though.

What is referred in the article as “sensory deprivation” is now referred more to restricted environmental stimulation technique (REST), and has been studied for a long time. Early studies of this phenomenon had focused on the deleterious effects and sensationalized the hallucinations and delirium that resulted. More recent studies have been focused on how it can be helpful in clinical therapy. My graduate school advisor, Peter Suedfeld, has done much with this research, including demonstrating its effects on cognition and usefulness for smoking cessation and other behavioral change.

BBC NEWS | Magazine | Alone in the dark:

North American scientists paid students to stay in conditions of sensory deprivation for varying lengths of time. Most dropped out after 72 hours, and very few were able to stay more than four or five days. The boredom and oppression of the experiments’ conditions became overpowering.

Mickey, a postman is seeing mosquitoes and fighter planes buzzing around his head and it’s frightening him.

Claire a psychology student doesn’t mind the little cars, snakes and zebras. But she gets scared when she suddenly feels somebody is in the room.

“In the dark room there is nothing to focus on,” says Prof Robbins as he monitors their behaviour. “In the absence of information the human brain carries on working and processing information even if there is no information to process and after a while it starts to create that information itself.”

Technorati Tags: psychology

• The scientific method, and methods of experimentation in psychology. Covers independent & dependent variables, control & experimental conditions, sampling, assignment, statistics.

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PSY201A Episode 3 - History, Systems & Methods Part 1

• This episode covers history of psychology post-renaissance, perspectives in psychology, and begins discussion of systems and methods: Scientific terminology.

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Covers electronic resources for learning & studying: MyPCC; textbook & MyPsychLab sites; podcast; weblog. Began survey of philosophy of mind-body dualism. Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas. Read the rest of this entry »

Introduction to my course in introductory psychology. Course policies and procedures. Psychophysiology labs. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the topics we will be studying later in the term is memory — specifically, how memory can be easily distorted, or even fabricated. The British Psychological Society’s weblog has an interesting summary of an article demonstrating that memory recall can be distorted by making people aware of stereotypes (a related topic is known as stereotype threat)…

BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: Gender stereotypes can distort our memories:

Plenty of research has shown that some stereotypes are not only offensive, they can also have a detrimental effect on people’s behaviour.

For example, women’s maths performance suffers after they are reminded of the stereotype that men are better than women at maths.

Now Armand Chatard and colleagues have taken this line of research a step further by demonstrating that being reminded of gender stereotypes can distort students’ memories of their prior exam performance.

Technorati Tags: memory, psychology, social psychology, stereotypes

The Advances in the History of Psychology weblog points to a story about a real-life example of Milgram’s obedience effects…

Advances in the History of Psychology — Milgram Study Comes to Life (Again):

This past August a Massachusetts institution that specializes in the treatment of people with autism, mental retardation, and emotional problems, the Judge Rotenberg center, was tricked into delivering dozens of electric shocks to two of its special education students when staff were ordered to do so over the telephone by a former student posing as a school supervisor.

Technorati Tags: psychology

The New York Times has an article about Freud’s theories and how they are increasingly being ignored in psychology departments, yet they are alive and well in the humanities…

Freud Is Widely Taught at Universities, Except in the Psychology Department - New York Times:

The primary reason it became marginalized, Ms. Eagly, said, is that while most disciplines in psychology began putting greater emphasis on testing the validity of their approaches scientifically, “psychoanalysts haven’t developed the same evidence-based grounding.” As a result, most psychology departments don’t pay as much attention to psychoanalysis.

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In Introduction to Psychology, we were recently discussing consciousness and non-ordinary consciousness. Hypnosis is one of those non-ordinary states of consciousness which can show some very important changes in perceptual experience, including pain relief. Mind Hacks has an interesting article on a research study underway…

Mind Hacks: Hypnosis as a surgical tool:

Patients were randomly assigned to either a brief 15-minute hypnosis condition, or to another where the patient discussed their concerns with an empathic psychologist (to make sure the effects weren’t just due to having someone their to ‘calm their nerves’).

The study found that patients given hypnosis needed less painkilling medication, were less nauseous, less emotionally upset, and experienced less pain intensity than the patients in the ‘empathic listening’ condition.

Technorati Tags: perception, psychology, hypnosis

In my Introduction to Psychology classes, we’re studying sensation and perception. The excellent weblog Cognitive Daily covers new research on something related: cognition and visual searches:

Cognitive Daily: Can you “use the force” to find things faster?:

People who study visual search have found anecdotally that just “relaxing” and looking for objects based on “gut instinct” can often be more effective than actively directing attention to a search.

Technorati Tags: cognition, psychology