Description: You have, do doubt, encountered toxic people in your life. Even without labels, you know the sorts of things they do – manipulating social situations, taking advantage of others, particularly when the others are honest and humble, or currying favor with those in charge. In day-to-day life you can often simply walk away from… Read more »
Posts By: Mike Boyes
Want Valuable Long Term Relationship Data? Enter an Escape Room!
Description: Ok imagine you are trying to get to know someone – someone with whom you might form a long term intimate relationship. Forget running your own version of a reality TV show (The Bachelor or the Bachelorette) but what sort of data would you want to gather as you contemplate moving forward with the… Read more »
Searching for the Origins of Schizophrenia
Description: Schizophrenia affects about 1% of the population and while there are treatments that can be partially effective there is no real cure. An understanding of the origins of schizophrenia, of how it emerges, could move us towards earlier identification and could suggest new treatment avenues. As it has been discussed in our textbooks, schizophrenia… Read more »
Transitioning from High School to College or University: Will You Be a Thriver or a Diver? It is up to you!
Description: The transition from high school to college or university can be easy or challenging. Those of you contemplating your own upcoming transitions to post-secondary settings may be wondering how it will go for you. The best predictor of post-secondary educational success in secondary educational success, or on other words, if you got good marks… Read more »
Peer-to-Peer Campaigns for Dealing with Depression in High Schools: A Solution to Screening Woes?
Description: One of the biggest challenges in dealing with depression in the population is getting those who are struggling with it to seek help. Efforts to set up screening systems for any psychological (or physical) health matter are potentially very costly and very difficult to design effectively (just think about two issues – false negatives,… Read more »
Applying Classic Psychology Experiments to Leadership and Life
Description: What makes a Psychology experiment a “classic”? Well perhaps that s too broad a question but, in truth, “classic” psychology experiments, even, or perhaps especially, the ones that would not get through an ethic panel review today can cause us to reflect upon some important issues and variables in our lives. Think about what… Read more »
Narcolpsy, Stigma and Normative Tyranny: Sleepyheads
Description: When you consider one or another of the array of disorders you may have been presented in the Abnormal Psychology section of an Introductory Psychology course or in an Abnormal Psychology course it is easy to step back and take a broad perspective on the population of individuals who at some point meet the… Read more »
Spotting Liars: New tools for assessing character (shhhh don’t tell your friends and relatives!)
Description: Can you tell when someone is lying to you? If you do a You Tube search on lie detection you will find a great many postings showing versions of the classic lie detection game where someone tells you several things about themselves one of which is a lie and you have to figure out… Read more »
Pitching Apps/Sites for Mental Health: Fad or global change in mental health management and promotion?
Description: The Calgary Distress Centre (in my home town) started out as a call-in center, open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Until recently its only form of contact with distressed individuals was over their phone lines and that worked very well as a way for people to find someone to talk to… Read more »
Baby Strokes: Plasticity and Hemispheric Shifts in Loction of Function
Description: Two questions before we get into this topic. First, who has strokes? Second, if someone has a massive left hemisphere stroke what will likely happen to their spoken language abilities? Old people and language will suffer right? Well, not entirely. You see, infants, and in fact, newborns (about 1 in 4000) can have strokes…. Read more »
Books for Success!
