Description: Answer two questions: Where you born before or after 1995? How old were you the first time you were allowed, by your parents, to out of your house and into your neighborhood by yourself? If you were born after 1995 you are more likely to have said 10, 11 or 12 years of age… Read more »
Posts By: Mike Boyes
Failure Leads to Success: Just How Does That Work?
Description: Does failure lead to more failure or to success? You have probably heard from one source or another that we learn more from failure than from success which would suggest some sort of a link between failure and subsequent success. But is that true and if so just how is it that failure could… Read more »
Do Sex Differences Mean There Are Male and Female Brains?
Description: Book titles such as Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus (John Gray) suggest that there are some fundamental differences between men and women. What might that hypothesis or sentiment suggest about the brains of men and women? Well, the idea that, at the level of the brain, men and women are… Read more »
What Parts of Resilience are in the Brain?
Description: In developmental psychology the term resilience has an interesting recent history. It debuted in research in the 1970’s in studies such as one looking at the children of Kuai. That important study gathered detailed data regarding the prenatal, birth and post-natal experiences of every child born on the island of Kuai in Hawaii in… Read more »
The Efficacy and Ethics of Zapping Depression
Description: Ok here we go…. This sounds like science fiction BUT … what if we could implant electrodes into our brains into specific locations and then, when necessary, such as when were are clinically depressed, we could use the implanted electrodes to stimulate those areas of the brain and by doing so normalize the functioning… Read more »
Dealing with Problematic Drinking in High School: A Developmental Approach
Description: There are many issues and problems that can benefit from a developmental perspective. We can try and find ways to address reduce or fix problems when they arise. For example, we can address the problems associated with some risk-seeking young drivers by suspending their licenses after fewer demerit points than would be true for… Read more »
Suicide Prediction Algorythms: Possible? Ethical? Essential?
Description: Suicides are preventable, but, ….. predicting suicide attempts so that timely assistance and support can be offered is incredibly difficult. Part of the problem, from an epidemiological perspective, is that suicide is a statistically rare event (annually 11 per 100,000 per year in Canada currently) but still, 10 people a day commit suicide in… Read more »
Biology and Mental Illness: Why No Cures Yet?
Description: We have drugs that treat mental disorders like schizophrenia and depression so do we have cures for those disorders? One of the reasons given for the focus shift taken by Martin Seligman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and others to Positive Psychology (optimizing things for everyone) is that we have addressed mental illness and can move on…. Read more »
Can We Study Luck?
Description: Are you a lucky person? Are there regular situations where you do or do not do things like buy a raffle ticket or get a job where you do or do not act based on your beliefs about how lucky you are? Such thoughts come up at least once and a while for most… Read more »
Good Narcissism?
Description: Unless you have been asleep for the past 2 to 3 years you could not have missed the serious bump in interest in narcissism and the related dark triad or tetrad of personality. Certainly the implications of narcissism for social functioning and for occupying and acquitting the duties of …. well … senior public… Read more »
Books for Success!
