Description: Ok, at work or any formal group setting (a class, a club, a team, etc.) how do you manage your emotions and your expression of your emotions as they arise? Do you let them show and express them? Do you cover or hide them and ‘show’ and even calm exterior or one that is… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Social Influence
Magic and Psychology: Sort Them Out or Fold Them Together?
Description: Think back to the last time you saw a magician at work and in particular when they either made something disappear or, perhaps, appear or reappear unexpectedly or ‘magically’. What were you thinking about as they made those things happen? Were you trying to figure out how they did it? Were you trying to… Read more »
Is (or When is) City Living Good For You?
Description: Is city living good for you? When lecturing on mental health and illness I usually refer to research suggesting that rates of a number of mental disorders are higher in urban centers but that causal nature of that observation is problematic as cities are where most mental health treatment centers are located and most… Read more »
Social Media and Self-Esteem: A BIG picture Perspective
Description: You have most certainly heard more than a few concerns offered or even alarms raised regarding the potentially negative effects arising from social media use particularly among teams. Many have arisen from population level observations of correlations between rates of social media use and anxiety or depression or other negative outcomes, but such studies… Read more »
Racism and the Everyday Psychology of Urban Indigenous Women
Description: One of the challenges involved in trying to Indigenize Psychology is tied to fact that western Psychology is rather deeply grounded in the same a-cultural, individualistic perspective that defines the western or settler perspective. What this can mean is that while Psychology as a discipline CAN consider issues of culture, stigma and social stereotypes… Read more »
Teen Dating and Development: Normative?
Description: Often when we are looking at what is going on at certain points in human developmental trajectories, we make assumptions. We assume that something that most individuals at that particular age or stage are doing is normative. Normative technically just means most frequent but additional meaning is usually included with term. We frequently assume… Read more »
Clever Horses, School Children and The Pygmalion Effect
Description: What do horses that seem to be able to spell and do math, grade school children, and stereotypes of poor people or smokers have in common? The Pygmalion Effect. Well that is not enlightening but what about expectancy effects and not their own expectancies but expectancies or assumptions that other have about them? How… Read more »
Is Evil Born or Made or What?
Description: I have posted about the Dark Triad (Machiavellianism, Narcissism and Psychopathy) before which suggests how some poor or bad behavior in others might be accounted for, but what about large-scale evil? An ongoing question has been to wonder what array of circumstances, conditions, and characteristics come together to produce truly evil people such a… Read more »
Psychology and Socialization: The Individual and (versus) the Social
Description: Psychology has a recurrent problem. Well, perhaps, it may be better to say that western (North American) Psychology, despite its commitment to empiricism and scientific objectivity, is a product of its culture. Try this thought on for size: Western Psychology strongly prefers to see the individual (singular person) as its unit of analysis. One… Read more »
APA, Gillette, #MeToo, and Toxic Masculinity
Description: Have you seen the ad recently produced by the Gillette company? Their company tag line is “The Best a Man can Get” and in their ad they argue against toxic masculinity and that recent social change movements such as #MeToo have initiated changes in our thinking about masculinity. Gillette’s ad states that things have… Read more »
Books for Success!
