Description: Ok, here is a challenging question. Imagine you are a parent, and your child is 4 years old, and you need some butter for a recipe you are working on for a large family dinner, but you have several things in the oven and on the stove and you cannot leave (Covid inspired delivery… Read more »
Posts Categorized: The Self
Can Criticism be Positive?
Description: If you cannot say something nice say nothing at all! Did you ever get that advice? It is possibly good advice for young children who are learning how to “play nice” together but what about in adulthood and especially what about in work settings where you might be training or managing others or working… Read more »
Predicting Personality from Twitter Posts? Hmmm…
Description: How accurately do you think you could predict peoples’ Big Fiver personality profiles by reviewing their twitter posts? Really, pick a percentage! Are peoples’ Twitter personalities different than those they show in face-to-face interactions? Now, with your number picked (assuming it was not a zero), think about what you would look for in your… Read more »
Perfectionism: A Growing Problem That Needs A Wider Perspective
Description: Are you aware of the consistent finding that the rates of perfectionism among adolescents and emerging adults have increased dramatically over the past 20 to 30 years? Young people driving themselves to be perfect, holding themselves to I possibly high standards, and believing that doing so is essential to moving forward positively in life… Read more »
Replication Superstars in Social Psychology
Description: If you have taken a psychology course or two (or if you just read widely in the science media) you have likely heard about something called the replication crisis in social psychology. Because every study done involves less that everyone (i.e., a sample not the whole population) there is always a chance that any… Read more »
Talking to Children about the Ukraine
Description: When I was 7 years old (in grade 3) at around 11 am on or about October 26, 1962, there was a general announcement by our elementary school principal over the PA system that we were all to pack up and go home. I do not recall whether I had any clue as to… Read more »
How Trustworthy are Personality Tests? Or is That the Right Question?
Description: Want to find out about yourself? You can take a personality test. But before you do, consider whether you will be able to trust the results. Are the accurate? Stable? Predictive of how you will behave in future? How would you go about answering those questions? Well, you could just throw caution to the… Read more »
A Soon Post-COVID (Small, Thin) Silver Lining?
Description: OK, I realize deeply and fully that we are most definitely NOT even close to being ready to consider even the thinnest of possible silver linings to the COVID debacle. So, just put that aside for now (I will hint at it very cautiously at the end of the second section below) and let’s… Read more »
Are Other People Hell or the Key to Happiness?
Description: Perhaps without realizing who it belonged to, you have likely hear Jen Paul Sartre’s line from the play he wrote in 1944 that goes “Hell is other people”. Without diving into his existential philosophy, you can see some applicability of this line to the world we are currently living in today (particularly in terms… Read more »
What To Do With Dreams?
Description: A seasonal classic film (well there are MANY versions) is A Christmas Carol. In it as in the Dickens novel it arose from, Scrooge tells the ghost of his dead business partner, Jacob Marley, that he is not real but is, perhaps “an undigested bit of beef, a blob of mustard, a crumb of… Read more »
Books for Success!
