I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, p. 99)
As a person who has spent my career as a child psychologist and have dealt with many children who have struggled with many problems in families, I have seen families ripped apart by so many things that sometimes law has tried to deal with.
We don’t yet have a body of scientific knowledge about evil to be called a facet of psychology. Therefore, religious reasoning for actions will always be at the discretion of the psychologist, thus making them the judge and jury over what is delusi...
Psychology is much bigger than just medicine, or fixing unhealthy things. It's about education, work, marriage - it's even about sports. What I want to do is see psychologists working to help people build strengths in all these domains.
My early research - I'm a social psychologist, and my early research was on how people make moral judgments. When I entered the field in 1987, everybody was looking at moral reasoning - how do kids reason about a moral dilemma? Should a guy steal a d...
A psychologist said to me, there are only two important questions you have to ask yourself. What do you really feel? And, what do you really want? If you can answer those two, you probably can leave your neuroses behind you.
In 1948, psychologists asked more than 10,000 adolescents whether they considered themselves to be a very important person. At that point, 12 percent said yes. The same question was asked in 2003, and this time it wasn’t 12 percent who considered t...
Busy people all make the same mistake: they assume they are short on time, which of course, they are. But time is not their only scarce resource. They are also short on bandwidth. By bandwidth I mean basic cognitive resources - psychologists call the...
Superintendant: Don't you love him? Jane Lagrange: No. Superintendant: Really? I'd have said you did. Laying yourself on the line for him like that, I thought you must love him. Jane Lagrange: You're not the psychologist you imagined.
One of the things psychologists used to say was that if you are depressed, anxious or angry, you couldn't be happy. Those were at opposite ends of a continuum. I believe that you can be suffering or have a mental illness and be happy - just not in th...
Westerners often laud their children as 'talented' or 'gifted', while Asian parents highlight the importance of hard work. And in fact, research performed by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has found that the way parents offer approval affects the ...
Mom, Dad, I’m fourteen, I see what the world is like. And, no, I did not get this from the psychologist...I came to this understanding on my own, from what I really see in myself and about life.
But I know too that if we ever make a world without shadow, if the chemists and scientists and psychologists succeed in abolishing fear, pain, loneliness, death, some of us will find life so intolerable we will probably blow out our brains out of she...
As soon as we confront concrete marriages with other foreign images-such as well-being, happiness, a home for children-marriage appears to be senseless, withered, moribund, and kept alive largely by a great apparatus of psychologists and marriage cou...
Social scientists and psychologists are conducting research studies that clearly show that when we behave and act as if we are happy, confident, healthy or in love, we become happy, confident, healthy and in love.
When we're interested in something, everything around us appears to refer to it (the mystics call these phenomena 'signs', the sceptics 'coincidence', and psychologists 'concentrated focus', although I've yet to find out what term historians would us...
according to the psychologist irving Janis, is that our sense of belonging (which makes us feel safe) blinds us to dangers and encourages greater risk-taking.
Jerome Kagan, the Harvard psychologist, only hires people who are anxious, because he thinks they are better and more conscientious workers. I do think that being afraid of failing spurred me to do more and more and ask more questions, but there are ...
A single human brain has about a hundred million nerve cells... and a computer program that throws light on the mind/brain problem will have to incorporate the deepest insights of biologists, nerve scientists, psychologists, physiologists, linguists,...
Time and again, we let the fear of loss overpower rational decision-making and often make ourselves worse off just to avoid a potential loss. Psychologists call this loss aversion, and it means we often tend to prefer avoiding losses at the expense o...
Like so many Boomers, I saw 'Lawrence of Arabia' in 1962 when it was first released and when we were young teenagers. I'm not quite sure why - I really wish some psychologist would explain this - but that movie had a tremendous effect on many of us.
