Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry
Authors:  Jeffrey A. Lieberman and Ogi Ogas
ISBN-10: 031627898X
ISBN-13: 978-0316278980

APA Style Citation
Lieberman, J. A. (2015).  Shrinks: The untold story of psychiatry. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company.
 
Buy This Book
https://www.amazon.com/Shrinks-Untold-Psychiatry-Jeffrey-Lieberman/dp/031627898

Book Description
 
Psychiatry was coined in 1808 by German physician Johann Christian Reil and means “medical treatment of the soul.” Despite its origin over 100 years ago, major discoveries have only recently happened in the last few decades. The author of Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry is Jeffrey A. Lieberman, MD, the Lawrence C. Kolb Professor and Chairman, Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons; Director, New York State Psychiatric Institute; and Psychiatrist-in-Chief, Columbia University Medical Center of the New York-Presbyterian Hospital. He was a member of the DSM-5 oversight committee and president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) during the publication of the DSM-5. Dr. Lieberman believes he became the president of the APA at a historical turning point in the profession, when psychiatry finally assumed its rightful place in the medical community. New research, technologies, and insights have allowed the field to come out of the shadows of its dark history. He believes to move forward the field needs to own up to its history of mistakes and how they overcame their problematic past. He shares this controversial history in three main sections: the story of diagnosis, the story of treatment, and psychiatry reborn.
 
Psychology is not the only field with fake treatments, but it does have more illegitimate treatments than any other one. In order to understand the methods for diagnosis and treatment, Dr. Lieberman takes the reader on a journey through the history of diagnosis. The field of psychiatry has been historically split into two camps. There are the neurologists who work with visible damage to the brain, such as dementia, strokes, tumors, Parkinson’s disease, and Alzheimer’s disease. Then there are psychiatrists who work with mysterious conditions, such as psychoses, manias, phobias, melancholia, obsessions, and hysteria. The field has swung from psychodynamic psychiatry that views mental illness as a result of inner psychic processes to biological psychiatry that supports mental illness as an identifiable physical abnormality in the brain. This dichotomy exits to this day, while most psychiatrists have settled on a pluralistic psychology that accepts both views. Next, the reader is taken on a journey through the early asylums, the movement of alienists, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, the WWII shift in psychoanalysis from Europe to the U.S., the foundation of American psychiatry, and the formation of the term “shrinks.” In the 1960s, American Psychoanalysts took the U.S. by storm and gained power by influencing universities. With this newfound power they wanted to fix the world and got swept up in America’s social activism. The 1970s was faced with the Rosenhan study, homosexuality controversy, and the antipsychiatry movement. The final part of the story takes the reader through the development of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and its modern day influence.
 
Psychiatry is often given a black eye for its early start consisting of the harsh treatment of its patients. The unfortunate lack of adequate budgets and overcrowded facilities led to intolerable conditions in the early asylums. Out of desperation physicians tried techniques that sound barbaric by today’s standards. Dr. Lieberman takes the reader on the story of treatment in the field of psychiatry. The American story starts with Dorthea Dix, pyrotherapy (creating an artificial fever), insulin-shock therapy, transorbital lobotomy, convulsive therapy, and electroconvulsive therapy. Next, came the use of psychiatric drugs to pacify disruptive patients. These included morphine, chloral, and sodium bromide. In the 1950s, the first psychopharmaceutical drug was born to relieve anxiety, known as Miltown. But the beginning of the end of asylums didn’t come until the introduction of Thorazine, the first antipsychotic. Soon after came antidepressants, mood stabilizers, and MAOIs. According to Dr. Lieberman, the three flagship illnesses had a solution that took them from “wholly untreatable” to “largely manageable.” The world of psychiatry was changing.
 
Since the history of diagnosis and treatment, the field of psychiatry has witnessed a rebirth with the study of the brain. Phrenology, the study of bumps on the skull, started in 1809, but it wasn’t until the late 1900s that scientists were able to study the brain inside the skull while their patient was still alive. In the 1980s, brain imaging opened the door in the brain wide open for exploration. The PET scan, which measures the brain’s chemistry and metabolism, was nicknamed the “head-shrinker.” The 1990s became the Decade of the Brain. Eric Kandel was studying memory in the brain and Aaron Beck developed cognitive-behavioral therapy. Thanks to the Human Genome Project and the ROMA technique psychiatrists were able to explore genetics in a way that was never done before. Meanwhile the diagnosis of PTSD was evolving and the DSM was facing revisions in the digital age.  In 2006, the DSM-5 Task Force faced a daunting task of updating the DSM while public complaints were expressed on the Internet. Leaders of previous DSMs began to question the process publically. Shrouded in confidentiality agreements and behind closed doors, the revision process put the APA back in the public spotlight. From 2008 to 2013, the media fueled the fire and kept the DSM in the public eye. The APA appointed an oversight committee that recognized a serious problem and then implemented two post hoc review committees to squelch internal conflict. The DSM-5 was confirmed by vote in 2013 and quickly attacked by the National Institute of Mental Health who proposed they would make their own diagnostic system based on neural definitions of psychopathology. This criticism quickly faded after recognizing the size of the task and since then criticism and news involving the DSM has fallen quiet. 
 
The story of psychiatry has taken many turns in recent history, but the future has many more hurdles ahead. Once there were no effective diagnostic criteria or treatments, whereas now the social stigma associated with mental illness prevails as the main hurdle ahead. Hollywood has taken on the issue and has start to put a dent in the problem, but there is a ways to go before society accepts mental illness in the same way as physical illness. The future also offers promising areas of research in genetics and diagnostic testing. Thanks to technology, research, and the use of mobile devices more improvements are on the way.  The story of psychiatry is long from coming to a close and it is an exciting time in the field with many advances right around the corner.  
 
Other Related Resources
Colombia University
https://www.columbiapsychiatry.org/profile/jeffrey-lieberman-md
 
Personal Website (Book, Podcasts, Media)
https://www.jeffreyliebermanmd.com/
 
Twitter
https://twitter.com/DrJlieberman?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
 
New York Times article
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/books/review/shrinks-by-jeffrey-a-lieberman-with-ogi-ogas.html
 
Editorial
Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry, by Jeffrey A. Lieberman, M.D. ...
aapdp.org/documents/uploads/pdps.Friedman_Critique_of_Lieberman.pdf
 
Psychological Figures and Concepts 
 
Aaron Beck
Abraham Maslow
Albert Einstein
Alfred Adler
Anna O
Antonio Egas Moniz
B.F. Skinner
Carl Gustav Jung
Charles Darwin
David Rosenhan
Dorthea Dix
Emil Kraepelin
Eric Kandel
Franz Mesmer
G. Stanley Hall
Hermann von Ebbinghaus
Ivan Pavlov
Paul Broca
Philippe Pinel
Sigmund Freud
Walter Freeman
Wilhelm Wundt
William James
 
ADHD
Agoraphobia
Alzheimer’s disease
American Psychiatric Association (APA)
American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA)
American Psychological Association (APA)
Amygdala
Animal magnetism
Antidepressant
Antipsychotic
Anxiety
Anxiolytics
Apgar score
Archetypes
Asylums
Autism
Autonomic nervous system
Aversion therapy
Barbiturates
Blindsight
Case studies
Castration anxiety
Catharsis
Classification system
Cognitive-behavioral therapy
Cohort
Collective unconscious
Confidentiality
Conversion reaction
Crisis of reliability
CT scan
Deep brain stimulation (DBS)
Defense mechanisms
Deinstitutionalization
Delusions
Dementia
Denial
Dreams
DSM (I-5)
ECT
EEG
Empiricism
Evidence-based psychotherapy
Flashbulb memories
Flat affect
fMRI
Free-association
Freudian slips
Frontal lobe
Gestalt theory
Glutamate
Heritability
Hippocampus
Homosexuality
Hypnosis
Id, ego, superego
Implicit memory
Informed consent
Insanity
Intellectual disability
Interpersonal psychotherapy
Labels
Leucotomy
Lithium
LSD
Malingering
Mania
Meditation
Monozygotic/dizygotic twins
MRI
Narcissistic
Neural network
Neurologists
Neuroplasticity
Neurosis
OCD
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)
Oedipus/Electra complex
Opiates
Panic disorder
Paranoia
Parkinson’s disease
Penis envy
PET scan
Phenylketonuria (PHU)
Phobias
Phrenology
Prefrontal cortex
Priming
Prozac
Pseudoscientists
Psychiatrist
Psychoanalytic vs Psychodynamic
Psychosexual development
PTSD
Replication
Resistance
Retrograde amnesia
Schizophrenia
Simple reflexes
SSRI
Stigma
Sublimation
Substance abuse
Suicide
Synapses
Transference
Xanax

​A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
Author:  Mike Jay
ISBN:  978-1-58394-717-3
 
APA Style Citation
Kay, M. (2014).  A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine. North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California.
 
Buy this book
https://www.amazon.com/Visionary-Madness-Matthews-Influencing-Machine/dp/1583947175
 

​Book Description
“They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.”
                                    -Nathaniel Lee, admitted to Bedlam in 1684
 
James Tilly Matthews is often cited as the most widely early reported case of schizophrenia.  Authorities stated that Matthews was delusional and paranoid, believing that the British government was out to get him.  Matthews also believed that there was an “influencing machine,” which he described as an “air loom,” which was a kind of primitive machine that could control people`s thoughts and actions.  The machine was operated by a team of men, and Matthews produced many detailed drawings and thousands of words of descriptions regarding the workings of the  “machine.”  The impetus for Matthew`s diagnosis and eventual confinement occurred after he attended a session of the House of Commons and then loudly accused the Prime Minister of treason.  He was removed and taken immediately to Bethlem asylum.  Once admitted to Bethlem, Matthews refused to associate with the other patients, claiming they were not lunatics, but rather spies placed there by the government to keep an eye on him.  He also refused to drink the water believing that it could be poisoned.  
 
Dr. James Haslam served as the resident apothecary (an early term for a psychiatrist) at Bethlem and was responsible for the care of Matthews during his stay.  Careers in “mad doctoring” were not highly sought out at the time, and Dr. Haslam received little recognition despite his hard work.  Dr. Haslam was one of the first to advocate that “madness” was not a spiritual problem, but rather an organic brain disorder.  He acknowledged that one could suffer from a mental illness and still retain a high level of intelligence.  Dr. Haslam completed post-mortem analysis of patient`s brains to determine if he could find the source of the problem.  He did find increased ventricles in some patients which today has been confirmed in the brains of some individuals with schizophrenia. 
 
If that were the full case of James Tilly Matthew`s insanity, we would not likely know of him today.  It is possible that Matthews was not insane at all but rather the patsy in a government cover-up.  Matthews had worked as a spy for the British government. He acted as an intermediary between French and British forces just after the French Revolution.  He and a colleague worked through intermediaries on behalf of William Pitt (a prominent statesman) to find a way to keep peace between England and France.  He accompanied David Williams to Paris to work with the committee drafting the new constitution.  They had received the invitation via a French agent in London and were traveling undercover on enemy soil.  Matthews had been well-funded and supported by the British government, however, once talks fell apart Pitt refused to meet with Matthews and eventually he found himself a prisoner in France.  After his imprisonment, the British government seemed to want to distance themselves from their previous involvement in his covert actions. Matthews went from an esteemed agent for the state to a pauper.  
 
Matthews had a brilliant mind, when Bethlem needed to be reconstructed because the old building was sinking and falling apart, Matthews provided a set of ingenious plans with a visionary plan with modernized heating, ventilation, and beautifully designed architecture.  Matthew`s family and a number of his associates remained steadfast in their claims that he was perfectly sane.  Initially, Matthew`s stay at Bethlem was paid for by his local parish as was customary at the time.  For reasons unknown, however, and without the Parish of Camberwell (the parish providing payment) ever being informed, Matthew`s was designated as a state prisoner, this seems suspicious and supports the idea that the state may have been behind the internment from the start.  
 
Matthew`s family claimed they would take full responsibility for him upon his release which would lighten the burden on the state significantly and Matthews did not seem to pose a physical threat to anyone which was the typical concern upon release in cases such as these.  While the head of Bethlem, Thomas Munro, states that he has “never felt the smallest doubt with respect to his insanity and believes him to be a most insane and dangerous lunatic and wholly unfit to be at large.”  Munro provides no specific details to support this and spent very little time at Bethlem. Matthews had never acted overtly violent to anyone during his stay at Bethlem. In addition, the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia is generally categorized by delusions so bizarre that they are difficult to follow, Matthew`s supposed delusions were characterized by events that can be demonstrated as fact and they remained consistent over the length of his internment.  
 
The James Tilly Matthews case is not the only one in which the ambiguity of psychological labeling has been addressed.  In the 1970s, psychologist David Rosenhan and eight other mentally healthy people checked themselves into mental health care facilities claiming to hear voices saying, “thud,” “empty,” “dull.”  All participants were immediately admitted to the facilities but then acted normally.  Their normal behaviors were often interpreted as symptoms of their “illness.” It seems as if their label of schizophrenia (bipolar psychosis for one participant) had reframed all of their behaviors.  Even simple questions or not talking was identified as “disordered.”  These mentally healthy individuals were held at the mental health care facilities between 17 and 51 days and were released as having schizophrenia in remission.  
 
Did the label that was attached to James Tilly Matthews also cause his everyday activities to be labeled as “disordered?”  Did the British government simply concoct a story to make Matthews seem insane so if he revealed any of his covert actions, they would be written off as the work of a madman?  Even if he did have schizophrenia at some point, was he held in Bethlem because he was a pseudo-celebrity, because his therapist had written a book about Matthew`s insanity or because the facility wanted to capitalize off of his clear brilliance?  Dr. Haslam would not release Matthews because even though he acknowledged his sanity after a number of years of treatment, there was also the requirement that Matthews admit that at one time he was not sane, which Matthews refused to do, therefore he remained at Bethlem.  
 
Eventually, the governors of Bethlem admitted that Matthews` mental state was not the reason for his confinement, rather it was an issue of state security.  He was eventually transferred to a country house with more freedom, where the doctors who visited him found him conscious and clear.  They reported that he appeared “collected, tranquil and intelligent”. Shortly after moving to the country house, Matthews died as a result of living for years in the damp and cold environment of Bethlem.  After Matthew`s death, Dr. Haslam,  Matthew`s long-time doctor never even attempted to object to Matthews sanity when confronted with the evidence.
 
We will likely never know the full truth about the James Tilly Matthews case, but this historical case is still relevant today as we continue to struggle with the line between strange behaviors and diagnoseable illnesses.
 
Other Related Resources
Illustrations from James Tilly Matthews
https://publicdomainreview.org/2014/11/12/illustrations-of-madness-james-tilly-matthews-and-the-air-loom/
 
The Air Loom:  Mind Control
http://www.theairloom.org/mindcontrol.php
 
Video Describing the Air Loom
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc1LOPoSE3A
 
Why the Rosenhan Experiment Still Matters
https://bigthink.com/rosenhan-experiment-mental-institution
 
The Washington Post:  This Secret Experiment Tricked Psychiatrists into Diagnosing Sane People as having Schizophrenia.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/an-experiment-fooled-psychiatrists-into-treating-sane-people-as-if-they-were-insane/2017/12/29/c6c9c3ea-d5f7-11e7-b62d-d9345ced896d_story.html?utm_term=.14a602f9b51f
 
 
Psychological Figures and Concepts
 
Alfred Adler
Eugen Bleuler
Sigmund Freud
Carl Jung
John Locke
Franz Anton Mesmer
Philippe Pinel
Edward Wakefield
 
 
Bethlem
Cerebrospinal fluid 
CT scans
Delusions of reference
Denial
Double-blind tests
EEG
Electro-convulsive therapy
Flat effect
Hallucinations
Insanity defense 
Labelling
Mesmerism
Narcissism
Neurochemistry
Paranoid schizophrenia
Personality disorders
Pre-frontal lobotomy
Projection
Psychiatry
Psychoanalysis
Psychodynamic method
Psychosis
Schizophrenia
Stream of consciousness
Telepathy
Temporal lobes
Unconscious
Ventricles
 
 
 

The Man Who Couldn't Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought
Author: David Adam
ISBN-10: 1250083184
ISBN-13: 978-1250083180
 
APA Style Citation
Adam, D. (2016). The man who couldn't stop: OCD and the true story of a life lost in thought. New York, NY: Picador.
 
Buy This Book
https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Couldnt-Stop-Thought/dp/1250083184/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_img_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=F7EB0H0TX69H38ZENPNE
​

Book Description
Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) often does not get the attention it deserves. It is the fourth most common mental disorder after the big three of depression, substance abuse, and anxiety. OCD is referred to as a “secret disease” and a “silent epidemic,” but subclincial OCD is everywhere.  The stigma has lessened for some disorders, such as depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar, but there is a way to go for OCD. The book The Man Who Couldn't Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought shares the personal journey of the author, David Adam, a science writer from the United Kingdom who informs the reader of the science and history of OCD in hopes of reducing the stigma associated with the disorder.
 
Psychiatrists have made it clear that OCD is not an exaggerated form of everyday worries, but yet the general public often persists in thinking otherwise.  A thorough explanation of the different types of symptoms is provided for the reader. Specific attention is given to intrusive thoughts. Adam goes on to explain the Pure-O form of OCD with no overt compulsions, the just-no-right experience where behaviors come first, and the high-place phenomenon where individuals commonly report wanting to jump from a window or bridge. OCD is not a problem with memory, but rather a loss of confidence that a given behavior has been successfully carried out.  The author weaves his personal story with OCD that peaked in 1991 throughout the book. He would obsess about the ways he could catch AIDS. He describes how it took over his life and how he would call the National AIDS Helpline on a regular basis. Adam also provides the historical background to the diagnosis of OCD, taking it back to patient zero, Mademoiselle F, a French woman from the early 19th century.  He explains models of OCD throughout the text based on the knowledge at that given time.
 
Over twenty separate conditions are linked to OCD, and each of these similar disorders is carefully differentiated from OCD in the book. People with phobias can avoid what causes their anxiety, but those with OCD cannot. Adam differentiates between the commonly confused OCD and OCPD. He explains hoarding and neurological disorders, such as Tourette’s syndrome and Parkinson’s disease, and their connection to OCD. In addition, he investigates connections to impulsive disorders, such as gambling, pyromania, and kleptomania. Differentiations are also provided for trichotillomania, skin-picking, body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), body integrity disorder (BII), hypochondriasis, eating disorders (anorexia or bulimia), maladaptive daydreaming, and obsessional jealousy.
 
Another section of the book is dedicated to the types of therapy that have historically been offered to treat OCD. He chronicles classic psychodynamic analysis, with specific attention to Freud’s contribution. Next, the behavioral approach in the 1960s and the era of aversion and thought-stopping therapy are addressed. In the 1990s the cognitive psychologists started to explore OCD and first looked at the connection to religion. While religion does not cause OCD, it provides an outlet for the symptoms. Research also focused on three dysfunctional beliefs important to OCD: Inflated sense of threat and personal responsibility, perfectionism and intolerance of responsibility, and over-importance of thought and the need to control them. These different types of dysfunctional beliefs could explain the range of symptoms.  
 
The first modern cognitive model of OCD was based on how one reacts to thoughts.  With great responsibility, comes great power. The responsibility of parenting can bring many intrusive thoughts. Adam goes on to explore postnatal OCD, which is almost unheard of in comparison to postnatal depression now recognized as a serious problem.  It can take an upsetting form where mothers have powerful urges to throw their baby into a fire, cook them in a microwave, etc. It is important to note that none of this happens outside of the mother’s head, they do not act on their intrusive thoughts.  The author recognizes that a substantial shift in his story happened when he found blood on his six month old’s leg. Immediately he became obsessed with the thought that he had given her AIDS. He had settled for a personal life with OCD, but never wanted to impact his family. He refused to make his daughter an accomplice and wanted his intrusive thoughts to stop with him, so he sought out therapy.
 
Another section focuses on animals and human patterns of behavior and ritual. Various animal examples are provided and the similarities to OCD are explored. Check out the book review Animal Madness:  How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves (https://booksforpsychologyclass.weebly.com/blog/category/disorderstreatment8086727c74/2). Humans like routine, whether it a sports routine, washing in the shower, or taking a path from point A to point B. The link between ritual and OCD fascinates scientists and there is a belief that ritual is useful by performing tasks with less mental effort and therefore saving energy. Other evolutionary explanations are also explained. The differences between anxiety and OCD are carefully teased apart.
 
The author turns back to the causes of OCD. Possible explanations are explored, including genes, early experiences and dysfunctional beliefs, inflated responsibility, parenting styles, and family accommodation of symptoms. Age ranges are provided, as well as risk factors for developing OCD. Rituals are normal for children, but some warning signs are provided. Lots of attention is devoted to the brain’s role in the development of OCD.  Research involving scans are described in detail, specific brain parts and neurotransmitters are identified and explained, even the connection to Pandas- Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections.
 
Treatments are addressed once again. The variety of medications to treat OCD is explained.  Before SSRIs became available in the 1980s and 1990s, patients were treated with clomipramine. The methods of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) are explained. Furthermore, exposure and response prevention have also been found to be successful in treating OCD. The use of systematic desensitization is explained in detail.  In 2012, a comprehensive meta-analysis of CBT for OCD found more people improved with treatment, than chance alone. If you change the mind, then you can change the brain. The lobotomy is explored in detail. The author discusses the historical contributions of Phineas Gage, Egas Moniz, Walter Freeman, and James Watts. While the traditional method is no longer used, psychosurgery has provided a cautious green light to more selective stereotactic surgery, such as a cingulotomy where specific tissue is targeted and lesioned.
 
Politics and prejudice are also addressed. The author believes it is important to raise awareness of what OCD is and what it is not (not just about cleanliness). He explains how individuals have lost their jobs and have been separated from their families when harmless obsessions are reported. The stigma has decreased for many mental illnesses, but OCD has a long way to go. It may be due to many not viewing it as a serious disorder. Hollywood has contributed to this by treating OCD with humor and levity. 
 
In 2013, the new Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) brought attention to OCD. It was reclassified as an OCD spectrum disorder, no longer an anxiety disorder. Connections between OCD and other disorders, such as PTSD or schizophrenia are being further investigated. A short history of the DSM and Emil Kraeplin’s classification system used in Europe is explained to help the reader. Also, a critical look at the current categories approach is explored, and a dimensionality approach is offered in its replacement.
 
The author offers his final thoughts, looking back at his symptoms early in life. Currently, he is doing well, but he knows that he will continue to wrestle with his OCD throughout his life. He wants people to know that the bad news is that it won’t go away by itself. But the good news is that we are finding out more about how to diagnose and treat the condition. Sharing his story and many others helps us understand more about OCD.
 
Other Related Resources
2016 Annual OCD Conference Keynote - David Adam "The Accidental Advocate"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KccklYNpTus
 
https://iocdf.org/blog/2016/07/07/david-adam-to-bring-humor-hope-and-books-to-this-years-ocd-conference/
 
The OCD Stories Podcast- Interview with David Adam
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWXIq_Ir9vA
 
http://theocdstories.com/podcast/david-adam-the-man-who-couldnt-stop/
 
Understanding the OCD Brain part 1: OCD and me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpCOAqxbfpA
 
Addiction.com ‘The Man Who Couldn’t Stop’: A Q&A with David Adam on OCDhttps://www.addiction.com/8869/the-man-who-couldnt-stop-a-qa-with-david-adam-on-ocd/
 
NPR- Why OCD Is 'Miserable': A Science Reporter's Obsession With Contracting HIVhttps://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/12/376438311/why-ocd-is-miserable-a-science-reporters-obsession-with-contracting-hiv
 
New York Times Article
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/01/books/review/david-adams-the-man-who-couldnt-stop.html
 
Time Article
http://time.com/4890095/obsessive-compulsive-disorder-ocd-joke/
 
The Guardian Article
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/20/the-man-who-couldnt-stop-review-david-adam-ocd-review

 
Psychological Figures and Concepts
Charles Darwin
Egas Moniz
Emil Kraeplin- category approach in DSM
Ivan Pavlov
James Watts
Konrad Lorenz
Mademoiselle F. (Patient zero of OCD)
Paul Broca
Phineas Gage
Rat Man- Ernst Lanzer (Freud Case Study)
Rosemary Kennedy
Sigmund Freud
Walter Freeman
Wilder Penfield
William James
 
Altered perception
Amphetamines
Amygdala
Anal personality
Anorexia nervosa
Anxiety hierarchy
DSM
Authoritarian
Autism
Aversion therapy
Basal ganglia
Behavioral psychologists
Bipolar
Blood-brain barrier
Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD)
Body integrity disorder
Bulimia nervosa
CAT scan
Catastrophizing
Chromosomes
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)
Cognitive psychologists
Cohort studies
Co-morbidity
Compulsions
Deep brain stimulation
Depression
Dimensionality vs. category approach
Disgust
Distress scale
Dopamine
Dualism
Dysfunctional beliefs
Eating disorders
ECT
Ethics
Evolutionary psychology
Extinction
Factor analysis
Fight-or-flight response
Frontal leucotomy
Genotype maps
Glutamate
Grey vs. white matter ratio
Group therapy
Hippocampus
Hoarding
Homosexuality
Huntington’s disease
Hypochondriasis
Impulse-control disorder
Insanity
Insight
Insulin overdose
Intelligence
Kleptomania
Lesions
Lie detectors
Lithium
Lobotomy
LSD
Memory
Meta-analysis
Motor cortex
MRI
Functional MRI
Nature vs. nurture
Neurologists
Neurosis vs. psychosis
Neurotransmitters
Nucleus accumbens
Obsessions
Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)
Obsessive compulsive personality disorder (OCPD)
Oxytocin
Parasomnia
Parenting styles
Parkinson’s disease
Pathological gambling
PET scan
Phobias
Phrenology
Postnatal depression
Postnatal OCD
Prefrontal lobotomy
Prozac
Psychiatrists vs. psychologists
Psychoanalytic movement
Psychopath
Psychosurgery
Psychotropic medication
PTSD
Pyromania
Rational vs. irrational
Reuptake
Schizo-obsessive disorder
Schizophrenia
Self-harm
Serotonin
Skin-picking disorder
SSRIs
Stigma
Stream of consciousness
Substance abuse
Suicide
Systematic desensitization
Thalamus
Tourette’s syndrome
Trauma
Trichotillomania
Twin studies
Withdrawal symptoms
Zoloft

​Becoming 
Author: Michelle Obama
ISBN:  9781524763138
 
APA Style Citation
Obama, M. (2018). Becoming. New York, NY: Penguin, Random House.
 
Buy this Book
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079ZYWJJ8/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
 

​Book Description
Becoming describes Michelle Obama`s life from her early years living on the South Side of Chicago to her post First Lady of the United States (FLOTUS)experiences.  Many of the situations presented in Becomingcan easily be integratedinto a psychology class in particular, in the social and cognitive units of the course.
 
Michelle was raisedin the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago just a few miles south of the Loop. Thiswas a neighborhood that was experiencing “white flight.”  As middle-class black families moved into the neighborhood because of the reasonable home prices, the traditionally White, Irish Catholic neighborhood changed into what some described as a “black ghetto.” Included in the book are some pictures of Michelle`s 2nd-gradeclass which is fairly diverse and her 6th-gradeclass in which all but one of the students is black.  As the neighborhood changed, so did the schools and the local schools began to have a reputation for being poor quality inner-city schools that were not educating their students properly.  Good teachers were leaving, and talented teachers did not want to come to South Shore. Obama describes thefeeling of a failing school, she reports that people know it is happening but they often there is nothing they can do to stop it.  
 
Michelle had an advocate in her mother, who went in to protest the lack of teaching in Michelle`s grade school classroom.  She was able to arrange for Michelle to get tested and Michelle was ultimately placed into the talented and gifted program. This change allowed Michelle to have an enriching grade school experience.  Michelle loved learning and as a result,was givenmore and more challenging assignments. For high school, Michelle tested into Morgan Park Academy which was a magnet school about an hour away from Michelle`s home but also one of the best schools in the city where she was challenged by demanding classes and surrounded by other ambitious students from all over the city.  From there, Michelle was accepted to Princeton University to complete her undergraduate degree and then onto Harvard University Law school before landing a job at a successful law firm in Chicago. 
 
Michelle experienced the impact of stereotyping both at home and in her education.  One of her cousins once asked her “why she talked like a white person.”  This comment resonated with Michelle and her feel like she was somehow an outsider even with some members of her own family.  When she attended Princeton, she was one of the few black students on campus and spent much of her time at the black student center to feel like she had a support network with people whom she could identify with.  Because she was often the only black person in class, she felt pressure to work harder and be better as she did not want people to feel that she was attending Princeton for any other reason other than her academic talent.  Stereotype threat can be a strong force, but in this case,Michelle worked harder and focused all of her energy to overcome the belief some people had that perhaps she was not “Princeton material.”  When things were difficult, Michelle demonstratedGRIT and a belief in herself and her abilities and was able to show her true abilities.
 
Michelle also found friends who had the same academic ambitions as herself, andthey helped to motivate her but also to keep her grounded.  She was good friends with Jesse Jackson’s daughter.  Michelle participated in her first political marches and saw the inner working of what occurred behind the scenes for a public political figure. She also saw the sacrifice and the challenges that a life of public service created for the family of the public figure.
 
Michelle met Barack Obama when she was assigned to supervise him while he completed a summer internship at the law firm she was working at.  At first,she was skeptical as she described people`s excitement about this brilliant young intern, she expected him to be arrogant and entitled, what she found instead was that he was confident but kind and personable.  By the end of the summer they were dating, and Barack quickly introduced Michelle to his passion as a community organizer.  While Michelle accompanied him to many meetings, she understood the concerns of neighbors who were watching their communities being taken over by gangs and drug dealers, seeing businesses move out of the area, and home prices plummet.  Michelle had seen the same thing in her ownneighborhood and felt compelled to do something to help.
 
Eventually, she left her law firm to take a job at the City of Chicago working for Valerie Jarrett, they became fast friends, andMichelle became acquainted with the many challenges facing people in different neighborhoods in the city.  She went on to create a mentor program and then to work as a community organizer for the University of Chicago hospital.  By this time Barack had become a state senator, andMichelle was surprised by the expectation from women in D.C. that she drop everything and move to support her husband. She faced judgmentfrom the other Senators’ wives who thought she should be lunchingwith them in Washington while their husbands were legislating.  Michelle was juggling a successful career, two young children and a husband that was often away for work.  She credits the many others around her including friends, family and babysitters who helped to assist her through this demanding time in order for her to remain committed to the passions of her work.  
 
When Barack decided to run for president, Michelle tried to keep her position at the hospital, buteventually,it became too challenging, she did, however, insist on a schedule that would get her home in time to put her children to bed each night.  She also advocated for her ownstaff as her travel became more constant and hectic.  People were quick to judge her involvement in the campaign, her care (or lack thereof) of her children, her clothing choices and her informal and accessible style of speaking.  She believed that if she told her story honestly and worked hard that her best was all she could give.  She was right andher husband, with her help, was elected the 44thpresident of the U.S.
 
During the almost instant transition into public life, Michelle kept her focus on creating a normal life for her children and creating a platform as the firstlady that would focus on a healthy lifestyle.  Michelle had seen in her own Chicago community the lack of fresh food and had herself experienced a dependenceon processed food and takeout for her and the girls asshe tried to navigate each busy day.  Michelle organized the planting of a community garden on the lawn of the White House and advocated for causes she believed in.  She met with state and national leaders but limited her time for formal events to be certain that Malia and Sasha felt supported in their new environment.  She also brought her mother with her to the White House so that when she was traveling, her girls would have their grandmother to support and make the White House feel more like a home. 
 
Becoming begins and ends with Michelle in her post-WhiteHouse home, making herself a cheesy sandwich.  She sits on her back steps relishing the strange quietness of being home alone for the first time in years (despite the secret service located feet away in the garage).  She expresses gratefulness for the time she spent doing the many things she loved and wonders what will be next. 
 
Other Related Resources
 
NPR:  Michelle Obama tells the story of “Becoming” herself
https://www.npr.org/2018/11/09/666093279/michelle-obama-tells-the-story-of-becoming-herself-and-the-struggle-to-hang-on
 
BBC radio:  Eight amazing things we learned from Michelle Obama
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2KRlQwwrfbLmpf08pltxtJz/eight-amazing-things-we-learned-from-michelle-obama
 
Playhouse Square:  Becoming: An Intimate Conversation with Michelle Obama
http://www.playhousesquare.org/events/detail/becoming-an-intimate-conversation-with-michelle-obama
 
BOOKRIOT:  The Most Powerful Quotes from Becoming
https://bookriot.com/2019/02/06/becoming-quotes/
 
Time Magazine review of Becoming
http://time.com/5457854/michelle-obama-becoming-review/
 
 
 
Psychological Figures and Concepts
Belief Perseverance
Discrimination
GRIT
Prejudice
Social Facilitation
Stereotyping
Stereotype Threat

​Prepare for the AP Psychology Exam While Playing a Game with iScore5!
 
iScore5 AP Psych is an app dedicatedto helping students score high marks onthe AP examination.  The app makes exam review entertaining and engaging for students. The creators have designed an app that functions asa game and helps students to master over 800 vocabulary words for AP Psychology.  The app, however,goes beyond merely learning basic vocabulary by challenging students to master multiple-choice questions in levels of increasing difficulty.  The questions have all been writtenby experienced AP Psychology teachers or College professors of psychology, all of whom are also AP exam readers.
 
The interactive interface of the app is easy to navigate,and students may choose to return to study mode to practice basic vocabulary at any point during the game.  The app records a running score allowing students to monitor their progress and better understand the concepts they will need to know for the exam. Within each level including the study mode, the questions and practice items are organized according to the fourteen units outlined by the official College Board AP Psychology course outline.
 
The app is also an effective way for students to prepare for classroom unit exams, midterms, and finals.  Because it is portable and easily accessed by phone or tablet, students are more likely to review more often than with traditional review books.  Even if students only have five or ten minutes to review at a time, this will result in an impressive increase in knowledge of psychology content due to the spacing effect.
 
How to Play!
 
Study Level: 800 key concepts for students to master organized by each of the AP Psychology units are presented in a flash card format.  Thestudy level is available for review atany level of the game.  
 
Level 1:  Vocabulary questions at this level are organizedby each of the AP Psychology units and presented in a multiple-choice format.  Level 1 provides 20 terms at a time for each unit,so it is recommendedthat students play this level often as the app generatesa different set of terms each time the student plays.
 
BONUS:  Between each of the levels, students have the opportunity to answer 20 multiple-choice questions for additional points that are basedon the work of famous psychologists mentionedin the official College Board AP Psychology course outline,and the bonus option is available atall levels.
 
Levels 2, 3, and 4:  These levels contain a set of multiple-choice questions in an AP format for each of the 14 AP Psychology units. Each level increases the level of difficulty:  level 2 (general understanding), level 3 (intermediate difficulty), and level 4 (advanced).  The correct answer toeach question is explainedregardless of whether or not the student answered correctly. 
            
Level 5: The final level consists of a 100-question sample AP Psychology exam.  Students are given the same amount of time that they will have during the official AP Psychology exam (1 hour and 10 minutes) and provides them with their total score.   
 
FRQ Practice:  In addition to all of the levels and practice multiple choice questions the app also includes two practice Free Response Questions and rubrics.
 
The iscore5 AP Psych app provides students with a fun and entertaining way to review for the exam.  Because all of the questions are craftedby expert AP Psychology teachers and college psychology professor,the quality of the questions is very similar to what will be seenon the AP exam. Additionally, the app features a Leaderboard that allows students if they choose, to see how they are doing in comparison with others. 
 
Get the App!
The iScore 5 AP Psych app is now available for $4.99 in the iTunes app store for Apple or Google Play for Android. 
iTunes  https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iscore5-ap-psych-2016/id1084611907?mt=8
Google Play  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iscorePysch
 
Volume Discounts
The link to the volume purchase program that Apple provides to educational institutions will allow a school to purchase multiple apps (more than 20) at a discounted price.  The details of the Apple volume discount program can be foundat the following link. 
https://volume.itunes.apple.com/store
https://support.google.com/edu/play/answer/3396716?hl=en
 
Other Apps Available from iScore5
The iScore5 company also offers review apps for other Advanced Placement topics including AP American Government and Politics, AP World History, and AP Human Geography.  Visit the main iScore website for information about these other programs: http://www.iscore5.com.
 
Social Media
For more information about iScore5 AP Psych, visit the company website or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.  Look for review material and study tips to appear on Facebook and Twitter to help students and instructors prepare for the exam.
 
Website: 
http://www.iscore5.com/apreg-psychology.html
 
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/iScore5APPsych/?fref=nf
 
Twitter:  
https://twitter.com/iScore5APpsych
 

Beat Boredom: Engaging Tuned-Out Teenagers
Author:  Martha Sevetson-Rush
ISBN-13: 978-1625311498
ISBN-10: 1625311494
 
APA Style Citation
Rush-Sevetson, M., & Palmer, E. (2018). Beat boredom: Engaging tuned-out teenagers. Portland, ME: Stenhouse.
 
Buy This Book
https://www.stenhouse.com/content/beat-boredom
​

Book Description
 
Beat Boredom is a guide from a veteran teacher that provides detailed and specific ideas for helping students stay engaged and master difficult material. Martha Sevetson-Rush is a master teacher who was a journalist before spending twenty-five plus years in the classroom teaching journalism, language arts, United States history, economics, personal finance, government, and psychology.  Currently, she teaches AP Psychology as well as AP Microeconomics and AP Macroeconomics.  She has been the recipient of the John Morton Excellence in the Teaching of Economics award in 2014, and she has been recognized in Minnesota as Journalism Educator of the Year (2014), TIES Exceptional Technology Educator (2014), JA Capstone Teacher of the Year (2012) and Economic Educator of Excellence (2012).  Martha delivers workshops for teachers for the College Board as a consultant for AP Economics and the Council on Economic Education as well as through her educational consulting firm, NeverBore LLC.
 
Sevetson-Rush articulates the causes of disengagement and boredom and provides concrete solutions for use by instructors across a variety of disciplines.  Research suggests that boredom is a real problem and that high school juniors report being bored in class 58% of the time and boredom has been linked to a variety of negative outcomes including truancy, increased dropout rates, and lower achievement, and drug use and delinquency.  Sevetson-Rush also cites research that  indicates there are four main causes of student boredom (ranging from mild, to unpleasant, or in some cases actually painful) which are the belief that the work they are doing lacks meaning, activities are repetitive, students feel confined in their environment, or students feel that they have little control over what happens in the classroom.  Some high school students spend most of their day sitting in assigned seats, passively listening to teachers while taking notes, or working quietly on practice problems.  Although some amount of repetition and direct instruction is necessary for difficult concepts, Beat Boredom offers a variety of methods of what she refers to as highly engaging, motivating instruction designed to reach all types of students, but especially those who are unmotivated and easily discouraged.  Rush-Sevenston asks, “Do we want to treat high school as an endurance test, something to be suffered through?  Or do we want high school to be an opportunity for genuine learning and growth?  Do we like lecturing to a zoned-out audience and blaming them when they don’t remember?  Are we satisfied with a system that works for only some of our students, the ones who are already motivated?”
 
The author acknowledges that utilizing the active learning methods presented in the book is not a guarantee of success and that there are potential concerns to look out for when implementing active learning strategies.  The five potential concerns when using actice learning strategies are: (1) While engagement is required, it is not the only piece that is needed for successful learning.  She does not suggest that teaching is merely entertainment, “anyone could get students to pay attention by juggling, handing out money, running a karaoke session, or letting students gripe about unfair school policies,” but what is needed is engagement with a purpose. (2) Although she discusses ways to use technology in active learning, she does not suggest that technology alone is the answer to beating boredom.  (3) Using active learning does not necessitate the loss of instruction in content.  Choosing to use highly engaging methods such as problem-based learning, simulations, and discussions does not mean that traditional content is not taught. (4) Avoid thinking in dichotomies in which you must teach exclusively by active learning or through direct instruction and whole class discussion.  (5) The use of active learning methods requires practice and training, and the best lessons are perfected over time often through continual reflection on one’s practice and incorporating input from fellow teachers and students.  
 
The conversational tone of the book speaks directly to teachers through the use of classroom examples of student reactions to lessons that are easy to relate to regardless of the content or area where you teach.  The book consists of six main chapters each outlining a specific active learning strategy complete with examples across a range of content areas including psychology, government, and economics.  The active learning strategies covered involve storytelling (giving students someone or something to care about), discussion and debate (trust students to drive meaningful conversation), problem-based learning (let students struggle with real and unsolved problems, simulation (immerse students in thoughtful role plays), competition (give students a chance to prove themselves), and authentic tasks (encourage work that matters outside of school).  Within each chapter, the author defines each strategy, articulates the benefits of the method, provides instructions on how to implement the strategy along with examples, addresses challenges related to the strategy, and ends with specific tips for teachers.  The teacher tips include ideas for getting started, tips for building on your current use of this particular active learning strategie, and ways to assess the effectiveness of the method for your students.
 
Beat Boredom: Engaging Tuned-Out Teenagers is full of amazing ideas and specific tips for using active learning methods in a variety of types of classes that both increase student engagement and promote deeper learning. 
 
Other Related Resources
 
Beat Boredom Study Guide
A free study guide to accompany the book is available as a downloadable PDF on the website of the publisher.  The publisher also offers a variety of other books related to teaching and learning and organizes professional development sessions, mentoring, and other services with the authors including Martha Sevetson-Rush.  Check out her recent post about an app called TeachFX which uses AI to visualize for teachers what portions of class are composed of teacher talk v. student talk. 
https://www.stenhouse.com/content/beat-boredom
 
Author Website and Blog
Visit the website and subscribe to author Martha Sevetson-Rush’s blog for engaging high interest discussions of current educational issues and tips for teaching. Rush’s website includes several free resources.
https://martharush.org/
 
https://neverbore.org/
 
The Story of Psychology – Reference Book
Morton Hunt’s The Story of Psychology provides interesting and detailed biographical backstories on the most influential thinkers related to the scientific field of psychology, as well as excellent summaries of their key theories and ideas. This book can be used to build engagement through the active learning strategy of storytelling for many areas of the psychology curriculum.
Hunt, M. M. (2007). The story of psychology. New York: Anchor Books.
 
Make it Stick:  The Science of Successful Learning (Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel)
This powerful book about learning is an excellent resource referenced by Sevetson in Beat Boredom and the website for the book has additional useful materials for classroom use.
https://www.retrievalpractice.org/make-it-stick
 
 
Psychological Figures and Concepts
Phineas Gage
Henry Molaison (Patient H.M.)
Daniel Pink
Achievement gap
Active learning strategies
Backward design process
Classroom management
Collaborative learning
Creativity
Debriefing
Decision-making problems
Divergent thinking
Hippocampus
Intrinsic motivation
Problem-Based Learning (PBL)
 
 

Author:  Richard E. Nisbett
ISBN-10: 0374112673
ISBN-13: 978-0374112677

APA Style Citation
Nisbett, R. E. (2015).  Mindware: Tools for smart thinking. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
 
Buy This Book
https://www.amazon.com/Mindware-Tools-Thinking-Richard-Nisbett/dp/0374112673/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=&dpID=61YCTcmKbhL&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=detail
​

​

​Book Description
 
Will what you learn in college affect how you think about everyday life? Yes. The book Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking addresses how scientific and philosophical thought can be taught to affect reasoning in everyday life. The key is how events are framed and coded. The concepts in the book are important, teachable, and central.
 
There are six main parts to the book. The first part is about thinking about the world. It explains how we think, the mistakes we make, how to fix those mistakes, and how to improve our thinking. In order to make fewer errors in judgment, we should be careful of inferences, be aware of schemas, recognize how incidental and irrelevant perceptions can affect our thinking, and recognize the power of heuristics.  In order to improve our thinking, we should pay more attention to context, recognize the power of the situation for ourselves as well as others, and know that people can change. In daily life we should not assume that we know why we think the way we do.
 
The second part is about choices. It focuses on economics and real-life examples for the reader.  The third part is about making categorizations of the world. It explains attributions and more specifically the fundamental attribution error. The fourth part is about causality. The focus is on experiments. The fifth part is about types of reasoning. The abstract and formal deductive reasoning are associated with Western thinking. While the dialectical reasoning is associated with Eastern thinking.  The sixth part is about what makes a good theory. For example, the principle KISS- Keep It Simple, Stupid- provides the basis for a good theory. The principles of reductionism, hypothesis testing, confirmation bias, and falsifiability are also addressed. Overall, this book points out how our beliefs can often be wrong, but we can also be more aware and compensate for this. The tools offered by Nisbett, with a little practice, can enhance your smart thinking.
 
Other Related Resources
Author website
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nisbett/
 
The Psychology of Thinking Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKm4VoExc0Q
Q and A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2Ci4ro75fM
 
The Guardian Article
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/09/world-in-context-mindware-tools-for-sharp-thinking
 
Psychological Figures and Concepts 
Alfred Binet
Aristotle
B.F. Skinner
Charles Darwin
Edward Thorndike
Ivan Pavlov
Jean Piaget
John Darley and Bibb Latané
Martin Seligman
Norman Triplett
Plato
Robert Zajonc
Rorschach
Sigmund Freud
William James
 
Actor-observer bias
Animal models
Availability heuristic
Bystander intervention
Chi square
Cocktail party phenomenon
Cognitive dissonance theory
Concrete operations
Confirmation bias
Conformity
Conservation
Context-dependent
Correlation
Cost-benefit analysis
Culture
Death instinct
Deductive reasoning
Dialectical reasoning
Dispersion
Dispositional attribution
Double-blind
Evolutionary theory
Extrasensory perception
Formal operation
Framing
Fundamental attribution error
Halo effect
Heuristics
Hypothesis
Illusory correlations
Implicit Association Test
Inductive reasoning
Inference
Insight
Interview illusion
Introspection
IQ tests
Law of large numbers
Learning
Mental illness
Mere exposure
Modeling
Multiple regression analysis (MRA)
Natural experiments
Normal distribution
Oedipus complex
Overjustification effect
Pearson correlation coefficient
Percentile rank
Phobia
Population
Postformal operations
Problem-solving
Pseudoscience
Psychoanalytic theory
Psychosexual stages
Random assignment
Range
Reference group effect
Regression
Regression to the mean
Reinforcement learning theory
Reliability
Representative heuristic
Sample
Sample bias
Scatterplots
Schemas
Scientific method
Self-enhancement bias
Self-selection
Set point
Situational attribution
Social desirability bias
Social facilitation effect
Social influence
Social psychology
Spreading activation
Standard deviation
Statistically significant
Statistics
Stereotypes
Subliminal perception and persuasion
Surveys
Syllogisms
Theory
Tragedy of the commons
Transference
Trauma
Unconscious mind
Validity
Ventromedial hypothesis
Vicarious reinforcement theory
Within design

​You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice
Author:  Tom Vanderbilt
ISBN:  978-0-307-93859-5
 
APA Style Citation
Vanderbilt, T. (2016).  You may also like:  Taste in an age of endless choice. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
 
Buy This Book here:
https://www.amazon.com/You-May-Also-Like-Endless/dp/0307948595
 


​
Book Description
Tom Vanderbilt explores why we like what we like. This seems fairly straight forward, we have an experience, we determine how we feel about that experience and then assess that experience.  We tend to believe that our preference leads us to a choice, but Vanderbilt sites economists who argue that this can also work in reverse and that our choices can lead to preferences.  For example, once we have paid $200 for concert tickets, we are more likely to report liking that concert than if we saw the same concert for free.  Effort justification is one component of liking, it occurs when the more effort we put into something is indicative of liking that experience more.  Vanderbilt explores many more of the components that make up liking and reveals that we often fool ourselves into believing that we have total control over what we like and that we are not influenced by outside sources.
 
Preference for colors may be one of the earliest likes we verbalize, however, it may be the association of colors that feed our preferences rather than the color itself.  Young girls may describe a preference for pink not because of some natural inclination but rather because the marketing of toys that they enjoy are often pink.  Pinkaliciousis a cartoon character intended to appeal to young girls, liking the character may also increase liking of the color. We may demonstrate a preference for our own school colors without realizing that we are demonstrating a preference for colors that have brought some positive outcome or feeling in the past. 
 
Our preferences for taste may in part have a biological basis, we are quicker to articulate what we do not like rather than what we like. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that we have a natural inclination to dislike bitter tastes.  Try to recall your first taste of coffee, you likely cut the bitterness with milk or sugar, but over time you may have come to enjoy and even crave this taste, thus bypassing your natural preferences.  The taste for sweet conversely is prewired and desirable as highly caloric foods may have served the function of providing calories and energy.  Provide a young child with a taste of bitter chocolate or sweet candy and the preference will be easily displayed.  Humans naturally are “neophobic” or hesitant to try new foods, this may be because we do not know what new foods contain and are not certain that they are safe. Think of the first time you have tried a new food, chances are you did not immediately fall in love.  Vanderbilt argues that the mere exposure effect has a dramatic influence on what we like or do not like.  We tend not to like what is new or different, this applies to tastes, or music or fashion rather, the more we are exposed to something, the more we tend to like it.  Once we try that new food, song, or style over and over again, it becomes familiar which often leads to liking.  However, this liking is not completely objective, we now have an expectation of what a certain food will taste like or what a certain genre of music should sound like and we compare it to past experiences.  
 
This top-down processing allows us to place our experiences into context by comparing them to similar experiences in the past.  If you loved classic 1960s rock music and then heard the punk music of the 1970s you may have initially been horrified, but after listening over and over again you may find you prefer this to classic rock.  Just seeing a new food or knowing your favorite band has a new album creates an expectation before the sensory experiences even begins.  While we attribute our preference to bottom-up processing, our preferences are driven by our expectations as much as by our sensory receptors.  We also like choice, just by having items on a menu or a playlist to select from makes us enjoy our choice more that if this is out of our control.  If you go to The Cheesecake Factoryand are presented with a menu that spans seven pages, you may still choose the same item or few items each time you dine, but the illusion of choice increases your liking for what you have selected.  
 
Marketers make a living from studying people`s preferences and may know what we like, or dislike better than we do.  We are not always honest in reporting what we like because we want to portray ourselves in a positive light.  Organizations like Netflix know this, so you might report that you love watching historical documentaries, but the recommendation Netflix is making for you is a silly romantic comedy.  What people say they like and what they actually watch are not the same.  Todd Yellin, Netflix vice president for product innovation says, “You might giveHotel Rwandafive stars and two stars to Captain America, but you are much more likely to watch Captain America.”  We also don`t necessarily show consistency over what we like, as people rate the same movie differently after multiple viewings.  Context, mood, setting, and who you watch a movie with have a tremendous impact on your preference for that film, food, person, artwork, etc.  
 
Experts no longer have the same sway as before in terms of creating our sense of liking.  With social media sites anyone can become an expert and the opinions of lay people and experts vary greatly.  Those who rate hotels or restaurants, tend to come from a bimodal population, they either had a great experience or a horrible experience and can easily share this online.  When we see positive reviews, we are more likely to follow suit or adjust our opinion in a positive direction.  When the first comments are negative, the next comments seem to also follow suit. However, this can backfire; books that have received literary awards actually are rated lower after they receive the rewards.  Presumably this occurs because sales increase after the award causing people who would not normally purchase the book to buy a book that might not suit their particular preferences.  It may also set up an unrealistic expectation that the book will be life changing and it may not live up to the hype.  Too many reviews online are like too many choices, even if a book or a hotel has 4,000 reviews you cannot reasonably take in and assess all of that information, so you will read a few reviews and make a decision from there. 
 
Everyone wants to feel that we are unique in our likes or dislikes, so we reject the idea that we are conforming to a norm, we feel silly when we wear the same shorts as someone else to work or wear the same prom dress, which we think perfectly suits our personality.  Solomon Asch clearly demonstrated our tendency to conform to others in his historic line study, but just as the participants in his study stated that they believed they provided the correct responses, we also believe that we set our own trends and do not give into the pressure of conformity.  We conform to the preferences of our friends and fashion and we tend to like those who share our preferences.  
 
Each of these factors contribute to the vast lists of likes and dislikes we experience each day. Knowing these factors can allow us to realize that preferences are more subjective and less personal than we might like to believe.  Knowing how are preferences are shaped can help marketers or advertisers, or those social media influencers shape our likes and dislikes.  Vanderbilt`s research demonstrates that, “we really can account for taste.” 
 

​Other Related Resources
Video description of book in discussion with Tom Vanderbilt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9rRDhE409Q
 
Tom Vanderbilt Website Featuring You May Also Like
http://tomvanderbilt.com/books/you-may-also-like/
 
Talks at Google:  Interview with Tom Vanderbilt
https://talksat.withgoogle.com/talk/you-may-also-like
 
Social Psych online:  The Mere Exposure Effect
http://socialpsychonline.com/2016/03/the-mere-exposure-effect/
 
Video on Mere Exposure Effect from Easy A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9MvUdR6j3w
 
The Guardian:  Advertising and Controlling our thoughts
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/31/advertising-academia-controlling-thoughts-universities
 
 
Psychological Figures and Concepts
Solomon Asch
John Dewey
Hans Eysenck
Gustav Fechner
Eric Kandel
John Locke
Konrad Lorenz
Stanley Milgram
Amos Tversky
Robert Zajonc
 
Alzheimer`s Disease
Assimilation
Amygdala
Assimilation
Bimodal Distribution
Bottom-Up Processing
Cognitive Dissonance
Critical Period
Dual Processing
Effort Justification
Factor Analysis
False Consensus Effect
Foveal Vision
Fronto-temporal Dementia
Gestalt
Habituation
Heuristics
Idealized Self
Inter-Rater Reliability
Mere Exposure Effect
Modeling
Necker Cube
Neuropsychology
Pavlovian Conditioning
Priming
Prototype
Psychophysics
Regression to the Mean
Repressed Memories
Snowball Effect
Social Influence Bias
Social Learning
Top-Down Processing
 

​Factfulness:  Ten Reasons We`re Wrong About the World-and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
Author:  Hans Rosling
ISBN:  978-147-363-7467
 
APA Style Citation  
Rosling, H. (2018).  Factfulness: ten reasons we`re wrong about the world-and why things are better than you think.  Flatiron books.
 
Buy This Book  
https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-Wrong-Things-Better/dp/1473637465. 

​Book Description  
Factfulnessis Hans Rosling’s last effort to dissolve misconceptions about the current state of the world using data to demonstrate how confirmation bias, expectations, media, and ethnocentrism can blind us to the realities of the world in which we live. Before you continue reading, move to the activity for Factfulness and take the 12-question quiz.  Once you are done and have checked your results, come back and read more about the results of others who took the quiz and how Rosling uses data to demonstrate how conditions around the world continue to improve and how we often fool ourselves into thinking that things are worse than they actually are.
 
In 2017, Rosling asked nearly 12,000 people in 14 countries to answer the questions in the quiz.  He also asked chimps to answer the questions, and the chimps chose correctly 1/3rd of the time earning an average of 4 correct which is what we would expect from blind guessing.  College-educated adult humans from all over the globe faired far worse.  People on average scored 2 of the 12 questions correct. Not a single person got all of the questions correct, one person in Sweden earned 11 of the 12 correct, and 15% of respondents did not get a single question correct.  The educational level, age career, or political affiliation of the audience did not seem to matter.  Even the experts at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland did worse than the chimps.  
 
The reality is that the world has been steadily improving and while this improvement still needs to continue, we are inundated with images of poverty, disease and other sensationalist stories which often focus on the negative.  Much of this recent change for the better has been happening in Asia and Africa.  Those in Europe and the United States often do not see those changes and make negative assumptions about other parts of the world about which they have little data.  Rosling wants to help people understand these changes to better understand the current state of the world.  Students of psychology are often hesitant to learn about research and statistics, however, one of the most important lessons students of science can learn is that they should let the data lead them to a conclusion, not their intuition. Researchers should look for reasons to reject what they believe, rather than looking for support for preexisting presumptions.  Rosling describes data as therapy, which can confirm or in many cases disconfirm what we think we know.  When we have the facts, we can adjust our thinking to align with reality.
 
Rosling demonstrates how much the world has changed in his lifetime, and he describes how his grandmother spent many days doing laundry on a washboard.  His mother got a machine washer, and instead of doing laundry in the afternoon, she took Hans to the library.  Hans credits the washing machine to his interest and ability to spend time reading and pursuing academics.  These changes are not limited to wealthy countries which Rosling describes as level 4 countries(wealthy and healthy countries).  As an example, in Saudi Arabia in 1960, 242 babies out of every 1,000 died before their fifth birthday.  Today, that number is 35.  In Malaysia, the number was 93 in 1960 and is 14 today.  Europeans and Americans tend to look at the world using what Rosling refers to as the gap instinct, in their mind, they split the world into two groups of countries, rich or poor and assume that there are massive differences in the way people live in these countries.  
 
The reality is that most people today live in middle-income countries and have lives that have improved dramatically in the past few decades. Some of these changes include significantly increasing access to electricity, refrigeration, and mechanisms for cooking or heating food.  Rosling also explains the problem with using the terms “developing” and “developed” to describe countries around the world.  Eighty five percent of people living on the planet would fall into the bucket for the “developed” world.  Only 13 countries would fall in the “developing” world (representing 6% of the population), and all others would be in-between.  In the past 20 years, 29% of the world population lived in extreme poverty, today that number is 9%.  Billions of people have moved from levels 1 to levels 2 and 3, but often the media focuses on the worst stories distorting the reality of this improving situation. Rosling provides data for other phenomena that are improving, but from listening to the news, it would be difficult to identify this positive trend.  The death penalty, battle deaths, oil spills, legal slavery, child labor, smallpox and deaths from disasters have all been dramatically decreasing over the past 30 years. Rosling acknowledges that even one hungry child is a problem that needs to be addressed but we also need to understand that as a whole things are getting better.
 
Rosling describes an instance as a young doctor when he believed a Russian pilot with an expensive jumpsuit had just come into the emergency room and was bleeding profusely.  He was about to cut off the jumpsuit when the head nurse came in, and she explained that this was a Swedish pilot in shock which was why he could not speak properly and Rosling was standing on the ink cartridge from the life jacket he was wearing, making the entire floor red.  The jumpsuit Rosling was about the cut unnecessarily cut off, cost tens of thousands of dollars.  Rosling uses this story to explain how the fear instinct can make us jump to erroneous conclusions.  Critical thinking is almost always difficult, but it becomes even more so when we are afraid. The media feeds on this fear instinct by reporting on stories that will catch our attention even if these reports do not represent the trends in behavior.  Psychologists know this as the availability heuristic.  In 2016, 40 million commercial passenger flights landed safely at their destinations, we heard about the ten that did not.
 
Terrorism is a concern for those all over the world, despite media coverage, acts of terrorism are on the decline.  For those in level 4, from 2007-2016 a total of 1,439 people were killed by terrorists, during the ten years before that 4,358 people were killed. This includes the 9-11 attacks that killed 2,996 people.  In the past 20 years in the United States, an average of 159 people were killed by terrorists each year.  Alcohol, on the other hand, killed 69,000 people per year during the same time period. The chances that someone in the United States will be killed by a drunk driver is 50 times higher than being killed by a terrorist.  Frightening and dangerous are not necessarily the same.  
 
Rosling talks about the time he spent in a rural African district with an extraordinarily high childhood death rate.  He explained that as the only doctor in the district he could not spend hours saving the life of a child who came to the hospital because he could save far more lives by vaccinating hundreds of children in the same amount of time decrease the likelihood that they got sick.  While this may seem cruel, in reality, it is far more humane.  We hear about shark attacks and bear attacks that happened once in a rare while, but rarely hear about cases of domestic abuse which are far more fatal, in Sweden this occurs once every 30 days.  Rosling likens relying on the media to form your worldview to looking at a picture of his foot to get an idea of what he looks like.  It gives you part of the story, but it is certainly not complete.
 
While Hans uses data to bring people`s thinking in line with reality, he also emphasizes the human factor to his work.  His hypothesis and questions come from talking to others and in his openness for data to be interpreted differently.  At a conference on climate change, a European leader discussed the rapid growth in the use of fuels by India and China and indicated that they were going to have to find a way to slow down this use.  When he had finished speaking, the representative from India indicated that it was not only India and China that would need to change.  He argued that they were using more fuels because there were far more people living there and that usage should be considered on a per capita basis not country by country.  Those is the West had been using massive amounts of fuels for decades and are often unwilling to change any of their own behaviors.  These individuals had the same data but a very different interpretation of what that data meant and how to move forward. Rosling indicates that the world cannot be understood without numbers, but we cannot understand the world through numbers alone.  Rosling nearly finished Factfulnessbefore his death (his daughter and son-in-law also contributed much to the book and completed the project after Rosling`s death).  Rosling leaves a legacy of service to public health and the desire to improve the lives of people all over the world while simultaneously informing us about those factors that are improving and those that needed direct attention, for this we should be eternally thankful.
 
Other Related Resources
https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$chart-type=bubbles
All data in the book (as well as much more) can be found on this website.  The data can be manipulated by country and is quite interactive.  There are handouts, posters, complete lesson plans and great information related to health, lifespan, disease prevention and much more.
 
Hans Rosling TED Talk:  How not to be ignorant about the world
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_and_ola_rosling_how_not_to_be_ignorant_about_the_world
 
Hans Rosling TED Talk:  The best stats you`ve ever seen
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen?language=en
 
Hans Rosling Obituary
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/feb/07/hans-rosling-obituary
 
Psychological Figures and Concepts
Availability heuristic
Descriptive statistics
Hypothesis testing
Inferential statistics
Muller-Lyer Illusion
Multi-factorial causation
 

Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence--and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process
Author:  Irene Pepperberg
ISBN-10: 0061673986
ISBN-13: 978-0061673986

APA Style Citation
Pepperberg, I. (2009).  Alex & Me: How a scientists and a parrot discovered a hidden world of animal intelligence—and formed a deep bond in the process. New York, NY: Harper Perennial.
 
Buy This Book
https://www.amazon.com/Alex-Me-Scientist-Discovered-Intelligence/dp/006167398

​Book Description
Do birds have language or is the story of Alex & Me for the birds? The studies of Dr. Irene Pepperberg revolutionized the way we think of bird brains. She worked with an African Grey parrot named Alex for over three decades as she tested his verbal, mathematical, and cognitive abilities. The book starts with the public acknowledgement of his death in 2007. For example, Diane Sawyer did a 2.5 minutes segment on ABC’s Good Morning America. She commented “And now I have a kind of obituary and I want to inform the next of kin about a death in the family. And, yes, the next of kin would be all of us.” A website was setup for condolences and many cards were received. One card came from Penny Patterson and friends, owner of the famous Koko gorilla who used sign language to communicate with humans. “Koko sends a message with the color of healing. Please know you are all in our thoughts and prayers- Alex’s passing is a great loss to all.” Below Penny’s words was an orange squiggle, done by Koko himself. Then the story rewinds back to Dr. Pepperberg as a child receiving her first bird as a present and winds through the trials and tribulations of her career as she explores animal thinking.
 
Dr. Pepperberg’s love for birds started as a young child. She grew up as an only child with a distant mother and didn’t really fit in with her peers. With a surprise gift of a parakeet for her fourth birthday and exposure to Dr. Doolittle, her journey working with birds started. Rather than taking the traditional route of studying biology, she fell in love with the periodic table of elements and followed the path of chemistry. At 16 years-old she headed off to MIT to study chemistry, but birds remained an important part of her life. After getting married and losing her home to a fire, Pepperberg was exposed to PBS’s NOVA television series, which was devoted to science and nature. Her passion for animals was reignited and she cast chemistry aside.  Quickly, she became engrossed in bird behavior, child cognition, and language. At this time scientists believed animals were robotic automations who mindlessly responded to stimuli in their environment. However, new science was changing this view and Dr. Pepperberg wanted to be involved in this revolution.
 
In 1977, Pepperberg and her husband moved to Indiana where she spent seven years at Purdue University. Shortly after arriving she selected her first African Grey parrot from a Chicago pet store. It did not start well because Alex was uneasy and scared of his new environment, but within a few days they became more familiar with each other. He came out of his cage and would perch on her arm. Dr. Pepperberg called him Alex, which was short for Project ALEX: Avian Language Experiment. Soon after she switched it to Avian Learning Experiment and planned to develop parrot-human communication using labels, as was being done with apes.  She gave Alex objects, such as paper and pieces of wood, to explore his preferences. She also used a modified form of training based on social context. Two trainers would take turns asking each other about an object’s label, with Alex observing. At the time operant conditioning was the preferred method of training. Dr. Pepperberg applied for a National Institute of Mental Health grant with the desire to replicate in a Grey parrot the linguistic and cognitive skills that has been previously achieved with chimps. The NIMH proposal was approved but no money was available to fund it. Dr. Pepperberg refused to give up.
 
Alex progressed quickly, within a year he had 80% accuracy in labeling seven objects and was beginning to learn his colors. He could also identify 3-corner pieces and 4-corner pieces of wood. Dr. Pepperberg tried to have her studies published in both American and British journals, but there was no significant interest. At this time the field of animal thinking was being questioned.  These attacks on the field only caused Dr. Pepperberg to continue her rigorous training in testing her Grey parrots. She came from the hard sciences and wanted to have scientific proof of her theories. She insisted on repetitive trials before she could say with statistical confidence that Alex had cognitive ability.  Empirical results with animal studies were necessary to avoid a “Clever Hans” situation, where researcher bias influenced the results. Check out the book review "The Horse That Won’t Go Away: Clever Hans, Facilitated Communication, and the Need for Clear Thinking.” (https://booksforpsychologyclass.weebly.com/blog/the-horse-that-wont-go-away-clever-hans-facilitated-communication-and-the-need-for-clear-thinking).
 
Dr. Pepperberg was able to live off meager National Science Foundation grants. By 1981, Alex started to get public attention and continued to advance at an astounding rate. He could understand the concept of color and shape as categories that contained labels. He learned to use “I’m sorry” in an upsetting moment. Alex continued to advance and soon he combined parts of words to make a new word. For example, he called an apple a “bannerry;” banana + cherry = banerry.  He also became bored easily. When asked about the color of an object, he would sometimes give every color he knew, skipping only the correct color. While his sense of humor was not science, it was telling. Something was going on in his little bird brain. He knew what he was saying, and his comprehension was equal to chimpanzees and dolphins. His next challenge was to determine if objects were the same or different. It took months to train him, but he was correct 75% of the time when asked about the same “shape” or “color.” When novel objects were presented, such as a color he could not label, he was correct 85% of the time. He had outwitted chimps, by not only identifying if two objects were similar or not, but by verbalizing how they were the same or different in color, shape, or material.
 
In 1991, Dr. Pepperberg’s position at Northwestern came to a close, and her marriage fell apart. She was not taken seriously as a female scientist, and she struggled to gain employment. Alex got a fungal infection in his chest cavity and lungs. He was very sick and had to have surgery. It took over a year for him to recover and the whole ordeal was quite taxing physically and emotionally on Dr. Pepperberg. Finally, she decided to take a position in Tucson, Arizona and moved with Alex alone to the southwest.
 
In Arizona, Pepperberg continued her work with Grey parrots. She expanded her studies with two more Greys- Alo and Kyaaro (Kyo) and created a culture balanced with playfulness and careful scientific study. In 1991, she established the Alex Foundation to raise money to support and spread the word of her work. Alex participated in a study on recognizing and understanding Arabic numbers.  His vocalizations sounded like English, but did they have similar acoustic properties?  Sonograms proved that his vocalizations looked identical to human speech.  In 1995, Alo was sent to live with a friend, and Dr. Pepperberg got a new 7.5-week-old Grey parrot, which she named Griffin. Greys are territorial, and Alex did not take well to the new parrot. Alex was the boss of the lab and filled with entitlement.  His perch always had to be higher, and he needed attention first or he would not work for the day. Dr. Pepperberg would often take Alex home, but in 1998 he saw western screech owls building a nest outside her window and wanted to leave. She pulled the drapes, still he cried “Wanna go back…wanna go back.” This was a perfect example to demonstrate that Alex had mastered the concept of object permanence.
 
As Alex gained public exposure, he stirred jealousy amongst Dr. Pepperberg’s colleagues. This combined with other circumstance no longer made Tucson a good fit. When Pepperberg was asked to give a lecture on Alex at MIT’s Media Lab, she accepted a position and left Alex behind in Arizona for one year. It was here that her creative side was allowed to blossom. She worked on an electronic bird sitter, a smart nest that tracked Greys in Africa, and a system that enriched parrot’s vocab and worked with autistic children. It was at MIT that she got Wart, a 1-year-old Grey. In 2000, she taped another episode of Scientific American Frontiers, called Pet Tech, with Alan Alda.  Alex was also being trained to sound out phonemes with colored plastic refrigerator letters. During one interview he would answer her questions, but then demanded a nut. Suddenly he said, “Want a nut…nnn…uh…tuh.” He leaped beyond the expected results of his training and was able to demand a nut while using phonemes. Dr. Pepperberg received a five-year renewable contract as a research scientist at Media Lab and she left her tenured job in Arizona. Only three months later, in mid-2001, she and 30 others were let go. Without a lab, her parrots had to move in with friends for the next five months. Alex and Griffin became subdued at this time.
 
Dr. Pepperberg ended up receiving a position at Brandeis University in Boston. It was challenging at first, but she enlisted Alex as Griffin’s trainer and soon her work was back on track. By 2003, Alex knew numbers 1-6. He had a concept of zero and soon after was learning addition. Over the next six months, his addition accuracy was 85%, and he was on par with small children and chimpanzees. When presented with a green Arabic numeral 5 next to three blue wooden blocks and asked which color is bigger, he replied “green” showcasing his ability to judge the question according to number. Chimps cannot do this without extensive training. He was also tested on the Muller-Lyer illusion, and he fell for the optical illusion in a similar way as humans. In 2005, Dr. Pepperberg moved on to Harvard.
 
On September 5, 2007, Alex bid Dr. Pepperberg goodnight with, “You be good, I love you.” Pepperberg answered, “I love you, too.” Alex followed with, “You’ll be in tomorrow?” Dr. Pepperberg responded, “Yes, I’ll be in tomorrow.” This was their usual evening exchange. The next morning Dr. Pepperberg received the alarming email that he had passed away in the evening, 20 years before his expected life expectancy. Dr. Pepperberg believes the greatest lesson Alex taught her was patience. But the greatest lesson to be learned was that animal minds are more like human minds than was once believed.  Any animal limitation thrown at Alex, he was able to accomplish. If only his life did not come to an abrupt halt, he may have accomplished so much more.
 
Other Related Resources
Alex Foundation
https://alexfoundation.org/
 
How Irene Pepperberg Revolutionized Our Understanding of Bird Intelligence
https://www.audubon.org/news/how-irene-pepperberg-revolutionized-our-understanding-bird-intelligence
 
NY Times- Alex’s Death
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/science/10cnd-parrot.html
 
NY Times- “Brainy Parrot Dies, Emotive to the End”
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/science/11parrot.html?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=418229D220C538443336F917ABCAFDE5&gwt=pay
 
NPR- Alex’s Death
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14293868
 
NY Times- “Alex the Parrot”
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/12/opinion/12wed4.html?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=B20EDBF8BC268546B6755365A542F53F&gwt=pay&assetType=opinion
 
NY Times- “Alex Wanted a Cracker, but Did He Want One?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/weekinreview/16john.html
 
Economist- “Alex the African Grey”
https://www.economist.com/obituary/2007/09/20/alex-the-african-Grey
 
Alex the Parrots’ Final Experiment
https://www.aaas.org/alex-parrots-final-experiment
 
Alex the Parrot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXoTaZotdHg
 
Psychological Figures and Concepts 
Aristotle
Nim Chimpsky
Noam Chompsky
Charles Darwin
Allen and Beatrice Gardner
Jane Goodall
Clever Hans
Koko
Konrad Lorenz
Jean Piaget
David Premack
Washoe
 
Animal cognition
Animal subjects
Assimilate
Autism
Babbling
Behaviorism
Biology
Birds
Chimps
Cortex
Empathy
Innate
Language
Mirror tests
Muller-Lyer illusion
Object permanence
Operant conditioning
Optical illusions
Phonemes
Psychotic
Second-language acquisition
Statistical sample
Visual perception

Crazy in America:  The Hidden Tragedy of OurCriminalized Mentally Ill
Author:  Mary Beth Pfeiffer
ISBN:  978-0-78671-745-3
 
APA Style Citation
Pfeiffer, M. (2007).  Crazy in America:  The Hidden Tragedy of OurCriminalized Mentally Ill.  Carroll and Graf Publishers, N.Y., New York.
 
Buy This Book
https://www.amazon.com/Crazy-America-Tragedy-Criminalized-Mentally/dp/0786717459
​

​Summary of Book
Shayne Eggan was a beautiful girl with a charismatic personality who took after her dynamic and free-spirited Greek mother.  She had a normal and happy life until her mid-teens when she began to respond to the overtures of boys and older men and started to express the belief that others could “read her mind.”  Shayne was hospitalizedfor these delusions and her strange Indian themed hallucinations.  She became a ward of the state of Iowa because her parents` minimal means could not pay for her continued hospitalization and she was determined to have paranoid schizophrenic tendencies which could cause her to become violent.  Shayne believed she was an Indian princess.  She became obsessed with an older Indian man and continued to write to him and believe they would be together long after he was married and had children.  Shayne often became violent, first with her family, and then with others.  She expressed that, “I get so scared that people are going to hurt me, that I have to hurt them first.” During one such psychotic episode, the police were called,andshe lunged at a police officer with a knife because she thought he was going to hurt her.  She was arrested and thus began Shayne`s life in the criminal justice system.  Shayne had a baby in prison who was immediately removed from her care because it was claimedthat Shayne expressed a desire to kill him, which she denied.  Shayne would be releasedafter serving a term but within a few days would often wind up back in prison because her delusions caused her to break into someone`s home, or act out violently when she felt she was being threatened.  Because of her record, instead of a warning or probation, she would wind up back in prison. Once in prison, she could not abide by the strict rules of the institution which would result in an extended sentence or time in solitary confinement, which often made her delusions worse.  The local mental health care facility was not an option because the facility which had housed 1,800 people in the 1940s, housed only 95 patients in the 1990s. From 1995 to 2000, Iowa went from having 204 beds for every 100,000 people to having six.
 
Shayne needed immediateintervention and could not wait years for treatment.  She attempted to treat her delusions and hallucinations with drugs, which often exacerbated the problems.  In solitary confinement, Shayne`s delusions became so intense that she dug her owneye out, she explained that this made her feel good.  While prison officials panicked, Shayne played with her hanging eye, and was eventually handcuffed to restrict this behavior.  Later, during another stint in solitary, Shayne attempted to chew off her pinky and lost four teeth in the process.  
 
Shayne is not alone in suffering from her mental illness while incarcerated.  Of the 2.2 million people in American jails in 1999, roughly 330,000 were mentally ill. In 2005 estimates were that 34% of those in prisons were mentally ill.  By 2006, Shayne was one of the lucky ones as she was able to procure a bed at the mental health institute in Independence, Iowa.  By that time, Shayne had lost her second eye in much the same way as her first and was completely blind.  While she is not curedtoday, her symptoms seem more under control, although she still has not accepted her diagnosis. 
 
Shayne’s story is typical of hundreds of thousands of Americans dealing with a criminal justice system that does not allow for the different and often “belligerent” behavior of some individuals withmental illness.  These individuals often have no place to go and as a result of their illness wind up in prison where treatment is lacking if there is any treatment at all.  While Shayne eventually received the treatment she so desperately needed, many others are not so lucky.  
 
In another case study described in the book, Luke Ashely who suffered from debilitating anxiety and schizophrenia self-medicated with drugs.  He was initially arrestedfor possession of two pills of ecstasy.  Eventually, after begging his mother to come and get him out of prison somehow, he hanged himself in his cell as the stress and anxiety of prison was simply too much for him to take.  
 
In another tragic case depicted in the book, Alan Houseman wandered the streets of his Tampa neighborhood where he was recognizedas odd but not dangerous.  He lived with his mother, andafter her death,his paranoia became increasingly more intense.  He would eventually lose his life after being shot by a police officer who confronted him as he urinated in a public parking lot.  His paranoia of law enforcement caused him to ignore orders from the officer, andwhile he attempted to flee (because he believed she was there to take him to a mental health care facility),he was shotmultiple times.  In yet another case, Peter Nadir who was extremely autistic got into a physical altercation with his disabledmother.  Concerned neighbors called the police,andin the pursuit of Peter who would not abide by officers` request,Peter died of asphyxiation.  A police officer who was trying to get Peter under control, was kneeling on his back but also cutting off his ability to breathe.
 
Between 2000 and 2006, 24 people were killed by police officers in the Tampa Bay area alone.  Most investigations into the deaths of these individuals resulted in the exoneration of police officers, most of whom have not been trainedin dealing with the mentally ill.  In 2002, in Florida jails, 23 percent of inmates had a mentalillness, which is three times the figure from 1992.  Florida, like many other states, hasessentially replaced state psychiatric hospitals with state and local correctional institutions.  America`s prison system had the world’s highest per capitaincarceration rate in 2005; 714 per 100,000 people.  In the U.S., 60 billion dollars was spent on prisons while a fraction of that was spenton the proactive treatment of the mentally ill.  In 1980, 57% of people incarcerated in New York had gone to prison for violent offenses.  By 2002, that number was down to 29%.  Many mentally ill individuals attempt to self-medicate by using illicit drugs and because of “get tough”laws on drug crimes many of these individuals find themselves in prison and unable to manage day-to-day prison life because their illness makes it difficult to abide by the strict rules of the system.  Thisoften results in increased sentences because of misbehavior or time in solitary, which often makes the psychotic symptoms worse. While the history of treatment for the mentally ill in America has certainly been far from perfect, we appear to have moved away from a structured and helpful treatment.  
 
Proactive efforts to treat the mentally ill would allow many to lead healthy and productive lives before the symptoms get out of control.  Law enforcement agents need to be trainedon how to deal with mentally ill individuals who may feel threatened or act violently because of their illness.  Community programs are necessary to reintegrate or keep those suffering from mental illness in the community that may mean helping with simple tasks such as paying bills and supporting the individualswith empathy and understanding.  Despite some progress, mental illness still carries a stigma, andmany of those suffering are forced to live on the fringes of society.  America has done little to assist this population, andthe impact has been profound.
 
Other Related Resources
 
Stigma in a Global Context:  Mental Health Study Indiana University 
http://www.indiana.edu/~sgcmhs/
 
The Atlantic: Should the United States Bring Back Psychiatric Asylums?  
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/should-the-us-bring-back-psychiatric-asylums/384838/  
 
John Oliver Last Week Tonight on Mental Health 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGY6DqB1HX8  
 
National Bureau of Economic Research:  Mental Health Treatment and Criminal Justice Outcomes by Richard Frank and Thomas G. McGuire April 2010 
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15858.pdf
 
PEW Charitable Trusts:  Prison Health Care:  Costs and Quality:  How and Why States strive for high-performing systems October 2017
https://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/assets/2017/10/sfh_prison_health_care_costs_and_quality_final.pdf
 
National Public Radio:  How the Loss of U.S. Psychiatric Hospitals led to a Mental Health Crisis
https://www.npr.org/2017/11/30/567477160/how-the-loss-of-u-s-psychiatric-hospitals-led-to-a-mental-health-crisis?t=1537124105158
 
Technology and the Future of Mental Health Treatment:  National Institute of Mental Health
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/technology-and-the-future-of-mental-health-treatment/index.shtml  
 
Five-point Plan to Improve the Nations Mental Health
https://blog.samhsa.gov/2015/02/18/five-point-plan-to-improve-the-nations-mental-health/#.W56kTS2B36A  
 
 
Psychological Figures and Concepts 
Anxiety Disorder
Autism
Delusion
Haldol
Paranoid Schizophrenia
Prolixin
Schizoaffective Disorder
 
 

If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating
Author: Alan Alda
ISBN-10: 1524781924
ISBN-13: 978-1524781927
 
APA Style Citation
Alda, A. (2017). If I understood you, would I have this look on my face? My adventures in the art and science of relating and communicating. New York, NY: Random House LLC.
 
Buy This Book
https://www.amazon.com/Understood-Would-Have-This-Look/dp/1524781924
​

​Book Description
What is the key to communication? Alan Alda, author of the book If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating, believes it is empathy and recognizing what the other person is thinking. He is an actor, writer, and director. Some may know him from his role on the TV show M*A*S*H and various movie appearances. Others know him within the scientific community as host of the PBS show Scientific American Frontiers and founder of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University.  Recently, he has also been thrust into the spotlight by sharing his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. His varied history within the fields of science and media provides him an interesting perspective when answering the question of how to enhance communication. He started with wanting to teach scientists how to communicate better, but now wants to share what he learned with you so you can become a better communicator.
 
As he ventured into the world of interviewing scientists, he recognized the need to listen with his eyes, ears, and feelings. He believes his training in improvisation helped him do just that and can help you too. Through games and exercises, your communication can be transformed. These theater games include sharing something in space, using mirroring exercises, guessing the relationship, and playing imaginary games, such as volleyball or tug-of-war. He also explored the fundamental rule of improv known as “Yes, and…” in the context of communication. If one can start with where the listener is in their knowledge and build, they will have more successful communication.  According to Alda, the person delivering the message is responsible for good communication, not the person receiving it. You need to listen to what the audience needs and is feeling. This advice works in all areas of life, including business and personal relationships. 
 
Not all empathy is created equal. Empathy is never good if it traps you in quicksand and encompasses your life. It can also be bad if it is being used to keep others submissive, what Alda refers to as dark empathy. This topic is further addressed in a blog entry for Against Empathy under the category Motivation/Emotion. Alda uses examples of bullies, torture sessions, and dishonorable sales techniques to point out how empathy can be used in a negative way. But then he quickly emphasizes that empathy is not the basis of good behavior, but rather a tool for communication.  A little acting training that involves empathy, can lead to a positive doctor-patient relationship and improve communication in those on the autism spectrum. It can also enhance writing and teaching.
 
On Scientific American Frontiers, Alda was always willing to volunteer and throw himself into the research. So when he was curious about the power of empathy on communication, he began a personal journey. He started to practice reading the faces of strangers, listening to people, and mentally attaching a word to what he thought was the emotion they were experiencing. He believed that naming emotions would help increase empathy. He was able to test this hypothesis with the help of a colleague and a cellphone application that allowed one to record every time you read someone’s emotion and labeled it. After one week with daily practice of paying attention to emotions and faces, his empathy did improve.
 
Along the journey to enhance communication, Alda explores what both helps and hurts communication. He shares how emotions make experiences memorable. In particular, laughter not only aids in memory but helps people connect. Stories provide the perfect vehicle to build a personal connection. A little dramatic action in the story is sure to catch the listener. People also become better communicators when they recognize what they have in common with each other. On the flip side, there are some aspects to avoid. Jargon and the curse of knowledge prevent people from communicating.  One of the most challenging roadblocks to communication is when you can’t imagine what it is like to not have that knowledge. It prevents you from being able to truly listen to the other person.  
 
Daily life offers you a continuous chance at improvisation. While there are no specific tips necessary to increase empathy, Alda encourages you to make personal connections and experience improvisation if you can. To get better at communication, it takes practice and being able to read another person. It is an art, not a formula. So keep practicing!
 
Other Related Resources
Author Website
http://alanalda.com/
 
Clear + Vivid Podcast
http://www.aldacommunicationtraining.com/podcasts/
 
Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science
https://www.aldacenter.org/
 
Alan Alda Twitter
https://twitter.com/search?q=alan+alda&ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Esearch
 
Life’s Work: Interview with Alan Alda
https://hbr.org/2017/07/alan-alda
 
NPR: Learning Life’s Lessons from Alan Alda
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4856461
 
Alan Alda has Parkinson’s disease
https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/31/entertainment/alan-alda-parkinsons/index.html
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/31/634346984/i-m-not-angry-alan-alda-says-he-s-living-with-parkinson-s
 
Mirror Neurons
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-social-brain/
 
TED Talk- Helen Riess and Doctor-Patient Empathy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baHrcC8B4WM
 
Psychological Figures and Concepts
Albert Bandura
Carl Rogers
Daniel Goleman
Edward Thorndike
Michael Gazzaniga
Sigmund Freud
 
Active listening
Affective resonance
Altruism
Amygdala
Attention
Autism spectrum
Body language
Cognitive empathy
Communication
Corpus callosum
Dreams
EEG
Emotional intelligence
Empathy
Epilepsy
Facial expressions
Fear
fMRI
Humor
Learned helplessness
Lie detectors
Meditation
Memory
Meta-analysis
Mirror neurons
MRI
Neuroscientists
Oxytocin
Self-regulation
Similarity
Social awareness
Split brain
Stress-hormone response
Theory of mind

​Patient H.M.:  A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets
Author:  Luke Dittrich
ISBN:  978-0-8129-8252-7
 
APA Style Citation
Dittrich, L. (2017).  Patient H.M.:  A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets
Penguin, Random House, New York, N.Y.
 
Buy the Book
https://www.amazon.com/Patient-H-M-Memory-Madness-Secrets/dp/0812982525

Book Description
Luke Dittrich spent sixyears conducting impeccable research on perhaps the most famous patient in the history of neuroscience, Henry Gustav Molaison.  During his life,he was knownasH.M.;,Henryis often citedas the original case study to help neuroscientists understand the role of the hippocampus in encoding short-term to long-term memories.  Henry had dealt with increasingly alarmingand dangerous seizures since he was hit by a bicycle at age eight.  Nearly 20 years later, Dr. William Beecher Scoville, a dashing, daring surgeon burrowed deep into Henry`s temporal lobe and into the hippocampus in an effort toease the occurrence of the seizures. Dittrich had a motivating force driving his long-term research on this project, Dr. Scoville was his grandfather.
 
While Henry Molaison is the central figure of the book, the story is set against a backdrop of the debate about the proper way toconduct a lobotomy, treatment of the mentally ill in the 1950s and the very real possibility that Dr. Scoville carried out a lobotomy on his own wife who suffered a psychotic break and was sent to the Instituteof the Living in Hartford,Connecticut.  Dittrich describes heating and cooling treatments, which were an essential component of treating psychosis prior tothe availability of antipsychotic medication.
Dittrich remembers his grandmother as quiet and reserved but never knew about her history with mental illness prior tohis research for the book.  Dittrich describes some of his grandfather`s risky surgical practices such as scheduling lobotomies on Saturdays or after hours even after most of the medical community had rejected their use.  He compares his grandfather to the even more reckless Walter Freeman who wanted to allow psychologists rather than only neurosurgeonsto conduct lobotomies.  Freeman used the barbaric “ice pick” lobotomy while Scoville used specially designed instruments to limit the depth and breadth of the damage to the cerebrum.  Freeman operated on patients as young as 7 and as old as 72.  Both men conducted thevast majority of lobotomies on women, most of whom were psychotic, but some with depressive disorders or even others who were simply considered to be “rebellious.”
 
For 20 years Henry lived with his seizures,andwhile this eventually prevented him from working, he was able to attend high school and had many recollections of his childhood. He recalled a girl in junior high whomhe had a crush on (she did not remember him), he recalled details about his parents and the homes in which they lived when he was a child,but had virtually no personal memories after his surgery.  Because of the notoriety of H.M. (as he was knownin the research during his life), many individuals wanted to work with Henry to make their mark on the history of neuroscience.  While Scoville conducted the surgery, he did not play a large role in Henry`s treatment or care post-surgery.  Brenda Milner, a young female psychologist in a time when there were very few in the field, completed the psychological testing on Henry.  While she tested him for many years, he never recognized her from one visit to the next.  Henry met her for a series of tests both at McGill University where she worked and in his hometown.  Henry`s episodic and semantic memories were essentially destroyed,butMilner found that he improved on the procedural task of outlining a star in the mirror.  Henry claimed to have never seen the task before,,but improved on the task each time it was presented.  He acknowledged that he found it quite easy, he could not identify whyhis performance was so quick.  Milner concluded that procedural memories are heldin a location of the brain (cerebellum) distinct from those areas that held episodic and semantic memories.  Thismay help to explain why other amnesiac patients like Clive Wearing have retained the procedural skills such as playing the organ they held before the hippocampal damage such as playing the organ.  
 
When Henry`s parents passed away, adistant cousin became Henry`s guardian but gave the authority of all medicaland research decisions to Susan Corkinof MIT.  Susan Corkin by coincidence was a friend of Scoville`s daughter (Dittrich`s mother) who was a neurologist and oversaw who had contact with Henry.  She strictly regulated who came into contact with Henry and rejected most requests to work with himwithout giving them serious consideration.  Some believe she was fiercely protective in order tosave H.M.`s anonymity, others like Dittrich believe that she did this out of self-interest in order tohave sole access to the most famous patient in neurological history. Even with his family connection, Corkin refused to let Dittrich meet H.M. or even share his location.  She eventually sent a detailed list of restrictions written up by MIT lawyers regarding what Dittrich could and could not do, which he rejected, but eventually,he found out who H.M. was on his own.  
 
After Henry`s death, the world was allowed to know his real name and Corkin realized she needed help if she were to continue to study Henry`s brain after his death.  She employed the help of Jacopo Annese of the Brain Observatory in San Diego, California.  He carried Henry`s brain from Boston back to his lab where it was encased in silicone and live-streamedin 2010 as it was cutinto 2,401 slices.  These slices could be studied in detail to better understand the extent of the damage to Henry`s brain.  Annese found that the hippocampus had not been entirely destroyedas previously believed.  After over a year with the brain, Annese wanted to continue the investigation with Henry`s brain and intended to publish papers based on his findings.  He was sued by MITfor the return of the brain which Corkin wanted to reside permanently at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital.  After a prolonged fight, the brain was returnedto Massachusetts.  
 
The contributions of Henry Molaison to science are significant in part because of the trauma he suffered as a child.  However so are the nameless others who underwent leucotomies, lobotomies, insulin shock treatment, extreme heat or cold or other experimental procedures in which the results and impacts were unknown.  
 
Other Related Resources
Interview with Author Luke Dittrich
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7akPs8ptg4
 
H.M. Brain Slicing with Dr. Ramachandran and Roger Bingham
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKzOQ1uezYc
 
PBS: Interview with Susan Corkin about H.M.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/corkin-hm-memory.html
 
Luke Dittrich interview with Susan Corkin
https://medium.com/@lukedittrich/questions-answers-about-patient-h-m-ae4ddd33ed9c
 
Famous Amnesia Patient`s Brain Cut into 2,401 pieces
https://www.livescience.com/42898-patient-hm-postmortem-brain.html
 
BRAIN:  A Journal of Neurology
Brenda Milner Biographyon her 100thbirthday:  a lifetime of “good ideas”[JF1] 
https://www.psych.ualberta.ca/GCPWS/Milner/Biography/Milner_bio1.html
 
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation :  Brenda Milner turns 100
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/trailblazing-montreal-neuroscientist-brenda-milner-turns-100-1.4743054
 
Brenda Milner: Neuroscientist (video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JliczINA__Y&t=426s
 
The Society of Neurological Surgeons:  Profile of William Beecher Scoville
https://www.societyns.org/society/bio.aspx?MemberID=7664
 
Wired:  The Untold Story about Neuroscience`s Most Famous Brain
https://www.wired.com/2016/08/untold-story-neurosciences-famous-brain/
https://academic.oup.com/brain/article-abstract/141/8/2527/5050904?redirectedFrom=fulltext
 
https://bigpictureeducation.com/brain-case-study-patient-hm
 
https://www.npr.org/2016/08/14/489997276/how-patient-h-m-and-his-lobotomy-contributed-to-understanding-memories
 
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/corkin-hm-memory.html
 
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/magazine/the-brain-that-couldnt-remember.html
 ​
Psychological Figures and Concepts
Jacopo Annese
Gotlieb Burckhardt
Susan Corkin
Walter Freeman
Sigmund Freud
Phineas Gage
Karl Lashley
Anton Mesmer
Brenda Milner
Egaz Moniz
Wilder Penfield
Hermann Rorschach
William Scoville
James Watts
David Wechsler
 
Antipsychotic medication
Amygdala
Anterograde Amnesia
Arachnoid Mater
Auditory Cortex
Broca`s Area
Cerebrum
Cerebellum
Cerebral Cortex
Cerebrospinal Fluid
Corpus Callosum
Electroencephaologram(EEG)
Endocrinology
Epilepsy
Free Association
Frontal Lobes
Homunculus
Hypothalamus
Informed Consent
Insulin Shock Treatment
Leucotomy
Limbic System
Lobotomy
Localization of Function
Meninges
Motor Cortex
MRI
Neuroanatomist
Neurologist
Olfactory Cortex
Phrenology
Psychoanalysis
Psychosurgery
Repressed Memories
Retrograde Amnesia
Short-term Memory
Temporal Lobe
Thorazine
Unconsciousness
 
 
 
 


 

​The Worth Expert Guide to Scientific Literacy: Thinking Like a Psychological Scientist
Authors: Kenneth Keith and Bernard Beins
ISBN-13: 978-1319021429
ISBN-10: 1319021425

APA Style Citation
Keith, K. D., & Beins, B. C. (2017). The worth expert guide to scientific literacy: Thinking like a psychological scientist. New York, NY: Worth Publishers.
 
Buy This Book
https://www.macmillanlearning.com/Catalog/product/worthexpertguidetoscientificliteracythinkinglikeapsychologicalscientist-firstedition-keith
​

​Book Description
What comes to mind when you think of science? Are you picturing a large textbook and scientists lecturing facts or are you picturing beakers, microscopes, and lab coats? Do you think of science as a body of knowledge, as a process, or both? According to the authors of The Worth Expert Guide to Scientific Literacy: Thinking Like a Psychological Scientist, “For scientific literacy is not just about what we know; it is about how we know it, and how we conduct our lives.” Kenneth D. Keith, Ph.D. is professor emeritus of psychological sciences at the University of San Diego, and Bernard C. Beins Ph.D. is a professor of psychology at Ithaca College. Both authors are well-published and focus on the teaching of psychology. In addition, both have held leadership roles for the AP Psychology Reading.  The focus of this text is on why scientific literacy is important and how to increase it through psychology.  Teachers in psychology have the ability to enhance their students’ critical thinking and help their students go beyond what they know and start to question how they know it is true.
 
It is said that over a quarter of the American population could be considered scientifically literate. While this dismal statistic is alarming, at least it has been on the rise in the past few decades. Where does the discipline of psychology stand in the world of scientific literacy? Some believe the recent Reproducibility Project has challenged psychology`s standing as a science. The project began in 2011 and was led by the Center for Open Science’s co-founder Brian Nosek, who set out to replicate the findings of original studies published in 2008. Of the 100 published studies that were repeated by independent researchers, 39 had the same outcome, 24 had moderately similar results, and a little over one third had patterns noticeably discrepant from the original. However, this replication crisis is not confined to the field of psychology. The replication crisis is across all sciences but is most commonly discussed in psychology, especially social psychology, and medicine.
 
The authors argue that psychology helps to develop scientific literacy. Our discipline focuses on empirical questions and devotes more space to scientific literacy than the natural sciences. Psychology also has more complex explanations that require we control extraneous factors and utilize random samples. We are considered one of the seven hub sciences, along with chemistry and medicine, and it has been demonstrated that psychology students become more scientifically literate as they take more classes in the discipline. Introduction to psychology books devote much attention to the scientific process and overall the discipline helps prepare individuals to think about questions related to psychology in complex ways.
 
What are the characteristics of scientific literacy? A small quiz is provided to check the reader’s scientific literacy. In addition, the authors help break down the types of reasoning and the knowledge of facts. It is important to note that psychology has a rather short half-life of facts, only seven years. After that time, half the facts would be considered wrong or irrelevant. In physics, the half-life of facts is 13 years and in some areas of medicine, it is up to 45 years. Knowing this, it is important to check facts to see if they are valid and credible.  As teachers of science, we should encourage our students to think like scientists and continue to question the content as our discipline and other scientific disciplines progress. While the base of knowledge is continuously growing, we should not be scared to question what we learn and look for new evidence to either refute or support earlier findings.  As the authors explain the questions necessary for scientific literacy, they provide multiple examples and offer readers an antidote to fix their thinking. Psychology is ripe with examples and is useful in helping to increase scientific literacy. 
 
A large portion of the text is dedicated to evaluating evidence and interpreting numbers. Once again lots of examples and antidotes are provided to guide the reader as they question what they believe to be true.  Readers learn to decide what appropriate evidence is and how knowing about probability helps make better decisions.  As we look at the evidence we must learn to call into question what is involved, such as personal experiences, authority, and anecdotes. While interpreting statistics we need to understand the numbers and check for deception. Numbers are a tool to help us make the best conclusion possible, but statistics are not infallible. Problems arise when people don’t understand or misinterpret statistics. We need to learn to understand numbers and recognize appropriate evidence and relevant facts, all while learning to avoid potential traps.  Not necessarily an easy task, but psychology students are ready!
 
The authors return to myths and misconceptions. This time they take the approach of why we believe them. They explore culture, self-deception, intuition, authority, faith, personal experience, sources, and evidence. The fallacies underlying common misconceptions are identified and strategies to recognize and overcome these myths are provided.
 
Another large portion of the text is assigned to scientific literacy within specific fields of psychology. Many terms within the introduction to psychology course are addressed. First, the authors look at psychological beliefs and values. A variety of examples in the fields of sensation and perception and cognition are explored. Second, the authors look at social behavior. Specific attributional errors are addressed. Third, they focus on explanatory style and health-related behaviors. These three chapters are filled to the brim with connections to the psychology classroom.
 
Finally, psychological science is discussed in the frame of everyday life beyond the lab and classroom.  Pioneers in science have not always been received fondly, but we utilize the fruits of the field on a regular basis as we search the Internet, use a cellphone, watch TV, or take a medication. According to the authors, the need for scientific literacy is important as we tackle important topics, such as the anti-vaccine movement, recovered memory therapy, and global climate control. Each of these topics can have dire consequences if the truth is not addressed. Some may question the field of psychology as a science. They use arguments, such as research having to be politically correct, intuition and common sense encompassing an individual’s truths, the pervasiveness of pseudoscientific claims, and the belief that everyday life equals training in psychology. Furthermore, our discipline is faced with the common belief that theories are mere speculation when really they constitute an explanatory framework. Thinking like a scientist can help us overcome misconceptions and make us better problem solvers, decision makers, and partners in relationships. We can better understand motives and avoid being misled with self-deception and selective use of data. Science has a significant role in our everyday lives. On a final note from the authors, “Psychology offers a strong foundation in scientific literacy and it is not just for psychologists.”  
 
Other Related Resources
NOBA Thinking Like a Psychological Scientist
http://nobaproject.com/modules/thinking-like-a-psychological-scientist
 
Lumen Introduction to Psychology
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/ivytech-psychology1/chapter/the-replication-crisis-in-psychology/
 
Retraction Watch
https://retractionwatch.com/
 
Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science
https://osf.io/jtcu9/
 
Articles
What psychology’s crisis means for the future of science- Vox article
https://www.vox.com/2016/3/14/11219446/psychology-replication-crisis
 
Stanford Prison Experiment: Why famous psychology experiments- Vox article
The Stanford Prison Experiment was massively influential. We just learned it was a fraud.
https://www.vox.com/2018/6/13/17449118/stanford-prison-experiment-fraud-psychology-replication
 
Philip Zimbardo’s response to recent criticisms on Stanford Prison Experiment
http://www.prisonexp.org/response/
 
The “marshmallow test” said patience was a key to success. A new replication tells us s’more. - Vox article
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/6/6/17413000/marshmallow-test-replication-mischel-psychology
 
Cancer scientists are having trouble replicating groundbreaking research- Vox article
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/1/23/14324326/replication-science-is-hard
 
The 7 biggest problems facing science, according to 270 scientists
https://www.vox.com/2016/7/14/12016710/science-challeges-research-funding-peer-review-process
 
What a nerdy debate about p-values shows about science — and how to fix it- Vox article
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/7/31/16021654/p-values-statistical-significance-redefine-0005
 
Science is often flawed. It's time we embraced that- Vox article
https://www.vox.com/2015/5/13/8591837/how-science-is-broken
 
The replication crisis in science
https://thewire.in/science/replication-crisis-science
 
Students are the answer to psychology’s replication crisis
http://theconversation.com/why-students-are-the-answer-to-psychologys-replication-crisis-90286
 
Why is the replication crisis focused on social psychology?
http://andrewgelman.com/2018/05/07/replication-crisis-centered-social-psychology/
 
Neuroscientist explains psychology’s replication crisis
https://www.theguardian.com/science/audio/2018/mar/19/a-neuroscientist-explains-psychologys-replication-crisis-podcast
 
What Do Talking Apes Really Tell Us? Koko, Kanzi, and ape language
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/08/koko_kanzi_and_ape_language_research_criticism_of_working_conditions_and.html
 
Psychological Figures and Concepts
B.F. Skinner
Daryl Bem
Franz Anton Mesmer
Fritz Heider
George Miller
Henry H. Goddard
Jean Piaget
John B. Watson
Kitty Genovese
Martin Seligman
Sigmund Freud
Sir Cyril Burt- educational psychology
 
ABC cognitive approach
Aggression
Algorithm
Analytic thought
Anecdotes
Attraction
Attribution theory
Authority
Availability heuristic
Base rate
Belief perseverance
Binocular disparity
Black swan hypothesis
Change blindness
Cognitive dissonance
Confirmation bias
Control group
Correlations
Culture
Cyberbullying
Deductive reasoning
Descriptive statistics
Disposition attribution
Double-blind
Effect sizes
Empirical approach
Ethnocentric
Experimental control
Explanatory style
External validity
Extraneous variables
Extrasensory perception (ESP)
Eyewitness identification
Face validity
False consensus effect
File drawer problem
First instinct fallacy
Formal operations
Framing effect
Fundamental attribution error
Gambler’s fallacy
Happiness
Hedonic adaptation
Heuristic
Hindsight bias
Homeopathic medicine
Hyperactivity
Hypnosis
Hypothesis
Illusory correlation
Immunotherapy
Inattentional blindness
Inductive reasoning
Inferential statistics
In-group
Intuition
Law of small numbers
Marijuana
Mean (arithmetic mean)
Median
Mesmerism
Meta-analysis
Modeling
Moon-illusion
Myside bias
Narcolepsy
Near-death experience
Operational definitions
Optimistic
Outgroup homogeneity bias
Outliers
Oxytocin
Pessimistic
Placebo effects
Pollyanna Principle
Priming
Probability
Pseudoscience
Psychokinesis
Random assignment
Reaction time
Recency effect
Regression to the mean
Replication
Representative heuristic
Repression
Reproducibility Project
Sample size
Science literacy
Scientific literacy
Self-deception
Self-effacement
Self-justification
Self-serving bias
Short-term memory capacity
Situational attribution
Standard deviation
Statistically significant
Statistics
Subjective well-being
Subliminal messages
Theory
Thermal grill illusion
Type I error
Type II error
Unrealistic optimism
Validity
Warrior gene

The Lost Boys:  Inside Muzafer Sherif`s Robbers Cave Experiment
Author: Gina Perry
ISBN:  e-book 9781925548303; hard copy book in the U.S.is not yet available
 
APA Style Citation
Perry, G. (2018). The Lost Boys:  Inside Muzafer Sherif`s Robbers Cave Experiment.  Scribe Publications, London.
 
Buy This Book
https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Boys-Muzafer-Sherifs-experiment-ebook/dp/B07BL7DZ3M

​Book Description
The validity of many social psychology studies hasrecentlybeen questioned.  The highly staged and deceptive practices of Milgram and the personal involvement, as well as the potential emotional harm, of Zimbardo’s prison studyhave garnered much attention and called into question the degree of manipulation in these studies.  Thus far, Muzafer Sherif`s study at Robbers Cave, which investigated superordinate goals to overcome out-group bias and stereotypes, has avoided the spotlight for unethical and questionable practices. Gina Perry`s new book will likely change this.  Fresh off of her book Behind the Shock Machine,which exposed some of the misperceptions and deception involved in the Milgram studies, Perry delves into the archives of Psychology in Akron, Ohio to examine Muzafer Sherif`s personal history and his infamous study of in-group and out-groups at Robbers Cave in Oklahoma.
 
Perry devotes the first third of the book to a study that was conducted in 1953 in Middle Grove, New York one year prior tothe Robbers Cave study.  This nameless study seemed to be one Sherif wanted to disappear, as he did not publish or write about the results despite receiving a large grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.  In a similar circumstance to the Robbers Cave study, 24 underprivileged boys were gathered to study group dynamics and the development of in-group and out-groups.  The letter provided to parents to gain consent included not outright deception,but was interesting for what it did not say.  The letter indicated that the 10 and 11-year-old boys would be participating in a study of child relations and social organization among children. A condition of this agreement was that parents not visit as it might “distract” the boys.  As we now know from Milgram`s infamous study, the affiliation with Yale University would have provided a sense of legitimacy for the study and parents may have wanted their sons associated with a study from a highly esteemed university without asking too many questions.  
In this Middle Grove study, the boys initially made friends with one another; and when divided into groups, they expressed a desire to be with their friends who were purposely placed in the opposing group (Panthers and Pythons). Sherif would remedy this in the Robbers Cave study by not allowing the two groups to get to know one another before the division into groups occurred.  The camp counselors were part of Sherif`s research team, andSherif himself acted as the camp custodian.  The researchers were told not to interfere with the boys and provided little guidance even when the boys clearlyneeded some direction from an adult.  When the boys did not act according to what Sherif expected, he broke his own rules by ordering the counselors to raid one group`s tent to make it look like the other team had done this, even going so far as to break a young man`s ukulele.  The boys did not take the bait, they suspected the camp staff rather than the other boys, andinstead of becoming divided, they encouraged the other team when they lost and wanted to share their winnings (pocket knives).  When they believed they were treated unfairly in a competition, they looked to the counselors to sort things out; and when they did not intervene, the boys took that as a betrayal from the adults who they believed should reconcile the situation, this made them align with the other boys in camp against the counselors. As the study unraveled, Sherif began drinking excessively and threatened one of his research assistants. By the end of the three-week study, the boys were essentially lefton their own.  When they destroyed the camp piano, there were no repercussions andthe boys seemed to sense that ahead of time. It is clear from Perry`s research that this study was not discussedbecause the outcome Sherif believed he would find never surfaced.  The Robbers Cave study would be his opportunity to make certain he created the right dynamics to create divisions between the groups.  
 
The second portion of the book is devoted to Sherif`s interesting background as a Turkish psychologist who was essentially bannedfrom returning to Turkey because of his liberal beliefs.  Perry addresses the discrimination Sherif faced upon his arrival in America, as people seemed bewildered that a Turk could be a prominent academic.  Perry argues that Sherif`s experience during the Turkish Revolution may be reflectedin the Robbers Cave study.  When Sherif was a student, people aligned themselves either with the Nationalistic Ataturk or the Greeks and Armenians. Former friends became bitter enemies and long-time neighbors no longer trusted one another.  Sherif would have seen first-hand the deep divisions that group affiliations can create.
 
Sherif often bristled that he was not given much attention for his Robbers Cave study, which he considered to be groundbreaking research in the field of social psychology.  He often felt overshadowed by Solomon Asch. Sherif believed he was responsible for convincing Asch to pursue social psychology while the two studied together at Columbia University.  Because Milgram then studied under Asch, Sherif saw himself as a "defacto" father of social psychology who was not given the credit he deserved, as he was relegatedto the outpost of Oklahoma rather than one of the eliteIvy League East Coast universities.  Much correspondence at the time refers to Sherif`s incredible intellect, but also to his challenging temperament.  His wife Carolyn, also a social psychologist, seemed to be able to reign in some of his difficult personality, but he was often a challenge to work with or to have on staff.  Sherif was eventually diagnosedwith bipolar disorder, andafter moving to Penn State, Carolyn`s career accelerated while Muzafer`s faded.  
 
Finally, the last portion of the book is devoted to the most famous work Sherif conducted, which examined in-group and out-group bias between the Rattlers and Eagles at Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma.  The 22 boys in this study were 10 and 11 years-old, from lower-middle class and working-class families in the area. The two groups of boys were located about a mile away from one another, andSherif`s team was careful to facilitate the creation of strong group alliances from the start by allowing the boys to create team identities (Rattlers and Eagles).  The groups were kept separate for three days tohelp facilitate the creation of strong group affiliations. Some of the aggressive behaviors the boys exhibited may have been due to a single individual who became the leader of the Rattlers early in the study.  Red was bigger than most of the boys and swore, berated, and mocked even the boys on his ownteam.   He created an aggressive dynamic within the Rattlers and this inevitably transferred to the behavior between the groups as well.  He would later be castinto the woods for stealing from his ownteam until he improved his behavior.  
 
Sixteen events were scheduled over four days to pit the teams against one another. 
Perry was able to track down a few of the men who had participated in the study, none of whom knew that the camp had been a testing ground for research on group dynamics.  The men were interested although tentative regarding what the researchers could have been studying but remembered some events from the camp vividly.  As in the earlier study, the researchers did little to intervene in the boy’s treatment of one another even when they began swearing and making fun of the boys in the camp.  While interference from the researchers was not strictly forbidden as it was in the first study, the suggestion to get revenge on the other team may have been more the camp counselors’ (researchers’) idea thanthe boys.  At first,the losses were blamedon other group members, rather than the opposing team.  Afterwinninga baseball game, the Eagles made three cheers for the Rattlers, which differs greatly from what has originally been reported. After raids on each other’s cabins and the theft of knives used as a reward for winning the tournament, some of the boys started to break down, andSherif worried he mayhave gone too far.  
 
During the final stage of the study, the boys were toldthat there was a water shortage and they had to work together to find the problem (this event was purposely orchestrated). Sherif believed this would begin to heal the rift between the groups. During the last event, the boys went to Arkansas for a trip to a nearby town, when one of the trucks broke down. The boys piled into one truck and seemed to overcome theirprior disdainfor one another.  Thismight have been as much due to the Rattlers banning Red from the group until he behaved, as it did with the superordinate goals on which Sherif focused.  
 
Perry argues that one cannot examine the Robbers Cave study without taking into consideration the extraordinary role of the researchers disguised as counselors.  This seemingly naturalistic study was more highly manipulatedthan ever reported and the results may be due to confirmation bias, rather than a legitimate difference between groups.  Sherif failed to take into account his own experiences in Turkey and how that may have impacted his perspective of the harshness that can exist between groups.  Sherif did not seem to take into consideration the potential emotional suffering the boys experienced, either during or after the conclusion of the study.  Sadly, Perry`s book is another hit to the credibility ofsocial psychology studies, but perhaps knowing the truth about what actuallyoccurred helps us understand human nature after all.
 
Resources
The British Psychological Society:  The Unknown Muzafer Sherif
https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-27/edition-11/unknown-muzafer-sherif
 
Simply Psychology:  Robbers Cave, Realistic Conflict Theory
https://www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html
 
The Guardian:  A Real-Life Lord of the Flies: The troubling legacy of the Robbers Cave experiment.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/apr/16/a-real-life-lord-of-the-flies-the-troubling-legacy-of-the-robbers-cave-experiment
 
The Guardian: “Come out and Fight!” an extract from The Lost Boysby Gina Perry
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/apr/16/come-on-out-and-fight-an-extract-from-the-lost-boys-by-gina-perry
 
Author Gina Perry’s Website
http://www.gina-perry.com/the-lost-boys/
 
New York Times Obituary for social psychologist Muzafer Sherif
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/27/obituaries/muzafer-sherif-82-psychologist-who-studied-hostility-of-groups.html
 
Video
You Tube:  Robber`s Cave
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PRuxMprSDQ
 
 
Psychological Figures and Concepts
Allport, Gordon
Asch, Solomon
Clark, Kenneth,andMamie 
Dewey, John
Hall, G. Stanley
James, William 
Lewin, Kurt
Mead, Margaret 
Milgram, Stanley
Sherif, Muzafer
Watson, John
 
Confirmation bias
Conflict
Cooperation
Debriefing
Deception
Discrimination
Group dynamics
Group norm
In-Group bias
Intragroup relations
Little Albert
Out-Group bias
Persuasion
Prejudice
 

The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery
​Authors:  Barbara K. Lipska and Elaine McArdle
ISBN-10: 1328787303
ISBN-13: 978-1328787309

APA Style Citation
Lipska, B. K. & McArdle, E. (2018).  The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
 
Buy This Book
https://www.amazon.com/Neuroscientist-Who-Lost-Her-Mind/dp/1328787303

​Book Description
Dr. Barbara Lipska dedicated her life to neuroscience and ended up raging a personal battle with her own brain. As a neuroscientist her specialty was schizophrenia, but soon she experienced the very symptoms she studied. The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery follows her personal story of overcoming melanoma that metastasized to the brain. She reminds us that mental illness is a brain disease and provides a blend of brain awareness and personal anecdotes to educate the reader. According to Dr. Thomas R. Insel, former National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) director, when speaking of Lipska, “You have done something so important for people with serious mental illness who do not have an observable lesion. Not only have you reminded us all that mental illnesses are brain illnesses, you have reminded us to be hopeful. People recover.” It is her expertise, desire to help reduce stigma, and optimism that leaves a lasting mark on the reader.
 
Throughout the book, Dr. Lipska divulges personal stories to build together the timeline of her amazing strength and battle with various cancers.  She began her journey in communist Poland in the 1980s where she worked on clinical trials for drugs to treat schizophrenia. Her first marriage quickly fell apart after she learned her husband had melanoma that ended up metastasizing to the brain, the very disorder she later faced. She found comfort in another man, Mirek and went on to marry him and raise her two children from her first marriage. In 1989, she was offered employment at the National Institute of Health in Maryland. Her research quickly took off and, in 1993, she published findings for the Lipska model. Then, in 2009, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy on her left breast. Again in 2011, she received the unimaginable news and learned that she had the deadliest form of skin cancer, melanoma. She went on to beat cancer for a second time. In 2013, she was named Director of the Human Brain Collection Core at the NIMH. Life seemed to be taking a turn for the better, and she started to train for a half Ironman.
 
In January 2015, her story changed once again for the worse. She was working on her computer when her right hand vanished from her lower right visual field. She did not want to admit that something was wrong, but she was well-versed in the symptoms of cancer. An MRI confirmed she had three tumors and that one was bleeding and appeared to be melanoma. She was going to battle this cancer with the “kitchen sink”, including surgery, radiation, and immunotherapy. She was given steroids to prevent swelling and needed brain surgery to remove the bleeding tumor from her occipital lobe. Fortunately, the raisin-sized tumor was in a non-life-threatening location. Next, she decided to use stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) to focus high doses of radiation onto individual tumors. Within one month of the brain surgery she was skiing, and within two months, training for a triathlon again. The family vacationed in Hawaii and spirits were high. After she returned, she received the news that she had been accepted into an immunotherapy clinical trial. Immunotherapy uses the body’s own defenses to fight the disease and has been touted as one of the most encouraging cancer treatments in decades.  Over 12 weeks, Dr. Lipska received four injections, consisting of a combination of two monoclonal antibody drugs that boosted the immune system. The drugs teach the dysfunctional T cells to recognize, attack, and kill off the cancerous cells.  She was not supposed to have any active tumors to complete the trial because the consequences were unknown. However, she learned from a second opinion that she had three new tumors.  Dr. Lipska decided to keep the news a secret and she proceeded with the trial. After the second injection, her body took a turn for the worse. She had an autoimmune reaction and suffered lymphedema from her previous mastectomy. When her lymph nodes were removed, her lymphatic system was blocked and her lymph fluid could not properly drain. This fluid buildup led to swelling in Dr. Lipska’s arm. It was at this time that her personality started to change. She became aggressive, acting like a 2-year-old having a tantrum, but did not have insight into her own behavior. She lashed out at her family, a physical therapist, and termite inspection man. She was angry, paranoid, impatient, and lacked empathy. Her frontal lobe was changing, but everyone wrote it off as stress. In June 2015, a variety of odd behaviors started to occur. She went for a run in her neighborhood with hair dye dripping everywhere and missing her prosthetic breast. She lost her car and, after finding it, damaged it as she frantically tried to escape the parking structure. After her final injection, she got sick on pizza and believed she had been poisoned by plastic hidden in the pizza. Upon her family’s advice she returned to the doctor for her first MRI since joining the immunotherapy trial. She learned that she had new tumors and the immunotherapy did not work. There was a total of 18 tumors, the largest in her frontal and parietal lobe.  She also had significant swelling and inflammation of brain tissue. Once again, she was given high amounts of steroids. This time her therapy included CyberKnife Robotic Radiosurgery, which used a robotic arm to shoot high-dose radiation into the tumors.
 
Dr. Lipska continued to battle her symptoms for the next two months.  She was argumentative and lost her ability to plan. She became obsessed with food and gained ten pounds. She was told to get her affairs in order, and her family began a rotation of visits. As her symptoms continued to advance, she forgot her husband’s birthday and how to do simple math, but her writing and creativity remained strong.  Dr. Lipska continued to work out, but did not understand the physical strain on her body. One specific incident included a seven-mile hike where she found chanterelle mushrooms that she wanted her husband to gather for breakfast.  After her 2.5 hour walk, she was exhausted and became overwhelmed. Her brain entered survival mode, and she blew up at her husband and family. Soon after this incident, her family noticed her short-term memory was disappearing. In addition, she would lose her balance and not be able to judge distance. One afternoon after demanding to walk home, she got lost and had her first incident of incontinence. When attending the grand opening of a local supermarket, she experienced a sensory overload from the music that sent her into panic mode. She was living a strange irony of the symptoms she once studied. 
 
Her mind finally started to return. She described it like crawling out of a black hole. Dr. Lipska wanted to keep fighting, but the two new drugs that showed promise for her genetic variation were not approved by the FDA and were not covered by insurance. The drug company gave her the drugs for “compassionate use” and she began both types. Her body exploded in a rash, but eventually she had promising results. In July 2015, she had a scan that showed the tumors shrank considerably or disappeared.  There was no way to know exactly which treatment worked, but she was grateful (even though the scientist in her was annoyed). She continued to have brain scans every six weeks. Small tumors have appeared and were treated with CyberKnife.
 
Dr. Lipska has tried to put all the pieces together and figure out how to move forward. Her family doesn’t talk much about those two summer months. She was scared about how her mind failed and has since regularly tested herself to see if her symptoms are returning. She publicly shared her story through The New York Times for the first time and received a positive response. But her story took another twist in August 2016. At the site of her biggest tumor she experienced brain tissue necrosis. This is a delayed and sometimes fatal effect of radiation, where the surrounding tissue of the brain tumor does not heal after the radiation.  Dr. Lipska noticed a blind spot at the top of her visual field in her left eye. She was diagnosed with irreversible optic neuropathy- total blindness in her left eye due to the radiation she received. Lipska refused to give up, retrained her body to deal with the blindness, and even trained for a family triathlon. Two weeks before the race she experienced a leg twitch. She was having seizures due to necrotic tissue in her right motor cortex.  Despite her complications she continued to compete in the triathlon, taking the swimming leg of the race. When she passed the timing piece to her husband, he said, “Life is a team sport! And remember, my love, we’ll conquer this beast!”
 
The prognosis for Dr. Lipska is good, but she is cautious. She is worried it could all happen again with old age. But she knows it is through the support of her family that she got through her journey to madness and back.
 
Other Related Resources
Barbara K. Lipska Webpage
https://www.barbaralipska.com/bio/
 
The New York Times Article written by Dr. Lipska
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscientist-who-lost-her-mind.html
Possible questions include:

1. What symptoms did Dr. Lipska experience that mimic mental illness?
2. What role did her family play in her story with melanoma?
3. How does this story fight the stigma of mental illness?
4. How is this story a testament to optimism?

 
NPR Interview with Dr. Lipska
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/03/31/598236622/the-neuroscientist-who-lost-her-mind-returns-from-madness
 
Megyn Kelly TODAY interview with Dr. Lipska
https://www.today.com/video/meet-the-neuroscientist-who-lost-her-mind-then-got-it-back-again-1209150019548
 
2018 Gaithersburg Book Festival in Maryland book talk with Dr. Lipska
https://www.c-span.org/video/?445042-12/the-neuroscientist-lost-mind
 
WGBH News interview with Dr. Lipska
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abWumGocVoU
 
WBUR- Radio Boston interview with Dr. Lipska
http://www.wbur.org/radioboston/2018/04/23/neuroscientist-new-book
 
Psychology Today posts from authors
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/experts/barbara-k-lipska-phd-elaine-mcardle
 
The Guardian Article
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/mar/30/i-was-a-caricature-of-my-worst-traits-how-brain-cancer-can-affect-the-mind
 
Wall Street Journal article written by James (son-in-law) about the family triathlon
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-triathlon-is-easy-next-to-soviets-and-polio-1495492959
 
Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor- Harvard trained brain scientist who suffers from a stroke and then writes about it
http://mystrokeofinsight.com/
http://drjilltaylor.com/book.html
https://www.amazon.com/My-Stroke-Insight-Scientists-Personal/dp/0452295548
https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104154403
 
Psychological Figures and Concepts 
Phineas Gage
 
Adrenal glands
Anosognosia- lack of insight
Antipsychotic drugs in the 1950s
Blood-brain-barrier (BBB)
Brain
Brain bank
Cerebellum
Confidentiality
Consciousness
Creativity
CT scan
Dementia
DSM-5
Dyspraxia
Empathy
Frontal cortex
Frontal lobotomy
Frontotemporal dementia (FTD)
Gray vs. white matter
Hippocampus
Id vs. superego
Immunotherapy
Language
Lipska model- neonatal hippocampal lesion model of schizophrenia
Lobes- frontal, parietal, temporal, occipital
Localization
Mental illness statistics
MRI
Nature vs. nurture
Neuroscientist
Paranoia
PET scan
Pituitary glands
Prefrontal cortex
Psychosis
Schizophrenagenic mother myth
Schizophrenia
Sensory overload
Short vs. long-term memory
Spatial memory
Stigma of mental illness
Thyroid glands
Visual field

Against Empathy:  The Case for Rational Compassion
Author:  Paul Bloom
ISBN:  978-0-06-233933-1
 
APA Style Citation
Bloom, P.  (2016). Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, Harper Collins, New York, New York.
 
Buy This Book
https://www.amazon.com/Against-Empathy-Case-Rational-Compassion/dp/0062339338
​

​Book Description
Paul Bloom knows that many people will read this book out of anger, with the intention and hope of refuting the argument that empathy is bad for the world.  I did. I wanted to find fault with the reasoning that placing ourselves in the shoes of someone else was somehow a danger to both ourselves and others.  While Bloom has not convinced me that empathetic behaviors cause more harm than good, I can acknowledge that sometimes his argument is strong.  He concedes that not all empathy is negative, but rather argues that on the whole, it is not beneficial.  He opens with an example of an adorable young girl who needs a kidney transplant.  Once we get to know this girl and understand that she will likely die without the transplant, we often demonstrate empathy by imagining what it might feel like if this was happening in our own family.  When given the opportunity to move this girl up the list of those waiting for the transplant, we may jump at the opportunity to save her and her family from their continued suffering.  Bloom argues that this would be a case of empathy leading to injustice.  The feelings of empathy for this young girl have prioritized her life over the lives of others also waiting for a kidney who were rightfully in line ahead of the girl with whom we empathize.
 
Bloom argues that one of the reasons most people are so deeply in favor of the concept of empathy is that is has been associated with many concepts such as compassion, sympathy, and kindness which are related to but not actually empathy.  Bloom makes it clear that he is in favor of kindness and compassion.  He believes that empathy causes us to make decisions that seem kind and compassionate but that can actually hurt more people than help. He argues that empathy is like cholesterol and has both good and bad types.  The first, cognitive empathy is the type of empathy in which a person can understand another person`s suffering but does not feel what they feel.  We can feel compassion or sympathy without feeling what the person themselves feel, Bloom argues that this is often the case when we help others.  If a child falls from a high jungle gym and breaks his nose, we will immediately try to help, but it is unreasonable to argue that we feel what he/she feels. Similarly, we can buy a gift that we think someone else will enjoy, without necessarily liking it ourselves; this is kindness but not empathy.  These concepts are often presented as interchangeable and interwoven, but Bloom argues that can exist as distinct entities.
 
The second type of empathy is emotional empathy; this occurs when we feel the pain of others, this is the emphasis of the book and the type of empathy that Bloom believes can blur the lines of morality, balanced reasoning and fairness and that which he argues against.  Bloom argues that empathy can be learned and socialized and is often employed to encourage people to “do the right thing.”  Children are often scolded by asking, “How would you like it if someone did that to you?”  Bloom argues that there needs to be more to morality than empathy and that in fact, they are distinct because they need not occur simultaneously.  If you see someone throw garbage out of his or her car window, this may upset you morally, but there is no empathetic element, you do not feel what the person does or for that matter what the garbage feels. 
 
Bloom uses the very emotionally sensitive topic of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting in Newtown Connecticut as an example of how empathy can result in an unseen negative outcome.  While it is impossible to overestimate the tragedy that occurred in Newtown, More children were killed in the city of Chicago in a single year than those killed in Newtown.  However, the vividness of hearing the news of the Newtown victims and the painful emotions associated with this single event, makes the Newtown shootings stand out in our minds.  While the Chicago shootings may be covered daily in the paper they are not a single event, but rather multiple less salient events that are easier to forget. This availability heuristic created an outpouring of emotional empathy and gifts flooded into Newtown from all over the country.  Unfortunately, the gifts far exceeded what could be distributed in Newton a relatively affluent community, but many volunteers were needed to help store the gifts and toys even after Newtown officials asked that nothing else be sent. Bloom argues that this money could have been better spent saving lives by buying mosquito netting for children in Sudan and providing clean drinking water for those who have no access or meals to the elderly who do not have enough food.  In this way, people would be saving lives, but instead, their emotional empathy created a glut of teddy bears in a community that needed emotional support, but not tangible items and diverted resources from other potentially deadly situations.  
 
Bloom argues that this and other similar examples demonstrate that compassion is biased and often results in a cost-benefit net loss. Therapists who are too empathetic with their client’s problems face burn out and need to learn how to help their clients through the healing process without taking on the pain and suffering of their clients at the same time.  Bloom provides an example of a worker at the 9-11 sight looking for bodies when it was clear that they would find no more survivors, this person needed to try to dial back their empathy as they would otherwise have become overwhelmed and unable to help in the recovery efforts.  Surgeons may also need to practice this skill as too much empathy may inhibit their ability to do their job well.  The key here may to be employ understanding and caring rather than empathy. 
 
Empathy can also be counterintuitive; when we perceive that individuals play a role for creating a negative situation in their own life, we are likely to employ the just world phenomenon and demonstrate very little empathy even if it would be the kind and moral thing to do.  For example, if you found that someone was infected through HIV because they were an intravenous drug user who had used and infected needle, we might be likely to say that “it was their own fault.” Psychopaths are often said to lack empathy, but Bloom argues that criminal psychopaths have normal empathetic abilities, but they can dial it up to ingratiate themselves with people and then turn it down if they violate trust or engage in a criminal activity that may result in hurting others. Those with autism, unlike the criminal psychopaths, have little ability to empathize but do not have questionable moral behavior. Demonstrating Bloom`s argument that empathy and morality and not inevitable linked to one another. 
 
Bloom also discusses that the development of an in-group to whom we are likely to empathize and find similarities often creates and out-group may lead to stereotyping, dehumanization and unfair negative attributes.  While we can empathize with the victim of a crime or a family member who is suffering, Bloom argues that there are limits in empathy.  For example, if you heard that 30 people were killed in a flood in Indonesia, you would likely feel badly and perhaps empathize with the families of those killed or injured.  However, if you heard that 3000 people were killed in the flooding, would you feel 300 times worse?  We might go to herculean efforts to remove child trapped in a well, but do very little to try and change the climate which may over time results in the deaths of thousands more people.  Bloom uses quotes by both Stalin and Mother Teresa to demonstrate this point.  Stalin said, “One death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic.  Mother Teresa, “If I look at the mass, I will never act, if I look at the one, I will. Both understood the limits of empathy, but one in demonstrating Bloom`s thesis, the morality of this understanding is neutral, empathy need not only be used for good.  
Bloom does recognize that some good can come out of empathy and organizations such as effective Altruism advocate doing good deeds that combines the efforts of the head and the heart.  
 
Other Related Resources
The Atlantic:  Short video of psychologist Paul Bloom making the argument that empathy is a bad thing
https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/474588/why-empathy-is-a-bad-thing/. Bloom maintains that he is against empathy but for compassion.  He poses that empathy should not override rational deliberation; it should be a reliable servant-but never a master.
 
Big Think:  Why Empathy is not the Best Way to Care:  Video in which Paul Bloom describes why empathy can backfire and lead to negative effects.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhCGmDJQRpc
 
Psychology Today:  Why Paul Boom is Wrong about Empathy and Morality
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/good-thinking/201310/why-paul-bloom-is-wrong-about-empathy-and-morality
 
Quartz: Empathy Makes us Immoral
https://qz.com/1250764/work-japan-app-aims-to-help-foreigners-find-blue-collar-jobs-despite-japans-resistance-to-immigrants/
 
Oxford Education Blog:  Against Empathy?  Really
https://educationblog.oup.com/theory-of-knowledge/against-empathy-really
 
Psychological Figures and Concepts
Amygdala
Anterior Insula
Autism
Availability Heuristic
Base Rate
Clinical Psychology
Cognitive Empathy
Cognitive Neuroscience
Dualism
Emotional Contagion
Emotional Empathy
Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis
File Drawer Problem
fMRI
Incentive
Just World Phenomenon
Localization
Medial Prefrontal Cortex
Mindfulness
Mirror Neuron
Neuroanatomist
Neuroimaging
Posterior Cingulate Gyrus
Psychopaths
Statistical Significance
Theory of Mind
 
Psychological Figures
Charles Darwin
David Eagelman
Sigmund Freud
Michael Gazzaniga
Marc Iacobini
Steven Pinker

Intelligence: All That Matters
Author:  Stuart Ritchie
ISBN: 9781444791877
 
APA Style Citation
Ritchie, S. (2016). Intelligence:  All That Matters. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
 
Buy This Book
https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritchie/dp/1444791877
​

Book Description
The fast-paced book Intelligence, from the All That Matters series, is an excellent resource relating to teaching intelligence and testing units as well as a review of research and statistics in psychology. The book begins with a study the history of intelligence testing and includes sections on how modern intelligence tests work, why studying intelligence is important, the nature and nurture of intelligence, methods for increasing IQ, individual differences in intelligence, and a discussion of the controversies surrounding intelligence research.  Author Stuart Ritchie makes a strong case for the importance of intelligence research and presents the facts supported by research that intelligence tests indicate intelligence has a high rate of heritability, is generally stable throughout an individual’s life, and is correlated to numerous other lifestyle factors such as health, wealth, and educational and career success. Ritchie also discusses how IQ tests are connected to socio-economic status.
 
Additionally, the book provides a great opportunity to use the intelligence unit to practice analyzing research and critically examine data sets through the use of graphs and charts. Despite the controversy about the value of intelligence testing, the book makes a compelling research-based case for the usefulness of IQ testing.  For example, IQ scores are shown to be related to a variety of important variables including income, life expectancy, and educational performance. The author, Stuart Ritchie, directly confronts the major criticisms of IQ testing and highlights the benefits that can be gained by examining the research on human intelligence.
 
Throughout the book, the author provides interesting sections that highlight topics related to intelligence theory which are difficult for students to understand such as the concept of heritability.
 
What Heritability Does NOT Tell Us about intelligence.

1. Heritability does not indicate that 50% of an individual’s intelligence is the result of genetics.  Heritability is group figure that describes variance in a specific population of individuals.
2. Heritability does not indicate anything about average intelligence.  Intelligence may be 5- percent heritable in a group where the average IQ could be 85, 100, 118, 150, or any other number.
3. The term “heritable” does not mean the same thing as hereditary.  A hereditary trait is anything passed from parent to child, but heritability is about genetic variation of a particular trait. To understand this, it is essential to understand that traits can be influenced by environmental factors.
4. Heritability does not only apply to intelligence. Most human traits that vary between individuals (e.g., height, personality, political attitude, resistance to disease) is heritable (genes explain at least some of the variation).

The book has an excellent section on the Flynn Effect.  Evidence shows that better access to education and improved nutrition and health care are helpful in raising intelligence and that in many parts of the world access to these benefits has greatly increased over the last 100 years.  As a result, intelligence test scores have been increasing by around 3 points per decade since IQ testing began.  The average score on an intelligence test is 100, but researchers began to see that individuals who were born later typically earned average scores above 100 – in other words, they were scoring higher than the norm of the prior generation.  As a result, intelligence tests must be periodically re-normed with the score of 100 set to match up to an average of a sample of individuals for the current generation.  Flynn and other IQ researchers argue that improvements in education and nutrition are only a part of the picture when it comes to explaining generational increases in IQ scores.  The argument is that the way the average human thinks has undergone a dramatic shift over the last 100 years moving away from focusing on real-world applications of concrete concepts toward a more abstract and scientific way of thinking.  According to Flynn, “we all now wear scientific spectacles.”
 
The final part of the book is titled100 ideas is a wealth of resources about intelligence research including: fifteen recommended books about intelligence, five websites for the latest on intelligence research, five commonly used intelligence tests, twenty intelligence researchers working today and their areas of interest, ten review papers you should read, five (perhaps) surprising things that correlate with higher intelligence, five historical intelligence researchers not featured in the chapter on history, five anti-IQ books, ten common myths (debunked in the book) about intelligence, five fictional characters known for high intelligence, five fictional characters known for low intelligence, and ten ‘big questions’ for future intelligence research. 
 
Other Related Resources
 
TED Talk by James Flynn - Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents'
James Flynn’s 2013 TED talk discussing how the changes in how individuals think and reason that have occurred over the last 100 years explains the Flynn Effect.
https://www.ted.com/talks/james_flynn_why_our_iq_levels_are_higher_than_our_grandparents
 
Battle of the Brains
BBC Horizon’s documentary in which seven individuals who are all very successful in their respective fields are tested in a variety of ways to measure intelligence.  The documentary covers many of the main concepts and theories discussed in the curriculum for psychology units related to testing and individual’s differences. http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/broadband/tx/intelligence/highlights/
 
Current Intelligence Research Websites (from the 100 ideas section of the book)
International Society for Intelligence Research website
http://www.isironline.org/
 
Duke psychologist Jonathan Wai’s blog, Finding the Next Einstein:  discussing research findings and ideas that touch upon multiple issues surrounding the identification and development of talent and explores how these issues might be relevant to what's going on in the world.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-the-next-einstein
 
Temple University psychologist Joel Schneider’s blog:  Assessing Psyche on psychological assessment and psychometrics.
https://assessingpsyche.wordpress.com/
 
Kevin McGrew’s blog, IQ’s Corner Intelligent Insights on Intelligence Theories and Tests.  Educational psychologist Dr. Kevin McGrew is Director of the Institute for Applied Psychometrics 
http://www.iqscorner.com/
 
Psychological Figures and Concepts
Alfred Binet
Thomas J. Bouchard
Raymond Cattell
James Flynn
Hans J. Eysenck
Francis Galton
Howard Gardner
Stephen Pinker
Theodore Simon
Charles Spearman
William Stern
Robert Sternberg
Louis L. Thurstone
David Wechsler
Robert Yerkes
 
Bell (normal) curve
Binet Simon Test
Cattell Culture Fair Intelligence Test
Correlation
Crystalized intelligence
Emotional intelligence
Eugenics
Factor analysis
Fluid intelligence
Flynn effect
fMRI
g-factor
Genetics of intelligence
Heritability
IQ
Learning disability (e.g. dyslexia, dyscalculia, specific language impairment)
Mental age
Multiple intelligence theory
Nature and nurture of intelligence
Power test
Processing speed
Race and sex differences in intelligence
Raven’s Progressive Matrices
Regression
Reliability
Speed test
Standardized test
Triarchic theory of intelligence
Twin studies
Validity
Wechsler Intelligence Scales
Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Cognitive Ability
​

​Who’s In Charge:  Free Will and the Science of the Brain
Author:  Michael S. Gazzaniga
ISBN:  978-06-190610-7
 
APA Style Citation
Gazzaniga, M.S. (2011).  Who`s In Charge:  Free Will and the Science of the Brain, Harper Collins, New York, New York.
 
Buy This Book
https://www.amazon.com/Whos-Charge-Free-Science-Brain/dp/0061906107
 

Book Description
The origin of this book is derived from the Gifford lecture series named after Scottish advocate and judge Adam Lord Gifford.  These academic lectures have covered a wide variety of topics over the years from acclaimed academics in all areas, including famed psychologist William James.  This book is the result of Gazzaniga's own Gifford Lecture.
 
Gazzaniga opens with an explanation of the unbelievable capacity of the human brain to adapt, process information, and to adjust to trauma or external factors. Gazzaniga discusses the similarities and differences in the brain of human and the brains of other animals.  While humans share many similarities with the brains of other animals, the extremely large cerebral cortex (82 percent of the human brain) and forebrain allows for incredibly complex thought and higher-order thinking that significantly exceeds that of all other species.
 
Gazzaniga then lays out the difference in how psychologists historically believed humans gained information.  Those like John Watson believed humans were born a blank slate and experience shaped the individual one was to become through the person`s experience with rewards, punishments and observations.  Others believed that genes alone determined one`s intelligence, personality, and other characteristics.  Eventually, researchers began the study of individual neurons and brain areas, many of which demonstrated localization of brain function and a more interactionist approach was born.
 
Gazzaniga provides an example regarding how these interactions help us evaluate stimuli in our environment such as how one determines the brightness of an object.  Brightness is in part determined by the amount of light that enters the eye which can in large part be explained by biological factors.  However, our experience in the world helps identify a particular color, as well as the other surrounding colors, interact to create our experience of color in the world.  Beau Lotto discusses how easily we can be fooled by manipulating environmental factors (see resources for Beau Lotto TED talk).  This current interactionist view of how the brain functions is that the large-scale plan is genetic, but the specific connections and functions are a result of both epigenetic functions and experience. Genetics can set boundaries, for example, the process of neurogenesis is highly controlled by DNA and gradually decreases as one ages.  Asymmetries such as the localization of language in the left hemisphere and specifically in the language productions area of the left frontal lobe where Broca`s area is located are determined primarily by genetics.  However, young children with damage to the left frontal lobe or with hemispherectomies can “rewire” their brain so that language is redirected to the right hemisphere. 
 
Some of our behaviors may not be unique to the genes passed along directly from our parents, but rather from multiple generations as humans have adapted to changing environments.  Gazzaniga suggests humans and animals may be born ready to fear animals such as tigers and snakes with front facing eyes and sharp teeth.  Even squirrels who are raised in isolation and have never seen a snake before, avoid them when they are presented.  Other fears may be learned through negative life experiences, and others still may develop from an interaction between these two factors.  These interactionist occurrences even span to moral dilemmas, for example, in the infamous trolley problem, one must decide if they should flip a switch to have the trolley kill one person on the track or leave the switch as is and kill five people working on the tracks.  Most people (89%) will choose to flip the switch, but when the situation is changed slightly, and they are asked if they would push a person onto the tracks to save five people 89% of people say “no.”  Gazzaniga believes that the altruistic helping behavior may be inborn, the social construct of making the moral dilemma personal or impersonal is likely to be influenced by learning what behaviors are acceptable and which are unacceptable as determining by what we have learned through our experiences.  Similarly, we are born with a predisposition to learn language, but our surroundings will determine which language(s) we ultimately master. 
 
Gazzaniga is perhaps most well-known for his research with split-brained patients, having taken the reigns in this area from Nobel prize-winning researcher Roger Sperry who split the brains of severely epileptic patients to save at least one hemisphere from the debilitating epileptic seizures.  While some see this treatment as inhumane and unethical, Gazzaniga cites that these patients on average experience a 60-70 percent reduction in the number of seizures they are experiencing and others experienced no further seizures.  The corpus callosum is not completely split; but is still connected at the brainstem allowing for basic life functions to reach both hemispheres.  There is also some communication that remains between hemispheres because it has been shown that emotional stimuli presented to one hemisphere still impacts the judgment in the other hemisphere.  While split-brained patients appear completely normal in most ways, Gazzaniga has designed a unique method to test the experiences of split-brained patients.  By presenting a visual stimulus very briefly at the center of a screen, Gazzaniga can control images presented to the patients right or left visual field.  Half of all visual information will be directed to the opposite hemisphere of the brain by way of the optic chiasm.  The medial (inside) track crosses the optic chiasm to the opposite side of the brain while the lateral (outside) stays on the same side as the incoming message.  Since the left hemisphere is superior at language and the right at spatial tasks, it is then possible in split-brained patients to isolate the hemisphere receiving each message.  A spoon displayed to the right visual field will be verbally identified but cannot be selected properly from a ruler a pencil or a teacup.  Conversely, if the object were displayed to the left visual field, it could be identified spatially but not verbally.  These studies are not possible with “normal” individuals because the corpus callosum serves as a conduit between hemispheres.
 
When applying moral situations to split-brained patients, Gazzaniga poses questions first to a control group with intact brains and then to split-brained patients.  When asked about a secretary who accidentally puts poison in her boss`s coffee while intending to put sugar in and another she wants to poison her boss but accidentally puts sugar in his coffee, those with intact brains say the intention is what determines if the action is right or wrong.  Those with split-brains, however, indicate that the outcome is what matters, this is likely because likely because belief attribution is located in the right hemisphere of the brain and this cannot be easily integrated moral reasoning components of the brain, 
 
Ultimately, the mind constrains the brain, and social processes constrain individual`s minds.  These interactions between organisms and their environments are bidirectional.  The organism can change the environment and vice versa. Complete dependency on localization of function in the brain would mean that we are completely beholden to a single malfunction while total reliance on the environment would create a lack of consistency with personality or socialization, this interaction is necessary, it is what makes us human.
 
Other Related Resources
Diane Rehm Show:  Interview with Michael Gazzaniga discussing the book “Who`s in Charge?”
https://dianerehm.org/shows/2011-11-28/michael-gazzaniga-whos-charge-free-will-and-science-brain
 
Michel Gazzaniga Website University of California Santa Barbara
https://www.psych.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/gazzaniga
 
The Information Philosopher:  Interview with Michael Gazzaniga
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/gazzaniga/
 
Videos on Gazzaniga`s work with Split-brained patients
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfGwsAdS9Dc&t=13s
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCv4K5aStdU&t=48s
 
Beau Lotto:  Ted talk on Sensory Perceptions
https://www.ted.com/talks/beau_lotto_optical_illusions_show_how_we_see
 
René Balligeron :  Object Permanence
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0010027785900083
 
Morality in Chimps:  TED talk with Frans de Waal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysC
 
Law and Neuroscience:  Vanderbilt University
http://www.lawneuro.org/history.php
 
Psychological Figures and Concepts
Adrenal Gland
Agnosia
Algorithm
Amygdala
Anterior Cingulate Cortex
Aphasia
Associative Learning
Axon
Broca’s Area
Cerebellum
Corpus Callosum
Defense Mechanism
Denial
Determinism
Dualism
Egocentrism
Epigenetics
Epinephrine
False Belief Test
Free Will
Functional Plasticity
Genotype
Hippocampus
Homunculus
Lateralization
Lesioning
Mirror Neuron
Motor Neuron
Muller-Lyer Illusion
Nature versus Nurture Debate
Neocortex
Neurogenesis
Neural Network
Occipital Lobe
Optic Nerve
Optic Chiasm
Parietal Lobe
Phenotype
Phrenology
Prefrontal Cortex
Rationalization
Reciprocity
Retina
Schizophrenia
Sensitive Period (Critical Period)
Serotonin
Somatosensory System
Split-Brained Patient
Stream of Consciousness
Sympathetic Nervous System
Thalamus
Theory of Mind
Top-Down Processing
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)
Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex
Visual Cortex
Wernicke’s Area
 
Researchers
Rene Ballageon (Video of preference of babies for puppets who divide things equally)
Paul Broca
John Darley
Charles Darwin
Robin Dunbar
Leon Festinger
Sigmund Freud
Franz Joseph Gall
Jonathan Haidt
Hermann von Helmholtz
William James
Karl Lashley
Beau Lotto
George Miller
Richard Nisbett
Ivan Pavlov
David Premack
V.S. Ramachandran
Robert Sapolsky
Stanley Schachter
Roger Sperry
Lev Vygotsky
John Watson

The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory
Author:  Julia Shaw
ISBN: 9781847947628

APA Style Citation
Shaw, J. (2016). The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the science of False Memory. London: Random House Books.
 
Buy This Book
https://www.amazon.com/Memory-Illusion-Remembering-Forgetting-Science-ebook/dp/B019CGXQA8
​

Book Description
The author of The Memory Illusion, Dr. Julia Shaw, a forensic psychologist in the Department of Law and Social Sciences at London South Bank University, studies the creation of false memories and is a consultant on memory issues for the legal system, the military, and businesses. Dr. Shaw demonstrates how important memory is in a variety of contexts including the law, interpersonal communication, social media, personality and identity and the many ways in which our memory can be deceptive. By highlighting the latest research, the book demonstrates how understanding problems with memory can provide insight into ways in which memory can be improved. 
 
Dr. Shaw is a leading expert in the area of autobiographical false memory, and her research involves creating false memories in her research participants.  In one such study, Dr. Shae wanted to see if it was possible to create a false memory of committing a crime. The 100 participants in the study were told that they would be taking part in a study on actual memory and they are all aware that Dr. Shaw had spoken in advance with their parents to gain personal information about them.  During the first visit, Dr. Shaw began by discussing an actual event in the life of the participant that was shared by his or her parents.  Next, Dr. Shaw introduced the false memory of an event that resulted in police involvement, e.g., “your parents talked about a fight you had when you were in your early teens that was so severe that the police called your parents.”  The false memory included a few details that were true as well such as the location of where the person lived at that age and the name of a friend from the time.  The participants often reported that they did not recall this happening
 
Dr. Shaw then introduced some methods that are known to induce false memories such as visualization exercises. Dr. Shaw also introduced subtle social pressure by explaining that these methods work for most people if the subject tried had enough.  On the second visit, one week later, it was found that over 70% of participants accepted the false memory that they had committed a crime. The participants typically began to add details by filling in details such as background information and what the scene looked and felt like. Participants, of course, were fully debriefed at the conclusion of the study.  According to Shaw, “In essence, what I do is I get people to confuse their imagination with their memory.”  Shaw’s research has numerous connections to the psychology curriculum, including the work of Elizabeth Loftus on the misinformation effect and the fallibility of memory as well as source amnesia and reality monitoring errors.  
 
The book covers a wide range of memory research and memory phenomena including the problem of recalling childhood memories, the influence of perception on memory, the influence of memory on identity and sense of self, extremes of memory (e.g., individuals with highly superior autobiographical memory, savants), arousal and memory (Yerkes-Dodson law), memory and the legal system, the biology of memory, flashbulb memory, memory hacking, social media influences, and memory improvement.  In one section, the author discusses the 2015 social media sensation of the dress (blue/black or white/gold) regarding memory and how it relates to perception. A video describing the dress controversy is listed in the other related resources section of the post.

​What color do you perceive the dress in the image above to be?
 
Three scientific papers were published on this Internet phenomenon which is seen as one of the first clear examples of individuals looking at an identical physical stimulus, yet seeing it differently.  The answer seems to relate to the perceptual idea of color constancy in which the visual system compensates for differences in lighting to have an understanding of color.  The author illustrates how color constancy is informed by memory.  Team white/gold saw the dress using color constancy based on a memory of items being dimly lit, and team blue/black saw the dress using color constancy based on a memory of items being better lit.  Both teams of viewers combined perceptual visual information with memories of how objects appear in different types of lighting.  The book also explains how the dress controversy and other examples illustrate the interaction of bottom-up and top-down (including memory) processing influence our implicit expectations about the world. 
 
Shaw discusses a study she conducted in which participants were shown a picture of a “suspect” along with a short story about the crime they were accused of committing and then were asked to serve as jurors to decide if the person was innocent or guilty.  The only evidence they had to make their decision was the photo, the short story and a written sheet of evidence.  The stories and evidence were matched with photos by chance so that the researchers could determine if the jurors were impartially deciding on the evidence alone and not the photo. The photos were all previously rated on a scale of trustworthiness.  The results showed that participants were more likely to be harsher when the face associated with the evidence was previously rated as low in trustworthiness.  For a low trustworthiness face participant needed fewer pieces of evidence to assign guilt and less likely to change their mind after viewing exonerating information.  Despite using the same evidence, the face of the suspect led to drastically different conclusions even with the same evidence indicating bias. If someone is completely innocent, they may still be convicted simply because they “look” guiltier.
 
The Memory Illusion includes interesting and surprising connections between memory and other areas of the psychology curriculum.  In addition to a fascinating discussion of the topics in memory, the book also covers concepts from units including social psychology, research, biological bases, sensation and perception, learning, states of consciousness, personality, and motivation and emotion are included illustrating how the various fields of psychology are connected to the cognitive perspective.  Students will also see through this book how psychology relates to a wide range of other fields including medicine, law, economics, business, politics, and the military. 
 
Other Related Resources
National Geographic Episode – Interactive video to examine a variety of memory problems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWO2UQ4MW7U
 
What Color is the Dress?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AskAQwOBvhc
 
The Dresser: Color Constancy
http://uk.businessinsider.com/dresser-has-the-internet-arguing-over-its-color-2017-12?r=US&IR=T
 
Julia Shaw’s TEDx talk on How False Memories Corrupt Our Identities, Politics, and Justice System.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8j3FQOz310
 
Julia Shaw on “Memory Hackers” NOVA PBS documentary demonstrates her research on how it is possible to create false memories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfPLTtlo2oY
 
Julia Shaw – Memory Hacking:  The science of learning in the 21st Century at the Learning Technologies Conference on February 28th, 2017.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU4suR_uXbg
 
Julia Shaw – Embrace Your Imperfect Memory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L71f71b1CL0
 
"Making Evil: The Science Behind Humanity's Dark Side." The new book by Dr. Shaw due out in 2019.  A new book by the author of “The Memory Illusion.”
 
Julia Shaw’s 2015 paper titled, Constructing Rich False Memories of Committing a Crime published by the Association for Psychological Science.
http://nebula.wsimg.com/ce2babe46721a32c861f1a646c2836aa?AccessKeyId=AF62ECFBCD8F6D95BACE&disposition=0&alloworigin=1
 
Elizabeth Loftus’s TED Talk – How Reliable is Your Memory?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB2OegI6wvI
 
Elizabeth Loftus:  Lost at a Shopping Mall
https://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm
 
Beau Lotto’s TED Talk – Optical Illusions Show How We See
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf5otGNbkuc
 
Picking Cotton:  60 Minutes episode on the wrongful conviction of Ronald Cotton and the fallibility of eyewitness testimony
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkBiaI9PSQU
 
Psychological Figures and Concepts
Gordon Allport
Dan Ariely
Solomon Asch
Rene Descartes
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Sigmund Freud
Jerome Kagan
Daniel Kahneman
Eric Kandel
Joseph Le Doux
Elizabeth Loftus
Oliver Sacks
Nicholas Spanos
Amos Tversky
Robert Yerkes
Alzheimer’s disease
Amnesia
Amygdala
Auditory lobe
Autism
Backmasking
Behaviorism
Benzodiazepines
Bias (own age, own-gender, own-race)
Bottom-up processing and top-down processing
Brain region and memory (limbic system, frontal lobe, parietal lobe, temporal lobe, thalamus)
Change blindness
Chunking
Confabulation
Conformity
Dementia
Depression
Dissociation
DSM-5
Eidetic memory
Electroencephalography (EEG)
Emotion
Engram
Episodic memory
Eyewitness testimony
Face recognition
False memory
Flashbulb memory
fMRI functional magnetic resonance imaging
Forgetting
Hippocampus
Hypnosis
In-group bias
Innocence project
Inverted-U hypothesis
Language development
Long-term memory
Long-term potentiation
Maturation
Memory palace
Metamemory
Misinformation effect
MRI magnetic resonance imaging
Neurotransmitters (e.g., acetylcholine, GABA, glutamate)
Overconfidence
Parallel processing
Pineal gland
Plasticity
Post-traumatic stress disorder
Priming
Prospective memory
Prosopagnosia
Pruning
Psychoanalysis
Rapid eye movement (REM)
Schema
Semantic memory
Short-term memory
Source confusion
Super recognizer
Task switching
Theory of mind
Weapon focus effect