Teach of You

Social Stigma and Psychological Disorder  Ever heard a really good joke about polio? Or make a casual reference to someone having hepatitis? Or maybe teased your buddy by saying he has muscular dystrophy? Of course, you have never done that. Because you are not a terrible person, you'd never make fun of someone for having a physical illness. But folks make all kinds of offhand remarks about people having mental illnesses and never give it a second thought. How often have you heard a person say that someone's psycho or schizo or bipolar or OCD? I can pretty much guarantee that the people who used those terms had no idea what they actually meant. We've talked about how psychological disorders and the people who have them have often been stigmatized. But at the same time, we tend to minimize those disorders, using them as nicknames for things that people do, think, or say that may not exactly be universal but are still basically healthy.  And we all do it, but only because we ...

Asylums  Way back in 1887, a journalist named Elizabeth Cochran assumed the alias Nellie Bly and feigned a mental illness to report on the truly awful conditions inside psychiatric hospitals in the US, which were known as asylums at the time. She found rotten food, cold showers, prevalent rats, abusive nurses, and patients being tied down in her famous expose, Ten Days in a Madhouse. What she documented had been pretty standard mental health treatment for centuries, but her work led the charge in mental health reform. It's been a long battle. Nearly a century later, in 1975, American psychologist David Rosenhan published a paper called On Being Sane in Insane Places, detailing the experiment that he conducted on psychiatric institutions themselves. The first part of his experiment involved sending pseudo-patients, a group of eight totally mentally sound associates, including David himself, to knock on institution doors and falsely report that they'd been hearing voices.  Once ...

  Biological Sex & Gender Identify People have been having sex and writing songs about it carving statues of it and changing fashion for it since the dawn of humanity. But it wasn't until fairly recently, in the 1940s, that serious Western scientific study of sex began. And by most accounts, you can thank one guy for that, Alfred Kinsey. Kinsey was born in 1894 in New Jersey to poor, strict Methodist parents. He studied entomology in college, graduating with degrees in biology and psychology before heading to Harvard. His doctoral thesis was on the genealogy of gall wasps, a subject he tackled with intensity, meticulously collecting over five million samples, and measuring hundreds of thousands of specimens. Wasps are interesting and everything, but Kinsey's interest drifted toward human sexuality, and his research at Indiana University paved the way for decades of study into sex.  He surveyed thousands of men and women about their sexual habits and histories and found all...

 How Emotions Work Did you know that astronauts in space have a hard time communicating without words because their weightless bodily fluids make their faces all puffy and hard to read? Have you heard that Botox can actually improve your mood, not by smoothing wrinkles, but actually by easing depression? Or that this come here gesture is common in the US, but is considered so rude in the Philippines that it could actually get you arrested? Yeah. All true! Emotions and the ways we express them are strange and powerful things. And emotions aren't just ephemeral psychological phenomena, they affect our bodies and our health. Because so many emotions have a certain contagious quality, our feelings and the behaviors they drive also affect the minds bodies, and health of those around us.  This is true whether your emotions at the moment are of the feel-good variety or not. The powers of both positivity and negativity are stronger than you may know. Lots of studies have shown that pe...

  INTRODUCTION: EMOTION Mel Gibson did it, Tom Cruise nearly busted Oprah's couch doing it, and Kanye pretty much has owned it for years now. Talking about expressing too much emotion, usually in public, and in weird and often insensitive ways. Such regrettable outbursts are not unique to celebrities, of course, and they can be enough to make us think of our emotions as irrational. But they're not. Well, not usually. When they're not getting the better of us, they have work to do. Part of their job is to provide the energy and motivation that lets us meet our goals and our needs, and despite the occasional public failure, they often improve our performance in a given situation. So emotions play an important role in how we think and behave.  Of course, when they blow up and someone screams at a flight attendant or punches a paparazzo, or jumps on stage and grabs the mic away from a teenager in the middle of her acceptance speech to say that someone else deserved the honor mo...

  INTRODUCTION: In your lifetime, you have probably stared down any number of ability tests and course exams and PSATs, SATs, ACTs, GREs, GCSEs, whatever you have in your country. Humans, it seems, really get a thrill out of measuring, ranking, and comparing each other's intelligence. Unfortunately, as you saw last week, historically we have been kind of bad at that. Today, we think of intelligence as determined by a series of factors related to genetics, environment, education, perhaps even randomness itself, some aspects of which may correlate with belonging to a particular social group and others not. The key here, though, is that we don't fully understand how or how much some of these factors work. How do elements like personal history and conditions like poverty, access to education, stress, and even nutrition, affect someone's scores on cognitive tests?  And if a group of people has some of these conditions, how will they respond, both as individuals and as a group, t...

 Defining Intelligence Smarty Pants, Egghead, Brainiac. You've heard terms like these before. Maybe you've even been on the receiving end of one of them. But actually, defining intelligence is a lot trickier than just coming up with new names for smart people. I mean, intelligence isn't like height or weight. You can't just toss someone on a scale and get an exact measurement. It has different meanings for different cultures ages and skill sets. So what is intelligence? It's a question that doesn't give us a lot of answers, but it does open up a bunch of other equally important and interesting questions. Like, what influences it, and how can it be assessed? Is it a single, general ability, or does it cover a range of aptitudes skills, and talents?  How do things like creativity and innovation factor in, or genetics, environment, or education? And what about emotional intelligence? Most agree that it's best to think of intelligence not as a concrete thing, so...