psychology Archives | Page 4 of 30

Tagpsychology

ImagiNation: An RPG For People Suffering From Depression

February 14, 2013 / Klint Finley

A personal game about depression and its effects intended to help people with invisible illnesses broach the subject and explore it in a way they can have power over it.

ImagiNation is set after the fall of mainland Britain to a strange reality breakdown. The barriers between imagination and reality, dreams and nightmares have shattered and strange things dreamed up by people caught in the event teem across the land.

Only those who are already ‘broken’ can hope to cope with exploring, understanding and combatting this strangeness for the sake of the huddled refugees that sit and wait and watch from the smaller islands around the coast.

A game of mental illness and art using The Description System (Neverwhere).

This game is available FREE so please promote, download, host and spread as far and wide as you can.

Full Story: ImagiNation

Study: Table Top Role Players Are More Creative

Is Being Spiritual But Not Religious Dangerous To Your Mental Health?

January 26, 2013 / Klint Finley

A recent paper published in The British Journal of Psychiatry looks at surveys of 7,400 people in the United Kingdom for links between mental health and religiousness and spirituality. I could only find the abstract online, but Mark Vernon (a former priest turned agnostic Christian journalist) wrote about the paper for The Guardian here.

Vernon focused on the paper’s finding that spiritual but not religious people are more prone to . But there were two other unusual findings:

-Non-spiritual, non-religious people were no more likely to have mental health disorders, other than heavy drinking (the abstract notes that they also are more likely to have tried drugs, but doesn’t indicate that they are more likely to have developed a habitual drug habit). This conflicts with previous studies that assumed that religion was a key part of happiness.

-According to Vernon’s write-up, non-spiritual, non-religious people tended not to have education beyond secondary school, challenging previous findings that atheists are more intelligent (or perhaps the assumption that intelligent people go to university).

Vernon concludes that churches in Britain should do a better job of reaching spiritual people who don’t have religious affiliations. He’s holding on to the idea that religion can treat mental health issues, but I think he’s reading too much into the study. First of all, it will need to be repeated and compared with other studies with conflicting results. Second, it’s not clear that religiosity is what “healed” anyone — correlation vs. causation and all that. But it does lend some credence to concerns about religious practices being taken out of context.

Rethinking Bullying

January 3, 2013 / Klint Finley

Bullying is a means of asserting the social order of popularity and keeping lower-status members in their place; the seductive pleasure of cruelty is a rewarding, and sometimes addicting, privilege for higher-status members (but not highest — they don’t need to bully). Bullying is not committed by individuals qua individuals against individuals qua individuals; it is committed by individuals who experience themselves as representatives of a social class within a social hierarchy against other individuals who experience themselves in being bullied as representatives of a social class within that same social hierarchy.

Full Story: Siderea: One Thought on Bullying

Rethinking in this frame would require us to reassess whether Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were bullies or had been bullied.

The Media Needs to Stop Inspiring Copycat Murders

December 22, 2012 / Klint Finley

Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci on ways that media and law enforcement can reduce the number of copycat killers after a mass shooting:

1. Law enforcement should not release details of the methods and manner of the killings, and those who learn those details should not share them.

2. If and when social media accounts of the killers are located, law enforcement should work with the platforms to immediately pull them.

3. The name of the killer should not be revealed immediately. If possible, law enforcement and media sources should agree to withhold it for weeks.

Similarly, the killer should not be profiled extensively, at least not at first.

4. The intense push to interview survivors and loved ones in their most vulnerable moments should be stopped.

Full Story: The Atlantic: The Media Needs to Stop Inspiring Copycat Murders. Here’s How.

These points are not unlike forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz’ principles for not propagating mass murders:

Don’t start the story with sirens blaring.

Don’t have photographs of the killer.

Don’t make this 24/7 coverage.

Do everything you can not to make the body count the lead story.

Not to make the killer some kind of anti-hero.

Do localise this story to the affected community and as boring as possible in every other market.

The Science Of Intuition

November 13, 2012 / Klint Finley

Maria Popova recently reviewed on Answers for Aristotle, a book on the science of intuition by Massimo Pigliucci. The snap summary: intuition is essentially subconscious pattern recognition. Here’s an excerpt Popova included:

One of the first things that modern research on intuition has clearly shown is that there is no such thing as an intuitive person tout court. Intuition is a domain-specific ability, so that people can be very intuitive about one thing (say, medical practice, or chess playing) and just as clueless as the average person about pretty much everything else. Moreover, intuitions get better with practice — especially with a lot of practice — because at bottom intuition is about the brain’s ability to pick up on certain recurring patterns; the more we are exposed to a particular domain of activity the more familiar we become with the relevant patterns (medical charts, positions of chess pieces), and the more and faster our brains generate heuristic solutions to the problem we happen to be facing within that domain.

Full Story: The Science of “Intuition”

Researchers Hack Brainwaves to Reveal PINs, Other Personal Data

October 2, 2012 / Klint Finley

Yeah, I know this is really old by internet time, but I’ve been really busy with work and I’m still catching up:

A team of security researchers from Oxford, UC Berkeley, and the University of Geneva say that they were able to deduce digits of PIN numbers, birth months, areas of residence and other personal information by presenting 30 headset-wearing subjects with images of ATM machines, debit cards, maps, people, and random numbers in a series of experiments. The paper, titled “On the Feasibility of Side-Channel Attacks with Brain Computer Interfaces,” represents the first major attempt to uncover potential security risks in the use of the headsets. […]

Emotiv and NeuroSky both have “app stores,” where users of the devices can download third-party applications. The applications use a common API for access to the EEG device. […]

“We simulated a scenario where someone writes a malicious app, the user downloads it and trusts the app, and actively supports all the calibration steps of the device to make the software work,” said Frank. In these seemingly innocuous calibration steps, which are standard for most games and other applications using the headsets, there could be the potential to harvest personal information.

Full Story: Wired: Researchers Hack Brainwaves to Reveal PINs, Other Personal Data

The paper is available on Scribd.

I wonder if this could be used to determine passwords that users don’t consciously remember?

I’ve said before: steganograph your brain before it’s too late!

U.S. Military Funding Research On “Spidey Sense”

September 20, 2012 / Klint Finley

The Office of Naval research wants to fund more research on intuition:

esearch in human pattern recognition and decision-making suggest that there is a “sixth sense” through which humans can detect and act on unique patterns without consciously and intentionally analyzing them. Evidence is accumulating that this capability, known as intuition or intuitive decision making, enables the rapid detection of patterns in ambiguous, uncertain and time restricted information contexts, that it informs the decision making process and, most importantly, that it may not require domain expertise to be effective. These properties make intuition a strong candidate for further exploration as the basis for developing a new set of decision support training technologies. The proposed topic will lead to new insights into intuitive decision making, and develop new approaches for enhancing this process.

General Services Office: OFFICE OF NAVAL RESEARCH BASIC RESEARCH CHALLENGE – ENHANCING INTUITIVE DECISION MAKING THROUGH IMPLICIT LEARNING

(via Adam Flynn)

Study: Table Top Role Players Are More Creative

August 7, 2012 / Klint Finley

Interesting, but there’s a fundamental causation vs. correlation problem here. I know at least one person who says she doesn’t play RPGs because she’s not imaginative enough.

A study forthcoming in Thinking Skills and Creativity found that people who play table-top role playing games (e.g. Dungeons and Dragons) engage in more divergent thinking (a common measure of creativity) than people who play electronic role playing games (e.g. Final Fantasy) or people who don’t play any role playing games.

What makes a game like Dungeons and Dragons so beneficial is that it gets at the cognitive core of what creativity is about — the act of connecting existing knowledge in a novel way in order to generate new knowledge. This new knowledge can be a pleasant way to place paint on a canvass, a plan to stop the leak in your sink, or a way to explain how a Dwarf’s Level 3 Fire spell is repelled by a Dark Ogre.

Peer Review My Neurons: Want to Be Creative? Play Dungeons and Dragons

(via Metafilter)

Global Brain Connectivity Explains 10 Percent of Variance in Individual Intelligence

August 2, 2012 / Klint Finley

Science Daily reports on a recent study using magnetic imaging found that about 6.7% of variation in individual intelligence can be predicted by the overall size of the brain, another 5% can be predicted by the size of the lateral prefrontal cortex and another 10% can be predicted by the strength of the connection between the left lateral prefrontal cortex and the rest of the brain. From the story:

“This study suggests that part of what it means to be intelligent is having a lateral prefrontal cortex that does its job well; and part of what that means is that it can effectively communicate with the rest of the brain,” says study co-author Todd Braver, PhD, professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences and of neuroscience and radiology in the School of Medicine. Braver is a co-director of the Cognitive Control and Psychopathology Lab at Washington University, in which the research was conducted.

One possible explanation of the findings, the research team suggests, is that the lateral prefrontal region is a “flexible hub” that uses its extensive brain-wide connectivity to monitor and influence other brain regions in a goal-directed manner.

Science Daily: Brain Imaging Can Predict How Intelligent You Are: ‘Global Brain Connectivity’ Explains 10 Percent of Variance in Individual Intelligence

(via Ryan Yonck)

Technoccult Interview: Open Source Buddhism with Al Jigong Billings

July 25, 2012 / Klint Finley

Many Technoccult readers have probably seen Hermetic.com. Maybe you even got your first taste of Aleister Crowley, Austin Osman Spare or Hakim Bey there. What you might not know is that the site’s founder, Al Jigong Billings has given up the site to focus on what he calls “Open Source Buddhism.” I recently talked with Al about what Open Source Buddhism is, how it differs from other contemporary the Pragmatic Dharma movement and the secular mindfulness movement, and how he gravitated from Neopaganism to Buddhism.

Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑

Technoccult

Mutate Your Mind

Tagpsychology

ImagiNation: An RPG For People Suffering From Depression

Is Being Spiritual But Not Religious Dangerous To Your Mental Health?

Rethinking Bullying

The Media Needs to Stop Inspiring Copycat Murders

The Science Of Intuition

Researchers Hack Brainwaves to Reveal PINs, Other Personal Data

U.S. Military Funding Research On “Spidey Sense”

Study: Table Top Role Players Are More Creative

Global Brain Connectivity Explains 10 Percent of Variance in Individual Intelligence

Technoccult Interview: Open Source Buddhism with Al Jigong Billings

Archive by Subject

Archive by Date