Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Kenneth Barish
When talking about children’s emotions, it is difficult to avoid saying things that are not already commonly known, or even common sense. Recent advances in the psychology and neuroscience of emotions, however, now offer us a new understanding of the nature of emotion. In childhood and throughout life, our emotions guide our thoughts and our imagination, our behavior and our moral judgments.
By Edward Shorter and Susan Bélanger
In the fifty years since the publication of A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess’s dystopian fable remains by far the best-known of his more than 60 books. It also remains controversial and widely misunderstood: assailed for inciting adolescent violence (especially following Stanley Kubrick’s explicit 1971 film adaptation) or viewed as an anti-psychiatry treatise for presenting behavioural conditioning as an instrument of social control. But this aspect of the book needs to be seen within a broader context.
In Bully, Emmy award-winning director Lee Hirsch invites viewers to spend a year in the lives of students and parents who deal with public torment and humiliation on a daily basis. By following the young victims from the classroom to their living rooms, viewers are given an intimate look into the effects that bullying has on these targets and their families. While parents and administrators scramble to find a solution to the problem, they must ask themselves: how do we differentiate bullying from conflict within friendships?
By Clark McCauley
A year ago President Obama announced that US Special Forces had shot and killed Osama bin Laden. Jubilant crowds gathered outside the White House in Washington and at Ground Zero in New York City. Pictures of the crowds show them smiling and cheering, raising US flags and flashing victory “V”s.
By Barbara Oakley, Ph.D. As we approach the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death, it’s time to step back and think on the sin of altruism. Sin, you say? How can wanting to help others be a sin? Or, at the very least, how could it possibly harm people by simply trying to help them? […]
By Maureen Duffy
(1) Ignore the bullying complaints, or deny or minimize them.
It’s very difficult for a child or young person to come forward with complaints of being bullied in the first place. The negative acts involved in bullying like name-calling, taunting, mocking, spreading rumors, social exclusion, or throwing things at the victim are humiliating. No child or young person wants to be disliked by peers and to have to disclose to an adult that they are targets of bullying can be a source of further shame.
Have you ever wondered if it is really possible for others to know what you are thinking? Our brains seem to allow both “internal” points of view, and “external” ones. As individuals, we know them from the inside as we experience our thoughts, perceptions and emotions. Scientists, on the other hand, only know our brains from the outside, as they employ brain imaging, EEG, or other types of techniques.
By Mary Coleman
Autism was first described in 1943 and since then, the understanding of this disease entity by the scientific community has greatly changed. In 2012, autism is now considered a behaviorally defined neurodevelopmental disorder arising well before birth, characterized by a marked clinical and etiological heterogeneity. Recently there is a question whether there may be an epidemic of autism, as the rates of diagnosis have continued to rise to alarming levels.
The law is based on reasoned analysis, devoid of ideological biases or unconscious influences. Judges frame their decisions as straightforward applications of an established set of legal doctrines, principles, and mandates to a given set of facts. Or so we think. We sat down with Director of the Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School (PLMS) and editor of Ideology, Psychology, and Law, Professor Jon Hanson, to discuss the interaction of psychology and the law, and how they interact to form ideologies by which we all must live.
By Allan V. Horwitz
The latest revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the DSM-5, now scheduled to be published in May 2013, has generated a tremendous amount of controversy. The DSM is published by the American Psychiatric Association to provide common language and criteria for the diagnosis of mental disorders, so any proposed changes to its terminology could mean millions more, or millions less, diagnosed with an illness. Nevertheless, the proposed changes in the Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) have been relatively neglected.
With the season premiere of AMC’s Mad Men coming this weekend, we thought we’d use this opportunity to introduce you to one of the most highly respected scientists in the field of Persuasion. As a matter of fact, many people consider Dr. Robert Cialdini as the “Godfather of influence”. What better way to do that then provide you with the foreword he wrote to a just-released book, Six Degrees of Social Influence. Enjoy his words below and enjoy the premiere.
By Anthony Scioli
Spring and hope are intertwined in the mind, body, and soul. In spring, nature conspires with biology and psychology to spark the basic needs that underlie hope: attachment, mastery, survival, and spirituality. It is true that hope does not melt away in the summer; it is not rendered fallow in autumn nor does it perish in the deep freeze of winter. But none of these other seasons can match the bounty of hope that greets us in the spring. My reflections on hope and the spring season are cast in terms of metaphors.
By Stuart Vyse
“Beware the Ides of March,” warns the soothsayer in Act 1, scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and by the end of the play, the Roman dictator, having ignored the soothsayer’s prophecy, is dead at the hands of a conspiracy of foes. The 15th of March was made famous by this single historical event, described in Plutarch’s history of Caesar’s life and made part of our contemporary Western vocabulary by Shakespeare’s tragedy and, more recently, by last summer’s political drama starring Ryan Gosling and George Clooney.
Recently I learned of yet another suicide of a young gay may which has been attributed to sustained bullying at school. Phillip Parker was 14 years old when he took his own life on Friday January 20th, 2012. Surely it has to be wrong for any young person to feel so helpless that the only way to be freed from the torment of the bullies is to commit suicide.
By Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge
Neandertal communication must have been different from modern language. Neandertals were not a stage of evolution that preceded modern humans. They were a distinct population that had a separate evolutionary history for several hundred thousand years.
Every year, 90% of Americans give money to charities. There is at least one capital campaign to raise $25 million or more underway in virtually every major population center in North America. Smaller capital campaigns are even more numerous, with phone-a-thons, door-to-door drives, and mail solicitations increasing in popularity. Despite the ubiquity of fund-raising, we still have an imperfect understanding of the motivations for giving and the welfare implications for the giver. One may wonder: what moves all of these people to donate? Is such generosity necessarily welfare-enhancing for the giver?