Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Rosalind Cartwright has dedicated her entire career’s work to studying sleep, and in her new book The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives she proposes a new theory on the confluence of our dream and waking selves. Here Cartwright reveals the scientific truths behind Inception and why, once we resolve Leo’s unconscious self, we should start tending to our own.
Matt J. Rossano is head of the Psychology department at Southeastern Louisiana University. His new book, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved, presents an evolutionary history of religion, drawing together evidence from a wide range of disciplines to show the valuable adaptive purpose served by systemic belief in the supernatural. In the excerpt below, Rossano reminds us of the comfort of believing in things that may be irrational.
Christopher A. Kearney is a Professor of Psychology and Director of UNLV Child School Refusal and Anxiety Disorders Clinic, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His new book, Helping Children with Selective Mutism and their Parents, provides information that can help readers better understand and combat selective mutism. In the excerpt below, Kearney provides some techniques to help children cope with their anxiety about speaking.
Robert Freedman, MD, is Professor and Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado and the Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Psychiatry. His new book, The Madness Within Us: Schizophrenia as a Neuronal Process, is a discussion of these two aspects of the illness. Freedman outlines the emerging understanding of schizophrenia as a neurobiological illness. In the excerpt below we learn about the basic brain dysfunction in schizophrenia.
Eavesdropping has a bad name. It is a form of human communication in which the information gained is stolen, and where such words as cheating and spying come into play. But eavesdropping may also be an attempt to understand what goes on in the lives of others so as to know better how to live one’s own. John L. Locke’s entertaining and disturbing new book, Eavesdropping: An Intimate History, explores everything from sixteenth-century voyeurism to Facebook and Twitter. Below is a short excerpt from the book’s prologue, explaining why he finds eavesdropping so fascinating.
Rosalind D. Cartwright is Professor Emeritus of Rush University Medical Center’s Graduate College Neuroscience Division, and was chair of the College’s Department of Behavioral Sciences until 2008. In her new book, The Twenty-Four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives, Cartwright brings together decades of research into the bizarre sleep disorders known as parasomnias to propose a new theory of how the human mind works consistently throughout waking and sleeping hours. In the excerpt below we learn how important it is to slow down and get the appropriate amount of sleep.
Jerald M. Jellison has been a Professor of Psychology at the University of Southern California for three decades. His book, Life After Grad School: Getting From A to B, looks at the unspoken truth that less than 5 percent of the 2.5 million graduate students in the U.S. will realize their dream of becoming a professor. Jellison looks at what the other 95 percent should do, illuminating the transition from academia to a satisfying and well-paying job with a company, government agency, or not-for-profit organization. In the excerpt below Jellison addresses how students should find out if they are destined to become a tenure track professor.
Thanks to early screenings and leaked footage, the much-anticipated movie Kick-Ass gained massive buzz among fanboys, bloggers (and pretty much everyone else under the age of 30) months before it hit movie theaters, poising itself to possibly be the best superhero move ever made. But when the feature finally released last month–replete with glorified violence and a young girl with the dirtiest mouth since Bob Saget–it was met with formidable resistance from parents and critics alike.
Thanks to early screenings and leaked footage, the much-anticipated movie Kick-Ass gained massive buzz among fanboys, bloggers (and pretty much everyone else under the age of 30) months before it hit movie theaters, poising itself to possibly be the best superhero move ever made. But when the feature finally released last month–replete with glorified violence and a young girl with the dirtiest mouth since Bob Saget–it was met with formidable resistance from parents and critics alike.
Edna Foa is a Professor of Clinical Psychology in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and Director of the Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety. Her most recent book, Prolonged Exposure Therapy for PTSD: Emotional Processing of Traumatic Experiences, was written with Elizabeth Hembree and Barbara Olaslov Rothbaum. The guide gives clinicians the information they need to treat clients who exhibit the symptoms of PTSD. Recently Foa was name by Time Magazine as one of the most influential people in 2010. Below she reacts to the honor.
Endocrine Psychiatry: Solving the Riddle of Melancholia, traces the enthusiasm of biological efforts to solve the mystery of melancholia and proposes that a useful, and a potentially life-saving, connection between medicine and psychiatry has been lost. Below we have excerpted the preface which explains why endocrine psychiatry deserves a second look.
An excerpt from Silencing the Self Across Cultures: Depression and Gender in the Social World.
The Fundamentalist Mindset sheds light on the psychology of fundamentalism, with a particular focus on those who become extremists and fanatics. The collection is edited by Charles B. Strozier, a Professor of History at John Jay College, CUNY, and a practicing psychoanalyst, David M. Terman, Director of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, James W. Jones, a Professor of Religion and adjunct Professor of Clinical Psychology at Rutgers University and Katharine A. Boyd a doctoral student at John Jay College, CUNY.
An excerpt from Blindspots: The May Ways We Cannont See.
Goodwin and Guze’s Psychiatric Diagnosis gives us a historical background to panic disorders and hysteria.
What is the psychology behind judicial decisions?