Psychology in Everyday Life: The Psych Files

In movies and TV, women are understandably tired of playing roles like the "Wife" or the "Girlfriend". Nowadays we're seeing more women in film and TV but has their role in the production really changed all that much? That's what the Bechdel testâ is all about.  It's not a test per se but rather a few questions to help you determine whether the women in that movie, TV show, play, or book are characters with agency, or are just there to fill out the background for what the male characters do. In this episode I talk with Bard professor Wendy Urban-Mead about this Bechdel test and what it says about Shakespeare's plays and a play that she's appearing in called "The Women", a play featuring 35 female characters and has no male roles. Does it pass the Bechdel test?

Would you be surprised to learn that B.F. Skinner was a very likable guy and that you may actually be very much in agreement with his ideas? Many people who study psychology have a negative impression of Skinner. Well, I'm about to challenge those impressions by presenting a side of Skinner you probably haven't been exposed to. In these sound bytes you'll hear his ideas about learning to play music, about discovery, having fun and becoming the most that you can be.

Does your dog have thoughts and feelings? How about your cat? In this episode we find out what scientists have to say about how we should study this question. I also review a fascinating new study by Dr. Alexandra Horowitz of Barnard College who studied whether or not dogs who have that guilty look actually do feel guilty. We take a look at the idea of anthropomorphism and your dog in this episode of The Psych Files.

Have you ever gotten to immersed in a book or movie that you actually felt like the character? Or you felt the character's pain or joy? Why does this happen? When does this happen? What is it about the book or the movie and its characters that draws us in like this? It's amazing isn't it? To be so moved like this. Psychologists have studied this experience and we have some ideas regarding what factors have to be present in order for this to happen. And would you believe that this understand might help us to combat racism and bullying? Pretty amazing stuff. Join me as I explore what psychologists call "experience taking".

Transference and countertransference are two key concepts in psychoanalysis and they are fascinating. If you're interested in the therapy side of psychology - particularly psychoanalysis - this is the episode for you. Kerry Malawista, psychoanalyst and author, along with Anne Adeleman and Catherine Anderson, talks about their new book, "Wearing My Tutu To Analysis". In this episode we focus on two of the stories in the book, which focus on transference and countertransference.

How do you get someone is is conservative to support climate change? Or stricter controls on guns? There is a way. Research confirms that conservatives tend to be focused on how good the past was, while liberals are “future-focused”. So what if you frame a statement about gun control by framing that statement around words and images that support a person’s preferences for the past or the future? Let’s see how your attitudes are being ever so slightly influenced by the way statements are “framed”. You’ll be a wiser consumer as a result.

In this episode I cover a few interesting topics. First, have you ever "blanked out" in front of an audience? I recently did and I was determined to find out why this happened. I found some answers in a great book called Stop Talking, Start Influencing. Also I'll tell you about the memorization strategies I used in a recent play I was in, and we'll finish up with a snippet from an interview with Clive Thompson, author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World and he'll tell us how some coders tried to automate parts of their love life.

What makes some songs so popular? Guess what - psychologists actually know a lot of the answers. In this episode we'll listen to excerpts from Leonard Cohen's song Hallelujah, as well as Noisestorm's Ignite, Adele's Someone Like You, the Enterprise Theme from Star Trek, and even two pieces of music from the motion picture Koyaanisqatsi. We'll especially deconstruct "Hallelujah" to figure out why it is such a popular song. Many thanks to musician extraordiaire - Steve Kessler.

If you have been in therapy you want to believe it "worked". We all do. And hopefully it did have a positive effect on you. But how do you know? How do therapists know if what they're doing really has resulted in improvements in their clients? Yes, we have controlled studies for many treatments which give us confidence that these techniques really do help people, but we also have a lot of "therapeutic" techniques that have not been thoroughly tested. Nonetheless, lots of amazing claims are made for their effectiveness and no doubt the people who provide these therapies really do believe that they work. But let's step back and look critically at what we're doing. We must be willing to look critically at what we're doing as therapists or healers of any type: are you really helping people or are you just picking and choosing the "evidence" that you think indicates success? Do you just want to believe because you work hard at what you do, or because you make a lot of money at what you do, or because some of your clients have said really positive things?

Almost everyone has heard of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, her book On Death and Dying, and her five stages of grief. But are these stages accurate? Could the five stages of grief actually be doing more harm than good? Are they helping us to better understand what dying people go through or are they making it more difficult for us to truly understand and relate to them? Find out in this episode of The Psych Files.

What does the movie Shrek have to do with labeling, the DSM-V and the self-fulfilling prophecy? In this episode I take a close look at the well-known Rosenhan study. This was the study in which "pseudopatients" pretend to hear voices and on the basis of this they get admitted to psychiatric centers. Then they were told to act "normally". It took an average of 19 days for these "pseudopatients" to be discharged from the hospital and even then they were diagnosed as "schizophrenia in remission".

You may have heard that Facebook manipulated the content of user's New Feeds during January of 2012 so that some users saw more positive posts than others, which other Facebook users saw more negative posts. How did this affect these users? Did those who say negative posts become more negative and vice versa? The answer is that the research indicates that some of them - though a very, very few of them - did subsequently write posts that were similar to the ones that saw on their News Feed. How big of an effect is this? Is it unethical? Does agreeing to Facebook's Terms of Use constitute "informed consent". I examine these questions in this episode of The Psych Files.

Why do some conspiracy theories seem to have so much evidence to support them? Well, that's because if you look hard enough at any event, and you don't have any particular theory before you start looking, you're eventually going to find something. And you'll probably think that thing is AMAZING. This is what careful thinkers and researchers have to learn: if you're going to find something truly amazing, you have to make your predictions FIRST. In this episode I talk about how we can be fooled by conspiracies.

Do subliminal messages in self-help tapes really work? There actually is some evidence that people can be influenced by subliminal messages. Can your self-esteem be raised with subliminal tapes? Can subliminal persuasion help you lose weight? Are there subliminal messages in Disney files? Are there subliminal messages in advertising that can make you buy certain products? These questions answered once and for all at The Psych Files podcast.

Have to memorize lines for a play or musical? There are a lot of techniques. Let me tell you about a few that are backed by science. I've been involved in the theatre for many years and I've done a lot of memorizing of both lines and song lyrics. Typically, actors and singers use repetition - and don't get me wrong - that works, but there are other ways to get those lines into your head. Ever heard of interleaving? How about using the Method of Loci (often called the Memory Palace) to memorize the sequence of an entire play? Impossible? Nope. Let's take a look.