Psychology
fromPsychology Today
1 day agoWho You Know Shapes What You Believe
Close social networks shape beliefs, but one differing view can broaden perspective and reduce extremity.
Anna Holmes defines 'hype aversion' as a reflex against being told what to like, suggesting that popularity can create pressure rather than signal quality. This feeling can lead to a deliberate choice to resist mainstream culture.
In 1925, Sukhareva clearly described older boys who were writing for a school newspaper in a great literary style, playing musical instruments, creating art, connecting deeply with nature and select individuals, and holding on to their ethical principles. They also had sensory sensitivities, limited motor coordination, intense idiosyncratic interests, and difficulties with socializing.
Americans are also facing a bizarre epidemic of gullibility and cynicism-gullicism, if you need a portmanteau-that is drawing people into a world of conspiracism and falsehoods, one where facts are drowned out by a cacophony of extremely loud and wrong voices. Reliable information is both more available and harder to find than ever.
In the practice of psychiatry, we like to think we have better radar than most doctors for identifying incoherent thinking in our fellow humans. Incoherence is one of the crucial signs for potential disasters in the central nervous system-delirium, psychosis, mania, intoxication, stroke, encephalitis. And yet, now in the waning years of my career, I confess that I've practiced this skill of identifying incoherent thinking with only the vaguest definition of coherence, and no measure.
Attention is the brain's filtering mechanism; what passes through that filter is what gets encoded. What gets encoded becomes memory. And memory is the raw material of identity. So in the architecture of your identity, attention is the doorway.
If you feel shame, recognize that no one else can shame you; only you can make yourself feel ashamed. Only you have the power to create your emotions-positive, negative, helpful, or unhelpful. The Stoics Hundreds of years ago, the Greek and Roman Stoics advanced that insight. In his treatise the Enchiridion, Epictetus wrote: Men are disturbed not by the things that happen but by their opinions about those things. In his Epistles, Seneca stated: Everything depends on opinion.
Like us, you may feel paralyzed in the face of the relentless images of violence we see every day. Suffering children, military occupations, the devastated neighborhoods, the cries of parents mourning their dead-these scenes haunt us. Whether it is happening in Palestine or Minneapolis, we are witnesses to suffering, and that witnessing takes a heavy toll. Clearly, the devastating situations in the West Bank and Gaza and in Minneapolis differ
Romantic Relationships Get Defined Any single person knows that the struggle of dating involves perpetually undefined relationships. Emotional detachment has been embedded in modern dating, from the language we use to the (loose, barely existent) script that guides how people enter romantic relationships. Even saying "dating" feels like a commitment. Instead, people "talk" when they're first getting to know each other; they "go out," but they don't "go on a date."
Relations between the US and Germany are increasingly tense. As German and European leaders determine how to respond to Donald Trump's tariff threats over Greenland, we're asking if world events affecting the everyday lives of Americans in Germany? While we'd like to believe that everyone is capable of making the distinction between a citizen of a certain country and the actions of their government, that's not always the case.
On Wednesday Brussels is due to outline the terms of the 90bn loan it has promised to Ukraine, amid internal tensions over whether Kyiv can use the money to buy US as well as EU weapons. On the same day, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, is due to meet ministers from Denmark and Greenland, as Donald Trump continues to insist that the US will take ownership of the latter one way or another.
That local exodus is documented by Cornell-led research that mapped annual moves between U.S. neighborhoods from 2010 to 2019 in detail 4,600 times greater than standard public data. Called MIGRATE, the new, publicly available dataset revealed that most of those displaced remained within the affected county - moves not captured in county-level public migration data aggregated every five years.
Just before winter break, news broke that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill plans to close its centers for African, Asian, European, Middle Eastern, Latin American and Slavic, Eurasian and East European studies. Though UNC administrators said in a statement that decisions on closures are not finalized, they confirmed they are evaluating centers and institutes as part of a budget-cutting effort in response to state and federal funding changes.
Collating data from the World Bank and other sources in innovative ways, he argues that globalization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century was accompanied by then-unprecedented growth of income in both previously poor populations (notably in China) and people at the top of the world's income distribution (especially those in the West). By contrast, relative shares of world income stagnated or were thought to have declined for wealthy nations' middle and working classes, including in the United States.
What I mean is that 'religion' was the way the classical sociologists like like Emil Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber first managed to turn 'society' into something you could actually study. Durkheim's Elementary Forms defines religion as a system of beliefs and practices tied to sacred things, and what matters there is how those beliefs and rituals bind people together into a moral community-the church. For him, the believer isn't wrong to think he depends on a higher power.
For most of my life, I thought of myself as a fixed entity: This is me. These are my traits. This is who I am. I assumed I was essentially that same person who loved sugary cereal at age 8, fried chicken at 12, and tequila at 21, and who still loves those things now, even if my stomach disagrees. But this is an illusion. Neuroscience, physics, and Buddhism all agree: There is nothing fixed about us-not even close.
The word umwelt comes from biology, coined by ethologists studying animals in their natural habitats. It refers to the world as an organism can perceive it, based entirely on its sensory equipment. A bat's umwelt is built from echo. A dog's from scent. A tick's world is dominated by a single chemical cue that tells it when to drop from a branch onto a passing mammal.
Led Zeppelin warned us about the perils of misunderstood communications in relationships. Failing to translate what we are trying to say or do so that someone else gets it is the root of so many problems. But translation is a fantastic find when it goes right. Here are some things I've learned about translating meaning from a lifetime of speaking numerous languages, practicing a wide array of martial arts, and communicating science.
A large global study across 69 countries found something unexpected: the more individualistic a society is, the more similar people are in how they feel-and in how they want to feel. Across 59 out of 60 emotions, emotional experiences showed greater uniformity in individualistic cultures. This challenges the common assumption that collectivistic cultures are emotionally restrictive because they suppress individuality. In fact, emotional life in individualistic societies appears to be shaped by strong shared norms that dictate which emotions are acceptable, desirable, or problematic-especially regarding negative emotions.
Shame is a painful perception of self as failing, inadequate, impotent, defective, unattractive, or unlovable. Pride is a pleasant perception of self as successful, accomplished, potent, admirable, attractive, or lovable. Inner perceptions of self implicitly guide thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Rarely do we consciously consider ourselves to be failures, successful, lovable, or unlovable. Inner self shame manifests only when shameful behavior is exposed-that is, when we're caught.
Anyone who is under psychiatric care, or loves someone who is, may want to read the book The Devil's Castle: Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry's Troubled History Reverberates Today, by Susanne Paola Antonetta. If you care about history, particularly the history of eugenics, you may be interested as well. The book may offer us more respect for the mind, for consciousness, and its diversity.