Today's psychology readings

[rachelmanija]

Long. Mostly for my own reference/learning. No obligation to click!

Comments

[marzipan_pig]

It often takes a sexual experience or falling in love to make gay teens confront/accept their desires.

Something about this charmed me, I think it 'often takes' this for adults too :)

[rachelmanija]

Very true!

[torrilin]

I thought the whole point of doing repair work on my brain was to work towards the positive :o. Otherwise it wouldn't be a repair, it'd be a band-aid.

As far as the CBT thing... It's something a parent can teach a kid by example. Or someone can teach it to themselves from a book. Yes, it takes study. For most people, studying a subject does not crush their individuality or identity. The therapist making this claim needs to do more teaching and spend less time imagining teaching. I'd think a bigger issue is that not every patient finds learning new things intrinsically fun, and patients who don't get joy out of learning for its own sake may need more nurturing and encouragement, or they may need a therapist whose greatest joy is teaching.

[rachelmanija]

A lot of people feel like just the act of teaching is inherently authoritarian. (I disagree - I think that depends on how you approach it.)

[tanyahp]

Good teaching is collaborative. Authoritarianistic teaching tends to motivate the student through coercion and fear. In some cases not-learning on the part of the student is a form of resistance, and might actually be healthier than learning would be under the authoritarian teacher. Good teaching on the other hand is student-focused and takes the form of an interaction or dialogue between teacher and student, where the student's goals are equally, if not more, important than the teacher's.

[rachelmanija]

Can you elaborate a bit on that?

[rachelmanija]

Thanks. I see what you mean.

I'd also say that's a bad use of CBT for more than the obvious reason. CBT isn't really about thinking positively. It's about thinking realistically. If your problem is something like your husband beating you, trying to think positively without making any life changes isn't very realistic. "Realistic thinking" would involve facing the gravity of the situation, not making excuses for it.

I wonder if there's anything formally integrating something like narrative therapy, which is all about creating change and dealing with external issues, and CBT, which is very helpful for not still feeling and acting like you're stuck in a traumatic situation when that's no longer true.

[swan_tower]

I really may need to pick your brain at some point for one of my back-burner projects; for reasons rooted in the worldbuilding, there's a whole group of people there who have to be raised from infancy in an institutional setting, i.e. where caregivers are a) not family and b) outnumbered by their charges. Since the people of this world have a Very Strong Interest in seeing those kids grow up emotionally stable, however, this isn't some Dickensian orphanage; it needs to be the most well-designed, nurturing environment it can be under the circumstances. (To some extent I can handwave that via magic, because the caregivers are all capable of controlling other people's emotions. But I'd rather set it up in a fashion where somebody like you would look at it and go, okay, that makes sense.)

Digression aside, what gets classed as a "social emotion"? I can guess, obviously, but I'm curious whether the category is broad or narrow.

[rachelmanija]

Feel free to email

[swan_tower]

Woot. This is very helpful, but I'll respond by e-mail so as not to totally hijack the thread. :-)

[elsmi]

This is pointlessly nitpicky, I'm sure, but -- "a face can be picked up within 40 milliseconds" -- really? Because it takes 40-50 ms just for signals to travel down the "wires" from the eye to cortex (V1), and I don't think anyone believes that that the first layer of neurons can pick out faces.

(There are some subcortical areas that get the signals faster, like the pathways involved in blindsight, but again I think people would be surprised and excited to find evidence of robust face recognition happening down there. Mostly they seem more worried about things like circadian regulation...)

[rachelmanija]

It's an interview transcript, so either the writer or Schore probably got the number wrong. What would be more plausible?

[elsmi]

Well, face recognition's not my speciality, and it's a very difficult question to answer even in principle. It's easy to measure the instant when someone, say, presses a button, but how do you tell at what moment they've "picked up" or "appraised" a face? I'm not sure it's actually a meaningful question