8/30/2006

Aggressive Behaviour

Aggressive Behaviour
any action of an animal that serves to injure an opponent or prey animal or to cause an opponent to retreat. The term is used in manydifferent ways, however, and no single definition can possibly cover all of its meanings. When considering human aggression, for example, some psychiatrists consider any act that has destructive consequences (including suicide) to be aggressive. (For a discussion of aggressivebehaviour in man, see emotion.) Thus, the role of aggression in behaviour has been—and continues to be—debated by psychologists and ethologists, as is the meaning of the term itself. Frequently, aggressive behaviour encompasses both attack and defense. Other investigators exclude food-gathering behaviour, though it may involve attack on another animal.

In order to avoid these ambiguities of definition, a distinction must be made between causation, function, and description of observed behaviour. It is frequently assumed that a single motivational system (aggression) causes all recognizably aggressive behaviour in higher animals. This assumption is certainly invalid for invertebrates and for most higher vertebrates, in which a variety of motivational bases appear to exist. A motivational definition of aggression is thus difficult. The only possible rigorous approach is to list patterns of behaviour, usually held on both functional and causative grounds to be aggressive. Because aggressive behaviour has been most studied in mammals, mammalian behaviour will be examined here first as a basis for comparison with other animals.

Affective Disorder

Affective Disorder
mental disorder characterized by dramatic changes or extremes of mood. Affective disorders may include manic (elevated, expansive, or irritable mood with hyperactivity, pressured speech, and inflated self-esteem) or depressive (dejected mood with disinterest in life, sleep disturbance, agitation, and feelings of worthlessness or guilt) episodes, and often combinations of thetwo. Persons with an affective disorder may or may not have psychotic symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations, or other lossof contact with reality.

In manic-depressive disorders, periods of mania and depression may alternate with abrupt onsets and recoveries. Depression is the more common symptom, and many patients never develop a genuine manic phase, although they may experience a brief period of overoptimism and mild euphoria while recovering from a depression. The most extreme manifestation of mania is violence against others, while that of depression is suicide. Statistical studies have suggested a hereditary predisposition to the disorder, which commonly appears for the first time in young adults.

Manic-depressive disorders were described in antiquity by the 2nd-century Greek physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia and in modern times by the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin. The current term is derived from folie ma ni aco-mélancholique, whichwas introduced in the 17th century.

Adulthood

Adulthood
the period in the human lifespan in which full physical and intellectual maturity have been attained. Adulthood is commonly thought ofas beginning at age 20 or 21 years. Middle age, commencing at about 40 years, is followed by old age at about 60 years.

Physically, early and middle adulthood are marked by slow, gradual declines in body functioning, which accelerate as old age is reached. The muscle mass continues to increase through the mid-20s, thereafter gradually decreasing. The skeletal mass increases until age 30 or so, and then begins to decrease, first in the central skeleton (pelvis and spine) and last in the peripheral skeleton (fingers and toes). Throughout adulthood there is a progressive deposition of cholesterol in the arteries, and the heartmuscle eventually grows weaker even in the absence of detectable disease. The production of both male and female hormones also diminishes with age, though this cannot be directly related to the gradual diminution in sexual activity that occurs in both males and females between 20 and 60.

There is clear evidence that with increasing age adults display a slow, very gradual tendency toward decreasing speed of response in the execution of intellectual (and physical) tasks. Slowing rates of electrical activity in the older adult brain have been linked to the slowing of behaviour itself. This decline in the rate of central nervous system processing does not necessarily imply similar changes in learning, memory, or other intellectual functions. The learning capacity of young adults is superior to thatof older adults, as is their ability to organize new information in terms of its content or meaning. Older adults, on the other hand, are equal or superior to young adults in their capacity to retain general information and in their accumulated cultural knowledge.

Adolescence

adolescence
transitional phase of growth and developmentbetween childhood and adulthood. “Adolescence” is a convenient label for the period in the life span between ages 12 and 20 and is roughly equivalent to the term “teens.”

In many societies adolescence is narrowly equated with puberty (q.v.) and the cycle of physical changes culminating in reproductive maturity. Western societies understand adolescence in terms of a broader sense of development—that is, it encompasses psychological, social, and moral terrain as well as the strictly physical aspects of maturation.

Adolescence is the period during which the individual experiences an upsurge of sexual feelings following the latency period of childhood. During this time the individual learns to control and direct his sex urges. Another issue that usually arises in adolescence is that of emotional (if not physical) separation from parents as a necessary step in the establishment of personalvalues. This new responsibility for self-determination and self-sufficiency forces an array of adjustments upon many adolescents. Furthermore, teenagers often have no defined role of their own in society but are caught in the ambiguous overlap between the reasonably clearly defined roles of childhood and adulthood. In a sense these issues define adolescence in Western cultures, and the response to them partly determines thenature of an individual's adult years.

Some specialists consider adolescence to be an intense and often stressful period of development that is characterized by a variety of special types of behaviour. Others find that the difficulties of adolescence have been exaggerated and that for many adolescents the process of maturation is usually peaceful and untroubled.

Adler, Alfred

Adler, Alfred
born February 7, 1870, Penzing, Austria
died May 28, 1937, Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, Scotland

psychiatrist whose influential system of individual psychology introduced the term inferiority feeling, later widely and often inaccurately called inferiority complex. He developed a flexible, supportive psychotherapy to direct those emotionally disabled by inferiority feelings toward maturity, common sense, and social usefulness.

Throughout his life Adler maintained a strongawareness of social problems, and this servedas a principal motivation in his work. From his earliest years as a physician (M.D., University of Vienna Medical School, 1895), he stressed consideration of the patient in relation to the total environment, and he began developing a humanistic, holistic approach to human problems.

About 1900 Adler began to explore psychopathology within the context of general medicine and in 1902 became closely associated with Sigmund Freud. Gradually, however, differences between the two became irreconcilable, notably after the appearance of Adler's Studie über Minderwertigkeit von Organen(1907; Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical Compensation),in which he suggested that persons try to compensate psychologically for a physical disability and its attendant feeling of inferiority. Unsatisfactory compensation results in neurosis. Adler increasingly downplayed Freud's basic contention that sexual conflicts in early childhood cause mental illness, and he further came to confine sexuality to a symbolic role in human strivings to overcome feelings of inadequacy. Outspokenly criticalof Freud by 1911, Adler and a group of followers severed ties with Freud's circle and began developing what they called individual psychology, first outlined in Über den nervösen Charakter (1912; The Neurotic Constitution). The system was elaborated in later editions of this work and in other writings, such as Menschenkenntnis (1927; Understanding Human Nature).

Individual psychology maintains that the overriding motivation inmost people is a striving for what Adler somewhat misleadingly termed superiority (i.e., self-realization, completeness, or perfection). This striving for superiority may be frustrated by feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, or incompleteness arising fromphysical defects, low social status, pampering or neglect during childhood, or other causes encountered in the course of life. Individuals can compensate for their feelings of inferiority by developing their skills and abilities, or, less healthily, they may develop an inferiority complex that comes to dominate their behaviour. Overcompensation for inferiority feelings can take the form of an egocentric striving for power and self-aggrandizing behaviour at others' expense.

Each person develops his personality and strives for perfection in his own particular way, in what Adler termed a style of life, or lifestyle. The individual's lifestyle forms in early childhood and is partly determined by what particular inferiority affected him mostdeeply during his formative years. The striving for superiority coexists with another innate urge: to cooperate and work with other people for the common good, a drive that Adler termed thesocial interest. Mental health is characterized by reason, social interest, and self-transcendence; mental disorder by feelings of inferiority and self-centred concern for one's safety and superiority or power over others. The Adlerian psychotherapist directs the patient's attention to the unsuccessful, neurotic character of his attempts to cope with feelings of inferiority. Oncethe patient has become aware of these, the therapist builds up hisself-esteem, helps him adopt more realistic goals, and encourages more useful behaviour and a stronger social interest.

In 1921 Adler established the first child-guidance clinic in Vienna, soon thereafter opening and maintaining about 30 more there under his direction. Adler first went to the United States in 1926 and became visiting professor at Columbia University in 1927. He was appointed visiting professor of the Long Island College of Medicine in New York in 1932. In 1934 the government in Austria closed his clinics. Many of his later writings, such as What Life Should Mean to You (1931), were directed to the general reader. Heinz L. and Rowena R. Ansbacher edited The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler (1956) and Superiority andSocial Interest (1964).

Growing depression: Psychology behind farmer suicides

Growing depression: Psychology behind farmer suicides
NDTV Correspondent
Tuesday, August 29, 2006 (Vidharba):
As steps are taken to fight a spate of farmer suicides in Vidharba, the psychology behind the move is last thing on anyone's mind.

Psychiatrist Sujay Patil, the son of a farmer tries to get people in Chandur Village to recognise symptoms of clinical depression.

"A farmer drowns in sorrow and begins to feel suicidal. He feels his life has no meaning. He feels trapped. He can neither buy books for his children nor clothes for his wife. He sees no hope and gets into acute depression," Patil said.

It is likely that one of the flaws in the official logic of checking farmer suicides is to only focus on the farmers' part of it by announcing scheme after scheme.

8/29/2006

Gestalt psychology

Gestalt psychology
20th-century school of psychology that provided the foundation for the modern study ofperception. Its precepts, formulated as a reaction against the atomistic orientation of previous theories, emphasized thatthe whole of anything is greater than its parts. The attributes of the whole of anything are not deducible from analysis of the parts in isolation. The word Gestalt is used in modern German to mean the way a thing has been gestellt; i.e., “placed,” or “put together.” There is no exact equivalent in English. “Form” and “shape” are the usual translations; in psychology the word is often rendered “pattern” or “configuration.”


Gestalt theory began toward the close of the 19th century in Austria and south Germany as a protest against the associationist and structural schools' piecemeal analyses of experience into atomistic elements. Gestalt studies made use instead of the methods of phenomenology. This method, with a tradition going back to Goethe, involves nothing more than the description of direct psychological experience, with no restrictions on what is permissible in the description. Gestalt psychology was in part an attempt to add a humanistic dimension to what was considered a barren approach to the scientific study of mental life. Gestalt psychology sought to encompass the qualities of form, meaning, and value that prevailing psychologists had either ignored or thought to fall outside the confines of science.

Max Wertheimer (q.v.) in 1912 published the paper considered to mark the founding of the Gestalt school. In it he reported the result of an experimental study done at Frankfurt with two colleagues, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka (qq.v.); these threeformed the core of the Gestalt school for the next decades. The earliest Gestalt work concerned the area of perception, particularly visual perceptual organization as illuminated by the phenomenon of illusion. A perceptual illusion that provided strong support for Gestalt principles was the phi-phenomenon, an illusion of apparent motion named and described in 1912 by Wertheimer. The phi-phenomenon is a visual illusion in which stationary objects shown in rapid succession appear to move by transcending the threshold at which they can be perceived separately (the phenomenon is experienced in viewing motion pictures).

The effect of the phi-phenomenon was apparently inexplicable on the old assumption that the sensations of perceptual experience stand in a one-to-one relation to the physical stimuli. The perceived motion is an emergent experience, not present in the stimuli in isolation but dependent upon the relational characteristics of the stimuli. The nervous system of the observerand the observer's experience do not passively register the physical input in a piecemeal way. Rather, the neural organization as well as the perceptual experience springs immediately into existence as an entire field with differentiated parts. In later writings this principle was stated as the law of Prägnanz: The neural and perceptual organization of any set of impinging stimuli forms as good a Gestalt, or whole, as the prevailing conditions allow.

Major elaborations of the new formulation occurred within the next decades. Wertheimer, Köhler, Koffka, and their students extended the Gestalt approach to problems in other areas of perception, problem solving, learning, and thinking. The Gestalt principles were later applied to motivation, social psychology, and personality, particularly by Kurt Lewin (q.v.), and to aesthetics and economic behaviour. Wertheimer demonstrated that Gestalt concepts could also be used to shed light on problems in ethics, political behaviour, and the nature of truth. Gestalt psychology's traditions have continued in the perceptual investigations undertaken by Rudolf Arnheim and Hans Wallach in the United States.

comparative psychology

comparative psychology
the study of similarities and differences in behavioral organization among living beings, from bacteria to plants to humans. The discipline pays particular attention to the psychological nature of human beings in comparison with other animals.

In the study of animals, comparative psychology concentrates on discerning qualitative as well as quantitative similarities and differences in animal (including human) behaviour. It has important applications in fields such as medicine, ecology, and animal training. With the rise of an experimental comparative psychology in the latter half of the 19th century and its rapid growth during the 20th, the study of lower animals has cast increasing light on human psychology in such areas as the development of individual behaviour, motivation, the nature and methods of learning, effects of drugs, and localization of brain function. Other animals are easier to obtain in numbers and can be better controlled under experimental conditions than can human subjects, and much can be learned about humans from lower animals. Comparative psychologists have been careful, however, to avoid anthropomorphizing the behaviour of animals; that is, to avoid ascribing to animals human attributes and motivations when their behaviours can be explained by simpler theories. This principle is known as Lloyd Morgan's canon, namedafter a British pioneer in comparative psychology.

The tendency to endow lower animals with human capacities always has been strong. In recorded history, two different views have developed concerning human beings' relation to the lower animals. One, termed for convenience the man-brute view, stresses differences often to the point of denying similarities altogether and derives from the traditional religious accounts of the separate creations of humans and animals; the other, the evolutionary view, stresses both similarities and differences. Aristotle formalized the man-brute view, attributing a rational faculty to humans alone, lesser faculties to the animals. The modern scientific view, on the other hand, considers humans to be highly evolved animals; evidence indicates that continuity in the evolution of organisms provides a basis for essential psychological similarities and differences between lower and higher animals, including humans.

developmental psychology

developmental psychology
also called Life-span Psychology, the branch of psychology concerned with the changes in cognitive, motivational, psychophysiological, and social functioning that occur throughout the human life span. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, developmental psychologists were concerned primarily with child psychology. In the 1950s, however, they became interested in the relationship between personality variables and child rearing, and the behavioral theories of B.F. Skinner and the cognitive theories of Jean Piaget were concerned with the growthand development of children through adolescence. At the same time, the German psychologist Erik Erikson insisted that there are meaningful stages of adult psychology that have to be considered in addition to child development. Psychologists also began to consider the processes that underlie the development of behaviour in the total person from birth to death, including various aspects of the physical-chemical environment that can affect the individual during the intrauterine period and at birth. By the latter part of the 20th century, developmental psychologists had become interested in many broad issues dealing with the psychological process throughout life, including the relation of heredity and environment, continuity and discontinuity in development, and behavioral and cognitive elements in the development of the total person.

fatigue

fatigue
specific form of human inadequacyin which the individual experiencesan aversion to exertion and feels unable to carry on. Such feelings may be generated by muscular effort; exhaustion of the energy supply to the muscles of the body,however, is not an invariable precursor. Feelings of fatigue may also stem from pain, anxiety, fear, or boredom. In the latter cases, muscle function commonly is unimpaired.

The once-held belief that work was the cause of fatigue led to efforts to use the work output of factory workers, for example, as direct measures of fatigue. Early studies by industrial psychologists and engineers failed to show a close connection between how an individual worker said he felt and the amount of work he accomplished; production-oriented investigators were even led to attribute no significance at all to inner feelings of fatigue, and their attention shifted from the inner condition of the worker to external phenomena not related to the worker at all. In the process it was forgotten that work output is a product of, rather than a description of, the worker.

For other researchers who retained an interest in the worker himself, study was typically directed to observable body processes rather than to the overall internal state of the worker as manifested in how he said he felt. Such studies disclosed, among other things, that oxygen and glucose were consumed during work and that waste products such as carbon dioxide anduric acid were produced. Hence, for some investigators fatigue came to mean a bodily state in which waste products were present in high concentration.

All such studies clearly revealed specific results of exertion and disclosed evidence for the burning of food materials (metabolites); taken by themselves, the data provided a picture of the human organism as an energy-converting system and showed a definite relation of this process to energetic (work) performance. Such studies are a part of basic physiological research and apply most closely to what may be expected of people under heavy exertion in the workaday world and in sportsand athletics.

Feelings and other signs of fatigue can arise suddenly and disappear suddenly, and the onset, duration, and termination of fatigue symptoms may appear to bear little relation to exertion orwork. When fatigue arises in nonexertional situations, there is a temptation simply to say that the fatigue is “psychological” or “ motivational.” Relatively little research has been devoted to fatigue as descriptive of the person himself and of the full range of demands he has to meet, although many of these demands lie outside the simple energy requirements of more-or-less arduous work.

Man is able to—and may—respond to any situation in more than one way and at more than one level of behavioral complexity. The most readily observable ways are grossly physical and chemical; but these, in turn, underlie other levels of response such as primitive sensory activity (becoming aware of stimuli), and still higher levels such as perceiving (e.g., evaluating the nature and objectives of work activity). At the highest level of activity the relationship often is spoken of as existing between the whole person and the environment.

Since most investigative attention in industrial or other production situations has been directed toward what man can do in terms of his being only a machine that converts food energy into useful work, an understanding of the fine details of the relation between fatigue and physiological body processes has preceded experimental efforts to specify the role of personal attitudes (such as the individual's own evaluation of his abilities). Such self-evaluations (e.g., a worker's judgment that he cannot continue activity) rather than any exhaustion of the energy available within the body result in the termination of activity. Often when such changes in performance are attributed to motivation, or to any of a number of factors called psychological, one's allegiance to ancient views of the nature of man may tempthim to think of mental factors disjoined and unrelated to any physical, energistic description of the organism. Yet, a fully usefuldefinition of fatigue would require that all relevant factors be considered. Indeed, modern efforts to achieve a unified, integrated definition of fatigue rest on studies in which higher-order mental processes (such as thinking, perceiving, andemoting) are investigated to find whether they seem to stem from physical body processes.

Fatigue as it is applied to the whole person involves an individual's feelings of discomfort and aversion, his inner awareness of making mistakes, and any changes in observable signs of effort required to carry on the performance involved. These aspects are found to be related in various ways to measurable variations in work output. Investigators who typicallyfocus primarily on work output are apt to be concerned with the applied, practical view of the person as a productive worker; interest is more likely to be concentrated upon the worker himself by those scientists who wish to study fatigue even if their findings are not directly productive of work output. The worker himself is interested in how he feels and what makes him feel as he does.

At any rate, in accounting for fatigue, it is useful to make distinctions between what pertains to the individual as a whole and what pertains only to some part or organ of the individual. That the total behaviour is spoken of as personalistic, or psychological, is not simply because self-awareness (inner feelingof fatigue) is involved but because, at this level, resources are directed toward ends that go beyond the limited function of any one body part. This situation is illustrated by a simple example in muscular activity. When muscle activity is described in itself (at agiven subpersonalistic level), it is simply called muscle contraction. Muscle contraction occurring as an integrated part of more complex personalistic behaviour may be called reaching;this action is an integral part of grasping a pencil, which is part ofthe more personalistic act of writing to one's friends.

While fatigue is one consequence of grossly observable activity, itcan occur in the absence of manifest muscular exertion. It can develop, for example, as a rather immediate response to a sociallyexercised demand (such as that of a nagging supervisor), of which the person suddenly becomes aware but may not like. Thefeeling of fatigue produced in the absence of productive work seems to be essentially the same as that produced by goal-directed labour. Some components nevertheless are different, such as aching muscles in the one case and not in the other, but the factors that give fatigue its identity and differentiate it from other states of inadequacy are present in both. In each case conditions exist that can even result in one's total inability to carry on, whether his muscles contain high concentrations of waste products or not.

Muscular exertion does, however, produce biochemical changes in the body that are quite complex and that differ in various tissues and organs such as the heart or the brain. The consequence almost invariably is to produce secondary effects, perhaps muscular stiffness, and these in turn give rise to higher level effects such as one's sensory awareness of pain and discomfort. At a more personalistic level, the individual may develop a change in attitude with regard to the task or activity inprogress; e.g., he may begin to feel aversion for the work. The whole process, in effect, yields the individual's self-generated assessment of his own ability to carry on. If he continues his exertions under his personal assessment that such activity will produce more pain or will become more nearly intolerable or even impossible, the anticipated consequences include less efficient work performance. As the worker becomes preoccupied with his discomfort and with his waning production, the effect typically is to produce still more inefficient work. Thus fatigue defined as muscular inability to carry on and fatigue defined as a kind of felt aversion for exertion and as feelings of inability to carry on are all produced.

Performance may be observed to deteriorate (among factory workers, for example) even when there are no signs of the feelingstate and of the aversive, pessimistic self-assessment defined here as personalistic fatigue. Indeed, often enough one may be “fatigued” without knowing it, indicating the predominance of relatively subpersonalistic factors at work. Such factors can be lumped under the term impairment, mentioned originally as one of the major forms of human inadequacy. While transient impairment and personalistic fatigue generally have not been distinguished from each other by many psychologists, in numerous studies impairment, rather than the feeling of fatigue, has been the point of interest.

Impairment of this sort reflects alterations in the chemical processes that occur within the cells of the body. That the alterations are reversible is illustrated in alcohol intoxication and oxygen lack (hypoxia). When such transient impairment incapacitates the individual for energetic activities without greatly affecting his brain processes, he is likely to feel tired and weak. Thus, it can be said that transient physiological impairment and personalistic fatigue are closely related, one being a basis for the other. When brain processes are so sharply affected as to reduce perceptual or attitudinal awareness, impairment may produce marked behavioral consequences without associated feelings of fatigue. In such cases, feelings of weakness and tiredness may not be reported by the individual since his abilities for self-evaluation have been dulled.

The failure of people to have feelings of fatigue as a consequence of physiological impairment is characteristic of some forms of hypoxia, which can be brought on in several ways. One of these isby a fairly abrupt reduction in atmospheric oxygen pressure, as would occur in one's being deposited atop a mountain by helicopter. Feelings of fatigue are much more likely to set in when oxygen reduction is gradual and associated with exertion (as in mountain climbing). Along with lack of oxygen, other factors of the climber's task play their roles, and the climber's own awareness of the negative factors that are developing produces the full syndrome of fatigue, including both the inability to carry on and the aversive attitude.

In contrast to this, oxygen lack can be produced much more quickly in a decompression chamber in a laboratory, without any associated muscular exertion. It is possible to reach levels of hypoxia that abruptly reduce the subject's efficiency in exercising self-assessment, and personalistic fatigue in such cases fails to develop.

industrial psychology

industrial psychology
also called occupational psychologyapplication of the concepts and methods of experimental, clinical, and social psychology to industry. The primary concern of industrial psychology is with the basic relations in industry between worker and machine and the organization.

Industrial psychology was first developed in the United States in theearly 1900s and has come to be applied, usually through personnel and office administrations, to industrial management in industries in other parts of the world, particularly in those countries where a concern has developed for the systematic and scientific examination of the problems of workers in industry.

8/21/2006

Use Psychology to Lose Weight

Use Psychology to Lose Weight - Dieters Can Learn From This Study - Smaller Portions Can Translate To Smaller Meals
July 30th 2006
Portion Size
Researchers from Pennsylvania say that a meal size has a lot to do with psychology. The size may depend on the size of the plate or package or what is served. This may help explain how culture has a lot to do with obesity.

For instance, in France the food package size of yogurt is a little over half-the-size of the American counterparts. The researchers say that the French don’t eat two packages of food; they just accept the one package as the size of a meal.

The researchers used environmental cues to manipulate people’s ideas of how big a food unit is. They put a bowl of M&Ms on a table of an upscale apartment building with a sign that read “Eat Your Fill. Please use the spoon to serve yourself." They varied the size of the spoon from a quarter cup to a tablespoon.

On days when the spoon was a quarter cup, people took more. They repeated the experiment in a snacking area with 80 small Tootsie Rolls or 20 big ones. Over a 10 day period they found that people took more by weight when the larger Tootsie Rolls were left out. The same outcome was seen with large and small pretzels.

This information may help dieters. Food companies have begun to produce 100-calorie packages. A recent study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says that super-sizing meals has an added cost in health care associated with it.

In this newer study, Andrew Geier of the University of Pennsylvania says food companies should display the serving or portion sizes more prominently on the package. He works with overweight patients and tells them when ordering in a restaurant to ask the server to cut the meal in half and box-up one portion to take home.

Geier says the portion size strategy has its limits. Associated press reporter, Malcolm Ritter said “He had one dining hall at his university provide 10-ounce glasses for soda, and a second provide 16-ounce glasses. He predicted that students at the first hall would drink less soda. In fact, they drank more.”

Only later did he find out what went wrong. Geier said "They were taking two glasses at a time. I guess I went below what is culturally construed as a unit of soda."

The Psychology of History

The Psychology of History
Few statesmen have been as prescient as Winston Churchill. During World Wart II he said someone is going to write this history and it’s going to be me. The Prime Minister had a sense of destiny from a very early age and always kept an eye on the historical archetype.

Naturally, most leaders want history to be kind to them. During the infamous Watergate episode thirty years ago, President Richard Nixon revealed in the taped White House conversations that he was more interested in the big sweep of history than a petty robbery at his opponent’s headquarters. Indeed, he saw himself as the new Marco Polo opening up China and the only credible American political figure who could establish an uneasy détente with the old Soviet Union. Nixon’s dark, Jansenist, vengeful streak would do him in. He spent the last twenty years of his life trying to salvage a reputation. He knew the game. When you don’t like history, rewrite it or re-envision it.

As historians know, history is always being rewritten and-envisioned. This activity is imperative, of course, as new information becomes available. Sigmund Freud suggested, without consciousness, we will always fall victims to our personal and collective histories. Japan, for example, has never really embraced its role in World Wart II. But all nations have their fictions, often opting for sophomoric histories that reinforce a national innocence. In its relationship to American Indians the Unites States has long been in denial. As psychologist C.G Jung notes, what we suppress will become public in other forms, such as how the culture treats non-white ethnic groups. From a psychological perspective, this is called “shadow work.” If our history casts a shadow, we are obliged to consider the consequences. This is not easy work.

In Indian Mirror: The Making of the Brazilian Soul, Roberto Gambini has attempted such shadow work, examining the historical and cultural elements that contribute to Brazilian soul. More specifically, he has tried to resurrect the idea of an ancestral soul rooted in Indian tribal consciousness.

A note of clarification. Though I have been to Brazil many times, I am hardly a student of the culture. But I am a student of Jungian psychology, which is the lens through which Gambini looks at the making of the Brazilian soul. Jungian psychology is archetypal psychology. That is, Jung postulated that all cultures share certain common archetypes such as the Wise Old Man, the Primitive, the Senex, the Crone, the Warrior King and the like. These are pre-conscious cultural traits that humans have in common.

Gambini builds his argument around the Jungian notion of projection, perhaps the most common psychological phenomenon. In short, everything that is unconscious in ourselves, we will discover in our neighbors. Gambini notes “projection is not a pathology of a disturbed personality, but a real fact through which everything unknown in the psyche may be expressed.” This is the tool the author will use to examine Brazilian history.

Gambini writes “One day, wandering around downtown Sao Paulo, I suddenly found myself in front of the restored façade of the primitive Jesuit chapel and of the school for Indian boys, which, in 1554, was the birthplace of what today is one of the greatest urban conglomerates in the world.” At this place he found three volumes of Jesuit letters, reproduced in the Portuguese of five centuries ago. Since the missionaries had already told their version of their arrival in Brazil, Gambini would talk on behalf of the Indians.

The author’s psychological analysis begins in fact, using 200 letters written by the Jesuits between 1549 and 1563, “in which they portray the new land and its native inhabitants.” The letters were published in 1954 and are considered important documents, especially for the study of the Jesuits. However, as the author remarks, “they have never been examined from a psychological point of view, as if such an approach would have nothing relevant to offer to the understanding of a highly complex human interaction that is at the very root of Brazilian society. Gambini postulates that, if a psychological theory is valid for the individual, it should also apply to collective situations. This is a bold enterprise with numerous risks.

Nonetheless, it is very difficult to argue with the writer’s basic premise. The letters to and from the first Brazilian missionaries are filled with the language of projection. Brazil was to be the New World, the Second Eden, and a Paradise. But the shadow of Christendom, symbolized by the serpent of evil, found the ideal land in America for projection. The Indians would be converted, the land tamed, Catholic morality imposed. Gambini writes that the “Jesuits knew they would find less-than-human beings in Brazil and it was precisely to change or improve them that they went abroad. The first contact was a confirmation of the truthfulness of a specific image that had for the first time been presented to Europe in 1492 through Columbus’ letter describing the Caribs in the Antilles. But this first ‘journalistic’ report was already archetypal, for the image of primitive man is as old as mankind.”

In the religious pantheon, primitive man was dark, ape-like, and uncivilized. This idea was already in the European psyche. As the letters make clear, the Jesuits believed the catechization of the Indians was a re-enactment of the Creation, a recapitulation of an eternal myth. The majestic iconography of the invaders would soon appropriate and

overwhelm the culture of the Indians. The letters and maps show very clearly how Europeans projected their religion, morality and fantasies on the land and its inhabitants.

A central Jungian idea is to stay with the image, for this is the royal road to soul making. Gambini’s book is an appeal to modern Brazilian culture and consciousness to understand and learn from what has been repressed. “What happened in Brazil, the author writes, “was a psychic mingling and not a communion of souls, because the conquerors do not admit that those he vanquished had human qualities of some value. We are, in fact, a population of mixed races—mixed biologically, genetically; but the psychic mixture, the mutual fertilization among the souls has not taken place yet.

“The Porto Seguro landmark requires another interpretation. The first mass requires another reading. And so, in the same way, a whole gallery of images taken over by official history should be replaced by another one that tells the history of the soul. But we shall only reach this through empathy, imagination, recovery of silenced voices and the retrieval of bizarre images—some of which have been included in this book—that truly portray what in fact happened when these two segments of humanity encountered. To work with images may be the only way left to reconnect with the lost language of the soul.”

“Indian Mirror” represents a courageous attempt to re-envision history using some basic tenets of Jungian psychology. As Jung himself learned in his remarks about German cultural and psychological identity, there is danger in such prescriptions and descriptions. Finding certain Warrior Gods in the German psyche did not do much to help us understand Nazism or the average German.

I don’t think Gambini falls into this trap. Obviously, he is enamored of Jung and is sometimes too prescriptive is describing Jung’s psychology. Importantly, the author’s remarks are based on the very real content of the 200 letters, which represent the collective psychology of the age and the Catholic Church. In my opinion these letters beg for a psychological interpretation.

According to the author “Brazilian consciousness is unable to face the Indians. It does not know what they are. Indians have not room in it. Either one takes their land, creates a national park, invites them to an ethnic show or writes an academic thesis. And why? Because Indian consciousness has a different structure. Negroes are closer to the categories of ruling consciousness, even because they were forced to a closer togetherness. With the end of slavery, they were assimilated to the lowest level of the Brazilian society. A lot is said about contribution of both races to the make-up of the rich Brazilian culture, but much is silenced about what could not be assimilated.”

In Gambini’s opinion, for Brazil to fully mature, it must look at the unconscious elements, as they relate to the Indians, that have been repressed. This is a bold challenge and perhaps an impossible task. Jung himself had few fantasies about the ability of an individual to become conscious (withdraw projection). He didn’t necessary apply his psychology to nations. When he did, Jung was not convincing.

However, that does not invalidate Indian Mirror which argues there is another history of Brazil best amplified by the use of Jungian psychology. The book represents an important contribution to the Shadow Work that has been going on in Brazil for a long time. This is history inviting the artist in, one person at a time. Such is the nature of consciousness and conversion.

Psychology group's policy draws dissent

Psychology group's policy draws dissent
By LINDSEY TANNER
Associated Press
CHICAGO - The American Psychological Association is under fire from some of its members and other professionals for declaring that it is permissible for psychologists to assist in military interrogations.

An online petition against the group's policy has garnered more than 1,300 signatures from members and other psychologists. Protest forums are being planned for the APA's convention next month in New Orleans. And some members have threatened to withhold dues or quit.

The unrest stems from an APA policy, issued last year, that says that while psychologists should not get involved in torture or other degrading treatment, it is ethical for them to act as consultants to interrogation and information-gathering for national security purposes.

That stand troubles some members of the organization in light of the reported abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

''The issue is being couched as psychologists helping out with national security at the same time that psychologists are opposed to the issue of torture,'' said Chicago psychologist William Gorman, an APA member who signed the petition and works with refugee survivors of torture. ''That stance in the present context appears to me incongruous.''

News reports have said that mental health specialists who are helping U.S. military interrogators have helped create coercive techniques, including sleep deprivation and playing on detainees' phobias, to extract information.

The American Medical Association last month adopted what many view as a stronger stand against physician involvement in prisoner interrogation, echoing a position held by the American Psychiatric Association, whose members are medical doctors. The U.S. military has indicated it will therefore favor using psychologists, who are not medical doctors and are not bound by the other groups' policies.

The Physicians for Human Rights, a Cambridge, Mass.-based advocacy group, issued a statement Wednesday urging APA leaders to ''explicitly prohibit psychologists from participating in interrogations.''

Salon.com reported Wednesday that six of the 10 people on the APA task force that drafted the psychologists' policy have close military ties, including four who have worked at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib or Afghanistan.

New York psychologist Steven Reisner, an APA member and vocal opponent of the policy, said those ties make the group's stance even more troubling.

Gerald Koocher, APA's president, said that none of the task force members was involved in torture and that their military ties were not a conflict of interest.

Some professionals, including Reisner, a faculty member at Columbia University's International Trauma Studies program and at New York University's medical school, want the 150,000-member organization to rewrite the group's ethics code to bar psychologists from any involvement in detainee interrogation.

Reisner said fliers and forums are being prepared for the group's Aug. 10-13 convention ''to generate a momentum of embarrassment and outrage that the APA has thus far been facilitating these interrogations rather than stopping the violations of human rights.''

Responding to member concerns, the APA's ethics committee is drawing up guidance on what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate behavior by psychologists involved in interrogations, Koocher said.

The APA also said that its governing council is expected to vote on a resolution on Aug. 9, a day before the convention, reaffirming the group's opposition to torture and other inhumane treatment.

The group also has invited Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, the Army's surgeon general, to attend the convention and answer questions about military use of psychologists.

Psychology of the fight

Psychology of the fight
By IRWIN J MANSDORF
How can you fight, win, but still come out losing? Well, it's all in the psychology of the fight, and like most classical wars, the confrontation between Israel and Hizbullah is featuring the use of psychological warfare to lower the enemy's morale and gain a strategic advantage.

But unlike most classical wars, this one also features some clearly ruthless and unconventional psychological methods.

Seizing on a technique that has been shown to bear fruit, Hizbullah has included civilians in its battle plans. And its armamentarium of civilians is just as psychologically important as the missiles being hurled toward Israel every day.

Those missiles - generally inaccurate, occasionally lethal and always frightening - are designed less to create physical damage and more to wreak havoc, fear and panic. While these are all psychological targets, they nonetheless serve a clear military purpose: to weaken home front resolve and pressure Israel to cease its operations in Lebanon.

How Hizbullah views Israel's resolve is best described by Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, who compared Israeli society to a "spider's web," sophisticated and complex, but also fragile and easily destroyed by a sweep of one's hand. For Hizbullah, sweeping away that web exposes the soft underbelly of a society that cannot tolerate soldier's deaths and surely would not stand up to rocket barrages.

PSYCHOLOGISTS say that predicting future behavior is a matter of looking at past behavior, and that is what Hizbullah did in planning the ambush of an Israeli patrol and the kidnapping of two soldiers, an event that precipitated the current battle.

In the past, Israeli responses were limited in their scope, and Hizbullah willingly absorbed any losses they sustained as a result. According to their thinking, a limited Israeli response puts them in a favorable negotiating position, one that strengthens their popularity and image as the only fighting force that exacts tangible results when confronting Israel.

But when Israel's response was stronger than Hizbullah expected, and when the home front seemed to able to psychologically withstand days and scores of rockets, Hizbullah needed to move from conventional psychological warfare to more unconventional methods.

Here is where they turned to their ace in the hole, the civilian population.

HOW CAN Hizbullah win this war?
No one, not even Hizbullah, expects an outright military defeat of Israel. But for Hizbullah, victory lies not in physically vanquishing Israel - although the more Israeli causalities, the better - but rather in ensuring that Hizbullah stays alive and intact as a fighting and political force after hostilities end.

Being able to demonstrate its ability to fight and survive is key to maintaining the organization's image as the premier "resistance" movement in the Islamic world and moving closer to their ultimate goal of leading the efforts to eventually destroy the Jewish state.

So, for the moment, Hizbullah does not need to "win," only to survive.

For Israel, the goal is much clearer: to ensure that Hizbullah no longer presents a threat to it. And while Israel uses conventional military and political means to reach that goal, Hizbullah's survival is a matter of using psychological warfare that involves a brutal manipulation of its own population.

IF THERE IS one thing Hizbullah has learned from history, it is that civilian deaths play to its advantage. That's the way it was after the accidental Israeli bombing of Kfar Kana during Operation Grapes of Wrath resulted in pressure on Israel to end hostilities and agree to a formula that allowed Hizbullah to continue as a formidable force in Lebanon.

Learning from that experience, Hizbullah looks to the civilian population to provide a critical weapon, a psychological one whose target is world opinion. It is here more than on the battlefield that Hizbullah hopes to stop Israel.

By concealing rockets in the homes of ordinary citizens, by having its fighters dress like civilians and operate out of civilian areas, and by preventing large numbers of people from moving out of battle zones Hizbullah knows that civilians will be struck. Unable to stop Israel on the battlefield, it is relying on the psychological impact of civilian death and destruction on the nightly news all over the world to reach its goal.

BUT A FUNNY thing happened on the way to the newsroom. While many indeed have spoken of Israel's use of "disproportionate force," the expected reaction and outcry against Israel did not materialize. And the most important player in this equation, the US, far from condemning Israel, has continued to back Israel's military goals, namely, to continue fighting until Hizbullah is significantly degraded and its standing and influence are marginalized.

Hizbullah has also miscalculated in judging the strength of that "spider's web" Nasrallah so mockingly referred to. Far from being the weak collection of fibers the sheikh expected, it is turning out to be far stronger, surprising not only Hizbullah but many in Israel as well.

Israelis, having endured some very intense years of home front violence, seem no longer to be the same people that shook and cowed in fear at Saddam's Scuds in 1991. Israelis appear to have been inoculated against the fear of terror, and have developed psychological antibodies to repel the emotional impact of Hizbullah's missiles.

Hopefully, the world will learn from Israel that dealing with terror involves being able to withstand bombs and missiles, and also repelling any psychological pressure a terror group may use, including the tragically cynical exploitation of civilians.
Failing to do so may enable the good guys to win the battle, but not the war.

The writer, a licensed psychologist in Israel and the US, deals with the effects of war and terror. Founder of MATAN crisis intervention services, he was a consultant to the post-9/11 crisis intervention program in New York. This op-ed was written prior to the Kafr Kana incident

The psychology of killing

The psychology of killing
Human evolution may allow us to commit genocide, but that’s no excuse
By James E. Waller
The field of evolutionary psychology, or EP, illustrates that people are part of the natural world and, like other animals, have their own particular psychological tendencies that animate behaviors. Those behaviors can be both good and bad — responsible for both love and hate — and can both be understood by EP.

“Immediate influences” explain why a behavior occurs, such as how hunger impels people to eat or lust impels them to have sex. “Ultimate influences,” conversely, refer to deeper influences from humans’ evolutionary past — why a behavior evolved by natural selection — such as the need for nutrition and reproduction that gave us the drives of hunger and lust.

It is these ultimate influences, flowing from the deep evolutionary streams of human nature, that help us understand how ordinary people commit genocide and mass killing.

EP: Full steam ahead

EP — a marriage of cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology — is leading the charge in investigating human nature as an ultimate influence on behavior. Essentially, EP is a multidisciplinary way of applying knowledge and principles from evolutionary biology to research the structure of the human mind. In a kind of reverse-engineering, EP researchers examine the human mind today for clues as to how it evolved in the past. It’s a complicated process because human nature included hundreds, perhaps thousands, of psychological adaptations, each designed for different, domain-specific conditions. Today’s human brain can be compared to a Swiss Army knife, with its various blades and gadgets meant for different tasks.

A detailed evolutionary heritage

Humans are obligated to examine the impact of what they are and who they are in understanding the origins of genocide and mass killing. While the roots of genocide and mass killing cannot be attributed solely to the deep traces of design left in the mind by natural selection, people can no longer dismiss as an unsupportable theological or philosophical assumption that human nature has a dark side. Evil deeds are at least partially grounded in human nature. An impulse to do evil is not the defining characteristic of human nature, but the impulse is certainly within human capacity.

How does our evolutionary heritage help us comprehend the perpetration of genocide and mass killing? To begin with, humans have evolved natures with broad arrays of psychological adaptations. On the positive side, some of these adaptations affirm a capacity for goodness. These include love, friendship, cooperativeness, trustworthiness, preferential and reciprocal altruism, nurturance, friendship, compassion, communication, a sense of fairness and even self-sacrifice — in short, the things that hold society together.

EP warns, however, that self-congratulation about humanity is premature. Beneath the social surface is a seamy underside of human nature that is much less flattering. Prosocial adaptations are qualified by the reality that people reserve major doses of goodness either for close kin or for nonkin who show signs of someday returning the favor. Underlying these so-called acts of charity are selfish and aggressive traits that are part of inherently self-centered human nature. Sometimes altruism and cooperation turn out to be the most effective ways to compete.

The Swiss Army knife of adaptations includes even darker ultimate motives — such as intergroup competition for dominance, boundary definition and fear of social exclusion — which often tear society apart by providing the critical building blocks for within-group niceness and between-group nastiness.

For instance, studies worldwide show that ethnocentrism (focusing on our group as the “right” one) and xenophobia (fearing outsiders or strangers) are not only universal in people, but also that these tendencies start in infancy. We have an evolved capacity to see our group as superior to all others and even to be reluctant to recognize members of other groups as deserving of equal respect. Some even suggest that our tendency to divide the world into “us” and “them” is one of the few true human universals.

A group of the !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert, for instance, call themselves by a name that literally means “the real people.” In their language, the words for “bad” and “foreign” are one and the same. Similarly, the cannibal inhabitants of the delta area of Irian in Indonesian New Guinea call themselves the Asmat, which means “the people — the human beings.” All outsiders are known very simply as Manowe — “the edible ones.” It is these types of “darker” universal adaptations that can be evoked by governments, propaganda and militaries in the recruitment of genocidal killers.

As William James, the first great American psychologist, opined more than a century ago, “We, the lineal representatives of the successful enactors of one scene of slaughter after another, must, whatever more pacific virtues we may also possess, still carry about with us, ready at any moment to burst into flame, the smoldering and sinister traits of character by means of which they lived through so many massacres, harming others, but themselves unharmed.”

EP vs. the social fabric of life

Understanding the powerful, innate, ultimate, “animal” influences lying at the core of human nature is only the first step, however, in understanding how ordinary people commit genocide and mass killing.

Natural selection may have designed certain adaptations that provide the capacity for extraordinary evil, but no other species shows the degree of premeditated mass killings of its own that humans have shown over the centuries. Indeed, it is quite unfair to other species to compare them with humankind.

EP describes the ultimate evolutionary capacities common to everyone. But this understanding must be couched in the context of the more proximate and immediate cultural, psychological and social constructions that activate these capacities.

Taming the animal instincts within

While it is not reasonable to hope for dramatic or quick evolution of humanity, the dark side of human nature is not behaviorally inevitable.

People can and should identify the psychological adaptations that can most usefully serve cooperative and peaceful goals and build on them. There are certainly innate tendencies for cooperative, caring and nonviolent relations that enhanced human ancestors’ survival rates and reproductive success in a world of limited resources. Such pro-social tendencies would have been favored by natural selection and would still be retained at some level as long-term adaptations. Fostering cultural practices and resources that activate these adaptations can be done to produce mutually beneficial outcomes for formerly antagonistic groups. As biologist Lyall Watson reminds us, “The roots of war lie deep in nature, it seems, but then so too do the roots of peace.”

Humans are not slaves to an unyielding genetic leash. The mentally ill aside, people are not forced by some internal monster of the mind to commit such atrocities as genocide or mass killing. Evolutionary adaptations are best understood not as immutable genetic programs, but simply as predispositions to learn. Genes endow a capacity to learn and to adapt to life in a variety of environments, and as a result, people are not constrained by innate psychological adaptations.

As a matter of fact, the more psychological adaptations humans have, the more capabilities they have. It’s the large number of psychological adaptations — and their infinite range of combined interactions — that make human behavior more flexible and intelligent than other animals.

James E. Waller is a professor of psychology and Edward B. Lindaman Chair at Whitworth College in Spokane, Wash.

Math and psychology

Math and psychology: Truesdell's approach to poker pays off
By MISTY MAYNARD Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 9, 2006 9:36 PM EDT Print this story | Email this story

Justin Truesdell earns his living playing games.

About 18 months ago, Truesdell, who graduated from St. Patrick School, learned how to play poker. Within months, he found himself earning more playing the card game than he did at his job, so he quit, and became a professional poker player.

"It's a tough game," Truesdell said. "But it's all math and psychology."

Math just so happens to be Truesdell's "forte." In school, Truesdell said he competed in the academic league in the math category. After graduating high school, Truesdell enrolled at Centre College, where he completed his marketing degree. He was working with Cingular selling cell phones when he started playing poker for fun, only to discover how lucrative it could be for him.

Truesdell now spends about 10 hours a day, four to seven days a week, playing poker, mostly online. He said he starts his day with more money than he made in a month at his previous job.

Recently, Truesdell competed in the World Series of Poker tournament. It was actually through an online site, pokerstars.com, Truesdell entered into a qualifying tournament for the World Series of Poker competition -- and he made the cut. The site paid Truesdell's entry free, and sent him to Las Vegas for the tournament.

For two months, Truesdell said he lived in Las Vegas, playing in smaller tournaments, building up to the main event. More than 8,700 people participated in the tournament, but only about 10 percent of those actually made money from their efforts. Truesdell managed to make more than $16,000 through the tournament.

The tournament, Truesdell said, will be "all over" ESPN in a couple of weeks, and could possibly show the local poker professional.

"I got filmed three times, (they) got my name and hometown," he said, though if he actually appears on television depends on editing.

Truesdell said the players received 10,000 chips, and they would play until someone got all the chips.

"It's about surviving until you can't survive anymore," he said.

While he may be playing a game, Truesdell said it can get intense, with the stress level rising as the stakes rise.

While he travels across the country now playing poker, he said he hopes to make enough money to one day start his own business. The 25-year-old said he will likely continue to play poker for the next five years or so. When he retires from the professional poker arena, Truesdell said he is not exactly sure what he will do.

"I'm young, I'm playing it by ear right now," he said. "I've got a good degree I can always fall back on."

With Truesdell earning most of his living through online poker sites, he is concerned with a proposed "Internet gambling prohibition," which would outlaw Internet poker. He said the ban is mostly being sought to prevent children from using their parents credit cards online, but said there are actually few cases of that occurring. Most of the time, Truesdell said the people who play online are those who work all day, and enjoy a game of low-stakes poker in the evening.

Though his family is supportive of Truesdell's current poker profession, he said he does sometimes receive negative comments from people.

"A lot of people look at me and ask me when I'm going to get a job," he said. "They have no clue that I do much better (playing poker)."

Truesdell said to many, poker is just a game, but he looks at it as if it were a business. He said playing online, he does not have to beat the house, he simply has to beat the other players.

"As long as you're smarter than the average person, or know more about the game than the average person, you can make money," he said.

Psychology of the Sports Fan

Psychology of the Sports Fan
Some people have a passing interest in sports, while others are . . . TRUE FANS
By Jim Patrick
The Salt Lake Tribune

Joe Mannino seems like a normal enough guy. He's in his 30s, he has a wife and a daughter and people expect normal enough things from him.
Except when it comes to soccer.
An hour and a half before a recent Real Salt Lake game, Mannino was sitting out by the parking lot of Rice-Eccles Stadium in a $65 RSL jersey. He was waiting on a press credential from a Mexican newspaper to arrive for him to get into the press box. This isn't how he sees every game, but he clearly is excited about going to the RSL game.
Maybe a little too excited.
He faced a tough choice a few weeks ago. His daughter had a church ceremony that conflicted with an RSL event.
Tough call.
"In the end, I made the right choice and did the family thing," he said. "But at the end of the day . . . ," his voice trails off.
He would have preferred to be at the game.
Ed Hirt, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Indiana, has studied what drives sports fans.
"Being a fan has a self-esteem benefit," Hirt said. "It's the same thing as a parent with a kid who lives vicariously through the kid's achievements. There are things like that in everyday life. We drop names all the time about connections we have, people we went to school with. By doing that, we're trying to associate ourselves with something bigger than ourselves."
There's no shortage of fans doing that in Salt Lake.
If you want to see some fans that identify themselves - strongly - with a team, show up at an RSL game. You don't even have to leave the parking lot to witness the devotion. Fan groups such as The Loyalists gather at the edge of the parking lot to eat, drink and get pumped up for the game. Members of The Loyalists debate on just how fanatical their fanship is.
"I'm insane. My wife would probably say that," Scott Stucki said.
Said Loyalists president Glenn Webb: "I don't know if it's crazy or unbalanced. We're normal people with normal lives. People expect normal things from us."
And yet, they aspire to some abnormality.
Members of the group talk about an exhibition game RSL played against Mexican team Morelia a few weeks ago as an eye-opening event. Those fans had tears in their eyes when their team took the field.
Hirt, the Indiana psychologist, says a large part of the behavior is fans taking their cues from other fans. In the case of soccer, RSL fans are looking at die-hard international soccer fans and trying to emulate them.
RSL and Major League Soccer are different from other top-level professional leagues in the United States. RSL practices are open to the public, and fans can get right next to players, more or less, as they go about their drills.
Imagine if the New York Yankees had fans down on the field as Alex Rodriguez took batting practice.
Albert Baumann was at a recent practice. Wearing jeans and a blue-and-white striped shirt with a pair of glasses tucked into a pocket at the top, the 69-year-old bearded man barely looks like a radical fan. But, try asking him how often he comes to practice.
"I never miss a practice," said Baumann, a former goalkeeper who played 2 1/2 seasons in the top German league, the Bundesliga. "This is my life, you know. I'm an old man. I have nothing else to do. They feel like family to me."
Fans used to be able to get this close to players for a Utah sports institution: the Utah Jazz.

BIG-TIME FANS

The Jazz are so popular in Utah that, at one point, seemingly every sports team in the state had two Z's in its name, in an effort to play off the Jazz's success.
Howard Nakagama was around when the Jazz first came to Utah. He's fished with Mark Eaton and used to get to travel on the team bus or stay at the team hotel when the team went on trips.
"Now, it's probably next to impossible to do all of those things," Nakagama said. "But back when they first made the playoffs, it was pretty easy to do."
Not any more.
Tickets alone pose a problem for fans trying to go to 41 home Jazz games. With a few $10 seats relegated to the upper reaches of the stadium, and with parking and food exacting a premium, going to a game is a once-in-a-while affair for most Jazz fans. Hence the rise of TV viewership for Jazz games.
Daniel Wann, an associate psychology professor at Murray State, wrote the book "Sport Fans: The Psychology and Social Impact of Spectators." In it, he details why people would be fanatical about a team they watched play live and in person once or twice a season.
They include:
l Eustress - the need for positive stress
l Escapism
l Entertainment
l Gambling
l Group affiliation
Jazz fans, Hirt said, probably feel a strong sense of community derived from being a fan. Just turn on a sports radio station and listen to how people talk about the Jazz. This past Wednesday, callers to a local radio show were bemoaning a shot Michael Jordan hit over Bryon Russell.
"We never got over that one," one caller said.
That was eight years ago.

STAYING THE COURSE

Some groups of fans are explained more easily.
College fans, for example, are primarily college-aged or alumni from the institution. As they grow older, many college fans become less rabidly involved with their teams.
But what about NASCAR fans and golf fans?
Hirt says they're a different breed. They look for drivers or golfers who exemplify something people like about themselves. Tiger Woods represents being the best athlete in the game. Dale Earnhardt was a straight shooter who would shove you out of the way for a win.
"With golf, or with auto racing, there's a sense of the entourage," Hirt said. "Some of the facets of being a fan are there, but there's a sense of what that sport means to you. That person you root for reflects something about yourself.
"It's more like the fans of a rock band."
Salt Lake Bees manager Brian Harper has seen the best and worst of sports fans. In 1991, Harper was the starting catcher for the Minnesota Twins and played in the "Thunderdome," as the Metrodome was renamed for its rowdy constituency.
As manager of the Bees, Harper gets heckled by a few members of the home crowd.
"I have a couple of fans on me all the time in Salt Lake," Harper said. "There are times where, as a player, fans don't understand how difficult it is to play at this level."
Still, Harper says he runs into fans around Salt Lake all the time and enjoys the experience. On the road, a Bees fan on summer vacation showed up in Omaha, Neb., to watch the Bees play.
As a player in the majors, Harper said the most crazed fans were in the Northeast, where Boston and New York Yankees fans routinely taunt each other.
"Fans differ from region to region," he said. "On the East Coast, fans are rabid. In the Midwest, they're knowledgeable but not crazy.
Out West, they're more laid-back, but still very knowledgeable." Mannino, the RSL fan, comes from the West Coast, but he seems to have more in common with a rabid Yankees fan.
A full-blooded Italian, Mannino roots for Juventus in the Italian premier league. Juventus was plagued by a match-fixing scandal last winter and had a bad season.
"My real team is Juventus over in Italy," he said. "They got relegated to the second league this year and I felt like somebody killed my sister."
Mannino says there's no point at which being a fan is unhealthy. Hirt disagrees.
"The funny thing about it is, you are drawing your self-esteem from others," Hirt said. "It's nice to feel like a member of a group, but, when nothing comes from within, that seems pretty dangerous. If your whole life is derived from this identity as a fan, you've got to relate more to life than that. Like, maybe they need to spend some time with their family."

Many Sports, Many Fans
Percentage of adults in the United States who identified themselves in 2004 as fans of various sports:
Sport Pct. Change
NFL 67.5 (2.0)
MLB 60.1 (2.4)
College football 56.1 (0.5)
NBA 48.5 (none)
Figure skating 46.8 (-2.5)
College basketball 46.3 (1.5)
Extreme sports 43.6 (-1.6)
NASCAR 43.4 (0.5)
Sport Pct. Change
Horse racing 37.4 (5.1)
Fishing 36.6 (1.9)
PGA 36.4 (-2.4)
Boxing 38.2 (0.6)
NHL 32.7 (-4.1)
WNBA 32.0 (-2.1)
WTA 31.5 (-5.4)
- TNS Sports Poll

Attendance
Total 2004 attendance in millions:
Baseball 120.3
Football 72.0
Basketball 67.2
Hockey 60.7
Auto racing 35.9
Horse racing 30.6
Rodeo 23.6
Golf 12.5
Soccer 7.2
Greyhound racing 6.4

UAB researcher in child psychology wins national award

UAB researcher in child psychology wins national award
Birmingham Business Journal - August 10, 2006

A University of Alabama at Birmingham psychologist has won the Society of Pediatric Psychology's Routh Early Career Award.

David Schwebel, an associate professor and vice chairman of UAB's psychology department, focuses his research on risk factors that lead to childhood injuries, including temperament, overestimation of physical ability and parent-child relationships. He is also director of undergraduate studies for the department and a scientist with both the UAB Injury Control Center and the UAB Center for the Advancement of Youth Health.

Schwebel's most recent research projects include the development of a behavioral intervention to reduce behaviors that can lead to unintentional playground injuries at pre-schools, and the development of a virtual reality software program designed to teach young children how to cross streets safely.

Schwebel is the principal investigator on several projects, including research supported by the Centers for Disease Control, the Federal Highway Administration and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He has published articles in nearly 30 academic journals, including the Journal of Pediatric Psychology, Health Psychology, Child Development and the Journal of Safety Research.

The Society of Pediatric Psychology is a division of the American Psychological Association.

Pop's Psychology Explains All

Pop's Psychology Explains All
Steve Franks has fun inserting lessons from his police officer dad into "Psych," his show about a cop's slacker son who has eerie detective talents.
By Lynn Smith, Times Staff Writer
August 6, 2006

In the days when Steve Franks was pitching his idea for "Psych," USA Network's new comedy about a fake psychic detective, he always began by talking about his dad.

His father was an LAPD cop who liked to call himself "a trained observer" and wanted to groom his only son to follow in his footsteps. Whenever they went to a restaurant, he would test young Steve by telling him to close his eyes and recall: How many people have hats on? Where is the exit? What's the name on the hostess' nametag?

Anyone who saw — and can recall — the July 7 pilot will recognize this childhood memory in the opening scene: a little boy being peppered by questions while having lunch with his demanding dad — a uniformed police officer. The show flashes back and forth between that past and the present, where Shawn (James Roday) is a footloose twentysomething living in Santa Barbara who clearly has not fulfilled his father's dream. But his powers of observation are so acute, he helps the police solve crimes by pretending to be psychic.

"I guess I was wired for this sort of show," said Franks.

USA will air 8 episodes on Fridays this summer and four more in January. According to Nielsen Media Research, "Psych" has drawn an average 3.3 million viewers in its first three weeks, a respectable showing for cable. In an effort to draw broadcast viewers to USA, sister network NBC will air the first episode of "Psych" on Monday, and the second a week later.

"Psych" could be seen as a meditation on the authoritarian father/unambitious son syndrome — the son knows whatever he does will never be good enough, so he avoids responsibility altogether. ("If you're going to play, Shawn, play right," the father (Corbin Bernsen) tells the young boy in one episode.)But mostly "Psych" is about "the search for fun, what place fun has in your life, and how much is too much fun," Franks said. "I'm trying to bring fun back to TV. You don't see it that much."

Some critics have complained there's too much silliness in the show. " 'Psych' is, for the most part, merely jokey," wrote Nancy Franklin in the New Yorker. Dulé Hill ("The West Wing") contributes to the comedy as Shawn's reluctant assistant and best friend; he played one scene with dollops of shaving cream on his head. USA President Bonnie Hammer said she prefers to characterize the humor as "irreverent." Along with "Monk," she called "Psych" a perfect fit with the network, which is aiming to send Friday night viewers off to sleep with a chuckle. Its current motto: "Characters Welcome."

Besides his own family, Franks said he was inspired by the lighter crime-solving shows he grew up with, such as "Magnum, P.I.," "The Rockford Files" and "Moonlighting," which featured charming wise guys coasting through life who could fast-talk their way out of any situation.

Besides just watching TV, Franks was something of a "television savant" who played industry games of his own making when he was in grammar school. Just for fun, he would create his own imaginary television shows and then draw up charts and grids, scheduling one against the other, guessing how the ratings went — and then extending or canceling them accordingly.


Parental guidance

When Franks was 16, his father took him along to the set of "Moonlighting," where he had an extra job working security. That experience made Franks realize that a television career might actually be a possibility in real life.

After graduating from UC Irvine, Franks sold a script for the Adam Sandler film "Big Daddy" (1999) to Columbia, and then pitched about half a dozen TV shows with little success. Long before psychic shows such as "Medium" became hot, Franks said, he came up with the idea of a psychic detective who wasn't really psychic. What it lacked, he said, was a way into the main character.

As it turned out, it was Franks' mother, not his father, who provided the key, he said. She was also an acute observer and could pick out the culprit on TV crime shows in minutes. Shawn displays that same skill in scene two of the pilot.

Franks said some well-known actors were interested in the lead but wouldn't read for the part — a prerequisite, Franks said, given the quirkiness needed to play it. Roday ("The Dukes of Hazzard") was the only candidate who grasped the type of comedy Franks was after, he said.

"We do a lot of word jokes about vocabulary and syntax," Franks said.

Later, Roday discovered that he grew up with a father similar to Franks'. Roday's dad was an Air Force training instructor, a disciplinarian prone to driving home object lessons. He also hoped in vain that his only child would follow suit in a military career.

Over time, though, Roday said his father came to accept his determination to become an actor. "He was fully on board by the time I finished college," he said.

In addition to acting, Roday writes and directs, and contributed to an upcoming episode directed by John Landis in which Shawn's father helps solve a case. In the show, the dad imparts a life lesson: "The truth is right in front of you. Don't overcomplicate things."

Roday said he plays his character as a young man still seeking approval from a father who's unable to give it. There's been talk about whether Dad might give his son a kiss in one of those flashbacks. "I don't know if that works or not," Roday said. "We shot it both ways. We might not be there yet in terms of knowing the answer."

But now that the thematic and comedic elements have been pinned down, he said the writers are starting to explore other areas, such as more complex mysteries and relationships.

The flashbacks of Shawn's childhood worked so well in the pilot that they are now a staple of each episode.

"It's become my favorite part of writing the show," Franks said. "Now I realize I can tie it thematically, or tonally, or take a specific incident and re-create something in the past and see how it plays out in the future. Something I was using as a pitch is now a frame," he said.

Besides, he added, "it's a chance to see Corbin Bernsen in a wig, which is always fun."

Franks said relationships in his own family are less strained than those among the Spencers. While Spencer's parents are divorced, Franks' are still together. "My dad is my hero," he said.

His father has also made peace with the fact that his son is not a cop. Said Franks: He loved the pilot and is now "calling me every other day with story pitches."

Where psychology meets music: Classical plays a role

Where psychology meets music: Classical plays a role
By PIERRE RUHE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In a shop lined with shelves of pricey merchandise, the music is blaring and it's in your face. The lyrics are suggestive of sexual promiscuity and two-timing girlfriends.

But this isn't rock or rap thumping in a hip boutique, it's opera — Pavarotti singing the famous "La donna e mobile" — and the shop is EatZi's, a prepared-food market and bakery in a Dunwoody strip mall. From opening until close, the soundtrack is opera.

supervisor. In her four years with the Dallas-based gourmet chain, she says, "a few people have complained that it's too loud, but more people say they love it, they love this atmosphere. We're mostly a to-go place in a European style, so it's opera and it's loud. That's a part of our identity."

But there is more to this suburban sophistication than meets the ear, according to experts who study the potent intersection of music, marketing and psychology.

When peddling Provençal sea salt — or deterring crime, or boosting efficiency in a hospital's operating room — classical music seems to be played as much for its psychological properties as for the art-for-art's-sake aesthetic of the concert hall.

In retail, says James Kellaris, a marketing professor at the University of Cincinnati, "music can create moods and reinforce the store's image by associative learning — where 'classy' music implies 'classy' store."

Beyond these obvious effects, he adds, "music can help shape customers' time perception, lower sales resistance, and increase willingness to spend."

For most people, classical music is complex and relatively unfamiliar. So exposure to opera shrinks what psychologists call a person's subjective time, relative to what the clock says: By working harder than usual in a short period of time, your brain overcompensates by making you feel like you've spent less time in the shop.

Coupled with the music's sonic complexity, aggressive loudness can help lower a shopper's ability to critically evaluate beautifully packaged merchandise or a sales pitch. Together, these two factors can encourage longer visits, more impulse buying and more overall spending. (That is, unless the shopper happens to be a music connoisseur, since hearing even a snippet of a familiar song expands the subjective timer.)

EatZi's gets opera from a satellite radio service called DMX Music, which broadcasts everything from ambient background sounds to country and top-40 pop. EatZi's subscribes to the "Arias and Overtures" program, which the DMX Web site pitches to retailers this way: "Classical and ambient music invites customers to linger in upscale boutiques, [and] says 'distinguished' the moment you walk in ..."

Kellaris says such music also serves as an "aspirational reference," a soundtrack to fantasies of upward mobility.

"The deli is telling us, in effect, 'Our antipasto is expensive, but if you eat it you'll be as sophisticated and prosperous as people who vacation in Tuscany or hold season tickets to the opera.' "

A SWAT team of sound

It seems music that reduces brain power in one audience enhances gray matter in another — and some people find the stuff repellent.

On a recent sweltering afternoon on the dimly lit platform of the Decatur MARTA station, a warbly allegro from Handel's "Water Music" filled the air. While the quieter nuances of the piece were lost in the station's vast space, its bold rhythms and pomp came across clearly.

For $56 a month, MARTA subscribes to a satellite service from ambient music provider Muzak. Although the company is famous for fare such as the mind-numbing renditions of Beatles songs heard in elevators and waiting rooms, Muzak offers more than 100 different audio programs, from disco-fueled "HI-NRG" to contemporary Christian.

MARTA riders hear Muzak's "light classical" program. It's beamed into all 36 stations (although the audio equipment is broken in many locations).

Muzak describes the program as suitable for "banks, fine dining establishments, medical facilities, garden centers, grocery stores, museums, arts facilities, bookstores," and the target audience as 29-79, "not exclusively Classical aficionados, but comfortable to all."

What Muzak fails to mention is the program's apparent crime-fighting abilities.

The effect has been documented in England. In 2004, after gangs infested London Underground stations in some of the city's most crime-ridden neighborhoods, British Transport Police turned to a weapon of last resort. In six months, they cut robbery by 33 percent, staff assaults by 25 percent and vandalism by 37 percent.

Their ammo?A shock-and-awe assault of Mozart minuets and Pavarotti arias, pumped onto station platforms like sonic napalm — the very same repertoire that helps EatZi's sell a $12.99 applewood-smoked bacon and Jarlsberg cheese quiche.

MARTA deputy general manager Franklin Beauford says he hadn't heard of classical music's crime-deterrent potential, and doubts its efficacy. "It's my experience that criminals don't pay attention to what they're listening to, pickpockets and vandals don't care what the music is," he says. "And when the trains come though a station you can hardly hear it, anyway."

For MARTA, he says, the music is merely a means to provide "a pleasant environment and enhances the transit experience for our customers."

'Remarkable' effects

Then there's the medical use of classical music.

Marc Rynearson is a classical programmer at DMX Music. He created the "Arias and Overtures" heard at EatZi's and is developing music for hospitals.

"Waiting rooms get one sound, a chapel gets music that's very beautiful and reflective with a spiritual context, such as instrumental pieces from a Bach cantata," he explains. "In the maternity ward, tempos will be a bit faster, and we'll create a gentle atmosphere with cute instruments like the oboe and the harp, and include lots of lullabies. There's documentation that the effects of classical music on mind and body are remarkable."

The new DMX mix, however, won't include a "product" for operating rooms, where some doctors are playing deejay themselves.

On a typical day at the DeKalb Medical Center, Dr. Sidney Stapleton will reach into a satchel, pick out a CD and slide it into a small boom box. Then he scrubs and prepares for surgery.

Once his patient has been anesthetized, a nurse hits the play button. Music, such as Russian pianist Yevgeny Kissin easing into a Beethoven sonata, quietly but insistently fills the operating room, a counterpoint to the regular beeps of the monitors. Everyone in the room listens while they work.

Only about a quarter of surgeons at the center play music in the O.R. — the decision to do so, and the repertoire, is at the discretion of the senior surgeon. Most who do their cutting at DeKalb choose a soundtrack of light rock or country.

"I find classical music makes for a great environment in the O.R.," says Stapleton, 66. "Often, when the music's playing, there's less chatter, and everyone's more efficient, you can concentrate when you need to, and the time passes quickly."

He's learned to limit his choices. The tiled acoustics of the operating room forbids music with too wide a dynamic range — the quiet parts are inaudible, the loud parts unbearable — so big romantic symphonies, opera and choral music are off-limits, he says. Baroque orchestral music and a spectrum of piano music, from Bach to Prokofiev, usually gets the call.

Still, he concedes, "if the operation is too challenging, I won't bother with it and, anyway, it's not fair for me to hold the [O.R. staff] captive with my musical preferences."

When they're awake, patients usually like what they hear, he says. During a routine procedure not long ago, Stapleton put on one of his favorites: Pianist Dinu Lipatti playing a Bach-Busoni chorale.

"I got a thank-you note from the patient," he recalls. "She wrote: 'What a delightful experience to be ushered into anesthesia to the sound of Bach.' "

Star World examines the psychology of 'Criminal Minds'

Star World examines the psychology of 'Criminal Minds' next month
By ASHWIN PINTO
Indiantelevision.com Team
MUMBAI: From 3 September 2006 English general entertainment channel Star World will air the show Criminal Minds on Sundays at noon and 10 pm, Mondays at 1 pm and on Saturdays at 5 pm.

Best described as a psychological suspense thriller, with lots of deductive action, Criminal Minds follows an elite squad of profilers who analyse the country's most twisted serial criminal minds, anticipating their next move before they strike again.


The show stars Mandy Patinkin Chicago Hope as head of the Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, the series also features Thomas Gibson as a disarming family man, Matthew Gray Gubler as a socially-retarded genius, Shemar Moore as an expert on obsession crimes and Lola Galudini as an agent specialising in sexual offenses, who was herself assaulted years ago.

In the first episode, when a fourth woman goes missing in Seattle during the course of four months, the team is brought in to profile her captor and find him before he strikes again. Gideon, who has taken a six month leave of absence since running lead on a case in Boston that ended in a disaster, is asked to help crack the case. While the team works to hunt down the serial killer, Hotch is asked to discreetly evaluate whether or not Gideon is really ready to return to full-time duty.

In the second episode the team investigates a series of fires set on a college campus. Since most of the evidence from the fires has been burned beyond recognition, Gideon and his team must rely on psychological analysis to identify the firestarter. Utilising their knowledge of serial arsonists, they set up a general profile. When the fires start, claiming the lives of several victims, the search heats up, forcing them to look beyond the textbook profile to catch the killer.

The channel will also air the second season of Enterprise from 9 September every Saturday at 10 pm. The science fiction show is set in the 22nd century, nearly 100 years before the events shown in the television show Star Trek. Enterprise takes place during the early pioneering days of deep space exploration, when interstellar travel is in its infancy and the United Federation of Planets is still decades away.

Captain Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula) is the prototype for Starfleet captains to come; he's bold, intensely curious, and eager to venture where no man has gone before. Unlike the seasoned, sometimes unflappable officers of the 24th century, the crew of Enterprise exhibits a sense of wonder and excitement, as well as a little trepidation about the strange things they'll encounter. With their star charts mostly empty, they'll have to prove they're ready for life among the stars.

Experts meet to apply Asian perspective to psychology

Experts meet to apply Asian perspective to psychology
Jakarta (ANTARA News) - Psychologists from Asia and several western nations will meet on the Indonesian island of Bali this week to develop an Asian perspective to their work, including theories on preventing terrorism.

"Long-time studies and experience have proven that not all western theories fit the eastern context," Sarlito Sarwono, chairman of the one-year-old Asian Psychologist Association, was quoted by AFP as saying late Tuesday.

Western theories and paradigms dominate the science of psychology. But
developments including the rise of Asian economies, terrorism in Indonesia and disasters in Asia have prompted more thought about Asian perspectives, he said.

Psychologists from around the world now see "that the Asian community
should be seen from an Asian perspective, and not the psychological approaches developed in the west," Sarwono told a press briefing.

Monty Satiadarma, the organisation's secretary, said the congress hoped "to provide more opportunity for Asian psychologists to develop approaches for Asian problems."

Among the topics to be covered at the two-day weekend seminar will be terrorism psychology, Sarwono said.

Bekto Suprapto, who heads Indonesia's anti-terror detachment, will give a
briefing on the country's handling of terror cases, while Sarwono will present psychological profiles of some key detained terrorists.

Indonesia has suffered a spate of bombings by Islamic extremists in recent years, including the October 2002 Bali bombings which killed 202 people -- mostly western holidaymakers.

Using Asian approaches, the symposium was aimed at helping the world
develop more effective programs to prevent terrorism, the association said.

"It is necessary to find a way to prevent future terrorism and to develop
counselling techniques for the detainees to prevent them from becoming terror recidivists," Sarwono added.

About 150 participants from nine Asian countries as well as Australia,
Canada and the Netherlands will attend the meeting. (*)