Quotes by Psychologists - Page 33

In projecting onto others their own moral sense, therapists sometimes make terrible errors. Child physical abusers are automatically labeled “impulsive," despite extensive evidence that they are not necessarily impulsive but more often make thinking errors that justify the assaults. Sexual and physical offenders who profess to be remorseful after they are caught are automatically assumed to be sincere. After all, the therapist would feel terrible if he or she did such a thing. It makes perfect sense that the offender would regret abusing a child. People routinely listen to their own moral sense and assume that others share it.Thus, those who are malevolent attack others as being malevolent, as engaging in dirty tricks, as being “in it for the money,“ and those who are well meaning assume others are too, and keep arguing logically, keep producing more studies, keep expecting an academic debate, all the time assuming that the issue at hand is the truth of the matter.Confessions of a Whistle-Blower: Lessons Learned Author: Anna C. Salter. Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8, Issue 2 June 1998 p122
Anna C. Salter
People, in general, tend to project onto others their own state of mind. Well-meaning people inevitably assume other people are well meaning. People who cheat assume everyone cheats. People who deceive assume everybody deceives.Confessions of a Whistle-Blower: Lessons Anna C. Salter. Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8, Issue 2 June 1998
Anna C. Salter
A man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house.
William James
At first, when a child meets something that scares him, the fear grows, like a wave. But when he goes into the water and swims - gets used to the water - the wave grows small. If we pull the child away when the wave is high, he never sees that, never learns how to swim and remains afraid. If he gets a chance to feel strong, in control, that's called coping. When he copes, he feels better.
Jonathan Kellerman
The law (of least effort) asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.
Daniel Kahneman
If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. My Princeton colleague Danny Oppenheimer refuted a myth prevalent among undergraduates about the vocabulary that professors find most impressive. In an article titled "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly," he showed that couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility.
Daniel Kahneman
Most of us probably fall several times a day into a fit somewhat like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into a confused unity, the attention is dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of consciousness is filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the empty passing of time. In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start; the pensée de derrière la tête [thought at the back of the head] fails to pierce the shell of lethargy that wraps our state about. Every moment we expect the shell to break, for we know no reason why it should continue. But it does continue, pulse after pulse, and we float with it, until—also without reason that we can discover—an energy is given, something—we know not what—enables us to gather ourselves together, we wink our eyes, we shake our head, the background ideas become effective, and the wheels of life go round again.
William James
Historians are wont to name technological advances as the great milestones of culture, among them the development of the plow, the discovery of smelting and metalworking, the invention of the clock, printing press, steam power, electric engine, lightbulb, semiconductor, and computer. But possibly even more transforming than any of these was the recognition by Greek philosophers and their intellectual descendants that human beings could examine, comprehend, and eventually even guide or control their own thought process, emotions, and resulting behavior. With that realization we became something new and different on earth: the only animal that, by examining its own cerebration and behavior, could alter them. This, surely, was a giant step in evolution. Although we are physically little different from the people of three thousand years ago, we are culturally a different species. We are the psychologizing animal.
Morton Hunt
One thing I want to make clear: I don’t think our old maps are bad. They deserve to be honored for their intent to help guide us safely through life. This is one of the reasons why, when we try to "push through" resistance, it seems to get even harder to move forward. After all, if you were trying to save someone by keeping them from running out into a dangerous situation, and they were pulling against you, you'd try to hold tighter, wouldn't you?
Rachel S. Heslin
If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.
Adrian Furnham
The loss of my child broke my spirit.
Asa Don Brown
Allow yourself to be an anchor and anchored by others.
Asa Don Brown
Psychologists call these fully absorbing experiences flowstates, which were discovered and named by a world-famous psychologistwith the most unpronounceable surname I have ever encountered –Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Ilona Boniwell
The analysis of the psychological motivations behind certain doctrines or ideas can never be a substitute for a rational judgment of the validity of the doctrine and of the values which it implies, although such analysis may lead to a better understanding of the real meaning of a doctrine and thereby influence one’s value judgment.What the psychological analysis of doctrines can show is the subjective motivations which make a person aware of certain problems and make him seek for answers in certain directions. Any kind of thought, true or false, if it is more than a superficial conformance with conventional ideas, is motivated by the subjective needs and interests of the person who is thinking. It happens that some interests are furthered by finding the truth, others by destroying it. But in both cases the psychological motivations are important incentives for arriving at certain conclusions. We can go even further and say that ideas which are not rooted in powerful needs of the personality will have little influence on the actions and on the whole life of the person concerned.
Erich Fromm
No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference… between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.
William James
Ego depletion comes from American psychologist Roy Baumeister, who believes that enduring something stressful exhausts our capacity for willpower to the extent that we give in to our temptations that we would rather avoid.
Bruce Hood
In certain diseased conditions consciousness is a mere spark, without memory of the past or thought of the future, and with the present narrowed down to some one simple emotion or sensation of the body.
William James
Human emotions have deep evolutionary roots, a fact that may explain their complexity and provide tools for clinical practice.The Nature of Emotions (2001)
Robert Plutchik
... [O]ne of the most influential approaches to thinking about memory in recent years, known as connectionism, has abandoned the idea that a memory is an activated picture of a past event. Connectionist or neural network models are based on the principle that the brain stores engrams by increasing the strength of connections between different neurons that participate in encoding an experience. When we encode an experience, connections between active neurons become stronger, and this specific pattern of brain activity constitutes the engram. Later, as we try to remember the experience, a retrieval cue will induce another pattern of activity in the brain. If this pattern is similar enough to a previously encoded pattern, remembering will occur. The "memory" in a neural network model is not simply an activated engram, however. It is a unique pattern that emerges from the pooled contributions of the cue and the engram. A neural network combines information in the present environment with patterns that have been stored in the past, and the resulting mixture of the two is what the network remembers... When we remember, we complete a pattern with the best match available in memory; we do not shine a spotlight on a stored picture.
Daniel L. Schacter
Thus, the "memories" that people reported contained little information about the event they were trying to recall (the speaker's tone of voice) but were greatly influenced by the properties of the retrieval cue that we gave them (the positive or negative facial expression).
Daniel L. Schacter
If we can predict, then we have observed enough to know that what we are observing does not just happen randomly; we have noted a pattern of regularities.
Hugh Coolican
In general, people find it easier to accept flattery or false praise than genuine admiration and love, because a build-up does not threaten their negative beliefs about themselves. It is not uncommon for people to dismiss a genuine compliment from someone who really admires them and appreciates their personal qualities. they feel awkward and uncomfortable because this experience causes anxiety, self-consciousness, and guilt about standing out.
Robert Firestone Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice
The cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper: the wish to know the secret of things and of life.
Erich Fromm
Genes and education are fundamental building blocks with witch man develops personality and lifestyle in one way or other...
Monica Rus Carmen psychologyst
Human person as a unit harmonic and dynamic individual integrates in the living environment using for this purpose all available resources.
Monica Rus Carmen psychologyst
Human nature is so complicated that it will never know the exact border between normality and abnormality them they..
Monica Rus Carmen psychologyst
Treatment for DID should adhere to the basic principles of psychotherapy and psychiatric medical management, and therapists should use specialized techniques only as needed to address specific dissociative symptomatology.Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision
James A. Chu
The primary treatment modality for DID is individual outpatient psychotherapy.Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision
James A. Chu
Switches among identities occur in response to changes in emotional state or to environmental demands, resulting in another identity emerging to assume control. Because different identities have different roles, experiences, emotions, memories, and beliefs, the therapist is constantly contending with their competing points of view. Helping the identities to be aware of one another as legitimate parts of the self and to negotiate and resolve their conflicts is at the very core of the therapeutic process. It is countertherapeutic for the therapist to treat any alternate identity as if it were more “real” or more important than any other.Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision
James A. Chu
Boundary construction is most evident in three-year-olds. Boundary construction is most evident in three-year-olds. By this time, they should have mastered the following tasks:1. The ability to be emotionally attached to others, yet without giving up a sense of self and one‘s freedom to be apart, 2. The ability to say appropriate no's to others without fear of loss of love, 3. The ability to take appropriate no's from others without withdrawing emotionally. Noting these tasks, a friend said half-joking, "They need to learn this by age three? How about by fourty-three?" Yes, these are tall orders but boundary development is essential in the early years of life.
Henry Cloud
Early relational trauma results from the fact that we are often given more to experience in this life than we can bear to experience consciously. This problem has been around since the beginning of time, but it is especially acute in early childhood where, because of the immaturity of the psyche and/or brain, we are ill-equipped to metabolize our experience. An infant or young child who is abused, violated or seriously neglected by a caretaking adult is overwhelmed by intolerable affects that are impossible for it to metabolize, much less understand or even think about.
Donald Kalsched
The guilty are uncomfortable with silence.
David J. Lieberman
Sometimes people who adamantly assert an opinion or view don't even hold it themselves.
David J. Lieberman
An anchor should be someone who is personally open and willing to communicate.
Asa Don Brown
The loss of a child exploits the emotions of each individual it encounters.
Asa Don Brown
Letting go of the past, is like opening the flood gates of healing to be set free.
Asa Don Brown
The benefits of forgiveness are limitless.
Asa Don Brown
In simple, the past is a time gone by and no longer exists in the present moment, but we choose to allow this past to occupy our minds, our bodies and our very existence.
Asa Don Brown
...whatever God found worth creating we can find worth studying.
David G. Myers
...even though we do not have the wisdom to enumerate the reasons for the behaviour of another person, we can grant that every individual does have his private world of meaning, conceived out of the integrity and dignity of his personality.
Virginia M. Axline
To show how memory changes to fit our story, psychologists study how memories evolve over time: if your memories of the same people change, becoming positive or negative spending on what is happening in your life now, then it’s all about you, not them. This process happens so gradually that it can be a jolt to realize you ever felt differently.
Carol Tavris
What the new science of anthrozoology reveals is that our attitudes, behaviors, and relationships with the animals in our lives- the ones we love, the ones we hate, and the ones we eat- are, likewise, more complicated than we thought.
Hal Herzog
The only consistency in the way humans think about animals is inconsistency.
Hal Herzog
It is fascinating to discover that individuals who are asked to assign a punishment to a criminal are influenced by factors that they are unaware of (like the presence of a flag in the room) or that they would consciously diavow (like the color of the criminal's skin). It is boring to find that individuals' proposed punishments are influenced by rational considerations such as the severity of the crime and the criminal's previous record. Interesting: we are more willing to help someonw if there is the smell of fresh bread in the air. Boring: we are more willing to help someone if he or she has been kind to us in the past. We sometimes forget that this bias in publication exists and take what is reported in scientific journals and the popular press as an accurate reflection of our best science of how the mind works. But this is like watching the nightly news and concluding that rape, robbery, and murder are part of any individual's everyday life - forgetting that the nightly news doesn't report the vast majority of cases where nothing of this sort happens at all.
Paul Bloom
By far, the most important distortions and confabulations of memory are those that serve to justify and explain our own lives. The mind, sense-making organ that it is, does not interpret our experiences as if they were shattered shards of glass; it assembles them into a mosaic. From the distance of years, we see the mosaic’s pattern. It seems tangible, unchangeable; we can’t imagine how we could reconfigure those pieces into another design. But it is a result of years of telling our story, shaping it into a life narrative that is complete with heroes and villians, an account of how we came to be the way we are. Because that narrative is the way we understand the world and our place in it, it is bigger than the sum of its parts. If on part, one memory, is shown to be wrong, people have to reduce the resulting dissonance and even rethink the basic mental category: you mean Dad (Mom) wasn’t such a bad (good) person after all? You mean Dad (Mom) was a complex human being? The life narrative may be fundamentally true; Your father or mother might really have been hateful, or saintly. The problem is that when the narrative becomes a major source of self-justification, one the storyteller relies on to excuse mistakes and failings, memory becomes warped in its service. The storyteller remembers only the confirming examples of the parent’s malevolence and forgets the dissonant instances of the parent’s good qualities. Over time, as the story hardens, it becomes more difficult to see the whole parent — the mixture of good and bad, strengths and flaws, good intentions and unfortunate blunders.Memories create our stories, but our stories also create our memories.
Carol Tavris
What we enjoy we enjoy, dispute is useless. ~ Aarush Kashyap
Kirtida Gautam
Competence is the most effective tool to hide madness. Black holes actually appear to be the brightest stars in sky. ~ Aarush Kashyap
Kirtida Gautam
Perception and worldview are one's summary of life.
Asa Don Brown
The person who says it is lonely at the top has no idea what the view looks like from above. ~ Aarush Kashyap
Kirtida Gautam
If I wanted you to understand, I would have explained it better ~ Aarush Kashyap
Kirtida Gautam
Think or don't think, but don't think that you are thinking when you are postulating.
Kirtida Gautam
I am not the Hero of this story Bob is~ Aarush Kashyap
Kirtida Gautam
Worldview is often confused with perception; rather, it is our perception that influences our worldview.
Asa Don Brown
Whatever I fed to his mind, thinking it was nutrition was, in fact, poison. No matter how much a person likes or craves sugar, he should not be raised on the diet of only sugar ~ Rudransh Kashyap
Kirtida Gautam
This may sound like a bunch of psychobabble, but the truth is that we are all filled with contradictions; personality is fluid not black and white. And, well…we are all both strongand weak. That’s what it means to be human. We all have flaws,weaknesses. The real strength is when we can admit these to ourselves and become able to show them to others.
Jacqueline Simon Gunn
The best way to reduce stress in your life is to stop screwing up.
Roy F. Baumeister
Unravelling the complexity of human development is a daunting task and it is unlikely that scientists will ever be able to do so for even one individual, because the interactions of biology and environment are likelihoods and not certainties. There are just too many ways that the cards could stack up. More importantly, as the vernacular saying goes, "Shit happens", which is a very succinct and scientifically accurate way of saying that random events during development can change the course of who we become in unpredictable ways.
Bruce Hood
Living a religious sexual lifestyle is tantamount to living a lie.Religion distorts our sexuality when the majority of religious people live one life for the public and another in private. It can be as simple as living as a "happily married" couple when you are both miserable with your sex life.
Darrel Ray
Religious training and indoctrination creates internal states that are in conflict with natural urges and drives.
Darrel Ray
All major religions put most of the responsibility for sexual morality on women. Religions teach that women should remain chaste and should control and hide their sexuality so men will not be tempted.
Darrel Ray