People to People: Why Do People Do What They Do?
Humans use inferential rules to decode the behavior of others in an attempt to determine the meaning of their actions. The fundamental attribute error is to incorrectly infer that another person's behavior was caused by their dispositions when it wa...
Stressed to the Limit: Finding Resilience
Resilience, the ability to bounce back despite life's difficulties, has become an important research topic in psychology. Two cancer survivors talk about their response to their disease, and how they learned to take the cancer experience and turn it...
Out of Balance: Labeling Psychological Disorders
The psychiatry profession has created a mechanism for classifying psychological disorders, often referred to as DSM. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Psychiatric Disorders uses behavioral definitions to help mental health workers diagnose p...
People to People: Relations Characterized by Altruism and Conciliation
When you look at daily behavior, people are continually doing things for other people when they don't have to. Certain emotions like awe and compassion encourage people to commit to collective principles and become more devoted to their group. An ex...
Different Strokes: Mitigating the Distrust Associated with Prejudice
Most people would like to believe that they're not prejudiced, that they don't hold unjustified negative attitudes toward the members of out groups. Mahzarin Banaji illustrates how the use of the Implicit Association Test can help people realize...
Different Strokes: TRIOS-African American Cultural Patterns
Cultural patterns echo from one generation to the next. Psychologist James Jones uses the acronym "TRIOS" to describe the characteristics that link Black Americans to their African roots.
Getting It Together: Choosing a Therapist
Research shows that the style of the therapist even more than the nature of the therapy determines whether or not there is a beneficial outcome. It is important to find a therapist who is not only license and properly credentialed, but is also someo...
Different Strokes: Differences that Define and Separate People
As humans we share a common heritage and face common problems. Yet the differences that help define who we are-our culture, our gender, our race-often separate us in ways that are both cognitive and social. Humans are cognitive misers who distil...
Different Strokes: How Influential is the Shared Family Environment?
The environment is the nature portion of the human equation-those factors along with genetics that shape the emerging individual. From the time of Freud, it was assumed that the shared family environment was primarily responsible for similarities ...
Different Strokes: Cultural Influences on Development
Culture sets forth the explicit rules, beliefs, assumptions, and social norms that organize people. At a very basic level, culture affects how parents interact with their children, as shown in a comparative study of American and Japanese mothers a...