Humans have always used drugs, but current level of drug abuse could indicate a bigger problem that we’re driving people into addiction. What’s the connection between the increase in chronic diseases, mental illness and drug addiction in our society today? On this edition, Dr. Gabor Maté talks about the relationship between mind and body health – and what the rise of capitalism has done to destroy both. Special thanks to KPFA in Berkeley, CA.
Dr. Gabor Maté, physician and author of several books including, “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction,” “Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers” (co-authored by Gordon Neufeld), and “When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress.”
What does it mean to say that someone is prejudiced? Are things like racial prejudice or sexism a thing of the past?
Research in social psychology shows that prejudice is much more than thinking negative thoughts or treating people from other groups badly. Prejudice can also be found in our unconscious thoughts and feelings, and can leak out in our unintended actions.
The way that we think about ourselves and our own groups can also create and maintain prejudice and discrimination against others.
While alarming and disappointing to people who do not want to believe they are prejudiced, these new ways of recognizing and understanding prejudice also offer important insights into how we can combat it and reduce inequality.
In this RSA talk Professor Wilson reveals how many conventional psychological therapies and interventions, including most self-help books, can do us more harm than good. Presenting the very latest research, he shows that the key to transforming our lives lies simply in learning to redirect the stories we tell ourselves.
Fusing sociology, psychoanalysis and philosophy, Professor Renata Salecl shows that individual choice is rarely based on a simple rational decision with a predictable outcome.
No passado dia 10 de Abril de 2010, reuniram-se em Pombal cerca de 150 pessoas para participar no colóquio "Transição para uma economia e cultura pós-carbono"
No painel 1, o Prof. Vítor Rodrigues, ajudou-nos a reflectir sobre algumas características do ser humano e da cultura dominante, que dificultam o correcto diagnóstico da situação do mundo.
American culture is homogenizing the way the world goes mad. Our exportation of everything from movies to junk food is a well-documented phenomenon. But neither our golden arches nor our bomb craters represent our most troubling impact on the world: the bulldozing of the human mind itself.
In Crazy Like Us, leading trend-spotter and science writer Ethan Watters shows that we are not only changing the way the world treats and understands mental illness, we are actually changing the symptoms and prevalence of the diseases themselves.
Watters travels the world to illustrate the ways in which Western influences have changed mental illness.
In Hong Kong, he meets teenagers who have learned from American culture that anorexia is the modern way to express distress, and who began refusing food after a wave of Western celebrities and researchers began raising awareness. In Zanzibar, he witnesses a much milder and more bearable form of schizophrenia than what we have in the States.
In Sri Lanka, he sees western crisis counselors bungle the treatment of tsunami victims and actually cause the community more distress.
And in Japan, he tells the story of the drug companies selling depression itself to create a market for a new drug.
It is well known that American culture is a dominant force at home and abroad; our exportation of everything from movies to junk food is a well-documented phenomenon. But is it possible America's most troubling impact on the globalizing world has yet to be accounted for? In Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters reveals that the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself: We are in the process of homogenizing the way the world goes mad.
America has been the world leader in generating new mental health treatments and modern theories of the human psyche. We export our psychopharmaceuticals packaged with the certainty that our biomedical knowledge will relieve the suffering and stigma of mental illness. We categorize disorders, thereby defining mental illness and health, and then parade these seemingly scientific certainties in front of the world. The blowback from these efforts is just now coming to light: It turns out that we have not only been changing the way the world talks about and treats mental illness -- we have been changing the mental illnesses themselves.
For millennia, local beliefs in different cultures have shaped the experience of mental illness into endless varieties. Crazy Like Us documents how American interventions have discounted and worked to change those indigenous beliefs, often at a dizzying rate. Over the last decades, mental illnesses popularized in America have been spreading across the globe with the speed of contagious diseases. Watters travels from China to Tanzania to bring home the unsettling conclusion that the virus is us: As we introduce Americanized ways of treating mental illnesses, we are in fact spreading the diseases.
In post-tsunami Sri Lanka, Watters reports on the Western trauma counselors who, in their rush to help, inadvertently trampled local expressions of grief, suffering, and healing. In Hong Kong, he retraces the last steps of the teenager whose death sparked an epidemic of the American version of anorexia nervosa. Watters reveals the truth about a multi-million-dollar campaign by one of the world's biggest drug companies to change the Japanese experience of depression -- literally marketing the disease along with the drug.
But this book is not just about the damage we've caused in faraway places. Looking at our impact on the psyches of people in other cultures is a gut check, a way of forcing ourselves to take a fresh look at our own beliefs about mental health and healing. When we examine our assumptions from a farther shore, we begin to understand how our own culture constantly shapes and sometimes creates the mental illnesses of our time. By setting aside our role as the world's therapist, we may come to accept that we have as much to learn from other cultures' beliefs about the mind as we have to teach.
segunda-feira, 18 de janeiro de 2010
Albert Bandura is arguably the most eminent living psychologist. His Social Cognitive theory has influenced many areas of inquiry: education, health sciences, social policy and psychotherapy among others. This film presents Dr. Bandura and footage from some of his best-known research such as the BoBo doll experiment, treatment for snake phobias and the use of television dramas to convey positive social messages. Dr. Bandura is a genial host for the film that also includes much footage from abroad showing the universality of his concepts including the analysis of personal efficacy and the social roots of moral behavior. (2003 38 minutes) (This is a 4-minute sample clip from the film) The film is part of the acclaimed GIANTS OF PSYCHOLOGY series from Davidson Films, Inc. that also introduces college students to the work and lives of Mary Ainsworth, John Dewey, Erik Erikson, Maria Montessori, Jean Piaget, B. F. Skinner and Lev Vygotsky
Just 40 years after a famous TIME magazine cover asked "Is God Dead?" the answer appears to be a resounding "No!" According to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life in a recent issue of Foreign Policy magazine, "God is Winning". Religions are increasingly a geopolitical force to be reckoned with. Fundamentalist movements - some violent in the extreme - are growing. Science and religion are at odds in the classrooms and courtrooms. And a return to religious values is widely touted as an antidote to the alleged decline in public morality. After two centuries, could this be twilight for the Enlightenment project and the beginning of a new age of unreason? Will faith and dogma trump rational inquiry, or will it be possible to reconcile religious and scientific worldviews? Can evolutionary biology, anthropology and neuroscience help us to better understand how we construct beliefs, and experience empathy, fear and awe? Can science help us create a new rational narrative as poetic and powerful as those that have traditionally sustained societies? Can we treat religion as a natural phenomenon? Can we be good without God? And if not God, then what?
Harvard psychologist, Dr. Mahzarin R. Banaji, delivers a lecture titled "Paradoxes of Mind & Society" at the Yale University Department of Psychology. Dr. Banaji describes her research into the unconscious prejudices that human beings may carry below the threshold of consciousness. She is also a key contributor for the development of the "Implicit Association Test" (IAT), which is used in a range of experiments to measure the magnitude of prejudices that may lie in the subconscious of the test taker. This video may be viewed in its entirety along with a description and transcript at the following link:
Scientific American Frontiers Host, Alan Alda, speaks with Dr. Mahzarin R. Banaji (Harvard University) and Dr. Brian Nosek (University of Virginia) on how the subconscious mind can influence decision making. They discuss several experiments that use the "Implicit Association Test" (IAT) to reveal hidden gender and racial biases.
Mahzarin R. Banaji's presentation from the 2008 Project on Law and Mind Sciences (PLMS) Conference.
"If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Ideology is like that, psychologically orienting us to hammer (almost) every judgment and decision with it. I will offer data on the conscious and unconscious manner in which the mind so hammers, and its consequences for fairness in law."
For more speaker videos and to find out more about this year's conference, please visit the PLMS website.
Center for Ethics.
HLS Professor [and Situationist contributor] Jon Hanson, who delivered the introduction to the lecture, said Zimbardo “did an amazing job of demonstrating some of the unsettling discoveries of social psychology and their implications for law and policy.” Hanson said feedback from the event was “incredibly positive,” and that PLMS hopes to continue to bring prominent mind scientists, as well as the legal scholars who rely on their work, to the law school.
To view the video, click here
Barry Schwartz presented at the third annual conference on Law and Mind Sciences,The Free Market Mindset: History, Psychology, and Consequences, which took place on March 7, 2009 at Harvard Law School.
He is the Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College. Barry Schwartz studies the relationship between economics and psychology, delivering startling insights into modern life. http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bschwar1/books.html
quarta-feira, 16 de dezembro de 2009
Scientific American Frontiers Host, Alan Alda, speaks with Dr. Mahzarin R. Banaji (Harvard University) and Dr. Brian Nosek (University of Virginia) on how the subconscious mind can influence decision making. They discuss several experiments that use the "Implicit Association Test" (IAT) to reveal hidden gender and racial biases.
Harvard psychologist, Dr. Mahzarin R. Banaji, delivers a lecture titled "Paradoxes of Mind & Society" at the Yale University Department of Psychology. Dr. Banaji describes her research into the unconscious prejudices that human beings may carry below the threshold of consciousness. She is also a key contributor for the development of the "Implicit Association Test" (IAT), which is used in a range of experiments to measure the magnitude of prejudices that may lie in the subconscious of the test taker. This video may be viewed in its entirety along with a description and transcript at the following link.
A landmark text that maintains its relevance and unique approach edition after edition, The Social Animal offers a brief, compelling introduction to modern social psychology. Through vivid narrative, lively presentations of important research, and intriguing examples, Elliot Aronson probes the patterns and motives of human behavior, covering such diverse topics as terrorism, conformity, obedience, politics, race relations, advertising, war, interpersonal attraction, and the power of religious cults.
When you put that set of horrendous work conditions and external factors together, it creates an evil barrel. You could put virtually anybody in it and you're going to get this kind of evil behavior. The Pentagon and the military say that the Abu Ghraib scandal is the result of a few bad apples in an otherwise good barrel. That's the dispositional analysis. The social psychologist in me, and the consensus among many of my colleagues in experimental social psychology, says that's the wrong analysis. It's not the bad apples, it's the bad barrels that corrupt good people. Understanding the abuses at this Iraqi prison starts with an analysis of both the situational and systematic forces operating on those soldiers working the night shift in that 'little shop of horrors.
Research Summary: Analysis of basic mechanisms of human agency through which people exercise control over their level of functioning and events that affect their lives. One line of research is concerned with how people regulate their own motivation, thought patterns, affective states and behavior through beliefs of personal and collective efficacy. A second line of research examines the paramount role of self-regulatory mechanisms relying on internal standards and self-influence in human self-development, adaptation, and change. These mechanisms are studied in the areas of sociocognitive development, affect regulation, health promotion and disease prevention, organizational functioning, and collective action for social change.
Eduardo Galeano: "El mundo se divide en indignos e indignados"
The Crime of Ecocide
http://www.pollyhiggins.com/
"... move away from property laws to trusteeship laws, so rather than I own, to I owe. I owe a duty of care to this planet."
12-year old Victoria Grant explains why Canada (her homeland) and most of the world, is in debt.
"How the Media Frames Political Issues" by Scott London
In The Emergence of American Political Issues (1977) McCombs and Shaw state that the most important effect of the mass media is "its ability to mentally order and organize our world for us. In short, the mass media may not be successful in telling us what to think, but they are stunningly successful in telling us what to think about."[13] The presidential observer Theodore White corroborates this conclusion in The Making of a President (1972):
The power of the press in America is a primordial one. It sets the agenda of public discussion; and this sweeping political power is unrestrained by any law. It determines what people will talk and think about - an authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties and mandarins.[14]
McCombs and Shaw also note that the media's tendency to structure voters' perceptions of political reality in effect constitutes a bias: "to a considerable degree the art of politics in a democracy is the art of determining which issue dimensions are of major interest to the public or can be made salient in order to win public support."[15] http://www.scottlondon.com/reports/frames.html
I am just an anonymous citizen who firmly believes that we are the ones we are always waiting for. No saviors, heroes, leaders, gurus, or superior or inferior, we are all equals, and we need to think and behave as if it matters.
