New Books in Psychology
1,038 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 2 months ago - ★★★★ - 44 ratingsInterviews with Psychologists about their New Books
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Episodes
Diane Ehrensaft, “The Gender Creative Child: Pathways for Nurturing and Supporting Children Who Live Outside Gender Boxes” (The Experiment, 2016)
September 07, 2016 14:33 - 1 hourThe gender binary is recently giving way to gender infinity, and our youngest members of society are both driving and benefiting from this evolution. They’re finding novel ways of expressing their true gender identities, whether or not those match what’s on their birth certificates. But the journeys of these gender creative children are often bumpy, as they encounter psychological, physical, and even legal challenges. This all raises important question for these children’s parents, teachers, ...
Martha Nussbaum, “Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice” (Oxford UP, 2016)
September 01, 2016 10:00 - 1 hourAnger is among the most familiar phenomena in our moral lives. It is common to think that anger is an appropriate, and sometimes morally required, emotional response to wrongdoing and injustice. In fact, our day-to-day lives are saturated with inducements not only to become angry, but to embrace the idea that anger is morally righteous. However, at the same time, were all familiar with the ways in which anger can go morally wrong. We know that anger can eat away at us; it can render us morall...
Carol Gignoux, “Your Innovator Brain: The Truth About ADHD” (Balboa Press, 2016)
August 26, 2016 14:12 - 1 hourWhat exactly is ADHD, and is it time to update our ideas about it? In her new book, Your Innovator Brain: The Truth About ADHD (Balboa Press, 2016), Carol Gignoux turns our ideas about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder on their head and introduces a strengths-based rather than deficits-based perspective on this brain type. In her forty-plus years coaching individuals with ADHD, Gignoux has witnessed how ADHD stigma stymies these individuals’ creativity and self-esteem. They often adop...
Jonathan Garb, “Yearnings of the Soul: Psychological Thought in Modern Kabbalah” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015)
August 22, 2016 10:00 - 30 minutesIn Yearnings of the Soul: Psychological Thought in Modern Kabbalah (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Jonathan Garb, the Gershom Scholem Professor in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explores the rich psychological tradition in modern Kabbalah and modern mysticism. Tracing Kabbalistic writing from sixteenth-century Safed to contemporary New York, he shows how both psychoanalysis and modern Kabbalah have been expressions of the process of modernization....
Mark Borg, et. al. “Irrelationship: How We Use Dysfunctional Relationships to Hide from Intimacy” (Central Recovery Press, 2015)
July 16, 2016 20:56 - 1 hourWhy do relationship partners so often feel isolated and unsatisfied despite all their efforts to show love and caring to one another? And how do they break out of the self-defeating cycles that get them there? In their new book, Irrelationship: How We Use Dysfunctional Relationships to Hide from Intimacy (Central Recovery Press, 2015), Mark Borg, Grant Brenner, and Daniel Berry address these daunting questions. They explain how parental disappointments during childhood can set one up for a li...
Sabine Arnaud, “On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015)
July 05, 2016 17:20 - 1 hourSabine Arnaud‘s new book explores a history of discursive practices that played a role in the construction of hysteria as pathology. On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820 (University of Chicago Press, 2015) considers a wide range of issues that are both specific to the particular history of hysteria, and more broadly applicable to the history medicine. Arnaud pays special attention to the role played by language in the definition of any medical category, basin...
Samuel Morris Brown, “Through the Valley of Shadows: Living Wills, Intensive Care, and Making Medicine Human” (Oxford University Press, 2016)
June 29, 2016 04:00 - 1 hourConversations about death during hospitalization are among the most difficult imaginable: the moral weight of a human life is suspended by stressful conversations in which medical knowledge and personal context must be negotiated. In Through the Valley of Shadows: Living Wills, Intensive Care, and Making Medicine Human (Oxford University Press, 2016), Samuel Morris Brown approaches the problem of end-of-life care with a clinician’s eye and a scholar of religion’s touch. The book places advan...
Saul J. Weiner and Alan Schwartz, “Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care” (Oxford University Press 2016)
June 22, 2016 04:00 - 1 hourWhen clinicians listen to patients, what do they hear? In Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care (Oxford UP, 2016), Saul Weiner and Alan Schwartz provide a riveting account of a decade of research on improving outcomes by incorporating patients’ individual life contexts into planning of care. Their groundbreaking studies showed that physicians, while getting the biological details largely correct, frequently disregard personal circumstances that lead to medical...
Roy Fox, “Facing the Sky: Composing Through Trauma in Word and Image” (Parlor, 2015)
May 17, 2016 11:14 - 48 minutesAll of us experience trauma at various points throughout our lives. On one end of the spectrum, we have negative experiences from which we tend to think we can recover quickly. This might include a fight with a friend or an hurtful comment made in passing. On the other end of the spectrum, we have those experiences that induce so much anger, sadness, fear, or disgust that we readily acknowledge our difficulty moving forward. These are everything from the death of loved one to the diagnosis of...
Emily Troscianko, “Kafka’s Cognitive Realism” (Routledge, 2014)
May 02, 2016 10:46 - 39 minutesIn her first monograph, Kafka’s Cognitive Realism (Routledge, 2014), Emily Troscianko set out to answer a brief, cogent question: “Why is Kafka so brilliant? Why do I still want to read his work after all this time? It’s a good question. Even today, Kafka’s fiction retains a felt strangeness, the “Kafkaesque,” a quality Dr. Troscianko calls “both compelling and unsettling.” His stories have had an enduring readership, sustaining critical attention for over a century. This was what Troscianko ...
Rebecca Lemov, “Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity” (Yale University Press, 2015)
April 27, 2016 15:08 - 55 minutesRebecca Lemov‘s beautifully written Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (Yale University Press, 2015) is at once an exploration of mid-century social science through paths less traveled and the tale of a forgotten future. The book is anchored around the story of Harvard-trained social scientist Bert Kaplan, who embarked on, in her words, a dizzyingly ambitious 1950s-era project to capture peoples dreams in large amounts and store them in an experimental data bank. While uni...
Heather Vacek, “Madness: American Protestant Responses to Mental Illness” (Baylor UP, 2015)
March 30, 2016 00:10 - 1 hourShould the member of a Christian congregation be injured in a car accident, that person will likely be the subject of public prayers and hospitality. But if that same person suffers a mental breakdown, reactions will likely be much more complex and awkward. In her fascinating book, Madness: American Protestant Responses to Mental Illness (Baylor University Press, 2015), Dr. Heather Vacek examines how American Protestants have struggled with the problem of mental illness, and how their relatio...
Colette Soler, “Lacanian Affects: The Function of Affect in Lacan’s Work”, trans. Bruce Fink (Routledge, 2016)
March 14, 2016 15:36 - 58 minutesAffect is a weighty and consequential problem in psychoanalysis. People enter treatment hoping for relief from symptoms and their attendant unbearable affects. While various theorists and schools offer differing approaches to “feeling states,” emotions, and affects, Lacan, despite devoting an entire seminar to anxiety, often is charged with completely ignoring affect. This misperception stems in part from a caricatured understanding of Lacanian technique – a suspicion that it consists mainly ...
Prakash Mondal, “Language, Mind and Computation” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
February 17, 2016 11:19 - 54 minutesMy instinct as a researcher is usually to shy away from confrontation about foundational issues in the philosophy of language, which is probably why I do what I do (that is to say, from a generative perspective, not linguistics). With a few notable exceptions, it’s my impression that researchers tend either to keep quiet about their skepticism about some foundational matters, or to gravitate towards fields in which those issues are moot. In this respect,Prakash Mondal‘s approach inLanguage, M...
Ronald Chase, “Schizophrenia: A Brother Finds Answers in Biological Science” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013)
January 26, 2016 07:51 - 58 minutesIn his book, Schizophrenia: A Brother Finds Answers in Biological Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), biologist Ronald Chase explores the frequently misunderstood condition through an engaging combination of scientific exploration and personal memoir. In recounting the life of his older brother, Jim, who was a bright young graduate student at UCLA when his episodes began to intensify, Chase tells the story of how the treatment of schizophrenia has changed since the 1950s, connecti...
George Makari, “Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind” (Norton, 2014)
January 20, 2016 07:12 - 55 minutesIn his new book Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind (Norton, 2014), the psychoanalyst and innovative historian, George Makari speaks to us about the dramatic history of the invention of the concept of the mind. Beginning at the origins of modernity, Makari takes the reader on a wild ride across the European continent in a search for answers about the nature of human inner life. Hardly a sedate academic debate, the history of the mind is a history soaked in blood. Heretical ideas c...
Abram de Swaan, “The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder” (Yale UP, 2015)
January 11, 2016 14:25 - 1 hourFor a couple of decades, scholars have moved toward a broad consensus that context, rather than ideology, is most important in pushing ordinary men and women to participate in mass murder. The “situationist paradigm,” as Abram de Swaan labels this, concludes from studies by psychologists, sociologists, historians and others, that individuals are malleable, easily influenced by their surroundings, easily enough that they can be moved to do things that, in other contexts, would be easily recogn...
Erik Linstrum, “Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire” (Harvard UP, 2016)
December 30, 2015 19:54 - 58 minutesIn Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire (Harvard University Press, 2016), Erik Linstrum examines how the field of psychology was employed in the service of empire. Linstrum explores the careers of scientists sent to the South Pacific, India, and Africa to verify and define characteristics of white racial superiority. Far from confirming the inferiority of the colonized, psychologists exposed flaws in Britain’s civilizing mission, often doubting or subverting its underlying assumpti...
Christopher Bollas, “When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia” (Yale University Press, 2015)
December 21, 2015 13:42 - 55 minutesIn his second visit with New Books in Psychoanalysis, Christopher Bollas elucidates his thinking about schizophrenia. But he also does more than that; because his beginnings as a clinician are intimately intertwined with the treatment of psychosis, the ways in which this early exposure colors all of his clinical thinking becomes apparent. Indeed, in psychoanalysis we could say that there are two kinds of clinicians–those who treat psychosis and those who don’t. Bollas is clearly in the forme...
Darian Leader, “Strictly Bipolar” (Penguin, 2013)
November 03, 2015 13:01 - 40 minutesTo those unfamiliar with psychodiagnostics, Bipolar 3.5 might sound like the latest Apple software. To psychoanalyst Darian Leader it is indicative of the relatively recent proliferation and growing elasticity of bipolar disorders. For about the last twenty years, argues Leader, the bipolar spectrum has been tailored to a pharmaceutical industry eager to shift attention away from ineffective antidepressants and toward newly developed mood stabilizers. A household word since the mid-1990s, “bi...
Lisa Tessman, “Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality” (Oxford UP, 2015)
November 01, 2015 06:00 - 1 hourMoral theories are often focused almost exclusively on answering the question, “What ought I do?” Typically, theories presuppose that for any particular agent under any given circumstance, there indeed is some one thing that she ought to do. And if she were indeed to do this thing, she would thereby morally succeed. But we know from experience that our moral lives involve moral dilemmas. These are cases in which it seems that moral success is not possible because every action available to us ...
Dana Suskind, “Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain”
October 13, 2015 14:12 - 36 minutesWe may disagree about whether phonics or whole language is the better approach to reading instruction or whether bilingual education or English immersion is the better way to support English language learners. Whatever our opinions are, they are founded on the perceived immediate impact on students in school. But how might the way we use language with children years before they enter school affect their academic potential? Does it have the ability to improve more than their vocabulary? Can it...
Eugene Raikhel, Todd Meyers, Emily Yates-Doerr, “Somatosphere.net”
October 13, 2015 13:56 - 1 hourSomatosphere is “a collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural psychiatry, psychology and bioethics.” Founded in July 2008, Somatosphere has evolved into an innovative platform for collaborative experiments, interdisciplinary exchange, and intellectual community. As such, it reveals how websites–and the communities of discourse that create and read them–have become important sites of intellectual production, authorship, an...
M. Chirimuuta, “Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy” (MIT Press, 2015)
September 15, 2015 06:00 - 1 hourWhat is color? On the one hand it seems obvious that it is a property of objects – roses are red, violets are blue, and so on. On the other hand, even the red of a single petal of a rose differs in different lighting conditions or when seen from different angles, and the basic physical elements that make up the rose don’t have colors. So is color instead a property of a mental state, or a relation between a perceiving mind and an object? In Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of ...
Cass Sunstein, “Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice” (Oxford UP, 2015)
September 01, 2015 06:00 - 1 hourThe political tradition of liberalism tends to associate political liberty with the individual’s freedom of choice. The thought is that political freedom is intrinsically tied to the individual’s ability to select one’s own path in life – to choose one’s occupation, one’s values, one’s hobbies, one’s possessions, and so on – without the intrusion or supervision of others. John Stuart Mill, who held a version of this view, argued that it is in choosing for ourselves that we develop not only se...
Carolyn Pedwell, “Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
August 27, 2015 13:12 - 1 hourWhat are the multiple meanings, ambivalences, possible risks, and potentials for transformation that arise from interrogating empathy on a transnational scale? Carolyn Pedwell (University of Kent) thinks through these complex questions in her new book, Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). The book ambitiously traverses multiple disciplinary and intellectual boundaries, drawing together feminist and anti-racist social theory, media and cultural...
William Davies, “The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being” (Verso, 2015)
August 18, 2015 17:12 - 44 minutesAre you happy? In his new book The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (Verso, 2015), William Davies, a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, critically investigates this question. The book offers skepticism towardsthe demand that economy and society be happy, skepticism founded in an interrogation of the practices of contemporary government and businesses. A whole range of our everyday experiences, including ‘nudges’ for citizens...
Chad Engelland, “Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind” (MIT Press, 2015)
August 14, 2015 06:00 - 1 hourHow do we learn our first words? What is it that makes the linguistic intentions of others manifest to us, when our eyes follow a pointing finger to an object and associate that object with a word? Chad Engelland addresses these and related questions in Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 2015). Engelland, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Dallas, explores the way in which ostension crosses the Cartesian boundary between body and mind. Drawing o...
Helen de Cruz and Johan de Smedt, “A Natural History of Natural Theology” (MIT Press, 2015)
June 15, 2015 06:00 - 1 hourIn A Natural History of Natural Theology: The Cognitive Science of Theology and Philosophy of Religion (MIT Press, 2015), Helen de Cruz of the VU University Amsterdam and Johan de Smedt of Ghent University examine how the findings of cognitive science can and cannot be used to draw conclusions about the rationality of religious belief. They examine the types and role of the cognitive processes at work in these arguments, such as cause and effect and inference to the best explanation. They als...
J. Bronsteen, C. Buccafusco, and J. S. Masur, “Happiness and the Law” (U Chicago Press, 2014)
May 12, 2015 16:11 - 43 minutesIn their new book Happiness and the Law (University of Chicago Press 2014), John Bronsteen, Christopher Buccafusco, and Jonathan S. Masur argue through the use of hedonic psychological data that we should consider happiness when determining the best ways to effectuate law. In this podcast Buccafusco, Associate Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for Empirical Studies of Intellectual Property at the Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College, shares some of the following ...
Matthew M. Heaton, “Black Skin, White Coats” (Ohio UP, 2013)
April 27, 2015 11:50 - 1 hourIn Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry (Ohio University Press, 2013), Matthew M. Heaton explores changes in psychiatric theory and practice during the decolonization of European empires in Africa in the mid-twentieth century. His story follows the transcultural Nigerian psychiatrists who tried to transform the discourse around and treatment of mental illness in both their local contexts and in global psychiatric circles. The dec...
Wayne Wu, “Attention” (Routledge, 2014)
April 15, 2015 06:00 - 1 hourThe mental phenomenon of attention is often thought of metaphorically as a kind of spotlight: we focus our attention on a particular item or task, our attention is divided or diffused when we try to text and drive at the same time, and our attention is captured when we suddenly hear our name pop out from the conversational hubbub of a noisy party. But what is attention? How seriously should we take this or other metaphors as giving us insight into the nature of attention? In Attention (Routle...
Rick Strassman, “DMT and the Soul of Prophecy” (Park Street Press, 2014)
March 15, 2015 06:01 - 1 hourDMT and the Soul of Prophecy:A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible (Park Street Press, 2014) asks a number of provocative questions about drugs, consciousness, prophecy, and the Hebrew Bible–with attention to how a particular chemical can help us understand mystical experience. DMT (dimethyltryptamine) is a molecule endogenous to several mammals including humans, as well as the active psychedelic ingredient in a number of plant species around the world–most notably in an A...
Donna J. Drucker, “The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge” (University of Pittsburg Press, 2014)
March 10, 2015 13:50 - 1 hourDonna J. Drucker is a guest professor at Darmstadt Technical University in Germany. Her book The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge (University of Pittsburg Press, 2014) is an in-depth and detailed study of Kinsey’s scientific approach. The book examines his career and method of gathering vast amounts of data, identifying patterns, and interpretation that was critical to his most influential works Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior...
Evan Thompson, “Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy” (Columbia UP, 2014)
February 15, 2015 06:00 - 1 hourThe quest for an explanation of consciousness is currently dominated by scientific efforts to find the neural correlates of conscious states, on the assumption that these states are dependent on the brain. A very different way of exploring consciousness is undertaken within various Indian religious traditions, in which subtle states of consciousness and transitions between such states can be revealed through meditation. In Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Medit...
Joelle Proust, “The Philosophy of Metacognition: Mental Agency and Self-Awareness” (Oxford University Press, 2014)
December 15, 2014 16:33 - 1 hourMetacognition is cognition about cognition – what we do when we assess our cognitive states, such as wondering whether we’ve remembered a phone number correctly. In The Philosophy of Metacognition: Mental Agency and Self-Awareness (Oxford University Press, 2014) Joelle Proust considers the nature of metacognition from a naturalistic perspective, drawing on recent psychological research as well as a range of philosophical work in philosophy of mind and philosophy of action. In this erudite and...
Anne Jaap Jacobson, “Keeping the World in Mind” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
August 15, 2014 06:00 - 1 hourSome theorists in the cognitive sciences argue that the sciences of the mind don’t need or use a concept of mental representation. In her new book, Keeping the World in Mind: Mental Representations and the Science of the Mind (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Anne Jaap Jacobson, Professor of Philosophy and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Houston, argues that what is needed is a different kind of theory of what mental representations are, one that reflects the way the notion...
Marcin Milkowski, “Explaining the Computational Mind” (MIT Press, 2013)
July 15, 2014 06:00 - 1 hourThe computational theory of mind has its roots in Alan Turing’s development of the basic ideas behind computer programming, specifically the manipulation of symbols according to rules. That idea has been elaborated since in a number of very different ways, but in some form it remains a core idea of the cognitive sciences today. In Explaining the Computational Mind (MIT Press, 2013), Marcin Milkowski, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy of Mind of the Polish Academ...
Elizabeth Lunbeck, “The Americanization of Narcissism” (Harvard University Press, 2014)
June 20, 2014 11:16 - 1 hour“It is a commonplace of social criticism that America has become, over the past half century or so, a nation of narcissists.” From this opening, Elizabeth Lunbeck‘s new book proceeds to offer a fascinating narrative of how this came to be, exploring the entwined histories of narcissism, psychoanalysis, and modernity in 20th and 21st century America. Narcissism permeated 1970s discourse on America, its decline, the relationship of that decline to material consumption, and the physical and emo...
Jakob Hohwy, “The Predictive Mind” (Oxford UP, 2014)
June 15, 2014 06:00 - 1 hourThe prediction error minimization hypothesis is the first grand unified empirical theory about how the brain implements the mind. The hypothesis, which is as bold as it is controversial, proposes to explain the mind via one core mechanism: a process of comparing predicted sensory input with actual input, updating our hypotheses in light of the difference, and generating new predictions. In The Predictive Mind (Oxford University Press), Jakob Hohwy introduces this theory to a wider audience, d...
Sharon K. Farber, “Hunger for Ecstasy: Trauma, the Brain, and the Influence of the Sixties” (Aronson, 2013)
May 20, 2014 14:09 - 1 hourIt may seem silly to ask why we seek ecstasy. We seek it, of course, because it’s ECSTASY. We are evolved to want it. It’s our brain’s way of saying “Do this again and as often as possible.” But there’s more to it than that. For one thing, there are many ways to get to ecstasy, and some of them are very harmful: cutting, starving, and, of course, drug-taking. These things may render an ecstatic state, but they will also kill you. Moreover, many of the ecstasy-inducing activities and substance...
Paula A. Michaels, “Lamaze: An International History” (Oxford UP, 2014)
May 16, 2014 11:00 - 1 hourThe twentieth-century West witnessed a revolution in childbirth. Before that time, most women gave birth at home and were attended by family members and midwives. The process was usually terribly painful for the mother. Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, doctors started to “medicalize” childbirth. Physicians began to think of ways to ease the pain of childbirth. Two main options were explored. One–drugs–is quite familiar to us, for it is the primary tool used by doctors to make w...
Benjamin Radcliff, “The Political Economy of Happiness” (Cambridge UP, 2013)
May 01, 2014 15:18 - 1 hourAmericans are very politically divided. Democrats say we need a more powerful welfare state while Republicans say we need to maintain the free market. The struggle, we are constantly informed, is one of ideas. And that it is in the worst possible sense, for neither the Democrats nor Republicans seem interested in evidence. They don’t want the facts to get in the way of their arguments. In his remarkable book The Political Economy of Human Happiness: How Voters’ Choices Determine the Quality ...
Adrienne Martin, “How We Hope: A Moral Psychology” (Princeton UP, 2013)
April 01, 2014 06:00 - 47 minutesFrom political campaigns to sports stadiums and hospital rooms, the concept of hope is pervasive. And the story we tend to tell ourselves about hope is that it is intrinsically a good thing — in many ways we still tend to think of hope as a kind of virtue. Hence we talk about hopes being dashed or crushed; and we speak as if losing hope is an unmitigated bad. We also talk about false hope, which is a kind of misfortune rather than a blemish on hope’s moral ledger. Hope is deeply bound up with...
Aneta Pavlenko, “The Bilingual Mind And What It Tells Us about Language and Thought” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
March 29, 2014 14:08 - 45 minutesBig ideas about language often ignore, or abstract away from, the individual’s capacity to learn more than one language. In a world where the majority of human beings are bilingual, is this kind of idealization desirable? Is it useful, or necessary? Aneta Pavlenko‘s book The Bilingual Mind And What It Tells Us about Language and Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2014), covers a range of issues in the relationship between language and cognition, and its core thesis is that study of the mon...
George E. Vaillant, “Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study” (Harvard UP, 2012)
March 27, 2014 16:52 - 51 minutesThere are very few studies like the Harvard Grant Study. Started in 1938, it has been following its approximately 200 participants ever since, analyzing their physical and mental health and assessing which factors are correlated with healthy living and healthy aging. One of the psychiatrists of the study is George E. Vaillant, who was a young man in 1966 when he joined the research group, and has now written Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (Harvard University Pres...
John Hibbing et al., “Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences” (Routledge, 2013)
February 24, 2014 06:00 - 21 minutesJohn Hibbing, Kevin Smith, and John Alford are the authors of Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences (Routledge, 2013). Hibbing is professor of political science and psychology at the University of Nebraska, Smith is professor of political science at the University of Nebraska, and Alford is associate professor of political science at Rice University. Predisposed approaches the difference between liberals and conservatives from the perspective of physi...
Carlo C. DiClemente, “Substance Abuse Treatment and the Stages of Change: Selecting and Planning Interventions” (Guilford Press, 2013)
February 20, 2014 18:21 - 1 hourIn this episode, I talk with Carlo C. DiClemente, a Presidential Research Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland- Baltimore County, about his co-authored book, Substance Abuse Treatment and the Stages of Change: Selecting and Planning Interventions (Guilford Press, 2013). We examine the stages-of-change model (also known as the transtheoretical model) in behavioral change, particularly in substance abuse and drug addiction treatment. We discuss the complexity ...
Michael Pettit, “The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
February 19, 2014 05:00 - 55 minutesParapsychology. You may have heard of it. You know, telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis. Spoon-bending and that sort of thing. If you have heard of it, you probably think of it as a pseudoscience. And indeed it is. But it wasn’t always so. There was a time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when practitioners and advocates of parapsychology abounded. William James, one of the very founders of modern psychological science, was a fan. Most of the founders of m...
Alistair Knott, “Sensorimotor Cognition and Natural Language Syntax” (MIT Press, 2012)
January 28, 2014 12:47 - 53 minutesWhen big claims are made about neurolinguistics, there often seems to be a subtext that the latest findings will render traditional linguistics obsolete. These claims are often met with appropriate scepticism by experienced linguistics practitioners, either because experience tells them not to believe the hype, or (in a few cases) because they were already obsolete and were managing just fine anyway. Alistair Knott‘s claim in Sensorimotor Cognition and Natural Language Syntax (MIT Press, 2012...