Departments

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psychology

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    4/26/2021

    The Tyranny of the Female-Orgasm Industrial Complex

    The writer's personal experiences, in light of a historical review of ideas about female sexuality, suggests that more knowledge has reinforced the social control of women by making pleasure obligatory rather than prohibited (Note: contains frank, explicit and extensive discussions of sexual activity).

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    2/16/2021

    Can Historians Be Traumatized by History? (Content Warning)

    by James Robins

    "If the historian—the very person supposed to process the past on behalf of everyone else—struggles with trauma, then it is little surprise that societies as a whole struggle to face the violence of how they were formed and how they prevailed."

  • 12/20/2020

    The Psychology of Election Denial

    by Robert Brent Toplin

    The Republican response to the election results is a lesson in the mental mechanics of cognitive dissonance. 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    12/14/2020

    How Civilization Broke Our Brains

    The anthropologist James Suzman's book evaluates the ravages of modern capitalist civilization – in particular, the institution of work –  on individual and collective psychology. 

  • 6/28/2020

    Those We Abuse, We Loathe

    by J. Chester Johnson

    Until white Americans reckon with the significance of white supremacy in America, they will deflect a sense of responsibility by laying blame for black suffering on black Americans themselves. 

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    3/30/2020

    The History of Loneliness

    by Jill Lepore

    Until a century or so ago, almost no one lived alone; now many endure shutdowns and lockdowns on their own. How did modern life get so lonely?

  • 2-1-15

    The Complex History of Pain: An Interview with Joanna Bourke

    by Robin Lindley

    In her groundbreaking new book "The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers," renowned British historian Joanna Bourke explores how the understanding of the human sensation of pain has evolved over the past three centuries in the English-speaking world.

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    7-18-13

    Louis René Beres: What Does It Mean to Kill for a Cause?

    Louis René Beres is a professor of political science at Purdue University and the author of multiple books.Before any country can fashion an effective counter-terrorism policy, it needs a clear and purposeful understanding of "the enemy." For the United States, especially after discovering so-many behavioral contradictions in the Boston Marathon bombers, an underlying task must be to look more closely and explicitly at issues of normalcy. On the cover of yesterday's Rolling Stone, for instance (which was the source of widespread outcry) Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is both "glamorously" posed and called a "monster."Is it correct to assume that all or most of this country's terrorist foes are "abnormal"? Or does such a position ultimately hinder our urgent national security efforts? Would such an assumption represent little more than a ritualized political obligation -- a purely self-serving and ideologically obligatory policy stance -- or might it still be the considered outcome of rock solid and objective psychological science?

  • SOURCE: NYT
    1-14-13

    Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Psychologist Who Studied Depression in Women, Dies at 53

    Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, a psychologist and writer whose work helped explain why women are twice as prone to depression as men and why such low moods can be so hard to shake, died on Jan. 2 in New Haven. She was 53.Her death followed heart surgery to correct a congenitally weak valve, said her husband, Richard Nolen-Hoeksema.Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema, a professor at Yale University, began studying depression in the 1980s, a time of great excitement in psychiatry and psychology. New drugs like Prozac were entering the market; novel talking therapies were proving effective, too, particularly cognitive behavior therapy, in which people learn to defuse upsetting thoughts by questioning their basis.