Jenni Russell’s article for the Guardian newspaper that appeared on 6th December 2003 raises contemporary problems in social interactions. She laments the fact that as individual, isolated consumers of a capitalist society, people are gradually losing their humanity. In its place, they are acquiring rather unsavory social tendencies, the most blatant of which is lack…
Category: Psychology
Normal & Abnormal within the Psychoanalytical, Biological, Behavioral, Cognitive, Sociocultural & Humanist perspectives
The definition of mental illnesses is a complex and controversial subject, where there is no universal consensus yet. The disagreements are not only at the level of different perspectives such as psychoanalytical, medical, socio-cultural, etc, but are evident within them as well. Since mental illnesses don’t lend themselves to physiologic proofs such as blood tests…
What makes Margaret Mead so important in Anthropological circles?
It is fair to say that Margaret Mead is one of the most influential cultural anthropologists of the century gone by. Although some of her inferences have been proven to be flawed, she is a pioneer in the field who opened new vistas within the field of anthropology. In the documentary videos about her life…
A perspective on The History of Love by Nicole Krauss:
Rubric: One of your peers made the claim that rather than being about “The History of Love,” this novel is largely about the history of loss. Argue for or against this assertion. Whether you support or refute this claim, be sure to explain the significance of yours. The History of Love: A Novel is the second…
Can we really trust our senses and the interpretation of sensory data to give us an accurate view of the world?
The human sensory faculties, in addition to the processing power of the brain, play a vital and definitive role in how knowledge is acquired. The five major sensory faculties are sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch. Cognition is the higher faculty that integrates and interprets inputs from these five senses. But what is also interesting…
First-borns V Later-borns
Conventional knowledge, as gathered from history, mythology and literature, has always differentiated human personality types based on the birth order. But it is only in the recent century that scientific evidence is brought to bear on the subject. Today, based upon numerous surveys and scholarly studies conducted on the subject, it is fairly clear that…
What is Cognitive Dissonance?
First coined by social psychologist Leon Festinger in his 1956 book When Prophecy Fails, Cognitive Dissonance describes the state of conflict arising in the human mind as it tries to accommodate two opposing realities. This concept is best illustrated through Aesop’s fable of the hungry wolf. As the wolf’s attempts to get hold of the…
Philosopher Alan Watts’ views on ‘love’
“Love is always something more and something different than can be captured by any single definition” (Watts, 2002). Love is a universal phenomenon of life. Where ever life exists, love manifests there. Love can take various configurations too. While romantic love is the most publicised and celebrated type, parental love, sibling love and compassionate love…
A psychophilosophical perspective on Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Ambrose Bierce’s short story titled An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is one of the classics of the art form. The story could be read from several different angles, such as the social, cultural, psychological, political, etc. First, the American Civil War of the 1860s provides the political angle. Second is the cultural angle, whereby…
Reading Response to Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is a popular science book published in 2005. The subject is the ‘human adaptive unconscious’, which is the cognitive phenomenon behind quick, frequent and automatic processes in the mind. Gladwell’s central thesis is that our minds can make fairly accurate judgments, without consuming much time and information. Gladwell…