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Showing posts with the label psychology

Art or Science-The conception of the human mind?

Carl Jung argued that the mind contained the psyche and this is rooted as deeply as the biological legacy we inherited from thousands of years of evolution. Dr. Raya Jones from the Cardiff School of Social Sciences discusses the differences between the science of the psyche and the science of biology and how these created two fundamentally different arguments within the field.  The mind is created over time and conceptualized as the soul. It is part of our conscious as a people and determines who we are, what we believe, and how we perceive the world. The biological sciences focus more on the empirical view of the body as a collection of wiring, chemistry, and anatomy that makes us physical humans. The problem is that the mind-body connection has never been made scientifically.  Jung also believed in a collective unconscious that is deeper than our individual unconscious. It is something that connects all human beings together through their species. This existence is often

Researchers Find 21 Different Facial Expressions

Researchers at the Ohio State University recently announced that the average human had 21 different facial expressions ( 1 ). Previously people thought there was only anger, happiness, disgust, surprise, sadness and fear. These expressions are considered universal across cultures, religions and races. That list has now been expanded to include more subtle impressions. The recognition is based off of the way the muscles move behind the skin to create an expression ( 3 ). People can generally recognize these emotions based upon the expression a person provides in any given circumstance. Finding 21 different expressions changes the amount of information a person can gain from watching anothers face. Famous philosophers such as Aristotle, Rene Descartes, Leonard Da Vinci and Charles Darwin believed in facial expressions as traits hundreds of years before modern findings. Research has now supported their discoveries originally derived from watching, studying, and artistically r

Book Review: The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

The book The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt moves into the psychology of political parties and political persuasion. People naturally accuse the other parties of not thinking clearly and following logic. Each views the other as duped! Yet in his work, he points out that since there are strong logical arguments that follow most parties, these rational choices are based on their intuition. The logic seems to follow as people find justification for their choices. This makes changing one’s ideological views very difficult for many people.  Jonathan Haidt, University of Virginia social psychologist, believes that people first have intuition and then rational choice. That rational choice is based upon people’s intuition and subject to it. He does not discuss those who can find multiple paths to rationality, understand the various arguments, and find validity in each of these arguments to think critically about ideology. It would require a level of stepping outside oneself withou

Channel Expansion Theory as an Online Biological Extension of Urges

Technology has huge impacts on our daily life and has encouraged new ways of communicating. Such technology is the natural extension of our biological capacities within the environment. Whether we are discussing education, government, social relationships, business development or international relations this technology now dominates our evolutionary developmental process as a powerful new tool. As this technological ability grows in society people will naturally start using this technology in new ways. According to channel expansion theory people will communicate using these new methodologies in order to expand their capabilities of reaching out in the environment.   This reaching out creates new influences on human behaviors through the process of imitation. Most of human behavior is not within our awareness and we have a hard time reflecting on such behavior. Such behavior is below our level of conscious understandings (Barkow et. al., 1992). This means that most people act