“Mental Notes: Music, Cognition, & the Brain” Symposium – May 23, 5pm

Psychology in Action is proud to announce the second annual Psychology Interdisciplinary Events symposium, Thursday, May 23rd, 2012, from 5 to 7pm in UCLA’s CNSI Auditorium.  The discussion will focus on the intersection of music, psychology, and neuroscience.  The event is completely FREE and open to the general public!  We hope to see you there! Featuring – Dr. …

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How do childhood experiences affect how we interpret facial expressions?

Guest Author: Valentina Park Much of our daily, personal interactions are based on how we interpret the facial expressions of people we meet. On a basic level, when a person smiles we know we made them happy and when they look angry we may have offended them. This type of facial discrimination has become so …

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Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was a Swiss developmental psychologist. While he made many contributions to the field, his most notable is his systematic study of cognitive development. Early psychologists assumed that infants saw the world as a “blooming, buzzing confusion” (William James); Piaget theorized that even the youngest infants were learning how to make sense of …

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DV

The Truth about Domestic Violence: Literature Review

As more and more clients are entering therapy with concerns related to abuse, such as domestic violence incidents, it seems prudent to review how  these issues might play a role in mental health and treatment. The facts on domestic violence are startling. Estimates by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, Bureau of Justice, and Centers …

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How will Big Data shape psychology research?

I’m sure all of you have heard of the Big Data movement going on right now. From the Harvard Business Review to David Brooks in the NY Times, everyone seems to be talking about the power of big data to provide “insights” into the inner workings of the world. Of course as a scientist, recognizing the …

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“Mental Notes: Music, Cognition, & the Brain” Symposium – May 23, 5pmHow do childhood experiences affect how we interpret facial expressions?Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive DevelopmentThe Truth about Domestic Violence: Literature ReviewHow will Big Data shape psychology research?

Graduate Program Interviews: Clinical Psychology

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Careers in Psychology, Clinical Psychology

February 6, 2013

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This post is part of an ongoing series about applicant interview weekends in Psychology departments. Check back for posts about interviews in other areas of Psychology, and visit our Careers in Psychology section.

Interviewing for doctoral programs in clinical psychology can be a nerve-racking process. Here are some tips from current clinical psychology graduate students on questions they asked (or wish they had asked) during interviews and also some questions you should prepare to answer. You may not have an opportunity to ask all of the questions in part 1, and you certainly will not end up answering all of part 2 during your interviews. So identify which topics are most interesting or relevant to you, and start from there! Good luck!

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Graduate Program Interviews: Health Psychology

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Careers in Psychology, Health Psychology and Public Health

February 4, 2013

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This post is part of an ongoing series about applicant interview weekends in Psychology departments. Check back for posts about interviews in other areas of Psychology, and visit our Careers in Psychology section.

So you want to be a Health Psychologist? Here are some tips from current Health graduate
students on questions they asked [or wish they had asked] during interviews as well as questions they were asked by faculty that really got them thinking. Read the rest of this entry »

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New paper by UCLA alums highlights emerging trend in cognitive neuroscience

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Cognition and Perception, Drug Abuse, General Psychology, Interdisciplinary, Neuroscience, Social Psychology

January 30, 2013

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Psychologists aim to better understand the link between internal and external states, that is, between cognitions and behaviors. Behaviors are often clear enough to measure, but accurately capturing the essence of a cognition can be a much fuzzier task. Read the rest of this entry »

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“Silver Linings Playbook” Makes a Hit Film Out of a Risky Concept: A Romantic Comedy about the Mentally Ill

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Clinical Psychology

January 26, 2013

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The promotional poster for the film "Silver Linings Playbook"

[Warning: The following article contains spoilers. If you have not seen the film and do not wish to have key plot points and character dynamics revealed, do not proceed further.]

As discussed in all of my previous posts, dramatizing mental illness and mental health treatment is a risky pursuit. Sometimes the resulting product richly moves and informs, while other times it exploits and misleads.  Perhaps an even riskier venture than dramatizing this topic is milking it for laughs. However, director David O. Russell decided he was up to the challenge, bringing his adaptation of Matthew Quick’s novel Silver Linings Playbook to the big screen this past November. The film mixes elements of several genres, but is ultimately a romantic comedy about a man with bipolar disorder and a woman with borderline personality disorder. The result has been a huge hit with every key sector. The Hollywood elite just rewarded it with 8 Oscar nominations and gave it the distinction of being the first film in 31 years (since Reds, Warren Beatty’s epic about Russian communism) to receive an Oscar nomination in every major category (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and all four acting categories). Critics have been kind as well, heralding the film as one of the best of the year. Audiences, too, have been enthused. The film has already earned nearly $80 million at the global box office (which is an enormous profit for a film that only cost $21 million to produce). There seems to be consensus that Silver Linings Playbook is a great film. But how does it fare as a portrayal of mental illness?

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Classic Psychology Experiments: Claude Steele’s Stereotype Threat Paradigm

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Classic Psychology Experiments, Education, Social Psychology

January 23, 2013

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This post is part of our new ongoing series exploring classic experiments in the history of psychological research.

In the late 1980s, a university committee at the University of Michigan called for psychology professor Dr. Claude Steele to tackle the problem of academic achievement among minority students at the university. His subsequent research resulted in the discovery and identification of one of the most far-reaching and influential phenomena in social psychology: stereotype threat, or the fear of confirming negative stereotypes about a group to which one belongs.

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Classic Psychology Experiments: James Pennebaker’s Expressive Writing Paradigm

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Classic Psychology Experiments, Health Psychology and Public Health

January 11, 2013

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This post is part of our new ongoing series exploring classic experiments in the history of psychological research.

While research first conducted in the late 1980s may not seem like a “classic,” James Pennebaker’s writing paradigm was an important contribution to the young field of health psychology at the time and continues to be used today to explore connections between disclosure and physical and mental health and to generate hypotheses about other psychological phenomena.

Pennebaker began his research with an interest in the impact of traumatic experiences on physical and mental health. We often think of physical and mental health problems as common consequences of trauma. However, many, or even most, people who experience trauma do not experience such problems. Pennebaker was interested in why not; what is it about these people or their experiences that makes them resilient to the potential consequences of trauma? He had a hunch that expressing their feelings and thoughts about the traumatic event in words enabled people to avoid or improve problems with mental and physical health.

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Are genetics destiny for psychiatric disorders?

Categories:

Clinical Psychology, Developmental Psychology, General Psychology, Interdisciplinary, Neuroscience

November 26, 2012

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Are genetics destiny? Simplistic thinkers may say so, but what scientists are learning is that, though many traits are heritable (e.g., height, extraversion, IQ), it is difficult to find a “gene” for the vast majority of traits. At the completion of the human genome project, there were high hopes that single genes could be located that are associated with human behavior, and in particular disease. With 70 percent of genes being expressed in the brain, genes are a good place to look to find potential causes, and more likely, risk factors, for psychiatric disorders. Psychologists and psychiatrists have long known that mental health is complicated, it changes across time, and in response to experience. Thus, a 1:1 ratio for gene to disorder is extremely unlikely.

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Infants Learn to Walk by Learning to Fall

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Developmental Psychology, General Psychology

November 22, 2012

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When a baby starts to fall, our natural instincts tell us to protect them and quickly catch them.  In general, parents’ instincts are to catch their children before they “fall” in many aspects in life.  But, as with many things that require you to fail before you can succeed, infants need to learn to fall before they can learn how to walk.  Researchers at New York University directed by Dr. Karen Adolph have conducted research just recently published in Psychological Science that demonstrates this important pattern of learning (Adolph et al., 2012).

 

Adolph and her colleagues set out to try to answer the fundamental question: why do experienced crawlers walk?  If an infant is an excellent crawler and can get around perfectly well from a stable four-prong position, why then would the infant take a risk to start locomoting by using such an unstable, risky, and unknown method such as walking?  This is actually a familiar pattern with many developments through infancy and childhood- many times, children will adopt new strategies for executing something that is initially more difficult than their current strategy.  As of now, there is no unified theory about why children might be motivated to make these changes.

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Social Learning: What do children learn from screens?

Categories:

Developmental Psychology, General Psychology, Health Psychology and Public Health, Social Psychology

November 6, 2012

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Beginning early in development, children learn from watching others and through social interaction.  Do children learn about the social world when they watch screens, and can that compare with real life?

Social interaction is an important pathway towards learning social cognition throughout the lifespan, but may be particularly critical in the first few years of life.   As of 2011, a nationwide survey of children under eight found that, in America, two thirds of 0- to 1-year olds have watched TV, and 37% do so at least once every day; moreover, nearly one in three children under one year of age have a TV in their bedroom (Common Sense Media, 2011). Because media are in children’s learning environments from such an early age, they are an important influence on burgeoning social cognition  (Greenfield, 2009a; Rideout et al., 2010). Read the rest of this entry »

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The Psychology of Film Music

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Cognition and Perception, General Psychology, Interdisciplinary, Social Psychology

November 5, 2012

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Have you ever seen a movie which has a great musical score? Wondered how film composers and music directors write and choose music to enhance the images and make the whole experience more powerful? Dr. Roger Kendall, a UCLA Ethnomusicology professor with degrees in music and psychology, studies what makes a “good” match between motion pictures and music in film. Read the rest of this entry »

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