Science of the SpiritS


TV

Parasocial relationships: The make-believe bonds with celebrities

Friends
Jaye Derrick has a special relationship with the television sitcom Friends. Years ago, she began to notice a recurring pattern: whenever she had a fight with her boyfriend she would turn on her television and watch reruns of the popular sitcom. From her sofa in Buffalo, New York, Derrick noticed that Ross, Rachel, Joey, Chandler, Monica and Phoebe were beginning to feel like an extended group of friends.

Following the group's zany dramas and misunderstandings with one another—and seeing how they propped each other up—provided Derrick with a sense of support when her own personal life was on the rocks. The show's theme song "I'll be there for you" rung true for her. She soon purchased a DVD box set of the show.

"Watching these episodes seemed to be taking away some of the feelings of rejection or distracting me long enough that the argument wasn't a problem anymore," says Derrick, a social psychology professor at the University of Houston in Texas, who was inspired by her relationship with Friends to study the phenomenon known as parasocial relationships.

Comment: There is nothing wrong with appreciating a certain performer's work but when you turn off the media and find that you're cultivating a fantasy bubble in which you have a fictional relationship with the performer, there's a problem. If done over long periods of time it becomes a means of avoiding reality.


2 + 2 = 4

Want a successful child? Try homeschooling

homeschooled girl
Nowadays, many parents choose for their kids to be taught from home instead of enrolling them into the traditional school settings. This decision often comes from the parents that prefer to place the responsibility of quality education on themselves, so if you are one of those parents, keep reading. Even though some people view it as super intense parenting, spending more time with your children is a reasonable decision that can be understood. Several years ago, we did not enjoy such technological progress that allowed us to teach from home, but now that we do, more and more parents choose to use this option, says Mitchell Stevens, a Stanford University professor. According to Mr. Stevens, this method is widely popular in America at the moment due to the availability of resources on the Internet that increase the quality of homeschooling.

There are a lot of reasons parents choose to teach their children from home. For example, issues with convenience, transportation, teaching quality of the local school, or a poor learning environment that does not challenge the child and therefore cannot produce desired outcomes. Also, the child might have special needs that can be met only at home, where the atmosphere is relaxed. Despite the reason, in many cases, homeschooling can be the source of numerous benefits in making the child smart and successful. These benefits were highlighted in the Academic Statistics on Homeschooling that showed that students who were taught at home performed better than the ones educated in the traditional classroom. Let's review some of them below.

Comment: See also:


Toys

Do new parenting trends enable children and keep them dependent?

children playing
I grew up in the late 80s and I was obsessed with The Babysitter's Club books. My best friend and I started a booming neighborhood business based on this popular young adult series. We each took care of different kids after school, on weekends, and even late nights while neighborhood parents went out to dinner or a movie. We got great reviews from everyone, and we made a lot of money, too. The most "unusual" part? We were 11 years old.

Nobody batted an eye back in 1990 when my friend and I started our business. Besides taking care of other people's kids, I used to stay home from the age of 9 when my parents worked out at a local health club. I also remember sitting in the car while my mom ran errands from about the age of 6. I used to spend long summer days wandering my suburban neighborhood with the directive to "be home before dinner." I was a responsible and confident kid—I had common sense and wasn't afraid to ask for directions or to talk to adults. I felt like I was a part of my community and my parents trusted me to make smart decisions. But in the last decade or so, the concept of "no child left alone" (check out this book by the same title) has become not only the social norm, but a legal one in the United States. There are many reasons for this, but a recent study is shedding light on why these attitudes have changed in recent years.

Comment: See also:


People 2

Turning tide: Young adults switching off social media apps say their lives have improved

cellphone movil
© Foto: Pixabay
Our love of social media seems to have grown and grown in the past decade, but recent studies show the tide may be turning for some platforms, with young people in particular ditching Facebook. One study claims that more than 11 million teenagers left Facebook between 2011 and 2014. It's been argued that they are swapping public platforms such as Twitter and Instagram for more private messaging apps like WhatsApp and Snapchat.

We asked the Guardian's younger readers whether they have quit social media and why, as well as what apps they are ditching. Almost all reported a greater sense of happiness after going offline. Here, we share some of their experiences.

Daisy, 23, Manchester: 'I feel less anxious and less like a failure'

After a romance ended with a guy I really liked, I kept trying to avoid Facebook so I wouldn't have to see him. It was after this that I gradually switched off from it, but before that I'd been wanting to quit for a while.

Facebook made me feel anxious, depressed and like a failure. When I went online it seemed like everyone was in Australia or Thailand, and if they weren't travelling they were getting engaged or landing great jobs. I felt like everyone was living the dream and I was still at home with my parents, with debt from my student loan hanging over me.

I also felt that if I wasn't tagging myself at restaurants or uploading photos from nights out, people would assume I wasn't living. I remember a friend from uni said to me once, "Yeah, but you're still going out having fun, I've seen on Facebook." I tried to present myself as always having a great time. If my status didn't get more than five likes, I'd delete it.

Comment:


Question

Have humans forgotten the basic tenets of empathy?

empathy between animals
According to Wikipedia, empathy is defined as: the capacity to understand or feel what another being (a human or non-human animal) is experiencing from within the other being's frame of reference, i.e., the capacity to place oneself in another's position.

In my recent research on animals, I've come across interesting concepts and theories. The most notable, the concept of empathy among other animal species.

Scientists used to believe that only humans were capable of experiencing any emotions, most of all, empathy.

However, we now know that elephants, dolphins, whales, chimpanzees, and a handful of other animals also demonstrate emotional reactions that appear to be "empathy" and a type of self-awareness. They are able to recognize themselves in the mirror, mourn the death of their young, and experience a wide range of emotions.

Additionally, several species of animals have areas of their brains that are analogous to our emotional epicenters, the limbic and paralimbic systems.

In fact, it seems as though some nonhuman animals may experience a wider range of emotions, and/or have a larger neocortex and capacity for empathy, than even we do.

Comment: The Greatest Epidemic Sickness Known to Humanity

We, as a species, are in the midst of a massive psychic epidemic, a virulent collective psychosis that has been brewing in humanity's psyche from the beginning of time. Indigenous people have been tracking this 'psychic' virus calling it "wetiko," a Cree term which refers to a diabolically wicked person or spirit who terrorizes others.

Wetiko is a disease of industrial civilization - its unsustainable nature is based on, and increasingly requires violence to maintain itself. Modern civilization suffers from the overly one-sided dominance of the rational, intellectual mind that disconnects us from nature, from empathy, and from ourselves. Due to its disassociation from the whole, wetiko is a disturber of the peace of humanity and the natural world, a sickness which spawns aggression and is capable of inciting violence amongst living beings. Those afflicted with wetiko, like a cannibal, consume the life-force of others -- human and nonhuman -- for private purpose or profit, and do so without giving back something from their own lives.


Cell Phone

Addiction to being online could signal other mental health issues

internet addiction
© STEFANO CAVORETTO, GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTOExcessive internet use may signal other mental health problems in college students, researchers say
Internet addiction may signal other mental health issues among college students, according to a new study.

Canadian researchers say their findings could affect how psychiatrists approach people who spend a significant amount of time online​.

For the study, the researchers evaluated the internet use of 254 freshmen at McMaster University in Ontario. The researchers used a tool called the Internet Addiction Test (IAT), developed in 1998, as well as their own scale based on more recent criteria.

"Internet use has changed radically over the last 18 years, through more people working online, media streaming, social media, etc. We were concerned that the IAT questionnaire may not have been picking up on problematic modern internet use​, or showing up false positives for people who were simply using the internet rather than being over-reliant on it," said chief researcher Dr. Michael Van Ameringen. He is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at McMaster.

With the new screening tool, 33 students met criteria for internet addiction, and 107 for problematic internet use.

Music

Melancholy melodies trigger emotional response in empathetic listeners

Melancholy music
© Bina80
Have you ever felt particularly moved by a melancholy melody? Recent research published in Frontiers in Psychology suggests that it just might be a sign of your extraordinary empathy.

Finnish researchers conducted a quirky sort of experiment with 102 volunteers. They had them listen to an unfamiliar piece of sad instrumental music and then evaluated their emotional responses in different ways, including measuring the variation between heartbeats. The researchers categorized three broad types of response — a relaxed, peaceful sadness; an anxious, nervous sadness; and an intense, almost transcendental sadness. They also discovered a pattern: Those who had higher levels of empathy were more likely to experience the intense type of sadness, while there were no clear relationship with the other types.

"It has previously been known that people experience paradoxical pleasure when engaging with tragic art, but this seems to be more pronounced in those who have a heightened ability to engage with other people's emotions,"said the study's lead author Dr. Tuomas Eerola, currently a professor of music cognition at Durham University in England, in a statement. "Conversely, people with low empathy do not report feeling moved after listening to sad music."

Eerola and his colleagues took pains to eliminate any other causes for the volunteers' reactions by measuring their baseline heartbeats, blood pressure, and other factors that could influence their heart's reaction to the music.

"By using unfamiliar, instrumental sad music in our experiment, we were able to rule out most other possible sources of emotion such as specific memories and lyrics." explained study co-author Jonna Vuoskoski from the University of Oxford. "Thus, participants' emotional responses must have been brought about by the music itself."

Comment: See also: Musical preferences linked to cognitive processes


Pharoah

Entitlement: The personality trait that leads to feelings of chronic disappointment

entitlement
This personality trait is on the rise among the younger generation.

The personality trait of entitlement can lead to chronic disappointment, psychologists have concluded.

Entitlement is believing you are better than others and deserve more than them.

Unfortunately people who feel entitled often enter a spiral of habitual behavior that is toxic.

From anger they tend to lash out at others, blaming them.

At the same time they continue to tell themselves that they are special.

Bulb

Evidence rebuts Chomsky's theory of language learning

Much of Noam Chomsky's revolution in linguistics—including its account of the way we learn languages—is being overturned

Language learning
© Owen Gildersleeve
The idea that we have brains hardwired with a mental template for learning grammar—famously espoused by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—has dominated linguistics for almost half a century. Recently, though, cognitive scientists and linguists have abandoned Chomsky's "universal grammar" theory in droves because of new research examining many different languages—and the way young children learn to understand and speak the tongues of their communities. That work fails to support Chomsky's assertions.

The research suggests a radically different view, in which learning of a child's first language does not rely on an innate grammar module. Instead the new research shows that young children use various types of thinking that may not be specific to language at all—such as the ability to classify the world into categories (people or objects, for instance) and to understand the relations among things. These capabilities, coupled with a unique hu­­­man ability to grasp what others intend to communicate, allow language to happen. The new findings indicate that if researchers truly want to understand how children, and others, learn languages, they need to look outside of Chomsky's theory for guidance.

This conclusion is important because the study of language plays a central role in diverse disciplines—from poetry to artificial intelligence to linguistics itself; misguided methods lead to questionable results. Further, language is used by humans in ways no animal can match; if you understand what language is, you comprehend a little bit more about human nature.

Comment: Related articles:


Compass

How morality changes in a foreign language

Fascinating ethical shifts come with thinking in a different language

Speak language
© Matt Kenyon / Getty Images
What defines who we are? Our habits? Our aesthetic tastes? Our memories? If pressed, I would answer that if there is any part of me that sits at my core, that is an essential part of who I am, then surely it must be my moral center, my deep-seated sense of right and wrong.

And yet, like many other people who speak more than one language, I often have the sense that I'm a slightly different person in each of my languages—more assertive in English, more relaxed in French, more sentimental in Czech. Is it possible that, along with these differences, my moral compass also points in somewhat different directions depending on the language I'm using at the time?

Psychologists who study moral judgments have become very interested in this question. Several recent studies have focused on how people think about ethics in a non-native language—as might take place, for example, among a group of delegates at the United Nations using a lingua franca to hash out a resolution. The findings suggest that when people are confronted with moral dilemmas, they do indeed respond differently when considering them in a foreign language than when using their native tongue.

Comment: See also: