Science of the SpiritS


Snakes in Suits

The successful pathological

Psychopaths
© SOTT

Pathology Education teaches that pathological partners come in all levels of social and economic success.

Survivors say, "He's a doctor" to which I respond "SO?" So what. Doctors, attorneys, clergy, law enforcement---it's not the job that's pathological--- it's the character and personality disorders underneath.

Pathologicals flock to all types of careers. Those with high levels of narcissism and psychopathy flock to areas where they are experts, heroes, or are able to climb high up the career ladder. These disorders 'want' adoration. You don't get a lot of that on the back end of garbage truck as a worker.

Paul Babiak and Robert Hare wrote about this in their book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. The book examines the rise of white collar psychopathy in our country and in the work place. Some forms of pathology hide very well within their careers and success. A subconscious belief system is "If they are successful, they must be ok."

A degree from Yale means he's smart. It doesn't mean he's safe. A doctor that saves 'others lives' doesn't mean he won't take yours. Clergy who will pray for others souls doesn't mean he isn't soul-deadening in a personal relationship.

People 2

How other people's unspoken expectations control us

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We quickly sense how others view us and play up to these expectations.

A good exercise for learning about yourself is to think about how other people might view you in different ways. Consider how your family, your work colleagues or your partner think of you.

Now here's an interesting question: to what extent do you play up to these expectations about how they view you?

This idea that other people's expectations about us directly affect how we behave was examined in a classic social psychology study carried out by Dr Mark Snyder from the University of Minnesota and colleagues (Snyder et al., 1977). They had a hunch that people automatically sense how others view them and immediately start exhibiting the expected behaviours.

Eye 1

Research examines the power of a human stare

Paper by Dr. Colin A. Ross explains how to measure the eyes electromagnetic energy

Noted psychiatrist and author Colin A. Ross, M.D., has published experimental data that supports his scientific hypothesis that the eyes emit energy that can be captured and measured. Dr. Ross paper, 'The Electrophysiological Basis of Evil Eye Belief', is published in the current issue of Anthropology of Consciousness, a journal of the American Anthropological Association. The full paper is available here.

Although nearly everyone has experienced the sense of being stared at only to find that a person or animal really was looking, Western science has long rejected that the human eye can emit any form of energy. Dr. Ross says his findings move human ocular extramission, which he also refers to as an eyebeam, from the realm of superstition to science.


Book 2

Upcoming book: Gladwell believes in the underdog's advantage


Malcolm Gladwell has good news for underdogs: There probably is a way to win. But it's definitely not the easy way.

"Most people who are running a weak team would rather do the easy thing and lose than do the hard thing and win," Gladwell said Wednesday at Nielsen's Consumer 360 conference in Phoenix.

The author gave a preview of the themes from his upcoming book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants - in which he finds that advantages in life aren't always ... advantageous.

Case in point: A successful tech executive named Vivek who, in coaching his 12-year-old daughter's basketball team, had several things going against him. First, he was coaching a team of girls who were far from top athletes. And more importantly, he knew nothing about basketball, having grown up in Mumbai.

But Vivek's outsider status made him see basketball in a way most people didn't.

"He decided the way Americans play basketball is completely mindless," Gladwell said.

Arrow Down

It's true: Some parents want to live through their kids

Child Playing Piano
© Jaren Jai Wicklund, ShutterstockParents may wish for kids to fulfill their unfulfilled dreams, like become a concert pianist, research published June 19, 2013 finds.
Yes, mom may really be pushing you into marching band because she always wanted to be drum major. New research finds that, consistent with what kids may believe, parents really do hope to live out unfulfilled ambitions through their children.

Parents are more likely to hope that their child fulfills their own broken dreams when they see their kid as part of themselves, according to the study, which appears online today (June 19) in the journal PLOS ONE.

"The child's achievements may come to function as a surrogate for parents' own unfulfilled ambitions," said study researcher Eddie Brummelman, a doctoral psychology student at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. "In this way, a sense of oneness with their children may compel parents to transfer their unfulfilled ambitions on to them.

Info

Dimming the lights can increase your creativity by making you feel 'free from constraints'

People in dim light are better at solving creative insight problems
Those in normal light are no more creative than those in bright light
And we can become more creative just by thinking about being in dim light


Dimming the lights can increase your creativity levels, new research reveals.

German researchers found that people sitting in dim light are significantly better able to solve creative insight problems than those working under normal or bright lights.

However, people working under normal lights are no more creative than those in very bright light.

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People sitting in dim light are significantly better able to solve creative insight problems than those working under normal or bright lights

Eye 1

Blind man's brain still responds to eye contact with unhappy faces and averted gazes

Blind
© Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Brain scans reveal a blind man reacts to averted eyes and emotional faces, even though he has no recollection of seeing them.
How much of this world does your mind actually see? Potentially more than you think, according to series of studies on a blind man whose brain can still record and respond to the facial expressions from others without him being aware of it. These observations, published today in the Journal of Neuroscience, suggest the existence of visual brain pathways that register hostile or unhappy visages without our conscious knowledge.

The man in question, who the study's authors refer to as Patient TN, suffered two strokes in 2003 that almost completely eradicated his primary visual cortex. This brain region, located at the back of the skull, is responsible for processing visual input from the eyes and shipping it to the rest of the brain. Thus, Patient TN's blindness is caused by a faulty brain circuitry rather than eye damage. Indeed, one could assume that his eyes are still transmitting visual information to his brain, but "nobody is home" to collect the message.

Without his primary visual cortex, you might have predicted that Patient TN should be utterly blind, but follow-up experiments at the University of Geneva suggested the contrary.

In 2005, neuropsychologist Dr. Alan Pegna and colleagues placed a series of pictures with facial expressions in front of Patient TN's eyes and asked him to guess the emotions being portrayed in the photos.

Amazingly Patient TN could accurately distinguish between happy and angry faces 60 percent of the time, which is a success rate that could not be attributed to mere chance.

People 2

People can sense a smile before it appears on the face

People can sense a genuine smile before it even appears on a face, researchers say
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Researchers say the study reflects the unique social value of a heartfelt smile
But a forced or polite smile does not transmit the same signals, meaning we only detect it when it is visible, reports journal Psychological Science.

Researchers say the study reflects the unique social value of a heartfelt smile, which involves specific movements of muscles around the eyes.

A team from Bangor University had noted that pairs of strangers getting to know one another not only exchanged smiles, they almost always matched the particular smile type, whether genuine or polite.

But they responded much more quickly to their partners' genuine smiles than their polite smiles, suggesting that they were anticipating the genuine smiles.

In the lab, the results were repeated and data from electrical sensors on participants' faces revealed that they engaged smile-related muscles when they expected a genuine smile to appear but showed no such activity when expecting polite smiles.

People 2

Confirmation bias: Why it is hard to change your mind

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© wsj.com
People search for information that confirms their view of the world and ignore what doesn't fit.

In an uncertain world, people love to be right because it helps us make sense of things. Indeed some psychologists think it's akin to a basic drive.

One of the ways they strive to be correct is by looking for evidence that confirms they are correct, sometimes with depressing or comic results:
  • A woman hires a worker that turns out to be incompetent. She doesn't notice that everyone else is doing his work for him because she is so impressed that he shows up every day, right on time.
  • A sports fan who believes his team is the best only seems to remember the matches they won and none of the embarrassing defeats to inferior opponents.
  • A man who loves the country life, but has to move to the city for a new job, ignores the flight-path he lives under and noisy-neighbours-from-hell and tells you how much he enjoys the farmer's market and tending his window box.
We do it automatically, usually without realising. We do it partly because it's easier to see where new pieces fit into the picture-puzzle we are working on, rather than imagining a new picture. It also helps shore up our vision of ourselves as accurate, right-thinking, consistent people who know what's what.

Info

Babies have sympathy for bully victims, study suggests

Baby Girl
© glayan, ShutterstockA 10-month-old baby girl.
Babies may be able to show sympathy before their first birthday, according to a new study in which 10-month-olds preferred the victims rather than the aggressors in a bullying encounter.

The research, published Wednesday (June 12) in the journal PLOS ONE, is the first to find evidence of possible sympathy in children younger than toddlers, the researchers said. Sympathy is the feeling of concern for others.

Because 10-month-olds can't yet express sympathy verbally, Kyoto University researcher Shoji Itakura and colleagues turned to a common tactic in baby-brain research: using simple animations to determine what infants prefer. They showed 40 babies an animation of a blue ball and a yellow cube.

Half of the infants watched a short clip in which the blue ball chased the yellow cube around the screen, hitting it seven times before finally squishing it against a wall. The other half of the group saw the same movements, including the squishing, but the two shapes moved independently without interacting.

In some cases, the "bully" and "victim" roles were swapped, so that the yellow cube was the bad guy. After watching the show, the babies were shown a real yellow cube and a real blue ball, and given the chance to reach for one of the objects.

In cases where the babies had seen one shape beating up on the other, they overwhelmingly reached for the victim, 16 out of 20 times. In comparison, when the shapes hadn't interacted, the babies' choices were basically random - nine went for the shape that had gotten squished, and the other 11 went for the nonsquished shape.