Sam Richards is a sociologist and award-winning teacher who has been inspiring undergraduate students at Penn State since 1990. Every semester, 725 students register for his Race and Ethnic Relations course, one of the most popular classes at Penn State and the largest of its kind in the country.
Through his natural ability of seeing a subject from many angles, Richards encourages students to engage more fully with the world and to think for themselves - something he did not do until his third year in college. Because of his passion for challenging students to open their minds, an interviewer recently referred to him as "an alarm clock for eighteen-year-olds."
Science of the Spirit
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Scientific studies show that psychopaths' brains work in very different ways to the brains of normal human beings. According to Robert Hare, the psychopath seems to interpret, process and use emotional information as if it was neutral information. The psychopath cannot extract emotional information from words as normal people do. Words like "murder, rape and death", provoke NO reaction in the mind/brain of a psychopath. They respond 'in a very superficial manner' to concepts that cause an emotional and distressing reaction in normal people.
Scientific studies show that psychopaths' brains work in very different ways to the brains of normal human beings. According to Robert Hare, the psychopath seems to interpret, process and use emotional information as if it was neutral information. The psychopath cannot extract emotional information from words as normal people do. Words like "murder, rape and death", provoke NO reaction in the mind/brain of a psychopath. They respond 'in a very superficial manner' to concepts that cause an emotional and distressing reaction in normal people.
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One of the more challenging thoughts to be aired recently is the theory that there are more psychopaths in UK company boardrooms than there are in Britain's mental hospitals.
That might be a tough one to prove, but I have it on the best authority that you are at least three times more likely to meet a psychopath in the higher echelons of business than you are in the population at large.
In any company of 1000 employees there should be about 10 - and the most fruitful place to go looking for them is in the executive suite.
These insights come courtesy of Holly Andrews of the Worcester Business School and a lecture that she delivered earlier this month at a conference which was organised by The Institute of Risk Management.
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This release is available in German.
The active agent ziconotide, the synthetic toxin of the cone snail (Conus magus), was acclaimed a safe alternative to morphine when it was introduced six years ago. Now it is increasingly suspected of causing patients to commit suicide. Researchers working under the auspices of Prof. Christoph Maier (Director of the Pain Clinic Bergmannsheil at the Ruhr University in Bochum) presume that ziconotide not only suppresses the transmission of pain stimuli, but also deteriorates the frame of mind and could simultaneously reduce anxiety and impulse control. These mechanisms could promote suicidal tendencies in vulnerable patients. The research scientists thus advise careful diagnosis and monitoring of the psychic condition of patients treated with ziconotide. They have published their findings in the Medical Journal Pain.
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A recent survey conducted by the Associated Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ASSOCHAM) has revealed that children between the ages of six and 17 spend over 35 hours a week in front of the TV, which is more time than they spend in any other activity except sleeping
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The rate, slightly higher than last year's 19.5 percent figure, reflected increasing depression, especially among the unemployed, SAMHSA, part of the National Institutes of Health, said.
"Too many Americans are not getting the help they need and opportunities to prevent and intervene early are being missed," Pamela Hyde, SAMHSA's administrator, said in a statement.
"The consequences for individuals, families and communities can be devastating. If left untreated mental illnesses can result in disability, substance abuse, suicides, lost productivity, and family discord."
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Psychopaths are hoarders of women, even those they tired of and tossed aside. They break up easily with their partners, of course. Psychopaths throw away old relationships with as little emotion or regret as normal people toss away their old shoes. But they rarely completely disappear from the radar, even years after the relationship with them is over. As they're pursuing their newest flames, psychopaths continue to keep tabs on their former girlfriends, sink their claws deeper into the current ones, put a few more women, which are on their way out, on the back-burner as they slowly simmer, wondering what they did to lose their attention and love. Hoarders accumulate junk; psychopaths accumulate broken relationships. Since possessing women (and men) reminds psychopaths of their dominance, the more ex-partners, current partners and potential future partners they can juggle, the more powerful they feel.
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Harvard psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth (right) and Daniel T. Gilbert (left) used a special "track your happiness" iPhone app to gather research. The results: We spend at least half our time thinking about something other than our immediate surroundings, and most of this daydreaming doesn't make us happy.
Harvard psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth (right) and Daniel T. Gilbert (left) used a special "track your happiness" iPhone app to gather research. The results: We spend at least half our time thinking about something other than our immediate surroundings, and most of this daydreaming doesn't make us happy.
The research, by psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University, is described this week in the journal Science.
"A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind," Killingsworth and Gilbert write. "The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost."
Unlike other animals, humans spend a lot of time thinking about what isn't going on around them: contemplating events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or may never happen at all. Indeed, mind-wandering appears to be the human brain's default mode of operation.
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Now, new research is showing that sleep also seems to reorganize memories, picking out the emotional details and reconfiguring the memories to help you produce new and creative ideas, according to the authors of an article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
"Sleep is making memories stronger," says Jessica D. Payne of the University of Notre Dame, who cowrote the review with Elizabeth A. Kensinger of Boston College. "It also seems to be doing something which I think is so much more interesting, and that is reorganizing and restructuring memories."
Payne and Kensinger study what happens to memories during sleep, and they have found that a person tends to hang on to the most emotional part of a memory. For example, if someone is shown a scene with an emotional object, such as a wrecked car, in the foreground, they're more likely to remember the emotional object than, say, the palm trees in the background - particularly if they're tested after a night of sleep. They have also measured brain activity during sleep and found that regions of the brain involved with emotion and memory consolidation are active.
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Scientists have claimed that the way a person gyrates in time to music can betray secrets of their character
Scientists have claimed that the way a person gyrates in time to music can betray secrets of their character
It is where many couples first set eyes on one another - and now research suggests that the dancefloor is the perfect place to gauge a prospective partner's personality.
Scientists have claimed that the way a person gyrates in time to music can betray secrets of their character.
Using personality tests, the researchers assessed volunteeers into one of five "types".
They then observed how each members of each group danced to different kinds of music.
Comment: For more information see:
Ponerology 101 Snakes-in-Suits