“St. Olaf to honor Psychology Department founder (St. Olaf College News)” plus 1 more |
| St. Olaf to honor Psychology Department founder (St. Olaf College News) Posted: 18 Mar 2010 10:33 AM PDT St. Olaf to honor Psychology Department founder
For Olaf Millert, the emeritus faculty member who founded the St. Olaf Psychology Department in 1960, helping students is a normal part of life. The 85-year-old still lives within walking distance of campus and keeps in touch with current St. Olaf students — some of whom he treats as if they were his children. Millert's concern for students also is reflected in his record of giving to the college. St. Olaf was informed recently that Millert is planning to leave his estate to the college. This gift, along with a history of establishing various endowments for the college, has prompted St. Olaf to name a laboratory space in Regents Hall of Natural and Mathematical Sciences in honor of Millert and his late wife, Juta Rae Millert '65. The naming ceremony will take place in Regents Hall Monday. The Millerts began giving financially to St. Olaf when they established the Gordon Allport award, named for a founder of personality psychology and Millert's mentor. The financial award is given annually to a junior psychology major. And the Olaf and Juta Millert Endowment, established in honor of late Estonian President Lennart Meri after his visit to St. Olaf in 2000, provides funds for select students from Baltic and Scandinavian countries. Millert's most recent gift to the college established the Juta R. Millert Memorial Speaker Series in Psychology that will support an annual lecture. The Estonian immigrant who left a war-ravaged Europe to earn a degree from Harvard says he's just repaying the kindness that others have shown him throughout his life. "This has been our attempt to help, financially and otherwise, young people of different backgrounds," says Millert as he shows pictures and tells stories about the many students who have kept in touch with him over the decades. "And why shouldn't I give to the only college that happens to carry my name?" he asks with a grin.
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| Posted: 18 Mar 2010 12:18 PM PDT Humans living in modern society are something like those lab animals, a Harvard psychology professor says. Like them, our innate instincts are overstimulated by unnatural products, as well as by advertising and images. And, like them, we respond almost unconsciously: reaching for more food, Web-surfing for porn, dumping time and money on "cute" toys, sitting for hours in front of televisions, and sending troops to fight a dehumanized "them." The difference between lab animals and us, however, is that overstimulation for animals isn't present in nature. It can really only be found in the laboratory. If an animal escapes to its natural environment, it will return to natural stimuli and responses. For people, however, because we live in an artificial world of our own making, escaping those stimuli is not so easy. But Deirdre Barrett, assistant clinical professor of psychology in Harvard Medical School's Psychiatry Department, says that doesn't mean there's no hope for us.
In her book, Barrett examines the history of research into supernormal stimuli, describing early behavioral experiments on birds and fish. In one, birds whose eggs were lightly speckled fell off as they tried to incubate ridiculously large, boldly polka-dotted fakes. In another, red-bellied male fish fought off artificial red-painted lures even when they didn't look much like fish. These outsized prods to normal instincts are called "supernormal stimuli," and Barrett believes they're present in our world today, sometimes quite intentionally, prodding us to buy and consume and do. It's an easy sell, in many cases, because the stimuli give us a push to do things we're already inclined toward.
Though supernormal stimuli are not universally related to problems, Barrett said many of the episodes in her book do fall into that category. Understanding ourselves and the reasons we feel as we do, Barrett said, is the first step in overriding our instincts, in our being able to resist the siren song of the Big Mac.
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