Tuesday, June 15, 2010

“Psychology researcher awarded Spenser Fellowship” plus 2 more

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“Psychology researcher awarded Spenser Fellowship” plus 2 more

Psychology researcher awarded Spenser Fellowship

Posted: 15 Jun 2010 10:47 AM PDT

Andrew Stull, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology at UC Santa Barbara, is one of 20 scholars nationwide to be awarded a prestigious Spencer Fellowship by the National Academy of Education.

The fellowship will provide Stull with a $55,000 research stipend to examine the educational merit of the use of instructional models in chemistry. Although instructional models are widely used in educational settings, there are no empirical studies that document the cognitive factors and instructional conditions under which these models contribute to meaningful learning, Stull noted.

"The award will allow me to investigate the interaction between a learner's internal representation and the external representations that we construct for teaching," he said. "Although chemistry is the discipline that I am investigating, my work is relevant to any situation where we interact with real or virtual objects during the course of learning."

Stull earned his doctorate in psychology at UCSB in 2009 under the mentorship of psychology professors Mary Hegarty and Richard Mayer. Stull's research interests encompass multimedia design, diagrammatic reasoning, instructional technology integration, and teaching and learning in science domains as they relate to human cognition. His collaborative research with Hegarty focuses on the cognitive and perceptual affects of employing concrete and virtual reality models in science education. Previously, he taught high school and community college courses in biology.

Spencer postdoctoral fellowships are administered by the National Academy of Education, an honorary educational society that advances education research and its use in policy formation and practice. Now in its 24th year, the fellowship program has more than 600 alumni who include many of the strongest educational researchers in the field today. The awards enhance the future of education research by developing new talent in the many disciplines and fields represented by the selected scholars.

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David Livingstone Smith: Psychology Of Violence

Posted: 15 Jun 2010 03:16 PM PDT


I nominate taking dehumanization seriously as a key idea for the 21st century. Let me explain. There is a strange paradox at the heart of human nature. We humans are the most sociable creatures on earth, with a remarkable ability to cooperate with one another. This, combined with our equally remarkable intelligence, was responsible for the birth and development of civilization, and therefore for the scientific, technological and cultural innovations that have transformed our lives over the past 10,000 years. And yet, our species also displays a more ominous side. Human beings are also creatures of unparalleled ferocity. No other animal is capable of the horrors--the wars, genocides, torture and oppression--that we have regularly visited upon our fellow human beings.

This is all the more perplexing because killing does not come easily to us. In fact, in order to cooperate so effectively, our species has had to develop powerful inhibitions against committing lethal violence. This is why homicide is comparatively rare (in fact, each year far more people take their own lives than are killed in war and homicide combined).

Even soldiers, who are rewarded for killing, find it difficult to kill in cold blood, especially in close combat. Looking another person in the eye, with a full awareness of his humanity, and then pulling the trigger, and blowing them away, is an intense traumatic experience. This is why soldiers sometimes vomit, weep, become incontinent or tremble uncontrollably after their first kill. The alarming suicide rate amongst veterans, and the psychiatric symptoms that may haunt them for a lifetime, also testify to the degree to which the act of killing damages the killer. It is clear that human beings have a horror of killing as well as a fatal attraction to it, and it is tempting to suppose that one of these attitudes is more basic or authentic than the other. But the evidence points in quite a different direction.

Is there an idea you believe can change the world? Describe it in the comments section at the bottom of this story, and Forbes could publish your idea.

There are compelling reasons to think that both violence and an aversion to violence are fundamental features of the human animal. Both are deeply rooted in our nature.

Mostly, our inhibitions keep the violent side in check, but when the balance between them is upset, the results can be devastating. Let me briefly describe an example. For a period of six weeks from December 1937 to January 1938, Japanese soldiers slaughtered, mutilated, raped and tortured thousands of Chinese civilians. Honda Katsuichi's harrowing book The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan's National Shame describes many of the details of what happened. Katsuichi lets the perpetrators speak for themselves, and their accounts of the atrocities are so horrific that they are difficult to read.

For example, one veteran confessed that, because a woman's crying infant was interfering with his rape of her he "took a living human child … an innocent baby that was just beginning to talk, and threw it into boiling water." It is hard to imagine normal men behaving in this way. Try to imagine yourself doing it, and your mind will probably recoil in disgust. However, the soldiers who committed these atrocities were neither madmen nor monsters. They were, for the most part, ordinary people. People like you. The same is true of all the other mass atrocities that litter human history. The infernal ovens of Auschwitz, the mass graves at Srebrenica and the killing fields of Pol Pot's Kampuchea were all the handiwork of ordinary people.

These observations raise an extremely important question. What goes on in the human mind to make such brutality possible? Yoshio Tshuchiya, another Japanese veteran interviewed in Katsuichi's book, gestures towards an answer. "We called the Chinese 'chancorro' … that meant below human, like bugs or animals … The Chinese didn't belong to the human race. That was the way we looked at it." "If I'd thought of them as human beings I couldn't have done it," he observed, "But … I thought of them as animals or below human beings."

This is called dehumanization. We dehumanize our fellow human beings when we convince ourselves (or allow ourselves to be convinced) that they are less than human and come to believe that, although these people appear to be human beings like us, this is merely a façade. Beneath the surface they are really subhuman creatures, fit to be hunted down and destroyed. The immense destructive power of dehumanization lies in the fact that it excludes its victims from the universe of moral obligation, so killing them is of no greater consequence swatting a mosquito, or poisoning a rat. If dehumanization is a key factor in war and genocide, we ought to be working very hard to prevent it.

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The Political Psychology of Barack Obama

Posted: 15 Jun 2010 10:03 AM PDT

On Monday, President Obama suggested that the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico would shape environmental and energy policy in the same dramatic way that the terrorist acts of 9/11 shaped our foreign policy. His comment was more than illuminating, from a psychological perspective: It was a clear glimpse of the way the President thinks and the way he hopes that Americans will think.

Despite the qualifying language about shaping policy in very different arenas, President Obama was essentially equating the actions of British Petroleum, which may or may not include extreme negligence, with the deliberate murder of thousands of Americans by Islamic extremists who would like to kill all Americans in a Holy War. In so doing he is suggesting (perhaps because he believes it) that the actions of corporations in jeopardizing our natural resources are just as violent and just as offensive to him as the actions of al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations.

This view from the president is very much in line with his extreme distrust of industry and his obvious belief that government control is the people's only hope for protection from evil corporations. It is consistent with his apparent vision of himself as the force bringing equilibrium to an American psyche he seems to believe is wrongly focused on enemies outside our gates when equal or greater enemies are within our gates. It is as if he is echoing the rallying cry, "We have met the enemy and he is us!"

The president is like a doctor who would argue not to worry much about being shot by the gunman outside the hospital, since you have cancer to worry about. No one can do you more harm than your body's own pathology (or that of the body politic, if you will.) The president's most recent comment adds fuel (pun intended) to his seeming desire to help us shed this national pathology — our collective narcissism — and accept ourselves as the vile lot we are: a nation of sinners whose love of consumerism and blind pursuit of the American dream has us tripping and spilling black blood all over ourselves, in quantities equal to, or greater than, the volume of red blood spilled by terrorists.

In addition to our vulnerability to hurt ourselves by, well, being ourselves, the president apparently worries that our support of staunch allies like Israel and Great Britain is toxic to our best interests and to those of the "oppressed." We Americans just can't get it right, and he knows it and can help us repent.

President Obama is acting the part of an overactive superego — harshly judging America from within our own boundaries, holding up a mirror and suggesting that it is a window on the greatest risks we face.

The president is overreaching here, and by a lot. BP is not Al Qaeda. An oil spill is a horrifying tragedy that must be investigated, but it is not an act of war. We really do have outside enemies who hate our way of life and want us to die. And as inept as industry attempts to stop the oil spill seem to have been, they are not aimed at destabilizing our government and setting the stage for genocide.

A cultural mirror can be a good thing. We should, of course, look in one, time-to-time, as America's history unfolds. Self-criticism has its place. But in this dangerous world, in this perilous time, it's best to sit closer to a window on the forces outside our way of life that seek to destroy it.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for Fox News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His book, "Living the Truth: Transform Your Life Through the Power of Insight and Honesty" has launched a new self-help movement including www.livingthetruth.com. Dr. Ablow can be reached at info@keithablow.com.

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