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I just noticed there’s a Freud quiz appeared in the digital resources section of this site. On the surface it appears to be a straightforward tickbox exercise encouraging contemplation of the strengths and weaknesses of his  approach to the treatment of mental disorders - however, like all good psychoanalytic research, there’s more to it than that: Like the psychodynamic model of the mind, it works on two levels, and the seemingly random or pointless aspects of the task are often the most insightful:  In this case, once you’ve answered the questions and thus completed the rational ’surface’ or ‘manifest’ aspect of the activity, you can then click on the handy drawing tool and scrawl pictures of Batman all over the page - thus allowing a valuable insight into the darker hidden thoughts and wishes of your unconscious mind…. this being , of course, where all the true action takes place in Freudian theory…

 Tell you what, save the pics (press ‘print screen’ on your keyboard and paste into a document) send ‘em in and maybe we’ll have ourselves a little online psychodynamic gallery / therapy session….?

I feel less stressed already…. you can tell I’m supposed to be doing something else can’t you? ….. (I think this is what Freud termed ’displacement‘ …)

We contacted Donald Meichenbaum, the man who developed Stress Inoculation Training (SIT), to get permission to use his photograph in the latest edition of The Complete Companion. He asked to receive a copy of the finished book and has written to use saying ‘Please send my congratulations to the authors Mike and Cara. The book is engaging and informative. I appreciate the attention they have devoted to my work on Stress Inoculation Training (SIT).’ However he did also point out that one of our criticisms might be a tad unjustified. We suggest that one disadvantage of SIT is that the treatment takes a long time. He says, in fact, it has been applied successfullty in as short as one hour in helping medical patients prepare for surgery and for cardiac catherization examinations. He further points out that one of the streghts of SIT is its adapatability to meet the varying demands of populations. Finally he mentions his own website which you may find interesting.

I know this is supposed to be about the new exam and all that….. but my new ‘Advice on Approaches Questions’ podcast is now up… with added backbeats (heh..)

(More podcasts for paper 5 here….. sadly lacking in beats though )

 Good luck if you’ve got an exam next week!

We are getting lots of visitors to this site and would really like to make it as useful as possible (within the bounds of our capabilities!). So tell us what kind of things you’d like to see in this blog - more news-type items? More activities for students? Exam-focused stuff? Things for teachers? Things for students? You can write a comment here or send an email to us psychcompanion@folensblogs.com

Check out the sample (free) digital resources to go with the AS book - click on the tab for digital resources. The full set of resources will be available in the coming academic year.

Since Stanley Milgram first published his classic study on obedience an enormous number of people have offered comments and reinterpretations of his work. Perhaps the most recent come from Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher (famous for their adaptation of Zimbardo’s prison study). Haslam and Reicher suggest that there are several problems with the concept of the agentic shift. For example, how does this explain why subjects were less likely to obey in the run down office? Logically we might expect an increased agentic state (and higher obedience) because the relative authority of the experimenter was greater in a less prestigious environment.  

Haslam and Reicher use a different explanation – social identity theory. They argue that the degree to which we obey someone depends on the extent to which we identify with them. The more you identify, the more you obey. They use this to explain Zimbardo’s experiment and also the obedience of guards in the Second World War. They may have been ordinary people (as Hannah Arendt proposed) but the reason for obedience was less to do with an agentic shift and more because they identified with the Nazi movement and believed it to be right.

The importance of this interpretation is that it may lead us to understand obedience to unjust authority better, in terms of identification rather than lack of autonomy.

LINK

If you go here, you can download a copy of one of the most famous radio broadcasts ever made: Orson Welles 1938 adaptation of ‘War Of The Worlds’, a drama that caused mass panic and hysteria when it was broadcast. Here’s what happened:

 “On the evening of Sunday, October 30, 1938 – a month after the Munich – Orson Welles of the Mercury Theatre gave, over the Columbia Broadcasting System, a scheduled radio dramatization of an old fantasy by H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds. To make it vivid, he arranged it to simulate a current news broadcast. After an announcer had clearly explained the nature of the program, a voice gave a prosaic weather forecast; then another voice said that the program would be continued from a hotel, with dance music; shortly this music was interrupted by a “flash” to the effect that a professor at “Mount Jennings Observatory,” Chicago, reported seeing explosions at regular intervals on the planted Mars; then the listeners were “returned” in orthodox fashion “to the music of Ramon Raquello…a tune that never loses favor, the popular ‘Star Dust’”; then came an interview with an imaginary Princeton professor, with more information about disturbances on Mars – whereupon a series of further “news bulletins” described the arrival of Martians in huge metal cylinders which landed in New Jersey. The broadcast gathered speed, bulleting following bulletin. More Martians landed – an army of them, which quickly defeated the New Jersey State Militia. Presently the Martina attack was vividly described as being general all over the United States, with the population of New York evacuating the city and Martian heat-rays and flame-throwers and other diabolical devices causing terrific destruction, till all was laid to waste.”

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This is the conclusion reached by leading sleep researcher, Jerry Siegel, after decades of sleep research. In a recent article in the New Scientitst Siegel claims that the effects of sleep deprivation are actually quite small and certainly not enough to offset the potential danger of being asleep (watch out that lion is going to get you!). Evidence from the animal kingdom is surfacing all the time which increases our understanding of sleep. It appears that fur seals, like dolphins, sleep one hemisphere at a time when hunting at sea and experience no REM activity, but once back on land they revert to the more normal sleep patterns of other animals (i.e. both REM and NREM activity and whole brain sleep).Siegel suggests that the purpose of REM sleep may be just to keep the brain stem active. If an animal is sleeping one hemisphere at a time Read the rest of this entry »