Quotes About Psychology

I couldn't stop killing. It got easier each time." William Bonin

Don't you know clowns can get away with murder?" John Wayne Gacy

He had also by this time begun to indulge in cannibalism, believing that his victims would live on inside him if he consumed their flesh.

Being blessed has tremendous psychological consequences for us. There are even studies that show that our bodies actually change chemically when we feel valued, praised, and blessed.

Archetypes cannot be banished or wished away.

Jungians have found that in every man there is a feminine sub-personality called the Anima, made up of the feminine archetypes. And in every woman there is a masculine sub-personality called the Animus, made up of the masculine archetypes.

Kohut noticed that grandiosity, rather than improving your sex life, either makes you impotent or makes you so promiscuous that you cannot sustain relationships and you put yourself in danger of getting AIDS and dying. In other words, grandiosity tends to destroy you if you don't face up it and learn how to regulate it.

Sustained stress has numerous adverse effects. The amygdala becomes overactive and more coupled to pathways of habitual behavior; it is easier to learn fear and harder to unlearn it.

It takes surprisingly little in terms of uncontrollable unpleasantness to make humans give up and become helpless in a generalized way.

Pretty straightforwardly, the more categories of adversities a child suffers, the dimmer his or her chances of a happy, functional adulthood.45

Irrational optimism can be great; it's why only about 15 percent instead of 99 percent of humans get clinically depressed.

Being fearless, overconfident, and delusionally optimistic sure feels good. No surprise, then, that testosterone can be pleasurable.

The insula activates when we eat a cockroach or imagine doing so.

Someone does something lousy and selfish to you in a game, and the extent of insular and amygdaloid activation predicts how much outrage you feel and how much revenge you take.

In a typical study, higher testosterone levels would be observed in those male prisoners with higher rates of aggression. But being aggressive stimulates testosterone secretion; no wonder more aggressive individuals had higher levels.

Thus there's dopaminergic activation during schadenfreude—gloating over an envied person's fall from grace.

Willpower is more than just a metaphor; self-control is a finite resource. Frontal neurons are expensive cells, and expensive cells are vulnerable cells. Consistent

Something roughly akin to love is needed for proper biological development, and its absence is among the most aching, distorting stressors that we can suffer.

Success in everything from athletics to chess to the stock market boosts testosterone levels.

dopamine is not about the happiness of reward. It's about the happiness of pursuit of reward that has a decent chance of occurring.

in general, major stressors make people of both genders more risk taking. But moderate stressors bias men toward, and women away from, risk taking. In the absence of stress, men tend toward more risk taking than women; thus

There's support for the idea—three of my favorites are that (a) forcing depressed people to smile makes them feel better; (b) instructing people to take on a more "dominant" posture makes them feel more so (lowers stress hormone levels); and (c) muscle relaxants decrease anxiety ("Things are still awful, but if my muscles are so relaxed that I'm dribbling out of this chair, things must be improving"). Nonetheless

The contrast between rapid, automatic moral intuitionism and conscious, deliberative moral reasoning plays out in another crucial realm and is the subject of Greene's superb 2014 book Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.

Why else evolve the fusiform? The shape of women's faces changes subtly during their ovulatory cycle, and men prefer female faces at the time of ovulation.