Quotes About Psychology

Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: contempt. If Gottman observes one or both partners in a marriage showing contempt toward the other, he considers it the single most important sign that the marriage is in trouble.

What Hartshorne and May concluded, then, is that something like honesty isn't a fundamental trait, or what they called a unified trait. A trait like honesty, they concluded, is considerably influenced by the situation.

The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.

The phenomenon of relative deprivation applied to education is called—appropriately enough—the "Big Fish–Little Pond Effect." The more elite an educational institution is, the worse students feel about their own academic abilities.

Gottman has found, in fact, that the presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or a wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contempt toward you is so stressful that it begins to affect the functioning of your immune system.

Gottman has proven something remarkable. If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later. If he watches a couple for fifteen minutes, his success rate is around 90 percent.

At three and four and five, children may not be able to follow complicated plots and subplots. But the narrative form, psychologists now believe, is absolutely central to them.

The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people's behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of situation and context.

We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration

What Hartshorne and May concluded, then, is that something like honesty isn't a fundamental trait, or what they called a "unified" trait. A trait like honesty, they concluded, is considerably influenced by the situation.

So here is the question: once the number-one form of suicide in England became a physiological impossibility, did the people who wanted to kill themselves switch to other methods? Or did the people who would have put their heads in ovens now not commit suicide at all?

Gottman is far more selective. He has found that he can find out much of what he needs to know just by focusing on what he calls the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt.

and they were the subjects of what would become one of the most famous psychological studies in history. For the rest of his life, Terman watched over his charges like a mother hen. They were tracked

the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.

What did Festinger make of all this? The more you invest in a set of beliefs—the greater the sacrifice you make in the service of that conviction—the more resistant you will be to evidence that suggests that you are mistaken. You don't give up. You double down.

The participants in all conditions grossly overestimated their surprise expressivity," Schützwohl wrote. Why? They "inferred their likely facial expressions to the surprising event from…folk-psychological beliefs about emotion-face associations." Folk psychology is the kind of crude psychology we glean from cultural sources such as sitcoms.

relative deprivation

MacCurdy argued that when a bomb falls, it divides the affected population into three groups. The first group is the people killed. They are the ones for whom the experience of the bombing is—obviously—the most devastating. But as MacCurdy pointed out (perhaps a bit callously), "the morale of the community depends on the reaction of the survivors, so from that point of view, the killed do not matter.

FACS, which stands for Facial Action Coding System.

Existen una serie de teorías que tratan de explicar por qué fumar tiene una relación tan fuerte con los problemas emocionales. La primera de ellas es que las mismas cosas que harían que alguien fuera susceptible a los efectos contagiosos del tabaco (baja autoestima, o vida privada infeliz o insana) vienen a ser también las cosas que contribuyen a crear una depresión.

Emotion can also start on the face. The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.

As Wilson puts it, what happens is that we come up with a plausible-sounding reason for why we might like or dislike something, and then we adjust our true preferences to be in line with that plausible-sounding reason.

O sucesso é uma combinação de talento e preparação. O problema com essa forma de pensar é que, quanto mais a fundo os psicólogos analisam as carreiras dos talentosos, menor parece o papel desempenhado pelo talento e maior se mostra a importância da preparação.

Most psychologists believe that nature—genetics—accounts for about half of the reason why we tend to act the way we do. His point is simply that there are certain times and places and conditions when much of that can be swept away, that there are instances where you can take normal people from good schools and happy families and good neighborhoods and powerfully affect their behavior merely by changing the immediate details of their situation. This