Quotes About Psychology

Good fiction often gives us characters in extremity, which ironically gives us a clearer mirror in which to see ourselves.

Almost 400 years ago, Shakespeare was portraying adolescents in a very similar light to the light that we portray them in today — but today we try to understand their behavior in terms of the underlying changes that are going on in their brain.

Once you had read the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, you knew that everyday life was psychopathology.

The idea of making the century's great crime look dull is not banal. Politically, psychologically, the Germans had an idea of genius. The banality was only camouflage. What better way to get the curse out of murder than to make it look ordinary, boring, or trite?… Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience.

Why stroke the hypersensitive ears of our modern weaklings? Why yield even a single step … to the Tartuffery of words? For us psychologists that would involve a Tartuffery of action … For a psychologist today shows his good taste (others may say his integrity) in this, if in anything, that he resists the shamefully moralized manner of speaking which makes all modern judgments about men and things slimy. We

Sometimes I wake up with such an immense sense of disappointment that I can hardly breathe. Usually nothing has obviously triggered it and I put it down to some combination of an unhappy childhood and bad dreams (those two things go very well together).

We expect others to act rationally even though we are irrational.

his son was a weak and mentally unstable young man with sadistic inclinations—which went a long way toward explaining his current flirtation with the British—

All religions, I claim, involve counterintuitive beliefs in supernatural beings. Moreover, such beliefs are systematically counterintuitive in the same basic ways. As we shall see, these basic ways of entertaining supernatural beliefs are more or less predictable from a fairly limited set of species-specific cognitive structures. These

During the first year of life, a child acquires the concept of teleomechanical agency: the child is able to perceive an object's physical movement as goal-directed. In the second year, the child develops comprehension of mentalistic agency: the child attributes internal, mental states, such as perception and desire, to actors in predicting or explaining their actions.

Because religious beliefs and experiences cannot be reliably validated through logical deduction or observational induction, validation occurs only by satisfying the emotions that motivate religion in the first place. Religious

Emotivism does give us something positive, a reminder that moral language is emotionally charged and can be used improperly to manipulate people under the guise of getting them to do the right thing. Unfortunately, because moral language is so emotionally charged, people often dismiss it today as too divisive or incapable of verification.

when you can laugh at your mistake, you know you've accepted it and no longer judge yourself on the basis of one single event. Reaching this kind of perspective is very important in avoiding future mistakes. Humor loosens up your psychology and prevents you from obsessing about the past.

Think biologically: humans are in better moods after they've eaten a fine meal or when they are in more pleasant surroundings.

There are no genuinely blue foods. Foods that appear blue such as blueberries are often a shade of purple.

Psychopaths are immune to contagious yawning and are less likely to be startled.

In a study conducted by the Bay State Medical Center in Springfield, approximately 68% of people experience phantom vibrations syndrome, a sensory hallucination where you mistakenly think your phone is buzzing in your pocket.

I thought of my mother (...). Freud wrote that no man is secure in the love of his mother can ever be a failure. Well, I had been busy proving that theory wrong.

Researchers at the University of Iowa have for years been studying a woman, known in the literature as S.M., whose amygdala was destroyed by a rare disease—and who cannot, as a consequence, experience fear.)

No wonder I'm anxious: I'm like Woody Allen trapped in John Calvin.

self-preoccupation tends to be tied to anxiety),

Those who are unable to experience anxiety are, generally speaking, more deeply pathological—and more dangerous to society—than those who experience it acutely or irrationally; they're sociopaths.)

My anxiety is a reminder that I am governed by my physiology—that what happens in the body may do more to determine what happens in the mind than the other way around.

Today, evolutionary psychologists say Watson misinterpreted his Little Albert experiment: the real reason Albert developed such a profound phobia of rats was not because behavioral conditioning is so intrinsically potent but because the human brain has a natural—and evolutionarily adaptive—predisposition to fear small furry things on the basis of the diseases they carry. (I explore this at greater length in chapter 9.)