Quotes About Psychology

Increasing the distance between the [combatants]—whether by emphasizing their differences or by increasing the chain of responsibility between the aggressor and his victim allows for an increase in the degree of aggression. —Ben Shalit The Psychology of Conflict and Combat

As a counselor I have been taught, and I hold it to be a fundamental truth of human nature, that when someone withholds something traumatic it can cause great damage. When

The triad of methods used to achieve this remarkable increase in killing are desensitization, conditioning, and denial defense mechanisms.

after 60 days and nights of constant combat, 98 percent of all soldiers became psychiatric casualties.

learned in World War II that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen fired their weapons at an exposed enemy soldier.

In developmental psychology there is a general understanding that an individual must master the twin areas of sexuality and aggression (Freud's Eros and Thanatos) in order to have truly achieved adulthood. In the same way, the maturation of the human race necessitates our collective mastery of these two areas.

Some psychiatric casualties have always been associated with war, but it was only in the twentieth century that our physical and logistical capability to sustain combat outstripped our psychological capacity to endure it.

those who experienced the "Thank God it wasn't me" response. Having this thought race through your mind upon seeing violent death is arguably one of the deepest, darkest, most shameful of all human responses. However, when you tell people that it is a normal thought, it is as if a huge weight has been lifted, and their sense of shame no longer has power to hurt them.

when soldiers were left to their own devices, the vast majority of them, on all sides, could not kill.

The German root word for "debt" is the same as for "guilt.

The amygdala doesn't use language. It learns by association, and that's how it remembers

Mental violence, whether acted out or not, still releases bile and other gastric juices, and extra adrenaline pumps through the body. The effect of our thoughts on our health remains a major unexplored territory in medicine.

even the finest examples of men and women are capable of horrific acts under the right circumstances,

little man syndrome

There, in the dirty sludge of a winter highway, he learned for the first time that a lot of life is all in the mind.

We now enter the Twilight Zone of psychology. Hundreds of theories of personality exist, but no one has yet successfully identified, or even defined, what personality is (Hall and Lindzey, 1957). Thus, there exists a myriad of psychological tests that measure something, but no one seems to quite know what it is.

You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams.

I certainly don't buy into the idea that positive attitudes can somehow mysteriously directly influence physical health outcomes.

It is important and vital to not use more than 5% of any given time on rewarding yourself, rewards are good for your psyche but too much leads you in the regret and remorse trap

Sometimes they do things to make me do the opposite of what they think, I think, they think, I am going to do.

If you ain't scared," Alby said, "you ain't human. Act any different and I'd throw you off the Cliff because it'd mean you're a psycho.

She'd snapped, he thought. She'd definitely snapped.

I think the one thing this picture shows that's new is the psychological disproportion of the kids' demands on the parents. Parents are often at fault, but the kids have some work to do, too.