Quotes About Psychology

during the second half of the first year, "regulation of arousal and emotion no longer depend simply on what the caregiver does, but on how the infant interprets the caregiver's accessibility and behavior

interpret their own and others' behavior by attributing mental states

Exploring the meaning of others' actions is then a precursor of children's ability to label and find meaningful their own psychological experiences. This ability arguably underlies the capacities for affect regulation, impulse control, self-monitoring, and the experience of self-agency—the building blocks of the organization of the self.

lower levels of coordination are optimal for secure attachment and easy temperament;

Disorganization of attachment may be the indication of exceptionally poor mentalization.

Don't ask what causes my problems, don't probe my memories or thoughts or feelings; there is nothing to know, the answer lies in my genes. There was no room for human mystery! This inability to envision psychological and psychosocial causation is both at the root of the psychological problems these individuals brought into the consulting-room and at the core of the naive nativist perspective.

provides empirical support for the notion that an infant's sense of self emerges from the affective quality of relationship with the primary caregiver.

We shall argue that attachment is not an end in itself; rather, it exists in order to produce a representational system that has evolved, we may presume, to aid human survival.

mental agency may be more usefully seen as a developing or constructed capacity.

Rhesus monkeys (Suomi 2000) that individuals who carry the "short" allele of the 5-HTT gene are significantly more severely affected by maternal deprivation than are individuals with the "long" allele

understanding of the self as a mental agent grows out of interpersonal experience, particularly primary-object relationships

According to Damasio, the core self is the foundation of consciousness, and the autobiographical self is its glory

In conclusion, the neuroscientific accounts of LeDoux and Damasio deepen the Spinozistic insight that we are embodied minds.

Once achieved, regulation is not automatically maintained. Characteristically, it is lost and regained even for the most capable people.

1 Attachment and Reflective Function: Their Role in Self-Organization

Hysteria defied self-control; obsessional neurosis mimicked it.

His portrait of a married couple — brazen male incompetence on one side, camera-shy female wisdom on the other — must have evoked in many men clusters of mental images, or vague memories, recalling the first and shaping love affair of their lives, with their mother. What Barrie thought every woman knew was something that most men knew, in their troubled unconscious.

H]umor has, among other duties, the task of controlling anxieties, of mastering threats, by increasing their distance and reducing their dimensions.

parted from Freud, aware how much Freud disliked emotional displays, he spoke lightly about travel plans. Freud, Sachs records, understood

Siegel, who codirects UCLA's Mindsight Institute and is author of the scientifically acclaimed books "The Developing Mind: and "The Mindful Brain," broke down the essential sequence of surprise as expectation + violation of expectation. He quoted Jerome Bruner, one of the fathers of cognitive psychology, who said "narrative emerges from violations to expectations.

It will never be easy for me to watch men cry. Maybe because I know how fatal crying is to their self-respect. Maybe because it's so unusual for them that it always carries them back to their childhood. The mechanic has reached the stage where

Psychologists call this sort of mental mechanism, in which beliefs conform to behavior rather than the other way around, a response to "cognitive dissonance,

When you kill do you also conjoin somehow? In some horrible communion you will never shake? Is that why soldiers come home and scream at night and kill themselves? Because they have become their targets?

Pagan philosophers saw human qualities mirrored in nature and cast these giant reflections of themselves as gods. It is therefore unsurprising that most pagan cosmologies contain a complete spectrum of our psychology in god form.