Every month I share the most interesting articles I’ve come across while writing about the history of psychology.

This month, you’ll find everything from the birthplace of psychoanalysis in America — hint: it’s not New York City — to the founder of cognitive psychology to an entire series on mental illness and last rites.

Let’s get started…

In 1920, behaviorist John Watson and his graduate student-turned-wife Rosalie Rayner conducted a conditioning experiment that everyone who’s ever taken an intro psychology course knows all too well: They taught 9-month-old Albert to fear a variety of stimuli that were seemingly innocuous to him from the start.

The most famous example involved a rat. When a rat was first placed alongside Little Albert, he appeared interested and unafraid. When the researchers paired the rat with a loud noise, over time, Albert got scared.

In fact, Albert would start crying at the mere sight of the rat, even though the noise was gone. It turned out that Albert’s newfound fear also extended beyond the rat. He started fearing other furry objects.

Watson used this experiment to substantiate his theory that babies were blank states, and the environment was powerful in influencing them. This experiment was always considered controversial, and many psychologists were curious if Albert’s learned fears continued into adulthood. (That’s because Watson and Rayner never deconditioned him.)

But no one knew Little Albert’s identify or his fate… until a few years ago.

Does having an abortion lead to a greater likelihood of having future mental health problems?

That’s what a study by Priscilla Coleman and her colleagues published in 2009 in the Journal of Psychiatric Research claimed. She said the data showed a direct, temporal relationship. In other words, after a woman had an abortion, they were more likely to report a serious mental health concern later in their life.

However, when other researchers (Steinberg & Finer, 2012) tried to replicate Coleman et al.’s findings, they could not do so. After conferring with the original authors and digging through the data a little more, they discovered the problem.

Coleman et al. had misrepresented a very important component of their original research. They never looked at a person’s recent or current psychiatric diagnosis. Instead, they had asked only about any diagnosis in their entire lifetime — something that meant they had no data about whether such a diagnosis was made before or after the abortion.

Last week, more than a few news agencies and blogs picked up the story that “one out of every 10 Wall Street employees is a psychopath.” This immediately caught my attention, because as a researcher, I found the statistic intriguing because it was so out of whack with the incidence of psychopathy in the general population.

But in trying to research where this statistic came from, I stumbled upon a symptom of what’s wrong with a lot of journalism today.

I can summarize the problem in one word — laziness. Many (most?) journalists nowadays take “experts” words for whatever claims they make, without ever bothering to check them out independently.

“Have the psychiatrists gone mad? — those who weren’t crazy to begin with! They want to turn grief into a disease!”

This might well be the attitude of many in the general public, having read the misleading news coverage of a debate over the DSM-5 — the still-preliminary diagnostic classification of mental disorders, often referred to as “psychiatry’s Bible.” Now, I am no fan of the DSM model of diagnosis — in fact, if the DSM is the “bible,” I’m something of a heretic. In my view, the DSM’s superficial symptom checklists are great for research purposes, but not very useful for most clinicians or patients.

Nevertheless, I don’t like seeing the work of my DSM-5 colleagues misrepresented. So when I see bogus headlines like, “Grief Could Join List of Disorders” in the usually circumspect New York Times, I cringe.

Before discussing the arcane debate over the “bereavement exclusion,” it’s important to understand what most psychiatrists really believe about grief, bereavement, and depression.

In a recent post on the topic of food likes and dislikes, we explored the way food preferences can be affected by the proximity of something else that is liked or disliked. This phenomenon is called “evaluative conditioning.”

The relationship between flavor evaluative conditioning and contingency awareness was investigated in two experiments (Wardle et al., 2007).  In both experiments evaluative conditioning was seen only in those participants who were aware of the contingencies.  According to the researchers, the results of these experiments contradicted earlier findings, where evaluative conditioning occurred in participants who showed no awareness of the contingencies. 

How did they research these issues and what did they find?

In his fascinating book Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World, psychology professor and researcher Sam Sommers, Ph.D, reveals the big impact context has on public behavior — how we think about others and even how we think about ourselves.

According to Sommers, “Even the most private of perceptions — our very sense of self — is shaped by where we are and who we’re with, though we may resist this notion.”

Our Iffy Introspection

Complete this statement five times: “I am _____________.” This is a short version of the “Twenty Statements Test.” If you were given this same test tomorrow or a few years from now or in a different place, do you think your answers would be the same?

Sommers doesn’t think so. He says that how we view ourselves actually changes over time and location. Even small changes in context can affect our responses in a big way.

Evaluative conditioning is defined as a change in liking, which occurs due to an association with a positive or negative stimulus (De Hower et al., 2001).

Simply put, this means that our preferences for brands, products, people and other things can be influenced and even modified by the presence of something we like or dislike strongly.

Evaluative conditioning has also been associated with the development of food likes and dislikes.  Humans develop a dislike for foods that are followed by negative consequences such as nausea, rashes, diarrhea, and breathing problems (Pelchat & Rozin, 1982).  Taste aversions are derived from various situations, such as food poisoning, allergic reactions, over consumption and some medical treatments (Batsell & Brown, 1998). 

Although the majority of developed food aversions are attributed to the taste or flavor of food, a proportion of aversions are related to smell (de Silva & Rachman, 1987). 

As folks get ready to watch the Super Bowl on television this Sunday in the U.S., many of us will be joining or attending Super Bowl viewing parties. If you’re like most Americans, you’ll probably drive to get to that party.

But unlike most Sundays, when you drive this Sunday coming home from your Super Bowl Party, be especially careful. Why?

Because unlike other Sundays when a football game is televised, researchers found that both non-fatal and fatal car accidents increase 41 percent on average. The risk is highest within an hour of the game’s end, when most people are driving home.

What causes this rise in automobile accidents? Not surprising, alcohol was involved in most fatal injury accidents, as well as a majority of non-fatal accidents. Inattention and fatigue are two additional factors implicated.

Why does the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC) misrepresent psychological research?

For instance, in its post on its website titled, “STUDY: Manic Symptoms Linked to Specific Criminal Acts,” the unattributed and undated article suggests that a new study was released that demonstrated a causal link between manic symptoms, and well, specific criminal acts.

But when I read the study, and compared it with what was in the article on the TAC website, I saw a complete misunderstanding (or misrepresentation, whether intentional or not) of the new study.

It now makes me question the validity of any information published by the Treatment Advocacy Center on their website, because it appears their bias — to drive home the mistaken idea that mental illness = increased risk of violence — affects their ability to even deliver research news objectively.

Stress affects everyone in varying degrees. And what’s stressful to me — paying the bills, writing a great article, organizing and cleaning the house, having a mile-long to-do list — may not be stressful to you.

But regardless of what ruffles you, it helps to have many stress-relieving options on hand to either stave off stress or minimize it when you feel the tinges of overwhelm.

To get the scoop on ways to deal with stress, we spoke with Dr. Darlene Mininni, Ph.D, the author of The Emotional Toolkit and a contributor to Dr. Drew’s TV show Lifechangers. Here, she shares a list of quick and even unexpected strategies that can help.

Following these tips you’ll also find additional pieces on minimizing stress.

The importance of the comparative approach to studying the brain cannot be overstated.  The comparative approach allows us to compare human brains to brains of non-humans.

One of the key findings in this area is that the difference between human brains and brains of other species are often quantitative rather than qualitative.  Comparative studies do reveal differences, but they also reveal many similarities that can lead to a better understanding of evolution and brain development.  The primary benefits of using the comparative approach are that simpler brains found in other species make it more likely that brain-behavior relationships will be revealed, and there are fewer ethical restrictions applied to the study of other species.

Researchers who work with our closest relatives, chimps, assume that the things learned about chimps’ brains and behavior could be applied to understanding human brains and behavior.  Researchers can also make meaningful comparisons with more distantly related species: slugs, fruit flies, rats and cats.  Brain-behavior comparisons across species provide information that is difficult to obtain from studying a single species.