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World of Psychology


Books

Using the 5 Second Rule to Initiate Tasks


The title -- The 5 Second Rule: Transform Your Life, Work, and Confidence with Everyday Courage -- intrigued me.

According to the publisher, Mel Robbins’s self-help book is “based on a simple psychological tool that the author developed to motivate herself. Using a technique that involves counting down backwards from five to one, she gave herself the extra push she needed to complete dreaded tasks, become more productive.”

Could this technique help solve my task-initiation problem?
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Anxiety and Panic

Reduce Anxiety by Shifting Focus to Positive Cues

Dr. Brady Nelson and colleagues at Stony Brook University recently published a study in the journal Biological Psychology which found that you can mute the brain’s anxiety/threat response with simple shifts in attentional training.

They found that a brief 5-10 minutes intervention of Cognitive Bias Modification (or CBM) training is enough to reverse a default neural response, a supposed hardwiring that creates a negativity bias in our attention. In CBM training the default gets shifted to allow a person to instead focus more on positive cues. At the level of cognition, this helps cuts off the cascade of an anxiety response.
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Anxiety and Panic

Psychology Around the Net: July 21, 2018


Whether you read this with your Saturday morning coffee or while winding down after a busy weekend, you definitely want to make some time to catch up on the latest in this week's mental health news!

This week's Psychology Around the Net takes a look at the so-called "narcissism epidemic" of Western culture, whether or not "scream therapy" is a useful tool for treating anxiety, how poverty affects the mental health of menstruating women, and more.
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Family

4 Mental Health Tips for New Moms

Perinatal or maternal mental health is just as important as physical health. Check out these four important tips for maintaining your health as a new mom.   

One of my very best friends gave birth to her first child recently, and I’ve been lucky enough to get to help her care for him during the past few months. While helping her care for her newborn son, I’ve realized how much of an effect being a new mother can have on a person’s mental health.
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ADHD and ADD

Do French Kids Get ADHD? Yes

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has become an increasing commonplace childhood malady, affecting somewhere between 5 to 9 percent of American children ever year.

Back in 2012, a blog was written claiming it explained the reason "Why French Kids Don't Have ADHD." In the article, Dr. Marilyn Wedge made the astonishing claim that while American children suffered ADHD prevalence rates of around 9 percent, French children have a prevalence rate of "less than 0.5 percent."

The only problem with this claim? It's not true.

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Best of Our Blogs

Best of Our Blogs: July 20, 2018

Whether physical or mental, illness can definitely set you back. If it's chronic, you might question your ability to carry the weight of it. You might wonder how you'll manage it now and for the rest of your life.

What's brought hope in my own life is knowing we're all in this together. Everyone struggles with some challenge. All I need to do is reach out to find support and an understanding friend.

I also know that no matter how acute the symptom is, everything ebbs and flows. There will be bad days, but there will also be good ones.

I hope this provides a reminder that you're not alone, and that while being completely cured may not be a part of your story, being healed certainly can.
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Habits

Is Timing Really Everything?

I have assembled a Time Chart to determine the best times to do certain things during the day, or during one’s life. The chart is based on a series of interdisciplinary studies about time and its improbable effects on decision-making processes, emotional performance, lifestyle choices, sociological trends, and more. The importance of time, in many frightening ways, is discussed and distilled in a new book by Dan Pink, entitled When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.

Let’s start with a disturbing, real-life example of time’s unconscious power over fate -- at least for a prisoner facing a parole board. When, would you say, during the course of a day, is the best time to be judged by a panel of one’s peers? Would the answer be 9:00 am? 11:45 am? Or 4:30 pm?
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ADHD and ADD

Making the Most of Summer Games for Your Child and YOU

I don’t play. I don’t do games.

When one of my colleagues in the industry asked me what educational games I would recommend for the summer I found myself thinking: What do I know about games? What do I know about playing?

I reached out to a few friends and did some cursory research but generally felt uninspired. As I dug a little deeper, I realized I was battling a familiar pang: mother guilt layered upon the recognition that I don’t play enough with my daughter.
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General

Podcast: The Stanford Prison Non-Experiment


For decades, students have been taught about the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which volunteers were assigned as either “prisoners” or “guards” in a mock prison. The “guards” in this scenario allegedly became abusive and controlling toward the “prisoners,” thus it was concluded that average people, given power and control, would turn to such negative behavior. But was this a legitimate experiment? New evidence reveals that there was a lot more going on behind the scenes than was originally reported. Listen as we discuss the origin of the experiment, the controversy surrounding it, and what (if anything) we can actually learn from it.
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