Island Confidential: pychology

Showing posts with label pychology. Show all posts

From Cake Wrecks: Kawaii Cakes

Yesterday, we introduced a new bakery-themed mystery series from R.L. Syme. Since I’m in no hurry to leave the topic of sweets, here is a post from the archives of Cake Wrecks. Enjoy! “Kawaii” is the Japanese word for “cute” – used as both an adjective and a noun – but it’s much more than […]
from From Cake Wrecks: Kawaii Cakes

How Music Can Boost Your Mood

Paralyzed by worry.Overcome with regret. Fraught with rage. Down in the dumps. Have you ever felt stuck in an emotional state that you can’t seem to get out of? If you’ve felt this way before, you may have even wished that there was a way to turn these emotions off entirely. With colder temperatures outside […]

from Frankie Bow

How Music Can Boost Your Mood

Feeling stressed? Try doing something nice for someone else.

Feeling seasonal stress? Try doing a small favor for someone else. A study in Clinical Psychological Science found that

prosocial behavior moderated the effects of stress on positive affect, negative affect, and overall mental health. Findings suggest that affiliative behavior may be an important component of coping with stress and indicate that engaging in prosocial behavior might be an effective strategy for reducing the impact of stress on emotional functioning.

» Read the summary on PsyBlog: A Surprising Way To Cope With Everyday Stress

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Filed under: APS, PsyBlog, pychology, Science, Science! Tagged: Jeremy Dean, PsyBlog, stress
from Feeling stressed? Try doing something nice for someone else.

The Secret Crime on Campus: Guest Post by Bourne Morris, author of Rise of the Red Queen

“With The Rise of the Red Queen, Bourne Morris is poised to become the queen of academic mysteries and suspense.” – Gigi Pandian, USA Today Bestselling Author of the Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mysteries

A beautiful journalism student is abducted by a man with unusual and frightening expectations. While searching for her missing student, Red Solaris must contend with a university committee quarreling over the rights of the victims and those accused in sexual assault cases. And, in the midst of all this, a journalism professor brings a gun to school and shoots a colleague. Will Red’s ambition to become dean be destroyed by scandal around her? Will she and Detective Joe Morgan ever acknowledge their true feelings for each other?

The Secret Crime on Campus

Guest Post by Bourne Morris

I was a college professor for 26 years and now I write fiction about campus violence. In the past two years, we have all seen the number of discussions and articles in the media about sexual assault on American campuses. It’s raised some serious questions in my mind about my own college experience and about the health and safety of the students I taught for 26 years. I know the topic is not cozy, but if you have a child going to college these days, it’s worth thinking about.

Should the names of Sexual Assault victims be kept secret? Some women are coming forward with stories of what happened to them. Not just older women, but often young women who are still in school. Those who go public call themselves survivors, not victims, and many regard the process of telling their stories as a step toward healing.

Yet, at many universities, the policy of the administration is still to protect the identity of the victim. And many major news organizations still have policies requiring that the name of the assaulted be kept secret from the community.

Is this discretion reasonable? From time to time someone argues that if a man or woman was robbed, his or her name would be revealed. If she was murdered her name would be known as soon as the body was identified and the family notified. If he was beaten up in a parking lot, we would know his name as well as what he could tell us about the event.

But sexual assault is a crime of violence still shrouded in secrecy. It seems we have a hard time separating the word “sexual’ from the word “assault.” The difference in attitudes, often reflected in varying state laws, is enough to drive you crazy. In some places, unless the victim actively fights back, no crime is committed.

One of the more surprising facts I learned in my research is the number of times the female victim is fearful she will lose her friends if she reports assault. In too many cases, it’s not the accused who tells her to keep her mouth shut, it’s other girls in her dorm or sorority.

Perhaps we are unwilling to identify the victim of a sex crime because even if she (or he) is badly hurt, we still think that somehow the victim was partly to blame.

Or maybe it’s because we still think that a young woman is somehow so altered by the event it will affect her chances of marriage. Or that a young man who is assaulted must be some sort of weakling.

Or maybe it’s because it’s so darn difficult to prove a crime when it’s two people telling very different versions of the same event

Or because, every once in a while, someone makes it up to get a former lover in trouble.

Whatever our reasons, the rule of secrecy causes more sorrow and depression than we know. One has only to understand what it is like to keep a traumatic event a secret for years, to keep from seeking justice for a crime committed against yourself or someone close, to know what price the survivors pay for the discretion as well as the act itself.

Why I decided to write about sexual assault in “The Rise of the Red Queen.” The basic theme of the Red Queen series is campus crime and violence. And trying to cope with the problems posed by sexual assault is a major issue for today’s university administrations. The variety of policies now in place or under consideration indicate the predicament we find ourselves in.

It seems to be no trick at all to decide that campus crimes of murder, theft, battery and vandalism are immediately reported to the police and described in the media.

Perhaps some day we will be as open and swift about sexual assault. We will believe is not about sex. It is not a form of bullying or a drunken error in judgment. It’s an act of violence and should be treated as such.

That’s what my protagonist, Dr. Meredith “Red” Solaris hopes as she battles with the murky politics of her campus and searches for a kidnapped student taken by a deranged man.

About The Author

After Bennington College, I worked at McCall’s Magazine and then went to Ogilvy&Mather, New York during the “Mad Men “ era. David Ogilvy and his colleagues treated me wonderfully, promoted me several times and then sent me west to become head of their agency in Los Angeles. I had a splendid run in advertising.

In 1983, I joined the University of Nevada Reno as a full professor in Journalism where I taught until 2009. I learned about campus politics when I served as chair of the faculty senate. I retired to write mysteries in 2009 after a wonderful teaching career.

I live with my husband of 34 years in a ranch house with a view of tall trees and mountains. We have four children and eight grandchildren. Life is good.

Amazon Author Page | Website | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads

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Filed under: Author Interviews, pychology, Writing Tagged: academic mystery, Author Interviews, blog tour, Bourne Morris, campus crime, red queen
from The Secret Crime on Campus: Guest Post by Bourne Morris, author of Rise of the Red Queen

Drink to remember?

One to three glasses of champagne each week could slow memory loss from ageing, recent research finds.

Scientists have found that phenolic compounds in champagne can help improve spatial memory.

The phenolic compounds come from the Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier red grapes which are used alongside Chardonnay in the production of champagne.

The compounds affect the signals sent from the hippocampus to the cortex.

The compounds were found to slow the age-related decline in this signalling.

» Continue reading: The Celebratory Drink That Could Improve Memory

from PsyBlog http://bit.ly/1OYl1H5

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Filed under: PsyBlog, pychology, Science, Science! Tagged: Champagne, Pinot Noir, PsyBlog
from Drink to remember?

Don’t touch me there: The Body Map of Acceptable Social Touching

Who is allowed to touch whom, where, and under what circumstances? Thanks to a cross-cultural study, we now know:

The greater the pleasure caused by touching a specific area of the body, the more selectively we allow others to touch it.

Few major differences were seen in the types of social touching allowed between the different cultures.

The closer the relationship, the fewer places were off-limits.

The study was published in the journal PNAS (Suvilehto et al., 2015).

» Continue reading: The Body Map of Acceptable Social Touching

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Filed under: PsyBlog, pychology, Science Tagged: Jeremy Dean, PNAS, PsyBlog, touching
from Don’t touch me there: The Body Map of Acceptable Social Touching

Today in Whaaa?!? Communicating with direct brain-to-brain connection.

Two human brains have been directly linked to play a game over the internet for the first time.

The experiment, carried out at the University of Washington, allowed people to send signals directly from one brain to the other over the internet.

For the research, two people played a game similar to ’20 questions’ — a parlour game where you have to guess what object the other person is thinking of.

One person wore a cap measuring their brainwaves (EEG) and looked at a screen, on which was displayed an object, such as a dog.

They then responded to questions by focussing on one of two flashing LEDs.

In control experiments receivers guessed the correct object only 18% of the time.

But, when their brains were connected via the internet, the rate jumped to 72%.

» Continue reading: Two Human Brains Directly Connected To Play Parlour Game Over The Internet

from PsyBlog http://bit.ly/1WxZKol
talking brain illustration by Freepik.com

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Filed under: PsyBlog, pychology, Science, Science! Tagged: Brains, Jeremy Dean, PsyBlog, science
from Today in Whaaa?!? Communicating with direct brain-to-brain connection.