Building mental wellness on a foundation of strength
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is the psychology of war atrocities. This post won't go into any details of the atrocities themselves; rather, the focus is on what contributes to people becoming perpetrators. This post is based on a comprehensive paper on the… Continue reading What Is… the Psychology of War Atrocities
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is learned helplessness. Learned helplessness was first described by Martin Seligman, who is also the founder of positive psychology. It began with observations made during animal studies, and eventually became his theory of depression. While doing classical conditioning… Continue reading What Is… Learned Helplessness
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is heuristic. Heuristics (from the Greek "to discover") are mental rules of thumb or shortcuts that allow our brains to process information and arrive at conclusions more quickly. A post not long ago covered philosophical razors, which are… Continue reading What Is… a Heuristic
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is moralization. This topic came to mind recently while reading a post on another blog. The author was making pornography a moral issue, and I wanted to do some exploring around that process of moralizing. The term moralization… Continue reading What Is… Moralization
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is psychological construct. In psychology, constructs are ways to describe patterns of behaviour or experiences so that they can be explored, investigated, and discussed. It's a way of putting a name to things that don't exist in a… Continue reading What Is… a Psychological Construct
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is double depression, which comes at the suggestion of Meg of Where Good Advice Happens. This post uses a lot of abbreviations, which are summarized down at the bottom of this post. The term double depression is sometimes… Continue reading What Is… Double Depression
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is self-verification theory. Self-verification theory comes from social psychology, and it says that we want other people to see us the way we see ourselves. That might seem self-obvious, but what's interesting is that this applies even when… Continue reading What Is… Self-Verification Theory
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week we're going to look at the psychology of cuteness. Whether your preference is human babies or babies of the animal variety, they're cute. Even if the associated adults are rather unattractive, the babies just tug at the heartstrings. And… Continue reading What Is… the Psychology of Cuteness
On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder provides twenty lessons that society can learn from the tyrants of the 20th century. The book was recommended to me by rts of Facing the Challenges of Mental Health. This post is less a book review and more a follow-up to a what is... post I did recently on the… Continue reading Book Review/Reflections: On Tyranny
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is emotions. This may seem like a rather obvious topic; after all, we all have emotions. But there's actually more than meets the eye, so I thought it would be interesting to look a little closer. Emotions are… Continue reading What Is… an Emotion
