Quotes by Psychologists - Page 44

From a social psychological standpoint, the selfie phenomenon seems to stem from two basic human motives. The first is to attract attention from other people. Because people’s positive social outcomes in life require that others know them, people are motivated to get and maintain social attention. By posting selfies, people can keep themselves in other people’s minds. In addition, like all photographs that are posted on line, selfies are used to convey a particular impression of oneself. Through the clothes one wears, one’s expression, staging of the physical setting, and the style of the photo, people can convey a particular public image of themselves, presumably one that they think will garner social rewards.
Mark R. Leary
Do anything that you want to do other than what you are required to do...success will surely go to others.
Amit Abraham
It is important to refuse to be intimidated. That refusal must not be based simply on a calculation of the odds of succeeding. At times, in my case, multiple lawsuits and an ethics charge seemed overwhelming, and the fact that I knew my work to be accurate and responsible was only partial solace. l was well aware that court, like the National Football League, is an arena in which, on any given Sunday, anybody can win.The refusal to be intimidated must come, in the end, not from a sureness of succeeding but from a knowledge of the cost of scurrying for shelter through fake retractions and disowned truths. It is a question, in the end of self-respect.Who among us could, in good faith, ever face a survivor of childhood abuse again were we to run for cover when pressed ourselves? Children are not permitted that choice, and the adults who choose to work with them and with the survivors they become cannot afford to make it. It would be a choice to become. Through betrayal and deceit, that to which we object.Our alternative, then, is not to hide. Not to refuse to treat adult survivors, not to refuse to go to court in their defense, not to apologize and retract statements we know are true, but to cultivate endurance and tenacity as carefully as we read the research.Confessions of a Whistle-Blower: Lessons Learned Author: Anna C. Salter. Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8, Issue 2 June 1998
Anna C. Salter
The language of love is the only language understood but not spoken the world over.
Amit Abraham
Traumas produce their disintegrating effects in proportion to their intensity, duration and repetition. (1909)
Pierre Janet
The biggest battle in life is to change the negative stories we tell ourselves
Melanie Greenberg
Sometimes people who adamantly assert an opinion or view don't even hold it themselves.
David J. Lieberman
The tobacco control movement provides a good model for how to achieve massive societal changes. In 1965, over 50 percent of men and 34 percent of women smoked. By 2010, only 23.5 percent of men and 17.9 percent of women were smoking (CDC 2011). These numbers represent one of the twentieth century’s most important public health achievements.
Anthony Biglan
Self-esteem is a barometer of your overall internal makeup.
Asa Don Brown
The key to activating maturation is to take care of the attachment needs of the child. To foster independance we must first invite dependance; to promote individuation we must provide a sense of belonging and unity; to help the child separate we must assume the responsibility for keeping the child close. We help a child let go by providing more contact and connection than he himself is seeking. When he asks for a hug, we give him a warmer one than he is giving us. We liberate children not by making them work for our love but by letting them rest in it. We help a child face the separation involved in going to sleep or going to school by satisfying his need for closeness.
Gordon Neufeld
Although there are certain needs, such as hunger, thirst, sex, which are common to man, those drives which make for the differences in men's characters, like love and hatred, the lust for power and the yearning for submission, the enjoyment of sensuous pleasure and the fear of it, are all products of the social process. The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed and biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man. In other words, society has not only a suppressing function - although it has that too - but it has also a creative function.
Erich Fromm
One of the most interesting results was part of a study my students and I conducted dealing with status in email correspondence. Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than people who are low in status.
James W. Pennebaker
Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use.
Wendell Johnson
The argument has long been made that we humans are by nature compassionate and empathic despite the occasional streak of meanness, but torrents of bad news throughout history have contradicted that claim, and little sound science has backed it. But try this thought experiment. Imagine the number of opportunities people around the world today might have to commit an antisocial act, from rape or murder to simple rudeness and dishonesty. Make that number the bottom of a fraction. Now for the top value you put the number of such antisocial acts that will actually occur today. That ratio of potential to enacted meanness holds at close to zero any day of the year. And if for the top value you put the number of benevolent acts performed in a given day, the ratio of kindness to cruelty will always be positive. (The news, however, comes to us as though that ratio was reversed.)Harvard's Jerome Kagan proposes this mental exercise to make a simple point about human nature: the sum total of goodness vastly outweighs that of meanness. 'Although humans inherit a biological bias that permits them to feel anger, jealousy, selfishness and envy, and to be rude, aggressive or violent,' Kagan notes, 'they inherit an even stronger biological bias for kindness, compassion, cooperation, love and nurture – especially toward those in need.' This inbuilt ethical sense, he adds, 'is a biological feature of our species.
Daniel Goleman
Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority.
Stanley Milgram
A good listener is a witness, not a judge of your experience.
Michael P Nichols
The sexual act without love never bridges the gap between two human beings, except momentarily.
Erich Fromm
Love and work are to people what water and sunshine are to plants.
Jonathan Haidt
Observing desire without acting on it enlarges our freedom to choose how we live.
Tara Brach
Children become frustrated and resentful when they view their parents as not being interested “in how they feel and in their point of view.
Haim G. Ginott
...the vast majority of these [dissociative identity disorder] patients have subtle presentations characterized by a mixture of dissociative and PTSD symptoms embedded with other symptoms, such as posttraumatic depression, substance abuse, somatoform symptoms, eating disorders, and self-destructive and impulsive behaviors.2,10A history of multiple treatment providers, hospitalizations, and good medication trials, many of which result in only partial or no benefit, is often an indicator of dissociative identity disorder or another form of complex PTSD.
Bethany L. Brand
It is not important who the leader is. Its important where they lead you to.
Amit Abraham
Numbers, furthermore as archetypal structural constants of the collective unconscious, possess a dynamic, active aspect which is especially important to keep in mind. It is not what we can do with numbers but what they do to our consciousness that is essential.
Marie-Louise von Franz
Those who think money can't buy happiness just don't know where to shop … People would be happier and healthier if they took more time off and spent it with their family and friends, yet America has long been heading in the opposite direction. People would be happier if they reduced their commuting time, even if it meant living in smaller houses, yet American trends are toward even larger houses and ever longer commutes. People would be happier and healthier if they took longer vacations even if that meant earning less, yet vacation times are shrinking in the United States, and in Europe as well. People would be happier, and in the long run and wealthier, if they bought basic functional appliances, automobiles, and wristwatches, and invested the money they saved for future consumption; yet, Americans and in particular spend almost everything they have – and sometimes more – on goods for present consumption, often paying a large premium for designer names and superfluous features.
Jonathan Haidt
We must know something about malevolence, about how to recognize it, and about how not to make excuses for it. We must know that we cannot expect fair play.That is, perhaps, most crucial of all. Those of us who practice in this field must face the implications of the fact that we are dealing with sexual abuse. Child sex offenders-people who exploit children’s bodies and betray their trust-are not going to hesitate to lie outright. This is obvious but nonetheless frequently seems to catch people by surprise.Confessions of a Whistle-Blower: Lessons Learned Author: Anna C. Salter. Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8, Issue 2 June 1998
Anna C. Salter
Pushing through fear is less frightening than living with the underlying fear that comes from a feeling of helplessness.
Susan Jeffers
Characteristics of System 1: • generates impressions, feelings, and inclinations; when endorsed by System 2 these become beliefs, attitudes, and intentions • operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort, and no sense of voluntary control • can be programmed by System 2 to mobilize attention when a particular pattern is detected (search) • executes skilled responses and generates skilled intuitions, after adequate training • creates a coherent pattern of activated ideas in associative memory • links a sense of cognitive ease to illusions of truth, pleasant feelings, and reduced vigilance • distinguishes the surprising from the normal • infers and invents causes and intentions • neglects ambiguity and suppresses doubt • is biased to believe and confirm • exaggerates emotional consistency (halo effect) • focuses on existing evidence and ignores absent evidence (WYSIATI)• generates a limited set of basic assessments • represents sets by norms and prototypes, does not integrate• matches intensities across scales (e.g., size to loudness) • computes more than intended (mental shotgun) • sometimes substitutes an easier question for a difficult one (heuristics) • is more sensitive to changes than to states (prospect theory)* • overweights low probabilities* • shows diminishing sensitivity to quantity (psychophysics)* • responds more strongly to losses than to gains (loss aversion)* • frames decision problems narrowly, in isolation from one another*
Daniel Kahneman
Certainly, child rearing requires many different interventions. There are times for helping, for not getting involved, or for being strict, But the real issue is this: Is what you are going being done on purpose? Or are you doing it from reasons that you do not think about, such as your own personality, childhood, need of the moment, or fears?
Henry Cloud
The punishment for rape should be castration.
Amit Abraham
A child's attachment process begins within the first year of life...
Asa Don Brown
Religious persons are generally very interested in sex just like any normal person - and have an imagination and the energy for it. When constrained by the guilt cycle, however, they keep it under wraps. When guilt is temporarily removed, they can go to the other extreme. Many can remain in the uninhibited phase for weeks - months at most - then a wave of guilt overtakes them.
Darrel Ray
Allow the way to your great work to be guided by your service to others.
Mollie Marti
Women aren't my competition because male attention and sexual objectification are not prizes for me.
Miya Yamanouchi
Dissociation, a form of hypnotic trance, helps children survive the abuse…The abuse takes on a dream-like, surreal quality and deadened feelings and altered perceptions add to the strangeness. The whole scene does not fit into the 'real world.' It is simple to forget, easy to believe nothing happened.
Renee Fredrickson
Your generation has been the target of incredible disinformation on the subject of premarital sex, which is another enticing addictive behavior to be considered. In this instance, our own government is responsible for much of the confusion. For some thirty years, federal and state programs have promoted a concept its promoters call "safe sex," which refers to the use of condoms in sexual intercourse. Billions of dollars have been spent telling young people that they can have sex—lots of really good sex—without suffering from the consequences of it. Condoms, they say, will solve all the problems.
James C. Dobson
Shoulds can masquerade as high standards or lofty goals, but they are not the same. Goals direct us from the inside, but shoulds are paralyzing judgments from the outside. Goals feel like authentic dreams while shoulds feel like oppressive obligations. Shoulds set up a false dichotomy between either meeting an ideal or being a failure, between perfection or settling. The tyranny of the should even pits us against our own best interests.
Meg Jay
I hate everything about you that you do and love everything you don’t
Amit Abraham
If you don’t want to get stuck where you don’t want to be, have the courage to do difficult things.
Marci G. Fox
If you want your children to improve let them overhear the nice things you say about them to others.
Haim Ginott
A therapist who rushes to help forgets to listen.
Noam Shpancer
You must have been working very hard here, with so few distractions.”Mary’s eyes darkened and she looked away.“Not quite as much as I hoped for. At times the loneliness and the unanswered questions can get overwhelming, like very loud voices echoing inside my head, just asking ‘why’ ‘who’ and making me think about my wasted life.
Olga Núñez Miret
The doubt itself will not disappear as long as man does not overcome his isolation and as long as his place in the world has not become a meaningful one in terms of his human needs.
Erich Fromm
When you're having what you feel like is a "bad day" and then someone comes along out of nowhere and extends to you the simplest of kind gestures, you feel it so deeply within your heart.
Miya Yamanouchi
Perhaps a better explanation for why it's so difficult to feel our feelings is that ALL emotion, positive or negative, opens the door to the nature of reality. All of us prefer to avoid pain -- but even more, we want to escape reality.
Dan B. Allender
Acceptance doesn't mean tolerating unhealthy relationships or problem behaviour. In relationships, acceptance has two key qualities. First, it means being willing to recognize that your partner, right here and right now, is struggling too. It means allowing for the possibility that his motivations might be good and constructive, even if it doesn't feel that way. It means not getting caught up in the belief that he's wrong or doesn't care about you, and instead embracing the possibility that he's doing the best he can. He may even be trying to make you happy--but in a way that only makes sense inside the male mind. Acceptance also means embracing the formidable task of empathizing with your partner's struggle when you least want to do so.
Shawn T. Smith
Try to be surprised by something every day. It could be something you see, hear, or read about. Stop to look at the unusual car parked at the curb, taste the new item on the cafeteria menu, actually listen to your colleague at the office. How is this different from other similar cars, dishes or conversations? What is its essence? Don't assume that you already know what these things are all about, or that even if you knew them, they wouldn't matter anyway. Experience this once thing for what it is, not what you think it is. Be open to what the world is telling you. Life is nothing more than a stream of experiences - the more widely and deeply you swim in it, the richer your life will be.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
He sees those tears in your eyes. He knows the desire of your heart. And you will hear from Him-just in time to take the next step.
James C. Dobson
Desire is the key to motivation. It is the key to develop a healthy personality and a positive attitude towards oneself and others.
Amit Abraham
Every girl who aspires ultimately to outfit her own home should assemble a library on architectural styles and on furniture both traditional and modern. As few brides can buy expensively illustrated volumes and household equipment simultaneously, a girl should begin asking parents for books early in life, probably while still in the primary grades...
Johnson O'Connor
One of the central elements of resilience, Bonanno has found, is perception: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow? “Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic,” Bonanno told me, in December. “To call something a ‘traumatic event’ belies that fact.” He has coined a different term: PTE, or potentially traumatic event, which he argues is more accurate.The theory is straightforward. Every frightening event, no matter how negative it might seem from the sidelines, has the potential to be traumatic or not to the person experiencing it. Take something as terrible as the surprising death of a close friend: you might be sad, but if you can find a way to construe that event as filled with meaning—perhaps it leads to greater awareness of a certain disease, say, or to closer ties with the community—then it may not be seen as a trauma. The experience isn’t inherent in the event; it resides in the event’s psychological construal. It’s for this reason, Bonanno told me, that “stressful” or “traumatic” events in and of themselves don’t have much predictive power when it comes to life outcomes. “The prospective epidemiological data shows that exposure to potentially traumatic events does not predict later functioning,” he said. “It’s only predictive if there’s a negative response.” In other words, living through adversity, be it endemic to your environment or an acute negative event, doesn’t guarantee that you’ll suffer going forward. What matters is whether that adversity becomes traumatizing.
Maria Konnikova
We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.
John Dewey
Seven Rules Formulated for Teaching Arithmetic:1) Consider the situation the pupils faces.2) Consider the response you wish to connect with.3) Form the bond; do not expect it to come by miracle.4) Other things being equal, form no bond that will have to be broken.5) Other things being equal, do not form two or three bonds when one will serve.6) Other things being equal, form bonds in the way that they are required later to act.7) Favor, therefore, the situations which life itself will offer, and the responses which life itself will demand. (p. 101)
Edward Lee Thorndike
It seems safe to say that significant discovery really creative thinking does not occur with regard to problems about which the thinker is lukewarm.
Mary Henle
One reason we're not winning the fight against depression is that our available treatments leave so many in partial recovery limbo.
Jonathan Rottenberg
Every time I went to the library, it felt like a treasure hunt: somewhere amid those dusty books was the answer, and all I had to do was find it.
Jean M. Twenge
Through most of human history, our ancestors had children shortly after puberty, just as the members of all nonhuman species do to this day. Whether we like the idea or not, our young ancestors must have been capable of providing for their offspring, defending their families from predators, cooperating with others, and in most other respects functioning fully as adults. If they couldn't function as adults, their young could not have survived, which would have meant the swift demise of the human race. The fact that we're still here suggests that most young people are probably far more capable than we think they are. Somewhere along the line, we lost sight of – and buried – the potential of our teens.
Robert Epstein
In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.
Rollo May
What is the ROI (return on investment) of your suffering?
Lisa Cypers Kamen
Beyond telling and getting away however there are an awful lot of myths out there about how to move on or get justice. People may tell you to report the crime or confront you abuser- or even to forgive him. I don't necessarily advocate any of these things. I think counseling of some kind can be enormously useful, but the bottom line is that the main way to heal is to find people who will support you, to talk about what happened, and to ground yourself in the reality that the abuse was not your fault, that you have nothing to be ashamed of, and that you deserve great love and happiness in your life.
Patti Feuereisen
Critical thinking helps us to more clearly understand situations, patients, colleagues, and our agendas, negative emotions, attitudes, motivations, talents, and growing edges. This not only helps us to have a greater grasp of reality but also stops the drain of psychological energy that is necessary to be defensive or to protect our image. Because critical thinking is not natural, although we may think it is for us, it takes discipline, a willingness to face the unpleasant, and a stamina that allows one not to become unduly frustrated when we do not achieve results as quickly as we prefer with respect to our insights and growth.
Robert J. Wicks