Welcome to the Weekly Medius PsychNews. Every week, we select five thought-provoking Psychology articles from hundreds published in journals and other media. Psychology Drives Everything.
10 Things You Don't Know about Yourself:
Your “self” lies before you like an open book. Just peer inside and read: who you are, your likes and dislikes, your hopes and fears; they are all there, ready to be understood. This notion is popular but is probably completely false! Psychological research shows that we do not have privileged access to who we are. When we try to assess ourselves accurately, we are really poking around in a fog.
Full article.
4 Days of Intensive Therapy Can Reverse OCD for Years:
For almost a decade, cleaning rituals ruled Kathrine’s life. The middle-aged resident of Bergen, a coastal town in the southern tip of Norway, was consumed by a fear of germs and contamination that led to endless cycles of tidying, vacuuming and washing. “I realized that I was facing a catastrophe,” Kathrine Mydland-aas, now 41, recalls. “I couldn’t help the kids with homework, couldn’t make dinner for them, couldn’t give them hugs. I didn’t do anything but cleaning. I tried to quit, but the rituals always won.”
Full article.
Three Negative Feelings That Can Sometimes Be Good:
A few years ago, I gave a talk at a conference for cancer survivors. In attendance were more than a thousand people in various stages of their battles against this daunting disease, ranging from those who had just received their diagnosis to people years into remission. Somewhat spontaneously, I asked the audience a question: "What is the least helpful piece of advice anyone offered you during your cancer ordeal?" Given the number of people, it shouldn’t be surprising that there was a plethora of opinions. But, there was a wave of agreement that one of the very least helpful things they heard — often over and over again — was, "Look on the bright side! Just put your mind on the positive, and everything will be all right." The main problem with this advice, the audience told me, was that it's simply impossible to follow. "The more I try to force myself to think positively," one woman commented, "the more I just feel like I’m lying to myself and the people I love."
Full article.
4 Proven Approaches to Increase Your Confidence Level:
Have you ever said to yourself, “I don’t feel confident, so I couldn’t possibly…" [insert desired goal here]. Not many of us are taught how confidence truly works. We get it backwards: We believe we have to wait until we
feel confident before we can
act confidently. In my new book,
The Self-Confidence Workbook: A Guide to Overcoming Self-Doubt and Improving Self-Esteem, I show you the truth about self-confidence: what it is, where it come from, and how to master the rules of the confidence game. The book is based on evidence-based therapies, meaning they’ve been shown in rigorous research studies to work. Let’s look at each one and show how it relates to self-confidence.
Full article.
Researchers say they’ve identified two brain networks – one responsible for volition, the other for agency – that together underlie our sense of free will:
While there’s still a debate about whether we have free will or not, most researchers at least agree that we feel as if we do. That perception is often considered to have two elements: a sense of having decided to act – called “volition”; and feeling that that decision was our own – having “agency”. Now in a paper in
PNAS, Ryan Darby at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and colleagues have used a new technique – lesion network mapping – to identify for the first time the brain networks that underlie our feelings of volition and for agency. “Together, these networks may underlie our perception of free will, with implications for neuropsychiatric diseases in which these processes are impaired,” the researchers write.
Full article.
