Nothing captures human attention more than a moral dilemma. Whether we are soap opera fanatics or not, we can’t help sticking our noses in other people’s affairs, pronouncing our views on right and wrong, justified or not. For millennia, philosophers have speculated about how people make moral decisions, what decisions they make, and what decisions they ought to make. To this rich history of theory the Psychology Department at Harvard University hopes to contribute some data — with your help. Their aim is to use data from the Moral Sense Test,(MST) as well as other experiments, to characterize the nature of our moral psychology, how it evolved, and how it develops in our species, creating individuals with moral responsibilities. The MST has been designed for all humans who are curious about that puzzling little word “ought” — about the principles that make one action right and another wrong.
You have the opportunity to participate in the Moral Sense Test right now. The test is short, and your responses are completely confidential. For more information, read the privacy statement.
Before therapists and medication, were kids better off working out mental health problems for themselves?
That’s the question explored by psychotherapist Erik Kobell in today’s New York Times Cases column, which was inspired by a bar patron who overheard Dr. Kobell’s conversation with a fellow therapist.
“I can tell you one thing,” he announced, as I recall. “Back in my day, you didn’t have young kids going around talking to shrinks. . . .Back in my day, kids were kids! We worked out our problems on our own. We didn’t go crying to some stranger with a whole bunch of initials after his name.”
But were kids better off working things out for themselves? To learn more, read the full column, “Fake Nostalgia for a Pre-Therapy Past” and then join the discussion.
For all those dismayed by scenes of looting in disaster-struck zones, whether Haiti or Chile or elsewhere, take heart: Good acts – acts of kindness, generosity and cooperation – spread just as easily as bad. And it takes only a handful of individuals to really make a difference.
In a study published in the March 8 early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of California, San Diego and Harvard provide the first laboratory evidence that cooperative behavior is contagious and that it spreads from person to person to person. When people benefit from kindness they “pay it forward” by helping others who were not originally involved, and this creates a cascade of cooperation that influences dozens more in a social network. [click to continue…]
In this interview, Dr. Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe of Washington State University discusses different types of memory concepts – including semantic memory, episodic memory, prospective memory, source memory, and working memory and how these are affected by dementia and MCI. Greg Lee, the interviewer, is a psychology undergraduate student at the University of Idaho.
