Monthly Archives: August 2013

Meet Willow, she’s going to be helping me with various psychological projects over the coming months. You may recall a previous article where I reviewed a study that looked at how the hormone released when we see an image like that of a puppy (oxytocin) had been shown to increase donations in response to adverts for good causes (here’s a link), and people reported empathising more with the focus of the ad they had seen. This is a case of misattribution: we experience an ‘instinctive’ reaction in our unconscious mind, and misdirect the resulting feeling to something else we encounter around the same time. Of course, you can’t go around squirting hormones up people’s noses, but you can surround your product with oxytocin-inducing imagery (Willow is available for photo shoots, but growing very quickly). Whipping out a picture of a puppy isn’t necessarily that easy either. But there are lots […]

Sometimes it’s hard to find the right way of phrasing something, but for the most part our flow feels natural. We learn the rules of grammar from an early age. And we learn them implicitly for the most part. Certainly, when I was at school, no one explained grammar formally. What little I was taught explicitly about tenses and adverbs and the like, was gleaned in a couple of years of studying French. The challenge of which might have been slightly easier if, prior to that, I’d had a clue what, say, a past participle was: quel fromage, or do I mean dommage, or should I say il est dommage? Even without realising it we are often making a choice to express ourselves in one particular way when another might apply equally well. But here’s the question: do such choices matter? If the meaning is essentially the same should be […]

I know that we live in a crazy, fast-paced world. And that you’re currently sitting at a computer where at any moment you might be alerted to the arrival of what could be an important email (but is probably someone selling pills or informing you of the inheritance you’re due to receive from a long lost diplomat relative). But forget all that. Just slow down, take a deep breath and enjoy this moment of tranquillity. Allow yourself to drift into the scene above, here the waves brushing over the sand and feel the gentle breeze on your skin. Your phone is turned off and no one is going to bother you. Relax. Incidentally, whilst you have nothing else to do with your time, take a look at this clock. I’d be interested to know what you think it’s worth? As an astute judge of an item’s value I’m sure your […]

The decision has been taken: there is to be an addition to the household. A puppy, that the family has named Willow, will be arriving in a few weeks. As the resident psychologist I have taken on responsibility for training Willow: from what I’ve read this is a reasonably straight-forward exercise involving tasty treats, repetition and the avoidance of saying one thing whilst everything else that’s happening is signalling something else to the dog. Of course, Pavlov famously demonstrated the nature of conditioned response with a dog and, whilst there is much debate within the dog training world, most training boils down to this principle. Most people recognise this response mechanism within dogs, after all, unlike us, they don’t have access to the critical thinking processes that we do. What we tend to focus on much less is our own conditioned responses. We are far more like dogs than we would […]