(Part 3) Top products from r/psychology

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature - evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics. (probably most interesting from a Freudian perspective, deals with many of our unconscious instincts)

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces The Shape Our Decisions - Unconscious decision-making, behavioral economics, consumer psychology. Fun read.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion - Most popular book on the psychology of persuasion, covers all the main principles. Very popular among business crowds.

Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships - Social neuroscience, mirror neurons, empathy, practical stuff mixed with easy to understand brain science.

Authentic Happiness - Positive Psychology, happiness, increasing life satisfaction.

Feeling Good - A good primer on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Also widely considered one of the best self-help books by mental health practitioners.

The Brain That Changes Itself - Neuroplasticity, how experience shapes our brains. Some really remarkable case studies that get you wondering how powerful our brains really are.

The Buddhist Brain - The practical neuroscience of happiness, love, and wisdom from a Buddhist perspective.

That should give you more than enough to chew on.

My training is majorly in neuropsychology, and my experience of the field of research is that biology does indeed play a large role in the development of behavior, with varying degrees of impact depending on the environment.

It is incredibly difficult to make solid conclusions about sex and gender differences from cross cultural analysis, as the author rightly identifies, but it is a very valid observation that there are biological differences which are identifiable in child brain development and subsequently personality development.

A citation for much of his article can be found here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ijop.12265

David Schmitt is quite respected in this area, and he writes frequently on similar topics with
admirable scientific balance

Essentially, if you were blinded to the sex and gender of a child, there are metrics you would be able to measure which would allow you to place those individuals along a binomial distribution which would correlate very well with various phenotypical representations of biological sex (not chromosomal sex though).

I have followed the work of Simon Baron-Cohen for years, as he is a world leader in research of ASD, empathy, and more; and his explanation of the biological differences between sex and gender is very astute and identifies the issues with the terminology while still having a foundation in biological origins.

One of his best explanations is written up here,
and naturally his book has more in depth analysis all fully cited

This is not to say that we should all rely on biological determinism, but it is far more accurate to discuss the development of the brain in terms of overall biological potential which is either encouraged or stunted by environmental impacts.

The development of empathy is a good example of this. This is an oversimplification, but it makes it easier to conceptualize.
The majority of people have a potential empathy level of 100, for the sake of the example, and may have a predisposition multiplier of .5 - 2, so a child with a 2 would develop towards their empathy potential faster than a child with a 1.

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (a good example since indicators of this develop before birth and therefore are not affected by the ‘environment’ of the parenting) will have a much lower potential empathy level, but may still vary as to how fast they are able to meet their potential

Now, most importantly, children will only be able to meet their potential if they experience the prerequisite environmental nurturing as provided by the carer, and this is most obvious in foster children where there is a breach of this care, and even children with a high potential and a high rate can have develop maladaptive empathy and go on to be diagnosed with BPD, NPD or APD, the zero empathy disorders.

I'm not exactly sure where this thought originated, or how it's viewed in the whole field, but it's something I found extremely interesting when I came across it. Robert A. Johnson does an excellent job of presenting it in a very readable form in his book Transformation.

Ah, and now that I've looked it up again I'm reminded that it's specifically about "masculine consciousness" (though, as always, much of it can be applied to "feminine consciousness," just as the reverse is true).

It's an interesting accounting of the so-called three levels of consciousness. He uses three literary examples to illustrate the three levels of consciousness (Don Quixote as the archetypal "simple man", Hamlet as the complex man, and Faust as the enlightened man).

Again I'm not sure how it fits into much of the most modern understanding of the psyche, but I think most people would be able take away quite a bit of useful insight. I highly recommend it.

Bonobos love sex and will have it with any other bonobo just as a show of affection or for pure pleasure. They're very friendly. It bothers me when people point to Apes as proof of our war-like nature, when really we're more like bonobos.

To the OP, Sex at Dawn is a really great book recently published on human sexuality and its origins. Has a nice chapter on bonobos.

TLDR: Say "Alexa, enable emotion pal" and learn to better understand your emotions.

We recently launched the first Alexa app designed by a clinical psychologist.

Because you can talk with Alexa anytime, it's is a great guide to talk you to a better understanding of your emotions when you're feeling them.

Emotion Pal validates your emotion (over 200 are recognized), educates you about the different components of what you're feeling, and provides them with concrete strategies for evaluating whether or not it is helpful to act on the emotion based on clinical DBT tools (this part is US and UK only).

If you're curious, we made a video explaining it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q71tM-51_v8

You can enable Emotion Pal by saying "Alexa, enable emotion pal" or going to: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B081QJX5PK/

We really want this to be as useful as possible, so please let me know if you have any feedback!

I think one of the major reasons for missing data here is because there's so many different ways to measure intelligence.

A book by Matt Ridley (Genome, The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters) explores the area a little bit. It's a bit dated but the logic still applies.

Humans, statistically, measure intelligence via IQ. Why? I dunno.

In the study he cited, genetic traits were not the only influencer on IQ test results. Even IF someone scored lower on an IQ test, that does not mean they are not of high intelligence in some other aspect.

For instance, having an IQ may correlate with a vast knowledge of history but may have nothing to do with an individual's ability to bake (baking... sigh.... hard).

I'd recommend reading the chapter on Intelligence and genes. It was insightful and a potentially good starting point.

The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene (also try his other books, utterly fascinating, beautiful pieces of work)

Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

Vital Lies, Simple Truths by Daniel Goleman

The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker

Leadership and Self Deception by The Arbinger Institute

Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury

Influence by Robert Cialdini

I could go on but these would have to be my favourites that come to mind which relate to what you seem to be interested in. Let me know if you want more suggestions :)

If you have any interest in therapy, I unequivocally recommend The Gift of Therapy by Irvin Yalom. In fact, I recommend any of Yalom's books.

http://www.amazon.com/Rules-Game-Neil-Strauss/dp/0061540455/ref=pd_sim_b_5

I read the first book of this, when I was at a low point in my life. It is less about this will get you all the women in the world, but why. The why, is that you are confident in yourself and you make the world around you. It's about being comfortable in your own skin, and walks you through a series of exercises to get you there. It really works for being self-esteem.

I really enjoyed that book. Another good one by Yalom was Momma and the Meaning of Life.

>A lot of modern psychology and neuroscience appears to be neglecting the concept of the unconscious mind.... Psychology is so determined to get religion out of science that it cannot allow for the concept of the unconscious

I honestly cannot imagine how you came to this conclusion. There is no question at all among psychologists that unconscious processes play an important role in cognition. Every single popular cognitive psychology book I can think of (e.g. 1 2 3 4) discusses the importance of unconscious processes.

> As for the increase in disorders, that's exactly what we'd expect from a newly studied area. We can't judge how "arbitrary" they are by simply saying "look how many there are now!". You'd need to show that the evidential basis presented for certain disorders is inadequate.

Why would we expect an increase in the number of 'disorders' as soon as people embark on a new realm of study? There's a notion of surveying, of cataloging, of checking out what comprises the breadth of human diversity that is more about accepting and compassion than labeling and diagnosing.

Earlier editions of the DSM had homosexuality catalogued as a mental disorder. It took a political movement to get it removed, and today we'd be outraged if psychiatrists tried to put it back. There's a Native American disease diagnosis similar to in form to that of the psychiatrists'. If 'arbitrary' isn't the right word, then perhaps another word or set of words, like 'subjective'?

>Why would we expect an increase in the number of 'disorders' as soon as people embark on a new realm of study?

Because we shouldn't expect them to discover and perfectly describe every single possible disorder on their first try.

>There's a notion of surveying, of cataloging, of checking out what comprises the breadth of human diversity that is more about accepting and compassion than labeling and diagnosing.
Or we do both, as is what currently happens. It's certainly great to increase acceptance and understanding of diversity, but when all these people are suffering we also need to figure out ways to help them cope.

>Earlier editions of the DSM had homosexuality catalogued as a mental disorder. It took a political movement to get it removed, and today we'd be outraged if psychiatrists tried to put it back.

That's not how it happened. Homosexuality was included because all the best available evidence showed that homosexuality was significantly associated with distress and difficulties functioning.

As it turned out however, this was due to a fundamental selection bias in evidence gathering - ie they based their judgement on the only gay people they knew, the ones coming into their office asking for help.

It took the research of people like Kinsey and Hooker who showed that the issues weren't inherent to homosexuality and the problems were more caused by the stigma and how they were treated in society. This evidence was presented and the decision reversed before the petition was finished and political pressure had time to work.

>There's a Native American disease diagnosis similar to in form to that of the psychiatrists'.

I don't understand what relevance this has to the discussion. I don't think the Native Americans gathered objective scientific evidence to reach their conclusions about disorders.

>If 'arbitrary' isn't the right word, then perhaps another word or set of words, like 'subjective'?

But that doesn't work either as the existence of mental disorders aren't subjective.

In the additional list in the article I really enjoyed Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct

One of my own favorites; Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain by Antonio Damasio

The opposite of black and white thinking (I guess you mean reflexive decision-making) isn't indecision, it's informed and reflective decision.

This resource might help you: http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555

This book doesn't have self-affirmation in it, but it's otherwise very in-depth about this gap between self-control and non, and applications of the way our minds work that have come out of brain research over the past 10 years. Here's the author's Google Talk. Very much recommended if you haven't already seen it, it's radical, at least in the last half, IIRC.

The book: Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long .

(and no I'm not David Rock nor associated, it's just a bunch of mind-blowing stuff if you haven't seen it).

In addition to Yalom and Oliver Sacks:

The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness by Ellen Saks

Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher

The Mummy at the Dining Room Table - Eminent Therapists Reveal Their Most Unusual Cases and What They Teach Us About Human Behavior by Jeffrey Cottler and Jon Carlson

Astonish Yourself: 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life

I have to say, as a programmer it doesn't seem that hard a problem to me.
When I'm coding, I write incredibly abstract instructions for the computer to follow. Then, by some miracle, it gets transformed into instructions for the hardware to carry out on the basic level of on/off boolean states.
If somebody made that, then I have no problem believing that our incredibly abstract consciousness is equally explicable in terms of electrochemical interactions.

Incidentally I would highly recommend Dennett's consciousness explained, which deals with this subject in some depth.

Kinda practical, not sure if it's quite what you're looking for-The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

Also The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill by David Buss.

I am going to comment again. But I use to have this same problem. Not being able to fall asleep becasue I was too busy OCDing in my head about shit. It got to the point where I could not fall asleep in my bed. Here is what my psychologist told me. I had associated anxiety with my bed. In a pavlovian kind of way everytime I went to sleep on my bed I started to get anxious and started to obsess. When I would move to the couch or the floor slept like a baby. How I got over it was everytime I would fall asleep if I didnt fall asleep with in the fifteen minutes I got up and walked around, watched TV, or Read. BUT NOT IN MY BED. When I felt tired I went back to my bed and tried again. I will admit the first couple of nights this was a little annoying as there was multiple attempts. But lo and behold i started falling asleep int he first fifteen minutes and I broke that habit.
If you havent already seen a physician I recommend you do so. Average age of diagnosis for someone with OCD is 27. If you get a chance check out this book.

http://www.amazon.com/Brain-Lock-Yourself-Obsessive-Compulsive-Behavior/dp/0060987111

He is one of the leading researchers in the world on OCD.