New Books in Psychology

In October 2007, journalist Eric Simons sat in the stands of Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, Calif., to watch his beloved University of California Bears take on Oregon State University in football. If Cal won, it almost certainly would be ranked No. 1 in the country. Instead, Simons agonized as Cal’s quarterback struggled through the final play. Cal lost. Simons suffered a miserable train ride home to San Francisco. But from crushing defeat sprang an idea for his latest book, The Secret Lives of Sports Fans: The Science of Sports Obsession (The Overlook Press, 2013). A science and nature writer by trade, Simons sought scientific explanations for the physical and emotional reactions experienced by sports fans., “We are not subject to any kind of fan nature; we are more complex than that,” Simons writes. “We sports fan are glorious expressions of all the wondrous quirks and oddities in human nature.” Through the lens of sport and sports fans, Simons has built a unique window into what it means to be human. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

It is common today to treat depression and other mental disorders as concrete illnesses – akin to having pneumonia or the flu. In fact, being prescribed a pill after complaining to your family doctor about feeling depressed is a common occurrence. But are mental disorders really illnesses the way that a sinus infection is? Gary Greenberg, in his fascinating new book The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry (Blue Rider Press, 2013), argues that the answer is no. The DSM, which categorizes and defines mental disorders, is socially constructed, he claims, and changes over time. Homosexuality, for example, was considered an illness until 1973, and Asperger’s, now widely considered by the public to be a real condition (which many identify with), may no longer be in the newest revision of the DSM. Greenberg is not indicting all psychiatry or arguing that people should not take antidepressants, but he is criticizing the assumption that mental suffering is the same as physical suffering, arguing that mental anguish is often a multi-layered problem that cannot be fixed by a pill or explained by brain malfunction (though we are often led to believe that this is the case). Allowing the DSM to dictate reality as if it were a scientifically grounded book is a mistake, and we should be more aware of the haphazard way in which it was assembled. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Identical twins, separated at birth, raised in different families, and reunited in adulthood. In 1979, psychology researchers in Minnesota found some twins who had been reunited after a lifetime of separation, and brought them in to participate in a research study. And so began the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. At the time, psychology leaned heavily toward the nurture side of the nature-nurture debate. The twins provided unique information about the role of genes and environment in human development. Over the twenty years of the study, massive amounts of data about the twin pairs were collected about intelligence, personality, medical traits, and many other aspects of development. The results changed our understanding of how we become who we are in adulthood. In her book, Born Together-Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study (Harvard University Press, 2012), Dr. Nancy Segal describes the history of the controversial Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, as well as the results of the study and case examples of these fascinating twin pairs.  Her book recently won the prestigious William James Book Award from The American Psychological Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Before the Second World War, very few Americans visited psychologists or psychiatrists. Today, millions and millions of Americans do. How did seeing a “shrink” become, quite suddenly, a typical part of the “American Experience?” In his fascinating book Shrink: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in America (Nebraska University Press, 2013), Lawrence R. Samuel examines the arrival, remarkable growth, and transformation of psychoanalysis in the United States. As Samuel shows, Americans have a kind of love-hate relationship with their “shrinks”: sometimes they love them and sometimes they loath them. The “shrinks” seem to know that their clients are fickle, and so they “re-brand” their technique with some regularity. Sometimes it’s “analysis,” sometimes it’s “therapy,” sometimes it’s just “counseling.” But, regardless of what it’s called, it’s always some variation on the “talking cure” and it can always be traced to Freud. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

If you have studied neuroscience, memory, or even basic psychology, it is likely that you have heard of the famous amnesic patient Henry Molaison, or “H.M.” as he was known during his lifetime. In 1953, Henry underwent an experimental brain surgery in hopes of finding a cure for his severe epilepsy. As a result, he developed a severe case of amnesia. Unable to encode new memories into long-term storage, Henry lived constantly in the present, unable to recall events that had happened even minutes before. In the 55 years between the surgery and his death in 2008, Henry became the most famous and comprehensively studied patient in neuroscience. Decades of research on Henry’s cognitive abilities provided a lasting contribution to neuroscience, and research on his postmortem brain is continuing into the future. Perhaps no one knew the case of H.M. better than Dr. Suzanne Corkin. In this interview, Dr. Corkin will discuss her new book, Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesic Patient, H.M. (Basic Books, 2013) Her decades of research with Henry provided a major contribution to our understanding of various systems of memory and the brain, and the book tells the incredible tale of Henry the person, “H.M.” the willing research participant, and the complexity of human memory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

It’s not surprising that human language reflects and respects logical relations – logic, in some sense, ‘works’. For linguists, this represents a potentially interesting avenue of approach to the much-debated question of innateness. Is there knowledge about logic that is present in humans prior to any experience? And if so, what does it consist of? In The Emergence of Meaning (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Stephen Crain argues the case for ‘logical nativism’, the idea that some logical concepts are innately given and that these concepts are relevant both to human language and to human reasoning. He illuminates his argument with extensive reference to empirical data, particularly from child language acquisition, where the patterns from typologically distant languages appear to exhibit a surprising degree of underlying unity. In this interview, we discuss the nature of logical nativism and debate the limitations of experience-based accounts as possible explanations of the relevant data. We consider the case of scope relations between quantifiers, and see how shared developmental trajectories emerge between English and Mandarin speakers. And we look at possible lines of attack on this issue from a parametric point of view. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

What explains human behavior? It is standard to consider answers from the perspective of a dichotomy between nature and nurture, with most researchers today in agreement that it is both. For Helen Longino, Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University, the “both” answer misses the fact that the nature/nurture divide is itself problematic. In her groundbreaking book, Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality (University of Chicago Press) Longino looks closely at a variety of scientific approaches to the study of human aggression and sexuality to argue that there is no one right way to divide nature from nurture within the scientific approaches to the study of behavior, and that the nature/nurture dichotomy reinforces and reflects an undue emphasis on explanations that focus on the dispositions of individuals rather than those that look at patterns of frequency and distribution of behavior within populations. She reveals the distinct and incompatible ways these different approaches define the factors that explain behavior, how these different explanatory approaches are related, and how the bias towards particular types of explanation is reflected in the way the scientific findings are publicly disseminated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Human behavior is notoriously complex and difficult to predict. For decades, social psychologists have been exploring situational variables and how they impact our behavior. We might like to think that we behave consistently in various contexts, but that turns out not to be the case. In his book, Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World (Riverhead Books, 2011) social psychology professor Sam Sommers writes about how our actions vary depending on the context. He draws on classic and recent social psychology research, as well as humorous anecdotes, to illustrate his points. He discusses a variety of topics, including altruism, self-perception, gender differences, and conformity. The book might help you understand your own behavior better, and respond with greater flexibility and effectiveness in your daily life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Although there seems to be a trend towards linguistic theories getting more cognitively or neurally plausible, there doesn’t seem to be an imminent prospect of a reconciliation between linguistics and neuroscience. Network models of various aspects of language have often been criticised as theoretically simplistic, custom-made to solve a single problem (such as past tense marking), and/or abandoning their neurally-inspired roots. In The Neural Architecture of Grammar (MIT Press, 2012), Stephen Nadeau proposes an account of language in the brain that goes some way towards answering these objections. He argues that the sometimes-maligned Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) approach can genuinely be seen as a way of modelling the brain. Combining theoretical, experimental and biological perspectives, he proposes a model of language function that is based upon these principles, proceeding concisely all the way from concept meaning to high-level syntactic organisation. He proposes that this model offers a plausible account of a wealth of data from studies of normal language functioning and, at the same time, a convincing perspective on how language breaks down as a consequence of brain injury. Within an hour, it’s hard to do justice to the full complexity of the model. However, we do get to discuss much of the background and motivation for this approach. In particular, we talk about the emergence of PDP models of concept meaning and of phonological linear order. We consider the relations between this concept of meaning and the increasingly well-studied notion of ’embodied cognition’. And we look at the aphasia literature, which, Nadeau argues, provides compelling support for a view of language that is fundamentally stochastic and susceptible to graceful degradation – two automatic consequences of adopting a PDP perspective. We conclude by touching on the potential relevance of this type of account for treatments for aphasia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

For decades now, philosophers, linguists, psychologists and neuroscientists have been working to understand the nature of the hard-to-describe but very familiar conscious experiences we have while awake. Some have thought consciousness can’t be explained scientifically, and others have argued that it will always remain a mystery. But most consider some sort of explanation in physical, specifically neural, terms to be possible. In The Conscious Brain: How Attention Engenders Experience (Oxford University Press, 2012), Jesse J. Prinz — Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center — synthesizes scientific data and hypothesis with philosophical theory and insight to argue for the AIR theory of consciousness. On his view, consciousness is Attention to Intermediate-level Representations, attention is availability to working memory, and availability to working memory is realized by synchronized neural activity in the gamma frequency range. In this deftly written book, Prinz also provides novel arguments against competitor theories, argues against the idea that there is a phenomenal self, and proposes a mind-body metaphysics that draws on insights from both non-reductive and reductive physicalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology