Image by ParanoidMonk via Flickr No, I am not speaking metaphorically. Quite literally,there has been accumulating evidence that sense are sharpened and have great acuity in mania while they are dulled in depression and the effects can be seen within the same individual over time as he/she suffers from manic/depressive episodes. The latest study to add to this literature is by Bubl et al that found that...

Image via Wikipedia I had been struggling with the how many and what framework to use for defining the basic emotions and especially as I was sure that there would be eight basic emotions/emotion systems that would lie on a eight fold evolutionary path/model. Basic emotions research is fraught with many researchers claiming different types of basic emotions and thus there is a lot of disagreement and...

Michael Jackson via last.fm I recently came across this blog post by Christopher Peterson and was immediately drawn into the work of Stephen Pepper and using Google books access tried to read as much as I could of his print-on-demand book 'World Hypotheses'. It is a philosophical work of how people reason about their world and 'carve nature at the joints' but despite being a philosophical work and thus being...

Image via Wikipedia As per a new study reported in PNAS, positive emotions and hedonic well being, like happiness and enjoyment, increase past the age of 50 (after reaching a nadir at that age)  , while negative emotions , like stress, worry and anger decline with age throughout. This is the conclusion that Stone et al reached after analyzing response to a telephonic survey of 3,40,000 individuals...

Image via Wikipedia A new and important research paper by Ed Diener et al has been recently published in JPSP and you should read the paper in full by requesting reprint using this page (this is how I got access to the paper) . It is very lucidly written and bears upon an important question: can money buy us happiness and if so to what extent and of what kind? The research paper itself is a result of a...

Image via Wikipedia This should be a no-brainer: in an era when increasingly words like 'gene-environment interaction' are bandied around, it would be self evident that for full flowering of a prototypical trait, the genotype has to get the right environmental inputs. In absence of the right environmental conditions, the genetic differences may be masked and the trait under consideration suffer from...

Image via Wikipedia ADHD has traditionally been conceptualized in terms of deficits- that of attention , impulse control or motor restraint; but the new neurodiversity paradigm forces us to take a more balanced look and acknowledge the strengths that the ADHD kid may have- divergent thinking, spontaneity and high energy and vitality. That brings me to research by Cramform that shows that the symptoms...

Image via Wikipedia I've written about the relation between personality and emotion from my perspective, but was gladdened when I found Scherer has written on the matter in a very eloquent and apt manner. To quote from him and Revelle: Personality is the coherent patterning of affect, behavior, cognition, and desires (goals) over time and space. Just as a full blown emotion represents an integration of...

Image via Wikipedia I've recently latched onto the ABCD model of psychological entities, where any psychological aspect is defined by following four features/dimensions: Affect( how does it subjectively feel) , Behavior (what are the manifest effects resulting in overt behavioral changes) , Cognition (how is it cognitively appraised) and Desire/Drive(what are the underlying motivations). I was prompted on...