If you've experienced multiple-victimization, please understand this: The problem is not that you attract only resentful, angry, or abusive suitors; it's that, by and large, you have not been receptive to the gentler, more respectful men you also attract. This is not due to your temperament or personality; it's a normal defensive reaction. After you've been hurt, of course you'll put up subtle barriers for self-protection. Non-abusive men will recognize and respect those barriers. For example, suppose that you work with someone who's attracted to you. But he senses that you're uncomfortable with his small gestures for more closeness. He will naturally back off and give you time to heal, or he'll settle for a non-romantic friendship. But a man who is likely to mistreat you will either not recognize your barriers or completely disregard them. He will continue to hit on you, until he breaks down the protective walls that surround your hungry heart.

via https://twitter.com/#!/nchirls/status/204405738158825472

A deep look at the fringe movement that just lost its only shred of scientific support.

Autistic savant Daniel Tammet shot to fame when he set a European record for the number of digits of pi he recited from memory (22,514). For afters, he learned Icelandic in a week. But unlike many savants, he's able to tell us how he does it. We could all unleash extraordinary mental abilities by getting inside the savant mind, he tells Celeste Biever

WHILE many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. During this leanest of times, the strictest, most authoritarian churches saw a surge in attendance.

This anomaly was documented in the early 1970s, but only now is science beginning to tell us why. It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times.

The idea that a person's character can be glimpsed in their face dates back to the ancient Greeks. It was most famously popularised in the late 18th century by the Swiss poet Johann Lavater, whose ideas became a talking point in intellectual circles. In Darwin's day, they were more or less taken as given. It was only after the subject became associated with phrenology, which fell into disrepute in the late 19th century, that physiognomy was written off as pseudoscience.

TAKE anyone with a psychiatric disorder and the chances are they don't sleep well. The result of their illness, you might think. Now this long-standing assumption is being turned on its head, with the radical suggestion that poor sleep might actually cause some psychiatric illnesses or lead people to behave in ways that doctors mistake for mental problems.

Geoffrey Miller. Perspectives on Psychological Science 2012 7: 221 DOI: 10.1177/1745691612441215

ABSTRACT By 2025, when most of today’s psychology undergraduates will be in their mid-30s, more than 5 billion people on our planet will be using ultra-broadband, sensor-rich smartphones far beyond the abilities of today’s iPhones, Androids, and Blackberries. Although smartphones were not designed for psychological research, they can collect vast amounts of ecologically valid data, easily and quickly, from large global samples. If participants download the right “psych apps,” smartphones can record where they are, what they are doing, and what they can see and hear and can run interactive surveys, tests, and experiments through touch screens and wireless connections to nearby screens, headsets, biosensors, and other peripherals. This article reviews previous behavioral research using mobile electronic devices, outlines what smartphones can do now and will be able to do in the near future, explains how a smartphone study could work practically given current technology (e.g., in studying ovulatory cycle effects on women’s sexuality), discusses some limitations and challenges of smartphone research, and compares smartphones to other research methods. Smartphone research will require new skills in app development and data analysis and will raise tough new ethical issues, but smartphones could transform psychology even more profoundly than PCs and brain imaging did.

“Although studies show women are more obsessed with Facebook photos than men, men still get into it too. This article on Men’s Psychology offers tips to men about how to post just the right pictures to make the women swoon. A year or two ago, we just looked at people who posted a lot of party pictures on Facebook as being insecure or obsessed with their appearance.

However, now that posting and tagging Facebook photos has almost become part of our culture, it’s like a seventh sense we all have. Our online persona, and how we present that to the world, is becoming a large part of who we are. Since many women post pictures just to get a reaction from men and to get attention, it once again glorifies how important it is to have a certain type of body and just the right physical appearance. New studies suggest that many women have their self-esteem and self-worth wrapped up in these photos and the reactions they get from them.”

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