I've been reading Psychology's Ghosts: The Crisis in the Profession and the Way Back and have recommended it to others several times. Reading the first chapter can help one become a much more critical reader of research. Jerome Kagan, the author, points out that behaviors and biological responses are influenced by properties of the brain, an individual's prior experience, and the setting of the behavior or response. He argues that sometimes research ignores that context. In fact, the chapter is titled "Missing Contexts." I urge you to get your hands on a copy of the book and at least read that chapter. You may look at research with a wiser eye; I will.
To me, the entire book has been stimulating. It includes many, many points I want to remember or return to for more thought. Although I don't agree with everything I have read, I am never bored. Here's an example of a point that I found particularly interesting.
A few psychologists [have suggested] that the physical pain of a broken leg shares important features with the “pain” of social rejection. They called the latter “social pain.” A major reason for implying that physical pain shares important features with the feeling accompanying rejection is that a small number of brain sites are active in both states. This argument has flaws. The amygdala is activated by pictures of erotic couples as well as bloody surgical operations. That fact does not mean that scenes of sex and surgery evoke a common psychological state. Both my visual and motor cortex are active when I write, sip coffee, tie my shoes, pick up a soiled sock, and cut an apple, but these five acts do not belong to the same psychological category because my intentions and psychological states are different in each of these actions. It is misleading, therefore, to call the state produced by social exclusion "social pain." Exclusion or rejection can evoke anxiety, anger, sadness, or self-hatred, but none of these states could be confused with the sensation of a toothache.
Poets, novelists, and lyricists are permitted to write about the "pain of love," but scientists should not treat casually constructed metaphors as deep insights into human nature. I hope no psychologist decides that hunger for food resembles a hunger for friendships. The positing of social pain is another example of the psychologists' fatal attraction to positing abstract categories based primarily on a common semantic term. ...
If you read the book, let me know what you think.
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