What's a Demand Characteristic in Psychological Studies?

 In this short reading I discuss Demand Characteristics and how the relate to experimenter bias and the need to control for such in conducting research and, in my profession, child custody evaluations.

Click the link below to hear my reading about Clever Hans and an interesting take on Hans and the implications of Pgunsts' (1911) research into the Clever Hans case as it relates to studies of animal language, especially that of apes and chimpanzees.

Demand Characteristics 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Freud on the Dynamics of Transference

Freud on the Dynamics of Transference I decided to read Freud's 1912 "Dynamics of Transference" after reading the following statement in Cozolino's "The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy" where he talked about the projective hypothesis. There Cozolino wrote: "Despite a conscious awareness that something may be wrong, the hidden layers of neural  processing continue to organize the world based on the prior experiences that shaped them. As we  will see in later chapters, the neural circuitry involved with fear has a tenacious memory and can  invisibly influence conscious awareness for a lifetime. Part of psychodynamic therapy is an  exploration and uncovering of this unconscious organization of experience. Freud’s projective  hypothesis described the process by which our brains create and organize the world around us.  As  the clarity of a situation decreases, the brain naturally generates structure and projects it onto the  world. The way we organize a...
Read more

Why Does Mindfulness Reduce Calm Stress, Improve Your Mood, and Promote Better Health?

Image
Mindfulness reduces stress and improves health. This is a robust scientific finding supported by many recent scientific experimental research. If you want to benefit from this, you can start being mindful right now.            1.  Pay attention on purpose to your thoughts and feelings. You don't have to close your eyes but that may help. You can also add some soothing music.            2.  In addition to paying attention to your thoughts and feelings you can also purposely slow and deepen your breathing.           3.  In paying attention on purpose (called monitoring) you will also purposely ACCEPT Your thoughts and feelings even if you don't agree or like them.           R ecently published scientific research highlighted this acceptance component of mindfulness. Using a dismantling technique in a randomized and controlled test of three different gr...
Read more
 Dr. Jim reads About Bowen's Differentiation of Self, Part 1                In 1975 Wilson wrote about three key properties of social organization: c ohesiveness, altruism, and c ooperativeness. In the animal kingdom only four groups of animals have been able to significantly develop these properties: (1) colonial invertebrates—coral/the Portuguese man-of-war; (2) social insects (ants, termites, certain wasps and bees), (3) nonhuman mammals (particularly the elephants, chimpanzees, and African wild dogs), and (4) humans. It's important to recognize that high levels of social integration are not inherently "good" for the adaptiveness of a species.                The key to the "level of complexity" of our social organization involves our capacity for abstraction in the service of win-win social groupings and self-government. This capacity enables us to "establish long-remembered contracts and...
Read more