Stories By Van

Imagine yourself at your 10-year high school reunion, a long anticipated get-together for you and all your old friends. You haven’t seen many of them since graduation day, and naturally everyone is comparing notes on the lives they have lived since then. This puts you in a reflective mood, but not in a good way. Life has been unkind to you—compared to the lives of your friends, who have all been spared your travails. For days after the reunion, you can’t focus on anything but your difficulties, and the unfairness of it all. If you’re a brooder, that is. Someone else might have the same reunion experience, yet come away with a very different interpretation. Every life has its ups and downs, and yours is not unusually good or bad. That’s life. Brooding is a particularly toxic kind of rumination, and it’s strongly associated with clinical depression. Brooders see their own problems as debilitating, and this self-focus sabotages any real effort to make things better. It leads...

Society influences people by shaping their belief systems, controlling their behavior and determining their values. It sends these messages to individuals through the media, school curricula, community leaders, family and churches. Family Matters One way that society influences people is through laws and rules that determine how they should behave. For example, parents establish rules for their families that show the children proper behavior. They may insist that children wait their turn before speaking instead of interrupting other or that children must sit or lie on the furniture instead of jumping and climbing on it. When the children fail to follow the rules, they face consequences. In this way, the children learn how to adjust their behavior to fit in with their families and with others. The Rule of Law Similarly, governments create laws that direct behavior. State and federal governments establish speed limits for roads that tell people how fast they can...

The halo effect is a type of cognitive bias in which our overall impression of a person influences how we feel and think about his or her character. Essentially, your overall impression of a person ("He is nice!") impacts your evaluations of that person's specific traits ("He is also smart!"). One great example of the halo effect in action is our overall impression of celebrities. Since we perceive them as attractive, successful, and often likable, we also tend to see them as intelligent, kind, and funny. Definitions of the Halo Effect "Also known as the physical attractiveness stereotype and the "what is beautiful is good" principle, the halo effect, at the most specific level, refers to the habitual tendency of people to rate attractive individuals more favorably for their personality traits or characteristics than those who are less attractive. Halo effect is also used in a more general sense to describe the global impact o...

A huge factor in different cultures is different religions. As Christopher Dawson wrote in his book Religion and Culture , "In all ages the first creative works of a culture are due to a religious inspiration and dedicated to a religions end" (Dawson 50). Almost every piece of art created by the Greeks or Romans were dedicated to their gods or depicted the gods doing certain things. Most ancient stories are in some way influenced by religion, and people today still hold religious sacrifices, pray, and thank god for things that happen. Not only does religion affect how people in certain cultures think or how they are inspired, but it also affects how they act. For example, Muslims do not eat, touch, or gift with their left hand, because they think that it is evil. They also do not talk loudly or hold eye contact, and this is all because of their religion ("Customs and Behavior | Tips on how to behave in Muslim countries"). Similarly, many Hindus are vegetar...

Around the world, alcohol is often seen as an acceptable beverage in moderation, and even accepted in excess. And while it’s a drug, it’s typically not referred to as such, since “drugs” seem to fall into a taboo category that have caused many of them to be outlawed altogether. But why do we put alcohol on a pedestal and others, like psychedelics, in such a dark place? A 2014 Vice article titled Why Are Psychedelics Illegal ? by Tao Lin put this interesting dichotomy into perspective by pointing out why psychedelics are illegal: “Terence McKenna viewed cannabis, psilocybin, DMT, LSD, and other psychedelics as ‘catalysts of intellectual dissent.’ He wrote in The Archaic Revival (1991) that his assumption about psychedelics had always been that they were illegal ‘not because it troubles anyone that you have visions’ but because ‘there is something about them that casts doubts on the validity of reality.’ This makes it difficult, McKenna observed, for societies—even democr...

March is many things — a month when we set back our clocks, a month when we celebrate the return of spring, a month when we consistently find ourselves over or under dressed for the weather, no matter what the actual temperature is — but it is also Women’s History Month! This is the month where we revel in learning about all manner of female history-makers, from the big names to the unsung heroes. It's also a time when we focus on learning more about the female perspective on big movements in human history. If you’re all about egalitarianism, though, you might be wondering why one gender needs a particular month devoted to its contributions to and arguments about history. And the answer’s actually pretty simple: It’s because, when it comes to history, the story of women is largely one of exclusion, silence, absence and bias, and we need a month (at minimum) to redress the balance. Women have made a lot of history, but sometimes, looking at the history books, you wouldn’t exac...

Conformity involves changing your behaviors in order to "fit in" or "go along" with the people around you. In some cases, this social influence might involve agreeing with or acting like the majority of people in a specific group, or it might involve behaving in a particular way in order to be perceived as "normal" by the group. Definitions Psychologists have proposed a variety of definitions to encompass the social influence that conformity exerts. Essentially, conformity involves giving in to group pressure. Some other definitions include: "Conformity is the most general concept and refers to any change in behavior caused by another person or group; the individual acted in some way because of influence from others. Note that conformity is limited to changes in behavior caused by other people; it does not refer to effects of other people on internal concepts like attitudes or beliefs... Conformity encompasses compliance and obedience ...

The ancient Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes was extreme in a lot of ways. He deliberately lived on the street, and, in accordance with his teachings that people should not be embarrassed to do private things in public, was said to defecate and masturbate openly in front of others. Plato called him “a Socrates gone mad.” Shocking right to the end, he told his friends that when he died, he didn’t want to be buried. He wanted them to throw his body over the city wall, where it could be devoured by animals. “What harm then can the mangling of wild beasts do me if I am without consciousness?” he asked. What is a dead body but an empty shell?, he’s asking. What does it matter what happens to it? These are also the questions that the University of California, Berkeley, history professor Thomas Laqueur asks in his new book The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains. “Diogenes was right,” he writes, “but also existentially wrong.” This is the tension sur...

VeryWellMind.com The famous experiments that psychologist Harry Harlow conducted in the 1950's on maternal deprivation in rhesus monkeys were landmarks not only in primatology, but in the evolving science of attachment and loss. Harlow himself repeatedly compared his experimental subjects to children and press reports universally treated his findings as major statements about love and development in human beings. These monkey love experiments had powerful implications for any and all separations of mothers and infants, including adoption, as well as child-rearing in general. In his University of Wisconsin laboratory, Harlow probed the nature of love, aiming to illuminate its first causes and mechanisms in the relationships formed between infants and mothers. First, he showed that mother love was emotional rather than physiological, substantiating the adoption-friendly theory that continuity of care—“nurture”—was a far more determining factor in healthy psychological devel...

When we were younger, most of us knew that having a birthday meant having a birthday party, getting treated special, not getting in trouble and getting presents and cupcakes. When we were younger, birthday parties were where we decided who the great friends are; you know, the ones who would give you that birthday present that you secretly eyed and left not-so-subtle hints about or those who loved chocolate cake as much as you. When we were younger, birthdays were fun social events that we eagerly anticipated; so what happened? Why is it that as we get older, birthdays become something to be ashamed of and age is corresponded with irrelevance and lack of importance? I still have trouble wrapping my mind around why it is that people who seemingly have lived a fulling life are so eager to put life into slow motion and anxiously counting down days till the next birthday. The way I see it, birthdays should be celebrated at all ages. Let me break down my thought process here…...

Every decision you make is essentially a committee act. Members chime in, options are weighed, and eventually a single proposal for action is approved by consensus. The committee, of course, is the densely knit society of neurons in your head. And “approved by consensus” is really just a delicate way of saying that the opposition was silenced. Our brains seem to work not by generating only “correct” actions and executing them in serial, but rather by representing many possibilities in parallel, and suppressing all but one. When this inhibitory action is lost, as happens in people with frontal lobe damage, these multiple possibilities become a burden, and can lead to so-called utilization behaviors. Such impaired individuals will indiscriminately reach for objects placed in front of them - a hairbrush or a hammer, for example - and use them even in inappropriate contexts. In essence, despite our feeling that we are singular, unified agents, we are more like hive minds unto our...

Wendell Johnson was a tall, knobby 20-year-old farm boy when he arrived at the University of Iowa in Iowa City to study English in 1926. The class president and valedictorian of his tiny high school in Roxbury, Kan., Johnson was engaging, ''quite a clown'' in the estimation of the folks back home. He also stuttered grotesquely, often rendered speechless by the impediment. His inability to express himself nudged him toward writing and literature, and he developed a penchant for antic humor, which kept him popular despite his silence. It also propelled him to U. Iowa, the most famous center for stuttering research in the world. Around the country, speech pathology was fighting to be recognized as a science, and Iowa was the new discipline's polestar. Dozens of experiments were under way when Johnson arrived, and he enthusiastically threw himself into the invigorating work, switching to psychology for his master's study. ''I became a speech pathologis...