(Part 2) Best products from r/psychology

I apologize in advance for this wall of text. There's a TL;DR at the bottom.

I'm a fellow undergrad and working on getting into graduate school also.

One of the biggest things I'm learning is that research experience is crucial to make yourself a better applicant.

If you're in the US and are wanting to get a PhD, you will want to start studying for the GRE and take it in your junior year of college if possible. Most if not all of the PhD programs that are certified by the American Psychological Association require the GRE.

If your college has any research programs, you could try to get involved with those. If they don't, you could try talking with a professor to see whether you could help them with their research.

If these don't work, you might try volunteering at other colleges nearby. Finally some colleges will let you conduct an independent study (often for college credit) with a faculty member. These are excellent ways to gain research experience and show grad school programs that you're a serious candidate.

As far as volunteer work is concern, I've been told that it all looks good, but it looks even better if it's somehow related to what you're trying to study. You might consider doing an informational interview with a clinical psychologist and also a health psychologist. This will help you get a better understanding of what they think about the career, what they had to do/learn to get licensed in their career etc. Additionally it will help you network with other psychologists who will be your peers in the future, and finally it might help you clarify which of the two fields you're interested in pursuing.

I conducted informational interviews with psychologists and counselors and it helped me decide on the kind of degree and research focus I am interested in.

As a final note, the American Psychological Association has published several books that are helpful regarding grad school in the United States. Here are the ones I found helpful:

Getting In: A Step-by-Step Plan for Gaining Admission to Graduate School in Psychology, Second Edition

The "Getting In" book has helpful information and chapter 7 has information on preselection interviews along with information on common questions that are often asked of graduate school applicants, as well as good questions for you to ask them during the interview.

Graduate Study in Psychology - You'll want to wait on this one until you're in your senior year as it is updated annually. This is the best book I've bought as it has info on every APA certified program in the US and Canada.

Surviving Graduate School in Psychology: A Pocket Mentor I'm not in grad school yet, but this helped me get a better picture of what the day-to-day realities of grad school are.

Career Paths in Psychology: Where Your Degree Can Take You, Second Edition

The "Career Paths in Psychology" text is helpful if you're not certain which specialty you'd like to go into. The chapters in this book are written by psychologists and counselors in a variety of areas including academia, private practice, hospital settings and more. There are three chapters that may be of interest to you specifically. The first two involve clinical psychologists, one in private practice and the other in a hospital setting. The third chapter is specific to health psychologists.

These books are available via the APA website, but are cheaper if you purchase them through Amazon. Also, all but one of them are available in Kindle editions if you have a Kindle or Smartphone or the Amazon reader installed on your computer.

TL;DR Gaining research experience is crucial to becoming a better grad school candidate. Talk with professors about helping with their research and/or look into doing an independent study at your college. APA has several helpful books on this topic if you're pursuing graduate school in the United States.

Thank you for reading and I hope this helps!

(edited for clarity - I'm an undergrad working on getting into grad school, I'm not doing both at the same time. Doh!)

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature - evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics. (probably most interesting from a Freudian perspective, deals with many of our unconscious instincts)

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces The Shape Our Decisions - Unconscious decision-making, behavioral economics, consumer psychology. Fun read.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion - Most popular book on the psychology of persuasion, covers all the main principles. Very popular among business crowds.

Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships - Social neuroscience, mirror neurons, empathy, practical stuff mixed with easy to understand brain science.

Authentic Happiness - Positive Psychology, happiness, increasing life satisfaction.

Feeling Good - A good primer on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Also widely considered one of the best self-help books by mental health practitioners.

The Brain That Changes Itself - Neuroplasticity, how experience shapes our brains. Some really remarkable case studies that get you wondering how powerful our brains really are.

The Buddhist Brain - The practical neuroscience of happiness, love, and wisdom from a Buddhist perspective.

That should give you more than enough to chew on.

A combination of becoming very well-read in Horneyan psychoanalysis (especially her books Our Inner Conflicts and Neurosis and Human Growth. Also Self-Analysis), smoking marijuana, and finding God. And finally finding a really good therapist. And time, lots of time.

Ultimately it was about swallowing my pride and committing to see things as they are, as best as I can tell, regardless of how I might feel about that. Recognizing that learning the truth about something (in my case, ways I have hurt certain people in the past), even if a bitter pill, cannot actually harm me. It's just knowledge.

That might sound cryptic, but it's the best way I can think of to put it. The Horney books really helped, because they exposed me to myself in ways I found it very difficult to deny. Reading them while high on good weed was especially an experience, because I made the emotional connections much more easily (believe it or not you can learn to read while high if you work your way past the super-short-attention-span phase). Once I saw certain connections I simply could not deny, I discovered what it means to be in dire need of forgiveness (this is tough to explain, but let's just say it's hard to be somebody committed to the truth and then realize that means you have to carry around an awful truth about yourself). I asked for it, and had an experience of grace half a year later.

A few years of a mix of blessings and involvement in spiritual kookery and I eventually found a fantastic therapist, and the two of us are working together to uncover the inner bullshit that keeps me down, and to set me free.

That was a bit long-winded, but you asked.

I'm only about half-way through it, but I think the book your looking for is The Red Book which was just recently released from the Jung family's swiss bank vault, after collecting dust for about half a century. This NYTime's article does a fantastic job of telling the very rich story of the book.

From what I have read so far, the archetypes are formed from the experiences outlined in this book [events that take place within the unconscious mind]; his dreams and "active imagination" sessions, which could be comparable to waking hallucinations. The bridge, I think, is that he found all the same symbols in his dreams/imagination sessions as in the many patients he analyzed himself - leading him to the formation of the archetypes and the idea of the collective unconscious. I'm not yet at the point where I could articulate a valid tl;dr answer for you, and also keep in mind this is just my interpretation of the material, not "solid facts."

It's really something you have to read to understand, it's no easy task either, challenging and delightful.

I love the gloria tapes :) One of her daughters wrote a really interesting book about the aftermath of the tapes http://www.amazon.co.uk/Living-Gloria-Films-Daughters-Memory/dp/1906254028

Good luck finding anyone doing RET today though. CBT is close enough though and has gained more popularity.

So many! Dissociative Identity disorder (more commonly know as Multiple Personality Disorder); Psychopathy (especially because we know so little about it.) ; Phantom limbs ; Capgras syndrom ( delusion that a close friend or family member has been replaced by aliens) ; Hyprocondriasis; Narcolepsy; sleep paralysis; Dissociative Fugue ; The case of H.M. (a very well known case study on memory loss. He was a man who suffered retrograde amnesia, but whose working memory was still intact. taught us a lot about different types of memory and their corresponding brain redgions...

There are plenty of others that I cannot think of off the top of my head. But if you are looking for some interesting cases, here are two great books about really strange and interesting psychological phenomenons are "The Man Who Mistook His for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales" by Oliver Sacks , and " Phantoms in the Brain" by V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee

The first one includes several cases of patients with inexplicably strange neurological disorders. For example, a man who is no longer able to recognize people and common objects. There is an other story about a man who sometimes wakes suddenly at night, thoroughly convinced that his leg is actually a corpse's leg that somebody has placed in bed with him.

The second book was the text book for my cognitive psych class in second year. Like the first book contains many stories of fantastically strange cases that the author has encountered as a neuroscientist. This book contains more of the psychological and neurological basis for the disorders, and shows how they helped us understand different aspects of behaviour and structures of the brain.

Yes, absolutely. Knowledge is key.

Consider this analogy: A clinically depressed person, is an individual who is in an unfamiliar land, a depressive land. And psychological knowledge, and philosophical knowledge serves as the map with which the individual may become better acquainted with their surroundings, feeling more comfortable there, and the map can direct them towards roads/highways/bridges to leave that place and venture to other states of mind.


I was depressed to the point of cutting myself each night and considering suicide on a weekly basis. And so I checked myself into a clinical psychologist and it was the best decision I ever made in my life thus far.

I realize you have financial constraints, and so I will tell you that I benefited wonderfully from therapy thus far through my therapist's book recommendations. I've since become very interested in philosophy. And you will find that philosophy and psychology are like neighbors really.

• For example: Descartes articulated the idea of neurotransmitters back in his time with his work "Passions of the Soul", and that was written back in 1649. His work is arguably the foundation on which contemporary psychiatry has been established.
  
  
  And so I encourage you to investigate your problems. Knowledge holds the key to happiness. As I was depressed I was simply unaware of various psychological doors which separated me from happiness, and I was unaware of my ability to open those doors myself. The power of the self to heal the self is astounding. On that note, here are some book recommendations for you.
  
  
• http://www.amazon.com/The-Consolations-Philosophy-Alain-Botton/dp/0679779175
  
  
• http://www.amazon.com/The-Happiness-10th-Anniversary-Edition/dp/1594488894/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334098673&sr=1-1

I like both of these.

http://www.amazon.com/Intimate-Connections-David-D-Burns/dp/0451148452

http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Get-Off-Our-Buts/dp/093158079X/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1300996919&sr=1-6

The just do it one was a complete surprise to me. It sounds like a tard title, but had great theory in it. The David Burns one is really "on" as well, plus is written with a little more psyc ideas.

Both can be bought used for a cent... And there is a 8MB pdf of the David Burns one, floating on the net.

comics about the brain :::
infographic about memory :::
biology behind alcohol-induced blackouts :::
cool awareness test :::
hodge podge of material, I'm mostly interested in neuroscience and behavioral economics, speaking of which a book called predictably irrational mentions some social experiments you could easily implement in the classroom. hope something helps.

I'm someone going into school psychology and I've read a number of really good books that have had a huge impact on the way I view people and recognize a lot of both macro and micro-level issues that people, and especially children, deal with. That said, my favorites would be Outliers and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and Ain't No Makin' It by Jay MacLeod.

I think "From Mating to Mentality: Evaluating Evolutionary Psychology" is a great introduction to the field. It's a collection of essays written on various topics, which makes it an extremely balanced and accurate representation of the field. You can read some chapters here:

Does the Selection Task Detect Cheater-Detection?

Evolutionary Psychology and the Challenge of Adaptive Explanation

It's best to avoid books by people like Tooby, Cosmides, Buss, Pinker, etc, as they promote a very specific form of evolutionary psychology, and are generally rejected as extremists by their peers. Their approach is referred to as the 'Santa Barbara Church of Psychology'...

Have you read any books about psychological research?

My passion for all things psychological really started when I read Blink by Malcom Gladwell. And his other book Tipping Point.

After I read that book the vast majority of the non fiction books I read for pleasure were psychological in nature. I loved Why Kids Kill, a book analyzing the mental state of children who killed their own classmates and why violence in the media is not to blame. Sex at Dawn was another book I really enjoyed. (If you're interested in human evolutionary biology check out Adam's Curse, The Seven Daughters of Eve and How women got their curves).

If you're looking for novels that might pique your specific interests more, the goodreads list of suggested psych books is wonderful.

The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want - Sonja Lyubomirsky
Learned Optimism - Seligman
MAn's Search for Meaning - Frankl

I'd recommend (just off the top of my head):

• The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness by Mingyur Rinpoche
  
  
• The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler
  
  Most of Thich Naht Hanh's books go into this in one way or another too. Basically if you read a book by any Buddhist teacher they'll go into this at least a little bit.

Intimate Connections and How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Have you read this book or others like it? Most people don't have one learning style, and the most successful learning occurs when you do multiple things (reading alound, taking notes, reciting information outloud, taking practice exams, etc.)

>Gloria apparently found the one with Fritz Perls to be the most helpful.

I always found that surprising, given the way he rips into her, but then I tend to prefer a less confrontational approach (I'm a big fan of Rogers).

I just discovered that there's a book by her daughter. The blurb and comments suggest that the videos are actually a breach of her confidentiality, in that she was told they were for teaching purposes only but they were — obviously — made more widely available. Hopefully the other YouTube/Vimeo videos were obtained more ethically.

>A lot of modern psychology and neuroscience appears to be neglecting the concept of the unconscious mind.... Psychology is so determined to get religion out of science that it cannot allow for the concept of the unconscious

I honestly cannot imagine how you came to this conclusion. There is no question at all among psychologists that unconscious processes play an important role in cognition. Every single popular cognitive psychology book I can think of (e.g. 1 2 3 4) discusses the importance of unconscious processes.

> As for the increase in disorders, that's exactly what we'd expect from a newly studied area. We can't judge how "arbitrary" they are by simply saying "look how many there are now!". You'd need to show that the evidential basis presented for certain disorders is inadequate.

Why would we expect an increase in the number of 'disorders' as soon as people embark on a new realm of study? There's a notion of surveying, of cataloging, of checking out what comprises the breadth of human diversity that is more about accepting and compassion than labeling and diagnosing.

Earlier editions of the DSM had homosexuality catalogued as a mental disorder. It took a political movement to get it removed, and today we'd be outraged if psychiatrists tried to put it back. There's a Native American disease diagnosis similar to in form to that of the psychiatrists'. If 'arbitrary' isn't the right word, then perhaps another word or set of words, like 'subjective'?

Or better yet, read V. S. Ramachandran's Phantoms in the Brain. He has been working on solving this problem since the 90's and created the mirror technique.

I would read Sue Johnson's book first: https://www.amazon.com/Hold-Me-Tight-Conversations-Lifetime/dp/031611300X/ref=pd_cp_14_2/138-8589847-3436922?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=031611300X&pd_rd_r=2f4ed5bd-840c-4bbb-adc6-652388f56e6f&pd_rd_w=4HmQ0&pd_rd_wg=DQa4X&pf_rd_p=0e5324e1-c848-4872-bbd5-5be6baedf80e&pf_rd_r=VG2QRAS06FAFVBRR5Z3M&psc=1&refRID=VG2QRAS06FAFVBRR5Z3M

Then Gottman: https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Principles-Making-Marriage-Work/dp/0609805797,

Then Gottman: https://www.amazon.com/What-Makes-Love-Last-Betrayal-ebook/dp/B0061Q640C.

​

There is a huge gap in Gottman's teaching about how to avoid flooding and to attune to your partner that Johnson covers in great depth. When I read Hold Me Tight a bunch of the stuff in the Gottman books clicked for me.

http://www.amazon.com/Red-Book-C-G-Jung/dp/0393065677

$117 now!! LOL = I must be dreaming!

Love it. I've been reading Mindset over the past few weeks and it's really changed how I talk to my 8 year-old son about his school work.

Couple this book with The Learning Habit if you're raising young students.

http://www.amazon.com/Graduate-Psychology-American-Psychological-Association/dp/1433810670/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1314577432&sr=8-1

I bought that book a while back when I was considering graduate school in Psychology (I opted for and am now attending a doctorate in Marketing instead).

For non-Clinical programs, it's perhaps the best single resource for data and information from almost every American program. Average GRE, GPA, admission statistics, program/school description and orientations, demographics, application deadlines, etc. are all included.

On Becoming a Person

• Classic book about psychotherapy from a giant in the field and written for the layperson. Really, anything by Rogers is good.
  
  The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat
  
  
• you can probably argue that this collection of case studies is more neurology than psychology, but I think it overlaps and is a very interesting read.

Some popular psychology books that are very well done:

Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Chialdini

The opposite of black and white thinking (I guess you mean reflexive decision-making) isn't indecision, it's informed and reflective decision.

This resource might help you: http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555

This seems to be more about fixed vs. growth mindsets rather than introversion vs. narcissism.

Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. It's not too heavy and its an important book in humanistic psych.

Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Towards Self-Realization by Karen Horney

You may find this book right up your alley then: http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/0684853949

Bursts, Blink, Nudge

The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge
https://www.amazon.com/Brain-That-Changes-Itself-Frontiers/dp/0143113100

First, read Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind.

Then do your presentation on pretty much anything in the book. It is about how physical changes to the brain can cause very weird psychological results, and not just your standard "Phineas Gage" personality changes, either. We're talking the inability to perceive motion, or hallucinating cartoon characters in blind spots... all kinds of crazy stuff.