New Books in Psychology

Feelings of meaninglessness often are caused by how we understand ourselves. If we change how we think about our worth, we’ll discover radiant meaning can be found in even the most ordinary aspects of our lives.Guest: David Burns is a leading psychiatrist and a pioneer of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. His best-selling book, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy has sold over 4 million copies and is the book most frequently “prescribed” for depressed patients by psychiatrists and psychologists in the United States and Canada.Making Meaning is a limited series from Ministry of Ideas that explores how life can be lived more meaningfully. Featuring meditations by some of the world’s most sensitive and insightful thinkers, Making Meaning will give you fresh perspective and encouragement to live with greater intention and fullness. Making Meaning is produced by Jack Pombriant and Zachary Davis. Artwork by Dan Pecci. Learn more at ministryofideas.org and find us on Twitter @ministryofideas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Leidy, professor of engineering at the University of Virginia, talks about his book, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less, with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. As Klotz shows throughout the book, we pile on “to-dos” but don’t consider “stop-doings.” We create incentives for good behavior, but don’t get rid of obstacles to it. We collect new-and-improved ideas, but don’t prune the outdated ones. Every day, across challenges big and small, we neglect a basic way to make things better: we don’t subtract. Klotz’s work sits at a fascinating intersection between engineering, design, and experimental psychology. His pioneering research shows us what is true whether we’re building Lego models, cities, or strategic plans: Our minds tend to add before taking away, and this is holding us back. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

What do you want out of life? To make a lot of money--or work for justice? To run marathons--or sing in a choir? To have children--or travel the world? The things we care about in life--family, friendship, leisure activities, work, our moral ideals--often conflict, preventing us from doing what matters most to us. Even worse, we don't always know what we really want, or how to define success. Blending personal stories, philosophy, and psychology, this insightful and entertaining book offers invaluable advice about living well by understanding your values and resolving the conflicts that frustrate their fulfillment.Valerie Tiberius introduces you to a way of thinking about your goals that enables you to reflect on them effectively throughout your life. She illustrates her approach with vivid examples, many of which are drawn from her own life, ranging from the silly to the serious, from shopping to navigating prejudice. Throughout, the book emphasizes the importance of interconnectedness, reminding us of the profound influence other people have on our lives, our goals, and how we should pursue them. At the same time, the book offers strategies for coping with obstacles to realizing your goals, including gender bias and other kinds of discrimination.Whether you are changing jobs, rethinking your priorities, or reconsidering your whole life path, What Do You Want Out of Life?: A Philosophical Guide to Figuring Out What Matters (Princeton UP, 2023)s an essential guide to helping you understand what really matters to you and how you can thoughtfully pursue it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Hannah Zeavin, lecturer in the department of History and member of the executive committees of both the Center for New Media and the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society at University of California, Berkeley, talks about her book, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy, with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The book tracks the history of teletherapy, which Zeavin defines as therapeutic interaction over distance, and its metamorphosis from a model of cure to one of contingent help. The book starts with letters sent through the mail and ends in our current coronavirus catastrophe. Zeavin and Vinsel also talk about the complexities and potential harms of going back fully in-person, including how it will negatively affect disabled people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Change is not about grand statements and sweeping gestures. It is about chipping away, a bit at a time, at the habits that hold us back.Dr Rebecca Ray knows about the power of small habits to make big changes. By introducing small changes into her own life, she transformed her career as a clinical psychologist to become one of Australia's most effective communicators on matters of the mind. Rebecca has helped many members of her large online community and her clients do the same.In Small Habits for a Big Life (Macmillan, 2022), Dr Rebecca Ray breaks down the process for her reader. She explains how we can override the part of the brain that seeks pleasure and comfort (ice cream and wine) and activate the parts that tolerate some discomfort for the sake of long-term goals (an hour of study instead of an hour of TV).Small Habits for a Big Life clears the way for readers to embark on their own path to change and provides exactly the right amount of support along the way.Elizabeth Cronin, Psy.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher with offices in Brookline and Norwood, MA. You can follow her on Instagram or visit her website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Linking morality and science can conjure up disturbing histories around social Darwinism, eugenics, and genetically engineered humans. But scientists today are making discoveries that moral agents shouldn’t ignore: how to overcome aggression and tribalism, and how to sustain cooperation in a modern pluralist world.Guests: Diane Paul, professor emerita of the University of Massachusetts, Boston and research associate at the Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology. Ben Allen, associate professor of mathematics at Emmanuel College. Steven Pinker, professor of cognitive psychology at Harvard University and bestselling author of The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate, and many others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Linking morality and science can conjure up disturbing histories around social Darwinism, eugenics, and genetically engineered humans. But scientists today are making discoveries that moral agents shouldn’t ignore: how to overcome aggression and tribalism, and how to sustain cooperation in a modern pluralist world.Guests: Diane Paul, professor emerita of the University of Massachusetts, Boston and research associate at the Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology. Ben Allen, associate professor of mathematics at Emmanuel College. Steven Pinker, professor of cognitive psychology at Harvard University and bestselling author of The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate, and many others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Justin Gregg, a senior research associate with the Dolphin Communication Project, explores the paradox of human intelligence in his book, highlighting how our cognitive abilities might be more problematic than beneficial. He questions traditional views on intelligence, illustrating the efficiency of animals that thrive without humanity's existential burdens. Gregg contrasts human moral frameworks with animal behavior, emphasizing the unique dark sides of our moral constructs. He provocatively considers whether a life without human angst, as a narwhal, might lead to greater happiness.

Today I talked to Batja Mesquita about her book Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions (Norton, 2022).To a degree sometimes not realized, we discuss emotions through the lens of what have been called WEIRD cultures, i.e. Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. As a result, the perspective taken tends to be inside/out, privileging one’s private feelings: a Mine approach. Yet in much of the world, more of an Ours approach prevails, with an understanding of emotions as being important because they help us navigate the cultures we live in. So as Batja Mesquita notes, emotions are therefore recognized as happening between people because emotions are relational, cultural, situational, and heavily involve cultural norms. To unpack an emotional episode is to explore, by degrees, what is going on and why the episode is significant in relation to one’s goals and values, and one’s place within a given situation and wider, cultural context.Dr. Batja Mesquita is a social psychologist, an affective scientist, and a pioneer of cultural psychology. She’s a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Leuven, Belgium. She’s from a Dutch Jewish family with parents who survived the Holocaust in hiding. She’s also lived in Italy, Bosnia, and the U.S., where she did her post-doctoral work at the University of Michigan.Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His newest book is Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

In this episode of High Theory, Laura Wittman tells us about near death experiences. The central feature of these experiences is a vision and a story, which it turns out are a lot stranger than the “best seller” version. These narrative encounters with death often inspire people to make dramatic moves in search of a more meaningful life, from newfound religious faith or activist commitments to career changes and divorce.In the episode, she talks about the changes in what makes a good death, from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, and how the narratives of near death experiences reflect our desires for older forms of sociality around life’s passing. She references Oliver Sacks’s book Hallucinations (Random House, 2012) in regards to the visions patients experience in hospitals, and their desire for a witness in the moments of lucidity that often occur before death.Laura Wittman is an associate professor of French and Italian at Stanford University. She teaches nineteenth and twentieth century literature, and her research focuses on what happens to religious experience in the so-called secular modern age. Her book, The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning, and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body (Toronto UP, 2011) has recently been translated into Italian as Il Milite ignoto. Storia e Mito. (LEG, 2021) She also coordinates the Medical Humanities Working Group at the Stanford Humanities Center.This week’s image is a photograph of the Ellen Browning Scripps Memorial Pier in La Jolla, California, taken by Kim Adams in November 2022. On the top of the pier is a research site for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology