Research on Hypnosis

Most people can be easily hypnotized, but the depth of the trance varies widely. A profound trance is characterized by a forgetting of trance events and by an ability to respond automatically to posthypnotic suggestions that are not too anxiety-provoking. The depth of trance achievable is a relatively fixed characteristic, dependent on the emotional condition of the subject and on the skill of the hypnotist. Only 20 percent of subjects are capable of entering somnambulistic states through the usual methods of induction. Medically, this percentage is not significant, since therapeutic effects occur even in a light trance.
Hypnosis can produce a deeper contact with one's emotional life, resulting in some lifting of repressions and exposure of buried fears and conflicts. This effect potentially lends itself to medical and educational use, but it also lends itself to misinterpretation. Thus, the revival through hypnosis of early, forgotten memories may be fused with fantasies. Research into hypnotically induced memories in recent years has in fact stressed their uncertain reliability. For this reason a number of state court systems in the U.S. have placed increasing constraints on the use of evidence hypnotically obtained from witnesses, although most states still permit its introduction in court.
Hypnosis has been used to treat a variety of physiological and behavioral problems. It can alleviate back pain and pain resulting from burns and cancer. It has been used by some obstetricians as the sole analgesia for normal childbirth. Hypnosis is sometimes also employed to treat physical problems with a possible psychological component, such as Raynaud's syndrome (a circulatory disease) and fecal incontinence in children. Researchers have demonstrated that the benefit of hypnosis is greater than the effect of a placebo and probably results from changing the focus of attention. Few physicians, however, include hypnosis as part of their practice.
Some behavioral difficulties, such as cigarette smoking, overeating, and insomnia, are also amenable to resolution through hypnosis. Nonetheless, most psychiatrists think that fundamental psychiatric illness is better treated with the patient in a normal state of consciousness.

HYPNOTISM --- PARASYCOLOGY

Hypnosis is a mental state (state theory) or imaginative role-enactment (non-state theory) usually induced by a procedure known as a hypnotic induction, which is commonly composed of a long series of preliminary instructions and suggestions.Hypnotic suggestions may be delivered by a hypnotist in the presence of the subject, or may be self-administered ("self-suggestion" or "autosuggestion"). The use of hypnotism for therapeutic purposes is referred to as "hypnotherapy".
The words 'hypnosis' and 'hypnotism' both derive from the term "neuro-hypnotism" (nervous sleep) coined by the Scottish surgeon James Braid around 1841. Braid based his practice on that developed by Franz Mesmer and his followers ("Mesmerism" or "animal magnetism"), but differed in his theory as to how the procedure worked.  Hypnosis, altered state of consciousness and heightened responsiveness to suggestion; it may be induced in normal persons by a variety of methods and has been used occasionally in medical and psychiatric treatment. Most frequently hypnosis is brought about through the actions of an operator, the hypnotist, who engages the attention of a subject and assigns certain tasks to him or her while uttering monotonous, repetitive verbal commands; such tasks may include muscle relaxation, eye fixation, and arm levitation. Hypnosis also may be self-induced, by trained relaxation, concentration on one's own breathing, or by a variety of monotonous practices and rituals that are found in many mystical, philosophical, and religious systems.
         Hypnosis results in the gradual assumption by the subject of a state of consciousness in which attention is withdrawn from the outside world and is concentrated on mental, sensory, and physiological experiences. When a hypnotist induces a trance, a close relationship or rapport develops between operator and subject. The responses of subjects in the trance state, and the phenomena or behavior they manifest objectively, are the product of their motivational set; that is, behavior reflects what is being sought from the experience.

Investigations on parasychology

Among the early achievements of the British group was the investigation of hypnotism , a field later claimed by medicine and psychology. The society also investigated phenomena produced at spiritualistic séances and the claims of spiritualism. Psi phenomena to be investigated were classified as either physical or mental. The physical effects, or PK, include the movement of physical objects or an influence upon material processes by the apparent direct action of mind over matter. The mental manifestations, or ESP, include telepathy, which is the direct transmission of messages, emotions, or other subjective states from one person to another without the use of any sensory channel of communication; clairvoyance, meaning direct responses to a physical object or event without any sensory contact; and precognition, or a noninferential response to a future event.

One of the first specific investigations in the field was the examination, by the British chemist and physicist Sir William Crookes, of the phenomena produced at séances held by the Scottish medium Daniel Dunglas Home. Home, a physical medium, generally used some type of lighting during his séances, and the validity of the paranormal phenomena he produced has never been successfully impugned. The contents of verbal utterances by mental mediums were also studied. Significant early research involved the American medium Leonore E. Piper, whose apparent psychical gifts were discovered by the American philosopher and psychologist William James. Other lines of investigation dealt with psychic experiences that seemed to occur spontaneously in everyday life, and involved the controlled testing of persons with apparently outstanding ESP abilities.

While the results of such experiments are regarded by some parapsychologists as having demonstrated the existence of some forms of psychic abilities the consensus of the scientific community is that psychic abilities have not been demonstrated to exist. Critics argue that methodological flaws may explain any apparent experimental successes

Research On Para-psychology

In the U.S., one of the earliest groups to become active in parapsychology was the Parapsychology Laboratory of North Carolina's Duke University, which began publishing literature in the 1930s. There, under the direction of the American psychologist Joseph Banks Rhine, methods were developed that advanced psychical investigations from the correlations of isolated and often vague anecdotal reports to a mathematical study based on statistics and the laws of probability.

In the experiments dealing with ESP, Rhine and his associates used mainly a deck of 25 cards, somewhat similar to ordinary playing cards but bearing on their faces only five designs: star, circle, cross, square, and wavy lines. If a subject correctly named 5 out of the shuffled deck of 25 concealed cards, that was considered pure chance. Certain subjects, however, consistently named 6 out of 10 cards correctly; so Rhine and his associates concluded that this demonstrated the existence of ESP. In their experiments on PK, the group used ordinary dice that were thrown from a cup against a wall or tumbled in mechanically driven cages. In these tests, an apparent relationship was found between the mental effort of subjects to “will” particular faces of the dice to appear upward and the percentage of times the faces actually did so. The results obtained in many individual experiments and in the research as a whole, Rhine and his workers decided, could not reasonably be attributed to the fluctuations of chance.

Rhine retired from Duke University in 1965 and transferred his research to a privately endowed organization, the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man. Since that time parapsychology has become better established in other universities, as illustrated by the offering of credit courses in the subject in increasing numbers. In addition, independent research centers continue to be founded, among them the American Society for Psychical Research, with headquarters in New York City. The Parapsychological Association, an international group of scholars actively working in the field, was formed in 1957 and was granted affiliation status by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1969

Para-psychology

Parapsychology, scientific investigation of alleged phenomena and events that appear to be unaccounted for by conventional physical, biological, or psychological theories. Parapsychologists study two kinds of so-called psi phenomena: extrasensory perception (ESP), or the acquiring of information through nonsensory means; and psychokinesis (PK), or the ability to affect objects at a distance by means other than known physical forces. Psychical research also investigates the survival of personality after death and deals with related topics such as trance mediumship, hauntings, apparitions, poltergeists (involuntary PK), and out-of-body experiences. The name of this field of investigation is taken from the Society of Psychical Research, founded in England in 1882 and in the U.S. in 1884; both groups continue to publish their findings today.

Although parapsychologists are increasingly employing and refining scientific methodologies for their observations, one of the chief criticisms of their work is that experiments in psi phenomena can rarely be duplicated. Under the most rigorous laboratory controls, for example, experiments on phenomena such as out-of-body experiences—in which individuals demonstrate an apparent ability to locate their center of perception outside their bodies—indicate that even reputable psychics are rarely able to duplicate earlier, high-scoring performances. The scores of such individuals, in fact, tend to drop to the level of probability the more the experiment is repeated. Nonparapsychologists find psi experiments even more difficult to repeat, and a majority of conventional scientists dismiss parapsychology findings as unscientific or at best inconclusive.

A similar criticism is based on the claim by most parapsychologists that psi phenomena occur beyond the law of causality, which is one of the fundamental premises of any scientific investigation. Indeed, results of psi experiments often turn out to be far from or even contradictory to the original predictions. Parapsychologists admit that psi phenomena fall so far outside ordinary comprehension that they are often unsure whether an ESP event or a PK event has occurred; Rhine himself stated that one kind of event could not occur without the other. Because these phenomena are difficult to define or isolate when they appear to happen—and, further, because the phenomena occur only for a select group of observers—most scientists think that psi investigations fall far short of the rules of objectivity required by the scientific method. As a result, many parapsychologists, rather than trying to demonstrate the reality of psi phenomena to a skeptical scientific community, have turned to exploring how such phenomena might actually work; they even have drawn on quantum physics for empirical support. Some workers in the field object to the very notion of repeatability of experiments as foreign to the nature of psi phenomena; they consider the scientific method, as currently understood, too restrictive a formulation for exploring the unknown

Social Psychology

Social Psychology , the scientific study of how people think, feel, and behave in social situations. This area of specialization draws on two disciplines: sociology, which focuses on groups; and psychology, which centers on the individual.
Social psychologists seek to answer a wide variety of questions, among them: Why do we help or ignore others in need? Why are people romantically attracted to each other? How do people form stereotypes about racial and ethnic groups, and how can they overcome them? What techniques of persuasion do advertisers use to sell their products? Why do people usually conform in group situations? What makes someone an effective leader?

As in other branches of psychology, social psychologists use a wide variety of research methods, including laboratory experiments, observations in the real world, case studies, and public opinion surveys. Some social psychologists conduct basic research to test general theories about human social behavior, while others seek to apply that research to solve real-world social problems.

Social psychology and sociology are often confused, because both fields study groups and group behavior. However, their perspectives differ. Whereas sociologists strive to understand group behavior in terms of society and social institutions, social psychologists focus on individuals and how they perceive, interact with, and influence each other. They study how individuals exert influence on groups and how group situations affect the behavior of individuals

Clinical psychology

Clinical psychology is dedicated to the study, diagnosis, and treatment of mental illnesses and other emotional or behavioral disorders. More psychologists work in this field than in any other branch of psychology. In hospitals, community clinics, schools, and in private practice, they use interviews and tests to diagnose depression, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, and other mental illnesses. People with these psychological disorders often suffer terribly. They experience disturbing symptoms that make it difficult for them to work, relate to others, and cope with the demands of everyday life.

Over the years, scientists and mental health professionals have made great strides in the treatment of psychological disorders. For example, advances in psychopharmacology have led to the development of drugs that relieve severe symptoms of mental illness. Clinical psychologists usually cannot prescribe drugs, but they often work in collaboration with a patient’s physician. Drug treatment is often combined with psychotherapy, a form of intervention that relies primarily on verbal communication to treat emotional or behavioral problems. Over the years, psychologists have developed many different forms of psychotherapy. Some forms, such as psychoanalysis, focus on resolving internal, unconscious conflicts stemming from childhood and past experiences. Other forms, such as cognitive and behavioral therapies, focus more on the person’s current level of functioning and try to help the individual change distressing thoughts, feelings, or behaviors.

In addition to studying and treating mental disorders, many clinical psychologists study the normal human personality and the ways in which individuals differ from one another. Still others administer a variety of psychological tests, including intelligence tests and personality tests. These tests are commonly given to individuals in the workplace or in school to assess their interests, skills, and level of functioning. Clinical psychologists also use tests to help them diagnose people with different types of psychological disorders.

The field of counseling psychology is closely related to clinical psychology. Counseling psychologists may treat mental disorders, but they more commonly treat people with less-severe adjustment problems related to marriage, family, school, or career. Many other types of professionals care for and treat people with psychological disorders, including psychiatrists, psychiatric social workers, and psychiatric nurses

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Neuropsychology

Neuropsychology is the basic scientific discipline that studies the structure and function of the brain related to specific psychological processes and overt behaviors. The term neuropsychology has been applied to lesion studies in humans and animals. It has also been applied to efforts to record electrical activity from individual cells (or groups of cells) in higher primates (including some studies of human patients).It is scientific in its approach and shares an information processing view of the mind with cognitive psychology and cognitive science. It is one of the more eclectic of the psychological disciplines, overlapping at times with areas such as neuroscience, philosophy (particularly philosophy of mind), neurology, psychiatry and computer science (particularly by making use of artificial  neural networks).
In practice neuropsychologists tend to work in academia (involved in basic or clinical research), clinical settings (involved in assessing or treating patients with neuropsychological problems – see clinical neuropsychology), forensic settings (often assessing people for legal reasons or court cases or working with offenders, or appearing in court as expert witness) or industry (often as consultants where neuropsychological knowledge is applied to product design or in the management of pharmaceutical clinical-trials research for drugs that might have a potential impact on CNS functioning).

Phineas P. Gage survived an accident in which a large iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying much of his brain's left frontal lobe, and is remembered for that injury's reported effects on his personality and behavior.Neuropsychology involves the study of both healthy individuals and patients, typically who have suffered either brain injury or mental illness.Cognitive neuropsychology and cognitive neuropsychiatry study neurological or mental impairment in an attempt to infer theories of normal mind and brain function. This typically involves looking for differences in patterns of remaining ability (known as 'functional disassociations') which can give clues as to whether abilities are composed of smaller functions, or are controlled by a single cognitive mechanism.
In addition, experimental techniques are often used to study the neuropsychology of healthy individuals. These include behavioral experiments, brain-scanning or functional neuroimaging, used to examine the activity of the brain during task performance, and techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation, which can safely alter the function of small brain areas to reveal their importance in mental operations.

OTHER ASPECTS

• Psychology– Discover  How to  Communicate with People
  
  Everyday we face different situations where we have to apply our communication skills in practice. Unfortunately not everyone can call himself a communication guru. That's why it can be very useful to gain a degree in psychology just to top up your own knowledge. Taking into consideration that nowadays getting a prestigious diploma is as easy as never before with all the new outstanding possibilities for distance education.

Communication skills may help you in all the spheres of life. It's especially essential for people working in marketing, management or social industry. A degree in psychology is an indubitable advantage for your CV. Human beings are social creatures by nature, that's why it doesn't matter if we like it or not, but we have to socialize with each other. So why not to make communication capabilities our strong side and use it for our own benefit?

Psychology is a relatively new science, however it will help you to get a more profound understanding of yourself and people who surround you. Psychology is definitely a key for self-improvement and development of artificial intelligence. Though if you decided to choose psychology as a career path, then the list of available psychology subfields is quite wide to chose from: biological, clinical, cognitive, comparative, consulting, counseling, developmental, educational, industrial-organizational, personality, quantitative, etc. Communication is a key to get what we want and receive the desired result. Psychological studies are more than education, degree or diploma you might gain. This science involves deep integration with up-to-date life and people's minds. Therefore, studying psychology is the best way to perceive yourself and discover how to communicate with people.

EXPERIMENTS

Experimental psychological research is conducted in a laboratory under controlled conditions. This method of research relies on the application of the scientific method to understand behavior. Experimenters use several types of measurements, including rate of response, reaction time, and various psychometric measurements. Experiments are designed to test specific hypotheses (deductive approach) or evaluate functional relationships (inductive approach). A true experiment with random allocation of subjects to conditions allows researchers to infer causal relationships between different aspects of behavior and the environment. In an experiment, one or more variables of interest are controlled by the experimenter (independent variable) and another variable is measured in response to different conditions (dependent variable). Experiments are one of the primary research methods in many areas of psychology, particularly cognitive/psychonomics, mathematical psychology, psychophysiology and biological psychology/cognitive neuroscience.
Experiments on humans have been put under some controls, namely informed and voluntary consent. After World War II, the Nuremberg Code was established, because of Nazi abuses of experimental subjects. Later, most countries (and scientific journals) adopted the Declaration of Helsinki. In the US, the National Institutes of Health established the Institutional Review Board in 1966, and in 1974 adopted the National Research Act (HR 7724). All of these measures encouraged researchers to obtain informed consent from human participants in experimental studies. A number of influential studies led to the establishment of this rule; such studies included the MIT and Fernald School radioisotope studies, the Thalidomide tragedy, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, and Stanley Milgram's studies of obedience to authority.

HISTORY

History of psychology
   Wilhelm Wundt with colleagues in his psychological laboratory, the first of its kind. Wundt is credited with setting up psychology as a field of scientific inquiry independent of the disciplines philosophy and biology.
         The study of psychology in philosophical context dates back to the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, China, India, and Persia. Historians point to the writings of ancient Greek philosophers, such as Thales, Plato, and Aristotle (esp. De Anima), as the first significant work to be rich in psychology-related thought. In 1802, French physiologist Pierre Cabanis sketched out the beginnings of physiological psychology with his essay, Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme (On the relations between the physical and moral aspects of man). Cabanis interpreted the mind in light of his previous studies of biology, arguing that sensibility and soul are properties of the nervous system.
German physician Wilhelm Wundt is known as the "father of experimental psychology," because he founded the first psychological laboratory, at Leipzig University in 1879. Wundt focused on breaking down mental processes into the most basic components, starting a school of psychology that is called structuralism. Edward Titchener was another major structuralist thinker.
Functionalism formed as a reaction to the theories of the structuralist school of thought and was heavily influenced by the work of the American philosopher and psychologist William James. In his seminal book, Principles of Psychology,published in 1890, he laid the foundations for many of the questions that psychologists would explore for years to come. Other major functionalist thinkers included John Dewey and Harvey Carr.

Psychology

Psychology, the scientific study of behavior and the mind.It is the study of human or animal mental functions and behaviors.Basic research in psychology includes perception, cognition, attention, emotion, motivation, brain functioning, personality, behavior, and interpersonal relationships.The word psychology literally means "study of the soul".It derives from Ancient Greek: (psych?, meaning "breath", "spirit", or "soul"); and The Latin word psychologia has likely origins in mid-16th century Germany.
           Many people think of psychologists as individuals who dispense advice, analyze personality, and help those who are troubled or mentally ill. But psychology is far more than the treatment of personal problems. Psychologists strive to understand the mysteries of human nature-why people think, feel, and act as they do. While psychological knowledge is typically applied to the assessment and treatment of mental healthproblems, it is also applied to understanding and solving problems in many different spheres of human activity. The vast majority of psychologists are involved in clinical, counseling, and school positions, some are employed in the industrial and organizational setting, and other areas such as human development and aging, sports, health, the media, legal, and forensics. Psychology incorporates research from the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities
      Psychologists attempt to understand the role of mental functions in individual and social behavior, while also exploring underlying physiological and neurological processes. Psychologists seek to answer a wide range of important questions about human nature: Are individuals genetically predisposed at birth to develop certain traits or abilities? How accurate are people at remembering faces, places, or conversations from the past? What motivates us to seek out friends and sexual partners? Why do so many people become depressed and behave in ways that seem self-destructive? Do intelligence test scores predict success in school, or later in a career? What causes prejudice, and why is it so widespread? Can the mind be used to heal the body? Discoveries from psychology can help people understand themselves, relate better to others, and solve the problems that confront them.