Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [431]
—Teams of researchers have been conducting long-term longitudinal studies of individuals who suffer recurrent periods of depression. Typically, they track the events and changes of their subjects’ lives, correlate these with their emotional states, and statistically disentangle the influence of each possible cause of depression. Findings have lent weight to such stressful influences as childhood abuse, family conflicts, spousal abuse, and other traumas, and the counteracting force of such compensatory factors as the support of friends and relatives.8 The Stirling County Study, the longest-running of all such studies (it was started in 1948), has yielded a mass of published results. One recent example is the finding that women born after World War II are at greater risk for depressive illness than older women, possibly because many of the younger women entered the labor force and employment is a major stressor. Another finding is that men with long-term depression have far higher mortality and morbidity rates than long-term depressed women, perhaps because men are less willing to seek treatment.9
—The nature of intelligence has been explored intensively for many decades, but in recent years some current researchers have advanced the concept that intelligence is neither overall intellectual ability nor a collection of correlated abilities but a set of different processes and strategies that may operate at different levels in the same person. As mentioned earlier, Howard Gardner of Harvard, for one, argues that each individual has seven distinct intelligences: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. Robert J. Sternberg of Yale, for another, offers research data pointing to a “triarchic” structure of intelligence: the mind’s knowledge of its own abilities, its use of its accumulated experience, and its appraisal of the existing situation.
—A good many researchers are probing deeper than ever into the sources of gender role behavior and sexual preference. Some focus on prenatal influences on brain development, some on genetic anomalies, others on familial influences, and still others on cultural factors. Each group portrays its factors as the most influential, but the emerging view is that all are involved and to varying degrees in each case; it is the specific kinds of interactions, in any individual’s history, that determine the outcome.
—The nature of consciousness, possibly the most profound puzzle of psychology, was long set aside as either not investigable or not useful either theoretically or practically. However, since the cognitive revolution and the cognitive neuroscience revolution, it has again been seen by some investigators as a question of paramount importance, and one they believe can eventually be answered. A few years ago Francis Crick suggested that a continuous, semi-oscillatory firing of sets of neurons creates a temporary unity of neural activity in many parts of the brain; the self-activating nature of the pattern is the basis of consciousness. Philip Johnson-Laird has likened consciousness to a computer’s “operating system,” a set of instructions that direct and control the flow of information in whatever programs are running. Gerald Edelman has proposed two levels of consciousness. A low-level form arises from the interaction between the part of the brain governing internal physiological drives and the part processing information from the outside