UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner is a pioneer in the study of an emotion known as "elevation," characterized by a "a feeling of spreading, liquid warmth in the chest and a lump in the throat." (Not be confused with heartburn.) Triggering that emotion in the lab is challenging. His research group's latest approach though is to play their subjects Barack Obama's victory speech. (My IFTF colleague Jason Tester has dubbed the impact of Obama on people's brains "neurobama.") Slate has a great profile of "elevation" research, including the work of moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis. I also look forward to reading Keltner's forthcoming book on the subject of "elevation," titled Born To Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life (which is not an Obama biography). From Slate: Elevation has always existed but has just moved out of the realm of philosophy and religion and been recognized as a distinct emotional state and a subject for psychological study. Psychology has long focused on what goes wrong, but in the past decade there has been an explosion of interest in "positive psychology"—what makes us feel good and why. University of Virginia moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who coined the term elevation, writes, "Powerful moments of elevation sometimes seem to push a mental 'reset button,' wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, and optimism, and a sense of moral inspiration...." We come to elevation, Haidt writes, through observing others—their strength of character, virtue, or "moral beauty." Elevation evokes in us "a desire to become a better person, or to lead a better life." "Obama in Your Heart" (Slate), Buy "Born To Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life" (Amazon), Buy "The Happiness Hypothesis" (Amazon)...br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=26e20096747314259a7e32045fa2ec27p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=26e20096747314259a7e32045fa2ec27p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=26e20096747314259a7e32045fa2ec27" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

Readers from waaaay back may recall an event I helped out with a few years ago, bringing together scientists, philosophers, and our resident IDist to discuss evolution and intelligent design. One of the speakers was University of Iowa professor Mark Blumberg, a colleague in the Department of Psychology. Dr. Blumberg also happens to be a prolific author, and has just released his third book in 4 years: “Freaks of Nature: What Anomalies Tell us About...

Jürgen Habermas currently ranks as one of the most influential philosophers in the world. Bridging continental and Anglo-American traditions of thought, he has engaged in debates with thinkers as diverse as Gadamer and Putnam, Foucault and Rawls, Derrida and Brandom. His extensive written work addresses topics stretching from social-political theory to aesthetics, epistemology and language to philosophy of religion, and his ideas have significantly influenced not only philosophy but also political-legal thought, sociology, communication studies, argumentation theory and rhetoric, developmental psychology and theology. Moreover, he has figured prominently in Germany as a public intellectual, commenting on controversial issues of the day in German newspapers such as Die Zeit. nbsp; nbsp; However, if one looks back over his corpus of work, one can discern two broad lines of enduring interest, one having to do with the political domain, the other with issues of rationality, communication, and knowledge. (In what follows, unnamed citations refer to works by Habermas; quotations are from the English editions, where available.) a HREF=https://www.msu.edu/~robins11/habermas/ nbsp; The Jürgen Habermas Web Resource/a

a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_(patient)"Henry G. Molaison/a, known to psychology and neurology students worldwide as quot;H.M.quot;, a href="http://dr.vivienneming.com/2008/12/impact-he-could-never-appreciate.html"dies/a. a href="http://www.metafilter.com/48573/Henrys-Brain"Previously./a br /

h4Wall Street as post-coitus behavorial psychology/h4 pstrongRadio Reg/strong Patrick Byrne doesn't call it an economic meltdown. He calls it "the de-leveraging of a civilization.".../pa href="http://ad.uk.doubleclick.net/jump/reg.rss.4159/main;sz=336x280;ord=1234567893?" target="_blank"img src="http://ad.uk.doubleclick.net/ad/reg.rss.4159/main;sz=336x280;ord=1234567893?" border="0" alt=""/a