New Books In Psychology

Today I talked to Lindsey Pollak about her book Recalculating: Navigate Your Career Through the Changing World of Work (HarperCollins, 2021). How can envy be a positive catalyst for changing your career? Why is curiosity so vital? (Hint: it’s been said that “Learning is the new pension.”) These are among the topics, and emotions, covered in this episode that runs the gamut from getting hired to managing both your boss and your personal brand. Along the way, this episode delves into what kinds of emotions one might feel at every stage in one’s career. While fear is likely during the job search, and a mixture of happiness, pride and relief on starting the new job, it’s important as well not to let shame keep you from getting the credit you deserve for a job well done. After all, as Pollak notes performance is table stakes, and vital to success. But so is burnishing your image and getting exposure. A job well done that isn’t noticed won’t advance your fortunes. Lindsey Pollak is the New York Times bestselling au

Today I talked to Mike Robbins about his new book We're All in This Together: Creating a Team Culture of High Performance, Trust, and Belonging (Hay House, 2020). COVID-19 has spurred two major issues for companies in general, and often their HR departments in particular: remote/hybrid work, and retention given the Great Resignation as workers leave companies to find workplaces that better align with their values and dreams. This week’s guest, Tim Robbins, is intimately familiar with both of those challenges as well as the topic of DEI (Diversity/Equity/Inclusion) in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death and so many others in recent years. Long-term, Robbins has also addressed EQ, employee burn-out, mental health, and how best to handle teamwork and conflict over his 20+ year career. Binding it all together is an approach outlined in this episode, which involves the four pillars of providing psychological safety, inclusivity, constructive “sweaty-palm” conversations (to resolve conflict) and a caring approach

Even after a decades-long opioid overdose crisis, intense controversy still rages over the fundamental nature of addiction and the best way to treat it. With uncommon empathy and erudition, Carl Erik Fisher draws on his own experience as a clinician, researcher, and alcoholic in recovery as he traces the history of a phenomenon that, centuries on, we hardly appear closer to understanding—let alone addressing effectively. As a psychiatrist-in-training fresh from medical school, Fisher was soon face-to-face with his own addiction crisis, one that nearly cost him everything. Desperate to make sense of the condition that had plagued his family for generations, he turned to the history of addiction, learning that the current quagmire is only the latest iteration of a centuries-old story: humans have struggled to define, treat, and control addictive behavior for most of recorded history, including well before the advent of modern science and medicine.  A rich, sweeping account that probes not only medicine and scie

Today I talked to Gautham Pallapa about his new book Leading with Empathy: Understanding the Needs of Today's Workforce (John Wiley and Sons, 2021). The World Health Organization’s director-general has called Covid-19 more traumatic than World War Two. Add in other issues like racism, sexism, and inequality and there’s never been a more important moment for leaders to step up and be more empathetic. What are the limiting beliefs that may hinder their ability to be so? As my guest observes, too often being the “strong silent type” with a kind of militaristic mindset means these leaders may practice cognition empathy, but rather progress beyond it to emotional and compassionate empathy. What do those two versions entail? Not merely seeing the other person’s point of view, but going on to form a real connection, feeling the other person’s pain points and doing something to reduce them. In this episode, the emphasis is on creating psychological safety so employees can collaborate and innovate in meaningful ways t

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: How a devotion to efficiency can become unhealthy Why leisure time (a.k.a. doing nothing) is essential How to reclaim our time and humanity · A discussion of the book Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving Today’s book is: Do Nothing, by Celeste Headlee, which examines how in searching for ways to “hack” our bodies and minds for peak performance, people are working more instead of less, living harder not smarter, and becoming more lonely and anxious. We strive for the absolute best in every aspect of our lives, ignoring what we do well naturally, and reaching for a bar that keeps rising higher. In Do Nothing, Celeste Headlee illuminates a new path to stop sabotaging our well-being, and start living instead of doing. Celeste offers strategies help you determine how your hours are being spent, invest in quality idle time, and focus on end goals instead of mean goals. Our guest is: Celeste Headlee, an awar

What makes a living body conscious? What is consciousness and are there different types of it? These questions have been studied by Professor Eva Jablonka from the Cohn Institute for the History of Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. Much of her early work was on epigenetic inheritance which poses questions such as whether learned behaviour can be passed on from one generation to the next and that has led her to think about whether it’s possible to take an evolutionary approach to consciousness. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Much is known about the physical strain that athletes’ bodies are subjected to, but until recently, the role of psychological factors in risk and rehabilitation has been poorly understood. In The Mental Impact of Sports Injury (Routledge, 2021), Dr. Carly McKay bridges the gap between academic research and practical settings in an informative, yet easy to follow guide to the psychology of sports injury. Addressing risk, rehabilitation, and prevention, it outlines key considerations for researchers and practitioners across all levels of sport. Alongside the fundamentals of injury psychology, emerging areas of importance are also discussed, including training load monitoring and the technological advances that are shaping modern sport medicine. Targeted examples highlight the challenges of preventing and managing injury in grassroots, elite, and professional contexts, with chapters dedicated to the under-served communities of youth and Para sport athletes. Stepping away from traditional texts, this unique book

The untimely losses of her brother, her father, and her husband, make this author uniquely qualified to help support you through your loss and grief. She understands that each loss will change one’s life in different ways as she writes about the fears and questions that swirled in her head following each of the deaths in her immediate family. In Chapter nine she focuses on the first loss in the family, when her older brother was killed in action in Vietnam in 1967. Her father died of a heart attack in 1970. Chapter sixteen describes the sudden death of her husband in 1984 when he suffered a heart attack while playing racquet ball. She writes about her early months as a young widow with a three-year-old daughter and wonders if grief is cumulative.The author realized, early on, that her family’s traditional way of grieving, did not work for her. She gives important, information on how family and friends’ attempt to be helpful, can sometimes fall short. Grief overload moved her to be proactive in finding the sup

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: How rejection is normal and even inevitable Skills to help you learn from and move through rejections toward your goals Why you need to develop your capacity for patience How asking people about their own rejections can help normalize yours A discussion of the book Win or Learn Today’s book is: Win or Learn: The Naked Truth About Turning Every Rejection into Your Ultimate Success, by rejection expert and New York Times bestselling author Harlan Cohen. Cohen lays the framework for identifying your wants, taking the risks necessary to pursue them, and finding success no matter the outcome. This step-by-step risk-taking experiment will guide you on a journey to understand your worth and fight for your goals—because rejection is a universal truth but not a final destination. Our guest is: Harlan Cohen, bestselling author of seven books, a journalist, and a speaker who has visited over 500 college campuses. He loves helping people find suppor

Today I talked to Daniel H. Pink about his new book The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward (Riverhead Books, 2022). After the emotion of love, regret is the second most common emotion people report feeling. Regret is therefore our single most common negative emotion, and yet an emotion that we can benefit from. In this episode, the celebrated author Daniel H. Pink explains that what we regret also serves as a compass pointing us toward what we value most and want to get right in our lives. What did Pink learn from his global survey that catalogued over 16,000 regrets? That they fit into four categories: connection regrets, boldness regrets, foundation regrets, and moral regrets. From the goals of love, learning, stability, to being lovable, these regrets compel us to be better by ideally reflecting, rather than brooding, over what might have been better. One fun or at least intriguing take-away from this episode: you can hear about Pink’s own Regret Resume, i.e., the two take-away lessons

If you're like most people, you probably believe that your identity is stable. But in fact, your identity is constantly changing—often outside your conscious awareness and sometimes even against your wishes—to reflect the interests of the groups you belong to. In The Power of Us (Little Brown, Spark, 2021), psychologists Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel integrate their own cutting-edge research in psychology and neuroscience to explain how identity really works and how to harness its dynamic nature to: - Boost cooperation and productivity - Overcome bias - Escape from echo chambers - Break political gridlock - Foster dissent and mobilize for change - Lead effectively - Galvanize action to address persistent global problems Along the way, they explore such seemingly unrelated phenomena as why a small town in Germany spent decades divided by shoes, why beliefs persist after they are disproven, how working together synchronizes our brains, what makes selfish people generous, why effective leaders say “we

We are delighted to present All for One and One for All: Public Seminar Series on Mental Health in Academia and Society. All for One and One for All talks will shine the light on and discuss mental health issues in academia across all levels – from students to faculty, as well as in wider society. Seminars are held online once per month on Wednesdays at 5pm CET/ 11am EST and free for all to attend. Speakers include academics, organisations, and health professionals whose work focuses on mental health. Live Q and A sessions will be held after each talk. For live webinar schedule please visit this website. Follow us on Twitter: @LashuelLab Today’s talk is with Dr. Stuart Farrimond, Dr. Hilal Lashuel and Galina Limorenko Dr Stuart Farrimond is a medical doctor turned science communicator and food scientist and is author of the DK bestsellers The Science of Cooking (2017) and Science of Spice (2018), and the Sunday Times bestseller The Science of Living (2021) (Sold as Live Your Best Life in North America). He is

Kile M. Ortigo's Beyond the Narrow Life: A Guide to Psychedelic Integration and Existential Exploration (Synergetic Press, 2021) addresses major issues that arise from the psychospiritual and therapeutic use of psychedelics. It describes a core structure that psychedelic journeys exhibit, and share, with classic mythologies; religious traditions; and spiritual practices. Its method is to integrate findings from cognitive-behavioral therapy, Jungian depth psychology, existential philosophy, compassion and mindfulness practices, comparative mythology, pop culture, film, and scientific understandings of the cosmos. The book also includes exercises designed to guide readers through the profound questions raised by diverse individual journeys of change and growth.  Steve Beitler’s work in the history of medicine focuses on how pain has been understood, treated, experienced, and represented. Recently published articles examined the history of opiates in American football and surveyed the history of therapeutic drug

The Expectation Effect: How your Mindset Can Change Your World (Henry Holt, 2022) is a journey through the cutting-edge science of how our mindset shapes every facet of our lives, revealing how your brain holds the keys to unlocking a better you. What you believe can make it so. You’ve heard of the placebo effect and how sugar pills can accelerate healing. But did you know that sham heart surgeries often work just as well as placing real stents? Or that people who think they’re particularly prone to cardiovascular disease are four times as likely to die from cardiac arrest? Such is the power and deadly importance of the expectation effect―how what we think will happen changes what does happen. Melding neuroscience with narrative, science journalist David Robson takes readers on a deep dive into the many life zones the expectation effect permeates. We see how people who believe stress is beneficial become more creative when placed under strain. We see how associating aging with wisdom can add seven plus years

The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks. Nobody needs telling there isn't enough time. We're obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless battle against distraction; and we're deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and "life hacks" to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks. Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejectin

According to a broad consensus among philosophers across the ages, anger is regrettable, counterproductive, and bad. It is something to be overcome or suppressed, something that involves an immoral drive for revenge or a naïve commitment to cosmic justice. Anger is said to involve a corruption of the person – it “eats away” at them, or plunges them into madness. Maybe anger has been under-appreciated. Perhaps we have failed to make the right distinctions between different varieties of anger – thereby overlooking kinds that are productive and appropriate. In The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle (Oxford University Press 2021), Myisha Cherry argues that we need to give anger a chance. After identifying distinct forms of anger, she defends a kind of anger she calls Lordean Rage, which she argues is central to antiracist social progress. Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many people, at some stage of their life, worry about sleep: are they getting enough of it? Or even, too much? Derk-Jan Dijk is Professor of Sleep and Physiology at University of Surrey. His current research interests include the contribution of sleep to brain function in healthy ageing and dementia; the role of circadian rhythms in sleep regulation; negative effects of sleep loss; understanding age and sex related differences in sleep physiology and developing tests to monitor sleep. In this podcast he discusses these issues and the future direction of the discipline with Owen Bennett-Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwo

This book cuts new ground by applying a human rights lens of analysis to domestic mental health laws. It makes a timely contribution into the discourse regarding mental health, supported decision-making and disability rights in the post CRPD era. In A New Era for Mental Health Law and Policy: Supported Decision-Making and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Cambridge University Press, 2017) Research Fellow Dr Piers Gooding challenges law makers to bring domestic laws into compliance with the CRPD. At the same time, Gooding confronts the pragmatic concerns which continue to shape these same laws, such as the case where a person's mental impairment is perceived as a risk to self or others.   I had a great chat with Dr. Gooding in this hour; we spoke about arguments for and against coercive interventions, the right to and meaning of autonomy, tensions between rights based legalism and clinical governance, and more. We spoke about how domestic mental health laws have evolved since the 19

Screen time. Daycare. Praise. Sleep training. Spanking and time-outs. Helicopter versus "old school" parenting. There are a lot of questions facing parents of young children but consistent and reliable science-based answers can be hard to find. Parenting Made Complicated: What Science Really Knows about the Greatest Debates of Early Childhood (Oxford UP, 2021), written by child psychiatrist Dr. David Rettew, tackles many of the biggest controversies facing new parents today and examines the science behind these issues with writing that is lively, personal, non-preachy, and even funny. This book doesn't assume that the "correct" answer for each parenting dilemma is the same for each child. Instead it describes how different approaches may be required based on a child's unique temperament or other important factors. Practical, informed, and entertaining, Parenting Made Complicated is a complete resource for parents and professionals alike who are looking for dependable information about today's parenting contro

Neurodisability and the Criminal Justice System: Comparative and Therapeutic Responses (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021) delves into an under-researched and little understood but extremely pertinent issue in law; the prevalence of neurodisability within criminal justice systems. Considering the challenges faced by both juveniles and adults with neuorodisabilities who come into contact with the criminal justice system, a host of interdisciplinary international scholars examine the issue from multiple perspectives; from that of lawyers, magistrates, and through the lens of therapeutic and legal analysis, this contribution offers suggestions for reform of both legislation and practice. The book makes the case that criminal justice systems lack the accommodations required both within the institution and the community to adequately support those with neurodisabilities who come into contact with the criminal justice system.  In this conversation, with one of the co-editors of the book, Anna Eriksson, we cover a broad