Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
240
result(s) for
"Barrett, Deirdre"
Sort by:
Dream content discovery from social media using natural language processing
Dreaming is a fundamental but not fully understood part of human experience. Traditional dream content analysis practices, while popular and aided by over 130 unique scales and rating systems, have limitations. Often based on retrospective surveys or lab studies, and sometimes on in-home dream reports collected over some days, they struggle to be applied on a large scale or to show the importance and connections between different dream themes. To overcome these issues, we conducted data-driven mixed-method analysis identifying topics in free-form dream reports through natural language processing. We applied this analysis on 44,213 dream reports from Reddit’s
r/Dreams
subreddit, where we uncovered 217 topics, grouped into 22 larger themes: the most extensive collection of dream topics to date. We validated our topics by comparing it to the widely-used Hall and van de Castle scale. Going beyond traditional scales, our method can find unique patterns in different dream types (like nightmares or recurring dreams), understand topic importance and connections (like finding a greater predominance of indoor location settings in Reddit dreams than what was in general stipulated by previous work), and observe changes in collective dream experiences over time and around major events (like the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent Russo-Ukrainian war). We envision that the applications of our method will provide valuable insights into the complex nature of dreaming and its interplay with our waking experiences.
Journal Article
Supernormal stimuli : how primal urges overran their evolutionary purpose
In this book, a Harvard evolutionary psychologist explains how our once-helpful instincts get hijacked in our garish modern world. Our instincts--for food, sex, or territorial protection--evolved for life on the savannahs 10,000 years ago, not in today's world of densely populated cities, technological innovations, and pollution. We now have access to a glut of larger-than-life objects, from candy to pornography to atomic weapons--that gratify these gut instincts with often-dangerous results. Animal biologists coined the term \"supernormal stimuli\" to describe imitations that appeal to primitive instincts and exert a stronger pull than real things, such as soccer balls that geese prefer over eggs. The author applies this concept to the alarming disconnect between human instinct and our created environment, demonstrating how supernormal stimuli are a major cause of today's most pressing problems, including obesity and war.
BOOK
When the Answer Comes in a Dream
While teaching a summer course at University College London in 2011, Barrett's came across a unique set of dreams recorded in the archives of the Wellcome Library Medical Collection: those from British officers in a World War II Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. From 1940 to 1942, Major Kenneth Hopkins had gathered dream accounts every morning from 79 fellow prisoners being held in Laufen Castle in Bavaria. Hopkins planned to use the data for his dissertation research, but he died of a lung ailment in the camp. These dreams sat unread for decades. A group of undergraduate students and her scored these accounts using standardized scales that rate dreams for their emotions, types of social interactions, and categories of characters, settings, and objects. They compared the ratings for the soldiers' dreams to those for dreams from college males of the same time period. Predictably, perhaps, the prisoners' dreams had more references to food and dead people, and they contained less friendliness, sexuality, and aggression.
Journal Article
Transgenerational Trauma
Epigenetics is the study of cellular variations that are caused by external, environmental factors that “switch” genes “on” and “off,” making changes in the phenotype of genetic expression without concomitant changes in the DNA sequence or genotype. Epigenetic effects have been noted in the offspring of traumatized parents and there is some evidence that some of these effects can be observed in third generation offspring. However, the latter studies have been conducted with small numbers of non-human animals, with modest effect sizes. Implications for evolutional theory and psychotherapy are discussed.
Journal Article
Hypnosis in Film and Television
When a hypnotist appears on screen, expect evil. If his induction features 'magnetic' hand passes, he's probably about to compel someone to commit a crime. If he hypnotizes with an intense stare, his intent is likelier seduction-in fact many screen inductions are identical to the eye contact ethologists have labeled \"the copulatory gaze.\" This paper explores to role of hypnosis in more than 230 films in which it has been depicted and categorizes the-mostly negative-stereotypes about it. A handful of exceptions in which hypnosis is positive and/or realistic are examined. The discussion compares this to the role of psychotherapy and dreams in cinema. It discusses why hypnosis is so maligned and whether there is anything practitioners can do to alter the stereotype.
Journal Article
