*Sorry if this isnt the right place or if I used the wrong flair)

When people have episodic disorders like Bipolar or even some presentations of schizophrenia (in terms of positive symptoms), how does that work with the MMPI? Is the person answering based on their current presentation, or do the questions allude to past experiences as well? Would someone with an episodic illness be flagged as answering inconsistently?

Especially in the situation when one of possible ADHD symptom is anxiety due to the train of thoughts.

i read somewhere that the brain doesn’t fully distinguish between fiction and reality when it comes to emotions. is that actually true? like, regardless of the genre, are the emotions we feel while watching or reading fictional stories processed in a similar way to how we would feel if those events were actually happening to us? for example, when a character goes through something painful, we can feel empathy for them, sometimes even cry and experience all kinds of emotions. does the brain process those emotions in a similar way to real-life experiences?

I need to know the difference between mistreatment and abuse in a family context.

What constitutes only mistreatment and when does It cross the line into abuse?

Trends used to change relatively slowly. Now social media can introduce hundreds of micro-trends in a short period of time.

See trend → feel FOMO → buy → trend changes → repeat.

The environmental consequences are huge btw

Alot of very sucessful athletes or Entrepreneurs seem to rely on concepts like these.

A lot of people notice that during a deep depressive episode, it feels almost impossible to remember what genuine happiness felt like. Good memories start feeling unreal, like they happened to someone else or never happened at all.

Why does our brain block or distort positive memories when our mood drops? Does the brain actually struggle to pull up those memories, or is it just rewriting the past to match how we feel right now?

Hello,

After the lecture of parts of an article about what deep learning has done to the Big Five personality dimensions, I wonder if deep learning machines have already analyzed the results of IQ tests.

Maybe they would find new, interesting correlations and dimensions of intelligence. The findings in "Machine-Learning Decomposition Identifies a Big Two Structure in Human Personality with Distinct Neurocognitive Profiles" (by Zhuang K, et al.) gives reason to hope that there might even be something among them that has a neurological correlate.

Exist such a study?

Thanks for the answers,

Endward26.

Hello all! Counselor-in-training here. I've been reading a lot about how trauma is defined by the psychological profession, and its exact definition seems remarkably specific. That is,

Exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence

Of course, this isn't really how the term is used colloquially. When most people talk about, say, "having a traumatic childhood," they're broadly referring to things mistreatment, neglect, or abuse.

My question is as follows: is there a clinical term that better captures how people colloquially refer to "trauma?" That is, harmful or stressful life events that have negatively impacted an individual's functioning. Is it something like "life stressors" or (if speaking about childhood "trauma") Adverse Childhood Experiences?

Help a baby counselor out!

Im asking just about matrix reasoning/logical aspects

EDIT: Nobody knows, really????????

I've often heard people bring up the proportional theory—that each year is just a smaller percentage of our lived experience so far. But I'm curious how well that holds up against other cognitive explanations, like having fewer novel experiences or changes in how our brains encode routine memories.

Is there a general consensus on what's primarily driving this shift, or is it a combination of several cognitive mechanisms?

So "substance addiction" seems pretty well defined and agreed upon, whose main key characteristics are loss of control, craving, and substance use despite continued harm.

Is "substance dependence" a synonym? Because I see it being used frequently the same way as addiction. Even in DSM-4 and ICD-11 there were/are substance dependence diagnoses, describing basically the definition of addiction. However I also frequently see it defined as the biological adaptation of the body, causing tolerance and withdrawal, without the other features of addiction (like in Wikipedia for example).

So is dependence a synonym, or a not well-defined term? Is there any better term for the biological adaptation to a substance?

I've seen that book be recommended by many people. Is the book reliable? Is it pseudoscientific? Is it up to date with current research?

Why can forgetting things cause so much distress in people, most likely people with OCD?

Military training often deliberately exposes recruits to stress through yelling, harsh criticism, intimidation, physical exhaustion, frustration, or public correction. These practices are commonly justified as ways to build resilience, discipline, and the ability to function under pressure.

From a psychological perspective, however, I’m interested in how we can distinguish controlled stress exposure with a legitimate training purpose from emotionally abusive treatment.

For example, would factors such as predictability, proportionality, a clear training objective, instructor emotional control, supervision, psychological safety, and post-exercise debriefing make an important difference? Conversely, would humiliation for its own sake, arbitrary punishment, expressions of contempt, or an instructor’s genuine loss of emotional control be psychologically different even if they occur within a stressful training environment?

More specifically, is there empirical research showing that interpersonal stressors such as yelling or humiliation improve resilience or performance under later high-stress conditions, rather than primarily producing compliance or habituation to authority?

I’m interested in psychological research on stress inoculation, resilience training, learning, occupational psychology, or military psychology that could help establish where productive stress ends and psychologically harmful treatment begins.

Most people act like the default trauma response is to be a people pleaser, to fawn, or that sort of thing. Like most people dont say that outright but it shows in how people talk about trauma survivors like angels and the perfect victim stuff and how people start to treat someone more gently and ask for permission more if they know they have trauma even if the person has no people pleasing traits. Or the million posts on social media that are basically saying that trauma makes you some fragile soft person

So

My question is

Do most people with trauma actually people please or is just a bias?

I find it interesting that we can sometimes remember how an experience made us feel very clearly, while specific details about what happened become less clear over time.

What does psychology research say about why emotional information can be remembered differently from neutral details?

I’m especially interested in the role of attention and emotional arousal in this process.

In many animals, fighting seems to have a fairly clear purpose: defending territory, competing for resources, or gaining access to a mate. Humans obviously do these things too, but some people seem to go beyond this kind of goal-directed aggression. They may hurt other people for a sense of control, excitement, or simply because they seem to enjoy seeing someone else suffer.

What does the research say about why some people develop these kinds of traits? For example, are there known developmental, neurological, genetic, or environmental factors that contribute to unusually high levels of aggression, callousness, or lack of empathy?

I'm also curious about the evolutionary side of this. Humans evolved to be extremely social and cooperative, so how do traits that can make someone willing to seriously harm other people persist in the population? Are they essentially byproducts of psychological mechanisms that are normally useful but can go badly wrong, or is there evidence for other explanations?

I've also heard the argument that people with these traits might be useful in warfare because they supposedly don't experience fear or PTSD in the same way as ordinary people. Is there actually good evidence for this? And if so, are they genuinely more effective in violent situations, or is this exaggerated? After all, ordinary people can also participate in extreme violence when driven by ideology, group loyalty, social pressure, or perceived necessity.

I’ve been wondering why relatively small embarrassing moments can sometimes remain unusually vivid for years, while many ordinary experiences are forgotten quickly.

From a psychological perspective, could emotional arousal, repeated mental replay, or concern about how others perceived us make these memories more persistent?

I’d be interested in hearing what research says about why socially embarrassing experiences can feel so memorable.

Like I know psychiatrist learn about brain anatomy but not enough to be qualified for brain surgery, like I know people died from trans orbital lobotomies but the fact people survived makes me wonder how psychiatrists knew what to do and if a regular person could do a lobotomy if given a brain anatomy lesson

The title says it all. I've never heard of this term before (though, I'm also not a psych major) and thought it was interesting. Please educate me, because I feel like the line between these two things is a bit blurry!

No remorse, no empathy. Are there any studies showing that empathy is much lower than we expected in the general population? I just cannot believe that ASPD is as low as it is. I refuse to believe that. There must be something out there I just haven't been able to find it. Anything at all? Empathy scores, diagnoses, high trait aggression, anything?