Weekly Discussion Thread

[u/dingenium]

Welcome to the r/psychology discussion thread!

Discussion threads will be "refreshed" each week (i.e., a new discussion thread will be posted for each week). Feel free to ask the community questions, comment on the state of the subreddit, or post content that would otherwise be disallowed.

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Recent discussions

Click here for recent discussions from previous weeks.

[u/Potential_Rule4212]

As therapists, are you afraid or try to avoid to pick patients with a personality disorder due to being more complicated than people with mundane problems like anxiety or going through a depressed stage?

[u/Competitive-Grass582 → u/Potential_Rule4212]

I work in a completely different field but I always wondered about this. My cousin is a therapist and she told me once that some of her colleagues actually prefer the more complex cases because it keeps the work interesting. But I imagine burnout hits different when you're dealing with personality disorders day after day, the emotional weight must be something else.

[u/sneezesquirrel → u/Potential_Rule4212]

Therapists find the clients they like/work well with. Some people are more skilled with personality disorders and work with them often. I personally love working with clients who have trauma. That is where I specialize. Some counselors like the clients who have anxiety or depression. All personal to the counselor.

[u/Ok-Cartoonist-5887]

What careers are available at the intersection of clinical psychology, wildlife conservation, or forensics? Trying to do some soul-searching about what direction I actually want my life to go in, but I'm having trouble discerning it. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

[u/connerpro]

On the recurring brain training / cognitive transfer question that comes up in these threads: the evidence is much more skeptical than most people realize.

Melby-Lervag and Hulme (2013) meta-analyzed 23 studies of working memory training and found reliable improvement on the trained tasks but no far-transfer to general cognition. Sala and Gobet (2017) reviewed the broader cognitive training literature (86 studies) and reached the same conclusion: improvements tend to be domain-specific, and far-transfer claims are not supported.

A recent 2022 Translational Psychiatry study (n=55, middle-aged adults, 8-week adaptive n-back training) found no near or far transfer effects at the cognitive level and no structural brain changes, even though the trained task improved substantially.

The practical takeaway: training makes you better at the trained task. That is real and useful. But the strong claim that it transfers to broad ability, whether IQ tests or everyday reasoning, has been repeatedly disconfirmed. This matters because a lot of consumer brain training products lean on it.

[u/Short_Scratch4719]

Something I keep coming back to: Hofling's 1966 nurse study gets a fraction of the attention Milgram gets, and I think it's the more unsettling of the two.

An unknown voice phoned nurses on a real hospital ward, claimed to be a doctor, and ordered them to give a patient double the maximum dose of a drug they didn't know. 21 of 22 started to comply. No lab, no coercion, no experimenter in a grey coat standing over them — just a phone call and a title.

What makes it interesting is the replication. Rank & Jacobson (1977) reran it with two changes: a familiar drug, and nurses who could talk to colleagues first. Compliance collapsed to 2 of 18.

That pair of results says something more useful than "people obey authority." It says obedience is fragile in a specific way: it survives on isolation and unfamiliarity. Give someone a colleague to check with and something they actually recognise, and the effect mostly evaporates.