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How Not To Cope With a Personal Insult
Humans have always had to cope with threats, both big and small. The physical and life-threatening threats that our ancestors faced have largely been replaced by social threats, but they are nonetheless an emotional menace: Insults, rejections and criticism can undermine our integrity and self-esteem, even our sense that the world is a meaningful place. Sometimes we cope with these threats smoothly, and other times awkwardly—sometimes disastrously. Is there a single, most effective strategy for dealing with life’s constant battering?
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The Cluelessness of the Psychopath
Hannibal Lecter is arguably the world’s most famous psychopath. I know—he’s not real. Still, the anti-hero of The Silence of the Lambs embodies the chilling constellation of traits generally associated with this rare mental disorder. A highly intelligent physician and psychiatrist, Lecter is superficially charming, even urbane—at least when he’s not cannibalizing his innocent victims. He is rarely emotional, and despite the brutality of his crimes, he shows absolutely no evidence of empathy or a guilty conscience. That’s what makes psychopaths so mysterious and incomprehensible—the lack of normal human feeling. How could somebody’s child develop into that kind of merciless automaton?
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Will Work For . . . Well, That Depends.
It’s going to be a gloomy Labor Day for many this year. The national unemployment rate, now 9.1 percent, won’t seem to budge, and many states are doing worse than that. The unemployment rate in California exceeds 12 percent, with some communities registering staggering rates of more than 30 percent. Yet jobs go begging. I see jobs advertised in store windows of my hometown, Washington, DC, where one in ten workers is out of work. Many working Americans find this perplexing. Isn’t it simple economics that the unemployed would take these jobs—indeed welcome any job—when times are rough?
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Back-to-school dilemma: Why do bullies bully?
Long thought to result from fragile self-esteem, bullying may instead stem from grandiose, inflated, and narcissistic self-assessment, some psychological scientists argue.
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The Bully in the Baby?
While only a minority of toddlers are habitual bullies, this aggressive tendency appears to emerge right along with the motor skills that make it possible.
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From Lab to Court: Memory and the Law
The New Jersey Supreme Court this week released radical new rules on the use and misuse of eyewitness testimony. The ruling has profound legal implications, essentially challenging the 34-year-old U.S. Supreme Court standard for the reliability of eyewitness memories of crimes, making it much easier for defendants to dispute eyewitness evidence in court. The New Jersey Court is considered a trailblazer in criminal law, and the ruling could well end up re-shaping the law of the land. The ruling also reflects decades of scientific research on human memory, and its failings.
