Psychological Research
January 1, 1954
Joseph T. Kelly
3 citations
Mescaline, a psychedelic compound, demonstrated significant potential in enhancing psychological well-being. In a sample of 100 participants undergoing psychotherapy, 75% reported improved emotional health after mescaline sessions. The Rorschach test indicated that 60% of subjects exhibited more positive psychological profiles post-treatment. These findings suggest that integrating mescaline into psychotherapy techniques could offer new applications for psychological testing and assessment, potentially transforming therapeutic approaches and outcomes for various mental health conditions.
Psychological Research
June 1, 2023
Georgina Nemeth
Dream reports are shaped by three distinct steps: the generation of a conscious experience during sleep (dream production), storing a memory trace of that experience (dream encoding), and accessing that trace upon waking (dream retrieval). The paper argues that prospective methods such as laboratory reports and logs provide more direct access to data about dream production and encoding than retrospective scales, which cannot systematically control factors affecting retrieval and thus screen off variability in production and encoding. Understanding how trait and state factors interact with each step is crucial for improving empirical research on dream experiences.
Psychological Research
April 1, 2022
Larissa Lusnig, Ralph Radach, Markus J. Hofmann
A longitudinal study examined how meditation affects the processing of written single words. Participants completed a lexical decision task and rated the affective valence of nouns before and after a 7-week class in mindfulness meditation, loving-kindness meditation, or a control intervention. Both meditation groups rated the emotional valence of nouns more neutral afterward, suggesting a general down-regulation of emotions. In the loving-kindness group, positive words were rated more positively after the intervention, indicating a specific intensification of positive feelings. Response times in the lexical decision task accelerated significantly after both meditation interventions, with the largest facilitation in the loving-kindness group. The authors suggest meditation may have increased attention, improved visual discrimination, broadened attentional focus, and reduced mind-wandering, enabling accelerated word recognition.
Psychological Research
July 1, 2018
Charlotte Martial, Vanessa Charland-Verville, Hedwige Dehon et al.
People who have had a near-death experience (NDE) are no more likely than others to form false memories, but when they do, they recall those false memories with a stronger sense of vivid, compelling recollection. The study used a standard word-list task to test memory in 20 individuals who had an NDE during a life-threatening event and 20 matched controls who had a life-threatening event without an NDE. Both groups produced false memories at similar rates, but those with NDEs more often reported that the false items felt like real, detailed memories. Further analysis indicated that both groups thought of the false items equally often, but the NDE group was less able to correctly monitor the source of those thoughts.
Psychological Research
March 1, 2018
Andreas Meyer, Benedikt Hackert, Ulrich Weger
The emergence of psychology as an academic discipline over a century ago brought a paradigm shift that enabled rigorous, experimentation-based study of psychological phenomena but also alienated researchers from the experiential, or qualia, aspects of those phenomena, as inquiry increasingly relied on third-person measures such as behavioral or physiological observations. At this turning point stood the European scholar Franz Brentano, who advocated for a synthesis of both third-person and first-person research methods. On the centenary of his death, this article outlines the historical context, introduces Brentano's approach and work, and discusses its relevance for contemporary experimental psychology.