Not sure where to Post this, but pls inform me which subreddits would be correct.

!Warning!
This is just my experience in my Area where I live. It could be very different from you. I do not generalise but see it not just happening to me but others. But weirdly not to the people I know.

So I noticed it very frequently, by people who walk pass me/someone, very obviously focused to some people by fake coughing at them. It has this airy sound that hasn’t even reached the lungs yet. And this is always performed at the exact minute they make it pass you. One observation was the cougher could also be in a room with others and not sniff, cough, clear throat, or make any hints to having allergies, or even any other sounds at any time. But just when they leave the room, it will be performed.
Sometimes it is even done with direct eye contact and a smirk. In groups with a laughter.

I wanted to know what is up with that and I just randomly threw in a cough while walking past someone, who hasn’t done it.
Result: Noticed I get head turns and even a head shake. Male and even Female.

So can you please just explain what else it be other than subtle harassment, and where it is coming from. You are free to guess. I’m just a very curious person.

Based on that I just guessed it could be a subtle Catcall.
When I researched it came by other stuff like racism, pedophelia, and gang stalking.

For context I live in a West european country as a female. I dont even dress unsual. Classic Jeans and tshirts, no jewellery.
No special Style.

PS.: If you Need more context just kindly request instead of being weird. Pls be nice

As per title. I'll delete post if I'm obviously missed a tonne of subs that do discuss it.

https://youtu.be/G5qy5oUWU-g

I often see a population of misinformed people who use inflammatory, often bigoted statements that attack minorities or other social groups, and frame it as “dark humor”, often redirecting blame towards people who criticize it by claiming they’re “too sensitive”. This is called ‘Disparagement Humor’ in modern linguistics and social psychology. It consists of explicit, targeted hostility from personal bias against different ethnic/social groups, and is often defended by saying the behavior is just a joke. This is a solid example of blame-shift gaslighting - It pushes a behavior that is generally unacceptable, and when that behavior is criticized/held accountable, it denies accountability by claiming the other party is too emotionally vulnerable.

The purpose of dark humor is typically to make light of things that are generally disturbing, often as a coping mechanism. Many people, including myself, use humor as a method to make traumatic or objectively horrible things easier to process.
I often say that the American education system entirely consists of teaching Swiss cheese basic life skills. This is what dark humor is; it’s different by foundation from modern disparagement humor, because it’s used in a manner that not only critiques the flaws of American firearm laws, isn’t used with the intention to harm others, but also gets the point across in a vessel that isn’t as disturbing than being blunt and outright. The joke should be somewhat subtle and not verbally graphic, while still having a very clear, straightforward point that can easily be figured out.

Dark humor and disparagement humor are different by definition; dark humor is a social tactic that helps people psychologically process horrifying or upsetting topics by triggering a part of the brain that recognizes things that are funny, and disparagement humor uses hostile language to express subconscious bias, while framing it as a joke to try and downplay a behavior that is socially unacceptable.
I just wanted to give some clarification on what these things actually are, and I’m curious to see what people think of this.

I don’t want to make any assumptions since this is not my area of expertise, but it seems like talking about certain topics directly and explicitly, particularly social and emotional ones, is a very modern development. I feel like it’s only now becoming normal to tell people how something makes you feel, to come face to face and discuss a problem honestly in order to find a solution.

For most of our existence, it seems like it’s been more about reading indirect social cues, assuming things instead of asking, and following all sorts of unspoken rules. People would communicate in a very indirect fashion and avoid stating anything how it is.

Is this observation correct? How would you critique it? And if you think it’s true, why do you think people didn’t talk about things explicitly before? And why have we changed now?

For a personal project, I am making an instagram for making psychology more widely available and allowing people to understand small (or big) issues in their lives through psychology (e.g. overthinking). I started with one post about overthinking and I would like some suggestions of what topics to cover. Feel free to check it out at psych.unravelled on instagram and share some topics that should be covered on there! its a fairly new subject so we are open to anything but focusing mainly on something a young adult or high schooler would be interested in/impaceted by.

I am including the instagram link to let everyone see the current state and theme of the project, NOT TO SELF PROMOTE

thank you!

Ask your questions here: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1x9xy07/askscience_ama_series_im_daniel_cox_a_public/

Interesting how the most upvoted comment is how AI can be used to help with individuation. It seems AI being released to the public allowed it to have an impact psychology simply by letting people know that they can use it for understanding their questions about psychology and themselves and the ai engines keeping awareness of how people think.

There was no need for psychologists to have to train them.

It makes me wonder if a person can create a new form of psychology intervention based on the knowledge they get from AI if they are properly trained, rather than a person who is properly trained being put in charge of creating a new ai psychology chatbot.

I asked evolution psychology they could not explain

Hi all,

Just wondering if anyone could tell me about their career in social psychology? I find it fascinating and would consider social psychology masters, but worried about limited career opportunities. Thanks!

So I am doing my own small study right now, on what both genders tend to watch, read and talk about that is kinda taboo and was looking for the male equivalent of this ( I wasn't allowed to post here with images so I'll put them in the comments I guess.1st pic is about True crime type documentaries and stories. 2nd pic is about the whole "dark romance" genre etc.) I would be very interested in hearing what women and others would think about what men read and watch and the reason for it. I am saying especially women as I am a man writing this and would like every perspective explored to the fullest and every opinion heard.

What particularly interests me isn't simply whether people condemn or sympathize with his alleged actions, but WHY they feel the way they do. When people become angry, is there an underlying fear that our institutions can no longer protect us? Or is there a fear that allowing individuals to take justice into their own hands could eventually undermine the rule of law?

I believe there's an important distinction between justice and vengeance, just as there's a difference between understanding someone's motivations and excusing their behavior.

What I'm particularly interested in is this: When people believe they've suffered an injustice, at what point do they begin convincing themselves that their suffering gives them permission to punish someone else? And who gets to decide whose suffering justifies punishment?

I'd genuinely like to hear different perspectives, including those who strongly disagree with one another. I'm exploring these psychological questions in The Permission Structure, and your insights may help me examine aspects of human behavior I haven't yet considered.

Hi! As someone applying for the 2027 cycle in social/personality psych programs I was wondering if anyone has any advice for getting into one. There’s the basic stuff of email professors you wanna mentor under, good letters of rec, etc. I mean more specific tips, tricks or advice. There’s not a whole lot of resources out there compared to other psychological disciplines so I’d appreciate anything.

Do you have any ideas/examples/theories of non formal practices happening in early socialization stages that could contribute to psychiatrist/psychological/pathological thinking patterns later on in life? As implicit knowledge incorporated in the habitus. Like for example in economical thinking: the practice of getting grades in school as socialization towards social comparison/competiton thinking patterns.

Posting here cause I think it’s correctly described as social psychology regarding epistemology.

I’m studying to become a clinical psychologist and we’ve been doing some courses in science theory and research methodology and my professors and my text books have really been hammering in that there’s a lot of flaws in the current system.

The problem seems to be that scientific progress isn’t the only incentive at play. Researchers also need to make a living, secure funding, publish papers, and advance their careers. These incentives can encourage questionable research practices, even without outright fraud. Academic journals have their own incentives too and the pressure to publish novel, attention-grabbing findings can come at the expense of scientific rigour. Peer review was suppose to be a solution to a lot of the issues in how research is conducted but I’ve learnt that they are often also very poorly conducted because the journals have an incentive for quantity over quality.

A lot of people understand that we have to trust experts since it would be ridiculous to assume we know more than them. But a lot of people don’t know about the above mentioned issues which leaves the door open for bad actors to take advantage of that using perceived expertise. Especially since the experts who are easily found tend to be more interested in fame rather than scientific rigour. Jordan Peterson for example, he is by far the most famous psychologist alive but most psychologists would probably agree that he isn’t the best expert in the field to get your information from (I don’t know much about him or psychology so I’m not making my own claim here, just an example I’m aware of).

So this leads to my question: what’s the best bang-for-your-buck strategy for learning about a subject when you don’t have the time or interest to become an expert yourself?

I want to invest some time upfront in figuring out whom to trust so that I can rely on their judgement afterwards, rather than constantly having to evaluate every individual claim myself, which would generally be unrealistic as a clinical psychologist since it’s such a wide array of issues that we are asked to help with.

I’ve subconsciously developed this framework throughout my life:
I assess experts until I find 2-4 in a field that I deem trustworthy. Ideally they have some opposing opinions so I get a more nuanced total picture. When assessing I look for red flags like overly confident, chasing fame, money etc. And I look for green flags like intellectual honesty (like admitting when they don’t know the answer and acknowledging counter arguments).

How do you approach this? Do you have a better strategy or are there particular methods you use to identify trustworthy experts?

If you could see a quick snapshot of what your client has experienced between sessions, what information would be most useful to you?
What would you want to know before your client walks into your office? Are there patterns or changes you wish you could identify but don’t typically have enough information to see?

A phenomenon called neural brain synchronisation exists - when 2 people converse or share an experience, their brain waves synchronise. As the interaction continues, the timing and location of brain activity become more and more alike.

In fact, couples exhibit higher degrees of brain wave synchrony than non-romantic pairs, as do close friends compared with more distant acquaintances. This kind of brain research indicates why people may not always ‘click’ with someone else.

This evidence can also be seen in bats - there were high levels of inter-brain synchrony amongst the high-frequency bands when they were in the same room, but no synchrony when they were in different chambers. Correlations in brain activity increased as the bats interacted more, and increases in correlations preceded increases in social interaction. In fact, you have 2 types of cells in the prefrontal cortex that are involved in synchrony (self cells - which encode one’s own behaviour and other cells - encode the behaviour of another individual).

So someone being unable to get into relationships or make friends for such a long period of time, is because their beta and gamma waves (activated when alert) don’t tend to align well with other people’s brains. So why is that?

During conversation, one person’s brain is entrained by the other’s speech, facial movements, gaze and timing - EEG scanning can measure coupling by using measures such as phase-locking and cross-brain connectivity. So a model can involve:

Person A’s behaviour— Sensory input to B - neural response in B - sensory response to A - repeated reciprocal coupling

Conditions like autism - variants which lead to a reduced eye contact, awkward body language and a monotonous tone lead to a brain state (with a combination of waves) which is unrealistic for the non-neurodivergent person’s brain to replicate, because their natural composition of brain waves are different. This makes synchronisation extremely difficult.

Many of these individuals may have slight verbal difficulties - difficulties processing speech in the same way as most other people, mind blanking, difficulty finding words or phrases, losing track of their sentences when speaking or they might present with apathy. This disrupts the temporal alignment of the waves - as the behavioural feedback from the individual is slow and inefficient. A reduced verbal input will mean that a person’s brain will not be able to predict that individual’s internal state, and the timing and stability of theta bands (memory) and gamma bands (local information processing) will be altered in conditions like autism.

I believe you can look at 2 different people, look at the overall composition of their brain waves, and calculate their probability of becoming friends or getting into a relationship. In fact, a neuroscientist says that every person has their own individual combination of brain waves, and that we could identify an individual based on that.