English For Psychology

Anna Treger, Bronisław Treger
English for Psychology

Recenzent
dr Agnieszka Bieńkowska
Projekt okładki i rysunki

Anna Zielińska
Projekt graficzny
Małgorzata “Czarli” Bajka
Redakcja językowa
dr Alisa Mitchel-Masiejczyk
Publikacja dofinansowana przez

Akademię Pedagogiki Specjalnej im. Marii Grzegorzewskiej
ze środków na działalność statutową
Copyright © by
Wydawnictwo Akademii Pedagogiki Specjalnej
Warszawa 2014
ISBN 978-83-62828-87-6

02-353 Warszawa, ul. Szczęśliwicka 40
tel. 22 5893645
e-mail: wydawnictwo@aps.edu.pl

Wydanie pierwsze
Arkuszy drukarskich 13,5
Skład i łamanie: Małgorzata “Czarli” Bajka
Druk ukończono w sierpniu 2014
Druk i oprawa: P.W “Formator“ Sp. zo.o.
Table of contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Mind and Brain ......................................................................................................................... 7
2. Intelligence .............................................................................................................................. 14
3. The Unconscious Mind ....................................................................................................... 21
4. Protecting the Ego. Defence Mechanisms ................................................................... 28
5. The Science Behind Dreams .............................................................................................. 36
6. Behaviourism. The Power of the Environment ........................................................... 44
7. Senses. Making Sense of the World ................................................................................ 53
8. Memory and the Brain ........................................................................................................ 59
9. In Search of Memory. Memory Loss ............................................................................... 65
10. When Things Go Wrong .................................................................................................... 70
11. Jean Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development ...................................................... 76
12. Language and Thought ...................................................................................................... 83
13. Language Development .................................................................................................... 91
14. Animal Language Acquisition ......................................................................................... 98
15. Nonverbal Behaviours. Emotions and Facial Expressions ................................... 107
16. Nonverbal Behaviours. Body Language .................................................................... 114
17. Differences Between People. The Roles of Genes and Environment .............. 121
18. Theories of Moral Development .................................................................................. 129
19. Man and Society. In-Group versus Out-Group ........................................................ 135
20. Breaking Stereotypes ....................................................................................................... 143
21. The Disease of Addictions .............................................................................................. 150
22. Being Happy ........................................................................................................................ 157
Revision ................................................................................................................................. 164
Key ........................................................................................................................................... 174
Glossary ................................................................................................................................. 199
Text acknowledgements ................................................................................................. 216
Preface
“English for Psychology“ is an upper-intermediate to advanced level course for learners
who need to be able to use English in the psychology profession. It is primarily intended
for students of psychology, but also for everyone interested in this discipline.
The book is divided into 22 units designed to be taught over one academic year. The units
are grouped into five areas which constitute the main branches of psychology: neuro-
science, developmental, cognitive, social, and clinical.
Each unit of the book contains a short text which provides the learners with an overview
of the topic area in question. These overview texts introduce crucial concepts while pre-
senting relevant vocabulary in the topic area. In the main body of each unit, there are
authentic texts taken from prestigious magazines such as “The New York Times“ or “The
Guardian.“ The texts are accompanied by a range of activities including discussions, read-
ing comprehension and vocabulary exercises. At the back of the book, there is a revision
section giving further practice of the material covered in class, an Answer Key to the ex-
ercises and a glossary of all the psychological terms which appear in the units.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We have been lucky to work with supportive people at The Maria Grzegorzewska Univer-
sity of Special Education who have helped us produce this book. Our thanks go to Prof.
Helena Ciążela, Deputy Rector for Education, for her massive support, Prof. Jarosław Rola,
Dean of the Faculty of Applied Social Sciences, who gave us the green light to write the
book, Deputy Dean Dr Agnieszka Bieńkowska for reviewing the material thoroughly an
her invaluable comments, the Head of the Department of Foreign Languages, Elżbieta
Grabińska, for approving the project, and the Managing Editor, Monika Bielska-Łach, for
her cooperation during the publication process.
We also thank Anna Zielińska for use of her artwork on the cover and inside the book,
Czarli Bajka for the excellent interior design, and Dr Alisa Mitchel-Masiejczyk for the
proof-reading of the manuscript.
We are especially grateful to those authors and publishers who graciously allowed us
to reprint their work free of charge: Faith Brynie, Kathy Sena, Susan Krauss Whitbourne,
Mack LeMouse, Joe Navarro, “The Guardian,“ “The Independent“ and BBC.
Last but not least, we would like to thank the students who took part in Anna’s “English
for Psychology” and “English for Psychology and Pedagogy” courses for their interest and
feedback that helped shape the book.
Anna and Bronisław Treger
Funding for this publication was provided by a grant from The Maria Grzegorzewska University of
Special Education, grant number BSTP 16/13-I.
DISCLAIMER
This book uses British spelling convention except for the reprinted texts from American papers
which keep the spelling of the authors.
5
Mind and Brain
1
LEAD-IN
1. Discuss the questions.
1. What is it that determines our character and identity?

2. Do character and identity exist outside of the
psychological functions of the brain?
3. Does consciousness depend on the brain?
2. Are the mind and the body separate entities or is the mind merely what the brain
does? Ideas and explanations for the mind-body relation date back as far as to Ancient
Greece. Some thinkers and philosophers have believed that only dualism could properly
explain this relation. Dualism insists that the mind is distinct from the physical body.
This concept holds that the mind has a spiritual dimension which includes conscious-
ness and self-awareness. The opposing view is materialism, which states that all of our
mental states depend on physical states of the brain; that the mind and the brain are
one and the same.
3. Read the idea of Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics.
What is the “astonishing hypothesis”? Why is it so astonishing? Is it a materialistic or dual-
istic theory of mind?
“The Astonishing Hypothesis is that «YOU», your joys and your sorrows, your memories
and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than
the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis
Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: «You’re nothing but a pack of neurons»...The scien-
tific belief is that our minds – the behavior of our brains – can be explained by the interac-
tions of nerve cells (and other cells) and the molecules associated with them.”
What does it mean for your emotions, ambitions or thoughts to be “no more than” the
mere physical activity of the neurons in our brain? How does it feel?
7
4. Read the case of Phineas Gage.
On September 13th, 1848, a 25-year-old construction foreman Phineas Gage was helping
to excavate rocks to make way for the railroad near Cavendish, Vermont. One day some-
thing went horribly wrong. While he was preparing for an explosion using an iron rod to
tamp gunpowder into a hole in the rock, one of the charges went off too early, driving the
rod through the left side of his skull.
Accidents on construction sites happen all the time. The reason why people remember
Gage’s is because he survived it. Just seven months later he resumed his work, but the ac-
cident left him a changed man. The Gage that returned to work was not the Gage before
the accident – a hard-working, responsible and well-liked worker. He was just a shadow
of his former self.
Phineas Gage became the most famous patient in the annals of neuroscience, because
his accident suggested a link between personality and the functions of the brain, and cast
some light on the question of dualism.
5. The sudden change that Phineas Gage underwent shows that an individual’s person-
ality can be radically changed by an accident. Does it imply that the brain and the mind
are one thing or two?
Could a person be alive with no higher brain functions? Would he/she have any sense of
self?
READING
1. Decide if the statements below are true (T) or false (F). Then read “The Duel Between
Body and Soul“ to see if you were right. Do you agree with the views?
1. Dualism makes all sorts of religious beliefs possible.

2. Dualism diminishes the moral status of people.
3. Common sense tells us that we are not material beings.
2. Why are most people dualists? What are the arguments for dualism? Read the text to
find out.
The Duel Between Body and Soul
New Haven – What people think about many of the big issues that will be discussed in the
next two months – like gay marriage, stem-cell research and the role of religion in public
life – is intimately related to their views on human nature. And while there may be differ-
ences between Republicans and Democrats, one fundamental assumption is accepted by
almost everyone. This would be reassuring – if science didn’t tell us that this assumption
is mistaken.
8
Mind and Brain 1
People see bodies and souls as separate; we are common-sense dualists. The President’s
Council on Bioethics expressed this belief system with considerable eloquence in its De-
cember 2003 report “Being Human’’: “We have both corporeal and noncorporeal aspects.
We are embodied spirits and inspirited bodies (or, if you will, embodied minds and mind-
ed bodies).”
Our dualism makes it possible for us to appreciate stories where people are liberated from
their bodies. In the movie “13 Going on 30,’’ a teenager wakes up as Jennifer Garner, just as
a 12-year-old was once transformed into Tom Hanks in “Big.’’ Characters can trade bodies,
as in “Freaky Friday,’’ or battle for control of a single body, as when Steve Martin and Lily
Tomlin fight it out in “All of Me.’’
Body-hopping is not a Hollywood invention. Franz Kafka tells of a man who wakes up one
morning as a gigantic insect. Homer, writing hundreds of years before the birth of Christ,
describes how the companions of Odysseus were transformed into pigs – but their minds
were unchanged, and so they wept. Children easily understand stories in which the frog
becomes a prince or a villain takes control of a superhero’s body.
In fact, most people think that a far more radical transformation actually takes place; they
believe that the soul can survive the complete destruction of the body. The soul’s even-
tual fate varies; most Americans believe it ascends to heaven or descends into hell, while
people from other cultures believe that it enters a parallel spirit world, or occupies some
other body, human or animal.
Our dualist perspective also frames how we think about the issues that are most central to
our lives. It is no accident that a bioethics committee is talking about spirits. When people
wonder about the moral status of animals or fetuses or stem cells, for instance, they often
ask: Does it have a soul? If the answer is yes, then it is a precious individual, deserving of
compassion and care.
In the case of abortion, our common-sense dualism can support either side of the issue.
We use phrases like “my body” and “my brain,” describing our bodies and body parts as if
they were possessions. Some people insist that all of us – including pregnant women –
own our bodies, and therefore can use them as we wish. To others, the organism residing
inside a pregnant body has a soul of its own, possibly from the moment of conception,
and would thereby have its own rights.
Admittedly, not everyone explicitly endorses dualism; some people wouldn’t be caught
dead talking about souls or spirits. But common-sense dualism still frames how we think
about such issues. That’s why people often appeal to science to answer the question
“When does life begin?” in the hopes that an objective answer will settle the abortion de-
bate once and for all. But the question is not really about life in any biological sense. It is
instead asking about the magical moment at which a cluster of cells becomes more than
a mere physical thing. It is a question about the soul.
And it is not a question that scientists could ever answer. The qualities of mental life that
we associate with souls are purely corporeal; they emerge from biochemical processes in
the brain. This is starkly demonstrated in cases in which damage to the brain wipes out
capacities as central to our humanity as memory, self-control and decision-making.
One implication of this scientific view of mental life is that it takes the important moral
questions away from the scientists. As the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker points out,
the qualities that we are most interested in from a moral standpoint – consciousness and
9
the capacity to experience pain – result from brain processes that emerge gradually in
both development and evolution. There is no moment at which a soulless body becomes
an ensouled one, and so scientific research cannot provide objective answers to the ques-
tions that matter the most to us.
Some scholars are confident that people will come to accept this scientific view. In the
domain of bodies, after all, most of us accept that common sense is wrong. We concede
that apparently solid objects are actually mostly empty space, and consist of tiny particles
and fields of energy. Perhaps the same sort of reconciliation will happen in the domain of
souls, and it will come to be broadly recognized that dualism, though intuitively appeal-
ing, is factually mistaken.
I am less optimistic. I once asked my 6-year-old son, Max, about the brain, and he said that
it is very important and involved in a lot of thinking – but it is not the source of dreaming
or feeling sad, or loving his brother. Max said that’s what he does, though he admitted
that his brain might help him out. Studies from developmental psychology suggest that
young children do not see their brain as the source of conscious experience and will. They
see it instead as a tool we use for certain mental operations. It is a cognitive prosthesis,
added to the soul to increase its computing power.
This understanding might not be so different from that of many adults. People are often
surprised to find out that certain parts of the brain are shown to be active – they “light up”
– in a brain scanner when subjects think about religion, sex or race. This surprise reveals
the tacit assumption that the brain is involved in some aspects of mental life but not oth-
ers. Even experts, when describing such results, slip into dualistic language: “I think about
sex and this activates such-as-so part of my brain” – as if there are two separate things
going on, first the thought and then the brain activity.
It gets worse. The conclusion that our souls are flesh is profoundly troubling to many, as
it clashes with the notion that the soul survives the death of the body. It is a much harder
pill to swallow than evolution, then, and might be impossible to reconcile with many
religious views. Pope John Paul II was clear about this, conceding our bodies may have
evolved, but that theories which “consider the spirit as emerging from the forces of liv-
ing matter, or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth
about man.”
This clash is not going to be easily resolved. The great conflict between science and re-
ligion in the last century was over evolutionary biology. In this century, it will be over
psychology, and the stakes are nothing less than our souls.
From The New York Times, September 10, 2004 © 2004 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by per-
mission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or
retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.
10
Mind and Brain 1
3. For sentences 1-8, choose the answer (a, b or c) which you think fits best according to
the text.
1. Most people around the world believe
a) that people can survive the destruction of their bodies.

b) in reincarnation.
c) that people aren’t separable from their bodies.
2. Our dualist perspective makes us feel
a) as if there was a residing organism inside us.

b) as if we were immaterial souls.
c) as if we owned our bodies.
3. Materialists insist that mental life is
a) the product of brain activities.

b) non-physical.
c) both a and b
4. Dualists can take the position that
a) abortion should be permitted.

b) abortion should be prohibited.
c) both a and b
5. Damage to the brain
a) can increase our mental faculties.

b) can result in amnesia.
c) can’t change who you are.
6. Children see their brain as a
a) source of conscious experience.

b) tool for mental operations.
c) prosthetic limb.
11
7. A brain scanner can tell
a) how intelligent we are.

b) what we are thinking about.
c) which areas in the brain are most active.
8. Science tells us that common-sense dualism
a) is wrong.
b) makes sense.
c) explains how mental life emerges from physical processes.
VOCABULARY IN USE
1. Complete the sentences below with the words in the box in the right form.
involve, possess, wipe out, emerge, clash, settle, survive, float
1. Most people in all religions believe that the soul __________ the destruction of the
body.
2. Damage to the brain may __________ your mental capacities, such as memory or
concentration.
3. Those who endorse a materialist view say that our mental life including thoughts and
feelings __________ from biochemical processes in the brain.
4. Materialists argue that there is strong evidence that the brain is __________ in mental life.
5. There are some universal experiences such as the sensation of __________ above
one’s body in a dream that point to dualism.
6. Our dualistic perspective makes us feel as if we __________ our bodies.
7. Some people reject materialism since it __________ with their religious views.
8. People try to define when life begins in the hope of __________ the abortion debate.
2. Choose the correct option (a, b or c) to complete each sentence.
1. Many defenders of abortion claim that the organism __________ inside a pregnant
body has a soul of its own.
a) occupying b) residing c) belonging
12
Mind and Brain 1
2. Because people are __________ dualists, all sorts of religious beliefs are possible.
a) innate b) born c) true
3. According to Francis Crick, what we take to be soul is, in fact, nothing more than
a complex __________ of neurons in our brain.
a) chain b) number c) network
4. Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom uses the term “common sense dualism” to de-
scribe our __________ to see bodies and souls as distinct.
a) trend b) nature c) tendency
5. Many religions believe that after death the soul is __________ from the body.
a) rescued b) saved c) liberated
6. Dualism claims that our material bodies are _________ from our immaterial minds.
a) divided b) separate c) distant
7. The typical conception of the brain __________ by children is that it is fundamentally

instrumental.
a) held b) regarded c) considered
8. Phineas Gage’s case suggests a link between brain _________ and personality change.
a) hurt b) blow c) trauma
13
2 Intelligence
LEAD-IN
1. Which of the following statements do you agree with most and why?
Intelligence is
knowledge
what intelligence tests test
more than IQ
“street smarts”
the ability to learn and understand
the ability to adapt oneself to a new environment
the ability to think logically and rationally
the ability to apply the acquired knowledge meaningfully
the ability to achieve one’s goal in life
a wide range of skills and competencies
2. Who is the most intelligent person you know/have heard about? Why do you think
they are very intelligent? Which of the things mentioned in point 1 do they have?
3. Read the profiles of three high school students. All of them were accepted to Yale.
How well do you think they did in their further education? Give your reasons.
Alice was a student who got all A’s in high school. She was not very creative, but she had
an excellent memory and analytical skills. That was more than enough to score high on
tests and to be top of the class. As expected, Alice did very well on college board exams
and got great letters of recommendation.
Barbara’s grades weren’t as good as Alice’s and she didn’t perform very well on the tests
taken to get into Yale. Despite that, her letters of recommendation were enthusiastic,
praising her for being exceptionally creative and original.
Celia had neither Alice’s superb analytical skills nor Barbara’s creativity, but she was
a practically gifted student. She was successful at figuring out what was expected of her,
she knew how to get along with people, and the like. Her board scores weren’t outstand-
ing, but still good for admission to Yale.
14
Intelligence 2
4. Science has few more sensitive and controversial topics than intelligence. For years
scientists have been trying to define and measure intelligence, but only few of them
agree on a single definition. Some scientists have suggested that intelligence is a single,
general ability, whilst others claim that intelligence is much broader than that, taking in
a number of distinct abilities. Among the latter is Robert Sternberg, one of the top re-
searchers into human intelligence, who defines it as “the cognitive ability to learn from
experience, to reason well, to remember important information, and to cope with the de-
mands of daily living.” This definition is based on his own theory that intelligence consists
of three aspects: analytical, creative or synthetic, and practical.
Despite these differences, one thing is clear: intelligence is essentially about cognitive
processes, such as reasoning, memory, problem solving, decision-making and retrieval
of general knowledge.
Study on the nature of intelligence focuses primarily on three aspects: individual differ-
ences, the role of nature and nurture in determining intelligence, and socio-economic
influences.
5. a) Match Sternberg’s intelligences with their definitions.
1. analytical intelligence a) the ability to adapt to everyday life by using exist-

ing knowledge and skills
2. creative/synthetic intelligence b) the ability to complete academic, problem-solving
tasks
3. practical intelligence c) the ability to successfully deal with new and
unsual situations by using existing knowledge
and skills
b) Match the characteristics with the intelligences. There are four characteristics for
each intelligence. What are you good at? Which intelligence are you strongest in?
Characteristics Intelligence
adapting to a new environment
analysing problems from different perspectives
being streetwise
coming up with new solutions to problems
dealing with problems that you confront in daily life
developing new ideas and concepts
evaluating things
handling massive amounts of information
handling situations in innovative ways
having common sense
having great insight and imagination
using the critical thinking
15
READING
1. Read the text. How did Sternberg first became interested in IQ tests? Where did his
triarchic theory intelligence arise from?
“The Triarchic Mind” : Yale Psychologist Defines Three Types of Intelligence
Remember sitting in class and noticing how Alice up front always raised her hand, always
knew the right answer? Remember thinking that in some undefined way you were better
than she was: maybe more human, maybe more street-smart, or at least better at knock
hockey?
You may have been right, says Robert S. Sternberg, a Yale University psychologist whose
recent book, “The Triarchic Mind: A New Theory of Human Intelligence” explains why. The
book defines and analyzes three kinds of intelligence – internal (such as Alice’s), the crea-
tive experiential type and the street-smart contextual variety – saying that Alice’s kind is
only part of the story and doesn’t mean a lot for her future success.
Sternberg’s field is cognitive science, a discipline made up of researchers in psychology,
artificial intelligence, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics and the neurosciences. These
people, he says, “are trying to figure out what goes on in our heads when we bring our
intelligence to bear on a problem.” Sternberg has been fascinated by intelligence tests
since his childhood, when he did terribly on them.
IQ Tests Criticized
Since the 1960s people have criticized IQ tests as being too bound by white Western
culture and as neglecting certain kinds of achievement. But that wasn’t enough for Stern-
berg, who seems to revel in turning experience into an analyzed quantity.
Sternberg’s early frustration with intelligence tests led him to a seventh-grade science
project on intelligence testing. In graduate school in the 1970s, he wrote a Barron’s guide,
“How To Prepare for the Miller Analogy Test,” which kept him thinking about the steps
people go through in using their minds.
Analogy tests ask for the answer to problems such as “stubborn is to mule as fickle is to:
(a) chameleon (b) salamander (c) tadpole (d) frog.” Whether you answer the question
quickly or slowly, the way you answer it is complex.
First, you translate the problem into a mental representation: Stubbornness is a quality;
a mule and the reptiles and amphibians listed are animals with various characteristics.
Then you think about the relationship between the first term and the second – mules are
often considered stubborn, so much so that they are metaphors for stubbornness.
You relate the two halves of the analogy: If mules are metaphors for stubbornness, what
is a metaphor for fickleness? Finally, you must apply the relationships and give an answer:
Fickleness is constant change. Tadpoles change into frogs, but both “tadpoles” and “frogs”
are answers, so they can’t be right; anyway, a tadpole changes only once. But chameleons
change color all the time. And you probably know that they have been used as a meta-
phor for fickleness. There’s the answer.
16
Intelligence 2
Thinking Components
Sternberg eventually broke down the components of such question-answering and gave
the parts names:
There are “metacomponents” – the executive functions that boss the other intelligence
functions around. Examples of these are recognizing the existence of a problem, defining
its nature and generating the set of steps necessary to solve it.
There are the “performance components” that take those steps, using such processes as
inference, the discovery of relationships between objects and events.
And along the way, you might have had to pick up some new knowledge – such as what
a chameleon is – and had to use “knowledge-acquisition components.”
As his career as a professor progressed, he got to know many graduate students in psy-
chology. He got together with them to do studies and tests of their achievements as re-
lated to their test scores, and learned surprising things.
Near-Perfect Record
First, your old classmate Alice ended up in his classes. She had fulfilled the obvious prom-
ise she had shown in the days when you envied her. She had a near-perfect record and
had no trouble getting into Yale. Her grades were high for the first 2 years of graduate
school, but then something happened. They slipped, around the time she had to start
putting things together herself – to do some creative original research.
Then there was Barbara, an admissions officer’s long shot. She didn’t have the kind of
grades or test scores that made Yale salivate – but she did have some glowing recommen-
dations and some unusual original research. When grad school became less academic
and more improvisational, she excelled.
Then there was Celia, somewhere in between the first two academically. But Celia was
good at scoping out what was expected of her and using it. She could take her new sur-
roundings and know whether to adapt to them, change them or quit, and she probably
had no trouble writing grant applications after graduating.
Sternberg uses the three graduate students – real people to whom he gave fake names –
as analogies of what he means by a triarchic theory of intelligence.
Alice’s intelligence he calls “internal” and is the kind usually measured by intelligence
tests. He calls Barbara’s creative powers “experiential” intelligence. Celia’s street smarts
represent “contextual” intelligence.
In dozens of papers, articles in professional and popular journals, and seminars, Sternberg
is trying to influence the world of testing to take the second two kinds of intelligence into
account. He is working with the Psychological Corp. to develop a Sternberg Multidimen-
sional Abilities Test – a test measuring all three kinds of intelligence – by 1992. He believes
strongly that all three kinds of intelligence can be taught – that it is possible to, as he says,
“get smart.”
To Pascal Forgione, the chief of the Office of Research and Evaluation at the Connecticut
Department of Education, Sternberg’s theory is in the democratic spirit. Forgione’s office
studies ways to improve the tests given schoolchildren in the state. Much of the debate
17
has regarded intelligence itself as a cast-in-concrete, given quantity, and debated such
issues as whether it is dependent on heredity or environment.
Traditional ways of looking at intelligence “didn’t get at the process of learning,” Forgione
says. “IQ tests were bad indicators of later success. Sternberg’s idea is that the compo-
nents of intelligence are teachable – that if a student doesn’t do well, it’s not genetically
going to be that way ... Sternberg takes us beyond.”
But not everyone is enthralled with Sternberg’s theories. The book, touting “mental self-
management,” contains injunctions such as “turn crisis into opportunities” that bother
a British cognitive scientist, Philip N. Johnson-Laird. “Some of his advice is merely an el-
egant variation on the vacuous exhortation: Be intelligent,” Johnson-Laird wrote in a New
York Times book review of “The Triarchic Mind.”
By Steve Courtney, © 1989 Los Angeles Times
2. Go back to Lead-in 3. Where you right about Alice, Barbara and Celia?
3. For sentences 1-7, choose the answer (a, b or c) which you think fits best according
to the text.
1. IQ tests have been criticised for
a) being culturally biased.

b) testing only internal intelligence.
c) both a and b
2. Relating “fickleness” to “chameleon” is an example of
a) metacomponents.
b) performance components.
c) knowledge-acquisition components.
3. Knowledge-acquisition components are the processes used in
a) learning and storing new information.

b) using existing knowledge to solve a problem.
c) acquiring information about how to deal with a problem.
18
Intelligence 2
4. Alice’s grades started to slip after the first two years of graduate school, because she
a) didn’t work hard enough.

b) wasn’t good enough at creating new ideas for research.
c) couldn’t adapt to the academic environment.
5. Sternberg believes that solving analogy tests requires the joint operation of
a) thinking components.
b) three kinds of intelligence.
c) processes related to executive functions.
6. According to Sternberg, intelligence is
a) fixed at birth.
b) constant throughout life.
c) expandable.
7. Pascal Forgione says that IQ tests
a) are bad predictors of academic performance.

b) don’t predict success in life outside of school.
c) can be learnt and improved upon.
VOCABULARY IN USE
1. For gaps 1-8 choose the answer (a, b or c) which you think fits best.
In 1995 two Stanford psychologists Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson found that nega-
tive stereotyping had a disruptive effect on people’s self-esteem and __________ (1). The
psychologists demonstrated that black college freshmen and sophomores __________ (2)
much worse on standardised tests than white students when they were __________ (3)
beforehand of their race. They theorised that this effect, which they called “stereotype
threat”, is at work in any situation where people are __________ (4) with a negative stere-
otype __________ (5) with their group, such as “girls can’t do maths” or “blacks are dumb”
and, as a result, are __________ (6) inferior. Steele and Aronson also suggested that stere-
otype threat might explain the race gap in academic outcomes.
A new study suggests there may be a clever way to __________ (7) stereotype threat.
Just telling students that intelligence is __________ (8) and can be developed over time,
improves their academic achievement.
19
1. a) work b) performance c) intellect
2. a) did b) passed c) made
3. a) recalled b) reminded c) remembered
4. a) confronted b) compared c) presented
5. a) tied b) related c) associated
6. a) viewed b) considered c) seen
7. a) damage b) cope c) overcome
8. a) fickle b) learnt c) changeable
2. Complete the sentences with the verbs from the box in the right form.
define, score, measure, consist, neglect, adapt, excel
1. Intelligence is a hard thing to __________ because it comes in different forms.

2. A person who is practically intelligent can effectively _________ to new situations in
life.
3. Sternberg has criticised traditional IQ tests, saying that they __________ practical and
creative abilities.
4. People with creative intelligence __________ in dealing with new situations in an in-
novative way.
5. The triarchic theory of intelligence suggests that intelligence __________ of compli-
mentary processes of analytical, creative and practical thinking.
6. In Sternberg’s theory, intelligence is __________ as an ability to achieve your goals in
the real world.
7. Children who don’t __________ high on IQ tests are often unjustly said to be “slow”.
20
The Unconscious
Mind 3
LEAD-IN
1. Read the following situations and answer the questions that follow.
a)
Paddy has been dieting for three weeks now in an effort to get in shape and lose a few
pounds before summer. Today, a friend offered her a mouth-watering dessert. Although
on many occasions she had said that going back to her old way of eating sweets would
make her regain the weight she had worked so hard to lose, she happily accepted it. The
temptation was too great to resist. She just took the fork and dug in.
b)
Becky is at the start of her second year of college. One evening, a friend of hers took his
father’s car, though he had no license and little driving experience, and offered to take her
out for a joyride. Although Becky wanted to take up his offer and to do something crazy
for once in her life, she knew that her parents wouldn’t approve of it. They trusted her not
to do something stupid, therefore, regretfully she declined.
c)
Joe was in his room, studying hard for his end-of-year exams, when his friend called to
say that he had two tickets for the semi-finals and final of the local tennis championships.
Two tickets were for that evening and the other two for the following evening. Being an
avid tennis fan, Joe wanted to go to both games, but he knew that his exams were ap-
proaching fast and he had to study. He told his friend that he wouldn’t be able to make
it that night, but he would love to join him the next night.
1. Which character sought immediate satisfaction?

2. Which character tried to behave according to certain rules?
3. Which character tried to find a balance between his/her urges and reality?
21
1. Is consciousness the essence of who we are?

2. How would you interpret the situation below?
Why did the man go to work instead of going to a shop?
Has anything like this ever happened to you?
A few years ago I went to my best friend’s birthday party. The party was a great fun, and
we ran out of food pretty quickly. Because no party is complete without food, the host
said: “I’ll go buy something to eat at the supermarket down the street. I’ll be back in 20
minutes.” 20 minutes passed, then 30, and then an hour, and he was still gone. Then we
waited no longer. Worried, we called him up and he said: “You wouldn’t believe it. I just
got into the car and drove to work!”
3. In point 2.2 you have probably admitted that many of our day-to-day activities are
done unconsciously. Decide which of these phenomena are unconscious.
1 automatic skills and reactions

2 intentional actions
3 hidden emotions
4 cancelled needs, wishes or desires
4. Interest in unconscious processes has a long history in philosophy and psychology.

Although the idea of the unconscious (or the unconscious mind) is commonly cred-
ited to Sigmund Freud, it goes back long before him. Versions of it had been around
at least since Leibniz made a distinction between conscious and unconscious mental
states in the 17th century. The term “unconscious mind”, however, is considered to have
been coined by the 18th-century romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling. Even if Freud
didn’t originate the idea, he certainly developed it and made an extensive use of it in his
psychoanalysis. He saw the unconscious as something of a great waste-paper basket of
the mind, a garbage dump of repressed feelings, desires or needs that we would rather
not admit to ourselves, painful memories and fears pushed out of consciousness by our
defence mechanisms. They, however, never disappear. They reveal themselves in our un-
conscious body language, slips of the tongue or in our dreams and affect our conscious
behaviour.
Freud’s division between the conscious and unconscious mind constitutes his psycho-
analytic personality theory. According to it, personality consists of three components
known as the id, the ego and the superego. Together they create complex human behav-
iours.
22
The Unconscious Mind 3
5. Match the terms from both columns.
1. id a) consciousness
2. ego b) conscience
3. superego c) unconsciousness
6. Read sentences a-f. Which personality component (the id, the ego or the superego)
does „it” in bold refer to? Replace “it” with the appropriate component and then rearrange
the sentences into a meaningful paragraph.
a) It works to suppress our unacceptable desires, because it holds all of our moral stan-
dards and ideals that we acquired from both our parents and society. Therefore, it tells us
the proper way that we should act.
b) It works on “the Pleasure Principle”, meaning it seeks immediate pleasure at any cost. It
wants to eat, drink, get warm or get to sleep immediately. If these needs are not satisfied
quickly, the result is a state of anxiety or tension.
c) It works on “the Reality Principle”, meaning it mediates between desires and the realities
of the world. But that is not all to it. If we satisfy our needs in a manner that is not accept-
able to the community or if these needs are inappropriate, we may be punished for them.
d) The understanding that immediate pleasure is not always possible comes with devel-
opment of a new structure of personality – it. It also seeks to satisfy pleasures and avoids
pain, but it’s realistic.
e) However, life doesn’t always work like that and the immediate satisfaction is not
always realistic or even possible. Sometimes we need to wait until the right moment or
until we develop a strategy or a plan to obtain pleasure.
f) We are all born with it. It is an animal part of the self and is made of instinctive and
primitive behaviours.
7. Go back to Lead-in 1 and indicate whether the actions taken were directed by the id,
the ego, or the superego. Give your reasons.
READING
1. Read the review of the unconscious and then answer the questions that follow.
The Great Unknown
Can we ever really know ourselves, let alone other people? For Sigmund Freud and his
followers, our lives are shaped by forces we are totally unaware of. Although we think
we’re in charge, we just keep repeating the same blunders without knowing it. Like a bro-
ken record, we choose jobs we don’t enjoy, we fall out with friends and we alienate our
23
partners. Sometimes we are forced to realise that something is awry: a bad dream that
won’t go away, an unexplained physical symptom or a bizarre intrusive thought makes us
realise that we are not masters in our own house. This, Freud believed, is the unconscious
at work.
Freud’s fascination with the unconscious was triggered by his work as a neurologist. In
case after case, he found symptoms that did not behave as anatomy dictated. The dis-
tribution of pain or the loss of sensation ought to have followed the medical, biological
map. Instead it was as if these bodies obeyed a different anatomy, made up of words and
ideas. In one case, a boy’s hand froze after his mother urged him to sign a letter denounc-
ing his father in a divorce: the paralysis saved him from the violence of the denunciation.
Why couldn’t the boy just have refused to sign the letter? Why the paralysis? For Freud,
the unconscious was inherently conflictual, and in this example, the boy may have felt
both the wish to sign and not to sign the letter. This would have stirred up his oedipal
conflict with his father and the guilt that went with it. The symptom allowed him not to
sign and, through the physical pain of the paralysis, punished him for his guilty wish.
Contradictory thoughts generate tensions in our minds, and symptoms in our bodies.
Through listening carefully to his patients, Freud discovered that our conscious thought
is just the tip of the iceberg: most of what we think takes place at an unconscious level,
yet exerts powerful effects on our lives.
The other major discovery Freud made at the same time was about our need to rational-
ise. If a hypnotised subject is told there is no furniture in a room, and then instructed to
cross it, he will naturally avoid the furniture. When asked why he took such an odd route,
rather than admit the existence of the furniture he will invent false explanations: for ex-
ample, the picture on the wall looked interesting so he moved towards it. Rather than
seeing these false explanations as restricted to the hypnotic state, Freud believed that
they were a basic feature of the human ego.
Although we might not crash into furniture, we spend every day deceiving ourselves
about why we do things. We tell ourselves we love this person because of some inner
quality, rather than because they share some trait with our mother.
We think we get angry with our bosses because they are unreasonable, without notic-
ing it is because they are echoing the behaviour of our father. We are excessively kind to
other people, not realising this is overcompensation against our wish to harm them.
Reaching the repressed
The world of the unconscious isn’t nice. It’s all about the sexuality and violence directed
to those closest to us. These thoughts are unbearable, so we repress them. But repres-
sion is nearly always incomplete: the repressed returns in slips of the tongue, dreams
and symptoms. By taking these strange phenomena seriously, we can be led back to our
unconscious desires.
Making this kind of connection can hardly ever happen through armchair introspection,
and that is why Freud had to invent a new technique to access the unconscious. The pa-
tient would lie on a couch and “free associate”. As they said anything that came to mind,
repetitive motifs would emerge, and little details would surface that allowed connections
to be made. Repressed ideas seeking representation would use the most inconspicuous
trivia to smuggle themselves past our psychical censorship.
24
With dreams, for example, it is often the tiniest, seemingly trivial details that turn out to
have the greatest significance.
Psychoanalysis was thus a strange kind of conversation. The patient would be speaking
on a couch to a listener they couldn’t see, following the associative threads of their dis-
course, however meaningless or random they seemed. Where many other therapies of-
fered a straight face-to-face chat, with advice and guidance, here was something else.
Analysis didn’t even claim to offer cure or happiness. Freud compared it with a train ticket
– an access to the unconscious – which we can either use or discard.
Yet it became clear to Freud and his colleagues that there is much more to the psyche
than what we repress. The id, for example, was made up of drives that never fully became
part of the unconscious. Later analysts explored those areas of our psychical life that were
buried even deeper than the repressed. Some material, they thought, could never be ac-
cessed through ideas or images, yet caused us the most intense suffering and misery. Its
effects could be seen in problems such as drug addictions and alcoholism.
The challenge for them was to find new techniques to engage with this lost part of our
psyche.
Beyond Freud
Distancing himself from Freud, Carl Jung felt that there had been too much emphasis
on personal history at the expense of collective human history. If you talk to your ana-
lyst about your mother, it is not simply your own mother but also a representation at an
unconscious level of everything we understand by “mother”. Jung called these universal
forms “archetypes” and believed that we can never know them directly. He encouraged
the study of myth, folklore, religion and dreaming to learn more about archetypes, and he
saw therapy as involving an organic process of self-realisation he termed “individuation”.
Later analysts such as Jacques Lacan emphasised not only symbolic forms but their ab-
sence. For them, it was the non-existence of archetypes that gave rise to human inven-
tion, creativity and neurosis. Since there was no archetype of birth or death, the child
must invent solutions for him or herself.
As psychoanalysis became part of popular culture, the analyst was often pictured as
a kind of detective: the missing piece had to be found for the whole puzzle to become
complete. Yet Freud recognised that things were hardly so simple. Human beings tend
to cling to their symptoms and suffering and are usually loth to give them up. There is
a powerful pull to self-destruction, a kind of masochism and pleasure in pain that Freud
called the “death drive.” Later generations of analysts were divided on this.
Melanie Klein believed that the unconscious was formed from a complex set of processes
of introjection and projection, while Lacan thought that it was created through speech,
the words that are imposed on us in our childhood. We act out scripts without knowing it,
while at the same time a crucial area of our mental life is governed by an unrepresentable
and unbearable domain that we only ever encounter fleetingly: in a nightmare, a panic
attack or a hallucination.
Where Kleinians tend to interpret the relationship between analyst and analysand sys-
tematically, Lacanians don’t believe that they know more than the analysand. For Lacan,
the analyst knows very little: he is more like a cross between a beggar and a clown, coax-
ing material from the analysand and interpreting rarely and in unexpected and often star-
tling ways.
25
Klein became the most influential theorist in British psychoanalysis while Lacan’s work
has held sway worldwide. Jungian analysis and the new relational psychoanalysis are also
flourishing.
Gaining truth
Despite more than 100 years of research into the unconscious, it is still an unpalatable
idea to most people. The idea that we might not know what we are thinking and feeling
is too big a blow to our narcissism. We like to believe that we are in control of our lives,
and psychoanalytic ideas still arouse the greatest resistance.
Getting to know one’s own unconscious is never easy. It will mean becoming less familiar
with ourselves, and questioning the false rationalisations that we have lived by. It may de-
liver what Freud called “a gain of truth”, yet this will be the result of a long and painstaking
work. Analysis lasts a long time, and involves both the acquisition of a certain knowledge
and a recognition of what cannot be known: we will be forced to give up any hope of
complete understanding of ourselves and others.
Recognising uncertainty and incompleteness can allow us to live more authentically and
creatively. We might start to follow our real interests rather than those we have adopted
out of fear or to please others. We might also realise the futility of trying to control those
around us, and give them the space we have deprived them of, allowing our relationships
to develop and grow. But if analysis can help us along these paths, it almost never results
in peace and harmony: rather a state of war and peace, perhaps less devastating and
more tolerable than before.
By Darian Leader, © Guardian News & Media Ltd. 2009
2. Answer the questions.
1. Where does Freud’s fascination with the unconscious stem from?

2. How does the boy’s wish to sign the letter relate to an Oedipal conflict?
3. Why, according to Freud, do we use rationalisation?
4. What is the analogy between analysis and a train ticket?
5. Why did Freud make his patients lie on couches?
6. Why did popular culture picture the psychoanalyst as a kind of detective?
7. What is a “death drive”?
8. What did Jung disagree with Freud about?
26
VOCABULARY IN USE
1. Rewrite the statements below, replacing the underlined words and phrases with
words from the box. Make any necessary changes.
repress, interact, exert, generate, invent, access, govern, seek
1. According to psychoanalytic theory, the id, the ego and the superego act together,
but sometimes they are in conflict.
2. In Freud’s view, the id tries to get immediate satisfaction of its needs.
3. Although it’s largely invisible, the unconscious has powerful effects on our lives.
4. Conflicting thoughts can cause both anxiety in our minds and physical symptoms
in our bodies.
5. Freud believed that there are many ways to reach the unconscious. Slips of the
tongue are one way to gather information about what is really on our mind.
6. What goes on in the unconscious mind takes control of our behaviour.
7. We block out painful memories, but they never really go away. They may be released by
the unconscious during sleep.
8. Rationalisation occurs when we give false explanations of our behaviour.
2. Complete the sentences with the adjectives in the box in the right form.
repressed, unpalatable, conscious, collective, trivial, authentic, incomplete, intrusive
1. During free association, patients are encouraged to say whatever crosses their mind,
no matter how __________ or irrelevant.
2. According to Freud, dreams reflect our __________ memories, which have been rel-
egated to the unconscious.
3. Getting to know our own unconscious allows us to live a more __________ and
meaningful life.
4. The unconscious can be secretly glimpsed in __________ thoughts and heard in
slips of the tongue.
5. Freud claimed that our __________ mind is just the tip of the iceberg. Most of our
mental activity is hidden from us.
6. Although the unconscious is hardly a new concept, it is still a(n) __________ idea to
many.
7. Repression is always __________ and the repressed inevitably reemerges into
awareness.
8. Jung claimed that the __________ unconscious contains archetypes which shape peo-
ple’s feelings and actions.
27
4 Protecting the Ego.
Defence Mechanisms
LEAD-IN
1. Read Aesop’s fable “The Fox and the Grapes.“ Why do you think the fox tried to
reach the grapes if he was sure they were sour and not good for him?
What does the English idiomatic expression “sour grapes” mean? How often do you hear
sour grapes at school/work?
“One hot summer’s day a Fox was strolling through an orchard till he came to a bunch of
Grapes just ripening on a vine which had been trained over a lofty branch. “Just the things
to quench my thirst,” quoth he. Drawing back a few paces, he took a run and a jump, and
just missed the bunch. Turning round again with a One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but
with no greater success. Again and again he tried after the tempting morsel, but at last
had to give it up, and walked away with his nose in the air, saying: “I am sure they are sour.”
2. Freud described a lot of everyday life in terms of different psychological strategies

that we use to cope with harsh realities of life, to protect ourselves from things we aren’t
ready to deal with, and to keep these things from coming to the surface of consciousness.
He called these strategies “defence mechanisms.” We are not aware of them because
they operate on an unconscious level.
Whilst Freud recognised the role of defence mechanisms in protecting the ego, and he
described several types, it was his daughter, Anna Freud, who elaborated on them in her
book “The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence.“
3. Match the examples of the defence mechanisms with their names and descriptions.
Which defence mechanism is “sour grapes?”
28
Protecting the Ego. Defence Mechanisms 4
Name of defence
Description Example
mechanism
Pushing down painful or A person who was bitten by
Projection upsetting feelings/thoughts a dog may forget that the at-
into the unconscious tack occurred.
Retreating to an earlier stage A woman gets fired from her
Rationalisation of development rather than job, but she doesn’t believe
handling unpleasant situa- that her work performance
tions in a more adult way failed her employer’s stan-
dards.
Redirecting some kind of ag- You dislike your teacher, but
Repression you say that he is the one
gression towards something
or someone else to relieve who doesn’t like you.
the tension of the situation
Making excuses to defend A boy breaks his drinking
Regression your controversial behaviour glass after he was yelled at
or motivation to avoid any by his father.
true explanation
Attributing your own unac- A man turns his strong ag-
Denial ceptable thoughts or im- gressive energy into boxing
pulses to someone else or hockey.
Refusing to accept or ac- A parent who enjoys spanking

Sublimation knowledge reality because it his child says that he/she does
is too painful it for the child’s own good.
Redirecting unacceptable im- Stuck in a traffic jam, a driver
Displacement pulses into socially accept- shouts and honks at others.
able actions or behaviour
READING
1. Read the text. What other defence mechanisms are mentioned?
Defence Mechanisms
Freud is often thought of by people who don’t know much about his theories as being
a guy who came up with a lot of crazy ideas about people fancying their mothers, and
who perhaps seemed a little sex obsessed. This is maybe not entirely unfair, and it’s fair to
29
say that a lot of his theories did focus on sex – and that his Oedipus complex ideas were
perhaps a little on the quirky side.
However that said, Freud still had a lot of good ideas too and it is often overlooked that
without him, we would never have had any concept of an “unconscious” mind – some-
thing we now largely take for granted and think of as playing a huge part in our lives and
in our psychology. His other great discovery, and one which we now also use as part of
our every day lexicon and part of our general knowledge of psychology, is that of the
“Defence Mechanisms” which he viewed us as all employing unconsciously.
The theory that Freud has, is that much of what think and feel would be damaging to our
ego or our psyche. For example if we had an inappropriate sexual urge, then this could be
damaging to our sense of self and our psyche. The superego then uses multiple methods
to hide these from our conscious mind. At the same time some memories can also prove
to be damaging – such as a memory of being raped or of seeing someone die – and so
these too are hidden by the superego. This is where the “ego defence mechanisms” come
in, and regardless of how you feel about all the rest of his theories they can certainly be
seen in action when you observe people’s behaviour.
Understanding the defence mechanisms then can really help you to better understand
the behaviour and motivations of both yourself and of others. Being able to identify the
defence mechanisms in action in the people you know is not only fun, but also allows you
deeper insight into their psyche allowing you to benefit from understanding their psyche
perhaps even better than them in some cases. Here we will look at some of the examples
of ego defence mechanisms, and how to spot them.
Repression: Repression is the most obvious example of a defence mechanism and the
one that most people are most familiar with. The central concept here is that our super-
ego sometimes simply forces us to forget the things that could otherwise do harm to
our psyche. This is something which is witnessed many times in cases of rape and other
atrocities. However there is a lot of controversy surrounding the use of hypnosis to try
and uncover cases of repression, as often this can create bogus results and end in wrong-
ful imprisonment.
However sometimes it’s also possible to notice ourselves “trying to forget” things, or try-
ing to at least recreate our own histories for the sake of our ego – tweaking little elements
of things that happened. Normally if someone is repressing something they will dance
around and avoid the topic, so see if you can’t spot instances of this happening.
Reaction formation: Reaction formation is a very interesting concept, wherein a person
tries to “prove” that they aren’t a certain way or that they aren’t a certain thing by acting
the complete opposite way in a very blatant manner. For example someone who was gay,
but who wasn’t ready for their ego to come to terms with this fact, might become very
heterosexual in their actions, and in extreme cases might even go to lengths to becom-
ing vocally “anti gay”. It is thought for example that some of Hitler’s extreme reactions
towards Jews could have been a result of his discovering he had Jewish blood.
Overcompensation: Over compensation is another defence mechanism that we encoun-
ter in popular culture often and that has become a household term. Essentially overcom-
pensation is when we ”make up” for something we perceive to be lacking by going over-
board in other areas. The most famous examples of this are when those with flashy sports
30
cars or a large collection of guns are said to be overcompensating for a small part of their
anatomy. Sometimes there is truth in this, other times there is not. More often overcom-
pensation might take the form of something more subtle and to an extent we all attempt
to improve in areas where we are skilful in order to make up for the areas where we are
not. If you see someone who seems to be trying very hard then, perhaps this is a form of
overcompensation.
Catharsis: Catharsis is the venting of emotions. For example screaming into the air be-
cause you’re frustrated or punching a punching bag to relieve stress at work. You can’t re-
lieve this stress in the way you would like to (perhaps by punching the boss) so this is the
safest way for you to deal with those strong emotions. Interestingly this has resulted in
a whole school of psychological treatment in itself in the form of ”Primal Scream Therapy”.
which is when you shout at the top of your voice as a way to let go of your anxieties. This
was the subject of the song “Shout” by Tears for Fears.
Projection: Projection is when you accuse another individual or a group of your own
thoughts, feelings or shortcomings. You might for example shout at someone for being
forgetful, when really you are annoyed at your own disorganisation. This way you are
dealing with the emotion without having to admit to it. A great come back to any argu-
ment is “stop projecting”.
Displacement: Displacement is when you take the negative feelings about someone
or something and move them onto someone else or something else. This might mean
that you have negative feelings towards someone who you feel you shouldn’t – perhaps
a family member, or against yourself. You might then accuse a friend who has nothing to
do with the situation of acting in this way, or just shout at them for no reason. It could also
be thought of as a form of displacement when you punch the punching bag as a form of
catharsis, especially if you imagine the face of the person you are really angry at the time...
Intellectualisation: Intellectualisation is the act of trying to distance yourself from the
emotion of an event or thought by trying to coldly analyse it. Here you are dealing with
a situation without dealing with the emotions – thinking it through without ever engag-
ing in it. You might then think through all of the aspects of a situation and a good solu-
tion, without getting upset or angry.
Fantasy: Fantasy can be used as a defence mechanism when we retreat into a fantasy
world in order to escape from reality. This is something we all do, but it’s more highly
common in younger children who have more active imaginations. If they are having
a hard time at school for example, then they might convince themselves that they are in
fact spies, or have superpowers like Superman, and this can help them to deal with the
situation.
Rationalisation: Rationalisation is similar to intellectualisation, except that it is not always
logical. Here you “make excuses” – accurate or not – for a situation, emotion or behav-
iour. For example, if you walked passed someone and they laughed at you, you might
be tempted to think that they thought you were ugly or stupid. However the superego
would use the defence mechanism here of rationalisation in order to protect our self es-
teem, and we might therefore explain the behaviour as coincidence – they were laughing
at something else, or of ignorance on their part.
31
This is really only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to defence mechanisms, and Freud
and others have described many more as playing important parts in our psychological
makeup and in protecting our egos and our confidence. There are also many others that
we likely use on a day to day basis, but which do not have official names and which have
not been observed in the same way.
By Mack LeMouse, © 2014 Healthguidance.org
2. Decide if the following statements are true (T) or false (F).

1. Understanding defence mechanisms is essential to understanding our behaviour.
2. Defence mechanisms are indistinguishable.
3. There are eight defence mechanisms.
4. Repression is usually observed in cases of a traumatic experience.
5. People use fantasy to escape from the harsh reality of their lives.
6. Whenever overcompensation takes place, you compensate for your wrongdoing.
7. Punching a punching bag can be both an example of catharsis and displacement.
8. When you think about a painful or unpleasant situation in cold, rational terms, you
use intellectualisation.
9. Rationalisation involves making logical excuses.
10. Rationalisation happens when e.g. a man who is gay ends up heterosexual in his
behaviour and criticises gays.
3. Do the quiz and find out which defence mechanism you are.
1. Your partner has broken up with you. You are devastated. How do you handle it?
a) You say: “S/he hasn’t dumped me, we’ve just quarrelled.”

b) You go out with someone else on the rebound.
c) You say: “I let her/him go because s/he wasn’t worthy of me.”
d) You go to your room, wrap yourself in a blanket and cry all day.
e) You become a successful divorce attorney.
2. You are in a loving and satisfying relationship, but you can’t take your eyes off
a very attractive colleague of yours. How do you deal with it?
a) You say: “I’m not attracted to him/her, come on! S/he is not even pretty/handsome.”
b) You want to ask him/her for a coffee in the canteen, but cannot gather up courage.
Instead you go to the canteen with someone else.
c) You say it’s natural to be attracted to the opposite sex, irrespective of whether you
are in a relationship or not.
d) You begin thumb sucking.
e) You transform your sexual urges into writing romance novels.
32
3. Your boss gets angry and shouts at you. How do you react?
a) You say: “My boss hasn’t shouted at me. He has just given his opinion.”
b) Instead of taking out your frustration on the boss, you shout at your colleague.
c) You say: “He has probably a bad day. This can happen to anyone.”
d) You sit and stare off into space until you feel better.
e) Rather than lashing out, you go out and chop wood. You’ve got firewood and feel
much better.
4. You got caught red-handed cheating on the exam. Your teacher fails you.
How do you react?
a) You say: “I didn’t cheat actually. I knew all the answers, anyway.”
b) You’re angry at your teacher. During a break you take it out on a classmate of yours.
c) You say to yourself: “Well, everybody cheats. It’s not a big deal.”
d) You’re angry at your teacher. You throw a tantrum.
e) You turn all your energy and anger into schoolwork.
5. You knock off your grandma’s precious cup. What do you do?
a) You say: “But I just touched the cup. It broke itself.”

b) You take out your frustration on your younger brother.
c) You say: “It was a very ugly cup. At least no one will say now that grandma has bad
taste.”
d) You curl in your bed in a fetal position, too terrified to confront your grandma.
e) You turn your aggressive behaviour into martial arts. You spend a lot of time
breaking cement blocks.
6. You weren’t accepted at a medical school. You are badly disappointed and angry.
How do you react?
a) You assume it’s a mistake. After all, you had good test scores and grades.
b) You blame your parents for not caring enough about your education.
c) You say: “Actually, I didn’t want to study medicine.”
d) You go home and cling to your mother.
e) You transform your frustration into writing a blog about corrupt doctors.
If you have most answers in A, you are DENIAL.

If you have most answers in B, you are DISPLACEMENT.
If you have most answers in C, you are RATIONALISATION.
If you have most answers in D, you are REGRESSION.
If you have most answers in E, you are SUBLIMATION.
33
4. In your opinion, which defence mechanisms are most and least mature?
VOCABULARY IN USE
1. Complete the sentences with the correct form of the verbs in the box.
negate, distort, operate, cope, reduce, protect, harm
1. The ego uses multiple psychological strategies known as defence mechanisms to

__________ us from things that are too painful to think about or deal with.
2. Defence mechanisms __________ on an unconscious level, meaning we are not
aware of their use.
3. A person in denial __________ the harsh aspects of reality that produces too much
stress for him to handle.
4. Defence mechanisms help us __________ negative thoughts and feelings to a man-
ageable level.
5. We use defence mechanisms to keep our ego safe from things that could otherwise
__________ it.
6. The ego uses mature defence mechanism such as rationalisation to __________ with
unpleasant reality instead of falsifying it.
7. Primitive and less mature defence mechanisms effectively __________ reality, ma-
king it difficult or impossible for an individual to see his situation as it is.
2. Match the verbs in column A with the phrases in column B to make correct expressions.
A B
1. repress a) one’s emotions on (somebody)
2. make up b) one’s tension
3. vent c) to accept (something)
4. distance oneself d) excuses
5. retreat e) one’s frustration to (somebody)
6. make f) for (something)
7. project g) from the emotion of an event
8. refuse h) one’s memories
9. redirect i) into a fantasy world
10. relieve j) one’s own racism onto (somebody)
3. Put the correct form of the expressions from exercise 2 into the following sentences.
1. She _________________ of the abuse until she recovered them in psychotherapy.

2. Please, don’t yell at me. There’s no need to _________________ me.
3. Feeling overwhelmed at work, he _________________ his co-workers.
34
4. Kate is able to _________________ by standing back and observing things objec-

tively.
5. As a little boy Josh was shy and quiet, and often _________________ to forget his
nightmarish home life.
6. Judith’s parents are always too busy with work, so they spoil her with expensive
clothes to _________________ the time they spend away from home.
7. Although, this conversation may not help you solve your problems, it can cer-
tainly help you _________________ .
8. Stop _________________ to justify leaving your family. I don’t want to hear them.
9. Debra is seriously ill, but she _________________ it and says: “It’s nothing serious.
I’m definitely not going to hospital.”
10. Being a downright racist, the critic __________________ the movie director, accus-
ing him of discriminating against minorities.
35
5 The Science Behind
Dreams
LEAD-IN
1. What is a dream?
2. Why do we dream?
3. Why don’t we just sleep without dreaming?
2. Dreams are mental experiences, typically in the form of images, ideas, and sensa-
tions that come about involuntarily in the mind during REM sleep. Dreams can be vivid,
vague or totally absurd. They can be joyful, but also very disturbing, and most people
have at least one episode of waking up in the middle of the night all drenched in sweat.
While it is easy to provide a definition of a dream, why we actually dream remains one
of the science’s greatest unanswered questions, though it has been a topic of study dat-
ing as far back as 4000 B.C. Early civilisations saw dreams as a channel of communication
with the spiritual world and in many cultures they are still believed to be mystical. To
date, many theories have been offered as to what the purpose of dreaming is. According
to some scientists, dreams are random and meaningless. As psychologist Steven Pinker
wrote, “dreaming might be a kind of screen saver in which it doesn’t really matter what
the content is as long as certain parts of the brain are active.” However to others, dreams
do make sense and serve particular functions, including memory consolidation, infor-
mation processing and threat simulation. Whatever the theory, none is yet definitive.
One of the first theorists in modern times to consider dreams was Sigmund Freud. He
conjectured that dreams were the “royal road to the unconscious”, usually relating to our
suppressed fears and desires. Although his dream theories have been largely disproved,
they still provoke scientists into heated debates and some people continue to believe
that dreams are messages from the unconscious mind and look into them to gain insight
into their own lives.
36
37
Men tend to dream about aggressive encounters with male strangers. In their dreams, they are more likely to be involved in
fights, chases or criminal activities than women. In contrast, women often dream about weddings, babies and motherhood,
but these are not always pleasant dreams.
In their wedding dreams, things often go wrong or end in disaster, e.g. they get married to a total stranger. New mothers
tend to have terrifying nightmares involving their babies – a big cat eating them, or they are kidnapped from their prams.
Children dream about animals more often than adults, and they are more likely to have fantasy-like dreams.
3) c)
2)
b)
1) a)
bottom of the page.
the dreams with the people who dream them. Give your reasons. For the answer, see the
3. Look at the pictures. Do they present a woman’s, man’s or a child’s dreams? Match
5 The Science Behind Dreams
READING
1. Despite a wealth of research, scientists and researchers still don’t know why we dre-
am. However, they have some theories. Read the text to learn more about them.
Field of dreams
We spend years of our lives having them but no one knows why. Alok Jha uncovers re-
search which could finally give us the answers
I am in a huge arena, straight out of the film Ben Hur, racing towards a line of charioteers.
The crowd is deafening. Getting closer to the menacing line, their swords glint and my
heart doubles its already ridiculous rate. A hair’s breadth away from smacking into them,
I jerk awake and find myself in a room the size of an aircraft hangar, in darkness. A hun-
dred or so other people are fast asleep. This is Birmingham, not ancient Rome, and it’s an
experiment looking at how dreams are affected by external noises and music.
Dreams have held cultural significance ever since humans have had them. Trying to un-
derstand what they can tell us about ourselves or even our future life has been a popular
sport for people who believe that dreams are some kind of window into our minds.
But researchers studying dreams from a more scientific perspective have struggled to
gain acceptance. Science is still grappling with the big questions: what does dreaming
mean? Why do dreams happen? What do they tell us about our brains?
Now, work by neuroscientists and psychologists has led to some intriguing clues about
how we enter this alternate reality when we sleep. Some researchers even say that un-
derstanding why we dream could be the key to comprehending our own consciousness.
For the most part, dreams are still the preserve of the mystic – simply because dream
research is not easy to do. There is no way to “see” what a person is dreaming and re-
searchers in sleep laboratories normally rely on reports of dreams given to them by the
volunteers taking part. Often these are selective accounts of what happened. I know that
my own dream report after the experiment in Birmingham was only partial – all I could
remember were the last moments.
“I can’t cause a dream to happen, it’s not easy to manipulate the content,” says G William
Domhoff, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
“There have been a lot of studies in which we tickle you or whisper something in your
ear, or we make a sound while you sleep. Dreams are pretty autonomous, they’re pretty
impervious to that kind of stuff.”
Even so, the interpretation of dreams has a patchy history. They formed a fundamental
part of Sigmund Freud’s work, and of the development of psychoanalysis at the turn of
the 19th century. He argued that dreams were a form of wish fulfilment during sleep, aris-
ing from our sexual urges.
But Freud’s argument was entirely subjective. By attempting to work out associations be-
tween the dreamer and the various elements of the dreams, he tried to uncover the latent
thoughts he hypothesised must be causing them. Freud said these latent thoughts were
always wishful.
38
The Science Behind Dreams 5
In 1953, two American researchers discovered a physiological state known as “rapid eye
movement” (Rem) sleep. This is a paradoxical state: we remain fast asleep but our brains
are as highly aroused and active as during normal waking hours. It occurs every 90 min-
utes during sleep. Experiments in the 1950s showed that 80% of people woken from this
state of sleep reported dreams, whereas only 10% of people woken from non-Rem sleep
said the same. This led to the conclusion that Rem sleep was the physiological equivalent
of dreaming.
By the 1970s, Freud’s theory of dreaming was in trouble when Allan Hobson of Harvard
Medical School and Robert McCarley laid bare the mechanism behind Rem sleep. It is
controlled by a switch located in the brain stem, called the pons, that has very little to do
with mental life aside from regulating levels of wakefulness. Hobson had established that
Rem sleep, and hence dreaming, had no connection with any conscious desires and that
it had nothing to do with wish fulfilment.
Hobson went on to say that dreams were generated by the random activation of the
forebrain.
Mark Solms is a professor of neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town, who origi-
nally trained as a neuroscientist but began studying dreams after later training as a psy-
choanalyst. “You see things in dreams because your visual cortex is excited. You hear
things because auditory cortex is excited,” he says. “The forebrain connects all the images
together in a futile attempt to make a story or an episode out of what’s happening. The
narrative doesn’t mean anything.”
Hobson’s “activation synthesis theory” remained the accepted explanation for how
dreams are generated and Freud’s ideas were discounted by mainstream scientists. That
is until Solms made the chance discovery that people with lesions on their pons were still
having dreams.
“I was taken aback – we know that damage to this structure leads to a loss of Rem sleep
and therefore it must lead to a loss of dreaming,” recalls Solms. He had disassociated Rem
sleep from dreams but it left the question wide open once more: what part of the brain
was causing dreams?
The answer came as another surprise. “There were brain structures which, when dam-
aged, led to a cessation of dreaming,” explains Solms. One was the part of the brain that
processes spatial cognition. But more interesting was the fact that dreaming also stopped
with damage to a part of the brain that controlled motivation.
Patients who have suffered damage to this part of the brain – the ventromesial quadrant
of the frontal lobe – not only lose their ability to dream, but have a complete lack of mo-
tivation to do anything. “Patients basically do nothing of their own volition,” says Solms.
“They can perform any action no matter how complex so long as you instruct them to do
it. They don’t have an internal drive to do anything.”
The research showed that dreams were not controlled by the basic automatic mecha-
nisms as had been thought. And the fact that the particular aspect of the mind that
seemed to be most critical for the generation of dreams was the motivational mechanism
was particularly interesting: it was close to the sort of conclusions that the psychoana-
lysts were drawing from Freud. Strong though the evidence was, Solms cautions against
any rash conclusions. “This is not proof that Freudian dream theory is correct,” he says. “It
39
makes Freudian dream theory neuroscientifically plausible and possible. All we can say is
that dreams are generated by higher brain mechanisms.”
Domhoff, however, says that both the activation synthesis theory and Solms’ updates of
Freudian theory do not explain everything. Freud, he points out, argued that the wish
fulfilment aspect of dreaming should be most prominent in children. This is impossible
on the basis of experiments carried out in the late 1990s. “There’s good research that
suggests that children only gradually develop the capability of dreaming. Children under
age six or seven do not dream often or well and children do not have adult-like dreaming
until age 10.”
Studies of the dreams of college students all over the world also reveal more similarities
than differences. And dreams collected in the 1950s don’t differ that much from dreams
collected in the 1990s. They tend to be about personal concerns, over family or significant
others. Any pattern would indicate that the activation of the brain might not be random.
“Certainly that’s not something the Freudians or the activation synthesists would antici-
pate,” says Domhoff.
Domhoff’s own cognitive theory of dreaming, developed after studying thousands of
dream reports over several decades, suggests that the brain could be actively creating
dreams in the same way it creates waking thoughts.
“The brain’s goal is always to construct a reasonable image of the world based on the
material it’s receiving,” he says. “If you’re in a situation where it’s not receiving any informa-
tion from the outside, then it starts to invent. A cognitive theory says that dreaming is just
a form of thinking with some subtle changes. It is because the brain is trying to construct
a reasonable picture of the world with the information it has.”
But what’s the point of all this activity? Antti Revonsuo, a researcher at the University of
Turku’s centre for cognitive neuroscience in Finland, says that dreams do serve a function.
“If we look at the dream research literature, where thousands and thousands of dream
reports have been systematically analysed for their content, there are certain features
that stand out,” he says. “The various negative elements seem to be more prominent than
the corresponding positive elements. Negative emotions are more common than posi-
tive emotions and aggressive interactions are more common than friendly interactions.”
Revonsuo will argue the case for his “threat simulation theory” next week at the Associa-
tion for the Study of Dreams annual conference in Copenhagen. It’s comforting to know
that I’m not alone in the feelings of fear that were hijacking me in my one-man assault on
a serried rank of Roman gladiators.
About 80% of people have had dreams where they are being attacked or chased. Revon-
suo explains the negative dreams as a sort of simulation for real life. “We know the envi-
ronment in which our ancestors lived was full of all sorts of threats. The function of these
dreams is to be simulations of the most dangerous threat in that environment.” Revon-
suo’s theory also takes in why we might have recurrent nightmares. “Dreaming gets stuck
or starts to repeat its most horrible experiences just because that is exactly the function
of dreaming: to identify the most dangerous situations where we have ever been during
our lives,” he says.
40
“Exactly because they are the most dangerous and life-threatening, the dreaming brain
constructs the simulations in order for us to be better prepared to face such situations
should they ever occur in our real lives.”
Domhoff argues that understanding dreams will fulfil an even more basic requirement for
scientists. “If you’re going to have a complete theory of the mind it’s got to have the range
to encompass dreams,” he says.
Jennie Parker, a researcher at the University of the West of England and the psychologist
behind the sleepover in Birmingham, wants to use the dream reports from the volunteers
there to test a new way of analysing dreams. The analysis will not tell the participants
what their dream might have meant but, instead, will look for patterns in the narratives
and emotions that the dreamer felt. So, unfortunately, she won’t be able to explain why
I was dreaming of being a Roman charioteer. To her, my feelings of determination and
a twinge of fear at being outnumbered are more important.
Parker says that dreaming happens so often to so many people, we cannot simply ignore
the possibility of understanding why we do it. “If we can figure out dreams, we can figure
out all other forms of human consciousness,” she says.
By Alok Jha, © Guardian News & Media Ltd. 2004
to the text.
1. The author of the text wakes up from his bizarre dream to find himself
a) in a sleep laboratory.
b) on a plane to Birmingham.
c) in an aircraft hangar.
2. Freud theorised that dreams
a) cause latent sexual urges.

b) help us solve problems in our lives.
c) express unconscious wishes.
3. It is in REM sleep that
a) the brain activity is at its lowest.

b) dreams mostly occur.
c) people often wake up.
41
4. In Hobson’s activation synthesis theory, dreams
a) are random brain activity.

b) relate to our waking lives.
c) originate in the forebrain.
5. According to Mark Solms
a) we dream when we are excited.

b) damage to the pons costs people the ability to dream.
c) ventromesial quadrant of the frontal lobe is essential for dreaming.
6. Domhoff’s theory suggests that dreams
a) reflect our waking thoughts.

b) reveal what is in our unconscious mind.
c) consolidate what we have learnt.
7. Revonsuo’s “threat simulation theory” proposes that nightmares
a) are as common as happy dreams.

b) help us prepare for bad situations.
c) cause sleep deprivation.
8. The purpose of the study from the University of the West of England was to
a) interpret the volunteers’ dreams.

b) research the underlying causes of the volunteers’ nightmares.
c) investigate possible similarities between the volunteers’ dreams.
VOCABULARY IN USE
1. Match the items from the two columns to make expressions. Sometimes there is
more than one possibility.
A B
1. dream a) sleep
2. sleeping b) structure
42
3. recurrent c) laboratory
4. dream d) brain
5. brain e) hours
6. sleep f ) nightmares
7. waking g) research
8. REM h) content
2. Complete the sentences with the correct form of the expressions from exercise 1.
1. _________________ is a relatively new science which seeks to answer many of the

unresolved questions about dreaming.
2. According to the threat simulation theory of dreaming, _________________ prepare
us for threatening situations in the real world.
3. When awoken in the middle of _________________, people can usually recall what
they were just dreaming.
4. Although sleep is a time of rest and recovery, scientists have shown that at various
times during the night, the _________________ is highly aroused.
5. Some scientists argue that _________________ is related to how we think and behave
when we are awake.
6. During sleep, all of our body’s muscles are more relaxed than in _________________.
7. Numerous studies conducted in _________________ have found that it is not easy to
manipulate dreams.
8. Damage to certain _________________ is known to result in a cessation of dreaming.
generate, process, develop, simulate, remain, lead, occur
1. Domhoff argues that we gradually ____________ the ability to dream.

2. Revonsuo has put forward a theory which states that dreams ____________ threaten-
ing waking situations.
3. According to Hobson and McCarley’s “activation synthesis theory”, dreams are
____________ by random nerve signals originating in the pons during REM sleep.
4. Studies revealed that pontine lesions don’t ____________ to a cessation of dreaming.
5. REM sleep ____________ at regular 90-minute intervals and typically occupies about
20% of total sleep time in adults.
6. When in REM sleep we ____________ fast asleep, but our brains are as active as when
we are awake.
7. Solms’ theory posits that two specific parts of the brain are needed for dream forma-
tion: one is the part that ____________ spatial cognition and the other is the part that
controls motivation.
43
6
Behaviourism.
The Power of the
Environment
LEAD-IN
1. Read the famous quote by John B.Watson and answer the questions.
“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them
up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of
specialist I might select - doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and, yes, even beggar-man
and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of
his ancestors.”
1. What according to John B. Watson is the cardinal factor in determining

people’s behaviour?
2. Can people be moulded into anything that we want them to be by manipulating
their behaviour?
2. Read the text about how certain training techniques can change not only wild ani-
mals.
Scott is educated, well-read and fun to be with, and would altogether make a perfect
husband if it weren’t for his quick temper, forgetfulness and untidiness.
Amy, his wife, observing the transformation of her puppy after it was trained in obedi-
44
ence, wrote in her diary one day: “Try on Scott!” She did and it worked great. Here is how:
To prevent Scott from stomping through the house and blowing his top when he couldn’t
find his keys, she used on him the Least Reinforcing Scenario, which is ignoring unwanted
habits and rewarding desired ones, the same approach animal trainers use to get dol-
phins to flip or tigers to jump through hoops. In crude terms, instead of joining in the
search of keys, or fueling his temper by snapping at him, she turned a deaf ear to his
outbursts. To prevent him from bothering her while she was trying to cook, she applied
“incompatible behaviours”, which is to get somebody to do something else rather than
have them stop something you don’t like, by putting a bowl of chips on the other side of
the kitchen island.
After two years of animal training, Amy enjoys a far smoother marriage and a more love-
able husband.
1. Do you agree with these statements?

a) You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
b) If you want a perfect marriage, treat your husband like a dog.
2. Can consequences shape behaviour?
3. Would the techniques work with real marital problems such as infidelity
or lack of communication?
4. Is it right to manipulate other people’s behaviour?
4. Behaviourism is a school of thought whose main influences were John B. Watson,

Ivan Pavlov, Edward Lee Thorndike and B.F. Skinner. It is based on the idea that we are all
born as blank slates (tabula rasa) waiting to be written on. Everything we do (act, think
or feel) is regarded as behaviour and all behaviour as the product of learning. Learn-
ing is therefore defined as the acquisition of new behaviour. Furthermore, behaviourism
claims that man is incapable of responsibility and self-control, as there is no self in the
first place. Man reacts and behaves to external forces such as rewards and punishments
while thought and awareness are merely insignificant by-products.
According to behaviourism, learning may occur as a result of classical conditioning and
operant conditioning. Operant conditioning comes in four types: positive reinforce-
ment, negative reinforcement, positive punishment and negative punishment, where
positive and negative are not used in their usual meaning. Instead, positive means adding
something while negative means taking something away.
5. Analyse the table and say in your own words what the nature of each type of learn-
ing is.
Which form of learning is Amy Sutherland’s the Least Reinforcing Scenario based on?
45
Type of learning Basis of learning Adaptive value Example
Responding to stimuli After eating bad
Classical Getting used to that signal the occur- shrimp you were sick
conditioning certain stimuli rence of other stimuli for two days. The next
time you see shrimp,
you feel nauseous.
Responding to stimuli A student arrives at his

Operant Association in such a way as to class on time so that
conditioning between stimuli obtain rewards and the teacher does not
avoid punishment shout at him.
6. Match the stimulus (something that causes a response) on the left with the corre-
sponding response (the reaction to an occurrence or event) on the right.
1. delicious food a) screaming

2. a police car on the road b) salivation
3. seeing and smelling alcohol c) dislike of cats
4. allergic reaction (e.g. sneezing) d) nausea
5. an insect crawling on your arm e) slowing down
7. For situations a-j, decide if the behaviour in question was acquired through classical
or operant conditioning. If operant conditioning, identify which type of consequence
was responsible for the changed behaviour (positive reinforcement, negative reinforce-
ment, positive punishment, negative punishment).
a) You eat a new dish. You don’t have the flu at the time but you get sick soon after. As
a result you cannot tolerate the smell and taste of the dish.
b) Your parents buy you a new laptop after your first semester in college because you did
very well. As a result, your grades will get even better in your second semester.
c) The child has his toys taken away for fighting with other children.
d) You find a change in the coin return slot in a vending machine. You find yourself check-
ing the coin return slot every time you walk by a vending machine.
e) Your little sister was bitten by a neighbours’ dog. Now whenever she sees a dog, she is
scared and starts screaming.
f ) A little boy doesn’t want to go to sleep. You insist that he should go because it’s his
bedtime. The boy keeps pleading for an exception to the going-to-bed rule. As a re-
sult, you allow him to stay up a little longer.
46
Behaviourism. The Power of the Environment 6
g) You always do your homework at your desk. After a stressful year, you find that sitting
at the desk makes you feel ill at ease.
h) Advertisers pair the sights and sounds of their products with photographs of attractive
people to get customers to associate the products with beauty and success.
i) A dog learns that by obeying your request it can make something good happen to
him, e.g. he can receive a treat.
j) You drive more than 30 kilometres per hour over the speed limit. As a result, you are
stopped by a police officer and receive a ticket.
READING
1. Decide if the following statements are true (T) or false (F). Then read the text to see
if you were right.
1. Behaviourists use behaviour modification to resolve neurotic problems.

2. Behaviour therapy is criticised for treating people like laboratory animals.
3. Behaviourism is commonly used in the classroom to mould students’ behaviour.
4. Women are easier than men to manipulate.
5. The more we use incentives to motivate people, the less interested they are in
whatever they do.
2. Why is behaviourism considered a threat to man’s freedom? Read the text to find out.
Why Are Americans So Easy to Manipulate and Control?

Shoppers, students, workers, and voters are all seen by consumerism and behaviorism
the same way: passive, conditionable objects.
What a fascinating thing! Total control of a living organism!

– psychologist B.F. Skinner
In psychologist B.F. Skinner’s best-selling book “Beyond Freedom and Dignity” (1971), he
argued that freedom and dignity are illusions that hinder the science of behavior modifi-
cation, which he claimed could create a better-organized and happier society.
During the height of Skinner’s fame in the 1970s, it was obvious to anti-authoritarians
such as Noam Chomsky (“The Case Against B.F. Skinner”) and Lewis Mumord that Skin-
ner’s worldview – a society ruled by benevolent control freaks – was antithetical to de-
47
mocracy. In Skinner’s novel “Walden Two” (1948), his behaviorist hero states, “We do not
take history seriously,” to which Lewis Mumford retorted, “And no wonder: if man knew no
history, the Skinners would govern the world, as Skinner himself has modestly proposed
in his behaviorist utopia.”
As a psychology student during that era, I remember being embarrassed by the silence
of most psychologists about the political ramifications of Skinner and behavior modifica-
tion.
In the mid-1970s, as an intern on a locked ward in a state psychiatric hospital, I first expe-
rienced one of behavior modification’s staple techniques, the “token economy.” And that’s
where I also discovered that anti-authoritarians try their best to resist behavior modifica-
tion. George was a severely depressed anti-authoritarian who refused to talk to staff, but
for some reason, chose me to shoot pool with. My boss, a clinical psychologist, spotted
my interaction with George, and told me that I should give him a token – a cigarette – to
reward his “prosocial behavior.” I fought it, trying to explain that I was 20 and George was
50, and this would be humiliating. But my boss subtly threatened to kick me off the ward.
So, I asked George what I should do.
George, fighting the zombifying effects of his heavy medication, grinned and said, “We’ll
win. Let me have the cigarette.” In full view of staff, George took the cigarette and then
placed it into the shirt pocket of another patient, and then looked at the staff shaking his
head in contempt.
Unlike Skinner, George was not “beyond freedom and dignity.” Anti-authoritarians such as
George – who don’t take seriously the rewards and punishments of control-freak authori-
ties – deprive authoritarian ideologies such as behavior modification from total domina-
tion.
Behavior Modification Techniques Excite Authoritarians
If you have taken introductory psychology, you probably have heard of Ivan Pavlov’s “clas-
sical conditioning” and B.F. Skinner’s “operant conditioning.”
An example of Pavlov’s classical conditioning? A dog hears a bell at the same time he re-
ceives food; then the bell is sounded without the food and still elicits a salivating dog. Pair
a scantily clad attractive woman with some crappy beer, and condition men to sexually
salivate to the sight of the crappy beer and buy it. The advertising industry has been using
classical conditioning for quite some time.
Skinner’s operant conditioning? Rewards, like money, are “positive reinforcements”; the
removal of rewards are “negative reinforcements”; and punishments, such as electric
shocks, are labeled in fact as “punishments.” Operant conditioning pervades the class-
room, the workplace and mental health treatment.
Skinner was heavily influenced by the book “Behaviorism” (1924) by John B. Watson.
Watson achieved some fame in the early 1900s by advocating a mechanical, rigid, affec-
tionless manner in child rearing. He confidently asserted that he could take any healthy
infant, and given complete control of the infant’s world, train him for any profession.
When Watson was in his early 40s, he quit university life and began a new career in adver-
tising at J. Walter Thompson.
48
Behaviorism and consumerism, two ideologies that achieved tremendous power in the
20th century, are cut from the same cloth. The shopper, the student, the worker, and the
voter are all seen by consumerism and behaviorism the same way: passive, conditionable
objects.
Who are Easiest to Manipulate?
Those who rise to power in the corporatocracy are control freaks, addicted to the buzz of
power over other human beings, and so it is natural for such authorities to have become
excited by behavior modification.
Alfie Kohn, in “Punished by Rewards” (1993), documents with copious research how be-
havior modification works best on dependent, powerless, infantilized, bored, and insti-
tutionalized people. And so for authorities who get a buzz from controlling others, this
creates a terrifying incentive to construct a society that creates dependent, powerless,
infantilized, bored, and institutionalized people.
Many of the most successful applications of behavior modification have involved labora-
tory animals, children, or institutionalized adults. According to management theorists Ri-
chard Hackman and Greg Oldham in ”Work Redesign” (1980), “Individuals in each of these
groups are necessarily dependent on powerful others for many of the things they most
want and need, and their behavior usually can be shaped with relative ease.”
It is also easiest to condition people who dislike what they are doing. Rewards work best
for those who are alienated from their work, according to researcher Morton Deutsch
(“Distributive Justice”, 1985). This helps explain why attention-deficit-hyperactivity dis-
order (ADHD)-labeled kids perform as well as so-called “normals” on boring schoolwork
when paid for it (see Thomas Armstrong’s “The Myth of the A.D.D. Child”, 1995). Correla-
tively, Kohn offers research showing that rewards are least effective when people are do-
ing something that isn’t boring.
In a review of the literature on the harmful effects of rewards, researcher Kenneth Mc-
Graw concluded that rewards will have a detrimental effect on performance under two
conditions: “first, when the task is interesting enough for the subjects that the offer of
incentives is a superfluous source of motivation; second, when the solution to the task is
open-ended enough that the steps leading to a solution are not immediately obvious.”
Kohn also reports that at least 10 studies show rewards work best on simplistic and pre-
dictable tasks. How about more demanding ones? In research on preschoolers (working
for toys), older children (working for grades) and adults (working for money), all avoided
challenging tasks. The bigger the reward, the easier the task that is chosen; while without
rewards, human beings are more likely to accept a challenge.
The Anti-Democratic Nature of Behavior Modification
Behavior modification is fundamentally a means of controlling people and thus for Kohn,
“by its nature inimical to democracy, critical questioning, and the free exchange of ideas
among equal participants.”
For Skinner, all behavior is externally controlled, and we don’t truly have freedom and
choice. Behaviorists see freedom, choice, and intrinsic motivations as illusory, or what
Skinner called “phantoms.” Back in the 1970s, Noam Chomsky exposed Skinner’s unsci-
49
entific view of science, specifically Skinner’s view that science should be prohibited from
examining internal states and intrinsic forces.
In democracy, citizens are free to think for themselves and explore, and are motivated
by very real – not phantom – intrinsic forces, including curiosity and a desire for justice,
community, and solidarity.
What is also scary about behaviorists is that their external controls can destroy intrinsic
forces of our humanity that are necessary for a democratic society. Researcher Mark Lep-
per was able to diminish young children’s intrinsic joy of drawing with Magic Markers by
awarding them personalized certificates for coloring with a Magic Marker. Even a single,
one-time reward for doing something enjoyable can kill interest in it for weeks.
Behavior modification can also destroy our intrinsic desire for compassion, which is nec-
essary for a democratic society. Kohn offers several studies showing “children whose
parents believe in using rewards to motivate them are less cooperative and generous
[children] than their peers.” Children of mothers who relied on tangible rewards were less
likely than other children to care and share at home.
How, in a democratic society, do children become ethical and caring adults? They need
a history of being cared about, taken seriously, and respected, which they can model and
reciprocate.
By Bruce E.Levine, reprinted with permission from AlterNet, www.AlterNet.org
3. Answer the following questions.
1. What is behaviour modification?

2. Where are the principles of operant conditioning applied?
3. Why do behaviour modification techniques appeal to authoritarians?
4. Who is easiest to manipulate?
5. When are rewards least effective?
6. What is the main criticism of behaviour modification?
50
VOCABULARY IN USE
1. Complete the sentences with the correct form of the verbs in the box. Some verbs
may be used more than once.
reward, shape, condition, control, ignore, manipulate, resist, motivate, pervade
1. Pavlov’s dog was ____________ to salivate at the sound of a bell.

2. The technique Amy Sutherland uses is based on ____________ desired behaviours
and ____________ unwanted ones.
3. To its critics, behaviour modification is a means of ____________ people into behav-
ing in a particular way.
4. According to operant conditioning, behaviour can be ____________ through a sys-
tem of rewards and punishments.
5. Children who are ____________ by tangible rewards rather than by intrinsic forces
are less cooperative and generous than their peers.
6. Anti-authoritarians ____________ behaviour modification by remaining unaffected
by the consequences of their actions.
7. Operant conditioning ____________ our community, not only the classroom and the
workplace, but also mental health treatment.
8. Behaviourists claim that behaviour is ____________ by environmental stimuli.
1. “Token economy” is one of behaviour modification’s ________ techniques used to

reinforce positive behaviour in exchange for a reward.
a) operant b) staple c) authoritarian
2. “Negative reinforcement” occurs when a behaviour is followed by the ________ of

an unpleasant stimulus.
a) addition b) reinforcement c) removal
3. The offer of ________ can be counterproductive if a task is rewarding in itself.

a) incentives b) stimuli c) awards
4. Critics say that behaviourism treats people as dependent, ________ objects with no
free wills of their own.
a) simplistic b) conditionable c) prosocial
5. According to Morton Deutsch, rewards best serve those who are ________ from their
work.
a) removed b) prohibited c) alienated
51
6. Chocolate commercials are likely to ________ salivating reactions from those who
have seen them.
a) expose b) elicit c) excite
7. Behaviourism is based on the idea that we are all born as blank ________, knowing
nothing.
a) slates b) sheets c) spaces
8. Opponents of behaviourism believe that ________ controls can destroy an individual’s

intrinsic motivation to engage in an activity.
a) internal b) innate c) external
52
7
Senses.
Making Sense of
the World
LEAD-IN
1. What are senses?

2. What would it be like to lose one of them?
3. Are our senses always reliable?
4. What stimuli are registered by the senses during eating, smelling, touching,
looking and listening? What senses register them?
2. Our senses are our connection to the world around us. We have five basic senses: the
sense of taste, smell, touch, hearing, and sight. They all work by receiving stimuli at the
sense organs – eyes, ears, skin, tongue, and nose. When the sense organs receive stimuli,
they translate them into nerve impulses that are transmitted to the brain where they are
processed into a response.
Sometimes we cannot fully trust our senses. Think about optical and natural illusions,
for example. You see circles moving on the sheet of paper, although you know that it is
a still image. In another illusion, two arrow-like lines seem to be of different lengths even
though they are the same. If you put a pencil in water, it appears to be bent or broken.
We are sometimes very wrong about our experiences. What you see conflicts with the
information you get from other sensory systems, so you are confused. In a 3-dimensional
movie, people or objects appear to fly out of screen and float in front of you, or recede far
into the distance, even though you know they cannot move like that. Not only can your
eyes play tricks on you, other sense organs can do it as well. It doesn’t happen all that
much, but it happens. Fill three containers with water – cold, hot, and at room tempera-
ture. Then put your left hand into the cold water, and your right hand into the hot water.
53
Next, put both hands into the container with water at room temperature. You are wrong if
you expect the same sensation. Although they are in the same water, your left hand feels
warm and your right hand feels cool.
3. Sometimes people perceive the world in most curious ways. History is abundant
with accounts of people who feel shapes when they eat foods or see colours when they
hear music, and completely blind individuals who can “see” but do not see. For years such
stories were considered curiosities, anomalies and even paranormal abilities. Recently,
however, scientists have come to offer an explanation for the extraordinary powers of our
senses.
What, do you think, scientists have discovered about human perception?
READING
if you were right.
1. Human sensory systems are interconnected.

2. When we lose one sense, other senses become stronger.
3. If senses collide, people can’t function normally.
4. A deficiency of close physical contact can affect a baby’s emotional development.
2. What happens when our senses intertwine? Read the text to find out.
The world at our fingertips

“Touch functions on many levels of adaptation, first to make survival possible and then to
make life meaningful.” – T B Brazelton, 1990
In 1972 John Berger pointed out in his book “Ways of Seeing” that “seeing comes before
words“.That is sight before language. But in terms of your development, touch comes
before both. In fact, it may well be through the haptic sense that you learn to know and
find your place in the world.
Before you are born you begin exploring yourself and what’s around you. As early as eight
weeks into gestation you are able to respond to a gentle touch on the cheek. By 12 weeks
you begin sucking your thumb and even make licking movements as you start to dis-
cover your environment. At 32 weeks you are able to decode a rich array of sensory in-
formation from the world in the form of temperature, pressure and pain, and touch is the
medium for this knowledge. You are perceiving the world through touching it, or being
touched by it.
54
Senses. Making Sense of the World
7
Richard Gregory, emeritus professor of neuropsychology at the University of Bristol, de-
scribed, when I met him in February, the remarkable case of a man who was blind from
birth and regained his sight after a corneal graft. After the operation he could, to Grego-
ry’s surprise, walk down hospital corridors without holding on to walls. Soon after leaving
hospital he asked the professor to take him to the Science Museum to see an exhibit of
a simple lathe. With the lathe in the glass case he was unable to say anything about the
object. When the case was removed and he was allowed to run his hand over the ma-
chine, he understood everything about it. “Now that I’ve felt it I can see,” he said.
Bizarrely, he was effectively “blind” to objects he hadn’t touched: he had to make the con-
nection between the feel and image of the lathe before he could see it. It is impossible
for those of us with normal vision to imagine this predicament – to be blind to an object
you can see in front of you – yet it suggests that in some way we can see with touch, even
that we need touch to see. In other words, there is far more crosstalk between our senses
than we might imagine.
I recently interviewed James Wannerton, a synaesthete who has a neuronal crosswiring
between two of his senses. The interview was part of a TV programme investigating the
nature of Einstein’s genius and its relationship to increased connectivity in the brain. Each
time James heard a word he would get a sharp, involuntary taste in his mouth, because
of a mixing of his taste and hearing senses. “Yoghurt and wafers, Albert Einstein tastes of
yoghurt and wafers,” he announced as I said the words to him.
This unusual crosswiring between brain areas can cause the most peculiar sensations.
Imagine mixing touch with vision, which is impossible, yet strangely not as far fetched as
you might think. Professor Vilayanur Ramachandran tells of a blind patient who began to
notice that whenever he touched objects or read braille his mind would conjure up vivid
images or flashes of light, and another who experienced a vivid bitter taste in his mouth
when shaping hamburger patties with his hands.
It would appear that touch is not always touch; that the organisation of our brain dictates
how we experience our sensations. The brain has different regions that control different
functions and it was thought that the visual part was just for seeing. This would seem not
to be the case. If you are blind from early in life, you become very good at detecting small
distances between two points (as in braille). Apparently, this new-found “vision” is in part
due to touch taking over or reorganising the visual part of the brain so that you have bet-
ter touch sensitivity.
The tactile sense develops prior to others and is not as confined to discrete boundaries.
But could it underpin our ability to communicate? Imagine that you are wearing a blind-
fold and holding two shapes, one like a piece of shattered glass with many jagged edges,
the other a softly rounded blob. I’m going to give you two nonsense words, “booba” and
“kiki”, and I want you to associate each with a shape. My guess is that you would partner
booba with the rounded shape and kiki with the jagged one. If you did, you’d be one of
the 98% who would do the same. Along the same lines, we might also say that the taste of
lemon is sharp; here we are associating shape and taste. Could this simple representation
of the characteristics of shapes that we have touched (or seen) as sounds or words be the
building block for language as a form of communication?
55
Sensations provide your conscious and subconscious with an awareness of the internal
and external conditions of your body. The skin feeds you information on temperature
and, if you are in danger of damaging your delicate tissue, pain or pressure. Yet you also
have a kind of internal “touch”. Nineteenth-century neuroanatomist Sir Charles Bell called
this the sixth sense: proprioception, your unconscious interpretation of the sensory feed-
back derived from muscle, tendons and joints that enables you to keep track of your body
in space. You can test this sense by placing your right hand out of sight above your head.
Keeping it still, use your left index finger to touch your right thumb. It is not always easy
to make an immediate connection with your thumb. If you did contact it directly, you’ll be
glad to hear it’s thanks to proprioception.
This leads me to “the disembodied woman” Christina, a patient of neurologist Oliver Sacks
who had lost her proprioception. She had difficulty walking and standing as she would
“lose” her body in space. This may be similar to the feeling you get if your leg “goes to
sleep”. As Christina’s sense of touch was unaffected, she could find her body image via
touch by riding in a convertible car and letting the wind brush against her skin, thus en-
joying the feeling of embodiment once again.
Yet touch is more than a mechanism by which we sense the world around us. It is a two-
way process that provides a complex exchange between people: it establishes a relation-
ship or connection and creates a dialogue. To start a haptic communication you need
to be within “arm’s reach”, which is more than just an idiomatic expression, but defines
a special spatial relationship. You touch to experience, to acquire knowledge, but when
another is involved you also touch to communicate. Without thinking you transfer infor-
mation. We even use the phrase “keep in touch” as a metaphor for speaking in the near
future.
Touch as communication can elicit chemical and physical changes in the brain and body,
and lack of physical contact in the early years can lead to abnormal development in brain
areas that deal with emotion. Young children or babies subjected to extreme depriva-
tion of touch may suffer delayed development of mental and motor skills. In the saddest
cases, a child could die through lack of contact.
This relationship between touching and knowing is possibly one of the cornerstones for
our human experience and communication. Touch is many things and can be described
by science in wondrous and infinite detail, yet it was the deafblind Helen Keller who
brought us to a core understanding of our relationship with touch: “My hand is to me
what your hearing and sight together are to you ... it is the hand that binds me to the
world of men and women.”
By Mark Lythgoe, © Guardian News & Media Ltd. 2005
56
Senses. Making Sense of the World
7
1. What sense develops prior to other senses?

2. What is haptic perception?
3. Why was Professor Gregory’s patient blind to the lathe?
4. How does synesthesia affect James Wannerton?
5. Why do the vast majority of people choose “kiki” for the jagged shape and
“booba” for the rounded shape?
6. What happens if an individual loses his sense of proprioception?
VOCABULARY IN USE
1. Decide which option in italics is not possible in each sentence.
1. We can usually differentiate/discriminate/differ between what we hear and what we

see, but it is not always the case.
2. When the senses mix/hit/collide, they cause people to see sounds or taste shapes.
3. All of the senses are interconnected/intertwined/hardwired. It means that when one
sense is stimulated, other senses are stimulated at the same time.
4. Sense organs emit/transmit/convey nerve impulses along sensory neurons to the
brain.
5. It is through our senses that we can explore/interpret/make sense the world around us.
6. Once the brain receives information from the external environment, it interprets this
information into a meaningful perception/sensation/response.
7. Our senses don’t operate/register/work independently of one another, but in con-
junction.
8. Synesthesia is a neurological condition characterised by an atypical neuronal double-
cross/crosswiring/crosstalk of the senses.
9. The sense of touch develops before the other senses, and is the main way in which
babies bond/adapt/connect with their environments.
10. Studies have shown that lack of physical contact in the early years can lead/contri-
bute/result to abnormal development in a part of the brain that controls emotions.
2. Complete the text with the verbs from the box.
echolocate, navigate, interact, emit, create, bounce, return
Bats ________ (1) sounds into their surroundings to ________ (2) and “see” in the dark.
They can do that by sensing and interpreting echoes which ________ (3) off the objects
57
around them. This ability is called echolocation, and apart from bats some other mam-
mals (mainly whales and dolphins) and a few birds are known to ________ (4). But echo-
location isn’t only just for animals. Some blind people have managed to perfect a form of
echolocation. These individuals are unusual in their independence. Not only can they live
worthwhile lives just as sighted people do, but they also can ride bikes, climb mountains
and do all sorts of outdoor activities. How do they do all these things? They make clicks
with their tongues, similar to the bat’s high-pitched sounds, which ________ (5) as echoes
to their ears. Unlike bats, they don’t make hundreds of clicks per second, just a few clicks
every few seconds, which is enough to ________ (6) special images of their surroundings.
In this way, they can find their way around and ________ (7) effectively with the world.
58
Memory
and the Brain 8
LEAD-IN
1. Do you remember the name of your first-grade teacher, what you had for
dinner last Saturday and where you were 10 years ago today?
Which was the easier to remember? Why do remember certain things,
but forget others?
2. It is good to remember as much as possible?
2. Match the types of memory with their definitions and examples. Then read the text
in point 4 to see if you were right.
Type of memory Definition Example
A type of memory containing a lim- You see an object briefly be-

sensory ited amount of information (typically fore it disappears. Once it is
memory 7 ± 2 chunks) stored for up to 30 sec- gone, it is still retained in the
onds. If rehearsed, the information memory for a very short pe-
can be renewed indefinitely. riod of time.
short-term A type of memory containing infor- You remember the name of

memory mation stored from about 30 sec- your first-grade teacher, or
onds to decades. what your old friend’s face
looks like.
long-term A type of memory containing infor- You memorise a telephone

memory mation processed by the sense or- number that you have just
gans (eye, ear, tongue, nose, or skin), heard because there is no
stored for up to a few seconds. way to write it down.
59
3. How much do you know about memorising things? Consider the following situa-
tions. What do they say about memory?
a) George Miller presented the idea that short-term memory can hold 5 to 9 (7 ± 2) chunks
of information, where a chunk is any meaningful unit, be it a letter or a digit.
Can you try to remember this string of letters: E, S, L, D, I, Y, I, B and M?
Is it easier to remember the same letters arranged into three acronyms: ESL, DIY and IBM?
b) You will find mnemonics in virtually every discipline from foreign languages, mathe-
matics and biology to geography, physics and music. People may also use mnemonics on
a daily basis to remember a shopping list or a telephone number. Some mnemonics use
acronyms and memorable phrases, where the first letter of each word forms a word you’re
trying to remember, or can be converted into a digit. Some take the form of rhymes and
associations.
What do the following mnemonics stand for?
a) Big Elephants Can Always Understand Small Elephants

b) For I want a snowy Christmas, my friend
c) FANBOYS
d) Spring forward. Fall back
e) My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos
4. Read the text and answer the questions that follow.
The study of human memory has been a source of fascination for centuries and has be-
come one of the major topics of interest within cognitive psychology. But what exactly is
memory and more importantly: how does it work?
Have you ever wondered how it is possible to remember what happened to us when
we were only 4 years old or how it is possible to store huge amounts of information and
retrieve most of them easily? If you have, you are one of many.
Memory is a hugely broad concept. Crudely, it is a special capacity of the human brain for
storing information. There are basically three types of memory: sensory memory, short-
term memory and long-term memory. Sensory memory is a residue in our senses. It is
the ability to look at an object and remember what it was like with just a second of obser-
vation. Once the object is gone, it is still stored in the memory, but for a few seconds or
less. After that the information is lost. Sensory memory is very different from short-term
memory, which lasts up to 30 seconds and its capacity is 7 ± 2 items. It’s where you store
a telephone number that you have just seen or heard. Finally, there is long-term memory,
which is a like the hard drive on the computer, but no one really knows its capacity.
It holds everything what we walk around with, including faces we have ever seen, things
60
Memory and the Brain 8
that have happened to us, languages we speak, stories, places, songs, TV programmes,
etc. Sometimes, things held in short-term memory get converted into long-term mem-
ory. One way to do it is through rehearsal, but usually it’s not enough. If you want to
remember something, make sure to give it meaning and sense.
Short-term and long-term memory are theorised to be located in different parts of the
brain. Short-term memory is believed to be stored in the hippocampus area as opposed
to long-term memory, which seems to be stored as concepts throughout the entire brain.
1. What are the differences between sensory, short-term and long-term memory?
What information is held in each?
2. How do we get things from short-term memory into long-term one?
3. Where is memory located?
READING
1. How does the brain “decide” what information to keep and what to dump? Read the
text to find out.
Sleep Helps Us Remember What We Need To
The jury is back and the verdict is in. The long-term storage of memories occurs during
sleep. It’s not just a passive process of forgetting – in which useless or trivial short-term
memories fade into obscurity. Memory storage during sleep is an active process. Several
researchers have shown that neuronal representations of memories are reactivated dur-
ing sleep, as if the brain were replaying a recording. The replay is essential to long-term
memory storage, possibly because it redistributes neuronal connections from short-term
memory to long-term storage sites in the neocortex.
The brain constructs and reorganizes its circuits while we sleep. Yet, it is apparent that
there must be some selectivity involved. Most of the enormous amount of information
that comes into us every day is encoded for a short time; today we remember what we
had for breakfast and where we parked the car. But as we sleep, most of that knowledge
is discarded. So what we know today may be lost tomorrow – or not. Although most of
what was encoded into memory is shed, the “important stuff” remains. We don’t forget
a disagreement with a spouse or a promising job interview.
The pivotal question is, How does the brain “decide” what to keep and what to dump? This
past week, a significant study caught my eye, one that can help us eventually answer that
question. German researchers have garnered evidence that the brain sorts through mem-
ories during sleep and preferentially retains the ones that are most relevant. The study,
published in the “Journal of Neuroscience“, concludes that the brain evaluates informa-
tion based on future expectations. After a good night’s sleep, we remember information
better when we know it will be useful in the future.
61
In this study, a team of researchers led by Jan Born of the University of Lübeck set up two
experiments to test memory. In the first experiment, volunteers attempted to learn 40
pairs of words. Participants in the second experiment played a card game in which they
matched pictures of animals and objects (similar to the game “Concentration”) and also
practiced sequences of finger taps.
In both groups, half the volunteers were told immediately following the learning tasks
that they would be tested in 10 hours. In truth, all of the participants were tested later,
but only half of them expected the test. Also, some, but not all, of the volunteers were al-
lowed to sleep between the time they learned the tasks and the time they took the tests.
Sleep compared with wakefulness produced a strong improvement on test performance
only if the subjects had been informed about the test. For subjects who had not been
informed, retrieval after sleep was no better than after wakefulness. Retention during
the wake intervals was not affected by expectance of a test. In sum, only the people who
slept and knew a test was coming had substantially improved recall. Thus, the mere ex-
pectation that a memory will prove useful in the future causes sleep to consolidate the
memory.
The researchers also recorded electroencephalograms (EEGs) from the individuals who
slept. Subjects who expected a test displayed a strong increase in slow oscillation activ-
ity during their slow-wave sleep. The more slow-wave activity the sleeping participants
had, the better their memory during the test. Born and colleagues think that the process
may involve at least two parts of the brain. The brain’s prefrontal cortex appears to “tag”
memories deemed potentially useful for the future, while the hippocampus consolidates
those memories during sleep.
“Our results show that memory consolidation during sleep indeed involves a basic selec-
tion process that determines which of the many pieces of the day’s information are sent
to long-term storage,” Born says. “Our findings also indicate that information relevant for
future demands is selected foremost for storage.”
From Psychology Today, February 18, 2011 © Faith Brynie 2011
1. Sleep consolidates short-term memories.

2. The expectation that a piece of information will be used in the future determines
whether or not sleep consolidates this information.
3. During sleep the brain discards irrelevant information.
4. Only the people who slept and didn’t know a test was coming considerably improved
their memory.
5. Test performance is always better after a period of sleep.
62
Memory and the Brain
8
VOCABULARY IN USE
1.
a) Complete the table with the missing word forms.
Noun Verb
retrieval
retain
storage
conversion
select
recall
rehearsal
lose
consolidation
expect
b) Complete the sentences below with words from the table. Sometimes there is more
than one answer.
1. _____________ in crude terms is a process of accessing our memories.

2. Quite a few researchers link sleep deprivation to memory _____________. If you are
sleep deprived, your ability to remember may be impaired.
3. It is not a secret that a good night’s sleep helps us to _____________ short-term memo-
ries into long-term ones.
4. Sleep is useful in terms of helping _____________ relevant information from among
the rest, which can be discarded.
5. Some people who have sustained brain damage from a car accident, cannot
_____________ any memories from after the accident.
6. Although _____________ is a good way to strengthen memories, sometimes it’s not
enough to get information into permanent memory.
7. It is said that the hippocampus encodes and _____________ memory for long-term
storage during sleep.
8. When you suffer from amnesia, you may not be able to _____________ one or more
memories from your past.
9. The human brain has the capacity _____________ an infinite amount of information.
10. The results gained from the memory experiment showed that test performance was
better when the participants _____________ the test.
63
2. Complete the sentences with the verbs in the box in the right form.
encode, sort, fade, evaluate, construct, dump, keep
1. The brain _____________ information during sleep and ___________ only what it
predicts will be important in the future.
2. Discarded pieces of information _____________ into obscurity because it makes easier
to remember what is truly important.
3. The brain _____________ information as memories which are stored and retrieved
when it is needed.
4. As we sleep, the brain _____________ through memories and discards all that are ir-
relevant.
5. By selecting what is relevant from what is not, the brain _____________ most of the
information.
6. It is claimed that the brain _____________ its neuronal networks during sleep.
3. For gaps 1-7 choose the answer (a, b or c) which you think fits best.
People generally misunderstand how memory works. According to a popular belief,

memory works like a video camera, recording events or situations accurately as they
happened. But instead of “tape recording“ things and playing them back each time you
_____________ (1) them, your brain _____________ (2) memories to make them fit with
what you believe and expect. If you don't have enough information to go on, your brain
unknowingly fills in any gaps in your ____________ (3) with incorrect facts, guessing or
new information. For instance, it _____________ (4) things from the present into the
memories of the past or _____________ (5) your memories with imagined details. Al-
tered memories can afflict everyone. Even people with highly superior autobiographical
memory are as vulnerable to memory _____________ (6) as the general public. You can
also go as far as to create memories of events that never happened. Through the power
of suggestion, you can be led to falsely remember something from your earlier life. It is
possible, for instance, to make you remember committing a crime or falling victim to a
crime.
The unreliable nature of memory makes you an untrustworthy eyewitness in a court of
law, but some degree of memory_____________ (7) may be actually good for your well-
being. Inaccurate memory does have its benefits, even though it opens you up to some
mistakes.
1. a) remind b) retrieve c) retain

2. a) reconstructs b) rehearses c) recalls
3. a) retrieval b) remembrance c) recollections
4. a) incorporates b) associates c) projects
5. a) compensates b) modifies c) confabulates
6. a) impairment b) decline c) fallibility
7. a) negligence b) loss c) distortion
64
9
In Search of Memory.
Memory Loss
LEAD-IN
1. What is forgetting?
2. What are the reasons for forgetting things?
3. What is normal memory loss and what is not?
2. While most people experience subtle changes in memory function as they grow
older, extreme changes concern a relatively small proportion of people. Subtle changes
in memory function known technically as mild cognitive impairment (MCI) usually occur
in geriatric population and is more serious than ordinary memory lapses or forgetful-
ness, such as misplacing things and having difficulty recalling words. Although at first
MCI doesn’t interfere with the activities of daily life, it can be a precursor of dementia in-
cluding Alzheimer’s disease and lead to memory loss. Memory loss or amnesia can also
be caused by brain injury, psychological disorders like depression or emotional traumas.
Basically, there are two types of amnesia: retrograde amnesia and anterograde amnesia.
Retrograde amnesia (RA) is when an individual cannot recall memories that occurred
before the event which caused the condition, whereas anterograde amnesia (AA) is when
an individual is unable to form new memories after the event. Whilst both RA and AA
commonly result from brain injuries or traumas, AA can also be induced by some drugs,
psychological disorders and alcohol intoxication.
3. Read the short text about a character from “50 First Dates.“ What type of amnesia
does Lucy suffer from? Can a person lose all his/her memories?
65
Drew Barrymore’s character, Lucy Whitmore, suffers from Goldfield’s syndrome (a fictive
name, there is no such thing), a rare brain disorder as a result of a head injury in a car
accident. Her condition leaves her with no memory of anything between the day of the
accident and the present as she can’t convert short-term memories into long-term ones.
This is pretty much the basis of the romantic comedy called “50 First Dates.“ Lucy wakes
up every morning without any memories from what happened in the previous 24 hours.
She is not intellectually nor mentally impaired, though. She just can’t form any new
memories. Lucy is trapped in living the same day over and over again and as a result she
can’t get on with her life. Eventually with the help of the man she would later marry, she
realises her condition and moves forwards.
READING
1. Decide if the statements below are true (T) or false (F). Then read “Lest we forget“
to see if you were right.
1. When you lose your memory, you lose who you are.
2. You shouldn’t worry every time you forget someone’s name or misplace an object.
3. In most people, mild cognitive impairment progresses to Alzheimer’s disease.
4. Stress is one of the most common causes of short-term memory loss.
2. The scientists at Princeton University discovered that adult humans generate new
brain cells. How does it reshape our understanding of memory? Read the text to find out.
Lest we forget
In the long list of feared and dreaded diseases that haunts our 4am imaginations, Alzhe-
imer’s has a special place of its own. It is not just the prospect of slow, inevitable decline
that scares us, but the loss of our memories. Because our memories are us. In the extreme
cases of amnesia and Alzheimer’s, we see what we would become without them: lost,
unconnected, unable to make sense of our world or our place in it.
In Jonathan Miller’s powerful documentary about the musician Clive Wearing, “Prisoner of
Consciousness”, he showed just how desolate it is to live, literally, in the moment. Wearing
had a bout of encephalitis and sustained damage to his brain that dramatically affected
his memory. Most of his memories have vanished. His short-term memory has been dev-
astated – he cannot remember things that happened just moments before. Each day, he
is convinced that he has just regained consciousness, and lives in a tragic, true-life version
of Groundhog Day. He can’t even go out without getting lost.
Wearing is a rare and extreme example, but his story illustrates the profound importance
of memory to our everyday lives. Memory is how we learn and how we communicate with
66
In Search of Memory. Memory Loss
9
the world. It is also a facility that peaks in the young and begins to decline as we age. Why
this happens, and whether or not it is inevitable, is something we don’t fully understand.
For all the great advances of the last decades, human memory remains, to a certain ex-
tent, a mystery.
Alan Baddeley, author of “Essentials Of Human Memory,” published by Psychology Press,
believes we are at a critical stage in our study of memory. “Better treatments for Alzhe-
imer’s, and for the memory “flashbacks” of Post-Traumatic Stress sufferers are two areas
where I expect real breakthroughs in the next few years.” The old debate about how much
memory is controlled by ‘brain’ and how much by “mind” is, he says, becoming redundant.
“They are both crucial, and new research increasingly recognises that.” It is psychology,
for example, that explains why we may often have good memories for certain things, like
phone numbers, and poor memories for others, such as locations. “Memory is very af-
fected by motivation and attention,” says Baddeley. “Very simply, we remember best what
we’re most interested in. Also, we tend to remember things in different ways. A verbally
orientated person may remember conversations well, while a visually orientated person
may remember faces.” This also explains why two people having the same experience will
have very different memories afterwards.
But two of the most exciting new research studies into human memory belong in the field
of biochemistry. In the first, scientists at Princeton genetically engineered a strain of mice
with enhanced learning and memory abilities, increasing the brain protein NR2B, which
they identified as a key to brain function. Their findings open the door to the possibility of
one day producing the same effect in humans. This could lead to NR2B being used in new
drug treatments for disorders such as Alzheimer’s.
The second study, also from Princeton, discovered that the brain constantly generates
new neurons for learning and memory. This contradicts the decades-old belief that, once
neurons were lost, they were not replaced and their function was finished, and it could
also have huge significance for understanding memory and memory loss.
It isn’t just the brain-damaged or diseased who could benefit from these new waves of
research. An entire industry is growing up to ensure we march into an extended old age
with our muscle tone and mental faculties in good shape. Dr Cynthia R Green is direc-
tor of the Memory Enhancement programme at the Mount Sinai Medical School in New
York, and author of a new book, “Total Memory Workout: Eight Easy Steps To Maximum
Memory Fitness” (published by Bantam in the US and Piatkus in this country next year).
Her premise is that human memory is the equivalent of a muscle: keep working it, and it
will stay in shape. “Around the mid-forties to early fifties, most people begin to notice that
they have become more forgetful,” she says. “We sometimes joke about it, but behind the
jokes there is often a kind of unease. Are we losing our memory? Is our intelligence declin-
ing? Could this be a whisper of future Alzheimer’s?”
The good news is that some memory loss is completely normal. ”We start to notice memo-
ry loss because of a consciousness of growing older generally. You probably forgot things
when you were younger but didn’t notice or mind then.” Dr Green has come up with a list
of strategies and solutions to keep our memories sharp. She recommends regular “brain
games” like playing bridge or doing jigsaws and crossword puzzles. “Research shows that
67
people who keep their minds alert and engaged age far more successfully than those
who don’t. I’d say that it’s as important as keeping physically well.”
But, she admits, there is some decline in intellectual functioning as we age. We also get
information overload: “It may take longer for an older person to access information than
a younger person who has less to remember.” She recommends simple strategies such
as list – making, and also common – sense advice such as eating and sleeping well and
avoiding stress, which plays havoc with short-term memory.
Some researchers maintain we never lose our memories – just our ability to access them.
Baddeley disagrees. “I don’t think it’s possible. It would be a disaster to remember abso-
lutely everything – we’d be overwhelmed. Sometimes, forgetting is a kindness.”
By Maureen Rice, © Guardian News & Media Ltd. 1999
1. How has the brain damage affected Clive Wearing’s memory?

2. Why do we have good memories for some things and not for others?
3. How has the second study reshaped the way we think about the brain?
4. What did Dr Green liken memory to and why?
5. How can we prevent age-related memory loss?
VOCABULARY IN USE
1. Complete the sentences with the nouns in the box. Sometimes you may need to put
the nouns into the plural form. More than one answer is possible.
lapse, disorder, dementia, forgetfulness, impairment, condition, deficit
1. Old-age related _____________ such as misplacing objects isn’t usually a big problem
unless it interferes with activities of everyday life.
2. Memory _____________ are very common and most people have struggled trying
to remember someone’s name or find the right word.
3. As they age, most people develop mild cognitive _____________ .
4. Mind-robbing _____________ such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is likely to turn your
life upside down in that it deprives you not only of your memory, but also of personality.
5. Even though subtle _____________ in cognitive function may prohibit people from
functioning to the best of their ability, they allow them to live relatively independently.
6. When your grandma misplaces her purse or forgets an appointment, you may wonder
if it is just “senior moments” or something more serious, like AD or other _____________ .
7. Although a growing number of people suffer from neurological _____________,
scientists still have a limited knowledge of how the brain works.
68
In Search of Memory. Memory Loss
9
2. Complete the sentences with the verbs in the box in the right form.
decline, escape, lose, haunt, erase, vanish
1. Memory problems _____________ almost everyone, but they are especially persistent
in older people.
2. ______________ your train of thought can be a sign that you are tired, but if your
memory is getting worse, you should see your doctor.
3. Even if sometimes a word _____________ you, don’t panic. Most of the time it isn’t
a reason for concern.
4. In retrograde amnesia the brain _____________ the memories from before the event
which caused the amnesia.
5. Clive Wearing suffered from encephalitis which devastated his memory. Everything
that entered his mind _____________ immediately.
6. Memory _____________ with age, but there are strategies that we can use to keep our
minds sharp.
3. Complete the text. The first letter of each missing word has been given.
Mrs Brody is an elderly woman who until quite recently was a fully functioning person,
taking care of her adult children and their families. Now, with Alzheimer’s she is not the
person she used to be - she is unable to take care even of herself. The early symptoms of
d_____________ (1) began a few years ago with seemingly customary f_____________ (2).
She couldn’t r_____________ (3) important dates, where she put her things and she had
trouble finding the right word. Nobody was particularly worried about it at this point.
They attributed her memory l_____________ (4) to old age and s_____________ (5) mo-
ments. It was not until a neighbour called to say that Mrs Brody had forgotten his name
and who he was that her family became alarmed over her c_____________ (6). A visit to
a neurologist revealed what was feared to be the case: Alzheimer’s d_____________ (7).
Fortunately, her Alzheimer’s isn’t so bad that she needs round-the-clock care in a nursing
home, she is being looked after in her house. There are times when she is very disoriented
and confused, but she can still have some good days.
69
10 When Things
Go Wrong
LEAD-IN
1. What would make a person go to bed for a long period of time?

Eva Beaver, a heroine of a semi-humorous novel by Sue Townsend called “The Woman
who Went to Bed for a Year“, the day her children fly the nest to go to university, climbs
into bed in the middle of the day and stays there longer than expected. Eva is so tired
that she doesn’t even take off her clothes and shoes. After years of running the house-
hold and being a dutiful wife and mother, she feels that life is too much and she has
come to a dead end. She can no longer tolerate the thought of cleaning up after her dif-
ficult family, preparing food, doing the shopping or any other domestic task. For seven-
teen years she has wanted to yell “Stop. I want to get off!”, and finally she does so.
What went wrong for Eva? What kept her in bed for a year?
1. What are mental disorders? What causes them?

2. In what way are physical illnesses different from mental illnesses?
3. A mental disorder or a mental illness is a health condition that disrupts an indi-

vidual’s feeling, thinking and acting, causing a great deal of suffering and difficulty in
everyday functioning.
At this time, scientists don’t know exactly what is at the root of mental illnesses, however
a growing amount of evidence points to a combination of biological, psychological and
environmental factors. Just like any physical illness, mental illness can affect anyone,
irrespective of age, gender, race, intellect, social class or income level.
70
When Things Go Wrong
10
There are more than 200 classified forms of mental illness, including schizophrenia, anxi-
ety disorders (a broad term for a range of anxiety conditions such as generalised anxiety
disorder (GAD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD), panic disorder (PD) and phobias), depression and borderline personality dis-
order (BPD). With 13% of the global burden of disease, they are a major public health
problems, surpassing cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
4. Match the names of mental disorders (1-8) with their examples (a-h).
1. schizophrenia
2. generalised anxiety disorder
3. obsessive-compulsive disorder
4. dissociative fugue
5. dissociative identity disorder
6. narcissistic personality disorder
7. borderline personality disorder
8. antisocial personality disorder
a) The man left home and vanished into thin air. Half a year later he was found living
under an assumed name in a squat, unable to remember personal information such as
who he was or where he came from.
b) Dorothy has become obsessed with number 17. Whenever she washes her hands,
she turns the tap on and off 17 times, gets 17 pumps of liquid soap and dries her hands 17
times. She also does other things 17 times, including opening and closing doors.
c) The woman is scores of different people occupying her body. They are all very distinct
from one another. Each has their own personality and name. Some are male and some are
female, some are old and some are young.
d) Mrs Chandler constantly anticipates bad things happening to her and worries about
almost everything. As a result she feels tense and restless all the time.
e) The patient turns on the TV and believes there are coded messages meant only for
him. He also hears voices telling him that other people are conspiring against him.
f) Matthew has obsessive self-interest and longs for the recognition and admiration of
others. He is a tennis player of moderate ability, but he is absolutely convinced that one
day he will be one of the most celebrated athletes in the world.
g) Much of her everyday life is an emotional roller coaster as she very often, even sev-
eral times a day, experiences severe mood swings, going from feeling normal to feeling
sad, desperate and hopeless. It was only yesterday that she slit her wrists with a razor
blade and banged her head against the wall.
71
h) He is very cold and apathetic about other people. He often gets involved in inappro-
priate behaviours, including lying, cheating, fighting and breaking the law.
READING
1. Why are women more likely to develop mental disorders than men? How does the
environment contribute to gender disparities in mental health? Read the text to find out.
Women 40% more likely than men to develop mental illness, study finds
Researchers say women are more likely to have depression and anxiety, while more men
report substance abuse
Women are up to 40% more likely than men to develop mental health conditions, accord-
ing to new analysis by a clinical psychologist at Oxford University.
The finding, based on analysis of epidemiological studies from the UK, US, Europe, Aus-
tralia and New Zealand, has significant consequences for public health, according to Prof
Daniel Freeman, who said that as millions of people in the UK alone were affected by
mental illness, the consequences of gender disparities were widespread. Mental health
campaigners said GPs needed to be aware of such disparities when deciding how to com-
mission resources for treatment and support.
According to Freeman’s study, women are approximately 75% more likely than men to
report having recently suffered from depression, and around 60% more likely to report
an anxiety disorder.
Men are more likely to report substance misuse disorders – around two and a half times
more frequently than women. Conditions such as ADHD (attention deficit hyperactiv-
ity disorder) and schizophrenia did not have statistically significant differences between
genders in adults.
Freeman said that because the conditions most affecting women were more common
than those affecting men, overall mental health conditions were more common in wom-
en than in men, by a factor of 20% to 40%.
The result is based on analysis of 12 large-scale epidemiological studies carried out across
the world since the 1990s, for Freeman’s new book “The Stressed Sex”, published by Ox-
ford University Press. The analysis used only large-scale studies, which looked at the gen-
eral population, to control for men being less likely to seek help for psychological disor-
ders than women.
However, while pre-set criteria were used to select which studies to include and exclude,
the research is not a formal meta-analysis, regarded as the gold standard of evidence.
Freeman said the differences in the types of conditions reported by genders was interest-
ing.
“There is a pattern within – women tend to suffer more from what we call ‘internal’ prob-
lems like depression or sleep problems,” he said. “They take out problems on themselves,
72
10
as it were, where men have externalising problems, where they take things out on their
environment, such as alcohol and anger problems.”
He added that there was likely a complex mixture of factors contributing to the diffe-
rences between the genders – related not only to physiological or biological factors, but
society, too.
“Because mental health problems are extremely prevalent, if you do see an imbalance,
it’s an imbalance that concerns millions of people, so it’s a major public health issue. The
initial things we need to do is establish this fully in the UK, but also crack the issues of
why,” he said.
“Mental health issues are complex, they do arise from a range of factors, but we should
highlight the environment, because we know discrepancies are greatest where the en-
vironment has the greatest role,” he said. “Where we think it has an effect is particularly
on women’s self-esteem or self-worth: women tend to view themselves more negatively
than men, and that is a vulnerability factor for many mental health problems.”
Other academics cast a note of scepticism on Freeman’s findings. Professor Kathryn Abel,
of the centre for women’s mental health at Manchester University, said that when looking
for studies to corroborate a particular thesis there was a risk of cherrypicking ones which
backed it up.
Abel said that while disparities between rates of particular conditions were well-estab-
lished in research, she had not seen evidence of significant differences in the overall rates
of mental health disorders across lifetimes. She added that age was also a significant fac-
tor in different ratios, particularly given physical and social changes at different stages
of life. She also noted that thanks to modern healthcare and society, particularly in the
developed world where much of the data on rates of mental disorder comes from, “stress”
by its formal definition (survival stress) is lower for women and men than at virtually any
point in history.
She also considered whether some mental health conditions, though serious, were in
part an effect of a relatively low-stress environment when compared with the past.
“In terms of survival, we’re not exposed to stress compared with our ancestors,” she said.
“It is estimated that over their lifetime nearly a quarter of women will suffer a depressive
illness. As a population, we are incredibly healthy, and in spite of continuing inequalities,
we have never had it so good: women are living longer and more healthily than ever be-
fore – as are men.
“Some populations show lower rates of some of these arguably ‘stress-related’ disorders;
in those countries women and men remain under far more hardship.”
Abel did also note that little good-quality evidence was available to allow us to make
more sense of whether or how sex differences were related to any specific physiological
factors in different mental health conditions in women, as not much specific research had
yet been carried out.
By James Ball, © Guardian News & Media Ltd. 2013
73
to the text.
1. Based on the results of his study, Prof. Daniel Freeman claims that
a) approximately 40% of women are prone to mental disorders.

b) mental disorders are up to 40% more common in women than men.
c) for every man affected by mental disorders, there are 40 women.
2. It can be inferred from the text that
a) women need to be more aware of gender disparities in mental health.

b) health professionals give little attention to the question of gender disparities.
c) GPs pay increasingly more attention to the question of gender disparities.
3. As stated by Freeman, the disorders in which women predominate include
a) schizophrenia.
b) alcohol abuse.
c) depression.
4. According to the study, when facing problems men tend to
a) act them out.

b) keep them inside.
c) seek help.
5. Freeman says that mental health conditions
a) have common roots.

b) can be attributed to a variety of factors.
c) are innate.
6. Kathryn Abel disagrees with Freeman because she believes
a) gender is not a determinant of mental disorders.

b) the results of the research were falsified.
c) he chose those studies which supported his thesis.
74
10
7. Abel suggests that some mental disorders are
a) partly due to a low-stress environment.

b) caused by exposure to a high level of stress.
c) more severe than in the past.
VOCABULARY IN USE
1. Complete the sentences below with the right preposition.
1. Hundreds of millions of people are affected _____________ mental illness around

the world.
2. Studies have found that anxiety problems are more common _____________ women
than men.
3. Social pressure puts women more at risk _____________ anxiety disorders than men.
4. Women more than men seek help _____________ their mental health problems.
5. If you internalise problems, you take them out _____________ yourself and let them
brew inside of you.
6. A number of factors contribute _____________ gender disparities in mental health.
7. We are not really exposed _____________ survival stress compared to our ancestors.
2. Complete the sentences below with the verbs from the box in the right form.
distort, suffer, develop, affect, experience, account, arise, report
1. The dominant view nowadays is that mental health problems _____________ from
a combination of biological, psychological and social factors.
2. Mental disorders _____________ for more than 10% of the global disease burden.
3. Although mental disorders _____________ millions of people worldwide, they are still
feared and stigmatised.
4. Schizophrenia _____________ the patient’s way of thinking, acting and perceiving the
world.
5. Some scientists argue that women are more likely than men to _____________ mental
health problems.
6. More women than men _____________ from depression, most likely because they
tend to view themselves more critically than men.
7. Anxiety can happen to anybody in any age group, though women _____________
anxiety problems much more often than men.
8. People with depression can _____________ severe mood swings over the course of
the day.
75
11
Jean Piaget’s Theory
of Cognitive
Development
LEAD-IN
1. Read the situation. How do children learn? How do they relate to the world around
them?
Does the situation prove that children are less competent thinkers than adults?
When I was in kindergarten I thought that my teacher lived in the classroom. She was
there when we arrived, she was there when we left and there was a wardrobe.
2. In one of his experiments, Piaget asked children, “What makes the wind?”
This is an exchange between him and a 5-year-old girl named Julia.
Read the dialogue. Are Julia’s explanations sensible?
Piaget: What makes the wind?

Julia: The trees.
P: How do you know?
J: I saw them waving their arms.
P: How does that make the wind?
J (waving her hand in front of his face): Like this. Only they are bigger. And there are lots
of trees.
P: What makes the wind on the ocean?
J: It blows there from the land. No. It’s the waves...
3. Before Jean Piaget, a Swiss developmental psychologist and philosopher, most theo-
rists believed that children are how they are because they are less intelligent than adults.
Piaget claimed that it was not a matter of intelligence; it was just that children think in
76
fundamentally different ways compared to adults. According to him, children are active
thinkers or little scientists who try to figure out the world. They are not just limited to
receiving knowledge from their parents or teachers, but they build their own knowledge
by means of experience and according to their age. Piaget claimed that cognitive devel-
opment is a systematic, structured process and all children go through four stages: sen-
sorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational and formal operational in sequence,
however the rate at which they do so may vary. In each stage, they develop new intel-
lectual abilities and increase their understanding of the world.
4. For each of Piaget’s stages of cognitive development, complete the table by provid-
ing the key characteristics.
Stage Characteristics
Sensorimotor
(Birth-2 years)
Pre-operational
(2-7 years)
Concrete operational
(7-11 years)
Formal operational
(11 years onwards)
1. Children are capable of abstract, theoretical and hypothetical reasoning.

2. Children are egocentric: have difficulty taking the viewpoint of others.
3. Children begin thinking logically and rationally.
4. Children are able to approach problems in a systematic way.
5. Children don’t reason yet.
6. Children just watch, touch, suck, grasp and listen.
7. Children learn the rule of conservation.
8. Children learn to use language.
9. Children start to represent the world with words and images.
5. What do children at different ages find funny in this joke?
- Why did the orange go to the doctor?

- Because it wasn’t peeling well.
77
READING
1. Which of Piaget’s significant findings are mentioned in this article?
It’s child’s play
Jean Piaget revolutionised our approach to children. But, says our correspondent, he un-
derestimated their abilities. Even four-year-olds can learn philosophy
If you’ve ever occupied a toddler with a washing-up bowl full of water and some plastic
cups and jugs, you have Jean Piaget to thank. Today’s parents may not realise it, but the
way we raise our children is heavily influenced by the theories of this Swiss psychologist,
who died over 20 years ago.
Piaget is considered the father of developmental psychology, and has been voted by the
British Psychological Society the greatest psychologist.
His central idea was that children do not think like little adults. As Peter Sutherland, a lec-
turer in education at Stirling University, explains, this was revolutionary thinking. “The
idea had been that a child is like a miniature adult who learns in the same way as an adult
– if I want to know something, I find a book and accumulate the knowledge. But Piaget
showed that with a child this idea is totally wrong. A young child learns through touching
and feeling and using their senses.”
Piaget saw children as scientists, investigating how the world works through their own
experiments. After enough attempts a child learns that the water from a large saucepan
simply won’t fit into a tall, narrow jug, despite its comparative height. Eventually children
change their ideas about size to fit in with their discovery. Learning through trial and er-
ror at home helps them to make sense of the world around them.
Thanks to Piaget, play is now seen as an important part of learning. “There’s an increasing
awareness among parents and teachers of the importance of play. It used to be seen as
something that was just done, but Piaget showed that it has a role in a child’s develop-
ment,” says John Oates, a senior lecturer in psychology at the Open University. Pioneers
such as Freud and Maria Montessori stressed the importance of play, but what gripped
Piaget was the way in which play can help children to develop their thinking.
Piaget’s ideas have so filtered through that the idea of getting into a mess is seen as part
of life both at nursery and at home. Mucky play provides children with the chance to
experiment.
As a parent you might also find yourself turning to concrete examples to explain some-
thing abstract, such as maths, to your child. To teach addition, you’re more likely to reach
for some pennies or plastic bricks than for a pen and paper. This is Piaget’s influence again
– he showed that children find maths easier if they have concrete examples in front of
them.
After endless conversations with children, Piaget discovered a logic behind the entertain-
ing mistakes that they make. A child might tell you the reason the sun comes up is that
78
Jean Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
11
it wants to warm you up. This makes perfect sense if you look at the way in which small
children understand the world: everything that happens is centred on them.
To look further at this, Piaget devised one of his most famous studies – the three moun-
tains task, inspired by his walks with his family around Geneva. Children were shown
a threedimensional model of three mountains, along with pictures of the model from
each side. They then had to choose which picture corresponded with the view a doll
would see if placed on the other side of the mountains. At the age of three most children
simply picked the view from their own side, but by about nine, most children could do it.
He concluded that the younger children were unable to take another person’s perspec-
tive: they were egocentric – not deliberately selfish, but unable to see things from some-
one else’s point of view.
Many of Piaget’s experiments have since been criticised as flawed. Piaget, who died in
1980 at the age of 84, believed that children must pass through certain stages of reason-
ing and cannot move on until they’re ready. Some believe that this causes both teachers
and parents to underestimate children’s abilities and holds them back. According to Karen
Murris, whose company Dialogueworks runs courses in creative thinking for businesses
and schools, “it’s amazing how Piaget has permeated society.” As a result, she says, “we
don’t credit children with enough.” Small children can succeed in complex thinking if the
task is explained to them in the right way.
With the right encouragement children can achieve complex thinking that can help with
all their learning. Murris trains teachers to hold philosophy classes for children as young
as four, which Piaget would have considered impossible. Tuckswood Community First
School in Norwich has held such sessions for the past eight years (even at reception level)
and Sue Eagle, the head teacher, says that she has seen the impact across the curriculum,
from better problem-solving in maths to an increased curiosity in geography.
“If you trust children, expect high-quality things of them and you are prepared to wait,
then they will give you what they’ve got inside them,” Eagle says. “They learn to respect
each other’s opinions.”
Murris works with parents, too, suggesting ways of instigating conversations at home: if
you’re reading out loud, encourage your child to think by asking how he/she knows an
object in the story is real.
Eagle believes that we need to give children time to think their ideas through: “If a child
of four or five is struggling with a thought, they don’t want an adult jumping in to rescue
them, which is what we tend to do.”
But even if Piaget was wrong about some of the details, he was the first to look systemati-
cally at how children’s thinking develops, setting the agenda for decades of research as
well as shaping the way both parents and teachers view children today. As Einstein put it,
Piaget’s discovery that children think in a different, but to them logical, way from adults
was “so simple that only a genius could have thought of it.”
Copyright © Claudia Hammond 2003. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White
Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN. This article first appeared in The Times 15/12/2003.
79
2. For sentences 1-7, choose the best answer (a, b or c).
1. According to Piaget, children
a) think like miniature adults.

b) think in a different manner than adults do.
c) are not significantly different than adults.
2. Children learn through
a) accumulating knowledge.
b) hands-on experiences.
c) common sense.
3. After enough attempts, children
a) understand the problem of liquid and volume.

b) learn about containers (e.g. saucepans and jugs).
c) are able to drink water from a jug by themselves.
4. Children learn maths easier through
a) pen and paper activities.

b) abstract examples.
c) concrete examples.
5. Piaget discovered that
a) children’s incorrect ideas about the world make it hard for them to learn.
b) children’s incorrect ideas about the world make it hard to talk with them.
c) children’s incorrect ideas about the world make sense.
6. By the age of 3, children
a) perceive the world egocentrically.

b) are typically selfish.
c) can already take another person’s perspective.
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Jean Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
11
7. Critics of Piaget’s theory argue that he
a) believed complex thinking is beyond children.

b) discouraged children from learning philosophy.
c) underestimated the cognitive capacities of young children.
VOCABULARY IN USE
1.
a) Complete the sentences with the words or expressions in the box in the right form.
struggle with, move on, jump in, hold back, learn, think through, figure out
1. We can’t _____________ to the next stage until we complete the previous one.
2. I need some time to _____________ your proposal. I don’t want to make any hasty
decisions.
3. I think they should tell the teacher that their child is _____________ reading and writ-
ing.
4. His parents _____________ his progress by not giving him a chance to develop his
musical interests.
5. Just like little scientists, children _____________ through trial and error.
6. A little boy was trying to tie his shoelaces, when his mother _____________ to help.
“I’d rather do it myself, Mum,” the boy said.
7. A little girl couldn’t _____________ how to put on socks.
b) Match the words or expressions in the box in 1a to their synonyms below.
consider, interfere, progress, comprehend, have difficulty, impede, acquire knowledge
1. Children work out/investigate/research the world by themselves and independently of

others.
2. Adults learn/accumulate/add to their knowledge unlike children, who learn by doing.
3. Piaget discovered that children think/realise/reason differently at different stages of
their lives.
4. Small children believe that everything is centred/aims/focuses on them until they
learn better.
5. Piaget asserted that children pass/undergo/move through four stages of cognitive de-
velopment in a fixed order.
6. Today parents often turn/resort/rely to concrete examples to explain abstract ideas to
their kids.
81
7. Piaget pointed/stressed/emphasised the importance of play in young children’s de-
velopment.
8. It is claimed that Piaget underestimated/underrated/exaggerated children’s cognitive
abilities at particular ages.
82
Language and
Thought 12
LEAD-IN
1. Do you agree with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous idea: “The limits of my

language mean the limits to my world”?
2. What would it be like to have never learnt Polish, but instead to know Korean,
Japanese or Indonesian?
3. Do Polish, Korean or Indonesian speakers perceive, understand and
remember their experiences differently just because they talk differently?
2. The question of whether language affects the way we think has been the subject of
lengthy – and sometimes heated – debate among linguists, psychologists, philologists,
philosophers, anthropologists and other scholars. One of the most controversial answers
came from Benjamin Lee Whorf and his teacher, Edward Sapir. Their linguistic theory, the
so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, said that language determines thought and the way
of looking at the world. While some scholars support the hypothesis, and others contest
it in scientific literature, the latest findings indicate that language does influence thought
and perception of reality to an extent, but it does not determine thought or reality.
3. Read about the basic principles of Newspeek, a fictional language in George Orwell’s
“1984.“ How do they relate to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?
“The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-
view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [English Socialism], but to make
all other modes of thought impossible.” It was intended that when Newspeak had been
83
adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought--that is, a thought
diverging from the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least as far as
thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and
often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish
to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them
by indirect method. This was done partly by the invention of new words and by stripping
such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary
meanings whatever... A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would
no more know that “equal” had once had the secondary meaning of “politically equal,” or
that “free” had once meant “intellectually free,” than, for instance, a person who had never
heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to “queen” or “rook.”
There would be many crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit,
simply because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable.”
READING
1.
1. Think about two (or more) languages you know. How are they different?
2. Does language X might make you pay more attention to something than
language Y does?
2. Lera Boroditsky, a psychologist at Stanford University, has long been interested in

an age-old question whether the language we speak can influence the way we think.
Read the text to find out what she claims about the relationship between language and
thought.
Lost in Translation
Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts,
or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very
thoughts we wish to express?
Take “Humpty Dumpty sat on a...” Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much
languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense;
in this case, we say “sat” rather than “sit.” In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can’t)
change the verb to mark tense.
In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs.
Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed
or not. If our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it would be
a different form of the verb than if, say, he had a great fall.
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Language and Thought
12
In Turkish, you would have to include in the verb how you acquired this information. For
example, if you saw the chubby fellow on the wall with your own eyes, you’d use one form
of the verb, but if you had simply read or heard about it, you’d use a different form.
Do English, Indonesian, Russian and Turkish speakers end up attending to, understand-
ing, and remembering their experiences differently simply because they speak different
languages?
These questions touch on all the major controversies in the study of mind, with important
implications for politics, law and religion. Yet very little empirical work had been done
on these questions until recently. The idea that language might shape thought was for
a long time considered untestable at best and more often simply crazy and wrong. Now,
a flurry of new cognitive science research is showing that in fact, language does pro-
foundly influence how we see the world.
The search for linguistic universals yielded interesting data on languages, but after dec-
ades of work, not a single proposed universal has withstood scrutiny. Instead, as linguists
probed deeper into the world’s languages (7,000 or so, only a fraction of them analyzed),
innumerable unpredictable differences emerged.
Of course, just because people talk differently doesn’t necessarily mean they think differ-
ently. In the past decade, cognitive scientists have begun to measure not just how people
talk, but also how they think, asking whether our understanding of even such fundamen-
tal domains of experience as space, time and causality could be constructed by language.
For example, in Pormpuraaw, a remote Aboriginal community in Australia, the indige-
nous languages don’t use terms like “left” and “right.” Instead, everything is talked about
in terms of absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, west), which means you say
things like, “There’s an ant on your southwest leg.” To say hello in Pormpuraaw, one asks,
“Where are you going?”, and an appropriate response might be, “A long way to the south-
southwest. How about you?” If you don’t know which way is which, you literally can’t get
past hello.
About a third of the world’s languages (spoken in all kinds of physical environments) rely
on absolute directions for space. As a result of this constant linguistic training, speakers
of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where
they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes. They perform navigational feats scientists once
thought were beyond human capabilities. This is a big difference, a fundamentally differ-
ent way of conceptualizing space, trained by language.
Differences in how people think about space don’t end there. People rely on their spa-
tial knowledge to build many other more complex or abstract representations including
time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality and emotions. So if Pormpuraa-
wans think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like
time?
To find out, my colleague Alice Gaby and I traveled to Australia and gave Pormpuraawans
sets of pictures that showed temporal progressions (for example, pictures of a man at
different ages, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange
the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each
person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. When
85
asked to do this, English speakers arrange time from left to right. Hebrew speakers do it
from right to left (because Hebrew is written from right to left).
Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from east to west. That is, seated facing south,
time went left to right. When facing north, right to left. When facing east, toward the
body, and so on. Of course, we never told any of our participants which direction they
faced. The Pormpuraawans not only knew that already, but they also spontaneously used
this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time. And many other ways
to organize time exist in the world’s languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and
the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in
front.
In addition to space and time, languages also shape how we understand causality. For
example, English likes to describe events in terms of agents doing things. English speak-
ers tend to say things like “John broke the vase” even for accidents. Speakers of Spanish
or Japanese would be more likely to say “the vase broke” or “the vase was broken”. Such
differences between languages have profound consequences for how their speakers un-
derstand events, construct notions of causality and agency, what they remember as eye-
witnesses and how much they blame and punish others.
In studies conducted by Caitlin Fausey at Stanford, speakers of English, Spanish and Japa-
nese watched videos of two people popping balloons, breaking eggs and spilling drinks
either intentionally or accidentally. Later everyone got a surprise memory test: For each
event, can you remember who did it? She discovered a striking cross-linguistic difference
in eyewitness memory. Spanish and Japanese speakers did not remember the agents of
accidental events as well as did English speakers. Mind you, they remembered the agents
of intentional events (for which their language would mention the agent) just fine. But
for accidental events, when one wouldn’t normally mention the agent in Spanish or Japa-
nese, they didn’t encode or remember the agent as well.
Beyond space, time and causality, patterns in language have been shown to shape many
other domains of thought. Russian speakers, who make an extra distinction between
light and dark blues in their language, are better able to visually discriminate shades of
blue. The Piraha, a tribe in the Amazon in Brazil, whose language eschews number words
in favor of terms like few and many, are not able to keep track of exact quantities. And
Shakespeare, it turns out, was wrong about roses: Roses by many other names (as told to
blindfolded subjects) do not smell as sweet.
Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent and hone to suit our needs.
Simply showing that speakers of different languages think differently doesn’t tell us
whether it’s language that shapes thought or the other way around. To demonstrate the
causal role of language, what’s needed are studies that directly manipulate language and
look for effects in cognition.
One of the key advances in recent years has been the demonstration of precisely this
causal link. It turns out that if you change how people talk, that changes how they think.
If people learn another language, they inadvertently also learn a new way of looking at
the world. When bilingual people switch from one language to another, they start think-
ing differently, too. And if you take away people’s ability to use language in what should
be a simple nonlinguistic task, their performance can change dramatically, sometimes
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12
making them look no smarter than rats or infants. (For example, in recent studies, MIT stu-
dents were shown dots on a screen and asked to say how many there were. If they were
allowed to count normally, they did great. If they simultaneously did a nonlinguistic task
– like banging out rhythms – they still did great. But if they did a verbal task when shown
the dots – like repeating the words spoken in a news report – their counting fell apart. In
other words, they needed their language skills to count.)
All this new research shows us that the languages we speak not only reflect or express our
thoughts, but also shape the very thoughts we wish to express. The structures that exist
in our languages profoundly shape how we construct reality, and help make us as smart
and sophisticated as we are.
By Lera Boroditsky, © 2010, Dow Jones & Company
1. In Indonesian, the speaker
a) doesn’t change the verb to express time.

b) changes the verb to express time.
c) has no sense of time.
2. In Russian, the verb indicates whether the book was
a) read or not.
b) complete or not.
c) both a and b
3. In Turkish the verb signifies that the event was
a) seen by the speaker personally.

b) reported.
c) both a and b
4. The Pormpuraawans, an Aboriginal community in Australia,

don’t use terms like “left” and “right” but
a) geographical terms.
b) spatial terms.
c) cardinal points.
87
5. When Boroditsky asked these Aborigines to arrange photos to show the correct
temporal order, they did it
a) east to west only when facing north.

b) east to west only when facing south.
c) east to west regardless of which way they were facing.
6. In Spanish and Japanese the agent of accidental events is
a) dropped.
b) kept.
c) ignored.
7. Russian speakers are better able to distinguish two shades of blue because
a) there is no single word for the English “blue” in Russian.

b) they have different perception of colour.
c) they are better at colour distinction.
8. You can’t translate “eighty-five” exactly in
a) Pormpuraaw.
b) Piraha.
c) Aymara.
9. According to Boroditsky, if you limit people’s ability to use language
a) they can still perform simple linguistic tasks.

b) they need more time to perform simple linguistic tasks.
c) they can’t perform even simple tasks such as counting.
3. Suppose you wanted to say, “Tony accidently knocked the cup off the table” in Rus-
sian, Indonesian, Spanish and Turkish, what things would you consider?
4. Do we think about the world differently because we speak about it differently? Just
because we don’t have a name for some shades of colour, does it mean that we can’t dis-
tinguish between them? Give your reasons.
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12
VOCABULARY IN USE
1. Complete the sentences with the words in the box in the right form.
determine, perceive, adapt, switch, strip, exert
1. The underlying idea of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that people ___________ to their
social environments through the languages they know.
2. According to some linguists and psychologists, the way individuals ___________
the world varies with the languages they speak.
3. Although most scientists disprove the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, they agree that lan-
guage ___________ some influence on thought.
4. Lera Boroditsky maintains that language doesn’t ___________ our thinking in the
Whorfian sense, yet it is a powerful tool in shaping thought about nonphysical con-
cepts such as space.
5. In Orwell’s Newspeak, words are ___________ of their undesirable meanings.
6. Many bilinguals report thinking differently when they ___________ from one lan-
guage to another.
2. Complete the sentences using the words in the box in the right form.
inflect, conjugate, discriminate, quantify, refer, express, include, mention,

indicate, pluralise
1. Russian speakers, who have more words for light and dark blue, are faster to
___________ shades of blue. That may suggest that they perceive light and dark blue
as distinct.
2. The Pormpuraawans rarely use terms for right and left, and instead they ___________
to space in terms of absolute cardinal directions, and as a result they have great spatial
orientation.
3. The Piraha have no linguistic means of ___________ exact quantity like two or five.
Instead, they ____________ objects approximately, using terms such as “few“ and
“many.” As a result, they are not able to represent exact amounts.
4. Spanish and Japanese speakers aren’t as adept as British speakers at remembering
causal agents. Why? Because Spanish and Japanese speakers don’t ___________ the
agent as often when describing accidental events. They say “The vase was broken,”
rather than “He broke the vase.”
5. Unlike many other languages, Indonesian doesn’t ___________ the verb for tense. It
doesn’t mean, however, that Indonesian speakers don’t have a sense of time. They rely
on adverbials of time to ___________ when the action was performed.
6. English isn’t a particularly difficult language to learn. Its verbs don’t really ___________,
nouns ___________ easily, and there is no grammatical gender.
7. In Turkish, verbs ___________ the information about whether the action was ob-
served or just rumoured. For instance if you witnessed an accident, you’d use a form of
the verb different from the one you’d use if you had just read or heard about it.
89
3. Complete the text with the words in the box in the right form.
reformulate, form, categorise, keep, glue, shape, view
In a 1940 article, Benjamin Lee Whorf wrote that Eskimo people had several words for
snow like “tipsiq”, wind-driven snow, “aput”, snow on the ground, “gana”, falling snow,
“piqsirpoq”, drifting snow, and “pukajaq”, snow good for cooking. He claimed that be-
cause Eskimos ___________ (1) snow differently from people of other cultures, they
could ___________ (2) it differently as well. That is, having numerous words for snow
___________ (3) Eskimos more alert to different aspects of their physical environment
and therefore ___________ (4) their view of reality.
Whorf’s logic was very popular at the time, and was ___________ (5) by other linguists
who inflated the number of snow words. Soon several became a dozen, then fifty, one
hundred and even two hundred! These days most linguists consider it a widespread
myth, born of sloppy science. First of all, there is no single Eskimo language. “Eskimo” is
a broad term that includes Inuit and Yupik peoples inhabiting Greenland and the Arctic
regions of Siberia, Canada and the USA. They speak different languages, such as Inuktitut,
Kalaallisut, Alutiiq, Central Alaskan Yup’ik and Naukan Yupik. There are multiple dialects
of each. Because they are all agglutinative languages (prefixes, infixes and suffixes are
___________ (6) to words to ___________ (7) new words and phrases), they don’t have
as many “words” for snow as speakers of other languages understand the term. Many lin-
guists point out that the actual number of words for snow in “Eskimo” is about the same
as in English. Wind-driven snow in English is blizzard, snow storm or snow shower. Snow
on the ground can be slush, avalanche, snow drift or hardpack. Falling snow can be snow,
sleet or flurry. Other words for snow include snowflake, whiteout, snowfall and frost to
mention a few.
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13
Language
Development
LEAD-IN
1. What is language?
2. What would your life be like if you had never learned a language?
2. Although it was known that there are some areas of the human brain that control
the interpretation and production of speech, it was not clear at all as to how people ac-
quire language. This is where, among others, Noam Chomsky, Eric Lenneberg and B.F.
Skinner made their contributions. Chomsky claimed that human beings have innate lin-
guistic competence. We have language, according to him, not because we are taught it,
not because we are intelligent, but because we are born with a prewired knowledge of
how languages work and how they don’t. The principles of language are in our genes.
Eric Lenneberg added his own twist to the theory. He agreed that we’re born with the
principles of language, but he argued that there is a critical period for applying them.
If language acquisition doesn’t occur by puberty, a child will never achieve a full com-
mand of language. In contrast, B.F. Skinner regarded language as behaviour which, just
like any other kind of cognitive behaviour, must be learnt. And it is learnt through oper-
ant conditioning, i.e. by reinforcement and imitation. Beyond one year, children begin to
babble. Because babbling is not provided with any reward, it is soon forgotten. As soon
as children begin to speak a recognisable word, they get attention from their parents. As
a result, the meaningful words and phrases are remembered and the nonsense words
are not.
3. What happens to neurologically normal people who as children, for whatever reason,
never learnt to speak? Can they acquire a language?
91
4. Consider the case of Genie. How does Genie’s language development fit into the
theories of Chomsky, Lenneberg and Skinner?
Was Genie’s linguistic isolation the one and only factor that contributed to her abnormal
language development? What other factor(s) might have been involved?
In 1970, a feral girl, named Genie, was discovered by Los Angeles authorities. Genie spent
the first 12 years of her life locked in her bedroom and tied to a potty chair by her men-
tally unbalanced father. Raised in severe isolation with virtually no human contact, she
could hardly speak. She had a vocabulary of about 20 words and few short phrases such
as “stop it” and “no more.”
Genie’s case attracted a lot of attention from scientists who immediately considered the
girl a unique opportunity to study language skills and acquisition and to test the critical
period hypothesis, a theory proposed by Eric Lenneberg.
Although Genie had practically no language before treatment, she did manage to ac-
quire some language abilities. At first she was only able to produce one-word utterances,
as toddlers do when they start to talk. Then she began to string two words together on
her own. A little later she could produce some verbs and three-word sentences. However,
she didn’t progress in the way that normal children do. Genie couldn’t speak in a fully
developed way. She never asked questions and she was never able to construct gram-
matical sentences.
READING
1. Using language is an amazing feat that is performed by people who are too young
to add or tie their shoes. Decide if the following statements are true (T) or false (F). Then
read the text to see if you were right.
1. All you need to have to learn a language is to be smart.

2. You have to speak to a child. Otherwise, he won’t learn a language.
3. The best thing you can do to help a child improve his language skills
is to sit him/her in front of the television.
4. It is not common for 18-month-old toddlers to confuse the difference
between “Big Bird is tickling Cookie Monster” and “Cookie Monster
is tickling Big Bird.“
2.
Talk to Me
Research indicates that language development begins as early as the first few months
of life and that speaking comes as naturally to children as eating and sleeping. Parental
interaction plays a big role.
When their daughter, Makena, was born four years ago, Hermosa Beach residents and
first-time parents Karlee and Dave McCarroll did all the right things to encourage her
language development.
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Language Development
13
“Reading to Makena, even as a baby, helped tremendously as far as teaching her new
words,” said Karlee McCarroll. “And I’ve always talked with her – from day one – as if she
could understand everything I said.”
These days, the amount of talking that goes on in the McCarroll house is about to in-
crease big time. Identical twins Morgan and Kennedi, at 20 months, are “babbling all the
time,” McCarroll said.
Now an experienced mom, McCarroll is looking forward to the great language explosion
that occurs toward the end of the second year. But she still worries that she could be do-
ing more to help encourage her toddlers’ language skills.
McCarroll isn’t alone in her parental hand-wringing, according to Lise Eliot, assistant pro-
fessor of cell biology and anatomy at the Chicago Medical School.
“If parents spend the first year of their child’s life worrying mostly about motor develop-
ment, we devote the second to language,” said Eliot, who has two young children. “And
if a child’s speech isn’t all that forthcoming, we begin nervously reading up on language
delays and disorders.”
Fortunately, the vast majority of children learn language without a hitch, Eliot said. When
you think of how difficult it is to master a new language yourself, she pointed out, the fact
that children 3 or 4 years old, who can’t even add or tie their shoes, can understand and
speak in full, complex sentences without any training can seem pretty amazing.
“You become convinced, as most linguists now are, that human language is an instinct,
a behavior as innate and inevitable as sleeping – or eating,” Eliot said, adding that some
researchers have come to this conclusion after seeing how young children will invent
their own language (deaf children singing spontaneously, for example) if for some reason
they are unable to pick up on the language around them.
We’ve come a long way, just in the last few years, in our understanding of how babies
learn language, said Peter Jusczyk, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at
Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
“I remember my mother telling me, when my sister was born, that babies really couldn’t
see things for the first six months,” Jusczyk said. “It was also thought that babies didn’t re-
ally understand language until they were able to produce it.”
“Back when our parents were reading baby books, popular learning theorist B.F. Skinner
argued that a child learns language through behavioral feedback, a trial-and-error pro-
cess of having the correct words rewarded (getting a bottle after saying “milk”) and the
incorrect words ignored (because “mug” will be misunderstood),“ Eliot explained.
Speaking Is Innate and Instinctive
But researchers now believe a baby’s ability to learn language is much more than trial and
error. It’s hard-wired into the brain right from the start.
“Watch how young children constantly think up new words and phrases, which make
sense to them, that couldn’t possibly have been shaped by mimicking Mom or Dad,“ Eliot
said.
But just because language appears to be instinctive, it doesn’t mean babies and toddlers
don’t benefit greatly from interaction with their parents and caregivers. In fact, a baby’s
93
day-to-day experience is so important to language development that a baby of any racial
or cultural origin, “can be adopted into another country or culture and end up sounding
indistinguishable from native-born speakers,” Eliot said.
So it’s up to parents to provide a language-rich environment right from the start. And that
includes the baby talk that so many parents instinctively use with their children, said Rob-
erta Golinkoff, director of the Infant Language Laboratory at the University of Delaware.
Even immediately after birth, babies respond more to infant-directed talk than they do
to adult-directed talk, Golinkoff said. When speaking baby talk, “your facial expressions
are exaggerated. Your eyes open wide. That’s very appealing to a baby,” she said, noting
that researchers repeatedly have found that baby talk helps infants differentiate between
sounds.
Experts dispute the notion that baby talk will result in children who, when they are older
and speaking more easily, will sound too much like babies.
Baby talk “naturally stops as the child gets older and is able to better communicate with
the parent,” Golinkoff explained.
“While you’re doing all that baby talk, be sure to say your child’s name frequently because
researchers have found that babies are picking up on the sound of their own name as
early as 4 1/2 months,” Jusczyk said.
“By about 9 months, babies begin understanding the frequency of patterns in language,”
Jusczyk said. A baby will listen longer to the sounds that occur frequently.
While knowing how language skills develop is helpful for parents, they shouldn’t get too
hung up on milestones, because normal development can vary widely. For example, sib-
lings of different sexes may learn language at different speeds.
“One recent study found that as early as mid-gestation, female fetuses move their mouths
significantly more than male fetuses, as if already practicing for a lifetime of speech,” Eliot
said.
“Girl babies, on average, start talking a month or two earlier than boys, experts say. But
boys usually catch up during the vocabulary spurt that occurs between 18 and 24 months,
when toddlers can learn an amazing 10 to 20 words a day,” Jusczyk said.
Interaction Is Key to Learning
“Long before your child starts holding up her end of the conversation, the best thing you
can do to help improve her language skills is talk with her,” Eliot said.
“Babies and toddlers need to hear a lot of conversations. But that doesn’t mean you plug
your baby in front of a TV or just let her listen while you talk on the phone.”
It’s the interaction with you that will make all the difference.
Repetition is important, but don’t underestimate your child.
“Babies get bored,” Eliot said. “You need to keep changing things.” So instead of saying
“cup” over and over while pointing to a cup, try saying, “Would you like the blue cup or the
purple cup?” or “Would you like water or juice in your cup?”
Try to stay just slightly ahead of your baby’s developmental stages, Eliot suggested. At 3
to 4 months old, most babies will be making mostly vowel sounds, for example. So this
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13
is a good time to start making repetitive consonant sounds, such as pointing to pictures
and talking about “the cat, the cow and the canary” in a children’s book.
Through the first year, a baby concentrates primarily on individual words. But at 16 to 18
months, toddlers begin to appreciate differences in word order, Eliot said. For example, in
one study, 16- to 18-month-olds were seated in front of two TVs, each showing “Sesame
Street” puppets acting out one of the following two sentences: “Big Bird is tickling Cookie
Monster” or “Cookie Monster is tickling Big Bird.” The children paid more attention to the
video that corresponded correctly to whichever sentence was playing on voice-over.This
ability to appreciate the meaning of word order is helpful when, at 18 to 24 months,
toddlers begin speaking two-word phrases themselves. Just listen to a 2-year-old: “I go.”
“See kitty.” “More milk.”
Childhood Is Best Time to Train the Tongue
If learning one’s native tongue is a big job, parents may be concerned that exposing
a baby to two or more languages, either in a bilingual home or through time spent with
a caretaker who speaks a different language, might be too much of a burden. It’s not,
said Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, a pediatrician and a popular author of several books on child
development.
“I wish I had raised my children bilingually,” he said. “If a child is lucky enough to hear two
languages – or even three – he is set up to be bilingual.”
Hearing different languages can be confusing at first, Brazelton admitted, and there can
be delays in learning English as the child sorts out more than one language. But in the
end, the child comes out ahead, he said.
Golinkoff agrees.
“We know from research that the critical period, when a person is most receptive to
learning multiple languages, is before puberty,” she said. “And to become the best native
speaker, the best time to learn is age 5 and under. So what do we do in this country? We
teach foreign languages after puberty.”
It’s never too soon to introduce a baby to the joys of books and words. Use cloth or card-
board books for babies, Golinkoff suggested. Now is the time to make books fun, so don’t
make proper page-turning an issue, and don’t worry if your child wants to skip pages or
just talk about the pictures, she added. Just have a good time.
If, for some reason, parents are unable to read with their child, “perhaps an older sibling
or a baby-sitter can read to him,” Jusczyk said. Visiting story time at a library, with the child
sitting cozily in a parent’s lap, also helps promote a love of books and language.
“The important thing is to show your child that reading is a fun, interesting thing to do,
and that you value it,” Jusczyk said.
From Los Angeles Times, October 4, 1999 © Kathy Sena 1999
95
3. Answer the following sentences.
1. What evidence indicates that children have an innate ability to acquire language?
2. What evidence indicates that children can’t possibly learn language through imitation
alone?
3. What is language explosion and when does it occur in development? What other ex-
pression is used in the text with the same meaning?
4. Can deaf children learn a sign language if their parents and other people around them
don’t use the language with them?
5. What is baby talk? Does it facilitate or hinder language learning?
VOCABULARY IN USE
1. Complete the sentences below with the words from the box in the right form.
acquire, memorise, pick, sock, produce, master, babble
1. I ___________ up a few words of German from my friends and from watching TV.
2. As Chomsky claimed, babies ___________ language because they are born with the
principles of language.
3. According to the critical period hypothesis, if a child is not exposed to language
before puberty, he will never ___________ it at all.
4. My sister’s child ___________ more and more, making sounds such as “ma-ma-ma”
and “ba-ba-ba.”
5. I ___________ new words by repeating them again and again. There is no better way
for me.
6. By 12 months, babies can typically ___________ three or four words.
7. Around the age of two, most children have ___________ away up to 2,000 words
and started producing spontaneous two-word strings, such as “mummy come..“
2. Match the verbs in column A with the phrases in column B to make logical expres-
sions. Sometimes there is more than one possibility.
A B
1. string a) with one’s peers
2. pick up b) baby talk
3. mimic c) to two or more languages
4. catch up d) differences in word order
5. make e) one’s parents
6. speak f ) on the sound of one’s own name
7. speak g) vowel sounds
8. be exposed h) new words and phrases
9. think up i) in full, complex sentences
10. appreciate j) two words together
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13
3. Complete the sentences with phrases from exercise 2 in the right form.
1. It’s not uncommon for parents to worry that their two-year olds can’t
___________________. Some toddlers don’t even talk until they are three.
2. Around four months of age, babies start ________________________ and respond-
ing to it.
3. Babies begin to learn language by, among other things,_______________________.
4. Most late-talking boys _________________________ during the vocabulary spurt,
which occurs roughly between 18 to 24 months.
5. As early as 3 to 4 months of age, infants ________________________ such as “oh” and
“ah.“
6. Although Genie managed to expand her repertoire of words, she was unable to
_________________________ .
7. Language learning is more than trial and error. Children constantly ______________
___________ to fill gaps in their vocabulary.
8. Researchers suggest that the exaggerated tone of voice which adults use when they
_________________________ helps infants learn language.
9. Some parents wrongly believe that if a child is _________________________, he may
not be able to differentiate between them.
10. By 18 months of age, babies begin to ________________________ and most know
that “Big Bird is tickling Cookie Monster” means something different from “Cookie
Monster is tickling Big Bird.”
97
14 Animal Language
Acquisition
LEAD-IN
1. Is language unique to humans?

2. Do animals have the potential to acquire it?
3. What is the difference between animal communication systems and
human language?
2. Animal learning studies date back at least to French philosopher Julien Offray de La
Mettrie, who argued that there is no major difference between humans and animals. Like
humans, animals can also think and communicate their feelings and needs. La Mettrie
believed that apes cannot speak not because they are inferior to people, but because of
“some defect in the organs of speech”. He was also convinced that given the right envi-
ronment, a young ape can be trained to learn sign language.
The first experiment to teach an ape human words took place in 1930s when scientists
Luella and Winthrop Kellogg brought up their son with a female chimp, Gua. In 1950s be-
havioural psychologists Keith and Cathy Hayes similarly raised an infant chimp called Viki.
Although both chimpanzees reportedly understood some spoken language, they could
never produce recognisable words. In 1960s Beatrix and Allen Gardner began working
with a chimp named Washoe. This time the caretakers didn’t try to make a chimp speak,
but to teach her sign language. Washoe, with her vocabulary of about 200 signs, be-
came famous as the first chimp to acquire human sign language. Spurred on by her suc-
cess, many other experiments of this kind followed and one of the most famous is that of
a chimpanzee, Nim Chimpsky. The experiment, known as “Project Nim”, was intended to
settle a long-standing argument between Noam Chomsky and B.F. Skinner about wheth-
er learning language is an innate ability or learned behaviour.
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Animal Language Acquisition
14
3. The chimpanzee, Nim Chimpsky made the following 7-word-long sentence:

“Me banana you banana me you give.”
A two-year old child, made a sentence of comparable length:
“Elax (relax) mommy, I in my room.”
Compare these two utterances. What do they say about the “language instinct”?
READING
1. Most linguists claim that apes cannot really communicate in human language. What
are their arguments? Read the text to find out.
Chimp Talk Debate: Is It Really Language?
Panbanisha, a Bonobo chimpanzee who has become something of a star among animal
language researchers, was strolling through the Georgia woods with a group of her fellow
primates – scientists at the Language Research Center at Georgia State University in At-
lanta. Suddenly, the chimp pulled one of them aside. Grabbing a special keyboard of the
kind used to teach severely retarded children to communicate, she repeatedly pressed
three symbols – “Fight,” “Mad,” “Austin” – in various combinations.
Austin is the name of another chimpanzee at the center. Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, one
of Panbanisha’s trainers, asked, “Was there a fight at Austin’s house?”
“Waa, waa, waa” said the chimpanzee, in what Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh took as a sign of
affirmation. She rushed to the building where Austin lives and learned that earlier in the
day two of the chimps there, a mother and her son, had fought over which got to play
with a computer and joystick used as part of the training program. The son had bitten his
mother, causing a ruckus that, Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh surmised, had been overheard by
Panbanisha, who lived in another building about 200 feet away. As Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh
saw it, Panbanisha had a secret she urgently wanted to tell.
A decade and a half after the claims of animal language researchers were discredited as
exaggerated self-delusions, Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh is reporting that her chimpanzees can
demonstrate the rudimentary comprehension skills of 2 1/2-year-old children. According
to a series of recent papers, the Bonobo, or pygmy, chimps, which some scientists believe
are more humanlike and intelligent than the common chimpanzees studied in the earlier,
flawed experiments, have learned to understand complex sentences and use symbolic
language to communicate spontaneously with the outside world.
“She had never put those three lexigrams together,” Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh said, refer-
ring to the keyboard symbols with which the animals are trained. She found the incident,
which occurred last month, particularly gratifying because the chimp seemed to be using
the symbols not to demand food, which is usually the case in these experiments, but to
gossip.
Most language experts dismiss experiments like the ones with Panbanisha as exercises
in wishful thinking. “In my mind this kind of research is more analogous to the bears in
99
the Moscow circus who are trained to ride unicycles,” said Dr. Steven Pinker, a cognitive
scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies language acquisition
in children. “You can train animals to do all kinds of amazing things.” He is not convinced
that the chimps have learned anything more sophisticated than how to press the right
buttons in order to get the hairless apes on the other side of the console to cough up
M & M’s, bananas and other tidbits of food.
Dr. Noam Chomsky, the M.I.T. linguist whose theory that language is innate and unique to
people forms the infrastructure of the field, says that attempting to teach linguistic skills
to animals is irrational – like trying to teach people to flap their arms and fly.
But some philosophers, like Dr. Shanker, complain that the linguists are applying a double
standard: they dismiss skills – like putting together a noun and a verb to form a two-word
sentence – that they consider nascent linguistic abilities in a very young child.
“The linguists kept upping their demands and Sue kept meeting the demands,” said Dr.
Shanker. “But the linguists keep moving the goal post.”
Following Dr. Chomsky, most linguists argue that special neural circuitry needed for lan-
guage evolved after man’s ancestors split from those of the chimps millions of years ago.
As evidence they note how quickly children, unlike chimpanzees, go from cobbling to-
gether two-word utterances to effortlessly spinning out complex sentences with phrases
embedded within phrases like Russian dolls. But Dr. Shanker and his colleagues insist that
Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh’s experiments suggest that there is not an unbridgeable divide
between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, as orthodox linguists believe, but
rather a gradation of linguistic skills.
Animal language research fell into disrepute in the late 1970’s when “talking” chimps like
Washoe and the provocatively named Nim Chimpsky were exposed as unintentional
frauds. Because chimpanzees lack the vocal apparatus to make a variety of modulated
sounds, the animals were taught a vocabulary of hand signs – an approach first suggest-
ed in the 18th century by the French physician Julien Offray de La Mettrie. In appearances
on television talk shows, trainers claimed the chimps could construct sentences of several
words. But upon closer examination, scientists found strong evidence that the chimps
had simply learned to please their teachers by contorting their hands into all kinds of
configurations. And the trainers, straining to find examples of linguistic communication,
thought they saw words among the wiggling, like children seeing pictures in the clouds.
In a widely quoted paper in the journal Science, “Can an Ape Create a Sentence?” Nim
Chimpsky’s trainer, Dr. Herbert Terrace, a Columbia University psychologist, reluctantly
concluded that the answer was no.
A chimp might learn to connect a hand sign with an item of food, skeptics like Dr. Terrace
argued, but this could be a matter of simple conditioning, like Pavlov’s dogs learning to
salivate at the sound of a bell. Most importantly, there was no evidence that the chimps
had acquired a generative grammar – the ability to string words together into sentences
of arbitrary length and complexity.
As a young veteran of the original animal language experiments, Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh
decided to try a different approach. To eliminate the ambiguity of hand signs, she used
a keyboard with dozens of buttons marked with geometric symbols.
100
14
In elaborate exercises beginning in the mid 1970’s, she and her colleagues taught com-
mon chimpanzees and bonobos to associate symbols with a variety of things, people and
places in and around the laboratory. The smartest chimps even seemed to learn abstract
categories, identifying pictures of objects as either tools or food. Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh
reported that two of the chimps learned to use symbols to communicate with each oth-
er. Pecking away at the keyboard, one would tell a companion where to find a key that
would liberate a banana for them both to share.
Most impressive of all was a bonobo named Kanzi. After futilely trying to train Kanzi’s
adopted mother to use the keyboard, the researchers found that the 2 1/2-year-old
chimp, who apparently had been eavesdropping all along, had picked up an impressive
vocabulary on his own. Kanzi was taught not in laboriously structured training sessions
but on walks through the 50 acres of forest surrounding the language center. By the time
he was 6 years old, Kanzi had acquired a vocabulary of 200 symbols and was construct-
ing what might be taken as rudimentary sentences consisting of a word combined with
a gesture or occasionally of two or three words. Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh became convinced
that exposure to language must start early and that the lessons should be driven by the
animal’s curiosity.
Compared with other chimps, Kanzi’s utterances are striking, but they are still far from hu-
man abilities. Kanzi is much better at responding to vocal commands like “Take off Sue’s
shoe.” In one particularly arresting feat, recorded on videotape, Kanzi was told, “Give the
dog a shot.” The chimpanzee picked up a hypodermic syringe lying on the ground in front
of him, pulled off the cap and injected a toy stuffed dog.
Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh’s critics say there is nothing surprising about chimpanzees or even
dogs and parrots associating vocal sounds with objects. Kanzi has been trained to asso-
ciate the sound “dog” with the furry thing in front of him and has been programmed to
carry out a stylized routine when he hears “shot.” But does the chimp really understand
what he is doing?
Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh insists that experiments using words in novel contexts show that
the chimps are not just responding to sounds in a knee-jerk manner. It is true, she says,
that Kanzi was initially aided by vocal inflections, hand gestures, facial expressions and
other contextual clues. But once it had mastered a vocabulary, the bonobo could prop-
erly respond to 70 percent of unfamiliar sentences spoken by a trainer whose face was
concealed.
None of this is very persuasive to linguists for whom the acid test of language is not com-
prehension but performance, the ability to use grammar to generate ever more complex
sentences.
Dr. Terrace says Kanzi, like the disappointing Nim Chimpsky, is simply “going through
a bag of tricks in order to get things.” He is not impressed by comparisons to human chil-
dren. “If a child did exactly what the best chimpanzee did, the child would be thought
of as disturbed,” Dr. Terrace said.
The scientists at the Language Research Center are “studying some very complicated
cognitive processes in chimpanzees,” Dr. Terrace said. “That says an awful lot about the
evolution of intelligence. How do chimpanzees think without language, how do they re-
101
member without language? Those are much more important questions than trying to
reproduce a few tidbits of language from a chimpanzee trying to get rewards.”
Attempting to shift the fulcrum of the debate over performance versus comprehension,
Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh argues that the linguists have things backward: “Comprehension
is the route into language,” she says. In her view it is easier to take an idea already in one’s
mind and translate it into a grammatical string of words than to decipher a sentence spo-
ken by another whose intentions are unknown.
Dr. Shanker, the York University philosopher, believes that the linguists’ objections reveal
a naive view of how language works. When Kanzi gives the dog a shot, he might well be
relying on all kinds of contextual clues and subtle gestures from the speaker, but that, Dr.
Shanker argues, is what people do all the time.
Following the ideas of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, he argues that language is
not just a matter of encoding and decoding strings of arbitrary symbols. It is a social act
that is always embedded in a situation.
But trotting out Wittgenstein and his often obscure philosophy is a way of sending many
linguists bolting for the exits. “If higher apes were incapable of anything beyond the trivi-
alities that have been shown in these experiments, they would have been extinct millions
of years ago,” Dr. Chomsky said. “If you want to find out about an organism you study
what it’s good at. If you want to study humans you study language. If you want to study
pigeons you study their homing instinct. Every biologist knows this. This research is just
some kind of fanaticism.”
There is a suspicion among some linguists and cognitive scientists that animal language
experiments are motivated as much by ideological as scientific concerns – by the convic-
tion that intelligent behavior is not hard-wired but learnable, by the desire to knock peo-
ple off their self-appointed thrones and champion the rights of downtrodden animals.
“I know what it’s like,” Dr. Terrace said. “I was once stung by the same bug. I really wanted
to communicate with a chimpanzee and find out what the world looks like from a chim-
panzee’s point of view. “
From The New York Times, June 6, 1995 © 1995 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission
and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retrans-
mission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.
1. Panbanisha appeared to be using the system of lexigrams to
a) gossip.
b) ask for a treat.
c) learn.
102
14
2. Steven Pinker argues that chimps can
a) hardly do amazing things.

b) merely link certain symbols with objects.
c) communicate spontaneously to receive food.
3. Dr Shanker complains that the linguists
a) ignore apes’ ability to produce two-word strings.

b) compare apes’ linguistic abilities with those of very young children.
c) overestimate apes’ skills.
4. According to Dr Savage-Rumbaugh, with regard to linguistic abilities
a) there is an unbridgeable gap between humans and apes.

b) there is no sharp difference between humans and apes.
c) apes can outperform very young children.
5. Scientists disproved claims that the chimps could make sentences, saying
a) their utterances were instrumental.

b) the animal trainers interpreted chimps’ signs to their liking.
c) both a and b
6. Dr Terrace asserts that apes
a) are able to acquire basic grammar.

b) lack syntax.
c) can salivate at the sound of a bell.
7. A young bonobo named Kanzi picked up some of ASL
a) from his adoptive mother.

b) by using the keyboard with lexigrams.
c) by observing his caregivers.
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8. The bonobo was tested with rigorous control procedures (e.g having the trainer
conceal his face) to ensure that he
a) didn’t receive any contextual clues.

b) couldn’t recognise the trainer.
c) could respond to sounds in a knee-jerk manner.
9. Dr Savage-Rumbaugh states that the linguists show little concern for Kanzi’s
a) ability to produce words.

b) comprehension of spoken words.
c) syntactical competence.
10. Noam Chomsky believes that apes
a) would have become extinct millions of years ago if they weren’t able to speak.
b) have linguistic skills, but have chosen not to use them.
c) are capable of far more than the trivialities of animal language experiments.
3. Why would we expect a chimpanzee or any other primate to learn a human language?
VOCABULARY IN USE
1. Match the beginnings of the sentences to their endings. There are two redundant
endings.
1. Animals can be taught to mimic human behaviour

2. Washoe managed to master a
3. Although he could imitate his teachers’ signs,
4. Chomsky claimed that children can learn
5. To date, quite a few people claim that primates can
6. Animals’ vocal cords are way different from those of people,
7. By having a chimp learn a sign language,
a) Nim Chimpsky never made a sign on his own initiative.

b) language because they have a prewired idea of how language works.
c) as well as respond to human sounds and gestures.
d) vocabulary of around 20 signs.
104
14
e) Dr Terrace wanted to prove that chimpanzees can develop real language.

f) therefore researchers weren’t attempting to make a chimp speak.
g) converse freely with humans through sign language or symbols.
h) lacked knowledge of syntactic structure.
i) the chimp did learn some elements of language.
2. Complete the text with the verbs in the box in the right form.
use, point, understand x 2, mimic, overinterpret, master, express, learn, govern
When Koko __________ (1) the sign language gesture for pain and __________ (2) to her
mouth, several specialists, including three dentists, took action to relieve her of the pain.
In a matter of minutes, Koko was undergoing her first complex dental check-up in years.
The offending tooth was extracted, and soon life for Koko was good again.
This situation wouldn’t seem in any way unusual, except for one thing: Koko was not
a human, but a gorilla. Famous worldwide for her language capacities, she has reportedly
__________ (3) more than 1,000 signs of modified ASL and __________ (4) about 2,000
words of spoken English. She can __________ (5) her feelings and thoughts on almost
any subject you care to discuss, including her own pain. Now 40, Koko has become the
subject of the longest continuous inter-species communication programme ever.
As any project of this kind, this project too has been surrounded by various controversies.
Linguistic researchers say that language is not just a list of words, but a frame __________ (6)
by syntax, the art that Koko obviously hasn’t __________ (7). Even if the bar on the defi-
nition of language was lowered, Koko’s signs still wouldn’t be considered real language.
They go on arguing that the gorilla doesn’t really __________ (8) the meaning behind the
sings, and what she does is at best the __________ (9) of her trainers. Another concern
about Koko’s sign language communication is that her trainers often __________ (10) her
gestures, seeing in them what they want to see.
3. Complete the sentences using the words in the box.
symbolic, universal, contextual, elaborate, rudimentary, homologous, impressive,

discredited
1. In a number of __________ studies, several great apes, including chimpanzees and

gorillas, were taught to communicate with their human trainers using either hand
signs or keyboard symbols.
2. Animal language studies have been __________ by most linguists who say that chim-
panzees are just doing clever tricks to get a reward.
3. Noam Chomsky argues that the apes’ abilities aren’t __________ to human language.
4. Dr Shanker claims that although Kanzi was initially dependent upon __________ cues
from the speaker, language is a “social act always embedded in a situation.”
5. By the age of 6, Kanzi had naturalistically acquired a(n) __________ vocabulary of 200
keyboard symbols.
105
6. Dr Savage-Rumbaugh states that her chimpanzees can demonstrate the __________
comprehension skills of two-and-a-half-year-old toddlers.
7. Some animal language researchers believe that apes can use __________ language to
communicate with humans in many ways.
8. According to Chomsky’s theory of __________ grammar, the human brain is
equipped with a “language organ” which contains a unified structure shared by all
languages.
106
15
Nonverbal Behaviours.
Emotions and Facial
Expressions
LEAD-IN
1. Where do our emotions come from? What is it about the human body and mind
that possesses the ability to form emotions in a wide variety of situations? And in the
first place, why do we form these emotions? Are they one thing or many things? Are they
learnt or innate? What, if any, function do they serve? Are they a state of mind, cognitive
judgements, or perceptions of physiological changes? Although these are seemingly
current questions, they really are not since they have been debated for hundreds of years.
Over time numerous theories have been proposed, but many of them have been de-
fied, rejected, and even ridiculed. Although to date no single definition of emotions has
been agreed upon, there is wide consensus that emotional states are generated through
a combination of cognitive appraisal and bodily perceptions. Whatever the definition,
emotions are considered to be mechanisms that set goals and priorities, without which
life wouldn’t be possible.
1. Why do people have emotions?

2. Are there any unneeded emotions? Make a list of emotions that you
believe aren’t really necessary.
3. Facial expressions are linked to certain emotions. Are they learnt or innate?
3. Read the two following short texts about facial expressions. Which opinion in point
2.3 do they seem to support?
107
In his work “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals“, Charles Darwin argued
that babies are able to recognise other people’s facial expressions. He observed this on
the example of his baby son who assumed a melancholy expression in a situation where
a maid in the Darwins’ home pretended to cry. As the boy hadn’t had any previous expe-
rience of seeing a crying person before and as such couldn’t have associated crying with
a feeling of sadness, Darwin claimed that he must have inherited this association.
In “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences“, Gili Peleg, a researcher from the
University of Haifa, described 21interviews she recorded with born-blind people and 30
interviews with sighted people that the blind people were genetically related to. She
asked them to recount experiences of when they were sad, angry, disgusted and happy.
As they did so, their faces assumed the appropriate emotions. Then, she gave them a test
to see what they looked like when they were concentrated and surprised. Next, she
watched all the recorded interviews and observed that although the blind volunteers
had never seen their relatives’ faces before, their facial expressions were strikingly alike.
READING
1. Decide if the following statements are true (T) or false (F). Then read the text to
see if you were right.
1. Without emotions we wouldn’t be able to fully function.

2. Emotions can influence our relationships.
3. Different cultures have different basic emotions.
4. Our emotions are contagious.
5. Our thoughts can influence our emotional state.
2. Read the text to learn more about some of the major theories that have been pro-
posed to explain emotions.
The Complete Guide to Understanding Your Emotions
Your emotions are crucial to your ability to adapt to the challenges of your daily life. When
you feel good, you’re able to shrug off even the most burdensome of tasks, but when
you’re miserable, you view even an enjoyable activity with a sense of gloom and doom.
Emotions also affect our relationships with others. If a friend tells you a tragic story and
you react by snickering instead of looking sad or concerned, you’ll seem rude and insensi-
tive. On the other hand, if you frown when you should smile at your friend’s jokes, you’ll
cause offense for different reasons.
Flying off the handle to a minor annoyance can make you seem hyper or even unbal-
anced. Conversely, if you react with undue glee to a relatively minor piece of good news,
people will also question your maturity and stability. Babies are allowed to shriek with
108
Nonverbal Behaviours. Emotions and Facial Expressions
14
pleasure or howl with rage but as adults, we’re expected to rein in the outward show of
our feelings.
Psychologist Paul Ekman showed that there are six basic emotions that people of all cul-
tures experience and recognize (happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, fear, and disgust).
How and when we express these emotions differs radically by the norms of each of our
cultures, the so-called display rules.
Our emotions affect not only the way others treat us, but our inner sense of well-being. We
tend to believe that whether we are experiencing positive or negative emotions reflects
forces outside our control, blaming everything from our genes to the weather. However,
what many people do not realize is that emotions aren’t strictly controlled by your body’s
physiology the way that reflexes are. You’re not stuck for life with the emotional equip-
ment programmed into your DNA.
To understand the way that you can control your emotions, we first have to take a slight
detour through the early history of psychology. Views about what emotions are, and what
causes them, have changed radically in the last 100 or so years. To take this journey, who
better to start with than William James, the founder of American psychology. Accord-
ing to James, and the closely related views of physiologist Carl Lange, your emotions are
completely governed by your body’s responses. In fact, they are the emotions. Imagine
you’re being pursued by a bear. If you’re like most of us, fear and panic will take over your
entire being, causing your heart to race, your palms to get sweaty, and your stomach to
turn somersaults. James and Lange equated these responses of your autonomic nervous
system with the actual emotion of fear. According to their theory (known to intro psych
students as the infamous “James-Lange Theory”), your bodily reaction doesn’t follow the
emotion, it is the emotion. As James said, “Common sense says we lose our fortune, are
sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are
angry and strike, afraid because we tremble… the more rational statement is that we feel
sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble” (Ellsworth,
1994, p. 222). Quite literally, when James and Lange talked about a “visceral” (or gut) emo-
tional reaction, they meant it.
Many people found the James-Lange theory hard to accept. Common sense seems to
just fine, despite James’ assertion. Apart from the theory just “feeling” wrong (so to speak),
it also failed to meet the test of scientific acceptability and was therefore eventually
dropped as an explanation.
One very similar theory that appeared soon after the James-Lange foray into the field was
that proposed by physiologist Walter Cannon; a view that is now known as the “Cannon-
Bard” theory (reflecting his collaboration with a doctoral student named Philip Bard). This
theory proposes that our emotions are regulated by the reaction of a small structure in
the brain known as the thalamus. It’s the thalamus that would sense, for example, the
onrushing bear. This sensation simultaneously causes the visceral reactions in the body
and the subjective experience in the brain. The Cannon-Bard theory eventually became
discredited too because it did not withstand experimental scrutiny. The thalamus may be
involved in some emotional regulation, but it’s not the brain’s hot spot for our feelings.
Instead, the amygdala seems to be the culprit when it comes to such emotions as fear,
rage, and jealousy.
109
The idea that our emotions may be controllable started to emerge in the theory devel-
oped by Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer in the early 1960s. In their now classic psy-
chology experiment, they led college students to believe that they were receiving a trial
dose of a vitamin. In fact, the experimenters injected the students with epinephrine. The
students then watched a “confederate” (another student acting out experimental instruc-
tions) who became either angry or euphoric while completing a set of questionnaires.
The students exposed to the angry confederate reported that they felt angry; those
exposed to the euphoric confederate said they felt happy. The results showed that the
combination of arousal (caused by epinephrine) and context (the confederate’s behavior)
influenced the emotional state of the experimental subject.
To translate, the Schachter-Singer study implies that your emotions are influenced by
what’s going on in the people around you and which emotions they’re expressing. An-
other term for this is “emotional contagion.” If you’ve ever felt moved to cry at the wed-
ding of people you don’t know very well because everyone around you is weeping into
their hankies, you know how these feelings can catch on. (Why we cry at weddings is
another story.)
Your emotions don’t have to fall prey to those being expressed by the people around you,
though. The cognitive revolution in emotion theory, led by University of Pennsylvania psy-
chiatrist Aaron Beck, showed that our thoughts alone can produce our emotions. Beck’s
studies of depressed individuals led him to the discovery that dysfunctional attitudes
and negatively-framed automatic thoughts are at the root of people’s feelings of sadness.
A dysfunctional attitude is a way of viewing the world that focuses on the negative and
unrealistic aspects of your experiences. A negatively-framed automatic thought is an un-
conscious belief that focuses on your weaknesses rather than your strengths. Together,
dysfunctional attitudes and automatic thoughts create the “negative triad” consisting of
a negative view of yourself, your world, and your future. The extensive research based on
Beck’s theory has led to acceptance of his cognitive-behavioral method of therapy as the
premier treatment of depression.
Even if you’re not clinically depressed, you can borrow a page from Beck’s playbook to
understand your emotions. For instance, sadness is caused by the belief that you’ve lost
or will lose something important to you, anger is caused by the belief that someone has
taken something away from you, and anxiety is based on the belief that something bad
will happen to you. Unrealistically distorting your experiences produces these thoughts
which then lead to your negative emotions.
Rational-emotive psychologist Albert Ellis takes another approach to cognitive theory,
accounting more broadly for our tendencies to let our thoughts produce our own self-
produced misery. Ellis believed that we allow our emotions to be dominated by the
“must’s”: “I must be successful,” “I must be loved,” “I must have what I want.” Ellis talked
about the “A-B-C” model of emotion:
A: Activating event (a friend turns you down for dinner)
+B: Belief (no one likes me)
=C: Consequence (sad mood, feelings of rejection)
To change the consequence (i.e. your emotion), you need to change your beliefs.
To change your beliefs you need to examine them. In this example, you can the belief
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14
that “no one likes me” by looking at the evidence for this belief. Why do you think that no
one likes you? Does one person’s turning you down mean that no one likes you? Does this
mean that no one will ever like you? Does it mean that you must have everyone like you?
It’s through challenging your thoughts and beliefs about yourself that you can change
your emotional reactions. Once you start to pick apart the illogical basis for your emo-
tions you can free yourself from being dominated by the maladaptive emotions of rage,
jealousy, rejection, and dejection and instead boost your adaptive emotions of happi-
ness, contentment, and joy.
Now that you’ve given your thoughts this readjustment, you’ve got one more job to do.
According to the “facial feedback hypothesis” of emotion, the expression on your face can
influence your emotional state. When you activate the muscles that control your facial
expressions, you actually trigger internal changes that lead to the corresponding mood.
If you frown, you’ll feel mad. If you turn the corners of your mouth down, you’ll feel sad.
And if you turn the corners of your mouth up in a smile you’ll feel good. As the song says,
to “make gray skies clear up,” just “put on a happy face!”
With this emotional repair kit, you’ll be able to make more than the gray skies clear up.
You don’t have to be held hostage to your gut, your thalamus, or even your amygdala.
Focus on the thoughts that precede your emotions and you’ll find that you can control
your mood. And remember to smile!
From Psychology Today, May 19, 2012 © Susan Krauss Whitbourne 2012
1. Getting unduly angry over a trivial issue makes you seem
a) desperate for attention.

b) a little crazy.
c) gleeful.
2. Display rules
a) make us suppress emotions.

b) are the same everywhere.
c) vary from culture to culture.
3. Which of the following is not one of the six basic emotions?
a) fear
b) disgust
c) guilt
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4. According to the “James-Lange” theory of emotion,
a) emotions follow our bodily reactions.

b) bodily reactions follow our emotions.
c) emotions and bodily reactions occur simultaneously.
5. According to the “Cannon-Bard” theory of emotion,
a) emotions follow our bodily reactions.

b) bodily reactions follow our emotions.
c) emotions and bodily reactions occur simultaneously.
6. According to Schachter and Singer, you are likely to feel _______ in the presence
of an euphoric “confederate” if you were injected with epinephrine beforehand.
a) more excited
b) less excited
c) nothing
7. Aaron Beck believed that our emotional disorders are
a) caused by our suppressed needs.

b) dependent on our negative thoughts.
c) the result of physiological changes.
8. “Facial feedback hypothesis” of emotion states that
a) facial expressions can affect emotions.

b) emotions can affect facial expressions.
c) facial muscles can affect facial expressions.
VOCABULARY IN USE
1. According to Darwin, all people, irrespective of race or nationality, have the ability to
__________ some emotions in the same ways.
a) display b) demonstrate c) manifest
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14
2. The basic premise of the “James-Lange” theory of emotion claims that your emotions
are __________ by your bodily responses.
a) governed b) ordered c) supervised
3. The “James-Lange” theory proposes that seeing a bear __________ in fast heart rate
which you interpret to mean that you are scared.
a) effects b) results c) causes
4. “Emotional contagion” happens where emotions __________ from person to person.

a) expand b) stretch c) spread
5. The “Cannon-Bard” theory states that emotions are __________ by the thalamus.
a) regulated b) expressed c) shared
6. The “Schachter -Singer” theory of emotion suggests that your emotions are __________
by what’s going on in your immediate environment.
a) related b) felt c) influenced
7. Aaron Beck claimed that emotions can be __________ by our thoughts alone. For
instance, the thought of threat causes anxiety and the thought of loss causes sadness.
a) followed b) perceived c) produced
8. Albert Ellis believed that our __________ feelings and behaviours can be changed if
we are willing to change our thinking.
a) disrupted b) disturbed c) impaired
2. Rewrite the statements below, replacing the underlined phrases with words and
phrases from the box in the right form.
take control of, ignore, control, lose control, be affected by, pessimism, be infectious
1. Adults are expected to rein in the outward show of their feelings, especially while in
public or at work.
2. If you fly off the handle over small matters, you are likely to be considered unbalanced.
3. When we feel good, we are able to shrug off every problem that arises around us.
4. Good feelings can catch on just as easily as bad ones.
5. Although our emotions fall prey to other people’s emotions, our thoughts alone can
create our emotional states.
6. If we feel low, we tend to look even at an enjoyable activity with a sense of gloom and
doom.
7. When attacked by an enemy, fear and panic take over you. You begin to tremble and
chills run down your spine.
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16 Nonverbal Behaviours.
Body Language
LEAD-IN
1. Analyse the people’s body language and what they say. Do you believe them? Give
your reasons.
It’s nothing. I guess

I was just lucky.
Nice ride, enjoy her.
Sure, I’m happy to put in

some overtime.
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2. When Akio Toyoda, Toyota’s president, bowed slightly at a press conference and apo-
logised for safety problems that led to the recall of more than 8 million cars and at least
19 deaths, it was commented on widely in the media.
1. As was said in the previous chapter, the way we express our emotions and feelings
differs from culture to culture. What does a bow mean in Japan?
Why do you think Akido Toyoda’s bow was analysed for its meaning?
2. Can you think of other examples of cultural differences in nonverbal behaviour?
3. For millions of years, human’s ancestors struggled usually successfully with hunger,
disease and daily dangers of their time. They did so by effectively communicating their
feelings, needs and observations. Before language they had to rely on nonverbal com-
munication and more specifically on facial expressions, body language, gestures, or
chemical scent. Despite the passage of time, all of these have remained in us. Although
we primarily communicate by means of a language, much (if not most) of what we want
to say is conveyed through nonverbal behaviours.
Our bodies are controlled at all times by our brains. Nothing in us functions without the
brain and when it comes to nonverbal communications, there is a very close interaction
between our minds and bodies.
Since we are aware of this interaction, by observing the body we can tell what is going on
in other people’s heads with regard to emotions, intentions, thoughts or desires.
1. What is body language?

2. How important is it in our daily communication?
3. Which of the following is not typically body language?
facial expressions
breathing rate
pitch of voice
pace of voice
tone of voice
posture
gestures
eye contact
skin colouring
5. Match the facial and body gestures from column A with their meaning from column B.
A B
1. fold your arms a) good luck
2. clench your fists b) agreement, understanding, “yes”
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3. cross your fingers c) greeting, respect
4. rub your eyes d) getting someone attention, marking the beat of music
5. bow e) confusion, thinking about something
6. nod f) disagreement, “no”
7. pat sb on the back g) impatience
8. shrug your shoulders h) disagreement, annoyance
9. wave i) applause
10. hug j) disbelief, doubt
11. drum your fingers k) hostility, anger
12. clap your hands l) lack of knowledge, concern
13. shake your head m) “hello” or “goodbye”
14. scratch your head n) support, friendship, love
15. snap your fingers o) encouragement, congratulations, consolation
READING
1. This article mentions some other facial and body gestures such as lip compressing,
jaw clenching, lip biting, neck touching, lip puckering and eyebrow arching. Do you know
their meanings? What part of the brain is responsible for our body language? Read the
text to find out.
The Key to Understanding Body Language
Since writing “What Every Body is Saying,” the question I am most often asked is, “What
nonverbal behaviors should I be looking for and are they different at home, at work, or
in relationships?” Perhaps this will help to clarify the matter. Somewhere in our hominid
past, as with most animals, we developed the ability to communicate nonverbally and
that still remains our primary method of communication, especially when it comes to
emotions. Charles Darwin first and Paul Ekman much later, have written about the uni-
versality of emotions in part because, as Joseph Ledoux has pointed out, these and other
survival behaviors are governed by our very elegant limbic brain.
The governance of homeostasis, procreation, emotion, spotting and reacting to threats,
as well as assuring our survival, are all heavy responsibilities of the limbic system. Limbic
reaction are immediate, sure, time-tested, and honest and apply to us all. Limbic reac-
tions are hard wired in us, part of our paleo-circuits which we can see in the limbic behav-
iors of children who are born blind. Which is why in every culture, we inch towards the
edge of the cliff, and don’t bound over to look. Our limbic brain simply does not allow it.
Our needs, feelings, thoughts, and intentions are processed by the limbic brain and ex-
pressed in our body language. A baby which doesn’t like a certain food will purse or puck-
er her lips in Boston and in Borneo. And babies everywhere delight (eyes dilate) when
they see their mothers. These limbic expressions are very simple and binary through
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Nonverbal Behaviours. Body Language
16
a constellation of behaviors that fall under limbically driven comfort/discomfort displays.

From the time we are born, we are either: warm or cold, contented or displeased, hap-
py or sad. And we show this through our facial and body gestures, much the same way
throughout our lives.
Someone gives us bad news and our lips compress, the bus leaves without us and we are
clenching our jaws, rubbing our necks. We are asked to work another weekend and the
orbits of our eyes narrow as our chin lowers. These are discomfort displays and we trans-
mit how we feel or what we are thinking, through our bodies, because this is what our
limbic brain has perfected over millions of years.
Conversely, when we see someone we really like our eyebrows will arch defying gravity,
our facial muscles will relax, and our arms become more pliable (even extended) so we
can welcome this person. In the presence of someone we love, we will mirror their behav-
ior (isopraxis), tilt our heads, and blood will flow to our lips making them full, even as our
pupils dilate. Once again, our limbic brain communicates through our bodies precisely
the true sentiments that we feel and orchestrates accurate corresponding nonverbal dis-
plays.
When there is conflict between what is said verbally and what is transmitted nonver-
bally, the body almost always holds sway. Why? Again because this has been our primary
means of communication for millions of years. So when a person says, “Yes I am happy to
help this weekend,” and in doing so you see lip biting, stillness in the face, and neck touch-
ing, you can be certain there are issues there. What are they? They could be anything:
from a personal dislike of you, to a previously scheduled event that conflicts. But what is
important, is that in response to the question, “Will you help me this weekend?” there was
an authentic limbic response of discomfort on the part of the other individual, which was
reflected in the body (discomfort displays) and which was absent in their words.
Whether in business, at home, or in relationships, always focus on the comfort/discom-
fort paradigm and ask yourself; in response to any question or behavioral cue, am I see-
ing comfort or discomfort? By focusing on this it will lead you to explore issues that are
concealed, verbally denied, or to verify the validity of sentiments expressed. We are con-
stantly transmitting information as to our thoughts, feelings, and intentions through our
limbic responses. Most likely the behaviors you see will fit under one of these two catego-
ries (comfort/discomfort) for which we can thank that emotional part of the brain that
first aroused Darwin so very long ago: the limbic system.
The essence of the article comes from Joe Navarro’s book What Every Body is Saying (2008) and his web site at
www.jnforensics.com.
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to the text.
1. The limbic system is not responsible for controlling
a) sexual behaviour.
b) emotions relevant to our survival.
c) speech and language.
2. Limbic reactions happen
a) instantly.
b) with delay.
c) within several seconds.
3. Lip puckering in small babies is
a) a universal discomfort display.

b) especially common in Boston and Borneo.
c) a natural reaction to tasting something sweet.
4. If you are watching a man and a woman in a conversation and the man’s pupils
dilate, it usually means that the man
a) feels uncomfortable around the woman.

b) dislikes the woman.
c) finds the woman attractive.
5. When we stand at the edge of a cliff, our brain makes us
a) stand still.
b) feel scared.
c) look down.
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Nonverbal Behaviours. Body Language
16
6. We express our facial and body gestures
a) inconsistently from one situation to another.

b) differently in different times of our lives.
c) similarly throughout our lives.
7. Our limbic brain
a) orchestrates what we feel and what we transmit nonverbally.

b) orchestrates what we feel and what we transmit verbally.
c) orchestrates our verbal and nonverbal transmissions.
8. Which of the following is not true about limbic reactions?
a) Limbic reactions are unreliable.

b) Limbic reactions are something we are born with.
c) Limbic reactions are hardly possible to fake.
3. People in some professions need to be more aware of body language than others.
What professions are these people in? What can they do to use body language to their
advantage?
VOCABULARY IN USE
1. Complete the sentences below with using verbs of facial expressions and body ges-
tures. If in doubt, refer to Lead-in 5.
1. Mark ___________________ in disbelief thinking that he was only imagining it.

2. The audience ___________________ as the performance ended.
3. The man ___________________ on the table as he waited impatiently for the wait-
ress to bring him a drink.
4. Robert ___________________ at us when he was getting on the train.
5. Dad __________ me ___________ to congratulate me on passing the exam.
6. Hugh narrowed his eyes and ___________________ in anger but he didn’t say any-
thing.
7. Johnny ___________________ across his chest and stared at his parents stubbornly.
8. I offered him a drink but he ___________________ .
9. We ___________________ each other when we met at the airport.
10. The boy ___________________ to his neighbour as he greeted him.
11. I will ___________________ for you, dear. Best of luck!
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12. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Yes, I’m fine,” she ___________________ .
13. Paul ___________________, thinking of what to say.
14. She ___________________ to get his attention.
15. Bob ___________________ to say that he didn’t know the answer.
2. Match the items from the two columns to make expressions.
A B
1. hominid a) displays
2. survival b) muscles
3. limbic c) scent
4. discomfort d) brain
5. body e) ancestors
6. facial f ) behaviour
7. chemical g) language
3. Complete the sentences below with the expressions from exercise 2.
1. ___________________ such as lip biting or jaw clenching reveal how we feel or what
we are thinking.
2. We communicate with ___________________ and what we say to people is not
always what we feel.
3. She relaxed her ___________________, which was a sign that she was beginning to
get more comfortable.
4. Sometimes when we are scared our ___________________ takes over and we are un-
able to think rationally.
5. Before there was a spoken language, man’s ___________________ had to rely on non-
verbal communication to express their needs and feelings.
6. Feelings of fear, disgust or anxiety can be communicated through _________________.
7. The most instinctive ___________________ that humans display in the face of danger
is flight.
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17
Differences Between
People. The Roles of
Genes and Environment
LEAD-IN
1. Discuss the question.
To what extent does our personality depend on the way we were brought up by
our parents, and to what extent does it depend on our genetic make-up?
2. The nature vs nurture (genes vs the environment) argument, one of the oldest in
psychology, asks: What is it that makes us what we are? Is it the sum of all the experiences
or is it our genetic make-up? Furthermore, what is the interplay between the nature and
nurture? These seem like basic questions, but they are not simple at all.
Plato held that behaviour and knowledge were due to innate factors. A child begins life
with knowledge already present within him and the environment’s purpose is to remind
him of the information he already knows. Similar views were argued by René Descartes.
Conversely, Aristotle believed in what is known as tabula rasa, which suggests that the
mind is merely a blank slate on which nothing has been written. According to him,
a child is not born with knowledge, he just acquires it through experience. In 17th cen-
tury, the tabula rasa theory was rediscovered and systematised by John Locke. Like Aris-
totle, he claimed that the mind upon entering the world is nothing and contains nothing.
It is experiences that “write” a person.
Although this debate has continued to date, there has been no solid answer to how our
personality and intelligence are shaped. However, most people seem to have come to
distrust any radical who claims that the mind is a blank slate, or that genes control our
behaviours at all times. In fact, the real controversy involves how much of our behaviour
is caused by genes, and how much is caused by the environment.
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3. Read the opening lines of This Be The Verse by Philip Larking. What perspective does it
offer on the role of parents in a child’s development? Which side of the nature vs nurture
argument does it support? Give your reasons.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra just for you.
READING
1. Read the first paragraph of the text. How much do you think parents matter in how
their children turn out?
The Parent Trap
Surely there is no more cherished, yet humbling, idea than the conviction that parents
hold in their hands the power to shape their child’s tomorrows. And the evidence for it
is as impossible to ignore as the toddler throwing a tantrum in the grocery store when
Daddy refuses to buy him M&Ms: setting reasonable, but firm, limits teaches children self-
control and good behavior, but being either too permissive or too dictatorial breeds little
brats. Giving your little girl a big hug when she skins her knee makes her feel loved and
secure, which enables her to form trusting relationships when she blooms into a young
woman. Reading and talking to children fosters a love of reading; divorce puts them at
risk of depression and academic failure. Physical abuse makes them aggressive, but pa-
tience and kindness, as shown by the parents who soothe their child’s frustration at not
being able to play a favorite piano piece rather than belittling him, leaves a child better
able to handle distress both in youth and in adulthood. Right?
2. Read the remaining text. According to Judith Rich Harris, how much are parents re-
sponsible for their children’s upbringing? What parental measures are mentioned? Can
you see any good points that the author is making? Do you agree with all she claims?
Wrong, wrong and wrong again, contends Judith Rich Harris. In a new book, “The Nurture
Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do; Parents Matter Less Than You Think
and Peers Matter More.“ Harris is igniting a bonfire of controversy for her central claim: the
belief “that what influences children’s development... is the way their parents bring them
up... is wrong.” After parents contribute an egg or a sperm filled with DNA, she argues,
virtually nothing they do or say – no kind words or hugs, slaps or tirades; neither permis-
siveness nor authoritarianism; neither encouragement nor scorn – makes a smidgen of
difference to what kind of adult the child becomes. Nothing parents do will affect his
behavior, mental health, ability to form relationships, sense of self-worth, intelligence or
personality. What genes don’t do, peers do.
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Differences Between People. The Roles of Genes and Environment
17
Although Harris’s book lists some 750 scientific papers, articles and books as references,
maybe all she really had to do to reach this conclusion was keep good notes about the
goings-on in her own suburban New Jersey colonial. Harris and her husband, Charles,
had one daughter, Nomi, on New Year’s Day, 1966, and adopted a second, Elaine, almost
four years later. The girls grew up in the same home “filled to overflowing with books and
magazines, where classical music was played, where jokes were told,” recalls Harris. Both
girls took ballet lessons; both learned the crawl at Mrs. Dee’s Swim School. Both were
read books by their parents and both delighted in birthday parties with homemade cake.
Both experienced the sorrow and stress of a sick mother (Harris developed a mysterious
autoimmune illness, part lupus and part systemic sclerosis, when Elaine was 6 and Nomi
10, and was often confined to bed). Yet Nomi was a well-behaved child who “didn’t want
to do anything we didn’t want her to do,” says Harris over iced tea in her kitchen. Elaine,
adopted at 2 months, was defiant by the age of 11. She angrily announced to her parents
that she didn’t have to listen to them. When they grounded her once, at 15, she left for
school the next morning – and didn’t come back that night. Nomi was a model student;
Elaine dropped out of high school.
It made Harris wonder. Why was she having about as much influence on Elaine as the
fluttering wings of a butterfly do on the path of a hurricane? And it made her mad. “All
of these studies that supposedly show an influence of parents on children – they don’t
prove what they purport to,” she fumes.
Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University says her book is “based on solid
science.” John Bruer, president of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, which funds edu-
cation programs, praises it as “a needed corrective to this belief that early experiences
between the child and parents have a deterministic, lifelong effect.” And linguist Steven
Pinker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology predicts that “The Nurture Assump-
tion” “will come to be seen as a turning point in the history of psychology.”
So far, though, that’s a minority view, and many scientists are nothing short of scathing.
“I am embarrassed for psychology,” says Harvard’s Jerome Kagan, arguably one of the
deans of child development. “She’s all wrong,” says psychologist Frank Farley of Temple
University, president of the APA division that honored Harris. “She’s taking an extreme
position based on a limited set of data. Her thesis is absurd on its face, but consider what
might happen if parents believe this stuff! Will it free some to mistreat their kids, since ‘it
doesn’t matter’? Will it tell parents who are tired after a long day that they needn’t bother
even paying any attention to their kid since ‘it doesn’t matter’?” Psychologist Wendy Wil-
liams of Cornell University, who studies how environment affects IQ, argues that “there
are many, many good studies that show parents can affect how children turn out in both
cognitive abilities and behavior. By taking such an extreme position, Harris does a tre-
mendous disservice.”
In fact, neither scholars nor parents have always believed that parents matter. Sure, today
rows upon rows of parent-advice books fill stores, parenting magazines clog newsstands,
and new parents know the names Penelope Leach and T. Berry Brazelton better than they
do their newborns’. But a leading tome on child development published in 1934 didn’t
even include a chapter on parents. It was only in the 1950s that researchers began to
seek the causes of differences among children in the ways that parents raised them. Now
123
Harris is part of a growing backlash against the idea that parents can mold their child like
Play-Doh.
With an impish wit and a chatty style, Harris spins a persuasive argument that the 1934
book got it right. Her starting point is behavioral genetics. This field examines how much
of the differences between people reflect heredity, the genes they inherit from their par-
ents. Over the years, researchers have concluded that variations in traits like impulsivity,
aggression, thrill-seeking, neuroticism, intelligence, amiability and shyness are partly due
to genes. “Partly” means anywhere from 20 to 70 percent. The other 30 to 80 percent
reflects “environment.” “Environment” means influences like an encounter with a bully,
a best-friendship that lasts decades, an inspiring math teacher. It also includes, you’d
think, how your parents reared you. But Harris argues that “environment” includes a pa-
rental contribution of precisely zero (unless you count Mom and Dad’s decision about
which neighborhood to live in, which we’ll get to later). When she says parents don’t
“matter,” she means they do not leave a lasting effect – into adulthood. (She accepts that
how parents treat a child affects how that child behaves at home, as well as whether the
grown child regards the parents with love, resentment or anger.)
To reach her parents-don’t-matter conclusion, Harris first demolishes some truly lousy
studies that have become part of the scientific canon. A lot of research, for instance, con-
cludes that divorce puts kids at greater risk of academic failure and problem behavior
like drug use and drinking. Other studies claim to show that parents who treat their kids
with love and respect, and who get along well with others, have children who also have
successful personal relationships. Yet neither sort of study “proves the power of nurture
at all,” Harris says emphatically. Why? They do not take into account genetics. Maybe the
reason some parents are loving or competent or prone to divorce or whatever is genetic.
After all, being impulsive and aggressive makes you more likely to divorce; both tenden-
cies are partly genetic, so maybe you passed them on to your kids. Then it’s their genes,
and not seeing their parents’ marriage fail, that explain the kids’ troubles, Harris claims.
And if being patient and agreeable makes you more likely to be a loving and patient
parent, and if you pass that nice DNA to your kids, then again it is the genes and not the
parenting that made the kids nice.
Do your own eyes tell you that being a just-right disciplinarian – not too strict, not too
easy – teaches children limits and self-control? Not so fast. Harris points out that children,
through their innate temperament, can elicit a particular parenting style. For example,
a little hellion will likely make her parents first impatient and then angry and then re-
signed. It isn’t parental anger and resignation that made the kid, say, a runaway and
a dropout. Rather, the child’s natural, genetic tendencies made her parents behave a cer-
tain way; those same tendencies made her a runaway and a dropout. Again, argues Har-
ris, not the parents’ fault. By this logic, of course, parents don’t get credit, either. You think
reading to your toddler made her an academic star? Uh-uh, says Harris. Maybe kids get
read to more if they like to get read to. If so, liking books is also what makes them good in
school, not listening to “Goodnight Moon.”
Studies of twins seem to support Harris’s demotion of parents. “[I]dentical twins reared in
the same home,” says Harris, “... are no more alike than identical twins separated in infancy
and reared in different homes.” Apparently, being reared by the same parents did nothing
to increase twins’ alikeness. Same with siblings. “[B]eing reared by the same parents [has]
124
17
little or no effect on [their] adult personalities,” writes Harris. “The genes they share can
entirely account for any resemblances between them; there are no leftover similarities
for the shared environment to explain.” By “shared environment,” she means things like
parents’ working outside the home, battling constantly, being dour or affectionate. A son
might be a cold fishlike Dad, or react against him and become a warm puppy. “If children
can go either way, turning out like their parents or going in the opposite direction,” says
Harris, “then what you are saying is that parents have no predictable effects on their chil-
dren. You are saying that this parenting style does not produce this trait in the adult.”
What Harris offers in place of this “nurture assumption” is the idea that peer groups teach
children how to behave out in the world. A second-grade girl identifies with second-grade
girls and adopts the behavioral norms of that group. Kids model themselves on other
kids, “taking on [the group’s]attitudes, behaviors, speech, and styles of dress and adorn-
ment,” Harris says. Later, a child gravitates toward the studious kids or the mischief makers
or whomever. Because people try to become more similar to members of their group and
more distinct from members of other groups, innate differences get magnified. The jock
becomes jockier, the good student more studious. This all begins in elementary school.
Harris’s bottom line: “The world that children share with their peers determines the sort
of people they will be when they grow up.”
Is there no way parents can shape their children? Harris offers this: have enough money to
live in a good neighborhood so your children associate with only the ‘’right’’ peers. Dress
your sons and daughters in the fashions of the moment so they are not ostracized. If their
appearance is so odd that they are in danger of being shunned, spring for orthodontia.
Or, Harris writes, “if you can afford it, or your health insurance will cover it, plastic surgery.’’
From Newsweek, September 7, 1998 © 1998 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC. All rights reserved.
Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistri-
bution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.
to the text.
1. According to Judith Rich Harris, children behave like their parents because
a) parents raised them in a particular way.

b) when in Rome do as the Romans do.
c) they’re genetically related.
2. Harris argues that children’s personalities are shaped by the experiences they have
the home.
a) inside
b) outside
c) both a and b
125
3. She goes on to claim that how parents treat their children depends largely on
a) what the children are like.

b) what the parents are like.
c) the house rules.
4. She asserts that children turn out the way
a) their parents bring them up.

b) their peers influence them.
c) both a and b
5. Identical twins brought up in the same home are identical twins

brought up apart.
a) very similar to
b) much different from
c) no longer like
6. As Harris says, the way parents treat their child affects
a) how the child behaves at home.

b) how the child behaves at school.
c) how the child behaves with peers.
7. Even Harris admits that
a) peers often influence each other in negative ways.

b) siblings who grow up together can influence each other heavily.
c) parents have an influence on their children in some respects.
4. Can you think of any examples that support/refute Judith Rich Harris’s thesis?
126
17
VOCABULARY IN USE
1. Harris questions the idea that the personality of individuals is determined by the way
they were turned out/raised/brought up by their parents.
2. Parents like to think that they mould/teach/shape their children’s behaviour, but Ju-
dith Rich Harris claims that parenting doesn’t really matter.
3. According to Harris, no parental measures make real difference to what kind of adult
the child becomes/turns out/breeds.
4. Elaine’s biological parents had no part in her upbringing/breeding/nurture.
5. How parents treat/rear/grow up their children has a major influence/effect/affect on
the way they relate to them.
6. Mike brought up/turned out/grew up this way because of his supportive father.
7. Permissive and overindulgent parents can breed/raise/grow spoilt children.
8. Harris stresses that children’s personalities are to a significant extent effected/shaped/
influenced by their peer groups.
9. When children grow up/mature/raise they are accountable for their actions.
10. Not everyone supports the belief that good parental care is essential for a child to
grow up/rear/blossom into a confident and successful adult.
11. Children model/identify/pattern themselves mostly on their peers no matter if it is at-
titude, style of dress or interests.
12. Being a malleable child, Connor quickly modelled/adopted/took on the style of his
peers.
foster, inherit, produce, form, set, matter, put, contribute, pay, soothe
1. We can’t change the genes we __________ from our parents.

2. It’s believed that the authoritarian parenting style __________ children who are with-
drawn and uncertain.
3. Reading aloud to children can __________ a love of books from an early age.
4. Overprotection __________ kids at risk of becoming less independent than their
peers.
5. She never failed to __________ attention to her son even when she came home late
from work.
6. Physical abuse can severely impair children’s abilities to __________ trusting relation-
ships.
7. Any loving mother would try to __________ her kid’s fears.
8. Some go as far as to claim that parents __________ little to the development of their
children’s personalities.
127
9. Parents discipline their children by __________ limits on how far they can and cannot
go.
10. Some psychologists say that parents __________, but not as much as we think.
3. Match the terms in column A with their definitions in column B.
A B
1. cold fish a) a child who has left home without telling anyone and
does not intend to come back
2. brat b) someone who quits school
3. bully c) a mischievous person, troublemaker
4. hellion d) an unfriendly and unemotional person
5. dropout e) someone who plays a lot of sports
6. runaway f ) a spoiled, ill-mannered child
7. jock g) a person who hurts or intimidates those who are weaker
128
18
Theories of
Moral Development
LEAD-IN
1. How to teach children the difference between right and wrong?

2. Why is socialisation critically important?
3. Is morality a consequence of the culture in which we grow up or our
innate capacity? Is it a matter of nature or nurture?
2. Read the text. Do you agree with the view that children are born as tyrannical brats?
“The Onion“, an online publication, reports that a study published in “The Journal Of
Child PsychologyAnd Psychiatry“ has concluded that an estimated 98% of children un-
der the age of 10 show no empathetic behaviour and little social consciousness.
According to Dr Leonard Mateo, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, a lead psy-
chologist of this study, until you have been in the presence of one of these “little devils”
for long enough, you’d never believe what they are really capable of. Children subcon-
sciously try to manipulate people to get their way and show little regard for anything
other than themselves. “These people – if you can even call them that – deliberately vio-
late every social norm without ever pausing to consider how their selfish behavior might
affect others. It’s as if they have no concept of anyone but themselves,” he said.
He goes on to call children “remorseless sociopaths”, “tiny psychopaths”, “callous mon-
sters” who “would remorselessly exploit” and “display superficial charm, pathological ly-
ing, manipulative behaviors, and a grandiose sense of self-importance.”
Dr Mateo comments further, “Children will use any tool at their disposal to secure grati-
fication, and as soon as the desire is fulfilled, be it some material want or simply an insa-
129
tiable and narcissistic desire for validation, they quickly become bored and lose interest
in their victims, all the while thinking only of satisfying whatever their next hedonistic
craving might be.”
3. The findings of the study have taken heavy criticism from many people, especially
parents and teachers. What, in your opinion, might they have said?
4. Childhood is not only a period of cognitive development, but also a time of moral
development. Morality is, however, very different from physical life in such a way that
the truths of physics are universal. Objects are governed by the same physical laws eve-
rywhere, whilst moral principles vary as they are a synthesis of the biological and the
cultural. Perhaps, there is no such thing as a universal moral code.
Many psychologists have long argued that humans begin life as amoral blank slates.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau called the baby “a perfect idiot.” Sigmund Freud said that people
start their lives as “amoral animals.“William James described the inner world of babies
as “one great, blooming, buzzing confusion”. However, a recent study at the infant cog-
nition centre at Yale University suggests, contrary to conventional wisdom, that we are
actually born with a hard-wired morality. Professor Paul Bloom, a psychologist involved
in this study, said: “A growing body of evidence, though, suggests that humans do have
a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed
experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling
even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone.”
If this is so, then morality is an inherited characteristic. An opposing view is that of de-
fenders of nurture, who suppose morality to be an acquired characteristic. According to
this view, we internalise, by a process known as socialisation, the values of our society
passed on by customs, laws and by application of sanctions.
READING
1. Before you read the text, consider Kohlberg’s moral dilemma.
The Heinz Dilemma
“In Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug
that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the
same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist
was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium
and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman’s husband, Heinz, went
to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $1,000,
which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him
to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said, “No, I discovered the drug and
I’m going to make money from it.” So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man’s store
to steal the drug for his wife. Should the husband have done that?”
(Kohlberg, 1963)
130
Theories of Moral Development
18
1. What should Heizn have done and why?

2. How would children respond to this dilemma?
2. Read the text about the moral life of children and then answer the questions that
follow.
How Kids Grow The Good, The Bad And The Difference
Like many children, Sara Newland loves animals. But unlike most youngsters, she has
turned that love into activism. Five years ago, during a trip to the zoo, the New York City
girl learned about the plight of endangered species, and decided to help. With the aid
of her mother, Sara – then about 4 years old – baked cakes and cookies and sold them
on the sidewalk near her apartment building. She felt triumphant when she raised $35,
which she promptly sent in to the World Wildlife Fund.
A few weeks later, triumph turned into tears when the fund wrote Sara asking for more
money. “She was devastated because she thought she had taken care of that problem,”
says Polly Newland, who then patiently told her daughter that there are lots of big prob-
lems that require continual help from lots of people. That explanation worked. Sara, now
9, has expanded her causes. Through her school, she helps out at an inner-city child-care
center; she also regularly brings meals to homeless people in her neighborhood.
A sensitive parent can make all the difference in encouraging – or discouraging – a child’s
developing sense of morality and values. Psychologists say that not only are parents im-
portant as role models, they also have to be aware of a child’s perception of the world at
different ages and respond appropriately to children’s concerns. “I think the capacity for
goodness is there from the start,” says Thomas Lickona, a professor of education at the
State University of New York at Cortland and author of “Raising Good Children.” But, he
says, parents must nurture those instincts just as they help their children become good
readers or athletes or musicians.
That’s not an easy task these days. In the past, schools and churches played a key role in
fostering moral development. Now, with religious influence in decline and schools wa-
vering over the way to teach values, parents are pretty much on their own. Other recent
social trends have complicated the transmission of values. “We’re raising a generation
that is still groping for a good future direction,” says psychologist William Damon, head
of Brown University’s education department. Many of today’s parents were raised in the
‘60s, the age of permissiveness. Their children were born in the age of affluence, the ‘80s,
when materialism was rampant. “It’s an unholy combination,” says Damon.
These problems may make parents feel they have no effect on how their children turn out.
But many studies show that parents are still the single most important influence on their
children. Lickona says that the adolescents most likely to follow their consciences rather
than give in to peer pressure are those who grew up in “authoritative” homes, where rules
are firm but clearly explained and justified – as opposed to “authoritarian” homes (where
rules are laid down without explanation) or “permissive” homes.
131
The way a parent explains rules depends, of course, on the age of the child. Many adults
assume that kids see right and wrong in grown-up terms. But what may be seen as “bad”
behavior by an adult may not be bad in the child’s eyes. For example, a young child may
not know the difference between a fanciful tale and a lie, while older kids – past the age
of 5 – do know.
Many psychologists think that in children, the seeds of moral values are emotional, not
intellectual. Such traits as empathy and guilt – observable in the very young – represent
the beginning of what will later be a conscience. Even newborns respond to signs of dis-
tress in other. In a hospital nursery, for example, a bout of crying by one infant will trigger
wailing all around. Research on children’s attachment to their mothers shows that babies
who are most secure (and those whose mothers are most responsive to their needs) later
turn out to be leaders in school: self-directed and eager to learn. They are also most likely
to absorb parental values.
The first modern researcher to describe the stages of a child’s moral development was
Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. In his groundbreaking 1932 book, “The Moral Judgment
of the Child,” he described three overlapping phases of childhood, from 5 to 12. The first
is the “morality of constraint” stage: children accept adult rules as absolutes. Then comes
the “morality of cooperation,” in which youngsters think of morality as equal treatment.
Parents of siblings will recognize this as the “If he got a new Ninja Turtle, I want one, too,”
stage. In the third, kids can see complexity in moral situations. They can understand ex-
tenuating circumstances in which strict equality might not necessarily mean fairness (“He
got a new Ninja Turtle, but I got to go to the ball game, so it’s OK.”)
Although Piaget’s conclusions have been expanded by subsequent researchers, his work
forms the basis for most current theories of moral development. In a study begun in
the 1950s, Lawrence Kohlberg, a Harvard professor, used “moral dilemmas” to define six
phases. He began with 50 boys who were 10,13 and 16. Over the next 20 years, he asked
them their reactions to carefully constructed dilemmas. The most famous concerns a man
named Heinz, whose wife was dying of cancer. The boys were told, in part, that a drug
that might save her was a form of radium discovered by the town pharmacist. But the
pharmacist was charging 10 times the cost of manufacture for the drug and Heinz could
not afford it – although he tried to borrow money from everyone he knew. Heinz begged
the pharmacist to sell it more cheaply, but he refused. So Heinz, in desperation, broke into
the store and stole the drug. Kohlberg asked his subjects: Did Heinz do the right thing?
Why?
Kohlberg and others found that at the first stage, children base their answers simply on
the likelihood of getting caught. As they get older, their reasons for doing the right thing
become more complex. For example, Lickona says typical 5-year-olds want to stay out of
trouble. Kids from 6 to 9 characteristically act out of self-interest; most 10- to 13-year-olds
crave social approval. Many 15- to l9-year-olds have moved on to thinking about main-
taining the social system and being responsible.
Over the years, educators have used these theories to establish new curricula at schools
around the country that emphasize moral development. The Lab School, a private pre-
school in Houston, was designed by Rheta DeVries, a student of Kohlberg’s. The teacher
is a “companion/guide,” not an absolute authority figure. The object of the curriculum
132
Theories of Moral Development
18
is to get kids to think about why they take certain actions and to think about conse-
quences. For example, if two children are playing a game and one wants to change the
rules, the teacher would ask the other child if that was all right. “Moral development oc-
curs best when children live in an environment where fairness and justice is a way of life,”
says DeVries.
Not everyone agrees with the concept of moral development as a series of definable
stages. Other researchers say that the stage theories downplay the role of emotion, em-
pathy and faith. In “The Moral Life of Children,” Harvard child psychiatrist Robert Coles
tells the story of a 6-year-old black girl named Ruby, who braved vicious racist crowds to
integrate her New Orleans school – and then prayed for her tormentors each night before
she went to bed. Clearly, Coles says, she did not easily fall into any of Kohlberg’s or Piaget’s
stages. Another criticism of stage theorists comes from feminist psychologists, including
Carol Gilligan, author of “In a Different Voice.” Gilligan says that the stages represent only
male development with the emphasis on the concepts of justice and rights, not female
development, which, she says, is more concerned with responsibility and caring.
But many psychologists say parents can use the stage theories to gain insight into their
children’s development. At each phase, parents should help their children make the
right decisions about their behavior. In his book, Lickona describes a typical situation in-
volving a 5-year-old who has hit a friend over the head with a toy while playing at the
friend’s house. Lickona suggests that the parents, instead of simply punishing their son,
talk to him about why he hit his friend (the boy played with a toy instead of with him) and
about what he could do next time instead of hitting. The parents, Lickona says, should
also discuss how the friend might have felt about being hit. By the end of the discussion,
the child should realize that there are consequences to his behavior. In Lickona’s example,
the child decides to call his friend and apologize – a positive ending.
For older children, Lickona suggests family “fairness meetings” to alleviate tension. If, for
example, a brother and sister are constantly fighting, the parents could talk to both of
them about what seem to be persistent sources of irritation. Then, youngsters can think
of ways to bring about a truce – or at least a cease-fire.
Children who learn these lessons can become role models for other youngsters – and for
adults as well. Sara Newland tells her friends not to be scared of homeless people (most
of them rush by without even a quick glance, she says). “Some people think, ‘Why should
I give to them?’ ” she says. “But I feel that you should give. If everyone gave food, they
would all have decent meals.” One recent evening, she and her mother fixed up three
plates of beef stew to give out. They handed the first to the homeless man who’s always
on their corner. Then, Sara says, they noticed two “rough-looking guys” down the block.
Sara’s mother, a little scared, walked quickly past them. Then, she changed her mind and
asked them if they’d like some dinner. “They said, ‘Yes, God bless you’ ,” Sara recalls. “At
that moment, they weren’t the same people who were looking through a garbage can
for beer bottles a little while before. It brought out a part of them that they didn’t know
they had.”
From Newsweek, May 31, 1991 © 1991 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC. All rights reserved. Used by
permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution,
or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.
133
1. What is the difference between authoritative, authoritarian and permissive homes?

2. How many stages did Piaget and Kohlberg claim were involved in moral development?
3. How, according to Rheta DeVries, should children be taught moral principles?
4. Why does Robert Cole criticise stage-based theories of moral development?
5. What does Carol Gilligan claim about moral tendencies in men and women?
6. How can stage theory, according to Thomas Lickona, help parents to raise children?
VOCABULARY IN USE
1. Choose the correct option.
1. Parents need to nature/nurture children’s developing sense of morality and values.

2. Children rised/raised in permissive homes are likely to succumb to peer/pear pressure.
3. Traits/Trails of empathy and guilt form the foundation of what will later be a con-
science.
4. Some critics of the theory of moral development argue that it ignores and down-
plays/replays the role of emotion and empathy.
5. To elevate/alleviate tension between siblings, parents should hold “fairness meet-
ings”, where a conflict is solved in a way that is fair to everybody.
6. Maturing changes children’s perception/reception of the world and their ability to in-
teract with it.
7. Through the stage theories, parents gain valuable sight/insight into children’s moral
development as well as and their role in shaping that development.
8. The suffering of others is aversive/averse even to newborn babies, who cry at signs of
distress in other babies.
2. Rewrite the statements below, replacing the underlined words/phrases with words/
phrases from the box. Make any necessary changes.
develop, innate, in their own, norm, be subject, reveal, avoid, encourage
1. Children always act out of self-interest.

2. Moral development in children depends highly upon environment where fairness
and justice is a way of life.
3. The woman’s help brought out a part of him that he hadn’t known he had.
4. Many psychologists believe that the capacity for goodness is bred in the bone.
5. The way parents treat their children has a great deal of influence on how they turn out.
6. A sensitive parent knows how to foster a child’s developing sense of morality and values.
7. Adolescents from authoritative homes are very unlikely to give in to pressure from
their peer group.
8. In the earliest of Kohlberg’s levels, children stay out of trouble because they fear pun-
ishment.
134
19
Man and Society.
In-Group versus
Out-Group
LEAD-IN
1. What are in-groups and out-groups?

2. How do people respond to in-group members and out-group members?
3. What are the causes of intergroup conflicts?
4. What are the consequences of such conflicts?
2. Read the quote from Lord of the Flies. Do you agree with what it says? Is it how preju-
dices are formed?
“You are driven to create and form groups and then believe others are wrong just be-
cause they are others.”
Can you think of examples of intergroup conflicts? How can they be resolved?
3. Intergroup conflicts are a natural part of human interaction. They have occurred
continuously throughout history and range from large-scale conflicts involving wars,
rebellions, revolutions, terrorism and discrimination to small-scale conflicts such as disa-
greements with neighbours, competition between sports teams, street gang fights and
high school cliques.
Intergroup conflicts have became a dominant theme in social psychology since its emer-
gence as a discipline of its own during the first half of the 20th century. One of the main
contributions to the understanding of this phenomenon is Muzafer Sherif’s research on
135
social processes, particularly on group behaviour, social norms and social conflict. His
“Realistic Conflict Theory” suggests that competition between groups becomes hostile
when needed resources (such as food, money, territory, political power, etc.) are scarce
or in limited supply.
READING
if you were right.
1. There is one universal cure for racism.

2. Psychologists don’t fully understand how bigotry develops.
3. We like people in our group more than people in other groups.
4. According to surveys, discrimination has decreased in the last decades.
5. Through stereotyping we confirm our expectations and beliefs about
members of other groups.
2. What are the strategies for reducing racial prejudice? Read the text to find out.
Psychologists Find Ways To Break Racism’s Hold
As racial violence continues to roil communities like Bensonhurst and more subtle preju-
dice permeates many American institutions, psychologists are refining their understand-
ing of how bigotry develops and devising new ways to fight and prevent it.
Some of the most promising techniques are aimed at grade-school children, whose bi-
ases have not had time to harden. But research has also led to a range of principles that
can be used by any organization, whether university or corporation or city government or
armed service, to change the atmosphere that leads to racial incidents.
“There is no single cure for racism,’’ said Dr. Robert Slavin, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins
University. But he and other psychologists have used data from experiments to identify
techniques and principles for reducing the hold of racism.
Interracial Learning Teams
One of the most successful methods is dividing students into interracial learning teams,
which, like sports teams, knit members together in common purpose that can lead to
friendship.
Such learning groups are widespread in the United States, especially in school districts
with potential or actual racial problems. In Israel, they have been used to defuse tensions
between Jewish students of Middle Eastern and European descent; in Canada between
Canadians and immigrants, and in California between Hispanic and non-Hispanic stu-
dents.
136
Man and Society. In-Group versus Out-Group
19
Such cooperative groups reduce prejudice by undercutting the categories that lead to
stereotyped thinking, according to research published in the August issue of The Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology.
“Once you categorize people into groups in any way, you tend to like people in your own
group more than those in others,’’ said Dr. Samuel Gaertner, a psychologist at the Univer-
sity of Delaware who conducted the research.
In Dr. Gaertner’s experiment, volunteers were formed into arbitrary groups to work on
a hypothetical problem about surviving after a crash landing. Once they had become
a unified group, they began to like each other more than they liked people who were put
in other groups, a simulation of the process that can lead to prejudice in other circum-
stances.
When the working groups were then mixed with others into a single unified group to
work on another problem, their preferences shifted yet again.
“Cooperation widens your sense of who’s in your group,’’ Dr. Gaertner said. “It changes
your thinking from ‘us and them’ to ‘we.’ People you once saw as part of some other group
now are part of your own. That’s why team learning groups can reduce bias.”
Although surveys show a decline over the last 40 years in the number of people who
openly express bigotry, prejudice persists in more subtle forms. Dr. Howard Gadlin,
a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, says the behavior of college
students is a telling indication of racial attitudes. Campuses were in the forefront of the
civil-rights movement in the 1960’s; yet in the past two years, he notes, ”racial incidents
have been on the rise on campuses across the country.’’
In devising ways to combat racism, psychologists can turn to a strong body of research
into the mental processes that lead to bigotry. Dr. Janet Schofield, a psychologist at the
University of Pittsburgh, has demonstrated ways in which social barriers between racial
groups can create suspicion and mistrust.
In one junior high school she observed, the students were split into hostile racial cliques.
“A socially active black kid was more likely to be seen as aggressive than was a white kid
doing exactly the same thing,’’ Dr. Schofield said. “For instance, if he asked someone in the
cafeteria, ‘Can I have your cake?’ or even if he happened to bump someone in the hall,
that was interpreted as an aggressive act if it was done by a black kid, but not by a white.’’
That perception was part of a cycle in which the social distance between blacks and
whites fostered stereotypes that could not be broken down even by positive experiences.
The most widely used technique for promoting racial harmony, mixing racial or ethnic
groups into teams where they cooperate for a common goal, is intended to break down
just such barriers to understanding.
The growing consensus from psychological experiments is that racial and ethnic preju-
dices are an unfortunate byproduct of the way the mind categorizes all experience. Es-
sentially, the mind seeks to simplify the chaos of the world by fitting all perceptions into
categories. Thus it fits different kinds of people into pigeonholes, just as it does with res-
taurants or television programs.
That is where the problem begins, psychologists say. Too often people see the category
and not the individual. Once these categories are formed, the beliefs and assumptions
137
that underlie them are confirmed at every possible opportunity, even at the cost of disre-
garding evidence to the contrary.
David Hamilton, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, has found
in a series of experiments that people tend to forget facts that would change their as-
sumptions about categories, while seeking and remembering information that would
confirm those assumptions. When they meet someone who does not fit the stereotype,
they tell themselves the individual is an exception.
The strength of stereotypes – both innocent and hostile – is attributed to the mind’s natu-
ral bent to seek to confirm its beliefs. While several experiences to the contrary can chal-
lenge those beliefs, an isolated experience is unlikely to do so.
The Power of Teamwork
Such self-confirmation of stereotypes is especially likely when members of different
groups have little contact with each other. Merely integrating a school, business or neigh-
borhood may fail to change old stereotypes if the groups keep to themselves.
The learning-team approach was based on pioneering work on intergroup harmony in
the 1950’s by psychologists like Dr. Gordon Allport and Dr. Muzafer Sherif. It was given
added scientific impetus by research on prejudice among high school students in the
1970’s. That work, by Dr. Slavin and others, found that in mixed-race schools, students
with the least prejudice and most friends from other races were members of sports teams
or bands in which they had to work together.
The most widespread approach puts students together in four- or five-member “learn-
ing teams.’’ The racial or ethnic makeup of each team reflects the overall makeup of the
school. While members study together and are encouraged to teach each other, they are
tested individually. But the team gets a score or other recognition of its work as a unit.
Teams work together for about six weeks, and then students are reassigned to a new
team to promote as many contacts as possible among students.
“No point is made of the fact that these are mixed racial groups,’’ Dr. Slavin said. “The kids
see nothing unusual; it seems random. The effects are very positive, especially in junior
and senior high school, where the problem is greatest.’’
After the students work together in teams, Dr. Slavin and other researchers have found a sig-
nificant increase in the number who say their friends are from other races or ethnic groups.
“Zero Tolerance” for Bias
“Even in cooperative groups, students may still carry biases into the sessions,” Dr. Schofield
said.‘’ Blacks may expect that the whites will dominate, for instance. Sometimes you can
combat these attitudes by giving minority kids a head start on a lesson, and having them
teach it to the white kids.’’
The psychologists say a sense of fairness is also important. If one group is perceived to be
treated better or to have higher status than another, the situation is ripe for tensions. For
that reason, psychologists stress the importance of openly acknowledging differences in
the ways groups are treated.
“My research shows that when people try to act colorblind, as though there were no racial
or ethnic differences, it backfires,’’ Dr. Schofield said.
Dr. Slavin says school officials need to recognize and address such differences.
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19
“If 90 percent of the kids suspended are black or Hispanic, or all the kids on the student
council are Oriental or white, you need to bring that fact into the open before you can
deal with it,’’ he said. “The worst thing is for members of some group to feel, ‘People like
me have no chance here.’ ”
“You need to pay careful attention to issues of equity. If it’s a school, for instance, you
need to be sure the cheerleading squad and student council are racially mixed in a way
that represents the student body, even if that means a certain proportion are appointed.’’
Many universities are now appointing ombudsmen to deal impartially with complaints of
racial, ethnic or sexual bias, among other grievances.
“It may seem obvious, but it’s often overlooked,’’ said Dr. Gadlin, who is the ombudsman
at the University of Massachusetts.“ We need ways of dealing openly with the fears and
resentments that breed racial tensions,’’ he added. “We have no forums where you can do
much more than talk around the problems in ways that are proper and polite but avoid
the real issues. If you have to pretend that racial problems don’t exist, the tensions will
escalate until they explode.’’
From The New York Times, September 5, 1989 © 1989 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by per-
mission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or
retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.
to the text.
1. One of the most successful methods of fighting racism is
a) dividing students into homogeneous groups.

b) dividing students into racially diverse groups.
c) dividing students into groups of compatriots.
2. Categorising people into groups gives rise to
a) stereotyping.
b) cooperation.
c) competition.
3. Prejudices are a byproduct of
a) negative feelings.
b) chaos.
c) organising information about the world.
139
4. According to Dr Hamilton, people
a) remember evidence that confirms the prejudice, but ignore evidence to the contrary.
b) seek evidence that confirms the prejudice, but also accept evidence to the contrary.
c) don’t seek evidence that confirms the prejudice, however they keep the prejudice
despite evidence to the contrary.
5. Dr Slavin found that students with the least prejudice
a) attended mixed-race schools.

b) played team sports with students from other races.
c) were socially active and had many friends.
6. To ensure equity, student teams and organisations must have number

of white and non-white students.
a) an equal
b) a proportional
c) a comparable
7. Dr Schofield said that the right way to act is
a) to behave in a colourblind manner.

b) to pretend races don’t exist.
c) to recognise differences.
4. Do you agree with the assumption that you shouldn’t favour members of your own
group over members of another group? If you do agree with it, consider this situation:
A building is on fire and two people are trapped in it. You are close to one, whom you
are in a position to save. The other person is farther off, so the help is not very likely to
succeed. Suppose that the other person is someone close to you, be it a sibling, parent,
spouse or a friend.
What you’ve just agreed with is the assumption that everyone is equal and we shouldn’t
prioritise one over another. Is it wrong to try to save a person whom you like or love?
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19
VOCABULARY IN USE
1. Complete the text with the verbs in the box in the right form.
defuse, harden, breed, establish, emerge, express, reduce, arrange, achieve, foster
In 1954, in a summer camp in Robbers Cave State Park, Oklahoma, two groups of boys
nearly killed each other. They weren’t juvenile delinquents, addicts nor social failures, but
11 and 12 year-old boys from white middle-class backgrounds, well-adjusted, and with
no previous behavioural problems. The reason they didn’t eventually kill each other was
because they all were subjects of a psychology experiment that formed the basis of Muz-
afer Sherif’s study on prejudice and intergroup conflict. Its result wasn’t unlike that which
took place in William Golding’s classic novel, Lord of the Flies.
Upon arrival at camp, the boys were randomly divided into two groups. During the first
phase of the experiment, the groups were kept apart, unaware of each other’s exist-
ence. The boys spent time bonding with each other in most part of the day. Soon they
__________ (1) their own culture, rules and leadership. One group called itself “The Ea-
gles” and the other “The Rattlers”. After about a week, the experiment moved into its
second phase where the groups found that they weren’t alone in the park. The signs of
intergroup conflict __________ (2) practically from the very moment each group learnt of
the other group’s existence. The groups were then set in a four-day series of competition
against each other. Initially, the prejudice was only verbally __________ (3), yet shortly
thereafter it __________ (4) and evolved into hostilities, raids and violence. The boys be-
came so aggressive that it was decided to __________ (5) the tension and __________ (6)
cooperation between the groups. This was when the third and final phase of the experi-
ment started. The researchers __________ (7) for both groups to watch movies together,
have their meals at the same time, and even to listen to a religious figure preaching on
brotherly love and forgiveness. Nothing worked, so the researchers tried a new approach.
This time they made the boys all work together in a cooperative effort to _______ (8) su-
perordinate goals (e.g. pulling a truck that was stuck in a rut) which was eventually what
brought “The Eagles” and “The Rattlers” together.
All in all, the Robbers Cave Experiment was seen as a success. Sherif made several obser-
vations based on it, such as that cultural and personality differences are not necessary for
__________ (9) intergroup conflict, and that tension between groups can be __________ (10)
if superordinate goals are in place.
2. Complete the sentences below with the words in the box in the right form.
backfire, persist, permeate, develop, knit, fit, carry, combat
1. Fuelled by stereotypes, prejudice __________ every aspect of our daily lives.

2. The bigotry __________ largely as a result of fear and ignorance.
141
3. In __________ prejudice, racial or ethnic groups are mixed into teams.
4. Interracial learning teams __________ students together in an attempt to facilitate
cooperation among students of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds.
5. Despite being divided into a single unified group, some students still ___________
biases against members of out-groups.
6. Although there is less racial discrimination today than ever before, prejudice still
_________ .
7. Inevitably, the school’s policy to act colourblind __________ and led to racial tensions.
8. When confronted with information about someone who doesn’t __________ our ster-
eotype, we are likely to discount the information.
142
Breaking Stereotypes
20
LEAD-IN
1. What are stereotypes?

2. How do they begin?
3. What are the stereotypes elicited by these terms: feminist, accountant and hippie?
2. Answer the questions. What do your answers say about the nature of stereotypes?
Is stereotyping always negative?
a)
1. Who is more likely to be a better basketball player: a Japanese or an American?
2. Which dog breed is more likely to be gentle: a pit bull or a poodle?
3. What is a red plastic bottle more likely to contain: juice or ketchup?
4. Who is more likely to be wealthier: a white person or a black person?
5. Who is more likely to be spoilt: a rich child or a less well-off child?
b)
1. What makes you perceive someone as a good basketball player?
2. What makes you perceive a dog as gentle?
3. How do you perceive a red plastic bottle?
4. What makes you perceive someone as rich?
5. What makes you perceive a child as spoilt?
143
3. What’s the relation between these concepts? Can they exist independently of one
another?
prejudice, stereotype, discrimination, scapegoating, racism, labelling, bias
4. Complete the text with the terms in point 3.
a)
The most common __________ about the Swiss is that they are ruddy-cheeked and
healthy because they get plenty of fresh mountain air. Their wives wear long dresses and
tights. They are usually fair-haired, they enjoy milking the cattle and are mostly called
Heidi.
b)
A parent was a judge in a competition in which his daughter was one of the competitors.
It was clear to everyone that he had a __________ in favour of her and against the others.
c)
An employer wants to hire someone for a job. Before he even looks at the CVs, he has a
strong dislike for people who studied at Yale. It happens that one applicant went to Yale
and the others didn’t. On learning this, the employer feels a __________ against the Yale
graduate and favours the other ones.
d)
An employer wants to hire someone for a job. He interviews a few candidates and choos-
es to hire an attractive woman instead of a plain-looking one, even though __________
in the workplace is strictly prohibited.
e)
An incident of __________ was reported in a small community during a time of economic
recession. An angry crowd attacked immigrants, accusing them of taking their jobs and
blaming them for their problems.
f)
A young boy of Afghan origin fell victim to __________ last week in the centre of Warsaw.
The boy was viciously attacked by a group of youths who threw him on the ground and
punched him repeatedly on the face.
g)
Becky is one of many high school students who have experienced __________. She is
continually made fun of and called “nerd” only because she is very bright and does very
well at school.
5. Stereotypes are oversimplified generalisations about the world that we base on our
observations and experience, and on average they tend to be true. We collect informa-
tion about categories of people and objects, and use it adaptively in new situations. The
ability to collect information and later to make generalisations is necessary to keep us out
of harm’s way in that it allows us to respond instinctively to new situations.
144
20
There is a lot of stereotyping about everything: men and women, children and adults,
whites and non-whites, straights and gays, and so on. This in no way is a bad thing. Some
stereotypes are positive, such as that some groups of people are exceptionally hard-
working and responsible. However, sometimes we attribute characteristics to groups
inaccurately, believing that “All black people are ...”, “All men are ... ”, “All blonde women
are ...”, etc.
“Stereotyping allows us to understand a complex world with a minimum of effort and as
quickly as possible,” says John Dovidio, a psychology professor at Yale. “Most of the time
we develop rules of understanding the world that work, but because it’s a simplifying
system that trades efficiency for accuracy, it can become distorted and biased in a self-
perpetuating way.”
READING
1. Why do we assume that a plain-looking middle-aged woman cannot be a talented

singer? Read the text to find out.
Yes, Looks Do Matter
For more than a week now, people on both sides of the Atlantic have been using the story
of Susan Boyle – the dowdy Scottish spinster who sang her way to fame on “Britain’s Got
Talent” TV show – as an example of just how shallow we’ve become.
Before she sang, Ms. Boyle seemed to be merely a frumpy 47-year-old unemployed church
volunteer who lived alone with her cat, Pebbles, and had, she said, “never been kissed”
(a claim that she later took back).
Now, after the video of her performance went viral, a flurry of commentary has focused
on how we stereotype people into categories, how we fall victim to the prejudices of
ageism or lookism, and how we should learn, once and for all, not to judge books by their
covers.
But many social scientists and others who study the science of stereotyping say there
are reasons we quickly size people up based on how they look. Snap judgments about
people are crucial to the way we function, they say – even when those judgments are
very wrong.
They would even agree with Ms. Boyle herself, who said after her performance that while
society is too quick to judge people by appearance, “There is not much you can do about
it; it is the way they think; it is the way they are.”
On a very basic level, judging people by appearance means putting them quickly into im-
personal categories, much like deciding whether an animal is a dog or a cat. “Stereotypes
are seen as a necessary mechanism for making sense of information,” said David Amodio,
an assistant professor of psychology at New York University. “If we look at a chair, we can
categorize it quickly even though there are many different kinds of chairs out there.”
145
Eons ago, this capability was of life-and-death importance, and humans developed the
ability to gauge other people within seconds.
Susan Fiske, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton, said that tradition-
ally, most stereotypes break down into two broad dimensions: whether a person appears
to have malignant or benign intent and whether a person appears dangerous. “In ances-
tral times, it was important to stay away from people who looked angry and dominant,”
she said.
Women are also subdivided into “traditionally attractive” women, who “don’t look domi-
nant, have baby-faced features,” Professor Fiske said. “They’re not threatening.”
Indeed, attractiveness is one thing that can make stereotypes self-fulfilling and reinforc-
ing. Attractive people are “credited with being socially skilled,” Professor Fiske said, and
maybe they are, because “if you’re beautiful or handsome, people laugh at your jokes and
interact with you in such a way that it’s easy to be socially skilled.”
“If you’re unattractive, it’s harder to get all that stuff because people don’t seek you out,”
she said.
Age plays a role in forging stereotypes, too, with older people traditionally seen as “harm-
less and useless,” Professor Fiske said. In fact, she said, research has shown that racial
and ethnic stereotypes are easier to change over time than gender and age stereotypes,
which are “particularly sticky.”
One reason our brains persist in using stereotypes, experts say, is that often they give us
broadly accurate information, even if all the details don’t line up. Ms. Boyle’s looks, for ex-
ample, accurately telegraphed much about her biography, including her socioeconomic
level and lack of worldly experience.
Her behavior on stage reinforced an outsider image. David Berreby, author of “Us and
Them,” about why people categorize one another, said the TV audience may have also
judged her harshly because, in banter with the judges before singing, she appeared to be
trying, awkwardly, to fit in.
“She tried to be chipper, and when they asked her age, she did this little shimmy,” as
though she assumed that on such programs “you’re supposed to be kind of sexy and per-
sonable, and she got it wrong,” Mr. Berreby said. “Nothing sort of triggers our contempt
more than something trying to be acceptable and then failing.”
When people don’t fit our preconceived notions, we tend to ignore the contradictions,
until they are too dramatic to overlook. In those cases, said John F. Dovidio, a psychology
professor at Yale, we focus on the contradiction – Ms. Boyle’s voice, for example. While
that makes us see her as more of an individual, we also “find a way to make the world
make sense again, even if the way we do it is to say, ‘This is an exceptional situation.’ It’s
easier for me to keep the same categories in my mind and come up with an explanation
for the things that are discrepant.”
Even when presented with multiple exceptions to the stereotype, we often keep the
broad category and simply create a subtype, Professor Dovidio said.
For example, President Obama challenged negative stereotypes about blacks, but some
people may have come up with a subtype of blacks – black professionals – rather than
146
20
challenge the overall stereotype, Professor Dovidio said. “That does it in the simplest and
most cognitively energy-saving way.”
Scientists are finding that stereotypes are not simply stored and retrieved by the brain,
but “are associated with general regions in the brain involved in memory and goal-plan-
ning,” Professor Amodio said, suggesting that “people recruit stereotypes to kind of help
them plan a world that’s consistent with the goal they might have.”
Professor Fiske’s research suggests that those in low status register differently in the brain.
“The part of the brain that normally activates when you are thinking about people is sur-
prisingly silent when you’re looking at homeless people,” she said. “It’s kind of a neural
dehumanization. Maybe we can’t bear the horrible situation they are in, or we don’t want
to get involved, or we’re afraid we might get contaminated.”
But, she said, the neural response is restored when people are asked to focus on what
soup the homeless person might like to eat, something that makes one think about the
person as someone with wants or goals.
The fact that we can switch our reactions to people – Ms. Boyle’s status went instantly
from low to high – also has roots in our physiology, scientists say.
Professor Dovidio said that encountering discrepancies to stereotypes probably “creates
a sort of autonomic arousal” in our peripheral nervous system, triggering spikes of corti-
sol and other indicators of stress. “That autonomic arousal is going to motivate us to do
something in that situation,” he said, especially if the situation is dangerous.
Helen Fisher, an anthropology professor at Rutgers, theorizes that in Ms. Boyle’s case, the
audience also experienced a “rush of dopamine” from the surprise pleasure of hearing her
voice. “Novelty drives up dopamine in the brain and you feel good,” she said.
That may help explain why so many people are drawn to the Susan Boyle story. But their
embrace of her and other underestimated underdogs is unlikely to upend our penchant
to stereotype.
Modern society, with its awareness of the prejudices of history and its unprecedented
ability to introduce so many different types of people to one another, may dilute or even
neutralize some preconceived notions. But others will persist and new ones will form,
experts say.
Which may be why, even as she expressed the hope that “maybe this could teach them
a lesson, or set an example,” Ms. Boyle has begun to change her appearance in recent
days, wearing makeup, dying her frizzy gray hair, and appearing in more stylish clothing.
“The raw material of saying you’re with me and she’s not is always present,” Mr. Berreby
said. “It’s not something we came up with because of TV or the car. It’s not connected to
modern life at all. It is inherent in the mind.”
From The New York Times, April 26, 2009 © 2009 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission
and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retrans-
mission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.
147
1. Susan Boyle fell victim to the prejudice of sexism.

2. Stereotypes can help us make it through life.
3. Subtypes are categories for people who don’t fit in to general stereotypes.
4. Subtyping helps us fight a stereotype.
5. The most persistent stereotypes are those based on race and ethnicity.
7. Attractive people are typically viewed as more socially skilled than those who are
less attractive.
8. Low-status people fail to stimulate the parts of the brain that usually activate when
we think about others.
9. New stereotypes are being invented to replace the old ones.
VOCABULARY IN USE
1. Match the items from the two columns to make correct expressions.
A B
1. stereotype a) generalisations
2. fall victim b) the stereotype
3. judge c) one group over another
4. have d) to the prejudice
5. make e) people by
6. attribute f ) a disruptive effect on
7. favour g) people into categories
8. fit h) characteristics to a group
2. Complete the sentences below with the expressions from exercise 1 in the correct
form.
1. Fair or not, we ____________________ without regard to individual attributes.

2. We often ____________________ their looks, seeing only what is on the outside.
3. ____________________ of lookism, Beth is striving to get a model-like figure.
4. If we were stripped of our ability to ____________________, we wouldn’t be able to
understand the world around us.
5. Stereotype threat may ____________________ on black students’ performance in
that it undercuts their confidence.
6. When we meet someone who doesn’t ____________________, we don’t question the
stereotype, but rather we regard the individual as an exception.
7. We ____________________ and everyone who belongs to it, incorrectly assuming
that all members of that group share the same characteristics.
8. ____________________ may contribute to an open conflict where one group feels
discriminated against and therefore fights for equality.
148
20
1. In many cases, stereotypical generalisations are broadly accurate, even if all the details
don’t quite line up/speak up/add up.
2. Part of the reason generalisations exist is because they help us sort out/make sense/
understand the world.
3. It takes us only a few seconds to calculate/size up/gauge another person when we first
meet them.
4. If we look at an object, we categorise/put/fall it quickly into a specific category.
5. Attractive people are usually considered/credited/believed to be socially skilled.
6. No one likes to admit that they judge people by their cover/by appearance/based on
how they look but that is often the case.
7. When we meet a person who doesn’t fit/confirm/conform the stereotype, we tend to
ignore the contradictions.
8. Susan Boyle reinforced/challenged/defied the stereotype that only young and
attractive people can dream about becoming professional musicians.
149
21 The Disease
of Addiction
LEAD-IN
1. Do you agree with these sentences?
1. Behavioural addictions are often harder to deal with than substance addictions.
2. At the start, a person’s choice to start using an addictive substance is usually
voluntary.
3. Peoples’ genes decide whether they become addicts or not.
4. Too much alcohol at too early an age can lead to brain damage.
5. Women get addicted more easily to alcohol than men.
6. Addictive behaviours can be treated with a single drug.
2. Read the situation. Why did the woman feel the need to take Prozac?
Beth hung up the phone after hearing her husband’s insistent request to cook dinner for
him and his colleagues that evening. The phone call meant she had to change her plans
and instead of going to the gym, she had to shop and prepare the food. As she was star-
ing at the phone, she felt the overwhelming urge to take some of her Prozac.
1. What are the things people can get addicted to?

2. What are addiction triggers?
3. Why are certain things addictive?
4. Do you agree with the statement that people can get addicted to just about anything?
5. What happens if addicts go untreated?
150
The Disease of Addiction
21
4.
a) Look at the addictions in the box. Is there anything that you haven’t mentioned in point
3.1?
drugs, the internet, gambling, nicotine, alcohol, shopping, video-games, coffee,
possessions, food, work, chocolate, television-watching, sex, tanning
b) What do you call a person who is addicted to the things mentioned in the box?
5. Addictions can have profound negative effects on an individual’s way of life. They
disturb thoughts, feelings and behaviour, and eventually they can significantly disrupt
an addict’s personality.
When people talk about addictions, what they think of right away is drug abuse and
alcoholism, but there is much more to it. Generally, there are two types of addictions:
substance addiction and behavioural addiction. In substance addiction, an individual is
addicted to a chemical substance, such as drugs, tobacco or alcohol, on which his body
has grown dependent. In behavioural addiction, an individual repetitively engages in an
action, such as eating, gambling, shopping, working and even sex until said action leads
to psychological dependence.
READING
if you were right.
1. Scientists still don’t know what causes addiction.
2. Lots of people take to drinking, smoking or doing drugs for social reasons.
3. People in their 20s are more likely to become addicted than any other age group.
4. There are certain personality characteristics that most addicts have in common.
5. Most drinkers become alcoholics.
6. There are many effective medications that help people break their additions to nico-
tine, alcohol and opiates.
7. Children of alcoholics are at high risk of alcohol dependence.
2. Why do some people get addicted while others don’t? And in the first place, how do
people get addicted and why is it so difficult to stop? Read the text to find out.
Addiction: What gets us hooked?

Some people have their lives destroyed by drugs or alcohol, while others can indulge and
walk away. Now doctors are beginning to understand the reasons why.
“My destructive side has grown a mile wide,” she sang on her first album in
2003. The cause of Amy Winehouse’s death has not yet been confirmed, but
her struggles with drug addiction, and more recently alcoholism, mean most
people will be shocked if a link isn’t found.
151
But have you ever wondered why one person can drink like a fish for years and never be-
come an alcoholic, while for others, like Winehouse, a tipple or 10 can begin the slide into
dependency? Why can one person take that first disgusting drag of a cigarette (for that
first drag is always disgusting) and say never again, while for others it becomes the start
of nicotine dependence, still the most common addiction in the world?
It’s a question that has dogged professionals for decades. So what have they discovered?
While addiction is naturally associated with drink and drugs, is that the whole story? Can,
as the NHS claims, anything be addictive, from gambling to chocolate?
Addiction has to start with exposure, says Dr Gillian Tober, president of the Society for the
Study of Addiction. “It’s generally for social reasons – groups of friends or a boyfriend or
girlfriend – and it’s often not pleasant. The reward is merely social. It then becomes rein-
forced and casual use shifts to dependence.”
Drugs directly feed the reward circuitry of the brain, she says, and the brain learns to
look forward to the thrill. Tolerance occurs as you demand more each time. Physiological
dependence – addiction – then emerges. “It is this area – the mechanisms involved in
the addictive process – where research has been most progressive and this has meant
we have a lot more effective medications to help people come off nicotine, alcohol and
opiates,” Ilana Crome, a professor of addiction psychiatry at Keele University, says. “But we
still don’t know what actually causes addiction.”
Indeed, many people drink but few are addicted. During the Vietnam war, when many
American soldiers took lots of heroin, there were concerns that they would have difficulty
coping without it when they came home. In fact, when they returned to an environment
where there wasn’t the same availability and it wasn’t part of their social lives, most were
fine. Likewise, when opiates have been given to cancer sufferers for many years, studies
show that only a few remain addicted.
“There is no single reason why this is the case,” Dr Tober says. “There are not even any par-
ticular personality characteristics that predispose people to becoming addicted. There
are risks involved in being outgoing, but equally there are risks involved in being intro-
verted. Every sort of personality can become addicted.”
Indeed, a long-term study of 500 men, which began in the 1940s, exploring why some
people become addicts while others don’t, found there were no consistent personality
types, says Bob Adams, a consultant psychiatrist in York NHS Trust.
But the Faculty of Addictions at the Royal College of Psychiatrists claims there are three
key risk factors – biological, psychological and social. Biologically, addicts may be wired
differently, particularly in the brain’s orbito-frontal cortex, the part of the brain involved
in weighing up the pros and cons of a particular action, they say.
Meanwhile, scientists at the Neurocentre Magendie in Bordeaux recently found those
who became addicts had brains incapable of returning to normal after regular drug
abuse. Long-term drug binges change the way people’s minds work, but they only be-
come addicts if their brain cannot bounce back to normal when they stop, the French
study found. Addicts lose the ability to produce a form of brain plasticity, known as LTD,
crucial for developing and holding new memories and therefore in having flexible behav-
iour, they concluded.
152
21
“Scandinavian studies have shown that children of alcoholics – even those who were
adopted – are more likely to become alcoholics themselves, suggesting there is a genetic
component,” Dr William Shanahan, a lead addiction consultant at Capio Nightingale Hos-
pital in London, says. “It doesn’t mean you’re going to see the addiction through – you still
have free will, after all, so you might, for example, recognise it in others around you early
on and get frightened off, or something else, like religion, acts as your salvation. In fact,
it’s often the case that if you find a non-drinker, you can usually find a drinker somewhere
in their lives.”
The second risk factor is psychological trauma. Childhood neglect, abuse or bereave-
ment is extremely common among addicts, Harry Shapiro from DrugScope, says. For
others, the trauma comes later – a bereavement, loss of job or late-onset anxiety might
make them turn to the bottle or cocaine. Research from the Nineties found there may be
a biological link here, too. Levels of feel-good chemicals in the brain, mainly serotonin
and dopamine, can be reduced by any traumatic event such as divorce or abuse. People
who become addicted to certain substances are subconsciously trying to boost the levels
of these feel-good chemicals.
Thirdly, social risks include the availability of the particular drug, being around others that
take it and social deprivation. “Most of the people who come forward for heroin or crack
use are pretty impoverished,” Shapiro says.
Dr Farrukh Alam, consultant psychiatrist and clinical director at Central and Northwest
London NHS Foundation Trust, believes the clues that we have about these, and other,
risk factors mean that we may be able to identify a propensity towards addiction. You
can spot some traits as early as late adolescence, he says. “We know, for instance, that
among those most prone are people with compulsive or impulsive types of behaviour, an
unwillingness to take responsibility for their own actions or who are stressed and anxious
even in times of relative ease. The age of initiation is relevant, too – the earlier you start to
misuse substances, the more likely you are to develop chronic dependence.” Certain oc-
cupations have also been shown to be higher risk – media, entertainment, catering and
the military among them.
Some even believe there’s an “addictive personality”, seen in people who have an addic-
tive edge, that obsessive side to their personality that gets them practising at something
until they’re the best. It would certainly explain why so many people famous for their
talents – Andre Agassi, Paul Gascoigne, and Winehouse among them – wind up in rehab.
Most addiction professionals talk about drugs and alcohol, but can you become addicted
to anything? Gambling is accepted as a behaviour involving a thrill that the brain can be-
come hooked on. And the NHS is reconsidering sex addiction as a genuine disorder after
the American Psychiatric Association added it to its main diagnostic manual.
But not everyone is convinced. “I think the addiction has become a lazy word for a bit of
an obsessive habit, which is not the same,” Shapiro says.
“Put it this way – how many people do you know whose job has gone out of the window
or they have neglected everyone in their lives because they want to buy more shoes, get
a better tan or eat more chocolate?”
153
Warning signs
How to tell if you’re an addict. If you answer “yes” to three or more of these, it is prob-
ably time to seek help:
Do you crave the substance or behaviour?
Do you have difficulty controlling your intake?
Have you become tolerant to it – ie, you need increased amounts in order to produce
the same effects?
Do you neglect other interests to feed your habit?
Do you get physiological withdrawal symptoms upon cessation, such as sweating,
anxiety and tremors?
Do you persist in its use despite understanding the harmful consequences?
By Kate Hilpern, © 2011 The Independent
3. Answer the following questions.
1. How do addictions start?

2. What is drug tolerance?
3. What are the key factors for addiction?
4. What did the scientists at the Neurocentre Magendie find about addiction?
5. What people, according to Dr Alam, are most predisposed to addictions?
6. Why does Harry Shapiro think the word “addiction” has been incorrectly applied to
compulsive behaviours such as gambling?
7. What symptoms occur upon discontinuation of alcohol or drug consumption?
4. “Personality” is a term that refers to an individual’s ways of feeling, thinking and act-
ing. These ways evolve with age and circumstances. Therefore, is there such a thing as an
“additive personality?”
VOCABULARY IN USE
1. As casual substance use slides/shifts/turns to dependence, the user becomes addicted

and can no longer control his behaviour.
2. Even people who have managed to get off/fall off/come off alcohol may experience
cravings for drink again.
3. Dr Tober claims that there is no set of personality characteristics that predisposes/
causes/makes people to become addicted.
4. Many people empty the bottle/turn to the bottle/hit the bottle because it seems to be
the only way of dealing with their problems.
5. Children of alcoholics are more likely than others to develop/pose/experience alcohol
problems themselves.
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21
6. It is not uncommon for drug addicts to steal to feed/kick/support their habit.

7. Some individuals persist in/carry on/keep at drinking even though they know it can
ruin their lives.
8. Scientists at the Neurocentre Magendie in Bordeaux found that addicted individuals’
brains are incapable of boosting/returning/bouncing back to normal after regular drug
abuse.
2. Complete the sentences below with the nouns in the box. Sometimes you may need
to put the nouns into the plural form.
alcohol abuser, heavy smoker, shopaholic, excessive gambler, workaholic,

closet drinker, dope fiend, victim, user, compulsive eater
1. Like other ______________ , Scott visits a casino on a regular basis.

2. It wasn’t long before the teenager fell ______________ to addiction.
3. The stereotype of a(n) ______________ portrays a person who drinks to kill his or her
psychological pain.
4. Now he begins to consider himself as a(n) ______________ who cannot control his
consumption of the drug.
5. My boss is a(n) ______________ who chooses to spend more time at work than with
his family.
6. With overflowing wardrobes and drawers this ______________ can’t resist a spend-
ing spree to cheer herself up.
7. Ellen always seems to be on a diet. It’s hard to believe that she used to be a _______
_______ .
8. ______________ run a high risk of developing lung diseases.
9. Jenny is a ______________ and she drinks in secret when nobody watches her.
10. Marijuana ______________ vigorously deny that the drug has any negative effects.
3. Complete the sentences with the words in the box.
binges, substance, opiates, dependence, barbiturate, habit, vice, cocaine,

nicotine, inhalants
a)
1. Thousands of people each year try to break free from nicotine ______________, but
most of them fail.
2. Bob is a heavy drinker but he is trying to kick his ______________ and get his life back
together again.
3. Long-term drug ______________ affect the way people’s minds function.
4. To some, marihuana smoking is a minor ______________ compared to drinking.
155
b)
1. Their son was suspended from school for using an illegal ______________ .
2. Some people take a ______________ to sleep or relax just like others take_________
_______ to perk up.
3. Kids generally use ____________ as a substitute for drugs or alcohol, because they
are relatively easy to get.
4. She is addicted to _____________, but she tries to quit the habit by wearing
patches and chewing gum.
5. ____________ are misused to give euphoric feelings and a sense of well-being.
156
Being Happy
22
LEAD-IN
1. What is happiness? Is it about possessions, prosperity or something else?

2. When have you been happiest?
2. Read the text. What lesson does the tale teach us? Why wasn’t the fisherman’s wife
satisfied with all she got?
Once upon a time, in a land far away, there was a fisherman and his wife living poorly but
happily in an old hut by the sea. Every day the man goes out to fish and one day he catch-
es a golden flounder. The fish pleads for its life, promising in return to grant the man any
wish he would like. The fisherman does not want anything, and releases the fish to the
sea. When he gets home and tells his wife about the golden fish, she shouts at him and
tells him to go back and ask the fish for a new washboard. The fish happily grants his wife’s
wish. The next day, the wife asks for a new house instead of their old one, and again the
fish grants it. The woman, however, is still not satisfied and asks in succession for a palace,
to become the ruler of her province and to become the tsarina. The golden fish grants all
these wishes, but even then the woman is not satisfied and demands to become the Ruler
of the Sea with the golden fish as her servant. The fisherman calls the fish and makes the
wish, however, when he returns home he finds that everything has turned back to what it
used to be – his wife in her old clothes standing by the broken washboard.
Do you agree with the statement: “With the poor, a little money can buy a lot of happi-
ness. If you’re rich, a lot of money can buy you a little more happiness?”
157
3. Psychology traditionally focuses on dysfunction, disorders and abnormal behaviour,
ignoring for the most part life’s joys. Studying psychological problems gives you just part
of the picture of mental health. To have a complete one, you need to study, at least ac-
cording to positive psychology, the sources of human strength, positive emotions, hap-
piness and everything which is the foundation of “good life.” Positive psychology is one
of the newest branches of psychology and it claims that by better understanding human
strengths, we can learn new ways to fight disorders, and even to help people become
happier.
How can you help people become happy or happier? And, in the first place, what exactly
is happiness?
Happiness is an emotion. So is joy, fear, love, hate, sadness, anger, sorrow, anxiety, guilt or
jealousy. All emotions have their causes which can be understood and managed to make
our lives better. The emotion of happiness is not caused merely by getting what you want
or by momentary pleasures. On the contrary, happiness is a long lasting feeling of con-
tent and satisfaction, not limited to any specific cause. Although sources of happiness
vary from person to person, typically the best predictor of happiness is meaningful social
relationships and the amount of time that people spend with family and friends.
How would the following make you feel? How happy would you be on a scale of 1 to 5
(5 being very happy)? How long would the feeling in each case last?
buying a new house

going on holiday
landing a dream job
moving to a warmer climate
winning the lottery
passing an exam with a high score
getting into a loving relationship
Is it easy to predict our feelings?
READING
1. Decide if the following statements are true (T) or false (F). Then read “Happiness is
ruining our lives“ to see if you were right. Do you agree with the views?
1. As a rule, we don’t return to our emotional baseline after undergoing a trauma or suf-
fering from a loss.
2. Most events have a small impact on how we are going to feel in the future.
3. The more we have, the more we want.
4. Happiness comes from the little things.
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Being Happy
22
5. In general, we are happiest when we rest.
2. We may be more affluent and have more opportunities than ever, but why aren’t we
happier? Read the text to find out.
Happiness is ruining our lives
Happiness, like death and the sun, cannot be stared at directly. Turn to look at it, and it
disappears.
We know when we are unhappy, irritable, angry, depressed, but we only realise we’re
happy when it’s over and become a memory. Yet still we seek happiness as if it were
a thing hidden from us, or a place we are trying to reach. In the American Constitution,
“the pursuit of happiness” sounds like the hunt for a half-wild animal.
There are professors of happiness, laughter clinics, learned studies, Government initia-
tives, scientists dissecting the brain in search of the site of contentment just as anatomists
used to hunt for the human soul. We have “happy drugs” like Prozac. We have come to
think of happiness as our right.
This month, at Harvard University in the United States, a psychologist called Daniel Gil-
bert published his research on how one’s “emotional barometers” function. His study –
based on questioning more than 100 university professors, before and after they found
out whether they had achieved tenure – casts a strange light on our ability to achieve
happiness, and our stubborn refusal to change.
Gilbert’s professors all expected to be quite happy if they got tenure, and rather unhappy
if they did not. In both cases, they were wrong.
Those who succeeded were happy for a while, but not as happy as they had expected to
be. And those who failed were not as unhappy as they had predicted.
Moreover, there seems to be a baseline for one’s state of mind. We may feel euphoria or
misery for a bit, but we soon return to our usual level. The discontented remain so; the
sunny-natured continue cheerful. The change in circumstances, however violent, merely
causes a blip in the predictable graph of our lives.
This can be read as good news or bad: it’s not easier to make ourselves happier, but nei-
ther is it difficult to cheer ourselves up. “Most people are reasonably happy most of the
time,” said Gilbert, “and most events do little to change that for long.” We are dogged
dwellers in our normal states of mind.
Many examples prove Gilbert’s phlegmatic philosophy of “reasonable happiness,” some
more momentous than promotion at work. People who were tested for Huntington’s dis-
ease or HIV infection expected to be devastated if the news was bad but, extraordinarily,
most were not.
What was most distressing was uncertainty: those who decided out of fear not to be
tested fared worse than any other group.
Lottery winners might expect to be made happier; in fact, after the initial elation (often
allied with a wild spending spree), they settle back into their average mood. If they were
159
glum before, they were glum after. If they were tranquil before, then they were tranquil
again.
That old saying seems proved: money can’t buy happiness. A book that is causing a stir in
America makes the same point. Robert Frank’s “Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy
in an Era of Excess” claims that two decades of rapidly increasing affluence and lavish
spending has not made anyone any happier. Clearly retail therapy doesn’t work for long.
Franks believes that the Western world has gone on a spending spree that has trickled
down from the very rich to the middle and even lower-middle economic classes – what
was once a luxury becomes an expectation. Its absence is a source of dissatisfaction. Big-
ger houses, better cars, more luxurious holidays, less time with family or friends, more
time on the couch. Can we ever have enough? The answer seems to be no – even too
much is never enough.
British psychologist Oliver James goes further than Robert Frank or Daniel Gilbert. In his
book “Britain on the Couch: Why We Are Unhappier Compared with 1950 Despite Being
Richer,” he argues that more of us are depressed now than 50 years ago, despite being
markedly better off.
An analysis of 39,000 people from eight countries concluded that 25-year-olds were three
times more likely to suffer from depression now; that in Britain cases of mild depression
had risen from 22 per cent to 31 per cent of the population; that in America 20 per cent
had suffered from serious mental illness.
Drug use, violent crimes and compulsive behaviour such as bulimia and anorexia and
gambling are all on the increase, as is the suicide rate (especially among young men).
James quotes Freud: depression is the rule, not the exception.
He points to many reasons for our misery: we might all be richer, but the gulf between
rich and poor is growing; divorce is like an emotional world war; unemployment reduces
the sense of self-esteem and purpose; young people grow up so quickly, often so brutally,
that they lose the gradualness of childhood. We feel let down, argues James – by love and
by our own aspirations. Even when we succeed, we feel that we have failed.
What is this happiness of which James, Frank or Gilbert talk? The affluent of the West
live in a therapy culture; even those of us who have not lain on the couch are soaked in
the language of self-consciousness, fulfilment, self-knowledge. We have learnt to expect
things our ancestors never sought. We look inside ourselves for the reasons of our dis-
satisfaction. Our life becomes a journey of self-discovery and our ambition is to find hap-
piness along the way.
And how, even if you know what it means, do you measure happiness? Certainly, you
don’t find it by looking at it, any more than you find sleep, say. Happiness is a by-product;
it lies in the margins of the day, between the lines. It is the shadow thrown by something
else. In therapy, you can discover, sometimes, reasons for personal pain and incapacity
and through understanding gain control over your life, but you can’t find contentment.
People are never happy when they are dwelling upon themselves. In all the research into
happiness, what emerges is that when people say they are happy, they are almost always
busy, and caught up in activity. They have a purpose. Employed people are far more likely
to be happy than the unemployed, which is only partly to do with income.
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Being Happy
22
Eccentrics are contented because they become so engaged with their obsessive pursuits.
Cheerful children are those who disappear into their play.
In other words, happiness comes when you lose yourself. In these moments of euphoric
forgetfulness, when we are no longer dwelling upon ourselves, we find what we cannot
ever grasp when we are consciously trying to do so. And perhaps it follows, therefore,
that our introspection chases away happiness. Perhaps we are, or feel we are, less happy
today because we are trying so hard to be more so. By making happiness a goal we chase
it away. French philosopher Michel Foucault claimed that we have substituted sex with
the talk of sex. Perhaps we have done the same with happiness.
People didn’t think happiness was their right – partly because they didn’t have the time,
but also because life used to have God at its centre. Life was a waiting room. Even when it
was full of pain and deprivation, it had a purpose. But few people have that kind of faith
any longer. We are born, and then we die. It is what happens in between that matters. In
a godless world we ponder life’s meaning. If there is no immortal happiness, we have to
find it here, now.
Lewis Wolpert has suggested that, for mild depression at least, brisk exercise is likely to
be more effective than pills and therapy. It seems that a similarly stoical approach may be
appropriate for happiness.
You want to be happy? Don’t buy a lottery ticket or blow your savings on a holiday. In-
stead, clear out that cupboard that’s been getting you down, make that awkward phone
call you’ve been putting off.
Research suggests that it will make you happier, and even if the research is wrong, at least
you’ll end up with a clean cupboard rather than a worthless lottery ticket.
By Nicci Gerrard, © Guardian News & Media Ltd.1999
to the text.
1. When predicting exactly how we will feel about something in the future,
we are most often
a) right.
b) wrong.
c) pessimistic.
2. According to Robert Frank,
a) affluence doesn’t make us happy as it could.

b) we feel deprived if we have less.
c) both a and b
161
3. Daniel Gilbert claims that negative events
a) don’t affect us as much as we think they do.

b) have long-lasting effects on us.
c) go unforgotten.
4. As James Oliver says,
a) modern life is driving more of us depressed.

b) happiness is dependent on economic growth.
c) failure is a cause of increasing unhappiness.
5. People are happiest when they are
a) relaxing and daydreaming.

b) engaged in a meaningful activity.
c) in pursuit of happiness.
6. Our ancestors didn’t seek happiness because
a) religion gave meaning to their existence.

b) they were happy with what little they had.
c) their lives were full of hardship.
VOCABULARY IN USE
1. Complete the text with the words from the box.
hedonic treadmill, happiness baseline, stimulus, circumstances, environment,

background, well-being, gains, mechanisms
How long can happiness and any other feeling be expected to endure? Feelings don’t
change as much as people might think. Life events and material ___________ (1) influ-
ence our subjective ___________ (2) for not much longer than just a few months because
we adapt to whatever happens in our ___________ (3). In pursuit of elusive ___________ (4)
we are on “the ___________ (5)” – no matter how fast we run on it, we stay in the same
place. We must keep working to achieve more success, earn more money, own more
things to maintain our ___________ (6). In other words, our level of happiness stays
about the same because if we are repeatedly exposed to a ___________ (7), we get used
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Being Happy
22
to it and eventually stop responding to it. Our adaptation ___________ (8) allow continu-
ous stimuli to fade into the ___________ (9). We get what we wanted, we adapt to it and
then we update our aspirations.
2. Complete the sentences with the words from the box.
by-product, state, predictor, impact, feelings, minds, forecasts, level, approach, pursuit
1. The single best ___________ of happiness is having meaningful social relationships.

2. After the initial elation, our ___________ of happiness returns to where it was before.
3. We’ve been predicting our ___________ all the time, only to find that the future rarely
turns out as we have anticipated.
4. One of the reasons why our individual ___________ are often wrong is that we dis-
count negative past events.
5. For centuries, people have been pondering what happiness is. Is it a fleeting emotion
or a ___________ of mind?
6. One theory is that happiness is a ___________ and you won’t find it if you make it
a goal of your life.
7. Most people incorrectly expect negative events to have a long-term adverse ______
______ on their lives.
8. A stoical ___________ to life seems to do more good for our mental well-being than
pills and therapy.
9. Psychologists say that the ___________ of happiness can actually make us less happy,
not more.
10. Our predictive powers aren’t very accurate and we often believe that things in reality
will be just as they are in our ___________ .
163
Revision
1. What defence mechanisms are these?
a)
John has been let go from his job. He accepts his dismissal with good grace, but once he
gets home, he takes it out on his wife and children.
b)
Andrew has a drink problem. His family and friends realise that he is addicted, but when
they confront him, he says: “I may like to drink from time to time, but I’m not an alcoholic.”
c)
Zoe witnessed a fatal car accident when she was a little girl. She has no recollection of this
event, but she is scared of cars and terrified at the very thought of driving.
d)
You may think that Sophie is very fond of Tom. She is particularly kind and friendly to-
wards him, but it’s all an act. She behaves in the exact opposite manner to cover her real
feelings.
e)
Bob was beside himself with anger when his boss had passed him over for promotion.
Instead of lashing out, he turned to the gym for relief.
f)
Mary has been diagnosed with a serious liver condition. She hides her anxiety by reading
about her illness in medical books and journals as well as educating herself on the treat-
ment options.
164
g)
A student gets a failing grade on a test and then he says: “The teacher has a down on me.
He is always giving me bad marks.”
h)
Ellen has a strong dislike for Grace, her colleague, but she says that it is Grace who dislikes
her.
i)
Alice is a shy and withdrawn girl who has trouble relating to her peers. She often retreats
into a dream world, where she is popular and gets a lot of attention.
j)
Debby feels inadequate due to her unsatisfying social life. She has no close friends and
rarely goes out after work. To cover up her feelings of inadequacy, she is overly focused
on her career.
2. Fill in the blanks with appropriate words derived from the ones given in brackets.
1. Most researchers studying dreams from a ___________ perspective reject Freudian

theory. (science)
2. Freud argued that dreams were a form of wish ___________ during sleep. (fulfil)
3. In REM sleep our brains are as highly ___________ as they are when we are awake.
(rouse)
4. Recent research have shown that pontine lesions don’t cause ___________ of
dreaming. (cease)
5. In Revonsuo’s theory, ___________ nightmares prepare us for bad situations in real
ity. (recur)
6. Sleep is a time of mental and physical ___________. (recover)
7. During sleep, the brain sorts through memories and rejects the ones that are ______
_____ . (relevant)
8. Some scientists have taken the position that dreams are basically random and _________.
(meaning)
9. During REM sleep, a ___________ moves his eyes back and forth rapidly. (dream)
10. There is strong evidence that the long-term ___________ of memories occurs while
we sleep. (store)
3. Decide what each example is: positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, posi-
tive punishment or negative punishment.
a)
Bob hates it when his mom pesters him to make his bed. He eventually starts to make his
bed as soon as he gets up to avoid his mom’s nagging.
165
b)
The teacher praises the students each time they get the answer right.
c)
Jim’s grades at school begin to slip. As a result, his parents decide to restrict his computer
and TV time.
d)
A driver receives a ticket for not wearing a seatbelt.
4. Complete the short texts with the missing names of the senses.
a)
Without the sense of ___________, we wouldn’t be able to enjoy our food as much as we
do now, nor take in the delicious scents around us. Deprived of this sense, we would miss
out on the full impact of odours such as those from gas leaks, rotten food, or a fire and
thus fail to detect dangers in time.
b)
Without the sense of ___________, we would never be able to communicate verbally
with one another, nor have the least idea of a sound.
c)
The lack of the sense of ___________ impairs our ability to observe things around us,
learn from visual information, and recognise imminent dangers such as oncoming vehi-
cles and overhead obstacles.
d)
Loss of the sense of ___________ can seriously impede our walking as we don’t feel our
feet hitting the floor. It can also put us in danger for not recognising pain if we are hurt.
Without it, we would never know the feel of rain on our faces and a hug from someone
we love.
e)
Without the sense of ___________, we can’t experience our own body. We don’t know
where our body parts are in space unless we look at them, nor how to control them.
Without it, we would need to consciously watch our feet lest we stumble on stairs or fall
when we walk.
f)
The loss of the sense of ___________ can lead us to eat food that is unfit for human con-
sumption. We would eat only for the benefit of our health and never for the pleasure of it.
166
Revision
5. Underline the correct alternative.
1. Memory is a cognitive ability which allows us to store and retrieve/rehearse informa-

tion.
2. No one knows the capacity/content of long-term memory.
3. It is claimed that during sleep the brain absorbs/discards all the irrelevant information
that we have obtained during the day.
4. Scientists have found that a good night’s sleep helps consolidate/trigger memories.
5. Long-term memory can encode/store a limitless amount of information.
6. Amnesic patients are not able to retain/retrieve information for more than a few min-
utes.
7. Most of people need to rehearse/recall new material a few times in order to commit it
to memory.
8. Most people suppress/repress traumatic memories by blocking them from their con-
sciousness.
6. Complete the sentences with appropriate names of disorders.
1. Tom may have _____________________. He is constantly putting himself on a pedes-

tal and boasting about anything he has ever done.
2. Due to her _____________________, Chloe doesn’t dine out, as she is scared to eat
food that other people have touched.
3. Mike had his first attack of _____________________ at age 6, when he was taking
a lift down alone.
4. Self-mutilation and suicidal behaviour are typical of _____________________, there-
fore those who are affected by it need constant medical attention.
5. The man suffers from _____________________ following a traffic accident. Now he is
even afraid to ride a bike.
6. Because people with _____________________ have no regard for the feelings of oth-
ers, they tend to engage in abusive and violent behaviours.
7. Mary has always anticipated bad things coming. Now that she has been diagnosed
with _____________________, she at least realises that her fears are irrational, but yet
she can’t shake them.
8. She has been struggling with _____________________ for years. She started drinking
when she was 15 and progressed to cocaine when she was in college.
1. Phineas Gage followed/sustained traumatic brain injury when an iron rod drove
through the left side of his skull.
2. According to WHO report, mental illnesses affect/influence one in four people.
3. As a result of his illness, Clive Wearing developed/caught a severe case of retrograde
and anterograde amnesia.
167
4. There is no single cause that contributes/triggers to mental disorders, but rather a com-
bination of biological, psychological and social factors.
5. About 75% of people with schizophrenia hallucinate/hear voices in their heads.
6. Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that disrupts/weakens the way an individual
thinks, behaves and feels.
7. Although memory escapes/declines with age, memory loss is typically the result of
a disease, not the aging process.
8. Due to hormonal fluctuations, women are more likely than men to suffer/prone from
depression.
8. Add appropriate adjectives to the following sentences.
1. Among the most common activities which are viewed as _____________ behaviour
are excessive eating and drinking.
2. People express their feelings not only with words but also through _____________
behaviour such as facial expressions.
3. Many children resort to _____________ behaviour to get what they want.
4. B.F. Skinner and other behaviourists claimed that language is a _____________ behav-
iour, as is walking or eating with a fork.
5. In Freud’s theory, unresolved conflicts in childhood can lead to _____________ be-
haviour later in life.
6. People with _____________ behaviour tend to act without thinking.
7. Even normal activities such as hand washing or tidying up things can become
_____________ behaviours if performed excessively.
8. In simple terms, “token economy” is based on a premise that rewards increase
a _____________ behaviour.
1. Chomsky proposed that we are born with innate/distinct abilities to acquire the lan-
guage to which we are accustomed/exposed.
2. Washoe is said to have acquired/picked about 200 ASL words.
3. At about 18 months, an infant’s vocabulary is expanding/spreading at a surprising rate.
4. Children will invent their own language if they are unable to catch up/pick up on the
language of their community.
5. By the age of six months, babies start to babble/chatter and speak simple words such
as “mama” or “dada..”
6. Maybe language doesn’t indicate/determine the ways in which we conceptualise
the world, but it certainly influences our thinking.
7. Despite extensive training, Genie never mastered/achieved the rules of grammar.
8. Around their second birthday, most children begin to produce/string two words to-
gether.
168
Revision
10. Complete the sentences below with using verbs of facial expressions and body ges-
tures.
1. The man _____________ his fingers impatiently on his desk, as he waited for the oth-
ers to join him.
2. The audience were so stunned by the remarkable performance that it took almost
a minute before they _____________ their hands.
3. Philip _____________ his head, trying to think of the right word to say.
4. The boy _____________ his fists, fighting his instinct to dash out of the room.
5. When I asked Bob what he really meant, he didn’t answer in words. He just ________
______ his shoulders.
6. Every time they try to feed their baby daughter, she _____________ her lips so
tightly that they can’t put anything into her mouth.
7. Tim’s eyes _____________ when he recalled the way she had treated him the other
day.
8. She was sitting on a sofa, _____________ her fingers to some beat in her head.
9. Usually, the pupils of our eyes _____________ when we are attracted to someone.
10. Jack _____________ his eyes in disbelief, hoping it was all a dream.
11. Complete the sentences with the names of brain structures from the box.
amygdala, limbic brain, neocortex, forebrain, pons, ventromesial

quadrant of the frontal lobe, hippocampus
1. Individuals with damage to the _____________ lose both their ability to dream and to
do anything of their own volition.
2. For some time Hobson’s theory that dreams originate in the _____________ was
largely accepted by scientists, until Solms found that some patients with intact pon-
tine regions didn’t dream, and some patients with pontine lesions were still having
dreams.
3. The _____________ is located within the temporal lobe of the brain. It is involved in
memory and strong emotions, such as fear, anxiety and stress, that are essential to our
survival.
4. Everything that goes in our brains, our emotions, feelings, needs and intentions are
processed by the _____________, a structure inherited from earlier mammals, and
then revealed in our body language.
5. The _____________ plays a key role in the formation and retrieval of memories. Peo-
ple who have suffered from damage to the _____________ have experienced pro-
found difficulties in forming new memories as well as retrieving memories from be-
fore the onset of the amnesia.
6. Studies of memory have provided a great deal of evidence that long-term memory is
stored in _____________.
7. Hobson’s “activation synthesis theory” posits that dreams are generated in the
_____________ and that dreaming doesn’t occur solely in REM sleep.
169
1. How the child turns out/brings up as an adult is directly related to the upbringing it
receives.
2. The boy was raised/grown in a permissive home where everything was allowed.
3. Judith Rich Harris argues that the way parents shape/rear their kids has almost no
bearing on what kind of adults they grow/turn into.
4. Their daughter has raised/blossomed into a strong, independent woman.
5. It’s widely believed that if parents provide a good, caring environment for their chil-
dren, they will grow up/bring up confident and self-reliant.
6. Some psychologists claim that parents have no real power to shape/rear their chil-
dren’s personalities.
7. Parenting is hardly the only factor that decides how children turn/develop. Others in-
clude heredity, peers and school.
13. Complete the text. The first letter of each missing word has been given.
Morals tell us what is right and what is wrong, and what standards of conduct are expect-
ed. They are laid down for us by society and though many of them are u__________ (1)
(i.e. they are shared in all times and places), they can v__________ (2) from culture
to culture and even from person to person. Morals are not static. They are constantly
e__________ (3) to suit the needs of society. As society changes, so do morals, lest we suf-
fer the consequences. Morals, thus, are changeable because that is the way of progress.
All theories and a__________ (4) about morals and morality must confront the other side
of the coin: there are some ethical issues – the so-called “moral d__________” (5) – that
have no correct solution. Even if we act upon our values and principles, whatever we do
involves a conflict between moral requirements, as there is no real right and wrong.
Imagine that an obese woman gets stuck in a cave and traps 22 tourists behind her. Now
imagine that neither drilling nor cutting is an option. What would you do? Sacrifice the
woman to save the 22, or let her die together with the others? That’s a real quandary
about what to do in this situation. Fortunately, there was a simpler way out. The woman
was eventually freed with liquid paraffin and a pulley after a few hours, and everyone else
walked away unharmed.
What are the sources of our ethical judgements? A new science of morality suggests that
we are all equipped with a universal “moral grammar”, a set of rules h__________ (6) into
our brains, which prepares us to make fast and i__________ (7) judgements of right and
wrong. People of different ages, g__________ (8) and backgrounds respond similarly to
a tragic choice, however they cannot explain why they respond the way they do. Surpris-
ingly, emotions follow from moral judgements rather than p__________ (9) them. On
this view, our emotions have little to do with our judgements, however, they have a big
e__________ (10) on what we do. For example, we would probably all agree that it is per-
missible to kill one if it meant saving several others, but when it comes to actually taking
someone’s life, most of us would lose our resolve.
170
Revision
14. Complete the text with the words from the box.
discrimination, label, fear, tolerance, bias, prejudice
The situation of sexual minorities in Poland didn’t capture public attention until the late
1980s. The main reason for this was strong Catholicism in Poland and the values it pro-
moted. This in turn resulted in lack of __________ (1), irrational __________ (2) and largely
religious __________ (3) against homosexuals. Stigmatised by the __________ (4) “moral
pervert”, Polish gays and lesbians lived their lives behind closed doors. They wouldn’t go
out in public together and often passed for heterosexuals. Only after Poland’s accession
to the EU did the gay movement actually begin to pick up speed, and Polish homosexu-
als started to come out of the closet. A week after accession, the “March of Tolerance” was
held in Kraków with the attendance of more than a thousand people, including artists
and politicians, against __________ (5) towards sexual minorities. In the meantime, an
“anti-march” was organised by violent nationalist activists who were chanting homopho-
bic slogans. Despite the tension, the march was highly successful. Following these events,
the Mayor of Warsaw imposed a ban on the Parade of Equality scheduled for June the
same year. Until then, the Parade had been held annually in protest at sexual __________ (6)
in Poland. Despite the official ban, the Parade went ahead under the disguise of a demon-
stration for freedom. A few months later, a similar situation happened in Greater Poland.
The Mayor of Poznań banned the “March of Equality” that was supposed to take place in
November. The organisers of the March, a new liberal organisation called Greens 2004,
claimed that the demonstration would take place anyway. The demonstration did take
place, but because the march was interrupted supposedly by homophobic football fans
hurling eggs, oranges and even stones at the marchers, the event eventually had to be
cancelled.
15. Complete the sentences and underline the correct word.
1. Almost every __________ addict/addiction started with marijuana or hash.

2. __________ addict/addiction is the single most common cause of obesity and diabe-
tes.
3. Through insisting on abstinence, AA members are recovering from _________ addict/
addiction.
4. Even though __________ addicts/addictions aren’t disabling, they are still potentially
harmful.
5. __________ addict/addiction is the most common substance use disorder in the world
and the most difficult to break.
6. __________ addicts/addictions have a lot of partners, but they are unable to build
meaningful and lasting relationships.
7. __________ addict/addiction seems to be a minor problem compared to drinking,
smoking or gambling, yet it is one of the reasons marriages fall apart.
8. Euphoric effects, physical dependence and compulsive use are all the hallmarks of
__________ addict/addiction.
171
16. Decide which option in italics is not possible. Sometimes all three options are correct.
THE NATURE OF ADDICTION

Robert was addicted to heroin for 16 years. In a spiral of decline he lost his wife, his chil-
dren, his job and his self esteem. He would wake up feeling sick and spend the day steal-
ing and begging for money to support/kick/feed (1) his habit. He’d started taking the drug
because it gave him pleasure – he’d get a tremendous high, an amazing rush and an
escape from the world around him. Like many users he thought he was in control – until
finally he was forced to accept he was addicted.
Brain reward
No-one sets out to be an addict – to be dependent on a particular drug. Unfortunate-
ly with many substances the process is inevitable, and it’s only recently scientists have
started to understand what’s going on when a drug user becomes dependent/addicted/
hooked (2).
Clare Stamford of University College London, who studies the biochemical process of
addiction, says: “People continue to take drugs because they like what the drugs do and
want to keep on taking more.”
“Unfortunately, people keep/persist in/continue (3) taking drugs because if they don’t, they
get plummeted/slide/bounce (4) into a withdrawal syndrome which can be uncomfortable
and life threatening.” Drugs like morphine and heroin work by entering a “reward system/
circuitry/network (5)” in the brain. They attach themselves to custom-built receptors into
which the drug molecules fit like a key into a lock.
Vulnerability
Dr David Best from the UK’s National Addiction Centre explains: “People experience an
hedonic rush but over a period of time the brain develops a tolerance to the drug, it de-
mands/craves/requires (6) it more and more.”
The quicker the effect of a drug wears off, the more addictive it tends to be. But the issue
of drug addiction goes far deeper than just a biochemical process in the brain, says Adam
Winstock, a lecturer in Clinical psychology at Kings College London.
“It has its roots in both the biology of the individual, how susceptible/predisposed/prone
(7) they are to addiction, but also in the environment they live in.
“Habit/Dependency/Addiction (8) is always going to be an interaction of opportunity and
vulnerability.”
Take Carol, for example, a member of Narcotics Anonymous in Nairobi, who started tak-
ing heroin when she was at college.
She was away from home, lonely and vulnerable. Her friends took/turned to/came off (9)
heroin, she soon started enjoying it, then she found she couldn’t stop.
By Richard Hollingham, BBC News ©2000 BBC
172
Revision
17. Rewrite the sentences using the words in brackets.
1. People with practical intelligence are much better than others at adapting to every
day life. (excel)
People with practical intelligence _______________ adapting to everyday life.
2. The student was unjustly said to be slow. (labelled)
The student was unjustly _________________ slow.
3. Repressed feelings and desires reveal themselves in dreams or slips of the tongue.
(glimpsed)
Repressed feelings and desires can ________________ in dreams or slips of the tongue.
4. He drives fancy cars to make him feel better about his small stature. (overcompen-
sate)
He drives fancy cars to ______________________ his small stature.
5. Piaget’s theory allows us to gain a deeper understanding of children’s cognitive devel-
opment. (insight)
Piaget’s theory allows us to gain ______________________ cognitive development.
6. Russian speakers are better than English speakers at recognising differences between
shades of blue. (discriminating)
Russian speakers are better than English speakers at ________________ shades of blue.
7. Operating on the Pleasure Principle, the id looks for immediate satisfaction of its urg-
es. (seeks)
Operating on the Pleasure Principle, the id ____________ immediate satisfaction of
its urges.
8. The AIDS patient was badly affected by the prejudice of his neighbours. (victim)
The AIDS patient __________________ the prejudice of his neighbours.
9. Bats emit calls and listen to the echoes that return from the objects around them.
(bounce)
Bats emit calls and listen to the echoes that __________________ the objects around
them.
10. Psychologists say that pursuing happiness can actually make people feel worse. (pur-
suit)
Psychologists say that ___________ happiness can actually make people feel worse.
173

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Anna Treger, Bronisław Treger

English for Psychology

Projekt okładki i rysunki

Publikacja dofinansowana przez

Wydawnictwo Akademii Pedagogiki Specjalnej

Wydawnictwo Akademii Pedagogiki Specjalnej

1. Discuss the questions.

1. What is it that determines our character and identity?

1. Dualism makes all sorts of religious beliefs possible.

The Duel Between Body and Soul

a) that people can survive the destruction of their bodies.

2. Our dualist perspective makes us feel

a) as if there was a residing organism inside us.

3. Materialists insist that mental life is

a) the product of brain activities.

4. Dualists can take the position that

a) abortion should be permitted.

5. Damage to the brain

a) can increase our mental faculties.

6. Children see their brain as a

a) source of conscious experience.

a) how intelligent we are.

8. Science tells us that common-sense dualism

involve, possess, wipe out, emerge, clash, settle, survive, float

2. Choose the correct option (a, b or c) to complete each sentence.

a) occupying b) residing c) belonging

a) innate b) born c) true

a) chain b) number c) network

a) trend b) nature c) tendency

a) rescued b) saved c) liberated

a) divided b) separate c) distant

7. The typical conception of the brain __________ by children is that it is fundamentally

a) held b) regarded c) considered

a) hurt b) blow c) trauma

5. a) Match Sternberg’s intelligences with their definitions.

1. analytical intelligence a) the ability to adapt to everyday life by using exist-

“The Triarchic Mind” : Yale Psychologist Defines Three Types of Intelligence

1. IQ tests have been criticised for

a) being culturally biased.

2. Relating “fickleness” to “chameleon” is an example of

3. Knowledge-acquisition components are the processes used in

a) learning and storing new information.

a) didn’t work hard enough.

6. According to Sternberg, intelligence is

7. Pascal Forgione says that IQ tests

a) are bad predictors of academic performance.

define, score, measure, consist, neglect, adapt, excel

1. Intelligence is a hard thing to __________ because it comes in different forms.

1. Which character sought immediate satisfaction?

1. Is consciousness the essence of who we are?

1 automatic skills and reactions

4. Interest in unconscious processes has a long history in philosophy and psychology.

5. Match the terms from both columns.

The Great Unknown

2. Answer the questions.

1. Where does Freud’s fascination with the unconscious stem from?

repress, interact, exert, generate, invent, access, govern, seek

repressed, unpalatable, conscious, collective, trivial, authentic, incomplete, intrusive

2. Freud described a lot of everyday life in terms of different psychological strategies

Refusing to accept or ac- A parent who enjoys spanking

1. Read the text. What other defence mechanisms are mentioned?

2. Decide if the following statements are true (T) or false (F).

a) You say: “S/he hasn’t dumped me, we’ve just quarrelled.”