The Psych Student

Wired reports: The visual and audio feedback presented to Erik Ramsey, a locked-in man who uses an experimental wireless brain-computer interface to produce vowel sounds. As the system expands, he could eventually form consonants as well.

In the above clip is Professor Martin Seligman, renowned on the subjects of depression and abnormal psychology, who has become since around the 90′s a proponent of Positive Psychology.

This video is a TED talk he gave on July 21, 2008, in which he delves into what Positive Psychology is; moving the science beyond just treating those people suffering from something to helping people achieve actual happiness and meaningful lives. Being that it’s TED, he ties it back to technology, science and design at the end, but it’s essentially a very similar talk to the one I heard him give last Tuesday on the subject of “Positive Psychology and Positive Education” as part of the British Psychological Society Lecture Series.

There’s a lot to be said for what Seligman is evangelizing, and a number of areas worth exploring, but what interested me quite a bit was the notion of flow. Read the rest of this entry »

Fig. 8B from patent application number: 11/716,378, "Selective user monitoring in an online environment" by Gary Hayato Ogasawara et al, filed in 2007.

Previously on this blog I’ve talked about using inventories to measure feelings, burnout, etc. These are assessment tools to gauge unhappiness among a wide swathe of individuals. Inventories are good ways to measure something as opposed to hiring the hundreads of trained psychologists and sending them out en masse to question every single person you want and individually quantify their wellbeing. But measuring tools still have trained practitioners at the controls. What happens when we start to outsource this to technology? Read the rest of this entry »

"One Hundred and Sixty" by Stibbons

Most everyone knows what professional burnout feels like, but measuring it and describing it objectively seems to be an elusive goal, akin to describing the color blue to a blind person. Burnout is a part of my current job.

Not my own burnout¹ but professional burnout among educators, the people who Teacher Support Network² serve. Our online and telephone support services did help rekindle my interest in psychology and get me on the path back to school, and I tend to spend some time looking at new ways to bring tools to teachers to measure their own stress levels, work/life balance, etc., but how to best measure burnout overall? What’s the best method for people to assess themselves, and how can a school system best look at the burnout rate of its educators? Read the rest of this entry »