By better understanding young shooters and the factors that influence the propensity to commit these crimes, we may be able to reduce the incidence of mass shootings. This post focuses on factors unique to the online ecosystems that many young people, especially young men, inhabit. While there isn't a universally accepted definition of a "mass shooting," roughly following The Violence Project and other researchers,
From there, he said to remember those good memories and focus on cultivating a warm and curious rapport that is centered around simple, effective, and concise questions that you already know the answers to. The questions can be along the lines of "Tell me more about why you believe this to be true?" or "Where did you get this information from?"
Now, in this final part (transformation), we follow Claire further: how her need for control - once an adaptive defence - turns into a closed system of fear, and how healing begins not by surrendering control, but by understanding what it has been protecting all along. Compensatory Narcissism and Mnemonic Anger Claire's discipline is often mistaken for pride, but it is, in fact, compensatory narcissism-not vanity, but a defence against humiliation, a defensive self-idealisation that repairs a wounded sense of worth.
Have you ever gone grocery shopping with a grocery list of items to get, but then walked out of the store with more things than your grocery list? Grocery stores are spaces that are designed to make you spend more money. Strategic aisle placements and product positions follow a deliberate strategy rooted in consumer psychology and decades of behavioral research.
Claire is 35, a highly accomplished architect known for her precision, discipline, persistence, determination, and clarity of thought. She has never been one for shortcuts. Through school and university, she was the kind of student who turned in clean drafts weeks before deadlines, earning her reputation as the straight-A girl who never left loose ends. Her teachers valued her efficiency, her peers respected her output, and her supervisors quickly learned she could be trusted with complex projects.
However, a complicating factor witnessed in many clinical trials is that some patients who received the placebo or fake medicine show signs of improvement. This has become known as the " placebo effect." This can occur when a person believes the medicine they are receiving will result in better health outcomes. This psychological phenomenon suggests there is a strong mind-body connection. As shown with the placebo effect, positive expectations can actually result in positive outcomes.
Researchers in the area of emotions and cognition have long maintained that there are strong links between feeling and thinking. One approach in particular, the "broaden and build" theory, maintains that when you're upset about something, you view the world in terms of tiny details, but when you're happy, everything is covered in a big, rosy glow. It's impossible, the theory says, to draw a bright line between thoughts and emotions due to this process.
You'll find a plethora of articles on how it affects the individual subscriber, citing the effects of excessively high standards for oneself on one's long-term motivation, self-esteem, and passion for one's work. Those articles consistently relate this form of perfectionism back to oneself. The problem, however, is that the preoccupation with self continues with a further preoccupation with self. "How does this affect me?" is the perfectionist's seminal question.
"I always dream of the same mall." So begins a recent post on the popular subreddit r/The MallWorld. The post continued: "It has a very vintage feel to it. It always has warm amber lighting and wooden guard rails. It has 3 main floors, and one secret lower floor. "The lower floor is usually kept pristine, a time capsule of the 90's. The stores are closed, but the merchandise remains. It smells like my kindergarten class did.."
Bandura (1977) showed that human beings tend to imitate those who appear to be powerful, or to be rewarded for their actions. When a "model" was observed by children to assault a "bobo doll" punching bag, the children generally tended to attack the bag with greater frequency and intensity, especially if the model was an adult (and hence relatively powerful by child standards), or was seen to be rewarded for the violent action. This "modeling" behavior was basic to the development of social learning theory.
Years ago, I identified "personal control" as a key component of a resilient outlook and a resilient life. I defined personal control as the ability to focus our time and energy on factors over which we have some influence rather than on situations over which we have little, if any, control. Resilient people have learned to cope effectively with challenges and adversity and demonstrate personal control.
When someone has had an experience or series of experiences wherein they were powerless, that sense of helplessness can get stamped onto their perceptions. Psychologists have known this for decades. As early as 1967, an experiment subjected dogs to repeated shocks in such a way that the dogs could not predict when they would be shocked (Overmier and Seligman, 1967). Over time, the creatures simply accepted the shocks and became docile.
"What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering." ~Don Miguel Ruiz For most of my life, I didn't fully understand what projection was. I just knew I kept becoming the problem. I was "too much." Too intense. Too emotional. Thought too deeply. Spoke too plainly.
Play first stirs in the mutual, musical back-and-forth cooing of mother and infant. This proto-play practices attunement. Before we learn to talk, we learn to chortle and gurgle and babble and hum along. Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson noted that this pleasurable and surprising dialog "negotiates the first interpersonal encounters, the light of the eyes, the features of the face, and the sound of the name [as they each] become essential ingredients of a first recognition by the primal other."
For almost five years, I've been dutifully drawing little green dots at the top of my journal entries. A small green dot means it was a generally good day, a slightly bigger one that it was pretty fantastic. A huge one represents one of the handful of no-notes, absolutely perfect days of the year. Orange dots equal stress, red denotes anger, and blue means feeling blue.
When Nick Watkins was a child, he pasted articles about space exploration into scrapbooks and drew annotated diagrams of rockets. He knew this because, years later, he still had the scrapbooks, and took them to be evidence that he had been a happy child, although he didn't remember making them. When he was seven, in the summer of 1969, his father woke him up to watch the moon landing; it was the middle of the night where they lived, near Southampton, in England.
The amount of often conflicting advice for parents and caregivers available on social media can feel overwhelming. How does one even begin to sort through this overabundance of advice, much less figure out what is best practice for building healthy relationships? The Spirited Child Approach has been developed over decades of working with families of spirited children who are typical and yet more intense, persistent, perceptive, sensitive, and energetic. It interweaves findings from the fields of temperament, secure attachment, sleep, development, resiliency, neurobiology, and self-regulation.
Older adults are often mocked ("OK, Boomer!"), set off to the side, or treated as incompetent nuisances, at least in much public discourse. So, where did the expression come from? In earlier times, older adults were treated as the repository of knowledge, elders who could provide sage advice to the less polished members of younger generations. There is, then, a tradition of viewing older adults as valued and respected members of their communities.
Egocentrism has to do with failing to understand that others may be experiencing an object or event differently than you are. Egotism, on the other hand, has to do with failing to appreciate that the needs and interests of others are as important as one's own. Egocentrism is a cognitive domain largely independent of one's personality, while egotism is a personality trait that is largely independent of one's level of cognitive functioning.
When a rival lies or cheats, we demand justice. But when a friend does, we offer excuses. Equally, we believe our team plays by the rules while others bend them. Yet honesty depends on the messenger. When someone from our in-group bends the truth, we call it strategic, but when the out-group does it, we call it deceit. In a modern era of algorithmic bubbles, deep fakes, and partisan feeds, the cost of this bias grows.
When it comes to love, this rule doesn't just distort memory; it reshapes how we evaluate our relationships. It influences the way we decide whether to stay, go, or grow. That makes it far more than a curious quirk of memory. It is, in fact, a bias with real consequences for how we choose and sustain our bonds. Understanding how the peak-end rule works can help us consciously redesign our relationships in ways that resist such distortion, allowing us to remember them more truthfully.
I think a lot of people don't realize that investing is a problem that's been solved. We know what the average returns are for equity, for fixed income. We know what inflation looks like over the long haul. We know what the economy broadly does, what the range looks like. The variable, the wild card, that we haven't yet solved for is our own behavior.
