Sex, Drugs, and Boredom

The Great Feast

Peter G. Stromberg, Ph.D. — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:43:59 +0000

Benjamin Franklin asserted that the turkey , not the eagle, should be our national symbol, calling the former a "much more respectable bird." I'll give you another reason to favor the turkey for this job: We eat it in our national feast. In order to explain this, I must relate some facts from long ago.

Among the greatest Biblical scholars of the 19th century was the Scot William Robertson Smith. Smith was excommunicated by his church, however, because his findings did not sit well with the religious authorities of the time. Perhaps the most influential of his ideas was that a common ritual stood at the heart of ancient religions. In this ritual an animal that symbolizes the group of worshippers is sacrificed and then eaten by the group. This communal feast, held Robertson-Smith, was the basis for the kinship that held the group together: it was by eating together that a common bond of kinship was created. Robertson-Smith based his argument on documents describing the early religious practices of Semitic peoples, but he also held that similar communal feasts could be observed world-wide.

One of Smith's readers was Sigmund Freud, who used Smith's theory as a basis for his book Totem and Taboo. Freud combined his own ideas about the Oedipus Complex with Smith's about the communal feast, and came up with the following: The communal feast is a somewhat watered-down version of a ritual that was practiced at the very origin of our species. In the original form, the sacrificial victim was not an animal representing the group, rather it was the dominant male in the group; his male offspring eventually became strong enough to kill their father, thereby ending his monopolistic control over the females of the group. Then, for good measure, the group of sons ate the old guy, gristly though he must have been. Later, feeling guilty about the whole business, they came to worship his memory.

Is any of this true? Probably not: Smith combined some interesting evidence with a good deal of conjecture and speculation, and then Freud added another layer of speculation. But I also think it would be wrong to dismiss these theories as simple nonsense. After all, billions of people do in fact believe some version of the idea that it is important to share a meal comprised of the (either symbolic or real) body of God; Christians call this communion. And it really is also true that many other religions contain some version of this idea-a ritual based on eating a sacrificial victim that represents both the worshippers and God. But of course, at the end of the day, these are simply interesting observations, and no one really knows how (or if) they fit together.

So we are left with a mystery: When Americans feast on an animal that can be said to represent them, they express elements of a strange human behavioral pattern that surely stretches back before the beginning of recorded history. Why does this basic ceremony appear so often across different cultural traditions? The answers that Freud and Robertson Smith offered were probably wrong, but that doesn't mean the mystery isn't real.

Learn more at Peter G. Stromberg's website. Photo from flickr, user-name tuchodi

Party On, Dude

Peter G. Stromberg, Ph.D. — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 15:43:13 +0000

Unless you have alienated everyone around you, in the next two months you are likely to be invited to at least one party. If you take the perspective of a visitor from outer space, parties are actually sort of weird: "The humans gather in groups and consume food and other substances that make them dizzy. Using special equipment designed to produce loud sounds, they begin to hop around and become quite excited. Sometimes they even initiate their mating practices."

I was recently interviewed for an article about parties, and as I talked I realized how much recent research on imitation can help us understand about these odd behaviors. Survival among our non-human primate ancestors was tied to effective means of coordinating and sustaining social groups with increasingly flexible and complex means of adapting to their environments. One of the most effective means of coordinating groups is imitation, because it promotes group solidarity and allows for rapid learning.

We now know that there is a system of mirror neurons, probably present in all primates, but highly developed in humans. These specialized neurons fire both when we perform certain kinds of actions and when we observe others performing them. This means, for one thing, that we automatically imitate others much of the time, and the only reason we don't walk around imitating constantly is that we also learn, as we grow, to inhibit many of our neural impulses to imitate. Nevertheless, and this is the key point for parties, we still imitate others all the time, often without knowing we do so.

Thus, research has shown that if you are engaged in a lively conversation with someone, you will closely imitate their facial expressions. This will have two more or less inevitable consequences: so long as you sustain a lively conversation, you and your partner will tend to like one another. (In support of these points, see the articles and comments by Ap Dijksterhuis in Perspectives on Imitation) Second, you and your partner will begin to share emotions, because it is now widely accepted that emotions are triggered by associated facial expressions. As you know, a lively conversation can be very stimulating, even exciting: this is why.

Suppose you are in a setting where several small groups are having lively conversations. These folks are enjoying themselves and laughing. You are imitating those you are in conversation with, enjoying yourself, and feeling the happiness even of the other conversational groups. You are laughing and speaking excitedly-others hear this, and in turn they become more aroused and excited.

This emotional contagion may sound odd (aren't emotions supposed to well up from within our innermost selves?), but in fact it's an everyday sort of thing. An example I sometimes use to convey this to students: I ask them if they have ever been with a group of friends talking, and they have laughed so hard they felt they couldn't stop. Virtually everyone says they have had this experience. Now, I say, have you ever felt that way just sitting by yourself, not reading or watching a movie, when you just think of something funny? No one has ever claimed such an experience. The point is that we are usually capable of much more intense emotions in groups than as individuals.

Now of course, parties aren't just about conversations. There can be music, dancing, drinking, etc. But notice that all of these things also can lead to high arousal levels, even what might be called altered states of consciousness. Drums have been used since time immemorial to stimulate trance-we are highly susceptible to regularly repeated rhythms. Further, a lot of what happens with rhythm and dance is physical entrainment, a process that is closely related to imitation. Entrainment is another elemental motor process, deeply embedded in our evolutionary history, and it has been shown that infants who are but a few hours old will begin to synchronize bodily movements with their caretakers.

What does all this add up to? Intense collective celebrations have had important social functions for millions of years, even before our ancestors became human beings. At such events we find ourselves feeling emotions that we are not used to, we experience levels of arousal not familiar from day to day life, and we find ourselves doing things that we haven't really fully intended to do. This is why parties can be so much fun. They can be so stimulating that normal conventions of comportment may seem unnecessary or irrelevant, and at a really good party, people can get pretty crazy. Not you or me, of course, but those other humans...

To learn more, visit Peter G. Stromberg's website. Photo by Dennis Crowley.

Entertainment and Imitation

Peter G. Stromberg, Ph.D. — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 15:55:28 +0000

Usually we regard entertainment such as TV, movies, and novels as leisure time activities, enjoyable but not terribly important. I think this is incorrect; my view is that entertainment experiences are both powerful and consequential. In part, this is because entertainment engages the strong tendency for members of our species to imitate what we see and imagine.

When we use the word "imitation" in everyday speech we are referring to one person doing the same thing as someone else. I'm speaking about humans here, but in fact many animals imitate one another in this sense. For example, a whole flock of birds may take to the skies when one does so.

Recently scientists from a number of different disciplines have made great strides in understanding imitation. There is now general agreement that there is a level of imitation that goes beyond "doing what someone else is doing." In full imitation, A understands that B is a being like A who is pursuing a goal, and since A has a similar goal, A does what B is doing.

It may be that only humans are capable of imitation in this sense, although some would assert that there are some other mammals that can do this. That's not the point here, however. The point is rather that many cognitive scientists argue that this sort of imitation is the foundation of human cooperation in social groups. Humans can understand what other humans are up to and can thus join in with them on a wide range of complex projects. Perhaps the single most important of these projects is language, but there are a lot of others-hunting and warfare, roads and pottery, economic and legal systems, you get the picture.

This perspective on imitation can help us to understand how entertainment works on us. We are wired to imitate what we see, even what we imagine, and to easily adopt the perspective of others; in fact, we will do so automatically before we learn the skills of inhibiting such responses. Thus, to take a single example, when you watch a romantic movie, you will automatically tend to imitate the facial expressions of the actors on the screen, and as a result you may begin to feel-really feel-the emotions of tenderness or passion or frustration that are being skillfully portrayed. The goal of the actors becomes your goal-you are desperate for the couple to get together (or in an action movie, you really want the bad guy to get what's coming to him).

The result? Well, the obvious one is that this is an enjoyable experience, because even though we never lose track of the fact that it's a story, it feels real. In fact, it's so enjoyable that we will shell out good money to climb on this ride. But there is also another, less obvious, result. The experience we construct as we join into the film through our imitative capacities leaves us with a memory of some very powerful and pleasant feelings. These feelings can become an emotional standard for us, against which we judge our experiences in the real world. We know that romantic movies aren't real, but we may still bring emotional expectations from these movies into our real relationships. And this is one reason that many can't shake the feeling that their real-world relationships are flawed, that there is something better out there somewhere...

Learn more at Peter G. Stromberg's website. Photo by Patrick Byrne.

Halloween and Classification

Peter G. Stromberg, Ph.D. — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:18:44 +0000

You remember Rumpelstiltskin, right? Ugly little dude with some serious spinning wheel skills. He rescues a fair maiden from doom by spinning straw into gold. But in return he extracts a terrible price: when she has a child, she must hand it over to him. She eventually is able to escape this obligation because she guesses his name. Rumpelstiltskin doesn't take this well, and tears himself in half.

What does this have to do with Halloween?

When I was a youngster, I could never understand why this powerful, albeit ugly, guy couldn't just take the kid. Why is he rendered powerless when fair maiden (actually, I guess she's no longer a maiden at that point) guesses his name? As I got a little older, I learned that it is not uncommon, in the world's myths and religions, for supernatural figures to have secret names. For example, you may know that the ancient Israelis followed various practices intended to conceal the true name of God.

So, that's a hint: The power of a supernatural being is sometimes thought to depend on concealing its name. The reason for this was explained many years ago by anthropologists such as Victor Turner and Mary Douglas. Douglas proposed a cognitive theory to explain the power of the un-named: Every society has, built into its language and thought, systems of classification that divide the world into various categories. But there are always things that don't fit very well into any classification system. And, throughout history and across the globe, things that don't fit into classification systems are thought to be mysterious and powerful.

Consider, for example, the popular classification of living beings in English. Two of our important categories are animals and birds. For the most part, it's pretty obvious what goes where. But what about bats? Animals should have something under their feet; celebrity flying squirrels aside, no self-respecting creature with fur flies. And no self-respecting bird has fur. Before the advent of scientific classification, the bat was a complete anomaly. Therefore, we don't know just what it is. The bat is like a being without a name: eerie, mysterious, dangerous.

We also classify time into categories: day and night, this year and next year, and so on. Therefore, according to the theory, we should expect to find that the moments of time that stand between these categories are oddly powerful. And indeed, magical transformations are likely to occur at midnight, religious groups hold their ceremonies at the end or the beginning of the week, and New Year's Eve is becomes the occasion for a wild party.

In parts of pre-Christian Europe, of course, Halloween was New Year's Eve, a moment when the very boundary between life and death was thought to dissolve. As Turner pointed out, these moments of transition are not only unknown, they contain within themselves the awesome power of transformation, for through them, one thing becomes another thing.

And so we are reluctant to give up our celebrations of transformation. These days, on Halloween we don masks and disguises so that we too will be unknown; we attempt to appropriate the powers of the transitional to ourselves. Enjoy Halloween, and keep in mind that you are celebrating ideas that were probably first formulated in the Paleolithic era.

To learn more, visit Peter G. Stromberg's website. Photo credit: Mr. 119th Street.

Entertainment's Disciples

Peter G. Stromberg, Ph.D. — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:30:52 +0000

I have done a few media interviews in connection with my book on entertainment, and at times I have been pressed to offer a judgment on whether the entertainment that is prominent in our culture is a good or a bad thing. I resist making such judgments, in part because that's not my job. As a social scientist, my task is to study entertainment, not to pass moral judgments. In addition, it seems to me that the category of entertainment is too broad to be judged good or bad. Entertainment is like the weather-sometimes good, sometimes bad. But nobody makes a global judgment of weather like "weather is bad." I don't think global judgments of entertainment make much sense either.

That doesn't mean that it's impossible to generalize about the effects of entertainment on our lives. For example, we should be aware that participating in any sort of entertainment is a form of discipline. It seems odd to say this-watching TV doesn't seem like discipline at all. That's because we usually use discipline to refer to rigorous training, and sitting in front of a television does not seem like training at all, much less rigorous training. But our word discipline is derived from disciple, which as you may know means "follower." To participate in entertainment like novels or movies or TV, you have to follow what is going on. You must become a disciple, a follower of the entertainment.

Those who have followed a course of rigorous training-to master a profession or a sport or a skill such as carpentry, for example-will probably be able to describe the payoff of this sort of discipline. Rigorous training makes demands, and because of that the person who goes through it is changed, something is added to the self. The disciple follows the tradition, and whether the tradition is becoming a physician or a member of a religion, the disciple is transformed.

The discipline of entertainment is not rigorous, it is fun; that's why it is entertainment. But that does not mean we do not follow it. Entertainment can take us to relaxation and to pleasurable experiences, and it too will transform those who engage in it. Virtually everyone (including me) enjoys some entertainment. But some disciples of entertainment-like some followers of religion-become fanatics. When talking about entertainment, we use a shortened version of the word: fan. There are always some dangers with fanaticism.

At the end of the day, what people want to do with their lives is none of my business, and not something I have anything to say about. But I do feel comfortable saying this: What you follow is a pretty good guide to where you will end up.

To learn more, please visit Peter G. Stromberg's website. Painting photo by Sharon Mollerus.

Talk Radio as Entertainment

Peter G. Stromberg, Ph.D. — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 16:05:45 +0000

Entertainment comes in many forms in contemporary society. Elsewhere I have opined that some self-help books should be considered entertainment, as should much published "advice." Here I'd like to talk about entertainment and talk radio.

Much of talk radio is entertainment. That is, usually talk radio is not about informing listeners about political or cultural issues, it is about entertaining them. Maybe that's not a big surprise to you. But think about how this happens: it happens via the same patterns we observe in other forms of entertainment. Movies, for example, work by creating strong emotions such as terror or romantic passion, and then attaching these emotions to a suspenseful narrative. We watch in large part because we enjoy being drawn into the powerful emotional stream.

Talk radio is also about provoking strong emotions such as outrage, fear, sympathy, disgust...But instead of attaching these emotions to suspenseful narratives, the talk show host attaches them to beliefs, values, and ideas. This has the same effects that entertainment does. If you become caught up in a romantic movie, it tends to strengthen your faith in the ideal of romance. If a voice coming out of your radio is bashing some person and you fall in synch with the strong disdain for and anger at that person, you will tend to form a negative opinion about the person.

Why is this entertaining? Well, the fact is, many strong negative emotions are quite enjoyable so long as one knows one is not in any personal danger. People pay good money to experience strong fear and anxiety in horror movies and on roller coasters. Getting people riled up about political and moral issues is a time-honored way to provoke very powerful physical feelings, and many people enjoy those feelings.

Sometimes talk radio hosts are called demagogues-persons who attempt to gain political power by appealing to the prejudices and even hatreds of their audience. Radio talk show hosts may often use these techniques, but generally they are not doing so to enhance their own political power. They probably have a political agenda, but they also, like all entertainers, are primarily interested in making money by creating a big audience.

So is there any problem with talk radio as entertainment? The biggest problem I see--strangely enough-is a threat to our freedom of speech. Sure, talk radio hosts are free to shout their opinions, but does this really encourage freedom of thought and debate? It is more likely to encourage mutual hostility among our citizens. That's not the product I would choose to sell in pursuit of my fortune.

To learn more, visit Peter G. Stromberg's website. Photo credit: Ctd 2005.

Millenarianism Lite

Peter G. Stromberg, Ph.D. — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 15:35:51 +0000

Again and again, throughout human history, the following events have played out: Step One: A group of people faces a threat of some kind. Perhaps a powerful army is advancing toward its borders, or perhaps a severe economic crisis portends uncertainty and privation. Or perhaps it is just that the group is being left behind as others successfully pursue wealth and status.

Step Two: Despair begins to spread. Some respond with apathy, others with violence. Suicide rates may increase, along with rates of mental disorders such as depression and anxiety disorders. Hopelessness and apathy are rampant; many turn to heavy use of alcohol or other available drugs.

Step Three: A powerful leader arises, typically a person who has him or herself suffered as a result of the society's troubles. Usually-although not always-the leader's power stems from a claim to speak for God. The leader's message is: Follow me, I know the way out of our dilemma. The leader specifies what people must do-engage in a holy war, perform certain rituals, give up alcohol, etc.-and promises that a realm of paradise awaits his or her disciples. But those who hear the message and reject it will be punished not only by exclusion from the coming paradise, but by death and damnation.

Possibly these steps sound familiar to you. They outline the basic structure of what scholars of religion call millenarian movements (so named for a Biblical prophecy that Christ will reign over the Kingdom of God for a thousand years). You may be able to name several of the religions that have started in this way and have changed the course of human history: Christianity, Islam, Mormonism. And of course, smaller movements of this sort continue to arise today, and sometimes become the focus of media attention, especially when their clashes with the larger society lead to violence (Jim Jones in Guyana, the Branch Davidians in Waco).

Starting around the turn of the 20th century, there was a frightening development in the long history of millenarianism: It began to take secular (non-religious) forms. Powerful leaders emerged in the chaos of Europe during and after the first world war who promised utopias based on the principles of their political systems-communism and the Thousand Year Reich. As we all know, the chain of events set in motion by these social movements led to unprecedented horrors.

Although there have been many millenarian movements in America, no such movement has ever taken the reigns of the government. However, it's interesting to think about whether we have created-and are living in-our own distinctive, and relatively benign, form of millenarianism. At roughly the same time as the rise of millenarian-tinged totalitarianism in Europe, Americans began to develop extraordinarily effective techniques of advertising and entertainment. The new innovation that built these institutions was nothing other than the basic premise of millenarianism, promises of a world of enormous pleasure and satisfaction if you will just buy this product-whether it be a car or a movie or a soft drink.

Today our society is plagued by high rates of boredom and apathy, of depression and anxiety, and an intractable drug addiction problem. No wonder that people are happy to retreat into the utopian fantasies of the romance novel, the blockbuster movie, the dream of a new iPhone. It's millenarianism lite: no eternal damnation, no death camps, all utopia all the time. Could be worse, I suppose.

To learn more, visit Peter G. Stromberg's website. Photo by Michael Tracey.

Romance and Romantic Stories

Peter G. Stromberg, Ph.D. — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 14:55:13 +0000

Sociologists studying love and marriage report a finding that you probably won't find surprising: people don't describe their marriages as the "happily ever after" bliss suggested in our romantic stories and movies. Most people say that no matter how romantic the relationship felt when they were dating, marriage isn't the achievement of perfection. Rather, marriage itself requires hard work, compromises, working on a friendship, etc. etc. And come to think of it, our romantic stories aren't about long term relationships like marriages at all, they are about people in the early stages of getting to know one another. Think about the iconic romance, "Sleepless in Seattle" in which the couple doesn't even meet until the movie's final scene.

So why do so many people continue to hope for an eternally blissful romantic relationship even though they "know" it's not a possibility? And this isn't just a matter of day-dreaming. I'm sure you can think of people who broke up their families because they "fell in love" with someone else, only to have that new relationship eventually disappear (or else morph into a real marriage like the one they left in the first place).

One possible answer to the question of why people pursue perfect romance when they know it doesn't exist has to do with the incredible popularity of our romantic stories. Last time I checked romance novels accounted for about half of all books sold in any given year. As I have pointed out before, we human beings are really adept at projecting ourselves into stories, so that as we become caught up in a story we actually think and feel from the fictional perspective. Our ability to do this is based in no small part on the imitative capacities that are built into our brains: we can even imitate imaginary situations and easily experience what it is like to see and feel the world from that situation. Maybe a story is not a real relationship, but for a few hours it can come close to feeling like it's real.

So even if you recognize that eternal romantic passion isn't really an earthly possibility, you can still experience it by getting caught up in romantic stories. This puts your mind in the interesting position of having a belief (happily ever after doesn't really happen) that is contradicted by experience. This is probably why many of the same people who explicitly say that real relationships never work out this way continue to describe an ideal relationship as a happily ever after romance.

And that surely bears on the question I started out with. People continue to hope for and try to realize perfect romantic relationships in spite of the fact that they don't see such relationships as possible. It kind of makes you respect the power of a story.

Learn more at Peter G. Stromberg's website. Photo by Sabrina Campagna.

Evidence comes in many forms

Peter G. Stromberg, Ph.D. — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 19:01:18 +0000

One of the first posts I read on this site (a while back) was written by a young man who argued strenuously that psychologists should endorse only "testable ideas and theories," and cast out the rest. I applaud the notion that we should support our ideas and theories with evidence. But at the same time I'm kind of concerned about this contention that only testable ideas are valid, because I know that no matter how absurd a statement is, if it begins to circulate (as this idea does in some graduate programs of education and psychology) more and more people will start to believe it

The obvious fact is that most of what anybody knows is not based on testable propositions, if by "testable" we mean a rigorous process of devising methods for isolating certain independent variables and seeing how they react to controlled variations. You know the driver ahead of you is not paying attention, that your child is stretching the truth, that this tie won't go with that jacket, etc. All of this knowledge is based on evidence, but not upon evaluating testable propositions.

In the last fifty years or so, there has been a tendency in some quarters to claim that the only real knowledge is that which can be backed up by testable, preferably quantitative evidence. That idea is so obviously stupid that I don't really know where to begin in disputing it.

Now, in saying that this is a stupid idea, I do not mean for a moment to say that those who express it are themselves lacking in intelligence. Rather, they are repeating what they have been told, which is something that all human beings are very likely to do. And that's the very reason that it is best to be vigilant about stupid ideas.

By all means, let's use scientific methods whenever possible to figure out the sorts of things that can be tested through controlled experiments or the quantitative assessment of careful observations. But it does not follow from this commitment that controlled tests provide the only sort of valid evidence. If a psychotherapist with decades of clinical experience is able to offer insight into a patient's behavior based on subtle factors such as facial expressions and what the patient said two weeks ago, that insight may be based on evidence as well, even though it's not "testable." Can you provide a testable explanation for why the Axis powers were defeated in the Second World War? Does that mean that some explanations for the course of that war aren't supported by better evidence than others?

There may be seemingly sensible people around you who say that the only real knowledge is that which can be supported with quantitative evidence, but that doesn't make it true. This is an affront to common sense, and if you accept this statement, your intellect will be thereby impoverished.

Learn more at Peter G. Stromberg's website.

What is Psychological Anthropology?

Peter G. Stromberg, Ph.D. — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 14:37:36 +0000

My discipline, Psychological Anthropology (call it PA to save space), may be unfamiliar to many readers, so it's worth spending a few paragraphs introducing this field. This might help you to assess what you are reading on this blog. As I get underway, I'd better confess right off the bat that my description reflects my own prejudices-there are plenty of PAs who would disagree with most of what I'm about to say. Nobody appointed me the spokesperson for PA. But we have to start somewhere; let those who disagree write their own posts.

PAs are interested in many of the same questions as Psychologists, except that we PAs always try to think about the possibility that human activity is based not only in personality or the nervous system but also in a person's culture and social environment. This means that while PAs often study the same problems as Psychologists, they may do so from different angles, and as a result might end up asking different questions.

As an example, let's take eating disorders. Psychologists studying eating disorders might work to understand (among many other things) what combinations of symptoms typify different eating disorders, the relationship of personality variables to eating disorders, and effective therapies to treat these illnesses. On the other hand PAs might ask: Are there cultural factors that contribute to eating disorders? After all, the odd religious ascetic aside, it seems pretty clear that eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia are significantly more common today than they were a century ago. Can something in our culture be contributing to the high incidence of eating disorders?

Which approach is correct? Both are, of course, it depends on what you are trying to accomplish. If you are treating a patient whose life is in danger because of a severe eating disorder, learning about the cultural factors that might be implicated in their illness is not likely to be at the top of your priority list. If, on the other hand, we want to understand the epidemiology of eating disorders, those factors might be of key importance.

How is PA different from Cross Cultural Psychology, a course that is often taught in Psychology departments? Some would say they are the same approach with different names. Both disciplines are concerned with such issues as how the understanding of mental illness-or its treatment-vary across cultures.

But some PAs question the assumptions embedded in the label "cross-cultural psychology." Often, these contrary folks (full disclosure: I'm one of them) might point out, the assumption behind much cross cultural psychology seems to be that we here in the West have stumbled upon the universal science of psychology, which can now be used to study societies which may think about human beings in ways that are quite different from us. But maybe that's not true.

For example, can you study the relationship between anger and anxiety in a society that has no words for either anger or anxiety? I'd say that to do so is to impose one's preconceptions on the data, never a good strategy for a scientist. Rather, I would say we need to learn how these other people conceptualize such feelings. In doing so, we might gain a new perspective on the relationship we want to understand.

I've only scratched the surface of the sorts of questions that interest PAs, but I hope that I have shown you that PA is a discipline that can both challenge and ultimately complement theories and research in Psychology.

You can learn more at Peter G. Stromberg's website.