Word: psychologistic
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Thompson is a psychologist and co-author of Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, among other works
...tendency to worry and feel victimized. Significantly, they also score lower in the so-called constraint category, meaning they are given to impulsiveness and thrill seeking. That's a bad combination, particularly when you throw drugs, drink or gambling into the mix. "It's like picking your poison," says psychologist Avshalom Caspi of King's College in London, one of the researchers in the study...
Like Marlatt's moderation strategy, however, the Illinois program takes a measure of self-discipline that may be the very thing compulsive gamblers lack. "In addiction, they call it chasing the high," says psychologist Carlos DiClemente of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. "In gambling, it's called chasing the big win. And that's where self-regulation goes down the tubes." Better, say DiClemente and others, to simply to put down the cards or dice or cup of coins for good. As battle-scarred gamblers are fond of saying, the only way to be sure you come out ahead...
Dolphins, dogs and primates are the usual suspects when scientists talk about higher mental functions, but fairness, at least, extends even deeper into the lower animal kingdom. If you watch rats wrestle, says Stephen Siviy, a psychologist at Gettysburg College, you'll see that the bigger rat lets the smaller rat win every now and then so that the smaller rat will keep playing. That, he says, could be interpreted as a sense of fair play, although he emphasizes that a rat's behavior is probably Darwinian--based not on thoughtful consideration but on what has worked in the past...
...Bowling Green State University in Ohio, psychologist Jaak Panksepp is similarly leery of using words like morality and ethics to describe animal behavior. He is sure that rats and other animals do experience joy, sadness, anger and fear--because the wiring of the brain is set up to generate those feelings. (Actually, Panksepp discovered a few years ago that rats chirp in laughter, albeit in response to tickling, and in a register too high for the human ear to detect.) Nobody has yet found the neurocircuits for ethics or morality, however, so Panksepp is reluctant to comment about those qualities...