Psychology in Everyday Life: The Psych Files

Most performers "mark" when they're tired during rehearsals.  Are they "not giving it their all" or are they getting quite a benefit from doing this?  You'd be surprised at how beneficial marking can be.  

If you're not familiar with marking, here's a definition from the authors of a recent study on how marking benefits dancers: "Marking involves enacting the sequence of movements with curtailed size and energy by diminishing the size of steps, height of jumps and leaps, and extension of limbs. The dancer often does not leave the floor and may even substitute hand gestures for certain steps."

A humorous way to learn about the Freudian defense mechanisms (actually elaborated by Anna Freud) of Displacement, Denial, Sublimation, Reaction Formation, and Projection.  A little dream analysis thrown in.  Who knows?  Maybe Freud would have been good at tech support... 

Need to memorize Freud's stages for a test?  Here's a mnemonic that should do the trick.  In this brief video, the founder of psychoanalysis gives you a mnemonic and explains the 5 stages for you.  Make sure to check out these other Psych Files episodes for psychology mnemonics: How to Memorize the Parts of the Brain, How to Memorize Erikson's Eight Stages, and How to Memorize Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development.  I love mnemonics here on The Psych Files so if you need to memorize anything else let me know!

Depression and other mental health problems are often treated with medications which are called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors and/or Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors.  How do they work? I'll show you in this brief video.  More free psychology resources at The Psych Files website and podcast: http://www.ThePsychFiles.com

What if you could study for your psychology test in 24 second sound bytes on your iPhone? Now you can.  I recently contacted Parviv - the founder of an app called Clammr. Typically, people use Clammr to stay on top of the news, listen to podcasts or "top tweets" and other humorous audio clips. I thought it would make a great test prep tool. So check it out: download Clammr on your iPhone and search for Psych Fest Prep. You can choose from 7 major psychology topics and start studying!

Hints:

Put your email address in the Settings>Edit Profile page. When you tap the thumbs up icon on important terms you'll get an email with links to those terms you can listen to again.

Set "Skip Heard Clammrs" to OFF (under Settings>Preferences.

I hope this helps for your next test. Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions!