Confidence Intervals

They say that the key to a good relationship is communication. I don’t know who “they” are supposed to be, but they’ve been saying it for years on end, so I’m inclined to believe them. Luckily, science agrees with them. There’s a lot you can do with a relationship if you’re able to communicate well with someone, and a lot of issues in a relationship can be traced back to miscommunications or misunderstandings. Knowing how to work through communication issues to be clear and gracious toward each other can go a long way to making life – even life after this pandemic – survivable. Here are some strategies for communicating better with your loved ones – whether they are your significant other or not! If you want a TL;DR of this, scroll to the end for a poster one of my fellow clinicians put together that lays it all out nice and pretty-like. Communication Rules You probably don’t realize it, but there are often unspoken rules to how your conversations go, and if these rules are b...

It’s no secret that what’s happening these days is tough on everyone. The limits of the human experience are being challenged in ways we never imagined would happen to us. In some instances, you hear whispers that we weren’t prepared for this. And yet... You hear stories of resilience. Videos on social media have gone viral, of people singing from their balconies , exercise instructors getting people to exercise from their balconies , people dancing with each other at a socially-respectable distance , and visiting loved ones through glass or the other side of a balcony to close the gap on the lack of social contact people have been getting these days. Then there are the virtual interactions, with the choirs and orchestras coming together to perform masterfully edited numbers that include hymns , Disney covers , and show tunes . There have also been the music artists who have done virtual concerts and the movie actors who have been collaborating to provide some measu...

This is the first post in a series that I am doing for the Psychological Services Center, located at Regent University, a department/school mental health clinic that serves the student population of Regent University and the surrounding community. With so much of the world in a constant state of unknown, and most of the world being confined to their houses for the last month, many are seeing their mental health affected. At times, people can get confused about why their mental health is affected. “I’m just stuck in my house, it’s not like anything is really happening to me.” And yet, there are a lot of reports of a lack of motivation, concentration, and energy. Declarations of newfound productivity are played out on the couch in front of Netflix and a bag of Cheetos. Marriages have been feeling tense, and the joys of parenting are starting to look more like struggles. Fears about being infected with a new strain of a disease we don’t know much about are fighting for attention ...

Ibuprofen reduces inflammation, fevers, and pain. Anti-depressants relieve symptoms of depression. Lithium stabilizes manic symptoms back to baseline. Statements like these are easy to make. Often, they are  made, without a forethought about the implications. Most of the time, statements like these are true. But the sucky thing about humanity is that we can't say, with absolute certainty, that these things are always  true. They're not fact. Enough research and evidence has pretty well convinced us that we can make statements like these with at least a little bit of confidence, but humans are so vast, and so imperfect, that sometimes ibuprofen doesn't do what we've been told it does. Sometimes anti-depressants don't relieve as many of the symptoms of depression as we want, or think it should . Lithium works as well as the dosage and the person's physiology match up. Moral of the story: science is only as strong as the research that supports it.  Whe...

Self is the name, and care is the game.  Okay, that was cheesy. But seriously. Self-care. It's become a sort of buzzword in a lot of circles these days, to the point where some people tend to cringe when they hear it, but I don't think people really get what it means. Getting into a doctoral program in psychology, we were barely in the door when our professors all  started talking about the importance of self-care.  This is a very intensive program , they said. You need to remember to take care of yourself , they said.  Yeah, well...that's easier said than done.  My cohort being what it is, we are in the final days of our second semester of our first year in this program, and we are all feeling the effects of the pressure, and the workload, and the effort, and the stakes of each of our final assignments and tests. And we are hurting.  Some of us have figured out the key to pacing ourselves and taking time to still be human amidst the never-e...

Psychological Tests. The thing that makes psychologists different from other mental health professionals. Our most unique claim to scientific fame. What's it all about? Psychology, as a science, uses the scientific method to figure things out. When we have a question, we will make a hypothesis, come up with a way to test it, do the test, look at the data, and draw conclusions from the data - all while talking about limitations to the test that was done. In effect, that is what psychological testing is. Asking a question like, "what are the cognitive strengths and weaknesses of a person," led to a test like the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, or the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, or the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Cognitive Abilities. It was a way to answer the same question without having to make a new test every time. And because they wanted to answer the same question for a bunch of different people, they made sure they could show that the tests measure what t...

I just realized I blasted through the last post. My b. I should probably introduce myself. I'm Shawn. I'm a first year doctoral student in Clinical Psychology. I love helping people figure life out, and feel okay doing it. It's why I decided to go into this field. It's also why I'm starting this blog. I wanted to do a YouTube channel, but I can't make sense of that, so here we are! Good, old fashioned (digital) print! I want to use this blog to help make psychology less mysterious to people I interact with on the interwebs. I also want to help clear up some confusion people experience with the rumors and misunderstandings people hear about psychologists and what we do. Today's topic is about what psychology isn't.  It isn't  a lot of things, but I'm mostly going to stick with some of the things I hear most often. When I tell someone what I'm studying, I invariably hear a lot of the following: "Oh no! He's going to analyze me!...