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Do subliminal messages in self-help tapes really work? There actually is some evidence that people can be influenced by subliminal messages. Can your self-esteem be raised with subliminal tapes? Can subliminal persuasion help you lose weight? Are there even subliminal messages in Disney files?? Are there subliminal messages in advertising that can make you buy certain products? These questions answered once and for all at The Psych Files podcast.

Resources on Subliminal Messages

• Pratkanis, A.R., Eskenazi, J., Greenwald, A. J. (1994). What You Expect is What You Believe but Not Necessarily What You Get: a Test of the Effectiveness of Subliminal Self-Help Audiotapes, Basic and Applied Social Psychology.
• Murphy S.T. & Zajonc, R.B. (1993). Affect, cognition, and awareness: affective priming with optimal and suboptimal stimulus exposures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(5), 723-739.
• Smith, K.H. & Rogers, M. (1994). Effectiveness of subliminal messages in television commercials: Two experiments. Journal of Applied Psychology, 79(6), 866-874.
• Moore, T.E. (1995). Subliminal self​-​help auditory tapes: An empirical test of perceptual consequences. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science,27(1), 9-20.
• Merikle, P.M. & Skanes, H.E. (1992). Subliminal self​-​help audiotapes: A search for placebo effects. Journal of Applied Psychology, 77(5), 772-776.
• Vokey, J. R. & Read, J. D. (1985). Subliminal messages: Between the devil and the media. American Psychologist, 40(11), 1231-1239.
• Champion, J. M. & Turner, W.W. (1959). An experimental investigation of subliminal perception. Journal of Applied Psychology, 43(6),382-384.
• Byrne, D. (1959). The effect of a subliminal food stimulus on verbal responses. Journal of Applied Psychology, 43(4), 249-252.
• The Cargo-Cult Science of Subliminal Persuasion
• THE 2000 CAMPAIGN: THE AD CAMPAIGN; Democrats See, and Smell, Rats in G.O.P. Ad
• Here’s a link to the book that was very useful to me in developing this episode, "Scientific Perspectives on Pseudoscience and the Paranormal" by Timothy J. Lawson:
  

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Can horses be used for corporate training or is this nonsense? If you listened to the NPR piece called, “Horse Sense: New Breed Of Executive Training” you might have had the same reaction I did: sounds a little “fishy”. Find out why “Clever Hans” just might be alive and well in the field of management training.

Resources for this Episode

Thank you to the following for permission to use their comments:

• Dr. Debra Briihl, Dept. of Psychology and Counseling, Valdosta State University
• Dr. Dennis Goff, Chair, Department of Psychology, Randolph College
• Melissa R. Shyan-Norwalt, PhD, CAAB, Companion Animal Problem Solvers, Inc.
• Dr. Gerald L. Peterson, Professor of Psychology, Saginaw Valley State University
• Dr. Carol Devolder, St. Ambrose University

Clever Hans

• Episode 31: Lemon Slices and a New Face on Mars! Gestalt Principles at Work
• The story on the NPR site: Horse Sense: New Breed Of Executive Training
• In Wikipedia
• The Skeptic’s Dictionary
• UK-Skeptics
• Paul F. Ballantyne Ph.D website

Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation

• Evaluation of Executive Training by Glenn Crone
• Encyclopedia of Educational Technology
• Instructional System Design - Evaluation Phase - Chapter VI. From the Performance, Learning, Leadership, & Knowledge website

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Have you heard that president Abraham Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy and president John F. Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln? In this episode of The Psych Files we explore strange coincidences like this one and we also examine Carl Jung’s concept of Synchronicity. Does it mean that everything happens for a reason - or is the idea more complex than that? Let’s find out. Oh and by the way - turns out Lincoln never had a secretary named Kennedy. Don’t believe me? Find out more in this episode of The Psych Files.
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We do not notice what does not happen.

• Correction: I said in the podcast that it would take only a group of 23 people for you to find someone with your birthday. This is incorrect. Thanks to Doug and Leen for emailing me to remind me that I should have said that it would take only 23 people to find two people in the group who had the same birthday. (Note: this has been corrected in the audio as of 9/11/08)

Resources for this Episode

• The place to go to examine all sorts of urban myths and to check your facts is a website called Snopes. Here is the link to their page about the Lincoln and Kennedy coincidences. Check it out. Very neat site.
• Leavy, J. (1992). Our Spooky Presidential Coincidences Contest. The Skeptical Inquirer, 16 (3), 316-320.
• Martin, B. (1998). Coincidences: Remarkable or Random? The Skeptical Inquirer, 22 (5), 23-27.
• Carr, N. (2008). Is Google making us stoopid? The Atlantic, July/August.
• More information about Carl Jung can be found in the journal Quadrant.
• You can learn more about Carl Jung and the concept of synchronicity on the Carl Jung Resources site.
• Doug Drinen, a Psych Files listener, sports fan and mathematician, hosts a football blog called Pro Football Reference and in one post he takes a look at the odd number of occurrences of Friday the 13 among football players in 2006. Check it out - very eerie (or just chance).

Similarities Between John McCain and Barack Obama:

1. They were both born in the month of August
2. Obama was born on August 4th and McCain on August 29 - 25 days apart
3. Obama was born in 1961 and McCain on August 29 - 25 years apart
4. McCain announced his presidency on April 25th of 2007
5. Time magazine named McCain as one of the “25 Most Influential People in America”
6. John McCain, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden were named after their fathers and Sarah Palin was named after her mother
7. Obama wrote a book called Dreams from My Father
8. McCain wrote a book called Faith of My Fathers
9. Both Obama’s father and McCain’s father served in World War II.
10. Barack’s VP candidate’s last name is Biden, McCain’s VP candidate’s last name is Palin. Both of these names have 5 letters and these names rhyme.
11. Both Obama and McCain have two daughters (of course, McCain also has two sons, but we don’t have to mention that do we?).

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Image via WikipediaEye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing - what is it about this type of psychotherapy that draws such criticism? In this episode I interview Dr. Scott Lilienfeld of Emory University. Dr. Lilienfeld has been a critic of EMDR and in this episode he explains his reasons why. He also talks a little bit about how exposure therapy works. A fascinating interview with a leading critic and author of a new textbook in Psychology.

Resources for this episode

Authors critical of EMDR:

• Dr. Scott Lilienfeld, who wrote the article on EMDR, has a website here at Emory University where he is a Professor of Psychology.

• You can learn more about Dr. Lilienfeld’s new textbook, “Psychology: From Inquiry to Understanding” here.

• Here is where you can find the full article that Dr. Lilienfeld wrote regarding his criticisms of EMDR treatment. The full title of the article is EMDR Treatment: Less Than Meets the Eye? and it originally appeared in the January/February 1996 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer.

• Another article that is critical of EMDR can be found here on the New England Skeptical Society website.

Authors supportive of EMDR:

• The Perkins Center for Counseling has an article by Byron R. Perkins and Curtis C. Rouanzoin which attempts to address the critics of EMDR.

• The EMDR Institute maintains an FAQ page containing information supportive of the treatment.

• Here is the link to the interview I conducted with Jamie O’Neil, a practitioner of EMDR. This is episode 19.

The gestalt principles of perception - how do they explain how we not only sometimes perceive strange things, but also how we can appreciate works of art? In this episode I take a close look at why people see a lot of strange things around them - including me. We’ll see images on lemon slices, floor panels, building tops, etc. Why do we perceive these things?

Resources for this Podcast

• Perceptual Set Experiment: go here to do the “Man on a horse” experiment I created. You can run this experiment on your friends, or even use it for a project in class. Have fun with it and let me know if you’ve got any feedback/suggestions. NOTE: The control condition is the “condition 1″ button (random pictures which are unrelated to the man on the horse). The experimental condition is the “condition 2″ button (pictures of animals which should help the viewer more easily see the man on the horse).

Here are a few sites which further explain some of the Gestalt principles of organization:

• You can learn how psychological gestalt principles apply to web design at the Web Design for Instruction site
• And more about psychological gestalt principles from the Spokane Falls Community College Graphic Design website.
• Here’s the NASA site where you’ll find the “Face On Mars” pictures.
• Here’s a good site which describes the gestalt principles. It’s from the Interaction Design website.

Here is a slideshow of some of the images used in this episode. Roll over the bottom of the box below to see thumbnails of all the images which you can click on to examine any of the photos in more detail.