British Psychologist Quotes

Hans Eysenck

Raymond Cattell

Nigel Balchin

Simon Baron-Cohen

Richard Wiseman

Richard D. Ryder

Gordon Pask

Loving a baby or child is a circular business, a kind of feedback loop. The more you give, the more you get, the more you get, the more you feel like giving.

When you notice an unhelpful emotion or a shift in mood, or when you notice that you're doing something you know can cause problems (being snappy, for example, or drinking too much), that could act as a cue to examine your own thoughts - "what am I thinking?".

Peter Kinderman

I contend that most emotional distress is best understood as a rational response to sick societies.

Oliver James (psychologist)

Although the idea that we have no bananas is unlikely to be a new one, or one that is hard to grasp, the idea that no bananas, no sheep, no children, no prospects are really all the same, in that they have the same numerosity, is a very abstract one.

Brian Butterworth

In their pure form, the martial arts demand the intense awareness of the meditative mind, and have nothing to do with anger or wanton aggression. A practitioner is taught from the outset that the skills must never be used for personal gain, but only in self-defence or in the protection of others -- and even then only enough force as is absolutely necessary should be used.

He divided people into statisticians, people who knew about statistics, and people who didn't. He liked the middle group best. He didn't like the real statisticians much because they argued with him, and he thought people who didn't know any statistics were just animal life.

To establish that a rule is likely to be true, one must try to prove it false.

Stuart Sutherland

Science... deals exclusively with changes of configuration, and traces the accelerations which are observed to occur, leaving to metaphysics to deal with the underlying agency, if it exists.

C. Lloyd Morgan

The surest guide to the meaning of a dream is the feeling and judgment of the dreamer himself, who deep down inside knows its meaning.

Misleading may be the claims that procedures [of animal testing] are carried out under anaesthesia. Restraining devices and paralysing drugs can today be so effective that an anaesthetic is often unnecessary from the purely practical point of view. The risk of giving a dose too large and thereby losing an expensive chimpanzee, for example, may often tempt a scientist or technician, inexperienced with sophisticated anaesthetic techniques, to give a dose too small, from which the animal quickly recovers — but not of course until after it has been strapped securely to the operating table.

Richard D. Ryder

When you gossip about another person, listeners unconsciously associate you with the characteristics you are describing, ultimately leading to those characteristics' being transferred to you. So, say positive and pleasant things about friends and colleagues, and you are seen as a nice person. In contrast, constantly complain about their failings, and people will unconsciously apply the negative traits and incompetence to you.

Richard Wiseman

Scientists, especially when they leave the particular field in which they have specialized, are just as ordinary, pigheaded and unreasonable as anybody else.

Among all the disputes and uncertainties of the ethnographers about the races of Europe, one fact stands out clearly – namely, that we can distinguish a race of northerly distribution and origin, characterized physically by fair color of hair and skin and eyes, by tall stature and dolichocephaly (i. e. long shape of head), and mentally by great independence of character, individual initiative, and tenacity of will. Many names have been used to denote this type,.... It is also called the Nordic type.

William McDougall

I thought of the analyst Winnicott's observation: 'It is a joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found'.

'Leaders' are rarely ousted by anyone other than would-be leaders. In not wishing to act like 'men', there is no need for us to act like 'women'. The rise of the oppressed should not be a glorification of oppressed characteristics.

Juliet Mitchell

In principle, it might be possible to obtain evidence of focal-attentive processing in the absence of awareness of what is being processed... in practice, however, a complete dissociation of consciousness from focal-attentive processing is difficult to achieve.

Universities are renowned for their tolerance of unusual characters, especially if they show originality and dedication to their research. I have often made the comment that not only are universities a 'cathedral' for worship of knowledge, they are also 'sheltered workshops' for the socially challenged.

Plato compared the intellect to a charioteer guiding the powerful horses of the passions, i.e., he gave it both the power of perception and the power of control.

Raymond Cattell

What would our lives be like if we took earthworms seriously, took the ground under our feet rather than the skies high above our heads, as the place to look, as well, eventually, as the place to be? It is as though we have been pointed in the wrong direction.

Adam Phillips (psychologist)

Parents who discipline their child by discussing the consequences of their actions produce children who have better moral development, compared to children whose parents use authoritarian methods and punishment.

Simon Baron-Cohen

If you think something is missing in your life, it is probably YOU...

Robert Holden (author)

This book an attempt will be made to outline the principles of cybernetics and relate them to what we know of behaviour, both from the point of view of experimental psychology and also from the point of view of neurophysiology.

Frank Honywill George

You can't expect that what you've become a master in will keep you valuable throughout the whole of your career, and you want to add to that the fact that most people are now going to be working into their 70s. Being a generalist is, in my view, very unwise. Your major competitor is Wikipedia or Google.

Did you know that you use less than 1% of your brain? The good news is that mind mapping can help you to access the other 99%!

If cognitive processes can be realized in a general machine then it is possible to execute mental operations in artifacts that are not necessarily subject to the embarrassing spatio-temporal limitations and structural frailties of a biological processor.