Mary Martin

The picture of the mind that most people have is still one in which passion and reason are separate, and emotions get in the way of clear thinking. But metacognitive feelings show the constant interaction of ‘reason’ and ‘passion’ in our mental processes. Moreover – as we’ll explain – these feelings are consequential. In fact, cognitive prowess... See more

The anthropocentrism of humanity’s

predominant relationship to the environment is so extreme that this gratuitous violence against

other animals (both domesticated and free-living) goes largely unnoticed in everyday society.

Meanwhile, environmental justice, the very field established to champion public awareness

and policy in the service of... See more

Though our collective forgetting is enormous, it is mostly unremarkable to those who study the transmission of culture. What puzzles me, and others who study transmission, is why so much unwritten knowledge has survived. Despite the brittleness of cultural practices, skills proliferate with and without records, chaining generation to generation,... See more

Are mental health awareness efforts contributing to the rise in reported mental health problems? A call to test the prevalence inflation hypothesis

Learned helplessness, the failure to escape shock induced by uncontrollable aversive events, was discovered half a century ago. Seligman and Maier (1967) theorized that animals learned that outcomes were independent of their responses—that nothing they did mattered – and that this learning undermined trying to escape. The mechanism of learned... See more