Psychologists From The United States

"Reaction to limerence theory depends partly on acquaintance with the evidence for it and partly on personal experience. People who have not experienced limerence are baffled by descriptions of it and are often resistant to the evidence that it exists. To such outside observers, limerence seems pathological. The phenomenon that provides the subject of much romantic poetry and fiction has been called an addiction, an indication of low self-esteem, irrational, neurotic, erotomanic, and delusional. To those without direct experience it seems inconceivable that a sane person could attach so much importance to another individual."

"I rejected "infatuation" because although the meanings of the terms overlap in some respect, they differ in meaning, and evoke different connotations."

"It is safer to write as a moralist, as an observer and evaluator outside personal involvement who may not know the precise nature of the subject matter, but who can indicate clearly what others ought and ought not do. Much of the writing in the literature of love was written by persons, who, perhaps never having suffered the insanity themselves but having observed its outward manifestations, are adamantly opposed to it. Limerent persons, sufferers of an unallowable condition, find themselves speechless save for ambiguity of "poetic" expression."

"To explain why the environment of our ancestors "selected" limerence, we might consider the behavior it induces. Some limerence-inspired actions are socially undesirable, even socially disruptive. Limerence intrudes, deflecting interest from affairs of business, of state, even of family. In the midst of battle, the soldier's despair over a letter of rejection from LO is not forgotten. A king gives up his crown. An artist's career languishes. But such visible disadvantages should not constitute the sole basis of judgment. The most consistent result of limerence is mating, not merely sexual interaction but also commitment, the establishment of a shared domicile in the form of a cozy nest built for enjoyment of ecstasy, for reproduction, and for the rearing of children."

"I coined the word "limerence." It was pronounceable and seemed to me and to two students to have a "fitting" sound. To be in the state of limerence is to feel what is usually termed "being in love.""

"Writers have been philosophizing, moralizing, and eulogizing on the subject of "erotic," "passionate," "romantic" love (i.e., limerence) since Plato (and surely long before that). And more often than not, what is said is enough to make a limerent dissolve into the walls in embarrassment. It can be dangerous to stick your neck out on the subject of love—dangerous to your self-esteem and to your reputation."

"Many writers on love have complained about semantic difficulties. The dictionary lists two dozen different meanings of the word "love." And how does one distinguish between love and affection, liking, fondness, caring, concern, infatuation, attraction, or desire? The Group was overwhelmingly of the opinion that loving and liking refer to quite different feelings, but what, precisely, constitutes the difference? Acknowledgment of a distinction between love as a verb, as an action taken by the individual, and love as a state is awkward. Never having fallen in love is not at all a matter of not loving, if loving is defined as caring. Furthermore, this state of "being in love" included feelings that do not properly fit with love defined as concern. As de Rougement said, being in love is not the same. One is a state; the other, an act, and an act is chosen, not something merely endured."

"“A clean setting leads people to do good things: Not engage in crime, not litter, and show more generosity,” Vohs explains for the Association for Psychological Science . “We found, however, that you can get really valuable outcomes from being in a messy setting.”"

"Interviewer: Do you have any advice for individuals who wish to pursue a career in social psychology? Vohs: Sure! Work, work, work, and work. This career is one of persistence, and so the harder you work, the more successful you are likely to be. Keep positive! This job is mostly a series of “no, go away” messages so keeping positive and excited about the fact that you are helping to figure out how the world works is key."

"The research has received a lot of media attention, and Vohs thinks she knows why: "I think it makes people feel vindicated," Vohs says. "There's a multibillion dollar industry to help people de-clutter their lives. Relationship partners, employers, everyone wants you to be neat … but there may be times being messy is good, too. I think messy people feel vindicated big time."

"One of the most frustrating goals for people is weight loss or weight loss maintenance," Professor Vohs said. So if a person concentrates on that goal, she may have fewer internal resources to deal with other challenging situations in life, like a demanding boss or an angry spouse. The answer, Professor Vohs said, is perhaps "stepping back temporarily and saying, 'I'm going to try to live a healthy life and not try so hard to lose weight.'"

"Using your mind to make decisions is a very taxing enterprise. When people make decisions, it turns out that it takes energy away from their entire psychological system. That energy is needed specifically for controlling their behaviors, making other good decisions down the line...doing the right thing essentially. So you’ll see people from President Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and going back to Einstein; all wearing the same one or two outfits every single day as a way to minimize the number of decisions that they have to make on what would be called trivial, or what President Obama calls ‘trivial or routinised decisions’."

"A child is a child, but a black child is something special, it is special because it is I, it is you; it is personal."

"He is the most omniverous of scientists and scholars. He has become an excellent dye chemist, a good mammalogist, he knows the sedges, mushrooms and the birds of New England. He knows neuroanatomy and neurophysiology from their original sources in Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and German for he learns any language he needs as soon as he needs it. Things like electrical circuit theory and the practical soldering in of power, lighting, and radio circuits he does himself. In my long life, I have never seen a man so erudite or so really practical."

"It was apparent to him after we had done the frog’s eye that even if logic played a part, it didn’t play the important or central part that one would have expected. It disappointed him. He would never admit it, but it seemed to add to his despair at the loss of Wiener’s friendship."

"The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs."

"He read incessantly and omnivorously, but stayed away from everyone. He read like someone waiting to die but willing to be distracted during the last hours."

"Pitts was married to abstract thought... We never knew anything about his family or his feelings about us. He died mysterious, sad and remote, and not once did I find out, or even want to find out more about how he felt or what he hoped. To be interested in him as a person was to lose him as a friend. One was to be interested only in what he knew."

"[Pitts] was in no uncertain terms the genius of our group. He was absolutely incomparable in the scholarship of chemistry, physics, of everything you could talk about history, botany, etc. When you asked him a question, you would get back a whole textbook … To him, the world was connected in a very complex and wonderful fashion."

"He recognized that we learn in part by disrupting what we knew in the past, and that can be dislodging to our stability and sense of what we understand, but that’s how we grow."

"“What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain”... devastated Pitts because it showed that retinal ganglion cells were not simply acting as logical devices, thus appearing to shatter his dream that logic could be used to explain the nervous system."

"The movie Forrest Gump made the point that the greatest, most heroic Americans are people of extraordinary character who flicker briefly into public consciousness and are quickly forgotten... while his contemporaries Alan Turing, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and John von Neumann entered the pantheon of fame, Pitts remains a shadowy folk hero. Stories about Pitts have circulated among the cognescenti for years, but almost nothing has been written about him."

"At about the time of the break with Wiener, and arguably because of it, Pitts destroyed his thesis and all of his papers, felt unable to become interested in anything new, and began a long, slow decline. He did not simply begin to drink—as befitting a man of his talents, he synthesized novel analogues of barbituates and opiates in the laboratory and experimented on himself by ingesting long-chain alcohols."

"Next to Mozart, other kinds of music are not music at all."

"The story is told that, at age 12, Pitts ran into the public library to hide from some bullies, found a copy of Principia Mathematica by the 20th-century philosophers Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, and proceeded to read it cover to cover in the next few weeks. Pitts experienced a metaphysical insight that logic rules the universe, and as a corollary he felt that ego—and his ego in particular— needed to be erased in order to achieve an understanding of the world."

"[Depression is] common to all people with an excessively logical education who work in applied mathematics: It is a kind of pessimism resulting from an inability to believe in what people call the Principle of Induction, or the principle of the Uniformity of Nature. Since one cannot prove, or even render probable a priori, that the sun should rise tomorrow, we cannot really believe it shall."

"Dress from the waist up."

"Ignore bureaucrats and they will ignore you."

"Walter Pitts, who was companion, protege, and friend to Warren, had, for a long time, been convinced that the only way of understanding nature was by logic and logic alone .... Pitts had committed himself to logic as the key to the structure of the world in a way that no other person that [ know had ever done."

"For this writer, the perceptron program is not primarily concerned with the invention of devices for "artificial intelligence", but rather with investigating the physical structures and neurodynamic principles which underlie "natural intelligence". A perceptron is first and foremost a brain model, not an invention for pattern recognition. As a brain model, its utility is in enabling us to determine the physical conditions for the emergence of various psychological properties... we are fully aware of the simplifications which have been made from biological systems; but it is, at least, an analyzable model."

"It is only after much hesitation that the writer has reconciled himself to the addition of the term "neurodynamics" to the list of such recent linguistic artifacts as "cybernetics", "bionics", "autonomics", "biomimesis", "synnoetics", "intelectronics", and "robotics"."

"... the handling of the first public announcement of the program in 1958 by the popular press, which fell to the task with all the exuberance and sense of discretion of a pack of happy bloodhounds. Such headlines as "Frankenstein Monster Designed by Navy: Robot That Thinks" (Tulsa, Oklahoma Times) were hardly designed to inspire scientific confidence."

"The term "perceptron", originally intended as a generic name for a variety of theoretical nerve nets, has an unfortunate tendency to suggest a specific piece of hardware, and it is only with difficulty that its well-meaning popularizers can be persuaded to suppress their natural urge to capitalize the initial "p". On being asked, "How is 'Perceptron' performing today?" I am often tempted to respond, "Very well, thank you, and how are 'Neutron' and 'Electron' behaving?""

"In some respects, modern-day behavioural science can be construed as a derivative of the psychological school of behaviourism that gained prominence over a century ago with the work of American psychologist, John B. Watson. A rejection of the previously dominant introspectionist movement (whose focus was subjectivity and inner consciousness), Watson viewed the main goal of psychology to be the ‘prediction and control of behaviour.’ The paradigm of behaviourism concentrated exclusively on observables: the environmental stimuli that make a particular behaviour more or less likely, the overt behaviour itself, and the consequences of that behaviour (referred to as ‘reinforcement’ or ‘punishment’)."

"‘Watson’s Utopia, the implied authority of experts was institutionalised in the form of a technocracy managed by behavioural scientists’. Watson wanted religion, the antithesis of science, to be ‘outlawed”. When conditioning failed to cure what Watson termed the ‘hopelessly insane, or incurably diseased’, the physician ‘would not hesitate to put them to death’. According to Buckley, ‘there would also be no mercy’. This has echoes of the Nazi Goebbels. Watson’s ideal community would not recognize words like, ‘right, wrong or punishment.'"

"In 75 percent of the television programs shown during hours when American children are most likely to be watching, the hero either kills people or beats them up. This violence typically constitutes the "climax" of the show. Viewers, having been taught that bad guys deserve to be punished, take pleasure in watching this violence."

"Had we been raised speaking a language that facilitated the expression of compassion, we would have learned to articulate our needs and values directly, rather than to insinuate wrongness when they have not been met."

"Most of us grew up speaking a language that encourages us to label, compare, demand, and pronounce judgements rather than to be aware of what we are feeling and needing."

"Right action tends to be defined in terms of general individual rights and standards that have been critically examined and agreed upon by the whole society."

"McDougall's principle, therefore, "that the original impulse or conation supplies the motive power to all the activities that are but means to the attainment of the desired end," would make a very bad guide in education or in any attempt to control and influence the behavior of men. It would lead the teacher to introduce extraneous motives at every turn and leave out of account the interest which might be generated in the subject matter. It would lead the manager of a business to conclude, since the employes are certainly there for the prime purpose of earning money, that it would be hopeless to generate in them any loyalty and enthusiasm for the concern or any interest in the technique of its processes."

"Unless you get up an interest in a system of activities you can accomplish nothing in it. Extraneous motives may bring you to the door of a system of activities, but, once inside, you must drop everything extraneous."

"Often voluntary effort is needed in order to get a task started, to overcome repugnance, inertia, and distracting influences. The extraneous motive brings the horse to the water, but real drinking does not occur except from thirst, that is to say, from a desire for the particular results obtained by the activity in progress."

"We all know this type of behavior, where the interest of the performer is in himself and not in the work. One who has thoroughly prepared for a public performance of some sort, may break down in the performance because of inability to get away from the desire to do his best in the presence of all these spectators, this self-consciousness making impossible a direct application of his energies to the work in hand."

"As a general proposition, we may say that the drive that carries forward any activity, when it is running freely and effectively, is inherent in that activity. It is only when an activity is running by its own drive that it can run thus freely and effectively; for as long as it is being driven by some extrinsic motive, it is subject to the distraction of that motive."

"The motive that originally induced him to go in for this event may very well have been a desire to distinguish himself; but this motive has to drop out of sight or else by its distraction spoil the performance. It is not true, then, that the motive that initiates a given activity furnishes the motive force for the whole activity; it simply leads the performer up to the act, but the motive force for the act itself must be inherent."

"It's this sense of company-wide empowerment that has the potential to take your business to new heights [...] We should strive to help everyone in our places of work to feel more powerful, because it tends to bring out the best in us."

"I love working with the World Business Forum [...] I find the participants uniquely engaged and optimistic – they’re really happy to be there and always eager to understand and apply what they’re learning about."

"What 'boldness' and 'confidence' mean for leaders in the workplace has, to the benefit of everyone, evolved in the last decade, and even more so in the last few years, given the COVID-19 pandemic."

"I have a different take, which I learned from Bob Chapman, CEO of Barry-Wehmiller and author of the bestselling leadership book Everybody Matters."

"The 'bold, confident' leader as someone who never asks for help, who has all the answers, who shows little emotion or compassion – they're a thing of the past,"