People with Amy K

Ne(w)(urotransmitter) Love This Valentines Day, lets talk about love. Not the love for your mother, but the passionate romantic love Nicholas Spark writes about, as, despite some overlap, there is a difference.  Studies have shown that different areas of the brain are active during romantic love when compared to the love we have for a companion or family member. There changes are seen in our neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are the brains chemical messengers that send signals through the body and control our cognition and mood among other things. Several neurotransmitters are associated with romantic love and sexual activity. The most prominent of these is dopamine. Dopamine is the feel good chemical that allows us to feel pleasure, satisfaction, and motivation.  This neurotransmitter is responsible for addiction, and is activated when you're in love and during intercourse, which is why these can both be as addicting as drugs, gambling, or anything else. This addictive pro...

  Parenting Styles For some parents, their style of parenting feels more like knee-jerk reactions and doing what they have to do to make it through the day. As much as each parent and family is unique, however, parenting styles are typically seen as best fitting into one of 4 categories. These categories are separated by differences in degree of warmth and demand, among others, and can lead to different benefits and setbacks for the child later in life. Of course, no parenting style is perfect, and choosing one can be a vital early step in the lives of new parents. For this reason, I've outlined the 4 major categories of parenting types with explanations here, as well as some of the pros and cons associated with each. Permissive Permissive parenting is characterized by the least expectations and avoiding confrontation with the child. This style ranks high in warmth, but low in levels of demand. These parents are very stand-off in their approach, and often allow their child nearly f...

Émile Durkheim Émile Durkheim was a French Sociologist  who is best known as the principal architect of modern social science and is widely regarded as the founder of the French School of Sociology. Some of his major works include the Division of Labour in Society, the Rules of the Sociological Method, Suicide, Pedagogical Evolution in France, and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.   His most notable work is called Suicide and is largely about how capitalism robs humans of their happiness until they reach the point of craving death.  In this book, he outlines 5 reason that humans are so unhappy 1. Individualism The first reason he outlines, is that in a society of capitalism, there is too much pressure on the individual. Before capitalism, roles were assigned at birth. Now-with competition-there's more pressure on the individual and uncertainty in the work that you'll do and the life you will live. With this uncertainty, stress is put on the individual that coul...

 Killed: "The Black Dahlia" A mugshot of Elizabeth Short from 1943, when she was arrested for underage drinking. Also known as "The Black Dahlia," Elizabeth Short was an aspiring actress who  wanted be famous more than anything else in the world. As the old doctrine tells us, be careful what you wish for. Her brutal murder at only 22 years old has immortalized her as one of the most gruesome unsolved murders of all time. On January 15, 1947, a young woman and her three-year-old daughter stumbled upon the body of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short. She was horribly mutilated, lying in the grass of a Los Angeles residential neighborhood, her body completely chopped in half. The two pieces of her body were about a foot apart. Her intestines had been removed, folded up and then shoved back into her gut. Her body had been drained of blood from holes in her wrists, and perhaps the worst part, the killer had cut it open from the corners of both sides of her mouth to her ears, per...

 Beginner's Guide to Dissociative Identity Disorder Formerly known as multiple personality disorder, dissociative identity disorder is seen as the most severe of 3 dissociative disorders recognized by the DSM-5-which involve problems relating to memory, identity, emotion, perception, behavior, and sense of self. Since it was first identified in 1882, to its popularization in the media in the 1970s when the movie Sybil was released, until today, this disorder has baffled many and remains controversial and even an enigma to much of the psychiatric community. So, what is dissociative identity disorder? Where does it come from, and what is available as far as treatment for this disorder today? What is dissociative Identity disorder? Dissociative identity disorder, or DID, is a disorder of dissociation which is a coping mechanism the brain employs in severe episodes of trauma, in which the individual may feel detached from reality, present, or even themselves. When this coping mechanism...