Sandeep Gautam's Blog

I recently came across the concept of climbing The Second Mountain, via Optimize Philosophers Notes (check out my last post to know how to get access), about David Brooks book of the same title. The concept is super simple, and yet profound. Haven’t read the book, but from what I have understood from the book […]

Long time readers of this blog will know that I am enamored by psychology, especially that, which can be put to practical use. While I have developed some expertise in psychology, especially positive psychology, I have always been pondering whether I have been able to apply it equally well, and that too at scale. As […]

Update: With generous help from Rob Capili, I have switched my hosting service provider and The Mouse Trap blog remain available at the-mouse-trap.com. Accordingly, references to the wordpress.com blog has been deleted from below to avoid confusion. The original post follows with slight modification. The posts on The Mouse Trap are my life’s work- for […]

Update 2: With the generous help from Rob Capili ,a long time reader of The Mouse Trap blog, I have changed the hosting provider and managed to retain the domain. So no need to bookmark the wordpress.com blog I had mentioned earlier. I’ll be taking that down and also removing references to that site from […]

The post The Mouse Trap is Available (at the same domain!) first appeared on The Mouse Trap.
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All of psychology can be summed up as a combination of Affect, Behaviour and Cognition. Emotions are affect proper, but being in an affective or emotional state also carries along with it certain changes in behaviour and cognitions. For eg, an angry person not only feels angry but also behaves in an aggressive manner and […]

The post ABC of emotions first appeared on The Mouse Trap.
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‘Shaping Psychology: Perspectives on Legacy, Controversy and the Future of the Field’ is a book by Tomasz Witkowiski and aims to do a review of the field of psychology by interviewing prominent psychologists that have had a seminal influence on the field. The 15 interviewees included in the book include such diverse stalwarts as Daniel […]

The post Shaping Psychology: A book review first appeared on The Mouse Trap.
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What does it mean to live optimally? Is there any difference between self actualization and self-transcendence? Do peak performances and peak experiences differ? The last question was asked yesterday by Scott Barry Kaufman on twitter and it got me thinking.




I've been thinking a lot lately [...]
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Resilience is typically studied as either a recovery/ bouncing back factor where you return to baseline levels of functioning before an acute stressor had occurred, or as a sustainability factor where you continue performing/ adapting well despite the presence of a chronic stressor.



How [...]
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Attention has been studied heavily and as per a popular model of attention by Posner et al, we have 3 systems for attention: alerting, orienting and an executive control network.



Now let me propose a radical fourth network for the same, but before I do that I want to clear some misconceptions [...]
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Some of you may be already familiar with the Dualistic Model of Passion as advocated by Robert Vallerand et al. To recap, passion is of two types: harmonious and obsessive. Both of them have different antecedents (autonomous vs controlled integration) and different consequents ( well-being vs [...]
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