By John M. Oldham, MD At the Menninger Clinic, where I work, we speak a lot about the importance of mentalizing. It simply means the ability to see yourself from the outside and to see others from the inside. In other words, the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes and try to see […]
Are you a conscientious person: organized, detail-oriented, reliable, dutiful, focused on work, predictable and orderly? If so, according to The Journal of Sex Research, you and your partner are probably having good sex. Researchers at Ruhr University Bochum, in Germany, studied 964 couples to see how personality affected their sex lives. They gave them questionnaires […]
Watch Dr. Oldham, an expert in personality styles and personality disorders, as he commends comedian Pete Davidson for being open about his diagnosis of borderline personality disorder on Good Morning America. Dr. Oldham is the interim chief of staff at the Menninger Clinic in Houston.
John M. Oldham, MD Why is it that so few people who recover from an episode of severe depression never have another one? This question, addressed in a recent New York Times article, brought to mind one of my own: What does personality have to do with it? Flourishing After Depression In the New York […]
Do you look trustworthy? Lazy? Enthusiastic? When it comes to snap judgments, your body shape affects other’s first impressions of your personality. Researchers at the University of Texas in Dallas tested their theory that body-shape and personality-trait stereotypes affect how we judge and interact with people we haven’t met before. The Body Shape Study […]
By John M. Oldham, MD For $99.95, anyone can purchase a lie detector from Walmart. Who buys a polygraph test? Who uses it? Who relies on the results? These are questions I can’t answer, and I was surprised to find one being marketed to the public, since even in expert hands, lie detection results are […]
Want to know why casting headlines as “fake news” gets traction with so many people? The strategy, say psychologists, is “plausible deniability,” meaning the claim cannot be proven wrong in the moment. The strategy is often put to use by overly confident politicians and business leaders among others, say researchers at the University of Notre […]
