Video lecture: Why Is Psychology Silent on Atheism?

[Underseer]

Your comments suggest you are referring to "Clinical" Psychologists" / Therapists who deal with "abnormal" or disfunctional thought and behavior.
You are right that people with their own psychological problems are drawn to this field.
However, Clincial Psychologists comprise only 50% of the people who get Ph.D.s in psychology, with the rest being "Experimental" psychologists of which the sub-disciplines are Cognitive, Social, Developmental, Biological, and Educational Psychology. They study normal everyday human learning, thought, emotion, action, and brain function.
90% of undergrads who think they are interested in psychology are interested in Clinical and therapy, but few of these make it to grad school. At the grad school and Ph.D levels there is about an even split between Clinical programs and Experimental programs. BTW, the "experimental" refers to the fact that there focus and training is upon conducting empirical experiments to test hypotheses and theories, mostly about the normal and fundamental aspects of human (and non-human for some bio-psych) psychology. This is the more scientifically grounded side of psychology (sadly many Therapists are borderline scientically illiterate). They are the people who splintered off from the Clinical dominated APA 27 years ago because it was too political, ideological and unscientific to form the APS (Association for Psychological Science). Some abnormal and disfunctional psychology is included in this, but it about conducting controlled experiments.
Most experimental psychologist are drawn to the field for the similar intellectual curiosity that people are drawn to other scientific fields. Atheism and its causes and effects would be something most effectively studied non these non-clinicial experimental psychologists.

Your description of of those in experimental psychology miss me, a person with a PhD in experimental psychology almost completely. My specializations are motivation and emotion, learning, human engineering, psychophysics, and biological (publications in memory, learning, behavior genetics, and neuronal chemical characterization). I also have publications in psychometics. I just checked and the number of divisions in APA is 56 http://www.apa.org/about/division/index.aspx

I agree that many clinical psychologists who author studies on their own in clinical psychology journals are probably not that up to it. However those who really try do so usually under the guidance of both experimental psychologists and clinical psychiatrists and these studies are usually first rate.

APS has 26 k members and APA has 137k members. I just published just a few articles in psychological journals. I published mainly in Institute of Physic journals (JASA), engineering journals and physiological society journals. Since I don't like schmoozing nor was I political I generally avoided such as regional and national meetings and politics. I'm quite sure conjoint measurement could be used in such endeavors as discriminating attributes of those who are atheists.

So we don't write that well. So what. I enjoyed your post. Obviously.

If you're in experimental psychology, what are your opinions about the content of the video?

My apologies if you already answered this and I missed it.

 

[fromderinside]

Your description of of those in experimental psychology miss me, a person with a PhD in experimental psychology almost completely. My specializations are motivation and emotion, learning, human engineering, psychophysics, and biological (publications in memory, learning, behavior genetics, and neuronal chemical characterization). I also have publications in psychometics. I just checked and the number of divisions in APA is 56 http://www.apa.org/about/division/index.aspx

I agree that many clinical psychologists who author studies on their own in clinical psychology journals are probably not that up to it. However those who really try do so usually under the guidance of both experimental psychologists and clinical psychiatrists and these studies are usually first rate.

APS has 26 k members and APA has 137k members. I just published just a few articles in psychological journals. I published mainly in Institute of Physic journals (JASA), engineering journals and physiological society journals. Since I don't like schmoozing nor was I political I generally avoided such as regional and national meetings and politics. I'm quite sure conjoint measurement could be used in such endeavors as discriminating attributes of those who are atheists.

So we don't write that well. So what. I enjoyed your post. Obviously.

If you're in experimental psychology, what are your opinions about the content of the video?

My apologies if you already answered this and I missed it.

This is just for you Underseer.

I am an experimental psycho-acoustician who is in an even smaller scientific minority than are those psychologists and sociologists sometimes studying atheism.

However I have stronger experimental methods than does our use of folk psychological terms and techniques atheist psychologist. As a precaution I Google searched 'atheism research journals' and just as I thought atheism popped up over and over in secular journals as well as in journals studying religion (one can ask whether belief is belief can't one). So that's one for preconceptions, hers versus mine. The rest of my comments are going to be of similar vein. Her statistics are very weak even limited, as they are, by her to cross sectional study blinder viewer.

For instance her gathering dimensions in defense of atheists as outcasts needing psychological support she uses methods much less viable than my use of MOAT and SOMA for evaluating technical effectiveness and Workload from well trained pilots. At least I could test my dimensions. Please note the inverted U she presented showing strong atheists have similar mental health to strong God believers. Another discriminated against group, Jews, live longer, are more likely to be Nobel prizewinners, and great psychoanalysts, inferring good mental health?, than are either believer or non believers of other stripes. Both of these kind of put the kibosh on her entire notion that discriminated against people are in need of psychological aid.

Good speaker, kind of dancy, very little of substance presented.

That's the view of this experimental psychologist of the video and the presenter.

 

[Underseer]

Thanks for your thoughts, that's exactly the kind of perspective I was hoping for.

 

[fromderinside]

...by your command.