Tales of Tenth Grade

Weird Psychological/Neurological Disorders These are pretty crazy.  Apotemnophilia This is when someone has an obsessive desire to cut off a healthy limb or to become paralyzed from the waist down. Patients generally preferred amputating the leg, rather than the arm, and most patients wanted to cut off a limb from the left side of their body. The main explanation at the moment is that apotemnophilia is driven by sexual compulsion, however, some studies have observed individuals with apotemnophilia who needed to cut off their leg "to feel complete."  Alien Hand Syndrome This syndrome was investigated after a 77-year-old woman complained that her hand was moving without her mind's control. She was watching TV, and her hand starting stroking her face and hair as if it wasn't her own. This generally caused by brain tumors, aneurysms, degenerative diseases of the brain, and, as in the woman's case, a stroke. These lesions will be in the corpus callosu...

I really enjoyed studying the psychological and social experiments in English these past few weeks, so I decided to find some more and compile them here for anyone else who was interested. A Class Divided This study, conducted by Jane Elliot, was designed to mimic racism and prejudice.  Elliot divided a classroom of children based on eye color.  She gave the blue-eyed group special privileges and told them they were the superior group.  Individuals from the brown-eyed group were criticized by Elliot and treated poorly.  Throughout the experiment, the blue-eyed group showed an improvement in academic performance and even mirrored Elliot's poor treatment of the brown-eyed group, while the brown-eyed group experienced deteriorating self-confidence and worsened academic performance. Little Albert Experiment This study was conducted at Johns Hopkins University in 1920 to determine whether they could condition a 9-month old baby to have an irrational fear of rats....