ramblings

The Origin of Personality through a Religious Lens

As I’ve been taking this Psychology of Personality class, something that’s come up multiple times is what the origins of some of these different personality traits are. In other words, why is it that some people are extroverts and others are empathetic and others are neurotic? We’ve discussed a number of different causes, from the effects of upbringing, to the environment you were raised in, to genetic factors. Another item that’s come up multiple times is to trace the roots of those personality types back to evolution. All of this has got me thinking (as usual). I can see the

What Makes Something “Young Adult”?

I read reviews and chatter about books online. It comes with the territory of being an author and librarian. And a personal pet peeve of mine is when books are dismissed as being “too young adult.” (I mean, of course it would irritate me, seeing as how I write young adult literature. I’d like to make a particular side note of an even bigger pet peeve: when adults criticize a YA book for being “too YA.” That’s like me getting angry that my chocolate ice cream tastes like chocolate.) From context, I gather that when people talk about something being

Back to Psychology

The new school year is under way for everyone. MC headed off yesterday to fifth grade, and Daniela started her sophomore year this morning. Denisa’s teaching her second day of classes today, and I’ve already been back on the reference desk, visiting classes, and scheduling research appointments. (Note: the work never ends for me. It’s not like I’ve got a summer vacation. I’ve got more of a “summer of doing something else for part of the time.”) This year, I’m also going back to another psychology class. If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you know that I

The Power of Serendipity

Yesterday I headed off to the University of Maine at Augusta for a Faculty Development Institute. Basically it was an all day conference focused on a wide range of topics on teaching and collaborating more effectively. I went for a variety of reasons. There were some presentations that touched on the role of libraries in that process, and I was interested in learning more about ChatGPT in education, but most importantly, I went because I never know ahead of time what meeting will end up being helpful or not. All I know is that if I never go to meetings

The Perils of Groupthink

I’m a regular reader of Reddit. It’s a site with a bunch of communities, and you can pick the communities you want to be a part of. Those communities run from very specialized to very broad. There’s one on Video Games, and then smaller ones for individual video games, or types of video games. By joining one, you get to read a constant stream of updates from that community, collated with all the other communities you’ve joined. There’s a lot to like about Reddit. It’s like an interactive Wiki, with specialists in areas there to offer suggestions and advice on