Famous People Who Were Mentally Ill:
    *Abraham Lincoln
    *Patty Duke
    *Ernest Hemingway
    *Vincent Van Gogh
    *Pablo Picasso
    *Edgar Allen Poe

1 in 3 people has some sort of mental illness (includes depression, alcoholism, etc)
 

According to the Depressive Realism Theory, depressed people are NOT overly pessimistic...they actually tend to have a more realistic view of the world, and everybody else is overly optimistic.  (Optimism is healthier, though...)
 

Violence against animals, particularly cats, is one of the signs associated with serial killers (think Jeffrey Dahmer...).  Just the violence against animals part didn't surprise me, but I wonder why they single out cats??
 

Doctors have higher than average rates of suicide, but psychiatrists have the highest rates out of all medical professionals!  I thought that was pretty strange...considering that they're trained in dealing with other suicidal people.
 

(Kenrick and Gutierres study, 1980) -- Contrast Effect --  After looking at pictures of very attractive women/centerfolds, the men reported less love for their wives/girlfriends, and rated them less favorably!  (Just gives us girls another reason to hate girlie magazines...)

If someone asked you to guess who the loneliest people in our society were, who would you guess?  The class thought it would be the elderly...but guess what--it's teens and young adults! Reasons?  They're in a transitional phase in their lives, and they tend to move around a lot (college, moving from their childhood homes to new areas, etc).  It's also possible that young people expect more from their relationships, and are disappointed (hence, lonely) when they don't get it.

(Duval and Wickland study, 1972) -- Self-Awareness Theory -- When something draws attention to you, it increases your self-awareness and causes you to become aware of your shortcomings (discrepancies between what you are and what you would like to be).  This is basically a pretty crappy feeling, so we try to escape those situations (Ex:  That's why people hide from cameras.  When their picture is taken, they're forced to realize that they don't look the way they want to look...Pretty obvious, but I never realized there was an actual theory behind it.)

Another study that had to do with self-awareness was done on little kids trick-or-treating... They left bowls of candy out on the porch with a sign that said "Take One."  Of course, most of the kids took the whole bowl.  Then they tried the same situation, but with a mirror behind the bowl so that the kids had to watch their own behavior--Most of the kids in that situation only took one!  They found out that mirrors are a way to  keep people honest, because they don't want to watch themselves behaving badly.  That's also why department stores have those mirrors all over the store...to prevent shoplifting.

There's a correlation between call waiting and incidence of genital herpes -- People with call waiting have a higher incidence. (Correlation does not equal causation!)

And the wackiest thing I've heard all semester (well, along with some of Freud's theories)...
The Twinkie Defense:
    A guy who killed 2 people was convicted only of voluntary manslaughter (less than 8 years in jail) because his attorney claimed that his client's high sugar intake (Twinkies, pop, and chips) affected his thinking and emotions and partially caused his actions.  Ok...I eat TONS of sugar (cappuccino and cookie dinners, baby!) and I've never once felt the urge to kill after eating junk food.  I think that's whacked.
 

Quotes I Agree With (from journal articles i had to use for my papers):

    "The personal insecurities of low self-esteem individuals therefore frustrate their quest for acceptance and felt security, echoing Erikson's (1968) contention that identity needs must be satisfied before trust and intimacy can be secured."  (In other words, if you don't know who you are, and like yourself, you can't fully trust that someone else could care about you.  The article did say that in time --I don't know how much time-- self-esteem is supposed to increase gradually when you realize that the person isn't going anywhere.  But I bet you frustrate the other person a lot in the mean time.)

    "It may be that during adolescence, when romantic interactional patterns develop and lay the foundations for future styles of initiating and terminating intimate relations, relationship loss may be especially meaningful psychologically and have important consequences for emotional development and psychological vulnerability."  (I totally agree...Lots of times people don't think teenage relationships are a big deal, but they can do a LOT to your psychological state.)

    "Termination of an early significant romantic relationship (or a particular type of termination; e.g., hostile or callous rejection) may reverberate in negative ways through later relationships or impair one's abilities to select or maintain and appropriate partner in the future."  (In other words, bad experiences when you don't have any other experience to use as a reference can screw you up.)

    "The higher an individual's clarity (the extent to which beliefs about oneself are clearly defined, consistent with one another, and stable across situations and over time), the higher the self-esteem..."  (In other words, you need to know who you are and what you believe in before you can like yourself as a person...if you don't know who you are, you probably won't like yourself, either.)