All of the following come from PsiCafe

HOW MANY PSYCHOLOGISTS DOES IT TAKE TO CHANGE A LIGHTBULB? 

Just one, but the bulb will have to be ready to change

PSYCHOLOGY IS ACTUALLY MATH

Psychology is actually biology.  

Biology is actually chemistry.  

Chemistry is actually physics.  

And physics is actually math.

FACTS OF LIFE - SCHOOL

1.  If you are given on open-book exam, you will forget your book.  

2.  If you are given a take-home test, you will forget where you live.  

3.  Vital papers will demonstrate their vitality by moving from where you left them to where you can't find them.

FACTS OF LIFE - GENDER

1.  The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think.

2.  Smart man + smart woman = romance 

     Smart man + dumb woman = pregnancy

     Dumb man + smart woman = affair

     Dumb man + dumb woman = marriage 

3.  A man will pay $2 for a $1 item he needs. A woman will pay $1 for a $2 item that she doesn't need. 

4.  A woman has the last word in any argument. Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument. 

5.  Women look to one man to satisfy her every need. Men look to every woman to satisfy his one need. 

MEN, WOMEN, AND PUNCTUATION

An English professor wrote the words: "Woman without her man is nothing" on the blackboard and directed the students to punctuate it correctly. 

The men wrote: "Woman, without her man, is nothing."

The women wrote: "Woman! Without her, man is nothing."

AGE BELL CURVE

It seems that life goes by resembling somewhat of a bell curve of what is considered successful... 

At age 4...success is...not peeing in your pants. 

At age 10...success is...making your own meals.  

At age 12...success is...having friends. 

At age 16...success is...having a drivers license. 

At age 20...success is...having sex.

At age 35...success is...having money.

At age 50...success is...having money.

At age 60...success is...having sex.

At age 70...success is...having a drivers license. 

At age 75...success is...having friends. 

At age 80...success is...making your own meals. 

At age 85...success is...not peeing in your pants. 

SIGNS THAT YOUR ARE NO LONGER A KID

You're asleep, but others worry that you're dead.  

You can live without sex but not without glasses. 

Your back goes out more than you do.  

You quit trying to hold your stomach in, no matter who walks into the room.  

You buy a compass for the dash of your car.  

You are proud of your lawnmower.  

Your best friend is dating someone half their age...and isn't breaking any laws.  

Your arms are almost too short to read the newspaper.  

You sing along with the elevator music.  

You would rather go to work than stay home sick.  

You constantly talk about the price of gasoline.  

You enjoy hearing about other people's operations.  

You consider coffee one of the most important things in life.  

You make an appointment to see the dentist.  

You no longer think of speed limits as a challenge.  

Neighbors borrow your tools.  

People call at 9 p.m. and ask, "Did I wake you ?"  

You have a dream about prunes.  

You answer a question with, "Because I said so!"  

You send money to PBS.  

The end of your tie doesn't come anywhere near the top of your pants. 

You take a metal detector to the beach.  

You wear black socks with sandals.  

You know what the word "equity" means. 

You can't remember the last time you laid on the floor to watch television. 

Your ears are hairier than your head. 

You talk about "good grass" and you're referring to someone's lawn. 

You get into a heated argument about pension plans. You got cable for the weather channel. (Weather Channel "Old Folks MTV"?) 

You have a party and the neighbors don't even realize it.

WHAT DO PSYCHOLOGISTS SAY TO EACH OTHER WHEN THEY MEET?

You're fine, how am I?

COLLEGE FOODCHAIN by B. Schneiderman

THE DEAN

Leaps tall buildings in a single bound 

Is more powerful than a locomotive

Is faster than a speeding bullet

Walks on water

Gives policy to God  

THE DEPARTMENT HEAD 

Leaps short buildings in a single bound 

Is more powerful than a switch engine 

Is just as fast as a speeding bullet 

Talks with God  

PROFESSOR 

Leaps short buildings with a running start and favorable winds 

Is almost as powerful a switch engine 

Is faster than a speeding BB 

Walks on water in an indoor swimming pool 

Talks with God if a special request is honored  

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

Barely clears a quonset hut

Loses tug of war with a locomotive

Can fire a speeding bullet

Swims well

Is occasionally addressed by God 

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

Makes high marks on the walls when trying to leap tall buildings 

Is run over by locomotives 

Can sometimes handle a gun without inflicting self-injury 

Treads water 

Talks to animals  

INSTRUCTOR 

Climbs walls continually 

Rides the rails 

Plays russian roulette 

Walks on thin ice

Prays a lot 

GRADUATE STUDENT

Runs into buildings

Recognizes locomotives two out of three times

Is not issued ammunition

Can stay afloat with a life jacket

Talks to walls  

UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT 

Falls over doorstep when trying to enter buildings 

Says "Look at the choo-choo"

Wets himself with a water pistol

Plays in mud puddles

Mumbles to himself

THE LANGUAGE OF THESIS ADVISORS

YOU JUST MIGHT BE A GRADUATE STUDENT IF...  

...you spend more on books than on tuition.  

...you actually hope your professor assigns homework.  

...you get a 3-hour final with 5 questions or less.  

...the words "free time" are unfamiliar to you.  

...you spend Saturday morning waiting for the library to open. 

...you've memorized your professors' home phone numbers.  

...your professors know your home phone number. 

...more than 25% of your textbook is "left as an exercise for the reader." 

...you are on a first-name basis with everyone on the library staff. 

...you can analyze the significance of appliances you cannot operate. 

...your office is better decorated than your apartment. 

...you have ever, as a folklore project, attempted to track the progress of your own joke across the Internet.  

...you are startled to meet people who neither need nor want to read.  

...you have ever brought a scholarly article to a bar.  

...you rate coffee shops by the availability of outlets for your laptop.

...everything reminds you of something in your discipline.

...you have ever discussed academic matters at a sporting event.

...you have ever spent more than $50 on photocopying while researching a single paper.

...there is a microfilm reader in the library that you consider "yours."  

...you actually have a preference between microfilm and microfiche. 

...you can tell the time of day by looking at the traffic flow at the library.  

...you look forward to summers because you're more productive without the distraction of classes.  

...you regard ibuprofen as a vitamin.  

...you consider all papers to be works in progress.  

...professors don't really care when you turn in work anymore.  

...you find the bibliographies of books more interesting than the actual text.  

...you have given up trying to keep your books organized and are now just trying to keep them all in the same general area.  

...you have accepted guilt as an inherent feature of relaxation. 

...you reflexively start analyzing those greek letters before you realize that it's a sorority sweatshirt, not an equation.  

...you find yourself explaining to children that you are in "20th grade". 

...you start refering to stories like "Snow White et al."  

...you frequently wonder how long you can live on pasta without getting scurvy.  

...you look forward to taking some time off to do laundry.  

...you have more photocopy cards than credit cards.  

...you wonder if APA style allows you to cite talking to yourself as "personal communication".

WHY GOD NEVER RECEIVED A PH.D. 

1. He had only one major publication.

2. It was in Hebrew.

3. It had no references. 

4. It wasn't published in a refereed journal. 

5. Some even doubt he wrote it by himself. 

6. It may be true that he created the world, but what has he done since then?  

7. His cooperative efforts have been quite limited.  

8. The scientific community has had a hard time replicating his results. 

9. He never applied to the ethics board for permission to use human subjects. 

10. When one experiment went awry he tried to cover it by drowning his subjects. 

11. When subjects didn't behave as predicted, he deleted them from the sample. 

12. He rarely came to class, just told students to read the book. 

13. Some say he had his son teach the class. 

14. He expelled his first two students for learning. 

15. Although there were only 10 requirements, most of his students failed his tests. 

16. His office hours were infrequent and usually held on a mountain top. 

17. No record of working well with colleagues. 

THESIS ON CLASSICAL CONDITIONING

An MIT student spent an entire summer going to the Harvard football field every day wearing a black and white striped shirt, walking up and down the field for ten or fifteen minutes throwing birdseed all over the field, blowing a whistle and then walking off the field.  

At the end of the summer, it came time for the first Harvard home football game, the referee walked onto the field and blew the whistle, and the game had to be delayed for a half hour to wait for the birds to get off of the field. The guy wrote his thesis on this and graduated.

Freud On Seuss 

The Cat in the Hat By Dr. Seuss, 61 pages. Beginner Books, $3.95 

A book review by Josh LeBeau 

Borrowed from the Koala, UCSD's humour newspaper 

 The Cat in the Hat is a hard-hitting novel of prose and poetry in which the author re-examines the dynamic rhyming schemes and bold imagery of some of his earlier works, most notably "Green Eggs And Ham," "If I Ran The Zoo," and "Why Can't I Shower With Mommy?" In this novel, Theodore Geisel, writing under the pseudonym Dr. Seuss, pays homage to the great Dr. Sigmund Freud in a nightmarish fantasy of a renegade feline helping two young children understand their own frustrated sexuality.  

The story opens with two youngsters, a brother and a sister, abandoned by their mother, staring mournfully through the window of their single-family dwelling. In the foreground, a large tree/phallic symbol dances wildly in the wind, taunting the children and encouraging them to succumb to the sexual yearnings they undoubtedly feel for each other. Even to the most unlearned reader, the blatant references to the incestuous relationship the two share set the tone for Seuss' probing examination of the satisfaction of primitive needs. The Cat proceeds to charm the wary youths into engaging in what he so innocently refers to as "tricks." At this point, the fish, an obvious Christ figure who represents the prevailing Christian morality, attempts to warn the children, and thus, in effect, warns all of humanity of the dangers associated with the unleashing of the primal urges. In response to this, the cat proceeds to balance the aquatic naysayer on the end of his umbrella, essentially saying, "Down with morality; down with God!"  

After poohpoohing the righteous rantings of the waterlogged Christ figure, the Cat begins to juggle several icons of Western culture, most notably two books, representing the Old and New Testaments, and a saucer of lactal fluid, an ironic reference to maternal loss the two children experienced when their mother abandoned them "for the afternoon." Our heroic Id adds to this bold gesture a rake and a toy man, and thus completes the Oedipal triangle. 

Later in the novel, Seuss introduces the proverbial Pandora's box, a large red crate out of which the Id releases Thing One, or Freud's concept of Ego, the division of the psyche that serves as the conscious mediator between the person and reality, and Thing Two, the Superego which functions to reward and punish through a system of moral attitudes, conscience, and guilt. Referring to this box, the Cat says, "Now look at this trick. Take a look!" In this, Dr. Seuss uses the children as a brilliant metaphor for the reader, and asks the reader to re-examine his own inner self.  

The children, unable to control the Id, Ego, and Superego allow these creatures to run free and mess up the house, or more symbolically, control their lives. This rampage continues until the fish, or Christ symbol, warns that the mother is returning to reinstate the Oedipal triangle that existed before her abandonment of the children. At this point, Seuss introduces a many-armed cleaning device which represents the psychoanalytic couch, which proceeds to put the two youngsters' lives back in order. 

With powerful simplicity, clarity, and drama, Seuss reduces Freud's concepts on the dynamics of the human psyche to an easily understood gesture. Mr. Seuss' poetry and choice of words is equally impressive and serves as a splendid counterpart to his bold symbolism. In all, his writing style is quick and fluid, making _The Cat in the Hat_ impossible to put down. While this novel is only 61 pages in length, and one can read it in five minutes or less, it is not until after multiple readings that the genius of this modern-day master becomes apparent...

STRESS MANAGEMENT: A VISUALIZATION

Picture yourself near a stream.  

Birds are singing in the crisp, cool mountain air. 

Nothing can bother you here. 

No one knows this secret place. 

You are in total seclusion from that place called the world.  

The soothing sound of a gentle waterfall fills the air with a cascade of serenity. 

The water is clear. 

You can easily make out the face of the person whose head you're holding under the water. 

There now, feeling better?

 WAS FREUD SEDUCED BY HIS OWN NAME?

Eine Zigarre in die Mund gibt mir Freude. 

(A cigar in the mouth gives me pleasure.)  

Could it be that the father of psychoanalysis was seduced by his very name? --Philip Champagne  

LIFESPAN DEVELOPMENT

GREAT TRUTHS ABOUT LIFE THAT LITTLE CHILDREN HAVE LEARNED

1) No matter how hard you try, you can't baptize cats.

2) When your Mom is mad at your Dad, don't let her brush your hair.

3) If your sister hits you, don't hit her back. They always catch the second person.

4) Never ask your 3-year old brother to hold a tomato. 

5) You can't trust dogs to watch your food. 

6) Don't sneeze when someone is cutting your hair. 

7) Never hold a Dust-Buster and a cat at the same time.

8) You can't hide a piece of broccoli in a glass of milk. 

9) Don't wear polka-dot underwear under white shorts.  

10) The best place to be when you're sad is Grandma's lap.  

GREAT TRUTHS ABOUT LIFE THAT ADULTS HAVE LEARNED: 

1) Raising teenagers is like nailing Jell-O to a tree.

2) Wrinkles don't hurt. 

3) Families are like fudge . . . mostly sweet, with a few nuts. 

4) Today's mighty oak is just yesterday's nut that held its ground. 

5) Laughing is good exercise. It's like jogging on the inside. 

6) Middle age is when you choose your cereal for the fiber, not the joy. 

GREAT TRUTHS ABOUT GROWING OLD 

1) Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional. 

2) Forget the health food. I need all the preservatives I can get.  

3) When you fall down, you wonder what else you can do while you're down there.  

4) You're getting old when you get the same sensation from a rocking chair that you once got from a roller coaster.  

5) It's frustrating when you know all the answers, but nobody bothers to ask you the questions.  

6) Time may be a great healer, but it's a lousy beautician.  

7) Wisdom comes with age, but sometimes age comes alone.  

THE FOUR STAGES OF LIFE:  

1) You believe in Santa Claus. 

2) You don't believe in Santa Claus. 

3) You are Santa Claus. 

4) You look like Santa Claus.

USEFUL RESEARCH PHRASES (TRUE MEANINGS)

[I didn't look up the original reference.]

[These data are practically meaningless.]

[Interesting to me.]

[An unsuccessful experiment but I still have to get it published.]

[The results of the others didn't make any sense.]

[The best results are shown.]

[I might get around to this sometime if I'm pushed.]

[He was my graduate assistant.]

[I think]

[A couple of other guys think so, too.]

[I don't understand it.]

[Wrong]

[This is a lousy paper, but so are all the others on this miserable topic.]

[Blotz did the work and Frink explained to me what it meant.]

grammer lesson

This is the a lesson in punctuation and how you can screw
up if you don't pay attention:

HOW TO WRITE A PAPER

 Sit in a straight, comfortable chair in a well lighted place with plenty of freshly sharpened pencils.

 Check your email.

 Read over the assignment carefully, to make certain you understand it.

 Walk down to the vending machines and buy some coffee to help you concentrate.

 Check your email.

 Stop off at another floor on the way back and visit with your friend from class.

-- If your friend hasn't started the paper yet either, you can both walk to McDonalds and buy a hamburger to help you concentrate.

-- If your friend shows you her/her paper, typed, double-spaced, and bound in one of those irritating see-thru plastic folders, drop him/her.

 When you get back to your room, sit in a straight, comfortable chair in a clean, well lighted place with plenty of freshly sharpened pencils.

 Read over the assignment again to make absolutely certain you understand it.

 Check your email.

 You know, you haven't written to that kid you met at camp since the fourth grade.

-- You'd better write that letter now and get it out of the way so you can concentrate.

 Look at your teeth in the bathroom mirror.

 Listen to one side of your favorite tape and that's it.

-- I mean it. As soon as it's over you are going to start that paper.

 Listen to the other side.

 Check your email.

 Rearrange all of your CDs into alphabetical order.

 Phone your friend on the other floor and ask if he/she has started writing yet.

-- Exchange derogatory remarks about your professor, course, the university, the world at large.

 Sit in a straight, comfortable chair.

 Have a Lifesaver.

-- Savor its special flavor across your tongue.

 Check your email.

 Check the newspaper listings to make sure you aren't missing something truly worthwhile on TV.

-- Note: When you have a paper due in less than 12 hours, anything on TV from Masterpiece Theater to Sgt. Preston of the Yukon is truly worthwhile, with these exceptions:

a) Pro Bowlers Tour

b) any movie starring Don Ameche

 Catch the last hour of Soul Brother of Kung Fu on Channel 26.

 Phone your friend on the third floor to see if he/she was watching.

-- Discuss the finer points of the plot.

 Check your email.

 Look at your tongue in the bathroom mirror.

 Look through your roommate's book of pictures from home.

-- Ask who everyone is.

 Sit down and do some serious thinking about your plans for the future.

 Open our door and check to see if there are any mysterious, trench-coated strangers lurking in the hall.

 Check your email.

 Sit in a straight, comfortable chair in a clean, well lighted place with plenty of freshly sharpened pencils.

 Read over the assignment one more time, just for the heck of it.

 Scoot your chair across the room to the window and watch the sunrise.

 Lie face down on the floor and moan.

 Check your email.

 Leap up and write the paper.

 Type the paper, and while you're at it, check your email.

 Complain to everyone that you didn't get any sleep because you had to write that darn paper.

WHERE TO PUBLISH YOUR PAPER

1) If you understand it and can prove it, then send it to a journal of mathematics.

2) If you understand it, but can't prove it, then send it to a physics journal.

3) If you can't understand it, but can prove it, then send it to an economics journal.

4) If you can neither understand it nor prove it, then send it to a psychology journal.

5) If it attempts to make something important out of something trivial, then send it to a journal of  education.