Emily Martin – författare

An inside view of the experimental practices of cognitive psychology—and their influence on the addictive nature of social mediaExperimental cognitive psychology research is a hidden force in our online lives. We engage with it, often unknowingly, whenever we download a health app, complete a Facebook quiz, or rate our latest purchase. How did experimental psychology come to play an outsized role in these developments? Experiments of the Mind considers this question through a look at cognitive psychology laboratories. Emily Martin traces how psychological research methods evolved, escaped the boundaries of the discipline, and infiltrated social media and our digital universe.Martin recounts her participation in psychology labs, and she conveys their activities through the voices of principal investigators, graduate students, and subjects. Despite claims of experimental psychology’s focus on isolated individuals, Martin finds that the history of the field—from early German labs to Gestalt psychology—has led to research methods that are, in fact, highly social. She shows how these methods are deployed online: amplified by troves of data and powerful machine learning, an unprecedented model of human psychology is now widespread—one in which statistical measures are paired with algorithms to predict and influence users’ behavior.Experiments of the Mind examines how psychology research has shaped us to be perfectly suited for our networked age.

Manic behavior holds an undeniable fascination in American culture today. It fuels the plots of best-selling novels and the imagery of MTV videos, is acknowledged as the driving force for successful entrepreneurs like Ted Turner, and is celebrated as the source of the creativity of artists like Vincent Van Gogh and movie stars like Robin Williams. Bipolar Expeditions seeks to understand mania''s appeal and how it weighs on the lives of Americans diagnosed with manic depression. Anthropologist Emily Martin guides us into the fascinating and sometimes disturbing worlds of mental-health support groups, mood charts, psychiatric rounds, the pharmaceutical industry, and psychotropic drugs. Charting how these worlds intersect with the wider popular culture, she reveals how people living under the description of bipolar disorder are often denied the status of being fully human, even while contemporary America exhibits a powerful affinity for manic behavior. Mania, Martin shows, has come to be regarded as a distant frontier that invites exploration because it seems to offer fame and profits to pioneers, while depression is imagined as something that should be eliminated altogether with the help of drugs. Bipolar Expeditions argues that mania and depression have a cultural life outside the confines of diagnosis, that the experiences of people living with bipolar disorder belong fully to the human condition, and that even the most so-called rational everyday practices are intertwined with irrational ones. Martin''s own experience with bipolar disorder informs her analysis and lends a personal perspective to this complex story.Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

Comment vivent les Américains décrits comme maniaco-dépressifs ? Ce livre explore leur expérience quotidienne à travers une enquête ethnographique auprès de groupes de soutien, de groupes de travail en psychiatrie et de salariés du marketing pharmaceutique. Il s’appuie sur la propre expérience de l’auteur avec les troubles bipolaires et ouvre une réflexion sur la place de la manie et de la dépression dans la culture américaine. Cette recherche fascinante et parfois dérangeante permet au lecteur de découvrir l’univers des troubles bipolaires tout en posant des questions fondamentales sur la dimension culturelle de l’irrationalité. Que signifie perdre le statut de personne ? Peut-on être parfois rationnel et parfois irrationnel ? Pourquoi certaines personnalités maniaques réussissent-elles socialement tandis que d’autres, la majorité, perdent leur emploi, leur famille et leurs amis ? Quel est le statut des médicaments, pour ceux qui les produisent et pour ceux qui les utilisent ? Le rapport profondément ambivalent de la culture américaine avec la manie, valorisée notamment dans les entreprises, et la dépression, son double inversé, entraîne le lecteur dans une réflexion sur les transformations les plus récentes du capitalisme à partir d’un angle original : l’optimisation de nos états mentaux et de nos émotions. Préface d’Anne M. LOVELL Traduit de l’anglais par Camille SALGUES