Psychology

My dad is a psychologist and though he doesn't work like one at the moment, he still looks at things from a psychological point of view. His psychological comments in various situations (and also his stories from work) made me interested in psychology too. So I asked my dad to help me learn the basics of psychology and later to explain more thoroughly other areas of psychology that I would be interested in.

After learning the basics, I chose to concentrate on communication (mostly nonverbal), social psychology and lies. I read several books about body language and usually they were about separate signs - when someone crosses his arms, he's feeling insecure, when he turns sideways towards you and still looks at you, he's agressive etc. But one of these books (written by CIA agents) was much more interesting - it talks about "clusters" of signs. Isolated signs aren't very reliable (you can cross your arms because you're cold, yawn because you're tired or be nervous because you might miss the train). But when you come across a whole cluster of signs indicating deceit, it's time to take them seriously. That was very interesting!

I enjoyed trying to explain the behavior of people (for example in movies or books) using psychology. I don't know if I interpreted it corectly but if was fun to try and I think it helped me to see things from the other person's point of view.

In this book there were some psychology tests:

I used this textbook for learning about social psychology:

And this is the book I wrote about above - my favorite book about body language and lies: