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Attention training helps subjects practice how not to focus on threatening words or on photos of threatening faces

anxiety disorder to achieve remission. The disorder, estimated to affect 6.8 million U.S. adults, involves constant, exaggerated worries about impending disasters regarding health, money or other issues.

A similar form of attention guidance, directed by psychologist Norman Schmidt of Florida State University in Tallahassee, provided marked relief for many patients diagnosed with social anxiety disorder. About 15 million U.S. adults struggle with this condition, which is characterized by a debilitating dread of everyday social situations and a fear of being watched and judged by others.

a standard set of questions they would like answered: can you really divide people up into a particular set of categories? Are the tests for these categories reliable; if you take the test twice will you come out the same both times? Are the categories you are trying to use related to how people learn? If you use a theory of learning styles, do people learn better? Can you use learning styles to predict who will benefit most from particular styles of instruction? Does using a learning styles system - any system - for teaching have other effects on learners or teachings, such as making them more confident or making them expend more effort? These questions stem from the way academic psychologists systematically approach topics: we like to establish the truth of psychological claims. If someone comes to us with a theory about learning styles we want to know (a) if learning styles really exist, (b) if they really are associated with better learning and also (c) if, when learning styles are taken into account, learning is better because of something about the specific learing style theory rather than just being a side effect of an increase in teacher confidence, effort or somesuch.

Using a learning style theory is great, but you lose a lot of flexibility and potential for change if you start to believe that the theory is based on proven facts about the way the world is, rather than just being a useful set of habits and suggestions which might, sometimes, help guide us through the maze of teaching and learning.

f anything can be pursued in an armchair, philosophy can," the esteemed Oxford philosopher Timothy Williamson told the Aristotelian Society, of London, a few years ago. That may sound like an innocuous

Experimental philosophers also draw on work by contemporary psychologists demonstrating just how malleable human cognition is, how easily redirected and reshaped it is by external cues, even as the conscious mind remains blissfully unaware. Opinions on crime and punishment, for instance, can be altered by placing people in a dirty room designed to trigger feelings of disgust: Subjects in such experiments respond more punitively when asked what should be done to certain hypothetical criminals.

They think that by studying human minds, using empirical techniques, and drawing on the insights of modern psychological science, they can get a better sense of where intuitions come from, and whether or when they should be granted credence.