Thank God for Martha Stout--Terms and Definitions from The Paranoid Switch

Contrast Effect- enhancement or diminishment of an experience by previous experience or expectation.

Perceptual Contrast Effect- an example of this phenomenon is looking at supermodels. How pretty do you feel after looking at them? This is called Perceptual Contrast Effect.

Safety Signal-a symbol that indicates by its presence that danger is gone.

Limbic Resonance-ability to sense the emotions of other people; emotive connectivity.

Limbic Wars-the manipulation of group trauma by political leaders to engage in military or emotional warfare. Examples that she include the "War on Terror" in which the Bush administration capitalizes on the U.S. populations fear of terrorism and their recent trauma from the terrorism that occurred on 9/11 in order to push their agenda for war in Iraq, and now with Iran. Other examples in the book are the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, the reign of terror eked out by the Ku Klux Klan, McCarthyism, and the Cold War. Other examples that I can think of are the Spanish-American war, the Nazi campaign against the Jews,and the race riots in the early part of the 20th century with white mobs terrorizing urban Black communities.


Systematic Desensitization- process of incrementally reducing a person(or a people's) emotional response. Psychotherapists use this to help trauma victims overcome their fears. Perpetrators of fear, including politicians use this to strip populations of their emotional reactions to illicit activities around them. For example, responses to Abu Ghraib and the erosion of civil and human rights in the United States.