Psychology

Danish veterinarians are a little squeamish about working on dead animals - instead of encouraging them to find other careers, the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Copenhagen is encouraging them to work on stuffed animals to lessen their anxiety. The stuffed animal operating room laboratory allows students to train basic surgical skills on toys which resemble animals, featuring organs, veins and arteries. Measurements of students' heart rate, questionnaires and interviews show that after attending the 'teddy laboratory', students are less fearful about the possibility of surgery…

Modern culture is always trying to find new ways to catch bad guys more scientifically but as psychology has fallen in credibility, so has one of its more successful methods; profiling. It isn't a new trend; after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, there was outcry because the terrorists had not been arrested in advance. One bureaucrat came forward and was identified as a whistleblower because she had tried to raise alarm but that renewed the debate - she used 'racial' profiling about people from the Mid-East and had narrowed in on the right people. It can also go wrong when people…

A sociology paper claims that binge-drinking college students are having a much better time in school than their non-binge-drinking counterparts. Binge drinking may be popular on campuses not simply because young people have no jobs yet don't live at home, but because binge drinkers are cool and therefore happy with their college experience. According to the surveys, students from higher status groups (i.e., wealthy, male, white, heterosexual, and Greek affiliated undergraduates) were consistently happier with their college social experience than their peers from lower status groups, i.e.,…

Urban legend says that alcohol is a social icebreaker - and we want to believe, given our preference for commercials where impossibly attractive young people converge on some beach and all have a fantastic time, which is in contrast to actual beer gatherings where a lot of fights and arrests occur.(1) Want to look like this?  Drink alcohol. Credit: Shutterstock But moderate alcohol can boost social bonding, according to a recent paper in Psychological Science.  The paper claims that alcohol dampens negative feelings as well. We have all seen people who have more negative feelings…

Most people claim they don't make judgments about people based on appearance, and most people who say that are lying.  'First impressions' became a term for a reason. Everyone knows appearance counts in first impressions, and first impressions count overall, that is why it is better to wear a tie to a job interview than pajamas but how much are people really able to tell about someone else based on physical aspects, aside from whether or not they are wearing pajamas instead of a tie or if they look like George Clooney?  A 2009 study examined the accuracy of observers’ determination…

In the last year, I've had the occasion to review several books that deal with the unconscious mind. Each author has had an interesting take on the same material, and it's been illuminating to see how writers with different areas of expertise handle the unconscious mind and render the research readable for a popular audience.Leonard Mlodinow is a name many science readers will recognize as belonging with physics, not psychology and neuroscience. His handling of this topic, which has been handled by Eagleman, McRae, Shermer, and others in the last couple years, is skillful and entertaining.…

Husbands and wives express love differently in marriage, according to a new study.  Looking at survey results collected at four time points over 13 years of marriage, researchers ("Do Men and Women Show Love Differently in Marriage?" Schoenfeld et al., Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, November 2012) found that while both genders were equally likely to show love through affection, wives expressed love by being less antagonistic while husbands showed love by initiating sex or sharing activities together.  In Western societies, the cultural myth is that women in…

Afraid of flying?  Maybe there is something to that.  Dogs?  Okay.  But fear of buttons?  Puh-leeeze. The phobia business - legitimizing irrational quirks - has become Big Business and life change consultant Mark O'Donoghue of Purple Smarties in Stoke-on-Trent is ready to believe you. In all, he has helped 99 people since he set up his business in 2008, he says. It isn't just your fear of buttons he can fix, he has also helped with more mainstream things like helping fat people eat fewer pizzas and helping dumb people smoke fewer cigarettes.  O'Donoghue blames…

It's American election season and that means it is time for psychologists to introduce racism again - not whether you are racist, but how much. Well, only white people are, said a talk at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association. Even if they do not have any racist thoughts or lock their car door when they see a young, black man on the sidewalk and voted for Obama in 2008, white people still are; and their racial attitudes, both conscious and unconscious, may be a significant factor in this year's U.S. presidential election. A survey says so."People may not even be…

We can't complain that children don't know how to think and act like adults if we homogenize the way children behave...but criminologists wish you would.   If you don't, they could be drug addicts. Defiant kids are correlated with drug dependence - they include cigarettes along with pot and cocaine, naturally - according to surveys analyzed by psychologists at Sainte-Justine University Hospital Center’s (UHC) Research Center and the University of Montreal, concluded following a 15-year population-based paper published in Molecular Psychiatry. The behavior analysis was of 1,803 children…