Psychology

I was looking through the feeds on the autism blogs directory, as I do everyday, and reading the various thumbnails, clicking through on those blog posts that I thought would be helpful to read, and I was struck again by the diversity of bloggers--the various opinions, beliefs, and experiences of them, and how it can be a bit disconcerting to be hit with this huge spectrum (pun intended) all on one page.  Some of the parents write about recovery and how slow it's going. Some write posts in support of Wakefield.  Others write about triumphs, about fights with the school…

MELBOURNE, Australia, June 13 -- In what is being billed as the world's largest international study of online consumer behavior, involving over 36,000 users (though that sounds low - we could easily get more than 36,000 respondents to a survey today), differences between online behavior cultures were found, including the secret to success - which appears to be simplicity.  The Webreep online consumer survey analyzed consumer behavior on the internet between May 2011 and May 2012. Participants were distributed across 7 regions, including France, Germany, Spain, Australia, China, and…

Men are generally more reluctant to try vegetarian products and a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research says that is influenced by a strong association of meat with masculinity. "We examined whether people in Western cultures have a metaphoric link between meat and men" write the authors.  And they concluded there was a strong cultural connection to meat - especially muscle meat, like steak.  Evolutionary psychologists would likely disagree, as do unbiased dietary scientists.In a number of experiments that looked at metaphors and certain foods, like meat and milk, the…

Don Ritchie earned the title of ‘the Angel of the Gap’ for his tireless attempts over the last 45 years, to dissuade people from jumping to their death from the high cliffs known as 'the Gap' at Watsons Bay, but mostly from Gap Park opposite his home on Old South Head Road in Woollahra, Sydney. Officially Don Ritchie has successfully persuaded 160 people not to jump to their deaths, but unofficially we are told that the figure is probably closer to 400 people. Unlike the hundreds of people over the years, who have committed suicide, by jumping from this notorious, suicide cliff,…

Females like the bad boys when they are young, we all know that colloquially - and even more so when they are ovulating, say a group of social and evolutionary psychologists. It's social psychology and a professor of marketing is as qualified to look at survey results as anyone so let's go with it - actually, applied psychology, like marketing, has proven its worth far more than efforts to make it a theoretical science so marketing people likely have a great deal more credibility.  Plus, this study is actually pretty good, at least compared to other social psychology nonsense like…

It's no surprise that tattoos and piercings have been linked to other risky decisions but capped Internet bandwidth?   Some people don't like that Internet providers have been secretly capping broadband Internet speeds.  Marshini Chetty, a postdoctoral researcher in Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing, interviewed 12 households in South Africa, where broadband caps were universal until February 2010. The caps set by South African ISPs vary, with some plans only offering 1 GB of data per month. At the time of the study, the caps ranged up to 9 GB of data, far lower than…

Teenage youngsters around the world are rapidly evolving their communication habits with peers. This modern form of communications bypasses the 70,000 years of gene-culture coevolution that developed our syntatic cultural innovations from early man. Recent evidence has shown that the brain goes through a remodelling process during adolescence. It is possible that neural plasticity facilitates the development of social cognitive skills required during the period of adolescence. Human communication is informed by gestures, voice intonation, and significantly by facial expression. Non-verbal…

It's been said that science fiction can sometimes turn into science fact. In that same vein, it may be that stories from The Onion (More U.S. Children Being Diagnosed With Youthful Tendency Disorder) may one day become part of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). While mental disorders are clearly a serious problem, even if the World Health Organization says they are(1), a questionnaire about kids probably isn't going to be the way to prevent them. Even sillier would be using a genetic test to make the determination that a misbehaving kid is mentally ill. Yet…

Commonly prescribed anti-depressants appear to be doing patients more harm than good, say researchers who have published a paper examining the impact of the medications on the entire body. Anti-depressants are designed to relieve the symptoms of depression by increasing the levels of serotonin in the brain, where it regulates mood. The vast majority of serotonin that the body produces, though, is used for other purposes, including digestion, forming blood clots at wound sites, reproduction and development. Researchers examined previous patient studies into the effects of anti-depressants…

Let's be honest - in the 21st century the wussification of men has been in full force.   Being a man is out if that means not being a politically correct, hyper-sensitive, asexual, homogenized follower of all that is cool and popular among the cultural intelligentsia. But testosterone levels are dropping and that could mean any number of consequences for the future of our species. Now you have one more science excuse to sack up and stop identifying as a metrosexual; a group of researchers concluded in 2010 that modest males endure social backlash because they are not 'macho' enough. We…