Psychology

Cyberbullies don't feel like they are the same as physical bullies.  Some new research agrees, and for that reason anti-bullying campaigns need to be optimized for the Internet. Traditional bullying, the 'schoolyard' kind of bullying, is often associated with three main characteristics: a power differential between bully and victim, proactive targeting of a victim and ongoing aggression. The Internet is the great equalizer. Traditional power differentials, like size and popularity, don't apply as commonly in cyberbullying and the lines between victim and aggressor are more blurred; it is…

Self-esteem programs have worked.  Of 3,500 college applicants, more than a third couldn't report their weight accurately. The heavier they were, the less accurate their estimates. Overweight and obese men were even more likely to underestimate their weight than overweight and obese women. The results were part of the Up Amigos project, a collaboration between collaborators at the University of Illinois and the Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potos in Mexico. In physical exams, the height, weight, and body mass index (BMI) of 3,622 18- to 20-year-old applicants to the Mexican university…

What the public and even experts suspected is now supported by representative data collected by researchers at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) and University of Basel: ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, has been over-diagnosed. New studies show that child and adolescent psychotherapists and psychiatrists have tended to give a diagnosis based on heuristics and unclear rules of thumb rather than adhering to recognized diagnostic criteria. Boys in particular are substantially more often misdiagnosed compared to girls.  The researchers surveyed altogether 1,000 child and…

Atheists like to think they are more rational people but, as death approaches, they secretly play the irrational odds, according to new work which suggests that when even non-religious people think about their own death and consciously still seem to be more skeptical about religion, they unconsciously grow more receptive to religious belief.  Or at least less likely to deny it. The work from the Department of Psychology at the University of Otago in New Zealand, predictably also found that when religious people think about death, their religious beliefs appear to strengthen at both…

Wait, a study claims drinking alcohol makes you less likely to throw cultural caution to the wind and spend stupidly? Does. Not. Compute. Unless it's social psychology, but even then no one is believing it unless they are one of the people writing about how screwed up Republicans are, i.e., need some new framework for the confirmation bias of their audience.  Chris Mooney, writing in Rolling Stone, is in a tough spot.  He historically has wanted to talk about actual science, which should make it hard for him not to smirk at a social psychology 'study' conducted outside a bar, but he…

Yesterday, I wrote a post about how facebook is a rapid, easy way to spread misinformation and pseudoscience, and the difficulties in figuring out how to respond to pseudoscience when you see it. I wasn't specific about what triggered it, but I reached out to a few who shared the link and provided additional information, I placed a comment where I was invited to do so, and I flooded my facebook wall with information about facilitated communication. I didn't inundate other people's walls or posts with this information, but I tried in my own drown-my-own-wall-in-information way to…

We engage in wishful thinking all the time. Infomercials continue to exist because people continue to buy the products. Diet pills fly off the shelves because we want an easy fix. The HCG diet is popular because, of course, the weight falls off when you restrict your calories to 500 a day--drops be damned. The problem with this tendency to accept what we hear or read unquestioningly is a huge one, and one that psychologists have long been aware of. In 1990, Daniel Gilbert, Douglas Krull, and Patrick Malone showed that people "easily accept all information before it is assessed, and…

After marriage your well-being dips and after divorce it rises; after childbirth, relationship satisfaction stays permanently below its pre-birth level -– so says a meta-analysis of 2,159 studies, published this week in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Sound dire? It is. But keep reading – the reasons for these dips and rises give us married-with-children guys hope. “It turns out that in the period before marriage, well-being goes way up,” says Maike Luhmann, PhD, postdoctoral researcher in psychology in the Cacioppo Lab at the University of Chicago, and lead author of the…

As a society, we Westerners exalt individualism and self-reliance, and yet our biology moves us in other directions. Humans evolved as social animals, and we posses a number of behaviors that motivate us towards group conformity. The feeling of wanting friends, of desiring a peer group, and of needing to feel like we are valuable members of that group is something we all can directly relate to, and we usually experience those feelings as a positive thing. Yet there is a bit of a dark side to our social nature that we might not notice, particularly because so much of its action goes on…

A randomized controlled trial showed that fear of flying can be cured independently of drug condition after 4 sessions of virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET). The study introduced a new treatment for fear of flying. Research suggests that yohimbine hydrochloride (YOH), a noradrenaline agonist, can facilitate fear extinction. It is thought that the mechanism of enhanced emotional memory is stimulated through elevated noradrenaline levels.  The randomized placebo-controlled trial examined the potential exposure-enhancing effects of YOH in a clinical sample of participants meeting DSM-…