Psychology

Your ears enjoy music but your heart may also benefit, according to a new study presented at the American College of Cardiology's Annual Scientific Session. Patients with early post-infarction angina, episodes of chest pain after a heart attack, reported significantly lower levels of anxiety and pain if they listened to music for 30 minutes a day. While that's hard to pin down biologically, 700,000 people survive a heart attack just in the U.S. each year and roughly 1 in 9 heart attack survivors experience subsequent episodes of chest pain and anxiety within the first 48 hours…

Letting kids use a cell phone at dinner seems to be the height of rudeness, symbolic of participation trophy culture and a desire to be best friends with a child rather than a parent, but a new study argues it may be better for health. If it reduces calorie intake. It's no secret the developed world has an obesity problem, and it is no secret that cell phones are now ubiquitous, but while some try to create a causal link between them, the new paper say phones can be preventative.  Being distracted by technology during mealtimes may decrease the amount of food a person eats, nutrition…

The Judge Rotenberg Educational Center (JRC) in Canton, Massachusetts, has 45 people who've been exposed to electrical shocks through electrodes attached to their skin, under the guise of conditioning individuals to stop engaging in self-injurious or aggressive behavior. They have names such as Whistle Stop, SIBIS, GED, GED-3A 2, and GED-4 2. Some 35 years ago, they were approved as medical devices. In a rare move, the U.S. FDA is banning these electrical stimulation devices (ESDs) because they present an unreasonable and substantial risk of illness or injury that cannot be corrected or…

Edgar Allan Poe, The author, poet, editor, and literary critic, died in 1849 at age 40 in Maryland. He was chronically depressed, he had even tried to commit suicide using laudanum a year before his death. But when he went to the hospital for the last time, having been found delirious and wearing a stranger's clothes, he hadn't been committing suicide, according to a heuristic look at his writing. Using computerized language analysis, they analyzed 309 of Poe's personal letters, 49 poems, and 63 short stories and investigated whether a pattern of linguistic cues consistent with depression and…

If you were long concerned about Russians exploiting American media for their gain, you turned out to be right. But before they were meddling in American elections, they were meddling in American science. The Obama administration Director of National Intelligence warned that Russians were using offshore "donor advised" funds to launder dark money anonymous donations to activists opposing natural gas - Russia's top export. And they did the same thing with food, their second largest export. A recent analysis shows that the largest media purveyors of anti-science beliefs about biology are just…

A new study shows there is a reason USA Today is the most popular newspaper in America - they won't specify "laparoscopy" when "minimally invasive surgery" gets the point across to more people. While America leads the world in adult science literacy, that is still with under 30 percent of the population. To really reach the public, we need to use language that won't be a turn-off. Jargon may make us feel smarter, but it makes people who lack the vocabulary feel dumber, and that is a violation of smart journalism. A new study found that people exposed to jargon when reading about subjects…

Today, women will celebrate Galentine’s Day, a holiday trumpeting the joys of female friendships. The holiday can trace its origins to a 2010 episode of “Parks and Rec,” in which the main character, Leslie Knope, decides that the day before Valentine’s Day should be an opportunity to celebrate the platonic love among women, ideally with booze and breakfast food. In the years since the episode aired, the fictional holiday has caught on in the real world. But why hasn’t there been a male equivalent? Image: miniwide/Shutterstock.com If anything, it seems that men should crave such a holiday…

Do you listen to experts when it comes to food? If so, you are in the rarity. Most mimic what their friends do, according to recent survey results. Study participants ate an extra fifth of a portion of fruit and vegetables for every portion they thought their social media peers ate - and they consumed an extra portion of snack foods and sugary drinks for every three portions they believed their online social circles did. So our friends determine our eating behavior? Or do we tend to be friends with people who have our lifestyles? And what might that mean for government panels that want…

An experiment before the 2016 Trump-Clinton debate in metropolitan New York City showed that it was possible to have people be less polarized.  They showed questionnaire responses where respondents were actually more moderate than their real responses, and then people justified their moderation. Posing as political researchers, a research team from McGill and Lund Universities approached 136 voters at the first Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton presidential debate, on Long Island, and asked them to compare Trump and Clinton on various leadership traits (such as courage, vision, and…

If you have never heard of the Journal of International Psychology, you are not alone. Bizarre social psychology claims hit their apex in the early 2000s but began to descend into self-parody after that, with claims such as your personality type determines what kind of car grill you buy, liberals are more intelligent than conservatives, and that humans evolved to like black women less. (1) After exploiting the New York Times on too many occasions to count (their defense of Reiki as cancer cure, astrology, acupuncture, and all other things Goop is not new), social psychologists were…