Psychology

Okay, we all knew that cats manipulate women more than men but now science has confirmed it.   An article in Behavioural Processes says cats gravitate toward women and it isn't just because they are easier to bilk food from.  No, cats are even more devious than we previously believed. You probably want to slap people who tell you they have pets when you ask if they have children - and, I confess, I have gotten dirty looks when people have asked me if I have pets and I tell them I instead have children, which are 'just like' pets - but the social bond that crazy cat lady has…

Some of the most naturally appealing stories in the autism world (and our wider world) are those stories that reinforce the myth of the self-made man (a concept I coincidentally taught this week in American Literature). We like movies like Rudy, All the Right Moves, and the Mighty Ducks series because they feed the myth, the feel-good notion that no matter how far behind one is, how disadvantaged, that plucky teamwork, determined effort, and good fortune will be enough to overcome all obstacles, make the team, win the game, and the woman (or man), and get out of the miserable…

Think all Republicans are anti-science or religious people are stupid?  You may look for data to rationalize your bias but a new study in Psychological Science says it may just be your own low self-esteem; when people are feeling badly about themselves, they're more likely to show bias against people who are different from them.  Jeffrey Sherman of the University of California, Davis, who wrote the study with Thomas Allen, used the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a task designed to assess people's automatic reactions to words and/or images, to investigate this claim. In…

—A Critical Look at Recent Studies of Creativity and Insight— "All this fires in my soul, and—provided I am not disturbed—my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and in the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance..." —Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart This is how Mozart described his subjective cognitive experience at his time of greatest productivity. We may recognize it as the "Ah ha!" moment—the point at which everything rapidly, and often suddenly, comes together to…

When you were younger, you may have wondered why gas had odd prices like $1.09.9 and your parents likely told you it's because $1.09.9 looks cheaper than $1.10.   Stores love prices that end in $.99 for that reason. But numbers work the other way as well - a larger number looks better, even if its value is equivalent to a smaller number scaled differently.   Writing in Journal of Consumer Research, Mario Pandelaere and Christophe Lembregts of Ghent University,  along with Barbara Briers of Tilburg University,  note that higher numbers seem to represent bigger…

I just got back from a vacation in Hawaii and for the entire time, I had laryngitis, or some sort of thing that made me unable to talk and my throat sore. So I could not speak. I tell you, I have never been so attractive to my wife, even though she married me because I am brilliant.   My lack of communication made her unsure if I had concerns about us and the relationship, it seems, along with an extra dose of 'cold' and 'distant'.  In reality she could not see me pointing wildly to the coffee maker and then my throat from where I was bedridden. But it turns out there may be…

In the 'gay sex is bad unless it's women' cultural milieu, a survey by a University of Texas at Austin psychologist determined that men are more than twice as likely to continue dating a girlfriend who has cheated on them with another woman than if she cheated with another man. The survey used 700 college students so calibrate accordingly - men may not like their girlfriends sleeping with another guy but a girlfriend sleeping with another girl is a porn movie. But don't start yelling about young men.  While women were more likely to break off the relationship following both kinds of…

What are the prices we pay for following unsubstantiated treatments and bogus therapies? Sometimes, the costs are tragically high. Facilitated communication is unequivocally one of those bogus remedies that promises far more than it can deliver and can destroy lives in the process, lives like those of Julian and Thal Wendrow, whose 14-year-old daughter accused her father of molesting her for years and her mother of standing by while it happened.  Except it turns out that this young woman, severely autistic and nonverbal did no such thing; the aide at her school who…

How can a man who writes an article noting the many positive strides made in eliminating gender discrimination be sexist?    Well, he isn't, but men who go out of their way to help women can be considered sexist, thought it is a more benevolent sexism than the real kind. New research from the University of Granada warns about the negative effects of "benevolent sexism", a term used for apparently positive ideas and attitudes of men towards women, which are based on the assumption that men must take care of and sacrifice themselves for women. Their research uses an odd example, like…

If you are concerned your child spends too much time playing video games, you're not alone.  And you may be right in your worry.   A new study says video game "addiction" is a global problem and that greater amounts of gaming, lower social competence and greater impulsivity were risk factors for becoming pathological gamers. A two-year longitudinal study of 3,034 third through eighth grade students in Singapore found approximately 9% of gamers to be pathological players according to standards similar to those established by the American Psychiatric Association for diagnosing…