Psychology

I'm sure for many of us, our family stories are rich, varied, and often conflicting. We share our pasts with our children often without reflection of what they do not know and are surprised when there are gaps in what they know about us, about our lives as a family. I know that it's often surprising to me personally to realize that there are vast stretches of years that I feel I recall well that my bright boy has no recollection of, even though he was there. Just yesterday, I had a reminder that although we've spent more than two decades together that there are experience we did indeed share…

A man that fancies women with blond hair may announce such almost anywhere. Established scientists frequently work thinly veiled references to the proverbial sexiness of blondes into their talks, to loosen them up, to render the seminar or lecture personal and memorable. On the other hand, I have never seen anybody but Quentin Tarantino put their foot fetish into their work; certainly I do not know of any politician or scientist “putting their or others’ feet in their mouth” this way. Being into blondes is accepted – it makes you “one of the blokes”, a good pal. If you are into high heels…

Mental health clinicians need a new way classify personality disorders.  A more scientific and practical method of categorizing disorders could improve treatment, says a new analysis. The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) scheduled to come out in 2013, could be a complete train wreck due to inclusion of virtually every personality type as some spectrum of disorder.  What is needed is some sanity because the DSM is considered "The Bible" of the U.S. mental health industry and is used by insurance companies as the basis for treatment…

Have you heard about HOTorNOT.com? It's perhaps the most superficial of all superficial dating site, allowing members to vote on other members' attractiveness and promoting dating decisions based almost solely on attractiveness scores. (You carry your own attractiveness score with you and how hot you are becomes part of your profile.) Researchers in the science of beauty and human attraction call this a data paradise. Here are some of the things researchers have been able to discover using HOTorNOT.com's magical numbers: • Men are 240% more likely to accept a date offer than women. • With…

A new study says supplemental brief dynamic therapy in the treatment of patients with obsessive compulsive-disorder with concurrent major depressive disorder who are receiving effective medication has no significant clinical effect on obsessive and depressive symptoms. When obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a recurring topic is whether psychoanalysis or related brief psychotherapies help and answering that was the goal a study performed by researchers of the University of Torino in the current issue of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics. Until now no studies have investigated the benefits of…

A new study published says that people who think about time become more social and at least plan to spend more time with the people in their lives, while people who think about money fill their schedules with work.  Cassie Mogilner of the University of Pennsylvania designed an online experiment where adults from all over the United Statesbconcentrated on money or time.  The volunteers were asked to unscramble a series of sentences; some participants were presented with sentences containing words related to time (e.g., "clock" and "day"), whereas others' sentences contained words…

Gamblers behave differently during game time and lulls in action such as half-time.   A computer-modeled comparison of their actions says there are corollaries between the actions of gamblers at half-time and people in the stock market. But how do behaviors change when no action is happening?   Unlike the stock market, football gamblers are, more often than not, free of news about the game during half-time. Gamblers are simply left to their own devices which, the researchers suggest, is akin to identifying the complex interactions of stock market traders. The researchers from…

Okay, in the past two days we've seen that our memories are malleable. We can easily be made to misremember, and easily be made to adopt memories of things that never happened. But what actually goes on in our brains as we code bad information? Can we see misinformation taking hold? Researchers Yoko Okado and Craig Stark can. They showed subjects slides (correct information), and then showed them another set of slides with details changed (incorrect information). Our hippocampus drives memory. Okado and Stark watched subjects' hippocampuses as subjects evaluated the two slides and sure…

Yesterday I posted about how Elizabeth Loftus is able to Jedi mind trick our interpretations of memories, but what about creating entirely new memories? Oh yeah, baby. Actually, making a false memory is pretty easy. Loftus describes a father convincing his daughter she’d gotten lost in a mall when she was five years old. At first, the daughter denied any memory of the event, but as the father provided more fake details—“Don’t you remember that I told you we would meet at the Tug Boat”—the daughter began to “remember” and even provide details of her own. Eventually when her father said “I…

Like many of history's greatest minds, narcissists spend a great deal of time deep in thought - but for narcissists it is thought about themselves. Neuroscientists recently found a correlation between high scores on the Machiavellian Egocentricity subscale - a measure of narcissism - and activity during rest in the posteromedial cortex, a brain region that previous studies have associated with thoughts about the self.  The study also found a correlation between poor decision-making and brain activity during rest in the medial prefrontal cortex. Impulsive action without regard for…