Psychology

Why do we get intense desires to eat certain foods? A pair of psychologists from Flinders University, Australia, say they may know. The team authored a review of the literature on food cravings and found that mental imagery may be a key component of food cravings — when people crave a specific food, they have vivid images of that food. The review was published in Current Directions in Psychological Science. Results of one study, for example, showed that the strength of participants' cravings was linked to how vividly they imagined the food. Mental imagery (imagining food or anything else)…

Newborns learn during sleep, say the authors of a new study in the Proceedings in The National Academy of Sciences. The findings reveal valuable information about how newborns are able to learn so quickly from their environment, researchers say. The study could also lead to identifying those at risk for developmental disorders such as autism and dyslexia. "We found a basic form of learning in sleeping newborns, a type of learning that may not be seen in sleeping adults," said Dana Byrd, a research affiliate in psychology at the University of Florida. Researchers tested the learning abilities…

A RAND corporation study examining the long-term economic consequences of childhood psychological disorders suggests the conditions diminish people's ability to work and earn as adults, costing $2.1 trillion over the lifetimes of all affected Americans. The findings, published in Social Science&Medicine, show that people who suffer from childhood conditions such as depression and substance abuse are less likely to be married, attain less education and see their income reduced by about 20 percent over their lifetimes. "This study shows childhood psychological disorders can cause…

A woman's touch tends to make us feel secure and increases our risk tolerance as a result, according to a new study in Psychological science. The authors believe this soothing effect originates during infancy, when children have a lot of physical contact with their mothers. During the study, if a female experimenter patted a participant on the back, they'd risk more money on an investment or gamble than if she just talked to them, or if a man did the patting. When we are infants, we receive a lot of touch from our mothers. This creates a sense of attachment, which makes a baby feel secure.…

The admittedly small and self-selected group of inmates that I provide psychotherapy for on a weekly basis at our local county jail has inspired my curiosity about the mental and emotional health of general inmate populations throughout the United States.  Of special interest are persistent reports about growing numbers of inmates coupled with correctional facility overcrowding.  In part these swelling numbers are no doubt due to high recidivism rates, and this “revolving door” phenomenon has in recent years generated interest among researchers and officials partly in response to…

For decades, the consensus among psychologists was that young children adopt an "anthropocentric" stance, favoring humans over non-human animals, when they begin reasoning about the biological world. But a new study published in Cognitive Development reveals that this style of human-centered reasoning is not universal.  The study included children growing up in an urban setting (Chicago) as well as children from rural Wisconsin, who have more extensive direct contact with the natural world. To examine the influence of culture, the rural community included European-American and Native…

Washing your hands can cleanse you of past immoral behavior, it can also eliminate traces of buyer's remorse by reducing the need to justify past decisions, say psychologist writing in Science. "It's not just that washing your hands contributes to moral cleanliness as well as physical cleanliness, as seen in earlier research" said U-M psychologists Spike W. S.. "Our studies show that washing also reduces the influence of past behaviors and decisions that have no moral implications whatsoever." Researchers asked undergraduate students to browse through 30 CD covers as part of an alleged…

Teenage girls are more willing than boys to communicate with their parents when it comes to talking about most dating issues, and both sexes generally prefer to talk to their mothers, according to a new study in the Journal of Adolescence. The new study also found, however, that girls and boys are equally close-mouthed about issues involving sex and what they do with their dates while unsupervised. And in this case, teens were no more eager to talk to their mothers than they were their fathers. Results showed that the amount of information parents hear from their teenagers about dating depend…

Pregnant mothers who smoke during pregnancy may be putting their children at risk psychiatric problems in childhood and young adulthood, according to a new study. Finnish researchers found that adolescents who had been exposed to prenatal smoking were at increased risk for use of all psychiatric drugs especially those uses to treat depression, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and addiction compared to non-exposed youths. The study will be presented tomorrow at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The team collected…

A new study of Australian preschoolers and Kalahari Bushman children suggests that overimitation, in which a child copies everything an adult shows them, appears to be a universal human activity, rather than something the children of western middle-class parents pick up. The research, published in Psychological Science, may help shed light on how humans develop and transmit culture. For the experiments, the children were shown how to open a box – but in a complicated way, with impractical actions thrown in. For example, the adult would drag a stick across a box, then use a stick to open the…