Psychology

In 2008, Sam Harris posted an online survey seeking the opinions of Christians and atheists on a wide variety of topics. The real aim was to design the survey for their subsequent laboratory research with properly phrased questions that would either polarize the two camps or show common ground. However, the raw data does show a few interesting things. The section on religious beliefs has fairly predictable differences between atheists and Christians and merely illustrates that some of the questions are better phrased than others. To get the best results in the subsequent fMRI experiment…

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland have found that the reward centers in the human brain respond more strongly when a poor person receives a financial reward than when a rich person does. This activity pattern holds true even if the brain being looked at is in the rich person's head, rather than the poor person's. The significance? The human brain is a big believer in equality, the scientists say. Their results are detailed in a new study appearing in Nature. It's long been known that we humans don't like inequality,…

According to a new study in Social Psychology Quarterly, the higher your IQ the more likely you are to be a liberal and an atheist. The author says this is because more intelligent people exhibit social values and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history--mainly, liberalism and atheism. The study advances a new theory to explain why people form particular preferences and values. The theory suggests that more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not…

Patients diagnosed with clinical depression may respond better to medical treatment as a result of belief in a personal God, say researchers at Rush University Medical Center writing in the Journal of Clinical Psychology. 136 adults diagnosed with major depression or bipolar depression at inpatient and outpatient psychiatric care facilities in Chicago participated in the study. The patients were surveyed shortly after admission for treatment and eight weeks later, using the Beck Depression Inventory, the Beck Hopelessness Scale, and the Religious Well-Being Scale – all standard instruments…

What makes Hollywood blockbusters? Scientists writing in Psychological Science may have the answer. Using the sophisticated tools of modern perception research to deconstruct 70 years of film, shot by shot, the Cornell researchers say that successful movies follow a particular mathematical pattern. The team of psychologists measured the duration of every shot in every scene of 150 of the most popular films released from 1935 to 2005. The films represented five major genres—action, adventure, animation, comedy and drama. Using a complex mathematical formula, they translated these sequences of…

New research from the University of California, Berkeley, suggest that a biphasic sleep schedule, sleeping several times a day, not only refreshes the mind, but can also make us smarter. Conversely, the more hours we spend awake, the more sluggish our minds become, according to the findings. The results support previous data from the same research team that pulling an all-nighter – a common practice at college during midterms and finals –- decreases the ability to cram in new facts by nearly 40 percent, due to a shutdown of brain regions during sleep deprivation.  The results were…

If the folks behind the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) were crafty, they would have latched on to the upcoming movie, "The Crazies," for some free publicity.1 Although that's probably not quite the image they want to convey, so maybe it was a shrewd non-move after all. Well played, American Psychiatric Association. For those not in the know, the DSM is the "Bible" for physicians, researchers and insurance companies. The manual "contains descriptions, symptoms and other criteria for diagnosing mental disorders," according to the APA. "These criteria for diagnosis…

My recent love of watching TV online while attempting to get some of my more mindless tasks done led me to discover a "48 Hours: Mystery" episode called "American Girl: Italian Murder" on Amanda Knox, the American study abroad student who was tried and convicted for the murder of Meredith Kercher. I honestly knew only the basics of the case - that it was a supposed love triangle and that Knox was found guilty and a few more details - but this show shed some interesting (and bizarrely fascinating) light on some of the more questionable aspects of Knox's trial. (If you want to know more,…

LONDON, February 8 /PRNewswire/ -- It's a fact that men have sex on the brain more than women. Yet, encouraging men and women to think about sex in a different way is important for the public's health and wellbeing according to the Sexual Advice Association*. Launching its Thinking About Sex Day (TASD), an awareness campaign, on Valentine's Day, the Sexual Advice Association takes its commitment to raise awareness of physical and psychological issues around sexual activity to new heights.  Three actors, Alistair McGowan, Miranda Richardson and Ronni Ancona support TASD with their…

 Religion is a hotly debated topic both among scholars and the general public, and a new paper authored by researchers from the University of Helsinki and Harvard University is only likely to up the level controversy surrounding the subject. Published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, the study suggests that intuitive judgments of right and wrong seem to operate independently of explicit religious commitments. "Some scholars claim that religion evolved as an adaptation to solve the problem of cooperation among genetically unrelated individuals, while others propose that religion emerged…