Psychology

Children who were consistently victimized by peers were more likely to develop psychotic symptoms in early adolescence, according to a report in the May issue of Archives of General Psychiatry. Some psychosis-like symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions are commonly experienced in childhood and even adulthood, according to background information in the article, though children with these symptoms are at increased risk of developing psychosis in adulthood. So did bullying cause the psychosis or were the kids bullied because they had psychotic symptoms? The risk of psychotic symptoms was…

Increased social stress in childhood and young adulthood has a direct link to later increased dating violence, and that young social stress is impacted by things like unemployment and economic worries, according to Murray Straus, professor of sociology and co-director of the University of New Hampshire Family Research Laboratory.  The research, based on a 32-nation study,  was presented at the conference on “War, Terrorism, and Social Stress: Impacts on Crime and the Criminal Justice System” at the Institute of Criminology, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Monday, May 4, 2009. He…

Do you like being stereotyped?   Maybe not, though everyone does it to some extent (and some have more than stereotypes than others; being a white, male,southern, Catholic, Republican is 5 way open season for ridicule by people who otherwise claim to be loving and tolerant - editor) but it's usually okay if the stereotype makes you feel better about yourself. American regard Mexicans as more outgoing, talkative, sociable and extroverted - actual Mexicans think they are less.   Turns out stereotypes are right more often that not once again - that's probably how they became…

According to a 19th century nursery rhyme, the biological distinctions between males and females are thus: What are little boys made of?What are little boys made of? Frogs and snailsAnd puppy-dogs' tails,That's what little boys are made of.What are little girls made of?What are little girls made of? Sugar and spiceAnd all things nice,That's what little girls are made of. This was pre-Mendel but we bet he agreed.    Boys seem to really get cheated on cute rhymes about gender differences.   But what came first, the rhyme or the differences?    A new…

Young children think about gender in the same way they think about species of animals. They believe, for example, that a boy's preference for football is innate, as is a girl's preference for dolls, just as cats' behavior is innately different from dogs'. That's the finding of a new study from researchers at Pacific Lutheran University and the University of Michigan. The study appears in the March/April 2009 issue of the journal Child Development. "These results have important implications for how children think about activities that are culturally associated with the other gender, for…

When I was a kid, 'toxic' assets were not assets at all; they were called 'liabilities.'    That's why asset and liability columns exist on these things called 'spreadsheets.'   But I am neither a politician nor a banker so I have poor grasp of things I know nothing about.  Much like this Timothy Geithner guy. But apparently toxic assets do exist because banks around the world are being dragged down by them.   Who would have thought that mortgage-backed securities based on a housing bubble fueled by people who couldn't afford their homes would ever be a problem?…

We've all heard it before.   Some of you may even have used it:   "I thought she was X" age.    Alcohol impairs judgment, it is said, or releases inhibitions, depending on whether you like the effects. There may be nothing to that argument, according to a new study.   Consuming alcohol did not affect how men judged the age of women, which has important legal implications if alcohol is cited as a cause of impairing judgement in cases of unlawful sex with a minor, because  men always think women look older. The research in the University of Leicester School of…

Religion and mental health seems to be a double-edged sword. Religion features in a lot of psychotic delusions, but there's also a lot of evidence linking religious belief to better mental health. There's some new research which suggests that part of the problem in teasing out the relationships is that it's not belief itself, but rather the type of god that you believe in, that matters. The data came from a 2004 US survey on religion and health, which included measures of what people thought about god, and also a variety of health measures including some standard psychiatric scales. The…

Scientists have long been interested in the interplay of emotions and identity, and some have recently focused on cultural identity. One's heritage would seem to be especially stable and impervious to change, simply because it's been passed down generation after generation and is deeply ingrained in the collective psyche. But how deeply, exactly? Psychologists Claire Ashton-James of the University of British Columbia, William W. Maddux from INSEAD, Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University, and Tanya Chartrand from Duke University decided to explore this intriguing question in the laboratory,…

If Mark Twain were alive today he might rephrase his frequently cited observation about everyone talking about the weather but not doing anything about it to say, "Everyone reads or watches weather forecasts, but many people don't understand them."  He'd do that because new research indicates that only about half the population knows what a forecast means when it predicts a 20 percent chance of rain, according to researchers at the University of Washington.  Writing in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the researchers said the confusion comes because people don't…