Psychology

Reading is good for the brain but researchers at Duke Children's Hospital say a good book can also help kids lose weight. It just has to be the right kind of book. The Duke researchers asked obese females aged 9 to 13 who were already in a comprehensive weight loss program to read an age-appropriate novel called Lake Rescue (Beacon Street Press) - a book carefully crafted with the help of pediatric experts to include specific healthy lifestyle and weight management guidance, as well as positive messages and strong role models. Six months later, the Duke researchers found the 31 girls who…

It's baseball playoff time and you know what that means; not just hot dogs and beer but also smelly men who refuse to change their socks lest they spoil their good luck. After all, they got this far with smelly socks, right? And New research published in Science seeks to explain why people sometimes find and impose order in a chaotic world through superstition, rituals and conspiratorial explanations. The research finds that a quest for structure or understanding leads people to trick themselves into seeing and believing connections that simply don't exist. It's baseball playoff time and…

A new study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry says that women who smoke are at greater risk of developing major depressive disorder. Australian researchers from the University of Melbourne and Geelng's Barwon Health assessed a group of 1043 Australian women, whose health had been monitored for a decade as part of the Geelong Osteoporosis Study. On their ten year follow up participants were given an additional test of a psychiatric assessment. Results revealed that women with depression were more likely to have been smokers than those without depression. Compared with non-…

Recently I was lounging at an on campus coffee shop, melting into a plastic chair, tired around my eyes, and grimacing at the ache in my arms that I was convinced signified the flu. Only three weeks into the semester, and already brain matter regenerated over the summer was turning into mush. I sat there trying to mentally prepare for a three hour barrage of lecture and overzealous graduate students obsessed with dead French critics. I contemplated lying in the grass and catching a snooze before class, but decide to sulk instead. I was still sulking when Robin, one of my colleagues, joined…

No matter where you are on the political spectrum, says a new Northwestern University study in the Journal of Research in Personality, you're motivated by fear. Political conservatives worry about fear of chaos and absence of order while political liberals operate out of a fear of emptiness, they say. How did they arrive at those conclusions? "Social scientists long have assumed that liberals are more rational and less fearful than conservatives, but we find that both groups view the world as a dangerous place," says McAdams. "It's just that their fears emerge differently. Social…

Have a Facebook account? Laura Buffardi, doctoral student in psychology, and associate professor W. Keith Campbell from the University of Georgia says it may tell them you are a narcissist. Narcissism is not just attention-seeking or wanting to be liked. Clearly everyone who signs up for a social media site wants to interact with others. It is more severe and characterized by an inability to form healthy, long-term relationships. The tremendous growth of social networking sites (Facebook now has 100 million users, for example) has led psychologists to explore how personality traits are…

Young girls from poor neighborhoods with conduct issues are more likely to initiate sex at a young age, according to a new study by researchers from the Université de Montréal, the University of New Brunswick and Tufts University, published in the journal Child Development. The study found that troubled girls living in poor neighborhoods were more likely to engage in sexual intercourse in early adolescence and also to be doing so with older boys. These teen girls from poor neighborhoods with a history of conduct problems were more likely to associate with deviant peers and to be initiated…

Menus and advertising affect our emotions, and if we understand those emotions, we make better food choices, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. Authors Blair Kidwell, David M. Hardesty, and Terry L. Childers (all University of Kentucky) examined the "emotional intelligence" of consumers, including obese people. They found that people who made the healthiest choices had high correlations between their emotional intelligence and confidence in their emotional intelligence—what the authors call "emotional calibration." "When perusing a restaurant menu, many consumers…

Almost every bad thing a teenager does gets attributed to the 'crowd' they hang out with - few parents confess to having the troublemaker kid. Now an RTI International researcher says that goes for weight gain in kids too. It isn't your fault for letting them eat junk food; it's their friends, for also being overweight. The study, published in the September issue of Journal of Health Economics says that friends' weight is correlated with an adolescent’s own weight even after considering demographics, smoking status, birth weight, and household characteristics such as parental obesity.…

Yes, you read that right - the very people you look to for comfort, for learning, for a shoulder to cry on, could lead you down the path of annihilation. You don't have to be a lemming zombie to take up terrorism after all! A New Kind of Networking Liverpool University's Center (or Centre, if you live across the pond) for Investigative Psychology led a project that constructed psychological "profiles" to describe how Jihadists were led into their violence, according to a BBC article. A team interviewed 49 people convicted of bombing and killings using the "repertory grid" technique, a "method…