Psychology

There are currently no objective clinical laboratory blood tests for mood disorders. The current reliance on patient self-report of symptom severity and on the clinicians’ impression is a rate limiting step in effective treatment and new drug development. Investigators from Indiana propose, and provide proof of principle for, an approach to help identify blood biomarkers for mood state. They measured whole-genome gene expression differences in blood samples from subjects with bipolar disorder that had low mood vs. those that had high mood at the time of the blood draw, and separately, changes…

Scientists at UCL (University College London) have found the link between what we expect to see, and what our brain tells us we actually saw. The study, published in this week’s PLoS Journal of Computational Biology, reveals that the context surrounding what we see is all important – sometimes overriding the evidence gathered by our eyes and even causing us to imagine things which aren’t really there. The paper reveals that a vague background context is more influential and helps us to fill in more blanks than a bright, well-defined context. This may explain why we are prone to ‘see’…

When it comes to romantic attraction men primarily are motivated by good looks and women by earning power. At least that’s what men and women have been saying for a long time. Based on research that dates back several decades, the widely accepted notion permeates popular culture today. But those sex differences didn’t hold up in a new in-depth study of romantic attraction undertaken by two Northwestern University psychologists. In short, the data suggest that whether you’re a man or a woman, being attractive is just as good for your romantic prospects and, to a lesser extent, so is being a…

Singles’ bars, classified personals and dating websites are a reflection, not only of the common human desire to find a mate, but of the sense of scarcity that seems to surround the hunt. Many people participate in dating activities in the hopes of finding that special someone, yet feel as though it is an impossible task. However, thanks to an international team of psychologists, the solution may be closer than we think — within ourselves, to be exact. Xianchi Dai, Klaus Wertenbroch and Miguel Brendl from INSEAD, the international business school with campuses in France and Singapore, have…

I asked a friend of mine why she was a good boss. “I was nurturing,” she said. A big study of managers reached essentially the same conclusion: Good managers don’t try to make employees fit a pre-established box, the manager’s preconception about how to do the job. A good manager tries to encourage, to bring out, whatever strengths the employee already has. This wasn’t a philosophy or value judgment, it was what the data showed. The “good” managers were defined as the more productive ones — something like that. (My post about this.) The reason for the study, as Veblen might say, was the need…

Physical attractiveness is important in choosing whom to date. Good looking people are not only popular targets for romantic pursuits, they themselves also tend to flock together with more attractive others. Does this mean then that more attractive versus less attractive people wear a different pair of lens when evaluating others’ attractiveness? Columbia University marketing professor, Leonard Lee, and colleagues, George Loewenstein (Carnegie Mellon University), Dan Ariely (MIT) and James Hong and Jim Young (HOTorNOT.com), decided to test this theory in the realm of an online dating site.…

How you are feeling has an impact on your routine economic transactions, whether you’re aware of this effect or not. In a new study that links contemporary science with the classic philosophy of William James, a research team finds that people feeling sad and self-focused spend more money to acquire the same commodities than those in a neutral emotional state. The team’s paper, “Misery is not Miserly: Sad and Self-Focused Individuals Spend More,” will be published in the June 2008 edition of Psychological Science and will be presented at the Society for Social and Personality Psychology’s…

There are two mistakes you can make when you read a scientific paper: You can believe it (a) too much or (b) too little. The possibility of believing something too little does not occur to most professional scientists, at least if you judge them by their public statements, which are full of cautions against too much belief and literally never against too little belief. Never. If I’m wrong — if you have ever seen a scientist warn against too little belief — please let me know. Yet too little belief is just as costly as too much. It’s a stunning imbalance which I have never seen pointed out.…

Think it's laws or governments that keep people honest? Not according to a new study in Psychological Science. Two psychologists examined the psychological impact of genetic determinism, free will, and ethical behavior and found that people who felt like they were in control of their destiny acted more ethically than people who felt like they were not. It is well established that changing people’s sense of responsibility can change their behavior. But what would happen if people came to believe that their behavior was the inevitable product of a causal chain beyond their control – a…

You’re more likely to give things a favorable evaluation when you’re happy and a negative evaluation when you’re sad. But how does mood influence your choices among items? A new study in the February issue of the Journal of Consumer Research people finds that consumers in a good mood are more likely than unhappy consumers to choose the first item they see, especially if all the choices are more or less the same. “It is surprising that little research has been done to examine how affect influences comparisons and choices,” say Cheng Qiu (University of Hong Kong) and Catherine W. M. Yeung (…