Psychology

‘Truthiness,’ according to fount-of-all-important-wisdom and television host Stephen Colbert, represents the human preference to follow our intuition despite the presence of actual facts or evidence - and the more ambiguous an answer to a question, the more likely an individual will believe it is truthful. Psychologists Rick Dale of the University of Memphis, Michael Spivey of Cornell University and the late Chris McKinstry affirmed this when they asked college students questions that ranged in levels of vagueness and tracked their corresponding arm movements to clicking ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on a…

Some elections are tougher than others. If you like John Edwards, who would you reject if he drops out, Clinton or Obama? How we decide against candidates can tell us valuable things about how people make choices. A new study from the February issue of the Journal of Consumer Research reveals that sometimes asking people to reject an option – rather than choose an option – makes it easier for consumers to decide among options that they don’t particularly like. “If both the alternatives are attractive, then both provide reasons to choose, and therefore are compatible with the choose task,”…

About 121 million people world-wide are believed to suffer from depression. This can be seen in disturbed appetite, sleep patterns and overall functioning as well as leading to low self-esteem and feelings of worthlessness and guilt. It can lead to suicide and is associated with 1 million deaths a year. Drugs and psychotherapy are common treatments, but a group of Cochrane Researchers set out to see whether there was evidence that music therapy could deliver benefits. “It is important to note that at the moment there are only a small number of relatively low quality studies in this area, and…

Friendships are an important part of developing social skills and cultural confidence but when antisocial teenagers interacted closely with each other and spent their time discussing such things as substance abuse or breaking the law, they tended to later engage in problem behavior, according to University of Oregon researchers. For their study, the researchers videotaped 16- and 17-year-olds as they interacted with close friends. The UO team was seeking to find mechanisms behind the idea that antisocial behavior is predictable based on the behavior of peers. Subjects were divided into three…

It's a marketing expert's dream; if you want people to like your product more, charge a higher price. Hilke Plassmann, et al, writing in PNAS, had test subjects undergo functional MRIs while they sipped wine. They were given 5 wines at 5 different prices. Except there were only 3 wines. 2 were identical and just had different prices. People enjoyed the $90 wine more than they did when told the price was $10. Likewise a $5 wine was better when told it cost $45. This was not a simple survey where they checked a box, the MRI results showed the subjects actually enjoyed the wine more when it…

Psychotherapies such as cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) are under-regulated in the UK and should be subject to the same standards of evidence as drugs, assert two experts in psychological medicine writing in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. They say the largely unrecognized potential for serious adverse effects resulting from talking therapies means rules should be tightened, particularly in light of the UK Government’s recent £150m investment in psychotherapy services for depression and anxiety, which will result in many more therapists practising in the UK. “While welcoming the…

As Americans increasingly seek a “quick fix” to physical and mental ailments, psychoanalysts can be caught in the crossfire of a debate about the potential benefits and drawbacks of including medication in their treatment plans. A panel discussion entitled “The Uses of Medications in Psychoanalysis: What We Know; What is Uncertain,” will be led by internationally renowned psychoanalyst Glen O. Gabbard, M.D., at the American Psychoanalytic Association’s 2008 Winter Meeting on Friday, January 18, 2008, from 2-5 p.m. at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. Taking the position for a cautious…

Even a few days into New Year’s resolutions to exercise more, people are finding reasons to skip workouts even though the benefits of a healthy lifestyle are well-known: In addition to weight loss, exercise has been linked to reducing symptoms of depression and also to lower risk of heart disease. If the temptation to sit on the couch and watch TV instead of going for a short jog is just too great you’re not alone, but preferring to be sedentary is not an innate human trait. Most children are quite active and people generally stay active all the way through high school but many stop being…

Oxytocin, a hormone involved in child-birth and breast-feeding, helps people recognize familiar faces, according to new research in the January 7 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. Study participants who had one dose of an oxytocin nasal spray showed improved recognition memory for faces, but not for inanimate objects. "This is the first paper showing that a single dose of oxytocin specifically improves recognition memory for social, but not for nonsocial, stimuli," said Ernst Fehr, PhD, an economist at the University of Zurich who has studied oxytocin's effect on trust and is unaffiliated…

Many parents have said yes. David Healy, a Scottish psychiatrist, prompted by those stories, did a small experiment in which undepressed persons took anti-depressants. About 10% of them started having suicidal thoughts. Drug companies and the University of Toronto (where Healy had been offered a job) reacted very badly to this information, as Healy describes in Let Them Eat Prozac. An article in the latest issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry by a biostatistician named David Leon on the FDA oversight panel describes why he voted to extend a warning about this from children ( 18 years…