Psychology

A long-held belief in theories of human behavior is that people want to feel good and avoid feeling bad. Nothing in that principle explains why people enjoy horror movies or, additionally, why they pay for the privilege of being scared. Investigators generally use one of two theories to explain why people like horror movies: 1. It's excitement, not fear. People aren't actually afraid, they get a surge from the action and suspense. 2. Terror now brings euphoria later. Think you had a bad day at the office? Imagine being chased by zombies. It always feels better to know someone else is…

In the psychological phenomenon known as “synesthesia,” individuals’ sensory systems are a bit more intertwined than usual. Some people, for example, report seeing colors when musical notes are played. One of the most common forms is grapheme-color synesthesia, in which letters or numbers (collectively called “graphemes”) are highlighted with particular colors. Although synesthesia has been well documented, it is unknown whether these experiences, reported as vivid and realistic, are actually being perceived or if they are a byproduct of some other psychological mechanism such as memory.…

Should adolescents with depression be prescribed antidepressants, and if so, should they be given only with a psychological therapy, as advocated by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE)? A study published on bmj.com last month found that adding cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) treatment is unlikely to improve outcomes for adolescents with moderate to severe depression. These findings challenge current NICE guidelines that recommend SSRIs be prescribed only in conjunction with psychological therapies. In an…

At very young ages, children’s defiant behavior toward their mothers may not be a bad thing. This defiance may in fact reflect children’s emerging autonomy and a confidence that they can control events that are important to them. Those are the findings of a new study conducted by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Michigan. To understand how very young children react to being controlled by their parents, the researchers videotaped 119 mostly middle-class mothers as they interacted with their 14- to 27-month-old children. Mothers were asked to have their…

Taking part in group psychotherapy can help men who have erectile dysfunction to overcome their problem, and adding sildenafil to group therapy was more effective that sildenafil alone. In addition, group psychotherapy was more effective than taking sildenafil on its own, a Cochrane Systematic Review has found. Normal sexual function relies on the coordination of psychological, endocrine, vascular and neurological factor. Recent research has increased attention on the role of psychological issues. In particular, depression, low self-esteem, anxiety and other psychosocial stresses can play a…

Elizabeth Rode, Paul Rozin, and Paula Durlach measured the remembered pleasure for meals. It didn’t matter how long the meal lasted. They called this “duration neglect.” To quote the article: The existence of duration neglect implies that, with respect to memories of a meal, small portions of a highly favored dish will have roughly the same memorial effect as large portions.

Refuting the popular stereotype that females talk more than men, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have found women and men both use an average of 16,000 words each day. The psychology researchers have published their findings in “Are Women Really More Talkative Than Men"” in the July issue of Science. For more than a decade, researchers have claimed that women use far more words each day than men. One set of numbers that is commonly tossed around is that women use 20,000 words per day compared to only 7,000 for men. “These findings have been reported widely by national media…

Psychologists from the University of Exeter have identified an 'early warning signal' in the brain that helps us avoid repeating previous mistakes. Published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, their research identifies, for the first time, a mechanism in the brain that reacts in just 0.1 seconds to things that have resulted in us making errors in the past. Previous research has shown that we learn more about things for which we initially make incorrect predictions than for things for which our initial predictions are correct. The element of surprise in discovering we are wrong is…

The first pigs containing genes responsible for Alzheimer’s disease will be born in Denmark in August. This event is a landmark achivement in the effort towards finding a cure for the disease. Scientists from the universities of Copenhagen and Århus, Denmark are once again at the cutting edge of biotechnology. This time with cloned pigs that have been genetically modified so that they may function as animal models for the notorious Alzheimer’s disease. In the US alone, 5 million people suffer from this human brain disorder and globally the number is set at approx. 24 million (source:…

The first experts were shamans, an occupational category that eventually divided into doctors and priests. As the Catholic Church became more and more powerful, abuses of priestly power became more and more apparent and upsetting, leading to the Protestant Reformation. Now — half a millennium later — doctors are under much greater scrutiny. The results of that scrutiny are unfavorable — perhaps highly unfavorable. A RAND study suggested that the overall benefit of a substantial amount of health care was small, except in certain special cases such as eyeglass prescription. A large fraction of…