Psychology

A University of Leicester researcher has proved that men are as interested in gossip as women-and that women are more interested in gossip about other women. The postgraduate research project by Dr. Charlotte De Backer, of the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Leicester, also found: in gossip about girls, it was whether someone was pretty or not that was the most important feature – for boys and girls alike in gossip about boys it was his wealth status that was the cue most picked up upon –by both men and women people already in relationships were just as keen as…

To learn a language is to learn a set of all-purpose rules that can be used in an infinite number of ways. A new study shows that by the age of seven months, human infants are on the lookout for abstract rules – and that they know the best place to look for such abstractions is in human speech. In a series of experiments appearing in the May issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Gary Marcus and co-authors Keith Fernandes and Scott Johnson at New York University exposed infants to algebraically structured sequences that consisted of either…

Why does foreign money often feel like play money to travelers" Just in time for summer vacation season, an important new study from the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research examines why spending patterns abroad deviate so much from what we spend at home. Klaus Wertenbroch (INSEAD, France), Dilip Soman (University of Toronto), and Amitava Chattopadhyay (INSEAD, Singapore) argue that problems arise from a fundamental mistake in how people perceive the value of currency, known as money illusion. The numerical value printed on a bill affects our perceptions of its real purchasing…

It’s totally understandable to feel ambivalent when presented with both positive and negative evidence. However, people often feel ambivalent even when all the news is good or bad, anticipating conflict before it arises. The first empirical demonstration of this reaction appears in new study from the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. “Many people recognize that there are often two sides to every story and that nothing is perfect (or completely worthless),” explains Joseph R. Priester (University of Southern California), Richard E. Petty (Ohio State University) and Kiwan Park (…

The majority of doctors in North Carolina do not probe for signs of postpartum depression in new mothers, according to a survey conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Of the 228 physicians responding to the survey who said they had seen women for postpartum visits in the previous three months, 79 percent said they were unlikely to formally screen the patients for depression. An estimated 13 percent of new mothers are affected by postpartum depression. “We believe that it is very important that physicians work some type of depression screening into…

Young, single women in urban China are aware of contraceptive methods but some may be too shy to ask for them, research published in the online open access journal BMC Health Services Research reveals. Young women want more information, but need private and anonymous family planning because of judgemental attitudes surrounding premarital sex and particularly premarital pregnancy. Encouraging contraceptive use among young migrant workers in China to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases is no easy task, according to the study by Xu Qian and other researchers from Fudan…

A popular stereotype that boys are better at mathematics than girls undermines girls' math performance because it causes worrying that erodes the mental resources needed for problem solving, new research at the University of Chicago shows. The scholars found that the worrying undermines women's working memory. Working memory is a short-term memory system involved in the control, regulation and active maintenance of limited information needed immediately to deal with problems at hand. They also showed for the first time that this threat to performance caused by stereotyping can also hinder…

Leave it to white Canadians to tell African-Americans how they feel about people with health problems. A study by the University of Alberta, published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, says African Americans appear to perceive people with extreme health problems as less productive or valuable The study examined the differences in preferences for the EQ-5D health states among African Americans, Hispanics, and other races living in the United States. For this study, one of the first studies to examine the determinants of health preferences, 4,048 individuals were selected for…

In adults with major depressive disorder, adding aripiprazole to antidepressant therapy (ADT) resulted in significant improvement in the primary endpoint, the Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS) Total Score. In this six-week, randomized, placebo-controlled study atypical antipsychotic aripiprazole was added to antidepressants in patients who did not have an adequate response to ADT alone. (1)(Berman, 2007, APA Poster) These findings are from one of two completed studies evaluating adjunctive aripiprazole with ADT. “Investigational studies are important because many patients…

By the time they are adults, men and women have distinctive attitudes about the roles women should play in society. But little is known about how these views develop. The first longitudinal study to track young people's attitudes toward gender found that no single course of gender attitude development contributed to adult attitudes, but rather that attitudes develop as a result of such factors as gender, birth order, gender of sibling, and parents' influences. The findings are published in the May/June 2007 issue of the journal Child Development. The study was conducted by researchers at…