Psychology

"What might have been" or fictive learning affects the brain and plays an important role in the choices individuals make – and may play a role in addiction, said Baylor College of Medicine researchers and others in a report that appears online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These "fictive learning" experiences, governed by what might have happened under different circumstances, "often dominate the evaluation of the choices we make now and will make in the future, " said Dr. P. Read Montague, Jr., professor of neuroscience at BCM and director of the BCM Human…

Professor of Women's Health Psychology at the University of Western Sydney, Jane Ussher, has been researching the issue for 20 years and says that women are being controlled by medical practices which position their unhappiness as a biomedical condition. Women are being sold the idea that their bodies are biologically faulty and they need medication for PMS, post-natal depression and menopausal outbursts when in fact the pressures of being 'superwoman' are more likely to blame. "I would argue that PMS and PND are essentially a form of repressed rage women feel rather than a medical illness.…

Many products, such as golf clubs or cameras, are designed for consumers of a certain skill level. However, deciding what product would be most appropriate is often based on skewed self-assessment, leading to a purchase of equipment that may be too advanced or too basic. A revealing new study from the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research shows how these choices may be affected by marketing strategies and provides insight into how consumers can better select the right products for their particular skill level. Perceptions of skill are frequently inaccurate because people base…

Exposure to trauma may create enough changes in the brain to sensitize people to overreact to an innocuous facial gesture years later, even in people who don’t have a stress-related disorder, says new research. It appears that proximity to high-intensity traumas can have long lasting effects on the brain and behavior of healthy people without causing a current clinical disorder. But these subtle changes could increase susceptibility to mental health problems later on. Evidence that trauma can have long-term effects on the brains of healthy individuals was demonstrated by measuring adults’…

In the mid-1990s, scientists at the University of Parma, in Italy, made a discovery so novel that it shifted the way psychologists discuss the brain. After researchers implanted electrodes into the heads of monkeys, they noticed a burst of activity in the premotor cortex when the animals clutched a piece of food. In a wonderfully fictitious account of the discovery, neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti was licking ice cream in the lab when this same region again fired in the monkeys. In an equally wonderful truthful account, the neurons in this region did, in fact, fire when the monkeys merely…

Eating low-calorie soup before a meal can help cut back on how much food and calories you eat at the meal, a new Penn State study shows. Results show that when participants in the study ate a first course of soup before a lunch entree, they reduced their total calorie intake at lunch (soup + entrée) by 20 percent, compared to when they did not eat soup. "This study expands on previous studies about consuming lower-calorie soup as a way to reduce food intake," says co-author Dr. Barbara Rolls, who holds the Guthrie Chair of Nutrition at Penn State. "Earlier work suggests that chunky soup may…

Eating disorders may be overlooked in some groups - boys and some ethnicities - by physicians accustomed to diagnosing the condition in white teenage girls, say researchers at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital and the Stanford University School of Medicine. The problem is compounded when the sufferers don't display the typical symptoms of disordered eating. "We need to think more broadly about who struggles with eating disorders," said adolescent medicine and eating disorder specialist Rebecka Peebles, MD, instructor in pediatrics (adolescent medicine). Peebles pointed out that diagnostic…

Personally I have very little interest in the paranormal or parapsychology, but I have to commend Alex Tsakiris of the Skeptiko podcast for presenting interviews from both sides of the debate. Alex clearly does believe that parapsychology is a valid science, but his podcast is surprisingly balanced. I think it is very valuable to listen to what those with different viewpoints have to say, and there are a surprising number of scientists devoted to trying to find replicable data in the field. When we consider findings like those that show that meditation leads to measurable changes in the…

Research shows that adolescents who engage in one form of risky behavior, like drug or alcohol use, are likely to engage in other risky behaviors like self-harm, or having unprotected sex, but often times these behaviors are not discussed during a medical or mental health exam. Now, a new study shows that a simple and brief screening measure called the adolescent risk inventory (ARI) can quickly identify the broad range of risk behaviors found among adolescents. "This constellation of behavior problems is really the thing we are trying to avoid. So, identifying early that a teen is engaging…

Last night, at a Vietnamese restaurant, I had an avocado shake for dessert. On the way home I stopped at a Chinese bakery and got garlic pork cookies. Had science, like cooking, been invented more than once, what would other scientific traditions — other ways of doing science — look like? My guess is they would not include: 1. Treating results with p = 0.04 quite differently than results with p = 0.06. Use of an arbitrary dividing line (p = 0.05) makes little sense. 2. Departments of Statistics. Departments of Scientific Tools, yes; but to put all one’s resources into figuring out how to…