Psychology

For years contractors, real estate agents and event planners have said that whether building, buying or planning an event, a higher or vaulted ceiling is always better. Are they right? Until now there has been no real evidence that ceiling height has any influence or advantage with consumers. But recent research by Joan Meyers-Levy, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management, suggests that the way people think and act is affected by ceiling height. Meyers-Levy and co-author Rui (Juliet) Zhu, assistant professor of marketing at the Sauder School of…

Alcoholism is more common in people with alcoholic spouses than those without, a new study shows. This makes some sense. If you met her while doing shots of Jäger off her drunken abdomen, she's going to be a little more tolerant of your excessive drinking, as long as you share. It's important to have things in common if you want your relationship to last. They call it "associative mating", which is a technical term for 'marry a person like you.' Alcohol dependence (AD) is 50% genetic, says lead author Julia D. Grant, research assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at…

The culture of a school can dampen – or exacerbate – the violent or disruptive tendencies of aggressive young teens, new research indicates. A large-scale study from the University of Illinois found that while personal traits and peer interactions have the most direct effect on the aggressive behavior of middle school students, the school environment also influences student aggression. The study assessed individual, family and school predictors of aggression in 111,662 middle school students. The findings appear in the March 2007 issue of the journal, Youth & Society. The researchers…

Adolescents who are chronically exposed to family turmoil, violence, noise, poor housing or other chronic risk factors show more stress-induced physiological strain on their organs and tissues than other young people. However, when they have responsive, supportive mothers, they do not experience these negative physiological changes, reports a new study from Cornell. But the research group also found that the cardiovascular systems of youths who are exposed to chronic and multiple risk factors are compromised, regardless of their mothers' responsiveness. The study, led by environmental and…

  During the recent PBS special on obesity Fat: What No One is Telling You, a segment about surgery included this voiceover: Until recently it was believed that the tiny stomach [that the surgery produces] is what forces the patient to eat less and lose weight. The surprise came when researchers learned that what makes surgery work so well is the cutting of some nerves in the bowel, which changes signals which flow between the gut and the brain. I’m not surprised the researchers were surprised. The obvious function of nerves from gut to brain is to tell the brain food is present…

Grandparents of adopted grandchildren relate to them as an integral part of the family – just as they relate to their biological grandchildren. This was revealed in research conducted at the University of Haifa School of Social Work. This research is unique in the field in that it evaluated adoptive relationships from the viewpoint of grandparents; previous research examined relationships from the viewpoint of parents and children. Fifteen grandparents between the ages of 59 and 90 participated in the research which was conducted by Ms. Nira Degani under the supervision of Prof. Ariela…

Research finds calorie-dense dessert recipes printed in major newspapers across the country may be contributing to obesity in large cities. The study, conducted by researchers at Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation, Marshfield, Wis., is published in the latest issue of the Wisconsin Medical Journal (Volume 106, No. 2). The regions studied were in the West (Los Angeles, Denver, Portland), Midwest (Milwaukee, Detroit, Kansas City), South (Washington D.C., Dallas, Jacksonville) and the Northeast (New York, Philadelphia, Boston). "The average total caloric content of dessert recipes was…

A study funded by the Atlanta-based Center for Behavioral Neuroscience (CBN) analyzed the viewing patterns of men and women looking at sexual photographs, and the result was not what one typically might expect.  Researchers hypothesized women would look at faces and men at genitals, but, surprisingly, they found men are more likely than women to first look at a woman's face before other parts of the body, and women focused longer on photographs of men performing sexual acts with women than did the males. These types of results could play a key role in helping researchers to understand…

Experience hearing a person's voice allows us to more easily hear what they are saying. Now research by UC Riverside psychology Professor Lawrence D. Rosenblum and graduate students Rachel M. Miller and Kauyumari Sanchez has shown that experience seeing a person's face also makes it easier to hear them. Rosenblum’s paper, “Lip-Read Me Now, Hear Me Better Later: Crossmodal Transfer of Talker Familiarity Effects,” will appear in the May issue of the journal Psychological Science. Sixty college undergraduates were asked to lip-read sentences from a silent videotape of a talker's face. These…

The obvious connection between durian, the big smelly spiky Asian fruit, and the Shangri-La Diet is that both rely on flavor-calorie learning. We come to like the initially unpleasant smell and flavor of durian because we learn to associate it with the calories in the fruit. Here’s what happens “To anyone who doesn’t like durian it smells like a bunch of dead cats,” said Bob Halliday, a food writer in based Bangkok. “But as you get to appreciate durian, the smell is not offensive at all. It’s attractive. From an article in today’s New York Times. The theory that led me to the SLD centers on…