Psychology

Stereotype threat is a sociological invention which seeks to rationalized why some people don't perform as well as others. In biology, for example, if a group of women didn't fare well on tests sociologists argue that if there were not enough women in the classroom, women felt like they were representing women in biology and if they didn't do well, all women would look bad. And that pressure caused them to not do well. Outside the social justice world, in the realm of data, there is one area where women are not being told by the social sciences they are too intimidated to compete: chess.…

In Canada, even people with Celiac disease don't really think of it as a disease, so it's no surprise the more subjective gluten "intolerance", which food marketers have used to create a $5 billion industry south of the Canadian border, is basically unknown.  Efforts to manufacture concern have not helped. A few months ago, a group tried to get more attention for gluten issues, so they examined blood work of almost 3,000 Canadians and found that one in 114 (just under one percent, the same as elsewhere) had elevated antibodies that indicate they suffered from celiac disease, which causes…

A new Pew Research Center survey examining people’s experiences in the workplace and perceptions of fair treatment for women provides just the results you would guess; half of women say they have been subjected to gender discrimination. The survey was 4,914 U.S. adults was conducted from July 11 to Aug. 10, 2017 and included 2,344 workers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) jobs. The problem will always be in the subjective nature of the concept. How many people have career setbacks and assume it must be because of some secret factor, like corporate hiring quotas, that they…

If you have a lot of assets to split, and splitting is easy, it's also easy to create ultimatums. When America was a poor country, people stayed together longer, families lived near each other, conflicts were resolved. You never went to bed angry, it was said. Not so today. There are many ways in which America is no longer on the upswing but has already arrived. The U.S. has more diversity and equality than France, better health care than anywhere, and so much food the U.S. government is trying to tell 80 million Americans they could be on the road to Type 2 diabetes. People can even overpay…

Nearly everyone is familiar with emoji, those popular icons that appear in text messages, emails and social media platforms. Emoji are often used as light-hearted adjuncts to text, or to soften the blow of a message. Emoji can be viewed as overly simplistic in some contexts. For example, government officials were questioned when Foreign Minister Julie Bishop conducted an interview using just emoji, and described Russian President Vladmir Putin using an angry face   A 2017 study found that use of emoji in work emails reduced perceptions of competence. But emoji can be taken very…

Allegations about sexual harassment in Hollywood, British politics and various other sectors have exposed a reality already familiar to most women. Harassment, interruption, and intrusion from men is commonly disregarded as an inevitable part of life, unpleasant but expected. It is rarely acknowledged for what it is: a key factor structuring women’s lives. Comedian Jo Brand’s recent comments on the quiz show Have I Got News For You help explain how it works. Responding to panelist Ian Hislop’s dismissal of some forms of harassment as “not high level crime”, Brand explained the continuum of…

Though men account for the overwhelming majority of suicides and have increasingly sought help for depression, the clinical community has yet to figure out how to better help them.  A new pilot study from Australia shows the extent of the problem. Men surveyed reported that instead of receiving tailored treatment regimens more suited toward them, the clinical community seems to take a one-size-fits-all-genders unstructured talk therapy approach. Few gave their clients goals to work towards or outlined skills they could gain to deal with their depression, which was the opposite of the…

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention seem more scared than elated by United States smoking rates. They have migrated from a war on the world's top killer, smoking, to being in a war on a chemical, nicotine. They needn't be concerned. Science and health have won, and it wasn't because of taxes on cigarettes or a cottage industry of anti-smoking ads built by a tobacco company settlement, it was because of peer pressure. In young people. As the American Council on Science and Health, a pro-science consumer advocacy group based in New York City, has said since the 1970s, smoking is a…

All across America people are dreaming of a better life, thanks to the government-sponsored gambling event known as the Powerball Lottery. Don't get nationalistic, Americans, we didn't invent it, lotteries were held as far back as 200 BC. Government gambling financed the Great Wall of China and the Revolutionary War. Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1793 for the directors of the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures that they should have a national lottery and "That it be simple and summary; because it will be more readily understood by every body&the imagination will see fewer…

Nomophobia, defined as smartphone separation anxiety,  is when people perceive smartphones as part of their extended selves. Counselors, lawyers and therapists are aggressively pushing it as the fad diagnosis of 2017, but what behaviors and descriptors can help identify people with high nomophobia ? A new paper compares how people considered to have high and low nomophobic tendencies perceive and value their smartphones. In the pay-to-publish journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, Seunghee Han and Jang Hyun Kim, PhD, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Republic…