Psychology

The move by food group Mars to introduce a worldwide labeling scheme that categorizes its products as “occasional” and “everyday” based on their sugar, salt and fat content, is both unusual and potentially risky. The American company is behind products including Uncle Ben’s rice and Dolmio pasta sauces, though the chocolate ranges it is also known for aren’t part of this new initiative. The plan to label around 5% of the Mars mealtime products as “occasional” may mean the public will perceive them to be unhealthy where they didn’t before. This could harm sales of certain Dolmio savoury…

Men on Tinder expect casual sex to compensate for the 'breach of trust' when their date's appearance is less attractive than her profile photograph, say sociologists at the British Sociological Association's annual conference in Birmingham. Dr Jenny van Hooff, senior lecturer in sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University, said, "Many of our respondents felt let down on meeting a woman and on feeling a visual representation hadn't been accurate. Some of our respondents felt that this breaking of trust was a license to use their date as they saw fit, thereby speeding up intimacy and…

Everyone has known a coworker who wastes time, mismanages resources, and has been known to engage in activities that are conflicts of interest, yet they "do no wrong" in the eyes of the company. Why? Because they produce.  A new paper in Personnel Psychology discusses surveys of why employees' unethical behaviors may be tolerated or rejected. The scholars conducted three studies and surveyed 1,040 people, including more than 300 pairs of supervisors and their employees. Survey results show: High job performance may provide a motivated reason to ignore moral violations…

http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/meet-survivalists-massing-be... A few years ago, a show premiered called "Doomsday Preppers." I was fascinated by it because just in my lifetime I can't recall how many Apocalyptic events have come and gone,(1) starting of course with the darling of the environmental movement, Professor Paul Ehrlich ("Population Bomb"), and then a decade later with President Obama's Science Czar Dr. John Holdren and his mandatory abortions and world government ("Ecoscience"), and in between every year or so Natural Resources Defense Council would claim some…

Scholars have identified a single, universal facial expression that is interpreted across many cultures as the embodiment of negative emotion. That includes native speakers of English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese and American Sign Language (ASL). We've all seen it. It consists of a furrowed brow, pressed lips and raised chin, and because we make it when we convey negative sentiments, such as "I do not agree." It is called the "not" face. The paper in Cognition also reveals that our facial muscles contract to form the "not face" at the same frequency at which we speak or sign words in a sentence…

A group of scholars believed that "mindfulness" meditation, practiced as a way to calm the mind, could be a non-drug alternative to help decrease chronic low back pain that is psychosomatic, and set out to show it.  Claims of chronic low back pain are a costly condition that plagues eight in 10 Americans at some point in their lives. A team at Group Health Research Institute compared a specific kind of meditation called mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) along with cognitive behavioral therapy, a kind of talk therapy, to see if these interventions might alleviate pain. The…

A dramatic increase in time spent on social media may be a sign of depression, according to a paper in Depression and Anxiety. And the more time young adults use social media, the more likely they are to be depressed, according to findings which could guide clinical and public health interventions to tackle depression, forecast to become a leading cause of psychological disability by 2030 - in high-income countries, anyway. Poor countries don't have the luxury of depression.  This was the first large, nationally representative study of survey data to look for associations…

Veteran foreign correspondent and broadcaster Michael Buerk is getting tired of “bleeding heart” celebrities. In an interview in the latest issue of the Radio Times, Buerk said that he was “a little sniffy about celebs pratting around among the world’s victims”. He went on to single out actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Emma Thompson for wearing their hearts a little too regularly on their sleeves: feather-bedded thesps pay flying visits to the desperate to parade their bleeding hearts and trumpet their infantile ideas on what “must be done”. There’s only so much of the Benedict and Emma…

Psychologists overuse terms like narcissist and sociopath as much as they do declaring everyone they dislike has Asperger's, but they get one thing right - if you have to deal with such people, you are better off online than in person.  A team pf psychologists says that traditionally successful manipulators who are classified as what they like to try and deem the Dark Triad (DT)--people with narcissistic, psychopathic or Machiavellian tendencies--don't send very compelling online messages. The study, titled "The Dark Side of Negotiation" and published in the Journal of Personality…

There is a war on working mothers that shouldn't be waged. It is a war that seeks to make breastfeeding moms better parents, while subtly criticizing moms who use formula, which will invariably impact career and poor women most. And there is zero evidence that "natural" is better, it is just clever marketing that caters to wealthy elites.  But claiming that breastfeeding is more natural and therefore superior could result in harmful decision-making by some parents on other important health matters, according a Perspectives column in the April issue of Pediatrics.  Jessica…