Psychology

Our nation's veterans continue to suffer emotional and psychological effects of war--some for decades. And while there has been greater attention directed recently toward post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and more veterans are seeking help, current psychotherapy treatments are less than optimal, according to a new narrative review. Even the term "narrative review" shows what the problem is. Anyone can have PTSD if they self-identify with it or get prompted to believe they have it. In a review of literature over a 35-year period, scholars in the Department of Psychiatry at NYU Langone…

Many people who are skeptical about vaccinating their children can be convinced to do so, but only if the argument is presented in a certain way, a team of psychologists from UCLA and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reported today. The research appears in the online early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The finding is especially important because the number of measles cases in the U.S. tripled from 2013 to 2014. The disease's re-emergence has been linked to a trend of parents refusing to vaccinate their children. What doesn't change their…

The desire to quit smoking--often considered a requirement for enrolling in treatment programs--is not always necessary to reduce cigarette cravings, argues a review of addiction research. Early evidence suggests that exercises aimed at increasing self-control, such as mindfulness meditation, can decrease the unconscious influences that motivate a person to smoke.  Scientists are looking to the brain to understand why setting a "quit day" isn't a surefire way to rid oneself of a cigarette habit. Recent neuroimaging studies have shown that smokers have less activity in the brain regions…

Bad Gastein in the Austrian Alps. It’s 10 am on a Wednesday in early March, cold and snowy – but not in the entrance to the main gallery of what was once a gold mine. Togged out in swimming trunks, flip-flops and a bath robe, I have just squeezed into one of the carriages of a narrow-gauge railway that’s about to carry me 2 km into the heart of the Radhausberg mountain. Fifteen minutes later we’re there and I’m ready to enjoy what the brochures insist will be a health-enhancing environment. Enjoyment, of course, is a subjective term. The temperature inside the mountain’s dimly lit tunnels is…

A new University of Michigan study finds that teens using marijuana for medical reasons are 10 times more likely to say they are hooked on marijuana than youth who get marijuana illegally. The study is the first to report on a nationally representative sample of 4,394 high school seniors and their legal or illegal medical marijuana use as it relates to other drug use. In the study, 48 teens had medical marijuana cards, but 266 teens used medical marijuana without a card. Carol Boyd, the study's lead author and professor at the U-M School of Nursing, said she doesn't believe that medical…

Researchers studying wild banded mongooses in Uganda have discovered that these small mammals have either cooperative or selfish personalities which last for their entire lifetime. The researchers investigated the selfish behavior of mongoose mate-guarding - where dominant males guard particular females - and the cooperative behavior of 'babysitting' and 'escorting' the young. They found that cooperative mongooses that helped out with offspring care did so consistently over their whole lifetime but those that put in little effort never increased their workload. Similar consistent behavior…

In America there has been yet another shooting and the common denominator has been the presence of psychiatric medication. Clearly better diagnosis of people is not what is needed, better outcomes are. Medications are wildly over-prescribed and they don't work very well. For some patients, a nicotine patch is as effective as medication after two months. Treatment has to get better, finding the right page in DSM 5 with which to label someone doesn't matter if a good medication would cover a lot of diagnoses anyway. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that nearly one in five…

In what they say is the first study that looks at a variety of healthcare providers and their implicit attitudes towards lesbian women and gay men, scholars say they have found there is widespread implicit bias toward lesbian women and gay men.  Implicit bias is a controversial technique in psychology and sociology where people are shown to be prejudiced, even if they don't act in prejudiced ways. In the paper, the authors use implicit association to conclude there is moderate to strong implicit preferences for straight people over lesbian and gay people are widespread among…

Youth from low-income families who succeed academically and socially may actually pay a price when it comes to their health, because relentlessly pursuing goals can undermine health. To draw their conclusion, scholars  focused on a group of approximately 300 rural African-American teenagers making the transition from adolescence to adulthood. They found that those adolescents who have high levels of self-control, or the ability to focus on long-term goals over more immediate ones, fare better on a variety of psychological outcomes as young adults.  "Emerging data suggest that for…

When 21-year-old nurse Carol Felstead went to her doctor complaining of repeated headaches, she wasn’t just prescribed painkillers. Instead, she was referred for psychotherapy that would ultimately involve hypnosis to “recover” so-called repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. Carol subsequently came to believe that her parents were the leaders of a Satanic cult and that her mother murdered another of her children, sat Carol on top of the body and then set fire to the family home. But these allegations were untrue and the memories they were based upon were incorrect. Today, almost 30…