Psychology

When fruit flies respond to the threat of an overhead shadow, is that fear? The response to visual threats includes many essential elements of what we humans call fear and David J. Anderson of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the California Institute of Technology and colleagues write in a new paper that their work on fear in flies are a step toward dissecting the fundamental neurochemistry, neuropeptides, and neural circuitry underlying fear and other emotion states. "No one will argue with you if you claim that flies have four fundamental drives just as humans do: feeding, fighting…

The prospect of death, and the impact of mortality, is a lot less daunting when there is belief in the afterlife, say psychologists. Dr. Arnaud Wisman and Dr. Nathan Heflick, of the University of Kent School of Psychology set out to establish in four separate studies whether people lose hope when thinking about death - known as Terror Management Theory - under a range of different conditions. The research was based on the premise that self-awareness among humans has been shown to create the potential for hope - or the general expectation and feeling that future desired outcomes will occur.…

In an experiment, rats who saw another rat drowning extended a helping paw to rescue it, and the behavior was even more pronounced in rats that previously had a watery near-death experience.  This prosocial behavior, even if it does not gain any advantage from it, was also noted when rats helped members of their own species to escape from a tubelike cage. For a new study, the team conducted three sets of experiments involving a pool of water. One rat was made to swim for its life in the pool, with another being in a cage adjacent to it. The soaked rat could only gain access to a dry and…

The act of identifying a perpetrator is memory and involves thinking but it also constitutes a moral decision - because by identifying or not identifying someone, an eyewitness runs the risk of either implicating an innocent person or letting a guilty person go free. In a recent article, Spring et al. discuss two studies in which children and adolescents of different ages watched a film involving a potential wrong-doing: throwing a lit birthday cake into a wastebasket, either with or without the intention of starting a fire and resulting in either no fire or a serious fire. The filmed act is…

If you got a recent promotion, or a new car on Facebook, that's good news, and in the idealized vision of social media it should be shared. That is just social media marketing talking. In reality, you have probably become convinced that your hard work and success elicits positive emotions and you are probably wrong.  Irene Scopelliti, George Loewenstein and Joachim Vosgerau wanted to find out why so many try to increase the favorability of the opinion others have of them by engaging in more positive self-promotion, which has the opposite of the intended effect.  "Most people…

Male job applicants are perceived to have high levels of leadership potential and are rated as a better employment prospect than a female applicant with proven leadership track record, according to a presentation at the British Psychological Society Annual Conference in Liverpool which discussed how 98 participants (39 women) participated in an online hiring simulation. Each participant was shown four potential applicants for a managerial role with roughly the same age. The applications differed by varying the applicant's gender and assessments of leadership potential and leadership…

Brian Owens, Inside Science - Habitual gamblers are more likely to believe they see patterns in random sequences of events, and to act on that belief, than the general population, according to new research. Wolfgang Gaissmaier, a psychologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany, and his colleagues studied how habitual gamblers, recruited from among the regular patrons of the Akwesasne Mohawk Casino in upstate New York, used a cognitive strategy known as "probability matching" in a betting scenario. The regular gamblers, who ranged from slot machine players to those who frequent the…

America is the fattest developed country on earth and psychologists say that positive images and societal reinforcement make losing weight easier - obese people are more likely to have obese friends and family, the same way alcoholics and drug addicts do. Yet such 'thinspiration' images are also considered body shaming of overweight people by some. The 'Objectification' hypothesis of cultural body standards goes both ways.The Social Cognitive hypothesis also proposes that people learn from modeled behaviors and that 'thinspiration' content may be particularly important because such pictures…

A majority of American adults have tried dieting to lose weight at some point in their lives, and at any given time, about one-third of the adult population say they're currently dieting, which is why diet books are the one consistent think about the New York Times bestseller list. Yet 60 percent of American adults are overweight or even obese and more than 16 percent of deaths nationwide are linked to that.  Why do some people succeed at diets while others fail? Dieting is a process that involves a plan to change eating behavior and behaving according to that plan. But the factors…

Our view of what makes us happy has changed  since 1938. In the United States of 1938, for example, it was a good thing not to have heat waves and droughts and a Dust Bowl across 75 percent of the country. It would have made people happy to be out of the Great Depression instead of politicians telling them it had long been over. Heat waves, droughts, and politicians claiming things are great because Wall Street executives are making money? 1938 does sound a lot like 2015. Today at the Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society in Liverpool, psychologist Sandie McHugh…