Psychology

Most psychiatric disorders - including depression -- do not predict future violent behavior, according to a longitudinal study of delinquent youth. Some delinquent youth with current psychiatric illness may also be violent - males with mania were more than twice as likely to report current violence than those without - but those relationships are not necessarily causal.  The one exception is when there is substance abuse and dependence. That was a predictor of violence in people with psychiatric conditions. The study used data from the Northwestern Juvenile Project, a longitudinal study…

Up to 6 out of 1,000 children worldwide may be on the spectrum of an autistic disorder (ASD) and 50 percent of those kids demonstrate serious and disruptive behavior, including tantrums, aggression, self-injury and noncompliance. For children with ASD, serious disruptive behavior interrupts daily functioning and social skills development, limits their ability to benefit from education and speech therapy, can increase social isolation and intensify caregiver stress.  Luc Lecavalier and colleagues from The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center conducted a 24-week parent training…

Suicide remains the second leading cause of death for adolescents in the United States, this year nearly 5,000 adolescents will commit suicide and advocates claim over 500,000 will make an emergency room visit that is or could be a suicide attempt. Better tools to evaluate, identify, and treat at-risk adolescents are crucial for the development and implementation of effective preventive strategies and a series of articles explores key factors that may contribute to suicidal risk and presents new assessment and treatment approaches. Co-editors of the Journal of Child and Adolescent…

Happy Meals for broccoli? A paper presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in San Diego says that because poor food choices in school cafeterias are a risk factor for childhood obesity, students will make better choices if healthy foods are labeled with smiley faces and have prizes - similar to what fast food corporations do to try and make lunch more fun. The talk highlighted a two-phase intervention to improve healthful eating among kindergarten through sixth-grade students at an inner-city school in Cincinnati. The first phase consisted of placing green smiley…

Scientists may get frustrated at Dr. Oz and The Food Babe and other people who are against genetically modified organisms (GMOs) while munching happily on organic strains created by mutagenesis, but if we care about cognitive science issues, the evidence-based world might want to be a little kinder to them in the future. The reason some people don't trust science has evolutionary roots, a group of Belgian scholars believe - science is complex, they say, and when brains were more primitive, the world had to be made as simple as possible. So 'if I can't pronounce it, you should not eat it' may…

Major depression comes with an unexpected metabolic signature, according to new findings. Authors in search of genes that increase depression risk analyzed thousands of women. those with recurrent major depression and healthy controls, and found that many of the women with depression also had experienced adversity in childhood, including sexual abuse.  The researchers noticed something rather unusual in the DNA. The samples taken from women with a history of stress-related depression contained more mitochondrial DNA than other samples. "Our most notable finding is that the amount of…

Recent advances with so-called meta-materials have shown that a practical invisibility cloak might one day be possible. But a new study has approached the scenario from the other direction, asking what it would feel like to be invisible. The answer, it turns out, is it would make us feel more confident. The research was carried out using an extension of the classic rubber-hand illusion. In this experiment, a participant views a dummy hand being stroked with a brush, while also feeling a similar brush stroking their real hand, which is hidden behind a curtain. If the brush-stroking they are…

Invasive pests known as spruce bark beetles have been attacking Alaskan forests for decades, killing more than 1 million acres of forest on the Kenai Peninsula in southern Alaska for more than 25 years. Beyond environmental concerns regarding the millions of "beetle kill" dead trees, inhabitants of the peninsula and surrounding areas are faced with problems including dangerous falling trees, high wildfire risks, loss of scenic views and increased soil erosion. Intriguingly, a sociologist from the University of Missouri says that human perception of the beetle kill problem in the Kenai…

A study of approximately 95,000 children with older siblings found that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine is not associated with an increased risk of autism spectrum disorders regardless of whether older siblings had been diagnosed on the autism spectrum - and epidemiological papers say those children should be at higher risk for an autism diagnosis. During the last 15 years, no valid study has found a link between the MMR vaccine and ASD but some parents and people selling alternative medicines continue to associate the vaccine with ASD. Surveys of parents who have children with ASD…

A real-world analysis of human behavior finds that men treat online giving as a competitive enterprise: Men will donate four times more money to an attractive female fundraiser if they feel like they are in competition with another male, which evolutionary psychologists contend is a subconscious sexual mandate based on biology. Most studies involving 'competitive helping' involve games played in a lab so scholars are delighted to have real-world data. Nichola Raihani of University College London and Sarah Smith of the University of Bristol used a UK-based, online fundraising platform to test…