Psychology

In an experiment, 221 college students in an online chat room watched a fellow student get "bullied" right before their eyes but only 10 percent did something about it, either by helping the victim or confronting the bully. Even in the safe online world, modern young people are less inclined than ever to get involved. Using the online equivalent of taking a picture of a victim rather than helping, 70 percent of participants who noticed the bullying gave the bully or the chat room a bad review. For the experiment, the undergraduate students were led to believe they would be testing an…

Patients who have tried to commit suicide with medication are prescribed more medication after the attempt, not less, according to an analysis of patients who were admitted to three Norwegian hospitals after deliberate self-poisoning.  The psychologists behind the work collected information about the patients' medication from The Norwegian prescription database in order to compare the medication load in the year before and after the poisoning episode and say they were surprised to discover that the patients' medication load, which was high in the first place, increased even more after…

If you are not a person who handles stress well, you are unlikely to enter a high-risk, high-reward field like sales, instead something calmer will be more suitable, even if the pay is much lower. Making less money did not cause your stress level, stress caused you to make less money, according to a new paper by scholars at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. On a biological level, they associated the effects of stress with the release of the hormone cortisol in the Psychoneuroendocrinology paper.  Confidence is essential to our ability to compete in society, the authors note. When…

There may be a new explanation for why fad diets tend to cluster in pockets - and it may help companies spend their marketing money a little smarter also. If a new diet or exercise program is clearly working for a friend it carries more weight, pardon the pun, than a charismatic, but less successful pal or a celebrity endorsement. Countless diets and weight-loss programs exist to combat the high rate of obesity among Americans and they probably all work as well as each other, assuming they lead to fewer calories going surplus each day, but they do little good if people don't adopt them. …

Many of us have asked ourselves in the past few days: can you really falsely remember something as significant as being in a helicopter that was shot down? And many of us probably think “No way,” and quickly conclude that NBC news anchor Brian Williams invented this story to embellish his public image as a news anchor who put his life in danger. But before condemning Brian Williams as a narcissistic liar, let’s take a closer look at what memory research has to say about false memories and memories of traumatic experiences. This work suggests it’s plausible that Williams is truthfully…

“My dearest Theresa,” Lord Byron wrote to his mistress in his garden, August 1819. A century later, on a July afternoon in 1916, Captain Alfred Bland, a British officer in World War I, sat down before battle and did the same: “My only and eternal blessedness” began his letter to his wife. In a hundred years, it seems, not much had changed. Love letters have existed for almost as long as writing itself. The Roman governor Pliny wrote to his wife, “a longing for you possesses me”. In the 15th century, noblewoman Margery Brews confided to her fiancé that to marry him would make her “the happiest…

Yin and yang or two peas in a pod? Shutterstock Relationships are often interpreted as the outcome of an exchange of goods and services. Common knowledge says that the sexes want different things from a partner. These preferences are often reduced to shallow, one-dimensional demands – beauty for men and resources for women. “Opposites attract,” they say. No one asks, “Why did that beautiful, young woman marry that old, old man?” because they already know the answer. He had something she wanted and she had something he wanted. This exchange view of relationships is constantly reinforced –…

Take care lovers, wherever you are, as Valentine’s Day is soon upon us. Whether you’re in a relationship or want to be in a relationship, research over a number of years shows that February 14 can be a day of broken hearts and broken wallets. A study by US psychologists in 2004 found that relationship breakups were 27% to 40% higher around Valentine’s Day than at other times of the year. Fortunately, this bleak trend was only found amongst couples on a downward trajectory who weren’t the happiest to begin with. For stable or improving couples, Valentine’s Day thankfully didn’t serve as a…

If you are not inclined to be faithful and your partner is not buying into your claim of sex addiction, psychologists may have a better alternative: genetics. They made their determination by analyzing individual attitudes relating to non-committed sex and the length of the ring finger compared to the index finger. The questions were for 575 North American and British people about non-committed sex. The psychologists then measured photocopies of the right hands of 1,314 British people. With regard to attitudes towards sex, the psychologists found that both men and women fell into one of two…

What happens when people in one political party in America are presented with science that doesn't align with their political views? The same thing that happens in the other party. They rationalize why it isn't valid science. Despite claims by liberals that they hold some special acceptance of science - the same thing conservatives claimed until the 2000s - a new study has found it isn't the case when the science issue is political. It's no secret that conservatives are less likely to accept evolution and climate change science, science media has talked about it for over a decade. Yet…