Psychology

President Biden is touting his strong economic performance but the public disagrees; his approval rating is in the 30th percentile because an expanding economy as framed by politicians still means high inflation to people paying taxes. The psychological impacts of bad economic performance are evident also; when times are good, spending makes people happy. When times are bad, spending is stressful. Customers even leave worse reviews, according to a new paper. In the work, over 40 studies measured people’s perceptions about their financial situations and recent purchases. Whether they bought a…

There is a myth that people act differently during a full moon but nurses swear by it because of perception of an increase in emergency room cases. Now demographers have linked heat waves to emergency care, except the mental health kind. The paper correlated days with higher-than-normal temperatures during the summer season in the United States to increased rates of emergency department (ED) visits for any mental health-related condition, particularly substance use, anxiety and stress disorders, and mood disorders. The impact of heat on physical health is well documented, but few studies have…

Check out your birth certificate and surely you’ll see a designation for sex. When you were born, a doctor or clinician assigned you the “male” or “female” label based on a look at your genitalia. In the U.S., this has been standard practice for more than a century. But sex designation is not as simple as a glance and then a check of one box or another. Instead, the overwhelming evidence shows that sex is not binary. To put it another way, the terms “male” and “female” don’t fully capture the complex biological, anatomical and chromosomal variations that occur in the human body. That’s why…

Epidemiology pushes out a lot of dumb papers. Not as many as social psychology per capita but in volume a whole lot more. It's easy to see why the public believes horse de-wormer cures COVID-19, it was in an epidemiology paper, and that methodology was just as valid as a paper this week 'linking' olive oil to longer life.  But neither of those is as bad as the half-baked correlation mixed with supernatural beliefs in unsubstantiated epigenetics to say something so dumb last week that I don't even feel mean ridiculing it. The worst epidemiology paper (well, the worst that got corporate…

In 2008, Senator Barack Obama was opposed to gay marriage and worried vaccines might cause autism. A few years later he said neither of those things. Did Democrats flip to being pro-science and the party followed and then the President reflected those polls? Perhaps he changed from stating party platforms based on voter beliefs to his own once he was elected, then he changed the party, and then the party led its members, finds results in a new paper on party and personal political polarization.  The humanities scholars in political science wanted to examine both sides of this…

There has long been something of a stigma about mental health issues. If a celebrity goes into an alcohol or drug clinic, 30 days later their career is back on track, but a reputation for depression makes filmmakers worry they won't be able to take the stress of a new project. The COVID-19 pandemic, and depression brought on by isolation and non-stop media coverage, changed all that.  For the first time since national data have been tracked in the United States, stigma toward people with depression has declined,  There has even been a statistically significant drop in social…

People age differently but it is unclear why. Some argue it is mitochondria while others contend it is equally nebulous epigenetics - a broad umbrella term for changes in genes that don't impact DNA but have been correlated to everything from probiotic yogurt to homeopathy. Because so-called “epigenetic clocks” occur at different times in different people they don't seem like clocks at all. There is little use for a clock that only gives you subjective time. A new study hopes to change that, and argues that one such clock, named “GrimAge”, might be a predictor of lifespan and health…

Do you know people who just can't help themselves when it comes to buying things or engaging in behavior you and they know they will regret later? Deemed “negative urgency,” a clinical form of impulsivity, it is linked to depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, eating disorders, self-harm, bipolar disorder and ADHD. A new test believes such pathological impulsivity can be predicted based on how fast you react to stimulating visuals, especially disturbing ones. Negative urgency is traditionally measured with a self-report questionnaire, but to provide a more reliable measure, researchers…

Sometimes people ask me if there is an evidence-based way to manage the stress of dealing with difficult relatives at Thanksgiving, and my short answer is "chloroform." In modern hippie dippie wellness culture, that may not be the response people are seeking, they may want validation of essential oils or an app, but one thing most people don't realize is that stress is not about fads or even other people. We manage stress, we only think it manages us.  Any gathering of diverse family and friends is probably going to have someone you dislike but if you are already complaining about…

Recent survey results of 118 eight-to-twelve year-old children examined total hours of media consumed, hours of video game play, and number of media used concurrently. Then the authors correlated those to things like behavior, sleep, and psychological issues. The results are only correlation but they found that young people now average over 8 hours of digital content per day. That's a lot of time. Or is it? Time spent playing video games led to positive results for both boys and girls. Kids who spent more time on video games than things like social media did better on cognitive tests and…