Psychology

An analysis of U.C. Berkeley students has concluded that inflated or deflated feelings of self-worth are linked to afflictions like bipolar disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, anxiety and depression - more evidence that the widening gulf between rich and poor can be bad for your health, say the psychologists who conducted the survey.  "We found that it is important to consider the motivation to pursue power, beliefs about how much power one has attained, pro-social and aggressive strategies for attaining power, and emotions related to attaining power," said Sheri Johnson, a U.C…

If you want children ages 4 to 8 to tell the truth, it's best not to threaten to punish them if they lie. An experiment involving 372 children, led by Prof. Victoria Talwar of McGill's Dept. of Educational and Counselling Psychology, left each child alone in a room for 1 minute with a toy behind them on a table, having told the child not to peek during their absence.  While they were out of the room, a hidden video camera filmed what went on. When the researchers returned, they asked the child, a simple question: "When I was gone, did you turn around and peak at the toy?" What the…

What made the wealthy elites in San Fransisco and Seattle who deny the benefits of child vaccines suddenly clamor for government action to create more vaccines? Two cases of Ebola in the United States. Though 12,000 people died of heart disease in that same time, and their states were leading the nation in preventable debilitating childhood diseases, it got little media, and therefore consumer, attention. There is a reason why. In the modern environment of surveillance medicine and the focus on risk factors for disease, the lines between health and illness have become blurry and even skewed,…

Psychology surveys have found that when people go to bed and thus how long they sleep at a time might actually make it difficult for people to stop worrying. The surveys showed that people who sleep for shorter periods of time and go to bed very late at night often have more negative thoughts than those who keep regular sleeping hours.   People are said to have repetitive negative thinking when they have bothersome pessimistic thoughts that seem to repeat and over which they have no control. They tend to worry excessively about the future, delve too much in the past and experience…

In a bygone era, the macho stereotype of the maverick doctor bucking convention, or the Marine running toward danger rather than away from it, inspired young men to want to be bold. No longer. Modern youth have become so convinced that being bold is a negative that they perceive occupations like that as a 'macho' stereotype and are driven away because they do not feel competent.  Although numerous papers have noted the negative impact of gendered workplace stereotypes on women, far less attention has been paid to their effect on men.    Although there is much evidence of the…

The sons of fathers with criminal records tend to have less intelligence than sons of fathers with no criminal history, according to data from over 1 million Swedish men compiled as part of the Swedish mandatory conscription program.  Population analyses have found that children of parents who engage in "antisocial" behaviors, such as rule-breaking, aggressive, or violent behavior, are at greater risk for various negative outcomes, including criminality, psychiatric disorders, substance use, and low academic achievement. Other papers have found that individuals who engage in antisocial…

It's that time of year again. The days are shorter and nights are colder and with that comes people blaming bad moods and symptoms of depression on the decreased amount of daylight, saying, “Oh, I have Seasonal Affective Disorder.” Do they? Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is a form of depression associated with late autumn and winter and thought to be caused by a lack of light. It’s estimated to affect up to 10 million Americans, with another 1-2 million Americans suffering from a mild form- making it extremely common, affecting 1 in every 30 people in the U.S. The term Seasonal…

Not as simple as black and white. Fred Bchx, CC BY-NC-SA By Ian Rickard, Durham University Evolutionary psychology, the field that uses the process of natural selection to provide a theoretical framework to explain human behavior, gets in the press a lot.  And if there’s one thing that gets web hits, it’s stories about sex. But just how relevant are such sexy facts to the reader? How does a scientific truth relate to an individual life? The answer is not as simple as it might seem at first. One recent study considered the combined effects of using the contraceptive pill and facial…

Our culture tells women there's something wrong with them if they don't orgasm. Gustavo Gomes/Flickr, CC BY-NC By Sally Hunter, University of New England A recently published Italian study suggesting women can only have clitoral, rather than vaginal, orgasms raises important questions about the medicalization of female sexuality and sexual dysfunction. Many women would be happy to have an orgasm any old way, as University of Western Sydney researcher Jane Ussher points out, especially those who experience sexual difficulties. It’s difficult to write about the topic of female sexuality without…

Shifting descriptions of schizophrenia. Shutterstock By Huw Green, City University of New York In an attempt to move away from the traditional language used to describe psychosis and schizophrenia, the British Psychological Society (BPS) has launched an update to its thinking on this issue. The foreword of the report it has published sets out the vision: We hope that in future, services will no longer insist that service users accept one particular view of their problem, namely the traditional view that they have an illness which needs to be treated primarily by medication. The report comes…