Psychology

Fantasies shouldn't be confused with wishes or behaviors. conrado/Shutterstock By Christian Joyal, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR) Can we use unusual sexual fantasies to identify sexual deviancy? Is there a link between what people fantasize about and how they actually behave? Psychiatry’s two main diagnostic manuals list certain sexual interests - such as voyeurism, exhibitionism, fetishism, sadism and masochism - as “anomalous” or “unusual”. But our new survey shows that some of these fantasies are not all that unusual. To find out what defines an unusual sexual fantasy, we…

There is a perception that 'the wealthy' are opposed to more taxes and income redistribution in America. But the wealthy already pay an alarming amount in taxes and 47% remain loyal to tax-cutting politicians every election cycle. People have ideological reasons to oppose government redistribution of their work, of course, but it may also be relative. Someone who is in a poor neighborhood but doing better than others may not like the idea of higher taxes either, according to a paper in Psychological Science. Survey results compiled by the authors finds that those people are not motivated…

What will it take to convince skeptics of global warming that the phenomenon is real? Droughts, floods and heat waves will begin to change minds. But is attributing every weather event to climate change helping or hurting? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says media should not do it, but media know that in order to do news they also have to sell ads, so they will alternate Miracle Vegetable stories with Scare Journalism when it comes to science. When it comes to weather, if they can turn a Tropical Storm into a SuperStorm they will do it. The Polar Vortex has been around for…

Americans may recall the 'threat warning level' system that came into being after the terrorist attacks on the Wall Trade Center on September 9th, 2011. It was a color coded with 5 levels. But it never once dropped below 3 - yellow, before it was dissolved in 2011. Did anyone pay attention? Another famous example is the "Doomsday Clock", created by anti-nuclear activists to increase anxiety about nuclear weapons. Even after disarmaments and the collapse of the Soviet Union, it barely moved. We are always on the verge of Doom, according to doomsday prophets, today they just say it's because of…

Magic and sparkle? Diliff, CC BY By Isabelle Szmigin, University of Birmingham As well as the tell-tale signs of decorations going up, the rolling out of Christmas advertisements has become a key moment for getting us all in the seasonal mood. And the competition to capture the festive spirit – and the customers that come with it – is fierce. Television viewers would have seen their screens packed with Christmas spots from major retailers recently. Debenhams, John Lewis, Iceland and Tesco have all aired their Christmas ads and John Lewis has continued its tradition of tugging at viewers'…

A study of 1,300 middle-aged men and 1,500 middle-aged women in Wisconsin found that being the boss increases depression among women but decreases it for men. "Women with job authority -- the ability to hire, fire, and influence pay -- have significantly more symptoms of depression than women without this power," said  University of Texas at Austin sociologist Tetyana Pudrovska, the lead author of the study "Gender, Job Authority, and Depression," in the December issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. "In contrast, men with job authority have fewer symptoms of depression…

Hundreds of ISIS militants are rumored to be disillusioned. Handout/Reuters By John Horgan, University of Massachusetts Lowell “Feet first”. That’s how one terrorist leader told recruits was the only way out. It makes sense. Allowing members to just walk away wouldn’t be good for the group’s image. And yet – at the same time as Islamic State parades its European jihadis in shocking beheading videos and continues to recruit aggressively around the world – terrorists do disengage all the time. Some quietly disappear. Others go public, telling their stories on TV or in autobiographies. They…

Following a woman in high heels up out of the subway is like discovering America. Following a woman in flip-flops up out of the subway is like riding the subway. - Rich Brookhiser Women judge men by their shoes, that is no secret. Women colloquially say that they know how a man will treat them based on how much he cares about his footwear and (bonus tell: how he treats the waitress in a restaurant). A new analysis in Archives of Sexual Behavior finds that it is not just women who make sweeping judgments based on shoes - men do it too, at least in France. Sociologist Nicolas Guéguen of the…

You can't catch attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) but you wouldn't know that by the way diagnoses are spreading - up 10X in some countries.  America went through this in the 1990s, when it was just ADD rather than the broader spectrum of ADHD. Then in the 2000s it was supplanted by Autism Spectrum Disorder, which replaced Autism with a set of ASD criteria so broad up to 80 percent of people are included. Fad diagnoses diminish the seriousness of the disease for families that really have it but they are good for business. Until recently, North America tallied by far the most…

An epidemiology analysis finds that acculturative stress, which is a term created to highlight that immigrants straddling two different cultures have greater stress than natives, is the reason Latino youth in Indiana have higher suicide and depression rates than white counterparts. Young people are forced to be one thing in their homes and then also part of the larger outside culture and the conflict between Latino teens and their parents regarding what they do and how they should act at, for example, school versus home, adds to the pressure of teenage years. While examining…