Psychology

With over one billion people worldwide using social media, including 80 percent of employees using private sharing sites at work, members have been scrambling to insist that not only does it not negatively affect their work performance, but that it improves it. Yahtzee! probably wishes they could get the kind of free public relations Twitter gets. Few studies have been done to examine the issue. Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Cecilie Schou Andreassen and colleagues at the University of Bergen looked at the consequences of the use of social media during working hours.  The goal was to…

Different people behave in different ways behind the wheel of a car. Flickr/Nuno Sousa, CC BY-NC-ND By Vanessa Beanland, Australian National University and Martin Sellbom, Australian National University Personality traits can be used to predict a lot about a person. They can tell about their probable career success, if they’re likely to get divorced, their risk at dying early from disease – and now, how safe they are as drivers. We have been exploring the question of how personality predicts driving behavior. Our recently published study was the first to take a comprehensive look at the…

Did you spend those pre-school years telling your child how smart and wonderful they are? School is going to be an unwelcome dose of reality.  While we all want kids to be self-confident, unrealistic perceptions of academic abilities can be harmful, a new study of eighth-graders finds. The more one student feels unrealistically superior to another, the less the two students like each other.   Katrin Rentzsch of the University of Bamberg in Germany first became interested in the effects of such self-perceptions when she was studying how people became labeled as nerds. "There is…

Sharon Stone, in Basic Instinct, dramatized the catastrophic actions of a clever yet unhinged woman. EPA/ Peter Foley By Suzie Gibson Mental illness and women’s sexuality are frequently aligned – on screen and off. The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, pathologized women’s sexuality. Indeed, his definition of a woman as someone lacking a penis has underwritten depictions of women’s sexuality. Countless novels, films and TV programs continually pathologize women through and because of their sexuality. Meron Wondemaghen rightly asserted on The Conversation recently that the…

Organic food has quietly become a Big Ag behemoth. Everyone talks about video games and the film industry, for example, but Big Organic dwarfs them both in revenue and by next year it will be a $100 billion juggernaut. The increase is partly because more farmers are taking advantage of the healthier profit margins and partly because organic marketing groups sell a health food mythology where cost is not a factor, so costs can rise along with more product. It is a miracle of capitalism. But given a consumer-base that is wealthy and that is educated by advertising so completely, why don't all…

If you voted for a Democrat this week, it may not be because of the issues, it may be because your emotions caused you to gloss over facts, according to a paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Emotions are obviously powerful forces in human behavior and attitudes and to some extent they play an important role in guiding policy support. A paper by researchers at Tel Aviv University and the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya studied the interaction between emotion and political ideology, showing that the motivating power of emotions is not the same for those on different ends…

John F. Kennedy didn't just win the presidential election in 1960 because an alarming number of dead people in Chicago and Texas voted for him, it was only close in the first place because his debate with Vice-President Richard Nixon was televised - and he thought makeup was unmanly. While Kennedy looked healthy and vigorous, Nixon looked pale and sweaty. History was made and politics was changed forever. Two generations later, a healthy complexion is vital - but looking intelligent is not as important, except for positions that require negotiation between groups or exploration of new…

Addiction recovery has numerous pitfalls and the inability to sleep only compounds the risk of relapse, so persistent insomnia is a concern, write researchers in the Journal of Addiction Medicine. The authors believe that the incidence of insomnia in early recovery may be five times higher than the general population and may persist for months or even years. They say insomnia may be linked with a higher risk of alcohol-related problems and relapse. The association may run in the other direction as well—population studies report people with sleep disturbance are more likely to be at risk…

Online gambling has exploded in the last decades and several states, hungry for more revenue without direct taxes, have approved measures to legalize various types of gambling. Critics contend that will lead to more crime and more broken homes due to gambling problems. A new University at Buffalo Research Institute on Addictions (RIA) survey says that isn't the case. They interviewed 2,613 people in 1999-2000, and the second survey interviewed 2,963 people in 2011-13. Individuals were asked about their participation in a broad range of gambling activities, including raffles, office pools,…

Fashion and beauty magazines are tremendously successful, as are television ad campaigns where women who are 5'10" and weigh 120 lbs. model jeans. Clearly, most women do not look like that and never will, so why do they buy magazines and clothes that remind them of it? While critics insist that Americans, the fattest people on the planet, are under too much pressure to be thin, the truth is instead that they like role models, no differently than how some parents will buy a particular magazine if it has a female scientist on the cover. Models on magazine covers do not taunt imperfect women,…