Psychology

Do kids of "tiger moms" - the term used by culture for demanding mothers in Asian families and   popularized due to the 2011 book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" by Amy Chua - have lower self-esteem? Not if the halls of Caltech are any indication. And do we need more young people with high levels of self-esteem living with their parents in their 30s? Regardless, a new paper in  the Journal of Family Issues finds that less supportive and punitive parenting techniques used by some Chinese parents might lead to the development of low self-esteem and school adjustment…

In American culture, media and men are criticized for how women feel about their bodies while in Europe women are given more credit for being able to decide for themselves how they feel.  Europeans may be onto something. A paper in Psychology of Women Quarterly finds that body dissatisfaction among young girls isn't caused by ads for skinny jeans on television or males, it is caused by older girls in schools.  A team led by Jaine Strauss, Professor of Psychology at Macalester College, surveyed 1,536 5th through 8th-grade female students attending schools with different…

Most dogs are happy and they are "man's best friend" because they brighten our day. If you rescue a starving dog they will love you forever whereas if you rescue a starving human, in a week they will have decided they did you a favor. With cats, that sentiment lasts until the first meal is over. But inside, your dog may be more pessimistic, according to a paper from Dr. Melissa Starling of the Faculty of Veterinary Science at the University of Sydney.  Dogs were taught to associate two different sounds (two octaves apart) with whether they would get the preferred reward of…

Google buses yuppifying San Francisco. Facebook creepily profiling us. iCloud giving up our pubes to hacker paparazzi. We poured our faith and money into these companies, and now we feel like jilted lovers. Apple once made “the computer for the rest of us.” OK, we always knew Google wanted world domination, but we thought it would be benevolent. Google even told its coders, “Don’t be evil.” We placed the tech companies on a pedestal, in a new category. They were different from the rapacious, polluting, high-handed businesses of yesteryear. Tech oligopolies and game theory I like to think of…

One way to know there will be no science at a nutrition conference is to find a yogic flying instructor on the panel roster. Yoga has a variety of mental and physical health benefits, just like all exercise and sports do, but it is not going to cure bipolar disorder or any other disease. Even taking a few dozen surveys of people with bipolar disorder who do hatha yoga, a questionable methodology, does not find clinical benefits outside the placebo range, according to a paper in the Journal of Psychiatric Practice.  Hatha yoga is the practice, familiar in the West, in which people…

A new paper indicates that people with psychopathic traits have a preference for non-romantic sexual fantasies with anonymous and uncommitted partners. The authors did two studies to examine relationships between psychopathic traits and sexual fantasy content. In the first study, they rated content themes in the fantasy narratives of 195 Canadian students. In the second, they administered a sexual fantasy questionnaire to 355 Canadian students. In the first study, they found that psychopathic traits predicted themes of anonymous, uncommitted, and non-romantic sexual activity after…

Not all objects are equal in our minds. A Picasso sculpture is not the same way as a hammer, no matter how fancy the hammer.  The reason? We see the Picasso more as a person than an object, according to a new paper from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. And in some cases, we make distinctions between artworks — say, an exact replica of a piece created by the artist, versus one created by a different artist. Art, in other words, is an extension of the creator, write Professor Daniel M. Bartels of Chicago Booth, and Professor George E. Newman and Rosanna K. Smith, a…

For the last decade, political science has been engaged in an effort to make all political behavior a function of biology, much the same way evolutionary psychologists make everything about sex.  A new paper goes beyond suspect fMRI imaging interpretation and surveys of college students and makes the case that political leaning can be predicted by a preference for...body odor.  Their basis is that mates appear to assort on religion and political attitudes more than any other social, behavioral, or physical trait. Most people do not overtly claim they have to marry a Democrat, even…

There is a link between our brain structure and our tolerance of risk, find economists who say they have found the first stable 'biomarker' for financial risk-attitudes. Does that mean there is a causal link between brain structure and behavior? Neuroscientists and psychologists tend to fall into that trap but the scholars in the Journal of Neuroscience avoid that trap. Dr Agnieszka Tymula, an economist at the University of Sydney, and colleagues found that the gray matter volume of a region in the right posterior parietal cortex was significantly predictive of individual risk attitudes. Men…

Concerns about kidney transplantation are very high among kidney failure patients, particularly older adults and women, but why? There are thousands of patients with kidney failure who lack access to kidney transplantation, and disparities persist in terms of race, age, sex, and other patient characteristics.  That gets a lot of attention but what gets less mention is those disparities are in large part self-created. To improve access, it's important to understand the sources of the disparities. Are patients unaware of transplantation and clinicians don't explain it, clinicians don't…