Psychology

If a person commits a violent criminal act, there is a higher chance that a younger sibling will follow in their footsteps than an older one, according to a new paper. It's been common sense for centuries that violent criminal behavior runs strongly in families but why is unclear. Blame is attributed to shared environmental factors such as poverty, divorce and poor parental supervision.  This 'social transmission' of violent behaviors suggests that environmental factors within families can be important when it comes to delinquent behavior.  The paper in Psychological Medicine…

Modern Western parents spend a lot of time trying to figure out new ways for kids not to be kids and to force their behavior into narrow ranges. Then modern Western spend a lot of time filling out surveys saying they want their kids to be intelligent, creative and independent.  If you are a parent who wants to mollify the animalistic eating behavior of your child, don't give them a chicken drumstick, cut their food into little pieces for them. Yes, whole foods are causing bad behavior, according to a new paper. Cornell marketing guru Professor Brian Wansink and colleagues write…

Anywhere from 40 to 60 percent of women who undergo routine screening mammography during a ten-year period will experience a false-positive mammogram. They then suffer anxiety while they undergo additional testing, sometimes involving a biopsy, to confirm that cancer is not present. Researchers have suspected that increased anxiety, pain, and the bother of additional tests might adversely affect the quality of life for women who experience false-positive screening mammograms. In a new paper, Dartmouth scholars used data collected by the Digital Mammographic Imaging Screening Trial (…

Why is Edward Snowden a villain to some people while the same people regard Bradley Manning as a hero? Why do so many people say they never thought it could happen if someone they know commits a crime? When is an atrocity not remembered that way at all? An in-group portrayal may make the difference. A group of scholars focus on recent events to discuss their hypothesis about psychology - what they call atrocities in Iraq, Afghanistan,  Abu-Ghraib and Guantanamo and how people recall them. Those are all very safe things to posture about from the comforts of a western nation - good luck…

Kids know it is wrong to steal stuff - they also seem to know it's wrong to steal an idea. They just discover it a little later. University of Washington psychologist Kristina Olson and colleagues discovered that preschoolers often don't view a copycat negatively but by the age of 5 or 6, they do. It holds true even across cultures that typically view intellectual property rights in different ways, like in Germany where they violate international trademarks and hold a Science 2.0 conference and, worse, charge people to attend. "Physical property is something that can be seen, but…

Because the majority of prescriptions for depression, are given to women, men don't get a lot of concern, but depression can hit young fathers hard and the symptoms can increase dramatically during the formative years of children. Depressive symptoms increased on average by 68 percent over the first five years of fatherhood for the young men in a Pediatrics analysis, who were around 25 years old when they became fathers and lived in the same home as their children. Craig Garfield, M.D., associate professor in pediatrics Northwestern University and a pediatrician at Ann&Robert H.…

Should you get a pet? If so, a dog or a cat?  For families of children with autism, the decision may have gotten a little easier. A University of Missouri nurse has studied dog ownership decisions in families of children with autism and found, regardless of whether they owned dogs, the parents reported the benefits of dog ownership included companionship, stress relief and opportunities for their children to learn responsibility. "Children with autism spectrum disorders often struggle with interacting with others, which can make it difficult for them to form friendships," said Gretchen…

Idioscenic Conjecture I am posting some ideas here to promote discussion of the psychology of conspiracism. I suggest that the mere fact of knowing that some events have been caused by C may overly influence an observer to look first for C even if an indifferent observer would consider C unlikely in the particular case. By way of example, it is known that forensic investigators who have observed particular burn patterns associated with particular causes of fire have wrongly attributed all such burn patterns to the same cause, which has often led to miscarriages of justice1.  We must be…

A phenomenon has long been believed in psychology: traumatic experiences induce behavioral disorders that are passed down from one generation to the next, a kind of psychological epigenetics. Recently, neuroscientists have set out to understand what physiological processes might underlie this hereditary trauma. "There are diseases such as bipolar disorder, that run in families but can't be traced back to a particular gene", explains Isabelle Mansuy, professor at ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich. With her research group at the Brain Research Institute of the University of Zurich, she…

Is there a link between maternal obesity during pregnancy and the risk of developmental disorders in a child? In the wide world of epigenetics and causalation there can be, because no one can prove there can't be. However, if obesity is a link at all, paternal obesity could be a greater risk factor than maternal obesity, according to a new paper from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.  Dr. Pål Surén claims to be the first to study the role of paternal obesity in autism and emphasizes that this is still speculation on its way to becoming a hypothesis. Surén notes it requires…