Psychology

Sorry Batman, the dark knight persona is going exactly where Frank Miller predicted it would three decades ago in "The Dark Knight Returns" - you are going to be labeled an over-medicated, mentally disturbed sociopath. The over-medicated may be right. The recent shooting at Fort Hood in Texas was in a "gun-free" zone but a soldier who had never been in combat was still on prescription medication for psychiatric issues related to combat zone trauma. As long as psychiatry remains trapped in the symptom-based world of the past, it is going to be the case that someone who complains enough will…

A new paper has linked unhealthy weight control behavior, like vomiting and diet pills, to indoor tanning among high school students. Another supposed problem for middle class white girls? Not so, say the authors in the Journal of Developmental&Behavioral Pediatrics, the association is even stronger for males. Stephen M. Amrock, SM, and Michael Weitzman, MD, of the New York University School of Medicine say that indoor tanning might identify a group of teens at increased risk of eating disorders. The researchers analyzed nationally representative survey data on nearly 27,000 high school…

Up to 7% of Americans married between 2005-2012 say they met on social networking sites. This has led to a rash of claims by marketing groups for dating sites that it is the future of romance and that more marriages happen to their technology. Between 3 and 6% of couples say they met that way. But how much is technology a factor versus other factors? How do couples compare to couples who met through other types of online meetings or the "old-fashioned" way in terms of age, race, frequency of Internet use, and other factors? In an article on the subject, Jeffrey Hall, PhD, a…

 There are various efforts to try and spur more equality among genders in certain fields. Companies say they don't care about gender - and they don't, unless government forces them to hire people to fill in boxes on government forms.  They say they just want the best people and they can't hire people who don't show an interest in working there. Gender activists say the task falls to companies to change how they approach potential hires, an idea which doesn't please anyone except gender activists. Appealing to stereotypical female emotion may be a strategy no one is…

Recent mass killings in Norway, America and in numerous countries have happened at locations as different as schools, movie theaters, and marathons. Though the actual number of mass killings has not changed in 30 years, they get a lot more attention now. One trait they all share in common is psychiatric medication but unsurprisingly the biggest focus in a roundtable discussion among film studies scholars, psychiatrists and psychologists in a publication named Violence and Gender is that they were all young males. The participants speculate about the possible reasons for high incidence of…

I was at the park the other day throwing pinecones at my kids when a horrified mother asked, “How can you hit your kids with pinecones!” I said it was pretty easy: you just don’t lead them as much. First, this is important because my brain is almost completely incapable of accessing the proper pop-culture comeback (in this case, Full Metal Jacket) until the middle of the night after it was needed. Second, it’s not entirely true: my 5-year-old still tends to take a vector, but my 7-year-old has learned to zig and zag in a way that makes him really hard to hit. (Note: for proper aerodynamics it…

Oxytocin, the love hormone, is correlated to everything from maternal attachment to sexual addiction. Now it has been implicated in lying. Oxytocin is a hormone the body naturally produces to stimulate bonding and psychologists from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) and the University of Amsterdam say it even causes participants to lie more to benefit their groups. People do so more quickly and without expectation of reciprocal dishonesty from their group, they write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS). "Our results suggest people are willing to bend ethical…

A new sociology paper finds that bullying does not just occur among social outcasts. It happens to popular kids too, and the impact may be magnified even more. Popular kids could suffer more from a single act of social aggression. In a study of students and their friendship networks in 19 North Carolina schools, the authors write in American Sociological Review that the risk of being bullied drops dramatically only for the adolescents in the truly elite among the school's social strata - the top 5%.  For everyone else trying to get into the top 5, bullying may be a tactical form of…

When people go out to restaurants, they don't care about eating healthy. Great chefs know the secret to food people want is unreal levels of butter. Fast food restaurants have been convinced to spend tens of millions of dollars marketing healthy choices for kids, like apples, and they are basically invisible to children. People don't want to overpay for the same food they will get at home and they don't care about labels. But when they fill out surveys they will claim to care about labels, which is not the same thing. When it comes to food, behavior and claims are often radically different,…

Fast food giants are happy to promote healthy menus - they are in the revenue generation business, they will sell what people want to buy. Yet food activists and government officials seem to lack basic insight into what kids want, whereas marketing will make whatever campaigns companies want - even if they know they won't work. But they are trying to make healthier food sound appealing, thus coming up with names like Fresh Apple Fries. Even kids ages 3 to 7 have little interest in attempts at depicting healthier kids' meals, according to a new study by Dartmouth-Hitchcock Norris Cotton…