Psychology

If you walk by the checkout counters at most supermarkets,you might come to believe that changing your behavior is almost impossible.  Every month, the headlines from countless magazines scream out with advice to lose weight, get in shape, and help yourself to feel better.   Apparently, everyone is constantly struggling with their weight and fitness. Yet, there are notable success stories. For example, the Cleveland Clinic has had incredible success helping their employees to stop smoking, eat well, and stay fit. They start with a specific definition of wellness involving five…

Children with irregular bedtimes are more likely to have behavioral difficulties. finds a study in Pediatrics, because it can disrupt natural body rhythms and cause sleep deprivation, undermining brain maturation and the ability to regulate certain conduct. Analysing data from more than 10,000 children in the UK Millennium Cohort Study, the team collected bedtime data at three, five and seven years, as well as incorporating reports from the children's mothers and teachers on behavioral problems. The study found a clear clinical and statistically significant link between bedtimes and…

Kissing helps us size up potential partners and, once in a relationship, may be a way of getting a partner to stick around, according to psychologists in a new paper. The scholars set up an online questionnaire in which over 900 adults answered questions about the importance of kissing in both short-term and long-term relationships.  The survey responses were that women rated kissing as generally more important in relationships than men. Furthermore, men and women who rated themselves as being attractive, or who tended to have more short-term relationships and casual encounters,…

America and the UK are sarcastic nations. Maybe they care too much. Children learn early to recognize sarcasm, especially if they have greater empathy, according to a new study. For children, sarcastic language can be difficult to understand, but they generally begin to recognize sarcasm between ages 6 and 8, especially familiar sarcastic praise such as "Thanks a lot!" and "Nice going!" Some children take much longer to begin to understand sarcasm and the authors of the paper investigated whether differences in the ability of children to empathize with others might help to explain why. The…

A transgenerational study with female rats suggests that exposure to social stress not only impairs a mother's ability to care for her children but can also negatively impact her daughter's ability to provide maternal care to future offspring.  Researchers at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University conducted examined the behavioral and physiological changes in mothers exposed to chronic social stress early in life as a model for postpartum depression and anxiety.  A different male rat was placed in the cage of the first-generation mothers and their newly born…

Eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are primarily cultural but the search is also on for a biological disposition that would confirm it outside primarily middle-class white girls in developed nations. Eating disorders are found in families but no genetic basis for predisposition has been identified.  In a recent paper, researchers identified genetic mutations in two such families affected by eating disorders. Mutations were linked to the same transcriptional pathway using whole-genome sequencing following linkage mapping or by whole-exome sequencing. In the…

High taxes or low taxes, anti-global warming or anti-GMO. You can often figure out how an American votes by asking their stance on a few issues. The government is currently in the middle of a shutdown because neither side remembers what bipartisan means. Yet one things remains the same in both camps; belief superiority, the idea that their views on certain issues are not only correct but also that all other views are inferior. A recent psychology paper examined whether one end of the American political spectrum believes more strongly than the other in the superiority of its principles…

In a world of over-diagnosis, virtually anything can be considered a mental disorder if you are willing to pay someone to give you therapy for it. Afraid of attractive women? You have Venustraphobia. Afraid of GMO foods? The name is in the works.  Body piercings. plastic surgery, eating couch cushions, every odd compulsion has someone saying clinically it's real. Even in the fuzzy world of behavior, being an actual clinical diagnosis requires an evidence basis and most pop diagnosis addictions don't have that; it's just individual weirdness manifesting a compulsion.  What about…

There's little quantifiable value to arts and literature but they hold a great deal more prestige in culture than science does. If you attend a Manhattan dinner party and are unfamiliar with some obscure performance artist, they will be horrified - but they won't know anything at all about adaptive radiation.  A new social psychology paper attempt to change that quantifiability; it says that highbrow literature enhances a set of skills and thought processes fundamental to complex social relationships—and functional societies. Sorry, Fifty Shades of Grey readers, that didn't help you read…

If you want to enjoy your food, stop taking pictures of it and putting them on the Internet, say marketing scholars. They mean you, foodies on Instagram and Pinterest. It could be ruining your appetite by making you feel like you've already experienced eating that food. Marketing experts at Brigham Young and University of Minnesota have concluded that what happens is the over-exposure to food imagery increases people's satiation. Satiation is defined as the drop in enjoyment with repeated consumption. Or, in other words, the fifth bite of cake or the fourth hour of playing a video game are…