Psychology

It's easy to forget that there was once a time when a lot of hype resulted from claims that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed biological differences between political brains - it was open season on the opposition by people who understand biology even less than psychology.  To dredge the water-logged corpse up again, the scholars behind a paper (eventually published years later in PLoS One, with a few modifications) said conservatives were found to be more 'afraid' in a risk-taking task and that is why they like more social authoritarian policies. This didn't make sense to anyone…

A new paper says there may be a biological reason why you are afraid of soap bubbles. An ancient evolutionary part of the brain, say psychologists Dr. Geoff Cole and Professor Arnold Wilkins  from the Centre for Brain Science at the University of Essex, is worried about poisonous animals. If  the sight of aerated chocolate or a lotus flower seed pod bring you out in a cold sweat and make you feel panicky, you could be one of many on the Internet claiming to have one of the most common phobias you have never heard of; trypophobia, the fear of holes. For trypophobes, the sight of…

It's often been said that violent video games such as ‘Mortal Kombat,’ ‘Halo’ and ‘Grand Theft Auto’ trigger teenagers with symptoms of depression or attention deficit disorder to become aggressive bullies or delinquents. Media has power, that is why marketing is a multi-billion dollar industry and cigarette and alcohol companies can't advertise on cartoon shows. It makes sense that long-term exposure to violence could trigger violence, especially in young people with psychological conditions. Yet making sense is not enough. There has to be data, and a new study finds no evidence that…

Time of year and weather conditions don't have much influence on depressive symptoms. Getting depressed when it's cold and dreary outside may not be as common as believed. That's not to say clinically diagnosed seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is not real, the authors note, but instead that people may be overestimating the impact that seasons have on depression in the general population.  The scholars analyzed surveys from a sample of 556 community participants in Iowa and 206 people in western Oregon. Participants completed self-report measures of depressive symptoms multiple times…

Girls are told they are supposed to experience math anxiety and so they claim to on surveys but they are not actually more anxious during math classes and exams, according to a new paper.  Sociology surveys suggest that females are more anxious when it comes to mathematics than their male peers. But education researchers identified a critical limitation of previous papers examining math anxiety: They asked students to describe more generalized perceptions of mathematics anxiety, rather than assessing anxiety during actual math classes and exams. To address this limitation, the…

 Around the world, more than two billion tons of trash is generated each year. America leads the world in accurate reporting of trash levels and therefore has the distinction of throwing away more than any other country. Understanding why consumers throw recyclable products into the garbage instead of recycling them could help companies and public policy makers find novel ways to encourage consumers to step up their recycling efforts.  A paper in the Journal of Consumer Research examines recycling habits and finds that consumers are more likely to toss a dented can or a chopped-up…

'Family annihilators', where the male parent murders the family, are most prevalent in August. That doesn't mean much, it is too rare a crime to have a lot of data and when there are 12 months in the year, one month is going to be first, but the first ever study of British ‘family annihilators’ uses that and similar facts over three decades of cases to create four new types of 'annihilator'. Using newspaper archives to analyze three decades of family annihilation, from 1980 to 2012, the paper’s authors note shared characteristics of the killers and then catalog four different types.…

People have always distrusted science, just like people have always been afraid of the supernatural (unless it promises a spiritual pot of gold at the end of your particular rainbow) but the naturalistic fallacy - that natural is somehow good and unnatural is somehow bad - is a recent invention. It used to be that the future was good. Like in modern movies, where virtually no heroic scientists exist any more and technology is evil, a large subset of people have instead begun to believe scientists are simply unethical and that the future is bleak. It may not be naturalism itself that is the…

What group has above average interest in systems and scores below average in empathy? If you answered autistic people, you are correct. If you answered girls with anorexia, also correct. Girls with anorexia nervosa show a mild echo of the characteristics of autism, suggests new research. At first glance, anorexia and autism seem very different, but they both share certain features, such as rigid attitudes and behaviours, a tendency to be very self-focussed, and a fascination with detail. Both conditions also share similar alterations in structure and function of brain regions involved in…

Surveys show that people have less empathy for battered human adults than they do dogs, according to a paper at the American Sociological Association. Jack Levin  and Arnold Arluke, sociology professors at Northeastern University, used the opinions of 240 men and women, most of whom were white and between the ages of 18-25 (college students), at a large northeastern university (guess which one) who randomly received one of four fictional news articles about; the beating of a one-year-old child, an adult in his thirties, a puppy, or a 6-year-old dog. The stories were identical except for…