Psychology

Long hours, no money - medical residents have a hard job and it can wear them down. But topping the list are residents in anesthesiology training programs, reports a surve in the July issue of Anesthesia&Analgesia. The findings raise concerns that, "In addition to effects on the health of anesthesiology trainees, burnout and depression may also affect patient care and safety," write Dr Gildasio S. de Oliveira, Jr, and colleagues of Northwestern University, Chicago. The survey was performed among U.S. anesthesiology residents nationwide. Confidential responses from 1,508 residents were…

Goals need to be flexible, according to a new paper.  People who set a goal of losing between 2 and 4 pounds will still lose an average of 3 lbs. while a person who targets 3 lbs. specifically has less chance of success.  Consumers often have a choice about the types of goals they want to set for themselves, and they may want to repeat various goals over time. For example, consumers often reengage goals such as losing weight, saving money, or improving their exercise or sports performance. In one study, consumers in a weight loss program set either high-low range goals or…

If you watch musicals from the 1950s or teen comedies from the 1990s, you find a lot of movies with different titles but the themes and plotlines barely change; two friends competing for a girl in the former or some teen wants to improve another teen, who becomes really popular, in the latter. It's not that Hollywood lacks imagination, we are naturally drawn toward a specific set of universal narratives within cultural products, says a new paper. We have evolved to like stories about Superman saving strangers or Brad Pitt fighting zombies.  It's evolutionary consumerism, says…

Overprecision, excessive confidence in the accuracy of our knowledge, can have profound consequences in various ways, making people intolerant of dissenting views,  leading physicians to gravitate too quickly to a diagnosis or inflating investors' valuation of their investments. Overprecision is a common form of overconfidence driven, at least in part, by excessive certainty in the accuracy of our judgments, say business scholars. A new paper in Psychological Science says that the more confident participants were about their estimates of an uncertain quantity, the less they adjusted…

Combat troops must minimize the 'human-ness' of their enemies in order to kill them, they can't be effective fighters if they're distracted by feelings of empathy for opponents. But if the opponent is dehumanized, which entails seeing them as disgusting animals, the possibility for war crimes is greater, note psychologists writing in NeuroImage. Indifference to the enemy, rather than loathing, may help prevent war crimes and provide troops with a better path back to healthy civilian lives, they propose. Their hypothesis is based on new work showing how the brain operates when people…

Studies have shown that religious people are actually helped by faith in stressful situations. Oxford University psychologists suggest atheists are also helped by belief during times of crisis; the explanatory and revealing power of science increases in the face of stress or anxiety, they have found. The social psychologists argue that a 'belief in science' may help non-religious people deal with adversity by offering similar comfort and reassurance that religious people get from spirituality. "We found that being in a more stressful or anxiety-inducing situation increased participants' "…

Fibromyalgia affects up to 2% of the U.S. population, mostly older women. What is it? No one really knows, it is a blanket term for symptoms like widespread pain, unexplained fatigue, headaches, and sleep disturbances. What causes it? No one knows but self-reported results suggest patients have increased sensitivity to a range of stimuli and up to 92% say weather conditions exacerbate their symptoms.  Cross off that last one, say Dutch psychologists in Arthritis Care&Research. Temperature, sunshine, and precipitation have no impact on fibromyalgia symptoms in female patients.…

Researchers behind a new paper say women's brains appear to be hard-wired to respond to the cries of a hungry infant. They asked men and women to let their minds wander, then played a recording of white noise interspersed with the sounds of an infant crying. Brain scans showed that, in the women, patterns of brain activity abruptly switched to an attentive mode when they heard the infant cries, whereas the men's brains remained in the resting state. “Previous studies have shown that, on an emotional level, men and women respond differently to the sound of an infant crying,” said psychologist…

Psychology students, male and female, lie about their sexual behavior to match the cultural expectations of how they perceive other students believe men or women should act – even though they wouldn't distort other gender-related behaviors, a new paper has concluded. 293 General Psychology students attending a regional campus of a major Midwestern university in the United States, ages 18 to 25, completed a questionnaire that asked how often they engaged in 124 different behaviors (from never to a few times a day). People in a previous study had identified all the behaviors to be typical of…

Dr. Daniel Freeman, professor of clinical psychology at Oxford, has good news if you believe women are more nuts than men: there is a 40% chance you are right. We know that discussing biological differences between men and women is taboo - men and women are no different in any physical way, as former Harvard President Larry Summers will rush to agree these days. But what about in psychological ways?   Unlike Ivy League presidents, a professor has tenure and can't be chased out of his job by an angry mob of progressives, so Freeman wrote a book, “The Stressed Sex: Uncovering the Truth…