Psychology

There's no awareness issue in climate change - almost no one on the planet hasn't heard of it or lacks an opinion. 62% of Americans believe global warming is happening - which means 38% do not. Like evolution or anti-science beliefs about genetic modification and vaccines and autism, the majority may fall along particular cultural lines but acceptance is still a problem that defies easy categorization and stereotypes. Yet framing and deficit thinking have all been tried, and they have made the problem worse. Instead of leading to more science acceptance, opinion on the climate now goes up and…

If you are physically strong, social science scholars believe they can predict whether or not you are more conservative than other men. This might seem obvious. Fitness takes a lot of individual initiative, the government can do all of the outreach programs and legislate all of the soda cups they want, but it won't make people exercise. Super-fit people have to be conservative when it comes to their own exercise, even if they are liberal about money.  Michael Bang Petersen, associate professor in the Department of Political Science and Government at Aarhus University, and evolutionary…

The Rubber Hand illusion never fails to teach us new things - not just about neuroscience, but also about culture. If you are not familiar with the Rubber Hand illusion, it shows that the combination of seeing a touch on a rubber hand and feeing a touch on your own creates the illusion that the fake hand is now part of your body. In a new paper, scholars did that; they asked participants to look at a fake hand being touched, while at the same time the experimenter touched the participants' own hand, hidden out of view. But there was a twist. The paper authors were testing whether people can…

Social and evolutionary psychology studies get a large share of media attention despite being primarily based on surveys of psychology undergraduate students. It was only a matter of time before others mimicked that process to add their own claims of scientific validity - and so Burger King has taken its war with McDonald's to a new level with a study finding that men who prefer grilled burgers are considered more attractive than men who like 'em fried. It looks legitimate enough to me, at least if we are to believe social psychology and evolutionary psychology studies showing that liberals…

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is distancing itself from the the American Psychiatric Association and its upcoming Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). While they acknowledge that the goal of DSM "is to provide a common language for describing psychopathology" they are no longer convinced that approach has value if we are going to solve 21st century cognitive science problems.  It is, paraphrasing the statement  of Thomas R. Insel, M.D., Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, more of a dictionary than a manual.  He uses…

School violence has always been an important social issue world-wide because it poses a significant threat to the health, achievement, and well-being of students. In recent times and with 24-hour media (and with flawed social media avalanches of information, including a lot that is incorrect, as shown in dangerous finger-pointing at a student in the recent Boston bombings, whose dead body was recently recovered) the most highly-publicized incidents involve serious physical violence, but less serious forms of physical aggression and psychological violence (harassment, bullying, etc.) have…

A paper in Journal of Affective Disorders found that belief in God was correlated to improved outcomes for those receiving short-term treatment for psychiatric illness. Dr. David H. Rosmarin, McLean Hospital clinician and instructor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, examined individuals at the Behavioral Health Partial Hospital program at McLean in an effort to investigate the relationship between patients' level of belief in God, expectations for treatment and actual treatment outcomes. The study looked at 159 patients, recruited over a one-year period. Each…

In a recent study, an area of the brain that initiates behavioral changes had greater activation in smokers who watched anti-smoking ads with strong arguments than ads with clever tricks like loud sounds and unexpected twists - and those smokers had significantly less nicotine metabolites in their urine when tested a month after viewing those ads. In a study of 71 non-treatment-seeking smokers recruited from the Philadelphia area, the team led by Daniel D. Langleben, M.D., a psychiatrist in the Center for Studies of Addiction at Penn Medicine, identified key brain regions engaged in the…

Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States. Statistics show that 38 percent of suicidal adults and 90 percent of youths had visited their primary care physicians in the 12 months prior to committing suicide.   An evidence review finds that while there are screening tools to help physicians identify adults at risk for suicide, there's no evidence that using these screening tools in primary care will actually prevent suicides. In adolescents, there are no proven primary care-relevant screening tools to identify suicide risk.   The U.S. Preventive Services Task…

Humans navigate complex social situations in deciding who to befriend or to abandon - a "frenemy" is someone who is both friend and enemy while the old military saying is that 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend'. Animal social networks also use sophistication in judging social configurations and a new paper in Animal Behaviour applied a long-standing theory in social psychology called "structural balance."   Structural balance theory considers the positive or negative ties between three individuals, or triads, and suggests that "the friend of my enemy is my enemy" triangle is more…