Psychology
It sounds as suspect as every other lie detector test, but psychologists have used thermography, a technique based on determining body temperature, to determine if someone is telling the truth.
They say a person telling a lie has been shown to undergo a "Pinocchio effect" - their nose changes. But it does not grow, instead they can detect an increase in the temperature around the nose and in the orbital muscle in the inner corner of the eye. Plus, they say when people exert a considerable mental effort the face temperature drops - and the opposite happens during an anxiety attack. …
If you can't afford heat during the ongoing economic malaise, there is some good news; psychology surveys show that students who think about happier times are warmer.
The results, published in Emotion, used college students in China and the Netherlands to investigate the effects of nostalgic feelings on reaction to cold and the perception of warmth.
The first project asked participants to keep an account of their nostalgic feelings over 30 days and the results showed they felt more nostalgic on colder days. The second project put participants in one of three rooms: cold (20˚C),…
When people witness a hurtful action they make a moral determination based on whether it is intentional or accidental instantly, according to a new paper.
The paper says the brain is hard-wired to recognize when another person is being intentionally harmed. It also provides new insights into how such recognition is connected with emotion and morality, according to lead author Jean Decety, Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at UChicago.
The researchers studied adults who watched videos of people who suffered accidental harm (such as being hit with a golf club) and intentional harm (such as…
Most people learn when to be afraid and when things are not as bad as they might have once seemed but some new research on autism shows that children with the diagnosis don't easily let go of old, outdated fears and that this rigid fearfulness is linked to the severity of classic symptoms of autism, such as repeated movements and resistance to change.
The new research highlights the need to help children make emotional transitions – particularly when dealing with their fears.
In the study, psychologists recruited 30 children diagnosed with autism and 29 without to participate in an…
Can advertising make kids fat?
Childhood obesity rates have tripled in the past 30 years and food marketing has been implicated as one factor contributing to this trend. A week after the Hostess company, makers of Twinkies, went bankrupt, a member of Congress tried to raise unemployment even more and kill the entire industry by proposing elimination of marketing as a legitimate expense.
Every year, companies spend more than $10 billion in the US marketing their food and beverages to children and 98% of the food products advertised to children on television are high in fat, sugar,…
A large number of friends on Facebook has been linked to higher levels of stress, according to surveys compiled by the University of Edinburgh Business School which found that the more groups of people in someone's Facebook friends, the greater potential to cause offense. No surprise, adding employers or parents resulted in the greatest increase in anxiety.
The stress happens when a user posts something on Facebook that is unacceptable to some of their online 'friends'. It could be behavior, such as swearing, recklessness, drinking and smoking, or even politics. The more people on a…
Hank |
The moon is both easy and tough to figure out. Of the many things Galileo got wrong, the moon was the biggest, despite it being studied for millenia by then, unless you think we only have one tide per day. And last year some people wanted to believe an earthquake in Japan was caused by a 'Supermoon', where our friend Luna was slightly closer to us.
Animals howl at the moon, drunken hillbillies howl at the moon - though those are not limited to the full moon or any moon at all. Yet the full moon issue is so well known it even gets a monster attributed to it. Writers as far back as Ovid…
vongehr |
Car accidents are the number one killer of teenagers in America! There is something that should have been done a long time ago and that would help all drivers and of course their "victims". We don’t do it, because people are afraid to doubt their own agency and rationality. Benjamin Libet’s research is not difficult but people refuse to accept the science. The pet assumption in this case? That you are consciously aware of what you are doing at the time you are doing it, which you* are not! Libet’s research [1, 2] quantified how large the problem is, and it…
Hank |
Marriage counseling is so 20th century. The 21st century may belong to relationship neuroinformaticians because they can create a mathematical model for efficient communication in your love life.
The dynamics of love can look like a sine wave, with smooth, repetitive highs and lows. That's probably not too bad. We certainly try for a flat line but that is difficult to achieve. What you want to avoid is having your other half begin to vibrate weirdly. When that happens, couples oscillate without any harmony, the waves go out of control and soon you are forced to…
Suicidal doctors have excellent access to health care but appear to be under-treated for mental health problems, according to a new University of Michigan analysis.
More physicians than non-physicians in their analysis had known mental health problems prior to suicide but that didn't translate into a higher rate of antidepressant use. Major depression is a known risk factor for suicide, particularly for female physicians.
Stigma, lack of confidentiality, and desire to self-treat may explain why physicians don't seek formal treatment for mental health problems, says lead author…