Psychology
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“Take your ear off for me, please,” Rosie Seelaus says to Randy James, who is sitting on a black exam chair in a special room designed for viewing colours in the Craniofacial Center on the Near West Side of Chicago.
He reaches up and detaches his right ear, which she created for him out of silicone seven years before. The ear is shabby, stained from skin oil and mottled by daily use. Viewed under various lights in the neutral, grey-walled room – daylight, incandescent, fluorescent – it remains a pasty beige.
James is a doctor with the Department of Veterans Affairs in Las Vegas – the fierce…
There are more men in hard science and engineering and there are a variety of explanations for why, everything from the sexism notion, promoted by those in the social sciences, to the idea that the physical sciences and engineering don't seem directly related to helping people, which is an explanation offered by women who choose a life science or medicine. One odd notion, typified by prominent friend of Obama Dr. Larry Summers while he was at Harvard, was that women were not as good at math.
Tests added evidence to that idea but while No Child Left Behind was in force, its focus on math led…
Another shooting, this time in a Charleston church, and another link to psychiatric drugs. Psychological disturbances caused by psychotropic drug treatment are a neglected problem, say therapists in a recent article.
Up to 70% of patients with psychosis treated with antiserotoninergic second-generation antipsychotics (SGAs; clozapine, olanzapine and risperidone) develop secondary obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OCS) or secondary obsessive-compulsive disorder (s-OCD), they write. The experts suggest two pharmacological strategies to treat s-OCD: a combination of antiserotoninergic SGAs…
Political partisanship is rooted in affective, physiological processes that cause partisans to toe the party line on policies and issues, regardless of policy content, according to a new paper.
Social psychologists have said that party identifiers are more inclined to agree with policy proposals that are proposed by their own party, independent of the content of the proposal. If the same proposal is issued by a competing party, they will be inclined to respond negatively to it. In other words, liberals and conservatives don't care about what is best for society, it has to be filtered through…
A study of parental age and autism risk including
5.7 million children in five countries
found increased autism rates among the children of teen moms and among children whose parents have relatively large gaps between their ages. It also confirmed that older parents are at higher risk of having children with autism.
Though previous studies identified a link between advancing parental age and autism risk, many aspects of the association remained unclear. For example, some studies found increased risk with older dads but not moms. The goal of the new study was to determine whether…
A psychologist and an English professor have written a review of studies and concluded that pigs perform as well as or better than dogs on some tests of behavioral and cognitive sophistication, and they compare favorably to chimpanzees.
The review by Emory psychologist Dr. Lori Marino and visiting English Professor Christina M. Colvin, seeks to extrapolate results to deduce what we do and do not know about pigs. The areas they discuss include cognition, emotion, self-awareness, personality and social complexity.
They conclude that “pigs possess complex ethological traits similar … to…
It is believed by the social sciences that all people have bias - and a "bias blind spot," meaning that they are less likely to detect bias in themselves than others.
If so, how blind are we to our own actual degree of bias, and how many of us think we are less biased than others?
A new paper outlines a tool to detect gaps, a kind of implicit association test but for bias blind spots rather than making you feel racist, and it reveals that believing that you are less biased than your peers has detrimental consequences on judgments and behaviors, such as accurately judging whether advice is…
Honest behavior is much like sticking to a diet - you have to be ready for temptation and consider the long-term consequences.
A recent paper says it is the first study to test how the two separate factors of identifying an ethical conflict and preemptively exercising self-control interact in shaping ethical decision-making.
In a series of experiments that included common ethical dilemmas, such as calling in sick to work and negotiating a home sale, the researchers found that two factors together promoted ethical behavior: Participants who identified a potential ethical dilemma as…
Scientists are beginning to unwrap the biology behind why some people are more prone to major depression and other psychiatric disorders than others when experiencing stressful life events.
The researchers found that cellular activity in response to stress hormone receptor activation differs from individual to individual.
The study, led by Janine Arloth, Ryan Bogdan, and Elisabeth Binder at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Germany, also shows that the genetic variations underlying this difference in stress response correlate with dysfunction in the amygdala, a brain region that is…
The impact of scary TV on children's wellbeing has been overstated, according to a new paper. While research has shown that a small minority of children can have extreme reactions to a scary program, overall there is very little sign of increased anxiety, fear, sadness or sleep problems.
Instead, it is probably the case that kids are a lot more resilient than modern parenting (and psychology) thinks.
The meta-analysis of work into the topic carried out over the past 25 years found that children spend a lot of time watching TV - in the UK, 4-9-year-olds watch an average of 17 hours…