Psychology
There are a number of government-funded campaigns to promote more participation in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields, with the promise that a PhD means basic discovery and improving the human condition.
Yet what is left out of expensive marketing efforts is that there are now 6 PhDs for every job in academia - just because more people want to work at a university does not mean the government will increase funding to pay for it. Instead of selling STEM careers to students, the National Science Foundation would be doing a greater service by showing students that…
Abortion has been federal law in America for over 40 years, yet every election cycle politicians in Democratic Congressional districts campaign on the issue - and sociologists write about this common medical procedure. How common? So common it happens more often than miscarriages, according to a new paper.
Surveys are not telling us much new at this point but a sociologist writing in Sociological Science analyzes a survey and finds that anti-abortion people are less likely to hear about the abortions women they know have had than are pro-abortion Americans.
That makes obvious sense.…
Fantasizing about sex with two women is common but fantasizing about being urinated on - called a golden shower - is not.
That's just one of the findings from a research project on sexual deviation undertaken by scholars at Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal and Institut Philippe-Pinel de Montréal.
Deviant sexual fantasies are addressed in numerous speculations and conjectures by psychologists but atypical fantasies (paraphilias) are so subjective they aren't really defined. The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) refers to "…
When Australian singer and TV personality Mark Holden appeared as a clown recently on Channel 7’s "Dancing with the Stars", his supposedly “bizarre” behavior sparked furious debate and complaints to the network, demonstrating the problematic nature of the clown figure today.
The clown has a long history, ranging from the court clowns of ancient Egypt and imperial China, and trickster figures of Native American cultures, through the “sanctioned fool” of Renaissance drama and zanni of the commedia dell arte, to mainstay of the circus in the 19th century.
Due to the popularity of circus and…
A new psychology paper says people feel sad up to 240 times longer than they do ashamed, surprised, irritated or even bored.
The reason may be because sadness often goes hand in hand with events of greater impact such as death or accidents and so we need more time to mull over and cope with what happened to fully comprehend it, say Philippe Verduyn and Saskia Lavrijsen of the University of Leuven in Belgium, who asked 233 high school students to recollect recent emotional episodes and report their duration. The participants also had to answer questions about the strategies they use to…
Due to increased awareness of suicide and military life, there has been concern military lifestyle may be causing more suicides. A new study instead finds that new soldiers are twice as likely to have three or more psychological disorders, or comorbidity, prior to enlisting as civilians.
They may regard the military as a solution to their problems.
One recent study found that new soldiers and matched civilians are about equally likely to have experienced one major episode of mental illness in their lifetime (38.7 percent of new soldiers and 36.5 percent of civilians) but that…
Hank |
Psychology has endured a lot of black eyes in recent years. Numerous papers have used arbitrary interpretations of brain scans, surveys of college students and unreal levels of social priming, implicit association and motivated reasoning. It has become woo central, embracing everything from the idea that voting Republican is an adaptive function to claims that people can predict the future
High-profile scandals like Kanazawa, Hauser and Stapel make lesser-known social science scholars want to stay hidden in the shadows.
But every time I have written about the flaws in…
Credit: The Conversation
By Jordan Gaines Lewis, Penn State College of Medicine
If you’ve ever applied for a job, you know how hard it is to write the perfect cover letter that will make you stand out above all the other applicants. It’s a competitive job market, and more often than not, career seekers find themselves face-to-face with blank computer screens in an attempt to pen that one short masterpiece.
Students also face this overwhelming task to land a spot in college, doling out, on average, nine applications each. And in order to afford the inevitable financial burdens, many also toil…
We have over the years read of paintings by chimpanzees, but
could they be art critics also?
A recent article has appeared, outlining
evidence that many cognitive tasks the we take to be a function of our human
intelligence can be performed just as well (or even better) by chimpanzees. Here are links to two versions of the
article:
Short version: In
a battle of brains, chimpanzees match human toddlers | Genetic Literacy
Project
Full version: BBC
– Earth – Is your toddler really smarter than a
chimpanzee?
Both versions ask the question “could a chimpanzee
distinguish a…
Playing violent video games in 3-D makes everything seem more real – and in a new study researchers found that people who played violent video games in 3-D showed more evidence of anger afterward than people who played games on 2-D systems.
That may have troubling consequences for young players, according to an upcoming paper in Psychology of Popular Media Culture.
The higher anger in 3-D players was connected to the fact that, compared to 2-D players, they were more likely to feel they were "immersed in the game," said Brad Bushman, co-author of the study and professor of…