Psychology
They say money can't buy happiness. Can genetics?
Some people seem to be happy no matter what. If you visit many places in Africa, even when the existence may seem hard to Europeans or Americans, a lot of people are quite happy.
The key could be genetics say....economists.
Why not economists? We let sociologists and anthropologists make all kinds of claims and they don't understand statistics anywhere near as well as the economists from the University of Warwick Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy.
The scholars wanted to find out why certain countries top the world…
It's a common trope among Hollywood celebrities; media is alarmed at weight gain, celebrity says they are proud of their body, they feel better than ever, people clap, celebrity appears two months later and lost 25 lbs. and is on magazine covers with diet tips and talking about how much better they feel.
Celebrities are externally driven and they add external motivations to boost their willpower, what about people who can't afford personal chefs and trainers? What about regular people who are already demoralized? An intervention program aimed at helping obese women maintain their weight also…
Cigarette smokers are more likely to commit suicide than people who don't smoke. People with psychiatric disorders have higher suicide rates and tend to smoke, so the connection is so simple an epidemiologist could make it.
But psychiatrists now say that smoking itself may increase suicide risk and that bans and higher taxes on smoking cause suicide rates to drop.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that in 2010, nearly 40,000 people killed themselves in the US and every death that occurs in the United States is recorded in a database managed by the National Center for…
A new research paper analyzed how cooperative attitudes evolve in different age ranges.
The experiment was presented as a game via a web interface developed by researchers at the Instituto BIFI of the Universidad de Zaragoza and was carried out using 168 subjects between 10 and 87 years of age who had been chosen at random during Festival DAU Barcelona de Juegos de Mesa, held in Barcelona's "Fábrica de Creación Fabra i Coats" in December of 2012.
The team installed a portable laboratory with a dozen computers and took volunteers from among the Festival's visitors until a statistically…
The University of Manchester's National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Homicide by People with Mental Illness found that mental health patients are at their highest risk of suicide in the first two weeks after leaving hospital.
Around 3,225 patients died by suicide in the UK within the first three months of their discharge from hospital – 18% of all patient suicides between 2002-2012 - and 526 patients died within the first week, the peak time of risk in England, Northern Ireland and Scotland. In Wales, it is the first two weeks after leaving the hospital.
The Inquiry data was…
Teenage boys are often considered aloof and distant by parents and driven by desire by teenage girls, but they are not so simple, say scholars at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.
Teenage boys desire intimacy and sex in the context of a meaningful relationship and value trust in their partnerships, providing a contradictory snapshot of masculine values in adolescence.
The results were derived from discussion with 33 males who ranged from 14 to 16 years of age, to learn more about how their romantic and sexual relationships developed, progressed, and ended. The…
In the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-5, the age of onset criterion for
attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
was changed from 7, where it was placed in DSM-IV, to 12.
The writers said they changed the age to reflect the importance of clinical presentation during childhood for accurate diagnosis, while also acknowledging the difficulties in establishing precise childhood onset retrospectively. A recent paper in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry says it has validated that decision.
Using data from a…
Neonaticide and infanticide are horrible crimes to most people but in psychology it's all relative.
Dr. Helen Gavin, a psychologist at the University of Huddersfield, and Dr. Theresa Porter, a clinical psychologist based at a hospital in Connecticut, think that such murderers are getting a bad rap in culture, so they wrote "Infanticide and Neonaticide: A Review of 40 Years of Research Literature on Incidence and Causes" for Trauma, Violence and Abuse to rationalize that women who kill their babies – either within 24 hours of birth (neonaticide) – or at a later stage (…
No one worries about children like parents, and having a child with a pacemaker is even more worrisome. But kids who are worried over too much develop a low sense of self-competence which can contribute to decreased quality of life, according to a paper in Journal of Developmental&Behavioral Pediatric.
The authors suggest that young patients with pacemakers might benefit from interventions to help them feel more confident in social interactions and other areas of life. The pacemaker doesn't need to define them, and that has to start with how their families treat them.
The researchers…
Tofu is prized by vegetarians as an alternate source of protein, if they don't mind highly processed food that will make men sterile.
But Dr. Oz, the Cornell Food and Brand Lab and others swear by it. Yet Tofu is not a food fad for Millennial women because of any marketing claims about health benefits, they just want dishes that are quick, easy to cook and that don't have calories.
"They basically seem to care less about any health benefits of Tofu," said lead Cornell researcher Brian Wansink, "They eat it to look good and because it's quick to cook and it's filling."
The results…