Psychology
Psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES) are seizures that resemble epilepsy but are instead a psychological condition. It is not the result of abnormal brain electrical activity.
Because it looks like epilepsy, but isn't, it can be made worse by anti-epileptic medications. Diagnoses is subjective so there are claims that up to 20 percent of civilians and as many as 25 percent of veterans diagnosed as having epilepsy actually have PNES.
A clinical trial found a reduction in seizures and improvement in related symptoms, including depression and anxiety, in patients with psychogenic…
Orgasms aren’t just good for your sexual relationship, they may also promote good communication, according to a paper in Communication Monographs.
In the aftermath of having experienced an orgasm, people are more likely to share important information with their partners. And, that communication is likely to be positive.
Spies always knew this, of course. The USSR recruited the most beautiful women in Romania during the Cold War because they knew if they could seduce someone important, information would flow. Oxytocin, a “pro-social” hormone, floods a person’s brain immediately after…
There can't be many rich fat people because poor physical health and financial health are driven by the same underlying psychological factors, according to Lamar Pierce, PhD, associate professor of strategy at Washington University in St. Louis, and PhD-candidate Timothy Gubler.
Of course, the argument is academic. Galileo once declared that, despite what sailors and the natural world knows, tides only happened once per day and the moon had no effect. He clearly needed to get out of the library. We know that the moon impacts the tides and we know that plenty of poor people are in fine…
Can addiction be predicted? That's always been the goal and conjecture has focused on everything from family to environment. But there are just as many fails as wins. A child who grew up in a house with smokers is only correlated to smoking if they felt like their parents were positive role models, for example, so inheritance claims are spotty.
That people at increased risk for developing addiction share many of the same neurobiological signatures of people who have already developed addiction is not a surprise, as individuals with family members who have struggled with addiction are over-…
Jill Abramson was recently ousted from her position as the executive editor of The New York Times. Her defenders said it was because of her gender (yet she got the job) and her demand for more compensation (she was paid more than her predecessor and the New York Times is hemorrhaging money) while critics called her polarizing and brusque. Some used the term 'pushy' which was codespeak for sexism, it was said.
She was not the first difficult person to end up running a newsroom and the response her firing got from subordinates and other media leaders likely surprised her - difficult people…
Surveys show that managers hold more negative attitudes to private use of social media at work - they should know what a time waster it is, they use it more than subordinates.
11,000 Norwegian employees participated in a study called 'Predictors of Use of Social Network Sites at Work'.
"It is very interesting that top executives, who are negative to private web-surfing during working hours, are the ones who surf the most for private purposes when at work," says Dr. Cecilie Schou Andreassen at the University of Bergen Department of Psychosocial Science, who suggests that this can be…
If your child spends their evening beating up hookers in Grand Theft Auto, there is a silver lining - they are less likely to actually beat up hookers in real life. At least surveys by humanities scholars say so.
This is good knowledge. There has long been a fear that advertising of McDonald's Happy Meals and cigarettes and violence in media might actually lead to people buying more junk food or smoking or being violent, but the new study led by Matthew Grizzard, PhD, assistant professor in the University at Buffalo Department of Communication, and co-authored by researchers at Michigan State…
The sign of a bad gambler is the belief that they are on a winning streak, that luck is just going their way.
Gambling is math and luck. If you can afford to keep doubling, you will win. And as long as you stop after you win, you can never lose. That is why casinos have table minimums and maximums, to prevent winning.
But humans have a well-documented tendency to see instead winning and losing streaks in situations that, in fact, are random. Psychologists disagree about whether this "hot-hand bias" is a cultural artifact picked up in childhood or a predisposition deeply ingrained…
A new form of neurotransmission influences the long-lasting memory created by addictive drugs, like cocaine and opioids, and the subsequent craving for these drugs of abuse, according to a recent study.
Loss of this type of neurotransmission creates changes in brains cells that resemble the changes caused by drug addiction so targeting it might lead to new therapies for treating drug addiction.
The new form of neurotransmission involves proteins called acid-sensitive ion channels (ASICs), which have previously been shown to promote learning and memory, and which are abundant in a part of the…
In social psychology, it's no surprise to see conflicting, counter-intuitive results. That's possible because studies are primarily based on surveys. So one psychologist will claim conservatives are more obedient to leadership, yet in practice conservatives tend to be anti-leadership. In American culture, it tends to be liberals who are more social authoritarian and rely on government to control behavior.
That is the problem with trying to map simple politics to actual underlying psychological science. Liberals want to ban guns and conservatives want to ban gay marriage makes for an easy…