Psychology
Spontaneous thoughts, intuitions, quick impressions, we all have random thoughts popping into our minds on a daily basis and sometimes they even pop out of our mouths.
What to make of unplanned, spur-of-the-moment thoughts? If you know bad psychologists, you know they can't attend a Christmas party without declaring the entire room as having Asperger's based on snap judgments, but how do we view ourselves? Do we view spontaneous thoughts as coincidental wanderings of a restless mind, or as revealing meaningful insight?
Marketing scholars writing in Journal of Experimental Psychology:…
Do you have a soul?
Even if you do, psychologists say, free will is a conscious choice.
This is nothing new. Religious people of 400 B.C. debunked atomic determinism because they believed in free will, just like they debunked genetic determinism of the early 20th century. To scholars, there has always been a difference between mind and soul but an article in Consciousness and Cognition rehashes ancient metaphysical arguments and use results from Amazon Mechanical Turk volunteers to do so, which means it is not a representative sample.
We've seen this dichotomy in action so…
If we care about saving lives, we'd be better off funding more mental health services than we are taxing and penalizing cigarettes companies in order to subsidize the industry that has been built to market against cigarettes.
Serious mental illnesses reduce life expectancy by 10-20 years, worse than that for heavy smoking.
Why isn't mental health the same public health priority? Likely because there is no well-funded public relations machine that has convinced taxpayers the job will not be done until zero people are allowed to smoke. 1 in 4 people in the UK will experience some kind of mental…
Mu Delta Kappa is a key
brain receptor targets for opiates
because the mu opioid receptor is the primary target for morphine and endogenous opioids like endorphin. The delta opioid receptor shows the highest affinity for endogenous enkephalins. The kappa opioid receptor (KOR) is very interesting, but the least understood of the opiate receptor family.
The mu opioid receptor has received the most attention in alcoholism research. Naltrexone, a drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of alcoholism, acts by blocking opiate action at brain receptors and is most…
She will tell you it doesn't matter. But it does, men. It does.
Up to a third of all men have had premature ejaculation - it's all good for them, but a University of Zurich sex researcher says curtailed sexual intercourse without climaxing can be more frustrating for women. Or less. It depends. Women are complicated that way..
Premature ejaculation in men can causes increased psychological strain and stress in women, according to the survey conducted by Andrea Burri, a clinical psychologist at the University of Zurich, but if men are focused too heavily on controlling ejaculation, they…
Hank |
Spite certainly involves some strange behavior.
But if someone looks like they are trying to rush you, and you slow down, is that really spite? Is a Muslim terrorist doing a suicide bombing engaged in spite?
Not every Pyhrric victory is spite.
David Marcus, a Washington State University professor of psychology, says spite has been ignored by social, personality and clinical psychologists but even that is misunderstanding basic definitions. Clearly psychologists who have used surveys and weak observational methodologies to make all kinds of bizarre claims (liberals are less afraid of change,…
In recent court cases involving affirmative action for university admissions, the obvious question became 'when should it ever end?' and how is that not discrimination? Supporters of race-based admissions argued that ending discrimination would mean favoritism.
Favoritism is something less understood than as a form of discrimination, the oft-repeated belief is that discrimination is a hostile act, but a new paper in American Psychologist argues it is even worse than believed. It's a review of other psychology papers, which are overrun with stereotype threats and Implicit Association…
The vast majority of so-called "super-frequent user" patients who seek care in the Emergency Department - a patient is considered a super-frequent user if they visit the emergency room at least 10 times a year - have a substance abuse addiction, according to a Henry Ford Hospital analysis.
ER physicians have long said that patients who frequent the ER for their care have a substance abuse addiction but few studies have actually measured the rate of addiction of these patients.
The findings presented Saturday at the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) annual meeting…
We're all going to die, that is nature's way of telling us to get the hint. But it is the purpose of science and medicine to defy nature. Death is going to be standing at the door and doctors have taken an oath to block the way.
But what about when it's unavoidable and quality of death becomes more important than quality of life? That's a psychology issue.
A paper in Journal of Pain and Symptom Management analyzes the overall 'quality of death' of cancer patients who die in an urban Canadian setting with ready access to palliative care was found to be good to excellent in the large majority…
If you think young adults regard Twitter and other social media as legitimate news sources, think again - they may be letting you think that, but even then they may be doing it ironically.
Instead, like most people on Twitter, they retweet messages they like and don't actually read any of the links, just like most people. And young people know that anyone can start a Twitter account and post bogus information. They know politicians do it, they know companies do it, they know anarchists do it.
Fan of science and critic of wasted science funding Senator Tom Coburn won't like this…