Psychology
Autism diagnoses have gone up a lot in the last generation. It was to the 2000s what ADD diagnoses were to the 1990s.
And so people have rushed to attribute blame. Vaccines, GMOs, even BPA. If someone is selling alternative medicine, food or culture they have found a way to link their competition to autism. And then there is the idea that it is simply better diagnoses. And the charge that it has been over-diagnosed.
New diagnosis guidelines by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) have therapists and some families in a panic, because in an effort to be more scientific and less…
A new method for the treatment of phantom limb pain after an amputation has been initially tested on a patient who has suffered from severe phantom limb pain for 48 years. The case study shows a drastic reduction of pain.
It is common for people who lose an arm or a leg to experience phantom sensations, as if the missing limb were still there. 70 percent of amputees experience pain in the amputated limb despite the fact that it no longer exists. Obviously that can be frustrating. Phantom limb pain can become a deteriorating condition that reduces the quality of life considerably, but how do…
Hank |
Do you think pharmaceutical companies are creating problems that don't exist in order to keep selling drugs to an increasingly over-medicated population? Do you think scientists are unethical if they work at a corporation like DuPont or in nuclear science, rather than being funded by the government?
Such beliefs have become so increasingly mainstream among a particular political and cultural demographic that we can quite easily make lots of accurate determinations about them, the same way we can infer things about someone if they don't buy into global warming.
Yet kids are the ones most…
Eating is a biological necessity that became a communal activity. If you have gotten used to eating popcorn at the movies with your family, you either have to avoid going to the movies or have the willpower to say no to the popcorn.
Not everyone can do it. The presence of friends, late night cravings or alcohol can make dieting difficult too. Research led by University of Birmingham sport and exercise scholar Heather McKee monitored the social and environmental factors that make people, who are following weight management programs, cheat.
80 people who were either part of a weight-…
Rule breakers are often more creative, because they are not bound by conventional ideas. So are liars.
Yet one of those has a positive connotation and one is negative. But lying about performance on one task increased creativity on a subsequent task, by making people feel less bound by conventional rules, finds a paper in Psychological Science.
To examine the link between dishonesty and creativity,
lead researcher Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School
and colleague Scott Wiltermuth of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California designed a series of…
If you want to turn down the emotional intensity before making an important decision, turn down the lights, say Alison Jing Xu, assistant professor of management at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and Aparna Labroo of Northwestern University.
The scholars conducted a series of studies to examine the effects of lighting and human emotion. They asked participants to rate a wide range of things — the spiciness of chicken-wing sauce, the aggressiveness of a fictional character, how attractive someone was, their feelings about specific words, and the taste of two juices — under…
Why are some people are unable to break free of their delusions, despite overwhelming evidence explaining the delusion isn't real?
A new paper by a philosopher offers as good an explanation as any, that dreams and delusions have a common link – they are associated with faulty "reality testing" in the brain's higher order cognitive systems.
"Normally this 'reality testing' in the brain monitors a 'story telling' system which generates a narrative of people's experience," says University of Adelaide philosopher Professor Philip Gerrans. "A simple example of normal reality testing is…
Does cortisol, the stress hormone, cause risk aversion and 'irrational pessimism' in bankers and fund managers during financial crises?
The authors of a paper in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
correlate the fact that traders exhibit risk averse behavior during periods of extreme market volatility – when a crashing market most needs them to take risks, according to academics not responsible for billions of dollars of someone else's money – and that this change in their appetite for risk may be "physiologically-driven", specifically by the body's response to cortisol.…
Is your significant other fickle? Blame evolution, say psychologists in a new
Psychological Bulletin paper.
The authors analyzed dozens of published and unpublished studies to try and determine how women's preferences for mates change throughout the menstrual cycle. They suggest that ovulating women have evolved to prefer mates who display sexy traits – such as a masculine body type and facial features, dominant behavior and certain scents – but not traits typically desired in long-term mates.
So, desires for those masculine characteristics, which are thought to have been markers of…
First impressions are so powerful that they can override what we are told about people, say social psychologists. A new paper presented today at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) annual conference in Austin says that even when told whether a person was gay or straight, participants generally identified the person's sexual orientation based on how they looked.
The less time we have to make our judgments, the more likely we are to go with our gut, even over fact, they say.
"We judge books by their covers, and we can't help but do it," says psychologist Nicholas Rule of…