Psychology
Knocking on wood is a common superstition in Western culture, mostly used to prevent bad luck after talking about good fortune, but sometimes to reverse bad fortune or undo a "jinx."
Other cultures maintain similar practices, like spitting or throwing salt, after someone has tempted fate. Even people who aren't superstitious often participate in these practices. And since this baseball playoffs start today, don't even get one of them going about their crazy superstitions and rituals.
A recent paper contends that these superstitions actually do "reverse" perceived bad fortune.…
Disrupted sleep patterns have been linked to autism but the quality of the evidence accumulated to date has often been compromised by small sample size, lack of agreed definitions, and poor comparability of study participants.
Some data also suggest that production of the sleep hormone melatonin may be impaired in some children with autistic spectrum disorders, which may explain disturbed sleep patterns, say the authors of a new paper.
But it's unclear just what impact this shortened sleep pattern may have, they acknowledge, though other researchers have suggested that sleep loss may have…
Oxytocin, colloquially called the 'love hormone' because of its correlation to mother-infant attachment and romantic bonding in adults, could also make us more accepting of other people, according to a new psychology paper.
Dr. Valentina Colonnello Ph.D., and Dr. Markus Heinrichs from the Department of Psychology at the University of Freiburg write that oxytocin can sharpen the brain's self-other differentiation, a function that has been shown to play a crucial role in social bonding, successful social interactions and the tolerance of others. They also conclude that oxytocin…
Hank |
Unless you are in a bar and have a bartender with a pour spout (in other words, a terrible bar), pouring a glass of wine is not an exact measurement. And at a private party or in someone's house, a 'glass of wine' can be more like three - if you master the psychology of wine glasses.
We're in a world of over-labeling. Everything has calories printed on it, warnings about cancer and claims about gluten-free meat and GMO-free rock salt being healthier. The wine pour is the last open frontier where you can still game the system a little. No one uses a pour spout for wine. Seriously, if the…
Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by a lack of empathy and remorse, shallow affect, glibness, manipulation and callousness. Though less than one percent of the general population meet the criteria, the rate of psychopathy in prisons is around 23%.
As you might suspect, psychopaths don't much care when people are in pain.
A new paper using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on the brains of 121 inmates of a medium-security prison in the USA finds that in psychopaths, the brain areas necessary for feeling empathy and concern for others fail to become…
One subset of children frequently believed to have autism may be misdiagnosed because some of the social impairments associated with their developmental delay looks like features of autism, according to a new paper.
The children have a genetic disorder called 22q11.2 deletion syndrome and their prevalence of autism has been reported as high as 50 percent, using what is called 'gold-standard' diagnostic criteria. But the researchers found that none of the children with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome "met strict diagnostic criteria" for autism.
The researchers said the finding…
Music makes people nostalgic, it has long been said that music can bring us back to specific points in time. Young adults surveyed recently are even fond of and have an emotional connection to the music that was popular for their parents' generation, says a new psychology paper.
While songs that were popular in our early 20s seem to have the greatest lasting emotional impact, music that was popular during our parents' younger days- and likely what they played around kids - also evokes vivid memories.
Carol Lynne Krumhansl and Justin Adam Zupnick asked 62 college students to…
Obese teenagers who lose weight are at greater risk of developing eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, a sign that there may be a psychology issue regarding their relationship to food.
But because weight loss is a healthy positive to both doctors and family members, eating disorders may not be adequately detected. Up to 6 percent of American adolescents suffer from eating disorders, and in surveys more than 55 percent of high school females and 30 percent of males claim disordered eating symptoms including engaging in one or more maladaptive behaviors (fasting…
What happens when you tell a lie? Ethical concerns aside, what goes on in your brain when you willfully deceive someone? And what happens later, when you attempt to access the memory of your deceit?
How you remember a lie may be impacted profoundly by how you lie, according to a paper by Kathleen M. Vieira and Sean Lane. They examines two kinds of lies – false descriptions and false denials – and the different cognitive machinery that we use to record and retrieve them.
False descriptions are deliberate flights of the imagination—details and descriptions that we invent for something…
Zoological methods of studying behavior patterns in animals have led to insights on people with serious mental disorders.
Prof. David Eilam of
Tel Aviv University
's Zoology Department recorded patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder and "schizo-OCD", which combines symptoms of schizophrenia and OCD, as they performed basic tasks. By analyzing the patients' movements, they were able to identify similarities and differences between two frequently confused disorders.
The research represents a step toward resolving a longstanding question about the nature of schizo-OCD: Is it a combination…