Psychologists have documented what they believe to be a clinical first - the case of an amnesic woman whose memory for new material is erased each night that she goes to sleep (movie fans will recognise this as a plot device in the 2004 film 50 First Dates). Referred to as case FL, the woman developed these symptoms after she hit her head in a car accident in 2005, aged 48. Brain scans and neurological exams revealed no signs of brain damage, thus suggesting the woman is exhibiting what's known as psychogenic or functional amnesia - that is, symptoms in the absence of any detectable organic ...
Sloshed, trollied, hammered, plastered. We've done a sterling job of inventing words for the inebriated state, but when it comes to judging from their behaviour how much a person has drunk, we could do (a lot) better. That's according to a review of the literature by US psychologist Steve Rubenzer.
We all have our trusted indices for judging other people's drunkenness. Perhaps it's when the eyeballs start floating about as if under the control of a clumsy puppeteer. Or maybe the effusive 'you know I love you' delivered with a trickle of dribble. However, the vast majority of studies find ...
As the dirt and germs are wiped away, we're left feeling not just bodily but also morally cleansed - a kind of metaphorical virtuosity that leads us to judge others more harshly. That's according to Chen-Bo Zhong's team, who invited 58 undergrads to a lab filled with spotless new equipment. Half the students were asked to clean their hands with an antiseptic wipe so as not to soil the shiny surfaces. Afterwards all the students rated the morality of six societal issues including pornography and littering. Those who'd wiped their hands made far harsher judgments than those who didn't.
It was ...
We trawl the world's journals so you don't have to:
Diagnosis, diagnosis, diagnosis: towards DSM-5 (Mental Health Journal). Open Access.
First-year maternal employment and child development in the first seven years (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development).
Culture and psychological science (Perspectives on Psychological Science).
Special Issue on Language Development (Brain and Language).
Play, Talk, Learn: Promising Practices in Youth Mentoring (New Directions in Youth Development).
Special Issue: European Personality Reviews 2010 (European Journal of ...
Some people expect cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to be more prescriptive than it is, and therapists to be more controlling than they really are. That's according to a series of interviews with 18 clients who undertook 8 sessions (14 hours) of CBT to help with their diagnosis of generalised anxiety disorder.
Henny Westra and colleagues selected for interview nine clients whose therapy had ended positively and nine whose therapy had ended poorly. Four of the clients were male. There were four CBT therapists - two men and two women. One was PhD qualified, two were senior clinical ...
Dear members of the APA Division 20 List-Serv,As a member of the APA Division 20 List-Serv, you are no doubt aware of the many great opportunities this division provides. We invite you to engage even more fully in Division 20 by becoming a member! As a long-time member of the Division myself, membership has allowed me to enjoy the multitude of professional benefits of Division 20
Below is a link to the NIH State of the Science Conference Statement on Preventing Alzheimer's Disease and Cognitive Decline.
It contains the draft Conference statement.
http://consensus.nih.gov/2010/alz.htm
Greg
APPLICATIONS BEING ACCEPTED FOR
2010 NATIONAL FAMILY CAREGIVING AWARDS PROGRAM
March 12, 2010—Bethesda, Maryland—The National Alliance for Caregiving and MetLife Foundation are pleased to announce that applications are being accepted for the 2010 National Family Caregiving Awards Program. The request for applications is available online at
Dear all:
Please read below and participate if you have materials in this area.
best,
Peter
>X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true>X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: >AvIEANjj1kvRVd69kGdsb2JhbACQQgEBjAgIFQEBAQEJCQwHEQMfwQ6FDgSPGw>X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.52,283,1270440000";> d="pdf'?scan'208";a="253749671">Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2010 16:19:31 -0400>Subject: psych wiki resource request>From: Karen
The deadline for D20 awards is fast approaching, May 21. For information on the awards, please see the D20 webpage, http://apadiv20.phhp.ufl.edu/apadiv20.htm.
Sadly, this year we will not offer the Student Awards for Proposed Research; however, we have a number of other awards available.
If you have questions, please contact us at D20awards@gmail.com.
Ron Spiro and Jacqui Smith
Co-Chairs,
Alternative medicine is very popular right now. In the world of psychology there is also an alternative medicine. This is using energy healing called Energy
Alternative medicine is very popular right now. In the world of psychology there is also an alternative medicine. This is using energy healing called Energy
A new study from the University of Arizona shows that people in the midst of a divorce typically reveal how they are handling things – not so much by what they say but how they say it.
read
More people are likely to believe scientific studies claiming that oil drilling is riskier, not safer, than was previously thought, according to a new study of attitudes in California. What's more the findings, which appear in the journal Public Understanding of Science (PUS), published by SAGE, show that scientists' efforts to influence public opinion have a limited effect.
read
Scientists have long thought that social networks, which features many distant connections, or "long ties," produces large-scale changes most quickly. But in a new study, Damon Centola, an assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has reached a different conclusion: Individuals are more likely to acquire new health practices while living in networks with dense clusters of connections — that is, when in close contact with people they already know well.
read ...
The academic performance of adolescents will suffer in at least one of four key subjects –– English, math, science, history –– if their DNA contains one or more of three specific dopamine gene variations, according to a study led by renowned biosocial criminologist Kevin M. Beaver of The Florida State University.
read
A study just published in the British Journal of Psychiatry has found that only 23% of the population are without symptoms of personality disorder.
If you’re not familiar with it, personality disorder is a somewhat controversial diagnosis which essentially classifies people who we might otherwise called ‘extremely difficult’ but to the point where they cause themselves significant life problems.
This new survey used the standard diagnostic criteria, but instead of giving people a “you’ve got it or you haven’t” all-or-nothing diagnosis (given when a ...
Oliver Sacks is interviewed on NeuroTribes where he talks about his forthcoming book and his own experience of spectacular hallucinations that occurred after he developed a tumour behind his retina.
NeuroTribes is a new blog by ace science writer and Wired veteran Steve Silberman. It is part of the new PLoS science blog network and in the inaugural post Silberman has scooped a fascinating interview with the great neurologist and raconteur himself.
Here he discusses how his hallucinations, caused by the brain trying to ‘fill in’ or ‘guess’ what should be in the damaged ...
This post is part of a Nature Blog Focus on hallucinogenic drugs in medicine and mental health, inspired by a recent Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper ‘The neurobiology of psychedelic drugs: implications for the treatment of mood disorders’ by Franz Vollenweider and Michael Kometer.
This article will be available, open-access, until September 23. For more information on this Blog Focus please visit the Table of Contents.
In a hut, in a forest, in the mountains of Colombia, I am puking into a bucket. I close my eyes and every time my body convulses I see ripples in a ...
Anthropologist Pascal Boyer has written a wonderfully contrarian essay for Cognition and Culture criticising the “crashingly banal assumptions” behind supposedly radical theories of human nature.
While Boyer is clearly making mischief, his main criticism of the post-modernist idea that human nature is entirely socially constructed is spot on.
While there are clear social influences in how we understand ourselves, the extreme relativism of saying everything is ‘defined by culture’ tends to evaporate when examined too closely.
But on closer inspection, it generally ...
Today’s New York Times has a wonderful feature article on how language shapes our perception of the world.
The infamous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis claimed that our understanding was limited by language and has long been used as an example of a ‘dead theory’ but new evidence is suggesting that certain aspects of a language can indeed influence how we think
The NYT piece is a wonderfully engaging look at the studies which have shown how our perceptions are biased by language and is written by linguist Guy Deutscher.
Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed ...
One of the most general principles of human decision making is that we use relativity as a way to figure out how much we value things. We see a sale sign and the comparison of the current price to a more expensive past price makes us think that we are standing in front of a good deal. We see a modestly prices sweater next to a much more expensive one and we reason that is it a better deal for the money. And so on.
Relativity is not always the right strategy for figuring out how much to value things (very often it is not), but it gives us a quick and handy tool for going about the world ...
The Magic of Procrastination
Oscar Wilde once said, “I never put off till tomorrow what I can do the day after.” As a university professor, I constantly see Wilde’s words put into action. Each fall students arrive to the first day of class determined to meet deadlines and stay on top of their assignments. And each fall the human weakness to procrastinate gets the best of them. After a few years of witnessing this behavior, my colleague Klaus Wertenbroch and I worked up a few studies hoping to get to the root of this problem. Our guinea pigs were the delightful students in my class on consumer ...
For the last 2 years I have been positing this video in celebration of the new school year, and all the hopes and promises we make to ourselves that this year things will be different….
Somewhat unsurprisingly, this video is still as relevant as always.
Happy new school year
Dan
...
In Chapter 6 of “The Upside of Irrationality” I wrote about the the process of adaptation, which is the process by which we get used to stuff — like pain, romantic partners, and new cars.
Some of the personal experiences and experiments I described were about how experiencing pain when I was hospitalized caused me (and others) to view pain differently and with a lower intensity.
A new study on back pain, showed the basic same results:
“This study of 396 adults with chronic back pain found that those with some lifetime adversity reported less physical impairment, disability, ...
By Alon Nir
0. Intro
Sometimes interesting opportunities can emerge from unfavorable situations. Tense diplomatic atmosphere between Israel and Turkey in the past couple of months, brought on a cyber-attack from the Turkish side. A major Israeli apartment-listing website was hacked and so was Pizza Hut’s local website. The credentials of over 100,000 user accounts (roughly 2% of internet users in the country) were revealed and published on dubious Turkish forums. Naturally, it wasn’t long before these lucrative spreadsheets, containing usernames, email addresses and passwords became so ...
Email is a fantastic tool, but these ten psychology studies remind us of its dark side.
Like the telephone or the TV, email is a technology so embedded in our lives, we think nothing of it. Both help and hindrance, on one hand it's the internet's original 'killer application' and on the other it's a spam-spewing slave-driver.
We're used to hearing about the negative side of the balance-sheet, about email's addictive nature and the unnecessary stress it injects into the modern worker's life, but we downplay these problems because it's so incredibly useful.
Now that email is well into middle ...
The online disinhibition effect has cost people their jobs, their income and their relationships, yet many are still oblivious to it.
The first famous case of someone allegedly losing their job from indiscreet remarks made online was in 2002. Heather Armstrong, author of the blog 'dooce', claimed she was fired after her colleagues discovered she'd been lampooning them online.
In internet terms getting fired for a blog rant is ancient news; to make the headlines now your indiscretions have to be on Twitter or Facebook. One recent example was this girl who was 'Facebook fired' after she said ...
Psychological research on Twitter reveals who tweets, how much, what they talk about and why.
There are now 190 million Twitter users around the world producing 65 million tweets each day. 19% of US internet users now say they use Twitter or a similar service to share updates about themselves—double the figure from the previous year (Pew, 2009).
So who tweets? Why? What are they talking about? And what is so engaging about all those little textual transmissions?
Since Twitter didn't exist until 2006, psychologists have had little chance to explore it, but some of the early research ...
Why people think they are less influenced than others by adverts and persuasive messages.
One of the most intriguing things about the psychology of persuasion is how many people say that persuasion attempts have little or no effect on them. Other people, oh sure, adverts, work on them. But not you and I, we're too clever for that.
Attractive woman holding a bottle of beer? Hah! How stupid do they think we are? We know what they're doing and we wouldn't fall for such cheap tactics.
Would we?
Persuasive experiments
So pervasive is this feeling that only 'other' people are influenced by things ...
Central to the art and science of persuasion is understanding three goals for which everyone is aiming.
The art and science of persuasion is often discussed as though changing people's minds is about using the right arguments, the right tone of voice or the right negotiation tactic. But effective influence and persuasion isn't just about patter, body language or other techniques, it's also about understanding people's motivations.
In the scrabble to explain technique, it's easy to forget that there are certain universal goals of which, at least some of the time, we are barely aware. ...
Source: Medical News TodayThe terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 have been called the defining moment of our time. Thousands of people died and the attacks had huge individual and collective consequences, including two wars. But less is known about the immediate emotional reactions to the attacks. For a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers analyzed text messages sent on September 11, ...
Source: ScienceDailyInsomnia and other sleep disorders are very common, yet are not generally well understood by doctors and other health care professionals. Now the British Association for Psychopharmacology has released up-to-the-minute guidelines in the Journal of Psychopharmacology to guide psychiatrists and physicians caring for those with sleep ...
Source: ScienceDailyPsychological migraine treatment gives sufferers a confidence boost in their ability to self-manage their symptoms. For severe migraine sufferers, psychological treatments build on the benefits of drug therapy, according to a new study. A comparison of the effects of various treatment combinations for severe migraine - drug therapy with or without behavioral management - shows that those patients receiving the behavioral management ...
Source: Medical News TodayKennedy Krieger Institute announced new study results showing an early marker for later communication and social delays in infants at a higher-risk for autism may be infrequent gazing at other people when unprompted. Published in the September issue of the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, the study also found that six-month-old high-risk infants demonstrated the same level of cause and effect learning skills when compared to ...
December 07, 2009 Dec. 7--High absence rates among students with disabilities in Chicago's public high schools are the largest factor explaining the difference in their academic performance when compared with non-disabled peers, according to a new research
December 07, 2009 Dec. 7--High absence rates among students with disabilities in Chicago's public high schools are the largest factor explaining the difference in their academic performance when compared with non-disabled peers, according to a new research
December 07, 2009 Dec. 7--High absence rates among students with disabilities in Chicago's public high schools are the largest factor explaining the difference in their academic performance when compared with non-disabled peers, according to a new research
December 07, 2009 Dec. 7--High absence rates among students with disabilities in Chicago's public high schools are the largest factor explaining the difference in their academic performance when compared with non-disabled peers, according to a new research
