Today's 60 Second Psych Podcast is brought to you by five-year-old Operation Iraqi Freedom:
Fear Raises Self-Esteem in Iraqi Teens
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Results tagged “psychology” from 60 Second Science
Fear Raises Self-Esteem in Iraqi Teens [podcast]
Life's U-Shaped Path of Happiness [podcast]
Today's 60 Second Science Podcast is brought to you by sports-car-driving, mid-life crisis Boomers everywhere :
Life's U-Shaped Path of Happiness
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Scratching Brings Mental Satisfaction [podcast]
Today's 60 Second Science Podcast is brought to you by The Itchy and Scratchy Show, of course:
Scratching Brings Mental Satisfaction
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The 'Me' Generation Isn't So 'Me' [podcast]
Today's 60 Second Psych Podcast is brought to you by MyBook and FaceSpace (that's what the kids call it, right?):
The 'Me' Generation Isn't So 'Me'
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Lookin' Crazy in Love [podcast]
Today's 60 Second Psych Podcast is brought to you by one Ms. Beyonce Knowles:
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"Generation Me" ego no bigger than Gen X's
Take a quick walk on the Quad, and you may catch a whiff of students putting on airs of self entitlement.
Give the kids a break. Just because these youngins broadcast their every breath on MySpace and Facebook, they aren't all ego.
Behavioral scientists have accused today's kids of having an arrogance that previous generations did not. But a new study suggests behavioral scientists have given "Generation Me" a misnomer of a nickname. This generation feels no more cocky than its forebears felt.
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Aggression Is Its Own Reward [podcast]
Today's 60 Second Science Podcast is brought to you by Bruce Banner:
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Bisexuality is a Distinct Sexual Orientation [podcast]
Today's 60 Second Psych Podcast is brought to you by that one time your girlfriend in college kissed another girl...for serious:
Bisexuality is a Distinct Sexual Orientation
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CEO's Face Correlates with Company's Fortune [podcast]
Today's 60 Second Science Podcast is brought to you by Donald Trump's lovely mug:
CEO's Face Correlates with Company's Fortune
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You're so Psychic, Bet You Know This Podcast is About You
Today's 60 Second Psych Podcast is brought to you by Carly Simon:
You're so Psychic, Bet You Know This Podcast is About You
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Study says women, gay men worse drivers than straight men; lazy stand-up comedians vindicated
OK, this is something you probably shouldn't bring up over the dinner table with your wife/girlfriend/boyfriend, unless you want a throwdown: A recent study claims that women and gay men are more likely to be worse drivers. Psychologists at Queen Mary, University of London found that both women and gay men perform poorly on tests involving spatial relationships and navigation when compared to heterosexual men.
According to the study, these same women and gay men tend to rely on landmarks to get around, making them less competent at driving in unfamiliar environments.
Do you hear that dripping sound? It's the sound of marriage counselors and cheap stand-up comedians drooling as their stocks go up.
Kids and Adults Share Nightmares [podcast]
Today's 60 Second Science Podcast is brought to you by Freddie Krueger:
Kids and Adults Share Nightmares
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Race, IQ and Flynn [podcast]
Today's 60 Second Psych Podcast is brought to you by Mensa International:
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Meditation Enhances Attention - Street Science [Video]
Episode V of our new video podcast comin' atcha:
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10,000 Years of Human Civilization Explained by One Study
Yeah, this isn't The Onion, bro, this is a real science news source. I actually might be almost serious:
A Yale study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown that children imitate the actions of adults who have proven to be untrustworthy, even to the point of excluding obvious solutions to problems.
The effect, called 'over-imitation,' is so powerful that chimpanzees will often solve a given problem more quickly than will a child under its influence.
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Divorce Wrecks Environment Too [podcast]
Today's 60 Second Science Podcast is brought to you by Kramer vs. Kramer:
Divorce Wrecks Environment Too
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No duh dept: 20% of long-term relationships begin with infidelity
Ah, infidelity: Some Americans call it 'sinful,' the Spanish call it an 'adventure,' and Mormon fundamentalists call it Thursday. A new study shows evidence that 20 percent of all long-term relationships start when one party is already involved with someone else.
Psychologists who polled 16,000 individuals in 53 countries as part of the International Sexuality Description Project found the figure holds up across age groups and with couples who are married, living together or dating.
In North America, 62 percent of men and 40 percent of women say they've attempted to entice another's mate for a short-term fling. Some 47 percent of men and 32 percent of women say they've succumbed to such attempts. The more sexual equality in a culture, the closer women come to matching men in the number of poaching attempts.
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The CDC wants you to know that video games are almost as bad as smoking
"Exposure to violent electronic media has a larger effect than all but one other well-known threat to public health. The only effect slightly larger than the effect of media violence on aggression is that of cigarette smoking on lung cancer," said L. Rowell Huesmann, author of a new study in a special edition of the Journal of Adolescent Health looking at over 50 years of research.
While smokers can remain excited that they're still living on the edge as by far the most badass people in the world, people have been ragging on violent media for, obviously, over 50 years (actual date closer to 2000 years.) But it looks like this study was promoted by the government. At the very bottom of the press release is this tidbit: "The supplement was funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."
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See your doc to stop smoking [podcast]
Today's 60 Second Psych podcast is brought to you by Joe Camel:
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The Joneses Paradox: Brain-Scan Study Rewrites Economic Theory
Once a week, we tap our friends over at Daily Galaxy for insights into science, astronomy, and general tomfoolery.
“Not what we have but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.”
~ Epicurus (Greek philosopher, BC 341-270)
Trying to keep up with Joneses? Why is having “enough” never quite enough for those of us living in the “rat race” of urban ideals? In an interesting new study of how money motivates, brought to us by the University of Bonn, researchers discovered that humans don’t just want “more”—we want more in comparison to others. This relative sense of “more” appears to play a much larger role in motivation that previously suspected.
These findings support previous research by Andrew Oswald of England's Warwick University and David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College who found that even if our own incomes are rising, we tend to become less happy if the incomes of others are increasing more in relation to ours.
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Babies can tell Gallant from Goofus [podcast]
Today's 60 Second Science podcast is brought to you by Highlights for Children:
Babies can tell Gallant from Goofus [podcast]
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When the virtual you changes the real you [podcast]
Today's 60 Second Psych podcast is brought to you by The Wachowski Brothers:
When the virtual you changes the real you
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Denial could make the perfect holiday gift
If there’s a time of year when our instincts for social survival go into high gear, it’s got to be the holidays. We gather with our brethren, co-workers, and friends – just about every social network that we rely on for reciprocal care.
The importance of denial in maintaining these social groups and our closest relationships is gaining attention according to today’s New York Times heath section.
Denial enables us to bear the shock of bad news, tolerate mild transgressions (like eating the pie before the turkey on Thanksgiving...I was young) and appears to be the basis for forgiveness, according to an increasing number of social scientists.
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Laughing in the face of adversity [podcast]
Today's 60 Second Psych podcast is brought to you by The Joker:
Laughing in the face of adversity
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Does your name define you?
Psychologists have famously found that people subconsciously gravitate towards places and jobs that resemble their names: more "Kens" live in Kentucky and more "Lauras" become lawyers, for example, than what would be predicted by chance alone. But this secret love we harbor for our names can hurt us, according to a new study published in the journal Psychological Science. If your name is associated with something bad, you might gravitate towards the bad, too.
Psychiatry and Big Pharma cited for bad reps, smoking behind the school gym
The left-leaning and heavily Greek-accented Huffington Post has an interesting takedown of the nefarious ties between the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and Big Pharma by blogger and clinical psychologist Bruce Levine. Levine asks whether psychiatry has earned its bad reputation in the public eye by heading out to Makeout Point with Big Pharma and letting it, at the very least,get to third base.
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Researchers sniff out brain sex differences
Today's 60 Second Science podcast is brought to you by -- ewwww, worms:
Researchers sniff out brain sex differences
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Thinking about your own death boosts your mood
Feelin' blue? Here, this'll cheer you right up.
Picture yourself laying on the cool grass... as it soaks up the arterial blood pouring out of a massive chest wound. Then picture the expression on your face: a rictus of disbelief, now going pale and slack as your head flops to the side, the light already fading from your eyes, a final dullness glazing over them. Good. Finally, imagine your recently buried body, swollen in your funeral clothes from the gases given off by decomposition, and then decades later, moldering and sloughing apart in its rotting box, a box which, with each passing day, marks an evermore pointless distinction between its contents and the damp dirt outside.
I'll bet that frown's turned upside down already! And so do the authors of a recent study in Psychological Science, who claim that contemplating oblivion activates our unconscious mental defense mechanisms -- in essence, taking us to our "happy place" without us even knowing it.
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A sexy walk doesn't mean she's interested
Man, have I learned this the hard way, through multiple face slaps and restraining orders. Still, new research backs up what the courts have been telling me for years:
The sway of a woman's hips is not intended to impress men. So say researchers who have found that women have the sexiest walk during the part of the monthly cycle when they are least fertile. The finding implies that women use a variety of signals to advertise their fertility to men, using some signals to advertise when they are ovulating and others to conceal the fact.
And here I was, thinking strippers taught me everything I needed to know about evolutionary biology.
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Human females may actually go into heat; blogger demands more "in-depth" research
Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico wins today's Unsung Genius Award (UGA) for getting out of the lab, hitting the streets and taking his research to truly hallowed ground: the strip club. Humans were thought not to go into estrus like other mammals, but by measuring strippers' tips, Miller and his team of intrepid lap-dancees found that tips rose and fell to match the corresponding dancer's ovulatory cycle. Hot and informative!
Surveying strip-club lap dancers, who perform erotic dances for for cash, they found that tips vary by an average of 45 percent depending on the time of the month, corresponding to the length of the ovulatory cycle. That’s the one-month cycle in which a ripe egg is released from the ovary, becoming available for fertilization.
Does Halloween Make Us Crazy?
Halloween: you either love it or you hate it. But no matter how you feel about it, it is the one day of the year when you can throw away your socially appropriate garb and don whatever crazy persona you choose. On October 31, society gives us the A-OK to throw away our business suits and dress entirely in bubble wrap if we want to—allowing us, essentially, to become someone (or something) else. But I've always wondered: do crazy costumes also make us act a little crazy? Do we not just look out of character on Halloween, but also behave out of character—say, by drinking twice as much as we usually do, committing petty crimes, or having one-night stands?
Luckily, science has some answers.
Intense, man... new theory of autism
Although the debate over the causes of autism is still vexed, arguments over the nature of the disorder itself rage, too. In the November 1 issue of Frontiers In Neuroscience [hat tip to Frontal Cortex for blogging it on 10/25], Henry Markram, Tania Rinaldi and Kamila Markram propose a new unifying theory. They call it “The Intense World Syndrome” and the basic idea is that the core problem in autism is not difficulty recognizing other people’s thoughts and motivations (the “theory of mind” theory), but a hyper-responsive brain that encodes most sensory input as overwhelming.
Psych professor turns haunted house into a lab
Kids knocking on David Zald's door tonight looking for a treat are in for a trick. Zald, a psychology professor at Vanderbilt University, decorates his house with skeletons and creepy fog. As children walk through his haunted house, Zald can see fear in their faces.
"They want the candy, but they're not sure they want to come up," Zald said.
Who would blame them? Especially when he's dressed in white polyester as Disco Stu from the "The Simpsons."
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Anatomy of a child molester: well, he tends to be short
Pedophilia has been linked to IQ, education, and even handedness—and a new study adds height to the mix. Pedophiles, are, on average, two centimeters shorter than non-pedophiles, according to research published by the University of Toronto's Center for Addiction and Mental Health. But does this tell us anything about the psychology of a child molester? Actually, it may.
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Soft on Fat or Soft on Data?
The AP today looks at a new campaign by the Advertising Council aimed at fighting obesity. It cites critics who complain that the ads are "namby pamby" and "wimpy." But is "soft" always bad?
What the story fails to mention is that while the shocking and attention-getting advertisements it cites with approval
have a long history in anti-drug campaigns, they also have a long history of not only failure, but backfiring.
The Ad Council knows this well-- years ago, it found that while shocking pictures of car crashes and interviews with people who lost loved ones to drunk drivers won advertising awards, they didn't deter drunk drivers. What worked? Ads that gave partners humorous ways of getting the car keys away from drunks.
The Council is probably basing its new campaign on these findings-- while toughness may sound better, "wimpy" ads may work better at changing behavior. And isn't that what we want them to do?
