Today's 60 Second Psych Podcast is brought to you by five-year-old Operation Iraqi Freedom:
Fear Raises Self-Esteem in Iraqi Teens
Full transcript after the jump...
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Results tagged “violence” from 60 Second Science
Fear Raises Self-Esteem in Iraqi Teens [podcast]
Want to reduce crime? Stop hosting football games.
Football games do funny things to people. Everyone knows that to some degree--I remember a distinct urge to roll an SUV and light things on fire when my Texas Longhorns won the Rose Bowl in 2006--but apparently no one has studied it. Until now.
Assaults increase by about 9% when a community hosts a college game, vandalism spikes by about 18%, and DUIs increase by about 13%, reports a new working paper by Daniel I. Rees, an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Colorado Denver, and Kevin T. Schnepel, a graduate student in the economics program. It's even worse when there's an upset. An upset at home brings 112% increase in assaults and a 61% increase in vandalism.
Too bad the 'Horns sucked it up this year and gave in to a few upsets. Anyone game for some petty vandalism? Continue reading 'Want to reduce crime? Stop hosting football games.' >
Aggression feels as good as sex, drugs, and rock and roll
Everyone gets a rise out of watching the 5 foot 8 receiver get jacked up by the 250 pound linebacker. Here's why 16 million viewers of Sunday Night football can't help but love watching the big hits.
The brain processes aggression as a reward, similar to the way it reacts to sex, food and drugs, according to new research.
In a series of experiments on mice, scientists discovered that mice will literally push the button willingly to introduce more aggression into their lives. Behaving just as they would for the good stuff.
"Aggression occurs among virtually all vertebrates and is necessary to get and keep important resources such as mates, territory and food,” says Craig Kennedy, professor of special education and pediatrics at Vanderbilt University. “We have found that the ‘reward pathway’ in the brain becomes engaged in response to an aggressive event and that dopamine is involved.”
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Humans are orders of magnitude less violent than they once were, says Steven Pinker
"At the widest-angle view, one can see a whopping difference across the millennia that separate us from our pre-state ancestors... quantitative body-counts... suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own."
(Incredibly, he's even including all the wars and genocides of the 21st century in that body count)
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."
Continue reading 'The CDC wants you to know that video games are almost as bad as smoking' >
Damn dirty rhesus!
Because science is charged with illuminating truth above all else, no matter how disturbing, we find it in the common interest to let you know: Monkeys are out to kill you — especially if you work in politics.
Wild monkeys killed a senior Indian government official in his home. New Delhi deputy mayor SS Bajwa died after being pushed from his balcony during the attack by the gang of Rhesus macaques.
Damn, that's gangsta!
