Psychology News- Psychology Video and Psychology News // Current

added
3 days ago

Japan Revises SSRI Warnings--Hostility, Violence

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/151688.php May 2009 In Japan reports of violence linked to SSRI antidepressants... more

CarolynGillis
added this

Cocktail for killers: Facts not reported in US News...again at Ft. Hood

http://current.com/items/91079159_cocktail-for-killers-facts-not-reported-in-us-news.htm Everyone seems befuddled every time... more

CarolynGillis
added this

Study Shows Men Find the Color Red Physically and Sexually Attractive

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2354010/study_shows_men_find_the_color_red.html?cat=69

ProfessorWoland
added this

ADHD Drugs Killed Their Son, Parents Say

http://www.courthousenews.com/2009/10/29/ADHD_Drugs_Killed_Their_Son_Parents_Say.htm MANHATTAN (CN) - A boy died from taking... more

PepsiJuror
added this

Psychiatric Drug Side Effects Search Engine

http://www.cchrint.org/psychdrugdangers/

PepsiJuror
added this

The power to resist temptation has been extolled by philosophers, psychologists, teachers, coaches, and mothers. Anyone with advice on how you should live your life has surely spoken to you of its benefits. It is the path to the good life, professional and personal satisfaction, social adjustment and success, performance under pressure, and the best way for any child to avoid a penetrating stare and a cold dinner. Of course, this assumes that our natural urges are a thing to be resisted – that there is a devil inside, luring you to cheat, offend, err, and annoy. New research has begun to question this assumption.

A new brain imaging study by Josh Greene and Joe Paxton at Harvard University published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that what separates the well-behaved from the poorly-behaved might not be the ability to control your temptations but rather what kind of temptations you have. For example, foregoing the opportunity for short-term gain and satisfaction, whether it is a delicious slice of tiramisu or that wallet stuffed with cash you stumbled across in the empty parking lot, will depend more on the nature of your automatic urges than your ability to control them.

Greene and Paxton were interested in why people behave honestly when confronted with the opportunity to anonymously cheat for personal gain. They considered two possible explanations. First, there is the “Will” hypothesis: in order to behave honestly people must actively resist the temptation to cheat. In other words, returning the wallet depends on your ability to stifle your desire to take the cash and buy yourself something nice. Alternatively, there is the “Grace” hypothesis: honest behavior results from the absence of temptation. Returning the wallet requires no particular ability to control your treacherous urges – the urge simply isn’t there.

These two hypotheses make competing predictions regarding the brain regions activated when acting honestly as well as the time it should take participants to decide to act honestly. If “Will” is correct then people who choose to act honestly should exhibit heightened activity in brain regions responsible for cognitive control (presumably resulting from the struggle to ignore immediate desires). But if “Grace” is right then no such increase should occur. Furthermore, people should take a longer time to decide to act honestly if doing so requires a conscious act of “Will,” but a relatively shorter time to act if all you need is a bit of “Grace.”

In order to test these possibilities the researchers measured neural activity in an fMRI machine while participants played a computerized game wherein they could gain money by predicting the outcome of coin flips. Correctly guess heads or tails, you get some cash. In one condition, participants recorded their predictions before seeing any of the flips, precluding the opportunity to cheat. In the other condition, participants were rewarded based on self-reported accuracy after the flips, and therefore could fudge their predictions in accordance with the outcome of the flip. I got 100 percent correct, Mr. Experimenter, must be my lucky day!

Consistent with the “Grace” hypothesis, those who acted honestly (who guessed wrong and self-reported as much) showed no increased activity in control-related areas relative to others who guessed wrong but did not have the opportunity to cheat. Honest reporting of scores, then, didn’t require will-power, these participants simply did not feel the urge to cheat. Reaction time data further supported “Grace” showing that participants who acted honestly took no longer to do so, on average, when they had the opportunity to cheat than when they did not. The authors suggest that these findings demonstrate the human capacity to, at least temporarily, achieve a state of “moral grace” – a state devoid of selfish temptation.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=new-science-temptationThe power to resist temptation has been extolled by philosophers, psychologists, teachers, coaches, and mothers. Anyone with... more

pjacobs51
added this

16 comments

added
5 days ago

Turning of the tide

This is a very intelligent speech about the herd mentality, "the sheeple" and how people are being manipulated by a few... more

lookatmypix
added this

5 comments

added
5 days ago

Guilty of Insider Trading "Morning Joe" Features Dr. Nancy "Get your damn vaccine" Snyderman

http://humanbeingsfirst.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/msnbc-nancy-snyderman-round2-trust-your-government.jpg... more

CarolynGillis
added this

0 comments

added
5 days ago

Do digital diaries mess up your brain?

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/11/03/digital.diary.brain.mind/index.html
The meal you ate the first day you started working. The first exam you aced in high school. The shoes you wore to the prom.
These minute details of life often fade into the abyss of memory, which is not a perfect scrapbook of every experience. Over time, we forget details of events that happened long ago or even mis-remember them.
But today's technology creates opportunities for greater, moment-by-moment record-keeping. Archives of your blog, Facebook or Twitter feed -- both in text and in pictures -- might reveal exactly what you ate on important occasions, the papers you were proud of and the outfits you wore.
Microsoft is developing a camera that takes this further: SenseCam, which automatically captures photos of everything you see and do all day. There are even people, such as Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell, who go around with audio and video equipment to create a more complete supplement to biological memory.
If we rely on technology for documenting, sorting and storing information -- creating digital diaries, or "lifestreaming" -- what will become of our minds? Although there is not a lot of research on this subject, psychologists have a range of opinions about where we're headed.
Using computers to outsource many mental tasks isn't necessarily bad as long as the brain is being stimulated in other ways, said David Bucci, associate professor of psychology at Dartmouth College. With the advent of the calculator, the need to memorize multiplication tables became less important, and hand-held devices such as smart phones and PDAs have eliminated the need to remember phone numbers and to-do lists.
Read about one CNN writer's week of recording 'digital memory'
But none of these task-replacing devices has been shown to damage the mind. Rather, they allow people to devote more brain resources to other things, he said.
Learning how to use technologies is good for the brain, just like learning a language or doing puzzles, he said. There is also evidence that physical activity helps stave off dementia.
"The key thing is that the sedentary brain, just like the sedentary body, is going to atrophy," he said.
Although people may lose interest in services such as Twitter, one day, recording everything may take a lot less effort. In fact, it's not inconceivable that a microchip could be implanted in the brain that would be used to make external copies of memory, said Dr. Gary Small, director of the UCLA Center on Aging and co-author of the book "iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind."
On the plus side, this would help patients with Alzheimer's disease who have begun to forget key elements of their existence, he said. Presenting them their own memories could add "another 10 years of cognitive life," he said.http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/11/03/digital.diary.brain.mind/index.html The meal you ate the first day you started working. The... more

singrrr
added this

0 comments

added
5 days ago

Is teen suicide contagious?

http://www.sphere.com/2009/11/03/is-teen-suicide-contagious/ - Over the past six months, four students at Henry M. Gunn High... more

singrrr
added this

52 comments

added
5 days ago

10 Failed Doomsday Predictions

"With the upcoming disaster film "2012" and the current hype about Mayan calendars and doomsday predictions, it... more

DeliaTheArtist
added this

49 comments

added
6 days ago

Gossip at work

One side, the functionalist school, sees gossip as a useful tool for enforcing social rules and maintaining group solidarity. The... more

andyjoe
added this

0 comments

added
6 days ago

Creationism Emerges in the Islamic World

"Creationism is growing in the Muslim world, from Turkey to Pakistan to Indonesia, international academics said last month as they gathered here to discuss the topic.

But, they said, young-Earth creationists, who believe God created the universe, Earth and life just a few thousand years ago, are rare, if not nonexistent.

One reason is that although the Koran, the holy text of Islam, says the universe was created in six days, the next line adds that a day, in this instance, is metaphorical: “a thousand years of your reckoning.”

By contrast, some Christian creationists find in the Bible a strict chronology that requires a 6,000-year-old Earth and thus object not only to evolution but also to much of modern geology and cosmology, which say the Earth and the universe are billions of years old.

“Views of scientific evolution are clearly influenced by underlying religious beliefs,” said Salman Hameed, who convened the two-day conference here at Hampshire College, where he is a professor of integrated science and humanities. “There is no young-Earth creationism.”

But that does not mean that all of evolution fits Islam or that all Muslims happily accept the findings of modern biology. More and more seem to be joining the ranks of the so-called old-Earth creationists. They do not quarrel with astronomers and geologists, just biologists, insisting that life is the creation of God, not the happenstance consequence of random occurrences.

In Turkey, officially a secular government but now ruled by an Islamic party, the teaching of evolution has largely disappeared, at least below the university level, and the science curriculum in public schools is written in deference to religious beliefs, Dr. Edis said.

For many Muslims, even evolution and the notion that life flourished without the intervening hand of Allah is largely compatible with their religion. What many find unacceptable is human evolution, the idea that humans evolved from primitive primates. The Koran states that Allah created Adam, the first man, separately out of clay.

Mentioning human evolution led to near riots, and he had to be escorted out. “That’s the one thing that will never be possible to bridge,” he said. “Your lineage is what determines your worth.”

More at link! Another religion lines up to refute evolution...what do you think about it?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/science/03islam.html?_r=1&src=twt&twt=nytimesscience"Creationism is growing in the Muslim world, from Turkey to Pakistan to Indonesia, international academics said last month as... more