Psychology

Cognition causes language, not the other way around. Correlations between changes in thought with changes in language abound. But the arguments are very weak for causality from language to cognition in this context.

What do People Mean by Language Shapes Thought?



Lera Boroditsky likes to spread the meme language shapes thought. Others have used it too when talking about Whorfian matters.

There's no awareness issue in climate change - almost no one on the planet hasn't heard of it or lacks an opinion.

62% of Americans believe global warming is happening - which means 38% do not. Like evolution or anti-science beliefs about genetic modification and vaccines and autism, the majority may fall along particular cultural lines but acceptance is still a problem that defies easy categorization and stereotypes. Yet framing and deficit thinking have all been tried, and they have made the problem worse. Instead of leading to more science acceptance, opinion on the climate now goes up and down with media reports about the weather.


If you are physically strong, social science scholars believe they can predict whether or not you are more conservative than other men.

This might seem obvious. Fitness takes a lot of individual initiative, the government can do all of the outreach programs and legislate all of the soda cups they want, but it won't make people exercise. Super-fit people have to be conservative when it comes to their own exercise, even if they are liberal about money. 

Michael Bang Petersen, associate professor in the Department of Political Science and Government at Aarhus University, and evolutionary psychology colleagues at UC Santa Barbara say the strength/politics connection is due to evolution, which is sure to annoy biologists.


The Rubber Hand illusion never fails to teach us new things - not just about neuroscience, but also about culture.

If you are not familiar with the Rubber Hand illusion, it shows that the combination of seeing a touch on a rubber hand and feeing a touch on your own creates the illusion that the fake hand is now part of your body. In a new paper, scholars did that; they asked participants to look at a fake hand being touched, while at the same time the experimenter touched the participants' own hand, hidden out of view.


The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is distancing itself from the the American Psychiatric Association and its upcoming Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).

While they acknowledge that the goal of DSM "is to provide a common language for describing psychopathology" they are no longer convinced that approach has value if we are going to solve 21st century cognitive science problems.  It is, paraphrasing the statement  of Thomas R. Insel, M.D., Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, more of a dictionary than a manual.  He uses the term "Bible" instead of 'manual' but I would have used 'glossary' rather than 'dictionary'.

School violence has always been an important social issue world-wide because it poses a significant threat to the health, achievement, and well-being of students.


A paper in Journal of Affective Disorders
found that belief in God was correlated to improved outcomes for those receiving short-term treatment for psychiatric illness.

Dr. David H. Rosmarin, McLean Hospital clinician and instructor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, examined individuals at the Behavioral Health Partial Hospital program at McLean in an effort to investigate the relationship between patients' level of belief in God, expectations for treatment and actual treatment outcomes.


In a recent study, an area of the brain that initiates behavioral changes had greater activation in smokers who watched anti-smoking ads with strong arguments than ads with clever tricks like loud sounds and unexpected twists - and those smokers had significantly less nicotine metabolites in their urine when tested a month after viewing those ads.


Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States. Statistics show that 38 percent of suicidal adults and 90 percent of youths had visited their primary care physicians in the 12 months prior to committing suicide.  

An evidence review finds that while there are screening tools to help physicians identify adults at risk for suicide, there's no evidence that using these screening tools in primary care will actually prevent suicides. In adolescents, there are no proven primary care-relevant screening tools to identify suicide risk.  

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force reviewed evidence for upcoming recommendations on suicide screening and treatment for adults and adolescents and issued a paper. 


Humans navigate complex social situations in deciding who to befriend or to abandon - a "frenemy" is someone who is both friend and enemy while the old military saying is that 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend'.

Animal social networks also use sophistication in judging social configurations and a new paper in Animal Behaviour applied a long-standing theory in social psychology called "structural balance."