Psychology

'Extreme Altruists' Are Motivated By Gut Instinct

Intuitive processes may underlie decisions of those who help others while risking their own lives. Credit: AAresTT/Shutterstock By Penny Orbell, The Conversation If you noticed a person in grave danger would you act first and think later in order to save ...

Article - The Conversation - Oct 16 2014 - 12:01pm

The Ineffectiveness of Opioids for Chronic Pain

Let me first say that I am not a medical doctor. However, as the founder and CEO of an addiction treatment center, I sit on the front-lines of the prescription painkiller epidemic. From this vantage point, by working with addicts and their families and th ...

Blog Post - Richard Taite - Oct 15 2014 - 10:27pm

Siblings Make Boys Prosocial

In modern culture, boys are often slighted; girls get billions devoted to their welfare while boys are the default excuse for whatever is wrong. Almost every television show that has a tough woman has her disclaiming, 'I grew up in a house full of bo ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 16 2014 - 9:38am

Play Action Video Games, Boost Your Sensorimotor Skills

A new study has found that people who play action video games such as the "Call of Duty" or "Assassin's Creed" seem to learn a new sensorimotor skill faster than non-gamers do. Sorry, Bungie, "Destiny" was not out when t ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 18 2014 - 9:42am

Seasonal Affective Disorder- Depression Linked To Serotonin

Some people suffer from 'winter blues' while others have no issue. Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) affects people as daylight levels drop in autumn. At Northern European latitudes (for example all of Scandinavia, Glasgow and Moscow) around 1 p ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 20 2014 - 7:00pm

The Optimism Of Depressed People

Even depressed people are essentially optimistic- they believe that tomorrow will be better, even though that belief probably won't lead to better outcomes. That is true optimism. A paper in Clinical Psychological Science says that middle-aged adults ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 21 2014 - 8:56am

Perception Of Hatred Fuels Conflicts Between Democrats And Republicans

There are some things that Republicans and Democrats share in common with Palestinians and Israelis and lots of other groups where human conflict seems intractable. A new sociology paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says that seeming ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 21 2014 - 6:00pm

To Reduce Drug-Related Harm, It's Time To Be Honest About The Pleasure

Getting high on own supply. Dance by Shutterstock By Adam Winstock, King's College London Despite the language we use about drugs, many people don’t see themselves as “drug users” but as rational adults who aren’t on a mission to seek moral disintegr ...

Article - The Conversation - Oct 21 2014 - 2:30pm

Violent Immersion: How 3-D Gaming Affects Player Emotions

Playing violent video games in 3-D makes everything seem more real –  and in a new study researchers found that people who played violent video games in 3-D showed more evidence of anger afterward than people who played games on 2-D systems.  That may hav ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 21 2014 - 8:42pm

It’s Art, but is it Abstract?

We have over the years read of paintings by chimpanzees, but could they be art critics also? A recent article has appeared, outlining evidence that many cognitive tasks the we take to be a function of our human intelligence can be performed just as well ( ...

Blog Post - Robert H Olley - Oct 23 2014 - 1:49am