Psychology

Rigid Fearfulness Linked To Autism Severity

Most people learn when to be afraid and when things are not as bad as they might have once seemed but some new research on autism shows that children with the diagnosis don't easily let go of old, outdated fears and that this rigid fearfulness is lin ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 30 2012 - 1:00pm

Obese Kids Love Junk Food Advertisements

Can advertising make kids fat?  Childhood obesity rates have tripled in the past 30 years and food marketing has been implicated as one factor contributing to this trend.  A week after the Hostess company, makers of Twinkies, went bankrupt, a member of Co ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 30 2012 - 9:30am

Thermography: Lying And The Thermal Footprint Of Flamenco

It sounds as suspect as every other lie detector test, but psychologists have used thermography, a technique based on determining body temperature, to determine if someone is telling the truth. They say a person telling a lie has been shown to undergo a & ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 3 2012 - 1:00pm

Nostalgia Can Make You Feel Warmer, Say Psychologists

If you can't afford heat during the ongoing economic malaise, there is some good news; psychology surveys show that students who think about happier times are warmer. The results, published in Emotion, used college students in China and the Netherlan ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 3 2012 - 12:00pm

No Cabbage? The Memory Of A Good Meal Can Fill Your Belly

If your pockets are empty and you have no money for roast beast this Christmas, there may still be hope. You could try remembering a better dinner and trick your brain into feeling full. That's episodic memory. The memory of having eaten a large meal ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 9 2012 - 7:12pm

How To Tell A Better Lie

Lying, like anything else, can be done pretty well with some practice.  Just like not everyone can be a world class pianist but everyone can sound decent with some time and effort, with a little work, one could learn to tell a lie that may be indistinguis ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 9 2012 - 11:42am

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Works Where Antidepressants Alone Don't- Study

Antidepressants are the most widely used treatment for people with moderate to severe depression but up to two thirds of people with depression don't respond fully to antidepressants. A new paper in The Lancet says cognitive behavioral therapy reduce ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 8 2012 - 7:30am

Aggressive Impact Of Violent Video Games Accumulates Over Time

Experimental evidence by psychologists concludes that the negative effects of playing violent video games can accumulate over time. The psychologists found that people who played a violent video game for three consecutive days showed increases in aggressi ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 10 2012 - 11:30am

Want Conservatives To Take Action On The Environment? Frame It As A Moral Issue

Public opinion on environmental issues such as climate change, deforestation, and toxic waste seems to fall along predictable partisan lines but they have little to do with science. People who deny global warming, for example, conserve just as much energy ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 10 2012 - 10:17pm

Word Recognition Memory: Do Words Have Feelings Too?

Emotion can help us recognize words more quickly, just like the context of a sentence can. But a new paper about the role of emotion in word recognition memory says we do not remember emotionally intoned speech as accurately as neutral speech- and if we d ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 11 2012 - 7:30pm