Psychology

Empathy In Psychopaths: A Neurological Basis?

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by a lack of empathy and remorse, shallow affect, glibness, manipulation and callousness. Though less than one percent of the general population meet the criteria, the rate of psychopathy in prisons is a ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 24 2013 - 4:46pm

Oxytocin Could Make You More Tolerant

Oxytocin, colloquially called the 'love hormone' because of its correlation to mother-infant attachment and romantic bonding in adults, could also make us more accepting of other people, according to a new psychology paper.  ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 29 2013 - 1:28pm

Poor Sleep Linked To Autism And Behavior

Disrupted sleep patterns have been linked to autism but the quality of the evidence accumulated to date has often been compromised by small sample size, lack of agreed definitions, and poor comparability of study participants. Some data also suggest that ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 1 2013 - 6:00am

Baseball Players Take Note: Knocking On Wood Actually Can Undo Jinx

Knocking on wood is a common superstition in Western culture, mostly used to prevent bad luck after talking about good fortune, but sometimes to reverse bad fortune or undo a "jinx." Other cultures maintain similar practices, like spitting or th ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 1 2013 - 4:32pm

How Instagram Ruined Dinner

If you want to enjoy your food, stop taking pictures of it and putting them on the Internet, say marketing scholars. They mean you, foodies on Instagram and Pinterest. It could be ruining your appetite by making you feel like you've already experienc ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 3 2013 - 5:00pm

Read Minds By Reading Fiction, Say Social Psychologists

There's little quantifiable value to arts and literature but they hold a great deal more prestige in culture than science does. If you attend a Manhattan dinner party and are unfamiliar with some obscure performance artist, they will be horrified- bu ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 4 2015 - 10:22am

Is Food Addiction A Real Thing?

In a world of over-diagnosis, virtually anything can be considered a mental disorder if you are willing to pay someone to give you therapy for it. Afraid of attractive women? You have Venustraphobia. Afraid of GMO foods? The name is in the works.  Body pi ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 7 2013 - 9:52am

The One Bipartisan Thing Left In America: Belief Superiority

High taxes or low taxes, anti-global warming or anti-GMO. You can often figure out how an American votes by asking their stance on a few issues. The government is currently in the middle of a shutdown because neither side remembers what bipartisan means. ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 7 2013 - 11:19am

Estrogen-Related Receptor Linked To Eating Disorder Risk

Eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are primarily cultural but the search is also on for a biological disposition that would confirm it outside primarily middle-class white girls in developed nations. Eating disorders are found i ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 8 2013 - 1:30pm

Another Thing To Blame Your Mother For: Postpartum Depression Spans Generations

A transgenerational study with female rats suggests that exposure to social stress not only impairs a mother's ability to care for her children but can also negatively impact her daughter's ability to provide maternal care to future offspring.  ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 8 2013 - 2:30pm