Psychology

Atheists And Liberals More Intelligent, Says Atheist, Liberal Psychologist

According to a new study in Social Psychology Quarterly, the higher your IQ the more likely you are to be a liberal and an atheist. The author says this is because more intelligent people exhibit social values and political preferences that are novel to th ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 24 2012 - 1:11am

How The Human Brain Responds To Inequality

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland have found that the reward centers in the human brain respond more strongly when a poor person receives a financial reward than when a rich person does ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 8 2010 - 7:03pm

What Are The Psychological Beliefs of Atheists And Christians?

In 2008, Sam Harris posted an online survey seeking the opinions of Christians and atheists on a wide variety of topics. The real aim was to design the survey for their subsequent laboratory research with properly phrased questions that would either polari ...

Blog Post - Richard Mankiewicz - Feb 24 2010 - 9:56pm

Why Do We Name Our Cars? The Psychology Of Anthropomorphism

People have a strong tendency to give nonhuman entities human characteristics (known as anthropomorphism), and researchers from Harvard and the University of Chicago say they now understand the psychology that underlies this behavior. The research appears ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 25 2010 - 2:32pm

Other People Know You Better Than You Do, Study Shows

Most people believe the individual is the best judge of his or her own personality. But a Washington University Psychologist says that we are not the know-it-alls that we think we are. Simine Vazire, Ph.D., Washington University assistant professor of psy ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 27 2010 - 1:15pm

Born to Believe – Review and Response

A New Scientist article, Born believers: how your brain creates God, takes us through some recent research with children that suggests belief in supernatural beings is somehow hard-wired into the human brain. The starting point is the rather unsurprising s ...

Blog Post - Richard Mankiewicz - Feb 26 2010 - 9:58pm

Pitfalls of weekend shifts

Cannot resist posting the following paperclip, grabbed from a news site this afternoon (it's a Sunday, a critical detail you should not overlook; and this is an Italian newspaper, as should be obvious). The piece reports news on the Chilean earthquake ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 28 2010 - 3:06pm

Blame Video Games For Aggressive Children, Psychologist Says

A new meta-analysis of 130 research reports on more than 130,000 subjects worldwide 'proves conclusively' that exposure to violent video games makes more aggressive, less caring kids, say researchers from Iowa State University and the City Univer ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 1 2010 - 11:45am

Low LPFC Function May Be Risk-Factor For Behavioral Problems

A new study of adult participants in committed relationships suggest that the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) helps people control their emotional reactions to negative facial expressions from their romantic partners. The findings indicate that compromise ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 2 2010 - 12:59pm

Happy People Are Less Trusting People

It may seem safe to assume that happy people are trusting people, but a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that, in some instances, people may actually be less trusting of others when they are in a pleasant mood. Accordi ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 2 2010 - 4:28pm