Psychology News and Research

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Psychology is the study of human mental functions, behavior and processes.

Novel method to analyze fatigue through speech

What can scientists learn from watching a group of people sitting around, chatting, playing movies, reading, and happily making new friends? Quite a lot, says University of Melbourne, Australia acoustician Adam Vogel, who carefully observed this sort of group in a fatigue management study he and his colleagues describe this month in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

22 Dec 2010

Ketamine tried on college students in experiments sparks outrage

Department of Psychiatry at Cambridge University designed experiments to investigate treatment methods for schizophrenia. Like schizophrenics who sometimes believe that external objects have become part of their body, injection of ketamine – an anesthetic agent also produces similar feelings. Ketamine is a hallucinogenic drug.

22 Dec 2010

Ability to recognize and remember faces peaks at age 30 to 34

Scientists have made the surprising discovery that our ability to recognize and remember faces peaks at age 30 to 34, about a decade later than most of our other mental abilities.

22 Dec 2010

86.9% of adults express support for melanoma genetic testing in minors

The vast majority of parents who tested positive for a genetic mutation that increases the risk of melanoma support genetic testing of their children or grandchildren.

22 Dec 2010

Smoking can increase pain severity in cancer patients

The relationship between smoking and cancer is well established. In a study published in the January 2011 issue of PAIN, researchers report evidence to suggest that cancer patients who continue to smoke despite their diagnosis experience greater pain than nonsmokers.

22 Dec 2010

Writing habit 'is one of the top predictors of weight loss success'

The first step to reaching your ideal weight in the New Year may be as simple as writing it down.

21 Dec 2010

Recent study finds racial and ethnic minority smokers of menthol cigarettes have lower quit rate

Menthol cigarettes may be harder to quit, particularly for some teens and African-Americans, who have the highest menthol cigarette use, according to a study by a team of researchers.

21 Dec 2010

Motivational interviewing may not be an ideal treatment choice for smoking-cessation

Motivational interviewing, a popular counseling technique for many addictive behaviors, might not be the ideal treatment choice for those who smoke cigarettes.

21 Dec 2010

Touro University Worldwide introduces new online program in Marriage and Family Therapy

Dr. Bernard Luskin, CEO and Senior Provost of Touro University Worldwide recently announced its new online program in Marriage and Family Therapy with concentrations in pastoral counseling, coaching, mediation and dispute resolution.

21 Dec 2010

'CART' treatment better than traditional cognitive therapy at altering hyperventilation and panic symptoms

A new treatment program teaches people who suffer from panic disorder how to reduce the terrorizing symptoms by normalizing their breathing.

21 Dec 2010

SAGE publishes first comprehensive textbook on psychology

Psychology for medicine, published today by SAGE, is the first comprehensive textbook on psychology for medical students that is relevant to all of their undergraduate studies.

20 Dec 2010

Completely fearless woman stirs scientific interest

It has been known since the 1930s that when a certain part of monkeys’ brains were removed, the animals became fearless. Now similar effects are being seen in humans according to a study in the journal Current Biology. Justin Feinstein, the study’s lead author and a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of Iowa said, “There’s not very many humans with this sort of brain damage… Luckily for us, we had access to a patient, SM, and we studied her different fear behaviours and we read her personal diaries.”

19 Dec 2010

First comprehensive textbook on psychology for medical students

Psychology for medicine, published today by SAGE, is the first comprehensive textbook on psychology for medical students that is relevant to all of their undergraduate studies. Following the General Medical Council's call for greater coverage of psychology throughout medical degree courses, this groundbreaking textbook does just that - presenting all the psychology an undergraduate medical student needs to know.

17 Dec 2010

Early intervention can improve core symptoms of ASD in young children: Study

In a study recently published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry (Epub ahead of print), researchers from the Kennedy Krieger Institute found that early intervention can improve the core symptoms of autism spectrum disorders in very young children.

17 Dec 2010

Emotional intelligence and cognitive skills sharpen after 60

Older people have a hard time keeping a lid on their feelings, especially when viewing heartbreaking or disgusting scenes in movies and reality shows, psychologists have found. But they're better than their younger counterparts at seeing the positive side of a stressful situation and empathizing with the less fortunate, according to research from the University of California, Berkeley.

17 Dec 2010

Foster care standards formulated

Now all foster children in Australia for the first time will receive individual plans detailing the support they need after leaving care. This comes under the new national scheme wherein uniform standards in meeting each child’s requirements at the time of entering foster care will be ensured. At present child protection systems are different for each of the states and territories. This scheme will unite them all.

16 Dec 2010

Perirhinal cortex critical for forming unconscious conceptual memories

A small area deep in the brain called the perirhinal cortex is critical for forming unconscious conceptual memories, researchers at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain have found.

16 Dec 2010

Study: People who believe in justice believe that tragedy gives the victim's life more meaning

Seeing bad things happen to other people is scary. One way to respond to this is to blame the victim-to look for some reason why it happened to them. But there's another common response, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The researchers found that people who believe in justice in the world also believe that a tragedy gives the victim's life more meaning.

16 Dec 2010

Houston Endowment awards UH $5 million to increase number of doctoral student graduates

Houston Endowment Inc. has awarded $5 million to the University of Houston, which it will use to help increase the number of doctoral students it graduates annually, a key element in UH's mission to become a Tier One institution.

16 Dec 2010

Researchers discover newborn's brain respond strongly to mother's voice

A mother's voice will preferentially activate the parts of the brain responsible for language learning, say researchers from the University of Montreal and the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Centre.

16 Dec 2010