Utah Psychologists Warn Against Cell Phone Use While Driving
Three years after the preliminary results first were presented at a scientific meeting and drew wide attention, University of Utah psychologists have published a study showing that motorists who talk on handheld or hands-free cellular phones are as impaired as drunken drivers.

29 June 2006

The brain's reward for getting a concept is a shot of natural opiates
Neuroscientists have proposed a simple explanation for the pleasure of grasping a new concept: The brain is getting its fix.

The "click" of comprehension triggers a biochemical cascade that rewards the brain with a shot of natural opium-like substances, said Irving Biederman of the University of Southern California. He presents his theory in an invited article in the latest issue of American Scientist. [read more]

EurekAlert!
20 June 2006

On his 150th anniversary, Freud's legacy is being dismantled by the ideas of his greatest challenger, Aaron Beck. Cognitive therapy is now the orthodox talking cure in Britain, and the government wants more of it. But with cognitive science comes a new battle for the meaning of the human mind.

After Freud by Alexander Linklater & Robert Harland
Prospect (June 2006)

News stories about medical research, often based on initial findings presented at professional conferences, frequently omit basic facts about the study and fail to highlight important limitations, warn Dartmouth researchers. Such omissions can mislead the public and distort the actual significance of the research, they caution. [read more]

Dartmouth Medical School News
6 June 2006

In the latest issue of Psychology of Women Quarterly (June 2006), researchers find that men rate themselves and the women they just interacted with higher on sexual traits, such as flirtatiousness, than women rate men. The authors find that after a five-minute conversation with a stranger of the opposite gender, men were more likely to interpret ambiguous or friendly behavior as indicating sexual interest. "The findings suggest that men generally think in more sexual terms than women," the authors explain.

Within their brief conversation, partners introduced themselves and talked about college experiences. There was no significant difference in how men, compared to women, rated their conversation partners on agreeableness or extroversion. Nor was their evidence of sexual chemistry, as partners did not share a tendency to find each other attractive or desire a future interaction.

If women found their male partner as more partner physically attractive and saw him as more agreeable, they rated the partner higher on sexual traits. Men's ratings of women were also associated with physical attractiveness but unrelated to whether he saw her as agreeable or felt the conversation was enjoyable.

EurekAlert!
8 June 2006

New Haven, Conn. — People who see their relationships as either all good or all bad tend to have low self-esteem, according to a series of seven studies by Yale researchers published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

In two of the studies participants were asked to indicate as quickly as possible whether each of 10 adjectives applied to their relationship partner, adjectives such as caring and warm or greedy and dishonest. Partners in this study included college roommates and mothers.

Individuals low in self-esteem were considerably slower to respond when negative and positive adjectives were alternated than when similar adjectives appeared in blocks. Those high in self-esteem were equally quick to respond to the adjectives no matter how they were presented.

“This suggests it was hard for them to think of their partners as a mix of positive and negative characteristics at a given point in time,” said Margaret Clark, a professor in the Department of Psychology and senior faculty author of the study. “We do not think these results are limited to any one type of relationship. We think they apply to any close relationship.”

Clark said the effects were obtained only when people judged relationship partners. There was no delayed response when judging an object, in this case, their computer.

The researchers first measured self-esteem by asking participants to fill out the Rosenberg self-esteem inventory, a self-report measure of self-esteem. The reaction time task was administered weeks later by an experimenter who did not know their evaluation results.

 “Those low in self-esteem are chronically concerned about whether or not their close relationship partners will or will not accept them,” Clark said. “In good times, those low in self-esteem tend to idealize partners, rendering those partners safe for approach and likely to reflect positively upon them. At the first sign of a partner not being perfect, however, they switch to focusing on all possible negatives about the partner so as to justify withdrawing from that partner and not risking vulnerability.”

Based on their research, Clark and Steven Graham, first author of the study, developed a way to measure the extent to which people segregate thoughts about partners into “all good” and “all bad” qualities. Their new scale is called the I-TAPS (Integration of Thoughts About Partners Scale).

The work was supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Graham received a dissertation prize for his part in the research from the International Association of Relationship Researchers. The prize is for the best Ph.D. dissertation of the year dealing with relationships.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90: 652-665 (May 2006)

Yale University News Release
7 June 2006

Intermittent Explosive Disorder could be behind cases of road rage and spousal abuse; Early detection key to treatment

BOSTON--A seldom-studied mental illness called Intermittent Explosive Disorder, characterized by recurrent episodes of angry and potentially violent outbursts--seen in cases of road rage or spousal abuse--has been found to be much more common than previously thought. Depending upon how broadly it is defined, this disorder affects as many as 7.3 percent of adults, or 16 million Americans, in their lifetimes. In a year, Intermittent Explosive Disorder affects nearly 4 percent of Americans, or 8.6 million adults, reports Ronald Kessler, PhD, professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School (HMS), and colleagues. The study also found that Intermittent Explosive Disorder may predispose people to other mental illnesses and substance abuse. These results are reported in the June 2006 issue of Archives of General Psychiatry.

Intermittent Explosive Disorder attacks are out of proportion to the social stressors triggering them and are not due to another mental disorder or the effects of drugs or alcohol, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV). People with this disorder overreact to situations with uncontrollable rage, feel a sense of relief during the angry outburst, and then feel remorseful about their actions. [read more]

EurekAlert!
5 June 2006

About 17 percent of college students -- 20 percent of women and 14 percent of men -- report that they have cut, burned, carved or harmed themselves in other ways, reports a new survey by Cornell and Princeton University researchers, the largest study on self-injurious behavior (SIB) in the United States to date. [read more]

EurekAlert!
5 June 2006

A steadily increasing number of patients younger than age 20 received prescriptions for antipsychotic medications between 1993 and 2002, according to a report published in the June issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Antipsychotics are medications used to treat mental disorders, such as schizophrenia and mania, that may involve loss of contact with reality. Several studies have indicated that prescriptions for these medications have been increasing among children and adolescents, raising concerns among professionals and the public. However, no national data have previously been available, according to background information in the article. Most prescriptions given to children and adolescents are for second-generation antipsychotics, which are not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for pediatric patients. [read more]

EurekAlert!
5 June 2006