all psychology and psychiatry stories

Neuroimaging fails to demonstrate ESP is real

404132862 — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 16:00:49 -0500

Psychologists at Harvard University have developed a new method to study extrasensory perception that, they argue, can resolve the century-old debate over its existence. According to the authors, their study not only illustrates a new method for studying such phenomena, but also provides the strongest evidence yet
obtained against the existence of extrasensory perception, or ESP.

Percentage of Katrina survivors with mental disorders increasing

404132862 — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 13:15:53 -0500

According to the most comprehensive survey yet conducted of people affected by Hurricane Katrina, the percentage of pre-hurricane residents of the affected areas in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi who have mental disorders has increased significantly compared to the situation five to eight months after the hurricane.

HSPH study shows guns in homes linked to higher rates of suicide

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 15:03:54 -0400

In the first nationally representative study to examine the relationship between survey measures of household firearm ownership and state-level rates of suicide in the United States, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) found that suicide rates among children, women, and men of all ages are higher in states where more households have guns. The study appears in the April 2007 issue of The Journal of Trauma.

“We found that where there are more guns, there are more suicides,” said Matthew Miller, assistant professor of health policy and management at HSPH and lead author of the study.

Children can perform approximate math without arithmetic instruction

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 11:10:21 -0400

Children are able to solve approximate addition or subtraction problems involving large numbers even before they have been taught arithmetic, according to a study conducted at Harvard University by researchers from the University of Nottingham and Harvard.

Addiction illuminates concept of ‘free will’

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 11:38:37 -0400

Whether humans possess free will or whether their actions are determined by something outside their conscious control is one of the most persistent problems in philosophy.

In a lecture May 9, Steven E. Hyman warned his audience that he would not attempt to resolve the issue of free will in an ultimate sense. He did, however, have some fascinating insights regarding a special instance of the free-will dilemma — namely, the neurochemical mechanisms that result in the loss of free will when a person becomes addicted to drugs.

“Drug addiction has been used as a yardstick for reward-based behavior,” said Hyman. “With addiction, there is a narrowing of life focus in that drug-seeking crowds out all other motivations and goals.”

Is doing the right thing hard-wired?

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 13:15:44 -0400

What gives people the ability to tell right from wrong? Is the moral sense instilled in us by God? Is it inculcated through religious training? Or does moral judgment vary according to the culture in which we were raised?

In a talk April 26, psychology professor Marc Hauser argued that our moral sense is part of our evolutionary inheritance. Like the “language instinct” hypothesized by linguistic theorist Noam Chomsky, the capacity for moral judgment is a universal human trait, “relatively immune” to cultural differences. Hauser described it as a “cold calculus,” independent of emotion, whose workings are largely inaccessible to our conscious minds.

Ursano: Stopping post-traumatic stress disorder before it happens

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 13:44:30 -0400

Mental health professionals are aware of the importance of understanding the kinds of illnesses — such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — that can result from disasters both natural and human-made. But perhaps even more crucial, according to Robert J. Ursano, is that they understand the behaviors associated with such events.

Unfeeling moral choices traced to damaged frontal lobes

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 16:45:32 -0400

Consider the following scenario: Someone you know has AIDS and plans to infect others, some of whom will die. Your only options are to let it happen or to kill the person. Do you pull the trigger?

Most people waver or say they could not, even if they agree that in theory they should. But according to a new study in the journal Nature, subjects with damage to a part of the frontal lobe make a less personal calculation. The logical choice, they say, is to sacrifice one life to save many.

I know just how you feel

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 09:40:37 -0400

When people talk with psychotherapists, the best results occur if both feel similar emotions, when both “like” each other. But do most therapists really connect with patients this way? No one has ever tried to directly measure the biology of empathy between the two.

To fill this gap, a group of researchers at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital measured involuntary biological reactions by both patients and therapists during a regular psychotherapy session. Attention and inattention, expressions of pleasure and satisfaction, and words of care and understanding also were caught on videotape.

Adjusting to death of a loved one

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 10:37:38 -0400

"Is my grief normal?" That is one of the most common questions posed by people who have lost a loved one. A new study by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researchers has helped answer that question by affirming the commonly accepted stages of grief - disbelief, yearning, anger, depression, and acceptance - and the sequence in which these emotions occur. The findings appear in the Feb. 21 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Study shows importance of sleep for optimal memory functioning

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:46:32 -0400

Harvard researchers have tracked fatigue's footsteps on the human brain, showing that sleeplessness impairs the ability to learn new information and that abnormal brain function, not reduced alertness, is the cause.

The study, released in the journal Nature Neuroscience, adds a new wrinkle to the unfolding story of the importance of sleep for memory function and builds on earlier studies that show that sleep deprivation after an event also impairs memory formation.

The study found that student volunteers who had been awake for 35 hours before viewing images performed an average of 19 percent worse remembering those images two days later, after catching up on their sleep.

What does it mean to have a mind? Maybe more than you think

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 12:27:35 -0400

Through an online survey of more than 2,000 people, psychologists at Harvard University have found that we perceive the minds of others along two distinct dimensions: agency, an individual's ability for self-control, morality, and planning; and experience, the capacity to feel sensations such as hunger, fear, and pain.

The findings, presented this week in the journal Science, not only overturn the traditional notion that people see mind along a single continuum, but also provide a framework for understanding many moral and legal decisions and highlight the subjective nature of perceiving mental attributes in others.

Take the online survey

A short history: Psychiatry in modern Africa

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 15:21:44 -0400

Psychiatrists working in Africa during the colonial period held to the belief that Africans did not suffer from depression. They based this idea on the assumption that Africans lacked the ability to be self-reflective or self-critical and therefore depression had no chance of gaining a foothold in their psyches.

Later research during the 1950s showed that this view was nonsense. Africans, along with people throughout the world, suffer from certain universal mental disorders. What differs is the nature of their symptoms, the way these disorders are expressed.

More blacks 'misperceive' weight problem

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 15:59:20 -0400

Overweight black Americans are two to three times more likely than heavy white Americans to say they are of average weight - even after being diagnosed as overweight or obese by their doctors, according to a new study led by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researchers.

Weight misperception was most common among black men and women, and also was found among Hispanic men (but not women), compared to their white counterparts. The findings, which appear in the current online issue of the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, are significant because excess body weight is a known risk factor for diabetes, heart disease, many forms of cancer, and premature death.

Growing concern over the national obesity epidemic in recent years apparently has not significantly increased overweight blacks' recognition of their excess pounds, said lead author Gary G. Bennett of Dana-Farber's Center for Community-Based Research and of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.

The report by Bennett and Kathleen Y. Wolin of Northwestern University is based on an analysis of data collected in the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (NHANES), a government-sponsored research study begun in the 1960s. It includes both interviews and physical examinations carried out by mobile units across the country.

Children are attracted to the fortunate more than the unfortunate

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 09:47:08 -0400

Children as young as 5 prefer lucky individuals over the less fortunate, according to new research by psychologists at Harvard and Stanford University. This phenomenon, the researchers say, could clarify the origins of human attitudes toward differing social groups and help explain the persistence of social inequality.

The work, by Kristina R. Olson and her colleagues, is published in the latest issue of the journal Psychological Science.