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An American study has investigated the effect of prayer on patients undergoing heart surgery. Three hundred and seventy-one heart surgery patients who were prayed for by 12 religious congregations fared no better in the six months after their operation than 377 patients who were not prayed for. However, lead researcher Mitchell Krucoff at Duke University told Reuters that “This is not ‘God failed the test’ or ‘God passed the test’…it’s [ Read More ]
Sadly, children who are abused by their parents are more likely than unharmed children to grow up to become abusive parents themselves. Whether this behaviour is inherited or learned is unclear. Dario Maestripieri at the Yerkes National Primate Research Centre investigated this issue in rhesus macaque monkeys, among whom infant abuse is also known to occur. To compare the influence of genes vs. experience, Maestripieri used a cross-fostering technique that [ Read More ]
Anticipating where your opponent’s shot is going to land is vital for success at games like tennis. There are visual clues from the way your opponent strikes the ball, and it obviously helps to carefully watch the ball’s flight. But another way, investigated by Lionel Crognier and Yves-Andre Fery, is to impose your tactics on the rally, influencing your opponent’s shot so that you can predict where she will play [ Read More ]
Every year in the UK, 150,000 people attend Accident and Emergency (A&E) having deliberately harmed themselves. These are vulnerable people, up to five per cent of whom, based on current rates, will have committed suicide within five to ten years. The staff at A&E are often the only professional contact these patients will have. Yet evidence suggests self-harm patients are unpopular among A&E staff, and in a recent survey self-harm [ Read More ]
There’s emerging evidence that sitting near a bright light every morning could help people with depression (see recent Cochrane review). More dubious is the suggestion that ‘negative ion generators’ – gadgets that purportedly increase the concentration of negatively-charged atoms in the atmosphere – might also help relieve depression. Namni Goel at Weslyan University and his team tested both these treatments with 31 patients who had been diagnosed with major depression [ Read More ]
To investigate the neuroscience behind socialising, Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg and colleagues have scanned the brains of people with the genetic disorder Williams-Beuren syndrome and compared them with scans of healthy controls. People with Williams syndrome are socially fearless, impulsive, erratic, and highly empathic, but they’re excessively anxious about non-social situations. Meyer-Lindenberg recruited 13 people with Williams syndrome who were unusual in that they had normal IQ. They and 13 healthy controls [ Read More ]
How is knowledge about the world organised in our minds? Studies with people whose memory has been affected by brain damage, have pointed to a hierarchy of factual, ‘semantic’ knowledge, in which more general information must be accessed first on the way to more specific information. Presented with a photo of a dog, patients with semantic dementia will often only be able to identify it as an ‘animal’. Presented with [ Read More ]
How much do young children understand about the internet? Zheng Yan at the University of Albany recruited 83 children, aged from 5 to 12 years, to find out how much they used and understood the internet. Children aged from five to eight years tended to have little online experience, and to be naïve about both the technical and social side of the internet. One five-year-old-boy said “Um, it has two [ Read More ]
Older people who are depressed, especially those in residential or nursing care homes, could benefit from writing about their lives. Helen Elford at Sheffield University and her colleagues recruited four residents from a nursing home in South Yorkshire. The residents, one man and four women aged between 71 and 89 years, were invited to write in a series of booklets, each containing prompts to reminisce about different aspects of their [ Read More ]
An inevitable weakness with psychology research is that so much of it is conducted with people (usually students) who have volunteered. If certain kinds of people routinely opt out of research, it could mean our estimates of what is psychologically average or ‘normal’ are completely off the mark. Bernd Marcus and Astrid Schūtz at Chemnitz University of Technology tried to find out if people who don’t participate in research have [ Read More ]