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Archive for ديسمبر, 2005
Depressed people are normally thought of as being somewhat disengaged from the rest of the world, but psychologists at Queen’s University in Canada have found that mildly depressed students actually have a heightened ability to detect other people’s emotions. Kate Harkness and colleagues asked 43 depressed and non-depressed students to identify people’s emotions from pictures that showed only the eye region of their faces. The 16 students who were classified [ Read More ]
Being a doctor can be incredibly stressful and more than a fifth of junior physicians wish they’d never taken medicine in the first place. Moreover, there’s evidence showing that stressed doctors are bad doctors, so it would make sense if applicants to medical school were selected not just on the basis of their academic strengths but also on whether they’re likely to enjoy being a doctor. But in the UK, [ Read More ]
For the first time anywhere in the world, psychologists at California-based company Omneuron and Stanford University have demonstrated that people can be taught how to reduce their experience of pain with the aid of real-time images of their brain activity. Healthy participants had a painful stimulus applied to the back of their hand. At the same time they learned to use mental strategies – such as concentrating on another part [ Read More ]
Most people have experienced the sensation that someone is staring at them, only to turn around and find that indeed, someone’s gaze is burning a hole in the back of their head. The phenomenon has led some to believe that people must have a sixth sense that allows them to know they are being stared at. However, when experimenters have investigated whether the phenomenon is a real one, the results [ Read More ]
It’s no wonder they get bored. According to psychologists James Danckert and Ava-Ann Allman at the University of Waterloo in Canada, time really does pass more slowly for people who are prone to boredom. The researchers came to this conclusion after finding people prone to boredom were less accurate at estimating the duration of intervals lasting from two seconds to a minute, than were people not prone to boredom. Four [ Read More ]
The days of finding Dutch courage in a quick drink before a stressful situation could soon be over – researchers have reported that a few sniffs of the hormone oxytocin can dampen the brain’s fear response to threatening images. The finding follows a report earlier this year showing oxytocin can increase people’s trust. Peter Kirsch and colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health in America scanned the brains of [ Read More ]
Contributed by Hannah Corlass at Totton College Is it worrying that young girls don’t like their bodies, and know what a diet is?This study aimed to find out how aware of dieting and body dissatisfaction young girls (5-8 years old) are, and how peers affect this awareness. Previous research has shown that the desire to be thinner has become so common in women it’s considered ‘a normative discontent’. Eighty-one girls [ Read More ]
Artists and poets who have an embryonic form of schizophrenia called ‘schizotypy’ are responsible for the illness not dying out despite the fact that people with full-blown schizophrenia are far less likely to have children than healthy people. That’s according to Daniel Nettle and Helen Keenoo who believe prevalence rates for schizophrenia remain relatively constant at around one per cent of the population because of the superior mating success of [ Read More ]
Most textbooks fail to discuss the role of humour in business negotiations but from her analysis of two real-life meetings concerning a multi-million pound transaction, Taina Vuorela at the Helsinki School of Economics reports that humour can be an important strategic tool for negotiators. Vuorela first sat in on an internal strategic meeting held by sellers – four British men and a Finn – at a Finnish company that manufactures [ Read More ]