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Men’s Interest in Babies Linked With Hormonal Responses to Sexual Stimuli
Young men’s interest in babies is associated with their physiological reactivity to sexually explicit material, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The study showed that young men who reported more interest in babies showed a lower increase in testosterone in response to sexually explicit material than men who weren’t as interested in babies. “Our findings show there is a strong mind-body connection: Liking or not liking babies is related to how a man’s body – specifically, his testosterone – responds to sexual stimuli,” explains Dario Maestripieri of the University of Chicago, lead researcher on the study.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: The Price of Perspective Taking: Child Depressive Symptoms Interact With Parental Empathy to Predict Immune Functioning in Parents Erika M. Manczak, Devika Basu, and Edith Chen People vary in the amount of empathy -- the tendency to affectively experience and adopt the perspective of others -- they experience. Empathy is generally considered to be a positive and desirable trait, but are there circumstances in which empathy is harmful?
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Get Up, Stand Up! How to Get People to Quit Sitting
If you work a typical office job, you might be spending more than 10 hours a day sitting down. Across numerous studies, extensive sitting has been linked to diabetes, heart disease, cancer and even an early death. People are becoming increasingly aware of the health risks associated with sitting, but with many employees desk-bound, how do you convince people to get up and get moving at work? According to a new meta-analysis, interventions that specifically targeted sitting, rather than just getting people to exercise more often, were the most effective at getting people to be less sedentary at work.
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Quick Thinkers Are Charismatic
Charisma may rely on quick thinking, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The research shows that people who were able to respond more quickly to general knowledge questions and visual tasks were perceived as more charismatic by their friends, independently of IQ and other personality traits.
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Inside the Psychologist’s Studio: Annette Karmiloff-Smith
Developmental psychology will become increasingly interdisciplinary, incorporating genetics, cell biology, the brain, the environment, and more, APS Board Member Annette Karmiloff-Smith projects in a just-released “Inside the Psychologist’s Studio” interview. Karmiloff-Smith, a highly influential developmental and cognitive neuroscientist, adds that she expects developmental researchers to devote increased attention to individual differences and environmental influences.
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Showcasing Psychological Science: A Conference for High School Students and Teachers
Many initiatives promote psychological science among college students and their teachers, but their high school counterparts often are left out. To address this issue, faculty at Marian University, with the support of the APS Fund for Teaching and Public Understanding of Psychological Science, created a conference to showcase psychological science and pedagogy for high school students and teachers in Indiana. To highlight the science of psychology, James McKeen Cattell APS Fellow Scott Lilienfeld (Emory University) and Leslie Ashburn-Nardo (Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis) discussed the differences between psychological science and pseudoscience.
