-
The new (and nastier) ageism
America is a rapidly graying society. This demographic trend has been underway for a while—and anticipated for a long while—yet some of its implications are just now coming into focus. Most notably, the aging of America will almost certainly trigger a retirement crisis, with elderly boomers competing for limited financial and medical resources—and working longer just to stay afloat. The elderly have never been honored in American society. They have more often been stereotyped, stigmatized and pitied as outdated and weak, both physically and mentally.
-
Does Our Innate Ability to Estimate Numbers Benefit From Education?
Children are born with an innate number sense -- the ability to discriminate quickly between different amounts or numbers of objects, even without counting. And research has shown that children who have a more acute number sense -- or Approximate Number System (ANS) -- are also better at mathematics. In a new article published in Psychological Science, researcher Manuela Piazza of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit at INSERM in France and colleagues sought to understand whether improvements in ANS ability come naturally with age or whether they are the result of formal education. The researchers tested 38 subjects from an indigenous Mundurucú population in Brazil.
-
Sweaty Babies
BBC: A study of one year old babies has found an intriguing connection between their physiological symptoms when they are confronted with a frightening situation, and their levels of aggression two years later. Professor Stephanie Van Goozen from Cardiff University’s School of Psychology in Wales conducted this new research. It was published online this week in the journal Psychological Science. Read the whole story: BBC
-
Au bureau, assumons nos erreurs (How to accept our mistakes)
Le Monde: Lisa Legault, chercheuse en psychologie à l'université Clarkson (Etats-Unis), vient d'en faire la démonstration, avec son équipe. Son article "Préserver son intégrité quand nos performances sont menacées : l'affirmation de soi accroît la réponse neurophysiologique aux erreurs" était publié dans le numéro de février de la revue Psychological Science. Les chercheurs américains ont mené une première expérience qui consistait à déstabiliser la moitié d'un groupe de participants. Puis ils leur ont fait faire un test. Quand ils se trompaient, "Faux", criait le système, pour effrayer les cobayes encore davantage.
-
If Your Shrink Is A Bot, How Do You Respond?
NPR: Her hair is brown and tied back into a professional-looking ponytail. She wears a blue shirt, tan sweater and delicate gold chain. It's the first time she has met the man sitting across from her, and she looks out at him, her eyes curious. ... Now, obviously this work raises all kinds of issues, and even on a practical level, real obstacles remain. Jeff Cohn, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh, studies the relationship between physical movements and emotion and says signals from the face, voice and body are incredibly complicated to interpret. "Individuals vary a lot in how expressive they are," Cohn explains.
-
How Psychiatry Went Crazy
The Wall Street Journal: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is often called the "Bible" of psychiatric diagnosis, and the term is apt. The DSM consists of instructions from on high; readers usually disagree in their interpretations of the text; and believing it is an act of faith. At least the Bible lists only 10 Commandments; the DSM grows by leaps and bounds with every revision. The first edition, published by the American Psychiatric Association in 1952, was a spiral-bound pamphlet that described 11 categories of mental disorder, including brain syndromes, personality problems and psychotic disorders.
