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Study discovers the ordinary psycho
New Zealand Herald: There's more to psychopaths than being murderous. They aren't all as smart as Hannibal Lecter, or evil, and they can change, say researchers. Victoria University Associate Professor Devon Polaschek, one of four authors of research about to be published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, says psychopaths of the popular imagination give the personality disorder a bad name. Patrick Bateman in the film American Psycho inserts a chainsaw into a prostitute. Alex in A Clockwork Orange fantasises about torture and slaughter while listening to music. But psychopaths can wreak havoc in workplaces without stabbing, or eating, their colleagues.
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Research States That Prejudice Comes From a Basic Human Need and Way of Thinking
Where does prejudice come from? Not from ideology, say the authors of a new paper. Instead, prejudice stems from a deeper psychological need, associated with a particular way of thinking. People who aren’t comfortable with ambiguity and want to make quick and firm decisions are also prone to making generalizations about others. In a new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Arne Roets and Alain Van Hiel of Ghent University in Belgium look at what psychological scientists have learned about prejudice since the 1954 publication of an influential book, The Nature of Prejudice by Gordon Allport.
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Left-leaning estimations
The Globe and Mail: “If something has gone down in your estimation, check your stance,” says the New Scientist. “Leaning to the left encourages people to underestimate everything from the height of buildings to the number of Michael Jackson chart-toppers. To find out whether body positions influence value estimation, Anita Eerland and her colleagues at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands asked 33 people to guess the numerical answer to questions while [standing] on a Wii-console balance board.
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Does having more potential mates make us focus on deep qualities or shallow ones?
Business Insider: A study published in Psychological Science found that volunteers who have the choice of many potential mates pay less attention to important characteristics that take more time to elicit and pay more attention to trivial characteristics that are quickly and easily assessed. ...Results found that in small speed-dating sessions, people made choices based primarily on important characteristics that take more time to evaluate while those in large speed-dating sessions made choices based on quick and easy-to-assess characteristics. Read the whole story: Business Insider
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The Unreal World: ‘Homeland’ and bipolar disorder
Los Angeles Times: Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) returns as a hero to the U.S. after spending eight years as a prisoner of war in Afghanistan. Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) is a mentally unstable CIA officer who is convinced that Brody is an agent of Al Qaeda. She gets antipsychotic medication and lithium from her sister, psychiatrist Maggie Mathison (Amy Hargreaves), but she fears she'll lose her job if she gets medical treatment through normal channels. In this episode, Carrie is hospitalized after being burned and bruised in a briefcase bomb explosion. She hasn't taken her medication in several days and is becoming increasingly manic.
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Men Often Misread Women’s Sexual Cues: Study
U.S. News & World Report: Men often have difficulty accurately reading a woman's level of interest in them, a new study finds. In what should come as no surprise to any woman who's spent time in the dating world, a certain type of guy tends to think all women want him, while other guys just can't seem to pick up on the cues. The study included 96 male and 103 female U.S. college undergraduates who took part in a "speed-meeting" exercise that involved talking for three minutes to each of five members of the opposite sex. Before the exercise, the participants rated their own attractiveness and were assessed for their desire for a short-term sexual encounter.
