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Placebo Power
APS Fellow and Charter Member Irving Kirsch, associate director of the Placebo Studies Program at Harvard Medical School, says the difference between the effect of a placebo and the effect of an antidepressant is minimal for most people. "People get better when they take the drug, but it's not the chemical ingredients of the drugs that are making them better," Kirsch told Lesley Stael in a 60 Minutes interview, "it's largely the placebo effect." The "placebo effect" may not be all in your head says Kirsch in the interview below: Kirsch, I., Deacon, B.J., Huedo-Medina, T.B., Scoboria, A., Moore, T.J., & Johnson, B.T. (2008).
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Peter Ayton: To Risk or Not to Risk
Peter Ayton, a researcher from City University London, UK, investigates how people make judgments and decisions under conditions of risk, uncertainty, and ambiguity. Ayton will be speaking at the Invited Symposium Emotional Influences on Decision Making at the 24th APS Annual Convention in Chicago. Ayton’s talk in this symposium, Dread Risk: Terrorism and Bicycle Accidents, will discuss a claim made by Gigerenzer (2004) that dread evoked by the September 11, 2001 attacks prompted switching from flying to driving, producing additional road accidents causing 1,500 fatalities.
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Behind the Music: Human Factors Rap
The Arch Laboratory at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, USA is the main research and training facility of the graduate program in Human Factors and Applied Cognition. Arch Lab members conduct research in attention, audition, biological motion, eye movements, imagery, memory, and visual perception as applied to such domains as automation, aviation, driving, robotics, and human-computer interaction. Students and faculty created this video for a Human Factors and Ergonomics Society video contest in 2011 to help explains what human factors is.
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All About Online Love
When Dan Ariely was a teenager, he suffered burns so severe that he spent three years in the hospital. Ariely worried about how his injuries would affect the way he fit in socially — especially when it came to dating. Now a professor of behavioral economics at Duke University, Ariely recently spoke with Today Show correspondent Amy Robach about relationships and dating. Ariely and Eli Finkel — lead author of a new study on online dating in Psychological Science in the Public Interest — were featured in a CNBC report on online dating that aired Thursday, February 9.
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Science on Love (and Hate, Too) at the APS Convention
Although Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, psychological scientists study love all year round — and it’s not always pretty. In this video, Douglas T. Kenrick discusses his book Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life. Plan to see Kenrick and others present research on love, sex, online dating, and more at the 24th APS Annual Convention in Chicago. Passionate Love: Looking Back and Looking Ahead Elaine Hatfield will talk about how research on passionate love and sexual desire has evolved over the last 50 years. Hatfield will be introduced by Ellen Berscheid, with whom she will share the 2012 APS William James Fellow Award.
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Science on Swearing
Timothy Jay knows enough about curse words to make any seven-year-old jealous. The Boston Globe has called him the “Doctor of dirty words,” and he frequently appears in news stories — like this one from the Today Show — to discuss swearing. Even though swearing is frowned upon, research that Jay published in Perspectives on Psychological Science shows that profane language is everywhere, and it has an important purpose. Taboo words pack a lot of emotion, and this allows them to achieve certain goals, such as conveying frustration or humor, more easily than non-taboo words.
