Psychology Research

You must have been sleeping if you have missed SciCurious’ post Friday Weird Science: Condoms and ‘Blunt Puncture’ the other day. If you missed it – go now and read it. But, the comment section also produced the idea that Sci should do an anonymous survey of the readers who have experienced condom breakage so she can do the analysis targeting the questions/factors not considered by the original article she blogged aboout, make a cute graph or two, and generally have a good excuse to blog about this topic yet again So, now you need to do the survey . A couple of minutes of your time and it’s fun. And it’s all for the sake of science !!! Read the comments on this post…

Coturnix pointed out that many people may feel too shy to just put their condom breakage experiences in the comments, but Sci is extremely curious to find out why condoms in general break in the population. So she made a SURVEY!* Please do take it, and I’ll graph up the results in a few days. *Of course all information entered will be completely confidential. I will be using this survey exclusively for the purposes of enlightening the internet, and possibly enlightening the people who take it when they see the results. There is no obligation to take the survey and you may exit at any time. Also, please let me know if there are any major questions I may have missed on the survey. Sci has never made a survey before, and if her first job is shoddy, she would really like to improve in the future. The survey can be found here: Click Here to take survey High n’s are always better! Please share with your friends! And in the comments on the survey, please try to keep it clinical. My cat reads over my shoulder sometimes. Read the comments on this post…

tags: get religion , religion , godlessness , atheism , streaming video Here’s an ad for one of the world’s favorite time and life-wasters: Religion. Presented here as a public service (notice the background music) [1:25] Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

This is disturbing stuff. According to the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences , No-Lie MRI has recently produced a report that’s being offered as evidence in a California court. The case is a child protection hearing being conducted in the juvenile court. In brief, and because the details of the case are sealed and of a sensitive nature, the issue is whether a minor has suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a custodial parent and should remain removed from the home. The parent has contracted No Lie MRI and apparently undergone a brain scan. The defense plans to claim the fMRI-based lie detection (or “truth verification”) technology is accurate and generally accepted within the relevant scientific community in part by narrowly defining the relevant community as only those who research and develop fMRI-based lie detection. [Note: California follows its own version of the Frye test of admissibility, not the current federal test under Daubert.] Limiting the “relevant community” to only those who research and develop fMRI based lie detection is without merit, if only because such a definition precludes effective or sufficient peer-review. Indeed, it is arguable such a narrowly-defined community has a strong incentive to exaggerate its claims of accuracy and overlook unanswered questions for financial gain if such techniques are “legally admissible.” I think we need to tread very, very carefully when it comes to incorporating fMRI data into the legal system. Brain scans can be incredibly useful, and have generated lots of really exciting research, but I worry about juries and judges subscribing to a false metaphor, which is that these massive magnets are accurate “windows” into the brain/mind/soul. (This is the “myth of transparency,” which I’ve written about before.) It’s important to remind ourselves that every fMRI image is highly processed snapshot of blood flow, not some magic readout of our secret thoughts. And then there’s the bias that’s introduced when people are shown silhouettes of the skull, complete with splotches of primary color: Deena Skolnick Weisberg, a researcher at Rutgers University, recently demonstrated how referencing brain scans can bias the evaluation of scientific papers. When she gave neuroscience students and ordinary adults a few examples of obviously flawed scientific explanations, people were consistently able to find the flaws. However, when the same explanations were prefaced with the phrase “Brain scans indicate” both the students and adults became much less critical. In short, I’d want to see a lot more peer-reviewed work on fMRI and truth detection before I’d feel comfortable seeing brain scan data in court. Otherwise, I think it’s too easy to be seduced and convinced by data that looks scientific (the Latinate anatomy! the cortical references! the expensive machines!) but might actually be shoddy pseudoscience. Read the comments on this post…

Have you ever looked at a piano keyboard and wondered why the notes of an octave were divided up into seven white keys and five black ones? After all, the sounds that lie between one C and another form a continuous range of frequencies. And yet, throughout history and across different cultures, we have consistently divided them into these set of twelve semi-tones. Now, Deborah Ross and colleagues from DukeUniversity have found the answer. These musical intervals actually reflect the sounds of our own speech, and are hidden in the vowels we use. Musical scales just sound right because they match the frequency ratios that our brains are primed to detect. When you talk, your larynx produces sound waves which resonate through your throats. The rest of your vocal tract -your lips, tongue, mouth and more – act as a living, flexible organ pipe, that shifts in shape to change the characteristics of these waves. What eventually escapes from our mouths is a combination of sound waves travelling at different frequencies, some louder than others. The loudest frequencies are called formants , and different vowels have different ‘formant signature’. Our brains use these to distinguish between different vowel sounds. Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

A reader asks: What’s the hardest question you’ve gotten about the new book? Is there one you were totally unprepared to answer? This is a slightly embarrassing confession, but one of the most difficult questions I’ve been asked is also one of the most obvious. It goes something like this: “What practical knowledge have we gained by looking at decision-making in the brain that we didn’t already have, either through introspection or behavioral studies?” When I was first asked this question, I think I muttered something about the virtue of curiosity, breaking open the black box and fulfilling that ancient dictum “know thyself”. In other words, I completely avoided the query, like a slippery politician. While I think those are all valid motivations for neuroscience – there is something epic about trying to understand the three pounds of gelatinous flesh inside the skull – they also aren’t particularly practical. And I think it’s also worth pointing out (as I have before) that a tremendous amount of modern neuroscientific ideas have been presciently anticipated by everyone from David Hume to William James to Aristotle to Virginia Woolf. This shouldn’t be too surprising – introspection is a powerful investigative tool. David Hume, for instance, summarizes an awful lot of recent work on the importance of emotional signals during decision-making with this famous line: “Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” So what’s the added benefit of neuroscientific explanations? If Hume was right, and James was such a genius, and we can learn so much from “mere” behavioral studies, then why bother with the amygdala or dopamine? The best answer, I think, is that learning about the brain can help constrain our theories. We haven’t decoded the cortex or solved human nature – we’re not even close – but we can begin to narrow the space of possible theories . We know, for instance, that the rational agent model of Homo Economicus isn’t particularly accurate, at least from the perspective of the brain, and that the deliberative prefrontal cortex is often out-shouted by emotional brain areas like the nucleus accumbens, insula, etc. This supports, of course, lots of observational studies that demonstrate that people rarely rely on explicit calculations of utility (or explicit calculations of anything, really) when making decisions. The anatomical details, in other words, can help settle the argument. Now this might seem rather underwhelming – all those pretty fMRI pictures just constrain our pre-existing theories? – but I actually think it’s rather essential. Consider Freud. The man had an uncanny talent for inventing elegant theories. He was a hypothesis machine, churning out one fantastic sounding idea after another. But which of these ideas are true? Here’s where neuroscience comes to the rescue. I think time and experiments have redeemed some of Freud’s fundamental theories – the unconscious drives much of our behavior, dreams aren’t random narratives, but actually regurgitate scenes and snippets from daily life, etc. – while other Freudian theories have largely fallen flat (your Mom probably isn’t responsible for most of your neuroses). We can take something as vague as the id and began shackling it to particular brain regions, like the aforementioned amygdala. (The prefrontal cortex is some fusion of the ego and super-ego.) By recording from hippocampal cells in the rat, scientists can begin to decode the function of dreams, and see how they’re a crucial component of memory consolidation. And so on. The point is that, while all of Freud’s theories might sound convincing, only a few of them are actually correct. In this sense, neuroscience is what helps us separate the beautiful theory from the definite truth. How would you answer the question? Read the comments on this post…

One of my most vivid memories from middle school was in English class. The class wasn’t paying attention to the teacher — we were chattering during “work time” and she wanted us to stop and return to a full-class lesson. So she shouted “SEX!” We all shut up immediately and stared at her in disbelief. Then she said, in a calm, normal voice: “Now that I’ve got your attention …” and proceeded with her lesson. It worked great — except for one thing. I have no recollection of what she actually taught us that day. This brings up an interesting point: Teachers are often tempted to bring up interesting but irrelevant details (like SEX) in order to maintain student interest in a lesson. But does this actually help students learn the material better? Several studies indicate that it does not. Adding extraneous, unrelated anecdotes can actually distract students from the task at hand and lead to poorer recall, even if they are more “interested” in the material. But a secondary question about extra details in course materials has yet to be answered: Is it the fact that extra details are present at all which leads to poorer learning? Or does the kind of extra details matter? Are students “seduced” by sexier examples, therefore missing the primary point of the lesson? A team led by Richard Mayer created two different versions of a lesson on how viruses attack humans. In one version, each major point of the lesson was interrupted by an interesting anecdote such as this one: A study conducted by researchers at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, reveals that people who make love once or twice a week are more immune to colds than folks who abstain from sex. Researchers believe that bedroom activity somehow stimulates an immune-boosting antibody called IgA. In the other version, boring anecdotes were used instead: Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

Given the significance of today’s events in American history, I figured I better inaugurate something new here on the Psychology Today blogs. So I’ve decided to do a weekly feature called Girl-Crotch Tuesday. Every Tuesday I’ll be posting something interesting but hopefully not predictable about the female crotch. For today’s Girl-Crotch Tuesday, I tried not to get too Cosmo on you, even if the "Three Mistakes Women Make…" title does sound like I spent too long in front of the magazine racks at the check-out line at the supermarket. For the new 6th edition of my book, I decided to do a chapter titled Vulva Care–Keeping Your Kitty Happy. I was very fortunate to receive the advice of two highly experienced female gynecologists from two different parts of the country–so you might appreciate my surprise when they quite independently mentioned three of the same concerns about the way women treat their vulvas. However, nothing I say should be construed as medical advice. Check with your healthcare provider and local fire official before burning your thongs, panties or pads. #1. Thongs are bad. Perhaps you feel your crotch should be a slave to fashion, but thongs can irritate and abrade the skin of your vulva worse than a horny boyfriend with rough hands. Another concern is the way that bacteria from your bum might be using the butt-floss part of your thong to rappel into the opening of your vagina. We all know the evils that can befall a vagina when Mr. Sam Fecal meets Ms. Puss du Pink. #2. When possible, go commando (without panties) day and night–but especially at night. Contrary to what the manufacturers of women’s underwear want you to believe, your kitty needs air to breathe. This doesn’t happen too well when you are wearing underwear, even if your panties are made of 100% cotton. It especially doesn’t happen when you are wearing panties or pajama bottoms and have the covers on. (Why do so many American women sleep with their panties on? Surely the Sand Man doesn’t care if your crotch is bare.) 3. Pad problems… Wearing pads or pantiliners to "feel fresh" can be just another way to trap moisture and to irritate your vulva. If you tend to leak or get all drippy from hot sex fantasies, try using a clean cotton handkerchief to line your panties, or get yourself some 100% cotton pads. Possible sources include GladRags and LunaPads, or better yet, why not make your own? For a very cool website that shows you how to make your own period pads, click here.   © 2009 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

Is that George Carlin I hear laughing from beyond the grave? When he died a few months ago, we posted a humble tribute to the great man and Psychology Today carried an excellent in-depth interview by Jay Dixit. Were curious George alive today, we’re pretty sure he’d be cracking up at the recent indefinite suspension of hockey-playing loudmouth Sean Avery. Apparently, Avery made an off-color remark about how a couple of his former girlfriends were dating other hockey players, using a phrase, composed of two innocuous words that somehow, when put together, become explosive: nitrogen and glycerine, sloppy and seconds. Watching the various news outlets desperately try to dance around the phrase without stepping on their own flat feet was most entertaining — especially since neither the phrase nor either of the words composing it have been declared officially verboten up til now, as far as I can tell. But now that the NHL’s offended enough to suspend the guy, no more sloppy seconds for anyone, apparently. Maybe we’re about to expand our habit of humiliating ourselves by saying stupid things like "the c-word" by expanding the inanity to "the s-s phrase." "In today’s news, another hockey player has been suspended for refering to his ex-girlfriend as ‘the s-s phrase.’"  It’s only a matter of time. There appears to be a tipping point at which we somehow determine that enough of us know the secret meaning of a heretofore obscure word or phrase that we have to stop saying it publicly. It’s an amusing process to watch, since knowing the hidden meaning means we all know what we’re avoiding, which makes the effort to avoid it seem what, hypocritical? Absurd? Delusional? It’s a funny thing: we seem to believe in the magical power of words. Don’t believe me? Try saying, out loud, the following sentence: "I hope my children get cancer." Even if you can do it, it feels downright creepy, right? It goes the other way, too. Remember when it was offensive to say something "sucked?" Well, no more. Whatever its salacious origins, the word is now as acceptable as oreo cookies. A few years ago, Seth Stevenson amusingly argued in Slate that we should all just relax and use the word freely without thinking of its, you know, meaning.  Which is fine by me, but why not apply that line of reasoning to all the other still-offensive words we use in ways not aligned with their literal meaning, like doctors prescribing drugs "off-label?" Strangely, it would be acceptable to say I though the film Rachel Gets Married sucked, but it would be offensive to say that watching it f*cked up my night. Go figure. Hypocrisy is like lying: you start out small but before you know it, you’re drifting into the emptiness, like an astronaut’s toolbag. © 2008 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

This is a hormone imbalance that can result in irregular periods, unwanted hair growth, acne, extra weight gain, baldness, and patches of dark skin on the back of your neck and inner thighs that weren’t caused by some guy giving you a hickey. Nearly 1 of every 10 to 20 women have PCOS, and it tends to be especially common in young women. Cases can be mild or severe. Researchers still don’t know what causes it, but they suspect that insulin resistance plays a factor in many cases. The symptoms of PCOS start when your pituitary makes too much leutinizing hormone (LH) and/or your pancreas makes too much insulin. This causes your ovaries to make more testosterone than your body needs, which helps explain the extra acne and body hair. Too much testosterone can also cause cysts in your ovaries which aren’t so much cysts as they are immature follicles which started to develop but stopped before they could release an egg. The most common treatment for PCOS is the birth control pill, which lowers testosterone in a woman’s body. Diet and exercise are also recommended. PCOS is associated with diabetes and obesity, and can result in making it difficult to conceive. If you suspect you might have it, consultation with an endocrinologist who specializes in PCOS is highly advisable. © 2008 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.