Psychoworld.sk – human psychology news

“Easy On The Eyes” May Hit Closer To The Mark Than We Thought.

Experiments led by Piotr Winkielman, of the University of California, San Diego, and published in the current issue of Psychological Science, suggest that judgments of attractiveness depend on mental processing ease, or being “easy on the mind.”

“What you like is a function of what your mind has been trained on,” Winkielman said. “A stimulus becomes attractive if it falls into the average of what you’ve seen and is therefore simple for your brain to process. In our experiments, we show that we can make an arbitrary pattern likeable just by preparing the mind to recognize it quickly.”

Humans have similar preferences for prototypes in a wide variety of other categories, including dogs, birds, fish, cars and even watches.

Yet the question “why?” has remained open. A popular explanation has been an evolutionary, sexual-selection one that goes something as follows: Like symmetry (another reliable predictor of attractiveness), prototypicality signals health and fitness – unusually protuberant eyes might be a clue to disease, for example – and so is a kind of shorthand for the value of a potential mate.
Read more.

U.S. psychologists say people made to think quickly report feeling happier and more energetic, creative and self-assured.

In other words, such people reported a whole set of experiences associated with being manic, said Princeton University psychologist Emily Pronin, co-author of the study.

Fast thinking, or racing thoughts, is most commonly known as a symptom of the clinical psychiatric disorder of mania.

But Pronin says most healthy people have experienced racing thoughts at some point in time, such as while excited about a new idea or while brainstorming with a group of people.

The researchers found people felt happier and more energetic, creative, powerful and grandiose when made to read a statement at a fast, rather than slow. More here.

Giving your children music lessons could be one of the best things you ever do for their education, claim researchers.

Unique brain testing shows how early musical training improves memory and IQ – within as little as four months.

Experts say music should be routinely taught in pre-school and primary school to maximise children’s brain development.

Brain scanning showed children aged between four and six who received music lessons generated more sophisticated responses than those who did not. Read more…

Researchers at the University of Warwick and Watson Wyatt have been examining just how much money one needs to win in the lottery to have a long term impact on personal happiness.

Unsurprisingly the researchers found that small wins in tens or hundreds of pound made little long term difference, but they also found one did not need to win the jackpot to gain a significant increase in long-term mental wellbeing.

Intriguingly the researchers also found that this increased happiness is not obvious immediately after the medium-sized win and takes some time to show through. Economist Professor Andrew Oswald from the University of Warwick said:

“This delay could be due the short term disruptive effect on one’s live of actually winning, but a more plausible explanation of the delay is that initially many windfall lottery funds are saved and spent later.” Read more.

After comparing children who had music lessons with those who didn’t, scientists from McMaster University, Canada, found that those who took music lessons had different patterns of brain development.

The children with music lessons had better memories as well as higher literacy and math levels. All the kids in the study were aged 4-6 years.You will be able to read about this study in the October issue of Brain.

Professor Laurel Trainor, team leader, said “This is the first study to show that brain responses in young, musically trained and untrained children change differently over the course of a year.”

While all the children listened to two sounds, a violin tone, and a white noise burst – the scientists used magnetoencephalography to measure their brain activity. All the kids responded more to the violin tone than the white noise burst.

This indicates that the children’s brains are being used more when the sound is meaningful. During the year-long study the researchers also noticed that all the children’s brains gradually responded more rapidly to sounds – indicating brain maturity. Read more.

Anyone who has traveled has experienced jet lag—that groggy realization that while your day is beginning in Washington, D.C., the night you just left in San Francisco is hardly over.

Jet lag is an inconvenient reminder that the body is set to a 24-hour clock, known by scientists as circadian rhythms, from the Latin circa dies, “about one day.” An internal biological clock is fundamental to all living organisms, influencing hormones that play a role in sleep and wakefulness, metabolic rate, and body temperature.

Disruption of circadian rhythms not only affects sleep patterns but also has been found to precipitate mania in people with bipolar disorder (manic-depressive illness). Other types of illnesses also are affected by circadian rhythms; for example, heart attacks occur more frequently in the morning while asthma attacks occur more often at night.

Although biological clocks have been the focus of intensive research over the past four decades, only recently have the tools needed to examine the molecular basis of circadian rhythms become available. Early studies pointed to an area of the brain, the hypothalamus, as the location of the circadian pacemaker in mammals. More findings here.

Using marijuana in adolescence and early adulthood increases the likelihood of psychotic symptoms in later life, a new study suggests. The risk of developing these symptoms is “moderate”, say researchers, though is higher in people with a pre-disposition to psychosis.

A team led by Jim van Os of the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands followed 2437 people aged between 14 and 24. After four years, 21% of cannabis users had experienced psychotic symptoms compared with 15% of non-users. And the more a participant used cannabis, the more likely they were to develop symptoms.

Family history

The risk appears greatest for those with a predisposition to psychosis, as evidenced by mild signs of psychosis at the outset of the study.

Given the wealth of evidence that smoking damages your health, you would have to be stupid not to kick the habit. Now a study suggests this could be a self-fulfilling prophecy, because smoking reduces your IQ.

Lawrence Whalley at the University of Aberdeen and colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, both in the UK, looked at how the cognitive ability of 465 individuals, approximately half of whom were smokers, changed over their lifetime and whether this related to their smoking habits.

Smokers performed significantly worse in five different cognitive tests than did both former smokers and those who had never smoked. When social and health factors such as education, occupation and alcohol consumption were taken into account, smoking still appeared to contribute to a drop in cognitive function of just under 1%. More here.

Psychologists have launched a study to find out why some people who hear voices in their head consider it a positive experience while others find it distressing.

Although hearing voices has traditionally been viewed as ‘abnormal’ and a symptom of mental illness, the Dutch findings suggest it is more widespread than previously thought, estimating that about 4% of the population hear voices. That would be equivalent to 100,000 people in Greater Manchester.

Researcher Aylish Campbell said: “We know that many members of the general population hear voices but have never felt the need to access mental health services; some experts even claim that more people hear voices and don’t seek psychiatric help than those who do. Continues…

People are becoming addicted to mobile phones, causing them to become stressed and irritable, psychologists say.

Some 16% of examinated students were found to have problem behaviour linked to using their phone – either lying about how much they used them, becoming irritable after using them or being overly pre-occupied with them.

Cancer
“Mobile phones have impacted on every aspect of our social world,” Dr Sheffield will say.
The warnings come after years of debate about whether mobile phones increase the risk of cancer.