Psychology and human relations. Human relationships. Love and illness. Illness and Psychology.
To the long list of things to consider when choosing a mate, there is now evidence suggesting that your spouse’s personality can have a major influence on your own ability to recover from – and perhaps even survive – a major challenge to your health.
The study involved 111 and their spouses. The researchers assessed aspects of personality, symptoms of depression, and the marital satisfaction of 111 coronary artery bypass patients and their spouses prior to, and 18 months following, surgery.
The main finding was that within couples, the personality of one person predicted the depression level of their partner 18 months later. The results were published in the most recent issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
The research demonstrated that a patient married to a generally neurotic and anxious spouse was more likely to report symptoms of depression 18 months after surgery.
The study also focused on how the spouses of patients coped over the course of the study. More here.
Psychology and human relations. Human relationships. Love and illness. Illness and Psychology.
By Jeremy Dean, of PsyBlog. Human psychology
“Is psychology a coherent scientific discipline and can its existence be effectively defined?” Henriques (2004:1218).
Neither defining terms, nor unity of knowledge have ever been strong points of psychological science. Many psychologists, faced with bringing order to psychology’s diversity, or even offering a definition of psychology, have excused themselves and gone for a lie down.
Gregg Henriques’ (2004) ‘Psychology Defined’ spearheads a bold move to both unify and define the discipline. Henriques (2004) argues that psychology’s epistemological fissures can be healed by accepting that psychology has two main subject matters: psychological formalism and human psychology.
Psychological formalism is the science of mind and includes the cognitive, behavioural and neuro- sciences. Henriques thinks ‘mind’ can be conceptualized as the set of ‘mental behaviours’ in a manner that unites and bridges the schisms between the behavioural and cognitive sciences.
Human psychology is a sub-discipline of psychological formalism essentially dealing with how humans differ from other animals. To explain the separation, Henriques puts forward the ‘Justification Hypothesis’, which holds that humans are marked out from other animals by a capacity to justify their own behaviour. Read more here.
Human psychology Psychological formalism Humans Animals Human psychology Psychological formalism Humans Animals Human psychology Psychological formalism
For those who particularly admire psychology’s furtive manner, neuroscience’s focus on direct measurement of our mental hardware might seem crude and ordinary, at least in comparison to the artful techniques of experimental psychology.
What can neuroscience add, beyond telling us that cognition happens in the brain? One answer to that question comes from a study by Vogel and Machizawa on a topic of perennial debate: the question of how much information people can hold in their short-term ‘working’ memory.
In just three pages, the authors describe how they were able to use electroencephalography (EEG) to identify waves of electrical activity on the surface of the brain that predicted how much visual information someone could hold in their working memory.
Subjects first donned an elastic electrode cap, and were then asked to remember just one side (either the left or right) of a display of coloured squares. After a one second delay, subjects were asked to judge whether a second display was the same as or different from the first display.
See the results of the study here.
This study exemplifies how an intelligent fusion of methods from both psychology and neuroscience can help to address questions of central importance – even those that have been hotly debated for nearly a century, such as this one.
Breastfeeding Does Not Make Baby More Intelligent
A link between breastfeeding and higher IQ was first spotted in 1929, and has been a controversial subject ever since, says Geoff Der, lead researcher. He said that not only do breastfed children generally perform better on intelligence tests, but they also tend to come from more advantaged backgrounds.
Breastfed babies are more intelligent because a higher percentage of highly educated mothers tend to breastfeed, say researchers from the Medical Research Council (UK) and the University of Edinburgh.
A higher percentage of breastfed babies are brought up in a mentally stimulating environment. You can read about this study in the British Medical Journal.
Benefits of the breastfeeding for the baby:
– Babies who are breastfed have better stabilized blood sugar levels
– Breastfed babies are less likely to have diarrhea
– Breastfed babies are less likely to have respiratory infections
– Studies have also indicated that breastfed babies are less likely to develop hypertension (high blood pressure) and obesity later in life
– Breastfed babies have fewer illnesses. The mother’s milk provides the infant with antibodies. 80% of breast milk cells kill bacteria, fungi and viruses (they are macrophages)
Breastfeeding benefits for mother
– It is less complicated. No bottles to organize, no formula to mix
– It helps the mother get back to her normal weight
– It helps get the uterus back to its normal size more quickly
– Breastfeeding often suppresses ovulation. This makes it less likely that the mother will get pregnant
– Breastfeeding is cheaper than bottle-feeding
Effect of breast feeding on intelligence in children: prospective study, sibling pairs analysis, and meta-analysisGeoff Der, G David Batty, Ian J DearyBMJ, doi:10.1136/bmj.38978.699583.55 (published 4 October 2006) Click here to view abstract online
Written by: Christian Nordqvist
Editor: Medical News Today
Compulsive buying is not just a problem that some women have – it seems that men are just as likely to suffer from it, say researchers from Stanford University, USA. About 5% of adults in the USA say they cannot refrain from shopping for stuff they probably don’t want or need.
The traditional view of women suffering from compulsive buying is probably the result of most studies being done mainly on women. Women are also more likely to admit to compulsive shopping than men.
You can read about this new study in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
Surprisingly, more people from lower incomes suffer from compulsive shopping than people from higher incomes. More here.
Good communication skills can help you in both your personal and professional life. While verbal and written communication skills are important, research has shown that nonverbal behaviors make up a large percentage of our daily interpersonal communication.
How can you improve your nonverbal communication skills? The following top ten tips for nonverbal communication can help you learn to read the nonverbal signals of other people and enhance your own ability to communicate effectively.
1) Pay Attention to Nonverbal Signals
2) Look for Incongruent Behaviors
3) Concentrate on Your Tone of Voice When Speaking
4) Use Good Eye Contact
5) Ask Questions About Nonverbal Signals
6) Use Signals to Make Communication More Effective and Meaningful
7) Look at Signals as a Group
Consider Context
9) Be Aware That Signals Can be Misread
10) Practice, Practice, Practice
Good communication skills can help you in both your personal and professional life. While verbal and written communication skills are important, social psychologists have suggested that nonverbal behaviors make up a large percentage of our daily interpersonal communication.
Hopes are that those tips above will help you out in the betterment of your own communication skills.
“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.