Your Psychology Psychology articles and news

Besides Sigmund Freud, B.F. Skinner was the most famous and perhaps the most influential psychologist of the 20th century. But who was Skinner? Psychologists have now use source materials and standard measures of personality traits to describe him and compare him with other eminent scientists. Their study reveals a complex man — but nothing like the monster his detractors called him.

Friendly to a fault, yet tense? A personality profile marked by overly gregarious yet anxious behavior is rooted in abnormal development of a circuit hub buried deep in the front center of the brain. Brain scans pinpointed the suspect brain area in people with Williams syndrome. Matching the scans to their scores on a personality rating scale revealed that the temperament traits correlated with abnormalities in the brain structure, called the insula.

Early disruptions in serotonin signaling in the brain may contribute to autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and other “enduring effects on behavior,” researchers report. The investigators previously identified genetic variations in children with ASD that disrupt the function of the serotonin transporter, which regulates the supply of serotonin. Now, they report the creation of a mouse model that expresses the most common of these variations.

A new study suggests that babies who are breast-fed or bottle-fed to a schedule do not perform academically as well at school as their demand-fed peers. The finding is based on the results of IQ tests and school-based SATs tests carried out between the ages of five and 14, which show that demand-feeding was associated with higher IQ scores. The IQ scores of eight-year-old children who had been demand-fed as babies were between four and five points higher than the scores of schedule-fed children, says the new study.

Synthetic types of marijuana, commonly known as blaze, spice, and K2, are being consumed by a growing number of adolescent children and young adults, and are sending many of them to the emergency room, researchers from the Children’s National Medical Center, Washington D.C., reported in the journal Pediatrics…

A new book by a University of New Hampshire researcher and Vietnam-era disabled veteran sheds new light on the long-term psychological trauma experienced by the coalition force in recent wars in the Gulf and Balkans that, when left untreated, can have deadly consequences…

Studies have demonstrated that an individual’s mind drifts off to unrelated thoughts regardless of what they are doing half of the time and chances are you will not read this entire article without thinking about something else…

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) works by altering how different parts of the brain involved in depression communicate with each other, Scottish researchers reported in the journal PNAS (Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences). ECT has been an effective and controversial therapy for depression for over seven decades; doctors knew it would often work, but were never sure why…

Distinct patterns of activity – which may indicate a predisposition to care for infants – appear in the brains of adults who view an image of an infant face – even when the child is not theirs, according to a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health and in Germany, Italy, and Japan…

For the average narcissist, Facebook “offers a gateway for hundreds of shallow relationships and emotionally detached communication,” one expert says. More importantly, for this study, social networking in general allows the user a great deal of control over how he or she is presented to and perceived by peers and other users, he added.