Is honesty the best policy? According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, consumers who lie during a service encounter are more satisfied than truth tellers when they get what they want.
When it comes to mental health information Wikipedia is a credible source according to a new study from the University of Melbourne. The often consulted, but sometimes doubted, website is the most highly rated source for accessing information on mental-health related topics. Researcher Dr Nicola Reavley explained to Bob Hughes what the study found and …
Dr Jason Buhle explains his pain relief experiment and what it means in this audio interview. Pain relief is a compelling subject for people living with physical discomfort. Some new work suggests that there are two different ways you can use your brain to get some relief. The power of placebos has been long studied – if you think something is going to do you good then it can. And distraction can also be useful in pain management – getting your mind off it really works. But are they the same effect? Apparently not according to this new research.
If there was an ipad size machine with electrodes that attach to your skull which enhanced your motor skills, your vision, your decision making, mathematical ability, language, memory, and attention. Who wouldn’t want one? And if the improvements lasted a year, with no side effects? Sold. That’s the promise of Transcranial direct current stimulation, but …
How you think about your illness may play a bigger part in how well you recover (or whether you don’t) thsan the actual severity of the disease according to a new paper in Current Directions in Psychological Science. Hear what Prof Keith Petrie told Bob Hughes about patient expectations about their diseases in this story
When we’re put on a box, we just aren’t as creative as when we escape and ‘think outside the box’ Dr Angela Leung of the Singapore Management University has found. And when we gesture with both hands (acting out ‘on the other hand’) we get more creative too. When people walk around a box – like a quadrangle they don’t get ideas that are as good as when they roam freely, too. And that applies even when people are moving an avatar in second life.
How do others see us and how do we see them? The science of ‘mind perception’ is the work of Professor Kurt Gray of the University of Maryland’s Mind Perception and Morality Lab. His work ranges from how people see those in a persistent vegetative state as worse than dead, to how people are more sympathetic to someone who’s a victim than a villain. Dr Gray examined how we see naked people differently. We don’t objectify them as popular culture suggests.
“If it bleeds, it leads,” goes the cynical saying with television and newspaper editors. In other words, most news is bad news and the worst news gets the big story on the front page. So one might expect major newspapers to contain, on average, more negative and unhappy types of words — like “war,” “ funeral,” “cancer,” “murder” — than positive, happy ones — like “love,” “peace” and “hero.” But it turns out to be the opposite.
Women who wrote about their most important values, like close relationships, music, or religion, lost more weight over the next few months than women who did not have that experience.
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