How do you know when you are finished eating?

An excerpt from Brian Wasnick, author of Mindless Eating:In a recent study, researchers from my Cornell Food Lab asked 133 participants from Paris and 145 from Chicago to complete a brief survey on their food habits, posing the question “How do you know when you are...

Placebo Works Better if It Costs More

An excerpt about different costs of a placebo:Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University in North Carolina, and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tested 82 volunteers.All got a light electric shock and were offered what they were told...

Signs of Threat Change Decision Making

An excerpt from the BPS Blog:Aspects of the environment that indicate danger – from flashing lights to a mere exclamation mark – lead us to make faster and more extreme judgements about fairness.Kees van den Bos and colleagues say this happens because when...

Baseline Testing and Steroids

An excerpt from Psychology Today:See, it comes down to math. All steroids are hormones and all hormones begin life as cholesterol. The body turns cholesterol into progesterone, estrogen, DHEA, testosterone and cortisol, but these aren’t the only possibilities....

Antidepressants and Placebo Effect

An excerpt from MindHacks:Psychologist Irving Kirsch, who led this new research, has conducted several previous studies looking at the effectiveness of SSRI antidepressant drugs and found similar results, although this is the first time that the study has factored in...

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

An excerpt from the NY Times:If Carole Johnson, a retired school administrator who lives near Sacramento, Calif., happens to have a distressing thought while passing through a doorway, she needs to “clear” the thought by passing through the door twice more, doing it...

Morality and Free Will Arguments

A new study by Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler investigates whether students exposed to arguments against the existence of free will are more likely to cheat. Here is an excerpt from the BPS blog about this study and below is the link to the article (need to have...

Implicit Association Test (IAT)

An excerpt from Mindhacks:Edge has a video interview with two of its creators, psychologists Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald, and an online version of the IAT which allows you to test your unconscious associations in relation to the US presidential candidates....

Diagnostic Status of PTSD

An excerpt from Mindhacks:He’s made his case in an editorial for the British Journal of Psychiatry and debates his ideas in an engaging discussion in a BJP podcast. PTSD is the only psychiatric diagnosis where a clear cause forms part of the diagnosis. The...

Acceptance

An excerpt from the BPS Blog:according to Jenny McMullen and colleagues who tested the ability of student partiThat’s cipants to cope with unpleasant electric shocks of increasing duration. The students were tested before and after receiving tuition in...