Author Interviews, Education, Pediatrics, Psychological Science, Social Issues / 31.10.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Angeline Lillard PhD Professor of Psychology University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Montessori education was developed in the first half of the last century, but has been subject to little formal research. Prior research on its outcomes was problematic in using poor control groups, very small samples, demographically limited samples, a single school or classroom, or poor quality Montessori, or data from just a single time point and limited measurements. This study addressed all these issues: it collected data 4 times over 3 years from 141 children, experimental children were in 11 classrooms at 2 high quality Montessori schools at which the control children were waitlisted and admission was done by a randomized lottery, family income ranged from $0-200K, groups were demographically equivalent at the start of the study, and many measures were taken. (more…)
Author Interviews, Psychological Science, UC Davis / 19.10.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Karen L. Bales PhD Professor of Psychology University of California Davis, CA 95616 MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response:  Titi monkeys are a socially monogamous species in which adults form pair bonds.  In my laboratory we are studying the neurobiology of pair bonding, and understanding jealousy is important because it's one mechanism by which the pair bond is maintained.  In this study, male titi monkeys viewed their pair mate next to a stranger male, and we examined the neural, behavioral, and hormonal consequences.  (more…)
Author Interviews, Psychological Science / 19.10.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Tobias Gerstenberg, PhD MIT MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: The question of how causation is best understood has been troubling philosophers for a long time. As psychologists, we are particularly interested in understanding how people make causal judgments. In our experiments, we showed participants video clips of colliding billiard balls. Participants were asked to say whether one ball (ball A) caused another (ball B) to go through a gate, or prevented it from going through. We used eye-tracking technology to record participants' eye-movements as they were watching the clips. The results showed that participants spontaneously engaged in counterfactual simulation when asked to make causal judgments. They not only looked at what actually happened, but also tried to anticipate where ball B would have gone if ball A hadn't been present. The more certain participants were that ball B would have missed the goal if ball A hadn't been there, the more they agreed that ball A caused ball B to go through the gate. In a control condition we asked participants about what actually happened. In this condition, participants were much less likely to simulate where ball B would have gone. Together, these findings demonstrate a very close link between counterfactual simulation and causal judgment. (more…)
Author Interviews, Psychological Science / 17.10.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Tamara Masters, PhD Marketing Marriott School of Management Brigham Young University MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: As a marketing professor I have studied the disparity of what people are willing to sell items/products for and how much that differs from how much others are willing to pay. I do research in consumer decision making and find the neurophysiological aspects of consumers fascinating.  I read medical and neuroscience research for fun and see many ways individuals may be effected in the use of their limited resources.  We are all consumers – many make purchases of some type daily – even it if it is to play online games or where and how to get our next meal. The main findings relate to how a person is either attached to or feels an aversion to losing an object.  There has been debate as to which of these factors leads to a difference in buy and selling prices.  This research provides a new and unique look at how BOTH factors must be present for this disparity to emerge.  This research is unique because it uses combines the fields neuroscience, psychology and economics to explain something we all experience. (more…)
Author Interviews, Mental Health Research, Pharmacology, Psychological Science / 10.10.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Vanda Faria PhD Department of Psychology Uppsala, Sweden  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: It has been debated whether selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which are commonly prescribed for depression and anxiety, are more effective than placebo. Concerns have been raised that the beneficial effects of SSRIs, as measured in double-blind clinical trials, may be explained by expectancies (a crucial placebo mechanism) rather than the biochemical compound. But no study has tested experimentally the extent to which the SSRI treatment effect can be influenced by expectancies induced by verbal suggestions. We compared the efficacy of overt vs. covert administration of an SSRI (escitalopram) in patients with social anxiety disorder. Rather than comparing the SSRI with placebo, we compared it with itself while manipulating the patients’ expectations of improvement. This was achieved by informing one group correctly about the SSRI and its effectiveness (overt group) whereas the comparison (covert) group received incorrect information. By use of a cover story, the covert group was led to believe they were treated with a so called “active placebo”, an ineffective neurokinin-1 antagonist yielding similar side effects as the SSRI but lacking anxiety-reducing properties. But the treatment, dosage and duration was in fact identical in both groups. Results showed that overt outperformed covert SSRI treatment, as the number of treatment responders was more than three times higher on the main clinical outcome measure when correct information was given. Using neuroimaging (fMRI) we also noted differences between the overt and covert SSRI groups on objective brain activity measures. There were differences between the groups e.g. with regard to activation of the posterior cingulate cortex with treatment, and the functional coupling between this region and the amygdala which is a brain region crucially involved in fear and anxiety. The fMRI  results may reflect the interaction between cognition and emotion as the brain changes differently with treatment pending on the expectations of improvement. (more…)
Author Interviews, Psychological Science, Social Issues / 09.08.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Mirkka Danielsbacka PhD, D.Soc.Sci Senior researcher University of Turku MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Relations between family generations are widely studied in disciplines such as family sociology and demography. However, relations between in-laws are often neglected in family studies of contemporary societies. Especially conflicts have been surprisingly little investigated. We were especially interested in how parenthood is associated with relations to in-laws in a contemporary Western society. Using nationally representative survey data from Finland with over 1,200 respondents, we studied conflicts that spouses reported having with their own parents and their in-laws. Overall, Finns more often reported having had any conflict with their own parents than with their in-laws. Compared to childless couples, couples with children were as likely to report conflicts with their own parents. However, couples with children were more likely to report conflicts with their parents-in-law. Our results took into account how frequently family members were in contact with each other and how emotionally close they felt, as well as other sociodemographic factors. (more…)
Author Interviews, Psychological Science, Technology / 07.08.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Mag. Nicole Mirnig  Research Fellow Center for Human-Computer Interaction University of Salzburg Salzburg, Austria  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: From our previous research on social robots, we know that humans show observable reactions when a robot makes an error. These findings result from a video analysis we performed over a large data corpus from different human-robot interaction studies. With the study at hand, we wanted to replicate this effect in the lab in order to explore into more detail how humans react and what they think about a robot that makes a mistake. Our main findings made us quite excited. First of all, we could show that humans respond to faulty robot behavior with social signals. Second, we found that the error-prone robot was perceived as significantly more likeable than the flawless robot. One possible explanation for this finding would be the following. Research has shown that people form their opinions and expectations about robots to a substantial proportion on what they learn from the media. Those media entail movies in which robots are often portrayed as perfectly functioning entities (good or evil). Upon interacting with a social robot themselves, people adjust their opinions and expectations based on their interaction experience. We assume that interacting with a robot that makes mistakes, makes us feel closer and less inferior to technology. (more…)
Author Interviews, Psychological Science / 31.07.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Jared Friedman Doctoral Student, Organizational Behavior Research Assistant II, Brain Mind and Consciousness Lab Case Western Reserve University MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: These studies were motivated by our prior work in neuroscience and psychology.  Neuroscience research from our lab has shown that brain areas associated with empathy seem to share a ‘see-saw’ relationship with brain areas associated with analytic reasoning.  As activity in one set of brain areas goes up, activity in the other set of brain areas tends to go down.  This suggests there is a sort of neural antagonism between warm, empathic sorts of thinking on the one hand, and cold, analytic sorts of thinking on the other. In prior psychological work, we tested the hypothesis that these two different sorts of thinking might share opposing relationships to religious belief.  Over a series of 8 studies, we showed that although religious belief is negatively related to analytic reasoning skills (which many other labs had shown), it shares a much stronger positive relationship to measures of empathy and moral concern.  This suggests that religious belief, measured on a continuum, might emerge from the tension between empathic and analytic forms of thinking. The current studies expanded on this prior work by examining how dogmatism – strongly holding onto one’s beliefs, even in the face of contradictory evidence – relates to measures of moral concern and analytic reasoning among individuals identifying as religious and non-religious.  The measure of dogmatism we used is neutral with respect to any particular belief system, which means that it measures dogmatism in general (rather than dogmatism towards, for instance, religious beliefs).  We found that analytic reasoning negatively relates to dogmatic tendencies in both groups.  However, the interesting part is that higher levels of dogmatism among the religious were related to higher levels of moral concern, whereas higher levels of dogmatism among the nonreligious relate to lower levels moral concern.  This is very intriguing because it suggests that religious and nonreligious individuals rely differently on these two types of cognition when forming beliefs about the world, in general.  We also found that perspective taking, which is an emotionally detached form of understanding other people’s minds, had a particularly strong negative relationship among the nonreligious. (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, Psychological Science, Technology, University of Pennsylvania / 21.05.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Jason Han, MD Resident, Cardiothoracic Surgery Hospital at the University of Pennsylvania MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: The inspiration for this study comes from my personal experience as a medical student on clinical rotations. Despite having been a victim of a medical error while growing up myself, I found it extraordinarily difficult to admit to even some of my smallest errors to my patients and team. Perplexed by the psychological barriers that impeded error disclosure, I began to discuss this subject with my advisory Dean and mentor, Dr. Neha Vapiwala. We wanted to analyze the topic more robustly through an academic lens and researched cognitive biases that must be overcome in order to facilitate effective disclosure of error, and began to think about potential ways to implement these strategies into the medical school curriculum with the help of the director of the Standardized Patient program at the Perelman School of Medicine, Denise LaMarra. We ultimately contend that any educational strategy that aims to truly address and improve error disclosure must target the cognitive roots of this paradigm. And at this point in time, simulation-based learning seems to be the most direct way to do so, but also remain hopeful that emerging technologies such as virtual and augmented reality may offer ways for students as well as staff to rehearse difficult patient encounters and improve. (more…)
Author Interviews, Mental Health Research, Psychological Science / 19.05.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Justin M. Kim, Ph.D Dartmouth College Advisor: Paul J. Whalen MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Anxiety (and its co-conspirator ‘worry’) is an active, energy consuming process. You haven’t given up - you are still fighting back, trying to anticipate what might happen tomorrow. The problem of course is that there are an infinite number of ‘what if…’ scenarios you can come up with. For some individuals, the uncertainty of what ‘might happen’ tomorrow, is actually worse than the negative event itself actually happening. These individuals are intolerant of uncertainty. We were interested in how uncertainty and ambiguity of potential future threat contribute to the generation of anxiety and how they might be represented in our brain. In the psychology literature, how we deal with an uncertain future can be quantified as intolerance of uncertainty (IU). As is the case with any other personality characteristic, we all have varying degrees of IU. For example, individuals high in IU display difficulty accepting the possibility of potential negative events in the future. Importantly, psychiatric disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), whose symptoms are marked with worrying/obsessing, are commonly associated elevated IU. We noticed that while much of the neuroimaging research on IU has been primarily focused on brain function, brain structural correlates of IU have received little attention so far. As such, we believed that it was an important endeavor to assess the relationship between IU and the structural properties of the brain, which can be done through the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques. (more…)
Author Interviews, Psychological Science, Social Issues / 18.05.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Carlota Batres PhD Postdoctoral fellow at Gettysburg College MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: The background for this study is that previous research has found that individuals from rural areas prefer heavier women than individuals from urban areas. Several explanations have been proposed to explain these preference differences: media exposure, differing optimal weights for different environments, and urbanization. In this study, we investigated familiarity as a possible explanation by examining participants’ face preferences while also examining the facial characteristics of the actual participants. The main finding of this study is that familiarity appears to be contributing to our facial preferences. (more…)
Author Interviews, Psychological Science, Technology / 09.02.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Lazaros Gonidis PhD candidate Postgraduate Researcher University of Kent MedicalResearch.com: In general, why do we tend to underestimate time when we are distracted versus when we are doing something boring? Is the adage that “time flies when you’re having fun” true? Response:  In order to be accurate at time “keeping” we need to attend to it. Anything that distracts us makes us less accurate, and to be more specific, it makes us underestimate the duration of events. In simple terms when we experience an event that last 10 minutes a distraction could make it feel like 5 minutes. On the other hand when we are bored, let’s say during a non-interesting event, we tend to focus more on time keeping looking forward for the event to finish. In this case we would overestimate the event and 10 minutes could feel like 15 minutes. (more…)
Author Interviews, Psychological Science, Social Issues / 18.11.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Carlota Batres, Ph.D. Perception Lab School of Psychology and Neuroscience University of St Andrews UK MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: The background for this study is that previous research had found that people in different environments prefer different faces, which suggests that preferences change according to the environment. However, because previous research had never tracked the same participants across environmental changes, such a link could not be confirmed. Therefore, we sought to determine if, and to what extent, face preferences were malleable by repeatedly testing participants whose environment was not changing as well participants undergoing intensive training at an army camp. (more…)
Addiction, Alcohol, Author Interviews, Psychological Science / 16.09.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Kristina J. Berglund Department of Psychology University of Gothenburg MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: In Sweden, care providers do offer different treatment strategies for individuals who have alcohol problems, where some offer a treatment where the goal is abstinence and other offer a treatment where the goal is low-risk consumption. We wanted to investigate how important it was for having a successful treatment when there was congruence between the patient’s goals and the advocated goal of the treatment, and when there was not. The main findings was that that if the patient had a goal of abstinence than it was much more likely to reach that goal if the patient went to a treatment that advocated abstinence. It was less likely to reach the goal if a patient had a goal of low-risk consumption and went to a treatment that advocated low-risk consumption. The treatment that advocated abstinence was also more effective when the patient were ambivalent of his/her own goal. (more…)
Abuse and Neglect, Mental Health Research, Psychological Science, Technology / 15.09.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Yu Chen, Ph.D. Post-doc researcher Department of Informatics University of California, Irvine MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: College students are facing increasing amount of stress these days. We are interested in leveraging information technology to help them become happier. We week to implement happiness-boosting exercises in positive psychology using technology in a lightweight way. Since college students frequently take photos using their smartphones, we started to investigate how to use smartphone photography to help students conduct the happiness-boosting exercises. Participants were divided into three groups and instructed to take a photo per day in one of the following three conditions: 1) a smiling selfie; 2) a photo of something that makes himself/herself happy; 3) a photo of something that makes another person happy, which is then sent to that person. We found that participants have become more positive after purposefully taking the assigned type of photo for three weeks. Participants who took photos that make others happy also became calmer. Some participants who took smiling selfies reported becoming more confident and comfortable with their smiles. Those who took photos to make themselves happy reported becoming more reflective and appreciative. Participants who took photos to make others happy found connecting with strong ties help them reduce stress. (more…)
Author Interviews, Duke, Medical Imaging, MRI, PLoS, Psychological Science, Social Issues / 15.09.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Kevin S. LaBar, Ph.D. Professor and Head, Cognition & Cognitive Neuroscience Program Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies in Neuroscience Center for Cognitive Neuroscience Duke University Durham, NC MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Emotion research is limited by a lack of objective markers of emotional states. Most human research relies on self-report, but individuals may not have good insight into their own emotions. We have developed a new way to identify emotional states using brain imaging and machine learning tools. First, we induced emotional states using film and music clips while individuals were in an MRI scanner. We trained a computer algorithm to identify the brain areas that distinguished 7 emotions from each other (fear, anger, surprise, sadness, amusement, contentment, and a neutral state). This procedure created a brain map for each of the 7 emotions. Then, a new group of participants self-reported their emotional state every 30 seconds in an MRI scanner while no stimuli were presented. We could predict which emotion was spontaneously reported by the subjects by comparing their brain scans to each of the 7 emotion maps. Finally, in a large group of 499 subjects, we found that the presence of the fear map during rest predicted state and trait anxiety while the presence of the sadness map predicted state and trait depression. (more…)
Author Interviews, Psychological Science / 14.09.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Mr Liam Satchell Research Associate Department of Psychology University of Portsmouth, UK MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Most people in general are really interested in trying to understand "body language", how a person behaves may give clues to their psychology. However, psychology has rarely engaged in an empirical investigation of what information about personality may be available in largely automatic movements, such as walking. We brought together techniques from psychology research and sports and exercise science to investigate what features of personality may be available in gait. (more…)
Author Interviews, Breast Cancer, Genetic Research, Mental Health Research, Ovarian Cancer, Psychological Science / 31.08.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Mag. Dr. Anne Oberguggenberger PhD Medizinische Universität Innsbruck Department für Psychiatrie, Psychotherapie und Psychosomatik Innsbruck Austria MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Genetic counseling and testing is increasingly integrated in routine clinical care for breast- and ovarian cancer (BOC). Knowledge on follow-up psychosocial outcomes in all different groups of counselees is essential in order to improve follow-up care and counselees’ quality of life. (more…)
Author Interviews, Endocrinology, Social Issues / 03.06.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr Robb Rutledge UCL Institute of Neurology and Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research University College London MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Dr. Rutledge: As we get older, dopamine levels in the brain gradually decline. Dopamine has long been associated with risk taking and we have recently found that it is related specifically to how willing people are to take risks for potential rewards. It is widely believed that older people are risk averse, but this is controversial, and it is unknown whether age-related changes in dopamine are responsible for changes in risk taking. In this study, we tested over 25,000 people using a smartphone app called The Great Brain Experiment where players tried to win as many points as they could by choosing between safe and risky options. We found that older people were less willing to takes risks for potential rewards than young people, the same situations dopamine is known to be involved in. (more…)
Author Interviews, Heart Disease, Pain Research, Psychological Science / 26.05.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Robert W. Levenson, Ph.D. Professor, Department of Psychology Director, Institute of Personality and Social Research (IPSR) University of California Berkeley, CA MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Dr. Levenson: This study comes from a 20-year longitudinal study of Bay Area married couples that we began in the late 1980s. The main purpose of the study was to understand the emotional qualities of successful marriages. Couples came to our laboratory every five years so that we could get a snapshot of the way they interacted with each. We also measured their psychological and physical health. This new paper connects the emotional behaviors we observed when couples discussed a problem in their marriage at the start of the study with the kinds of illnesses they developed over the ensuing decades. (more…)
Author Interviews, Eating Disorders, Psychological Science, Weight Research / 18.01.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Samuel Chng PhD Researcher in Psychology Applied to Health University of Exeter Medical School St Luke’s campus Exeter, EX1 2LU, United Kingdom Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: The study was conceptualised from the curious question from my childhood, “How did my parents influence my behaviours?” Together with my co-author, Dr. Daniel Fassnacht, we decided to explore how a specific form of parental influence, their comments, would influence the development of disordered eating symptoms. From studies conducted with Western samples that parental comments play a role in the development of eating disorder symptoms, and body dissatisfaction is one of the more studied mediator of this relationship. However, we could not find any study that investigated the influential nature of parent comments in Asia. So, we decided to focus our study on Asian parents and their children. Singapore, a developed Asian country that continues to have strong familial roots, provided an ideal population for our study, and we would expect, the relationships we found indicated some potential differences in amongst Asian families. We found that young women, compared to young men, in Singapore generally reported higher levels of parental comments (about their weight, body shape and eating habit), body dissatisfaction and disordered eating symptoms. However what we found for both young women and men was that negative comments from mothers (for example, ‘You need to lose weight’) was the only category of comments that predicted disordered eating and this was mediated by the presence of body dissatisfaction. Positive comments from parents, though suggested from past studies to be a protective factor, did not influence body dissatisfaction and disordered eating. (more…)
Author Interviews, Lancet, Psychological Science / 10.12.2015

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr Bette Liu MD PhD University of New South Wales Sydney, NSW Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Dr. Liu: There is a generally held belief that being happier makes you live longer. We wanted to look at this question. We examined over 700,000 women enrolled in the UK Million Women Study. We found that being in poor health was associated with being unhappy but after accounting for an individuals poor health, unhappiness in itself was not associated with an increased risk of death. This finding was true for overall deaths, for deaths from heart disease and from cancer and it was true for stress as well as for unhappiness.  (more…)
Author Interviews, Psychological Science, Sexual Health / 04.12.2015

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Tess M. Gemberling, M.A. Social Psychology Ph.D. Student Co-Principal Investigator University of Alabama Medical Research: What is the background for this study? Response: Many stereotypes of BDSM (bondage and discipline [B&D], dominance and submission [D/s], sadomasochism [SM],) that can be seen on websites similar to fucked gay xxx, exist; however, research with practitioners suggests these stereotypes are largely unfounded. Preliminary evidence implies BDSM practitioners are psychologically healthy individuals. This study was conducted to further evaluate these results. Medical Research: What are the main findings? Response: Along with other findings, the majority of results indicates practitioners are well functioning. Overall, participants are healthy in the mental, emotional, and interpersonal aspects of their lives. In addition, practitioners are often victims of violence but are not perpetrators of violence. (more…)
Author Interviews, Psychological Science, University of Pittsburgh, Weight Research / 21.09.2015

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Linda J Ewing PhD RN Department of Psychiatry and Lora E Burke PhD, MPH, RN, FAAN Department of Health and Community Systems University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: This study was the product both of work done in Dr. Burke’s lab as well as cumulative findings of other investigators demonstrating that improved self-efficacy is related to positive changes in health behaviors (e.g., physical activity, increased Intake of healthier foods, such as fruits and vegetables).  Given that, we designed a behavioral weight loss study that included an intentional focus on enhancing participant self-efficacy for healthy behaviors related to weight loss maintenance.  No previous study had self-efficacy enhancement as a focus of intervention with the long-term goal of increasing weight loss maintenance.  Thus our study focused on mastery performance of weight loss related behaviors.  Findings supported our hypothesis; participants in both arms of the study (standard behavioral weight loss (SBT) and SBT with self-efficacy enhancement (SBT+SE) achieved clinically significant weight loss.  Participants in the SBT+SE group had greater weight loss maintenance while those in the SBT group had clinically significant weight regain. (more…)
Author Interviews, Psychological Science / 04.09.2015

Jeffrey A. Hall PhD Associate professor of communication studies University of KansasMedicalResearch.com Interview with: Jeffrey A. Hall PhD Associate professor of communication studies University of Kansas Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Dr. Hall: Men might want to ditch the pickup lines and polish their punchlines in their quest to attract women, new research at the University of Kansas suggests. Jeffrey Hall, an associate professor of communication studies, found that when two strangers meet, the more times a man tries to be funny and the more a woman laughs at those attempts, the more likely it is for the woman to be interested in dating. However an even better indicator of romantic connection is if the two are spotted laughing together. Those findings were among the discoveries Hall made in his search for a link between humor and intelligence. For the past decade, research has debated whether women appreciate men’s humor, which is often cited as one of the most valued traits in a partner, because it allows them to suss out the smarts of potential mates. But Hall said finding someone who appreciates your sense of humor is valuable in its own right. “The idea that humor is a signal of intelligence doesn’t give humor its due credit,” Hall said. “If you meet someone who you can laugh with, it might mean your future relationship is going to be fun and filled with good cheer.” In the first study, 35 participants studied the Facebook profile pages of a 100 strangers to gauge their personalities. Their evaluations were compared to a survey completed by the Facebook users. Hall found humorous people were much more likely to be extroverted than intelligent, and were seen by strangers that way too. The data also suggested that men and women posted similar amounts of humorous content to their pages. In the second study, nearly 300 students filled out a survey on humor in courtship. Looking at GPA and ACT scores, the study found that there was no connection between how smart the person was and how funny he or she claimed to be.  But it did find a relationship with humor and extroversion. The study also didn’t find a difference in how men and women comprehended or appreciated humor. To find out how humor used by men and appreciated by women played a role in romantic attraction, the final study brought together 51 pairs of single, heterosexual college students who didn’t know each other. The pairs sat alone in a room and talked for about 10 minutes. Afterward they filled out a survey. The results didn’t indicate that one sex tried to be funnier than the other. However, it did suggest the more times a man tried to be funny and the more times a woman laughed at his jokes, the more likely she was romantically interested. The reverse was not true for women who attempted humor. It also showed that when the pair laughed together, they were more interested in each other. (more…)
Author Interviews, Genetic Research, Pediatrics, Psychological Science / 02.09.2015

Beate W. Hygen PhD Student Department of Psychology Norwegian University of Science and Technology Social ScienceMedicalResearch.com Interview with: Beate W. Hygen PhD Student Department of Psychology Norwegian University of Science and Technology Social Science Medical Research: What is the background for this study? Response: The study is part of the Trondheim Early Secure Study (TESS) conducted at the  Department of Psychology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and NTNU Social Science. The main aim of TESS is to detect risk and protective factors with regards to children’s mental health and well-being.  TESS examines multiple factors which may play a role in children`s development. There is substantial research, based on diathesis-stress theorizing, indicating that some individuals, including children, are more susceptible to the negative effects of contextual adversity than are others. However, according to differential susceptibility theory, such "vulnerable" individuals may also be the ones that benefit the most from positive environmental conditions. Thus, some individuals are more malleable for "better and for worse" to environmental exposures. The article Child exposure to serious life events, COMT, and aggression: Testing differential susceptibility theory was designed to examine if the COMT polymorphism moderated the effect of early-life adversity on aggressive behavior. Thus, we sought to competitively evaluate which model of person X environment interaction best accounted for the anticipated differential effects of life event stress on children's aggressive behavior. (more…)
Author Interviews, Mental Health Research, Psychological Science / 30.08.2015

Brian W. Haas, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Department of Psychology University of Georgia MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Brian W. Haas, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Department of Psychology University of Georgia Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Dr. Haas: We used a new way to study Borderline Personality Disorder.  We studied the traits associated with this condition in healthy people not diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder.  We found that people that possess more Borderline Personality traits exhibit reduced brain activity in parts of the brain important for empathy. (more…)
Author Interviews, Social Issues / 19.08.2015

Carlota Batres PhD Candidate at the Perception Lab School of Psychology and Neuroscience University of St Andrews MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Carlota Batres PhD Candidate at the Perception Lab School of Psychology and Neuroscience University of St Andrews   Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response:  Dominance in men is associated with a variety of social outcomes, ranging from high rank attainment of cadets in the military to high levels of sexual activity in teenage boys. Dominant men are also favored as leaders during times of intergroup conflict and are more successful leaders in the business world. Therefore, we wanted to investigate what exactly it is that makes a face look dominant. Our main finding was that maximum dominance was achieved by increasing perceived height and masculinity while maintaining a man's age at around 35 years. (more…)
Author Interviews, Psychological Science / 09.08.2015

Andrew P. Hill, Ph.D, CPsychol, FBASES, FHEA Associate Professor and Head of Taught Postgraduate Programmes Faculty of Health and Life Sciences York St John University York UKMedicalResearch.com Interview with: Andrew P. Hill, Ph.D, CPsychol, FBASES, FHEA Associate Professor and Head of Taught Postgraduate Programmes Faculty of Health and Life Sciences York St John University York UK Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Dr. Hill: Our research examines the effects of perfectionism in a wide range of contexts and for a number of outcomes. We are particularly interested in the perfectionism-burnout relationship. Perfectionism is a characteristic that is more common than you might think, everyone seems to know someone who is a perfectionist. Burnout is the result of stress and, anecdotally, people seem to be finding modern life more stressful. The main finding was that perfectionistic concerns, a core feature of perfectionism that reflects doubts and fears relating to the consequences of failure, was positively related to burnout in the workplace, sport, and education. This relationship was stronger in the workplace. (more…)