Thomas Friedman’s op-ed in the NY Times today underscores some of the findings of psychological research for the last few years… namely that young people in the US may be changing. Below are some of the findings from recent studies: Narcissism has go …
Why do we dream? Theory 1: Dreams express inner wishes and desires (Freud’s idea). But what about nightmares? Those can’t be wishes. Theory 2: Dreams provide solutions to problems. But then why can we only recall 1% of dreams? Dreams aren’t helpful in …
Peggy Orenstein’s recent NY Times Magazine piece on Twittering brings to the forefront many of the issues that psychologists at the CDMC@LA are concerned about. Due to the myriad of self-presentation tools that digital media such as YouTube, twitteri …
The recent article in the New York Times outlining research on the preschool-age depression has raised public interest in the origins of mental disorders. Many non-scholars and even some psychologists are skeptical about the emergence of psychological …
In an exciting new article in Slate.com, top researchers discuss the various negative impacts of stress during childhood. Among many points the authors make, stress consists not only of severe physical and sexual abuse, but even negative interaction pa …
Physician Health Programs (PHP) are reporting an astonishing success rate when it comes to providing addiction treatment for addicted doctors: Only about 20% of doctors ever test positive after being admitted to the program within a 5 year period. More …
Perhaps the most influential and important leader in the burgeoning field of psychology was the German psychologist/philosopher Hermann Ebbinghaus. Ebbinghaus was without the status and resources to conduct his experiments on memory using a large pool …
If we could make it so drug addicts could stop craving the substances that have brought them to their knees, would relapse rates drop and addiction-treatment success rates soar? I sure hope so! Medications that stop cravings? I’ve already written about …
Kid’s networking… we’re cited in the NY Times http://tiny.cc/09wdm
“Proposals for reform that focus solely on individuals-be it on their knowledge, willpower, or decision-making ability-will not be successful in reversing our society’s body weight trajectory. We need measures aimed at changing the context, not the ind …
Did you know that the second most popular use of mobile phones by teenagers is texting? The first… checking the time!
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has received wave of criticism over the department’s prohibition on providing prescriptions for medical marijuana to patients, even for patients living in the 14 states that have legalized medical marijuana. Stat …
Approximately half of all children experience the divorce of their parents (National Center for Health Statistics, 2008), and the negative impact of divorce has been widely studied and debated. While researchers generally agree that children of divorce …
Research on the treatments for ADHD suggest that even the most effective treatments may not be sufficient for improving outcomes for children with ADHD diagnoses. Current treatments have a predominately person-biased approach to conceptualizing and tre …
I have to admit that before I became an academic, I believed this phrase was true “Those that can not do, teach.” This despite coming from a family of academics. Of course, now that I am on this path, I see that there are many passionate, smart, commit …
You might have heard that Avatar is responsible for a whole new kind of movie technology and that thousands of theaters had to be built or upgraded just to show these movies. What exactly are these technological miracles and if they’re so great, why do …
Frontline recently aired a documentary called Digital Nation which took a look at all the different ways we use media. And at recent research in the field. One of the scientists they interviewed is Dr Gary Small at UCLA. He looked at people’s brains …
Dr. Andrew Wakefiled’s research on 12 children that served as the only major link between autism and the MMT vaccine has now been officially retracted by the Lancet, the British journal that published it originally. It seems Dr. Wakefiled may have play …
contributing author: Gacia Tachejian Have you ever asked yourself where it is that kids learn about drug use? Parents have long been known to protect their young ones from “bad” influences from outside, but a recent study at Yale shows that a major sou …
A new study came out from Kaiser that talks about the astonishing amount of time that children spend with media today. Media is defined as tv, music, video games, print, computer and movies. Today’s kids 8-18 spend 7 1/2 hours using media, almost as lo …
It has been common practice in the study of genes and behavior to identify certain genes as “risk genes.” You may hear people say, “I have the depression gene” or “addiction gene” or even as broad as a “bad gene.” However, the understandings about spec …