Professionals in psychiatry and clinical psychology rely heavily on the guidelines laid out in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in order to make decisions about clients’ disorder status. This American Psychiatric Association pu …

Tobias Gibson once said, “Great people talk about ideas. Small people talk about other people.” Well that may or may not be true, talking about other people may be adaptive. We all find ourselves engaging in this activity from time to time and it may n …

Ok, so there’s the question of whether a higher power exists or not.  I leave that to you.  However, either way, we have a psychological question.  How do we maintain our beliefs in a supernatural plane of existence and make causal attributions to Gods …

From allaboutaddiction.com: A comment posted by a reader on a recent post reprimanded me for suggesting that marijuana caused relationships to go bad. While in that instance the reader was mistaken, as I had specifically used the word associated, the c …

From Science Sounds: The US Preventative Services Task Force concluded last week that men over 75 years old should no longer be screened for prostate cancer. Furthermore, they conclude that “the current evidence is insufficient to assess the balance of …

From Science Sounds: A recent article in the New York Times reported results from an APA study that concluded that abortion does not cause mental illness. The full title of the article is “Abortion Does Not Cause Mental Illness, Panel Says.” Maybe I am …

From All About Addiction: About a year ago, while sitting in a lecture on learning and memory, the idea that certain drugs can affect the emotional responses to memory long after the memory itself has been formed came up. As someone interested in addic …

Some theories suggest that conservatives tend to have a more structured and persistent cognitive style, where liberals tend to be more open to ambiguity.  Building on this idea, a recent paper by David Amodio and his colleagues investigated whether lib …

It’s no secret that politicians can twist words to make anything sound as if it supports their agenda. There’s even a name for those who are good at this (and a 90s band with the same name) – Spin Doctors. However, when scientific findings are misrepre …

We’ve all had to swerve out of the way of someone who’s paying more attention to their cell phone than to the road. Presumably the problem stems from the fact that the person is driving one handed, dialing, looking at the phone, etc. So, on July 1, dri …

“The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and endangering the country.” Basically, people will fall in line i …

Well, sort of. Traditionally, academics have argued that our sense of right and wrong is based on the harm that might occur or the rights that might be violated as a result of our judgments. But according to Psychologist Jonathan Haidt (2007), people h …

Sharon Stone got in trouble today, and it wasn’t for her performance in Basic Instinct 2. No, Stone made headlines when she declared that the recent Earthquake in China, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives, was the result of bad karma stemming …

Are you a fan of top ten lists? Do you wish you could take a look at ‘the greatest hits’ of social psych experiments all at once? Our friends at PsyBlog solicited votes on the most popular psych studies of all time. Check out the link http://www.spring …

From all-about-addiction: The U.S. policy regarding the drug problem is centered mainly on the enforcement of its drug laws and the intervention in the drug supply both within the U.S. and from bordering countries. There is no question that this “crusa …

With the ongoing saga of the Democratic Primary, and the upcoming presidential election, we will all be hearing more and more about the cost of health care in this country. While the debate at the national and state levels will certainly influence the …

It’s no secret that diagnoses like ADD and ADHD have been seen with much greater frequency in the last decade or so. Slight variations on the same theme, both of these disorders have to do with a person’s (usually a child) inability to appropriately co …