12 Vote(s)
September 30, 2009
Peer Pressure Builds More Latrines Than Financial Assistance
Government subsidies persuade some people to change habits, but social shame works even better, suggests a recent study of efforts to reduce elevated childhood death and disease rates blamed on the microbial pathogens that cause diarrhea in rural India.
12 Vote(s)
12 Vote(s)
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Study Indicates Effectiveness Of Online Screenings In Connecting Individuals At Risk For Depression To Treatment
Screening for Mental Health, Inc., the leading nonprofit provider of online and in-person mental health screening programs, today released results from a follow-up study of participants in the 2008 National Depression Screening Day® (NDSD) online program. The study found that over half of participants sought depression treatment in the three months following their initial screening.
6 Vote(s)
6 Vote(s)
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Nervous Breakdown: Remember When People Used to Overcome Mental Illness?
When I was growing up, people had nervous breakdowns - you know, through some trauma or emotional exertion, they temporarily "went crazy" and had to be institutionalized. As a child, we ooed and aahed about such mysterious cases in our neighborhood. Then the person would reappear, somewhat ashen (or was that my imagination), as they reintegrated themselves in their family and work lives.Then re
8 Vote(s)
8 Vote(s)
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Women Who Are Sexually Satisfied Have Better General Well-Being And More Vitality
Pre- and post-menopausal women who self-rated themselves as being sexually satisfied had a higher overall psychological well-being score and scores for "positive well-being" and "vitality," compared with sexually dissatisfied women in a study of 295 women sexually active more than twice a month. The study, published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, also uncovered a positive association between
5 Vote(s)
5 Vote(s)
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How Developmental Psychology’s Marriage to the School System Distorts Our Understanding of Children
Have you ever seen the Handbook of Child Psychology? If not, I urge you to take a look at it the next time you have the opportunity to visit a university library. Handbook is a misnomer for this work; you'd need both arms to carry it all, and if you have a weak back you might want to carry it only a part at a time. The rest of its title--of Child Psychology--is also, in my opinion, a misnomer.The
7 Vote(s)
7 Vote(s)
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Director Of UT Southwestern Center Honored With First International Neurology Medal
Dr. Roger Rosenberg, director of the Alzheimer's Disease Center at UT Southwestern Medical Center, has been awarded the first Medal for Scientific Achievement by the World Federation of Neurology. The federation is made up of more than 100 neurology associations internationally. It established the award, and another for service to international neurology, in 2008. The prizes are the first ever
5 Vote(s)
5 Vote(s)
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Life And Death During The Great Depression
The Great Depression had a silver lining: During that hard time, U.S. life expectancy actually increased by 6.2 years, according to a University of Michigan study published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Life expectancy rose from 57.1 in 1929 to 63.3 years in 1932, according to the analysis by U-M researchers José A. Tapia Granados and Ana Diez Ro
10 Vote(s)
10 Vote(s)
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Bye bye modular, hello cognit!
What is a cognit you ask? It's a basic unit of memory or knowledge defined by pattern of connections between a network of neurons associated by experience.Termed by Fuster in 2006, the construct was created to solve the problematic yet popular view that the human brain is made up of discrete cortical domains dedicated exclusively to visual discrimination, language, spatial attention, face recogni
13 Vote(s)
13 Vote(s)
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Side-effects from placebos can be drug specific
A fascinating study just published in the medical journal Pain examined the side-effects reported by patients taking placebos in clinical trials to test migraine drugs. It found that side-effects from placebo were almost as common as from the actual drug, but most interestingly, were specific to side-effects you would expected from the comparison medication.In other words, the side-effects you ge
5 Vote(s)
5 Vote(s)
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Political activism is good for you
Aristotle argued that we're political animals at heart and that active involvement in society fulfils a basic human need. It's an idea that's been rediscovered recently by psychologists interested in well-being and human flourishing. Now the positive psychologists Malte Klar and Tim Kasser have provided some tentative evidence that activists are happier than non-activists. Moreover, they've shown
11 Vote(s)
11 Vote(s)
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