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Stopping Temper Tantrums Before They Start
Shoving, punching, and belligerent insults aren’t just for ruffians at biker bars and soccer games. At some point or another, most children throw temper tantrums. But changing the child’s behavior is not the key to stopping these fits — it’s the parents who have to change. “Most of the parenting methods, most of the parenting books, most of the advice is not based on research, and very much of it violates what we actually know,” said APS Fellow Alan Kazdin in this interview with the Today Show. Kazdin, who directs the Yale Parenting Center, said that punishing bad behavior won’t stop tantrums. Instead, parents should be praising good behavior and ignoring the bad.
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Request for Information: Suicide Prevention Research
A Call to Identify Key Methodological Roadblocks and Propose New Paradigms in Suicide Prevention Research The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), and National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) announce a newly released Request for Information (RFI): A Call to Identify Key Methodological Roadblocks and Propose New Paradigms in Suicide Prevention Research. The RFI seeks input to identify the types of research tools needed to support rapid advancement in suicide prevention research.
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Sleep, Social Cues, and Dissociative Disorders
There’s a good chance that most of your knowledge about dissociative identity disorder (DID) — formerly known as multiple personality disorder — comes from films like Sybil (1976) or The Three Faces of Eve (1957). Sybil and Eve both develop multiple, distinct personalities in order to cope with psychologically traumatic events from their childhoods. But current research has shown that this popular “posttraumatic model” is not accurate. DID may actually arise due to a combination of factors, such as cues from therapists, a fantasy-prone personality, and even irregular sleep patterns.
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Facebook Users: Ruminating or Savoring?
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Sara M. Locatelli of the Department of Veterans Affairs and Loyola University, Chicago present her poster session research on “Facebook Use, Rumination, Savoring, and Personality: Influence on Health and Life Satisfaction.” Locatelli and her coauthors examined Facebook use among college students — specifically status updates — to look for links among Facebook use, rumination, savoring, and specific health outcomes. They found a connection between Facebook use and rumination but no link between Facebook use and savoring.
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Peter Ayton: To Risk or Not to Risk
Peter Ayton, a researcher from City University London, UK, investigates how people make judgments and decisions under conditions of risk, uncertainty, and ambiguity. Ayton will be speaking at the Invited Symposium Emotional Influences on Decision Making at the 24th APS Annual Convention in Chicago. Ayton’s talk in this symposium, Dread Risk: Terrorism and Bicycle Accidents, will discuss a claim made by Gigerenzer (2004) that dread evoked by the September 11, 2001 attacks prompted switching from flying to driving, producing additional road accidents causing 1,500 fatalities.
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Q & A With Eli Finkel – The Science Behind Online Dating (Part 2)
Eli Finkel, a social psychologist at Northwestern University, is one of five authors on a new study in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. The study, ‘Online Dating: A Critical Analysis from the Perspective of Psychological Science‘ is co-authored by Paul Eastwick of Texas A & M University, Benjamin Karney of UCLA, Harry Reis of the University of Rochester and Susan Sprecher of Illinois State University. We invited our Facebook and Twitter followers to submit their questions on love, relationships and online dating to Finkel. Here is the second part of his response. Check out Part 1 of the Q & A here!
