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He aims to humanize health care – Q & A
Boston.com: WHO Dr. Omar Sultan Haque WHAT Haque, a psychology PhD candidate at Harvard, wrote a piece with Adam Waytz in the current issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science about the dehumanization of medicine. Q. What do you mean when you say that medicine has been dehumanized? A. Dehumanization means denying a distinctively human mind to another person. It refers to any situation in which you have diminished appreciation for other people’s mental states. In the medical context it primarily means treating patients like objects - more like pets than people. Labeling people as their diseases. Read the whole story: Boston.com
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The Perils of Trying to Unlearn
There are tons of studies about how to improve learning, but what happens when we want to unlearn is less clear. Research on learning by association goes back to Pavlov’s famous experiments in which he taught a dog to expect food at the sound of a bell, but scientists have found that getting a dog — or human — to forget an association once they’ve learned it is really hard. A new paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science describes how scientists have attempted to change associations.
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SAVE THE DATE – PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE CONVENTION IN CHICAGO, MAY 24-27, 2012
Save the date for the Association for Psychological Science's 24th Annual Convention in Chicago from May 24-27, 2012. Register now! If you cover health, business, lifestyles or science news, the APS convention provides news on the mind-body connection, discrimination, marketing, bullying, mental illnesses and more. APS conventions cover many types of science, including neuroscience, industrial and management psychology, and social interactions. Talks Include: Are We Overmedicating America’s Children? Psychosocial, Pharmacological, Combined, and Sequenced Interventions for ADHD William E.
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Time to be honest
The Economist: “IS SIN original?” That is the question addressed by Shaul Shalvi, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, in a paper just published in Psychological Science. Dr Shalvi and his colleagues, Ori Eldar and Yoella Bereby-Meyer of Ben-Gurion University in Israel, wanted to know if the impulse to cheat is something that grows or diminishes when the potential cheater has time for reflection on his actions. Is cheating, in other words, instinctive or calculating? Appropriately, the researchers’ apparatus for their experiment was that icon of sinful activity, the gambling die.
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$1 at a time, Americans wager nearly $1.5 billion on longest of shots to become a millionaire
The Washington Post: Across the country, Americans plunked down an estimated $1.5 billion on the longest of long shots: an infinitesimally small chance to win what could end up being the single biggest lottery payout the world has ever seen. But forget about how the $640 million Mega Millions jackpot could change the life of the winner. It’s a collective wager that could fund a presidential campaign several times over, make a dent in struggling state budgets or take away the gas worries and grocery bills for thousands of middle-class citizens. And it’s a cheap investment for the chance of a big reward, no matter how long the odds — 1 in 176 million.
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Rethinking the Value of Pets
The New York Times: Think an elderly family member is better off with a pet? You may want to think again. Sure, there have been hundreds of articles claiming dogs and cats can lower blood pressure, zap stress and combat depression and loneliness. But some experts say the evidence that pet companionship is healthy is not all that definitive. And for the elderly, having a dog and cat can be both stressful and dangerous. Falls involving pets and their paraphernalia are an underappreciated health hazard.
