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Rocky Mountain Psychological Association
April 14–16, 2011 Salt Lake City, UT, USA www.rockymountainpsych.org
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Are You a Video Game Master or Addict?
APS Member Douglas Gentile, who runs the Media Research Laboratory at Iowa State University is interviewed via Skype by Fox News. Gentile discusses video game habits among youth and if their behavior patterns follow that of an addiction. Read the full story: Fox Excessive gaming linked to depression and anxiety in kids: MyFoxBOSTON.com
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Push It Back
When an alcoholic sees a drink, it’s hard to resist the impulsive response to approach it. Turning that impulse to grab it into an impulse to avoid it may help. A study published in Psychological Science found that a new cognitive-bias modification (CBM) treatment involving approach-avoidance tasks may help alcoholics stay abstinent from drinking. Alcoholic volunteers were trained to push away pictures of alcoholic drinks. When tested a week later, their approach bias for alcohol had changed to avoidance bias, compared to the control group that showed no such changes.
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Mate Idealization Makes for Happy Early Marriage
They say that love is blind. And that’s probably for the best. Because a new study shows that people who greatly idealize their spouses have the happiest marriages. For the first few years, anyway. The research appears in the journal Psychological Science. Karen Hopkin of Scientific American's 60-Second Science reports that people who had seemingly unrealistic expectations of their spouses were nonetheless happier than more realistic mates in a marriage's early years. Listen to the podcast here.
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Is That What You Think? My Brain Agrees
Have you caught yourself conforming to your friends’ opinions? A new study published in Psychological Science found conformity to social norms happens even in our brains! When people change their opinions to conform to social norms, the parts of their brains associated with rewards are engaged, giving us added incentive to fit in. Psychological scientists at Harvard University asked male volunteers to rate the attractiveness of 180 digitized female Facebook photos on a scale from 1 to 7. They were then told that many other men had also rated the same photos—some of those “peer” ratings were higher than the participant’s, some were lower, and some were the same.
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Mean Girls: The Science Behind the Silver Screen Hit
No one likes to be excluded, women especially. A study published in Psychological Science found that when females feel a threat of social exclusion, they are more likely than males to respond by forming other cliques and alliances to prevent their own exclusion. To investigate how men and women respond when faced with a social threat, psychological scientist Joyce F. Benenson of Emmanuel College and Harvard University, along with her colleagues, asked volunteers to play a game against two hypothetical partners in which they accumulated points for money.
