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Comfort or Food? This Harlow Love Song Has the Answer
Harry Harlow conducted his famous experiments on maternal separation and social isolation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1950s and 1960s. Decades later, Brad Wray and his independent study students from Arundel High School in Maryland have set one of those experiments to music. Harlow took baby monkeys from their mothers and placed them with two “surrogate” mothers: one made of wire that dispensed milk and one made of terry cloth that didn’t dispense milk. The song, set to the tune of Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours,” tells how the baby monkeys had to make a choice.
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Agreement of Alcohol Use Among Roommates
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Grace Jackson from New York University present her poster session research on “Agreement of Alcohol Use: A Year-Long Study of College Roommates.” Grace Jackson is interested in researching how relationships progress over time. Jackson and coauthors Sean P. Lane (New York University), Gertraud Stadler (Columbia University),Niall Bolger (Columbia University), andPatrick E. Shrout (New York University) studied 293 pairs of undergraduate roommates (N = 586). They found that roommates are generally pretty good at reporting trait-level, a.k.a.
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Health Psychology: The Politics of Health
Politics and health may seem like an unlikely pair. Yet, a brief glance into history shows us that public policies contribute mightily to individual health outcomes. Early examples of this relationship are found in the development of public and private sanitation systems in the Indus Valley region in 2000 BCE, the development of public water systems in ancient Greece and later Rome, and public health studies of the relationship between sewer systems and fevers in England in the mid-1800s. Dr.
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APS Fellow Helps Make Life With Autism a Little Easier
When she was a graduate student in the late 1970s, APS Fellow Geraldine Dawson worked with a family that changed her life. They had an autistic child and “I was just captured by the experience and decided to devote my entire career to it,” Dawson told Autism Talk TV. Today, Dawson is a professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as well as Chief Science Officer of Autism Speaks. She is recognized as a pioneer in the study of autism who has used brain imaging to analyze neural irregularities associated with the disease. She has also studied the genetics of autism and helped to pinpoint some of the earliest symptoms of the disorder.
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The Photos That Make Us Feel
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Kathleen E. Hazlett from Marquette University present her poster session research on “Self Selected Pictures Are More Effective than IAPS for Inducing Positive Emotion.” According to Hazlett, your own photo album (or Facebook timeline, or Flickr account) might be the best pick-me-up when you’re feeling down. Personal photos could also be the best way for researchers to elicit positive emotions in the lab.
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Placebo Power
APS Fellow and Charter Member Irving Kirsch, associate director of the Placebo Studies Program at Harvard Medical School, says the difference between the effect of a placebo and the effect of an antidepressant is minimal for most people. "People get better when they take the drug, but it's not the chemical ingredients of the drugs that are making them better," Kirsch told Lesley Stael in a 60 Minutes interview, "it's largely the placebo effect." The "placebo effect" may not be all in your head says Kirsch in the interview below: Kirsch, I., Deacon, B.J., Huedo-Medina, T.B., Scoboria, A., Moore, T.J., & Johnson, B.T. (2008).
