Does the placebo effect work — even when you know it’s a placebo?
ople were told they were being given “placebo pills made of an inert substance, like sugar pills, that have been shown in clinical studies to produce significant improvement in IBS symptoms through mind-body self-healing processes” and still got the benefits of the placebo effect: Background Placebo treatment can significantly influence subjective symptoms. However, it is widely believed that response to placebo requires concealment or deception. We tested whether open-label placebo (non-deceptive and non-concealed administration) is superior to a no-treatment control with…
2 minutes
Here’s Why Females Orgasm
om Big Think: "When a woman has an orgasm," he explains, "the pH of her reproductive tract shifts in a way that favors sperm that enter her at that point." Why is this so important? Sperm competition. In prehistoric times, according to Ryan, women had "multiple lovers at any given ovulatory cycle, even in any given sexual event." And so, let's say a woman is having sex with several different men, and she likes them all well enough. Now let's…
2 minutes
Will running marathons kill you?
. OBJECTIVE: To determine from a societal perspective the risk of sudden cardiac death associated with running in an organised marathon compared with the risk of dying from a motor vehicle crash that might otherwise have taken place if the roads had not been closed. DESIGN: Population based retrospective analysis with linked ecological comparisons of sudden death. SETTING: Marathons with at least 1000 participants that had two decades of history and were on public roads in the United States, 1975-2004.…
2 minutes
Is Facebook making it impossible to be an undercover cop?
a Techworld: Facebook has proven to be one of the biggest dangers in keeping undercover police officers safe due to applications such as facial recognition and photo tagging, according to a adjunct professor at ANU and Charles Sturt University. Mick Keelty, a former Australian Federal Police (AFP) commissioner, told the audience at Security 2011 in Sydney that because of the convergence of a number of technologies including biometrics, undercover policing may be "impossible" in the future. And: "The results found…
1 min read
Does the Socratic method really help people learn?
cratic questioning, a cornerstone of CBT, is as equally useful in coaching to raise awareness, promote reflection and improve problem-solving thinking. Padesky’s (Socratic questioning: Changing minds or guiding discovery? 1993) bifurcation of Socratic questioning, changing minds versus guiding discovery, is commented upon. The characteristics of good Socratic questions are enumerated, the pitfalls of experienced coaches’ over-reliance on intuition to guide their questioning is discussed and how continuing deliberate practice through, for example, providing the logical basis for sequencing questions can correct…
1 min read
Can how you sit affect your memory?
mory is improved when your posture is the same as when the memory was created: We assessed potential facilitation of congruent body posture on access to and retention of autobiographical memories in younger and older adults. Response times were shorter when body positions during prompted retrieval of autobiographical events were similar to the body positions in the original events than when body position was incongruent. Free recall of the autobiographical events two weeks later was also better for congruent-posture than…
1 min read
Is this why it’s so hard to be compassionate?
en when things occur by accident our brains prefer to make them sound deliberate: Three studies tested the idea that our analyses of human behavior are guided by an “intentionality bias,” an implicit bias where all actions are judged to be intentional by default. In Study 1 participants read a series of sentences describing actions that can be done either on purpose or by accident (e.g., “He set the house on fire”) and had to decide which interpretation best characterized…
2 minutes
Are good relationships better than Tylenol?
lationships may influence adjustment to chronic pain conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA). We examined how both marital status and marital adjustment were related to pain, physical disability, and psychological disability in 255 adults with RA. Among married participants (n = 158), better marital adjustment (assessed using the Locke-Wallace Marital Adjustment Scale) was correlated with less pain and physical and psychological disability (all P values < .05). Married participants were divided into distressed (n = 44) and nondistressed (n = 114) subgroups…
1 min read
