An empirical investigation of dance addiction

Dancing is mentally dangerous, suggests this new study, which is a further advance in our understanding the threats posed by addiction: “An Empirical Investigation of Dance Addiction,” Aniko Maraz [pictured here], Róbert Urbán, Mark Damian Griffiths, Zsolt Demetrovics, PLoS ONE 10(5), May 7, 2015, e0125988. (Thanks to Neil Martin for bringing this to our attention.) […]

Non-smokers who might someday smoke might someday smoke

Another possibly great possible breakthrough in the ongoing effort to write academic reports related to addiction. The discovery in this report: Among children who do not smoke cigarettes, the ones who drink alcohol OR smoke marijuana OR have positive attitudes toward smoking cigarettes OR who have close friends who smoke cigarettes might themselves some day become cigarette smokers, or they might […]

PR Headline of the Week: “Heavy Drinking Is Bad for Marriage if One Spouse Drinks, but Not Both”

This week’s Press Release Headline of the Week waves atop a press release issued by the University of Buffalo. It says: Heavy Drinking Is Bad for Marriage if One Spouse Drinks, but Not Both Beneath the banner lies the story of a breakthrough in the difficult academic field called “Addiction Studies”. The lead researcher, Kenneth […]

Announcement of a Finger-Length-Ratio/Video-Game-Addiction Connection

Evidence of one sort or another piles deep, deep, deep for or against there being significance to the length of a person’s second finger as compared with the length of that person’s fourth finger. Now implicated in the ever-more-encompassing story: video game addiction. Here’s a new (and perhaps the only) study on this particular vexing question: […]

Drug experiment of the day: Cocaine and Oreo Cookies

Today’s Drug Experiment of the Day happened at the University of Connecticut. Connecticut College News announces: In a study designed to shed light on the potential addictiveness of high-fat/ high-sugar foods, Professor Joseph Schroeder [pictured here] and his students found rats formed an equally strong association between the pleasurable effects of eating Oreos and a specific environment as […]

Slot Machine Gamblers: Hard to Study?

It’s hard to get good payoffs from slot machines, yes. But it’s also hard to get good information from slot-machine gamblers, and that made things awkward for psychologists Mark Griffiths, of Nottingham Trent University, and Jonathan Parke, of Salford University. They explained how, in a monograph called Slot Machine Gamblers – Why Are They So […]